 Feel free to text me directly or text it to the room. I just want to really look at three things today. I have three big questions I kind of want to explore, and I'll try to build in the interactivity every 10 minutes or so. There'll be opportunities to write questions on the board, which you could also write them to me directly, and I'm hoping that we can facilitate conversation as well. And you can follow up with an email if you want as well to go further with the conversation. But essentially the three big ideas I want to talk about are why we would want to worry about professional learning in the first place, why is instruction such an important issue, and secondly, why is it that traditional forms of professional learning sometimes aren't as successful as we'd like them to be. And then I want to just propose sort of a picture of what might happen in order to create effective professional learning. And I'm going to paint one scenario. It's really the ideas that are in the new book I've written called Unmistakable Impact, but it's just one idea, and it's not to suggest you would follow the ideas there, but maybe that they'll lead to some thoughts about what you might be doing with respect to your schools. And I hope I'll hear back from you as well as we go through this. So the first question is why would we worry about this in the first place? And I have a simple chart I wanted to show you, and this is from a study that was done by Sanders in Tennessee. And what he did is he, in Tennessee, they used what's called the teacher value added assessment system, which what they do is instead of comparing the scores of the sixth graders this year versus the sixth graders last year, they compare the sixth graders with where they were in fifth year and where they were in fourth year and where they were in third year. So they monitor the progress of individual students and not compare each grade against the grade that was there the previous year. And because they use that assessment approach using the state assessment scores, they're able to monitor which teachers have the greatest impact on kids and which ones don't. And what Sanders did is he took the teacher value added assessment data from the state assessments and he sorted it out into teachers who were in five quintiles, the top 20%, the next 20%, the next 20%, and so forth down to the bottom 20%. In other words, which 20% of teachers demonstrated the most growth as according to the state assessment scores versus which 20% of the teachers demonstrated the least growth, or their students at least showed the least amount of growth. What Sanders did is he said, okay, well, if we sort them into these five different quintiles, what happens if a student gets three years of a teacher who's in the top 20% versus three years of a teacher who's in the bottom 20%? What's the difference in the achievement of the students? And what he found in the first system was if you had a bottom 20% teacher, so to speak, that your average scores were 6% below average on the state assessment scores. But if you had a top 20% teacher who's in three years in a row, your scores were 46% higher than average. In other words, there was a difference on the state assessment scores of 52% just based on which teacher you got. And in the second major district, another big district in Tennessee, he got similar data except it's a little more troubling because if you got a bottom 20% teacher, so to speak, in that district, your scores would be 21% below average. 20% below average just by virtue of who your teacher was. In the other district, excuse me, in the top 20%, if you were a student in that class, you would be up by 33%. In this case, a difference of 54% on student achievement. So I have a simple question to get us started. Do you agree that instruction is a critical factor in student learning? So what this data would show would be, although there are lots of things that affect the impact on students and how they learn, that the one thing would be critically important and that would be instruction. If we can impact instruction, if we go back to that chart, it can make an enormous difference in terms of what happens. So if you could just respond to that question by, I guess, doing a little check mark green or the X, do you agree that instruction is a critical factor in student learning or do you think there's a lot of other things that are way more important? So I think it's important for us to vote. I would like to go ahead and make your selection and we'll publish the results as a poll when everyone has voted. Now, I probably wouldn't be having this conversation if I wasn't inclined to say that the answer to this is yes. And I'll tell you how I see that. I think if you've ever been in college, which we've all been in college or university and you've taken a class, you know that what becomes a critical answer is the question you ask your colleagues is, who's teaching the course? And the issue is that instruction, from my perspective, can make an enormous difference. We know that with our own experiences. And I think that's why we do professional learning. That's why we focus on professional learning in schools is because we know that improving instruction likely has a positive impact on student achievement. So the question then becomes, what about professional development? Why doesn't it work more effectively? And I think there's a lot of answers to those questions. First off, I'd say there's an awful lot of research that would show that traditional forms of professional development don't make a dent in what happens with respect to instruction. And you can see some of them at the website instructionalcoach.org in the research section. But one reason is school improvement plans are generally too complicated. Doug Reeves has a quotation that Michael Fullen quotes, and he says, something to the effect that the prettiness of the school improvement plan and its thickness are inversely proportional to it actually have an impact on instruction. And what I think Reeves means is, in most cases, when these school improvement plans are released, they really have little impact because nobody really knows what's in them. They're not red, and if they're red, they're only understood at a kind of superficial level. So one thing is just that what should be the engine for school improvement often isn't even understood or used. The second reason traditional forms of professional development don't work is that in our studies, we found that one shop workshops just don't have an impact on instruction. There's a fellow named Marshall Goldsmith who wrote a book called Mojo. And Goldsmith is a leading executive coach in the United States. He's probably the leading