Unstuck

How Curiosity, Peer Coaching, and Teaming Can Change Your School

Bryan Goodwin, Tonia Gibson, Dale Lewis, Kris Rouleau

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781416625902
• eBook ISBN: 9781416625933
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Good ideas, the best intentions, and a stirring vision aren't enough to effect change in schools. Unstuck offers a road map to help schools change from the inside out instead of the top down. Inside-out approaches are designed to encourage schools to become more innovative and entrepreneurial, finding better ways to help students learn and pursue their own intellectual passions and talents—while also maintaining a healthy skepticism and reliance on data to make sure new approaches and ideas are working. This process involves seven steps: starting with moral purpose, unleashing curiosity, building on bright spots, peer coaching toward precision, leading from the inside out, and moving the goal posts. This book's tips, real-life examples, and next steps will help leaders get from where they are now to where they want to be.

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Chapter 1

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When Delivering Well Stops Delivering Well

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It isn't what we don't know that gives us
trouble,it's what we know that ain't so.

Will Rogers
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In late 2002, professor David Hopkins found himself called to 10 Downing Street to meet with Tony Blair. The prime minister was, to put it mildly, irate. Hopkins, newly minted head of the standards and effectiveness unit at the national education department—essentially the chief education advisor to Blair—found himself in the unenviable position of needing to explain why, seemingly under his watch, national reading and mathematics scores that had once been on a steady upward trajectory had hit a plateau (Hopkins & Craig, 2011).

It didn't help, of course, that Hopkins's predecessor, Michael Barber, had a made a name for himself by evangelizing a method known by the tongue-in-cheek moniker deliverology. Known as "Mr. Targets" in the British government (Smithers, 2005), Barber had gotten all schools in the United Kingdom to adopt standardized approaches to reading and mathematics instruction and focused everyone's attention on delivering the new approaches well (i.e., meeting his famous targets).

The gains had been impressive: Between 1997 (when the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy was adopted) and 2000, the percentage of students testing at proficient levels in reading and mathematics rose from 63 to 75 percent and from 62 to 73 percent, respectively (Olson, 2004). "We got something quite rare," Barber would later comment, "which is, across a whole system, to get rising average standards and a narrowing of the [achievement] gap" (Olson, 2004).

So successful was his method that Barber, in fact, went on to write a field guide for the deliverology method (Barber, Moffit, & Kihn, 2011) and founded a nonprofit organization in the United States dedicated to its principles, the Education Delivery Institute. Yet shortly after Barber's departure from the Blair government, something seemed to have gone wrong: Student achievement scores leveled off. They weren't getting worse, but they certainly weren't getting better. Across the Atlantic, Education Week picked up on the story, citing it as a cautionary tale for U.S. reformers who were heading down a similar path (Olson, 2004).

Had teachers lost their focus? Had people stopped paying attention to deliverology? No, Hopkins explained carefully to Blair. Nothing had changed. In fact, that was the problem. The performance plateau they were experiencing was quite predictable—a natural result of the top-down approach to reform that the United Kingdom had taken, which had been necessary to begin with, but was now yielding diminishing returns.

"I would make no apology for what Michael et al. did in 1997," Hopkins told Education Week. To so dramatically move the needle on such a large system "has to be a stunning achievement. But," he added, "and this is a big but, that was only the first stage in a long-term, large-scale reform. And one of the reasons why we've stalled is that more of the same will not work" (Olson, 2004).

To understand why, empirically, that should be the case, let's back up a bit to understand what we know from research about the complexities of change and program implementation.

Getting from Knowing Better to Doing Better

The first point we must acknowledge is that doing anything well—sometimes referred to as closing the knowing-doing gap—is no small feat. Like most organizations, schools have yet to perfect the art of implementation. Case in point: A few years ago, the U.S. government supported more than two dozen scientific studies of popular interventions through its Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) program. The hope was that in doing so, the so-called regional labs could separate the wheat from the chaff and add the good programs to the newly created What Works Clearinghouse, an online repository designed to provide educators with gold-star reassurance of which programs they could go forth and use with confidence.

There was just one problem with the raft of studies: In every case but one, the popular and widespread approaches, when put under glass, were found to have no positive effects on student achievement (Goodwin, 2011b). If we dig more deeply into those published studies, though, it becomes apparent that in most cases, the programs studied were so poorly implemented that researchers were unable to discern whether the fault lay with program itself or poor deliverology. To wit:

