Induction used to be something that our teachers would have to go to on a Monday night. And I didn’t hear very much about it apart from that. It was a commitment. It was a hoop they had to jump through. And in the last few years, I’ve noticed a real change.

Now we have people coming back and leading PD around the change ideas that they’ve been working on in induction. So for example, last year we had a teacher really work on reading groups. And we were able to use the ideas that she trialed, and the data that she got from that, and feed them back and share them out with other teachers.

Welcome to High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and you just heard the voice of Briony Chown, director of High Tech Elementary Explorer. Also, Briony and I are married. I should probably mention that. And what Briony noticed about the teacher induction program wasn’t an accident.

The program was totally overhauled in 2016. This episode is all about what changed and what other schools can learn from it. But in order for anything else to make sense in this episode, you need to know what we mean by induction program.

And we’ll start with a painful fact about teaching in California. When you get your teaching credential, it’s not really a credential, it’s a preliminary credential. I’ll let High Tech High’s director of credentialing operations, Julie Holmes, explain.

The way California looks at the credentialing structure is that it’s a two-tiered approach. So the first tier of preparation is your student teaching, or your intern experience, in your teacher preparation program. The second tier is now you’re on a preliminary credential, and now you have to clear it. And that is through what California calls induction.

So why would the state of California give new teachers, who are already among the world’s most stressed out and overworked people, more hoops to jump through? Believe it or not, it’s meant to keep them from quitting their jobs.

In 1988, teachers were leaving the profession in droves. They would start, they’d become a teacher, they would start working, they would quit. And they weren’t just quitting their school to find a different job, they were quitting the profession.

That’s when this whole shift for induction came upon us in 1988. And it was really meant to be a mentoring program. Support people in the field so that they want to stay in the profession. And people that get support and feel supported typically, ultimately, want to stay.

So that was the intention. I’m a veteran of the California induction system. High Tech High’s program, in fact. And as Julie admits, when I went through, it was not living up to its stated purpose.

Back in the day, induction was a little dry. It with a lot of boilerplate templates that teachers had to fill out. And it was, you know, one size fits all. So teachers are trying to fill out these template forms, it didn’t apply to their setting, or their placement, or the students they were working with.

And it was very frustrating to them. And the whole point of it was lost. The whole point of this is an additional program to support you so that you will ultimately stay in the profession felt like it was having the opposite effect on teachers. Teachers were like, ugh, I’m just done.

Julie and her team did their best to minimize the pain.

We took out what we could, we took out the really redundant boiler plates.

Then in 2016, with absolutely no warning, everything changed.

The commission on teacher credentialing radically changed induction. The pendulum swung from super over-designed template forms to it’s all about working with your mentor. It’s all about your individual support. It’s all about what you, the teacher, need to be better in your practice.

So now we’ve got this amazing opportunity to completely redesign an entire program to serve new teachers. It was just like, wow, we’re free, we can do whatever we want. It was very exciting and daunting because if you’ve only had this one curriculum to teach off of, and now that binder is out the window and you get to do whatever you want, there’s a lot of freedom in that. And it’s a little scary, because you want to make sure that you’re providing the best program to teachers.

At this point, the team knew that teachers in the program would create and follow what’s called an individualized learning plan, and that they would work with a mentor at their school for the course of the year. Those were still state requirements. Everything else was wide open.

So Julie and her team talked to teachers about what sounded useful and interesting to them. And they looked for an answer to the question what do you do when you can do anything. Meanwhile a few people at High Tech High’s graduate school of education were getting very excited about something called improvement science. Only now they call it continuous improvement.

We’re going to get into that in another episode. Anyway, whatever you call it, at the heart of continuous improvement are three questions. I’ll leave it to Stacey Caillier, director of High Tech High’s Center for Research on Equity and Innovation, to explain.

Is it helpful to actually say the questions?

Yeah.

