Random Grouping from the Start: A Best Practice?

Our staff development teacher recommended the following article from September 2008 for our reading and review this week. Much of its content resonated with my own experiences in the classroom as a student. As an educator, it also had me rethinking the ways I group students and how I can better suit all of their learning needs.


Best Practice for Equity: Random Grouping 


September 19, 2008 


Consider the following question.  Did you go to elementary school with
essentially the same group of students?  Or perhaps, even through
middle school and high school.  Think about the students who were your
friends.  Think, too, about peers that you may have chosen not to be
friends with or with whom you had little academic and/or social
interaction.  Many of us can picture students like this.  In a school
system, increasingly reflective of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and
socio-economic diversity, it becomes imperative that we find ways to
build positive relationships among students that support academic
achievement by ensuring all students feel connected, confident, and
cared about by their peers.  One way to do this is through grouping
practices. 


A preponderance of educators recommends flexible grouping that
provides opportunities for students to be part of many different kinds
of groups during the course of the school day.  Random grouping is a
way to ensure students learn with and from students that they may not
choose to interact with, students with backgrounds, experiences, and
ideas that differ from their own. As students interact within random
groups, there is greater perspective taking and more frequent
opportunities to give and receive explanations that can result in
deeper understanding and increased retention. Responsibility for
learning is shared and social support for academic mastery can
increase as students begin to feel more connected to and accepted by
their peers.  These enhanced abilities to work collaboratively can not
only increase school success, but prepare students for the world of
work. 


Below are some ideas for randomly grouping students. 

•     Cut magazine pictures, postcards, or old photos into the same number
of pieces as there will be students in a group.  Mix the pieces in a
bag and ask students to draw a piece without looking.  Students whose
pieces form the whole picture become a group.  Once seated together,
ask students to come to consensus on a title that expresses the main
idea of the picture.  Share group ideas in the whole class and
discuss. 


•     Write four synonyms, one on each of four index cards for key
vocabulary words.  Again place the cards in a bag and ask students to
draw a card without looking.  Students with synonyms form a group and
discuss the different connotations of the words.  Use SAT vocabulary
words for older students.  This method can be used with antonyms or
homonyms if you want to form pairs instead of larger groups.  Pairs
follow up by writing sentences that contain both words. 


•     Identify quotes related to an instructional concept.  Write each
quote on a piece of paper and cut into the same number of pieces as
there will be students in a group.  After students pick a piece
without looking and form a group, ask group members to individually
write a sentence or two that express their response to the quote.
Group members share their responses one at a time without discussion.
The rule is to listen to understand what has been shared, not
respond.  Once everyone has read their sentences students discuss the
similarities and difference in their responses. 


•     On index cards write words that belong to instructional categories,
such as book titles written by the same authors or parts of speech.
Students draw the cards and find the other students with words from
the same category. Once they groups are formed, group members create a
visual representation of the category using pictures and symbols. 


•     In math, write sets of different problems that have the same answer
on different index cards.  Students draw a card and complete the
problem on their own. Next students find the other students that have
problems with the same answer. Once groups are formed students share
the strategy they used to solve the problem.  For younger children,
you can use basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division
facts. 


•     Pose an opinion-based statement related to an instructional concept
being studied.  For instance, in an ecology unit, the statement could
be, “All resource development of rain forests around the world should
be banned immediately.”  Or make a statement that expresses one point
of view regarding a current event topic. Give students private think
time to consider how much they agree or disagree with the statement.
Based on a scale of 1-5, one being total disagreement and 5 being
total agreement, ask students to form a single line around the
classroom.   Fold the line from one end to the other so that there are
two lines with each student facing a partner.  Allow a specified
amount of time (not more than one minute) for each partner to share
why they agree or disagree with the statement.  Be sure to tell
students that they are not to discuss the topic; one partner listens
while the other talks and then they reverse roles. 


Random grouping can be accomplished in simpler ways as well.  Students
can just count off by the number of groups you want to have (in a
class of 24, have students count off 1-6, to form groups of four) or
use your class list to divide students into groups by their last
name.  Or have students from the same row of desks work together.  All
of these methods will ensure that every student in the class has the
opportunity to work with every other student during the course of a
week.  When beginning random grouping it is best to start with pairs
and to keep the task short.  As students become more comfortable,
confident, and skilled being randomly assigned to work with their
peers, group size and the duration of the task can be increased. 


