School Administrators: Not Sure What To Focus On Once You Get Into Classrooms? Try This!

If you have been following along at home, this is the third in a series of four articles about teacher supervision and evaluation practices. We looked at how the teacher contract impacts teacher evaluation (Is Your District’s Teacher Evaluation System Stopping You From Being An Effective Instructional Leader) and how you as the site administrator implement the system (Teacher Supervision and Evaluation: How I Got Better). If you have not already done so, there are two research-based surveys you can take to get a feeling for where both the district and your own personal practice are on the continuum that is modeled after the Continuum of Teaching Practice for the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTPs). You can find them at the end of each of these posts.

Keep It Simple

We will now be transitioning to an important administrator best practice to set yourself up for success – FINDING YOUR INSTRUCTIONAL SUPERVISION FOCUS for the school year. You might be saying, “but I already have identified our school-wide goals and they were aligned with the district-wide goals.” 

Excellent! I am going to make a bold prediction here that no matter what your goals are the focus for your visits, walk-throughs, informal observations and formal observations will fit within what I am about to suggest. Are you excited to find out more?

Without further ado….here it is…ACTIVE PARTICIPATION. What this means is whenever you are in classrooms (either in-person or virtually) your lens is focused on what strategy the teacher is using to engage ALL students and how they are responding. This is a tall order as it was very difficult to identify and improve practice around student engagement pre-pandemic. I know that some of you are farther along in your practice and I look forward to having you share your success stories with us. 🙂

Oh…Now I Get It!

I had the great fortune of working with the late Dr. Patricia Lawrence over the course of several years at which time she trained all administrators and teachers on the Essential Elements of Effective Instructional (Some of us affectionately called it E3I. There were a few who were less excited about the experience called it EIEIO – you have to be careful with acronyms, as they will sometimes come back to bite you). Dr. Lawrence described active participation this way: simultaneous, consistent, ongoing, mandated, involvement of all learners.

If you think this is a lot to wrap your mind around, you would be right. It took some time for teachers and administrators to understand what this would look like in the classroom. We had to DISPEL the idea that listening, reading, and taking notes were examples of active participation. This is heavy stuff! 

I confess that as a classroom teacher I would ask students to do like this (*nod head*) so I knew they understood.  Yikes! I did the same thing when working with adult learners. After being exposed to what truly constitutes active participation and how it is strategically used throughout a lesson to check for understanding, I began to realize the incredible power of developing a MORE effective active participation practice (and nodding your head is NOT one of them!).

One of the most vivid memories I have of applying this strategy was using whiteboards to have workshop participants identify if the statement I read was an example of overt or covert learning. I thought they all fully understood the concept after we spent some time talking about it and going through some examples together. Over half of the group of about 25 could not correctly identify the examples I gave them. I was in the room with them and making eye contact and they were smiling and nodding their heads that they understood, but they clearly did NOT…and that was on me. Distance learning makes it even more difficult as picking up on body language is near impossible on a Zoom meeting. That’s why intentionally planning for active participation is crucial. 

Next Steps

Some of the strategies that Dr. Lawerence had us practice included choral reading, call and response, thumbs up/thumbs down, whiteboard, and sticky notes/exit tickets. I recognize that distance learning is the reality for many teachers and students today. There are many creative ways that teachers are including opportunities for students to virtually participate. Here are some people I follow on Twitter who consistently post a wide variety of distance learning ideas and strategies: @thomascmurray, @gcouros, @E_Sheninger, @Catlin_Tucker, @jodylo, @techsavvygirl, @thatEdTechguy, @Curiosity_Films, and @TheBestEducator.

The good news, you don’t have to know all the ways this could happen and neither do your teachers! There are just two steps to implementing an instructional supervision focus of active participation, (1) get into classrooms every day and (2) have informal conversations with your teachers about what is happening and what else could be happening to get students actively participating. 

I have uploaded a lesson planning placemat that was developed by the new teacher support team I had to good fortune to lead that may be useful to you. It captures Dr. Lawerence’s training over the three years we worked with her. We would give a copy to the teachers we were supporting and one to their administrators as a possible resource for refining lessons plans. It contains A LOT of information and will likely reappear in future posts with expanded descriptions. 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Cheers,

Amysurveys