Date sent: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 02:10:58 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Learning lessons 2


>Subject: Learning lessons 2
>
>Training and Support
>"If you want to bring about fairly simple changes which are intuitive for
>people, then you
>can do it fairly briskly. But if the nature of the daily interactions between
>students and
>teachers, between students and technology, between teachers and teachers is
>going to be
>fundamentally different, people don't have experience in doing that. And if
>there's going to
>be more responsibility for placing education in the hands of local folks,
>then a McDonald's
>cookie-cutter kind of approach isn't going to work.''
>--Howard Gardner
>Director of the Project Zero Development Group
>
>The more complex the reforms, the harder they are to implement, and the more
>people need
>help. Virtually every reform group is struggling to provide ongoing,
>intensive support to
>educators in the midst of change. "The research on change says that if
>schools are going
>to implement various promising programs, of almost any type, they're going to
>need a
>long-term commitment at the school level and from the developer of the
>program,'' notes
>Stringfield, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University. "That's
>the premise that
>makes scaling up so hard. It's clearly important that they get that Á but how
>in the world is
>it going to be provided?''
>The response of most networks has been to train and support "coaches'' who
>work with
>schools on a regular basis. In 1991, the Accelerated Schools Project provided
>a five-day
>training program for teams of eight to 10 people from individual schools. A
>follow-up of
>the schools' progress a few months later revealed that one-third of the
>schools were
>floundering and another third were doing nothing. "We had made no provision
>for
>systematic follow-up,'' says Levin, the director of the program. "We were
>trying to cram
>into the heads of people what they were going to do for the next five to six
>years, and
>that's absurd.'' Since then, the project has developed a
>training-and-certification program
>for coaches who are based out in the school district. "The coaching model,''
>Levin says,
>"has become the major vehicle for expansion.''
>Reading Recovery relies on "teacher leaders,'' specially trained individuals
>who continue
>to work with children at the same time that they educate other teachers. The
>teacher
>leaders spend a year honing their skills at 23 regional training sites. Then
>they work with a
>class of 12 new teachers each year. But they always remain in touch with the
>previous
>year's group. "You do not stop and have everybody ready and do an
>intervention,'' says
>Gay Su Pinnell, the director of Reading Recovery. "People need to know, 'I
>will never learn
>all there is to know about this. I am part of Reading Recovery and,
>therefore, I am a
>continual learner.' ''
>All of the nasdc design teams use coaches or facilitators, although the
>frequency of their
>interaction with schools and their availability varies widely. Success for
>All requires
>schools to designate a full-time facilitator at the school site. "We'll
>compromise on a lot of
>things,'' says Slavin, "but we've found we just cannot compromise on that.
>Somebody
>must be responsible for seeing through the change process at the school every
>day, down
>to the little details. Somebody needs to be worrying about the quality of the
>implementation all the time for something that is major.''
>In their study of promising strategies for educating disadvantaged students,
>the Johns
>Hopkins researchers found access to technical assistance that is
>strategy-specific almost
>always had a positive effect. And ongoing professional development was
>consistently
>associated with higher levels of implementation.
>But the problem for many networks is how to provide high-quality support as
>they expand
>in size. For almost all of them, the response has been to decentralize: from
>a small staff of
>experts at Yale or Brown or Stanford to a constellation of regional centers
>scattered across
>the country. Even so, studies suggest that the amount of guidance and
>assistance schools
>receive varies widely. And those sites receiving the least assistance
>typically show the
>least fidelity to the original concepts.
>Many of the reform networks have also discovered that they need to provide
>more help
>with curriculum and pedagogy than they had anticipated. The School
>Development
>Program emphasizes the use of child-development theories and principles to
>improve
>student learning. But it recently hired someone to work with districts on
>curriculum and
>instructional issues. It has also sought alliances with other groups--like
>Project Zero--that
>can help teachers improve their curriculum planning, instructional delivery,
>and
>assessments. "In the past, we've not given a whole lot of guidance on
>curriculum,'' says
>Joyner, the acting director. "But what we're seeing now is that we need to do
>that.''
>The National Alliance for Restructuring Education has commissioned a set of
>essays that
>illustrate best practices in curriculum and instruction, written by
>subject-matter experts and
>teachers. It's also developing a "national curriculum academy,'' where lead
>teachers can
>synthesize and distribute best practice. The Johns Hopkins study of 10 reform
>strategies
>found that, for all the programs, the aspect of schooling slowest to change
>was the
>content of the core curriculum.
>
>A Sense of Connectedness
>"One of the things that invariably runs down innovations over time is a
>feeling of
>isolation. The people within a school have got to feel that there's somebody
>elsewhere
>who cares a lot about what they're doing and speaks their language.''
>--Robert E. Slavin
>
>All of the reform groups have come to appreciate the importance of networks
>that allow
>conversation, support, and learning among groups of like-minded people. Many
>of them
>are trying to strengthen networks through newsletters, conferences,
>electronic linkages,
>and clusters of schools in close geographic proximity. "At the local level,
>there's been a
>movement that we've been promoting where schools are connected with each
>other and
>they create local support networks,'' Slavin says. The schools hold monthly
>meetings, visit
>each other, and send their more experienced members to work with new schools.