Full article available at: http://groups.google.com/group/diversity/browse_thread/thread/4646205446a54d58#

The Power of Language Cannot be Underestimated

As educators, what we say and do in the classroom on a daily basis is often scrutinized and analyzed to the nth degree. We aim to empower our students with motivating and powerful words rather than degrade or insult them (obviously!). But what happens when moments get the best of us and we say something to a student we instantly regret that can be misconstrued and easily taken out of context? After all, we may be teachers, but we are also human.


In my six years of teaching, I have made my fair share of disrespectful and harsh remarks to students I'd like to take back. I am sometimes too sarcastic to students, which is inappropriate and not handled well by 13 and 14 year olds.


An unfortunate incident occurred with one of our staff members last week that reminded me of the power of language in instilling self-worth, confidence, and pride in our students and their identities. The statement made to the student was not done in a malicious or mean-spirited way, and I can see how this teacher got caught up in the moment and said such a thing. I too know this student and how difficult his/her behaviors can be, depending on the day.


I invite you to read the email response to the incident from the student's parent below, which I have edited to remove all personal identification and protect the confidentiality of all individuals involved. You will find this parent's response to be well-written, insightful, and important for all educators to hear.

Good Afternoon Everyone:

I wanted to communicate what my child shared with me the other day about a comment a teacher (Teacher A) made to him/her. Teacher A saw my child in the front office and overheard someone call out his/her name. Teacher A then commented, "So you're the infamous (child's name here) I've been hearing about". Later, my child came home to ask me what the word "infamous" meant while looking the word up in the dictionary. 

Language conveys a lot, and the language used with my child was not appropriate, in my opinion. Maybe the teacher made the comment on a light note- but for a child who is already struggling with self-esteem issues, it was conveyed hurtfully. Some people wonder why some youth are full of anger, but we miss the importance of how we fail to treat individuals respectfully and communicate with them appropriately. Although I'm this child's mother, I still continue to work on how I use language with him/her at home and feel that I have to be careful with my words and the way in which I respond to his/her actions. 

Language and how we choose our words is so important when we are dealing with youth. More importantly, we have to be careful not to be so quick to label. Even children who are arsonist, sexual predators, fight everyday, rob, and do many unlawful things within society need appropriate adult guidance and respect. These same children may turn their lives around in the best way and be of great service to society in their adult years. My child does not fall into any of those categories but has had some rough days and made some wrong choices at school. What needs to be recognized is that most days he/she does well at school from the feedback I'm receiving from teachers who have been supportive and use positive reinforcement.

My child has shown great improvements as he/she matures and is bright enough to look forward to the best out of the worst of situations. He/she takes his school work and grades very seriously and has been capable of turning things around for the better all on his/her own initiative. He/she is his own toughest critic and doesn't need an adult to kick him down. Everyone need to be respected, and to be called infamous is not respectful nor received well. 

In the school environment, teachers and administrators usually have the last say. It's mandatory to empower children rather than trying to set them up for failure and degrading them.

Is Economic Integration the Answer to Closing the Achievement Gap?

What is the answer to closing the achievement gap for our students? While numerous failed "solutions" to this never-ending problem have been proposed over the past decades, could it be possible that the answer is easier than we think? Could economic integration be a possible answer and aid educational reform? The following article explains a study conducted in my district that supports the belief that low-income students will achieve and learn more when given the opportunity to attend middle-class schools. See if you agree.


Study of Montgomery County Schools Shows Benefits of Economic Integration


By Stephanie McCrummen and Michael Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 15, 2010; 12:26 AM 




Low-income students in Montgomery County performed better when they attended affluent elementary schools instead of ones with higher concentrations of poverty, according to a new study that suggests economic integration is a powerful but neglected school-reform tool.


The debate over reforming public education has focused mostly on improving individual schools through better teaching and expanded accountability efforts. But the study, to be released Friday, addresses the potential impact of policies that mix income levels across several schools or an entire district. And it suggests that such policies could be more effective than directing extra resources at higher-poverty schools.


The idea is easier to apply in areas with substantial middle-class populations and more difficult in communities, such as the District, with large concentrations of poverty. Yet it lends fresh support to an idea as old as the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954: Segregated schools - in this case, separated by economics, not law - are rarely as good as diverse ones at educating low-income students.


"Today, 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make high-poverty schools work," said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in New York that published the report. "This research suggests there is a much more effective way to help close the achievement gap. And that is to give low-income students a chance to attend middle-class schools."


