Mary Beth Blegen’s honest and reflective post on the small schools listserve (see below) on her experience with Small Learning Communities in St Paul unfortunately does not represent an outlier in the national school reform experience over the past decade or two (or three). People with the best of intentions, who are committed to improving learning for their students and the quality of professional lives of teachers, and who manage to get the funds to enact a reform plan (SLC’s being just one of the efforts funded over the past several decades) still face immense obstacles to their success. A lack of knowledge of the complexities of the change process in large organizations like high schools (and the districts in which they are situated), an assumption that structural change is sufficient (or the opposite, an assumption that only improving instruction in the absence of structural and policy change is sufficient), a failure to take into account the need for effective professional development in how to build professional learning communities or communities of practice with the time built into the regular schedule to look rigorously at student learning and teacher practice, understanding the needed changes in teacher practice and student assessment, all of this and more makes the challenge almost insurmountable.
What is often left out of the stories of success and failure across the nation is the role of outside service providers who either do or don’t have the knowledge of all of these dynamics and the skills to provide coaching and consulting advice and support for addressing these complexities on an ongoing, over-the-shoulder basis for folks like Mary Beth. When high quality and knowledgeable coaching is provided on addressing not just classroom instruction or instructional leadership, but also these larger system change issues, the chances that the effort will make measurable progress is greatly enhanced. But too often that story is left untold, and as a result, schools and communities are left thinking that the simplistic stories they read in the newspapers about successful SLC’s or small schools magically blooming in an educational desert after being given funds to restructure their high schools are true. Or they find themselves spending a few painful years struggling and then the public gets tired of the whole project and they go back to the old system out of frustration. Or they hire one of the many packaged outside programs that promise results but do not address the complex contextualized realities of the local setting, only to find themselves several years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars down the line with little substantive change.
I have been wondering about this missing piece of the dialogue on change for awhile. Of course on the small schools listserve, we hear from people like Mike Klonsky and Joe Nathan and Dan French and the folks at CCE in Boston, and occasionally the folks from the Small Schools Project, or at BayCES or CES about the programs that they have in place to support small schools and school change. The recent report Joe posted there about the successes in Cincinnati hint at the role of the outside consultants (and one assumes lots of coaching) in that effort. Yet the dialogue does not seem to me to go deep enough or broadly enough for us to be able to offer guidance to someone like Mary Beth about what sort of coaching would have gotten her effort off to a good start and sustained it over the long haul. Really, I do think we know how to do this work. But the knowledge is hidden in little enclaves, small networks of practitioners, an organization here and there. I am hoping we can bring it all out into the light of day and really spend some time rigorously digging into what makes for successful coaching and consulting in these efforts, and what are the pitfalls to avoid. What does a highly qualified coach do who is able to address all of the issues that plagued Mary Beth’s effort?
That was the reason I started this blog. Already some of you have visited it, but I would like to see a dialogue begin here that addresses the implicit questions that Mary Beth asks, which are, What could we have done differently? and, Why did we not know that then? These are embedded in the questions I posed in my first post, and which I would like to see us all contribute to discussing now. Those are:
- What is whole system coaching?
- What do whole system coaches do?
- What do high quality coaches need to know and be able to do to be effective?
- What sorts of professional learning systems do coaches need to be effective?
- What results in schools and districts constitute “being effective?”
- What kinds of communities of practice, or professional learning communities, or coach collaborations currently exist and how do they support coaches to be effective?
- What sorts of communities of practice and networks can you imagine creating that would enhance existing ones and enable greater shared learning and innovation in coaching?
- What sorts of organizational arrangements best support effective coaching, both in schools and districts and in outside providers?
- What kinds of knowledge management systems best support effective coaching?
Might we start that dialogue now? I am going to post something on the first two questions soon…
Thanks,
John
Mary Beth Blegen’s post to the small schools listserve:
As our work in Small Learning Communities now recedes, we have learned much. I am hoping what we have learned can provide good questions for those who are now engaged in the work.Six years ago, when we began the work, we assumed too much about high schools and change. We assumed that the opportunities presented by SLC grants (both Federal and Gates) would be received in a much different way. We assumed that scrutiny in the high schools would be welcome.I almost giggle now when I think of my naivete, considering I taught in a high school for 30 years.We focused far too much on structure and far too little on instruction. I believe that if we have 15 teachers in an SLC located in a hallway, but that they don’t know how to talk to each to each about student achievement, little can happen. I believe that without focused conversations in buildings for which time and support are provided, little will change.Little will even change with the conversations without expectations and goals, monitoring and evaluation.Ah, yes, we have learned. If we were entitled to a second go round, the focus would be on student learning, measured, discussed and adjusted.I have hopes for the professional conversations, but we have a very long way to go there, too.
