Leading and Coaching a Culture of Thinking
Creating a culture of thinking is not as simple as adopting a program or instituting a set of practices. It begins with a commitment to the ideas that developing our students as thinkers and learners is one of our chief goals on which all else rests. It demands that teachers see their jobs as requiring continuous growth, innovation, and responsiveness in pursuit of this goal. It requires us to reflect on our practice and our actions as we strive to do the best to meet our students where they are. Of course, developing a culture of thinking across a school or district takes ongoing support, coaching, and leadership. We are currently in the process of investigating what it means to lead and coach a culture of thinking, documenting pictures of practice to highlight what this might look like, and developing tools to help this process. At this point, we have identified a few important practices and developed some tools that we share here.
Fostering Reflection on Teaching and Learning
John Dewey famously said that we don’t learn by doing, but by reflecting on our doing. Of course, making reflection a regular part of teaching can be challenging. One of the tools we have developed to both foster reflection is the Snapshot Observation Protocol in which small groups of teachers observe a colleague, not to offer feedback but to use whatever they observe as a basis for reflecting on their own teaching.
A Focus on Inquiry
Developing a culture of thinking is much more than using thinking routines, it involves learning to leverage all 8 cultural forces to align them with the support of students’ development as thinkers and learners. This process can be facilitated through collective inquiry into each cultural force to better understand how it is currently playing out in your classroom and school, designing appropriate actions to move forward, and reflecting on those actions through guided, sustained inquiry.
Documenting the Story of Our Collective Learning
Capturing growth, change, and well as telling and celebrating the story of our collective learning is important for sustaining development of a culture of thinking over the long haul. Coming together to identify the important milestones, reflect upon them, and realize just how much has been done is an important community building process. the example to the left comes from Reuther Middle School in Rochester, Michigan.