In Seek of Continuous Improvement

The post and reflection below comes from teaching fellow and 2nd grade Bel Air teacher Denise Sinkel.

As the end of the year approaches, I have spent some time reflecting on this school year and what we can do better next year.  In class we were asked, what is your vision? Where do you see your school going? I have targeted three areas of improvement for Bel Air and more specifically, 2nd grade. My first idea targets our 2nd grade intervention model, while the second and third target the entire school.

First, I want to change our intervention model. Currently, we have a strong focus on fluency and phonics. It seems that the same kids are in intervention for the majority of the year, there is not much flow in or out. We tend to forget about math interventions altogether. In 2nd grade, fluency and phonics are crucial. We are moving toward 100 minutes of phonics instruction a week next year, which I hope will free up some intervention time. Here is what I would like to see done with that time:

When we complete a plan-do-study-act cycle, we are never at 100% proficiency. We make or exceed our goal, but there are still kids who are not proficient. What are we doing for those kids?  The majority of the students are ready to move on, so we need to continue. We always say that we are going to keep working with those students who are not ready, but we need to be more purposeful with how we do that. I would like to see some of our intervention time spent on these students. The interventions would be flexible; whichever standard we focused on for that cycle is what the intervention would be. Maybe 2 days a week we take those students who are not proficient and they receive intervention based on that standard. With this model, we make sure the students who need extra support are getting it. We are not just saying we will keep working with them, we are actually doing it and in a more meaningful way.

The second and third parts of my vision go hand-in-hand. Our population of students with mental illness seems to be growing. I see anxieties showing up in my students on a daily basis. These anxieties are often displayed as some sort of negative behavior. We need support staff at the school to help with the growing mental issues that are presenting themselves. I would love to see a counselor that meets with children throughout their day. We need to be proactive, not reactive when it comes to mental illness. We need more opportunities for social groups. I know many students who would benefit from a daily social group or seeing a counselor on a daily basis.

The final part of my vision is a mentorship program between teachers and students that I think would be wonderful for our school. I want to see every teacher be a mentor to one student who needs extra support. The student could have a mental illness, speak english as a second language, have a chaotic homelife, or be struggling academically. The mentorship would last the student’s entire career at Bel Air and possibly beyond. Imagine the relationship and trust that could be built. I think behavior issues would decrease while academic progress would increase.  Teachers would need time to connect during the school day at least once a week. This could look like having lunch together, helping with homework, taking 10 minutes to play a game or just to have a meaningful conversation. I would also like to see this program extend outside regular school hours at least once a month. Outside of school it might look like going to a museum, having a picnic at a park together, or going bowling. I think this program would have endless benefits for our school and community.

Providing Actionable Feedback to Students

This post is courtesy of Sarah Anderson, Irondale High School Social Studies Teacher and Mounds View Fellow:

As I look at my daunting pile of essay portfolio folders I am tempted to run back upstairs to my bed and climb under the covers.  It is spring break and my students have been writing essays all year, keeping a portfolio that includes their own reflections about how each essay went and what specific feedback they want me to give them.  Over the course of the year and with the cooperation of my PLC member I have been working smarter not harder, making the job of feedback not quite so daunting (however a pile of 90 essays is still daunting!)

What is feedback?  According to Grant Wiggins (2012 ), “it is goal referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.” Similarly according to  Susan Brookhart (2012),“good feedback is timely, descriptive of the work, positive, clear and specific, and differentiated.”  Therefore, in order to spend the time giving feedback teachers need to be cognitive of the way in which feedback is delivered.  

