Don't "Hope": Design and Implement

With the first day of school less than a week away, I find myself getting tremendously keyed up to meet my new staff, student body, and parent community.  Over the last couple of weeks, staff members have begun to come in to set up their classrooms and prepare their lessons as well as to say hello and welcome me to our new school. Honestly, I have had some butterflies when meeting our faculty:  I know how important first impressions are, and I want to make sure that I talk less and listen more so that I can get to know them.

At the same time that I am starting at a new school, my daughter is starting her K-12 career in kindergarten this year.  I am excited and nervous for her all at the same time.  I hope that she will enjoy going to school. I hope that she will continue to be curious about, well, pretty much everything.  I hope that her teachers will get to know Paige a little bit, and get to know what her interests are and what makes her tick.  I hope that they can start to discover what she knows, and how that prior knowledge can connect to future learning that she is going to do this year and beyond.  I hope that they try to discover what motivates her, and what is demotivating to her.

It sounds like I am hoping for a number of things.

Interestingly, I think there are parallels here for both Paige as a new learner and me as a new administrator to my school.  I hope that my staff will enjoy coming to school and having me learn along side them.  I hope that I get to know a little bit about each of our staff members and find out what interests them.  I hope that I can find out their areas of expertise, and how we can connect this prior learning to where we want to go as a staff.  I hope that I can discover what motivates them, and what is demotivating as well.

Once again, it sounds like I am hoping for a number of things.

But I realize that I can't "hope" for these things to occur with our staff.  If it is important to me, I have to find ways to make this happen.  One of the most useful action phrases I learned when I was studying Instructional Rounds was 'design and implement'.  And in this case with our staff, I need to design and implement a means by which I will get to know our staff and learn the things that work for them.

At the start of each year, while a number of teachers will stop by the office to say 'hey', a number will not.  They will go right by the office to their classroom and get down to the work of getting ready for the upcoming school year--they are busy.  So as much as I already have had many conversations with staff members this week, I need to ensure that I have met with each faculty member in the building, and the sooner the better.  If a face-to-face meeting is important (which to me it is), then I need to slot it in.

As much as I have already sent our faculty a Course Outline Reflection Checklist which will give me a sense of how our staff structures their classes, I also sent out a Google Doc with a schedule so the entire staff books a time with me that is convenient for them.  We need to meet, and I need to make it happen.  And while I truly want these conversations to be open and informal, there are a few things that I want to make sure I ask, such as:

• What can you tell me about you, the person away from school?  (I love learning where people are from, about their families, whether they have kids, or dogs, or fish, or cars, or whatever...)
• What's something that you are good at that others might not know? (Fun question)
• Can you describe some of your strengths as a teacher?  How have these become strengths for you and how can I support them?
• Can you talk about some areas that you would like to grow as a teacher?  How can I support you?
• How best do you learn?  What does it look like when you are learning?
• What are some of the strengths of our school? 
• What are some of the areas that you would like to see the school grow?  What could that look like?
• How best can I encourage you?  What does that sound like?
• What is the best way for me to tell you "no" or give you news/feedback that might be difficult to hear?

The last two questions were adapted from a post I read recently called "Why Encouragement Fails", and I look forward to some of the different answers that I will get as a result.

I'm really excited to meet the teachers and the rest of the staff at our school, and by creating a schedule of one-on-one chats to kick the year off, I can begin to build connections and learn more about our staff, our culture, and our school community.  By designing and implementing a structure to do this, I can take "hope" out of the equation and actually make it happen.  And while we have more than forty teachers and this will take some time , it's so important that I just can't leave learning about our staff to chance.

If you have activities that you use to get to know your staff or have questions that you feel might be important to ask or information that you think is important to solicit, please comment!

Be Less Helpful

As odd as it sounds, I like this concept.  "Be Less Helpful".  Not to someone who has their arms full of groceries and is trying to fumble with a door handle, of course.  But in learning and education, I think that in more than a few circumstances it might pay off to "be less helpful". 

This morning my power went off.  So rather than drink my oil-barrel sized coffee and eat my gigantic bowl of cereal in front of the TV whilst watching the news like I usually would, I pulled out my phone and looked through a few TED talks.   I found one that was particularly intriguing by Dan Meyer called "Math Class Needs a Makeover", which I am sure most have seen but was new to me (see below).  Within the context of his remedial math class, he spoke about some of the characteristics of his typical math students:

I found these characteristics to be particularly compelling as they could easily have been used to describe me when it came to my math experiences in high school and university.  Oddly, I managed to survive quite well in math, but it was mostly due to the fact that I was quite adept at being able to look at word problems, figure out which bits could fit into a formula that I had memorized prior to a test and feverishly scribbled on the top, and then plug them in--I was 'eager for formula'.

