6 The Instructional Playbook If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
—Albert Einstein (in Lefever, The Art of Explanation)
April Strong is an instructional coach in Martin County School District in Florida. When I fi rst spoke with April, she had been in education for 13 years. She spent the fi rst 10 years teaching 4th and 5th grades, but she had set the goal for herself that after teaching for 10 years, she would shift to supporting teachers. “I had been supported so much by my peers,” she said, “and I wanted to give something back to the profession that I love so much.” In her 10th year, April was hired as an instructional coach.
When I talked with April about her use of an instructional playbook, she told me about working with David Yankwitt, a second-year social studies teacher. At fi rst, she was anxious about partnering with him. She didn’t know David, who had been told to work with her because his students’ scores on the district benchmark assessments were low. April knew coaching went more smoothly when she worked with teachers who volunteered for coaching. She also was nervous that it might pose a problem that she was an elementary teacher and David was a secondary teacher. “I tried not to let the secondary teachers know I was an elementary teacher,” she said, “but you can smell it all over me.”
To her relief, David was interested in coaching. “Right away, he was very open about needing help and didn’t put on a show. He admitted there was a lot to do, and we hit the ground running.” “Thank goodness you’re here!” David exclaimed, making April feel like a “lifeline.”
David had a lot to learn. “He was doing the typical stand-and-deliver instructional strategy and getting very little engagement from his students,” said April. As a result, he and April quickly turned their focus to engagement. April introduced David to a lot of Kagan cooperative learning strategies (Kagan & Kagan, 2009), like the Carousel strategy and Graffi ti on the Wall. “We tried a lot of things to get the kids up and moving,” April said. “David ultimately liked using technology strategies and self-paced questioning and answering, like [the learning game] Kahoot! and quizzes.” David also started using turn-and-talk and other groupings. Students were assigned roles in groups and followed the round robin strategy. “David worked on moving kids from one station to the next and having conversations,” April explained As David became more skilled, he saw success and started to become more confi dent as a teacher. “He recognized the importance of intentional planning and rooting [instruction] in the standards in diff erent ways,” April explained. The strategies David used translated into results. In one shot, his class’s overall percentage on the district assessment went from 62 percent to 83 percent. When David texted April the wonderful results, she “squealed and did a little bit of a happy dance,” she said. “I am his biggest fan, and I celebrated how hard he worked and what he was able to do with students.” What was most gratifying to April was David’s desire to keep learning. “He’s feeling the power of learning and growing professionally, the power of working with me as a partner.”
A year after David had gotten the great test results, I contacted April to fact-check this chapter. She told me that the story wasn’t over: the week before, David informed her that he had won Social Studies Teacher of the Year for the district.
What Is an Instructional Playbook?
April was able to help David because she had a deep understanding of teaching strategies that would help him increase student engagement. Once David learned those practices, he succeeded. The teaching strategies April shared were not simply good ideas that she had picked up along the way. She knew the strategies well because she had a tool that prepared her to succeed as an instructional coach: the instructional playbook. As my colleagues Ann Hoff - man, Michelle Harris, Sharon Thomas, and I explain in The Instructional Playbook (2020), anyone who aspires to be an eff ective instructional coach needs an instructional playbook.
Part of what prompted us to write that book was our discovery that many coaches cannot name the teaching strategies they share with teachers or are unclear about how the strategies they share are to be eff ectively implemented. Since the job of an instructional coach is to support teachers as they try to get better, coaches need to understand—and understand well—the strategies they share.
Playbooks are essential because they make learning real. Far too often, we pretend professional development will have a positive impact on what takes place in classrooms when we know that, in reality, usually nothing will happen after the event. A presenter might off er an entertaining and interesting workshop, but unless the participants do the hard work of deeply understanding strategies and how to use them, they won’t implement them. The shelves in teachers’ classrooms around the world are fi lled with books that were never opened once the workshop was over. Instructional playbooks are designed to change that by empowering coaches and teachers to take research off the shelf and put it into action in the classroom.
