Learning from greatness

Happy Friday, Bell Ringers! We are preparing for Snowmageddon and the Icepocalypse over here, hope you are somewhere warm this weekend.

Today’s letter is asking why the education system as a whole doesn’t hold up schools and educators who have great success with student learning and study them, the way Kobe did with Jordan, or Dylan did with Woodie Guthrie. Would a culture of studying the greats lead to improvement?

(Photo credit: IU Hoosiers News.)

It’s been a big week for my Hoosier family. I grew up in Bobby Knight’s Indiana, so IU’s incredible football National Championship win is a big deal in my home state.

After the Hoosiers’ historic win, in a matter of days, on podcasts and in the media, I noticed a rush from fans, players and coaches to everyday people to try to study and understand exactly what IU head football coach Curt Cignetti did to turn the program around from the failingest in football to national champions in just a couple of years. This will likely go on for some time, probably years. And here I am—little ol’ me, who has watched so little football I didn’t understand until recently why the teams were constantly hiding the ball so I couldn’t tell who had it—I have read enough to get an idea of how Cignetti thinks about success and what his loose blueprint for winning looks like. I’ve even read about the greats who influenced Cignetti, taking it back more layers.

In sports and music, there’s an ingrained culture of learning from the greats; it’s expected. And it’s also public, common knowledge. Many readers of this esteemed publication could probably rattle off the greats who Bob Dylan modeled his music after, or who Kobe Bryant studied as he rose to superstardom.

But this is largely not the culture in education. In a lot of my reporting, honestly, sometimes it feels like the opposite is true, that many are downright incurious about what great schools are doing and whether any of those practices might apply to them.

A few years ago, visiting one of the consistently top-performing schools in a nearby state, one where they were educating some of the state’s most disadvantaged children and sending them to college, I asked the school’s leader how many local leaders had visited to see what they were doing.

“Zero,” he said, shaking his head. (I hope it has changed since.)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a similar experience talking with teachers across the country who are often one of the only educators in their buildings getting consistently blow-your-mind reading scores for their students. How many leaders from central office—heck, how many from down the hall—wanted a blueprint for what they were doing, or wanted to come investigate? Sadly for many teachers, the answer is the same: zero.

I’ve become genuinely curious about why a culture of “learning from the greats” isn’t the norm in education. (I’m taking suggestions, so have at it in the comments.) Smart people who work within the system have given me clues: for some, excellence and greatness in student learning isn’t a top priority, so therefore some might be unaware of who is doing something exceptional; weak systems don’t do a good job identifying who others should look to for guidance; egos get in the way of shining a light on those who are making a big difference; and perhaps most of all, educator and author Mike Schmoker’s observation that in education the road to greatness is often obscured, sometimes on purpose.

He wrote:

The chief hindrance to such improvement is that the richest opportunities are hidden, sometimes by design. As the late Harvard professor Richard Elmore showed us, the “superstructure of schooling” conceals its gravest defects and its failure to align its practices with its hard-earned research base. To break through, educators have to stare down the gap between proven practice and common practice.

Even with the understanding that schools serve different kinds of kids, and context really matters to success (nothing works everywhere, etc.), I’m pretty baffled why there isn’t more curiosity about what great schools are doing to improve and increase learning for students. I also wonder why there isn’t more public acknowledgement about who inspired great teachers and leaders, who they studied to become great. (Can you imagine an elementary school principal making a public speech on how she closely studied the success of a fellow principal, her Uncle Kevin, for example, to learn why his students were always doing so well? And then everyone rushing to make podcasts with millions of listeners about Uncle Kevin, asking him to explain his blueprint for success?)

The entire system would benefit from public acknowledgement of who is doing great work.

I’ve spent a good deal of time in this newsletter writing and talking about building up student background knowledge, how that knowledge holds the keys to academic success as well as to critical and creative thinking—should we also apply that understanding to those who lead our education systems? What about their background knowledge of the greats, those who are consistently successful, and how it shapes how they think about their own?

Get more knowledge about building student knowledge:

Paul Kirschner on the critical role of knowledge in learning

I know that learning from greatness is always happening among teachers, leaders and schools, I just wonder whether it’s the norm, or the expectation.

