release the hounds

One of the wonderful aspects of summer is the opportunity to go to an amusement park. My daughter was very excited this week to join her friends at our local theme park and the excursion was going to be even more special because they are now old enough to drive there themselves. A great combination of gleeful anticipation of the thrill rides, turbo-charged with the adventurous sense of independence! But, on the morning of the big day she wakes up and it is raining. Not just drizzling, but a serious downpour; raindrops the size of your fist and enough thunder to let you know that Zeus is bowling a 300 game. Her tittering excitement quickly turns into a sullen and solemn demeanor as the joy is sucked right out of her life.

So on the first day of meetings before the school year starts, what administrative duty do you commit against your teachers that sucks the joy from their hopeful outlook? Yes, I know that certain administrative-oriented tasks need to occur early on when you have everyone together, but at what cost? Teachers are as eager to have a good year and are as hopeful as my daughter and her group of friends about the adventure that lies ahead. So why rain on the parade?

Consider this: If my daughter’s day had started with some brilliant sunshine and if she had the opportunity to experience some of the thrill rides with her buddies, and then it started to rain; she would have come home laughing about the fun they had dancing in the puddles. Her positive outlook would have been shaped by the context of the initial fun from the amusement rides. Administrators must establish the same scenario, create the bond of shared joy or amusement before taking care of the mundane.

Terrence Deal and Kent Peterson’s book, Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership, emphasizes the role that emotions, vision, and ceremony have in creating a productive culture. “It is important to remember the formidable nature of the school leader’s unofficial power to reshape school culture towards an ‘ethos of excellence’ and make quality an authentic part of the daily routine of school life” (p. 86). Part of that ethos of excellence is evolves from accentuating the positive. They encourage administrators to “rabidly” celebrate the positive (p. 127).

Rabidly celebrate the positive!

Rabid. As in go-crazy-foam-at-the-mouth enthusiasm. However, if foaming at the mouth does not fall within the parameters of your personality traits, then you can focus on the celebration of the positive piece of their proclamation. If you have too much of a tame Lassie temperament, then show a video clip and let it serve the role of Cujo. My superintendent showed an Abbott and Costello comedy routine on mathematics that prompted some shared laughter before presenting the students’ scores on the standardized math test. It is that spoonful of sugar strategy that Mary Poppins sang about. And I feel like busting out that song about rubber tree plants…cause I have high hopes.

Still feeling like this is not in your comfort zone or that taking the time to create a celebration of the positive seems trivial compared to all the other tasks that are of high priority, then listen to some experts: page one from Deal and Peterson: “Highly respected organizations have evolved a shared system of informal folkways and traditions that infuse work with meaning, passion, and purpose.” Meaning, passion, and purpose. These are the targets for day one.

Make a good day,
Tod

PS. T. E. Deal & K. D. Peterson (1999). Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

PSS. Frankie singing High hopes: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x58asx_sinatras-classic-song-high-hopes_music

PSSS. In case you are not familiar with the Stephen Knovel, Cujo , here is the movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0k21yeVMbM

PSSSS. Abott and Costello math video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WMi5TUJDso

summer reading

a wish

if only we allowed children to build our houses
they would be bright bright yellow
the doors would be smiley faces
the windows would be blue wind
flowers parading and holding hands
would accompany the walkways
the roofs steep and orange
would lift toward the heavens
if only we allowed children to build our houses
the sun would shine everyday
rain would be a blessing
trees would grow more colorfully
the grass wold be taller
more birds would fill the sky
more birds would fill the sky
if only we allowed children to build our houses
if only we allowed children to build our houses
every picture would be a song
every movement a dance
every moment the eternal
every heart a gift
if only we allowed children to build our houses
we would have reached so many moons so many stars by now

Tryfon Tolides


Complete the following:

1) If only we allowed children to build our schools...


PS. Poem is from Shapes (Spring , 1999) Manchester Community-Technical College's art and literary magazine. A book of his work is avaiable: T. Tolides (2006). An Almost Pure Empty Walking. New York: Penguin Books.

who done it?

I love a good mystery. Except of course when it involves the location of my car keys. Dick Francis and P.D. James are two of my favorite authors. The appeal for me in the works of Dick Francis is that his characters are often just average Joes that find themselves in a predicament that needs attention. After some blundering juxtaposed with serendipitous sleuthing, the resiliency of the protagonist results in a successful resolution. My enjoyment in reading these stories is the sense of uncertainty. A good plot in a mystery should keep you guessing as to what might happen next and who is the responsible party.

However, there should be no mystery in education when it comes down to seeing if reform initiatives are being implemented by the staff. There may be a myriad of reasons why a particular person is not practicing the reform, but regardless of the reason, the administrator needs to know if it is being practiced (and then can determine what interventions are necessary). The issue therefore centers on how the fidelity of the program will be monitored.

Fidelity.

Fidelity is my new favorite catchword in educational reform (usually that phrasing would represent a sarcastic comment, but I really do like this term). It is one of my favorites because it is well worth the effort to create the infrastructure necessary to support it. Thomas Guskey, in Evaluating Professional Development (2000), repeatedly reiterates the value of monitoring professional development initiatives.

Some reforms are content-based, others are more process-oriented that involves the interaction between teacher and student. The first question to be asked is: Can the reform be evidenced in a student performance task? If it can assessed via the review of an artifact, then these artifacts can become items for analysis in Professional Learning Communities (see last week‘s blog for tips on how to structure professional dialogue in a PLC). If the reform is concerned more with a particular classroom practice, such as student-teacher dialogue or the manner in which the teacher references the Essential Understanding for the unit as part of the delivery of the lesson, then this requires a visitation to the classroom.

Walk-through visitations are one technique to monitor fidelity. I admit that I was originally skeptical about the use of walk-through observations because it is a technique that is ripe for misuse or misapplication. In order for the data to have significance, there needs to be multiple visits. My worry is that due to the daily emergent priorities that usurp the intention to visit classrooms, that the number of visits that actually occur will be minimal, but conclusions will still be made on the limited data pool. The staff will quickly resent the process if it is done poorly.

In order for fidelity to be more than a catchword, the approach to monitoring the fidelity must be user-friendly. User-friendly. If it is not an efficient process and user-friendly then it will fade away and the results will be misapplied. Either of those options are disheartening to staff. So spend time on the design of the observation form, pilot its use, and then redesign the form. Here is the mantra: Monitor the fidelity consistently, efficiently, and in a manner in which the data can be displayed graphically.

Consistently, as in everyone knows what the topics are and that there is agreement as to what the observational evidence needs to be. Efficient means it can be done in 5 minutes or less, therefore use a checklist. Sorry if some purists are aghast at the mention of a checklist, but the reality is that it helps maintain the required consistency and it keeps the process user-friendly. I don’t just mean user-friendly for the person conducting the visit, but the person being observed should know the exact nature of the criteria. If the criteria are articulated in a checklist/scoring rubric format then everyone knows beforehand what the evidence needs to be for each rating. Each specific item being targeted should have a spectrum of criteria that includes the optimum level of practice, e.g. daily objective absent, daily objective posted, objective referenced during class by the teacher, objective referenced in context to lesson/unit by student(s). The data garnered from the rubrics should be presented in a graphic format that has visual impact in order to easily trigger conversation.

A well crafted observation form is the key to keeping it user-friendly. Then the only mystery is whether Colonial Mustard used the candlestick in the conservatory or the kitchen.

