Instructional Rounds

Developing a culture that is open to feedback and reflection is essential to a turnaround school. One of the key strategies that I implemented when I began as a Turnaround Principal was Instructional Rounds. There are different names - Teacher Rounds, Rounds, teachers observing teachers, or classroom walk-throughs. Whatever you call them, the idea is similar to how doctors observe practice and use those observations to reflect and grow on their own practice.

In the book, Instructional Rounds in Education by City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel, the author's outline the importance of peers observing other instructional practices, sharing feedback, and reflecting on their own instruction. This practice is powerful - and provides both observers and practitioners the opportunity to reflect on instructional practices and next steps.

I knew that I wanted to embed the concepts of rounds into the vision at Dr. Weeks, but I needed to accommodate the time that we had available, the size of our staff, and the desire to involve everyone instead of just a few teachers. I ended up creating a model within our collaborative team planning time (50 minutes daily) where teachers would meet for a pre-brief on an identified topic, observe in a classroom for 10-15 minutes, and then de-brief with the practitioner using a "warm feedback/cool feedback" protocol. We tweaked the routine as we moved forward, but the commitment to the rounds remained consistent. The teachers express regularly how powerful this tool has become for them - they have been able to increase their collaboration across grade level teams, they have become more comfortable asking for support with practice, and they have become more reflective about what they see in their own rooms and in the rooms of their peers. It never fails that I have an experience where I get goosebumps when I am facilitating rounds because there is some moment where that "a-ha" happens and you can watch the impact of this process in action.

This week, we did instructional rounds around writing - which is our instructional focus area. We spent two days observing writing practice across all content areas and in every grade level. One of the most powerful experiences was in a 5th grade mathematics classroom. In this classroom, students were working (and they were working hard!) on complex tasks by using the read, write, and draw strategies. The teacher was using over the shoulder conferencing with students as they worked independently. When a student expressed that they were stuck, the teacher asked questions to try and help the student become "unstuck" without giving the answers, and even shared exemplar student work with comments to encourage student thinking. The teacher took a picture of one student's work (not the student with the most complete response or the best writing) and put it immediately on the smart board. The student explained her thinking and then the other students coached her and asked her questions to move the exemplar student forward in her thinking. I was so excited that other teachers were able to experience this high level instruction. It is usually just administrators that get to observe this kind of excellence of both teacher practice and student achievement, but by using the rounds process, we had many teachers now able to participate in the process of observing and reflecting on how we define effective teaching.

The commitment to rounds is part of the vision that I have for our turnaround school - one with a truly collaborative teacher culture and where students are are academically challenged and supported. The time that we give to instructional rounds is scheduled in the calendar and maintained as a priority. If you can implement instructional rounds in any capacity, I strongly believe that it could be a gamechanger for you in terms of turning around your school culture and raising the level of instruction in classrooms.

Here are some great inspirations from our instructional rounds that might inspire you to take that first step.

Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners

I began my teaching career in a rural district in Upstate NY. To say that there was very little diversity might actually be an understatement. Although there were many challenges that faced rural schools - including servicing rural poverty, providing for a wide range of needs with limited resources, and designing instruction that would move students and the community towards a new future - everyone basically looked the same, had similar backgrounds, and had similar experiences.

I chose to become an urban educator because I wanted to experience diversity. I knew that there was more that I could do as an educator to learn and grow if there were different challenges in my classroom and in my school. Boy, was I right! My first teaching position in an urban district was in a school with a population that was 95% African American. It was the opposite of my previous teaching experience, which was rural and predominantly white, but it was still not diverse. Everyone in my first urban school was predominantly from the same neighborhood, similar backgrounds, and very little racial diversity.

My first experience with a significantly diverse population - where there are students and families from a variety of backgrounds, religions, with different languages, and from different countries all over the world was extremely eye opening for me. I was able to be an administrative intern at the school where I am now a principal, and that was my first true experience with significant diversity. We have 25% of our student population receiving ENL instruction. There are 20 languages spoken by students and families who attend my school. While 53% of our population is black or African-American, 47% is a rainbow of colors, backgrounds, languages, and belief structures. Teaching in such a diverse population has significant challenges. Leading such a diverse school community through school turnaround and receivership is unbelievably challenging.

I have classrooms with a wide range of learners in their classrooms. As I reviewed data from our initial running records administration, I saw classrooms with ranges from levels PA to V at 5th Grade. I have 1st and 2nd grade classrooms with 16, 17, 18, or 19 students receiving ENL services. So, differentiation is a hot topic in our feedback and planning discussions. We have been talking about defining differentiation as the place where our deep content knowledge and our understanding the needs of our students comes together. When we understand our content and our students' needs, we can make decisions about how we can individualize the way we will deliver the instruction to our students. Even in whole group instruction, we must be aware of the ways we deliver our instruction and provide opportunities for individual students to access the curriculum.

