I didn't lose control ... I never had it

The older I get, the more I realize that we, as educators, cannot control students.
The only person I can control is myself. 

But in recent work with the Danielson Framework for Teaching, I find that this inability to control students is not just a realization that is supposed to dawn on us midway through our careers.  It's good teaching from Day 1.  And I could kick myself, because my first teaching position (as a high school choral director in Iowa) used the Danielson model.  We had switched from Madeline (raise your hand if you can still say "anticipatory set") to Charlotte in the waning days of the 20th century, but there wasn't much PD around the switch.  Some things never change ...

Let's think about Domain 2, called "The Classroom Environment".
The questions and reflections that follow are my own, borne out of years of study and practice using the Danielson model, first as a teacher, and now as an administrator.  The explanations are grossly simplified for the purpose of this blog post.

Component 2a - Creating an Environment of Respect and Rapport
This is all about the quality of the interactions.  Interactions between teacher and students, as well as between students themselves.  It's all about relationships.  "No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship" (Comer).
Question for 2a:  To what extent do the interactions in my room impact the learning that happens?
Interactions that exist for classroom compliance are level 2.
Interactions that are respectful are level 3.
Interactions that are caring are level 4.

Component 2b - Establishing a Culture for Learning
This is all about the space a teacher creates for cognitive energy.  A wise friend once told me "The one who does the thinking does the learning."  A busy cognitive environment means students are visibly demonstrating their thinking.  It's brainy chaos.
Question for 2b:  Who owns the learning in my classroom?
If learning equates to task completion, that is level 2.
If learning equates to genuine mental effort, that is level 3.
If learning equates to ownership of learning (where students take charge), that is level 4.

The next two components both use the word "manage".
Managers (factory managers or service managers) have:
• a plan and a vision ahead of time about how something is supposed to run,
• the ability to recognize quickly when something is out of alignment,
• a predisposition towards action when something is not running correctly,
• an understanding that a smooth running operation is NOT their ultimate goal, but rather
• an understanding that a great product or great service is their ultimate goal.

Component 2c - Managing Instructional Procedures
The procedures in a classroom are endless.  A colleague of mine was incredible at developing procedures.  The year I had 90 eighth graders in choir, guess what I did?  I went to her for feedback.  We teach procedures so that they fade and disappear into the background, allowing learning to take center stage.
Question for 2c:  To what extent do the procedures in my room help (or hinder) the learning?
Inconsistent procedures are level 2.
Smooth procedures that lead to learning are level 3.
Student-led procedures are the hallmark of level 4, so that you only notice the learning.

Component 2d - Managing Student Behavior
This component is about having a standard of behavior in your room and effective responses.  That means we are clear and consistent in what we look for in student behavior and that students respond when we intervene.
Question for 2d:  Do I have a standard of behavior and do students respond effectively?
If the teacher has a standard, but the results are inconsistent, it is level 2.
If the teacher has a standard, and the results are consistent, it is level 3.
If the students monitor and reinforce each other, especially in group work, it is level 4.

As a teacher, I can't control student interactions (2a).
But I can set the tone for them and respond when they don't meet my expectations.
As a teacher, I can't make students think (2b).
But I can create a space for them to engage cognitively.
As a teacher, I can't make students organized and productive (2c).
But I can establish procedures that maximize learning time.
As a teacher, I can't make students behave (2d).
But I can create a standard of behavior and respond when I see it neglected.

So I may not be able to control students, but I can control the amount of learning that is possible in a classroom and create the conditions for learning.

Two Contrasting Articles

Educational policy doesn't get much play in the media lately, but two articles in Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel caught my attention.

The first, an article that claims that the drop in suspension rates is to blame for a perceived drop in classroom safety.
The second, an article about the promises of character education in schools.

I offer two pieces of advice:
• Don't confuse correlation with causation
• A rising tide lifts all boats

The first article, about suspension rates, claims that "the increasing hesitancy of schools to utilize discipline is having a negative effect on the learning environment" and "the rapid drop in suspension rates has also raised safety concerns".  The article blames the drop in suspension rates on political structures.  Correlation is not causation.

This take on suspension rates ignores the idea that hardworking educators are finding new and better ways to build relationships and communicate with students and families on an ongoing basis.  Ideas such as culturally-responsive teaching, trauma-informed teaching, and equity have found center stage.  Does that mean we don't deal appropriately with extreme misbehavior when we see it?  Absolutely not.  But it also means we care at least as much about the antecedent as we do the behavior and the consequence.

The second article is about the need for character education in all schools.  My favorite line:
"Drilling the multiplication tables will not help lonely, desperate children or develop a world-class workforce.  What we need to do is encourage character where it exists and grow it where it is lacking".  Educators work hard to create a common language about academic outcomes.  We fall flat when trying to speak a common vocabulary about the character outcomes we expect.  But it's not impossible.  A rising tide lifts all boats!  Our efforts at character education proactively benefit every student.

We must ask ourselves:  Do we face a "character gap"?  And if so, how does it relate to the "achievement gap"?  These have become color-blind, poverty-blind, ability-blind questions.
Discipline?  Yes.  Character?  Yes.  Achievement?  Yes.
Which of those do you think is the starting point for long-term student success?

The Challenge of Change

This past week, I spent a lot of time in conversations about change.

Wednesday - a staff meeting about report cards and complex change.

Wednesday - two meetings to try and get our PTO off the ground.

