Dupage Policy Journal

The Addison School District learned details about a new professional development program at one of their schools during a recent board meeting.

Staff at Lincoln has been doing what are called Instructional Practices Inventory (IPI) walkthroughs, where they briefly walk through a class and evaluate what the majority of students are doing, and then code the level of engagement afterward. IPI training is meant to help teachers better understand and work with students’ levels of engagement, not necessarily meaning their level of being on task, but rather their cognitive perspective and focus throughout different areas.

“I know for years being a teacher, we've always been encouraged to get into other  teachers' classrooms,” Lincoln Elementary teacher Michael Brumbaugh said at the Feb. 22 meeting. “Some of the best things that we see is we get to see other teachers teach or we get to see some of the great things going on. But a lot of times teachers are reluctant to go into classrooms or have other people.” 

There are six levels of engagement, according to IPI protocol: level 1 is complete disengagement, level 2 is student working with teacher not engaged, level 3 is student working with teacher while engaged, level 4 is teacher-led instruction, level 5 is student-led conversations, and level 6 is student active engaged learning.

While a mixture of several of these categories is needed for quality classroom instruction and learning, the goal is to have students in levels 5 and 6 at the end of a unit, taking ownership and control of the lessons they are being taught, Brumbaugh said.

The plan tracks student-teacher engagement, and its objective is to do that during typical class time, Brumbaugh said. Thus, evaluations aren’t generally done the day after a holiday, the first or last 10 minutes of the day, or other transitional times, he added. 

“We don't code it (at those times) because we want real, authentic data, and teachers will be given a heads-up that IPI walkthroughs are going to occur sometime in the week, but they're not going to have advance knowledge of when it's when it's occurring,” Brumbaugh said.

Lincoln’s IPI scores were in the middle of the categories. The majority of classrooms, 63%, scored a 4. Just over 25% of classrooms scored a category 3, and just under 11% of classrooms reached a level 5. Teachers have said that they enjoyed and valued the training and wanted to continue it in the building and district as they felt it would help them improve their student engagement and higher order thinking skills in each lesson.