A Gift for Change

Have you ever coached a group of teachers who wanted to change their practice, but couldn’t seem to move forward?

I’ve been attempting to organize my files and ran across a set of slides I used to facilitate a critical friends (CF) discussion among a team of 6 teachers. The teachers wanted to engage their students in more inquiry-based instruction, but couldn’t seem to move away from their comfortable GRR/”stand-and-deliver” mode of instruction. Their principal asked if I would help them and so I did.

After some time of observation, I realized that they would benefit from a reflective-practice focused discussion. Once we established a safe space for honest sharing, the teachers admitted their concerns…and yes, their fears. Providing them the opportunity to reflect on not only their practice, but their feelings resulted in the teachers committing to the following:

1. Creating a 2-month plan of action to engage students in inquiry-based instruction
2. Meeting weekly to reflect on their transformational process
3. Assuming leadership of the CF as I decreased my presence

In short, the session was a success!

Well it’s the season of giving, and so that’s what I’d like to do–give you the actual slides to the session I facilitated. All I ask in return is if you like them, or you find them helpful, please “pay it forward” by sharing the slides with 3 of your colleagues. That’s all. Consider this a gift for change.

Enjoy the slides and enjoy the holidays!

Go here for the slides.

The 21st Century Teacher: A Leader’s Reflection

Did you read the confessions of a 21st century teacher?

Two weeks ago I shared the thoughts of a real teacher who vented about a professional development session held at her school. She was an effective teacher who was tired of what she referred to as the B.S. involved in professional development. Her comments should have caused leaders to investigate the health of the adult learning culture at their school.

If you haven’t read her 7-minute venting session, check out Part 1 and Part 2. Afterward, consider Learning Forward’s professional learning standards below and accept the challenge of answering the questions that follow.

Learning Forward: Standards for Professional Learning

Challenge Questions

In order to increase educator effectiveness and results for all students through professional learning:

1. How do you ensure or gauge collective responsibility?
2. How do you develop and ensure a support system?
3. How do you prioritize, monitor and coordinate resources effectively?
4. How o you evaluate the effectiveness of professional learning?
5. How do you integrate theories of human learning?
6. How do you apply change research to sustain long-term change?
7. How do you align educator performance outcomes with the CCSS?

Ensuring an effective adult learning culture where contributions and participation are authentic is one of your first steps to the student success you seek. Through progressive partnerships, principals I’ve worked with have done just this. Find out how you can be sure your adult learning culture is authentic with a progressive partnership.

Confessions of a 21st Century Teacher – Part 2

I’m saying all of that to say this. When you have teachers saying all of this bull@#*& about “I do…uhg!”

She paused as if she were finished. Then she continued.

Remember last week? That’s where we left of with Ms. 21^st Century Teacher. She was in the middle of reflecting on her frustrating professional development experience. This week we continue with her thoughts as promised.

A reminder from last week: this teacher is an effective one. She’s skilled at engaging traditionally low performing students in critical thinking, and has the ability to excite students about learning. Ms. 21st Century Teacher works until 9PM weekday evenings and on Sundays to prepare for her students. She is no excuse maker. I mention her work ethic so that potential questions do not interfere with your empathy toward her. And so with that, here is the continuation of Confessions of a 21^st Century Teacher.

“Yes. I know I’m rambling, but I just need to say it. I just need to say it because I can’t say it here because I don’t know who will go back and say something to the principal. But what I’m saying is this: at the end of the day if you have kids…” She breathed deeply to collect her thoughts, then explained, “Okay you know in third grade you have kids who should be around L, M, N, O, that’s where they should be. I have kids in my class who really truthfully and honestly are reading at a Level D. They are no place close to an L or an M. Then I have kids that are reading on Level R—maybe four of them. And then I have a good chunk of them that are at an L…like bordering third grade reading level. How am I doing all of these other things?”

“How?” Now she escalated to a soft yell—the whisper yelling you do when you don’t want to be heard.

