If you or your school has embraced Instructional Rounds, here’s a book for you. Titled Opening Doors to Equity: A Practical Guide to Observation-Based Professional Learning, this book provides a format for schools to adapt Instructional Rounds for a grade-level, subject area, or even for inter-school collaboration.
As Lois Brown Easton suggests in the foreword, this book is “oriented toward implementation.”
The author, Tonya Ward Singer, is a professional learning expert with experience as a classroom teacher, reading teacher and ELL specialist. Her passion for ensuring that all students receive a top-notch education led her to write this book:
“What drives me is the belief that every child, regardless of family income, ethnicity, or home language, deserves to graduate from high school with choices and opportunity. This vision has led me to ask tough questions and continuously evolve based on the answers I find.” (p. 2)
And, Singer’s answers constitute the content of this very resource-laden and useful book!
Shared professional learning goals
Singer proposes five shared professional learning goals that help schools effectively serve all their students (p. 14):
1. Raise expectations for achievement of all students;
2. Elevate students’ active engagement across all lessons;
3. Teach language in tandem with content and critical thinking
4. Elevate students’ oral language use and collaboration conversation skills; and
5. Deepen expertise in using formative data to refine instruction to meet the needs of all learners.
To attain those important goals, Singer details a process she calls Observation Inquiry, or OI for short. A hybrid that utilizes many of the key aspects from Instructional Rounds and Lesson Study, OI involves a team of teachers who agree to work together for a year on an identified problem of practice (POP).
The POP is a “high priority” issue where the solution process can elevate student learning while at the same time deepening teacher expertise (p. 23)
How Observation Inquiry works
Relying on data and inquiry, the OI process invites teachers to first develop and then work on the identified POP by developing, teaching, and analyzing a series of lessons across the year. This six-step process involves:
- Defining a problem to solve and asking questions to drive inquiry.
- Researching to plan a theory of action.
- Planning a lesson to test an approach.
- Teaching and observing
- Analyzing and interpreting observation data.
- Analyzing impact to reflect on and refine. (p. 25)
Throughout the year, this cycle is repeated so that all participants both teach a lesson and observe and analyze their colleagues teach a lesson. The graphic below illustrates the OI process.
The beauty of the OI process is that it results in improving both teaching and learning. The challenge, Singer says, is that it oftentimes initially moves many teachers out of their comfort zone:
“In collaborative inquiry, our goal is to push beyond what we are sure will work by asking questions to which we don’t know the answer, questions that catapult us into that tenuous space of risking failure and discovering data that challenges us to think and act in new ways… Following steps of an inquiry model without being at this edge, won’t lead to learning or innovation.” (p. 25, emphasis added)
Getting comfortable with the shift
To help participants be comfortable with this big shift in thinking, OI employs protocols that structure the dialogue and learning in productive ways. Throughout the book, Singer delineates these protocols. Copies are also available either in the book’s appendix or accessing a URL code. (The book is also supported by a companion website. Read samples from the book here.)
Each chapter highlights the necessary planning and steps involved in Observation Inquiry, beginning with “Opening Doors: Build Buy-In and Trust” to the last chapter, “Evaluating and Expanding Our Impact.” The full table of contents is here.
If you are a school committed to data-driven continuous improvement, Tonya Ward Singer’s book is for you. And it provides the next steps for schools committed to the Instructional Rounds process, but want more specific ideas about how to move forward. Most importantly, it can help ensure that all of your students succeed and thrive.
