Tag Archives: Teachers

Reimagining Coaching and Teachers’ Time: Scanning the News for Innovations in Teachers’ Professional Learning (Part 2)

Posted on July 31, 2024 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

This week, IEN’s managing editor Sarah Etzel continues a scan of recent news articles and research on post-pandemic developments in the teaching profession. In part two of the post, Etzel describes some of the initiatives to use technology to help to free-up time for teachers by reorganizing staffing and scheduling. Part one explored innovations in blended and remote teacher professional development models and the use of AI to provide feedback to teachers.

What’s happened to teachers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? On the one hand, in the US teacher vacancies appear to have grown substantially. One report released in the fall of 2023 showed 55,000 vacant teaching positions, an increase from 36,000 the previous year. On top of that, the report found that 270,000 teachers – almost 9% of the entire teaching force – are “underqualified,” either lacking full certification or teaching in a subject in which they are not certified. The National Center for Education Statistics also revealed that 86% of K-12 schools reported problems hiring new teachers in advance of the 2023-24 school year, and almost half of all public schools describing themselves as “understaffed.” On the other hand, the pandemic helped to stimulate experiments with new models for staffing and with virtual teachers that might help to address teacher shortages.

Staffing Changes: Unconventional Teaching Roles

Whether in-person or virtual, a small set of schools and organizations around the US are exploring what alternative teaching and staffing models for schools could look like. A report from FutureEd focusing on pandemic-inspired staffing strategies, for example, highlights the benefits of some co-teaching, team teaching, and mentor teaching models. Public Impact, working with a network of over 300 schools, has pioneered models designed to use teacher teams to enable teachers who have shown their effectiveness to reach more students. These “multi-classroom” leaders teach part-time and also lead small, collaborative teams of other teachers, paraprofessionals, and intern teachers in the same grade or subject. Cadence extends the reach of effective teachers by developing a national team of mentor teachers who deliver online lessons for a group of partner schools across the US. The teachers in the partner schools both learn from the mentor models and they can incorporate the lessons into the work with their own students. As Steven Wilson, a co-founder of Cadence, puts it: “It’s like being able to sit in the back of the room of the best teacher in the building for weeks at a time and see his or her moves and adapt them and make them your own.”

The FutureED report also emphasizes the potential of flexible class sizes, time blocks, and instructional cycles that allow for teachers to work with smaller groups of students outside of traditional grade-level and schedule constraints. As an example, the report highlights a particularly unusual approach from Kairos Academies in St. Louis that developed a seven-week schedule in which students attend school for five weeks, followed by two weeks off; staff have one week off, but use the other week to review data and plan for the next cycle. The report quotes, Gavin Schiffres, Kairos founder and CEO, describing what he sees as the advantages of the cycles; “With the cycle model, we operate in sprints, much like the technology industry. In a traditional calendar, you have kids in the building for such long stretches that as soon as there’s a break, everyone just wants to crash.”

“We operate in sprints, much like the technology industry. In a traditional calendar, you have kids in the building for such long stretches that as soon as there’s a break, everyone just wants to crash.”

Drawing on interviews with a small group of leaders from six districts involved in staffing experiments, the Center on Reinventing Public Education issued a report on how unconventional teaching roles could help to make the profession more sustainable and increase teacher satisfaction in the process. Some of these roles include:

Lead teacher: An individual who mentors a team of teachers (across content areas or grade levels) by developing curricula and co-teaching as necessary
Empowered teacher: An individual who supports with school-level policies and sets learning targets
Team teacher: An individual who teaches a large group of students (50-80) in collaboration with two to four other teachers
Community learning guide: An individual who works with a group of educators and their students to create experiences grounded in students’ wider environment, community, or culture.
Solo learning guide: An individual who independently teaches a small group students (5-15) in school or home contexts
Technical guide: An individual who leverages subject area expertise (e.g. robotics, architecture) to provide curriculum support and work with small groups of students

According to the report, teachers in these roles shared that they experienced less stress and felt more motivated; working in diverse or team settings, teachers were able to share responsibilities, learn from each other, and feel connected to the purpose of teaching. Despite the potential, a review of the CRPE report from the National Education Policy Center cautions that it is too early to tell whether these kinds of staffing changes could be scaled effectively or whether they would have the desired impact.

In order to address the shortage of teachers and support those that are in place, some schools in the US have also introduced models to support paraprofessionals to gain teaching credentials and become licensed teachers, while others have created pipelines for substitute teachers to gain teacher certifications. Beyond the US, organizations such as GPE KIX and UNICEF have been pioneering child-to-child teaching models, in which older students support the education of pre-primary learners, in areas where there are not enough teachers available (for past IEN coverage of peer-to-peer tutoring approaches, see: Education reform in Mexico, An interview with Dr. Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, and Bringing Effective Instructional Innovation to Scale through Social Movement in Mexico and Colombia).

Virtual teachers for in-person students

Along with developing new virtual and hybrid approaches for students to learn, during and after the pandemic, reports also note that some districts are spending millions of dollars on virtual teachers to fill-in when they can’t find the personnel they need in their local area. Among these, districts in Little Rock, Arkansas, Charleston County, South Carolina, San Jose, California, and Milwaukee Wisconsin have contracted with companies such as Elevate K-12, Coursemojo, and Proximity Learning to address their teacher vacancies and to provide virtual instructors who zoom into their classes. These companies employ fully certified virtual teachers who provide “synchronized learning services” in a range of subjects. The virtual teachers interact with students completely through the online platforms, with, in some cases, in-person supervision provided by paraprofessionals or long-term substitute teachers.

Elevate-K12’s model of “live teaching”, The 74

The benefits and drawbacks of these approaches are also being debated in the press. For some, these virtual options provide an alternative to other “quick fix” solutions that have been used to fill empty classrooms in the past, including hiring uncertified teachers, incentivizing military veterans to join the teaching force, or removing some degree requirements. According to the CEO of a San Jose charter school network that contracts with Coursemojo, this situation is not ideal, “but until we really, radically change the education profession here in the United States, we’re going to be looking at solutions like this.” Catherine Schumacher, Executive Director of Public Education Partners stated the importance of not shaming “districts for doing the absolute best they can do to get qualified teachers,” especially in a climate where “we have systematically underpaid…educators for years.”

Other advocates argue that the subjects virtual teachers are teaching have historically been hard to fill, meaning many students did not have access to these educational opportunities, particularly in low-resource school districts. As the Milwaukee Public Schools talent management director put it: “when we talk equity and access, I want to ensure that if my students want to take pre-calc, if they want chemistry, if they want physics, that they have the opportunity to do so.”

The cost-effectiveness of the virtual models also remains in question. For one school district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a contract with Elevate-K12 helped them fill 55 open positions at a cost of about $3.9 million, a savings from the $5 million it would have cost to hire that many in-person teachers. A district representative reported that they were able to save the $1.1 million because they did not have to provide benefits for Elevate K-12 teachers. In contrast, a school district in Charleston County, South Carolina that has used the virtual learning platform, Proximity found that these models were more expensive, as the schools needed to hire paraprofessionals to watch the students during the virtual classes.

Critics point to the fact that there is not yet enough evidence to show that students are achieving positive learning outcomes under these models, but proponents such as Elevate K-12 founder Shaily Baranwal, argue that virtual teaching during Covid-19 took place under emergency circumstances and, with more time to prepare and focus on delivery methods, post-pandemic virtual teaching could be particularly effective. Critics also question whether students’ social experiences and sense of belonging will suffer when they have virtual teachers, and some wonder who will be held accountable for student learning under blended learning models (i.e. the paraprofessionals who are in class every day with the students, or the virtual teachers?). With all these uncertainties, many parents remain skeptical of this virtual solution and question whether virtual teaching will be the best fit for their children.

The bottom line? Freeing up time to teach?

At the end of the day, the success of any of these “innovations” in professional learning depends on whether they can be put in place without adding to teachers already overloaded schedules and extensive set of responsibilities. Post-pandemic articles continue to highlight challenges like a lack of planning time for teachers and excessive time spent in staff meetings as well as hopes that AI may help address these issues by freeing up teachers’ teachers time from administrative tasks and helping teachers create differentiated assignments. Through a survey of 368 school-based employees across the U.S., AI-Equity found that 84% of those who used AI in the Daily/Weekly category reported they were “more excited about continuing education sector work because of AI,” compared to 52% of all respondents, while 94% of Daily/Weekly AI users shared that it made them more productive. According to research from MIT, AI can improve the performance of skilled workers in fields such as consulting by approximately 40%. A report from McKinsey and Co. estimates that teachers could free up 20-30% of their time by using AI and other technologies to support activities such as preparation, conducting evaluations and giving feedback, administrative duties, and professional development. The Christensen Institute argues that teachers may not use their reallocated time for increased student engagement without proper incentives, but freeing up teachers’ time could help to alleviate burnout and increase the attractiveness of the profession.

