Tag Archives: reflection

Reflection On Instruction Begets Improved Student Learning – Give Teachers Time to Reflect

Posted on by
Reply

Time and tide wait for no teacher when there is a school year of curriculum to be taught. There never is enough time to accomplish what takes inestimable time! Instruction that causes all children to learn, including children needing adjusted instruction, requires time for a teacher to reflect and determine how to clarify, correct, and teach anew. Reflection plus adjusted teaching improves learning for all students.

Form follows function – time is attached to what we prioritize

A teacher’s school day is dominated by the clock much like the chain driving an assembly line. Classes, meetings, lunch, prep, paperwork, work that goes on til midnight and then do it again the next day. The class bell does not wait for anyone – teacher or student – and a tardy teacher is worse than a tardy student. And being prepared for the continuing instruction and student learning is never-ending. Yet we know that significant accomplishments – Rome and student learning – require planning, careful work, and checking assurances for quality outcomes. When then, is a teacher able to reflect, really think about the effectiveness of her teaching in causing children to learn?

The easy answer for administrators has two parts.

  • Every teacher has contract-guaranteed prep time as well as time before and after the school day.
  • Professional teachers understand that their work is not limited by the school day and often requires more than eight hours per day.

Easy for an administrator is not easy for a teacher. A teacher’s school-assigned prep time is invaded without forethought. Urgent matters are a principal’s note to “see me during your prep” or a principal’s scheduling an IEP team meeting during a prep time. The “tapping into” teacher prep time happens with abandon in every school every day.

A teacher’s immediate needs must be met during “untapped” prep time. These include

  • Bio needs in the restroom.
  • Returning parent calls and e-mails.
  • Assembling student work collected prior to the prep time for later inspection.
  • Arranging materials for student instruction after the prep time.

If these are not accommodated during school day prep time, they don’t get done. Consequently, these tasks get done and instructional planning and reflection do not.

Before and after school time also is requisitioned by faculty meetings, grade level and departmental meetings, IEP team meetings, and professional development. Then, add the time needed by a student who “needs extra help” or has a question that could not be asked and answered in class and an eight-hour school day grows into nine and ten hours. The time crunch is exasperated for the many teachers who need to be home after school to take care of their own children.

The reality is that very few teachers use school day prep time for the planning and construction of instruction or the review of instructional effectiveness.

Automaton teaching is easy; informed teaching is hard

It is too easy for a teacher to be an automaton – a person who works in a mechanical, unthinking, and unemotional manner. I observed veteran teachers who had files of units and lesson plans and every year they literally taught through their file drawer. They used the same units and lessons year after year with the justification of “it seemed to work last year, so it will be just as good for this year.” When asked why they automatically repeated units and lessons, they told me “It took a lot of time to develop my units and lessons, and I don’t have time to develop ones or even to change why I have.”

Automaton teaching includes teachers who teach strictly from the publisher’s guide for curriculum their school has adopted. They do not make adjustments or modifications because “this is what my school board expects me to teach.”

Against this model, I observed veteran teachers who used their prep time for informed teaching. From her classroom doorway, I watched a kindergarten teacher using self-talk as she laid out materials on student desks. “Willie needs…, Jackie needs…, Aiden needs…”, and at the end of the lay out she reviewed exactly what each student needed to accomplish the objectives of their next lesson.

I watched a high school chemistry teacher use her whiteboard to review the results of a student quiz the day before. She used data to identify students who demonstrated clear learning and those who did not, and she listed the specific learning that needed to be clarified.

I talked with an ELA teacher as she shared the specific criteria, she had taught that she wanted students to demonstrate in a writing assignment. She used a holistic reading approach to identify assignments that met the requirements and those that did not and added post-a-notes to each writing sample telling the writer the detail that was missing or incorrect.

These teachers buck the pattern of automaton, same old/same old teaching by reflecting daily on the effectiveness of instruction and the adjusted teaching they will use to cause all students to achieve curricular success.

Break the pattern of same old/same old: protect time for instructional reflection

If a principal believes reflection is essential for ensuring high quality teaching and learning, the principal must assign and protect time for reflective work. The time does not need to be the same time of the school day for all teachers. If it is the same, it is too easy for that time to be stolen for other purposes. Ensured reflective planning time needs to be equitable, balanced and inviolate.

Second, the principal needs to “sit in” with teachers as they reflect. “Sitting in” is supportive not evaluative. Different teachers will reflect and plan differently; the just need the principal’s encouragement and affirmation that instructional reflection is a valued professional for improving teaching and learning.

