3A+Readings

Unit 3: Organizing for High Quality Instruction (Weeks 10­12) 3A: Schools as Learning Organizations for Adults

Edmonson "Local and Variegated Nature of Learning" ===// Deborah Ball, The Work of Teaching and the Challenge of Teacher Education, Invited Address at Vanderbilt University, September, 2008. 1­hour video. [] //=== //Sara's notes:// - speaking about the need for more practical classroom experience in the curriculum of collegiate education programs across the country. - “In Praise of Prescriptiveness and Training in Teacher Education” - main argument: we need to build a system of initial and continuing teacher education that can reliably help prepare ordinary people for effective professional practice in teaching
 * we are not going to look for an entirely different group of people

- what will it take? 3 things: - need to significantly change our mindset around teaching and teacher education
 * basing teacher education on the work of //teaching//
 * focusing developmentally on the highest-leverage practices
 * emphasizing the //performance// of teaching in the curriculum and assessments

Teaching in the US in the 21st century - Urgent problem – because of…
 * enormous gaps in opportunities for learning and achievement gap
 * rapidly changing school population – 1 in 4 students are ELL
 * rapidly raising academic goals for ALL students without accounting for the systemic changes to make this possible
 * teachers matter – “persistent evidence that a large proportion of the variability in student achievement gains is due to the teacher”
 * so – lets fix recruitment and professional training? Reorganize the policy strategy… but recruitment won’t be the fix, the answer is in fixing the training – because everyone is still going to need to learn how to teach

- The work of teaching and the need for professional training
 * 2 parts – scale – and teaching is unnatural, intricate and deliberate work – so to do work like that, at scale, we need a new system of training
 * Nurses are 2/3 the size of teaching – recruitment cannot be the answer
 * “We don’t expect other professionals to figure it out on the job”
 * should first year teachers do the same work everyone else does?
 * Yes everybody teaches, and people learn all the time without teachers, but public schools are set up to improve the probability that every kid will learn something that we think is important (the DELIBERATE act of increasing the chances if what the profession of teaching is about – moral imperative to reduce the “chanciness”)
 * “Given the scale of the need and the fact that teaching is unnatural, intricate and deliberate work… then equipping all students with good teachers is a problem of effective teacher education. BUT – teacher education in our country is under siege” … initial preparation, PD, mentorship…

i. 1/3 of programs are producing less than 40 teachers a year! ii. “we lack a reliable system to prepare professionals for practice iii. what would it look like if we really taught practice?
 * 1) a curriculum off center- emphasizing knowledge and beliefs rather than practice
 * 2) field experience often focused and more on reflection than on development of actual skill and judgment
 * 3) assessments that do not appraise professional effectiveness
 * 4) inappropriate subject matter preparation
 * 5) inadequate preparation for diversity of US classrooms”

Teaching practice inside teacher education: Toward a curriculum and 2 examples
 * How can practice be practiced? We have a lot to learn here…
 * Where are the settings for learning practice – virtual? Design?
 * How can we teach and assess practice?
 * Identifying what to teach:

iv. Decompose the work of teaching into smaller practices that: v. Choose practices that are high-leverage for beginners

Next steps – how can we center teacher education in practice?
 * Challenges – need greater knowledge base, problem with expertise and visible knowledge, cultural bias of teaching – resistant to thinking of it as high-precision work,
 * We could learn from clinical work, to relational and social work of teaching…

// Richard Elmore, “The Strategic Turn in School Improvement,” unpublished, 2009. (CP) //
//Sara's notes:// - the work is more about learning to do the work than about actually doing it - so to manage the organization (at classroom/school/system level) we must manage the learning of the organization strategy 1: doing many things, all at once, in the same general direction
 * “managing the organization //is// managing the learning of the organization” (2)
 * 1st operational definition of strategy – “a set of organizing ideas we use to help us decide which are the most important problems to be working on at any given time.” (3)
 * codes that help us prioritize
 * 2nd operational definition of strategy – “the pattern of actions we pursue in order to learn about the environment we are trying to transform and to use that learning in the service of transformation.” (3)
 * we have to work on multiple tasks in multiple dimensions – in an organized and purposeful way to produce large scale change?! We confront the issue that people learn and think in different ways when we move away from the hierarchy and begin to create a learning organization (4)
 * We confront the issue that people learn and think in different ways when we move away from the hierarchy and begin to create a learning organization (4)
 * Everyone’s learning is connected
 * So how do we create coherence?

