Supporting and Coaching Principals - How Central Office Administrators Can Help

In this Research for Better Teaching article, author/consultant Jon Saphier and Massachusetts superintendent Pia Durkin say a key missing link in school improvement is the effective supervision and evaluation of principals. Their theory of action: When principals are supervised well, they get better at improving classroom teaching, which leads directly to higher student achievement.

See the full text of the article here: Supervising Principals: How Central Office Administrators Can Improve Teaching and Learning in the Classroom: The Missing Link in Scaling Up School Improvement.

Please note: A summary of this article can be found in issue 643 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Balancing Responsiveness and Rigor in High-School Science Classrooms

Balancing Responsiveness and Rigor in High-School Science Classrooms

The summary below comes from issue #642 of The Marshall Memo (www.marshallmemo.com), an EXCELLENT resource for educattors

In this Teachers College Record article, Jessica Thompson, Carolyn Colley, and Mark Windschitl (University of Washington/Seattle), Sara Hagenah (Boise State University), Hosun Kang (University of California/Irvine), David Stroupe (Michigan State University), and Melissa Braaten (University of Wisconsin/Madison) start with a striking research finding: only about 13 percent of elementary and secondary math and science lessons are both responsive and rigorous – that is, respectful of students’ ideas while also teaching the required curriculum. “Our theory of action for rigorous and responsive teaching in classrooms,” say the authors, “rests on the assumption that teaching is fundamentally about setting intellectually meaningful learning goals and then creating opportunities for students to learn through mediated action… Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences… [H]igh levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students’ ideas or puzzlements.”

The tendency that Thompson and her colleagues observed in the secondary science classrooms they observed was that teachers either acted as the sage on the stage, dispensing science knowledge for students to memorize and regurgitate, or “elicited students’ ideas, opening up a range of possible ideas for consideration, but then narrowed the set of possible ideas to the correct science idea by the end of the class period, doing little to support subsequent sense-making.” Why? In both cases, it was because teachers wanted to keep their classroom under reasonable control and cover the curriculum. These two concerns acted as “sink stoppers” on the flow of ideas in classrooms, say the authors, preventing the ideal balance of curriculum coverage and student participation.

The very small number of teachers who were successful in combining rigor and responsiveness did three things: (a) Responding to and building on students’ science ideas and getting them talking in whole-class and small-group settings; (b) Encouraging participation in a learning community and reinforcing classroom norms; and (c) Eliciting and incorporating students’ lived experiences to build vivid scientific stories. An example of the third was a student telling the class that his family’s dog got sick, the vet’s blood tests found the dog was 15-20 percent wolf, and the dog had to be put down. This story became a shared problem that the class worked on for three weeks in the context of genetic variations among dogs.

             The secret sauce, say the authors, is for teachers to orchestrate or seize upon teachable moments, in any part of the lesson, have students juxtapose their first-hand experiences with known scientific ideas and concepts, and talk ideas through in a supportive classroom environment. “In the small fraction of lessons we coded as highly rigorous and responsive,” say Thompson and her colleagues, “students authored and owned scientific explanations while carefully listening and building on the ideas of others. Both teachers and students regularly engaged in in-the-moment sense-making and focused on synthesizing knowledge. Multiple students’ ideas were framed as legitimate resources that helped the whole class make progress on canonical science understandings, even as the science was localized in students’ experiences. Scientific knowledge was treated as partial and under constant revision. This allowed for a hybrid form of epistemic authority that combined canonical science knowledge with students’ locally authored science ideas. The result was shared scientific understandings that were made public, challenged, and revised until well-warranted.”

            Why did so few lessons successfully balance student voice and curriculum rigor? The authors believe it’s because of the perennial difficulty of juggling four classroom dilemmas:

-   How much to privilege canonical science knowledge? When there was too much of a gap between curriculum content and students’ ideas and misconceptions, teachers tended to revert to the Initiate-Respond-Evaluate pattern to keep students on track and move the lesson along.

-   How much to build on ideas from previous lessons? In the most effective classrooms, teachers jotted students’ ideas on easel sheets, posted them on the wall, and were able to quickly point out connections from previous lessons.

-   How many students should take part in a discussion before moving on or layering on the “correct” information? In the best lessons, there was less concern about the number of students participating than the quality of responses and the whole class putting together a good understanding of the topic.

-   How to legitimately use students’ lived experience and language to shape instruction? This was the biggest challenge for teachers, with fewer than 3 percent successfully incorporating real-life stories into lessons. Most of the time, teachers borrowed language from students’ stories and incorporated it into teacher-centered explanations. “By coopting students’ language and experiences in this manner,” say the authors, “teachers preserved their own storyline for science and marginalized student contributions by treating them as tokens.”

