Author: Alan Jones

     In a prior blog, titled, “The Workshop,” I describe why district half-day workshops fail to achieve their announced purpose: to enhance teaching practices. Putting aside the obvious obstacles to effective professional development listed in the blog—purpose, content, time—the underlying problem is an organizational configuration that treats the complex process of learning new theories and practices as merely a managerial problem of implementation—distribution of materials of materials, training, documentation. None of these managerial problems addresses how adults learn to practice methodologies that are foreign to how they believe their students learn.

      School districts that take professional development seriously formulate the learning process around two organizational components: a professional development infrastructure and a training regime. Much of the literature on professional development concentrates on the elements of an effective training regime. While the actual training of staff is a necessary component of adult learning, it is not sufficient to operationalize and sustain new classroom methodologies.

      The foundation of an effective of staff development program lies with three organizational components that often overlooked in the implementation of an effective training regime. The table below describes the three organization components that must be present for a staff development program to realize its educational goals. Each of the organizational components—instructional system, administrative commitment, organizational commitment—work in unison to provide teachers with the talent, the support, and the resources—to fully realize the goals, theories, and practices of new classroom methodologies.

INSTRUCTIONAL SYSTEMS   (Induction-Mentoring-Curriculum-Teacher Evaluation-Staff Development)	FIVE INSTRUCTIONAL SYSTEMS: District/school administrations have adopted an organizational configuration that fully enacts the five instructional systems that compose a quality instructional program. The goals and content of each system reflect a coherent response to the fundamental questions of schooling and possess the resources (personnel, time, space, materials, expertise) to advance the school’s instructional worldview.   REFLECTION-ON-PRACTICE: Embedded in each instructional system are conceptual frameworks & venues (e.g. cognitive coaching, curriculum guides) for interpreting and applying instructional theories, ideas, and practices.
ADMINISTRATIVE COMMITMENT   (Framing-Educating-Coaching-Structuring)	VALUED RESPONSIBILITIES: Administrators are evaluated on their ability to assist teachers with resolving instructional problems and advancing the school’s instructional worldview.   TRAINING & PARTICIPATION: All school administrators are expected to participate in the enactment of the school’s instructional worldview and possess the necessary educational background and training to assist teachers with further advancing the teaching of their subject areas. CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF INSTRUCTIONAL WORLDVIEW: Administrators in private and public venues regularly communicate a clear understanding of the theories, ideas, and practices that govern the school’s instructional worldview. INSTRUCTIONAL CONVERSATIONS: Administrators are adept at conducting instructional conversations (ListeningàQuestioningàInterpretingàAuthoring) that aim at assisting teachers with making classroom sense out of the theories, ideas, and practices associated with the school’s instructional worldview.   PROBLEM SOLVING: Administrative responses to school wide problems reflect a purposeful approach to problem solving: What is the problemàwhat do we know about the problemà What theories, ideas, practices govern the problemàwhat strategies could our school employ to resolve the problemàWhat plan of action will we pursue to resolve the problemàHow will we know if we have resolved the problem. Plans of action continually reference theories, ideas, values, and practices embedded in the school’s instructional worldview.   ADMINISTRATIVE TIME: Administrators devote a majority of their time to participating in one or more of the school’s instructional systems, assisting teachers with resolving instructional problems, and further elaboration of subject matter pedagogies.   PROTECTION OF FACULTY: Administrators employ various administrative strategies (buffering/bridge) to protect faculty from foreign instructional worldviews.
ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT	RATIONALE FOR NEW PROGRAMS: District/school administrators regularly provide teachers with reasons for new instructional initiatives. The reasons agree with the school’s instructional worldview and the organizational capacity of school.   ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY: Before new instructional programs are implemented, district/school administrators have acquired the space, time, materials, and expertise to fully educate and train teachers.   WORKLOAD: Before new instructional programs are implemented district/school administrators have determined that teachers will be able to accommodate the additional workload required for educating and training.   ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: As the implementation of a new instructional initiative progresses, administrators regularly review the allocation of resources /workload and make necessary ADJUSTMENTS to support teacher learning.   GOAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL SUPERVISION: As the implementation of new instructional initiative progresses district/school administrators situate themselves in teacher workspaces and classrooms to assist teachers with bridging the theory/practice divide of new pedagogies and adjusting the time, materials, and work assignments for teachers to effectively implement a new instructional initiative.   INSTRUCTIONAL TIME: School administrators protect instructional time by eliminating classroom interruptions (intercom announcements, telephone calls, messages from administrative offices, non-academic events, fundraisers). REFORM CLUTTER: District/school administrators are highly selective about the number and types (sophistication level) of new pedagogies they adopt during a school year. The initiation of new pedagogies adheres to the school’s instructional worldview and provides appropriate levels of resources (time, materials, space, expertise) to educate and train faculty.   CHANGE IN INSTRUCTIONAL ROUTINES: District/school administrators adopt new pedagogies that conform to the instructional routines embedded in the school’s instructional worldview.

