Category Archives: PLC

Being a student of your own school. #LearningWalks #InstructionalRounds #Pedagography

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We are a School of inquiry, innovation, and impact. Grounded in Christian values, we prepare all students to be college ready, globally competitive, and engaged citizen leaders.

– Mount Vernon Presbyterian School Mission

How are you studying your own school? In what ways are you being a student of your own school?

Certainly you send folks to conferences like bees sent to collect pollen. It’s likely that you send faculty to other schools to learn from their practices, too. Incredible stories continue to emerge from systemic school visits (see bullets below). Of course, there are countless virtual opportunities, as well. All of these techniques are critical parts of professional learning, for sure.

But how are you ensuring you have an effective “honey production” capacity, back at school, with all of that pollen you are collecting? Are the bees only set up in their own relatively isolated honey-production facilities (“classrooms”), or are you intentional about connecting those glorious hexagons into a fully optimized honeycomb (“learning community”)? How are you tapping the wisdom and experience of your faculty as they intentionally live at the nexus of research and practice?

MVPS Norms Promote Productive Postures

At Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation, we are intentional students of our own school. As a School of inquiry, innovation, and impact, we are as purposeful about living out those qualities in ourselves as adults as we are about nurturing them in our student learners. And that makes all the difference.

Our norms empower us in numerous ways to take on this work and define the postures to help us collectively succeed:

  1. Start with Questions
  2. Fail Up
  3. Assume the Best
  4. Share the Well
  5. Have Fun

From such postures and commitments to inquiry, innovation, and impact, we study ourselves in a number of systemically connected ways. Two primary methods include learning walks and instructional rounds.

Learning Walk and Instructional Rounds

design as changing existing situations into preferred situations

– from Debbie Millman interview with Joe Marinek

Mount Vernon is a community of educational designers. Consequently, we feel emboldened to use design to intentionally and purposefully change existing situations into preferred situations. As designers and design thinkers, we create and employ various auto-ethnography tools to help us meet the actual needs of the users for whom we are designing. These tools help us in optimizing our honey production.

Learning walks provide us with broad surveys of our teaching and learning ecosystem. Instructional rounds provide us with deeper dives into our pedagogical practices. And our particular brand of learning walks and instructional rounds enable us to map our learning operations as a school.

  • Shelley Clifford, Head of Lower School, shares practice of learning walks with parents
  • The “MVPS Learning Walks and Instructional Rounds” primer document, available on Scribd and embedded below, gives an overview of these integrated practices at Mount Vernon. At the bottom right-hand corner, you will find some additional resources linked, so that you can explore things more fully. Below the embedded Scribd document, there is a link to Bo’s Diigo library list for “Instructional Rounds,” as well as a Twitter archive of a winter #ISEDchat on instructional rounds, moderated by Chip Houston.

Innovating Instructional Rounds –> Pedagography

At Mount Vernon, we are innovating the practices of learning walks and instructional rounds. Learning walks have been a part of the MVPS culture for awhile.

This year, though, we began piloting new iterations of prototypes for learning walks, and we added instructional rounds to our repertoire. Almost immediately, we started to innovate instructional rounds beyond how they exist at any other school.

In the Middle School, our Heads of Grade identified a wildly important goal for themselves, and they worked with the Head of Middle School Chip Houston, the Director of 21C Teaching and Learning Katie Jones, the Director of the Center for Design Thinking Mary Cantwell, and me (the Chief Learning and Innovation Officer) to establish a system of observing each other for intensive feedback and discussing the feedback to develop practice.

We relied heavily on the instructional rounds work of Elizabeth City and Richard Elmore, we threaded in Japanese lesson study, and we also incorporated a mapping project into our IR work. While observing, we committed to collecting data that would allow us to more accurately map our teaching and learning core, just like Lewis and Clark mapped the Louisiana Purchase with the Corp of Discovery, or just like Google is working to map the Earth. We call this learning-culture mapping “Pedagography,” which is derived from work I initiated and led at Unboundary called “Pedagogical Master Planning.”

As a team of eight, we embarked on a journey of engaging in pedagography. Chip, Katie, Mary, and I served as the first four-person observation team for the Heads of Grade – Stephanie Immel, Maggie Menkus, Amy Wilkes, and Alex Bragg. During the visits, we collected narrative notes that draw on clinical observation as a methodological basis. These notes are reviewed by the observed teachers, and the recordings serve as the lenses through which we reflect on practice and debrief as a team. These Middle School Heads of Grade pioneered this new approach to instructional rounds and pedagography, and they provided invaluable insights into the development of the practice.

To conduct a thorough pedagography, in addition to the narrative notes field, we use a number of other capture prompts that we aggregate over time to help us see more holistically our teaching and learning ecosystem. Currently, we call the entire Survey Monkey tool “Proto 3,” and we are in the process of iterating to Proto 4.

Survey Monkey Tool – Proto 3

Expanding the Instructional Rounds Practice

After tremendous first-semester work among the #MVMiddle Heads of Grade IR Pilot Team, Houston decided to expand the practice to a widened circle of educational innovators. Leveraging the experience of the pilot team, additional Middle School faculty were engaged in another start-up of the pedagography experiment.

Additionally, we decided to expand the work into another division, as well. Head of Lower School Shelley Clifford and Director of 21C Teaching and Learning Nicole Martin pulled their Think Tank and Heads of Grade into the instructional rounds + pedagography. Like ripples in a pond, more teachers were being invited into this honey-production capacity building.

Conducting the Instructional Rounds Debrief

For the initial pilot of instructional rounds in the Middle School, we made the decision to jump in and get started immediately. Whereas some schools spend months prepping and training for new initiatives, Mount Vernon thrives in a “lean start-up” and entrepreneurial energy, and we believe in shipping innovations and learning by doing and iterating.

In the fall, the debriefs of the instructional-rounds observations were relatively unstructured, and we experimented with various methods for debriefing as we evolved the experiment. We learned a great deal from those debrief sessions, in terms of our meta-cognitive approach, and we applied that learning to the Lower School expansion.

For the Lower School, we started the debriefs as we did in the Middle School – the observed teacher reviewed the field notes and began the first debrief by thinking aloud about the notes and observations. Quite rapidly, though, we’ve moved to a developing protocol that asks the observed teacher to highlight the key reflections in the narrative and prepare a problem of practice objective to dig into during the debrief. Because of the hour-long time frame of the debrief and the need to discuss multiple observations, we focus each teacher debrief at about 10-15 minutes. Most recently, we’ve added “chalk talk” to our debriefs, and we systemically review the dynamic of the curriculum, instructional methods, learning space setup, and student engagement.

The Lower School Heads of Grade – Eileen Fennelly, Sherri Kirbo, Andrea McCranie, Chris Andres, and Jenny Farnham – have been an amazing team of rounders and pedagographers, especially in the ways that they are accelerating the protocol advancement of the debriefs.

What has also been profoundly rewarding is a bit of serendipity. At the same time that the Lower School was taking on the instructional rounds piloting, they also launched three book-study cohorts focused on Carol Dweck’s Mindset. As we jumped into more intensive feedback surrounding the instructional rounds practices, we found it incredibly helpful to also be studying the growth mindset as an entire division of faculty making honey together.

Beginning to Explore the Pedagography Maps

This year at the NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) Annual Conference 2014, I unveiled some of the data visualizations that we are starting to build from our pedagography at Mount Vernon. Grant Lichtman and I partnered for a session that explored Zero-Based Strategic Thinking and practices such as pedagography that can be utilized in such self-study as a school learning community.

Chip Houston, Shelley Clifford, and I are already planning to devote an entire session at next year’s NAIS Annual Conference to the practice of instructional rounds and pedagography (provided our proposal gets accepted).

Recently, Houston, Clifford, Nicole Martin, and I spent time digging into the aggregate data that we have collected from 350 ethnographic visits and observations across two divisions. In the near future, we’ll reveal more about what we are learning from these mappings of our teaching and learning ecosystem.

