About six years ago I was in a New York hospital recovering from a near-fatal bout of sepsis when a large group of people, all dressed in white, came into my hospital room and gathered at the end of my bed.  I was groggy from drugs and had no idea about what was going on. In fact, the next day I wasn’t even sure it had actually happened. Perhaps I had been hallucinating?  I asked a nurse, who told me it was part of ‘Grand Rounds,’ when doctors, residents, interns, and medical students go from room to room to talk about the condition and treatment of patients with that particular condition, and about the larger picture: how that condition is treated elsewhere, its causes, the prognosis for survival, and so forth.  Teachable moments, created by those in charge of education.

I later learned that Grand Rounds may be live-streamed, sometimes with actors standing (lying in?) for patients because of complaints from actual patients about insensitive treatment. (IE, they didn’t like lying there hearing their condition discussed openly by strangers.)

But the idea of information-sharing appealed to me.  How could it be applied to public schools, I wondered?  Could teachers systematically and routinely share relevant information about how they were getting through to certain students….and having trouble connecting with others?  And then I flashed back to a series I had done for the NewsHour somewhere around 1990.  We followed two rookie teachers in a Maryland school district for a year, one in a public high school, the other in a public middle school.  While it wasn’t a particularly memorable series, one segment stayed with me: We filmed all the 7th Grade teachers getting together to talk about individual students.  Basically, they shared what seemed to work with particular kids, and what didn’t.  Some openly voiced their frustrations with–even dislike of–certain students, something I don’t remember being able to do when I was teaching, but a healthy way of ‘clearing the air,’ it seemed to me. 

What we discovered was that, at that middle school, teachers met weekly, by grade, to share insights, ask questions, and express concerns.  It was a team-building exercise focused primarily on improving student outcomes, something that made sense then and makes even more sense today. I’m calling this Education Grand Rounds….but hope someone will come up with a better name.

I think we filmed 10 or 15 conversations about individual kids during that time period.  I’m guessing that their shared insights resulted in more effective teaching, more satisfying results with students, and in some cases close attention to a student’s problems.  Because no teacher wants to be continually disciplining students and putting out fires, and because teachers are willing to share success stories, what I think of as Education Grand Rounds make educational sense.  

Absent Education Grand Rounds, information sharing is left to chance, during a lunch break perhaps.  A retired teacher, a good friend, told me this story, which I know is representative of what happens all too often: “Leodardis was a child from El Salvador in my class. No one had done anything for him in his life, but he loved my class. He couldn’t see without his glasses, and that’s when he would act out, which is why I always made sure he had his glasses.  I even bought him a string to hold them around his neck, like mine.  When Leodardis went onto the next grade, the teacher asked me if he was always so badly behaved. ‘Does he have his glasses,’ I asked?  The teacher didn’t even know he wore glasses. It was all written up in the report I had filed, but she had never read it.“

While many private school faculty meet routinely to talk about individuals, it will be tougher for public schools, whose teachers are, in restaurant parlance, ‘fully booked,’ with perhaps only one free period a day, plus a few minutes for lunch.   Asking teachers to work longer hours–IE, meeting after school–probably won’t work. Schedules have to be redesigned.

As with creating extended homerooms, making Education Grand Rounds part of a school’s routine will involve reworking the daily calendar.  Like other changes I’m suggesting, this won’t be easy, but it can be done, because I saw it in action, albeit only a few times in my 41-year career as an education reporter.

(Interestingly, an Education Professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, Dr. Jennifer Gore, and a colleague have developed what they call “Quality Teaching Rounds,” where groups of teachers watch each other teach and then share their thoughts about the pedagogy. Its focus is on improving teaching, not getting to know students better. I’m indebted to Professor David Imig of the University of Maryland for this information.)

Here are the other steps that I believe will improve public schools, with hot links to each: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, and Ask the Right Question

I’m hoping you will share the links with people who have the power to change public schools, because it’s not enough to fight against those who would destroy public education. The system itself must improve, and that happens best at the level of the individual school.