Change vs. Improvement – important distinctions (page 5) Instructional Core Model – means improvement can only happen by… - not a linear model, not too many strategies, should be able to analyze your actions “in terms of their impact on all other elements”
 * Increasing level of content for students
 * Raising knowledge and skill of teachers
 * Changing student role in the instructional process

- we MUST invest in knowledge and skills for our teachers – we do this for other professions!?
 * Yet this creates the opportunity for improvement, not necessarily the improvement itself
 * Organization must have a process for building accountability and efficacy around practices that improve quality and performance
 * Students and staff must understand WHY – investment, trust & motivation
 * Leadership must be developed – need more leaders in different roles

Six principles for Strategic Thinking About School Improvement:
 * 1. The problems of the system are the problems of the smallest unit.
 * Use the fox and laser mindset to find these problems
 * 2. Processes of improvement are symmetrical across levels.
 * Must be worthwhile, and people and students must feel like they have some control over terms and conditions
 * 3. Reciprocity of pressure and support
 * “for every unit of performance I demand of you, I have a responsibility to provide you with a unit of capacity to produce that performance” (15)
 * 4. Coherence is a consequence of acting more than believing.
 * Control and commitment
 * “coherence results from people acting in concert according to practices they agree will lead to a good result, and learning how to modify their behavior on the basis of the evidence they learn from acting.” (16)
 * 5. Improvement consists of increases in quality and performance over time. Increases in performance result from increases in quality. Increases in performance generally lag increases in quality.
 * Take risks!
 * Improvement practices must be learned
 * Improvement is not a smooth, linear process ( instead, repeated growth-stability-growth pattern)
 * 6. High Levels of improvement require high levels of learning widely distributed in the organization, and high levels of learning require transfer of agency.
 * “highly complex tasks, require high discretion in their execution, but to make the exercise of this discretion deliver coherent results you have to have incentives and cultural norms that promote consistency in practice.” (19)

// Richard Elmore, “School Culture and School Improvement,” unpublished, 2009. (CP) //
//Sara's notes:// Culture and Strategy: - detailed descriptions of rounds at different schools, charter and public - power of culture in schools: “In order to make the kind of improvements that result in large increases in the level and type of student learning, you have to break the existing culture’s lock on instructional practice, BUT you can’t improve instructional practice at scale without building a strong culture instructional practice.” (7)
 * presents these to demonstrate – “the cultures they [teachers] live in exactly reflect and reproduce what they expect students to be able to do in their schools.” (6)
 * so challenging the culture is challenging our own beliefs!

- idea of the “grammar of schooling” – the glue that holds the culture of school together, what guides our decision making about what schools are and how they operate
 * challenging this is difficult!
 * Grammar of schooling is powerful, invisible, and resilient
 * Strategic view of school improvement – its not about changing the default culture, its about REPLACING the default culture

- “the primary unit by which we organize and deliver education is the classroom, NOT the school.” (10)
 * most of the decisions that affect student learning and content are made in the CLASSROOM
 * this is supported by research – variability on student achievement depending on teachers
 * “we have a resource embedded in the organization called teacher knowledge and skill, and this resource seems to have significant impacts on student learning. This resource varies considerably from classroom to classroom, and these variations have serious consequences for students’ learning. The current way in which we organize and manage schools seems to have little or no effect on the distribution or consistency of this resource. And the culture of teaching that surrounds this resource is actively resistant to the idea that it can be shared from classroom to classroom in any systematic way.” (13)

