Practice Into Theory: Teachers Coaching Teachers

Quotes: Problems

How can mathematics (other than statistics and probability) be incorporated into interdisciplinary work? Must math be tied to --and driven by --the science curriculum? If so, does placement in the science curriculum depend upon competence in math?

Bob Shanner, dean and math teacher
Whitfield School
St. Louis, MO

We are running into scheduling problems because of interdisciplinary classes; students and staff are having difficulties planning our day.

Bruce Frana and Bill Graham, science and social studies teachers
Metro High School
Cedar Rapids, IA

How can we achieve performance-based assessment graduation requirements that is valid enough to defend the state against lawsuits?

Janet Carter, Executive
Director, Bruner Foundation,
New York, NY

When there are successful programs that require double or triple periods --child care, print shop, performing arts --what steps are required to insure that these programs are not jeopardized?

Robert Zarfoss, principal,
William Penn High School,
York, Pennsylvania

Our small, traditional community sometimes objects to the selection of materials as well as the changes in curriculum that Re:Learning brings to the classroom. Also, we do not feel that the current teacher evaluation process is suitable for appraising Re:Learning teachers.

James Floyd, principal,
Perryville High School,
Perryville, Arkansas

How do we get the staff to focus on important, accomplishable aspects of Essential school principles rather than their money aspects? How do we define "using the mind well" to teachers who have been doing things the same way for 10 or 20 years?

Terri Foy, Language Arts department chair
Spurgeon Intermediate School
Santa Ana, California

Horace's Mailbox

To the Editor:

I just read the June and September copies of HORACE, and I congratulate you for such honest, believable portraits of Essential schools, and for your emphasis on personalization. I have read a few of the essays Pat Wasley has written on the struggles teachers go through as they and their schools change; like those essays, your reports also reflect approval and doubt, success and failure, enthusiasm and resistance. How refreshing this is; how enormously helpful, too, I have to think, in reaching teachers and administrators (and those who are considering grants to Re:Learning efforts) who are looking into the nature of Re:Learning schools. By not overselling the product you make a powerful case that something good if imperfect (and shouldn't it be? will any teacher believe it if nine principles suddenly transform schools into the Garden of Eden?) is happening in these Essential schools. The lack of defensiveness, the willingness to play the objective reporter --as much as possible --without judging or "correcting the criticisms --is a pleasure.

The attention on how schools can be personal, how a faculty can set up new ways of knowing all students on an individual basis, speaks so well to the human dilemma of teaching in a large public school. I have taught in two boarding schools and in a fairly large public school. Your issue on advisory groups offers some terrific examples of how those large public schools can take what is often most critical in making private schools different and better places for many students to learn. Some people may wonder why the Coalition would focus on it --aren't there more IMPORTANT educational issues that matter? But of course, as the Coalition understands, this kind of personalization is at the heart of better schools. Bravo.

Peter G. Huidekoper
Program Officer, Gates Foundation
Denver, Colorado

Rethinking the Curriculum: It messes things up - but that's what it's supposed to do

What is "rethinking the curriculum"? this group asked itself, struggling with the process of defining its problem. Is what to teach the issue, or HOW to teach it? How do differing ability levels, areas of expertise, and teacher styles affect the rethinking process? Once you're under way, how is a new curriculum best conveyed to others?

Some of the challenges that immediately arose were these:

• Modifying the curriculum to reflect connections between disciplines.
• Keeping what works in the current curriculum as it is improved; not losing foundation skills, but adding what's missing.
• Studying how kids learn in light of current views of intelligence, and shifting from acquiring knowledge itself to learning how to USE knowledge.
• Engaging people in and out of school with the rethinking of the curriculum, and using their expectations and support as one clearly defines the skills, standards, and activities desired for various levels.
• Coming up with content that will connect those skills, standards, and activities with the specific school's situation, not dictated by national tests, textbooks, or state requirements. A good curriculum reflects the strengths of its teachers, the cultural and social makeup of its community, the rhythms of the year or the day, what individual students find meaningful and interesting.
• Figuring out how to assess what students have learned based on the skills, standards, and activities they've been taught --shifting from an answer-oriented curriculum to a question-centered approach.
• Committing the time and resources to rethink the curriculum in a way that involves teachers and deals with their fears of change.