Thursday - RtI meetings focused on changing the way we use data to guide interventions.

Thursday night - panel presentation on Personalizing/Project Based Learning.

Friday - PD conversations about what we want learning to look like in 3 years.

And those are just the big ones in three days last week.  Really, every conversation I have seems to be a change conversation, right down to the hallway conversations with students about behavior.  

There are people who enjoy change.  But most don't like to admit it.

I'll own up to it right now.  I enjoy change.  I thrive on change.  

Here's the problem that I've realized about enjoying change, and maybe those of you who like change have realized this about yourself as well:

People who like change see themselves as optimists, 

but most other people view them as pessimists.

Why?  Because when you like change, you see possibilities everywhere, even when things are going well.  But some others will look at you and see a person who is never satisfied.

It's something I've tried to be keenly aware of as a leader.

Being aware of ourselves and our perceptions is key to working together as a team.

~~~

Speaking of change, a new iPhone just came out.  That makes me think of a great post by David Jakes.  (Mr. Jakes is a solid voice in the area for design thinking and innovation in schools, and some of his local clients include Racine and New Berlin.)  It was an innovative process that brought the iPhone to dominance.  But the money line is this:  "No one stands in line in the rain for the process." Ultimately, innovation leads to a product.  Our product is a re-imagined learning experience.  That's what we're building, and it makes all the changes worthwhile.  

Daily Innovations

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind.  They've included:
• Grade level meetings about kindness and empathy
• PBIS and RtI team training days
• Some difficult student behavior issues
• Some great Educator Effectiveness meetings
• The first home football playoff game in two decades
• An engaging PD data about data
• A visit from former-NFL player LeRoy Butler about bullying
• Our first student dance of the year

But let me talk about something completely different for a moment.
In-between other craziness right now, I am a reviewer for proposals for a high-profile national conference taking place next Summer.  40 different highly innovative workshop proposals that each required close investigation and rating.  Proposals that other educators and leaders had poured their professional careers into, waiting for coveted spots based on the reviews of people they have never met.  These educators have made innovation their life's work. 

Innovation itself is an interesting concept.  In medieval times, if you were an "innovator," it meant you were a heretic because you were adding something "new" to a concept (i.e., a religious tenet).  "Innovation" meant prison or worse for the accused.  Today, we honor innovators.  Steve Jobs & Jony Ive (Apple) ~ Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt (Google) ~ Jeff Bezos (Amazon) ~ and so many more.

Two thoughts about innovation:

1.  My favorite book about innovation is entitled Better by Atul Gawande.  Mr. Gawande is a surgeon, and the main point of his book is that everyone thinks innovation is waiting for some disruptor to step in and solve our problems.  99% of the time, that's not how it happens.  Most of the time, innovation means improving daily practice, one step at a time, until our skills are just ... better.  The book is filled with examples over the past centuries that detail how small, consistent innovations have made life better.   

2.  Once, I was asked the following question:  "What does full implementation of innovation mean to you?"  This question haunts me in a good way.  This means a school where every educator is committed to trying something new and improving practice every day because our students need us to be ... better. 

Last week, LeRoy Butler told our students to work hard for their teachers because their teachers love them, are the smartest people around, and give all this knowledge and love for free.  The good news is that our students do the same for us!  Our students help us improve our practice on a daily basis (and they give us this gift for free as well).  Every time we improve our game, they grow in achievement, which in turn begs us to up our game again.  None of us can be the same educator we were yesterday.  We have to be ... better.

My Two Favorite Questions

My previous blog post was about answers to leadership questions.  This blog post will be about questions - two of my favorite questions, actually.  But first, a digression about questions in general.

A mentor of mine always said, "The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning."
The older I get, the more I find this to be true.  The student that is talking is the person most engaged.  This is true when dealing with academic issues as well as behavior issues.  Whoever talks the most owns it.  This is why technology has evened the playing field in classrooms because everyone can be "talking" at once using various tech tools.

Questions are an engaged form of talking.
One year of teaching, I focused on student-generated questions.  To encourage and celebrate quality questions, I covered my entire chalkboard (yes, a chalkboard ...) with paper and wrote student questions on it all year long.  Students were elated to get their questions on the board, and it created an environment that celebrated inquiry.  And Danielson recognizes teachers who create classrooms where students generate the questions.

End of digression.  Now to my two favorite questions.

My daughters are very used to me asking them these two questions many nights after school.  It's become somewhat of a routine over the years:
• What questions did you ask today?
• What did your teacher do or say that was funny today?

The first question, "What questions did you ask today?" tells me if my own child is engaged in the thinking that is happening in her classroom, and by extension, if the teacher is creating an environment of inquiry.  Remember - the person asking the questions is doing the learning.  Believe me, the questions they asked when they were younger were very simple (i.e., "Can I go to the bathroom?")  Did I celebrate those questions?  Absolutely!  Then we talked about what other kinds of questions they could ask.

The second question, "What did your teacher do or say that was funny today?" gets at relationship building.  Is my chid in a environment that celebrates the the joy of learning?  I tell my kids that teachers do and say funny things constantly if they pay attention to it.  But that happens because the teacher uses his/her personality to create a purposefully engaging classroom.

Any questions?

5 Questions

I recently came across an old blog post by George Couros called "5 Questions You Should Ask Your Leader".  Being a new administrator, I know that I do not have the best answers yet, but it of course made me think about my responses.

