What Works in Schools...Keeping Up

Each edition of the weekend paper now comes with brightly colored advertising sections offering "door buster" prices for those willing to stand in the dark and cold at 4:00 a.m. Most of the best deals are on technology. One of the reasons that some of this technology can be sold so cheaply is that it is already outdated, or on the verge of irrelevance. Today's bargain computer is outdated within a year. Game systems for kids are upgraded and outdated within a year. That beautiful dvd/vcr combo you bought two Christmases ago is irrelevant - there are no more VHS tapes, and Blu-Ray technology has overtaken dvd technology as the industry standard for video replay. Education is much the same. In today's world, things happen fast. It is difficult to keep up with the newest technologies, the newest ideas, and determining which are passing fads, and which are worth investment. Nevertheless, we owe it to our students to offer them the most current, culturally, technologically and intellectually relevant education possible.

For the most part, in the last fifty years education in the United States has not changed much. Despite the changes in family dynamics, morality, technological access for all, and the "flattening" of the global world, schools continue to operate pretty much the same way they have for decades. Without a doubt schools have not changed as rapidly as the world around them, and so today's graduates are often at a disadvantage. When students are expected to learn facts through rote memorization and then regurgitate them as part of an assessment, they are not learning in a way that will significantly enhance their ability to be successful in the world outside of school. Today's world places a heavy emphasis on problem solving, and on the ability of people to be flexible and adapt. Schools would do well to emphasize those skills - problem solving, adaptability, and flexibility, as the cornerstone skills for all graduates.

At North High School, and in Grosse Pointe in general, we have been pursuing for two years now, a restyling of our high schools' instructional delivery models to focus on what today's graduates need as a skill set. The infusion of technology and project based learning at our schools is not a fad. It's an effort to prepare our students with the kind of skills that will make them successful in the world outside of high school.

I was speaking with a group of students in a social studies class last week, and they were guessing my age. I'd like to say they were guessing on the low side, but they were unfortunately accurate. We started talking about what school was like when I was their age. I told them a couple of things that shocked them all - I graduated from high school in 1982, and I'm 44 years old. When I was in high school there were exactly two computers in our building and they were both the size of file cabinets. They were used exclusively for the computer programming classes and clubs. In North high school alone, we have more than 300 computers in the building. There were no cell phones. Not just in high school - there were none. Now I would guess that 80% or more of our students carry a cell phone daily. No one I knew had ever heard of the internet. Today not only does every student know what the internet is, but studies show that the average high school student spends almost five hours a day online either through their phone or computer. The world changes rapidly. I use technology every day as part of my job that wasn't even on the horizon of my teachers imagination when I was in high school.

We have to keep up for our students' sake. Not only with technology, but with the best thinking about what works in schools. Sometimes, what really works are the simplest, most time tested ideas. Take the ideas in the below pasted abstract of an article I read this week. The things that work in schools are not "rocket science", but we better prepare our students to be "rocket scientists"...What I feel best about after reading this article, is that North is ahead of this curve in terms of what works in school, and we're striving not just to keep up, but to set the curve!

1. What Works in the World’s Best Schools
In this Journal of Staff Development interview by Tracy Crow, British education leader Michael Barber shares what he believes are the key drivers of first-rate schools in the four best school systems in the world: Canada, Finland, Singapore, and other parts of Asia. Some schools in the U.S. and the U.K. have these characteristics, he says, but most don’t.• Teachers – These countries recruit really good people into teaching – those with strong academic records, generosity, a liking for children, and the ability to inspire youth – and then provide robust initial training.• Professional development – “There’s an ethic of continuous improvement in the profession within these countries and within the successful schools,” says Barber. “You see a lot of embedded professional development with mentoring and coaching for support… There’s time in the school day, there’s time in the school year. There are teams of teachers working together, planning lessons, reviewing student work, comparing student work from different classes, and trying to understand why certain pedagogies seem to work more effectively than others… It’s that culture of professional learning, really focused on ‘how do I get the next child up to the standard?’”• Intervention with struggling students – Immediate action is taken when children fall behind. Instead of saying, “Oh, that child’s not clever enough or comes from a poor background,” teachers say, “What’s the barrier to that child keeping up with everybody else, and what do we need to do about it?” Finland is a model of prompt and effective intervention, says Barber: struggling students are referred to expert, more highly paid teachers who diagnose learning barriers and unlock learning. “Their job is to get that child back into the classroom with his or her peers as soon as possible,” he says. • Principals – Carefully selected, highly trained school leaders put the other elements in place. Reporting on a study of teacher attrition in the U.K., Barber says, “The single most important factor in teachers leaving the profession wasn’t pay, wasn’t challenging students, it was poor leadership in their school. They just couldn’t get anything done. They just got frustrated.” School leaders “set the culture, create the timetable, and create expectations for teachers,” he continues. “If the school leader creates a culture in which teachers are expected to look at data and worry about each student who falls behind, expected to watch each other teach, expected to work with mentors and coaches in the system, it will happen.” Barber concludes with two comments on American education: (a) Funding disparities among districts – In the U.S., schools in wealthier communities get better financial support than schools in poorer communities. “To the rest of the world,” says Barber, “that just looks completely nonsensical. We’re in an era where we’re setting high standards for everybody. We want everybody to achieve those high standards. It follows logically that children with the furthest to go need the most money spent on them. They need more support to get to those standards than children with less distance to travel.”(b) National standards – “You don’t have a choice about whether you achieve national standards,” says Barber, “because they will be imposed by globalization. Physics doesn’t change at the Rio Grande or the 49th parallel. It’s the same everywhere. As the economy around the world globalizes, you’re going to have to compare the standards your school system sets, wherever you are, to the standards of other systems. By accident or design, the U.S. ultimately will end up with something like national standards, but they may be implicit and chaotic or America could decide to do it properly. There’s no serious option of not having something like standards that compare to the rest of the world.”
“Q&A: Michael Barber – What Works, Works Everywhere” by Tracy Crow in Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2009 (Vol. 30, #1, p. 10-16), no e-link available