executive coach. And Goldsmith has followed up on 250,000 people who attended workshops that he's led on leadership. And what he said was, after following up over 250,000 people, is that there's no follow-up. The workshops don't make a dent in terms of people's practices. The workshop introduces ideas, but it doesn't really lead to change unless it's a part of a whole process that leads to follow-up. The third thing is that I think whenever we set up helping situations that helping is a complicated situation. And there are five big ideas about helping I'd like to talk about. In my opinion, in most cases, professional learning will fail unless it addresses these issues. And so I'll talk about the five different issues. The first one is that change is pretty complicated. There's a fellow named Prochaska. He wrote this book called Changing for Good. And he's probably the leading expert on change, even though his work is a little bit old. He's cited in almost any counseling book you're going to find. They'll talk about Prochaska and declimiting. And what he found was people moved through stages of change. But the first level in the stage is what's called pre-contemplation. And what pre-contemplation is, if you think of the word and visualize it in your head, pre-contemplation, the idea is that when you're in the pre-contemplative phase, you're not even thinking about the change. You don't think you need to make the change. You ignore data that suggests you should make the change. And we've spent the last year watching videotape of teachers discussing their instruction with teachers. And what we found is that it is absolutely true of the people we observe. That is, until they see video of themselves teaching, they have absolutely no idea what's happening in their practices. A simple truth about change then is most people don't realize they need to make the change. The second thing, a simple truth is identity. And I often tell a story, which would be if someone, let's say it's your sister that has a daughter and she's raising the daughter and you love that daughter like your own kid. And you think, I'm watching my sister and she's not raising her daughter right. And you think, I've got to go talk to her and tell her she's not raising her daughter right. And you're going to have a conversation about her parenting skills. You would probably, even though you're absolutely certain that what she's doing is doing damage to this little girl that you love, you might actually not have the conversation because you'd be so afraid of what damage it might do to their relationship with her. And that's because our identity is so deeply wrapped up in how we parent other people. Our identity is so wrapped up in how we parent our children. And I would argue that the same thing goes for teaching. Just like talking to somebody about parenting is extremely personal. When you talk to a teacher about teaching, you need to know that the teacher is deeply wrapped up in the way they teach. Talking to somebody about how they teach is almost as personal as talking to somebody about how they parent. And so people take it personally. The second simple truth about change is that people take it personally when you talk about the way they teach. The third truth, and most of those ideas are wrapped up in a book called Difficult Conversations by Sloan Patton and Heen. The third truth is about autonomy. And the idea is that, I like this little chart here. You'll see how they put a little gate on the lawn or on the road, but people quickly got around the gate by just driving around it. So you can't force people to follow directions. A gene arbitrary is a little thing there. But the idea that autonomy comes from Thomas Davenport who wrote this book. And Davenport studied knowledge workers and people who think, who create, who problem solve and use their brains to do their work. He says they're called knowledge workers. It's an old idea by Drucker. And what Davenport has said is that knowledge workers mean autonomy. The way he puts it is, knowledge workers don't like to be told what to do. Thinking for a living and genders thinking for oneself. Knowledge workers are paid for their education experience and expertise. So it's not surprisingly take offense when someone rides a rock shot over their intellectual territory. Another simple truth about change is if we do the thinking for someone else and we don't let them do the thinking, they're going to resist. Especially if they're knowledge workers, people who use their brains or intelligence or creativity to do what they do, because they want to think that's the virtue of the job. And if someone else does it, people are going to resist. Well, the fourth simple truth is about status. I hope you like this little picture here. And there's a great book about how status is a part of any healthy relationship. And it's Edgar Schein's book called Help It. And what Schein says is that any interaction with another person involves some negotiation of status. The way he puts it is, we want to be accorded the status we feel we're deserved. And if we don't get the status we deserve, we're going to resist what happens. We might exist explicitly or we might resist passively, but we're not going to buy it. And the way he puts it, citing somebody else is that in any kind of interaction, we can take on the role of being a parent. We can take on the role of being an adult or we can take on the role of being a child. But if someone takes on the role of parenting us and we're put in the role of being a child, it's not something that's going to work very well in terms of a helping situation. In fact, we will almost always resist. The way Schein says it is if we put ourselves one up and we put the person we're helping one down, you can almost be certain the person who's been put one down is not going to listen to what we say because they're going to be more concerned with status. And so what Schein suggests is that people who are in helping situations equalibrate the conversation and they make it really clear that this is an equal conversation. Not that I'm here to fix you, to help you, but that it's equal. Well, the last simple truth about change relates to motivation. And the book I've looked at that summarizes the ideas on motivation are Daniel Pink's book Drive. What Pink says basically is that we're not motivated by someone else's goals. The quotation I have here he says, goals that people have set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are healthy. The goals imposed by others, sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores and so on can sometimes have dangerous side effects. And one of the major side effects is just the profound lack of motivation. People