Plan-teach-reflect-teach

I always smiled when told “Mr. Smith is a good teacher” without hearing the criteria for the statement. It was a cynical smile. Good teaching is hard work that requires curricular and pedagogical mastery and consistent use of best practices. Good teaching knows each child being taught and how to connect each child’s uniqueness with instruction. Good teaching requires planning, teaching, reflection, and adjusted teaching. When I heard any or all of these criteria, I gave a true smile.

To make the magic of teaching work, teachers need time to assess the quality of student learning after their initial instruction, provide appropriate next assignments for students who were successful, AND plan how to correct, clarify, and appropriately students who were not initially successful. The magic requires informed reflection and time to reflect.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Teaching and Learning Is Not Piece Work

Posted on by
Reply

Henry Ford’s assembly line strategies revolutionized industry.  In a Ford plant, all work was piece work – an employee did one task repeatedly as the car chassis passed down the assembly line.  The speed of the “chain” determined work productivity.  Optimized speed of assembly and quality control were the abilities of all workers to do their assigned piece work in a predetermined number of minutes.  The image to consider is a naked car chassis at the beginning of the assembly line and complete and drivable car emerging at the end of the line.  It takes an extreme emergency for the speed of the assembly line chain to slow or stop – it never backs up.

What we should know.

Transfer that image to school.  A 4K child is at the beginning of the assembly line and a graduate emerges at the end of a school’s edu-assembly line.  In the early 1900s schooling took on an assembly line process.  Thank you, Henry Ford and John Dewey, and 1892’s Committee of Ten.  Elementary schools build the chassis and secondary school does the finishing work.  The chain runs 180 school days.  Teachers apply grade level or subject content knowledge and skills to the student as the child moves through the K-12 system.  Quality control is measured by standardized tests and displayed on a bell curve – some children demonstrate a higher quality of education than others, but any student within the parameters of two standard deviations below the norm is promoted and graduated.

Most educators do not like the image or analogy of schooling to assembly line work.  It offends their professional sensitivities.  However, current, and usual school operations look like, feel like, sound like, and are like assembly line work.  If you doubt this, try to change the speed of the school chain, or modify the work done at each grade level or subject along the edu-line.  It should not be difficult to do, but it is.  Try to diminish the school year by 10 days or make it longer by ten days.  The system will fight back and after much argument the chain will remain set at 180 days with its traditional work being done at each workstation.

What to do?

Accept that school is an assembly line and change the nature of the work along the assembly line.  It is the work at each teaching station along the line that matters.

My work with the WI DPI on teacher licensing requirements says that the teaching act is a sequence of six steps.  Each teacher candidate is required in pre-student teaching and student teaching to demonstrate evidence of their proficiency in:

  • Planning – creation of unit and lesson plans
  • Teaching – using a variety of teaching strategies, including explicit teaching
  • Assessment – formative assessment of initial student learning success
  • Reflection – the use of formative assessment data to help the teacher clarify, correct, enhance student learning
  • Adjustment of teaching – tactical use of differentiated teaching strategies to clarify, current, enhance student learning
  • Re-assessment – summative assessment at end of lesson or unit

This sequence is built into every unit and lesson design.  Each step is plain to see and document and verify.

What Makes the Edu-line Different?

It is the emphasis on the three middle points points – assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching – that separates education from piece work.  Henry Ford did not want an assembly line worker checking the effectiveness of their work, stopping the chain for a closer inspection, talking with other workers about how to fix an error in the car’s assembly, or to check for quality after the fix was applied.  We do.  In education, this is what makes good teaching effective teaching.

A child is a very messy car chassis.  Unlike a metal frame, a child moves, speaks, has personality, and individuality.  A child’s mind may still be on recess during a late morning lesson in reading or thinking about lunch while doing arithmetic.  A child may wriggle and moan when called upon to sing a solo or be bashful in showing an art project.  Messy is anathema to assembly line work.  The truth is teaching children is messy work and time effort committed these three essential steps – assessment, reflection, ad adjustment – is how we ensure that every child is a successful learner.

What does this look like?

We need to insist that every lesson and every unit has built in requirements for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Bell curve be damned.  The lesson does not move to re-assessment or to a next lesson until a teacher has demonstrated assessment, reflection, and adjustment and exercised all efforts to ensure successful learning.