How artificial intelligence will impact K-12 teachers, McKinsey

However, sources also caution that AI should not be viewed as a panacea for solving these issues, and in fact, may exacerbate some of the challenges that teachers face. As one teacher explained, the expectations developing lessons incorporating AI and other forms of technology “takes extreme planning, and that, we don’t have time for anymore.” Moreover, the increasing use of AI raises numerous questions about the potential impact on students’ learning and development. In particular, as Julia Freeland Fisher cautions, the education market doesn’t prioritize relationship building within its attainment metrics and so may fail to take into account AI’s impact on those relationships. Under those conditions, as Freeland Fisher put it, “the more commonplace that AI companions, coaches, and anthropomorphized bots in learning and support models are, the more fragile students’ social connectedness may become.”

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News, artificial intelligence, educational technology, Professional Learning, Teachers

Tagged artificial intelligence, educational technology, Professional Learning, Staffing, Teachers

Lead the Change Interview with Patricia Virella, Tayeon Kim, Lauren Bailes, and Elizabeth Zumpe

Posted on July 4, 2024 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

This month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview features the new leaders of the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, Patricia Virella, Tayeon Kim, Lauren Bailes, and Elizabeth Zumpe. This week IEN shares excerpts from those interviews focusing on the connections between their work and the work of the SIG and the wider field of educational change. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and sponsored by the Educational Change SIG. A pdf of the full interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change Interview with Patricia Virella

Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?

Patricia Virella (PV): Over the past year, I prioritized immersing myself in school environments, spending approximately 30 days actively engaging with students, teachers, and staff. This hands-on experience allowed me to gain profound insights into the unique challenges that students are facing in today’s educational landscape, including mental health issues, ongoing crises, and persistent inequities. Witnessing the resilience and joy demonstrated by students in the face of these challenges was incredibly inspiring. It reinforced the importance of understanding the realities of schooling in the present moment. All of us must pause and truly comprehend the current state of education before forging ahead with our plans and initiatives. This firsthand exposure has deepened my commitment to advocating for comprehensive support systems that address the multifaceted needs of students and educators alike. It has also fueled my passion for promoting holistic approaches to education that prioritize well-being and equity. I am driven to leverage these insights to inform my work and to champion initiatives that empower schools to create environments where every student can thrive.

LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?

PV: The idea of change is inherently exhilarating. While change often implies embracing entirely new approaches, I also ponder whether it involves a return to foundational concepts and theories that have yet to manifest their full potential, such as liberation, transformation, and experiential learning. This dual perspective prompts me to consider how we, as a collective of academics, can effectively support change that embodies the spirit of equity. I recognize that achieving equity can sometimes feel elusive, but it does not have to remain this way. My commitment to exploring the multifaceted nature of change and equity has deepened my resolve to advocate for inclusive and transformative practices within academic and institutional settings. By critically examining the intersections of change and equity, I am dedicated to fostering environments where all individuals have equal opportunities to thrive and contribute meaningfully. I am driven to channel these reflections into actionable strategies that promote systemic change and advance the realization of equity within educational and academic spheres.

Dr. Patricia M. Virella is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University. Dr. Virella’s research focuses on implementing equity-oriented leadership through leader responses, organizational transformation and preparation. Dr. Virella also studies equity-oriented crisis leadership examining how school leaders can respond to crises without further harming marginalized communities.

Lead the Change Interview with Taeyeon Kim

LtC: What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?

TK: My research offers several contributions to the field of Educational Change, focusing on three main areas: revisiting policy through the voices of equity leaders, critically examining policies and systems by centering racially and linguistically marginalized communities, and promoting cross-cultural dialogue using transnational and decolonial perspectives. Given that my work was previously featured in the Lead the Change series (See the Lead the ChangeOctober issue of 2023), I would like to highlight some insights from my recent publication on leadership learning.

As a leadership educator, I view learning as a core tenet of leading educational change. My scholarship on educational leadership and policy has led me to explore how to guide meaningful learning for aspiring leaders who pursue equity and social justice. My recent work, published in the Journal of School Leadership (Kim & Wright, 2024), presents a conceptual-pedagogical framework that on guides students through emotional discomfort when learning about inequities and injustice. This research underscores the importance of emotion in learning, which can drive change at both individual and social levels. When negative emotions are not properly addressed and processed, meaningful learning cannot occur, undermining leaders’ efforts to redress inequities, injustice, and harm. However, with appropriate guidance, emotional discomfort can be a valuable source for transformative learning and changes (see Mezirow 1997). Traditional scholarship on educational change often relies on rationalistic approaches; however, my recent study emphasizes the role of emotions and the holistic aspects of learning in effecting change. It also highlights the crucial role of facilitators and educators in developing equity leaders.

Thus, my work reveals that effective leadership learning involves addressing the emotional dimensions of learning about social justice issues. By integrating these emotional and holistic aspects, educational leaders can foster more profound and lasting changes in their practice, policy, and scholarship. This approach can help prepare leaders, better equipping them to navigate and address the complex challenges of inequity and injustice in education.

LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?

TK: The field of Educational Change is particularly exciting due to its emphasis on partnerships and interdisciplinary approaches, and its appreciation for international perspectives. As a transnational scholar, I often notice that AERA’s discourse tends to be US-centric and predominantly features scholarly thoughts and contexts published in English. This observation underscores the importance of the Educational Change SIG’s foundations and history, as it can potentially extend the boundaries of our educational scholarship.

To advance the field, I urge educational change scholars to critically engage with issues of geopolitics, coloniality, and global whiteness (e.g., Chen, 2010; Mignolo, 2008; Leonardo, 2002) that influence knowledge creation and dissemination. When we embrace “interdisciplinary” and “international” perspectives, it is crucial to interrogate whose knowledge is being prioritized and how it is being represented.

“To advance the field, I urge educational change scholars to critically engage with issues of geopolitics, coloniality, and global whiteness.”

With our new leadership team, I aim to extend the field of Educational Change through several focuses. First, I urge the field to integrate diverse onto-epistemological understandings. The field can benefit significantly from including non-Western, indigenous, and other marginalized ways of being and thinking. By incorporating these perspectives, we can challenge the dominance of Eurocentric paradigms and enrich our understanding of educational practices and policies. Second, educational change scholars need to consider the power dynamics involved in knowledge production and dissemination. This means questioning who has access to academic platforms, whose voices are amplified, and whose are marginalized. Future activities organized by the Educational Change SIG could better support multilingual scholarship and inclusive platforms that are accessible to scholars from various regions and backgrounds, ensuring that a variety of voices are heard and valued. This will eventually promote cross-cultural and transnational collaborations. Finally, integrating critical theories such as postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and feminist theory can provide valuable lenses through which to examine and address systemic inequities in education. These theories can help scholars and practitioners understand the historical and structural factors that perpetuate educational inequalities and identify pathways to more just and equitable educational systems.

By taking these steps, the Educational Change SIG can play a pivotal role in promoting a more inclusive and globally informed approach to educational change, ensuring that the field continues to evolve and respond to the complex needs of educational communities worldwide.

Taeyeon Kim is an assistant professor in the department of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Her scholarship explores intersections of policy and leadership, with a particular focus on how educational leadership can challenge unjust systems and humanize educational practices to empower marginalized students and communities.The Educational Change SIG would like to acknowledge and congratulate Taeyeon Kim as the recipient of the 2024 Educational Change SIG Emerging Scholar Award. Her work was featured in the Lead the Change in October, 2023.

Lead the Change Interview Lauren Bailes

LtC: What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?

LB: I aim to share with the field a clear emphasis on systems change for equity, especially in the ways we think about who leaders are. My research focuses on identifying the systems, practices, and mindsets that perpetuate inequities in the careers of educational leaders. Most of my work problematizes the notion of ‘pipelines,’ especially in educational leadership and how career experiences like preparation, promotion, and evaluation are differentially distributed by race and gender (e.g., Bailes & Guthery, 2020; Bailes et al., 2023). When we consider careers to be pipelines, we might wrongly believe those pipelines are neutral, and that everyone has an equal chance of entering or flowing through the pipeline. That is fundamentally untrue: Women and People of Color, as well as people with intersectional identities, experience sorting at every career juncture, even when they are equivalently qualified relative to white or male peers. Further, these career inequities often result in adverse outcomes for faculty and students—especially faculty and students of color.

“Most of my work problematizes the notion of ‘pipelines,’ especially in educational leadership and how career experiences like preparation, promotion, and evaluation are differentially distributed by race and gender.”

A second thing I hope to share is the critical importance of partnering with current practitioners and myriad ways of incorporating their perspectives to deepen, clarify, and implement approaches to and findings of research. The profound systems changes required to shift unjust organizational practices are unlikely to come only from the academy. While research like mine can and does inform practice, I value, seek, and incorporate the perspectives of folks who have experienced injustice in their career trajectories. They are uniquely capable of showing me what I might be missing and how to better capture and learn from what they have experienced or what they know might work to change the system. I also want to be clear that there is much I am still learning from colleagues in this SIG and throughout our field. I’m looking forward to deepening those connections and bringing my own learning to bear on my research and partnership efforts to shift systems in service of equity.

LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?

LB: I think there is a broad appetite—among researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and families—for change in education. That appetite often results in misguided and harmful movements toward neoliberalism, isolationism, or the erosion of schooling as a public good, but there may be opportunity for broad and supportive coalitions for some of the interventions, innovations, and structures that do preserve and enhance equitable and accessible education for every student.

Lauren P. Bailes is an associate professor of education leadership in the School of Education at the University of Delaware, where she is the coordinator of UD’s EdD in Educational Leadership. After teaching middle school language arts in New York City, she earned her doctorate at The Ohio State University. Now, she researches school leadership preparation, promotion, and evaluation; school organizational characteristics; and the intersection of school leadership and policy. Lauren’s favorite days are still the ones spent in schools alongside teachers and leaders.

Lead the Change Interview with Elizabeth Zumpe

LtC: What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?

EZ: Prevailing ideas about Educational Change tend to come from scholars and policymakers who work far from the realities of schools. Too often, these ideas rest upon wildly false assumptions about existing capacities in schools, overlooking how many operate amid chronic adversity. Chronic adversity occurs when schools regularly face inadequate resources to meet their community’s needs, unproductive pressures to improve, and a lack of support for the profession. When designed from afar, educational reforms tend to presume that school challenges stem from educators’ ‘lack’ of motivation or competence and that improvement thus depends upon intensive intervention from the outside.

My research offers a different perspective: school improvement amid adversity as a struggle to develop collective agency (Zumpe, 2024). Agency is an inherent driver of human motivation and of educational improvement. But agency can become constrained when people are regularly subjected to demands for which they do not have adequate resources and experience inevitable failure.

As part of one RPP described above, I collaborated closely with a school facing challenging circumstances (Zumpe, 2024). At the start of our collaboration, we realized that our partnership’s theory of action had not considered this school’s needs and context. Across years of being labeled as ‘failing’ and facing daily struggles to ‘reach’ students and cover classrooms, the school’s leaders had tried various initiatives to improve. However, most of their efforts faltered and sputtered out, leaving conflict and cynicism behind. By their own account, the faculty struggled with the “basics” to get along well enough to launch and sustain improvement.

When the school’s leadership team invited me to help, I tried to capture their efforts to develop a foundational capability to work together to solve problems, which I called collective agency. Through participant observation with several work groups, I traced how their collective agency became enabled and what shut it down. I also launched and studied a new group using action research.

Comparing groups, I found that efforts to develop collective agency collapsed when educators faced overwhelming and complex problems for which they could see no solutions within reach. In these situations, they avoided their problems, pointed fingers at each other, and expressed a sense of helplessness that nothing could be done. On the flip side, efforts to develop collective agency surged when someone charged the group to ‘do something,’ and when this initiative was combined with a simple solution that the group felt they had the capacity to enact. In these situations, members affirmed each other, perceived the group’s potential for success, and pulled together to make progress towards addressing a problem.

These findings suggest a need for policies and reforms aimed at enabling school improvement in the ‘next level of work’ (City et al., 2010). To do this, we need to partner with educators in challenging circumstances to define and frame goals for improvement within reach and incrementally build organizational problem-solving capacity. Policymakers and scholars need to recognize educators as partners in research and development, without whom our educational system cannot remedy or repair.

LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?

EZ: I find hope in the growing number of education researchers seeking answers to existential questions about the role of research in education. Many educators and scholars are deeply concerned about the future of our planet and our democratic values. Looking around at the pernicious grip of racism, the fracturing of civic values, and the erosion of our public education system, many scholars are asking, how does our research relate to this? What are we – as scholars– doing about it? Out of our collective angst comes a growing willingness to expand how we think about academic research and to innovate.

I am excited by the growing number of scholars, especially early career scholars, working to build a more humanistic and justice-forward academic culture. Within our Educational Change SIG and scholarly communities working in RPPs and continuous improvement in education, I am inspired by efforts to actively build a culture in which academics care about each other as people, carry our status with humility, open ourselves to be vulnerable as learners, and treat social impact as a core value.

To further those ideas, I think the Educational Change SIG should reimagine how we organize and schedule AERA sessions with the intention involving more PK-12 practitioners. One way the SIG can do this is to develop a conference call and session formats that encourage and elevate practitioners’ voices and expertise. The SIG might consider offering sponsored conference registration awards for presenting practitioners. The SIG executive committee can also advocate with AERA to schedule specially designated conference sessions for practitioners that are held during after work hours.

I think the Educational Change SIG should support the diversification of our membership and international learning as a facilitator of cross-national and trans-global exchange. One way to do this is by furthering our existing partnerships with the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (https://www.icsei.net/about-icsei/) and journals that explicitly seek scholarship with an international perspective, including the Journal for Educational Change. I would also like to see our SIG do more to promote and support international participation in AERA and other remote events for scholarly exchange throughout the year.

Elizabeth Zumpe is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. A former K-12 public school teacher for over a decade with National Board Certification, Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley.

References

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder.

Virella, P., & Liera, R. (2024). Nice for what? The contradictions and tensions of an urban district’s racial equity transformation. Education Sciences, 14(4), 420.

Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press.

del Carmen Salazar, M. (2013). A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey toward liberation. Review of Research in Education, 37(1), 121-148.

Kim, T., & Mauldin, C. (2022). Troubling unintended harm of heroic discourses in social justice leadership. Frontiers in Education, https://doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.796200

Kim, T., & Wright, J. (2024). Navigating emotional discomfort in developing equity-driven school leaders: A conceptual-pedagogical framework. Journal of School Leadership, 10526846241254050.

Leonardo, Z. (2002). The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), 29–50. doi:10.1080/13613320120117180

Mezirow J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997(74), 5–12.

Mignolo, W. D. (2008). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. In M. Moraña, E. Dussel & C. Jáuregui (Ed.), Coloniality at large: Latin America and the postcolonial debate

Bailes, L. P., Ahmad, S., Saylor, M., & Vitale, M. N. (2023). Quality or control: High-needs principals’ perceptions of a PSEL-based evaluation system. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 18(4), 622-648.

Bailes, L. P., & Guthery, S. (2020). Held down and held back: Systematically delayed principal promotions by race and gender. Aera Open, 6(2), 2332858420929298.

City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education (Vol. 30). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research-practice partnerships in education: The state of the field. William T. Grant Foundation.

Mintrop, R., & Zumpe, E. (2019). Solving real life problems of practice and education leaders’ school improvement mind-set. American Journal of Education, 125(3), 295-344.

Mintrop, R., Zumpe, E., Jackson, K., Nucci, D.,& Norman, J. (2022). Designing for deeper learning: Challenges in schools and school districts serving

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Posted in education reform, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, equity, Interviews, Lead the Change

Tagged education, leadership, Learning, Teachers, Teaching

Practices, Programs and Policies for Instructional Coaching: Lead the Change Interviews with Lynsey Gibbons, Abby Reisman, Jacy Ippolito, Rita M. Bean, and Sarah L. Woulfin

Posted on February 21, 2024 by T Hatch | 1 comment

This week, IEN explores what instructional coaching with teachers look like from “micro-“ and “macro-perspectives.” This post is the first in a series featuring excerpts of interviews with presenters participating in the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia in April. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “A Roundtable Discussion to Examine a Synthesis of Micro- to Macro-level Coaching Research.” These interviews are part of the Lead the Change series produced by AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb.

The Micro-level Work of Coaching: Examining the Content and Purpose of Coach-Teacher Interactions — Lynsey Gibbons, University of Delaware, Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

LtC: The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Lyndsey Gibbons & Abby Reisman (LG & AR): Instructional coaching has been widely utilized as a strategy both for school reform and improving learning opportunities for students by providing teachers with ongoing, job-embedded professional learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Instructional coaches are uniquely positioned to assist teachers to develop justice-oriented teaching that works toward transforming personal and power relationships in classrooms, as well as support them to interrogate the larger policies and practices of schooling (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). One way coaches do this is through supporting teachers to understand and respond to the roles of language, identity, culture, and power in learning (Baldinger, 2017; Marshall & Buenrostro, 2021). Coaches can also support teachers to interrogate policies and practices and make changes when they produce inequities or cause harm.

Lyndsey Gibbons (left) & Abby Reisman (right)

The larger theory of action of instructional coaching rests on resources that are made available to teachers through social interactions with coaches (Coburn & Russell, 2008). Coaching is job-embedded in nature, and coaches can take an active role in the work of teaching. As such, coaches can orchestrate professional interactions that make visible the complex reasoning work in justice-oriented teaching (Saclarides & Munson, 2021), such as considering when to ask a student to revoice another student’s contribution and the implications of such a choice. Professional discourse is central to how teachers learn and shapes what they have an opportunity to learn (Lefstein et al., 2020). Professional discourse is essential for productive discussions about justice-oriented teaching and learning because it allows teachers and coaches to name critical aspects of instructional practice and student learning. Coaches can help establish professional discourse to name aspects of teaching and help make it visible to teachers.