aren't motivated by other people's goals and motivated by their own goals. They don't have a voice or a say in what's being done and they're just handed a goal. The depth of commitment and the likelihood that people will be motivated to make the change work are not so great. So there are five simple truths. One of them is that people often don't realize they need to make the change. The second thing is, people take it personally when they're told how to do their work. The fourth thing is, people want to do the thinking and when others do the thinking for them, people resist. The fourth is that relationships around helping between adults involve status and if someone feels they've been put one down and you're one up and they feel that they should be equal, they're going to resist. And the fifth simple truth is that people aren't excited by other people's goals. They have to have a say and a goal has to matter to them. So I'll tell you how to put some comments here about what you think about this and also give you a chance to ask some questions or share some thoughts. Jan, you want to mention what people should do? Thanks, Jim. What we're going to do here is we've got three different ways that you can respond. You can respond using your microphone, you can respond by typing in the chat box or you can respond by writing on this graffiti board. And in order to do that, you would use, I'll just get a pointer tool here, you would use either the capital A or the A that looks like a word document, click on it and type in anywhere in this space and once you start typing, you can choose your color and I can move those around. If you'd like to type, if you'd prefer to type your comments, questions, wonders in the chat box, we can also copy and paste them in there for you. If you'd like to ask a question or ask us that you would click on the raised hand and we can take comments in the order that they pop up. Thanks. Jim, I can also put up a timer. How long do you think you would like me to put it up for so that people know there's a finite amount of time to respond before we go on? All we want to do is we will move on and just use the chat as a place for people to post their questions if they have questions. But does anybody like to use their mic to ask a question or ask a comment? We do have some people brave enough to use the graffiti board so good for you. The author of Difficult Conversations lets us stone a pattern in heat and it's published by Penguin. They work at the Harvard Negotiation Project and someone wrote of the five status is the most important developmental step. I think it's awfully important. I'm not entirely sure it's the most important but I wouldn't disagree with that either. I think status is the one you can really see. For example, if you lead a workshop and you do something or the presenter does something that suggests they think that they're superior you will see immediately a reaction of people's facial expressions or lack of interest and if that happens over time people come in with almost a passive aggressive resistance to the workshops because they feel they've been put one down. The question I'm seeing is how do you motivate teachers who find it hard to negotiate between teacher goals and motivation in the rest of the picture? I'm going to try to give some quick answers to that but to answer that question we have about 12 days of workshops at the University of Kansas and I'm going to try to give it in five minutes but I think one thing is that the relationship well I think I'll come back to that question because I think it's kind of being addressed throughout but I do think that to respect teachers through what I call a partnership approach is a critical part that they're involved in goal setting in very specific ways is critical and I'll sort of go through painting a picture of that. I think really the rest of the presentation is to say how do we address all these things? I'm overwhelmed by all your comments and I'm thinking I really like chat for the next one. But thank you for your comments. And a lot of them sort of are getting down to well how do you do this and so the rest of the way I'd like to talk about some aspects of that. In that conversation I see coaching as being central but I also see principal leadership as equally essential. So let me go ahead if by chance what you said hasn't been addressed on the graffiti please either speak up with the mic or use the chat to move forward but let me move on to paint a picture of how we might address those challenges to change and how we might address the fact that traditional workshops don't really make that big of a difference and also the other issue which is that school improvement plans are usually not read and certainly not understood. So I have this concept called impact schools and it's described in this book Unmistakable Impact. You've got a sample of tools you can use from the book and most of the tools will be online free at the website instructionalcoach.org. But let's talk about what we mean by an impact school. By an impact school I mean a place that's based on principles of partnership. Now online at that coaching website you can download a book called the partnership learning of a field book and it's free and it describes the principles. So I won't go into all the details but the core idea about the partnership principles is simply this if someone was telling me how to do my work how I want them to treat me and that's the way we should treat teachers when we try to help them do their work. And that usually involves feeling like I'm a person who's valued feeling like that I have some choices limited choices but nonetheless I have choices that have a voice in what's said that people listen to me and want to hear what I say and we would call that a dialogical way of interacting. It usually involves reflection and thinking together and a focus on real life activity. And it usually is going to work when the person is working with me actually expects to learn from me. It doesn't feel as a done deal to come in and so we've articulated those principles and we would argue that effective professional development would be grounded in that notion that we want to be treating people the way we would want to be treated. It's an old idea of course. So the one way to look like in a school well I think impact schools are built around these concepts and if you're familiar with Michael Fohlen's book Motion Leadership or any of his more recent books like The Six Secrets to Change a lot of these ideas were heavily influenced by Michael. He was gracious enough to write the introduction for the book in fact because he's been such an influence on me. But when I read Fohlen's work I was always