“And this is not exclusive to me. There are other classes that have this too. So how? How are they doing all these other activities and these skills?” Ms. 21^st Century Teacher leaned in toward me, clenched her hands and  raised her shoulders as she heightened her intensity. “They can’t really grasp a third grade sentence, but you’re doing all of this stuff with them? She took a deep breath then exhaled. “No you’re not. You’re lying!”

As if in mid-thought she calmly asserted, “Because you really have to spend time breaking s@#t down and getting them to understand the fundamentals. And my top group? I take them to the next level with it.”

She began imitating herself as if she were processing with her students saying, “Okay now you know how to answer a question and you do it in a very exquisite manner. Now I want you to start quoting where you get your information from and I want you to say ‘In the text…my evidence in shown in the text in paragraph 2, sentence 1.’ That’s where I’m taking my upper level group. My middle group? I have to get you to answer the question properly. My lower level group? I just got to get you to answer it. I can’t [ask you yet to] restate the question, answer, and give me a supporting detail. I’m just getting you to answer it. Just to find the answer. Then later on I’m going to start moving you to that next level.

She returned to the boasts of her colleagues. “These other teachers, they’re lying. They’re lying. They’re not doing all of that.”

“And I’m looking around and they are always posting s@#t–putting up, putting up, putting up.” At this point she began imitating a frantic teacher putting up student work around the room.

And then she remembered. “Plus you know what? Every time a student does work, we have a thing where you…okay say the student does a drawing and you put up the drawing, you have to have a rubric for the drawing. “You’ve gotta have a task, the rubric, the standard and then every single drawing has to have a Post-it—she leaned forward to enumerate with her fingers for emphasis.—what they did right, what’s the next step. That’s art.”

She listed even more with her fingers, “Social studies, math, science, ELA. Your’re talking about 5 subjects and 30 kids—I’m lucky I got 28 this year—but 30 kids in your class and every single thing they do you have to do that. Every single thing they’re doing?”

She rested in her chair and exhaled. “These teachers are in here lying.”

“Can you imagine that?” The teacher moved her hands feverishly to imitate the gesture of dispensing materials as she exclaimed, “Post-it! They just did the math. Post-it! Post-it! Okay. Post! Okay. Here’s the rubric.”

“Can you imagine that?” She continued. “Not to mention, you have the new [vendor name deleted] system—which calls you to break up into table groups, then you have the guided reading –which calls you to break up into groups and take notes on that, oh and take notes on your [vendor name deleted], then you have your RTIs—take notes on them and put them into groups, then you have your math groups—break them up and you write notes on them, then you have your RTI math groups and you take notes on them. All these groups and you take notes, plus….”

She paused then leaned in, exhaled again and continued “They’re lying. They’re not doing all of this.”

“And whoever thought ‘Wow! They don’t have enough to do. Let’s make them take notes on every single thing they are doing,’—she said sarcastically –“they’ve never been in the classroom. And what they have contributed to is a bunch of manipulative, conniving, deceitful, wretched teachers.

“I know. I went off on a tangent. I just had to release that.”

After allowing the teacher to vent, I reflected and I wondered about the instructional culture at her school as her principal views it. Then I wondered what other leaders had this teacher at their school—effective and fed up.

Vantage Point or Confessions of a 21st Century Teacher

Last week I was called by one of my son’s teachers because she felt disrespected by him. Later that evening as he and I discussed the situation, in all of his 16-year old self-focused wisdom, he could not understand how simply expressing himself was him being disrespectful. Rather than beat him down into submission with my words, I stopped, took a deep breath and silently asked myself “how can I get him to see someone else’s point of view?” And then the answer came to me.

I asked him, “Did you ever see the movie Vantage Point?” He opened his mouth to respond, became silent instead, then laughed. I asked, “Why are you laughing?” He replied, “Because I know what you are going to say.” I continued, “So do you understand your teacher’s point of view?” After a brief “lessons learned” discussion, he empathized with his teacher and indicated that he would apologize to her the next day.