Professional discourse is essential for productive discussions about justice-oriented teaching and learning.

Particular features of social interactions can be more or less conducive to accessing appropriate resources and creating a normative environment that supports and enables change in teachers’ instructional practices. In our session, we will explore the features of coach-teacher interactions that provide productive learning opportunities to teachers. For example, we found that history teachers whose coaches focused on posing open-ended questions and anticipating students’ responses grew more in their discussion facilitation than teachers whose coaches focused on historical thinking skills. Identifying features of coach-teacher interactions is critical to supporting the professional learning of coaches, as well as researching the effectiveness of coaching. Guiding questions for our roundtable discussion include: How can coach-teacher interactions be shaped to consider how to dismantle racial injustice in the classroom and beyond? How do coaches’ orientations toward teacher learning and toward justice influence their interactions with teachers? We then will consider how we might craft a research agenda moving forward that attends to examining coaching interactions that support teacher learning.

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?

In this session, we are intentionally bringing together scholars who study teacher learning, instructional coaching practice, and policies that impact coaching. By design, we will be examining practice and policies around coaching, as well as consider future directions for scholarship. The workgroup will break into three smaller groups to grapple with the logics, conceptualizations, and visions that shape their work researching coaching. The smaller groups will identify research gaps and consider new approaches. For example, a gap that might be identified is how coaches can help teachers attend to students’ identities and strengths as they plan for and enact instruction, as well as how coaches can help teachers learn to navigate the social and political dimensions of teaching (Marshall & Buenrostro, 2021). We then will come back together as a whole workgroup to synthesize discussions across domains to consider future, potentially collaborative, research agendas. We hope this session will be the genesis of long-term conversations organizing scholars who study coaching. Stemming from these initial conversations could be considerations for a special issue in a journal or creating a practitioner-facing document informing policies around coaching.

Widening Our Lens to Consider Coaching Models and Programs: The Benefits and Challenges of Programmatic Thinking — Jacy Ippolito, Salem State University, Rita M. Bean, University of Pittsburgh

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Jacy Ippolito & Rita M. Bean (JI & RMB): Our joint work has traditionally focused on the roles, responsibilities, and impact of instructional coaches (and literacy coaches specifically) across grade levels and school settings. In our latest book (Ippolito & Bean, 2024), we propose a new framework for understanding and synthesizing coaching research findings. The framework is an initial response to the Kraft et al. (2018) meta-analysis call to identify effective elements of coaching programs with simultaneous attention paid to both specific instructional practices and larger school and district contexts. Towards this end, our Content and Context Framework (CCF) for coaching reframes the notion of effective coaching. Instead of thinking of coaching success as solely the product of individual coaches’ work, we instead detail the ways in which coaching efficacy may be more accurately described as the alignment of instructional content with coaching programs and processes, all within a supportive school and district context.

Jacy Ippolito (left) & Rita M. Bean (right)

This more content- and context-dependent way of thinking about coaching success paves the way for coaches, teachers, and leaders to identify more clearly the ways in which issues of equity, diversity, and racial justice are influenced by coaching in schools. If coaching work is unable to influence the instructional core by creating more equitable opportunities and outcomes for all students, then we might be hard-pressed to say that the coaching program is successful. Likewise, if school and district contexts (i.e., leadership structures, coaching policies, systematic evaluations of coaching) are unable to fully support a coaching program that has diversity and equity as a core mission, again we might be unable to call a coaching program entirely successful.

If coaching work is unable to influence the instructional core by creating more equitable opportunities and outcomes for all students, then we might be hard-pressed to say that the coaching program is successful.

As we have begun to look across the past ten years of coaching research (Bean & Ippolito, 2023)—literacy coaching specifically, as well as research on instructional coaching more broadly—we found very few studies to date address content, coaching, and context simultaneously (e.g., Galey-Horn, 2020; Zoch, 2015). If alignment of these three domains is what we hypothesize may provide the best opportunities to address issues of equity and to dismantle racial injustice in classrooms, then we must incentivize future coaching researchers to attend carefully to content, coaching, and context together in larger-scale studies. Implications of this work are far-ranging, from influencing future research to shifting the ways that coaching programs are constructed, refined, and evaluated over time.

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?

JI & RMB: Instructional coaching has long been heralded as a gold standard for job-embedded professional learning for educators (Kraft et al., 2018). At its best, coaching is: personalized; responsive to teachers’ needs; attentive to school and district needs; sensitive to students’ unique learning successes and challenges; and implemented over long periods of time to help teachers shift instructional practices in meaningful ways. However, coaching research suggests that many coaching programs do not quite live up to their promise of supporting broad and deep changes in teaching and learning.

Our Content and Context Framework (CCF) for coaching suggests that part of the reason that many coaching programs do not fully succeed is due to a misalignment or inattention to content, coaching, and context simultaneously. For example, when all three elements are aligned, coaches can provide content-specific guidance to teachers that furthers schools’ and districts’ goals while simultaneously supporting teachers’ own identified needs. In cases where content, coaching, and context are misaligned, coaches and teachers’ work may run counter to school and district goals, and/or school or district needs (e.g., for coaches to step in as classroom substitutes) may subvert coaching work completely. A number of implications arise from our framework’s suggestion that coaching success results from the alignment of purpose and practices across content, coaching, and context.

For researchers, the implications of this framework include conducting studies that focus equally on classroom-level teaching and learning, coaching practices, and school/district contextual factors. Smaller-scale studies of individual coaches and/or coaching programs can be mined for guidance on the direction and questions of larger-scale longitudinal studies and meta-analyses. Future coaching research, regardless of scale, may best serve the field by always including: (a) data collected from and about teachers’ and students’ work in classrooms; (b) coaching practices and collaborations with both teachers and leaders; and (c) information collected from/about school and district leaders, school/district policies, and related coaching and professional learning initiatives. Such comprehensive research on coaching work—attending equally to content, coaching, and context—is what the field most needs to support future policy and practice.

For U.S. policymakers, implications include providing better guidance to schools, districts, and states about the interdependence of content, coaching, and context. Coaching guidance can no longer be provided as if content- and context-factors were neutral or irrelevant. Based on emerging content- and context-specific coaching research (e.g., Hannan & Russell, 2020), policymakers may be better equipped to provide funding and guidance to support the success of coaching practices best suited to different disciplinary initiatives (e.g., coaching practices within literacy vs. math initiatives) and different contexts (e.g. within large urban school districts vs. smaller rural districts). Ultimately, we must move away from one-size-fits-all policies for coaching, and instead move towards more nuanced content- and context-dependent guidance.

Finally, for practicing coaches and leaders, our framework suggests that the development, refinement, and evaluation of coaching programs must consider the alignment (or misalignment) of content, coaching, and context. This suggests that teachers, coaches, and leaders must partner even more closely to define coaching roles, responsibilities, and routines. School and district leaders must work with coaches to develop role descriptions, coaching schedules, and menus of service that are content- and context-specific. Finally, coaches and teachers must develop common communication and collaboration practices that are content- and context-specific, to meet teachers’ and students’ needs most effectively.

The 30,000 Foot View: Mapping the Institutional Landscape of Coaching — Sarah L. Woulfin, University of Texas at Austin

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Sarah L. Woulfin (SLW): My research responds to this year’s AERA theme by paying close attention to how infrastructure and leadership shape instructional reform efforts in ways that exacerbate—or disrupt—inequities in educational organizations. For instance, my research on the policies and practices of coaching has explored how district and school leaders structure and conceptualize coaching as a tool for reaching equity-oriented objectives. I’m currently co-facilitating professional development sessions for principals and coaches on equity-oriented coaching. And my research on the implementation of turnaround reform considers how school leaders promote curriculum use to improve outcomes for Black and Brown students.

The daily practices of leaders and teachers can ‘add up’ to make significant changes.

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?

SLW: One major branch of my work addresses the role of people in the implementation of education policy. In particular, the daily practices of leaders and teachers can “add up” to make significant changes. I hope the AERA and Educational Change audiences devote more attention to the power of and possibilities for individuals to catalyze crucial change to improve schools and communities. Additionally, the field should consider how to support the policy knowledge development of educators ranging from district leaders and principals to coaches and teachers. That is, how do we ensure that all educators hold the capacity to analyze and ask needed questions about reforms they are experiencing.

LtC: What excites you about the direction of the field of Educational Change, and how might we share and develop those ideas at AERA 2024?

SLW: I am excited about the ways the Educational Change field is examining a wide array of policies and programs, including discipline, attendance, school counseling, and EdTech in addition to accountability-oriented and instructional reforms. I believe this points to the utility of an Educational Change perspective for analyzing numerous aspects of districts and schools. And I encourage featuring scholarship that expands our understanding of educational change while looking at diverse reform efforts.

