Nabarro: Re-setting a culture is no small thing. A few days ago I started a blog travelogue about my week in England with a summary of my trip to Ark Soane Academy in London. The next day, Wednesday, I was in Bristol to visit Blaise High School which is a fascinating and impressive case study in turnaround. When the current leadership Greenshaw Learning Trust took over it had a minus 1.4 Progress 8 score. Lessons were constantly disrupted. It was hard to teach and it wasn’t a safe or supportive environment for students. In the span of under two years they’ve brought Progress 8 scores to .-2 ..read more

A bright and lovely place…   I’ve just returned a week in England in which I visited schools, talked teaching, led a workshop and learned many useful things. I’ve decided to string together a series of posts in a sort of mini-travel-log. Starting with my visit on Tuesday to Ark Soane Academy in Acton where Pritesh Raichura was my primary host—and everybody was gracious and great conversations abounded. It’s a lovely, lovely school. Bright and tidy; orderly, positive and caring; so intentional about teaching (very high quality) and the scaffolding of knowledge. One of my reasons for goi ..read more

Memo Sifuentes   Memo Sifuentes coaches the u14s (and formerly the u12s) at Austin FC’s Youth Academy. I always find him incredibly thoughtful and intentional about the teaching part of his job. We’ve been talking a bit over the past year about game day coaching: what to do to maximize long-term learning at halftime, in pregame talks, during the match, and afterwards. After one of our discussions, Memo put together a ‘framework’ so there was a clear model for how things were supposed to go at halftime with his team. I’ve outlined it, and a few of Memo’s reflections, below. The Framewor ..read more

In our previous three posts, we described lessons learned from our partnership with Harmony Public Schools as they endeavored to strengthen a culture of Lesson Preparation across their 60 campuses. Our team defines Lesson Preparation as consisting of 3 core practices:  Plan the Exemplar Plan for Error Plan the Means of Participation   (For more on these core practices, check out previous TLAC posts on Lesson Prep here and here). We think the three practices can be flexibly and productively applied across all grades and content areas. However, to realize the full potential of Less ..read more

Studying implementation with network leaders As we’ve shared in our first and second posts, we were fortunate to partner with Harmony Public Schools as they endeavored to deliver high quality professional development systems focused on Lesson Preparation for 300+ instructional leaders across 60 campuses.  In this post Dan Cotton and Dillon Fisher discuss how they worked with Harmony to develop and refine systems to constantly assess how professional development was shaping outcomes in the classroom: One key to successful organizational change (in organizations both small and large) is t ..read more

  That’s not really me; and that’s not really my vibe. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” my 15 year old daughter said, pressing pause, “But I really expected this to be boring. I’m kind of pleasantly surprised.” We were in the car. “This” was an interview I’d done with Amy Forrester and Adam Boxer, two teachers from the UK whose help I’d asked comparing the school systems in the US and the UK. They were crushing it. Very cautiously this year I’ve taken up podcasting. It’s let me have conversations with people I find super-interesting about topics I think are especially important. On the ..read more

We know that attention is central to every learning task and the quality of attention paid by learners shapes the outcome of learning endeavors. Part of attentiveness is individual. Some people are more attentive than others and have better skills/habits in terms of their attention. But is attention also partly social? Does the environment in which students learn influence their attentiveness? “Attention contagion” is the idea that attention (or inattention) might spread among students in a learning environment. Here’s a fascinating experiment: Video of a lecture playing at the front of t ..read more

Review/Think/Decide   Yesterday I posted about the challenges of managing limits on Working Memory for teachers. We know we’ve got to design our teaching to respond to the challenges the classrooms presents for student’s Working Memory, but we’ve also got to be thinking about the under-acknowledge issue of our own working memory overloads. Walking around the classroom trying to observe and remember what 30 different students understood (and didn’t) on two problems with four steps each while also managing behavior and being responsive to psycho-social needs is a big ask of Working Memor ..read more

Posted a quick note on Twitter the other day about working memory and teachers- how using a clip board to note observations could teachers’ working memory to be more responsive the students as they interacted and how having an exemplar–and ideal student answer you’d like to get to–written out and carried around with you could allow you to not have to try to hold that idea in your working memory as you spoke to students so again you’d have more working memory free to interact, and could refresh your recollection from time to time. I thought I’d post some examples from actual classrooms to show ..read more

  42,000 students and counting…   In October, our Consulting & Partnerships team completed a 30-month partnership (March 2021-September 2023) with Texas’ largest charter school network, Harmony Public Schools. Our role was to help the network refine its vision for instructional leadership, then build training and systems to study progress across its 55 (now 60) schools.  Dan Cotton and Dillon Fisher, who worked on the project, shared this reflection on some of the challenges of making change at scale. They’ll share further reflections in the coming weeks. Introduction: A Hi ..read more