like well how do you actually do that? And we've tried to create some specific tools to make it happen. One of them is the idea of a target for professional learning. One of them is the specifics of administrative support. One of them is how workshops support implementation of the target. And then there's the way we construct teams of coaches doing the midst of all this. And I would argue that the coaches are going to truly support the principal and the principal is going to truly support the coach. We need to create a system that actually needs to change. So the first thing to talk about is the target. And the idea of the target is that you would create a one page document that summarizes what the professional learning would look like in your school. The target might look something like this. It would be arranged in certain key areas. This one's built around community building, content planning, instruction and assessment for learning. And this one has things that teachers would do and things that students would do. And the way the target is developed involves interviews with all the teachers. There's a thing called the target design team that involves administrators and teachers. And then teachers commit to doing the target through conversations that the principal has with small groups and involves anonymous ways of doing voting and significant interaction. But it's a process that ultimately everyone is clear on what the focus of the professional learning is. And everybody is clear on where we're trying to get to. And you might have in some districts or some schools three targets, one for literacy, one for mathematics, and one for instruction. But it's critical to have this, and it doesn't have to be one page. But the idea of a one page is it forces you to have focus thinking and it forces you to key in on what's critical and do it in a way that everybody understands. I don't think you can expect to have a dramatic improvement in instruction unless through school improvement plans unless there's a deep shared understanding of what that looks like. The principal deeply understands it, the coach deeply understands it, the teacher deeply understand it. So the first part of the project is to develop a target. Now the way we do this is that we create these design teams. The design teams are made up of an administrator, all the administrators in the school and a select group of teachers who are teachers who have credibility with the staff. They're not necessarily the department chairs, but they're teachers who have credibility. The teachers on the team go out and interview every teacher in the school to ask them what they think should be on the target and what they think about their students. But the administrators go around and observe the classroom using an observation form. The document you can download has an example of an observation form. And then they come together, the administrators and the teachers, and the teachers who are the design teams represent the voices of the teachers. The principals represent the objective standard of what's been observed because sometimes teachers might not know what they need. And together they create a draft of the team and then the principal goes around and meets with the teachers and asks them what they think of the target and they have a chance to vote on whether or not they like the target. And then once we've got a target that everybody agrees with then the professional learning is focused around them. Now the last piece of that is that central office at the district has to be or the board has to be deeply involved in supporting the process. It's not going to work if a school develops an instructional target and then central offices, no, no, no, we're going in a different direction. The folks downtown have to make sure they support the whole process and ultimately the superintendent has to be the person who deeply believes in it. But the first idea is that we will create this simple target that captures the key ideas related to professional learning. Now I was wondering if you could fill in this whole survey here. I try to play with all the tools for a webinar and Jan is going to tell you how to answer the questions related to the survey. Now my question is simply this. What percentage of your teachers do you think right now fully understand your school's school improvement plan? So we're going to use a polling tool. You'll note where the check mark and the X were previously under our participant window. They've now changed to ABCD. So to make your selection easier, you simply choose A for 0 to 10%, B for 10 to 25, and so on. You won't be able to see everybody's votes at this point, but when everyone has voted or chosen their letter or the greater majority has anyway will publish it and then we'll take a look at those results. So we just have a few more votes to come in and I think I'll go ahead and publish. And there you go, Jim. Jim, you might be talking, but you're going to have to turn your mic back on. Sorry about that. We've got two who would say less than 10%, three who would say 10 to 25%, and then about 40% of you would say that 25 to 50%, and two of you say 10%. So if we look at our responses with the exception of two, almost everybody would say less than 50% of your teachers understand the school improvement plan. And even if they do understand it, often it's overwhelming if it's not focused and clear. But if it is focused and clear, you're probably well in your way and happy with where you are and pleased with how things are progressing. Anyway, the first idea here is not that you would necessarily create a target, but somehow you would develop a strategy so that you could do a target, but somehow you would create a strategy so that you could understand what the focus for professional learning is in the schools and we're going to stick with this plan for at least three years. It's not going to change next year. We know where we are, we know what we're trying to do when we have a clear sense of it. Now, the second part of this is what's the role of the principal? And so I'd like to say a few things about this, recognizing first off that what I'm about to say involves time and most principals I work with. So I have just got so much time I don't know what to do with. It's pretty much the opposite. In fact, one principal told me once, if I could just give up sleep and stay awake every day and stay awake every night and work 24 hours, I still don't think I get caught up. It's overwhelming with reports and dealing with parents and dealing with children and email. Some principals I know get more than time. And so all those things consume time, but without going into how to create the time, I'm still going to say that there are certain things that are essential for professional learning. The most important thing is that when it comes to change, the voice that carries the most weight in a school more than the superintendent is going to be the principal's voice. Everybody wants to do what the person they report to suggests. They may not want to act on it, but your opinion means more to the people you work with than anyone else's opinion if you're a principal. The principal's voice carries the most weight. Jim Collins has talked about this in one of his books. So the critical thing is, if the school is going to focus on professional learning, the principal has to be the first learner in the school, the person who leads that professional learning. And that involves certain things. One is that the principal observes the teachers and knows exactly how well each teacher is doing as they progress towards hitting the ideas that are on the target. If we know what we're focused on with respect to our professional learning, then the principal needs to know how everybody was doing. Secondly, so the principal has to know what it looks like when the target is done well and know exactly where each teacher is. And so they have to keep track of their progress. And there's a document I'll show you called the teacher progress map, which is one way of doing it. Since I'm talking to Alberta, I should really say progress. I'm being Americanized down here, even though I'm Canadian. And then the next thing is that if the principal believes that professional learning is central to the teacher's lives, they need to walk the talk by being a part of that professional learning. When the principal leaves the room of a workshop and goes back to something that's more important, often what teachers will feel is, well, this is so important. Why doesn't she stay here with me? I've got grading to do. I've got parents to call. I've got things I could do, lesson plans. I could go do stuff too. If this is so important, why isn't she here? Why isn't he here? And the truth is, if the workshop isn't tied to the target, it might not be that important. And it's a waste of teacher's time, unless it's really going to help them hit the key things that are in school and formal plans. And then the last thing the principal can do is refer teachers to work with coaches who aren't hitting the target and do it in a way that respects the principal's partnership, but nonetheless guides the teachers towards implementing the practices. So for us, the linchpin for professional learning in the school is the principal. Without the principal doing the leadership, the instructional leadership, it's going to be hard for a coach to have an impact. We can't throw the coaches out there without the leader in the school making it happen. And so there's tools we've developed that you can download that are free. And this, for example, is one for community building or sometimes called classroom management. So we would measure how many kids are on task, during direct instruction, how many opportunities to respond, how often does the teacher reinforce students or correct students, how many disruptions in a minute, maybe in a five-minute period of, has the teacher posted expectations in the classroom. If you think back to the target, there was community building, content planning, instruction and assessment for learning. And so the principal would have very precise ways of observing exactly what's on the target to see, are we close to the target and where are we. And then the idea is that the principal could keep track of those observations through something like a teacher progress map. Now this wouldn't be posted on the Web or in the staff lounge. It's something that the principal uses just for their own, that's a little joke there by the way, but anyway, it's something the principal uses for their own organization of profession learning to monitor where they are. But the idea is we want every teacher to hit mastery on those things that everybody's agreed with. If we all agree that we want to have 90% engagement in our classrooms, for example, but it has to be an authentic agreement. But if we make this target that everybody really wants to get there, then the principal just monitors where we are and then shapes profession learning to support that. That might involve teams, that might involve workshops, that might involve coaching, but it involves helping people hit the target. And in the little teacher progress map, and this is just an example, yours would fit your school and your students' needs. It wouldn't necessarily get these things, but we've articulated criteria. So if we were at limited use here with respect to behavior, that would mean that time on task is less than 80%. The teacher hasn't created expectations. The ratio of interaction is less than 1.1 to 1. That is there's more corrections than praise. And there's more than 10 disruptions per minute. If we're at some use, time on task is about 80% to less than 90%. There's expectations that are posted, but they're not followed. There's ratios of interaction that are slightly more than 1 to 1, but less than 2 to 1. And disruptions are about 1 every other minute. Mastery means you've got 90% time on task. Expectations are posted and followed by the students. That's why interactions is 3 to 1. Disruptions are 0 to 4 per 10 minutes. If you go back here, the idea would be that the principal over several years is constantly monitoring where are we with respect to hitting the target. And not in a kind of punitive way at all. It's simply that they know where it is and then they shape professional learning so that every teacher can move from limited use to some use to mastery. The idea would be we really want to hit all these things on the target, and so we're going to shape professional learning to make that happen. And these are just one way of doing it, but the idea is to have that kind of focus with what we do. So what questions do you have about that? You could either use your microphone to ask the questions, or you could post them on the chat. But what questions do people have about the idea of the observations, the target, and the teacher progress now? And just while people are doing that, Jim, I'll jump in and say that Will had a question. So maybe we can revisit his question around the three-year plan there in the chat. How big should plans say? Size seems to be important for some district leaders. Great. Well, I think I think that the critical thing is that the target is comprehensive enough to address the most important things for instruction. I think Michael's term is high leverage. You want the few practices that are going to really make the most difference. And I would say you