Purposeful Lesson Planning: Exploring the Focused Teaching Cycle Tool

Education Manager Series: Purposeful Lesson Planning: Exploring the Focused Teaching Cycle Tool

Maribel Centeno: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Maribel Centeno from the Ounce of Prevention Fund. Roselia, you were actually accidentally muted, so we couldn't hear you go through the session objectives, so I'll very quickly go through them. Objective number one will be to identify the need for an intentional approach to lesson planning. Objective number two is to describe the elements needed for effective, intentional team lesson planning in adult-child interactions, and objective three is to discuss the focus teaching cycle, to introduce it and discuss it. In this first section, we will explore the data on the national class scores and what the data is telling us about the urgency and the need to rethink lesson planning. The urgent need for an intentional approach to lesson planning can be established by taking a look at what the data is telling us. Despite strong improvements in emotional support and classroom organization, we still are challenged by the low quality of instructional supports in early childhood education. The data reflected here is over 3 years, 2013 to 2015, so let's see how we fare in 2018. Not so surprising that instructional support scores remain stagnant and inactive.

Most recent 2018 data tells us that education staff are still struggling with improving the quality of instructional supports. The data over a 5-year period demonstrates the urgency and the need to improve instructional supports for children. The grantee-level dimension scores are averaged to produce grantee-level domain scores. Previous large-scale studies on the class have shown that the average preschool classroom's scores are higher in the domains of emotional supports and classroom organization than the domain of instructional support. So, given the data we just saw, it makes me wonder where programs have a disconnect between the excellent record of providing supportive, nurturing, and organized classrooms while instructional practices remain stagnated and at the low end of the range. So, what does this mean for implementing an intentional approach to lesson planning, Mary Joyce?

Mary Joyce Robbins: Well, good afternoon, everybody. This is Mary Joyce Robbins, and I'm here with Maribel, and, Maribel, I like the data you just gave us. I've given it a lot of thought, and one consideration to think about is how programs support education staff to improve their practice. So, for example, how can we help programs give lift to opportunities and structures that will better support education staff to be intentional when they plan for high-quality teaching experiences and interaction?

Maribel: What do you mean by that, Mary Joyce?

Mary Joyce: Well, I think that if we want programs to focus on ambitious instruction or instructional rigor, then we need a different approach. Programs need to dedicate – I think even prioritize – time for education staff to collaborate, to become intentional about their teaching practice, and to really strategize for improved learning. So, in this case, it's about the job-embedded routine of intentional team lesson planning.

Maribel: How different is that from what they're already doing, Mary Joyce?

Mary Joyce: Well, that's a good question, Maribel, so, let's think some more about that. In this next section, we're going to describe the elements of job-embedded professional learning or intentional processes for lesson planning. Research has demonstrated that the more effective impact on student achievement is when education staff collaborate on improving their practice of teaching for learning, and as we think about how to support programs with this practice, we also consider the different program settings. So, we want to include center-based, home-based, family child care, as well as considerations for supporting children with special needs and those children who are dual language learners. We also want to mention that as we work through this discussion and we talk about teaching children, remember that our home visiting professionals are applying these practices as they support parents in the development of their children. So, our goal is to be intentional with the lens that we apply for support. So, what are the supports? These are key supports that are the key elements of what we call job-embedded professional learning. What's really important is that they occur in the workplace and that they're focused on the current children in the classroom and their learning needs. They're focused on current issues of practice and problem-solving in daily practice that teachers confront, and they also increase proficiency about what to teach and how to teach it in a developmentally appropriate sequence. So, let's look at what the data is telling us about the connections between what we are saying is job-embedded learning and student achievement, and see how this might address that urgent need for improvement that we've been talking about.

Maribel: So, to summarize the slides, Mary Joyce, educators working in settings with strong professional collaboration improve their capacity by 38%, resulting in improved student outcomes. So, in essence, when teacher effectiveness improves, student achievement improves. So, clearly, collaborating education staff is the key to improving teaching and learning, so let's take a look at some examples of educator collaboration.

