Today's learning walk

My absolute favorite aspect of being in administration is the ability to go into every classroom in the school and observe students and adults teaching and learning together. Today I did a "learning walk", in which I managed to see nine classes in about 80 minutes. As Tony Wagner says in The Global Achievement Gap, "The learning walk is one way to essentially audit what's taking place in a group of classes in a given period of time.... you have a snapshot of the teaching and learning that take place in that school. It's obviously not a way to evaluate individual teachers or an entire course, but this kind of sampling detects patterns within and across schools."

My walk began in the middle school, where I observed a 7th grade science class discuss a recent experiment on photosynthesis, and the relative effect of heat compared to light on the process. I then moved into a 6th grade math class, where students were putting the finishing touches on their Plan-A-Park Projects, and consulting this rubric to improve their work. In a 7th grade math class I watched as students wrestled with multiplication using negative numbers, predicting patterns and utilizing thinking routines to explain their thinking. In 8th grade English, students were engaged in a Reader's Theater read-through of the final scene from Romeo and Juliet.

I headed to the elementary level, where a work period was underway in Temescal Creek. Half the students were working with various pattern works from the TERC: Investigations curriculum, and the other half were using math-based Montessori materials such as the Stamp Game and Bead Frame to extend their understanding of multiplication and division. In Blackberry, students played class-favorite Roll and Record, or created number sentences based on the culinary exploits of the titular character in The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. In Laurel, students chose from a variety of activities during Reader's Workshop, including card work with consonant blends, sound/symbol association, investigation of short "a", spelling work using the Wilson Fundations program, and games that involved matching initial blends to word families.

In Strawberry, students were engaged in a poetry writing workshop. They worked at a range of places along the writing process continuum, from brainstorming to draft to editing to publishing, on pieces including concrete poems in the shape of rivers and boats, acrostics, and prose poems. One student was working on his mastery of syllables:

Geckos can blow our minds asunder.

They can climb and it makes us wonder,

Is destroying their habitat a blunder?

Students in Cerrito were working on poetry as well; they read a poem titled Melodic As Machine Guns, and analyzed it for "unbeautiful imagery." They then moved on to brainstorming ideas for their own unbeautiful poems, developing one of those ideas into a full-fledged concept, and writing a first draft. My learning walk ended in Sweet Briar, where students ended their mornings in a read-aloud, before discussing appropriate transition to hot lunch, and the cleaning procedures to use with the non-disposal plates and silverware that were introduced this week.

Several consistencies and patterns jumped out during my learning walk. One was the degree of individualization that was structured into the program, as seen in the Blackberry, Laurel, Temescal, Cerrito, Strawberry, and Wildcat (6th grade) classrooms; in each case, children were engaged in activities that were related by theme, and provided with an opportunity to choose from within the structure provided by the faculty. In contrast, the 7th and 8th grade students were working on the same work at the same time, as a collective group - a technique that happens throughout the school as well. Another similarity was the emphasis on creativity; from Blackberry's literature-based number sentences to the poetry of the 4/5 classrooms and the math projects in 6th grade, students were given opportunities to express their creative thinking in the service of problem solving. Equally present was the emphasis on critical thinking; first grade students were asked explain why certain numbers showed up more often than others in their game of Roll and Record, 4th grade students were asked to analyze poetic imagery, and 7th grade students were asked to reason about the impact of different conditions on the result of their science experiments. The importance of understanding the role of patterns in mathematical thinking showed up from Kindergarten, where a child pasted pictures from The Very Hungry Caterpillar in a "sweet, not sweet" pattern, to the third grade TERC: Investigations work, to the 7th grade attempts to predict and extend patterns abstractly. And finally, in six of the eight classrooms I visited without consulting a schedule prior to the start of my walk, students were engaged in mathematical and language arts, which has me wondering if it was coincidence, or a manifestation of how our teachers plan their days.