Bruce Karhoff                                                                                                 

EDL 704:  Instructional and Curriculum Leadership

6 May 2013

Clinical Supervision Project

Overview of the Lesson Observed:   For this full clinical observation cycle project, I worked with a colleague of mine in the English Department, CB.  She teaches a senior writing seminar, which meets eight hours a week; the class observed was the first hour of a two-hour class.  The capstone project for this course is a novella of between 55 and 95 pages.  The lesson I observed was on syntax, specifically, on how the effective use word order can help a writer make a greater impact on her/his reader.

Observation Tool Selected:  I chose to use parts of Charlotte Danielson’s Rubrics for Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching.  Danielson’s Framework is very comprehensive but unmanageable for a single observation—a 2011 revised edition adapted by the New York State Department of Education runs to 54 pages.  To help me narrow my observation, I decided to limit myself to just two components of Danielson.  I wanted to focus on Domain 3: Instruction.  As my school had recently undergone its School Quality Review (SQR) and had received feedback that we needed to incorporate better questioning in our instruction, I decided that Competency 3b: Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques made good sense to start with.  I then chose Competency 3c: Engaging Students in Learning as the second competency I would use in my observation cycle, student engagement being more fundamental to student learning than many of the other competencies described by Danielson.

I choose to use Danielson over other observation tools because I believe that a rubric format for evaluation is more effective at promoting teacher growth than binary formats that rate instruction as either Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory.  The Bronx Lab High School Formal Teacher Evaluation Rubric (borrowed from Teacher Evaluation Rubrics, by Kim Marshall), for example, employs binary indicators of teacher effectiveness that are too extreme to provide nuanced evaluation or give teachers useful feedback to effect improved performance.  One example will suffice to show how a binary model limits a supervisor.  Under “Delivery of Instruction,” an “Unsatisfactory” teacher “gives up on some students as hopeless,” while a “Satisfactory” teacher “exudes high expectations and determination and convinces all students that they will master the material.”  I would argue that the vast majority of teachers fall somewhere between these two extreme evaluations—teachers either give up on students or they motivate all students—and forces a false choice upon a supervisor.   As Kim Marshall argues (Marshall, 2009, p. 141), rubrics are “more judgemental, giving teachers a clearer sense of where they stand,” and “explicitly describe the characteristics at each level of performance, giving . . . teachers a road map for improvement.”  If the purpose of supervision is to provide constructive feedback to teachers so they can enhance their instructional practice (Hoy and Miskel, 2013), then a tool with a rubric is preferable to a tool with a binary model.

Pre-Observation Conference:  Two days before the lesson I observed, I met with the teacher, CB, to share with her the tool I was using and to see how she felt her lesson would demonstrate the two competencies I was focusing on.  CB outlined the lesson I would be observing and gave the context of the lesson within the unit.  This lesson, she told me, would be the first of a series of three lessons that would focus on syntax, the way words are arranged in sentences; this one would focus on word order, the following lessons would turn to sentence length and then punctuation.  Her students, she explained, were just completing the full draft of the novella they were writing as the capstone project for the course.  These lessons on syntax would set the stage for the revision process, giving them the technical tools to make their writing more descriptive and sophisticated.  She noted that the students probably had not had an explicit grammar or syntax lesson while in high school, and she was concerned how students would react to a lesson on this more technical aspect of writing.  The lesson was structured with an Opening in which they would discuss the Objective of the lesson, a Mini-Lesson with whole-class reading and direct instruction, and a Workshop in which students would practice their new skills twice using a template from the Mini-Lesson and then with scenes from their novella drafts.  She would informally assess student understanding as students shared their writing with the class.

I asked how her questioning (Compentency 3b) would promote student inquiry and learning.  She noted that she would probably use more low-level questioning than she would normally employ, with fewer open-ended questions that would lead to discussion.  Most of her questions would informally assess student understanding of the technical aspects of word order, questions that she could use to see if students would understand the difference moving one word in a sentence, for example, would have on the meaning of a sentence.  She also said she wanted to set the stage for the lesson by drawing upon prior knowledge, emphasizing that they have already worked on syntax through the years, even if they had never used that term before.  The class discussion she envisioned would have students critique others’ use of word order in their writing.  We completed this portion of the conference by reviewing the markers of “Effective” and “Highly Effective” questioning and discussion techniques, as outlined by Danielson.

We then discussed how I would know that students were engaged in learning (Competency 3c).  CB said that the first learning task of the Workshop had each student write their own variations of a sentence using a template; all students should be writing in their journals.   Ultimately, she said, I would know that students were engaged by their questions and comments about their own and others’ writing, and by their eagerness to share their writing with the class.  While she was fairly confident that all, or almost all, students would complete the writing activities, she was concerned that this lesson had a bit longer Mini-Lesson than students were used to, and thus the pacing of the lesson might be too slow to keep the majority of students intellectually engaged.  We concluded this final part of the pre-observation conference by reviewing the various levels of student engagement on the Danielson rubric.

Classroom Observation:  Evidence of Planning and Preparation for Learning: The lesson had a mastery objective for the series of lessons on syntax, it was shared and reviewed with students at the beginning of the lesson, and it was in kid-friendly language.  The class agenda was also posted and reviewed at the beginning of class.  These two strategies helped students know what to expect and what was expected of them.  It also enforced a classroom routine, which helped students get on task.  Each student was given a multi-paged handout on “Syntax” from Nancy Dean’s Discovering Voice.  In the Mini-Lesson, the teacher employed whole-class instruction, as students read and discussed the Introduction and a section on Word Order.  For the Workshop, students discussed a line from Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, dissecting how the author used word order to effect, and then used a template based on this sentence to write their own descriptive sentence of a person or character of their own imagination, and finally used the same template to write a descriptive sentence of a character from their novella.

Questioning and Discussion Techniques: There was evidence of effective questioning.  As the class read a paragraph of the text together, CB asked questions to promote student thinking and understanding, as well as student-student interaction.  She prompted students to summarize and decide what the salient points were; for example, she asked, “Shamari, what did you take away from this?  What did you CHUNQ?” (a text-marking technique that students learned earlier in the year).  At another point she asked if there was any confusion before the class moved on.  When one student said that she did not quite understand a certain point, CB asked, “Who can explain this to Janaysha?”  Another student explained to her the last point.  She also spread her questions around to engage more students and to get multiple responses to a particular situation: “I want someone who hasn’t spoken; what could the author mean by choosing this particular word order?”

Student Engagement:  During the Workshop, I did not see one student who was not writing his/her response in their writing journals.  There was also evidence of students asking other students about their writing.  CB checked in with each group of students, informally assessing their understanding.  At one point, CB noted that she “like[s] that you are helping each other.”  When called on to share their writing, there were more volunteers than time allowed each time.  During the Workshop, however, two groups of students completed their writing quickly and had several minutes of off-topic discussion while they class waited for the other students to finish.  Furthermore, during the Mini-Lesson, CB had to wait for the full class to come back together several times after pockets of off-topic chatting began.

Post-Observation Conference:  For the post-observation conference, I prepared my remarks with the Feedback Preparation Template, a tool shared with me by my principal.  The Template, a copy of which is attached, prompted me to form a tentative agenda for the conference, note the things I would like the teacher to change as a result of my feedback, think of questions I could ask to better understand the teacher’s practice, decide on the positive feedback I wanted to offer, cull specific evidence I would use from my observation notes, and have me consider the teacher supports the school already offers and which new supports might be useful for this teacher.  Additionally, the Template had me anticipate the teacher’s reaction to my feedback and prepare for any challenges that the teacher may have for me. 

CB and I met two days after the observation.  I opened by thanking her for allowing me to visit her classroom and noting that at this time of the school year look forward to reading some of the seniors’ completed novellas.  I wanted to establish a relaxed and supportive, yet professional, manner for the meeting at the very beginning. 

After setting the tone for the meeting, I gave my overall evaluation of the lesson for the two Compentencies I had focused on—I had found evidence of an “Effective” use of questioning techniques, and indications of both “Effective” and “Highly Effective” instruction for student engagement.  I began my discussion of the lesson with this overview of my evaluation for two reasons.  Just as effective teaching includes a clear lesson objective at the outset of the period, I wanted to be clear to CB up front with where this feedback was going.  Secondly, I wanted to relieve any potential anxiety about the evaluation “grade” so CB could focus on the content of my comments rather than try to decipher from my words what her “final grade” was going to be.  My principal had done this during my formal observation this year and I found it to be effective, so I adopted it for my practice.

