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In a former life, I was a quality manager where my job was to study things like kaizen, a Japanese methodology of “gradual continuous improvement”.  In my current life, a form of kaizen, also from Japanese culture is the structure of lesson study.

Consider this:  The team is faced with a learning challenge.  Data analysis identified the problem, student work reviews analyzed these kids’ particular misconceptions, the problem-solving process is underway to decide what to do and now you want to look at how we’re teaching to fix this problem.  Your team decides the next step is to actually plan, teach, observe, and analyze a lesson together to see what slight variables and improvements begin to really change kids’ learning.  After you’ve spent this time, you share what you learn in your own white paper so that other teachers might gain insight about their students.

This one really sounds almost too simplified.  If you read the previous five professional learning conceptions posted here (Managing Curriculum, Peer Observation, Lit Review, Data Analysis, Student Work Review), lesson study could easily sound redundant. While each of these formats can be useful individually, any of them could consume the limited professional learning time allotted to teachers.  If you are interested in pursuing an ongoing structure for your professional learning, these are all embedded features of lesson study.  Here is a concise organization system for engaging in lesson study from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.

How do you see implementing this model into your work?  What might enhance or inhibit it for you?

Picking up from the last Professional Learning Conception (#4 – Data Analysis), it seems that prerequisite to having data worth analyzing, there is student work that results in the data.  Before “data-driven” became the overused cliché that it has in education, we looked at how our students performed.  Tables, graphs, and normed numbers, as we now call “data”, make that process a little easier, but do not replace the decision-making step of determining how students got to those easy summaries that are data.  This requires collaborative learning through the close examination of student work, a skill that should be close, perhaps innate even, to the heart of even the least data-minded educator.

Consider this: Your team has student assessment data clearly showing a deficit in a specific area or skill.  The skill is important because, not only is it listed in the learning standards guiding and binding our profession, but primarily because the skill represents significant academic preparation for the road ahead for students. To really get to the heart of what’s going on with their performance, your team chooses to look at a few of the key pieces of work that you jointly assign.  These could be classwork, assessments, exit slips, probably not homework.  You know it would be fruitless to each bring the entire class set of work.  This isn’t sit and grade together time, it is professional learning time!  Instead, you decide that it makes sense to select only a few kids’ work, not those who have bombed everything and not those who aced it all.  You want some of those border kids, maybe someone who usually does okay but didn’t on this work.  It could be that you have a mass of kids who didn’t do well, or even some who seem to always be just under par.  This is the student work you want to analyze deeply: first, to determine what and how the kids were thinking and approaching the work; next, to determine if the task was as true to the expectation as you intended; finally, you discuss what changes or additional instruction need to happen for your kids to hit it.  Between these three methods, your team identifies opportunities to improve teaching, learning, and perhaps the assignment itself.

Examining our instruction through the lens of student work should be a regular activity that teachers do together in a self-sustaining school.  If it feels clumsy or misguided, there are plenty of protocols (Google: “examining student work”) that can help you structure these conversations in a variety of ways.  If student learning is what it’s all about, and I believe it is, then why wouldn’t we spend a good deal of our own professional learning studying the artifacts of theirs?

How do you see implementing this model into your work?  What might enhance or inhibit it for you?

One of my main concerns for teaching is the focus of student data that is increasingly being used to evaluate the quality of a teacher.  I agree whole-heartedly that student performance information should inform how a teacher measures progress towards learning targets and should inform the rate and method of instruction he chooses to hit those targets.  The truth is, quality teachers have always been engaged enough in their professional work that they spend most of their lives worrying and planning on how to reach students who need a lift or a challenge.  The problem is, formalizing and standardizing a practice of using data is not a skillset or disposition that all teachers bring to the classroom.  It must be developed, and usually is, with experience.  However, policy and laws are accelerating the need for those skills to be developed through punitive timelines that require we learn how to collect, analyze, and provide data that will not only be used to inform our teaching and learning, but may also preserve a livelihood we love.

Consider this:  Your team, and the local paper, receives a pile of reports from a state test showing that your students aren’t up to par.   Alas, you have been working with your team to determine what academic areas are historically weak in your building, grade, or department.  From those discussions, you’ve identified what other assessment opportunities there are to help you understand what and how the kids in front of you are learning in these areas.  With support from your principal, district peers, or a coach, the team has made it a point to learn new ways to analyze data together, giving you confidence to debunk any surface-level perceptions of your students’ learning.  In fact, this analysis of data points occurs in consistent intervals as part of your “PD” because it informs your problem-solving process for your professional learning and improving instruction for your kids. Invested in this approach to professional learning, you now infrequently hear team members lament on the litany of external variables that keep your students from succeeding. Rather, they discuss how to help kids based on specific measures for the task at hand.

