What’s Missing from the National Education Conversation?
Have you been listening to the national conversation about education reform? With a new administration in place along with billions of stimulus dollars, we “race to the top” with the same old ideas like charter schools, merit pay, accountability systems, etc., as the fix for our ailing schools. In this national discussion I have yet to hear anything regarding the one critical issue that should be of focus: the question of expertise. It’s like there is an implicit assumption that there is sufficient expertise in our schools to achieve excellence if we can only find the right incentives and rewards to harness this expertise. These well meaning reformers have largely missed the mark again! The real problem with our education system has more to do with the lack of expertise necessary to improve the quality of teaching. That’s right, our leaders – charged with improving the quality of schooling – do not know enough about what constitutes high quality instruction in order to improve the quality of teaching and learning for our students.
Our own faculty and researchers at the University of Washington have been assessing leaders’ ability to observe and
analyze instruction and provide feedback to teachers using a sophisticated, research-based instrument designed to measure instruction across five dimensions and thirteen sub-dimensions of teaching using a four point rubric that runs from novice to expert. To date, there have been approximately 1,000 principals and central office leaders from 26 school districts in six states who have participated. The two charts shown here illustrate the average scores for both the five general dimensions and thirteen sub-dimensions. As you can see, the average placement on the four-point rubric runs from 1.44 to 1.96 for the five general dimensions. To add some context, the rubric is as follows: 1.0 = Novice; 2.0 = Developing Expertise; 3.0 = Emerging Expertise; 4.0 = Expert. From this early research it is clear that too few leaders charged with leading the improvement of instruction have developed sufficient expertise to identify really good teaching and explicate what makes that teaching “really good.” We
have long had a mantra at CEL that says “you cannot lead what you don’t know.” In other words, without a common understanding and shared vision of high quality instruction, leaders cannot guide and support the improvement of teaching. How can they if they don’t have a clear picture in mind of what they are improving? In the truest spirit of you cannot lead what you do not know it is incumbent upon school leaders to develop their own expertise about what constitutes high quality instruction. Leaders charged with the improvement of teaching practice must understand and be able to define clearly what good practice looks like in order to lead and guide professional development, target and align resources, engage in on-going problem solving and long-range capacity building. This is part one of a two part instructional leadership equation. It is foundational and sequential. Without developing this expertise school leaders will not be able to provide the leadership necessary to improve teaching practice. Developing a deep understanding and clear vision of quality instruction provides the guidepost – the North Star so to speak, in terms of what they are leading for.The real challenge for school leaders lies in the fact that simply developing a more expert understanding of high quality teaching doesn’t mean they can successfully lead the improvement process. This brings us to the second part of the leadership equation which is still about expertise, but a very different kind of expertise. In addition to instructional expertise, leaders must also develop leadership expertise. That is, the knowledge and skills necessary to influence and mobilize action within complex organizations amidst a prevailing culture designed to blunt most any attempt to improve individual and collective practice. This is akin to effective classroom teachers who must possess both content and pedagogical expertise in order to successfully educate all students. In the case of the leadership discipline, leaders’ content expertise is a deep understanding of classroom teaching, and their pedagogical expertise is in knowing how to guide, support, nourish and nurture teachers in their own improvement effort.
In future blogs I will write more about how we can go about improving our knowledge of instruction and our ability to lead for instructional improvement. Suffice for now to say that both of these are critical preconditions for leaders who are intent on improving teaching and learning in their schools and school districts. Without developing this expertise, all of the incentives, rewards and accountability systems in the world will not improve at scale the quality of teaching and learning necessary to eliminate the pernicious achievement gap that continues to divide our nation’s children along the lines of race, class and language.
Dr. Stephen Fink is the Executive Director of the Center for Educational Leadership, and Affiliate Associate Professor, College of Education, University of Washington.
Center for Educational Leadership
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on target
Right on the money. If the feds are going to throw their weight around, it ought to be on issues where the research basis is solid -- not charters and pay for performance. On the former, there are strong charters with strong results and there are weak charters will appalling results and there are many charters that cannot be distinguished on the basis of academic results from average, traditional public schools. This is not surprising since the chartering of schools is based on an incomplete theory of action, which goes something like this. If schools are freed from the constraints of bureaucratic school systems, then school founders and leaders will be free to innovate and the resulting schools will better serve students. What I think is missing from the theory of action is the need for strong instruction and strong leadership and school programs that are coherently aligned around the instructional core. In other words, innovation along will not get you there. The really strong charter schools are not strong because they are charters, but because they have strong leadership and strong instruction. But because those elements are not built into the charter school theory of action, there will continue to be many weak and many mediocre charters.
On pay-for-performance, there is in fact an important body of psychological research indicating that the long-term effect of extrinsic motivation is to erode intrinsic motivation. The research is overwhelmingly clear about the importance of teacher quality. But centuries of experience and a good deal of research indicates that pay-for-performance is not how you get there.
Right On!
I agree with everything in your blog. For the last two years, we have focused our school improvement efforts in leadership development. It became obvious that our building principals needed to have a deep rooted technical understanding of teaching and learning and spend more time in classrooms. Secondly, they needed to build their leadership capapcities in the areas of disposition, knowledge and skills. It's working! Our teacher retention has increased dramatically and so has our student achievement. Another impressive statistic is that our achievement gap between ethnicities has closed substantially and in some schools is obsolete. The key principle in all of this is focused on what we call, "building relationships to influence change."
I totally agree with you
I totally agree with you regarding leaders not knowing or understanding how to recognize quality teaching/learning in classrooms. It is nearly impossible to prepare principals to wear all the "hats" required in education today. Until schools are allowed to employ curriculum leaders and separate the duties away from a building principal, we will continue to get the same as we always have.