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Jasmine's Identity as a reader and factors influencing Jasmine.

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Jasmine's Identity as a reader and factors influencing Jasmine.

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As we mention in the beginning of our article, there are many important things we do not yet know about how to teach struggling readers. We have a good grasp of what they need to know, but do not yet have a solid grasp on how to ensure they come to know it. Here, we discuss three critical issues for…

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read." ¹
"We are all good at speech, but disabled as readers and writers; the difference among us in reading/writing is simply that some are fairly easy to cure and some are not." ²

Helping children learn to read is big business. From expensive literacy curricula and remedial programs to one-day workshops and brain-training fads, there are too many claims of guaranteed success and too little focus on trustworthy findings. Having been researchers studying mechanisms for improving literacy outcomes for more than 30 years, we offer a more sober-and sobering-review of what is known about how to help struggling readers.

To begin, we confess that there are some rather large holes in our collective knowledge. We know more about the science of reading than the science of reading instruction. In other words, we know a lot more about what components are associated with improved outcomes for each stage of reading development (e.g., phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle are essential for beginning readers) than we do about how to teach all these components to a class of students with diverse learning needs. Similarly, we know more about interventions for students with mild to moderate reading difficulties than we do about students with severe reading difficulties. Students with very low reading skills-those at the bottom 10th percentile of word reading and lower-have been challenging to impact. Finally, in policy development, we have not capitalized on theory and science for effectively implementing new practices in schools. ³ Still, there is much we do know that can support excellent instruction. Both here and in two online supplements- "It's Time to Act on a 20-Year-Old Consensus" and "Three Things We Need to Learn" -we offer guidance to prevent and address reading difficulties. There is no doubt that some children have reading disabilities, but the key to improved outcomes for the vast majority of struggling readers, including those with a reading disability, is enhanced core instruction-and that means enhanced curricula, assessments, pre-service and in-service professional development, and supports.

In the high-functioning system we describe below, the primary focus is on assessing changes in children's reading abilities as a response to instruction and on building educators' capacity to deliver more intense, customized interventions. To be effective, such assessments and interventions need to be delivered through a seamless system of well-coordinated general and special education supports that emphasizes prevention, reduces inappropriate referral to and placement in special education as a function of low reading ability, and provides more intensive interventions for students with reading disabilities. Inappropriate referral to and placement in special education is often a function of identifying students as needing special education who have not received an adequate opportunity to learn, as well as the view that special education is the solution for all children who do not readily learn to read. Some students are not given an opportunity to learn because they move frequently or are absent often; others are present day after day but are taught with programs and practices that are not based on the science of reading. Because so few teacher preparation programs, school districts, and commercially available programs have implemented consistently what we have learned from the science of reading, far too many students struggle-feeling like they are reading failures, not realizing that they were never provided the explicit instruction they need to succeed.* The vast majority of students with low reading achievement have preventable problems: with explicit, evidence-based instruction, they would learn to read.

These evidence-based practices are fundamental and necessary not only to develop strong readers but also to discern the differences between students with reading difficulties that can be readily supported through general education from those with serious reading disabilities or dyslexia. For the purposes of this article, we are using reading disabilities and dyslexia synonymously to refer to children with foundational decoding and spelling problems.

Students in classrooms where evidence-based fundamentals of reading instruction are deliberately implemented are far less likely to demonstrate reading difficulties. Enhanced general education instruction in the early grades reduces the number of children who do not meet grade-level benchmarks and start to fall behind, and therefore it reduces eventual referrals to special education.

We recognize that teachers-even those with the most advanced knowledge and skills-cannot and should not be asked to carry the entire burden of improving reading outcomes for all learners. We think there is ample evidence to suggest that educational systems can be organized so that the vast majority of students-close to 95 percent-will be reasonably successful readers when these organized systems are effectively implemented. ⁴ The roughly 5 percent of students who do not make adequate progress when these systems are in place are likely truly reading disabled because of the persistence of their reading difficulties. They too can improve their reading skills, but they require highly specialized, intensive interventions and may have difficulty reading throughout their lives.

Why Do Some Children Learn to Read Easily, While Others Struggle?

Learning to read is a process that occurs so readily for some youngsters that it seems to develop almost naturally. With minimal guidance and feedback, some students are on their way to recognizing the patterns of written words and inferring the ways in which our phonological system (sounds of language) map to our complex orthography (written system). But for other students-anywhere from 40 to 65 percent-the task of learning to read is much more challenging. If these students do not receive highly explicit instruction with additional opportunities for implicit learning, difficulties in learning to read proficiently are inevitable. These more challenging readers are the ones who require the most knowledgeable and skillful teachers.

Reading science has established that learning to read is an acquired process, not a natural process-it's nothing like learning to walk or talk. There are no brain systems evolutionarily designed for reading. Rather, neural circuits for language and visual processing must be repurposed and reorganized to support literacy. ⁵ One neural circuit involves the ability to process sublexical units of words, initially at the phonological level. The child must take what is essentially an implicit understanding of the sound system of language and explicitly apply it to print. ⁶ Once this repurposing begins, another neural circuit designed for face and object recognition has to become a rapid letter and word processor; this reorganization of the circuit requires considerable meaningful exposure to print. As these circuits are revamped, they form a system, which usually takes several years to become well developed, that enables the child to process print with immediate access to the meaning of the word, which is sometimes described as "language at the speed of sight." ⁷ If a child does not have access because of struggles with mastering the alphabetic principle, this system does not develop adequately and the child falls behind in the ability to automatically recognize letter patterns. Reading becomes an effortful, unenjoyable process. Because all children must reorganize these neural circuits into a reading brain, prevention programs must focus on early acquisition of these skills. It is very hard to catch up if mastering the alphabetic principle is delayed. This is why prevention is more effective and less costly than remediation. ⁸

Students with reading disabilities have great difficulty acquiring foundational, word-level reading skills; they do not decode words accurately or fluently, and often they have poor spelling. Except for assessing to determine children's responses to instruction, there are no effective methods for differentiating subgroups of children with word-level problems. Students with reading disabilities (dyslexia) are real and represent the largest group of children in special education, even though in many cases stronger instruction in the earlier grades may have prevented the special education referral; they also comprise a large portion of the general education population that does not read well but has not been identified for special education.

Preventing reading difficulties is about making sure every child is exposed to reading instruction that is sufficiently explicit and customized to support the acquisition of foundational skills within a language-rich learning environment that promotes vocabulary and background knowledge. This will reduce unnecessary special education referral and identification. Students with significant, intractable reading problems that are not responsive to evidence-based instruction meet an important threshold for special education referral and identification. However, students who have not consistently had access to evidence-based instruction (because they are absent often or because their school district is not aware of the science of reading) are the students for whom reading difficulties can be prevented. While adequately addressing all the issues related to reading disabilities and dyslexia is beyond the scope of this article, we highlight "18 Common Misunderstandings of Dyslexia" in the box on the right.

How Should Educational Systems Be Organized So That the Vast Majority of Students Learn to Read?

Nearly two decades ago, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education ¹⁷ made three recommendations that-if fully implemented-could dramatically improve the instruction children receive and their reading achievement. The first recommendation was to focus on results, not process. The commission observed that special education was a highly bureaucratic process that did a good job in providing civil rights protection once a child was identified, but did not show strong evidence for accelerated gains in learning. It recommended the simplification of paperwork requirements and a change in monitoring of school-based implementation of special education to a focus on outcomes.

The second recommendation was to embrace a model of prevention, not a model of failure. Many literacy problems can be resolved with early intervention, so the commission advocated for universal screening, progress monitoring, and increasingly intense intervention based on instructional response; prevention was to start upon school entry and be supported by special education personnel. These methods, originally subsumed under a response to intervention (RTI) rubric, are now often referred to as multiple tiers of systematic support (MTSS).

The third recommendation was to consider children with disabilities as general education children first. Although requirements for placement in the least restrictive environment result in many children with reading disabilities spending the bulk of their school day in general education, there is often little alignment between the approaches to literacy instruction in general and special education. The primary special education intervention often involves accommodations, not remedial interventions to significantly improve students' reading ability.

We, as well as others, have summarized a model for preventing reading difficulties that aligns with an RTI/MTSS approach. ²³ The fundamental principle of prevention is screening to identify risk early. ²⁴ The idea is that it is better to over-identify children at risk for reading problems as early as possible and provide necessary instruction than to under-identify and have large numbers of students who suffer as their problems linger without the required instructional supports. An overview of this system for preventing reading difficulties is illustrated in the "Tiers of Instruction" below.

Tiers of Instruction
The Tiers of Instruction describes a model for providing increasingly customized reading interventions to students at risk for reading problems. Commonly presented as a triangle, we have tipped the triangle to emphasize the primacy of Tier 1 instruction for all students. Tiers 2 and 3 increase intensity for students who do not respond adequately to instruction. The percentages represent estimates, based on effective implementation of a multi-tiered system, of how many children are likely to be at or near grade level and only need Tier 1 (effective, evidence-based instruction for the whole class), at risk of reading difficulties and require Tier 2 (targeted, efficient supplemental instruction), or at risk of severe challenges and require Tier 3 (intensive, customized intervention, often with special education and/or dyslexia services).

From J. M. Fletcher, G. R. Lyon, L. S. Fuchs, and M. A. Barnes, Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019), 91. Copyright Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission from Guilford Press.

In this seamless, supportive system, all students are screened. Those at risk for reading difficulties receive continued evidence-based Tier 1 literacy instruction in the classroom, ongoing progress monitoring, and, if needed, a Tier 2 intervention that addresses their specific literacy problems. This Tier 2 intervention may be provided by the classroom teacher, a trained teaching assistant supervised by the classroom teacher, or an educational specialist such as a reading teacher. Tier 2 interventions are not part of a special education but rather an extension or supplement within general education. Students participate in Tier 2 intervention for a specified period of time, typically 8-12 weeks, with ongoing progress monitoring, approximately every two weeks. Using progress monitoring data and teachers' observations, each student's response to literacy instruction is determined (e.g., is the student reaching expected benchmarks?).

If the student's response is not sufficient to meet progress monitoring benchmarks, there are several options, including adjusting the instruction, changing the group, adjusting the group size, changing the intervention, or providing an increasingly intensive intervention (which may be longer, e.g., 30-45 minutes rather than 20 minutes, and more customized to each student's needs). If inadequate instructional response continues, the educational team or parent/guardian may determine that an eligibility evaluation for special education is in order. The advantage to this approach is that students are provided appropriate, evidence-based instruction early; for the majority of students, this rapid Tier 2 intervention is adequate for becoming strong readers. Only those students with persistent and significant reading difficulties would be referred for special education or dyslexia services.

Throughout this model, screening and progress monitoring are critical. Most schools across the United States are implementing screening approaches to reading difficulties that ostensibly identify those youngsters who are at risk for reading failure. It is mandated for dyslexia in over 40 states. ²⁵ Effective screeners (1) require 10 minutes or less per child, (2) demonstrate strong psychometric properties (e.g., are valid and reliable), (3) provide readily usable data that identify students as either at risk or not at risk, (4) are developmentally appropriate and can be administered two to three times per year, and (5) are easily scored. Errors in identifying which children are at risk of reading difficulties are inevitable, but we think schools should focus on reducing errors that result in not identifying risk (false negatives). In other words, it is better for a child who does not need extra instruction to get it than for a child who does need extra instruction to go without.

For progress monitoring, short probes involving timed word or passage reading are used so that teachers can make instructional decisions. ²⁶ These types of assessments are aimed at improving instruction and determining each student's incremental progress, recognizing that for students who are consistently making inadequate progress, additional interventions may be warranted. (For an easy-to-use review of progress monitoring tools, see here.)

Progress monitoring data can be useful in many ways. First, these data can document that students are learning the critical aspects of reading (e.g., sound-spelling patterns, vocabulary) being taught. Second, the types of responses students provide can guide instruction by highlighting each student's needs for reteaching and additional practice, while those elements that appear to be successfully learned can be monitored for maintenance. Third, data from these measures can facilitate decisions about curriculum (e.g., whether additional or different programs are needed), grouping (e.g., some students may benefit from a more advanced group; others may benefit from a mini one-on-one lesson to enhance performance), and interventions (e.g., whether to continue an intervention). Fourth, these data-especially ongoing progress monitoring data-can inform decisions about referral to and placement in special education. If special education eligibility becomes an issue, the best signal is the intractability of the child's reading problems when provided with the explicit instruction that works for most children.

How Can a Supportive, Integrated General and Special Education System Be Implemented?

Developing a systemic approach to supporting teachers so that they can meet the needs of the range of readers in their classrooms requires ongoing screening, monitoring students' responses to instruction so that teachers can adjust instruction to meet students' needs, and fidelity of implementation to ensure adherence to treatment protocols. But seamlessly assembling all these pieces is not easy.

First, most educators, including teachers and school leaders, would benefit from ongoing situated professional development that builds on the knowledge they have and extends it in ways that may be readily implemented in their school setting. What happens when you say "professional development" to most educators? Do they smile with anticipation about what they will learn and how they can implement it in their school? Typically, no. Too often, professional development is a one-day exposure to ideas (of varying quality), many of which are lost before the next day at school.

We are suggesting a distributed professional development model that provides ongoing learning opportunities as each aspect of the new system is launched. This model can follow standards like those from Learning Forward. Workshops on how to screen children and offer highly effective Tier 1 instruction would be followed with in-class coaching and support until the majority of educators were aligning their practices with data on outcomes. Then, educators would learn how to extend their Tier 1 practices with Tier 2 supplemental interventions, increasing time in literacy instruction for students who are not making sufficient progress. This would ensure that the instruction children receive in Tiers 1 and 2 is well aligned, which increases effectiveness.

Adding Tier 3 instruction requires yet more professional development, coaching, and coordination. Tier 3 more intensively focuses intervention on students' skill gaps and may be guided by more diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments. Students in Tier 3 may be candidates for special education and/or dyslexia identification and services. Because of the focus on individual skill gaps, it is not as tightly aligned with Tier 1 (regular classroom instruction), but Tier 1 remains essential for providing a comprehensive reading program. For example, a child receiving Tier 3 intervention for specific decoding skills needs Tier 1 core instruction to continue progressing in vocabulary, listening comprehension, writing across genres, and other aspects of English language arts.

Building up the seamless system takes time and a great deal of in-class support for teachers-but it is far more effective than scattershot workshops. Preventing and addressing reading difficulties is hard, but the effort pays big dividends in reducing reading difficulties. We urge schools, districts, and states to put far more effort into systemic supports (especially the professional development and coaching for teachers and administrators described here). We recommend beginning in grade 1, where the strongest evidence of the efficacy of these approaches exists, and then expanding to other grades.

What Can Teachers Do Now to Support Students with Reading Difficulties or with Mild to Moderate Disabilities or Dyslexia?

Most of what we describe above requires system-level change. But teachers want to do what's best for their students today. Here are six steps that teachers can implement in their classrooms now (and that school leaders should start supporting immediately).

1. Use academic learning time deliberately and purposefully to ensure students receive the maximum amount of evidence-based instruction. Academic engagement-i.e., time on task-is an excellent predictor of academic outcomes.²⁷ Consider how much time you spend explicitly teaching and providing highly focused instructional time. Observation studies reveal that surprisingly little class time is devoted to explicitly teaching the high-priority skills associated with improved reading outcomes.²⁸ Consider ways to structure your classroom, teaching, and resources so that maximum time is spent on instruction and minimal time is lost to transitions, over-explaining, and behavioral management.

2. Consider the value of the one-minute lesson. Many students with significant reading difficulties benefit from a one-minute lesson in which they are provided a mini review of a challenging task, an opportunity to practice word reading with feedback, or a chance to demonstrate what they know with feedback. Time is always an issue, but do not allow it to block you from spending highly focused instructional minutes with the students who need you the most.

3. Offer customized instruction that reflects students' learning needs. Many of the students you teach learn to read almost effortlessly. However, students with reading difficulties, disabilities, or dyslexia require highly customized instruction that aligns with their specific learning needs. How can you determine what this customized instruction might be? Examine their screening and progress monitoring data. Determine the high-priority areas in which they require additional instruction and practice. Identify ways to include this type of work each day in an individual mini lesson or with a small group of students with similar needs. Provide practice opportunities with feedback so they have multiple opportunities to acquire proficiency.

