I finished The Reading Teacher and a strong issue of the Journal of Staff Development, but didn't have room for the December Kappan. Next week. I have the December/January issue of Educational Leadership, but am continuing to hold off summarizing articles while ASCD and the Marshall Memo work on resolving our copyright disagreement.

My best,

Kim
 

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Quotes of the Week

“Individuals and organizations have an amazing capacity to maintain their current beliefs and practices in the face of massive, well-intentioned efforts to change them.”
Dennis Sparks (see item #3)

“People change less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.”
Kotter and Cohen (quoted by Dennis Sparks in item #3)

“Shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation.”
David Allen (quoted by Dennis Sparks, ibid.)

“Early wins are critical to motivating staff and disempowering naysayers.”
Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel (see item #2)

“Successful turnaround leaders are focused, fearless data hounds.”
Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel (ibid.)

“Districts that attempt to implement too many practices simultaneously overwhelm teachers with the changes they are expected to implement and decrease their enthusiasm for any change. Similarly, when districts frequently adopt and abandon programs and initiatives, teachers often take a wait-and-see approach to professional learning.”
Jim Knight (see item #4)

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1. What Works in the World’s Best Schools

In this Journal of Staff Development interview by Tracy Crow, British education leader Michael Barber shares what he believes are the key drivers of first-rate schools in the four best school systems in the world: Canada, Finland, Singapore, and other parts of Asia. Some schools in the U.S. and the U.K. have these characteristics, he says, but most don’t.
• Teachers – These countries recruit really good people into teaching – those with strong academic records, generosity, a liking for children, and the ability to inspire youth – and then provide robust initial training.
• Professional development – “There’s an ethic of continuous improvement in the profession within these countries and within the successful schools,” says Barber. “You see a lot of embedded professional development with mentoring and coaching for support… There’s time in the school day, there’s time in the school year. There are teams of teachers working together, planning lessons, reviewing student work, comparing student work from different classes, and trying to understand why certain pedagogies seem to work more effectively than others… It’s that culture of professional learning, really focused on ‘how do I get the next child up to the standard?’”
• Intervention with struggling students – Immediate action is taken when children fall behind. Instead of saying, “Oh, that child’s not clever enough or comes from a poor background,” teachers say, “What’s the barrier to that child keeping up with everybody else, and what do we need to do about it?” Finland is a model of prompt and effective intervention, says Barber: struggling students are referred to expert, more highly paid teachers who diagnose learning barriers and unlock learning. “Their job is to get that child back into the classroom with his or her peers as soon as possible,” he says.
• Principals – Carefully selected, highly trained school leaders put the other elements in place. Reporting on a study of teacher attrition in the U.K., Barber says, “The single most important factor in teachers leaving the profession wasn’t pay, wasn’t challenging students, it was poor leadership in their school. They just couldn’t get anything done. They just got frustrated.” School leaders “set the culture, create the timetable, and create expectations for teachers,” he continues. “If the school leader creates a culture in which teachers are expected to look at data and worry about each student who falls behind, expected to watch each other teach, expected to work with mentors and coaches in the system, it will happen.”
Barber concludes with two comments on American education: (a) Funding disparities among districts – In the U.S., schools in wealthier communities get better financial support than schools in poorer communities. “To the rest of the world,” says Barber, “that just looks completely nonsensical. We’re in an era where we’re setting high standards for everybody. We want everybody to achieve those high standards. It follows logically that children with the furthest to go need the most money spent on them. They need more support to get to those standards than children with less distance to travel.”
(b) National standards – “You don’t have a choice about whether you achieve national standards,” says Barber, “because they will be imposed by globalization. Physics doesn’t change at the Rio Grande or the 49th parallel. It’s the same everywhere. As the economy around the world globalizes, you’re going to have to compare the standards your school system sets, wherever you are, to the standards of other systems. By accident or design, the U.S. ultimately will end up with something like national standards, but they may be implicit and chaotic or America could decide to do it properly. There’s no serious option of not having something like standards that compare to the rest of the world.”