Mary Joyce: So, some of you may already be implementing some of these job-embedded learning routines, and today, we want to look a little closer at the framework educational managers can use for the routine of facilitated lesson planning or what we call the job- embedded routine of intentional team lesson planning, and, of course, this is all for the purpose of improving teacher effectiveness and outcomes for children.

Maribel: So, when we talk about facilitated team lesson planning, this means that it's guided and supported by an instructional leader. For example, an instructional leader is an education manager, education coordinators, coaches in your program, anyone in your program who was responsible for shaping and improving the practices of teaching and learning. The instructional leader ensures that the process of lesson planning is reflective, focused on children's learning and purposeful. The critically important factor for advancing children's learning in the lesson planning process is the importance of the weight that education staff give to planning for their own active roles, so what do we mean by that? For all adults in the learning environment, be engaged in the process of facilitating learning. So, what we're talking about is an intentional structured process for lesson planning. So, let's take a look at a poll. So, in your experience – we're going to ask you all – education managers and other leaders on the webinar with us – in your experience, how do education staff plan for intentional, purposeful, and engaging learning experiences for children? A, they plan alone, B, plan together with the education manager or the coach, plan together with other education staff or parents or, D, education managers, instructional leaders facilitate the team lesson planning with the entire education staff. Mary Joyce, look, we've got 35.4% of the participants on the webinar say that most of their educators plan alone. Let's see. We have about 9% that say they plan together with education managers or their coach, and about 43%, which is good, probably fairly close, plan together with the education staff or parents. 12%, a little over 12% or 13% of education staff plan with the education manager instructional leader who facilitates team lesson planning with the entire education staff. Wonderful, so we're breaking about even. Ideally, where we would love to be is where we have education staff really facilitating team lesson planning with the instructional team.

Mary Joyce: Well, yeah. That would be the ideal. We know that sometimes it's not practical to be able to have that time all together, but it really does point to the fact that the most effective way to plan for intentional and purposeful high-quality teaching is for the lesson planning to be facilitated by the education manager or instructional leader and to have effective teaching practices for children's learning. Now, we know that there are many approaches and templates that people use for their lesson plans, and each of you may have different forms or templates or strategies that you use, but, really, what we want to get across today is what matters most isn't the specific format or the forms that you use for lesson planning but rather that the critical components that we're going to talk about are embedded in your process of lesson planning in order to make it purposeful, intentional and have the best outcome, so let's look at what those critical components of lesson planning are, and let's examine a coherent process that we can talk about to build education staff capacity for rigor in their planning, one that advances learning for all children. So, what we know is that teams who plan together review data, they ask questions, they support each other in this process of inquiry and gathering data, they enable each other to serve as cognitive coaches for children's learning and provide facilitated inquiry-based learning for all children and debunk myths about teaching practices, so they are really problem-solving together, and when education managers are present in this process to facilitate, everyone's voice is included. The conversations stay focused. Each team member contributes their own perspective and knowledge to the discussion, and they use data and inquiries to support each other and learn from each other, challenge each other and ultimately deepen their understanding of children's learning needs and how to support children's full development and success, and in addition to that, when the education manager is present, that person is part of the process and learns as well, so how do we structure a routine of team lesson planning? How do you keep the topics focused on children's learning? So, we want to talk about frameworks that we can use, resources and tools to support intentional planning.

Speaking about designing the learning environment for children's explorations, the experiences and activities, are they primarily designing adult-directed learning experiences and lessons or learning explorations to include their own active roles in advancing children's learning, or would you say this might be more a mix of number one and number two?

So, take a look at that and let us know what your thoughts are. OK. So, this is interesting. It looks like currently, education staff are primarily designing a mix of one and two, one being the learning environment, so those experience and activities, and then lessons, adult-directed lessons, so 13.8% are focused on the learning environment, 6.7 on adult-directed learning lessons, 8.8% on learning explorations that include their own active role, and 70% say it's a mix of the learning environment and the lesson itself. What we really want to emphasize here is that all of those things are important, but what we really want to get to is the intentionality of the relationship for learning and the learning explorations that educators can plan their own role, so in fact, they're planning two things. They're planning for children's lessons and learning, but they're also planning for their own teaching strategy and how they can elicit thinking and learning. So, ideally, we would like them to be really thinking about their own roles, and in order to do this, the education staff does have to be ready for two things, and that is, one, they need to have the knowledge to know what level of understanding each child is at, and what would be the next step? What would be the next step in development? And then they'd have to have the sufficient proficiency to be able to do that facilitation and make it happen.

So, let's look now at a strategy that we have called the focused teaching cycle, which is our framework to support collaborative, intentional instructional practices, and if we look here at this slide, we see a group ... a circle of red boxes, and this is what we sometimes refer to as out- of-the-actions intentional planning, and it's really the glue of it. It is focused around having some reflection and inquiry and collaboration in order to look at standards, research-based standards and goals to guide, what is it we want the children to learn? And then on the right is the formative assessment of children's progress. Where are the children with regard to the standards and goals? What do they already know, and what has been their experiences, and how are we going to build on what they know and bring them to the next level? What interactions and instruction can the teacher... can the educator design? And not only what materials and interactions to design, but what can the teacher do to ensure that all the planning in the actions will support the instructional supports of teaching and learning, which we often refer to the class? And then once they have made those plans for what they are going to say and do and what they want the children to learn, then they have to talk about, how are they going to facilitate it? What are they going to look for? How are they going to know that the children are in fact learning and that their strategies are working? What evidence are they going to look for, and how will they document that? And once they have that plan in mind, that is they're out of the action planning, and they are ready to go and interact with the children in the action. So we just want to mention that this is a universal tool, the focused teaching cycle. It can be applied across multiple settings, and it can include home-based family child care and center-based settings and programs, so once all this good work has been done or out of the action planning, we want to talk about what happens in the action, so, Maribel, what do you see in this classroom this month? Imagine it's October in a preschool classroom. What do you see?

Maribel: I see pumpkins. I see orange colors and brown colors.

Mary Joyce: OK. So, there are a lot of engaging hooks to keep the children interested, but do you wonder, how is the educator focused on the learning? What are they thinking about what they want the children to learn and to understand? The focused teaching cycle is the framework as a tool that we are suggesting here as an organizer that education managers and teaching teams can use together to deepen their understanding about high-quality teaching practices, the how and the what of teaching. Now, whatever format your teachers or your home visitors are currently using for lesson planning either in their classrooms or during home visits, we encourage you to consider where and how they can integrate these key components into the processes that they use to strive for high-quality teaching practices. Now, I think it's safe to say that here in this group of education managers, we have a comprehensive understanding among all of us of each of these elements of the focused teaching cycle in the planning stage, so using the standards and the curriculum goals, using the formative assessments with data of children's progress, designing engaging explorations, interactions and instructions and then facilitating and documenting the learning is the center of how we get to intentional practices. So, now, we want to look at the center of that, and it talks about reflection, inquiry and collaboration, and as we said, this is the glue of what teachers do when they plan together.

So, the second part of the focused teaching cycle after the planning is in the action, and this is where we really give lift to those instructional supports through the adult-child interactions, so let's unpack this in the action phase a little bit more. We have three components of it: observe, reflect and respond. And this is a purposeful construct to bring the rigor of the class and to the interactions, to deepen cognition and advance children's executive function, so looking at first observe, we set all those goals and objectives and activities out of the actions. Now we want to observe in the actions. How are the children using those activities and materials that they planned? Are they meeting the goals and objectives that were identified? Observe calls for listening, observing for the emotions, the conversations, the connections and meaning in context that the children are bringing to the experience and responding, and the next one is reflect, so they've observed what's going on. Now, they want to reflect on their observations and determine if the learning that is... determine how the learning is unfolding and if the child or the children are meeting those targeted benchmarks or not. Reflect calls for the adult to pause and to think. What connections can I make to enhance understanding or correct misunderstanding, to advance thinking or to support persistence and engagement? So, after that reflection, and this would probably all happen fairly quickly, then respond, so based on what they've observed and reflected on with the children, the educator will then draw on the concepts and the constructs of the class instructional support, the engaged supports for learning to respond to the children, to probe for learning and to give that cognitive crack to advance children's cognition. Now, we know that this doesn't happen naturally for education staff. We know it's hard work. As the class scores suggested, we looked at those class scores that told us that there was a real struggle, so to do this effectively and consistently, teachers, educators really need to plan intentionally for the interactions. They need to individualize and take into account the needs of each child. They need ongoing support from their education managers to deepen their understanding of and competencies to use all the elements of the focused teaching cycle, so they need knowledge of the class, and then they need the proficiency to be able to transfer the knowledge to practice and to plan their teaching.

