When veteran PK-12 teachers consider how to best instruct the children in their classrooms, what influences that critical decision? Do they give primary value to the teaching/learning theories they learned in their teacher preparation and post-graduate programs? Do they implement the school policies and instructional initiatives of their school district? Do they adopt the hot button interventions that seemingly rise for every school crisis. How teachers decide to teach and the rationales for their choices make a difference not only in how teachers teach but also in how children learn.
Reality tells us that local school policies and governmental mandates form a teacher’s working conditions and these conditions shape daily work for classroom teachers. In the post-pandemic era, school boards have been highly active in revising and creating policies on district curriculum, student academic achievements, and student wellness. As lay leaders, board members respond to assessments, parents, and their community. They tend to perseverate on generalized data without drilling into local and disaggregated data. And board members universally lack foundational philosophical and theoretical working knowledge that should underlie educational decisions. This is not fault finding, just descriptive analysis. I am a retired school superintendent who also served as school board president.
Given the above, it is essential that professionally trained educators – teachers and administrators – provide their school district with the philosophical and theoretical foundations that ensure pedagogical and developmental appropriateness are embedded in solutions for academic and socio-emotional problems.
What do we know?
George Lucas tells us that “Your focus determines your reality.” When so many children are underperforming academically and are in socio-emotional distress, it is easy to focus on the here and now and that is what happens in school board meetings. Here and now focuses on existing problems by providing instructional remediation, services for the afflicted, and adopting rules and regulations to guard against repetition. Parents and community want to see action – something done now. A focus on immediate and direct responses, band aids though they may be, generally pleases constituents. When data says there is a problem, responses tend to focus on changing/improving the data. Action and quick response can be a focus and can be a wrong focus.
When I look at the number displayed on my bathroom scale each morning, I am presented with two different ways to focus on reducing that number. The first way, the one I usually choose, is fasting for two days and doing two-a-day routines on the elliptical. An immediate reduction of caloric intake and increase in calorie burn off lowers the numbers on the scale. If I repeat this routine every week for two months, I can really move the numbers. This is the same type of focus I see in too many school reactions to unsatisfactory data. Do something that is very visible now, repeat it over the short haul, and publish better data.
If I chart the numbers on my scale over several years, I can point out the months when I fasted and exercised and the months when I did not. However, I have known all along that this regimen is not healthy. It only moves the daily data. I can hear the old knight in Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, tell me “You did not choose wisely.” And I know he is right.
We need to focus educationally on the soundness of our programming before we decide that the data we see is bad data. In fact, we may be seeing the data we should expect given the construction of our programs. Our programs may be working very well to give us the results we see because this is appropriate data for poorly aligned programming. My weight, though I may not like it, is my weight given the decisions I make.
What to do?
Focus on the through-line of practices that produce quality outcomes.
The disconnect between educational training and everyday teaching practice is not new. There is very little incentive for a teacher to tell the children doing her math assignments that she consistently compares her teaching with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to ensure she always follows the highest professional standards. Or that “Today our learning objectives are at Bloom’s first two levels, remembering and understanding. Next week your learning will be at his application level.”
However, when focusing on the through-line of teaching practices that cause quality learning, there is every incentive for declaring the educational theories and principles of an instructional program and how those theories and principles are consistently developed in daily practice.
Examples look like these –
One should expect that EC/PK programs are aligned with national early childhood education standards (NAEYC), demonstrate an understanding of Piaget and child development, incorporate Montessori-like designs, are play-based, and emphasize socialization as well as pre-academic curriculum. These should not be assumed but should be a published and highlighted through-line for every child. EC/PK teachers should tell parents about the theories and principles that are foundations in their children’s daily schooling. EC/PK programs aligned on this through-line begin to see student performance data aligned with program expectations. Programs aligned with valid principles see data resulting from best practices. There always may be room for improvement, but there are no end-of-year comments of “We never expected that data.”
One should expect a K-12 mathematics curriculum to teach and require children to demonstrate understanding of and proficiency with each grade level of mathematics before progressing to the next level or course. Two realities exist for students in K-12 mathematics. First, math is not easy for all children, but all children can learn mathematics. Second, the “math wall” is not due to harder concepts in upper-level math but to the failure to master predecessor content, procedures, and reasoning. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, Ausubel’s development of predecessor knowledge, Vygotsky’s principles of proximal learning, theories of retention and transfer, and best practices of explicit teaching tell us these two realities are true.
The reality behind our students’ dismal performance on NAEP and international assessments is that children in our schools get passing grades without mastering developmental mathematics. The theory and principle-based through-line for mathematics must be theory and principle-based instruction AND mastery of content and procedures. Children cannot advance to the next level with demonstrative deficiencies in their predecessor understandings and skills. If they do advance, we should be pleased that the data resulting from their poor assessments correlate directly with the quality of our teaching.
One should expect all K-12 teachers to be versed in child and adolescent development, be proficient in identifying and responding to a child’s own aberrant behaviors and aberrant behaviors directed at other children. Bullying and harassment are real, just like a child who says 2 + 2 + 5. And they need to be corrected and repaired just like an academic error. Teachers who know and talk about principles and practices of logical consequences, assertive discipline, restorative justice, discipline with dignity and special needs programming of PBIS are prepared to deal with bullying and harassment when they encounter or are informed about it.
The Big Duh!
To paraphrase a line from the movie, The American President, “We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.” In a nutshell, the problem is not the data resulting from student assessments. The problem is that we expect better data without fixing the breakdowns in our teaching an learning. The data is accurate given our disconnected instruction.
When we align foundational teaching and learning theories, principles, and practices as a through-line in student learning, we will see improved data because it results from connected instruction.