Protocols

1
Protocols --

• Why do we need them?
• What are they?
• How do they help?

2
Group Work

• What are your reactions and concerns when you
  hear a facilitator in a professional development
  tell you that you are going to get into groups to
  work?

3
How do you characterize the typical kind of talk
that occurs in group work?

• Structured?
• Efficient?
• Purposeful?
• Make progress?
• Strategic?

4
3 types of tensions in group work

• Task vs. relationship orientations
• Comfort vs. discomfort
• Autonomy vs. collaboration

5
Protocols help to create trust in collaboration
and group work . . . how?
6
What will build trust?

• Having norms or rules to guide the talk
• Adhering to the steps of the protocol
• Practice! Repeat and use the protocol as needed
  over time to guide and structure conversations.

7
What are protocols?

• Structures that enable educators to look
  carefully and collaboratively at student and
  teacher work in order to learn from it.

8
How will protocols help to improve the quality
and depth of talk?

• Protocols do three things
• Provide a structure for a conversation
• Force transparency by specifying who does what
  when
• Facilitator, presenter, participant
• Speak, listen, describe, judge
• Transparency helps to create a safe environment
  for teachers to put their students work and in
  some cases, teachers work, on the table and
  listen to others discuss it

9

• No one person or element holds sole
  responsibility for the success of a
  protocol-guided conversation. In a professional
  learning community, we all share responsibility
  for the success of a protocol-guided
  conversation.

10

• We have learned to use two specific practicesto
  develop the capacity of leaders to objectify
  their own practiceOne practice involves the use
  of protocols to observe, analyze, and develop
  practice. We observe instructional practice
  using protocols that focus as much as possible on
  the visible evidence in the classroom, not on the
  personal attributes of the teacher to focus on
  the evidentiary claims that people in leadership
  positions make to justify their practices, or
  their theories of action, rather than the
  personal attributes of leaders. The use of
  protocols depersonalizes practice and in doing
  so, it makes the practice something that can be
  changed through learning and further practice.
  (Elmore, p. 14)

11

• Why do we want to objectify or depersonalize
  practice?
• it helps practitioners to objectify their
  practice, to put it terms that someone else can
  understand and that, if necessary, can be used to
  communicate with others and to teach them what
  the underlying line of thought and action is. It
  also depersonalizes practice so that people can
  feel free to treat their own most deeply-held
  values and beliefs as empirical propositions that
  be subject to verification through evidence on
  the effects of what they do
• making the invisible visible.
• (Elmore, p. 14)