So, to summarize, we want to kind of pull this all together for you. We are saying that the education staff becomes most effective when they integrate all the elements of the focused teaching cycle, all of those elements to be intentional so that they can plan nurturing, organized and instructional learning experiences for children. The essential focus of the planning process is aimed towards ambitious instruction, is implemented through trusting relationships.

Education managers can protect time to routinely facilitate teams' lesson planning in this model, deepen the professional growth of education staff, and they improve outcomes for children and families. So, we uploaded in one of your widgets, you'll be able to access some resources that we've provided to help structure the conversation for facilitated team lesson planning, so the slide you're looking at is what we call a worksheet, a protocol, a worksheet that helps structure the conversation so they stay focused on children's learning, so they stay focused on planning intentionally for those interactions. We also uploaded a couple of guides that the teaching staff can use with all of the questions that will guide them through each of the elements of the focused teaching cycle, so those are uploaded in your widgets. You'll have a guide for preschool, for 3 to 5, and a guide for infant and toddler staff.

So, I hope that you all will be able to access those and include them in your processes. So, we wanted to give you an idea of what this looks like in practice, so we're going to show you a video of a classroom educator engaged in an interaction with an infant in a toddler classroom. We're going to ask you to think about the elements of the focused teaching cycle as you watch the video, and then, we're going to ask you to highlight which elements of the focused teaching cycle you observe in practice. [Video begins]

Angela: Yeah, and what is that? What is that Rylan? Is that an orange ball? Can you make it turn? Can you turn the ball for me? Yes. That's a good boy. Move it, Rylan. Move it with your fingers. Oh, Rylan is doing it! You are doing it, Rylan, all by yourself. Look at there.

Lenisa: Me and my co-teacher, Ms. Angela, we work together once a week to make sure our lesson plan is completed.

Angela: You like that.

Lenisa: When we look at our individual curriculum plans, each child in our classroom has their own ICP, and based on the different developmental domains – social, emotional, language, literacy, physical, fine motor – we try to prepare them with goals that we want them to meet, depending on their developmental age.

Woman: Four, five ... Oh, keep going! You got it. You got it! Six, seven, eight ...

Angela: We try to meet the needs of every child, and we do realize that each child develop differently, so we want to capture and meet them right at their needs.

Lenisa: Amias, where's Demarco? Say, "peekaboo." Say, "peekaboo." Where's Amias? Thank you. You want to do it, Rylan? Here, ready, ready, ready? Peekaboo! In order to create an ICP for a child, you have to observe and collect information to know that child to know what they're good at and to figure out goals – what will make them better.

Angela: And a lot of times, when I plan different assignments like that, and I see that it's not capturing that child, I think of something quick, or I let the child lead me, because if I can see I'm playing peekaboo with you, and you're over here in the blocks, I'm like, "OK. He's not interested in this." So, I'll join in and follow his lead with the blocks and try and ask more questions like, what are you doing over here?

Lenisa: Yay! Clap for Amias! Yay! You did it Amias! You got the rectangle, yay! Let's see. Demarco, do you want to put it back in? I have one child that specifically doesn't like to put their hand in things, so I try to put different materials inside of the box, and the child was sitting next to me, so I role modeled, doing it myself to try to make them feel more comfortable, and then I did the hand over hand to see if they were comfortable with just even touching the top of the box, which eventually that child was because they grabbed the toy out. So, she's progressing on that goal, feeling more comfortable but just wanting her to continue that by providing her with more sensory experiences. Want to take some more out here?

