Reformers: Stop doing these 4 things
John L. O’Connor is the executive director for special services with the DeKalb County School System in Atlanta and author of “Turning Average Instruction into Great Instruction.” He wrote a piece for the American Association of School Administrators website about the four things that school leaders have to stop doing to help improve classroom. Following are excerpts, and you can find the entire article here.
By John L. O’Connor
Our charge as school leaders is to radically increase student achievement....Unfortunately, we often waste energy in completing activities that are hurting our cause.
In fact, many of the activities that we are leading actually contribute toward less effective classroom teaching. Countless hours are spent completing activities that steal effort and energy away from improving instruction. Therefore, we must stop doing four specific things that aren’t helping.
1) Discontinue Ineffective Professional Development Activities
....School leaders must provide an ongoing system of training, support, dialoguing and problem solving for teachers if we can realistically expect them to implement preferred practices. School leaders must create a school context in which teachers systematically reflect on their classroom practices with one another to determine how students are learning and brainstorm how to continually tweak instruction toward more effective practices.
Unfortunately, educators often default back to one-shot workshops when they consider implementing training activities. We develop flashy training activities that may be engaging to the audience, but are ultimately without follow-up, coaching, or support.
We constantly provide a barrage of one-shot training activities that cover a wide range of classroom practices instead of allowing for deep studies and investigations of a few high-leverage instructional practices that will have the greatest impact on student learning.
If we are going to systematically improve the practices of our teachers across all classrooms, we must limit our initiatives for a given school year to a few high-leverage practices and delve deeply into the implementation of those practices....
2) Stop Developing Massive Annual School Improvement Plans
Many schools have three-ring binders filled with exhaustive School Improvement Plans. In many instances, these plans were developed by select individuals who worked in isolation and then combined their efforts for the submission to the school district’s central office or the State Department of Education. Once they are developed, many of these plans sit on the shelf in administrators’ offices and are only pulled down when they have to be updated.
Many School Improvement Plans essentially include an expansive laundry list of the programs and initiatives within the school. Priorities are not evident. Nor program or activity seems more important than any other. With that type of planning, all activities in a school be implemented in the same way they were the previous year – with the same results.
The strategic planning process should clearly designate the priority areas for improvement based on student achievement. The areas of weakness should be precisely defined and a few specific and meaningful initiatives should be completed to address those weaknesses. Any reader should be able to connect the specific areas of weaknesses with the logical and specific actions that will be implemented to address those weaknesses.
The plan should include how job-embedded professional development systems will be implemented so that teachers are more competent and effective at implementing the prioritized initiatives.
Annual School Improvement Plans are truly a case where less is more. In most cases, the final draft of a School Improvement Plan should be limited to one page. This simple document should clearly describe the priorities for the year and what activities will occur throughout the year....
3) Stop Focusing on Structural Changes as the End Goal
Over the last decade many middle and high schools have transitioned from a schedule in which the students spent approximately one hour in each subject area to a block schedule in which students have extended time, perhaps 90 minutes to two hours, in each academic period. The rationale for this change was that students would have more time to delve deeper in the subject matter and complete more complex and rigorous activities.
In the schools where block scheduling changed instruction in that way, student achievement increased. In many schools that adopted block scheduling, however, classroom instruction did not change. Teachers provided the same instruction just for longer periods. Therefore, there was no significant increase in student achievement.
Even though there are some other benefits to block scheduling, such as a reduction in the amount of time students spend in the hallways, it is reasonable to ask whether the shift toward block schedules and all of the person-hours then went into that effort were good investments.
When implementing structural changes, whether converting to block schedules, re-mapping the organization chart, or changing the graduation requirements, for example, consider the structural change as a means to another end. Structural changes should ultimately improve classroom instruction, or else they are not worth the time and effort. The evaluation of structural changes should not be limited to how well those structures are being implemented but how much they fostered improved instruction....
4) Stop Focusing on Changing “Culture”
...A school’s culture is very difficult to define. Some administrators will say that the culture of their school has improved when there is not a corresponding improvement in student achievement. The truth is that a culture changes after adult practices are improved. A school’s culture changes when teachers change from implementing weak instruction to great instruction and when the school’s leaders spend their time building and implementing layers of support for that instruction. An improved culture is a side effect of drastically improving what happens in classrooms. Instead of focusing on changing culture, focus on improving instruction, which will ultimately lead to a more desirable culture.
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| June 10, 2010; 11:30 AM ET
Categories: Learning | Tags: block scheduling, great instruction, improving classroom instructions, john o'connor, mistakes in education reform, school reformers
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