Teaching seminar: Goals for the year

The beginning of the academic year means the beginning of a new year of Teaching Seminars, which is a tough subject for me.  There have been good times and bad times, in my opinion, but overall I would not call our Teaching Seminar a big success.  Attendance is low, participation is ordinary, the video of the teachers' discussions is mostly not rich, and there's not a sense on our part (the leadership) that we have really helped people get anywhere.  I hope I'm not being too negative in my characterization of our group opinion.... this is how it feels to me.

We are trying something different this year.  The plan is to support teachers in creating more high-quality discourse in their classrooms using an established discourse tool.  We have chosen a family of tools used by a team in the School of Ed at UW, called Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching; the developers are local and will hopefully collaborate with us.  Our hope is that once teachers get invested in producing exciting discourse using this tool, they will be excited to see how it works in their own classroom, and will eagerly invite us to videotape.  (Or, at least, they will feel less vulnerable about our videotaping, because we will be videotaping their enactment of someone else's thing, rather than just them.)  And the resulting video will be better than what we've usually gotten in the past, which will both support the Teaching Seminar itself, and will serve as evidence that we're helping teachers improve their classroom practice.  This is our vision.  

For the first session, though, we wanted to make sure and hear from the teachers about their own goals for themselves, and how we might support them during the academic year.  About a dozen people showed up and there was a convivial feeling.  As teachers came in, we had these beautiful little books waiting for them (thank you, Julie!):

Abby explained that their task, with these little books, is to jot down interesting things that students say, or that they see happen in their classes.  If you can write one little thing a day, or even not every day but just some days, then by the time the next Teaching Seminar comes around, there will be quite a bit of material.  The books are wonderfully attractive; they have a soft vinyl cover, they come in these beautiful colors, and they fit in a shirt pocket or back pants pocket.  I took one and put it in the camera bag.  

After a pleasant dinner, the first task was to respond to the following prompt (I'm paraphrasing):

"It is the summer of 2012!  As you relax and hike through the Cascades, you reflect on one wonderful new thing that happened this year.  What is it?"

I sat with Jean, Laura, Linda, Jim, Lane, and Stamatis, with a visitor named Ragini sitting in with us for a bit.  We had a wonderful conversation in which I learned a lot about each person's particular circumstances, and their wishes for their classrooms, which in some cases were in rather heartbreaking contrast.  There was a lot of consensus on the kind of statements people imagined making on this envisioned future hike:  here is what we agreed on:

(Click to make it bigger if it's hard to read.)  The rest of our conversation was centered on two other prompts, and since we were invited to share individual answers to the questions, that's what wound up on the white boards:

"What content area would you like to focus on this fall?"

"What content area would you like to see growth in for your students this fall?
"What instructional practice would you like to focus on developing this fall?"

The handwriting is all mine.  I wrote what people were saying partly because we had been asked to (and no one else picked up the pen before I did), partly to keep our discussion focused, and partly to acknowledge the very cool things that people were saying.

Here is the white board from the other table, which has responses to all three of the above prompts.  I hear that their discussion included a lot about Socractic seminars (described here).