School Leader

On Differentiation, Direct Instruction, and More: A Decade Later

Recently I was contacted by a teacher who had come across a now-decade old blog post I wrote about education author Mike Schmoker and his (hostile) take on differentiated instruction. I argued that, as much as I admired Schmoker's work, I thought he was making a bit of a straw man argument against differentiation. This teacher was curious if I had any more recent thoughts on this topic because his school had recently been through a long spell of exploring "personalized learning" and I got the impression that they weren't entirely satisfied because now they were studying Schmoker's (still classic) book Focus, which argues against bells and whistles and for a much more standardized (perhaps traditional) approach to instruction. Here's my response: 

Great to hear from you and I'm glad folks in the trenches are continuing to wrestle with these important issues.

 

I must admit that I have not followed Schmoker's work in recent years, or Tomlinson's for that matter. My gut instinct is still that their ideas really are in creative tension rather than opposition, but to the extent that they do represent different emphases, my money is still very much with Schmoker. 

 

And I'm more confident than I was in 2012 that you can't do it all. Schools must prioritize their "focus" and choose what to emphasize. I'm increasingly convinced that the focus for most schools needs to be on creating a strong, coherent, content-rich curriculum and then ensuring fidelity to that curriculum through administrative oversight and support. Then there must be a relentless focus on effective instruction to deliver that curriculum. Only when those pieces are in place can schools begin to meaningfully work on assessment (which they should). 

 

However, I'm much less confident than I used to be that schools can formatively assess short-term student learning in ways that can validly inform a lot of personalized instructional follow up. My thinking on this has been strongly informed by the work of England-based educator David Didau and his book What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Education Was Wrong? (See my review of his book here). Within that review, also see my references to books by Daisy Christodoulou and E.D. Hirsch, which seem to speak strongly to this topic of what should be our highest education priorities.

Bottom line: I think most talk of differentiation (and especially personalized learning) is a distraction for many schools, which have far greater fish to fry in terms of curriculum and instruction. Differentiation has never been practical for most classrooms and may not even be that beneficial. Education, like all human endeavors, involves limited resources of time, talent, and materials. We need to invest in the strategies that have the biggest impact for the vast majority of students. 

 

In most cases, that's likely to involve direct instruction of rich content by content-expert teachers.

 

Then I shared with him a couple of Twitter/X threads I have posted in recent months that even better summarize my current thinking, which I've reproduced below. The first is from August 18:

 

Earlier this week I quoted an article arguing that classrooms should feature more “lecture” and less “facilitation” on the part of teachers. The article (or the quote at least) provoked a big reaction, both positive and negative. It should go without saying that lecture, done poorly, is ineffective, and that more “student-centered” activities can sometimes work quite well for some students. But a general shift in emphasis toward more teacher-led classrooms is in order for two reasons.

 

The first is philosophical: much of the vacuous mess that makes up “contemporary” instructional strategies is the dross of assumptions about learning, the purpose of education, and of human nature left by Dewey & the “Progressives,” assumptions that can and should be challenged. The second is pragmatic: we should give primacy to instructional strategies that work best for most students when deployed by most teachers in most classrooms. That’s going to often be teacher-led learning centered on a rich, rigorous, established curriculum.

 

Of course there is room and need for variety in terms what this looks like in practice. But we need to throw out many if not most of the assumptions in which most teachers of the last generation have been trained.

 

Dear teacher, you are NOT a “guide on the side.” You better be a content expert ready to impart a comprehensive body of knowledge, skills, and cultural values that is not a personal assemblage of your favorite subjects and ideologies. You are a public servant forming children according to the knowledge and virtues that represent your state and local community’s vision for a life of adult flourishing. That requires you to be firmly in charge of the learning in your classroom. And yes, often it will mean a well-crafted lecture, demonstration, or modeled example is the centerpiece of most lessons. Don’t be shy about that and don’t ever apologize. Be the “sage on the stage.” Your students deserve it.

 

A few days later, I followed up with this thread:

 

More on why we need teachers to intentionally think of themselves as “sage” rather than “guide.” Relevant question: when *should* the teacher be a guide? 

 

There’s definitely a point in the learning journey when the sage becomes a guide. This happens at the highest levels of student learning after the mastery of a large body of knowledge and the practice of skill under the careful tutelage of the master. Examples: when I work w/ a doc student on their dissertation, when a HS composition teacher edits a student thesis, when a teacher steps aside so that well-read students can do Socratic seminar, and when the master electrician watches his apprentice wire a house for real people.

 

The problem is that we’ve been led to believe these are normal, everyday learning experiences that would apply to all students of all developmental levels rather than the culmination of months and years of didactic learning from the direct instruction of an expert. 

 

The ancients understood this when they organized the Trivium - the ascending ladder of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. First comes content knowledge, then understanding and skill for organizing that knowledge, and finally the skill to express it to others, including in novel ways. Contemporary education lost sight of this learning structure and pressures students and teachers to skip directly to application and synthesis without the hard work of mastering the underlying basics, or to jump around willy-nilly as if novice-level students were already masters. Therefore a thoughtful shift toward a more traditional (pre-Progressive) understanding of knowledge, learning, human nature, and the purpose of education itself, seems in order.

 

Looking at what I wrote 11 years ago compared with my more recent thoughts, I can see how my own understanding about high-quality instruction has matured while still revolving around a core set of principles, the chief of which is that schools can't do it all, and must prioritize their efforts on tried and true strategies that work for most students. It's a bit discouraging to think of how little progress most schools have made in this regard, but when I also consider the (re)emergence of classical education over this same time period and the recent achievements of many reformers around content knowledge, curriculum improvement, and science-based reading instruction, I'm encouraged for the future. 

