This year, our school has decided to dedicate some of our weekly planning time to participate in collaborative planning sessions. The Instructional Leadership Team and our grade-level team collaborate in planning an upcoming lesson about once a month. The ILT will come in to observe the lesson being taught so that we can review the impact of the teacher on student learning. We use our curriculum planning guide and our school-wide lesson planning template to help guide our meetings, staying focused on a shared outcome. The lesson plan template helps this time be more time-efficient since it highlights the most important parts of a lesson and also has guiding questions for us to think about. You can find the lesson planning template below.
Cipriani, (2015) reminds us that the more reflective we are, the more effective we are by using a Building Teacher's Capacity assessment is a tool that can be used throughout the change process to monitor the seven fundamentals of building teacher capacity:
1. Relationships, Roles, and Responsibilities
2. Expectations
3. Communication, Celebration, and Calibration
4. Goal-setting and Follow Through
5. Professional Learning Communities and Teacher Leadership
6. Differentiated Feedback
7. Differentiated Coaching
As a group, we reflect on our teacher effectiveness by reviewing student data to measure student learning throughout and after the lesson. This reflection process proves to be a very valuable use of our time since we are able to use students' most recent data to collaboratively decide on next steps. As a group, we consider all of the effective practices that the teacher demonstrated and stamp these as being best practices; teaching strategies that can be used in every content/ every lesson. Next, we begin to brainstorm ideas on how to reteach this lesson or move on to a new concept. The students' data drives our decision- making for next steps.
We also think about possible student misconceptions or challenges that could arise throughout he lesson. Hattie (2012) confirms the importance of thinking about students' responses before the lesson is taught. From this reading, I have learned that it is important for the teacher to understand the students strategies for thinking so that he/she can help advance the students' thinking.
References
Cipriani, M. (Producer). (2015). The reflective educator: A collaborative approach to building Teachers' capacity [ Video file]. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. New York, NY:Routledge
| lesson_plan_template.docx |
