How do schools with disadvantaged populations beat the odds? England’s Chief Inspector of Schools just released a report examining a group of schools that do and analysing what they have in common:
* They excel at what they do for a high proportion of the time
* They prove constantly that disadvantage or not speaking English at home need not be a barrier to achievement
* They put students first, invest in their staff and nurture their communities
* They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed
* They provide outstanding teaching, rich opportunities for learning and encouragement and support for each student
* They are highly inclusive
* Their achievements happen by highly reflective, carefully planned and implemented strategies
* They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency
* They are constantly looking for ways to improve further
* They have outstanding and well-distributed leadership.
This is exactly what you’d expect from the school improvement and effectiveness literature. I’ve been reading a lot of this lately, and what is surprising is how much convergence there is on this. You might think that having achieved such a high level of consensus it would be easy to move into some sort of policy promoting such schools. But it’s not so easy.
The latest book I’ve been reading is Charles Payne’s So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools
discipline positive behaviour (the fourth item in the list above). It is crucial to have a consistent and rigourously enforced (and fairly strict) discipline positive behaviour policy throughout the school. But the temptations for individual teachers to defect are immensely strong, and it doesn’t take a great deal of defection before the whole thing breaks down. Maintaining the policy requires constantly solving a pretty difficult collective action problem.
My conjectures. 1) Other things equal, smaller schools should find it easier to beat the odds than larger schools (because there are fewer members of the collective facing the collective action problem) 2) Elementary schools, where each child has fewer teachers, and less contact with children who have contact with other teachers, should find it easier to maintain discipline policies than high schools, because inconsistencies are harder for students to detect and thus less disruptive.
{ 43 comments }
LizardBreath 03.02.09 at 3:41 pm
I’m not certain how to say this without it sounding more hostile than I mean it to, but that list of bullet points doesn’t seem to me to say much of anything. The first point with any information seems to be “They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed”, which is repeated in “They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency”. All the other points boil down to “They do a good job by trying hard and planning.”
This probably is a good representation of successful schools, but I can’t see it being much use in terms of helping less successful schools to emulate them.
Harry 03.02.09 at 3:50 pm
Well, you’d be surprised….
No, I agree that the list isn’t especially helpful for emulation purposes, and contains a good deal of overlap and some redundancy (I wasn’t really recommending it as an analytical framework). But the last four items on the list and one or two others are all more distinctive than they look (“well distributed leadership”, e.g., means that there are competent and responsible instructional leaders not only in the core management team but throughout the school, something that is rare even in schools without high levels of disadvantage, and very hard to achieve; “looking for ways to improve further” is something that many if not most teachers will recognise as not really going on in their schools if they are honest).
Didn’t take you to be sounding hostile at all, but thanks for the assurance!
StevenAttewell 03.02.09 at 4:20 pm
Yeah, the meaning of some fo these terms aren’t entirely clear.
* They excel at what they do for a high proportion of the time
– this should be tossed out, since it just means “they’re good at being good”
* They prove constantly that disadvantage or not speaking English at home need
not be a barrier to achievement
– this does make sense, and its common sensical, given the real problem of
lowered expectations of teachers for ESL/poor/minority/etc. students.
* They put students first, invest in their staff and nurture their communities
– I do not know what “put students first” means. I’m guessing invest in their
staff refers to continued training and recruitment, and nuturing their
communities means community involvement plus helping parents help
their kids (possibly adult ed as well?).
* They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed
– high expectations I get, but strong values is another buzzword that could
mean anything.
* They provide outstanding teaching, rich opportunities for learning and encouragement and support for each student
– So good teachers, more resources/electives, and more individual help.
* They are highly inclusive
– meaning open to minorities/gays, etc? Or what?
* Their achievements happen by highly reflective, carefully planned and implemented strategies
– again, this is more easy understood as “they plan to do well.”
* They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency
* They are constantly looking for ways to improve further
* They have outstanding and well-distributed leadership.
– of these last three, only the first makes sense to me.
Harry 03.02.09 at 4:30 pm
When I’m ready I’ll do a post on all this stuff but it won’t be for quite a while. But here’s a couple of responses:
“inclusive”: Schools, often unselfconsciously, engage in two forms of triage. They marginalise the weakest and most-difficult to manage students, and they ignore the students who excel at nothing, but do ok and cause no great problems. “inclusive” means that the school is, quite deliberately minimising the extent to which both forms of triage go on. This overlaps with “putting students first”.
“highly reflective, carefully planned and implemented strategies” — this is not “they plan to do well” but “when they encounter problems they reflect on them, seek relevant evidence and expertise to help them figure out what to do, figure out what to do, and then actually do it in a timely fashion, disposed to carry out the whole plan but with a willingness to change course if things really don’t seem to be working out”. Schools without high need populations can get away without doing this, and a lot of them (eg, a lot of grammar schools) I suspect coast along. Schools with high-need populations often lack the capacity to live up to this.
salacious 03.02.09 at 4:31 pm
Damnit LB, you beat me to my argument again!
Also, I’m not sure about the causality here. Let’s say that there is some third characteristic that is driving high performance, such as statistical variation in student quality. Wouldn’t high performance schools be more likely to exhibit traits such as “excel at what they do for a high proportion of the time”, regardless of whether these criteria are responsible for that performance?
`
salient 03.02.09 at 4:35 pm
But it’s not so easy.
I was happy to see that you and I agree, that this element is really the key sticking point:
* They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency
Any significant divergence has schoolwide consequences, exactly: But the temptations for individual teachers to defect are immensely strong, and it doesn’t take a great deal of defection before the whole thing breaks down. Needless to say, this holds for academic/performance standards as well as behavioral. Unified front!
