Protocols

J.McDonald, Mohr, Dichter, E. McDonald Edited by Jim O’Toole
 * The Power of Protocols **

CHAPTER 1 The Basic Ideas In this chapter, we describe four basic ideas concerning the continuing professional education of educators in and for such setting. EXPLORING STUDENT WORK One good way for us to educate ourselves is to pause periodically in our practice to become deliberate students of our students. The point is to reach a different understanding of our students than the kind we're used to, one deeper than what is required merely to keep our teaching and their learning in sync. We read students' work closely and collectively for two reasons. One is to learn more about the students' learning to gain clues about their strengths and weaknesses, their misconceptions, their proximity or distance from a conceptual breakthrough, their progress with respect to some defined standard, or their unique ways of thinking and working. We also read students' work closely as a text that captures the efficacy of our own work. Thus our efforts to explore student work together are crucial to our efforts to revise and improve the collective work of our educational institutions. For these reasons, however, looking at student work particularly looking together at student work can be threatening. This is why protocols are useful. They protect us from what we may perceive as social danger, even as they teach us habits we wish we already had. PROTOCOL-BASED LEARNING. Thus, protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment. Protocols are regimens that ensure faithful replication of an experiment or medical treatment; they tell the scientist or doctor to do this first, then that, and so on. And in social science, they are the scripted questions that an interviewer covers, or the template for an observation. (McDonald, Klein, Riordan, & Broun, 2003). //But in formal settings, just talking can be counterproductive.// Emily White (2006) points out, for example, that meetings called to address serious "problems frequently fail because of under regulated talking. Often those running the meetings talk too much, and often they let others talk too much. Together the talkers choke off real listening, and the kind of distributed and beyond-your-comfort-zone learning that solving serious problems usually requires. **Educators in particular may need the focused conversation of protocols.** Of course, teachers hear from experts all the time for example, in professional development workshops but they gain real benefit from such encounters only when they dare to put their expertise at risk (McDonald, Buchanan, & Sterling, 2004). In forcing transparency, protocols again teach us habits that we wish we already had: to take the time to listen and notice, to take the time to know about what we want to say, to work without rushing, to speak less (or speak up more). Enriching Learning Like their counterparts in diplomacy, technology, science, medicine, and social science, the kind of protocols we describe and promote in this book constrain behavior in order to enhance experience. Some protocols enable enemies to sit at the same table and make peace. Others enable us to communicate instantaneously worldwide. Still others permit scientific advancements and medical cures. The ones we write about help educators and their students to exercise their descriptive powers, intensify their listening, enhance their qualities of judgment, and facilitate their communication with one another.

