This month’s JSD is just out of sight!  It’s focus is on implementation, one of the standards for professional learning designed by Learning Forward.  One particular stand out article is titled, Strategies Click into Place.  Online resources translate research to practice.  This article highlights a super valuable resource from the Doing What Works initiative, (from the IES’s (Institute of Education Sciences) What Works Clearinghouse sponsored by the Federal Dept of Education).  If you want to jump right to it the website the URL is http://dww.ed.gov.

Before I review the article, let’s start with page 8 of the April 2012 JSD where Learning Forward reiterates Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers (2002) seminal research that outlines four components to professional learning design.

Component One: Adults need to learn theory
Component Two: They need to see the theory or practice demonstrated
Component Three: They need to practice the new practice with input and feedback
Component Four: They need expert or peer coaching for ongoing support of implementation of practice. Along this continuum the thing that really triggers transfer of knowledge and skills into practice is coaching, but you need all four components of professional learning to get 95% transference to kids, e.g. execution of the new practice.

Given that, we all need to check out http://dww.ed.gov and here’s why.  What they have done is provide a four step adult learning cycle that can be done alone or in a PLC.  First you pick a high yield practice in the areas of data driven improvement, quality teaching, literacy, math and science, comprehensive support (such as drop out prevention and behavior issues) and early childhood development.  Then you follow the four step process:

1. Practice Summary: Gain an overview of a practice & see the issues it addresses.
2. Learn What Works: Learn about the research basis for this practice and key concepts.  You can also listen and watch expert interviews.  I visualize educators getting the theory (Joyce and Showers’ step one in adult learning theory) on their own or in PLCs.
3. See How it Works: This is where teachers can view school site videos and slideshows.  They can watch interviews and sample materials from schools. (Joyce and Showers’s step two, “see” the theory or practice demonstrated)
4. Do What Works: This is where the Doing What Works website provides ideas for action and the tools and templates necessary to implement practices – practice makes perfect!  Now the individual or PLC members have to take the ideas and tools and make them actionable (Joyce and Showers’ steps three and four where individuals or groups intentionally practice the research based pedagogy and provide each other expert and or peer feedback)

I can’t stress enough the need for districts to structure the school day so that teachers have common planning time to engage in this kind of methodology and practice.  I imagine teams looking at their student data and saying, collectively or in small groups we need professional learning on X. Then deciding whether they want to Learn What Works and See What Works on their own or during PLC time.  Regardless of the methodology of gaining knowledge in theory and seeing it played out in a classroom on the DWW website, the individual or group will need to come back together to practice the new concepts and skills in their classrooms and receive feedback so that the coaching aspect is instituted and we get actual transference of new concepts and skills to classroom practice.

No common planning time or release time for coaching and providing each other feedback on how new practices are playing out in our classrooms?  Another great article in April’s JSD is on page 18 titled, Record, Replay and Reflect where teachers are using simple tools such as their iPhones to record a lesson and then play it back to either self reflect or have a peer watch and provide feedback during individual planning time.  The article provides the questions observers should consider when observing video taped lessons, e.g. as you watch your students, what questions should you ask and as you watch yourself or a peer, what questions should you ask.  Great stuff!  I look forward to your thoughts.  C

As we continue to think and learn about inquiry based learning, what it really is, and easy to employ techniques to support it, I found the article titled, Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions. One small change can yield big results, by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, quite compelling.  Here’s what they have to say:

QFT – Question Formulation Technique is a process that develops students’ divergent (brainstorming), convergent (categorizing and prioritizing), and metacognitive (reflective) thinking abilities in a very short period of time.

The QFT process has six key steps:

Step 1: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus, or QFocus, is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The QFocus is different from many traditional prompts because it is not a teacher’s question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas. For example, after studying the causes of the 1804 Haitian revolution, one teacher presented this QFocus: “Once we were slaves. Now we are free.” The students began asking questions about what changed and what stayed the same after the revolution.

Step 2: Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly as it was stated; and change any statements into questions. Before students start generating their questions, the teacher introduces the rules and asks the students to think about and discuss possible challenges in following them. Once the students get to work, the rules provide a firm structure for an open-ended thinking process. Students are able to generate questions and think more broadly than they would have if they had not been guided by the rules.

Step 3: Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the differences between open- and closed-ended questions and by practicing changing one type to the other. The teacher begins this step by introducing definitions of closed- and open-ended questions. The students use the definitions to categorize the list of questions they have just produced into one of the two categories. Then, the teacher leads them through a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of questions. To conclude this step, the teacher asks the students to change at least one open-ended question into a closed-ended one, and vice versa, which leads students to think about how the phrasing of a question can affect the depth, quality, and value of the information they will obtain.

Step 4: Students Prioritize Their Questions. The teacher, with the lesson plan in mind, offers criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions. In an introduction to a unit, the instruction may be, “Choose the three questions you most want to explore further.” When designing a science experiment, it may be, “Choose three testable questions.” An essay related to a work of fiction may require that students select “three questions related to the key themes we’ve identified in this piece.” During this phase, students move from thinking divergently to thinking convergently, zero in on the locus of their inquiry, and plan concrete action steps for getting information they need to complete the lesson or task.

Step 5: Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, students and teachers work together to decide how to use the questions. One teacher, for example, presented all the groups’ priority questions to the entire class the next day during a “Do Now” exercise and asked them to rank their top three questions. Eventually, the class and the teacher agreed on this question for their Socratic Seminar discussion: “How do poverty and injustice lead to violence in A Tale of Two Cities?”

Step 6: Students Reflect on What They Have Learned. The teacher reviews the steps and provides students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and prioritizing their questions. Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings