Imagine educators having the opportunity to spend an entire day working with colleagues to discuss and clearly identify what effective teaching “looks like.” “Wait a minute,” I can almost hear you say, “Don’t educators already have a clear image of effective teaching?”
Apparently not, according to Tony Wagner and his colleagues at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
“Achieving a shared vision of what is good instruction is much more difficult than most people imagine,” contends Wagner in his 2006 book “Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools” on p. 29. Too often, Wagner points out, administrators assume that a common definition exists because teachers have attended the same workshops on theories of learning, but those same administrators may find that their faculty members have very different views of effective teaching.
Wagner tested this by showing a video clip of a high school English class to a group of educators, who were asked to then grade the lesson. The results were mixed, with grades ranging as widely as A+ to F. Wagner goes a step further, saying that in subsequent discussion, educators couldn’t really agree on the criteria for good teaching.
ABPC consultant Jackie Walsh and I decided to test that theory with several groups with whom we work, including the Key Leaders Network and leaders from two school districts. In our case, when we showed the same video Wagner used, participants gave grades ranging from A to D-. This convinced us that we needed to focus on helping educators in Alabama develop a clear and common vision of effective teaching.
To do that Jackie and I turned to another resource from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. This time, it was a 2009 book called “Instructional Rounds: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning” by Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, et. al.
The authors have adapted the medical rounds process, used routinely in teaching hospitals, to a school setting. These rounds are VERY different from traditional walk-throughs or teacher observations. In fact, the primary purpose of rounds is to develop a common vision of effective instruction and to give observers the opportunity to practice descriptive observation.
Using the rounds model, trained observers visit classrooms and record what they see based on a specific focus provided by the visited school. No checklist is used. Instead, observers record what they see happening in the classrooms they visit, with the primary focus on student learning. Observers are asked to play the old “Dragnet” TV show’s Joe Friday, and focus on “just the facts.” They must record what they see – not what they don’t see, what they think they might see, or their opinion about what they see.
For example, recently I walked into a fifth-grade classroom where the students were learning more about geometric shapes. Here’s what I recorded:
| What the student is doing | Instructional task (both content & activity) |
What the teacher is doing |
|---|---|---|
| 9:50 a.m. – Students in small groups making a pattern out of geometric shapes. 3 5th-grade males working together using cut-out hexagons and quadrilaterals. Moving shapes around on paper. Make a pattern. Start tracing shapes in pattern. Encounter difficulties in tracing and keeping shapes together.
9:58 a.m. – Student 3: picks up paper and all shapes move on desk. “We messed up!” They begin again I ask: “How do you know how to make a good pattern with these shapes? Student 2: “If there is a gap between shapes, then we don’t have a good pattern.” (demonstrates) 10:01 a.m. – Student 3: “We messed up tracing” Student 1: picks up hexagon and starts tracing. |
Use the 2 shapes you have been given to form a tiling pattern. Trace and cut out shapes or use shapes from your shape set. Sketch your tilings. | Moving from group to group checking work and giving suggestions.
Teacher to 3 students: “What happened? Did you have to start again?” Teacher: Try making pattern on desk (shows them). Then, take one hexagon and trace it on the paper here. Then move that hexagon so that it connects to the flat side like this. Then continue to trace the pattern that way. Show me. Teacher: “You got it!” |
The visited school sets the observer’s focus. Before a round is conducted, the visited school identifies a “problem of practice,” which is “something that you care about that would make a difference for student learning” if it were improved (p. 102). In the case of this visit, the problem of practice was centered on student engagement. Specifically, this school – a grade 4-6 school – wanted to know the following:
- To what extent are instructional strategies successfully engaging students – specifically, talking, writing, reading, questioning, investigating, and listening;
- To what extent is technology successfully engaging students; and
- To what extent is content material made relevant to students?
Observers – who in our case are state, district and school administrators from two Alabama school districts – are expected to do advance work. They are asked to read “Instructional Rounds” and do professional development to learn how to use descriptive observation that is based on evidence, not opinion.
Next, teams of observers visit classrooms – in our case four classrooms for 20 minutes each – recording what they observe related to the problem of practice. They are encouraged to be specific, or to use what the authors call “fine-grained descriptions” in their note-taking so that during the group discussion following the rounds, details can be shared and discussed.
Then, individuals review their notes and meet with their teams to analyze the evidence for patterns, contrasts, and to identify questions they may have. During this part of the process, each team has an “evidence policeman” with the job of “enforcing an evidence-only rule in their group,” and asking “What’s the evidence?” or “What did you see or hear that made you think that?” (p. 90)
Finally, the observers discuss the “next level of work, recommendations for the school and system to make progress on the problem of practice.” (p. 6) The feedback is general and focused at the school level, not at the individual classroom level. Feedback is organized into four categories: evidence of the problem of practice, patterns seen across classrooms, contrasts between classrooms, and questions prompted by the round.
Think for a minute about the power and depth of their conversations and the learning that happens as a result. “The idea behind Instructional Rounds is that everyone involved is working on their practice, everyone is obliged to be knowledgeable about the common task of instructional improvement, and everyone’s practice should be subject to scrutiny, critique, and improvement.” (pp. 4-5)
Being an observer is hard work that requires both concentration and unlearning some well-formed habits. It requires one to suspend judgment, to focus on just what one sees and connect it to the problem of practice, and – most of all – to focus on the learning. In contrast to the typical classroom observations, Instructional Rounds observers generally spend more time watching the students than watching the teacher.
The Instructional Rounds process offers a way to provide everyone – perhaps even the students – with a powerful learning opportunity. It not only provides educators with a powerful day of learning, but should also move them closer to embracing a common vision of effective teaching and learning.
