The Big Four: Beta Version

When I was a little kid, my Mom took me to Montreal's Expo 67 World's Fair.  This was a really exciting time in Canada, as we celebrated our centenary, on the verge of a new era as the country was about to vote in a young, visionary new Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau.  

Expo 67 was a big part of that excitement, and all of the world build these great pavilions celebrating their country's accomplishments.  Britain's pavilion was purposefully left unfinished to symbolically suggest that Britain's story as a nation was also unfinished.

I've always liked that metaphor because I think many of the things we do are too quickly finished.  We need to continually revise our teaching practices, for example, never getting to the point where we say, well, I'm done!  

For that reason, the Kansas Coaching Project, in partnership with the Instructional Coaching Group, is announcing the beta versions of the Big Four teaching tools. If you go to the tools section of the KCP website you'll discover that we have added a lot of tools, including mini-coaching manuals related to such topics as the real learning index, content planning, high-level questioning, and intensive-explicit instruction.  Also, you'll find a copy of the new Big Four walk-through, a survey for assessing the effectiveness of coaching programs, Sue Woodruff's assessment tool that coaches can use for evaluating the impact of coaching, as well as several articles and many new presentations.

These tools are not finished products; indeed, they may never be finished products.  With the British Pavilion as my metaphor, I am beginning to believe that we should never stop improving the teaching tools that coaches use to improve instruction.  So I am putting these tools out there for people to try out and give us feedback.  We hope to continually refine our tools so that they are simpler and more powerful, with the goal of creating a set of tools that help us achieve our goal of having an unmistakable positive impact on children's lives.

All of these tools are free, and you can copy them, use them, and share them.  All we ask is that you share with us what you have learned. Your ideas will help us make them better.  I have already received many suggestions for improvements, and I'm excited about putting more and more simple and powerful tools on line.

I know it is almost a cliche to say this, but I really believe that if we at the Kansas Coaching Project can tap into the expertise of the hundreds of coaches we know across the country, as well as the wisdom of the thousands of teachers with whom they work, well there is no limit to what we can accomplish.

What Interventions Should a Coach Share?

Today I was asked about the kinds of interventions that coaches should share with teachers. I thought I'd explain how we understand this on the Pathways to Success project.

Hierarchy of Instructional Practices:

Coaches in the Pathways to Success project identify appropriate interventions by understanding teachers’ needs as a hierarchy, something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s famous theory suggests that people are motivated by unsatisfied needs and that lower needs such as physiological, safety and love needs have to be satisfied before higher needs like esteem and self actualization can be addressed.

I make a similar claim for the professional needs of teachers in the classroom. A teacher who has not developed systems for managing student behavior in the classroom probably needs to learn how to keep his or her class under control before learning about teaching concepts, and that teacher is also probably most interested in learning about classroom management. By considering a teacher’s needs, Instructional Coaches can provide focused professional development that is highly relevant to the teacher. Our belief is that every level of the hierarchy has to be met before the next level can be addressed.

Level One: Classroom Management. Students can not learn if they are not on task. Teachers need to be able to keep the classroom a safe, productive learning community for all students. Coaches can teach teachers how to clarify and reinforce behavior expectations through interventions such as Randy Sprick’s CHAMPs program. Also teachers can learn how to establish the essential elements of a learning community through interventions such as Sue Vernon’s Talking Together program researched at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning.

Level Two: Clear Understanding of Content and Targets. Once teachers’ classrooms are under control, teachers’ need to be sure they are teaching the right content, and that they have a deep, correct understanding of the content. For that reason, coaches need to know how to access state standards for courses, and how to help teachers translate those standards into lesson plans. Coaches can use interventions such as Keith Lenz’s Course and Unit Organizers, researched at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning, or Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design to help teachers to unpack standards and clearly explain them as learning outcomes for students.

Level Three: Instructional Basics. Over the past 25 years researchers at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning have identified and validated instructional basics that teachers can use to help students’ learn effectively. Our research suggests that instruction is improved when teachers (a) provide an advance organizer, (b) use simple content enhancements to make content more memorable, © model thinking processes, (d) provide students with numerous opportunities for guided and independent practice, (e) provide constructive feedback, and (f) structure activities so that students can generalize their learning to other settings.

Level Four: Assessment Literacy. Teachers also need to know if their students are learning content, and they need to involve their students in the whole business of assessing learning. Students can become very motivated when they know how well they’re doing, when they’re getting frequent constructive feedback on their progress, and when they know what they still have to do to improve. Richard Stiggin’s work on Assessment for Learning provides excellent suggestions on how coaches can help their teachers become assessment literate.

Level Five: Instructional Proficiency. Once teachers have their classrooms under control, are clear on their content and content targets, use instructional basics fluently, and are assessment literate, they then can begin to explore any number of ways to demonstrate instructional proficiency. Coaches, at this point, can teach teachers about some additional Content Enhancement Routines, researched at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning, Discovery Learning, Socratic Dialogue, Story telling, Partnership Education any number of cooperative learning approaches, and so forth.

Understanding by DESIGN

By one of those strange learning coincidences, I’ve encountered ideas that seem to be fitting together in an interesting if not entirely coherent way. I'm in New York City to work with teachers, but it happens to be Design Week 2005. School and design seem to keep getting mixed up in my mind today.

First, although I’ve looked through Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design, (1998) on a number of occasions, I’ve only just started to read it with the care it deserves. I’m struck by how the authors compare instructional planning and curriculum development to design:

“Teacher are designers. An essential act of our profession is the design of curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes. We are also designers of assessments to diagnose student needs to guide our teaching and to enable us, our students, and others (parents and administrators) to determine whether our goals have been achieved; that is, did the students learn and understand the desired knowledge?

Like other design professions, such as architecture, engineering, or graphic arts, designers in education must be mindful of their audiences. Professionals in these fields are strongly client centered. The effectiveness of the designs corresponds to where they have accomplished their goals for the end users” (p.7).

At the same time, I’ve been reading this month’s Fast Company, which features several articles on design. I’ve found the articles, so far, to be energizing and they make me feel, at least for the moment, that there is so much more to “designing” instruction that authentically engages our students.

Fast Company suggests several interesting websites on design, and I find them inspiring and confusing, so I thought I would put the sites on here in case someone else might make use of them:

www.designobserver.com

http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY

www.core77.com