| The Leadership Difference at High Performing Schools | |
| Written by Clete Bulach | ||||
I wholeheartedly agree with Cathy Owens. The principal is the school’s coach and leader and must involve all school constituents if positive change is to occur. When principals have a clear vision of the type of school culture they want to create, they will be more effective in reducing resistance to school reform and likelier to succeed in creating a caring learning community. Creating a “high performing” school is an organizational approach to school reform that creates a distinctly different school culture and climate than can be found in existing schools. Based on my experience and research, I have determined that there are four types of school cultures: • The laissez-faire school culture—the under performing school (2-5%) These four types are described in detail in Creating a Culture for High Performing Schools (Bulach, Lunenburg, & Potter, 2008). The laissez-faire school has a very loose organizational and control structure, low student achievement, and a high failure and dropout rate. The traditional school culture has a strong emphasis on control and a top down organizational structure. Students are motivated by grades and must follow the rules or they will receive some form of punishment. The dropout and failure rate tends to be better than in the laissez-faire school, but it is still high. In the enlightened traditional school, a third motivator has been added to grades and rules and that is some form of reward. If students do what they are supposed to do, they get a reward. The reward could be a “Caught Doing Good Certificate,” lunch with faculty on the stage, student of the month, etc. This additional motivator improves student behavior and achievement and also reduces the dropout and failure rate. A high performing school is “one where student achievement is high and student and teacher absenteeism is low. Student behavior is such that teachers seldom have to control them or tell them what to do. This results in greater time on task, higher teacher morale, lower teacher absenteeism, a lower student dropout rate, and improved parental support” (Bulach et al., 2008, p. vi). One basic change in the high performing school culture is the way administrators and teachers provide leadership. The leadership style in this type of school culture is called “servant leadership.” When administrators and teachers come across as servants— as opposed to “self-serving”—a fundamental change in the culture occurs. The emphasis changes from “telling” to “listening” behaviors. Listening is a caring behavior that fosters the development of trust. In the other three types of school cultures, the emphasis is on control and “telling” students and teachers what to do. The other basic change in the high performing school is that the peer group changes from a negative force to a positive one, taking responsibility for controlling the other students at the school. This may seem like an impossible task, but it can be done, and I hope you’ll consult my new book for a detailed step-by-step process and a vision for principals on how to create that type of school culture (Bulach et al., 2008). When the peer group is involved in controlling each other, time on task increases because the teachers have more time to teach. This results in higher student achievement, lower failure and dropout rates, and a caring and successful learning community. Sources Bulach, C. R., Lunenburg, F. C., & Potter, L. (2008). Creating a culture for high performing schools: A comprehensive approach to school reform and dropout prevention. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education. Owens, Cathy (2008). Generating buy-in for school change. What’s Working in Schools, 10, November 20. |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 27 March 2009 11:38 ) |
By Marian Kisch
All children don’t learn in the same way. They start at different levels, respond to different approaches and progress at different rates.
“It’s no longer ‘one size fits all’ teaching,” Angie Rosen, supervisor of curriculum and instruction at Little Silver School District, says. “We know a lot more now about how students learn and we need to apply those techniques in our teaching.”
That’s where differentiated instruction (DI) comes in. In Little Silver, a suburban, K-8 school district of fewer than 1,000 students near Red Bank, NJ, DI has actually been part of the district’s strategic plan for four years. The ultimate goal is to improve student achievement. read more…
Making the Most of Professional Learning Communities |
written by Jay McTighe
This article is the first of a three part series.
A growing number of educators are involved in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) within their schools. Once a PLC structure is established and communities are formed, a set of substantive questions must be addressed: What is the role of PLCs within a school? How do we insure that a PLC achieves its desired results? What should teachers be doing when they meet in learning teams? In other words, how do we make the most of Professional Learning Communities?
