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Leadership > The Change Process
Interpreting the Nine Common Principles
Table of Contents:
Introduction
In this paper we present a discussion among the staff at an Essential school in which they explored what the nine Common Principles mean to them. This discussion took place during the second visit by the School Change Study research team to "Oak Hill," a small, public high school in the Northeast.
By joining the Coalition in 1994 and working toward becoming an Essential school, Oak Hill had made the commitment to attempt to use the nine Common Principles as guidelines for whole-school change. The Oak Hill staff felt that if they are using the Common Principles to guide them in developing a better school, then it is important to know what the staff understands them to mean. For that reason, they asked the researchers, after their first visit to the school in fall 1991, to facilitate a discussion about the Principles during their next visit, in spring 1992.
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About the Common Principles
Theodore Sizer, the founder and chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, conceived the nine Common Principles in 1983 while working on A Study of High Schools. The Principles are a set of common-sense criteria that Sizer believes would significantly improve the quality of secondary education in this country if put into place by local practitioners. Taken individually, the Principles are not unique among those proposed for improving education. Their uniqueness lies in being a set of ideas that, when taken together and put into practice, would have a profound effect on the nature of high school education in this country.
When Sizer founded the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1994, the nine Common Principles became the touchstone for its work of reform. Just as good families share powerful guiding ideas but cannot follow a single model because each family is unique and has its own traditions, so good schools, each with its own community, staff, and traditions, share powerful guiding ideas but cannot follow one blueprint or model for success. For this reason, the Coalition advances reform according to ideas rather than a model. The Principles driving Essential school reform are purposefully nonspecific so that they can apply to the widest variety of schools and can lead people to develop the school that is best for their own community.
Because the nine Common Principles are the foundation of Essential school reform, it is crucial that people working toward reform according to the Principles explore the ideas within them in order to be clear about the direction of their work and to find a common ground with others with whom they are working. By doing so they will be able to work in concert toward common goals for students and to support rather than undermine one another's efforts in changing school practice.
We will state each principle, present the staff's responses, and comment on their reactions and interpretations.
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Investigating the Nine Common Principles
1: Intellectual Focus
The school should focus on helping adolescents learn to use their minds well. Schools should not attempt to be "comprehensive" if such a claim is made at the expense of the school's central intellectual purpose.
Most teachers in this Essential school feel that learning "to use their minds well" means learning the skills of critical thinking and being able to solve complex problems.
[It means] using knowledge, not just sorting it.
It's being able to think through the consequences and the outcomes they want in longer work.
It's when the kids can formulate questions and develop responses and listen very carefully.
It's asking questions, and not just, "I don't understand." It's grasping a concept and applying it in all different kinds of ways that are pertinent to their own lives and their own experiences. It's when a kid says, "Well, if that happens then shouldn't this happen?" That is so far beyond sitting there and saying, "Tell me so I can give it back to you word for word."
When we were doing the weather-watch assignment in my science class, one of the kids used Harvard Graphics to chart his findings. I thought they looked pretty impressive at first but discovered that the graphs did not convey some of the essential ideas he was trying to show. I showed him and he got so excited. He said he thought he could get it right, and he just kept working on it until he did. He really grew from that. The two of us learned a lot.
A second group interprets using one's mind well as succeeding in the kind of work students have traditionally been given in school.
Kids should be able to learn the material we give them and retain it.
Kids should be able to read, do the work given to them, and solve the problems we give them.
I wouldn't think that using your mind well precluded memorizing whether it's appropriate to keep going back and back. There are some things you memorize in history so you don't keep looking it up in the index.
Not only does the staff have differing interpretations of this principle, they also have differing opinions as to whether it is achievable. The vice principal agrees that this principle refers to critical thinking and problem solving but points to the current difficulties in implementing it:
A kid should be developing the skills, not just to pass a test, but to think out a problem he's facing here and to try to make the problems here attached to what's out there. That's not so easily done with the curriculum the way it is now. People don't have as many resources as you might think to make everything so relevant; and the state board exam is the mountain blocking the valley of critical thinking that everyone is trying to get the kids to.
A small group believes that this principle refers to critical thinking and problem solving but feels that given today's kids, this principle is not realistic; kids do not seem to be able to use their minds well now.
In math it would be problem solving: being faced with a problem, where do you start, how do you proceed, where do you get the answer? And to get satisfaction when they get the answer. If that's possible, that would be using your mind well, but I don't want to guide them. I want them to do it. That's one of the things that annoys me: that they do want to rely on the teacher so often.
