Rewards and Sharing What Works
Rewards and Sharing
Meetings as development
Faculty meetings work best as shared learning, not attendance reviews or gripes.
Recognize good work
Invite the teacher who ran a strong technology lesson to show colleagues how.
Make honesty safe
Adults fear admitting failure. Recognition should reward experimenting and sharing.
Sharing multiplies learning
A hidden success teaches one teacher; a shared one teaches the whole staff.
Some technology lessons land well and some fall flat. A school gets far more from the ones that work if it does something with them beyond a quiet word to the teacher who pulled it off.
Faculty Meetings as Professional Development
Faculty meetings are often spent on administrative matters or on noting who arrived late. That is not their best purpose. They work far better as professional development inside the school: invite the teacher who ran a strong technology lesson this week or month to walk colleagues through it. Others can take notes, and the school can even record part of the lesson to replay later.
The scale can stay small. In a staff of twenty or thirty teachers, even two or three sharing each time is enough, and a school can begin with just once a month and build the habit from there.
Its stronger use is shared professional learning.
Time spent on attendance or complaints is time not spent letting teachers learn from a colleague’s real technology lesson, which is where the meeting tends to add the most value.
Why Recognition Sustains Reform
School leadership that openly values technology and reform is linked to more widespread and lasting effort in those areas. What deserves recognition is a particular habit: teachers willing to experiment, learn firsthand, and then share the result, including an honest account of what failed and what they changed before it worked.
That honesty is hard. Like students, many teachers feel embarrassed to admit something did not work and will not raise a hand to say so. Recognition has to make that admission safe, so a teacher can share both the lesson that succeeded and the failures that led there.
Like students, adults feel embarrassed to say something did not work.
Recognition has to make honesty safe, so teachers will share both the lesson that worked and the changes they made after one that did not.
The payoff is in the spread. When colleagues hear a success story, those who have not tried the method become more willing to attempt it. A teacher who keeps a winning lesson to herself is the only one who gains from it, while sharing it lets many others learn from the same experience.
Whether that sharing happens at all depends heavily on the tone leaders set for the whole staff.
More widespread and lasting effort on technology.
When leaders reward teachers who experiment and share, the practice of trying tools and passing on the results spreads further across the staff and holds up better over time.
How was this article?