Analytical Personal and Professional Update

Engagement in Professional Community

In the time since Portfolio 1 I have taken on part time work as an educational consultant

focusing on developing professional learning communities, continued my full time work as a

literacy instructional coach and taken seven graduate classes. Each of these arenas has presented

opportunities to engage with a broader professional community than I had earlier in my program.

Through my new consulting work with Solution Tree I have traveled to work with

schools in New Mexico, Texas, California, Georgia, Nevada and Arkansas, which has broadened

my perspective of the issues in education and the gaps in knowledge as I’ve worked with

teachers who function in very different contexts than I do in common core states, in unionized

districts, and in schools were they have very little freedom to make instructional decisions. I

wrote a blog on AllThingsPLC.com about change management during new curriculum adoption

that was retweeted or favorited over 700 times and I wrote an article for All Things PLC

Magazine on the power of teacher collaboration and the effect on literacy instruction. I have

coauthored the first two chapters of a book on developing professional learning communities in

early childhood settings and we will submit it for review next month. I have been inspired by the

fact that my words and work are now reaching a larger platform than my realm here in Fairfax

County and look forward to eventually being published for my research.

I was asked by Fairfax County Public Schools to be on the steering committee for their

Summer Literacy Symposium which brings together over a thousand teachers and administrators

from elementary schools across the county for two days of intense professional development

with a different focus each summer. Collaborating with the best and brightest literacy leaders in

our district for half a dozen days each spring in order to design the PD has allowed me to form
tighter bonds in my local professional community and has been some of the best PD of my

career. Bringing our plans to life as we facilitate the training for the teachers each summer has

been great experience in teaching adults, which makes me look forward to teaching college level

courses one day.

By crafting a secondary area of focus outside the education department I have been able

to connect with a more diverse group of students and professors. In two classes I was the only

person in K-12 education and I learned from peers in the military, health services, business, and

communication fields. It is a good challenge to have to explain the why behind what we do

instead of being comfortable with topics where you share a similar frame of reference with those

around you. Through my coursework I’ve had the opportunity to observe, interview and connect

with two different professors I did not previously know and each of these experiences helped me

hone my developing identity as teacher educator. I have joined the professional organization,

World Association of Lesson Study (WALS) and connected with a pool of educators and

researchers primarily from other countries and this connection is shaping my area of interest for

my dissertation. I submitted a proposal to present a project on evaluating the effectiveness of

lesson study as a form of professional development at the DC Consortium Student Conference on

Evaluation and Policy (DCSCEP) on May 4 and it has been accepted. I have also been asked to

review also an article submission for the International Journal of Education Policy and

Leadership which is helping me become familiar with the process of getting published.

As a full time practitioner and part time PhD student there are times when I’ve felt at a

disadvantage because I am not fully engaged in academia and the opportunities for intellectual

growth that present themselves if you are physically present on campus, working with professors

on research projects and engaging with others between classes. The two areas in which I feel I
lack deep understanding compared to those graduate students who are more engaged in academic

work are my familiarity with theoretical frameworks and quantitative research. Each semester I

question my choices and obligations and how I am allocating my time. Before writing this essay

I was wondering to what extent I could have been more engaged with the academic community

at George Mason but after reflecting I am really surprised to see how much my larger

professional community has grown since Portfolio 1. One of my goals was to become an

academic in order to be a link between the academic and practitioner worlds. Whereas I

previously thought of the need for that connection as unidirectional since I believe more practice

should be informed by research, what I have realized as I reflect on my professional growth is

the reciprocity of research informing practice and practice informing research. Since Portfolio 1 I

have developed two major areas of interest and I was introduced to one of them in my literacy

coaching job and one of them in my consulting job and now my dissertation is likely going to

focus on looking for connections between the two areas. At Portfolio 1 the one area that my

committee recommended I strengthen was my ability to make connections between what I was

learning as evidenced in my knowledge discussion. I believe the Knowledge Application and

Representation essays show my improved ability to do that plus I am making more connections

between my academic and practitioner pursuits.

