Good to Great, Great to Greater

Author Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, writes "Good is the enemy of great....we don't have great schools primarily because we have good schools." His point is that schools, and most organizations, that reach a level of proficiency become complacent and don't move beyond good. They stop reflecting on their practices, and do things the way they've always done them because these practices have proven over time to be good. Country Day School is a school that is great already in most respects, but we're committed to being "greater" in every way possible.

 

One of the initiatives we've undertaken this year is a horizontal and vertical integration of our curriculum. We have used a process we are calling "5 in / 5 out" as the vehicle for aligning our curriculum. The goal is to identify the five essential skills for a student coming into a content area by course or grade level, and the five essential skills or pieces of content knowledge with which a successful student will leave. In this way, we will link together all courses, content areas, and grade levels in the school, pk-12. We will also have a mechanism for eliminating unnecessary redundancies, and filling gaps that we discover exist. Through this process, teachers are meeting not only with their departmental or grade level colleagues, but also with teachers whose courses or grade levels come before and after them in the vertical path towards graduation. We have undertaken this endeavor not because we necessarily feel there are issues with our current curriculum, but so we can open dialogue between faculty at all levels, evaluate our own practices, and look for ways to make a great school even greater.

 

By the end of this school year, we anticipate that we will have completed our curriculum alignment, and will shift our efforts to discussion of "how we teach" rather than "what we teach". In this ongoing evaluation of curriculum and practice, we hope to establish strong connections across grade levels, and really develop the "One Country Day" concept of shared and collegial collaboration. One of the foundations of Detroit Country Day School is a commitment to excellence, and part of that commitment is consistent, ongoing self-reflection and evaluation. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, "If there's a way to do it better - find it."

Happy Holidays to all of our Country Day families. We wish you a happy and healthy holidays season and New Year.

Parent / Teacher Communication

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -  Mark Twain

 

I've always loved this quote attributed to Twain, as it so aptly describes the evolution we go through in our perceptions of our parents. Young people, particularly adolescents, often fail to appreciate the wisdom and knowledge that comes from their parents. This youthful perception is sometimes extended to all adults, including their teachers.  As both teachers and parents must deal with the commonly held adolescent belief that all adults are clueless, it can be hugely important to join forces in a positive way in the best interests of students. One of the most successful approaches is when parents and teachers knowingly work together to ensure student responsibility and accountability. Putting the responsibility on young people to handle issues with their teachers teaches them valuable coping lessons that will serve them in future issues that require self-reliance. Nevertheless, not all of a student's issues can be solved by the meeting of student and teacher, and the partnership of parents and teachers becomes essential.

 

I am sometimes asked by parents the proper protocol, and best steps to take in communicating with teachers. Parents sometimes worry that if they voice a concern there will be reprisals for their child. Our teachers are professionals, who are in this profession because of their commitment to young people and their growth, and mutual understanding and trust between parent and teacher can resolve most issues. Please consider the following protocol for optimal resolution of issues:

 

DCDS Problem Solving Protocol

1. Student addresses issue with teacher in a private, personal appointment. This will result in successful outcome in the majority of circumstances.
2. If student and teacher cannot resolve issue, parent makes email or phone contact with the teacher or the student's advisor who can often assist in facilitating a solution. If the situation is emotionally charged, it is recommended that this communication be solely for the purpose of arranging a personal meeting between parent and teacher. Many situations can be resolved by email or phone.
3. Personal meeting between parent and teacher - depending on the circumstances, it may be important to also include the student.
4. If a personal meeting with the teacher occurs, and the issue has still not been resolved satisfactorily,  the next step for parents should be contact with the relevant department chair, dean, or school director. Administrative assistance should be an avenue for resolution that occurs after other steps have been exhausted.