As the group wrestled with their definition, a striking number of other angles into the problem arose --so much so that the group resorted to drawing pictures of what happens when one sets out to rethink the curriculum. At the center of one of these concentric graphs was the phrase "meaningful learning," surrounded by a field defining what the phrase means, which was in turn encompassed by a circle describing how it might happen. (The correctly formatted version of this diagram appears in the published version of this issue.)

MEANINGFUL LEARNING:

What

• Uses the mind well in different circumstances
• Promotes lifelong skills
• Teaches the child to make connections
• Fits the student into a tradition of learning and analysis
• Helps the student understand the world and its content

How

• Use teacher strengths
• Assess it; know whether or how you succeeded
• Address different abilities
• Set goals; know what you're after
• Trust yourself; don't wait for "answers"
• Get your message out so fears are overcome
• Make the curriculum flow; avoid repetition
• Give enough time and money to it

What kinds of problems arise when all this starts happening? Fear of change is a big one for teachers, the group agreed. Among other things, they worry about giving up a straight textbook approach, learning how to lead a good discussion, and knowing whether the students are actually learning from the new ways. Certain practical steps will help:

• Decide what a student needs by the end of school
• Decide what a student needs by each level, and how those levels can connect for continuity
• Write interdisciplinary curriculum units around an "essential question"
• Write units that will lead to authentic performances
• Design ways to tell if the curriculum is actually working, and whether more desirable "qualities of mind" are resulting
• Allow enough time to work on the curriculum
• Accommodate the autonomy and individual styles of teachers

A good curriculum is not inflexible, one study group in this area concluded; it should be able accommodate specific situations with a degree of spontaneity. In one community with a large proportion of Zuni Indians, for instance, students would speak Zuni at home and in the hallways but be taught and tested in English. Their scores on standard measures label them slower academically than students in other schools and districts, but a rethinking of the curriculum could challenge this assumption --measuring their language skills in Zuni, for instance, or using their own culture's ways of teaching via apprenticeship rather than memorization, they might be assessed entirely differently. To reach these students and help them succeed in an Anglo system may take a new orientation on the part of their school district. Exhibitions might replace conventional tests, and competency tests might be orally administered with directions given in Zuni.

Another group examined in detail what would happen if a school set about developing interdisciplinary courses around an essential question. One strategy was to find the question's connections with the various disciplines, then insist on authentic --not contrived --ways to explore the question both within each discipline and among several. How would this affect various constituencies within the school system?

For students, the group predicted, linking the disciplines in this way should result in more coherence, and probably in more satisfaction and thought, as they stay with a subject longer and see it from different perspectives. They would place more value on content as they see it help to create a meaningful context for the question they are following. But the approach could also create stress for students used to a more formal and predictable --and anonymous --structure. Like teachers, they may be afraid they're not learning the "right" thing.

Parents too are used to defining a "right" curriculum, based on what they themselves had to do in school, and often expressed as "the basics." Basing a curriculum on questions may mean a kind of questioning of intellectual authority by their kids, which can threaten parents. On the other hand, cross-disciplinary projects often call on parental contributions, linking them to their children's learning in specific and helpful ways; and they may see their kids happier and more engaged at school.

Partly because of that very engagement, teachers may have more fun in the new curriculum as they try new things with the collaboration and support of other staff. But their new responsibility to work together can consume time and provoke anxiety as well; continually having to create the new curriculum means that teachers are often just one step ahead of the game in class preparations.

Building administrators inevitably take much of the flak if such strains arise; but they also benefit from a more lively tone to the school and a more engaged teaching staff. The same is true of the central office, which must understand what's going on so as to negotiate any necessary waivers from state authorities. The school board, too, must understand the system to explain it to voters; they have a predictable fear that the new ways will hurt students more than help them.

The business community, which has long been asking for students who can actively solve problems, must be persuaded that an interdisciplinary curriculum addresses that need. But if grants from businesses are partially supporting school reform, there could be pressure to do things their way; what if a major donor wants proof of results through standardized testing?

Similar pressures can show up at the state level, where the very regulations once written by the board of education are being questioned by the new curriculum. The equity of the new system may be challenged, too, by those who equate a uniform curriculum with justice. Still, certain states like to be thought of as "progressive" in education, and the corporate grant money that can accompany change. For legislators, too, educational reform is good politics -- but they need more money than they have, they want results fast, and they ask for foolproof measures of improvement.

