The Comprehensive Needs Assessment Report on the middle school has now been posted on the ARPS website (http://www.arps.org/node/1235). I'd encourage everyone to read through it in depth, and to watch the ACTV broadcast of the summary of this report by Dr. Beers. I'd like to again note that we have this evaluation of the middle school thanks to a set of goals adopted unanimously by the Regional School Committee last fall, and to the leadership of Dr. Rodriguez in finding Dr. Beers (and to me points out the real value of a set of outside eyes looking at our schools). I've also pasted the summary of this report below.
By all indications, Amherst Middle School is a good school that could be very good or even great. The teachers are competent, hard working, and caring. The administrators are respected by the staff for their dedication and support. With few exceptions, students are well behaved and come to school each day for the purpose of learning. The setting at Amherst Regional Middle School is more than suitable for academic excellence to occur.
However, many characteristics of highly effective schools are not observable at Amherst Regional Middle School. Highly effective schools have data-driven school improvement plans that are developed annually. Teachers are required to develop daily lesson plan which contain the elements that are developed by the instructional leaders with input from teachers. Classroom observations are frequent and followed by conversations designed to promote professional growth. Most, if not all, departments have common assessments which guide instruction. In highly effective schools, the characteristics of effective instruction are clearly defined and communicated in writing to stakeholders. Although teachers make daily instructional decisions based on the needs of their students, consistency is the norm. Parents receive frequent updates regarding student achievement data. Policies and procedures are known by all and applied on a consistent basis.
The curriculum leaders and administrators have recently been receptive to the challenge of increasing expectations in an effort to improve student achievement. However, this is going to be a long journey. Many teachers have become accustomed to “doing it their way.” Some teachers choose to collaborate with their colleagues, but this is not the norm. It can be expected that there will be resistance to the standardization of some practices. The success of the recommended changes will depend on the willingness of the faculty to institutionalize “best practices.” In addition, the leaders of the school must be able to guide the change process and develop the capacity of the faculty to implement the changes.
To paraphrase Jim Collins in “Good to Great,” the right people are on the bus (assuming an instructional leader is hired as principal). It is now time for everyone to get on the same bus even though their seats are different.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
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18 comments:
In what context should the School Committee discuss the findings of this report and move forward with agreed upon initiatives to turn ARMS, a good school, into a great school?
TomG, you got me thinking. Should the SC form a "MS Action Subcommittee" or advisory committee with the goal of implementing recommendations from the Beers study?
Would this group have any actual agency to effect change? Would the SC agree to be bound to its findings? Would acting adminstrators?
Rise Above
The district is in the process of hiring a new middle school principal. Dr. Beers' observations should play a critical role in determining which factors the search committee and the Interim Superintendent uses to select finalists. We need a transformative leader, whose success, as Dr. Beers concludes, "will depend on the willingness of the faculty to institutionalize 'best practices. In addition, the leaders of the school must be able to guide the change process and develop the capacity of the faculty to implement the changes."
I hope that I can trust the current interim superintendent to approach this search with an open mind, given what we have learned from Dr. Beers, so that the leader with the greatest ability to support and guide the teachers will be chosen. I hope that parents of current and future middle school parents as well as the teachers will have meaningful participation in the final decisions.
Anon 1136 said "TomG, you got me thinking. Should the SC form a "MS Action Subcommittee" or advisory committee with the goal of implementing recommendations from the Beers study?
Would this group have any actual agency to effect change? Would the SC agree to be bound to its findings? Would acting adminstrators?"
I do not believe it is the role of the SC to be so hands on with implementing change at the MS. That is the rold of the principal and staff, under the direction of the superintendent.
The SC sets goals and policy, hires and fires the Super and sets the budget. That's it!
"The SC sets goals and policy, hires and fires the Super and sets the budget. That's it!"
Anon 12:19--Would you say that a determination as to whether we want to follow best practices in instruction is not a matter of policy? Surely this is the role of the SC, and that's why Beers delivered his report to the SC. My only concern is that "advisory committees" may not happen in time to hire a middle school principal who can work with teachers to implement best practices. That search has already started.
Once the SC sets the policy, they do not micromanage the implementation of that policy...that is what the Super and principals do.
I think an Advisory committee would border on micromanaging on the part of the SC
I do not believe it is the role of the SC to be so hands on with implementing change at the MS. That is the role of the principal and staff, under the direction of the superintendent.
I vehemently disagree!
Change is, by definition, policy. It is a new policy replacing an old one. And that is the SC's role.
