Massachusetts Technology Leadership Consortium

By Jeff Nelsen and Amalia Cudeiro, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)

The following paper was written in support of the curriculum for the Principals' Advanced Leadership Institute, which was held during the summer of 2000. The purpose of the paper was to go a little deeper on some of the institute topics, and the material has been organized to reflect areas of interest expressed by participants during the institute. You can learn more about the authors by visiting their online bios. ( Jeff Nelsen / Amalia Cudeiro )

Creating an Instructional Focus:
How do you start the process of change? What was the first thing you did with your staff? What was the make-up of your different schools? What were some of your district strategies for increasing student achievement?

Designing Intensive Professional Development:
How were you able to get into the classroom 50% of the time with all of the responsibilities of being a principal? (How did you structure your day as a leader?) What effective, ongoing staff development programs are out there and what works?

Aligning Resources (Time-People-Money):
Did you implement significant organizational changes? How did you include parents and community members in the process? Did you receive any additional resources? How was technology used to address the above topics? What district support systems were in place?

Implementing an Internal Accountability Plan:
How did you effectively communicate other indicators of student achievement to the public so that they were valued as much as standardized test data?

We have tried to address your questions while describing as many specific examples as we can to illustrate the strong work we have seen concerning each of these topics. After you have a chance to read this, we'll be available to communicate online for the next two weeks. We hope this reading and our availability online will allow us to deepen the conversation even further and to individualize the coaching you may want concerning issues specific to your schools.

How do you start the process of change? What was the first thing you did with your staff? What was the make-up of your different schools? What were some of your district strategies for increasing student achievement?

Together, we have been administrators at eight different schools. Each of those schools qualifies as an urban/suburban example. Each is very diverse in language, ethnicity, and socioeconomic levels. Each showed dramatic improvement, and each developed into very different looking designs. One of the things that we have discovered about many high performing or rapidly improving schools is that they have found a way to focus their efforts - they do not try to do everything all at once. In our schools, this started with a conversation that acknowledged that current practice was not accomplishing what it needed to accomplish. This conversation was usually informed by student performance data from standardized test scores or local assessments or both. We strongly recommend some structured process for this that encourages objective reflection rather than defensive reaction to this type of data - something similar to the Red Flag process we shared with you at the Institute. It needs to be something that puts the emphasis on continuous improvement rather than blame for the current conditions. Getting to a focus took longer at some of our schools than others, but it always took at least a few months. After looking at data, it was important for schools to take time to talk about what was most important for all students to know and be able to do when they left our school.

One very important part of this conversation was often centered around our expectations for students. Do we really all believe that ALL of these kids can learn everything we're trying to teach them? Jeff Howard's work on The Social Construct of Intelligence at the Efficacy Institute in Cambridge, MA is a great way to deepen a faculty's thinking and stimulate some exciting conversations - remember "Problems are our friends" - the only way we can deal with tense issues is to put them out on the table in plain view and begin to talk about them. A powerful tool in helping teachers see what "these kids" are capable of - whoever "these kids" is -- is to find a high performing school with a similar population to yours and go visit. We have seen this be so powerful that it completely turned a reluctant faculty around and got them all excited about the possibilities. It's great when the whole faculty can get out and see how other schools work, but it can have strong impact even when it's just the leadership team that goes at first. The National Middle Grades Forum has identified a number of schools around the country as "School to Watch," the Disney Learning Partnership selects a "Spotlight School" each year, Blue Ribbon Schools are often receptive to visits, local universities can often help with referrals, and the Internet offers enormous potential for selecting a visitation site.

Part of the value of narrowing your focus is that it allows you to see that your own students are capable of high performance as well. When this happens in one area it goes a long way toward raising everyone's expectations for them in other areas, too.