What are you trying to accomplish? Essentially we like to think of it as what do you want to accomplish, for whom, by when so that it really forces you to get specific and concrete. How will you know that you’re improving, and what will you actually do to meet that goal? I think we all are like, well, yeah, I’ve got a goal, I’m going to pay attention to some stuff, and I’m going to try some things. But I think in general, that middle step of, like, how will I actually know if I’m making progress is actually a big cognitive leap.

Stacey and her colleague, Ryan Gallagher, thought those were good questions for new teachers to be asking about their classes, so they booked a meeting with Julie to talk about induction.

Stacey Caillier and Ryan Gallagher came over to meet with us, the induction program, to really talk about would improvement science mesh with induction and what we’re trying to do to prepare teachers. I knew a little bit at the time about improvement science.

I had seen what they were doing with different small groups in our schools. And I thought, well, this would be a great supplement to our program. I didn’t fully understand at the time how beautifully it would just blend together. It is the foundation of our induction program.

See, Julie really believes in the original 1988 purpose of induction to help teachers navigate their first years so they stay in the profession.

New teachers are– they’re in a state of fog in a blur, and they’re just trying to multitask and do so many things at the same time. There’s not always that time to reflect. And I think that induction allows that space to reflect on a lot of things. That’s where I love improvement science because it molds you to think in a certain way, and to think about how to measure something, or how the process of something, just really deeply understand it.

OK, that sounds good, but it’s pretty abstract. What does it look like? At its simplest, just take those three questions you heard earlier.

What are you trying to accomplish? How will you know that you’re improving? And what will you actually do to meet that goal?

Teachers in High Tech High’s induction program spend a year answering those three questions. They have regularly scheduled meetings.

We ask our teachers to come in one time per month from the start of the year to the end, so eight meetings across the year.

And there’s a lot of people to organize. Induction can be 100 plus teachers. So if you’re lost in a room of 100 people, you’re not feeling that supported. That doesn’t feel like a network. You feel like they probably don’t even know my name.

And the network is a big deal when you’re doing continuous improvement.

Successful programs, they have networks. We wanted to create learning communities where everyone, new teachers as well as veteran teachers, were gaining knowledge.

So they split the cohort into groups of 10 people or less, each focused on a different topic with a veteran teacher to serve as coach.

Teachers would self-select, and they were topics, for example, positive behavior support, or reading and writing workshop for elementary students, or making math meaningful.

As Ryan Gallagher explains, this is designed to let teachers personalize their work within a set structure.

Here’s a list of 13 big problems in education, group work, literacy, culturally relevant pedagogy. You know, you’re limiting the choice that folks can have. But we’ve done our work on the back end to say these are just important things to work on, and then we’re going to come together. So there’s a little bit of instead of you going out and saying, you just pick a problem, you know, here’s 10 really important ones, why don’t you find yourself in there. And then let’s understand your context, your kids, your students, through apathy work, through data that you’re collecting.

This choosing of the topics, that happens at the first induction session in September in a big room with each induction coach standing behind a table like recruiters at a college fair.

We had 15 improvement coaches, and they were almost pitching their ideas to teachers trying to get them to come into their group. Hey, come to my group. I’m doing writer’s workshop, sixth through twelfth grade. So improvement coaches did a little pitch this year, which I don’t know if the improvement coaches loved it, but the new teachers loved it.

I’m one of those improvement coaches, and I can tell you definitively that this improvement coach did not love it. But I’m glad it worked. The next session is in October. Now everybody meets in their specific group. The first thing they need to do is understand their problem. That’s understand the problem first. Don’t get this wrong and embarrass yourself like I did when I interviewed Stacey and Ryan.

I start with, like, what do I want to accomplish, how will I know–

You don’t start there.

No. What do I want to accomplish for whom by when, right?

Mmm–

I literally wrote this–

[LAUGHS] Yeah, yeah yeah.

Those are the three que– but I would say process-wise, if you’re thinking process-wise, I think it starts with what’s the problem we’re trying to– we want to solve.

OK, yeah, yeah, yeah.

