Knowledge Quest on the Web:
May/June 2001
Special full-text reprint with embedded links of the "Homepage" column
"Nourishing Professional Growth" (p. 11-12)
exclusively on KQWeb
Nourishing Professional Growth
Debbie Abilock, Editor
"Evaluating Educators"
Cynthia, the middle school coordinator at my school, had positioned her issue of Educational Leadership on the restaurant table so that we could read the article title.1 "There’s nothing in here that we don’t already know," she announced. "But schools have so many different data points--every school is different--how are we going to implement staff evaluation with our staff?
She’s already "cooking"--No surprise, in a way.
Like other good leaders, she is aware of the basic ingredients of a successful staff evaluation process: professional growth, reflection, and ongoing feedback--common knowledge among educators. However, she was acknowledging that the real challenges are combining them for the culture and mission of a particular institution--and differentiating the spices for individual staff members.
She’s on the right track.
She began by asking questions of her colleagues. Within a learning community, the systems of organizational management, teaching, and professional growth operate in a "cycle of inquiry and action," a cycle that inevitably reminds us librarians of the research process itself.2 Effective questions emanating from a genuine need to know are the first ingredient of the recipe for professional growth.
The January/February 2001 issue of Knowledge Quest focused on leadership. Now we turn our spotlight toward partners and mentors. The Partnerships Project, managed by Violet Harada and her colleagues and mentored by Jean Donham, has created such a learning community. Harada writes of a culture of inquiry among collaborative teams, supported by flexible structures and committed to academic rigor and reflection in a spirit of honesty and openness. "If [information] moves through a system freely, individuals learn and change, and their discoveries can be integrated by the system. The system becomes both resilient and flexible."3
While collegial partnerships are the bread and butter of everyday learning within a framework of professional practice, mentors are the microbrewers of renewal and wisdom.4 Distinct from external gurus, they are skillful educators in the stage of life that Erikson calls generative, steeped in the rich sauces of their professional lives, caring for and giving to the next generation.5
Based on the humanistic psychology of Maslow and Rogers, their facilitative approach trusts in the learner’s ability to find solutions to his or her own problems.6 Just as Odysseus charged his friend-teacher Mentor with the education of his son, our profession entrusts young library media specialists to those who understand the "individualized, tailored, one-to-one environments for giving and receiving the gift of wisdom--the time-honored process of mentoring."7 Julie Tallman and Mary Ann Fitzgerald of the Department of Instructional Technology at the University of Georgia are among our profession’s mentors.
Their mentees--Wanda Wilcoxon, Manda Gwatney, and Jennie Persinger--have learned important lessons. They have learned to ask carefully designed core questions that focus thought and guide inquiry.8 They have learned to invite partnerships in order to build ownership and elicit support for a process. As we read Gwatney’s questions to herself about the alignment of her own values and practices, we sense that Tallman and Anderson have nurtured what master teachers have always known as true power--the power to come to one’s own conclusions.9 The three practitioners who will not grow isolated within their media centers’ walls, for they are connected to colleagues through a desire to learn from them and a strong conceptual understanding of our profession’s beliefs and principles.
Our spotlight on mentors does not end here. Read through the references for each of the articles and columns in this issue. Barbara Stripling, Tony Ghaye, Marjorie Pappas, David Loertscher, Carol Simpson, Mike Eisenberg, Nancy Everhart, Grant Wiggins, Bob Berkowitz, Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, Stephen Krashen, and Carol Kuhlthau--they speak and teach and write and coach us all.
Within your school, district, and state, understand and support assessment that links accountability to mentoring and partnering. As part of the movement to hold schools accountable for student learning, for example, California is leavening a Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program with $137 million so that poor-performing veteran teachers are linked with peer mentors.10 Begin at your own site by using the worksheets and exercises in the Mentor’s Guide, join the Knowledge Loom educators’ forum online, or form a local Sand in the Oyster discussion group to use the grit of new ideas to stimulate pearls of learning.11
Now peek into the hearts of our members and learn why they write articles, volunteer, and respond to requests for help. With this issue we are launching an online series, "Why I...," that brings our colleagues up-close and personal. Reach out to add your "Why I..." to KQ on the Web by contacting our associate editor, Dennis LeLoup, at dleloup@surf-ici.com.
More than twenty-five centuries ago Shu Ching wrote, "those who are willing to learn from others, become greater."12 Learn from your partners and mentors wherever you find them, even among your students and within your family. In his anatomy of creativity, Howard Gardner points out that Picasso’s most important mentor was his father, just as columnist Carol Gordon has been shaped by authentic learning in her grandmother’s kitchen "Fa bene."13 Well done!
References
- "Evaluating Educators," Educational Leadership 58, no. 5 (Feb. 2001).
- Kathleen Cushman, ed., "The Cycle of Inquiry and Action: Essential Learning Communities," Horace 15, no. 4 (Apr. 1999). Availble online at www.essentialschools.org/pubs/horace/15/v15n04.html. Accessed 27 Feb. 2001.
- Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, A Simpler Way (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996), 82.
- Charlotte Danielson, Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1996), 117.
- John L. Brown and Cerylle A. Moffett, The Hero’s Journey: How Educators Can Transform Schools and Improve Learning (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1999), 106.; The George Lucas Educational Foundation, Skillful Educators: Mentoring, 2001, http://216.34.32.200/educators.html. Accessed 27 Feb. 2001.
- Peter Tomlinson, Understanding Mentoring: Reflective Strategies for School-Based Teacher Preparation (Buckingham, England: Open Univ. Pr., 1995), 60.
- Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch, Mentoring: The TAO of Giving and Receiving Wisdom (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995), xi.
- Marylou Dantonio and Paul C. Beisenherz, Learning to Question, Questioning to Learn: Developing Effective Teacher Questioning Practices (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 38.
- Peter Stern and Jean Yarbrough, "Hannah Arendt," in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, Joseph Epstein, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 210.
- Sarah Tully Tapia, "Few O.C. Teachers get Poor Evaluation," Orange County Register, 27 Feb. 2001. Available online at www.ocregister.com/community/par00227cci.shtml. Accessed 27 Feb. 2001.
- Lois J. Zachary, The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000); Shirley Weisman, "Sand in the Oyster," California School Library Association Newsletter 26, no. 6 (Feb. 2001), 2, 6.
- Huang and Lynch, Mentoring, xi.
- Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 377.
Debbie Abilock, Editor, is the Assistant Head of The San Francisco School, San Francisco CA.
Copyright © 2001 American Association of School Librarians, a division of the American Library Association.
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