What is the overall effect of the new curriculum on the organizational structure? "It messes it up," this group succinctly noted; and it requires more money as well. "We will have to play in two worlds for a while," they observed -- adopting a new approach, at the same time winning at the old game by demonstrating success through conventional measures. "We may not approve of tests, but we will have to use them or live with them," they concluded, "while we're in that transitional never-never land."

Assessment and Exhibitions: Do we rearrange the furniture we've got, or get new furniture instead?

One group began by naming a broad problem related to the topic of exhibitions: How do you figure out what you want kids to know and be able to do? And how do you tailor your school to suit such outcomes? The key dimensions of that problem, participants decided, were these:

• THE AUTHORITY PROBLEM. What role does each of the following parties play in formulating a school's goals (the first part of the problem), and in ensuring the vigorous and structurally embedded pursuit of them (the second part)? Principal? Departments? Community, including the business community? Parents? State-level authority? District-level authority? University, including local institutions and the larger research-and-development community? Teachers? Students?

• THE IMPACT PROBLEM. Here the group took a look especially at the second part of their problem --what happens once goals have been established? What must be changed to better aim the school toward the achievement of these goals? They came up with a host of candidates: scheduling, course design, the budget, teachers' habits, teachers' skills, teachers' sense of the range of their own competence, teachers' autonomy (especially in the area of standard setting and assessment), transcripts, school-level transitions, the community's sense of what the school is and of how it functions, graduation rate and timing, internal structures like departments.

• THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM. How much should the establishment and pursuit of outcome-based goals in an Essential school be affected by the traditional division of knowledge into subject fields? How much should goals and structures deliberately ignore traditional subject boundaries? A related but somewhat different question: how discipline-bound should the outcome goals and structures of an Essential school be, and how interdisciplinary? How much account should the high school take of the ways in which knowledge is traditionally organized in higher education? Looking in another direction, how much should the high school consult with middle and elementary schools in the formulation of goals and standards and methods? Granted that schools ought to focus first and principally on intellectual goals, how much do intellectual goals depend upon social ones? Another way to ask this question: how much is cognitive change dependent upon social interaction? And what are the implications for instruction in this dependence? How much of what we want for kids is already known, and how much must still be discovered? Another way to ask this question: how much should our goal-setting be a matter of rearranging the furniture we've now got, and how much a matter of getting new furniture?

• THE STANDARDS PROBLEM. How should a school set standards? How can it tune its standards to workplace and other community expectations? How much should standards vary over time and circumstance? How leveled should standards be in terms of developmental appropriateness and the nature of the challenges attempted? How can a school make sure its standards are pegged to the optimum rather than the minimum? How can a school tie graduation to the achievement of standards? Ho w can a school ensure that its standards are applied equitably across classrooms, subjects, experiences? How much should assessment operate coldly on the basis of standards alone, and how much should it take account of contextual things (how hard the kid worked, how much progress she made, how much the experience mattered to her, how much an encouraging word now will push her forward, etc.)? How can schools ensure honest and thorough assessment of individuals when the assessment process may involve public and cooperative activity?

• THE EQUITY PROBLEM. How can we ensure that the processes we imagine --setting outcome goals, assessing kids in these terms, orienting the structures and culture of the school to this end --will be equitable? How do we know that they will treat kids equitably across the following dimensions: learning style (or dominant intelligence), gender, ability/disability, native language, economic and other family circumstances, developmental issues, learning preparedness?

• THE METHODS OR TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM.Exhibitions can be more process-oriented, as in portfolio schemes, or more project-oriented, as in schemes that emphasize cumulative or integrative senior experiences and recitals --more like Walden III's "rite of passage experience" (ROPE), or like their nineteenth-century namesakes. What's the right mix of these two (soft) technologies? Meanwhile, what's the proper role of (hard) information technology in the maintenance and achievement of standards, and in the management of information related to assessment? How much do kids' and teachers' information needs shift when the school begins to center its work on the achievement of specified outcomes? How can a school ensure equitable access to learning opportunities when these opportunities are dependent upon technology?

• THE LEDGER PROBLEM. Schools are currently evaluated, and evaluate themselves, by means of what we called ledger entries: drop-out figures, standardized test scores, average daily attendance, number of students taking advanced placement courses, college acceptance rate, etc. This habit we have of ledger-like school evaluation can deeply affect how a school assesses its kids, and also how it structures itself. Solving the larger problem we've set ourselves requires a shift from the ledger method of school evaluation to a more dynamic method. What should be the new governing metaphor of school evaluation? Is graph better than ledger? Is portrait better than graph ? Is portfolio better than portrait? What are the practical consequences of each?

