It’s
Not Always about the Money, Honey
Dear Colleagues,
I hope that your December has
gone well so far. . . and that you are looking forward to a wonderful holiday
season.
The sun is now rising in the
East as I fly at 30,000 feet back home from the West Coast. I’ve been on the road for two and a half
weeks now- - consulting first on the East Coast, then in rural Michigan for
four days, and then on the West Coast.
The travel schedule aside. . .
this plane trip home gives me time to reflect on my interactions with the
students, staff, administrators, and parents in the three “real” school
districts I’ve worked with these past 18 days.
Three real school districts. . . that are stretched- - relative to
expectations, time, limited resources, and serious and persistent student
problems.
Significantly, in each of
these districts, I have helped in the areas of strategic planning,
organizational development, curriculum mapping, instructional effectiveness,
data-based problem solving for academically struggling or behaviorally
challenging students, and helping to hands-on develop and implement
multi-tiered instructional and intervention approaches.
When you have comprehensive
challenges, you need to use comprehensive approaches.
But even with comprehensive
challenges, there are some common denominators that guide all effective practices.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
A Tale of Three Cities
With respect to resources, the
three districts that I worked in on this trip reflect a “tale of three
cities.”
In one district, I spent two
days working with a group of 50 counselors, school psychologists, social
workers, school and district administrators, special educators, and other
support personnel. They had a lot of
resources, but needed better coordination and collaboration.
In the second district, I
worked with general and special education teacher leaders, school counselors,
and school-level administrators. The
district had one school psychologist, one diagnostician, and a part-time social
worker. But curiously, despite these
small numbers, none of the district-level support staff. . .and no district
administrators were present during any of my five consultation days on-site.
In the third district, a new
grant has increased the personnel available to work with challenging students,
but the presence of a number of very challenging students has required an
immediate focus on those students. . . while we also begin to reorganize
the services to all students.
ALL of the staff that I
interacted with in the three districts were skilled, professional, caring,
dedicated, and conscientious. And, in
all three districts, the focus was the same:
* They all had students
exhibiting serious academic deficiencies and social, emotional, and behavioral
problems. . . where existing approaches and services were not working, and
different, more effective practices were needed.
* They all had students with
critical medical or physiological issues, significant home or life traumas, and
longstanding histories of school failure. . . where these issues had not been
fully identified, defined, analyzed, or addressed.
* And, they all knew that they
were not maximizing the student-centered impact of their existing personnel and
resources, and they wanted realistic, field-tested strategies to get “the
biggest bang for the buck.”
In all of the cases above, the
staff only “knew what they knew.” They
needed different, more effective, and field-tested approaches that they had
never been exposed to. In some of the cases,
I recommended strategies and approaches where some staff said,
“We used to do that in the
past, and it worked”. . . “but we haven’t done that in a while”. . . “why did
we stop doing this?”
_ _ _ _ _
Resource Rich and Resource
Poor Districts
Of the three districts, one is
relatively Resource Rich, one is Resource Poor, and the last one
is Resource Ready.
But some commonalities across
the three districts included that they were:
* Not fully aware of the specific school,
district, and community resources that are available relative to, for example,
staff, curriculum, instruction, technology, and interventions
* Focused more on logistics, schedules, and
what staff (especially teachers) either want to do or had done in the past.
. . rather than on what staff need to do relative to students’ current
academic and behavioral status; how they had learned and progressed in the
past; and what services, supports, strategies, and programs they need to learn
and progress right now
* Not effectively coordinating their
curriculum, instruction, professional development, supervision, and
multi-tiered services and approaches. . . from a district level down to a
classroom level up perspective.
It was interesting that the
Resource Rich district was starting to make a commitment to
“cross-organizational” (i.e., cross-department, cross-professional, and
cross-school) staff collaboration. This
cross-organizational staff collaboration was less than apparent in the Resource
Poor district. And, the Resource Ready
district was just learning how to coordinate its newly-acquired staff.
Conclusion: When
cross-organizational staff collaboration is nonexistent, weak, or inefficient,
it limits the organization’s potential success - - regardless of how many
resources actually exist.
So how do districts and
schools organize their collaborative efforts - - especially for academically struggling and
behaviorally challenging students- - in ways that make instructional and
intervention sense?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Four Common Sense Practices
for Resource-Poor and Resource-Rich Districts
Below are four common sense
practices that I encouraged all three districts to consider over these past two
weeks. One practice relates directly to
leadership; one to instruction; one to assessment; and one to services and
supports.
* Common Sense Practice #1 (Leadership): Shared leadership structures and processes
are needed to maximize the outcome potential of any organization.
Shared leadership involves the
“Seven C’s of Success” - - the formal and informal processes that facilitate
Communication, Caring, Collaboration, Commitment, Consultation, Celebration,
and Consistency among school and district staff.
One way to implement a shared
leadership process in a school involves (a) adapting a school-level
committee blueprint that reflects the research-based components of effective
school and schooling; (b) ensuring that every staff member is on at least one
committee; and (c) asking instructional staff to co-chair the different
committees.
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The blueprint that we use
begins with the following committees:
* The School Leadership Team (where all
committee co-chairs are members)
* The Curriculum & Instruction Committee
* The School Climate/School Discipline
Committee
* The Professional Development/Teacher
Mentoring and Support Committee
* The Family and Community Outreach Committee
* The Student Assistance/Multi-tiered/Early
Intervention Committee (made up of the best academic/behavioral
assessment/intervention specialists in or available to the school)
One way to implement shared
leadership at the district level is to make sure that all professionals,
regardless of their “department” or “administrative assignment,” are organized
in cross-collaborative teams that focus on the following outcomes (note the
parallel with the Committees above):
* Students’ academic learning, mastery, and
application
* Students’ social, emotional, and behavioral
self-management and interpersonal success
* Teachers’ effective instruction relative to
student academics and self-management outcomes
* Meaningful professional development and staff
support to facilitate effective instruction and multi-tiered intervention
resulting in successful student outcomes
* Community and family outreach to maximize
their support, collaboration, and involvement in educational processes/activities
at the district, school, and student levels
Conclusion: When school
and district resources are not shared, coordinated, and focused. . . on
meaningful outcomes, it does not matter how many resources you have.
_ _ _ _ _
* Common Sense Practice #2 (Instruction): Differentiated Instruction will not work
when there are too many different skill groups in a classroom, or when teachers
do not know the functional skill levels of their students.
While many teachers are
trained in differentiated instruction (and universal design for learning),
these strategies are virtually impossible to implement (a) if there are too
many different or discrepant skill groups in the classroom to teach; and/or (b)
if teachers do not know the functional skill level of the students they need to
teach.
In the first situation,
it is not unusual to find elementary-level classrooms where teachers
have to teach five or more skill clusters of students in reading or math. For example, this week, we had a 3rd
grade teacher with 25 students in her class with reading skills (that reflected
six different skill groups) ranging from the middle of first grade to the
middle of fourth grade. While this
teacher could have been the world’s most gifted differentiated instruction
expert, there was no way that she could teach literacy to these very different
groups with equity, effectiveness, or excellence- - much less in the other academic areas (e.g.,
math, science, social studies) that also required reading.
The solution to this
dilemma is to implement (as does Success for All) a walk-to-reading
process where students are in homogeneous instructional-level groups when
focusing on teaching specific reading skills, and heterogeneous mixed-level
groups when focusing on vocabulary and comprehension-oriented literacy
skills. Part of this solution includes a
data-based student grouping process, prior to each new school year, with a goal
of organizing every classroom with no more than three to four different skill
groups in reading.
In the second situation,
it is not unusual for secondary-level teachers to not know the
functional literacy, math, written expression, and oral expression skill levels
of all of their students. This is
important, for example, when a 9th grade earth science teacher has
20 students in a class. . . with half of the students reading below grade
level, a third of the students functioning below grade level in math, and
two-thirds of the students with significant problems when writing their
thoughts on paper.
Without this information ahead
of time, the teacher does not know how to differentiate his or her instruction,
how to modify his or her curricular materials, and which students to provide
reading or math or written expression assistive or other supports. . . all so
that they can learn and master the science content.
