Instruction and the Learning Environment

James Keefe, John Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138470705
• eBook ISBN: 9781317921073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For leaders of elementary, middle, or high schools, this book shows how your school can excel in reaching students with diverse learning styles; providing "authentic" instruction and performance assessment; applying constructivist learning methodologies; and enhancing learning through alternative scheduling.

1THE SCHOOL AS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

A national study of restructuring schools conducted by The Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools (CORS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that restructuring is most likely to succeed when changes in school organization are motivated by three principles: intellectual quality, community, and sustained effort (Newman, et al., 1995). Schools have tried various organizational reforms to improve student learning. Many have proved helpful—cooperative learning, detracking, higher academic standards, new forms of scheduling, personalization, performance-based assessment, school-site and shared decision-making, teaming—but the results ultimately have been disappointing because the primary effort has been directed to these technical aspects of schooling. The CORS study found that specific organizational reforms are more or less successful depending on the degree to which they reflect the three principles of intellectual quality, school community and sustained effort.

The first challenge in improving schools is to define high standards of intellectual quality for instruction and learning. Concern for the intellectual quality of student experiences involves developing curriculum with challenging content rather than just teaching to the text, and emphasizing cognitive processes that enable students to construct meaning and in-depth understanding from their learning experiences. Innovative teaching techniques can support intellectual quality, but only when linked to important intellectual goals and to standards for authentic teaching and learning. (We discuss authentic pedagogy, instruction, and assessment in greater detail in Chapter 4.)

The second challenge for school reform is building organizational capacity to achieve the defined standards of intellectual quality. The most basic purpose of school reform is not to create new structures or even to upgrade the competence of school personnel, but to improve the capacity of the entire school organization to support student intellectual outcomes. Schools improve their organizational capacity by becoming learning communities. They become learning communities when students and teachers see themselves clearly as learners, when they pursue shared intellectual goals, when they work collaboratively and take collective responsibility for learning, and when they have backing from all school stakeholders. (Newman, et al., 1995). School community, in turn, is strengthened when the school becomes a learning organization, continually expanding its capacity to create what its members mutually w ant to do. The foundation, as well as the mark of a functioning learning community and organization, is a unified school culture.

The third challenge of reform is to sustain the effort of school improvement. Schools jump from one educational fad to another with sparse provision for ongoing visioning, longitudinal analysis of results, or data-based planning. Schools are “programmed” to death, with little articulation among programs and no commitment to a sustained focus. Many schools implement improvements, but few institutionalize these reforms in the culture of the organization. Sustained effort requires continuity in district and school leadership and in teaching staff, a common vision and goals that are continually reviewed and updated, and support from all stakeholders—school community and parents, policy and political agencies, and independent reform organizations like the Accelerated Schools Project, the Coalition of Essential Schools, and the Learning Environments Consortium.

CREATING A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

Nevis, et al. (1995), describe organizational learning as “the capacity or process within an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience.” This capacity implies the existence of processes and structures for acquiring, sharing, and using knowledge and skills. Successful learning organizations typically share three characteristics that give them the organizational capacity for improvement:

♦Well-developed core competencies that can lead to new products or services—In school organizations, core competencies include personnel policies and practices, staff development strategies, instructional delivery, and so on.

♦Attitudes supportive of continuous improvement, the cultural norms and expectations that produce a positive school climate and a risk-free school environment—A successful school environment supports a challenging curriculum, authentic instruction and assessment, and good communication.

♦The capability to redesign and renew the processes and structures of the organization—The successful instructional environment is flexible, personalized and committed to developing intellectual quality, school community and sustained effort.

In a recent interview (O'Neil, 1995), Peter Senge, the Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, observed that most schools are not learning organizations because they are not places where people work together to create the things they want done. Schools are rule-based places in which teachers work alone and students are engaged primarily in memorizing things that are of little intellectual or practical use to them.

Senge goes on to say that it is difficult to support collective learning in schools. “The education enterprise is especially complicated because not only does the organization have different levels; it's very stratified. You've got teachers, principals, off-site administrators, school board members. I'm not convinced many of them see themselves as having a lot of power …. And so it really should come as very little surprise that it's almost incapable of innovation.” Schools interested in creating learning organizations must concentrate on building environments where teachers can continuously learn. Senge suggests that principals start by bringing together those committed to a renewed school environment to talk to one another. Next, principals must create the most inclusive process possible under the circumstances to involve all interested parties in an ongoing “visioning” process-in deciding what they really want the school to become.