And boy, they snuck this idea in through the back door:
* They have outstanding and well-distributed leadership.
Well-distributed: well-delegated, with lead teachers who don’t see the delegated lead duties as extra-contractual or just-more-burden. The teachers therefore agree to work as cohesive units under the guidance of these leaders. The teachers present a unified front, they mentor each other, the leader researches good initiatives, prepares a plan for implementing new strategies and refining old strategies each year. The teachers follow the lead and implement good strategies. They would feel comfortable and happy with department leaders observing their class regularly, to assess the implementation process. The consequences of teamwork, an antithesis of the “This Classroom Is My Domain!” approach to being a teacher.
I wonder if these principles would hold true:
* Responsibilities for intra-departmental mentorship are delegated appropriately with a high degree of intra-departmental communication and collaboration.
* Less experienced teachers interact with mentors, and all teachers interact with their department members, throughout lesson planning, lesson design, and assessment of student achievements.
* Lessons are designed to promote inquiry and questioning, and students are consistently rewarded for being inquisitive or skeptical.
* They seek the “moral support” of their communities. School representatives (teachers or whoever) communicate face-to-face regularly with prominent community members and parents.
* Community members, especially parents of students, have a positive image of the school; they feel the goals of the school make sense, are reasonable, and are good.
…
I’m a little nervous to see Charles Payne make the must-read cut, but then, I’ve invested a great deal of my time and energy arguing against buyout initiatives. I think it’s suspect for any theorist who begins with the axiom that we can vanish some sub-population of low achievers or problem students, and Payne has argued in favor of allowing students to exit school and find work. That’s pretty much noncontroversial for 16-18-year-olds, who can pretty much just drop out of school with parent consent anyway, but I don’t think telling children much younger than that “succeed in school or you have to go get a job” is an appropriate kind of incentive structure.
Regardless of that, Getting What We Ask For was a useful launching point for thinking analytically about urban environments; if there’s a new edition out I’d recommend it. It got me thinking, tangent to its main arguments, about the characteristics of the “ideal soldier” that we’d like to see in the “ideal teacher” and how many problems in education/administration theory have neat parallels in military structure (though the appropriate solution set is often very different). In particular, the U.S. military has found effective solutions to the problem of how to maintain a strict and strictly adhered-to hierarchical structure in the absence of panopticon-esque observation. School principals, by and large, haven’t.
Rich Puchalsky 03.02.09 at 4:39 pm
This kind of thing is exactly why I distrust a lot of the school-improvement literature. Looking at the list, I wouldn’t say it’s as simple as “they plan to do well”, but the list shows a number of general qualities that seem to be characteristic of almost any kind of exceptional organizational leadership.
And you can’t plan for your school to be an exception. The kind of people who can sustain an organizational culture like the one described above are, for whatever reason, rare. The iea of “constantly looking for ways to improve further”, for instance, requires that rarest of bosses, the person who doesn’t become wedded to past improvements just because they made them. Not to mention that the school depicted is always walking a tightrope between inclusiveness (of students, of teacher’s ideas) and of strict discipline in how policies are carried out.
So occasionally you get someone, or some group of people, who can do this. Well, great. But that doesn’t seem to mean anything from a public policy point of view. In fact, it can be destructive from a public policy point of view. If you’re designing schools that only super-competent people can run, they may be worse when run by ordinary people than a school designed for slackers would be.
salient 03.02.09 at 4:59 pm
that list of bullet points doesn’t seem to me to say much of anything.
Ofsted has always struck me as trying to be as uncontroversial as humanly possible in their various reports, sometimes at the expense of incisiveness. Even so, I think the first bullet point is the only true throw-away.
I think what I get out of the BBC report is that these schools are all heavily hierarchical; (1) they have many leaders with specific delegated duties, (2) those leaders are competent and charismatic, and (3) those leaders are followed. In other words, we can characterize the authority structure as a kind of benevolent rigid hierarchy. Egos are suppressed, or converted to the cause. Teachers confidently follow the lead of their leaders, who in turn may confidently dictate intra-departmental policy, in accordance with the larger school-wide dictates.
Also, a kind of alarming percentage of the celebrated schools are technology and science schools, and none of them seem to be the kind of general-education mainstreaming conglomerates we take for granted around here. Or maybe they’re typical magnet high schools that only feature a couple extra elective classes, and it’s just that the buzzword “magnet school” hasn’t caught on across the pond, yet?
MDHinton 03.02.09 at 5:01 pm
To summarize:
Schools with strict, well-organized headmasters who don’t allow trendy, leftist, ripped-jeans wearing social theorists pretending to be teachers into the classroom to disrupt children’s education will generally do well.
Surely everyone knew that already?
dsquared 03.02.09 at 5:02 pm
the meaning of some fo these terms aren’t entirely clear
Welcome to my world. Of course, if it was easy to describe precisely how high-performing institutions differ from low-performing ones, in clear language that spelt out a precise sequences of steps to higher achievement, then everyone would be highest-achieving (which is to say, nobdoy would be)
There are two basic reactions to this – you can either throw up your hands, say “well, these things can’t be measured and a lot of this stuff looks like meaningless bullshit” and go back to thumbing through your book of Dilbert cartoons (occasionally sticking your head up to assert that the problem is “lack of resources”), or you can try to apply yourself to the task of understanding it a little bit better and making what improvements you can. I’m quite glad that someone in UK education policy is having a go at the second; the first has been extensively tested.
Harry 03.02.09 at 5:02 pm
Ok, there’s no claim about causation (at least in the BBC report, nor in most of the literature).
