Mapping Professional Practice: How To Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] Justin Baeder:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program my friend and colleague, Heather Bell-Williams. Heather is a former elementary principal in New Brunswick, and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time together up in New Brunswick. And we're here today to talk about a piece of our work in the book that we wrote together, Mapping Professional Practice.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:41] Justin Baeder:

Heather, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. I'm excited to talk about an aspect of our work that you have just done incredible things with since the book was published, as well as before, but especially in the period since then where you've worked with a lot of teachers individually. using what we call framework thinking.

[01:02]

So set that idea of framework thinking up for us because our listeners may be familiar with the whole process of developing an instructional framework, going through the whole process that we describe in the book. But framework thinking is kind of an express or a light version of that. Take us into what framework thinking means to you. Sure.

[01:19] Heather Bell-Williams:

I think we discovered early on that while mapping professional practice provided a really strong base for school leaders to construct their own instructional frameworks as a tool with either individuals or groups or staff or teams. We also recognize that many instructional leaders are on a time clock, especially when it comes to new teachers or maybe uncertified teachers. We're finding in our area, our jurisdiction for sure, that we have a real shortage of certified teachers. And so a lot of emergency certification going on. And that results in teachers being in a classroom, you know, in a really short period of time with no preparation. And school leaders didn't have the time.

[02:02]

I was hearing from them, we don't have the time to go through the whole, well, albeit valuable process of constructing a framework. We just don't have the time to do that. And so I started to think about how could we expedite that process? How could we peel back the layers of the onion, the practice that's going on, And especially for someone who might be struggling in a particular area of practice. and decide how could we get to the grassroots, get to the heart of the problem? What would be the quickest win?

[02:34]

We talk about quick wins for new teachers. So what would be the quickest win that we could get for them? What would be the biggest bang for our buck, so to speak, if we were able to help that teacher work through a particular problem of practice? So like you said, it's an expedited instructional framework in order to quickly get to the heart of the issues.

[02:55] Justin Baeder:

I think we've all had that experience working with newer teachers of looking at the evaluation criteria, you know, the whole set of expectations that we have and thinking to ourselves, you know, if I go over all of this with this new person who is struggling, they're going to break down, right? They are not ready to talk about every single piece of this and they're going to be so overwhelmed if we try to do that. that they're not going to be able to focus on one area and improve in that area. So we've really got to go through a process of kind of picking our battles and of doing some triage, some prioritization and figuring out, yeah, where can I get some traction? Where can this person implement some changes that will get them results? You know, and often We focus on things like classroom management, or if there's a planning issue that's underlying that, you know, we might need to focus on the approach that the teacher is using to get ready for class.

[03:46]

But, you know, we hopefully are able to get something to come to the surface for us that's going to make things better, right? Because everybody wants to feel successful. Everybody wants to feel a sense of momentum. And when people are struggling, it can just be so, so discouraging to go home so exhausted every day and so despairing even of ever getting your feet under you as a teacher. And you mentioned just the huge number of people coming into the profession now who don't have a lot of training, who perhaps did not major in education, don't have a master's degree, don't have certification, didn't have perhaps a student teaching experience like most of us had that really coached them through that process. So often you're coming in to coach people who are flying by the seat of their pants for one reason or another, but often it's because they don't have any preparation other than their own experience as a student.

[04:40]

What do you see as some of the top areas? We've mentioned a couple, but what do you see as some of the top areas where people struggle when all they have in the way of experience is experience as a student and now they're transitioning into being a teacher? What do they tend to struggle with where they can get some quick wins?

[04:54] Heather Bell-Williams:

Sure, Justin, you mentioned, you know, some of the difficulties that inexperienced teachers face. And one of the things that principals and school leaders are saying to me is that not only will they, you know, sort of collapse into a whole mess of tears, if I confront these issues, they'll quit. And that's a risk that instructional leaders weren't facing. I would suggest even five years ago that we weren't facing that kind of risk. Exodus when things weren't going well. And so, yes, I've been called in as a coach and consultant in the last couple of years to several situations where young inexperienced teachers were saying, okay, I'm done.

