Holland Public Schools
District continuous Improvement Team Meeting Minutes
October 8, 2013
Page 1 of 4
Instructional Rounds
Brian Davis, Holland Public Schools Superintendent and Jason Pasatta, Director at the
Educational Services Building at the Ottawa Area Intermediate School District (OAISD)
introduced the team to practice of instructional rounds.
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How can the Instructional Round process encourage and support the school improvement
process in the building by focusing on what students are doing?
o Instructional round focus is on observations of what students are doing in the
classroom, not teacher instruction.
The learning targets for team members are as follows:
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Ability to describe key features of the instructional round process
Comfort level for staff that will participate in instructional rounds at West on April 32
Utilization of the process to enhance personal leadership abilities as well as the
performance of the host school
What is the practice or process that ended up being instructional rounds?
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Began with the idea of medical rounds—going across organizations and looking at a
specified targeted practice and noting what is going on and how it can be improved
Expanding the practice of medical rounds to include instructional practice
A subset of people (superintendents and ISD staff) have been trained at Harvard
Additional superintendents will be trained next year
Each month this group visits a different district and school and, focusing on the “Problem
of Practice”
Host buildings identify the specific problem of practice and receives feedback from the
instructional round process to help them in their school improvement process
What are the bright spots to help people to learn from one another- what is the practice or
process to help us get at that and ended up with IR. The idea of medical rounds, going
across organization and looking at specific targeted practice and noting what is going on
and how can we improve it?
Problem of practice looks at an unresolved issue or question around student achievement
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For example: Why, in certain areas of mathematics are students struggling? Why are
youngest students having issues understanding schema?
Holland Public Schools
District continuous Improvement Team Meeting Minutes
October 8, 2013
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The problem of practice is based on the school improvement plan and the purpose is to
close the achievement gap for all students, as well as to increase the quality of
instruction.
Next a theory of action is generated (If, Then statement)
o If tasks are consistent with expectations, then schools and districts can close the
achievement gap
Instructional Round Practice
The purpose of instructional rounds is not to interrupt instruction, but rather to be fly on the wall
(blend in). It is also best not to share between observations as the process must remain very
factual. The building who is being observed is the owner of the process. The school chooses
which predictions they think will get them to the next level and chooses the work they will do in
the next month, school year, etc.
1) Make sure everyone understands the instructional round process, and what you want to
get out of it
a. The host network will spend 20 minutes to half hour with the visiting observers
b. Observing team will receive theory of action and the problem of practice
c. Observing team will receive a quick overview and the opportunity to ask
questions
2) Divide into teams and observe 20 minute chunks of classrooms
a. Write down descriptive really fine brain notes—what’s going on across the
board—not judging good or bad, but here’s what happening
3) Consider data with team and look for patterns based on common practice
a. Example: Level of questions—look for patterns (themes—what was the level on
higher and lower end of questions.
4) There will be guided questions to assist in observations.
5) Look at patterns and then make individual predictions
6) If the teacher being observed is not doing direct instruction you can converse with
students
a. Why are you doing this? May I see your journal?
Instructional Round practice is driven by the statement “You learn the work by doing the
work”—not by bring in an expert or reading a book but by doing the work.
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Instructional core is the connection between teacher/content/student (What’s being
taught, what students are doing, what the teacher’s doing)
o These three things are essential—if you don’t see it, it’s not happening.
Task always predicts performance (if students do everything the teacher instructs
them to do what will they themselves know and be able to do?) (Slide 11)
Holland Public Schools
District continuous Improvement Team Meeting Minutes
October 8, 2013
Page 3 of 4
There are seven principals at the forefront of the process (see slides 12-14)
1. Student learning increases as content, teacher knowledge/skill and student
engagement improve
2. Changing one element of core instruction requires change to all the elements of the
core
3. If you can’t see it in the core, it’s not there
4. Task predicts performance
5. Real accountability is in the tasks that students undertake
6. Learn the work by doing the work
7. Description before analysis, analysis before prediction, prediction before evaluation
(Ladder of Inference)
a. Instructional rounds stays very low on the ladder of inference—only record
observable data, refrain from making judgments
b. Slide 17 gives an example of descriptive observations
Team members participated in an observation exercise (one person closed their eyes and one
described a photograph) in preparation to use the instructional round process from a video of
classroom instruction.
Instructional Rounds
Visiting Classrooms
 Instructional round participants will visit 4 classrooms for 15 to 20 minutes
o While in the classrooms you will suspend talking to each other
o Not all groups will go to the same classroom
 In the classroom you are an observer and take notes
o If teacher is engage in direct instruction you will not interact with students
o If students are engaged in activities, then you can join a group and ask the student
questions regarding the problem of practice.
 As you “learn the work by doing the work”, you’ll develop strategies for the notes you
take as you go in the classroom.
o For example, you could make columns of task, what the teacher is doing, what the
student is doing to help organize your notes
o Typically within rounds it works well to do divide and conquer.
o You don’t want to all swarm one kid—one person could go with reading group,
one look at journals, etc. or one person could focus on the teacher, one on the
task, one on the students.
The team observed two classroom video sessions of approximately 10 minutes each and
practiced observing and debriefing the “instructional rounds”
When participating in Rounds, remember to:
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Label or name your group as descriptively as possible
Holland Public Schools
District continuous Improvement Team Meeting Minutes
October 8, 2013
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Look for themes in the data
Make predictions/recommendations remembering the ladder of influence
Challenge colleagues who want to move to judgments
During the descriptive debrief star or checkmark next to the five to ten notes that are most
relevant to the problem of practice (i.e.: identify the data that is most relevant and helpful
to the schools)
As staff members share observations, listen closely and ask clarifying questions if you
don’t understand their observation
Don’t have one person share out everything, but use the round robin process
Take your separate data points and look for themes and patterns—go beyond the obvious,
a few steps up the ladder of observation
Base predictions on what you SAW
Next DCIT
November 5, 2013
New Tech
3:30 pm to 5:30 pm