Part Two of Building a Learning-Focused Culture in Four Parts: Taking Stock

There is no time like the present (NO exaggeration!) to be in classrooms. Your presence and interest in what teachers and students are experiencing is the best way to show them your support. Developing a practice that focuses on instruction will greatly increase the return on your investment of time and impact the learning-focused culture at your school. Read on to find out more…

In the last post: Part One of Building a Learning-Focused Culture in Four Parts: Defining It, we looked at defining what it is and is not. Now it’s time to take inventory…literally, by counting the number of times you visit classrooms and follow-up with teachers each day. That’s it. Not how long the visit was or if the follow-up was a call, text or email. Right now, you are just keeping track of how many visits and follow-ups you do for one week.

Why Count?

Over the past few years, I had the great pleasure of working with Dr. Ayele Dodoo and Dr. Teresa Alonzo from The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd. (You can check out their work at  https://implementationmatrix.wested.org/). I have learned so much from them about collecting evidence of successful practice and why beginning with quantitative measures is so important. Setting a goal for improving practice cannot be developed without being aware of the current practice. You will learn much more about how they integrate implementation science with school leadership teams in Part Four of this series. You will be amazed by their work!

Building a learning-focused culture at your school will require that you are visiting classrooms. The simplest unit of measure for this is how many classrooms you visit over time. In addition, the number of follow-up conversations you have with the teachers you visit are counted, as this is where the magic happens! What does that look like? It can be a quick email, phone call, or virtual chat. The point is that your follow-up needs to be within the same day as the visit and focus on instructional practice. 

One of the ways I would track classroom visits would be to use a routing slip that the office staff already created. I placed a tally mark next to the name of the teacher I had visited and circled or highlighted the tally mark when I followed up. The details about the visit or the nature of the follow up are not important to record at this time as you are simply collecting baseline information about your visits and follow-up correspondence. 

Visiting and Following

As you are observing the lesson, focus on the use of student participation strategies.

Craft a short email to the teacher and if possible, send it BEFORE you leave the classroom. This email might include statements like:

• I value the time I was able to spend with you and your class today
• I saw your students….. (describe what you saw them doing)
• I wonder…(ask a follow-up question)
• I look forward to talking with you more about your thoughts on…
• Thank you for staying focused on the needs of our students by…(does not necessarily need to be connected to the observation).

Again, keep it simple and focus on one aspect of instruction for all teachers, like active student engagement. Writing these emails might be clunky at first. Remember for this week’s data collection, you are just counting how many visits and follow-ups.

Below is a model of what a tally for the week might look like: