When I am doing coaching training within a school district that is conducting walkthroughs, I am often asked if walkthroughs are a form of coaching. My usual response is,"It depends.”
It depends on the relationships and the conversations that occur between people doing the walkthroughs and the teachers whose classrooms are being observed. While working with a leadership team (teachers and administrators) in a large high school, we were discussing the value of coaching activities. The principal said,”Well, one coaching activity we have currently is our walkthroughs.” One of the teachers quickly added, “It still smells like evaluation to us.” That was hard for the principal to hear, but very important. If teachers at a leadership level had not experienced the difference, we can be sure that many other staff had not. This evaluation “feel” inhibits the self reflection that will create the greatest value from walkthroughs.
In an article titled, Making the Rounds, published in the American School Board Journal/ Dec 2007, Susan Black highlights walkthrough programs in place in several school districts and identifies criteria from Carolyn Downey’s book, The Three Minute Walk-Through- Changing School Supervisory Practice One Teacher at a Time.
Informal- avoid filling out checklist, and take notes only to help recall details later
Brief- observe classrooms frequently and keep the visits short
Unannounced- arrive without advanced notice to avoid a staged lesson
Focused- concentrate on the decisions teachers make about curriculum and instruction and how their decisions affect students’ learning. For teachers who need help suggest one or two things they can try.
Non-evaluative- keep visits collegial and cooperative. Assure teachers that the purpose of your visit is continuous improvement throughout the school.
Reflective- ask teachers to reflect on their instructional decisions and strategies. Occasionally invite teachers to a follow up conversation to discuss ways to improve practice.”
Here are some of my suggestions for increasing the “culture of coaching” with walkthroughs.
A preconference approach is critical for the walkthrough to feel like coaching. The teacher needs to play a role in focusing the walkthrough observation, to remove the evaluation feel. Either individually or as a team, department, or entire faculty, teachers should help focus the observer.
Conversation is critical for the observations to generate teacher reflection. When observed details are shared, time for conversation with groups of colleagues or with the observer is essential.
These coaching conversations and notes from observations should be outside any evaluation procedure.
Teachers should be engaged in conducting the walkthroughs. Administrators can take some of the time they would have spent doing walkthroughs and spend it covering a teachers class while that teacher conducts walkthrough observations and conversations.
Here are some coaching walkthrough activities:
One principal I met has teachers design the walkthrough observation tool that they want her to use to assist the teachers in focusing on their personal yearly growth plan. The principal pulls these request when she does her walkthroughs. Teachers know what data is being collected and can lead the conversation with the principal about what the data means.
School wide, teachers can use data collected from common focused walkthroughs. A school that has a focus of increasing student critical thinking through higher order questions could focus walkthroughs over an 8 week period on the questions teachers were heard asking. Questions collected each week could be collated and handed out to the faculty each Friday afternoon. Teachers could review the list of questions, identify ones that were theirs and compare with others.
After the 8th week, faculty groups could compare the questions from week one with week eight to see if a change was evident.
A middle school team interested in how they worked with ESOL students, asked an instructional coach to do walkthroughs in each of their classrooms and collect what she observed ESOL students doing whenever she could. The team then studied the data for clues about teacher and student behaviors that might be the focus of change.
Walkthroughs provide teachers with useable data only if the teacher is thinking critically about what the data means. Those providing the data need conscious conversations with teachers before and after the observations to set a collaborative climate for that critical thinking.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
SHOULD PARENTING TRAINING BE A 21ST CENTURY SKILL FOR OUR STUDENTS?
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has defined a frame work for 21st century learning.
They believe our core subjects should be broadened and deepened with interdisciplinary themes that explore:
*Global Awareness
*Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy
*Civic Literacy
*Health Literacy
The partnership also stresses the need for students to develop skills in the following areas:
Learning and Innovation Skills
*Creativity and Innovation
* Critical Thinking and Problem –Solving
* Communication and Collaboration
Information, Media, and Technology Skills
*Information Literacy
*Media Literacy
*ICT (Information, Communication, and Technology) Literacy
Life and Career Skills
*Flexibility and Adaptability
*Initiative and Self Direction
* Social and Cross Cultural Skills
* Productivity and Accountability
* Leadership and Responsibility
In Disrupting Class, authors Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn , and Curtis Johnson suggest that high school may be the important place for the training of tomorrow’s parents to occur.
