NCTM Seattle Reflection

As I sit here at the Seattle airport waiting to board my flight back to MSP, I’m deep in thought about the past three days. I had the privilege and honor of attending and speaking at the NCTM regional conference here in Seattle.

I am thinking about a buffet of items: the sense of relief knowing that I no longer must prepare for my presentation, the validation and motivation I feel sparked by the sessions I attended, and what my classroom is going to look like tomorrow when I go back to school and prepare for class.

I also can’t help to think about the sense of déjà vu I’m feeling right now. As I gathered my thoughts to compose this blog post, I happened to read my post from November 2018 in which I reflected on the first time I spoke at an NCTM regional conference.  In that post, I was proud of meeting a professional goal of presenting at an NCTM conference. The referenced déjà vu occurred when I clicked over to my website and noticed that I had met my goal of speaking again at an NCTM conference.

I wish I could blog about all of the items swirling through my mind, but unfortunately I don’t have time for that. The main purpose of this post is reflect on one specific session I attended, titled “Leading from Within – Improving the Instructional System While Remaining in the Classroom.”

The session began with Thomas and Brent asking us (session attendees) to think about which of our colleagues had the biggest impact on us professionally. They followed up with asking us to think about what roles those individuals were in when they impacted our lives. Their hope was for us to understand that we can positively impact those around us, as well as the greater system of education, without leaving the classroom.

Thomas spent a few minutes talking about a diagram that he found in the book called "Instructional Rounds in Education". The diagram summarizes "the instructional core" and focuses on the relationship between teachers, students, and the content. Thinking deeply about systems and changing the complex system of education took me back to the SDMath/Sci leadership trainings I attended. 

Thomas and Brent then spoke at length about the "four act drama" for effective teacher leaders.  It was sort of a checklist of things that really motivated me.

1. Fearlessly commit to best practice.
2. Operate with a leadership mindset.
3. Build collective teacher efficacy
4. Embrace courageous lifelong learning

A bit more detail about each bullet:

Fearlessly commit to best practice.

Thomas and Brent served up a beautiful reminder of what ambitious teaching requires: student-centered environment, problem based, collaborative, rigorous, 8 SMP, 5 Practices, high quality formative assessments, culturally responsive teaching, equitable instruction and grading practices, and social-emotional learning. They summarized this list by reminding us that these practices are "critical for some, but beneficial for all".

Operate with a leadership mindset.

Thomas used a compass analogy very effectively. North: as teacher leaders, sometimes we push our administrators to help drive change.  East/West: as teacher leaders, we need colleagues and other teacher leaders we can lean on for guidance. I think of the many professional colleagues nationwide I have via Desmos Fellowship, Twitter, NCTM committees, etc.  South: as teacher leaders, we must be ready to help the new teachers and veteran teachers who are ready to be led.

Thomas and Brent mentioned a few more things that hit home to me. First, we should always be monitoring our team's progress.  Data should be driving our thinking. We should be using our MAP testing data and celebrating our successes while also analyzing our non-successes.  Second, we must be strategic and know how to push the right buttons to drive change. Thomas mentioned that there are some colleagues in his department that don't care to hear any ideas for change from him. Therefore, he has to be strategic and enlist the help of others to pitch the ideas to those who don't care to change.  Last, teacher leaders must remember that "We are always learning. We are always leading. Teaching causes learning."

Build collective teacher efficacy.

We (as teacher leaders) believe that positive change to the system can happen.  But does our team?

Brent referenced Hattie's research and that teacher efficacy has and effect size of 1.57. 

He also mentioned the idea that "wins lead to wins", in other words success breeds success.  Our team should be trying to emulate the schools who are experiencing success right now.

I can't help to think about the data showed to the school board at a recent school board meeting and how we are doing on the state exams relative to the other ESD schools.  (Not well)

I am confident in saying that our teacher efficacy has not been good these past 3-5 years.

Embrace courageous lifelong learning.

Thomas called on teacher leaders to stay up to date with the newest research, to attend and speak at conferences, and find peers who dare to do great work. He reminded us to continually spread the word because we never know who we will touch and we never know who is ready to learn.

This was a motivating session because it reminded me that I have a plethora of leadership skill and knowledge and we (as teacher leaders) always need to be leading. I sometimes forget that because leading is hard work. 

One final thing that I was reminded about in this session was that in order to truly drive change in our own districts, everyone on the team needs to be working together... the school board, administrators, curriculum directors, TOSAs, teachers, TAs, etc.  Our district has some work to do in order to achieve this goal.  

Rapid fire reactions about other aspects of the conference:

• Peter Liljedahl's "Building Thinking Classrooms" is quickly becoming a must-do in mathematics education. Not surprisingly, there are still many who are not yet aware of the research or who are not implementing the BTC strategies.  I am happy with how we are implementing it in advanced algebra 2 this year. But I still need to become better at the fine details of implementation.
• As I have seen with other past NCTM regional conferences, there were many time slots that had multiple sessions I wanted to attend and was forced to choose. If only I had Hermione's time turner, I could attend more than one concurrent session.
• A number of sessions I attended had excellent presenters, whereas a few had presenters that were sub-par. Six years ago, Robert Kaplinsky blogged about things he's learned from being a presenter. The post detailed some of the nitty-gritty details of creating a quality presentation.  A lot of what he says holds up, but there almost needs to be an updated post about this due to improvements in technology.
• This comes with no surprise, but there is also a high level of skill in creating and delivering a high quality presentation in conference settings like this. One of the best tips I can provide is to borrow presentation moves from other presenters who you view as high-quality.  I was fortunate to listen to Graham Fletcher at the SD STEM ED conference just over a week ago, and he absolutely crushed both presentations I attended.  I borrowed three or four presentation moves directly from him.
• Speaking of my presentation, I was happy with how it went and that is mostly due to how happy I was with my preparation. My session was in a very large ballroom (capacity ~400).  Honestly, I was fairly nervous heading into it, mainly because of the size of the room. I didn't know what to expect for attendance.  The attendance turned out to be somewhere between 50 and 60 people, which wasn't so overwhelming.  I received positive feedback from a few participants who stuck around after the presentation ask questions.