Our expert researchers, evaluators, and veteran educators synthesize information gleaned from our research and blend it with best practices gathered from schools and districts around the world to bring you insightful and practical ideas that support changing the odds of success for you and your students. By aligning practice with research, we mix professional wisdom with real world experience to bring you unexpectedly insightful and uncommonly practical ideas that offer ways to build student resiliency, close achievement gaps, implement retention strategies, prioritize improvement initiatives, build staff motivation, and interpret data and understand its impact.
We know from research that students having a strong bond with even one teacher can dramatically impact math and reading scores and can impact overall behavior and achievement as students move through their K-12 years. Yet, in spite of knowing its importance, it’s easy for us as teachers to assume that, even if we don’t have a personal connection with a student, that someone else in the building does. But how can we be sure? How can we make absolutely certain that a student doesn’t “fall through the cracks” due to a lack of having access to a trusted adult?
At their core, classroom observations should be about coaching, building up professional practice, and supporting better outcomes for students. Principals should use classroom observation data to enrich conversations during professional learning community meetings, individual teacher coaching conferences, and staff meetings. When large samples of student data are available, school leaders can disaggregate the data by age, content area, or other categories to enable powerful analysis of the data’s meaning and uses. This, combined with other evidence, can be used to support school improvement goals, collaborative planning, professional development planning, and a common understanding of what quality pedagogy looks like. Principals who do this well can help their teachers
make great gains in teaching and learning.
We’re sometimes asked by principals and district leaders who are interested in Power Walkthrough® for more information about how the system ties in with research-informed instructional practices and good classroom observation protocols and purposes.
The Power Walkthrough system supports best practice by using a carefully designed template of observable elements based on the best understanding of modern pedagogy, with indicators of research-informed classroom environmental factors, instructional strategies, learning taxonomies, technology applications, evidence of learning, and student interview responses. The template is customizable, so that if a school wants to focus on formative assessment or collaborative learning, they can do so by adding or substituting observation elements. We recommend not adding too much to the observation template, so that it doesn’t turn into a teacher evaluation tool and take too long to conduct. If individual observations take more than 3-5 minutes to conduct, principals won’t
be able to visit enough classrooms for the data to be valid and reliable.
Validity and reliability of data relies not only on a sufficient sample size, but also on the skill of the observer. Becoming an efficient, skilled, and astute observer of teaching and learning takes quality training, practice, and collaborative reflection between observers. School leaders don’t have to be experts in all content areas to conduct good observations, but they do have to be highly knowledgeable in pedagogy and be a keen observer of student learning evidence. The Power Walkthrough templates help principals by providing cues, “look-fors,” and a common nomenclature.
Templates and lists provide structure and allow for statistical analysis, but they don’t preclude the principal from observing other factors in the classroom, interviewing students, or recording descriptive notes. In fact, Power
Walkthrough observations are designed to end with student interviews to gather student perspectives on what they’re trying to learn and why they’re learning it, to see if they fully comprehend the objectives of the lesson. Answers such as “we’re learning math because we have a test on Friday” aren’t good enough. A great
answer would be something like, “we’re learning how to graph polynomials because they can be used to model how some things work in nature like the shape a stream of water takes when it’s shot out of a fountain or the path of a
basketball when you shoot a free throw.”
In the end it’s not about the instrument itself, but how it’s applied. Depending on the goals of school leadership, Power Walkthrough can be used either for typical data collection purposes or innovative change. We encourage instructional leaders to collaborate with each other and their teachers to learn from the data together. Teachers will take ownership of the data’s meaning if they are allowed to find it themselves rather than using a top-down approach of dictating to them what the data means. If used regularly and collaboratively, Power Walkthrough data can provide a wealth of professional development experiences for all educators, both on a daily basis and as part of a whole school improvement effort.
We hope this explains a little more about how Power Walkthrough supports good classroom observation practices and instructional improvement.
Matt Kuhn is a principal consultant at McREL, where he designs and delivers professional development and provides technical assistance to school and districts in instructional technology, STEM, and leadership.
It’s nearing the end of the school year across America, which means thousands of principals are preparing school improvement plans for the 2013-14 school year. There are two common scenarios that take place, illustrated here by Principal A and Principal B:
Principal A sits down and, with little input or involvement from others, dutifully writes an ambitious school improvement plan for the next school year. The plan is submitted to the central office and receives a stamp of approval. At the beginning of the new school year, the plan is shared for the first time with the school staff. Momentum and focus are quickly lost, and the plan sits on a shelf, practically untouched, until the end of the school year.
I just had an article published in Middle Ground magazine, Creating Your Own Destiny: Teaching the Importance of Effort. This article talks about the importance helping students to understand the relationship between effort and their success.
Have you had a student like Lynn as described in the article? What strategies worked for you?
Classroom observations, or walkthroughs, are quick snapshots that, over time, begin to show trends within a school—trends which can be used to identify staff development needs. Based on feedback from our Power Walkthrough clients, we’ve found that schools and districts use their observation data to set goals, provide specific professional development, increase coaching conversations, and enhance mentoring programs.
But in examining our clients’ data, we often see a decrease in the number of walkthroughs during April and May. Walkthroughs should be an integral part of the school culture and part of the normal routine in which teachers and students are comfortable with administrators in the classroom. If we know and understand the importance of walkthroughs, why is there such a large drop-off in how many are done during the last quarter of the school year?
Are you seeing similar trends in your school? Why do you think this might be? We welcome your insights in the comments below.
Written by senior consultant Lisa Maxfield and administrative specialist Cheryl Mervich.
With this in mind, have we spent the past 20 years fretting over raising standards, creating related assessments, and designing accountability systems to improve student performance, but neglecting to help students understand why any of this should be meaningful to them?
Raise the bar and raise performance. For 20 years, that principle has guided school reform efforts in the United States and abroad. Since the early 90s, every U.S. state has developed systems standards, student testing on those standards, and accountability for results on those tests. More recently, 46 states have signed on to Common Core standards, which promise to raise the bar even higher. A new report from Harvard University, however, may cast some doubt on whether tougher state standards actually raise student performance.
But in examining our clients’ data, we often see a decrease in the number of walkthroughs during April and May. Walkthroughs should be an integral part of the school culture and part of the normal routine in which teachers and students are comfortable with administrators in the classroom. If we know and understand the importance of walkthroughs, why is there such a large drop-off in how many are done during the last quarter of the school year?