      An annual ritual each year in school districts, one in which staff are told to mark their calendars, is the half-day workshop. Depending on the state, districts are permitted a certain number of these days, which, for purposes of funding will be counted as full attendance days. The professed purpose of these days is to provide teachers with time and expertise to further “strengthen teacher practice.” What follows is a brief description of the typical workshop parameters that run in direct opposition to strengthening teacher practice:

      Purposes

      The announced purpose of these workshops is to strengthen teacher practice. In reality, the purpose of these workshops falls into three managerial purposes: program implementation; compliance regulations; the technique of the day. Although district and building administrators convince themselves that all three purposes serve the strengthening of teacher practice, in reality, they are designed to achieve a managerial purpose. In the case of program implementation, teachers are handed thick binders and checklists documenting the distribution of materials, schedules of training, list of materials, and, most importantly, procedures for documenting components of program implementation.

      The same procedures are followed for complying with governmental mandates. The distinction between both purposes is the source of the request. The source of program implementation is a professional organization. The source of compliance regulations is the county or state.

      Lastly, the purpose that has the most promise to advance teaching practice—the technique of the day—is presented a format—lecture, PowerPoint, video—that is thick on theory, thin on practices—educating, modeling, coaching—that are fundamental to learning and practicing a new teaching methodology.

      Time

      The district will publish in their calendar workshops lasting three-and-one-half hours. In reality a workshop ritual in all districts, one which few administrators will broach, is the much anticipated and thoroughly planned out luncheon at one or more of the favorite dining establishments in the community. By the time all vehicles have returned from lunch, teachers have settled into a particular training venue, and luncheon conversations are trailing off, at best, the district has two hours left to strengthen teacher practice.

      Content

      Putting aside the managerial purposes—implementation and compliance—the educational purposes and practices of new pedagogies will typically require teachers to change deep cultural beliefs about teaching and learning. For example, recent state and national standards governing science and mathematics are designed to challenge students to think, reason, and make sense of core ideas in both disciplines. The techniques governing these standards are embedded in the instructional task’s students are invited to engage in the classroom.

      The tasks laid out in these standards run directly counter to classrooms where teachers in both disciplines ask students to memorize facts or repeat already demonstrates procedures. Few teaching cultures in the country favor or practice instructional regimes that ask students to engage in the kinds of thinking prescribed in state and professional standards. In fact, quite the opposite, most teaching cultures reduce the complexities of science and mathematics to procedural exercises that replicate procedures spelled out in textbooks or worksheets.

      Rarely, would you observe in an American classroom the kinds of teaching behaviors—pressing students to justify, explain, or make meaning—that provide students with opportunities to achieve the higher-level cognitive demands written into state and national content standards.

      Design

      The parameters of workshops days—purposes, content, time—dictate a format consisting of a lot of lecturing from administrators or consultants, a lot of listening by teachers, and little time for questioning or discussions. Even when questions are asked they center on the clarification of procedural matters—timelines, form completion, supervisory responsibilities.

      Mood

      While teachers certainly feel good about time off from the classroom and the time spent with colleagues at lunch, they do not feel good about the purposes, the content, the time, and the design of the workshop day. The results on the mandatory feedback sheets will give high marks for time with their colleagues and in the comments section of the form the content and format of the workshop is summed up with the most frequent phrase: “what a waste of time.”

      Administrators brush off the expected poor reviews of the workshop. They believe they have effectively implemented the tasks associated with putting on a workshop. Although they will not admit this in public, they also believe their faculties lack the professionalism necessary for appreciating the knowledge and skills presented on workshop days. Rarely will an administrator question the purposes, content, and design of a workshops that are commonly panned by their faculties.

      In future blogs I will describe in some detail what an effective staff development program would entail. Suffice it to say, that in the decades ahead, faculties will be flooded with outside forces—new technologies, demographic changes, occupational uncertainties—that will demand dramatic changes in how we do school in this nation. The key to adjusting to these forces are effective staff development programs.

      In the last three decades, school districts throughout the country, are littered with school reform initiatives that are announced from auditorium stages on opening day and silently disappear from classrooms when teachers and students return from Thanksgiving break. You could fill a library on books written on why most school reform initiatives fail to gain a foothold in classrooms. The themes in all of these books fall into three categories: too much theory; too little resources; and too little leadership.

      Certainly, in all failed reform initiatives, one could point to one or more of these themes present in main offices and classrooms. While each theme is a necessary contributor to a reform failure, it is not sufficient to explain the total collapse of well thought out and well researched changes to how schooling is conducted in this country. The missing theme, which is right in front of the eyes of school personnel and reform advocates, is the role school routines play is success or failure of a school reform initiative.