In short, instructional playbooks are organizational tools that professional developers use to (1) identify high-impact teaching strategies and (2) explain those strategies to teachers so they and their students can meet powerful goals. Instructional playbooks are essential because too often, teachers don’t have the specifi c, practical information they need to implement teaching strategies eff ectively, even after reading books or attending professional development sessions. Like all professionals, teachers need ideas to be translated into explicit, actionable knowledge if they are going to implement them. As April Strong explains, “The instructional playbook brings clarity by breaking things down, step by step, to make an impact on how our teachers are instructing our students.”
Why We Need Instructional Playbooks
In preparation for our book The Instructional Playbook (Knight et al., 2020), ICG researcher Geoff Knight and I interviewed many educators who are creating and using instructional playbooks. The following are several reasons why coaches said they needed this tool.
Instructional Playbooks Help Identify the Highest-Impact Teaching Strategies
In many schools, too many teaching strategies are being promoted at the same time. The reason is understandable: educators and their students face many challenges, and leaders feel a duty to try to provide solutions. Unfortunately, as one strategy is piled on after another, many teachers and coaches start to feel overwhelmed. As a result, rather than helping, adding more and more strategies to a teacher’s already busy schedule can make things worse. Even though the programs and strategies that teachers and coaches are learning are likely powerful and effective, no one can implement all of them, and having too many innovations can lead to overload and poor implementation. Faced with the impossible task of trying to learn and use too many new strategies, educators may settle for superficial implementation just to show they are compliant with their leaders’ wishes and thereby fail to implement the strategies in ways that help students.
One of the most important features of the instructional playbook is that it forces coaches and leaders to identify the highest-impact strategies among the many they are often confronted with. We suggest that a playbook contain no more than 15 to 20 strategies. If you can’t list all your teaching strategies on a single page, you have too many. The high-impact strategies in the playbook are not the only ones coaches share or co-construct with teachers, but they are the core of their work on instruction. Once coaches have identified the most important strategies, they can focus on developing the deep understanding necessary to support effective professional learning.
Instructional Playbooks Lead to Deep Understanding
As I’ve been writing this book, my soundtrack has been Zhu Xiao-Mei’s Bach recordings. Listening to this music has been a joyful part of many writing sessions. At the same time, Zhu Xiao-Mei has been teaching me about deep understanding. In her book The Secret Piano (2007), she explains that one of her fi rst teachers, Pan Yiming, taught her to memorize each piece she plays. “I want you to play all of this by heart,” he told her. “From now on, for each lesson, you must play a piece by Bach and two études from memory and with no mistakes. Try to memorize each of them from the very fi rst time that you sight-read them” (p. 38).
u sight-read them” (p. 38). “Easy for him to say” (p. 38), Zhu Xiao-Mei thought—but in the end, she took his advice. Throughout her book, the pianist explains all the ways she comes to deeply understand a piece. She explores, memorizes, meditates, and immerses herself in the music, she says, until “I experience love for each passage and note, until I reach a state of natural and intuitive understanding.... By living with a piece, by not attempting to impose yourself in any way, you begin to breathe with it” (p. 222). And when you watch Zhu Xiao-Mei perform Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” playing it with her eyes closed so that she can feel every note more deeply, you get to see and hear deep understanding in action.
Similarly, coaches need to live with the teaching strategies they share to deeply understand their nuances. What coaches say about strategies will aff ect what teachers do, so if their explanations are superfi cial or incorrect, teachers’ practice will likely be ineff ective. Coaches need to off er high-quality explanations to foster high-quality implementation.
Instructional Playbooks Unblock Barriers to Deep Understanding
Four issues in particular interfere with our ability to develop deep understanding First, we may get a wide but shallow understanding of eff ective instruction by trying to learn too much too fast. When coaches try to learn everything, they may fi nd that when it comes to precise, practical knowledge, they really haven’t learned anything. Second, we may persuade ourselves that we know things better than we do. Michael Fullan (1982) refers to this as “false clarity”—a tendency to be totally confi dent in our incorrect understandings of practices. I’ve watched video of many instructional coaches whose explanations of teaching strategies are confi dent, clear—and wrong. (Unfortunately, I myself have been on many of those videos.)
