In the whirlwind of the last month, it has been hard to take a breath. Many schools across the nation have found themselves closing their doors for an extended period of time, while teachers are tasked with preparing and delivering instruction in a different way.  I have a couple of thoughts as we prepare ourselves for this venture. My first and predominant thought is to utilize technologies students are currently using can we leverage harness that power for learning. Things like Youtube can easily be used for this, through live-streaming or recording videos for student use. Additionally, we can utilize Twitter or other social media platforms to connect, especially if students do not have the ability to get onto Google Classroom or another LMS. While there are a plethora of digital learning tools available, it is also important that we explore what students currently are using to make steps in the right direction for learning. Additionally, as we socially isolate in our instruction, it becomes more apparent that we are not socially isolated. As you are creating content, you will find many others also doing the same thing. This opens doors for new collaborations that we had never thought of.

My challenge to you is to make sure that you connect with others, both in the methodology of how we deliver instruction and in the delivery itself. Through this tragedy, we can truly embrace a collaborative model that extends outside of our doors.

For years, a classroom standard has been the posted lesson objective. Personally, this has always been an exercise in fruition for me. Is it a simple way to help students in case the administrator comes in? Is it something that we just reference at the beginning and never come back to? I will admit that, too often, I have found myself putting that up, but never referencing it during the lesson. In reality, the purpose of this exercise is clear, to allow students to know the focus of the lesson and give the teacher a visible reminder of the target, but to often it is left dangling on the board.

Jeff Archer, et. al., in an article for “The Learning Professional”, observed that the evidence that administrators collect must also change to reflect this practice, “Instead of asking if the lesson objective was posted, these new instruments typically ask to what extent the objective was clear to students, how well the teacher connected the objective to students’ prior knowledge, and to what extent the teacher reinforced the objective.” This demonstrates the clear shift in thinking necessary for the focus of the lesson to remain the target throughout the duration of the lesson. For teachers and administrators we must accept this challenge to make the focus of our instruction increasingly meaningful to students.

In case you need more convincing on the importance of having a clear focus, many educational researchers have elaborated on the importance of ensuring students have a clear understanding of what the learning target or focus is for the lesson. Jere Brophy, in his book Encouraging Students to Learn states, “Goals (or focus), not content coverage or learning processes provide the rationale for curriculum and instruction.” Hubbell and Pitler expounded on the importance of this in the book Classroom Instruction that Works expanded on this by stating, “When teachers identify and communicate clear learning objectives, they send the message that there is a focus for the learning activities to come. This reassures students that there is a reason for learning and provides teachers with a focal point for planning instruction.” The McRel study continued to show the importance of setting learning goals and setting objectives provided a .31 effect size. As you set your yearly goals, I hope that this is enough for you to consider lesson focus as an extremely high priority!

In the Gym (Prep outside of school)

Over the last several years, I have become a gym rat. However, I don’t go to the gym so I can perform better at the gym, but so I am healthier and better outside of the gym. In the same way as teachers we must spend some time in the educational gym, grasping at PD and other opportunity to become more healthy as educators. Every item in this series will contain an “In the Gym” section where I focus on this health. Now, back to the focus!

Know your content, know your pedagogy and know your students! In our practice it is a constant struggle to know where to go next with our personal learning. We spend a great deal of our post college time learning about teaching strategies, but rarely go back to learning the content and focusing on what we are teaching. I would encourage you to take the time and really consider the content that you are teaching. What else could you learn about it? Are there interesting facts or applications that you may be unaware of? This broadened understanding will make a large difference as you clear up your focus. Using this increased understanding of content, you will find a clearer focus of what needs to be taught and improve your roadmap to your learning targets.

On the other end of the spectrum, maybe your content is clear but you could brush up on the strategies or vehicles that you use to deliver the information. Too often I have found I start my lesson with the target in mind, but by the end of the hour, I find that my lesson has shifted away from the target. Focusing on what is available will assist you in becoming more adept at taking the challenge to focus your lessons and aligning all activities with your target.

Finally, knowing your students. Always considering that you are not teaching last years students, or even last hour’s students, will make a large difference in designing plans that fit with the group that you are teaching. Secondary teachers know this all to well, as the lessons we teach in one hour completely flop in another. When this happens it is important to remember that the students are the center of the learning and the group dynamics change from one year to the next or one hour to the next. While the focus remains the same for these different groups, the activities and class materials may be completely different as long as the focus remains clear.

Focus your Planning

How are you working to focus your lessons?

How are you planning with your focus in mind? Standards begin to provide us with the road map for our direction as educators. However, simply reading the standards does not give the educator the tools to create 180 highly focused lesson plans. It is the work of teachers, administrators and coaches to unpack these standards and utilize different methods to turn these broad statements into a clearly focused lessons. There are many resources that will assist through this broad project, however, utilizing a backwards design approach, such as UbD (Understanding By Design) will be of a greatly improve your ability to keep focus in individual lessons. If you are in need of resources, check out the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching overview @ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/ .

