Collaborative learning teams are improving teacher practice and student learning results in the Dallas Center-Grimes Community School Districts near Des Moines, Iowa.
To continue reading, download the document below:
[box class=”grey_box”]By Deanna Hill, Judy Jeffrey, Peter McWalters, Kathleen Paliokas, Alice Seagren, and Circe Stumbo. This white paper outlines the agenda of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) to identify critical design elements of a high quality educator development system and to provide states with a tool to identify work to be done in each element. It articulates a vision for teaching and leading as part of a broader vision for transforming the public education system toward excellence and equity.[/box]
[box class=”grey_box”]As an organizational partner for The Summit for Courageous Conversation, which took place from September 28 through October 1, 2008, West Wind participated in the program design and contributed this powerful presentation in support of that design. By President Circe Stumbo & Project Director David Davidson.[/box]
[box class=”grey_box”]Presented for the National Education Association’s 2007 Fall conference, Circe Stumbo gave this presentation with the assistance of Policy Analysts Deanna Hill and Ernestine Key. The symposium’s theme was “What Challenges Must Education Goals Address and Have We Been Successful in Meeting Them?”[/box]
[box class=”grey_box”]A report on the Regional Focus Groups on High School Redesign and the Work of the High School Redesign Advisory Panel. Prepared for the Georgia Department of Education School Improvement Division.[/box]
Educators and the public in Georgia share a growing concern about the capabilities of the public education system going forward into the 21st century. Despite our best efforts, changing demographics, economic realities, and challenges to democracy put pressure on the system as a whole to improve. The good news is that much is being done to assess the current and future needs of students and to adjust or redesign our education systems accordingly. Over the past several years, the nationwide emphasis on early literacy and standards-based education reform opened the doors for improved student results. While many of these efforts are paying off in the early grades, improvements have not yet taken hold at the high school level nationwide or in Georgia. Rather than attempt to make incremental improvements to a system that is widely recognized as needing large-scale reform, the Georgia Department of Education has approached the challenge to improve student performance as an opportunity to redesign its high schools at the levels of both student and system outcomes. Initially, the Department endeavored to provide answers to three broad questions:
With these questions in mind, the Georgia Department of Education directed substantial resources to support secondary school improvement. In late 2004, the Department created the position of Coordinator of High School Improvement. It also directed a majority of its federal Comprehensive School Reform grants to high schools and middle schools. With the Board of Regents, the Department launched Education Go Get It in February, 2005, which is a program to encourage Georgia’s youth to embrace education in high school and beyond. Once these programs were in place, the Department began to plan the first steps toward its much larger goal of comprehensive high school evaluation and redesign.
In April 2005, the Department convened an Advisory Panel on High School Redesign, comprising leaders of statewide education associations, Department staff, and community partners. The Advisory Panel helped conceptualize the focus groups as forums for public engagement and information gathering. In August and September of 2005, the Georgia Department of Education organized a series of high school redesign focus groups, hosted by the Regional Education Service Agencies, with the purpose of identifying core areas for focus in Georgia’s effort to lead the nation in improving student achievement. The Department contracted West Wind Education Policy, Inc., an independent entity based in Iowa City, Iowa, and with no ties to the state of Georgia, to conduct the regional High School Redesign Focus Groups.
After collecting and analyzing focus group results, analysts at West Wind developed a series of recommendations based on those data. The Advisory Panel was again convened in December 2005 to review the findings and draft recommendations and again provide their input. The result is this report. It is hoped that the Department will use this resource as it develops a vision and state action plan for the redesign of high schools toward the goal of leading the nation in preparing high school students for education beyond high school and for their chosen fields of work.
Continue reading by downloading the full report (PDF).
[box class=”grey_box”]An article in Council Quarterly, the Newsletter of the Council of Chief State School Officers, on states’ challenges to drive public education to meet the demands of an emerging economy.[/box]
We are well into the 21st century, yet our high schools remain organized on 20th century needs and expectations. CCSSO President David Driscoll (MA) issued a challenging question to his fellow chiefs in 2005: What can we do at the state level to ensure all of our children graduate from high school prepared to succeed in the 21st century?
Driscoll’s question is complex. It requires us to understand the recent fundamental shifts in our economy and devise a new way of educating all children to succeed in this new economy—an economy so new that we still barely understand it. It also requires us to understand the structures and patterns within the modern high school and how they hold us back from our new aspirations, and to see how the changes we posit to these structures and patterns cut against many of our deepest held beliefs about high school.
