Part Three of Building a Learning-Focused Culture in Four Parts: One Classroom at a Time

If you have been following along with the first two parts of this series, you learned in Part 1 what a learning-focused culture can be and what it is not. In Part 2, you were asked to record your informal classroom observations and follow up teacher conversations. You likely have every intention of getting into classrooms as often as you are able. However, it is far too easy to get caught up in the daily managerial tasks as they are many and typically urgent (at least in someone’s estimation).

Three Dimensions to Success Building a Successful Practice

The key to building a learning-focused culture at your school requires that you unapologetically sanction time to be in classrooms and communicate with teachers about instruction EACH DAY. This sounds impossible, I know. Stay with me and I will explain how to create and maintain a classroom walk-through practice that is concise, structured, and impactful and will absolutely sharpen the focus on learning at your site.

Concise
This sounds counterintuitive, but committing to just two classroom visits and follow-up communication with teachers each day can be accomplished in very little time.  In fact, this can be completed in no more than 20 minutes in total. There are a few tools that can make this easier. One is creating a schedule of your visits and using a reminder system that works for you. Sticky notes and Google/Outlook calendar alarms are a couple of ways to keep this task on your radar every day. Each classroom visit should be about 5 minutes with another 5 minutes to craft follow-up feedback. Resist the urge to skip days and do more than two visits per day to catch up as this will impact your ability to provide actionable feedback.

Structured
Before your two daily classroom visits, you need to take a moment to mentally prepare. The first step is deciding what your focus will be during the visit. If you are just beginning to develop this practice, select one focus for everyone over a period of time (monthly, trimester, grading period, semester, for example). Student engagement is typically a high-leverage focus. During the visit, you are just paying attention to what the teacher is doing to engage students and how the students are responding.

The second step is to decide how you will deliver feedback to the teachers. One way is to craft a note (email, text, sticky note) before you leave the classroom. This works well for virtual environments. If you are physically in the classroom, wait until you are back in your office so it doesn’t appear that you are not paying attention during your visit. Whichever method you choose, be sure that it is easy to execute in a timely manner.

Impactful
I realize that site administrators DO NOT have 20 minutes each day to spend time on something that is not positively impacting the instructional program at their school. The classroom visit itself is necessary to get to the part that will create the most impact. The follow-up note or conversation after the visit is where the magic happens, especially when the feedback is strategically focused on opening the thinking of your teachers about their practice.

There are sentence stems that pose a reflective question that I found to be very useful when providing actionable feedback to teachers. When I first started, my notes were limited to “I like the way you…” or “your students enjoyed…”, which I eventually realized was vague and did not encourage reflection and further dialogue.

What’s Next?

In the fourth and final part of the series, I will share resources that helped me to consistently and efficiently provide learning-focused feedback to teachers that did lead to further dialogue and improved practice, including the afore mentioned sentence stems.

Below are a couple of articles I posted pre-pandemic – during my astronomy phase  🙂  that go into more detail. The one on the left is more practical.  The one on the right is much more technical, giving an example of how to align feedback to the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTPs). Simple click on the images to get to the articles.

Until next time…