Angela: We can see growth the way we plan the lesson plan because we work at each individual level, and it's just so great to just see the children growing and moving up from where they were. When we do the next ICP plan the next month, we can see a whole big difference in that.

Lenisa: Yeah, should we splash? Should we splash? You know how to splash? You got to take your hand. It keeps me motivated and on my toes throughout the day to know exactly what I should be doing, and it's also helpful for other people that come into our classrooms. This is the activity. This is how to implement it. These are the materials that are needed for it, and then, also there's a section in our lesson plan where notes can be added. That way, if a child isn't interested in it or if I have a child that doesn't like sensory play, I can let that teacher know by placing it on my lesson plan and also connecting it again to their ICP, making sure that when I implement that activity, that I am writing anecdotes as to whether they are progressing in that goal, if they still need more work. More, say, "more," Amias, more. Yes, Amias, yes, you did it, Amias, more, more Play-Doh. Here, I'm going to squeeze the Play-Doh. Can you squeeze it?

Squeeze the Play-Doh. [Video ends]

Mary Joyce: So, now we want to ask you a few questions about what you saw in the video. Which parts of the "Focus Teaching Cycle" did you observe? So, we have standards and curriculum goals, formative assessments, designing interactions and instruction, and facilitating and documenting learning. We're going to give you a few minutes to answer those. OK, so, it looks about 4.6% of you thought that they saw the evidence of standards and curriculum goals. 3.8% thought that there was a evidence of formative assessment, but a good 61.5% of you saw real strong evidence of designed interactions and instruction, and 30% saw evidence of facilitating and documenting learning. I think what really came across to me was that these teachers were very engaged with the children. They were having very powerful interactions, that they were very focused on what they wanted the children to learn, to know and be able to do, so they had guiding standards or goals that they had established, and they had a real element of engagement, and it made the children also look as though they were very focused and kept kind of persisting in the activity, so it just felt to me, Maribel, like the intentionality came through in here. How exactly many of each one of these, you know, we could always discuss further, I'm sure, but I think that what it gives, say, to me was that the intentionality increased the children's engagement. It increased their learning, but also, I loved seeing how the teachers very engaged and focused on assessing whether or not their teaching practices that they had put so much effort into and thought about were really effective or not.

Maribel: I agree, Mary Joyce, and earlier in this presentation, we talked about every educator is a cognitive coach of children's learning, right? The beauty of the process of a team who plans together is that everyone has an intentional role for ensuring that they're targeting those learning objectives and they're engaging children, so those interactions are intentionally planned to meet those objectives. So, yeah, so, the intentionality of effective teaching came out through their process of applying the elements of the Focus Teaching Cycle.

Mary Joyce: I also want to point out, and I don't know if we emphasized it a lot, but the fact that when the education manager or the instructional leader or coach is there with the teachers in the planning process, we did talk about how it gives everybody the opportunity to have a voice and participate in the process and contribute. But I also want to emphasize that the coach or the instructional leader or manager is also learning a great deal about his teachers or her teachers and how well they are understanding what their process is, how well they're understanding the Focus Teaching Cycle, the knowledge that they're trying to use and transfer to practice, and the more knowledge that coach or that education manager or instructional leader has, the more they can support and facilitate teachers' growth and development and professional learning. So, I think that there are so many different layers and elements to using a framework like the Focus Teaching Cycle. I'd like to say everybody learns. The children learn.

The teachers learn, and the coach and the manager learn as well and support and each other.

Maribel: I couldn't agree with you more, Mary Joyce. So, wonderful, this has been a good conversation. I want to just leave you all with some forward thinking, and we'll have some time to take some Q&A questions through the chat, so some forward thinking is connect. We all want you to think about as education managers to connect information what you already know and are doing with your educators. Support your education staff by facilitating team lesson planning. Support education staff to incorporate the language and the lens of the class in planning for effective adult-child interactions during the team lesson planning process.

