This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend EduCon in Philadelphia, PA. Principal – and friend – Chris Lehmann asked me to participate in the opening panel. Traditionally, the first panel has a set of big picture thinkers around a specific theme. This year, it was human-centered education, appropriate given the ascent of artificial intelligence, social media, and deeper polarization.
Later that night, I started to think about the workshops I’d like to attend the next day. For anyone who has seen me do a presentation at a conference, you may know that I also participate in the conference as well. When I was a full-time classroom teacher, I took advantage of the opportunity to learn from and listen to others. Now that I’m no longer in the classroom, I still want to get a sense of how teachers think about learning and sharing their practices. Yes, my research interests center social science, but I’m also finding the nexus between teacher practice and research.
As it stands, researchers rarely attend the professional development sessions of the teachers they study except when they’re presenting. But that’s another discussion.
For EduCon specifically, I’ve attended the gatherings frequently. Only recently did I finally get why I kept coming back. After re-learning the history of EduCon, participants returned because, for them/us, it was a sort of pedagogical home. In too many of our schooling places, we have an abundance of compliance measures, tiers of bureaucracy, and petty arguments that don’t have real effects on student learning. What if, for a few days, we could create space, specifically a school, where we could develop that vision for a school or, at worst, make better problems? (That’s Chris Lehmann’s phrasing, by the way.)
Policy Considerations for Pedagogical Homes
From a policy standpoint, pundits have argued for decades about the best way to train teachers. We have everything between highly-routinized schools churning out pedagogues, residency programs that focus on cohort experiences, and so-called traditional schools of ed. I say “so-called” because everyone’s experiences vary widely even in that latter model.
Yet, the point I rarely see brought up (unless I do) is what happens once the teacher meets the school building. In this, policymakers put too much blame on schools of education and not enough on what happens when a new teacher has to negotiate what they’ve learned with the culture of the school and system. The teacher may have learned a plethora of pedagogical strategies, but ends up getting hired at a place that’s antagonistic to student inquiry and focuses more on rote pedagogy.
What’s the course of action here? The answer is more complicated than the narrative allows.
For those of us who’ve taught more than two years, we start to consider teaching our profession, not just an interim job. From there, we probably need a few places to refill our cups. There’s a difference between a “pedagogical home” versus a conference, for example. Larger conferences, for example, intend on breadth over depth. They serve as a larger umbrella under a given topic (math, social studies, the future, etc.) rather than an explicit set of shared values.
By pedagogical home, I mean the balance between depth and breadth.
To build a pedagogical home, it means to construct a place temporarily suspended from the normal rigors of schooling. We’re still in times where the numbers game insists that principals and superintendents compete with each other. That dynamic creates an isolation among schools where even teachers next door to each other don’t share best practices sustainably. This also means principals have less resources dedicated to sending teachers out to professional development, instead focusing on teachers only teaching themselves within a building.
But, respectfully, that gets tiresome, too. Fresh thinking requires fresh air, and usually, we go outside to accomplish that. To this day, I still have a small but important set of pedagogical homes, many of which I’ve written about on this platform. For some, it’s that once-a-month PD in the district with colleagues of similar discipline. For others, it’s that city or statewide convening focused on a particular concern. We also have examples of teachers building their professional sustenance in the form of Edcamps, unconferences, and meetups.
And for many of us, there’s always EduColor.
On my way back from EduCon on the Amtrak, I reviewed the dozens of interviews I’ve done with NYC public school teachers and thought about how often teachers ask to control more of their own development. Many of us could use a space to either reimagine their work or see examples of alternative approaches to education. Some veterans could even use a space to be in dialogue with other educators with similar interests in students and communities.
This way of thinking about continuous learning isn’t new, but it’s sorely missing. Centering the human work elevates us all.
Jose, who has 10 more interviews to go …
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