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Tuesday Dec 09, 2008

Professional standards trump 'loose coupling'

John Travers
I recently read an article written in 2000 by Richard Elmore that has severely dented a concept that was important to school education in the English speaking world during most of my career as a principal.  He wrote Building a New Structure For School Leadership to explain why large-scale 'standards-based reform' is critical to the survival of public education. The shocking aspect of this paper for me was his criticism of the concept of 'loose coupling' which I widely touted in the '80s and 90s. Elmore blames the notion of loose-coupling for much of our current troubles. Loose coupling was not a term on everybody's lips, but the concept was widespread.

juggler"This [loose coupling] view, in brief, posits that the "technical core" of education, detailed decisions about what should be taught at any given time, how it should be taught, what students should be expected to learn at any given time, how they should be grouped within classrooms for purposes of instruction, what they should be required to do to demonstrate their knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, how their learning should be evaluated, resides in individual classrooms, not in the organizations that surround them."

He then accurately describes the dominant culture of schools in the west for the last few decades where principals were promoted on their ability to do everything except focus on student outcomes.

"...direct involvement in instruction is among the least frequent activities performed by administrators of any kind at any level..."

We did everything we could to develop a culture and environment where students learnt successfully, but as Elmore explains, much of our work was to provide a buffer behind which teachers could engage privately in the mysterious business of teaching and learning.

Elmore then point to the groundswell of community demand for improved school standards and this has become obvious even in Australia since 2000. But he advocates a strong emphasis on accountability for teaching not as a weapon to punish poor performing schools, but as an accompaniment to a rigorous staff learning program.

"...standards-based reform hits at a critical weakness of the existing institutional structure, namely its inability to account for why certain students master academic content and can demonstrate academic performance while others do not. When the core technology of schools is buried in the individual decisions of classroom teachers and buffered from external scrutiny, outcomes are the consequence of mysterious processes that no one understands at the collective, institutional level. Therefore, school people and the public at large are free to assign causality to whatever their favorite theory suggests: weak family structures, poverty, discrimination, lack of aptitude, peer pressure, diet, television, etc.

So Elmore makes what I think is the best case for school reform that I have seen over many years. It is: build the human capital in the school on a large scale basis, remove the privacy veil from teaching and use rigorous assessment of learning to guide this process and demonstrate the  teachers' and the schools' achievements.

Design Principles in this article for large-scale improvement in school systems are:
  • Maintain a tight instructional focus sustained over time.Target
  • Routinize Accountability for Practice and Performance in Face-to-Face Relationships.
  • Reduce Isolation and Open Practice Up to Direct Observation, Analysis, and Criticism.
  • Exercise Differential Treatment Based on Performing and Capacity, Not on Volunteerism.
  • Devolve Increased discretion Based on Practice and Performance.

Elmore R, Building a New Structure For School Leadership, 2000 Albert Shanker Institute ,

Tags: sictas sictaswork professional learning school improvement
Posted at 02:04PM Dec 09, 2008 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

Comments:

John We hear our politicians now argue that one of the most important factors affecting student achievementis teacher quality. In this case i think they are right. There is now strong evidence that the most important influence on student acheivement is teacher quality. This is why in school effectiveness research the between-classroom differences are more powerful than the between-school differences. In the OECD publication 'Teachers matter' (OECD, 2005, p. 26 etc) it is put like this: "The broad consensus is that ‘teacher quality’ is the single most important school variable influencing student achievement...Students of the most effective teachers have learning gains four time greater than students of the least effective, which accumulate over time." Locally Ken Rowe of ACER argues: "When all other sources of variation are taken into account, including gender, social backgrounds of students and differences between schools, the largest differences in student achievement are between classes. That is, by far the most important source of variation in student achievement is teacher quality. " ( Ken Rowe http://www.cis.org.au/IssueAnalysis/ia22/IA22.htm). How could we improve teacher quality? We have to work on the quality of what the teachers knows that influences how the teacher acts - all sorts of actions. (The importance of action is suggested by considering whether you could teach if you were totally paralysed). Soon as I begin to teach I act - make a sign with my hand, say something, write something, etc. As soon as i start wotk on my poetry lesson plan I am acting. When I start to speak to introduce my lesson on poetry I am acting, etc. If you could help me improve my poetry knowldege, and help me improve my lesson presentation actions you would be likely make a positive impact on the quality of my teaching. You could check this out by observing my planning and teaching and then by checking out the quality of the knowledge and learning actions of my students. Of course I might need some more time to do these things, so my principal or VC would be improving the quality of their leadership if they set up conditions that supported this, and the curriculum designers would be improving the quality of their curriculum design if they set up conditions that allowed me and my students time to construct the powerful knowledge that would enable us to solve the important problems identified in the curriculum. This doesn't sound like rocket science, but there is some science to support it. What's more i see some small signs of encouragement that some principals and curriculum designers are acting in the way I suggest ( Not sure about the VCs!). Last week I heard Barry McGaw talk about the National Curriculum. Encouragingly he seems determined to take note of the evidence on the sense of spending more time covering less content in the curriculum. I also heard a principal talk about the timetabling of space for teachers to work on their projects designed to improve the delivery of the curriculum using ICT. These moves seem to me to be in right direction.

Posted by Mike Lawson on December 14, 2008 at 11:29 PM CST #

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John Travers


I am a former teacher and principal with a strong interest in the use of ICT in learning. I work at Education.au and currently I am working on project...
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