Transcript Instructional Rounds and Walkthroughs

Instructional Rounds
and Walkthroughs
District-wide Practices for Advancing
our Vision
Learning Targets for this Presentation
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I can describe key features of the
instructional rounds process.
I can compare and contrast the features of
rounds and walkthroughs.
Based on the instructional rounds
framework, I can collaboratively develop
new protocols for district-wide
walkthroughs.
The Book
Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network
Approach to Improving Teaching and
Learning
City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel
(Harvard Press, 2009)
Based, in part, on their work with…
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Connecticut Superintendents Network
Cambridge, MA public schools
Ohio Leadership Collaborative
Iowa (state and regional levels)
Coming to Kentucky via GRREC
Inspired by the medical profession
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Based on the model of medical rounds
Good practice is highly contextualized
Education is a “profession in search of a
practice”
Practice: A Definition
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A set of protocols and processes for
observing, analyzing, discussing and
understanding instruction that can be used
to improve student learning “at scale.”
The instructional rounds process is an
example of a specific practice.
What Rounds are NOT
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Walkthroughs
PLC’s
Improvement Strategies
A Key Idea
“The idea behind instructional rounds is that
everyone involved is working on their
practice, everyone is obliged to be
knowledgeable about the common task of
instructional improvement, and everyone’s
practice should be subject to scrutiny,
critique, and improvement.”
Not walkthroughs…
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Walkthroughs presume that as the instructional
leaders, we know what we are looking for and will
monitor to see that it is there.
Little of the walkthrough process confronts us to
reflect on our own practice as instructional leaders
and to grow in our practice.
Instructional rounds are as much about the
leaders growing through the process as the
teachers they will observe.
Not PLC’s…
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PLC’s suffer from too many definitions and
purposes, though the common factor seems to be
a group of professionals who collaboratively assist
one another in the process of improving their
individual and collective practice.
Rounds, then, can be a vehicle for PLC work,
when the focus is on gathering evidence about a
commonly-identified problem of practice, with the
goal of enhancing our overall effectiveness.
Not improvement strategies…
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Rounds inform and are informed by improvement
strategies.
Rounds start with a problem of practice, one that
often emerges from some improvement strategy,
and end with ideas for making our improvement
strategies more effective.
Rounds are, then, a vehicle for improving our
strategies and making us much more reflective
about our work.
“Rounds are a special kind of walkthrough, a
special kind of network [PLC], and a special
kind of improvement strategy integrated
into one practice.”
A Picture of Rounds
A four-step process:
 Identifying a problem of practice from the
theory of action that is guiding our work.
 Observing classrooms, as individuals or in
small teams, gathering descriptive, nonevaluative evidence.
 Debriefing using the ladder of inference.
 Focusing on the next level of work.
Rounds can be understood as a(n)…
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Organizational process
Learning process
Culture-building process
Political process
Rounds as an organizational process
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School leaders rarely have a clear, common
definition of what high-quality instruction really
looks like. Rounds force us to develop common
language and common definitions.
Rounds confront the “privacy of teaching.” But
teachers are “justifiably skeptical about opening
up their classrooms to outsiders when the result is
conflicting or vague advice with little practical
value to them or their students.”
Rounds as a learning process
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Most educators are working, for better or
for worse, at, or very near, the limit of their
existing knowledge and skill.
PD alone is not an answer.
Even with good PD, we often lack the
internal structures, processes, and norms
necessary to pick up new knowledge and
deploy it in classrooms.
Rounds as a learning process, cont.
Rounds address the gap between PD and
our ability to implement the knowledge and
skills offered in PD by forcing us to look at
our underlying assumptions about
instructional improvement and identifying
and addressing the structural gaps that
prevent meaningful implementation of
various initiatives.
Rounds as a culture-building process
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Language shapes culture and rounds force
participants to develop a common language
about practice.
Rounds force us to engage in language
that focuses on the outcomes of our
behaviors.
Rounds as a political process
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Teaching is too often seen as a low-skill
profession (a perception that suits the
agendas of certain political factions and is
unfortunately reinforced sometimes by
teachers themselves).
Approaching our work as practice raises
the status and esteem of our work as
professionals.
