How did that happen? Now, there’s a common question asked by many who try to understand how an event or a situation or a set of events and situations came to be. In the weeks following Thanksgiving, one may ask “how did that happen?” when needing one more notch in the belt to hold up a pair of pants or a skirt. One looks for causes, usually something to point at, in order to explain the current condition. Some causes or reasons come easily to mind. Others are more difficult to divine.

Attribution is a concept used in psychology to explore the processes that we use to explain the causes of behavior or events or situations that we believe need explaining.

Explanatory attributions allow us, as best as we are able, to understand a particular problem that may have complex and complicated reasons. When we discuss attributing factors, we use logic and inference. We point directly to some attributes, like the extra helping of turkey and dressing and the double wedge of pumpkin pie and the late night bowl of left-over dressing on Thanksgiving day, when we step on the scale the following Sunday. “If only I had not eaten…” Some attributes are more difficult to point at. The fact that Uncle Pete and your grandfather and your father each had an endomorphic body shape, the stomach section of the body is wider than the hips, may lead us to an inference about our heredity and propensity for adding weight where it is difficult to lose. Whether through the use of logic or inference, we like to make causal statements and point at the attributes that lead us to our current conditions. Something or somebody must be the cause, perhaps the blame.

Public education is fertile ground for attribution. Johnny can’t read. There must be a cause. Algebra is difficult. There must be a cause. Student daily absenteeism from school increases as the student progresses through the grades. Of course, there is a cause. Children in the U.S. do not achieve the same as their international age peers on exams of reading, math and science. There must be a cause. Logical or inferential, there must be a cause.

In his Education Week Spotlight article, “Staff Development for Teachers Deemed Fragmented,” Stephen Sawchuk reports that “Although American teachers spend more time working in classrooms than do instructors in some of the top-performing European and Asian countries, U.S. students have scored in the middle of the pack on a number of prominent international exams in recent years.

That paradox appears to stem at least in part from a failing of the United States’ systems for supporting professional learning, concludes a new report released here last week. American teachers, it finds, are not given as many opportunities for on-the-job training as their international peers, and their effectiveness appears to suffer as a result.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/02/11/21development-2.h28.html

The finger is pointed. The “subsequent” mediocre achievement of Unites States children on international tests is attributed to the “antecedent” failure of our nation’s education systems to properly provide our teachers with effective professional development. Is this as good as pointing at the extra servings on Thanksgiving Day? Not quite, but let’s explore. There must be a cause.

What is professional development?

By definition, a professional is one whose work “relates to a job that requires special education, training or skill.” Consequently, professional development is the continuing education of a professional for the purpose of furthering the professional’s expertise in using the requisite knowledge, skills and processes of that profession. A somewhat circular statement, but it works.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional

To achieve an understanding of professional development for teachers one must find a comfortable chair and be patient. Professional development for teachers is one of those very large industries that lie just below the public radar. It does not receive the daily press of the health care industry or pharmaceutical industry or even the dairy products industry. But, it is LARGE and looming. Millions of dollars are spent annually on professional development for teachers. According to the Huffington Post, “The federal government gives local school districts more than $1 billion annually for training programs. New York City schools spent close to $100 million last year just on private consultants.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/improving-teachers-millio_n_1568103.html

So, what is professional development for a teacher? A scan of Education Week’s Professional Development Directory displays 38 categories of PD topics and within each category scores of listings. For example, under the category of “Effective Teaching Strategies” there are 99 listings. From A to Z, Action Learning Systems, Inc to Zia Learning, Inc, a PD-seeker can find everything from national multi—day workshops to online courses for graduate credit to multi-media kits designed for a school faculty’s in-service program. There are courses to train teachers in the latest teaching strategies, principals in effective supervision and coaching models, and everyone in the use of computer-based technologies. The fact that there is so much PD on the market leads to consumer confusion regarding what the best continuing education to resolve a school’s or a teacher’s educational challenges might be. Caveat emptor!

http://pddirectory.edweek.org/search-companies-by-category/effective-teaching-strategies

If professional development is an attribute for internationally non-competitive, student achievement, what could turn PD from being a cause of mediocrity to a cause of improvement and success?