When a team owns the things they can manage, by measuring it, they are able to explicitly and specifically cite data that supports the quality of instruction and professional learning that supports children.  Learning the skills of data analysis (what to measure, how to measure it, how to evaluate it) is not commonly considered pedagogical, but must become part of that book of knowledge of teaching.  This professional learning takes time to refine and apply to students, cohort after cohort, but is for their own academic good and our own professional security.

How do you see implementing this model into your work?  What might enhance or inhibit it for you?

So often I read professional articles or journals that really inspire and speak to me and my classroom needs.  A well-written, divinely-timed article can literally change your practice, just by growing your thinking about instruction, or even philosophy of teaching.  I can’t tell you how many articles come in and out of my inbox because, like me, other teachers who find something wonderful to them, want to make it wonderful for others.  My challenge is reading all of the great thinking and deciding which ones really are my kind of wonderful.

Consider this: You come across research that really moves you.  The author’s work, 15 pages long, drew you in and is now marked up with your highlights and comments about what made it so significant to you. Even a clean copy might be sufficiently long that you know your peers may not share your complete zeal for the subject, simply because they are busy.  You want others on your team to consider this exciting work and how it could improve your students’ success.  To replicate your excitement and professional judgment that this literature is important, you create a one-page (or less) white paper  (or email) summarizing the work.  Maybe it includes these four sections…article title/author, where it’s from, one-paragraph synopsis, connection to your team’s work.  (Having done this myself a handful of times, it takes about 10 minutes to write this because interest is high and your desire to share is higher.)  You send this out to your team and/or peers of interest, so that they can get glimpse of where your personal professional learning is headed.  Those interested might ask, or search, for the article for more details.  Upon your next “PD” time together, you have fodder for substantive conversation.

So many times teachers are presented with an article in a large group, asked to sit and read together, then discuss the implications if we found any.  At worst, such a process as I’ve described above is more directly related to a team’s ongoing work and provides an efficient way to separate chaff from grain.  At best, a team could plan time with the full text, and beyond, informing their own problem-solving process in true collaboration that is meaningful to their daily work with students.

How do you see implementing this model into your work?  What might enhance or inhibit it for you?

One of the common things I’ve heard from teachers for years is that we want to “watch someone else do it”.  This concept led me to a team-teaching model in my classroom so that I could have the daily experience of teaching in front of a partner for feedback and learning from observing another’s style.  Even those who think having an audience is unnerving, by-and-large I still hear them voice a desire to see others teach.  In some cases we want affirmation that what we’re doing is right or good, in others we are looking for qualitative improvements that inform our own learning.  Emotions and reasons aside, there remain logistical challenges to implementing true team-teaching or peer observations to scale.

Consider this: A team has worked through the problem-solving of particular content.  From an instructional viewpoint and from looking at their student outcomes they created evidence that the methods they learned and used were really effective and brought the results they were seeking.  This is now part of their practice, so they’ve recorded a lesson, or maybe just a clip of the strategies, and placed it in a video library that you and your team can now access.  As you approach an evidenced-based challenge on your team, you realize you need outside support to complete a plan to help your students and develop your instruction. Can your team take a little “PD” time to watch these strategies and make them part of your plan?

OR

Your kids aren’t performing to the level you expect, but you can’t figure out what would improve the results you want to see.  Working with your team, you devise a plan to record things going on in the classroom.  Maybe it’s your own room, maybe it’s a team member’s room; it might be a specific lesson, time of day, or strategy; perhaps you want to see what the kids are doing or what the teacher is doing.  There are so many variables, but you know that reflecting upon seeing it in action is the key to improving it.  Is your team safe enough to observe and honestly reflect on each other’s private teaching?  Could your team take a little “PD” time to organize this record-and-review process for your professional learning and the sake of your kids?

Athletic coaches and players watch video all the time to analyze individual and collective improvement.  We are so strapped for time and human resources in schools that instructional reflection is often relegated to the individual teacher, but digital videos are more available and efficient than ever.  It would seem that if learning by watching others remains a high interest among teacher, and we crave engaged learning, then we could use sparse resources and technology to fulfill a need that drives professional learning.

How do you see implementing this model into your work?  What might enhance or inhibit it for you?