Focus on Five Instructional Areas for Raising Student Achievement

If you review many of my earlier posts, you will see that I believe that a systems approach to school change is necessary. Many of the schools that I worked with in my very large district have moved forward in someway. They have attempted to break their large comprehensive high schools into a series of small schools or small learning communities or both. It is gratifying to see this happening; however, what you will also find in most of these schools is structural changes with little change in instructional classroom practice. Without a change of mindset in the area of instructional practice, we will not see the kind of sustained improvement of student achievement that we want.

I was recently asked by principal friend to help him develop his thinking on how to focus greater attention on the instructional practices in his school. His school had just made outstanding gains on the California State Assessment tool (API), but he was not sure if their previous year’s efforts would sustain growth in academic achievement over time. This conversation helped me to reflect on my own instructional focus during my years as a principal and director.

I have always believed that if you want to change anything, you have to figure out how to get the changes clearly stated in no more than five bullets. I did that with my school change mantra that you can read about in other blogs, and I did that with my school vision as a principal. Now, I was being asked to think through how to focus an administrative team and a teaching staff on no more than five areas that will lead to improved academic achievement for all students. Since placing my thinking into writing, I have had many conversations and practice sessions with district and school based administrators and some classroom teachers. I learn a lot from these conversations.

I am providing you with the five bullets in this entry, and then over the next several weeks I will try and develop each of the bullets more fully. I also wish to share a follow up to my healthy school culture entry with another related document on evaluating a school for a healthy instructional culture. I know that none of this work is easy, but through frequent conversations, it is easier to develop educators thinking than one might believe. Unfortunately, we rarely see administrators and/or teachers holding instructional conversations in depth that will lead to changes in mindset and the building of a common instructional vision that all community members can agree to be part of at a school.

My five areas of focus for improving student achievement, and raising the level of rigor within a classroom are:

1. By raising the level of questioning within a classroom by teachers and students we can increase the instructional rigor being introduced into any classroom
2. By increasing the amount and type of feedback that teachers offer to students, and that administrators offer to teachers, we can improve teaching and learning opportunities for everyone.
3. By creating a common educational language around important educational concepts, we will improve the professional practices of all educators. Discussing common language, implies having behaviors in the classroom that match the language, as discussed by Richard Elmore in his newest book, Rounds.
4. By guaranteeing the existence of a safe and caring classroom environment where students feel safe to ask questions and make mistakes, we will improve student’s interest in learning.
5. By creating strong personalized connections between students and teachers, and between students and the content, we can use to our advantage the relationships that are built as tools for student motivation

I will attempt to explain each of these five areas in greater detail in subsequent blog entries. I see each of these five as being supportive of any instructional effort that a district or school is attempting to put into place. Differentiated instruction, project-based learning, reciprocal teaching, Socratic seminars will all benefit by consciously including the five areas above within the professional development work of these or any other instructional delivery models.

If you have any comment on my thinking in this area, I would enjoy reading your responses, and holding a conversation with others around this topic.

Cyber Summit June 1-12 Online and Free

I encourage everyone to register and participate as much as possible in the 21st Century Cyber Summit being sponsored by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills office out of Washington, D.C. The URL for registering is:
http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/cybersummit

I hope that we run into each other online during this cyber conference.

I am currently working on my next blog post. I want to thank those of you who are encouraging me to continue writing and posting. It helps to be encouraged. It feels good to know that someone is reading what I have written. I look forward to what I have to say when the post is completed.

Sincerely,

Larry Tash

Sixth Grade Data Influences My Secondary Educational Belief

In 2002 I was asked by our district superintendent to lead the work in secondary school redesign for our district. I was honored to be asked to take advantage of all that I learned as a teacher and administrator and use my experiences to benefit the students and staff in our large district. What I found could influence the thinking of all middle and high school educators.

One of my first actions was to ask our performance and assessment office to help me to research student outcomes of sixth graders in our district in language arts and mathematics. Board members and the superintendent were interested in finding out if we should continue our middle schools as grade 6-8 schools, or should we be moving the sixth graders back to the elementary school. I wanted to do the research because only in sixth grade could we compare practices and outcomes between school levels. Most of our sixth graders were housed in secondary schools, but we had a significant number of sixth grade students attending our elementary schools. I saw this as a possible way to compare the instructional and organizational practices of secondary versus elementary schools and the impact on student achievement.

Our data experts told me that within our district we could compare the two sub groups of sixth graders and there were enough students in both school settings to make the results useful and reliable. This study was done on two separate occasions and the results were remarkably consistent and revealing. These results provide secondary educators with some important information that should be influential in our discussions of secondary school redesign.