The solution to this
dilemma is to establish a computer-based functional skill and mastery
running record portfolio on every student in a school or district. This portfolio should synthesize all
classroom-, curriculum-, and criterion-based assessments such that teachers can
easily see where a student is actually functioning in the above four core
academic skill areas.
One Common Core-friendly
resource that could be used here in mathematics is available free from the
Arkansas State Personnel Development Grant (SDPG): www.mathinterventions.org
.
Conclusion: When
the current functional skill level of individual students are unknown, and when
classrooms are not strategically organized by skill-based student learning
clusters, teachers may not have the organizational conditions to effectively
teacher, even though they are effective teachers.
_ _ _ _ _
* Common Sense Practice #3 (Assessment): Assessments for progress monitoring need
to be based on functional student outcomes, and not on global state or federal
requirements or standards.
In our current test-obsessed
“educational” climate, it seems that we have left “no test behind.” Critically, if you go into virtually any
school in America, most of the instruction. . . most of the testing. . . and
most of the evaluation of both students and teachers. . . is on students
being labeled “Proficient” (or above) on the State Standards (now, Common Core)
test.
And what does “Proficient”
mean? Answer: Not a lot.
In many states, given how they
establish the “cut score,” a student can earn only 50% of the points on the
test, and be deemed “Proficient.” In
many schools, there are students who are “Proficient,” and teachers can’t
figure out how that happened. And other
students who did not earn a “Proficient” rating, and same teachers can’t figure
out how that happened. And in
many universities, large numbers of “Proficient” students are entering the
freshman year needing to take remedial courses in reading and math.
At a functional level, we have
more test data on our students than we need.
And, our teachers (a) do not have the time to effectively collect, pool,
and analyze the data; (b) do not resources to synthesize the data so that
data-based conclusions are reliable and valid; and (c) do not have the
psychometric understanding or skills to translate even valid conclusions into
meaningful and useful for instruction.
And these gaps are not
remediated (alone) by having a “Data Coach” and PLC meetings. What is needed is ongoing professional
development so that grade-level teams (at the elementary level) and horizontal
and vertical instructional teams (at the secondary level) can coach
themselves. But professional development
has been sacrificed so that students have more days in school, and our teacher
training programs don’t even prepare their graduates in the area of classroom
management. . . never mind, psychometrics, test interpretation, and
curriculum-based assessment.
One of the school-based
problems here is that we are focused on testing, rather than assessment. And, we are focused on test results,
rather than on results that demonstrate that students have learned and mastered
content and skills that they can, over time, independently apply and solve
real-world problems.
_ _ _ _ _
To be “real”. . .
Standards-based and Common Core assessments are not bad in and of
themselves. What is bad is how they are
used (to evaluate schools and staff), and that they are used as the only
indicator that students have learned some skills (sampled by the test) that are
representative of a broad set of standards (that were never field-tested or
validated) that are supposed to reflect “college and career readiness.”
Why are we not using multiple
assessments in multiple formats across multiple applications and multiple
time frames to assess the functional literacy, math, science, and other skills
of our students. . . as well as to evaluate our teachers and schools? And why are we are ignoring what this
test-obsessed focus is doing to our teachers and administrators?
During the past two weeks, I
witnessed teachers who were almost exclusively teaching to the formative,
interim tests that their districts had chosen to predict students’ success
on the Common Core test (at the elementary level) and/or the end-of-course
(EOC) summative tests (at the secondary level).
Thus, these teachers are not
allowed to focus, more logically and systematically, on the knowledge,
content, and skills that, if effectively taught by them and mastered by
their students, will result in students who can, at their respective grade
levels, read and comprehend, calculate and solve real-world problems, and
communicate orally and in written form.
Moreover, the teachers will
not also be allowed to prove that- - when they focus on students’ knowledge,
content, and skill mastery, they will be more likely to pass the Common Core
and EOC tests.