“Q&A: Michael Barber – What Works, Works Everywhere” by Tracy Crow in Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2009 (Vol. 30, #1, p. 10-16), no e-link available
 

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2. Six Keys to Turnaround Efforts

In this helpful article in Education Next, North Carolina consultants Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel say that schools can learn a lot from turnarounds in businesses, nonprofits, health care, and public safety. Drawing on scores of studies, especially the dramatic rescue of Continental Airlines and the successful reengineering of the New York City Police Department in the 1990s, the authors have the following advice for educators charged with transforming dysfunctional schools:
• Focus on a few early wins. “Successful turnaround leaders choose a few high-priority goals with visible payoffs and use early success to gain momentum,” say the Hassels. “Early wins are critical to motivating staff and disempowering naysayers… For a demoralized organization, this kind of mission-focused early win is vital to convincing the team that it can in fact be successful.” Continental Airlines rapidly refurbished planes and terminal areas and improved its on-time record, while William Bratton, the NYPD police chief, led a massive crackdown on minor offenses (including subway turnstile-jumpers and the infamous “squeegie men”) to show citizens that the police could make a difference. In education, an early win might be dramatically improving teachers’ access to timely interim assessment results.
• Shift from unsuccessful patterns. “In a failing organization, existing practices contribute to failure,” say the Hassels. For example, Continental was in a “doom loop” of cutting spending, which made its planes and terminals less appealing to customers, which necessitated further budget cuts. The turnaround team actually increased spending short-term, which helped change the negative perception of the airline and increased revenues, more than paying for the extra spending. Continental’s leaders also took the nine-inch “Thou Shalt Not” book of corporate regulations and burned it in front of a crowd of employees. At NYPD, Bratton saw that officers were focusing mostly on responding to 911 calls rather than addressing the root cause of most 90s crime – drugs. He boosted spending on narcotics units and shifted their work schedules to include weekends, when most drug offenses were occurring. In schools, this might include making instructional use of dead-time (bus rides, lunch time) and using additional staff to tutor children in reading.
• Push rapid-fire experimentation. “Turnaround leaders press a fast cycle of trying new tactics, discarding failed tactics, and investing more in what works,” say the Hassels. “They resist touting mere progress as ultimate success.” At NYPD, Bratton’s most successful innovation was Compstat, a system for tracking and mapping crime throughout the city and holding precinct commanders accountable for their response to emerging patterns. The parallel in education is interim assessment results – timely student-by-student, teacher-by-teacher, grade-by-grade results from common tests given at regular intervals during the year that are used to spark thoughtful, real-time meetings on what’s working and what isn’t.
• Replace a few key people and improve the skills and beliefs of others. “Successful turnaround leaders typically do not replace all or even most staff at the start,” say the Hassels, “but they often replace some key leaders who help organize and drive change. For remaining staff, change is mandatory, not optional.” At Continental, 50 of 61 top managers were fired, but for most of the airline’s 40,000 employees, the focus was on retraining and reculturing. At NYPD, Bratton relied on a veteran second-in-command to weed out incompetent and disloyal headquarters leaders. In schools, the “early win” phase usually reveals which administrators and teachers can rise to the challenge and which need to be shown the door. What’s vital, say the Hassels, is having a right-hand person who will help to build the team and operationalize the improvement plan.
• Use data to inform better decisions. “Successful turnaround leaders are focused, fearless data hounds,” say the authors. “They choose their initial goals based on rigorous analysis. They report key staff results visibly and often. All staff who participate in decisionmaking are required to share periodic results in open-air sessions, shifting discussions from excuse making and blaming to problem solving.” At NYPD, all 76 precinct commanders were required to attend regular meetings to look at crime data and maps. At each meeting, one commander took the hot seat and was grilled on how his or her precinct was working to solve the problems revealed by the data and explain specific negative trends. This practice translates directly to education with teachers and administrators looking carefully at what students are and aren’t learning and creating classroom solutions to negative patterns. “The keys are using the right data to drive change and requiring all relevant staff to put their data on display in an open-air forum and then face tough questions (and helpful problem solving),” say the Hassels. “The process helps people improve their practice, [and] it also transforms the culture.”
• Lead a campaign. Turnaround leaders need to orchestrate something akin to a political campaign, say the Hassels, including:
- Communicating a vision of success;
- Helping staff personally relate to the problems that customers [students and parents] have;
- Getting key “influencers” on board;
- Using early wins to silence critics, which puts naysayers who continue to resist change in the position of being “champions of failure.”
The key is convincing staff and stakeholders that a successful strategy is in place and things are getting better. It’s important for school leaders to keep the big picture in front of everyone – how classroom improvement will transform children’s future school performance and life prospects.
What external conditions are needed for a successful turnaround? The Hassels argue that more money is not always the answer – in fact, it can sometimes be unhelpful if it prevents the organization from prioritizing and focusing on the right stuff. The one critical precondition, they argue, is a “big yes” from higher-ups supporting dramatic change, “even if it causes discomfort and political fallout.”