Setting your Focus

What is the Focus?

Begin with the end in mind by using a backwards design approach. Soon, you will find that working together for our common purpose makes all of the pieces will fall into place. As you take the time to go through this process, make sure that you take time to reflect, contemplate and collaborate with your colleagues. Creating well constructed lesson foci will not only assist in boosting student achievement, but also set a framework for instruction as we move through the other strategies that Hattie and Marzano agree on.

What must be included in Lesson Goals is given in 5 attributes according to John Hattie.

• Clearly state what you want the student to learn.

• Can focus on deep or surface learning

• Must be challenging for the students relative to their current mastery of the subject

• May be grouped (a single lesson may include more than one goal)

• Must be shared with students

Focusing on the goal of the lesson and sharing it with students has a profound effect on the student’s understanding of what is expected of them. Communicating these goals with students is of dire importance, but why stop there? Learning goals can be communicated with parents and other stakeholders as well. When parents understand the learning objectives of a class, they have the opportunity to share in their student’s learning and give relevance to what occurs during the school day.

Hubbell and Pitler expand that learning focus should not limit students, “Set learning objectives that are specific but not restrictive. Communicate the learning objectives to students and parents. Connect the learning objectives to previous and future learning. Engage students in setting personal learning objectives.”. It is important to communicate learning objectives to students explicitly by stating them verbally, displaying them in writing, and calling attention to them throughout a unit or lesson. For some additional goal/ focus writing resources, check out the following

https://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/lsp/developinggoals.htm

http://www.evidencebasedteaching.org.au/lesson-goals-2/

The Game Plan

When delivering and strategizing for your instruction, Marzano propose different strategies to use questioning at the beginning of a lesson. While different strategies of questioning can be utilized, the process of questioning elicits our students to begin to think without simply being told what is about to happen.

Marzano Examples

How do you add mixed fractions with different denominators? That’s what you must know by the end of this lesson.

What is the difference between elements and compounds…

Why is Persuasive Essay A better than Persuasive Essay B…

When (what period) were Egypt’s Pyramids Built…

Hattie Examples

What are today’s lesson goals?

What do I already know that will help me achieve these goals?

What actions do I need to take to ensure that I achieve these goals?

Conclusions

As we consider keeping learning in focus, it is important to look ahead to providing overt instruction. Prior to instruction, educators must utilize the tools in our tool-box to keep the lesson focus easily understood by the students. No matter how many times we repeat the focus, if the students don’t grasp what we want them to learn, the focus was not clear. The art of teaching makes us relate to our students and know what is important to them. Keeping our students first will allow us to keep fine-tune our focus and truly make a positive impact on the achievement of all students.

John Hattie and Robert Marzano have 8 strategies that have great effect on student learning. These strategies should be known to all educators and a focus of our efforts of development. The research behind these strategies allow educators to be confident that improving their skills in these areas will have increased student outcome.

1. Clear Focus

2. Overt Instruction

3. Student Engagement

4. Feedback

5. Multiple Exposures

6. Application of Learning

7. Group Work

8. Self-Efficacy

Over the course of the next 8 weeks, I will blog about each one of these. But, I challenge you this summer to take time and explore some/ all of these areas in your personal study this summer! There are so many avenues to explore each of these topics in more depth that I would love to collaborate with you on! If you re interested in doing a virtual book study, please leave feedback for this post!

As educators, we must stretch our own abilities. Often times this means putting the kids in the driver’s seat. One of my favorite ways to do this is through inquiry based learning. Students are given a general topic and are guided through the process of creating good research questions. This process forces students to think through the whole process and end up with a final product that represents the answers to their question. Please feel free to check out the following World Changers Unit that my students are currently completing!

World Changers – Inquiry Project 5-17 Edit

As summer approaches it is a great time to reflect and improve your craft. My kindle is overflowing with books that I have collected over the course of the year. As educators, reading  (or listening to audio books) is the single best tool for continuous improvement. As an administrator, we must read, we must take the steps to stay current, we must be the instructional leader of our school!

The List:

1.) Culturize – Jimmy Casas

2.) The Innovator’s Mindset – George Cuorus

3.) The Limitless School – Abe Hege & Adam Dovico

4.) The 10 Minute Inservice – Todd Whitaker & Annette Breaux

5.) Reframing the Path to School Leadership – Lee Bolman & Terrance Deal

6.) Embedding Formal Assessment – Dylan Wiliam & Siobhan Leahy

7.) Hacking Engagement Again – James Sturtevant

8.) Be the One for Kids – Ryan Sheehy

9.) Collaborative Leadership: Six Influences that Matter Most – Peter M. Dewitt

10.) What Schools Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America –

          Ted Dintersmith

What is on your Summer Reading list? Any suggestions?

