Essential Understandings

Cycle Step 6: What will we do to improve, catalog, and save our work?

What the Research Says:

For teachers, teams, and school systems to continuously advance they must not only look forward but also document their journey. This process integrates the three powerful improvement actions of reflecting, benchmarking and cataloguing the work.

The most effective schools build a culture where both students and teachers pursue the ideal of continuous learning. They adopt a growth mindset towards ongoing improvement (Dweck, 2006). Teachers who use formal and informal data to analyze instructional practices and reflect on their personal and collective impact will continuously become better educators and collaborators. When these practices are included in a recurring cycle of team collaboration, the positive impacts on student learning are magnified.

Teachers and collaborative teams gain valuable professional learning as they engage in reflective teaching practices individually and collectively. Proven collaborative approaches and protocols may help to guide the process of reflection, which, according Renard (2019) includes these basic steps:

1. “Teach

2. Self-assess the effect of your teaching on learning

3. Consider new ways of teaching that can improve the quality of learning

4. Try these ideas in practice

5. Evaluate the outcomes

6. Save the best of what worked.”

This process is repeated through the GEARS in an ongoing cycle of learning and reflection. Reflection should occur throughout the instructional process, not just at the end of a unit of instruction or at the end of a school year.

“Benchmarking is an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing the work procedures of one organization to those of another” (Kempner, 1993). This practice is a powerful tool that helps schools, teachers, and teams measure progress towards their goals and provides a clear pathway for learning from one another. Benchmarking allows for collaboration and sharing of best practices leading to improvement in instructional practice. “Benchmarking is a positive process and provides objective measurements for baselining (setting the initial values), goal-setting and improvement tracking, which can lead to dramatic innovations” (Shafer & Coate, 1992). Schools and systems must have a enough degree of common accountability measures, reporting tools, and a shared operational language to support effective benchmarking processes. Procedures for benchmarking must be made explicit to all stakeholders. Benchmarking provides, perhaps, the most promising framework for rapidly improving student outcomes to scale.

When developing a system to catalog and save work, the team must first and foremost decide what artifacts are deemed worthy and necessary to preserve. Without developing this fundamental working agreement, they may retain unnecessary information that will clutter and delay their accessibility in retrieving what they need in the future.

Without a simple and efficient means for cataloging artifacts of their instructional efforts, teachers and teams may lose track of valuable learning experiences, strategies, and lessons that have been successful, or worse, they may unintentionally repeat the mistakes they have made in the past. Ensuring an accurate historical record of the work that has been completed allows for schools, teachers, and teams to effectively measure progress, identify areas for growth, and benchmark their work overtime and across audiences.

Within each school or system, instructional leaders must determine a digital system to use that provides access and opportunity for all relevant stakeholders. This may mean a closed system that only those within the organization can access or an open system that invites outside contributors. A repository of this type needs to have clearly defined business rules for naming conventions, vetting materials, and editing rights in order to preserve the integrity and searchability of the resources. Finally, the system must have an explicitly defined expectation for use by all stakeholders. These expectations include teams reflecting on the artifacts as a regular part of the collaborative cycle. It is essential for teams to reflect upon and preserve work as they unpack standards, create common formative assessments, design engaging and rigorous lessons, plan for differentiation, employ interventions and extensions, and gather and reflect on data throughout the cycle. Effective district and school improvement plans communicate expectations related to the improvement actions of reflection, benchmarking, and cataloging collaborative teamwork.