The group then set about identifying strategies for addressing these problems, and came up with these:

• BE A VOID SEEKER. Seize every opportunity to fill a void --with ideas, provocations, and experiments in orienting the school to good outcomes, and the pursuit of them.

• BUILD CONSTITUENCIES FOR PLANNING BACKWARDS --either directly or with flanking maneuvers. So, maybe the faculty is lukewarm now, but what do parents think? Maybe the superintendent has doubts, but what about the business community?

• COLLECT LOTS OF IMAGES AND EXAMPLES OF WHAT YOU'RE AFTER --images of excellence, lists of outcomes, examples of standard-setting mechanisms, etc. Show them around to anyone who's interested; promote them.

• FOCUS ON THE KIDS whenever you're faced with philosophical, political, or any other kind of objection. Say, "But what do we want for the kids?"

• REMEMBER THAT THERE ARE MANY ROADS TO SUCCESS --many possible models, many possible reconfigurations of projects already in place (choice options, magnet programs, etc.). Take stock, then move forward using whatever you find.

• SEEK ASSESSMENT PARTNERS both inside and outside ordinary authority structures. Remember that there are many legitimate stakeholders in this work, and most of them want to help: district supervisors, state department people, local scholars, parents, the business community, etc.

• FACED WITH AN EQUITY ISSUE, FORCE IT OPEN --ask people to examine all kids' best interests. Ask what equity means, what it entails, when it is most in evidence. Ask what the difference may be between an equity based on uniform deprivation, and one based on uniform excellence.

• ASK PEOPLE CONTINUALLY TO FOCUS ON THE FUTURE: what the school will be like in two years, what the sixth graders will know when they graduate, what the workplace will demand in the year 2010, where mathematics education is heading, what kids will remember about American history a year after they've taken the course.

• STRIVE TO STRIKE BALANCES. Avoid dichotomous choices --between homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping, authentic and ordinary assessment, a college-bound curriculum and a non-college-bound curriculum. All these apparently dichotomous options have their legitimate time and place, and their way of mixing well with each other.

• APPROACH THE PROBLEM AS A MATTER REQUIRING NEGOTIATION, which is to say a matter requiring the identification of apparently competing interests. The point is "to get to yes" --to get resolution by means of satisfying key interests (as opposed to giving people what they say they want).

• COMBINE EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT. Assess the activity before you assess the performance. Find ways to make the school a center of inquiry, spending as much energy assessing itself as it does assessing its kids.

• EXPLORE AND INVENT METHODS THAT COMBINE GROUP ASSESSMENT WITH INDIVIDUAL ASSESSMENT --that provide individual accountability without sacrificing authentic experience in collaborative work and study.

• REMEMBER THAT THE PROBLEM ITSELF IS A SYSTEMIC ONE --one that touches many facets of school life. So, it must be approached systemically. One good tool for understanding systemic change is an analytical framework devised by Lee Bolman and Terry Deal. It assumes that all elements of school life take on a somewhat different meaning when viewed within each of four perceptual frames: the structural frame, the political frame, the human relations frame, and the symbolic frame. So, for example, an exhibition within the structural frame represents a change from the ordinary accumulation of Carnegie units; within the political frame, it is a threat to parents' and kids' sense of how long high school is; within the human relations frame, it is a challenge to the school's habits of advising students; and within the symbolic frame, it is a ceremony and an endorsement of certain ways of knowing and presenting.

In another small group, participants wrestled with a particular aspect of the exhibitions problem: How does one arrive at a school-wide consensus on learner outcomes across the disciplines for promotion or graduation? They came up with four strategies:

• Have faculty in every department develop lists of essential skills, content, and attitudes about learning. Keep the lists short, focusing on essentials. Invite students input through class discussions or workshops. Then get the departments together to review and share their lists, working it into one master list.

• Bring in local professionals or university-level faculty from different fields to talk about what they're looking for in high school graduates.

• Draw on material from national associations of teachers, like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics guidelines. Look at the guidelines developed by other Essential Schools where exhibitions are central: The ROPE course at Walden III, Central Park East's Senior Institute, Rochester's School Without Walls. (See Horace, Vol. 6, No. 3.)