Before offering my answers, I offer this thought:
As educators, we are ALL leaders.
Students and parents see all of us as leaders.  Over time, every educator develops a "niche" area of leadership, which could be service learning, curriculum writing, developing relationships with hard-to-reach students, content-area leadership, and so on.  I encourage you to think about your own answers to these questions as I humbly offer mine.

1.  What are some ways you connect with your school community (fostering effective relationships)?
Over the years, I've realized I'm really bad at names, but I'm really good at stories.  If I just hear a name, I have a hard time remembering it.  But if I get to hear about your life, family, and interests, I remember.  I think it's the part of me that loves to ask questions.  The upside?  It's genuine interest - I really do love the stories.  The downside?  It takes a long time to do this, especially if you are in a new role.  Making yourself present is the key.  That's actually easy to do with adults.  Trying to do that with students is more difficult - as a school leader, it seems that most of the times you see students, they are always in a hurry to get somewhere else ...

2.  What are some areas of teaching and learning that you can lead in the school (Instructional Leadership)?  Every educator eventually needs to specialize in a few things.  The art and science of education is too complicated to know it all.  After my years in the classroom and in teacher leadership, here are the areas of instructional leadership that others have helped me see in myself:
• Instructional Planning & Learning Target Theory
• Curriculum Development (UbD)
• Technology Integration
• Personalizing Learning
• Student Engagement strategies
• Feedback strategies
• Formative Assessment strategies
• Finding ways for teachers to measure their own impact
• Strategies for helping students in crisis
I purposefully avoided saying anything about content-area related leadership, preferring to focus on "Instructional Leadership" that cuts across borders.

3.  What are you hoping teaching and learning looks like in your school and how do you communicate that vision (Embodying Visionary Leadership)?  
Every school needs to come together to create its own vision of high-quality instruction.  Here is my personal vision of teaching and learning:
• A teacher's vocation is to help each student find his/her "song" and sing it proudly.
• Every student deserves at least one year's growth, every year.
• Highly engaging instructional strategies produce student efficacy and motivation that leads to achievement.
How is this communicated?  The staff, parents, and students should be co-creators of this instructional vision.  Jim Knight says keep it simple - a one page instructional vision that all can agree to and be accountable for.

4.  How do you build leadership capacity in your schools?  
First, we have to identify the talents we see in each other.  As stated earlier, we can't know or do it all in this complicated vocation we call "teaching".  Recognize and name the strengths we see in one another and then match those strengths to the needs we have as a school.  People don't want to join committees?  Maybe you have the wrong types of committees, or maybe you have too many overlapping strengths.  Give people permission to run with their strengths and see what develops.

5.  What will be your "fingerprints" on this building after you leave (creating sustainable change)?
Two "I"s of education:  Innovation and Impact.
• Innovation asks the question: "Can I do this in a better way?"
• Impact asks the question: "How do I know that what I did made a difference?"
Innovation means that we become a school that studies itself, looking for better ways to teach and reach students.  Impact means that we become educators who can look back at the end of our day and say, "Here are the ways I made a difference today and here's how I know it."  We become a school that studies itself, looking for ways to increase our impact in measurable ways.

Who Teaches Us?

My daughters are very interested in my career shift.  They were used to seeing dad as a music teacher, and we have interesting conversations at home now about dad's new work as an Assistant Principal. Two things they love:
• Playing "school" with their dolls as dad observes the teachers [Hard as they try, student engagement always seems to be quite lacking.]
• Asking them real interview questions [Q: How do you build relationships with students?  Their answer: Be nice and be funny.]

They have many questions and observations of their own about my new position.  The other night, one of them asked (in a very oversimplified way) "If teachers teach the students, and principals teach the teachers, who teaches the principal?"

After a pause, my very real answer was that the teachers teach the principal.  Yes, and ...

We must consider how each of us continues our learning journey every day.  It is more important than ever to be a "connected educator".  That doesn't mean connected to the internet - it means connected to people.  People who make us think, who motivate and inspire us, who confirm our instincts, challenge our thinking, and who push us into deeper waters.

The most important connections are the personal connections in your building.  But we all need connections to people in other buildings. To books and journals.  And more than ever, to online connections such as Twitter.

I always heard people say "I don't have time for Twitter."
Until one day I heard someone say "I don't have time NOT to be on Twitter."
That was the moment of clarity for me.  Even ten minutes a day of Twitter provided more connections, inspiration, challenges, and ideas from amazing educators than I could get anywhere else in the same amount of time.  The biggest time saver in life is having a world's worth of ideas at your fingertips.

I don't have time NOT to be connected anymore.

Make Your Own Heroes: "The Formative Five" Book Review

There are fewer and fewer positive role models for our children.  Parents are scared to let their children idolize a particular athlete, politician, actor, etc. because we've been disappointed time after time.  In the face of this reality, schools are taking ownership of teaching character.  There are at least two great reasons for this.  First, character counts in helping students succeed after they leave school. And second, character and academic achievement are positively correlated (character.org).

I just completed reading The Formative Five: Fostering Grit, Empathy, and Other Success Skills Every Student Needs by Thomas Hoerr (ASCD, 2016).  The author sums up his feelings on character education this way: "Who you are is more important that what you know" (5).  It sounds good, but that phrase runs counter to everything that American schools have been doing for the last ... well ... forever.  If schools live out the philosophy that "who students are" as people is even more important than what they learn academically, think of how it would impact everything from report cards to conferences to daily lesson plans.

