faulker008

If you’ve spent some time digging into student assessment data with your team or faculty, your group will be prepared to uncover causes. It’s only when we really get to the cause that effective solutions start to surface. A combination of the 5 Whys protocol and a fishbone analysis can get your thinking going in the right direction. The Fishbone is a structured team process for identifying underlying factors or causes of an event. The product of the team’s work is a cause/effect diagram that might look something like this: Or this, if you’ve got a group of creative teachers! Fishbones help us consider lots of alternate causes and sort ideas into useful categories. Here are the steps in the process. Working in small groups, ask: 1.     What is the problem/effect? Be clear & specific. Be careful not to define the problem in terms of a solution!  Write this at the head of the fish. 2.     What might be the major categories of causes of the problem?...

Last week’s post (check it out here ) described protocols for digging into the mounds of data that will be waiting when we return to school. Because it’s easy to jump to conclusions when figuring out the causes behind those results, I try to slow down everyone’s thinking as we examine the data. Here are a few ideas to help you do the same. You might laugh at this as a means of data analysis, but after doing the serious work of figuring out what the data says (summarizing and looking for patterns), we sometimes needed to lighten up – but stay on topic! So I ask everyone to take a full sheet of paper and write one reason – a possible cause – for something they’ve noticed in the data, be it good or bad. Once everyone has completed this task, we go to a large open space, paper in hand, and line up in two groups facing each other. Then I ask everyone to wad their paper up into a ball—and we have a snowball fight ! After throwing your “snowball,” pick up one that has been lobbed your way, un...

When school begins, there will be mountains of data asking for our attention. Whether it is results of the state-required assessment from last spring or new IRI scores, we’ll need to dig through these mounds and look for patterns and trends. When I’ve supported faculties in approaching this task, several protocols have been helpful. A simple favorite of mine is the Chalk Talk Protocol . It is a protocol of many uses, and one of them is examining data. I take different data reports and put each in the middle of a large sheet of bulletin board paper, then hang them around the room or place them on tables. (Choose enough different views of data so that there is at least one board per 5 teachers; they’ll move fluidly between charts during time for reflection.) Each faculty member has a colored marker, and during the silent thinking time, they leave a trail of comments on each chart. Anything they notice is worth jotting down. Teachers can draw arrows linking similar comments and use thei...

Today at #ILA2016, I attended #EdCampLiteracy and had a chance to sit around a table with instructional coaches from all around the country. The very first topic posed for discussion was how to work with reluctant teachers. This was the topic of my post last week, but the ideas shared today are worth passing along. “ It's all about power,” one experienced coach explained, when thinking about how to open the doors of resistant teachers. Her comment reminded me of what research tells us about motivation: Control and choice are important motivators. Your position as a coach may be viewed as a position of power. Teachers are often used to being the ones in control, so threats to that control by someone they consider to be in a position of power may be unwelcome. To soften this tension, find ways to offer choice. Create invitations for coaching that put control in the hands of teacher. Offer choices about where and when you will meet and the topics you'll address. Don't go in...

In many classrooms, teachers are embracing active, collaborative teaching methods that are cognitively engaging for students, encouraging them to construct meaning about important concepts. However, there are still some classrooms where teachers are desperately hanging on to practices that are less-effective for student learning. Some teachers still focus on content rather than concepts and delivery of information rather than building of understanding. In these classrooms, students are passive participants who learn content for short-term regurgitation. Teachers hang on to teaching strategies where they are the sage-on-the-stage for a number of reasons. Most teachers have their students’ best interests at heart. The passive learning strategies they use are not the result of laziness or indifference; they, too, feel they are doing what’s best for kids. They genuinely believe that these passive learning strategies are the best way to teach because the content they are sharing is importan...