Public Education is Worth Fighting For

Public Education is about to venture back into the debate of charters and vouchers as options for turning around our struggling schools. With the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, Public Education is again being threatened by another "transformation" that is meant to raise standards and provide for excellence in American classrooms. However, with a focus on repealing the Common Core State Standards, providing vouchers and funding charter schools, there is little hope that this refurbished approach to transforming American education will do much more than frustrate high quality educators and leaders who have invested their lives into educating future generations of American children.

As a leader of a struggling school that is a completely different place than it was three years ago, I have a few pieces of advice for the incoming Education Secretary - not that I think they will be heard, but I have decided that if I do not use my voice to advocate for what I believe in (aka Public Education), then I am not being true to myself as a leader and I am not showing my community what I believe in and am willing to invest my time and effort into.

Common Core - Why does the Education Secretary want to repeal the Common Core? Her tweet, "Many of you are asking about Common Core. To clarify, I am not a support - period," (read more here) has been retweeted and quoted throughout the news cycles. The Common Core State Standards has put the need for more rigorous, student-centered educational practices that build on conceptual understanding the center of classroom planning and practice. How is that hurting anyone? The whole idea behind transforming our education system is that American students lag significantly behind students from around the world (see chart below) and in a global economy, we simply cannot afford for American innovation and business to continue to lag behind. 

While the roll-out of Common Core and the connection to APPR were highly (and rightly) criticized, the need for rigorous discourse, high quality instruction that builds on conceptual understanding, reading complex text, and writing across the content areas continue to be the best parts of Common Core and should not be "watered down" in the name of "transformation." The Common Core is not the problem in America's schools - if our students cannot meet the standards, we must look at effective leadership practices and effective classroom practices that will make sure that our students (that's ALL students) get the high quality instruction that they deserve. 

Vouchers and Charters - I can hear it now..."What's the big deal? If there is more choice, that will force schools to be better if they want to keep students!"Here is the real deal...it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to turn around a school. I am on year three and we are really starting to see gains across all areas. However, we have not yet reached a tipping point where the majority of our students are performing at or above their grade level. Public school dollars support charter and voucher programs that allow for students to leave public schools and attend a school of choice, which has a devastating impact on the resources available to students and in classrooms. Public schools have an obligation to provide the highest quality education to all of our students in order to have an educated citizenry and that requires having adequate resources. We cannot educate the future of our communities and our country if only some students are given the opportunity to experience excellence. 

Teacher Preparation Programs - In the past twenty-five years that I have been in education, there has been very little public debate about the quality and expectations of Teacher Preparation Programs. There is a significant amount of debate from within education, but no one else has really seemed to take on the challenge. I would encourage Betsy DeVos to take this on as one of her important first challenges - more important than Common Core revision, ESSA, or even the Voucher debate. Without having top notch teachers in our classrooms, very little matters about what the laws and regulations state about what we need in American classrooms. What we need, more than absolutely anything, is the best teachers ever. That will definitely require that colleges make changes to their programs. It will require that teacher preparation programs look much more like doctor preparation programs. And it should require changes to the salary scales for teachers as well - if we are expected to train like doctors, we should be compensated like doctors. After all, we are saving lives, too. 

So, my challenge to incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is more of an invitation. Come and visit. See first hand who American children are, what American children are learning, and American teachers are teaching. Talk with high quality school leaders who are training the teachers who are coming out of our Teacher Preparation programs over the course of three years or more in order to make young teachers who have just stepped into the classroom into effective practitioners. And lastly, I would ask you to remember that educators are making investments in our future each and every day. We wouldn't ask Wall Street Investors to make a promising future without the appropriate resources - likewise, our public schools need the resources to ensure a bright future for ALL of our children. 

Developing Leadership Opportunities

One of the key components of leadership is developing the next generation of leaders, whether that is classroom leaders, model classrooms, or school or district level leaders. We have an obligation to ensure that the leaders who come after us have a mindset and beliefs that will serve the students of tomorrow and provide them with the absolute best education. In some ways, that means that leaders are always developing teachers out of the classrooms in their own building, which can have a significant impact on the instructional program in a school. So, it is necessary to have a leadership development plan.