 

Somebody email me in another 10 years and let's see where we're at.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Give parents options to "woke mathematics"

In my latest op-ed for Commonwealth Educational Opportunities with co-author John Garen, now published in multiple newspapers across the state, we highlight a new "anti-racist" math program in the Jefferson County Public Schools. We contrast this with the approach to rigorous math instruction made most famous by Jaime Escalante at Garfield High School, featured in the movie Stand and Deliver.

We argue that parents deserve to be able to choose a school for their children that reflects their preferences when it comes to things as important as math instruction:

If Jefferson County Public Schools won’t provide a high-quality math curriculum to all its students, families deserve other schooling options. Let education funding follow students to the school of their family’s choice. If families want “woke” mathematics, they can get it from JCPS. Or if they want the kind of rigorous mathematics that transformed lives at Garfield High School, they can get it from a school that will actually provide it.

Read the whole thing here.

 

 

What is personalized learning and how do we know if we're "doing" it?

Personalized learning has been a hot topic over the last decade and the challenges of education during the COVID pandemic have made it even more timely as educators have struggled to address student learning needs. The tendency of schools to approach instruction through a one-size-fits-all lens has never been more visible to parents and the public.

A team of researchers based at Western Kentucky University has just published an article in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership highlighting our work on a four-year, federally-funded grant to implement personalized learning in 111 Kentucky schools. The article describes our effort to create an Innovation Configuration Map that helps teachers understand what personalized learning really is and assess their school's progress in implementing personalized learning strategies.

The WKU team were evaluators for a $42 million grant awarded to the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC) and the Ohio Valley Education Cooperative (OVEC) in 2012. While the grant included several components, the overarching goal was to promote personalized learning in 111, mostly rural, schools. As we describe in the journal article, schools had wide latitude in selecting how they wanted to approach personalized learning, and in general educators have yet to develop a common understanding of what we mean by the term.

The WKU team explored research literature on constructs and strategies that seemed most closely related to the idea of personalized learning, including self-regulation theory, growth mindset, mastery learning, self-determination theory, and more. From there, we constructed an Innovation Configuration (IC) Map. Researchers Hall and Hord (2006) originally developed IC Maps as a way of helping organizations track their implementation of various change initiatives.

Our Personalized Learning IC map included four clusters/strands that described changes in the learning process, the classroom climate, and in the behaviors of students and teachers. Additionally, for each of these clusters, various indicators described the kinds of changes that might come about as a result of implementing personalized learning along a five-point continuum from continuing the status quo (no change) through implementing and finally sustaining the change intiative.

Because we lacked the resources to independently assess all 111 schools using the IC Map, the WKU team also developed a self-assessment manual for school-based leadership teams to evaluate their own implementation of personalized learning using the instrument. Then we selected six schools that reported high levels of implementation for site visits that ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the schools' self-ratings, suggesting to us that the Personalized Learning IC Map possessed some degree of validity. Schools self-assessed with the instrument for two years and researchers found that across both cooperatives schools deepened their implementation of personalized learning.

Our article suggests directions for future research and practitioner implementation using the IC Map. We are eager for others to explore the IC Map and use it both for research and to support their personalized learning efforts. You can find the instrument and the self-assessment manual on our Rock Solid Evaluation Services website. These tools may be used with our written permission. And of course I urge you to read the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership journal article for a more thorough description of the entire process. You can direct any questions about this research to me at [email protected].

The development of this Personalized Learning IC Map and the entire evaluation project for the GRREC/OVEC grant was a massive team effort. I want to especially recognized then-graduate assistants Dr. Trudy-Ann Crossbourne-Richards, who did the lion's share of the literature review upon which the IC Map was based, and Dr. Heather Arrowsmith, who developed the manuscript describing our work. WKU colleagues Dr. Jenni Redifer, Dr. Tony Norman (now dean of education at Morehead State University) and Dr. Jie Zhang (now with the University of Houston) were essential research partners on this project. I commend them all, and also the leadership of GRREC and OVEC and the 111 schools that participated in the grant.

One final thought, and speaking just for myself: I believe we need far more empirical research on this topic. I have had a long-standing professional interest in personalized learning, but I am generally quite skeptical that the casual way in which it has been approached in many schools will have a lasting effect on student achievement. The work of UK educator David Didau has illustrated how hard it is to accurately assess what students truly know and are able to do at any given moment, and that reality may point us toward much more traditional modes of teacher led, whole-class instruction, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. It also suggests that a content-rich curriculum may be far more important in the long-run than faddish, low-impact strategies for "personalization" that may have little grounding in theory or research.

I'm not ready to give up the quest for more personalized approaches to student learning, especially when they are wedded to content-rich curriculum. But I want to see far more empirical research on which strategies have the highest impact and how those compare to more traditional methods. I hope our IC Map will contribute to that effort.

Reference: Hall, G.E., & Hord, S.M. (2006). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

 

 

Impact Kentucky Survey: Improving feedback and coaching

The Impact Kentucky survey of teachers' perceptions of their working conditions was released earlier this week. As I pointed out in my previous blog post, statewide results indicate that many schools have a real opportunity to improve feedback and coaching to help teachers improve their practice.

These survey results offer school leaders a rich window into understanding how their teachers feel. Those feelings don't always translate directly into positive or negative outcomes for students, but they are important indicators. As a strong body of research reveals, principals influence student learning primarily through their relationships with teachers and their efforts to grow the academic capacity of the school. Working conditions are a key component of that capacity. So I encourage educators to explore their school and district's results. The interactive Impact Kentucky results website allows you to compare school results to the entire state and also to similar schools (so, high schools to all Kentucky high schools, for example) and those differences automatically tag the school's greatest (relative) strength and greatest growth areas.

It can take a lot of emotional courage, but highly reflective principals will want to unpack the results with their teachers and invite teacher and staff input into specific strategies to address growth areas. Goals can be set and progress can be monitored. The process itself will likely strengthen teachers perceptions regardless of the specific strategies pursued.

I received an email from one of my former students, now a successful high school principal in a nearby district, after she read my post and reviewed her school's results. She found that, like many schools across the state, one of her lowest domains on the Impact survey was Feedback and Coaching:

I, too, am in that boat.  I make daily classroom visits, however, I do not give my teachers any written feedback.  I want to but the formal "walkthrough" forms I have seen seem so cumbersome.  I've also considered having my department leads develop some type of feedback tool that I can use but we seem stuck in the weeds when we start to create something.

It's worth looking at the five survey questions related to this domain. They read as follows:

• How often do you receive feedback on your teaching?
• At your school, how thorough is the feedback you receive in covering all aspects of your role as teacher?
• How useful do you find the feedback on your teaching?
• How much feedback do you receive on your teaching?
• How much do you learn from the teacher evaluation process in your school?

The principal who wrote me went on:

I realize that providing written feedback is something novel for my team and that I will need to do some legwork on my end.  Honestly, I have been afraid to implement something like this for fear that they would think I am trying to catch them doing something wrong.  According to their responses, I do not provide effective/frequent feedback like they wish.

Do you have a form that you find effective?

Here was my response, which initiated some additional thought sharing between us:

Obviously from the data you are not alone in feeling like you want to give teachers better feedback. I’m afraid I have not seen any specific forms that I would recommend. I think this has more to do with creating an atmosphere in which everyone is continually working on their practice. You’ve got the most important step for that in place already by making daily classroom visits. There’s no way you can provide meaningful feedback without knowing what’s actually happening in the classrooms, so you’ve got that foundation already.

The next thing I might recommend, based on examples I’ve seen elsewhere, is to just start leaving some notes for teachers. It doesn’t have to be on a form. You could probably find some  medium-sized sticky notes that you could write a short message on and leave on the teacher’s desk. I would use this primarily for giving specific praise. Acknowledging the good practices you saw when you were in the room. Once you’ve established that as something the teachers can expect, and they see that you recognize their strengths, it will make it easier to provide suggestions (“wonder what it would be like if….have you ever thought about doing….”), and then even more critical feedback (although that might come more in one-on-one conversations)…OR, if you’re doing all this to supplement the use of your walkthrough form, maybe you can also then start using blank comment space on that form to make the occasional improvement suggestion.

When this is all woven into a meaningful evaluation process, then teachers are using the formative feedback you are giving all year and the summative feedback from their evaluation to craft personalized, substantive growth plans each year. Then you can start giving specific feedback during your walkthroughs on those teaching components that you know each teacher is working on.

Keep in mind it’s been years since I did a lot of walkthroughs where I had to give specific feedback, so what I’m describing comes from what I’ve observed other administrators do and from spending a lot of time reading about and researching this topic. You will have to figure out what works best for your particular context and staff. At any rate, the very fact that you are interested in this is great. Ask your teachers for their ideas too about how you and your leadership team can improve the feedback teachers get on their instruction. They’ll have some suggestions!

My former student indicated that she'd had success with the sticky note strategy when she was previously an elementary principal, but was willing to try it with her high school teachers. I imagine it's worth a shot as a good first step, but the teachers themselves will probably have the best ideas. And, I advised her, don't take "I just want to be left alone to teach" as a viable response! That's not an option.

I'd be eager to hear from other administrators or teachers what kinds of feedback strategies have worked best for you in the past? What kinds of feedback not only fostered a positive climate but also helped teachers actually improve their practice? Feel free to comment below or email me: [email protected].

Related posts:

• Impact Kentucky teacher survey can support school improvement
• New TELLKentucky research explores differences in principal and assistant principal perceptions
• PGES and the bathwater
• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA

 

 

Impact Kentucky teacher survey can support school improvement

Results from Kentucky's new survey of teachers' perceptions of their working conditions, called Impact Kentucky, have now been released and are available for review at the state, co-op, district, and school level. Impact Kentucky, which was administered to all Kentucky teachers and administrators earlier this year, replaced the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) survey, which was administered biannually from 2011 to 2017. In 2018 the New Teacher Center decided to discontinue providing the TELL survey to states, and this gave Kentucky an opportunity to develop a new tool that kept the best features of TELL while making it even more relevent for the work of school improvement. 

I had the honor of serving on a committee that assisted Kentucky Department of Education personnel and representatives from Panorama, the new survey provider, in designing the Impact Kentucky instrument. It turned out to be shorter than TELL, which was an advantage, and included several new features. See more about the structure of the survey here. About 85% of Kentucky educators responded to Impact Kentucky, which is an extremely high participation rate. In summarizing the statewide results, KDE pointed out the following key findings:

• Educators report most favorably on staff-leadership relationships.
• Educators report confidence in their ability to educate all students, regardless of race or cultural background, in a data-driven manner.
• Educators report least favorably about resources.
• Lower-grade educators have more favorable views of working conditions, especially when it comes to school climate and professional learning.
• Principals and assistant principals have more favorable views of working conditions than teachers and other education professionals.
• School leaders show clear strengths in leadership effectiveness and relations with staff.

Most of these findings are unsurprising and, for the most part, consistent with results from previous administrations of the TELL Kentucky survey. Of interest to me was that the second-l0west rated domain of the survey was feedback and coaching, with only a 56% favorable rating. The questions in this section had to do with the frequency and quality of feedback teachers receive from their supervisors. Less than half of teachers (48%) indicated that they learned much from the formal evaluation process at their schools. This is yet another signal that Kentucky schools, like those in most other states, have a lot of work to do in making teacher evaluation a more meaningful and growth-building process.

