LEADING A VISION FOR SCHOOL-WIDE LEARNING IMPROVEMENT . Write a short summary of topics covered in Chapters 5-9. ? ?What school characteristics and practices have been most successful i

Murnane, K.P.B.A.C. J. (2020). Data Wise, Revised and Expanded Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf]. Retrieved from https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781612505237/

5

EXAMINING INSTRUCTION

Elizabeth A. City, Melissa Kagle, and Mark B. Teoh

FRANKLIN MATH DEPARTMENT HEAD MALLORY GOLDEN BEGAN THE MEETING BY acknowledging the department’s work: “Well, we’ve made a lot of progress so far. We’ve decided that our learner-centered problem is that students are not able to solve multistep problems very well. Now, our next step is to understand why they’re having so much trouble with multistep problems.” “Are we really going to talk about this for another meeting?” interrupted Eddie. “All we

do is talk. Students are going to fail the state test again while we sit around and talk.” “I hear you,” replied Mallory. “But my question is, what’s happening—or not happening—

in our teaching that’s leading our students to struggle with multistep problems?” “Look, it’s not as if we haven’t taught multistep problems,” responded Eddie. “They’re in

every book I’ve used, not to mention on the state test. It would help if kids would do their homework and come prepared to class, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon, so I’ll give them more multistep problems to work on in class.”

Educators are constantly solving problems. These problems range from simple (a student doesn’t have a pencil) to complex (a student doesn’t understand an assignment or two students aren’t getting along). To manage the steady stream of problems, we tend to leap to solutions. However, many of the problems we face are too complicated for us to solve quickly on our own.

The learner-centered problem you have articulated by digging into data is a complicated problem—if it were an

easy one, you would have solved it by now. To solve it, you need to understand its teaching dimensions as well. While many factors outside of school influence children’s learning, these are outside the reach of most teachers. What educators can control is teaching. Teaching, therefore, will be the focus of the action plan. You need a process that allows teachers to take responsibility for solving the problem, instead of backing away from it because they feel it’s not their problem, or that they can’t do anything about it anyway, or that they’re being blamed for it.

To do this, you reframe the learner-centered problem as a “problem of practice” that, if solved, will mean progress toward your larger goals for students.1 The problem of practice is:

Directly related to the learner-centered problem

Based on evidence found when examining instruction

Within the school’s control

A statement about practice, not a question

Specific and small

Not only does identifying the problem of practice lay important groundwork for future action, it also saves time. Even though it may feel like one more thing to do, remember that this investment will likely keep you from spending months or years on something that won’t work because it doesn’t address the actual problem of practice that is at the heart of student learning difficulties.

Four main tasks will help you investigate instruction and articulate a problem of practice:

1. Link learning and teaching: With this particular learner-centered problem, how does instruction have an impact on what students learn?

2. Develop the skill of observing practice: How do we look at instructional data? 3. Develop a shared understanding of effective practice: What does effective instruction for

our learner-centered problem look like and what makes it effective? 4. Analyze current practice: What is actually happening in the classroom in terms of the

learner-centered problem, and how does it relate to our understanding of effective practice?

Because learning and teaching are so intertwined, you may already have partially completed one or more of these tasks when your school was digging into data. While schools that are new to the improvement process may find it easiest to proceed through these tasks in the sequence above, many schools find that examining instruction involves doing them more or less simultaneously. More important than the order in which the tasks are done is the necessity that they all be addressed.

LINK LEARNING AND TEACHING

Mallory continued the math department meeting by asking teachers to use their experience in the classroom to brainstorm why Franklin students were struggling with multistep problems. Teachers wrote their responses on sticky notes:

The first step in articulating a problem of practice is to establish a link between learning and teaching. This may sound surprising, since we presumably wouldn’t be teachers if we didn’t think our efforts mattered for learning. However, in the context of accountability policies and the day-to-day pressures of school, it can be easy to forget that teaching makes a difference in student learning. If teachers don’t fundamentally believe this, then it’s going to be difficult to convince them to change their teaching.

