Instructional Coach Newsletter

Research has shown that the use of “I Can” statements and purpose statements in our classrooms can be quite effective in helping students identify the relationships between skills to be mastered. Hattie identifies an effect size of .75 when learning targets are used to provide clarity. The effect size jumps to 1.44 when students are allowed to monitor their own progress with the targets. Remember that .44 is one year’s worth of growth so an effect size of 1.44 is closer to three year’s worth of growth. This focus on skills for each day’s lesson also gives students a sense of empowerment. As educators, we need to model the purpose statement and task for the day, as well as provide explicit direct instruction and demonstration.

In the book Learning by Doing, Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos (2016) lay out the core beliefs that guide the work of collaborative teams. They state that teams learn the most when they actually get started on the work and then continually reflect and revise throughout the implementation process. At Maquoketa Community School District, many of us have already begun to feel the “messy” effects of this work. Don’t worry, you are not alone. It is through this messiness that we find the best practices to help our students reach the mission of our district to ensure all students and staff are learning at high levels.

Completing this work as a team drives us even closer to our district vision: to develop a culture of collaboration and communication that supports continuous improvement for all. We encourage you to start this work using the intentional planning process (the P in the PDSA cycle - plan, do, study, act). Keep in mind, you will learn as you go!

Steps to Planning:

1. Identify the essential standards for your course or grade level

2. Unwrap standards into learning targets.

3. Pace those learning targets (from the essential standards as well as the supporting standards) throughout the school year.

4. Develop units of instruction that identify when you will give and use common formative assessment.

As you engage in this work, don’t forget to continually reflect with your team and collect data from your students to track progress and learn from your students as well.

In the book, Best Practices at Tier 1: Daily Differentiation for Effective Instruction, Secondary, Gregory, Kaufeldt, and Mattos discuss how pluralized instructional strategies can engage all learning preferences, rather than catering to just a few. Based on Marzano’s research, there are nine instructional strategies that highly impact student learning. As you are designing your lessons consider incorporating these strategies into your design:

1. Setting objectives and providing feedback

2. Reinforcing effort and providing recognition

3. Designing cooperative learning tasks

4. Using cues, questions, and advance organizers

5. Offering nonlinguistic representations

6. Promoting summarizing and note taking

7. Rehearsing learning through homework and practice

8. Identifying similarities and differences

9. Generating and testing hypothesis

These strategies can be grouped into three categories based on the strategies' benefits and how educators could best use the strategies in the classroom. The categories are:

1. Creating climate

2. Helping students develop understanding

3. Helping students extend and apply knowledge

For more information on these categories and the strategies that can be used with them, click on this link.

Our main objective during CTT meetings is to focus on the four questions of the PLC. Here are some deliverables or artifacts your team can create to help monitor your productivity.

What is it we expect students to learn?

• Identifying priority standards or essential learnings

• “I can” statements

• Aligned curriculum and assessment maps

• Pacing guides with relevant activities and assessments

How will we know when they have learned it?

• Pre-assessments, common formative assessments, summative assessments all aligned to standards

• Success criteria and rubrics

• Student work samples

• Analyzed results with error analysis

How will we respond when they don’t learn?

• Interventions

• Student work

• Data driven instructional decisions

• Summative scores

How will we respond when they do learn?

• Student work

• Data driven instructional decisions

• Enrichment and extension

Here is a help tool from Solution Tree to guide your team through this process.