Readers will know that I promised a thoughtful follow-up to my previous post in which I criticized DeLisle’s recent Ed Week rant on differentiated instruction.
However, after pondering the subject intensely for a week, I find myself facing a somewhat different and broader question – the baby and bathwater question: why do we constantly fail to distinguish a good idea from confused and ineffective implementations of good ideas, and throw out the idea – instead of refining the policies and practices?
For, surely, this is the issue with DI. The idea could not be more pedagogically and morally correct: design learning to make it most likely that all the varied learners in front of you will learn and be engaged in their learning. Even DeLisle acknowledges the core idea as sound. Indeed, almost every elementary teacher has long differentiated in ELA due to reading level differences, (something apparently unknown to other critics).
But once the going gets rough (e.g. classes are far too diverse; planning becomes more time-consuming), we rise up against “differentiated instruction” instead of tinkering with the way the idea is being implemented.
It’s not just DI. Raise your hand if there has been pushback against UbD, curriculum mapping, block scheduling, authentic assessment, standards-based grading, and problem-based learning in your school. Ok, everyone put their hands down now.
You don’t even have to like these initiatives to see that the implementation problems are rife: failure to think through training and feedback; failure to allocate enough time to experiment with the ideas before full implementation; failure to think through the likely rough spots and misunderstandings of those ideas.
At the implementation level of school reform, it’s one big game of Lucy holding the new-initiative football, and Charlie Brown thinking “THIS time it will work!”
Schools simply do not know how to change themselves. They are status quo machines of the highest order – on par with churches. Worse, administrators – in their naïve enthusiasm and stubbornness to bring change – too often fail to listen to critics or build in self-correcting mechanisms to ensure that implementation can be tweaked all along the way of the reform – as if admitting mistakes in early implementation would discredit the whole idea (and their leadership).
I can speak to this problem with lots of firsthand knowledge related to Understanding by Design over a 15 year period. Let me list a few horrible ways that UbD has been implemented in schools, districts and other countries – without either our blessing or consultation/feedback of any kind:
- In each unit there must be 4 essential questions
- In Year One, every teacher will design and implement all their units in UbD
- Every LESSON will be planned in the UbD Unit Template
- There has to be at least 1 performance task for every lesson
- In Year One, every UbD unit will be placed in the Atlas Rubicon software, with limited PD on either initiative
- Requiring SEPARATE UbD units for each subject at the elementary level in which the one teacher plans and teaches ALL the units.
I could go on, alas, but you get the point.
A process to avoid bad implementation. A solution seems straightforward, based on our sad history in making this mistake:
- intense study of local needs – identification of gaps between Mission and reality
- intense study of possible initiatives, given a need/problem statement
- a process and set of criteria for weighing the pros and cons of possible initiatives/approaches/programs
- a Purpose statement for the new initiative decided on – the idea and ideal to be safeguarded throughout the work, why the idea suits our needs at this moment in time, and why this is the most promising initiative
- intense study of past initiatives locally: which succeeded, which failed, and why?
- policies and criteria for vetting whether a proposed initiative is Mission-appropriate, and whether or not a strategic plan exists that is likely to make the initiative succeed
- incentives for pioneers to try it out and report back
- incentives and opportunities for rank-and-file teachers to try out some manageable aspects of the initiative – thus, some choice for teachers
- models of exactly what teachers are supposed to do, in their grade/subjects, of the initiative
- a strategic plan that anticipates and adjusts based on the most likely misunderstandings, concerns, rough spots, and logistical impediments to success. (“This initiative will fail unless we deal with such likely roadblocks as…”
- a system for ensuring lots of feedback to teachers and sharing by teachers in all scheduled staff meetings, as they try things out
- a steering committee charged with gathering constant and timely feedback about the initiative and acting on it in a timely way
- the steering committee recommending key structural changes needed to optimize the long-term success of the initiative, so that all the work is not on the back of individual isolated teachers
The first three points deserve special attention in light of common criticisms of DI – namely, that it is difficult to manage as an individual teacher (True).
