According to Michael Fullan, “no nation has ever got better by focusing on individual teachers as the driver” of school improvement. He argues that countries like Finland and Singapore set their sites on developing the entire teaching profession by “raising the bar for all.”
 
Collective or team work makes processes better. Fullan reminds us in his 2011 seminar paper Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform that focused collaborative activities drive change. He goes a step further: “the judicious mixture of high expectations, relentless but supportive leadership, good standards and assessment, investments in capacity, transparency of results and practice is what produces better results, and better accountability.” (p 12) And when he mentions transparency, Fullan implies the need for teachers to work collectively before schools can make the change process open and fully visible.
 
Fullan also considers the emergence of new technologies in the school and the tendency of some leaders to assume that technology can improve instruction and learning without regard to teacher effectiveness. He contends that the “notion that having a laptop computer or hand-held device for every student will make him or her smarter or even more knowledgeable is pedagogically vapid.” (p. 15). We see this in our ABPC work. Go into almost any school, and you’ll see the appropriate use of technology next door to a room where the lights are dimmed and the students are being subjected to “death by PowerPoint.”
 
In many schools, technology was introduced but not accompanied with significant and ongoing professional development. This type of “instructional incoherence” can derail an initiative, as Newmann and other researchers have demonstrated. To gain coherence requires that a school not only provide a professional development design (e.g., to support technology integration) but also seek a high level of agreement around such things as norms, values, and expectations In short, teamwork is a necessary pre-condition for ever achieving a coherent system of teaching and learning in a school.

Visible Collaboration
 
Thomas Hatch, in his book Managing to Change: How Schools Can Survive (and Sometimes Thrive) in Turbulent Times (2009), suggests that reaching a schoolwide level of common understanding and coherence is difficult.

He believes schools, most of which are faced with the challenges of changing policies, shifting demographics, and financial shortages, “need ways of recognizing when missions have drifted too far or common understandings have been lost, and they have to spend time and resources finding ways to bring the members of the organization back together.” (p. 59)
 
Hatch then shares an important concept:
 
“Schools that never establish a distinct focus or a sense of instructional coherence may have a harder time building up a public perception that something needs to be done because they have never experienced what it’s like to have a shared understanding to guide them.” (p. 62)
 
John Hattie, in his book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning (2012), contends that teamwork is not only a pre-condition of instructional coherence -- it is the only way for a school to become consistently high performing. Hattie points to a study by Linda Darling-Hammond which found that countries with the greatest improvements in overall student learning invested 15-to-25 hours weekly on teacher collaborative learning and teamwork.
 
Hattie says: “I want them [teachers] to spend such time working together to plan and critique lessons, interpret and deliberate in light of evidence about their impact on each student’s learning, [and be] in each other’s classes observing student learning, and continually evaluating the evidence about how ‘we as teachers in this school’ can optimize worthwhile outcomes for all students.” (p. 168).
 
Wherever we look these days, whether it's Fullan's change drivers, or other new pieces of education research and deep thinking we examine, we hear the same message: Schools must become places where educators collaborate and act collectively to improve instruction and serve kids better.
 
And guess what: in the best schools we visit across Alabama, that's exactly what I see going on.
 
Learn more about Fullan's change drivers in my earlier posts. Read More...

As part of a national project focused on researching and identifying exemplary models of virtual professional learning communities, the U.S. Department of Education and the American Institutes for Research have recognized the Alabama Best Practices Center for its "notable" work with online communities of practice.
 
ABPC is recognized at the Department-sponsored Connected Educators website for its development of two online learning communities -- the 21st Learners project supported by Microsoft Partners in Learning from 2005-08, and our current Instructional Partners Learning Network, developed in partnership with the Alabama State Department of Education.
 
You can visit ABPC's Notable Community page at Connected Educators and also read an interview with the ABPC leader Cathy Gassenheimer, who describes some of the lessons learned from this new kind of professional development work.
 
We appreciate this recognition and want to give special thanks to State Superintendent Tommy Bice and the ALSDE for their faith in our ability to do this work — and for the wonderful partnership we've been able to create together on behalf of our public school students and schools.
 