[05:34]

I'm out of here. And we needed to, like I said earlier, get some quick wins for them. You mentioned what areas and the one that does pop up a lot is management. But I love when I see sort of that tip of the iceberg, and we talk about this in the book, the idea that what we see in a walkthrough or a longer observation is just such a tip of the iceberg of practice and teacher decision-making and all that stuff that's below the surface of the water. And what I love to do is when I see that management is the thing, right? It's easy.

[06:10]

It's super clear when the management isn't going well, because you can see the results of that. And it's usually not good. And that's often what's making the new teacher upset. And that's the kind of thing that teachers go home and yeah, cry about, lie awake at night, worry about, or threatened to quit over. I like to try to peel back those layers and do a shortened version of what we talked about in the book of a root cause analysis and taking a look at, all right, this is what I see. This is the problem that I see.

[06:41]

Why is that happening? And then why is that happening? And then answer the question again, why is that happening? And that's just a fascinating process to me, because if I start to just ask three or four, maybe five whys, I can get to usually a problem of practice that's manageable. I'm thinking of an example, a teacher who was struggling, a new teacher who was struggling, and on the outside of it, it was management overall. Students, it was a grade.

[07:11]

two classrooms, students weren't following the expectations. And the teacher seemed to have a limited sort of bag of tricks in terms of management. And the temptation there is to maybe go in and give some suggestions around management strategies. But when I asked the why question, I got down to the idea that the teacher didn't feel it was necessary, nor had she taken any steps, therefore, to build relationships with students. And so we focused on an entirely different situation or a set of skills than we would have if we just looked at management. We might've talked about, oh, here's some things that you can do when students are on the floor in large group, and here's a little point system or here's a this or that.

[07:56]

But really when we got to the ground truth was that she was having difficulty establishing relationships. And so we were able to get more success once the students had that sense that she cared about them, was calling them by name. And so I love that idea that you can get to the root cause and that it's often not exactly what you see.

[08:18] Justin Baeder:

And that's a really interesting one, building relationships with students, because it's one of those things that people hate hearing. You know, teachers hate hearing, oh, you just need to build relationships with your students. Because often it's said to them in a way that's not helpful, right? Well, like, I tried to build relationships and here's what happened. Or, you know, like, I don't know what that means. So take us into that a little bit.

[08:39]

How did you break that down? You gave us, I think, some hints there. Like, what did it mean for this teacher to build relationships? And in the full framework development process, we would call these maybe the key components. But you're doing, you know, the quick version of that. So how did you break down relationships?

[08:53]

You said calling students by their name. Is that right?

[08:55] Heather Bell-Williams:

Yes, we talked a lot about things like greeting students first thing in the morning because it was an elementary classroom. These students were with this teacher for the majority of the day, so they weren't moving locations except for specials and things like that. So the beginning of the day was really important in terms of making eye contact with students. And the teacher was doing all kinds of great things in the morning. was looking at lunch orders and student agendas and things like that, but was giving off this notion that she was quite busy, which she was, but needed to just change up a few little things so that students felt that she was calling them by name and that she was interested in what was going on. Asked them about their soccer game last night.

[09:40]

Those kinds of things were very strategically discussed with her. When I talked with students in the classroom as part of my observation, there was a strong sense that she liked some students, the ones that, you know, were sitting doing what they were supposed to be doing, and that she didn't like another group of students. That was a strong sentiment that some of the children had expressed to me unsolicited. I wasn't going around asking. They told me that. And so I encouraged her along those lines, you know, asked her to think through some ways that she could mitigate that feeling on behalf of that group of students.

[10:19]

So some very specific things. And I guess I would jump into with a piece, you know, in the book, we talk about sort of mapping those practices through a growth process for teachers. And this teacher would have been at the very beginning. at the very beginning stages of working through those developed relationships. And so we would be being fairly directive in our feedback at that point, as she grew and maybe got to more of a developing phase, we would be asking more how questions of her and encouraging her to think through some of those strategies as she moved along. I realized as I was talking, it sounded very directive and it was at that early stage because she didn't know what she didn't know.