References (Gibbons & Reisman):

Baldinger, E. M. (2017). Maybe it’s a status problem”: Development of mathematics teacher noticing for equity. In E. O. Schack, J. Wilhelm, & M. H. Fisher (Eds.), Teacher noticing: Bridging and broadening perspectives, contexts, and frameworks (pp. 231–250). Springer.

Biancarosa, G., Bryk, A. S., & Dexter, E. R. (2010). Assessing the value-added effects of literacy collaborative professional development on student learning. The Elementary School Journal, 111(1), 7-34.

Coburn, C. E., & Russell, J. L. (2008). District policy and teachers’ social networks. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 30(3), 203-235.

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Learning Policy Institute.

Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R., & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools (Vol. 285). Peter Lang.

Ippolito, J. & Bean, R. (2024). The Power of Instructional Coaching in Context: A Systems View for Aligning Content and Coaching. The Guilford Press.

Kazemi, E., Granger, J. C., Lind, T., Lewis, R., Resnick, A. F., Gibbons, L. K. (in preparation). Children Thrive When Teachers Thrive. Harvard Education Press.

Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D. (2018). The effect of teacher coaching on instruction and achievement: A meta analysis of the causal evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 547-588.

Lefstein, A., Louie, N., Segal, A., & Becher, A. (2020). Taking stock of research on teacher collaborative discourse: Theory and method in a nascent field. Teaching and Teacher Education, 88, 102954.

Marshall, S. A., & Buenrostro, P. M. (2021). What makes mathematics teacher coaching effective? A call for a justice-oriented perspective. Journal of Teacher Education, 72(5), 594-606.

Robertson, D. A., Padesky, L. B., Ford Connors, E., & Paratore, J. R. (2020). What does it mean to say coaching is relational?. Journal of Literacy Research, 52(1), 55 – 78.

Saclarides, E. S., & Munson, J. (2021). Exploring the foci and depth of coach teacher interactions during modeled lessons. Teaching and Teacher Education, 105, 103418.

References (Ippolito & Bean):

Bean, R. M., & Ippolito, J. (2023, December). Interactions of content, coaching, and context in recent literacy coaching research. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Literacy Research Association (LRA), Atlanta, GA.

City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education. Harvard Education Press.

Galey-Horn, S. (2020). Capacity-building for district reform: The role of instructional coach teams. Teachers College Record, 122(10), 1-40.

Hannan, M. Q., & Russell, J. L. (2020). Coaching in context: Exploring conditions that shape instructional coaching practice. Teachers College Record, 122(10), 1–40. Ippolito, J., & Bean, R. M. (2024). The power of instructional coaching in context: A systems view

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News

Tagged Coaching, education, leadership, Learning, Teachers

Teacher shortages (Part 2)? Scanning the headlines from around the world

Posted on October 12, 2022 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Teacher shortages are in the news around the world, not just in the US. This week we share Part 2 of the teacher shortage related stories that we encountered during our annual scan of back-to-school headlines. This week’s review draws together headlines from a variety of countries and continents. Last week, Part 1 (“Are students going back to school without teachers? Scanning the headlines on the “teacher shortage” in the US“) focused on articles from the US.

Australia

Australian education ministers agree to draft national plan to combat teacher shortages, The Guardian

Plans to raise teacher salaries to $130,000 a year to stop sector hemorrhage, 9 News

Short versus long-term solutions to the teaching shortage crisis, School News Australia

Canada

Despite teacher shortages, some new grads still face roadblocks getting into classrooms, CBC News

“Ongoing teacher shortage ‘a significant crisis for the country,’ says British Columbia education dean”

France

France to fast-track training of school teachers to fill 4,000 vacancies, rfi

“More than 4,000 teaching jobs have yet to be filled just over a week before some 12 million French pupils go back to school.”

Hong Kong

Teacher exodus creates shortage as Hong Kong schools scramble to hire experienced staff, fresh graduates, YP

“Record number of teachers resigned over past two years, in wake of 2019 social unrest“

Jamaica

Retired teachers to be employed to fill shortage, Jamaica Observer

“The Ministry of Finance and the Public Service has granted approval for retired teachers and those who are on long-leave to fill areas of specialization where schools are not able to find adequate replacements.”

Netherlands

Four-day school week: some Dutch schools cut classes due to teacher shortage, Dutch Review

New Zealand

Thanks For The Bandaid, But Where’s The Actual Cure For Our Teaching Workforce?, Scoop

Peru

Government works to appoint some 80,000 teachers in Peru, Andina

Poland and Hungary

Teacher shortages grow worrisome in Poland and Hungary, The Associated Press

“Black-clad teachers in Budapest carried black umbrellas to protest stagnant wages and heavy workloads on the first day of school Thursday. Teachers’ union PSZ said young teachers earn a ‘humiliating’ monthly after-tax salary of just 500 euros (dollars) that has prompted many to walk away.”

Colleges in England struggle to find teachers for critical skills subjects, Financial Times

Secondary schools face 6,000 trainee teacher shortfall, Schools Week

Venezuela

Pay pushes Venezuelan teachers to protest, consider quitting, Independent

“Public school teachers across Venezuela had planned to use their annual vacation bonus to buy uniforms for their children, waterproof leaky roofs and get new prescription glasses“

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Tagged Educational Policy, Teachers

Are students going back to school without teachers? Scanning the headlines on the “teacher shortage” in the US

Posted on October 5, 2022 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Teacher shortages, at least the news about them, seems inescapable this year. For the next two weeks, we share many of the teacher shortage related stories that we encountered during our annual scan of back-to-school headlines. This week’s post focuses on articles from the US that discuss the shortage, describe the problems with the available data, and explore some of the efforts to deal with the challenges of hiring and retaining teachers; next week, Part 2 will draw together headlines about teacher shortages in other parts of the world.

As students headed back to school in the US in 2022, education news from many major education outlets raised concerns about shortages of teachers. Predictably, headlines describing a teacher shortage crisis were quickly followed by articles questioning whether there was a crisis at all. Matt Barnum, for example, noted both the reports describing a “catastrophic” teacher shortage as well as those expressing skepticism that there is sufficient evidence to support those claims (Is there a national teacher shortage? Here’s what we know and don’t know).

“The public narrative has gotten way ahead of the data and is even misleading in most cases,” Chad Alderman quoted in The Atlantic

Scanning the stories from the US suggests that there are indeed many places where districts and schools are having difficulty finding teachers to fill available positions. But whether or not and how much of a shortage there is varies from place to place, and by differences in the nature of the position (National Teacher Shortage? New Research Reveals Different Realities Between States). One recent report from the Annenberg Institute estimates that 36,504 full-time teaching positions in the US are unfilled — but shortages are localized in nine states. As one of the report authors, Tuan D. Nguyen, described it to Marianna McMurdock of The74 “There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states. … It’s just a question of how severe it is” (National Teacher Shortage? New Research Reveals Different Realities Between States). Joshua Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft add in another analysis published by the Annenberg Institute that a lack of up-to-date, consistent data also makes it hard to track any shortages and complicates efforts to explain what might be happening and why (Inconsistent Data Inflate Concerns of Teacher ‘Mass Exodus,’ Paper Argues).

National Teacher Shortage? New Research Reveals Different Realities Between States, *The74*

There may be many reasons for teachers to quit. In particular, one survey showed that fifty-nine percent of teachers say they’re burned out, compared to 44 percent of other workers. But it’s not clear the extent to which the number of teachers leaving the profession is significantly greater than it has been previously. Richard Ingersoll and colleagues have long highlighted challenges of staffing schools, pointing to problems with retaining as well as hiring new teachers (NEPC Talks Education). Furthermore, the shortages of teachers are being reported at the same time there have been recent declines in student enrollment and an increase in hiring of teachers and other support staff that has come along with the influx of federal funding to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. “[I]s it useful to use the term shortage,” Derek Thompson wondered in The Atlantic, “when, compared with staff numbers before the pandemic, more teachers might be employed in America’s public schools right now than in 2019?” (There Is No National Teacher Shortage).

