Nimble Leadership for Effective Schools

 (Originally titled “Linking Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Leadership”) 

        In this Educational Leadership article, Jal Mehta (Harvard University), Max Yurkofsky (Radford University), and Kim Frumin (Deeper Learning Dozen) say the continuous improvement process, widely implemented in business, health care, and education, usually calls for (a) defining a problem, (b) developing a strategy, (c) trying it out, (d) assessing how it’s working, (e) making adjustments, and (f) repeating the process. 

        But in a study of continuous improvement in four school districts in the U.S. and Canada, Mehta, Yurkofsky, and Frumin found that it’s not “the linear process that it is often understood to be; instead, there is a lot more leadership skill, relationship building, political savvy, judgment, and personal touch involved.” Here’s what was happening in the most successful schools: 

        • Forging a collective purpose – Leaders developed “a shared desire to move toward a common destination,” say the authors. This is challenging in K-12 schools because of the lack of agreement on goals and measures, a norm of privacy in classrooms, and disagreement on what good teaching looks like. “But when people do come together to work in a disciplined way on an identified problem,” they say, “remarkable things can happen.” 

        An example: in the late 1990s, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that when ninth graders were “off track” on several key indicators, they were much more likely to drop out. By focusing on getting freshmen on track, Chicago boosted its graduation rate from 60 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2020. The key to success was that principals and teachers deeply believed that their work would produce an important result – important for their kids, their colleagues, and their communities. 

        • Implementing with integrity versus fidelity – The authors critique the rigid implementation of a program in one school, resulting in delayed problem identification, lost momentum, and disappointing results. In another school, teachers looked for new strategies to address problems they’d previously identified. “Many of the teachers were inspired by their colleagues’ different approaches to instruction,” say the authors, “and made significant changes to their own practice as a result.” The leaders in this school listened, “trying to understand clearly where their team members were (in mood, energy, and commitment) – and then adapting based on what they were learning.” 

        • Developing dispositions – The most successful schools kept their eye on key processes versus step-by-step implementation of continuous improvement. “Perhaps the most important disposition,” say the authors, “is a commitment to disciplined, reflective inquiry, drawing on multiple sources of data and evidence. After a long focus on accountability, during which many teachers have felt controlled by data, in these cases, the teachers begin to feel the data are working for them.” The authors suggest using a variety of data – the voices of students and community members as well as test scores – and “holding data lightly” as problems are analyzed and solved. 

        • Building a culture of trust – In the most successful schools, this is what made the difference, motivating teachers’ sustained effort and energy for the mission. Trust also made it possible to have difficult conversations. “As people became more invested in one another,” say the authors, “they felt freer to share what was happening in their classrooms and share what was really on their minds.” 

        • Finding the right frequency for meetings – Given the demands on teachers’ time and the tendency for districts to load teachers with one new initiative after another, the authors found it was crucial to find the Goldilocks zone for collaboration. One district had success with every-other-week “huddle-calls” in which teacher teams gathered online for a half hour after school to recount struggles and share suggestions. Teachers liked this structure, say Mehta, Yurkofsky, and Frumin, because it was “small and personal, focused directly on what they were teaching, and gave them new ideas of things they could try” – without overmanaging them or requiring identical strategies. This approach “can lead to incremental improvement without radically revamping how schools normally work.” 

    • Buffering teachers from incoherence – A final role for leaders, say the authors, is making sure teachers aren’t discombobulated by conflicting demands on their time and attention. In one district they studied, an innovative constructivist biology initiative could have been jeopardized by rigid implementation of the teacher-evaluation process. A savvy university partner showed school administrators how teachers’ new pedagogy dovetailed with the district’s evaluation rubric. 

 “Linking Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Leadership” by Jal Mehta, Max Yurkofsky, and Kim Frumin in Educational Leadership, March 2022 (Vol. 79, #6, pp. 36-41); the authors can be reached at jal_mehta@gse.harvard.edu, myurkofsky@radford.edu, and kim_frumin@gse.harvard.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #926 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Formative Assessment: What Evidence Do Teachers Find Most Useful?

         In this AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice article, Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) and Laura Link (University of North Dakota) say the big idea of mastery learning is usually seen as using low-stakes interim assessments to give students feedback on what they’ve learned well (at an 80% level) and help them focus on errors and misconceptions. Teachers follow up with “corrective” activities aimed at improving students’ performance on a second, parallel assessment with slightly different problems or questions. These follow-up assessments give students a second chance to show mastery (which motivates their efforts) and provide teachers with feedback on how well their supplementary instruction worked. 

         “The ‘just-in-time’ correction,” say Guskey and Link, “prevents minor learning difficulties from accumulating and becoming major learning problems. It also gives teachers a practical means to vary and differentiate their instruction in order to better meet students’ individual learning needs.” (Students who show mastery on the initial assessment take on enrichment or extension activities such as projects, reports, digital academic games, or engaging problem-solving.) 

         “An equally important but often neglected use of formative assessments,” say Guskey and Link, “is the feedback they offer teachers.” The mistakes students make reflect directly on the instruction teachers just conducted. This article reports on a study of K-12 teachers in a suburban midwestern district who were implementing mastery learning. Teachers were asked which of three kinds of assessment reports was most helpful in improving their own teaching (click the article link below and go to pages 14 and 15 for graphics of each type): 

• An item-by-item error analysis of a formative assessment, with special attention to items that 1/3 or more of the class got wrong; 
• Mastery charts of class progress on initial and follow-up formative assessments across multiple units; 
• Summative assessments comparing current students with previous years’ classes taught the same content without mastery learning. 

With the first data report, teachers could zero in on items that more than 1/3 of students got wrong, asking whether it was a poorly-worded test item or instructional practices that failed to reach a significant number of students. With the second data report (mastery charts), teachers could look for a jump in student mastery from the first to the second formative assessment, with students’ scores on initial assessments steadily improving. With the third data report (comparing summative scores), assessments allowed teachers to see if the mastery learning approach was getting better results than the way they had taught the previous year. 

         Guskey and Link solicited teachers’ opinions on the three types of data presentation in a survey asking: 

• Were the results surprising or pretty much what you expected? 
• How informative were the data in providing insights on your teaching? 
• How useful were the results in planning how to teach more effectively? 

There were also open-ended questions asking teachers for their suggestions on adaptations they would recommend and what other types of information would be helpful for improving instruction. 

        What did teachers say? Across grade levels, teachers said they found the item analysis of formative assessments the most useful for improving instruction. “With these data,” comment Guskey and Link, “teachers could determine precisely which concepts and skills had been taught and learned well, and which required a different approach.” The second and third data reports looked at students’ performance at a more general level, which was interesting feedback on how the mastery learning process was working but not as important to improving teaching in real time. Elementary teachers seemed to be better at predicting how well their students would do on formative assessments – probably because teachers in self-contained classes knew their students better than departmentalized middle- and high-school teachers. 

        In the open-response questions, teachers shared two additional insights that are important to schools implementing mastery learning: 

         • Teachers said they needed more time for team meetings to develop common assessments with grade-level colleagues – both to improve the quality of assessment questions and to tap their colleagues’ ideas on crafting better corrective activities.  

        • Teachers said their principals needed to play a more active role in getting teachers to routinely establish mastery-level criteria for formative assessments and more consistently implement mastery learning across the school. 

 “Feedback for Teachers: What Evidence Do Teachers Find Most Useful?” by Thomas Guskey and Laura Link in AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice, Winter 2022 (Vol. 18, #4, pp. 9-20); the authors can be reached at guskey@uky.edu and laura.link@UND.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #925 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Recommended Children's Series and Text Sets

             In this feature in Language Arts, Aeriale Johnson recommends text sets and series that “nurture joyful readers” as well as building identity, skills, intellect, and critical thinking: 

• The Juana and Lucas Series by Juana Medina: Juana and Lucas, Juana and Lucas: Big Problemas, Juana and Lucas: Muchos Changes, age 5-8 
• The Front Desk Series by Kelly Yang: Front Desk, Three Keys, Room to Dream, ages 8-12 
• The Narwhal and Jelly series by Ben Clanton: Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea! Super Narwhal and Jelly Jolt, Narwhal Peanut Butter and Jelly, Narwhal’s Otter Friend, Happy Narwhalidays, Narwhal’s School of Awesomeness, age 5-8 
• The New Kid series by Jerry Craft: New Kid, Class Act, age 8-12 
• The 10 Reasons to Love… series by Hanako Clulow: 10 Reasons to Love a Whale, 10 Reasons to Love a Bear, 10 Reasons to Love a Penguin, 10 Reasons to Love a Lion, 10 Reasons to Love a Turtle, 10 Reasons to Love an Elephant, age 5-8 
• The Superpower Field Guide series by Rachel Poliquin, illustrated by Nicholas John Frith: Beavers, Moles, Ostriches, Eels, age 8-12 
• Minh Lê text set: Drawn Together, Green Lantern: Legacy, Let Me Finish, Lift, The Perfect Seat 
• Stacy McAnulty text set: Mars, Earth, Ocean, Sun, Moon 
• Books in Verse text set (various authors): Becoming Ali, Words with Wings, Land of the Cranes

“‘Endless Fun’: How an Instructional Framework, Series, and Text Sets Nurture Joyful Readers” by Aeriale Johnson in Language Arts, January 2022 (Vol. 99, #3, pp. 213-217)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #923 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Increasing Access to Advanced High-School Courses

 (Originally titled “Opening the Door to Advanced Classes”) 

             In this Educational Leadership article, Nancy Watkins (California State University/ Fullerton) says that with the honors, AP, IB, and other advanced courses students often take to move on to higher education, not all doors are open. “Some are locked,” she says. “some are stuck. Some are reserved for certain people. Some doors are hidden, and some are guarded.” A disproportionate number of low-income students and students of color don’t take these courses, and schools need to examine incentives and barriers that limit opportunities. 

            Watkins describes the persistent efforts of a former colleague who persuaded her high school to offer new courses and open college-track offerings to English learners who had previously been assigned to lower tracks. Over several years, more and more students enrolled in these building block courses, and in 2018, 94 percent passed the AP Spanish Language exam; the following year 96 percent passed. In 2019-20, native Spanish speakers were able to directly enroll in heterogeneous advanced Spanish classes. 

            Drawing on this experience, Watkins has the following recommendations for opening doors for marginalized students: 

• Reduce barriers for innovation and transformation by evaluating the policies and attitudes that inhibit change. “Often decisions are made by site or district administrators about who gets what, when, and how,” says Watkins, “and these choices exclude the voices of people on the margins.” Schools might create forums to listen to stakeholders who have ideas on addressing inequities in course enrollment. 
• Provide resources and teacher training for advanced curriculum offerings. Often this involves creating new courses that bridge knowledge and skill gaps. 
• Support students with tutors and fee waivers in preparation for college exams. Information and encouragement are vital in both areas. 
• Evaluate student language proficiency classifications related to language fluency and tracked courses to avoid arbitrary course enrollment. The segregation of English learners in low-level courses may be the result of early assessments that don’t reflect students’ current language proficiency. 
• Intentionally develop the master schedule to reflect opportunities for all students. Schedules reflect priorities and values, says Watkins: “Beyond putting the puzzle pieces together, incorporate analysis and reflection on the equity gaps evident in the master schedule.” 
• Remove prerequisites for enrolling in honors and advanced courses. Barring students from enrolling based on previous coursework or grades prevents them from considering courses, in consultation with their counselors, teachers, and families, that will interest and challenge them.
• Help families understand the importance of advanced courses to college and career readiness. Information sessions need to be offered in multiple languages. 

 “Opening the Door to Advanced Courses” by Nancy Watkins in Educational Leadership, February 2022 (Vol. 79, #5, pp. 60-65); Watkins can be reached at nwatkins@fullerton.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #923 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Thoughtful Classroom Observation

        In this keynote address at the National SAM Conference last month, consultant/author Mike Rutherford proposed the following logic model: (a) skillful teaching is the most important variable in students’ school learning; (b) teaching becomes more skillful with feedback and practice; and (c) observation can be a key factor in feedback. Rutherford suggests eleven principles for getting the most out of classroom visits: 

• Practice intellectual humility. There’s a lot that observers don’t know and see when they walk into a classroom: what happened just beforehand, the mood of certain students, where in a curriculum unit they are, what’s in the back of the teacher’s mind, and much more. It’s a myth, says Rutherford, that supervisors can achieve “inter-rater reliability” by watching and scoring classroom videos. 
• Have a language about instruction. The more observers know about good teaching, the more conceptual hooks they have to help them notice, appreciate, and understand what’s going on. Rutherford tells the story of a high-school principal he worked with as an AP who was brilliant at spotting where trouble was about to break out in a basketball crowd. That came from years of “pattern recognition” in countless home games. 
• Develop positive expectancy. Rutherford advises giving yourself a pep talk before entering a classroom so you focus on what the teacher might do that’s effective. This is to counter any less-than-positive expectations you might have based on previous visits – or perhaps your mood at that moment. 
• Stay on your feet. When observers are seated, their field of vision is limited and there’s a tendency to write feverishly rather than watching and listening. Moving around a classroom, the observer can look over students’ shoulders, look at their work, ask them questions, read what’s on the walls, and get different perspectives on the teachers’ actions. 
• Don’t worry about interrupting. “You’ve already done that,” says Rutherford; no matter how unobtrusive, an adult walking into a classroom will be noticed by the teacher and students, affecting them in ways large and small. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle describes the effect of an instrument of measurement on what’s being measured.) The only question is whether the feedback given to the teacher will be valuable enough to “pay them back” for the interruption.
• Enter as a visitor, not an owner. A classroom is a teacher’s “home,” their sacred ground; it’s where they spend more waking hours than almost anywhere else. Above all, Rutherford advises, avoid hanging out near the teacher’s desk – that’s their personal zone. And for heaven’s sake, don’t sit in their chair! 
• Maintain focus and intensity. Every 20 seconds, says Rutherford, teachers check out what the visitor is doing. They want to see someone who is engrossed, attentive, upbeat. • Delay zeroing in on details. The first priority walking in is to get the big picture, take in the climate, the overall tone of the room. 
• Alternate between zooming in and zooming out. Spend five minutes observing the big picture, then focus intently on a particular student, a piece of student work, an anchor chart, what’s on the board, or some other detail for five minutes, then spend the rest of the time observing more generally. That should be the shape of a 15-minute visit. 
• Look ahead of and behind the action. For example, what are students doing just before the teacher arrives at their group? What do they do after the teacher has talked to them and moved on
• Practice shorter, more-frequent observations. These mini-observations don’t need to be evaluative; they’re geared to getting a sense of everyday practice and following up with focused coaching conversations. They are likely to have much more impact on teaching and learning than traditional evaluations, which, says Rutherford, have “a very low effect size.”  

“Developing Sharper Vision for Classroom Observations” by Mike Rutherford, a keynote address at the National SAM Innovation Project Conference, January 28, 2022; Rutherford can be reached at mike@rutherfordlg.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #922 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Let's Solve Our Educational Problems Together

            Many of us have wondered why the Mt. Abraham Unified School District (MAUSD) would be considering closing elementary schools, and why MAUSD would support consolidating middle and high schools with Addison Northwest (the Vergennes area) and becoming one large uber-district. After all, the financial worries plaguing the MAUSD are the result of declining student enrollment and a state education funding system that was designed when student enrollment in Vermont was stable. Closing (or even threatening to close) town elementary schools; and consolidating (or even threatening to consolidate) middle and high schools with another district, will only make the enrollment decline worse. We are already hearing this concern from local real-estate agents. Why would young families move to our five towns without assurance that town schools will remain open and vibrant, and school bus rides will remain relatively short? 

            If declining student enrollment is part of the cause of the problem, let’s take steps to attract more families to our region. It seems to us that the solution consists of three key parts: 

• Increase the availability of jobs. Supporting the universal broadband efforts now underway across Addison County is one way to help here. Not only will affordable, universal high-speed internet enable many current and future residents to work from home, but it will promote economic development across our towns, creating more jobs and making it much easier for residents to find information that leads to gainful employment. For more information, please visit the Maple Broadband website. 
• Increase the availability of reasonably priced housing. The recent Population and Housing Report from the Addison County Regional Planning Commission suggests some solutions, including repurposing existing housing stock (Repurpose existing housing stock, not schools!). Our local and regional planning commissions have already been doing some great work on this issue. They need our questions and ideas, and they deserve our support in considering steps that will increase housing availability, especially for young families just starting out. There are a number of steps that towns can take, and a number of resource people and organizations that would help our towns with this part of the solution. 
• Increase the availability of early childcare. The scarcity of quality care for very young children is a huge obstacle to employment that discourages young families from settling in our rural towns. There must be ways to increase access to early childcare - including by locating it some of the extra space we currently have in our schools. 

