Instructional rounds and other routines can help educators develop and share knowledge and become researchers of their own practice. 

 

At the Connecticut Center for School Change, we work with central office and school leaders to help them become more effective instructional leaders who can bring about powerful classroom experiences for all students. Like all of our colleagues at the center, we’ve had long careers in K-12 education, but we are no longer practitioners. And while we participate in applied research and “translate” that research for practitioner audiences, we are not scholars. Rather, we live in the space between research and practice and spend our days negotiating the relationship between them. In effect, we serve as intermediaries, or what some call “knowledge brokers.”  

When discussing the gap between research and practice, some of our scholar colleagues complain that educators don’t read, that they resist new research that challenges old models of teaching and learning, that they are too drawn to plug-and-play programs supported by weak or nonexistent research, or that they reject research-based programs that don’t match their “style.” Our educator colleagues, on the other hand, tell us that scholars are disconnected from practice, that they focus on esoteric questions with no practical relevance to schools, and that their findings are unclear, ambiguous, or contradictory. Our experience suggests that there is truth to all of these observations. 

We are not in a position to make academia as responsive to the field as K-12 educators would like, but we are in a position to help practitioners incorporate research into their work in ways that are meaningful to them and that build their capacity to improve on their own practice, such as by engaging in communities of practice, data analysis, instructional rounds, or other means of regularly examining their practice. For our purposes, we refer to these as improvement routines 

What are improvement routines? 

Improvement routines are collaborative, consistent, regularly repeated practices designed to build organizational capacity. As long as they meet these criteria, they can include anything from the analysis of data by teams of teachers to instructional coaching and even staff meetings. Routines often get a bad rap, since they may seem inefficient or even cumbersome, and they are often associated with bureaucracy, inflexibility, and inertia. When implemented well, however, they often lead to significant improvements in professional practice (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). 

For decades, organizational theorists from a range of sectors have studied the power of such routines to promote both stability and change, and a number of researchers have identified them as central to the work of educational improvement in particular (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Barber, Kihn, & Moffett, 2010; Bryk et al., 2015; City & Curtis, 2009; Stevenson & Weiner, 2021). For example, Lauren Resnick and colleagues (2010) found that by introducing new “kernel” routines — such as weekly “learning walks,” in which teams of teachers and administrators visit classrooms, then debrief about what they observed — school leaders can “seed” the sorts of productive discussions that lead teachers to make significant improvements in classroom practice.  

In reviewing the existing scholarship in this area and reflecting on our own work in schools and districts, we have identified several characteristics of effective routines: 

  • They focus on what really matters for improving student learning — teachers’ instructional practice, the curriculum they teach, and the tasks they ask students to accomplish.
  • They contribute to a shared understanding of the district’s vision for school improvement and its definition of high-quality instruction.
  • They enable participants to build their professional knowledge and become better prepared to enact what they’ve learned in their own work, whether inside or outside the classroom.
  • They spread the new learning across the entire community of educators in the school or district, instead of remaining an isolated, self-contained performance for only a select few.
  • They collect and analyze evidence and data in a disciplined way that provides actionable intelligence about what educators need and how well they are implementing the strategies being discussed.
  • They happen frequently enough to be part of the school’s culture and integrated with its other systems and structures. 

Because of their complexity, just getting such routines off the ground can seem like a victory in itself, but we cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that improvement routines be employed thoughtfully, and that everyone involved has a shared understanding of their purpose. It is important that routines run smoothly, but this is not the primary goal. Ultimately, the point must be to build educators’ capacity to deliver consistent, high-quality instruction to all students across all classrooms. 

An example: Instructional rounds 

To better understand how improvement routines can link research and practice, let’s look at one specific type of routine — instructional rounds. Other routines, such as regularly participating in data teams or professional learning communities, could also serve as examples, but we choose to focus on rounds because the Connecticut Center for School Change has a long and storied history with the practice (City et al., 2009). 

Instructional rounds are an improvement routine in which educators identify a problem, gather low-inference data in classrooms, analyze those data to find schoolwide patterns and trends, and identify specific improvement strategies based on those findings (for a more detailed summary, see Roegman & Riehl, 2012). The process requires groups of educators to examine their own and others’ instructional practice closely, in a disciplined and intentional manner, while incorporating the data from their observations into a series of ongoing improvement cycles.  

