Category Archives: About K-12 International Education News

A call to action in the Netherlands: Addressing rising inequality in a decentralized system

Posted on June 15, 2022 by | 1 comment

This blog by Melanie Ehren and Martijn Meetern was originally published by LEARN!. Ehren is a Professor in Educational Governance and Director of Research Intsitute LEARN!, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Meeter is Full Professor, Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Educational and Family Studies, LEARN!

Increasing inequality

In many countries, COVID-related school closures affected already disadvantaged students most in their opportunities to learn and progress. In the Netherlands, the Inspectorate of Education raised the alarm over how the pandemic is leading to further inequality, with alarming numbers of students leaving primary education without the basic skills in arithmetic, reading and writing. As in many countries across the world, the Dutch government is developing new policies to address learning loss from COVID and ‘build back a better system’. These policies include funding for schools to organize targeted support for students in need (e.g. tutoring, remedial teaching) with further investments for schools serving a disadvantaged population. In addition, a government-wide investigation is now underway to better understand the root causes of educational inequality and how to make the education systems more responsive to policies addressing those root causes.

A decentralized system and a coordinated approach

Improving education from the top is not an easy task, given the highly decentralized nature of the education system in the Netherlands and the value placed on school autonomy. The OECD describes Dutch schools as having the highest autonomy internationally. Freedom of education has been the backbone of Dutch education for decades, and is a core value for many policymakers and practitioners working in education.

A more centralized and coordinated approach is, however, crucial to reduce inequality, given that differences in learning opportunities and outcomes often lie outside a school’s span of control. Examples are of parents’ free school choice, which leads to highly homogenous schools with a concentration of social, behavioural and learning problems in some schools, or the early tracking in secondary education which tends to disadvantage children from poorly educated and/or migrant backgrounds. Various studies have mapped out the causes and consequences of the high inequality in the Dutch system with one clear message: this is a complex problem because of its multidisciplinary nature (spatial, social, economic inequalities interact and reinforce each other) where any type of measure to improve education will have multiple outcomes, a high level of interconnectedness, and non-linear outcomes. The high complexity requires a coordinated approach that goes beyond individual interventions or programmes, but where the goal is to change how the whole education system operates to reduce inequality.

Where should we start when trying to address high inequality?

Ideally we want a set of interventions that have a multiplier effect where their collective impact on reducing inequality is greater than the sum of single activities. As  good teachers and high quality teaching are the backbone of any education system, this is where we should start: We need to ensure that all school have sufficient high-quality teachers.

“The OECD TALIS report also indicates a sharp decline in the status of the teaching profession in the Netherlands… By reducing entry requirements, we unintentionally lower quality standards as well as the status of the profession.”

However, the Netherlands faces a large teacher shortage that will only become bigger in the future. Predictions are that secondary schools in 2023 will have a shortage of more than 1000 teachers with a further estimation of a shortage of 2600 fte in 2026, due to retirement. Certain subjects (Dutch, German, French, ICT, Mathematics, Science etc) will be particularly affected in the future, while schools in some urban areas in the country are already in constant crisis management to fill vacancies. Approximately 12% of primary schools in the large cities (e.g. Amsterdam) have permanent vacancies as teachers are moving to more affordable places to live and work. Even when a sufficient number of teachers enters the profession (which is unlikely given current student numbers on teacher education programmes), many of them leave due to high workload and stress, a lack of support and too much responsibility when starting to teach, an unsupportive school environment with too few opportunities for career progression and lack of communication with colleagues and school leadership. An average of 31% of beginning teachers in secondary education tend to leave teaching within five years of graduation.

Contradictory measures

The Ministry of Education has tried to increase the number of teachers by allowing schools to hire unqualified teachers while they train to be teachers on the job, but these teachers seem to be particularly prone to exit the profession. It’s also worth questioning this strategy for the message it sends to the profession at large: how should we understand the nature and status of teaching when we allow anyone with a degree in Higher Education to be a teacher? The Inspectorate of Education reports that an average of 7% of primary schools have unqualified teaching staff and this has detrimental consequences for the instructional quality and children’s learning outcomes. The OECD TALIS report also indicates a sharp decline in the status of the teaching profession in the Netherlands. This may well be an important factor in shortages, as low status affects the potential to recruit sufficient high quality teachers. By reducing entry requirements, we unintentionally lower quality standards as well as the status of the profession. Unfortunately, past policies have seen more of such inconsistencies, such as the introduction of a professional register which provides entry barriers but also increases the administrative workload of teachers without necessarily improving the overall quality of their work.

What can we do to increase the number of high quality and qualified teachers?

Various studies look at the types of interventions that can help build a strong and sufficiently large body of teachers. Here is a summary of the top 6:

  1. Ensure high-quality school leaders. School leaders play a critical role in determining whether teachers are satisfied at work and remain at their school (Kraft et al, 2016), while their instructional leadership can improve the teaching in their school.
  2. Ensure a good working environment for teachers. Sims (2021) review of empirical literature stretching back 20 years suggests that the quality of the working environment in a teacher’s school is an important determinant of retention. A good working environment includes limited administrative workload and marking, collaboration with colleagues and having a manageable classroom of students in terms of their behaviour and teacher-student ratios. The school leader will have an important role in shaping these conditions of work, but external stakeholders (e.g. Inspectorates of Education) will also have a role to play.
  3. Ensure that new teachers are supported when starting teaching and receive feedback and coaching from experienced teachers in the school. 
  4. Ensure teachers are paid more in the most difficult schools, in the most unaffordable areas to live in, and to teach the subjects that are least popular. Sims and Benhenda (2022) find that eligible teachers are 23% less likely to leave teaching in state funded schools in years they were eligible for payments with similar results reported in the US.
  5. Ensure that teachers have career prospects within the teaching profession, so that they don’t have to find these elsewhere. Singapore’s model is exemplary in this regard, while other countries (e.g. England) are also increasing the opportunities for a career in teaching (including formalizing professional development for the various stages).
  6. Ensure that teaching is valued as a profession and has high status in society (e.g. such as when entry requirements are high and the job is paid well).

And one final take-away message: policies and measures need to be coherent and well-aligned in both aiming to increase quality and quantity; compromising on either will not reduce inequality in the long term.

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Is anything changing in schools post-pandemic? Scanning the news from around the world

Posted on June 8, 2022 by | Leave a comment

“What will change in schools and education post-pandemic?” Correne Reyes takes up this question in the 2nd part of a two-part post scanning news reports describing the proposals for “reimagining” education and chronicling what’s actually changing in a variety of countries. Part 1, “Is anything changing in US schools post-pandemic? Possibilities for rethinking time, place and supports for well-being,” focused on some of the key trends in policy and practice in the US. Reyes also highlighted some of the changes in education policy and practice in an earlier post: What’s Changing Post-COVID in Finland, New Zealand, and South Africa?

Hope remains that, despite the tragic losses and disruptions of the pandemic there may be an opportunity to reimagine critical aspects of schooling. Correspondingly, over the past year, a variety of news and research outlets have shared a wide variety of hopes and proposals for change. At the same time, some long-time observers, like Larry Cuban, argue that the proposals and visions for change may not find their way into practice. As he put it, “I don’t see COVID producing a lot of reforms. If anything, it produces this huge public and professional need to resume schooling as it was. I think basically schooling has much more stability than change in it. And that’s the historian’s point of view.” Cuban continues, “I think COVID has reminded us that all parents want is a return to face-to-face teaching and to let the teachers teach the lessons that they had before school closures. Let them do what they do best.”  To continue the exploration of the proposals and possibilities for changing schools post-pandemic, we highlight some of the related news stories we’ve come across from around the world, many of which echo trends in the US, including concerns about enrollment, “learning loss,” and well-being among students and teachers, and possibilities for digital/remote learning.

“I don’t see COVID producing a lot of reforms. If anything, it produces this huge public and professional need to resume schooling as it was.”

Larry Cuban, How Will COVID-19 Impact School Reform Movements?