The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education sponsored the “Transforming Schooling and Teaching: Teacher Professional Series” project led by Linda Darling-Hammond. As reported by Sawchuk in his EdWeek article, “Ms. Darling-Hammond and her colleagues extensively reviewed the research literature on professional development. The review included a synthesis of results from those studies employing the most scientifically rigorous research methodologies.

That synthesis found that training programs of a certain duration—30 to 100 hours of time over six months to a year—positively influenced student achievement, while those with fewer than 14 hours had little effect.

The report’s authors also drew on qualitative research to outline common features of professional development that appear to be associated with changes in teacher practices. Such features include a sustained curriculum that is connected to teachers’ classroom practice, focuses on specific content, aligns with school improvement goals, and fosters collaboration among a school’s staff. Professional-development practices in some of the top-performing industrialized countries frequently align to such a research base, while those in the United States largely contradict it.”

Sawchuk also cited Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of the National Staff Development Council. “In the U.S., professional development is predominantly an individual enterprise focused on serving individuals rather than focusing on what students need.”

According to Darling-Hammond, “… no causal evidence exists to link other countries’ professional-development techniques directly to their scores on international tests, the alignment of those countries’ practices to the research “suggest[s] that there may be some connection between the opportunities for teacher development and the quality of teaching and learning that result.”

Sawchuk reported that Susan Sclafani, director of state services for the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington-based nonprofit group that promotes a tighter link between education and workforce development, noted that several of the top-performing countries have stricter front-end selection criteria for teachers, larger class sizes, and longer hours to facilitate on-site professional learning. The United States, in contrast, typically has lax entry standards and smaller classes, and the majority of teachers receive no more than 16 hours of training in their subject per year.

These could be new attributes for future success in causing children in the U.S. to improve their competitive status. More importantly, these could be new attributes for improved classroom instruction.

Professional development for teachers that is

• Related to the daily instructional/learning needs of the children they teach.

Until education runs out of things to test, let the “what gets tested gets taught” rule prevail. Today, this would be Common Core standards paired with college and career readiness knowledge, skills and problem-solving skills. PD should make a teacher an expert in understanding and interpreting the complexities of the Core standards and in the pedagogy for teaching these standards to all children. Being an expert is a good PD target.

Associated with “what gets tested gets taught” is “student readiness to learn.” If the teacher cannot address “readiness or unreadiness” issues, the student will not learn. PD should train teachers in the abilities to develop positive, educational relationships with each student.

Building instructional expertise and a capacity for interpersonal relationships are the elements that should drive the “what” of teacher PD.

• Customized for the teacher’s readiness to learn new professional knowledge, skills and  instructional/learning processes.

Why would we ignore what we know about teaching children when we teach adults? PD must be matched with the teacher’s current professional expertise (content, pedagogical skills, instructional/learning processes) and readiness to learn. Just as importantly, PD for a teacher must be personalized and customized for the teacher’s successful growth. If so, we can expect growth in learning. If not, why are we surprised when there is no change in professional expertise? Treating the elements of readiness is the “when” of PD and is essential for its success.

• Provided in a consistent and constant manner until the teacher demonstrates                competence in the new professional learning.

Every sound principle of sequential learning, pacing, transfer from prior learning, reinforcement, guided and independent practice, and monitored results must be incorporated in PD for teachers. This means that PD is a year-round, continuing education. Two-day workshops, monthly staff meetings, once-a-semester in-service days loaded with disjointed meetings, guest speakers, and stand-alone conferences do not meet the standards of best PD practice. They may be incorporated into a constant and consistent PD, but as disjointed events they only breed disinterest at best and an anti-PD attitude at worst. Segregated time on a weekly basis over many months is the ticket for success.

• Delivered close to the teacher, in clusters of educators facing similar    instructional/learning challenges, makes teacher participation reasonable and acceptable.

Massed meetings held at a centralized location that necessitate a teacher to prepare for substitute teacher, drive many miles to the meeting place, sit and get generalized information in a loosely assembled grouping of teachers for six hours, and then drive back home is a sure recipe for failed PD. A teacher will grow to resent time away from the classroom, especially time spent driving to and from a meeting of massed peers and generalized delivery. PD that assembles and clusters teachers with similar instructional/learning needs presenting a similar readiness to learn in a location near their home school clearly demonstrates an awareness and accommodation of what are otherwise distractors to the teacher’s professional learning. PD is not about meeting the logistical needs of the providers; PD is all about the learning teacher.

