Keeping Meaningful Conversations Alive!

1. June 2008 Kathy S. Emeigh Assist. Director of Curriculum, IU 20 610-515-6546 kemeigh@ciu20.org Keeping Meaningful Conversations Alive!

2. How do you have meaningful conversations about student achievement in your buildings?

3. Training Methods & Levels of ImpactJoyce & Showers (1980) Method: Didactic presentations of theory and concepts Level of Impact: Awareness Evidence of Impact: Participant can articulate general concept and identify problems 1 inclined to teach or lecture others too much: “a boring, didactic speaker.”

4. Training Methods & Levels of ImpactJoyce & Showers (1980) Method: Modeling/Demonstration (i.e. live, video) Level of Impact: Conceptual Understanding Evidence of Impact: Participant can articulate concepts clearly and describe appropriate actions 2

5. Training Methods & Levels of ImpactJoyce & Showers (1980) Method: Practice in protected or simulated situations with immediate feedback Level of Impact: Skill Acquisition Evidence of Impact: Participant can begin to use skills in structured or simulated situations 3

6. Training Methods & Levels of ImpactJoyce & Showers (1980) Method: Coaching & Supervision during application Level of Impact: Application of Skills Evidence of Impact: Participant can use skills flexibly in actual settings. 4

7. Results-driven Planning for Professional Learning Schmoker • What do STUDENTS need to know? • What do Teachers need to know and be able to do to ensure student success? • What professional learning will ensure educators acquire the necessary knowledge and skills?

8. Agenda for Keeping Meaningful Conversations Alive! • It’s time to ask yourself, what do you believe? • How do you communicate your goals? • What strategies/routines enhance and facilitate communication?

9. Pair - Share • "The problem is not tests per se but the failure… to be results focused and data driven. Coaches regularly adjust performance in light of ongoing results, even dramatically altering their lesson plans in light of unexpectedly poor results." Grant Wiggins • “A rapidly growing number of schools have made a momentous discovery: When teachers regularly and collaboratively review assessment data for the purpose of improving practice to reach measurable achievement goals, something magical happens.” Michael J. Schmoker

10. “Professionally skim:” • What does meaningful conversation look like? • …. • ….

11. How do we go from intuition to fruition? • Intuition - instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes) • Fruition – • 1. Realization of something desired or worked for; accomplishment: labor finally coming to fruition. • 2. Enjoyment derived from use or possession. • 3. The condition of bearing fruit.

12. How To “Build” Collaboration: • Articulate: • Communicate: • Speculate: • Cogitate: • Demonstrate:

13. “ate” Latin Suffix – to do, or act upon, to do something with

14. Where should schools begin? • Focus on a few things: 1. Measurable goals • Your energy is diffused by trying to tackle too much. • Or, if what you are trying to accomplish, or the problem you are trying to solve, is too vague, your efforts get diluted. • “A Goal” – reserve that one word for a subject area. • “This year we’re going to improve in math, from 47% of the kids reaching proficient, to 50%.” How Many Goals? Schmoker, 2001

15. Measurable Goals: Criteria for Effective Goals(Schmoker, 1999) • Measurable • Annual: reflecting an increase over the previous year of the percentage of students achieving mastery. • Focused, with occasional exceptions, on student achievement. • Linked to a year-end assessment or other standards-based means measuring established level of performance. • Written in simple, direct language that can be understood by almost any audience.

16. Where should schools begin? • Focus on a few things: • Look at your data – assessment data • Determine areas of weakness – areas of “opportunity.” • Look for patterns and trends. • Look for those high-leverage areas where kids aren’t dong so well. Schmoker, 2001

17. Where should schools begin? • Focus on a few things: • Bring the real resource, teacher expertise, to the scheme. • Collaborative structures/meetings • Begin with a simple agenda • Agendas focused on problems that the students are having. • Find those patterns and trends…. • Generate solutions to those problems • Gather and analyze those results. Schmoker, 2001

18. Strategies and Routines to promote collegial collaboration and communication: • Professional Learning Communities • School perceptions – Are you a learning organization? • Fostering healthy conversations • 30 Minute Meeting • Protocols to examine student work • PASS – Principal Alignment for Student Success

19. Isolation: The Enemy of Improvement? What are the consequences of teacher isolation in schools? Just leave me alone and let me teach!

20. Building and Fostering Collegial Conversation through the “PLE” • Professional – someone with expertise in a specialized field. • Learning – Suggest ongoing action and perpetual curiosity. • Community – a group linked by common interests.