–the problem we’re trying to solve. And there’s a lot in there because I think that– like, we call it root cause analysis and improvement. And I think that’s a kind of a precursor to even getting to the questions first.

Right. Because you have to get clear on the problem before you know what you want to do about it.

You start working to understand your problem in that October meeting, but you also do something else. You get to know your group, which means it’s time for me to introduce this episode’s second Julie. Julie Rubel, seventh grade humanities teacher at High Tech Middle Media Arts, who went through induction last year, she was in my induction group. So we got together to talk about what we remembered.

I think on day one, when we were sharing strategies we saw working for us, we started to realize that there were a lot of strategies in the room almost regardless of level, actually. Because I still remember getting some of my favorite tweaks from elementary school teachers and I’m in middle school. And when people are sharing those, and sharing their challenges, sharing those kind of things are where I realized sort of the number one thing induction is going to give me is this environment of educators who are working together to improve. Which I know we try to do in so many ways at High Tech High, but literally sitting in a classroom together once a month and checking in was really useful for that, it was just very concentrated.

But back to figuring out what your problem is. How do you do this? You talk to some students. We call these empathy interviews because the goal is to empathize with the people you’re trying to help.

I really, really strongly encourage new teachers to do that and talk to their students. You will be surprised at what they share with you.

In the November induction meeting, everyone brings what they found in their empathy interviews, and it’s time to figure out the root causes of your problem. November is the most technical and jargon-heavy of the meetings. It begins with the fishbone diagram. Lots of people find this terminology a little off-putting. Not Julie Rubel.

Are you kidding? Love a fishbone. It’s so systematic. To me it’s a buffer against your assumptions, and I really like that because I make assumptions.

To do a fishbone diagram, you start with your problem. Here’s our problem.

Kids are not approaching text with confidence and motivation.

And you start the fishbone diagram with what you think is driving your problem.

We all did the post-its, like why do we think this is happening. We did a ton of post-its, and then we had rounds of categorizing the post-its. And the bones of the fish are kind of the categories, we realized, that we had come up with.

Once you’ve made your fishbone diagram, it’s time for an even more confusing bit of jargon, the interrelationship digraph.

I’ll let Julie Rubel explain again because she’s a super fan.

OK, so interrelationship digraphs blow my mind because I always have a preconception of the cause of a problem that’s probably informed by my race, my gender, my first language, and my experience in the classroom that comes through only my lens. All of these things might inform the way I’m seeing reading in my classroom, and I just have to pick that apart. And so this is a way, after we know some causes, we can actually, in a very systematic way, try to identify which one might affect most of the others. And so it’s like the highest leverage cause. Like, if we were to influence it, we might really make a difference in a lot of the other causes.

Then it just all meshes together. And teachers leave that night in a daze because they’re like, oh my gosh, now I get it. Now I see why I’m having these issues.

Also, at this point, teachers hopefully understand why they’ve spent two months on understanding the nature of their problem without saying anything about what they should do about it. To recap the program so far, in September, teachers choose an issue they want to focus on and get placed in an improvement group accordingly.

In October, the group meets for the first time to start defining the problem they are going to tackle together. Then every teacher conducts empathy interviews with three of their students. And when the group meets again in November, they sort all the factors that are contributing to the problem into categories using a fishbone diagram. Then they plot the categories on an interrelationship digraph, which leads them to figure out which one is the root cause, that is the place where they can have the most impact.

As you may have gathered, this is a very visual process, which does not exactly lend itself to podcasting. With that in mind, we’ve included links to our improvement group’s fishbone diagram and interrelationship digraph in the show notes. Now let’s continue to the rest of the school year. There’s no meeting in December because December is crazy for everybody. Then in January, it’s finally time to move from defining the problem to testing solutions.

So everyone in the group does some research, finds out what other people have done to address their problem, and brainstorms interventions that they could try in their own classrooms. It’s time for our next piece of technical language, the effort impact chart. This is pretty straightforward, and we’ve got a printable PDF in the show notes. Here’s how it looks. On one axis you put effort, going from low to high. On the other axis you put impact, also going low to high.

