If I were to create a word cloud of emerging concepts that I find most exciting in education today, it would include “creativity,” “design thinking,” and “maker spaces.” It seems that a grass-roots movement celebrating art and design, partnered with practical problem-solving, has taken hold in nearly every aspect of our culture.
McREL’s Power Walkthrough Coach, available July 1, builds upon our successful informal walkthrough platform for school leaders, providing tools and protocols to help coaches more specifically address instructional needs with the teachers they serve. This is in line with emerging trends we’ve seen in schools and districts, where coaches or peers give feedback to one another, yet don’t often have a vehicle for doing so in way that captures look-fors and progress without being evaluative.
For too long, though, education has been marked not so much by a pattern of incremental improvement, but rather by a swinging pendulum. We’ve lurched from one untested idea to the next—explicit instruction, inquiry-based instruction, whole language, phonics only—the list goes on and on. The point of research is to sift through various approaches to identify what has worked and what hasn’t, so we can lock in what we know works most of the time. Only then should we explore those edges where further improvements in professional practice are necessary.
On the NASA Wavelength blog, McREL STEM consultant Sandra Weeks takes a look at how scientists and engineers work together to accomplish NASA satellite mission objectives, and applies that model to implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) with a focus on the role of engineering. Read her blog post, Finding and supporting the E in STEM, here.
Sandra Weeks is a STEM consultant for McREL. As a former high school science teacher, her expertise in STEM education and NGSS lends to the design of K-12 instructional materials and professional development on a variety of STEM topics, including NGSS and Science Notebooks, for out-of-school-time programs such as Cosmic Chemistry, NanoExperiences, NASA’s Dawn Mission, and the NASA Science Mission Directorate Education and Public Outreach forums. You can also follow McREL’s STEM pages on Facebook and Twitter for more information about our STEM initiatives.
Data walls are a natural extension of the data-driven instruction process. While we don’t advocate sharing individual student data publicly, we believe there is value in sharing school or classroom data. Educators must be willing to look at, share, and talk about the data, in order to “take collective action” and build a unified focus on improvement across the school community.
During those critical hours between bell times, school leaders are continually challenged to find the time to conduct classroom observations—let alone, the time to take all the data they collect and use it effectively. For principals and assistant principals who have figured this out, we wondered how the tools they use to collect data help them be more effective, efficient leaders.
I had the opportunity recently to ask long-time users (six or more years) of McREL’s Power Walkthrough® observation software this question. Their answers highlighted the challenges school leaders face with conducting observations and how technology can help them maximize the experience for themselves and their teachers.
It makes the task of observing simpler but more meaningful. Administrators are more motivated to leave the office, visit classrooms, conduct brief walkthroughs, and collect data when they can use it immediately and meaningfully. With software loaded right onto their digital device, they save time and effort by not having to hand-write observations and reports. The time they save allows them to conduct more walkthroughs more frequently, which creates higher visibility for them in the school and ends up causing less disruption. The technology also allows them to give teachers formative feedback more quickly, by e-mailing data to them soon after an observation.
The data collected helps administrators and their teachers “zoom in” on what matters most. The software helps principals and assistant principals collect data that can be shared with teachers to heighten their awareness of school initiatives and progress. This opens lines of communication about what professional needs are and should be. Further, the data can help administrators determine the value of specific professional development and provide documentation needed for grant proposals and district reports.
In addition, the ability to customize templates to measure initiatives taking place allows school leaders to “inspect what they expect,” as one district administrator put it. “If you expect teachers to use 21st century skills, then you need to go into their classrooms and inspect [for 21st century skills],” she said. Similarly, one leader said his district started using a template based on the instructional strategies from Classroom Instruction That Works (2nd ed.), and then added to it their own “look-fors” related to the Common Core.
The reports generated help administrators “zoom out” and use the data at many levels. Power Walkthrough software can create more than 15 kinds or reports based on the data collected. These reports can be used to share information with colleagues and staff at the individual, grade, department, school, and district levels. The reports also can be used as an accountability measure on a larger scale for money spent on technology and other investments.
Conducting walkthroughs and gathering data is vital to identifying what individual teachers are doing well and the areas in which they need support, as well as ensuring high-quality instruction across classrooms. Technology can help simplify this process and, in short, maximize the power of walkthroughs.
Lisa Maxfield is managing consultant in McREL’s Center for Educator Effectiveness. To learn more about Power Walkthrough, contact her at lmaxfield@mcrel.org or 303.632.5561.
“Where are our reading strategies?” This was the reaction of a group of K‒5 educators in North Dakota I was working with in 2010 as we reviewed the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Some widely used strategies, such as summarizing and inferencing, were easily found in the new standards, while others—like text-to-self connections, making predictions, and pre-reading—were not. During the review process, it became clear that the role of reading strategies had shifted: They were no longer primary objectives for student reading, as they had been in previous state standards, curriculums, and reading programs.
The Common Core instead places the text and student understanding front and center. Rather than focus on reading strategies and how students read, the CCSS focuses on the text and what knowledge students gain from their reading. The new standards stress comprehension and analysis of complex texts and the synthesis of ideas across texts to build knowledge. Reading strategies are largely sidelined as techniques for scaffolding instruction with individual students. As David Coleman, a lead author of the CCSS and current president of the College Board, said in a presentation at the New York State Education Department, “We lavish so much attention on these strategies in the place of reading, I would urge us to instead read” (“Bringing the Common Core to Life,” p. 17).
We know, however, that many children don’t understand what they read, and that they benefit from instruction on how to apply research-based reading strategies. It is not surprising, then, that many teachers plan their reading curriculum around them. How can we align strategy-based curriculums with text-based standards? There is a sensible balance to be found.
Complex texts, by the very nature of their complexity, often require teachers to support students’ reading. Teachers should continue to teach students how to apply certain reading strategies when they need them, but strategies should not be applied for their own sakes. Strategies should be carefully selected to support the aspects of a given text that are complex. For example, texts that have a high readability score on the quantitative measure of the CCSS text complexity model often have challenging vocabulary and sentence structures, aspects that teachers should support through targeted reading strategies.
Research-based reading strategies still play an important role in teaching reading comprehension. However, teachers should seek out a complex text that provides the information or ideas that students need to learn, and then provide opportunities for students to practice using a strategy suited to that specific text, rather than seek out a text that “fits” a certain reading strategy dictated by the curriculum.
A former English language arts teacher, Susan Ryan is a curriculum services consultant at McREL and co-author of Common Core quick-start guides published by ASCD on English language arts and mathematics standards at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
