The Learning Walk

"Through the talking about goals, and reflecting on observations I think we can improve our craft. We can't be afraid to look at ourselves critically."

Carmen Jorgenson

Learning walks were developed from a business model at Hewlet Packard where management walked around and observed the company workers. The Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh developed and coined the term "Learning Walks" which is one of the new buzz words in education today. Principals, teachers, and superintendents visit classrooms as a team in order to see what students are experiencing at any given time. Some visits can be the whole class time or as brief as 5 to 10 minutes. Learning walks are about observation, reflection and growth, how teachers teach, how students learn, what gets taught to whom and why. NHUSD has adopted this format to develop improvements to instruction by assisting teachers with PLC's (Professional Learning Community). Alvarado has been doing Learning Walks since 2008. This practice also helps to identify best practices and future teacher leaders.

However, the business model presents some challenges for the school environment. If teachers leave the classroom to participate in the walk, then substitute teachers are teaching their students. Substitutes cost money and do not always provide the same quality of instruction as the regular classroom teacher. Team members are not supposed to talk during the visit unless they ask a question of a student and are to be unobtrusive in the classroom. Students are sometimes overwhelmed by having a group of teachers in their classrooms. In March of 2012, fifty teachers and administrators visited Alvarado in one day. Most classrooms in California are already overcrowded with barely enough room for the students. In some cases there may be as many as 6 or 7 teachers in the classroom possibly disrupting the focus of students.

School environments are very complex. Principals and teachers are being pulled in a million directions every day. Often there may not be the time to prepare and debrief teachers as the model requires. This can be very frustrating for the staff. Often teachers are told their class will be visited and then the team runs out of time for all the visits. This leaves the teachers on edge and wondering the age old question, "Am I not good enough for the team to observe?" Also the teams seldom visit the library, the science room, physical education, or the music class making those teachers feel like second class citizens.

For those being visited, Learning Walks can be stressful for teachers especially if they do not know the focus of the observation. For those schools in Program Improvement, the Walkers also look to see if the daily objectives of lessons are posted. Some of the time each teacher in each group is given a specific focus to observe. Before moving to the next classroom the teachers meet for about 5 minutes to debrief by each reporting their observations. Often the classroom teachers being observed are told to do a guided reading lesson during the visit which could mean the focus is reading instruction, but the team could be looking for interactions between students and teachers, classroom organization, independence in student learning, evidence of deep and rigorous thinking, displays, or all the above.

There are a set of steps for the walkers which includes orientation of the staff, instructional focus of the walk, the actual classroom visitation, brief outside the classroom talk, debriefing, and communication with teachers, either oral or written. The walkers may not make judgement statements about what the teachers and students are doing or not doing. Usually schools use a recording sheet for team members to jot down their observations. The teams often look at the walls to see how they support learning and examine student work on those walls. Some team members ask questions of students. The team looks to see what individual help is given to students. After all classrooms have been visited, then the team meets for general debriefing where each person shares what they saw in the classroom citing specific evidence. Then team members make inferences about how they can use their learnings in their own classroom or in the case of best practices the entire school. It is important to communicate the learnings to staff members not on the team and to thank the teachers who have been visited.

2004-2008 New Buzz Words

Except for literacy coaches and PLC, most of the new buzz words came directly as a result of the strategic plan spearheaded by Dr. Jaurequi. Previously we had literacy coaches with CELL and ExLL and had PLC with Power Standards. Most of the staff did not fully understand the implications of strategic planning. After awhile we figured out the buzz words, were Strategic Plan, Action Plan, Writers Workshop, Literacy Coaches for Writers Workshop, Professional Learning Community commonly referred to as PLC, NWEA computer testing and Data Director.

Strategic Plan
The school board adopted a 5 year strategic plan for budgeting and decision making and published it in PDF format as Creating the Future. The plan included a mission statement and a set of objectives. The planners agreed on five strategies to meet their goals and subsequent action plans to meet the goals. Community members, teachers, principals were to meet at each school to devise action plans which would lead to the achievement of the goals.

OBJECTIVES of the Strategic Plan

• By 2010, at least 85 percent of all students will be proficient on the California state assessment and the achievement gap for all subgroups will be narrowed.
• All students will develop and consistently demonstrate the character attributes of a productive, responsible and successful citizen.
• Every student will meet graduation requirements or achieve their Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals.

During the summer of 2008 members of the Alvarado staff, teachers and principals, parents, and students met with Glynn Thomson, Chief Academic Officer, to develop the strategic plan for Alvarado. During the following year members of the staff and students met to develop an action plan for Alvarado. The plan had to follow the guidelines of the original district strategic plan and Alvarado's own strategic plan. There were hundreds of hours spent on this after school and during the summer.

The district strategy that had most direct effect on instruction for Alvarado teachers and students was Strategy I.
We will assure effective implementation of the standards-based curriculum throughout the system and use assessment data to drive research-based instructional practices to ensure academic proficiency.
1.8 Implement the consistent use of the top 10 research-based instructional strategies as described in Classroom Instruction That Works by Robert Marzano, to improve student achievement and close the achievement gap.
1.11 Develop a model of literary instruction. (Writers Workshop)
1.12 Deliver and support New Haven’s model of literacy instruction.(Literacy Coaches)
1.18 Implement a system on ongoing collaboration between staff members that includes articulation of the K-5 curriculum. (PLC - Professional Learning Communities)
1.17 Integrate technology into the curriculum to improve/enhance instructional practices.
(NWEA Computer Testing and Data Director)

2000 - 2002 Power Standards

Karen Saucedo Principal
Holly Scroggins Assistant Principal
2001-2002
Click on the photo to enlarge.

Power Standards are a systematic method for prioritizing what students should know. The term “Power Standards” was coined by Dr. Douglas Reeves of the Center of Performance Assessment an international organization dedicated to improving student achievement. According to Dr. Robert Marzano (2001) the biggest impediment to implementing standards is the sheer number of standards.

Focusing on learning in a collaborative culture teachers were asked to meet with their grade levels and specialists with their colleagues to develop Power Standards. This collaborative culture was known as Professional Learning Communities or PLC. Teachers were required to meet at least two afternoons a week. Unlike some schools, Alvarado teachers always had a collaborative staff. Most grade levels had worked together for years, so required PLC meetings were unnecessary, but at these meetings there was a certain required protocal. Alvarado teachers spent many hours in PLC meetings and professional development days compiling their power standards. The media specialists also met to develop power standards.

Power Standards were to lead to the in-depth instruction of essential concepts. Reeves and Marzano discovered that 16 to 20 power standards per year for reading, writing, and speaking were the most effective. Power Standards are the subset of all the standards prioritized. All teachers must teach these and all students must learn these before leaving that grade level.

By Dr. Reeves definition, Power Standards are those standards that once mastered give the students the ability to use reasoning and thinking skills to learn and understand other curriculum objectives. However, Alvarado's individualized grade level power standards designed by the classroom teachers were never quite fully utilized in the classroom probably because in 2002 No Child Left Behind became the law and changed the focus of those in charge of education. NCLB changed what schools had to do to keep receiving federal funding, thus changing the landscape of education in the future. There was much to do to comply with NCLB.

However, Marzano's book is one of the action plans in the 5 year Strategic Plan, so the influence of Power Standards (as of this date 2009) still affect classroom instruction. In his book are ten instructional strategies that are most likely to improve student achievement across all content areas and across all grade levels, basically Power Standards. It's under the first strategy:
1.8 Implement the consistent use of the top 10 research-based instructional strategies as described in "Classroom Instruction That Works’’ by Robert Marzano, to improve student achievement and close the achievement gap.