Students need to be responsible and be organized and learn basic material in certain ways before they can start using their minds well. You can't just jump in there. A lot of kids aren't ready to use their minds well because there just isn't any information in there for them to use.
I know what it should mean. It would mean to make inferences and things of that nature. But heck, if they just even asked any type of intelligent question I would be happy, but of course they don't. I have second semester seniors. We sit around. The nine Common Principles are these great generalities but then there's the real worldin my classroom.
I'd like kids to be able to read a problem and know how to attack it. The amazing thing is that you change a percent problem from a $7.95 CD or tape to the next problem, which is the $125.00 suit, and it's as if you have a whole new mathematical problem.
Kids don't want to use their minds. They want us to tell them what to do. They need a clear sense of the expectations.
The staff reach some common ground when they discuss critical thinkingproblem solving, using knowledge, applying what was learned to a fresh situation, making inferencesand they agree that when students do these things, they are using their minds well.
The point of disagreement in the discussion of this principle lies in the staff's attitudes about student capabilities. Some suggest that state exams and mandates stand in the way, but imply that, given the opportunity, students are capable of using their minds well. Others suggest that students today have no will and no discipline, so that even if they were provided with the opportunity to use their minds well, they would not choose to do so. The polarity of opinion about student capabilities suggests that given the opportunity, the staff would create two very different kinds of schools.
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2: Less is More
The school's goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program's design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that students need, rather than necessarily by "subjects" as conventionally defined. The aphorism "Less is more" should dominate: curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort merely to cover content.
Some staff feel that this is a good principle, but, due to a variety of constraints, they are not yet following it.
It's doing one Shakespeare play instead of three. It's working on three pieces of music instead of six. We'd be better off to do this but parents want a traditional approach.
You can do it in two ways. You can limit the curricular offerings or limit the number of topics within an offering. But the AP exams and the state board exam constrain us.
If you look at our course offerings, we are still functioning on the basis of units of credit. If a kid passes a course with a 77 or a 66, we tell her she has passed the course and is ready to move on. I don't think that implies mastery of knowledge in any sense of the word. I don't think we know what this means as a staff. I don't think we've reached that decision.
The pace should be more thoughtful as we end the year. In fact, it gets much more frenetic. The AP exams are next week. I do not want to run a language course to take an exam. Our foreign exchange program would be out of the question for those students, and learning about other people and how they think is not included in the AP curriculum. Those elements of the course are far more important to retain than all of the rules of the language wrapped up in one bundle.
The constraint is the state board exam. We can't figure out what to cut. The state board exam courses are the antithesis of this principle. We need help to understand how we reduce the curriculum to prepare kids to go out on their own.
Some find the aphorism "Less is more" confusing or troublesome:
I think that the kids should have a background and a general knowledge to be an educated person. What bothers me is that the kids seem so "experience poor." It happens in class a lot. I give them an example: "You know, when you're walking along a stream and you're afraid to step on the bank because the stream has cut under it..." The kids look at me like I'm nuts. They're experience poor. It's hard to relate things to their everyday life because they are experience poor. Sometimes I ask them to visualize things, like a mass of air. They don't know what I mean. They don't form visual images. I don't know how to reduce what they need to know when they know so little.
We are already giving kids less in math. Their time has been inundated by requirements. They have to have technology. They have to have a language. Then there's drug and health education. These things are important, but twenty years ago, kids spent their whole day at school doing reading, writing, and arithmetic. And the high school curriculum is driven by the math and the verbal SATs. These kids have got to pass those tests. So I get a little nervous about "less is more."
Sometimes, the kids don't want less. They want to know more about this and more about that. You end up covering more than you ever thought you would cover and there's no complaints.
We're sending these kids off to college and the student arrives with a transcript which says, "I've taken pre-calculus." I think we have an obligation to make sure certain topics are covered. For instance, I'm not particularly crazy about logic proofs, so I might choose to leave those out and go into more depth on geometric proofs. My students may not have the foundation they need to go on. I don't think that we have the right to go and change the curriculum just because wein our own particular school districtfeel it should be different. We have an obligation to our students to prepare them for the schools that they choose to go to, for the SATs.
"Less is more" might be all right for some district in trouble, but ours is a school with high academic standards.
We've spent our careers building a program that offers students a good deal of choice, richness. Less is not more; more is more.
