Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta
Engaging educators in professional learning is most effective when the experience is cohesive, applicable, and considers teachers’ vast experiences, needs, and strengths. The ultimate measure of professional learning is whether or not it transfers to the classroom, and we’ve figured out how to ensure that happens. Just like we engage students in low floor high ceiling lessons, we need to engage teachers in low floor high ceiling professional learning.
Six Elements of Low Floor High Ceiling (LFHC) Professional Learning:
- Teacher choice: Effective LFHC professional learning offers options for teachers to select a focus based on their own interests, needs, and strengths. The content of the professional learning needs to be robust enough to provide interest to a wide range of educators. For example, if the professional learning focuses on reasoning routines, incorporating avenues of thinking and essential pedagogical strategies to engage all students in mathematical thinking, teachers have choices to apply to their own practice. One teacher may focus on implementing effective turn and talks and another may focus on the four Rs. One teacher may focus on quantitative reasoning, and another may integrate structural thinking.
- Appropriate grain size: Effective LFHC professional learning recognizes that teachers’ plates are full! As such, professional learning needs to be readily applicable and at a grain size that is manageable. We see teachers’ uptake of micro-routines and/or essential strategies when they apply them in their classrooms – even the next day!
- Engages teachers via effective math teaching practices: Effective LFHC professional learning walks the walk. When teachers experience engagement in mathematical thinking in ways that invite them into the space, support them as they struggle productively, they can articulate the specific pedagogies that created the experience and then replicate them in their classrooms.
- Develops new teaching habits: Effective LFHC professional learning leverages predictable classroom structures and routines so that teachers’ learning develops over regular and repeatable experiences, thus forming habits.
- Provides ongoing practice: Effective LFHC professional learning leverages regular PLCs, rehearsals, learning labs, and coaching sessions to provide supportive spaces for teachers to practice. For example, teachers might rehearse a newly learned routine during a department meeting and have that lesson be the focus of an upcoming learning lab.
- Explicitly targets existing goals: Effective LFHC professional learning aligns with district goals, targets school improvement plans, and is concretized by connecting directly to teachers’ professional learning goals. Not only is its impact then found in existing data collection (e.g., learning walks, coaching sessions, teacher evaluations, etc.), but all along teachers are collecting evidence to support their learning goals. When the multiple levels of goals are well aligned and communicated, plans of action are cohesive and results are felt by all.
Three ways we can help you get started with LFHC PL