May teacher burnout is real. As teachers we often struggle to deliver amazing lessons and content to students who are also beginning to check out for the year. This does not have to be the case. Often times teacher struggle is caused by over-delivery, over-talking, and over-working throughout the school year. As teachers, we have to stop doing the work for our students, putting them in the drivers seat and spending our time stoking their curiosity. At the end of the year, I prefer to allow students to  create an inquiry based project where they are almost completely in the driver’s seat. They have an assignment to learn about, must frame questions, and answer those questions. But it doesn’t stop their, they have to create a final product that shows what they have learned. For many creative students, this drive them through those research tasks they do not want to do and propagates increased success. As you close the year, I would encourage you to spend some summer time researching inquiry based learning, project based learning and the blended classroom. A great summer read would be Learn Like a Pirate by Paul Solarz.

Plus, it never hurts to take the class to the outdoor classroom.

The instructional leader elicits greatness in all students. Although the actualization of this maxim can be defined in multiple ways and can be viewed through multiple lenses, this greatness can be seen as students are able to reach their individual goals and continue to show growth. The leader guides all staff and students to see the possibilities when continuous improvement yields the desired outcomes. This is accomplished through a series of competent systems that provide students with differentiated instruction appropriate for their level of growth. Instructional leaders must see this vision and utilize the tools at their disposal to enact change that results in improved student performance. Principals are tasked with many responsibilities; however, these must be prioritized in ways that maximizes student growth.

An instructional leader’s tool-kit must not only contain the ability to cast a vision, but also the ability to diagnose problems that are preventing their school from achieving greatness. Every leader, within or outside of education, must be able to conduct a root cause analysis that accurately diagnosis issues that are preventing greatness. Along with this understanding, the leader must not work along. To properly utilize the 5-why’s, the fish bone, or other methods, the leader must place value in the input of others. Throughout this process, the leader must be willing to seek out opinions that may be hard to hear, but will contribute to truly analyzing a problem.

After the causation of the problem has been diagnosed, the leader must continue to function as a team to create a plan that addresses the hypothesized root cause. This comprehensive action plan cannot stop at basic steps, but address additional difficulties that may -arise during the process. Milestones and indicators must be shown to ensure that the plan is being followed and allow for modification for areas of the plan that are not providing the desired result. These indicators must be time based, as the roles of educators are filled with many priorities, those things without due dates are easily pushed aside by other perceived priorities. The principal must set the tone that improving instruction is the highest priority and cannot be ignored because of business in other matters.

The administrative professional must develop a strong tool-kit in supervising the processes of teaching and learning. The leader is responsible for not only having a working knowledge of the best practices in education, but must be highly capable of assisting educators in improving their instruction in techniques that result in improved learning. The principal must continue to show that their knowledge of pedagogy allows for the transcendence of subject matter to exact change despite the subject. At the most basic level, the leader of instruction must have a full understanding of the 8 strategies that Robert Marzano and John Hattie agree on. Continual development in these 8 areas has shown a strong and direct impact on student learning.

Supervision ultimately results in leading others where they are uncomfortable going. Due to this, the instructional leader must be very aware of the culture of the institution in which they work. While work in creating a positive culture may often be seen a superfluous to improving student outcomes, it is imperative that students and staff  work and learn in an environment that is conducive to doing hard things and understanding that failure in certain aspects is inevitable. Within the culture must be safeguards against individuals who are unwilling to embrace change and move towards higher achievement of students. The administrator must have systems in place to support these individuals to make change and reprimand those who are unwilling to change regardless of a high level of support.

Professional learning is the principal vehicle in which the instructional leaders have to provide direct instruction to teachers. The design of professional learning must be carefully considered, paralleling planning for student instruction. The instructional leader must utilize data to ensure the planning of the lesson is appropriate for the level of the educators under their leadership. Often times, the instructional leader must make sure that professional learning is provided in ways that are meaningful and accessible to all teachers as well as differentiated between experience, disciplines and teaching styles.

The instructional leader who selects the work of improving teaching as the highest priority must set systems in place to ensure the management of the building is in place. To be the instructional leader, the principal must have the correct policies, procedures and people in place to deal with the day-to-day situations that arise which all too often consume the principals time. Tasks that don’t result in improved student outcome must not become the primary role of the administrator. While the work is challenging, the benefits to students are extremely high.  At the end of their career, the administrator who has done the good work will have countless stories of success and have made the difference in the lives of those students who otherwise would not have actualized their own success in ways that were unimaginable prior to their educational experience.

At the beginning of summer I found out that I would be changing teaching positions. Next year I will be transitioning to the Aldo Leopold Level II teacher. This year will be filled with many learning opportunities for both myself and my students. The first order of business will be making sure routines and schedules are in place to set everyone up for success. For the first few weeks of school we will be practicing routines and creating a learning environment that will allow success for the rest of the school year.

– Mr White