This post is part of a series related to using Learning Sprints as described by Agile Schools and Dr. Simon Breakspear. The purpose of sharing these experiences is to help other school leaders in putting in place Learning Sprints by sharing triumphs and lessons learned throughout our experiment.
The schools in my area have designated days (about once a month) where students do not attend and the staff has the opportunity to meet. Part of this time is usually taken by meetings, operational items, and information transmission, but the other part is for collaborative professional learning. We just finished our “Professional Development” day and had a chance to have our Learning Sprints team together. This is our second sprint and the first where are the team had a better understanding of the process. I was rather excited to get back to this work before the day and am even more excited to see the result after our meeting.
If you have read my previous posts, you will know that this is our second official sprint. The first was not a smashing success, but we learned valuable lessons. We knew that this time around, we needed to define our learning goal much more clearly. What we were trying to achieve and with which students needed to be crystal clear. We also knew that with a limited amount of time (3 weeks), our target needed to be a small change. Getting too big was a recipe for overload and slow progress. We wanted to do a better job of developing the evaluation tools that would let us know if what we were doing was making meaningful impact, so needed to have this defined before we started. Lastly, I knew that the teachers had to lead this initiative. If I, as the administrator, was the one pushing forward when we went to scale it up to the rest of the school, it would not work.
Coming into this round, I think the expectations of teachers were higher, but they were still becoming comfortable with the learning sprint process. Change is hard and each teacher dealt with it differently. I am always fascinated watching the learning process, whether it be in students or teachers. The idea of the “learning pit” was evident in our meeting. This is the concept that when we encounter and are making sense of a new idea, we enter a pit. The time when we are unsure if we will master this new idea. We are sometimes frustrated and feel like the process is hard. Eventually, we overcome this difficulty and exit the “pit” with a new understanding. I heard this concept first from Simon Breakspear, but have appreciated the work of James Nottingham on this metaphor.
As we were going through this process, one comment that came up repeatedly was wanting a model or example. My teachers felt that having an example of what others had done would help their understanding. We could not find a complete learning cycle in our short search, so I offer to you our work as a model. Here is our Learning Sprint Canvas.
If the photo is not clear, please use the following link.
As you can see in the canvas, we are targeting literacy. The specific focus is on sharing the expectations and reasons we are reading a text. Our small change is that every time there is a text presented (whether it be in Math, Science, French or Music) that the purpose for reading will be explicitly shared. We also developed an evaluation tool that will allow us to see if the student knows the purpose of reading the text. Students will self-evaluate whether they are aware of why a text is being presented.
As I have shared before, we are working closely with the resource Visible Learning in Literacy and this sprint is inspired by some of the research shared in the book. Our teachers looked at maximizing their impact, which is why they felt this self-evaluated strategy was more interesting. They found it fascinating that sharing expectations and outcomes had half the reported impact than when self-evaluation was added to the same process.
Please do not think that you can print this Learning Sprint example off and present it as a finished product to your staff. The decisions made in this sprint were particular to the needs of our students and won’t necessarily work for the community you serve. Every sprint needs to be tailored to the individual needs of students that you have and there cannot be a plug-and-play model. As is often said, we are student driven and research informed. Do not try to implement the sprint that I have shared here without asking some critical questions about what it is that your students need and if this will meet the needs of the people at your school.
Looking forward to seeing what sprint 2 brings and sharing with our our progress.
Corey Haley 