Make a good day,
Tod

PS. Link to article/interview with Guskey in The Evaluation Exchange: A periodical on emerging strategies in evaluation. http://www.hfrp.org/evaluation/the-evaluation-exchange/issue-archive/professional-development

PSS. Connecticut walk-through guide has an extensive list of topics but the form is not user-friendly and does not translate well into a graphic data record. So it is an example of what NOT to do: http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/lib/sde/pdf/Curriculum/Walkthrough_Protocol_Guide_2008.pdf

PSSS. Interview with Dick Francis: http://www.eyeonbooks.com/fiction/0901/dickfrancis.html and a synopsis of each of his books: http://home.ca.inter.net/~jbeaumont/francis/

smart talk

“The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.”
Sid Caesar

One of the goals of educational leadership is to combine isolated expertise in order to achieve success at the organizational level, as stated metaphorically in Sid Caesar’s humorous remark. In other words, the days of the solo-close-the-door-do-it-alone approach are over. It is time to share expertise and craft knowledge in order to meet the demands of accountability. Structuring teachers’ dialogue about instructional strategies is a means to build on the strengths inherent in a school system. This structural approach to systematically creating a culture of reflection about best practices is referred to as Professional Learning Communities.

Fred Newmann’s landmark study of effective educational practices (Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools: Final Report, 1996) concluded that successful schools utilized Professional Learning Communities. Judith Little's article, Looking at Student Work in the United States: A Case of Countervailing Impulses in Professional Development (2004), cites research that shows it to be a value-added endeavor, but that teacher groups need good protocols, a good facilitator, and school-level support. Little states that the reason teachers need to refine their practices is because “Students can do no better than the assignments they are given” (p. 102). The take-away tidbit is this: If you want to improve students' performance, then improve the quality of the tasks that you are asking students to complete. So convene with your peers and enhance the quality of the tasks.

Professional Learning Communities.

The key operational word in that term is community. Will the nature of the discourse be direct and polite? This is difficult since some teachers I know are good about making direct comments about someone else’s teaching (usually when the person being spoken of is not in the room, so I guess it should be called indirect direct commentary) but if the person is in the room then the reverse is true, there tends to be too much politeness and the commentary is reduced to bland generic statements that do not move the conversation forward. The book, Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning, offers a 4-step protocol utilized in the medical field to conduct discussions in a professional manner; 1) description, not judgment; 2) analysis of the descriptions, examine evidence for patterns or contradictions; 3) prediction (the structure of the task predicts/sets the parameters for the student’s performance, so the question becomes: if the students are being asked to X, then they will be able to do X, not Y or Z. If what you really wanted was Z , then restructure the task for Z); and 4) evaluation. But the evaluation is not the typical “good, bad, or ugly” labeling, but the evaluation is focused on what the next level of professional practice should look like.

Seek the Holy Grail rather than sit around and bemoan how dirty the coffee mug is.

Notice how the process is virtually absent of personal opinion and resembles a clinical examination, like an autopsy. But in this case we are looking beyond placing a toe tag on the cadaver, we are looking forward to evaluating what a healthy specimen looks like. The focus is on success, not criticism. This is the climate in which a Professional Learning Community can maximize the expertise of the teachers and have them feel good about their work. Success can be contagious.

So be a genius, get all the wheels working together, and avoid the road rage.

Make a good day,
Tod

PS. City, E., Elmore, R., Fiarman, S., Teitel, L. (2009), Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

PSS. Little, J.W. (2004). 'Looking at student work' in the United States: Countervailing impulses in professional development. In C. Day & J. Sachs (eds.), International Handbook on the Continuing Professional Development of Teachers (pp. 94-118). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press; and for a list of her other publications: http://gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/JWLittle/JWLittle.html#Publications

PSSS. For an extensive list of literature on Professional Learning Communities that includes Newmann's report: http://www.allthingsplc.info/tools/bibliography.php

PSSSS. How NOT to have a discussion, Sid Caesar arguing with Nanette Fabray set to Beethovens 5th Sympathy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhF-7suDsM

PSSSSS. The Sid Caesar quotation was taken from Daniel Pink’s (2005) A Whole New Mind. New York: Riverhead Books.