What does it mean to be a professional in teaching?

While in my Islamic Art class, I met two art teachers who were taking the class as well.  They were interested in using it in their own art and in their classrooms.  It was fantastic talking with them about collaboration across content areas and what it means to be a professional as a teacher.

This made me think about what it means to be a "professional" in the field of teaching and how you "advance" in the career.  We have been talking about this at the KSTF summer meeting as well.  At KSTF summer meeting, several fellows mentioned that things they do in their school are seen as "leadership moves" - essentially moves that they are doing to show competency as a future admin, rather than authentic things that they think are will bring upon educational improvement.  Many of these teachers, like myself, have no interest in going into admin, but do want to improve education outside their classroom.  I am wondering is there a space for this type of action in my school or in other educational communities I am a part of.

MTBoS seems like an excellent example of teacher leadership - these are teachers who for the most part want to stay in the classroom but do extraordinary things to invite others into their classroom.  By inviting others in (though blogs, twitter, etc.) they are really impacting education far beyond their classroom.  I am a better teacher today because I follow Sam J Shah, Kate Novak and the like.  By participating in #teach180, I was able to open up my classroom and was certainly more involved in the larger STEM teacher community as a result.  I don't know if I impacted others outside my classroom but I do know that I learned a lot from participating with this educational community.

In addition to MTBoS I am beyond excited to be part of code.org's team this year!  I will be teaching AP CSP this year using their curriculum again and am excited to (hopefully) implement it with a little more confidence and with the ability to provide more extensions for students this year. Additionally, I am a facilitator for their CSP program which has given me access to the community of AP CSP facilitators as well as the ability to provide support for other CSP teachers through workshops and in an online community.  This feels like a more traditional path to leadership, but what I love about code.org is that their PD model asks facilitators to do just that, facilitate learning - not dictate it.  I appreciate the PD approach where you put teachers in the role of a learner and ask them to reflect on that process.  Seeing that reflection focus on engagement and equity is powerful for me to see since in my school community, I have not seen PD take this approach in the past.  ALTHOUGH, now that I have seen it done (and semi-facilitated it myself) I am wondering how (and if) I can bring that to my school community.

Finally, while in London, both of the teachers I met in my classes were exhibitionist artists in addition to teachers.  One of them mentioned that as a professional art teacher, she has decided it is important to be an exhibiting artist since she is teaching students to be artists, she needs to be an artist as well.   However, this individual felt like that being an exhibiting artist was not valued by her peers or by administration.  They thought of it as a "side thing" rather than an essential part of her professional development.  I wonder how being a mathematician, historian, or writer can be an act of teacher leadership.

In my first year of KSTF we did a lot with the different types of knowledge that teachers needed.  There was a diagram of an egg.  It kinda looked like this.

Now that I think about it, there were a lot of versions of the egg that we saw, BUT the point is that there are a lot of different things you need to know and be able to do.  Somehow, the knowledge of content seems to get pushed to the background at times.  Shouldn't it be important that people teaching math also practice math - that they put themselves into the position of actually LEARNING math.  Every time I take a math class after a while, I gain a new appreciation for what we put our students through in math.  When I had to take a college level geometry class after two years out of grad school I didn't understand 2/3 of what the professor was writing on the board!  Additionally, taking a math class helps me practice thinking like a mathematician and talking with other math students helps me practice communicating mathematically.  I wish our culture valued having teachers further their own content knowledge more - I think there is a perception out there that anyone who took high school algebra can teach high school algebra.  Even fellow math teachers have said that they don't use Abstract Algebra to teach Algebra 1.   Which, might be in part true, BUT that sounds awfully like what our students say ("When are we ever going to use this?") - a complaint that is often dismissed.  The point is that doing math at any level grows your brain and gives people new tools to look at the world and solve problems.

As far as my time in Europe goes, my time is London is done for the time being and I headed to Madrid yesterday and Cordoba today.  Cordoba has a lot of tiling everywhere!  I went to a synagogue that was originally a mosque where saw some more original tiling but I took pictures with my camera so I cannot post them here.  Then we went to some ruins at Medina Azahara .  While a lot of the decoration had deteriorated, the museum gave a good idea of what the palace was originally like.