Rich — well, my reading of the literature I’ve been reading is that it is very sensitive to the issue you raise. I think it is politicians, and perhaps especially state and district level leaders who mistake correlation for causation and think (in the face of their own experience to the contrary) that this is entirely do-able. AT the same time, the school improvement literature suggests that there is a lot of quite bad management, and that it can be improved.
Salient — just so you know I’m cutting and pasting your comments and passing them along to teachers who don’t have time to read CT (that’s ok, right?). As for Payne — I’m not through the book yet, and haven’t read anything else by him, but he doesn’t propose any of that here (yet). I’ll add Getting What You Ask For to the pile.
But what you say reminds me that I should have added that a lot of the popular Beating the Odds literature cites schools which engage in a certain amount of selection (eg KIPP schools), so are not, in fact, inclusive, and I don’t think we have a precise handle on how much a little bit of selection makes the job of the school easier (my guess is that it is a lot).
dsquared 03.02.09 at 5:03 pm
#9: You are Chris Woodhead and I claim my five pounds.
Alex 03.02.09 at 5:14 pm
Beneficial Characteristics Considered Helpful, Expert Consensus Finds. Some headline!
Roughly, it seems to mean that you need to fight prejudice, recognise your mistakes, and devolve responsibility. The fact that everyone from Peter Drucker to Gadhafi via David Stirling advocates something like this does not mean it isn’t true, or that it isn’t obvious, but it strongly suggests it’s neither trivial nor easy.
Rich Puchalsky 03.02.09 at 5:15 pm
“I think it is politicians, and perhaps especially state and district level leaders who mistake correlation for causation and think (in the face of their own experience to the contrary) that this is entirely do-able.”
I’m not sure that this is really confined to politicians and so on. One of the lines in your post is: “You might think that having achieved such a high level of consensus it would be easy to move into some sort of policy promoting such schools” and you conjecture that elementary schools should find it easier to maintain disciplinary policies, etc. That does suggest that although you don’t think that this can be easily duplicated, you might think that there is something there that might be useful in a general sense, although perhaps I’ve misread you.
But maybe there isn’t. I can easily imagine a situation in which, let’s say, relaxed discipline and individual initiative produces a general 10% improvement (leaving aside for the moment what metric you’re going to use) and an attempt at strict discipline produces a 50% improvement when it succeeds 5% of the time, and no improvement otherwise. In which case you’re learning the wrong lessons entirely.
salient 03.02.09 at 5:44 pm
Salient—just so you know I’m cutting and pasting your comments and passing them along to teachers who don’t have time to read CT (that’s ok, right?).
Yes, certainly. I’d also love to hear any replies or responses that filter back; please feel free to email me anything you hear back and/or share my email address.
Of course, everything I’m about to say will be kind of useless to teachers; what follows is just some high-administration how-do-we-reform-education thinking.
And you can’t plan for your school to be an exception.
Agreed. What do you think of the comparison of education administration to military command structure? I wouldn’t want to think of students like soldiers (!!), but among faculty and administration I think there might be some useful structural/organizational comparisons. I don’t know for sure.
By the way, one way to make teaching less “plan to be an exception”-oriented is to move very far away from a highly individualistic model of what makes a teacher great. The idea that teachers must be superheroic beings is closely tied to the ideal of a teacher as a highly individualistic genius, a do-it-yourself-er, who designs and implements innovative and effective learning experiences. There, “implements” is reasonable, and “designs” is not.
One of the most colossal inefficiencies in our education system is the reinvention of the wheel that we call unit planning or curriculum mapping: the large-scale, big-picture stuff each teacher or department needs to construct. Even the design of individual lesson plans adds up to a colossal, unbelievable waste of teachers’ time, wits, energy.
I believe that curriculum design and even lesson design ought to be adopted as a national responsibility. National teams could design several distinct units of lessons in different styles, have teachers beta-test them in classrooms around the country, and provide the revised versions to teachers for free via online PDF. Accommodation recommendations, extension projects, and in-class assessment instructions could be included. Teachers could study over each of the units, select a unit plan appropriate to their teaching style, tweak it a little for what they see as their individual classroom’s needs, and save an incredible amount of time each week. The units could come with final assessments in a variety of formats, which the teacher could use verbatim or tweak. The time individual teachers save on planning can be spent on contemplating, “how can I best get my students to engage this lesson?”
Ideally, teachers shouldn’t have to invest their time/energy resources into designing the large-scale planning, or making final assessments: those are duties that could be kicked off to someone else. And should be.
If we want less-than-exceptional people to be able to achieve excellence as teachers, we need to provide them with a template for excellent instruction, explaining what to present in what order, what to have students do in what order, how to respond to common student inquiries, etc. We need to, through national intervention, reduce the role of the teacher to something like “interactive, attentive, compassionate executor of pre-existing lesson plans.” That alone is a challenging, demanding, full-time job; the least we can do is clear away the vast amount of redundant, routine work teachers are subjected to.
I haven’t thought of any reasonable way to take away the grading/marking responsibilities from teachers, but hopefully with the advances in LSA essay-interpretation technology that folks like ESI are pursuing, solutions will arise over time. I guess, for some classes at least, we could begin with Scantron-style unit tests with free grading performed by a national agency.
MDHinton 03.02.09 at 5:44 pm
You got me! Where do I send the fiver?
