When Teachers Teach Teachers, Teachers Learn

Our guest author is Kata Solow, executive director of the Goyen Foundation, where she led its multi-year transformation process and created the Goyen Literacy Fellowship to recognize exceptional reading teachers. 

Elementary school teachers across the country are asking for help. 

Go on Facebook, browse Twitter, and you’ll hear a common refrain: “We want to change how we teach reading, but we don’t know where to begin. We need to see what it looks like. Give us models and examples of excellent literacy instruction.” 

Why is this happening? For these teachers, their world has just changed. Over the last five years, as reading-related legislation has swept the country, hundreds of thousands of elementary school teachers are being required to change the way they teach reading. This is a really big deal: changing how you teach reading is a hard thing to do.

States are trying to help teachers make these changes. Most of the newly-passed laws support professional development for in-service teachers. However, the most common PD programs like LETRS are highly theoretical. While they provide educators with a strong foundation in the components of structured literacy and the research that underlies it, they do not address what these components look like in a real classroom.    

At the Goyen Foundation, we think that we have started to build a model that bridges this research-to-practice gap by providing teachers with concrete examples of great literacy instruction. This piece is about how you can do it in your school or district.   

Part of the solution is video-based professional development: real footage of real teachers teaching real students. Teachers need opportunities to watch other educators teach so that they can learn from one another. After all, watching other teachers teach is an evidence-based practice. But it rarely happens. Due to scheduling and financial constraints, teachers don’t get outside their own classrooms very often. Videos can circumvent these obstacles. 

But building PD around great videos isn’t enough. We believe this PD  should be led by the teachers featured in the videos because they can explain their own work better than anyone else. . We also believe that there’s no better or credible messenger for teachers than other teachers. You might even say our motto is “When teachers teach teachers, teachers learn.”

Our PD program, Teachers Teach Teachers (TTT), is built around this idea. We have been overwhelmed by the number of teachers who want to watch other teachers teach and hear them discuss their work. 

While building TTT, we’ve also learned a lot about how to deliver this model–and how not to! In this piece, I want to tell you how, so you can try it yourself–and bring concrete, practical, AND teacher-led literacy professional development to your school or district. 

First, here’s how we do it:

1. We select a core literacy topic: small group instruction, fluency in early elementary, K-2 writing, a vocabulary routine, you name it! Get as granular and specific as possible.
2. Several of our Goyen Literacy fellows (all practicing teachers, all great reading teachers) film short videos that illustrate what this topic looks like in their classrooms.
3. At the virtual session, our fellows share their videos, briefly discuss their practice, and answer questions about their work. This is where the magic happens–teachers get to learn from teachers. They dig deep into what makes excellent routines tick. They sweat the small details. The videos act as shared texts that anchor these discussions.
4. Teachers leave these hour-long sessions with concrete, specific routines and resources that they can implement in their classes right away.
5. Repeat, focusing on a new topic each time, staying granular and in the weeds.
6. That’s it! That’s the program. It’s extremely simple. You can apply it to any subject, topic, or grade level. We just focus on literacy because that’s our thing. 

At the same time, here’s what we’ve learned NOT to do as you DIY this PD:

1. Don’t try to cram too much in a single session. Our most impactful and effective sessions have focused on routines that attendees can really dig into (fluency, vocabulary) and can implement right away. For more complex topics, like writing, pick just one narrow aspect of your writing routine (writing topic sentences or dissecting the prompt, for example) to unpack. I don’t think it’s possible to get too small and concrete here. We’ve found that teachers crave this kind of detail and nuance in PD–and they rarely get it.
2. Don’t show long videos. Videos are information-rich, so it’s easy to overload viewers’ working memories if they’re longer than two to three minutes. Instead, if you have a longer video, pause periodically, so viewers have the opportunity to think, discuss, and ask questions.
3. Don’t provide too much theory. Elementary teachers are absolutely inundated with theory right now (Scarborough’s Rope, The Simple View of Reading, The Active View of Reading, the list goes on). Don’t get me wrong: theory helps deepen understanding (and can also be extremely interesting), but most teachers need strategies and approaches that they can apply in their classroom the very next day. This is the opportunity to provide it.
4. Don’t be tempted to outsource the leadership of this work to district literacy coaches or outside experts. You might even be reading this and wondering: “Isn’t this what I’m paying my instructional coach to do?” This mindset, which is ultimately a dismissal of teachers, is exactly what we hope to challenge and reject through this work. This model provides an incredible opportunity to highlight, celebrate, and empower teachers to lead and teach other teachers. They are the ones doing the teaching, and they should be the ones presenting their work to their colleagues. We believe that when teachers teach teachers, teachers learn. 

Just a few months in, we’re thrilled with the success of TTT. Teachers love it; they want more of it, and we’re scrambling to offer more sessions.; BUT just talking about great instructional videos is not enough. To take this model to the next level, we need teachers to intentionally try out the routines and practices they’re learning in their own classrooms. Next school year, we will build a protocol (grounded in the principles of Japanese Lesson Study) for doing just that: implement the new routine, come back together as a group to analyze what worked and didn’t, and then do it again. That’s how we ensure that the practices stick and that the routines get implemented and improved. And of course, these follow-up meetings will be led by the same teachers.  

We believe in this work. We believe that teachers need and deserve concrete, practical, and teacher-led PD. And we are going to keep offering it until teachers stop asking for it. At the same time, we believe that this approach would be even more effective in schools and across districts! So pick a relevant literacy topic, recruit a few teachers, get them filming (you just need a phone and a tripod), and get started. And if you want some help getting started, get in touch! We work with dozens of brilliant teachers who can help you do this work.