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1.2: Analyzing Your Teaching

  • Page ID
    222415
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    Analyzing Instruction for the Purpose of Improving It

    Learning to teach and continuing to improve requires regular analysis of instruction and its effectiveness. Teachers analyze their instruction to:

    1. Improve their teaching: Teachers study their own teaching and that of their colleagues to improve their practice. Analyzing instruction may take place individually or with colleagues and involves identifying patterns, opportunities, and specific moves, and making hypotheses for how to improve.
    2. Improve equity and inclusion: Reflective teachers recognize subtle, normalized patterns of oppression that undermine the learning of marginalized groups. They interrogate their underlying assumptions and seek to develop new instructional habits and strategies that support students to thrive. Teachers carry out countless moves and in-the-moment decisions every day. Their moves and decisions are often shaped by deeply held assumptions and dominant White notions about students, the content, and teaching. By analyzing instruction, teachers attend to subtle patterns and biases and learn about how they might impact children.
    3. Support student learning: Analyzing instruction also provides opportunities to study students’ work, which can support teachers to see students’ strengths, deepen their content knowledge, and develop new strategies and approaches that can intervene in patterns that reproduce inequity.

    Decomposition of Analyzing Instruction for the Purpose of Improving It

    Identify a Focus Collect Artifacts of Practice Analyze Artifacts of Practice Identify and Use Professional Resources Determine and Implement Next Steps
    • Identify specific areas of instruction to focus on
    • Develop questions for inquiry that create opportunities to challenge assumptions and biases about students, content, and teaching practices
    • Determine artifacts that will provide insight into the focus area such as:
      • Video records of instruction
      • Records of student work or formative assessments
      • Observation notes from others
      • Input from students and families
    • Collect the artifacts in ways that guard against biases
      • Account for the limitations of a single observation or snapshot of teaching
      • Identify elements of teaching and learning that are not captured by a given set of artifacts
    • Seek patterns or trends and form hypotheses about students, learning, classroom environment, and teachers
    • Be careful to avoid jumping to conclusions and seek additional evidence to support or challenge hypotheses
    • Seek recommendations from colleagues or coaches
    • Draw on a wide range of resources, including those from other grades and content areas, and those developed by members of nondominant communities and cultures
    • Review materials from coursework or professional development
    • Consult materials recommended or published by professional or community organizations
    • Identify concrete actions, strategies or techniques to try
    • Determine what to collect to document work on next steps
    Identify a focus (Reflect on practice, develop questions, determine artifact to collect). Then you can collect artifacts of practice (video, observation notes, student work, surveys). Analyze and interpret the artifact (seek patterns or trends, make inferences, consider multiple interpretations, form hypotheses). Plan for improvement (set a goal, determine actions, establish a timeline). Finally, implement the plan.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Visual representation of analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it.

    1.2: Analyzing Your Teaching is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by TeachingWorks (University of Michigan).