DI is one possible solution to excessive i.e. unmanageable heterogeneity in the typical classroom. So, if the problem statement is: too many learners of great difference in ability in certain classes, limiting engagement and achievement for all, then there are additional reforms, beyond DI, that should be considered, too. Maybe we need to reconsider birth-year related grade levels; maybe we need to group more homogeneously (as we happily do in Spanish and upper-level math classes) throughout the period or day. Yes, tracking is bad; that doesn’t mean that intelligent and flexible grouping in classes – especially in a standards-based world where we are accountable for the achievement of all learners – is a bad idea. Then, any proposed solutions might tackle both DI and structural solutions – and be really “owned” by staff since the initiative was a logical response to need rather than a mysterious mandate.
In short, we tend to mandate “solutions” before the problem statement is fully explored, established, and used to consider alternative solutions.
Building an iterative reform system. The title of the post reminds us what tends to happen when leaders fail to do these things. We throw out the baby with the bathwater. i.e. we toss the good idea along with Implementation version 1. (Imagine if software creators gave up after Version 1, and you have some idea of how little we would now value software.)
Resisters/opponents of change get most of their power from the failure of implementation, not sound arguments against the core idea: “See? I told you it wouldn’t work; I told you it was a bad idea.” I think most of the big reform ideas mentioned above are sound, addressing fairly obvious needs for greater personalization, coherence, and accountability. Alas, even “reform” now is a bad word in many quarters (cf. Diane Ravitch) because the implementation of many of good ideas has been so poor.
Nor should we despair over the enormity of the task. We don’t need to be geniuses to change things for the better. We just need to want, solicit, and act on feedback when we initiate any change. That is the key to all modern improvements, from hardware to software to services. Change of any kind, to lead to progress and to last, involves a robust feedback system. Yet, school-people – be they admins or teachers, be it large-scale school reform or individual experiments in teaching – are prone to charge ahead without an adequate plan, then give up on an idea that doesn’t work out of the box (or press ahead with a plan impervious to results). That’s why it is essential in reform to provide structures and opportunities that send the message: Implementation Version 1.0 is LIKELY to fail. We won’t get this right, most likely until Version 3.5. So, let’s fail early and often (as they say at IDEO) and work to get it right as quickly as possible, based on feedback and advice.
Otherwise, like Charlie Brown, we’ll just be wishin’ and hopin’.
PS: In reference to a back and forth in the comments, I am posting our UbD-based Meeting Agenda Template v.15.
21 Responses
You have hit the nail on the head. It seems to me any educational “reform” is not really a reform but an “initiative.” Initiatives come and go with different administrators. Once he or she has used the initiative to pad a resume or get a promotion or give a workshop/ paper the initiative slowly dies until the next initiative is introduced. Very little support is provided and as a result, teachers become cynical and dismiss what are sometimes very good ideas.
To be fair, I would also say that part of the reason administrators and boards operate this way is because they are slaves to the “educational reform” industry. As education has become more commodified and “consumerized” , it has followed the path of the information technology industry which dictates that one must have the latest and greatest phone or tablet or whatever in order to be seen as “innovative” and cutting edge.
Poor implementation is a killer, it will kill the Common Core math if there are many instances of the following (which I have read about in several blogs):
1: A school district which mandated that every math class (in each level) will be on the same topic in the same week, in every school.
2.A school principal who mandated that every math class shall be strictly aligned with a specific standard.
3. A school principal (maybe from higher up) mandated that “The standard being studied in each class shall be written on the board for all to see”.
I am sure there are more horrors, from people who have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the philosophy of the Common Core.
It is not surprising that teachers are leaving in droves.
And it’s no wonder teachers, at least, sit in meetings, shake their heads, roll their eyes and say, perhaps only to themselves, “Haven’t we done this before?” or “Here we go again.”
Perhaps administrators do, also. Do they? You would know better than I.
But, I agree that teachers are not great believers in change, or even minor disruption. Even if something doesn’t work the way they’d like — i.e. teaching informative writing by “mode, – – they defend and resist sometimes for years! Finally, strong coercion does bring about a change in behavior – or a cosmetic one at least, Mike Rose’ recent comments about brute force notwithstanding. (sorry, the punch if mixed up there.)