21. In a Professional Learning Community: • All these characteristics are present • See tools to help develop a collaborative culture in your schools. • All educators create an environment that fosters mutual cooperation, emotional support, and personal growth. • All educators work together to achieve what they could not accomplish alone. www.allthingsplc.info

22. Professional Learning Teams Effective team-based learning communities – not workshops – are the very best kind of professional development! Why create them? To improve professional development by encouraging teachers to recognize and share the best of what they already know. (Schmoker, 2006)

23. Professional Learning Teams Why create them? To improve student achievement by assuring that instruction at each grade level builds on the previous year and prepares students for success in the next grade level.

24. Professional Learning Teams What would be the common purpose of a grade level, social studies Professional Learning Team? The basic structure of the professional learning team is a group that shares a common purpose. (DuFour and Eaker, 1998)

25. Professional Learning Teams Until a school has clarified what students should know and be able to do and the dispositions they should acquire as a result of schooling, its staff cannot function as a professional learning community. (DuFour and Eaker, 1998)

26. Four Focused Questions 1. What do we want students to know and be able to do? 2. How will we know when they know it? 3. What will we do if they don’t know it? 4. What can we do to extend understanding? ( DuFour and Eaker, 1998)

27. Professional Learning Teams Stop, Drop, and Jot! Finding time for collaboration: • Provide common preparation time. • Use parallel scheduling. • Adjust start and end times. • Share classes. • Use scheduled time for group activities, events, and testing. • Bank time. • Use in-service and faculty meeting time wisely. (DuFour, et.al., 2006)

28. Listen to the story of a teacher…. • What were the unwritten rules this teacher lived by? • Why did she return to those rules after a 3 year leave of absence to work in professional development role? • What recommendations could help teachers transform their practice? • Why is the isolated classroom scenario not working anymore?

29. Assessing your environment: • Shared and supportive leadership • Shared Values and Vision • Collective Learning and Application • Shared Personal Practice • Supportive Conditions and Capacities (Structures, Relationships)

30. Building Collaborative Teams • Build a community of listeners • Developing effective dialogue through the use of protocols

31. What are protocols? • Agreed upon guidelines for a conversation • Permits a focused kind of conversation to occur • Vehicles for building the skills and culture necessary for collaborative work • Actually creates a culture of trust by actually doing substantive work together www.lasw.org/protocols.html

32. Why use a protocol? • Makes is safe to ask challenging questions of each other • Makes the most of the time

33. Important note!! • The point of a protocol is not to “do” the protocol well, but to have an in-depth, insightful, conversation about teaching and learning.

34. The 30 Minute Meeting: • A protocol created for short, focused meetings aimed at achieving real, measurable results based on an agreed-upon goal. • Getting from “intuition” to “fruition”

35. Examining Student Work:Assessment Literacy • The capacity of teachers to examine student achievement data and student work. • The capacity to create/develop and implement classroom and school improvements plans designed to get better results. • The capacity to positively enter the debate and be influential in the discussions about the uses and misuses of achievement data.

36. Examining Student Work • Schools need to examine, simply and conscientiously, the number of students who can compute, calculate, analyze and compose. • Discuss the implications of where there are strengths and where there are weaknesses.

37. Examining Student Work • From there: • And this is where we fall down – • Instead of just talking…. • Adjust instruction in a way that enables more students to compute and calculate and analyze and compose

38. “PASS” – Principal Alignment for Student Success • Goals: • “They constantly remind students, staff and the community that the core purpose of the school is teaching and learning.” • Increase learning for all students • Increase purposeful and practical support for teachers and their pedagogy

39. The three surefire ways to kill your collaborative efforts • Ignore input • Use the collaborative processes in evaluation • Allow “planning time” to become a time for other things (like disseminating information that could be shared other ways)

40. …and some advice on keeping it going • Time for “do the data” is essential • Share data in multiple formats – graphs as well as charts • Illuminate your successes, especially the small ones!

41. Final Thoughts: “Collegiality among teachers, as measured by the frequency of communication, mutual support, help, etc., was a strong indicator of implementation success. Virtually every research study on the topic has found this to be the case” (Fullan, 1991, p. 132).

42. Warning: “Much of what we call teamwork or collegiality does not favor nor make explicit what should be its end: better results for children … the weaker, more common forms of collegiality ‘serve only to confirm present practice without evaluating its worth’.” (Schmoker, p. 15).

43. Professional Learning Teams Read more about Professional Learning Teams: • DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional learning communities at work: Best practices for enhancing student achievement. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD. • DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., & Many, T. (2006). Bloomington, Ind.: Solution Tree. • Langer, G., Colton, A., & Goff, L. (2003). Collaborative analysis of student work: Improving teaching and learning. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD. • Schmoker, Mike. (2006) Results now: How we can achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and learning. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD.

44. http://www.msdconline.org/Newsletters/msdc_2006-09.pdf