‘Instructional rounds’ approach flips classroom evaluations

New method from Harvard researchers analyzes school-wide trends by looking at how instruction is being received
From staff and wire reports

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“Generally, when you are working with teachers to improve instruction, you’re focused on the teacher. ... This approach is really just the opposite,” said Keyes Union School District Superintendent Karen Poppen.

As school leaders work to improve classroom teaching, a new way of evaluating instruction—one that shifts the focus from the teacher to the students—is emerging.

Called “instructional rounds,” the practice is based on the way doctors make their rounds in a teaching hospital, using facts rather than value judgments to determine the effectiveness of instruction.

Because it looks at how well kids are learning rather than how well the teacher is teaching, and because it includes fellow teachers on the evaluation team, this collaborative approach to classroom evaluation is less likely to meet with objections from educators, its advocates say.

Among the adopters of instructional rounds are the superintendents of five small, rural school districts in the California’s Central Valley. Those districts are the Keyes Union School District (KUSD), Livingston Union School District (LUSD), Corning Union Elementary School District, Corcoran Joint Unified School District, and Pleasant View School District.

“Generally, when you are working with teachers to improve instruction, you’re focused on the teacher—[and] you go into classrooms to observe what the teacher does. This approach is really just the opposite,” said KUSD Superintendent Karen Poppen. “We’re really looking at the task the students are asked to do. What’s on the student’s desk is really the focus.”

For more news about improving instruction:

Report: U.S. should model education system after other countries [2]

What the U.S. can learn about improving teacher effectiveness [3]

Should student test scores be used to evaluate teachers? [4]

The superintendents banded together with two county offices of education in November, found a grant for training in December, and recently presented their progress to the California Department of Education.

Grant money sent the five superintendents plus seven others to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in December to study the instructional rounds model.

“Where traditional methods kind of stand at the back of the room and watch the teachers, this is almost like standing at the front of the room and looking at all the students,” Poppen said.

Elizabeth City is one of the Harvard-based education specialists who helped develop the method, which involves teams of educators and administrators who look for school-wide patterns and then analyze these to determine how best to improve instruction building-wide.

“We can think of rounds as combining three things that educators are pretty familiar with into a practice,” City said. “One is network—a group of educators who form a community over time. Part two is classroom observations, and that’s kind of what people think of as the main part of the practice. And then the third part is strategy, which in most places takes the form of improvement plans.”

“”We look for what we call problems of practice. Then we step back and say, ‘What were the obvious trends here? What’s the next step teachers need to take to improve student achievement [5]?’” Poppen said.

For more news about improving instruction:

Report: U.S. should model education system after other countries [6]

What the U.S. can learn about improving teacher effectiveness [7]

Should student test scores be used to evaluate teachers? [8]

Teams evaluate groups of classes at a school at one time. They search for school-wide trends on those problems of practice and write down pieces of evidence that they find in classrooms.

“They give the staff an observation: Here’s something that they saw, and then they ask some questions for reflection that will help the staff take those next steps,” Poppen explained.

Poppen and City both said the method’s focus on teaching and how it is received, instead of individual teacher performance, is usually a welcome change with educators.

“People who are involved in rounds usually love it, because they get to talk about learning and teaching instead of all of the things that distract people during a regular day. Then the challenge is trying to take it from what people describe as really powerful individual professional development to something that really moves practice,” said City.

“It’s a pretty amazing process … that this gets down to in really trying to refine and make our instruction more effective,” Poppen said.

At Spratling Middle School in KUSD, for example, the team watched math classes from basic levels through algebra. Poppen said observers compared notes and realized teachers checked for understanding, but often there was little follow-up when students didn’t understand a portion of the lesson. That’s what the school will try to fix.

Schools might find they need to change the pace of instruction, or that more interventions need to be put in place, said LUSD Superintendent Andres Zamora. His elementary district is in the rural group.

For more news about improving instruction:

Report: U.S. should model education system after other countries [6]

What the U.S. can learn about improving teacher effectiveness [7]

Should student test scores be used to evaluate teachers? [8]

The group has offered to train other districts. “The concept is adaptable to any size school, any core subject, any academic content,” Zamora said.

LUSD has been training administrators and will focus on its teachers in the fall, he said. The collaborative approach has raised no objections from teachers, Zamora said. The process helps them see their craft “through a different lens,” he said, and assess how different strategies work.

“This is not something we’re doing to teachers. This is something we’re doing with teachers,” he said.

Copyright (c) 2011, The Modesto Bee, Calif., with additional reporting by eSchool Media. To see more of The Modesto Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.modbee.com/. [9] Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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[2] Report: U.S. should model education system after other countries: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/05/26/report-u-s-should-model-educa...

[3] What the U.S. can learn about improving teacher effectiveness: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/03/17/what-the-us-can-learn-about-i...

[4] Should student test scores be used to evaluate teachers?: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/01/12/should-student-test-scores-be...

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[7] What the U.S. can learn about improving teacher effectiveness: http://www.eschoolnews.com../2011/03/17/what-the-us-can-learn-about...

[8] Should student test scores be used to evaluate teachers?: http://www.eschoolnews.com../2011/01/12/should-student-test-scores-...

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