The study tracked the performance of 858 elementary students in public housing scattered across Montgomery from 2001 to 2007. About half the students ended up in schools where less than 20 percent of students qualified for subsidized meals. Most others went to schools where up to 60 percent of the students were poor and where the county had poured in extra money.


After seven years, the children in the lower-poverty schools performed 8 percentage points higher on standardized math tests than their peers attending the higher-poverty schools - even though the county had targeted them with extra resources. Students in these schools scored modestly higher on reading tests, but those results were not statistically significant.


"The conventional wisdom - and I don't want to knock the foundation of it - is that we really need to infuse the poorest schools with lots of resources," said Stefanie DeLuca, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, who has studied the issue and read an advance copy of the report. "This study turns that wisdom on its head to some extent. It says, actually, it's who you are going to school with."


Independent researchers call the report a step forward in studying the benefits of economic integration, which has been difficult to measure because it is hard to find large numbers of poor kids in wealthy areas. But Montgomery provided an ideal laboratory because of a long-standing policy of requiring developers to set aside housing for low-income families, who win spots through a lottery.


That randomness strengthens the study, researchers say. It mitigates a problem that hampered previous studies in which parents actively chose to place their children in better schools, making it difficult to separate the effect of the schools from the effect of having motivated parents.


Researchers see the results as especially significant because Montgomery, one of the nation's best and largest public school districts with 144,000 students, has been uncommonly aggressive in seeking to improve the performance of students in schools with higher poverty.


It has divided the county into a high-performing, more-affluent green zone and a high-needs red zone, where schools receive about $2,000 more in per-pupil funding. And yet, the low-income students in the study performed better in the green-zone schools.


Montgomery School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said that the report's findings were no surprise but that his policies are designed to counteract the ill effects of housing patterns that concentrate poverty in certain areas.


'Art of the possible'


"We chose to do the art of the possible," Weast said. "Housing policy is a far stretch for a school superintendent."
Education researcher Heather Schwartz wrote the study while working toward a PhD in education at Columbia University. She now works for the Rand Corp., which had no role in the study.


Researchers say that poor schools often struggle because they tend to attract rotating staffs of less-experienced teachers and administrators, among other problems. Schools with lower levels of poverty have a range of benefits that include more stable staffs, fewer discipline problems and more support from volunteers. Parents who have one job instead of three also have an easier time being involved. And expectations are usually higher.


"This is not about 'poor kids can't learn,' " DeLuca said. "It's about the fact that we've had a legacy in this country of segregated neighborhoods and socioeconomic isolation from opportunities and the mainstream of life."


The U.S. Education Department's $4 billion "Race to the Top" program encourages states to adopt policies that increase the role of student performance in teacher evaluations, expand charter school offerings, make it easier to fire bad teachers and adopt national standards for reading and math.


Scars from busing battles


But questions about integrating school systems have not been front-and-center since the 1970s, and scars from school busing battles have made policymakers leery of raising such issues again. Most districts nationwide now assign students to schools based only on where they live. Parents with the means to live close to top-performing schools often have resisted efforts that would send their children to schools with larger numbers of students from low-income families.


"There is still this kind of fear, a fear that is not easily overcome when you have a government that is highly parochial," said David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque who has written extensively on the subject. "Public officials in the United States with rare exceptions do not want to deal with the underlying economic and racial segregation of our neighborhoods."


A growing number of school districts - at least 60 so far - has in recent years been experimenting with strategies that promote economic diversity. These include magnet schools, student assignment policies that take into account economic status and agreements that give poor kids a chance to attend schools in wealthier suburbs.


"This study confirms what we've long believed," Education Department spokeswoman Sandra Abrevaya said via e-mail. She said that federal proposals to expand existing public school choice and magnet school programs were aimed at promoting racial and socioeconomic diversity.


The money spent on those programs, however, is relatively small, Kahlenberg said.


Dominique Johnson, 13, who attended an elementary school in the District before moving to a public housing apartment in Bethesda, said the difference was obvious.


"It was a bad, bad school," she said of her old school, shaking her head. "The principal, I don't think she did anything about all the fights. I had this one teacher who would curse at the kids."


At North Bethesda Middle School, she said, she found rules, focus and difficult classes with attentive teachers. Her grades dropped. But after a year or so, they improved.


