WEBVTT

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I am Don Davis, the Principal of Waterford High School in Waterford, California.

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We began a process of teachers visiting other teachers' classrooms,

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and we would call those instructional tours.

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And this is powerful because teachers then go in and observe a lesson for their own benefit,

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not for the benefit of the one being observed, but for the observer.

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And when two teachers go in together to watch instruction and then step outside

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and have a conversation that's sometimes facilitated by me and sometimes not,

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but it's a way that they can sort of calibrate their discussion-their lens-around what they saw.

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When I go in with teachers I will just ask that question, "What did you see in that lesson?"

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There is trust here.

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It's not evaluative, okay?

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The purpose is to see, are we seeing the same thing instructionally?

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And that's building coherence here.

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It's saying, "You know what, when we see a teacher using this strategy,

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we both saw the same thing.

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We both saw the same decisions made by the teacher.

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We're going to have a conversation."

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And we started to do that with our accreditation process to begin to tally the kind

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of strategies that were in place,

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but the teachers enjoyed it so much they said, "Can we just keep doing this?"

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So we created an instrument that would facilitate the observation and the subsequent discussion.

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And so, on a teacher's preparation period,

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I might take two or three teachers in the fall semester and say,

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"Let's go have an instructional tour."

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And we will drop into classrooms and stay five minutes, ten minutes, watch instruction,

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step outside: "What did you see?"