This is the third of three blogs illustrating how coaches can apply the backwards process of connecting the desired student learning production behaviors to the teacher behaviors/practices/strategies that can generate those behaviors. This post focuses on the coach working with an entire school staff. The previous blogs considered coaches working with individual teachers and PLCs, teams, and departments .

A high school leadership team which consists of the school principal, vice principals, department heads, and the instructional coach have formed school-wide goals to increase the number of students successfully completing honors and AP courses, raising student performance on ACT and building students’ abilities to successfully meet college and career challenges. They have agreed that students need to be engaged in deeper critical thinking processes. The common phrase they have shared is that the person in the classroom working the hardest learns the most. They observe that too often the teachers are working the hardest — working to guide the students through the critical tested material.

“The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.”
– Ruby Dee

The instructional coach provided the team with the following student and teacher behaviors concerning critical thinking and questioning, pulled from the Danielson Framework:

Students

• Think, reflect and test ideas against those of classmates.
• Formulate many questions, initiate topics and make unsolicited contributions.
• Ask cognitive challenging questions.
• Engage in give-and-take discussions with teachers and classmates.
• Invite comments from their classmates during discussions, ensuring that all voices are heard.

Teachers

• Ask fewer but cognitively challenging questions, often with multiple answers or approaches.
• Call on most students, even those who don’t initially volunteer.
• Work with student responses and ideas.
• Step back and facilitate student discussions.
• Provide time for students to work with questions.

The team agrees that this list is a good starting point for staff conversations, professional development, peer coaching and walk through “look fors.” The instructional coach challenges them to consider beginning with members of the leadership team peer coaching with each other around these teacher and student behaviors.

Following the team meeting, the instructional coach identifies a questioning protocol called Questions for Learning. She believes that it would provide a common vocabulary for staff and students to explore questioning in thinking, learning, and problem-solving.

At the next team meeting the instructional coach shares the diagram and explains the value of the staff developing a common vocabulary around questions. Questions for Learning is presented in three five hour online PD modules. The team agrees that they will complete the first module in September and if it is valuable, they will ask the staff to complete the first one in October. Then proceed through the other two (one each month) with the team completing each in advance of the staff.

The coach offers to co-teach with volunteering department heads for experimentation with the planning of questions and then observing students’ reactions. These co-teaching plans will provide models that can be shared with staff as their study and implementation progresses.

The coach reminds the team of the learning dip that occurs when consciously implementing a change in practice.

The uneasiness that teachers and students can experience during such a change in teaching and learning is an important component of growth. As coaching observations can document changes in teacher practice producing changes in student learning behaviors, continued effort in the practices is encouraged. The instructional coach supporting administrators and teacher leaders to coach the staff is very important. The instructional coach cannot meet whole staff needs on her own.

The September 2013 issue of Educational Leadership, titled Resilience and Learning, has several thought provoking articles. Two of them connected with the work I am doing with a few districts examining grading, motivation, and engagement.

A Conversation with Angela Lee Duckworth (pages 14-20) explores the significance of grit (earlier blog).  She states that “grit and talent either aren’t related at all or are actually inversely related”.

Duckworth describes a study of taxi drivers; Rainy days can be a goldmine for taxi drivers as everyone wants a cab and fares are plentiful. So you would think that drivers who are earning more per hour on rainy days would work more hours… but they tend to work less hours on rainy days. It appears they have a fixed amount they need to earn per day in their heads and on rainy days they get there quicker and go home early.

She suggests it’s similar with grit and talent in academics. If students are just focused on getting an A, the really talented student gets there easily and works less hard. If you are trying to maximize your outcomes, there is no ceiling. Your goal is,” How can I get the most out of my day?”.

I met a high school English teacher who has students continually improve a piece of writing across the whole school year. Each month they get their work back with her comments on the strengths and how it can be improved. In May she returns the work with a grade. If the grade is an A, which in most cases it is, she also includes the date at which it was scored an A. Many students find that they improved their work, three or four times beyond an A. Exactly what the teacher wanted to communicate. “Don’t allow a grading system to set an arbitrary limit on what you are capable of achieving.”

In the same issue of Educational Leadership, Tom Guskey (earlier blog)  provides an article titled, The Case Against Percentage Grading. He identifies a 2011 study that replicated a 1912 study illustrating the inaccuracy of much that happens with grading:

90 High school teachers –who had received nearly 20 hours of training in a writing assessment program- were asked to grade the same student paper on a 100 point scale. Among the 73 teachers who responded, scores ranged from 50- 96.

Guskey raises these concerns

•  If  60 or 65 is a passing score, a 100 point scale contains more distinct levels of failure than of passing. In affect students can receive a more finely distinguished degree of failure than of success.
• In the absence of a truly accurate measuring device, adding more gradations to the measurement scale offers an illusion of precision. (I’d suggest that few of the assessments used in school are highly accurate measuring devices.)

This statement by Guskey in the closing of the article (page 72) identifies for me what must become the work of educators in Professional Learning Communities at all levels.

“Assigning fair and meaningful grades to students will continue to challenge educators at every level. The process requires thoughtful and informed professional judgment, an abiding concern for what best serves the interest of students and their families, and careful examination of the tasks students are asked to complete and the questions they are asked to answer to demonstrate their learning.”

School leaders and instructional coaches need to be engaging teacher teams in these conversations. I often find building or districts guidelines regarding “recording grades” pushing teachers’ decisions that are not “best serving the interest of students”. Designing assessment and grading practices that promote student achievement must be a continual teacher learning process.