Life’s experiences always prepares us for the next opportunity to learn. The next day I was reminded of Vantage Point.

In preparation for an upcoming book, I was gathering qualitative data from a teacher about her classroom practices on close reading. A few minutes into our time together, it became apparent that she needed to clear her mental space in order to be fully present with me. We agreed to 10 minutes of “clearing.” Her venting created a number of insights for me, one being, I wonder how her administrators view this scenario?

With her permission, I’m sharing a Part 1 of her “space clearing” today and Part 2 next week because I want all of us to have the opportunity to reflect on a number of points she implied. As such, I challenge you to reflect with these questions after you read:

1. Is there such an undercurrent at my school?
2. If I say no, how can I be sure?
3. If I say yes, what can I do about it?

As you read her thoughts, please note that she is an effective teacher who demonstrates consistent growth annually, and exceeds her targets. She’s skilled at engaging traditionally low performing students in critical thinking, and has the ability to excite students about learning. I note this because some of her comments are normally attributed to “excuse makers.” This teacher works until 9PM weekday evenings and on Sundays to prepare for her students. She is no excuse maker.

Now that we are clear about her work ethics, here are the confessions of a 21st century teacher.

“So we had this PD the other day and in this PD I was listening to these teachers talk about this new program we’re using.” She held up a teacher’s manual to show what the PD was about and continued. “That’s the book we’re using. So it’s a nice simple book, right? It doesn’t seem like too much; however, there’s another book we have to use with this.”

“With that being said, I’m listening to these teachers in the PD because they went to the workshop to get the,” using air quotes and a hint of sarcasm, “training.”  “And they’re like,

Oh, I was “trained,” again she emphasized with air quotes.

“You weren’t trained. What you got was an overview. You weren’t really “trained” [air quotes again] because I don’t know how people can go to a one-day training and now ‘I know it.’ No. You have an overview. See and that speaks volumes about these products that people are selling and pushing because” and she leaned in toward me, “if you spent X amount of time developing this  product how can a person can come into your PD and do it in a couple of hours?” She fanned the idea off and leaned back in her chair with her head turned to the side.

Then looking directly at me she exclaimed, “It’s a scam. It’s a scam!”

The teacher took a breath to continue. “Okay so with all of that being said, with [vendor product name deleted] like many other products they give you so much material  and that’s great. But these teachers were talking about,” as she transformed her voice to sound nasally to imitate her colleagues while enumerating on her fingers,

I um…well first I scaffold my lesson, then I give a question, and then the question I put it in a separate time of the day and later after lunch we come back to the question because that means we’re still talking about the book and then I give them a question at home. So that means even when they’re home, they’re still talking about the book. They’re very…”

Ms. 21st Century Teacher returned to her own voice saying, “I’m listening to all this talk and I’m like they are not doing all of this. There is no way in the world they are doing all of this with their kids. They are lying. Then I looked around and realized that both APs (Assistant Principals) were in the room.”  

She looked up seemingly re-enacting her Aha-moment for me and said, “Yep! They are putting on a show. Okay. Yeah. I get it.”

“Because I’m like at the end of the day, when do we do all this?  You pull them out of this group, and you pull them out for that group.” She characterized the pulling of students with her hands as she moved her body from side to side. “And you pull them out of this group and make them do this, and then you pull them out of that group and make them do that and you do this activity and you do that activity and then you do this activity and then you do this group activity.” She opened her arms as if to emphasize a whole group activity. “Then you do—you’re doing this every single day? Every single day? And when they [the students] do that state exam, they [the leaders] want to know can I ask your kid a question and that kid  responds to the question in a complete set of sentences? If not, you wasted time with all these other THINGS” [things emphasized].

“In my head I’m thinking why are they…but then another teacher and I were both like, ‘Im not doing all that’,” she remarked as she shook her head and slightly glided her eyes toward the top right-hand corner of her eyelids. “No one cares. No one cares when you are doing all these great things.”

“I’m just venting right now,” Ms. 21st Century Teacher sighed.