[11:04]

She certainly wasn't getting up in the morning and deciding to have poor relationships with students. She just didn't know. she needed to be doing and the kinds of decisions and thinking she needed to be doing in order to have those good relationships.

[11:19] Justin Baeder:

Yeah. And one of my favorite parts of the book that you primarily generated this was the idea of different types of feedback to move between different levels, right? If you have a four level rubric, Moving from level one to level two on a framework often does require more direction because somebody doesn't really get that they need to do something and might not see the value of it and might just need to be told, hey, greet your students in the morning or talk to them in this particular way. Sometimes people need that handholding. And they're not going to kind of reflectively get there on their own, or it can be very frustrating to try to have a reflective conversation with someone who's just not at that level of awareness and just needs to be sent in the right direction and then come back with some experience to share and some thoughts to reflect on to move on to that next level. I wonder if we could talk about the idea of peer observations a bit, because you talked about how observing in the classroom, talking with students, hearing their unsolicited comments to you, gave you a sense of maybe where you needed to focus.

[12:21]

The students themselves could recognize the problem. They didn't know what to do about it. The students wouldn't necessarily have had the specific advice here, but your being in the classroom was, was a crucial source of insight for you. Talk to us a little bit about peer observations and how peer observations can be accelerated and just be a lot more useful as a result of using framework thinking.

[12:47] Heather Bell-Williams:

Absolutely. I know that you and I have talked about this and I don't recall how much of it we talked about formally in the book, but we can all think of times as experienced teachers now when we were young and inexperienced and being sent to observe another classroom. And I could tell you the name of that teacher. It was decades ago. And she taught the same grade as me. It was a grade one, two.

[13:13]

And she taught in a really rough neighborhood. And so, in fact, her children behaviorally were theoretically not as well behaved as the students I had. And when I went into that classroom, it looked like magic. It literally looked like magic. And I had no idea in terms of, you know, we talk about mapping in terms of stages, our practice to get better at something. I had no idea how to map that out.

[13:41]

I knew where I was and I knew that I was over at beginning. And I could see, I felt like she was an exemplary, off the charts exemplary. And I don't know in retrospect if she was that great, but she, it just looked magical. And that space in between where I was and where she was appeared just so magical and so out of reach for me. I absolutely couldn't articulate how to get that good. And so I couldn't really map the difference distance between where I was as a beginning teacher and where I saw her as an exemplary practitioner.

[14:21]

And I just saw it as magical and didn't know what to do. And so we discovered it through our conversations, Justin, that one of the best, one of the uses of an instructional framework is to use it to guide the observation of a new or inexperienced teacher as they observe a more experienced practitioner. I would caution against doing that too early in the process, because again, you think back to times when you were observing, uh, more experienced teachers. It's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's easy to come home at the end of those observations with just so many things in your head and a list of, of all the things you think you need to do right down to, you know, the color coding of the duotanes or how the pencils were arranged. You somehow think that some of the magic is in those things.

[15:15]

And while it could be, it's probably not the most important thing to be thinking about. And I feel like once a teacher is perhaps at the developing stage, that would be the place where it would be useful to give the teacher a framework or even some questions of things to look for based on the framework. and then send them to more experienced teacher. We've talked about this too, the idea of not sending them to, if you sense a teacher might be developing on the framework, to not send them to an exemplary teacher because that is too much of a gap again. You get into that magical space where it just seems impossible to bridge that gap. But if I'm a developing teacher and you send me to see someone who is fluent, sort of next to me on the framework, on the rubric, if you will,

[16:06]

It's a lot easier for me to see steps and to answer some questions based on that framework to help me take the steps that I need to move from developing to fluent.

[16:19] Justin Baeder:

Very well said. When I was up in your part of the world doing some trainings recently, did you see the clip of the classroom that I played? I did. We had a sample clip from a classroom where a teacher, I would say, kind of talks over students, high school classroom, a lot of using a loud voice, but then not getting quiet, not getting students quiet and just kind of continuing to talk over them while they talk and you're trying to give directions. And that strikes me as the kind of thing that would work perfectly with framework thinking and a peer observation to be able to say to this teacher, okay, your students are talking while you're talking. They're not really listening.

