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Layer support for teachers to improve student learning

By Joan Richardson
RESULTS - May 1999

The situation was so typical and so problematic: A middle school mathematics teacher became ill and a substitute teacher with no preparation in mathematics took over her classroom. The teacher's illness was more serious than expected and the substitute teacher stayed for the rest of the year.

But during that year something unusual happened. The sub participated actively in specialized staff development programs for middle school math teachers. She was coached regularly. Because her school was sensitive to the situation, her students also got an intensive dose of assistance.

The result? By year's end, the students in those sections of math had gained a year and half.

Johns Hopkins University researchers Robert Balfanz and Douglas MacIver point to examples like that to demonstrate what can happen when a school district embraces a systematic approach to improving student learning. Their examples and their ideas come out of work they have done with the Talent Development middle schools and high schools in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The pair presented their research in April at the American Educational Research Association meeting in Toronto.

"The hard part of reforming schools is not coming up with the mission statement, spelling out the district's learning goals, devising an accountability framework which measures progress towards the goals and creating a system of rewards and sanctions to motivate movement towards the goals. At the district level, the hard part is figuring out how a district can systematically help create, support, and sustain the high-performing learning environments which produce broad-based gains in academic achievement at the school and classroom level," they said.

Balfanz and MacIver said one of the follies of the 1980s move to decentralization was believing that schools would have the knowledge and skills to be able to follow through on their ideas. Decentralization encouraged local schools to dream big but often failed to provide the resources and technical skills they needed to make their dreams a reality.

In addition, they found that latching onto a whole-school reform model also often doesn't provide the answer. Although many of the reform models offer extensive support, Balfanz and MacIver said it's unrealistic to expect a few dozen whole-school models to provide the answers for hundreds of needy schools.

"These are slightly pie-in-the-sky ideas. Truly chaotic and organizationally weak schools don't need a plan. They need active and sustained support and assistance," they said.

Instead, Balfanz and MacIver believe low-performing schools will be transformed through multi-tiered support for new instructional programs.

Their recommendations assume that a district adopts a standards-based curriculum. Teachers need to agree to broad pacing and coverage goals, but they are still able to modify the curriculum to meet the specific needs of various students. "This may seem like a given, but in the urban schools where we have worked, this is the exception, not the rule," said Balfanz and MacIver.

They identify three major components for this support:

1. Select and develop expertise for a limited number of high quality standards-based instructional programs.

The message here is to be selective-then provide high quality staff development for the instructional programs you select.

MacIver compares it to computer support offices at universities. "It's never the case that a university offers to support every piece of software or equipment under the sun. They know they're not going to have the capacity to provide the level of support that's needed. In a similar way, school districts should say, 'Here are the programs we can support.' If school districts don't narrow the options, then they end up offering only generic support to teachers. And we know that generic support is not nearly as helpful to teachers as support that's really focused," MacIver said.

By focusing on a few programs, districts can provide a rich set of materials and extensive guidance for instruction. That, said Balfanz, allows teachers to "focus on polishing the stone" rather than becoming bogged down in detail.

2. Provide teachers with multiple layers of sustained support.

Borrowing from their experiences with the Talent Development schools, Balfanz and MacIver recommend several levels of support for teachers.

The first is to provide continuous curriculum-centered staff development.

"In our experience, teachers require a minimum of two years of monthly workshops to learn a new instructional program and use it with a moderate level of proficiency. As in any profession, further training brings even higher levels of skill. Moreover, the frequency with which middle school teachers change schools and subjects means schools will always have a significant number of untrained teachers unless staff development is continuously provided," they said.

The second level involves linking teachers with respected peers. These peers would not be involved in evaluating but would be informal coaches who could help teachers in a variety of ways from ensuring that they have adequate supplies and working equipment to modeling lessons for them and observing and critiquing their instruction.

The third tier of support would come from in-school subject-area support people. Balfanz and MacIver recommend identifying two teachers per school per subject who can be in-school experts. These subject-area specialists provide ongoing, in-classroom implementation assistance. "This runs the gamut from modeling sophisticated strategies to the nitty-gritty work of making sure teachers have the materials and supplies required by the instructional program," the researchers said.

Finally, Balfanz and MacIver recommend seeking external experts, perhaps from a university who can advise several middle or high schools.

At the middle school level, one subject-area facilitator can effectively support three middle schools, each with between 750 and 1,000 students. At the high school level, a subject-area facilitator can effectively work with no more than two high schools at a time.

These facilitators should be "top notch former teachers" who visit the school once a week or once every other week. They design staff development offerings and serve as the liaison with the principal to keep instruction and training on track.

Balfanz and MacIver believe subject-area facilitators are needed for at least three years.

In addition to these supports for teachers, they recommended an "organizational facilitator" for very chaotic, low-performing middle and high schools. This organizational facilitator would guide schools in shaping their schedules and procedures to support the instructional changes.

3. District policies must support rather than undercut the effort.

Districts must establish policies on pay, staffing, and scheduling that support their own reform efforts.

Rather than setting aside three to five days for professional development each year, for example, districts need to discover more flexible and useful arrangements for providing smaller amounts of time for staff development every month, the researchers said.

Linking teachers' professional advancement to attendance at professional development sessions is also key. In Philadelphia, for example, a partnership with a local university allows teachers to earn three hours of graduate credit for participating in subject-specific staff development sessions.

Finally, Balfanz and MacIver suggest that districts must find ways to stabilize school staffs, particularly in urban middle and high schools, to ensure that teachers are not arbitrarily assigned to another grade, subject, or school after a large investment has been made in training them for a particular grade or subject.

"School districts need to free themselves from magical thinking about what it takes to improve schools and start to pay the true costs of reform. This is labor-intensive work. If they put the support where it should be, they can raise the floor," said MacIver.