Instructional Rounds
Instructional Rounds in Education
by Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiaman, and Lee Teitel
Book notes compiled by Jane L. Sigford
Introduction:
· Instructional rounds are an adaptation and extension of the medical rounds model. Rounds embodies a specific set of ideas about how practitioners work together to solve common problems and improve their practice. P. 3
· Rounds sits at intersection of 3 current popular approaches to improvement of teaching and learning—walkthroughs, networks, and district improvement strategies. [Where is the data about any of these 3 making significant difference in student learning? NOTE MINE. Where are professional learning communities?? Professional development???]
· Walkthroughs have been corrupted because they have been confounded with supervising and evaluation of teacher. [Of course, because the walkthroughs are done by administrators and because of the power differential, teachers will confound walkthroughs with being evaluated. NOTE MINE]
· Networks—could be PLC, critical friends or study group. Sometimes merely a label for meetings that are dysfunctional or disconnected from instructional improvement.
· Key part of rounds connects classroom observations of the rounds model to larger context of the system’s improvement strategy.
· Process of rounds requires participants to focus on a common problem of practice that cuts across all levels of the system.[How do you do this in a large, very diverse system? QUESTION MINE} It is difficult to focus in a productive way on which problem to solve if you don’t have a strategy to start with. P. 7
· Rounds is 4 step process: identifying a problem of practice, observing, debriefing, and focusing on next level of work. [This will take highly trained observers, particularly if they are crossing job titles. Time this takes? Interrater reliability? Time to do this? Efficacy? QUESTIONS MINE}
· Some networks choose a common focus for a sustained period, like higher-order thinking skills or math, examining problems of practice and building their expertise in the focal area? [How do they do this? QUESTION MINE}
Rounds as Organizational Process
· Rounds forces multiple actors, with often quite different interests and ideas, to begin the difficult process of forming a coherent view of what constitutes powerful teaching and learning in classrooms.
· Also takes head-on the traditional norms around the privacy of teaching,. P. 8
Rounds as a Learning Process
· Accountability has put increasing pressure on school administrators to at least look as if they are actively managing instruction in their buildings.
· Virtually all the low-performing schools we work with are overwhelmed with people from multiple sectors and multiple levels of government telling them what to do. The problem is that they don’t have a process for translating that knowledge systematically into practice. Schools often don’t have internal structures, processes, and norms that are necessary to pick up the knowledge and deploy it in classrooms. P. 9
· Rounds [supposedly]puts educators in the position of having to actively construct their own knowledge of effective instructional practice and to develop, among colleagues who have to work together on school improvement, a shared understanding of what they mean by effective instruction. P. 12
· Rounds process…is about creating and modeling a specific set of ideas about how schools and systems can learn from their own practices, develop a more acute understanding of the next problem they need to solve, and take control of their own learning in ways that are more likely to lead to sustained improvement over time.
Rounds as Culture-Building process
· Requires sustained interaction around the details of instructional practice.
Rounds as a Political Process
· Presently, policy makers and critics lack much understanding of the actual knowledge and skill requirements of what they are asking educators to do. Educators are relatively powerless in this discussion because they are, as a group, active co-conspirators in the trivialization of educational expertise. School org. and culture, for the most part, do not exemplify a professional work environment as the broader society understands it. P. 12
· Educators report that the rounds work increases their acuity and sophistication around instructional issues and builds a strong set of collegial relationships with a common language and common set of concerns. [But does it improve student learning? Where is the data? Is this all self-reporting?? QUESTIONS MINE]
Some Background on Us and our networks
· Richard Elmore—launched first rounds network in Connecticut and drew the rest of the authors into the practice
· Sarah Fiaman—elementary school teacher with strong interest in developing communities of practice and experience as a consultant and prof. developer around quality instruction.
· Lee Teitel—leadership practice
· Elizabeth City—experienced teacher, principal, and consultant
· 4 networks—Connecticut Superintendents’ Network organized by Connecticut Center for School Change; Cambridge Leadership Network in 2005—30 people principals high school deans, president of teachers’ union; Ohio Leadership Collaborative—cross district—5 urban districts each with 5 person team; Iowa—Iowa Leadership Academy Superintendents’ Network built on regional superintendents’ group. [Only 4 networks? Where’s the proof that this makes a difference? Fullan has data showing that his work makes a difference in schools, not just on the team of observers. This sounds like it’s more beneficial for the team, than the students or the teachers. NOTE MINE]
Chapter 1: The Instructional Core
· Instructional Core is composed of the teacher and the student in the presence of content. P. 22.
