Instructional Coherence - and What Works Against It

         In this passage from his book, So Much Reform, So Little Change, Charles Payne (Rutgers University) summarizes research on school conditions that greatly improve students’ opportunity to learn – especially students who enter school with disadvantages: 

- A common instructional framework guides curriculum, teaching, assessment, and learning climate, combining specific expectations for students’ learning with specific instructional strategies, materials, and assessments. “There is a logical progression of material from grade to grade and within each grade,” says Payne, “Teachers at a grade level talk about what to teach, how to teach, and how to figure out what’s been learned.” 

- Staff working conditions support implementation of the framework. This includes time for same-grade/same-course teacher teams to meet and discuss curriculum and pedagogy, supportive professional development and facilitation of meetings, and norms and expectations for collaborative work. 

- The allocation of materials, time, and staff assignments is done in a way that advances the common instructional framework. “Teacher assignments reflect student need,” says Payne, “not political considerations. Assignments… remain stable enough to give teachers time to learn to do them well.” 

        When a school has these three elements of instructional coherence in place, it’s better able to put qualified staff in place and overcome the impediments to effective teaching and learning that Payne has observed: 

• A fragmented, poorly-paced curriculum; 
• Teachers asked to teach one thing while students are tested on different content; 
• Teachers and departments not coordinating with each another; 
• Unmet resource needs, including personnel, materials, and space; 
• Fragmented, “drive-by” staff development;
• Inadequate instructional supervision of teachers; lack of accountability; 
• Gaps in staff content knowledge; 
• Weak classroom management skills; conditions not conducive to learning; 
• Teacher isolation: What goes on in my classroom is my business. 
• Low sense of teacher agency; 
• Teacher skepticism about students’ learning capacity; 
• Inadequate informal staff knowledge about students’ backgrounds and interests; 
• Rigidity of teachers’ attitudes about how students learn; 
• Reluctance of teachers to accept leadership from colleagues: She must think she knows more than we do. 
• Generalized belief in program failure: We’ve seen programs come, we’ve seen ’em go.
• Generalized skepticism about professional development; 
• Attrition of effective instructional staff; the best people move on. 

So Much Reform, So Little Change by Charles Payne (Harvard Education Press, 2008, 2022, pp. 89-90, 81); Payne can be reached at cp840@newark.rutgers.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #986 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.