Argentina

Educational catastrophe: the pandemic generated a critical dropout rate in Argentina, La Nacion

Australia

GoKid partners to address school transportation crisis, Benzinga

SA schools drop non-essential activities as teachers face ‘exhaustion’ through COVID shortages, ABC News

Bangladesh is making a serious attempt to improve its schools, The Economist

Bangladesh 

Combatting the impact of COVID-19 school closures in Bangladesh, World Bank Blogs 

Bangladesh is making a serious attempt to improve its schools, The Economist

Brazil

Brazil: 40.8% of children are illiterate, according to research, The Rio Times

China

China Aims to Upgrade the Country’s Overall Digital Competitiveness via Education, OpenGov

China’s education reform is resulting in overworked teachers, SupChina

Colombia

Young Latin Americans see career dreams crushed in COVID’s wake, Reuters

Recovering lost learning in Ecuador after two years of the pandemic, UNICEF

Ecuador

Recovering lost learning in Ecuador after two years of the pandemic, UNICEF

A safe return to in-person classes in rural Ecuador, United Nations Sustainable Development Group

France

Strike in National Education: “We carry the school at arm’s length and the arms will let go”, Libération

Hong Kong

Lessons in caution at reopening of Hong Kong’s schools, South China Morning Post

India 

Changes in education system after Covid-19 pandemic, The Times of India 

How The Pandemic Changed The Face Of Education In India, Babaji Vidhyashram

Netherlands

The Dutch are still happy but slightly less so, and young adults are hardest hit, DutchNews

Lack of ‘basic’ skills in new entrants concerns teachers, stuff

New Zealand

What’s in the new New Zealand history curriculum, The Spin Off

Lack of ‘basic’ skills in new entrants concerns teachers, stuff

Paris

Parental Burnout Is Real — And Taking Leave Is Not An Option, Worldcrunch

Peru

Covid-19: Peruvian students have a hard time returning to school after two-year hiatus, Le Monde

Philippines

5 ways the Philippines can prepare its schools for health crises in 2022, Rappler

Spain

Teachers before the return to school: doubts about the new protocol and fear of an avalanche of casualties, El País

South Africa

Schools show shortfalls amid Covid-19 pandemic, Mail & Guardian

A teacher retirement wave is about to hit SA: what it means for class size, Sunday Times

3 big changes coming to schools in South Africa, BusinessTech

Uganda

Schools reopen in Uganda after nearly-two-year COVID closure, Aljazeera

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Is anything changing in US schools post-pandemic? Possibilities for rethinking time, place and supports for well-being

Posted on June 1, 2022 by | Leave a comment

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, numerous proposals to “reimagine education” have been made.  At IEN, we have been tracking both the news about those proposals for changing education and the discussions of what has (and has not) been changing in schools post-pandemic (see for example “What can change in schools after the pandemic?”). This week, Correne Reyes shares our latest scan of that news in the US and finds some media reports highlighting flexibility around “seat time;” increased attention to teacher wellbeing, and discussions of the ways online learning may serve as a substitute for classroom-based learning. A second scan will focus on educational changes reported in other parts of the world.

Rethinking Time in Schools?

The switch to remote learning in so many schools and districts prompted numerous proposals to rethink “seat time” – the conventional requirements for awarding credit based on the number of hours and days spent in classrooms. As Jonathan Alfuth put it , “While we agree that states must return to policies that ensure districts maximize the amount of time students spend on high-quality learning experiences, we also believe states must seize this unique moment to rethink the way in which they define instruction and credential learning.” These proposals argue for broadening definitions of what counts as “hours” of instruction, where instruction can take place, and how it can be measure (e.g. “How states are rethinking instructional time and attendance policies in the covid-19 era”; “Unlocking innovation in schools: Policies that create space for schools to better support their students”). Some states have begun reshaping their policies to adjust the barriers of seat time. For example, Minnesota proposed legislation that emphasizes personalized, competency-based education, which focuses on “outcomes—mapping to the pace of students’ mastery of knowledge and skills—instead of moving lockstep through time-based lessons and grades.” Arizona established an Instructional Time Model allowing school districts to adopt their own instructional hour requirements for attendance. Meanwhile, Washington created the mastery-based (or competency-based) credit as an option for high school students to earn credit for demonstration of learning on assessments that are tied to state learning standards.

A Post-Pandemic Opportunity to Think Differently About Instructional Time, Jonathan Alfuth, Education Next

Along those same lines, discussions of how time is used and organized have led some schools to add minutes and days to the school year but often without more substantial rethinking of the school calendar itself (see “Why schools see extra time as the solution to making up for lost instruction” and “Longer school days and years remain rare as schools fight learning loss with optional time” “Schools that switched to a four-day week saw learning reductions. what does that mean for the pandemic’s lost instructional time?”).

Going Beyond Classroom-based Learning?

Although the move to remote learning caused considerable distress for many students and families, it simultaneously allowed them to experience a variety of options for both digital schooling and other schooling arrangements such as pods and homeschooling. Moving forward, there are some signs that there may be a new desire to expand or at least preserve these options and arrangements moving forward. A 2021 Education Next poll, for example, reported that 48% of parents said elementary students should have remote learning options; 64% said the same for high school students. In addition, According to the Aurora Institute, nearly 3 in 5 families and 3 in 4 instructors preferred their “pod” over their child’s pre-pandemic schools (e.g. “Is there a future in the “learning pod” education model?”; “Crisis Breeds Innovation: Pandemic Pods and the Future of Education”; “For Learning Pod Teachers, a Pandemic Paradigm Shift: Why So Many Now Say They Don’t Want to Return to Traditional Classrooms”).

Results from the 2021 Education Next Poll, Education Next

At the same time, despite the calls to maintain some remote learning options, a report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (Virtual Learning, Now and Beyond) concludes that recent research on the relationship between learning mode and student achievement during COVID indicates that the shift to online education had negative effects on learning outcomes.  That report argues that “we have failed to build intentional on-ramps to virtual education” and “we remain unprepared to implement online learning when the need arises.” Another CRPE report (Crisis Breeds Innovation: Pandemic Pods and the Future of Education) noted that learning pods changed how some families viewed their children’s education, but points out most families sent their children back to their prior schools as a result of the costs of podding and the challenges of operating off-grid.

Building support for Teacher & Student Well-Being?

Teachers have always served a pivotal role in responding to students’ wellbeing, but the pandemic is contributing to low morale and high burnout, and, as one study described it, “a critical need to allocate more attention and resources to support teacher psychological health by strengthening emotional support, autonomy, and teaching efficacy” “Elementary School Teacher Well-Being and Supportive Measures Amid COVID-19: An Exploratory Study”).

Don’t Forget the Adults: How Schools and Districts Can Support Educator Mental Health, EducationWeek

As a consequence, educators are requesting more training and resources to support their own as well as their students’ mental health.  These concerns have fueled a variety of proposals for prioritizing well-being in schools moving forward (“The Mental Health Crisis Causing Teachers to Quit”; “How Schools Can Build a Culture of Support for Educator Mental Health“; With Teacher Morale in the Tank, What’s the Right Formula to Turn It Around?). Ronn Nozoe, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, has also advocated for districts and schools to use some of their federal COVID-19 relief funds to set up targeted support programs for school leaders’ mental health. However, the huge demand for mental health care professionals nationally has created a challenge for school districts. “It’s not for lack of want, it’s not for lack of ideas,” Nozoe continues. “It’s really a lack of available professionals who are willing and qualified to provide these kinds of services to help kids and families and ultimately educators.”

“It’s not for lack of want, it’s not for lack of ideas…It’s really a lack of available professionals who are willing and qualified to provide these kinds of services to help kids and families and ultimately educators.” Ronn Nozoe

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Preparing, hiring, and supporting education leaders: The Lead the Change interview with Lauren Bailes

Posted on May 25, 2022 by | Leave a comment

What does it take to support the development of a diverse group of education leaders? Lauren Bailes discusses this and other key issues of educational change in In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview. Bailes is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware who explores how organizational, social-cognitive, and leadership theory unite to promote the success of school leaders and K-12 students.The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website

Lead the Change: The 2022 AERA theme is Cultivating Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century and charges researchers and practitioners with dismantling oppressive education systems and replacing them with anti-racist, equity, and justice-oriented systems. To achieve these goals, researchers must engage in new methodologies, cross-disciplinary thinking, global perspectives, and community partnerships to respond to the challenges of the 21st century including the COVID-19 Pandemic and systemic racism among other persistent inequities. Given the dire need for all of us to do more to dismantle oppressive systems and reimagine new ways of thinking and doing in our own institutions and education more broadly, what specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Lauren Bailes: Two things come to mind for me in response to this call. First, I’m trying to stay connected to practitioners and stakeholders in my local contexts as much as possible in order to listen and learn about their needs in the midst of a rapidly shifting set of systems. I recently had a conversation with a state education leader in Delaware and he asked me, “Do you ever worry that you’ll do research for forty years and you will have become irrelevant?” I told him that I think about that most days. I think, right now, my responsibility—and the way to preclude that irrelevance—is to tailor my work to the espoused needs of education leaders and practitioners around me. I try to conceive of my research agenda as a way to be of service; that necessarily entails collaboration, flexibility, and pivots—all of which definitely keep things current and engaging.