4. Give struggling readers instruction in small groups, in pairs, or one on one. Many students with reading difficulties benefit from the specialized instruction that is allowable in small-group, paired, and one-on-one instruction. These formats provide opportunities to tailor instruction to their needs with appropriate practice and targeted feedback.

5. Create many opportunities to read a range of text types and a range of text levels. Students who struggle with reading benefit from opportunities to generalize their reading to varied text types, including digital texts, informational texts, and narrative texts as well as hybrid informational and narrative texts such as biographies. This variation in text types is not just for older students but can be part of the listening comprehension and text reading of younger students, including beginning readers. Also, consider ways to vary the text levels that students read. Students can read and comprehend more advanced texts when they have adequate background knowledge, are motivated by the topic, and/or have additional instructional support.

6. Provide explicit instruction that incorporates clear feedback. Explicit instruction with feedback is highly effective, especially when students are having difficulty learning with less explicit methods. Teachers who offer this type of evidence-based instruction do the following:

Identify, prior to teaching, what they expect the students to do or say.

State clearly and in as few words as possible what they need students to know.

Model what they expect students to say or do.

Ask students to demonstrate what is expected (e.g., blend phonemes, read a word, read a text silently).

Provide prompt feedback that is specific and clear (e.g., "I heard several of you blending the sounds /r/, /a/, /t/ and then saying the word 'rat.' That is what I expect. I also heard several of you only saying the word 'rat' and not blending the sounds. I will give you three more sounds, and I want everyone to both blend the sounds and say the word.").

Give selected students opportunities to respond independently (and avoid only calling on the most capable students).

Control the task difficulty by making the task less difficult for students in need of adaptation and then gradually increasing the task difficulty as their performance improves.

Maintain high levels of student success, engagement, and response.

Wrap Up

The degree to which a student expresses a reading difficulty is always an interaction between the child's opportunity to learn (due to absences, instructional quality, or other issues) and the extent of the student's reading impairment. Thus, youngsters who are provided a genuine opportunity to learn to read-including high-quality, explicit, evidence-based instruction-and yet still present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have a severe reading impairment. In contrast, children who have not consistently been able to access high-quality, evidence-based instruction and present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have reading problems that could have been prevented and still can be remediated. This difference is of the utmost importance. Currently, there are students with preventable reading problems who are suffering academically and emotionally, and who are placed in special education often to receive accommodations without effective remediation. And there are students with severe reading disabilities or dyslexia who are not getting the intensive interventions they need-in part because special education is overwhelmed with large numbers of students who do not actually have reading disabilities.

This must end, but teachers cannot solve these problems on their own. These are systemic problems-and that is why we have proposed a new, seamless, three-tiered system of general and special education to address them. Far too many students and teachers are struggling. It is long past time for leaders of schools, districts, and states-not to mention teacher preparation programs, curriculum developers, and professional development providers-to step up, change their policies and programs, and focus on meeting children's needs.

Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor in the Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders program. She has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Literacy and Learning and the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children. Jack M. Fletcher is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he is also the associate vice president for research administration. A former member of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, he has earned the International Literacy Association's Albert J. Harris Award and the International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award. This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the authors are solely responsible for the content).

*To learn more about how preparation programs, professional development, and other key supports could be improved, see "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science" in the Summer 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. R. Lyon et al., "Rethinking Learning Disabilities," in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, ed. C. E. Finn et al. (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, 2001), 287.
2. A. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech Affect Research in Reading and Writing," in Foundations of Reading Acquisition and Dyslexia: Implications for Early Intervention, ed. B. Blachman (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 5.
3. L. Sanetti and M. Collier-Meek, Supporting Successful Interventions in Schools: Tools to Plan, Evaluate, and Sustain Effective Implementation (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
4. J. Fletcher and S. Vaughn, "Response to Intervention: Preventing and Remediating Academic Difficulties," Child Development Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2009): 30-37; and A. VanDerHeyden, J. Witt, and D. Gilbertson, "A Multi-Year Evaluation of the Effects of a Response to Intervention (RTI) on Identification of Children for Special Education," Journal of School Psychology 45, no. 2 (2007): 225-256.
5. S. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).
6. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech."
7. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
8. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
9. A. VanDerHeyden, M. Burns, and W. Bonifay, "Is More Screening Better? The Relationship Between Frequent Screening, Accurate Decisions, and Reading Proficiency," School Psychology Review 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-82.
10. J. Fletcher and D. Currie, "Vision Efficiency Interventions and Reading Disability," Perspectives on Language and Literacy 37, no. 1 (2011): 21-24.
11. J. M. Fletcher et al., Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
12. A. E. Cunningham et al., "Disciplinary Knowledge of K-3 Teachers and Their Knowledge Calibration in the Domain of Early Literacy," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 139-167; and L. Spear-Swerling and P. Brucke, "Preparing Novice Teachers to Develop Basic Reading and Spelling Skills in Children," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 332-364.
13. J. Worthy, "'We Know for a Fact': Dyslexia Interventionists and the Power of Authoritative Discourse," Journal of Literacy Research 50, no. 3 (2018): 359-382.
14. R. Peterson and B. Pennington, "Developmental Dyslexia," The Lancet 379, no. 9830 (2012): 1997-2007.
15. S. Shaywitz et al., "Persistence of Dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence," Pediatrics 104, no. 6 (1999): 1351-1359.
16. A. Ellis, Reading, Writing and Dyslexia: A Cognitive Analysis (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1993).
17. US Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families (Washington, DC: 2002).
18. M. Snowling and M. Melby-Lervåg, "Oral Language Deficits in Familial Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis and Review," Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 5 (2016): 498-545.
19. See, for example, M. Melby-Lervåg, T. Redick, and C. Hulme, "Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of 'Far Transfer': Evidence from a Meta-Analytic Review," Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016): 512-534.
20. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain.
21. M. Scheiman, "Effect of Vergence/Accommodative Therapy on Reading in Children with Convergence Insufficiency: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Optometry and Vision Science 96, no. 11 (2019): 836-849.
22. L. Tamm, "Comparing Treatments for Children with ADHD and Word Reading Difficulties: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 85, no. 5 (2017): 434-446.
23. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
24. For similar models, see G. Batsche et al., Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation (Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 2005); and J. Kovaleski, A. VanDerHeyden, and E. Shapiro, The RTI Approach to Evaluating Learning Disabilities (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
25. Y. Petscher et al., Screening for Dyslexia (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy, 2019).
26. L. Fuchs et al., "Bringing Data-Based Individualization to Scale: A Call for the Next-Generation Technology of Teacher Supports," Journal of Learning Disabilities (forthcoming).
27. C. Greenwood, B. Horton, and C. Utley, "Academic Engagement: Current Perspectives on Research and Practice," School Psychology Review 31, no. 3 (2002): 328-349; and J. Stallings, R. Johnson, and J. Goodman, "Engaged Rates: Does Grade Level Make a Difference?," Journal of Research in Childhood Education 1 (1986): 20-26.
28. D. Chard and E. Kameenui, "Struggling First-Grade Readers: The Frequency and Progress of Their Reading," Journal of Special Education 34, no. 1 (2000): 28-38; and S. Vaughn et al., "Reading Instruction for Students with LD and EBD: A Synthesis of Observation Studies," Journal of Special Education 36, no. 1 (2002): 2-13.
29. See, for example, M. Lovett et al., "Treating the Core Deficits of Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence of Transfer of Learning After Phonologically- and Strategy-Based Reading Training Programs," Developmental Psychology 30, no. 6 (1994): 805-822; and R. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation for Developmental Reading Disabilities: IQ, Socioeconomic Status, and Race as Factors in Remedial Outcome," Journal of Learning Disabilities 45, no. 2 (2012): 99-127.
30. M. Lovett, R. Barron, and J. Frijters, "Word Identification Difficulties in Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: Intervention Research Findings," in Handbook of Learning Disabilities, ed. H. Swanson, K. Harris, and S. Graham (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
31. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation."
32. C. Denton et al., "An Evaluation of Intensive Intervention for Students with Persistent Reading Difficulties," Journal of Learning Disabilities 39, no. 5 (2006): 447-466.

[illustrated by Jia Liu]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read."

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J acqueline is a sixth-grade special education teacher whose school district recently decided to implement an inclusive approach to teaching and learning. Now special and general educators collaborate to provide a stronger system of instructional supports based on their analysis of students' data. Jacqueline and her colleagues are systematically supporting students with disabilities and others who are struggling in one or more academic or behavioral domains. After months of online learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, they now have a hybrid model in which students are on staggered schedules, coming to school two days a week. While some families have been able to adjust, many are experiencing a great deal of stress. More students than ever are slipping behind, acting out, and withdrawing. The whole sixth-grade instructional team has been searching for more effective practices to foster academic, social, and emotional development.
Jacqueline's sixth-grade general education colleagues have started to teach using modeling with think-alouds and strategies like summarizing text. They are also using specific scaffolds, including graphic organizers, to better accommodate students' learning needs. When working with students in small groups, Jacqueline reteaches strategies, models foundational skills necessary for successful participation in the general education curriculum, and helps her students learn to use accommodations that will support learning in both settings (such as text-to-speech software so that students who are still developing reading skills have access to grade-level content). The changes Jacqueline and her colleagues are making seem to be working. Almost all the students with disabilities and the students who have been struggling during the pandemic are securing better grades and seem more motivated to participate in instruction. Many are even beginning to show their peers how to use strategies they learned in Jacqueline's small groups.
Jacqueline and her general education colleagues have always worked hard and been dedicated to their students, but in the past their instructional strategies were not well coordinated. As they started working together more closely to adopt the inclusive model, they also dug into research on how to accelerate learning. They found that agreeing on some foundational ideas-like collaborating so that core and supplemental instruction are tightly connected and being more specific about students' learning goals and the scaffolds the team would use to meet them-made a big difference in their team's day-to-day work and their students' development.

Jacqueline's experience is in keeping with what research has established: students with disabilities can achieve content-area standards and meet social and emotional milestones when they are consistently provided the instructional practices and accommodations that best support their learning. Decades of research have defined effective instructional practices that general and special education teachers can use to help students with disabilities, and students without disabilities who need additional supports, achieve better academic and social-emotional outcomes. ¹ These well-researched, trustworthy instructional practices are freely available through national centers like the IRIS Center and the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability, and Reform (CEEDAR) Center, and in publications like Practice Guides published through the Institute of Education Sciences.

The challenge for teachers, however, is translating the many research-based instructional practices that exist into daily classroom instruction. Classrooms are complex environments, and teachers must attend to many demands. Time to study, try out, and reflect on new practices is in short supply. And time to do so collaboratively as an instructional team is all too rare. To address this problem, the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and CEEDAR convened scholars, researchers, practitioners, teacher preparation faculty, and advocates to carefully review the literature and identify high-leverage practices that improve instruction across different content domains and grade levels for students with disabilities and for other students with learning differences. These practices, when used over time, are designed to support and enhance teachers' implementation of content-specific, research-based practices in such areas as reading, writing, mathematics, and social-emotional learning. (To learn more about these practices and the professional learning system that states, teacher preparation programs, and school districts ought to provide for general and special education teachers, see the companion article, "Systemic Support for Special Education: Making It a More Integral Part of General Teacher Preparation.")

What Are High-Leverage Practices?

High-leverage practices (HLPs) are instructional approaches educators in K-12 can use to teach different types of learners and content. ² The working group convened by CEC and CEEDAR identified 22 such practices after spending 18 months engaged in the following process: discussing research on effective instruction, distilling that research into a manageable set of practices, incorporating feedback from several focus groups, presenting practices to the CEC representative assembly, and finalizing the HLPs with the CEC executive board. The group deemed the selected practices "high leverage" because they are foundational to effective instruction, they help with managing and intervening in students' behavior, and they support successful implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (the legislation guaranteeing that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate education with their nondisabled peers to the extent that is possible ³). The 22 practices are organized into four essential aspects of teachers' work: collaboration, assessment, social/emotional/behavioral, and instruction. (For the complete list of practices, see the box on the top right.)

In this article, we describe two HLPs that are foundational for delivering effective instruction: (1) use explicit instruction, and (2) provide high-quality feedback. Research shows that teachers can use these two practices in general and special education classrooms to improve student outcomes. In addition, they are a great starting place for implementing other HLPs. In describing these two HLPs, we provide examples of how teachers might use them. We also provide a list of resources teachers can use to support their implementation (see the lower box on the right).

Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction (HLP 16) is one of the most well-researched HLPs for teaching students with disabilities in grades K-12. When teachers provide explicit instruction, they make clear for students how to engage in a particular skill, how to be strategic when they approach a task (such as solving a mathematics problem or summarizing a paragraph), or how to define a concept using examples and nonexamples. Explicit instruction has been shown repeatedly to promote skill learning in many domains, problem-solving approaches in mathematics, and strategic thinking in disciplinary literacy instruction. ⁴

Most educators agree that explicit instruction includes the following components:⁵

Break down (or segment) the learning task.

Set clear, measurable, and feasible lesson objectives.

Provide numerous opportunities for students to respond to prompts of varying difficulty, and deliver immediate feedback.

Model by demonstrating and thinking aloud.

Provide guided and engaging practice.

Promote student independence.

In the following sections, we describe each component of explicit instruction and provide examples to support implementation. We suggest that teachers spend extra time learning how to engage in the explicit instruction component of modeling, as researchers have found that many teachers find modeling difficult and could benefit from additional professional development. ⁶

Break down (or segment) the learning task. During planning, teachers break down a learning task by analyzing the concept, strategy, or skill and listing key steps needed to teach it. For concepts, they think carefully about an appropriate definition and select examples and nonexamples that will elucidate the critical features or dimensions of the concept when teaching.

Here's an example from Jacqueline and one of the general education teachers, Tanisha; they want to use a graphic organizer to help students write persuasive essays. During a joint planning session, they list steps students need to learn in order to use a graphic organizer to map out ideas before writing. Jacqueline and Tanisha (1) decide how they will explain the graphic organizer's purpose; (2) set a measurable learning objective for each lesson; (3) script what they will say while thinking aloud-including the specific topic, examples, and nonexamples-when they model how to map out ideas with a graphic organizer; and (4) choose guided practice and independent practice activities to help students learn to use the graphic organizer. Jacqueline and Tanisha also consider scaffolds, such as speech-to-text software, that some of their students with disabilities may need to record their ideas.

Set clear, measurable, and feasible lesson objectives. This aspect of explicit instruction has been widely adopted. Many teachers begin every lesson by presenting an objective. The most effective approach is to provide a specific and measurable objective that can be accomplished in the time allocated for the lesson; they display the objective (e.g., on a dry-erase board), read it to the students, and discuss its importance. They also conclude each lesson by reviewing those aspects of the objective that were accomplished.

When introducing the graphic organizer for persuasive writing, Jacqueline and Tanisha explain to students that they will learn how to use a graphic organizer to develop a persuasive essay. They display and discuss the lesson objective: "Students will correctly explain to a partner the purpose of writing to persuade as well as how a graphic organizer can be used to organize key ideas and plan before we write." After introducing and discussing real-world examples of the genre and the purpose of persuasive writing, they explain each part of the graphic organizer, along with its function. Tanisha and Jacqueline provide several writing samples that include a graphic organizer and several others that do not. They then ask students to "explain to a partner the purpose of writing to persuade as well as how this particular graphic organizer will be used to organize ideas and plan before we write." To see if their learning objective has been met or if additional teaching is needed, Tanisha and Jacqueline close the lesson by assigning student pairs to report back on what they discussed.

Provide numerous opportunities for students to respond to prompts of varying difficulty, and deliver immediate feedback. A key element of explicit instruction is to provide students with numerous opportunities to respond to prompts. This both engages students in the learning process and enables teachers to assess understanding and learning. Teachers should be deliberate in terms of crafting opportunities to respond so they reflect the spectrum of difficulty (e.g., rote or deep/probing questions) and modalities (e.g., responses that are choral, gestural, individual, or written). Jacqueline and Tanisha use planning time to make decisions about what types of opportunities to respond each lesson will feature, and which individual students Jacqueline will focus on to demonstrate their learning. Wanting to ensure that Tanisha calls on many different students while she facilitates a whole-group discussion of which writing samples are or are not examples of persuasive essays, they decide she will use a system that helps keep students engaged: drawing popsicle sticks with students' names on them from a cup. Jacqueline and Tanisha also plan how they will provide students with immediate and specific feedback (the second high-leverage practice we discuss in this article). Feedback reinforces students' efforts and prevents them from unintentionally learning incorrect information.