A third issue involves a way of knowing that is the opposite of false clarity. Sometimes we know strategies so well that our knowledge actually makes it hard for us to explain them. Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber (1989) describe this as the “curse of knowledge,” which occurs when we have internalized so much information that we forget what we had to go through to learn it. As Heath and Heath (2007) explain, “Once we know something, we fi nd it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has cursed us. And it becomes diffi cult for us to share our knowledge with others because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind” (p.20).
Finally, a fourth roadblock to deep understanding is a phenomenon I call the “curse of forgetting.” Sometimes during explanations, coaches simply forget to explain important parts of strategies. Fortunately, creating and using an instructional playbook helps coaches circumvent all four of these roadblocks to deep understanding.
Instructional Playbooks Build a Shared Vocabular
When educators come together to create a playbook, they often discover that they don’t have shared defi nitions for terms that they use all the time. Vague defi nitions of terms can create the illusion of harmony. If I defi ne engagement in my way and you defi ne it in yours, even if we both agree that engagement is important, we aren’t really agreeing because we don’t know what the other person means by the term.
Real, shared understanding requires deep understanding. The collaborative conversations needed to create the playbook produce a shared, precise understanding of terms and strategies that is essential for meaningful conversation. True communication is only possible when people know what each other’s words mean,
Instructional Playbooks Improve the Quality of Conversations About Teaching
One theme my colleagues and I have heard across many interviews with coaches is that the deep understanding that comes from creating instructional playbooks improves the quality of conversations about teaching. For example, Maureen Hill, an instructional coach, related that “just kind of working on [the playbook] and creating one-pagers and checklists has helped bring clarity to conversations—just being more specifi c in what we are trying to fi x and work on because I have to be clear and concise when I explain teaching strategies.”
Similarly, Mary Webb, who directs the coaching program in the Frisco Independent School District, told us that one of the advantages of the playbook is that it increases clarity. “When I use the checklists from the playbook, I’m able to clearly communicate what a strategy looks like for teachers. So when teachers implement a strategy, there’s no room for them not to understand because the checklist is so clear, and I’m able to communicate so clearly. If you are using the checklists from the playbook, you’re removing a lot of error from communication.”
Instructional Playbooks Reduce Stress
Because instructional coaching is a relatively new position in many educational settings, coaches report that one of the most stressful aspects of their job is a lack of clarity. Too many aren’t clear on what they are expected to do, what success looks like for them, or even how they will be evaluated. Additionally, many coaches aren’t that clear on the actual teaching practices they are supposed to share.
This kind of ambiguity can lead to cognitive overload. When coaches try to remember everything, they can get overwhelmed. As Joi Lunsford, an instructional coach in Amarillo, Texas, told us, “You can only hold so much information.”
For these reasons, one of the most important advantages of using an instructional playbook is that coaches feel less ambiguity and, therefore, less stress.
Instructional Playbooks Foster Hope
As I’ve mentioned before in this book, hope involves three factors: a goal, pathways to the goal, and agency (a belief that we can hit the goal) (Lopez, 2013). The instructional playbook gives coaches the resources they need to help teachers see pathways to their goals. In a well-designed playbook, every high-impact teaching strategy listed should be extremely eff ective at helping teachers meet goals. When teachers see the pathway to their goal made possible by eff ective strategies, they begin to have hope.
Who Creates the Playbook?
The instructional playbook is created by a playbook development team. The team may include school administrators, curriculum leaders, teachers, students, and others, but, most important, it must be made up of the coaches who will be sharing the playbook and the person who directs the coaching program.
Usually, decisions about team membership are made by the director of the coaching program. The more people on the team, the greater an understanding there will be about the teaching practices that coaches make a priority. At the same time, having more people increases the challenges placed on the facilitator and the time it takes to produce the fi nal product.
To get around this issue, some school districts have diff erent-sized teams for diff erent parts of the playbook creation process. Thus, a team might be quite inclusive and large at the beginning of the process, when the playbook’s table of contents is being created and high-impact strategies are being identifi ed, but be much smaller, and consequently more effi cient, when checklists are being developed.
Leaders might be tempted to simply create the playbook that their coaches will use, but the people we interviewed said they felt the playbook should be created with others. “I really wanted to do it by myself, just because I wanted to get it done,” said Amber Theinel. “But there’s no way. I could never have done this by myself. So defi nitely don’t do it alone.”
