The 4SI ( Student Success School Support Initiative) process has been the richest professional
development experience of my 15 years as a Secondary School administrator.
There are a number of elements that have contributed to this richness:
1)
Because this was a Ministry mandated program, I
needed it to be my #1 priority for moving our teaching practice forward as a
school
2)
Because it was my #1 priority, I was thoroughly
engaged throughout the process, learning from and with our Professional
Learning Team (Plt)
3)
Because we learned together, we built trust in
one another, and in the process.
4)
Because we built trust, we could urge each other
to “step off the edge”, as one of our group likes to put it.
5)
Because I was at the table, the teachers felt
they had “permission” to make mistakes.
6)
Because we made mistakes, we learned from them.
7)
Because we “stepped off the edge”, we created
lessons that were accessible to the most at-risk students in our classes and
took the teachers off the center stage.
8)
Because we made our lessons accessible to all,
our most at-risk students miraculously became engaged in their learning and we
were awed by them.
9)
Because we were amazed that our most
disconnected students dove in and grabbed their learning by the throat and ran
with it, we came to embrace Dweck’s “growth mindset”.
10)
Because we learned to trust in our students’
ability to learn when the conditions were right, we could no longer accept that
the old way was good enough. We couldn’t go back and blame them for not
learning. We knew in our hearts that if we created lessons that were
differentiated and based on Hattie’s prime evidence-based teaching strategies,
we would level the playing field and invite all of our students to the table.
11)
Because of all of the above, our student achievement
has risen remarkably and our PLT has deepened our understanding of how students
learn and how to help make that possible.
12)
The experiences of our PLT have spread
throughout the school in rich discussions, shared practice, and an excitement
for change in our teaching practice as a school.
During this process, the need to deepen my knowledge of
current research on teaching and learning has become increasingly important and
because we refer to this research on a regular basis, it’s relevance is the
more evident.
At the beginning, although we were identified as a 4SI
school, I knew from experience that this could not be “just another
Ministry-imposed ‘thing’ ”. We would have to find a way to align it with the
important work we were doing on our school’s SMART goal which had been
identified as “critical thinking” (find the wording in SIPSA). Our staff had
embraced Lucy West’s inspirational work around “accountable talk”. We had
rallied around her wonderful quote that “traditional schooling involves 30
people watching 1 person work”. Our staff PD focused on creating strategies and
lesson plans that turned the tables on our students and brought them into the
learning through cooperative learning and active inquiry into concepts. There
was a buzz in the prep rooms about how to make this work. We had understood
that if we were going to develop ‘critical thinking’, then we were going to
have to, in fact, find a way to know what students were thinking. This had to
happen through “accountable talk”. In
studying the Ministry documents which referred to Hattie’s work, the PLT
quickly identified two strategies that would promote this reality:
“Self-verbalization” and “ Higher-level questioning”
(As an aside, John Hattie’s seminal work “Visible
Learning: A synthesis of over 80 Meta-analyses relating to Achievement”, is
a must-read for Administrators. If
offers so many insights into evidence-based strategies that can help direct
school improvement through an emphasis on teaching and learning.)
One element of the 4SI process involves creating diagnostic
tools for each of the subjects involved. This provides baseline data for
comparison with post-diagnostic assessments.
In addition, the PLT identifies skill gaps that inhibit success in those
subjects. In English, the teachers
identified Inferencing and Making Personal Connections, while the Math group
identified Proportional Reasoning as the skill sets that they would be seeking
to develop.
The 4SI process directed us to identify a model for our PLT.
We benefitted from the previous experience of two of our Math teachers, Bruce
McLaurin and Al Overwijk who had participated in Lesson Studies in their
earlier Ministry-funded TLLP project. This proved to be the most profound co-learning
experience that we could have ever imagined.
The Lesson Study involves bringing together the PLT in order
to co-plan, teach, and debrief “our” lesson.
The steps involved are as follows:
1)
As a team of four, then five teachers, two of
whom teach English, and three who teach Math, each teacher took a turn in the
cycle to teach a lesson. We recommend
that you put aside a full day for the first planning session of the Lesson
Study process. You will need this time to learn about the steps, discuss your
students in a general way, identify your “learning gap(s)” and begin to get to
know one another better. Let me say at the outset that our teachers found it
difficult to absent themselves regularly from these most at-risk students. We
learned that although this is part of the sacrifice of participating in a
Lesson Study, the pay-back was life-changing and the ultimate benefit for our
students worth the cost.
2)
You will need two half days for prepping, teaching and debriefing the
co-created lesson. On the first half-day the teacher in question brings along
an idea for a lesson, the “big ideas”, or curricular expectations linked to the
lesson, and the class list with the students’ pictures attached.
3)
Our first step was to discuss each of the
students in the class (because other teachers frequently taught the same
students, the insights were even richer). Teachers would describe the students’
strengths and challenges, social behaviours, family or socio-economic
situation, attendance, and any other contributing factors to their learning.
This is an important element for our observation of our lesson, as we have thus
identified the most at-risk students and can focus more effectively on their
engagement in the learning process.
4)
The co-creating process is extremely enriching.