I then spent the bulk of the conference giving specific feedback on each of the two Competencies.   For Competency 3b: Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques, I noted that I liked how she had students summarize what they had read as a class without using the word, “summarize,” and that she referred to reading skills she had taught earlier in the year (“What did you CHUNQ?”).  Also, I noted that she had checked for any questions or confusions are regular intervals throughout the lesson before moving on to the next part of the lesson, to allow for students to ask clarifying questions.  CB used both low-level questions and some open-ended questions (soliciting possible interpretations of similar texts with slightly different word order), but I found little evidence of higher-order questioning.  There were a few times that students responded to other students, but mostly the questioning produced a teacher-student-teacher-student-teacher-student response pattern.  While students did invite comments/clarification from other students in their groups while they were writing independently, I found no instances in which a student invited comments from their classmates during the whole-class discussions.  I noted that CB called on many different students and explicitly asked for new voices to be heard, including those who did not volunteer.  I asked if she thought she could vary her questioning to get students to initiate the more of the discussion.  She agreed that this was something to work on, but was unsure how to do so in this type of lesson in which more technical aspects of the writing process are introduced.  We also discussed writing some specific higher-order questions we wanted to use into the lesson plan, which would force the teacher to plan her/his questions just as one would plan the learning activities and objective.

For Student Engagement, I noted that it seemed that almost all, if not all, students were actively writing in their journals when asked to practice writing with word order in mind using the template provided, a sign that virtually all students are highly engaged in that aspect of the lesson.  With the open-ended nature of the learning task, there were multiple correct approaches/responses.  I noted too that she checked in with each group of students as they were writing to ensure engagement and to check for understanding.  While those check-ins took place, however, I found that several groups that finished the task quickly engaged in off-topic discussion for 4-5 minutes at a time.  I suggested that she could have had groups, if all had finished with the writing task, conduct a pair-share first while others had time to complete the task.  A pair-share would also give students another layer of feedback on their writing/understanding beyond the whole-class share/discussion.

To encourage improvement of her practice, and in light of our school’s SQR in which the superintendant noted that questioning techniques was an area for growth, I suggested that the school engage in PD on these lines, and I referred her to questioning support in our Staff Handbook.  I also asked CB what specific support on questioning she would like. 

I closed the conference by asking if there was anything about the lesson that CB would like to discuss that I had not brought up.  She asked if I had counted the number or noted the names of students who had spoken during the lesson.  (I had not.)  She then asked if I could do that the next time I visited her classroom so she could better analyze her own teaching for student engagement.  I concluded by thanking her again for inviting me into her classroom.

Reflection:  The Feedback Preparation Template was an especially useful tool for me to organize my thoughts as I prepared for the post-observation conference.  It gave me a structure to follow, based on best practices, and forced me to find specific evidence from my observation notes to support my feedback—both the positive and the critical.  It also helped me keep the conference balanced between warm and cool feedback.

As I was looking for specific evidence to back my assertions, though, I found my low-inference notes to be somewhat lacking.  Because I was also videotaping the class as I was observing, I did not circulate around the classroom as I should have.  I was able to listen in on student discussions from two groups well, but for the other four groups, my observations were limited.  The bulk of my notes are quotes from the teacher and students during whole-class instruction or discussion.  In the future, I would want the focus of my notes to be on what the students are doing; the evidence of effective questioning and engaged students come from students more so than from the teacher.  I need to find better tools for gathering evidence during classroom observations.  As Marshall urges taking no notes during Mini-Observations, I found him to be of limited help in this aspect.

In reviewing the conference video, I found my tone and body language to be welcoming and supportive of the teacher.  I thought the points I was trying to make were clearly communicated, but perhaps not very insightful.  I thought some of my suggestions to help the teacher improve were a bit banal—use higher-order questioning, or take part in a school-wide PD on questioning, for example.  Of course, improving one’s questioning techniques is something almost all teachers could improve upon.  I do think, however, that my suggestion that a few questions to promote deeper learning should be written into the lesson plan is a valid point that, if done thoughtfully, could improve both teaching and learning.   In sum, I was satisfied with the feedback I provided during the formal observation cycle, but would still give myself a “Developing.”

References

Hoy, W. K., and Miskel, C. G. (2013).  Educational Administration: Theory, Research, and Practice.  New York: McGraw Hill. 

Marshall, K.  (2009).  Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation: How to Work Smart, Build Collaboration, and Close the Achievement Gap.  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Boss.

Bronx Lab High School Formal Teacher Evaluation Rubric.  Unpublished document.

New York State Department of Education. (2011).  A Framework for Teaching.  URL:             http://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/teachers-leaders/practicerubrics/Docs/Teachscape_Rubric.pdf.