by Addye Hawkins, Kansas
In 2005, I became Director of Equity for the Kansas City, Kansas School District. At the onset of this appointment, I learned about the annual SRI Winter Meeting from a colleague of mine who happened to be a colleague of one of the facilitators. He was able to get three of us approved to attend the meeting in Denver that year. It was through that experience that I became hooked on the work!
Upon completing this extraordinary experience, I immediately began to work on bringing some of the SRI facilitators in to Kansas City, KS to work with our staff. For the next two years, we invited Gene Thompson-Grove, Christelle Estrada, Camilla Green, Greg Peters, Beth Graham, Marjorie Larner, and Teri Schrader to work with all central office administrators, principals, assistant principals, curriculum directors, Instructional coaches, and PLC leaders from each school to engage them in the 5 day institutes.
Although I had experienced the Winter Meeting, I was delighted to continue as a participant in several 5-day institutes, to hone my skills as a participant and facilitator.
Upon completion of the work with SRI facilitators, the expectation was that those same groups who experienced the training together meet monthly to practice giving and receiving feedback from colleagues while we were planning ways to move the work into the schools.
Several schools took this on as a means to support the work done in PLC’s. Others simply used the tools of SRI collaborative and reflective practices in staff development sessions to mostly study articles. As with any school reform initiative, there must be strong support from district administration and campus administrators. We fell short in most of our efforts to move the work to full implementation and that was disheartening. In spite of the lack of district level support some schools did extraordinary work and this is where I became involved with a couple of schools to support their implementation effort.
After 35 years of service with KCKPS, I decided to retire and devote time to develop my consulting in the areas of PLC development, Instructional Coaching Support, New Teacher coaching along with continuing equity work.
I was invited to return to Kansas City, Kansas as a consultant to continue some of the work I had started before retirement. One of the middle school principals contacted me to work with her staff to get SRI practices implemented within their PLC’s. She wanted a 3-day session as a review for all of her PLC leaders and a 1-day sessions for all teachers over several days to introduce them to the basics of asking clarifying and probing questions, using protocols to look at work, dilemmas, and study articles. The principal and assistant principals also attended and participated. She then shared with staff her vision for this work (in a consultancy) and responded to their questions and used some of their suggestions as we moved forward.
With feedback from the consultancy, she decided to have PLC’s bring student work or dilemmas about their practice to the group for feedback. My role was to serve as facilitator for each PLC once a month for a semester then we began the gradual release of responsibility to team leaders as I served as coach. Teachers who were a little hesitant at first soon came to see the value of the work as relationships were forming in a collegial way.
For the next two years, I continued to work with this school and served mostly as coach. We added the component of classroom learning walks during our PLC time once a month. The principal and I shared articles with them and facilitated the discussions using the text protocols to help them understand the purpose and to ensure them that this is not a “gotcha”, rather; it is an opportunity to learn from each other. During PLC time, teachers visit a classroom for 10 minutes, answer 4-5 questions on learning walk form (See Below), return to PLC and participate in a discussion around what was learned. The principal and I consistently asked for reflective feedback from teachers as to how well they felt this worked and what needs strengthening. Feedback was consistently positive.
I wanted to learn as much as I could from the work at this middle school to move on to other schools and districts. I am currently working with an elementary and high school in another district around some of the same work. This is the 2nd year for the elementary school and 1st year for the high school.
I’ve decided to only take on work that is to be done over an extended period of time so that I implementation can happen and it is not seen as a short term fix to a long term problem.
I love the work I do and just can’t imagine doing it without the tools I learned around SRI collaborative and reflective practices which helps drive it. I am forever grateful to my colleagues for their support during my time with Kansas City, KS Public Schools.
LEARNING WALKS
This is NOT about the person being observed. It is about using your colleague’s classroom as a lab for you to engage in reflective practice, which is thinking about YOUR practice.
Questions for self-reflection:
- If this were your classroom, what would you be proud of/wonder about?
- What percentage of the students was actively engaged in the learning? What would you do to improve this? In an effort to “ratchet up” the active cognitive engagement, what instructional moves would you make?
- What other things might you consider to make this lesson or classroom environment even better?
- What have you taken away from this that you will try out/tweak in your classroom?
- What would be the evidence of the teacher demonstrating a warm, yet demanding stance?
If you have any questions or feedback for Addye, she can be reached at addie.hwkns@gmail.com. Feel free to discuss this and other topics in our Facebook group.
