School and district leaders constantly balance the big picture with on the ground details.

Across the organization, it’s important to get everyone working towards higher quality instruction, and to provide feedback and support that actually reflects that vision.

At the same time, you have a list of specific projects and cohorts that need extra attention: early career teachers, a curriculum investment, or a school that needs special support. These groups require customized feedback to match those goals, without forgetting the org-level priorities.

That is exactly what M2’s Sites within a Team can do.

Three levels that match how districts already work

An M2 account is organized in three levels.

The Team is your district. It holds organization-wide expectations: the Coherence Prompt and the Rubrics that describe what good teaching looks like everywhere.

A Site is a school. Every school in the district is its own Site inside the Team, with its own Coherence Prompt, its own custom Rubrics, and its own view of the data.

Groups live inside a Site and organize the work that happens below the building level: PLCs, grade levels, new teacher cohorts, curriculum implementations, leadership teams.

The same structure applies whether you have sixty schools or one. That consistency is what lets a district track progress, helps a principal see their own staff, and allows a coach to look at a single cohort.

Support org-level goals and offer customized support

Administrators deploy feedback Coherence Prompts and scoring Rubrics at two levels: Team and Site.

At the Team level, district leaders set the defaults. Everyone in the district works within that context. Teachers get more frequent, criteria-aligned feedback to improve their practice. Leaders get a consistent picture of how instruction is changing over time, across every building.

At the Site level, a school adds what matters in that building. The teachers there still belong to the district Team, and the feedback and rubrics from both levels work together to support their practice. For example, a district-wide focus on student discourse stays in place, while a middle school in its second year of a new literacy curriculum can add look-fors tied to that program.

With this setup, everyone gets targeted, more frequent feedback, while the schools with distinct needs get scoring and feedback to match their goals.

Groups hold the projects inside a school

Lots of work does not happen at the level of a whole building. It happens in a first-year teacher cohort, a fourth-grade team, or a department piloting new materials. Groups are how those cohorts live inside a school Site.

Each Group is created with a group type, which is how you segment the work in a building and later look at data for that segment. M2 includes six predefined types:

• Classroom
• Evaluation
• PLC
• Staff Meeting
• Training
• One-on-Ones

Additional group types are coming, so accounts will be able to define their own labels for things like a beginning teacher program or a building leadership team.

This is also how a district initiative that spans multiple schools works. An induction program or a curriculum pilot running in five buildings becomes a Group with members in any of those Sites. The shared expectations for that initiative can sit at the Team level, so every participating teacher hears the same thing, while each school’s Site prompt and rubrics keep the feedback grounded in that building.

Start with the work you’re already doing

You do not need a complete map of every school, cohort, and PLC before anyone benefits from M2 in your organization.

Set up the district Team, create Sites for the schools that are participating now, and build your first Groups around the work already underway. Identify the teachers you are giving the most support to, or the initiative taking up the most attention this year, and start there.

The rest of the district, whether that includes administrators, school-level leaders, or teachers, can keep working with M2 at the Team and Site levels. They still get feedback and scoring aligned to the organization’s high-level goals.

Coaches can work across Sites

Instructional coaches often do not belong to a single building. A coach supporting several schools can work across multiple Sites, which adds flexibility to your setup.

The teachers most closely tied to a building stay on that building’s Site. The coach does not have to be limited to one of them. They can move across the Sites they support, while the teachers in each Site still receive the prompt, rubrics, and data that belong to their school.

Coherence and Customization

When a district uses this structure, there are two important benefits.

Teachers across the organization get more frequent feedback than walk-throughs and formal observations ever can provide, and all of it is aligned to the district’s values. That is the promise of M2’s rubric scoring and Coherence Prompt: frequent, consistent, criteria-aligned support at scale.

Additionally, the schools and cohorts that need something more specific can also get that support every time they turn on M2. New teachers hear from M2 in language that matches their induction program. A PLC works on the practices they are trying to build together. A school gets data that reflects their teachers and their goals, not an average of the whole district.

Leaders do not have to choose between coherence and customization. M2 delivers both.

The post How M2 delivers coherence and customization: Sites within a team appeared first on Swivl.

