Posts tagged improvement
In Defense of Incremental Change
0556 days
by Justin Baeder
in Articles
If you can bring about rapid, radical change to accomplish something important, go ahead – why not? We need bold experimentation and exploration. We need people to try things no one else is doing in education.
I’m a big fan of pilot projects and trying new ideas, but we can’t rest only on bold new ideas as our reform strategy. Why? The opportunities for radical change are fairly limited.
In other words, radical doesn’t scale. A bold reform may make headlines in one district, but it won’t even be allowed on the table in others. In most settings, improvement is going to happen at a slower and more incremental pace.
This can be frustrating – it can seem like nothing is happening, and it can be hard to maintain focus on the improvement. However, the greatest opportunity for improvement lies in those areas that can be changed incrementally – because everything can be improved incrementally.
We like fast results. We like to take credit. We like to celebrate visible success.
But over the long term, the biggest gains are going to come from the quiet, incremental changes we build into our work every day. Curriculum is a great example – it’s the quality and refinement of the implementation, not the radical shift to something new, that most improves student learning.
Is Everyday Math better than TERC? It depends – either curriculum can be implemented well or poorly (even within the same school). The devil (and the greatest opportunity) is in the details.
So what does getting better at something over time look like?
First, practice. When we consider how students improve as readers, it’s clear that doing lots of reading – in other words, practice – makes all the difference. The same is true for our work as educators – we improve our practice through more practice.
Second, strategies. Just as we run drills at soccer practice and teach students to use new reading comprehension strategies, there are strategies we can use in our schools to accelerate and scaffold the improvements that are taking place in instruction and other areas.
Third, attention to detail. When we get better at something and start to become experts, we start to see a world of detail that’s invisible to the untrained eye. This is why instructional coaches are so helpful – they see the opportunities for improvement that others might miss.
Fourth, collaboration. When we have a highly evolved state of practice, and this practice is shared among everyone in the organization, it’s possible to uphold very high standards and continually push everyone to the next level. This does not mean everyone is equally proficient – on the contrary, the diversity of levels of expertise is a rich resource for improvement. When you’re very good at something and I can see that I’m not as strong in that area, I can learn from you, and you can reflect on what would take your practice in that area to an even higher level. My school is in the first year of full implementation of a new writing curriculum, but some teachers have been using it for years, and their expertise is both a valuable resource for others and a reminder that others have strengths in other areas, and this expertise can and must be shared regularly.
In our national policy context, we’re investing in innovation, but I’d also suggest that refinement is even more worthy of investment, because refinement brings the greatest opportunity for improvement. There may be some gems out there waiting to be discovered, but there are no silver bullets.
What opportunities exist in your context for powerful incremental improvement?
Teaching Quality Is About Practice
1604 days
by Justin Baeder
in Quotes
In this op-ed in a recent issue of Ed Week, former superintendent Joseph Wise points out that accountability should not just focus on the what, but the how, of teaching. I could write five or ten posts on Wise’s various points in the article, but here’s what I think is at the core of his argument: Teaching is a practice, so the improvement of teaching must focus on practice.
Wise writes:
Historically, intense focus on the what of teaching has led us away from a healthy balance of all that drives true academic achievement. How we teach, how we challenge, how we redirect, and how we engage students is of no less importance than the what we profess to teach. Ironically, over the years, we actually have learned much and documented much about best practices in teaching. Substantial and expert research reveals that we already have explored and analyzed much about the how of teaching; we simply haven’t acknowledged its pivotal effect on academic achievement in the way we support and coach teachers.
Another great quote:
Accountability, at its essence, is not a goal; it is the acceptance of responsibility for all that we do in our classrooms, day in and day out. Accountability, when embraced for what it is, turns out to be not some sort of punitive “gotcha”; instead, it is what drives commitment to continuous examination, reflection, and improvement.
Joseph Wise, We Must Shift From Teacher Quality to Teaching Quality (Ed Week)
Improvement: Growth vs. Problem-Solving
0760 days
by Justin Baeder
in Articles
Growth is more or less continuous – as we refine our technique, we get better gradually over time. But growth isn’t the only type of improvement.
If there is a problem, a specific barrier to higher performance, solving it will not be a gradual process. When the problem is solved – either through an insight and a change in practice, or through outside assistance – performance takes a dramatic leap.
When you are considering your own practice, or the practice of someone you supervise, think about whether the greatest growth will come from a focus on problem-solving, or from refining existing techniques.
Heroism Vs. Performance
0786 days
by Justin Baeder
in Articles
Why do we find the idea of principal performance hard to swallow?
We like to think of the principal as a hero who does whatever it takes to ensure student learning. When we see heroes, we are drawn to them, and we tell ourselves “We need more heroes like this one!” We think heroes will save us.
And we think “If being a principal means being a hero, I must be a hero.” And we stop thinking about our own performance as school leaders.
But we will never have a shark-fin curve when it comes to excellence in school leadership:
Our profession will never be 90% heroes. And it shouldn’t be.
As Copland notes in his 2001 Kappan article “The Myth of the Superprincipal” (see excerpt, PDF), demands on school leaders are exceedingly high, and this expectation of heroism is problematic for recruitment and retention of effective school leaders. Expecting people to be heroes discourages qualified candidates from entering the field, and leads to burnout among those in the profession.
But the alternative is not to lower expectations for principals. Instead, we can – we must – identify what effective principals do, how school leaders improve their performance, and what can be done at the local, state, and national levels to promote improvement.
The Principal As Visionary Journalist
0787 days
by Justin Baeder
in Articles
How do you get more of what you want in the repertoire of practice in your organization?