Interestingly, Impact Kentucky also suggests that teachers have relatively strong relationships with their administrators (staff-leader relationships was the highest-rated domain of the survey). Giving critical feedback to teachers may be uncomfortable for many principals because they worry doing so will damage their relationships. But my previous research on coaching principals to improve their instructional leadership found that school leaders can sometimes leverage their positive relationships precisely to help teachers grow. The principal in our case study found that her strong personal connections to teachers made them more likely to receive her improvement feedback in positive ways, and to trust her guidance and help. Giving good feedback is difficult, to be sure, but principals have far more capacity than they realize, and the results are worth the risks involved.

Survey results vary considerably across schools and districts, of course, so I encourage teachers and school leaders to explore their local data for strengths and growth areas. 

Of great interest to me is the extent to which Impact Kentucky results also correlate to student achievement outcomes when controlling for demographic variables. In other words, could improving teachers' perceptions of their working conditions also have a measurable impact on student learning? The linkage from previous research is mixed. The TELL Kentucky survey was most predictive for student outcomes at the elementary level, and only for certain constructs within the survey. I believe Panorama will be generating some research reports for KDE examining this connection, and that will have the greatest utility for school leaders. If we're going to take the Impact Kentucky survey seriously, then we ought to have some reasonable confidence how doing so may actually improve student learning outcomes.

Regardless, measuring and tracking teacher perceptions of their working conditions can be useful in other practical ways. For example, my research colleagues and I used TELL Kentucky results to explore the impact of implementing school-wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. These are the kinds of applications that may also be useful to school leaders if they are willing to work with their teachers to explore their survey data, what it means, and how they can collectively respond. Panorama is offering two webinars on June 4 and 5 to assist school officials to do just that. See more here. 

I look forward to seeing how that process, and the research behind the survey itself, continues to play out.

Related posts:

• New TELLKentucky research explores differences in principal and assistant principal perceptions
• PGES and the bathwater
• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA

 

Every school should confront the "Opportunity Myth"

Creating a policy environment for effectively closing achievement gaps and accelerating overall student learning is the number one priority for the Kentucky Board of Education. To that end, at our annual retreat earlier this month KBE members spent an entire day hearing from a number of speakers from Kentucky and across the United States about their successful efforts to close gaps and boost achievement. Among the most interesting to me was a presentation from the TNTP organization on the "Opportunity Myth."

The Opportunity Myth report was issued more than a year ago, and while I missed it at the time, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis and leaders at the Kentucky Department of Education have been busy trying to share this vitally important research and its implications with school and districts leaders across the Commonwealth. Consistent with my own observations from thousands of classrooms visits over the years, the Opportunity Myth demonstrates that in far too many schools students are not being challenged with rigorous, grade appropriate content and lessons. And sadly, children of poverty and children of color are far more likely to be deprived of meaningful and challenging learning tasks.

In this post I'd like to summarize the findings of the Opportunity Myth research, reflect on the reasons for this problem, and urge educators to take this work seriously and explore its implications for their own school improvement efforts. As always, ideas I share on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education.

The Opportunity Myth: Too many lessons below grade level

TNTP (formerly known as The New Teacher Project) conducted research in 4 school districts and one charter school network, involving about 250 teachers and almost 4,000 students. The districts were chosen to represent a wide range of sizes, student demographics, and geographical diversity. Researchers administered student and teacher surveys, but in my opinion the most important component of the study was an analysis of student work samples and a series of classroom observations. 

The "Opportunity Myth," according to the authors, is the idea that if students come to school prepared and do the work that is presented to them by their teachers, they will succeed and be academically ready for the next level of learning. This is a myth, TNTP says, because student work samples revealed that while students accurately met the requirements of their classroom assignments 71% of the time, their work met grade-level academic standards only 17% of the time. This, in spite of the fact that 83% of students reported earning A's, B's, and C's in English language arts and 78% reported earning similar grades in math.

Simply put: teachers were routinely giving assignments that did not require students to do grade-appropriate work. And this pattern was much worse when classrooms were made up of a majority of minority students. In fact, in 4 out of ten classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment).

While this study is limited to the four districts and one charter network included in the research, the findings are consistent with many of my own observations visiting both high- and low-performing schools throughout my career. In many instances, teachers are completely unaware of how low their expectations are for student performance, or how inconsistent their lessons are with the rigor of state standards. And this may help explain why so many students are well below proficient levels in reading and math, and why achievement gaps continue to persist. Low-rigor lessons may also be more common in traditionally high-performing schools than we realize, but students with affluent, educated parents may simply be gaining more content knowledge outside of school that helps enhance their scores on standardized tests. So for schools of all kinds, the Opportunity Myth should provoke a serious bit of self-analysis and soul-searching about the quality of classroom assignments.

Curriculum, intervention, and expectations: Sources - and remedies - for the problem

As an educator myself, my immediate reaction to these findings was to ponder why. What accounts for the disconnect between the learning tasks teachers are giving students and the level of rigor required by grade-level standards? My instinct is that teachers (and their administrators) are not aware how much they are lowering the bar, and if that's the case, what systemic issues or unrecognized attitudes are contributing to this problem? And in identifying the causes, could we also point ourselves toward some possible remedies?

Curriculum. First, I've become increasingly concerned that most schools still need to do a lot of work around curriculum development. There is a significant difference between the state's academic standards (which stipulate the bare minimum of content and skills students need to master) and the actual curriculum needed to deliver those standards. Curricula include all the many choices schools must make about the specific texts students will read, content that will be provided, instructional materials that will be engaged, and lessons that will be taught.