Model by demonstrating and thinking aloud. Modeling includes the following steps: (1) demonstrating, (2) thinking aloud while demonstrating, and sometimes (3) presenting examples and nonexamples to reinforce learning. Although some educators assume that modeling is more applicable to elementary school, modeling is also relevant in grades 6-12, as well as in college and the workplace.* For instance, a 10th-grade history teacher can use modeling with a think-aloud to demonstrate some strategies for detecting bias in documents from a website. Steps may include demonstrating how to navigate to and within a website, describing the criteria he uses to evaluate a document for bias (such as looking for funding sources, for representation of multiple perspectives, or for acknowledgements of limitations of the work), and thinking aloud while he applies that criteria to evaluate the credibility of different documents (e.g., news articles, speeches, or policy papers). Time spent in the modeling phase is determined by skill complexity (e.g., modeling a cursive letter for third-graders versus a multistep algorithm for students in precalculus).

Jacqueline and Tanisha model with a think-aloud to show students how to use their notes from the graphic organizer to compose sentences for their persuasive essays. Jacqueline begins the model by showing students how to take two words from her graphic organizer, "vegan options," to write an introductory sentence. Jacqueline states, "My notes are brief, but contain good ideas. My notes say 'vegan options' for the introduction to my paragraph. Hmm, how will I turn this into a great sentence? Well, what I believe is that there should be at least one vegan option each day. I'll write, 'I believe the time has come for students to have a daily vegan option for lunch.' I like my sentence because it conveys to readers where I stand!" To demonstrate, Jacqueline writes the sentence on the board as she talks through the process.

Provide guided and engaging practice. In this component of explicit instruction, teachers plan highly interactive practice activities to build students' proficiency. Teachers ask students multiple questions to assess understanding or provide multiple opportunities to demonstrate what they are learning by showing their work. Teachers then provide quality feedback on students' responses.

Tanisha and Jacqueline realize that many students will require considerable support to independently write a persuasive essay. Along with breaking down lessons for each step-use a graphic organizer to plan ideas, convert notes into an essay, and revise and publish their essays-they also conduct guided practice for each step. In one guided practice session, Jacqueline, Tanisha, and their students generate ideas and notes for the graphic organizer based on the prompt: "Should the voting age be lowered to 17?" Through discussion, the class decides that 17 years old is appropriate. They then brainstorm reasons to support their position. To give students more opportunities to respond, Tanisha and Jacqueline divide the students into two groups, with each teacher facilitating one group. (Once the pandemic is over and it is safe for students to sit close to each other, they plan to pair students for "turn and talk" brainstorming.) In Tanisha's group, two students argue that 17-year-olds are responsible enough to vote because they had obtained drivers' licenses at age 16, and doing so demonstrated responsibility. As the students talk, Tanisha provides suggestions to help limit how many words they use during note taking. The students then choose the following words for their notes, "license shows responsibility."

To support three students whose graphic organizers are only partially completed, Jacqueline breaks a few of the group's ideas into more specific questions to improve their understanding of and participation in the task. For example, one student says her older brother, who is 17, has a job and that means he is responsible enough to vote; she then argues for being able to vote as soon as you get a job or turn 18, whichever comes first. To engage the three students in considering that assertion, Jacqueline asks a series of brief questions (starting with "Does having a job mean you are responsible?") and helps the students write their notes after each question. Once the class completes the graphic organizers, Jacqueline and Tanisha bring the whole class back together and provide feedback on ideas they generated. In their next planning period, they agree to create additional modeling and guided practice activities to help students learn how to generate text using ideas in their graphic organizers.

Promote student independence. Teachers gradually remove support during the guided practice phase and plan continued practice opportunities for students to increase their proficiency and their ability to apply what they have learned in new situations. ⁷ Independent practice activities vary in length and format (e.g., independent practice with solving mathematics word problems versus with writing chemistry lab reports), and include immediate and corrective feedback, a return to modeling as necessary, or additional examples and nonexamples if a review is warranted.

Tanisha and Jacqueline allot 30-minute periods spread over several days for independent practice. Students choose a topic to plan and compose a persuasive response. Topics include (1) whether the local government should install solar panels on government buildings, (2) whether the local library should add a computer lab or an art studio, and (3) which historical figure should be honored with a statue at a local park. Jacqueline conferences with students based on their needs. For instance, one student watches Jacqueline model and share examples of using transition words like furthermore, another reason, and besides when introducing a new idea. Jacqueline teaches another student to improve his writing by using the thesaurus on his laptop. Noting that he used the word obviously twice in one paragraph, Jacqueline models using the thesaurus to choose a new word. He then practices using the thesaurus independently.

Importantly, Jacqueline and Tanisha recognize that some students benefit from ongoing review as the school year advances, including repeated modeling of the steps in writing persuasive essays and other instructional scaffolds. After several months, the process of using explicit instruction to specify how to use a graphic organizer for writing a persuasive essay resulted in increased performance and greater confidence among the students, including those with disabilities. When the students with disabilities used the graphic organizer combined with speech-to-text software to support their spelling and handwriting issues, their writing improved substantially.

Feedback

Feedback (HLP 8, under social/emotional/behavioral, and HLP 22, under instruction) is a powerful research-based practice teachers can use to improve students' learning and development-from understanding concepts to mastering skills to enhancing social interactions. ⁸ Feedback is a key feature of explicit instruction that occurs after a teacher has provided an opportunity to practice a concept, skill, or strategy that the teacher has modeled and explained. When used effectively, feedback can increase student motivation and effort toward a learning task and improve performance.

To be effective, teachers' feedback must be specific. Specific feedback incorporates these qualities:⁹

Goal directed

Constructive

Immediate or timely

Positive and respectful

Goal directed. Goal-directed feedback focuses on the academic or behavioral target students are working toward. The learning target should be important for student growth, based on assessment of student performance, explained to the student clearly, and, when possible, developed collaboratively with the student.

Two of Jacqueline's students have not yet been able to write a cohesive essay. To support them, she and the students are working toward writing strong, well-organized paragraphs that include a topic sentence and three to four supporting details. When providing feedback to one of her students, Sam, she notes he has developed a strong topic sentence because it introduces what the paragraph will be about, and he has two details that support it. Jacqueline also points out that the remaining two sentences contain details that are not related to the topic sentence and helps Sam generate two related details that he can write about. In addition to focusing on Sam's writing, Jacqueline tells him that he did a good job of working independently, a skill she has been trying to promote. Being more specific, Jacqueline tells Sam that she appreciates that he first asked his peers for ideas and also looked up information on the computer before asking her for help. She emphasizes that it will be important for Sam to continue to seek help on his own to continue growing as an independent learner.

Constructive. Constructive feedback helps students understand specific aspects of performance that are effective and specific aspects that need to be improved. In Jacqueline's work with Sam, she helps him understand what he has done to meet his learning and behavior targets-such as writing the topic sentence, adding two related details, and improving his work through independent strategies. Then, Jacqueline specifies what he needs to do to improve (replacing the unrelated details in his paragraph). Building on the initiative Sam took by trying to look up information on the computer, Jacqueline later follows up to help Sam learn more about online research. Such support and clarity usually motivate all students, especially those who have been struggling to learn.

Immediate or timely. Immediate feedback is ideal in supporting student learning, whether instruction is focused on academic content or behavior. For example, while Jacqueline is teaching a small group of students to capitalize proper nouns in their essays, she draws attention immediately to the students' errors. Jacqueline offers this real-time feedback in a helpful manner, with an encouraging tone, such as pointing to a lowercased name in a student's paragraph and asking what is missing. The same is true for improving behavior. Quickly pointing out that a student engaged in an appropriate behavior is a positive way to increase prosocial interactions. For instance, right after Marcel helped Sam with his writing, Jacqueline tells him that she liked how helpful he was being-and she notices over the next week that Marcel is more frequently helping other students in the class.

Immediate feedback is not always possible, especially in general education classrooms where teachers are working with a large group of students on tasks such as extended writing or applying a summary strategy while reading with their peers. In these instances, teachers will want to provide feedback as soon as possible.

For the general education students' persuasive essays, Tanisha chooses to provide written feedback on their long-term learning goals: organization, use of details, capitalization, and appropriate punctuation. Tanisha also provides written feedback when her students are honing their ability to summarize. Once her students are ready for independent practice, Tanisha has them underline the topic sentence and then highlight ideas that supported it before writing a 10- to 15-word summary. That approach gives Tanisha insights into the students' thinking, allowing her to provide written feedback on whether they were able to identify the topic sentence and related ideas before they write their summaries. It also helps Tanisha identify what additional instruction the students need (such as a repeated modeling lesson or additional background knowledge and vocabulary).

Positive and respectful. Positive and respectful feedback helps students feel that their efforts are worthwhile and appreciated by the teacher. Teachers should acknowledge students' efforts as well as their correct answers and prosocial behaviors. For instance, Jacqueline often tells students she notices they are working well with their peers to read a passage; she appreciates the way they are taking turns and praising each other for reading carefully. Likewise, when students are decoding multisyllabic words but need additional help, Jacqueline is careful to focus on their efforts. She often makes remarks like, "Oh, that was an interesting way to sound out the word, let me show you what I would do."

To provide constructive feedback, it is most effective to focus only on what students did well and what they need to do to improve-and to avoid criticizing the quality of their efforts. For instance, when a student, Zara, gets stuck solving a word problem, Jacqueline tells her that she did a fine job of reading the mathematics problem aloud and then paraphrasing the question; Jacqueline then reminds Zara that she would find it easier to solve the problem if she drew a picture representing it, as Jacqueline taught the class to do earlier that week. Seeing that Zara looks confused, Jacqueline remodels how to represent the problem in a picture.

These high-leverage practices provide an excellent road map for K-12 educators to consider when designing and implementing instruction for students with disabilities and others who need additional supports. Although all HLPs are important for teachers' tool belts, use of explicit instruction and feedback stand out as must-have practices to produce strong outcomes for the broadest possible range of students-including large numbers of students who have fallen behind as a result of the pandemic. As noted above, educators can use explicit instruction and feedback across the day to teach just about any content, and then give students positive, timely information about the extent to which they are meeting expectations. But explicit instruction and feedback are not standalone practices.

To implement explicit instruction, teachers must also be able to establish consistent, organized, and respectful learning environments (HLP 7); otherwise, they will be unable to accomplish any instruction. They also must be able to identify and prioritize long- and short-term learning goals (HLP 11), if they are to focus their explicit instruction, and be able to promote active student engagement (HLP 18), if they are to create highly interactive instruction that helps students learn. Because all 22 HLPs reinforce each other but cannot be learned simultaneously, we recommend that educators looking for a logical entry point to adopt the HLPs begin with explicit instruction and feedback. These key practices serve as a strong foundation for other HLPs and are essential elements of many content-focused, research-based practices, such as teaching decoding in a systematic manner and encouraging positive behaviors.
Mary T. Brownell is a distinguished professor of special education at the University of Florida and director of the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability, and Reform (CEEDAR) Center. Stephen Ciullo is an associate professor of special education at Texas State University. Michael J. Kennedy is an associate professor of education in the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia and head of the STORMED (Supporting Teachers through cOaching, obseRvations, and Multimedia to Educate students with Disabilities) Lab. The content of this manuscript was produced under US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, Award No. H325A170003. David Guardino serves as the project officer. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the US Department of Education. No official endorsement by the US Department of Education is intended or should be inferred.
*For more on the importance of modeling in schooling, see "'Cognitive Apprenticeship' Revisited" in the Fall 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. R. Gersten et al., Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Response to Intervention (RtI) for Elementary and Middle Schools, NCEE 2009-4060 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, 2009). See also S. Graham et al., "Reading for Writing: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Reading Interventions on Writing," Review of Educational Research 88 (2018): 243-284.
2. J. McLeskey et al., High-Leverage Practices in Special Education (Arlington, VA: Council for Exceptional Children and CEEDAR Center, January 2017).
3. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (2004).
4. A. L. Archer and C. A. Hughes, Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching (New York: Guilford Press, 2010); and S. De La Paz et al., "A Historical Writing Apprenticeship for Adolescents: Integrating Disciplinary Learning with Cognitive Strategies," Reading Research Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2017): 31-52.
5. Archer and Hughes, Explicit Instruction; and C. A. Hughes et al., "Explicit Instruction: Historical and Contemporary Contexts," Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 32, no. 3 (2017): 140-148.
6. D. L. Coker Jr. et al., "Writing Instruction in First Grade: An Observational Study," Reading and Writing 29, no. 5 (2016): 793-832.
7. Hughes et al., "Explicit Instruction."
8. J. Hattie and H. Timperley, "The Power of Feedback," Review of Educational Research 77 (2007): 81-112.
9. M. Kennedy et al., "High-Leverage Practices #8 & #22: Provide Positive and Constructive Feedback to Guide Students' Learning and Behavior," 2018, highleveragepractices.org/701-2-3; and McLeskey et al., High-Leverage Practices.

[illustrated by Rachel Sender]

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J acqueline is a sixth-grade special education teacher whose school district recently decided to implement an inclusive approach to teaching and learning. Now special and general educators collaborate to provide a stronger system of instructional supports based on their analysis of students' data.

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Is it Possible to Use Personalized Learning to Accelerate Students’ Literacy Outcomes in the Time of COVID?

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Is it Possible to Use Personalized Learning to Accelerate Students’ Literacy Outcomes in the Time of COVID?

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The pandemic-induced nationwide school closures in the spring and wide variance in school conditions this fall are resulting in students receiving even spottier reading instruction than usual. The erratic and uneven access to literacy instruction exacerbated by the pandemic is intersecting with a long-delayed racial and socio-economic reckoning in America. Vital questions about how to ensure all school-aged children learn to read and write capably and with confidence have gained even greater urgency.

We are in the midst of a review of hundreds of studies in literacy, personalized learning, and principles of equitable instruction. We are providing some early learnings from that review that we hope will help guide school districts, principals, and teachers who are making pressurized decisions about what products to buy and use daily in the desire to maintain learning and literacy in unprecedented circumstances. Many products purport to personalize literacy instruction and accelerate gains. How then to decide what will best serve student and teacher needs?

Our working hypothesis is that personalized learning approaches, when thoughtfully implemented and grounded in research-based practices for literacy, can potentially serve as levers to help make up ground and accelerate literacy outcomes. This post, which is the first of a series of two, will lay a foundation for understanding where productive intersections lie between research-grounded literacy practices and promising directions in personalized learning. It names the "literacy accelerators," those ingredients that have a research base for undergirding successful reading and promoting vibrant facility with speaking, listening, and writing in English as well. It then discusses personalized learning and its potential to promote greater gains in literacy. The second post will offer a working draft of principles for considering the effective and just intersection of personalized learning and literacy. We hope those considerations, in particular, will provide practical guidance to school leaders and teachers in the immediate term.

These two introductory posts are forerunners for a longer research synthesis to be published in January 2021 that will offer answers to the queries and conditions established here.
What do we mean by personalized learning in ELA/literacy?
Personalized learning must be personal above all. Personalization can take many forms, but approaches must be selected based on knowledge of the student and attention to the specifics of the content area. It is an instructional approach, not a product. The goal of personalization should be that students are able to meet grade-level expectations and ultimately achieve college and career readiness. Personalized learning has the potential to achieve this goal when students are engaged in customized human and/or technology-enabled learning experiences that accelerate each student's progress, counteract biases, and engage, enrich, and motivate each student.

In this discussion, we are concentrated squarely on accelerating the literacy capacity of students who have not been well-served in public schools and whose learning needs have been pushed to the margins of resource allocation and focus. We intend to draw specific attention to Black students, students who come to English learning (ELs) from another language base, and students from chronically low-income households. These identifiers have become all too predictive of students' academic outcomes. Let's be clear, ending disparities in literacy-ensuring every student reads ably wherever they live-does not rest on students' shoulders; it rests on ours. It rests on those of us working as teachers and leaders in the education system to tap into each child's brilliance.

