Abstract
To improve learning, educators must first confront the truths about how schools actually operate — and then respond to those realities.
If we're trying to fundamentally change how students write, compute, and think, then we're going about it all wrong. While administrators busy themselves with an array of responsibilities and teachers faithfully attend institutes and afterschool workshops to learn the newest techniques, the century-old assign-and-assess method of instruction remains intact: Teachers talk a lot, students listen a lot, teachers grade a lot.
To change schools, we must transform that old method into a model of teaching that promotes high-quality interactions between teachers, students, and peers. We must organize subjects in a way that draws students into disciplined approaches to solving contemporary problems. And assignments must be designed to replicate authentic responses to real-world tasks.
Unfortunately, schools must respond to the pressure to improve, and accountability mandates cause them to respond in predictable ways. First, they target areas used to measure Adequate Yearly Progress. Reading is their first concern, followed closely by mathematics. When these strategies fail, they target improvement in reading or mathematics for a particular subgroup, especially ethnic or language minorities. And in addition to their efforts to increase reading and math scores, schools set an array of goals, including some that seem a bit capricious.
Instead, schools need to concentrate on improving the quality of instruction in all classrooms. Educators need to decide — in substantial detail — what good teaching looks like, and they need to measure their teaching against that yardstick. Teachers need a supportive teacher evaluation system that sets clear standards for performance and promotes teachers' development toward these benchmarks. And administrators need to know what high-quality teaching is in order to know what to look for in hiring, mentoring, supporting, and retaining staff.
While schools strive to accelerate learning in the core areas of reading and mathematics, they also need to improve instruction across the curriculum. The research is clear that while the quick fix might lead to transitory gains, an improvement in instructional practices across a school or across an entire system allows schools to boost learning substantially and to sustain that improvement in an environment of high expectations and high performance. However, while this seems obvious, many factors conspire to hide this truth from educators in the schools.
Another truth that seems hidden in plain sight is that students will learn only what teachers teach. Again, this seems obvious. But instructional time still is interrupted by numerous diversions, such as announcements on the public address system, students engaged in social conversation, teacher conferring with a colleague in the hall, etc. The more diversions there are, the less students learn.
While we're reporting the obvious, we will add a third truth hidden in plain sight. High-quality instruction must include some basic routines, especially situating learning in the essential concepts of the curriculum, reminding students what they have experienced so far, and explaining current and long-term goals to students and how the current activities will prepare them for the future.
SUGGESTED READINGS
Boyd, Donald, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Jonah Rockoff, and Jim Wyckoff. The Narrowing Gap in New York City Teacher Qualifications and Its Implications for Student Achievement in High-Poverty Schools. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2008.
Clotfelter, Charles T., Helen F. Ladd, and Jacob L. Vigdor. How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement? Durham, N.C.: Sanford Institute, Duke University, 2007.
Cuban, Larry. How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890 – 1980. Research on Teaching Monograph Series. New York: Longman, 1984.
Darling-Hammond, Linda, and David Haselkorn. “Reforming Teaching: Are We Missing the Boat?” Education Week, April 1, 2009.
Hillocks, George Jr. “Needed: A Revolution in the Teaching of Literacy.” English Leadership Quarterly 32, no. 1 (August 2009): 8-12.
Newmann, Fred M., BetsAnn Smith, Elaine Allensworth, and Anthony S. Bryk. “Instructional Program Coherence: What It Is and Why It Should Guide School Improvement Policy.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 23, no. 4 (2001): 297-321.
Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 2009.
TRANSFORMING ACCOUNTABILITY
A decade of accountability mandates has helped obscure the classroom truths children experience each day. Overcoming this problem requires a fundamental change in how we talk about accountability and how we act on this new conversation. Based on our extensive classroom observations in a variety of schools, we recommend a four-part strategy for transforming the truths in American classrooms.