In other words, curriculum is much more than just a textbook series. But in many schools, individual teachers are still making the vast majority of decisions about instructional materials. The Opportunity Myth research bears this out, finding that teachers reported spending about 7 hours per week creating or finding lessons and materials accounting for about 57% of everything they used in the classroom. This inevitably leads to vast inconsistencies across classrooms, disconnects between lessons and state standards, and ultimately learning tasks that are below grade level.

Schools should engage a systematic process of curriculum review and selection, and consider fully-developed curriculum programs like Core Knowledge that specify at a high level of detail the texts, concepts, and learning task for each grade level. Teachers should be spending a lot more of their time assessing student progress and developing interventions for those who are struggling to meet standards, and a lot less time inventing curriculum.

Intervention. But intervention efforts also have to be effective. I've long been an advocate for standards-based assessment of student learning, which is highly sensitive to students' "readiness levels." Rather than treat all students as if they are ready to learn the same material at the same pace, a more mastery-learning approach emphasizes constantly assessing student learning and then modifying instruction to meet students where they currently are. I believe many teachers have gotten that message, but now in their sensitivity to meet students at their readiness level, they may be grossly underestimating how prepared students really are for rigorous learning tasks (I've also come to understand that accurately gauging student readiness level is much harder than many of us have realized). 

If regular classroom instruction is unintentionally being watered down, then the interventions being offered to students in what educators call "Tier II" and "Tier III" (those who are preforming more significantly below grade level) are also failing then to catch students up to where they need to be, and never will as long as Tier I (the instruction offered to all students) is also below grade-level standards. We need a statewide reconsideration of how we are using systems of intervention, which on the whole appear to be making no impact on closing achievement gaps or accelerating students toward proficiency. And that reconsideration should begin by significantly ramping up the rigor of regular classroom learning tasks.

Teachers will naturally worry that students will fail if challenged with more demanding, grade-appropriate learning tasks. But the Opportunity Myth study offers some encouragement in this regard, finding that when students were confronted with grade-appropriate learning tasks they succeeded with those assignments 65% of the time. Moreover, value-added models employed by the study found that students who were consistently given grade-appropriate assignments made more than 7 months more academic gains in a single year than their peers who did not, proving that most students are far more capable than their teachers may realize.

Expectations. And this brings us to a final cause, deeply inter-related with the points above. Beyond the structural problems of poor curricula or ineffective systems of intervention, far too many educators simply have unfairly low expectations of what students of color and poverty are capable of doing, however well-intended their motives might be. We are far too prone to use poverty as an excuse for student outcomes. Poverty makes a huge difference, of course, but the Opportunity Myth makes it clear that students are far more capable than we sometimes give them credit, and we need a much greater collective sense of responsibility for school improvement and a hair-on-fire sense of urgency about figuring out how to get there. Believing in our kids, implementing a real curriculum, and figuring out interventions that actually catch kids up to grade level have to be key pieces of that process.

TNTP and the Kentucky Department of Education offer a wealth of resources for schools that would like to diagnose their own gaps between instruction and grade level standards and organize their improvement efforts around the Opportunity Myth research (my thanks to Associate Commissioner Amanda Ellis and her team for assembling this list of links). Among the resources available are the following:

• Assignment review tools that will help schools analyze classroom assignments for alignment with Kentucky standards in reading, writing, math, and social studies. This will help educators better determine if assignments are on grade level.
• The Student Work Library offers examples of assignments that are weakly, partially, and strongly aligned to grade-level standards in English language arts and math. KDE consultants are also working on vetting items for a student work library that will show assignments that are weakly, partially and strongly aligned to the KAS for reading & writing and mathematics.
• The Student Experience Assessment Guide is a how-to guide for systematically gauging the quality of students’ daily academic experiences and how to make informed decisions to improve those experiences for all students.
• The Student Experience Toolkit provides multiple resources available to ensure strong and engaging instruction and for enacting high expectations.

I encourage every school, but especially those that face the need to improve student proficiency rates or close achievement gaps, to use these resources for starting a rich, community-based conversation about how we can all take responsibility for  accelerating student learning.

Related posts:

• What I see in low-performing schools
• Why Knowledge Matters: The most important education book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II: Strengthening standards with a knowledge-rich curriculum
• What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
• Why Kentucky's 5-star school rating system is important - but maybe not in the way some people think

The role of reflection in school principal effectiveness

Recently my colleagues and I in Western Kentucky University's Department of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research attended an event in San Diego as part of our Wallace Foundation grant-funded initiative to rethink school principal training for the 21st century. The event was hosted by the educational leadership department at San Diego State University, one of our Wallace grant partners, and spotlighted key features of their principal certification program.

Of particular interest to us was San Diego's emphasis on reflection as a key component of principal training and practice. We had the chance to do a "fishbowl" activity with several of their current principal candidates discussing their Reflective Leader Rubric, which is used to assess aspiring principals' capacity to engage in deep reflection on their practice and their learning experiences.

What we observed in San Diego resonated for me because it closely mirrors work on reflective practice my colleague Tom Stewart and I have done in our principal classes, with teachers and administrators in professional development sessions, and in our research on school principal leadership coaching. Our efforts have been inspired, in part, by the book Reflective Practice for Renewing Schools: An Action Guide for Educators, by Jennifer York-Barr and colleagues, which provides a theory of action for reflective practice captured in the image below. Essential to this model is the idea that reflection requires a pause, a deliberate effort to refrain from activity, both outward and inward, to see what is really happening. From that pause the heart and mind open, and new questions and perspectives can emerge that lead to fresh ideas and more effective action, which in an educational context we hope always pays off in enhanced student learning.