We hold there are indeed known and powerful avenues that would allow for such acceleration to take place. Abundant research in cognitive science exists about the processes for learning to read and what matters most in growing successful readers.

We are confident about one more thing, which is that a truly productive approach to personalized learning must advocate for ways to fundamentally redesign the schooling system, not just maintain the trappings of school as we know it. Gloria Ladson Billings has called this moment an opportunity to do a "hard reset" for how we do schooling in America, and we agree. Personalized learning crammed into chronically underfunded and overcrowded classrooms will serve minimal good.
What accelerates literacy learning and reading ability specifically?
Reading is liberation. Being able to read well opens doors. Being literate provides opportunities to engage with and be productive in society in ways we each choose. Here's the really good news: while there is no silver bullet, all students can learn to read and write with the right combination of instructional ingredients and plentiful practice.

Reading is rich and complicated, an intricate mix of various habits, skills, confidence, and knowledge. The other skills of speaking, listening, writing, and facility with language add to the rich tapestry. Within that rich mix, some elements stand out as most critical for-and effective in-promoting students' robust literacy outcomes. We've dubbed these "literacy accelerators." There are five. These accelerators are well established in the literature, though they are too seldom fully integrated into instructional materials or teacher training. The accelerators work in concert; they bolster one another in innumerable ways. Each is essential, but they only genuinely accelerate student literacy when exercised together. Here's a rundown of the five leading literacy accelerators:

1. Securing solid foundational reading skills early on in students' school careers (ideally by grade three) so students can continually develop as fluent readers in every grade level thereafter. Teachers need to execute the direct teaching and reinforcement of foundational reading standards, with practice both in and out of context. That ensures children will learn how spoken language is represented in print. Teaching foundational skills, no matter the grade, goes on in parallel with attending to the rest of English Language Arts. The two are corresponding, not sequential activities. They work in tandem until the act of reading is automatic; fully fluent and foundational reading can disappear into the background to grease the wheels of comprehension forevermore.

2. Expanding the vocabulary children bring with them through a volume of reading (both read aloud to students and books they read for themselves) and word study. Knowledge of words and knowledge about the world are tightly connected. The things we know have to be named and described by words when encountered in print. The most efficient way to learn vocabulary is to acquire it while reading. Recent research demonstrates that students learn up to four times as many words when they are reading texts about conceptually coherent topics for a period of time. This is data too powerful to ignore.

3. Growing knowledge of the familiar and broader world through reading a volume of texts on topics at various complexity levels so students develop a trove of knowledge to reference whenever they read. Reading ability and knowledge about the world are equally tightly connected. Authors assume their readers know some things, so readers knowing things is a crucial component of those readers' success and continued comprehension gains. Instruction time should be centered on texts-both comprehension of grade-level text and the opportunity for volume of reading on conceptually coherent topics and free choice selection.

4. Marshalling evidence and communicating it when speaking and writing about what the text is communicating . With the emergence of college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards, the demand that students cite specific evidence from texts when writing to make their reasoning clear or constructively evaluate others' use of evidence is unambiguous. The careful attention that collecting evidence for writing requires gives students a payoff in the form of deepening their comprehension. Whether pursuing their own learning goals or responding to questions or tasks presented to them by a teacher, paying careful attention to the text activates the brain while reading.

5. Deepening understanding of what is read through regular, close reading of ever richer, more complex text, with supports as needed for universal access and success. To build solid reading habits and stamina, students must regularly parse complex syntax or trace references that will result in the text making sense. Giving students the opportunity to practice reading complex text carefully on a regular basis builds their expectation that what one reads should make sense, and it is critical to learning to stick with reading when reading gets tough. Such practice helps students notice and know what to do to solve those comprehension breakdowns when they occur.

Can personalized learning accelerate literacy outcomes and boost students' reading ability?
To that question, following the known research, we answer a qualified, "yes." While there is promise in personalized learning, much of it is as yet unstudied. Curiously, while personalized learning has been around for millennia, scant research on its efficacy exists. That's basic efficacy-defined as whether the treatment moves learning attainment at all compared to other conditions. In many studies, the variety of alternative treatments and conditions present makes it challenging to determine to what degree the personalized learning treatment was the major contributor to improved learning.

The most effective personalized education techniques known to date have a profoundly human touch, ubiquitous in all cultures and with an ancient lineage: face-to-face human personalization, differentiating according to individual needs and likings. Academic tutoring, where one tutor sits with one student and educates in a way deeply responsive to that student's current skill level and current learning needs, is a prime example.

What demonstrated success has been uncovered to date exists primarily in mathematics, and even it has somewhat mixed results. But that's math; we're focused on literacy. Personalizing reading and writing for students is thoroughly distinct from doing it in math.

The one area of literacy somewhat akin to mathematics in linearity is foundational reading. There, skills and instruction can progress in a sequence that leads to proficient and automatic word and sentence reading. Imagine a world where teachers could summon the precise foundational skills each student needs next. Imagine those learning opportunities get served in various forms tailored to each child's inclinations-either via learning games, or full-body Wii-type activities that practice foundational skills through movement and chanting, all while the teacher coaches, reinforces, encourages, and praises students to ensure progress. Imagine students choosing what aspect of recently learned course material they want to pursue to deepen and expand their learning. They select the resources (e.g., texts, visuals, multimedia) assembled for their extended learning and interact with easily accessible readings on their chosen topic. Imagine this program providing each student with immediate, targeted feedback based explicitly on their error patterns. This activity is currently teacher-directed, but could be technology-enabled. Such sophisticated capacity is within reach but hasn't yet been developed rigorously enough to be practicable in real settings.

In our work to date reviewing the research and pondering the intersection of literacy acceleration, educational equity, and promising personalized learning practices, it is clear there must be intentionality and differentiation in the approach depending on which aspects of personalization are being applied to which of the literacy accelerators. What is effective for accelerating writing in response to text, for example, will be markedly different from a personalized approach to improving students' reading fluency.

At this point we need to underscore that the potential triumphs of personalized learning are matched by the known perils and problematic track record of personalized approaches. In recent decades, practices labeled as differentiated or individualized (aka personalized) instruction have done much harm to students already perpetually marginalized in school because of their race, language base, or family's economics. Students have been tracked into low-level classes in which students are purportedly working at their individual instructional levels, or students are isolated within heterogeneous classes and left mired in low-level, "individualized" work, often accompanied only by a mind-numbing computer program. They have been denied thought-provoking and inspiring work while simultaneously not having their learning needs met.
What's next?
Personalized learning for literacy presents many unknowns, since, as noted above, little research exists on the effectiveness of approaches of any sort on literacy outcomes in any real-world contexts. With so much still unknown about what constitutes effective personalized learning for literacy, there is a clear need for a massive influx of research investment from philanthropy and research institutions before personalized learnings' efficacy in all its forms is actualized.

In the longer paper, we will take each one of the five accelerators and explore how we know it is an accelerator, particularly for students who are currently marginalized by inadequate instruction and materials. Anchoring the entire discussion will be how to choose learning approaches wisely and fairly based on what students need, so personalization does not become a vehicle for tracking or exacerbating educational inequities.

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Is it Possible to Use Personalized Learning to Accelerate Students' Literacy Outcomes in the Time of COVID? - Peers and Pedagogy

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The pandemic-induced nationwide school closures in the spring and wide variance in school conditions this fall are resulting in students receiving even spottier reading instruction than usual. The erratic and uneven access to literacy instruction exacerbated by the pandemic is intersecting with a long-delayed racial and socio-economic reckoning in America.

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The End of Average: Todd Rose's '8 for 8'

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A Matter of Talk: Nonie Lesaux's '8 for 8'

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The suggestions offered here range from simple to complex, and anyone can start to create the ripples that shift classroom and school culture.

Building Safety and Inclusion in Multicultural School Settings

1. Focus on how you might personally experience deep empathy. We all learn differently, so your empathy-building process might entail watching Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, or Bryan Stevenson's TED Talk " We Need to Talk About an Injustice." Or you could look for curricula on race and racism. Since there's no shortage of resources, try to discover first-person experiences. Take a deep breath, imagine yourself in those shoes, and withhold judgement. Share and model your inquiry and learning with students.

2. Curate your newsfeed, engage, and listen. Stay up to date with a few influencers, like Dr. Joy DeGruy or Professor Christopher Emdin, and news sources that inspire and challenge you to honestly confront difficult conversations on race and bias, from NPR's Code Switch to The Root. But limit these, so you don't get overwhelmed and shut down. Follow key hashtags like #Educolor on Twitter, to be aware of social justice and equity conversations. Spend time learning and listening to the conversation before opining on it.

3. Build your social justice vocabulary. Learn the meaning as well as application of terms like false equivalency, microaggression, Jim Crow, culturally responsive, white privilege, and allyship, among other terms. Watch out for coded language and call out prejudicial talk. As Professor Howard Stevenson says, "By practicing racial literacy, we can learn to not be so fearful and learn to problem-solve together, rather than run away from conversations about race."

4. Value stories and perspectives. Encourage your students to articulate their narratives, starting with learning the stories of individuals in their community. The Out of Eden Walk can serve as a framework for noticing the stories around us and discovering our own. Ensure that your classroom book collection and curriculum include high-quality stories that represent all the students in your class. Practice noticing who's writing the articles and stories you read. If you don't know where to begin, consult your librarian or simply search "diverse books." The Global Education Toolkit includes an appendix with 326 multicultural book titles for grades pre-K through 6.

5. Display your class values prominently. Establish ground rules for active listening in class. Take the time to reflect on values so they don't feel like a laundry list. Students can respond to prompts like: "What do you stand for? How might we demonstrate that in our classroom or daily lives?" or "What might loving-kindness (or empathy, respect, generosity) in our classroom look like? How do we get there?" If there's enough safety among students, they can share their writing in pairs.

6. When welcoming new students, learn to correctly say their name. If possible, visit families in their homes at some point in the year to deepen your relationship. The start of each school year can come with special anxiety for kids whose names are perceived as different-I know this too well. Your small effort to pronounce the name correctly, and not look perplexed while taking attendance, can offer a great relief and be incredibly welcoming.

7. Practice visible learning routines. Try See, Think, Wonder and Think, Pair, Share. Engage groups of two to three students in discussing prompts like "I see _____" (about something they're observing), "I think _____" (about what they think might be going on), and "I wonder _____" (which allows students to engage their curiosity). Or reserve time for quiet thinking before pairing and sharing ideas, which builds critical reasoning and safety among learners of different temperaments, cultures, and capacities, and illuminates diverse perspectives through group work.

8. Build global competence. As long as we keep isolating global learning from diversity work in schools, these priorities will both be minimized. We can connect these efforts through many techniques, like the Global Competence framework, and by encouraging professional collaboration across interest areas.

9. Relax and focus. Use relaxation strategies centering in mindfulness prior to conducting difficult conversations on Monday morning-these discussions require their own, set-aside time-to start the week and help unify students.

There's no shortage of techniques that can build safety and inclusion, and your willingness to try any of them sends a strong signal to your students, that their learning, engagement, and voice really matter.

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Being open to talking about race helps foster safety and unity in a multicultural classroom. Here are nine tips to help you prepare.

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Since March, when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the country, district leaders and educators have worked to navigate the challenges of this "new normal" in education. And nowhere have the challenges been steeper than in districts like the one I lead in Baltimore.

Like other districts already battling historic and systematic disinvestment in our schools and communities, Baltimore schools have advocated for everything that our educators and students need. We have zeroed in on the digital divide, using precious funds to connect students with devices and hotspots, while rallying for free internet for our students and families. We have called on our state leaders and Congress to pass legislation to ensure sorely needed emergency funding for public schools.

These efforts are critical. But if we focus all our attention outward, we educators will miss the real opportunity of our new reality: a once-in-a-generation chance to turn our attention aggressively inward, using the crisis upon us to accelerate the unfinished work of repairing the flaws and deep systemic inequities of the "old normal" in American education.

At a time when nearly everything is on the table, we can choose to address head-on our tendency to disproportionately assign our teachers still honing their craft to our students who need expert instruction. We can attend to the uneven quality and rigor of assignments across classrooms and schools. We can replace excessively rigid formulas for everything from class size to bell schedules with more nuanced approaches that vary according to student needs and staff expertise. And, while we're at it, we can surely push back on the notion that what's best for some kids is academic challenge while others just need more social-emotional learning, especially when we know that all young people need-and deserve-both.

COVID-19 has blown the doors off our schools and the walls off our classrooms. It has Zoomed educators into homes and parents into classrooms, providing the transparency that parents have long deserved. No longer are our practices hidden behind doors or buried in the pages of policy and collective bargaining agreements; they are now in full view on a screen. And our parents are watching.

Parents in every community and ZIP code have always cared deeply about their children's education. The difference now is that we are seeing it in both more intimate and more public ways.

We are seeing it in long lines of parents, with children in tow, taking days off work and braving multiple buses to get laptops. We are seeing it in the calls from parents and students flooding our hotlines at all hours to get help logging into remote learning. We are seeing it in classroom Zoom sessions, where parents and other caregivers sit with their students to support their learning and ask clarifying questions.

I have been struck by the number of principals telling me about staff who have said they were wrong about this parent or that grandmother, now seen more as a vital ally rather than an unwanted adversary.

No longer can we dust off the welcome mats for back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences and then swiftly roll them back up, shooing parents away and telling them, "Trust us." We are now guests in their homes.

For the first time ever, parents can see what exactly we're giving their children- and what we're not. They are hearing how we talk to students. They are coming to know, through all that we do, what we believe about their children.

Watching their children engage in remote learning, Zooming from one class to the next, parents note the differences across classrooms-differences we in education have long noted but have too often sought to minimize when trying to allay parents' concerns. That worrisome thing parents couldn't quite put their finger on-they can see it now.

They can see why their child, once so reluctant to practice math, hungrily attacks quadratic equations after their new teacher engages them in high-quality, live instruction over Zoom. Conversely, they understand why their child drags their feet to the kitchen table for an English class where the work is tedious exercises requiring little brainpower.

That simple "trust us" is not going to fly anymore.

My former colleagues at the Education Trust often referred to the critical combination of "heat and light" needed to spur change. The pandemic has lit the fire that schools need.

We leaders have a choice. We can seize this moment to take a hard, honest look at our policies and practices and our rate of speed in dismantling long-standing systemic inequities-and use it as a catalyst for change. Or we can sit on our hands and pretend they are tied by forces beyond our control.

I have seen, in my own district, what is possible when school leaders choose to seize the moment. I have witnessed firsthand, as I visit our small, in-person learning sites, leaders advancing efforts to match teacher strengths with student needs.

At one of these sites, the principal strategically tapped his most effective teachers to deliver high-quality, upfront instruction, while assigning those teachers still developing their skills to smaller pods of students for individual and small-group work. Here, students benefit from high-quality instruction and ongoing support while teachers still perfecting their craft benefit from observing their high-performing colleagues. Educators at sites like these are not just managing the pandemic but turning it to everyone's advantage.

As pundits debate the impact of this historic moment on American public education, school districts across the country are writing the actual story. Our actions in this unprecedented moment could do much more to dismantle inequity than to exacerbate it.

We have a choice about this crisis. As educators, we can make our "new normal" better than the old, engaging parents as the partners they are. Or we can wait for parents to lose whatever faith in us remains. They cannot unsee what they have witnessed so vividly in their own living rooms.

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Parents Are Watching Like Never Before. 'Trust Us' Isn't Enough (Opinion)

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Since March, when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the country, district leaders and educators have worked to navigate the challenges of this "new normal" in education. And nowhere have the challenges been steeper than in districts like the one I lead in Baltimore.

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Leading Change That Lasts

Adam Anderson And David James 2020-11-19 15:46:51

A Framework for Forging Change That Lasts
Too often, public education is accused of being resistant to change. "Stuck in the status quo," "a fully outdated system," "classrooms look the same as they did 150 years ago" are commonly voiced criticisms. However, those of us involved in public school leadership and management know that there has been no shortage of change initiatives and innovative ideas in public education: Common Core, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), an increased focus on social emotional learning, the growth of educational technology, the expansion of charter schools, more equitable funding formulas, and dual enrollment programs are just a few in the long list of recent innovations and initiatives.

But successfully effecting change in public education has been challenging, whether the change efforts have been driven by new federal or state policies, a district's own strategic agenda, or the need to respond to crises. The difficulty in effecting change is not unique to public education. In fact, the average success rate of organizational transformation across sectors is only 26%. Effectively leading and managing lasting change is complex and nuanced - one of the greatest tests of a leader's abilities. For leaders in education, leading and managing change is not simply a lofty, aspirational challenge - it is an urgent necessity. The needs of students and the futures they face are rapidly changing, and their futures and, indeed, the future of our nation are at stake. Leaders in education have an incredible opportunity to improve the futures of their students and communities if they can adopt a more comprehensive and effective approach to leading and managing change.

For this reason, District Management Group (DMGroup) has been thinking about processes and techniques to help public education leaders effect lasting change. Through our research on change management literature and our experience working with hundreds of districts, we have developed a change management framework that is specifically tailored to the unique challenges of districts and schools. We hope it will help district and school leaders manage through current challenges as well as embrace new opportunities to improve public education systems in the future.

The Challenge

Only about one in four change efforts across sectors is successful, and change is particularly challenging in public education. But school districts need to be able to effect change successfully to meet the changing needs of students and prepare them for the world that is rapidly evolving around us.

The Reason

Too often, change efforts are focused on the wrong change, are unstructured in their approach, or are simply too focused on the process - the series of steps required to implement change. While the process is important, it is not sufficient to make sure change happens - and lasts.

The Solution

Carefully selecting the right change effort, demonstrating specific leadership behaviors to drive change, strategically engaging people, and candidly assessing the organizational culture are all essential to incorporate into the work. Our change management framework can help district leaders lead change that lasts.
The Challenge of Change in Public Education
Change management as a field has been studied for decades by many prominent thought leaders who have provided guidance on transformation - John Kotter's "The 8-Step Process for Leading Change," Jeanie Duck's Change Monster: The Human Forces That Fuel or Foil Corporate Transformation and Change, and Kurt Lewin's Three-Step Model of Change: Unfreezing, Changing, and Refreezing are but a few of the best-known methodologies.

However, despite the wealth of guidance on how to effect change, most change efforts fail;the McKinsey & Company study cited above showed that 74% of transformation efforts in companies across a wide range of sectors were unsuccessful.

For public school districts, change is particularly challenging due to the unique and complex context in which they operate:

* People-Based: Education is a people-based business. Salaries account for approximately 80% of district expenses. And education is growing increasingly people-intensive;the pupil/teacher ratio has been steadily declining since the 1960s and the number of teachers has more than doubled in that time. Effecting change in this sector means leading an evolution of the mindsets and behaviors of many diverse individuals in addition to adapting structures, systems, policies, and processes.

* Serve All: Districts must serve every student who walks through their doors, inclusive of all backgrounds, learning needs, and socioeconomic statuses. And student populations continue to become increasingly diverse. For example, the number of students in the Free and Reduced Lunch Program (FRLP) increased nationally by 36% from 2000 to 2013 to 25.2 million students, while the English Language Learner (ELL) population increased 9% in the same period to 4.4 million students.

* Highly Regulated with Significant Accountability: Districts must adhere to an often overwhelming set of local, state, and federal laws and guidelines. Accountability has been increasing and continually changing through the No Child Left Behind Act and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Diverse Stakeholders: Districts work with multiple stakeholders, including students, families, taxpayers, the business community, unions, and school board members. While most of the stakeholders mean well and want to contribute positively, coordination and alignment across these important groups requires significant leadership skill, time commitment, and mindshare.

All of these factors contribute to making change management in education particularly complex, but district and school leaders need to embrace change if they are to serve their students and communities effectively. They bear the awesome, and often daunting, responsibility of being entrusted with preparing our nation's youth for their futures - in a world that is becoming increasingly hard to imagine. For example, the ever-increasing computing power has tremendous implications for industry and the jobs and careers of the future economy. For perspective, children who are starting kindergarten this fall will graduate high school in 2033. The ability of district and school leaders to anticipate the skills and competencies that will be required in the decades ahead and to lead the changes required in how we educate and prepare students for that future has never been more important. While the expectations for public education have never been higher or the challenges greater, the opportunities for educators to fulfill their mission may have never been more inspiring and important. With the privilege of being at the center of communities, district and school leaders are in the position to lead change efforts that can result in more equitable educational opportunities that will prepare all students to succeed and live fulfilling lives.
DMGroup's Change Management Framework for School Districts
In DMGroup's review of the literature on change management and our explorations into why change efforts often fail, one overarching theme emerges: change efforts often solely focus on process management. Process is important, of course, but it is crucial to prioritize the people and culture involved in the change. A holistic change management framework needs to complement process management with strategies that catalyze the people in the organization to action - with leaders serving as role models to help evolve the culture of the organization. When any organization embarks on a change effort of any scale, leaders tend to think that they are facing a set of operational tasks that will, if completed successfully, result in a new and better state. But as Jeanie Duck, one of the experts on change management, makes clear, "changing an organization is inherently and inescapably an emotional human process."

Combining our research into the literature of change management with our experience working with school districts large and small across the country, DMGroup has adapted a framework to help district leaders manage change. Our framework draws heavily upon the work of John Kotter and his "8-Step Process for Leading Change." It also incorporates ideas from Jeanie Duck's The Change Monster, Kurt Lewin's Three-Stage Model of Change, the Center for Creative Leadership, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey & Company, and others.6 The framework addresses the processes, the actions needed to engage people, and the leadership enablers required to drive real, lasting change ( Exhibit I).

"Changing an organization is inherently and inescapably an emotional human process." _ Jeanie Duck Author, The Change Monster

Prework: Defining the Keystone Change
Before district leaders dive into a very demanding change process, it is important to carefully select, consider, and define the keystone change. Any change effort requires resources and significant attention from leadership - this investment should not be wasted on low-impact initiatives or those that are destined to fail. Efforts need to be focused on bold moves that align to the district's priorities and will have significant impact. Equally important, the change must align with the leader's own passions and beliefs;to lead the change and create the needed buy-in, the leader must be able to convey genuine conviction and authentic energy that cannot be feigned.
A keystone change must
* Support a district-wide strategic priority

* Be core to the leader's passion and beliefs

* Require involvement from and transformation of multiple functions/departments

* Have buy-in from a significant majority of senior leaders

* Make significant impact on student outcomes, resource allocation, and/or operational efficiency

Selecting the right change effort in a district should result from deep deliberation and shared conviction among district leadership;it should not arise from the need to copy a peer district or to respond to a single, loud stakeholder group or to comply with the wishes of a forceful superintendent. The change effort must align with a compelling and broadly acknowledged priority within the district. Setting off on the wrong transformation journey can be a recipe for failure. To demonstrate the application of our change management framework, we will be focusing on the change management journey of a district that sought to dramatically improve outcomes for its students with mild to moderate disabilities.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Prework: Defining the Keystone Change
For this district, this change opportunity met all of the requirements of a keystone change:

* It supported the district-wide priority to increase achievement for students

* It aligned with a passion of the district leader, who had been a special education teacher early in her career

* It required the involvement of the central office, special education staff, and classroom teachers

* It had been expressed as a priority by the senior leadership team based on recent achievement data

* It would have a significant impact on student outcomes

* It could potentially have a positive impact on resource allocation. The changes envisioned were expected to allow the district to do more for students without needing additional resources.
GOOD LEADERSHIP IS AT THE CORE
Leadership matters. Without good leadership, lasting change simply cannot happen. Therefore, at the very center of DMGroup's change management framework are leadership and the critical behaviors leaders must exhibit, known as leadership enablers.

So, what are the key leadership enablers needed to successfully lead change?

* Communicate and Motivate: Leaders need to communicate their vision of the future with passion. They need to be able to communicate why change is needed, what specific change is required, and the implications of the change. Throughout the change journey, leaders need to continually share and reinforce the vision, the process, and the progress.

* Remain Steadfast and Focused: Leaders need to stay focused on the change effort at hand. They cannot give a rousing speech, set people to work, and then move on to the next project. Leaders must demonstrate unrelenting and persistent commitment to the change so that the team feels supported in its work, and leaders must reinforce to the organization the message that the change is important and is definitely going to be led to completion.

* Model the Change: Leaders need to model the required mindset and behavior changes and hold all senior leadership accountable to model the changes required as well. Modeling and accountability are accomplished not only through individual actions and behaviors, but also by addressing the systems, structures, and processes at the very top of the organization first and foremost.

* Be Engaged and Connected: Leaders need to stay involved in strategy and execution from beginning to end. They can continue to provide support by keeping a pulse on change through informal channels, making adjustments when needed along the way, and seeking the support and commitment of key influencers.

While these enablers may seem self-evident, they are not always easy to live out. Continually modeling the change, constantly communicating and staying connected, and exhibiting boldness and passion while attending to the rest of one's job is exhausting and, at times, overwhelming. District leaders need to remind themselves that their actions and persistence are vital to making sure that a change effort is successful, and must remember to fortify and recharge themselves so they are able to champion the change.
STEP 1: Create a Sense of Urgency _ _
Building a sense of urgency is essential for driving change. Successful change efforts often begin with a compelling change story that is centered on why the current state is no longer appropriate or sustainable while simultaneously creating an exciting vision of the future state. Striking this balance is a challenge, and the right message will depend on the keystone change. In some cases, as Kotter notes, the status quo needs to seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown.8 Other times, the current state may not necessarily be bad, but a more exciting, impactful future vision is necessary. This vision should be aspirational and focused on what the future will look and feel like - inspiring support for the change and generating impatience to achieve the exciting future state.
Appeal to Emotional and Rational Sides and Gain Leadership Commitment
People respond best to a call to action that engages their hearts as well as their minds, making them feel as i f they are part of something important and meaningful. Securing the support of senior leadership at the outset is essential - a rule of thumb is that buy-in by anything less than 75% of senior leadership can cause serious challenges to change efforts later in the process.9 Beyond the senior leadership team, all messaging about the case for change needs to help all stakeholders understand why the change is important and energize them for the future.

District leaders can follow these practical tips for building a sense of urgency and gaining support:

* Facts and Data: Quantify the problem and the potential impact to make the importance of the work clearer.

* Build compelling narratives: Anonymized stories and quotes from students, teachers, staff, and other stakeholders make the need - and opportunity - more personal, real, and relatable.

* Acknowledge past missteps: District leaders need to be honest about why past efforts have failed and how these issues are being addressed to prevent a repeat of the past. Acknowledging past missteps and clearly sharing why this effort will be different helps minimize cynicism and builds credibility that this time actually may be different.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 1: Create a Sense of Urgency
The superintendent began by meeting with senior staff and having them review the outcome data for their students with mild to moderate disabilities. They quantified the number of students and examined the outcome data in detail. They then gathered anonymized stories and quotes from students, teachers, staff, and other stakeholders, all of which helped them to create compelling narratives for why change was necessary. They acknowledged that their efforts in the past had been underfunded, top down, and unsuccessful, and they agreed that they needed to commit the resources and collective effort to achieve measurable results this time.
COVID-19: URGENT CHANGE REQUIRED
For nearly every district in the country, the rapid and widespread impact of COVID-19 this year created urgency to adapt instructional practices to a virtual environment and make myriad urgent changes. While crises provide clear urgency, changes under more normal circumstances require a more rigorous approach from the outset to address the inertia of the status quo. In this article, we are focusing on change efforts that are not driven by crises in order to demonstrate how the framework can be applied in any circumstance.
STEP 2: Build a Guiding PROCESS Coalition
Major district change efforts often start with one or two people, such as a superintendent and a deputy directly responsible for the department that is the primary focus. But to really build support and momentum, district leaders must convene what Kotter calls a "guiding coalition" to champion change.10 Members of the guiding coalition should bring content expertise, diverse perspectives, the energy to effect change, and a growth mindset. It is important that those selected are well regarded and trusted by teachers, staff, community, and leadership, and exhibit a commitment to the reputation of their school and district. Also, the coalition must be given the time and space outside of their regular duties to meet and discuss change efforts.
Network the Change
In selecting members of this group, district leaders must go beyond the traditional hierarchy and roles to include individuals from all relevant levels and departments with positional or personal influence throughout the district, such as

* Pride Builders: those who are great at motivating others and inspiring them to take pride in their work

* Trusted Nodes: go-to people who are repositories of the district's culture - the people that others seek out when they want to know what is really happening in the district

* Change Ambassadors: people who know, as if by instinct, how to live the change the organization is making and can serve as both exemplars and communicators.11
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 2: Build a Guiding Coalition
Determined to succeed, the superintendent and senior leaders built a guiding coalition of 20 individuals. The coalition included teachers, counselors, psychologists, special education staff, principals, social workers, and behaviorist specialists. In addition, it included a current student with a mild to moderate disability, a member of a respected advocacy group, a parent, a board member, and a local professor.

The coalition was responsible for providing content expertise, offering diverse perspectives based on each member's experiences, and championing the change effort within the district. Perhaps most importantly, these individuals were well regarded and trusted by teachers, parents, and the community; took pride in the reputation of their schools; and had a learning mindset - a willingness to do the hard work to champion change.
STEP 3: Form a Strategic Vision and Initiatives
A successful change effort is driven by a strategic vision that is sensible, clear, simple, elevating, and situation-specific. The vision must include a clear illustration of what the district is moving "from" and where it is moving "to."

A good rule of thumb: a district is not yet done with this phase of the change process i f its vision cannot be communicated concisely in three minutes or less to anyone in the community in a way that allows it to be fully understood and inspires interest. This statement of the strategic vision then needs to be accompanied by coordinated and targeted initiatives that describe how the vision will be achieved.
Collaborate, Validate, and Ensure Feasibility
The creation of a vision should be a collaborative process in which diverse feedback is incorporated. District leaders and the guiding coalition must work together to balance ambition and pragmatism. Together they must craft a vision that is feasible and then identify the initiatives that they are confident can be executed to bring the vision into reality. A common mistake at this stage is setting an unrealistic agenda. It is natural to get caught up in the excitement of the opportunity, but if the vision and initiatives are overly ambitious and unattainable, the effort may lose credibility immediately - or start to lose momentum as setbacks build up. As the vision and initiatives are developed, leaders and members of the guiding coalition need to involve stakeholders, solicit and incorporate feedback, and build broader engagement. At the end of this step, district leaders and the guiding coalition must feel ownership in and commitment to the vision as articulated.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 3: Form a Strategic Vision and Initiatives
The superintendent, senior leadership team, and guiding coalition worked together to create the following vision statement:

They then worked to determine how they would achieve this vision and decided upon the following initiatives - a set of actions they felt were ambitious but achievable:

* Provide general education teachers with focused coaching to support their development and ability to meet the needs of most students

* Provide intervention during extra time, and eliminate pulling students out from general education time

* Ensure all students have access to intervention taught by content experts

* Streamline meetings, paperwork, and processes to increase the time special education staff spend supporting students

With a strategic vision and set of initiatives drafted, the superintendent and senior leadership team held a series of "listen and learn" sessions with stakeholder groups, including teachers, central office staff, families, and community members. During these sessions, district leaders shared the draft vision and collected suggestions and feedback from participants. Later, the superintendent shared what was heard during the listen and learn sessions with the guiding coalition, who then helped to refine and finalize the vision and list of key initiatives.
STEP 4: Enlist a Volunteer Army PROCESS
"Alone we can do so little;together we can do so much," said Helen Keller, the American political activist and first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. For a major change effort to succeed, it needs to be supported throughout the district, so enlisting a "volunteer army" to help build this support is essential. Members of this volunteer army should include individuals who believe in the vision for change and are ready to take action to drive the shifts required. Teachers, school staff, and families tend to be deep repositories of knowledge about where potential glitches may occur, what technical and logistical issues need to be addressed, what past experiences may influence attitudes toward the proposed change, and how others may react to the changes over time. Although it may take longer in the beginning, ensuring broad involvement saves untold headaches later on.

