Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sixth Grade Data Influenced My Secondary Education Belief for Helping to Fix Our Schools

I have received several e-mails from colleagues asking me for the follow up to my last blog on fixing our secondary schools based on the data provided to me from the research and evaluation branch of our district. If you have not yet read the previous blog, I would suggest that you do so as I think that it will make more clear what I will be sharing here.

The research comparison of middle school and elementary school sixth graders was quite telling. As I stated in my previous blog, it would be easy to conclude that we should make our secondary schools more like our elementary schools, where a single teacher has the major responsibility for educating our students. This would be a simple conclusion for a complex problem. I supervised a school that was established to be a K-8 school, and I found the same secondary educational issues still in place in that model for the secondary students. So, first learning (stated repeatedly in past blogs) is that the structure that we create is not the solution to our achievement problems. The structure may support what we have found to be the missing pieces for our students. If we don't create a common vision, a common agreement on the instructional practices, strategies and procedures that we will use; and agree to build the necessary long term relationships (personalization) with our kids and their content, the structure will provide us with little change.

It was clear to me after visiting many elementary classrooms that a single teacher class leads to the teacher having real ownership for the education of their students. This is often not the case in our secondary schools. How can we recreate that sense of ownership without developing single teacher classes for our secondary students? The obvious, but not easy answer, is to create small groups of teachers who work with the same group of students over time. This model has been in place and shown success in my former district. We had magnet programs, academies, and schools-within-schools models. They do exactly what is described here. They provide a close approximation in a secondary model to the elementary school structure, where kids know their teachers over an extended time, and their teachers know their students well also. The problem that I see is that magnet schools, charters, public small schools, and other models in place around the country have met the needs of a small population of our students. Most of our secondary kids still are attending schools that look and act like comprehensive high schools. If the small school model is good for some kids, why isn't it good for all kids? If a comprehensive high school can produce the ownership necessary for outstanding student achievement, then that model is fine. Unfortunately, for much of the nation the comprehensive high school model has not met the needs of many students.

The second finding relates to instructional practice, procedures, and strategies. It was apparent that in a single teacher setting, the teacher has much control of the time allocated to each content area, the ability to make connections between content areas, and the freedom to create a good understanding of the instructional needs of each child to help them succeed. The teacher knows that sometime in the near future, the success or failure of the students, academically, will be placed on their doorstep. It is in the teacher's best interest to figure out how to help each child succeed at the greatest level possible. Of course this teacher only has 20 to 33 students in their classroom.

So, how could this model look similar but different in a secondary setting? First, we again look at a smaller setting where not only the students have the same teachers over time, but the teachers share the same peer group over time as well. The relationships between teacher peers can be incredibly powerful. I supervised a school that we moved into four small learning communities. After the first year, the trust I saw between SLC teacher members became very strong, with a SLC leader who had a strong instructional vision. These teachers visited each other regularly and had developed enough trust to allow for constructive criticism during their professional development time in a small group setting. It led to many teachers developing a similar instructional philosophy, providing students with common instructional strategies, practices, and classroom rules. Students did not see each teacher as being so independent of all other teachers. The teacher collaboration led to a very healthy work environment for both the adults and the students.

Instructional practices in the elementary school looked different than those in most secondary schools. The students were much more engaged in their work. They often had to be engaged because the teacher worked with small groups of students and the other students had to work independently for sometime. Also, time was not as much of a constant in elementary school as it is in secondary school. I often use the following phrase when speaking to secondary educators about bell schedule issues: "Do we want time to be the constant and learning the variable, or would we prefer that time were the variable and learning be the constant?" We know that in most secondary schools, time is the driver of our master schedule, our lesson planning, and our daily routines. We also know that not all students can learn in "the same way on the same day". (A quote that I have borrowed from Gary Soto, the former principal of Southridge MS in Fontana, a great educational reformer and leader). So, this led me to think through how we do more hands on and engaging work in our secondary schools, and how do we get away as much as possible from the secondary use of time, and try to create something that will help more students achieve? I need to include a comment that can be discussed in the future about the critical importance of intervention programs. Intervention is part of the change that must occur in our secondary schools. Frequently, I see intervention as being tutoring, and I do not believe that a tutoring program addresses the specific needs of students who require intervention support.

The final critical learning that I took from this study came when the R and E people took the study a year further and followed all sixth graders into seventh grade. A very interesting outcome arose. I always discussed this issue, but did not have much information to back up what I said until the results came out. The sixth graders from the elementary school, who outperformed the sixth graders in the middle school, had bigger academic dips in their achievement data in seventh grade than their middle school peers. This finding allowed me to conclude that transitions are extremely important to all students, and must be addressed to try and make every transition as smooth as possible.

These three findings on top of my research and personal experiences led me to where I am today in my beliefs about secondary redesign. Those in outline form look as follows:

1. We need to have a common vision agreed to by the entire school community.
2. We need to create an instructional plan that addresses the instructional needs of our students in an engaging way. We need to find a way where all students do not have to learn on the same schedule, but all must be held to learn the same materials.
3. We need to connect the adults in our schools to our students and parents. We also must connect our students to their content.
4. We must develop school structures that support our vision, our instructional plan, and our personalization plan.
5. We must consider all points of transition for our students. These points are not only from one school to the next, but from grade level to grade level, and program to program (ie. EL to regular education, and others)

Schools are systems, and systems can't be fixed by making changes to one part of the system without considering all parts of the system together. My conclusion is that we have to look carefully at many models that exist around our nation that have worked for educating large numbers of students. We can't hope that what we are doing is the right thing, we have to be sure that what we are doing is well thought out, researched based, and owned by everyone in the school community.

I would enjoy hearing from you if you have found success that could be shared with those who read this blog. As I have said a number of times, we all learn best through conversations around a common topic. If we care about kids, getting them educated is certainly a good topic for a public discussion.