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| Issue 35: Week of February 9, 2009 |
The LEARNING-FOCUSED Connections Newsletter is a weekly link to exemplary practice and ideas that will help you as an educator to increase achievement in your classroom and school. Some weeks there will be a mix of articles in the mailer; other weeks we will follow a theme. We are all working with the same goal in mind, continuous improvement in student achievement.
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21 Classroom Walkthrough Tips
by Denise Burson
"Inconsistent implementation of exemplary strategies is a malfunction of accountability and the major obstacle to school improvement." Richard Elmore-Harvard
Principals greatly benefit when they understand research-based teaching strategies, recognize strengths in their teachers' practice, and note areas that need improvement. Walkthroughs and conferencing are primary responsibilities for instructional leaders. (Glickman)
The classroom Walkthrough process provides administrators an opportunity to collect data that reveal how LEARNING-FOCUSED is impacting classroom instruction and student learning.
Tips for Successful Walkthroughs
1. Conduct a Walkthrough meeting with the staff. This meeting sets the stage for the Walkthrough and establishes clear expectations for the staff.
2. Identify the type of data to be collected and gather data during the Walkthrough.
3. Connect the "look-fors" to establish standards. This is an important step for developing a common language for staff and for establishing a matching set of indicators around instruction and learning.
4. Make a commitment to visit at least five classrooms for five minutes every day (5 x 5's).
5. Make time for Walkthroughs. Have your mail and email sorted before you read it.
6. Place non-essential operational items second.
7. Restructure support staff procedures dealing with appropriate issues.
8. Develop options for dealing with students sent to the office for discipline.
9. Move from morning supervision to classrooms...save the office for later.
10. Use the Learning-Focused Monitoring Guide and flipchart.
11. Look for evidence that supports the Lesson Essential Question (student work on display, work students are engage in, teacher questions, student responses).
12. Schedule classroom visits -no calls, no interruptions.
13. Train the school secretary to know where you are, and to answer your calls saying you are in classrooms observing teaching and learning when you are not in the office.
14. Create a Walkthrough calendar, and share it with the staff and secretary.
15. Have the secretary remind you/interrupt when it is time to leave the office for classroom visits.
16. Meet parents' request by having the secretary set appointments/phone calls.
17. Establish with the secretary a protocol for handling parent request for appointments and parent phone calls.
18. Publish the principal's schedule to parents in the newsletter (available meeting time)
19. Observe student behaviors that impact learning.
20. Take a camera. At faculty meetings share snapshots of effective teaching and learning.
21. 50% of the time use "Ask Abouts" and follow-up questions. If teachers can discuss their lessons and activities with you for a few minutes when you see them at bus duty, lunch duty, in the hallway, when they come to your office, etc... you will gain a lot of knowledge of their understanding of the school's instructional goals and expected practices.
For more information refer to the LEARNING-FOCUSED Monitoring Suite.
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Making Connections: Science, Research, and Graphic Organizers
by Brenda Hill
As educators we know that
writing development is important for ALL students. We also know the
importance of having students use and demonstrate an understanding of the writing process.
Research (D.B. Reaves, Accountability
in Action: A Blueprint for Learning Organization) shows that writing in all disciplines
increases student achievement. It IS necessary to have a scheduled
writing time each day but, even more importantly, students should be given the opportunity to write in and about all
subjects.
Writing assignments based upon content allow teachers the flexibility to "teach"
writing in the content areas, as well as during the English language arts
block. When we do this, students begin to make connections and transfer knowledge from one
subject to another. By having students write about a topic from content
we are addressing several standards within one task/assignment. For
example, a fifth grade class in West Virginia was learning about weather in science. During this time a
"weather" writing assignment was made. Students used the
completed graphic organizers from acquisition lessons, researched information
about weather on the internet in the computer lab, and used their textbooks to
write the assigned composition. In addition, the application of the
writing process was being used for the enhancement of each student's writing
development. When the assignment was completed, English language arts, technology/media,
science, and research state standards had been taught. WOW!!! What
a great way to make connections for students!!!