First, educators must stop using business terminology — accountability, quality dashboards, metrics, etc. — to describe what they do in schools. Unlike our counterparts in the business sector, we cannot be certain that stable inputs, outputs, and means of production are a part — nor will ever be a part — of teaching 25 or more students how to read, write, compute, and think well. The term educators should be using is responsibility. Accountability implies that supervisors and employees guarantee that implementing certain methods in certain ways result in certain outcomes within certain times. Responsibility implies that administrators and teachers configure the organization to support teaching, create staff development opportunities, and acquire materials to support an agreed-on instructional worldview. That is, it means that educators have constructed a coherent response to the fundamental questions of schooling: How do children learn? What knowledge is of most worth? How should subject matter be organized? How should we teach? How should we assess what students understand?
Second, school administrators must orchestrate a conversation about what is high-quality teaching. The shared understanding of the nature of high-quality teaching should inform much of the business of schools: recruitment and hiring, induction, mentoring, certified staff evaluation, and professional development.
Third, school administrators and other school leaders must enter classrooms to observe the instructional truths in their buildings. The goal of these observations is to identify the extent of the gaps between the teaching that actually occurs in the classrooms and the agreed-on vision of what good teaching should be. If school administrators lack the expertise to conduct an instructional audit of their building, they should seek out knowledgeable colleagues to assist them.
Finally, school administrators and teachers must work together to develop a plan for narrowing the gap between a school's instructional worldview and what teachers are actually doing in classrooms. This plan should contain the following elements:
Define high-quality teaching. The foundation of school improvement is defining the criteria for effective teaching, identifying the gaps between that definition and actual classroom performance, and providing teachers with high-quality staff development programs that close the gap. Responsible school leaders provide teachers with the needed materials, time, expertise, and organizational supports.
Measure the current state of teaching. Measuring baseline performance is essential for evaluating the effects of school-sponsored professional development at a later date. The current accountability model requires educators to examine academic achievement data in order to make inferences about the factors that affect students' achievement. Looking at high-quality teaching makes sense because we know that teaching has a strong effect on student achievement.
Pursue a purposeful approach to staff development. High-quality staff development cultivates ongoing relationships with an expert or mentor who models, observes, and provides feedback; offers continual opportunities to work with colleagues; and provides teachers the flexibility to adapt theories and practices to their classrooms.
Promote a purposeful approach to instructional program coherence. The American curriculum covers too much with too little emphasis on understanding. Students are expected to make sense out of catalogs of names, definitions, and routines. The only students who thrive in this instructional chaos are ones who already have a background that provides a context for these catalogs or ones who have a proclivity for imposing order on abstract symbol systems. Few students fall into either category. What's needed is a curriculum that's meaningful to the diverse populations coming through school doors.
CONCLUSION
We've observed in hundreds of classrooms and examined dozens of school improvement plans, and these experiences have led us to recognize some truths that have been hidden in plain sight. These are simple observations that must seem obvious to the reader, but that remain obscured in the practices of school. These hidden truths are:
If students are going to learn and reach high levels of achievement, teachers have to teach, and teach well.
Students' learning efforts must be situated in the context of a coherent curriculum, with the teacher expressing goals explicitly and linking these targets to previous learning and to subsequent activities and performances.
School improvement and literacy growth and achievement depend on high-quality teaching across the curriculum. The entire staff of a school must share a common understanding of high-quality teaching, and the criteria for defining quality must underlie recruiting, hiring, inducting, mentoring, coaching, evaluating, and training.
To know how to improve the quality of teaching, someone must first measure the current state of teaching in a school.
Sustained staff development should focus on the areas of teaching that most need to grow.
A decade of accountability mandates has caused schools to respond in predictable and unproductive ways. One of its effects has been to obscure certain truths about education as actually practiced in the classroom. If schools are to improve, they must abandon the business-oriented rhetoric of the accountability movement and concentrate on what we know will improve student achievement. That is, schools must focus on improving the quality of instruction in all classrooms.