For me, this has certainly meant attending to meaningful research questions using high-quality methodological approaches and publishing in respected outlets, but I don’t want to stop there. One of my favorite moments of my career thus far was when one of my EdD students (a Black woman who was at that time an assistant principal) saw the assistant principal findings from my and a colleague’s AERA Open piece (Bailes & Guthery, 2020) in EdWeek and reached out to me to say, “Hey! This is you, right? This is everything I’ve been trying to say in my district!” This encapsulated so much for me: research has to be multilingual and speak the languages of our research colleagues and our practitioner colleagues. For Sarah and me, this has meant writing shorter summaries of our research in plain language with clear action steps which follow the peer-reviewed research articles. This is not new information, but I take this responsibility very seriously. I’ve also tried to take on some responsibility for leader preparation in my state—both through our EdD program and through other initiatives like the Governor’s Institute for School Leadership (GISL), which is a year-long executive style professional learning experience for third-year Assistant Principals who seek promotion in the school system. My colleague Bryan VanGronigen and I co-wrote the curriculum for the year, and I also teach in the program. The woman who contacted me about the EdWeek writeup graduated from our EdD program then spent a year with GISL and is now a district leader. For her and others like her—in our preparation programs and in our statewide leader supports—the job of translating research clearly in diverse outlets, is incredibly important, as is the practical enactment of what I find and espouse in research.

LtC: Your recent work examines the impact of “disappearing diversity” on the hiring of teachers of color. You have also examined the path to the principalship for assistant principals of color. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience examining the growing equity issues of school staffing?

LB: School staffing is the chief concern I hear among my practitioner colleagues. Whether it’s hiring a highly qualified teacher, finding someone to cover a special education classroom, identifying an instructional coach for the school’s one STEM teacher, or retaining a principal, staffing is at the forefront for many school leaders.

Staffing shortages are certainly not new to schools and the acuity of that challenge varies by context; in Delaware, for example, 41% of principals are eligible for retirement in the next five years. Throughout the educator pipeline, there is a profound need to get positions filled. But even in the midst of a staffing crisis, just filling positions is insufficient. We have to maintain focus on equitable and just practices associated with recruiting, hiring, developing, retaining, and promoting education professionals (Bailes & Guthery, 2021).

Having a racially diverse pool of educators is good for all students and not just students of color, even though we also know that students of color experience particular benefits when they are taught and led by people who look like them (e.g., Simon et al., 2015).

One thing that became clear to me as Dr. Sarah Guthery and I wrote about teacher hiring was that we lose so many teachers of color in their teacher preparation programs. Whether that’s due to the cost of those programs, biased systems of licensure and certification, or lack of support among predominantly white systems of preparation, we have to make teacher preparation not just attractive but feasible for people of color. These might include more incentives for early career teachers of color as well as induction supports.

“We have to maintain focus on equitable and just practices associated with recruiting, hiring, developing, retaining, and promoting education professionals.”

We know from literature, and from the experiences of our practitioner colleagues, that the challenges inherent to education careers are multiplied when those educators are the only or one of very few people of color in their organizations. So, networks and ‘taps’ matter a lot. It’s critically important that, as women and people of color indicate interest in school leadership, they are able to identify systems of support and mentorship to get them into those positions, to scaffold their skills as they move into leadership, and then take seriously their development in those positions in order to retain them.

Ltc: In your study of principal promotion in Texas, you find that Black assistant principals and women high school assistant principals have harder paths to the principalship than their White and male counterparts. What policies and practices can school systems put in place to ensure equitable promotion?

LB: There are a lot of things districts can do and they fall roughly into issues of perception and issues of preparation. It’s also important to note that our study has been replicated a couple of times and the exact promotion patterns vary in different contexts, so I strongly recommend getting familiar with those patterns in your context. However, some of the perceptions regarding the leadership of women and people of color persist across systems. One of the most interesting things that I learned in the process of writing that paper with Dr. Guthery was that, even though we did not find a difference in likelihood of promotion to the principalship for women, we found that women were far more likely to be promoted to principalships in elementary and middle schools than in high schools. Given that superintendents and other district-level leaders are often hired out of high schools, this renders a lot of women invisible for those promotions (and has lasting consequences for pay equity). Principals of lower schools may be perceived as less ‘tough’ or as having to contend with fewer complex organizational management issues and that’s just not true (see for example: Joy, 1998). This is a perception problem and one we can and should counter very directly.

“Efforts toward equitable principal promotion have to be paired with other issues of persistent segregation as well.”

Similarly, principal licensure exams function as a sorting mechanism for many principal candidates of color. Despite similar qualifications to their white peers, aspiring leaders of color may be removed from candidacy because of licensure exams. This is also an opportunity to use the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) in lieu of biased exams to enhance justice and equity within principal hiring and promotion practices. No standards are perfect, and they require careful training to be used well, but assessing principal candidates through the lens of standards rather than licensure exams may be one way to create more equitable access to school leadership for women and people of color.

Superintendents are best positioned to enact some of these reforms. They can call for audits, examine hiring records (including applicant pools that are often inaccessible to researchers), change job postings and hiring structures, and deploy resources for support and mentoring opportunities for people who are underrepresented in school leadership.

Finally, it’s important to recall that issues of segregation among education professionals do not occur in a vacuum—they’re influenced by racism, sexism, misogyny, and oppression throughout our systems of housing, medical care, higher education, and the list goes on. Efforts toward equitable principal promotion have to be paired with and are more likely to be successful as we concurrently attend to other issues of persistent segregation as well.

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?

LB: I see a tremendous amount of curiosity and willingness to experiment among many of my collaborators—both researchers and practitioners. My conversations with local education leaders suggest that the inequities and challenges associated with schooling in the last two years are not new—they weren’t created by the pandemic—but they were instead thrown into stark relief by the pandemic. Researchers have one set of language and tools to name those challenges, and I’m consistently impressed when I see researchers expand their language, outlets, and tools to be more inclusive of practitioners.

Similarly, I’ve seen practitioners take on some really brave and creative work regarding equity, school discipline, community engagement, instruction, and cycles of school improvement and they’re looking for research partners to support that work. Our practitioner colleagues spent two years creating systems to do schooling with unthinkable constraints on staffing, resources, and technology, so they’re empowered to innovate in ways that previously seemed outside the ‘grammar’ of schooling.

“Get close to a school and support the shared work of the teachers, families, leaders, and students there.”

We’ve seen systems that are breaking new ground in leadership preparation, team teaching arrangements, and school-wide equity training. So if you’re looking for partnership opportunities, get close to a school and support the shared work of the teachers, families, leaders, and students there. Their work is accelerating, rather than slowing, towards justice and equity—often in spite of profound barriers associated with resources and policymaking.

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

LB: I’m learning a lot from thought leaders in the conversation about CritQuant (critical approaches to quantitative methods). I employ a lot of administrative data and I’m keenly aware of their limitations and the ways in which the assumptions embedded in those data perpetuate oppressions along dimensions of race, class, and gender. Categories—like those that currently characterize quantitative data— are necessarily limiting and so I’m trying to think about ways to acknowledge meaningful differences in how individuals are treated by education systems (for example, people of color are less likely to be promoted from assistant principalships to principalships than are their white counterparts) while also exploring ways to think beyond the limitations of the categories in those data. I’m excited about the conversations in this space and the ways in which we have more opportunities for collaboration across theoretical and methodological boundaries.

I’m also really excited about the recent emphasis on PSEL Standard 3, which addresses equity. As I mentioned above, I think there’s a real appetite among schools for concrete and creative steps to increase equity in their schools at every level. Standard 3— which includes skills like cultural responsiveness, an emphasis on each child, and inclusive decision-making—is really brought to life in the other nine standards. For example, what does it look like to carry out inclusive decision-making with instructional faculty or with families? How do leaders enact cultural responsiveness in their communications with families? How do school discipline policies attend to the needs of each child? As I’ve worked with school leaders, the overwhelming refrain is something like, “I’m committed to equity—I just don’t quite know how to do it.” It seems like some clear direction on how to bring Standard 3 to life will offer them some purchase as they engage equity work in their own contexts. I’m so excited to be connected to more of that work, and I’m really optimistic that such clarity will contribute to overall school improvement.

Overall, I feel very lucky to be surrounded by talented, committed colleagues at University of Delaware and nationally as well as in our surrounding communities and schools. I’m consistently encouraged by their technical expertise, courage, and optimism, and I’m confident that educational change is possible as we learn from each other and continue to prioritize students.

References

Sawchuk, S. (2020, June 15). For Black candidate and women, it takes longer to be promoted to principal. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/for-black-candidates-and-women-it-takes-longer-to-be-promoted-to-principal/2020/06

Bailes, L. P., & Guthery, S. (2020). Held Down and Held Back: Systematically Delayed Principal Promotions by Race and Gender. AERA Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858420929298

Bailes, L. P., & Guthery, S. (2021). Disappearing diversity and the probability of hiring a nonwhite teacher: Evidence from Texas. (EdWorkingPaper: 21-447). Annenberg Institute at Brown University. https://doi.org/10.26300/qvmz-gs17

Joy, L. (1998). Why are women underrepresented in public school administration? An empirical test of promotion discrimination. Economics of Education Review, 17(2), 193-204.

Simon, N. S., Johnson, S. M., & Reinhorn, S. K. (2015). The challenge of recruiting and hiring teachers of color: Lessons from six high-performing, high-poverty, urban schools. The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. https://projectngt.gse.harvard.edu/publications/challenge-recruiting-and-hiring-
teachers-color-lessons-six-high

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A Focus on (Imperfect) Leadership: Snapshots from the 9th ARC Education ThoughtMeet

Posted on May 18, 2022 by | 1 comment

The latest ThoughtMeet (TM) from the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory (ARC) featured conversations with Steve Munby and ARC delegates exploring “imperfect leadership.” Munby facilitates ARC events and is a member of the ARC Secretariat, and Visiting Professor at University College London Centre for Educational Leadership. Munby’s talk drew from his recently published book with co-author Marie-Claire Bretherton, Imperfect Leadership in Action: A practical book for school leaders who know they don’t know it all. This post highlights the key ideas and issues that were discussed in the meeting by representatives from the seven ARC member systems and its global partners. A summary, videos, and other resources from the March 25th ThoughtMeet: A Focus on Leadership. Summaries and materials from previous ThoughtMeets are available on the ARC Education Project website. This post was written by Mariana Domínguez González, and Daphne Varghese, ARC Research Assistants and Trista Hollweck, ARC Project Director.

“Nobody is ready for leadership. It is always a big step up. Imperfect leadership is neither a set of competencies to be mastered nor a body of knowledge to be memorized. It is a mindset to be embraced.”

Steve Munby

What is imperfect leadership? According to Steve Munby, imperfect leadership goes beyond how effectively a leader responds to ever-changing and dynamic work conditions to encompass who the leader is as a person– their personality, expertise, how they motivate others, respond to stress, etc. Leaders are not finished products; rather, they should strive to be endless learners which he describes as grown up & restless (as illustrated in the quadrants below). Munby reminded ARC delegates that “walking into a leadership role is a new playground for everyone. There is no such thing as perfect leadership when we step into a leadership role.” Thus, strong self-awareness is crucial for imperfect leadership.

Source: Quadrant taken from Steve Munby’s presentation: March 25th TM

In order for leaders to stay restless, Munby stressed the importance of developing and leading an open-to-learning culture. Leaders should review and reflect on events or situations that haven’t gone well, practice self-compassion, and use feedback processes (such as 360 degree feedback) in a focused and time-specific way to improve their leadership practices. 

How can we help educators to improve and to develop as leaders? Munby stressed that all members in a team have the potential to be leaders. The key is to provide them with the confidence to step up and take a leadership role. Creating an imperfect leadership culture requires an investment in others, especially early career leaders. As the more experienced leaders, he explained “it is our responsibility to support the leadership development of others. We must support future leaders and provide them with opportunities to take on challenging tasks and feel supported to take risks. We also must be conscious to not reinforce one simple stereotypical view of leadership, but encourage potential leaders from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to lead.” Munby added that an imperfect leadership culture provides opportunities for experienced leaders to take on new and challenging roles in an effort to renew and re-energize them.

A Q&A panel discussion followed the ARC talk and delegates asked Munby about the role of diversity in leadership, the importance of co-leadership and distributed leadership models, how to deal with negative organizational cultures, as well as how to balance risk-taking and learning from one’s failures against stakeholder expectations:

What role do you think diversity plays in leadership? Munby noted that organizations need to go beyond the notion that diversity is solely about fairness. Rather, diversity creates better teams characterized by numerous perspectives and expertise. Organizations also need to steer away from a singular approach to leadership, as it can encourage specific group members to be leaders and deter others from stepping into a leadership role. Munby emphasized that conceptualizations of talent are narrow and fixed, and we need to find ways to challenge them.

How do we “row together” to create an expectation of sharing power and decision-making?  Munby described how stakeholder engagement is an essential collaborative strategy for systems to develop imperfect leadership and promote progressive policy leadership. 

How do leaders cope with negative organizational cultures? According to Munby, it is always important to try to find a way to internally influence the work culture. However, in some cases, if the negative culture becomes too fixed and unlikely to change, it may be best for the leader to switch to another workplace. 

Follow-up reflection questions for system leaders: 

  • What does imperfect leadership mean in a virtual post-Covid-19 context? 
  • What is the difference between leadership and management? 
  • How do we further develop adaptive leadership in our systems so that leaders are not only aware of their individual strengths and default styles but equally aware of how to respond when a situation needs a different approach? 
  • How do leaders balance the system/political aspect as well as the personal side of leadership? 
  • How do leaders manage the very real external pressures and expectations and also provide conditions for aspiring leaders to grow and make mistakes? 
  • How do we prevent or avoid burnout in leaders at all levels? What kind of support is most needed? 

About the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory: 

The (ARC) is an international policy learning network that was established in 2016 to advance educational change based on eight guiding principles: equity, excellence, inclusion, wellbeing, democracy, sustainability, human rights, and professionally run systems. Headquartered at the University of Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) since 2019, ARC brings together senior public officials (i.e ministers and deputy ministers of education), professional association leaders (i.e. unions and inspectorates) and other key stakeholders from its seven education member systems (Iceland, Ireland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Scotland, Uruguay and Wales), global partners (International Confederation of Principals) and international experts and scholars to discuss, debate and exchange knowledge about educational policy issues and to formulate responses suited to their contexts. One of the founding ideas behind ARC is to tear down the walls between countries and regions, as well as between educational researchers and politicians, in order to pursue the most fundamental ideas of what it means to be educated in today’s world for the mutual benefit of all ARC-systems and future generations of students worldwide. Every year, ARC members meet at the annual Summit hosted by one of the member systems. However, since 2020, in addition to a virtual summit, ARC has also hosted bi-monthly virtual ARC ThoughtMeets (TMs) for its members. The TM outreach series was designed to stimulate and support a global educational movement for equitable, inclusive and sustainable educational solutions to COVID-19.

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Schooling around the World (from Larry Cuban)

Posted on May 11, 2022 by | Leave a comment

This week, IEN reposts part 2 of a series of blog posts in which Larry Cuban reflects on the endurance of “two dominant patterns of organizing schools and teaching lessons” in the US: the age-graded school and “teacher-centered instruction.” In part 2, Cuban begins exploring whether the patterns he has seen in the US appear in other countries, in this case France. The original post appeared on Larry Cuban’s Blog on May 7th.

In Part 1, I asked the question whether or not the ways that U.S. schools have organized (i.e., the age-graded school) and the dominant ways that teachers teach in American classrooms (i.e., teacher-centered instruction) are unique to the U.S. So in a series of posts over the next few weeks, I will sample how different nations organize their systems of schooling and offer photos of classrooms and descriptions of lessons to see how actual students and teachers appear. 

The organization of schools in other countries and photos of lessons suggest a strong similarity to the U.S.’s age-graded structures and classroom organization. While diagrams of a nation’s schools are helpful to readers in getting a sense of how each country organizes their public schools and while snapshots do convey how classroom furniture is arrayed, the importance of wall clocks, and national flags, neither charts nor photos tell viewers the ways these teachers teach multiple lessons thereby revealing patterns in teaching. Finally, snapshots fail to show student learning since they capture a mere instant of what a class is doing. So charts and photos can inform but they have definite limits.

Another shortcoming to relying upon photos is that I may have used non-representative samples of a nation’s classrooms, given that I pulled photos from the Internet. But those photos are all I have at the moment. I do invite readers to offer other photos and text that challenge the generalizations I make about school structures, given the limited evidence I offer. 

In this post, I will focus on one country–France–and offer photos of “typical” public school classrooms over the past few years including the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

France has a centralized system of schooling for its 13 million students. A Ministry of Education establishes the curriculum for all levels of schooling and allocates both staff and funds to the 31 regions or academies headed by a rectuerresponsible to the national Ministry of Education. 

The historically high degree of uniformity in curriculum and instruction has lessened in recent years as the Ministry of Education has delegated to local regions, curricular discretion. Moreover, local variation in schooling and classroom lessons–Brittany in the northeast of France and Marseilles on the Mediterranean Sea–Inescapably exists. 

In France, education is compulsory for children between the ages of three and 16 and consists of four levels:

Students are required to attend school from age six to sixteen. All schooling between kindergarten and university is free except for private schools where parents pay fees. Seventeen percent of French children attend private schools.

Schools open in September and end in June with two weeks of vacation every few months. Also, most French schools are open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesdays are often a half-day. The school day usually runs from eight AM to four PM. French students usually have over an hour for lunch and many go home to eat. 

Class sizes in public schools vary. For instance, in primary grades, one teacher and a teaching assistant typically will be in charge of 25 children; in secondary school, teachers commonly have 30 or more students.

Even with these similar features, there are differences in schooling across France (e.g., urban/rural, small/large schools, heavily immigrant/mostly middle and upper middle class, public/private). Thus, what some authorities call a “typical” lesson may simply be what they believe (or want to believe) is a common instance of classroom teaching. Readers should keep that in mind.

Here are a few photos of “typical” elementary and secondary classrooms in France. 

