Instructional Practices Inventory
Wednesday morning, my students had microscopes out and were quietly working to find organisms found in pond water. After I had introduced the class to the topic and gave them some tips on how to locate and identify creatures, I looked down to finish grading the last couple of tests from last week. One of my students had left an entire answer blank, so I called her up to ask her if she’d missed the question or just didn’t know the answer. At about that time, another teacher had quietly slipped into my class and was standing at the door.
When I noticed Mrs. S. , I wasn’t sure why she was there, but I did remember that Katie had asked to speak to her, so I thought maybe she was here to track down Katie. As it turned out, Mrs. S was part of the IPI team and she was here to evaluate my class.
We have been receiving some training and informational meetings about how IPI works, and in truth, I had been informed that the IPI would be making the rounds; I had just forgotten. Even with the reassurances that the information is not used for teacher evaluation purposes, I couldn’t help but feel a little worried about how my class looked and which rating I would be getting for that “snapshot”. I tried to think back about what I was doing, and tried to guess my score. We did receive the instructional practices inventory rubric which is used to evaluate instruction in these snapshots, and as a group, discussed various scenarios and how each would be scored.
(1) Complete Disengagement – students are not engaged in learning directly related to the curriculum
(2) Student Work with Teacher Not Engaged – Students are doing seatwork,working on worksheets, book work, tests, video without teacher support, etc. Teacher assistance or support is not evident.
(3) Student Work with Teacher Engaged – Students are doing seatwork, working on worksheets, book work, tests, video with teacher viewing the video with the students, etc. Teacher assistance or support is evident.
(4) Teacher-Led Instruction – Students are attentive to teacher-led learning experiences such as lecture, question and answer, teacher giving directions, and video instruction with teacher interaction. Discussion may occur, but instruction and ideas come primarily from the teacher.
(5) Student Learning Conversations – Students are engaged in active conversations that construct knowledge. Conversations may have been teacher stimulated but are not teacher dominated. Higher-order thinking is evident.
(6) Student Active Engaged Learning – Students are engaged in higher order learning. Common examples include authentic project work, cooperative learning, hands-on learning, problem-based learning, demonstrations, and research.
If I were to make a guess, at that moment, my class probably fell between a 2 and a 3 rating because I was grading tests while the students were working on their own. If I wanted to be optimistic, it may have been a (5) because they, sharing information and helping each other identify specimens and work the microscopes. Either way, what I can take from the experience is that I would have been a better teacher if I had saved the grading for another time and had been more actively engaged in what my students were doing.
I suppose, if the experience has led me to self reflect and consider ways of raising my level of student engagement, then IPI is a success. Of course, that is only one day, one teacher, and one classroom. IPI will hopefully allow us to look at ways to raise the overall level of engagement across the school.
More information on IPI can be found at MLLC Site
