Dear Colleagues,
Thank you so much for joining me
and Lucy as we visited the math classrooms at PS/IS 499 yesterday! I had
a wonderful and productive time and to a large part you made that
possible. We missed those of you who were unable to join us! Our
goals with these six visits is to norm our practice and develop a common
understanding of a high quality math classroom.
It feels to me and to Lucy as if we are off to a good start.
We would love to hear from you. If you have feedback or questions, please share them on our new blog!
The format of Day 1 gave us a glimpse at three different
grade levels and three different teachers. It also gave us a chance to share
our learning goals/themes, as well as an opportunity to talk with Liz (Thank
you so much, Liz!) about her work and with one another about our varying
perspectives. We have a better sense of the range of roles each member of the
group is playing as well as the differing points of view that are at play in
the group. These differences are the strength of the group and through learning
to keep our differences out on the table, finding ways to dialogue until we
come to some kind of coherence and then testing our hypotheses with the various
teachers and leaders we work with, we will find ways of naming the vital
behaviors we want to promote.
The themes that were most evident as we talked with one
another throughout the day were:
1. How do we cultivate a coherent vision of effective
mathematics instruction among the members of this group and then spread that
vision in a grounded way with those who are not part of this group?
2. How do we address the varying needs of the different
teachers/principals we work with in terms of pedagogy and content knowledge in
mathematics?
3. How do we find high-leverage ways to work in schools
without spreading ourselves too thin and without creating dependency models
that rely on the "expert" instructional specialist?
4. How do we engage teachers in their own learning vs. give
me/show me tendencies and overcome the tendency in the field to want immediate
answers?
5. Discourse, questioning and feedback seem to be
high-leverage aspects of the work--so how can we drill down and really develop
these interactions with teachers, between teachers and students, between
students, among ourselves, and with other leaders in the cluster?
6. What is evidence of student learning? Where does it show
up? What specific day-to-day data can we collect on this?
7. What is the difference between 'performance based'
coaching and content coaching (learning based or inquiry based coaching)?
Our next visit will be on Thu, Nov 28. Louise
will not be able to host our visit since the school she had in mind will have a
Quality Review that day. We’ll get back to Louise later J. Please let me know if you are
willing to host our next visit. If so, Lucy and I will be in touch to
support you in making the appropriate arrangements. Once again, our
thanks to Liz and Steven for an amazing first visit!
Please read the chapter on content coaching which is
attached before our next visit.
Best,
Linda and Lucy
