Teacher to Teacher Walkthrough

Today is cold.  It is chill your bones, freeze your face, super cold outside.  This is the start of winter but things are not slowing down in the classrooms!  Teachers are working on lesson design, CSAs, data teaming, and using the best instructional approaches possible to reach their students.  Another way teachers are keeping their lessons fresh this fall is by going on teacher to teacher walkthroughs.

At South Valley Middle School the teachers use one plan time a month to visit three to four other classrooms in the building for about 10 minutes each. After the walkthrough process, they debrief their findings with their own content team.  This experience keeps our teachers connected to the other content areas and let's all of us see various instructional practices being used.  Here are three of the highlights:

• Collaboration:  Many classrooms had the students working in small groups to grapple with a content idea.  The teachers posted questions for the students to consider with the content being used.
• Teacher to Student Conversations:  Teachers were talking to individual students/groups about the work they were doing.  Conversation pieces included, "explain your reasoning behind solving the problem", "why do you think others agree with the text", and "talk me through the work your group has completed".
• Nonlinguistic Representation: Students were diagraming and drawing the content they were learning, putting their own visual reference to the important details of the unit being taught.

The best part of the walkthrough process for me as a coach is the debriefing.  I truly love hearing a teacher say they want to try doing what they saw in a class, then working with them to modify it to fit their curriculum.  Teaching is about sharing, learning, and growing our own practice to benefit the students.  

It might be getting colder outside, but the South Valley classrooms are keep our students' minds warm and active!

Observing Feeback

Studies show that feedback to students can give the some of the highest gains in learning if done correctly.  What exactly is correct feedback?  Many educational researchers have different definitions for feedback and putting it in my simple terms, feedback is letting the student know what they have done correctly (or incorrectly) with guidance through questions or prompts to take the learning further.  Researchers do agree that the incorrect form of feedback is praise.  Yes, students need praise.  They need the “great job”, “good work”, “nice going”, etc. but to really get educational gains, students need the prompts to further their thinking, expanding on their ideas, and reach a little higher.

At the middle schools this week, the teachers are giving feedback to their students by

• Using online math textbooks that tell the student if they answered the questioned correctly and gives hints/explanations for getting to the correct answers. Easy and specific (correct/incorrect) feedback. Bonus, the textbook company created it.
• During small group work, a teacher moved from one group to the next checking on progress and asking thought provoking questions:
• You have the right idea, where are you going with that information?
• How did you come to that conclusion?
• There is an error in work, can your find the mistake?
• Small group conferencing allows for personalization and time in class for the students to apply the feedback to the learning process.    
• Self-paced learning via www.blendspace.com.  At different points students take a quiz to check for understanding before they move on to more content.  Feedback includes redirecting students to further learning on the concepts not yet mastered. The teacher was able to check in with students individually as they went through the items on Blendspace.
• Using create.kahoot.it to teach a lesson to the entire class and checking for understanding.  By seeing the correct and incorrect answers in real time, the teacher is able to direct feedback pinpointed at the misconception or talk in more detail about the concepts mastered.
• Brief, individual conversations with each student about what science experiment the student is considering doing in class. Then asking questions to further the brainstorming of how the experiment will need to be conducted.  Individualized conversations allow the teacher and student to know exactly where in the learning process the student is at and with good questions and prompts, the student can be pushed slightly beyond their knowledge level.

Feedback is important in the learning process.  There are many techniques that are beneficial to students.  Feel free to share with me the methods you use and see in classes.

Ch-Ch-Changes

David Bowie's song "Changes" started playing in my head once I put the title in on this blog post.  My intention was not to focus on the changes at LPS, but that is where topic of this post landed.

I have been with LPS for years.  I started at a time when the classroom computer sat in the corner and if a teacher wanted to use it, they could.  I don't think many people did though.  Attendance was on paper and grades were figured by hand.  The final grade did get typed into the computer.  There was email but it would crash if someone was more advanced than us and attempted to send pictures.  Beyond that, technology was truthfully hardly making an impact on our classrooms.  And time passed.  And technology changed.

Fast forward to the 2014-2015 school year at the middle schools and you will see every kid carrying a special black bag.  That bag contains their device, 8th graders a MacBook Air while the 6th and 7th graders tote around the Chromebook. LPS took the leap and our students are 1-1.
It is amazing, inspiring, exciting, scary, and many other emotions to see how a classroom has changed from that device being available to the student all day long.

Here are my some of my observations of things happening differently in classrooms:

• Students fully collaborating, researching, and calculating in a math class 
• Students designing and creating artistically to show their understanding of class materials
• Students exploring new programs (new to them and their teacher) to see if there is a better option to demonstrate their knowledge of content
• Students are given the opportunity to make choices on how they learn in class by selecting the a mode of delivery (video, audio, written materials)

Some of you may say you have been doing these things in your classroom for years.  Kudos to you for making waves that prompted the need for 1-1. My examples above are from my teachers who expressed concern and worry about the 1-1 computing.  These teachers have looked change directly in the eye and they are going for it!  

It's a great year to be student at LPS!

1st Day, 1st Blog

It’s the first day of school, for the 33rd time in my life.  And today is different. Today, I saw amazing things happen in classrooms of other teachers and I wondered, why aren’t these classrooms shared?  Why aren’t these activities video taped?  Why are teachers not bragging about the way they start their school year?  But that is exactly why, teachers don’t brag about themselves and what they are doing.  So, as the teachers introduced students to each other, played games to get to know each other, and started building relationships and trust it spurred me to make a few new goals for myself, to start my year differently.  I will start sharing and bragging about the awesome things they are doing.  Plus, this is going to push me.  I am not a writer.  I have not blogged yet, here it goes!

To follow the lead of the first classroom I visited today, I will introduce myself.  I am Amy Thornburg.  I am an Innovation and Learning Coach for Liberty and South Valley Middle Schools in the Liberty Public School District. In this classroom students proceeded to repeat the names of everyone in the class.  The purpose was set by Mr. Rasmussen, “As a team you call each other by name.  You don’t say, hey you, quarterback over there, throw me the ball in football. You use the player’s name.”  In Mr. Rasmussen’s choir class, the team knows each others names.  

Down the hall is Mrs. Beagle’s ELA classroom.  The students were busy writing an introduction of themselves with an embellishment.  I love the extension of the students writing, reading their introduction, then trying to guess what detail was not 100% true.  My initial thought, “how simple of a process to get kids WRITING on the first day of school!”

In another classroom Mrs. Robertson was taking a different approach to getting to know her students.  She was deep into building a trusting relationship with them by telling them what each student could expect from her.  She made it perfectly clear to her students that they can expect respect, fun, safety, and learning to happen in her classroom. 

Wow!  How many people out there think that learning names is only the teacher’s job, that curriculum starts after the procedures have been given, and that the expectations in a classroom are set only for the students to reach.  Today might be my 33rd first day of school, but it is definitely the most unique of them all.  I am truly honored to work alongside these professionals and look forward to bragging about all of them often.