In our experience, because we had combined English and Math, the English
teachers often felt out of their depth in the references to Math concepts. The
Math teachers mirrored this feeling in regards to the English lessons. The
power of this disconnect became immediately evident: what was important in the lesson was not so
much “what” was being taught as “how” and “to whom”. Our rich conversations reflect how difficult
it can be to make self-verbalization happen in our classes, and how much
thought must go into planning lessons where higher level questions are created,
both by the teachers, and more importantly, by our students. ( Another
wonderful resource that we have discovered at our Department Heads’ Book Club, and which has since been
disseminated throughout many departments, is “Essential Questions: Opening
Doors to Student Understanding” by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins )
5)
As the Principal, in addition to formalizing the
PLT work through my engagement in it, I have sought to encourage the team to ‘dare”
to make mistakes. As Eleanor Duckworth says: “learning is messy”. We have
pushed ourselves “off that edge” numerous times. Sometimes it has worked, and
sometimes not as well. But we have always learned from it. Sometimes we begin
to rely on traditional methods that won’t get us where we want to go. I see
part of my role as one of keeping our
collective eye on the ball. Reminding us that we are falling short of creating
opportunities for self-verbalization, answering too many questions, not leaving
room for student co-creating, taking too much place in the learning process –
allowing “30 people to watch 1 person work”.
In doing this, we have all taken on this
role in the lesson study process, each teacher bringing his or her expertise to
the planning process and challenging the whole to raise the bar.
6)
On the second half day, which is chosen so that
the lesson is always the first class in our two-period half day, the teacher
provides us with copies of the students’ names and faces, as well as the
write-up of the lesson. One of the powers of the Lesson Study is that we are
not watching the teacher, it is not his or her lesson, but “our” lesson, and
our emphasis is to watch how the students, and particularly those at-risk
students, engage in the lesson that we have co-created. We interact very
little with the students who are surprisingly unaffected by the presence of
five or six teachers in their classes! We observe and take notes, and sometimes
pictures of their work, and of them working. We are eager to see how effective
our lesson is.
7)
We use the period after the lesson to debrief.
The teacher whose class we have observed is first to offer his or her
observations about the class. What he thinks worked and didn’t work. What her
reactions to various students’ engagement or lack of are, and her feelings in
general about the experience. The other members of the PLT then offer their observations
about the lesson, about individual students’ engagement and what each has
learned through the process.
8)
It has been our experience that, as we go deeper
into the Lesson Study, and as we seek to integrate our identified teaching
strategies into our practice, other gaps begin to appear in the students’
learning, and in our own practice. For
example, although we initially created lessons that allowed students to respond
to open-ended questions and create their own, it became obvious that, in fact, they
frequently did not know what a good question was. This led to a subsequent lesson study that
focused on having students identified the criteria of “good questions”. Further
along the practice, and supported by Hattie’s research, we became aware that we
needed to develop our students’ ability to self-assess. This underlined how
important allowing students to co-create criteria is to their ability to self-assess.
9)
The importance of the teachers’ identifying the
“big ideas” of their courses became increasingly obvious. In this way, as we
“designed-down’ our lessons, we helped our students make the links to the
over-arching expectations of the course
(I would suggest that you might like to
read a very useful little book: ‘Lesson Study: Powerful Assessment and
Professional Practice”: by Brenda Augusta, Ruth Gauvreau, and Gerry Hector
. It provides you with a fulsome description of the Lesson Study process and
its elements.
An interesting spin-off from the Lesson
Study experience is how it has changed my
approach to the TPA process. Rather than the previous method of discussing what
I will see in the observed lesson, then debriefing based upon my scribed notes,
I now approach the experience through the Lesson Study lens. The teacher in
question and I co-create the lesson. The teacher presents the students to me,
describing their individual strengths and challenges (this is an insight in
their relationship building with their students, and if they currently have a
Growth Mindset). We discuss the overarching expectations of the course, and how
the particular lesson relates to them (knowledge of curriculum and Ministry
documents). The teacher describes potential formative feedback opportunities
(knowledge of A&E and Assessment As, For, and Of learning). Together we
review the initial idea that the teacher has for the lesson, emphasizing that
the end product will be judged based upon the engagement of the students in the
process. That this is OUR lesson and if
things go poorly based upon what we have attempted, it will not be held against
the teacher. The teacher takes away our notes and finalizes the lesson
When I go into the class, I am in a
position of knowledge about the students, their needs, and their potential. My
note taking will involve observations about the student engagement and the
teacher’s adoption of the teaching strategies that we have identified in the earlier
discussions.
The post-observation discussions are so
much richer than previous TPA’s! We have learned together, the teacher has
tried something new in an safe environment, and the TPA becomes what it should
truly be – a professional development opportunity. Next steps can more easily
identified and allow me to direct the teacher to professional development
opportunities that reflect his/her needs as well as opening the door to richer
conversations between us in subsequent visits. (I would not engage in this
process with a teacher who I know is a likely candidate for an Unsatisfactory
TPA)
The original Lesson Study activities have
generated considerable discussion and curiosity throughout out school. Although
teachers were at first reluctant to even consider having one or more colleagues
visiting their classes, there is much more openness to such observations now.
During the first year, no other department was interested in creating a Lesson
Study. Now, most departments in the school have run at least one cycle this
(second) year. Either one of the Vice Principals or I participates alongside
the teachers, again formalizing the process and learning together with them.
The art of teaching is considerably deprivatized as teachers discuss, test, and
adopt evidence-based teaching strategies that advance our school SMART goal of
critical thinking.
