May 14, 2011 |(25) Comments

Lisbon — Give Hamilton High School Associate Principal Keith Nerby 10 minutes in a classroom and he can tell you whether the type of teaching and learning there is what he wants to see.

Give him and the two other schoolwide administrators 10 minutes each in every teacher's classroom at the school over the course of an academic year and they can tell you whether the entire school is on track with the strategic plan for the district.

"It forces us to get out there and get in the classroom and see what's going on," Nerby said.

Quick classroom walk-throughs such as those at Nerby's Waukesha County school are catching on in the Milwaukee area amid a nationwide focus on improving classroom instruction through the extensive use of data.

Proponents say the brief visits give principals and other school administrators an excuse to get into teachers' classrooms more regularly in a nonthreatening way than in the far less frequent evaluation process. They also give administrators and others in charge of school policy a well-rounded picture of how districtwide directives are implemented at the ground level.

"I certainly feel like I have a better understanding of what's going on in the classroom and how our teachers are instructing our students and the learning strategies they're using with the students by being in that classroom," Nerby said.

Administrators' walk-throughs vary from school to school, not only in length but in what administrators look for during their brief time in the classrooms. Whether the visits are three or 20 minutes long, they can give principals and other office staff an opportunity to gauge what's being taught and how it's being taught in a way that student test scores cannot.

Kathy Larson, a professional development consultant for Cooperative Educational Service Agency No. 2 in Whitewater, describes walk-throughs as a way for administrators to conduct a system audit of their buildings.

Although administrators will get only a snapshot of the type of teaching and learning taking place during a single visit, with more frequent checks they should be able to build a complete picture of their schools that includes the teaching methods being employed and resources being used.

"This method is really to see what is going on holistically, and that can be used to really target changes," said Larson, who has trained administrators in the Pewaukee and Waukesha school districts in walk-throughs.

In the West Bend School District, which started administrator walk-throughs at its 12 schools at the beginning of the current school year, Assistant Superintendent Ted Neitzke said the overall emphasis is on providing a good learning environment for students.

There's an app for that

Using forms accessible on iPads and iPhones, administrators in the district have amassed data from more than 6,000 classroom visits so far this school year. The results include comparisons of how often they saw whole group vs. small group work, how often they witnessed teachers providing instructions and even the number of times during the visits that teachers or students tested hypotheses as part of the lessons.

The data from the current school year will help establish a baseline, Neitzke said. As the district studies test scores and other outcomes for students, it can measure those results against what administrators saw in their classroom visits for correlations that might help improve education for all students, he said.

"It's pretty awesome," Neitzke said. "When you're all said and done, that's a lot of principals in the classrooms. More so than ever before."

Classroom walk-throughs by administrators can help teachers be more reflective about their practice as well as give them an additional source for help, said Lindsey Klein, a German teacher at Hamilton High School.

The process is most helpful when administrators have specific comments, said Tom Deshotels, a communication arts teacher at Hamilton. "I'll admit, sometimes it might be a little nerve-racking when you're conducting your lesson and someone walks in your classroom," he said. "But the students are used to it. I'm used to it. We have a culture of openness."

On a recent weekday, Nerby visited both Klein and Deshotels' classrooms.

Afterward he listed what he liked about each - that Klein called students by name and transitioned quickly from her lesson to homework, that Deshotels had students editing each others' work in small groups where they used higher-order thinking and shared insights and ideas.

But Nerby said he saw one issue that he said he would bring up with the Deshotels later. "It was a comfortable classroom environment where students share ideas, but a student was sitting on a desk - I didn't like that point," Nerby said.

Such follow-up conversations, coupled with analysis of the data aggregated from the visits, are key to making walk-throughs successful, said Huck Fitterer, director of field services for WestEd, a public service agency on the West Coast that includes the approach in its Teach for Success school improvement program.

"It's basically what gets measured and what gets observed, gets done," he said.