Here are several excerpts from Cathy's interview:
 
"Our first online community experience grew out of our participation in a Microsoft Partners in Learning grant. We created a Community of Practice that engaged teacher-principal teams in a group of Alabama schools (elementary, middle and high) in several years of learning together. The focus was on integrating web tools and technology into best-practice instruction — blending the right tech into “instruction that works.” Over the course of that project, the community grew to include 40 schools and added some face-to-face collaboration to what began as a completely virtual experience. PiL was pleased with the results and we learned a lot about how to engage educators in online professional learning.
 
"Our second experience, which is currently underway, is part of the Alabama Instructional Partners Project. We’ve established a truly vibrant online community among participants in the project’s first year, using a private Ning-based platform. We started with just 15 teacher coaches and will triple that size in the fall of 2012. The IP project is done in partnership with the Alabama State Department of Education. We provide the professional development and support the online IP experience."
 
____
 
"We think face-to-face PD is important for social bonding, trust building, and some aspects of small/large group work. But we also know that online communities of practice can not only augment F2F learning but produce a synergistic effect. Both F2F and online experiences keep conversations and explorations “alive” and moving forward. The asynchronous aspect of online community also maximizes the use of scarce teacher/leader time. And online communities are a perfect place to share and curate digital work products, outside resources and research. If they are well-facilitated, they can also increase the social bond and build commitment and resilience through the sharing of solutions and success stories that may feel like “bragging” in a time-pressed F2F environment.
 
"If the community is well-bonded, excited by their shared interests, and 'restless to improve,' then the blended approach is ideal. The model is strengthened if the F2F experiences are relatively frequent — in our case, seven times during this school year, including three 3-day retreats. At the same time, I can’t stress enough that the power of the online community comes in its ability to “keep things going” — to keep the work and learning that’s our focus always in front of participants, 24/7. Because virtual CoPs are essentially “asynchronous,” they make it possible for professional learners to participate when they have the time and energy, and when they’re motivated by events or just inspired by some wondering."
 
Read more at the Connected Educators website
  Read More...

by Caroline Novak
President, A+ Education Partnership
 
If non-fiction speaks to the mind, literature speaks to the heart, as a teacher's story published recently in the New York Times so well demonstrates. Some of her observations are important for Alabama, as we take new steps to accelerate real learning in our classrooms, bring more balance to assessment and accountability, and increase our educators' capacity to lead students to higher levels of thinking and understanding.
 
Claire Hollander engages high-needs youngsters at her Manhattan middle school in a reading enrichment program that introduces them to great literature — to fiction written in complex language, telling stories that can help us explore what it means to be human. In doing so, Hollander says she is helping her students -- some of whom "are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods" -- build "cultural capital" that can give them the resilience they need to complete high school, to pursue college and careers, and to mature into thinking adults, effective workers and committed parents.
 
As Hollander suggests, a decade of well-meant but sometimes counterproductive accountability testing has pushed the study of literature and storytelling far down on the curriculum priority list. Most items that test reading comprehension today, she says, include "passages from watered-down news articles or biographies...memos or brochures — passages chosen not for emotional punch but for textual complexity."
 
We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.    
 
Students, and especially students with challenging home lives, are not likely to engage with exceptional literature outside of school, Hollander believes. Many low-income students "who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary...will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort."
 
In her experience, those are the same students "who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep." And the same can be said for many students in Alabama's high-needs schools, where educators (as we might expect) are shaping their curriculum and instruction to maximize student performance on test items that emphasize informational text. Hollander writes:
 
Of course no teacher disputes the necessity of being able to read for information. But if literature has no place in these tests, and if preparation for the tests becomes the sole goal of education, then the reading of literature will go out of fashion in our schools. I don’t have any illusions that adding literary passages to multiple-choice tests would instill a love of reading among students by itself. But it would keep those books on the syllabus, in the classrooms and in the hands of young readers — which is what really matters.
 
As Alabama schools implement new learning standards that will require higher orders of thinking from our students and higher orders of teaching from our educators, we believe it would be a terrible mistake to ignore Claire Hollander's core message:
 
We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts.... We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.
 
The A+ Education Partnership is all about "both/and" solutions. We believe that our schools can teach students how to analyze informational text and apply what they learn in the real world. We also believe that, at the same time, our teachers can guide our students as they grapple with the complex words and emotional events found in great fictional stories.
 
We affirm the power and value of literature to reach our hearts, and A+'s support for promoting real literature as part of curriculum for all students, whether they live in book-rich environments or depend on our public schools to help them become eager and able readers of every kind of text. Read More...