Coursework

I took EDUC 874 Achievement Gap right after Portfolio 1 when I was focused on

struggling readers, especially those who are culturally and linguistically diverse and live in

poverty. I work in a Title I school with students from 42 different birth countries who speak

almost 20 different languages so I considered myself well versed in the achievement gap but

what was mind blowing in this class was how uninformed I was about the depth of the black-
white achievement gap. We dug into white privilege, equity over equality and I was horrified to

learn that officials in my native state chose to defund and close public schools in Prince Edward

County rather than desegregate. White students never missed a beat since the white businessmen

immediately opened a private school for them while black children either went to live with

relatives or strangers in order to go to school or went without any school for the five years it took

until the Supreme Court forced the county to reopen schools.

The next semester I took my first class outside the education department. COMM 653

Instructional Communication helped me envision myself as a teacher educator after observing

Dr. Parker and designing a syllabus. It was during this semester that I first encountered change

management theory and was able to incorporate it into a presentation. Although it was a minor

part of the presentation, it was an aspect that everyone in class really connected to and

commented about afterwards, making me believe this was an area for further study. In COMM

635 Organizational Communication I was able to further explore organizational change and its

connection to collective efficacy. While I was in EDUC 896 Digital Literacies I put thoughts of

change management on hold and delved back into the world of literacy. I was able to expand my

interpretation of the word literacy and understand the nuances of terms such as new literacy,

media literacy, and critical literacy. I thought about these things not only from the perspective of

teaching children to be literate in the 21st century but also how that will affect adult learning

since I had created what felt like a masterpiece of a syllabus in COMM 653 and I could already

see ways to revise it and further reach adult students through digital literacy.

Next came EDRS 811 Quantitative Methods where I hoped to learn how to conduct

research to combine my new interest in change management with my primary focus of literacy

instruction but that was not the case. I learned how to navigate SPSS, but left the class with a
very poor foundation in quantitative methods and no experience as either a consumer or producer

of such research. The good news is that my dissertation research will likely be a case study with

three grade levels at my school, and while I am determined to collect and analyze some

quantitative data, I have made connections with fellow students here at GMU who specialize in

methods and can mentor and coach me through the experience.

Luckily this semester has been an explosion of learning and connections and everything

seems to be coming together to point me in the direction of a dissertation. EDUC 803 Teacher

Preparation has taught me about my identify as a teacher educator, creating learner-, knowledge-

and community centered environments and most importantly allowed me to explore my most

recent interest in lesson study. This has caused one of the biggest shifts since Portfolio 1 since I

no longer think I will collect data on struggling readers for my dissertation, but rather will focus

on teacher professional development in literacy. If I can get more teachers to change their

practices I will be impacting more struggling readers. EDRS 820 Evaluation Methods was

something I never would have taken but it was recommended to me at Portfolio 1 and has been a

wonderful fit. I have learned about doing field work, creating logic models and that I identify

with the pragmatic paradigm. I am in the process of developing an evaluation for the

effectiveness of lesson study as a model of professional development to be presented at my first

conference.

Goals

As mentioned earlier, the intellectual goals that I will pursue because they will not likely

be met through my remaining coursework are to learn more about theoretical frameworks

and quantitative research. I also am interested in learning more about collective efficacy

and seeing if it would fit into part of my dissertation because it has been shown to be
strongly related to student achievement with an effect size of 1.57 which is three times

more powerful and predictive than socio-economic status’s effect size of 0.52 (Hattie,

2012).

Given that I now have a vision for my dissertation whereas Portfolio 1 found me with no

idea in which direction I was headed, I am amazed to read the last lines of my original goal

statement and see how the big picture really hasn’t changed much:

“In conclusion, my professional goal at this point is to ensure every student has access to

quality literacy instruction and to be an agent of change in building teacher capacity to

help educators work together to meet that goal. I hope to work to accomplish this in the

private sector as a consultant and author of articles and books for practitioners as well as

in the public sector as researcher and professor.”

I’m fascinated that I used the term “agent of change” when I had not yet learned about change

management and now this year “agent of change” has become part of the title of my blog post on

the subject. Maybe I did have more of an inclination where I was headed than I realized. Below I

have included a graphic of my areas of interest and goals from Portfolio 1 followed by a much

clearer, simplified version of where I stand now.