When a teacher is planning a learning activity, what’s the movie that’s running in their mind? Are they mostly seeing what they are doing as a teacher or what their learners are doing? When teachers, like athletic and performing arts coaches, focus on the student learning actions they modify instructional moves as soon as recognizing that the needed learning behaviors are missing. Coaches can observe and build coaching conferences around student learning production behaviors.

Listen to Becca Silver’s Podcast here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.240] – Steve [Intro]
Hello and welcome to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Together, we’ll explore ways to support teacher growth, elevate your coaching practice, and boost student success. Each week, I’ll share my own insights as well as conversations with inspiring guests to help you lead with confidence. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:30.000] – Steve
Serving and Coaching with the Focus on Student Learning Production Behaviors. I was invited to join Becca Silver on the Whole Educator Podcast to explore coaching teachers with the focus on student learning production behaviors. Becca’s website shares her vision of shifting the culture of educational leadership to be more reflective, more responsive, and more people-centered. I think that focusing on student learning production behaviors supports that vision. Here’s a clip from my conversation with Becca.

[00:01:18.660] – Becca
So today, we are going to talk about student learning. Why do I keep forgetting the P? Student learning production behaviors. There we go. The thing I wanted to talk with you about was in classrooms, when we’re coaching, we walk into a classroom and we’re observing a teacher, the question is, what are we looking for? What I love that you talk about and you write blogs about it on your website, is we need to be looking at the student actions. That’s what I call student behavior, student actions. The relationship of what the teacher actions, how that’s impacting the student actions. I’d love to talk with you about that, what you call the SLPBs. I believe you… Do you have a list? You have a list of most impactful…where do your thoughts on that fall?

[00:02:17.040] – Steve
A starter list – the list came about because I was observing in a middle school that was using what they called station rotation. The teachers had most of the classrooms set up, so some kids were getting direct instruction, some kids were working independently, and other kids were working collaboratively. It jumped out at me that the students needed different learning behaviors every time they change stations, and nobody was making that clear. But to back it up one step further, what really pushed me to that is, enough working with vocational teachers and with performing arts instructors and athletic coaches, they totally get it. If you’re coaching a sport and you got 90 minutes of practice, almost all of your planning time is built around what it is the performers are going to do during practice. There’s this small piece of what do I have to do to get them to do that. When that hit me, I came to the phrase that, teachers don’t cause student achievement. Students cause student achievement. Then when I put that into a backwards planning model, it was, okay, identify what the achievement is your’re looking for. Then identify what would the learner need to do that would cause them to get that skill, and now back up.

[00:03:54.650] – Steve
And so now my planning for teachers is, how am I going to get the kids engaged in that behavior? When I saw PLCs doing what they call unpacking the standards, they would look at a standard, and the question they were asking was, how should I teach this? I came in and said, you got the wrong question there. The question is, what would kids do to learn it? Once you know what kids would do to learn it, now you’re ready to figure out what you’re going to do as a teacher.

[00:04:22.580] – Becca
I didn’t tell you this earlier, but this is actually how I was coached as a brand new teacher. I was using this model. No one I named you as the person, but I was taught in exactly this model. We would look at student data and we say, where’s a gap in data? Okay, what were the students doing to cause this gap in data? What was I doing as a teacher to cause that? And then what do I need, the foundational, do I need knowledge skills or mindsets to change my own behavior? So I love this. And so as a coach, I brought this mindset into coaching. And so I wanted to ask you, when you’re coaching teachers, so you’re in classrooms, right? And you’re observing, you’re looking at student actions and teacher actions, correct?

[00:05:09.310] – Steve
If you were to go back to the beginning of my career, I spent most of my time in the classroom watching the teacher and giving the feedback to the teacher on what I saw the teacher doing. Now, probably 90 plus % of my time is watching the students, according to what the students are doing. Now, if I think what the students are doing is going to cause students to reach the achievement, then I’m looking for what’s the teacher doing or what has the teacher done that’s causing that to happen. If what the students are doing isn’t likely to get me there, now my question is, what would the teacher change in order to get a change in what the students are doing? What I uncovered as I stepped into that was, I never have to tell the teacher what you’re doing is wrong. And very often, what you’re doing is getting a certain group of kids to do the right behavior. Now, you got other kids who aren’t doing it. The reason you need to change is because… I’ll give you a real tidy example. A teacher asked me, she said, “Steve, could you come in and observe fifth period for me?”