• Based upon the best practices of instruction.

The “science of teaching” should be best practice in PD for teachers. At the end of a semester’s work, no one gains if the teacher/learner has not learned. Hence, a Hunteresque lesson design with emphasis upon higher order learning and constant checking for understanding infuses very well into professional development for teachers. If this is the standard for assuring learning success for children, the design should be adapted to adult education.

• Designed with performance-based metrics to inform, reinforce and validate the teacher’s  new professional learning.

The metric of interest is how PD contributes to improved student learning and measured achievements. Part of the pre-PD design is to assay the status of student achievement. Part of the post-PD design is a second assessment of student achievement. The first purpose of professional development is to improve and extend a teacher’s professional expertise. The ultimate purpose of PD is to improve and extend student learning. Using classroom jargon, “if the assessment needle does not move in a significant, positive direction, there is a need for more but different PD. Time reteach until learning is successful.”

If our dissatisfaction with student learning performances causes us to point at the status of professional development for teachers, then we need to change the nature of that attribute. Making small adjustments through the selection of professional development on the national menu of PD will not turn the trick. The work of PD must be done differently and it is up to educational leadership to stipulate how a different PD looks and behaves. Then, if the subsequent conditions do not change as a result of different antecedents, point at the leaders.

Melanie Parma and Larry LePage, architects with Somerville, Inc, and I spoke at the 6th Annual Midwest Facility Masters Conference on November 14. Our presentation, “Discover the Twenty-First Century Learning Environment Within Your Existing Building,” illustrated how an existing school house can be transformed using the important concepts of security, storage, flexibility, and collaboration. Re-conceptualized classrooms, gyms, auditoriums, media/information centers, and pupil services centers in a 1950s building can function fully to support the designs of a 21st century educational center.

According to the 2010 census and the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 99,000 public schools in the United States. The average age was 42 years old. That means that more than half of our schools were constructed before 1968. In order to be more informative, the NCES sorts school buildings by functional age or the date of the last renovation to the main structure of the school house. Using this definition, the average age of America’s schools is 16 years. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/inc/displaytables_inc.asp

The difficulty for many older school houses is that they have been the subject of multiple renovations or additions. Like a person with organ transplants and/or synthetic joint replacements who says my kidneys are three years old, my right hip is eight years old, my knees are ten years old and the lenses in my eyes are six months old, age may seem interpretative but it really is a fixed number. And, by the way, my heart and lungs and brain and the rest of my body are 65 years old; like NCES schools, I am younger than my age.

My local school house is a K-12 school. It is an aggregate of an original gymnasium and three classrooms built in 1938, an elementary school that presents the front face of the school house and built in 1952, a high school addition built in 1976, two elementary wings and a middle school wing built in the 1980s, and a music wing built in 2005. The boilers, electrical and water/plumbing services are of the 1970s vintage. Most local community members are not able to attach a date to their local school but can approximate the most recent additions. Their perception is that the school is in good condition. Of course, their perspective derives from their experience as students in the school or as parents of children in the school; an historical perspective. Ms. Parma, Mr. LePage and I addressed age of a school from the perspective of future utility.

Security and access to the school currently is a non-negotiable issue for school architecture. The tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary is indelible and no school board wants to become a double victim of school violence; violent injury to children and/or school personnel, and, a perceived failure to take post-Sandy Hook security precautions. Most schools have weighed their vulnerability to a violent event and taken action to secure school doorways. Hardened vestibules and audio-visual surveillance are now the norm at most school buildings.

A 21st security system is physical and attitudinal. Parents bringing a forgotten lunch or picking up a child for a medical appointment or by a local banker coming to talk with high school business education students need reasonable access to the school house while the unknown and unanticipated visitor must be screened. Security being security, access for the first group above is shaping up to be a little different from access for the latter group. These concerns require physical changes to the school house and a public relations campaign to explain how reasonable and needed access by non-school folks can be facilitated.

A 21st security system also is infrastructural. Safety procedures extend to food, water and air safety and protective systems. New procedures also extend to the school’s Internet and Wifi systems. From the vantage point of school safety, the entry and exit of every person, every supply, and every service becomes a new concern. In-school and community discussion of these concerns is the beginning point of institutionalized change. Interestingly, a concern need not become a dollar sign when attitude and information can change behavior.

