A Protocol for Empowering Teachers to Examine their Beliefs

Carrie contributed this post. Click here for more of Carrie's thinking.

Last month, I mentioned that I was excited to see Elena Aguilar at an upcoming conference in May. In preparation, I’ve been reading her book “The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation.” Within the book she describes a tool called The Ladder of Inference which helps her coachees examine a belief. The tool, developed by Harvard professor Chris Argyris, allows a coach to ask probing questions at each rung of the ladder to help a coachee verbalize how their belief was developed and then determine if that belief is one that he/she would like to act upon.

Intrigued by The Ladder of Inference, I enlisted a willing coachee to move through the protocol with me. We started by thinking about any situation she was facing in her classroom where she had wondering any of the following things:

• “Is this the right conclusion?”
• “Why am I making this assumption?”
• “Is this really the right way to think about this?”
• “Is this conclusion based on facts?”

As a second grade teacher, she brought up the fact that she thinks that lately her students have lost reading stamina during Independent Reading time. She feels like she spends more time monitoring behaviors, which results in her interruption of small group, conferring, or guided reading time. Compared to the beginning of the year, she doesn’t feel like her students are getting as much value from this time as they were in the beginning of the year, and she is contemplating making changes like moving students into seats during this time.  

We discussed how the interruptions were her observable data. She says that as she moves through a guided reading lesson, she feels that she has to stop at least once, if not more, on any given day. In addition, these interruptions seems to be occurring more and more frequently. The frequency of the interruption is the selected data from her observations. Because of this selected data, she has now made the assumption that students are off task and drew the conclusion that reading stamina overall is decreasing. As a result, she believes that Independent Reading time has become less valuable and actions such as making assigned seating requirements, even though this goes against her vision of what Independent Reading time should look like, might have to be enforced.

Next we moved through the ladder using some coaching prompts at each rung. This time we worked backwards through the ladder. When we got to the selected data rung, we hit something interesting. Using the question “ What was the other information that you didn’t select when you created your belief?” The teacher started to talk about what the kids were saying and doing when she eventually approached the disruptive students. She would start with something like “I’ve noticed that you two have been talking during Independent Reading time. Maybe you’ve noticed that I’ve been giving you signals from my table that you are interrupting the group by talking.” She would then direct their attention to an anchor chart about Independent Reading behaviors.  Almost every time the kids would look up at her in surprise say something to the effect of:  “But, we are talking about our books?!?”  

As she finished verbalizing her process, I used my notes to prompt her with “Could that other information lead to different conclusions?”

After a pause, she said, “I want kids to be talking about books.”  She thought about her weekly book shout-outs and the importance she places on recommending great books to other friends.  The realization, I think, hit both of us at the same time. What a mis-match of values to actions!! On one hand, she spends all year teaching students that it is really important to talk about books and recommend books to friends. But on the other hand, her actions say, only talk about books during the scheduled time. In the end, the teacher decided that she does value talking about books, but she also really values running guided reading groups without interruptions. By working through the Ladder of Inference, she has decided to change her actions. No longer is she thinking about moving students back into seats or rows. Instead her next steps involve a quick review of appropriate voice levels and a revision to her Independent Reading behavior anchor chart!!