want your target to be as small as possible so long as it's addressing all of the important things. For us, the target should be built around four areas, community building, content planning or curriculum, construction or differentiated instruction, a variety of teaching practices. And finally, it would be assessment for learning. And that would be that the teacher knows how well they're progressing. And everybody, every student knows how well they're progressing. We feel if you could hit those four things, instruction, content planning, community building, your classroom management and assessment for learning, if you're doing really well on those four things, your class should really be going well. So it could be in some schools that they've been spending years reading Stiggins' work and they've done really well on assessment for learning. Or it could be that the school has and they've worked a lot on community building and used positive behavior supports and there's no need to worry about classroom management. We're just going to focus on assessment for learning and instruction or whatever. It's going to vary. But the simple thing would be it needs to be doable. It needs to be something that's monitored and it needs to be something that everybody agrees is worth focusing on. Or at least a large percentage of people, a critical mass of people, agree it's important. Any other questions? Actually, Dennis has got a question. Some of the issues to dance around are unions, principal, teacher, rotation, and the role of the principal is educational leader and being a manager. I agree with you and I don't have a very good way of telling you what to do with how to do that. I think it's... The one thing is I think that you really want to make sure that there's a genuine sense of partnership between all the people involved. And the leaders of change truly respects the teachers that have faith in their potential. They see the good in those people. They offer authentic choices. And there's a real meaningful conversation about these things. And so the union wouldn't be an adversary but would be someone that would be a true partnership in the process. And I don't know how possible it would always be, but I think that we move beyond an adversarial situation to one where we all work together to try to make things happen. I know it's going to be different kinds of situations. As far as teacher rotation goes, especially in some more challenging districts, your teachers might come and go pretty frequently, all the more important to have the coach in place to provide that kind of support and other kinds of ways of making it happen. There's a question posted. What's the role of the vice principal or vice principal? I really think that the I think the whole admin team, whether there's one vice principal or other administrators on the team, along with the principal, they really do all the things the principal does as well. They're walking the talk. They attend professional learning. They're conducting the observations. They're working with the principal to look at where everybody is and where everybody is. Okay, I have a few more things to say just to paint this picture. I hope it's working for you. I'm just trying to give you a sort of a sense of all this. I said there's a lot that's involved. But the thing is, well, what do we do with workshops in all of this? By the way, if I didn't answer your question, just feel free to use chat and I'd be happy to try to respond. Well, workshops are still critical. Michael Follin came down to consult with us here at the University of Kansas. I actually had the pleasure of studying with him when I was a student at the University of Toronto. But he came down and on the way back to the airport I asked him, I just spent two years studying workshops and I said to him, do you think workshops actually make a difference? And I was kind of nervous because I just spent two years studying it. And I thought, what if he says no, there are a complete waste of time? But what he said and I agree with his stance is that workshops are critical. I mean, you can't put a number on it, but it's something like 30% of the professional learning is workshops. What the workshops do is they introduce ideas into the system. They don't actually affect change, but they introduce the ideas. People pretty quickly forget what happened in the workshop. It takes about a week for people to forget. It's kind of like if you park your car on the airport and you go away for a week, you're not going to remember where you parked it. You remember it the first day, you only remember for a few days. But the workshop introduces the ideas and it's going to be effective for showing a lot of people what could happen. And so for me, for the workshop to be effective, it has to focus on the target. It has to be led by somebody who uses effective teaching. The principles should attend and sometimes lead the workshops. Cultures should support the workshops. At the end of the workshop, there should be time for whatever was learned for the teachers to say, let me plan how I'm going to work with the coach. You give some kind of form that the teachers use so that they can fill in how the coach is going to support it. Because without coaching, it's likely not going to happen. And there should be this notion permeating the whole workshop that the only reason we're doing this is to change teaching practice. That's why having coaches lead the workshops could be a great idea for other teachers in the school. You don't need to bring in outside experts to share the ideas. It'll be more effective in fact if the people in the school have the expertise or if the coaches can learn that expertise and bring it back to the team. But the workshop should be focusing on what's on the target and not a whole bunch of other stuff. And it should be organized to respond to the needs of the school so they can hit the target. And they should be led well. It wouldn't make sense to have a lecture on cooperative learning, for example, if you're doing this. The next thing is what I call intensive learning teams. Main school districts have teams that come together to develop curriculum. And those teams are the people who create the new curriculum are deeply invested in the process and they really deepen their knowledge and they love the curriculum they've developed. But the problem is for the teachers who are not on the curriculum development team when that curriculum comes to you it feels like just one more thing that's been handed down from on high. And there's just as much resistance to that curriculum that's been developed as there would be if it had just been cooked up by someone external to them. If they're not involved in