      For over a century, schools in this nation have been designed to achieve institutional goals: standardization, documentation, accountability. These institutional goals were established at the turn of the century by a group of administrative progressives who designed a system that could process large groups of foreign immigrants efficiently. The emphasis in this system was on processing, not educating.

      The institutional process reduces the educative function of schooling to a series of school routines and structures—classrooms, periods, subjects, grades, quizzes, tests, credits—that act as the foundation for what Tyack and Cuban have termed: “The Grammar of Schooling.” The entire process is designed for winnowing student populations rather than optimizing the individual abilities, talents, and interest of diverse student populations. Most, if not all, reform initiatives are founded on theories and pedagogical techniques that are in direct opposition to the goals and functions of institutional schooling. There is not a function of the grammar of schooling—time, space, assessment, grouping of students, organizational model, places where students learn, view of knowledge, student choice—that would serve as a welcome home for theories, routines, structures, that would advance the educational goals written into most school mission statements: critical thinking, divergent thinking, evidenced based reasoning, modeling, life-long learning, collaborative learning, meaningful learning experiences.

      School administrators confronted with the reality that the routines and structures that govern main offices will marginalize the goals and substance of the any mission driven initriative have three choices: allow the initiative to disappear at the Thanksgiving break; restructure their school routines to accommodate the substance of the initiative; or, what I will term, nibble around the edges. The safest choice for school administrators is looking the other way as the remnants of the change initiative silently disappear from classrooms.

      The dangerous choice is to attempt to restructure school routines to accommodate mission driven theories and pedagogical techniques. Despite the large amounts of literature disparaging the grammar of schooling, for the most part, school communities are comfortable with the grammar of schooling, just as it is. Yes, at times, there will be issues with how a routine is being performed, but, never would a parent call for the elimination of grades, or subjects, or classrooms, or periods, or tests, or teachers. Parents, and school community members, have all been socialized into the institutional goals and processes of schooling—what worked for them, will work for their children.

      The third choice, while the most difficult and complex to orchestrate, is the sole possibly for new theories and pedagogical regimes to enter and remain in classrooms. In my books on school reform, I have written extensively on strategies administrators can orchestrate to nibble around the edges of institutional norms. Listed below is an abbreviated version of each strategy:

Strategy #1:   Author a compelling narrative

• Uses the vocabularies of the change initiative
• Composed of three parts: the situation (what is wrong); the strategy (how will do this); and, capacity (can we do this)
• Tells a compelling story (how do we describe the situation we are in)

Strategy #2:   Design a comprehensive training regime

• Educate
• Model
• Practice
• Coach
• Author
• Standardize

Strategy #3:   Redesign “Cracks in the System”

• Locate institutional systems that are not working well or would draw little attention from the school community (e.g. personnel, curriculum development)
• Redesign failed systems to accommodate goals and practices of a change initiative

Strategy #4:   Develop a continuous learning environment

• Flood the organization with latest research on teaching and learning
• Develop decentralized communication structures—teams, study groups—where groups of administrators and teachers share and discuss information (not meetings)
• Promote, design, and resource experimental approaches to teaching and learning
• Redesign teacher workspaces/working day, in ways that faculty can share their work on a daily basis.

Strategy #5:   Protect faculty from external accountably mandates or silver bullet

                       solutions

• Attempts by external governmental agencies to regulate, disrupt, or colonize a school’s internal instructional worldview should be: modified or ignored

      Nibbling around the edges of institutional norms merges two models of schooling. The first model of schooling, what I term the why of schooling, is a marketplace of ideas where administrators and teachers come together to discuss, to interpret, to test, various theories, paradigms, models of learning. The second model of schooling, what I term the how of schooling, are organizational structures and instructional regimes that execute the products of those ideas that the marketplace as determined to be the most effective. The key to nibbling around the edges of institutional norms are school leaders who orchestrate pathways into the how of institutional schooling that will accommodate an agreed upon why of schooling.

      The chief tool is employing quality teachers in the interview. Yes, of course, before the interview, the personnel department employs various criteria—experience, academic background, recommendations—to select candidates that would warrant an interview. Along with the criteria developed to select candidates for interviews, districts do develop a set of interview questions that will bring some semblance of validity and reliability to the process. The questions posed to a teacher in main offices fall into three categories: philosophical, institutional, personal. Listed below are the questions that are typically asked in each category:

Philosophical: Questions that are rarely asked

1. How do children learn?

2. What knowledge is of most worth?

3. How should knowledge be organized?

4. How should we assess what students understand?

5. HOW SHOULD WE TEACH?

Personal: Break the ice questions

1. Why did you become a teacher?

2. Why do you want to work at this school?

3. What personality traits to teachers need to be successful?

4. Can you tell me about your favorite teachers when you were a student? What qualities did they have that you try to emulate on a daily basis?