Guilford County needed a flexible, efficient way to support and assess a math curriculum implementation.

Kat Stevens is the PreK-12 Director of Math in Guilford County Schools, a district of over 70,000 students and 120 schools in North Carolina. The district’s 27 middle schools recently adopted a new math curriculum with a goal of providing an equitable math education for all students.

But a successful curriculum implementation would require ongoing teacher support and assessment. “Just handing out books is not enough,” Kat said. 

To support this, Guilford County needed an implementation plan that was time and resource-efficient, while encouraging teachers to self-reflect and collaborate with coaches.

Another challenge for Guilford County was their size. District leadership needed to assess and support hundreds of teachers with various needs and experience levels. Kat recalled needing to help a 30-year veteran teacher buy-in to the need for a district-wide curriculum, while helping a first-year teacher master the new curriculum content.

Ultimately, Kat’s vision was about equity. “Every kid deserves high-quality math instruction,” she said.

District leaders assess 27 middle schools and coaches support hundreds of teachers through Swivl Teams + Robots

With one math supervisor dedicated to supporting 27 middle schools, Kat and her district leadership team have leveraged several outside teacher coaching consultancies to provide job embedded coaching. This coaching supports the implementation of the new math curriculum across the district’s middle schools.  

Through recording, sharing and discussing instructional videos through Swivl Teams + Robots, Kat shared that her coaches approach their work with a mindset of, “What do we see? What do we hear? How do we support the glows and grows of math curriculum implementation?”

Video also helps Guilford develop a shared language and consistent set of expectations for the delivery of their curriculum. Instructional leaders visit classrooms to model lessons streamed live for coaches and others to watch and discuss. Through this process, they ensure district leaders, coaches, and teachers are aligned with what success looks like and how to talk about it.

Guilford County has learned that the benefits of self-reflection and coaching over classroom video go beyond reducing the need for travel. Even though coaches have returned to visiting classrooms, they record lessons so that teachers can self-reflect over the videos during PLCs and coaching sessions.

“It’s always important for teachers to self-reflect,” Kat said. “When you think about an effective coaching model, it’s not about a coach telling teachers what to do, but a coach supporting me in conversation and helping me see what I need to do.”   

As Guilford County navigates large-scale change, Swivl tools make alignment and growth easier at all levels

Guilford County’s use of Swivl tools has led to improvements at all levels of the district.

In the classroom, Kat believes Swivl Teams + Robots empowers teachers to not only improve through work with coaches, but to take ownership of their growth through self-reflection over video.

“Swivl Teams + Robots has improved our coaching conversations because teachers are not only able to have their coaches watch them, but they’re able to go back, watch the video and reflect on their own teaching,” Kat said.

Kat believes the Swivl Robot’s ability to track educators as they move around the room, as well the high-quality audio captured by Swivl’s audio markers make a significant difference in the coaching and self-reflection experience.

“There’s such a difference between putting up a laptop and recording versus having that Swivl full view and seeing everything that’s going on,” Kat said. She also noted Guilford County teachers and coaches love to use audio markers to bookmark important moments during lessons.

While classroom visits can be stressful for teachers and students, videos captured by Swivl Robots and shared through Swivl Teams allow administrators to get a more accurate picture of their implementation with less stress on teachers and students. 

Ultimately, it’s about putting tools and systems in place to ensure a great math education

At the building and district level, capturing, sharing and discussing classroom videos ensures everyone in Guilford is “aligned with what high-quality instruction looks like,” as Kat put it.

Kat believes the biggest impact Swivl Teams + Robots have had on her leadership team has been helping the district be more aligned while saving time by capturing, sharing and discussing classroom video.

“We can have conversations no matter where we are,” Kat said. “I can go into a classroom anytime, anywhere, even if I’m not in the building. So it supports our conversation as leaders.”

Through frequent self-reflection, coaching, and administrator alignment, all supported with classroom video, Guilford County has put the tools and systems in place to ensure every student gets the high-quality math instruction they deserve.

Ready to ensure all your teachers have the support they need

to deliver high-quality instruction?

The post How Guilford County Supports Math Curriculum Implementation at 27 Middle Schools with Classroom Video appeared first on Swivl.