Second grade classroom
Secondary school classroom
During pandemic, students wearing protective masks sit in a classroom in a middle school in Bron, France (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images)
Arabic-language students at the Claude Monet high school in Paris. Here, the teacher opens the lesson by using LinkedIn to show students how many jobs are open to them if they speak Arabic.Credit…Sara Farid for The New York Times
Some 12 million French children returned to school for the first day of the new academic year on September 2, 2021. © Jeff Pachoud, AFP
High School classroom Paris France
A classroom in Nice, southern France. (File photo/September 2020) © Reuters/Eric Gaillard
Students listen the teacher during the first day of school for the 2021-2022 year at Gounod Lavoisier’primary school, Lille, northern France, Thursday, Sept.2 2021. 
A teacher uses an interactive whiteboard in a classroom at Germaine Tillion primary school, on September 4, 2012 at the start of the new school year in Lyon, eastern France (Photo credit should read JEFF PACHOUD/AFP via Getty Images).
Schoolchildren listen to a teacher showing how to use “GraphoLearn”, an application on a digital tablet, to learn to read, in a primary school on January 8, 2018 in Marseille, southern France. (Photo credit should read BERTRAND LANGLOIS/AFP via Getty Images)

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The Whole Child Model at the Van Ness Elementary School: A Conversation with Keptah Saint Julien (Part 2)

Posted on May 4, 2022 by | 4 comments

This week, Thomas Hatch continues his conversation with Keptah Saint Julien about the development of a Whole Child School Model at the Van Ness Elementary School, a District of Columbia Public School. In Part 1, Saint Julien talked about the beginnings of the Whole School Model, and some of the core components. Part 2 discusses some of the specific strategies for working with students who need additional support and some of the ways the model has changed over time. Keptah Saint Julien is a partner at Transcend with over a decade of experience in urban education. Saint Julien now works with her colleagues at Transcend to share the model in a Whole Child Collaborative in D.C. and in schools in Transcend’s national network. To support that work, Transcend recently received a $4 million dollar grant to study and scale the model in the DCPS and in Aldine ISD, in Texas.

Thomas Hatch: Last time, you talked about some of the key components that characterize the Whole Child School Model, can you talk a bit about the CARE plus and Boost strategies designed for students who need additional support?

Keptah Saint Julien: For some students, CARE isn’t enough. They need additional supports to help them to be successful. For this we have both CARE Plus and BOOST. CARE plus means using CARE strategies with greater frequency or intensity (e.g. if a student needs more connections, they get extra connecting activities during the day, etc), but it also incorporates classroom strategies that teachers can implement to help these students. They may be academic, social or emotional.

CARE plus classroom strategies

We also have what is called TLC (Time, Love, and Connection), which gives students who need additional connection a daily opportunity to check in with an adult that they trust. BOOST also encompasses specific interventions like structured recess. Van Ness incorporated this practice for students who were being unsafe with their bodies. It’s important that every student has recess. Physical activity is an important way to alleviate stress. But if a student gets into an altercation, a staff member will pick up the students and take them to a space where they first talk about what happened. The staff member sits on the ground at the same level as the students, and then makes sure the students understand why they are in structured recess while giving the students a space to express their frustrations. At Van Ness, the staff member is usually a “behavior technician” who works to foster the development of positive behaviors and support students who are struggling. (Van Ness is one of several schools in the district that has behavior tech’s.) What’s beautiful about the model is that teachers do affirm student emotions. Students are allowed to be upset. Structured recess gives them the space to be upset, to express their frustrations and to reflect on how they can improve. After reflecting, the students build their skills with the behavior tech through practicing different recess games. That might be “This is how we play tag. We can practice and play.” So students get a chance to practice appropriate touch in tag and build the skills that they need in a structured setting, while still allowing for them to have recess and deepen a trusting relationship with an adult as well.

The last core component is Family Circle, which has a lot to do with the relationship building between families, teachers and staff members. Family Circle includes proactive relationship building as part of it, ongoing communication, family to family community building, academic partnering, and additional support, of course, for families as well. All these three parts – Family Circle, CARE, and Boost – make up the approach to well-being.

TH: That’s fascinating, such great examples of things like being at eye level with students. These are specific practices that really add up. The structured recess was a good example of something that’s changed or developed over time. What other tweaks or changes had to be made as the model developed?

KSJ: I would say the biggest shift in any school redesign is the shift that happens with adult mindsets, particularly when working with veteran teachers who have experience, knowledge and strategies that work for them. The key issue is helping them to see that we need to approach behavior and approach student well-being through relationship building and through proactive strategies, such as classroom greetings, intentional language and tone, and classroom design.

“The biggest shift in any school with any sort of redesign is the shift that happens with adult mindsets.”

TH: What has Van Ness done to support that shift?

KSJ: Cynthia sends many teachers to trainings and books studies. They do a lot of intentional professional development through organizations like Transcend. A good portion of her budget is allocated towards this.

TH: Van Ness has now achieved some success and been recognized both within DCPS and other places as a really exciting and promising model. I know that you and your colleagues at Transcend are working on sharing that success with other schools and communities. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve learned as you’ve tried to spread the model? How the model has changed or how you’re thinking towards the model has changed?

KSJ: One of the first things that we’re committed to doing and that we’re working on is clarifying what’s core. It’s important that if a school says “I like the Whole Child Model and I really love what’s happening at Van Ness,” that they still recognize that each community is different, has different needs, students, and families. We are not trying to replicate Van Ness in every community, because the exact strategies are not going to work for every single community. But we know that student wellbeing is important for every school and every community. We’re trying to clarify what’s core. We’re testing and codifying some of the practices, and we’re also capturing the adaptations that are being done in different sites. Ultimately, we have this goal of increasing the impact of the model for schools and for school communities across the country. Right now, we have a first cohort that we’re still constantly learning from. We have also started an “Ignite Phase” for schools who are interested in the model. During this early phase, they explore questions like: What is wellbeing? What does wellbeing mean to me? What does it mean to my students? To my families? What do we know from research & best practice about factors that influence well-being? What are the strengths of our current approach? What are our needs? They start that listening process by interviewing and synthesizing information.

“We are not trying to replicate Van Ness in every community, because Van Ness is not going to work for every single community. But we know that student wellbeing is important for every school and every community.”

At the same time that we’re partnering with several schools in DCPS, we’re also working with schools around the country. For example, Carrollton Farmers Branch ISD, in the Dallas area, has identified one school who is piloting aspects of the model to determine how it might work there, and to see whether this is something that the district wishes to adopt more fully. Through an EIR grant we recently received, we’re able to expand to 10 schools in Aldine, Texas over the next several years. In addition, we’re partnering with a charter school in Memphis who wishes to adopt the model and potentially be a demonstration site for what this work can look like in Memphis. Even with this early expansion, we are very much in the learning phase. We learned a lot through our early work with Van Ness, and we’re learning a lot through our first cohort who are launching the model in their schools. It’s helping us learn what are the adaptations that we need to make in different school communities. One of the challenges arose when we launched with the first cohort because their first year of implementation happened during the pandemic. A lot of what they learned in the virtual world we are now transferring to classrooms, but it’s not always hitting the mark on the different elements of Strong Start for example. So now we have to go back and work on it again.

TH: Do you have another example like that – of something that’s not working that you have to change?

KSJ: Another thing that has been a struggle is structured recess. The issue is that there’s not a lot of capacity right now. As in many schools, a lot of teachers and staff members are unfortunately out. So, the schools just do not always have the people that they need in the building to run this type of intervention. Training and having a long-term sub who understands the model is a really important piece of the work to ensure students have a consistent experience. When you have a sub that comes in who doesn’t know the model, it can throw off the trajectory within a classroom and within the school culture. But right we just don’t have those long-term subs.

TH: These are great examples of both some of the changes that have been made and some of the challenges. As you look ahead, are there any key lessons, surprises, or things you didn’t know about when you went into this work that you’d want to share with others who are trying to develop more of a focus on well-being?

KSJ: I would like to touch on the family partnership aspect. We’re constantly going back to the drawing board and thinking about how to really meaningfully engage families in the work itself. That has been challenging, particularly now, given the circumstances that are happening in our very real world. It’s not always easy to partner up or communicate with families because families are busy and we’re busy. At the same time, families are our students’ first teachers. We aim to work in close partnership with them. It’s one thing, if I am teaching students how to self-regulate in their centering space and learn breathing, and teaching them focus. It’s even more powerful if, when they go home, they are practicing the same skills there. Without strong communication, there may be misalignment. The practices and teachings of social, emotional learning and wellness may not be consistent. We have to think about how we are working alongside families. What are their goals for their children? How are we helping them learn about the model and what’s happening in classrooms so that they are able to implement similar strategies at home and understand the language that students are using? Ongoing communication with families through meetings, newsletters, email and text has been really helpful. That is a part of Family Circle that is really going well. Parents are constantly looking out for further communication.

“We have to think about how we are working alongside families. What are their goals for their children? How are we helping them learn about the model and what’s happening in classrooms so that they are able to implement similar strategies at home and understand the language that students are using?”