Mr. Hoerr argues that there are five "success skills" that students need to continually grapple with and refine (hence the term formative five).  They are empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit.  The author describes how other character traits arise from a combination of these skills (such as courage, curiosity, or responsibility).   In discussing these five success skills, Mr. Hoerr dives into integrity vs. honesty, diversity beyond the numbers, the reason we use stereotypes, student engagement, and the role of failure.  Clearly, success skills do impact everything else we value in schools.

Some other great points to ponder from the book:
• Expanding the meaning of "whole child" from merely offering a wider curriculum to meeting the needs that allow children to become whole, actualized humans.  The Formative Five skills help a person meet the middle levels of Maslow's hierarchy - safety, love/belonging, and esteem (28-29).
• When trying to improve student's success skills, we shouldn't start by trying to change the children. We need to start by changing the culture of a school (134).  From the physical space to the relationships within it, culture is the water we swim in.  It cannot be ignored.
• "Making new mistakes" (149) is a key to moving people forward.  Cultures that make old mistakes or no mistakes at all are unhealthy.  It would be interesting to ask this question at each staff meeting: "What new mistakes did you make this week?"
• "Happiness comes from growth" (14).  Celebrate growth in students, both academically and in success skills.  Recognize students who demonstrate growth as well as achievement.

My favorite part is that each of the chapters that focuses on one of the five success skills ends with a litany of suggestions how to teach and integrate that skill into classrooms.  It would not be a big leap for a culture committee to take the ideas in the book and put together a year's worth of lessons.  The suggestions are differentiated for various age levels (including adults).

So, instead of looking for heroes outside of school to idolize, create an environment that allows students to become heroes for each other.  It is a deliberate process, but success skills can be taught, coached, and ultimately - celebrated!

Spreadsheets for Impact

John Hattie's mantra is "Know thy impact".

But how do teachers measure impact?  Is anyone teaching teachers how to measure impact?  Google Sheets (spreadsheets) has many built-in tools to analyze teacher impact.  Add a little knowledge of some simple spreadsheet formulas and any teacher can be measuring impact.

Last week, I presented a session on "Spreadsheets for Impact".  Here are the resources from that presentation.

Click here to make a copy of the spreadsheet I used in the presentation.

And here is the presentation itself, with some additional resources at the end.

Teacher Evaluation ... Training the Referees

Imagine watching this football game:

The score is tied at 0-0, even though the game is half over.
You soon realize that the reason the score is still 0-0 is because every time the offense gets close to the end zone, the quarterback throws the ball through the uprights.  The referees award 0 points and give the ball to the opposing team, which promptly does the same thing at the other end of the field. This is repeated over and over, up and down the field - until one player finally kicks the ball through the uprights out of frustration, at which point the referees award his team 3 points.
Everyone wonders: "Why didn't the referees tell us that was how to score points?"

Why in the world would we only train the referees in the rules of a game and make the players figure it out for themselves?  Makes no sense at all, right?  But that is exactly what many have done with teacher evaluation systems in recent years.

The impact of NCLB and Race to the Top funding caused states to focus on educator effectiveness in a very systematic fashion.  Many states now mandate the use of a particular framework.  In order to establish validity and reliability, administrators went through extensive training on the chosen framework and needed to pass tests to ensure inter-rater reliability. But nothing mandated that the teachers become educated on the framework, and the "trickle-down" varies on a school-by-school basis.  In the push for teacher accountability and effectiveness, we continue to train the referees and expect the score of the "game" to increase.

And we're not talking about a game here - we're talking about the real lives of children and the future of a nation!

I advocate that every teacher be trained in the same way administrators are trained, in regard to the use and understanding of teacher frameworks.  Level the playing field so that the teams on the field - the teachers - have the greatest chance of success for students.  Make sure the referees, coaches, and players share a common language for how the game is played.   Make sure the referees, coaches, and players have a common vision of how to succeed together.   Make sure everyone know what expertise looks like in order to maximize impact.

Principals must take it upon themselves to delve into teacher frameworks with staff.  Create conditions for rich discussion about what those frameworks contain.  Create cognitive dissonance in the minds of teachers who recognize current practice vs. expertise.  Create a shared language to talk about high-quality instruction.  The various teacher frameworks (Danielson, Stronge, Marzano, etc.) are rich with possibilities, and Frontier & Mielke in their new book Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter say "We've seen tremendous professional growth among teachers who have used frameworks as the starting point for a comprehensive self-assessment process" and that frameworks "clarify how [teachers] should invest their efforts" (19).

So - stop exclusively training the referees.  We need the referees and coaches to provide direction and create conditions for success.  But at some point, the players need to know the rules if everyone is going to achieve success together.

More Than Just Evaluation

Your principal walks into the room while you are teaching.
Here are some of the possibilities that go through your head while you continue to teach:
• Does she need one of the students for something?
• Does she need me for something?
• Is this just a quick 1-minute pop-in visit?
• Is this one of those 20-minute long "informal observations" that is actually formal ... because there are going to be forms involved?
• What am I supposed to be teaching right now?