“The Big U-Turn: How to Bring Schools from the Brink of Doom to Stellar Success” by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel in Education Next, Winter 2009 (Vol. 4, #1, p. 20-27), http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/34686334.html.
 

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3. Overcoming Denial and Resistance

“Individuals and organizations have an amazing capacity to maintain their current beliefs and practices in the face of massive, well-intentioned efforts to change them,” says professional development guru Dennis Sparks in this Journal of Staff Development article. The problem is the “knowing-doing gap” and penetrating to the inner sanctum of people’s beliefs so their actions really do change for the better. Sparks has two observations:
• Most efforts to improve teaching practice are too weak. The local context and existing practices prevent new ideas from taking hold. The same is true in medicine; 90 percent of heart-attack survivors stray from their doctors’ prescriptions and their own good intentions as the months pass. The key, says Sparks, is to tap into people’s emotions, and he quotes Kotter and Cohen (2002): “People change less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.” Sparks continues: “Vivid stories, images, and experiences are more powerful than research and analysis intended to offer logical reasons for change.” Paraphrasing Deutschman (2007), he says the following approaches are ineffective: “Facts (human beings are not as rational as we think we are), fear (at best it’s a short-term motivator), and force (there are many ways it can be resisted).”
• It takes a systematic effort to overcome resistance. The three elements that work are: (a) Relationships – building sustained communication and trust with teachers to inspire and sustain hope and provide support; (b) Repetition – new skills and habits of mind need to be learned, practiced, and mastered and that won’t happen from one or two presentations; and
(c) Reframing – think about the underlying cognitive frameworks that lead to resistance and develop new ones that allow teachers to take a leap of faith.
Sparks concludes with six specific actions that school leaders can take to close the knowing-doing gap:
• Keep your message simple. Leaders need to reduce core ideas to their essence. Sparks recommends the book, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath [see Marshall Memo 246 for a summary] for an excellent section on this.
• Build trusting teams. Reculturing is a major objective for leaders of schools where distrust and isolation are the norms. Communication, sharing, and mutual support are vital if more effective classroom practices are to take hold.
• Establish new habits of mind. “School leadership and teaching are complex tasks that to a large degree are governed by habits of mind and behavior that may operate beneath the level of conscious awareness,” says Sparks. “When those habits no longer serve the purposes of the organization they lead, successful educators consciously develop new habits that support the achievement of important goals.” This requires robust, active professional learning experiences with direct classroom applications and lots of follow-up support.
• Make beliefs explicit. Copying initiatives from other schools or districts often results in shallow understanding or even misunderstanding of the underlying ideas. Leaders need to make their theory of action crystal clear to all staff.
• Break away from ineffective practices. For example, “sit and git” workshops have to go!
• Think concretely about next steps. Sparks says that over the years he’s found David Allen’s advice (in his 2001 book, Getting Things Done) extraordinarily effective in schools: when confronting complex implementation challenges, always ask, “What’s the next action?” According to Allen, “shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation.”

“Reach for the Heart As Well As the Mind” by Dennis Sparks in Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2009 (Vol. 30, #1, p. 48-54), no e-link available; the author can be reached at dennis.sparks@comcast.net.
 