TH: What are some of your hopes for the future?

KSJ: My personal hope is that we are codifying practices in ways that are accessible to everyone. There’s also a need for this type of work in upper grades. What would this look like in middle school? In addition to spreading this work at the elementary level, I hope we can codify and build out practices for middle schools and high schools.

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The Whole Child Model at the Van Ness Elementary School: A Conversation with Keptah Saint Julien (Part 1)

Posted on April 27, 2022 by | 5 comments

This week’s post shares the first part of a conversation between Thomas Hatch and Keptah Saint Julien about the development of a Whole Child School Model at the Van Ness Elementary School, a District of Columbia Public School. The school was closed in 2006 due to under enrollment as the surrounding neighborhood was re-developed, with the school re-opened in 2015 under the leadership of Principal Cynthia Robinson-Rivers. Under Robinson-Rivers’ leadership and in partnership with Transcend, an organization that promotes school innovation and helps spread innovative school designs, Van Ness designed the Whole Child Model which prioritizes student wellbeing and socio-emotional growth. Currently, the school serves a racially diverse group of over 375 Preschool-5th grade students, with approximately 50% of students receiving free or reduced price lunch and 15% classified as having special needs. The redesign has been so successful that Van Ness received the District of Columbia Public School district’s (DCPS) Standing Ovation Award for excellence in school innovation in 2017-18 and schools across the district and country are beginning to adopt and adapt the approach. Keptah Saint Julien is a partner at Transcend with over a decade of experience in urban education. Saint Julien now works with her colleagues at Transcend to share the model in a Whole Child Collaborative in D.C. and in schools in Transcend’s national network. To support that work, Transcend recently received a $4 million dollar grant to study and scale the model in the DCPS and in Aldine ISD, in Texas.

“Our aim is to cultivate critical thinkers and develop a generation of confident, curious, and compassionate members of society.” – Van Ness Elementary School

Thomas Hatch: The work going on at Van Ness is really fascinating, both for the development of the model there and for the way you and your colleagues are working with other communities to adapt it. Can you start by telling us what was the problem that the Van Ness model set out to address?

Keptah Saint Julien: It started off with the idea that all students deserve a school that supports their overall wellbeing. Just as students need academic skills, they need social and emotional skills. The Whole Child Model is rooted in the belief that children’s academic success is inextricably linked to their social, emotional learning, and overall well-being, and the belief that we can and must attend to the whole child while achieving academic excellence as well.

Keptah Saint Julien

TH: My understanding was that while some of these key ideas and the impetus came from Cynthia, she also began with a community engagement initiative, essentially to find out what people in the community were concerned about. Is that right?

KSJ: That was definitely an important part of setting the vision for the school and a key part of the partnership with Transcend. We lead through a community driven research and design process. What that looks like is that we’re going out and talking with key stakeholders, learning from them and coming together to create graduate aims and learning experiences that work for all students in meeting those aims.

TH: Who were the stakeholders that you reached out to as part of that work with Transcend?

KSJ: Families. It’s our philosophy and it’s Van Ness’ philosophy that families are integral partners in this work. The vision for Van Ness was shaped through early conversations with families. You can think about our approach to wellbeing as consisting of three parts:

  • One part is a set of family engagement strategies that we call Family Circle. Van Ness prioritizes home visits for every student. Families receive regular updates through weekly newsletters and text updates, and participate in events like coffee with the principal to ask questions and share ideas.
  • The next part of the model is CARE, which is a cohesive set of Tier 1 supports that every student receives to help them feel safe and a sense of belonging. We worked closely with teachers at Van Ness to test and codify strategies that worked. Then we also have CARE plus strategies designed to support students whose past experiences and personal histories suggest they may benefit from a deeper sense of safety and connection at school.
  • Finally, we have Boost, which includes what are often termed Tier II and III supports and provide the additional boost and targeted interventions that some students need.

TH: Some of the things that are really striking to me about the model are the very specific and explicit structures, practices, and routines – what I would call the “micro-innovations” – that create a real, tangible infrastructure for supporting student wellbeing. Can you highlight a few of those?

KSJ: As I mentioned before, everything starts with CARE. CARE stands for Compassion, Assertiveness, Routines, and Environment. One routine is a set of strategies for what we call a “Strong Start” in the morning. Strong start begins with greetings and breakfast in the classroom. In fact, every student is greeted by two or more adults before they even enter into the classroom, and students have the autonomy to decide what kind of greeting they would like to receive, whether it’s a handshake, a high five, a hug or something else. We’re very much empowering students and putting them as decision makers. The whole purpose of Strong Start is to help students start the day feeling a sense of safety and connection to their classroom community, in addition to providing them with strategies they can use throughout the day. Another part of Strong Start, for example, is ‘Breathe and Focus,’ where students learn how to breathe deeply, release stress they may be carrying, and center themselves – things that help with executive functioning and self-regulation. They use that strategy throughout the day. If they’re having a moment of tension or frustration later on in the day, they can use the skills that they learned from Strong Start to enter their reasoning state.

Then there are strategies like using intentional language and tone, which helps teachers speak with students and issue directions in clear and consistent ways. Classroom jobs is another routine which I personally love. It relies on teachers who deeply know their students and their unique goals. So if I’m a student who struggles with organization, for example, my teacher knows this about me and might give me the intentional, meaningful job of being the person that organizes our classroom library. That’s my job.

We’re also very intentional about classroom design. ​​We know that if we are in spaces that feel beautiful and safe and clean our behavior automatically shifts. I think about going to a museum or the library. There are certain behaviors and ways that we feel when we’re in spaces like that. Teachers are very thoughtful when designing their classrooms. One of the tenets of care in classroom design is having natural elements, like green leaves and plants, as well as natural lighting. The classroom walls are free from clutter.

“We’re also very intentional about classroom design. ​​We know that if we are in spaces that feel beautiful, safe and clean our behavior automatically shifts.”

Students also actively shape the design of the space. Student work and pictures of them and their families are prominent throughout the classroom, enhancing the home to school connection. School should feel like a space for healing and an extension of home. There are also “centering spaces” in each classroom as part of the classroom design. It is an intentional space where students can go and collect their thoughts and get back to a calmer, “ reasoning” state through breathing and reflection. This is especially important for students who have experienced trauma.. All that is part of CARE, the first tier which every student gets. Additionally, there is a focus on adult wellbeing. A beautiful thing right now at Van Ness is that Cynthia has partnered with some therapeutic services provided by the Georgetown Center for Well-Being in School Environments (WISE) so teachers are able to receive therapy.

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Praxis, teacher education and symmetry: The Lead the Change interview with Sarah Fine

Posted on April 20, 2022 by | Leave a comment

This month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview features a conversation with Dr. Sarah Fine, an educator and scholar working at the intersection of practice and research. Fine currently directs the San Diego Teacher Residency, hosted at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, and also teaches courses in educational leadership at the University of California San Diego and at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her recent book, coauthored with Jal Mehta, is In Search of Deeper learning: The Quest to Transform the American High School.

Lead The Change: The 2022 AERA theme is Cultivating Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century and charges researchers and practitioners with dismantling oppressive education systems and replacing them with antiracist, equity, and justice-oriented systems. To achieve these goals, researchers must engage in new methodologies, cross-disciplinary thinking, global perspectives, and community partnerships to respond to the challenges of the 21st century including the COVID-19 Pandemic and systemic racism among other persistent inequities. Given the dire need for all of us to do more to dismantle oppressive systems and reimagine new ways of thinking and doing in our own institutions and education more broadly, what specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Sarah Fine: Paulo Freire offered us the notion of praxis: cycles of inquiry which involve thinking critically about how sociopolitical systems work, taking action to create positive change, and reflecting on the process (Freire, 1970). A number of brilliant folks have written about how educators can take up Freire’s ideas in K-12 classrooms (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; hooks, 1994). To this work I would add my own conviction that scholars of educational change, too, need to engage in praxis — and I believe that this praxis must involve more than simply galvanizing our students to do good work once they are “in the field.” This enlarged vision is no small commitment. The academy tends to reward thought over action, description over transformation, and theorizing about rather than theorizing with those who lead and work in schools. Plus, postulating on paper or in a lecture hall is comfortable; the world of K-12 public schools — “the field” — is a muddy, messy, imperfect place where elegant theories are inevitably complicated by the human-ness of human systems. Talking about implications for action is vanishingly simple by comparison to the actual work of making change in schools. I would argue, however, that it is imperative for us to do both: to read and write and observe and theorize, and also to enter into long-term action-focused partnerships which become a “text” that informs our scholarship. One without the other is insufficient.

