Interview with Michelle Voelker, a Kagan Instructional Coach

Michelle Voelker, an Instructional Coach form Warren Woods Public Schools in Michigan shares her district’s journey with Kagan Cooperative Learning on “School Talks” with Dr. Robert Livernois on WJR 760 AM radio.

Interview Transcript

Robert: As part of our continued focus on getting back to school this fall, we have an exciting lineup of guests on the program, including Michelle Voelker, an instructional coach from Warren Woods Public Schools…

Robert: Welcome back to School Talks. Michelle Voelker, K-12 Instructional Coach from Warren Woods Public Schools. welcome to the program.

Michelle: Thanks for having me, Bob.

So in your role as Instructional Coach, you have been part of an initiative known as Kagan Cooperative Learning. Help us understand what makes it different from what we might see in a traditional classroom.

Robert: Absolutely. The focus of Kagan Cooperative Learning is to structure the interactions that our students are having with the goal of improving student engagement. So we're teaching students how to work as teams, to build trust, and to focus on learning together.

It's really an awesome way to learn. When you think of a traditional classroom, you're likely imagining a teacher at the front of the room, students are sitting in desks and all in rows. When teachers pose questions in those traditional rooms, likely some students raise their hands and others don't.

When a teacher calls on just one student, what I think we should all be wondering is what about everyone else? In a Kagan Cooperative Learning Classroom, it forces us out of that traditional model, and this is the type of work we are doing in Warren Woods, and it's work I'm really proud to be a part of. A Cooperative Learning Classroom is one where teachers think strategically about the type of learning they want their students to be doing, and then they plan Cooperative Learning structures around that type of work.

So in this example, replace posing a question and just calling on one student with a round robin structure, for example. We give our students the opportunity to think about their answers, to share them with their teams, and then when we're ready as a teacher to hear what those answers are, not only has the student been given the opportunity to think about their answer and to share, but they've also heard from their peers, which gives them the opportunity to expand their thinking and to revise that answer. We increase that accountability when we ask our kids to share something that they heard in their team, too.

It's a really important social skill that cooperative learning builds in. And for parents listening right now, this is a type of learning I would say you really want your kids to be doing.

Robert: You know, with the emphasis in the workforce on working in teams, this seems like a natural segue. So, what brought your district to Kagan as an initiative, and why do you feel it is an important focus given the current state of the district?

Michelle: Kagan has been around for more than 50 years. Dr. Spencer Kagan did a lot of research at the university level, and Warren Woods had a team of teachers trained in Kagan about 10 years ago. And when we examined district needs three years ago for SR3, teachers overwhelmingly named student engagement as an area of concern.

Schools were seeing issues with behavior, a lack of social skills, and students who were struggling academically coming back to in-person learning. So because cooperative learning can address all of those needs, a five-year Kagan training plan was put into place, and instructional coaching was put in to support it, and that's my role.

Robert: That's your role, yes. And you mentioned ESSER 3. Just for our listening audience, ESSERS is an acronym for federal funding that districts received during the COVID pandemic and it came with certain expectations.

So that's a really good connection and more importantly, a really good use of that kind of funding to help students. What challenges might a teacher face in trying to rule this out in his or her classroom?

Michelle: Absolutely. This type of learning, when a traditional teacher hears it, it takes a bit of a leap of faith and it takes that tenacity to continue to work on it. It takes some time to implement.

A lot of times teachers are worried that students within their teams are going to share incorrect answers, or that they'll get off task, or that the teacher loses control of their classroom environment. For those fears, I would really say to remember the management and the routines that we're embedding with our students. We're modeling and reinforcing how kids can coach their peers, how they can hold each other accountable, and how they can respectfully disagree, which I think is a huge skill for our kids nowadays.”

So the classroom using structures may not necessarily be a quiet classroom, but it is one that is entirely focused on learning. I've also experienced the perception that implementation will take too much time for the teacher and too much effort. In my role as an instructional coach, I've worked in a variety of ways to support that.

I've planned alongside my teachers where I ask them, give me an example of a call on one question, can we replace that with a cooperative conversation? I've created materials to help support team building and class building because even though Kagan will often say, you don't need stuff to do cooperative learning, sometimes you do need physical material. So I took away that roadblock for my teachers.

Some other teachers have just wanted to see it work with their kids because in their minds, it looks great in PD, but it doesn't work for my kids. And I jumped in and modeled the structures. And I had a reluctant teacher this year say, gosh, I wish I would have tried.

