SWS+Faculty+Meeting+Jan.+7,+2011



**__ The Power of Protocols __**

__ Chapter I The Basic Ideas __

Exploring Student Work **__Ex__**

One good way for us to educate ourselves is to pause and 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 that 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 a social danger, even as they teach us habits we wish we already had.

**__ Protocol-Based Learning __**

Protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a learning environment. Protocols are regimens that ensure faithful replication of a plan of what to do first, then next and so on. Often in meetings, solving problems frequently fail because of under //regulated// talking. Educators in particular may need the focused conversation of protocols. 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. The type of protocols that we are interested in 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 __**

It is believed that facilitation of protocols can lead 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 make the work more effective. Some recent studies of school reform bear this out. Fred Newman 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. 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 is to build professional communities of practice.

**__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

It is important to ensure that there are people throughout the organization who know how to do the following: · 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 program, we mean someone empowered by role or opportunity to do these things.

__ Chapter 2 Facilitating __

Facilitating is about promoting participation, ensuring equity, and building trust. A facilitator has to understand that the three tasks involving participation, equity, and trust are at the heart of the work she/he is being asked to do. Furthermore, they 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. Openness to other’s perspectives provides learning opportunities otherwise unavailable. By encouraging participants in a protocol to “hear all voices” 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/she needs to learn in order to do the task at hand. //Everyone// involves adults as well as students. //A norm that respects disagreement is crucial to genuine accountability.// Until a professional community really knows and understands the range of viewpoints it contains, it is incapable of taking collective and effective action on behalf of all 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. 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. No one can give and get feedback sensitively, honestly, and effectively without first knowing a little bit about everybody else involved, discussing the agenda and setting or reviewing some group norms. Opening moves that should never be skipped are introductions, context review, and norm setting. Context review includes what we plan to work on and why, what we hope to achieve, and how long and in what ways we plan to work together. 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 things as how we treat one another’s ideas, how we push our own thinking and how we expect our facilitator to work with us.

**__Intervening and Closing__**

Participants should take the time to specify what they have learned substantively and procedurally and then to generalize from it. The facilitator can help with this by asking the participants to answer three questions, ones that are useful to nearly any kind of debriefing: When it comes to closing, short moves often work best.
 * What have I have 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?

**__ Power of Protocols __**

** Exploring Student Work **

What do you see as the greatest benefit to looking at students work more closely? (gaining of new ideas)

** Protocol -Based Learning and Different Workplace for Educators **

How do you think protocols can lead to a stronger professional community? (we will all be on the same page and understand what has been achieved before we receive our class.) _

** Facilitative Leadership **

Which role of the facilitator is most important? Why? (Opening statement, basic expectations)_

** Promoting participation **

Why is it important that we “hear all voices”? (very important)

** Ensuring Equity **

Why do you think it is important to understand a range of viewpoints? (gaining of knowledge)

** Building Trust **

Do you believe that you can learn from one another and work together even when the work creates discomfort? Why? (the trust cannot just be for that moment.....the trust must be there with the faculty, and the administration all the time....otherwise it will not be effective.)

** Opening/ Intervening and Closing **

How does the opening help us prepare to look at student work? You really had an understanding of what the teacher was looking for, her approach, and the difficulties that she faced.___