This desire to engage in praxis has been a guide for my own career choice. After nearly a decade spent exploring the notion of deeper learning through qualitative research, I chose to depart academia in order to road-test my ideas by designing and directing a teacher residency program run out of an alternative institution of higher education. I admit that this project sometimes runs the risk of straying from Freire’s vision; my days “in the field” are sometimes so breathless that they leave little room for reflection. But that, too, tells a story about what it will take to accelerate efforts at transformation. We must reimagine what it means to be in practice as an educator, providing support and incentives for those who spend their time in and around K-12 schools to contribute their wisdom and experiences to the field’s knowledge-base. It is these kinds of shifts that can help us all to move beyond patterns of siloing and exploitation and to make good on a collaborative commitment to positive change.

LtC: Through your work as the Director of the San Diego Teacher Residency at High Tech High Graduate School of Education, you support future teachers in creating justice-oriented classrooms rooted in deeper learning and strengthen the pipeline for teachers of color. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?

SF: In our recent book, Jal Mehta and I explored the idea of symmetry, e.g. the presence of guiding principles and practices which anchor the experiences of both adults and children in schools (Mehta & Fine, 2019). We argued that schools can make headway toward ambitious goals by cultivating symmetry — for example, by seeking to embed opportunities for extended inquiry or apprenticeship into adult learning as well as into classrooms. Based on my experiences designing and running the San Diego Teacher Residency, it turns out that symmetry is equally important in the context of teacher preparation. This is to say that novice teachers need the same things younger learners do in order to thrive and learn deeply: psychological safety, authentic purposes, culturally affirming pedagogy, tasks which lie within their zone of proximal development, modeling and support from expert mentors, opportunities to engage in productive struggle, and pauses to reflect on and celebrate their growth. On top of this, learning to teach for justice requires unlearning many of the normative beliefs and practices that dominate the field. This is true for white teachers and also for teachers of color, who may more easily recognize the myriad forms of oppression and marginalization that dominate traditional classrooms but still need to experience and learn new repertoires of practice by which to resist the pull of doing things as they have always been done. For example, we have found that with carefully designed coursework and expert facilitation, our teacher residents (white and BIPOC alike) are fairly quick to grasp why punitive and exclusionary classroom disciplinary policies are so inequitable. However, understanding what not to do does not automatically come along with the knowledge of what to do instead — and without viable alternatives, even teachers who recognize harmful practice will revert to the status quo. Thus, helping novices learn to “see” the problems of shallow, teacher-centered, eurocentric, one-size-fits- all pedagogy is the tip of the iceberg; the most important work lies in exploring and rehearsing new forms of instructional design and facilitation. This is where deliberate symmetry comes in, because every moment that our residents spend in our care is a moment to “walk our talk” by providing them with learning experiences that assist in the process of disruption and replacement.

“Learning to teach for justice requires unlearning many of the normative beliefs and practices that dominate the field.”

LtC: In your recent book, In Search of Deeper Learning, you argue for American high schools to create opportunities for deeper learning, teachers, administrators, parents, and educational communities need to unlearn ideas about schooling and set up organizational structures that value authentic problem solving and depth over breadth (among many other things!). In the past two years, how has remote learning and other school disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic changed this important work?

SF: During the long months of zoom school last year, those of us who spend our time thinking about teaching and learning looked on with mixture of apprehension and curiosity. Might the pandemic, for all of its awful-ness, finally open the door for the kinds of educational transformations that children so desperately need? Could this be the thing that would finally loosen the chokehold of the “grammar of schooling” that has persisted for more than a century? I wish I could say that the answer was yes — but in reality, the adjustments that I have seen schools and teachers make are subtle rather than dramatic. On the pessimistic side, at least from what I observed, much of what happened during remote schooling last year amounted to a doubling down on traditional practice. Elementary school teachers reverted to non-interactive read-alouds and assigned more than normal amounts of independent work; secondary teachers talked at their students even more than before; and everyone struggled to figure out how to get kids to interact meaningfully in breakout rooms. Things have gradually settled down with the return to in-person schooling this year, but I haven’t seen many examples of experiments or transformations. On a more positive note, however, remote schooling seemed to galvanize many teachers and leaders to make serious commitments to relationship-building, social- emotional learning, and trauma-informed practices. These things have always been essential, but until the pandemic forced the issue, they often took a backseat to academic content. I have been heartened to see this shift in priorities persist during this year, but I fear that all the talk of “learning loss” — not to mention the surge in staff shortages which are stretching all school staff extremely thin — could quickly return us to where we started. Still, I see the whole situation as being in-process. Perhaps there will continue to be opportunities for educators, parents, and policymakers to realize that the status quo isn’t something worth returning to after all. I’d like to believe that the pandemic has at very least increased everyone’s appetite for radical change, which could open the door for visionary educators (and scholars?) to try to do things differently.

“Productive change processes require disrupting traditional power dynamics.”

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?

SF: As a start, I would argue that those who are spearheading educational change should start by focusing on assets rather than deficits. Ask: Where are the bright spots? Who in our system is already galvanized around doing things differently? If students or educators are not succeeding in certain ways or in certain spaces, where and under what conditions are they thriving? How can we develop what already exists into visible proof-points that help everyone imagine why and how to do things differently? Don’t get me wrong — it’s still crucial to explore and map out the root causes of dysfunction — but asset-focused questions are far more energizing and efficacious than their inverse. On a separate note, I would argue that productive change processes require disrupting traditional power dynamics. Get folks from all parts of the system at the table together — not just district and school leaders, for example, but teachers and special educators and paraprofessionals and even students — and construct agreements and group culture that encourages them to listen deeply and speak from what they know. This decision honors the idea that the ones closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and it also positions the change process itself, not just the desired goals of the process, as an equity-focused intervention. Finally, I believe that it is critical that everyone involved in the change process needs to see themselves and be seen as a learner. School and district leaders often feel pressure to know “the answers” and to direct change from arm’s length, but the most powerful processes require new ways of being and doing. In turn, this demands opportunities for everyone involved to engage in productive struggle, to try out new practices without the certainty that they will work, and to experience the kinds of learning and/or culture that is sought for the entire system.

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

SF: I began my career as a teacher and (a bit later) my training as a scholar during the first decade of the 21st century: an era which was dominated by an obsession with top-down reforms and narrowly conceived indicators of educational quality. During those years, studying educational change in ways that the academy would validate involved doing research about or on schools and measuring impact using test-score-based metrics. The past decade, however, has seen the start of a long-overdue reckoning with the ways in which education research has too often been voyeuristic, exploitative, racially biased, and limited in its imagination of the possible. The growing visibility of paradigms such as Participatory Action Research and Design Based Implementation Research, along with the amplification of the voices of BIPOC scholars and practitioners and the expansion of Research-Practitioner Partnership opportunities, suggests that the world is gradually recognizing that educational change must involve working with and within communities of practice and defining educational “goods” more broadly. This excites me! As I wrote earlier, I believe that scholars of educational change have an obligation to engage in praxis, which requires forming long-term partnerships with practitioners and learning about the world by trying to change it. I’d like to believe that the structures of higher education eventually will shift to support this expansion of scholarly purposes and positioning. As it currently stands at many major schools of education, however, tenure-seeking scholars are still obligated to focus most of their efforts on producing first-authored publications in academic journals — which are stylistically inaccessible to lay readers and also usually live behind paywalls. Teaching and service to the institution come next, with community engagement and public scholarship treated as side-notes. On the other side of the “research/practice divide,” the work of educators and school/district leaders is mainly action-focused; there is rarely time or material support for doing much more than keeping the train on the tracks. I hope that the field as a whole will continue to elevate research-practice partnerships which can create positive change for educators and children and produce usable knowledge in the process.

References
Duncan-Andrade, J. M., & Morrell, E. (2008). The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving
from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (New edition edition). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Freire, P. (1970, rereleased 2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition. (M. B.
Ramos, Trans.) (30th Anniversary edition). New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Mehta, J, & Fine, S. (2019). In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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From a “wide portfolio” to systemic support for foundational learning: The evolution of the Central Square Foundation’s work on education in India (Part 2)

Posted on April 14, 2022 by | 1 comment

This week, IEN continues to look at the developing work of the Central Square Foundation (CSF) and its efforts to build the capacity for improving learning outcomes in India. The post draws from an interview with CSF’s Co-Managing Director Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja. Last week, part one explored the first five years of the Foundation’s initiatives (2012-2017) and how they developed their current strategy focusing on foundational learning, educational technology, and affordable private schools. This week, part two concentrates on the “four pillars” of their approach to foundational learning and the lessons they have learned in trying to improve learning at scale in India.

“Four pillars” of work on foundational literacy: Partnerships, aligned instruction, professional development and assessment

Thomas Hatch: Tell me a bit about your work on Foundational Literacy now.

Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja: After almost four decades, India came up with a new education policy that highlights that unless we solve for early learning, any other reform, whether we do it in higher education or in secondary schools, will become irrelevant. Just last summer, the national government launched the policy with the introduction of the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) The initiative aims to ensure that, by 2026-27, every child in India attains foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Grade 3. CSF has had a small but a catalytic role in the development of the policy, and this initiative is now phase three of our mission.