The serious point is that, according to the BBC report, by far the most important aspect of these schools is the disciplined regime. Twice at the beginning they mention the smart dress of the pupils, presumably in uniform. Not exactly ‘progressive’ is it?
lisa 03.02.09 at 7:06 pm
Is there anything about how administrators treat teachers? I know next to nothing about education but I do know this is a huge cause of demoralization for the teachers I know. There is such an astonishing amount of oversight in K-8 (and probably at the high school level) and it can cause a lot of fear and distress, particularly when administrators treat the teachers in thoughtless ways–as underlings, rather than collaborators, etc. There’s also a lot of arbitrary favoritism that my friends report, which demoralizes them as well. They see the educational process as far behind the politics in the priorities of administrators.
I know this could be among the things they mean by good leadership.
One of the things I’ve noticed among k-8 and high school teachers among my friends is that they they aren’t at all in on the process. And in ‘underperforming’ schools the anxiety about students with problems is often actually about administrator’s reaction to their difficulty controlling students with problems. Also, there’s the emphasis on testing, which brings in a whole other set of issues.
And for those who teach college–if you think there are nutty or immature or narcissistic people who make your job harder, you might try talking to a primary or secondary teacher. Those people sometimes make their job impossible.
The happiest teacher I know has a ton of autonomy because he teaches at a charter school and gets to develop innovative curriculum. (In fact, he seems like the only truly happy teacher I know.)
This definitely discourages people from entering the profession. It certainly discouraged me. My husband also considered teaching but wasn’t sure he could put up with the arbitrariness and administrative BS. The kids aren’t necessarily the main problem, is all I’m saying.
I LOVE that principal on ‘The Wire.’ I thought she was amazing. I would work for her in a heartbeat. She seemed like someone who could excel, given the right resources. Many of the people were working seemed like they could do a fantastic job in the right circumstances. They were student-focused in their own way. I think things are often much worse than that.
Zeba 03.02.09 at 8:35 pm
“We need to, through national intervention, reduce the role of the teacher to something like “interactive, attentive, compassionate executor of pre-existing lesson plans.†That alone is a challenging, demanding, full-time job; the least we can do is clear away the vast amount of redundant, routine work teachers are subjected to.” Salient
As a teacher this idea makes me want to throw up copiously. I don’t want to teach someone else’s lesson. I want to teach my own lesson in my own way to my own students who I know. Based on schemes of work that I have devised, based on overall curriculum plans that I have decided on.
Planning lessons is one of the areas in which we can exercise true creativity, sensitivity and awareness of our students. It is not redundant routine work, it is the meat of my teaching existence. Unless and until I plan my lessons there is no way in which I can be an interactive, attentive and compassionate individual in the classroom striving to get the best out of my students.
I’ve never heard such a reductive, cockamamie perspective, an idea which turns teachers into drones delivering what some faceless bureaucrat has determined my students need to know. I am fortunate to operate in a school system which has flaws galore, but at least preserves the autonomy of the teacher and encourages us to think about what we are doing in the classroom.
The Salient model is a means of diminishing further the independence of mind and thought that we should be fostering in teachers and students alike. It is crazily and dangerously prescriptive and at a time where herd-like behaviour amongst our supposedly brightest and best has led us to financial cataclysm, frankly, bonkers.
High expectations of staff and students, commitment and consistency are the keys to providing a decent education. If a school can sustain the high levels of staff and student engagement necessary to achieve these, it will continue to succeed.
harry b 03.02.09 at 9:47 pm
Zeba
well, I’m on salient’s side of this (well, maybe not quite as extreme, as him — I’m not sure about national level responsibility). I strongly suspect that the very best teachers teach best when having the level of control you are wanting. But on your model, numerous beginning teachers waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel, the weaker teachers (who have a lower rate of attrition than the stronger teachers) never manage to invent it, there is no basis for the observation and discussion of teaching and learning which is the key to improvement, and common assessments (that enable us to identify the level of student achievement as well as the most successful teachers) are impossible. And there’s a lot of scope for creativity even within a framework of common curriculums and published lesson plans, if, of course, the common curriculums and published plans are good.
Of course, when you have lousy administrators who don’t know the first thing about teaching and learning, it seems better to have complete autonomy. But what’s the point of administrators knowing anything about teaching and learning if teachers have total autonomy?
Rich — thanks for that, as you can tell I’m very much in the process of beginning to think about this stuff, and that comment is helpful.
salient — you’ll be hearing more from me, and since I’m sure I’ll be posting more on these things I hope you’ll keep pitching in (I’d say more, but child-time has just begun…)
joe koss 03.02.09 at 10:30 pm
Harry, I want to push you on this, now or later, if it is ok: “I wasn’t really recommending it as an analytical framework.”
I read the list, and nod my head. They are all worded more or less superbly, highlight the right areas and talk about the proper kind of leadership; but I have no idea what it amounts to practically (maybe that is because I am not a member yet). What are ideas for the analytical framework? What is the end game? Is there a common substratum? Is there actually a thing we can call ‘education’ (something to analyze)?
I was also nodding my head while reading salient’s post until the last, then thought: Is that the end result? Like Zeba, I wanted to throw up. There is no doubt the way we think about education (in the US and I imagine in other Western societies) needs serious attention. But it doesn’t strike me that salient’s direction is the surest way. Our (future) world, our (future) information dissemination, our (future) inter-connectivity probably doesn’t lend itself very well to overarching, paternalistic lesson master plans (but maybe the suggestion was something much less modest; I can envision something on this line helpful, but it is probably a fine line). It might have more to do with teacher training than lesson-planning (I think).
