No, You Can’t Challenge Yourself
Most educators would agree that teaching and leading schools is in the most challenging period in recent history. Chronic absenteeism is at an all-time high while the number of teachers entering the field is at historic lows. The pandemic’s negative effects continue to impact student learning as evidenced by standardized metrics. Despite the measured learning loss, recent studies have highlighted the growth in grade inflation at both the college level and in K-12 schools. All of these present barriers to learning but there are many barriers that are created by how we educate children.
Over the past couple years, I’ve developed a model for change with a focus on identifying barriers to improving education. Identification is the critical first step as it then allows stakeholders to target the barriers to move education forward and beyond the century old model of teaching all students the same way based on age. The structures we put in place as a means to maintain order, mostly for the adults, also create barriers that make improving education difficult. Structural barriers are the first of three areas we must explore if we truly want to tackle the challenges facing our students, schools, and communities.
At the core of education is the belief that every single child can be successful yet we create structures that tell the opposite story. How often has someone been in a faculty or team meeting as the conversation turns to the problems with specific students? As the complaints continue, the conversation moves further away from what the student could accomplish and towards what they can’t do. While understanding where each child is skill wise is critical, rarely are ideas articulated on how to move them forward. This usually leads to students being assigned to lower ability groups, such as reading or math, when a more personalized approach to learning is needed.
The structural barriers created at the elementary level subsequently carry over to the middle and high school in terms of prerequisites. Maybe the prerequisite is a certain high average or score on an assessment in order to get into an advanced math class. Worse still, maybe the criteria require the recommendation of a single teacher. I saw this firsthand as we worked to improve math scores that were the worst in our county. We worked to create curriculum, instruction and assessments tied to the high expectations of the state standards not what many felt our students were capable of doing. Part of this effort included introducing advanced math coursework at the 5th grade middle school level as students transitioned from the two elementary schools. Leading the effort was a middle school math teacher who knew the curriculum cold and had high expectations for all students. Her belief in all students was critical to getting others to follow. She stepped into the additional role of K-12 math chair and decided to change structures that had become barriers to more students being successful in math.
Before the end of the school year, 4th grade teachers were asked to create a list of students they would recommend for advanced math in 5th grade. Of the approximately 180 students, only 10, or 5.5% were recommended for advanced math. This was not good enough for our K-12 math chair. She had all the 4th grade teachers give their students a 5th grade assessment. If they could pass the assessment, she felt they easily qualified for advanced math. The number of students went from 10 to 50. A test score was not the only measure to determine eligibility. If a student wanted to be in the new 5th grade course, they could join as long as they worked hard. Another 10 students took on the challenge resulting in 33% of all incoming 5th graders in the advanced course.
Work continued over the next year at all grade levels. All students in the advanced course did well. That does not mean everyone was an A student but each student worked hard to improve their math skills far beyond what they may have experienced in previous years with all moving into 6th grade advanced math. A similar assessment was given to the current 4th grade student to help determine the next group for 5th grade advanced math. Out of 150 students, 100 passed the 5th grade pre-assessment or 67%!!! The raising of expectations had an effect across all grade levels. When state test scores were released, the district went from 10th in math scores in the county (last) to 2nd in one year. Instead of the structures creating barriers, a better more flexible structure was used based on what was best for the students, not arbitrary prerequisites to maintain control and compliance based on feelings and “professional opinion.”
The new student-focused structure did create a new issue. With 67% of students now qualifying for the 5th grade advanced math course, there were concerns over what kind of impact this would have on course enrollment at the high school level, 4 years from then. If more students were able to take high school level math courses in middle school, there would be less for the high school teachers to teach. Some worried that the lower numbers would result in math positions reductions when in reality it would allow more students to take higher level math course, including student populations typically left out of advanced coursework such as our minority or low wealth students. Because the old structures had been present for so long, most could not see beyond what came before. The structural barriers had become stronger over the years as they overlapped with cultural barriers, because “that is how we always have done it.” Opposition grew and started to include parents that could not believe so many students were “smart enough” to be in advanced math, especially when compared to past test results.
Structural barriers do not only include how schools, courses and students are organized. Structures also include how each educator goes about doing their job. The principal that greets students as they get off the bus in the morning has created a structure in concert with his/her personal values and beliefs. This is where habits are formed, both good and bad. How a teacher delivers content to their students often comes down to habits. They learn those processes or habits from when they were a student, during undergraduate coursework, and from colleagues. The only way a teacher changes their delivery is if an experience comes along to push them to change their structural habits.
Let’s go back to a math example, this time at the high school level. In one district, we had a large number of teachers interested in moving towards personalized learning. One of the methods used was to flip learning by having the students watch digital videos created by the teacher to learn the content. This could be done for homework or during class. Each student then completed practice questions to see how well they understood the material. The teacher acted as a facilitator for learning instead of being the content expert delivering the content to all students at the same time. This allowed absent students to catch up quickly, struggling students to take their time and get teacher assistance or advanced students to move as quickly as they wanted to without having to wait for the next lesson.
One teacher at the high school level, let’s call him Mr. Jones, used this innovative learning structure in his trigonometry classroom. By the time students reach trigonometry, they are expected to have a solid background in algebra and geometry. How well a student does in trigonometry correlates to their future success in Calculus which is often a requirement for college majors in the math and sciences. Throughout the year, I would check in with Mr. Jones to see how he and his students were doing. He was excited for the new format and was seeing students succeed. As he often reminded me, the true measure of success would be on the New York state assessment given at the end of the year.
A few days before the final state exam, I ran into Mr. Jones in the hall. I asked him how he thought the year went. He expressed his frustration. He enjoyed the different teaching structure as it allowed him to work more directly with individual students but he was also getting pressure from parents and even fellow teachers to return to the previous teaching method. He had a couple parents tell him that he wasn’t even teaching anymore. While he was hopeful for the coming exam, he also noted that he likely was going to go back to the old way.
A week later, all the exams were scored and graded. As I entered the high school after visiting another campus, our Director of Curriculum and Instruction told me Mr. Jones was looking for me. As I walked to his classroom, I had no idea what to expect. As I turned the corner into his room, Mr. Jones jumped up when he saw me. He was so excited that I didn’t quite understand what he told me. When I asked him to repeat it for me, Mr. Jones exclaimed, “the trig results are the best we have ever had!” He showed me a spreadsheet of state final exams since the new test format was created. Not only were percent of students passing the exam the highest in the district’s history, the percent of students achieving mastery, a score of 85 or greater, was also historic. I asked him what were his plans for next year. He simply stated, “there is no going back.” By changing his basic classroom structure, Mr. Jones’ students benefited and he found success by trying a different approach.
As we review the structures in our schools, classrooms or even in our daily lives, we must keep in mind the purpose behind the structure. If that purpose is merely to maintain the status quo and its structure of compliance, our focus is misplaced. Structures should act like pillars holding up the educational ideal that each child can be successful as a learner, a citizen, and an individual. The structures we put impact can be the difference between creating opportunities or creating barriers to a child’s success.