Universally, the staff considers this principle to be the most difficult and the most controversial. Almost everyone begins their comments by, "This one gives me trouble."
The staff have several reactions to the principle: some believe it is a good principle but, due to a variety of internal and external constraints, agree that they are not yet implementing it; some find the aphorism "less is more" confusing and do not believe the faculty has the right to decide the curriculum; and finally, others are trying to understand what mastery means, what knowledge is, and what
essential skills might be.
As the faculty members respond to the pieces of the principle"Less is more," "mastery," and "knowledge"they reveal its complexity. All of the faculty's comments suggest that this principle challenges the status quo, whether created by the staff or by the state department of education. Their responses also suggest that while everyone seems to understand the notion of "less," no one grapples with the meaning of "more." When and how "less" might be "more" is left unexplored.
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3: Universal Goals
The school's goals should apply to all students, while the means to these goals will vary as those students themselves vary. School practice should be tailor-made to meet the needs of every group or class of adolescents.
It means that all students should be exposed to the same standards, the same teaching, and the same resources.
It means that we're trying to get away from tracking but you can't do that in a high school. As soon as you start segregating the best math and foreign language students, you can't have the same school for everybody and you can't start that at the ninth grade.
I think mainstreaming has jogged some people's thinking. It's raised some questions about standards. What standards do all kids meet? What standards do some kids meet? Every one of us can tell stories about how mainstreaming is working in our classrooms, and where it is problematic. There's another part of it that we haven't confronted and that's the AP dilemma. At the junior and senior level, we are taking the top kids and segregating them. It leaves the rest of the classes with the middle kids and below. And it reinforces the idea that knowledge is an accumulation of stuff that kids then spit back faster. In the long run, I am not sure that the AP classes stretch them other than just to give them a whole lot of stuff to accumulate, and to give them the chance to do what they already do well a little better.
There is a wide range of teacher expectations in the school and a wide range of marks. I'm not sure how we get to some kind of consistency for all kids.
My grading is very subjective. I have one kid who is getting a 90; to someone else it is not 90 workbut for him it is. I might expect much more from another kid, much more. If a kid can do more, then I demand more.
This is hard to do in math. I have some kids who are barely struggling along with a 70 because the content, the conceptual level of the material, is hard for them.
It seems that the math department finds tracking to be the way to meet the criteria set by this principle. To "meet the needs of every group or class of adolescents," the math department has just created a new math class for students who are not yet ready for the state board exam math sequence. Almost everyone else's immediate response suggests that this principle refers to mainstreaming, which is designed to equalize the opportunities of those students with special needs. However, tracking and mainstreaming, the two strategies that the staff suggest for implementing this principle, are based on quite different assumptions about how teaching and learning take place.
The staff's comments reveal that they have additional, unresolved questions related to this principle. Several note that despite the hopes for equal opportunities for all students, individual faculty have very different standards and expectations for students. The math department indicate that they find following this principle to be an unrealistic goal, while another faculty member suggests that the principle contains contradictions which they have not yet addressed.
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4: Personalization
Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent. Efforts should be directed toward a goal that no teacher have direct responsibility for more than eighty students. To capitalize on this personalization, decisions about the details of the course of study, the use of students' and teachers' time, and the choice of teaching materials and specific pedagogies must be unreservedly placed in the hands of the principal and staff.
In terms of class load, several staff, noting that they have few students and small classes, believe that this principle is in place. Others have high class loadsupwards of ninety-eight students a dayand find it difficult to attend to the needs of all of them.
Beyond the course load issue, there are two distinct interpretations of this principle.
One group suggests that it means that teachers should get to know their students very well, both inside and outside of the classroom. Such intimate knowledge, they believe, is necessary for them to be able to help students make progress in class.
However, when you're talking personalization, you're not just talking about a friendly relationship, you're also talking about students and teachers confronting together what learning is and what it means for the individual. Are you going to make decisions as a learner that stretch you, and not take the easy way out on every occasion? I think if you have a good personal relationship with a kid, in some ways it makes it more difficult to confront the really tough issues.... Are you pushing yourself as hard as you should be as a learner?
This staff member suggests that personalization means that teachers need to be willing to argue with kids about the quality of the students' workthat teachers must push them to their true capacity. Teachers who define personalization in this way note that the advisory seminars help them to get to know their students better than before.
The second group defines this principle in terms of the shopping mall: "I'm not sure that this means any more than that you have some optionschoicesin classes, choices in assignments, choices in stuff to do after school." They explain that it means offering kids a variety of courses so that they can personalize the direction of their own education. This group believes that the school already offers this kind of program to the students.
These two interpretations are markedly different. One suggests that personalization means a wide variety of course options for students. The other suggests that teachers have a central responsibility to engage kids in a kind of critical friendshipnot the friendship of the treaties described in Shopping Mall High School (Powell et. al, 1985)but the tough kind that will enable students to confront and move beyond difficult learning problems.
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5: Student-as-Worker
The governing practical metaphor of the school should be student-as-worker, rather than the familiar metaphor of teacher-as-deliverer-of-instructional services. Accordingly, a prominent pedagogy will be coaching, to provoke students to learn how to learn and thus to teach themselves.
One teacher, a coach, suggests that this principle means that "you don't leave kids to rot behind a desk for twelve years":
Kids are active, involved and challengeddoing things not to prepare them for the real world but to engage them in the real world. The unfortunate part about the metaphor is that most coaches are not democratic. Joe Paterno titled his book
My Way for a reason. There was a big controversy a year ago between Elway and Dan Reeves. Elway, the quarterback, wanted more authority to call the plays and he almost left Denver over that issue. Winning coaches do not let kids do very much of the thinking. And I don't mean just sports coaches. Drama coaches, music coaches, too. I've coached for years, and believe me, most coaches aren't very democratic teachers.
Others concur with his perspective:
I'm saying that a coach is probably the most dictatorial position of all. As a coach I tell them, "You do this and this and this. You put your left foot right here when I tell you, and you don't do it any other way." And they don't do anything I don't tell them to do. Now, the Coalition has turned that around so that the coach stands there and lets the kids do it. But coaches don't do that because kids can't do it by themselves.
I had some teachers who were very brilliant, and I would sit there and listen to them talk about something and they would explain things in such beautiful ways and make it interesting, and I question whether we should take that out of the classroom. It sounds to me like kids should be sitting around in groups and the teachers aren't supposed to be in charge really.
The other thing is that in between games, coaches and kids drill over and over and over again. It's just plain ordinary work. The kids hate it. Nobody cheers. It's boring. And that is what we do in class. We drill. Nobody mentions running those 220s day after day after day, and nobody likes doing problems over and over and over, but that's what makes you good.
In my math class this morning I had them working in groups. They were getting a lot, but some of the things they were screwing up because they just didn't bother to follow the pattern or model I had on the sheet. They skipped a whole bunch of steps. The problem with this discovery thing is that it takes an awfully long time, and sometimes they discover something that will lead them in the wrong direction.
The second group believes that the metaphor is a good, but difficult, one. One teacher stated,
I do think, as much as possible, we should help the kids get the information by doing it themselves, whether that means reading it and trying to figure out what it says or teaching other kids. They should be setting up receptions like the kids are doing for the visitors from France. They should be in the play. They should be doing all the things they can possibly do because they learn a tremendous amount from doing different types of things.
When the principal says that the group has not yet reached any agreement on what legitimate work is, others add their views about work:
Vice principal: Student-as-worker is a good concepta great principle, but we're missing the boat on that one here. Kids are getting the message that they don't have to work very hard. Kids are living in a society that says "Do as little as you can." Our kids do not work as hard as they could and should, and our teachers get frustrated as hell over that.
A teacher: I could easily give them a little lecture on a story which would help them understand it more easily, or I could give it to them to figure out in groups, to be able to summarize it. It takes a lot more time, but I think students learn a great deal more because then they can attack other tasks and they develop skills that transfer.
Another teacher: I think we're at the stage where a lot of people have tried this and have said, "Ooooh, this is hard." We've run up against this in several of our interdisciplinary assignments. When you say to the kids, "Here's what you're going to do, here's the performance you're going to give, here's who your audience is, here's what the benchmarks are along the way, here's what I can do to support you, here's what you have to do on your own" and you set the kids free, one of a couple of things happens. You find kids who don't know how to do things like read an article. Then you find kids who learn more thoroughly. You get the opportunity to interact with kids in ways that we usually don't when we're dishing out the assignments and they are dishing them back in. I happened to be working regularly with one student who has learning disabilities. I realized just by sitting and watching him work, while I prompted him to think about things, how much difficulty he had trying to make sense of the written material he was using.