Everyone in the group writes down possible interventions to tackle the root cause of their problem on post-it notes. Then they put them onto the chart, which means they need to ask two questions, will this take a lot of effort, and will this have a big impact. Once all the posts are on the chart, everyone zeros in on the low-effort, high-impact part of the chart.

One of the things I love about looking at impact versus effort is I know that sometimes I’ll think of a change that I know would be a slam dunk for students. I know if I did it, it would make such a big impact. So I’ll get started on it, and it will be so high effort that I will never actually put it into effect, and I’ll harbor a lot of guilt about that, which will create other problems in my teaching.

And if I just take a moment to think about how much effort it’s going to take versus how much impact it might have, I’m so much more likely to choose a quick change that I could put into effect. It just makes a lot of sense to organize things this way. We’re all about doing the biggest thing, and, like, yes and there are some small things we can do, that we actually will do because they’re accessible.

For a lot of teachers, thinking about how much effort something will take feels a little bit subversive. We’ve internalized an expectation that we just do whatever it takes because we’re doing it for the kids. This is one of the reasons the teachers burn out. So an induction program that gives new teacher permission to make decisions based on effort is going to help keep people in the profession, which, remember, is the point of induction.

At the end of the January session, every teacher chooses the change idea to try. Then they decide what data they’re going to collect see whether it worked or not. Over the next month, they’ll test it out, collect the data, and write up what actually happened. This process is called a PDSA cycle, which stands for plan, do, study, act.

The teacher writes up their PDSA on a single PowerPoint slide. And during the Spring, they do four PDSA cycles. Then they write up their findings in a report called a change package that’s designed to be short and readable so other teachers can use it. They present this to a panel in May. And that’s it. That’s the entire induction program.

But that summary is kind of vague, so let’s talk through what Julie Rubel actually did. Julie focused all her PDSAs on quick jots, that is brief notes that students jot down in their notebooks when they’re done reading in class. We’ve put all Julie’s PDSA slides and her final change package in the show notes you can see with all of these look like.

So the four PDSAs. For her first change idea, Julie gave students a specific focus for their quick jots. For example, one day she gave a mini lesson on character development and then instructed students to focus on character development in their quick jots. For data, she checked the notebooks of students she’d chosen to focus on. And she found that a few of her students weren’t just confused about character development, they weren’t writing quick jots at all.

Now in hindsight, it seems like her second PDSA should have focused on those students. But at the time, she was preoccupied with checking notebooks more efficiently, which you will understand if you’ve ever lugged all your students notebooks home on Friday only to lug them all back unopened the following Monday. So Julie had students mark the quick jots they wanted her to read with post-it flags when they handed in their notebooks. Here’s the question she was trying to answer.

Will the post-it notes help me check this faster and easier? And the answer is no, FYI.

[LAUGHTER]

Post-it flags fall off, and I’m looking through pages and pages to figure out where their post-it flags are, and I don’t know if they fell off or if I’ve just missed– it was just– it was just a fail, and I really needed to adapt it.

During the normal course of teaching, it would have been easy for Julie to read too much into the post-its failure. Best case scenario, she would have felt guilty about the looming pile of unchecked notebooks that were shedding post-it flags by the hour. Worst case scenario, she might have decided quick jots really aren’t working for this class and stopped doing them entirely. But the PDSA allowed her to see this for what it was, no more than a single unsuccessful experiment. And it was then that she came back around to the findings of her first PDSA, the students who were jotting nonsense or not jotting at all.

My last PDSA, I realized, OK, that system for checking as closely as I wanted to is not going to work. And the priority right now is that three kids aren’t doing it at all. I’m not going to try to figure out another system before I address these three kids, because if everyone’s doing it on a regular basis, stopping and asking in their reading, huh, did I get that, then I know they’re going to grow even as I’m trying to catch up in how I collect data about it.