I recently finished Tony Frontier & Paul Mielke's new book Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter (ASCD, 2016).  The title speaks for itself: are you developing processes that grow teacher expertise, or are you just developing processes?

The authors contend that evaluation, supervision, and reflection are three sides of a triangle that build teacher expertise.  All three are necessary if growth is your expected outcome, but pull on one side of the triangle too hard, and the entire system gets out of balance.  This is what happens when we put all our eggs in the "evaluation" basket - we end up with bitterness instead of betterment.

Frontier & Mielke clearly define their three components and offer protocols that can be implemented to improve practice in each area.  Evaluation is what you'd expect it to be - valid and reliable rating of performance - which is what teachers hopefully do with student work at the end of a term.  The problem is that most teachers (and principals?) do not know when the administrator is functioning as an "evaluator" and when he/she is functioning in a different capacity.  Was that walk-through part of an evaluation or something else?  Was that quick hallway conversation about what was seen in your room an evaluatory or a coaching conversation?  Trust is built upon transparency.

System out of balance

Supervision means the way a supervisor "creates conditions for teachers to uncover and close the gap between their current performance and the next level of performance" (72).  The authors make an analogy between evaluation and supervision this way:
   • Evaluation is the state accountability assessment
   • Supervision is the curriculum that students engage in order to do well on the state assessment
What conditions does the principal create between evaluation cycles in order that growth might occur and expertise develop?  This takes trust, feedback, and deep knowledge of the chosen teaching framework (Danielson, Stronge, Marzano, etc.) by both the supervisor and the teacher.

Reflection seems self-explanatory, but the bigger question the authors offer is this: "When everyone reflects in a different way, how do you leverage reflection for school-wide improvement?" Reflection is about creating an internal dialog that drives your own improvement, and it is perhaps the biggest motivator of continuous improvement towards expertise.

The question we must ask ourselves as educators and leaders is this:
Are we trying to measure effectiveness or are we trying to improve effectiveness (160)?
There is a time and a place for measuring effectiveness - that's what evaluation seeks to do.
But if we are trying to improve effectiveness, we need the other two sides of the triangle - supervision and reflection - to create conditions that will drive true growth.

A New View of Growing Teacher Expertise

Recently, I finished Susan Brookhart's book How to Make Decisions with Different Kinds of Student Assessment Data (ASCD, 2016).  We have so much student data coming at us as educators - it is important to remember that not all data can be treated the same, and it is not all meant for the same people to use.  

Brookhart creates four quadrants by placing assessments on a spectrum of "formative vs. summative" and "large scale vs. classroom-focused" (yellow boxes below). But all this data is meant for different people, so I have added the red boxes to represent who are the prime users of each type of assessment data (see also Stiggins & Chappuis for more on this).

But as I was reading, I couldn't help but think about how we use data from teacher evaluations. (Or rather, how we do not use data from evaluations.) What different kinds of data do we collect?  Who are the prime users of this data?  Our quadrants might look like the chart below at first.  Note that the users of the data do not change, but the yellow boxes are empty.  In essence, we are asking, "What kind of data would be most valuable to each user?"  This also leads to dangerous discussions such as "What kinds of data promote expertise?"

I'm guessing that the majority of the evidence that you collect (if you are an evalutor) or that is collected about your practice (if you are a teacher) is on the "summative" end of the spectrum.  And since many states are systematizing the collection of teacher practice and SLO data, you could make an argument that most evaluation data is in the upper-right quadrant.  Look whom that data is meant for - district leaders, boards, and state officials.  Perhaps if you have an evaluator who makes more time for it, or if you have an observation cycle where not every year is a summative year, you might get to the lower-right quadrant.  But the left side is largely empty.  What to do?  Especially if these are the areas that benefit practice and innovation.

Here is one possible view of a "balanced" system to growing teacher expertise.  I have adapted it from Brookhart's quadrants.  

In the upper-left quadrant, we have schools studying themselves using school-chosen, educator-gathered, non-judgmental, iterative data.  The principal works with teachers to answer the question "What practices do we want to see and study?"  And then someone gathers that data and reports back to the staff on a regular basis to see if it is happening and with what level of quality. What to measure?  Consider what the instructional vision for your school is.  Or consider some top-tier Hattie strategies.  

In the lower-left quadrant, we have teachers studying themselves.  This is where instructional coaching and reflection come into play.  I often wonder: some doctors are "hospitalists" who specialize at overseeing the care of a vast array of inpatients.  Principals should develop the capacity to be seen as "instructionalists".  Leaders who are experts at strategies, coaching, and spurring reflection.  Teacher reflection is perhaps the strongest of the motivators towards innovation and expertise. 

I had these thoughts while reading Brookhart's book, but the next book I am starting is Frontier & Mielke's book about redefining the process of teacher evaluation and growth.  I think there will be many more connections in it to the quadrants above.  

Getting Better at Innovation

I recently wrote four posts about innovation in education, all inspired by the book "Better" by Atul Gawande.  The bottom line is this: Innovation does not need to be a disruptive practice, but it certainly doesn't happen by accident.  Improving existing practice is innovative, even when it happens incrementally.  Here are links to the four posts I wrote.

Better (link to post 1) - A doctor writes about innovation in the medical world.  Small innovations over the years from around the world have made us the healthy society we are today.  You can replace "doctor" with "educator" throughout this book for takeaways of your own.

Educators - Innovators or Researchers? (link to post 2) - Innovators must be researchers. The focus on PLN's, SLO's, data based decision making, and the "Plan-Do-Study-Act" cycle are all ways of saying teachers must reclaim their role as researchers.