In every discussion, in-school storage is one of the most common needs of all staff members from teacher to administrator to custodian to food service to bus drivers. No one has enough storage. We often perceive that a 21st century education will utilize digital information and should reduce the volume of books and paper supplies. While this is partially true, the emphasis of reform education on real life problem solving has made learning “stuff rich.” Real life problems require access to real life things and when complex problems are contemplated the quantity of stuff multiplies. Additionally, mobility has moved school supplies from the classroom student desk and shelf to the student back pack. Traditional hallway lockers and under-the-chair book bins are too small. Learning centers are organized on carts as are classroom laptops. Storage areas have begun to look like garages for classroom carts, some of which are needed daily and others are needed for instruction in October only. Conceptually, storage can go horizontal or vertical, on-site and off-site, real or virtual. Planners for a 21st century learning environment will exploit all of these opti0ns to assure that a 20th century classroom functions successfully in this century.

The need and accountability for spatial flexibility is heightened in 21st century school houses. All school departments are called upon to increase productivity while holding or diminishing operational costs. Multiple purpose rooms in a school have become physical “gold.” Whereas, in the early 1950s the construction of a school auditorium or a cafeteria or a rehearsal room may have received easy approval, school rooms or spaces that are used only a fraction of the school day are not acceptable today. Rooms that can double as lunch rooms and community rooms and study halls are needed. Renovations that install partitions and interchangeable seating and variable lighting are very good financial investments.

Flexible usage necessitates flexible structure and infrastructure. 21st learning uses an increasing number of electrical devices. These need electrical power. Power either is made pervasive through extended wiring service or portable with available battery exchanges. 21st learning requires grouping and regrouping of students and teachers. Large group spaces. Small group spaces. Conference rooms. Individual work spaces. All spaces must have access to power and computer servers. Also, 21st century learning is messy. Students engaged in complex and complicated problems need space for spreading out, organizing, analyzing, assembling and presenting their conclusions. Walls with whiteboards, conference table tops that can withstand tape and markers, and floors that can withstand debris and messiness are needed. Attitudinally flexible maintenance and custodial staff are essential now more than ever before.

The last 21st century learning environmental issue we addressed, collaborative processes, is almost anti-facility. In the hypothetical, collaborative learning requires near-spontaneous and simultaneous access of learner to learner, learner to teacher/mentor, and learner to learning information or material. In the hypothetical, a student with a laptop or tablet and cell phone could access any other student or teacher or community resource or higher education or real-world resource and collaboratively to engage in their needed learning experiences.

In real time, collaborative processes optimize a student’s access to teachers, mentors, other students and learning resources in or near to the physical environment of the school. For the facility master, the learning environment begins to resemble an open spaces center with minimized walls and barriers between students and teachers who are organized in subject-specific classes. For example, students in a social studies class examining the politics of global warming could have reasonable physical access to a science class investigating changing weather patterns and a math class learning about statistical models. Collaborative learning is optimized when students in these three disciplines can easily share instruction and study and conclusions. And, teachers of one discipline can engage students in another discipline whose learning needs at that moment require more than one teacher. Not hypothetically, fixed walls and corridors are barriers to optimal collaboration.

Additionally, collaborative learning environments may encompass aspects of security, storage and flexibility. Taken to an extreme, collaborative learning environments also may make the school house obsolete as learning in this context can take place almost anywhere anytime.

The NCES definition of the functional age of a school may require rethinking. The new definition must be in the context of a 21st century learning environment. Using this definition, it is probable that schools renovated even sixteen years ago now face outdated operability. It is probable that only 32 percent of all schools, those with original construction of less than five years present a 21st century learning environment. With clear insights into the differences between 20th and 21st century learning needs, older school houses can be made young again.

A parent recently asked me, “Which of the reading programs being used in the county will best teach my daughter to read? As a retired superintendent and elementary school principal, you know what is good and bad about reading programs? Which school will do the best job of teaching my little girl to read?”

In the new era of parental choice, this young mother was doing exactly what school choice wants her to do. She was investigating the educational options available in order to choose the best school for her child. But, what should inform her choice?

