Howard High School of Technology: Building Student Talk in Post-Pandemic Classrooms
A technical high school on a mission to prepare students for careers and post-secondary education
Howard High School of Technology is a Wilmington, Delaware career and technical high school focused on preparing students for careers and post-secondary education.
Howard’s committed and talented teachers, first-class facilities, and innovative technology provides students with a truly unique educational experience.
Throughout its 150-year history, Howard’s students have gone on to enjoy success in the areas of medicine, law, science, business, athletics, and more. Many families proudly count among them several generations of Howard graduates.
Changing teaching and learning in post-pandemic classrooms
As their teachers and students emerge from the pandemic and enter into this phase of post-pandemic education, Principal Kyle Hill and Assistant Principal Dr. Tamara McDermott have a shared focus on helping to change teaching and learning.
During pandemic virtual schooling, internet service became a barrier to participation for many students. The district supported those who needed it with boosted Wi-Fi and made the decision to not require kids to have their cameras on. This ensured attendance, but not necessarily engaged participation.
Having navigated virtual schooling, educators returned to classrooms in a newly complex position. Instructional leaders like Principal Hill and Assistant Principal McDermott set about identifying the learning gaps that had grown during the pandemic.
“I need you back, engaged, talking. Because talking is gonna let us know how true the deficits are.”
They needed a way to remediate the specific gaps for each student, adjust students back to active participation in the classroom, adjust teaching practices, all without falling into a continuous cycle of remediation.
And that meant finding ways to transition students out of that pandemic-era minimal participation mode.
Student talk helps teachers identify and address students’ post-pandemic learning needs
As Principal Hill described it, “By talking, in addition to other assessments, we would be able to have an accurate account for where we were.”
As a vocational tech school district, half the kids’ time is spent doing things with their hands. And that naturally generates questions and discourse. For example: when you’re building a mold of a lower set of teeth in dental class and it doesn’t come out right, there’s going to be conversation about what’s happening.
Career Technical Education (CTE) naturally creates a focus on discourse. So if Howard’s educators knew that student talk worked in CTE, and it can work in all learning, the question for them to explore was this: What can we do in math, social studies, science, English, to mimic what kids naturally do in their shop?
ESSER funds help schools like Howard build teaching capacity, post-pandemic
When Superintendent Joe Jones did a fireside chat about how to use ESSER funds to build teacher capacity, Dr. McDermott saw the path forward.
Like Principal Hill, Dr. McDermott had noticed a lot of direct instruction as teachers and students returned to their classrooms – more time spent with teachers talking than engaging students in the discourse.
Searching for a solution that would build teacher capacity to foster meaningful classroom conversation, Dr. McDermott found TeachFX.
She was intrigued to see how TeachFX was using AI to increase teacher capacity – and that doing so to help teachers increase student discourse especially aligned with their focus.
And Principal Hill saw that the TeachFX approach would integrate into their instructional vision: “Emphasizing student discourse was an easier way for us to assess kids daily on what they know and what they don’t know. And using TeachFX was a way to set the focus on student discourse.”
Integrating TeachFX into a commitment to student discourse
Change happens when we integrate initiatives into a clear, consistent, longer-term vision for teaching and learning.
At Howard, TeachFX has been clearly framed as part of an ongoing commitment to student discourse.
Principal Hill advises other principals not to start with the idea that: “Here’s this really cool tool that you should use because you’ll grow from it.” Rather, it’s about starting with: “We’re committed to student discourse. And this is one of the ways that we’re helping that happen in our classrooms.”
Still, any new initiative often starts with a cohort of lead learners.
Dr. McDermott piloted TeachFX with the math department. With time and collaboration, the lead learners could see how TeachFX is a tool for them, a way for them to gather their own feedback, and in a way that’s not evaluative and is totally private to them.
From staff meetings to PLCs, teachers have shared their own classroom-level insights and reflections, powered by TeachFX. They’ve been able to both self-reflect and build on each other’s learning in new and powerful ways.
Using TeachFX year after year, Howard’s teachers have seen the compounding effect on their own teaching practice and on what happens in their classrooms.
Howard’s teachers increasingly saw TeachFX as a way for them to gather insights into their own teaching practice, make decisions about where they wanted to change their practice, and explore the learning they wanted to pursue with each other or elsewhere.
Howard’s teachers are inspiring student discourse in their classrooms
Last school year, 50 teachers used TeachFX to gather insights into more than 300 lessons.
The average lesson showed 40% teacher talk time – that’s half the average found in John Hattie’s research!
The more frequently teachers use TeachFX in their classrooms, the more they increased student talk. Some have even more than doubled the amount of student talk they inspire.
And part of that change is that the more teachers have used TeachFX in their classrooms, the more aware and effective they’ve become and utilizing questioning and think time to create the space for students to bring their voices into the classroom conversation.
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