Time's Up to transform your school

The #timesup movement has been in the news recently relating to the treatment of women to stress the urgency of change needed in our society. As a longtime female high school administrator and the mother of a daughter and grandmother of a sweet little girl, I understand the importance of this important movement.

But I also believe, as educational leaders, we need to have an acute sense of urgency in the transformation of our schools, and that time’s up for this work.

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Educational research has long purported that it takes 3-5 years to transform elementary schools, 5-7 years to transform middle schools and 8-10 years to transform high schools.

The reason this research theory becomes a barrier is that many principals feel overwhelmed by the enormity and longevity of the work rather than taking immediate steps to initiate change.  It is a daunting task to initiate and sustain school transformation, but it can be done.

Those of us who have chosen school administration as our careers and, more importantly, love our students dearly know that our students’ lives depend on the transformation of schools.

As a high school administrator, In 8-10 years, we would have had hundreds and perhaps thousands of students pass through our buildings, many not college and career ready.  We must get better every day in every classroom in every high school. And we must start now.

As instructional leaders of our schools, we face many challenges of which it seems we have no control. State-mandated graduation tests, growing mental health challenges of students, the anxiety of school shootings, accountability on multiple levels, decreasing student engagement, budget constraints, and union contracts are just some of those challenges.

But we do have a number of areas that we can control in our buildings and on which we can collaborate with our students, parents, and staff to make timely and in some cases, immediate positive impact for our students.

To do so, we must recognize the sense of urgency for our students.  Many of our high school students attend classes in schools where learning data has been stagnant or nearly stagnant for a number of years. 

The same doors that were closed to students any number of years ago are still closed.  Moreover, although the high school graduation rate nationally is improving, minority groups such as those of blacks and Latinos are still lagging significantly behind.  According to the Washington Post, the national graduation rate in 2016 was 84% overall, a record high.  For black students, the rate was 76% and for Hispanics, 79%.

That means that the same barriers for students in life still exist today as they did for many of their parents and why we must increase student learning in our schools now.  Why? Because our students’ lives depend on it.

Students who do not graduate from high school can no longer obtain the low-level entry jobs of the past.  Many of those jobs are or will soon be automated.

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Students who do graduate from high school but who are not career and college ready will also likely be unsuccessful in life. A high school diploma that is not reflective of student learning is not going to do today’s graduate much good. 

And so, we must enact specific changes to increase learning in every high school in order to positively impact student learning and therefore, student lives.

Transformational change of our high schools cannot be a choice, it is a requirement of being an instructional leader.  We based the transformative change of our high school based on the Professional Learning  Community (PLC) research from the work of Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker, but also incorporated other researchers who put student learning at the forefront of their research. 

These areas are the ones on which we focused in our school improvement work and the ones that brought about the greatest improvement of our student learning data.

1.     Curriculum: Has you aligned your curriculum to your state’s mandated graduation tests? Are your teachers teaching it?  How do you know?  Providing collaboration time for your teachers to determine and teach standards and benchmarks in the same scope and sequence and to develop common assessments, common intervention and common enrichment will assure ALL students are learning the intended curriculum.

2.     Grades: Are you leading grading practice research and implementation with your staff? Is an A an A in every class? Are your grades reflective of learning or behavior? Do your teachers allow redos and retakes? Have you led discussions on effective homework with your staff?  Do your teachers still give zeroes? Grading practices of your staff truly do affect student learning and determine whether your school is a school of hope or failure.

3.     Assessment: What is the quality of assessments that your teachers give?  Are they reliable and valid? Do they model the types of questions that students will see on state-mandated tests and on the ACT/SAT? Do your teachers utilize diagnostic, formative and summative assessments?  Do they adjust and make instructional decisions based on data? Do you routinely and systemically monitor student learning based on your classroom assessments? Do you “put the faces” on your data, as Richard Stiggins encourages, and know the name of every student who is unsuccessful and provide intervention for them systemically?

4.     Master Schedule: Is your master schedule based on the needs of the adults in the building or on student learning data? Does it provide collaboration time for staff and intervention time for students? Are your best teachers with all students or with only your “best” students? Do you make teaching decisions based on student data and success or on what teachers want to teach? Are there unnecessary sacred cows in your master schedule based on adult habits and entitlement of years of experience that are barriers to establishing a master schedule that supports student learning?

5.     Instruction: Are you and your staff committed to improving instruction every day? Do your teachers provide specific and ongoing formative feedback each day during class to students? Do they incorporate strategies to determine whether student learning has occurred during class and then adjust their instruction? Do your teachers include student choice and voice in their instructional strategies? Do your teachers evaluate the effectiveness of their instruction based on student learning data? Do teachers engage in a variety of best instructional practices in order to ensure learning?

6.     Intervention: Do teachers plan for intervention as part of the instructional planning and implementation process? Do they collaborate with same-subject team members on effective intervention based on student assessment data? Do they allow redos and retakes? Is time or learning the constant in each classroom? Do you have teacher intervention, teacher team intervention and systemic building intervention based on a pyramid of intervention? Have you instituted student privileges for those students who achieve established levels in academics, behavior and attendance?

7.     Data: Do your teachers, teacher-teams and administrative team regularly analyze student learning data? Do you analyze student data at least every 4.5 weeks by grade level, individual student names, individual teacher names, and same-subject teacher teams? Is every staff member committed to setting SMART goals in order to improve student learning? Do you have specific building SMART goals to improve student learning? Is your classroom and building data transparent?

8.     Learning culture and climate: Do the students in your building receive messages of hope and encouragement for their learning? Do they know that you are a building focused on learning? Are they involved in monitoring and ensuring their own learning? Do your staff members understand that the purpose of teaching is learning and work to monitor and ensure student learning? Do you collaborate with your parents and inform them of all of the building work on ensuring student learning? Are they active participants in the learning process? Do you align all of your building practices, meetings, and goals to student learning?

To be a transformative leader, you must be a learning leader and a leader of learners.  If you commit to learning about learning, you can lead transformational change. We did, and became a National Model PLC at Work School and a National Blue Ribbon School. In doing so, not only was our school transformed, but so were our students’ lives.

You too can do this work—time’s up.

Sources:

Balingit, Mariah. (2017, Dec. 4). U.S high school graduation rates rise to new high. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/12/04/u-s-high-school-graduation-rates-rise-to-new-high/

DuFour, Richard & Fullan, Michael. (2013). Cultures Built to Last: Systemic PLCs at Work. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Hattie, John. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. New York, NY: Routledge.

Marzano, Robert. (2007). The Art and Science of Teaching. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.