Chatting About Instructional Rounds
Last week, I was invited to chat (via Google Hangouts) with a group of students at Harvard about instructional rounds. Wow – what an honor! It was fun to share the experiences of my team since we launched the practice of IR at Mount Vernon in 2013.
Some of the questions posed included…
How do you transform the culture of a school?
How much time do you spend aligning terms, norms, and expectations with observers and teachers?
How do you measure and capture the demonstrations of the MV Mindsets?
Have you ever included students or parents in instructional rounds?
Do you start with a problem of practice? What are some examples? What about teachers self-identifying a goal or focus in advance of being observed?
Following the chat, one student engaged in a follow up correspondence. His questions provide great prompts for discussion.
After teachers receive the feedback, what do the reflective and responsive action parts of the process look like in practice at your school? That is, once observations are made and data collected, how are strategies for improvement, for growth, ideated and communicated? Are individual teachers supposed to develop new ideas based on the information in SurveyMonkey and test them out on their own, or are there structures in place to help facilitate this in more of a collaborative way? In other words, what does the feedback process look like in terms of strategies for growth and learning among teachers?