Borderland

Today was a professional development day, and as these things go, it wasn’t bad. One thing that helped, I suspect, is that the school district curriculum department piggy-backed onto the Alaska State Literacy Association 2009 conference, so we were able to take advantage of some fresh ideas that weren’t part of the local institutional orthodoxy.

The keynote was delivered by IRA president, Katherine Au. According to her philosophy statement on the IRA site, she believes that teacher expertise is more important than programs for sustaining student success. Her talk today addressed a school-level reform process she calls the Standards-Based Change Process, which exemplifies her philosophy of teacher agency. At first, it sounded not-very-interesting to me, except for a couple of important details. Au shared a quote from Michael Fullan, “Educational change is technically simple and socially complex.”

Fullan recommends identifying and spreading the practices of “positive deviant teachers” within and across schools. So I was interested.

Fullan: The effective schools research found that classroom-to-classroom differences in effectiveness within schools is greater than school-to-school variation. Professional learning communities internal to a school should reduce the variation across classrooms with more and more teachers gravitating toward the best practices.

Positive deviant teachers can be used within and across schools. They have to get outside their classrooms, though, both within their schools and to link to what’s going on in other schools–to learn from other teachers as well as contribute to them.

The change process Kathryn Au described does this in a systematic fashion, and is designed to take approximately 3 years to complete. It’s built on a stair-step curriculum development process designed and written at the school level by the teachers themselves, who meet regularly to frame their vision of the “excellent reader.” The staircase curriculum, with the “excellent reader” on the top step, stands in contrast to fragmented curricula in which there may be excellent teaching going on, but in which there is no practical continuity. To bridge the gaps, teachers need time to talk and a process for identifying their strengths and needs, as well as negotiating and organizing their shared expectations. With this process, teachers become creators, rather than receivers, of curriculum:

The process of putting together their own literacy curriculum guides gives teachers a deep understanding of instruction and assessment in their grade levels and departments. Teachers initiate communication across grades and departments as they work on their guides, because they recognize the need for consistency in content, instruction, and assessment.

Au’s road map for school change outlines a process that moves through seven levels, encompassed by four main stages: emerging, aspiring, progressing, and inspiring. At the emerging stage, teachers need to recognize the need and organize for change, forming professional learning communities. At the aspiring stage, they work on the building blocks, and pull together to define shared goals across grade levels and departments, deciding on the evidence they will use to mark student progress. They share the results with I Can statements. The final two stages, progressing and inspiring, are when the staircase curriculum is implemented, and students are engaged, making it transparent to students and families.

One of the real strengths of this process is that it effectively builds teachers’ professional capacity regardless of program choices or instructional methods. Au called it a “home-grown” curriculum.

On another grassroots organizational note, I ran into some teachers from my old graduate school Reading Endorsement cohort during the lunch break, and we discussed organizing to resist a trend we see school districts across the state following, including mine. School district administrations are adopting an expensive and highly reductive diagnostic tool called AimsWeb, which promises to pervert the spirit and goals of the RTI initiative, substituting simplicity for developing teachers’ skill sets, and threatening to reduce elementary reading instruction to mere word-calling. We discussed starting a conversation on a group blog. This could be fun if it actually got rolling.