But as quickly as she took her break to indicate she was venting, she rolled out the accompanying thought with as much exacerbation as before her sigh asserting, “And the evidence and the proof of that is…” now imitating an administrator on her classroom intercom, …”Ms. 21^st Century Teacher will you please come into my office?”

“Beep,” the teacher imitated the intercom in her room. “Okay, I’m coming to your office.” She replied in a pollyannaish manner.

She shuffled then gathered a host of loose papers on a student’s desk where she sat and began to point to them while looking over her glasses as if she were the administrator and I was the teacher. She continued with her issue. “And then when you get to the office,” again imitating an administrator she declared, “Your scores for your students on the state exam are…” Ms. 21st Century Teacher paused as if to imply that the scores were all that was cared about. Then she tossed the papers to the side.

“No one talks to you about what you have them doing. No one talks to you about whether or not you’re doing a think-pair-share. No one talks to me about the fact that I have them using creative transitional words, that I have them learning how to do a grabber sentence, that I’m putting them…um…having them do a 5 paragraph essay in the third grade. Nobody cares about that.” She leaned over to the side, slammed her hands on the desk, grabbed the pieces of paper she previously threw down and asked while being back in character as the administrator, “What’s your state exam results?”  

The papers landed once more on the desk scattered by her frustration.

The venting progressed. “Nobody cares what I’m doing with my kids in Social Studies, nobody cares that my kids can say ‘I know who the prime minister of England is. I know how many countries there are in Africa. I know Africa is the second largest…’ They don’t care that the kids have this new body of knowledge. No one cares!”

“I’m saying all of that to say this. When you have teachers saying all of this bull@*%# about ‘I do this with my students…’ [breath.] Uhg!”

She paused as if she were complete. Then she continued.

Close Reading In the Parking Lot

Parking lot questions–those stuck on a Post-it® off to the side of the room–are just as important as those answered during a session, but unfortunately, time does not always allow for them to be addressed. Because of this, my promise to educators I serve through facilitating a professional learning session is to extend my personal one-on-one time with them by answering their questions that weren’t addressed during our face-to-face time together. That was the case recently in one of my Designing for Close Reading sessions. As I reflected on their questions, it occurred to me that many of the principals and teachers I have served tend to ask the same questions or variations of the same. That led me to think, “perhaps there are more educators with the same questions,” and so, this week I’m sharing the most recent Q&A  I created for administrators and teachers below.

If you’d like a pdf of this document, just let me know. If you’d like to schedule a session for your administrators and/or teachers, let me know that also. I have a few slots open for November and January, but they are filling up quickly, so contact me now.

Eduvation: What is it and How to Make it Happen

“Eduvation” is a word I created to shorten and blend the use of the words innovation in education. (Perhaps the term already exists elsewhere, but I haven’t heard it used yet.)

Last week I witnessed a debate that stretched for 3 days at an 8-day Baldrige event. The topic? The meaning of innovation. The challenge was that the term was suffering from multiple interpretations. Given that we were at a Baldrige Performance Excellence event, the group decided to review the Baldrige definition of innovation in order to ensure a common understanding of the common term.

According to the Education Criteria for Performance Excellence (Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, 2013), the term innovation refers to,

Making meaningful change to improve programs, services, processes or organizational effectiveness and to create a new value for students and stakeholders. Innovation involves the adoption of an idea, process, technology, program, service or business model that is either new or new to its proposed application. The outcome of innovation is a discontinuous or break through change in results, programs or services.

Successful organizational innovation is a multistep process that involves development and knowledge sharing, a decision to implement, implementation, evaluation and learning. Although innovation is often associated with technological innovation, it is applicable to all key organizational processes that would benefit from change, whether through breakthrough improvement or a change in approach or outputs. It could include fundamental changes in organizational structure to more effectively accomplish the organization’s work.

Recently, I read a few articles about eduvation–innovation in education–and they all seemed to focus on either new technology or new models. I wondered, “were those the only key levers to collectively move us forward in education?” My answer was no.