You are most likely to get buy in from teachers when two conditions are met: they can see some benefit to themselves in the change, and they have a say in shaping the change. Some of the benefits of collaboration teams at our schools included: getting help with challenging students, sharing assignments can reduce preparation time, collaboration teams can become a very meaningful form of PD - replacing boring presentations, collaboration teams enhance an individual teacher's sense of professionalism - you can probably think of a number benefits that fit your teachers' situation with whatever innovation you are implementing. The quickest way to kill buy in is if teachers see it as an add-on . We needed to give careful thought to what a new program is going to replace - what will we stop doing to make room for what we are starting to do? These collaborative conversations were held during faculty meetings and professional development times as well as during team time. This allowed us to group teachers across grade levels or disciplines and expand the perspective of the group. It's very easy to develop tunnel vision when all you see is your own classroom or your own grade level or content area, yet to be most effective, a faculty needs to be able to view their individual roles as leaders within the larger school.

When teachers meet, they need to have a structured protocol for their time. It's best to have the meetings facilitated by someone not on the team at first, spending time to debrief the strategies the facilitator used, so that team members will be able to assume facilitation of their own groups after four or five meetings. We also used the roles of recorder and timekeeper. The Annenberg web site describes nine different protocols that schools use and has links to other web sites that provide additional background on them. We met with our teacher collaboration teams most of the time, but acted as a participant. It was a great way to keep the information flow going, and to resolve issues quickly when they came up. Principals often don't realize how much more information they have than classroom teachers, and it is crucial to find ways to share what we know. One important way to help teachers value these sessions is to be sure to follow up on decisions and recommendations made during their time together. Lots of schools have a designated spot where teams post their minutes after each meeting . That way other teams know what was discussed and can join in on recommendations or share strategies and resources that they have discussed in their meetings. If the principal attends the meetings or at least reads the minutes of each meeting s/he can make fulfilling the requests and recommendations a priority - with the goal to have everything accomplished - or at least provide an update report of the status of each issue - before the next meeting. Nothing communicates the importance you place on these meetings more strongly than your follow through. It doesn't necessarily mean they get everything they ask for, but they get a response and an opportunity to dialogue about anything that they suggest will improve their teaching and their students' learning. Teachers then "own" the incremental improvements that they have participated in shaping, and the new practices are much more likely to become "the way we do things around here."

How were you able to get into the classroom 50% of the time with all of the responsibilities of being a principal? (How did you structure your day as a leader?) What effective, ongoing staff development programs are out there and what works?

Strong professional development is whole school, site-based, ongoing - at least 6 times per year - with practice, coaching and demo lessons between each input session. It also includes continuous circulation of articles, with all activities and articles relating to a clear schoolwide focus. A strong plan involves specifying a way to build expertise - as described above, and also ways to assure change in practice actually happens in the classrooms, assess affect on student learning, and a strategy for involving the school's leadership team in reviewing the impact and making changes to the plan as needed during the course of the year. The best way to be sure change is actually happening in classroom instructional practice, is for teachers to know that people will be coming in and out of their classrooms frequently to observe the new practices. It is essential that the principal be a part of this; teachers know what you value by how you spend your time. If they know you are going to be in and out often, looking for evidence of the new practices, they are much more likely to begin using them - especially if it's clear that we are all experimenting with the strategies and you are there to help them - not as their evaluator. Teachers are also less threatened when they know exactly what you will be looking for when you visit - the new practice the way you all learned it. This is why it's important for them to see you receiving the training with them and even practicing the new approaches in different classrooms in order to build your own expertise.

We realized quickly, however, that the principal should not be the only person going into classrooms to observe. It is important that you find ways for the teachers themselves to be able to observe each other implementing new practice. One rule of thumb we have used is that every person on staff who is not a classroom teacher is expected to take over classrooms for teachers at least 2 hours per week - usually in half hour increments - so all teachers can spend at least 30 minutes per week observing other teachers. When we talk about the principal being in classrooms 50% of each day, this is one of the ways we suggest the principal spend that time - taking over for teachers to observe. The principal and specialists in the area of your focus (the Reading Teacher if your focus is literacy) should also be in classrooms doing demonstration lessons and team teaching as teachers try out new strategies.