The point must be to build educators’ capacity to deliver consistent, high-quality instruction to all students across all classrooms. 

We’ve seen some districts adopt this strategy half-heartedly, adopting it only because the superintendent has decided that “doing rounds” is important. In such cases, practitioners merely go through the motions, without implementing the routine often enough, or with a strong enough sense of purpose, for it to become an important part of their professional culture. However, the school districts we work with have made instructional rounds into exactly the kind of improvement routine that we are advocating.  

One such district is Naugatuck Public Schools in Connecticut. Several years ago, the superintendent (now retired) and her leadership team recognized that their graduating students were not as prepared as they should be for life after high school. Having read up on a number of relevant strands of research, the superintendent was convinced that the students needed more challenging instruction, more rigorous and personally meaningful content, and more complex academic tasks. But she knew making these improvements would be a complex endeavor, one that would challenge many educators, students, and families’ assumptions about what teaching and learning should look like. And this, she recognized, would require a systematic, multiyear effort. 

A central component of her approach was to establish multiple avenues for sharing knowledge about content and pedagogy — and one such avenue was instructional rounds. The work began with instructional coaches and school leaders visiting math classrooms at every school in the district, to observe teachers as they implemented a new curriculum and to identify those teachers’ most frequent instructional practices. Through this process of observing instruction and then discussing what they saw, the administrators and instructional coaches began to develop a shared definition of the kinds of numeric reasoning they thought all students should develop, but which they weren’t learning in most of the district’s math classes. Further, they began to identify specific challenges that each school would have to overcome, as well as the specific kinds of support teachers would need, in order to make such instruction the norm. Then they began to invite local teachers to participate in these classroom visits, which they now called instructional rounds, to hone their own analytic skills, join the conversation about the kinds of mathematical reasoning they wanted students to develop, and collaborate in deciding how best to help the district move forward. Over time, administrators and teachers agreed to develop specific classroom tasks and assignments that would teach the kinds of numeric reasoning described in the Common Core State Standards. This, in turn, led Naugatuck educators to explore relevant research and analytic frameworks, which they relied on while redesigning their math classes.   

In Naugatuck, then, instructional rounds weren’t just a hoop that local educators had to jump through, just because the superintendent told them to. Rather, they became a regular professional routine, involving a varied group of participants, that was intentionally designed to build organizational capacity and improve teaching practice.  

It’s worth noting, also, that many of the participants were members of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and were familiar with current research on math teaching and curriculum. However, district leaders knew better than to wait, passively, for researchers to provide concrete guidance about how to implement the instructional shifts they recommended, or for those teachers to figure it out on their own. Rather, district leaders chose to engage educators in an active and ongoing process that involved observing classrooms, collecting and analyzing data, identifying needs and priorities, designing solutions, trying them out, observing the results, and regrouping. In short, while local practitioners were informed by their reading of academic research, they were fully invested in generating new knowledge and applying it to their own practice, right where it matters most — the instructional core.  

Years into its improvement journey, Naugatuck has improved mathematics outcomes for students at a rate that dramatically outpaces gains at the state level. But while instructional rounds and other improvement routines have played a significant role in Naugatuck’s success, it’s important to note that the district did not just take an improvement process off the shelf and implement it as directed. If instructional rounds have been useful, it is because participants have been deliberate about tailoring this routine to their specific improvement needs (implementing a new math curriculum), making thoughtful decisions about which classrooms to observe and when, whom to include in the process, what to look for during observations, how to structure their post-observation debriefing sessions, and so on. 

Barriers to implementing routines 

As with so much in education and leadership, none of this is easy. Naugatuck offers an example of one way to enact an improvement routine, but not the way. Any leaders looking to implement routines in their own district will need to consider what will work in their own context. And they will need to remember that real instructional improvement will take patience, commitment, attention to detail, awareness of participants’ anxieties and other psychological needs, and follow-through. But while every school and district will face its own unique challenges, we’ve seen that a few problems tend to be particularly common.  