That’s why admins like to change personnel. And their own departures frequently disrupt a good or almost-good thing.
As always, I have great respect for your more than cogent and solid arguments – including dismissing ideas that get messy on the ground, and thus dismissed ‘because they just don’t work.’ As a retired (private school) headmaster and teacher, I’ve been involved from multiple angles.
Yet I think that we are not going far enough with our changes, reforms — and basic, theoretical ideas. We are still delivering mail with the pony express system, and attempting to upgrade to the telegraph. Instead, what if we stood farther back and picked another metaphor: we are in a “Great Depression” in education which has left us bereft of hope, stripping individuals’ potential, and leaving us as a country of hopelessness. (Okay, maybe not quite jumping off window ledges….)
So, to really keep mixing the metaphor/s — we need to create a new system for delivering the mail with jumbo jets and big brown trucks (and maybe even Amazon’s secret sauce) to every single student’s address. A new set of assumptions about teaching-and-learning, based on psychology, neuroscience, and the micro-level stuff of each learner — as well as the macro-world of students’ families, communities, etc.
We’ll do away with age-grading, grading, and the whole thing (the bathwater goes but the baby-student stays) – but only after a big national ‘summit’ of thinkers and doers who have generated a national-level ‘outline’ (NOT a national level curriculum or teacher evaluation or other program) of how this new child-at-the-center educational ‘system’ would be generally laid out. A philosophical outline – with some practical implications and suggested strategies. (Picking the people, the place, the time – all itself a monumental set of obstacles! There are already ‘conferences’ galore)
Yes, it’s pie in the sky — but I believe we are in an educational depression, not with a ‘broken’ system but with a system that is suffering a kind of psycho-social mental illness that we are treating with many interventions that teachers and administrators have the power to dismiss — that’s even ignoring school boards, textbook salesmen, legislators, etc.
Having initiated initiatives that have failed, succeeded, stalled, etc — my conclusion has been that sometimes, the answer is finding a number of the “right,” well-intentioned people to step back, realize something is inordinately complex — and take a lot of time and resources, and work toward a brand new model — with time spent on how to handle change processes.
The chances for acceptance? Maybe 2 out of 5, maybe….But a long-term depression, well, it’s a really depressing alternative. This comment is a brief synopsis – and far too long as it is.
Thanks for listening – and please know again how much your words — far more practical and theoretically sound than mine — are deeply valued!
Thank you for this post. It is a great reminder that the first time something is tried, it will probably fail. I loved your analogy with “Version 1.0.” This is what finally pushed me to create my first post on my blog. My students are doing this, why not me?
Hooray for you, Jen. If it weren’t for students (and younger colleagues) I would not know half of what I know.
Love your analogy to video games because, like it or not, they do a lot of things right when it comes to learning models. A big one is the removal of the stigma associated with failure. To be told that “Implementation Version 1.0 is LIKELY to fail”, is antithetical to many charged with the implementation process. Failure is a key to learning. Once we get it “right” complacency sets in. If we are of the mindset that we can always do better then failure becomes less threatening and we are more likely to distinguish between the idea and its implementation and be more persistent in the later.
I love this post, Grant, and might suggest one of the biggest problems I’ve always found with implementation; it’s the all-in syndrome, meaning that once a school opts to move to something like expecting differentiation, UbD, UDL or PBL, people are now thinking that it all has to happen or it’s no good at all. As an administrator, I try to ask people to keep an eye on the ultimate goal but focus their efforts on what the first piece of evolution towards that goal would look like.
Instead of asking teachers to fully differentiate their classes all of a sudden, can’t we suggest that they come up with more than one assessment option for a unit or try adding some pedagogical variety that’ll bring the class closer to DI, things like jigsaw grouping or socratic seminar? We have to become better at turning progress into a process instead of an all-at-once expectation.
Agreed. I often recommend, for example, that people try out either an essential question or a performance task, so choice comes into it, too.
