Situating Instructional Rounds Inside a Lived Context

Note: This is work that I have been doing for the last year with a school district.  We have examined and participated in Instructional Rounds.

Thanks to @irasocol  and @monk51295 for video recommendations/creation:)


I. The Environment Matters




Begin in small, yet important ways by asking: Do children regulate their own physical selves at school?  Are they allowed to determine when and where they sit, stand, lean, and so on...



 What if the environment was not limited to the physical school?




 

II. We might collapse the entire year into a statement about slowing down and noticing.

Thinking About Student Engagement as Flow

Note: These are notes and activities for a presentation I will be doing this week with administrators as part of a continuing series of work related to Instructional Rounds.

1. Naming

1. Watch the video and notice what the students do and don't do.  
2. Discuss with your group the examples of disengagement that you find.  
3. How do students 'fake' engagement?  
4. How would you define engagement?

2. Research about Student Engagement and Flow

Student engagement

View more presentations from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc..

Csikszentmihalyi's “Flow” 

 from Wikipedia

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

 

 

 

Characteristics:

1. Very Focused
2. Very Clear Goal: Not too difficult or too easy.
3. Balance of Skills and Challenge
4. Immediate Feedback to their Action
5. In the present
6. Flow is the reward

 

3. Applying

Elementary Kids Monitor Terrain with Technology

1. View Video

2. Code Transcript


Using characteristics we named that suggest student engagement, code the transcript from the video.  

Summary of Project. 

Instructional Rounds for MSD

These are resources we will use in our discussions and planning for Instructional Rounds on 11.30.11.  

1.According to Richard Elmore what are challenges inherent in formal 'school-based' learning?

2. Now check/complicate what Elmore said against this 3:30 minute video from Springville. They discuss how they have developed a theory of action and are checking it with a problem of practice. (Increase reading comprehension in order to increase student achievement the goal). Please notice the VERBS!!!

Problem of Practice: Are teachers using strategies that contribute to increased student comprehension?

3. A Vision? Personalized learning at a secondary school.
Link to Coburg Senior High School.

Contextualizing the Visit for Instructional Rounds at Coburg Senior High School

Some Tasks Ahead (perhaps...)

1. Come to deeply understand the concept and practice of instructional core-- as well as the limitations of seeing/knowing that we each bring to classroom spaces when we observe learners.

2.  Notice the tasks.  Get underneath the tasks at what is being valued (and not).

3. Collaboratively compose ways of seeing learning within classroom spaces that is:

• descriptive
• disruptive
• attentive to the complexity of teaching and learning
• specific and related to the instructional core
• faulty even as we make it

4. Articulate at the district and at school levels--a theory of action (Start anywhere, follow it anywhere). Consider: What are if/then constructs related to learning you notice, align, come up against? Can the personal and the institutional reside side by side?

5. Think horizontally.  Act locally.  Can innovation be grown within idiosyncratic practices  that are place-based?  If so, how does one ensure that those practices represent the community definition of excellence? Who holds power to determine such things?

          6. Notice being wrong (often, a lot) until it feels common, like breathing.


          7. Court (in)stability.

Some recommended texts:

Berger, Ron. 2003. An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Davidson, Cathy N. (2011-08-18). Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. VIKING ADULT. Kindle Edition.

Jenkins., Henry. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning). Kindle Edition.

Langer, Ellen. (1989). Mindfulness. DeCapo Presss.

Perkins, David N. (2010-02-04). Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education. John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

Thomas, Douglas; Seely Brown, John (2011-03-12). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace. Kindle Edition. 

Wheatley, Margaret; Frieze, Deborah (2011-04-11). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition..

Wheatley, Margaret J. (2007). Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. Kindle Edition.

Video

Richard Elmore Policy to Reality (Part I)

Richard Elmore Policy to Reality (Part II)

Richard Elmore Policy to Reality (Part III)

Richard Elmore Policy to Reality (Part IV)

Richard Elmore Policy to Reality (Part V)

Big Thinkers: Linda Darling Hammond on Becoming Internationally Competitive

Cultural Anthropologist Mimi Ito on Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media

Morristown High School: The Classics Academy

TMB Panyee FC Short Film