Category Archives: Middle School

I Got Schooled – Practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership

So, here is I Got Schooled practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership.

Through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan spent five years studying what is succeeding in closing the education gap that depended only on factors inside the classroom itself and that were scalable. He discovered closing the achievement gap can’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself; five things must be implemented together to have any substantive effect.

Shyamalan uncovers five factors present in schools he found were significantly closing the education gap for inner city children and children of color. He provides just tons of example schools, clinical studies, data and statistics, detailing each of these five factors.

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
Right balance of leadership
Feedback that is timely and consistent
Smaller schools
More time in school

A large number of successful schools and programs are covered in the book, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

Factor #2 – LEADERSHIP, the right balance of

School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence on learning
“Superman principals” are not scalable
There is not a single documented case of a school successfully turning around its achievement trajectory in the absence of strong leadership
First, leaders vary in large and consistent ways – the most successful teams work under the most successful bosses (McKinsey & Company study)
Second, the boss’s most important job isn’t communicating strategy or even hiring and firing – it is teaching skills that persist
Motivating a team of subordinates isn’t nearly as important as improving their skills
The difference between a good principal and a mediocre one is nearly as big as that between a great teacher and a poor teacher
A principal effects hundreds of students, instead of a few dozen
Principals are profoundly important
The most effective principals are also the ones engaging in the most “negative teacher selection,” i.e., firing the lemons
The most effective principals also improved the instructional success of existing teachers
Least effective principals seldom leave the system – they just move to different schools, further widening the achievement gap
Existing, thorough application processes do not insure a consistent level of success
Principals should be primarily responsible for the instruction of teachers
But the typical urban principal spends less that 20 percent of their workday on instruction
Principals in the top systems around the world spend 80 percent of the school day on improving instruction in the classroom (McKinsey & Company study)
Schools need an Operations Manager to handle food service, discipline, custodians, paperwork, to free principals to help teachers help students learn
Such an administrative management model is scalable
Brett Peiser founder of Uncommon Schools network, on leaders: “Great leaders know culture eats strategy for lunch.”
Culture is everything distinctive to a place; it’s every way you know you are in an uncommon school; it’s rigorous in involving and aligning everything and everyone
Culture is beyond advertising brochures, it must have enough force and buy-in to overwhelm its students’ environments outside the school
A culture of high expectations seems almost important enough to earn a place as one of the keys to closing the achievement gap
Someone has to make certain that all teachers understand and support a uniform school culture in their bones
Again, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
Consistency in students’ experience from class to class and grade to grade; and quality control of this consistency is really important
Both unquestioned authority and humanity are equally important, i.e., caring and respect for students
There are techniques and behaviors that produce desirable results consistently, like Lemov’s Taxonomy, Teach Like A Champion, and they should be known and used
See also The Wooden Way, the legendary UCLA basketball coach’s system
And these practices are scalable

Hoping you are finding these interesting and perhaps useful.

Up next: Factor #3 – Feedback

Tom

I Got Schooled – Practice #1 – Effective teachers

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I Got Schooled Practice #1 – Effective teachers – hiring good and dropping poor

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
Right balance of leadership
Feedback that is timely and consistent
Smaller schools
More time in school

EFFECTIVE TEACHERS – dropping poor, hiring good

Are the engine that make schools run
Not all teachers perform equally (as do neither all salesmen, lawyers, accountants, basketball players, school principals, …)
Get the least effective teachers out of classrooms
You can discover who underperformers are
National studies find just 2% of teachers are rated unsatisfactory
Teachers in the middle, performance-wise, may be the most important factor for scaling success to 132,656 K-12 schools nationwide in 2010
One year with a great teacher is worth $20,000 in lifetime earnings for every student in that class
The effects of poor teachers in student learning outweighs the benefits provided by the good ones
Someone who barely graduated from Nowhere State is just as likely to be a great teacher as someone with a Summa Cum Laude from Harvard
Until you see them teach, you are picking blind; seeing them teach takes 2 to 3 years
After 2-3 years, tenure locks both good and bad teachers in place
Release procedures can take 300 days and cost $250,000, and so becomes too much trouble to take on
By replacing just 5 to 8% of the least effective teachers with average teachers, student overall achievement scores would rise to those of Canada or Finland
There is no evidence we can improve teachers’ performance by giving them bonuses or sending them to graduate school
Reliable tools must be used to determine teacher competence and effectiveness
Actual-versus-expected student progress can be a valid rating system (i.e., Value Added Method – VAM)
But … “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Voltaire
Hence the teacher evaluation problem: “Until someone comes up with a perfect tool for judging teachers, one that judges no teacher unfairly, there’s no point in using anything.”
If no one can be fired without a “fair” evaluation, and a fair evaluation needs to be error-free, then no one can be fired.
Multiple tests, as designed by the Measures of Effective Teaching project (MET), are providing greater reliability and validity to teacher evaluation (see the MET January 2013 final report)
Good news: an inner city student having a great teacher for four years in a row will close the gap separating her from her suburban counterpart, without doing anything else
Bad news: three great teachers won’t make up for one poor one
The ratio of great teachers to poor teachers is nowhere near three-to-one
For schools on the wrong side of the achievement gap, these “roadblock” teachers effectively trap students
Eliminating roadblock teachers is a necessary first step toward closing America’s achievement gap, but it’s not sufficient in and of itself. “You can’t fire your way to excellence.”
Hiring good teachers and releasing bad ones is a scalable practice

Next up: The right balance of leadership

Closing the education gap – new book – “I Got Schooled”

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This summary, borrowed from Amazon: I Got Schooled, offers a look at America’s educational achievement gap that could only have come from an outsider.

Famed director M. Night Shyamalan has long had a serious interest in education. The MNS Foundation he and his wife started once gave college scholarships to promising inner-city students, but Shyamalan realized that these scholarships did nothing to improve education for all the other students in under-performing schools. When he learned that some schools were succeeding with similar student populations, he traveled across the country to find out how they did this and whether these schools had something in common. He eventually learned that there are five keys to closing America’s achievement gap. But just as we must do several things simultaneously to maintain good health— eat the right foods, exercise regularly, get a good night’s sleep—so too must we use all five keys to turn around our lowest-performing schools.

These five keys are used by all the schools that are succeeding, and no schools are succeeding without them. Before he discovered them, Shyamalan investigated some popular reform ideas that proved to be dead ends, such as smaller class size, truculent unions, and merit pay for teachers. He found that the biggest obstacle to school reform is cognitive biases: too many would-be reformers have committed themselves to false solutions (*) .

This is a deeply personal book by an unbiased observer determined to find out what works and why, so that we as a nation can fulfill our obligation to give every student an opportunity for a good education.

(*) Not the answer to closing the education gap:

small classroom sizes
master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers
paying teachers like doctors
funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

Truly a book worth reading … and sharing … widely.

Here is a 58 minute video interview with M. Night Shyamalan that’s worth watching [click here to watch].

For busy people, I am posting a summary at tommilesabq.com of each of the five practices MNS Foundation discovered that “moved the needle” in closing the gap.

An ‘A’ for Job Readiness?

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From Melissa Korn, At Work Blog, WSJ.com:

“Nearly 80% of current college students say they’re “very” or “completely” prepared to put their organization skills to work, while just 54% of hiring managers who’ve interviewed recent grads would agree, according to a survey of 2,000 U.S. college students and 1,000 hiring managers, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of education company Chegg.

Students overestimate their abilities by at least 10 percentage points on each of the 11 criteria measured in the survey, according to the findings.”

From the study:

Assessment characteristic	Students view	Recruiters’ view
Making decisions without all the facts	47%	37%
Ability to communicate with bosses and clients	70%	44%

The study also found that collaboration, managing up (i.e., managing your manager(s)), making persuasive arguments, and critical thinking in general, were unprepared for. The feeling that more hands-on and applied learning would be supportive to both students and employers.

Methinks starting more ‘hands-on and applied learning’ in middle- and high-school would also be supportive.

Back from the polls with interesting article

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Whew! Sixteen hour election day poll work took a couple of days recovery time. Definitely not as young as I used to be.

Because this article on reverse engineering in healthcare seemed to have a number of interesting parallels with Education I thought I’d pass it on in the blog. Just substitute “education” for “healthcare” in the article. Here’s a summary:

Reverse innovation works because the different conditions in higher- and lower-income settings change the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that drive innovation.

What happens when you create health care solutions specifically for patients in low-income settings? It turns out that learning from and investing in these settings can be powerful ways to tackle problems at home that require out-of-the-box thinking. These differences include:

Higher volume for lower price. Radical approaches are often needed to achieve acceptable performance at ultra-low price points.
Less developed infrastructure allows rapid implementation of new solutions.
Sustainability is important in resource-limited areas, favoring “green solutions.”
Fewer regulations quicken the pace of innovation.
Preferences are different, inspiring creative design.
Overwhelming need increases the ‘purpose motive,’ fueling innovators who want to make a difference.

These six attributes make lower-income settings appealing places to create, test, and scale new ideas (In ABQ/BERNCO, think ABC Community Schools Partnership for pre-K-12 and Mission Graduate: 60,000 for K-12 and beyond).

So, just how do ideas move through a reverse innovation pipeline?

Identify a high priority problem shared between lower- and higher-income settings. For example, affordable, user-friendly diagnostics, or a mobile health information technology solution to a pressing health care issue.
Innovators in lower-income settings must create a solution that spreads to the first 15% of the population, or the “early adopters.” This usually happens only if the idea is better, relevant, simple, easily tested, and visible to others. Endorsement by early adopters pushes an innovation past its tipping point, where it is then likely to spread to the population at large.
The idea must cross-pollinate from lower- to a higher-income settings. Here the critical link is between lower-income early adopters and higher-income innovators. Whether these parties connect in-person or online, the quality of the interaction must facilitate sufficient trust to allow the idea to cross over. Building relationships over time helps create “spannable social distances,” such that the two parties find each other credible enough to take a risk on the other’s idea.
The idea has to spread in the higher-income setting. Again the innovation must be better, relevant, simple, easily tested, and visible to others. It must also overcome the resistance of existing infrastructure and other established solutions. If the idea is clearly effective in lower-income settings, this can help lower the barrier to adoption.