[16:58]

You're talking over them. You're being very loud. What I would like you to do is go into so-and-so's classroom. And I want you to notice, and it really helps, of course, if you've been in that classroom and you know that this person is a good example. You know what they do. You can break it down for the teacher who's going to be observing.

[17:13]

I want you to notice the way this other teacher uses volume, because it's not that this other teacher never gets loud. It's that they are strategic about getting loud. They're not screaming at their class, but they're getting students attention. So they're not being ignored, but then they're bringing their voice down. And it's in bringing their voice down that the students start to get quiet because that's being modeled for them. And I use that as an example.

[17:39]

And of course, in a room full of experienced principals, everyone just does that naturally, right? Like we know if you want to get everybody's attention, you have to kind of raise your voice or use some other sort of signal. But you can't continue then kind of shouting at everybody. You have to. get quieter. And it's in that getting quieter that students bring it down.

[17:57]

So breaking things like that down for people who are novices, even though all of our teachers probably did that when we were kids, or lots of our teachers did that. We probably had some people who just yelled all the time, but we've had that modeled for us, but without having it broken down and explained, here's what's going on. Here's why it works. Here's how you can learn from that. I find that people often imitate the wrong features or they take away the wrong things to copy. And you've had some people go on peer observations without that guidance and report back.

[18:30]

Or even with the right guidance, they sometimes bring back other things. It's like, no, don't bring that back. That's not what you're supposed to notice in that classroom, right?

[18:38] Heather Bell-Williams:

It's interesting that you bring that up. It's that idea of the iceberg. And when you go on a peer observation without any guidance, you're only looking at what's visible. And it's that small percentage of practice that's above the surface of the water. And so, yes, I sent a teacher on an observation. And when she came back, it happened to be physical education at the elementary level.

[19:03]

And she came back with a lovely sort of set of house league sports ideas and how to divide students into houses and and have them do intramurals at lunchtime. While that was a lovely system, it wasn't the focus of the observation or it wasn't what I wanted the focus of the observation to be. And so, you know, a lack of communication on my part as an inexperienced school leader, but certainly something like an instructional framework would have been a perfect talking point to get that conversation going. with the teacher prior to her going to experience a more experienced teacher or to observe a more experienced teacher. You mentioned really helpful if the person sending the inexperienced teacher on an observation can go first or can have a good sense of some of the routines and some of the things going on in the classroom that you want the teacher to notice.

[19:59]

Ideally, if it's in your own school, That's a win-win-win because you can be in observing in a more experienced teacher's classroom, doing walkthroughs, having those professional conversations of feedback. And at the same time, you can utilize that person to be a peer for another teacher to observe.

[20:19] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, absolutely. Great, great reason to get into classrooms. And it takes away one of those excuses that I know I went to as a new teacher when I was sent on a peer observation to another school. I walked into a classroom, same subject, different school. And I thought, oh, I see what's different in this classroom. They have better kids at this school.

[20:38]

You know, the kids are just better behaved. That's what it comes down to. And of course, that wasn't the case at all. The schools are virtually next door to each other. You know, it's 100% in the way the teacher is managing the class. And I wish I had had someone to go with me and break down what that teacher was doing because it did look like magic.

[20:55]

And I ultimately had a great mentor who helped me kind of break down some of that magic and figure out how to run a classroom, how to build relationships with students. And it is just such a gift to... to do that for someone who is struggling because, you know, figuring out how to make your own classroom tick is, it's just challenging. It's overwhelming.

[21:14]

There is so much to pay attention to. And I think this, this framework thinking that you've been describing is just such a great way to help people zoom in and help people focus on things that are going to pay off for them and not overwhelm them, but give them a specific set of things to work on. Talk to us a little bit about the focus over time when you're working with new teachers, do you focus on one thing at a time? Do you focus on a cluster of things? And then how do you move on from there and focus on other things? Take us into that long term, over a period of months, what that looks like.

[21:47] Heather Bell-Williams:

Sure. I can think of a couple of new teachers and experienced teachers who I worked with in the last couple of years. And I worked with the school leaders involved to coach them to follow up over the longer term so that my role was to be in there in the shorter term and sort of do some of the quicker work at the beginning. And then I coached the leaders in order that they could do it again with another teacher, presumably. to look at those key components. And so in the book, we lay out, you know, when we're looking at a practice, let's say it is around something like classroom materials or classroom routines.

[22:30]

Routines and procedures is one that some teachers struggle with. And so we might divide that into key components of the practice. And we talk very, very quickly. We talk about what an experienced teacher has to juggle. What balls do they have to keep in the air to manage routines and procedures? And well, we call those key components, those balls they have to juggle.

[22:51]

So one might be the same material. One might be actual procedures, but I can think of materials as one of the key ones that we'd start with. And so we would walk through the path to growth for one key component at a time. And then it gets trickier, right? Because then you're not only teaching the new teacher about materials, You're asking them to juggle that idea of materials while moving to another key component, like maybe transitions or timing, whatever you've determined to be the next most important key component. And so helping them keep that materials piece once they've reached fluency, then keeping that.

[23:33]

as well as then integrating another key component. But I tend to try to peel it back as much as I can and have them focus on one aspect, one key component until they reach a level of fluency, because it's really hard. It needs to become automatic, both in their actions and in their thinking before they can add something else. I found if I try to rush it, it's not as helpful.

[23:59] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned fluency because in our scheme for how these things are built, we've got beginning, developing, and fluent, I think is what we call it. Is that right? Is that what we call the first three levels, beginning, developing, and fluent? And if you get stuck in that second level where you're not fluent yet, that developing level, you're going through the motions, but nothing's quite clicking yet. Nothing's quite working. So you're putting forth the effort, but it's not quite good enough to get the result that you would get if you were truly fluent.

[24:28]

And that to me is a very overwhelming place for teachers. Like they need to keep pushing and keep focusing on that area to get to fluent or else it's going to be like trying to, you know, your first day juggling, you don't go up to chainsaws, right? You start with, you know, handkerchiefs and kind of work your way up to tennis balls. But, you know, when we move people up too quickly or move people on too quickly and they have not yet reached that level of fluency, right? They just get overwhelmed and they don't see the impact. They don't see the improvements that they get when they're at that fluent level.

[24:59] Heather Bell-Williams:

I think it's important too, Justin, to think long term. You mentioned, you know, a period of weeks or months and some of those changes that we see when someone's beginning. in their practice. Like I said, the feedback tends to be directive because they don't know what they don't know. So we say, try doing this now and we help them move along. That's fairly quick change because it's quite directive.

[25:23]

But you mentioned that idea of being at developing and it can be a long time at developing and it takes a really long time to go from developing to fluent. The change from beginning to developing is relatively quick. But it's going to take a good long time for someone to move from developing to fluent. And we don't want them to stall out there because then you end up with an experienced teacher in terms of years and in terms of time on the job thinking that's okay. They start to think, and I can think of a few teachers who've been in the profession a long time and are firmly entrenched in developing in a lot of their practice, especially around management. But it's been so long, they think that's OK and it's been allowed.

[26:11]

And so that's just what I do. Right. And so important to help teachers know that it's OK to take a lot of time to sort this out because it's hard work and it's not the most natural thing in the world for most people.

[26:27] Justin Baeder:

And we've been talking about new teachers, but often we have people who do have some experience, but may also need to do some reflection and to do some peer observation or get some feedback and improve in areas where maybe they feel okay about what they're doing. But we know there could be a much better outcome with some focused work. So the book is Mapping Professional Practice, How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth. And again, we have talked previously about the whole book. And today, I hope you've enjoyed our conversation on using framework thinking, kind of the express version of the process to help people grow quickly. Heather, thank you so much for joining me today.

[27:08]

If people are interested in potentially working with you or want to learn more about your work, what's the best place for them to go online?

[27:15] Heather Bell-Williams:

They can reach me at consulthbw at gmail.com or through my website, consulthbw.ca. Either of those places will get to me and be happy to chat with people about some coaching or consulting, whatever they need.

[27:31] Justin Baeder:

Fabulous. Thanks so much, Heather. Great to speak with you. Thanks, Justin.

[27:34] Announcer:

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