Next, the group turned to the consequences of their strategies. How would they tend to affect various constituencies--teachers, students, parents? What short-term or long-term effects might they have on people, organizational structure, the budget?

Starting with the departments, they noted, would be inherently divisive; the process of making choices that leads from "Less is more" can be very threatening. Why not instead lessen the territoriality by meeting across departments from the start? Work in small groups to define five individual goals first, they suggested, then hammer them into five group goals, then into five faculty goals.

Over the long term, this group suggested, a school might aim to structure itself in houses or teams instead of by departments. This would have its effect on the organizational structure; it might lead to basing hiring decisions more on whether a teacher could be a generalist, and to rethinking the school's scheduling framework. It would also require money in the budget for staff development, as teachers are asked to think across disciplinary lines.

(Thanks to Joe McDonald of the Coalition staff for the comprehensive distillation of his group's work that makes up for the major section of the above discussion.)

Heterogeneous Grouping: It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it

Should students be grouped in classes by ability levels for academic reasons? Or should students of differing levels learn together in heterogeneous groups? How best to resolve this tension was the problem this group worried over.

To realize fully the implications of the problem, they noted, it was necessary to address its class origins. Because students of lower socio-economic backgrounds have long been offered educational programs designed to reflect their presumed lower abilities and ambitions, they have been restricted from the mainstream --to their own loss and that of society. Heterogeneous grouping is meant to do away with this stultifying social stratification; but it creates significant new problems.

Especially in its early stages, the group decided, heterogeneous grouping cannot merely mean pooling the student population in different ways. Once all students have access to a richer educational experience, schools must take other steps so that real learning results.

To begin, the group suggested, class size must be reduced so that the spectrum of all students' needs may be addressed. Teachers must have the time to get to know their students better, and to pay attention to the needs of more capable as well as slower students. Second, heterogeneous classes need to build in support structures for classroom work, such as:

• Permanent drop-in "labs" or tutorial centers where students can seek additional help outside of class from teachers or advanced students. (Corporate grants can be sought to start up such programs.)
• Special ed teachers assigned to certain classes on a regular basis to help students as appropriate.
• Aides, or teaching machines like computers, in larger classrooms.

Of key importance is developing evaluation techniques based on student performance on specific academic criteria. Students must show they can master fundamental concepts in a particular discipline, the group asserted, but they will obviously not all master them at the same level. For this reason, an examination of "general knowledge," while relevant, should not be the only criterion for assessment; in a heterogeneous class, students' demonstrations of their conceptual mastery is also desirable. Some in the group argued for assessment based also on teachers' observations of emerging leadership skills, increased attention in class, and such less easily quantified matters.

Teachers will need more time to develop and try out new strategies and methods for heterogeneous classes. But most important, the group noted, the concept of student as worker and teacher as coach must be employed in the heterogeneous classroom. If students and teachers interact using this approach, many of the pressing problems of differing ability levels can turn into actual assets, through peer tutoring and increased responsibility for individual research.

Still, many teachers spoke of their frustration with "forced" heterogeneous grouping, and especially of the burdens that it places on more capable students. "How am I supposed to meet the needs of students," asked one teacher despairingly, "when they are so diverse in academic ability, social and physical maturity, emotional stability, ethnic background, and socioeconomic status?" Ninety percent of his energy is focused on ten percent of the kids, said one inner-city teacher. And the more skilled kids themselves complain, others noted, when they perceive that they are being used as classroom caretakers.

A teacher from a fairly academic high school with a high percentage of students going on to higher education agreed that students, parents, and teachers were opposed to changing the system in a school they deemed successful already. The teachers, he said, taught to the state Regents exams, and the students were tracked accordingly.

A physics teacher in an Essential school presented his version of the dilemma: The wide range of abilities and interests in his class, he said, imposed a frustrating level of mediocrity that he did not know how to deal with. Gifted students became bored, students with special needs or learning disabilities ended up failing, and he was unsure that the grades he gave reflected what a student "really knows."

What strategies might work for this class? The group suggested:

• Eliminating textbooks and substituting a series of assignments that kids could complete at their own pace.
• Tracking the grading system within the class so that students choose different levels of challenge they will attempt to master, and receive a grade that indicates the level they chose.
• Giving slower students an "incomplete" rather than a failing grade, and allowing them to work toward mastery for another term.
• Dividing whole-year courses into half-year segments, to better keep track of who's having trouble before it's too late.

