Engaging Teachers in Instructional Rounds

24. February 2011 · 12 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: , , ,

I had the good fortune to spend about three hours this morning with seven of my teachers as well as my instructional coach who are part of an intra-school “pilot” project inspired by Richard Elmore’s Instructional Rounds in Education. It’s a big chunk of my day, but this is the work that instructional leaders should be doing.

The Why

I have a personal goal to support teachers in talking to each other about their practice. As Elmore points out, “one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like” (p. 3). The rounds process is intended to bring conversations about instructional practice into the school improvement process. The rounds process is adapted from the medical rounds model and includes “observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction” (p. 3).

My hope is that I can expand this school-wide next year, but I wanted to start small. I worked with my instructional coach to solicit seven teacher volunteers to be part of this pilot. I have a cross-section of disciplines, grade levels, and experience and we meet biweekly for a total of seven sessions. Each teacher will open their classroom to the group one time and have the opportunity to observe the other six over the course of the pilot.

In Elmore’s parlance, I have a theory of action that looks something like this:

If we develop and nurture a school culture that supports collaborative inquiry and the sharing of best teaching practices, then classroom instruction will be strengthened and students will learn in deeper, more authentic ways.

The How

The participants voluntarily come in to pre-brief at 6:45am on lab days. They have no incentive other than coffee and conversation along with their commitment to improve their practice through sharing in the lab experience. Though all participants are observing the same class at the same time, each bring a different inquiry question to the lab experience. These questions run the gamut and are highly dependent on the teachers’ interests and perceived areas for growth.

Some examples of inquiry questions from this group:

  • How can a teacher foster global citizenship in his or her students?
  • What strategies do teachers use to get students talking about text?
  • How can social studies teachers more effectively include historical fiction in their units of instruction?
  • How can I move students from external accountability to intrinsic responsibility for their learning?
  • How can I ensure that my lessons are authentic and connect students with the larger social context?

The teacher being observed may also pose a specific question related to their class being observed. These questions are posted on our neopolitan-colored “Board of Inquiry.”

At our pre-brief, we also assign people to track specific data that the host teacher requests. For instance, this morning we tracked:

  • Use of vocabulary by teacher and students that indicates “global literacy”
  • Connections from historical fiction text to self
  • Wait time between posing a questions and selecting a student to respond

The most challenging part is arranging class coverage for the observing teachers so that we can all be together to observe and de-brief the process. I am very passionate about the success of this pilot and have committed to using a chunk of the sub dollars allocated to me for professional development. On lab days, we use in-house coverage only when absolutely necessary, instead bringing in four or five half-day subs to cover for lab participants.

Following the one-hour classroom observation, we take a short break, top off our coffees, and re-convene for a de-brief.

Once everyone is back together, we sit silently for a few minutes to reflect on our initial observations. We go quickly around the table, sharing an objective, non-value-laden observation about what we’ve seen. Our instructional coach then leads the group through a discussion connecting one or two of the principles from the Elmore book to the lesson we observed.

It is at this point in the process that the requested data is shared and processed, along with other relevant information. For instance, this morning one of the participants noted that the host teacher had asked 70 questions in a 60-minute observation.

The hour-long debrief process usually flies by, and ultimately ends with each participant sharing something that they believe they have learned about the host teachers core principles. Examples include:

  • Ms. X seems to value every student’s contribution to her class.
  • It seems very important to Ms. X that her students access their personal experience to build background knowledge before tackling new text.
  • Based on the discussion, it seems like Ms. X has high expectations that students are able to connect course content to real-world contexts.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

We are two lab cycles in to our pilot project and we continue to re-visit the norms we established at the outset. It is incredibly courageous of the teacher participants to open up their classrooms to their colleagues, and all have expressed their nervousness to do so.

All in all, I think the two teachers who have hosted to this point have come away feeling positive about the experience. My hope is to generate enough energy and momentum to roll this out school-wide next year. The logistics of pulling this off with 44 full-time faculty will be a bit of a challenge, but I believe passionately that this is the work we should be doing so I am committed to figuring out how to make it happen even if it means I’ll be covering classes.

