Phase 5: Designing Professional Learning Opportunities

ASCD Case Study: Inter-District Collaboration Powered by Openly Licensed Educational Resources

When education leaders from innovative districts come together, innovative projects result. That’s what happened in early 2015 when Devin Vodicka, superintendent of Vista Unified School District in California; Matthew Miller, superintendent of Mentor School District in Ohio; and Patricia Deklotz and Theresa Ewald, superintendent and assistant superintendent of Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin, found themselves seated at the same table during a meeting of the League of Innovative Schools. In this case, the chance meeting resulted in the COW—California–Ohio–Wisconsin—Project.

The COW leaders wanted to see if they could develop a competency-based, interstate, interdisciplinary course focusing on a single topic. Each district sent two teachers to the Mentor School District outside Cleveland to work on the project for three days. Together they developed curriculum around a singular guiding question: “How do people affect the land and how does the land affect people?” They “focused on Common Core English language arts (ELA) standards for the skills and learning, using social studies as the context for addressing those standards,” said Theresa Ewald, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning for Kettle Moraine.

One challenge was having enough internet bandwidth in the school to support the extensive online collaboration between the three districts. Another issue was that there wasn’t any off-the-shelf content for what they were teaching. All of the materials had to be something they had built, adopted, or adapted. To address this issue, a number of openly licensed educational resources were created jointly by teachers across the three districts as well as curated from existing resources. In addition to developing units of study tied to standards and finding appropriate resources for activities, the COW teachers designed the specifications of a project through which students would demonstrate their learning.

Leading with Professional Learning

Liberty’s systemic approach to implementing openly licensed educational resources started with making the decision a year ahead about which textbooks and instructional materials would be replaced by openly licensed educational resources. The district also developed a strategy for implementing intensive professional learning for the teachers who would be most affected by the change. Jeanette Westfall, Director of Curriculum at Liberty Schools, explained, “A year ago when we first started moving toward the the inclusion of open educational resources (OER) in educators’ practice, it was a “thing” and now it is a standard expectation for all courses to consider use of OER compared to proprietary and free resources as they go through curriculum review and alignment.”

After making the decision to replace its current social studies and science curricula, Liberty decided to take a portion of the money previously set aside to purchase static textbooks in those content areas and invest it in professional learning experiences that would help teachers in those subject areas learn how to create and curate openly licensed educational resources. Liberty also used some of the funds to support teachers in learning new classroom models such as project-based learning that would become more feasible to implement given the flexibility of openly licensed educational resources. This intensive support built capacity for the transition, motivated teachers to both create and curate the needed learning resources, and helped them learn effective ways to use the resources in new and more engaging learning models. This paradigm shift of transitioning to OER as a standard of practice did not occur overnight. It took time, careful preparation, and ongoing support to succeed.

Currently in their second year of implementation, teacher leaders have been identified across 6 different subject and grade levels to lead the #GoOpen team. These leaders share responsibilities, including reviewing all instructional materials to determine if OER, proprietary, or a combination of the two should be considered; submitting a 3-year budget proposal; planning professional learning; and creating lessons. The team members meet up to six times per year and can bring an additional 24 content teachers per meeting. As part of their proposal, content teachers are able to devote time to improving their practice by attending math workshops, classroom visits with a coach, or statewide conferences.

Liberty Public Schools is excited that the choice to use OER compared to traditional instructional materials is spreading to other grade levels and subject areas that are not part of the #GoOpen team. The adoption of openly licensed resources has presented an opportunity for deeper professional engagement. For example, the world languages department, has delayed the purchase of traditional textbook curriculum in order to dive deeper into their teaching practices and devote greater attention to levelled reading and student growth. Science teachers have volunteered to design a district-wide lesson on the 2017 solar eclipse and are collaborating across grade levels to organize, curate, and provide differentiated content appropriate for each grade level. Said Westfall, “In respect to #GoOpen and because of the direction the district is headed, these schools are leaning in and it’s becoming a standard of practice.”