I like the soldier analogy in one respect. I had a conversation recently with another student and we were talking about how the CIA trains it’s agents. In one respect, I think there would be interesting benefits to teach teachers more like we train highly specialized military personal (there are, of course, disanalogies): to recognize the little things in your surroundings; to make quick, sure, micro decisions; to be fast, able, analytical; to be able to make on the spot changes to plans; to be vocal; exhibit leadership; to fall in line if need be…etc, alt. Infusing practical, real-world, real-time, real-situational skills that are portable, more or less timeless and practical.
Could that ‘things they have in common list’ be more about what kind of teachers the school has, and how the headmaster/principle either got rid of the ones s/he didn’t want and attracted the one s/he did? Or is that just one of the pieces?
Theoretical frameworks for school reform and teacher training are good up to a point; research based programs for both are good up to a point. But devising and implementing the analytical framework –where we place these questions — (both for schools and for teachers) that seems pretty cool and interesting (and lacking).
salient 03.02.09 at 11:06 pm
The Salient model is a means of diminishing further the independence of mind and thought that we should be fostering in teachers and students alike.
Actually, I see what you’re saying here. You’re mistaken, because you are thinking that I’m calling for a mandate. I am not.
I’m calling for these resources to be made available to teachers, at federal government expense. You would still be free to deviate from (or ignore) the available unit plans, so long as you can certify that your course is teaching the content identified as essential (there’s nothing sinister or novel about this; an algebra course should cover algebra).
Heck, why not: perhaps we could set up a system where expert teachers are able to submit curriculum maps, unit plans, lesson plans. I mean this sincerely: why should your students be the only ones to benefit from your ingenuity? I intuitively trust that you have a solid command of your field and curriculum, Zeba, but there are a lot of teachers who don’t. Those teachers could benefit from my proposal.
I hope this clarification de-nauseates you somewhat.
But it doesn’t strike me that salient’s direction is the surest way.
Goodness, I would hope not — when it comes to appropriate government involvement, I’m still trying to work out the very basic fundamentals.
joe koss 03.02.09 at 11:57 pm
salient (and harry): resources (eureka!). The light bulb went on. On that point, I agree with you completely (and earnestly).
dsquared 03.03.09 at 12:08 am
hmmm, if Salient is abandoning the extreme right wing here, I think I’ll take it up. I’ve found in the past that this is the surest way to generate a lot of angry people, but I am hardly one to be scared of that, and it really is a fact that time and again, when motivated adults spend their own money on education, on subjects which it is instrumentally important for them to learn (learning English, drivers ed, professional exams etc), they tend to reinvent something which looks very like the Direct Instruction method, which is based on rote-learning, scripts and regular short tests.
There’s also a role for education as entertainment (which sounds more disparaging than it is; nothing wrong with entertainment, particularly if it’s of a high and fecund quality), but if you want results, tight central control and Taylorisation is what you end up on.
William 03.03.09 at 12:23 am
I think the discussion about “outstanding leadership” would be more fruitful if it included some specifics about what makes leadership outstanding. I think the quality of administration in a school has a huge impact on educational outcomes. There are too many administrators who are very poor managers. A few thoughts:
The topic of positive behavior was mentioned. Teacher’s need support of their administration when students repeatedly break rules. If students are sent to the office for misbehavior and there are no meaningful consequences, then after a while there is little point for teachers to bother enforcing the rules. This is something that works best when it is consistent and school-wide, so that the expectations for behavior can be more easily understood and there is minimal confusion to students as to how they should act.
Similarly, good administrators pay attention to scheduling and do their utmost to ensure that students are placed in courses where they can be successful. Sometimes this means designing remedial courses or meaningful electives to support academic achievement. It typically means rigorously scrutinizing class sizes to make sure that lower-level, lower-achieving, or foundational courses are smaller and have solid teachers. This is not easy. Many administrators do a poor job of oversight.
Probably the biggest issue is that many administrators are petty, dictators with personality disorders who don’t really understand how to run a large organization. They aren’t nice people and they don’t work very hard doing the things that matter. They don’t welcome personal evaluation, they aren’t looking at themselves for improvement, and this transfers over to their schools.
I do agree with Salient that when teachers have effective lesson plans, it is good for other teachers to have access to them. Good teachers are always looking for more effective ways to teach lessons. Good schools promote sharing and collaboration between teachers. It isn’t a bad thing if the least effective teachers at a school are encouraged to work with the most effective teachers in order to get better.
salient 03.03.09 at 2:15 am
hmmm, if Salient is abandoning the extreme right wing here
Pedantic note: I’d prefer “as Salient has clarified he was never trying to promote right-wing education theory in the first place” — my mistake was, I did not clearly articulate my position in #15 upthread. In particular, I am anti-mandate and I guess I should have clarified this. It just wouldn’t make any sense to deny talented teachers the ability to work their magic in their classrooms. In particular, just because we enable teachers to be “executors of well-made lesson plans” doesn’t mean we should in any way forcibly limit them to that role!
I guess the trouble is, I’m not really thinking about them. Experienced and talented teachers know what they’re doing; they don’t especially need help; they’re in a position to mentor and advise.
My vision, insofar as I have one, is a vast, well-organized, authoritative support network for new teachers, with specific resources (unit plans/lesson plans/assessments) that new teachers can steal and eventually build their individuality off of, over time. This network should be provided unambiguously and comprehensively by an authoritative source: a few lessons here and there, or even NCTM’s fantastic Illuminations, isn’t enough support.
I want for teachers to have the opportunity to experience basic success, reliably across districts and states, in their first year of teaching. However, the comprehensive lesson-planning-and-assessment support networks to enable that don’t exist right now. I’d like to see the federal government step in with comprehensive support and material resources: “money” does not interest me as much as “comprehensive templates for reasonably-high-quality instruction”.