To paraphrase Dickens, this was “the best of questions and the worst of questions.” Finding the best reading program has been public education’s never ending quest for more than a century. In many school districts, the search for “the” best reading program results in the adoption of the “next” best program every eight to ten years or whenever a drop in state or local reading achievement data causes politicians and pundits to ask “why Johnny can’t read.” Most schools and school districts change reading programs as often as they change high school football uniforms – programs and uniforms change frequently and each new design is meant to look like a reading program or a uniform that is successful somewhere else.

So, what question(s) should help to formulate an answer for this earnest parent? Is this a question about the quality of a school or the quality of a teacher or the quality of a reading curriculum? School, teacher and curriculum each are part of the answer.

Reading programs are complex because they have floating variables. There is the reading curriculum – the collection of reading materials, the embedded instruction of reading skills, and the sequencing of when students are challenged with reading materials and skills that cause individual student growth in reading. There are the teachers at each grade level and their various levels of instructional expertise. There is the degree of school focus on reading within the context of all of the school curricula. There is the support for reading that each child has at home – this can make a significant yet difficult to assess difference in annual reading growth.

Douglas Barnard and Robert Hetzel examined more than seventy reading programs used in early and upper elementary education. (Selecting a Basal Reading Program: Making the Right Choice, Douglas Barnard and Robert Hetzel, R & L Education, 1989.) Their study found three persistent elements that exist in effective reading programs. Although their study is not almost 25 years old, I find their results to be persistent. These are:

1. All of the beginning reading programs found to be effective or promising in qualifying experiments have a strong focus on teaching phonics and phonemic awareness. However, an emphasis on phonics did not guarantee positive effects. It clearly matters a great deal how reading is taught, and an emphasis on phonics may be necessary but it is not sufficient to ensure meaningful reading gains.

2. Successful programs almost always provide teachers with extensive professional development and follow-up focused on specific teaching methods.

3.  The research supports the use of well-developed programs that integrate curriculum, pedagogy, and extensive professional development.

This helps. I want this inquiring parent to examine the amount of time the school dedicates to early reading instruction in grades 4K, kindergarten and first grade and in the primary years of second and third grade. She should look for at least 90 minutes dedicated every day to reading and 90 minutes dedicated to English/language arts instruction. The commitment of time is highly indicative of district commitment because instructional time in the school day is finite and highly competitive. If reading and literacy receive three hours every day, the school is committed to teaching students to read.

This parent should be able to see a commitment to phonics and phonemic awareness in the first three years of school. She may say, “but I don’t know what phonics is,” and I will tell her that she does. She should see and hear consistent and explicit instruction in how letters of the alphabet are linked to sounds or phonemes to cause the child to form letter-sound correspondence and spelling patterns and to apply this knowledge to reading. Phonics and phoneme awareness should be happening every day and across the grade levels.

Balanced with phonics, the parent should be able to see that each child has a wide variety of reading materials that are examined and used daily. And, that the teacher and children talk a lot about vocabulary and what words mean in the context of these different reading materials. The talk about language should include student-to-student talk as children work to create their understanding of what words can mean in the different ways they are used. Best programs in reading instruction include student collaborative activities.

Lastly, this parent should be able to observe that each teacher spends time frequently dedicated to the professional development of reading instruction. For too many decades, a teacher with ten years of teaching experience had as much continuing education in reading in her tenth year as a first-year teacher. School districts believed that undergraduate training in reading was good enough – it is not. If the school district is not investing continuously in professional development in reading instruction, it is not a school district for this inquiring parent.

In 1978, Shirley Jackson raised criterion-based questions about reading programs and her inquiries remain perfectly valid today. In “The Quest for Reading Programs That Work” (http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_197812_jackson.pdf) Ms. Jackson asked many questions, but the most significant question was “which program is most successful in causing all children to make annual growth in reading.” Some children enter school as readers and others are ready to read, but there also are children who have not received any preparation for reading. School data should indicate that all children, including children receiving special education and ELL instruction, those from impoverished homes, and those with other socio-economic distractors, achieve the school’s goals for annual growth in reading.