Headlines:

‘Never seen it this bad’: America faces catastrophic teacher shortage, The Washington Post

Even Schools Flush With Cash Can’t Keep Up With Teacher Shortage, Bloomberg

Teacher Shortages a Reality as Schools Struggle to Fill New Positions, PBS News

Is there a teacher shortage? It’s complicated, CNN

Is there a national teacher shortage? Here’s what we know and don’t know, Chalkbeat

Are Teachers Leaving the Classroom En Masse?, Vox

How bad is the teacher shortage? It depends on where you live, The New York Times

Teacher Shortages Are Real, But Not For The Reason You Heard, AP News

Yes, There’s a Shortage of Special Education Teachers. And That’s Nothing New , The 74

Why teachers are leaving and what we can do about it, Marshall et. al., Phi Delta Kappan

Respect, pay, support: Why these former teachers quit and what could have helped, Chalkbeat

Schools Are Looking in Unusual Places to Deal With Teacher Shortage, Wall Street Journal

Biden-Harris Administration Announces Public and Private Sector Actions to Strengthen Teaching Profession and Help Schools Fill Vacancies, U.S. Department of Education

Biden administration partners with job firms to address teacher shortage, The Hill

Breaking the Legacy of Teacher Shortages, Linda Darling-Hammond, Educational Leadership

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Tagged Covid-19, Educational Policy, Teachers, United States

Collaboration, Coherence and Learning in Educational Improvement: A Conversation with Elizabeth Leisy Stosich

Posted on August 17, 2022 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In this month’s Lead the Change Interview, Elizabeth Leisy Stosich talks about her work focusing on understanding how district, school, and teacher leaders can work together to strengthen the quality and equity of students’ learning opportunities and outcomes. Stosich is Assistant Professor and Associate Chair of the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy at Fordham University. 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 (Ltc): The 2023 AERA theme is Interrogating Consequential Education Research in Pursuit of Truth and charges researchers and practitioners with creating and using education research to disrupt institutionalized forms of discrimination. The call urges scholars to challenge traditional methods of inquiry in order to create increasingly useful, responsive, and equity-oriented research that can be used by schools to develop informed policies and practices to better support students. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Elizabeth Leisy Stosich (ELS): I appreciate how AERA’s theme this year urges us as scholars to take responsibility for critically considering not simply what we research but how we approach our research and the consequences of these decisions. As educational scholars, we are (hopefully) deeply invested in understanding and supporting meaningful improvements in schools and systems. Yet, as educators and scholars, one challenge we face is that we each bring our own biases to understanding problems in education and, correspondingly, the change that is needed. These biases can lead us to define problems and identify solutions in particular ways, ways that may not reflect the actual problem as experienced by those closest it. For example, as a scholar focused primarily on instructional improvement, I can be quick to identify problems as student learning challenges that require new professional learning for teachers and school leaders. When you’re a hammer, every problem requires a nail. For me and many of the educational leaders I work with, we can be quick to see each problem as simply requiring new or different teacher PD. We can also be slow to give up on ideas that we’ve deeply invested in even when they either are a poor fit for the problem or we see little evidence of authentic improvement.

As educational change scholars, I think a central aspect of centering equity and pursuing truth is to engage as partners with the stakeholders closest to the “change.” In improvement science this is often described as being “user” centered. When we partner with practitioners, we need to take time to carefully understand and define the problems we seek to address with our change efforts. These initial decisions have important implications for the change work we take up. I think we are much more likely to be successful in supporting meaningful change when we engage in shared problem diagnosis and solution identification as partners with educators and the students and communities they serve. Through this collaborative process, we can bring more diverse perspectives to defining the problems we center in our change efforts.

Ltc: In your work, you examine relationships between school leaders on decision-making teams and during policy implementation. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?

ELS: In my own research (Stosich, 2020, 2021) as well as a number of large survey studies one thing stands out: principals think they are involving teachers in decision-making and teachers do not agree. Looking closely at decision-making in instructional leadership teams (ILTs), I found one explanation for this gap; principals typically involve teachers in decision-making only superficially. For example, principals may ask teachers to decide whether or not to move forward with a proposed initiative (e.g., Should we do lesson study?) rather than engaging them more fully as partners in problem diagnosis and solution identification (e.g., How could we work together to strengthen our instruction?).

This is a big problem for two reasons. First, truly engaging teachers as partners in decision-making is a powerful leadership practice because it allows for teachers to draw on their instructional expertise and knowledge of students and colleagues to inform the decision. Second, when principals and teachers make decisions together, principals gain teachers’ commitment for implementation as part of the decision-making process. When principals only engage teachers superficially in decision-making, they don’t benefit from teachers’ knowledge in shaping the decision and are unlikely to gain their commitment for implementing the proposed solution.

“Through this collaborative process, we can bring more diverse perspectives to defining the problems we center in our change efforts.”

Ltc: In your recent work investigating how educators experience policy shifts in high-accountability contexts, you find that policy alignment, thoughtful sequencing, slower pace, and extensive support can be helpful in creating successful change. How might your findings help scholars and practitioners imagine and implement policy changes more effectively?

ELS: I think we would benefit from paying greater attention to the larger environmental conditions we are creating for policy change. What are the conditions we are creating and what do they feel like for the educators responsible for policy implementation?

In a strategy activity in my book with Michelle Forman and Candice Bocala, The Internal Coherence Framework: Creating the Conditions for Continuous Improvement for Schools, we ask educators to reflect on the question: What does it feel like to be a teacher in this school? I think this question is essential in policy change. Do teachers feel like they are focused and engaged in sustained learning in an effort to implement a change that will result in meaningful benefits for students? Or are they overwhelmed by multiple initiatives with little time to really understand and apply new learning about these ideas in their classroom? We typically pair ambitious policy goals with pretty limited support for learning what changes are necessary to meet these goals. Changing practice is difficult and time-consuming work!

My research looking specifically at principals suggests that when principals acknowledge the challenge presented by new instructional policies and frame this challenge as one that requires learning to work with students and content in new ways, they are more likely to close the gap between current practice and policy goals than when they frame the challenge as one of simply executing new approaches (Stosich, 2017). As research from Amy Edmondson and others suggests, when we frame policy change as a “learning” rather than an “execution” challenge, we acknowledge that we don’t know everything we need to know to meet our goals for policy change and, thus, open ourselves to new learning and change. An execution challenge is more appropriate for routine changes, which are rarely the focus of policy change.

In my research with Emily Hodge on the Common Core (Hodge & Stosich, 2022), we found that when policies are introduced in rapid succession even those that are connected and reinforcing can be experienced by teachers and leaders as overwhelming and incoherent. This is particularly true when you introduce high-stakes accountability. We need a supportive environment for learning and change during policy implementation, one that provides the time and support necessary for learning and change before introducing accountability. This should include sustained, job-embedded opportunities for professional learning about the policy change and systems that reinforce and support this learning, such as aligned curriculum and assessment materials and ongoing, developmental feedback for teachers and school leaders.

“Learning is challenging but also rewarding—something we need to acknowledge and celebrate.”

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?

ELS: Be part of the change yourself! As scholars, we learn and change our thinking all the time (hopefully!) based on new understanding we gain from those with whom we study and work.

We need to share openly with our partners about how we are shifting our beliefs and practice and why. I think this modeling is important for reinforcing the idea that learning and change is an opportunity for growth and not simply an admission of weakness. Just this past fall I really shifted how I think about how people connect and develop relationships through improvement work after a comment from a member of our doctoral program led me to question some of my assumptions. I always assumed that we build the relationships that support our collaborative learning and improvement through working together towards shared goals. A student remarked with some surprise that we seemed to just “get right down to business” working on identifying and addressing problems of practice before really getting to know each other on a more personal level. This comment really struck a chord with me and led me to think more deeply about the very personal nature of change and what relationships could best support our collective change efforts. I tried to reflect openly about this change and how her thinking had changed my own during the course in hopes that this would encourage others to be open to change. I also thanked her—learning is challenging but also rewarding—something we need to acknowledge and celebrate.

Still, change can be personally challenging. Something I read in James Spillane’s (2004) book about standards implementation has stuck with me for a long time: when we ask people to learn new ways of doing familiar things, we risk damaging their self-concept. Essentially, when we ask people to change what they are already doing, we ask them to admit that what they have been doing wasn’t good enough and needs to change. This can feel a lot like telling me that I’m not good enough. I think the change process becomes less daunting when we share openly and model how we are changing our own beliefs and practices. This is important for people in all roles but particularly for leaders—are you asking others to be open to change without being open to change yourself? This creates an inhospitable environment for authentic learning and change, which requires acknowledging the limitations of our current knowledge and being open to new ideas and approaches.

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

ELS: I am excited about the more critical lenses educational leaders and scholars are bringing to their work in educational change. In doing so, there has been greater attention to not only issues of achievement and access but also issues of identity and power as part the focus of change. For instance, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from some very exciting work happening in a Bronx Community School District that involves networks of principals working together to address three equity-focused issues: reducing racial disproportionality in chronic absenteeism, strengthening culturally responsive-sustaining education (CRSE), and creating more affirming and inclusive school environments. In my view, chronic absenteeism is an access issue, while the district’s work on strengthening CRSE addresses issues of identity—including ensuring students’ identity is reflected in the curriculum—and power, as they teach students to understand and address systems of oppression. I am energized by the focus on more holistic, student-centered, and culturally responsive discussions of learning and change taking place in so many districts and schools.