Incorporate the use of the focus teaching cycle elements and tools in your lesson planning process, so a new role as education managers, consider using the elements of the Focus Teaching Cycle for how you plan for and design professional learning for your education staff. That really goes to the point that Mary Joyce was making a second earlier about how you can also apply the process of the Focus Teaching Cycle as an education manager to gauge the level of understanding, competence and proficiency that your staff have with those elements of the Focus Teaching Cycle, and that will help inform you about what types of jobs implement professional learning, you can certainly take a deep dive on to continue to build the capacity as a staff around these core elements of the Focus Teaching Cycle, whether that's use of data, whether that's effective use of standards and goals, whether that's making meaning of learning to understand how to scaffold that learning. The class is a beautiful tool to continue to take a deep dive on with staff, right? It's a journey, right? It's a journey to plan for an implement effective instructional practices. Teaching and learning is very complex, as we well know, and as the class data tells us, right? The key is to stay the course, plan and structure times to facilitate the lesson planning and continue on the journey. So, with that, I'll turn it over to Roselia who has some closing remarks.

Roselia Ramirez: Great. Thank you so much, ladies. That was a lot of information to take in. It is great there is such a tool out there to help our teaching staff with that intentional and purposeful lesson planning that will help them towards achieving those outcomes for children and families that, you know, their programs are set now to accomplish as they're working towards their school readiness goals and just seeing all the wonderful things that children could really benefit from as they're going through our program. So, we thank you for being with us today, and we hope to hear more about this tool, and just before we close out today or see if we have any additional questions that might come in for you guys, we wanted to just kind of share some information. Some of you may have already heard about the upcoming Education Managers Institute, but if you haven't, go ahead and save the date. The Office of Head Start Education Managers Institute will be coming your way. There is planning that is taking place as we speak and July the 15th through the 17th in Columbus, Ohio. So, it's an exciting opportunity for leadership to come together and just really engage in some professional development opportunities, so it's first time for such an institute, and so we're really excited. Information on how to register for the event will be available soon via the ECLKC, so be on the lookout for that. Again, that is July the 15th through the 17th, and that'll be out in Columbus, Ohio, so we're excited to be seeing folks in person out in Columbus. The other thing I wanted to mention, I know we do have some folks that are already members of the Educational Leaders Community. This is a community that is available on MyPeers. If you're not familiar with MyPeers, if you go to the ECLKC, scroll down all the way to the bottom, there's a link where you can sign up to become a part of the Education Leaders Community, and this is a great place to continue the discussion around this and other topics. I facilitate that community, and I've seen a lot of some of the questions that came in around lesson plan sharing and those kinds of things, and so this Education Leaders Community is a great place for you to interact with your peers and ask questions and kind of see what other folks are doing in their programs, sharing some challenges and then hearing some success that other folks have had, so we do encourage you to check out this community and continue the conversation in that community there. Then lastly again, we do want to thank our partners and our colleagues over at The Ounce. As Maribel and Mary Joyce shared, this is some work that they've done some research around, and so it's really exciting that there is a tool to help support that work around intentional lesson planning. So, with that, let's see if we have any questions that have come up in the Q and A and see if we can kind of get to those. We do have a question that came up around there's someone who was a coach to seven child providers that have 12 children, ranging from infant to 4 and older. They struggle with lesson planning for all the different children, so how can they help with planning so that it is not so overwhelming with all of their duties? I don't know if Maribel or Mary Joyce, you might have some suggestions for this individual.