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4. The Potential of Instructional Coaching – and How to Do It Right

In this Journal of Staff Development article, University of Kansas researcher Jim Knight quotes some powerful data about the chances of a teacher implementing a new instructional skill in the classrooms:
- Workshop on the new skill – 10%
- Workshop with modeling – 12-13%
- Workshop, modeling, and practice – 14-16%
- Workshop, modeling, practice, and feedback – 16-19%
- Workshop, modeling, practice, feedback, and coaching – 95%
So coaching hugely enhances the traction of conventional PD.
Knight says there are several types of coaching – literacy, instructional, and cognitive – but they share some commonalities:
- They are job-embedded, linked closely to each teacher’s classroom setting.
- They are intensive and ongoing, the opposite of one-shot workshops.
- They focus on teaching practices that work with students.
- They are grounded in partnership and dialogue; coaches don’t just tell teachers what to do, and teachers have choice and control over how things proceed.
- They are non-evaluative and confidential.
- Coaches are expert communicators who “articulate their messages clearly, listen respectfully, ask thought-provoking open-ended questions, and whose observations are energizing, encouraging, practical, and honest.

Knight and his colleagues have worked with schools, districts, and state education agencies in more than 35 states, and report that successful coaching programs have several key characteristics:
• Focus and continuity – “Districts that attempt to implement too many practices simultaneously overwhelm teachers with the changes they are expected to implement and decrease their enthusiasm for any change,” says Knight. “Similarly, when districts frequently adopt and abandon programs and initiatives, teachers often take a wait-and-see approach to professional learning.” What works is sustaining a few high-leverage strategies.
• A learning-friendly culture – For teachers to learn and grow, they need to feel respected and free to take risks without fear of punishment.
• Support from the principal – Principals should take a hands-on approach with coaches, meeting frequently with them to make sure they share the school’s instructional vision, visiting classrooms and talking about what’s going on, and observing coaches in action.
• Defined roles – Coaches are not administrators, and that must be clear to teachers if they are to develop the right kind of collegial relationships.
• Choice – Forcing a teacher to work with a coach is often counterproductive. But if a principal strongly encourages a teacher to change, and offers coaching as one of several options for professional growth, the teacher is more likely to see the coach as a lifeline than a punishment.
• Time – “The single most powerful way to increase the effectiveness of coaches is to ensure that they have sufficient time for coaching,” says Knight. School leaders need to refrain from using coaches for other duties.
• Walking the talk – Coaches need to constantly upgrade their skills and knowledge, including getting coached themselves.

“Coaching” by Jim Knight in Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2009 (Vol. 30, #1, p. 18-22), no e-link available; the author can be reached at jknight@ku.edu.
 

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5. Literacy Coaches – Mentors or Directors?

In this article in The Reading Teacher, University of Delaware educators Sharon Walpole and Katrin Blamey say that many literacy coaches are having difficult defining their roles and organizing their time. Many end up “simply managing the multiple demands of principals and teachers in idiosyncratic ways.” What literacy coaches should be doing is hotly debated, say the authors. The research isn’t very helpful so far, and “we are far from a science of coaching.”
Walpole and Blamey did in-depth interviews with a number of principals and coaches and have arrived at a tentative conclusion that the most productive literacy coaching role is a combination of directing the school’s literacy program and providing in-person professional support to teachers. “We envision not a one-size-fits-all model but rather a one-size-fits-here-now model,” they write.
In the study, the authors found that principals tended to see their coaches in one of two roles:
• Literacy coach as mentor – These principals saw their coach as the “teacher’s teacher,” spending lots of time in classrooms, planning together, and giving constructive feedback and support. Principals saw this as a valuable role, especially for novice and struggling teachers. The key requirements were experience, expertise, and interpersonal skills.
• Literacy coach as director – These principals saw their coach is a change agent, orchestrating the school’s literacy program. This included integrating state and district mandates, coordinating professional development, making presentations, and monitoring student achievement for action implications at the classroom and school level. This role requires vision, strong pedagogical knowledge, and a close relationship with the principal.
But when Walpole and Blamey interviewed coaches, they found that roles fell into somewhat different categories. Coaches saw themselves:
- As assessors – Coaches took the lead in coordinating during-the-year and summative assessments of students’ literacy achievement.
- As curriculum managers – Coaches worked with assessment data and teachers to monitor the effectiveness of instructional materials and time. Often they were in charge of shared book rooms and helped choose new classroom materials and professional books for teachers.
- As formative observers – Coaches watched teachers implement new strategies and materials and gave them specific, private feedback – but they were not formal evaluators.
- As modelers – Coaches were often called upon to model instructional approaches for individual teachers, teams, or the whole staff.
- As teachers of teachers – Coaches saw themselves as prime professional developers of their colleagues, striving to build a deep understanding of reading and teaching.
- As trainer – Coaches were almost always involved in direct skill-building of teachers with specific methods or materials, with the emphasis on “fidelity.”