The Baldrige definition provided six levers with one of them being processes. Furthermore, the definition states, “Although innovation is often associated with technological innovation, it is applicable to all key organizational processes that would benefit from change.” That being said, the questions for principals and teachers are, “what are all the key processes that would benefit from change, and particularly what are the key instructional and instructional leadership processes that would benefit from a change in thinking and practice?

The challenge this week is simple: engage in eduvation. The list below provides steps you can follow with your team and is followed by italicized examples.

1. Sit with your professional journal to brainstorm changes that are required (blending professional best practices to deconstruct the standards)
2. Collaborate with your peers to gather the collective thought and select the change that adds the most value (invest in The Core Deconstructed)
3. Create your roadmap (create The Core Deconstructed matrix)
4. Use technology to enhance the eduvation process (use the electronic template to later insert resources)
5. Collaborate across departments or schools (share and refine your matricies)
6. Communicate and eliminate barriers to the change (contact me for the next level and/or feedback)
7. Keep it simple (keep it simple :-))
8. Celebrate successes (share)

When you’re done, do #8 and let me know about your success!

Reference:

Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (2013). 2013 – 2014 Education criteria for performance excellence.

WARNING: Poor Lesson Plans Mean Students Learn Poorly

What’s your process for designing learning experiences? Just today I engaged in dialogue with a group of senior leaders about  processes. Their responses were filled with great output examples, but no processes. The discussion mirrored conversations I had last week about the process of lesson design. Given today’s experiences and given the fact that we are still at the start of the school year, I chose to share a post that was written almost one year ago.

Lesson design is a process. Edward Deming once stated, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” Clear processes lead to clear outcomes. When the process is unclear, then so goes the learning. Therefore, please note (and read)  the following –  WARNING: Poor Lesson Plans Mean Students Learn Poorly.

Common Confusion: How to Avoid it and Organize for Student Success

Language precision.

This is something that  good educators like yourself require from students because you know it is essential to your students’ success. This is the case in all disciplines. Without precise use of language you know that students may miscommunicate meaning, cause unintended confusion or access inadequate information. Have you seen this happen before? I’ve seen this happen, but not only with students. I have also seen this with well-intended educators.

The first notable time I recognized  the need for using precise language among educators was in a professional learning session with middle and high school teachers. They debated with me at length–conversations and emails spanning a week to be exact–about the meaning of a cognitive process. As math teachers, they argued that evaluate meant to solve a problem and that evaluate held a different meaning for math than for other subjects.  I wrote about it in 2012. You can see my response here.

The second notable time the need for using language precisely was highlighted was during a classroom visit. I noticed the objective read, “Students will analyze their answers and correct their errors,” but after a few minutes of observing students I saw that they were simply redoing the problems that were done incorrectly on a test. There was no process of breaking down the whole into its constituent parts to determine the interconnections and surface their faulty reasoning. Students simply redid their wrong answers.

The third notable time I recognized the need for precise language was during a professional learning session where a school administrator asked, “Doc, what’s the difference between analyze and evaluate?”

It became strikingly apparent that while we may use common terms, we do not hold common understandings and that our imprecision with how we define cognitive processes can interfere with our students’ learning. This sentiment was echoed recently by an educator during a Core Deconstructed workshop. After an activity that focused on gaining common understanding of common terms she reflected saying,

This was good for me because I see how we use these terms all of the time, but we ourselves had difficulty clarifying them. It made me think that if we have difficulty clarifying them, then somehow it’s impacting the way we teach and impacting what our students learn […] and this is particularly important for the population of students I serve. I have to be precise with my language.

Given her statement I ask, when you are collaborating with your peers, providing support to your colleagues or leading your staff particularly when the topic of transformation and new standards are involved, are you sure there is no miscommunication due to language imprecision? If your answer is an emphatic, “Yes! I am sure!” then great. But if you are not absolutely sure, here are three steps you can take to be sure.

