Molly Uline-Olmstread

Museums go with schools like peanut butter goes with jelly. It is a beautiful symbiotic relationship built on a variety of interactions including field trips, distance learning, traveling artifact programs, and teacher professional development. While I have worked with all of these programs in the past, I have been living in the teacher professional development neighborhood of the museum world since 2009. I work with K-16 teachers and other museum educators on projects meant to support and enhance teaching in the humanities through my job with the Creative Learning Factory at the Ohio Historical Society (the Factory).

Lately in conversations with teachers and museum colleagues, we have been talking less about content and more about learning. We have been asking the question, “How do we make learning an inextricable part of life?” Educators in formal and informal learning environments are bombarded with resources, regulations, and tremendous responsibilities. We struggle to find balance and time for exploration and reflection amid testing, lesson planning, and classroom management. Peter D. John articulates this frustration well in his 2006 article about non-traditional lesson planning, "The model of planning and teaching represented in this minimalist conception develops as follows: aim > input > task > feedback > evaluation. It reflects an approach to teaching and learning wherein reflection and exploration are at worst luxuries, not to be afforded, and at best minor spin-offs, to be accommodated.”  As cultural organizations, we are in that unique “third space,” which allows us to facilitate those crucial habits-of-mind that lead to life-long learning. I think of this as looking at the “whole educator” in the same way the education field has championed the “whole child.”

We have taken steps toward this model through a visionary, collaborative program called TRIAD 210—a teacher professional development series designed around the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (P21) framework. Kurt Huffman and Robin Dungan from the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), Rachel Trinkley and Jessimi Jones (formally) from the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), and I designed the program on three foundational values: students deserve to have a quality education that prepares them with the skills needed for success in the future; teachers deserve professional development that is practical, relevant, and supports improved student learning; and that by collaborating and pooling the strengths of each of our organizations we can provide high quality and substantive teacher professional development. With support from the Franklin County Educational Council and generous funding from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, we implemented our plan this year. We held three full day sessions with teams of teachers from districts around Franklin County, Ohio—one session at each of our institutions, focusing on the 21^st Century Skills highlighted in the P21 framework. We examined creativity at CMA, communication and collaboration at the Factory, and critical thinking at COSI. Each of us facilitated a hands-on activity for each day meant to help the teachers think about curriculum as trans-disciplinary, playful, community-based, and truly relevant. While they built cars out of balloons, designed arcade games out of recyclables, and made pinhole cameras out of matchboxes, we asked them to think about how to experiment with engineering and design challenges, analyze visual media, and engage with historical empathy. But most of all, we asked them to think about what makes them excited to teach and learn.

The one thing we did not ask them to do was write a lesson plan. Lesson plans are the currency of professional development traded for continuing education units, college credits, or stipends. These teachers were sick of writing them and we facilitators were sick of reading them. We all agreed that it is impossible to engage with real changes in teaching and learning in a single one or two-day lesson plan. So the teachers joined us in-between our Saturday sessions on three Wednesday evenings. We fed them dinner and asked them to find a way to weave the themes, concepts, and habits of thinking throughout their teaching practice in ways that made sense for them. This open ended format was challenging for us as facilitators and for the group of teachers who were in working teams from the same district, but from different grades and subject areas. However, by asking them to contemplate questions like “What have you wanted to teach but never have?” and “How will you make visible shifts in learning and thinking?” we have ended up with, among others, a project designed to change school culture around the organizing principle of kindness; a team taught class on media literacy and media production; a multi-year program involving students, teachers, and parents meant to re-introduce and cultivate curiosity in the classroom; and a design challenge across three grade levels that examines animal adaptations to our changing environment.

What we have all found in this process is that when we bust open the aim > input > task > feedback > evaluation lesson-planning, professional development, content loop, allowing space for authentic creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and space for educators to explore what excites and inspires their learning, we end up with re-invigorated educators and facilitators. Moving forward, we see this as a new model for educator professional development. One that leverages the strengths of three institutions, challenges the traditional model of lesson planning, and invites educators to look at learning and teaching as life-long, community driven, and geared towards the “whole educator.”

Interested in hearing more about the future of the arts from emerging arts leaders? Check out our preconference session on Arts Leadership at this year’s Annual Convention in Nashville, TN.

This Emerging Leaders Blog Salon on Charting the Future is generously sponsored by Patron Technology.