Michelle Bowman:
When you get to see your colleague teach the same content that you have been planning together, and see their special moves that they make, just watching a teacher just be excited about what they’re seeing someone else do. What are their quick grabs that they can take away and think about, “Well, how might that work in my classroom context?” Because we know each classroom context, it’s its own little community.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that’s the voice of Michelle Bowman, vice president of networks and continuous improvement at Learning Forward. Stacey Caillier spoke to Michelle and her colleague Elizabeth Foster, about what they’ve learned about adult learning in schools and particularly about continuous improvement. I’ll let Stacey take it from here.

Stacey Caillier:
Michelle Bowman and Elizabeth Foster, I am so excited to talk with you. Michelle, you are a vice president of networks and continuous improvement at Learning Forward, an organization whose mission is to build the capacity of leaders, to design and sustain meaningful professional learning in schools and districts across the country. And Elizabeth, you’re the vice president of research and standards at Learning Forward. You both coach and facilitate networks using continuous improvement to shift outcomes for students with a particular focus on math, literacy and systems for adult learning. And you’ve both thought a lot about what adult learning could and should look like in schools if we want to better serve the students our systems have traditionally failed. So thank you so much for being here and sharing your learning with us today.

Michelle Bowman:
Of course.

Elizabeth Foster:
Thanks for having us.

Stacey Caillier:
All right, well, so before we jump in, can you each share with us just your identity markers and how they influence how you show up in the world and in your work? And Michelle, if you wouldn’t mind starting us off.

Michelle Bowman:
So I’m a Black female and the work that I do in life and professionally is really rooted in my Christian faith. I’m really pleased and proud to be a first generation doctoral graduate. I just finished my doctorate in December, of 2021.

Stacey Caillier:
Woo hoo.

Michelle Bowman:
I know, right? Yeah, it feels so good.

Stacey Caillier:
That’s huge.

Michelle Bowman:
It is. And I was studying networks and how they really shape professional learning efficacy among school district leaders. So I’ve been doing this work around networks really for about the past seven years when I came to Learning Forward. And one of the things that I know I’ve learned about myself, especially these last seven years, is I really am about purposefully connecting with others, especially in communities. And I love to facilitate and I’m just going to not be humble, I’m good at it.

Stacey Caillier:
Woo.

Michelle Bowman:
The reason I think I’m good at it is because I just want to learn, I want others to learn, I want them to grow, and I really just want to see folks flourish. So it’s great to hear folks talk about themselves and just celebrate everybody’s contribution to the work that we’re doing.

Stacey Caillier:
Awesome. Thank you. All right, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Foster:
Hi. Thanks so much for having us here today. I am a Massachusetts girl, born and bred. I currently live in Washington DC, but my heart is really secretly on the beach up there somewhere in New England. I am a mom to two wonderful daughters, teenage daughters, one in college and one in high school. They are strong and interesting and fabulous, and they keep me busy and they keep me entertained at the same time. I’ve been working in education for about 25 years doing all kinds of different things really, from classroom teaching to research about teaching, to policy work about teacher recruitment and retention and professional learning.
I like the combination of research and policy and professional learning with folks in schools and classrooms. I think it just is a nice balance and a nice way to stay involved on a lot of different levels. My work at Learning Forward is focused on how professional learning can improve outcomes for educators and, of course, ultimately for students, for all students. I started my teaching working as a paraprofessional, working with kids with emotional and behavioral challenges and helping them make the transition from a residential facility to a general education classroom. And I learned so much about how important it is to see kids as individuals and help teachers understand how to get to know those kids and build relationships. So that’s a touchstone for me throughout everything I do.

Stacey Caillier:
Okay. So you both have been supporting adult learning in schools for a long time, and you were both educators yourselves. What do you think powerful adult learning that’s in service of students looks and feels like?

Elizabeth Foster:
I think it looks like educators sitting around a table asking questions, sharing documents, looking things up together, talking about their students, talking about their own history, both as younger students and adult students, and then what it looks like in their own classrooms and comparing, contrasting, making progress together.