THE FIVE DISCIPLINES

Senge believes that a learning organization grows from a commitment to what he calls the five “learning disciplines” (Senge, 1990; Senge, et al., 1994). Each discipline is distinct, but together they build the learning organization.

BUILDING SHARED VISION

The first discipline is concerned with “visioning,” with building shared images of the future of the school. Visioning is an ongoing process that brings all stakeholders together to construct what they want to do in the school. It is not just a “vision statement” that is framed and filed, but a conversation that empowers ongoing change in the school. It touches all aspects of school organization and instructional delivery.

PERSONAL MASTERY

The second discipline engages all members of the organization in developing and clarifying their personal visions and in helping to create an organization that supports each individual in mastering needed skills. Just as personal vision is the foundation of shared vision, so personal mastery is the basis for organizational development. Only when a school has a high percentage of administrators and teachers with broad mastery of educational skills can a truly successful learning organization be sustained. Shared vision and mastery begin to develop when individuals feel supported in their personal quests for mastery.

MENTAL MODELS

The third discipline involves confronting one's view of the world. We condition our judgments and actions by our mental models of reality; in this case, of the school and its learning environment. If we bring conventional views of schooling to the processes of visioning and personal mastery, if we believe that schooling should be as it was in the past, then we will try to recreate that reality. To achieve a functioning learning organization, a school must confront the differences in the mental models and personal visions of its members and then work to create a new consensus.

TEAM LEARNING

The fourth discipline postulates that teams, not individuals, are the fundamental units in modern organizations. Senge (1990) distinguishes between discussion and dialogue in developing team learning. Discussion is concerned with explaining a point of view in order to win an argument. Dialogue is a conversation that explores differences of opinion in order to resolve them. In most schools, discussion is the norm. Educators present and defend their views. Compromise, not consensus, is the goal. In a functioning learning organization, both discussion and dialogue are important. Discussion identifies differences and dialogue moves beyond them. As Senge (1990) puts it: “Individuals suspend their assumptions but they communicate their assumptions freely …. In dialogue, people become observers of their own thinking.”

SYSTEMS THINKING

The fifth discipline is a conceptual framework that integrates team learning, mental models, personal mastery and shared vision. It is a body of knowledge and tools that help a learning organization understand its patterns of operation and how they can be changed. A system is a group of components that operate together and influence the operation of the whole. Human bodies are systems. A modern building is a system. Automobiles are systems. The first principle of systems thinking is that “structure influences behavior.” A system functions in a certain way because of its structures. In a very real way, a system causes its own behavior. Conventional schools, for example, function in traditional ways because their system components make it hard to do otherwise. The systemic structure of a school is the pattern of relationships, not among the people, but among the key components of the school organization. (See Keefe and Howard, in press.)

Peter Senge (1990) discusses eleven laws of systems thinking in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. The following examples suggest some of the implications of these laws:

♦The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. This is compensating feedback in systems thinking. The harder you try, the harder success seems to be. Schools that attempt to personalize the instructional environment discover all the student needs that have been ignored in the past.

♦The easy way out usually leads back in. Familiar or time-honored solutions to issues or problems may actually make them worse. Problem learners are given bigger doses of what they do poorly in the first place (more lectures, more seatwork, more tests).

♦Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. Complicated problems have complex explanations; the prime causes often are quite remote from the effects. Poor student achievement may reflect poor motivation or study habits, but the ultimate explanation may be an unresponsive curriculum or boring instruction.

♦Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious. Solving a complicated problem requires finding the point of greatest leverage, where the least effort can make the biggest difference. The points of highest leverage are usually not obvious. Most schools fail to help problem learners because they neither diagnose their cognitive/learning styles nor remediate their poor learning skills. Instead they often place them in a repeated cycle of failure.

♦There is no blame. In systems thinking, the system itself is the problem, not the people. If the components of the systems are dysfunctional, problems will arise. No one in or outside the system is to blame. The system itself must be changed to effect a solution. Urban schools, for example, are thought to be the victims of poor teachers and unruly students when the reality is that the structures and/ or processes of these schools cannot support student learning. To sustain real improvement, the system must be modified and all system components brought into synchronization.

SCHOOL AS COMMUNITY

The school cannot become a total learning organization until it becomes a “community of learners.” Community is necessary because students need a supportive learning environment, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Published by Eye on Education
• Foreword
• About the Author
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The School as a Learning Organization
• 2 Learning and Information Processing
• 3 Instructional Models
• 4 Authentic Pedagogy
• 5 The Learning Environment
• 6 Subject Matter Instruction and Assessment
• 7 Scheduling and Instructional Organization
• 8 Motivation and Learning
• 9 Action Research
• References