Ever the optimist, I think we can still get this right.
February 13, 2008 at 5:33 pm |
Going further with Mary Beth Blegen’s and John Watkins’ reflections on the struggle to succeed with SLC’s: As a former coach/consultant who helped lead the creation of small schools at South Shore HS, in Chicago, I can add my own hard lessons. There were numerous forces over which I/we had no control. Grants from the Gates Foundation required teachers to attend prof. development that was irrelevant to what we were working on — but since that was where the money came from, the teachers attended that, leaving little time for more essential planning. The principals were under pressure to hire teachers from the former school, which brought on board many who had no real interest in developing a small school vision or team. The school board failed to mandate a cap on the number of students placed in each school — which ultimately undid the schedule we had so carefully created in order to gain common planning time. And as a coach, myself, I underestimated just how steep the learning curve was for many of the teachers, and tried to institute strategies that were too ambitious for where the teachers were (just a sample of my own mistakes). The Gates people and their representatives in Chicago never really held the Board’s feet to the fire to insure that supportive policies (around budget, attendance caps, etc.) were in place. Perhaps there was a way to succeed in that setting — but it would have taken far more political muscle and political savvy than we had.
Still, we learned many lessons — which is why I’ve focused my work now on a network of schools, the Chicago Schools Alliance, where the focus is on learning how to promote sustainability. A key teacher on this for us has been Andy Hargreaves, and his book (written with Dean Fink), Sustainable Leadership. Read it!
–Steve Zemelman
April 7, 2008 at 1:58 pm |
John,
I am one of those external coaches now, except that I spend my entire work schedule in three schools with little or no time at the district.
My time in schools has convinced me once again that if real change is to happen, it will be at the schools. All of the mandates in the world can’t make schools move unless there is the leadership capactiy in principals and teachers in schools, unless there is the desire to be ‘pleasantly disruptive’, unless there is a persistence that would defy most district intiatives and unless there is a willingness to not let go at the end of one year. Another important factor is accountability and evaluation. We simply haven’t done enough of either within the schools in a way that is meaningful to someimes cynical teachers.
I work directly in a coaching mode with principals, too. I believe that role is an essential. No, I haven’t been a principal, but I’ve been in high schools for 42 years and can ask important questions. Principals don’t get the time to reflect on their own and need to be supported in doing just that.
I’ve worked in the bureaucracy as a Teacher In Residence in Secretary Riley’s office for three years and as SLC Coordinator in Saint Paul. In each of those roles I became one of the people who said out loud, “If schools would just…..’ I forgot too quickly that no, schools won’t ‘just’ unless they are a part of the process. It is frightening how quickly a 30 year teaching veteran had the answers for others!
Enough, John. I would love to continue the dialogue. Let’s turn the paradigm upside down and make the districts true servants of the schools!
Mary Beth
April 7, 2008 at 4:51 pm |
Mary Beth added later in an email to me:
I would love to do more musing about all of this. Even though I taught for 30 years in a high school, served as National Teacher in 1996, etc., I didn’t know high schools until I began doing this work. One of our primary areas of emphasis must be on interpersonal skills within a school.
MB
I then wrote her:
I love your insights, even though I disagree that change is to happen it will happen [I think you imply "only" here] in the schools. Yesterday’s post on the small schools listserve about Life Academy in Oakland, of which I have some knowledge, should convince you that all the change in schools will be for nothing if we aren’t able to coach districts on the necessary changes in the role they play from bureaucratic silos enforcing mandates and compliance to learning networks providing coaching and support. And the importance of interpersonal skills, relationship building, and community involvement is just as crucial for the districts to learn!
John
…and she responded:
Oh, yes, there is no question that support is needed from the district, but it must be based on school needs, etc., not on faraway decisions.
MB
April 7, 2008 at 6:12 pm |
John,
Today I have hope. Somedays I wonder. I was pushing a young teacher…he has taught all of 8 weeks now …about his thinking. What has surprised him? What has challenged him? Where does he need support? And much more. He was indulging me and taking my questions very seriously.
He teaches in a struggling high school. But this is what he says about our kids. “I have already learned that these kids have much more knowledge than they have skills to express that knowledge. My job is to help them gain those skills.”
Not a complaint about kids, not a complaint about the system or parents, or the district,a etc. Just a wonderful comment on what he believes he can do for his kids.
He spoke of doing a Socratic seminar with ninth graders on ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. He said that if their responses were written down, someone would have called them profound.
There is our hope. I told him just that. He is willing to work together. He wants to tackle new genres and new ways of thinking. He is eager.
Now, how do we keep him from the jaws of what can be a painful, sad culture in a school where too often it is the kids’ fault?
We do have hope. We need these young, dynamic people so badly.
Mary Beth