Tag Archives: educator effectiveness

Many Teachers Try To Teach As They Were Taught – Stop Doing That!

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If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then many teachers of yore are buttered with adulation.  When people decide to become schoolteachers, they often do so thinking they will teach like their favorite teachers taught them.  You see it in the eyes of an interviewee when asked “Tell us about your favorite teacher when you were in school”.  Imitation later is demonstrated as a new teacher settles into patterns of mannerisms, classroom layout, and, most significantly, interacting with students.  Vestiges of a favorite teacher try to appear in a new teacher constantly. 

Stop doing that!  Most of what we admired in a favorite teacher was personality and charisma not teacher effectiveness.  Teach as you were taught to teach not as you were taught as a student. 

What do we know?

There is art to teaching.  Most favorite teachers touched us with their artful teaching, their personality, and their caring for each student.  They proved the statement that children do not care what a teacher knows until they know that a teacher cares.  Good teaching is an art form of connecting with children. Remembering a favorite teacher is like having that person’s arm around you or basking in her smile.  It is an emotional, affective warm feeling, often of kindness and support.  It grew from all the “atta-boys and atta-girls” she showered on students.  Children, as people pleasers, will do most anything to get a smile or a nod or a note to take home from a favorite teacher.  “How many books do I need to read?  I’ll read every day after school!”.  And the warmth of her smile gains even greater emotionality over time.

We would like to think that every teacher is a “favorite” to some students, but truth be told, there are some teachers who do not create adoring followers.  The art of teaching is not distributed equally among all teachers.

Favorite or Most Effective

An equally telling question for a teacher interview is “Tell us about the teacher who most effectively challenged you to learn”.  Effective teaching is causing children to learn and causation lies in the science of teaching.  Children may learn to please a favorite teacher; they learn from highly effective teachers due to an application of best teaching strategies. 

Highly effective teachers are not simply born.  They are the product of their study of theories and practices of pedagogy that consistently cause children, or anyone for that matter, to learn.  These theories and practices include –

  • Motivation.  Every child responds to positive triggers that encourage them to engage in learning.  Effective teachers pull those triggers.  They make learning personal by referencing a student’s name and that student’s high interest in the subject or skill as they introduce a lesson.  They make the new learning sound unique and special.  They attach new learning to recent successful learning.  They create a mystery children are to solve.  Effective teachers understand the need to continue to motivate throughout the lesson and unit not just as its beginning.
  • Direct instruction, inquiry-based instruction, and problem- or project-based instruction.  These three strategies are the arsenal for effective teachers, and they are masters of each.  Any lesson can be taught by one of these three strategies, yet there always is a most appropriate strategy for the nature of the learning.  Effective teachers provide variety in classroom work by rotating among these strategies. 
  • Practice and reinforcement.  Effective teachers understand that practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent.  They use immediate and massed practice and interval and distributed practice.  They don’t practice just to practice but for strategic reinforcement to build short- and long-term memory.  Effective teachers avoid the drudgery of drills while knowing that learning will erode and be lost without practice over time.  Reinforcement over time is a mantra.
  • Assessment and corrective teaching.  Effective teachers pre-assess, teach in chunks, model, practice, and use formative assessments to check the accuracy and strength of student learning.  They understand that very few lessons will immediately cause all children to be successful learners.  They use assessments to tell them “Correct this now before uninformed practice makes it harder to unlearn”.  They unteach, reteach, and teach differently based on assessments to move children from early errors to later success.  Effective teachers also are very good at observing student proficiency without testing; they have a mental rubric for the level of proficiency children need to achieve.
  • Extended and advanced learning.  Effective teachers know that some children will grasp and master new learning accurately and quickly.  Those children will need extended and advanced learning rather than corrective teaching.  Effective teachers plan enrichments and accelerated learning for children who need these to stay connected to the classroom.
  • Lesson planning.  Effective teachers are immaculate lesson planners understanding the steps of a plan that causes learning to happen.  In the 1980s school districts taught teachers to use Madeline Hunter’s Model of Mastery Learning.  Hunterisms became standard operating procedure for more than a decade.  Splashback against No Child Left Behind caused some educators to consider Hunter too mechanistic.  However, in the decades since, a Hunter lesson design rebounds as best practice.

https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/Holle-Lesson-Planning.pdf

  • Curricular design.  Effective teachers understand that some children really respond to direct instruction while others jump aboard for inquiry-based teaching and still others are excited by problem-based and project-based instruction.  These teachers strategically use all three strategies to engage children as active learners.  They also use Universal Design thinking in their curriculum to ensure learning is not hindered by avoidable barriers. 