Reblogged this on Director's Newsletter.
Glad you mentioned doing away with age-graded classrooms. I taught in a K-8 school where K-3 were called “continuous development.” Students moved from room to room as they mastered about 12 levels of ELA skills/content. You had automatic differentiation without having to create 6 levels of lessons (maybe 2, at most 3; sometimes one). Believe it or not, this was in a very low-income, Catholic, inner city school. The K-3 program was run by the K teacher, a very experienced nun who taught well and was really good at assessing when kids were ready to move out of K.
This might sound quite confusing for the children; in theory they could be moved from classroom to classroom quite often. In reality, this did not happen; once in the middle of the year was the most frequent between-year move, and most kids stayed in a room at least one year.
Thanks you Sister Macarius!!!
Really, really great post.
Adding to this, I think a major reason for failure in a reform like DI is that the ‘change’ is never marketed in a way which honors the needs of adult learners. The message at the outset is that a reform like DI is very valuable to students and that teachers will be serving the role of passing through this great idea to students. DI is marketed as something that students can benefit from, but NOT teachers.
This is a tragic mistake; it compromises the value of DI by suggesting that it valuable to one community of learners (students) and not another (teachers) and it sends a most bizarre message to teachers: “Teachers, differentiation will NOT be applied to you as a learner. Instead, we want you to learn how great it is and then give it away to your students. Now, get started”. This is the soil upon which resentment grows.
If DI is valuable to students, then why wouldn’t be valuable to teachers?
I see the logic this way
All human learners in a school community would benefit from DI
Teachers are human learners in a school community
Teachers would benefit from DI
With standardization of evaluation and standardized professional deveopment, it is abundantly clear that schools do not have the time or resources to treat teachers as individual learners. One-size fits all will have to do and there are many reasons for this of course. If there was some way, though, of creatively implementing DI to change the way in which teachers are dealt with, then it would have a much greater chance for adoption once given to students.
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This marketing problem doesn’t apply to all reform of course, but many. UBD for instance. If a school really wants to implement UBD properly, FORGET about the students for two years and focus like a laser on imbuing teacher professional development WITH UBD. Get feedback from the teachers as they experience it AS A LEARNER. Then, once teachers have internalized its value, then it can be rolled out to the students. This would make the chances for sustainable change so much greater– and most importantly, doing it this way communicates the value of reform to all learners in the school community.
Really valid commentary, DanF, on the problems with much school reform efforts. I have thought and said the same things many times. Firstly, as you said, wouldn’t it be nice if teachers were respected as adults learners who would greatly benefit from DI, and who are at various stages along a learning continuum, instead of treating them as if they were all identical in knowledge and experience, and herding them like cattle through the same PD sessions.
Secondly, brilliant example suggestion about letting teachers experience and appreciate the power of UBD themselves in PD sessions, before inviting them to use it in the class. When I was a coordinator of a BEd Preservice program, my partner and I planned and instructed the teacher candidates using UBD and Marzano et als Dimensions of Learning, along with an inquiry format that followed the 5E Science Learning Cycle. The teacher candidates were able to experience the power of learning theough these instructional design frameworks and strategies, and then were required to practice them in planning their practicum lesson sequences. The learning curve was steep, but feedback was very positive, and the work produced by the candidates was extremely impressive. Most said having experienced learning in these ways, they couldn’t imagine planning and teaching without using those same tools and strategies.
Similarly, when my secondment to the Faculty of Ed ended, I returned to a classroom in my school board looking forward to taking leadership within my school, and further developing my teaching through self- directed PD and reflective practice.
As Grant has said so well, there are many reasons why when it comes to refor. In education, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. I think a main reason is that it takes time and a certain amount of effort by admin to discern the learning needs and interests of staff, and then to plan PD accordingly to move each teacher forward with their input. In Ontario, pressure is often put on school admin from higher up in the admin chain to use the data from local and state/ province tests to design PD that will produce improved teaching and will raise achievement levels of so called “marker students” in as short a time as possible. A plan to do this is devised centrally and the edict passed down to schools. Not only is the allotted timeline for visible improvement short, release money for supply teachers to support in-school PD is limited, so the fastest approach is often take. Which is throw the same thing at everyone, and hope some of it sticks and gets used effectively.