Questions for Reflection
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What are your reactions to the notion that education
is a profession in search of a practice?
How would our work differ if we understood our
work as practice?
To what extent does our work in this district already
embody the notion of professional practice? In
what ways is our work lacking in this dimension?
What specific examples from our district’s
experience or from your own professional practice
illustrate or conflict with any of the issues noted so
far?
Some Core Assumptions (from Ch 1)
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The Instructional Core
“Task predicts performance”
The Ladder of Inference
Theories of Action (from Chapter 2)
The Instructional Core
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The “Instructional Core” is the interaction
of:
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Level of content
Teachers’ knowledge and skill
Student engagement
The Instructional Core, continued
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Only improvements in the instructional core
will actually make a large difference in
learning.
Improving one element of the core must
lead to improvement in the other two.
Task predicts performance
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The best way to get a glimpse of the
instructional core is to look at what the
students are doing, not necessarily what
the teacher is doing.
Feedback and guidance for the teacher
should focus on the tasks students
complete, with attention to how the three
dimensions of the instructional core must
be addressed.
The Ladder of Inference
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In school leadership, we are conditioned to jump
from observation immediately to evaluation.
The rounds process asks us to break this
perpetual habit by using the ladder of inference:
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Description before analysis
Analysis before prediction
Prediction before evaluation
Why use the Ladder of Inference?
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Because most of our preconceptions about
high-level practice can’t actually be
grounded in strong descriptive language.
The escalating demands of teaching
practice are such that the knowledge and
skill required to do the work is beyond both
the experience and practical knowledge of
the people charged with supervision.
Why use the Ladder of Inference?
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Creating a powerful culture of instructional
practice in this situation requires
supervisors to act is if they don’t know; in
this way, they learn what they need to
know.
After observing teaching, “the first words
out of your mouth should be a question to
which you do not know the answer.”
More on the Ladder of Inference
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Description – without commentary or
judgment, what do you see?
Analysis – getting people to work at
grouping what they see into mutually
agreed-upon categories and make
connections based on how the categories
are related to each other.
More on the Ladder of Inference
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Prediction – learning to use the evidence of
observation and analysis to make causal
arguments about what kind of student
learning we would expect to see as a
consequence of the instruction we have
observed.
Only then do we get to evaluation, which is
not framed by the question, “was this good
teaching or not?” Rather, the question is…
The ultimate question is…
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What is the next level of work in this
classroom, school, or system?
Thus, we reinforce the idea that
improvement is a clinical practice. Our job
is to make the practice better over time, not
to mete out rewards and punishments.
Questions for Reflection
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What are your reactions to the ladder of
inference?
What do you make of the assertion that the
knowledge and skill to actually do the work is
beyond the experience and skill of most school
leaders?
Is it true that we are conditioned to jump
immediately from observation to evaluation?
What is the evidence?
How would we act or think differently if we used
the ladder of inference?
Theories of Action and the Problem of
Practice
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We all have theories of action:
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“If…then” formulas that guide our thinking and
decision-making in all aspects of life.
Made up of a set of assumptions and action
strategies to accomplish a particular purpose.
They are the “story line that makes a vision and a
strategy concrete.”
An example from everyday life
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“If I brush my teeth twice a day, then I won’t
get cavities and will keep my teeth for a
long time.”
Based on certain assumptions.
Based on past experience.
Formulated using an action strategy.
Theories of Practice
Most theories of action (sometimes called
theories of practice) in the workplace are
based on a whole network of assumptions
and action strategies much more complex
than teeth-brushing.
Hidden theories of action
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Most of our theories of action are in our
subconscious until we start to intentionally name
and work with them.
Espoused theories are the theories we claim to
use to solve various problems.
Theories in use are the actual theories of action
that guide our behavior.
There is often a gap between our espoused
theories and theories in use.
Single-Loop Learning
Single-loop learning involves adapting our
action strategies based on feedback; if a
solution doesn’t work, we try a new solution
without ever questioning our core
assumptions (without making our theory of
action explicit).
Single-Loop Learning
Image © Houchens, G. W. (2008). Principal theories of practice: Mapping the cognitive structure and effects of instructional leadership
(Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisville, 2008). Dissertation Abstracts International: A, 69(10), Apr 2009.
