Strand 5 TBTS: Intentional professional choices

Intentional professional choices: Thinking Behind the Strand

Engages in ongoing professional learning and decision-making that is ethical, based on multiple forms of evidence and feedback, and extends opportunities for professional growth and leadership.

Early in our teaching careers, it often feels like things that go well, or don’t, happen at random. It’s common for beginning teachers in particular to have difficulty naming their instructional strengths and using them strategically for further development. Often, it’s easier to point to outcomes—successes and failures—than it is to describe the nuances of why a lesson succeeded or a transition bombed. However, through such self-reflection, we can be more intentional about our planning, content knowledge, and instructional development; our interactions with students, families, and colleagues; and our personal and professional development in education.

Intentionality

Being intentional as a teacher is about strategy and deliberation. It means thinking through the particulars of a situation or moment and strategically choosing from different approaches and resources to capitalize on the moment. Such intentionality is rooted in analysis of our practice: working to recognize why something didn’t go as hoped and evaluating our repair attempts. This process of analysis and decision-making builds confidence as we expand our comfort zones. Master teachers never stop this deliberation process. Their professional decisions are based in continued inquiry into their practices, knowledge of the students each year, sociopolitical contexts of teaching, and current developments in disciplinary content knowledge. As these elements shift, our teacher’s analysis must continue, and this analysis informs the best possible decision-making for our students.

Simultaneously, our intentional professional learning impacts our professional choices. We collaborate with a colleague who offers a new instructional strategy; we participate in a professional development workshop; we have an informative conversation with a parent— through these activities, our perspectives shift and informs our professional choices. All of these learning activities as well as others shape our understandings and can lead to intentional growth and development.

Intentionality also speaks to an ever-present teacher identity that can shape how we choose represent ourselves professionally in the world. Our choices in the classroom, how we carry ourselves, the clothes we wear, the ways we speak, and our work ethic are all viewed as part of our teacher identity. When our students see us in the grocery store or in images on social media, they don’t separate us from our teacher selves. Thus, our professional teacher identity must inform our decisions in the classroom and at school, but also beyond the school walls. At times, this can feel burdensome.

Coachability and feedback

Beginning teachers often have access to mentoring and coaching during their preparation and first years in the classroom. The feedback offered by a mentor can also be a powerful source of learning and analysis. But it requires an openness from us, as teachers, to listen and reflect on what the feedback is suggesting about improving our practices and presence in the classroom and for our collaborations. Not every morsel of feedback offered by a mentor will meet our needs, but the willingness to be coached, to take that feedback into consideration, supports our accumulation of practices and develops our self-reflection muscles. The more we are open to constructive feedback about our practice, the more comfortable we become with a teacher identity of being a continuous learner who will value coaching and feedback throughout our career.

We also must recognize that feedback about our teaching and collaboration can come from multiple sources: from direct sources such as colleagues, parents, our students; from measurement-based sources such as student achievement data, school climate surveys, and teacher evaluation frameworks; or from self-analysis processes such as student work samples, video, teacher study groups, and critical reflection. All of these sources of feedback serve as evidence that can help us to improve if we pay attention and intentionally use the information to locate areas of growth. This can be both unsettling and revealing; it can be both difficult and rejuvenating; and it can be ongoing and transformational—all if we allow ourselves to see the evidence in ways that allow us to learn and grow in intentional ways.

Teacher leadership

Teachers will be offered many and varied opportunities to engage in leadership. Some of these opportunities will be role-bound—serving on a committee, becoming a mentor, piloting a new curriculum. As teacher, we have a responsibility to take on some of these roles that will contribute to the development of the school and our local community. By actively engaging in these roles, we can share our ideas and expertise locally, and potentially contribute to the broader field of education regionally, nationally, and even internationally.

Teacher leadership opportunities can also present themselves as informal opportunities to influence colleagues by being a model or example or to make intentional decisions that may impact colleagues, students, and families. Enactment of this form of leadership is bound up in the practical actions and deliberated decisions of teachers in their daily work (Sato & Rogers, 2017).

Schools need strong, professional cultures to foster teacher learning and teacher leadership (Deal & Peterson, 1999). A school’s culture can support or sabotage the quality and effectiveness of professional learning and leading for teachers as well as for students (Fullan, 2001). School principals are often charged with the responsibility for creating and nurturing a healthy or positive school culture. Culture, however, when viewed as a dynamic and relational process rather than something that is created and becomes fixed in time, is everyone’s responsibility to shape. When teachers engage in both formal and informal leadership they accept the responsibility to participate in shaping the culture of the school.