Michelle Bowman:
So I think about powerful adult learning like a well rehearsed orchestra. I was in the orchestra in junior high and in high school, violin and viola player. So the conductor is there and they have their specific job to do. And part of what that conductor does is as you’re rehearsing, each musician has their part to play. We need the oboe to sound right, we need the violins to be in tune. We need the percussion section to keep the right time. And so the conductor provides the differentiated support that each of those instrumentalist needs, but they’re also moving everyone in the same direction toward the end, which is the performance. Because if things are out of tune or mistimed or maybe an instrument just doesn’t even come in when it’s their turn, then the piece as it’s performed is less than excellent. And then the audience doesn’t enjoy the performance.
And not that teaching is a performance, but it is something that is seen and observed and experienced. So then to me, adult learning, if it’s powerful in the same way as we’re moving toward excellence and equity in the teaching and in the learning. So I hope that that metaphor fits in this space.

Stacey Caillier:
I like it. As a former English major, I’m a big fan of metaphors. So can you guys give us an example of powerful adult learning from your work just to get us grounded in a particular example?

Michelle Bowman:
Yeah. So I think about a network that actually I’m still a part of here in Texas, working specifically with a couple of school districts and their middle school campuses and their teachers and school leaders. And so another colleague and I we’re trying to help the network members really get a clear picture of the full spectrum of the continuous improvement process. And so we created a simulation. We were just thinking about what’s a great learning design wherein the adults are experiencing themselves the very actions that they are then going to be responsible for implementing. And so writing that simulation and then facilitating with their group, we really were able to get them engaged in the process from a participant learner perspective. They put on the student hat, the teachers need to do some math. And we said yes, all of them, and we wanted them to try to put themselves in the space of an eighth grader in working through the math problem.
And the math problem was around rates of change. And so they worked through the scenario of the math problem. And it was interesting to hear some conversations, not so much of the math classroom teachers who are in the network, but the administrators from their campuses who are not as often working through math problems. And to see them and hear them even just struggle a little bit with looking at a graph and describing the race and using the data points that were there to talk about what the graph represented in terms of student rate in a race and how long it took a student to finish a race really provided I think an opportunity for particularly those administrators to feel some of the weight of the kinds of math instruction conversation that is expected to be going on in the classroom when the teachers are using rich tasks.
I do remember one person who was actually one of the people who supported the data analysis in our network, and she pulled me aside and she said, Michelle, I just want you to know that I’ve always had some anxiety about algebra. And I said, okay. I said, just put your student hat on. We’re here in our facilitation mode as the teachers in the classroom to help you think through. And it was so much fun to watch her get excited about engaging in math content in order to help her better understand the student experience in the classroom and then how that student experience both the feeling and the knowledge and skills and content output translates into the dialogue that educators have about their instructional practices as it pertains to their testing cycle.
Once the teams worked through the math problem, then they used a protocol to analyze the student work. And so again, we reminded them that this would be the practice of them as teachers. And so they worked through what’s called a three stack protocol. The teachers working as a collaborative team stacked the student work into those that most of the criteria to meet the content standard was evident. The criteria was not evident or the criteria, all of it was clearly evident. And after that, then they would have some discussion about what they understood about the students, their knowledge and skills, understanding areas that might need some additional attention or support. And so it was really powerful and beneficial for those adults to be steeped in the process, but using both perspectives. So that was a pretty powerful learning design that we were able to use.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that. I love how Rod Rearden, one of the founders of High Tech High, and I have written about this need for symmetry in learning that if we want to create amazing learning experiences for students, we need to create those same kind of experiences for adults so that they can experience themselves as learners. And so I just love, that’s such a beautiful example of that kind of symmetry that we’re hoping to create. Elizabeth, is there anything that you want to add or another example that comes up for you when you think powerful learning?