Let us continue to prepare and 'grow' our students for the future by allowing
them to become more fluent readers and better writers through the use and
application of content knowledge.
| Learn more about writing assignments in our Writing Assignments and Benchmark Assessments books and flipchart.
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| How Best Practices are Best Met in Middle and High School
by Debbie Willingham
Sometimes
even those teachers who want to do the best possible job helping their students
find success have a hard time realizing exactly what that should look like.
Students are often told the expectations for success without being
told how to reach those expectations. Sometimes teachers see a new initiative
as "one more thing" to have to do without understanding how it may seamlessly
fit in with the good practices they already have in place. Best practices are
the basis of the LEARNING-FOCUSED Strategies Model, so they should not be considered
something additional, but rather what we hope always happens in the classroom. Here
are some of the best practices we know we should be using and how
LEARNING-FOCUSED helps teachers meet them.
On top of the list is, of course, standards-driven design of all lessons.
LEARNING-FOCUSED helps teachers design standards-driven lessons with the development
of K-U-D (Know-Understand-Do) Organizers, Student Learning Maps, learning units, and
lessons planned with standards as the basis for all teaching and learning.
Beginning
by addressing the standards-driven objective of a lesson to focus students is
another best practice. LEARNING-FOCUSED extends this by turning it into an
essential question that students are expected to answer by the end of the
lesson and by posting and addressing the question with students.
An
obvious, but sometimes underused, best practice is the expectation by teachers of
a high degree of rigor in every class for every student. The consistent use of
high level questions throughout lessons as distributed guided practice and
summary can help all students keep up and understand at a high level.
Expecting all students to use extending thinking skills such as constructing
support, analyzing perspectives, deductive reasoning, and error analysis,
ensures that students are expected to think at and reach a higher level of
understanding-thinking "outside the box and beyond the book".
Keeping
all students constantly engaged and ensuring that they understand how
to think about specific content is another best practice that teachers
sometimes fail to address. The consistent use of graphic organizers in all
lessons to help students organize content and skills and to analyze
information, as well as the concerted effort by teachers to make all lectures
interactive, can increase engagement and understanding by all levels of
learners.
Displaying
student work and having "walls that teach" is another best practice. When
teachers have students create products or performances in their culminating and
extending thinking assignments, they can often be displayed with their
correlation to the essential question and standards that have been
addressed. To make them even more
powerful, the process can be shown by also displaying the graphic organizers
students used to design their products.
Finally,
assessing student understanding in ways beyond a test is an important best
practice, because "show what you know" can often be more revealing than just a
pencil and paper test. LEARNING-FOCUSED assessments are product or performance-based
and may include both extending thinking and culminating assignments. The use of
quality rubrics given to students when assignments are made lays out the
expectations, and they can be used by students, teachers, and parents for
formative and summative assessment.
Best
practices are things we know good teachers should do; they just do not always
happen on a consistent basis. Incorporating the LEARNING-FOCUSED Strategies Model for
planning and implementing lessons puts all the pieces together so that teachers
know they are doing the best possible job they can to move their students
forward.
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We Want You to Make "Connections"!
Subscribers, feel free to share the information, tips and strategies
that you receive in LEARNING-FOCUSED Connections with your colleagues.
Administrators and coaches, pass them on to the teachers in your school;
teachers, share them with your teammates and leadership team. The
newsletter can be the basis for discussion in team meetings or provide
ideas for further staff development. If individuals in your
school/district do not receive LEARNING-FOCUSED Connections, encourage
them to visit our website, www.LearningFocused.com, and subscribe through the link on our homepage.
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Past Connections Articles
Past Connections articles are available through the archive tool of this newsletter. Please click here to view the resources.
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Have an Idea for a Connections Article?
If
there are questions you want answered or strategies you want to know
more about, please let us know by emailing info@LearningFocused.com.
Insert "newsletter article request" in the subject line.
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