This webinar introduced participants to NTC’s new practical, research-backed protocol for designing, planning, and facilitating learning walks as powerful tools for professional learning. The session drew on findings from our recent Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant that supported a whole-school coaching model focused on the integration of academic instruction and social-and-emotional learning. Learning walks became a key tool to support high-quality implementation and continuous improvement in partner schools.

The session culminated with the release of the protocol, which is designed for immediate, real-world use by instructional leaders, coaches, and teacher teams with step-by-step guidance and practical templates. The goal is to help schools shift learning walks from feeling evaluative and top-down to providing opportunities for inquiry-driven, growth-oriented professional collaboration.

Speakers:

• Krysten Wendell, Vice President of Program and Partnerships, NTC
• Dr. Lisa Schmitt, Senior Director of Impact, NTC

Key background and findings from external evaluation of NTC’s EIR grant

• Interview data showed improvements in instructional leadership, teacher practices, and overall school climate, with schools reporting increased student engagement.
• Participants found that combining multiple forms of data to inform strategic planning increased teacher buy-in and ownership of professional growth.
• Strong implementation of the model was linked to significant positive impacts on students’ ELA achievement.
• Learning walks became a cornerstone practice in schools that showed the strongest outcomes, supporting the development of the protocol.

Planning for purposeful learning (Pre-walk)
Before anyone steps into a classroom, the Pre-walk phase is where the conditions for meaningful team learning are established. Teams address eight key planning components to ensure the walk is grounded and focused. The webinar explored the importance of purpose and mindset as well as key enabling conditions for successful learning walks. Key takeaways included:

• Every meaningful walk starts with a shared “why.” Teams must clarify what they hope to learn and how they will use what they see.
• The protocol guides teams through a From → To mindset shift: moving from checking for implementation to exploring how students are experiencing learning.
• Investing time in understanding purpose and mindset ensures learning walk teams enter every classroom with curiosity, clarity, and shared purpose.
• Five enabling conditions were highlighted: psychological safety (walks feel non-evaluative, focused on shared growth), shared purpose (everyone understands the “why”), collaborative curiosity (teams pose questions rather than make assumptions), protected reflection time (debrief is built into the schedule), and visible connection to action (findings loop back to plans).
• These conditions help teams self-assess their readiness to learn and sustain a culture of inquiry over time.

Observing with focus and consistency (During the walk)

The Walk phase focuses on what happens inside classrooms. Two anchors for this phase of collaborative learning are the targeted practice and an observation organizer.

Knowing your targeted practice

• Before entering any classroom, the team must agree on the “targeted practice.” This is the specific teaching move or student behavior the team is there to study.
• For example, consider the targeted practice of “Students assume the cognitive load.” On the teacher side, this might look like intentional wait time or asking students to analyze and critique. On the student side, it might look like grappling with content, generating questions, or engaging in sustained peer discussion. These are the specific things the team is looking for.
• The targeted practice provides a compass, keeping the walk focused and grounded in what’s actually happening in classrooms and enabling observers to collect consistent, comparable evidence.

Observation organizer and calibration

1. The observation organizer is an evidence-collection tool that keeps notes descriptive and low-inference versus evaluative.
2. And to pull this all together, brief hallway calibration touchpoints between classrooms are a small but critical step to ensure learning walk success. Here teams ask questions like: “What student behaviors are we capturing?” and “Are we staying grounded in low-inference notes?” to help stay aligned.
3. Common misalignments to watch for include: observers focusing on compliance versus the interactions between teacher actions and student behaviors. Or observation notes are evaluative rather than descriptive, or observers are collecting data not focused on the targeted practice. Real-time calibration provides a great, quick learning opportunity for the team and ensures that the data collected will support quality post-walk reflection and action.

From patterns to priorities (Post-walk)
The Post-walk phase offers a five-step facilitation sequence to move teams from organizing raw observation data to strategic next steps and action.

Debrief protocol
Teams walk through a series of steps that support unpacking learning walk evidence and then slowly move those insights into actionable outcomes:

• Step 1: “What did we see?” — Share evidence without interpretation.
• Step 2: “What could it mean?” — Explore learning implications and begin uncovering trends and patterns.
• Step 3: “Why might this be happening?” — Move deeper into root causes.
• Step 4: “What’s in our sphere of influence?” — Focus the team on what they can actually act on.
• Step 5: “What will we do now, next, and later?” — Translate insights into a concrete action plan with immediate, short-term, and longer-term commitments.

Pattern statements
Participants learned how to write pattern statements using a four-part structure: “In most classrooms, we observed that [who] were [doing what] when [conditions/context], which may suggest that [learning insight].”

They also reviewed and developed context-specific guiding questions to help the sense-making process, such as: Where are there clear bright spots or gaps? What do these patterns suggest about how students are learning? What does this tell us about our instructional strategies? In exploring these questions, participants learned how to compare clusters over time, across grade levels, and with prior walks to understand whether patterns are consistent or context-specific.

> Learn more and download NTC’s new protocol Learning Walks as Powerful Professional Learning.