Using Instructional Rounds at the School Level to Improve Classroom Instruction

Despite the growing descriptions of effective teacher community —and lessons about the conditions needed for them to survive — more research has been done on exemplars of strong professional community than on efforts to produce professional community where it doesn’t already exist. Building professional community is important to school improvement as it promotes cooperative, job-embedded learning where teachers engage in serious discussions about teaching that could lead to shift in instructional practice. Research on individual and group change suggests that these shifts are unlikely to occur without a supportive environment that includes positive pressure for change. The introduction of organizational routines designed to make teaching more public and collaborative is one solution. Instructional Rounds is a collegial network based approach to improving teaching and learning. At the school site level, Instructional Rounds can create a system and structure where teachers engage in professional dialogue and take collective action in their schools.Using a modified design development format (with an action research component), this study focuses on the implementation of Instructional Rounds at a school site. The study documents teacher experience with Rounds and documents a second iteration of Rounds that more resembled the protocol of Lesson Study. The participants were 24 teachers from an urban elementary school in the Bay Area of California where I serve as Principal. The findings of this study indicate that Instructional Rounds is a promising practice at a school site that can further the goal of making teaching more public and collaborative. The findings also indicate that, due to embedded norms of privacy and a culture of isolation, teachers will receive Rounds with some resistance as it opens up a focus on classroom practice. A key component of the initial success of Rounds was the role played by a site instructional leadership team, which led the planning and endorsed the approach. A second implementation of the intervention, grade-level rounds that resembled Lesson Study, did not have sufficient buy-in and contained many competing foci, and was not as effective. Nonetheless, for the teachers who did complete the full parameters of the Lesson Study, there was evidence documenting the promise of this practice to promote in-depth conversations of instructional practice. Overall, the findings in this study demonstrate the complexity in the introduction of organizational routines designed to make teaching more public and collective at a school site. From a perspective of distributed leadership, all leadership entities (teachers, administration, outside partners) need to be aligned and all potential resources in the school need to be sufficient for the introduction of the new routine to be successful