Teacher Effectiveness Don’t Forget School Design

By Barry Stern, Ph.D. Senior Fellow of the Haberman International Policy Institute in Education

The Gates Foundation is spending $500 million to understand and improve teacher effectiveness. It will likely confirm what we know already about great teaching, perhaps with a few tweaks, such as those noted below:

1. Select the right people the first time. Once they pass their probationary period, few poorly performing teachers are ever let go. There are tools to assist schools with teacher selection, such as the Haberman Star Teacher interview protocol that a 2008 Harvard study has proven effective in identifying teachers who are likely to succeed and stay in urban schools. Several urban school districts use it, as do some prominent charter school companies. The screening interview gets at deep seated beliefs about education, relating to students, and dealing with difficult circumstances.

2. Model high performance work methods and conditions. The best companies have no trouble in attracting and keeping excellent personnel. Contrast their approach with the way most American schools operate. Most high schools, for example, are still organized like factories, where students change what they do in response to a bell every 50 minutes, and much class time is wasted taking attendance, achieving order, and reviewing where class left off the previous day. Teachers must keep track of 120-150 students per day and thus barely get to know them. Knowledge is segregated into academic disciplines, which suits perhaps a third of students but not the great majority who learn more from courses that integrate disciplines and apply knowledge to solve practical, real-life problems.

Furthermore, high school teachers have no idea what other teachers are teaching, and they rarely communicate with one another about how to improve the performance of the students they mutually teach. The major exception is sports teams, where coaches continually communicate about performance. No wonder adolescents want to be part of these teams.

Contrast the typical school to high performing companies like Hewlett-Packard, Toyota, Motorola, and GE where: adults work in teams to produce results; workers are cross-trained and encouraged to understand the entire production process; more technology is provided to workers to improve productivity; employees are owners and are rewarded for individual and team excellence; there are flexible staffing patterns and opportunities to work on several projects at once; the environment is clean, attractive and conducive to employee interaction; and customer service is continually emphasized.

Converting schools into high performing work organizations is the key to attracting and keeping the best teachers. Average teachers can become good to great with the right leadership and instructional and management systems to produce results.

To attract, keep or develop the best, our schools must become more competitive, entrepreneurial, accountable and customer-oriented. Imagine a school district, for example, where:

• Each school fills a market niche and has a reputation of doing some things extremely well. There is open enrollment (with some limitations), and schools vigorously compete to attract parents and students. Dollars follow students to the schools they attend. More dollars accompany students with low income or disability status. The Seattle Schools under the legendary leadership of the late John Stanford did these very things with great success. Other districts continue to use some variation of his “weighted student average.”
• Job security and pay depend on how successful the school is in attracting students and meeting achievement standards. The best teachers can bid up their salaries in a competitive marketplace. Salary scales, tenure and seniority are replaced by renewable employment contracts that include a base salary and bonuses that are contingent on school success. Schools remain viable so long as they meet enrollment and performance criteria specified by the school board. The best of our charter schools do these things.

In such a competitive, results-oriented environment, teachers themselves will come up with the staffing, scheduling and curricular adjustments to produce student achievement. To be competitive, for example, teachers might well develop schools where:

• The school day lasts until late afternoon, thus affording time for students to see teachers or counselors about their progress and/or engage in projects and after-school activities. The longer day also affords time for teachers to engage in quality control: meeting with one another to assess student progress and make necessary adjustments in course content and teaching methods.
• Teachers know what other teachers are teaching, and they take mutual responsibility for the final “product,” i.e. students who meet standards of academic performance and personal behavior.
• Junior and senior high school students enjoy team-taught, interdisciplinary, computer-assisted classes facilitated by block or modular scheduling. In this environment, teachers truly get to know their students. Bells triggering 50-minute classes are relegated to the scrap heap of the long-gone industrial era.

