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To change those conditions, though, schools and districts will have to change some deeply engrained practices. In its first year, the program has found that it has bumped up against district practices in the following areas:
Identifying Quality Teaching
In the summer sessions and follow-up fall seminars, the fellows clarified what constitutes good teaching, using a constructivist approach: they viewed videos of classroom teaching, compared their individual ratings, and learned how divergent their assessments of good teaching were. They developed a more fine-grained, learner-centered framework to analyze and describe teaching and learning.
Through this work, they gained understanding of the effects of good teaching and how to recognize it. The USLF exercises revealed that despite the four districts’ investments in systemic reform, there was not a strong shared understanding of the attributes of quality teaching, nor a means by which the fellows’ new perspectives could be reconciled with existing district expectations.
Putting Learning into Practice
With new insights on quality teaching, fellows who were assistant principals noted how they looked at their own schools’ teachers differently, while fellows who were teachers reflected on how USLF pushed them to think differently about their teaching. With each session, the fellows gained insights into promoting quality teaching and learning, reducing the achievement gap, and addressing systemic change. They wanted to bring those insights into work the next day.
This turned out to be an unexpected tension in the program, because the intent had been to facilitate the fellows’ development for future leadership positions and not about how they might change their current roles and work to capitalize on what they were learning in the moment.
Sharing Learning with Others
An unexpected consequence of the program was that the fellows wanted to share their learning with their schools’ leadership teams, particularly their principals and other school administrators. They wanted to try out some new ideas and methods such as how to work with teachers to improve student engagement and learning. They wanted to engage their colleagues in collaboratively trying new approaches and jointly reflecting on what they were learning. Some of the fellows engaged in informal conversations with their principal or peer administrators, and others circulated readings and organized video-based discussions about teaching and learning, as they had done in the seminars.
The principals and other school leaders varied in their receptivity to this new information – from active interest, to resentment that they did not receive the same learning opportunity, to fear that they were at risk of being replaced.
Aligning Messages about Leadership Roles and Strategies for School Improvement
Throughout the USLF program, there were discussions of how effective leaders could facilitate school improvement both through work with individual teachers and through collective work with teaching faculty in fostering a vision, raising expectations, using data, and facilitating collaboration.
While district officials provided input into the program content and facilitated fellows’ discussions at each session, there was limited discussion about each district’s systemic improvement plans and leadership expectations and how these and the program’s expectations were aligned (or not). Thus, it was left up to each fellow to sort out the alignment issues and tensions, sometimes with their building leaders and sometimes not.
Leveraging a Critical Mass to Facilitate Systemic Change
As the program unfolded throughout the academic year, participating district officials and the fellows began to see the benefits of having a shared language and shared expectations about quality teaching, instructionally effective leadership, and strategies for enhancing student learning. These shared insights and expectations helped, in some cases, to generate a critical mass of people with leadership expectations and capacity for systemic reform work.
Building Partnerships for Long-Term Improvement
The USLF partners invested in building collective ownership so that all partners felt responsibility for the success of the entire program. This investment required significant time and planning.
The partners also found that utilizing comparative advantages required explicit conversations about how each organization and individual could best contribute, working under the explicit assumption that differentiated contributions may produce the most desirable result. As differentiation increased, so did the need for coordination. It took ongoing collaboration and communication across organizations to knit together the various aspects of the work into a coherent whole.
Finally, improving the program required ongoing reflection about practice based upon real data. Some of the most significant modifications to the program were direct responses to evaluation findings. The partners created opportunities to meet as a team and learn from and examine results of the program evaluators’ data gathering. This enabled the team to continuously improve the program and to re-engineer the curriculum and structural components to better meet the needs of the fellows and the districts.
The USLF partnership model is not a silver bullet for remedying all urban leadership problems. It is not a simple, packaged program that can be bought off the shelf and easily inserted into schools and districts. USLF is a complex initiative woven into the complicated work of four urban districts. It is a strategic and systemic effort intended to have a lasting impact upon the leadership capacity of the districts. The identification, development, and support of aspiring leaders within these four districts are being accomplished through a unique, effective, inter-organizational partnership.
As other districts across the nation struggle with developing a deep pool of building leaders who have the skills and knowledge to improve teaching and learning, they should ask: What is our comparative advantage relative to solving this problem? How can we strategically ally with organizations that offer different and complementary assets and strengths? How can we invest in the collaborative to produce a high-functioning partnership?
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References
Campbell, C., M. DeArmond, and A. Schumwinger. 2004. From Bystander to Ally: Transforming the District Human Resource Department. Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education.
City, E. A., R. F. Elmore, S. Fiarman, and L. Teitel. 2009. Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Leithwood, K., K. Seashore Louis, S. Anderson, and K. Wahlstrom. 2004. How Leadership Influences Student Learning. Minneapolis, MN; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and New York: University of Minnesota, Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement; Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto; and Wallace Foundation.
