Curriculum Corner

The Downey Walk-through is in its fourth year of full implementation.  Each year new administrators are trained in the process and all principals and other administrators are invited to attend monthly support sessions held at each grade band.  (Have we been to your school, yet?)  At the end of the last school year, teachers and members of the leadership team provided feedback via a survey.  The survey data has been useful in planning our monthly support sessions.  The data from that survey tells us that principals and teachers alike are comfortable with the basic structure of the walk-through.  We use a simple mnemonic device to remember:
            Every: Engagement or orientation of the student to the instruction
            Child: Curriculum: content, context, cognitive level, calibration (at grade-level)
            Is: Instruction strategies
            Worthy: “Walking” the walls for past curricular decisions and student work
            Safe: Are there any safety issues needing attention?

The curricular and instructional decisions that teachers make are observable.  While almost all decisions that a teacher makes in a walk-through “snapshot” are not judged right or wrong, the main goal of this process is to nudge teachers to be interdependent collaborative colleagues who want to increase their professional capacity.  That is why inviting teachers to reflect on their teaching practices is what distinguishes the Downey Walk-through from other inspectional models.  Our district survey informs us that this is the area that we need to improve upon this year and we are working on it!

The reflective conversation is short, friendly, and focuses on one teaching practice.  It simply states some examples of the teacher’s decisions that have been observed around that practice, e.g. grouping for instruction, and invites the teacher to think about the criteria that s/he uses when making those decisions in planning for instruction.  Teachers are not expected to answer the question on the spot.  Remember, it becomes a reflective conversation when the teacher willingly returns for some collegial conversation around the question that the principal poses.  Here is an example:

If you have a few minutes, I would like to get back to you about the walk-throughs I have been doing in your classroom over the last couple of months.  Great, great—well, I know you like to think about your classroom strategies.  One strategy that I have seen vary in your classroom is grouping students for instruction.  You know when I was in there today you had the students working in groups of two.  Other days you decided to have larger groups. So my reflective question for you is: “When planning your science lessons around your pacing guide, and thinking about how to group students during the instructional phase of your lessons what criteria do you think about to decide on your grouping strategy to make sure all your students are accountable to the learning?”   Let’s talk about it later when you are ready.

If you are a teacher I hope you will support your principal as s/he implements this important part of the process with you.