Advancing the Teaching Profession

How Teacher Turnover Harms Students

Finally reaching the bottom of one my reading stacks, I found myself fascinated and frustrated by the findings of a new study on the relationship between teacher turnover and student achievement.

The study, led by Matthew Ronfeldt and his education economist colleagues, used sophisticated methods to uncover empirical evidence on how teacher attrition, especially in high-need schools, seriously harms low-income and black students. They point out that previous researchers assumed that turnover rates negatively affected high-need students because high quality teachers were the ones leaving.

But this is not the case.

Teacher attrition has a detrimental effect on student achievement “even after controlling for different indicators of teacher quality” — including value-added ratings for teachers who leave and the ones who replace them. The researchers claim that teacher turnover “negatively affects collegiality or relational trust among faculty” or “results in loss of institutional knowledge among faculty that is critical for supporting all student learning.”

Other research has revealed complementary findings. Tony Bryk’s path-breaking analyses, for example, link trust and collegiality among teachers with higher student achievement. 

It’s time for policymakers to seriously consider who is recruited into teaching, for how long, and how they are placed in schools. Thoughtfulness in these areas will ensure that teachers contribute to, not undermine, faculty cohesiveness and long-term instructional strategies. It’s time to confront policymakers’ embrace of recruiting underprepared teachers to high-need schools without adequate training, supervision, and support.

At the same time, we need to question their dismissiveness of the positive effects working conditions can have on teaching and learning. It's time to build 21st-century school organizations that support teacher teams that have staying power and that are rewarded for working effectively with their students, families, and communities over time.

Reimagining School As We Know It

Over the past several years, we at CTQ have been documenting how school conditions and designs affect the way teachers teach and students learn. Research has demonstrated that curriculum, instructional resources, preparedness and stability of faculty, and connections to after-school and summer-school programs have strong impacts on student achievement. Teachers say the same.

Furman Brown’s Generation Schools are promising models of re-envisioned school conditions. Nearly 90% of the full-time professional staff teach classes. Students get more instructional time (up to 200 days), and class sizes can be as low as 16. Teachers have many opportunities to plan together and learn from one another. Currently, several districts in Colorado are piloting the Generation Schools model, which has found a “better way to organize and distribute work” for both students and teachers. (See this terrific report from Ed Sector on improving teacher quality through school design.)

Another innovative approach is also taking root in Colorado: the teacher-led school without a principal. With support from the Ford Foundation (which has made significant investments in extended learning opportunities for students and their teachers), we have been able to document the emergence of the Math and Science Leadership Academy (MSLA). There, strong teacher leaders, most National Board Certified, have forged deep connections to the communities they serve and are backed by a reform-minded union.

Watch the video to learn more about MSLA, and take a look at our case study about the school’s creation. MSLA is doing great things, and we need to make sure that the school, its teachers, and its stories become better known to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. We need find ways to take these good ideas to scale. 

 

  

 

Confronting the 15,000-Hour Problem

This commentary by Barnett Berry originally appeared as a guest post on Getting Smart's blog on September 1, 2011.

Imagine a new teaching profession — the one that students of today and tomorrow deserve. Here’s how “schools” and “teaching” could look:

• In transformed learning environments, digital tools enable students to learn 24/7 and use skills demanded by local and global economies. Meanwhile, similar technologies allow teachers to learn from each other anywhere, at any time.

• Expert teachers create seamless connections in and out of cyberspace. They bridge students’ virtual learning with what goes on in brick-and-mortar schools (including afterschool programs to deepen and extend learning for our most vulnerable students).

• Students learn from collaborative teams of teachers with varied strengths and roles.This is made possible by a career matrix (as opposed to the traditional career ladder) that includes differentiated pathways. The system places a premium on the spreading of teacher expertise—and is structured to encourage our best teachers to remain in the profession.

More than 600,000 “teacherpreneurs” are making a difference in our schools. These are effective teachers who continue to teach students regularly, but also work part-time on results-oriented efforts to improve student learning. They might design new instructional programs, orchestrate community partnerships, develop digital learning tools, and advance new policies and practices. Teacherpreneurs will be the “highest-paid anybodies” in a school district—and their roles will finally blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead.

These four possibilities, described more fully in TEACHING 2030, a new book I penned with 12 expert teachers, can help us imagine what teaching could look like. Here’s the catch: we have to move past the tired 20th century struggles over how we recruit, train, and pay teachers. Yes, some serious politics are involved, as described vividly, if not always accurately, in Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare.

