Instructional Rounds

Instructional rounds is a school and district improvement process, loosely based on the medical rounds model used by doctors, that brings educators together to look at classroom instruction in a focused, systematic, purposeful, and collective way. These observations are not intended to provide supervision or evaluation for specific teachers but instead to look closely at what is happening in classrooms and to work together systematically to make improvements. In this way, rounds visit is different from traditional outside-in or top-down administrative “walk-throughs.” They are generally more collegial and participatory, with host schools and districts playing important roles in every step of the improvement cycle.

This starts well before the actual visit, when educators who will be hosting the visit identify a stuck point or “problem of practice” on which they wish to get help. The more that the problem is tied to ongoing school or district improvement efforts, and the more engaged the staff is in the development of the problem of practice, the greater the likelihood that the rounds visit will contribute to school improvement.

On the day of the rounds visit, either observers will come from peer schools in a network or colleagues conducting school-based rounds will assemble to observe one another. After getting oriented to the school and the problem of practice, observers divide into teams of four or five and spend about 20 minutes per classroom in three to five classrooms, paying attention to what students and teachers are actually doing, and what kind of content they are working on. They write detailed observational notes related to the problem of practice, focusing on what they actually saw—not their reactions, judgments, or inferences.

After these observations, the observers share data from their notes that they think would be particularly useful in focusing on the problem that the school has identified, and together, they look for patterns within and across the classrooms they saw. Host teams choose which of these patterns seem “high leverage”—meaning that if they could make good progress in addressing that pattern, they would anticipate making significant progress on their original stuck point. Observers and host school staff analyze the high leverage patterns, figuring out what might be their root causes, and together, develop specific suggestions for the learning that can be done at the school and, if appropriate, at the district level as well.

A key part of the improvement cycle takes place after the visit. Teachers and administrators at the host school and district make sense of the observations, patterns, and suggestions that emerged from the visit day. They make plans to [Page 832]translate the learning that they have engaged in that day into action in ways that connect with and support the ongoing improvement efforts at the school and in the district. They also figure out how to engage all members of the faculty in these improvement efforts—not just the handful who were on the visit.

Although the rounds’ process is not a silver bullet that will single-handedly lead to better test scores or increased learning for students, it can be a powerful accelerant of school and district improvement efforts, providing tools for helping districts and schools improve teaching and learning at scale.

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