DIFFERENT WORKPLACE FOR EDUCATORS Facilitation of protocols. **These can lead, we believe, to the development of a different workplace by educators. This is one where the power to assess outcomes and to take action to improve them is distributed throughout the organization, and where the people who do the work are able, willing, and even eager in consultation with their colleagues to make changes as needed in order to the work more effective.** Some recent studies of school reform bear this out. Here the higher performance workplace has been associated with the development of what are called //professional communities of practice//. Similarly, Fred Newmann and Gary Wehlage (1995), reporting on a national study of 24 restructured schools, conclude that "the most successful schools were the ones that used restructuring tools to help them function as professional communities of practice" (p. 3). Where such communities had the right cultural and structural conditions to exert continual leadership, the researchers say, and where they focused on improving the intellectual quality of their students' work, the work did improve (Newmann & Associates, 1996; Newmann & Wehlage, 995). One of the problems associated with the proliferation of testing is that it is often taken to be accountability itself rather than an accountability tool. The best way to be clear at the core, we think, is to build professional communities of practice (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001, 2006). Facilitative Leadership Karen Seashore Louis and her colleagues (1996) argue that the crucial components of professional communities of practice are the following: 1) Focus on student learning 2) Deprivatization of practice 3) Collaboration 4) Shared norms and values 5) Reflective dialogue. Or they may insist on educators working in teams, but provide no models or coaching. Or they may provide time for educators to meet together for planning, but no norms for planning or frameworks of values pide it. This means working to ensure that there are people throughout the organization who know how to do the following: (Schwarz, 1994)  Gather colleagues together with a purpose.  Establish effective ground rules for the gatherings.  Enforce the ground rules by identifying behaviors consistent and inconsistent with them.  Enable the colleagues to share information freely with one another.  Help them attend fully to one another's perspectives.  Help them make a collective commitment to the choices the group may make.  When we use the word facilitator in this book, we mean someone empowered by role or opportunity to do these things. Thus freed from some kinds of decision-making, facilitators of protocols have more energy for making the decisions they must, and for reflecting on the results. In the next chapter, we examine more deeply the facilitator's role and offer practical advice to facilitators including the facilitator's role and offer practical advice to facilitators including some protocols they may use to manage some parts of their role. ** N.B. This is the work that Annenberg coaches perform. **  CHAPTER 2 Facilitating At its heart, facilitating is about promoting participation, ensuring equity, and building trust. This is to promote participation, ensure equity, and build trust, the facilitator first needs an "appointment." He has to understand that the three tasks involving participation, equity, and trust are at the heart of the work he is being asked to do. Furthermore, he must be willing and able to perform the tasks. Promoting Participation. Learning is social. We inevitably learn through and with others, even though what is finally understood is our own mental construction (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999, 2000). In insisting that educators learning together get to know one another first, the facilitator is not just encouraging cordiality. Openness to others' experiences builds openness to others' perspectives, and such openness provides learning opportunities otherwise unavailable. When the facilitator encourages participants in a protocol to "hear all voices," it is really a call to highlight a sufficient number of perspectives on the issue or problem at hand such that everyone can gain the possibility of new insight. Ensuring Equity. The presumption of a genuinely accountable educational organization is that everyone can learn what he or she needs to learn in order to do the task at hand. This everyone involves adults as well as students. //A norm that respects dissidence is crucial to genuine accountability.// Until a professional community really knows and understands the range of viewpoints it contains, however variable and contradictory, it remains incapable of taking collective and effective action on behalf of all its students' learning. Building Trust. When a facilitator promotes a group's trust, it is not to help everyone trust every other individual member as an individual, but rather to help each trust the situation that has been collectively created. The purpose is not trust in general, but trust sufficient to do the work at hand. Nor is the goal to make everyone feel comfortable. Given trust, a group of individuals can learn from one another and their work together even when the work creates discomfort - as work involving worthwhile learning often does. Opening. Preparing educators to give and get sensitive feedback is not a lightweight distraction or lure. No one can give and get feedback sensitively, honestly, and effectively without first knowing a little bit about everybody else involved, discussing the context in which they are gathered or what is often called an agenda and setting or reviewing some group norms. Time is always an issue in the facilitation of groups. In our experience, however, a little investment of time up front saves a lot of time later. In whatever form they take, however, the opening moves that should never be skipped are introductions, context review, and norm-setting. This is true for any group meeting, whether or not governed by protocols. Introductions have two general purposes. The first is to get everybody present to say something right away something that connects each to the business of the group. The second purpose is to help everyone know something relevant about each of the people now joining them in a learning activity, and thus representing in a way the presence of a distributed intelligence. Context review includes what we plan to work on and why, how we came to be here, what we hope to achieve, and how long and in what ways we plan to work together. A protocol usually defines only the last of these; the others need to be explained, discussed, and perhaps negotiated. Norms are behavioral guidelines whose purpose goes beyond the meeting itself. They signify ways of being together and learn; from one another that we hope will become habitual. They involve such other things as how we treat one another's ideas and how we push our own thinking. They also involve things such as whether we talk about what has transpired within the meeting outside the meeting, whether we turn off all phones during the meeting, and how we expect our facilitator to work with us. Intervening and Closing. Situations demanding facilitator interventions are usually somewhat easier to handle than this. That is, participants must take the trouble to specify what they have learned substantively and procedurally and then to generalize from it. One way the facilitator can help with this transfer is to press participants to answer three questions, ones that are useful to nearly any kind of debriefing: What have I learned about the topic that brought this group together? So What? What difference does it seem to make for example, to my teaching or my team's planning? Now what? What steps can I take to make the most of what I have learned? When it comes to closing especially, short moves often work best. BRIEF PROTOCOLS (pg 20) In what follows, we describe some brief protocols that can be used as opening, closing, or intervening moves. Later, we also describe three elaborate protocols that can serve as opening moves for meetings where time is plentiful and a good start crucial for example, a day-long or multiday retreat. Postcards The facilitator says, "Without looking at it first, deal yourself one of the picture postcards from this deck going around. Then imagine why it's the perfect picture for you at this moment [or how it represents your work,”describes your feelings about starting or ending the workshop]. Be prepared to show and tell." Clearing Clearing is also known as Connections. It helps enormously to take the time, In 5 to 10 minutes, for the group members to say what things are on their minds. AII-Purpose Go-Round The prompt can be as simple as "Introduce yourself and tell us one thing you like about technology and one thing you dislike." We call this protocol all-purpose because one can use it not only as an opener but as a closing move, too, or as an intervening one. Thus a facilitator can interrupt another activity to "do a quick go-round" of people's reactions to something that just happened, or even of whether to continue larger activity. Pair-Share Participants all share with a partner some past experience related to the goals of the meeting. Experiences might include a positive one they have had in a professional workshop, or best and worst experiences taking a test, or an earliest memory of being a student, or something about their first day as a principal. All pairs address the same question, and then discuss as a group what their sharing had in common and what surprised them. LONGER OPENERS (pg.23) Often, however, we leave timing for steps to facilitator discretion. Finally, the format includes some facilitation tips and some possibilities for variation. N.B. Each protocol includes //Details, Steps, Facilitation Tips, and Variations//. However, this document only includes the //Purpose.// ** Fears and Hopes (pg. 24) ** Some facilitators hesitate to open with a "negative" question such as "What are your fears about this meeting?" Their own fear is that the negativity will get out of hand. However, our experience is quite the opposite. When participants are encouraged to say aloud that they fear the meeting will be boring, will not meet their real needs, or will be run in a way that is insulting to their learning, then they become, paradoxically, much more open and receptive to the work of the actual meeting. Having accepted this first risk, they feel less defensive about others that may come their way. Purpose; One purpose is simply to help people learn some things about one other. But the deeper purpose is to establish a norm of ownership by the group of every individual’s expectations and concerns- to get these into the open and to begin to address them. ** Protocol for Setting Norms. (pg 25) ** "What norms do we need to increase the likelihood that our hopes will be realized and our fears allayed?" Purpose; We set norms first of all to curtail some unproductive behaviors (for example, "Don't monopolize the airtime"). We also set them to give ourselves permission to be bolder than we might otherwise be (for example, "Take some risks here"). And we set them in order to remind ourselves that people learn in different ways (for example, "Give everybody time to think"). Norms are especially useful when newcomers are likely to arrive after the work is already under way (and this happens frequently in professional learning groups). When newcomers arrive, the norms fill them in. They don't have to learn them through trial and error. Norms are also useful when "tricky" conversations are likely (and tricky conversations are frequent in real-life groups). ** Diversity Rounds (pg.27) ** Purpose. This protocol can be used to help participants become more aware of the various connections they have to others, and to understand the impact of personal identity on professional experience. The activity is most useful for groups that will be working together over an extended time. ** Marvin’s Model (pg. 29) ** Purpose: The purpose of this protocol is to facilitate rapid communication about a topic at hand among a large group of people, or to get many points of view in play quickly without engaging in dialogue. This can be used to open or close a meeting, or on occasion to intervene.