Developing a leadership development plan starts with your own leadership as the school building leader. You must have an idea of where you need to learn and grow if you are going to model and create opportunities for leadership development in your school. As a leader, you must learn and grow alongside your staff - simply providing them with opportunities to learn is not enough, and expecting them to learn for you is poor leadership. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Deborah Rowland cites that many employees do not trust their boss and that most in-house leadership development is less about "doing leadership" and more about "how to do" leadership. As school leaders, we must start with ourselves if we want to develop highly effective leaders.

Having a leadership plan requires a common language around the competencies of leadership. There are certainly many to choose from - I have used the Turnaround Leadership Competencies by Public Impact for myself, my leadership teams, and my classroom leaders. Hearing my teacher leaders talk about recognizing the early wins or requiring all staff to make changes is exciting and it underscores the importance of having that common language throughout an organization in order to make substantive change. Here is an example of a self-assessment tool that leaders can use when beginning to make a leadership development plan.

The next levels of leadership vary based on the size of your system. Identifying these levels of leadership is essential for any strong leadership development plan. In my system, I have a leadership team (their primary role is leadership within the building), teacher leaders (they have additional leadership responsibilities that they have taken on outside of their classroom role), team leaders (they are the key person on their grade level team or department), and classroom leaders. There is some crossover between the layers of leadership, as some people are involved in multiple levels of the work.

My responsibility as the building leader is to distribute the leadership of our school vision through internal leadership and also provide opportunities for them to learn and grow their own skill set. Within this system, I have several leaders who aspire to be building leaders, several who wish to become model classrooms or instructional coaches, and some who are working on developing stronger communication skills within their grade level team. Differentiating leadership development and opportunities for growth requires that school leaders know the skill sets and leadership capacities of their staff as well as creative opportunities for leadership to live in your school. Leadership development also requires clear visioning, strong communication regarding the vision, and regular feedback and check-ins. Two-way communication and checking-in on progress have to be a priority in order for budding leadership to grow and yield the expected results.

How Can You Tell If Your School Has "Turned Around?

There are many components of school turnaround - suspension and referral rates, student achievement measures, attendance, parent involvement, staff turnover, and school climate to name a few. With so many moving targets, how can anyone ever know if their school has really "turned around?"

Even the idea of "turnaround" is somewhat of a misnomer. Moving a school from significantly underperforming to achieving takes time. It's not as if there is a magic wand that can take a school from one end of the spectrum to the other overnight. When we talk about school turnaround, we are really talking about significant school improvement and being able to see improvement in the terms of any of the indicators previously listed is an amazing thing to see.

There are many voices in the school turnaround debate. Advocates range from strategies that involve closing schools and re-opening them with new leadership, new staff, and new curriculum to strategies that involve supporting the whole child through addressing the issues of high poverty. No matter what the approach to school turnaround, the research supports the need for strong, visionary leadership in implementing a school turnaround plan that yields results.

This is my third year as a turnaround principal. My school has made significant gains in reducing suspensions and referrals, in improving student achievement, in improving attendance rates, in engaging parents and families, in reducing staff turnover, and in creating a school culture that is a productive learning environment and values achievement. This week, New York State released the Demonstrable Improvement Index for schools in receivership. This score indicates an overall improvement rating based on metrics that were selected for that school. Schools were given points based on meeting the targets set for each metric. The school I lead scored a 92 out of 100. Maybe I should say that in a little different way - how's this?

92 out of 100!!! That's amazing!!!

This acknowledges and underscores our hard work and improvement efforts. We are working tirelessly to make greater gains in student achievement and to continue toward being a model school in school turnaround. To read more about our demonstrable improvement index, our metrics, out turnaround efforts, and our school community, click here.

When Thinking is Visible

How do we know that there is really deep thinking, measurable learning, and significant growth happening in our classrooms? If you have followed any of my previous posts, you know that I am pretty passionate about classrooms where there is a high level of rigor, real life engagement, and deep thinking. I love thinking about rigor as "cognitive demand" - in simplest terms, who is really doing the thinking and the work?

