Faculty Teaching and Learning

The Teacher as Learner at Wooster School

So, what does it mean to be a teacher learner at Wooster School? Here at Wooster, teachers engage with one another and with our students to make visible, capture, document, preserve, study, personalize, and share their practice with purposes of professional learning and research. As reflective practitioners, we aim to gather rich insights into how and why learners learn.

Our intentionality of design, visibility of the learning, and personalization based upon what is being seen and documented for both students and adults has helped us shape this culture of thinking and learning at Wooster.

When such learning and research are supported by a shared pedagogical language and by collaborative, collegiate and dialogical engagement, the learning for our teachers, and more importantly, for our students, improves and strengthens. Our Wooster teaching community is attuned to and continually looking for evidence of learning.

Theory into Practice at Wooster

Here is some evidence of teacher learning at Wooster School this year:

Director of Curriculum. Christopher Pannone, and I collaborated to structure our August and September workshops to focus teachers on our use of learning intentions, success criteria, and feedback in the learning environment.

From John Hattie’s Visible Learning: All Faculty Workshop 8/25/14 and 8/26/14

Incorporating, with intention and purpose, both learning intentions and success criteria for our daily practice. During this workshop, we addressed questions like: “Do students know what the purpose of the lesson is- beyond the task they are being asked to complete? What is the learning purpose of the lesson? What will they learn? And...what will they learn about learning?; “What does it mean to be good at ….? How do students know what mastery looks like?”

From John Hattie’s Visible Learning: All Faculty Workshop 9/10/14 Delayed Opening

Effective feedback from teachers helps students to answer three important questions: Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next? Teachers and students are now being asked to consistently consider these three questions when it comes to the feedback they are being provided and the feedback that is being collected.

From Making Thinking Visible: We continue our study into how to best structure thinking routines into our planning. Mark Church will be visiting our campus again in November to help grow our learning work here with our teachers.
Lower School teachers are working with Lit Life, to develop a Pre-K through 5 scope and sequence for writing across the curriculums. For more about Lit Life: http://litlifeinfo.com/about/what-we-do/
New Faculty are working with Lynne Muller and myself. We learned together for a two day workshop in August that was focused on Making Thinking Visible and Building Habits in Classroom Culture. Lynne and I continue our work with new teachers with biweekly visits into classrooms, one on conferences, and a monthly luncheon with teachers.
Each New Faculty member is working with a Wooster Mentor teacher to help support their learning as they transition into our community.
Wooster teachers are networking and presenting our learning within the professional communities around us. For example, Tom Curley presented at the Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom Conference on September 19, 2014.
Grades 6-12 History, English, and Humanities teachers are working together with Head of School, Matt Byrnes, on the Wooster Writing Project. Teachers are collecting samples of student work and studying sentence level writing. Next, they will be developing Teachers College model workshops to address and improve writing at the sentence level in our students.
Our teacher learning groups, rooted in our Making Thinking Visible learning, began to meet on September 24, 2014.

Obviously, we have been busy. And we will continue to be busy, but with a good kind of busy - busy learning with and amongst our students. We look forward to sharing more about our learning with our community in the coming months.

Kind regards,

Elizabeth Higgins

Director of Teaching & Learning