Sustaining Great Progressive Schools: Leadership, Courage, and Fulfilling Democratic Purpose

Presenter: Carl Glickman, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part Two

CARL GLICKMAN: A middle school in the Midwest had a prior record of terribly poor achievement among students. The school had been given an invitation by its superintendent and board to totally redesign itself. A small percentage of staff, led by the veteran guidance counselor, refused to implement the new performance report cards or draw up the new flexible schedule that had been agreed to by the majority of faculty to begin in the fall.

This veteran guidance counselor, he with the teacher association, said, no, I am not going to do it, and rejected almost every decision that the principal and faculty made. The principal knew that there were many teachers, young and old, who believed that kids were not getting the education that they should be getting, and they had agreed to make changes, but the counselor was not having any part of it. The counselor had been in the school for a long time. This counselor had a lot of community influence.

The principal discussed this situation with the superintendent and said that, basically, she was going to have to confront the counselor about the decisions that the school had made and wanted to make sure that the superintendent would be supportive. Knowing that that was there, she then met with the guidance counselor and told the guidance counselor that he either needed to support the school’s decision or resign, or take early retirement, that she would not tolerate his refusal to implement what had been agreed upon through the governing process of the school. And from this point on she would document closely his performance for possible dismissal proceedings.

In the interim, the principal removed the counselor from his duties and reassigned him for the remainder of the year to be her administrative assistant. The faculty, staff and students gasped when the reassignment took place. After one more incident and subsequent meetings between the principal and counselor, the principal did begin formal termination proceedings. It was at that moment that the school knew that the commitment to a new and better education program for all students was for real. That was the defining moment.

The following three years, several more teachers uncomfortable with the expectations of open collegiality, team planning, and peer coaching, and after several supervision cycles of conferences and observations to achieve professional goals, were asked to leave or left of their on volition. No one knows the story behind the success of this school, but people know of the curriculum redesign. They know the changes in assessments. They know the changes in staff development and teaching and learning methods. But what they do not know is 17 teachers left that school in the first two years and were replaced by teachers who were attracted to the educational ideas of this school.

This school is now one of the most famous schools in the United States. It is probably not the one that you are thinking about. It has been a lead example in powerful education in its own state. And the whole question is how the formal leader used moral authority to push and support what the vision of the school was to be.

Another quick example of a high school in the South, which was almost stopped in its initial year of redesign by 10 parents who objected to the heterogeneous grouping of their students in core interdisciplinary courses. The principal, after meeting with the parents, asked them to bring their requests, the parents’ requests, to an ad hoc group of students, parents and faculty. When the ad hoc group heard the request, they listened, deliberated, and then they explained to the parents their reasons for not agreeing or acquiescing to a concern of a few parents. The concern of a few parents would change the entire school program.

So, they recommended that the parents, with their children, should sit down with their classroom teachers and develop more individualized activities that would go beyond the requirements of the class. The parents were not happy. These parents were not happy. They wanted separate classes for their children, who they believed were particularly advanced and talented. The ad hoc group met with the principal and together they recommended to the superintendent that the school board hold a referendum; poll all parents in the school on whether they were satisfied with the new education being provided.

The superintendent and school board agreed. The principal and faculty were fairly confident that the majority of parents would approve the new program, but were amazed when the results were tallied and 92 percent of the parents supported the school’s program. The board then directed the dissenting parents to either keep their children in the school as structured or transfer to one of the two other adjacent high schools.

Again, the message was the same. The message is that this school was continuing forward. Let me see if I can give you one more fairly quick one.

One principal, beginning major changes in his school, knew of such a group of parents beforehand. So, he said, and these are his words: My most important job was to get to the parents who I knew might have the greatest objections at the very beginning and get to them before things get started. And I needed to tell them on behalf of the school and guarantee that when your student leaves us, he will be better prepared for whatever he chooses to do next under the new system than the old system. And you can hold me and all of us responsible to see that your child, at the end, like every other child, is going to have more options and is going to have a better education than what has been in the past.