Elizabeth Foster:
One of the things that Michelle just said really sparked my thinking because looking at student work and using us, looking at student work protocol can be so powerful for adults because that process of assembling your student artifacts and then mapping what you’re seeing in the student work to what your expectations are for your own instruction or for your team’s instruction, and then just talking through with your colleagues about what your assumptions are, what your expectations are, where there might be patterns of misconceptions in student work that might reflect your own misconceptions in your instruction.
The other thing I was just thinking about when Michelle was talking is the adult learning that happens when colleagues with different content expertise sit together and talk about some key conceptual ideas that might not be transferring in student understanding. And so I’m thinking about a team we worked with a couple of years ago where we had STEM teachers with different areas of expertise sit together and talk about how they were addressing a particular concept. And after a couple of hours of conversation, they realized that no one was in fact grounding students in the basic understanding of this concept. And they were all talking around it.

Stacey Caillier:
I also just want to put a little exclamation point on what you both were talking about in relation to student work, because I think student work is such a rich source of data for anybody involved in continuous improvement in schools. And it’s often one that folks don’t necessarily think of as data, because we tend to think of data as these big things that are outside of the classroom or things that we’re collecting in addition to our practice. But student work is such a powerful source of data for folks working on instruction. So I love that looking at student work protocol and I love that you all double down on that.

Michelle Bowman:
Yeah, it really is. Can I add one more thing, Stacey that-.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah.

Michelle Bowman:
… Bouncing off of what Elizabeth said that she was talking about peers being together and not necessarily recognizing what the others are doing. I couldn’t help but think of peer observation conversations. So in one of the districts that I had previously worked in, it was so much fun for me to walk with a teacher to see their colleagues teach. And they had done a fabulous job consistently of being in their professional learning communities and talking about how they were going to facilitate right instruction. But when you get to see your colleague teach the same content that you have been planning together and see their special moves that they make, just watching a teacher just be excited about what they’re seeing someone else do, what are their quick grabs that they can take away and think about, well how might that work in my classroom context?
And so educators thinking about how to tweak their own instruction by observing what their peers are doing. And also then the surprise of, well wait, everybody do what I do when I’m inside of my learning space. And the answer is no. I had those own realizations myself, even with adults as facilitators. So I’m saying a lot of things, but just peer observations, whether it’s teachers watching teachers, leaders observing other leaders leading in their school context, leading in their adult learning context. There’s so much power when you co-facilitate what you pick up from others who are leading from the front of the room while you’re supporting from the side and from the back. So again, just other ways that that collaboration and powerful adult learning happens when we observe each other and then have dialogue afterwards about what we saw, what we learned and what we can then apply.

Stacey Caillier:
Cool. Thank you for adding that. Awesome.

Elizabeth Foster:
Can I just add one thing too? We’re building this whole system of what adult learning looks like as we’re responding to you, but I have been struck by how powerful looking at exemplars can be for teams of educators to learn more about their own practice, like an exemplar lesson in writing, or a video of someone they don’t know in front of a classroom that then allows them to have a different conversation about their own instruction. You take away that direct comparison of colleague to colleague and you form this alliance in your team and the way you analyze that exemplar. And I’ve been really struck by how that exemplar can be a catalyst for a different kind of adult learning conversation.

Stacey Caillier:
That even reminds me of in the early days of High Tech High, we had a lot of folks coming through, would bring teams of educators to our schools and the reaction was often like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know what this looked like or I didn’t think this was possible. But now I do, because we’re seeing it together and we’re here as a team and we’re able to unpack it and debrief and ask questions. And not that we’re a model, we’re figuring things out all the time, but I think it was different enough from what folks were doing that it really stood out and push on some thinking in the same way that exemplars and models can do. So thanks for adding that.

Elizabeth Foster:
Yeah.

Michelle Bowman:
It makes us want to continually improve.

Stacey Caillier:
That’s the idea. Okay, perfect transition to the next question, which was you both have been doing a lot in terms of supporting adult learning for a while. And I’m curious just how you came to continuous improvement, and what felt new or different from how you had previously thought about adult learning in schools and what that looked like.