CHAPTER 3 Tapping Outside Sources (pg. 31)

** Final Word. (pg 31) ** Purpose The purpose of the Final Word Protocol is to expand the interpretation of one or more texts by encouraging the emergence of a variety of interests, viewpoints, and voices. By forcing everyone to offer an interpretation, and to listen closely to and reflect back others' interpretations, Final Word ensures the emergence of diverse perspectives on texts. It also helps participants feel safer in proposing what may be offbeat or dissident interpretations because the protocol implicitly avoids consensus-building. It is okay in this protocol to end a session with as much difference of interpretation in the air as was there at the start. The point is to get it in the air. ** Jigsaw Protocol (pg 34) ** Purpose: This protocol can be used to allow participant’s access to learning from a greater amount of text than time would permit had everyone read or viewed the same texts. ** Learning from Speakers Protocol (pg.36) ** Purpose: The purpose of the Learning from Speakers Protocol is to structure the experience of the invited speaker format so that learning is maximized for the speaker as well as the learners. The principles of the protocol are the same as for many others: to keep a focus, to foster listening, and to provide an opportunity to construct knowledge, both individually and collectively. ** Panel Protocol (pg.39) ** Purpose: The main use for the Panel Protocol is to make sure that a group of educators gets to interact meaningfully with some outsiders whose expertise it needs, instead of being bored by "talking heads." At the same time, the protocol's additional purpose is to help the experts think about and use their expertise so that it best meets the needs of the people they are trying to help.

