The following piece is adapted from a by Darren Cambridge on the theme of for Connected Educators Month.
Effective professional learning is characterized by continuous improvement, collective responsibility, peer-based accountability, acceptance of experimentation, and alignment. During the , organized by the National Commission on Teaching and America鈥檚 Future (NCTAF) a few weeks ago, Ren茅 Islas from pointed to research-based that align with this definition.
Similarly, the (of which NCTAF and Learning Forward are both stakeholder organizations) has synthesized research on effective collaboration and professional learning to define a .
It is clear from this body of research that collaboration as teamwork depends on teams having access to both appropriate evidence of student learning and information about research on relevant and effective instructional practices. For example, the limitations of high-stakes testing data as evidence to inform collaboration was a key theme in the New Frontiers in , high school teacher and author of Filkins and the other participants in the discussion pointed to formative assessment techniques, including systematic observation of students in action (鈥渒idwatching鈥�) and collective examination of student work, as essential to providing the fuller picture of student learning that collaboration requires.
It鈥檚 also interesting to note in Filkins鈥� introduction how the opportunity to learn with and alongside others shaped his understanding of assessment.
鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 just a few watershed realizations about what constitutes effective assessment that propelled my transformation to someone who can talk about assessment without feeling guilty or embarrassed. It was that I had enough experience as a teacher鈥攁s a Writing Project affiliate, as a student of effective practice in adolescent literacy instruction, as someone who works hard to be aware of his own literate practices鈥攖o have the pedagogical capacity to need the information from formative assessment to know what to do next.鈥