Innovation: Start with the Basics (link to post 3) - You can't innovate unless you know your impact. And as a teacher, you can't know your impact unless you have the basics of lesson design down. Leaders who leverage a common definition of "learning target" and "success criteria" create measurable clarity across a school.

Leading Innovation (link to post 4) - Innovation that isn't shared is wasted.  Sharing your innovations multiplies your impact.  Leaders must expect the sharing of innovation across a school, and educators must help each other realize their strengths.

Thanks for reading,
Chris

Leading Innovation

Last in a series about improving practice and creating a culture of innovation

The three qualities I said were necessary for fully innovative schools:
1.  Teachers claiming their roles as researchers, since research leads to innovation.
2.  Teachers knowing their impact, since professionals seek to increase their impact.

And, for this blog post:
3.  Innovation loves company: Leaders must expect transparent innovation across the school rather than supporting pockets of innovation.


At Google, employees are expected to share their passion projects.  This transparency eliminates silos and leverages the power of group-think to solve problems.  A recent article on IBM's Almaden Lab, one of the last corporate pure research labs, talks about how the researchers have switched from working in isolation to projects that co-evolve.

We need to develop schools in which teacher-researchers freely share their innovative projects with one another.  And leaders need to set the tone by sharing their own passion projects and expect the sharing of innovation across the board.  Remember: innovation does not have to be a disruptive practice, and sometimes we happen upon it by accident.  New educators may need assistance from others to discover what their passion is.  As we learned in the book Better (prior blog post), making daily practice better with consistent small innovations can be just as effective as searching for the miracle cure.

Impact is a measure of innovation.  If principals want to increase impact, we need to first ask how we are increasing innovation.

So what is YOUR innovation?  Your passion project?
Math talk ~ Personalized learning ~ Increasing feedback ~ Technology for achievement ~
Character ed ~ Building relationships with special ed students ~
Using achievement data better ~ Service learning ~ Parent relationships ~
Goal setting ~ Coaching other educators ~ ???

The list doesn't end.  Because innovation doesn't end.
Because getting better can't end.

Innovation: Start with the Basics

2nd in a series about teacher innovation

As an 18 year educator, I've been through many evaluations.  Do you know what point in every evaluation cycle I dread?
The point when you sit down with your evaluator after a formal observation and he/she asks "How do you think that lesson went?"  I always feel like I'm sitting at a car dealership negotiating a price: sound confident, but don't overdo it.

Here's the question I want evaluators to ask instead:
"What was your impact in that lesson?"
Who cares how I thought the lesson went?
What I care about is this: Do we know if meaningful student learning happened?

And this is where innovation comes into play.
You can't innovate unless you clearly know what your impact is on a lesson-by-lesson basis.
John Hattie's mantra of "Know Thy Impact" must be pervasive throughout a school in order for teachers to measure their impact, increase impact, and make their practice better.

If a teacher can't tell you what his/her impact in a lesson was, that's not a problem.
It's a starting point!  Let's help you find ways to measure your impact.
How about learning targets that are more focused? How about trying some exit tickets?
Let's do some meaningful group discussion.  Let's look at some student work.
Once you know what your impact is, the natural goal of a professional is to increase that impact.
And THAT takes innovation!

My two favorite resources on this topic are Formative Classroom Walkthroughs (Brookhart & Moss) and Leading with Focus (Mike Schmoker).  Although Formative Classroom Walkthroughs sounds like a book for principals, it is a great book for teachers to really rethink the basics of lesson design and evaluate impact.  "Learning target" has a different meaning to everyone, but if a principal can leverage a single definition of learning target and success criteria, a school can increase achievement. Remember that "teacher clarity" is a top-tier Hattie strategy.
The book Leading with Focus reminds principals that focusing on the basics of solid lesson design will always produce achievement.  But we need to get into classrooms often enough to see impact and coach impact.  No matter what other initiatives come along over the years, solid lesson design that measures daily impact will keep the ship steady.

You can't get to your destination unless you know where you are.
And you can't innovate unless you know your impact.
Sometimes innovation isn't about the latest, greatest thing.

Sometimes innovation is just about getting the basics right so we can get ... better.

Educators: Innovators or Researchers?

Do you consider yourself an innovator?
Do you consider yourself a researcher?

In my last post, I mentioned three conditions that are necessary for educators to embrace innovation:

• Educators must claim their role as researchers, because research is the foundation of innovation.
• Educators must refocus on the basics of solid lesson design, because increasing impact drives innovation.
• Leaders must expect transparent innovation from everyone, because innovation loves company.

I want to expand on all three in separate posts.  First, teachers need to recognize and honor their role as researchers.  The research cycle happens so quickly in a classroom that it often goes unnoticed, especially by the teacher him/herself. Here's what it looks like in slow motion:

Step 1 - The teacher is curious as to why a group of students did/thought _________.  
     Perhaps a group of students performed beyond expectations; or maybe a group did poorly.
     No matter what, the teacher is curious about performance and how to improve it.
     Innovation starts with curiosity.
Step 2 - The teacher gathers some background knowledge.
     The teacher talks to the students about their performance.
     The teacher talks to other teachers (including online PLC's) or does some reading.
Step 3 - The teacher creates a hypothesis.
     The teachers makes a guess as to what will improve this group's achievement.
     This is where innovation starts to come into play.
Step 4 - The teacher tries something different with the students.
     This would be called an "application".   But there is no control group, because
     it would be unethical to withhold help from a group of students that could benefit.
Step 5 - Look at the results.
     The teacher takes a step back and assesses.  Was the hypothesis valid?