The Big Duh! 

Teacher preparation programs teach us how to be effective in causing children to learn.  Effective teachers remember their favorite teachers from their school years and emulate many of those veteran teachers’ mannerisms.  Beyond that emulation, effective teachers are masters of the science of teaching and use all the tools they have been taught to cause all children to be successful learners of their annual curriculum. 

School Success Requires Planning for A Bipolar Spring

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Two quotes should be taped to the front entrance of every school house on the first school day in March.

“It ain’t over til it’s over.” (Yogi Berra)

“Somewhere there’s a score being kept …” (Bill Murray)

This and the next several blogs will discuss how these two messages can assure a successful close of a quality school year.

School climate in the spring is bipolar. While all faces turn to the vernal promise of sunshine and warmer weather, the underlying tone within the school is academically frenetic and pressure-packed. A big picture-school leader must manage this climatic paradox.

In 2015 a school planner still considers a school year to be approximately 180 days in length, although many states have modified that number to accommodate weather and politics, two inconstant variables in an educator’s world. Seeing the big picture of 180 days means seeing the biggest of the big pictures. If there are 180 school days, the number of prime instructional days is actually closer to 120 days. In the biggest picture view, school principals must manage 180 days while focusing on 120. This means getting more instruction and learning completed successfully in less time.

While the seasons of the year differ in the weather they bring us, they also differ in the sense of school climate. In the fall a school climate begins with high anticipation and excitement for a fresh school year. The climatic pressure is low keyed. The last days of summer, brilliant fall colors outside the school doors, the traditions of Homecoming, and the knowledge that there are two seasons in the school year to go maintain a friendly and welcoming school climate in September and October.

The cool to cold weather of winter not only brings almost all school activities indoors, it also clarifies the school climate to a focus on measures of student learning. Children are disaggregated into cadres of learners with specific expectations for academic achievement growth. Winter is an industrial month of instruction, assessment, reteaching and extended instruction, assessment, and validation. The units of grade level and course instruction are pre-blocked on the calendar and crossed off one-by-one. The school climate in the winter is heavy with the grind of school work.

Everyone looks forward to spring. However, spring is the most difficult of school seasons and the climate of spring is bipolar. The months of March, April and May contain 92 days and of these 64 are week days and potential school days. This is when a principal takes a new red marker from the storeroom and begins to narrow the calendar of days.

Most schools calendar a spring break and the majority of these break for a week in March or April. Red-line five days for the break, and, red-circle one week on either side of the spring break week. The lined out days are not available for instruction and the circled days are not prime instructional days. Some families will extend their spring break and excuse their children for days on either side of the break week, and the children whose parents don’t excuse them will tell their parents that “nothing is happening at school because so many kids are absent.”

Red-line Good Friday and circle the Thursday before it and the Monday that follows. Also, red-line Memorial Day and circle the Friday before and the Tuesday that follows. These represent another six days that are either not available for instruction or are not prime days.

Now check your state Department of Public Instruction web site to identify the statewide testing calendar. Circle all of the days that are mandated by the DPI for testing. Then, circle the week prior to the testing days. It is not reasonable to think that children who are tested for several hours each day will also be at their prime for learning the rest of the day. And, it is not reasonable to think that the week prior to testing is prime for instruction, as many teachers who are considering their teacher effectiveness ranking will use this time to review major skill sets that may be assessed on the tests.

March, April and May have 64 week days or potential school days for instruction. The principal has just red-lined or circled 31 days. Now there are 33 days for instruction during the spring season. But the job of seeing the calendar is not done, yet. If this is a high school or a middle school with spring sports, draw a red line under every date when a team will be excused from school early to travel to an away game or meet. How many children are engaged in track, baseball and softball, soccer, lacrosse, and golf? A date with a red line under it is day that is not a prime instructional day for some children, and will be seen by some teachers as instructional time that must be repeated around these school-approved absences.

Yogi Berra comes to mind now, because a school year isn’t over until it is over. Getting 64 days of potential instruction successfully learned by children in 33 days parallels Yogi’s 1973 New York Mets who trailed the Chicago Cubs by 9 1/2 games in July but won the pennant on the last day of the season. Big-picture principals know that every instructional day is important including the very last day.

And, Bill Murray comes to mind now, because student attendance, student academic achievement and the equity of measured achievement growth, and student promotion and graduation rates are scores that are being kept and these scores reflect upon the Educator Effectiveness ratings of all teachers and principals.