Three understandings emerge from the consideration of this principle. One group suggests that the metaphor is inept: that coaches are dictatorial and that kids cannot do the work without a dictatorial coach. Others think the principle does not convey what they believe the author intended, and that as a result it is either misinterpreted or rejected. Another group accepts that the metaphor means that students need to be actively engaged in their own learning. This group also suggests, however, that the actual doing is more difficult than one might imagine.
Again, the faculty's multiple interpretations of the principle reveal their own beliefs about the professional responsibilities of teachers and the capabilities of students.
The principal's observation that the staff does not share a common understanding about what constitutes legitimate work is revealing. In classrooms where students have to be told and shown what to do each step of the way, it would seem that the work they are given would be simpler than work given in other classes and that the teacher's responsibility would be to remain at the center of teaching and learning. In classrooms where teachers define the metaphor differently, work, as well as the teacher's role, takes on a different meaning. These two interpretations suggest very different philosophies about how learning takes place.
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6: Graduation by Exhibition
Students entering secondary school studies are those who can show competence in language and elementary mathematics. Students of traditional high school age but not yet at appropriate levels of competence to enter secondary school studies will be provided intensive remedial work to assist them quickly to meet these standards. The diploma should be awarded upon a successful final demonstration of mastery for graduationan "Exhibition." This Exhibition by the student of his or her grasp of the central skills and knowledge of the school's program may be jointly administered by the faculty and higher authorities. As the diploma is awarded when earned, the school's program proceeds with no strict age grading and with no system of "credits earned" by "time spent" in class. The emphasis is on the students' demonstration that they can do important things.
Many teachers in the school have been asking students to do Exhibitions in their individual classes. The term when used in this context generally means oral presentations given at the end of a unit. Math students did Exhibitions in the pre-calculus class. Other math students developed video tapes to teach math concepts. Students in ninth-grade English and social studies do Exhibitions at the end of the unit on China and South Africa. Some of these experiments have been positive experiences for staff and students, but they do take time.
However, when some of the faculty consider the term as it is couched in this principlea demonstration on which the diploma should be awardedthey feel less certain about it.
Some staff believe that they have been doing Exhibitions right along in their own classes: in the technology class the kids are developing prototypes for cars, the language students pre- sent a fashion show, in music the kids have performances, in art they have Exhibitions, and a math teacher notes that the state board exam is their Exhibition.
Another group is struggling with the idea. They point out that no one knows if Exhibitions work yetthat it's still just an idea with no verification.
I don't know why graduation should be based on one Exhibition. I don't know how great an Exhibition would have to be to convince me that somebody was ready to graduate. I think an Exhibition is a good way to show what you've learned in a somewhat limited area, such as playing an instrument in music or doing a painting or designing an experiment in science.
Varying uses of the term Exhibition
make discussion difficult. Many of the faculty are interested in Exhibitions as end-of-unit assessments but uncomfortable with them as a means by which to grant diplomas. Others think the tests, oral presentations, and essays which students have always been required to do are Exhibitions, so no further consideration is necessary; while still others note that they have not really talked about the issue. A more clearly drawn distinction between end-of-unit assessments and graduation requirements might prove helpful. Using two terms,
Exhibitions and performances, to clarify the distinction might be useful.
The central questions with which the staff must grapple are whether they believe performance assessment tells them more than traditional assessment does about what students know and can do, and whether they want to revise their graduation requirements and assessment method to enable students to learn the skills necessary for producing work that can be evaluated by performance assessment.
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7: Tone of Decency
The tone of the school should
explicitly and self-consciously
stress values of unanxious expectation ("I won't threaten you but I expect much of you"), of trust (until abused), and of decency (the values of fairness, generosity, and tolerance). Incentives appropriate to the school's particular students and teachers should be emphasized, and parents should be treated as essential collaborators.
Many staff feel that the values described in this principle are already in place and that they were described in the first snapshot. Teachers and students seem to care about each other; everyone is on the same side. The principal and several teachers push this idea a little further:
I think we're moving into some new territory in terms of empowerment with the Congress [the student-faculty decision-making body] and the Fairness Committee. The kids are asking questions, and while I think they are unbelievably respectful, some teachers are really nervous. There is a kind of smoldering lack of ease about these new relationships. We're trying to work through them in advisory seminars and in Congress. This has traditionally been a very polite place, so it's hard to confront issues like fairness.