"Now I understand the work," she said. "I've made friends. The principal is nice. It was harder at first, but at lunch I'd go to classes and the teachers helped me."

The Whiteboard (and Promethean Board!) Revolution

Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards

Robert J. Marzano

From: November 2009 | Volume 67 | Number 3 

Multiple Measures    Pages 80-82

Interactive whiteboards have become popular over the last few years, and it appears that their use will continue to grow exponentially. Indeed, books like The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution (Betcher & Lee, 2009) attest to the depth and breadth of change that this tool can promote in classroom practice.

For those who may still be unfamiliar with the technology, an interactive whiteboard is a large display that connects to a computer and a projector. The projector projects the computer's desktop onto the board's surface, where users control the computer with a pen, finger, or other device. The board is typically mounted to a wall or floor stand. Various accessories, such as student response systems, enable interactivity.

Although many teachers have enthusiastically adopted interactive whiteboards, little research is available on their effect on student achievement. However, in a study that involved 85 teachers and 170 classrooms, the teachers used interactive whiteboards to teach a set of lessons, which they then taught to a different group of students without using the technology (see Marzano & Haystead, 2009).

What the Research Found

The study results indicated that, in general, using interactive whiteboards was associated with a 16 percentile point gain in student achievement. This means that we can expect a student at the 50th percentile in a classroom without the technology to increase to the 66th percentile in a classroom using whiteboards.

In addition, three features inherent in interactive whiteboards have a statistically significant relationship with student achievement. The first is the learner-response device—handheld voting devices that students use to enter their responses to questions. The percentage of students providing the correct answer is then immediately displayed on the board in a bar graph or pie chart. Using voting devices was associated with a 26 percentile point gain in student achievement.

A second feature is the use of graphics and other visuals to represent information. These include downloaded pictures and video clips from the Internet, sites such as Google Earth, and graphs and charts. Use of these aids was also associated with a 26 percentile point gain in student achievement.

A third feature is the interactive whiteboard reinforcer—applications that teachers can use to signal that an answer is correct or to present information in an unusual context. These applications include dragging and dropping correct answers into specific locations, acknowledging correct answers with virtual applause, and uncovering information hidden under objects. These practices were associated with a 31 percentile point gain in student achievement.

What We Saw in the Classroom

One of the more interesting findings from the study was that in 23 percent of the cases, teachers had better results withoutthe interactive whiteboards. To determine why this occurred, we examined video-tapes of teachers using the boards. These disclosed some potential pitfalls in using the technology:

• Using the voting devices but doing little with the findings. In many classrooms, teachers simply noted how many students obtained the correct answer instead of probing into why one answer was more appropriate than another.
• Not organizing or pacing the content well. In these cases, the teachers incorporated video segments from the Internet or images intended to represent important information in their digital flipcharts. However, they ran through the flipcharts so quickly that students, although impressed with the graphics, did not have time to analyze and interact with one another about the content.
• Using too many visuals. Digital flipchart pages were awash with visual stimuli; it was hard to identify the important content.
• Paying too much attention to reinforcing features. For example, when teachers who had worse results with the technology used the virtual applause feature to signal a correct answer, the emphasis seemed to be on eliciting the applause rather than on clarifying the content.

Getting the Most Out of the Technology

This study, as well as what we know about good teaching in general, suggests how teachers might use interactive whiteboards more effectively. I recommend the following:

• Teachers should think through how they intend to organize information. They should group information into small, meaningful segments before they start developing the digital flipcharts. Once they've organized the content, then they can design the flipcharts to complement the organization. To ensure that they don't run through the flipcharts too quickly, teachers can insert flipcharts that remind them to stop the presentation so students can process and analyze the new information.
• Digital flipcharts should contain visuals, but those visuals should clearly focus on the important information. Also, no single flipchart should contain too many visuals or too much written information.
• After asking a question and getting student responses using voting devices, the teacher should typically discuss the correct answer along with the incorrect answers, making sure to elicit opinions from as many students as possible.
• When using reinforcing features like virtual applause, teachers should make sure that students focus on why an answer is correct or incorrect. Although these features can produce high engagement and certainly enliven the atmosphere in a classroom, they can also be distracting if used without a clear focus on essential content.

Interactive whiteboards have great potential as a tool to enhance pedagogical practices in the classroom and ultimately improve student achievement. However, simply assuming that using this or any other technological tool can automatically enhance student achievement would be a mistake. As is the case with all powerful tools, teachers must use interactive whiteboards thoughtfully, in accordance with what we know about good classroom practice.

References

Betcher, C., & Lee, M. (2009). The interactive whiteboard revolution: Teaching with IWBs. Victoria, Australia: ACER Press.

Marzano, R. J., & Haystead, M. (2009). Final report on the evaluation of the Promethean technology. Englewood, CO: Marzano Research Laboratory.

---

Robert J. Marzano is Cofounder and CEO of Marzano Research Laboratory in Denver, Colorado. He is the author ofThe Art and Science of Teaching (ASCD, 2007) and coauthor, with Mark W. Haystead, of Making Standards Useful in the Classroom (ASCD, 2008). To contact Marzano or participate in a study regarding a specific instructional strategy, visitwww.marzanoresearch.com.

---

Copyright © 2009 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

The Art of Writing: A Forgotten Art

Over a lively dinner conversation this week, two other women and I got into a heated discussion about students' writing skills and how low they often are upon entering college. A typical trend: Student A does not receive enough explicit writing instruction in middle or high school; Student A enters college/university unprepared to handle the multitude of writing assignments; Student A's professors blame Student A's secondary school teachers for not adequately preparing him/her in the art of analytical writing; Student A feels cheated and frustrated. This cycle only perpetuates itself with thousands of students across the county as they enter freshman year of college.


I love writing (obviously) and try to hook my eighth graders on it as well. I engage them in a variety of kinds of writing throughout the school year, from analytical textual analysis to a persuasive speech, complex research project, short story writing, and poetry. In May, through a Maryland Council for the Arts grant, I bring in a professional poet to do a Poetry Residence with my students, whereby each student creates at least five original poems and performs them to the wider school community in a poetry coffeehouse. My young adolescents are dying for the chance to express themselves creatively and very much want to have a written outlet to do so. Even my most rambunctious, reluctant, hyperactive boys bought into this process for the past two years and were eager to share their beautiful poetry with peers and other classes.


The challenge for me is often balancing enough opportunities for students to use creative writing with vitally important analytical writing and grammar instruction. Regardless of whether students want to or not, they must learn about the ever-hated appositives, run-on sentences, sentence clauses, parts of speech, usage, and all things grammar. Many current middle and high school curricula, including mine, do not stress grammar as much as they should. Instead of providing teachers with ideas for explicit grammar instruction, the lessons included are often random, surface-level, and disconnected from what else is being taught. I make it a point to start at the beginning and diagram sentences with students until they clearly understand what a subject, predicate, verb, noun, adjective, and adverb all are. It boggles my mind that my 14-year-old students -- even the most high-achieving ones -- give me baffled looks when asking them to know the parts of speech for their vocabulary words.


In addition to extensive grammar and vocabulary work, I also like to provide clear, succinct feedback to my students with their writing. Like any new fledging teacher, I had to learn and stop myself from dousing a student's paper with a red pen years ago. After all, students will not read all of these comments and only become overwhelmed with all the corrections you have made. Instead, I make use a rubric to score students' writing and write three specific comments on their writing -- one thing they did well, one thing they can improve on, and one way to improve this weakness. I emphasize to students that the writing process is never done and insist on seeing all parts of the process -- from brainstorming to the final draft -- turned in when an essay is due.


When former students come back from high school and visit me, they often comment on how difficult my vocabulary quizzes were (and how many of them still save them to refer to later!) and how much they learned from me about writing. Many say that they do not have adequate time or space to practice their writing formally in high school, even in English class. Is this acceptable? No. But essays take SO much time for the teachers to grade! Oh well.


Jay Mathews argues that students need far more serious opportunities for written analysis in high school, even when deemed unnecessary or inappropriate. Oh, and this kind of writing should not just take place in English class (Thank you!). Students need to learn to write effectively for all subjects and be afforded critical, meaningful feedback from their teachers in the process. Mathews writes:

In my search for signs of serious writing instruction in America high schools, I have stumbled across a rare creature: a physics teacher in Fairfax County who makes everyone in his honors classes enter a national science essay contest.

The 67-year-old West Springfield High School instructor, Ed Linz, is unconventional in other ways. He is a retired naval officer who once commanded a ballistic missile submarine. He was an All-Met Coach of the Year in cross country. He had a heart transplant 16 years ago. (When I asked how that was going, he said, “I woke up this morning.”) He wrote a book, “Life Row,” about the experience and does a weekly column for a newspaper in Spokane, Wash.

Teachers with dynamite résumés are not uncommon in the Washington area. Like Linz, they don’t take any nonsense from me. When I gushed over the writing he was teaching his students, and mentioned my view that all schools should require major essays, he said that showed how naive I was about demands on teachers’ time.

I think public high school students need to write a serious research paper before they graduate. Private schools insist on it. Students who do the International Baccalaureate program write 4,000-word essays, and many say it was their most satisfying academic experience. But Linz snorts at the notion of essays for all.

“I cannot imagine how any high school teacher with five classes can do a 4,000-word project,” he said. “To be done even semi-correctly, the teacher would have to do virtually nothing else for much of the year.”

Still, Linz has had success requiring his honors physics students to enter the DuPont Challenge, an annual competition requiring a researched 1,000-word science essay. I have never encountered a science teacher who insists on a major writing project, but it works for Linz. He likes the essay contest much better than the science fair. To him, competing experiments mean stacks of liability forms and debates about outside help. “I got tired of judging parents’ work,” Linz said.

He has no honors classes this year, but last year he had three. “We began by choosing appropriate topics in late October,” he said, “and then worked our way through at least three drafts before submitting the documents in late January. This assignment consumed at least half of my outside-of-class time for the second quarter of school to assess the work and four full class periods to discuss the papers with the students.” Having students do much of the work in class reduced the parental over-involvement he found with science fairs.

Like IB essay writers, Linz’s students groan about the high standard they are forced to meet but eventually admit it was good for them. Topics are as varied as why there are no square drums and why botox is more than a beauty treatment. Five Linz students have received DuPont honorable mentions in the past three years, more than in any other high school in the United States or Canada, he said.

“The real benefit for high school students is to sit with the teacher and receive critical feedback,” he said.

Exactly. I want Linz, who solved much more daunting organizational problems as a nuclear sub officer, to design a way to make that happen for everybody in high school.

If we increased class sizes for courses that did not require research papers and freed time for teachers with writing skill to meet with students as they wrote their successive drafts, it might work. Linz has handled a heavy load of writing students even though he is older than even I am and on his second heart.

Good writing is crucial to success in the era of the keyboard. High schools should teach it.

Full article available at: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/10/required_essays_in_a_physics_c.html#more

------

Couldn't be all channel a little more "Linz" into our classrooms??

The RIGHT Way to Empower Teachers

As a graduate student at Harvard, one of my favorite education courses was one in teacher leadership taught by Professor Katherine (Kitty) Boles. Having been teaching elementary school for over 20 years (making her the professor with the most K-12 teaching experience by far), she often argued that teachers needed to be challenged and have a clear plan for professional development in place to avoid teacher burn-out or complacency. The best way to do this? Fostering and honing the skills to help teachers become teacher leaders among their colleagues. I am fortunate enough to teach in a county that places high value on teacher leadership and professional development, and it can all start as a first-year teacher.


Now in my fourth year of teaching in my school and sixth overall, I can appreciate the many hats teacher leaders wear on a daily basis for their students and colleagues, from teacher to mentor, role model, liaison, coach, philosopher, disciplinarian, and friend. This balancing act is intricate, delicate, and complex, often pushing me to the breaking point or outer limits of personal sanity. There are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that needs to get done, and I often feel stretched in a zillion directions. Still, I am never bored and always challenged, both intellectually and socially, to achieve my personal best, the goal of student learning and success always at the forefront of my mind.


I am blessed to have colleagues who are equally as passionate, enthusiastic, and talented at teaching and learning, even with the unpredictable and often disadvantaged student population we have. It is refreshing to read other educational blogs, where teachers share their successes, failures, hopes, dreams, and best practices. I know I am not alone and love hearing other teachers' stories on how they overcame difficult circumstances to become even stronger teachers and leaders for their students and colleagues.


Teacher Anthony Cody has one such blog that continues to inspire and intrigue me. After 18 years as a science teacher in inner-city Oakland, he now works with a team of experienced science teacher-coaches who support the many novice teachers in his school district. He is a National Board-certified teacher and an active member of the Teacher Leaders Network. This appeared on his Teachers Magazine blog, Living in Dialogue.

Building teacher accountability from the ground up

By Anthony Cody

I am in my 24th year working in a medium-sized urban school district, and I have experienced school reform first-hand. Most often it takes the form of top-down programs that attempt to involve everyone in the District in a process that the superintendent (or state-appointed administrator) has decided will transform us from chronically under-performing to excellent in the coming year.