developing the curriculum it's not going to be something that they're going to see as being they're excited about implementing. So we created a process called intensive learning teams where every teacher who teaches a particular class comes together through the course of that becomes their professional development for a year. And when there's release time for professional development let's say it was sixth grade mathematics or grade six mathematics every teacher who teaches grade six math using tools there's some of them online that are free they create the curriculum they say what are the guiding questions for each unit what's the learning maps what's it going to look like. Everybody is deeply invested in creating it when we've done assessments of the intensive learning teams process what we found is everybody who's involved reports or at least the average scores show that teachers say their understanding of the content has been really deepened by the process so there's a lot that goes into it in terms of creating a positive learning community that what you've done is going to be truly reflective of teacher's voices but that everyone who's going to teach a new curriculum is involved in the writing of the curriculum and then coaching supports it because even if you create the curriculum it's just going to go on the wall of binders in the principal's office unless the coach supports it and helps to get implemented. And Jim if I can just jump in here for a second and then we'll talk about all of this. Sorry I just want to comment that in the Alberta context we cannot create curriculum curriculum is given to us by Alberta education but what we do do is we collaborate around the implementation of those things so collaborative planning around the implementation would be the Alberta context for that. Yeah and maybe I need to be more clear that what you do is you look at the learning maps and you develop the forward of assessments and then you talk about how to differentiate it it's not just a curriculum but you sort of say well how do we make this curriculum work and so the more articulated the curriculum is the better you're able to I mean that gives you kind of a heads up in fact but you still need to get in and make it a workable thing and that's where the intensive learning team would go along with that. Now last thing is coaching the question might be well how do we do this in the classroom and I don't think it's given the complexity to change I don't think much will happen without significant follow up after whether it's a workshop or intensive learning team or other kinds of profession learning in the system. In fact even if the coaching is too superficial it's not likely going to change. So there's a few key things we think coaching is essential for impact. The coaches need to know the target inside out. The coaches can lead the workshops in the intensive learning teams and the coaches need to be supported by the principal in the sense that the principal recognizes and works with the coach. The coach is kind of the right hand person of the principal doing things the principal would like to do if they had time but there also a peer who provides peer support and we think if you have coaches you might want to know well how do I support those coaches what should what could I look at if I was going to for example coach a coach. So we think one thing would be do they have one page summaries of all the tools that are on the target. In other words they need to have a deep precise understanding of any teaching practice that's in the school improvement plan or that's on the target and if they can't provide a one page summary of each of those practices they probably haven't got a deep enough understanding yet to provide the coach because if the coach doesn't know it nobody will know. Secondly they need to create I think checklists there's a great book by a tool called the checklist manifest the talks about the power of precise explanation sometimes teachers don't implement not because they're not interested but simply because they don't actually understand the practices. And thirdly we found that coaches need to be modeling in the classrooms for the teachers. They don't just grab a teacher in the hall though and say can I come in and model what they do is they they're helping teachers learn a practice and that the teacher wants to learn the practice and they go in and model. Then there are several things the coaches can do to enroll teachers one to one conversations small group conversations and at the end of workshops at the end of intensive learning teams or professional learning communities the coach is always there offering ways to provide support. Essentially the coach is saying their job is to say I can help you make it happen I can model for you I can prepare the materials I can be there I can I can I can help this thing become something that's real. And if I was coaching a coach I'd also want to know how they use their time. So do they have the summaries? Do they have the checklists? Are they doing modeling? How are they enrolling teachers? How do they use their time? On the coaching website instructionalcoach.org under presentations there's a chapter I wrote on instructional coaching and summarizes in a lot of detail these ideas. And tomorrow I'll be talking about them in the other webinar too but those to me are critical things to be looking at with coaches. One of the challenges of deserving of coaches of course they're not teachers they have a different kind of job so what is it they need to do? Well we did a study of effective coaches and I'll just mention these things quickly because I want to bring things to a close. But we found working from a pool of 2600 coaches when we did a qualitative study in Florida we found that the effective coaches are credible. They're people that when they speak people listen to them. They're school full relationship builders emotionally intelligent. They can go in the classroom and they can demonstrate the practices. They're diligent hard workers. One principle told me when I leave the parking lot if there's another car in the lot it's almost not always the coaches. And they're people who are turned on by learning. They're passionate about learning. So I'll just sum this up and then leave a couple minutes for questions and I'm happy to hang around and answer more questions if you like. Seven big ideas that are captured in this is that if you want professional learning to work there has to be school wide clarity on what it is, what the priorities are and there has to be commitment. Those practices have to be precisely articulated. Both the coach and the principal have to know exactly what they look like. Which means from my