“How teachers and students navigated these in-the-moment dilemmas – or not – helps explain the full range of more or less successful intertwining of rigor and responsiveness in our data set,” conclude Thompson et al. In the most successful lessons, students did the intellectual heavy lifting, with the teacher skillfully orchestrating the process and keeping the focus on the big ideas students needed to learn – in their own way. “Thus, the rigorous and responsive classrooms became places where students’ lives framed the community’s science work.”

“Rigor and Responsiveness in Classroom Activity” by Jessica Thompson, Sara Hagenah, Hosun Kang, David Stroupe, Melissa Braaten, Carolyn Colley, and Mark Windschitl in Teachers College Record, May 2016 (Vol. 118, #5, p. 1-58),

https://tcrecord.org/library/abstract.asp?contentid=19366; Thompson can be reached at jjthomps@uw.edu.

Is Elementary-School Departmentalization Effective?

            In this National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Roland Fryer (Harvard University) describes his two-year study of the efficacy of Houston Public Schools elementary teachers specializing in particular subjects. Twenty-five schools formed the control group and continued with traditional self-contained classes. Another 25 schools departmentalized using two different configurations for the 2-4 teachers at each grade level: (a) one teacher teaching reading/social studies, another teaching math/science; or (b) three teachers splitting up reading, math, and science/social studies. Principals decided which subject(s) teachers taught based on their sense of their strongest area(s). Students remained with the same classmates for all subjects.

As an economist, Fryer is familiar with the history of specialization in industry, including Henry Ford’s 1913 introduction of the assembly line to produce the Model T, which reduced the time it took to produce one car from 750 minutes to 93 minutes. In his classic economic treatise, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith looked at pin factories in 18^th-century England and found dramatic increases in productivity when individual workers were organized to specialize in discrete tasks.

            “The basic economics is intuitive,” says Fryer. “Specializing in the production of a subset of the tasks necessary to produce a final output allows workers to gain efficiency in that task.” Adam Smith believed there were three reasons for this:

-   Dividing a larger task into smaller tasks allows each worker to gain greater skill in his or her designated work.

-   Reducing the number of tasks each worker must manage reduces transition time from one task to the next.

-   Individual workers can focus their full attention on a few simple tasks, which increases the likelihood of technological innovation.

Similar advantages would seem to apply to elementary teachers specializing in particular subjects rather than trying to teach everything:

-   More time to master subject-specific content and pedagogy and stay on top of developments in that field;

-   Fewer lesson plans to write and therefore more time to invest in quality planning;

-   Greater teacher productivity by getting teachers working in areas in which they are most experienced and competent;

-   Preparing students for middle and high schools, which are almost always departmentalized;

-   Less teacher attrition because of a reduced workload and less stress from teaching unfamiliar subjects.

All these reasons make teacher specialization an appealing option for improving student achievement, without having to make staffing changes and spend additional money.

“But pupils are not pins,” says Fryer, “and the production of human capital is far more complex than assembling automobiles. Whether specialization can increase productivity in schools is an important open question in the design of primary and secondary schooling.” He notes that there are wide variations in the instructional models used in the 34 OECD countries, with only ten using specialization at the elementary level and six countries (Austria, Hungary, Norway, Portugal, Latvia, and Israel) using looping, with teachers working with the same students for at least three years.

            What did Fryer’s study show? That elementary departmentalization is “surprisingly inconsistent with the positive effect of specialization typically known to economists,” he says. In the first year of the experiment, students in departmentalized classes did slightly worse in reading and math compared to students in control schools. “Students who might be particularly vulnerable – such as those enrolled in special education or those who are taught by inexperienced teachers – demonstrated particularly negative impacts of treatment, “ says Fryer. In addition, students in treatment schools were more likely to exhibit problem behaviors and had lower school attendance.

            What was going on here? To get more details, Fryer administered a questionnaire to teachers and found that their responses to items on lesson planning, relationships with students, enjoyment of teaching, and teaching strategies were very similar between treatment and control schools, with one exception: departmentalized teachers were significantly less likely to report that they provided tailored instruction to their students.

The trade-off is clear: the more teachers specialize, the more difficult it is for them to gear instruction to individual student needs. Fryer reports some possible reasons from other research:

-   Teachers working with a larger number of students have less time to get to know and understand individual students’ personalities and learning needs.

-   When students have more transitions from class to class during the day, it’s more difficult for teachers to know each child’s emotional state and make differentiated judgments on the best pedagogy and interpersonal approach.

-   Increased transitions reduce instructional time.

-   Transitions and dealing with more students make classroom management more challenging for teachers.

“Empirically,” Fryer concludes, “I find that teacher specialization, if anything, decreases student achievement, decreases student attendance, and increases student behavioral problems… These results provide a cautionary tale about the potential productivity benefits of the division of labor when applied to human capital development.”

“The ‘Pupil Factory’: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools” by Roland Fryer, Jr., a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, April 2016, available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w22205 with free registration; Fryer can be reached at Rolandfryer@edlabs.harvard.edu.

(The article summary above comes from Issue #640 of The Marshall Memo, an EXCELLENT resource for educators.)