Friday, October 25, 2013

Classroom Walkthrough Google Style

New assistant principal uses Google Forms for Classroom Walkthrough.


Classroom walkthroughs (CWT) give administrators data. This data is important for providing relevant professional development to the teaching staff as well as a good way to be involved more in the classroom. Since we have implemented CWTs we have seen gains, but the data was slow and cumbersome to disaggregate. Paper forms were the norm, but at the beginning of this year we implemented a Google Form for CWTs. The transition has been spectacular. The data is coming in faster and in realtime. I am able to share it with the assistant superintendent and superintendent easily and that gives me justification on how to spend the precious professional development dollars.

The use of a Google Form for CWTs is not for building administrators that "Cant handle the truth." The results are live and in your face. As we developed our CWT instrument we thought that we would shine in many areas. The form does not lie. Be prepared to see the truth in the data. 

For example checkout some of our data below. 



When the data comes back to the spreadsheet Google will automatically create graphs. Follow the steps below to access the Summary of Responses.
  1. Open the associated spreadsheet that collects the form data
  2. Click Form
  3. Click Summary of Responses 

As you can tell we need some work on technology integration. It is a slow process for my new school but we are on the right track. I am a new assistant principal that prides myself on my technology integration chops. The data does not lie. I am not having as much impact as I should. 







Truth alert! Our English Language Arts teachers have the highest percentage of master's degrees and national board certification. As administrators we tend to visit the good teachers more to reaffirm our great impact on our teachers as the instructional leader. 



In the link below I have shared our CWT instrument with you. Please take some time to evaluate it and modify as necessary. I have outlined some steps so anyone with a Google Account either through a school managed domain (@yourschool.org) or a Google managed (@gmail.com) domain can access. 

  1. Click the link here to the form 
    1. this will open the form
  2. Click on File then Make a Copy
  3. The form is yours to modify 

To find out more about Google Forms and how to use them in the classroom read my bestselling book from Corwin Press: 




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2 comments:

  1. Larry F.October 25, 2013 at 11:56 AM

    Michael,

    Have your teachers seen the form ro the data? Is there any conversation with them as a result of the walkthrough? This feels like a bit of gotcha.

    I have used google forms for walk throughs for years. At the start, I collected data like your form does. Now, my walkthrough form (still google) is not for that kind of data collection. Instead, I have three prompts: "I noticed..." "Students were..." "A question to consider..."

    In other words, my walk through form leads to conversations about teaching, not gotcha data collection. This is part of my efforts to build trust and push thinking.

    I caution you not to draw conclusions based on your walkthrough data. You are getting a thin slice. Instead, ask questions and have conversations.

    Here is a link to a copy of the form I use https://docs.google.com/a/ossu.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Atbq53QsaVbIdG92ZW9zNllGMGVHOC1tYTgyRUdhZVE&usp=docslist_api

    Thanks for sharing your experiences.

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  2. Michael Graham ArkansasOctober 28, 2013 at 9:25 AM

    Larry,

    You bring up some great points. The teachers have reviewed the CWT form and have had a chance for input. Every teacher gets a copy of their form when it is done. The purpose of the form is to have relevant data about what is happening in our classrooms. It is meant to be a snapshot of classroom practices. When those snapshots are aggregated into a large data set (100 or more walkthroughs) the administrators can start to see a bigger picture.

    I am a new administrator and new to my building. When we started doing the planning process with this walkthrough system I voted to keep the teacher name out of it. I disagreed for your very reasons as it could become a gotcha moment. I think that the numbers are important as a group not how individual teachers are performing during that short slice of time. If you want to know how a particular teacher is doing we should be doing informal observations leading up to a summative observation.

    The only conclusions that we get from the walkthrough data is hard numbers. For example, we want to know as a building if teachers on average have quality lesson plans. We can tell that through the walkthrough data.

    We also have conversations about teaching like you advise from our comments section. We offer two things they are doing well as well as a question about what they could work on. This form was a joint effort from the administrator team in our district. We used some of the questions offered by the Teachscape CWT form as well as things particularly important to our district.

    I hope this helps explain the process.

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