Dan went on to describe the way in which math textbooks typically lay out problems--often times there are bits of data neatly laid out on a table with steps along the side there to guide the student through the problem, or particularly fascinating word problems that really just act as moderately interesting words interspersed between the numbers that the student will need to satisfy the component parts of a formula already given.  Because we do this so often, Meyer contends, students can become expectant of all of the parts of the problem to be laid out for them.  Of course when the pieces are not there, students become frustrated because they are unable to determine these components on their own.  Personally, I agree.

In the parlance of Instructional Rounds, the TASK PREDICTS THE PERFORMANCE.  Should a student be given a series of problems in which each of the variables are given (or at least made reasonably available) to fill out a formula that solves the problem, guess what?  The student will become incredibly adept at decoding the question to find those salient bits and matching them to a formula to spew out an answer, the signficance of which they might have little or no understanding.  This sounds incredibly familiar to me!

Dan Meyer suggests several solutions:

#3, 4 and #5 really resonate with me, not just within the context of a math class, but also when considering student and adult learning in general.  When I reflect upon the idea of task predicting performance, often times when I have worked with my staff and students in the past, I would present a problem and even a few possible solutions that I thought might work.  To utilize my good pal Bill Ferriter's use of Twitter hashtags, I might call myself

#nottoobright

Not only was I shutting down any creativity in terms of the solutions that might arise, I was presenting the problem as I saw it and possibly even creating a kind of dependency on the fact that I, Principal of the school, would have a solution that we could all use.  Once again,

#nottoobright

On the eve of my going in to my new school, I must be continually cognizant of the fact that

• most real-life problems don't just have signs on them saying "here is the problem"
• most answers to those real-life problems aren't just written in a nearby textbook on the pages after the appendix
• the way to create problem-solvers (students or adults) is not to provide the problem and possible solutions but rather to ask shorter questions and have the problem-solvers synthesize the problems and hypothesize and investigate solutions through a variety of lenses and perspectives.

As much as it is my tendency to want to jump in with what I feel are reasonable options to deal with the issue at hand, sometimes I truly do need to 'be less helpful'!

Check out Dan Meyer's TED talk--I think it's brilliant!

Do You Enable or Ensure ADULT Learning?

"Using recognized assessment measures and a support system that ensures positive outcomes, we will provide a student-focused learning environment." - excerpt from the SKSS Mission Statement

When I attended professional development sessions as a teacher of biology and PE, I used to have a highly student-centered focus on how I would apply what I was learning to my classroom.  Yet since I have been in administration, more often than not I find myself thinking about how I can apply the principles to my staff through the lens of adult learning, even if the session could be entirely focused on changing pedagogy for kids.  Since becoming a Principal, I have held firm to the belief that a focus on engaging educators (teachers AND administrators) in their learning is as important as (and arguably MORE important than) a focus on engaging students in their learning.  Without considering and expending notable amounts of time on the former, any efforts to the latter become much less effective.

Thanks to my colleague and friend Leeann Bartee (follow her, one of the most well-read and researched administrators that I have ever met) who introduced me to it, I have begun yet another educational read for the summer called "Instructional Rounds in Action", the sequel to "Instructional Rounds in Education" that I have written so much about over the last few months.  Even though I am only a couple of dozen pages into the book, it already has me hooked because of the emphasis on the importance of the learning of the adults in education.  From the Prologue, by Dr. Richard Elmore:

“The deepest irony of American education is that the institutions that are responsible for learning in our society do the worst job of enabling the learning of the people who work in them” 

He also states that:
 
"School reform, if it works at all, works systematically by increasing the capacity of individuals and the organizations in which they work...students learn best when adults are working and learning at the outer edge of their own practice."

This made me think about what we do as a system to ensure that we are systematically increasing the capacity of the individuals in education.  In our school's mission statement above, we emphasize the idea of ensuring student learning...so what about educator (teachers and administrators) learning?  How about the structures that we have in place to enable the learning of the people that work in our organizations?  What about the effectiveness of these structures?  Are we ensuring that adult learning is actually occurring, and that this learning is transformed into the changes in practice and the changes in the tasks that we have students do to elicit the learning that each of us wants for our students?

#notsosureaboutthat

This uncertainty is not a condemnation of those that work within the system, it is more a question about the system itself.  Schools pride themselves on recognizing the differences in students as learners, differentiating instruction and assessment for them, and providing multiple and varied opportunities for their success within a blanket of wraparound support.  Yet if educator learning is so critical to student learning, perhaps it's time for us to take a really good look at how we ensure that WE are the lead learners.