Finally, Driscoll challenges us to think hard about the opportunities and limitations that state education agencies (SEAs) have in supporting reform and the unique role that the state can play within a decentralized, yet highly standardized, system of education.
This challenge did not arise from a vacuum. Issues related to high school reform and 21st century expectations have been key themes for CCSSO’s membership meetings over the past several years. In 2003, under the direction of CCSSO President Mike Ward (NC), our priority theme was Seeing it Through. We studied high school reform at the 2003 Summer Institute (SI) and Annual Policy Forum (APF) where we had Ronald Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government help us understand leadership challenges in high school redesign.
In 2004, under the leadership of President Ted Stilwill (IA), we opened our SI by looking at the underlying reasons for the changes we called for. Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and current professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University, taught us about the structural changes to our economy and how knowing about them can help us change our role as educators. At the 2004 APF, David Gergen of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government built on those lessons by providing a political context for thinking about the changing economy.
It was those conversations—and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005)—that shaped our focus. We organized the 2005 SI on the premise that our expectations for student performance are too often inadequate and, therefore, we need to consider the following questions:
Robert Reich taught us that at one time in our economy, work that was routinized and standardized could support a middle class. Routinized work helped factories flourish—and with them, factory workers. Over time however, that type of work has diminished due to globalization, technological advances, and demographic shifts. Instead of standardized tasks, workers must solve novel problems and compete against workers worldwide. Reich warns us that to prepare young people to succeed in this economy, we must provide them a different set of skills than the ones around which we have organized education.
The World is Flat extends Reich’s lessons, giving specificity to the economic shift. We understand better now than ever how the changing nature of the workforce creates new demands on our education system. Average workers must be able to innovate, think critically, solve novel problems, utilize technology, and communicate well. In this new economy, we still rely on our education system to deliver the promise of equal opportunity that is the hallmark of American democracy.
At this year’s SI, John Bransford, professor at the University of Washington, connected the needs of the economy to instruction that “invite[s] innovation in order to work smarter and more efficiently (which makes learning more motivating, relevant, and effective).” He discussed how instruction that harnesses innovation and efficiency in learning requires student work that goes in cycles of action, feedback, and invention. Students become prepared to learn by inventing, testing, and refining. This leads to a new view of instructional expertise and has implications for assessment.
Bransford’s presentation was informed by research he and his colleagues reviewed in How People Learn: Bridging Research & Practice (1999), written by the National Research Council and edited by M. Suzanne Donovan, John D. Bransford, and James W. Pellegrino. Three key lessons about learning and teaching surfaced from the presentation:
Unfortunately, high schools by and large have not been designed around this understanding of learning.
To answer this question, CCSSO once again engaged the Regional Educational Laboratories to help study emerging frameworks and priorities for high school change and proposals for federal, state, and local redesign. We identified four key state policy areas that can help improve high school student achievement: aligning and integrating systems, engaging stakeholders, building educator capacity, and evaluating results. Our investigations into the state role in high school redesign brought us right back to standards-based reform as an approach to state education policy.
At least two facts give us confidence that standards-based reform can bring success in the knowledge economy. First, we have seen improvements in educational outcomes at the elementary level, many of which can be tracked to standards-based reform. We are only now turning our focus to high school. It does not require a leap of faith to believe the tools of standards-based reform that helped in the elementary grades may get us to where we need to be at the high school level.
Second, using Heifetz’s terminology, much of our work in high school reform has been “technical” to date; we have only begun to identify the “adaptive” challenges. Technical challenges are those for which we have the knowledge, skills, information, and ability to solve. Adaptive challenges are those that require a change of heart. Adaptive leadership helps people to identify and address the changes that they resist, helps them through times of stress and disequilibrium toward better outcomes for all. If we pay attention to adaptive challenges in high school redesign, standards-based reform may yet provide the road map to success.
Many more speakers, facilitators, and program collaborators worked in conjunction with CCSSO’s membership and staff at the 2005 SI. CCSSO will rely on these leaders as we continue our redesign efforts. CCSSO is in the process of formalizing a statement on high school redesign and 21st century expectations. Formalizing that policy statement will be a key outcome of the 2005 APF and Business Meeting. In the meantime, the public can access background readings and handouts provided at the 2005 SI by going to www.ccsso.org/projects/Membership_Meetings/Summer_Institute.
[box class=”grey_box”]Case briefs prepared for small-group work at CCSSO’s 2005 Summer Institute. The cases are built around nationwide challenges and individual states that have met those challenges with success. Included in this sampling are the following:[/box]