My favorite recent book is Decoteau Irby’s Stuck improving: Racial equity and school leadership. One important lesson I took from his research on racial equity improvement is that centering Black and Brown people’s perspectives, what he describes as “Black and Brown people’s influential presence,” is essential for understanding problems and monitoring progress (and setbacks) with attention to the influence of race and racism. This involves much more than simply seeking out the perspectives of Black and Brown youth, educators, and community members on the change work at one point in time. Instead, it involves building the organization—the school or district—in ways that will ensure Black and Brown people are not only present but actively influencing our change work at every step—including the problems we identify, the decisions we make about how to work on them, and all our learning along the way.

References

Forman, M. L., Stosich, E. L., & Bocala, C. (2017). The internal coherence framework: Creating the conditions for continuous improvement in schools. Harvard Education Press.

Hodge, E. & Stosich, E. L. (2022). Accountability, alignment, and coherence: How educators made sense of complex policy environments in the Common Core era. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737221079650

Irby, D. J. (2021). Stuck improving: Racial equity and school leadership. Harvard Education Press.

Spillane, J. P. (2004). Standards deviation: How schools misunderstand educational policy. Harvard University Press.

Stosich, E. L. (2017). Leading in a time of ambitious reform: Principals in high-poverty urban elementary schools frame the challenge of the Common Core State Standards. Elementary School Journal, 117(4), 539-565. https://doi.org/10.1086/691585

Stosich, E. L. (2020). Central office leadership for instructional improvement: Developing collaborative leadership among principals and instructional leadership team members. Teachers College Record, 122(9). https://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=23383
Stosich, E. L. (2021). “Are we an advisory board or a decision making entity?”: Teachers’ involvement in decision making in instructional leadership teams. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2021.1995879

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News

Tagged Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, Instructional improvement, Teachers

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

Posted on June 15, 2022 by T Hatch | 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:

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.
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.
Ensure that new teachers are supported when starting teaching and receive feedback and coaching from experienced teachers in the school.
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.
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).
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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Posted in About K-12 International Education News

Tagged Covid-19, Educational Policy, Netherlands, Teachers

Thirteen insights into teacher wellbeing and mental health in England

Posted on May 5, 2021 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Just in time for Teacher Appreciation Week, this week’s post describes the key results from a study of teachers’ wellbeing in England. The post comes from John Jerrim, Professor of Education and Social Statistics at the Institute of Education, University College London, and it was published originally on the UCL Institute of Education Blog

With my colleagues Becky Allen and Sam Sims, I have published a major new analysis of teacher mental health and wellbeing in England. Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, it is the culmination of two years of work and is, we believe, the most comprehensive analysis on this issue to date. In this blogpost, we’ll take you through a whistle-stop tour of some of our results.

1. Teachers in England are more likely to perceive their job as causing them stress – and having a negative impact upon their mental health – than teachers in other countries

In spring 2018, teachers in more than 40 countries were asked whether they felt their job caused them stress and had a negative impact upon their mental health. As the chart below illustrates, teachers in England were very clear in their views. Lower-secondary teachers in this country were more likely to say that their job had a negative impact upon their mental wellbeing than teachers in almost any other country. (Results for primary teachers produced a similar finding – albeit compared to a smaller number of other countries). Teachers in England clearly believe that their job – in certain ways – has a negative effect upon their wellbeing.

2. Teachers in England do not have lower levels of wellbeing than demographically similar individuals working in other professions.

It has previously been claimed that teachers have lower levels of wellbeing than other occupational groups. Our analysis dispels this myth – see the chart below. Once demographic background characteristics of individuals have been controlled for – e.g. gender – teachers in England actually have similar levels of (un)happiness and anxiety as other professional workers.

3. Like those working in other professions, there has been a recent rise in the percentage of teachers reporting mental health problems…

Over the last decade, there has been a notable rise in the percentage of teachers reporting a long-lasting mental health problem – see the chart below. This, however, is also true for other professional workers, such as accountants, nurses and human resource workers. It is therefore not a phenomenon that is specific to teaching, and hence seems unlikely to be related to teachers’ jobs. Indeed, our report reveals that there has been little change in the proportion of teachers who suggest depression has been caused or aggravated by their job.

4. …but this could just be due to an increase in reporting of mental health problems (rather than a decline in teacher wellbeing per se).

One potential explanation for the finding presented in the chart above is that it is due to increased reporting of mental health problems – both among teachers and society as a whole. The chart below may provide some support for this point of view. Over the period that reported mental health problems of teachers increased we have found the percentage of teachers reporting low levels of personal wellbeing has remained broadly flat. In other words, despite more teachers reporting a long-lasting mental health problem between 2011 and 2018, there has not been a similar systematic increase in anxiety, unhappiness, dissatisfaction with life and feelings of low self-worth.

5. There is no specific half-term where teachers feel particularly anxious or unhappy (…they are particularly happy in the summer, though!).

We all have ups and downs in our wellbeing. But we previously knew very little about how the feelings of teachers varied over the course of the academic year. Are teachers particularly anxious and unhappy at certain times? As the next chart demonstrates, we found little clear evidence that feelings of anxiety or unhappiness are especially likely to occur in any given half-term. Although there seems to be quite a large amount of week-on-week fluctuation (quite possibly due to our limited sample size) there seems little evidence of a systematic pattern by school term. The only exception is that – surprise, surprise – teachers seem to be happier and less anxious during the summer holiday.

6. There is no evidence that becoming a teacher is associated with a decline in mental health.

When someone decides to become a teacher – with the heavy workload and new experiences that entails – does wellbeing start to plummet? The answer – as demonstrated by the chart below – is no. Recently qualified teachers actually have similar levels of mental wellbeing at age 26 to when they were age 17 (before they became teachers). This pattern is also similar to other professional groups. Consistent with our interpretation of the second chart in this blogpost, this result suggests that deciding to become a teacher is unlikely to lead to a decline in wellbeing and mental health.

7. Middle-aged teachers who quit do not have better mental health and are not more happy generally (despite being slightly happier at work)

There is also little evidence that middle-aged teachers who quit for alternative employment experience much change in their general wellbeing and overall mental health. As the table below illustrates, although those middle-aged teachers who quit teaching report being slightly happier at work, this does not translate into lower levels of anxiety or depression, and is not associated with greater levels of happiness in life overall. In other words, for those who are considering leaving the teaching profession, the grass may not be that much greener on the other side.

8. Teachers’ working hours have been broadly stable since the early 1990s.

Workload and working hours have become a key education policy issue in England over the last few years, in part stimulated by results from the TALIS 2013 study which suggested that teachers in England work longer hours than teachers in most other countries. However, it does not seem that teachers are now working much longer hours than historical averages. Indeed, as the next chart reveals, there has been relatively little variation in the average working hours of teachers since the early 1990s. There is, of course, an important caveat to this finding. It is possible that workload has increased while working hours have remained stable – with teachers required to cram more work into the same amount of time – or for more tasks to build up and remain incomplete.

9. It is time spent upon marking and lesson planning that really causes teachers stress in the workplace.

When it comes to the link between working hours and workload stress, it is clear that not all tasks are equal – see the table below.

Looking across English-speaking countries, we find that each additional hour teachers spend on marking and lesson planning is strongly associated with an increase in their workload stress. The same is not true, however, for time spent on professional development and time spent actually teaching. Increasing working time spent on these areas are either associated with a decrease in workload stress or only weakly associated with an increase workload stress. For policymakers and senior leaders the message is clear. If you want to reduce the workload stress of teachers, it is these auxiliary tasks (often done in the evening, at weekends or during holidays) that need to be tackled.

10. Countries with extensive accountability systems are slightly more likely to have teachers who feel stressed from being held accountable for pupil achievement.

Outside of workload, the other great evil often associated with low levels of teacher wellbeing is high-stakes accountability. Unfortunately, little high-quality quantitative evidence exists on how such accountability systems really impact on the mental health of teachers. What we do know from our report is that countries with more school accountability do have teachers who are (slightly) more stressed by this aspect of their job. Now, as I have said previously, we need to be careful with such cross-national comparisons. And, of course, correlation does not equal causation. So we might ask: in England, do we have the right balance between quality assurance of schools and ensuring that this does not stress teaching staff out? But at the same time, we should keep in mind that the relationship between accountability and teacher wellbeing is not that strong – and is certainly not deterministic.

11. Teachers feel more stressed about accountability when their colleagues do as well (but, surprisingly, not really when their headteacher does).

One thing we have learned about teacher stress induced by accountability is that it seems to some extent to cluster within specific schools. A form of ‘emotional contagion’, as it were. Teachers in over 40 countries were asked to rate how stressed they were about accountability in the TALIS 2018 study – “not at all”, “to some extent”, “quite a bit”, or “a lot”.[1] For every one category increase in colleagues’ stress levels – from “quite a bit” to “a lot”, say – there was a 16 percentage point increase in the proportion of teachers saying that they felt “quite a bit” or “a lot” of accountability-related stress themselves. Interestingly, though, we find only a weak relationship between whether headteachers feel stressed by accountability and the stress reported by their teaching staff. This may suggest that, in general, headteachers do a good job in not projecting their worries about accountability on to their staff.