Some local customization of the playbook may be necessary, with diff erent settings requiring diff erent strategies. For example, if one school has all teachers with at least 15 years’ experience and hardly any students on free or reduced lunch, while another school has only teachers with fewer than 4 years’ experience and 95 percent of students on free or reduced lunch, the coaches at those two schools will likely need diff erent strategies. It makes no sense for coaches to have playbooks that don’t help teachers in their school meet their goals.
Nevertheless, to the greatest extent possible, playbooks should be consistent. When all coaches have similar strategies in their playbooks, professional development can be off ered for everyone, and by working from a shared understanding of strategies, coaches will have better conversations about the strategies they are using.
Contents of the Instructional Playbook
1. A table of contents
2. “One-pagers”
3. Checklists
Of course, each team can add or remove whatever sections it wants in order to create its own unique playbook. But I caution everyone to keep it simple. If the playbook is too complex, it may end up sitting on a shelf rather than being used by coaches with teachers.
Table of Contents
The table of contents is a list of teaching strategies that takes up no more than one page and functions, as you might guess, as an outline for the instructional playbook. The strategies listed in the table of contents should all be proven and evidence-based and address most of the goals teachers have set. Most important, the strategies should eff ectively empower teachers and students to meet the goals teachers set for or with students. Figure 6.1 shows a sample table of contents.
The idea that the table of contents has to be one page long isn’t etched in granite. Each team needs to create the right list for its setting. However, I have found that limiting the list to one page forces the team to think very deeply about each strategy on the page and why it must be there.
When creating a table of contents, teams can get bogged down if they fail to clarify the diff erence between strategies and activities. As a working defi - nition, I refer to strategies as categories of teaching practices and activities as individual examples of those categories. For example, cooperative learning is a strategy that can involve many diff erent activities. Those who are creating the table of contents will never fi t the 100-plus activities or learning structures from Kagan and Kagan’s Kagan Cooperative Learning (2009) on one page. But if they use the term cooperative learning in the table of contents, that term can refer to any number of student activities broadly categorized as part of cooperative learning.
In some settings, coaches might base their playbook on comprehensive instructional approaches that already exist, such as my book High-Impact Instruction (Knight, 2013); Jon Saphier, Mary Ann Haley-Speca, and Robert Gower’s The Skillful Teacher (2017); Robert Marzano’s The New Art and Science of Teaching (2017); or John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers (2009).
In other settings, the playbook can bring together diverse teaching strategies from a variety of sources, such as Randy Sprick’s CHAMPS (2009); Janis Bulgren, Jean Schumaker, and Donald Deshler’s The Concept Mastery Routine (1993); and Jan Chappuis and Rick Stiggins’s Introduction to Student-Involved Assessment for Learning (2017).
FIGURE 6.1 Sample Table of Contents Content Planning • Guiding Questions • Learning Maps Formative Assessment • Specifi c Profi ciencies • Checks for Understanding • Rubrics • Tests Instruction • Thinking Prompts • Effective Questions • Stories • Cooperative Learning • Authentic Learning Community Building • Culture • Power With • Freedom Within Form • Expectations • Witness to the Good • Fluent Corrections
Whether sorting through teaching strategies from one specifi c instructional model or bringing together strategies from various resources, the team must still identify the specifi c strategies that will make it into the table of contents. To do this, start by listing the most common goals that teachers identify during coaching. Then, brainstorm all the strategies teachers could use to hit those goals. Next, reduce the identifi ed strategies to a list that is both comprehensive (addressing all the common goals) and high-impact (made up of strategies that really work). After completing the list, sort the strategies into categories to make the list easier to understand. For example, in High-Impact Instruction (Knight, 2013), I sort teaching strategies into what I call “the Big Four”: planning, assessment, instruction for engagement and mastery, and community building.
One-Pagers
The second section of the instructional playbook contains one-pagers— documents that are written for each strategy listed in the table of contents. As you might guess, the documents are one page in length. A well-designed one-pager provides a quick summary of important information about each strategy in the playbook.
Each one-pager begins with a single sentence that answers two questions: “What is this strategy?” and “What does it do?” This sentence should be crafted in simple, correct language that is easily understood (as should every sentence in the playbook). This sentence is followed by a summary of the research evidence that supports use of a given strategy. The discussions that team members have about research related to eff ective instruction while creating one-pagers can be an opportunity to develop a districtwide deeper understanding of research methods. The one-pager also contains a “What’s the point?” section summarizing why and how the strategy should be used. Finally, two sections describe how the strategy is used by students and teachers.
Figure 6.2 shows an example of a one-pager for learning maps (much like the ones at the start of each chapter in this book). These maps help students to see the big picture of their learning and the connections between the things they’re learning.
When ICG consultant Ann Hoff man leads teams that are creating one-pagers, she suggests a simple three-part process. First, everyone creates an individual draft of the one-pager. (The idea is that each team tackles one strategy at a time.) Next, everyone shares their version of the one-pager. Finally, the team determines the best way to synthesize all ideas.
In some cases, the team will need help to summarize the research. Some research is complex and diffi cult to understand, and researchers themselves often spend a great deal of time disagreeing about what data mean. But this doesn’t mean that educators should ignore research. A better idea is to use research to identify high-impact strategies. Ultimately, the test of any strategy is how well it works to help students meet goals (which is why the after-implementation review meeting, described later in this chapter, is so important).
FIGURE 6.2 Sample One-Pager: Learning Maps In One Sentence A graphic organizer depicting the essential knowledge, skills, and big ideas students are to learn in a unit, used to organize students’ learning and teachers’ instruction. What Research Says • Hattie, Visible Learning (2008): Teacher Clarity (d = .75); Concept Mapping (d = .75) • Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, Classroom Instruction That Works (2001): Nonlinguistic Representations (d = .75) What’s the Point? • Learning maps are powerful because their visual depiction of a unit keeps students and teachers on track. • The map is an accommodation for students who struggle to take notes, and it structures the beginning and end of lessons. • Learning maps are living study guides that make connections explicit and support repeated review. How Are Learning Maps Used by Teachers? • Teachers should spend 25 to 40 minutes to introduce the unit through an interactive discussion of the map on the fi rst day of a unit. • Throughout the unit, the maps may be used as visual prompts for conversations around advance and post-organizers. • Teachers should prompt students to record new information on their maps as they learn it. • At the end of the unit, maps may be integrated into the unit review. How Are Learning Maps Used by Students? Students use learning maps • To take note of key information. • To frequently review and clarify their learning. • As points of departure for classroom dialogue.
Ultimately, the one-pager is a tool coaches use to clearly communicate with teachers about the strategies they may use in their classroom. Creating a one-pager deepens coaches’ understanding of strategies. That clarity must be refl ected in the accurate, precise, and easy-to-understand wording of the document. The playbook development team needs to keep working until each document it creates can be immediately understood.
Checklists
The bulk of an instructional playbook is made up of checklists. My colleagues and I at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning have been fi eld-testing checklists for more than two decades. When we fi rst began studying instructional coaching in 1996, we realized that our explanations had to be precise and actionable to be eff ective, and we learned that the easiest way to accomplish this was to structure our explanations around checklists.
Given our interest in checklists, we were thrilled to read Atul Gawande’s New York Times best seller The Checklist Manifesto (2011). As he explains in a TED Talk, Gawande (2012) was as surprised as anyone that he ended up studying checklists. “I did not expect to be spending a signifi cant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists,” he says. “And yet what we found [was] that these were tools to help make experts better.”
In partnership with the World Health Organization, Gawande studied the impact of surgical checklists in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately choosing a wide range of settings, with four hospitals from wealthier countries (the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and England) and four from poorer countries (Tanzania, Jordan, India, and the Philippines). The results were stunning: when surgical teams used checklists, complication rates in all hospitals fell an average of 35 percent and death rates fell by 47 percent. Largely because of this research, checklists are now seen as essential to eff ective care in hospitals around the world. If you’ve visited a hospital recently, you’ve probably seen someone using a checklist.
We have found that checklists are just as important in the classroom as they are in the operating room. Checklists help coaches show teachers how to turn abstract concepts into actions. When conversations around teaching strategies are too abstract or general, teachers struggle to implement what’s being discussed. For example, we might say that we want there to be more higher-order thinking in our classrooms, but remain unclear on what we actually need to do to make that happen. Conversations at the general level sound helpful, and they do provide an opportunity for exploring concepts, but they do not, on their own, lead to real change. The coaches we interviewed reported that they found that checklists helped them be more specifi c and consequently more eff ective.
Instructional coach Rachel LeForce explained that, for her, creating checklists was “kind of growing my own competency. I was making sure that I wasn’t giving teachers fl uff . I actually think that in providing rigor for myself, I have provided rigor for my teachers, and that is translating into rigor for our students.”
To create checklists for the playbook, coaches need to think deeply about precisely what a teaching strategy involves and then identify a simple, clear way to say that. Indeed, one of the most important reasons for creating a checklist is simply to experience the deep understanding that results from that creative act. When coaches understand their strategies better, their explanations are clearer, teachers’ implementation is more powerful, and student learning benefi ts.
A checklist is also a great communication tool. Because it is external to both the coach and the teacher, talking about it feels more collaborative than if the coach directly tells a teacher how to implement a strategy. The items on the checklist also provide a way for the coach to encourage teacher voice and deeper understanding at the same time. When coaches ask collaborating teachers if they want to modify a strategy for their students, teachers see that their voices count and learn more about the strategy because they have to understand it before they can change it.
Checklists can serve several purposes. Sometimes they are used to describe how to do something; for example, how to create learning maps. Other times they serve as rubrics for quality products (e.g., by identifying the characteristics of excellent learning maps). Checklists can also be used by coaches to describe what teachers or students do. For example, a coach might use one checklist to describe how teachers can use learning maps to introduce a day’s lesson and a diff erent one to describe how students use the maps to self-assess and prepare for tests.
A checklist should make it easy for teachers to implement a teaching strategy in a way that has an unmistakably positive impact on student learning or well-being. To accomplish this, checklists should be as short as possible without leaving out important information. Additionally, they should convey the key information about a strategy in precise, easy-to-understand language. (See Figure 6.3 for a checklist on how to use checklists.)
FIGURE 6.3 Checklist for Checklists An effective checklist is . . . ✓ Concise—–fewer than 10 lines and as short as possible Right—–steps of the strategy are correctly described Precise—–each item is clearly described Easy to understand—–uses the right words stated in the simplest way Comprehensive—–addresses everything that needs to be addressed
When we partner with teams to facilitate the creation of checklists like the one depicted in Figure 6.4, we ask team members to review the publications that describe the teaching strategies they have included in their table of contents. Then, during the meeting, as we do with the one-pager, we ask everyone to draft individual checklists on their own. Following this, we guide the team to integrate and synthesize comments until a document is created that everyone, or almost everyone, accepts. After the meeting, a designated person edits the checklist to make it as simple, clear, and concise as possible before it is included in the playbook.
Not every teaching strategy requires a checklist. A coach who is working with a teacher on questioning, for example, probably doesn’t need a checklist to distinguish between open and closed questions. And sometimes, a coach and teacher will need to create a checklist together when they are working on a strategy that isn’t in the coach’s playbook. There is value in co-creating checklists, but we have found that creating a concise, actionable, powerful checklist takes more time than teachers usually have. When we create a checklist in advance and then go through it with the teacher to modify it so that it is a good fit for the teacher and students, we still experience co-creation while saving time.
FIGURE 6.4 Sample Checklist: The Cue, Do, Review Teaching Routine TEACHER BEHAVIOR ✓ CUE Name the graphic organizer. Explain how it will help students learn. Specify what they need to do. DO Walk through the graphic organizer. Involve students. Shape student responses. Evaluate student understanding. Reinstruct if necessary. REVIEW Ask questions about information on the graphic organizer. Ask questions about how the graphic organizer works.
After-Implementation Review: Using the Playbook to Document Learning About Teaching
Many organizations use a learning process first developed by the U.S. Army called an after-action review, or AAR, to document the learning that occurs after an event. As explained in the U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual (Department of the Army, 2004), “An AAR is a professional discussion of an event, focused on performance standards, that allows participants to discover for themselves what happened, why it happened, and how to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses” (p. 6). Discussion during the AAR is built around four questions:
What was supposed to happen?
2. What really happened? 3
. What accounts for the difference?
4. What should we do differently next time?
This simple routine has now become an organizational learning process in thousands of organizations around the world.
Educators can use a similar procedure, which I refer to as the afterimplementation review (AIR), to surface, synthesize, and document their learning about the strategies in the playbook. This review can occur formally, in a structured AIR meeting, or informally, during coaching meetings.
Both formal and informal AIRs give educators opportunities to discuss what they are learning about the strategies in the playbook and then revise the playbook to include what has been learned. Playbooks are living documents, where organizational learning about teaching and learning is synthesized and recorded. As Joi Lunsford, an instructional coach in Amarillo, Texas, said about her district’s playbook, “I don’t know if it will ever be complete. It is something that we are constantly editing, updating, and tweaking.” Instructional coaches are frontline learners who see what is and what isn’t working with a given teaching practice. Each time a teacher sets a goal and implements a new strategy, that teacher’s coach should be learning which teaching strategies are eff ective and how strategies should be modifi ed to be more eff ective in each school’s context.
PEERS goals (see pp. 91–92) provide a helpful, objective measuring stick for assessing the eff ectiveness of strategies. Instructional coaches who spend most of their time partnering with teachers to set and hit goals will be learning almost daily about which strategies work and how they work best. The AIR is the process for gathering all that learning before it is lost.
The Formal After-Implementation Review
At least twice a year, but preferably more frequently, coaches should meet with the coaching program director to carefully consider what is and is not working with the teaching strategies in the playbook. Formal discussion should be scheduled for a half-day to allow for careful assessment of all the strategies. While others may participate, those who have fi rsthand knowledge about the strategies and will be sharing them with teachers should be at the heart of the discussion about revising the playbook.
Participants should come to the AIR prepared to discuss their experiences using the strategies in the playbook. Each team member can prepare by writing down responses to each of the AIR questions shown on page 157. An agenda built around the AIR questions should be distributed at least a week before the meeting.
The meeting itself should be led by a skilled facilitator who listens eff ectively, encourages everyone to participate, keeps the discussion moving, and makes sure that a few voices do not dominate discussion. Further, the facilitator should not take sides during discussion and should ensure everyone is heard. For this reason, it may be helpful to have a facilitator who is neither a coach nor responsible for the coaching program.
Someone should be designated as note taker to document what is learned. Notes should be circulated as soon as possible after the meeting and fi led so that they can be reviewed in a later meeting if necessary. Participants also need to understand how decisions are made—whether by the program director, a majority vote, a committee that meets after the AIR, or some other way. The simplest and perhaps most agreeable process is to go by majority vote. (When it comes to removing a strategy from the playbook, a two-thirds majority rule might be prudent to guard against prematurely removing a strategy that could prove to be eff ective in the future.)
I suggest the discussion be guided by the following AIR questions: 1. What’s working with the strategies in the playbook? 2. What are we learning about the strategies in the playbook? 3. What refi nements can be made to the strategies in the playbook? 4. What issues are not addressed but should be addressed by the strategies in the playbook? 5. What new strategies should we consider adding to the playbook? 6. What strategies either aren’t working or aren’t being used and thus should be removed from the playbook? 7. How well does the playbook align with district initiatives? Does the playbook need to change? Do district leaders need to hear anything about district initiatives? 8. What else can we do to make the playbook simpler or more useful? 9. What else should we do to improve the playbook?
What’s working with the strategies in the playbook?
This fi rst question provides a chance for everyone to revisit why the instructional playbook exists and what it is helping coaches accomplish. This component of the discussion also off ers a chance for coaches to celebrate the diff erence they are making in students’ and educators’ lives.
What are we learning about the strategies in the playbook?
This is an open question designed to encourage everyone to share general experiences with the playbook. As they work with teachers, coaches learn a lot about the best ways to implement teaching strategies. This question presents an opportunity for everyone to start providing more specifi c feedback on coaches’ experiences with the strategies in the playbook. All comments, both positive and negative, should be welcomed and noted.
What refi nements can be made to the strategies in the playbook?
Coaches and teachers frequently adapt teaching strategies so that they better meet the needs of students or better fi t a teacher’s strengths or principles. For example, a teacher and coach might discover that it’s important to review prior knowledge during the beginning of a teaching routine or that student behavior improves when students have a voice in setting community norms and expectations. Often, refi nements are recorded on the checklists that teachers and coaches use for classroom instruction and learning. Over time, all coaches should be learning better ways to implement the strategies in the playbook. Such refi nements should be documented and shared, and one way for that to occur is during discussion of this question.
What issues are not addressed but should be addressed by the strategies in the playbook?
The perfect playbook would address every important issue for every student in every classroom. But there is no perfect playbook, which is why all of them need to be continually improved through the AIR. One way to improve a playbook is to consider what PEERS goals the strategies are not addressing. After surfacing these issues, coaches can look to articles, books, conferences, institutes, workshops, experts, podcasts, blogs, and other resources to fi nd teaching strategies that might help teachers and students meet more goals.
What new strategies should we consider adding to the playbook?
To get better at helping teachers meet PEERS goals, coaches need to be curators of knowledge. That is, they should be constantly deepening their understanding of the strategies they know while expanding their knowledge of other strategies that could improve how they help teachers and students meet goals. Coaches’ deep understanding of teaching strategies is empowered by the creation of the playbook and is deepened by their day-to-day partnerships with teachers as teachers implement and learn about strategies. Coaches should also be learning about new practices by reading journals and books, reviewing blogs and podcasts, and attending conferences, institutes, and workshops. Then, to establish local validity, coaches should share the highest-impact strategies they learn about with teachers. If the strategies help teachers help students meet goals, coaches should share them with their colleagues, and during the AIR, the team should consider whether the new strategies should replace other strategies or simply be added to the playbook.
What strategies either aren’t working or aren’t being used?
In their collaborative work with teachers, coaches will discover that some teaching strategies are not as eff ective as anticipated when teachers actually implement them. Additionally, there may be strategies in the playbook that, despite their promise, never get used. If a strategy has been in a playbook for a year without anybody using it, or if a strategy in the playbook has been found not to help teachers or students, it should be removed so that a higher-impact strategy can be included instead.
How well does the playbook align with district initiatives?
Most districts invest in professional development to address important issues in schools. Frequently, a coach’s responsibilities include helping teachers learn and eff ectively implement the practices shared during professional development.
To prioritize their time eff ectively, coaches need guidance from their district leaders on how to align their coaching work on PEERS goals with the implementation support they provide for districtwide strategies. For all the reasons stated in earlier chapters of this book, the best scenario is that the strategies promoted at the district level are highly eff ective at helping teachers meet PEERS goals. When this isn’t the case, coaches should have an opportunity to discuss their experiences with strategies and report back to the district what is and what is not working. Leaders should enthusiastically encourage this feedback, as it can increase the eff ectiveness of district initiatives.
What else can we do to make the playbook simpler or more useful?
The best tools are powerful and simple. The educators who are revising the playbook should be careful not to make it overly complicated, such as by adding strategies without removing others. Before any revisions are agreed to, the team needs to pause and consider whether they have made the playbook too complicated or if there is anything else they can do to make it simpler or more powerful.
What else should we do to improve the playbook?
This fi nal question provides a last chance for the team to consider any additional ways in which the playbook can be improved. This discussion is also an opportunity for the facilitator to congratulate everyone on their hard work.
The Informal After-Implementation Review
Coaches don’t need to wait until the formal AIR meetings to discuss what they are learning about the playbook. Indeed, they should use every chance they have to share their learning. Such sharing of knowledge can occur in informal conversations, through online documents, via email, through meeting apps like Zoom, and so forth. Whenever coaches get together, they should build in time to discuss the playbook.
To Sum Up
Instructional playbooks are organizational tools used by professional developers to identify high-impact teaching strategies and explain those strategies to teachers so the teachers and their students can meet powerful goals. Playbooks consist of three sections: a one-page table of contents that outlines the material included; one-pagers that summarize the research, purpose, and use of each strategy; and checklists designed for use by coaches to make it easier for teachers to implement teaching strategies eff ectively. The instructional playbook is a living document, and as such it should be revised in formal meetings two to four times a year. The playbook should also be reviewed during any meetings of instructional coaches working from the same document.