Moving to a Staff Blog

05. February 2011 · 31 comments · Categories: blogging, Education, Leadership

In August, I went cold-turkey and informed my teachers that I would not be sending mass emails this year. I briefly touched on how inefficient email is as a one-to-many communication tool and most nodded along as they’ve all fallen victim to the “TMI” of a colleague who uses “reply all” to share that they wouldn’t make the faculty meeting because they’d been having stomach cramps all day.

As with the introduction of anything completely new, I explained to them the trade-off I was willing to make. My school was functioning under an intense “culture of meetings” that, in my opinion, was a little excessive. I committed to them to cut down on meeting times, but the trade-off was that all “FYI” items — without exception — would be posted on a private staff blog and that they were responsible for checking it every day.

Knowing that there would still be some for whom this was uncomfortable, I enabled a “subscribe by email” button at the top of the page. This meant that it was up to each individual to subscribe if they wanted to continue to receive school news via email. For me, this meant that I still only had to post in one place.

As a last bit of insurance, I worked with our school technologist to ensure that our staff blog was the browser start-up page on teacher computers. This means that it’s staring them in the face every time they open their browsers.

The benefits of the staff blog as I have seen them unfold this year are:

  • Information is archived. How many emails do you get from staff who absent-mindedly deleted that email with the attachment they needed? I’ve been guilty of this myself! On the blog, everything is categorized and archived by month so the assembly schedule we used in October is still there when we need it again in January.

  • Information is searchable. Technically, email is searchable, too, but if you’ve ever used FirstClass as your email client you’ll know that this is less than ideal. Plus, with the small mailbox sizes we are allocated, and the wonky way FC duplicates emails when you reply or forward, people tend to delete stuff.

  • Comments are way more efficient than emailing. This one was a bit unexpected, but it’s probably the biggest benefit. Say you post about an upcoming event and you omit an important piece of information. If you had emailed it, you’d get 10 or 15 emails asking for clarification and you’d have to either reply to each one or send one of those, “Oops! I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that Friday’s dance has an 80s theme…” emails. On the blog, one person asks the question in the comments and I can answer it once,

Overall, I think this has been a successful experiment. I think one of the primary reasons is that I articulated the purpose clearly as a reduction in wasted meeting time. Also, the cold-turkey approach was the only way to go. I don’t think this would have worked as effectively had I continued to send emails and post on the blog.

It didn’t take long for the hold-outs to come around when there was something they didn’t know about. I overheard more than one conversation along the lines of, “How did you know about [whatever]?”

“It was posted on the blog yesterday. Don’t you check it?”

Also, as with the team blogs, support is critical. This was new for people so hand-holding was critical for some while some were off and running right away. Some people stress out very easily because they “just aren’t good with technology” so it’s critical to support them in the early stages.

At this point in the year, there are four of us who have rights to post on the staff blog. I want to expand this next year to make it even more collaborative and to reinforce it as the “one-stop shop” for all things school related.

Meeting to Meet

10. August 2010 · 17 comments · Categories: Communication, Education, Leadership

I know this will come as a huge shock, but most people despise meetings. When I ask staff about things that are holding them back, almost to a person they have said, “Too many meetings.”

When it comes right down to it, though, these are rituals that are deeply ingrained in the culture of our school. Most schools have a similar situation.

Long, low-energy meetings tend to distract and mute the day. – Martin Fowler

The trouble with throwing out meetings completely is that they do have some value. According to a few papers summarized here, meetings can help achieve the following:

  • Shared commitment
  • Communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
  • Identify obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them
  • Set direction and focus
  • Build a team

Being a new leader and getting to know my staff, I’m not willing to cut out all meetings. But what I am committed to doing is making sure that every minute we spend in some kind of meeting serves to move forward the school’s mission and agenda.