And then, finally, the importance of including students at the very beginning. As principal George Wood wrote about the reinvention of Federal Hocking High in rural Ohio, a school which moved over the first five years of change from a low performing to a stellar school, involving every student in capstone performance assessments. George said: “We began with out students. We wanted to know how they experienced high school. What they should be like when they graduate. How we could make the school a place where teachers and students knew one another well enough to work together. We wanted a community built around personal relationships of students working with and for teachers who they knew were committed to their best interests.”

If you have not read Debbie Meier’s new book, In Schools We Trust, it is a wonderful graphic example of helping students to understand that the teachers’ role, in here, is you can trust us. That we are going to push you as hard as we possibly can to open up new opportunities for you that you did not have before.

Let's look at the foundation for sustained ability. I have written at length about this in the past. The development of three connected support girders was characteristic of all these schools. One girder was the schools had a clear, explicit covenant of educational beliefs that also laid out what students were expected to know and do — not just know but know and do — before they leave us. The second girder was a governing structure for school-wide decisions. And the third girder was an action research process for continuous internal study.

The covenant, developed through broad participation of stakeholders, defines a good education and does not leave it at some kind of general statement, but makes very clear what every kid needs to demonstrate to other people what they have learned and how it will be assessed.

The governing structure is a structure that involves faculty and staff, and students and parents, in how to bring these belief statements into implementation around changes in curriculum, staff development, schedules, instructional materials, classroom space, and so on. And action research is the ongoing study of what is possible based on what other schools have done and a school's own continuous collection and analysis how all students achieve against the school’s indicators of quality performance.

Now, what I want to do is to take this and give you some examples of how these schools moved from beginning to sustainability. And it is quite revealing the cases that faculty and parents and students gave to me who had been through interim periods at the school.

One elementary school in the Northeast, during the school's second year of operation in 1975, a vocal parent challenged a student-designed mural being hung on a classroom wall and used by a classroom teacher. The parent went to the principal and complained and said, that mural must come down.

Now, the principal, instead of doing what many in authority normally do, did not play the role of knowing what is best for everyone else. Instead, she asked the parent if he understood the school’s covenant. And if the parent did understand the covenant, then why should there be any disagreement with the classroom teacher using a mural designed and painted by the students that was in accord with it?

The covenant of the school clearly stated: Education in a democracy must promote understanding and respect for all people.

The classroom mural was developed in a literature unit on the American family, depicting a range of American families. The mural that the parent objected to included gay and lesbian couples with their children. The principal told the parent that if he believed that the school should change its covenant, then that would have to done through the same governance process that created those beliefs in the first place, and the parent could petition the school's governing body for doing so. But until the school changed its covenant, there was no matter to resolve. That mural remains.

Now, what is instructive about this is the principal did not impose her own beliefs. The principal did not try to negotiate between parent and individual teacher to find a resolution that would satisfy or accommodate both. To do so would have undermined the collective operations of the school and would have sent a message that a democratic community at the school is not really important when a crisis matter comes up.

The handling of this initial incident by the principal during the beginnings of remaking this school left a lasting impression, an institutional imprint of how the school works. You can go to that school now, 30 years later, and you can still see the imprint of what is valued in the school in how matters are handled in accord with what we have developed around core educational beliefs and what we hold ourselves to.

What does instructional leadership look like in these schools? In the recent booklet for ASCD entitled, Leadership For Learning, I began the book with this:

If, as a teacher, I practice the same lessons in the same manner as I have done in the past, if I seek no feedback from my students, if I do not analyze and evaluate student work in a manner that changes my own emphasis, repertoire and timing, if I do not visit or observe other adults teach, I do not share the work of my students with colleagues, I do not visit other schools or attend particular workshops or seminars or read professional literature, if I do not welcome visitors who have greater expertise and experience on some matters than I do to observe and provide feedback to me, if I have no yearly, individualized professional development plan focused on my classroom changes to improve student learning, and finally, if I have no systemic evaluation of my teaching tied to individual, grade, department, and school-wide goals, then I have absolutely no way to become better as a teacher. It just cannot happen.