Reflecting student mastery as suggested here would require a different kind of transcript, the group noted. Teachers must be willing to shift their approach more toward coaching, and to break the curriculum down into sequential increments. Assessment methods, homework, and classroom work must be revised to include "challenge" sections for students who work at higher levels. Ideally, gifted students could work more independently, leaving the teacher time to coach those who need more time and help.

Clearly helping out this teacher would involve changes in attitude and habits all the way up the hierarchical ladder. It may be an important decision whether to deal with his problem as a bureaucratic one--requiring transcript changes, course definition shifts, and the like--or whether to focus on his immediate human frustration and how he might start to relieve it by changes in his classroom that he has the immediate power to make on his own. As it begins to work, perhaps, step by step the bureaucratic obstacles can be addressed.

Leadership: More than standing there and letting it happen

Who are the leaders in an Essential school, and what do we want from them? Can the conventional organizational system support this kind of leadership, or will it have to change? What's the difference between a leader and a manager? How do we go about identifying leaders for hiring and promotion, developing them from existing staff; and encouraging reluctant leaders to step forward or expand their horizons?

No matter how much they want to be empowered, the group declared, individuals will always tend to come back to a central person for support, direction, and someone to blame when things go wrong. A dilemma may arise if a school is moving from a wheel-like structure, with the spokes attached to a central leader, to a structure that allows for multiple leaders. For example, a teacher who is designated an Essential school "coordinator" may not have the defined role of a conventional administrator to fall back on. Finally, a good leader must manage her boundaries, welcoming input not only from the school's central structures but also from elsewhere in the system.

A leader must always ask herself, "Am I just standing there letting it happen, or am I really leading?" This last, the group suggested, depends on the leader getting all of her "publics" to move in a general direction. Those "publics" may be the principal and faculty, for example, or the school board, the legislature, or the parent organization; but whoever they are, the effective leader must answer the same questions:

• What kind of behavior do we want from this "public"?
• What promotes or inhibits the support and help of this group?
• What would help remove or reduce whatever inhibits this group's support?

As an example, the group looked at the principal and faculty, from whom they wanted behavior like this:

• full and open participation
• willingness to assume different and unique responsibilities
• an understanding of Essential school concepts
• willingness to work in groups and teams
• willingness to take risks and learn through mistakes
• enthusiasm, professionalism, commitment to quality work
• ability to relay Essential school concepts to students
• willingness to express unpopular views
• a sense of humor and collegiality

Specifically, they noted, the principal is a key person in whom such behavior is desirable. An "authentic principal," the group noted, is accountable and non- manipulative, focusing first on a person rather than on that person's role. If these qualities are present, trust results --among colleagues, between faculty and principal, and within the organization as a whole. If they are not present, one can expect active and passive resistance, and eventually withdrawal from the group's commitment to change.

Members of this group raised a number of specific problems and strategies surrounding questions of leadership, including:

• What happens when an Essential school is not committed to shared decisionmaking? Establish a council with an uncomplicated process, the group suggested, to make, fund, and carry out decisions arrived at by consensus. If teachers do not want this kind of responsibility, make sure what they do or say makes a difference, working with opinion leaders (begin with the principal) to solve problems.

• What if your leaders burn out, or lose their enthusiasm? Try breaking the task into manageable pieces, some in the group suggested. Give authentic and specific encouragement, preferably in writing and delivered in person. Define and model your expectations; offer management consulting on leadership styles, and clerical assistance. Share common experiences, and put pressure on the principal to offer stronger administrative commitments. If all else fails, "send them to Orlando in February," someone joked.

• How do you get an organization to support Essential school leaders? Directly bring up the issues in specific and concrete terms, the group strategized; then don't avoid conflicts, but resolve them. Share the knowledge and the decisionmaking with all the school's constituencies (community, school board, etc.), letting others lead as the situation warrants, and arranging workshops that they all can attend. Develop a strong communications plan for both internal and outside use.

Resistant Teachers As a Force for Change
"We have met the enemy and he is us"

The problem of resistance to Essential school ideas, this group decided, takes place on two levels: institutional and personal. On both levels, it arises out of the same sources:

• FEAR. What does "less is more" mean? What does being a generalist entail, and how will it interfere with the way I currently do my job?