Using External Visitors, Too

During this academic year, Mount Vernon has hosted over 40 schools for visits to our campus. Early on, we realized the incredible advantages and benefits to inviting our visitors on learning walks with us. As a final leg of these host-visitor learning walks, we debrief the visit using such visible thinking routines as “See-Think-Wonder” and “Rose-Thorns-Buds.” The insights provided by our visitors are proving invaluable as we compare and contrast what they observe and share with our own archives from instructional rounds.

More to Come – A Mea Culpa

Reading back through this post, I realize how incomplete it is as a true record of the incredible work that the Middle School and Lower School leaders have been engaging to study our school and develop our learning community. However, I’ve been about to burst at the seams to start telling the story here, so I hope you’ll forgive the errors of omission committed by me in my excitement. Any gaps are the fault of my writing and not the fault of the incredible professionals forwarding this work —

Chip Houston, Katie Jones, Shelley Clifford, Nicole Martin, Mary Cantwell, the Middle School Heads of Grade, the Middle School IR Network Group, the Lower School Heads of Grade, Emily Breite, Kelly Kelly, and a number of others who support our work.

We look forward to sharing more of the well with you as we continue to innovate around professional learning and practice at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation.

Running two operating systems in concert. #PLC #ATPLC #Leadership #Strategy

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From John Kotter’s article “Accelerate!” in Harvard Business Review, November 2012 –

The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.
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During my fourth year as a middle school principal, in 2006-07, we began to restructure as a professional learning community, implementing the incredible work of Rick and Becky DuFour and Bob Eaker. As we progressed in this restructuring around a different work ethos, we tapped volunteers to co-lead the various departmental learning teams. Together these co-faciliators created the PLC-Facilitators PLC – a kind of meta-team to serve as a guiding coalition for the entire PLC transformation.

We ran two operating systems – an admin team known as the Guidance Committee (hierarchical), as well as the PLC-Facilitators PLC (networked). The Guidance Committee was tremendous at running the logistical operations of the school, just as Kotter describes the strengths of a hierarchical administration. The PLC-Facilitators PLC, and the “solar system” of PLCs throughout the middle school, was tremendous at adeptly navigating – even map making – for the strategic transformations necessary in a learning community being influenced by technology enhancements, brain research, assessment literacies, pedagogical improvements, etc.

Two operating systems may seem counter-intuituve. Yet, it was this practice of running two systems in concert that permitted us to embrace complexity versus trying to manage it.

[HT to Tod Martin for the Kotter article!]

2012 in review – the auto-prepared annual report of It’s About Learning

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 23,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

[Note: I’ve read a few blog self-analysis, “year in review” posts from other bloggers that I follow. However, I have resisted doing the same exercise for this blog. Then, yesterday, I received an email from WordPress explaining that their “stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.” At the conclusion of the annual report was an option to make the stats public and add as a blog post. I’m just trying out this feature.]

[Note #2: Here’s the automated annual report for PLC-Facilitators: Learning is the Focus, a blog that @jgough and I maintained for our work with the PLC facilitators at The Westminster Schools.]

PLCs, Westminster JH, Randolph, and Learning Together

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On Friday, February 17, Jill Gough and Bo Adams worked with The Randolph School faculty to share the story of PLC (Professional Learning Community) development at The Westminster Schools’ Junior High, as well as to facilitate a small piece of Randolph’s continuing, multi-year efforts to transform their school with the PLC ethos. Below, Bo and Jill have embedded the slide deck that they used during the Friday morning keynote. As usual, though, a slide deck cannot capture the rich conversations and invaluable discussions that surround and permeate professional work based on shared experience.

Randolph has been piloting PLCs for two years, and they are making formidable steps to enhance their teacher teaming and learner strategizing. Westminster and Randolph are imagining different ways to stretch time and embed regular teaming. There is no one-size-fits-all structural approach to PLCs, but there are universal ideas and questions that must guide our work:

3 Big Ideas:

  1. Learning is the focus.
  2. Collaboration is the culture.
  3. Results guide our decisions.

4 Key Questions:

  1. What should be learned?
  2. How will we know if “they” have learned?
  3. What will we do if “they” already know it?
  4. What will we do if “they” aren’t learning?

What a privilege and bright spot it is to collaborate among schools and learn with and from each other. Could our institutions and organizations actually stretch the PLC ethos to include more such collaboration among our schools? Could we model being PLCs among schools, like we model forming PLCs among our adult learners?

