Chapter ONE
Focusing Teacher Learning
Rachel Moriarty is the founding principal at Mountain View Middle School. She opened the school four years ago with the support of a brand-new assistant principal and a largely novice teaching staff. The school has grown year-by-year, reaching 925 students this fall, with an increasingly diverse student population in a neighborhood that used to be predominantly white and middle class. Now, although a third of the school has been designated âhighly capableâ (a group that tested into this program in first grade and also tends to be largely white and upper middle class), more than half of the population receives a free and reduced price lunchâincluding a growing homeless population.
As a whole, a little more than half the student population is white, 14% are Asian, 10% Latino, and 8% African American. There is a growing population of students who are also English language learners (ELLs), with more than 40 languages spoken at the school. The majority of the ELLs come from Spanish-speaking families, mainly from Central America. There is also an East African population, mostly Somali, in addition to some Eritrean and Ethiopian students. The ELL population is diverse in terms of schooling background. Some have attended public schools their whole lives and some had interrupted schooling prior to immigrating. Students' math test scores have shown a wide discrepancy between students of color, particularly the ELL students, and white students. Rachel, the principal, has noted over the past few years that Mountain View Middle School at times seems more like two schoolsâthe âhonorsâ and the âregularâ school.
The challenge for Rachel is typical for school leaders who strive to foster rigorous and relevant learning experiences for each student at their schools. School leaders who are not satisfied with an existing status quo that tends to sort students along lines of race, class, and language face an enormous taskâone that starts from the assumption that all students can learn, that learning depends on teachers creating powerful learning opportunities for their students, and that creating these learning opportunities for students is an incredibly complex and sophisticated endeavor. Not only do school leaders have to consider how to confront the implicit bias toward students of color or in poverty but also how to help teachers make shifts in their practice that will ask more of their students and that can challenge current conceptions of what students are capable of.
Rachel saw the gap in her students' math performance levels and knew something needed to change instructionally, but she was unsure about what those changes would be. Though she had taught for a decade, her own content expertise was in language arts, and she knew she needed to learn more about the shifts in math standards, how students learn these new content demands, and how teachers come to learn to these shifts. Rachel knew that the math teachers, by and large, knew their content area well and had a sense of what students should be able to do in sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade mathematics. However, she knew that the teachers did not know how to create enough scaffolding for students to be able to access the content that was presented. Furthermore, the more experienced teachers were also largely satisfied with what they were doing in the classroom. Given her own instructional background, Rachel could not yet name the specific changes in math instruction she wanted to see or what the teachers needed to learn to get there. But her own prior experience taught her that seeing what students are capable of, as a result of powerful teaching and learning opportunities, helps shift perceptions and expectations of what students can do. Indeed, John Hattie's research underscores this point: teachers' beliefs about their students' ability to learn and teachers' sense of efficacy about their impact on student learning is related to expertise. Expert teachers believe and expect their students to rise to the degree of challenge they present and they attend to the nature and the quality of the effect that they are having on every student (Hattie, 2009).
THE PRINCIPAL'S CHALLENGE
Instructional leaders face considerable challenges requiring instructional leadership expertise. They must figure out what teachers need to learn as well as how to orchestrate and nurture teacher learning that results in the improvement of teaching practices. In 2003, Stein and Nelson proposed that school leaders' understanding of a content area (e.g., mathematics), how it is learned, and how it is taught are critical components of instructional leadership. As they considered this challenge for leaders, Stein and Nelson proposed the idea of âpost holing,â or leaders' ability to draw from their expertise in one content area in order to understand how to support teacher learning in another content area. Thus, they argued, instructional leadership skills may be transferrable between content areas.
For Rachel, the newly state-mandated teacher evaluation system helped her move past binary ideas of âsatisfactoryâ or âunsatisfactoryâ teaching to rubrics with more descriptions to help gauge the quality of teaching. Yet replacing the âsat/un-satâ ratings with a four-point rubric does not fully define what a 4 looks and sounds like for particular grade levels and content areas, as well as what it takes to develop teachers' practice toward that definition. This level of expertise requires more than ârater reliabilityâ training. As well, the higher standards put in place over the last six years (e.g., Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards) have helped shape ideas of the level of rigor and student engagement we hope to see, but closing the gap between what we can envision for our students and what teachers know how to do will require even more support from leaders. Putting student learning standards and an evaluation tool in leaders' hands is not enough to help nurture and support the development of teachers' practice. Additionally, as the efficacy of professional learning opportunities typically offered to teachers has come into question (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014; The New Teacher Project, 2015), principals' roles in supporting teacher learning, versus compliance exercises, requires leaders to consider how they invest their leadership efforts to create and sustain relevant learning opportunities for teachers.
