A Culture of Practice

In a previous post I laid out our big picture thinking about student culture and since I often get asked a version of “what do academics look like at KPEA?” I thought it made sense to lay out how we think about instruction at KPEA. Where we start at KPEA is not going straight to what purchased curriculum we should buy, but with bigger picture ideas. Just like I believe strongly that we need a point of view and an approach about hiring and student culture, a school needs to have a common understanding of what great instruction looks like and how kids learn. We use the term “Culture of Practice” to describe what this means at KPEA.

Carnegie Hall- Our visual anchor for Culture of Practice

The idea of a culture of practice means that we believe students will make dramatic academic progress when three key conditions are met: students have lots of time practicing skills and engaging with the material, the work is at the correct level for each student, and teachers give lots and lots of feedback to students. The corollary to these ideas is that just because you taught something doesn’t mean students have gotten it and kids don’t learn by osmosis. Kids need to be taught in an intentional way – and then they need practice those skills until they have mastered the concept.


What does this mean for our instructional programming? Lots of things:

• We maximize the amount of time that students are actually doing things. We try to limit carpet time to no more than 1/3 of each lesson so 2/3 of the time can be spent with students practicing and applying what they have learned. In reading, this looks like over an hour of guided reading and literacy centers (computers, phonics practice, buddy reading, etc.) each day so that students have guided almost every day. In math, this means a quick mini-lesson and then it’s students working individually or in small teacher-led groups to practice the daily skill and then cycling through math centers to review previously taught objectives. In writing, we use a workshop approach where students are doing authentic writing each day. In art class, students create their own sculptures, paintings, and collages. During Spanish, students sing songs to review basic vocabulary, draw and label family portraits with correct terms, and match which animals live on the farm or in the savanna.

• We make differentiation a part of what we do in every lesson so that students are working with material that is just the right level for them as much as possible. We use our reading data to place students in guided reading groups and then we adjust groups and objectives every three weeks to make sure we’re still hitting the right level. In math, we use our interim assessment data to identify students who need extra review and they get in-class small group instruction multiple times each week. We split students across all three homerooms for our word study (phonics) part of the day so that we can create up to 7 differentiated groups, ensuring that all students are mastering the key phonics skills they need and are pushed when they are ready. In kindergarten, we use different kinds of writing paper because we know that while some students are ready to write 2-3 lines of text, others still need larger spaces and handwriting guide lines to help them correctly form letters. Our special education teachers and reading specialist work with students who need even more individualized practice.



• The feedback part of the equation is where we have been working hardest this year to get better. A lot of our work has been done with guided reading since it’s the most important part of the day if we want our kids to become great readers. We’ve done about 15 hours of professional development on guided reading this year, with a lot of the focus being how to coach and support readers, going all the way down to the level of what prompts are best for when a student gets stuck on a certain kind of word. Teachers have also been working super hard on the delicate balance of how to guide and support students without simply giving them the answer. This means thinking hard about where the breakdown in learning is taking place, how far back you need to back-track, and what questions you can ask to help students get unstuck.  Our staffing plan and schedule are built around the idea of putting as many great teachers in front of our kids as possible because you can’t give good feedback as a teacher if you’re not working with small groups of kids. In both our kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms we have two highlight qualified teachers working with our students all day and both teachers are teaching all day. Both teachers are pulling guided reading groups, leading small math groups, conferencing with students about their writing, etc. By putting all our specials in the afternoon, I created a schedule where our “specials” teachers don’t just teach art, gym, and Spanish, but teach reading, word study, or math in the mornings. I and our assistant principal frequently teach guided reading, word study, and other subjects. 

This is just the beginning of how we think and what we do, but having a clear central concept is so important as a guiding tool because it gives us guidance as a school about what to focus on. For example, we’ve made a small but important change to the kindergarten schedule to increase the amount of time students have for independent reading. We’ve formalized our reading interim assessment schedule this year so that we are doing F&P running records every three weeks (combined with STEP assessments every 12 weeks) so that we are making sure to adjust reading groups frequently. And lots of the lesson plan feedback teachers get is around finding ways to increase the number of “at bats” a student gets to practice a skill.

If you want to see more details of what we think about instruction, check out our instructional vision document and our 1st grade schedule, both hosted at the KIPP Philadelphia website.