[00:06:23.580] – Steve
And I said, “Sure. What is it?” And she says, “I don’t know what it is, but what I do second and third period works, but not in fifth.” So I went in and I observed fifth period, and the first thing I said to her was, “You’re absolutely right. It’s not working.” And her first question was, “What should I do?” I said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I know it’s not what you’re doing in second and third.”

[00:06:50.540] – Becca
Yeah.

[00:06:52.380] – Steve
That second and third period class, your actions got the actions from the kids you needed. Fifth period, it isn’t. So now let’s start digging.

[00:07:01.980] – Becca
That’s exactly it, right. And we start with the student, well, the students are doing this. You’re in classrooms, you’re really looking mostly at what the students are doing, and somewhat of what the teacher is doing. Then you sit down and have that coaching conversation. What does that look like, sound like when you’re having the conversation about student behaviors and teacher actions?

[00:07:31.420] – Steve
A rule that I take into the post-conference is, I don’t want to tell the teacher anything she already knows. A common question I’ll ask to start off a post-conference. When you planned the lesson, there was a movie in your head of what the kids were doing. During the lesson today, when did it match the movie? When didn’t it match the movie?

[00:07:58.660] – Becca
I love that question.

[00:08:00.840] – Steve
Then what thoughts came to mind or what decisions did you make? Hopefully in the pre-conference, I’ve had the teacher tell me what that movie was going to be. Then part of my observation is helping to look for that movie. Sometimes in the pre-conference, the question I’ll ask a teacher is, “How much of today’s learning activity is one that you could plan? How much of today’s learning activity is one that you’re going to have to be making move by move by move decisions during the lesson based on what’s happening?” All of those things set me up then to be observing the student behaviors. I’m getting the teacher to tell me all the student behaviors she saw first and what she thought about them. Then I’ll start pointing out some student behaviors that I saw that she she didn’t mention. I’m pretty sure the statement from John Hattie on this is that 80% of what kids are doing in the classroom isn’t observed by the teacher. The idea that you can have a colleague or an instructional coach, a school leader in the classroom, seeing and hearing things that you aren’t seeing and hearing is extremely critical.

[00:09:26.360] – Becca
It is for all teachers of all levels.

[00:09:30.000] – Steve
Absolutely. And I say this, see, in my work, the most sophisticated teacher should be receiving the most coaching.

[00:09:40.040] – Becca
Say that again for the people in the back. That is crazy.

[00:09:44.500] – Steve
The most sophisticated teacher should be receiving the most coaching. Why? Because they are working at the most complex level. They’re trying to do 15 different things all at the same time. So the idea that they can ask a coach to watch one of them. The lesson you’re coming into is a calculus lesson, but I have this strong focus on a certain social emotional skill. And so the fact that you can come into my classroom, don’t pay any attention to anything that has to do with calculus – just record that. And matter of fact, it may come down to two kids that I’m concerned about.

[00:10:19.480] – Becca
Yeah. It’s having to look for, right? It’s what am I actually looking for? And you and I are going to talk in another episode about that. I’m so excited to talk, really focus on the pre-conference. But I want to look at… The first part of the coaching conversation is you saying, I saw these student behaviors, right? Student actions. And then there’s a next steps, right? The what are we going to do to improve? What does that look and sound like?

[00:10:48.260] – Steve
Well, so let’s describe the student behavior that you want. Now we’ll talk about what teacher behaviors are more likely to get me that student behavior. So real simple. Actually, I even I wrote about this one. Observed a teacher, and she wanted to be focused on student engagement. And she had the kids off in groups for working on a problem that she gave them. And all during that time, engagement was really good. And about the last 15 minutes of class, she stopped and she had each group report out to the the whole class, and you could see the engagement drop. So then she could describe that to me that she saw it drop. So now what are possibilities? And now I can say out loud, A thought hit my mind. I wonder what would have happened if instead of groups reporting out to the whole class, they reported out to another group, and they heard that other groups. I’m wondering what three of those groups around the room, instead of whole class, would have got you more of what you told me that you wanted. That’s where the coaching now is making the connection between the things that teacher has control.

[00:12:16.820] – Steve
You don’t have any control over the kids’ behaviors other than a behavior that you decide to take on.

