Teacher Growth & Renewal | Building Rapport & Trust While Providing Feedback through Class Visits10/11/2019 It is great to be back working with faculty at De Smet Jesuit High School. Here, we have successfully appropriated the teacher Growth & Renewal process (an Independent Schools Management model) into our school – to support teachers’ reflective practices. One component of this process is central: class visits. As I enter Bob’s English class for a 15-20 minute unscheduled visit, I take a seat along the side, and fire up my tablet. This class visit represents one of perhaps 4 visits to any one of Bob’s classes for the academic school year. Using the school’s class visit rubric based on agreed upon Characteristics of Professional Excellence (CPE) that we developed as a community a few years ago, I observe student engagement, and I note summaries of what I directly see, in the appropriate spaces on the rubric. Sometimes I add reflective questions and affirmations. Because I don’t record what I don’t see, some of the CPEs are left blank – perhaps for noting during another visit. When I am ready to leave class after 15-20 minutes, I save my notes in the rubric and immediately send the rubric detailing the class visit to Bob, along with an email: Bob, thanks for having me in class today. I enjoyed seeing you interact with small groups, as they prepared specific presentations based on topics from a list you provided to them earlier. I appreciated seeing a shift from “teacher as imparter of knowledge” to “teacher as facilitator” as you helped students discover information and they prepared for presentations. In particular, I enjoyed your question as you approached student groups, “What do you know?” Attached are some reflections and notes as they relate to the Characteristics of Professional Excellence. You will notice some notes, some questions, some reflections. You might notice some categories are blank or “not as reflected upon.” Simply, those categories that are blank are those I did not visibly notice today. I would like the opportunity to debrief the class with you, sometime soon after you have reviewed the reflections. I will leave it up to you to contact me and set a time to meet within the next few days. The conversation doesn’t have to be long, just some time to chat about the class. It’s great to see you in action, and I’m grateful for what you do with our students! This email and the attached notes achieve four important things: immediate feedback to Bob about what I saw during his class, written documentation for Bob and for me, specific commendations (email, paragraph one) about Bob’s class, and a context setting piece and rationale for my notes and subsequent reflecting conversation (email, paragraph two). While my brief visits build positive rapport and a routine that is predictable and supportive, each visit also creates data points for the teacher, toward a yearly process of growth and renewal: my presence during class (and reflections on how that went), concrete summary notes based upon my visit, and a follow-up email that highlights a positive quality about the class that day. After my visit, Bob reviews notes and schedules a time to have a reflecting conversation with me based upon my reflections and his experience during class. The follow-up conversation typically takes between 15-20 minutes, and it is a structured conversation based upon the Cognitive Coaching model (https://www.thinkingcollaborative.com/seminars_cc_seminars/), that “strengthens performance by enhancing one’s ability to examine familiar patterns of practice and consider underlying assumptions that guide and direct action. Cognitive Coaching’s unique contribution is that it influences another person’s thought processes” (Costa, Garmston). A typical reflecting conversation includes the following sequential prompts posed by me:
After the reflecting conversation, I send a “thank you” email to the teacher, immediately highlighting some (not necessarily all) conversation take-aways. Below is a sample of a thank you email I sent to a Spanish teacher after our reflecting conversation based on my class visit: Thanks very much for taking some time to have a reflecting conversation after my visit to your class last week. Some reflections:
This email contains several noteworthy qualities: I affirm the classroom experience with commendations, I note challenges, I note possibilities for areas for growth (bolded above), and I thank the teacher. Potentially, in later conversations we could talk about class size, what’s happening in other similar class sections, learn about other LP strategies, focus on the pace at which she moves through content relative to students, and beware of her students’ upcoming trip to Spain. My follow-up email after the reflecting conversation concludes the visit process. At the end of each visit process, there are 5 data points that the teacher can reflect on:
During later visits, I embed the teacher’s Growth & Renewal goals for the year, and use those goals to drive a conversation about work. As I reflect on class visits, I am confident that they are becoming a predictable and support component of each teacher’s Growth and Renewal process. Here is a final list of 12 visit process suggestions:
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Pete MussoAssistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction Archives
May 2022
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