How do you respond when despite your best motivational targeted efforts, you still have a pocket of staff members who do not outwardly or inwardly support your efforts to move your staff forward in focusing on student learning?
How do you respond when despite presenting and engaging your staff in the best educational research, whether it be PLC, Marzano, Hattie, William, Stiggins, Schmoker, Schlechtly, or others, your school culture and climate is still largely focused on teaching rather than learning?
In thousands of schools across America, educators-- in fact really great educators-- are engaged in professional development to improve our schools. There are a myriad of focus areas, including student engagement, technology reform, creativity, walkthroughs, literacy across the curriculum, focusing on instruction, professional learning communities, mindfulness, and others.
Yet, true significant progress in improving student learning, particularly at the secondary level, in reading, math and science, the three focus areas of the PISA International Assessment that ranks world school districts, is largely unchanged in the US.
What about the percentage of students who meet the College Readiness standards on the ACT? What is the percentage of students in your high school of students who can meet these benchmarks in all areas of the ACT? Despite the validity and reliability of this data in projecting college and career readiness, even the best high schools do not have a significant percentage of their students meeting these standards.
What does it say when our students do not meet well-established global and national standards accepted to be a valid and reliable data?
It says that despite many of the initiatives, few are effective in improving student learning, or schools are ineffective in their implementation, often moving on or changing without allowing time to affect student data positively. Or, principals or superintendents change and even the most effective initiatives fade and lose momentum without a leader keeping the lamp lit and monitoring data progress.
More importantly, how do educators normally respond when we are not successful in our change efforts?
Do we look out the window or in the mirror? Looking out the window means that we seek answers outside of our school for the reasons our student learning data is not significantly improving.
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| Looking out the window for a solution? (Graphic by digitalart, freedigitalphotos.com) |
These reasons are the ones we have known for a number of years-- our students are unprepared for school by their parents: we have a large number of special needs, English Language Learners, and/or economically disadvantaged students.
Other "window" reasons include, but are not limited to some of the following: initiative overload by our own district offices, unfunded mandates by our legislatures, low pay for educators, a shortage of qualified teachers, and a lack of time or money for quality professional development.
And yes-- many of us see only these external influences when we examine our student learning data.
But what if we looked in the mirror? Richard DuFour discussed this concept of window or mirror in his educational research involving Professional Learning Community work. He clearly demonstrates the power of looking in the mirror to positively affect student learning.
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| Can we look in the mirror for our solutions? ( Photo by Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.com) |
When our schools face challenges, what if teacher-leaders, administrators and educators chose to look in the mirror? That is, what if we decided to focus on our learning problems ourselves by developing a culture and climate systemically focused on student learning?
What if we chose to embed collaboration time in the school day so that 100% of our teachers could focus on 100% of our students each day? By doing so, how much would our school data improve if we chose to ensure that each student learned the intended curriculum? What if we chose to develop valid and reliable assessments with clear learning targets in same-subject teams?
What if teachers analyzed data regularly in same-subject teams and provided intervention to each student who did not meet the established team SMART goal for student learning? What if every teacher utilized student performance as feedback to him/her on their instructional effectiveness?
And what if that same-subject team provided enriching instruction and support for those students who already know the materials before we teach it? What if every teacher committed to improving learning for every student?
Each of these questions mirrors the four essential questions of Professional Learning Community work as first established by Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker.
Want to truly improve your student learning? Then be a leader of leaders in your school organization and, utilizing research that focuses on student learning, devote every day to transforming your school culture to one of learning rather than teaching.
In The Six Secrets of Change, Michael Fullan states that schools must focus on consistency or what we do every day while simultaneously instituting innovation. The fourth secret, "Learning is the work," states that schools should and can focus on improving classroom instruction and build continuous improvement into the culture of the organization, monitoring each student's learning and responding to it through personalization.
Are there external challenges in education? Absolutely. Do some schools have more than others? Yes. But rather than try one initiative after another one, we should establish goals that focus on student learning, monitor learning progress, and stick to them.
It won't be easy. It takes passion and persistence and a longterm systemic focus.
And don't look out the window-- look in the mirror.
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