The authors present research from Todd Risley and Betty Hart:
…on average parents speak 1500 words per hour to their infant children. ”Talkative”, college educated parents spoke an average of 2,100 while “welfare” parents spoke 600 words per hour. By age 3, children of talkative parents had heard 48 million words while those of welfare parents had heard 13 million.
The most powerful words that promote subsequent cognitive achievement are spoken in the first year of life, when there is no visible evidence that the child is understanding. Children whose parents did not begin speaking seriously to them until the child could speak, roughly age 12 months, suffered a persistent deficit in intellectual capacity, compared to those whose parents were talkative from the beginning.(pg 149)
Hart and Risley describe the words that really matter as “language dancing”, face to face, adult, sophisticated , chatty language as if the child where comprehending and responding to the comments… not business language like a command, ”do this, or time for bed”, but deliberate, uncompromised, personal adult conversation.(pg 151)
The authors of Disrupting Class suggest that rather than funding preschool programs for children who have missed having “talkative parents”, schools might bring greater future learning by investing in teaching children how to be parents before they become parents. Perhaps young, single, intercity mothers could break multigenerational cycles of poverty and underachievement by knowing how to shape early interactions with their children to help them succeed in school. Professional couples of the future, anxious to return to careers, may make better- informed choices with parenting training as part of their high school curriculum.
Perhaps parenting skills fit in the health literacy area of 21st century skills. Maybe this is a step toward “every child ready for school”?
More in a future posting regarding the systemic change thinking presented in Disrupting Class...
They believe our core subjects should be broadened and deepened with interdisciplinary themes that explore:
*Global Awareness
*Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy
*Civic Literacy
*Health Literacy
The partnership also stresses the need for students to develop skills in the following areas:
Learning and Innovation Skills
*Creativity and Innovation
* Critical Thinking and Problem –Solving
* Communication and Collaboration
Information, Media, and Technology Skills
*Information Literacy
*Media Literacy
*ICT (Information, Communication, and Technology) Literacy
Life and Career Skills
*Flexibility and Adaptability
*Initiative and Self Direction
* Social and Cross Cultural Skills
* Productivity and Accountability
* Leadership and Responsibility
In Disrupting Class, authors Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn , and Curtis Johnson suggest that high school may be the important place for the training of tomorrow’s parents to occur.
The authors present research from Todd Risley and Betty Hart:
…on average parents speak 1500 words per hour to their infant children. ”Talkative”, college educated parents spoke an average of 2,100 while “welfare” parents spoke 600 words per hour. By age 3, children of talkative parents had heard 48 million words while those of welfare parents had heard 13 million.
The most powerful words that promote subsequent cognitive achievement are spoken in the first year of life, when there is no visible evidence that the child is understanding. Children whose parents did not begin speaking seriously to them until the child could speak, roughly age 12 months, suffered a persistent deficit in intellectual capacity, compared to those whose parents were talkative from the beginning.(pg 149)
Hart and Risley describe the words that really matter as “language dancing”, face to face, adult, sophisticated , chatty language as if the child where comprehending and responding to the comments… not business language like a command, ”do this, or time for bed”, but deliberate, uncompromised, personal adult conversation.(pg 151)
The authors of Disrupting Class suggest that rather than funding preschool programs for children who have missed having “talkative parents”, schools might bring greater future learning by investing in teaching children how to be parents before they become parents. Perhaps young, single, intercity mothers could break multigenerational cycles of poverty and underachievement by knowing how to shape early interactions with their children to help them succeed in school. Professional couples of the future, anxious to return to careers, may make better- informed choices with parenting training as part of their high school curriculum.
Perhaps parenting skills fit in the health literacy area of 21st century skills. Maybe this is a step toward “every child ready for school”?
More in a future posting regarding the systemic change thinking presented in Disrupting Class...
Sunday, July 13, 2008
PEER COACHING: UMBRELLA OR SKELETON
When describing to teachers that a peer coaching program is not ”another thing”, I often suggest that it is a tool… an umbrella under which many of our existing programs or tasks get accomplished. Most recently, I was training 165 pre-K to 12 teachers and administrators at the Enka International School in Istanbul, Turkey in peer coaching. With the whole staff training together, English and Turkish speakers using simultaneous translation with headsets, we were able to explore the many ways that peer coaching fits into the day to day goals of teachers and administrators.