• A study of 2,140 6th graders using Thinking Reader, a software program designed to improve reading comprehension by asking students computer-adaptive questions about young adult novels, found no effects on reading comprehension, yet fully 69 percent of students wound up using the Thinking Reader software less often than the program's developer has specified; in fact, software usage dropped off so much that by the end of the school year, just 8.9 percent of students actually finished the third and final novel (Drummond et al., 2011).
• A study involving 2,446 4th graders found no higher mathematics achievement for students working with the popular Odyssey Math software, which at the time was in use by 3 million students across the United States. However, during the course of the study, students used the software on average only 38 minutes a week, well below the minimum of 60 minutes the program developers required; moreover, of 60 classrooms studied, students in only one classroom actually used the software for the full time period required (Wijekumar, Hitchcock, Turner, Lei, & Peck, 2009).
• A study of nearly 10,000 4th and 5th graders found that students whose teachers were trained in another popular program, Classroom Assessment for Student Learning, demonstrated no higher levels of achievement than control group students. Yet teachers spent, on average, only about half the recommended time in training (31 versus 60 hours) and, perhaps not coincidentally, demonstrated no observable changes in their teaching practices (Randel et al., 2011).
• A group of more than 600 5th graders who were taught for one year with Collaborative Strategic Reading, a scaffolded approach to reading instruction, demonstrated no better achievement than control group students; however, classroom observations revealed that only 21.6 percent of teachers used all five strategies that the approach comprises (Hitchcock, Dimino, Kurki, Wilkins, & Gersten, 2010).

Of the more than two dozen programs rigorously studied by the regional labs, only one was found to yield significant results, a program called Kindergarten PAVEd for Success. Interestingly, it also appeared to devote the most attention to implementation—using a differentiated coaching model that provided more intensive support for teachers struggling to apply the program's explicit vocabulary instruction methods (Goodson, Wolf, Bell, Turner, & Finney, 2010).

Applying the Science of Deliverology

All of the above suggests that Michael Barber was spot-on with his focus on deliverology. Inconsistency in implementation confounds even the best laid plans. Bold proclamations and elaborate schemes don't amount to a hill of beans if no one follows through on them. Getting things done, according to Barber and his colleagues from McKinsey & Company (Barber et al., 2011), requires ensuring that all of these elements are in place:

• Identifying a team or unit to focus on the implementation. In keeping with the British adage that if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible, leaders must make clear who's responsible for what and what they expect of everyone.
• Maintaining clear performance targets and expectations. In keeping with another adage—if you don't know where you're going you'll probably wind up somewhere else—deliverology requires long-term goals and interim targets with progress indicators to track implementation (and celebrate accomplishments) along the way.
• Creating new routines. Any new program or approach requires creating new habits. One way to instill them is through regular progress monitoring and reporting, which sends the message to everyone that those pesky new expectations aren't going away.

The early results in the United Kingdom bear witness to the importance of following principles of deliverology, especially when what needs to be done is fairly straightforward. And to be clear, there are a lot of fairly straightforward things that, done well, can significantly improve student success.

The Power of Doing the Right Things Right

In our previous books, we've identified many simple (though not necessarily easy) things that system leaders, school leaders, and teachers can do to move the needle on student performance, starting with nine key categories of effective instruction in Classroom Instruction That Works (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler, & Stone, 2012) and a broader set of teaching behaviors in The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching (Goodwin & Hubbell, 2013), as well as three core elements of effective school leadership in Balanced Leadership for Powerful Learning (Goodwin, Cameron, & Hein, 2015), five key components of effective school systems in Simply Better (Goodwin, 2011c), and six correlates of district leader success in School District Leadership That Works (Waters & Marzano, 2006).

We have seen schools and districts nationwide move the needle on student achievement when they get these things right, which led us to conclude as we did in Simply Better, "One of the most powerful things school systems can do to change the odds for all students is simply doing well what they already know they must do" (Goodwin, 2011c, p. 134). Put simply, big gains in student achievement come from doing the right things right. That's why sometimes the most effective improvement efforts aren't terribly flashy; they can be quite ordinary, even plain vanilla.

Plain Vanilla Improvement

In the summer of 1989, Sam Stringfield, a professor and researcher at Johns Hopkins University, stumbled onto a mystery. He and his colleague, Charles Teddlie, had been staring at a "mountain of data" gathered through the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study, an examination of eight pairs of matched schools of similar size and demographics in which one member of the pair had strikingly high performance and the other strikingly low performance. A team of observers had gone to all 16 elementary schools to gather qualitative data that the researchers hoped would tease out the disparities among the different sets of schools. No observers (many of whom were non-educators) were told which schools were doing well or poorly, yet they had all been able to separate the princes from the frogs. Stringfield spent the summer sifting through the observers' case studies, trying to figure out what had tipped them off. After all, the low-performing schools weren't obviously inadequate. Each had a star teacher or two, several programs in place, and other seemingly positive things going on in them. On the other hand, the top-performing schools were, to be frank, a little boring. Some were underfunded. None were implementing the latest reform du jour. As Stringfield later recalled, "Several were as plain vanilla schools as could be imagined" (Stringfield, Reynolds, & Schaffer, 2010, p. 14).