Goal Referenced or Aligned to a Target

My students are writing essays for an AP History course, they know the standard rubric which includes having a clear well developed thesis, supporting evidence with specific examples, and effectively analyzing evidence. Instead of giving the students the rubric and making check marks if the student has met the goals, I write feedback on their essay and reflections targeting one of these three big areas.  The rubric itself is helpful for me and my own recording but it s not  helpful for a student that needs actionable steps to make progress.  Do I give them feedback on every mistake?  No, my goal is to help my students improve their writing and an exhaustive list of suggestions is not going to help them.  According to Brookhart (2012) “ Choose your words carefully, describe the works strengths and give at least one suggestion for a next step that is directly in line with the learning target.”  For example, at the beginning of the school year with the first essay my focus is the thesis statement.  Maybe the students have some strong supporting evidence within their body paragraphs and I will underline the evidence with a comment arguing that this is what strong supportive evidence looks like, but I will spend most of my time giving specific actionable feedback on the thesis, dissecting the thesis for the student or in some cases re writing the thesis using the arguments they put in the essay. According  to Wiggins (2012), “Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that , if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement.”

Positive and  Differentiated

Each student is at a differing point in their learning and as educators we have a responsibility to meet the students where they are at and move them in their learning, challenge them and help them continue to grow their skills.  Differentiated instruction uses the current work of the student to meet the need of the student, each student may need something different, a prompt for one or a reminder or example for another (Brookhart 2012).  As my students progress throughout the year, each will be in a different place in their writing. The writing portfolios are helpful because I can look at where they were in their last essay, what feedback was given and if they put that feedback to use in the next essay.  A student that has spent their first three essays addressing the complexity of their thesis and has gotten to a place where they have written a well developed thesis can see the growth and I can address the growth instilling not praise but confidence in that student as far as that element of writing is concerned.  Positive feedback promotes learning and allows students to see learning as a journey (Brookhart 2008). I am very careful to make sure the feedback is positive and not praise.  Praise can change the direction of the journey of learning making it about the teacher and not the student (Dweck, 2007).  If the thesis is not strengthening then I can as an educator come up with a different way to address this concern since my feedback is not helping the student progress.  Students are only given feedback and not a score on their essays, because again this a journey of learning and each student starts and ends in a different place in their writing.

Timely

This is the hardest issue to address as an educator. How do I make sure that the students get timely feedback?  How then are the students going to use the feedback that I have given them? In the writing portfolios, I am able to give feedback to students within a week of writing their essays. However, my students will not write another essay for two more weeks. So how do I make this useful to the student?   I have been giving the students their feedback within the week, then I have started to hand out the portfolios again the day before the next essay is to be written. At that time I ask my student individually what element  or elements of their writing are they going to work on during their next essay tomorrow?  Again when they come to class to write that day, they look one more time at their feedback from their previous essay, the content is different but the elements of writing are the same. According to Brookhart (2012) “ Timely. It arrives while the student is still thinking about the work and while there’s still time for improvement.”

Conclusion

Providing Actionable Feedback to our students is our responsibility as educators, if we want our students to grow and succeed they must know how to grow and succeed. Our students must be given feedback that provides them steps to achieve and in order for us to help our students achieve we must work smarter not harder. We must be aligned with a target in our feedback so that our students understand what they are working towards and are given actionable steps to use. We must be  positive in our feedback so they see learning as their journey not ours. We must differentiate our feedback to the needs of our specific students (giving one or two pieces of feedback to help them reach their learning target). And Lastly, we must be timely in our feedback so that our students can address the feedback by “trying it again.”  Therefore I will not run upstairs and crawl under my covers but instead work smarter not harder in delivering feedback to my students.

Brookhart, Susan M. (2012).  Preventing Feedback Fizzle. Educational Leadership. 70 (1) 24 - 29.

Wiggins, Grant. (2012). Seven Keys to Effective Feedback. Educational Leadership. 70 (1) 10 - 16.

Dweck.C. S. (2007). The perils and promises of praise. Educational Leadership. 65 (2) , 34 - 39.

5 Characteristics of Highly Effective Teams

The Advantage: Teamwork Model

In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni articulates five behavioral principles that all team members must embrace. As indicated in the image to the right, the 5 principles are  trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results. These principles build off one another, which is to say, if a team doesn't have trust they also won't have conflict, commitment, accountability or results. Just the same, if they have trust but shy away from conflict, they won't achieve commitment, accountability or results.