Institutional: Questions that are typically asked

1. How do you approach discipline and what role does it play in learning?

2. What do you think of technology in the classroom and how have you integrated it in your classroom?

3. How have local state and local curriculum standards affected your lesson planning process?

4. How do you approach instances of bullying?

5. What is your process for creating a lesson plan?

6. What is your grading process like?

7. How do you feel about extra credit?

8. What extracurricular activities would you feel comfortable coaching or sponsoring?

      They typical length of an interview session in a main office is one hour. When you consider questions related to a particular need or problem in a district—bullying, low test scores, coaching vacancies, mandates—there is little or no time to delve deeply into a candidate’s instructional worldview—their philosophy of education.

      Most administrators would view the asking of philosophical questions as an enormous waste of time—the practicalities of managing a school and classrooms are far more important that an ivory tower musing over big questions with no definitive answers. The drawback to focusing on the particulars of implementation is ignoring how those particulars fit together, if at all. Philosophy is a foundational tool for organizing the particulars of implementation into a coherent system for analyzing concepts, definitions, arguments, problems, and questions of value.

      Once one understands a candidate’s philosophy of teaching and learning, the particulars of implementation should be self-evident. This does mean that no implementation questions should be asked. In fact, to confirm a candidate’s instructional worldview, a few well-chosen implementation questions should be posed to see if there are any discrepancies between a candidate’s why and how.

      Of course, the assumption I am making, are main offices that have authored a district or schoolwide instructional worldview. Typically, school mission statements should serve this function. However, as I have pointed out in my most recent book few school districts live up to their district’s mission statement (Living Up to Your School Mission Statement: Reforming Schools from the Inside Out). Without attention to an agreed upon school mission, main offices become consumed with the managerial functions of schooling, which, in turn, reduce all aspects of schooling—the interview being one—to the particulars of implementation.

      All school districts spend considerable time and money on the authoring of a school mission statement. The content of these statements list what I term educational universals—goals and values that community members and school staff believe in, and, are committed to implement in their districts. The most cited goals and values written into these universal statements are: critical thinking, diversity, excellence, personalization, accountability, compassion, challenging, justice, leadership, kindness, growth, inclusion.

      There is no question about the value or intent of these educational universals. There is a question about why most of these goals and values are rarely carried out in main offices and classrooms. I have written an entire book describing in detail why schools are unable to live up to their published educational universals. (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Your-School-Mission-Statement/dp/147586292X). The brief version of the problem of unrealized universal values, is the embedded difficulty of aligning an abstract universal with specific behaviors in a main office or classroom.

      The source of the problem lies with the failure on the part of school leaders to take time to develop a consensus around the definition of a published universal value. Take for example one of the most commonly cited value in a school mission statement: “excellence.” Main offices, classrooms, and all school publications are crowded with the vocabularies of excellence: rigor, greatness, mastery, superiority, achievement, peak performance, high standards, being number one, perfect score, valedictorian.

      There are, however, two distinct vocabularies and narratives for defining excellence. One set of vocabularies and narratives, the set that school personnel and the school community believe they value is excellence defined as the optimization of talent. This definition of excellent values and works to optimize the individual talents, abilities, and interests of students in their schools. Along with the vocabularies and narratives of personalization is recognizing there are degrees of mastery of knowledge and skills—we all begin as novices, and depending upon our talents and interest, progress through stages of mastery—competent performer, expert, and public performance. Depending upon the individual talent and interest of a student, they may be satisfied with different levels of mastery or decide that the activity they are pursuing is not worth the time or effort.

      The other distinct vocabulary and narrative of excellence that governs schooling in this nation is defined as maximization of talent. This definition of excellence believes talent is a zero-sum game: a few gifted students will rise to the top of the schooling pyramid; most students will sink to the middle or bottom of the schooling pyramid. Translated into organizational and instructional specifics, this definition of excellence values grading, standardized curriculum, standardized testing, ranking, classrooms, seat-time, credits.

      Rarely, if ever, do school leaders articulate the disconnect between universal educational values and specific practices. The governing assumption being, that the specifics of schooling are aligned with an universal value. In this case, the school community assumes their schools are optimizing the talent of their son or daughter, when, in reality the school organization is structured to assign their son or daughter to a position on the school achievement pyramid.

Most organizations, including schools, are structured around the specifics of implementation—time, money, space, personnel, rules and regulations, standardization—and not, the universals values written into mission statements—autonomy, creativity, doubt, diversity. In the public and private sector, those leaders that stand out from their colleagues articulate and then resolve the gaps between the specifics of their organization and the universal values listed in their mission statements.