[00:12:24.460] – Becca
You could influence it. Yeah.

[00:12:26.220] – Steve
Now, let’s decide what options, what choices are out there. I might start that open-ended with the teacher. Was there a spot in the lesson where you would have liked more engagement than you got?

[00:12:37.080] – Becca
Yeah.

[00:12:37.800] – Steve
You have thoughts about what you would change or modify to get there. I call that then, I’m moving into what I like to call a thinking partner. The coach is thinking out loud with the teacher, and a co-construction between their thoughts out loud turns into an idea that the teacher wants to follow through. Now, my next coaching session, I might come in totally focused on the teacher because now the teacher has told me she wants to change behavior, so she’s looking for the coach to focus on whether or not she changes that behavior. After a while, we may come back now again and now go back to looking at the kids to see whether or not her change in teacher behavior created the change she wanted in student learning production behaviors.

[00:13:23.200] – Becca
love that this is exactly how I train coaches. It’s when we are setting goals with teachers, my favorite types of goals are student action goals and student learning goals. Then when we’re in classrooms, we’re observing what are the students doing and what’s the teacher doing or not doing that might be impacting that. Then when we set action steps, what are you going to do, teacher, to change? Then we’re going back and we’re actually looking much more at the teacher and seeing, did you do it? How well did you do it? How did it impact student behaviors? It’s what I want to say to folks listening, for those folks that get real stuck in giving advice. The advice monster is loud and proud. I think humans, we naturally want to help so badly and fix things. An easy way to not get stuck in that advice pit is exactly what you’re saying. If we can write observations of student actions and share with the teacher what we saw that naturally presents an opportunity to have a conversation about how to improve that versus advice.

[00:14:33.960] – Steve
You hit the magic word, conversation. I use a model, conversation generates reflection. Reflection should generate a conscious action. Coming out of the coaching session as the teacher, I got engaged in a conversation. It led me to this reflection, and I’m making a choice now to walk out of here doing something purposeful because of it. If I create that in an ongoing cycle, that’s where continuous growth comes in.

[00:15:11.820] – Steve
Becca’s description was right on. She said, “Recording observations of student actions and sharing with the teacher what we saw naturally presents an opportunity to have a conversation to improve the outcome.” And that makes for a people-centered post-conference. You can find the entire conversation with Becca Silver with the link that’s posted at the lead-in to this podcast. Let me know if you have questions or would like to have a conversation about student learning production behaviors. As always, you can find me at barkleypd.com. Thanks for listening.

[00:16:31.260] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

Research tells us that awe increases motivation and connection to learning, enhances critical thinking and careful information processing, encourages empathy and prosocial behavior, and supports creativity. What’s the plan for teachers and students first days of school? Are you more likely to hear ‘wow” and “awe” or “ Oh, no.” Explore some possibilities.

Find Steve’s book “WOW! Adding Pizzazz to Teaching and Learning, Second Edition” here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.560] – Steve
Start the school year with awe, wonder, and curiosity. Should we be looking to generate awe, wonder, and curiosity as the school year begins? Consider these comments from the International Baccalaureate website. Awe reduces stress, increases focus, and supports both physical and emotional health. It quiets the brain’s default mode network where self-focused thought lives, helping students become more open, attentive, and collaborative. In practical terms, awe increases motivation and connection to learning, enhances critical thinking and careful information processing, encourages empathy and prosocial behavior, supports creativity, especially in problem solving. Awe helps learners move from surface knowledge to deeper understanding. Students become more curious, reflective, caring, and open-minded when they’re inspired by something bigger than themselves. That sounds to me like a pretty good payoff for investing the effort. Encountering something completely unexpected or novel can lead to awe. The element of surprise or encountering the unfamiliar can provoke a sense of wonder. Consider what students frequently find at the start of a school year or a new course of study. Are they more likely to be responding with, “Wow!” awe or more likely with, “Oh, no.” What if we saved the handbook, the syllabus, and the class rules to at least the second day?

[00:02:25.940] – Steve
I was surprised several years back when my niece was entering middle school in grade 6 to find that her year started with a three-day overnight camping trip. I quickly realized the power of starting the year with what we might call a celebration that in most schools occurs at the end of the year. This opportunity for awe experiences in the first week of school can impact relationships, expectations, and motivation across the school year. The Children’s School in Atlanta, Georgia, has a program that illustrates these opportunities for awe that can build social bonds and collaboration. At their school, fourth graders begin the year with a two-night camping trip to Black Rock Mountain State Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Students focus on developing camping and organizational skills by planning activities, developing menus, cooking meals, and washing their dishes. Lots of chances to experience awe. Before reading about awe, I called these “wow experiences.” Here’s some examples.