1. Agree to agree on gaining common understanding while maintaining individual creativity
2. Agree to access The Core Deconstructed® as a tool for fostering common understanding and individual creativity
3. Agree to collaborate on working through the process together to ensure common understanding and individual creativity

Whether you use this process or another, one thing remains true: the use of imprecise language when organizing for student success will most certainly lead to miscommunicated meaning, unintended confusion and inadequate information.

The Common Core: Is Your Change Real?

“Can’t we just make all of our decisions based on our experiences?”

This was the question of an educational leader during a professional learning session on transformation. She was a huge advocate for data-driven decision making in her school system; however, I observed that the conflict between the leader’s espoused theory and theory in use was unconsciously demonstrated by the school leaders she supervised. While all of the school leaders I observed posted signs in the offices about data-driven decision making and their conversations were laden with the term, when they shared their decisions, they made statements such as “I think,” “I feel,” “I saw” or “I heard.”

To be clear,

When someone is asked how he would behave under certain circumstances, the answer he usually gives is his espoused theory of action for that situation. This is the theory of action to which he gives allegiance, and which, upon request, he communicates to others. However the theory that actually governs his actions is his theory-in-use, which may or may not be compatible with his espoused theory; furthermore, the individual may or may not be aware of incompatibility of the two theories (Argyris and Schön, 1974, pp. 6-7.)

With the Common Core upon us, it is critical that we maintain a reflective stance on a daily basis to ensure that our communicated theory is the actual one in use. We want to ensure that authentic transformation for student achievement occurs because of our data-based actions.

Last week I shared a tool that school leaders could use to self-assess their leadership team’s actual practices as they relate to authentic transformation. As you progress throughout the school year, you’ll want to ensure regular reflective practice, and so, today I present a new tool with a new challenge.

Consider this 7-day challenge:

1. Document the percentage of your student-achievement related decisions that you believe are data-driven
2. Reflect daily for 7 days on 3 decisions per day that had an impact on student achievement
3. Write if the decisions were based on actual and tangible data, an idea you had, your feeling, something you saw elsewhere, or something you heard
4. If the decision was driven by data, note the specific data
5. If the decision was based on any of the other factors, note which factor
6. Determine the percentage of decisions that were made in each category in #3 at the close of the week
7. Document the percentage of your student-achievemnt related decisions that were actually driven by tangible data

After completing the 7 steps, answer this: are you at, above or below your predicted percentage? If at, perfect! Keep moving forward. If above, even better! Keep challenging yourself. But if you were below, then it may be time to adjust your practices to move toward authentic transformation.

Transformation toward the 21st century school requires that we do what we say and we accomplish this by challenging our own thinking. So consider this: challenge your own thinking.

Reference:

Argyris, C. & Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Common Core: Seeing the Big Picture

Overall, I found that this system makes it easier for teachers to see the big picture and build towards the Practitioner/Expert level over the course of a few lessons rather than overwhelm students or unintentionally instill a sense of defeat in them if an objective were not met in by the end of a class.

Since my deconstruction matrix  is now a soft copy, over time I can link websites with enrichment or re-teaching exercises, online games, web-based assessments or supplemental texts to each cell in the matrix. This will enhance my ability to more effectively target instruction in my diverse classes.

The beauty of this system is that each teacher can tailor the results of the process to their own teaching style and the needs of their individual students.

These are the words of a middle school ELA/Literacy teacher who engaged in The Core Deconstructed® (TCD) process last school year. She shared deeper insights and tips that you can download and read here. She also shared her reflection below.

The Core Deconstructed® Practice Journals became available to all on Friday. The journal is loaded with grade level examples, sample lessons and other resources to help you master teaching the standards. Use the TCD® Practice Journal to analyze standards and determine how to accomplish the following: create pre- and post-unit assessments; write lessons that allow for teaching multiple standards at a time; design tiered lessons for special needs, struggling and advanced learners; pinpoint exactly where students are struggling in the process of mastering a standard and much more.

Now’s the time for you to deconstruct! See the big picture for the entire school year and experience the success that Heather did.