In our recent book, Schooling by Design (ASCD, 2007), Wiggins and McTighe propose various professional roles for teachers when they are not instructing students. In this article, and the forthcoming newsletter articles, I will discuss three of these roles as defining the essential work of members of a Professional Learning Community
- Serving as a “Critical Friend,”
- Looking at Student Work in Teams
- Continuous Learner
PLC Member Role #1 – Serving as a “Critical Friend”
Once a month, members of a cross-grade level PLC team meet to exchange unit plans for “critical friend” feedback. Allison and her fourth grade partner, Tom, give copies of their upcoming interdisciplinary unit on the “rain forest” to 5th grade teachers, Everett and Elizabeth, in exchange for their E/LA “poetry” unit. Following reading and paired discussions of the two units they received, each grade level team presents feedback and suggestions to the other.
During the meeting, Elizabeth and Everett suggest several essential questions for the rain forest unit (“How does where you live influence how you live?” and “How do living and non-living things of an eco-system interact?”) that can be productively revisited in fifth grade. As a group, the four teachers brainstorm ideas for a performance task that assesses several of the unit’s interdisciplinary learning targets. Allison and Tom commend the engaging learning activities of the poetry unit, but point out that the proposed assessment evidence does not align completely with the unit goals. Elizabeth and Everett discuss ways to sharpen the assessments. Tom suggests a wonderful Internet site on which elementary students can read poems written by students across the globe and publish their own poems. Everett and Elizabeth are thrilled to learn about this excellent new resource for their unit.
Most teachers plan lessons and units of study, based on an established curriculum framework. However, teacher-developed plans are typically created in isolation and (with the exception of untenured beginners) are rarely reviewed by administrators or colleagues. Moreover, teachers can sometimes get too close to their work and have a difficult time seeing any weaknesses. As an antidote to this prevalent aspect of our profession, I propose that all teachers should be actively involved in playing the role of a “critical friend” for their colleagues to review unit plans, lessons and assessments and provide helpful feedback.
While common practice in some professions (e.g., the peer review process for reviewing scientific claims in journals), the culture in many schools does not invite feedback from fellow professionals. Indeed, schools are more likely to reflect a “go it alone” ethos where “academic freedom” translates into “let me close my door and do my thing.”
A high school principal acknowledged this phenomenon when he sarcastically questioned his own leadership influence over his staff: “Principal? No, I am not the Principal. I rent space in an educational mall to self-employed entrepreneurs!”
Even where more collaborative school cultures exist, there is a tendency for educators to avoid criticizing each other’s professional practices. Yet, we know that feedback is necessary for improvement. Honest, specific and descriptive feedback from peers can prove invaluable to beginners and support even effective teachers in moving from “good to great.” Consequently, I recommend that structured opportunities for peer reviews of each other’s plans be included as an explicit expectation of Professional Learning Communities.
Since any “critical friend” process may run counter to prevailing school norms, leaders are advised to begin slowly to help staff become comfortable with peer review. For example, model the process with a lesson or unit plan developed elsewhere. Discuss the roles of reviewers and designers. (A “fishbowl” process works well to model these roles.) Ask for volunteers interested in having their own work (units or assessment tasks) submitted for peer review, and invite them to share the benefits of the resulting peer feedback. Involve more staff in peer review as people become more familiar and comfortable with the process. Peer reviews may be conducted with role-alike groups (i.e., same grade and subject) or more heterogeneous groups. A group size of three to seven teachers works well. When beginning, a school might schedule peer reviews once during the first semester and again during the second half of the year. Once the benefits are realized, staff may seek more frequent opportunities for peer feedback.
Any peer review process should be guided by an agreed-upon set of criteria so that the feedback is “standards based” and de-personalized. For example, McTighe and Wiggins offer a set of unit design standards in The Understanding by Design Professional Development Workbook (ASCD, 2004). This workbook includes a detailed description of a practical and proven protocol for conducting peer reviews.
While the primary purpose of peer review is to provide feedback to improve teaching plans, there are residual benefits as well. Participants in peer review sessions regularly comment on the value of the process as an opportunity to share and discuss curriculum, assessment and instruction with colleagues. Such sessions focus attention on essential questions of teaching and learning: what are the key ideas in targeted standards? What counts as evidence that students really understand and can transfer their learning? What and how to teach to enable students to achieve expected results?
