For those of you playing along at home…it has been two years since I published part three of this series. The lesson for me has been “better late than never.” Instead of being highly critical of my failure to complete this series in a timely manner, I chose to focus on the fact that I am finishing this series at this time and will continue to add content to this website.Â
Perhaps you have not made the progress you had hoped to regularly visit classrooms or maybe this is now part of your daily practice, but you have not had time to develop a consistent follow-up routine. No matter where you are in the building of a learning-focused culture at your school, it is time to evaluate progress.
A Review of the First Three Parts
Learning-focused means visiting classrooms daily and having meaningful follow up dialogue with teachers.
Get into two classrooms everyday and ask teachers follow-up questions about their practice. Record the number of visits and begin to document your questions.
Concise, structured, and impactful practice of visiting classrooms daily with follow-up conversations.
The ultimate outcome for building a learning-focused culture it to improve success for ALL students. This success is multi-faceted and includes: academic, social and emotional measures. It will take time to see changes in the metrics typically used to measure growth in these areas. We need to narrow the focus to the improvement in teacher practice. But how should we measure it?
The ultimate goal is to continuously improve the quality of the conversations you are having with your teachers, particularly those who are new or are struggling with some aspect of the craft.
At the most basic level, the number of times you visit classrooms is an easy metric to track. However, in order to improve the impact, follow-up conversations with each teacher is essential. Note: an email exchange is a conversation, too.
The next level would be to select and maintain a classroom visit focus for each teacher. Perhaps student engagement is a school-wide focus but may look different depending on the teacher, grade-level, or subject.
The next level is to consider the following:
- Have you identified what incremental growth will look like for each individual teacher?
- Have you communicated this to each teacher?
- How are your reinforcing the focus and celebrating growth for each teacher in subsequent walk-throughs?
I would love to hear from you about what is easy and what is hard about building a learning-focused culture.
- Part Four of Building a Learning-Focused Culture in Four Parts: Evaluating Progress - September 20, 2022
- Part Three of Building a Learning-Focused Culture in Four Parts: One Classroom at a Time - September 30, 2020
- Part Two of Building a Learning-Focused Culture in Four Parts: Taking Stock - September 14, 2020