This past weekend, I attended the NYSRA Conference in Rochester, New York. One of the most interesting sessions that I attended was by Maureen Boyd, a professor at University of Buffalo, which focused on classroom talk (find her book here). Although the idea of classroom talk seems simple, when you think of classroom talk as visible thinking, it takes on a different shape. Dr. Boyd talked about the power of the "third turn." The initial question is the first turn. The student response is the second turn. The power comes in the third turn - what the teacher does in response to the student response. The teacher can either elevate the thinking in this third turn by asking an additional question or asking for additional student responses, or the teacher can stop the thinking in the third turn by simply saying "okay, good." If the teacher's response ends the thinking, then the student only responds for the purpose of answering the question and getting a correct response - that is definitely not visible thinking. If you really want to learn about what students know or understand, you have to be willing to listen to student responses and all that they show you about what students do, and do not, think.

As School Leaders, it is our responsibility to know the kind of questioning, discourse, and thinking that is being asked of our students in our classrooms. When we see instruction that does not push our students' thinking and learning, it is our responsibility to have the hard conversations with our staff that will help them to think about pushing the thinking of our students. This idea of "the third turn" provides us with a clear strategy that can immediately change the level of questioning and discourse in our classrooms. Our classrooms must be vibrant places, full of cognitive demand and supportive relationships that help our students see their true potential. In this video from PS 359 in the South Bronx, you see exactly that - students who are given opportunities to show their thinking, explain their understanding or misunderstanding, and to take risks that will lead them closer to mastery of the standards. As leaders, we must push for our classrooms to engage our students in this kind of visible thinking in order to ensure that they are thinking deeply and authentically engaged in rigorous thinking.


Making Thinking Visible from NYC Public Schools on Vimeo.

Extended Learning Time

I have just returned from the Promising Practices Conference in Albany where we presented our approach to Extended Learning Time (see agenda here). There are many approaches to Extended Learning and our model centers on investing in both teachers and students through Collaborative Team Planning for teachers and Embedded Enrichment for students.

The research supporting extended learning time, particularly in urban schools, is convincing. In a recently published Hechinger Report, they outline the significant defecits thatchildren in poverty experience before they even start school. This research supports the need for extended learning time, and it also supports the importance of enrichment for children in poverty. Extending the school day for teachers without enriching the curriculum for students only addresses half of the need. 

Leadership in a school with extended learning time and embedded enrichment requires a clear vision (let's be real here, leadership always requires a clear vision) and a belief in the value of enrichment for students and the investment in teacher development through collaboration. The work we are doing in both areas is resulting significant growth in our school. 

Productive Struggle

When I was in middle school, I struggled with math. I didn't catch on quickly and the pace of the lessons always felt too fast for me. Math was presented in only one way and I had to try to follow along and make meaning, but I remember feeling stupid and started saying "I can't do math" as a result. My parents got me a tutor who helped me to see math in different ways and gave me the opportunity to talk through my thinking. It turns out, I could do math, but I needed to be able to make meaning and I needed to be able to talk through my misconceptions.

So, what is the difference between struggling in mathematics and productive struggle?

The shifts in the common core require that the students do the majority of the thinking and the work - that they are the ones productively struggling with the problem solving, questioning, thinking, and explaining.

It really comes down to conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding is how we make meaning of what we are learning - it's the mental models and images that we create to help us understanding what we are doing. 

Prior to common core, learning math was largely about about procedures. It was up to us to make our own meaning and find ways to understand the concepts behind the procedures if we did not immediately "get it." Twenty years ago, we didn't provide students with manipulatives to make meaning - we gave them procedures and expected them to figure it out. As a result, many students continued to feel like they didn't "get" math.

What is the lesson here for teachers of common core mathematics? 

Think about how long it took you to make meaning of mathematical concepts. Now think about how long you give kids to really make meaning of mathematical concepts. If you give students two days with manipulatives, have you really just substituted different procedures and students still don't have enough time to make meaning?

Here's an example. (https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/g4-m1-full-module.pdf)

Lucy plays an online math game. She scored 100,000 more points on Level 2 than on Level 3. If she scored 349,867 points on Level 2, what was her score on Level 3? Use pictures, words, or numbers to explain your thinking.

Struggling would mean that you would give this problem to students and let them try to figure it out., Productive struggle means that you woud read through this problem with your students, giving them an opportunity to discuss what strategies they might use to solve the problem and what information they see as critical to understanding what the problem is asking. 

In order to do teach in this way, you have to plan differently. First of all, you need to do the math. You have to understand what students are going to do when they first approach this problem. You have to plan for an ideal student response and also plan for misconceptions that students are going to have. If you don't do the math, you are merely teaching to procedures and not to conceptual understanding. 

