How We Implemented Instructional Rounds at Vestavia Hills High

At the end of the 2013-14 school year, my colleague Marla and I were discussing the need to see other teachers in their classrooms.  She had recently read a blog post about something the NTOY was doing at his school and encouraged me to go home and read about it.  When I read the blog, I was intrigued!  I came to her the next day and exclaimed, "We can totally do this!"  She said, "Yes, we can.  Let's go talk to Melissa (AP in charge of scheduling) and ask for the same planning period."  We were determined to establish a system of teacher-led instructional rounds at our school, even if we were the only two observers.

Here was the plan (2014-15):  We would set this up like medical rounds at a hospital.  Small groups of teachers (preferably 3, who shared a common planning period) would choose two teachers to observe once a month during their planning period.  They would observe teacher 1, exit, and debrief or talk about what they observed.  The small group would then observe teacher 2 and do the same.  The small group leader would be in charge of documenting a reflection in our shared google doc (several reflections shared at the end of this post).

During the first week of school, we decided to email the faculty in hopes that a few more would join.  The response was overwhelming!  We couldn't believe how many people wanted join in (it ended up being about 53 faculty members).  We made a list of observers by period, chose group leaders, and tried to make groups of 3 or 4 (we felt that 2 was too small).  Marla was concerned that several groups would want to observe many of the same teachers (especially at first), so she thought we needed to assign each group a specific week of the month to observe.  We didn't want any teachers to be overwhelmed or annoyed by lots of observers all at once!  Here is how we set it up:

Job of the small group leader (person highlighted in red):

1) email the group a week in advance to see which teachers they wanted to observe

2) email teachers to observe and set up a day

3) document on shared Google doc after observations 

Here are some of the reflections noted by participants on our shared Google doc:

Next steps (2015-16):  This year we want to make our Instructional Growth Rounds more intentional.  We have a representative from each department joining us this summer for a Design It Yourself Professional Development Workshop called Instructional Rounds Improvement Team.  Additionally, we provided a "survey" type questionnaire (it was quick and easy) to our faculty's end of the year checkout paperwork asking them to provide us with information on what they do really well in their individual classrooms (small grouping, questioning, student response systems, etc).  We also asked each faculty member to tell us what teaching techniques they would like to improve upon.  Both of these questions were accompanied by a list of ideas for convenience for our colleagues (remember it was the end of the year). Hopefully, we will come up with ways to help teachers grow in specific areas of desired growth - technology, instructional strategies, non-traditional classroom setup, small group discussions, fishbowls (large group, student-led discussion), etc…

2015-16 is gonna be a blast! 

Feel free to email us if you have specific questions:

brownjc@vestavia.k12.al.us

hinesmp@vestavia.k12.al.us

Jennifer Brown

Marla Hines