School leaders spend a lot of time talking about how to make learning more relevant and engaging for students.  Many of these discussions evolve into multi-year efforts to implement project-based or inquiry-based learning.  While any amount of time spent assuring access to deeper learning opportunities for all students is time well spent, the path to implementation can be both bumpy and lengthy.  At last week’s Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Executive Institute, Scott McLeod shared a great protocol that provides immediate immersion into the questions that we need to be asking about student learning.

McLeod’s Four Shifts Protocol, which he designed with Julie Graber, is a great discussion tool to immediately get people looking at how lessons and/or units can be improved in each of the following areas:

• Higher-level thinking
• Authentic work
• Student agency and personalization
• Technology Infusion

In addition, McLeod included videos and lesson plans from teachers at various grade levels during his introduction to the protocol (see page three here).  This would work well for school leaders beginning similar discussions with teachers because the focus would be on looking at someone else’s classroom and lessons before having them critique their own.

In getting started with the protocol McLeod recommended just picking a few bullets from one of the four areas to focus on at a time. For example, we looked at a video from a Geometry class and the lesson plan and then answered looked at the first four bullets under Authentic work (from page 3 of the protocol):

• Real or Fake. Is student work authentic and reflective of that done by experts outside of school?
  • Yes / No / Somewhat
• Authentic Role. Are students asked to take on an authentic societal role as part of their learning?
  • Yes / No / Somewhat
• Domain Practices. Are students utilizing authentic, discipline-specific, practices and processes?
  • Yes / No / Somewhat
• Domain Technologies. Are students utilizing authentic, discipline-specific tools and technologies?
  • Yes / No / Somewhat

During the first part of the protocol, we discussed in small groups whether we thought the answers to the questions were yes, no, or somewhat.  While that led to some interesting discussions, it was the second part of the protocol that was the most interesting.  This entailed each group going back and reframing the questions we had looked at and considering what we could do to make the work more authentic. For example, how could we make the student work more reflective of that which is done by experts outside the school? or What could we do to add more authentic, discipline-specific practices and processes?

Anyway, we spent about an hour going through the four areas of the protocol in the fashion described above. It seems like a great process to get teachers looking at ways to create more engaging lessons for students.