Different teachers, different skills sets, different students, and distinct personalities. If your staff holds regular planning sessions, you understand.
Team or department planning meetings create a consistent learning environment, not an identical experience.
Simplify the methods to decide your focus for an instructional cycle.
Excessive planning and control kill momentum. We usually blame a lack of execution on a lack of effort, but most often, over-planning is the culprit.
What do we want our students to learn?
What standards, skills, or knowledge support the learning focus? Do the standards, knowledge, or skills fit into our pacing plans? Based on the learning progression, is this the best time to have the team focus on these skills?
Diagnostic, Model, Independence
What diagnostic tool should measure where students are to begin the learning cycle?
Is there a recent work product or data that can serve as a diagnostic?
As you move through a school year, formative and summative measures used during recent instruction can inform the next steps in a learning progression. This reduces the need for some diagnostic assessments, while providing the similar value in information.
What will we need to model for our students? Is everyone expected to model the same instructional practice?
An agreement on modeling specific learning behaviors or skills will provide insight into the effectiveness of instructional practice. If you have teachers with special training, look at their results and practices to gauge a need for change.
What independent practice will all students complete during instruction?
Students need to show what they are learning and provide insight into instructional effectiveness. Independent practice includes formative assessments, or work all students complete during instruction. It is helpful to decide on modifications and support guidelines in advance to help gauge the learning and teaching effectiveness on common student work.
Materials and resources
What do we already have? What do we need?
Textbook resources will be a likely source for most materials. If you have any special materials used for instruction, it is best for everyone has access to them.
If you are not sharing some resources, or some on the team do not want to use them, note the information to help measure their effectiveness versus those not using specific resources.
What work product or assessment will all students produce for the team?
- Do we have an assessment ready?
- Does everyone agree on using the assessment with the same administration guidelines?
- What modifications can we use, and with which type of students?
A common formative assessment works well in these situations. Students need a common experience. If you allow any modifications, or additional support for specific students, agree on this before you administer an assessment. Consistency creates a better environment for performance data analysis.
How will we score and use the work product?
- Is there a rubric we can use for writing or performance tasks?
- Can we rely on the data to gauge teaching or resource effectiveness?
- Did everyone follow the agreed guidelines for administration?
- Are we going to share the results outside of the team?
If you are using an assessment for grades or placement, administration guidelines should be consistent across all classrooms.
If it provided some students support outside of the initial agreements, it may be best to analyze results with and without those students’ scores. Additional scaffolding or extra help can skew results for future planning. The support is not wrong, or bad, but to get better information, you need to be honest with your results internally.