A book I’m currently reading got me thinking about this kind of systemic learning, passed down from one generation to another: Schools that Succeed: How Educators Marshal the Power of Systems for Improvement, by education reporter Karin Chenoweth. It’s a decade old, but relevant and worth reading. Chenoweth reports on schools that are doing great work, often despite considerable obstacles, and highlights what highly successful schools and systems did to improve learning for their students.

Reading it has been like learning from the greats.

For greatness at the school level, strong systems

The central question animating Chenoweth’s Schools that Succeed asks what a group of unexpected, highly successful schools did to get there. Her reporting takes her to Lakewood, California, Nassau County in Long Island, New York, Mobile, Alabama, and other places to look closely at schools with outsize graduation rates and overall academic performance compared to the usual expectations of the students they serve.

Greatness is hard to achieve in schools, Chenoweth writes. Most of the time students leave schools at basically the same level they entered—advanced students get access to advanced coursework and stay advanced, and the same for low-achieving students. Moving a student from low to high is exceedingly hard work, and each chapter examines a different school doing exactly that.

But it’s the last chapter, “Marshaling the Power of Schools,” that I keep re-reading, especially since I’ve spent the last few years writing about pretty much nothing else but the scientific evidence on teaching and learning. To Chenoweth’s eye, evidence-based practices in these schools—where leaders and teachers understood what it means to learn, and which practices get them there—along with the expectation that every child could learn, were givens. They were the starting point, necessary but not sufficient.

“Certainly, it is critically important that these schools have leaders who feel a moral imperative to do what is right for kids and who spend a good deal of time understanding the research evidence about teaching and learning,” she wrote.

But that’s not the only magic happening at a schoolwide level. As a matter of fact, walk into any one of these schools and nothing special is going to jump out at you: “They don’t look all that different from other schools.” Even when teachers were using the evidence-based practices, the work of greatness often boiled down to the systems they had in place that kept things running, and the willingness of the adults to constantly evaluate and improve the systems.

Chenoweth highlights a high school in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where there were more Black students taking AP classes and passing AP exams than any other high school in the region. Black students commonly have less access to AP courses compared to other groups (though this access has improved slightly, thankfully, in the decade since). When she asked the principal what he attributed that success to, he pointed her to the master schedule, of all things—an unsexy but very real part of making AP classes available to more students. (The master schedule was key in providing student support, too.) Leaders at that school were hand-scheduling students to make sure they had more opportunities to take advanced academics.

In another example, leaders at Elmont Memorial High School in Elmont, New York, created a “ninth grade academy” with intensive supports to help support at-risk students in the transition from middle school. But as soon as leaders stopped seeing significant results, they stopped, evaluated and changed the systems around the academy, then kept experimenting to find what worked best so as many students as possible could succeed in high school.

Interestingly, Chenoweth compares these schools’ drive to greatness to the scientific method, something they all had in common—analyzing problems, hypothesizing a solution, then measuring results and re-evaluating if necessary. Wash, rinse, repeat to constantly improve. Much like Coach Cignetti, there seemed to be no flash, just precision, metrics and the often boring, systems route to progress.

“By focusing so closely on the systems underlying their work, educators are able to develop a professional distance and look at success and failure dispassionately rather than as a personal win or loss. The ability to examine evidence dispassionately is important because education in many ways is a very personal field, and anything that helps teachers and leaders evaluate what they are doing instead of deciding how much they love a particular practice or lesson plan is important,” she wrote.

Learning from greatness: the You factor

I’m interested in this scientific method approach, of that professional distance—learning from greatness doesn’t mean only studying leaders from the past who have already done it well, but includes educators examining themselves and what they are currently doing, and using the scientific method to try things and then measure their effectiveness.

Teacher educator Patrick Burke at the Dublin City University Institute of Education told me last summer that part of preservice teacher education in Ireland includes a teacher-as-researcher role, and he considers it a key piece of Ireland’s decade-long school improvement. Measuring the success and failure of their own lessons or approaches prepares teachers to see themselves as learners themselves, he said, who can look objectively at what they’ve done, evaluate it, and improve on it.

American programs are beginning to catch on to the teachers-as-researchers model, and I’d like to do some reporting on it. If you have been a part of such a program, or are doing this work currently and would like to talk about it, drop me a line.