PLC Randolph Slidedeck 2-2012.

[Cross-posted at Experiments in Learning by Doing]

New creation: culinary, jazz-fusion luminescence in teaching – PLCs as surgical-musical-chefs

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Working to understand better the functions and processes of PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) – this is a constant pursuit and area of deep investigation and learning for me. I am coming to believe, more and more, that high-functioning PLCs are like some hybrid-cross consisting of the following parts: chefs, surgical teams, and jazz musicians.

The three TED talks below are interesting and intriguing in their own, content-specific right. However, I think all three offer metaphorical meta-lessons about the nature of PLCs – teams of teachers working to learn with each other for the ultimate purpose of enhanced student learning. All three TED talks, when woven together into a common braid, speak to the power of CREATING SOMETHING NEW AS A TEAM. Great PLCs are like the innovative team of chefs at Moto – stretching concept and experimenting for fulfilling and engaging one’s appetite and taste buds (analogous to quenching the thirst for knowledge and wisdom). Great PLCs are like the collaborating surgeons who have discovered that luminescent dyes can be employed to light-up that which needs to be preserved and that which needs to be cut out (analogous to curriculum re-design and systemic formative assessment practices). Great PLCs are like the improvisational harmony of a jazz quartet that measures their successes by their level of responsiveness rather than by any sort of fixed-mindset worrying about mistakes (analogous to the thoughtful development of teamwork and use of RTI – response to intervention). Collectively, the three talks also point to the balance of art and science that seems essential to crafting the alloy which is a team of people working together to CREATE.

The Creation Project

This past semester, the English 7 team of the Junior High PLC developed a student-learning challenge about the nature of creation and creativity. This team of teachers acted in that careful blend of artists and scientists, and they utilized the professional practices of lesson study and instructional rounds to develop a common lesson and common assessment for their classes of English. Instead of simply sitting and being consumers of creation-archetype understanding, the students would become world creators themselves. [This reminds me of a recent post from Jonathan Martin: “Fab Labs and Makerbots: ‘Turning Consumers into Creators’ at our School.” Who knows…this may even partially inspire the next iteration of the world creations described below!]

Below you can find a Scribd document that provides more details about the learning challenge created by this team of teacher-learners. To me, they behaved something like that team of innovative chefs at Moto…that team of integrated-thinking surgeons pioneering the use of luminescent surgery…that team of improvisationally-responsive jazz musicians. This team of teachers is creating together in harmony – they are prototyping a product, as well as a process for using lesson study and instructional rounds to derive a better dish, a more successful surgery, a more beautiful harmony. They are innovating and creating. This stretch will provide potential for a further stretch next time. Their muscles are learning to work this way – a way that has been foreign to egg-crate culture schools for far too long.

“I’m passing along the “nuts and bolts” of our “What in the World?” Creativity Project, which is the product of our collaborative work in the 7th PLT…what a gift!”

What In the World – Creation Project (used with permission)

Peer Visit – Mackey visit from Snyder 11-16-11 (used with permission)

I am working on a blog post about this Creation Project – from the principal’s point of view. I plan to include the actual assignment document, and I am hoping to have a few more artifacts that point to ways that we (teachers, educators, etc.) can work on “teachers working in teams” and “integrated studies.” I think your peer visit serves as a superb artifact of how ideas and lessons can “seep” and “ooze” across disciplinary borders when teachers visit each other’s classrooms. [Brief backstory (from email to teacher requesting permission to use this peer visit)]

Now, we have a teacher of the subject of history interacting with a teacher of the subject of English. What interconnected learning and integrated studies might emerge from this seed? In other areas, we have World Cultures teachers teaming with Science 6 teachers to create a semester learning-challenge on global climate change in various world regions. We have PE and biology teachers crafting ideas of courses devoted to the understanding of the human body from an integrated approach through anatomy and exercise physiology.

We have distributed R&DIY “culinary, jazz-fusion luminescence” developing among our learners – teachers and students. Those are ideas worth spreading. Additionally, those teachers are inspiring me to think about the worlds that I would contribute to making. Hmmm….