[00:03:41.700] – Steve [Clip]
Kids ought to head home from that first day of school with a sense of wow. Over the years, I’ve collected examples. I believe science teachers may have it the easiest. First day of school, they’re going to blow something up and all the kids are wowed. I met a high school teacher who, on the first day of school, shows up not only in costume, but in character of the lead in the novel that the kids are going to be reading. I met a great fourth-grade teacher, and she came into the school on the first day of school, she had the secretary deliver a gift-wrapped box to her classroom. It was a rather large box, a big bow on it, a letter attached. She opened it up and she read read the card out to the kids, and the card said, “This is a gift to the fourth grade students to be opened as soon as you know the volume of the box.” Then, she said to the kids, “Does anybody know what volume is?” None of the kids knew. She said, “Well, I think it’s math.” The kids are all flipping through their math books, and they find the formula, and she puts that up.

[00:04:51.120] – Steve [Clip]
Now they have to do measurement. Then when they do measurement, they found fractions. It took almost three weeks for the kids. Every day, she’d take the box and put it back up on the shelf. The next day, the kids would come in and say, “Can we do math now?” She’d bring the box back out, and the kids would work on it. Finally, there came the day that the kids had figured out the volume of the box, and they had a big celebration. They opened it up, and inside the box was a giant plastic bag filled with candy, a long string of it, just round and round and round and round. It was all tight with a big bow, and it said, written on a card on the bow, “When you can divide me evenly, you can eat me.” Here’s the best part of that story was months later, at Christmas time, the kids left a present on the teacher’s desk, all gift-wrapped. When she went to open it, the whole class yelled out, “You can’t open it until you tell us the volume of the box!” I want to encourage you at this time of the year to be thinking about, do you have a wow planned for your kids to kick off that opening day of school?

[00:05:59.260] – Steve [Clip]
I worked with a high school in New Jersey, and nearly 90% of the teachers agreed to open school with a wow activity in their classrooms on that first day. The principal reported back to me that he received phone calls from parents who couldn’t believe the way that their high school students came home from that first day of school.

[00:06:30.000] – Steve [Clip]
Part of the positive emotional impact of providing wow experiences for our learners is that they tap our positive emotions, which add to the positiveness of the overall experience. Students’ first experiences with a teacher can impact the learning days that follow. This is a payoff worth the effort.

[00:06:58.960] – Steve
Just as teachers plan for generating awe, wonder, and curiosity, instructional coaches and administrators should be doing the same thing. In my book, “Wow: Adding Pizzazz to Teaching and Learning,” I include an example of how a principal delivered a wow that generated awe for her teachers. As teachers approach the school on the first day back, they found a long red carpet on the walkway from the parking lot to the school entrance. As the staff neared the entrance, they found braided velvet rope barriers on brass poles guiding them in, reminiscent of the Academy Awards. Behind the braided rope barriers were parents and students dressed as gaudy tourist who reacted as if the teachers were celebrities. They clicked cameras like paparazzi, and they asked for photographs with screams and swoons. The principal debriefed the impact of the experience with teachers and then had the staff collaborate on designing wow moments for the opening day with students. I found another example from an administrator and how he created an awe experience for teachers. At the beginning of a staff meeting, the staff found the documentary, March of the Penguins, playing on a large screen as they poured their coffee and selected snacks.

[00:08:32.520] – Steve
When everyone was seated and watching the video, in walked two live penguins, followed by a specialist from the zoo. The video stopped, and as the penguins pranced around the room, the speaker gave a short lesson about penguins, focusing on their ability to cope with changing conditions in their environment. As the speaker’s comments ended and the penguins followed him out, the principal started his conversation with staff, focusing on the changes that they and their students would be addressing in the coming year. What a great example showing teachers the impact of how wow and awe can focus attention for listening and learning. Sometimes students wow their teacher. Remember the example of the teacher who started the year with the gift-wrapped box box and the need for students to calculate the volume? She shared with me that at the holiday party in December, she was presented a gift-wrapped box from the students. As she reached to open the bow, the students yelled out, “You need to figure the volume of the box!” The students were prepared to check her calculations. In this case, wow and awe had created community. School is certainly hard work, requiring a lot of focused attention for both students and educators.