Grant and others in this blog have suggested possible solutions, and perhaps we shall see some of these worthwhile ideas being used in the future.
Very thoughtful and helpful comment, Lynn. “As short a time as possible” may be the key problem in all this work…
Thanks for the ideas Lynn. Your own personal experiences reveal the importance of this issue very well.
I got to thinking about the UBD idea more. Using a high school example, it might be something as simple as a principal telling his/her department chairs to use UBD as a way to structure their meetings with their departments. The edict would be that a day before every meeting the dept chair sends out a sample essential questions related to the art and science of teaching like: “How can a classroom be structured so that students assume more ownership over their learning?” Tell the teachers to think about how they would answer that and then leave 15 minutes at the end of the meeting to share their ideas. Do this for a year. Little do the teachers know, they are actually doing a component of UBD. By marketing it this way, teachers are shown how incredibly valuable the process is for THEM. And they will realize just how hard it is to think philosophically about their own practice. They can then carry this appreciation for the difficultly of asking and answering essential questions as they share the strategy with their students. This would make them much more prepared for implementation. And it would also make them better, more collaborative teachers in the process. Teachers and students win..
Great idea, Dan. I started using UbD as a meeting planner a few years ago – in fact, I even have a little form for it. I’ll add it to the bottom of the article.
I’ve read the comments as well as the article Grant and the words “start small” and “build it they shall come” – come to mind.
I went to a team of teachers and asked them to trial something I had heard about that might solve an educational problem the data suggested we had. I offered them some additional resources (coach, materials, time) for the trial. Over time we extended the trial to other teams and 3 years later its part of the instructional culture and just the way we do it and now my staff insist we / they induct new teachers into the instructional culture that features what was once an initiative.
Now we trial lost of things not all from my ideas and the discussions around pedagogy and evidence are great.
This is all sensible. Our mantra in Schooling by Design is Think big start small and smart. The problem in many cases, however, is that the trials never go anywhere. IE there is no intelligent lan for getting beyond trials to policy if things are going well in trials. But your account makes it clear that this is a sound approach. I encourage readers unfamiliar with our reform ideas in Schooling by Design to check out the last four chapters of the book where we lay out a formal approach based on these and other principles to make reform likely to succeed ‘by design’.
Several years ago, I was asked to present to a group of high school level science teachers from another district about my implementation of Differentiated Instruction in my physics classroom. I developed a presentation, PPT, etc and walked into an angry room of educators who had been informed that I was there to teach them how to implement this new district-wide mandated expectation. I teach Physics, y’all.
Needless to say, my presentation changed from the outset. I pulled up a chair and let these teachers vent about how this new DI was expectation from the administration was overwhelming to them. I asked…so who teaches students from another culture? How do you change your instruction to insure this student’s success? What creative ways have you come up with to meet the needs of a learner who was lagging behind? How do you help really bright kids not get bored in class?
Through this discussion, the teachers were able to identify a myriad of creative ways they had already been implementing differentiated instruction in their classrooms. Sharing ideas empowered these teachers to reach out to each other and begin documenting their own DI strategies. Affirming the work already being done by educators allowed them to become open to new ideas from me and each other. They also found they could become a resource for each other which provided ownership rather than feeling DI was just another administrative reform.
I believe that all quality reform depends on effective communication with teachers and comes from a place of affirming the work they have already been doing. Laura Zinszer
Great comment – and an important reminder that the adults need to practice what the initiative preaches if there is to be any hope.
Laura, fantastic comments and strategy. What you did so creatively is tap into the diverse needs of teachers– as learners– by acknowleding their unique experiences– you employed differentiation on them!!
It was revealed that they already had an appreciation of DI– they just needed to be presented with great questions so they could manifest this appreciation. The teachers now own an appreciation for DI because they experienced it as learners first- with success. that is great professional development.