School improvement in five simple (not easy!) steps
Dr. Boyd Chitwood is the superintendent of Mingo Valley Christian in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For more information about Mingo Valley, click here.
School improvement or, even more broadly and intimidatingly titled – school reform, is a constant topic of conversation, concern, study, and proposals. Appropriately so because schools in general aren’t regularly doing the best job for all of our kids. Even more to the point, shouldn’t we always be wanting to get better at educating and growing our children, out of love for them and commitment to the future?
The topic can be so intimidating and so incessant, however, that its mention turns our attention away from improvement, rather than toward it with motivation, direction and, amazing to include in this list, confidence! Yes, we can have confidence about school improvement!
Might it not help our resolve and concerted effort at school improvement if we actually believed there were a few things that worked almost every time in every place if applied with simple conviction and committed attention?
I would be foolish to claim that there are no arguments about these steps, for we can have the highest confidence that there will be argument about anything and everything. But there is less argument about these steps toward improvement than most. The steps are anything but easy, yet they are relatively simple, and may offer fair odds at keeping us in the game of improving our schools, rather than ignoring or abandoning the necessary work because it just seems too uncertain, too complex, really just too hard, and maybe downright futile.
These will look somewhat different in different school settings, but they really do apply to a huge span of school situations. Our schools could be inner-city Title 1, high tax/high return public suburbs, secular prep of both prodigious and parsimonious funding, parochial, evangelical Christian, charter, even experimental or lab and still gain ground when improving in these five, fairly well-defined dimensions.
The five areas don’t cover everything important for school success, but they do address most of the spectrum of what it takes to do school, and do school well. They are curriculum, faculty, assessment, leadership, and – we’ll say more about the last one when we get there. Assume that each will take a little more funding (though some can realistically save money as well), but the key here is not money as our answer to improvement.
Many schools do many of these, but every school can improve in at least a few. Some schools can improve by just adding a few points from the list, because their efforts really don’t touch on the proposed improvement. And schools that really and truly do them all, well those aren’t the schools we’re talking about when we have our unending debates about school improvement anyway.
1. Curriculum – How could one improvement help all the incredibly different approaches to curriculum in our schools? We have heavy reliance in many schools on standards-based instruction, usually but not always coupled with high stakes testing. We have schools with constructivist/Deweyian programs, some with classical curricula, others with problem-based learning, and still others with remedial efforts through direct instruction and scripted pedagogy. There are huge differences in this spectrum, but wouldn’t all be doing what they do better if children were more often and more effectively taught how (in addition to selective, occasional “what’s”) to think and motivated to do so? Certainly the problem-based pedagogue might think her curriculum is about thinking and that the direct instruction proponent is expecting of his or her students very little of that while the standards instructor might argue that at his best he is teaching thinking though his required testing can often get in the way.
Of course, these debates and differences have substance, but wouldn’t each of these approaches and many others be proponents of children thinking better? So, what does it mean to propose it? Only this. I am familiar with many, many schools of various and sundry types where children are schooled in procedures, prepared with lessons, assigned challenges, scaffolded for the concepts under consideration, guided through imitation of disputative forms, and drilled in skills all the day long, but rarely if ever show up for each teacher throughout the day expecting to think and appreciating it. Additionally, I am aware of a great majority of instructional lessons where students are not guided and encouraged in how to think and think more effectively. It is just rarely where we focus for lessons in school. And I can’t discuss it at length here, but I also don’t accept as a given that a “rich” learning environment where children are “free” to explore and discover learning is a consistent stimulant to deep, thoroughgoing and invested thinking on the part of the student. As humans, we may have a natural affinity for thinking, but we have just as natural a set of affinities for avoiding such an exhausting and potentially intimidating endeavor. As with Winnie the Pooh when he came to thoughts of exercise, we consider it every once in a while, but then lay down until the feeling passes.
None of this is to be settled in a few sentences, but let me close this item simply by asking you to ask yourself if your teaching could make more of a difference for your students’ learning if they were consistently being trained and motivated to think, more and better than they do now.
2. Faculty – Curriculum was a tough start, for we often propose curricula as our answer to the problem of educating children more effectively. Therefore, our proposal seems the answer to improvement in the area of curriculum.
This item on faculty is less at odds with the very differences which comprise the dimension. Some changes in faculty practice show substantially greater results for at-risk student populations, while others may best serve the most gifted and best prepared students. Professional Learning Communities, however, have been shown to make a positive difference in almost every type of school setting, at least when executed with consistency and determination.
And this does make simple educational sense. When teachers gain each other’s strengths through intentional teaming and do it with focus on student learning, we seem to be fairly close to the sweet spot of school improvement. Further, when that teaming for student learning includes willing reflection on results of instruction for the purpose of modifying and improving that instruction and that learning, we have almost created a tautology for the definition of school improvement. Tautology or not, PLC’s are worth a try wherever they haven’t been tried, for the benefit of all teachers and all students.
