View Content #17948

By Gweneth Bruey-Finck, M.Ed

Gweneth Bruey-Finck was a high school French teacher for 8 years in the Salem-Keizer (Oregon) School District and has served as President of the Confederation in Oregon for Language Teaching (COFLT), a Board Member of the Pacific Northwest Council for Language (PNCFL), and as a state delegate to the National Assembly at ACTFL. She became a Literacy Instructional Coach (Teacher on Special Assignment) with Salem-Keizer in 2012 and recently accepted a position as a school administrator.

As K-12 language teachers, there are many barriers we face with regard to traditional professional development. The first is the specificity of our content area; we are often times left to interpret workshops or conference sessions to fit the specific needs of our target language and/or the literacy level of our students. Many of us may also not have access to specialists who are knowledgeable about language teaching, so our options may be limited in terms of professional development to attend. In addition, budget restraints in the current state of public education usually equate to fewer paid days for attending professional development sessions and less money to reimburse such activities. Given these combined forces of specialized content and fewer resources, language teachers may feel held back from the forward movement of their professional learning. However, with participation in job-embedded professional development, teachers will discover a more relevant, frequent, and rigorous experience that will transform their professional culture and improve student learning.

The defining characteristic of job-embedded professional development is that it occurs within the work day at the school site. Instead of going outside of our schools or districts to attend workshops or conferences, opportunities lie within our day-to-day practices that can transform our instruction, create connections in our professional communities, and make us more responsive to student needs. These opportunities include action research and reflective practices that feature the collection of data, both quantitative and qualitative, to inform teacher practice and affect student learning. These activities may include:

• Peer observations, reflection, and debrief
• Peer instructional coaching and mentoring
• Self analysis via videotaped lessons
• Book studies and collaborative video lesson analyses
• Collaborative teams who analyze student work and share specific instructional strategies for enrichment or intervention

Job-embedded professional learning may occur between teachers of any content area as it focuses on high-leverage instructional strategies that have shown to greatly affect student learning, regardless of the discipline. This type of professional development is more relevant than our traditional model because teachers are able to see specific strategies in action, collect data to directly assess their impact in the classroom, collaborate to discuss options and next steps, and respond accordingly. Ongoing cycles of analysis with the use of data direct from the classroom provide more frequent learning opportunities than the once/twice yearly model from days past. Lastly, these opportunities are deeper, more rigorous experiences that help teachers to critically assess their practices with regard to student learning, rather than the "take it or leave it" mindset many teachers experience with traditional workshops and presentations. With job-embedded opportunities like those above, we can transform professional development from an event occurring once or twice a year to a daily, ongoing part of our professional culture.