Linking learning and teaching is also about helping teachers take responsibility for student learning. “Responsibility” doesn’t mean “it’s my fault”—it means, “I can and will do something about the learner-centered problem.” Poor test results and external pressures can lead educators to try to shift responsibility to others through finger-pointing and blame. For school-based educators, however, the primary focus has to be on what we have control over—what happens at school. This is not an easy task. Despite their hard work, teachers don’t often see great improvements on state tests, and they don’t think it’s possible to work any harder. They see lots of big issues that affect student learning that they can’t readily fix, like poverty, previous learning experiences, and parental education. The school leader must keep the conversation focused on what teachers can do in the classroom.

What we can do is teach well. To improve the quality of teaching in a school, leaders must push the conversation about the learning problem past the level of what students are and aren’t doing to look at what teachers are and aren’t doing. Additionally, school leaders have to help teachers link learning and teaching in a way that doesn’t make them defensive but does get them thinking about their own practice. When planning opportunities for teachers to link learning and teaching, consider these points:

How will you move the conversation from “students” (or “parents” or “community,” etc.) to “teachers”?

How will you frame the work as an opportunity to improve instruction, rather than as a failure (proactive vs. reactive)?

How will you help teachers have a questioning rather than a defensive stance?

How will you reinforce a collective conviction that teaching matters for learning?

Many school leaders we have worked with use structured protocols to address these questions and make the conversation both safer and closer to instruction for teachers. At Franklin, Mallory used the Affinity Protocol (see Selected Protocols at the end of the book) to have teachers brainstorm hypotheses about the learner-centered problem. After Mallory saw that most of the sticky notes started with “Students,” she encouraged teachers to consider other reasons students might be struggling with multistep problems, and to try starting some ideas with “I” or “Teachers.” Teachers’ responses included:

Although many of their sticky notes still didn’t focus specifically on teachers, when they organized all of their notes into categories, they labeled the categories “Curriculum,” “Instruction,” and “Motivation/Expectations,” and added a “Parking Lot” category for things over which they had no control. The process of working through the protocol helped teachers decide that ideas like “Students aren’t able to think abstractly” should be in the category of “Instruction,” even though they hadn’t thought of it that way originally. The categories, which focus on what teachers are doing rather than on students, reflected the faculty’s evolving understanding of their role in students’ learning. We have seen many schools use the Affinity Protocol with great success because it’s anonymous (thus letting participants write down things they might not say out loud), it levels the speaking field (thus addressing the

potential for one person to dominate or for everyone to wait to see what the principal says), and it’s fun (people appreciate the hands-on experience of using sticky notes and moving them around, rather than sitting and talking).

Other schools use a process of asking “why?” repeatedly to peel away the layers of the learning problem. They start with their learner-centered problem and then ask why they have that problem. For each answer they come up with, they ask why again, and repeat that process several times. One middle school’s “why-why-why” diagram about its special education students who were not answering math questions beyond the first step is displayed in Exhibit 5.1.2

Exhibit 5.1

Why-Why-Why Special Education Subgroup—Mathematics

The initial step of linking learning and teaching need not take a long time— most schools we know devote one meeting to it. However, it lays the groundwork for closer examination of practice by focusing attention squarely on

the instructional core, which is defined as the interaction between teachers, students, and content.3 The data used in the protocols above are teachers’ own experiences, including their assumptions and beliefs. This is a good place to start because this type of data is easily accessible and influences how teachers approach the problem of practice. To truly understand the problem of practice, however, you will have to get closer to what actually happens in classrooms.

DEVELOP THE SKILL OF OBSERVING PRACTICE

At Clark, teachers had spent the previous few weeks doing peer observations, with each teacher visiting one colleague. In team meetings, teachers shared what they had seen. “I enjoyed visiting Anita’s classroom. I saw students who were really engaged,” began

Kristina, a third-grade teacher. “That was true in Jae’s classroom, too,” said Vivian, a fourth-grade teacher. “Students

were well-behaved, they worked well in groups, and they looked like they were really on task.” “Good,” replied Sandy, the principal. “Engagement is important. The next question is,

what evidence did you see that students were engaged, and what task were students engaged in?”