>Similarly,
>Project Zero has found that once teachers have the chance to visit schools
>where changes
>in teaching and learning are occurring, they can develop networks that take
>on lives of
>their own.
>Anthony W. Jackson, the executive director of the middle-grades school-state
>policy
>initiative at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, says "providing intersite
>visitation and
>peer-to-peer reflection is really the primary vehicle that we believe will
>lead to scaling up. If
>you can have a few anchor--or mentor--schools, you can work off those and
>begin to
>develop relationships in a kind of exponential manner that allows people to
>learn firsthand
>from their peers how to do all this stuff.''
>
>Maintaining Consistency
>"Reading Recovery is very consistent. We've learned a repertoire of local
>adjustments, but
>we've also learned what's constant that we have to keep essential. If you're
>going to call it
>Reading Recovery, we're going to ask you to have certain characteristics in
>place.''
>--Gay Su Pinnell
>Director of Reading Recovery
>
>The largest school-reform networks disagree sharply about what should be held
>constant
>and what should be allowed to vary school by school.
>At one extreme are programs like Reading Recovery and Success for All, whose
>well-researched models depend on teachers following a precise approach to
>curriculum
>and pedagogy. At the other end of the spectrum are more philosophical
>approaches, like
>the Coalition of Essential Schools, that share common principles but
>encourage schools to
>devise their own solutions. In between are networks like the Accelerated
>Schools Project.
>It requires schools to follow a very specific process for analyzing problems
>and reaching
>consensus but does not mandate a particular approach to reading or
>mathematics.
>"For philosophical approaches,'' argues Stringfield, "a major challenge is
>how to translate
>the philosophy into concrete instructional strategies.'' Studies have found
>that educators
>at the same school often interpret the Coalition's principles differently.
>And Stringfield
>argues that schools would benefit from "standard solutions'' to commonly
>recurring
>problems, such as how to organize class schedules to provide more time for
>learning.
>But to some groups, providing such concrete models goes against their efforts
>to be
>intellectually respectful of educators. Many of the school designs are also
>works in
>progress. They rely on local sites as much to develop new knowledge as to
>replicate old
>techniques.
>In contrast, says Slavin, "People like us and Reading Recovery believe that
>you have to
>have a program and something reasonably well worked out if it's going to be
>effective
>when it is implemented and to see that it can be implemented at all.''
>Time and Costs
>"We have learned from our experiences that you can't hit the schools with
>everything at
>once. But, on the other hand, you have to go very rapidly--a lot more rapidly
>than most
>theorists in this area would believe. Á We say that if teachers are not
>perceiving a marked
>difference in reading performance by December, then you're in big trouble.
>Teachers have
>been through so many false reforms that they need to see something in the
>fairly near term
>that convinces them life is now really different.''
>--Robert E. Slavin
>
>The big school-reform networks also disagree about how long it takes to
>restructure a
>school and how much it costs. Success for All expects schools to see concrete
>results
>within the first year. Henry Levin estimates that it takes six years to
>create an Accelerated
>School, although schools with two or three years' experience have shown
>"dramatic gains''
>in student achievement, parental participation, student and teacher
>attendance, and better
>expectations and attitudes.
>The Coalition of Essential Schools estimates that it can take 18 months to
>two years for a
>school to meet the requirements for membership, but there is no time line for
>full
>implementation of its principles. The New American Schools Development
>Corporation has
>kept its design teams on a breakneck pace that required them to develop their
>designs in
>one year and implement them fully in two.
>Cost estimates are even murkier. Levin argues that the transformation to an
>Accelerated
>School can be made primarily by reallocating existing resources. The
>Coalition estimates
>that schools restructured according to its principles cost only 10 percent
>more than
>existing schools to operate.
>"I'm convinced that one can take the typical high school and, if one
>successfully
>rearranges the resources, design a dandy school,'' says Sizer, the
>Coalition's chairman. He
>admits, however, that "the costs of the planning and retraining are
>considerable, the
>up-front R&D costs. And I personally underestimated that. I don't know what
>it is.'' Such
>costs, Sizer now says, should not be rolled into the operating expenses for
>schools
>"anymore than progressive business puts it in that way. Research and
>development is a
>line item on its own. Most public education fails to invest anything at all
>in this kind of
>work.''
>
>Quality Control
>"If you talk about Protestant churches, they all have the same book. But you
>can go to one
>church and see it looks like these folks are loving their neighbor and
>honoring God. You
>go to another and you say, 'Is this a church or a saloon?'''
>--Edward T. Joyner
>Acting Director of the School Development Program
>
>Every reform group wants its ideas to spread with fidelity, which quickly
>leads them to the
>question of quality control. "There's a definite phenomenon in education
>reform--we call it
>'grand faloonery' from [Kurt Vonnegut's novel] Cat's Cradle--in which schools
>want the
>name, they want the flag, but they actually don't want to do any reform,''
>says Slavin of
>Success for All. "And we do everything we possibly can to look for that.''