- idea of “loose-coupling”
 * central work of the organization is too complex and uncertain to be managed directly – so organizations bracket/buffer their core functions
 * but it is NOT a stable condition

Programmatic Solutions to Instructional Problems:
 * In the classroom, we need to avoid “substituting the activity for the learning” and in the system we need to avoid “substituting the program for the learning”

Transforming the culture:
 * “requires a shift away from focusing on peoples’ intentions and toward focusing on their behavior, away from their espoused theories of action and toward their enacted theories of action, away from their interests, and toward the consequences of those interests for their behavior and their actions.” (20)
 * first step – to make the default culture visible then start to challenge behavior to challenge practice

// Adam Gamoran and Matthew Weinstein, “Differentiation and Opportunity in Restructured Schools,” American Journal of Education, Vol. 106, no. 3 (May 1998), pp. 385­415. //
//Sara's notes:// the article examines the responses of 24 highly restructured schools in how to balance “the competing aims of providing students with common experiences and addressing differences among individual students”
 * Two solutions – detracking or “maintain some degree of structural differentiation, but in doing so to improve the quality of instruction in low tracks.” (387) but the second solution still maintains unequal status
 * Conventional schools typically divide students for instruction into different tracks and ability groups. However, because of tracking promoting inequality, many restructured schools are trying to minimize these structures…
 * “Detracking appeared to face more barriers in secondary than in elementary schools, and it was resisted in math more than in other subjects.”

Conditions that supported high-quality instruction in a heterogeneous context:
 * small class sizes
 * extra resources that permit a highly individualized approach to instruction
 * strong intellectual leadership
 * the opportunity to select teachers and students

Conditions that supported effective instruction in the context of structural differentiation:
 * commitment to equity across classes
 * teacher and student selection of courses
 * teachers' intellectual commitment to subject matter

Focused on 3 central concepts:
 * Differentiation – “structural and other devices educators use to allocate different curricula and instruction to varied students” (387)
 * Opportunity – “what circumstances enhance the chances for high-quality instruction” (388)
 * Equity – do all students have the same access to high-quality instruction?

Analysis done at high school, middle school and elementary school levels Key findings: (398)
 * “heterogeneous grouping is more problematic for teachers in math than in social studies.”
 * “educators in high schools and middle schools experienced more conflict than those in elementary schools in trying to minimize grouping and tracking.”
 * “the evidence on restructured schools indicates that heterogeneous grouping neither ensures nor prohibits high-quality instruction for a wide range of students.”

Cibola High School – an example of a school that is working! (**really interesting** )
 * Additional time, individualized attention, small classes, looping, individualized grading and projects, school culture stresses collaboration and innovation, extra money raised, strong intellectual leadership
 * “Cibola provided its students with a common interdisciplinary math curriculum characterized by higher-order thinking. This curriculum was made possible by a variety of waivers. The quality of the curriculum also depended on small classes, a select faculty and students, and strong, visionary administration. The individualization of student assessment occurred within the framework of these complex tasks, and even though in teachers' evaluations of students it was clear that some students were held to lower standards than others, the overall complexity of the tasks coupled with an emphasis on group work meant that all students experienced relatively high levels of classroom teaching. Cibola High School demonstrates that detracking need not be accompanied by low standards. It also points to the variety of conditions that may be required to support those high standards, including strong intellectual leadership, small class size, some control over who attends and who teaches at the school, and resources that permit extra tutoring for students who may be falling behind.” (404)

=== // Ronald Gallimore, et al., “Moving the Learning of Teaching Closer to Practice: Teacher Education Implications of Teacher Inquiry Teams,” Elementary School Journal, Vol. 109, No. 5 (May 2009), pp. 537­553. // ===

=== // Judith Warren Little, “Locating Learning in Teachers’ Communities of Practice: Opening up Problems of Analysis in Records of Everyday Work,” Teaching and Teacher Education, v.18, issue 8, Nov 2002, 917­946. // ===