Examining instruction is a complex undertaking. There are many potential sources of evidence to explore, ranging from artifacts (such as assignments or assessments), to self-reports (such as surveys or interviews of teachers), to observations (in person or via video). When weighing this evidence, educators need to be able to recognize,

understand, and describe what they’re seeing. This is not as easy as it sounds, especially when the evidence under consideration is actual classroom practice. Understanding the Key Elements of Observing Practice

Most teachers have not had much experience with examining teaching, which means they have neither the skills to describe teaching in a fine-grained, evidence-based way, nor the collegial culture in which examining practice feels supportive rather than threatening. If you plunge right into examining instruction without developing skills for doing so, you will find the conversation is awash in compliments and generalities like “students are engaged” and “the lesson was well planned.” One principal we know calls this “happy talk”—our tendency as educators to be overly nice to colleagues, especially when we’re just beginning to examine practice. Although it is often helpful to point out what is working well, that level of generality and abstraction does little to help us understand how our teaching links to the learning in the classroom.

Developing skills for examining practice takes time, and dogged determination. In response to consistent feedback from educators who find this work particularly challenging, the Data Wise Project team developed Key Elements of Observing Practice: A Data Wise DVD and Facilitator’s

Guide. This resource offers a set of tools for developing teachers’ capacity to observe practice, including videos, agendas, protocols, and handouts to support professional development on this topic. The main message is that observation of practice is most effective when embedded in a formal protocol. The specific format of the protocol is less important than that it be designed to support an ongoing conversation, based on evidence, about what practice looks like. In particular, we found that effective protocols contain five key elements, and when the purpose of the observation is to identify a problem of practice, the elements involve the following tasks:

Key Elem ent

Tasks Associated with This Element (when the purpose of the observation is to identify a problem of practice)

Focu s

Review the learner-centered problem, provide context for the lesson(s) to be observed, discuss how observers will focus their attention during the observation.

Obse rve

View one or more classrooms, taking notes that capture details about what the teachers and students are saying

and doing and what tasks students are asked to complete.

Debri ef

Discuss the teaching and learning observed using descriptions (not inferences or judgments) and commit to next steps.

Adju st

Carry out the next steps agreed on during debriefing.

Follo w Up

Discuss what was learned during adjustment and plan future work.

When debriefing an observation, it is important that teachers be able to describe what they see using precise, shared vocabulary. For example, a teacher who has not had much practice analyzing instruction might observe a teacher introducing a new math concept and respond with the comment, “I noticed that students seem confused.” “Confused,” like “engaged,” could mean many things to different teachers. In contrast, a more precise observation might be, “I noticed that several students didn’t start the assignment immediately. One student was looking at other students. Two students were talking to each other while looking at the assignment, and four students raised their hands after the teacher gave directions for the assignment.” Cultivating the habit of maintaining a

relentless focus on evidence helps build the precise, shared vocabulary that will allow you to identify a meaningful problem of practice.

Cultivating the habit of intentional collaboration is also essential. It is more powerful to observe and analyze practice collaboratively because each person brings his or her own set of beliefs and assumptions to the observation. Hearing others’ responses to the same lesson helps challenge individual assumptions, allows everyone to notice different things and see the same things in a new way, and leads to a better understanding of the practice observed. For collaboration to be productive and safe, your team will need to adhere to the norms you set when organizing for collaborative work (see chapter 1) and perhaps revisit and expand upon those ground rules for discussion so that discussing teaching openly is possible. An important norm that many teams have is confidentiality, meaning that what is discussed about an observation will not be shared outside the group doing the analysis. Learning to See

To develop the skills of observing practice, you need not jump right into having teachers observe one another. Schools we have worked with often start by having teachers watch videos of teaching from outside the school

(such as the videos available in the Key Elements DVD mentioned above). Observing and discussing the practice of teachers they don’t know gives teachers the opportunity to build the skills necessary for safe and insightful conversations about practice. One principal we know called it “learning to see.” She gave teachers time to watch videos and make note of what they saw. She modeled using language like “I noticed that …,” “I saw that …,” and “I heard that …” with examples of what she saw and heard. With her persistent reminders to cite evidence rather than rush to judgments, teachers developed the habit of doing so, and then used this skill to examine their own practice when they observed each other teach.

