>>> Dana.Thames@USM.EDU 11/18/05 8:41 AM >>>
Please forgive my entry at this point in the dialogue and I fear I may have missed a point but I would like to share some information regarding science and literacy data boundaries...

For the last three summers I have had the good fortune to offer a Summer Polymer Science and Literacy program for High School students. Hence working with NSF to improve our goal with regard to keeping students involved in the math and science areas. Students attended for ten weeks, five days a week, from 8 until 2. The morning hours were devoted to literacy efforts related to learning from text: developing strategies to comprehend the text, vocabulary development, and study skills. The afternoon was devoted to lab time where the experiments, etc. were carried out.

Reflective journals (lab books) were kept, students wrote daily, read daily, etc. These students have gone on to enroll in science and math classes that once they elected to leave off of their course list. Each year when asked why they did not take extra science and math courses a student replied, "the stuff is too hard to read." A second student interjected that it wasn't reading the words that was hard it was "they couldn't make meaning from what they were reading...so the classes were too hard." They all shared that they loved science that it was fun and exciting but too hard to read and understand and no one to help them at home with homework.

Also involved in this program were High School Science and Math teachers who worked through the ten week program with the students. They were amazed at what the students could do and what a difference it made in behavior! The teachers are still using these strategies and we are working with groups of teachers who requested to know more about how to develop these literacy efforts for their respective classrooms.




  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Mark Conley
  To: NRCLIST@LISTSERV.NRCONLINE.ORG
  Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 1:13 PM
  Subject: Re: Staring at the data across the subject matter boundaries


  I posed this question yesterday to a friend, a science ed professor, who I respect a lot.  I asked his view of science teaching in an urban district where nearly 40 percent of the students cannot read very well, and if the science researchers deal with that issue very much.  His response was that science ed really doesn't deal with that and the reason is their perspective on the goals of science teaching and the place of text.  According to my friend, science educators are most concerned about helping adolescents interact with the natural world.  Texts, and particularly scientific texts, are excellent ways to support that interaction, but there are also many other ways, such as hands-on experiences and demonstrations.  His conclusion about working in a context where many students cannot read is that the science educator would not have access to one of the valuable tools - texts - but would rely on the other alternatives to support students' interactions with the natural world.  I asked: "Is that a solution with which you are comfortable?" and he answered "No, it's not ideal."



  My question for us is: How does our work, and the work of literacy coaches, fit in with this line of disciplinary reasoning?



  Mark



  Dr. Mark Conley

  Michigan State University

  359 Erickson Hall

  East Lansing, MI  48824



  -----Original Message-----
  From: NRC Members Listserv [mailto:NRCLIST@LISTSERV.NRCONLINE.ORG] On Behalf Of Sebastian Wren
  Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 11:13 AM
  To: NRCLIST@LISTSERV.NRCONLINE.ORG
  Subject: Re: Staring at the data across the subject matter boundaries



  On Nov 17, 2005, at 5:33 AM, Mark Conley wrote:

  I visited our local urban school district yesterday to talk about literacy coaches and striving readers.  Some of the stories were familiar - well-intended literacy coaches (we used to call them reading specialists) getting doors slammed in their faces by subject matter teachers.  I asked to see the district test data.  I oversee about 250 Michigan State juniors who tutor in the schools and was trying to explore ways that we could help.  The data, which we could argue about, showed that more than 40 percent of the middle school students were reading 2 or more years below grade level.  This did not surprise me, since we had heard reports from teachers and our own students for years about severe problems with reading fluency at the middle level.  Those students fortunate enough to make it to 9th grade, however, had a 50 percent chance of graduating.  Only 50 percent of the 9th graders make it to 12th grade.  What enormous human cost!

  The district leaders and I crafted a plan to get a group of us together in the same room - literacy coaches, teachers from across the disciplines, principals, and me with my 250 tutors.  We're all going to stare at the same data and ask: What does this mean? And What can we do about it?

  It struck me (actually, all of us at the meeting) that we often get focused on creating and implementing programs, like sending the literacy coaches in, for example.  We create structures and initiatives.  But it is very easy to forget the problems - significant problems - that we are all there to confront.  My hope is that we can get a conversation going across a very large and complicated urban district about who is falling behind, why, and what we can all do.  One positive side effect might be that when it comes time to cut the funding - say, for literacy coaches - we can be more concerned about the authentic job that literacy coaches do rather than just the dollar cost.  Maybe at age 51, I'm still pretty pie in the sky hopeful.  But it's worth a try.

  Winter finally arrived here in mid-Michigan last night.  Ugh!  Have a great Thanksgiving holiday and see you in Miami!


  School improvement is quite challenging, and I wish you luck. I can give you one word of advice as you go forward -- it is one word that has come up over and over and OVER again as I have worked with low-performing schools across the southwest -- that word is "leadership." When I start working with a low-performing school, leaders in that school almost always want me to "fix the teachers." They don't put it like that, but that's what it boils down to. They want me to go give the teachers some training and show them how to teach kids to read. Easy as that. I am always amazed that principals are so eager to allow me -- a perfect stranger -- to come in their schools and work with their teachers without any discussion of what I am going to do. They really didn't seem interested. They are busy people -- they just want me to go fix the teachers and get those reading scores up.

  That's always a bad sign.

