Instructional Rounds in Education

Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman and Lee Teital

Summary by Tom Crumrine

The opening of the book:

“Pierce Middle School is stuck. Despite the best efforts of its leadership and teaching staff, Pierce’s results on the statewide test have leveled off, or slightly declined, after two years of more or less steady improvement. Pierce’s staff feels the urgency of the situation. There is no question about their commitment to improved student learning. they feel they are working at the limit of their current knowledge and skill. The school district’s leadership is equally concerned, since they were relying on Pierce to serve as a model for their system-wide improvement strategy. Now it’s not clear what they will do. Maybe it’s just a temporary glitch in the test scores. But maybe it’s something more fundamental. Pierce’s leadership team and the district leadership team huddle in a conference room at the central office trying to figure out what to do next.”

Quotes from Introduction

What are rounds?

Repeatedly, district and school practitioners tell us that one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like.

The rounds process is and explicit practice that is designed to bring discussions of instruction directly into the process of school improvement. By practice we mean something quite specific. We mean a set of protocols and processes for observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction that can be used improve student learning at scale.

They talk further about the idea that this comes from the idea of rounds in medicine. Rounds where everyone learns.

Unfortunately, the practice of walkthroughs has become corrupted in many ways by confounding it with the supervision and evaluation of teachers.

This kind of practice is both antithetical to the purposes of instructional rounds and profoundly anti-professional.

The idea behind instructional rounds is that everyone involved is working on their practice, everyone is obliged to be knowledgeable about the common task of instructional improvement, and everyone’s practice should be subject to scrutiny, critique and improvement.

Chapter 1

First Principle: Increases in student learning occur only as a consequence of improvement in the level of content, teachers’ knowledge and skill, and student engagement. (24)

Second Principle: If you change any single element of the instructional core, you have to change the other two to affect student learning. (25)

Third Principle: If you can’t see it in the core, it’s not there. (27)

Does it really happen? It needs to be imbedded in the reality of the school. Presentations don’t do it. Looking at what is actually happen is what needs to be done.

Fourth Principle: The task predicts performance. (30)

It isn’t the curriculum. If students practice memorizing they get good at memorizing. If students practice analysis they get good at analysis. If a player practices free-throws they get good at free throws.

Fifth Principle: The real accountability system is in the tasks that students are asked to do. (31)

This is not that hard to do. We just don’t do it enough. The example that worked fairly well is the work of Feb. 2009 where the high school looked at what kinds of exams they give at mid-year time. Sure there are lots of constraints that go into giving mid-year exams but in general the tests asked more low level questions than high level question. (Following the seventh principle that will come later let’s not jump to an evaluation of this. Let’s talk about what we would like to see in mid-year exams and go from there.) This type of process can be repeated if we decide to make time to do it.

Sixth Principle: We learn to do the work by doing the work, not by telling other people to do the work, not by having done the work at some time in the past, and not by hiring experts who can act as proxies for our knowledge about how to do the work. (33)

There is a lot to learn from outside research. My friend cardiologist Ben Lowenstein regularly reads journal articles after his kids have gone to bed. But he also goes to conferences where he sees people performing best practice work and every single day—every single day—his decisions are examined and questioned by his fellow cardiologists, by nurses, etc. This last part is the cultural part that does not exist in education.

Seventh Principle: Description before analysis, analysis before prediction, prediction before evaluation. (34 and 35)

Their seventh principle outlines a common them in rounds discussions. Do not jump right from observation to evaluation. The community needs to come up with what they even want to observe when they do their rounds. After observation lots of conversation needs to happen about what the group would like to be seeing.