Where I first taught, every single student in all of my classes had had a long-term substitute mathematics teacher for a semester or more. Insert here, an exclamation of the implications of this!!! But it happens all the time, especially in high-turnover scenarios, as districts shuffle, as teachers move, et cetera. Those students probably aren’t going to receive truly stellar instruction during the substitute’s semester at bat. However, we should have a solid resource and instruction network that substitute (or inexperienced teacher) can tap into and draw from, to deliver competent and reasonably-high-quality education. The inexperienced teacher should feel free to leech 99.9% of unit plans and lesson plans and assessments from the government resources for all I care, during those first years Harry Wong calls “survival years”. They should be spending that time (1) practicing in-class instruction and classroom management, and (2) thinking about how the existing resources can be adapted to their students. If they do this over time, they’ll develop the intuition, connection, and mastery of instruction of a master teacher.
But the support needs to be there initially. Teacher intuition needs to be trained and honed by exposure to good, comprehensive unit/lesson plans and solid, diverse assessment ideas. And the place for this training and honing to take place must be the teacher’s classroom: education classes can provide theory and context, and a little practice, but not the trial-by-fire of daily lesson implementation. The best exposure (alongside mentorship) is having the opportunity to leech from a variety of lesson plans and assessments from an authoritative source, read supplementary explanations that advise how to use the resource in minute detail, and then use the resources. By seeing what works well and what doesn’t, the teacher has a basis (more solid than floundering or guessing on untrained intuition) for developing unique plans and assessments.
But in the absence of that support network, what happens? Often, this: McGraw-Hill or McDougal-Littell implicitly writes the curriculum for these desperate teachers, and the assessments, and the worksheets or overheads. The unit plans are: Title of Unit: Chapter 1. Lessons: 1.1, 1.2, … 1.9, Unit test. There’s a lot of problems with this. Students see right through it, they see the book is in charge rather than the teacher, which very subtly undermines the teacher’s authority. The teacher recognizes the soullessness of the textbook and begins to wonder why the heck they wanted to teach this stuff in the first place, and demoralization ensues. And (sometimes) these teachers never connect with the material they are teaching, and it takes years for them to develop a competent set of lessons, and they make a lot of mistakes that could be avoided, and they cement bad habits in their own instructional style… the standard burn-out experience, I guess.
Bryan 03.03.09 at 3:13 am
What Do We Know About the Outcomes of KIPP Schools? http://epicpolicy.org/files/PB-Henig-KIPP-FINALwc.pdf
Witt 03.03.09 at 4:06 am
I’m struck by how many of these issues are subject to strong external influences or even entirely outside of the school’s control. E.g.:
They are highly inclusive
When there are severe short-term consequences for being inclusive (i.e., not labeling a child as special-ed, or keeping a kid in an ESOL program longer than they really need to be there, because they’ll drag down the school’s test scores), it can be extremely difficult to make the long-term argument for inclusivity. In addition, when few support resources are available (the school nurse is there twice a week, the mental-health counselor is part-time for 800 kids), then a school which *would otherwise* be able to include students with health problems will not be able to. Regardless of how devoutly the leadership or the teachers hold that philosophy.
Their achievements happen by highly reflective, carefully planned and implemented strategies
“Reflective” to me translates as “have time to close feedback loop.” Again, this is an issue that may be completely out of the control of school leadership and teachers. If due to overcrowding and other issues you only get one 40-minute prep/lunch period per day, and you’re routinely staying late to accomplish your work, it’s hard to see where that precious reflection time could even be carved out FROM. Again, regardless of how genuinely people endorse the concept.
They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency
Again, this is very subeject to external influences. If you want to have a zero-tolerance policy for carrying weapons into school, but you know that explusion will result in some students getting transferred while other students get deported, that may be emotionally hard to enforce. If you want to treat all fights the same, but you know that over-18 students will end up with a life-altering criminal record (no federal student aid, ineligible for a host of jobs all the way down to school janitor that require a clean background check), you may find yourself hedging.
I don’t actually think this is a bad descriptive list. But it seems to talk about things as though the individual school has a lot more control than my experience of “failing” schools suggests.
Tracy W 03.03.09 at 10:38 am
Good post.
The Americans have published a more detailed list of what they call “effective schooling practices” which appears to match with the British study, but is much more detailed and specific. Eg, instead of saying:
“They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency ” this document says things like:
Lisa – I agree with you about this. One of the most valuable results I think from the literature on effective schools is that the evidence appears to be that it isn’t just about the teachers – teachers have to have good support from the school administration to be effective. Now I keep getting annoyed by journalists who write articles or opinion pieces about interventions that only ever consider what teachers do. Good quality teachers are important, and teaching is a very demanding professional job, but we shouldn’t expect teachers to achieve despite their school administration.
Tracy W 03.03.09 at 10:43 am
Oops, link to the American work is “Effective Schooling Practices:
A Research Synthesis: 1995 Update”, Kathleen Cotton, http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/esp/esp95toc.html
To the bit I quoted: http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/esp/esp95_2.html#2.2.2
Alex 03.03.09 at 11:03 am
If you have a fantastic set of lesson plans, why not release them under Creative Commons licensing? Isn’t Wikipedia already doing something along those lines?
Agreed. What do you think of the comparison of education administration to military command structure? I wouldn’t want to think of students like soldiers (!!), but among faculty and administration I think there might be some useful structural/organizational comparisons. I don’t know for sure.
Auftragstaktik? Which is pretty much the antithesis of Daviesism. I suppose it depends if you consider education an essentially defensive/conservative or essentially offensive/subversive task.
dsquared 03.03.09 at 11:21 am
I question the analogy to military tactics, as usually the kids are not actively trying to resist learning.