Several dimensions of SDSU's principal program feature components of this reflective practice framework. These were especially highlighted during the fishbowl activity wherein current program participants reflected on these elements of their experience so far. Among the themes that we heard were the following:

• As the word itself implies, reflection is a kind of "mirror," giving the principal or principal candidate an opportunity to see themselves more accurately and clearly. My previous research collaborations around leadership coaching for principals reveals that, without structures for self-reflection, most school administrators lack the opportunities and routines in their daily work to observe their own thought processes in a critical, self reflective way.
• Similarly, reflection involves deliberately seeking out diverse and even contradictory viewpoints and evidence to challenge our core, often unrecognized, assumptions about ourselves, our problems of practice, and our action strategies for addressing them.
• Related to assumptions, like SDSU, WKU's principal program redesign will involve a much more intentional focus on equity. But so much of the equity challenge is bound up in our unrecognized biases and assumptions about ourselves, others, and how children learn. Reflective practices are essential for helping uncover and confront these biases and assumptions.
• SDSU's principal candidates all acknowledged the challenge of making time for reflection, but as the York-Barr theory of practice makes clear, that time commitment is an investment. It takes enormous courage to set aside one's pressing work tasks to engage in reflection with the faith that, if one does it well, the payoff will be improved communication, greater awareness of self and others, and enhanced professional effectiveness.

The final thing that struck me about the SDSU principal candidates was their frequent use of "practice" language to describe their work. They clearly viewed leadership as a practice, meaning that it is a craft requiring a combination of skills, knowledge, and dispositions, and that as such their practice should be constantly growing and evolving based on new data and changing circumstances. Reflection is key to the process, and positive change is the fruit of reflection. As one principal candidate described it, "Reflection is not about what you've been doing wrong, but how you can keep getting better."

Usual disclaimer: Views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I am a member and chairman of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee).

Urgency and humility: A conservative philosophy of education reform

When I was first appointed to the Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) in 2016, I mused on the irony. As a professor of education administration, I was accustomed to telling my students (all aspiring school principals) to pay little attention to education policy or the workings of the state legislature or state board. School leaders spend way too much time fretting over the state accountability system or other mandates, all of which have an extremely indirect impact on student learning, and not nearly enough time on the building-level factors that actually make a difference in student achievement. That’s where I want my students to focus their efforts.

And then suddenly I was a member of the state board of education, helping make the policies I was telling practitioners not to worry with so much. At the time I argued that of course I believe policy does matter, but its function is in creating an environment where educational excellence can flourish by unleashing the innovative capacity of empowered teachers, parents, students, and local school and community leaders.

In the two years that have followed I’ve had many opportunities to reflect further on the tension between what we do at the state level and what happens at the local level in the larger effort to improve student learning. For example, when KBE was reworking the statewide school accountability system to conform with new federal guidelines, I cautioned fellow board members and education stakeholders that while we should build the best accountability system possible, we should not overestimate its capacity to actually accelerate student achievement. Only the work of local actors could make that happen, and the accountability system exists primarily to provide feedback on their efforts.

In April of this year several new members joined KBE as the terms of members appointed by the previous governor expired. These new members (several of whom I had worked with previously in their role as governor-appointed advisors to the board or in other capacities) have a refreshing and passionate urgency to press our educational system to much more rapid levels of improvement. While I am the only member of KBE to have served as a professional K-12 educator, these new members draw on their considerable experience as business and community leaders to provide new perspectives and ask demanding questions about our lackluster progress and how we can do better.

In our discussions about policy, I often find myself trying to explain the complexities of what educators do and the confounding, immeasurable, and often uncontrollable variables at work in the results. I anticipate that, as we move forward with our board agenda, I will often urge caution and careful consideration of sweeping policy ideas that, while well-intentioned, may not achieve the desired results and may ultimately do more harm than good. I expect to frequently advocate for giving educators more flexibility in their work and greater consideration of their perspectives and frustrations.

This is all good. I am grateful for board members who are fiercely dedicated to educational improvement, because no one should be satisfied with the results we are currently getting. Like everyone who has spent decades in a professional environment, I have my own blind spots where perhaps I have grown accustomed to the way we do things. I can readily admit that I’ve been wrong about certain educational ideas in the past and therefore I’m likely to be wrong about some of the ideas I currently hold as well.

But I also don’t want my reservations about state-level policy to come across as a defense of the educational status quo. Read virtually any post on my blog from the last eight years and it should be clear that I don’t endorse business as usual in education. I believe I was appointed to the KBE in the first place because of my advocacy for education reforms that might seriously disrupt the way we have traditionally thought about schooling. So I want to be clear, both for myself and others, what guides my thinking about the role of state policy, student learning, and the work of K-12 education.

In this extended post I’d like to unpack some of my thoughts about all this, first as an intellectual exercise for myself, but secondarily as a help to any education stakeholders interested in how we balance all the tensions we encounter while trying to make K-12 education far more effective than it has been in the past. As always, let me be clear that I speak strictly for myself, and no one else affiliated with the Kentucky Board of Education or my employer, Western Kentucky University.

We’re not getting better fast enough, for many reasons

The first thing to say is that the education system is, indeed, not getting the results we need. I won’t go into great detail about this as I’ve presented this argument elsewhere with data to demonstrate that, while Kentucky may be having some modest progress in certain areas of student achievement, the rate of improvement is so painfully slow that vast swaths of children will still be lacking in basic academic proficiency for generations to come. Of course there are serious limitations to what test scores can really tell us about student learning, but even with those limitations, our rate of progress (or lack thereof) is simply unacceptable.

