Peer Review of Minilessons

At our next-to-last department meeting before winter break, I asked the team to reflect on their workshop teaching. We are now three years into our workshop implementation, and I wanted to get a sense of what needed some "fine tuning". I gave them a form that listed the "pillars" of workshop along the left: Routines & Procedures, Choice, Minilessons, Conferring, Mentors, Assessment, and Celebration; along the top were the headings "What I do well is..." and "What I'm curious about...". Once teachers had some quiet time to reflect and respond, we shared some of the things we thought we did well, and things we want to continue working on. As we went around the table, we discovered that all of us listed Minilessons as something to work on: How do we keep them under 15 minutes? Do reading aloud mentor texts and active student engagement count within that time parameter? How do we make sure we are hitting all the components of a minilesson? We decided that this was an area for action research as a team.

Over the holiday, I discovered a fantastic resource: Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project's videos. These videos were published by TCRWP as a way to help teachers teach the Common Core State Standards using the workshop approach. As I perused the selection of 39 videos, I found one that fit right into what we were moving into after the break: a minilesson with 8th graders on character analysis in novels. This minilesson, taught by one of the Project's Literacy Coaches, was a model of a great minilesson and it had a mentor text read aloud component. I decided to use it at our next meeting as a way to start working on our action research. I also found a Tuning Protocol from the National School Reform Faculty that looked like a structured way to have a conversation around the lesson.

I facilitated the Tuning Protocol with the TCRWP model lesson at our first department meeting back from the winter break. The team was surprisingly lukewarm about the lesson, and remarked again and again about how staged and stilted the lesson seemed, "unauthentic." The fact that the Literacy Coach was not the students' teacher, and spoke in such a scripted manner, seemed to detract from the many good things to learn from the minilesson. Some members also were lukewarm about the Tuning Protocol, feeling like it was too formal. Nevertheless, I felt the goals of the session were fulfilled: the team saw a model minilesson and could pick out its component parts, as well as practicing a process that allowed individual reflection with warm/cool feedback to a presenter. I finished the meeting by inviting others to video their minilesson and we could use the Protocol to help each other "Tune" our practice. I volunteered to be the first one.

I have been observed teaching many times, by principals, by teachers, by visitors. This was the first time I had videotaped myself, and the first time that I laid myself on the chopping block for peer review by a group. Gulp! I discovered that one really nice thing about the Tuning Protocol is that the structure feels safe, because participants are prompted for warm feedback before offering cool feedback in the form of questions. With a designated facilitator, it also kept monopolizers from monopolizing, and everyone knew the expectation for when to talk and when to stay quiet. I was happy to hear that the things I thought were important to notice got noticed, and there were some interesting questions and suggestions to think about afterward. Whew!

I even got the next volunteer! I hope that peer observations in each other's classrooms, as well as using video reviews, will help us fine tune our minilessons and continue improving our practice.