Sadly, sweeping programs like these rarely make much difference, and leave teachers feeling as if they are not respected as professionals. This is not to say District level efforts are always worthless -- many of our elementary schools have greatly improved as a result of creative and intensive work by dedicated staff.

If systemic change is going to come, it must come from within. It must draw on the capacity of our own teachers to grapple with the challenges they face.

We hear a lot about "bad teachers" and "good teachers," but much less about the processes and practices that help teachers become better. The single greatest thing we could do to improve schools, without huge expense, would be to support processes that engage teachers in working together to examine their practice and their students' work, to reflect on what is working, and inquire into ways to improve.

What does this look like? Here are some examples of practices that work well.

National Board Take One!:
The National Board certification process has been shown to improve student learning by helping teachers reflect on what really matters in their practice. Take One! is a process that allows teachers to submit a single video portfolio entry for scoring. This entry can be used if the teacher decides to continue and complete the remaining portfolio entries for full National Board certification. Some schools or departments within schools have taken on Take One! as a collaborative professional growth experience, working together to improve their practice. Take One! costs just $395 for each participating teacher.

Collaborative Teacher Research:
Teachers work together to develop questions about their teaching practice which can be probed through a research process. Often teachers implement an innovative practice, and then reflect on how student learning changes as a result. When these lessons are shared at a school site, effective practices can be spread and move the entire community move forward. In Minneapolis, union leaders worked with the District to create an innovative pay structure that rewards teachers for engaging in this process, in a way that connects professional growth to the evaluation process.

Critical Friends Group:
The Critical Friends Group is described by the National School Reform Faculty as "a professional learning community consisting of approximately 8-12 educators who come together voluntarily at least once a month for about two hours. Group members are committed to improving their practice through collaborative learning." The National School Reform Faculty web site offers an extensive bank of resources, including discussion protocols for looking at student work and exploring equity issues.

Lesson Study:
Originally developed in Japan, Lesson Study is now being practiced at many schools across the US. I have done some work with Dr. Catherine Lewis, a proponent of this method, whose web site describes the process thusly:

In Lesson Study teachers:

* Think about the long-term goals of education - such as love of learning and respect for others;

* Carefully consider the goals of a particular subject area, unit or lesson (for example, why science is taught, what is important about levers, how to introduce levers);

* Plan classroom "research lessons" that bring to life both specific subject matter goals and long term goals for students; and

* Carefully study how students respond to these lessons - including their learning, engagement, and treatment of each other.

In my experience, Lesson Study offers teachers a valuable structure for delving into how our teaching intersects with student thinking and learning. Schools need to be prepared, however, to make a sustained commitment of time to the process, because the value comes from the careful planning of the lesson, and the rich discussions that follow.

All of these process share a common set of essential elements:

* They build community and collegiality among participants.

* They make our teaching practices public, in that we are sharing what is actually happening, good and bad, in our classrooms.

* They are focused on evidence of student learning.

* They are active inquiries into our teaching and how it can be improved.

To this list I would add another, equally important element. Teachers must be allowed to choose the model of professional development they will pursue.

I believe the four models I shared are all excellent and have the potential to yield good results, but if one imposes any of these models on a school, without actively involving teachers in the decision, the results will be disappointing. I think teachers should be empowered to choose from any model that combines the essential elements above, or even invent their own model for collective reflection and improvement.

Each of these processes works when it creates a sense of agency among the participants. Teachers conducting action research must select their question and design their own investigation. Lesson Study requires that teachers discuss what is important for the students to learn, and choose critical concepts as the focus of their investigation into learning. Critical Friends guide their groups to productive conversations focused on real issues members face.

Those doing Take One! must create their own portfolio entries. This agency is critical to the enthusiasm and engagement teachers will feel, and this is the true root of accountability, which depends on our ownership of the work. If leaders adopt a top-down approach by mandating a particular model, or micromanaging the processes, by directing teachers to focus on particular research questions or follow particular protocols, teachers are likely to disengage, and actually feel LESS accountable for the processes, since they do not own them.

We all share a sense of urgency about improving our schools, so our students are better able to succeed, and fewer of them drop out. We must hurry deliberately, however, and not rush past the critical steps that engage and activate teachers in doing the hard, and ultimately very personal work of reflecting on and improving our teaching.