3. Develop curricula and classroom practices that truly engage students. Gates’ idea of videotaping classes to get at effective teaching practices is nothing new, but it is effective. For example, some 25 years ago Drs. Cheryl and David Aspy of the Carkuff Institute (Georgia), provided convincing evidence that conventional, memory-based instruction predominated in our schools. Using a large database of classroom interaction (some 20,000 videotaped classroom hours), they found that 80 percent of classroom time is spent on memorization. In contrast, effective instructional systems devoted only 40 percent of classroom time to memorization, while 50 percent was devoted to improving thinking, information processing, and problem-solving skills. Another outcome of their videotape analysis was that the teacher behaviors that best predicted good reading and math scores among first and second graders were (1) looking students in the eye, (2) smiling and (3) calling them by name.  Amazing how well it works when you are cheerful and show students that you care.

Another common sense strategy would be to use activities that students already like in order to engage them in academics. For grades 1-3, for example, there is considerable evidence that music, art, games, and sport can be used to help students learn language and math. Yet the arts are the first things cut in a poor economy, and most elementary teachers are ill equipped to do such curricular integration. But TV programs as SuperWhy, Barney and Sesame Street do it. Maybe elementary teachers of the future shouldn’t be hired unless they have skills in the arts and physical education to go along with their academic preparation. Perhaps Gates’ money should be used to test this proposition.

At the high school level, why not pilot an accelerated learning program called Fast Break that has successfully engaged young adults while equipping them with the skills and habits of mind to move ahead to career entry positions or college. “Fast Break was initiated in Detroit in the early 90′s, replicated in Los Angeles with a 3-year NSF demonstration grant in 1995 and expanded in Michigan in 2001 with State funding.” The program typically yields graduates making 2+ grade-level increases in Reading and Math (1-2 WorkKeys levels), employable skills in computer applications–Word, Excel and PowerPoint–as well as teamwork and job readiness skills. Additionally, graduates take away from the program interview skills, professional resumes, speaking and conflict resolution skills. All in 2 months.  This fun, 6-8 hours-a-day program not only raises educational levels but also increases the earnings of graduates to $12+ an hour.” For the cost, the benefit to the individuals and society is considerable.

While Fast Break has closed the skills gap for a few thousand urban youths who have left school, it has not been tested for youth still in high school. Perhaps the Gates Foundation should fund a few high schools to pilot Fast Break. This intensive, highly integrated, highly applied, team-taught, computer-assisted model quite possibly is a microcosm of the kind of curriculum that will engage urban youth and increase high school achievement, retention and productivity.

Yet if Gates simply pours money into improving the ability of teachers to function in outmoded instructional systems like the factory model high school, it will have wasted its money. As most thriving enterprises have come to realize, the effectiveness of people is integrally related with the quality of the work environment. True, the most outstanding among us can overcome and even excel in lousy environments, usually by working harder and longer. But if schools are to sustain upward learning curves, teachers will have to work smarter. That is, the majority must be given the opportunity to implement better school designs and curricula, particularly those that require teaming and the intelligent use of technology. With designs that require teachers to work smarter and continually test their work, they will indeed become more enthusiastic and effective.

4. Ensure that teachers not only know their stuff but can team teach. There is widespread agreement that teachers should be equipped with decent basic skills, content knowledge in their discipline, and be savvy in the use of computers and the internet to aid instruction. Kids especially at the high school level know right away whether their teacher is competent. But can 21^st Century teachers work with other specialists to integrate disciplines and team teach? Moreover, can teachers out of economic necessity find cost-effective ways to engage and teach larger, more diverse and oftentimes ill-prepared groups of students? They had better, for the country is in the throes of a major economic crisis. Schools cannot be held harmless forever.

Virtually every workplace in America except schools requires teamwork and integrated knowledge to solve problems. By modeling the teamwork seen in the best companies, schools would engage many more students more of the time. Teachers working as a team and assisted by courseware, small group instructional strategies and an incentive structure that appeals would help not only struggling students, but it would bring up the achievement and motivation of all students, most of whom want to be part of a group with a winning mission. Will Gates’ funds help test the notion that teaching in the 21^st Century, especially in the upper grades, is a “team sport”?

In sum, Gates’ funds are more likely to advance effective teaching if they support simultaneously the development of new, break-the-mold designs for both instruction and entire schools. That is, let’s find, develop and keep teachers who can successfully implement the best of these new designs. But continuing to support efforts to improve teaching in the bureaucratic organizational dinosaurs we call public schools is unlikely to produce much more than it has.