3. Assessment – Assessment can offer accountability, information, motivation and further learning. Usually, we think of three key occasions for assessment (with a fourth added through observations for authentic assessment amidst the learning process): lesson by lesson or chapter by chapter for information on mastery and a level of accountability, cumulative for similar assessment of content and skills over time and course, and process accountability/performance status information through norm-referenced and/or criterion referenced, sometimes high stakes, testing. For improvement, I would propose that we always include growth assessments in our process. We want to know, and help the student know, how he or she has grown through the learning process. What content, skills and perspectives are there which weren’t before. This is much more than the standards-based skill acquisition or lesson content apprehension, this is growth from where they were to where they weren’t and are now. It can be performance-based, it can be norm- or criterion-referenced if connection and longitudinal interpretation is included, or it can be something like cumulative lesson-oriented assessments but with clear attention to student progress in knowledge and skills more than instructional content. Growth assessment helps keep the main thing the main thing in our teaching – student growth – and serves an intrinsic motivational purpose for we all like to know that we know and are able to do things which we didn’t know and couldn’t do before.
4. Leadership – I’ve written of this elsewhere. For now, I will let it suffice to say that we lead better when we lead as if the people we were leading were people. So often, they become human resources of a sort to us as leaders, and we fail both them and the challenge we are tasked with because something less than human is not the sort of team to lead in operational effectiveness nor in moral responsibility.
5. The Fifth Dimension – I thought first that perhaps a financial dimension was the way to go. It does take resources, used well, to do school effectively.
Finance – (a) Keep kids first in all financial leadership and priorities, but remain clear that educating children is an earned privilege from proper financial stewardship. The finances never come first in ordered importance, but if they are not foundationally established, the teaching and learning can’t be a sustained and successful endeavor. (b) I also thought perhaps in the financial area I should mention that the risk-reward assessment for guiding financial management decisions only works when we keep both variables dynamic. Fix on either because of our preferences or passions or fears and we freeze the motive force by which finances can make a difference for kids. But I couldn’t just stop at Finance as a fifth and final choice.
Technology – What school improvement plan makes sense today without the consideration and use of the immense power of technology? (a) So, remember for improvement that connection is the key sea change we have experienced which makes all the difference. Neither the “box” nor even the smarts of the box in the software are what take computers out of our dust-gathering corners and place them central amidst the learning. It is the connection, in class, in school and with the world. (b) But I couldn’t see applying that in technology without also keeping clear that learning leads technology and never vice versa if it is learning that we are improving. Sure, in some particulars, new tech can stimulate new possibilities, but for school improvement the learning questions should always be driving the pursuit of tech tools by which growth can better happen for students. While technology seemed necessary, lessons in hiring effectiveness also seemed essential if our schools are to improve.
Hiring - (a) Hire smarts, passion and principles. Technique and content can be taught. As for basketball where you can’t teach “tall”; pure reasoning ability, fire in the belly (You can stoke it, but I don’t believe you can light it to begin with.) and the moral backbone to do what is right are not the stuff of OJT. (b) But starting on hiring wisdom just turns me toward areas where I’ve seen some too broadly or simplistically apply real wisdom from Jim Collins that you have to “get the right people on the bus, and then get them in the right seats.” While Collins makes his primary contrast with deciding “who” before deciding “where” the bus is going, this insight is often applied mostly to hiring the kind of folks you want in the effort, and then figuring out where they should serve. Obviously, I’m not entirely averse to this view because I counseled to hire smarts, passion and principles; not designers, engineers, and salesmen. But we do need to know whether our bus requires a mechanic on board to fix it or that service is available for a price along the road. We need to know if anyone is bringing the snacks and if someone can lead the songs to make the ride pass with strength and with joy. So, get the right people, but have some view of what your strong, complete team will require to do the job before you. Yet, hiring still wasn’t enough.
Professional Development – This is teaching. PD is not a vestigial organ (though with the attention given it by executive leadership sometimes, it seems an appendix would get much greater respect). (a) For professional development that is a people-grower rather than a program-placeholder, make sure the priority agenda emerges from your formative assessment/self-evaluative growth process for faculty. But I couldn’t stop there. (b) It’s also vital that you have bite-size sessions but action-size learning units. People have to be able to swallow and digest the learning, but if it’s not packaged relative to the acquisition and beginning mastery of a new skill or perspective, then adults simply won’t take it seriously or pay attention. If required, they may show up, but in body only. They don’t go to school to be compliant; they pay attention to your agenda when it’s not what they brought in as their own agenda only if you’ve given them high confidence that they get new strength, capability and self-efficacy out of the deal. A smattering of this and that, or a huge set of learning objectives spread over an interminable length of time will not give you an invested professional team.
This isn’t coming to any sort of succinct closure, is it? The point was to have five points for school improvement which could actually build our confidence in success so we would stick with it. Is 8 too many? ( I know. It’s really 4 plus (4x2) for 12. It’s sure getting on the long side.
So, think of it this way. This Fifth Dimension is all about creating a culture where Best Practices are sought in all functional areas. These last four which each contained two fall pretty clearly into best practices pursuit, somewhat unlike the first four (Maybe #2, but probably not the rest). Build a culture where you’re always looking for the ways your work is being done better someplace else, and commit to meet that standard. That’s the fifth, and final, point: BUILD A CULTURE FOR BEST PRACTICES PURSUIT!