First, an entire generation of school and district administrators seems to have been taught that leaders must be visionary, inspirational, and transformational, and for these administrators, the whole idea of improvement routines can sound too slow, tiresome, procedural, and regressive. Sometimes, too, they find themselves pushed in another direction by their school board, or their own ego makes it difficult for them to continue an improvement strategy launched by their predecessor. The truth is, however, that leaders cannot make change happen simply by setting ambitious goals and applying the force of their own personality. Nor can they expect that a bold new strategy will immediately result in dramatic instructional improvements. If anything, such beliefs contribute to the constant churn of new initiatives and programs we see in so many districts, making it even more difficult to improve over the long term. In our experience, the most effective educational leaders pay close attention to detail, have a deep technical background in instruction, understand that it takes time for new professional routines to develop, mature, and show their effects, and are willing to stay the course. 

Second, school and district leaders often confuse a specific routine for the larger improvement strategy. We are forever dismayed, but no longer surprised, to hear superintendents complain that “We’ve been doing rounds (or data teams, or instructional coaching, or another routine) for over a year now and we haven’t seen any improvement.” However, we explain, instructional rounds and other routines are not districtwide strategies; they are tools that can help the district implement a larger plan by bringing educators together to study their own work and identify concrete ways to improve particular practices.  

And finally, when introducing new improvement routines, school and district leaders often neglect to pay close enough attention to their own positional authority and the psychological threats that this work can pose for teachers and staff. A superintendent, for example, may assert that they want staff to speak their minds, volunteer honest perspectives, and engage in open dialogue. All too often, though, they go on to shut down teachers’ ideas, check their messages while staff share research findings, and so on. Successful improvement routines rely on feedback loops. If teachers and administrators offer constructive feedback only to be ignored or receive a defensive response from their superiors, then they’re likely to view improvement routines as just another set of hoops they have to jump through.  

Knowledge for practice 

No improvement routine is a silver bullet. If details are not managed, a supportive culture does not materialize, and the purpose becomes murky, then instructional rounds and other routines will devolve into anemic or even toxic compliance activities. When implemented thoughtfully, however, such routines can foster disciplined and sophisticated collaboration that leads to real changes in instructional and organizational practice.  

Moreover, when improvement routines thrive, they remind us that the task of connecting research and practice involves more than building bridges between practitioners and scholars housed at universities and research institutes, and that we should also invest in understanding how practitioners use research on their own terms, deepening their individual and collective knowledge base.  

We have long treated teachers as technicians who need to be fixed or filled up with the right knowledge and dispositions, rather than encouraging them to take a lead role in developing their own expertise. More specifically, despite frequent calls for job-embedded professional learning, too many educators continue to work in isolation from their colleagues. We must create more opportunities for teachers to collaborate with each other in studying and making meaning of their practice, in the service of improving the instruction they provide to their students.   

References 

Argyris, C. & Schön, D. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Addison-Wesley. 

Barber, M., Kihn, M., & Moffett, A. (2010). Deliverology 101: A field guide for educational leaders. Corwin. 

Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L.M., Grunow, A., LeMahieu, P.G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.  

City, E.A. & Curtis, R. (2009). Strategy in action: How school systems can support powerful learning and teaching. Harvard Education Press.  

City, E.A., Elmore, R.F., Fiarman, S.E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education. Harvard Education Press. 

Feldman, M.S. & Pentland, B.T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48 (1), 94-118. 

Resnick, L.B., Spillane, J.P., Goldman, P., & Rangel, E. (2010). Implementing innovation: From visionary models to everyday practice. In H. Dumont, D. Istance, & F. Benavides (Eds.), The nature of learning: Using research to inspire practice (pp. 285-315). OECD Publishing. 

Roegman, R. & Riehl, C. (2012). Playing doctor with education: Considerations in using medical rounds as a model for instructional rounds. Journal of School Leadership, 22 (5), 922-952. 

Stevenson, I. & Weiner, J.M. (2021). The strategy playbook for educational leaders: Principles and processes. Routledge.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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Isobel Stevenson

ISOBEL STEVENSON is director of organizational learning at the Connecticut Center for School Change, Hartford, Conn. Stevenson is the coauthor of The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders ,

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Richard W. Lemons

RICHARD W. LEMONS  is executive director of the Connecticut Center for School Change, Hartford, CT. Lemons is a coauthor of Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming our Schools .