I view the school committee as the physician, the person responsible for directing patient care. The Superintendent is like the hospital administrator, doing what the doctors want and bringing in the logistics of reality to their policy decisions. "Sorry, I can't stock 15 mg Benicar, it only comes in 10 and 20 mg pills. So tell me what you want me to order..."
And I view the teachers as nurses, caring for the students, subject to the directions of the doctor.
Now this entire model is going to be vastly different from that of the teaching cadre who consider themselves some sort of authority-on-high empowered to tell the town what kind of school the town will have -- but the little problem is that they don't have that authority! It is the right of the CITIZENS to decide what kind of schools we want, and to elect school committee members who share our vision.
And if the teachers and principals want to claim the right to influence policy, they are going to have to accept the right of the voters to fire them. Not for cause, but just because we disagree with them. And I don't think they want that Sword of Damacles hanging over their heads and hence they really don't want to be where they are now...
0ne other thing: as much as I hate it personally, we really do need a uniform curriculum with uniform learning expectations.
Each grade in which we don't have this creates a problem in the grade above when kids are co-mingled. If half the kids learned X but not Y, and the other half the other way around, exactly what is the poor teacher supposed to teach?
I believe, 12:19, that some micromanaging is what's called for -- by the folks in the community looking for change and by the Beers report (implicitly if not explicitly stated therein).
Organizational inertia naturally mitigates against institutional change, so the push has to come from outside...even if "outside" just means within Amherst but outside of district/school admin (eg, a committee).
Left to their own devices, people seldom want to make massive paradigm shifts, especially if they perceive that it's some combination of uncomfortable, unnecessary, counter to historical precedent, and/or intrusive.
So what body is empowered to make changes in the schools? Some here are saying only school employees. That can't be right, or not totally right anyway.
Amherst voters chose CS and SR to get changes made, and these voters thought/assumed/hoped that the SC had the power to do so.
Now we see that there is a backlash or pushback, even if it's just emotions in the moment, against anyone outside of district employees having agency in important issues of educational policy (budgeting, curriculum, scheduling, eg).
It strikes me as incredibly backward that the only person with the power to break up such policy roadblocks is found in the person of the all-commanding Superintendent. How paternalistic, authoritarian and old-school. How NOT Amherst in all other regards.
One of the points Dr Beers emphasized the most is that teachers take ownership of school improvement. I think that with guidance from a principal, professional development, and light-handed oversight from the school committee, the MS would do just fine. Seriously, our teachers for the most part are mature professionals who value learning and want very much to grow and improve learning outcomes for their students. Many of these previous comments sound so autocratic.
I totally agree with the last post, and with what Barry Beers said that this change must be owned by the school staff so it can be real. Barry said that it needs to happen from within and not because he is coming back to check on everybody.
I thought what he said at the meeting sounded very good, and came across way more positive than his written report did. There has not been pushback towards his report, but open-mindedness. He himself has praised the staff at the school many times and acknowledged that much of the work he foresees being useful is already underway.
He has also acknowledged the importance of having good people (teachers, and school leaders) to undertake these recommendations. I think Barry would be the first to admit that you don't make a bad teacher suddenly good by forcing them to write plans. Fortunately I think we have many great teachers and his usggestions can help them be even more effective.
Actually teachers DO do better when they write plans. See last week's Sunday NYT magazine article I referenced in another post.
I'm sorry to say that when I worked in the Amehrst schools I didn't see formal planning on a consistent basis.
In particular the teacher I worked with treated formal lesson plans as a gross imposition and unecessary after her years in the classrom. She wasn't that old either.
This is just one example, one anecdote, but the bigger problem was the lack of accountability. Nobody seemed to be caring or checking!
Parents have complained about a lack of consistency and coherency in the day to day curriculum. Could this be one of the reasons why?
Although this may not be agreeable to some folks who are against spending money on administrators, there need to be curriculum people managing who's teaching what and how they're teaching it.
The principals are too busy with budgets and district & staff issues to supervise at that level.
And now that the elemenatary schools are going to be bigger they'll have even less time.
Hi 6:44--
I agree with what you are saying about a model of change. I am guessing that Dr. Beers would apply the same principles to teacher learning as he would to student learning. People don't learn by being told. They learn by actively engaging with the material, collaborating with others, and coming to realizations on their own. We have to provide them with the environment that best nurtures that process.
3:16 - wholeheartedly agree -- and I'd further suggest that the backlash/pushback is palpably more than emotions in the moment.
Outside influence is often seen as anathema to Amherst's Exceptionalism.