There was, however, one striking difference between the two sets of schools that the observers seemed to have picked up on. In the low-performing schools, an "anything goes" attitude appeared to prevail; they tolerated a wide range of teacher and student behaviors. In contrast, the high-performing schools had a much clearer focus on student achievement and maintained much more consistent standards of teacher and student behavior.

The high-performing schools had routines and followed them. Observers could walk into different classrooms in these schools and see the same thing occurring—good teaching. Classrooms in the low-performing schools, on the other hand, were more like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: You never knew what you were going to get. As it turns out, the key to going from low performance to better performance often appears to be one word: consistency.

Better Routines, Better Results

All of that is easier said than done. Simply knowing what to do is not the same as doing it. The key is employing effective practices with quality, intensity, fidelity, and consistency—doing them so well in every school and classroom that they become routine (Goodwin et al., 2015). In our previous books, in fact, we've borrowed a page from surgeon Atul Gawande, whose Checklist Manifesto (2009) demonstrated the power of simple checklists in emergency rooms to help health professionals establish new routines and avoid critical oversights and mistakes. To help school leaders and teachers develop new routines and stay focused on doing what matters most, we've provided our own model checklists (which, we should note, we've always presented as "do-confirm" lists to help people stay focused on meaningful practices, rather than as less mindful "read-do" lists or lock-step procedures).

In struggling schools or those with low capacity, these new routines may need to come from outside the system—in the form of a new leader bringing new ways of doing things, an off-the-shelf curriculum, a new behavior management program, or a prescribed instructional framework. For example, a series of case studies of high-performing, high-poverty schools conducted by Karin Chenoweth (2007, 2009) of the Education Trust found that many had started on their pathway to improvement by adopting prepackaged curricula, such as America's Choice, Success for All, or Core Knowledge—exactly which program they chose seemed to matter less than picking one and doing it well to overcome what one leader described as a "Burger King" culture in which teachers "got to have it their way" (Chenoweth, 2007, p. 128). In similar fashion, many of these turnaround schools gathered model lesson plans from teachers and put them in binders to give to novice teachers so they would have concrete examples of well-designed lessons to emulate. Soon after getting everyone on the same page, achievement rose.

Hard Habits to Break

It's important to note that low-performing schools often fall into the pattern of unchallenged "habits" and dysfunctional ways of doing things that must be broken and replaced with new and better routines (Brinson & Rhim, 2009). Of course, breaking habits and establishing new routines is never quite as easy as it sounds. For starters, there's the challenge of getting the new practice to stick. Charles Payne (2008) recounts, for example, the story of an urban high school where teachers came together to establish a new routine for reducing the excessively high number of students cutting class and loitering in the halls during class: Teachers with preparation periods would spent the first few minutes of those periods combing the hallways for students skipping class and send them all to the school's auditorium where punishment (e.g., afterschool detention) would be meted out. The new routine worked. Within a few weeks, student absences from class dropped and a growing sense of order and safety began to take root in the school. But then one day, one teacher decided not to follow the routine; other teachers soon followed, the routine faded, and the school reverted to disorder.

A second, and often more difficult challenge, is that the new routines don't always make things better—a phenomenon referred to as the "implementation dip" by Canadian researcher Michael Fullan (2001), who observed that when the fear of change collides with lack of know-how, performance slumps. To overcome implementation dips, Fullan encourages schools and their leaders to

• Maintain focus and urgency to quash any this-too-shall-pass syndrome.
• Monitor implementation to avoid backsliding into familiar (yet inferior) practices.
• Listen to naysayers and, as appropriate, incorporate their ideas into change efforts.
• Work as teams to buck each other up when the going gets tough.

By employing these strategies (as well as those Barber encourages for deliverology), school leaders can usually help their teams overcome implementation dips and experience success, which can feel like heady times. Data start trending upward, people start pulling together, and things feel different—a new culture begins to take root. People feel optimistic. They may begin to develop what's known as a sense of "collective efficacy"—a shared belief that they can pull together to have a positive effect on student success.

Then the Pixie Dust Wears Off

This upslope period may last a few years or more, but eventually the pixie dust starts to wear off. The routines employed to address obvious shortcomings begin to reveal shortcomings of their own. Maybe it becomes evident that the adopted reading program works great for 80 percent of students but not the other 20 percent. Or maybe the off-the-shelf curriculum that sparked initial gains by creating coherence and vertical articulation fails to engage students. Or the classroom walkthroughs that initially surfaced obvious opportunities for instru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Running in Place
• Chapter 1. When Delivering Well Stops Delivering Well
• Chapter 2. Flipping the Paradigm
• Chapter 3. Starting with a Moral Purpose
• Chapter 4. Unleashing Curiosity
• Chapter 5. Building on Bright Spots
• Chapter 6. Peer Coaching Toward Precision
• Chapter 7. Leading from the Inside Out
• Chapter 8. Moving the Goal Posts
• Chapter 9. The Rest of the Story
• Chapter 10. The Road Less Traveled Awaits
• Appendix
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright