‘Discovery Walks’ seek to improve student learning

A school-improvement tool with an impressive track record of raising student achievement will be introduced to all interested Catholic school principals this month.

The tool – known as “Discovery Walks” or “e-Walks” – involves quarterly visits to each classroom by a team of educators, led by the principal. Equipped with iPads, members of the walking team quietly observe the conditions and teaching strategies in use in each classroom, enter their observations onto an electronic checklist, and generate a series of “snapshots” – in the form of pie graphs – depicting the school’s overall operations. The graphs instantly enable administrators and teachers to identify what they are doing well as a school, and which elements of classroom logistics need their attention.

“It will mean five or so persons coming into your classrooms and watching what you do,” said Dr. Brian Riedlinger, introducing the Discovery Walk concept to Diocese of Baton Rouge teachers at an Aug. 2 gathering at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.

“This is not a ‘gotcha,’” Riedlinger said. “This is how we can help your school get better.”

Riedlinger, CEO of the School Leadership Center of Greater New Orleans (SLC), said the SLC has been facilitating Discovery Walks at about 60 southern Louisiana schools since 2006. The SLC provides certified walk “coaches” to assist at the quarterly walks, and reports that participating schools have been able to lift their average standardized test scores by an average of more than five points. Two impressive test cases are from St. James and Plaquemines parishes, where a grant funded Discovery Walks at public schools with first- and second-year principals, and used the districts’ remaining schools as its control group.

“In every case, the first- or second-year principals outscored all the other principals in the district,” said Riedlinger, noting that the St. James and Plaquemines school districts have seen a more than 10-point increase in test scores since implementing the walks in 2006 and 2007, respectively.

How the walks roll out

Before each Discovery Walk, the walking team – typically composed of the principal, assistant principal, two to three teachers and the SLC coach – meet briefly in the principal’s office to review what it will be looking for in the pending school-wide journey.

“Then they literally walk through every classroom,” Riedlinger said. During each 10- to 15-minute visit, team members document classroom realities such as student engagement, how pupils are grouped for learning, if hands-on learning is taking place, if the teacher is seated or circulating around the room, if question time is provided during the lesson, the cleanliness and organization of the classroom space, and if technology is supporting or deterring learning.

At the walk’s conclusion, Cloud software converts the team’s observations into graphs that show how the school is doing in the various instructional categories. A post-walk meeting examines the results, and the team works with faculty to design an improvement plan tailored to their specific school.

“After we get a picture of (how student instruction unfolds at the school), school leaders and teachers discuss how they can do better,” Riedlinger said. “This is not an overnight change; it’s a slow, steady progression.”

Currently, five Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of New Orleans – Cabrini, St. Scholastica Academy, Academy of Our Lady, Pope John Paul II and St. Charles Catholic – are already in various stages of implementing the Discovery Walk approach with the SLC’s assistance. The tool is also in place at one Catholic elementary school – Stuart Hall.

The observational walks are among the many strategies Cabrini principal Yvonne Hrapmann credits for the two-point rise in her school’s average composite ACT score between 2006 and 2010. After completing its first Discovery Walk in 2006, Cabrini discovered that teachers were doing “whole-class instruction” – or lecturing – 84 percent of the time. Riedlinger describes the instructional technique as “sit-and-get” learning.

“Eighty-four percent of the time the students were not doing something; they were just sitting,” Riedlinger said. “We’ve found that if you minimize (whole-class instruction), student engagement goes up; and if student engagement goes up, what they remember goes up.”

A shift in teaching style

After integrating more cooperative learning techniques into the classroom, Cabrini teachers were successful in reducing their whole-class instruction time to 50 percent, and worked diligently to produce a 30-percent increase in activities that challenge students to test and apply the knowledge they receive.

When Cabrini’s collaboration with the SLC revealed that something as basic as listing the objectives of each day’s lessons – either on the board or in some other visual form – increased student engagement, the faculty stepped up to the plate.

“Last year, when we asked our students what they were learning and why, 96 percent of them could tell us what the target (of the lesson) was,” Hrapmann said. “If they know the target, it’s more likely they can hit it. It’s not like, ‘We’re on page 16; it’s, ‘We’re learning how to solve polynomial problems.”

The walks also have helped her and her staff develop a “common language” for quality instruction and have led to more sharing of successful teaching strategies among colleagues.

As informative as the tool is, Discovery Walks do not evaluate individual teachers, Riedlinger stressed.

“It’s a snapshot of your school at the time the team walks into your room,” he said, noting that walks cull the most accurate picture of school dynamics by visiting classrooms at different times of the day. The SLC recommends that coached walks take place at least quarterly, and that schools follow up with daily, 5-minute “management walks” by the principal and department chairs.

The SLC helps schools tap into an array of lesson-building resources, including “Marzano’s Nine” – nine teaching strategies identified by researcher Robert Marzano as the most effective in improving student achievement across all content areas and grade levels. For example, Marzano’s Nine advocates the use of compare and contrast – a teaching strategy that spurs students to come up with their own metaphors and analogies while mastering concepts; and the use of visual aides, such as maps, graphs and models, as a more frequent complement to verbal instruction.

“If you stick with (the Discovery Walks), you can’t help but improve, and if you’re not improving, we can generally point to where you’re going wrong,” Riedlinger said.

Founded in 1997, the SLC is a non-profit collaborative of Baptist Community Ministries, the University of New Orleans and Xavier University. Its mission is to inspire and develop courageous leadership among principals and other educators through academic insight, reflective practice and collegial networking.

Dr. Jan Lancaster, superintendent of the Office of Catholic Schools and an SLC fellow, and Riedlinger will present an overview of the Discovery Walk tool to interested Catholic elementary and high school principals Aug. 23 from 9 to 11 a.m. at the Lindy C. Boggs International Conference Center at UNO. For more information, e-mail Lancaster at [email protected]

         Beth Donze can be reached at [email protected].