Consequently, these principals always are focused on using all possible school hours to achieve the greatest school “scores” by –

• Providing parents with “essential school dates” at least a year in advance. Help families that are compelled to excuse their children from school beyond vacation and holiday dates to use non-prime instructional days. Parents understand messages that say “this instructional time is important to your child”; parents respond well when self-interest may be present.

• Minimizing the distracting access of non-essential people and events during all 180 days of the school year. Time given to non-essential distraction in the fall places stress on the limited instructional time in the spring.

• Sharing with teachers the school’s need to discern between activities that are essential to strengthening learning for all children and activities that are “fun to do” or “wouldn’t it be nice to do.” There always is a need to inject “fun and interesting” into school life, but not every fun thing has its place. Sharing the need and ability to discern among these with teachers helps everyone to understand the relationship of the total school calendar to the scores that are being kept.

• Protecting teacher-child contact time. For example, professional development is essential for all educators. Big picture-thinking principals and teachers will schedule PD on school days that are not prime instructional days. Also, teacher leaves that are discretionary, such as medical and personal, can be scheduled for days that are not prime instructional days.

• Distributing necessary school assemblies and required safety drills across the school day to diminish their instructional distraction.

• Scheduling school sports and activity events on Saturdays. Non-school activities have liked Saturday schedules because many school coaches and directors used Saturdays as days off for themselves and their students. Now that academic scores command the attention of teachers and principals, scheduling away events on Saturday rather than a school day preserves more prime instructional time for learning.

• Minimizing the non-essential distractors on the 33 prime instructional days in March, April and May. Say “no” to anyone who wants to schedule a non-instructional event in a prime day. Say “no” to field trips that are not essential to academic instruction.

• Without causing too much anxiety, helping children to understand the importance of best performances on statewide assessments. Eliminate any school performances and games from the test week. Rehearsals and practices are okay; but no stress-building events. Structure test days so that the tests are the focus of the day by padding “relaxed” time around the test sessions.

Because “it’s over” is a definite date on the calendar, a big picture principal helps parents, teachers and children to optimize prime instructional and learning days across the entire calendar. And, because a score really is being kept and everyone in the school is a part of the scoring, a big picture principal helps parents, teachers and children to optimize their respective work that is scored.

Teacher Coaches – The New Player No One Knows

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In the land of teachers, what is a professional coach for teacher effectiveness?

When a new position is created in an established game, no one knows the rules for the player in that position. It would be like introducing a twelfth player onto the football field, one who is an expert in offensive and defensive and special team play, but does not wear a football uniform. Instead of playing the game, this expert-player is a coach on the field who can “stop the action” in order to critique the last play and then tell and show actual players how to improve performances on the next play. Most players, as well as football fans, would say, “This is new! How does this work?” This is the environment of professional coaches for educators who are employed to advance educator effectiveness. It is a new day and professional coaches in education are the new player.

Educators have a history of working with evaluators, coordinators, consultants and vendors. A veteran classroom teacher has a ready understanding of the roles these persons play in public education. Evaluators typically are building principals or district supervisors. Coordinators, as in curriculum coordinators and subject area specialists, assist the teacher in understanding the district’s approved curriculum and interpreting curricular outcomes into instructional designs. Consultants and vendors most usually work for producers of educational materials and are invested in helping teachers implement materials the district has purchased. But, a professional coach is none of these. So, what are the role parameters for a teacher’s coach?

“What does an instructional coach do? Look at ‘instruction’—the act, process, or art of imparting knowledge and skill. Look at ‘coach’—to teach. Instructional coaches teach teachers how to be effective instructors. This is the focus of instructional coaching because good instruction is 15 to 20 times more powerful in producing student achievement than family background and income, race, gender, and other explanatory variables. Student learning must be at the heart of all decisions made in the school.”

http://www.teachers.net/wong/SEP11/

In order to coach, coaches will need to persevere. If educational leadership follows past practice, professional coaches will be lost in the soft work of staff development and educational community building. Why do I believe this? Let’s start with the mission of a teacher coach: to improve a teacher’s active demonstration of the district’s adopted teacher effectiveness practices, and, improve the teacher’s skills in causing all children to achieve the district’s standardized testing and student learning objectives. Just as a hitting coach is responsible for improving each player’s hitting skills, as in on-base percentage and hits with runners in scoring position, a teaching coach is responsible for improving the educational effectiveness of teachers. Aligning and keeping the teaching coach aligned with this mission is the difficulty.

