Lima City Schools Superintendent Jill Ackerman addresses educators from around the state in a debriefing Thursday.
Jacob Espinosa
LIMA —Around 30 educators visited Lima City Schools on Thursday as part of an Ohio Mid-Sized Schools Leadership Collaborative instructional round.
Superintendents, teachers and curriculum leaders from schools across the state similar to Lima schools toured several buildings throughout the district to observe classrooms and offer feedback to staff about student engagement, teacher knowledge and skill and content.
“What we’ve done today was to mix them all up into groups and give them some background on Lima City Schools, and we gave them what we call a ‘problem of practice,’ which is something that we wonder if we need to work further on,” Lima Superintendent Jill Ackerman said. “We deployed them to walk through our classrooms and come back with findings to summarize what they saw and give us two to three recommendations for us to implement going forward.”
Trotwood-Madison Director of Curriculum and School Improvement Rachael Murdock said that educators could take lessons from what Lima schools are doing and apply it to their own districts to go with the recommendations they had for the district.
“We can go back to our own districts and look through the same lens and look for improvements in our own districts,” she said. “And for Lima, by having people come in from the outside, you can see things more objectively.”
Jeff Talbert, Superintendent of Canton City Schools, and Wendy Hartzell, Chief Academic Officer of Warren City Schools, were on hand as members of the leadership collaborative and said that it was important to have representatives of districts who have the same issues, but that even then, no two districts are exactly alike.
“Today, we’re going to get to see how Lima is addressing their issues, how they are using their ‘problem of practice’ and strategies to do that,” Talbert said. “And as a collective group, I hope that one, we’re able to take away one or two things that we can take back to our districts to help us continue to improve in our practice, but we can leave a few nuggets here for Lima as they continue to go to work and move forward.”
“I think this really allows practitioners to use a critical eye and have some strong collaborative conversations about what they’re seeing tied to what the district wants to focus on,” Hartzell said.
Dr. Eugene Sanders, Executive Director of the leadership collaborative, said that the idea of the instructional rounds is designed to be similar to medical rounds in which doctors assess a patient’s options for treatment in a group.
“We go into the classrooms looking for specific observations for instructions and then it is essentially a peer-review for best practices,” he said. “It’s really beneficial for districts that have an authentic external review.”
Following the debriefing, the collaborative formed a draft report to share with the district and will return for a further debriefing in 30 days.
“The feedback that we get is authentic,” Ackerman said. “Because we’re getting it from real people who are in the field, doing our work every day. So it’s not an outside consultant or the Ohio Department of Education, these are real people that are in schools every day doing the work that we do.”
Lima City Schools, as a member of the collaborative, will be on the other side of the initiative as they visit schools in Cincinnati, Canton, Trotwood-Madison and other districts in the future.
Lima City Schools previously hosted instructional rounds in 2019.
The idea of the instructional rounds is designed to be similar to medical rounds in which doctors assess a patient’s options for treatment in a group, said Dr. Eugene Sanders, Executive Director of the leadership collaborative.
Reach Jacob Espinosa at 567-242-0399.
