When Educators Lead, Their Professional Development Works Better

When Paul Tritter, Ed.M.’12, took on the inaugural role of director of professional learning for the Boston Teacher’s Union, the goal was clear: in collaboration with Boston Public Schools (BPS), figure out how to improve professional learning for educators across the district.

He started, as often happens when someone is new, by holding focus sessions to hear firsthand from educators about their professional learning experiences. A monthly working group followed, allowing teachers and administrators to share ideas and give feedback on district systems and initiatives. One strong and consistent theme emerged: “Educators wanted to be able to meet and share practices with people from other schools who did the same work they did,” he says. The need was especially acute in a city with many smaller schools, where an educator might be the only person in their building teaching a certain grade level or subject. 

From this need, the Telescope Network was created. A collaboration of the union and the district, Telescope is a professional development (PD) initiative where educators lead their own professional learning. Instead of top-down training, teachers share what they do best and learn directly with and from their peers.

For the past seven years, Mark Lonergan, Ed.M.’00, a long-time teacher who taught at Boston Arts Academy for 14 years, has co-led the project with a small team, including several Ed School alums: Tritter; Shakera Ford Walker, Ed.M.’02, an assistant superintendent for teacher leadership and development; and Oluwanifemi “Nifemi” Kolayemi, Ed.M.’15, a “networker” and point person for the city’s Wicked Math project. 

An important part of Lonergan’s work involves surveying educators every spring about what they want to be learning from their professional development and then diving into the data to figure out which topics “bubble up” as most needed. 

“And then we go out looking for the bright spots — who's doing it well,” he says. This past academic year, for example, K–12 librarians said they struggled with creating spaces that were welcoming and inclusive. Telescope, with the help of BPS central office staff, identified who was doing this well — and then they visited their libraries. 

“We used video to capture a tour of their spaces and interview them,” he says. “We then brought all of the K–12 librarians together to do a PD where we toured their spaces, in person or virtually.” More interviews and a debrief followed and each librarian picked one change idea — one thing that they were going to bring back to their own space to try out. The group continued to meet, allowing for check-ins, and then tweaked their change idea based on feedback. 

“It’s really a different kind of PD, in part because the topic comes from what people want to be learning, and then also because it’s not just built on one expert telling you what you should do, but a real colleague who’s struggling in the same space as you are and showing you what they’re doing,” Lonergan says. “It’s also giving folks space to re-contextualize those challenges in their spaces and then offering follow-up support.” 

Last fall, Telescope joined Wicked Math, an initiative that grew out of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s push to expand access to higher-level math for BPS students. Since then, Telescope has hosted 11 professional development sessions related to Wicked Math, and participants responded positively: Nearly 97% said they would recommend a Telescope session to a colleague.

Kolayemi, Ed.M.’15, is Telescope’s point person for the initiative. A former BPS teacher for eight years with a decade of experience in instructional design and teacher coaching, she says what excites her the most about Telescope’s participation in Wicked Math is the model of using teacher-to-teacher learning to improve students’ experiences.

“Every math teacher I’ve met through this work genuinely wants to make math meaningful, empowering, and relevant for all their students,” she says. “As a teacher, I’ve participated in professional learning that didn’t always feel actionable within my own classroom context. Telescope’s Wicked Math learning sites are different because the learning begins by observing colleagues who teach the same student population, in the same district, with similar resource challenges. There’s an incredible sense of empowerment that comes from realizing, ‘This classroom looks like mine, and these students are like mine. I love what I’m seeing, and I can’t wait to try it on Monday.’” There’s also a benefit for the host teacher, she says, when they receive thoughtful feedback and affirmation from peers on their work.

For Tritter, this circles back to an answer he gave in an interview in 2012, when he was named an Intellectual Contribution Award winner at the Ed School. When asked to name something he learned getting his master’s degree that he’d take throughout his career, he said, “I learned that the only thing that needs to be brought to scale is the idea that the people who work and learn in schools can learn to solve their own problems.”

That mindset, he says now, is exactly what led to the Telescope Network being created — and what drives his work and the work of the other Ed School alums involved.

“Most systems operate from the premise that educators don't want to change or improve. This results in a traditional top-down culture around professional learning where the implicit goal is to force teachers to change their practice against their will,” he says. “There is an assumption that if educators like a certain professional learning experience it must not have challenged them in any way. We challenge that culture and those assumptions by starting from the premise that educators want to do better for their students. We design powerful learning with rigor and accountability that educators appreciate because it is deeply relevant and actually helps them help their students.”