Michelle Bowman:
Yeah, so my trajectory to intentionally attending to continuous improvement within the frame of educator learning happened when I came to Learning Forward. And so when I came to Learning Forward, I was invited to be the facilitator of a network of about 20 school systems. And all of these school systems had previously worked on innovative professional learning initiatives. It had been grant funded and the name of that network acronym wise was RPDC, the Redesign Professional Development Community. And these systems really wanted to do a much better job of ensuring that the system of professional learning was coherent and meeting the needs of the educators and the system. And at the same time, the other problem of practice that was being focused on was how do we actually consistently and continually measure the impact of the professional learning so that we can make the app adaptations and changes that we need to in the system based on whether or not teachers are changing their practice and ultimately shifting outcomes for students.
And so we were focusing on a cycle right then that the whole system could be looking at and working through. And it just really shifted my mindset around the fact that you don’t just put a system in place and then go through your tasks and check them off and three years later, you look back and you strategize and you plan for a new system. But instead in intentional iterations, you look at how we’re doing against the ideas that we said, well let’s test this out. And they’re not just random ideas, they’re rooted in research, grounded also in our experiences and that of others. And we have a method by which we’re measuring the changes that we’re seeing in these intentionally scheduled iterations. And the more I’ve worked on continuous improvement work, the more I’ve been surprised at how natural it can become for us because in our regular lives, not necessarily our work lives, we’re often making these simple changes.
And even though we might be doing that similarly in school systems, we don’t do a good job of documenting the change that we made, why we made it, how we measured what happened because of that change and then the response that we’re making. And so I loved when I finally learned that there’s a really simple way to document that change cycle so that we might actually make better changes and make them in a way that we are consistently going to be able to evidence the improvements that we’re making. And I’ll hold off on talking about challenges, but that’s to answer the first part of it, how I got into it, and some of the things that get me excited as well as maybe surprise me a little bit along the way.

Stacey Caillier:
Thank you.

Elizabeth Foster:
So once I realized that classroom teaching was not my strength, I then went to do research about teaching and teachers and one of my first projects involved a lot of interviewing and observation of teachers and listening to them about what kinds of supports they needed and trying to capture everything I was learning from these focus groups and interviews to share with district policymakers. And I was thinking there are all these great ideas in their research and there are all these really well-written plans at the district level and there are teachers saying what they want, and none of it is connecting. And then when I came to Learning Forward, I started working really to build a network called the What Matters Now Network. So I first came to continuous improvement in this What Matters Now Network, where we got teams from three different states together to identify their priority problem of practice and then a design team of district and school administrators and educators and coaches and facilitators got together to say, what would this look like at the classroom level?
What’s the smallest possible start we can make to start building towards these desired improvements? And at the beginning it was still a little theoretical, but then once the teams started testing these improvements and documenting what they were learning and adjusting and trying something new and seeing the results in their own learning, and in their students’ learning, it just caught fire from there. And we saw improvements in the way districts in Maryland were designing their science instruction and at the same time that information, those science teams were collecting informed policy changes at the district and even the state level. And then once I saw it, I was just hooked. And I tried it with my kids, I tried it with my friends, I tried it with every other bit of work I’ve done since then.

Stacey Caillier:
Elizabeth, can you say three more sentences about the science example, and what were the sorts of things that people were trying, and how did that actually impact policy? What were some of the policies that emerged as a result of that work?

Elizabeth Foster:
So teams from two districts in Maryland were trying to align classroom instruction more closely to the Next Generation Science Standards. And when we started to look at where the disconnects were, we realized that a lot of the school professional learning did not include enough information about what was in the Next Generation Science Standards. We also saw a need for more explanation about how you talk about phenomena in science, for instance, that this was something that educators knew they needed to do but didn’t quite know what it looked like and what it would mean for their own classroom. So teams would read exemplar lessons, compare them to their own instruction, and then talk about what shifts they might make in instruction to tie their lesson more closely to what the standard called for. And to more accurately assess whether students were understanding the content they needed to understand in order to achieve the standard.
And then each team would share their results with other teams. So it spread across the district. And then part of the design of the network was to have district STEM administrators and state agency leaders as part of the discussions about the results of the cycles of improvement. And it became apparent that the state agency needed to provide some more accessible resources about what was required in the Next Generation Science Standards. So they slightly changed their protocols for the way they observed schools, and then they also created a checklist for districts to help them better understand the key components of the Next Generation Science Standards. So it was really a state agency produced set of supports in response to what the teachers were demonstrating they needed in their classroom.

