How Will We Extend Learning for Students Who Are Highly Proficient?
If a school focuses solely on helping students achieve their grade level or course’s standards, it places an artificial ceiling on students’ access to learning. For example, Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, is committed to “success for every student.” It interprets that commitment as ensuring every student will graduate with high levels of learning necessary for success in college or career training. At one point in its history, the school discouraged students from learning beyond the college preparatory curriculum by establishing limits and prerequisites to serve as barriers to the advanced placement (AP) program’s college-level work.
Over time, the faculty recognized that many students were capable of successfully completing college-level work while still in high school. So teachers now provide an extensive AP program and encourage all college-bound students to participate in that program while still in high school. The school also provides tutorial support for students who need assistance to succeed in the program. It has had remarkable results. Since the early 1980s, the percentage of graduating students who has successfully completed an AP course has increased from 7 percent to 90 percent, and the mode AP exam score for students is 5, the highest possible score (Adlai E. Stevenson High School, 2017).
Every department at Stevenson also fully commits to providing highly capable students with access to academic competitions that challenge them to go beyond the traditional high school curriculum. These competitions provide both students and teachers with external benchmarks to assess the impact of the school’s commitment to advancing high-performing students’ learning.
Mason Crest Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, is a nationally recognized Title I school that takes a different approach to extending student learning. In their planning for every unit, collaborative teams not only identify the essential standards and common formative assessments for that unit but also develop plans for extending high-performing students’ learning at the end of the unit. While some team members work with students who need intervention and others work with students who need additional practice, some team members work with students who are ready for deeper exploration of the topic.
The proficiency scale approach explained in chapter 5 (page 137) provides yet another approach to addressing the issue of extending proficient students’ learning. In short, a school committed to high levels of learning for all students will not establish an artificial ceiling on how much students can learn.
How Will We Increase Our Instructional Competence?
As mentioned earlier, Marzano and colleagues (2016) have added a fifth question for collaborative teams in high reliability schools to consider: How will we increase our instructional competence? This question makes sense because the high reliability school commits to ensuring more good teaching in more classrooms more of the time. Therefore, once a team has agreed on an essential standard and how it will assess student learning, members may benefit from sharing ideas about how to best teach that standard.
I fully support this idea. I also, however, must offer a caveat. The best predictor for how a teacher will teach a unit is how he or she has taught it in the past. So conversations about different practices absent evidence of student learning can easily end up discussing, “I like to teach it this way,” or “I have always taught it this way.” As John Hattie (2009) warns, reflective teaching has the most power when it is collective (involving a teacher team rather than an individual) and based on actual evidence of student learning.
Marzano (2009) offers similar advice when he asserts that the ultimate criterion for successful teaching is student learning, rather than any particular teacher moves. He writes, “The lesson to be learned is that educators must always look to whether a particular strategy is producing the desired results as opposed to simply assuming that if a strategy is being used, positive results will ensue” (p. 35). So although team members may benefit from a discussion about possible instructional strategies prior to teaching a unit, that discussion should never replace collective analysis of the strategies’ effectiveness based on actual evidence of student learning during and after the unit.
I made the case earlier in this introduction that one of the most powerful ways a school can increase instructional competence is to have collaborative teams collectively analyze transparent results from common formative assessments. This is an important context to keep in mind when reading chapter 3.
How Will We Coordinate Our Efforts as a School?
I could not agree more with the significance of this critical question, which Marzano and colleagues (2016) have added to the HRS model of school improvement. In fact, my colleagues and I have made nondiscretionary, coordinated, schoolwide efforts a central tenet of our work. A high reliability school must address the arbitrary and capricious nature of practices that characterize too many schools and must insist that all staff honor coordinated systems and processes so that the school can strive for both excellence and equity.
It ultimately falls on school leaders to ensure the staff coordinate their collective efforts in a way that benefits students. Effective leaders can address this responsibility by establishing a simultaneously loose and tight school culture, or what Marzano and Timothy Waters (2009) have called “defined autonomy” (p. 8). Such a culture makes certain clearly understood priorities, processes, practices, and parameters are nondiscretionary. These elements of the culture are tight or defined, and effective leaders will confront those who violate or ignore the parameters. But within those few tight parameters, the culture is loose, which empowers individuals and teams to make decisions and enjoy a great deal of collective autonomy.
In our work with schools, my colleagues and I insist that the following three elements of the PLC process must be tight.
1. The fundamental structure of the school is the collaborative team, in which members work interdependently to achieve common goals and take collective responsibility for the learning of all students.
2. Each collaborative team does the following.
a. Creates a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit, that provides all students with access to essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions, regardless of their assigned teacher
b. Uses an assessment process that includes frequent team-developed common formative assessments to monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis
c. Applies a data-analysis protocol that uses transparent evidence of student learning to support, inform, and improve its members’ individual and collective practice
3. The school creates a schoolwide plan for intervention and extension that guarantees students who experience difficulty receive additional time and support for learning in a timely, directive, coordinated, and systematic way; and that gives those who are highly proficient additional time and support to extend their learning.
An emerging theme in educational leadership finds that no one individual has the expertise, energy, and influence to bring about substantive school change. School leaders, then, must from the start face the challenge of establishing a guiding coalition or leadership team that will help guide the school through the predictable turmoil that comes with substantive cultural change. Principals should select