Making Rounds

What are the students doing? This question is crucial to our understanding of effective teaching. As principals and central office administrators, we need to focus not on what the teacher is doing, but what the students are doing. Recently, a teacher wrote me that we have spent so many years training teachers to be the "doers" that we have forgotten the role of the student.

Phillip Schlechty's, Working on the Work, provides us with a clear picture of the types of student engagement. Schlechty illustrates five types of student responses to a given task. At any time throughout the day we can find students that are authentically engaged or immersed in a value added activity that they see as beneficial to their lives. Students can be ritual engaged to simply get the grade. Extending effort to complete a task simply to avoid negative consequences is the description of the passive compliant response. Students can respond to a task by disengaging or creating their own task while disrupting each other. These students are responding by retreating or rebelling.

This month I would like to shift from Working on the Work to The Three Minute Classroom Walkthrough. While I find any type of prescriptive solution to be contrary to successful instruction, I do appreciate those researches that give me a way of looking at things with a new pair of glasses.

Take a look at the 3C's presented in the The Three Minute Classroom Walkthrough, content context and cognitive type. Take away references to teacher action and acknowledge the 3C's as crucial components of student engagement.

Content: Do the students know what they are learning? Are they aware of the skills, knowledge or concepts they are going to be learning?

Context: What are the students doing? Under what type of conditions are they pursueing understanding of the content?

Cognitive Type: What level of understanding are the students going to reach with the content? Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis or evaluation.

I agree with Scheltchy, that no one can sustain an authentic response level throughout the entire day. Nor is it reasonable or sound instruction to assume all understanding takes place at the top of Bloom's Taxonomy.

I have to ask myself how I would respond if I shadowed a student throughout any given day. What percentage of my day would I spend authentically engaged at a high level of understanding and interest?

This is in response to a great article, 21st Century Skills: the Challenges Ahead, by Adrew J. Rotherham and Daniel Willignham.

While I completely agree with all that was articulated by the authors, I feel crucial a component is missing. Recently, I have been reading Breakthrough by Michael Fullan, Peter Hill and Carmel Crevola. Both groups discuss the same concerns and suggested solutions for revamping our current status quo.
We need more meaningful assessments, understandings of content and skill, and a delineation of practice and skill.
If breakthroughs, utilizing instruction that works, assessing for readiness and understanding, learning to learn, focused instruction unique to content learning, and other more high quality improvements need to be made, then why do things still look so much the same? The old adage, wherever I go, there I am, rings true as we stay stuck in the status quo. How much have we really changed since the establishment of the first compulsory school in the United States? Sure, we have become more cognizant of the science behind learning. We are aware of motivation and the importance of learner readiness. The breadth of knowledge and understanding is staggering. My argument is that we have not been able to build our systems within schools and districts to genuinely improve. The way in which we schedule classes, structure the day, all those logistics, actually confine us to a system designed to meet the demands of early America, not the 21st century. Articles such as this only add to frustration because we are reminded of the design constraints of a school.
We have to begin to explore ways to allow teachers more time to collaborate and grow professionally. Schedules need to be redesigned to meet the needs of the learner and the teacher, not just transportation, UIL or athletics. Is this radical? Is there time for such an extreme remedy?
Personally, I need to find answers to a few questions. How do other countries find the time for teachers to collaborate? Is there any wasted time during the school day? Our country is accustomed to the 8-3 schedule of schools that giving students a day off during the week so teachers can collaborate is often fraught with concerns from parents about finding a sitter.
Anyway, great article and good thought.

Reading as a Participation Sport

Reading as a Participation Sport

This gives us an idea of the direction the Gen M student, as a reader, is heading. The idea of having tools to participate in my reading experience is comforting. Today's readers have a far wider breadth of information to sift through before drawing conclusions. We are challenged as teachers to help students graze through the steams of data to intentially select information that respondes to their needs.

What is the Daily?

The daily life of a principal. So what is it like to be responsible for the education, safety and well being of students? Share your thoughts and ideas.

How do you stay focused on instruction while working through the logistical web of everyday operations? Delegation is a great tool. How do you ensure delegated projects are completed on time and with quality?

Admin. meetings- when do you meet? How do you keep those pesky interruptions from halting your meeting?