Secondly, you need to plan for students to productively struggle. Again, that means that they have to have some information to use before they begin to problem solve. In this problem, you might talk about the numbers that are important in the problem, and you might even brainstorm strategies that students could use to solve the problem, but in order to ensure that students would be doing the thinking, you would not set up a tape diagram for them. Productive struggle means that students have to have an idea about the work they are going to engage in and they would be able to explain the reasons that they chose the approach that they did. Do you provide students with manipulatives or do you have them get their own? Do you encourage them to use their white board? How do you help guide students toward potential strategies that will help them make meaning without telling them how to think?

Students also need time to do the math. Too often, this time is cut significantly short because teachers have not taught students to productively struggle. You have to have an idea of what you expect to see while kids are working in order to plan effective questions, redirections, or next steps. Your job during this phase is really to facilitate thinking. Students have to have a starting point and they have to be able to determine which strategies are most efficient.  As you gather information from students, you have to be able to really listen to them in order to understand their thinking and plan for next steps in moving them forward. Students should be encouraged to work together if it helps to facilitate their thinking - think about what you would do if you had to solve a problem. Chances are, you would at least talk it through with someone before you decided what steps made the msot sense to you. 

The real impact comes in the student discourse - where students explain their thinking whether they have a right or a wrong answer. The confident practitioner will embrace the questions that help move other students toward understanding during this part and will not get nervous about students modeling incorrect answers or divergent thinking. If student discourse sounds just like students filling in the blanks in your classroom, it is not getting to real understanding and it is certainly not moving students toward proficiency. Students should be able to think through their understanding and simply snot encouraged to find a friend if it takes them longer than 15 seconds to answer or explain their thinking. Classrooms that really understand that every child makes meaning about mathematics in their own way are classrooms that will celebrate divergent thinking, will build on other students' responses, and will ultimately see the greatest growth in mathematical understanding. 

I have come to look at mathematics instruction so differently than when I was a student. Our children are ready, willing, and absolutely able to master the mathematical concepts and skills that are a part of our common core curriculum. Teachers must look at teaching as more than simply covering the lesson and must do the math in order to be able to facilitate conceptual understanding for students and build on their questions in order to secure foundational skills. Our students must have more time with manipulatives and making meaning in order to build conceptual understanding. 

Making math matter in classrooms requires teachers that believe in the power of making meaning, building conceptual understanding with tools and manipulatives, and the ability of our children to conceptualize how different parts of mathematics align and connect. Adults must engage in productive struggle with that kind of planning in order to create clasrooms where students can productively struggle with concepts in mathematics. 

http://makingmathmatteronline.com/resources/math-make-and-take-activities/

http://educore.ascd.org/channels/9f4217a1-0b89-456b-8188-ee29fccf1441

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/common-core-math-elementary-resources-matt-davis

Celebrating Diversity

I grew up in a small town. Diversity was not a part of the fabric of our community. I grew up knowing that there was much about other cultures that I didn't understand or even know about, and I chose to move away from the community that I love and to relocate in a place where there was greater diversity.

It may sound like a sound bite, but diversity is our greatest strenth. It is truly amazing to think how different people from different cultural backgrounds have all found themselves drawn to the liberties, freedoms, and opportunities that this country offers its people. I am not hugely political or patriotic, however, I believe that people deserve the "certain unalienable rights" that our forefathers wrote about and I believe that the people referred to in the Declaration of Independence rmeans all people. 

Friday we celebrated International Day at my school. It was absolutely amazing to see students dressed in their traditional cultural dress. Parents and families brought in traditional dishes to share with students in the class so everyone could have a "taste" of the different cultures that we represent. Classes read stories, learned cultural dances, made different foods, played games, and shared history from around the world as they learned to truly celebrate the diversity that lives in my school. I was so proud to be the leader of a school where there is so much diversity and so many cultures represented.

Providing opportunities for students to share their stories is essential in giving them a voice. In this day and age when some people feel that their voice should matter more than others, it is important for us to remember that public education exists to provide access, opportunity, and a level playing field for all - that means that all people, from all kinds of diverse backgrounds. Look at these kids - don't they deserve the very best we can give them every, single day?