It’s important to know that India doesn’t have a formal early childhood education system. Our Right to Education Act starts at age six and grade 1. Prior to that, you can go to the Anganwadi Centers, which are under a different Ministry, the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD). Those Centers, by the way, have done an incredible job when it comes to vaccination, nutrition, and health, but, unfortunately, the system is overloaded, and they also now have to take care of education. The new education policy talks about the need to address this problem in the three-to-eight-year age group and to have a strong pre-primary section, but it’s not yet institutionalized in the education system. 

TH: So this is a new focus area – it still follows your same general approach – but it’s not a totally distinct endeavor? 

SS: Exactly. It’s what we call radical prioritization of early learning. The idea is how do we equip the existing education system to raise the floor of their approach to early learning so that it translates into learning outcomes?  And it’s particularly crucial right now because, with COVID, enrollment in India is back to being a problem, especially with some socio-economic groups. For example, a girl who walked into grade three now would never have gone to grade 1 or grade 2, and India doesn’t have a pre-primary school system. The girl is probably eight or nine years old and is expected to start working at the third-grade level. That’s why the early learning focus is so important from a COVID learning loss perspective as well. 

“Now a girl would walk into grade three never having gone to grade 1 or grade 2, and India doesn’t have a pre-primary school system. The girl is probably eight or nine years old and is expected to start working at the third-grade level. That’s why the early learning focus is so important from COVID learning loss perspective as well.“

Building a lot on RTI’s approach in Kenya, we are pursuing what we call a four-pillar approach. The first step is to do a system diagnostic – “What are the critical enablers we need?”. One of the challenges in India is that learning gains are very intangible in the early stages of education. In India, the first high stakes assessment happens in grade 10, which is a board exam. That’s very critical and private schools will advertise how well they do, but it’s very late in the cycle of education and there’s no ownership or accountability for earlier stages of education. Actually, the system allows a child to pass out of primary and upper primary school without really having learned. That’s why the first step is How do we get alignment on goal setting and communication?” From the Chief Minister of a state to a parent or an illiterate parent who’s sending a first-generation learner to school, do we all understand what we mean by the mission of education and what we are hoping to achieve? What does learning to read with meaning mean? What does it mean to be able to do basic arithmetic? That becomes the first pillar. 

“From the Chief Minister of a state to a parent or an illiterate parent who’s sending a first-generation learner to the school, do we all understand what we mean by the mission of education and what we are hoping to achieve? What does learning to read with meaning mean? What does it mean to be able to do basic arithmetic? That becomes the first pillar.“

Teacher professional development and teaching and learning materials – the second and third pillars – are related.  With our literacy and numeracy partners, we are working on a structured pedagogy approach to ensure that there is a common learning outcomes framework reflected in lesson plans, workbooks, and learning activities for children in the classroom as well as deeply aligned teacher professional development. One of the learnings of all teacher training initiatives in India has been that teacher training by itself – which isn’t aligned to our curriculum or pedagogical approach – might inspire teachers, but doesn’t always translate to benefits in the classroom. So it’s designed to be a very integrated approach. In other words, it’s capacity building for the entire value chain, including teacher education and including all the materials and layers of academic support which are supposed to be helping teachers in the classroom. 

The fourth pillar is assessment and developing a monitoring framework. What will the assessment and monitoring dashboard look like at the district level, at the state level and then at the national level? Unfortunately, in India right now assessment is equal to testing and testing means we are judging children, whereas the intent has to be to assess so that we can support children wherever learning gaps are coming up.

Then, in order to support adoption and behavior change around these four pillars, we have to take into account things like, in India, teachers don’t retire. As economists say, there’s a “stock” but not a “flow;” there’s not an active “churn.” “I’ve been a teacher for two decades. What’s in it for me to truly change how I teach children language or another subject?”  That’s why we’ve specifically called out behavior change along with things like home learning and community engagement. How can we augment the teaching time that children are getting in school with the time they’re getting at home? But I want to stress that the idea is not to shift the responsibility of education to the parent, but can they play an enabling or facilitating role? 

These four pillars capture the work we are doing in our key states (Haryana, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh) with a focus on learning. Overall, our role is to leverage other NGO’s in the eco-system. The coalition that works with the state government in each case includes the Central Square Foundation, and we typically play a project management role and help to leverage other NGO’s in the eco-system, including a literacy expert and a numeracy expert. This approach reflects the principle that to solve this complex need, we need different organizations to bring their expertise and co-create a solution with the state. And it’s not proprietary. We want Gujarat to run it as Gujarat’s Foundational Literacy and Numeracy program. For it to actually scale and sustain, the budget, the branding, the operational costs has to come from the State itself. 

Reflections on the challenges and opportunities of supporting learning at scale 

TH: What kind of pushback have you gotten as this work has evolved? Are there particular areas where the government has resisted or you’ve had to change in order to move the partnership forward? 

SS: It took us a while to land on this four-pillar approach, but it’s what we have done strategically and theoretically. Actually bringing it to the ground with other partner organizations, as you can imagine, is easier said than done. There was a learning curve that we ourselves needed to go through. 

It’s easy for me to say that we are bringing together a project management partner, a literacy expert, and a numeracy expert. But historically in India, NGOs haven’t collaborated well. I think we NGO’s and civil society organizations tend to be in love with our own IP [intellectual property]. We think we’re the only ones who can do it, and it has to be done “our way.” But if I’m a teacher in a government school, and I’ve been teaching a certain subject for two decades, I’ve seen many programs and many missions and many NGOs come and go, but I’m still here. You can’t expect me to learn a different way of teaching language and a different way for numeracy and then do assessment. It all has to come together in an integrated manner. 

“If I’m a teacher in a government school and I’ve been teaching a certain subject for two decades, I’ve seen many programs and many missions and many NGOs come and go, but I’m still here. You can’t expect me to learn a different way of teaching language and a different way for numeracy and then assessment. It all has to come together in an integrated manner.“

The devil in the details is how will all the partners work together? How will we establish accountability? That’s been a learning experience. Because organizations are also people, understanding the chemistry of different partners – first at a coalition level, and then with the government stakeholders – has also been an interesting journey. 

From a government perspective, everyone understands why early learning is important so they latch on to the need for early learning, but I think the biggest challenge has been assessment and putting a strong monitoring system in place. Again, this comes from a legacy of assessment being equated with tests and exams that are used for selection. But it’s been much harder to make the transition to using assessment to inform instruction and to make course corrections so that everyone is that grade level and year-end remediation is not required. 

The other classic challenge is how prescriptive should a structured pedagogy approach be? Is teaching a science or is teaching an art? With our approach with the instructional materials and guidebooks for the teachers, we are trying to solve for the part that is science. And if you are a teacher who gets the art part right, your classroom will be more engaging, your students will be more engaged, and it will show up in their work. Whereas, if I’m an average teacher with average motivation, and I just want to get my work done, if you can provide me with a scientific solution that is prescriptive to a certain extent, at least it will ensure that my children get to grade level.

So, all in all, I would say our own learning has been around four challenges. First, what does it take to build a coalition for the four-pillar approach: What will our role be, how do we establish accountability? Second, how do we land that approach with a government so they see we are not coming with our own NGO program, that we want to help strengthen their early learning program? Third, how do we solve the assessment problem, so that assessment is both a check for understanding in the classroom and a way of monitoring so we know the health of the system overall? Fourth, what does having a scientifically defined learning framework with micro competencies and related lesson plans, do to the autonomy of a teacher?  Those have been the biggest challenges and areas of learnings for us.

“What does having a scientifically defined learning framework, with micro competencies and related lesson plans, do to the autonomy of a teacher?”  

TH: What have you learned and what have you had to change in order to shift, particularly that NGO mindset of “I have the solution?” 

SS: The first thing we’ve learned is we don’t have to start with a solution that we are proposing. First, we have to do a diagnostic and understand – and help the government understand – what their current approach is. How do they do early learning? What have their gaps been? What’s happening in the classroom and what are teachers experiencing? Then one of the things we’ve had to change is to get the conversation started on learning goals, teaching and learning materials, and on an assessment framework with the government as an equal partner. We’re not presenting the framework to them. We’re actually discovering it together. We’re peeling the onion to see what ‘s amiss, what can we contribute?  How can you support that or this is sacrosanct and you can’t touch it?  For example, in India, you can’t touch textbooks.  Textbooks come from NCERT/SCERT (State Education Department) and they just get followed. However, if you want to reorder or the sequence or if you want to skip two chapters and augment them with some supplementary material, we can have that conversation. It has been crucial to understand the constraints and the appetite for change.  It has taken us a while to realize that we’re not helping states start the early learning program we are helping them augment their early learning programs so that kids learn on grade level.  

“It has been crucial to understand the constraints and the appetite for change.  It has taken us a while to realize that we’re not helping states start the early learning program we are helping them augment their early learning programs so that kids learn on grade level.”

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