How big does the volunteer army need to be? DMGroup's work in districts across the country suggests that 15% of affected staff being supportive and involved is usually sufficient to begin to catalyze large-scale change.
Be Genuine and Targeted
District leaders and the guiding coalition need to create conditions that result in people "wanting" to be involved in the change process rather than "having" to be involved. One of the most important ways to create such conditions is to communicate the vision for change clearly, regularly, and with genuine conviction. District leaders must tirelessly help others understand what is either dangerous about the status quo or beneficial about the future state. District leaders who communicate well incorporate key messages about transformation efforts into their hour-by-hour activities, continually making connections between their activities and the aspiration and vision of the change effort.

Keep in mind that district leaders communicate in both words and actions, and the latter often sends a stronger signal to district staff. In fact, when senior leaders model the behavior changes they are asking district staff to make - spending time with the students who are the focus of an initiative, participating in appropriate trainings themselves, publicly supporting teachers and other staff leading the efforts, using consistent language and messaging, etc. - transformations are 5.3 times more likely to succeed. Staying connected with the volunteer army is also important to allow leaders to gather informal feedback on what is working and what needs to be modified. In addition, district leaders should regularly recognize and acknowledge this group's efforts in order to reinforce the importance of the work and maintain a high level of energy and commitment.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 4: Enlist a Volunteer Army
To begin to build its army of volunteers, the district encouraged participation by offering teachers early access to opt-in coaching, stipends for experts to teach intervention periods, and access to tools and technology. The district also included teachers and special education staff in the development of updated guidelines for supporting students. By encouraging participation and not demanding it, the superintendent, senior staff, and guiding coalition were able to build support and enthusiasm from special education staff and teachers.
STEP 5: Enable Action by Removing Barriers
With a strong contingent of district staff supporting the change effort, district leadership and the guiding coalition must focus on removing barriers in order to enable action. This may mean changing systems that seriously undermine the new vision, such as narrow job descriptions or misaligned performance-assessment systems. It may involve thoughtfully addressing managers who are slow to change, if not outright opposed to the change effort, to support them in the process ... or help them move on. The biggest obstacles to a change effort need to be identified, confronted, and removed as early as possible in the change process. Action is essential - both to empower others and to maintain the credibility of the change effort and of those leading it.
Empower and Respond
Real voice and power must be given to the guiding coalition and other members of the volunteer army by actively driving the changes they say are necessary to allow initiatives to take hold. Doing so not only propels change, but also builds morale and buy-in from those involved in the effort, generating additional energy that will continue to spread throughout the district more broadly.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 5: Enable Action by Removing Barriers
In seeking to put their initiatives into action, the guiding coalition identified a number of barriers to change. For example, the initiative to "provide intervention during extra time, and eliminate pulling students out from general education time" required making changes to schedules. Another initiative to "streamline meetings, paperwork, and processes to increase the time special education staff spend supporting students" required significant review of processes and forms.

After listening carefully to the issues raised by the guiding coalition, the superintendent and senior leaders debated and prioritized the actions needed.

They quickly pushed forward to do the following:

* Adapt guidelines on instructional minutes and scheduling as needed

* Collaboratively negotiate labor agreement adjustments and gain waivers

* Use tools and technology to support scheduling and process management

Their quick action to remove barriers demonstrated the commitment to effecting change and empowered and energized those involved in the change effort to move forward.
STEP 6: Generate Short-Term Wins
Real transformation does not happen overnight. Effecting significant, lasting change takes time and persistence. Therefore, generating short-term wins is essential to help energize the team, motivate the volunteer army, and inspire others to join the effort. Without short-term wins, momentum slows and staff may give up on the change effort to join the ranks of those resisting the change.

Experienced leaders of change set initial targets that are achievable early in the process in order to boost the credibility of the change process. While the goals should be purposefully designed to generate focus and build momentum, these cannot be made-up successes that exaggerate the progress or take credit for something that was already underway, nor should the bar be set too low for an "easy" win. Actively planning for short-term wins is about finding ways to set realistic goals early and often, and then recognizing when genuine progress is achieved.
Recognize Wins but Don't Celebrate Too Much
Small wins must be actively identified and highlighted by district leaders to keep stakeholders energized and motivated. These wins should be unambiguous, visible to many, and closely related to the change effort. But leaders should be careful to recognize the wins without celebrating too much because these small wins are not a vision achieved; they should be used to build credibility, confidence, and the excitement to tackle even bigger challenges.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 6: Generate Short-Term Wins
The leadership team and guiding coalition quickly identified some concrete short-term goals that they believed were achievable and could be highlighted as early wins:

* Quantifying the additional number of instructional minutes students are receiving as a result of a schedule change

* Sharing the number of teachers who opted in to partner with an instructional coach and the number of coaching sessions completed to date

* Highlighting student outcome improvements as measured by formative assessments

* Communicating the increase in the amount and proportion of time special education staff spend supporting students as a result of new instructional guidelines

* Sharing anonymized testimonials from teachers, students, and parents who were benefiting from the changes to complement data with a human element

When these early successes were achieved, leadership highlighted the progress and shared the news across the district. The early wins were used to reinforce that improvement is achievable - students were already starting to benefit - and to propel the work forward.
STEP 7: Sustain Acceleration
Maintaining urgency and a commitment to effecting change over months, if not years, is one of t] most difficult challenges associated with change management. Strong leaders of change will make sure the team continues to feel discomfort with the current state even as progress starts to be made, and will continue to hold high expectations about the focus and commitment required to accelerate change. In this phase of the process, leaders need to build momentum by consolidating accomplished gains, highlighting them as stepping stones to greater wins, and enabling staff to continue to work toward the larger goal. This may include reassessing the current state relative to the vision and evolving the change story and process to maintain urgency. Frequently, after a few initial wins, some team members will feel that what has been achieved is "good enough," so it is crucial for district leaders to balance recognizing progress with the need to see the change through to reach the ultimate vision.
Recalibrate and Persist
While we are laying out a step-by-step framework, the reality is that transformation is not linear - it is a dynamic process, with ups and downs during the journey. Inevitably, there will be moments when determination will wane, or a crisis will occur. One way for district leaders to sustain the work is to collect and share endorsements and validating quotes from a diverse stakeholder base, while also highlighting remaining needs. Sometimes the change story may need to be recalibrated and evolved to make sure that the effort is not abandoned and that lasting change can be realized. Most importantly, district leadership must not waiver in their own commitment to and enthusiasm for achieving the vision, while expressing empathy and understanding for the wide range of human emotions that emerge during change.
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 7: Sustain Acceleration
Tactics that the district used to sustain acceleration included the following:

* Recognizing increases in student outcomes as the data became available

* Continuing to scale up coaching, process improvements, and technology integration

* Highlighting success stories and remaining needs to show that more students continued to need support

* Collecting and sharing endorsements and validating quotes from a diverse stakeholder base

* Using the natural attrition of paraprofessionals over time in order to redirect resources to hire additional content experts
Watch Out for the Change Monster
Jeanie Duck's change curve, shown above, outlines the five common phases of change any organization experiences: stagnation, preparation, implementation, determination, and finally fruition. Lurking at the bottom of this visual is the "change monster" - all of the human issues associated with change, such as fear, curiosity, exhaustion, loyalty, paranoia, depression, optimism, rage, and delight.16 Managing the monster requires a heightened sensitivity to the emotional and behavioral issues staff face during a change process, and district leadership's willingness to address them.
STEP 8: Institute Change ...
Change sticks only when teachers and staff no longer think of the new approach as "the new way" but simply regard it as "the way things are done in the district." To institute change means ensuring that the organizational structures, management systems, processes, and norms are all in place to maintain this "new normal." Getting to this point of real transformation takes time, but once achieved it ensures lasting change.
Celebrate and Embed Talent Management
At this point in the process, district leaders should celebrate the change and recognize and reward those who have contributed to effecting it. This is the time to ensure that changes are embedded in the district's talent management systems. Roles, performance management, promotions, and rewards all need to support the new normal so that the successes achieved will be sustained.

Nearly all district leaders will encounter the "change monster" in some form at some point during a change effort. District leaders need to identify potential challenge points (in advance, if possible);they need to anticipate emotional responses to the process and be prepared to rally their team to push through. While the framework for a change process makes it appear as if a district can move seamlessly from one step to the next, the reality is that leaders will likely face multiple "crises" along the way. The aim is to take the path where "Results are realized" and not the path where "Change is abandoned."
Example Dramatically improve outcomes for students with mild to moderate disabilities Step 8: Institute Change
To embed the change achieved, the superintendent, senior management, and guiding coalition took the following steps:

* Embedded resource allocations into ongoing budget priorities

* Formalized updated roles and responsibilities, instructional minute and scheduling guidelines, and a model intervention plan

* Codified enhanced staff screening and hiring processes to focus on content expertise and the updated roles and responsibilities

The real key to lasting change lies in changing the district culture itself, through consistency of action over time.
Conclusion
We all know that change is challenging but necessary. Leaders across all organizations are charged with driving change in an increasingly complex world and fail more often than they succeed. Nowhere is change more difficult than in public education, where the unique context creates a complex set of challenges. But the opportunity and imperative to lead change in public education is a noble charge and one that is critical to the future of our society. Current and future students deserve nothing less than a high-quality education that allows them to live fulfilling lives and be positioned to take part in the economy of the future.

Too often, leaders take the wrong approach to change: they choose the wrong change, try to drive change through top-down management, lose focus, or fail to use a comprehensive and rigorous change strategy. Change efforts are inevitably about the people and culture of an organization as much as they are about the initiatives and process that drive the change. Even successful change efforts are messy and full of surprises, requiring confidence, energy, and persistence to see them through.

District leaders attempting to lead a change effort should consider using DMGroup's change management framework. It starts by making sure the right changes are prioritized, and then integrates change processes, staff needs and emotional responses, and associated leadership behaviors required to identify and achieve lasting change. While any meaningful change process is time-consuming, complex, and filled with challenges, it can also be the most rewarding, rigorous, and engaging work district leaders undertake.
NOTES
See John Kotter, "8-Step Process [for Leading Change]," Kotter, accessed October 1, 2020, https://www.kotterinc.com/8-steps-process-for-leading-change/, and Jeanie Daniel Duck, The Change Monster: The Human Forces That Fuel or Foil Corporate Transformation and Change (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). For a summary of Lewin's model, see Mind Tools Comment Team, "Lewin's Change Management Model: Understanding the Three Stages of Change," MindTools.com, 2019, https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_94.htm.

Duck, The Change Monster, 9.

In addition to the sources cited in other notes, we drew upon the following sources in our literature review: Ron Ashkenas, "Change Management Needs to Change," Harvard Business Review (April 2013), https://hbr.org/2013/04/change-management-needs-to-cha; Amanda Athuraliya, "8 Vital Change Management Tools for Effectively Managing Change," Creately blog, January 29, 2019, https://creately.com/blog/diagrams/changemanagement-tools-list/; Ron Carucci, "Leading Change in a Company That's Historically Bad at It," Harvard Business Review (August 2019), https://hbr.org/2019/08/leading-change-in-a-company-thats-historically-bad-at-it; Jeanie Daniel Duck, "The Change Monster," BCG (Boston Consulting Group), April 15, 2001, https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2001/change-monster-human-forces-fuel-foil-corporate-transformation-change.aspx; Jeanie Daniel Duck, "Lessons from Three Decades with the Change Monster," BCG, July 2008, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2008/lessons-from-three-decades-change-monster.aspx; Shannon Muhly Bendixen, Michael Campbell, Corey Criswell, and Roland Smith, "Change-Capable Leadership: The Real Power Propelling Successful Change," Center for Creative Leadership, 2017, https://www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Change-Capable-Leadership.pdf; and Greg Satell, "Change Management: 4 Tips for Managing Organizational Change," Harvard Business Review (August 2019), https://hbr.org/2019/08/4-tips-for-managingorganizational-change?referral=03759&cmvc=rritempage.bottom.

This phrase and all of the steps illustrated in the inner circle in Exhibit 1 are from Kotter's "8-Step Process [for Leading Change]."

Marcel van Assen, Gerben van den Berg, and Paul Pietersma, Key Management Models: The 60+ Models Every Manager Needs to Know (Harlow, UK: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2010).

Kotter, "8-Step Process."

Aguirre and Alpern, "10 Principles of Leading Change Management."

Jacquemont, Maor, and Reich, "How to Beat the Transformation Odds."

Duck, The Change Monster.

©District Management Group. View All Articles.

Leading Change That Lasts
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Adam Anderson And David James 2020-11-19 15:46:51 A Framework for Forging Change That Lasts Too often, public education is accused of being resistant to change.

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Leadership Development : Change in a Parallel Universe

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Leadership Development : Change in a Parallel Universe

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Dr. Richard Elmore
Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Education Leadership, Harvard University

It is a privilege to someone who works in this field that is being in Canada and being in Ontario. It's like being in a parallel universe. You could live in the world that I live in.

The level of professionalism, commitment, the alignment of the political agenda with the professional agenda, the quality of discourse...I have spent a fair amount of time in Canadian schools and in Ontario schools. Just the quality of the discourse among teachers and among school leaders and between teachers and school leaders is just markedly different from virtually every setting I'm in in the States and for many, internationally, which is no matter how good the practice is, no matter how positive the reinforcement from student learning that you get as a teacher you still experience loss. And my friend and colleague, Bob Keagan, who's just written a new book called "Immunity to Change", has this nailed -- which is: you ask people to do things differently. You bet that the reinforcement they get, the feedback they get from the practice in terms of student learning will be a powerful motivator. And it typically is if you master the practice. But one of the things that we don't take account of is that people still experience loss because they had a deep investment in what they were doing before. So part of the practice is understanding enough about the technical so you can get to the cultural and understanding about the cultural stakes involved so that you can deal with people's socio, emotional responses to the change in practice and that's the level of leadership, I think, that we're talking about here.

Psychological Safety

Powerful learning requires psychological safety. Because of this kind of blend of the cultural, the technical and the social/emotional. People have to feel safe in a learning environment. Now I just want to say, one of the characteristics of educators is that, is that they, they tend to substitute polite discourse for learning, especially among adults. So it becomes very important for people to acknowledge the importance of the other per-, person's contribution, to appear to be engaged and interested even if inside they're thinking what in the world is this person talking about? And to try to keep the interpersonal dimension of the work "under control". And, for most of the teams I work with, that's a totally dysfunctional behaviour. I call it the land of nice. And one of the things I've, I've learned from observing and working with physicians is it is possible to be blunt and candid and to be psychologically safe. But one of the things I want, I want you to think about is not so much the practice of rounds but rounds as an activity in which people learn to speak powerfully and candidly to each other about practice in a psychologically safe environment.
The Impact of Individual and Collective Efficacy
The second big finding, I think, of the organizational learning research is that, it's not so much individual learning and individual efficacy that, promote performance in organizations. It's collective efficacy and collective learning. Roger Goddard, from the University of Michigan now, Texas A&M, has done, I think, kind of the definitive, so far, organizational research on collective efficacy and it's a very tight, very sweet piece of empirical research in which he actually looks at measures of individual efficacy on the part of teachers. That is, do I feel as though I individually influence student learning? And in, and measures of collective efficacy which is do we as an organization know what we're doing when we try to influence student learning? And are we effective at doing it? And one of the, sort of, I think just blindingly interesting findings is that the coefficient on the collective efficacy variable is hugely correlated with performance. The co, the, the coefficient on the individual efficacy variable actually is not all that highly correlated with performance. Now, if you think about this it makes a certain amount of sense. You can fill a school up with a bunch of highly efficacious people and because they're all divas, you know, they're operating across purposes to each other. They're having a great time in their own classrooms, right? But the organization itself doesn't actually know what it's doing.

Three Ways to Increase Student Achievement

Also, fundamentally there are only three ways you're going to increase student learning in an environment. And this is a technical claim. You're going to do it by increasing teachers' knowledge and skill enacted in the classroom. You're going to do it by raising the level of the content. Or you're going to do it by changing the student's role in the instructional process. Those are pretty much your choices. If you're not working one of those three things you're probably not working on anything that's going to actually improve student learning. If you do any one you have to do the other two. If you raise the content without raising teachers' knowledge and skill you're going to get low level teaching of high level content. If you raise teachers' knowledge and skill without focusing on the discipline of content you're going to increase the variability in teaching practice in your organization. If you do either one of those things and you don't pay attention to the role of the student in the instructional process you're going to have brilliant virtuosos standing in front of the classroom and students sitting there with a tiny bit of saliva coming out of the corner of their mouths deeply appreciative and bored beyond belief.

Task Predicts Performances

The secret in the universe is that task predicts performance. If you get really good at this work you can do what I do which is you can make a pass through a school. If you give me two hours, if you give me a while to understand your assessment system and you give me two hours in your school and give me access to any classroom I want to be in I can come back and I can write down the distribution of performance on your external measure. We can compare your actual performance to my prediction and the two will be virtually identical.

How do I do this? I can do this because what's producing the externally measured performance is the actual work product that students are being asked to do. And one of the things about schools as organizations is that the work products are far more predictable and standardized than people actually believe they are.

I'll just tell you what we see as the first level effect of teacher teams. I'm big on teams. The whole, I mean my whole theory of organizational learning is based on teamwork. I think the literature supports that idea. I would say that the first level effects of teaming don't have much to do at all with instruction. And it's because people are not focused on the task.

So let's just take an example which is now a repeated pattern in the schools in which we're doing rounds. We observe teachers doing teamwork. So we actually sit in the planning session where they actually look at the data and make the commitment to what they're going to do. They make a specific commitment to teach a particular unit in a particular way. They go out. They teach it. They bring back the evidence and the evidence is, never tells them quite what they thought it was going to tell them. There's much more variability in students' responses than they thought there was going to be because after all, we're common planning, we're, in the words of one team leader, I don't understand we're all teaching the same thing. When you actually observe for the task it turns out they're not teaching the same thing. They're actually teaching their conception of the same thing which means that the investment of teamwork hasn't taken the work down to the level of the actual task that students are being asked to do. And it's the task that predicts the performance, not the common planning. There's huge cultural resistance to putting teachers in each other's classrooms.

Now I know from my own practice I am a notoriously bad observer of my own teaching. That's why I never teach anymore without having somebody else in the room. So it's not that people are willfully misrepresenting their practice it's that they're not representing it accurately because they're not focused on the technical, enough on the technical side of the enterprise so that they can actually describe the difference between the task as it's enacted in Classroom A, Classroom B, Classroom C and Classroom D. You can do that with observation and it is painful. It's painful. People have these little recognition experiences when they think they're doing the same thing because they planned it together and they actually see that there are three or four different versions of the task that are enacted in each classroom. And the range in terms of cognitive demand on students and in terms of teacher control is huge from classroom to classroom.

Theory of Action

Yeah, the first time we did this in Ohio with our vertical teams one team from one of our Ohio districts showed up and they were so proud of their Theory of Action. It was printed with beautiful graphics and it was laminated. And I thought, boy if there ever, ever was a demonstration of the unpredictable effects of teaching this was it. So our slogan now is in pencil on cheap paper. Because the whole point of a Theory of Action is it should be continuously in revision and it should look like you're working on it. That is, it should have, it should have, be crossed out. It should be in draft form at all times.

So there is a kind of discipline that precedes this. It's a straightforward, if then exercise. It needs to be falsifiable. It connects the general with the specific. We use this metaphor of the, of the laser and the light bulb, the fox and the hedgehog. That is the laser takes you to a specific spot. The light bulb illuminates the whole thing. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.

What we try to get people to do is to feel comfortable going back and forth between the very, very, very specific manifestations of your aspirations in that particular transaction between that teacher and that student. Back up through the organizational strategy. Back up to the improvement strategy. And back down it.

So what we try to do is to get people to think about this as a movement from the very specific to the very general. And we try to think about the Theory of Action as grounded of in the actual observation of the work and its implications for how we organize, how we build a culture, what we focus on and what the vision is.

Elmore's 4th Law

Changes in performance lag changes in quality. You will see evidence of dramatic changes in student work and the level of the task before you ever see them represented on external measures. And that's because what's happening is the organization is re-aligning its culture. And it takes time for the people in the organization to settle down around the new culture. And it's the new culture and the tasks that go with the culture that produces the measured performance. So you will see changes in quality before you see changes in performance. And it's an existential, it's a, it's a moment of existential terror. It's that little problem that wakes you up at three o'clock in the morning with that little dribble of cold sweat down the back of your neck. Which is it's happening in classrooms and we can't see it on the tests. And I got news for you. I can't help you other than to say you have to continue to do it.

The Need to Declutter

It's particularly true with low performing schools in the American context: they have too many people trying to help them. They have too many people with great ideas about what their kids need. And because there is this kind of professional norm within the field that you don't actually to, to turn down an extra resource that's designed to help your kids is an immoral act, right. What happens is that these organizations layer on huge numbers of specific activities and programs and projects and then the leaders and the planning teams spend all their time trying to figure out how to make sense of the clutter rather than how to have a tight and focused improvement strategy. So, the purpose of a good Theory of Action should be to cut through the clutter and frankly, to decide which clutter to get rid of.

Teamwork and Closing

One of the things about teaming is, is it creates micro cultures. It's your job to manage the micro cultures because what you're going to do otherwise is you're just going to take the variability at the classroom level and reproduce it at the team level. So now you have two sources of variability to manage, not one, right. So if teaming doesn't produce coherence it's your responsibility to make sure that it does - transfer of agency, gradual release of control. The goal is to get these adults to take responsibility for their own work so that they're telling you what the next level of work is not you telling them what the next level of work is. Work on the technical at the same time as the cultural. And work on collective commitments and collective knowledge as well as individual knowledge.

I'm gratified; it's a tremendous privilege to be here, in this parallel universe. Go forth, do good work so we have something to study. Thank you.

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leadership development: change in a parallel universe

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leadership development: change in a parallel universe

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Leadership Development: Change in a Parallel Universe

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Dr. Richard Elmore Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Education Leadership, Harvard University It is a privilege to someone who works in this field that is being in Canada and being in Ontario. It's like being in a parallel universe. You could live in the world that I live in.

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning. The most common cultural tools for processing information utilize the brain's memory systems -- music, repetition, metaphor, recitation, physical manipulation of content, and ritual. The teacher is "responsive" when she is able to mirror these ways of learning in her instruction, using similar strategies to scaffold learning.

For example, a science teacher I mention in the book wasn't having much success with her sixth-grade students learning the science vocabulary. Rather than continue assigning a word list and have kids look words up in the dictionary, we looked at how she could redesign word study using some combination of the cultural tools familiar to her students.

Afterwards, learning weekly vocabulary was more active and game-like. She reported that students were not only re-engaged, but made noticeable progress in using their knowledge of science vocabulary during the lessons.

You'll notice that there's no mention of Africa, Mexico, or race at all. It's a misconception that culturally responsive instruction has to mention race. It's not race that matters in culturally responsive teaching but awareness of implicit bias that gets in the way of healthy student-teacher relationships and narrow interpretations of learning that ignore the cultural tools students bring to class.

Who is the primary audience for your book? Who do you hope will read it?

This is the first year that our public schools have a majority minority student population. That means our classrooms are more racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse than they have ever been, but the majority of our teaching force is still white.

Historically, students of color experience cross-cultural equity issues that contribute to the achievement gap. Closing this gap is where teachers need support. I believe the book will be a resource for instructional coaches as they build their own knowledge and skill around how to help teachers increase their cultural responsiveness.

I hope every teacher gets a copy of the book and reads it with other colleagues. Hopefully it will spark classroom inquiry in identifying what cultural capital students are bringing to school and how to mirror them during instruction.

What are three things that you hope readers will take away from your book?

First I want teachers to get that you don't have to learn 19 different cultures to be effective. Teachers need to simply begin with understanding the cultural dimensions of communalism -- most communities of color have this cultural trait in common, namely a focus on the interdependence of the group. It can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." This way of being is contrasted with our dominant culture's more individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps worldview.

The second thing is how important it is to build trusting relationships with students who feel marginalized or misunderstood. The neuroscience is clear on the connection between emotions, trust, and learning. Stress hormones from mistrust block cognition. Students respond to a teacher's focus on care by giving her permission to be tough and push them toward higher achievement.

And last, I hope they take from the book new processes and strategies for operationalizing culturally responsive teaching. I see a lot of school districts using the term, but there isn't much guidance to help teachers build the routines, processes, and structures in their classrooms so that it becomes more than a gimmick.

I'm most intrigued by the title of chapter three, "This Is Your Brain on Culture." Can you give a quick synopsis of that chapter?

This is where the neuroscience is so cool in helping us understand the role of culture in learning. It is like software that programs our "hardware" (the brain). Cultural values and learning practices transmitted from our parents and community guide how the brain wires itself to process information and handle relationships. Neural pathways are over-developed around one's cultural ways of learning.

Culturally responsive teachers know this and piggyback on these well-developed neural pathways with similar types of instruction. Tapping into these neural pathways can help students accelerate their own learning.

I have a huge stack of education-related books that I want to read. Can you convince me why I should read your book?

There are so many good books out there we should be reading that provide new strategies and best practices. But this book isn't a collection of so called "best practices" for African American students or English learners. Instead it provides a framework that helps teachers learn about the resources any group of students brings to class.

The added bonus is that sharing the neuroscience behind culturally responsive moves can help teachers really get it.

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning.

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But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

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But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

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Culturally Relevant Teaching in the Classroom: Where to Begin

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Culturally Relevant Teaching in the Classroom: Where to Begin

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Cultural Responsiveness Starts with Real Caring

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Cultural Responsiveness Starts with Real Caring

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Editor's Note: This blog was first published at www.Ready4Rigor.com on Oct. 4, 2012 and posted here with permission.
"If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit."
-Ralph Ellison

I've been in conversation with teachers, literacy coaches and district-level folk who out of the gate are trying to figure out how to raise the achievement of black and brown students in reading. The big question folks keep asking is: How do we accelerate their progress? How do we motivate students of color to learn?

They want to focus on the techniques and the strategies-the technical moves of culturally responsive instruction.

But I am reminded by the Ralph Ellison quote that the foundation of culturally responsive instruction is not technical, but relational. It's about authentic caring. It's not about using some generic "call and response" strategy to get kids fired up so they are excited about the same ole boring, unrelated stuff. Kids can see through that...quick.

A colleague told me about a recent incident that makes the point. She was part of a team doing classroom walk-throughs in a school in the Midwest that wanted to really focus on culturally responsive pedagogy school-wide.

When the team walked into one fifth-grade classroom with mostly white students, they saw an African-American boy curled in a corner crying hard. The teacher wasn't attending to him. The other members of her team just looked at each other trying to figure out if they should do something. She couldn't believe this was a point up for debate. She went over, crouched down to his level, put her hand on his shoulder, and asked what was wrong.
The Neuroscience of Caring and Being Cared For
A moment of compassion. A gesture of caring.

There's real science behind this idea of caring as the on-ramp to learning. When we feel cared for, our brain is flooded with neurotransmitters and hormones like oxytocin, the same hormone that makes moms fall in love with their babies even after the pain and effort of labor. These "happy chemicals" tell our pre-frontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain, that all is safe socially, emotionally and physically. All systems are a go for learning.

What happens if you don't feel safe or cared for? Ain't no learning happening. The flood of stress hormones like cortisol divert blood from the pre-frontal cortex to the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ in our reptilian brain, in preparation for fight or flight. Not the time for learning. The brain is signaling us that it's time to respond to threats, not lay back and chill.
Call for the Warm Demander
Imagine going through school without feeling affirmed for the way you speak, think or see the world? I can bet that doesn't generate a lot of happy feelings. Instead, you might feel guarded, untrusting and a wee bit hostile even.

How do we show care as culturally responsive educators? By building rapport and a sense of connection, but also by showing "tough love" when necessary, insisting that students rise to their fullest potential, bringing them into their zone of proximal development, kicking and screaming if necessary.

I call it care and push.

It's just like insisting your kids eat their vegetables and refusing to let them eat donuts for dinner. You know veggies are good for them. And while donuts may make them happy in the moment, it's not in their best interest in the long run.
How do you show "care and push"? How do you explain your "tough love" to students? Hammond is an educator and writer passionate about teaching and learning. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area. She's worked as a research analyst, high school and college writing instructor, a literacy consultant, and, for the past 13 years, as a professional developer.
Becoming culturally responsive starts with showing genuine caring that recognizes the unique gifts and talents of every child, particularly when that child doesn't look like you.

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Cultural Responsiveness Starts with Real Caring

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Editor's Note: This blog was first published at www.Ready4Rigor.com on Oct. 4, 2012 and posted here with permission. "If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit."

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The Silence Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children

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The Silence Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children

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Culturally Responsive Teaching

Teaching students about oppression and critical consciousness is a vital component of social-emotional learning.

Over the past decade, thousands of K-12 schools and school districts have embraced social-emotional learning as a key ingredient in their students' success. Now, educators invested in social-emotional learning want to ensure that SEL practices are enacted in ways that are culturally responsive to and equitable for youth from historically marginalized groups.

For example, cultivating students' tenacity and growth mindset-their belief that effort determines success- can have powerful and positive effects, but doing so can also unintentionally convey that students' ability to thrive is entirely dependent upon their own internal qualities.

Internal qualities matter, but our lives are also shaped by external forces such as racism, sexism, and ableism. Without acknowledgment of these external forces, students may blame themselves when they encounter obstacles posed by these forces.

Critical consciousness refers to youths' ability to recognize and resist the oppressive forces shaping their lives and communities and has been referred to as a form of " psychological armor" against oppression. A growing body of research is finding that marginalized youth who are critically conscious demonstrate greater resilience, self-esteem, academic achievement, political engagement, and professional aspirations.

In our book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness, we report on practices through which secondary educators have contributed to their students' critical consciousness development. Several of those practices offer opportunities for growth in students' social-emotional learning and critical consciousness.

Introduce a Framework

Present students with frameworks for recognizing and making sense of oppressive social forces. In a ninth-grade English course, for example, students learn a "Three I's" framework that helps them to conceptualize oppression as interpersonal, institutional, or internalized in nature. Talk through definitions of these terms. Then allow students to work in groups to identify examples of these different forms of oppression in their own communities.

Students then use this framework across all of their ninth-grade classes to analyze a variety of texts, historical cases, and current events. In one class, they identify how dominant standards of beauty contributed to feelings of internalized oppression by the central character in Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. In another class, they discuss how the absence of nutritious food options represents a form of institutional oppression facing many poorer communities in the United States.

For students from marginalized groups, the Three I's offer a framework for making sense of both academic content and the social forces with which they contend on a daily basis. As one young man explained of these lessons, "Once I started thinking about it, you start putting the pieces together, and you start noticing like nothing happens just because. Like somebody's benefiting from everything, somebody's not benefiting from everything." The Three I's framework strengthened this young man's self-awareness and social analysis skills-key dimensions of social-emotional learning and critical consciousness, respectively.

Look for Real-World Change

Provide assignments in which students can effect change in the real world. For example, students in ninth-grade history concluded a unit on colonization in the Americas by writing letters to their elected representatives in which they articulated their own beliefs about what Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States should be. In so doing, students applied their learning about the history and consequences of colonization to a contemporary, ongoing situation.

They started by brainstorming their own key takeaways about the consequences of colonization and the implications for the United States' contemporary relationship with Puerto Rico. Next, they drew up an outline for a letter that could convey those key points clearly and succinctly. Students used those outlines to author initial drafts of their letters and then worked in pairs to strengthen the professionalism and persuasiveness of those initial drafts. The final step was to identify the right mailing address for their elected representative-a civic skill in and of itself-and to mail the letter.

Such an assignment helps students develop empathy and perspective-taking skills-two key dimensions of social-emotional learning- as well as their understanding of how to effect political change-a key dimension of critical consciousness.

Challenge Injustice

Research shows schools that are responsive to students' concerns are more likely to produce graduates with confidence in their ability to influence larger political systems. Accordingly, students benefit when their schools offer them opportunities to challenge injustice within their own school community.

In an 11th-grade civics class, for example, students identified an unjust school policy that they then worked as a class to change. Students began by reflecting with their teacher on the definition of injustice and the qualities or circumstances that might make a law or policy unjust. Then students pored through their school handbook in search of policies that met these criteria. For example, one group of students selected their school's outdated policy governing technology use in the classroom.

Next, students worked together to find research that informed their critique of the existing school policy and could guide their development of a new or revised policy. As students began to put together their proposal for a new policy, they debated as a class philosophical questions such as "Does the new policy avoid all of the previously established tenets of injustice?" and operational questions such as "Should the new policy be phased in gradually or all at once?"

Ultimately, students worked to compile the fruits of those discussions into a presentation advocating for the policy change and how to carry it out. They spoke about it with the entire school's teachers and administrators at a faculty meeting. The students seeking to change their school's technology policy won their teachers' approval to try out the new policy for the remainder of the school year, with the promise to make the change a permanent one if the trial period went smoothly.

As students identify an unjust school policy and make their case for a change, they also build relationship skills and decision-making skills-two more key dimensions of social-emotional learning-and practice working collaboratively to effect change-a key element of critical consciousness.

Engaging youth in learning that simultaneously fosters their social-emotional learning and critical consciousness empowers them to thrive and transform the world.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching Teaching students about oppression and critical consciousness is a vital component of social-emotional learning. Over the past decade, thousands of K-12 schools and school districts have embraced social-emotional learning as a key ingredient in their students' success.

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Personalized Learning and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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At a school in Oakland, California, students see themselves—and the broader world—in the books they read.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Talking about race, although hard, is necessary. We are here to provide tools and guidance to empower your journey and inspire conversation.

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Using Diversity to Build a Culture of Belonging 

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Using Diversity to Build a Culture of Belonging 

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Using Diversity to Build a Culture of Belonging

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Academics and social skills are equally prioritized at this multilingual elementary school in Chicago, ranked one of the best in the city.

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Educators have the unique responsibility of delivering content as well as helping students to move in the direction of personal growth and development. This movement happens best when there is a common frame of reference or starting point for working toward the destination.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, the practice of social-emotional learning (SEL) has five different competencies which include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decisionmaking. These SEL competencies are how educators help children process their environment and become better students and humans. SEL cannot take place without a culturally relevant start. It's important that we seek to understand students culturally before helping them learn new social skills and behaviors.

Culture is central to how we think, live, and see the world as humans. The values and beliefs around how one is reared, the customs shared, holidays celebrated, foods eaten, and language used are all a part of one's cultural socialization. As culturally responsive educators, our goal is to tap into this identity causing students to feel engaged with a sense of belonging. It's an uphill climb to help a student toward self-awareness without an understanding of the cultural background that they bring to school each day.

The competency of self-management works in a very similar way. For example, if one grows up in a very patriarchal-centered home. they will have a different perspective on manhood as well as what expressions of masculinity may look like. With that, some children may act out, suppress emotion, or regulate self-control differently from others. Educators engaging in emotion-talk with students can encounter obvious barriers when not taking the individual's cultural background into account.

When teaching SEL, we also have to recognize that children have been taught, some intentionally and some via inference, to be aware of how the social world perceives them. Educators must be mindful that children from racial "minority" groups may not understand diversity and multiculturalism as the language of inclusivity but instead see a world of combatting generalizations and stereotypes. If the educator is not aware of the potential skepticism felt by a disadvantaged student, the learning cannot move forward because it's not a safe space for one to share their reality. Our goals in SEL are to help students feel connected to the teaching and learning experience. In order for this to happen, students have to feel that they can drop their guard to reflect on different ways of being human. Building relationships is key to establishing trust and serves as an observable platform for teaching young people how to positively interact with others.

Our social world is not without bias, and neither are our classrooms. Work around decisionmaking as a core competency can be life-changing when taught in the perceivably neutral classrooms of a school. However, neutrality is subjective, and it's an educator's consideration of the cultural, environmental, historical, and socio-political experiences of students that creates the optimal starting point for SEL. The provision of realistic scenarios for consequential thinking and analysis can only come from genuine engagement and understanding of the cultural lives of the students entrusted to our care. SEL work is typically rooted in helping students understand how to respond appropriately to "mainstream" ideals. However, I argue that it's equally, if not more, important to teach mainstream educators to learn and become aware of new or unfamiliar cultural ideas.

Culture is an undeniable part of everything we do as humans, and SEL is a major platform for how we knowingly, and unknowingly, share values and norms with students. The work inside of schools has to be a become a fusion of both. Every day, students enter our space with values and beliefs that may cause them to see the world uniquely. This cultural knowledge shouldn't be dismissed just because it feels unfamiliar to us. Educators need social-emotional learning, too. It's tough to do this work if one hasn't explored their own cultural identity and biases. As educators, we have to predetermine that we will not allow cultural differences to be perceived as human deficits. An educator's SEL programming will be completely ineffective unless it starts with the cultural uniqueness that makes us different, yet in the pursuit of a full humanity, makes us equally the same.

Complex People: Insights at the Intersection of Black Culture and American Social Life (HUE Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter @darylhowardphd.

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Social-Emotional Learning Won't Happen Without a Culturally Relevant Start (Opinion)

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Educators have the unique responsibility of delivering content as well as helping students to move in the direction of personal growth and development. This movement happens best when there is a common frame of reference or starting point for working toward the destination.

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A Plea for Identity and Criticality - Dr. Gholdy Muhammad

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A Plea for Identity and Criticality - Dr. Gholdy Muhammad

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Take this test to learn more about your own bias and learn how bias is the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination.

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Culturally Responsive Curriculum Score Card

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Culturally Responsive Curriculum Score Card

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What Principles Must Underlie Successful Personalized Learning?

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What Principles Must Underlie Successful Personalized Learning?

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In a recent blog post , we identified five key literacy accelerators and shared some early learnings from our examination of the research on how personalized learning might accelerate students' literacy outcomes, and how to do so equitably and justly to the greater good of all students. While we acknowledge the potential triumphs of personalized learning, we note these are as yet unrealized. They are also matched by known perils including a troubling track record that has resulted in locking too many students into below-grade-level, mind-numbing work.

We are following up with a set of principles educators can consult right away as they decide whether, what, and how to include personalized instruction-human or technology-enabled-as an adjunct to the central work of the English Language Arts class.

Time is a scarce commodity in educating students-now made more compressed by months of school closures. With greater variability in the experiences of returning students, how can we best accelerate all students' learning, amplify what matters most, and invest in students' social-emotional development so they engage in schoolwork? Whether school has started back with students learning in buildings, remotely, or through rolling closures, all students in every learning community need to be engaged in challenging study. What has always been important is especially important now.

Anything that distracts from the focus on students learning to read, reading and listening to content-rich texts widely and deeply, and responding to what they read through lively discussions and in writing will need to be stripped away. Tools and techniques that promote these activities should be given priority. Limiting work to a focus on the essentials will enable students to engage more profoundly with content-rich texts and create opportunities to provide students with needed supports and scaffolding. Focusing on the work that matters most promotes well-being and allows students to thrive.
Personalized learning can play a role here, but beware the pitfalls.
Given the months students have been out of school and socially isolated, coupled with the complicated realities many students are facing, it can be tempting to double-down on traditional leveled text instruction-a particularly pernicious form of personalized learning. It limits students to reading texts at their designated independent reading levels and to reading texts they already know how to read without teacher support. Seductive, but destructive. For a sizable number of students, this translates into reading a restricted range of lower-than-grade-level complex text (one day on one topic and another day on another topic) that will hinder, rather than accelerate, their literacy development. For students to become literate participants in the world around them with the ability to deploy and understand English in integrated, holistic, and flexible ways, they need and deserve regular access to grade-level complex texts in the company of their peers. They also need lots of time to independently explore particular topics (influenced by their individual interests at times) by reading multiple texts at various complexity levels. Otherwise, students won't grow the vocabulary and knowledge they need, or learn how to deal with complicated syntax or subtle cohesive links in texts.
Core principles for personalized learning approaches or products to accelerate literacy
Regardless of the aspect of literacy or the nature of the personalization, our developing thinking has pointed us toward a set of core principles that must be addressed to do personalized learning well.
Translating the core principles into "Do Nows" with literacy instruction
How might these principles translate into ways personalized learning can help with literacy to mitigate some of the pressures teachers, students, and families are facing? What kinds of initiatives are best set on the "explore these ideas later" stack? What should be avoided at all costs? The examples that follow are proxies for the kinds of decisions we'd urge stakeholders to make and are by no means exhaustive . This directional guidance will be fleshed out more in the longer report of findings (early 2021).
Personalized learning can be used right now in literacy to:

Provide practice in various forms for mastering phonemic awareness and phonics skills to the point of automatic word recognition . The research on foundational skills and their place in securing reading progress is clear. It is also clear there is wide variance in how much exposure and practice different students need for mastery. Note, this experience can be tech-enabled but must be accessible to all students in any setting, indicating materials may need to also exist in physical form, e.g., paper and pencil or free-standing device. (Supports foundational skills. Accounts for all principles.)

Provide fluency practice with grade-level readings connected to the instructional focus of students' classes or student interest. For older students, double duty can be accomplished by positioning such practice as performance and public speaking. (Supports foundational skills and speaking about text and public speaking facility. Accounts for all principles.)

Assess all foundational skills progress in all areas, providing feedback and additional practice as indicated by results. Assessments must be lightweight and administered frequently. (Supports foundational skills mastery. Accounts for principles 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10.)

Provide access to a wide volume of reading to build knowledge and vocabulary . Texts and other media must be abundant, exist at a variety of complexity levels for universal and independent student access, and be clustered around topics that connect to what the class is studying and/or student interest. (Supports growing vocabulary and knowledge. Accounts for principles 1, 2, 10, and 11 especially, and does not activate principle 7.)

Provide opportunities for writing and discussing text and textual evidence connected to topics being studied. In a time of disrupted learning, it is imperative that students have a variety of ways to collaborate with one another and stay connected to the life of the classroom. (Supports access to complex text. Accounts for all principles, with 1, 2, 4, and 8 most critical.)

What we really need is that "hard reset"-to reimagine how we do school for all students.
In sum, e very student is entitled to the "good stuff"; every student must be regularly engaged in reading and thinking about rich, grade-appropriate content and get to do so regularly in the company of peers. student should get what they need when learning is personalized. How can both these conditions be met consistently, within the same classroom in ways teachers can implement and sustain, and students reap the benefits? One obvious answer is to provide the human and material resources to accomplish both-to invest smartly and generously in educating student to their intellectual potential-something we have yet to do as a nation. Stay tuned for a paper in early 2021 that provides more detail and a way forward on the potential intersections between the literacy accelerators and personalization.

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What Principles Must Underlie Successful Personalized Learning? - Peers and Pedagogy

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In a recent blog post, we identified five key literacy accelerators and shared some early learnings from our examination of the research on how personalized learning might accelerate students' literacy outcomes, and how to do so equitably and justly to the greater good of all students.

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Dropbox: Securely share, store and do more with your content

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Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork-so you can focus on the things that matter. Sign in and put your creative energy to work.

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Insight to Action

We created a toolkit outlining a series of action steps to assist school leaders in getting the most of their Shadow experience. These steps help you pick a suitable student to shadow and translate your observations into experiments for improvement we call hacks.

Prep

Shadow

Reflect

Act

Download the Shadow Toolkit below!

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Shadow a Student Challenge - Stanford d.school

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We created a toolkit outlining a series of action steps to assist school leaders in getting the most of their Shadow experience. These steps help you pick a suitable student to shadow and translate your observations into experiments for improvement we call hacks. Download the Shadow Toolkit below!

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Dialogic Reading: An Effective Way to Read Aloud with Young Children

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Dialogic reading works. Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.

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It’s Not Enough To Mean Well | Reading Rockets

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I came into the teaching profession aware that my White middle class experience would impact how I taught. I earned my teaching credential and masters degree from a program focused on social justice. There, I’d read and discussed books such as Teaching Other People’s Children and Bad Boys: Public Sc…

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A Second Lens on Formative Reading Assessment with Multilingual Students

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A Second Lens on Formative Reading Assessment with Multilingual Students

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A Conversation About Instructional Equity

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A Conversation About Instructional Equity

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Developing a Love of Reading in Students

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Developing a Love of Reading in Students

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Exposing new readers to a variety of genres can help them find the books they love. Plus, reading comprehension strategies to deepen their engagement.

Jim West / Alamy Stock Photo

Every elementary school teacher is a reading teacher and is essential in helping each child on his or her reading journey. When we provide the resources to meet the literacy needs of our students beginning as early as prekindergarten, students and teachers will feel both confident and competent in teaching and learning to read.

While helping students learn to read, it is also important to create a love of reading. Students who read voluntarily report less negativity about reading than those who are required to read.

Create Motivation

Motivation is the key in promoting a love of literacy in children. One of the best resources I have found for creating motivation is a shelf filled with books that match students' interest level and reading level. They should be surrounded by titles that reflect the lives of themselves as well as their classmates. When students find titles with characters that look like them and families that resemble their own or their neighbors, their interest level increases. Making these connections also increases student comprehension.

Students should be provided with books that represent all genres so that they can determine what they most enjoy reading. Unless a child is given the opportunity to read poetry, mysteries, historical fiction, biographies, autobiographies, and science fiction, he or she may not know all of the types of stories that are created for readers of all ages. Student book choice is the first step in getting children hooked on reading. When students have ownership of their reading, successful, independent readers begin to bloom.

Teachers can be the best book matchmakers for their students. While teachers are building relationships with their students in the beginning of the year, they can also conduct one-on-one interviews or give interest surveys to each child. This practice will help teachers learn the strengths, challenges, likes, and dislikes of their students. This information helps teachers select the best book to spark a child's interest in reading.

Peers can be a great resource for helping students find what books they will love to read. Encourage classmates to be book matchmakers by creating personalized book recommendations for their peers. It's easy to create a recommendation template that can be stacked in the class book nook. When students find a book they think would match the interests and hobbies of classmates, they can fill out the personalized book recommendation form and give it to their classmate.

Literacy diagnostic tools such as running records or anecdotal notes can also be used to understand the instructional and independent reading levels of students. During one-on-one or small-group reading instruction, teachers can note the reading behaviors they observe, including any errors made during reading, students' responses to comprehension questions, or details about their expression, tone, or reading rate.

Read Together

Through daily guided reading, teachers can introduce students to high-interest instructional text across genres. Daily individualized reading practice gives students the opportunity to read books of choice on their independent reading level and grow as readers. Introduce children to multiple genres of books during small-group reading instruction. When children find a book of interest, they can turn the book into their choice book for independent reading time.

Background knowledge about a topic or subject matter can help students engage in the reading. For example, if a child has never been to a farm, he or she may not understand how the setting of the barn is crucial to the plot of a story that takes place on a farm. If a student has no prior knowledge about the roaring twenties, he or she will not fully comprehend an article about the Great Depression. Making stories and articles relevant to everyday life and current events is one more way to increase background knowledge. In order to build background knowledge before reading, teachers should consider taking students on virtual or live field trips or giving them access to real objects.

Assume that students have no understanding of the vocabulary words or content of the text. Allow them to make predictions, make connections, and ask questions before every reading experience to gauge their knowledge. These three comprehension strategies inform a teacher of the students' proficiency about a particular topic. Encourage readers to use the title and pictures to make a prediction about what the book is about before reading it. During reading, students confirm their prediction and make a connection. Ask questions such as, "What does this text remind you of?" or "What is going to happen next?" to build comprehension.

Give students daily experiences in instructional guided reading, independent reading, and choice. Exposure them to culturally relevant and diverse genres, and guide them with comprehension strategies to enhance a love of reading.

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Developing a Love of Reading in Students

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Exposing new readers to a variety of genres can help them find the books they love. Plus, reading comprehension strategies to deepen their engagement.

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Guiding Questions for Planning Toolkit Lessons

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Guiding Questions for Planning Toolkit Lessons

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Reading in Taxonomy, Spanish vs. English

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Reading in Taxonomy, Spanish vs. English

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100 Book Challenge -Parent's Guide (English)

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100 Book Challenge -Parent's Guide (English)

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100 Book Challenge -Parent's Guide (Spanish)

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100 Book Challenge -Parent's Guide (Spanish)

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Why A Structured Phonics Program is Effective

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Why A Structured Phonics Program is Effective

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Video - Initial Leveling and Entering in SchoolPace by Katie Collins

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Video - Initial Leveling and Entering in SchoolPace by Katie Collins

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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ELL Modifications