Mandate or Persuade

By Steve Atwater | Published: February 3, 2013

One of the challenges that school leaders face is finding the right balance between that which is mandated and that which is supported through persuasion.  Push too hard on the mandate side and the staff will likely resist.  An initiative promoted with a persuasive approach can slow the rate of change and may lead toward complacency.  If I don’t have to do it, then why should I?  It is my sense that this is where we are with professional development.  We mandate certain things, usually that which is tied to the mechanics of teaching and persuade staff to participate in other offerings.   With this in mind, I feel that it is time for the state to rethink its recertification requirements that require earning six credits in five years. Teachers have a fair amount of autonomy to choose which classes to pursue for this purpose.  I’d like to instead have the districts provide some input on which courses can be used.

It is easy to casually talk about the importance of professional development.  The challenge of finding time to do it well is limited by the inherited structure of education.  The state can do two things to help in this area.  One, provide funds for more professional development time and two, rewrite the regulations that guide recertification so that a district can determine which courses will be accepted.  Our persuasive approach toward PD is helping us to improve.  I feel that the suggested coordination with the state on PD will be the mandate to help us get to the next level.

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Using video to improve instruction

By Steve Atwater | Published: January 27, 2013

For the past couple of days I have been attending the Response to Intervention Conference in Anchorage.  Because much of my job involves work with finances and legislative issues, I found my time at the conference focusing on instruction and interacting with teachers from around the state to be refreshing.  I am pleased to learn that KPBSD, by comparison with other Alaska districts, is in pretty good shape with regard to our RTI processes.  As always however, I recognize areas for improvement.  One of the concerns that I heard during the three days was that some teachers are too quick to refer a student who struggles to the RTI process without thoroughly reflecting on whether their core content instruction can be adjusted to better meet the student’s learning needs.

I know that our focus on effective instruction has helped our teachers improve their skills.  A next step on our path of improvement is using video to more thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of instructional practices.  One presenter showed the benefits of video as a way to show student engagement.  The first clip illustrated the limitation of the traditional practice of a teacher offering open ended questions with a few students raising their hands.  This was contrasted with a video that showed a high level of student engagement with students working in groups to solve problems or to teach each other. For teachers, it is a big risk to have your instruction viewed in this way.  But when it is done in a non-evaluative manner, teams of teachers can collaborate on what they see and offer suggestions for improvement.

 

 

 

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Independent Learning

By Steve Atwater | Published: January 20, 2013

This week’s headline announcing the Anchorage School District’s plans to cut 100s of jobs formally kicked off our annual school funding conversation. Our preliminary budget, while not as dire, will likely also lead to the elimination of some positions.  Much of our conversation on how to curb expenses will center on our pupil to teacher ratio.  For many, an increase to PTR should be a last resort.  But after visiting Sterling Elementary last week, I was reminded that while PTR is important, our students’ ability to learn independently is even more critical.  A class of 24 can accomplish just as much as a class of 22 if the students are adept at independent learning.  In each of the primary classes that I visited at Sterling, I saw a group of students working with their teacher while the rest of the class worked independently in small groups or alone.  I was impressed that these young students were for the most part getting on with their work. The teacher rarely had to encourage them.

There is no question that a large class size presents challenges and that we want to keep our classes small.  But there is also a need to train our students to learn on their own.  This important skill is one of the foundation pieces of differentiation.  Acquiring the skills to learn independently doesn’t just happen, it has to be taught.  It was obvious that the Sterling teachers have spent time with their students on this.

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Measuring teacher effectiveness through student surveys

By Steve Atwater | Published: January 12, 2013

During the fall of my first year of teaching I learned that our superintendent Mr. Evans would be visiting my classroom the next day.  On the assumption that a quiet, orderly classroom was an indication of good teaching, I advised my 7th grade students to be on their best behavior when Mr. Evans was in our room.  Fortunately, the students heeded my advice and when the visit was over, I was convinced that the superintendent had a favorable impression of me as a teacher.  If however, the visit had been unannounced, the findings may have been quite different.  I recall many days when my learning activity was not passive and the noise level was pretty high.  For the past several years there has been an increasing focus on student learning and how to measure it.  While observation of a teacher and students is one way, it only tells part of the story.