Time spent in collaborative planning and peer review can reduce teacher isolation while enhancing effectiveness. When PLC team members engage in peer feedback sessions, they are “walking the talk” of standards-based education by applying standards to their own work – a hallmark of true professionalism.
To see these techniques in McTighe’s video series, Effective Assessment for Effective Learning, click here.
For the rest of the roles as defining the essential work of members of a Professional Learning Community see our January newsletter.
To read more from Jay McTighe you can reference chapter 8 in Failure Is Not an Option ® 6 Principles for Making Student Success the ONLY Option.
 Jay McTighe's "Making the Most of Professional Learning Communities" |
Jay McTighe brings a wealth of experience developed during a rich and varied career in education. He served as Director of the Maryland Assessment Consortium, a state collaboration of school districts working together to develop and share formative performance assessments. Prior to this position, Jay was involved with school improvement projects at The Maryland State Department of Education.
©Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay (2007) Schooling by Design. |
SEATTLE, WA — Attendees at the annual Title I Conference left with a lot of ideas – and more than a little HOPE.
With a theme of “Harboring Success for Every Child,” the conference kicked off with a keynote address by Alan Blankstein, President of the HOPE Foundation and author of the award-winning Failure Is Not an Option®: Six Principles that Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools, and the recently released book The Answer Is in the Room: How Effective Schools Scale Up Student Achievement.
Blankstein’s presentation focused on how school teachers and leaders can succeed with virtually every student, create high-performing teams, and build school cultures that close performance gaps.
Here’s a synopsis:
While the press spotlights charismatic leaders as the solution, research shows that this lasts only as long as that leader’s tenure. Significant early gains and sustainable improvement need not present a dichotomy to school administrators today. How can school systems make sustainable, scalable improvement in teacher effectiveness to support school and district improvement goals? The best kept secret in education today is that the answer is already in the room. The question is how to build a culture of trust and collaboration to spread the good things already happening within a district.
“The foundation of the successes we have had in schools throughout North America is in building a learning culture of trust in the school. This in turn supports commitment and capacity building of staff which then is leveraged to enhance teacher effectiveness,” said Blankstein. He then described the process, recently codified by an evaluation by the American Institutes of Research, which has led one school in New York City from the verge of closure to being named last month by the New York Times as one of the top 5 schools in the city.
Alan Blankstein is the President of the HOPE Foundation and author of the award-winning Failure Is Not an Option®: Six Principles that Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools, and the recently released book The Answer Is in the Room: How Effective Schools Scale Up Student Achievement.
For more on The Answer is in the Room, or Failure Is Not an Option®, click here.
To have Alan Blankstein or an associate come to your school district, national or state conference, call Carol Wander at 812-340-4393 or email her at cwander@hopefoundation.org.
Contact us today to learn more about bringing HOPE to your school or district.
By Rebecca Alber
Teachers have all experienced a professional development that is so way off target, or one that had nothing to do with what they teach or who they teach. We teachers can talk about having to sit in poorly-run, irrelevant PD like they are war stories.
Today, I teach teachers and design and facilitate a good number of teacher workshops. I’d like to share some things I’ve discovered — through experience and research — when it comes to PD.
Generating Buy-in for School Change
| Generating Buy-in for School Change |
| Written by Cathy Owens | |||||
As I travel across North America, the feedback I hear from teachers is always the same: “Our schools don’t need outside experts to come in and fix our problems. As teachers working here everyday, we are the first responders, and we can offer the best practical decisions.” Most of the problems schools face are best solved by the teachers who deal with them head-on everyday. Teachers’ daily experiences foster an up-close insider view that positions them to most quickly and creatively determine the right solutions. read more… |
| Written by Alan Blankstein | ||||
Naming and facing our fears constructively can be the first step to overcoming them. As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great (2001), successful organizations consistently and accurately assess current performance with an eye toward improvement. They “face the brutal facts.” Facing the facts is often difficult; they can be unflattering! For educators especially, certain types of assessment tend to correlate with personal and critical evaluation by administration (Fullan & Hargreaves, 1996, 1998). Nevertheless, facing the data and our fears constructively changes our responses from avoidance to an expanded range of possible actions. Compare these two events from NASA: read more… |
By: Marian Kisch
Although Mansfield Independent School District in Texas was doing “pretty good” according to its superintendent, Bob Morrison, complacency was setting in. “There seemed to be no urgency to change.” But Morrison saw areas that warranted improvement, such as communication between different levels of instruction.