Having thought through these questions and examined what I knew about each school’s commitment of in-school time and to professional development to reading instruction and what I knew about school achievement data, I told my inquiring parent which school I would recommend for her daughter. I also told her why I would choose that school. Most importantly, I helped her to understand what to look for in subsequent years to assure that this school remained her choice. If reading instruction is her criteria for choosing a school, and there can be many valid reasons for choosing a school, then she should examine reading achievement in that school over time to assure that an informed choice remains an informed choice. This is what school choice should be about.

Read Jennie Magiera’s words aloud and imagine they are your words.

“Differentiated. Relevant. Engaging. These are all words used to describe quality instruction. Yet how ironic is it that they so rarely describe the professional development of teachers. Most of the time we are talked at for several hours on a Saturday morning, or in the afternoon after a long day in the classroom, with nothing to engage us but a conciliatory bowl of candy. This would not stand in our classrooms, so why does it with teacher PD?”

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_ahead/2012/05/the_bionic_pd_half_live_-_half_digital.html

Weren’t you about to say the same things as Ms. Magiera? Too often, professional development for classroom teachers is not a best practices event, but demonstrates an expectation that “do as I say, not as I do” is good enough for educators who know better. This is hypocrisy personified.

Ms. Magiera makes a compelling argument for “bionic PD.” She exemplifies a generation of teachers who use social media, on-demand digital information, and continuous and spontaneous interactive communications to share thoughts with their peers. She values real as well as virtual “in-person interactions” through which she can actively engage in advancing her personal learning.

“So what I propose is for districts to consider a hybrid approach: a differentiated, relevant, and engaging live PD to whet teachers’ curiosities and ignite their passions, then an online platform for teachers to continue to learn and pursue their new thirst for knowledge.”

So, what might this look like.

Differentiated professional development should acknowledge that each adult learner has similarities to each child learner in a classroom; each will respond positively to quality instruction. Best practice does not treat all learners the same. We do not lecture large groups of K-12 students in a sterile environment expecting each child to develop her own connections to the presentation. Differentiated PD connects with , creates professional learning communities, and treats each community effectively.

Relevant PD assesses the needs of each professional relative to the goals of the organization and builds an extended design for each learner. Best practice instruction blends readiness to learn with required to learn.

Fisher and Frey write about the gradual release of responsibility for learning. Like a classroom teacher, the professional has a responsibility to teach not just to present. At the same time, teacher/learners have a responsibility to engage with the PDer making a commitment to integrate and apply what they learn.

http://www.glencoe.com/glencoe_research/Jamestown/gradual_release_of_responsibility.pdf

The release of responsibility for learning looks like this.

https://www.mheonline.com/_treasures/pdf/douglas_fisher.pdf

Effective professional development is not about telling learners what they should know, accepting applause at the end of the session, and sending learners back to their work place to make progress independently. Effective PD assumes initial responsibility for instruction/learning and assists the professional learner to responsibly use and integrate new learning. As the Fischer and Frey models are being applied to student instructional practices related to the Common Core Standards, does it not make sense that it also should be applied to PD for teachers learning to teach the Core?

And, the concept of a professional meeting should be completely rethought. A PD meeting(s) that is about causing professionals to develop would:

1. Provide professional learners with the meeting objectives and all information that would be non-interpretatively presented at the meeting prior to the meeting. Information should be shared digitally and through social media. Learners can profitably ingest this material before attending the meeting.

2. Use the meeting for an interactive discussion of

a. what does the information mean and

b. why does the information matter.

Use professional learning communities within the meeting to raise and answer questions that clarify learners’ understandings of “meaning and matter.”

3. After the meeting, use social media to share the escalating understanding and application of presented and shared information among members of a PLC and between PLCs.

 4. Assertively push for mastery of professional learning. If the goal of professional development is not mastery, then the goal is not worth a professional’s time.

The reform of K-12 education should be paralleled by a re-development of the professional training required for those reforms.

When educational reform is in the air, some organizations make strong, positive adjustments and others spin their wheels in the bog of indecision. Teach For America has read the wind and is making the right adjustments so that TFA teachers are able to cause children to succeed in a performance-based world that demands increased academic performance. Teach for America infuses growth modeling into its teacher preparation and teacher supervision practices and is moving the metrics of student learning.