Darlene Fisher, the director of Enka School used the symbol of a skeleton. Coaching being the skeleton that supports the many activities of a faculty… a community of learners.
See how the symbols apply for you.
I usually start this conversation by looking at three types of coaching illustrated in an early coaching article by Robert Garmston:
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Consider technical coaching most commonly connected to staff development. This is the follow up coaching that is needed when teachers take new skills back to the classroom to integrate into their existing practice. We are all familiar with how our best intentions to implement new learning can be lost without coaching support, reinforcement and celebrations of persistence. Coaching should be how changes in practice or curriculum are implemented. Coaching should be written into any team or individual professional development plan.
I connect collegial coaching to the development of teacher relationships. In other words, the what we are coaching may be less critical than the fact that that staff are getting to know each other and our programs through peer observation and conversation. I am often amazed that in a coaching workshop teachers from the same building make a discovery about each other in a 10 minute practice conference. I had a science teacher say that he just discovered that the Art teacher taught some important material. Coaching should be a component of Professional Learning Communities (PLC). As teachers in a PLC get to know each other better, the quality of their work will deepen. Small Learning Communities and Middle School Teams can both speed the development of their relationships through peer coaching.
Challenge Coaching is helpful when teachers want to work together to create an new opportunity or solve a problem. I worked with an English department that designed a lesson structure for a critical thinking lesson. Then, one teacher taught the lesson and video taped it. The team coached the lesson, modified it and passed it on to another teacher who taught and video taped. The process continued until 9 members taught and together polished the lesson design. Grade level or department teachers can use challenge coaching to tackle a standard that is troubling a number of students or create a plan for a disruptive student that they share. Observing in each others’ classrooms and reflecting and problem solving together often builds creativity.
Within the two day training and a follow up day with teachers and administrators at the Enka School, the following discussions of peer coaching were heard…
In the training during practice, a teacher shared that he had just met a person on the staff that he didn’t know and it was June!
Enka is structured in Pre –K , 1-5 and 6-12 units… discussions emerged about the value of 5 and 6 teachers coaching each other.
Discussion emerged around departments and grade levels selecting a common area for professional development and agreeing to coach each other.
Several teachers wrote on exit notes that they were anxious to coach with teachers in other grade levels and departments.
English pre school lessons will be team taught next year to provide teachers greater flexibility in differentiating. These teachers were discussing how coaching could be a daily activity. Since teaming will be new for most, we discussed teams inviting a third teacher to coach them on their teaming.
E-portfolios are being explored by a group of Enka teachers. They met briefly to examine how coaching was a natural component to support the reflection element of portfolios.
How would you label the Enka staff’s ideas for peer coaching…… technical, collegial, challenge? Do you see many areas of overlap?
Peer Coaching……..umbrella or skeleton? Do you have a better symbol?
Darlene Fisher, the director of Enka School used the symbol of a skeleton. Coaching being the skeleton that supports the many activities of a faculty… a community of learners.
See how the symbols apply for you.
I usually start this conversation by looking at three types of coaching illustrated in an early coaching article by Robert Garmston:
Consider technical coaching most commonly connected to staff development. This is the follow up coaching that is needed when teachers take new skills back to the classroom to integrate into their existing practice. We are all familiar with how our best intentions to implement new learning can be lost without coaching support, reinforcement and celebrations of persistence. Coaching should be how changes in practice or curriculum are implemented. Coaching should be written into any team or individual professional development plan.
I connect collegial coaching to the development of teacher relationships. In other words, the what we are coaching may be less critical than the fact that that staff are getting to know each other and our programs through peer observation and conversation. I am often amazed that in a coaching workshop teachers from the same building make a discovery about each other in a 10 minute practice conference. I had a science teacher say that he just discovered that the Art teacher taught some important material. Coaching should be a component of Professional Learning Communities (PLC). As teachers in a PLC get to know each other better, the quality of their work will deepen. Small Learning Communities and Middle School Teams can both speed the development of their relationships through peer coaching.