So PDSA three, a worksheet-based accommodation for kids who have not gotten the hang of jotting, which is just three kids, requiring them to show me their jots during exit procedure, or have to jot during break the following day. [INAUDIBLE]

I know, I’m really mean.

These are riveting narratives. Like, now I’m like, what’s going to happen to the three kids. Well, thank you.

Are the three students who aren’t jotting able to jot if they have a separate sheet and daily accountability? Results? Two students were able to draw a lot more effectively with this accommodation, the other student is still not jotting effectively. So what happened?

Well, OK, so now two kids are back in the system where we’re all reading together. And for that one kid, that kid is telling me, this isn’t working for me. We’ve tried to tweak, it’s still not working. And so I knew that kid actually went into a book club with another student where they were reading aloud to one another because that is the kind of thing that their attention required to track a book at that time. And so I needed to keep going until I knew that they needed that. And I needed not to ignore it and let them flounder.

Yeah.

So it’s still good data. Like, if you can’t do it, that’s also important to know.

For Julie’s final PDSA, she went back to focusing on the whole group. This time the problem was kids taking their time getting their independent reading books out at the start of class. Her change idea was to walk around the room and give a gentle tap on the desk of students who hadn’t started reading. It worked.

And now I’m going to tell you something I didn’t mention before. Julie’s not a new teacher. She had been teaching for 11 years when she went through induction. She’d just been in another state, and California’s really strict about its credentialing. Nevertheless, her PDSAs transformed her classroom practice.

I think if I were doing this in sort of the casual way I did before, I would not have necessarily picked up on that one kid and changed the structure as quickly. I would have half-heartedly tried a bunch of different things, and then been like, well, there’s always one. You know, [LAUGHS] like, that’s not OK. You know.

And so it’s really good to systematize it to where I’m like, there is one, and now another structure stated for them. And not only that, but I’m noticing as we go through these every conclusion that I came to, I am still using. I’m using the worksheet accommodation for kids who struggle setting it up in their notebook. I’m using the book club for kids who struggle even still with a worksheet accommodation. I’m using the walk around and tap instead of verbal reminders.

And so it’s really neat to see that it’s not like I thought. Oh, these are the results of my PDSA, let me put them in my plan. It’s more just this taught me something, and I use what I learned. And I think that’s the cool thing about this, is it’s all been so applicable that I do it naturally now.

To me, there’s a lot to love about this way of doing teacher induction. I love that it helps teachers like Julie make useful, sustainable changes in their classrooms. I love that it puts teachers in charge of what issues they prioritize and what data they collect. I love that it helps teachers form networks with other teachers who are trying to figure out the same problems.

But most of all, I love how it trains you to think about what happens in your classroom. For Julie Rubel, this way of thinking has been literally revolutionary in the sense that it helps to identify systems of oppression and tear them down.

What I realized doing continuous improvement is that it is what I was already doing as a teacher, in the sense of noticing a problem, trying out this quick tweak, and collecting data. But naming all of the steps and doing them in a more formalized way kind of helps me to check where I was doing it in too informal a way to catch oppressive ideas. Data collection is a good example of this. I think I’m collecting data all the time.

And I am collecting data all the time in my classroom. But having to stop and ask myself, does the data I’m collecting actually match the interpretations I’m making, and is it unbiased data, or am I using assumptions about what’s happening in my classroom– just that tweak of thinking about it that way is a good reminder so that as I’m doing it now, I am not just using my assumptions as data. But I am instead thinking, OK, how do I know that each of my students is getting what they need.

You’ve been listening to High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. Our theme music is by [? Brother ?] Herschel, with additional music by [? Brady ?] [? Bookser, ?] High Tech High media arts class of ’22, and High Tech High’s very own multimedia ethnographer, Brent Spirnak. To find out more about High Tech High’s induction program, visit www.hightechhigh.org/teachercenter. Thanks for listening.

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