• DISTRUST. Resistant staff may be self-reliant, successful, recognized as good teachers; and their resistance may provide useful feedback. They may distrust authority (even if it is site-based and teacher-run, and distrust other people pressuring them towards new styles of learning, heterogeneous grouping, or alterations in their schedule.

• TURF PROTECTION. On an institutional level, this may mean programs in competition with each other --a school within a school that gets preferential treatment, for example. Issues of power arise: who hires, who's on what team, who's telling whom to change?

• TIME ISSUES. At an institutional level, time may be a big objection --will there be time to guarantee the coverage of subjects that teachers feel they need, to prepare kids for standardized tests? On a personal level, time is a factor too --time for classroom planning or for all-faculty meetings is scarce; and on a larger level, it takes time to make change happen --everyone seems to want change all at once! Time issues can create resentment if only some teachers are getting extra planning time for Essential classes or teams.

What strategies could work to break through these problems? The group suggested several:

• Make people who feel left out feel unique instead. A home economics teacher, for instance, may be using exhibitions as an assessment measure already; ask her to share her evaluative techniques with the rest of the staff, or lead a discussion on how such methods might work in other disciplines.

• Break out of the usual patterns of socialization among teachers within the school, such as by sitting at lunch with resisting teachers, or arranging interdepartmental events.

• Invite vocal resisters to attend workshops at the school's expense. Solicit their criticism and take it seriously. The resistant faculty member can help cut through jargon and analyze problems if his criticisms are treated constructively. "We have met the enemy and he is us," quipped one group leader.

To explore this further, small groups took on specific problems at first the personal and then the institutional level. One group, for example, worried over how to address the problem of a teacher who resisted teaming. The strategies they suggested started with a personal conference with him, asking him about his concerns. A "shadow study" could be initiated, with the resistant teacher following a student through a typical day. Perhaps he could be invited as a visiting expert to address a class in another discipline on some subject they hold in common. Or he could be offered release time to plan for teaming, or to attend a conference at which he could gain new ideas.

So what effects would these strategies have on the resistant teacher and the rest of the school community? The group recognized that this problem has no surefire solution; "shadowing," for example, could work well or it could backfire. Students could get to see the teacher in a different environment, to view him as a learner like themselves and to gain from his new viewpoint on their subject matter. Other teachers could be inspired to try a shadow study themselves or they could be threatened by having their classes visited by another teacher. In any case, the atmosphere of the school begins to change when teachers start visiting each others' classes and sharing their expertise. On a personal level, everyone might start to know the resistant teacher better, and he may gain in self confidence and awareness of the possibilities of teaming. The shadow study could also demonstrate to the teacher a need for cross- disciplinary teaming.

The group considered the view that "resistance" is best thought of as a step or stage in the process of change --during which everyone can look at his or her own personal concerns about that change. The issue then becomes how to help everyone acknowledge their various concerns, and move on to thinking about how to carry out the program.

Another group worked on how to provide the time staff would need to work toward Essential School change during their regular working hours. Their strategies, they decided, could include:

• Scheduling four day-long planning sessions, without students at school, per year --preferably at the end of regular breaks such as Thanksgiving and winter vacations.
• Seeking support from community businesses such as ice rinks or movie theatres, who might schedule special programs for these days.
• Including team-building activities for staff as part of planning days.

At an organizational level, the group suggested, this move would shift the balance of power within the structure toward teachers. With sustained blocks of time to plan, they reasoned, teachers would not feel as though more work were being piled into their crowded days.

What financial implications does this kind of change have for the overall school organization? Some money might be saved on busing, but the cafeteria could lose money; and any consultants brought in for the planning sessions would cost extra. Whether personal days or conference days would be used up by these planning days was another area to be decided, they agreed.

At the state level, legislators would get the message that teachers need professional time for planning; many states, they noted, already support such policies. The move could increase the school's prestige and visibility with the state education department, making it more likely to get help in the future. And in the long term, teacher morale and student engagement should rise as new ideas make their way into the classroom.

Source: Horace. Volume 7, #2. Nov. 1990.
Publication Year: 1990
Publisher: CES National
Type: Horace Feature, Horace Sidebar
School Level: All
Issue: 7.2
Focus Area: School Design
STRAND: School Design: teacher collaboration & learning
Teacher Collaboration and Learning: Peer Coaching
The Change Process: Managing Change