            Wouldn’t it be a more productive and harmonious use of our time and resources to work together on these steps toward solutions, rather than just treating the symptom of the problem with measures (closing schools and further consolidating school governance) that would have so many negative effects on our students and our communities? Imagine MAUSD Board members, the MAUSD administration, and community members from across our five towns, intentionally collaborating to keep our schools open, vibrant, thriving and cost effective. With that kind of effort there’s nothing we couldn’t accomplish. While we’re at it, let’s also collaborate in calling on the Vermont Legislature to make needed changes to the state’s system for funding public schools, so Vermont’s rural communities won’t have to suburbanize our school systems in order to be able to afford them. 

 By Nancy Cornell on behalf of the Starksboro SOS (Save Our Schools) Committee

Please note: This editorial appeared in the December 23, 2021 edition of The Addison Independent.

What Are the Results When Elementary Teachers Specialize?

          In this Annenberg Institute paper, NaYoung Hwang and Brian Kisida (University of Missouri) report on their study of the impact of elementary schools having teachers focus on fewer subjects – for example, one teaches math and science while another teaches ELA and social studies. While the majority of U.S. elementary students learn in self-contained classes, with the homeroom teacher covering all major subjects, a growing number of schools are using a semi-departmentalized structure, with teachers specializing in one or more subjects and working with two or more homerooms. The percent of schools using this model has increased from 5 percent in the mid-1990s to 20 percent by the early 2000s. 

          Over the years, advocates have advanced a number of arguments for elementary specialization:

• Although highly effective teachers in one subject are usually effective in others, there is variation; teachers are more proficient in some subjects than others. 
• This suggests that getting teachers working in their best subject will have a positive effect on student achievement. 
• When teachers specialize, they can more easily hone their skills. 
• Training and PD are streamlined and less time-consuming. 
• Teaching the same lesson two or more times a day improves performance. 
• Having fewer preps reduces teachers’ workload and stress and increases job satisfaction. 

Despite these appealing advantages, specialization has some downsides: 

• Teachers are responsible for at least twice as many students, making it more difficult to know each students’ strengths and weaknesses, needs, and special circumstances. 
• It’s more challenging for students to build trusting relationships with teachers and develop a sense of belonging in the school. 
• That’s concerning since research consistently shows that relationships play an important part in student success, especially in the early grades and for vulnerable students.
• For parents, having to deal with several teachers makes it more challenging to communicate about their children’s development and learning. 

 Hwang and Kisida say these pros and cons of elementary specialization haven’t been adequately researched, despite more than a century of debate. However, two recent studies – one in Houston, the other in North Carolina – cast doubt on the practice, documenting negative effects on student achievement. 

          Hwang and Kisida followed up on those studies by looking at statewide data on fourth and fifth grade teachers in Indiana public schools from 2011 to 2017. The researchers were able to compare data on the same teachers in years when they taught self-contained classes and years when they specialized in one or two areas. The data linked 591,311 students to 15,895 math teachers and 17,101 reading teachers. Here are the conclusions. 

• Teachers performed less well when they specialized than when they taught self-contained classes.
• Students with specialized teachers performed less well in reading and math than students with self-contained homeroom teachers. 
• This was especially true with low-achieving students, English language learners, students with special needs, and those eligible for free and reduced-price meals. 
• Schools implementing specialization saw no improvements in student achievement, attendance, or disciplinary infractions. 
• The researchers found that teachers who specialized tended to be less qualified by Indiana standards and often had a prior track record of lower impact on student achievement. 
• However, the researchers don’t believe this was the reason specialized teachers did less well; that’s because in the North Carolina study, specialized teachers more often had higher effectiveness ratings. 

What explains the negative findings on specialized elementary classrooms? Hwang and Kisida believe it’s because “specialization weakens student-teacher relationships.” They were able to test this hypothesis by looking at schools where students looped with specialist teachers – had the same combination of teachers two years in a row. In these classes, the negative effect of specialization on math achievement was significant lower. These data, say the authors, “show that finding strategies to increase student-teacher familiarity with specialists may improve their effectiveness.” There’s also the option of not specializing. 

 “Spread Too Thin: The Effects of Teacher Specialization on Student Achievement” by NaYoung Hwang and Brian Kisida, Annenberg Institute, October 2021; the authors can be reached at nhwang@missouri.edu and kisidab@missouri.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #915 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.