Stacey Caillier:
Great. Well, so thinking back to all this work that you both have done with continuous improvement, what are some of the challenges that you’ve encountered along the way, and how have you addressed those?

Michelle Bowman:
When you’ve been working with a team or a group for 12 to 15 months and then there’s a change and the change is in leadership, sometimes I’ve recognized that we haven’t done the best job of helping the process be integrated and embedded into the system because it’s attached to certain people. And any advice experience because of your experiences Stacey that you have on that, I would love it.

Stacey Caillier:
I’ll just say that we share the same grapple and I think the distinction you just made is really helpful around thinking in terms of processes, not people. Because you’re right, I think there’s this default to, well we have Anna, we have Jose, they’ve got it, and the process will live with a few people and then when those few people leave or don’t get the support they need to spread that the work can really struggle. And so we grapple with that as well. And I think the key is what you’re saying, getting enough leadership investment involved that it starts to be seen as a process in how we do things versus Anna and Jose. So that really resonates with me. I don’t know that I have any great advice to share, but we can noodle on it together over a drink sometime.

Michelle Bowman:
Okay. Yeah, I will say certainly just you confirming that, it’s not an isolated scenario in the work that I’ve been involved in, but it can be a significant hurdle. So yeah, just avoid it as a pitfall for sure. And let’s keep it a low hurdle so you can at least hop over it.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. And I’ll just name that the pandemic has really amplified all of that. We’re seeing so much turnover in schools, so much overwhelm in schools, so that all plays into this too. It makes it really hard to embed things into a new system, even though it could also be viewed as a huge opportunity to rethink the system.

Michelle Bowman:
Yeah. So on that note, I’ve also heard different folks say as you’re beginning an engagement together, because we’ve all agreed yes, this is the kind of work we want to start, and that shortly thereafter someone’s like, oh, well we already do that. So breaking the bubble of, well we do that, we just call it X, Y, or Z. And I guess the beauty is because we work to make sure that there’s trusting relationships that we can come alongside one another. And I think Jim Knight is the one that says nudging without bruising. And if it’s not Jim Knight, I don’t know who says it, but lots of folks in the coaching world, let’s just go with that. Say you want to nudge people without bruising them to show them that, well, you are doing something that looks like this, but it doesn’t sound like it, it doesn’t taste like it, and it really doesn’t smell like it at all. So let’s work on that together and then we’ll be in sync.

Elizabeth Foster:
I was going to say, Stacey, to your point of adding this process versus embedding this process can be a huge challenge, especially at the beginning because it’s challenging to convince people who have such full plates that something new might better facilitate the work they’re already trying to do. We also had the challenge of over-explaining the theory of continuous improvement instead of just getting into the process and trusting that the proof was in the pudding. The other challenge I think is, going back to what we were talking about a little while ago about how important data and documentation is. There’s sometimes a challenge in the way people think about what data is.
So sometimes when you say we want you to collect classroom level data or that’s what we’re going to use to analyze how well this change idea impacted your classroom, people assume it’s some kind of big new undertaking as opposed to data being your exit tickets or your a student work. So that can be another challenge I think, mainly to getting started. Because once you understand that your own classroom practices and your student work are the data you’re off to the races, but that initial conversation about what data is and what’s valuable can be a challenge.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because I think one of the dispositions we’re always trying to cultivate through continuous improvement is this desire to ask ourselves, how do we know? And we talk about the three improvement questions, what do we want to accomplish for whom and why? What are we going to try? And then how do we know? And I feel like educators can get very clear on those first two and ready to go, but we don’t often loop back to that, how do we know? And so I was wondering, can you just share maybe a little bit more about, or a particular example of how do you support others and maybe even each other in the work to return to this question of how do we know? What does that look like for you all?

Elizabeth Foster:
We literally have that question, how do you know? And the educators address that question individually and then come together and focus on their responses and compare and contrast based on their own classroom experiences.