“This has really worked well and look how excited my kids are. And now I have teachers asking to use my templates to create their own materials. We just have to meet the staff where they are because the goal of this implementation is to get them one step closer to that fidelity level that we really want them to get to, which is why our most recent efforts in Warren Woods is to train teachers and administrators in what they call Kagan Coaching, which is kind of like athletic coaching.

You observe a structure and you make fine-tuned changes in the moment. And we're excited to add that at Warren Woods this year.

Robert: Fantastic. And you raise an important point. Given education has been for decades really good at starting things, especially given the symbiosis that is in and around education from all the different stakeholders.

And given that level of change in symbiosis, what kind of metrics will you be looking for to measure the effectiveness of this as you move through the school year?

Michelle: Like I said, this is a five-year plan. And Warren Woods, and I will start by saying just qualitatively, the feeling that you got in a cooperative learning classroom is incredible. We are really proud to say our youngest learners are using cooperative learning structures.

We have our high school that is using it in culinary arts, PE, our resource rooms, all the way up through our advanced placement courses. Our alternative high schools are benefiting from those things. I recently had a middle school science teacher.

She committed to using a structure called Quiz-Quiz-Trade towards the end of the year. And she emailed me saying her class average had gone from less than 70 percent to over 90 percent. It was the same students in front of her, but we had just deliberately implemented cooperative learning.”

Our high school English department, our SAT prep unit, our 11th graders responded that they loved prep. And I think to have a group of 11th graders say that they enjoyed test prep is a win in itself, but our college board results showed that this cohort of students had scored closer to state and national averages than they ever had on a college board test. And I would attribute that to the use of cooperative learning.

Robert: With us on the program is Michelle Voelker, instructional coach from Warren Woods Public Schools. Michelle, what advice would you give to another school district that might be considering this engagement model?

Michelle: I would say that we need to acknowledge that it is a radical shift from what a traditional classroom might look like. And as you're looking into a method for increasing student engagement, we need to acknowledge also that Kagan is not a program you're purchasing. This is a way of functioning within your district.”

You can utilize this strategically with any content standards and any age level. So it cannot be a one and done PD. This needs to be something that we're providing your staff with proper training and ongoing support and make this living within your classrooms, within your staff meetings.

I even had our school board engage in it. And that's a really important shift as far as the culture of the district. For my administrators, my advice would be to engage in the training, understand the structure so that you can lead alongside your teachers, and when they have concerns, hear them, but provide that positive pressure, because the gains that you're going to make are huge.

So I guess my advice would be to commit to the hard work and commit to cooperative learning, because when your students learn to build skills to communicate, think critically, and take academic risks, they're really going to be contributing citizens as they move forward in life.

Robert: And you know, when you think about how disengaging education became during the pandemic, what a wonderful opportunity to not only bring them back to school, but foster a different type of engagement. And what might you say to a teacher who's reluctant to pursue this type of instruction with their students?

Michelle: I have had those situations where we have reluctant teachers. And like I said previously, you really need to meet them where they are. For many of them, I have gotten them to give an opportunity to simply replace a call-on-one question with a cooperative conversation.

And in those situations, they have seen the type of answers that you can get when you give students time to process and to prepare their answer versus a call-on-one answer. That's what hooked many of them. And others just simply need to see it.

Robert: And you know, that point raises an important one that in a system like this, the teacher becomes much more of a facilitator.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Robert: As opposed to just a conveyor of information. For so long, education was the teacher transmits information and the students give it back in the form of a test or a speech or a paper or essay. And the fundamental philosophy of this is so much different and seemingly productive, especially how it engages all of the students in that capacity.

One last question. If I were an outsider coming to a school and I come upon a classroom that is fully engaged in this, what might I see that looks different from maybe how I was educated?

Michelle: The traditional setup of a classroom with desks and rows is not conducive to cooperative learning. You're going to see students in teams or at least in pairs. You are going to hear conversation.

You might see the teacher standing off to the side and circulating. Those are the things, like you said, the teacher is a facilitator in these conversations.

Robert: Thank you. It's wonderful. That's all the time we have for today, Michelle. Your information on student engagement makes a lot of sense given the challenge of keeping students on task.”

Source: From Dr. Robert Livernois' "School Talks" on WJR.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/school-talks-sept-1-2024/id1763286931?i=1000667979464

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