The article provides three very interesting real-world examples in Diagnostics, Health IT, and Service Delivery.

In short, reverse innovation has tremendous potential to align incentives and disrupt existing systems and technologies. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg (or, as their African colleagues like to say, the ears of the hippopotamus – I just love that analogy).

Also … beware the resistance inherent in disrupting existing systems.

What can we do to increase the pace of reverse innovation? For starters, we can:

Identify high-priority problems that could potentially be solved in lower-income settings.
Empower lower-income innovators and early adopters through seed funding, competitive “innovation awards,” or other mechanisms.
Bring lower-income early adopters and higher-income innovators together through conferences or learning collaboratives (live or virtual).
Track reverse innovation activity globally, identifying and removing barriers to spread.

Many intractable problems in health care could be solved if we accelerated the spread of ideas through the reverse innovation pipeline. To do this, we will need to think differently, invest in reverse innovation, and work together to solve common problems.

Again, think of the work being done today by ABC Community Schools Partnership for pre-K-12 and Mission Graduate: 60,000 for K-12 and beyond.

Read the complete article here.

Do You Know About ShareMyLesson.com?

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If You Happen To Know Any Teachers, Here’s Something That Will Make Their Day

The last few years have been tough on schools. With deep budget cuts, many have had to scramble to teach the same number of kids (and sometimes more!) with less. Here’s one truly amazing idea that aims to equalize the playing field and give all students the kind of engaging classroom time they deserve.

It’s called “ShareMyLesson.com” and it’s free!

Free back-to-school teaching resources
The fastest-growing network of teachers in the U.S.

Sounds pretty cool!

Flipboard for Educators – cool!

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Posted on August 29, 2013 by insideflipboard

As students and teachers head back to school all over the country, we wanted to share some ideas on how Flipboard can be helpful this school year. Since the launch of Flipboard 2.0 this past spring, our readers can collect articles and turn them into shareable magazines. We’ve found that educators are doing this a lot—for class reading assignments, student projects and their own enlightenment.

Here’s how you can use Flipboard in teaching and learning:

1. Keep up on current events: Flipboard has more than 125 publishing partners, including the BBC, New York Times, TechCrunch, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as sections curated around topics such as News, Tech, Travel and Design—”one-stop shops” for authoritative news on a subject. Tap on the red ribbon to explore great magazines, newspapers and blogs in the Content Guide.

2. Create a class syllabus: Plan out the semester for your students by making your syllabus available in a magazine. Include articles and editorial content that your students need to read throughout the semester to ensure success in your class. You can supplement it with your own notes by using a blogging platform such as WordPress, and flipping your posts into your magazine. Encourage students to comment on articles to track engagement.

Things AP Econ Students Should Know: by Michael Brody

3. Class projects: Task your students with creating a class-project magazine. Have them compile editorial, images and YouTube videos around specific subject matter they’re studying in your class. They can do this individually, or in groups (tap “Invite Contributors” from the magazine’s front page.)

Government Class: by kimberleyscox

Mike McCue: by Brian Pinkston

4. Educational Resource Guides: The education process is never ending. Create a resource guide by compiling articles and educational materials on a single topic or general areas of inquiry and share that with your colleagues.

Science class: by Zach Morrow

EducAtion: by Brendan Gilligan

Early Childhood Education: by Jacqueline Mezquita

5. Collaboration: Teaching is all about teamwork. Invite other educators to collaborate on a resource guide or have your students collaborate on a magazine for class. Compile articles, teaching resources or how to videos related to the subject you teach or education in general and share that magazine with other educators in your school or district.

Student Blogging Challenge Sept 2013: by suewaters

Education & Educapability: by Joshua Hostetter

6. Keep parents informed: Stay in touch with your classroom parents by creating a magazine with curriculum examples, class readings, suggested at home projects, images from class and classroom updates flipped in from a personal blog. Encourage your parents to subscribe to the magazine to stay up to date on everything going on in your classroom.

7. Your school, on the go: For administrators—Flipboard is a great way for your school to stay in touch with students, parents and the community. As long as your school paper, newsletter or event images are available as an RSS feed or via social media, you can search for it on Flipboard. You can also use our Web tools to flip your school’s posts into new magazines—into which you can even mix in other content—around any topic you like.

The Paly Voice: by Callie Walker

Flipboard has previously teamed up with both TeachThought and EdReach, two great educational organizations, to teach their networks how educators and students can best use Flipboard. Check out both of these resources for some additional tips and tricks.