They wanted our feedback to be critical and constructive, not superficial or cordial. They asked us to identify places where those “look-fors” were in evidence and times when they appeared absent. The lists of classroom “look-fors” they gave us were our opportunity to help them ground truth their own journey. Consider the costs of not looking beyond our own parking lots: for students, who may not experience the benefits of effective practices observed elsewhere and applied back home for classroom teachers, who might lose the opportunity to be inspired to try new things in class and for school leaders, who might not discover a powerful and supportive school structure.Īs our visiting team stepped into classrooms, huddled with principals and teacher leaders in conference rooms, absorbed the hum in media centers, and took numerous pictures of school artifacts, we also learned that our hosts were fellow learners. If we could think of every American school system as an innovation lab (some more effective than others), school site visits allow us to scout the collective brainstrust and receive new inspiration and technical how-tos. The school team I accompanied had the wisdom to realize that their own innovative thinking was limited. Our discourse and our designs are too frequently limited by the boundaries of our hyper-local geography. The benefits of conducting a school site visit are powerful. Each evening, as they shared snacks and drinks, they made sense of their findings and explored the implications for their own system back home. They conversed with students, met teachers before and after school, and studied artifacts for two solid days. The team of four-two administrators and two teachers-visited classrooms in three schools. I was accompanying a school team as their school coach while they conducted a two-day site visit to a district they had identified as being aspirational to their own system’s evolution. She glowed as she informed her visitors about the process and her learning. Her mummy was a repurposed Barbie doll, but the hieroglyphics on the shoebox, we were told, had historic validity. The young learner explained that she had been dedicating her recent “Genius Hour” time to learning more about the history of mummification. On the table was a sarcophagus rendered from a shoebox. In one hand was a mummy, a doll-sized figure wrapped thoroughly in white plastered fabric. The third-grader was standing beside a table in the noisy art classroom, ready to explain the tangible evidence of her learning.
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