12. Supportive leadership and manageable workloads appear more important than other factors when controlling workplace stress levels.

What can schools do to reduce workplace stress? In our project, we looked at how workplace stress (as well as job satisfaction and teacher retention) is related to five separate aspects of teachers’ working environments. When it comes to workplace stress, two of these working conditions stood out – see the table below. First, having teachers who feel their workload is manageable is strongly associated with a reduction in their stress levels. The second is having a supportive leadership team in place. These factors were much more important than collaboration with colleagues, lesson preparation and school discipline when it came to teacher wellbeing in the workplace.

13. Lockdown did not seem to reduce teachers’ workplace wellbeing or lead them to suffer from greater levels of work-related anxiety

The Covid-19 crisis has, of course, turned teachers’ (and everyone else’s) lives upside down. Although most of the data we use in our report comes from the pre-Covid era, we were able to investigate how the wellbeing of teachers may have changed during the early stages of the pandemic. As the chart below reveals, teachers’ work-related anxiety actually declined during lockdown. Moreover, our report reveals how lockdown did not seem to impact upon teacher wellbeing overall. Headteachers, however, did suffer from some period of high-stress, particularly just before school lockdown was announced and when school reopening was announced.

The project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation. Visit www.nuffieldfoundation.org.

Notes: The findings relate to around 131,000 teachers in lower-secondary schools.

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News

Tagged Teachers, Teaching profession, Wellbeing

How are educators responding to the insurrection at the US Capitol?

Posted on January 13, 2021 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Last week, IEN rounded up headlines from articles trying to make sense of what happened in education in 2020. This week, we had planned to look ahead at predictions for what might happen in education in 2021. Instead, we found numerous articles discussing how educators have been and could be talking with their students about the insurrection at the US Capitol incited by Donald Trump. A few of these articles also explicitly discuss the racism made visible both by the insurrection and the responses to it, and we encountered several other articles that talked more broadly about the teaching of controversial topics in the wake of the insurrection.

https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/everything-has-a-history/the-assault-on-the-capitol-in-historical-perspective-resources-for-educators

Insurgency at the U.S. Capitol: A dreaded, real-life lesson facing teachers, Madeline Will & Stephen Sawchuck, Education Week

‘You have to address it.’ How San Diego educators are teaching about the Capitol mob, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Vermont’s educators grapple with insurrection at the Capitol, Lola Dufort, VTdigger

Teachers Shift Lessons to Focus on US Capitol Attack, Suevon Lee, Honolulu Civil Beat

Lessons from an insurrection: A day after D.C. rampage, how 15 educators from across U.S. helped students make sense of the chaos, The74

Ways to teach about today’s insurrection, Larry Ferlazzo, Education Week

Responding to the insurrection at the US Capitol, Facing History and Ourselves

Resources for educators in response to the insurrection in Washington, Generation Citizen

Preparing yourself for tomorrow…, Tamisha Williams & Lori Cohen, Tamisha Williams Consulting Newsletter

Resources for teachers on the days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Beyond the Stoplight

“What questions do you have?” 3rd grader’s responses on 1/7/2021

The Assault on the Capitol in Historical Perspective: Resources for Educators, American Historical Association

Three ways to teach the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, PBS NewsHour

How to talk to children about the Capitol riots: An age by age guide, Meghan Holohan, Today

How to talk to kids about the riots at the U.S. Capitol, Anya Kamentz, NPR

Don’t talk about the Capitol siege without mentioning white privilege, Ellen McGirt & Aric Jenkins, Fortune

The lies we tell ourselves about race, Sam Sanders, NPR

Mobs of white citizens rioting have been commonplace in the United States for centuries, Joshua D. Rothman, Hechinger Report

Confused and angry, young teachers seek guidance on discussing current events with students, Jennifer Rich, The Hechinger Report

Teachers of color more likely than white peers to tackle ‘controversial’ civics topics, Sarah Schwartz, Education Week

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News

Tagged education, Educational Crisis, equity, justice, race, Teachers, Teaching

A View of School Closures and Remote Learning From Emma Hua in Shanghai

Posted on July 29, 2020 by T Hatch | 2 comments

This week’s post features an e-mail interview that Aidi Bian conducted for IEN with Emma Hua. Hua and Bian are teachers at the HD school, a school with campuses in Shanghai, Ningbo, Beijing and Qingdao. These four schools have close to 3000 enrolled students in total. A fifth campus, in Nanjing, will open in 2021. The school describes itself as a “private experimental school” and each homeroom has one “national teacher” and one “international teacher.” HD school is one of a growing number of bilingual schools in China that have been gaining popularity. Bilingual and international schools in China have been particularly hard hit by the virus because of visa restrictions that have made it hard to find teachers from outside China.

Across China, schools were closed for some time, but most cities reopened schools in April, with schools in heavily affected areas like Beijing and Wuhan opening later. After a small outbreak in Beijing in late June, Beijing’s schools were closed throughout the spring semester. Nationwide, the annual “Gaokao” exam was postponed until July 7, one month later than a normal year. Current regulations in Shanghai require every school to track the temperatures and health status of their students every day and report to the district government.

This post is the ninth in a series that includes views from Chile, from Japan, from the Netherlands, Scotland, Liberia, Pakistan, Australia, and Canada. The “A view from…” series editors are IEN’s Thomas Hatch and Karen Edge, Reader/Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at University College London’s Institute of Education.

IEN: What’s happening with you and your family/friends?

Emma Hua: I was originally from Wuhan, Hubei, where Covid19 firstly broke out. I went back to Wuhan for Spring Festival during the winter break and stayed at home since Wuhan was locked down in late January. Things were not too bad after we got used to the situation. Our community in general was in good order: volunteers helped with information collection, people ordered food and things online and got delivery in time. I worked at home from early February to middle April, and then successfully returned back to Shanghai, after I was tested negative for the coronavirus in Wuhan.

IEN: What’s happening with education/learning in your community?

EH: Our school started remote classes since February. For primary school, most of the courses were recorded as 10 or 15-minute videos and uploaded to an online platform where students can download and watch every day at their convenience. This is a deliberate design since it would be hard for young kids to stay focused for a long time in an online live class, and many parents have concerns with their children in front of screens for too long. All the materials and resources were uploaded online, and students took picture of their homework and sent them to teachers. We suggested a timetable for the students, which they could adjust, and many students gradually developed a more regular and feasible timetable for themselves with the help from parents. At the end of each day around 4 or 5 pm, each class would have a Q&A live session where teachers talked about common mistakes in the homework and got updates from students.

We suggested a timetable for the students, which they could adjust, and many students gradually developed a more regular and feasible timetable for themselves with the help from parents.

The online class lasted until April when the situation in Shanghai was basically in control. An interesting discovery was that after students got back to school, some students made better progress than expected as they studied more online at home than at school. We hypothesized this happened because some of them could better individualize the pace of their learning as they watched the videos at home.

IEN: What do you/your community need help with?

EH: At first, many teachers were not familiar with teaching online or making slides and videos, so the school organized some trainings to help teachers with making powerpoints and video editing. Courses and materials were prepared within a grade, where every teacher was responsible for several sessions of the whole week, to separate the tasks among the grade group. Some traditional teachers especially needed help with technology support from younger teachers. There were also struggles and pains when the internet of some teachers or students was not stable. In particular, when kids were young, they did not know how to deal with the technical problems. Teachers were tired, too, because the working time could be extended when communication with parents wasn’t smooth.

Courses and materials were prepared within a grade, where every teacher was responsible for several sessions of the whole week, to separate the tasks among the grade group.

IEN: What resources/links/supports have you found most useful?

EH: We used DingTalk as the main online platform for our second grade. After students selected their school and class, they could do a lot of things such as check in, download lessons and materials, submit homework, get feedback from teachers, etc. A good thing about this platform is that it did evolve and developed many good features that fit educational uses. For example, at first, students could see one another’s homework without any restriction, which could lead to copying. Later the new version changed the rule so that only students who had submitted their homework could access others’ work. Also, the platform allowed teachers to rate and exhibite the best work to the whole class.

IEN: What have you found most inspiring?

EH: I am appreciative that our school principals were very helpful and supportive to teachers. We have both foreign and Chinese principals, and they were responsible for the international teacher and Chinese teacher team respectively. I belong to the Chinese team, and the principal would participate in curriculum design and preparation and gave us support and suggestions. The school also has small gifts for teachers on national holidays. Another inspiration in the latter stage of remote learning was that we were trying to add more elements and activities to the online routine, such as weekly guided reading, which gave students a more diverse and similar-to-school experience even when studying online.

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News

Tagged China, Coronavirus, Remote Learning, school closure, Shanghai, Teachers, Teaching

Tag Archives: Teachers

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How are educators responding to the insurrection at the US Capitol?

A View of School Closures and Remote Learning From Emma Hua in Shanghai

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