PEER COACHING AT WALTON HIGH SCHOOL

I have had the wonderful opportunity over the past two years to work with the teachers and administrators at Walton High School in Cobb County, GA.
After my most recent training session I posed the following questions to Principal Tom Higgins and Lead Teacher Suzanne Schott. Feel free to contact them or me your questions or thoughts.

Tom Higgins, Principal, Walton High School tom.higgins@cobbk12.org
Suzanne Schott, Area Lead Teacher suzanne.schott@cobbk12.org

Description of Walton:
Walton is a suburban high school (grades 9-12) in the metro Atlanta area with a student population of just over 2600. It is part of a large district of 113 schools. Walton is a two time National School of Excellence and a conversion Charter. Walton’s combined SAT scores, with 100% of the seniors taking the exam, exceeded the national combined average by 186 points. Last year 960 students took 2058 AP exams.

Having attended the first Cobb County presentation on coaching, what caused you to want to explore peer coaching as a professional development strategy for your school?
We have a very talented staff and we were looking for ways to share the talent. We know that coaching is a critical component for the implementation of any new teaching strategies. We also saw coaching as a way to encourage and support the collaboration within the vertical and horizontal teaming structure that we already had in place at Walton.

What are your observations as you’ve had increasing numbers of teachers complete coaching training and begin peer coaching activities?
Teachers find a lot of value in learning from their peers. It’s probably the most common source of new knowledge for teachers, and peer coaching provides a structure for facilitating this exchange of ideas.

What resistance have you encountered and how are you responding?
Teachers do not like to take time away from their students even to learn new skills; however, our teachers are spreading the news about how valuable the experience has been by sharing their success stories and by explaining how they are now better able to meet their students’ instructional needs. We have also, very carefully, scheduled training for days when classes are not in session so that instructional time will not be interrupted.

What are your future plans? Why?
We are moving away from a traditional evaluation model for most teachers to a model where coaching is the norm. We feel that a checklist that a supervisor or administrator completes during an observation, in an attempt to assess a teacher’s competency, is not the most effective way to promote growth. We are asking teachers to pick a learning goal and then to specify the coaching they need to meet this goal. Why? Collaboration is the best way to leverage the talent in your building. We have found that more times than not the best way to provide professional learning on a continual basis is to structure effective ways for teachers to learn from each other. We currently have teachers in training who eventually will be in-house trainers for the collaborative peer coaching process.


Thanks Tom and Suzanne....... you reminded me of the following, written by Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association and vice president of the American Federation of Teachers:

"Many daunting problems in education are borne of the isolation of teachers. Teaching requires the highest concentration of adults in the workplace of nearly any profession, and, ironically, it is the most isolating as well. There is no such thing as excellence in teaching when in solitude. By definition, excellence in teaching is a form of communication and group activity."
(from Forward…Quality Teaching in a Culture of Coaching)

SCHOOL BASED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

I am currently working with two state departments of education and one county wide school district that are focused on designing and implementing building based professional development plans. In each case we are using a backwards design approach starting with desired student achievement.

After identifying specific student achievement goals, designers focus on what students would need to do in order to get the student achievement being sought. This is new to most of the teams with whom I’ve worked. This “what do we need students to do” is the best starting point for designers to consider what teachers need to do. I am suggesting that when teachers are focused on “what students need to do” to reach the achievement goal, they are set to plan instruction. Too often teachers are only focused on the achievement outcome not the precursor student work process.

Having identified the needed teacher behaviors, designers can now plan professional development trainings, peer coaching activities, collaborative staff conversations and professional learning community agendas that would support the desired teacher performance. School leaders are now in a position to determine how their work supports the entire process.

Here is a questioning sequence I recently use to facilitate the above process.

-What is the student achievement goal(s) driving your professional development effort?

-What changes in student experiences/behaviors are precursors to those achievement goals?

-What teacher changes are needed to create the desired student behaviors?

-What will initiate and support those teacher changes? Professional Development/ Coaching/PLC activities/ Leadership

-What resources from Central Office Professional Development would support your efforts?

TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING STYLES TO ENCOURAGE EFFORT

Recently two of my back to back presentations connected my thinking to look at how technology can bring learning style options to increase students’ effort. At the Arkansas Department of Education, I was working with the statewide professional development specialist looking at using coaching to help teachers increase student effort. The next day I was with undergraduate honors students, SCATT (Suncoast Area Teacher Training) at the University of South Florida. In both sessions we examined how teachers rotating instruction to address all learning preferences, along with educating students about how they learned best, could increase students’ willingness to extend effort in learning .
When visiting the USF College of Education website, I discovered a podcast from an undergraduate Special Education student, Allison Papke, who implemented a project for her Level 3 practicum at John Long Middle School in Pasco County. She used iPods to create an individualized testing experience for students.
Usually the special education students in her eighth grade social studies class were pulled out of class and had tests read to them. Using the Notes feature of the iPods, Allison created an interactive experience that allowed the students to listen to the test questions at their own pace. The students could also repeat questions as many times as needed. Since they were listening to the questions on an iPod, they did not have to be pulled out of the room and were able to take the test with the rest of their classmates. The iPod version of the test included text to accompany the audio so that students could read the test questions as they listened to them.
Chances are great that students supported in this fashion would put forth more effort.
Alison’s story reminded me of another teacher’s website I had seen before. Eric Langhorst, an eighth grade American history teacher at South Valley Junior High School in Liberty, Missouri and Missouri's 2007-08 Teacher of the Year, began podcasting Speaking of History with his students in the fall of 2006. One of his most effective uses of podcasts is StudyCasts. He records an audio review of important material lasting about 20 minutes to help students prepare for upcoming unit tests. "Students then are able to listen to the study review at home on their computers or download it to their personal MP3 players; they can review for the test anywhere. Some students report that they listen to the reviews while exercising, riding the bus, or with their parents. Langhorst made the free StudyCasts available through i-Tunes, and students who did not have Internet access at home had the opportunity to check out a CD at school." (See full article from Education World.)
Both of these projects bring support and encouragement for increased student efforts. We should be discovering more ways to use technology to support learners everyday.

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES-Conversations for Student Achievement

I have often recommended that forming PLC’s, so that teachers have at least some students in common, greatly increases the power of conversations to impact student achievement. I recently had the opportunity to observe Twin Lakes Elementary School’s K-2, 3-5, Special Education, and specialist (music, physical education, library and computer) Teaching and Learning Teams.(PLCs)
My thinking on teams with students in common was reinforced when I observed:

-At a K-2 meeting, the second grade teachers were presenting the results of a math assessment they had recently completed with their students. They shared that their students scored low when questions asked them to explain their math reasoning. Hearing this, the first grade teachers quickly said, “That’s because we did not address that last year” At this point (September) the PLC placed on their April agenda the need to revisit this learning objective for late in the year planning.

-At the special education team meeting, teachers were discussing several students who should begin additional mainstreaming experiences. They discussed the need to attend K-2 and 3-5 house meetings to seek assistance in finding the best settings for mainstreaming. They decide to individually prepare the following chart for their next meeting in preparation for meeting with the other houses:



This work will place individual student needs and ways teachers can meet them on the agendas of several meetings.

-At the same special education team meeting, I observed a teacher describing a student who was struggling. A teacher who previously worked with the student offered some insights. Other teachers began to think out loud about “what might help”. Some teachers offered equipment from their classrooms that the teacher could experiment with. The team facilitator mentioned that the teacher might want someone from the team to observe the student and collect data as the student responds to the teacher’s current practice. Before the meeting ended, an observer and observation times were identified and recorded in the team minutes.

It is easy to see that students at Twin Lake Elementary will benefit from the collaboration time their teachers spend. [Twin Lakes teachers have a one hour common release time each week for these Professional Teaching and Learning Teams meetings. Their students also are scheduled for the same lunch so that teachers share this common time.]
Do you have similar experiences?