Why are our schools not successfully meeting this challenge? The reasons are legion and no single cause accounts for a measurably larger explanation than others. Poverty certainly has a key role to play. There is overwhelming evidence that students who grow up in low-income homes face a multitude of learning challenges. A few bold voices have recently started naming the role of family breakdown (a phenomenon closely, but not exclusively, linked to poverty) as an enormous obstacle to student achievement. Sometimes educators want to blame low student performance exclusively on poverty and family instability, but this ignores the reality that there are schools serving high percentages of low-income students that are nevertheless getting strong results (updated: see this new New York Times piece on how Chicago schools are beating the odds with high percentages of students living in poverty). In my own experience, there are qualitative differences between high and low-performing schools in terms of learning processes and leadership decision-making that can explain more than poverty. But even when all those best practices are in place, it is demonstrably harder to accelerate learning with at-risk kids and schools have not been able to scale up a more rapid improvement in overall student achievement.

New TELLKentucky research explores differences between principal and assistant principal perceptions

One of the many things I love about my work is the chance to partner with colleagues from across Western Kentucky University and beyond on a variety of projects. The fruit of one of those collaborations was recently published in the NASSP Bulletin, peer-reviewed research journal of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 

This research study used the 2011 Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) Kentucky survey, administered statewide to all Kentucky educators, to explore how high school principals differed from assistant principals in their perceptions of school working conditions. My co-authors included former WKU colleague Dr. Jie Zhang (now a the University of Houston), WKU Educational Leadership doctoral program graduate Dr. Chunling Niu (now with the University of Kentucky College of Social Work), retired WKU colleague Dr. Stephen K. Miller, and Dr. Tony Norman, director of WKU's EdD program.

The TELL Kentucky survey was developed by the New Teacher Center of Santa Cruz, California, and has been administered every other year since 2011 to all Kentucky teachers and other school-level, certified personnel. The survey collects teacher attitudes toward eight aspects of their working conditions: Time, Facilities and Resources, Community Support and Involvement, Managing Student Conduct, Teacher Leadership, School Leadership, Professional Development, and Instructional Practices and Supports. The survey has always enjoyed a high response rate (80% in 2011) and provides a useful tool for reflecting on factors that impact teacher job satisfaction and school-wide professional culture.

Previously our research team had used the 2011 TELL Kentucky results to examine how implementing school-wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) impacts teacher perceptions of their working conditions. In this study, we wanted to focus on school administrators. Specifically, we were interested in how assistant principals might differ from principals in their perceptions.

As I have written previously, the assistant principalship is the gateway for many aspiring principals to enter school administration, but not always a good one. Assistant principals are often relegated to uninspiring, non-instructional managerial tasks that may not prepare them well for the multi-faceted job of school principals. While empirical research is limited, we found evidence from earlier literature that principals and assistant principals often differ in their perceptions of each other's roles. We hypothesized that assistant principals might likewise differ in their perceptions of the school's working conditions. And given that the primary way principals impact student achievement is through developing structures of distributed leadership and by building academic capacity in the school, we speculated that differences between principal and assistant principal perceptions might also be related to student achievement outcomes.

We limited our population to high schools (where the most combinations of principals and assistant principals could be found). Using selection criteria described in the article, our sample included 149 principals and 240 assistant principals representing 133 schools (many schools have multiple AP's and some even have multiple principals). We found that principals and assistant principals had significantly different perceptions of their schools on two TELL constructs: school leadership and teacher leadership. In both cases, principals tended to rate their schools more positively than assistant principals. In other analyses (presented at the Mid-South Education Research Association in 2013), we had found that high school principals tended to rate most TELL constructs higher than teachers.

In this way, assistant principal perceptions were more like teachers on the constructs of school leadership (which has to do with how responsive and collaborative school leaders are with teachers) and teacher leadership (which focuses on how teachers are empowered with decision-making authority). Differences in principal and AP perceptions did not predict differences in student achievement, however.

Limitations abound in every research study, of course. Our school achievement variable was the overall academic index score of the school, which is an amalgamation of numerous student outcome data points. A more fine-grain analysis may have revealed other effects on student achievement. But it's also possible that, by virtue of their mostly non-instructional roles, differences in assistant principal and principal perceptions just have limited bearing on the academic life of the school.

The study also revealed some interesting interactions between parental involvement and discrepancies between principals and assistant principals in their perceptions of working conditions. Schools with high levels of parental involvement tended to also have higher degrees of agreement between APs and principals on TELL constructs. Our earlier research found that higher levels of parent involvement were (unsurprisingly) predictive of higher levels of student achievement in the school.

While we can't draw causal connections among these variables, this research in general suggests there is value in principals working more closely with their assistant principals to calibrate their perceptions of what is happening in the school. Doing so may not only build a unity of purpose but also serve to better empower assistant principals as more significant decision-makers in the school and better prepare them for leadership roles.

I'm continuing to work with colleagues on several additional analyses of TELL data from 2011 and subsequent years, along with results from other teacher perceptions surveys, and how these tools might better predict student achievement outcomes and therefore inform school improvement efforts in more meaningful ways. We hope to begin presenting and publishing those results later this year.

You may download our study on the NASSP Bulletin website (behind a paywall, but you may have access through a university affiliation). Contact me directly for more information on our research.

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I am associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I have served as a member since 2016).

Related posts:

• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA
• TELL Kentucky-PBIS research presented at AERA

What if everything you knew about education was wrong?

Near the beginning of his book, David Didau says he doesn’t actually want to convince you that everything you know about education is wrong (though a fair amount of it actually is), but rather “that you will consider the implications of being wrong and consider what you would do differently if your most cherished beliefs about education turned out not to be true.” He spends a good portion of the book exploring why we have a tendency to stubbornly believe what we do, but then he explodes some of the most commonly-held beliefs in P-12 education.