Some educators were playing the blame game, he says. Upper grade level teachers were complaining, for instance, that students were not prepared for math, while lower grade teachers got defensive saying they had taught those skills.
“Education is not a blame game,” Morrison says. “Our goal is to do such a good job that when students walk across the stage at graduation, they are prepared to do whatever they want, be it college, work or the military.”
Five years ago when Morrison was an assistant superintendent, he took some of his administrators to a HOPE Foundation conference. Upon his return, Morrison bought copies of Alan Blankstein’s book, Failure is Not an Option, and led book study groups for the administrators. The district brought HOPE to Mansfield over the next three years to lead training sessions four times each year for staff from each of the 42 campuses. They explored how to improve communications, develop relationships with students and enhance community relations.
“HOPE tries to make it real so we don’t see kids as statistics,” Morrison says. Developing relationships with children will pay big because “children will do anything for you if they know you care. HOPE teaches you to establish positive relations with students and their parents.”
Looking at the whole situation is important, including what’s happening with children at home. For example, maybe the child has increased responsibilities at home and therefore couldn’t finish his homework. Perhaps the parents have been sick and the child needs a pat on the back. “We need to show children that we appreciate what they’re doing,” the school leader says. “That’s what HOPE instills.”
According to Morrison, HOPE gave the district the tools to help educators start critical conversations about problems, and ways to solve them. “We needed to have meaningful discussions without needing to blame someone. There was no more ‘I gotcha’ to blame others for children’s failures.”
The district formed Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to work together monthly on preventive strategies and improving communications. They began with the HOPE committees and then spread to teams and departments, depending on the age level of the campus. The PLCs started with communications strategies and then moved on to walk throughs and calibrations of worksheets to make sure the work they were providing their students was on grade level.
Accountability is important in education and in Mansfield. But education is much more than a one day test, according to the superintendent. “HOPE has helped us see that we need to be flexible and instill the love of learning. Then good things will happen. We need to assess, but it doesn’t need to be a statement of whether a child has been successful or not based upon one test.”
Although HOPE is no longer conducting training sessions on site, Mansfield has continued to carry on many of its principles including teamwork, collaboration and communication. The district has reorganized its administrative team, changing from a secondary and primary superintendent format to three area superintendents each serving 13 schools. This allows meetings to include communication between different grade levels, which encourages better cooperation. “This changes the structure of the district,” Morrison says. “Teachers now talk to one another and discuss mutual issues and expectations. Children are the winners here.”
The structure of meetings has changed, too. Instead of dwelling on nitty gritty issues such as the best time for lunch (this is now handled through email), discussions revolve around why kids are not doing well on a test or on the continuum of learning expectations. “Before HOPE we never had that kind of conversation,” the superintendent says. “Before, everyone was worried about their own school. Now we’re all looking out for the same thing: what’s best for the education of our students.”
PRINCETON, NJ — Attendees at the annual New Jersey Education Association Urban Education Best Practices Conference left with a lot of ideas – and more than a little HOPE.
Conference attendees warmed up to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” and were then treated to an interdisciplinary lesson merging that song, the inauguration of President Obama, and pertinent facts about mosquitoes mating.
With a theme of “Harboring Success for Every Child,” the conference kicked off with a keynote address by Alan Blankstein, President of the HOPE Foundation and author of the award-winning Failure Is Not an Option®: Six Principles that Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools, and the recently released book The Answer Is in the Room: How Effective Schools Scale Up Student Achievement.
Blankstein’s presentation focused on how school teachers and leaders can succeed with virtually every student, create high-performing teams, and build school cultures that close performance gaps.