_ _ _ _ _
The solution to this
dilemma is for every grade level (or course) in a district to have (a)
good, developmentally-appropriate curricular maps (b) that identify the
knowledge, content, and skills needed by students, along with (c) the criteria
for student mastery; and for every teacher to have (d) the skill, materials,
and opportunity (see above) needed to effectively differentiate and teach,
assess, and monitor their students’ learning and mastery.
If these elements are present.
. . the high stakes tests will take care of themselves.
Conclusion: When
instructional, support, and administrative personnel in a school or district
focus largely on the high-stakes tests, test results become more important than
educational results.
_ _ _ _ _
* Common Sense Practice #4 (Services and Supports): Services and supports need to be
strategically delegated to students and, especially, students in need - - regardless
of school or departmental assignments, funding sources, or the “chain of command.”
I have worked in too many
districts where the schools do not know what resources exist, or they are
unwilling or do not think to share them.
Metaphorically, the schools (or departments or staff within these
schools) are sometimes organized like a “feudal system” (“futile” system ???)
where schools, departments, or selected staff have a “moat” dug around
them.
* The schools (in the same district) amass
their own, and don’t share their resources with other schools.
* The departments compete for resources, and
teach “their” curricula- - to the exclusion of others.
* Some staff (e.g., “special education” staff)
are not allowed to work with “those” (or all) students. . . they
can only work with “these” (or my) students.
Critically, I am not just
talking about people and expertise, I am also talking about knowledge and
information, curricula and other print materials, software and computer-based
instruction or intervention programs, and student data and experiences.
When we initially enter a
district or school, we work with staff to identify their school, district, and
community/regional Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (a SWOT
analysis) by conducting a number of interdependent audits:
* Strategic Planning, Organizational Stability,
and Data-Driven Decision-Making Audits
* Academic and Health/Mental Health/Wellness
Curriculum, Curricular Alignment, and Curriculum Selection Audits
* Technological Hardware and Software
Curriculum, Instruction, and Intervention Support Audits
* Professional Development, Supervision, and
Staff Evaluation Audits
By completing and sharing
these audits, everyone knows what resources (and resource gaps) exist across
the district, and how they can be used to benefit students, staff, and schools.
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As part of this process, we
also survey all staff (and support staff at the district and community levels)
to identify their specific areas of expertise.
For example, while helpful to know that you have (as in the first
district described above) 50 counselors, school psychologists, social workers,
school and district administrators, special educators, and other support
personnel. It is more important to have
a Consultant Resource Directory that specifies their areas of knowledge
and expertise, what areas of student need they can address, and what types of
strategic or intensive academic or behavioral interventions they can provide or
consult on.
But beyond the audit results
and the consultant directories, district and school administrators must
communicate and reinforce a “spirit of giving” where (as needed) services,
supports, and strategies are shared across schools, departments, funding
sources, and “chains of command”. . . with a focus on student outcomes and
success. Moreover, from year to year,
these services, supports, and strategies need to “follow the student
need.” That is, staff within a school;
support staff assigned to a school; and technological, curricular, or other
intervention resources “owned” by a school. . . may need to be deployed from
one year to the next to best meet the needs of academically struggling or
behaviorally challenging students.
Conclusion: Whether
districts have limited or limitless resources, they need to coordinate and
share these resources- - realigning, reallocating, and/or redeploying them
across schools even on an annual basis to address the needs of their students.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Summary
I am not saying that these
“Common Sense Practices” are easy to do, but I do believe that they are
necessary to do. And, by themselves, I
understand that they take resources (time, staff, expertise) to
accomplish.
But when they are
implemented. . . sometimes over a period of one to three years, and they are
institutionalized, everyone benefits.
_ _ _ _ _
Beyond the professional
“spirit of giving” noted above, at this holiday season, I would imagine that
your personal “spirit of giving” is in full swing.
Given this- - regardless of
culture, religion, or background, I hope that your spirit is focused on the
“true” meaning of this season, and that you are able to celebrate the people in
your life, and to celebrate with the people in your life.
Please accept my best wishes
for a safe, restful, and enjoyable holiday season and New Years. We’ll see you in 2015.
Best,
Howie
