CTTCS Admin Guide
Creative ways to highlight math instruction in your staff: “What we want for our students we should want for our teachers.” In the same way that involving students in their assessment is motivating, involving teachers and giving them choice is celebratory and respectful of practice. What would teachers like to focus on? What would they like to have administrators come and see? And just like we want students to know the criteria, teachers need to know the criteria too. Share this binder and all the checklists with them.
Ideas:
- Have conversations around screener data and brainstorm which areas of this binder will have the most impact on improving student success.
- Have teachers invite you to your classroom when they are ready to demonstrate something they are trying.
- You could choose one area of this binder a month. Do a small PD at a staff meeting and ask teachers to invite you to their room to witness one strength, change, or improvement of their practice in that area.
- There are some articles or book chapters included here. Select one or two and do a “walk and talk”—read the article and have a 5 minute walk with a partner to discuss what you read.
- Have teachers choose a partner to do a lesson study with. https://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/lesson-study-framework-508.pdf
- https://www.edutopia.org/article/personalized-professional-development
Note that this is a very effective growth tool for teachers!
Contact your math consultant to offer some ideas at a staff meeting. Professional reading and dialog, graffiti activities, reflective conversations, and other engaging professional growth ideas are risk-free but still get us thinking about aspects of math instruction.
- Ask teams of staff members to each present on one area of this binder at staff meetings throughout the year, or a several year plan.
- Have teachers self assess using the self-assessment tool that is aligned with the Danielson framework, or the “Evidence” sheets at the back of each section.
- Teachers take turns sharing one thing they are trying at staff meetings, using data to help gauge effect.
- Ask teachers to survey their students about what helps them learn in math class, then reflect on student responses.
- Make a school-wide goal. It could be working on fluency (don’t time things though), doing number talks every day, redoing screeners, focusing on clear learning goals and lesson summaries/consolidation, vocabulary work, spaced practice, focusing on word problems, etc. In this model all teachers are trying the same thing, working towards improvement in an area.
- From Alberta Learning Consortium, a Principal Classroom Observation Guide