As I shared in our last bulletin, one book that I love picking up time and time again is our PLC bible, Learning by Doing. If you do not have a copy ask me and I will get you one! Mine is well loved and I would love for yours to be just as earmarked, highlighted, and sticky-note filled. In continuing from last week’s bulletin on Chapter 6, I continued to refresh on CFA protocols and tools to guide the work of the collaborative team.
A few more notes/reminders/thoughts to keep in your back pocket from rereading pieces of Chapter 6 (I highly encourage you to do so too!):
- Common Formative Assessment (CFA) Protocols ensure all voices are heard on the critical issue at hand, help members look closely at evidence of student learning, examine success as well as failure, and help all participants become skillful in facilitating dialogue on the right work.
- A CFA protocol creates the structure that makes it safe for teachers to ask challenging questions of one another.
- Assessment must result in informing and improving teacher practices.
- Here is an example of a protocol with 6 steps that might be considered to be adopted by a grade level team:
1. Team members examine evidence of student learning or examples of student work in
silence and take notes on their observations.
2. The team leader asks, “What did you see?” Members are asked to make factual, nonevaluative statements.
3. The team leader asks, “What questions does this evidence of student learning raise for you?” Members speculate about students’ thought processes and gaps in understanding.
4. Members discuss implications for their teaching.
5. Members establish action plans to act on their learning.
6. Members share their reactions to and assessment of the meeting.
- Teams can also use protocols to create a safe environment for an individual teacher to pose a problem and seek the help of his or her colleagues. This is one way to support one another through protocols:
1. Introduction: A team member presents the results of an assessment or examples of student work to teammates (five minutes).
2. Teacher presentation: Team members review the presented work as the presenting member explains his or her concerns or questions. No interruptions or questions are allowed during this presentation (ten minutes).
3. Clarifying questions: Participants may ask clarifying questions, but again no discussion is allowed at this point (five minutes).
4. Feedback: The team discusses the work together, giving 3 kinds of feedback each in separate intervals. The presenting teacher listens and takes notes while his or her colleagues talk (ten minutes).
- The feedback must directly relate to the assessment or examples of student work at hand. The 3 kinds of feedback include the following:
* Warm feedback- positive points associated with the work
* Cool feedback-questions, doubts or possible gaps in the work
* Hard feedback-challenges related to the work
5. Reflection: The presenting teacher responds to the team members’ feedback, highlighting new insights, seeking clarifications, and identifying changes to be made (ten minutes).
6. Debrief: The team leader solicits feedback regarding the team’s perceptions of the process (five minutes).
- Teams should also return to the results of their analysis when they prepare to teach the same unit in the next school year. They should examine where students experienced difficulty on the assessment, their theories as to why students struggled, and the corrective actions they took to improve their ability to teach that skill or concept more effectively. They would then set a short-term SMART goal for the unit to improve on the student achievement levels from the previous year.
I challenge you to try one of these protocols in an upcoming grade level meeting. Next up, we will be talking about Depth of Knowledge and deeper learning in a coming bulletin.