The Teaching Channel has partnered with the Oakland Unified School District to provide important video resources of key practices for differentiation - particularly for ENL students.  This overview is a key resource for teachers in diverse learning communities to gain insight into the ways that we can provide all of our children with access to proficiency with the new learning standards. In this video, supports for ENL students within the English Language Arts include a "talking rock" or a talking piece, which empowers students by providing them with the complete focus of the other students when it is their turn to talk. We have to remember that the curriculum does not tell us how to teach - it is not a script - it outlines what we need to teach in order for our students to be college and career ready. In our hectic and busy lives as educators (who are also trying to be spouses, parents, sons, daughters, friends, volunteers, and many other roles), we must keep learning as the focus. If we only think about teaching, we miss such an important opportunity to see our students in the driver's seat. Their learning, combined with our high expectations, is the key component. That is where the connection between our deep content knowledge and our knowledge of our individual students is the most vibrant: where our lessons reflect the kinds of differentiation that will ensure that all of our students succeed.

Here are some other resources that you might find helpful in your supports of diverse learners in your classroom:
http://www.casenex.com/casenet/pages/readings/differentiation/diffisisnot.htm

http://www.cdl.org/articles/differentiating-instruction-and-practice/

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/every-learner/6776

Creating a Culture of Achievement

I haven't written in a couple of weeks. I have been really engaged in the delicate balance of managing the immediate needs of where we currently are (which, by the way, is light years ahead of where we were this time last year!!) and planning for our future. We are part of a new legislation in New York that places struggling or persistently struggling schools in a status called "Receivership." To summarize receivership, it is the last chance that the lowest 5% of achieving schools in New York have to improve before someone else (an "independent receiver") steps in to take over. Although we have not made the kind of growth that we wanted or expected in terms of state assessments, we have plenty of evidence to support that we are really on the right track (for example, we are light years ahead of where we were at this time last year!!), so we have embraced receivership as a great opportunity to add more details to our plan and really think through what we envision from our school in 2-3 years. This kind of backwards planning is critical to the process of turnaround. If you can clearly see where you want to be at the end, and then you can articulate exactly what you need to do in order to get there, and you can allow for assessment and adjustments along the way, then how can you fail? Vision + planning + follow through = success.

But I digress. The real topic today is about achievement. The kind of achievement that permeates the entire of a school and of a community. The kind of achievement that hast parents invested and asking questions; the kind of achievement that makes it more cool for kids to be spending their time talking about reading or writing than it is for them to goof off; the kind of achievement that has teachers talking about best practices and ways to reach and teach kids - even over lunch or in the copy room. How does that shift happen? We worked so hard in year one to develop data protocols, make goal setting and achievement a living part of our culture, and shared data with our parents and families. Our students made progress - the growth was evident - but we really didn't achieve mastery. As we got deep into our data over the summer we knew exactly what we were missing. Our students were progressing and we were so proud of that growth, but they were not achieving the standards because we did not invest in sharing the standards with our students - we did not show them enough exemplar work, have them assess their own work against the standards using student friendly rubrics, and we did not inform parents and families about what grade level work is supposed to look like. In other words, we created a strong culture of learning, but we did not go far enough to fully develop as a culture of achievement.

 So, we are getting smarter. Our data meetings include more exemplars of grade level writing. Our discussions surround how we can align our expectations to standards, rather than letting our students define our expectations. That brings a real issue to the table - our students have been performing below level, and that has been a part of the culture at my school for many years (hence, the receivership status). So, making sure that we have the right strategies in place to move our students toward the standards becomes the work. In this video, a teacher prepares her students to dig deep into the work around theme in a novel and shares with her students the different levels of proficiency that they may be at in terms of this concept. There is real power in helping students to understand their own level of proficiency and be able to identify levels of proficiency in their peers. This is how we become more of a culture of achievement.

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With all of this talk about standards, achievement, and classroom culture, it is so important to remember that creating a culture of achievement in classrooms is purposefully built. Teachers who are able to move their students toward this do not have a magic wand and they are not simply "better teachers." The same kind of backwards planning that I am using to move our school forward as a school in turnaround is the same kind of purposeful and backwards planning that teachers must utilize in creating a culture of achievement in their classrooms. Debbie Miller (in her book Teaching with Intention) talks about the importance of purposeful planning to achieve what you believe that students can achieve. If you believe that students can, and should, be engaged in discourse around standards, exemplars, and levels of quality work (and I certainly believe this!), then you must implement structures that build the capacity of students to do this. It will not happen overnight. And it is so important to persevere and make sure that you don't give up and let the student's performance define your expectations. If it isn't working, reflect on what skill students are missing and back track to teach that skill. Involve students in assessing their own progress. Allow them to reflect on how they can do it better. But do not give up and lower your expectations. Our students must have the same high expectations in their classrooms that we expect from our own children. This is the work - and it is so important.