In the coming year we will be developing assessments that will be used to measure student learning.  Using before and after tests for this purpose is a standard part of good teaching, but it has not been formalized in this way.  Recently, I read of using student surveys as a way to measure teacher effectiveness and by extension learning.  I feel that the use of perception data from students about their teacher although open to potential measurement errors, should be one of several indicators to consider when determining teacher effectiveness.  The Tripod survey (developed by Ron Ferguson) gathers information on the seven C’s that researchers have deemed important to determine how well teachers teach.  They include: care, control, clarify, challenge, captivate, confer and consolidate.  I realize that surveys can be onerous; the Tripod Survey however, may be a nice compliment to our evaluation system and to the slew of quantitative data that is headed our way. We need to do more in this realm, our current practice of gathering student feedback on their teachers is far too passive and rarely used.

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Teaching Writing

By Steve Atwater | Published: December 28, 2012

While our son is home from college for the Christmas Holiday, I am reminded of the role that texting plays in his life.  If I had a dollar for every time his phone buzzed announcing a new text, I would be rich.  The text exchanges are predictably short and from what I can see when I snoop over his shoulder, full of abbreviations.  While his texting is not unusual, it does help illustrate the dynamic nature of language; things in this realm are not static.  Using u instead of you or an acronym such as lol although annoying to the language purists, are more and more the norm for our students.  Nevertheless, there is plenty of research to show that teaching students to effectively communicate through writing is a way to float the whole education boat higher.

The Common Core standards in writing that strongly influenced Alaska’s writing standards will lead to the development of writing assessments that may be much more difficult than are our current tests. It is probable that the percentage of our students who score proficient on the new writing assessments will be significantly lower than it is for today’s SBA writing tests. In a shift away from creative expression, the new standards place a greater emphasis on expository and analytical writing.  This shift may cause teachers to embrace a more old fashioned, formulaic approach to writing instruction that is frowned on by some teachers. A failing high school on Staten Island adopted such an approach to writing instruction across the curriculum and saw marked improvement in student achievement in many of the content areas. We are thus, at somewhat of a crossroads with written communication. On the one side is students’ relaxed electronic communication, while on the other side is the expectation that our students will be able to write well developed essays.  While the creative writing exercise with peer editing will still be a part of writing instruction, the new standards will cause this activity to lose some of its luster. For many of our students learning to write is a hit or miss proposition.  To avoid having more misses will require us to be more analytical about our writing instruction.

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Collaboration at Mountain View

By Steve Atwater | Published: December 21, 2012

For the past four years the district has been promoting the benefits of teacher collaboration.  It is widely recognized that when teachers collectively work to solve problems that are immediate to their assignment, the resulting solutions will be more effective than when solved alone.  This morning I was at the Mountain View Elementary for the start of their end of semester inservice and got to see the benefits of their collaboration efforts.  Each of the school’s grade level teams shared the successes of their collaborative journey of the past four months and in several cases, stressed how much of a paradigm shift it is for a teacher to work in this way.  The bottom line is that the staff at Mountain View is at a much different place than they were four years ago.  They are far more sophisticated and analytical in their approach toward instruction and assessment.

One of the common complaints that all educators have is that you can’t do it all.  There is a tension between what is expected and what is doable.   I often hear that the teacher’s job assignment is too broad.  While all educators understand that their jobs are hard and require a lot of work, collaboration is designed to relax some of tension that their assignment presents.   Thanks to all the Mountain View staff for being willing to step out of their comfort zone to embrace their small professional learning communities.  I know their students are benefitting from this collective approach to work.

 

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Responding to tragedy

By Steve Atwater | Published: December 15, 2012

Yesterday’s tragedy in Connecticut is one that will remain with us for a long time. As I learned the specifics of the horror, I found my emotions shifting from despair to anger. While each of us processes grief in different ways, I am struggling to find a way to reach an emotional equilibrium with what took place.