But we must also contend with the 15,000-hour problem. Most Americans have attended schools for 13 years—and have watched teachers teach for more than 15,000 hours, usually in the company of 25 or 30 other students (40 or 50 in hard times). And while most Americans may want improved schools and better teaching, they do not want teaching and learning to look all that different from when they were in school themselves. The public’s familiarity with teaching reifies expectations. It may even breed contempt for the specialized skills that effective teachers and administrators need to develop—after all, an expert teacher can make the job look easy.

But the 15,000-hour problem besets teachers and administrators as well. Almost four decades ago, Dan Lortie, the well-known education sociologist, described the 15,000 problem as the “apprenticeship of observation” — when teachers and administrators come into the profession thinking they already know how to teach and lead. In fact, since many educators have had the experience of “liking school” as K-12 students, they often resist major transformative changes. They may not want to think differently about teachers’ roles, teaching methods, and how and when students are expected to learn.

So what do we do? We shouldn’t simply seek more recruits from alternative routes. Plenty of evidence suggests that even teachers and administrators from “alternative routes” reify the current system of teaching and learning.

Instead, we should consider how teachers’ and administrators’ preparation can set the stage for a new expectations about what schools and learning look like.

And now is the time for public engagement campaign that informs and inspires, helping Americans shift their own beliefs about what schools and teachers can accomplish — and how they should go about it.

Selling a bold new vision of teaching and learning is far from impossible.

The American people have the capacity to let go of old patterns of thinking when the evidence is compelling and well-presented. Consider how our nation’s adult population changed its collective mind about cigarette smoking. In the early 1960s, cigarette smoking was common. In ads, the Marlboro Man (portrayed as a rugged cowboy) gave cigarettes a free-spirited, back-to-basics, all-American image. Then studies began to identify empirical links between smoking and cancer. Early anti-smoking commercials, starring “Johnny Smoke,” showed cowboys keeling over with poisonous fumes in their lungs, parodying the Marlboro Man. Public awareness grew and behavior began to change, as TV ads for cigarettes were banned and the Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarette packages became more stark and visible. Within 40 years, the percentage of American adults smoking cigarettes decreased from 45% to 20%.

An inefficient public education system mired in 20th-century debates may not be blackening our lungs. But the status quo is doing something just as serious: failing our students, our communities, and our democracy. We must help the public understand what is possible. We must get past the 15,000-hour conundrum. We must work together to create the transformed system of teaching and learning that 21st-century students deserve.

Implementing Common Core Standards

By Susan Graham

Susan Graham, a National Board Certified Teacher and Teacher Leaders Network member, retired in spring 2011 after 28 years in the classroom. However, she continues to encourage innovative reforms in teaching and learning, and is currently serving as a Virtual Community Organizer for CTQ’s new Implementing Common Core Standards project. 

Overheard this weekend at the Center for Teaching Quality’s headquarters in Carrboro, NC: “This is such incredibly complicated work…” (one-second pause) “…but I am so exhilarated by the process!”

That’s the sort of energy generated when exemplary teachers combine their expertise to tackle tough issues in teaching and learning—which happens all the time on CTQ’s virtual Teacher Leaders Network. But this energy is powerful face-to-face, too, as I witnessed this weekend when CTQ assembled 21 National Board Certified Teachers from NC and KY to work on the Implementing Common Core Standards (ICCS) project. 

Here’s how the Common Core State Standards website describes the standards:

The Common Core Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

But what does that look like in the classroom? How will students demonstrate mastery of the standards of literacy and mathematical functionality? And how do these efforts square with the pressures of standardized test performance (currently the centerpiece of many states’ assessment and evaluation systems)?

Over the next year, the accomplished teachers I met at CTQ will face down these tough questions. They will design—and test-drive in their own classrooms, with their own students—lessons and assessments linked to the Common Core State Standards.

ICCS teachers will pilot formative assessment templates created by the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The teachers met with Eleanor Dougherty (LDC) and Ann Shannon (MDC) to get a better sense of how to implement these new tools.

The teachers aren’t just test-driving—they’re documenting every curve of the road. As they fine-tune, deliver, and evaluate LDC and MDC modules, they’ll be compiling video clips of instruction and assembling evidence of student work, and reflecting on how the modules affect student learning and their own practice.  

In spring 2012, the ICCS teachers will begin to share the toolkits they’re creating—influencing student achievement in classrooms across the country. And their field-test critiques of the Design Collaborative concepts will inform the process of integrating Common Core Standards and state course standards.   

How will the pieces fit together? What will the results be? Which questions will be answered—in full or in part—and which will remain? We don’t know yet—but it is exciting to know that 21 highly accomplished teachers are already hard at work on a potentially transformative project for advancing student learning.  

 

Expertise to Action in Denver

By Jessica Keigan and Dana Nardello

One of the most exciting parts about working with expert teacher leaders is seeing their hard work and expertise appreciated. The Denver NMI team’s positive contribution to shaping and implementing teaching policies in Colorado attests to the importance of teacher voice in the policymaking process. I’ve asked two members of the Denver NMI team, Jessica Keigan and Dana Nardello, to share some of their recent involvement with the state legislation process. Jessica also spoke about her involvement during a special Rocky Mountain PBS roundtable held last Friday, where she represented her team with solutions-focused comments and compelling stories. --Barnett Berry

Here in the Mile High City, there has been a lot of buzz about Senate Bill 191, a law that calls for the creation and implementation of a new evaluation system for principals and teachers.

Among other things, the bill requires that half of a teacher’s evaluation be determined by student growth measures and that the other half -- loosely labeled as “multiple measures” -- include classroom observations by peers or administrators, goal attainment processes, or other similar tools.

But the tools used to assess teachers’ effectiveness on the basis of gains on a once-a-year standardized test are still pretty raw. As noted in a recent Congressional briefing, the grade-level standardized tests do not capture “teacher effects” when students are way below or above where they are supposed to be.  Some teachers teach a disproportionate share of second language learners or special needs students. Some teachers are part of teaching teams and it is difficult to determine who is most responsible. Some teachers work with students who get all kinds of help from afterschool and summer programs, but others do not.

As members of the Denver New Millennium Initiative, we knew it was important to be part of the conversation about the bill’s implementation. Since the release of our report “Making Teacher Evaluation Work: Voices from the Classroom,” various stakeholders have solicited our suggestions for specific and concrete suggestions. And last week, we had the fantastic opportunity to share our expertise at a state board public hearing.

The Process

This past May, the State Council on Educator Effectiveness (SCEE) began working to define what makes an educator effective, and since then it has made several recommendations to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE). The council has drafted and revised rules and has encouraged general feedback through public hearings – an opportunity we decided to take advantage of.

After releasing our report, our team spent the summer months researching teacher effectiveness and various topics introduced in the drafted rules (e.g., comparability, assessment tools, state vs. local control). Deciding to focus on what we thought the state’s definition of “multiple measures” should be, we submitted a list of recommendations to the board. At the public hearing, NMI team members supplemented the list by sharing our classroom realities, e.g., how highly mobile students or a large number of second language learners who just entered our classes, could influence the accuracy of the test score evidence. We described how teachers can assemble a wide array of data on their students so we can figure out how to improve our teaching.

Why Do We Care?

As teachers, we want stronger teaching accountability systems. We want to reach beyond our classroom walls and influence the policies that drive the work we do each day. Conversations about education reform need to include perspectives of people who know what happens inside the classroom.  We have solutions, we have ideas, and we want to share them.

Our day-to-day experience allows us to anticipate pitfalls and envision successes in a way that wouldn’t be possible for most lawmakers. Because we believe we have the responsibility to be involved in education policy, we are continually searching for entry points, conversations, meetings, and committees that we can contribute our expertise to.

What We Learned

Classroom teachers often think they don’t know enough about policy, politics, or the legislative process. But the truth is that teachers hold the critical piece of the puzzle. Our stories from the classroom can corroborate expert suggestions or productively challenge them.

The great news is that we aren’t the only ones who think this.

Our team and two other teachers were the only teacher voices heard during the hearing, and we could tell that our input made an impact on the audience. After giving our testimony last week, a member of the SCEE cited our evidence specifically when discussing next steps with the board. We knew we were being listened to, and it was an exhilarating experience.

Each new encounter with policymaking is showing us that people want to hear what teachers have to say. They respect our contributions as experts in our field –especially when they are solutions oriented.

Next Steps

Last week we received tangible indication that our teacher voices are having a positive effect on policy. Witnessing such respect for teacher expertise makes us excited to continue contributing to this process.

The Denver NMI team will continue to review the commentary and drafts that stakeholders are submitting. The next public hearing is scheduled for October 5, and on that day we hope even more Denver NMI teachers will share personal evidence that will support our recommendations.

As always, we will continue to seek out opportunities to share our voices, in hopes that we can improve our profession and best serve our students, inside and outside the classroom. 

 

Reshaping the Teacher Preparation Debate

A few days ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a shout-out to the University of Michigan for serving as a national model for “reinventing” education schools. Indeed, the UM education school, led by Dean Deborah Ball, has done much to recalibrate university-based preparation programs by focusing on the practical how-tos of teaching specific curricular content and drawing on new research about how students learn. And though Secretary Duncan has often called for more student teaching, not less, his Race to the Top policies continue to embrace shortcut alternative-certification programs. Such routes, like Teach for America, can’t come close to offering new recruits the kind of preparation provided by UM’s education school (or by the many other university preparation programs that have also overhauled their approaches).

Secretary Duncan’s contradictory stances on teacher training are difficult to reconcile.

I keep thinking back to a terrific conversation captured by Education Next a few years ago. Arthur Wise, a champion for professionalizing teaching, and Julie Mikuta, a TFA alum and partner in the NewSchools Venture Fund, discussed the merits of university-based and alternative-certification approaches to teacher preparation. The three-year-old piece brings to light a number of issues surrounding TFA and whether it’s a “valuable strategy for recruiting the best and brightest into education and energizing school improvement, or a distraction and a device for sending ill-prepared neophytes to serve some of the nation’s neediest students.”

Federal policymakers have much to learn from the Education Next conversation – especially from Dr. Wise, who points to the false dichotomies often promoted in the current policy debates over teacher education. Rather than demonizing TFA or claiming teacher education programs have it all figured out, he calls for a strategy that scaffolds learning for all novices, whether they are TFA members or university-based recruits. He envisions a “teaching team strategy” in which experienced teachers are ultimately responsible for students, “but in multiple classrooms and with the assistance of the novices.”

Both TFA and traditional recruits have much to contribute to the process of improving teaching and learning. No teacher, however, should teach independently until he or she has passed muster on performance metrics, including teaching diverse learners (such as ELL students) and using sophisticated assessment tools to determine student progress toward 21st-century academic standards. It’s time that our nation’s education leaders learn that teacher education and licensing is not about dichotomous choices, but inventive approaches that can support student learning today and tomorrow.

 

Ensuring Teachers are Real Participants and Partners in Reform

Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pointed out, "Teachers need and deserve more autonomy and respect--and they must become real participants and partners in reform if outcomes for children are to dramatically improve."

We couldn't agree more. 

In a new CTQ report, "Teaching Effectiveness for the New Millennium," 23 expert teachers describe how policymakers can more accurately define student learning and advance teaching effectiveness reforms. They emphasized that policymakers must capitalize on the untapped potential of classroom leaders.

The teachers' insights--informed by research and their classroom experience--were inspired by online conversations with a group of key USDOE staff and with Secretary Duncan. The teachers began by unpacking the Department’s ESEA “blueprint” — but soon honed in on the significance of hybrid teaching roles in implementing new reforms with veracity and fidelity.  

All co-authors are members of CTQ's Teacher Leaders Network, and several participate in our New Millennium Initiative. Drawing upon research and their teaching expertise, they highlight promising steps by the USDOE and also call for specific teaching effectiveness reforms, including:

• Involve teacher leaders in creating and scoring assessments aligned with Common Core standards throughout the school year. These assessments could help teachers fine-tune instruction and could inform results-oriented teaching evaluations.  
• Draw upon and spread the expertise of National Board Certified Teachers, who have met rigorous standards and demonstrated skill in analyzing student evidence to improve instruction.
• Promote and support hybrid roles that allow teacher leaders to continue building upon their classroom skills while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession. Our nation needs more teacherpreneurs if we are to take innovative steps to improve our schools. 
• Develop new forms of shared school leadership to support teaching effectiveness, like tapping expert teachers to serve as peer reviewers in implementing high-quality, rigorous classroom evaluations.

Just yesterday, I was reading a newly released study that examines the effectiveness of high-quality peer review programs, such as California's Poway and San Juan districts. The researchers found that, when compared to principals, teachers are far more thorough and tough-minded in evaluating their colleagues. Expert teachers "get" the job of teaching--and what it takes to do that job well.

Kudos to Secretary Duncan and his staff for engaging in an authentic conversation with some of the nation’s best teachers. Now let’s find ways--including more robust peer review programs--for teacher leaders to become the “real participants and partners” in reform.