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When you were watching the Olympics this month, did you get some practice making judgments? Even though I don’t know much about diving, I love watching the graceful moves the divers execute between board and water, and I get caught up in the experience. In my enthusiasm, I start shouting out scores as soon as the diver hits the water. I comment on how tight the tuck was or how smooth the entry was, making my evaluation before the judges post their scores. Sometimes I’m close to the actual scores, and sometimes we’re miles apart. It’s laughable that after a few minutes of watching I have become an arm-chair expert, when in reality I know almost nothing about what is going on! Sometimes the same thing happens when I visit a classroom. It is easy to jump to judgment after spending a few minutes in a classroom. Easy to notice what is not happening. Easy to feel myself expert when I know almost nothing about what I am really seeing. When I find myself jumping to judgments, I remind myself t...

Bob Bowman knows something about coaching: He has coached swimmer Michael Phelps to his record 28 Olympic medals. Bowman offers some advice about coaching that applies in educational settings, too. 1. Abandon the “one size fits all” mentality. Swimmers have different approaches and gifts, and so do teachers, so coaches should individualize their support. The Gradual Increase of Responsibility Model for Coaching (described in previous posts), can help instructional coaches pick an effective coaching tool. 2. Determine the gold standard. Bowman suggests being process-oriented and focused on the things you can control. “Be a little better today than you were yesterday,” he said. Doing that day after day leads to remarkable change. As coaches, we can focus on individual goals (for ourselves and others) and also organizational goals (for the school or district). Establishing clear targets and keeping them in focus is an important coaching task. 3. Continue to develop your skills. For Instr...

This week I am in Haiti with 30 amazing educators who are part of a teaching exchange. It is my second experience participating in a professional learning experience with Haitian educators, and, like last year, I will be going home with new insights and more humility. One memorable experience happened on the day we asked teachers to chart questions or challenges related to classroom management, since that was an area they said they wanted to address during the exchange. Working with grade-level peers, each group wrote three questions about challenges they were facing. Then we asked them to come up with two possible solutions for each challenge. At first, many of them looked at us with bewilderment. “You thought someone else would be providing these solutions, didn’t you?” I asked, reading the surprise on their faces. There were many nodding heads. “Well,” I continued, “the very best people for solving these problems are sitting around the table with you. You know your students, you kno...

Are you vexed by student achievement data that doesn’t meet the muster? Get ready for some exploration! Successful solutions require thorough investigation, and that investigation works best as a collaborative activity. Your faculty will be more likely to buy into the solution if they were on the answer exploration expedition! If you’ve used protocols for digging into the data, identifying causes , and looking for the issues underlying those causes , you’ve surfaced topics that are ripe for exploration. The Chalk Talk Protocol can come in handy again. Write topics that were identified as underlying causes in the middle of a big sheet of bulletin board paper, one per sheet. For example, your analysis may have revealed class schedules as a potential underlying cause of low student achievement data. Write this topic in the middle of the paper and do the same with the other possible causes that have been uncovered. Teachers silently move from topic to topic, jotting down thoughts, drawing...

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...