Because Rachel could draw on her expertise in language arts and experience supporting teachers' learning in literacy, she knew that the math department needed the kind of learning opportunities that cultivated changes in beliefs about what students were capable of and the development of instructional practices that helped teachers see the link between their specific teaching and what students could do as result. She knew that she would also have to support teachers' capacity to collaborate on and collectively problem-solve the instructional problems of practice that would emerge as teachers tried out new ways to scaffold student learning. She knew she had to support habits of collaboration and problem-solving in her math team: there were two veteran teachers with more than 10 years' experience among the group of largely novices, and she wanted to capitalize on their leadership potential as well as develop the entire team's capacity to learn with and from one another.
THE CHALLENGE OF PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
There is a high bar for learning opportunities for teachers: learning opportunities are effective insofar as we can see the impact on the quality of classroom learning experiences for students. Although indeed a high bar for teacher learning, as we've learned from the research on âexpertise,â becoming more expert in anything (in this case, teaching) is about the doingâthe actual performance. And although there are standards for professional learning and wide agreement for what constitutes âqualityâ professional development (Learning Forward, 2011), as a field we often miss the mark when it comes to creating ongoing learning opportunities that increase teachers' expertise over time and that result in improved student learning. For leaders, creating a culture of continuous improvement and a collective effort to solve problems of student learning is as complex as teaching itself.
Katz and Dack (2013) assert that professional learning for teachers often lacks clear focus, collaborative inquiry that will challenge thinking and current practice, and formal and informal instructional leadership. Their research underscores (1) the importance of âintentional interruptionsâ that help teachers question current understandings and practice and (2) the role of instructional leadership to support teachers' learning and hold teachers accountable for their learning. In the following chapter, and using the case of our middle school leader, we will explicate what we mean by instructional leadership as it is described in our 4 Dimensions of Instructional Leadership framework and will say more about how leaders support teachers' learning and hold teachers accountable.
When we consider what it takes to develop expertiseâthat is, the ongoing opportunity for deliberate practice with feedback and coaching (Ericsson & Pool, 2016)âand we pause to consider the enormous complexity of teaching, the findings from The New Teacher Project's Mirage study (2015) should not be a surprise. This study highlights the need for a definition of âdevelopmentâ toward an ambitious standard of teaching and student learning, with clear, deep understanding of performance and process. The Mirage study asserts that teachers' skills plateau, seldom reaching the skill level that will help engage their students in the kind of critical thinking that leads to students' conceptual understanding or to active ownership of their own learning, especially as it relates to the teaching and learning shifts described in the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards:
The fact is, we will continue to underestimate the conditions needed to foster the improvement of teaching practice until we come face-to-face with what it takes to develop expertise. Ericsson and Pool (2016, p. 204) write that learning means you are developing âmental representations,â increasingly sophisticated mental maps of concepts, how those concepts connect, and how to analyze them, which enables you to figure out what needs improving and then come up with ways to realize that improvement. We do not develop increasingly detailed mental representations by sheer experience; rather, we need an expert alongside us to help us âseeâ and to engage in deliberate practice of a skill set, taking risks to push ourselves out of the comfort zone of what we already know how to do, to purposeful practice of a new skill over time. If we apply what we know about âjob-embeddedâ professional development to the actual work of teachers, with the idea of developing increasingly sophisticated mental representations of, for example, what it looks and sounds like to engage and formatively assess a group of nine-year-olds as they navigate a narrative nonfiction chapter book for the first time, then we can begin to think through the kind of deliberate practice that will be necessary to develop such complex practices. Engaging in deliberate practice requires us to address the norms of privacy and autonomy that tend to keep teachers from working and learning with and from one another. Figuring out how to focus on teacher performance and how to improve it has, in this case, nothing to do with new teacher evaluation policy; rather, it has everything to do with getting better (Ericsson and Pool, 2016):
