Monthly Archives: February 2011

Engaging Teachers in Instructional Rounds

I had the good fortune to spend about three hours this morning with seven of my teachers as well as my instructional coach who are part of an intra-school “pilot” project inspired by Richard Elmore’s Instructional Rounds in Education. It’s a big chunk of my day, but this is the work that instructional leaders should be doing.

The Why

I have a personal goal to support teachers in talking to each other about their practice. As Elmore points out, “one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like” (p. 3). The rounds process is intended to bring conversations about instructional practice into the school improvement process. The rounds process is adapted from the medical rounds model and includes “observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction” (p. 3).

My hope is that I can expand this school-wide next year, but I wanted to start small. I worked with my instructional coach to solicit seven teacher volunteers to be part of this pilot. I have a cross-section of disciplines, grade levels, and experience and we meet biweekly for a total of seven sessions. Each teacher will open their classroom to the group one time and have the opportunity to observe the other six over the course of the pilot.

In Elmore’s parlance, I have a theory of action that looks something like this:

If we develop and nurture a school culture that supports collaborative inquiry and the sharing of best teaching practices, then classroom instruction will be strengthened and students will learn in deeper, more authentic ways.

The How

The participants voluntarily come in to pre-brief at 6:45am on lab days. They have no incentive other than coffee and conversation along with their commitment to improve their practice through sharing in the lab experience. Though all participants are observing the same class at the same time, each bring a different inquiry question to the lab experience. These questions run the gamut and are highly dependent on the teachers’ interests and perceived areas for growth.

Some examples of inquiry questions from this group:

  • How can a teacher foster global citizenship in his or her students?
  • What strategies do teachers use to get students talking about text?
  • How can social studies teachers more effectively include historical fiction in their units of instruction?
  • How can I move students from external accountability to intrinsic responsibility for their learning?
  • How can I ensure that my lessons are authentic and connect students with the larger social context?

The teacher being observed may also pose a specific question related to their class being observed. These questions are posted on our neopolitan-colored “Board of Inquiry.”

At our pre-brief, we also assign people to track specific data that the host teacher requests. For instance, this morning we tracked:

  • Use of vocabulary by teacher and students that indicates “global literacy”
  • Connections from historical fiction text to self
  • Wait time between posing a questions and selecting a student to respond

The most challenging part is arranging class coverage for the observing teachers so that we can all be together to observe and de-brief the process. I am very passionate about the success of this pilot and have committed to using a chunk of the sub dollars allocated to me for professional development. On lab days, we use in-house coverage only when absolutely necessary, instead bringing in four or five half-day subs to cover for lab participants.

Following the one-hour classroom observation, we take a short break, top off our coffees, and re-convene for a de-brief.

Once everyone is back together, we sit silently for a few minutes to reflect on our initial observations. We go quickly around the table, sharing an objective, non-value-laden observation about what we’ve seen. Our instructional coach then leads the group through a discussion connecting one or two of the principles from the Elmore book to the lesson we observed.

It is at this point in the process that the requested data is shared and processed, along with other relevant information. For instance, this morning one of the participants noted that the host teacher had asked 70 questions in a 60-minute observation.

The hour-long debrief process usually flies by, and ultimately ends with each participant sharing something that they believe they have learned about the host teachers core principles. Examples include:

  • Ms. X seems to value every student’s contribution to her class.
  • It seems very important to Ms. X that her students access their personal experience to build background knowledge before tackling new text.
  • Based on the discussion, it seems like Ms. X has high expectations that students are able to connect course content to real-world contexts.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

We are two lab cycles in to our pilot project and we continue to re-visit the norms we established at the outset. It is incredibly courageous of the teacher participants to open up their classrooms to their colleagues, and all have expressed their nervousness to do so.

All in all, I think the two teachers who have hosted to this point have come away feeling positive about the experience. My hope is to generate enough energy and momentum to roll this out school-wide next year. The logistics of pulling this off with 44 full-time faculty will be a bit of a challenge, but I believe passionately that this is the work we should be doing so I am committed to figuring out how to make it happen even if it means I’ll be covering classes.

Narrative Research on a Mac

As part of my class last fall in Narrative Inquiry, we were required to keep a research journal. Like any self-respecting geek, I kept mine in a WordPress blog that I am about to delete because it’s abandoned and getting non-stop spam at this point. While most of the posts were about class assignments, this is the one post I wanted to save so I can re-visit it and keep it up-to-date.

Last Revised in February 8, 2011

One of the things people who know me well will tell you is that I am a major Apple geek. If Apple put their logo on a pair of socks, I’d buy them and proceed to tell everyone I know how superior they are to Windows and Linux socks.

In terms of my work in Narrative Inquiry, I wanted to make mention of a couple of the tools I discovered (or discovered new uses for) over the course of the semester. Some of these I used for transcribing interviews, coding and reviewing notes, and outlining and diagramming major themes. Maybe these can help future students who want to use some digital tools in their narrative research.

Scrivener

A powerful application, Scrivener is used by writers for everything from lengthy legal briefs to crafting the great American novel. I’ve used Scrivener for the first pass of almost all of my academic writing since starting my PhD program in 2007. Version 2.0 was recently released and there is a Windows version in Beta as I write this. In my work for this course, Scrivener was an invaluable tool for transcribing audio files and putting together a final transcript.

iAnnotate PDF

I actually started coding my transcript in hard-copy form. What I couldn’t shake was the sense that pulling the codes together at the end was going to be a lot more work than it needed to be. Using my iPad and iAnnotate, I was able to use several colors of highlighter to identify key themes that I identified in the interview. Once the highlighting was complete, I was able to export the highlighted text as a plain text file for further analysis. The plain text file includes data on the color used to highlight each piece of text.

OmniOutliner Pro

Once I had the plain text out of iAnnotate, the next step was to regroup like colors together into some kind of an outline. For years, the “non-pro” version of OmniOutliner was bundled on every Mac. I used it from time to time for class notes and the like, but doing narrative research I discovered it’s real power to import raw .txt files and simplify the process of cleaning it up and getting it in outline form. Not only does OmniOutliner save in its own native file format, it also has the capability to export outlines in the standard OPML format that can be read by other applications.

OmniGraffle Pro

OmniGraffle Pro has the ability to read files that have been formatted in OPML and turn them into visual displays. At first this was just a way for me to see how far I could push my “all electronic” system, but I really liked the way that it looked. I found that it was nice to have a graphical representation of how the coding was looking.

I’m not sure if this will ever be helpful to other narrative researchers considering how to use their Mac to the best of its ability, but I found this to be a great starting point for my work in this class.

UPDATE 2/8/2011: PDF Expert

With a UI that is far superior to iAnnotate’s, PDF Expert only lacks one feature and that is the ability to export highlighted text to a plain text email. That being said, it’s worth a look if that is not the killer feature for you. I’ve downloaded and used it for class readings when I knew I wouldn’t have a reason to export length quotations.

Moving to a Staff Blog

In August, I went cold-turkey and informed my teachers that I would not be sending mass emails this year. I briefly touched on how inefficient email is as a one-to-many communication tool and most nodded along as they’ve all fallen victim to the “TMI” of a colleague who uses “reply all” to share that they wouldn’t make the faculty meeting because they’d been having stomach cramps all day.

As with the introduction of anything completely new, I explained to them the trade-off I was willing to make. My school was functioning under an intense “culture of meetings” that, in my opinion, was a little excessive. I committed to them to cut down on meeting times, but the trade-off was that all “FYI” items — without exception — would be posted on a private staff blog and that they were responsible for checking it every day.

Knowing that there would still be some for whom this was uncomfortable, I enabled a “subscribe by email” button at the top of the page. This meant that it was up to each individual to subscribe if they wanted to continue to receive school news via email. For me, this meant that I still only had to post in one place.

As a last bit of insurance, I worked with our school technologist to ensure that our staff blog was the browser start-up page on teacher computers. This means that it’s staring them in the face every time they open their browsers.

The benefits of the staff blog as I have seen them unfold this year are:

  • Information is archived. How many emails do you get from staff who absent-mindedly deleted that email with the attachment they needed? I’ve been guilty of this myself! On the blog, everything is categorized and archived by month so the assembly schedule we used in October is still there when we need it again in January.

  • Information is searchable. Technically, email is searchable, too, but if you’ve ever used FirstClass as your email client you’ll know that this is less than ideal. Plus, with the small mailbox sizes we are allocated, and the wonky way FC duplicates emails when you reply or forward, people tend to delete stuff.

  • Comments are way more efficient than emailing. This one was a bit unexpected, but it’s probably the biggest benefit. Say you post about an upcoming event and you omit an important piece of information. If you had emailed it, you’d get 10 or 15 emails asking for clarification and you’d have to either reply to each one or send one of those, “Oops! I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that Friday’s dance has an 80s theme…” emails. On the blog, one person asks the question in the comments and I can answer it once,

Overall, I think this has been a successful experiment. I think one of the primary reasons is that I articulated the purpose clearly as a reduction in wasted meeting time. Also, the cold-turkey approach was the only way to go. I don’t think this would have worked as effectively had I continued to send emails and post on the blog.

It didn’t take long for the hold-outs to come around when there was something they didn’t know about. I overheard more than one conversation along the lines of, “How did you know about [whatever]?”

“It was posted on the blog yesterday. Don’t you check it?”

Also, as with the team blogs, support is critical. This was new for people so hand-holding was critical for some while some were off and running right away. Some people stress out very easily because they “just aren’t good with technology” so it’s critical to support them in the early stages.

At this point in the year, there are four of us who have rights to post on the staff blog. I want to expand this next year to make it even more collaborative and to reinforce it as the “one-stop shop” for all things school related.