What I Learned from This Year’s Instructional Rounds

pic_cathyBy Cathy Gassenheimer

Last week I facilitated our seventh and final instructional round for this school year. Facilitating rounds may be my very favorite activity. I get to visit classrooms, talk with both students and teachers, and get a true birds-eye view of learning in action.

Participating in an instructional round requires a lot of concentrated mental work. After learning (or brushing up on) the purpose and format of instructional rounds and the importance of gathering “fine-grained, descriptive, non-judgmental evidence related to a specific focus,” participants visit three classrooms at one of our cooperating schools.

While in each classroom, the visitors ideally talk with students (if during small group instruction) and gather evidence they can use later in the day to identify patterns, contrasts, predictions, and questions…all related to the school’s identified focus, which is called a “problem of practice.”

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Students at Vestavia Hills HS in a circle discussion, as instructional rounds participants observe.

Then the fun begins as participants transfer their gleaned evidence onto post-it notes, map them on a sheet of easel paper to group “like ideas” and begin to process what they saw and the implications for their own professional learning.

At the beginning of almost every instructional round, I tell participants that if we “do” instructional rounds correctly, their head will hurt by the end of the day because of their hard work and deep conversations.  It’s about the best headache you can get!

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An instructional rounds chart from the Slingluff Elementary gallery walk.

My Take on This Year’s Rounds

My first post about this year’s instructional rounds explained the process in detail. This post focuses specifically on what I learned and also on some of my pet peeves and celebrations.

As I was thinking about this potential blog, I ran across an article by Peter DeWitt in Education Week, “The Myth of Walkthroughs,” that I found to be particularly helpful. DeWitt talks about why most classroom walk-throughs aren’t very effective. He cites many factors including lack of preparation, lack of identified focus, and lack of follow-up.

DeWitt then suggests that to maximize effectiveness, walk-throughs (or instructional rounds) focus on eight practices. I found five of the eight particularly telling, based on our own recent instructional rounds in nearly 20 schools.

Cooperative learning vs. Cooperative seating – I like DeWitt’s terminology. In almost every round, one of the questions we surfaced was this: “In what ways can you ensure that students are working and learning collaboratively when in small groups?” It’s a common issue, as DeWitt notes by citing research by Rob Cole that found that even though students spend 70% of their learning time in small groups, for 80% of that time they are working individually.

Experts tell us that effective cooperative learning requires every student to have a specific role – and that a final joint project or learning experience should be expected. Simply putting students in small groups and giving each a worksheet or assignment is not sufficient.

Authentic engagement vs. compliant engagement – Are students really engaged in the classrooms you visit? Our facilitation during instructional rounds may be most valuable in the matter of observation. We urge paticipants to spend a lot of time watching, listening, and talking with students to surface whether or not learning is happening. Observing the teaching is not enough.

If I don’t ask students what they are learning, or carefully listen to their discussion or answers, it will be hard to determine whether students are truly engaged or just “doing school.”

Surface level vs. Deep level questioning – My colleague Jackie Walsh is an expert on questioning and we’ve all learned so much from her. She likes to call on Dylan Wiliam who notes that there are only two good reasons for questioning in the classroom: “To cause thinking and to provide information to the teacher about what to do next” (p. 79).

Yet, in some classrooms, I saw teachers asking “yes” or “no” questions or questions that had “one right answer.” To get students to think requires that teachers first think about the desired learning and craft questions accordingly. If done correctly, deep level questioning can promote metacognition and scaffold their learning to mastery.

Teacher talk vs. Student talk – DeWitt points to a statistic that should disturb everyone: “University of Melbourne researcher Janet Clinton found that on average, teachers asked about 200 questions per day and students asked 2 questions per student per week.”

Unfortunately, I saw this in a number of classrooms visited during  our instructional rounds this year. In a middle school science classroom, during the 15 minutes I was in the room, the teachers asked more than 50 questions. He answered about 1/3 of them himself. Eight of 22 students answered about 1/3 of the questions, and the remainder were not answered.

As I left that classroom, I wondered what might have happened if the teacher had posed one of his more challenging questions, asked students to gather in small groups and develop an answer to that question, and share their thinking behind their answer. By doing so, the teacher would be shifting the cognitive load to the student, ensuring that he could check for understanding (knowing where all the students stood instead of just the eight that answered his questions) and promote greater student engagement.

 Teacher-student relationships – Research and common sense tell us that relationships matter. Students will work harder for teachers who they know respect them and hold high expectations for them. Happily, I saw strong, healthy teacher-student relationships in almost every classroom visited.

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Instructional rounds participants observing at Vestavia Hills High.

The Curmudgeon Emerges

In addition to reflecting on DeWitt’s list, I’d like to call first on my “curmudgeon” side to identify some practices that I hope will be dramatically minimalized:

  • Lights off, movie or PowerPoint on. Lights off, to me, implies passive learning where the screen becomes the teacher and where some students go to sleep. If students can’t see a PowerPoint with the lights on, then try a different screen color or font color. Also: while I can understand showing short excerpts of movies or documentaries, can’t this be punctuated with small group or whole group discussion about the implications of what is being watched?
  • Students watching the teacher use technology. Thankfully, I saw this practice less frequently this year. Technology should be a learning tool that is most often put in the hands of students. Don’t worry. They know how to use it!

Celebrations

Tapping now into my inner cheerleader, I saw so many things to celebrate during instructional rounds, including:

► Welcoming buildings with walls full of student work, data, and celebrations.

► Excited students who were ready and willing to talk with visitors about what they were learning and why.

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George Hall Elementary kids in a “student fishbowl” with IR participants.

► Teachers often stepping out of their comfort zone to better engage students through cooperative learning, project-based learning, and engaging learning activities.

► Administrators who are instructional leaders and hungry for feedback that can help take their students to an even higher level of learning.

► Participants who, even though their heads may hurt from the day’s thinking and high-level discussions, are excited about taking descriptive observation – and the other practices associated with instructional rounds – back to their schools.

As I close the chapter on this year’s instructional rounds, I’m grateful to the many schools, teachers, and student who opened their doors to other educators across the state. And, I’m already looking forward to next year and the many learnings that will surface thanks to this wonderful process. If you haven’t tried it, you should!

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Madison City instructional rounds participants on their way to Vestavia Hills HS.

 


Related Post:

A Closer Look at ABPC’s Statewide Instructional Rounds Program