Growth models for improving student learning are a significant tool for planning, monitoring and evaluating the cause and effect relationships between instruction and learning, according to a Pearson white paper. Growth models

• “conceptually align well with one of the fundamental goals of education – student learning,

• provide richer information on student learning than a single score at one point in time because they connect scores from multiple assessments, and

• focus on the educational development of individual students.”

http://www.pearsonassessments.com/hai/Images/tmrs/Student_Growth_WP_083111_FINAL.pdf

A general rule states that if you always do what you always have done, you only will get more of what you always have gotten. Educational reforms demand improvements in student learning achievement. Improvements typically are not achieved through typical and usual efforts, but require commitment to and intentional execution of actions focused on desired results. Getting schools and school districts to adopt new strategies has not been easy.

“Since 2005, 15 states have been approved (by the US Department of Education) to implement a growth model pilot. The states adopted one of four distinct models—Trajectory, Transition Tables, Student Growth Percentiles, and Projection—each with some drawbacks,” reports the American Institute for Research in their study of the effects of the No Child Left Behind legislation. The report says that each model has drawbacks as well as virtues. However, the data derived from these pilots have become bogged with comparisons of incomparable models, a federal definition of school proficiency based upon the percentage of students passing a single test, the inadequacy of state tests, the inadequacy of state academic standards, and the politicization of public knowledge of a teacher’s record in causing assigned students to achieve proficiency on state tests. The result is a general understanding that growth modeling can validate changes in educational achievement if policymakers can settle upon a clean set of rules. In the absence of correlated policy and program, individual organizations have had to find their own way forward.

http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/GrowthModelsAndAccountability_Release%20.pdf

“Teach For America now unabashedly defines effectiveness in terms of how its teachers’ students perform. All corps members are expected to reach at least one of these goals: move student learning forward by 1.5 grade levels, close achievement gaps by 20 percent, or ensure that 80 percent of students have met grade-level standards.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/09/11/03tfa_ep.h29.html

Taken separately, the TFA expectations for what quality teaching should do are wholly aligned with most school district goals.

1. Moving student learning forward by 1.5 grade levels understands that typical regression from the previous summer vacation means that a gross growth of 1.5 grade levels per school year nets at about 1.0 grade levels of growth. Setting the metric for growth in student learning at 1.5 years fits into the reality of a child’s educational experience.

2. In addition, past learning achievement has not moved most children forward at 1.0 grade levels per school year. In fact, by the time most children reach sixth grade their tested achievement levels typically are still in the fourth grade. By the time children reach tenth grade, their tested achievement levels are still in the middle of middle school. Setting the metric for growth in student learning at 1.5 can counterbalance underachievement in prior school years.

3. Achievement gaps are closed over time by combining growth models instruction with instruction that strengthens vocabulary, background information, and developmental skills sets. This is not accomplished in a single school year or, in fact in several. Achievement gaps that derive from learning disabilities, non-English backgrounds, and poverty and its educational distractions require many years of consistent and constant work.

4. In combination with 1 – 3, ensuring that 80 percent of children successfully can perform grade-level standards keeps a forward instructional press for quality instruction. To restate this TFA expectation, at least 80 percent of children in a grade level will be able to successful perform all of the learning standards relevant to that grade level.

The Teaching for Leadership Comprehensive Rubric combines many aspects of the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching. Dr. Danielson is a nationally-recognized leader in identifying and validating effective instructional practices of classroom teachers. Many school districts have adopted the Danielson Framework in their professional development programs. TFA moves beyond teacher knowledge of effective teaching practices to evaluating teachers on student learning growth based upon quality teaching practices.

http://www.teachingasleadership.org/sites/default/files/TAL.Comprehensive.Rubric.FINAL.pdf

http://www.danielsongroup.org/userfiles/files/downloads/2013EvaluationInstrument.pdf

The TFA improvement strategy will not immediately reverse the history of under- or poorly-achieving schools. As Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of the National Staff Development Council, states “If you build the strongest possible induction model for people that come with this background, and equip them with the technology of teaching, will that help individuals improve? Yes, and I think TFA shows evidence of that.” TFA assures that teachers trained under its design have the skills to be effective teachers, but TFA does not address the professional development of veteran teachers. TFA leadership believes that, “Ultimately, our schools and districts should be taking that on.”

The common denominator in developing educational accountability systems is an annual measurement of student learning growth. Teach For America is demonstrating that criterioned-teaching focused upon criterioned-learning growth is a very viable strategy for causing improvements in student learning.