The Instructional Core Team (ICT)

The Charge 1. Understand the charge of the ICT and decide whether you want to commit to it This may be the most challenging thing we’ve ever done as educators, but it may also turn out to be the most rewarding.

The Charge 2. Read Instructional Rounds in Education and discuss it as a team for shared understanding. We can’t launch this process or hope to succeed in it without everyone reading this book first.

The Charge 3. Build a collaborative learning culture. In other words, we build a culture in our district wherein it becomes the norm for everyone to work together to continuously observe, analyze, reflect upon and improve our teaching and learning practices.

The Charge 4. Develop, for the district, a clearly articulated and widely held and understood point of view on what high quality teaching and learning look like. This is where our history with Pathwise will serve us well, and the members of this team will all be trained or re-trained in Pathwise early in the process.

The Charge 5. Develop theories of action about how to most effectively improve instruction and student learning. Example: Think of this as an If... then, or cause and effect statement: if we implement X-teaching strategy, then we will increase student engagement.

The Charge 6. Develop and implement coherent systemwide strategies that support high quality teaching and learning in all classrooms. Example: MAP Assessments. If every faculty member can use MAP assessment data skillfully, we can use it to inform and improve our instruction for every student.

The Charge 7. Receive training in classroom observation, and practice to develop and hone those skills. Pathwise: Note that it is classroom observation, not teacher observation. If you know Pathwise, you know that observing the teacher is only a portion of the observation.

The Charge 8. Participate in scheduled classroom observations across the district, which means time out of your own classroom.

The Charge 9. Debrief classroom observations as a team. Equally important to doing the observations is the time spent discussing, as a team, what we saw and what it means. This is where we develop problems of practice and theories of action.

The Charge 10. Identify problems of practice to focus our observations. Example: If flexible grouping is a district-wide instructional strategy, what is the expected and defined outcome verses the actual observed outcome. The gap between the two is where we focus our improvement efforts.

The Charge 11. Communicate the purpose and activities of the ICT to colleagues in various forums. You become a recognized leader and spokesperson for the district, who will have to communicate what we are doing, how and why.

The Charge 12. READ and LEAD! I anticipate that we will have the need and desire to read a number of books and articles to accomplish our work. If you don’t read, you can’t lead.

The Charge 13. There is no stipend for this work. The payoff is what should be tremendous professional development for each of us individually, and an improved Instructional Core for the district.

This is a journey with humility... What will we learn from it? I DON’T KNOW, YET. Will this improve our instructional core I DON’T KNOW, YET.

QUESTIONS/ COMMENTS?