Beth Sattes

This session focuses on (1) why discussion is such an important teaching and learning strategy; (2) the skills necessary for discussion and how to help students develop them; (3) the cycle of planning and facilitating a discussion; and (4) three discrete forms of discussions useful in K-16 classrooms.

NOTE: For deep learning, recommend the purchase of the book: Walsh and Sattes, Questioning for Classroom Discussion: Purposeful Speaking, Engaged Listening, Deep Thinking, ASCD, 2015.

LEADERSHIP TEAM OPTION: Multiple days (3) might occur over the course of a school year or a semester. Three days might be for a team (principal and 1-2 teachers per grade level or department) from one or more schools within a district or districts. Teacher-leader members would try out selected learnings in their classrooms with students, and with the support of school leadership, schedule time and share content with colleagues.

Questions and questioning practices are important tools for teachers to maximize learning for all students and to engage them in thinking and learning.

A short session (1/2 or 1 day) will select from among several focus areas:

• How to frame questions that relate to the attainment of specific standards, selecting and using Webb’s DOK or Bloom’s revised taxonomy to move student thinking to deeper understanding and performance
• A variety of practical tools teachers can use to engage all students in thinking to formulate a response to every question—as well as framing their own questions to take their thinking deeper
• Strategies to create and sustain a classroom culture of thoughtfulness, collaboration, and student responsibility for learning.

For deep and extended learning and classroom application by participants, we recommend the purchase of the book: Walsh and Sattes, Quality Questioning: Research-Based Practice to Engage Every Learner. Corwin Press, 2017.

The skill of questioning is essential to effective leadership, as it is to good teaching and learning. Seeking to understand—through careful and considerate listening and through the posing of questions and the encouragement of question-asking—is essential to effective leadership. This session can be tailored for instructional coaches, school and district administrators, and teacher-leaders.
For deep and extended learning and application by participants, we recommend the purchase of the book: Walsh and Sattes, Leading through Quality Questioning: Creating Capacity, Commitment, and Community. Corwin Press, 2010.

Schools have found that students become more responsible for their own learning when they take ownership for leading parent conferences to share their learning progress and problems. This workshop provides a rationale, including research to back the effectiveness of student-led conferences (e.g. higher turnout of parent attendance; improved student understanding of their performance; etc.), and “how-to’s” for successful implementation of student-led conferences.

Teachers learn from one another, when given the opportunity and a productive strategy for doing so. A meaningful opportunity for teachers to learn together is through the sharing of student work (both the teacher-created assignment and the resultant student products) with peers. The use of protocols during this experience helps to make the process “safe” for teachers and one from which they learn—whether the focus is their own students’ work or the work of peers’ students; avoids overt criticism by the encouragement of question-asking based on individual, paired, and small group reflections; and is a way to “open the doors” into others’ classrooms via student work and/or selected classroom videos.

Instructional Rounds, named after “medical rounds” (in which students of medicine learn from conversations with experienced and student doctors about patient data) are a learning-filled experience for educators who observe other teachers and their students AND for those who are observed.

This learning experience requires a day and a preparatory two hour session: in a two-hour learning session, teachers and administrators who want to learn this strategy come together to learn the process. It is different than most school visits or classroom observations in the following ways:

• observations are descriptive, not evaluative;
• observations focus on students, classroom teacher, and the instructional content;
• the focus of observations is selected by the visited school—before the visit;
• collected data is analyzed not according to a pre-established rubric but rather through small group review, categorization, and analysis of specific recorded evidence;
• summaries are shared with the visited school;
• questions are posed for the visited school (answers are not given.)

For a full day, teachers and administrators visit a school to review the process they learned, learn about the specific practice that the visited school is interested in learning more about, visit classrooms to observe students, return to teams to analyze data and pose questions, and share data collection with the visited school.