This is the first in a 5-part series of reflections aiming to use Lencioni's Teamwork Model to detail the importance of each principle as it relates to Mounds View Teacher Development and Appraisal Process (TDAP). I intend to provide strategies for teams that need to establish or refine any or all of these principles as part of their quest to become a highly effective team. I'll begin where all teams wishing to become highly effective must begin, by building trust.

Building Trust
Without establishing vulnerability-based trust, teams will struggle to engage in conflict, achieve collective commitments, hold each other accountable and produce desired results. Trust is everything. To be clear, trust is not just about having confidence in a team member to follow through on a set of agreed-upon action steps. It's the ability of team members to speak openly, honestly and with vulnerability about mistakes, failures, and weaknesses. This level of trust is uncommon, especially among relationally disconnected teams. PLCs void of trust often operate at a very surface level. They focus meetings around procedural discussions related to a common calendar (upcoming units, assignments, projects, field trips, or standardized assessments). They are not engaged in action research around their collective capacity to cause learning (the goal of TDAP) because to articulate what they're doing well and not so well necessitates a willingness to be vulnerable. Collaborative teams that don't have trust "do" PLC work, as opposed to identifying the collaborative process as synonymous with who they are as teachers.

Graham and Ferriter (2009) suggest teams use and discuss the results of this survey to determine the extent to which they trust one another enough to engage in the kind of conflict that produces authentic commitment. To then begin building trust, Lencioni suggests teams share "Personal Histories." Members simply share meaningful things about their lives; they take time to discuss where they were born or grew up, how many siblings they have and where they fall in the order among them, and what the most interesting or difficult challenge was for them as a child (Lencioni, 2012, P. 28). To lead this type of discussion, consider using this 4-corners exercise. It's been my experience that when teams begin to share personal histories, they find connections they did not know previously existed (I found out a team member dated the girl I took to  my senior prom). The other added benefit is that each member takes a "journey within," whenever asked to recall previous lived experiences. When led skillfully, these "personal journeys within" can be tied to who each person is as a cultural  being, a necessary realization for becoming culturally proficient.

In addition to intentionally building relational awareness and capacity through the sharing of personal histories, Lencioni suggests teams engage in this "Team Effectiveness Exercise." In completing the exercise, whereby each person articulates one thing the other members do that helps the team and hurts the team, groups discover how giving and receiving direct and actionable feedback improves team performance.

Building Trust Means Being Aware of Fundamental Attribution Error
A key piece of learning for teams that don't have trust is the notion of fundamental attribution error. Lencioni describes fundamental attribution error as "the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors (Lencioni, 2012, P. 32)."  To be mindful of fundamental attribution error is to become aware of how our perceptions and misconceptions color our collaborative reality.

For more on trust and the "power of vulnerability" visit my blog entry from November 2014.

Our Schools

Today's entry comes from David Wicklund, Pinewood Special Education teacher and Mounds View Fellow:

With more of an emphasis today in education being placed on the whole learner, non-cognitive skills, and our own “habits of mind,” we teachers find ourselves being pulled in so many directions. At times the job can seem daunting. Read teacher blogs, daily commentary in the news or opinion pages, or watch the political education rhetoric being produced and you know that we teachers and our students are consistently feeling the pressures placed on our schools.

The sense of urgency with which teachers teach should not be lost with those both inside and outside of classrooms. At our best, teachers are agents of change who engage all learners, work collaboratively within school communities, inspire creativity, continually seek best practices, embed technology for better understanding, and feel a passion to work for all students especially the most vulnerable in our communities. Celebrated success is all around us.

Although we know the daily expectations that are on all teachers, for the most difficult classrooms, we teachers can feel the opposite of inspirational or inspired. Most days it can feel like we are operating in constant emergencies. The never-ending need to adjust, find solutions, maintain growth, balance relationships, build consistency in the classroom and school, all while operating with a “growth mindset” can be overwhelming. What happens when school communities daily struggle to understand all students who enter their schools? How do school communities grow and create narratives that can be internalized for all students, for all in the community?