What Should I Look for Three Months After a Workshop?

An instructional coach asked me this question recently, and it is one I hear from principals and district leaders all the time:

“We sent a group of teachers to ADI training in the summer. I want to walk through their classrooms this fall and figure out if the training worked. What should I be looking for? And what separates the classrooms where it sticks from the ones where it doesn’t?”

It is exactly the right question to ask, and it is also the one most walkthrough tools are not built to answer.

Most walkthrough checklists look for surface features: students are sitting in groups, the handout is out, there are whiteboards on the tables, the teacher is circulating. Those features are easy to see, and they are also the features that survive when the practice itself has not. A classroom can have every one of them and still be running the same question, answer, evaluate pattern it ran before the workshop.

The difference between classrooms where the training sticks and classrooms where it does not is rarely effort. It is usually what I call a near-miss: an enactment that carries the surface features of a practice without doing its work. Near-misses are fixable, but only if the walkthrough is designed to see them.

Below are seven things I look for. The first three are things to look at. The last four are things to listen for.

Three Things to Look At

1. Look at what students are trying to figure out, not whether they are busy.

Kneel down next to a group and ask, “What is your group trying to figure out right now?” In classrooms where the training has stuck, students can name the phenomenon and tell you why it is not settled yet. In a near-miss, students name the activity (“We’re doing the lab” or “We’re on the Plan part”). Busy is not the same as figuring something out.

2. Look for more than one idea on the table.

Argumentation only happens when the evidence could support more than one account. Look at the initial models or the draft arguments around the room. Are they different from each other? The near-miss here is a teacher who poses a question with a known answer, treats the time before students produce it as uncertainty, and closes the discussion the moment the expected answer appears.

3. Look at what is public, and whether it is changing.

Where are student claims, evidence, and justifications recorded, and do those records get revised? In a classroom where ADI has taken hold, you will see places where the class has recorded where accounts disagree, not just where they agree. The near-miss is groups presenting finished arguments to the teacher in turn while everyone else waits for their own turn, with no way for one group’s thinking to bear on another’s.

Four Things to Listen For

1. Listen for who students are talking to.

Count, for two minutes, how many exchanges go student to student and how many go student to teacher. When the training has not stuck, almost every exchange routes through the teacher, even in a room arranged for group work.

2. Listen for disagreement, and where it is aimed.

In classrooms where ADI is working, disagreement sounds ordinary and is directed at ideas: “I don’t think your data shows that, because your third trial was different.” The near-miss is a room with respectful-talk norms posted on the wall and no disagreement at all, because the teacher redirects whenever an exchange starts to feel uncomfortable.

3. Listen for what the teacher does with an unexpected idea.

This is the single best indicator I know. When a student says something the teacher did not anticipate, does anything change? Does the teacher follow it, bring it to the class, or use it to set up the next discussion? The near-miss is a teacher who circulates, acknowledges every contribution warmly, and then proceeds with the planned sequence regardless of what was said.

4. Listen for how the class talks about quality.

Do students talk about what makes an argument strong, and do those criteria come from the class’s own work? Or is the argument template a worksheet to fill in, judged by whether every box has something in it? When a tool is working, it makes reasoning visible. When it is not, it becomes a substitute for reasoning.

Putting It All Together

None of these look-fors require a special rubric, and none require the teacher to be doing something dramatic while you are in the room. They require you to watch the thinking instead of the furniture.

What I have come to believe is that the classrooms where training does not stick are almost never classrooms where teachers did not try. They are classrooms where the surface features arrived and the work behind them did not, usually because the teacher never had a chance to rehearse the practice in a low-stakes setting or to look closely at a record of their own teaching with someone else.

That matters for how you use what you see. If a walkthrough is evaluative, teachers will perform the surface features for you, and you will learn nothing. If it is formative, and the debrief starts with a question like “Where did the uncertainty go in that discussion?”, you will learn a great deal, and so will the teacher.

I would also encourage you to retire the walkthrough question “Is the teacher differentiating?” and replace it with a better one: “Is this learning experience meaningful, rigorous, and equitable for every student in the room?” That question points directly at the look-fors above.

How ADI Makes This Easier

The hardest look-fors to create from scratch are the first two, because they depend on a task that actually contains more than one defensible answer. That is design work, and it is exactly what Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) materials do for you. Every investigation is built around a phenomenon that admits multiple plausible explanations, so the uncertainty is there before the teacher says a word.

The seven-stage ADI instructional model also gives observers a shared vocabulary. If you know which stage a class is in, you know what should be happening: initial models in Task, sensemaking with texts in Ideas, critique in Share, discussion in Reflect. That makes it much easier to tell a near-miss from the real thing and to have a specific, useful conversation with the teacher afterward.

Planning your follow-up?

Learn more about ADI curriculum materials, the ADI Learning Hub, and our professional learning options, including ongoing implementation support, at argumentdriveninquiry.com.