· 7 principles guide our work with the core
- Increases in student learning occur only as a consequence of improvements in the level of content, teachers’ knowledge and skill, and student engagement p. 24 There are 3 ways to improve student learning at scale: a. increase level of knowledge and skill of teacher, b increase level and complexity of content students are asked to learn, c. change role of student in instructional process to be more active. Standards don’t change learning unless they influence the level of content that’s actually being taught. [This is why the Common Core standards will not increase learning, unless our instruction changes. NOTE MINE] Professional development matters IF it influences what teachers DO. Supervision and evaluation matter only if they change the knowledge and skill of teachers, level of work in the classroom and the level of active learning by students [Do administrators know this? QUESTION MINE] Policy and management don’t increase student learning. At best they create conditions that influence what goes on inside the instructional core. The primary work of schooling occurs inside classrooms not in the organizations and institutions that surround the classroom. Schools don’t improve through political and managerial incantation; they improve through the complex and demanding work of teaching and learning. p. 25
2. If you change any single element of the instructional core, you have to change the other two to affect student learning. Culture of American schools is very teacher-centric. We need to worry about whether students are actually interested in, actively engaged in, and able to explain how they the students think about what adults are trying to teach them. P. 26 [Isn’t it about what they are learning?? QUESTION MINE]
- If you can’t see it in the core, it’s not there.
- The task predicts performance. Have to look at what students are actually doing. They must know not only what they are expected to do but also how they are expected to do it, and what knowledge and skill they need to learn how. P. 31
5. The real accountability system is in the tasks that students are asked to do. [No, it’s what they learn—not what they are asked to do. NOTE MINE] They have spent a good deal of professional energy in building the competence of leaders in schools to observe, analyze, and affect instructional practice. P. 32 [Wouldn’t it be better to build the instructional capacity of teachers? How does the knowledge of leaders get conveyed to teachers to affect classroom practice? Rounds every year or so is not enough feedback to change instructional practice. NOTE MINE]
- We learn to do the work by doing the work, NOT by telling other people to do the work, NOT by having done the work at some time in the past, and NOT by hiring experts who can act as proxies for our knowledge about how to do the work. The genius of medial rounds model is that the profession reproduces its practice and the surrounding culture through direct, face-to-face interactions around the work. [However, medical rounds is a small specific cadre of 1st year, 2nd year, etc med. Students It is NOT a large group of multi-age group and multi-disciplinary teachers as in a school. We do not have small cohorts of teachers who can go through rounds together and learn about ONE specific “patient” . We have classrooms FULL of students all with different “presenting” problems, not one specific set of symptoms as in a hospital rounds. NOTES MINE]
- Description before analysis, analysis before prediction, prediction before evaluation. Only after we develop the disciplines of description, analysis, and prediction do we raise the issue of evaluation. P. 34 Most of the people who, by virtue of their positional authority, are evaluating teachers could not themselves do what they are asking teachers to do. Teachers know this. P. 34 They spent two years focused on training the team on descriptive/analytic phase. Goal is to deepen the work with greater focus on building a strong culture of “instructional practice.” [This is so ‘loosely coupled’. How can this have effects across the system when it is so sparse, and not at the teacher level .NOTE MINE] Schools need to do less with greater focus. They need a more powerful, coherent culture of instructional practice. [This focus is described powerfully in Mike Schmoker’s book Focus where he talks about what we know works and making sure TEACHERS know this, not a team that only observes once every two years. NOTE MINE] In order for system-wide improvement strategies to work, they have to address the absence of a focus on the instructional core in the work of people in schools and in the work of people who nominal job is to supervise and support schools. P. 37
Tips and Takeaways:
· Focus on the core
· Task predicts performance
· Accountability begins the tasks that students are asked to do. [I disagree. I think it’s what they ACTUALLY do, not what they are ASKED to do. It’s about learning, not about tasks. NOTE MINE]
Chapter 2: Theories of Action
· In rounds we focus a significant amount on getting participants to construct explicit theories of action and to assess these theories against the realities of their work.
Theory of action has 3 main requirements:
- Must being with a statement of a causal relationship between what I do—in my role as superintendent, principal, teacher, coach, etc—and what constitutes a good result in the classroom
- It must be empirically falsifiable; that is I must be able to disqualify all or parts of the theory as a useful guide to action that is based on evidence of what occurs as a consequence of my actions.
- It must be open ended; that is it must prompt me to further revise and specify the causal relationship I initially identified as I learn more about the consequences of my actions p. 41
· Begin by making inventory of all district-wide initiatives they are engaged in. Always too many. Need a theory of action that provides a through-line to the instructional core—what are the vital activities that need to happen to improve teaching and learning. p. 45
· It is not the job of a good theory of action to make sense of the clutter in an organization
· Good theories tighten up accountability relationships because theories show how people in different roles must depend on one another to get a good result. P. 45
· Table 2.1 on p. 47 provides a sample of a district-based theory of action and a school-based theory of action [They are both too complicated to be effective change agents, in my opinion because they are too similar to strategic plans which we know have not been effective in stimulating student learning based on research. NOTE MINE]
Theory of Action as a falsifiable hypothesis
· Which means that the theory may not work in all situations. Allows practitioners to take best ideas into practice, to see where they break down, and to modify them in light of experience. P. 543
Revising the Theory of Action and double-loop learning
· Double-loop learning is when you try something, it may not work as well as you wish, you modify, retry, remodify, retry, etc. Requires an open-endedness and successive discussion and revision which are important because they model knowledge and skill in practice as a collective rather than an individual good. P. 53
· They usually begin this process by having leaders construct a theory of action because if individual leaders can’t clearly describe what they are trying to accomplish, it is highly unlikely that the organizations they lead will behave coherently.