I’ve found that staying focused on instruction, as opposed to curriculum and programs, can be difficult in the work of an administrator.  Parents tend to focus much more on programs and curriculum than on matters of instructional practice.  That makes sense.  Program implementation and participation rates come with relatively concrete statistics and costs.   Curriculum adoptions usually have well-defined materials and per classroom costs and inventories.  A principal might often tell parents about a terrific new club or sport being offered at the school.  A district administrator might proudly announce the adoption of a new standards-aligned curriculum.

Instruction, however, is a different matter entirely.  While I’ve put up signs advertising an award-winning arts or IB program, I’ve never put up a sign that says “we deliver a killer think/pair/share.”  How many clubs do you have?  How good is the football team?  Those are matters that get attention.  How well do teachers pull off a socratic seminar in class?  Unless you are a teacher, you probably don’t even know what that means.

In other words, while all the research is clear about the importance and impact of skilled instructional practice, it’s the thing that most stakeholders outside of teachers know and care the least about when it comes to our schools.  Effective instructional practice can be hard to describe – even for teachers.  It’s notoriously hard to measure.  It can be incredibly expensive to coach and develop.  It’s the bedrock and foundation of what we do in schools, yet it is a black box.

One of my areas of focus this year is to consistently champion and elevate instructional practice in my current leadership role.  I want to have more conversations focused on instruction.  I want to see more great instruction in practice.  I want to celebrate quality instruction where it is happening.  To that end, I’m hoping to use some of my blog posts to highlight high leverage instructional practices.  Almost like a food blog where I share some of my favorite recipes, I’m hoping to dedicate a least some of my space to my favorite instructional strategies, as well as some new ones that I am learning about for the first time.  The goal is to reinforce a commitment to elevate instructional practice in our day to day discussions of what it means to provide high quality, rigorous learning environments for all of our students.

Think – Write – Pair – Share

Think Write Pair Share is a classic, foundational collaboration and student discourse strategy in the classroom.  It provides students with the opportunity to improve comprehension by processing verbally, in their own words, what they are learning.  I believe that it should be a part of every teachers’ toolkit.

Step 1: Think – announce to students that they’ll be doing a quick Think Write Pair Share.  Explain that the first step is to think about the question or prompt introduced by the teacher, another student, or a text.  “All right everyone, we’re going to do a quick think write pair share, so I want you to take a moment to think about which step of factoring an equation you think is the hardest, and why.”

Step 2: Write – closely linked to the first step, students are prompted to capture some of the thoughts from the thinking prompt in writing.  “Go ahead and write down your thoughts in your journal entry page for today.”  The key to the write portion is a background system where there is clarity about where students should be writing.  In my classroom, that was usually on a specified page in their interactive journal.  With adults, I tend to use post-its.

Step 3: Pair – Using a designated partner, ask students to pair up and discuss their thinking from their written notes regarding the prompt.  “You have 2 minutes to turn to your table buddy and explain the step you found most challenging and why.  Remember that I’ll be calling on some of your groups to share with the rest of the class when the two minutes are up, so I expect that your conversations are focused on math.”

Step 4: Share – I like to cold call on groups to share the highlights of the discussion they just had with partners.  While this provides some accountability for the content of each partner conversation, it more importantly surfaces student thinking on the topic.  You can capture common ideas or follow-up questions as a class on a board or – even better – in a shared doc for later reference.  “Great, I heard a lot of good thinking going on and a lot of you were being honest about what is difficult about factoring.  Devontae, can you share with the class what you and Jorge decided were the hardest parts about factoring?”