Alex 03.03.09 at 11:42 am
Assumes facts not in evidence!
LizardBreath 03.03.09 at 12:26 pm
Ah. Apparently you’ve never taught at the secondary school level.
laura 03.03.09 at 1:08 pm
I’m not a fan of that list, because it’s way too vague as others have said, but I am a fan of the Consortium and that Payne book sounds very interesting. I have to check it out.
You know what is missing from that first list? Parents. Are parental involvement and Parent-teacher councils and all that stuff completely out of fashion?
harry b 03.03.09 at 1:19 pm
LB — oh, they’re not resisting learning. They’re just trying to learn….something else.
Agree entirely with lisa and tracy. There’s a lot more to be said about principals, and principal training, and I’ll say some of it soon(!). Thanks for the link Tracy.
kids to school time, so no time for more.
Zeba 03.03.09 at 4:14 pm
Harry said:
“But on your model, numerous beginning teachers waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel, the weaker teachers (who have a lower rate of attrition than the stronger teachers) never manage to invent it, there is no basis for the observation and discussion of teaching and learning which is the key to improvement, and common assessments (that enable us to identify the level of student achievement as well as the most successful teachers) are impossible. And there’s a lot of scope for creativity even within a framework of common curriculums and published lesson plans, if, of course, the common curriculums and published plans are good.”
Point one: good management includes provision of consistent, high quality mentoring for new and weak teachers – a decent mentor helps out with the tendency to reinvent the wheel. There are loads of resources sites out there already where teachers can share lesson plans, observations and discussion. But these ought to be adapted not adopted wholesale.
Point two: while I do think my current workplace could do with more observation/discussion and general CPD, how far does this need to be formalised? I’ve worked now in six different schools (very different types of school) and even in the most demoralised and uncertain of departments, found that the one thing teachers do well is discuss what they are doing. But this doesn’t need to be wholly formalised – it’s like going to conferences, where the best discussions are usually the unstructured ones in breaks. One of the gifts of good management is providing staff with unstructured time. In other words, ensuring that non-contact time is across a department, for example, limiting cover and administration/paperwork.
Point three: I work in a system where there is very limited common assessment – but our qualification (the European Baccalaureate) has been found (by a series of external surveys) to be one of the most reliable of indicators of student success at tertiary level – in other words, whichever of the 27 EU nations a student comes from with a EuroBac, the dropouts are significantly lower than for other qualifications e.g. A levels, and the final Bac score is a fairly sure indicator of likely levels of achievement at university – 90%+ at Bac is likely to get a first, 75-80% is likely to get a 2.1, 65-75% a 2.2 and 60-65% a 3rd. This is across language barriers – every student who takes the EuroBac does so in their mother tongue and a second language, some kids are taking nearly all their subjects in a second language, and the assessment bases across languages are not necessarily harmonised – a kid doing Dutch mother tongue has a different exam to a kid doing Swedish or English. Given the pig’s ear that the UK has made in designing SATS at KS1,2 and 3, I am extremely wary of common assessment, especially having served as an examiner in my subject for KS3 and GCSE. It is too easily manipulated by exam boards for their own or political purposes. On the other hand, our system allows for a good deal of shared assessment on a smaller scale between teachers. We co-write exams, we moderate, we we develop shared marking schemes. No one tells us to do this, but we cooperate across classes and across schools.
Point four – ‘if common curriculums and published plans are good’ – there’s the rub. Look at the drubbing of the UK primary curriculum in the latest instalment of the Alexander review.
The best teachers are inspirational, because they are invested in their subject matter, they are constantly challenging themselves and ideally, inspiring colleagues as well as students to do the same. Reducing teachers to facilitation and delivery of pre-prepared materials is short-changing teachers and students from achieving real excellence in the classroom.
salient 03.03.09 at 4:17 pm
If you have a fantastic set of lesson plans, why not release them under Creative Commons licensing?
Because it’s a colossal amount of work to prepare ’em. Most teachers’ lesson plan books, what they write out or document, is 2% of what the plan consists of. Why: a detailed and comprehensive description of the lesson would take hours to prepare, so it’s time (and energy) prohibitive. Describing the how-to in one’s lesson plan each day would take forever and be draining.
And, that kind of writing-everything-out work doesn’t help a master teacher: they know in their head what to do, how to execute; they know what leading questions they’re prepared to ask and what pitfalls they’re likely to encounter.
I question the analogy to military tactics
Well, I was hypothesizing about principal-teacher relations having similarities with military command structure / organization. How does the military maintain rigorous consistency across a broad spectrum, and can principals apply those kinds of ideas to departmental meetings? Students didn’t come in to that metaphor. Maybe it’s a dangerous or pointless metaphor and I should abandon it; it seemed to me that one of the relatively strong successes of a strong military is its ability to organize a consistent and reliable hierarchical authority structure, and maybe we can learn from that success. Or maybe there’s no useful parallels, I don’t know.
Are parental involvement and Parent-teacher councils and all that stuff completely out of fashion?
I think it’s a selection issue. It seems “Beating the Odds” somehow implies “Odds” being a significant lack of community involvement, especially among parents. Many behavioral and extrinsic-motivational issues fade in significance when there’s substantial community/parent involvement — issues of classroom management and student participation are there, but are exponentially easier to solve — and it’s probably no longer fair to call such schools odds-beaters.
SamChevre 03.03.09 at 5:29 pm
If you’re seriously interested in “what does a good lesson plan look like”, I recommend getting a copy of 2 curricula from Rod and Staff Publishers (the books I used in school, and among the best I taught out of.)