Double-loop Learning
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Double-loop learning is single-loop learning
with the additional stage of reflection on the
process by which we gather feedback and
adapt to the consequences of our actions.
Double-loop learning involves questioning
our assumptions and trying to improve not
only our actions but how we learn from our
actions.
Double-Loop Learning
Image © Houchens, G. W. (2008). Principal theories of practice: Mapping the cognitive structure and effects of instructional leadership
(Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisville, 2008). Dissertation Abstracts International: A, 69(10), Apr 2009.
Reflective Practice
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The rounds process, and any other process using
theories of action, challenges us to engage in
double-loop learning because it is a much more
highly-refined method of reflecting on our work
(reflective practice).
In rounds, we will try to make our theories of
action about instructional leadership explicit,
concretely relating our assumptions and
strategies about our work as leaders to the work
of teachers and students in the classroom.
Criteria for using theories of action in
the instructional rounds framework
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Must begin with a statement of a causal
relationship between what I do and what
constitutes a good result in the classroom.
Must be empirically falsifiable; I must be able to
gather evidence that would either prove or
disprove that the causal relationship I assume in
the theory of action actually exists.
It must be open ended; that is, it must prompt me
to further revise and specify the causal
relationships I initially identified as I learn more
about the consequences of my actions.
A draft theory of action
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Ideally, theories of action for instructional
rounds should be collaboratively
developed. This is just an example.
Exploring the differences among our
theories of action would be very revealing.
There are multiple theories of action that
could be starting points. This is one
example, focused on learning targets.
A first attempt
“If teachers use learning targets to guide
instruction, then higher student
achievement will be the result.”
Problematic on a couple of levels…
Problems…
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Vague
Makes no reference to the student
Leaves out many things that must occur
between the “if” and the “then.”
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A common problem with theories of action,
which, if explicitly stated, suggest something like,
“If we do x, then…a miracle will happen…and
then higher student achievement will result.”
A second attempt
“If lessons are guided by clear learning targets
aligned to established content standards, and if
students and teachers use effective formative
and summative assessments of learning aligned
to those targets, then students and teachers will
have richer information to guide the teaching
and learning process and to differentiate
learning for individual student needs, and higher
student achievement will be the result.”
Reflection Activity
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Using the criteria (below), analyze the
usefulness of this theory of action for
instructional rounds:
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States a causal relationship
Can be proven or disproved with evidence
Is open-ended, leading us to further refinements
of the theory of action based on the evidence
Using the theory of action
The theory of action may be broken down
into all the assumptions that are embedded
within, and analyzed to see what questions
arise about our work as school leaders and
what is happening or not happening in our
schools that challenge the assumption or
reveal weaknesses or blind spots in our
thinking.
Assumption 1: Questions for practice
If lessons are guided by clear learning targets
aligned to established content standards…
 How do teachers know how to establish clear
learning targets aligned to established content
standards?
 What established content standards should be
used (CCD, college readiness standards, national
standards, school/district-level curricula, etc.)?
Assumption 1: More questions for
practice
If lessons are guided by clear learning targets
aligned to established content standards…
 If teachers know how to establish clear learning
targets, how will we support them in doing so and
how will we monitor and document their work?
 If teachers know how to establish clear learning
targets, do they know how to effectively use those
targets to guide lessons? What does it mean to
effectively use a learning target to guide the
lesson?
Assumption 2: Questions for practice
…and if students and teachers use effective
formative and summative assessments of
learning aligned to those targets…
 How will teachers learn effective formative and
summative assessment techniques? How will
leaders know if teachers know how to do this
and how will they support the process? What
role with students play?
 How will we know if our assessments are
aligned to our learning targets?
First things first
We could go on analyzing all the
assumptions from the theory of action and
their implications, but it makes sense to
focus on the first assumption, working our
way through the theory of action and
revising it as we go, because the questions
raised by our first assumption shapes
everything that follows.
The Problem of Practice
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The problem of practice begins to shape
what, specifically, we’ll be looking for during
the rounds.