Zero-Based Meeting Budgeting We’re going to get back to basics. At the first regular, monthly meeting of our leadership team, we will remove every meeting from our calendars and begin adding back in those meetings that make sense and will move us toward our goals. We will no longer meet four times per month if we can accomplish the same objective in two highly-productive, focused meetings.

Less meeting time focused on dissemination of information Since my first day on the job, I’ve made some changes that I hope will whittle down the sheer volume of meeting time. Depending on the sensitivity, items that are “information only” in nature go into an email to team leaders or onto our school blog or wiki. Weening people off email has gone well so far, in no small part thanks to my very flexible group of teacher leaders who have been willing to jump into some new ways of doing business.

Two things I’ve learned in trying to bring this level of change to the day-to-day business of an organization are (1) stop trying to use the “inducement” approach to improving processes and systems (see letter B of Scott’s post on RSS for PD), and (2) stop asking questions like “Do you use Google Docs?” in favor of questions like, “To which email address should I send the invite for this document we’re working on?” It’s all about positive presuppositions. Of course we’re using Google Docs! I mean, who isn’t?

I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s a start! Look for an upcoming post with more detail on the process of paper-reduction in a 40-year-old middle school.

Interesting reads I plan to share with the team:

Rereading Rework

08. August 2010 · 12 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership

Tomorrow is the first time I’ll speak (officially, formally) to the entire staff at my school as their principal. I’ve been thinking and stressing a lot over the last week about how that might go. Then I picked up Rework, which was one of the books I read this summer, and found a passage I’d highlighted a few days before I was asked to be a principal:

Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real. It’s why we like real flowers that wilt, not perfect plastic ones that never change. Don’t worry about how you’re supposed to sound and how you’re supposed to act. Show the world what you’re really like, warts and all. So talk like you really talk. Reveal things that others are unwilling to discuss. Be upfront about your shortcomings. Show the latest version of what you’re working on, even if you’re not done yet. It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.

What we do; What we think

06. August 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: , ,

Being a newly appointed principal has provided me with a short window of time during which I am doing a sort of “ethnography” of the school and culture. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my goals these first few weeks has been to try to gather an understanding of what staff is most proud of and what they’d like to see abandoned or, at least, reconsidered.

Like some other schools with diverse student populations, our students need a variety of supports – both academic and personal – to achieve “proficiency” on state tests. While I’m not a fan of this kind of assessment of our kids or our schools, as a new principal I believe that arguing about the merits of said tests is best left to the policy wonks. It’s the hand we’re dealt for now, and as a new principal I’m focusing first on those things within my control.

So my main objective in the near-term is to support my teachers in wrapping their heads around the idea that student success as measured on our state standardized tests and student success as measured by their ability to communicate, collaborate, and produce content in an interconnected, global community are not mutually exclusive.

When I first landed in the Big Chair, I ramped up my scouring of the blogs of other school leaders. What I found was an abundance of ideas, lists of tools and apps, advice on being a good Tweeter, and the like. I’m certainly guilty of posts like this…

What I’ve become increasingly focused on is moving from ideas and feel-good blog posts to action. One of my goals is to renew my use of this space and to spend time writing and reflecting about my actions in this first year as principal. I want to look at things that I actually do as a new principal that might improve systems, culture, and learning in my school with the goal of cultivating an environment that empowers students to learn and develop their identities as global citizens and world-class learners.

I’ll probably fall on my face. I might do that more than once. But at least I’ll try to maintain a good record of my thoughts and actions and how they play out in this organization. Maybe they’ll even help someone else who is entrusted with the exciting but very real responsibility of being a principal.

Some topics I will be addressing in upcoming posts:

  • Re-imagining a culture of meetings
  • Developing a manageable system of academic interventions that address students’ individual needs
  • Moving a 40-year-old school into the 21st century
  • Paring back “initiative bloat”
  • Doing my best not to reinforce the status quo
  • Quite frankly, anything else that comes to mind…

So stick around. This could get interesting.

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