Challenge Coaching is helpful when teachers want to work together to create an new opportunity or solve a problem. I worked with an English department that designed a lesson structure for a critical thinking lesson. Then, one teacher taught the lesson and video taped it. The team coached the lesson, modified it and passed it on to another teacher who taught and video taped. The process continued until 9 members taught and together polished the lesson design. Grade level or department teachers can use challenge coaching to tackle a standard that is troubling a number of students or create a plan for a disruptive student that they share. Observing in each others’ classrooms and reflecting and problem solving together often builds creativity.
Within the two day training and a follow up day with teachers and administrators at the Enka School, the following discussions of peer coaching were heard…
In the training during practice, a teacher shared that he had just met a person on the staff that he didn’t know and it was June!
Enka is structured in Pre –K , 1-5 and 6-12 units… discussions emerged about the value of 5 and 6 teachers coaching each other.
Discussion emerged around departments and grade levels selecting a common area for professional development and agreeing to coach each other.
Several teachers wrote on exit notes that they were anxious to coach with teachers in other grade levels and departments.
English pre school lessons will be team taught next year to provide teachers greater flexibility in differentiating. These teachers were discussing how coaching could be a daily activity. Since teaming will be new for most, we discussed teams inviting a third teacher to coach them on their teaming.
E-portfolios are being explored by a group of Enka teachers. They met briefly to examine how coaching was a natural component to support the reflection element of portfolios.
How would you label the Enka staff’s ideas for peer coaching…… technical, collegial, challenge? Do you see many areas of overlap?
Peer Coaching……..umbrella or skeleton? Do you have a better symbol?
Sunday, July 6, 2008
NEED FOR DIRECTION
Those of you who have attended my workshops or read my book, Tapping Student Effort…..Increasing Student Achievement, know that I focus on the need for students to have a “picture of the future” that motivates the effort that is necessary for achievement.
A recent article in Education Week (June 11, 2008) Eye on Research, featured the results of a study surveying 1200 12- 26 year olds over a 5 year period conducted by Stanford University psychologist William Damon. In his book, The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life, Damon identifies that a majority of young people are struggling to make the leap into adulthood. (Click for article from Education Week.)
Students in the study were classified into four groups:
Approximately:
20% The Purposeful—found something meaningful to dedicate themselves to, have sustained interest over time, and express a clear sense of what they are trying to accomplish in the world and why
31% The Dabblers-have tried a number of potentially purposeful pursuits but have yet to find reason to commit to any of them
25% The Dreamers-can imagine themselves doing great things in the world but have yet to do anything to pursue their ideas in a practical way.
25% The Disengaged-have neither a purpose in life nor an inclination to find one.
Damon suggest that there have always been kids who drift, but he thinks we have a special problem today with the number of kids and the kind of trouble they are having finding a sense of direction.
What are the skills, practices and dispositions that students need to be developing in our schools? What implications are there for the work of teachers as advisors with middle school and high school students?
Since my first readings about the Met School in Providence Rhode Island, I was impressed with their strong focus on developing and tapping student interest. Elliot Washor outinles that focus in an online article:
Perspectives on relevance and the quest for rigorous student learning: balancing life to text and text to life
Every learner has interests that can be used to create relevant and powerful learning opportunities. We believe, however, that three core aspects of relevance are often overlooked.
Relevance begins with the individual learner. It is the learner who decides what and from whom he will learn. Relevance is about deep connections between the student, his emerging interest in a given area and the complex learning challenges that define that area. Relevance starts and ends with what the student really wants to learn and broadens out as the student makes connections and wants to learn more. Determining what is relevant is itself an essential part of each student’s learning.
Relevance involves a balance between student interests and the curriculum. Traditionally, schools and colleges have featured learning that employs an approach that could be characterized as ‘text to life’. They emphasize in their teaching the world of words in all manner of texts – textbooks most prominently, if not exclusively – in order to prepare students for the world of action. It is extremely important, however, to blend ‘text to life’ with ‘life to text’. The world of action, and the student’s interest in that world of action, will lead him to the textual knowledge he will need to deal successfully with future challenges in his life’s work.