Tips, and Potential Pitfalls to Avoid:

1. Teachers appreciate students who advocate for themselves. That being said, private conversations that are pre-arranged are almost always better than a public or classroom conversation.
2. A cooling off period is almost always beneficial for all. If the situation is emotionally charged, follow the 24 hour rule, and allow for some time to pass so that cool heads can resolve issues.
3. Email can be dangerous for resolving complex issues, as many nuances of communication are lost in these impersonal written communications. Email can be very effective for getting information, communicating absences, arranging appointments and other surface communications. It is advisable not to rely on email for exchanges of a more personal nature. If you are unsure as to whether an email is appropriate for a situation, err on the side of a personal meeting.
4. It is not appropriate or constructive to confront a teacher or administrator about personal student matters in public spaces, or without an appointment. In emergency situations, always visit the academic office first for communication with an administrator who will help facilitate problem solving measures.
5. Successful resolutions do not result from threatening language or behavior. Even if it may not seem so at the time, educators try their best to work in the interest of all students, and are generally compassionate and caring towards young people. If you find it difficult to maintain composure because of the tenor of a meeting, involve an administrator to facilitate or take a cooling off period.

Our teachers, administration and staff are here for you and your children. We want the best possible experience for them, and working together with parents in a positive and constructive way to present a unified team approach to students reinforces the important roles of both school and family. It may even result in students who someday recognize our "growth" in knowledge and intelligence as they gain a more global, adult perspective of the motives of parent and school.

 

If you have any questions about appropriate school contacts and , or strategies to resolve conflicts, please don't hesitate to contact me at Tbearden@dcds.edu, or by phone at 248.430.3696.

Welcome

Welcome to The Principal's Office, a blog created by Tim Bearden, Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Upper School at Detroit Country Day School.

The purpose of this blog is not only to provide information and updates relevant to the DCDS school community, but to explore concepts, ideas, programs and directions germane to 21st century schools, and the creativity and innovation that will be necessary to best serve students of this next generation.

This blog is a continuation of the blog The Principal's Office first started at Grosse Pointe North High School. Some of the posts from that blog which have relevance to educational issues in general, and are not specific to North, have been retained as part of this new iteration.

As always, comments are encouraged and welcomed, and thanks for visiting The Principal's Office.

EPIC Instruction

At the beginning of this school year we had an inservice for staff designed to look at different ways to deliver instruction built around a theme that instruction for today's generation of students has to be "EPIC". EPIC is an acronym coined by Tim Elmore for instruction that is Experiential, Participatory, Image Rich and Connected. EPIC instruction certainly looks different than traditional lecture delivery, and it feels different for students and teachers alike. Our approach of evolving to a project based model of instruction is built on the platform of EPIC instructional delivery.

Well-known New York educator Pedro Noguera has often said, "I can spend all day teaching my dog Spanish - that doesn't mean that at the end of the day he can speak it". For years education has been built on the instructional delivery model of teachers lecturing, students taking notes, and subsequently "regurgitating" the information. One need go no further than personal experience to evaluate whether that model led to long term retention...in my case I can say unequivocally that I no longer remember much of what I "learned" during my college experience (and no, it's not because of the number of years that have passed...).

More recent research is clear that retention and "learning" is based largely on experience. Few of us learn by having someone tell us information. EPIC instruction is based on the premise that students must experience and participate in the learning and the delivery of learning, and that the role of the teacher must transform into one of "guide on the side" vs. "sage on the stage".

This article details that transformation through the lens of experiences of a college physics instructor. As I visit the classrooms of our building, I can say with a high degree of certainty that EPIC instruction works, it's more engaging, and develops a deeper understanding of material.

Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool
by Emily Hanford

January 1, 2012

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text size A A A January 1, 2012 from APM The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.

"Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down," says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it's a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

When Eric Mazur began teaching physics at Harvard, he started out teaching the same way he had been taught.

"I sort of projected my own experience, my own vision of learning and teaching — which is what my instructors had done to me. So I lectured," he says.

He loved to lecture. Mazur's students apparently loved it, too. They gave him great evaluations and his classes were full.

"For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job," he says.

But then in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the series when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent.

"I noted that the reason for that was that his examination questions were mostly qualitative, requiring understanding of the concepts rather than just calculational, using formulas, which is what most of the instructors did," Hestenes says.

Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. So he and a colleague developed a test to look at students' conceptual understanding of physics. It's a test Maryland's Redish has given his students many times.

Here's a question from the test: "Two balls are the same size but one weighs twice as much as the other. The balls are dropped from the top of a two-story building at the same instant of time. The time it takes the ball to reach the ground will be..."

The possible answers include about half as long for the heavier ball, about half as long for the lighter ball, or the same time for both. This is a fundamental concept but even some people who've taken physics get this question wrong.