I don't think the kids get a lot of feedback from test scores or homework. I've been trying to set up the writing program so that kids get a lot of feedback. It's hard to look at someone with whom you're trying to build trust and say, "I just didn't get anything from this paper." The bottom line is that relationships just simply can't always be friendly. They have to be based on what will move us all forward as learners and as a community.
Several teachers mention that they think that anxiety is a good thing:
I think we have to fine-tune the anxiety because on the one hand, it's a negative word, and yet, there's got to be some way to get at the kids who are laid back. They're kind of like Paul Simon's song, "Slip Slidin' Away." There has to be a certain element of anxiety.
These kids, I'm serious, have no anxiety about not doing their work. I think they get away with a lot. And I think expectations need to be clear for them. We need more of the discipline of caring. They need to know what the consequences are.
Several other teachers mention that in order for this principle to work, the parents need to be involved.
I've come 360 degrees around on this one. I think the parents are left out too much now. I don't care who the parent isdrunken, educated, not educated. They have to be part of the process because the kids can't leave here and go home without doing some of their work at home. The really good students are kids who spend hours each night. That's part of their job. They wouldn't think about postponing it. Parents can help us there.
Again, interpretations among the staff are varied and tend to address parts of the principle: fairness, trust, anxiety, or parental involvement. Addres-sing the parts, as opposed to the whole principle, underlines the complexity of the principle. The fact that no one mentions expectations would also suggest that there may not be common agreement about what expectations for students should be. Taken together, the two words,
unanxious expectations, suggest something different from the staff's interpretation of making sure that the kids experience the consequences of not doing their work.
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8: Teacher-as -Generalist
The principal and teachers should perceive themselves as generalists first (teachers and scholars in general education) and specialists second (experts in but one particular discipline). Staff should expect multiple obligations (teacher-counselor-manager)
and a sense of commitment to the entire school.
The faculty have two general responses to this principle.
One group feels that the staff are really doing this now, but their examples vary quite dramatically. The special education staff no longer have their own classrooms. They go to classes with their students and help wherever help is needed. They work much more closely than before with other teachers.
One of the math teachers indicates that he follows this principle by knowing what other teachers are doing so he can adjust the work load in his discipline. Still others think that teachers are enacting this principle because they are now conducting advisory seminars, working with Congress, helping with the junior class dinner dance, and the like. Another teacher thinks it means knowing the students outside the classroom; he appreciates what his coaching responsibilities have taught him about the kids.
Another group feels uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. One notes that, outside of special education, the staff have not even begun to look at using resources such as time, people, and money differently. Even in the interdisciplinary team everyone is still discipline-centered. Others feel competent to teach some other subjects but wonder whether the students would be cheated if a teacher, untrained in math, had to teach math, for instance. Another teacher says that she frankly likes her discipline better than she likes kids, at this point in her career, but that she is willing to try working collaboratively with other teachers.
Some of the teachers who suggest that they are already fulfilling this principle's criteria are describing newly wrought changes. Others believe that common practices, in place for many years, show that this principle is already in place. Are these groups' interpretations of the principle similar? Do these responses reflect different beliefs and attitudes?
Other teachers feel that the principle suggests that they take on responsibilities which would not support student learning. How might the staff interpret this principle if it were to mean increased support for students' learning?
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9: Budget
Ultimate administrative and budget targets should include, in addition to total student loads per teacher of eighty or fewer pupils, substantial time for collective planning by teachers, competitive salaries for staff, and an ultimate per-pupil cost not to exceed that at traditional schools by more than 10 percent.
To accomplish this, administrative plans may have to show the phased reduction or elimination of some services now provided students in many traditional comprehensive secondary schools.
The faculty responded quite generally to this principle. Most feel that they have remarkably low class loads. Those who do not, feel the pressure. On the other hand, everyone cried out for more time to work together, to plan, and to think things through.
What we need now is time to digest and talk among ourselves and try to see where we are and where we think we're going. In addition, there are nitty-gritty things that we need to attend tosuch as getting kids to do the work they need to do.
Teachers acknowledge that the principal has been terrific at giving them time if they needed ita day here or there to establish a new thrust or to problem-solve. An educational consultant who worked with the staff fairly regularly was much appreciated, also. But the teachers who are trying to develop new unitslike the moon-tracking unit (in which students kept daily measurements of the position of the moon), the weather unit, the Holocaust unit, the apartheid unitand teachers who are trying new strategies, such as Socratic seminars, alternative assessment, advisory seminars, and cooperative learning on biomes, need regular time to work with colleagues and to think things through. There was general consensus that they are limited in what they can do by the amount of time they have to work things out.