Our findings produced the following information:
• Demographic data of both groups showed that the student populations were very similar in both settings.
• Testing data for both groups showed that there was no appreciable difference in student achievement based on the district’s standardized tests for fifth grade.
• Sixth grade students in elementary schools outperformed similar students in the sixth grade middle schools by a significant margin in language arts.
• Sixth grade students in elementary schools outperformed similar students in the sixth grade middle schools by a significant margin in mathematics.
• Seventh grade students who were new to middle school had greater achievement declines than seventh grade students who originally attended sixth grade in a middle school. However, overall their achievement remained higher than the middle school group.

As a result of this data, I wanted to determine the difference in practices within the two school settings that may have resulted in the achievement differences that became apparent. I am a secondary educator and I was not interested in turning our middle schools into elementary schools, but I am interested in improving the secondary schools practices if it will lead to greater student achievement.

By going out and visiting schools, speaking with educators of sixth graders from both elementary and secondary schools, there were some interesting outcomes that I learned and those results have influenced much of what I now believe to be necessary for improving secondary student achievement. My findings are not about sixth grade, but really they are about what all secondary educators could learn from our elementary partners. Many of my own beliefs were reinforced, and new thinking became necessary. The research and data led me to these conclusions:
• Teaching in elementary school is much less bound by time with only one teacher responsible for instruction.
• Teaching in elementary school tends to be more engaging and hands-on instructionally.
• Since there is only one teacher the students become very familiar the strategies and practices that the teacher uses on a regular basis.
• Since students have only one teacher, students know the teacher very well and the teacher knows the students very well.
• Teachers feel a strong sense of ownership for their students’ academic outcomes since they are the primary (and often the only) teacher for their students.

My work on school redesigned has been strongly influenced by this research. It appears to be closely aligned to what educational leaders around the nation believe to be true. I will share what I believe and how it is embedded in all that I write and present in my next blog. I look forward to hearing from you, since I feel strongly that changes in thinking lead to changes in practice, and both occur only through conversations and discussions that continually occur over time.

Cyber Safety

This post is unique as compared to other posts that I have listed on this blog. However, the topic is so important I thought I would share it with interested educators. I placed my article below on the school web page where I am currently working as the interim principal. I share this with teachers and administrators so that we can find ways to support parents in helping to make our students as safe as possible since 75% or more of our students are using cell phones, computers, or other cyber devices to communicate and to find information. Educators have an important role in helping parents to make students as safe as possible when in the cyber world.

CYBER SAFETY FOR OUR STUDENTS

"All parents of teenagers should read this article carefully. Our children have grown up with technology. Often they know much more about the use of cyber tools than any of us. After all they are “Cyber Natives,” most of us are “Cyber Foreigners”. Our children have never known a time without computers, the internet, cell phones, and they have grown up understanding the incredible use of these technology tools in finding and sharing information. So, as parents who do not have the same knowledge or skills as our children when it comes to the use of technology, what do we do? How can we be responsible parents? How do we face the latest parental issues that have developed?

“Teenagers are early adopters of technology–from the latest social-networking sites to the hottest new cell phones,” said Susan Schulz, special projects editor for Hearst Magazines (which publishes Cosmo Girl). “While this tech savvy can be seen as positive, our study reveals there’s also a negative side. Teenagers should be aware of the real consequences of this type of behavior, and we need to provide them with guidance and encourage them to make smarter choices.” Do parents even know all of the people that our children are communicating with online? Do the kids really know who they are communicating with online?

Our children are using technology to send pictures, messages, music, and join social groups. We know from news stories that have been made public by a variety of media sources that sometimes, this sharing of information, ideas, and pictures can have very negative outcomes for both the sender and the person being shown or discussed. As parents and as school staff we have a responsibility to help our children to make good decisions at all times. Furthermore, when they choose to make bad decisions, that are harmful to themselves or others, we have to turn those ill-advised decisions into learning opportunities so that those choices are not repeated in the future. Providing learning opportunities implies that there are consequences for our children’s choices, but there is also the opportunity for parents and/or school staff to sit and be sure that students learn from these mistakes and not feel that they were given consequences without purpose.

To help warn teens and young adults of the dangers associated with sending or posting inappropriate material online, a National Campaign to protect children from cyber mistakes has published a list of 10 suggestions. Please review each of the recommendations and share them with your children; it may save your child and your family from some very uncomfortable situation in the future.

For parents, the initiative recommends:

1. Talking to kids about what they are doing in cyberspace.
2. Knowing who kids are communicating with.
3. Considering limitations on electronic communication.
4. Being aware of what teens are posting publicly.
5. Setting expectations.

For teens:

1. Don’t assume anything you send or post is going to remain private.
2. There is no changing your mind in cyberspace–anything you send or post will never truly go away.
3. Don’t give in to the pressure to do something that makes you uncomfortable, even in cyberspace.
4. Consider the recipient’s reaction.
5. Nothing is truly anonymous."