We have also seen teams develop these skills when one brave soul, such as a teacher or instructional coach, volunteers to have other teachers observe his teaching. Group members then discuss their observations, practicing using evidence, precise vocabulary, and norms. It can be especially compelling when the school leader volunteers to have teachers observe and discuss her teaching, thus opening his or her own practice to faculty for examination.

This step of “learning to see” instruction focuses on description rather than evaluation. The distinction is important because our normative judgments tend to cloud our ability to see what’s happening—for example, students

look “engaged,” which we think is good, but when we look at what they’re “engaged” with, we see that they’re doing work that’s several grade levels below where they should be. There are limits, though, to what describing can do.

DEVELOP A SHARED UNDERSTANDING OF EFFECTIVE PRACTICE

At Clark, a seventh-grade teacher had volunteered to have colleagues observe her teaching the concept of inference. At the next faculty meeting, teachers discussed what they had seen and were thinking about teaching inference. “The kids were doing inference through drama,” said Vivian, a fourth-grade teacher. “First,

they were taking lines from everyday interactions, like ‘I’m fine’ or ‘Excuse me,’ and they were saying the lines in all different ways, and then the rest of the class was guessing—or inferring—what they were actually thinking when they said it. One student said ‘Excuse me’ like she was really embarrassed, and another said it like he was really annoyed. Then they moved on to reading lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they worked on saying those lines with meaning that was appropriate, based on the text.”

“It was great, but I hope there are other ways to teach inferring—I’m just not the drama type and I can’t see using Shakespeare with third graders,” Kristina said, referring to her students. “Do we have any other ideas about teaching inference?”

A critical step in articulating a problem of practice is to develop a shared understanding of instruction that will effectively address the learner-centered problem that you have identified. You need a vision for what this effective teaching looks like so you can assess whether what you’re doing now fits or doesn’t fit that vision. The problem of practice is in the gap between current practice and effective practice for addressing the learner-centered problem. If an understanding of effective practice for addressing the problem already existed among your faculty, you probably wouldn’t have the learner-centered problem, as teachers would know how to successfully teach inferring or solving multistep problems, or whatever your learner-centered problem is. Thus, building teacher knowledge is important in articulating the problem of practice. The faculty will continue to develop and refine their understanding of effective practice as they develop the action plan, implement the plan, and assess progress, but it’s important to lay the groundwork at this stage. Without a vision of what’s possible, we limit our expectations and goals for addressing the learner-centered problem, as well as our ability to examine our own practice with an informed eye.

Drawing on Internal Resources

In developing a shared understanding of effective practice, the essential question is, Based on student and teacher data, what does instruction that addresses the learner-centered problem look like? To answer this question, schools can look internally at instruction in their own buildings and look externally to other practitioners and to research. Looking internally has advantages: it honors the work of teachers in the building, which can build a sense of confidence and competence, and the practice is very specific to the context of the school, thus requiring less translation or adaptation than an external practice might. Looking internally also has potential disadvantages: the scope of ideas may be narrow because we don’t have all the answers; singling out particular teachers as examples of “effective practice” may promote a sense of competition or comparison among teachers; and our assumptions about what’s possible may be limited. A school that chooses to use examples of effective practice from inside the school can mitigate these pitfalls in several ways. First, introduce a wider range of practices by bringing in outside resources, such as journal articles that address the learner-centered problem. Second, involve the whole staff in identifying effective practice to cut down on feelings of competition.