50% of each day may seem unrealistic to you at first, but it is actually quite doable, and lots of principals have found ways to make it happen. You don't need to start with that much, though. It's ok to start slowly - an hour and a half or two hours per day at first. Either way, be sure to inform the teachers, the community, the central office - about what you are doing and why. They need to know in advance why they can't find you at their convenience. It's also crucial that you don't do unnecessary paperwork - delegate when you can, wait for the 3rd phone call on some of it, work with other principals to help your central office find other ways to get the information they need from some other source. This can not be an add on for you - it is too important. It must replace business as usual, and become a new fundamental role. If you need to change the contract for teachers or administrators to be able to do this start working on it with your colleagues now, so that you can begin this new role as soon as possible.

One change that many administrators need to make to be able to be in classrooms so much, is how the discipline is handled. Schools that have minimal discipline issues combine a set of clear, schoolwide expectations and engaging instructional practice. Students must see that teachers have authority, too, and students should not see the principal for behavioral infractions until teachers have handled several steps themselves first - including contacting parents. One school saw a sharp decline in discipline issues when they combined a new student-centered curriculum with a specific behavior plan that included putting phones in each classroom (you can only call out during the school day - no incoming call interruptions). Teachers were expected to call at least three families each afternoon to leave positive messages, as well as messages concerning any students who needed to improve. We could not continue to be seen as THE disciplinarian for the school. We focused on improving the instructional program to improve student behavior. We have always had no tolerance - automatic suspension - for fighting of any kind or directly defying authority. Coupled with a caring explanation to student and parent that we are doing this to improve the learning of the student - not as punishment - fights and defiance became almost non-existent at each of our schools.

Did you implement significant organizational changes? How did you include parents and community members in the process? Did you receive any additional resources? How was technology used to address the above topics? What district support systems were in place?

First, we spent a lot of time identifying with our faculty and community what was most important for our kids to know and be able to do. When we were clear on our focus, it was easier to decide how to use our resources, i.e. time, people, and money. We committed at least half of our instructional time to the focus - embedding other content areas into that instructional time - at least symbolically. We used all non-classroom personnel as support for instruction in the focus. We usually converted some positions that were having less impact on our focus (aides, clerical, some specialists) into funding for professional development or changed the job descriptions to increase their impact on our focus area. We stopped doing pull-out programs - they just don't work in most situations - and provided support in classrooms to assure high quality teaching. We paired SPED and regular teachers together whenever possible, we implemented looping and multi-age classrooms so teachers were with the same students for several years (a research-based move that we feel had tremendous positive impact), and we provided teachers with training, time, and resources to dramatically modify the curriculum and instruction we delivered, so that it was much more individualized and centered on active learning and deep understanding. We have also seen some schools put specialists back into their own classrooms to reduce class size at certain grade levels or in certain subject areas. Some of our schools looked very different after we had been at them for a year or two, but all of the changes were arrived at collaboratively, based on extended dialogue, research, and experimentation.

Much of what we did was done with existing resources. Amalia was able to move ahead her school's focus on critical thinking via Science and Technology much more quickly after receiving a competitive grant for computers and staff development. Jeff saw his resources in Title 1 dwindle from $350,000 to only $18,000 as more and more students began testing at grade level. We have found that it's not usually about getting more resources, as much as about re-aligning the resources a school already has.

