Welcome to Terrible Trope Tuesday Everybody!
Where we breakdown longstanding norms of teacher professional development sessions to get better results.
We don’t know about you but we are tired of having the same conversations in data and planning meetings that usually yield the same results. The teachers who would have likely performed well without the meeting perform as expected and the teachers who typically struggle to get the same results continue to get lackluster results.
This week, we tackle: Planning Teacher Questions
For years, building administrators and site instructional coaches have tried to increase the sophistication and complexity of the questions teachers ask during instruction. This has had many names over the years. It has been called increasing rigor, lesson differentiation, higher level questioning, depth of knowledge and even backward by design.
All of these systems have run on a simple premise. If teachers look to a set of standards, or an assessment and plan out what questions they want to ask, they will be more likely to ask those questions during a lesson. Thousands of PD’s have involved categorizing and classifying, sorting and resorting banks of sample questions and other questions stems that teachers could choose from in order to make their instruction more effective.
And in some classrooms, for some teachers, it worked. But for many other teachers who prepared and utilized the same planning and resources, outcomes have continued to fall short.