Walpole and Blamey combined the principals’ and coaches’ perspectives on coaching and came up with a synthesis in the form of a Venn diagram (see below). The trick, they say, is for the coach to juggle these different roles, bringing maximum coherence to the school’s literacy program and maximum support to teachers according to their needs – all this without stepping over the line to becoming evaluators or full-fledged administrators.

DIRECTOR DIRECTOR & MENTOR MENTOR
Curriculum manager: Assessor: Teacher:
- Buying new materials - Summarizing schoolwide data - Designing and
- Organizing materials providing formal
- Scheduling instruction Formative observer: presentations
- Grouping students - Observing instruction - Facilitating
- Providing confidential feedback study groups
Trainer :
- Promoting assessment fidelity Modeler:
- Promoting curriculum fidelity - Demonstrating
instruction inside and outside classes

“Elementary Literacy Coaches: The Reality of Dual Roles” by Sharon Walpole and Katrin Blamey in The Reading Teacher, November 2008 (Vol. 62, #3, p. 222-231) no e-link available; the authors can be reached at swalpole@udel.edu and kladkins@udel.edu.
 

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6. Running an Effective Workshop

In this Journal of Staff Development article, author and former Georgia district administrator Marcia Tate shares ten suggestions for giving a workshop that produces real learning and change:
• Hook your audience by setting a purpose and linking the topic to people’s school needs.
• Know your participants and help them get to know you. It’s best to get some basic information about your audience beforehand, get there early so you’re set up and can greet people as they come in, and allow group members to find out some important facts about you.
• Begin and end with a bang. A good personal story that drives home your central point can be powerful.
• Use music. Tate likes to play soothing music before her workshop and use other types of music during interactive segments.
• Use humor. Cartoons, well-chosen jokes, and learning games can loosen people up and increase adult learning.
• Chunk the content. People can absorb only so much information at a time, so effective presenters break it into bite-size pieces and give participants time and activities to process each one.
• Build in interaction. Brainstorming, discussion, and small-group cooperative activities increase learning.
• Build in movement. Well-planned role-playing, writing, and other physical activities also boost learning and retention.
• Build in reflection. “It is not so much the activities in your workshop that can change adult behavior,” says Tate, “it is the reflection on the activities that makes the change.”
• Plan for follow-up and support. A brilliant workshop might result in no change in teachers’ behavior in their classrooms, says Tate. It’s important to build in ways of confronting stubborn beliefs and behaviors and changing them back in their schools.
Tate closes with a list of 20 “brain-compatible” strategies for use in any type of workshop:
- Brainstorming and discussion
- Drawing
- Field trips
- Games
- Graphic organizers
- Humor and celebration
- Manipulatives
- Metaphor, analogy, and simile
- Movement
- Mnemonic devices
- Music
- Project-based and problem-based instruction
- Reciprocal teaching, cooperative learning, peer coaching
- Role play
- Storytelling
- Technology
- Visualization
- Visuals
- Work study and action research
- Writing and reflection

“Workshops” by Marcia Tate in Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2009 (Vol. 30, #1, p. 44-46), no e-link available; the author can be reached at marciata@bellsouth.net.
 