Mary Joyce: You know, that is a question that often comes up, whether it's with family home care or classroom, there's such a wide range of children, and how do teachers meet all those needs? And I think that the important thing is to really focus on some of the things that we talked about in terms of knowing that we want children. We want to have some research-based standards and goals. We want to know what we want them to learn and be able to do and have some data on, "What do they already know? What are their experiences? What are these things that they have already shown proficiency in, and how can we build on those?" And every single day and every single minute of the day cannot possibly meet the needs of every single child, but if the teacher consistently focuses on, "What do I want the children to learn? What do they already know, and how can I build on those strengths and those experiences," then ultimately, everybody does learn. And keep in mind too that very often, we're unaware of how much children are learning from each other. Even though we may not be directly involved in those interactions that those activities, if they are positive and they're a nurturing environment, there's an organized environment, and children have the opportunity to interact with each other as well as with the adults, then there is a lot of learning that can happen even besides what is intentionally planned.

Maribel: Yeah, I'm also thinking that teachers of mixed-age classrooms, as the one you described, can also think about a tiered approach to lesson planning, right? You can have a group of kids that you can plan who are much more advanced, or you can have, if you think about the PBIS method, where you have a top-tier group, those are your kids that probably are behind and haven't met those learning targets or those developmentally appropriate milestones. Those are the children you want to spend more time with in those adult-to-adult interactions, and then you have some students or children that are much more advanced, right, that you can pair up with some of the children that are right at the border, or you can have, when we talk about a cognitive coach of children's learning, everyone in the classroom. You can have an assistant or an aide pair up with those subgroups of kids and focus on where you need to direct them next to. So, the beauty of the process of team lesson planning is that it allows for a collaborative approach to figure those strategies out together, to understand the learning, to understand the learners in the group, how we're going to structure ourselves and organize ourselves so we can best support the needs of all of those children, regardless of their ages.

Roselia: Great. All right. So, this might be a great question to continue the conversation on MyPeers, but we did have someone that came in, and they're asking about, what about large case loads? So, what do they say to ed managers that have large case loads, and so, how do you suggest they meet with that many staff? So, in this case, each of our ... The ed supervisors have about nine to 10 classrooms and so just trying to, I guess, look at how this approach, how to have a collaborative approach when there's large case loads to manage.

Maribel: So, what I'll say is it's a very similar response to what we just talked about, right? In terms of how we think about a tiered approach to supporting children, we can also think about a tiered approach to supporting staff. The intent of the Focus Teaching Cycle is to begin to support teachers in a mindset shift in thinking about intentionality not just around for planning for children's learning but planning for their active role to facilitate learning. So, you're going to have some teachers that are really, you know, veterans, seasoned teachers that really have this down pat, right? Those teachers can advance some of this method with their own teaching teams, and if you have a large case load, you might want to pair your educators that are at that top tier that need more intensive supports, and then you have some educators that may need some targeted support, that don't need that kind of intensity and time from an education manager, and then you have your teachers which we call, your very proficient, you know, your much more advanced teachers, who what we call are at the universal level. They got this.

They've been doing it for a long time. They can facilitate the process with their own teams or with other teams that might be at a targeted level. So, again, it's a process that you can ... a parallel process of thinking about a target ... oh, my gosh, a tiered approach to supporting a large number of education staff, right? So, you can also then think about ... You might have teachers that you can then decide, "Well, I can work with this group in community of practice and really focus with them on understanding how to apply the standards and goals and how to think about benchmarks," right? You can do that in a professional development that targets all the staff. You can then also think about your staff that might be struggling with adult-to-child interactions, right? Those teachers may need more one-on-one coaching, right? So, you can apply those other routines of professional development to continue to support and grow the proficiency on all of these constructs of the Focus Teaching Cycle. And the same is true, like you do in a classroom when you have all of these children who are learning at different developmental areas, levels, right, you have differentiated learning targets, and you would do the same thing for your professional staff.

Roselia: Right. Thank you, ladies. So, we're at time today for our session. I do really encourage you guys to get on to the MyPeers and continue the conversation. We had some questions that came in about teacher buy-in and how to just kind of work through some of those challenges, and so, we really encourage you to get on there and share with your peers to share one another some strategies that you may have done in your programs to kind of help with that teacher buy-in. So, with that, we thank you for joining us today, and again, thank you to our partners over at The Ounce for coming on with us and sharing this great information.