Networks and Essential
Schools:
How Trust Advances Learning
Volume 13, Number 1
September, 1996
Sidebars:
Circles of Support:
The Context for Successful School
Restructuring
The Essential School
Network and How It Grew
Creating a Network
of Schools as Critical Friends:
The Fifty Schools Project
What Does a Critical
Friends Group Do?
Teachers Learning Along
a Continuum of Connections
Regional Centers: A
Larger Link, A Stronger Voice
Elements of a Successful
Network
Readings About Networks
Building mutual relationships that
encourage honest looks at teacher
practice and student work can profoundly
shift the culture of schooling.
Both inside schools and among them,
networks of teachers are creating
new ways to share and question their
work, learn from each other, and
hold themselves to higher standards.
To see a group of teachers sitting
around a table in silence at 8:15
on a school morning seems almost
oxymoronic, given the press and
pace of high school life. But for
hundreds of Essential School teachers
who have participated in professional
development through the Coalition,
the ritual of "Connections"
now represents a new way of starting
the day: quietly making space for
human contact among their colleagues
and speaking, when they are moved
to, of the emotional realities they
bring with them to work.
"It's not a discussion," says
Gene Thompson-Grove, who introduced
the practice when she began working
with the Coalition's Citibank Faculty
in 1990. "There's no need to
respond, or even to speak at all.
No one speaks twice, unless everyone
else who wishes to has spoken."
Not unlike a Quaker meeting, she
says, these fifteen quiet minutes
create bonds of community and authenticity
among those who habitually share
them. The same groups typically
end the day with a like period of
"Reflections," which often
includes a brief journal entry responding
to the day's work. And many teachers
have also brought the rituals into
their students' lives, starting
and ending class sessions with Connections
and Reflections.
Why bother? What does the way teachers
and students feel have to do with
the central goal of Essential schooling,
that students learn to use their
minds well? Everything, say the
growing number of educators who
argue that successful learning can
only take place when supported by
an entire culture-a culture where
it is safe to speak honestly of
one's beliefs and questions, doubts
and hopes and fears.
"What you believe about your
students and your colleagues does
directly affect the quality of student
work in your school," asserts Bob
McCarthy, the Coalition's interim
executive director. "Acting
as if a particular group of kids
can't do challenging work, for instance,
virtually guarantees that they won't.
If you don't trust other teachers
enough to open your classroom door
to them, you can't get their support
and feedback as you try new ways
to reach students. And if administrators
act as if teachers can't be trusted
to hold themselves accountable for
high quality work, they get a system
where that doesn't happen."
Whatever the issue-whether national
standards and testing; race, class,
and gender; or new structures like
charter schools-school people's
beliefs about others can have a
startling impact on both policy
and practice. If authentic relationships
built on trust and common concern
begin to drive what goes on in schools,
for example, small systems could
evolve where people hold each other
accountable to their shared standards
and educational purpose. And if
the traditional school culture of
isolation gives way to honest talk,
we stand to learn much about how
our beliefs about children and their
learning affect what they achieve.
Because of this, helping teachers
strengthen and use relationships
in networks both within and outside
their own schools has lately emerged
as a key Essential School strategy.
School networks subvert the very
function of bureaucracy-to regulate
people who are expected to fight
with each other-and replace it with
looser associations of trust and
common purpose. Locally, a network's
critical mass and reputation can
often protect restructuring schools
from reactive political forces.
And nationally, networks of like-minded
school reformers can wield considerable
political clout. At best, networks
that create a "system of schools"
to counter the conventional "school
system" hold radical potential for
reshaping the way schools work together.
How Networks Affect Quality
Student achievement lies at the heart
of this push for more personal connections
among school people. Entire groups
of children suffer from low expectations,
educators like Michael Alexander
and Nancy Mohr argue, because teachers.
beliefs about race, class, and gender
currently go unchallenged by their
colleagues. Few teachers invite
direct critical review by their
fellows of actual work, and even
fewer schools ask outsiders in to
give feedback.
