Fostering a Culture of Instructional Excellence through Engagement

Maggie Schumacher contributed this post. Click here for more of Maggie's thinking and writing.

This year, I’ve been fortunate to participate in a series of workshops focused on creating a culture of instructional excellence through engagement. These workshops were offered through CESA 2 2 and are facilitated by Dr. Kevin Feldman, the director of reading and intervention for the Sonoma (California) County Office of Education and independent educational consultant. The focus of the workshops is on strengthening instructional practices across the content areas through use of student engagement.

Dr. Feldman believes strongly that there should be shared ownership of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and THINKING in every grade across every content area. All disciplines require these things in order for students to master the content. He promotes the idea that teaching our students HOW to think rather than WHAT to think would significantly improve their chances of being effective citizens in everything they do. The goal, however, is to make student thinking and learning visible. We want our students to be able to show, explain, and analyze their thinking. And we want our students to do this in every class, every day. Everyone does everything.

Throughout these workshops, Dr. Feldman has focused on essential truths for improving our schools. The first and foremost truth is that it’s impossible to improve student achievement unless we determine how to improve our teaching. How well we teach equates to how well our students learn. In other words, we haven’t taught unless our students have demonstrated this learning. As educators, we need to move away from the notion that tests are for kids. On the contrary, tests are for teachers. A good test answers the questions: What did you teach? What didn’t you teach? Who did you teach? Who didn’t you teach? True teaching takes humility. We as teachers and coaches have the power to be change agents and to raise the bar for our students. However, by raising the bar, we need to support our students so they can jump over the bar and not just run into it.

As coaches, we have the power to give our teachers the actionable feedback they need so they can improve their practice and students can improve their learning. The feedback they get should be immediate and non-threatening but should also be actionable. We need to make room for questions and wonderings. What did you notice about the lesson? What did you see and what didn’t you see? Everyone wants to improve their practice. How often do we hear teachers say, “I can’t get any better than this” when we ask how their practice could improve? Never. The goal is to create mutual trust along with developing a sense of urgency. Why is it important they change or strengthen their teaching practices? Always, the answer and the focus needs to be on the student and the learning that is happening in the classroom.

In an ideal world, students should be doing most of the work in the classroom. In reality, teachers do most of the “heavy lifting” in the classroom on a daily basis while the majority of students sit passively taking it in. But in the game of life, you have to be on the field to get better at the game. You don’t get better by sitting in the stands. We’ve given our students the message that listening means not talking, but this is not the case. Decades of research demonstrates that 20% of our students are responsible for doing 80% of the work. Our students who most need to be engaged in our lessons are chilling in the zone of minimal effort. We need to make our schools “no chill zones” and shoot for 100% engagement.

How do we do this? We structure our classes to make student learning visible. If we can’t see it, the learning is not there. Every 2-10 minutes, our students need to be saying, writing, and/or doing something related to the learning objective. We make our teaching practice intentional. One way to do this is by teaching our students the power of paraphrasing. We can teach our students how to be cognitive listeners through precision partnering and accountable listening. This takes the idea of “turn and talk” to a new level and gives it purpose. We teach students the 4 L’s of Listening: Look, Lean, Listen, and Low Voice. While one student is explaining their understanding or thinking, the other student partner is the listener. One student speaks for 90 seconds, and the partner has 30 seconds to paraphrase his/her partner’s thinking. They learn to use conversation starters such as, “What I hear you saying is…” or “In other words, you believe…” Then students switch roles. The act of precision partnering and active listening not only allows for checks for understanding for the teacher, but also builds class relationships, understanding, and empathy. Students receive immediate feedback from their peers and the teacher that feeds forward.

Through these workshops, Dr. Feldman has introduced various other methods for making learning visible in the classroom. We get as much engagement as we intentionally plan for. The good news is we can hit the “reset button” any time. “It’s a game, and it’s our job to structure the game so the students win.”

Precision Partnering Graphic