To get to the answer, Redish went to the second floor of the physics building. A group of his students was on the sidewalk below. When he reached the top, he dropped two balls from the roof.

The two balls reached the ground at the same time. Sir Isaac Newton was the first person who figured out why. He came up with a law of motion to explain how two balls of different weights, dropped from the same height, hit the ground simultaneously.

While most physics students can recite Newton's second law of motion, Harvard's Mazur says, the conceptual test developed by Hestenes showed that after an entire semester they understood only about 14 percent more about the fundamental concepts of physics. When Mazur read the results, he shook his head in disbelief. The test covered such basic material.

"I gave it to my students only to discover that they didn't do much better," he says.

The test has now been given to tens of thousands of students around the world and the results are virtually the same everywhere. The traditional lecture-based physics course produces little or no change in most students' fundamental understanding of how the physical world works.

"The classes only seem to be really working for about 10 percent of the students," Arizona State's Hestenes says. "And I maintain, I think all the evidence indicates, that these 10 percent are the students that would learn it even without the instructor. They essentially learn it on their own."

He says that listening to someone talk is not an effective way to learn any subject.

"Students have to be active in developing their knowledge," he says. "They can't passively assimilate it."

This is something many people have known intuitively for a long time — the physicists just came up with the hard data. Their work, along with research by cognitive scientists, provides a compelling case against lecturing. But with budgets shrinking and enrollments booming, large classes aren't going away. You don't have to lecture in a lecture hall though.

Mazur's physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.

At a recent class, the students — nearly 100 of them — are in small groups discussing a question. Three possible answers to the question are projected on a screen. Before the students start talking with one another, they use a mobile device to vote for their answer. Only 29 percent got it right. After talking for a few minutes, Mazur tells them to answer the question again.

This time, 62 percent of the students get the question right. Next, Mazur leads a discussion about the reasoning behind the answer. The process then begins again with a new question. This is a method Mazur calls "peer Instruction." He now teaches all of his classes this way.

"What we found over now close to 20 years of using this approach is that the learning gains at the end of the semester nearly triple," he says.

One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don't need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the "information-gathering" part of education — before they come to class.

"In class, we work on trying to make sense of the information," Mazur says. "Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part."

Mazur's approach is one of many developed in response to evidence that traditional lectures don't work. Among the advocates of these approaches there's an increasing sense of urgency about how to help more students do better.

"We need to educate a population to compete in this global marketplace," says Brian Lukoff, an education researcher at Harvard. "We can't do that by just sort of picking out 10 percent and saying, 'Oh you guys are going to be the successful ones,' and you know we need a much larger swath of that population to be able to think critically and problem-solve."

But ask anyone involved with efforts to lose the lecture and they'll tell you they encounter resistance. Sometimes the stiffest opposition comes from the students.

"Revamping my entire education, you know, philosophy for this one class was a bit daunting," says Ryan Duncan, a sophomore in Mazur's class.

But he adapted and says he learned more in Mazur's class than he did in his other physics course at Harvard.

Maryland's Redish says when he lays out the case against lecturing, colleagues often nod their heads, but insist their lectures work just fine. Redish tells them — lecturing isn't enough anymore.

"With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it," Redish says. "Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty."

Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don't have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.

"It used to be just be the 'sage on the stage,' the source of knowledge and information," he says. "We now know that it's not good enough to have a source of information."

Mazur sees himself now as the "guide on the side" – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.

American Radioworks is the documentary series from American Public Media. You can find more of their reporting on this issue at "Don't Lecture Me."

Signing Off

After six years as Principal of North High School, I have accepted a position as Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Upper School at Detroit Country Day School in Beverly Hills, MI. DCDS is one of the top schools in the nation, and this opportunity and challenge is one I couldn't turn down.

It has been a great run at North, and I have been blessed by the many wonderful young people, faculty members and community members who have been part of the Norseman nation during my years at North. I want to sincerely thank each of you for your support, and for your commitment to North High School. I will be moving the Principal's Office blog off the North website soon, but plan to continue blogging under a new address. Hopefully those of you have found some interest in my all too infrequent posts will continue to follow as I will continue to follow my many friends at GPN.

Grosse Pointe North is a wonderful school of caring, compassionate educators, and devoted, dedicated students and parents. I wish success and happiness to everyone wearing the Green & Gold.

Thanks and Best Wishes,

Tim Bearden