The problem of practice emerges from the
questions raised by the assumptions
embedded in our theory of action. So, our
first assumption…
If lessons are guided by clear learning targets
aligned to established content standards…
Might imply the following problems
of practice…
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While teachers have been developing learning
targets, we haven’t really given them any training
on how to use the targets to guide lessons. Is this
training needed, or is this obvious? How would
we find out? If we need to train them, we need to
develop a strategy for doing so.
How do we as leaders support and monitor
teachers in effectively using the learning targets to
guide lessons?
A draft problem of practice
Teachers have been trained on unpacking
standards to develop student-friendly learning
targets, which should now guide their
lessons. Many teachers have posted learning
targets on their boards. However, informal
classroom walkthroughs suggest that student
work isn’t consistently guided by these learning
targets.
 What does student work tell us about the focus of
their lessons?
Criteria for useful problems of practice
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Focuses on the instructional core (the
interaction of students, teacher, and
content)
Is directly observable
Is actionable (is within the school or
district’s control and can be improved in
real time)
Criteria for useful problems of
practice, continued
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Connects to a broader strategy of
improvement
Is high-leverage (if acted on, it would make
a significant difference for student learning)
Is not too vague but also not so specific as
to constrain open-ended evidence
gathering (perhaps the most difficult criteria
of all)
Reflection Activity
Review the draft problem of practice and
analyze based on the criteria established
above.
The Rounds Protocol
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Draft a theory of action that emerges with and
from a current problem of practice.
Carefully articulate the problem of practice
based on assumptions embedded in the theory
of action.
Develop observation protocols for addressing
the theory of practice (perhaps just a guiding
question).
Gather evidence.
Meet to debrief.
The Debrief Meeting:
Using the Ladder of Inference
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Describe what was observed in nonjudgmental,
non-evaluative terms.
Analyze to group evidence into categories to
make sense of what was observed.
Predict what will be the result in student learning
based on this evidence.
Evaluate our theory of action and our current
leadership activities in light of the result.
Rounds versus Walkthroughs
Activity
Based on what you understand so far about
instructional rounds, create a t-chart, “top
hat” or other organizer to compare and
contrast instructional rounds with our
experience of walkthroughs in this district.
Unfulfilled Expectations
We’ve had conflicted assumptions about the
purpose of our walkthroughs. Are they…
 Tools to monitor what teachers are doing?
 Non-judgmental and non-evaluative tools
that inform our instructional practice?
Regardless of our intent, they have been
perceived as the former. Why?
Our implicit theory of action of
walkthroughs?
“If district leaders provide teachers with school-wide
data on what activities are observed in the
classroom, and if principals facilitate collaborative
discussions with teachers about that data, then
teachers will adjust their practices to engage in
more effective instructional behaviors, and then
ultimately obtain higher levels of student
achievement.”
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Problems we have encountered with walkthroughs may
partially reflect potential weaknesses in our theory of
action.
Problems with the walkthroughs
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A multitude of indicators.
Administrators struggled with defining what the
indicators look like in practice.
Teachers got hung up on the vagueness of our
definitions.
Teachers (and, perhaps, administrators) focused
more on getting the check mark than internalizing
what the check mark represents.
More problems with walkthroughs
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Principals were not entirely consistent in
their efforts to intentionally and thoughtfully
share walkthrough data with teachers
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Overwhelmed by multiple priorities?
Perhaps harbor their own doubts about the
validity of the process?
Lack the skills or confidence to effectively
analyze the walkthrough data with teachers?
Ideas we’ve discussed to improve
walkthroughs…
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Reduce the number of indicators
Make improvements to the instrument that
would provide more specificity in our “lookfor’s” associated with each indicator
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Antonetti’s checklist for student engagement?
These steps might address weaknesses in
our theory of practice, but…
The challenge with walkthroughs
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Walkthroughs serve a purpose – monitoring
instruction is one of Marzano’s research-based
strategies of effective school leadership,
regardless of context.
But should this monitoring work be a primary
function of the school or the district leadership
teams?
Where does leadership for learning and reflective
practice fit in – isn’t this best facilitated at the
district level?
A Proposal
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Develop district-wide walkthrough forms, with a
narrower focus and clearer indicators, to be used
by the principal and leadership team of each
school.
Establish a simple protocol for teacher-to-teacher
walkthroughs.
As a district leadership team, establish
instructional rounds as our primary method of
continuously refining our own practice.