[00:10:07.420] – Steve
Let’s generate opportunities for awe and wonder, wow, and curiosity as the year Americans, and again, as frequently as we can as the year progresses. As I quoted from that IB website, awe can reduce stress, increase focus, and support both physical physical and emotional health. There’s a payoff of people becoming more open, attentive, and collaborative, something we need for our students and for our educators. I’d love to hear your strategies for increasing awe, wonder, and curiosity. Drop me a note at barkleypd.com. Here’s wishing you an awe-filled year. Thanks for listening.

[00:11:04.640] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

 

As teachers, individually or collaboratively, design instructional plans for learning, their work should be guided by planning backwards from desired student learning outcomes. Knowing the desired learning outcome, a teacher can focus on what learning production behaviors on the students’ part will generate that outcome. Knowing the necessary learning production behaviors, a teacher can design the teaching strategies and actions to gain those behaviors.

Teachers should consider how the learning outcome goals differ for students, considering their entry level of understanding and experience prior to the start of instruction. At a minimum, a teacher likely has some students who are prepared to engage in the work necessary to produce understanding while some are lacking prerequisite skills or experiences. Some students may be advanced and will quickly master the new content and some students may already have internalized the knowledge or skills.

Based on a teacher’s experience with students or on a preassessment prior to the beginning of a unit, she might consider setting outcome goals in these categories:

• Students on level with necessary previous experiences.
• Highly proficient students who will likely master new understanding quickly.
• Below proficient students who will need scaffolded learning opportunities.
• Advanced students who may already have learned the ‘content being introduced’.
• Intensive students who will need maximum learning support to show growth but are unlikely to meet the grade level standard.

As a teacher establishes these goals it is most appropriate to create the summative assessment process that will be used to identify mastery and progress. Often curriculum materials will provide the assessment for grade level proficiency, but the teacher may need to add items to measure the growth of high proficient and advanced students and possibly some items to show the growth of intensive learners. This is a valuable time for teachers to be working collaboratively reaching consensus on indicators of desired learning outcomes.

“Identifying the end product students will complete to demonstrate mastery of the target and how teachers will assess it provide both teachers and students with a clear path toward reaching that target. It also provides the foundation for a curriculum that is guaranteed and viable for all students, no matter to which teacher the school assigns them.”

Amplify Your Impact: Coaching Collaborative Teams in PLCs at Work

EXAMPLE:

Standard – Matter and Energy in Organisms and Ecosystems (Grade 5)

Performance Expectations: Students can develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants (producers), animals (consumers), decomposers, and the environment.

 

As a starting point, the teacher(s) decide upon the assessment tasks that can be used to assess mastery of the skill at grade level proficiency for the standard and at advanced learning outcome levels. This can guide the design of tasks that will provide the teacher with a preassessment of students’ knowledge and experiences with the content of the standard. (Are students familiar with photosynthesis?) The preassessment will assist the teacher in setting differentiated outcome goals and identifying needed learning production behaviors.

What are possible learning experiences that will engage students in key learning production behaviors?

• Students working in small groups will analyze teacher created energy food chains (simple and complex) and identify the reasons for the order of items in the chain.
• Students will create an energy food chain cycle from their lunch.
• Students will view a video clip on decomposers and then research and create a list of plant and animal decomposers. Students will share examples from their list explaining why the example is a decomposer.
• Students will be provided with the daily nutritional requirements for heath and growth at their age and then identify how they gain those elements. They will then trace the flow of energy/matter prior to their consumption of the food.

What teacher actions will maximize student engagement in the critical thinking elements for learning?

• What vocabulary should be introduced? When? How?
• What questions will probe students search for connections and understanding?
• How might increased student choice increase student learning?
• How should students gain feedback on their application and solutions?
• How can the teacher assess students’ understanding throughout the process to best guide “next steps?”

As a summative evaluation is made, how will a decision be reached regarding the need to extend time on student mastery of this standard or proceed to other standards in the curriculum?  Is this a power standard? How key is it to future content mastery.

Thinking through the backwards process at the start will guide critical teacher decision-making at the important spots throughout the student learning process.