As this school year has gotten underway I have been working in several systems with principals and instructional coaches to prepare their plans for the professional learning of staff that is focused on increased student achievement. Sometimes this work produced a principal/ coach partnership laying out the roles that each would take, resources that might be needed from central office, and the commitments to each other.

I built my work around the three big ideas pulled from the work of DuFour for PLCs  and created questions to drive the leaders’ conversation.

#1 Results: Every teacher-team participates in an ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement, establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress.

So as the school year begins teachers should have assessment data, from the previous year or newly collected, to identify their students’ level of performance and then set end of year goals that focus instructional planning and formative assessments. I often find teachers hard at work “teaching” without goals. This creates what I would label as an acceptance of results (When the test comes this is what we’ve got).  I also find that higher achieving students are often overlooked as teachers push for the proficient standard.

Questions:

How will principal and coach work with staff to establish learning goals for students?

How will you hold staff accountable for consistent assessment (monitoring) and planning for the goals achievement?

#2 Focus on Learning: The assumption is that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn.

For me this means clearly identifying the student behaviors, actions, and experiences that are needed to gain the learning result (the element that I continually find being skipped), then deciding the teacher behaviors that will generate the student actions. With these identified, principals and coaches have clear “look fors” as they observe in classrooms.

Question:

#3 Collaboration: Educators recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.

Collegiality and teamwork rarely happen by happenstance. It is most often the hard work of leaders with purposeful design.

 Questions:

What leadership behaviors on the principal’s part are focused on increasing shared accountability among staff for student success?

What role should the coach play in building staff collegiality?

In what ways are the principal and coach modeling the vulnerability and collegiality that you want the staff to embrace?

Lastly, I provided some questions to examine how teachers would receive feedback as they worked to reach the goals for student achievement.

What should be the focus of observations that are geared to your school improvement efforts?

How might teachers be involved in observations?

When conducting coaching conversations around your school improvement efforts, what will be critical questions to pose?

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During a recent PLC observation, where I was invited to provide coaching, teachers, their instructional coach, and principal were observing a video clip of a teacher’s writing lesson. In the section they were observing, the teacher had students on the floor around her as she reviewed writing components and connected them to a recent activity the whole class had experienced.

Students responded to prompts that she provided by pairing and answering to each other. As the group discussed the observation of the clip with the teacher, she suggested that she needed to provide her students more specific instructions on expectations for paired talk. The PLC conversation concluded that this strategy was important and that it might be worth examining with the entire staff.

I shared with the PLC a resource I had recently found when attending a presentation by Brianna Gray and Jake Rosch.  Jake and Brianna are middle school teachers at ACS international School. As part of the school’s Center for Inspiring Minds, they conducted a study of student to student dialogue. Working with a project team of teachers, they researched, trained, practiced, observed, documented, and reflected on using the practice in classrooms.

They captured their experiences in an awesome ibook that’s available as a free download at www.talkinginclass.com . I recommend it highly. They provide a great review of research, their process and findings, including video interviews with teachers and students.

Approximately 50% Brianna’s and Jake’s middle school students do not have English as their first language and nearly 20% are considered beginners in English proficiency. The ibook provides a chapter on academic vocabulary and the research benefits of paired dialogue:

1) Using new words in authentic discourse is vital for lasting learning.

2)  Students must use words in slightly new ways and in different contexts to make them solidify in the brain.

3) The more students converse about a topic, the more they report feeling intelligent and more capable in their ability to talk about what they are learning.

4) Conversation builds oral language, which is a foundation for reading and writing.

 5) Students who engage in conversations with academic content build their “academic identity” and as a result have more confidence in their ability to engage with others in academic discourse.

Another resource, especially for primary teachers, is Talk Partners; A Guidance Booklet for Schools.  They cite the following benefits of paired talk:

• provides an opportunity for all children to speak and listen to each other;
• helps children to generate ideas, views and opinions safely;
• provides the opportunity for all children to voice their understanding of ideas, concepts, vocabulary and linguistic conventions;
• enables participation by children who might not be as confident in the whole class situation;
• helps in the rehearsal of words and phrases before committing them to paper or contributing to a larger audience;
• develops thinking, speaking, listening, collaborative and cooperative skills;
• ensures all children are involved in the lesson;
• encourages the involvement of boys;
• enables children to learn from each other;
• provides thinking time;
• encourages extended responses;
• develops coherent thinking;
• develops ‘process talk’ (thinking through talk);
• provides opportunities for adults to observe, listen to and assess children’s understanding.

Jake and Brianna focused on developing five core academic conversation skills that they pulled from the work of Zwiers and Crowford (2011) Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk That Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings:

Elaborate and Clarify

Students are encourage to prompt their peers with probes and active listening.

Support Ideas with Examples

Using examples to support ideas has to do with explaining concepts and ideas with text and personal experiences.

Build on or Challenge a Partner’s Idea

When building on and/or challenging others’ ideas, students do not focus on “winning” the conversation. Instead, this skill teaches students to seek to understand the message of others through inquiry, while linking their own ideas.

Paraphrase

The paraphrasing skill teaches students to understand, organize and retell what was understood in their own words. When a listener paraphrases what was said, it allows the listener to clarify the idea to accurately convey his/her message.

Synthesize Conversation Points

Synthesizing information involves taking in information, breaking it down into paraphrased chunks and putting together a thoughtful conclusion.

As I review that list I believe we need to be building the same skillset among teachers to enhance the effectiveness of PLCs.