>Both Success for All and Reading Recovery gather detailed data on the
>progress of
>individual students and use them to help monitor whether schools are running
>into
>problems in implementing their model. The Accelerated Schools Project is
>trying to
>establish a data base to keep track of its schools. The School Development
>Program tries
>to track a school's test scores, its climate (as perceived by teachers,
>parents, and
>administrators), students' self-concept and attendance, and the rates of
>suspension and
>explusion. But Joyner says many schools and districts aren't used to
>collecting such
>information. The program also sends out people twice a year to assess whether
>school
>sites are faithfully replicating elements of the program.
>The ultimate measure of quality is whether students perform at consistently
>higher levels.
>But most schools have not been engaged in the reform networks long enough to
>produce
>such data, except in anecdotal form. They decry the use of traditional
>multiple-choice tests
>to measure students' progress. But new forms of assessment that would be more
>appropriate are still under development.
>As a result, it's often hard for schools to evaluate whether these models are
>worth
>pursuing. And it's equally hard for reformers to insure that schools are not
>joining their
>network in name only.
>In general, it is rare that any reform network kicks out a school or a
>district. And some
>efforts lack a specific schedule or a set of benchmarks for evaluating
>progress. "Almost
>none of these programs notice when one of their schools doesn't do an
>important
>component,'' Stringfield of Johns Hopkins charges. "They have very few
>mechanisms in
>place to notice when lapses are happening. That would be a hell of a way to
>run a nuclear
>power plant.''
>In the study of strategies for educating disadvantaged students, Stringfield
>found that
>none of the programs had left a "clear, uniform imprint on regular classroom
>instruction.''
>And he was struck by how unevenly and incompletely programs were implemented
>at
>many sites.
>So Stringfield began looking at the characteristics of organizations--like
>air-traffic
>controllers and electric-power companies--that operate with high levels of
>reliability. "If
>you assume that the program you have is valid, there is a literature out
>there that can tell
>you what things have to be in place for reliable implementation,'' he says.
>High-reliability organizations, he found, share a number of characteristics:
>They consider
>failures a disaster and unacceptable; they have a clear sense of their
>primary mission; they
>have a set of understandable and replicable procedures; they recruit and
>train extensively
>because professional judgment is valued; and they have initiatives to
>identify flaws in
>their procedures and to propose and validate changes.
>"There needs to be a quality-control component built into the system,'' he
>argues. "There
>can be diverse discussions about how to do that, but to just assume that
>these are good
>people and good people will go off and do good things is garbage.''
>After two years, the National Alliance for Restructuring Education concluded
>that real
>change in what schools and districts did depended on the Alliance's being
>much clearer
>about what was expected and setting deadlines for accomplishing those things.
>As a
>result, it came up with 21 "indicators of core commitment''--things that
>someone should be
>able to see, feel, and hear in an Alliance school by the fall of 1995--as
>well as a set of 14
>"vital signs'' to measure student success and system performance.
>But many reformers are reluctant to become quality police, given the
>complexity of the
>changes they are asking schools to pursue and the different starting points
>of the schools.
>Such a role is also in conflict with the supportive, collegial atmosphere
>that many of the
>networks are trying to promote.
>"If a school says it's an Essential School and then proceeds to deepen and
>intensify its
>ability grouping and its discipline-based teaching, to me that's a gross
>distortion,'' says
>Robert McCarthy, the Coalition's director of school development. "But if a
>school really
>stays on student as worker and doesn't recognize the need for schedule
>changes or
>anything that would disrupt the flow of life in the school, that's more a
>failure of nerve.''
>"I think we have to be willing to tolerate these variations in order to have
>the ideas
>spread,'' he argues, "to have people talking about and interpreting the
>ideas, and to have at
>least these variations in practice begin to take place.''
>
>Reasons for Hope
>"We don't control schools. We don't have any money. We don't have any
>political power.
>All we can do is persuade people. And culture is not easy to change.''
>--Henry Levin
>Director of the Accelerated Schools Project
>
>In the end, argues Richard Elmore, a professor at the Harvard graduate school
>of
>education, the school-improvement networks should be viewed as "national
>treasures. We
>should promote a culture of this kind of work. But they're very limited
>prototypes for a
>particular kind of social intervention, which is gathering up the faithful
>and converting
>them. And by definition, for a whole lot of reasons we can describe, they run
>out of gas,
>not the least of which is the extraordinary demands they make on the people
>who are in
>them.''
>But others are more optimistic that the number and scope of such networks
>will continue
>to grow. And they reason that the lessons learned from them will enrich our
>information
>about educational change. "If you look at all these networks, for all the
>difficulties that
>you're talking about--which are more or less severe--there are more and more
>schools
>involved every year,'' argues Frank Newman of the Education Commission of the
>States.
>"There are more and more networks every year. So we're getting there.''