Georgia's Department of Education has ramped up its school improvement efforts on a large scale. This year, with the state's rollout of new performance standards and the dissemination of research-based models for teaching and learning, Georgia's education leaders hope to set the gold standard for education reform.
Georgia's education officials do not shy away from big numbers when it comes to the scale of school improvement. The state's ambitious program to mine the wealth of 35 years of research on student achievement involves more than 800 schools, or 40 percent of the state's total. These schools have agreed to use some specific research-based tools to tackle key issues in learning, teaching, administration, and school culture.
The Georgia Department of Education is using Robert Marzano's model from the ASCD book What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action to scale up individual school improvement into a statewide initiative. Georgia officials view the program as a tool to promote wider understanding and use of research-proven practices consistently linked to raising student achievement, they say.
Because of the initiative, educators across Georgia can talk about the research using a “common language that we never really had before,” says Lissa Pijanowski, director of the department's School Improvement Division, which administers the program.
The schools participating in the What Works in Schools (WWIS) program include more than 400 institutions that did not make adequate yearly progress goals under the No Child Left Behind law. Other schools joined the program to formalize and streamline a variety of improvement initiatives to meet long-term goals, says Pijanowski.
What the Research Says
Marzano, a senior scholar at the nonprofit Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Aurora, Colo., and a member of the ASCD Faculty, noted that previous analyses of the body of research on school improvement arrived at similar conclusions about best practices.
Marzano looked at the research to find “what schools can do now that is within their reach with the resources they have available,” he says. “I did not include in my list ‘to add 40 days to the school year’ or ‘one-on-one tutoring,’ which would, of course, make a big difference for student achievement. But they're probably beyond the resources of most schools.”
In his book, Marzano boiled down the research to 11 factors that have a significant effect on student achievement and then outlined action steps for schools to improve their standing in each area.
Because Georgia this year will release new performance standards in various subject areas, the state is urging schools to give the greatest attention to some specific factors in Marzano's list, says Pijanowski. At the school level, for example, educators should seek ways to promote a “guaranteed and viable curriculum,” which means providing students the opportunity and time to learn what they're supposed to learn. The state will also encourage schools to adopt best practices in the areas of instructional strategies, providing challenging goals, and promoting collegiality and professionalism.
At the same time, educators at all of the state's schools will receive training in redesigning the curriculum to flow from the new standards, using the backward design model from ASCD's Understanding by Design program. The new performance standards represent the state's first major curriculum revision since the early 1980s.
Online Survey
Schools participating in the improvement initiative are using ASCD's What Works in Schools Survey as a key data-gathering component. The online inventory allows teachers and administrators to gauge their schools' current effectiveness in 68 best practices grouped within the 11 categories that have a high effect on student achievement.
The survey asks teachers and administrators to rate each practice through three different lenses:
- How well is the school doing the practice now?
- If we changed our current use of the practice, how would it affect student achievement?
- How much effort would be required to make a change?
The massive survey of 30,865 Georgia educators allows the state and districts to generate reports at the school, district, regional, and state levels. To get building-level discussions rolling, each school typically focuses on 10 areas in which the school could do a better job to gain a maximum effect on school achievement. Those 10 areas are the ones most often identified by survey respondents in that school.
“We want schools to look at what teachers were thinking and why they were thinking that,” says Rhonda Baldwin, professional learning director for Douglas County Schools. With the initial data, a school leadership team can probe highinterest issues with further in-depth interviews, she suggests.
The database, which largely reflects teacher perceptions, can also be sliced in other ways. For example, if answers from one district's middle school and high school English teachers show a sharp contrast, that might indicate a problem. “If teachers see students differently, that says we need to have more vertical teaming taking place so that the expectations for the child are consistent,” Baldwin says.
At Fairplay Middle School in Douglas County, Principal Ed Bengtson learned from the WWIS survey that his staff put a high value on instructional time and also felt that the school does not do enough to promote self-discipline among students in their behavior and academic work.
A Fairplay leadership team will “take time to chew on the data” and recommend changes for the new school year, Bengtson says, but he has already made some “little changes.” For example, Bengtson canceled a school fundraiser that would have taken time away from class for a kickoff rally and sales awards. He has also worked with the students, parents, and teachers to limit the number of school spirit activities. “Little changes do send messages” about school priorities, says Bengtson.
Teachers, for their part, have begun to examine how they handle classroom management and instructional planning to recover more time, he adds. When everybody on the staff analyzes the survey results, that places accountability on the whole organization, he says.
Data Triangulation
Through regional workshops, Georgia state education officials are helping schools and districts analyze the WWIS survey data along with other information, such as state test results and high school exit exams, to target areas that need the most attention, says Pijanowski. As another aspect of measurement, this year the state is also field-testing the Georgia Standards for School Performance to help schools measure themselves against criteria for an effective school in the coming years.
As the conversations about school improvement take place in school-based professional development settings, teams of teachers and administrators will learn how to weigh data from different sources and set priorities, officials say.
“Teachers see the power of working with formative data, summative data, and perceptual data together. You have to triangulate all of this in order to meet individual needs,” says Baldwin. The teams' decisions about school priorities need to be reported to Baldwin by May, and to the state by September, she adds, so officials can budget for the necessary resources.
The What Works in Schools Survey is only one piece of Georgia's statewide school improvement initiative. An independent audit four years ago concluded that Georgia's curriculum had become an unwieldy list of objectives that were superficially taught, so in 2004 the state began releasing revamped performance-based standards. These curriculum standards target deeper understanding of essential concepts and learning within a content area, such as language arts for grades K–12; science for grades 6, 7, and 9–12; and math for grade 6. All of the new standards will be in place by fall 2005.
To help address instructional issues related to the new standards and raised by the WWIS survey, the state education department's Curriculum and Instructional Services Division is holding regional workshops to train local leaders who will be responsible for training the state's 96,000 teachers.
These workshops will focus on the principles of backward curriculum design as outlined in the ASCD book Understanding by Design by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. Backward design, as the name indicates, requires teachers to start with the standards (especially concepts requiring deep understanding), then design assessments geared toward the standards, and, finally, fashion instructional units using essential questions that will lead students to explore key ideas tied to the standards.
Finding ways to work with the new set of standards is going to be a “conceptual change” for schools in Georgia, says Robin Gower, program manager for professional learning and curriculum. As a culminating activity, workshop participants actually will design instructional units or professional development units using backward design, so they can teach others its principles.
“We can't mandate that any school must use Understanding by Design—that's just our model for getting teachers to think about teaching for understanding. Our goal is to help them see what's working and what's not working in their school, so they don't throw out something that's working,” explains Gower, who also notes that some schools may already be using similar design models.
Changing School Culture
Fairplay's Bengtson welcomes the variety of research that Georgia educators can now access to improve their practice. The perception might be that there are many different improvement efforts underway, but “these are all helping to reinforce each other.”
Pointing out that Georgia middle schools have 110 minutes of daily group or individual planning time, Bengtson looks forward to the shift in school culture that will promote collegial professional growth. “The whole staff is changing the culture of professional learning so that we can learn from each other.”
The WWIS survey allows input from each educator at a school and demands that they all understand what the results mean and how to compare them with other types of data. This involvement gives teachers a greater stake in the process, says Bobby Smith, a state education department leadership facilitator who works with Dougherty County schools.
With 30 years of experience watching education innovations come and go, Smith should know.
“When people try to change us, we turn up our force fields,” he says, alluding to the protective although invisible shields that kept dangerous alien objects from harming TV's Star Trek crew members. But when teachers have a hand on the controls, they are more likely to welcome a shift in direction. “To make things happen in the schools, change has to happen internally. If teachers don't own some of it, there won't be lasting change.”