     Did the application work?  Or do we need to cycle back and try something else?
Step 6 - Report the results.
     Reflect with the students on what happened.  Reflect with other teachers, coaches, and
     leaders about what happened.  Blog online.
     No matter if it worked or not - help others learn!

A professional educator goes through this cycle every day, and sometimes even "mini cycles" several times within a lesson.  Constantly listening to students, making a guess, applying a new strategy, measuring the response, over and over.

When we talk about improving practice - making practice better - it is a result of research and reflection.
This is why I believe the most important professional development that educators do is the daily interaction they have with students.  Research, reflection, and innovation become the daily norm for educators who use their classroom as a laboratory to study students. Professional development is no longer a stand-alone event; it becomes the norm.  Those half-days or whole days once a month become a time to consult the experts or do some deeper analysis with colleagues.

And it doesn't stop there:
Teachers study students.
Principals study schools.
Superintendents study districts.

So if an educator says "I'm not an innovator" I would ask, "Are you a researcher?" because one flows from the other.

   

Better

"Perfect is the enemy of good" - or - Instead of waiting for the miracle cure, what if we focused on consistent improvements in our daily practice?

This is the problem Atul Gawande presents in Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.  There are so many times in the book when you could substitute "educator" for "doctor".  Medicine, like education, is ultimately a system of human contact and human decisions, and every decision makes an impact on the life of another.  Two professions that have become increasingly standardized, filled with bureaucracy, and influenced by profits.  Yet both are still practiced at a personal level - doctor to patient - teacher to student - with traditions and knowledge handed down over centuries to make the next generation ... better.

Gawande presents stories from the world of medicine to illustrate his point that continuously improving our practice can be nearly as effective as seeking the miracle cure.  For example, the clinic that has cystic fibrosis patients living nearly as long as their peers simply by innovating and holding themselves (and their patients) to a higher standard. Or how convincing health care workers in the the mid-1800's to simply wash their hands saved scores of lives.

How many of us in education are seeking the "miracle cure" today?  Flipped classrooms, interactive whiteboards, zero tolerance policies, small class sizes, new standards, experiments in school governance, standardized testing - the list goes on and on.  Gawande's question for us would be "Why throw out everything you've learned as a profession over the years?"  Improvement lies within your own power to control, and you can improve the lives of the people under you right now instead of waiting for the miracle cure to help somebody else down the road.  Improving practice works at the strategy & self levers (Frontier & Rickabaugh) as opposed to so many other innovations that sound better to the public but don't move achievement as far.

The chapter on innovation in childbirth translates well to education.  You've heard of Apgar scores for newborns?  Virginia Apgar's 1952 innovation allowed doctors and entire hospitals to be compared, driving standardization across the nation. Previously, OB's used various techniques to aid in childbirth, such as forceps deliveries, depending on the position of the baby. But since forceps deliveries and these other techniques are difficult to teach young doctors, C-sections became the industry standard.  C-sections are easier to teach, answer nearly every complication that could arise (as opposed to the myriad of techniques OB's had to master), and are convenient to schedule. Likewise, standardized testing in education has given rise to pre-packaged curricula and pacing guides.  Students spending weeks alone on devices drilling math facts.  Students expected to all know the same thing at the same time because their age says they should.

So what is the solution?
1.  Teachers must claim their role as researchers, because curiosity and research lead to innovation.  The most important professional development teachers engage in is their daily work in the classroom.  "I wonder why this group of students thought X?"  Curiosity leads to a theory, an application ("I'll try this intervention"), gathering data to see if it worked, and then reporting the result to help others.  That's research, and teachers do it over and over every day - we need to recognize and honor it because research is the foundation of innovation.

2.  Teachers must refocus on basics of lesson design, because increasing impact is how our practice gets better.  What do I want students to learn?  How will students prove they learned it? What impact did I, as a teacher, have on this lesson?  How do I know? Teaching = effectiveness. Learning = impact.  There's a difference.  (This book by Mike Schmoker and this book by Moss & Brookhart are great resources here.)

3.  Innovation needs to be the norm in school culture.  Administrators should do more than create a culture that merely "supports" pockets of innovation.  A culture that expects transparent innovation as part of professional responsibility is what will set individual schools and systems apart.

It's easy to wait for the miracle cure - mostly because it's somebody else's job to discover it and tell you how to use it effectively.  But getting better is a self-driven process that can make an impact now!

6 Essentials for Student-Owned Learning

I think every educator wants student ownership of learning to be THE goal of teaching and learning. When you "own" something, you will protect it, take pride in it, and seek ways to increase its value. (see Frontier & Rickabaugh's "self" lever)  That's a life-long learner.  Take a look at the Danielson Framework for Teaching and note that the the difference between a proficient and distinguished teacher is the level of student-initiated learning taking place in a classroom.

And none of it happens by accident.  It all happens by design.
Here are 6 essentials for student-owned learning that I have uncovered this school year.

Norms of a 5th grade class

Essential #1 - Development of classroom norms so that everyone knows how to function within the group. 
From day one, collaboratively setting class norms tells students "You have a voice here. You have choices here. You are able to hold yourself and others to these norms. Everyone here has a role to play, and this is how we function together."  This is the first step in creating the conditions for student-owned learning.

"Wall of Great Questions"