Didau, who is from England, is a former teacher and a devotee of education psychology. As formative assessment guru Dylan Wiliam notes in his introduction to Didau’s 2015 book, What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?, the practice of education in recent years seems remarkably disconnected from what research actually reveals about the way we learn. Didau uses that research to challenge a host of ideas about instruction and assessment and offers a robust defense for a rather traditional approach to learning: knowledgeable teachers carefully modeling and guiding students through supported practice, revisiting challenging, domain-specific concepts until students have become experts in their own right.

According to Didau, if there’s one overarching misconception about education, it’s that we can observe short-term, incremental learning in students. “We teach, children learn,” Didau says of our false assumptions. “That’s the input/output myth.” Research on learning reveals that the process is far more complicated, Didau argues. In our obsession with short-term learning gains, we mistake “performance” - the ability to mimic a skill or concept - for real learning. Information can be forced into short-term memory over brief periods of time, but it doesn’t last. Thus the experience of every teacher: today students seem to understand the lesson, but tomorrow they’ll be as clueless as if I had never taught it at all.

Didau shows how forgetting is actually an essential part of learning. Unless a learning experience is imbued with a very high degree of emotional content or connection, new information usually has to be taught - and forgotten - several times for it to become embedded in long-term memory. Real learning takes place when new knowledge becomes linked to an existing schema - a mental framework of understand a complex web of information - or when schema are completely rearranged into new patterns to incorporate added content.

The implications of this understanding of learning are considerable. Didau is critical of many current practices of formative assessment, which seek to determine whether students have attained short-term mastery of a concept. Relying on students correctly answering formative assessment questions or tasks can be misleading, especially if the teacher assumes these correct answers means she can “move on” and be done with the concept. “If they answer your questions correctly, it means very little,” Didau says. “Who cares what they know at the end of the lesson. Better to assume that they are likely to forget it.”

Didau advocates a practice he calls “interleaving,” or intentionally reteaching key concepts while increasing the amount of time after each lesson. Not every concept or skill would need to be addressed through interleaving, but only those he calls threshold concepts, or those key understandings that students often struggle to master and upon which further progress in that subject depends. For example, Didau suggests gravity in physics, evolutionary theory in biology, opportunity cost in economics, and deconstruction in literature as possible threshold concepts for each discipline. Each subject might have several more threshold concepts depending on the grade level or developmental level of the students.

That these concepts are difficult to master explains why they are linchpins to deeper learning. The key goal of lesson planning should be to make sure every student is engaged in productive struggle with new material, because that’s where maximum learning takes place. Teachers should be assisting students in moving from a novice to an expert level (as developmentally appropriate) relative to their subjects.

While all of the above may sound like common sense, much of educational practice in recent decades stands in the way of the kind of rich, content-specific, and teacher-led instruction Didau is advocating. In fact, Didau positions the teacher as essential player in the learning process (very much the “sage on the stage” and not merely the “guide on the side”). In contrast to teaching approaches that place a major emphasis on student agency, collaborative learning, and “real-world relevancy” (whatever that means), Didau argues for a traditional model of instruction whereby the teacher as content-area expert explains new material, models new skill and application of knowledge, and carefully directs students through scaffolded levels of practice until independence is achieved.

Didau doesn’t necessarily reject project-based learning, group work, or “21st century skills” as wastes of time, but argues that spending energy on these strategies is far less effective and efficient than teacher-led instruction. Lest the reader think Didau’s methods would lead to rote memorization of facts, he presents a powerful argument that embedding new knowledge into students long-term memory is inseparable from teaching them how to think critically and creatively. “Creativity requires form,” he argues, illustrating how masterful artists spend years learning techniques and styles so that they can actually deviate from them.

As an advocate for formative assessment strategies, I found What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? compelling on multiple levels. Didau offers several pages of his book to formative assessment expert Dylan Wiliam, who agrees with Didau that there are many ways of oversimplifying and misusing formative assessment while still making a strong case that, whatever its limitations, teachers and students benefit from having more data about their learning progress than less.

Didau does not argue against assessment, but shifts the emphasis in how assessment is used. Specifically, he argues that regular testing of previously-taught material is itself one of the most powerful means of helping students relearn and therefore master new knowledge. So he advocates for less re-teaching and lots more retesting of previously-taught material.

Related to this, I found Didau’s ideas challenging to my keen interest in helping teachers create more personalized learning environments. I’ve recently become concerned about some of the excesses in the personalized learning movement that have de-emphasized the important role of knowledge in favor of teaching generic skills (as if those could be separated from domain-specific content), but still feel that instruction needs to be far more directed to individual students’ readiness levels relative to a clear and rigorous curriculum. But if Didau is correct, it’s far more difficult to actually establish a child’s readiness level that I assumed, and students may actually benefit greatly from being regularly reintroduced to content they or their teacher think they have already mastered.

Perhaps there is more room here for whole class instruction than I’ve previously considered, and perhaps the key really is ensuring that no matter how many times a student has encountered a concept, the learning must be deliberately difficult enough to cause the student to struggle, but always with the actual possibility of supported success.

I believe all teachers and school administrators would benefit from reading What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? and struggling with the questions David Didau raises. Alongside recent works by E. D. Hirsch (reviewed here) and Daisy Christodoulou (reviewed here), Didau’s book makes a strong case for a rigorous and well-planned curriculum and thoughtful teacher-led classrooms.

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• Seven Myths About Education
• Why Knowledge Matters: The most important education book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II: Strengthening standards with a content-rich curriculum
• If caring is king, content is queen.
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution.