Webinar Highlights: Bluebonnet Walks in Texas

So we don't target teachers. Leaders get into as many classrooms as they can, and they make sure that they're getting into every teacher's classroom and not just a handful of teachers. Everyone gets feedback. Everyone is growing, that's kind of our mantra in Temple, just like we want our students to grow, everybody grows, whether it's a teacher or a leader, and so I think making sure that everyone gets feedback and that that feedback is affirming, but also that it challenges teacher growth and that it's substantive and doesn't feel like you're nitpicking at things has really helped us to move that along.

And so the question is not what did we observe, but it's more so about because of what we observed, what are we going to do about it? And so identifying patterns like concept development across the campus informs our coaching priorities, informs what we're going to do with professional development, informs how I'll lead those principal conversations at principal meetings, and it also informs us what we're going to look at for future walkthroughs. And so we want our data to really drive that instruction, not just to give a report. The data should give you what happens next type of thing. And so support becomes more intentional and it becomes more aligned when you're looking at that dashboard to show a pattern or a trend. You're also looking at, okay, now what is our next step?

We look at their coaching trackers, and we can see that it's February, and they've got six teachers that are still in the management phase or phase one on the waterfall document. So we can ask, what's the issue? How can we support? Let's put our heads together to solve the problem. And so I think a concrete example of a question that the combined data, asked might be, how is observation feedback and coaching impacting student achievement? Because again, you can do a thousand walk throughs and have a thousand coaching cycles, but if the student achievement is not improving, then people are just working really hard and they're not gonna see the impact at the end of the year.

So for us, coherence means that teachers don't experience competing priorities. And that's really about us narrowing our focus, ensuring that professional learning, our PLCs, our learning walks, our ops feedback, data conversations, coaching should all kind of reinforce that same instructional vision and not operate as separate initiatives. We know that we're becoming more coherent when our principals, our coaches, teachers, when everyone starts using the same instructional language, they're able to identify the same evidence in the classrooms, not just principals doing walk throughs, but teachers need to do the walk throughs as well and observe each other so that they can identify that same evidence, then everyone is responding with across the campus. And so that's how we know that we've improved in Marshall because the sustainability of the system itself, not individual people that's carrying the work.

So we've actually adding in the ability to script notes within KickUp themselves. Once you're in here, notice all the different notes that are already in here. Start typing in. A few things to call out. You'll see the time stamped, whether it is student led or teacher led, your notes, and then we actually use AI's help and align it to the framework of choice. In this case it will be Bluebonnet. As you scroll through, still, as a human being, I still need to make sure that my notes make sense with what AI is suggesting. So I can easily say, yeah, I think this does follow routines, but not so much for check for understanding, but I do believe that it fits within the academic language as an example. So you can go in and align that to that particular note of your note taking session. While still in the inside bar, you'll notice over here that you see these little numbers, that shows you how many notes there are aligned to each piece of the framework, giving your leaders and observers quick insight on where work is being done. At any point in time, you can click over to the timeline and notice the notes that you've put down. So often we hear leaders and observers say, you know, I took all these notes, I don't really remember what I said, it's all right there for them to come back in and take a look at, and then they can copy them one by one. If they'd like, just simply click copy and or copy all and scroll back, click on form, go down to my notes, and just copy what I would like into this box. We're still on one tab, still on one platform, doing all the work that you need in one space.