Too many coaching positions are filled by teacher/coaches. A current teacher, usually a very competent teacher, is assigned to a split assignment: half-time teacher and half-time coach. This “half way” attempt to create a coach fails to align the coach with the mission because teaching is a full-time assignment. A competent teacher will commit as much time to planning, assessing and teaching a half-day assignment as she will to a whole day assignment. The belief that she can be an effective coach on released time is both naïve and condescending to the possibility of coaching.

Second, when a teacher is a half-time coach, her fellow teachers cannot have adequate availability to her coaching. Half of the faculty will be available when she is a coach and half will not be when she is teaching. Principals may try to assuage this by using the teacher/coach’s prep time for coaching, but this will only irritate the coach’s teaching assignment. Using prep time in the day or before or after the teaching day only short-changes both assignments.

Third, teachers view teachers as teachers. There always will be a shadow over her coaching as the teachers she coaches will look at the half day she is teaching to examine “And, how effective is she in her own classroom?” Disregarding the variables of student demographics and the pull of her dual assignments, a teacher/coach’s classroom work will be used as a judge of her coaching expertise.

Fourth, district leadership with a political or budgetary mind-set will include the instructional coach within departments of coordinators and staff developers. The coach’s role of critical assessment and refinement of teaching skills requires an intimate relationship with a small set of teachers while coordinators and staff developers work across the district. Combining the coach with these generalists dissolves the ability of the coach to do the critical and clinical work of coaching into another district-wide responsibility.

Finally, districts with multiple initiatives, such as building professional learning communities for teachers, mentoring of initial educators, and teacher retention programs, have a propensity for adding a component of each of these to coordinators and specialists. Existing descriptions of instructional coaches in some districts displays this misalignment of mission.

A report by the Annenberg Institute verifies the potential for structural problems in aligning teacher coaches with their mission. “Since coaching is a relatively new practice, much attention has been given to creating the conditions necessary to implement coaching at the district and school levels. As coaching becomes more widespread, attention needs to shift to making sure coaching has a significant impact on teaching practice, and, ultimately, on student learning. For coaching to make an impact, it must be wedded to specific, articulated gaps in content outcomes. Effective coaching structures use indicators to measure the changes in their practice and assess the effectiveness of their work.

Central office supports for instruction and school-level efforts to improve instruction are often not consistently aligned and coordinated. While coaches can serve as liaisons between school and administration, clear routes of access to supports and communication of needs between central offices and schools remain ongoing challenges, particularly in large or decentralized districts.”

http://annenberginstitute.org/pdf/InstructionalCoaching.pdf

In the land of teachers, district and building level leadership must let teacher’s coaches have direct access to teachers in their classrooms. This new player is a wild card that cannot be clouded by non-mission assignments. Coaching for educator effectiveness is predicated upon a coach’s

  • direct observation of the teacher,
  • clinical lesson studies with the teacher,
  • critical analysis of the teacher’s effective educator practices,
  • instructive modeling of effective practices by the coach,
  • objective analysis of student achievement data
  • instructive modeling of instruction aimed at student achievement gaps, and
  • constant interaction between the coach and teacher.

If the new player on the education field is to be given a chance to make a difference in teacher effectiveness, the coach must be allowed to coach.

Professional Coaches for Educators: Critical Observation, Focused Criticism and Objective Reflection

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We all know folks who are born with innate talents. Yay for them. The rest of us need all the help we can get. Professional coaching has become a very accepted and productive strategy for improving professional skills. Today, given state and local mandates for improved educator effectiveness, teachers and principals everywhere should be accessing professional coaching as a means for polishing existing talents and learning new skills.

There was a time when a baccalaureate degree led to a teacher’s license and periodic post-graduate course credits or course equivalency units sustained that license for the duration of an educator’s career. Historic professional development entailed an educator’s attending classes and writing a paper or creating a project or taking a test. Not so much today. The definition and display of professional competence has and is changing dramatically. In Wisconsin, my home state, educator effectiveness is a rated composite of observed educator behaviors and the measured value of student performances on mandated tests and student learning objectives (SLOs). The pathway for today’s educators to learn their new effectiveness competencies is through a much more dynamic professional development (PD) scenario than yesteryears’. Contemporary PD leads to outcomes that are measured and an educator’s measured outcomes must meet “or exceed mandated performance standards to sustain an educator’s professional employment. “Be an effective professional or leave the profession” is the new credo.

Professional coaching serves two powerful purposes for today’s educator. First, professional coaching is the bridge between learning and performing new effectiveness standards. Using the language of instructional design, coaching supports the guided and independent practice of new learning. And, second, professional coaching elevates the level of the educator’s practice; it moves the measurement needle to higher levels of effectiveness. Professional coaching of educators is all about effectiveness training.

