Conducting instructional rounds is a process that school districts and schools use to better understand teaching and learning in schools in order to improve learning at scale. In an instructional rounds session, a group of educators, from perhaps 20 to 40 in size, makes a series of visits to multiple classrooms to observe what is taking place in the instructional core (the interactions between students and teachers in the presence of content). Low inference observation notes are taken about a learning problem (a "problem of practice") identified by the school being observed. The observation notes are used to create a data picture of what has been seen in teaching and learning practices throughout the school. It is these data and practices that are shared with the school, not information about individual teachers or students. Adapted from the practice of
grand rounds
Grand rounds are a methodology of medical education and inpatient care, consisting of presenting the medical problems and treatment of a particular patient to an audience consisting of doctors, pharmacists, residents, and medical students. It w ...
in medical school,
the aim of instructional rounds is to observe teaching and learning to discern root causes for problems identified by the school and to help the school and district create more productive outcomes. Distinct from
supervision and evaluation, instructional rounds are used to describe what is happening in classrooms and to share observations with educators - and are not intended to be
evaluative.
Origin
The process of instructional rounds was adapted from medical rounds model that is used in schools of medicine and teaching hospitals to improve practice of prospective and current doctors in diagnosing and curing patients. Physicians use medical rounds as a major way of improving their theory and practice. "In the most commonly used version of medical rounds, a group of medical interns, residents, and supervising or attending physicians visit patients, observe and discuss the evidence for diagnoses, and, after a thorough analysis of evidence, discuss possible treatments."
Description of common practice
Instructional rounds include several steps: formation of a network that ideally includes representative members from all those who impact student learning; choosing a problem to be addressed; classroom observation; observation debrief ; detection of the next steps, and regular repetition of this process.
Network formation
Network formation involves the gathering of educators who will regularly meet with each other to do rounds. There are not specific criteria sets for the creation of networks, it depends on the situation, time and preferences of educators. Different kinds of networks could be used to do rounds.
Some of them are cross-functional in which teachers and administrators work together, while others are
homogeneous in nature composed of
superintendent
Superintendent may refer to:
*Superintendent (police), Superintendent of Police (SP), or Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), a police rank
*Prison warden or Superintendent, a prison administrator
*Superintendent (ecclesiastical), a church exec ...
s or teachers exclusively. Instructional rounds could be integrated into existing networks or specially formed new networks of educators. Sometimes members of the network are selected intentionally, according to the subject, content they teach or problem area they share. Other networks are more
pragmatic
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement.
Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to:
*Pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy
*Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics and semiotics
*''Pragmatics'', an academic journal in ...
, for instance, teachers with the same planning time engage in rounds together.
Choosing problem of practice
The problem of practice is a specific issue that the school needs constructive feedback on, worries about or struggles against.
The problem should be
observable
In physics, an observable is a physical quantity that can be measured. Examples include position and momentum. In systems governed by classical mechanics, it is a real-valued "function" on the set of all possible system states. In quantum phy ...
and focused on improving teaching. It is unsolved problem that the school has spent time and money to address, but it is in further need of assistance.
There are different ways of identifying problems of practice. The best way is to relate these problems to continuous school improvement and to proceed based on data. To determine the problem of practice sometimes the entire staff gathers or only the leadership team meets to identify a problem.
An example of a problem of practice could be the following: "In reading and writing, our students seem to be doing relatively well on
decoding,
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...
, and simple writing tasks, but they are not doing as well as we had hoped on comprehension free-response tasks. Teachers have begun using a workshop method to work with smaller groups of students, but there is no consistency in what happens in those small groups".
Classroom observation
After determining the problem of practice, the network splits into smaller groups of 4-5 teachers that visit approximately 4-5 classrooms for 25 minutes each. Observers collect descriptive data rather than evaluative, meaning that they do not have any
rubrics
A rubric is a word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis. The word derives from the la, rubrica, meaning red ochre or red chalk, and originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 13th cen ...
to guide them. Observers do have guiding questions associated with the problem they are investigating. For instance, 'What are students and teachers doing and saying?,' 'What is the assignment?,' 'What do students do when they do not understand the concept or instruction?'.
Observers do not look at every issue in the classroom, but only those connected with the problem of practice. For instance, if the issue is lack of higher order thinking skills among students, observers do not pay attention on behavior and attendance of students, their involvement in the task, or teacher behavior, such as writing objectives on the board. Observers attempt to find the cause of the existing problem of practice in school and then identify a viable cure for it.
It is very important that observers do not talk between class observations and save everything they saw, their descriptive feedback, for the official debrief.
Observation debrief
The process of debrief consists of three steps:
description
Description is the pattern of narrative development that aims to make vivid a place, object, character, or group. Description is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as ''modes of discourse''), along with exposition, argumentation, and narra ...
,
analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...
, and
prediction. During the description stage, all groups of the network meet together and share their evidence that pertains to the problem of practice with the others. The evidence should be specific and descriptive rather than evaluative and general. Regular practice and peer help could facilitate learning to collect specific and descriptive evidence.
Having gathered a set of evidence, the network can begin analyzing it by looking at trends, patterns, and exceptions across the data. Examples of patterns could be: Students are divided into groups, but work individually; teacher asks simple questions that requires short 1-2 words answers. Each groups of teachers share trends and patterns that have seen. This could help educators to determine common patterns in subject area, grade level and across school. However, sometimes patterns could vary in each subject or grade level.
At the prediction stage observers answer to the following question, “If you were a student in these classes today and you did everything the teacher asked you to do, what would you know and be able to do?” This question is asked to see what students could learn as a result of the completed assignments and tasks in the class. The responses of the observers could be: Learners will be able to solve mathematical problems, recall information, etc.
Detection of the next steps
There are different ways of detecting next steps of work. Some networks
brainstorm action plans for the following week, next month or by the end of educational year. Other networks creates reflective questions to reflect
References
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Observation
Teacher training