When we can't remember how to cook something, we call our mothers. When we get stuck in World of Warcraft, we call our best friends. More often than not, we instinctively turn to the closest experts to help us with personal dilemmas. Professionally, however, when we want to explore a topic or practice unknown to us, we rely on the most authoritative expert we can find on YouTube, through Twitter, or at a conference.
What if instead we create a professional culture in which our peers are recognized as the closest experts, and, as such, we turn to them first when we want to learn something new or further explore a topic?
At the American School of Bombay, we are attempting to do this through our Experts in the Building initiative, launched this fall. The components may sound familiar, but we have uniquely structured them to foster a culture of professional sharing and learning.
The first component is a published list of experts and the topics about which they are willing to share their deep understanding. The list, which is posted to our Teaching & Learning website, covers areas such as project-based learning, differentiation, and using data to drive instruction. Our hope is that teachers will begin to use one another as initial sources of insight and knowledge as much as they would use other resources—and the initiative has found early success. A high school math teacher recently referenced the list when she wanted to "gamify" an upcoming unit. She not only gained access to print and online resources but also was able to consult with a resident gamification expert in the middle school to talk through how some of her ideas might play out in the classroom.
The second component is a set of small professional learning groups, each focused on an area of interest to teachers. For the groups to learn together, we transformed 10 divisional faculty meetings into 90-minute, faculty-directed learning sessions. The final session will consist of a Learning Fair at which groups will share what they learned and implemented with the rest of the staff.
After the first several meetings, we found it necessary to change membership in some groups because of overrepresentation of topics within departments or because of an honest mismatch between a teacher's personal interest and the topic being explored. Overall, however, the majority of teachers remained engaged in their groups' topics.
Replicating Experts in the Building should be easy in most contexts. Both the list of experts and the professional learning groups can be created based on data collected in a survey. Our survey listed the topics explored by our school in recent years and provided the opportunity for teachers to add their own topics.