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Study groups lift Missouri district's teachers, principals and students

By Joan Richardson

Results, December/January 2005

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2005. All rights reserved.

Four years ago, the Springfield, Mo., Public Schools was shocked to learn that it had just barely managed to get state accreditation.

"We had always been above the state average. Then we realized that being above average was not good enough any more," said Anita Kissinger, the district's staff development director.

Prodded by a sense of urgency and led by a new superintendent, Springfield embarked down a new path that relied on extensive use of study groups as a way to infuse professional development into every aspect of teachers' and principals' work.

"We have focused all of our professional learning on our student learning. It's all about what students need to have us do," Kissinger said.

The results? The district moved from being provisionally accredited to receiving a perfect score on the state accreditation - a decision made solely on improvements in student learning - and, this year, has been exempted from annual accreditation review.

"We're not perfect and we know we need to continue to improve. But, I think if we can just maintain our focus, we'll be fine," Kissinger said.

BEGIN WITH DATA

Springfield began its change process by having teachers closely examine data about student learning. What they discovered was a significant achievement gap. "Our gap had nothing to do with race (because Springfield has a small minority population). But we had children who came to school advantaged and children who came to school disadvantaged. We had achievement levels that were vastly different between those two groups," said Emily Weiskopf, then a staff developer for the district and now an outside consultant for Springfield working primarily on study groups.

Schools have wide variations in the socioeconomic status of students, with some schools having as few as 5% of students receiving free- and reduced-price lunch and others as high as 90%. "We had to find a way to even the playing field," Kissinger said.

About the same time, the Springfield board of education set two overarching goals for the district: reducing the dropout rate (then at 8.1% and now down to 4.6%) and improving student achievement. Schools were told to focus their school improvement plans on achieving those two goals. "The goals are very clear to everyone: Get them to school, keep them in school, and improve their learning," Weiskopf said. The goals appear on every page of the school district's web site.

How the schools would assist the district in achieving those larger goals was up to each school. What was not optional was examining their data before deciding the focus of their work.

Kissinger searched for a professional development model that would support this concept. What she found was the Whole Faculty Study Group (WFSG) model developed by Carlene Murphy. "It's like our mini-school improvement plan because it starts with looking at the data and deciding our student needs. It's all about how we impact teaching so student learning will improve," Kissinger said.

"We knew that just creating teams, just putting people together and creating time wasn't going to do the job. Whole Faculty Study Groups helped us put everything into reality," Weiskopf said.

Kissinger favors study groups because they build capacity at the school. "This is a model that respects teachers as professionals. It doesn't allow someone from the outside to come in and tell them what to do," she said.

The district introduced but did not mandate that schools use study groups. But Kissinger said the message was clear: If 75% of your staff does not agree to begin this process, then what research-supported strategies for professional learning will you use to impact student learning?

"We also made some organizational changes to send a message that we believed this was a critical model for schools to consider," Kissinger said. The district transferred some districtwide staff development time to the schools to create time for study groups to meet; allowed teachers to use the study group action plans as their individual professional development plans; and allowed schools to do some creative scheduling to allow teachers to meet during the school day.

WILLIAMS ELEMENTARY

Williams Elementary School was one of the schools that willingly embraced study groups. Williams is high-poverty school that has struggled with low test scores which rose and then fell again in a pattern typical of challenged schools. The school's teachers believe study groups is a strategy that will eventually pay off in improved student learning.

Williams' teachers meet in grade-level teams once a week for one hour for collaborative planning and looking at student work. To begin, principal Lynne Miller told them to devote one of those meetings to WFSG. Weiskopf helped facilitate their work.

In the first year, the staff focused on Ruby Payne's work on understanding children who live in poverty. "We wanted to understand better how we could relate to our kids. We wanted to understand what obstacles we had to overcome," Miller said.

"We realized that our kids couldn't make a lot of the connections we were expecting them to make because they didn't have the background knowledge," Miller said.

Logs that were maintained by the study groups showed that teachers were trying to blend that new learning into their instruction. Teachers described connections they were making in class to help students bridge from their own experiences into the text they were reading, for example.

Without abandoning the Payne work, Weiskopf introduced the study groups to reading strategies that might be useful. Building on what they had learned through their Payne readings, teachers could identify strategies that might be more beneficial for their students.

The logs, which were posted in a public area for all to read, became a lively report on what teachers were doing in class, how students were responding, and what work students were producing. Miller did her part by reading the logs each week, initially serving as a "rah-rah girl where everything was positive." By the second year, Miller's comments were more like probing questions that urged teachers to think more deeply about their work.

"The logs were great because we were so tied into the same thing that teachers could read logs from other groups and get ideas from each other," Miller said. "They give you a real temperature reading of what's going on in the classrooms."

After two years' experience with study groups, Miller introduced a new expectation for teachers: peer coaching. Each teacher had to have three peer coaching sessions during the school year. Consultant Weiskopf did one of those but teachers in the building did the other two. The instructions were simple: teachers were to be observed when they were teaching something they were learning. "I wanted this to be very non-threatening. I wanted them to get used to people being in their classrooms," she said. In the second year of peer coaching, Miller changed the rules slightly. During that year, teachers had to identify an area of concern about which they wanted feedback.

"Growth is the ultimate goal here. We want growth for students and we want growth for teachers," Miller said.

The unexpected benefit of the study groups and the peer coachings was growth for the principal. "No one has grown more than me. It's been huge. I've been right there in the middle of the process. I can now have conversations with teachers about things that I could not have talked with them about during my first year," Miller said.

PRINCIPAL STUDY GROUPS

After experiencing some success with teacher study groups, Springfield decided to try study groups for principals. "This was really a walk out on the limb for us," Weiskopf said.

Principals already were meeting regularly in job-alike groups so the first step was to ask principals to devote the first 45 to 60 minutes of those meetings to their own professional learning. During the first year, the principals read and talked about The Skillful Leader by Alexander Platt (Research for Better Schools, 2000).

By the second year, principals were ready to move ahead into a topic of their own choosing, Miller said. The topic they chose to discuss was mediocre teaching because that issue nagged at everyone.

That discussion led principals to examine their performance-based teacher evaluations and how to conference with a teacher after a formal evaluation.

"Nobody is happy with the evaluation piece. I realized that I can't make a total, abrupt change in how I do this but I can add one question when I conference that will tell me more. I started asking teachers, 'How does your classroom look different this year than last year?' I learned that if they're truly implementing, that answer is going to take a long time to answer. When a teacher can't answer that question, that is a huge indicator that there's not much going on in that classroom," Miller said.

The discussion about evaluation gradually led principals to a discussion about classroom walkthroughs as a strategy. Principals began to team up to do walkthroughs together in each other's schools.

"It really revved them up to have the chance to look more closely at what their teachers are doing," Weiskopf said.

What started as an attempt to get principals talking with each other eventually led to having more principals working directly with each other in the everyday work of being a leader in the district.

From Kissinger's vantage point, the use of study groups has shifted the culture in the district. "This has moved us away from addressing what adults want to a common conversation about what students need. It's all about having a common message and a common vision. No matter where you go in this district, the focus is the same: improving student learning."