perspective the people in the school who most should be getting professional development are the principal and the coach. Often the principal is the last person that seems to get professional development but I think they should be at the head of the list so that they can lead the charge. And that means that principals are the ones who are the first learners in the school. They're the ones who really keep the project, they monitor the project to make sure it's moving forward in terms of the practice. And then professional learning needs to be focused on a few key things. They're nice to have the piercing clarity that everybody knows what it is but it needs to be shared in a way that's grounded in partnership. So we have a clear sense of where we're going to go and we have real choices about how we get there but there's essentially choice but also non-negotiables once you've developed the target. And finally the schools aren't doing this on their own. It's a system where I support so that central office leaders don't come in and undercut the progress that's being made. Because what I've seen in some districts is the school starts to move forward but then the coordinators or the directors for different disciplines come in and say no, no, no, our focus is on this. Or they observe teachers for things that are not on the target and it gets confusing when what's being successful in the school isn't clearly supported by what's happening at central office. I really do believe two things. One of them is that professional learning is absolutely vital to giving kids the kinds of schools they want. And I also think that almost everybody in the school would agree with that. They do want to move forward. There are some people less than 5% who really have given up. But most teachers who aren't implementing is because the system hasn't been created where they actually feel they've been respected and they can have a voice and they can change. But I think this idea of undistakeable impact of an impact school is a way to create a situation where it really could happen, where there really is clear focus and a clear commitment to impact and clear progress. What questions do folks have before we bring things to a close? That's all I had to say but I'd be happy to try to answer questions. I guess I'd say too if you want to follow up I'll put my email in the chat and I'm happy to respond by email. One other thing I guess I'll add while you think if you have any questions is you can follow up by going to two different sites InstructionalCoach.org and then I have a blog where I comment on a lot of these ideas and it's called Radical Learners.com and you can subscribe and get it as an email and I even have a lot of Canadian content since I'm a good Canadian boy. So do you have any questions you'd like to ask before we bring things to a close? Please feel free to use either the microphone or the chat or again you can use the white board with graffiti as graffiti and put in your questions and comments. While we're waiting for people to do that I do want to mention that our next session is roughly a month from now. It's going to be on October 25th at the same time and I also want to thank Jim on behalf of ERLC and our participants today for bringing us these seven ideas around successful instructional coaching and professional learning. It was really valuable information for me too. The webinar is being recorded in archives for everyone to review again after the session and you'll receive an email, follow up email at the archive location. But I am wondering if anybody has any questions. The other thing I think would be really interesting to know is with this little cohort that we've sort of formed here for these three sessions if people could tell us where they're from and introduce themselves a little bit. We didn't do that at the beginning of the session. That was my oversight and I really would like to know where everyone's from so maybe we could just go down the list starting with Ann. Can you just type in the chat box where you're from or speak into the microphone and also if you have any questions I can see Ann starting to type there and Chris is as well anybody brave enough to jump on to the microphones and introduce themselves and see where they're from. Hi, I'm Denise Harrison and I'm from Blackgold Regional Schools in the Duke area. Welcome Denise, thanks for using the microphone. Collette. I'm Collette Sylvester and I'm the classroom support teacher at Fuller Cross Elementary in Colm Lake with Will Baker. That's awesome, Gil. Is that a girl? Hi again, Gil. My name is Dennis Potman, I'm an associate superintendent in McLean County. And looking in the chat we have some people from Fort McMurray, Dan Rizzuto. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Ann said she depends with Blackgold, Marina and David are both from St. Albert. We do have to try to keep it to one mic open at a time, otherwise we do get a echo if people don't have their headsets on. So if you'd like to just raise your hand actually that's probably the best way and then we can give the mic, moderate that. Okay, go ahead, Will. Hi, I'm Will Baker, principal at Holy Cross School and also part of McLean Catholic and we're in Colm Lake over. Thanks, Will. You can toggle your mic off. Oh yes, Jim said that he's lived in Alberta for a lot of years and I was telling him I went to the Calgary Stampeders game on the weekend and well we all know how that turned out. So it was my first live football game and it was interesting to say the least. I think there we go, so it's good to see those connections. I think if we have no questions I know your time is very valuable, but again, Jim I'd like to thank you for your time today. Lots of good learning and we're really looking forward to the next one. What I'd ask you is if given this overview if there are specific things you'd like me to focus on in the subsequent ones just send me an email at mack.com and say I'd really like to know more about how you developed the target or I'd like you to go into more detail about the observations of teachers or I'd really like to know more about how specifics of how the coach and principal work together. I really think that I wanted to give today an overview and I have ideas in mind about how I'll go more specifically but I would really like to hear from you if I can be more particular about some of the concerns. And I was just typing in the chat that as you leave there's an exit survey just really short, wouldn't take you any more than about two minutes but it would also allow you to respond so that it could inform our next session as well. So thanks again everyone to leave you simply have to use the quit command under your main menu.