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7. Improving a Fifth/First-Grade Reading Buddies Program

In this article in The Reading Teacher, California State University professor Joan Leikam Theurer and California first-grade teacher Kathy Burson Schmidt describe how they worked together to improve the reading buddies program Schmidt had been using for a number of years with a cooperating fifth-grade class. Although the first-graders loved the program, some of the older students were uncertain of their roles and the instruction wasn’t always on target. Here are the improvements the authors implemented:
• Training the fifth graders – Schmidt met with the fifth-grade buddies at the beginning of the year, reminded them of their own experiences with the program when they were first graders, and gave them pointers on choosing the right book and coaching their buddy through it.
• Book selection – Schmidt showed the fifth graders examples of suitable and unsuitable books and brainstormed characteristics of each. She then gave them a list of available books and showed them how to access the list on the school’s website. She also explained that there would be times when the first graders would be able to choose their own books.
• Teaching techniques – Schmidt coached fifth graders to preview the book they were going to read with their buddy, read it aloud twice before the buddy session, work on fluency and expression, and practice using different pitches and creating distinct voices for each character. She taught the students how to read the title to their buddies and ask them to predict what was going to happen in the story, and to choose a spot in the book where they would pause and talk to their buddy about the book. She taught them how to help the first graders with decoding, including sounding out a word, looking for a little word within a bigger word, looking for word chunks and word families, separating the base word from the ending, asking what makes sense, reading on, looking at the picture, giving a synonym, thinking of a similar rhyming word and reading the sentence once a difficult word has been decoded. Finally, Schmidt had the older students think through the details of reading with their buddy, including who would hold the book, who would turn the pages, and whether they would read as a pair together.
• Interacting with their buddies – Schmidt prepped the fifth graders on some basics: saying something nice when they greeted their buddies; smiling and saying good-bye when they left; encouraging and complimenting them; and what to do if their buddy wasn’t listening, not cooperating, or behaving inappropriately.
• Preparing for the first meeting – Schmidt gave the first-grade teacher a class list and they worked together to pair students appropriately, taking into account ELL, shyness, boy/girl, and other issues. The two teachers also arranged for letters of introduction to be sent by the fifth graders and responses to be written by the first graders.
• Question cubes – To boost the level of questioning in buddy pairings, Schmidt created a set of fiction and non-fiction question cubes, with a different question on each face. When students finished a book, they rolled the cubes and answered the question that landed on top. This promoted conversation and discussion between the buddies and sparked critical thinking. Here are sample questions:
Fiction cube:
- Does this book remind you of another book you have read?
- Who was your favorite character?
- What is the message of this book?
- What was your favorite part of the book?
- How would you change the ending of the story?
- What character would you like to be? Why?
- What is the problem in this story? How is it resolved?
- Did you like this book? Why? Give two good reasons.
Nonfiction cube:
- What are two things you learned from this book?
- Does this book have a Table of Contents? What are the topic headings?
- Does this book have an index? What can you find in the index?
- Did you like this book? Why? Give two good reasons.
- How was the information in this book organized?
- What was the most interesting part of this book?
- Do you have question this book did not answer?
- Would you want to read another book by this author? Why?

As the year progressed, the buddies transitioned to a reading log in which they wrote the name of the book they had just read, rated it on a happy-sad-face scale, and responded to a question chosen from this list:
- Sometimes we make a personal connection with a story. This book reminded me of…
- Here is a new ending for this story:
- The problem in this story is…
- Here is an important point from this book:
- My favorite character is… My favorite word in this story is… My favorite part is…
- I like the character______ because ______.
- Here is a quote that I like:
- This book made me think about…
- The character sees…., does…, feels…, thinks….
- I think the author wrote this book because…
- Here are some wondrous words from this book:
- After reading this book, I wonder…
- This is something I learned from this book:
- If I could be a character in this book I would be _____ because ______.

“Coaching Reading Buddies for Success” by Joan Leikam Theurer and Kathy Burson Schmidt in The Reading Teacher, November 2008 (Vol. 62, #3, p. 261-264) no e-link available; Theurer can be reached at jtheurer@csulb.edu.
 

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