Improving instructional practice

One of the struggles for any large school is to continually provide support and feedback to teachers and/or departments regarding instructional practice. I’m not referring to evaluations which are – at least for now – relatively infrequent and well, evaluative. I’m referring to information taken from classrooms without mention of teacher name that we can collect to provide us insight into trends we’re observing across the school or a department. When we are visited next year by NEASC or as we were five years ago by a School Accountability for Learning and Teaching (SALT) visit, teams of educators from the outside spend a few days in classrooms and provide observations and feedback regarding trends they observe. Are students engaged? Is the level of conversation rigorous? Are teachers differentiating their instruction? Do students understand what they are learning and why? But those observations are for all intents and purposes evaluative, and isolated. Recently, we’ve taken advantage of a resource provided by the RI Department of Education called the Dana Center. The Dana Center is an organization that works with schools, districts and states on the alignment of standards-based curriculum and the instruction to support those curricular goals. SKHS department chairs were provided training on how to utilize a data collection tool created by the Dana Center where an educator records what they observe over a five minutes time period. Part of the protocol is to, whenever possible, ask students what they are doing to see if the learning objective is evident to students. Observers also observe other indicators such as instructor practices (coaching, lecture, discussion, etc.), student actions (such as reading, writing, working with hands-on materials), rigor of student work (comprehension, application, synthesis) and classroom engagement (highly engaged, well managed, disengaged). Department chairs and administrators have been conducting at least ten of these visits each week. Through internal discussion and professional support from trainers, our department chairs have become comfortable with using the data collection tool. The data is aggregated each week to get a big picture sense of what is happening in classrooms. Recently, department chairs have started sharing the data, using a protocol, with their departments. The early feedback from both department chairs and teachers has been positive. By having these discussions in a non-evaluative milieu, the conversation can be more focused on instructional practice in many classrooms and less about the performance of one teacher. We expect that the continued conversations will provide all of us with a better sense of what we do well and what we need to do to provide a more vibrant and supportive learning environment for SKHS students.