“The foundation of the successes we have had in schools throughout North America is in building a learning culture of trust in the school. This in turn supports commitment and capacity building of staff which then is leveraged to enhance teacher effectiveness,” said Blankstein. He then described the process, recently codified by an evaluation by the American Institutes of Research, which has led one school in New York City from the verge of closure to being named last month by the New York Times as one of the top 5 schools in the city.
Most of the session, however, was spent hearing people laugh, talk with one another, and fully engage in the principles and processes being described.
This was a powerful presentation that gives our members hope, and clarity about how to improve their practices to assure success for all students,” shared Pam Garwood, Associate Director of Professional Development. “Alan modeled what he spoke about and the message and specific strategies were excellent. It was probably the best kick off of this annual event that we have had to date.”
For more on The Answer is in the Room, or Failure Is Not an Option®, click here.
To have Alan Blankstein or an associate come to your school district, national or state conference, call Carol Wander at 812-340-4393 or email her at cwander@hopefoundation.org.
Contact us today to learn more about bringing HOPE to your school or district.
The following is an excerpt from the a collaboration between HOPE Foundation, Corwin Press and the American Association of School Administrators: Sustaining Learning Communities, with contributions from Alan Blankstein, Shirley Hord, Stephanie Hirsh, Deborah Wortham, Maurice Elias, Andy Hargreaves and many others….
If one reflects again on the words that comprise the term professional learning community, it seems plausible that the three words convey the idea of the professionals in a school (or other organization) coming together in a group that is, in community in order to learn. Members of a PLC are expected to recognize that their learning will be the key to their students’ learning. Members of the PLC are expected to acknowledge their own learning needs in their quest to support their students’ success. Their true purpose must be improved staff and student performance and the PLC specifies learning in community as the way to achieve this valued goal.
Improvement and Reform, Professional Development, Budget Development and Technological Application, Program Evaluation, Parent/Community Relations, Curriculum Design, Development, and Evaluation, and Facilities Administration.
While there are many other important tasks that teachers and administrators complete when they meet in collaborative work groups, a PLC expects them to join the group with the assumption that the data they examine and the needs they identify will point toward the learning they must undertake in order to successfully address the challenges that face them. Deliberate and carefully constructed learning for adults will produce better results for students. Learning is always intentional; it is not simply a byproduct of the many important tasks that occur among the group members.
From a review and synthesis of the research literature where the work of the PLC, and its results, correlated with improved student learning (Hord, 2004), five components of the professional learning community were identified. These included:
- Shared values and vision by the community, wherein individuals identify their own beliefs and purposes for which the school exists, leading to synthesis and agreed upon common goals which they are committed to pursue for the benefit of students. Without values shared across the group, there can be no community.
- Shared and supportive leadership, provided by the positional leaders of the school or organization and accompanied by structures and activities that enable staff members to develop leadership capacity, leads to the increasing professionalism of the staff and their assessment of self-efficacy.
- Collective learning, identified by the community and specifying what the community must learn and how they will go about learning it, is followed by application of the learning across the school, district, or organizational unit.
Supportive conditions, of which two kinds are required physical or structural, such as time for meeting, space for meeting, and other resources such as materials, information, and consultants so that the community can come together to do its learning and work. A second supportive condition is the human or relational feelings or perspectives that the participants have for each other, including respect and high regard for all members, and harmonious attitudes that support learning together.
- The fifth dimension is peers supporting peers in their improvement efforts, as when a host teacher invites another teacher to visit and observe her/him in a specified teaching activity, after which the visiting teacher provides feedback to the host teacher. This activity engages individuals in learning while observing others, which benefits the visiting teacher as well as the host teacher. In this way, not only do individuals improve, but the organization also increases in effectiveness through the learning of its members.
In essence, the major goal of the PLC is staff learning together, with the staff’s learning directed to student needs. The staff learning occurs more deeply and richly in interactions and conversations in which staff members pursue intentional learning, share new knowledge, test ideas, ask questions, gain clarification, debate conclusions, and seek consensus on how to transfer new learning to practice.
References:
- Hord, S. M. (Ed). (2004). Learning together, leading together: Changing schools through professional learning communities. New York: Teachers College Press.