Addressing what is relevant requires a special student–teacher relationship, in which the teacher establishes a relationship with the student through the student’s interests. As this relationship builds the level and quality of the student’s motivation to learn, both the student and the teacher can more successfully understand and pursue rigorous learning strategies.
Importantly, through this relevant and rigorous learning built upon a firm student–teacher relationship, the student will more readily recognize the inherent value of 21st-century skills such as literacy, numeracy, innovative problem solving and self-development. Because these skills will be deliberately grounded in the student’s own areas of interests, he will more readily recognize them as essential tools to master in order to think, learn and perform at high levels. In an ongoing cycle, life’s experiences lead the student to the text and the text leads the student back to life.1
Performance Learning Systems courses, Teaching the Skills of the 21st Century and Live Event Learning, help teacher explore strategies for planning for learning that supports learner interest and skill development.
1 Curriculum Leadership Journal, Volume 6 Issue 8
Perspectives on relevance and the quest for rigorous student learning: balancing life to text and text to life,Elliot Washor
A recent article in Education Week (June 11, 2008) Eye on Research, featured the results of a study surveying 1200 12- 26 year olds over a 5 year period conducted by Stanford University psychologist William Damon. In his book, The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life, Damon identifies that a majority of young people are struggling to make the leap into adulthood. (Click for article from Education Week.)
Students in the study were classified into four groups:
Approximately:
20% The Purposeful—found something meaningful to dedicate themselves to, have sustained interest over time, and express a clear sense of what they are trying to accomplish in the world and why
31% The Dabblers-have tried a number of potentially purposeful pursuits but have yet to find reason to commit to any of them
25% The Dreamers-can imagine themselves doing great things in the world but have yet to do anything to pursue their ideas in a practical way.
25% The Disengaged-have neither a purpose in life nor an inclination to find one.
Damon suggest that there have always been kids who drift, but he thinks we have a special problem today with the number of kids and the kind of trouble they are having finding a sense of direction.
What are the skills, practices and dispositions that students need to be developing in our schools? What implications are there for the work of teachers as advisors with middle school and high school students?
Since my first readings about the Met School in Providence Rhode Island, I was impressed with their strong focus on developing and tapping student interest. Elliot Washor outinles that focus in an online article:
Perspectives on relevance and the quest for rigorous student learning: balancing life to text and text to life
Every learner has interests that can be used to create relevant and powerful learning opportunities. We believe, however, that three core aspects of relevance are often overlooked.
Relevance begins with the individual learner. It is the learner who decides what and from whom he will learn. Relevance is about deep connections between the student, his emerging interest in a given area and the complex learning challenges that define that area. Relevance starts and ends with what the student really wants to learn and broadens out as the student makes connections and wants to learn more. Determining what is relevant is itself an essential part of each student’s learning.
Relevance involves a balance between student interests and the curriculum. Traditionally, schools and colleges have featured learning that employs an approach that could be characterized as ‘text to life’. They emphasize in their teaching the world of words in all manner of texts – textbooks most prominently, if not exclusively – in order to prepare students for the world of action. It is extremely important, however, to blend ‘text to life’ with ‘life to text’. The world of action, and the student’s interest in that world of action, will lead him to the textual knowledge he will need to deal successfully with future challenges in his life’s work.
Addressing what is relevant requires a special student–teacher relationship, in which the teacher establishes a relationship with the student through the student’s interests. As this relationship builds the level and quality of the student’s motivation to learn, both the student and the teacher can more successfully understand and pursue rigorous learning strategies.
Importantly, through this relevant and rigorous learning built upon a firm student–teacher relationship, the student will more readily recognize the inherent value of 21st-century skills such as literacy, numeracy, innovative problem solving and self-development. Because these skills will be deliberately grounded in the student’s own areas of interests, he will more readily recognize them as essential tools to master in order to think, learn and perform at high levels. In an ongoing cycle, life’s experiences lead the student to the text and the text leads the student back to life.1
Performance Learning Systems courses, Teaching the Skills of the 21st Century and Live Event Learning, help teacher explore strategies for planning for learning that supports learner interest and skill development.
1 Curriculum Leadership Journal, Volume 6 Issue 8
Perspectives on relevance and the quest for rigorous student learning: balancing life to text and text to life,Elliot Washor
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