** Provocative Prompts (pg.42) ** Purpose The purpose of the protocols is to infuse a conversation about a particular topic with a quick and contrasting set of viewpoints on it viewpoints that participants in a learning group can use to help elicit, shape, and reexamine their own perspectives and attitudes. They are often used as a way into a complex issue that is then treated in a more comprehensive way. ** Stuff and Vision Protocol (pg. 44) ** Purpose The purpose of this protocol is to assist team-teaching groups or other collegial planning groups to plan lessons that take the best advantage of the stuff they each bring to their teaching, while honoring and honing the vision to which they feel collectively committed. ** Mars/Venus Protocol (pg. 47) ** Purpose: This protocol is useful in helping people learn from contrasting points of view, particularly when one of the views is less familiar. It works especially well when a group has agreed to split into two reading groups in order to tackle two contrasting texts. ** Rich Text Protocol (pg. 49) ** Purpose: This protocol is useful for dealing with a text that is particularly dense or ambiguous in meaning, complex in discourse, or complicated in structure. It enables a group to "unpack" the text (written, video, or still visual)-that is, to take it apart slowly, element by element and layer by layer. One can, of course, do the same thing in an ordinary text-based discussion without benefit of a protocol, but this protocol has the advantage of making the phases of analysis more transparent. For this reason, it may appeal to participants who might otherwise become impatient with the mincing because they do not understand the method behind it.

CHAPTER 4 Working on Problems of Practice

** Descriptive Consultancy (pg.54) ** Purpose: The purpose of Descriptive Consultancy is to help someone think through a problem by framing it himself or herself, then hearing how others frame it. That is why participants are encouraged to be more descriptive than judgmental. An assumption behind the use of the protocol is that framing and reframing a complex problem is an especially valuable step in moving toward creative, focused problem-solving. The protocol also includes an advice-giving step. ** Issaquah Coaching Protocol (pg. 56) ** Purpose: Because this protocol models a developmentally appropriate order for questioning in coaching and consulting situations, it can be especially useful for educators whose roles involve such situations. ** Constructivist Learning Groups Protocol (pg.59) ** Purpose: The purpose of this protocol is to help participants analyze the different facets of a problem, issue, or question that they have all been wrestling with, and in the process to move beyond familiar or predictable responses. This activity is useful at various junctures in a group's work. It is especially useful if there is a sticky issue at hand, one that needs some group consensus-building.

** Success Analysis Protocol (pg. 60) ** Purpose: The purpose of the Success Analysis Protocol is to engage colleagues in collaborative analysis of cases from practice in order to understand the circumstances and actions that make them successful ones, and then to apply this understanding to future practice.

** Tuning Protocol (pg. 63) ** Purpose: As a problem-solving tool, the Tuning Protocol aims to ensure that educators receive direct and respectful feedback on the problems they present, as well as the opportunity to reflect on the feedback. It also aims to help all participants "tune up" their values through contact with others' diverse and candid views. It forces presenters to frame a particular problem from the hundreds they might select, and to collect and present evidence that bears on the problem. It orients their colleagues to examine both the problem and the evidence from both warm and cool perspectives. ** New Design Protocol (pg. 66) ** Purpose: The purpose of this protocol is to help reach consensus among teams working to design a solution to a commonly perceived organizational problem. ** Peeling the Onion (pg. 69) ** Purpose The purpose of Peeling the Onion is to provide a structured way to develop an appreciation for the complexity of a problem. This is done in order to avoid the inclination of many groups to start out immediately “solving" the problem at hand (which may not be the real problem at all). ** School Visit Protocol (pg.70) **  Purpose: The purpose of the School Visit Protocol is to assist colleagues in learning from visits to one another's work sites, in the process defusing the tendency that some educators have to be either overly judgmental or defensive in the face of practice that is different from their own. Note that while some of its steps may apply, this protocol is likely too elaborate for 1 school visit in which the visitors are strangers to one another and to the host principal.  ** Four Frames Protocol (pg73) **  Purpose: The Four Frames Protocol is designed to engage colleagues as well as their critical friends in collaborative analysis of cases from practice based on systematic reframing and deliberate reinterpretation of the case. The aim is to improve the likelihood that leadership interventions in the same or similar cases will prove effective.