One of the administrators noted that just as the teachers need more planning time, the administrators need more time tooto think things through, to check for coherence, and to troubleshoot. The amount of time they spend in planning for change helps to ensure that change moves smoothlythat it is less difficult, bumpy, and disconcerting for teachers.
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An Overview of the Interpretations
Overall, the discussion of the nine Common Principles reveals that despite the fact that the staff agreed to the principles when they joined the Coalition, they have, not surprisingly, very different interpretations of them. Many comments suggest that the staff have not begun to look at a number of the ideas in the principles and that there is some confusion about what this or that principle means.
It is not so much an issue of whether the staff have common definitions, which they clearly do not, or whether they disagree over them, but that they have multiple, private interpretations, many of which center on a part or a phrase of a principle rather than on the whole.
It is also true that only a portion of the staff interpret the principles as if they were designed to provoke investigative discussion about better possibilities for student learning. Others interpret them as if they were designed to engage faculties in a debate about the defensibility of their common practices.
Furthermore, the principles are interrelated and synergistic. In our interviews, unfortunately, we did not ask people to consider them as a whole, and so whether the staff accept only a few of them or the principles as a whole remains to be seen.
Now that the staff have the information concerning their interpretations and reactions to the nine Common Principles, the question is, what to do about it or with it? The ideas were designed to provide members of the Coalition with a kind of scrim, to borrow a theater terma light, unobtrusive backdrop which adds depth, clarity, and purpose to the stage. In schools, our stage is the classroom, where teachers refine their craft, look repeatedly and relentlessly for more powerful ways to engage students in the gathering, the practicing, and finally, the performing of new knowledge, skills, and understanding.
The principles were designed to help people examine traditional practices with a fresh eye and to help them consider when these practices are best used, when discarded, and when refined. They do not provide much help when staff dismiss them as inappropriate. They do not help much either when people suggest that they have already been following them.
An industrial arts teacher from another school shared his insights with us in this regard. For years, because he had a hands-on class, he thought he was "doing it," while the rest of his school considered change. After some considerable time, he came to a kind of personal revelationthat he had not been doing any more than giving the students skill-and-drill kinds of activities. For years, the kids had to do nothing more than follow his directions just like in any other class, even though that meant using a band saw or a lathe. He felt a little sheepish but began looking for ways to allow the students to use what they were learning with their own, fresh applications and to provide them with real problems which needed solving.
Instead of demonstrating step-by-step how they might repair a small engine, he solicited engines from around the community which were destined for the junk heap, unless the kids could fix them. Working in groups, they got engines and were told to have a go at it.
The teacher was still called on to demonstrate. He still gave his favorite lecture on small machines, but it was in the context of a problem in which the kids were interestedand some of the machines were returned fixed!
This is not to say that some people in this Essential school are not "doing it" alreadybecause they are. It is just to suggest that the infamous phrase "we already do that" often enables people to pass over a complex idea with a quick and shallow glance.
A principal of another Essential school said recently,
The deeper we get into our understanding of the nine Common Principles, the more work we have to do. I just realized that we have not, as a staff, ever talked about what it means for kids to use their minds well. And every year, we think we're doing it already!
Clearly, the trick for the staff is to figure out how to use these ideas in a way that is helpful, in a way that does not conjure up images of a vehement, new religious sect or of a traveling educational road show that passes through, leaving little evidence of substance. Change is very difficulteven exhausting. It would be great if the ideas provided some sustenance to those involved in this challenging, exhausting endeavor.
[Return to Table of Contents]
The Oak Hill research team was headed by CES senior researcher Patricia A. Wasley, author of Teachers Who Lead: The Rhetoric of Reform and the Realities of Practice (l991)
and Stirring the Chalkdust: Tales of Teachers Changing Classroom Practice
(l994). The other members of the Oak Hill team were Donna Hughes, a former teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent, currently an educational consultant and author living in Arizona; and Barbara Powell, Ed.D., a former teacher and principal, currently an educational researcher and consultant living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Code: OH2a
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This resource last updated: June 10, 2002
Database Information:
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Publication Year: 1992
Publisher: CES National
School Level: High
Focus Area: Leadership
STRAND: Leadership: the change process
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