Essential #2 - Develop a culture that values questioning.  
Students cannot initiate learning unless questions are valued. Humans are naturally inquisitive, but schools are an artificial construct designed to efficiently pass on knowledge. Don't let school drive out children's natural instinct to wonder and question. If you are a teacher, publicly celebrate quality questions.  If you are a parent, ask your child what questions he/she asks at school each day. You can tell so much about people from the questions they ask.

Essential #3 - Clear learning targets & success criteria every lesson so that students know what to learn and how to know when they've achieved it. 

Learning Target & Look For's

How is today's class different from yesterday's?  What am I learning today that I never learned before?  Please make me curious about something and tell me what I need to do to learn it well.  The research of John Hattie about teacher clarity (d=.75) and Brookhart & Moss (learning target theory) will have you rethinking lesson design to creates the conditions for student-owned learning.

Essential #4 - Teach students how to have conversations about their work.
If the only conversation about a piece of student work is between the teacher and the student, then you've just missed 25 other possible conversations students could have had about their work in your classroom. Students will talk to their peers openly and honestly about their work - The problem is they don't know how to have those conversations.  Provide prompts. Model it. Monitor it. Make time for it. Celebrate it when you see it.

Provide prompts for student conversations

Essential #5 - Publicly recognize students who are helping others along their journey.
Once your class begins to take ownership of its learning, you will see students helping each other more than ever.  While you are helping one student, ten other helpful conversations are taking place that you don't see or hear.  Find a way to acknowledge those conversations.  Ask kids "Who helped you today?  What did they do to help you?"  Celebrate respect, helpfulness, and teamwork and it will multiply.

Essential #6 - Formative feedback.  Maximize personal conversations as the main source of feedback.
We learn about what we value, but how do kids learn to value something they can't see or hold? How do you make knowledge and understanding a valuable commodity in your building? When teachers provide personal feedback, students work harder and see value in the process, the product, and the person helping them.  That is an essential component of student-owned learning.

Personalization vs. Specialization

Do you personalize learning or specialize learning?
What might be the difference?

Jerome Bruner makes reference to personalized learning in his early works, The Process of Education (1960) and Towards a Theory of Instruction (1966).  This quote struck me as especially powerful when thinking about personalized education:

"To personalize knowledge one does not simply link it to the familiar.
Rather, one makes the familiar an instance of a more general case and thereby produces awareness of it" (1966, p. 161).

Educators who think personalized learning should be tailored specifically to the interests of a student are missing the point.  To make a child's entire education about football, music, robots, or anything else is doing the opposite of what education should be.  Education should open a child's eyes to make broad connections while transmitting culture.  Letting a child focus on one small slice of life for overly extended amounts of time does not build connections.

Bruner's view of instruction moves the child into ever wider concentric circles, each one with a larger worldview.  A continual movement from specific to general.  Personalized learning uses what is familiar to aid this movement.  To me, this is the opposite of specialization, in which a student becomes more and more adept at a single skill or domain.  Specializing learning in this way (letting a child focus exclusively on one type of content) is harmful to young students in the long run.

Bruner & the Role of Teachers

In the previous two posts (here & here), I wrote about the early work and legacy of Jerome Bruner. Bruner's works calls us to take a closer look at the role and purpose of teachers.

Bruner called education a "social intervention" (22) and said that every generation needs to redefine the purpose of education for itself.  Because society is constantly re-inventing itself, so too must education continue to re-invent itself.

The natural world is the place for spontaneous, authentic learning - school is an artificial environment we have created for learning out of necessity.  But what does that mean for the role of a teacher?  Bruner says "Instruction should have an edge over 'spontaneous' learning" (44).  So the job of a teacher is to make sure instruction builds upon knowledge and skills at a faster rate than a student could on his/her own.

This is exactly the work of the Hattie study (2009).  Hattie's mantra of "Know thy impact" comes from his meta-study which compares the effect sizes of various instructional strategies on achievement.  A few strategies and policies had a reverse effect on achievement (a negative effect size), some are called "Developmental effects" (what a student would likely achieve without a teacher), "Teacher effects", and finally a zone of "Desired effects" - strategies that had an effect above the average effect size of 0.40 in the study.  This is Hattie's "hinge point".

It should not be surprising, then, that the highest ranking strategies in the Hattie study are foreseen 50 years ago in Bruner's early writings.  The words might be different now, but Bruner foresaw the strategies teachers needed to use to keep that "edge".  Here are some examples:
• Piagetian programs - Bruner was a strong believer in matching learning to Piagetian stages
• Formative Evaluation and Feedback - Bruner saw feedback as important not just for achievement in the moment, but also for connecting the student to his/her greater goals.  Calling this the teacher's "special role", Bruner says learners can usually recognize if his/her immediate efforts worked or not, but a teacher's feedback is needed to show students if their work is leading to the eventual goal (51).
• Acceleration - allowing students to move forward at their own pace, jumping ahead when possible
• Problem-solving - Curiosity is the first intrinsic motivator for learning according to Bruner.

The teacher's role is a "provisional" role in Bruner's words.  We teach to create independence from a teacher.  This means helping students discover the ability within themselves to continue to learn on their own - to transmit culture without aid.  To that end, Bruner says (96):

"For if we do nothing else, we should somehow give to children a respect for their own powers of thinking, for their power to generate good questions, to come up with interesting informed guesses."