For all of us who are educators, it is incomprehensible that a school, our place of work where we do all that we can to ensure a positive, safe learning environment, was transformed in this way. I hope that this tragedy serves as a reminder that despite our increasingly polarized opinions and digital aloofness, we are all a part of a society that desperately needs cohesion. Although the shooting was 4,000 miles away in a state that is less than half the size of our borough, what took place is immediate to all of us at KPBSD. The resumed debate over gun control may help some cope with this horror. As educators however, there is a need for more than what is being offered by this predictable conversation.

On Monday morning much of the school district will observe a moment a silence to remember those young children and adults who died while at school. I trust that this moment will help us to process the grief of this event and to acknowledge that we must not lose sight of the fact that our school district is a part of a large network of school districts and that we are inextricably tied to the residents of Newtown.

 

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Opportunity to learn and universal competence

By Steve Atwater | Published: December 8, 2012

A significant change to education in Alaska was made yesterday when the state board approved regulations that will guide the evaluation of teachers and principals.  Included in these regulations is the requirement that evidence of student learning will be a component of the evaluations.  That is, a student’s performance on assessments will be one of the ways to determine a teacher’s or principal’s effectiveness.  There is a lot of concern that this new component of  evaluation may unfairly cast teachers or principals as not doing a good job.   While the move to measure a teacher’s effectiveness has been gaining momentum for the past several years, it really started in 2002 when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was reauthorized as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

NCLB stated that all students will learn.  The act boldly set 2014 as the year when every student in the United States would be proficient in reading, writing and math.  NCLB shifted the role of school as one that David Porter, formerly at UAF, stated as presenting students with an opportunity to learn to one that requires universal competence.  Herein lies the issue for educators.  Some argue that if schools do their part and offer students the best possible opportunity to learn, then they have satisfied their purpose.   Others don’t feel that this is not enough, that without the expectation of universal competence, schools will not go the extra mile for students.  There are numerous variables that affect student learning.  My sense is that if the school does all that it can to affect those variables over which it has some control, then the opportunity to learn will be met.  In the past, a teacher evaluation system measured how well a teacher prepared and delivered lessons.  Starting in 2015 the system will also include how well a student performs.

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Project Search

By Steve Atwater | Published: December 1, 2012

In the past 10 years there has been an increasing amount of pressure placed on educators to show that their students are having success.  The simplest way to show success is to highlight students who have scored well on a test, been accepted at a top college or earned a scholarship or award.   We have plenty of these sorts of success stories; they help paint a picture to show that KPBSD is doing well.  While it is easy to be enamored with the scholarship or the prize, we also need to pay attention to the success stories that do not have the same sort of social allure.  We have many students who are having success in a less public manner.  On Tuesday I had the good fortune to meet three such students who are a part of Project Search.

Project Search is a program that provides employability skills, training and workplace internships for individuals with significant disabilities, particularly youth transitioning from high school to adult life.  Our three students are spending their senior year as a part of this program and are benefitting from our partnerships with Central Peninsula Hospital, the Governor’s Council on Disabilities and Special Education, Division of Vocational Rehabilitation and Frontier Community Services.  My brief interaction with the three students made me proud that our district is reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of school.  Let’s make sure that we look for multiple ways to measure student success.

 

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Site identity, the counterbalance to standardization

By Steve Atwater | Published: November 24, 2012

The recent release of the film Lincoln unleashed a plethora of interest in our 16th president.  I’ve read several reviews of the movie and learned that one of Lincoln’s lesser known acts was to standardize the width of railroad tracks.  This relatively obscure action made transportation of goods more efficient, and in turn, led to an increase in commerce.  One of my goals for KPBSD is to increase our students’ learning by standardizing that which is common to all our schools and students.  This standardization includes the obvious such as what we must teach and how we evaluate staff.  It also includes more subtle items such as how we plan our professional development.  We cannot however, expect standardization of all things by our schools.

Our principals are charged with first learning their site’s strengths and then using this knowledge to create a site identity that will serve as a foundation on which their students can excel. This could be the recognition that several staff members at an elementary school have a good knowledge of science content that could lead to them collaborating so that science concepts are woven into non-science instruction.  Or, it might be a school staff embracing a behavioral program that helps to define the school’s culture. The site identity is an important part of a school’s improvement efforts and is the counterbalance to district level standardization.

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