New View EDU Episode 69: Building Collaborative Learning Cultures

Available April 1, 2025

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Elham Kazemi and Jessica CalabreseProfessional development is an important part of educational leadership, but not all professional development opportunities are equally effective. When we’re seeking to improve teaching and learning outcomes in our schools, are we developing classrooms or cultures? Siloes or collaborative communities? Guests Elham Kazemi (left) and Jessica Calabrese (right), co-authors of Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning, join host Morva McDonald to share how they worked together on a novel practice that built community, improved student outcomes, and changed how both teachers and learners thought about their work.

Jessica shares how she accepted a position as the principal of a struggling public school in Renton, WA, with the charge of turning the school’s test scores and learner outcomes around. Seeking a radically different approach to supporting the school community and introducing improvements, she partnered with Elham, a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, to create an embedded professional development program at the school. Elham and her colleagues helped implement a specialized lab program, which transformed the teaching and learning culture. 

Elham and Jessica highlight the key aspects of the lab program: instructional coaches were provided to work directly with teachers in the classroom; real-time professional development work done while teachers were with their own students; teachers planning and trying new lessons and ideas together; and embedding the learning for educators into the classroom work, so professional development happens during the learning day, not as a separate task. “I could see that path between, we all learned something today with and from kids and each other. And now tomorrow, I could hold that thread into, OK, what are we all doing tomorrow? … I could pull that thread right back to the classroom,” Jessica says.

Elham notes that one of the strengths of the lab model is generating knowledge in real time together, not handing knowledge from a professional development presenter to teachers. Because the labs engaged educators in observing how kids were thinking and approaching tasks, they then had to actively participate together in building on those observations to deepen the learning. Jessica refers repeatedly to the work as being about understanding that children are sense-makers in the classroom, and teachers are there to support them in making sense of the concepts. 

Changing the way we think and talk about the students in our care is also a big part of what makes Elham and Jessica’s approach successful. They share that along with thinking about students as sense-makers, they also encourage educators to stop categorizing kids by “levels” that align with their achievements and scores. Instead, Elham says, educators can look at how each student thinks and approaches tasks, and understand where their process is going awry. In that context, she says, errors become opportunities to clarify and refine a child’s thinking, and learners become more empowered to take risks and contribute in the classroom because discussion and observation encourage them to keep trying. 

Ultimately, Jessica says, the work of labs leads to an important cultural shift: a true vision of the collaborative teaching and learning community you want to foster. When teachers feel clear on the vision of what the classroom can become, and feel invited into that as part of a consistently improving community of educators, everything flows from that place. And, she notes, the test scores and outcomes follow.

 

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Elham, Jessica, and Morva explore in this episode include:

  • What does the lab model look like in practice? How are teachers working together, alongside their students, to learn and develop skills in real time?
  • How does a school leader have to approach this kind of embedded professional development to help teachers feel invited into community with one another and to encourage continued growth?
  • Within this model of teaching and learning, how do the roles for educator and student shift? How can we change our expectations and the way we talk and think about each person’s role?
  • What kind of architecture and systems have to be in place for something like this to work within a school community? 

Episode Highlights

  • “We think about what it is that we want to try with students, but then all of us go into the classroom together. Instead of going separately into our own individual spaces, we collaboratively go into one space where we know the kids, where we're invested in their learning, and try to learn with them. So we'll pose the tasks. We'll think with the kids. We'll tell the kids that we're there to try something out and learn from the children themselves. And we pause when we need to make sense of what to do next or something that we see that we didn't anticipate, that now we can take advantage of because our real children are there with us.” (7:52)
  • “The lab is part of a larger system that we craft to constantly support teachers as growing decision-makers. Teachers make a million impromptu decisions a day. And if we can help them with content knowledge or strategies to engage all learners or conversation to deepen their thinking about what's happening in their learning environment, in their classrooms, then we are providing instructional leadership that supports their continuous growth.” (15:56)
  • “Instead of sorting kids into categories, what you start to do is pay attention to what they're understanding and why they're doing what they're doing and what's the logic. So even when they make errors, how are they interpreting the problem? How are they attacking a certain text? You know, what is it that's happening? So that your instructional decision-making is specific to what you're seeing. And you don't look at the diversity in your class as a problem, right? You don't think, ‘Oh, I have such a range of kids.’ You actually realize that part of what helps everybody grow is the way they compare and connect their ideas.” (29:27)
  • “We have to redefine our identity as teachers, that my job isn't to get kids to do things. I can get you to do things, but you are not left with something new in your understanding when I walk away. So if I'm truly teaching you to be a learner, like we talk a lot about teach the reader, not the book. Teach the mathematician, not the math. And it takes a lot of reassurance from leaders for teachers to believe it's OK to do that, that I am not being judged by what I can get kids to do, things in a moment or on a day of a test. And I find myself saying that a lot of like, we're growing children, not test scores.” (37:51)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

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About Our Guests

Jessica Calabrese is the co-author of Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning. She was the chief of school improvement in the Renton School District and the principal at Lakeridge Elementary, the school at which the research-practice partnership described in the book originated. During her five years as principal, she led the development of professional learning and collaboration practices that resulted in the school’s performance rising from the fifth percentile of schools in the state to exiting improvement status. 

As the chief of school improvement, she led the development of a collective of six schools purposely organized to provide ongoing and embedded teacher and leader learning. She now works with school and district teams to develop sustainable and coherent teacher learning systems.

Elham Kazemi is a professor of mathematics education at the University of Washington. She studies children’s mathematical thinking and learning experiences in classrooms, the teacher’s role in facilitating discussions, and how teacher educators design and lead environments so that teachers learn from and with their students. One important theme throughout all this work is nurturing strong professional communities among teachers. Her research and partnership work has been informed by research on organizational learning, school reform, children’s mathematical thinking and classroom practice.

Recent books include Intentional Talk, coauthored with Allison Hintz, which focuses on leading productive discussions in mathematics; Choral Counting and Counting Collections, edited with Megan Franke and Angela Turrou, which describes two generative routines for student learning; and Learning Together, co-authored with Jessica Calabrese, Teresa Lind, Becca Lewis, Alison Resnick, and Lynsey Gibbons, which explains the work that teachers, coaches, and principals can do together to make schools powerful places for student and teacher learning.