CHAPTER 5 Exploring Student Work ** What Comes Up (pg. 78) ** Purpose: The Connecticut teachers asked Simon for a protocol they could use in short after-school faculty meetings, the kind that are often dominated by announcements and that seldom focus on teaching and learning. Thus the purpose of “What Comes Up” is subversive if also practical. ** Collaborative Assessment Conference (pg. 80) ** Purpose: This protocol has four purposes, according to Steve Seidel. The first is to enhance teachers' perceptions of all their students' work by honing the teachers' perceptual skills. The second is to encourage depth of perception by demonstrating all that can be seen in a single student's work. The third is to encourage a balance in perception the habit of looking for strength as well as need. The assumption behind this purpose is that a teacher can address need only by building on strength. The fourth purpose is to encourage conversation among teachers about what the work shows and how they can act individually and collectively on what it shows in order to benefit their students. Unlike many protocols for looking at student work, the Collaborative Assessment Conference typically focuses attention on one student's work. This is because of its interest in honing perception, and its assumption that care in looking at one can generalize to care in looking at many. Also unlike many other protocols, this one does not pay overt attention to a set of learning standards. Still, it involves standards implicitly, but purposefully. That is because the honing of perception is ultimately and "effectively the honing of standards, too, and conversation about students inevitably involves "tuning" standards, even when the word standards never comes up (McDonald, 2001). ** Standards in Practice (pg. 83) **  Purpose The purpose of SIP is to increase the rigor of teachers' assignments time by aligning them with standards, and pressing toward increased student learning. At first it is usually used with assignments already given, but as groups of teachers use it continually, it often changes into a planning tool as well an opportunity to test out new assignment ideas and tune them up before the students get them. It works not just with teacher designed assignments but with assignments derived from any source: textbooks, school or district curricula, and so on.  ** Analysis of Student Work (pg. 87) **  Purpose The overriding purpose of the protocol is to shift a teacher's focus from instructional moves and student behaviors which are typical concerns of novice educators in particular to analysis of learning outcomes and the development of differentiation strategies. As a result of thoughtful engagement with other protocol participants, teachers gain new insights into gaps in student learning as well as a better understanding of their own learning needs with regard to content and instructional practices. The protocol can be used with any set of content and performance standards, and can provide powerful tuning-up opportunities for teachers at any stage of their careers. ** Minnesota **** Slice (pg. 92) ** Purpose: The purpose of the Slice Protocol is to help answer a question raised by a school, school district, college, or other educational program. It is important that the question be one that a broad but limited (in time) student work sample can help answer. The Slice cannot definitively answer the kinds of questions it typically addresses. It merely provides a text that can provoke useful conversation regarding the questions, one that may lead in turn to new insights. ** Shadow Protocol (pg.98) ** Purpose The purpose of the Shadow Protocol is to situate a student's work within the context of his or her own complex school life. And thus to understand the student better and teach him or her effectively. ** ESP Protocol (pg. 101) ** In this case, ESP stands for Empire State Partnerships. Begun in 1996 Purpose: The ESP Protocol aims to stimulate teachers' perceptions of qualities of thinking and feeling in their students' work; to connect these perceived qualities with standards (in ESP's case, the New York State Learning Standards); and thus to help the teachers help their students achieve the standards. Another of the protocol's aims is to help teams of educators (including classroom teachers and teaching artists) learn how to work more collaboratively by inquiring together about the qualities of their students' learning, and by receiving feedback from one or two other teams of educators working on different projects.

** Equity Protocol (pg. 103) ** This protocol originated at the Winter Meeting of the National School reform Faculty in Houston in December 2001. The focus of the meeting was on equity, and participants grappled with the question of what equity really is-as applied to teaching and learning. In this protocol, as in most of the others described in this chapter, we look at student work in order to understand our own work. Conclusion Jumping In  Remember our claim: that we can have the kinds of genuinely accountable institutions of learning that our students need only if many of us who work in educational institutions are willing to learn how to take the lead in educating ourselves. And if you have taken the trouble to read this book, then certainly you are likely to be or to become a facilitative leader. How to become such a leader, if you are not already one? The only way to learn this work is by doing it.

"Cliff notes" prepared by Dr. James O'Toole