One such resource is parents. We believe parent involvement is essential for students to achieve at their highest level, so we found ways to assure that every parent was involved, and their students knew how. To do this we had to redefine the term "parent involvement" and we had to meet the parents where they were first. Amalia visited her families at home to help them see how important their involvement was. Jeff's schools had "mandatory" parent involvement contracts that gave parents options for involvement before school, during school, at home or at school, after school, evenings, and during weekends. They were also expected to assure that each student did at least an hour of homework - practicing what they already know how to do - each evening, and to be sure their child was "ready to learn" - physically, emotionally, and psychologically - each day. We also invited parents to our professional development activities, so they would know what we were learning to do and why, and we used monthly evening meetings as interactive learning opportunities for students and parents - not as opportunities for them to come listen to us talk. Jeff's schools had Family Fun Nights - 1 per month - that each focused on a different curriculum area. The teacher experts for each area would plan interactive centers that embedded content into their literacy focus. The experts would share these centers at a faculty meeting - along with all materials necessary - and each class would do the centers with the students on the afternoon of the Family Fun Night. After a half hour of dessert pot luck, parents and students would go to their classrooms and students would help their parents with the activities at the centers - explaining what they were learning. This proved to be an invaluable strategy for building support with parents as we implemented some new - and potentially confusing - instructional practices (such as manipulatives in math, activity-based science, whole language approaches in reading). Another school we have worked with saw it's parent involvement and support soar after they implemented a program of meeting with parents on Saturday mornings once per quarter for "teacher listening" sessions. The teachers would use a half day professional development block and go home early. They would exchange that for coming in to school on a Saturday morning, when parents were more available. They provided breakfast for families (donated by a local Burger King), activities for children (supervised by local recreation department) and met with parents in their childrens' classrooms. Each teacher asked two questions: What is working well for your child in this classroom? and What do you think would help your child learn more in this classroom? Teachers were not to answer or defend parent concerns or suggestions, just to listen closely and chart their suggestions and concerns. The parents were told that the teachers would meet together to share their charts and create ways to implement changes to improve the learning environment wherever possible. They went from having 10 or 12 parents attend their "parent meetings" to having more than 80% attend the Saturday morning sessions.

How did you effectively communicate your other indicators of student achievement to the public so that they are valued as much as standardized test data?

When you have a clear focus, and you channel all resources and energy toward that focus, you will see improvement in student learning if you have a consistent way to monitor student performance. We have found that many schools have such data available but don't collect it, organize it, and publicize it. We have used a variety of assessments at our schools - Running Record, Scholastic Reading Inventory, Developmental Reading Assessment, schoolwide writing prompts utilizing site-based rubrics, end of unit tests from texts, teacher-made tests, criterion-referenced tests, and standardized, norm-referenced tests. There are lots of assessment options available - the important thing is to find one that measures student performance in your area of focus that you can give to students every 6 to 8 weeks so you can track progress throughout the year.

At our schools, we stressed the need to monitor each student in our area of focus, and to collect data about their progress so teams of teachers and the principal could sit together and discuss how to get even more progress - especially from any students who continued to be below grade level. We were then able to celebrate our success shamelessly and publicize it as often as possible.

Jeff always had a PTA volunteer position for PR. This person's job was to get at least one positive report about our school into the local newspaper each week. The position was handled as it would be in business. We took reporters to lunch to explain our focus, goals, and progress. We wrote drafts of stories for them - always with some reference to the gains we were making -- including charts, graphs, illustrations from Microsoft Excel - reporting everything in numbers - percentages of students at level or percent of improvement in the number of students on grade level since September, etc. We worked with political figures to get support for a special weekly supplement on the local schools. We volunteered for radio talk shows and local cable broadcasts. All of this built expectations that our school was academically focused and continuously improving.

Success breeds success, and we have found that students live up to the expectations we set for them. We also produced high quality tri-fold flyers that were distributed to businesses and service organizations in our community showing charts and graphs of our improvement, and soon realtors were telling a very different story about our schools. As standardized scores followed our local performance measures in improvement, a variety of state and federal organizations began to contact us regarding award and recognition proposals. We treated these seriously and found funding to take engage our whole faculty in receiving these awards. But we believe firmly that it starts with identifying some specific local measures in our focus area that we can administer, monitor, collect, display, publicize and celebrate as a way to build momentum and expectation of achieving our challenging goals of high achievement for all of our students.

What wasn't clear? How can we help with specific issues you are working on at your school? For the next couple of weeks, we will be available to respond to whatever thoughts, questions, doubts, successes you want to share. We look forward to hearing from you. Yours is the most important job in education - you can make a difference that no other position permits. We'd love to try to help you each be the very best instructional leader - even better than you are now, so your students can learn even more than they are learning now.

Module Four: Reading

Making Good Schools Better - The Charge of the Instructional Leader : Some Case Stories