Get their 1st-grade reading and phonics.
Get their 5-th grade math.
Note that in both, they point out clearly where students may get stuck; explain EXACTLY what to say in explanation; and give suggested exercises.
Those books explain why schools with teachers with 8th-grade educations consistently turn out 8th-graders who can pass a high-school leaving exam, in a second language.
harry b 03.03.09 at 6:16 pm
Thanks Zeba, I should have figured that you weren’t American. This part of the conversation (about common assessments and common curricula) is hard to have across the boundary of the Atlantic because the in-school in-class differences are so extreme. If I thought for a minute I could convince local schools to offer the Bac instead of allowing teachers to do whatever they want in their own classrooms and assign grades themselves based on their own imagined scale of performance without once visiting the classroom or seeing the assessments of their peers or having their own classrooms visited by anyone, ever, I’d be pretty happy.
Can’t continue, but just to say that the glimpse into your own school life is much closer to what salient/I agree would be good than to what we have witnessed in american middle and high schools.
virgil xenophon 03.03.09 at 9:22 pm
dsquared@23 is pretty much on to something. Take pilot training in the armed services as another example. When lives are on the line, standardized instruction and “teaching to the test” for minimal levels of core competence that will keep people alive is the name of the game. And while pilotage skills in terms of flying techniques vary around the creative edges, the very limitations of the laws of physics and aerodynamics limit to a great extent the amount of creative variation possible.
We are, after all, talking about education on an industrial scale here, and while the world is replete with self-taught, creative idiosyncratic geniuses (including pilots–the Red Baron crashed six times, after-all–and walked away– while teaching himself to fly) such individual’s capabilities (student or instructor) are not what one designs a core curriculum and syllabus of instruction around.
Salient and harryb make some very sensible points with which I am in general agreement, yet at the same time I can commiserate with zebra–because whether as a teacher, athlete, or pilot (which I was) I always hated the thought of my individual creativity being straight-jacketed–which is the other side of the education instruction paradigm’s double-edged sword.
And when salient talks about parental involvment@37 I feel compelled to relate a personal story: Much of my entire family on both sides were educators to include two School Superintendents, one HS Principal, one HS Librarian, One college professor (My Father) and two second-grade teachers (one of whom was my Mother.)
Growing up in the fifties I naturally heard my Mother talk often (usually after returning home from the meetings in question) of the relatively usefulness/futility of formal parent-teacher conference nights. Years later in 1974, while as a security guard for xtra money in grad school, I was assigned to shepherd the teachers around the halls at a parent-teacher conference night at a middle school next door to one of the two worst crime-infested housing projects in New Orleans (the Fischer Project). As I escorted a group of teachers down the halls I overheard one remark casually to another using THE EXACT SAME WORDS I had heard my Mother use over twenty years prior: “Well, it’s the same old story, the parents who really need to be here because of their child’s poor performance never are–and the one’s who don’t really need to be here always show up.” LOL. And thirty-five years later I’m sure (so sure I’d bet BIG MONEY on it) those exact same words still echo down school hall-ways from the mouths of teachers on parent-teacher nights all over America today……..Some things about human nature NEVER change……..
Harry 03.03.09 at 9:27 pm
virgil
you are much older than I thought. Take that as a compliment.
salient 03.04.09 at 3:09 am
As a kind of cap for the moment, T. Herman Zweibel Media Industries has published a news report on some of my earlier work.
I recommend getting a copy of 2 curricula from Rod and Staff Publishers (the books I used in school, and among the best I taught out of.)
Thanks for the suggestion; I’ll hunt for a cheap used copy of the teacher’s manuals and take a look. I’m not terribly optimistic, though: these look like home-schooling materials, and crossing over from lessons for a small group of home-school students to lessons for a classroom-full usually requires inordinate full-scale overhaul (this isn’t a denigration; there exist some truly fantastic home-school resources; it’s just a very different teaching experience). But maybe I’m misinterpreting the publisher’s description.
Also, there’s something fun about ordering a math lesson-book from this Rod & Staff’s distribution outlet (the Anabaptist Bookstore) and receiving this message: “Sub Total $13.65 Your order is less than $5, so a $3 processing fee will be added later.” Well, then.
and the one’s who don’t really need to be here always show up.
Indeed, LOL — I’m certainly not taking you up on that bet. I also find it hilarious how many of these teachers can’t think up a productive use for talking with parents of successful students who are also taking the time to meet you in person instead of just emailing a brusque grades-update request. “Look, ___ is doing just fine in my class, but while you’re here…” I think one semester I almost accidentally set up a volunteer teacher’s aide network just by hypothesizing about it in all my PT conferences. Got me thinking…
virgil xenophon 03.04.09 at 7:54 pm
Harry@41
HA! Not really sure how to take that. If you are referring to my chronological age, I will be 65 this May 6th (always falls near Ky. Derby weekend–yet another reason to bend the elbow). OTH, if you somehow mean to compliment this wizened head as having demonstrated mature, thoughtful and intelligent judgment beyond my years, i.e., an “old head” on my shoulders–my true inner 19 year old self has to seriously question your powers of analysis. Or more probable still, you are simply taking pity
on what you regard as a doddering, misguided geezer who should nonetheless be tolerated–perhaps even humored– if for no other reason than in the belief that when I’m tied up on the keyboard here I can’t do truly serious real damage flailing about elsewhere in society at large…. Come to think of it, perhaps it’s time for this geezer to adopt a new moniker upon reaching age 65. That’s it, a new, transmorgified me : “The Fighting Fossil!”
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