Mistrust between "reformers"
and "resisters," between administrators
and teachers, between parents and
school people grows from the same
behaviors and attitudes that show
up in troubled families: we forget
to listen respectfully; we fear
losing power and control; we cling
to ways that have served old purposes
well.
Clearly, changing such familial patterns
cannot happen by policy mandate,
or even by introducing innovative
programs. Only if the fundamental
units in school organizations-teachers,
parents, students, administrators-can
establish new habits of relating
to each other and their work will
a dysfunctional school community
begin to thrive.
"Change continues to be a problem
of the smallest unit," declares
Stanford University's Milbrey McLaughlin
in her essay revisiting a decade
later the conclusions of the Rand
Corporation's 1980 Change Agent
study of innovative school practices.
To change what goes on in schools
every day, she says, has proved
"beyond the control of bureaucracy."
In fact, McLaughlin's research into
the context of secondary school
teaching shows persuasively that
personal connections among teachers-whether
in a department, a professional
organization, or a network-most
directly influence the success of
school reforms.
When a whole school creates such a
context, extraordinary changes can
result. Organizations change, Peter
Senge asserts in his book The
Fifth Discipline, when their
members can identify their most
deeply ingrained assumptions, then
unearth a shared picture of the
future and go after it together.
In such "learning organizations,"
he says, people "continually
discover how they create their reality
and how they can change it, and
continuously expand their capacity
to create their future."
Senge is saying what most successful
school people intuitively know:
that everyone learns more when people
gather together by choice to do
something they believe in. Whether
it happens inside a school or outside
it, this is a personal act, not
a bureaucratic one.
In fact, most successful networks
have grown organically from the
needs of individuals to explore
problems together, share resources,
and learn from each other. The Foxfire
Teacher Outreach Network, for instance,
grew from one Georgia teacher's
commitment to develop literacy through
locally based experiential projects.
The National Writing Project emerged
from a widespread desire to share
with students in schools the real
process writers use. The National
Elementary School Network sprang
from teachers' sense that Essential
schooling, which began as a secondary
school movement, had powerful meaning
in lower grades, too. Even within
schools, strong working relationships
typically form on common ground,
as when special education teachers,
for instance, join other teachers
to add perspective and resources
to a student's learning situation.
Student Work at the Center
The most powerful of these connections
often happen when people gather
at regular intervals to look carefully
at students' portfolios and exhibitions,
read their essays or lab notebooks,
witness their art or drama or music-making,
and talk together about what they
see. This kind of conversation leads
naturally to students experiencing
more continuity and coherence in
what goes on at school. For teachers,
it serves as a springboard from
which to reflect on their daily
experience, relate it to the experience
of others, and have their understandings
critiqued by trusted colleagues.
Parents become part of the web of
shared interest, as they are invited
to review and discuss what their
children are learning. All involved
are constructing powerful new knowledge
with every step.
Fred Newmann, the director of a massive
University of Wisconsin study of
the effects of restructuring practices
on student achievement, draws a
series of concentric circles to
illustrate how student work benefits
when a school organizes its professional
community around improving teaching
and learning, and when the external
environment-community, district,
state-consistently supports that
effort. If one views the connections
among Newmann's circles as the outline
of a web, it is easy to see how
a network begins to form.
Schools whose internal structures
encourage communication and trust
provide fertile ground for that
to happen. Many Essential schools
have encouraged this by creating
"critical friends" relationships
among their teachers, either through
CES-sponsored programs like the
Trek or through the Annenberg Institute's
National School Reform Faculty.
Such groups shape small networks
in their own right, and also link
to those in other schools until
it seems sometimes that only "six
degrees of separation" come between
any given participants.
Their work starts with teambuilding,
which most organizational change
experts call a prerequisite for
any reform effort's success. Paying
attention to group process, for
example, dramatically affects the
quality of how people work together
in a meeting. "We always review
our norms first, and then address
any issues that might get in the
way of what we do," says Lois Jones,
whose time as principal of Oceana
High School in Pacifica, California
has been marked by a passion for
building community.
Oceana's Critical Friends Group has
devised a number of ways to come
together around student work. "Something
as simple as showing rough videos
of our senior exhibitions really
brought us together," says humanities
teacher Mary Stuart.
Like other Oceana teachers who are
paired as critical friends, Jill
Whitby and Greg Nakara sit in on
each other's classes once every
two weeks over a two-year period.
Though Jill teaches math and Greg
is a humanities teacher, they say
the practice gets them in the habit
of reflecting on their teaching.
Feedback is informal and spontaneous;
at the end of the first year the
two went to Yosemite for some quiet
time to review the year.
These habits and structures of reflective
practice lay a solid ground for
teachers to reach out to outsiders
when they feel ready. As she documents
the work by school clusters in the
Coalition's Fifty Schools Project
Nancy Walwood says, she notices
a difference between schools that
have CFGs and those that don't.
"Schools where teachers know
their ideas and opinions are valuable
have a built-in language for working
through things together," she says.
"It's a natural progression
then to include external partners
to help them continue the work they've
chosen."
Finding and practicing ways to promote
respectful discourse on difficult
topics helps immeasurably, these
schools say. One tool that most
CFGs find invaluable is the "tuning
protocol" developed at CES by Joseph
McDonald and David Allen, which
offers a structured format for "warm"
and "cool" conversation about
student and teacher work. (See Horace,
Volume 11, Number 4.)
After ten teachers at New Hampshire's
Souhegan High School learned to
use the tuning protocol, says teacher
Jennifer Mueller, they set up workshops
to familiarize their colleagues
with the tool. "New people
had the chance to witness a safe
conversation about important things,"
she says. As the practice spread,
she says, "we did not anticipate
how much it would help in our unstructured
conversations, too."
"We struggle to find ways to
say hard things to each other in
an honest but comfortable way,"
says Souhegan's academic dean, Allison
Rowe. Such talk includes more than
just "straight shooting" about
academic matters, she adds.
"Both with students and with
colleagues, we need to be able to
talk about how their behavior affects
us," she says. "Someone once
said to me in a critical friends
meeting, "You're using an administrative
voice that makes me very uncomfortable..
That was real learning for me-I
didn't even know I had an administrative
voice! But it was even harder for
the person to say it."
Using the tuning protocol within their
school gave new heart to the faculty
of Louisville's Fairdale High School,
discouraged by Kentucky's high-stakes
labeling of schools according to
state test scores. "We brought
it first into the classroom to focus
on student work," principal Sherry
Abma says. "It helped build
a culture of trust in which teachers
could critique their own work."
"Doing this redefines the starting
point," says Allison Rowe. "It
helps you be flexible enough to
move people from the point where
they're beginning." As people grow
used to having a safe place to voice
their concerns, "resisters"
and "reformers" start sharing
the same goals.
"The term "buy-in sends
the wrong message," observes Kenneth
Duncan, who teaches at Flower Vocational-Technical
High School in Chicago. "We're
not selling something. This is about
bringing ideas together until we
shape something we all want."
"Implicit in every conversation
in a good network is a sense of
"into,. "Through,. and
"Beyond,." says Steve Jubb
of the Bay Area regional CES Center.
"The work is always evolving
from shared understanding, and leading
to continued action aimed at what's
good for kids."
Networks Among Schools
Both in the Coalition's regional Centers
and in local school networks, Essential
schools pursue the same kind of
interconnections with the same tools
and strategies aimed at building
trust and candor. In the process,
Bob McCarthy says, they are reclaiming
accountability as their own business.
"The Coalition base became so
large that it lost the ability to
stay accountable," he says. "School
clusters can solve that by developing
clear expectations among themselves
and setting up ways to routinely
hold each other accountable."
"Ask yourself what kind of evidence
you would trust from another school
that they are making a difference
to students," CES vice-chair Deborah
Meier told a Fifty Schools gathering
recently. "Then ask, "How
would I check it out?."
The Fifty Schools network has used
the tuning protocol both to check
out that evidence and to ease any
awkwardness in visiting a partner
school to view their work in progress.
"It allowed us to enter each
other's school cultures smoothly,
giving us a common language in which
we could get down to business,"
says principal Kathy Mason of Croton-Harmon
High School in New York, where a
faculty team has exchanged visits
over the past three years with Chatham
(NY) High School and Souhegan High
School.
The practice became so routine that,
stuck in the planning stages of
a new advisory program, Croton's
faculty asked its Fifty Schools
team to present their work in progress
for "tuning" to Souhegan, which
had long been using advisory groups.
The resulting proposal won faculty
approval partly because of how it
was developed and presented.
"Schools trying out new ideas
appreciate not having to start from
scratch," says Nancy Walwood. "And
even when teachers feel buried under
everything, taking time away from
the school building to get feedback
from other schools has proved a
very powerful way to push past the
comfort zone, to try new things
and ask new questions. They communicate
with each other in ways that they
don't. in school."
If several different groups of people,
working on different aspects of
change, get together over time between
the same two schools, a critical
mass begins to accumulate of knowing
the other school well, notes Oceana's
Greg Nakata. Cross-school visits
between Oceana and the Humanities
school at Piner High School in Santa
Rosa sent Nakata's team back "brimming
with ideas," he says; and Piner
revamped its senior exhibitions
based on the ideas it gleaned from
Oceana.
Small-scale school connections often
blossom into larger networks. Bill
Liebensperger worked for one year
as an external coach to a new Critical
Friends Group at Reynoldsburg High
School, traveling some 40 miles
from his own high school in Galloway,
Ohio, which was not yet ready to
commit to a CFG. At year's end the
team ran a week-long summer institute
modeling the critical friend process
to other schools in the region,
and a small network of Ohio schools
was born.
Multiple Networks
Doesn't there come a point when outside
networks take over the landscape,
distracting teachers from the daily
work of school? Schools involved
in multiple networks need a strategic
plan, Steve Jubb observes, to make
the situation work for rather than
against them.
In California, where he and Lisa Lasky
co-direct the Bay Area CES regional
Center, an Essential school might
easily participate in as many as
half a dozen overlapping networks-the
state's 1274 School Restructuring
initiative, a partnership with Stanford
University, the Bay Area Writing
Project, the Annenberg Challenge,
the Transitions project on college
admissions, and more. So as the
Center facilitates connections among
twenty Essential schools, it also
aims to coordinate and bring coherence
to their work on many different
initiatives.
"At best, multiple connections
can deepen the work, give more people
opportunities to become leaders
in the school, and galvanize new
ideas into action by providing money
or conceptual structures," says
Jubb. "The down side comes
if you just assign the same group
of people to merely "Comply,.
in the interests of time."
In Chicago, eleven CES schools are
clustered with a regional Coalition
center, and teachers have begun
getting together to work on topics
like block scheduling and to share
tools for peer coaching and other
strategies. In each school a Critical
Friends Group of teachers will soon
be meeting regularly with its coach,
and coaches from the eleven schools
will also meet monthly to share
progress. A Leadership Team for
principals will meet monthly as
critical friends. Finally, parents
will be working with the Right Question
project, a national effort to help
parents improve communication with
their local schools. When viewed
in the context of its surrounding
state and national network affiliations-the
Illinois Alliance of Essential Schools,
the Annenberg Challenge, the National
School Reform Faculty-Chicago forms
a web of complementary connections
supporting the same central goals.
In Missouri, two regional Centers
in Kansas City and St. Louis have
worked together to establish an
Essential School presence across
the state and to cooperate with
the Accelerated Schools movement,
the League of Professional Schools,
the National Center for Educational
Renewal, and other school reform
efforts. From that effort is growing
a shared network whose schools are
collaborating to advance "authentic
pedagogy," says Susan Hanan, who
directs the St. Louis Center. A
new Principals Leadership Network
will tie into that work; so will
"action research" by member
schools on the effects of shared
decisionmaking on teacher practice
and student learning.
Sometimes a large network must break
into smaller ones to get the job
done. "A network has to share
an intention," says Marian Mogulescu,
who coaches a CFG at Vanguard High
School, which belongs to one of
twelve small networks linked through
the Center for Collaborative Education
in New York City. "The point
of ours is to pool our staff development
money to work on the same issues."
Because people typically join networks
by choice, what they do there tends
to have a spontaneous, flexible,
personal character. Often members
forge relationships face to face,
then keep them alive using e-mail.
For example, many Essential school
teachers are members of the Four
Seasons network, a joint project
of Columbia University's National
Center for Restructuring Education,
Schools, and Teaching (NCREST),
CES, the Foxfire Teacher Outreach
Network, and Harvard University's
Project Zero. Its participants meet
twice yearly to work on authentic
assessment, then keep in touch via
the World Wide Web. "It's as
if the conference extends all year,"
says Joel Kammer, a teacher at Piner
High School and a Four Seasons member.
How Networks Thrive
If such connections stay alive and
informal, research by Ann Lieberman
and Maureen Grolnick shows, networks
will adapt to their changing contexts
and last as long as they remain
useful-unlike bureaucracies, which
tend to perpetuate themselves indefinitely.
And as long as a network broadly
disperses leadership and responsibilities,
it can provide a vital and resilient
alternative to a calcified bureaucracy.
As much as school change depends on
coordination and support at all
levels, though, it rests on individual
people making authentic personal
relationships based on interests,
needs, and growing trust. "It
is very difficult to change one's
practice in a vacuum," says Marylyn
Wentworth, who helped found the
Southern Maine Partnership's regional
CES Center. "Everyone needs
a place to generate ideas, share
reflection, get feedback, tackle
problems, express frustration. Teaching
requires too much energy to be without
the regeneration that comes from
the collective intelligence of a
strong network."
That regenerative process is personal,
which is why informality and spontaneity
characterize a strong network more
than efficiency or uniformity. But
we're talking about respect, not
intimacy, Deborah Meier points out:
work-oriented activities that may
spill over into the social as the
work gets done, like a theater company's
opening night party.
"The basis for all organized
learning is to invite in new people
who are more expert than we are
in what we want to do," she argues.
"But this only happens if adults
in schools have an exciting intellectual
life of their own-if we get together
the way lawyers do, to have good
thick conversations in small groups.
Without this, educating kids is
impossible; kids need to experience
a responsible, thoughtful community
of grownups whom they want to be
like. We must build these structures
into the very purpose of schooling,
and then hold ourselves accountable
to providing them."
For Discussion: List the ways
teachers in your school connect
on a personal level with other teachers.
Which of these have to do with learning,
and how? How might that learning
grow more powerful?
Circles of Support:
The Context for Successful
School Restructuring
From Fred M. Newmann
and Gary C. Wehlage,
Successful School
Restructuring. Madison,
WI, Center on Organization
and Restructuring
of Schools, 1995.
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The Essential School
Network and How It
Grew
The Coalition of Essential
Schools is itself
a network, which
Theodore Sizer conceived
as "a conversation
among friends" about
his Nine Common Principles.
Such conversation
flowed readily among
the dozen original
members schools and
among the 150 participants
at the first Fall
Forum, held in Providence,
Rhode Island in 1986.
As the membership
grew-to 50 schools
by 1988, more than
100 schools by 1990,
and more than 200
schools by 1995-school
people began working
together to support
and strengthen each
other's efforts.
Essential school
teams signed up for
CES-sponsored "Treks,"
which created cross-school
groups of "critical
friends" to support
each other's change
efforts. More than
125 teachers received
intensive professional
development at Brown
University during
the four years of
the Citibank Faculty
program, and they,
along with several
dozen principals
from the Thomson
Fellows program,
now constitute a
network of practitioners,
a nationwide "faculty,"
who work toward Essential
school change. A
similar program prepared
math and science
teachers to work
with colleagues.
As the number of schools
joining the Coalition
rose, the number
of schools less formally
affiliated with CES
and its ideas ballooned
past the 1,000 mark.
Over 3,700 people
jammed the 1995 Fall
Forum in New York.
The five-year Re:Learning
initiative ultimately
spawned local Essential
school networks in
twelve states, comprising
anywhere from a dozen
to several hundred
schools. Grassroots
networks, such as
the Center for Collaborative
Education in New
York City, began
attracting like-minded
school people who
meet regularly for
discussion and professional
development. Independent
school districts,
such as Jefferson
County, Kentucky
and Broward County,
Florida, supported
Essential school
efforts and built
active local school
networks, further
swelling the Coalition's
ranks.
Not surprisingly, the
Coalition's very
success rendered
the "conversation
among friends" less
personal and direct.
Successful networks
run the risk of overextending,
Columbia University
professor Ann Lieberman
points out-losing
control over their
intellectual quality
and diminishing the
sense of ownership
on the part of an
increasingly dispersed
membership. Recognizing
this, the Coalition
has begun restructuring
itself to seat its
crucial functions-
including governance,
fundraising and professional
development-in regional
Centers around the
country. Restoring
a more manageable
scale to the Essential
School network, CES's
"Futures Committee"
decided, would not
only enrich and enliven
its work but also
enable more direct
and honest accountability
among its member
schools. And it will
allow local practitioners,
through representation
from the Centers
at a twice-yearly
national congress,
greater influence
on the Coalition's
national agenda.
As a growing web of
like-minded school
reform initiatives
increases its political
clout through a "network
of networks," Essential
schools aim to strengthen
and deepen the "near
in" connections that
most directly influence
student achievement.
Today the Coalition's
strength is located
not in Providence
but in small regional
networks of schools
that use the "critical
friend" strategy
to advance the Nine
Common Principles.
Several dozen Essential
school teachers are
being trained to
coach Critical Friends
Groups (CFG) by the
Annenberg Institute's
new National School
Reform Faculty; back
home, they work with
school-based CFGs
to keep the quality
of student work at
center stage.
Along with Harvard
University's Project
Zero, Yale's School
Development Project,
and Education Development
Center, the Coalition
belongs to a network
of ATLAS Communities
that embrace the
goals of all four
groups. And it has
joined with the League
of Professional Schools,
the schools involved
in the Annenberg
Challenge, the National
Writing Project,
the Breadloaf Rural
Teachers Initiative,
and many other school
reform networks in
using the Annenberg
Institute for School
Reform at Brown University
as a forum for sharing
resources and amassing
political weight.
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Creating a Network
of Schools as Critical
Friends: The Fifty
Schools Project
Since 1992 the Coalition's
Fifty Schools Project
has worked to bring
together small clusters
of exemplary reform-focused
high schools and
support them in sharing
resources and solving
problems. The effort
could easily serve
as a blueprint for
how any like-minded
group could structure
a network:
1. Four to eight schools,
preferably within
easy reach of each
other but possibly
linked only through
common ideas and
goals, partner together
in an active network.
Teams from each school
meet in person twice
a year in a cluster
retreat (convening
on a Friday afternoon
and lasting through
Saturday evening,
then follow up with
electronic mail and
videoconferencing).
A five- day summer
institute also convenes
around a common theme.
2. A "cluster
coordinator" provides
logistical support
and facilitative
leadership to each
member school. She
begins the year with
a visit to each school
of up to a week,
during which she
observes and debriefs
its faculty, notes
areas of common need
with partner schools,
and introduces techniques
and processes (such
as the "tuning
protocol") that the
network can use in
its critical friendships.
In subsequent visits
of one or two days,
she provides structured
checkpoints and follow-up
as each school makes
progress on its agenda
for the year, helps
start up critical
friendships among
the school's faculty,
and gathers helpful
resources and readings.
She brokers school
visits between teams
around areas of mutual
interest or need,
and plays an important
part in facilitating
the twice-yearly
cluster meetings.
(The Fifty Schools
Project bears the
cost of the coordinator's
salary for three
years, but a group
of schools could
hire a comparable
person by each contributing
a portion of her
salary from professional
development funds.)
3. A "school coordinator"
within each school
works closely with
the cluster coordinator
to synthesize various
initiatives within
the school so that
they have as much
coherence as possible,
and to make best
use of the visiting
coordinator's time.
At specified intervals
between the twice-yearly
cluster meetings,
the school coordinators
report to each other
on how the work in
their schools is
playing out. (The
cost of the school
coordinator equals
that of reducing
a full-time teacher's
load by one quarter.)
They also help reach
agreement as to the
agendas for the twice-yearly
cluster meetings,
which generally focus
on specific common
concerns such as
heterogeneous grouping,
democratic decision-making,
standard-setting,
or authentic instruction
and assessment.
4. An evaluation program
measures progress
throughout the network.
Schools agree to
use the same measures
across the network
to assess and document
their progress in
the key areas they
are tackling. If
they need help in
this effort from
an outside partner
(such as a university
or foundation), they
arrange for it collectively,
and they disseminate
results jointly when
the time comes.
5. Schools in the network
make and share video
presentations for
community and parent
groups, write articles
for publication about
the process of school
change, and present
their work in public
to support the network's
efforts.
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What Does a Critical
Friends Group Do?
A Critical Friends
Group (CFG) brings
together four to
ten teachers within
a school over at
least two years,
to help each other
look seriously at
their own classroom
practice and make
changes in it. After
a solid grounding
in group process
skills, members focus
on designing learning
goals for students
which can be stated
specifically enough
that others can observe
them in operation.
They work out strategies
to move students
toward these goals
and collect evidence
on how those strategies
are working out.
In a structured setting
of mutual support
and honest critical
feedback from trusted
peers, they then
work to adapt and
revise their goals
and strategies and
to modify conditions
within the school
so as to better support
student learning.
A portfolio of each
member's work documents
evidence of their
progress.
Each CFG meets for
at least two hours
monthly with a coach,
sometimes from within
the school and sometimes
not. Many Essential
schools have more
than one CFG; and
typically the groups
broaden their perspective
through partnerships
and regional meetings
with CFGs from other
schools. The Annenberg
Institute's National
School Reform Faculty
provides training
to CFG coaches and
helps with yearly
week-long summer
institutes for school
teams.
Sometimes people with
a common interest
will form a Critical
Friends Group whose
members hail from
different schools.
Librarian Mark Gordon,
for example, coaches
a "virtual"
CFG that links five
Essential school
librarians via electronic
conferencing; and
CFGs made up of Essential
school principals
convene in many regions.
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Teachers Learning
Along a Continuum
of Connections
Ann Lieberman uses
this chart to describe
the many ways that
connections among
teachers and the
outside world can
advance their professional
growth.
"Direct"
Teaching
ï Inspirationals
ï Awareness sessions
ï Initial conversation
ï Charismatic speakers
ï Conferences
ï Courses and workshops
ï Consultations
Learning in School
ï Team teaching
ï Peer coaching
ï Action research
ï Problem-solving
groups
ï Reviews of students
ï Assessment development
ï Case studies of
practice
ï Standard setting
ï Journal writing
ï Working on tasks
together
ï Writing for professional
journals
ï On-line conversations
ï School-site management
team
ï Curriculum writing
ï Mentoring
ï Peer reviews of
practice
Learning out of School
ï Reform networks
ï School/university
partnerships
ï Subject matter
networks
ï Study groups
ï Collaborations
ï Teacher centers
Reprinted with permission
from Ann Lieberman's
"Transforming
Conceptions of Teacher
Learning," in
M. W. McLaughlin
and I. Oberman, eds.,
Teacher Learning:
New Policies, New
Practices. New
York: Teachers College
Press.
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Regional Centers:
A Larger Link, A
Stronger Voice
The Coalition's Regional
Centers provide many
of the same benefits
to affiliated schools
that clusters do:
a milieu in which
to work together
on common concerns,
to build critical
friendships, and
to locate helpful
resources. In fact,
many began as smaller
networks or clusters
of schools engaged
in critical friendships.
But as nonprofit organizations
with governing boards
and position in the
community, CES Centers
also can reach into
the outside world
to rally support
for schools in the
midst of complex
change. They can
bring together small
clusters or networks
for larger conferences
and forums. They
can exert pressure
on districts and
administrators to
support systemic
change; they can
raise money from
foundations; they
can carry out long-term
evaluative studies
and publish the results.
Finally, Centers
send voting representatives
to CES's new governing
Congress, giving
the national network
a stronger regional
voice.
CES regional Centers
are already up and
running in New York
City, Boston, Southern
Maine, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, St.
Louis, Kansas City
(MO), Chicago, and
elsewhere. The National
Elementary School
Networks has also
launched school-based
centers across the
country to foster
Essential School
principles in elementary
schools.
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Elements of a Successful
Network
A review of the writings
of Ann Lieberman
and Maureen Grolnick,
Andy Hargreaves and
others suggests these
elements of a successful
network:
- Building trusting
relationships
through inquiry
and work initiated
or chosen by
members because
of their own
needs and carried
out together
over time.
- Establishing
norms of reflective
practice and
shared decision
making, which
provide internal
avenues by which
to share information.
- The support of
district and
building leadership,
including respect
for true empowerment
of teachers,
parents, and
students rather
than "contrived
collegiality"
in the service
of administrative
control.
- A common purpose
and the flexibility
to adapt and
revise that
purpose together
as the network
evolves.
- Compelling activities
that support
the central
purpose, allow
for participants
to share their
own experience,
and extend intermittent
"transformative"
experiences
into actual
daily work.
- Crossing role
groups to use
both "outside"
and "inside"
knowledge, balancing
theory, research,
and practice
to solve common
problems.
- A reliable way
to provide information
to members.
- Structures and
roles that diffuse
responsibility
and leadership
among the members
of the organization.
- An emphasis
on informal
personal connections
in network activities,
even at the
expense of efficiency
or uniformity.
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Readings About Networks
Ann Lieberman and Maureen
Grolnick, "Networks
and Reform in American
Education." New York:
National Center for
Restructuring Education,
Schools, and Teaching
(NCREST), 1996.
Ann Lieberman and Milbrey
McLaughlin, "Networks
for Educational Change:
Powerful and Problematic."
Phi Delta Kappan,
May 1992.
Milbrey McLaughlin
and Joan E. Talbert,
Contexts that Matter
for Teaching and
Learning. Stanford,
CA: Center for Research
on the Context of
Secondary School
Teaching, 1993. (415)
723-4972.
Milbrey McLaughlin,
"The Rand Change
Agent Study Revisited:
Macro Perspectives
and Micro Realities."
Educational Researcher,
December 1990.
Peter Senge, The
Fifth Discipline:
The Art and Practice
of the Learning Organization.
New York: Currency
Books, 1990.
Fred M. Newmann and
Gary G. Wehlage,
Successful School
Restructuring.
Madison, WI, Center
on Organization and
Restructuring of
Schools, 1995.
Theodore Sizer, Horace's
Hope: What Works
for the American
High School.
Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1996.
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