And third, facilitate conversations carefully to get teachers thinking more widely about practice.

When looking internally to develop ideas of effective practice, the key is to ground the discussion in evidence. We know many schools where teachers share instructional strategies that they call “best practices.” This is an important way to develop craft knowledge, but is often disconnected from data and from the learner-centered problem. Some schools we work with address this by inviting teachers to share practices related to the learner-centered problem and to support the belief that these are “best” practices with evidence of student learning. In these schools, teachers use the following protocol: “This is a ‘best practice’ because when I did this, the learning looked like this.” They then present their instructional strategy and evidence from student work. Connecting best practices to data serves multiple purposes: it increases the likelihood that the practice is effective rather than simply congenial; it reinforces the discipline of grounding all conversations about teaching and learning in evidence rather than generalities or assumptions; it’s more persuasive—teachers are more likely to try something for which there’s evidence that it works; and it reinforces the link between learning and teaching. Drawing on External Resources

At Franklin, Sasha, the math coach, showed the math department videos of algebra lessons from Japan, Germany, and the United States from the TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science Study). “Well, sure, it would be great if our lessons looked like the Japanese one, but our

classrooms are really different,” Eddie said. “First of all, we’re dealing with a much more diverse population than those Japanese teachers are. Second, I’ve tried that approach of putting a problem on the board and having kids try to solve it, and it just doesn’t work. Some of them don’t even start it, and just talk to their neighbors. Others start it, and then stop as soon as they’re stuck. If I’m not helping them through each step of the problem, they just give up.”

“What do you see in these videos that relates to the article that I gave you about differences in teaching practice across countries at different performance levels on international math tests?” asked Sasha.

“The article said that countries in the middle of the pack, like the U.S. and Germany, tend to spend lots of class time on reviewing homework and applying formulas. We definitely saw that in the video,” said Mallory.

“The article also said that the countries that score higher, like Japan, have students develop some understanding of the theory behind an operation, rather than just applying an algorithm. And there was the piece in the article about breadth versus depth—U.S. textbooks are much fatter than Japanese and Korean textbooks and cover a lot more concepts. We saw some of both of those things. In the U.S. classroom, students were doing many problems that drew on a number of different math concepts, whereas in the Japanese classroom, students did two problems in the class period, both on the same math concepts.”

“Okay,” said Eddie. “Like I said, I’d love to teach just like those Japanese teachers. But how would this work at Franklin?”

In schools, internal resources often are not adequate for developing a shared understanding of effective practice related to the learner-centered problem. This is when school leaders should use external resources to seed the conversation about effective practice and build teachers’ knowledge. You can go to the source, by visiting another school or attending a professional conference, or you can bring it in, by learning from consultants or reviewing research. Looking externally brings its own advantages and disadvantages. Some advantages include bringing in a range of ideas and expertise that is beyond that of your staff, and making it easier to have an “objective” conversation. Many school leaders we know bring in articles and videos to start conversations with their faculty, which helps teachers get perspective on their own practice and talk about effective practice. External resources also can challenge assumptions about what’s possible by showing evidence of other practitioners succeeding where we have not; providing access to ideas that have potentially been tested more systematically or for a longer period of

time (e.g., research); and helping triangulate teachers’ hunches and experiences of good practice with external ideas.

Drawing on outside resources also brings potential disadvantages. For some teachers, external resources challenge their professionalism and suggest that they’re not good teachers or don’t know what good teaching is. There is also the “But they’re different! That wouldn’t work here!” problem, as math teacher Eddie exemplified at Franklin. In this view, educators assume that whatever success the external resource had won’t hold when applied to their own unique setting. With external resources, it’s not always clear which elements are essential and which can be adapted (or how) to another context.

Adopting an inquiry stance, in which any resource—internal or external—is questioned and investigated, addresses these disadvantages. Inquiry is essential in developing a shared understanding of effective practice because you want everyone to understand not only what effec

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