As an instructional leader, one way to encourage practices that contribute to student learning is to recognize, call out, and celebrate them when you see them.
When teachers know their colleagues are finding success with a new initiative, hearing it from the principal validates that it can be done.
When someone is struggling with an instructional technique, or dealing with a major classroom challenge, if the principal celebrates what they’re doing to head in the right direction, it can serve as a tremendous source of encouragement.
In this way, the principal serves as a journalist – not of the world as it is, but as it should be.
This is what it means to have vision – to connect the present with the possible, and to encourage and document progress toward that possibility.
Moving the Bell Curve To the Right
0791 days
by Justin Baeder
in Articles
In Better, Atul Gawande describes the unexciting but immensely powerful impact of improving the performance of doctors. Rather than focus on breakthroughs and new technologies, he says, many more lives can be saved by simply moving the bell curve to the right.
It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals or doctors in a particular specialty were generally insignificant. If you plotted a graph showing the results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis – or any other disease, for that matter – people expected that the curve would look something like a shark fin, with most places clustered around the very best outcomes.
But the evidence has begun to indicate otherwise. What you tend to find is a bell curve: a handful of teams with disturbingly poor outcomes for their patients, a handful with remarkably good results, and a great undistinguished middle. link (PDF)
In a recent NY Times article, Elizabeth Green sounds a similar note in education reform:
THOMAS KANE, a Harvard economist who studies education… is one of several researchers who told me recently that he now has a more open mind. “I still think tenure review is important,” he said. “It’s just, I don’t think we should throw in our towel on the other things.” There is simply too much potential in improving the vast number of teachers who neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead.
By figuring out what makes the great teachers great, and passing that on to the mass of teachers in the middle, he said, “we could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today.” He has made a guess about the effect that change would have. “We could close the gap between the United States and Japan on these international tests within two years.” link
Don’t we typically act as if most educators are outstanding, with a few average teachers and principals mixed in, along with a tiny number of incompetent people who should be exited from the profession? Don’t we assume our performance curve is a shark fin?
It’s not.
The shark fin isn’t coming any time soon, and it doesn’t need to – our best hope is to shift the bell curve to the right.
Kane refers to average teachers who “neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead,” which is reminiscent of my recent characterization of the majority of principals as “warm bodies” who have neither a positive nor a negative impact on student learning.
If we are to consider improving performance to be the fundamental obligation of a school leader, Gawande and Kane’s insights tell us two things:
- We need to continually invest in professional development to move the bell curve to the right. Superstars will not save us.
- We need to do what we can to lop off the extreme lower end of the bell curve, where we’re actually paying people to do harm.
Introducing Atul Gawande, Educator
0796 days
One of my favorite authors on improvement and performance today is Atul Gawande. His insights have profound implications for educational leaders, and he may be one of the most influential reformers to come along in a long time.
But you won’t find him at Teachers College or ASCD. Atul Gawande is a surgeon.
In Better, he writes about numerous aspects of improvement in healthcare. In The Checklist Manifesto, he explores the power of checklists to reduce errors in complex fields such as aviation (where checklists are ubiquitous) and medicine (where he hopes to make checklists part of standard practice). I finished these two books in a day or two each, and am working on his first book, Complications, now.
In addition, Gawande writes regularly for The New Yorker.
Here’s Gawande in a recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in which he talks about The Checklist Manifesto:
Clearly, there are many parallels between the challenges in healthcare and those faced by educators. I will soon have more to say on The Checklist Manifesto and Better from an educator’s perspective (you can subscribe to email updates using the form in the sidebar of this site).
Gawande will be in Seattle on May 3 if you’d like to hear him live.
Stepping It Up
01034 days
by Justin Baeder
in Articles
When you’re trying to bring about a change, how and when do you decide if your efforts are working? If your efforts are either misdirected or inadequate, it’s important to know this quickly so you can make an adjustment.
If you’re trying to lose ten pounds, and your strategy is to eat less red meat and take a walk three nights a week, at what point do you decide it’s not working? How do you know when you need to step up your efforts?
Whenever we’re pursuing a goal, we need progress indicators to tell us if we’re moving quickly enough toward our goal.
There are two things to measure:
1. Whether you’re actually implementing the strategies you intended
2. Whether the strategies are having the intended effect
Comprehensive improvement planning often fails to address these issues adequately. If the achievement of the goal itself is our only source of data, we may find out too late that our efforts were misdirected or inadequate. We need to ask two questions – early and regularly – to make this determination:
1. Are we doing what we planned to do?
2. Is it working the way we wanted it to?
The first question is about fidelity of implementation – are we really doing what we set out to do? Are we doing it correctly? This is often a multifaceted question, especially when implementing a complex intervention.
The second question is about effectiveness – is this strategy producing results?
If we’ve implemented our strategies faithfully, but without the expected results, we could have a problem with fidelity of implementation, or with the level of intensity.
If research has shown that the strategy consistently works, and we can tell we’ve implemented it with fidelity, the problem is probably one of intensity – we need to step up our efforts. There is no question that exercise leads to weight loss, but only if the exercise is done with enough intensity. Similarly, many programs we use in our schools are effective in achieving their stated goals, but only if implemented with fidelity and intensity.
If we’ve decided in advance what types of evidence to collect to answer each of these questions, supervising and evaluating programs in our schools becomes much easier.
Getting Started with Data Teams Presentation – WASA Summer Conference 2009
31053 days
Linked below are the documents from my presentation at the WASA/AWSP 2009 Summer Conference in Spokane, WA. Use the contact form if you have any questions or would like more information. Thanks to everyone who participated.