  Early in my career, I did just what they wanted me to. I did inservice sessions or paid teachers stipends for Saturday sessions, gave them demonstration lessons, talked to them about what they should be teaching, how to individualize their instruction, etc. And the teachers loved it -- they thought I was very entertaining (I am... I tell a lot of jokes.... I'm very funny). The evaluations of my little workshops were always fabulous and peppered with glowing comments that made my head swell. The principals and district leaders thought I was providing a fabulous service for their district. They weren't there to see any of it for themselves, but they heard about it, and they heard it was great.

  Unfortunately, nothing changed in the classroom.

  So, I started flying BACK out to the schools soon after the Saturday sessions, and I started following up with individual teachers in their classrooms. I made schedules for me to observe them teaching the lessons that I had demonstrated in the previous staff-development session. Sometimes I demonstrated the lesson again with their students (usually while the teacher sat at her desk and graded papers). The follow-up improved things a bit -- at least a few of the teachers started making a connection between the Saturday session and their classroom instruction. Still, most teachers would only put on a dog-and-pony show for my benefit, and then would go back to business-as-usual as soon as I left. And we were spending something like $125,000 per year to pay my salary and keep sending me back to these schools -- there was no way to sustain that.

  I found in almost every school where I worked, there was at least one person (teacher, reading specialist, tutor, retired professional) who had a passion and talent for reading instruction. I believed that if I could effectively partner with that person, I could fly out once per month, work mostly with that person, and then that person could follow-up with the rest of the teachers. I could support that person via e-mail and telephone the rest of the time. Effectively, the person would become a literacy coach. That model improved things in a few schools, but in most schools even that didn't work. In a few cases it made things worse.

  In the few schools where it did work well, school and district leaders clearly and actively supported the literacy coach, and made it clear to the other teachers that they should work with the literacy coach as a vehicle for professional development and instructional improvement. Time, money, and other resources were provided to the literacy coach in the successful schools. And in the successful schools, the literacy coach started working with the school leaders to help them be better instructional leaders. (That was spontaneous -- I didn't plan that.) In one school the literacy coach and I made a habit of walking the principal through the classrooms, talking about improvements that have been made, showing the principal examples of student work that showed new learning, showing them things that still needed improvement, etc. Month after month, that principal got more and more involved in improving reading instruction in her school.

  But that was not the case in most schools. In most schools, the literacy coaches did not get support from the school and district leaders, they were not really accountable for providing ongoing, job-embedded professional development to the teachers, and the teachers were not accountable for working with the literacy coaches. Some principals were just negligent -- others clearly felt threatened by the literacy coach and were more actively undermining the coach's efforts. The well-intentioned literacy coaches would turn to me for help, and I would offer advice and assistance where I could. But without the full support of the school and district leaders, there was really not much I could do. Those literacy coaches became feckless scape-goats for low achievement. A bit of a joke. One of the best literacy coaches I worked with quit in frustration -- I don't blame her one bit. She was put in a terrible situation.

  Mark, could you clarify your letter for me, because you are touching on something that I am very curious about. Would you say that the literacy coaches in your schools are effective? I have been reading about the effectiveness of staffing a literacy coach -- there are many articles (informal case-studies mostly) claiming that literacy coaches are effective components in school improvement. But I am concerned that for every success story that we read about, there may be countless failures that never get written about. I have worked closely with dozens of literacy coaches, and though they have good intentions, there have only been a couple that I have worked with that were really able to be effective agents of improvement in their schools. I love the idea of staffing a literacy coach, but I am beginning to suspect that without actively supportive leaders, literacy coaches are not very likely to make a difference. There are thousands of literacy coaches working in schools across the country -- the IRA describes it as a "booming" population. Surely some of them are extremely effective -- but the question is, how many? And why? (Okay, that's two questions.) I would wager that their success or failure depends partly on their own talents and personality, but mostly on the support they receive from school leaders.

  It always comes back to leadership.

  There are low-performing schools, and then there are LOW-performing schools -- I've worked in both types quite a bit. A 50% drop-out rate is really not that hard to overcome if you have good leaders who are willing to work with you and do what it takes to improve their schools. I have worked in schools where only 10% of the students were meeting the expectations set by their state -- I've worked in other schools where 85% were meeting state expectations. You would think that the latter school would be easier to improve, but that's not necessarily true. The success rate is not the variable that matters -- it is the capacity and willingness of school leaders to do what it takes every day to improve their schools that determines whether a school will improve. I have seen leaders in schools with 90% failure rates turn their schools around -- they take personal responsibility for student success, they work closely with their teachers, and they work closely with experts, and they are constantly working to find solutions to problems. They are clearly focused on solving high-priority problems.

  The state of Arkansas has started a Master Principal program that, I think, is one of the best ideas ever. It is a cheap investment, and I believe it is one that will pay off handsomely in coming years. In the Arkansas Master Principal program, principals go through 3 years of intensive training and support. Every year, they have to apply to stay in the program -- there may be 40 principals in the first year, and only 9 in the second year. If they are not improving their own school measurably as they go through the program, they are not allowed to stay in the program. After 3 years, the state guarantees a substantial raise in salary for graduates of the program. But the real plum comes if the Master Principal decides to move from her current school (which has already been improved) to a new, low-performing school. Then, in addition to the first pay raise, the principal gets a much larger pay raise. I think it is something like 25,000 dollars more per year total added to their salary. Very, very few principals make it through this program, but those that do are really excellent leaders who understand how to improve a school and have demonstrated the talent and will to do so.

  If we really want to improve our schools, then we need to improve leadership capacity. Personally, to start, I think every state needs to implement a Master Principal Program.

  Winter arrived in Texas, too. It's 60 freakin' degrees outside! I'm thinking about actually buying a coat! Brrrr!