So how do we change this?  Professional development days?  Send people to conferences?  Bring in guest speakers?  Put time for collaboration within the timetable?  Create peer coaches?  Skyped-in mentorship?  Adopt Google's 20% model?  Have educators get connected and develop PLNs?  Make faculty meetings about staff development rather than the technical managerial pieces of school operations?   

Yes.  Absolutely.  Do some of these things.  Do all of these things.  In fact, most of us do some or all of these activities for and with our faculties already.  More and more, however, I am starting to consider whether the things that we do to increase the capacity of ourselves as educators actually ensure learning rather than just enable the possibility of learning.  My thinking right now is leaning far more towards the latter rather than the former.  And I know that were we speaking about enabling rather than ensuring student learning, most educators would agree that such a premise would be less than acceptable.

Over the next few weeks, I want to design a model that ensures the learning of the educators in our school system.  If you have any ideas about this, I would love to hear them!

Do You SEE or JUDGE?

"What a great lesson!"

"The teacher seemed unprepared."

"The kids were really working hard."

"I wouldn't have taught the concept that way."

"I'm not sure how kids could be excited about that topic when even I was bored."

"Boy, they just nailed that one--that was great pedagogy!"

Have you ever gone into a classroom to observe a lesson had any of these thoughts after you left the class?  I'm sure that any number of people who watched me teach biology or PE could have said one or all of these things on a given day.  Over the last thirteen years, I have been in numerous classrooms and I know that at varying times I have had these types of phrases run through my head as I did walk-throughs around my schools.

How meaningless for me, and even more importantly, how meaningless for anyone to whom I was going to describe what I saw in the class.  Whether I was speaking to that teacher, another educator or administrator, these normative-based bits of feedback were almost entirely useless in describing the learning environment that I had observed.

In each of these instances, I was unclear as to what I was actually looking for, and moreover I was quickly jumping to conclusions that were based on my own biases and experiences as both a learner and a teacher.

Imagine that you were taking a piano lesson and the teacher said "Good one!  You really nailed it!".  Or you swung your golf club and your golf pro said "Well, clearly you didn't prepare for today.".  Or perhaps in your evening art class, your professor says "I wouldn't have done it that way.".  Would any of this be meaningful?

#notlikely

One of the pieces that truly challenged my thinking when studying the concepts of Instructional Rounds was learning and practicing the discipline of description.   More specifically, I found it difficult to begin by determining an area of focus for feedback, and then to describe the EVIDENCE of what I saw in classrooms from the students, the teachers, and the tasks they were doing as opposed to stating my OPINION of what I saw.  City, Elmore, Fiarman and Teitel (2009) call this "learning to see" and "unlearning to judge".  I imagine being in the middle of teaching a science lesson and my Principal coming to my class, doing an observation, and giving me this feedback:

• "the pace was too fast"
• "you assigned a highly complex lab to the students"
• "the students were actively engaged with their groups during the lesson"

or....a different scenario, such as me asking the Principal to come to my class to look at something that my department and I had collectively determined as an area of focus, such as "when doing labs with our students, we find that they struggle with following instructions and using higher level thinking skills to connect the lab to the concept we are doing in class."  If he then gave the following feedback:

• "when you moved from the first task to the second task, eight of the students had not completed the first task"
• "you assigned the students a task that required them to collect, plot, and analyze and draw conclusions from data"  
• "the students used a rubric to provide feedback to their peers on the structure of the conclusions they had drawn and the strength of the evidence to find those conclusions."  

The first set of feedback has limited use for me, as the terms "too fast", "highly complex" and"actively engaged" are judgement statements.  As the teacher, I might respond to this feedback..."What do you mean too fast? I thought it was fine."  Or maybe "The lab actually wasn't complex, the students just didn't get it.". Or "Glad to hear they were engaged, I worked hard to put this lab together."  And PS, "Why were you here in the first place?"

The second set of feedback lets me slow down and do some thinking.  Hmmm...if eight students had not completed the first step, should I have circled back?  Was my instruction not clear enough?  The assignment did involve some higher order thinking skills, as did the peer evaluation tool at the end--this is what the department and I wanted to examine in more detail.  Cool.

At some point in the process of examining our practice, there will be judgement.  Make no doubt, if we collectively are looking at an area of focus in what we are doing in the classroom, given enough descriptive feedback, we will start to note patterns and draw some conclusions.  But by giving descriptive feedback without judgement, or learning to SEE rather than jumping to OPINION, we can slow the process down and approach classrooms in a more meaningful and productive manner that can truly impact teaching practice.

Now THAT would be cool.  Wait a sec, that's a judgement...


City, Elizabeth A et al. Instructional rounds in education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2009.