Michelle Bowman:
I appreciate Elizabeth that you brought up the intentionality of time to devote to the question of how do we know? And what it made me think about is how often when we come together, especially in larger group convenings of the whole network or even just maybe role alikes, that we remind them of the different types of measurement that they might be assessing. And so often we default to measurement for accountability and that’s not helpful in this continuous improvement situation. But rather we want to look at those smaller measures that we can quickly glean information from on the day-to-day or over a short number of weeks.
And I think when we engage, going back to that powerful adult learning structure, when we engage with the teachers and the leaders early on in the network in that simulated scenario, and we model for them what that easily accessible, you probably capture this kind of stuff all the time, data is, then we harken them back to that experience in the moments of how do you know? In the current network, a teacher team was really thinking about their math instruction and the types of questions that they are offering to students in order to advance students thinking. And so there’s advancing questions and there are questions that really just shortcut getting to an answer. And this group of teachers really wanted to do more in the advancing questions. So they had a question tracker.
And just that simple measure, what’s the language and improvement is a practical measure, that they could just simply themselves or a colleague on behalf of them could tally when and how often they’re asking advancing questions as compared to other types. You could just see this team of teachers recognize their own growth, because the data was right in front of them and it was their data about them in their classroom.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that example too, because it makes me think about one of the most powerful practical measures I think there is, it’s just conversation mapping and noticing who’s talking, where the conversation is going in a classroom and just being able to look at maps over time as you’re trying new things and see the density increase and more students speaking up. It’s like it’s such a easy thing to do in the moment and it’s so compelling to look at the change and map it to what you’re trying. So in some of our previous conversations, I have really appreciated the emphasis that you both have put on understanding the system and the need to create greater coherence and alignment across a system. And I’m curious just, and maybe this goes back to our earlier question about the challenges, but what have you learned about the conditions that need to be in place for continuous improvement to really flourish?

Michelle Bowman:
The leaders being able to engage with other leaders to talk about their professional learning challenges embodied in a network where they had a shared problem of practice. They were working on that together, that they were able to build those relationships with one another to work not only within their own district teams, but working across district teams. The learning leaders professional learning efficacy, it changed because they participated in that community of practice. They increased their knowledge, they increased their knowledge of their role and their responsibility in ensuring effective and efficient and equitable professional learning. It developed new capacities to lead and advocate for professional learning.
The leaders in the system need to stand up for the fact that professional learning matters. And when I say the leaders in the system, that’s not just folks who have a title. Classroom teachers are leaders in an education system. And so their agency to say, this is the kind of learning I need is a condition that tremendously matters. We’ve been talking about this cultural of collaborative inquiry, that’s also fundamental to the conditions for an effective and high impact system of professional learning. And it was so much fun for me as a lifelong educator, professional learning nerd, and now an emerging scholar to be able to document through research that networking and the network leaders working on conditions in their own systems certainly makes a difference.

Stacey Caillier:
Okay. Last question. If you could go back to whisper in your own ears when you were launching your first improvement network, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourselves?

Elizabeth Foster:
I have an easy one. I mentioned this before, but we spent a lot of time talking about the theory and the principles of improvement science. And we got all the teachers together and all the coaches together and all the district department chairs together and talked them to death about why this would be a great idea and how we weren’t going to waste their time because this is going to support the work you’re already doing as we were potentially wasting their time over explaining. And so if I could go back in time, I would just be faster about that and use what we know about good professional learning and show them what would happen and how fast it can happen and how valuable it could be to the changes they want to see in their school.

Michelle Bowman:
That’s an excellent point, Elizabeth. I think I would whisper to myself to remember to do what you’re teaching so explicitly, explicitly document in your own practice as a professional, or as a member of a team at Learning Forward, the very thing that you are asking other folks to engage in so that I could myself at times feel the frustration of the form that I might be asking them to fill out. I made it, it’s great. I can’t understand why it seems to take such a period of time to complete it, but if I’d probably spent time myself filling it out for my own improvement work before I really got deeply into the process, I might have more empathy. Well, I know me, I would actually have empathy for them because I’d experienced my own pitfall. So yeah, that’s probably my best whisper is do it yourself before you ask others to do it.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Stacey Caillier, Michelle Bowman and Elizabeth Foster for this conversation. Thanks for listening.