When an educator agrees to be coached, she should expect three things from her coach. Her coach must be a critical observer and a laser-pointed critic who causes her to open her professional work to her own objective reflection and improvement. Anything less is a waste of time. There have been too many evaluators in the past who sat silently in the back of the classroom for a mandatory 45-minute observation or two and spent the majority of their time watching a child of interest or reading bulletin boards only to submit a milquetoast evaluation that neither identified professional strengths nor exposed weaknesses. For too many educators and for too long a time, milquetoast accurately described their professional evaluations and professional improvement plans. No longer.

Today’s professional evaluators are evaluating effectiveness of the teacher in executing a set of district adopted teacher practices and in causing children to achieve prescribed levels of results on academic tests. Principals are being evaluated in the same manner using adopted administrator standards and their ability to cause their faculty to cause children to achieve or improve their achievement on academic tests; the latter may seem like a stretch but it is a real part of the evaluation design.

State and local authorities have pointed to professional development as the means for assisting teachers and principals to become increasingly effective. Many state plans for professional development include references to “professional coaches” as resources for teachers and principals. Most state and district plans are indistinct in prescribing the role or expectations of a professional coach. It is the “open door” for coaching that allows teachers and principals to connect with “their coach” and create a very personalized professional development plan for their “improved effectiveness.”

The following portrays what a coach should tell a teacher (or principal) in establishing a coaching relationship.

Coaching as Critical Observation

Her Coach says, “I am your critical observer. Both words are essential. I will be critical and I will observe everything. I have a singular agenda. Your district adopted Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching as its template for educator effectiveness. My job is to cause you to be a very competent practitioner of that Framework. I have no other agenda; I just forgot every other effectiveness template except Danielson’s.

I will be critical in my observation. When you show me your instructional design, I am looking at how well you know the children you are instructing and not just their names. I am looking for your knowledge of their learning preferences and their learning needs and how well you personalize your design for their individual success. I am looking at your unwrapping of their grade level standards and your schedule of incremental learning objectives. I am looking at your array and use of varied formative assessments and reteaching activities, when needed, and learning extensions for children who learned from your initial instruction. I am watching you through Danielson’s eyes and I am watching you through your children’s eyes. And, I am a critical watcher.”

http://danielsongroup.org/framework/

Coaching as Focused Criticism

Her Coach says, “I will start with the black and white. The black is my telling you where you are not coherent with Danielson and the white is where you are. I will not generalize, but will identify the element of the domain as it relates to your work and tell you how effectively you are portraying that element. I will not shirk from calling the ‘balls and strikes.’ We will not mince words.

I tell you now and will remind you every time we talk that I am your Coach. I am employed by the school district, but I report to you alone. What I tell you is for your professional improvement; it is not connected in any way to your professional evaluation. That is your principal’s assignment.

As I describe specific areas of your work, you must listen carefully and ask for any and all clarification you need to understand what I am telling you. I will check your understanding, just as an effective teacher checks a student’s progressive understanding, but you also have a responsibility to seek clarification.

It is essential that we both understand that professional criticism is a good thing when it is designed for professional improvement. Criticism is not mean-spirited or demeaning; it is descriptive of your work. Professional criticism is highly personal, because it is all about you and your work, and it is highly impersonal, because it is transitory. Everything that you take as a negative criticism can be turned into a plan for improvement and cause you to be highly successful.

Finally, even on your best day I will make a criticism. It is what I do. Teaching is so complex and children so diverse that every practice can be improved given these changing variables.”

Coaching that Causes Objective Reflection

Her Coach says, “For every criticism I make, we will create a plan for your improvement. This is the coaching loop. ‘I observe, I criticize, we talk and plan and design new practice, you teach, I observe, I criticize…’ This loop works as long as you are able to engage in objective reflection. I can do all that I do and we can make wonderful plans, but you must understand that is your objectivity in reflecting upon your work and my coaching of your work that will increase your professional effectiveness over time. Your improvement is within you and we need to find it and develop it together.

If you are game, we will begin today. If you are game, we will work together throughout the school year and for years to come.”

It is probable that the world of professional development experienced a true paradigm shift when governmental mandates changed to include educator effectiveness models. The old paradigm that said “professional development is static and passive” also told the educator “you are an individual who can successfully satisfy these rules without much assistance.” The new paradigm that says “professional development must improve an educator’s measured performance of exacting standards and practices” opens the door for professional coaching. And, that door stands wide open with a sign that reads “Coaches Enter Here.”