Assessment, reflection, and adjustment require teacher time.  These tasks are not accomplished while a teacher is driving to school in the morning or home after school.  They are not accomplished during a teacher’s lunch time.  And they are not accomplished while a teacher is doing daily prep period work.  Interestingly, the number one function of teacher prep time is a bathroom break.  The next most important functions are talking to another adult, checking correspondence, and just taking a break from being on the classroom stage.  The assessment, reflection, and adjustment of daily teaching rarely surfaces in a teacher’s usual school day.  We need to face this reality – daily prep time before, during and after the school day is inadequate for the assessment, reflection, and adjustment of ongoing teaching.

We need to build new organizational structures to ensure that all teachers have the time and resources for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of new teaching.

Intermittent breaks.

The administration provides individual teachers with a substitute teacher for a school day and the classroom teacher engages in assessment, reflection, and adjustment work.  That is the only assignment the teacher has on this day.  Prior to the intermittent day break, the teacher and administrator select the unit(s) of instruction to be the focus of the break day.  They discuss the assessment data to be examined.  The teacher uses this day to make a full evaluation of student learning via the teacher’s observations, existing assessment data, and any personal education plans (IEPs and 504s) for her students.  Reflection is reviewing the lesson plans for this unit(s) and notating parts that were successful and parts that were not as successful.  Reflection also is consideration of the teacher’s expectations for student performance on the assessment(s).  Adjustment is a planning of a necessary lesson(s) that will assist all children to achieve the teacher’s expectations on re-assessment that will follow these necessary lesson plans.

Intermittent breaks assures that all children in the school have continuous instruction AND rotates all teachers into their intermittent day break.  Every teacher in the school is provided intermittent breaks several times each school, perhaps once each quarter.

An intermittent break fits every teacher because the assessment data is the teacher’s data – it is not state assessments that are narrowly academic.  All subject area teachers, e.g., art, music, PE, second language, shop, use their intermittent break to assess, reflect, and adjust their subject area teaching and learning.

Whole school breaks.

The advantage of whole school breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment is that all teachers are available for this work.  The administration places a whole school break day on the school calendar so that parents can plan for a day when children are not in school.  Whole school breaks are scheduled once each quarter of the school calendar.

On whole school break days, all teachers are available for grade level, subject area, special grouping collaboration.  A team of grade level teachers can provide each other with insights and observations and alternative adjustment strategies.

Whole school break days can also be in-person and/or remote workdays.  Whole school break days also contribute the mental health of the school by releasing all students and teachers from the usual routines of continuous school. 

Reduced daily assignments to create daily time.

A school that wants to institutionalize teacher availability for assessment, reflection, and adjustment can build time for these three activities into teachers’ daily assignments by removing one or more classes for each teacher’s assignment.  For example, instead of assigning a teacher to teach five classes per day with one period of preparation time, assign the teacher four classes per day with one period every day for assessment, reflection, and adjustment and one period for preparation.  This requires hiring additional teachers to be assigned the teaching of class periods removed from other teacher’s usual schedules.

Costs – Pay Now or Instead of Later

There is cost to providing breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching.  One cost is the employment of substitute teachers, or the employment of more teachers.  There is the cost of additional resources for adjusted teaching – the same old, same old will not produce new results.  There also is the cost of institutionalization and constant prioritization of assessment, reflection, and adjustment in the school. 

When considering the cost of hiring more teachers, consider the cost to student learning of not providing consistent time for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Because schools are edu-assembly lines, we keep the edu-chain moving until after student failures to learn have piled up and we play catch up trying the remediate students out of sequence with their learning.  We spend more annual revenue hiring intervention teachers, tutorial aides, and assigning students to summer school and other make-up venues than we need to.   Instead, use those financial and professional resources to ensure adequate assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching in the real time of lesson and unit instruction. 

The Key Essential for Breaks

The essential element for making an assessment, reflection, and adjustment break successful is an administrator/teacher conversation about the goals for the break.  This is laser focused work on teaching and learning – what worked to cause successful student learning, what did students NOT successfully learn, how can teaching be changed and improved to cause all students to be successful learners, and then teaching using those changes and improvements. 

Teaching that is carefully targeted for students with enough rigor and challenge will always cause a distribution of learning successes.  Teaching that all students succeed at in at their first exposure is undertargeted.  Conversely, if no students succeed in the first exposure, then teaching has been overtargeted.  Assessment, reflection, and adjustment are how teachers practice this sequence – aim, fire, adjust your aim, fire again – instead of our usual fire, aim, fire again

This is effective teaching and effective teaching is not piece work.