Uniformity and accountability are upsetting to even selectively progressive people whose overriding instinct is to cling to the notion of "Not Invented Here."
My response:
So, I think the key to improvement in the MS is (a) hiring a great principal, and (b) hiring a great superintendent. Those strike me as the two key things that need to occur. A principal will in theory by hired in the next month -- I believe public forums with finalists will be held in late March/early April. I'd strongly encourage parents and community members to come to all public forums for finalists and complete feedback forms -- ultimately, Maria will select the permanent principal.
In terms of making change -- I'm really at a loss here. I really agreed with the information in Dr. Beer's report, and it confirmed a lot of what I've heard over the years from many parents (the good and the not so good). So, I doubt that there was a lot in the report that was really surprising to MS teachers/administration (maybe I'm wrong -- if so, I hope teachers/administrators will tell me what was surprising). I also know that this report summarized some concerns that parents have shared with MS staff over the years -- consistency, rigor, communication are all issues that I've heard about from parents for years. Now, given that these concerns were not new, and that most of the administration and teachers have been in the school for some time, I am wondering whether this report will lead to changes that couldn't have happened without it (perhaps, but again, these are by and large not NEW problems or concerns). So, although I think in an ideal world, the change would come from the inside -- with teachers/administration rising to the occasion -- I also have to wonder whether this is realistic. After all, isn't the whole team structure (advisories, etc.) supposed to enable collaboration and communication? I guess I'm not sure why the teachers would want to work on these things NOW on their own ... what has changed that would allow this type of growth to occur within the school, when it apparently hasn't occurred on its own previously?
I guess I tend to agree with Anonymous 3:16: "Left to their own devices, people seldom want to make massive paradigm shifts, especially if they perceive that it's some combination of uncomfortable, unnecessary, counter to historical precedent, and/or intrusive."
I hope I'm wrong on this ... but I'd like to see some evidence that the type of changes Beers identifed are going to be implemented (in some relatively fast period of time) ... and if there isn't clear progress, I think it would be entirely appropriate for the SC to either push the superintendent to push for such changes OR to write policies that set clear expectations (e.g., a homework policy, a policy on providing challenge/extensions problems, etc.).
Isn't it up to the SC to decide some clear markers (by vote) about the direction they'd like the grade schools, middle schools, and ARHS to move in in terms of curriculum, curriculum coordination, and aligning curriculum with grade level; and perhaps some of the detail about how levels in a grade are handled but maybe not?
Will the school board be able to continue to make progress on policy making and progress on implementation of policy under an interim superintendent who has the position for 1 year and 4 months ... and then bring a new super up to speed and continue the work?
Providing people with a learning environment doesn't just mean you give them some meeting time, leave them alone, and hope for the best. It means that you give them some tools, pose questions, interact with them, let them try things and then reflect on what happened. In the case of teacher-learners, the building administrators would be in charge of providing this environment.
Here's one example of how posing a question can lead to learning. An administrator could ask a teacher "How do students know the objectives of a lesson?" Then the teacher has to think that through. That's called engagement.
Notice that it's different than saying: "Okay, everybody, new rule: you have to write the objectives on the board." Now of course you could get teachers to do that but that doesn't necessarily mean that the kids would then know the objectives. There are lots of things that get written on the board that don't sink in. And if all you do is give people a rule and tell them to follow it, then they might feel like "Okay I'm done; I followed the rule." Blanket rules tend to absolve people of doing any thinking.
I think writing the objectives on the board would be just a start. What would be more important would be for those objectives to be actively present in the teacher's mind as she walks around the room and interacts with the kids. The objectives should guide the interaction.
As I listened to Dr. Beers' presentation, I started thinking about my own practice and I thought, "Okay I could do a better job with that. Let me think about how I would implement it." Since then I have come up with several different models in my mind and I have also looked on line to see what other people have done. I realized that I had started on some of this over the summer and then dropped the ball on it when I got overwhelmed with work. So now I have resolved to try to do better. Dictating a rule would not have prompted that same sense of ownership in me.
I don't think anyone is suggesting "oh just leave us alone and we'll take care of it." What I was describing was a process where you find a way to work with people so that they internalize the ideas. Then the change is genuine. If people are just obeying orders, you haven't made any fundamental changes in their thinking and I don't think it will make a significant difference in outcomes for students.
those objectives to be actively present in the teacher's mind as she walks around the room and interacts with the kids.
Unfortunately I saw way too much sitting on a chair talking-talking-talking (and writing on overhead acetates at the same time), and this by young teachers who were supposed to be "the good ones."
Where is the quality control?
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