It is fairly simple. I cannot be better at what I do in isolation from other people. To improve, I have to have formats, structures and plans for assessing, reflecting upon, and changing my practice. And while I found instructional leadership powerful at what I call the great American schools, there is this ongoing force structure and focus that makes sure that what everyone does in the school is public to each other.

So, the school is not simply providing an education for the public, but those who work in the school are in public to each other. And some of the structures that you know about or read about that make this publicness to each other are clinical supervision, peer coaching, critical friends groups, school study, and action research groups.

I do not know, again, if I am saying something that may be fairly to obvious to you, but no matter how good a school improvement plan is, unless teachers have a focus and a structure for an ongoing looking at what each other is doing, having time with to critique and examine each other’s work and what students are learning, there will be no improvement throughout the school, even though the plan sounds great.

The new ASCD video, of which I will show you just three minutes of, was developed by my colleagues at Southwest Texas State University. It is "Improving Instruction Through Observation and Feedback." It is three different tapes, but I am just going to give you one little snippet of one the practices of making teaching and learning public within a school.

[Videotape is shown]

CARL GLICKMAN: That was three minutes.

The point of the videos was to show different types of structures, focus and formats that make teaching public to each other. And these combinations of peer coaching, combinations of critical study groups, action research, some schools may have a particular focus on one of these structures and formats more than others, but what is consistent in all of the schools that we looked at is that there was a continuous flow of teachers going and looking at each other and other people coming in and looking at what I am doing, and the idea of examining student work against what we say we believe, educationally, that all students should leave this school being able to do.

Having said this now, I want to mention the issues around accountability and standards. How do these what I call great progressive schools respond to tests and accountability? And I am going to circle back on this in a moment, but let me begin it before I can start coming back on it.

School success over time is never a result of one event, meeting or activity. Rather, it is a journey of recursive decisions and actions. Yet, I did find in my visits stories about particular events that happened decades ago and are still shared among colleagues. These stories become symbolic and ceremonial reminders of the core values of education of the school and the necessary vigilance to keep the work alive.

For example, one middle school in a high- to moderate-income area of a Midwest city that is justifiably well known for their inquiry-centered curriculum has a phrase that reminds everybody what the school is about. The phrase is "Don't do a Peabody." The actual word is not "Peabody," but I had to change it so you would not know who I am referring to.

The phrase evokes the fight that the faculty exerted against a national school reform model that they had applied for and received for a renewable three-year period with a grant that came to a large amount of dollars for teacher staff development, travel and computers for students. After the first year, the faculty realized they had made a mistake. They found rigidity in the model curriculum, in the sequenced lesson plans, and in the assessment methods. The program was at odds with their educational values that were in their covenant.

So, the faculty met with the principal and parent group and they decided to return the grant funds. They gave back several hundred thousand dollars, because they thought it was more important to stick to their core values than to have the additional money. And they also learned that they have to think very carefully about what they get themselves into next.

So, even though this happened years ago, even today, if you sit in on a school council meeting or you overhear a conversation in the teacher's lounge, one is still likely to hear the caution of "Let's not do a Peabody again." It is a reminder. It is a constant reminder about what are we centered on and what are we not.

These were the sort of avenues, in looking at these schools, that were so strikingly different from other schools. Other schools kept going through different cycles of reforms. Every time a new leader would come, they would be moved off into something else. Whether it was a new principal, or superintendent or the moving of a group teachers who left, the school would then move from one focus area to another.

What was striking about these schools is people had retired, there had been four or five political swings, there had been budget swings, yet the school much very much is still identifiable in terms of the core teaching and learning and assessments that went on.

So, in having looked at this, I need to talk to you about how they deal with tests and accountability pressures. Most of these school acknowledge that students have to do well on required tests. But they will never sacrifice their curriculum and their core mission to the test itself. These schools are not test preparation factories intentionally.

PREVIOUS PART

NEXT PART