Valor Collegiate’s Walk-Through Tool

by Eric Thomas and Todd Dickson

“The height of sophistication is simplicity.”
— Clare Boothe Luce

A few years ago, Todd Dickson walked through classrooms at Nashville’s Valor Collegiate Academies after spring testing had ended.

Something wasn’t right.

“I had a sick feeling in my stomach,“ the founder and CEO of the high-performing public charter school network said. “It just didn’t feel like what I wanted the experience of Valor classrooms to be for our kids.”

Dickson was most frustrated with his own leadership.

“I didn’t know how I would give feedback to a teacher on why things felt wrong or how to make it better. We didn’t have the language. We didn’t have the clarity of vision,” he lamented.

Then Dickson, Valor’s Chief Culture Officer Daren Dickson (Todd’s twin brother), and Chief Academic Officer Seneca Rosenberg set out to change things. They began with two questions: at the most basic level, what does the ideal classroom feel like for students, and what should the ideal learning experience mean for them?

After workshopping the idea with teachers and staff, the Valor team landed on their vision: Students deserve a predictable environment where they feel safe, known, affirmed, and engaged. Intellectually, their learning experience should be a joyful struggle.

But having a clear vision was not enough. Dickson knew they needed tangible descriptions of what actions and behaviors would drive progress. Then they needed a way to assess them frequently.

Valor capitalized on an opportunity working with Achievement First’s Charter Network Accelerator — a program that supports networks in creating and driving organization-wide priorities — and set out to design a powerful tool that would support this quest.

“We tried to distill our beliefs into their most powerful, simple essence for teachers,” Dickson said. “We needed these elements to be compelling and clear but also simple and measurable enough to observe in short walk-throughs.”

The beauty of Valor’s tool may be its simplicity. Many classroom observation protocols tend to be exhaustive, cumbersome, and subjective. Valor’s Walk-Throughs take only ten minutes and they are targeted, precise, and efficient.

Here are Valor’s Six Elements:

1. Safe — 100% moments: When a teacher gives a whole-class direction, do all students follow it within 5 seconds?

2. Productive — On Task: Are all students engaged in the activity of the classroom?

3. Known — Net Affirmations: When teachers interact individually with students, do they use affirming, neutral, or negative language?

4. Engaged — Student Lift: What % of time are students visibly engaged in cognitive work?

5. Pushed to Precision: When a student offers an answer or thought verbally or in writing, does the teacher accept it outright or push him/her to refine or extend the thought?

6. Vision of Excellence: Does the teacher have an annotated lesson plan with exemplars?

One of Valor’s big “a-ha” moments came when they first tested the tool with teachers. The clarity was empowering.

“The initial reaction was ‘Yes!” Dickson recounted, “that’s what I want my classroom to be like, where kids feel safe, productive, and known!”

The team realized that by directly connecting the metrics to descriptions of the student experience (safe, productive, known, engaged), they were tapping into a common set of values for teachers and leaders. It was something they could all rally around.

Valor also made important changes to the tool over time based on feedback from teachers.

“When we first observed classrooms, we didn’t have ‘net affirmations’ as an element,” Dickson recounted. “We added it because we got feedback that our expectation of ‘100% moments’ (where students are expected to follow every direction), if unbalanced, could feel really bad or punitive for kids at its worst.”

Valor didn’t want to remove the element, since students participating in class is an essential foundation for learning. Yet they realized they had to capture something about the way teachers were interacting with kids when holding them accountable.

They created the “Known + Net Affirmations” element to give language to their values. The Valor team believes that students should feel known and honored by every adult, and if that’s the case, they theorized that the types of interactions between students and staff, even when redirection or reprimands are given, should be affirming far more often than negative.

“If a student has negative interactions with adults 90% of the time, clearly something isn’t working,” Dickson said.

Valor created language to teach and identify whether interactions between adults and students were affirming, neutral, or negative, and they now use the Walk-Through tool to assess them.

Applying Barbara Fredrickson’s research on healthy relationships, the team landed on an expected ratio of 6:1 across the school. If adults are affirming students in six interactions for every one negative or neutral, the thinking goes, they’ve hit the right balance for holding high expectations yet also supporting students become their best selves.

Not only do they have an ideal, Valor now has the data to frame the debate, observing hundreds of classrooms in the first few weeks of each school year. The team is efficiently able to diagnose where individual teachers may be interacting more negatively with students and coach them to intentionally change their language or tone.

Perhaps the most unique element in the Walk-Through tool is the “Push to Precision” value. Underlying it is Valor’s belief that intellectual pursuit is about developing habits of curiosity, constantly challenging oneself to get better, working to refine an argument, and applying knowledge in new contexts.

Valor’s teachers routinely affirm students’ articulation of a thought and then challenge them to make it better (rather than accepting it outright). The result is that a lively intellectual environment grows over time. Discussions are rich with questioning, thinking, and refining ideas — from teachers and students.

With the Walk-Through tool, Valor can actually tell you which classroom in every school “Pushes to Precision” the most over a school year, and they see strong correlation to academic growth on MAP and TNReady assessments.

Last year, Valor’s students had the highest growth rates of all 1,380 elementary and middle schools in the state of Tennessee, and their students outperformed 98% of schools state-wide on absolute achievement. They may be on to something.

To download the comprehensive Valor Walk-Through tool, which includes training advice: Go here.