A Conversation with Mike Schmoker
The following is an excerpt from a longer interview.
What are the basic principles for school improvement that you wrote about in your books Results and The Results Fieldbook?
Schools need to examine, simply and conscientiously, the number of students who can compute, calculate, analyze, and compose—and then discuss the implications of where there are strengths, where there are weaknesses.
From there—and this is where we fall down—instead of just talking, we need to adjust instruction in a way that enables more students to compute and calculate and analyze and compose. That's a pretty simple formula, and it's one that's going to work. But unfortunately it is, at this point, altogether too rare in schools.
Where should schools begin?
We need to focus on a few things. Those few things are, number one, measurable goals. That's a good starting point. Number two, once you have those measurable goals, the question is: How do you reach them? Well, you look at your data—in this case, assessment data. It tells you where you have areas of weakness—or, as I like to say, areas of opportunity. You look for those high-leverage areas where kids aren't doing so well, and then you bring the real resource, teacher expertise, to the scheme.
The name of the game is to get teachers, once they've identified those areas of weakness, to talk optimistically about better ways to teach to those areas. To invent, reinvent, and refine those strategies, those lessons—literally, those lessons.
Why is it important for learning goals to be explicit and specific?
With almost any problem you try to solve, your energy is diffused by trying to tackle too much. Or if what you're trying to accomplish, or the problem you're trying to solve, is too vague and amorphous, your efforts get diluted.
I would like to clarify a little bit here. When I say "a goal," I tend to want to reserve that one word for a subject area. "This year we're going to improve in math, from 47 percent of the kids reaching standards to, say, 50-some percent." That's your goal. Then you look at—you could call them "sub-goals." You look at those specific areas identified in your assessment data.
What's a good number of goals for a school to have? Can you have too many?
There is indeed a danger of having too many. It seems to me that if a goal, an annual improvement goal, is worth its salt, it's a goal for which you're willing to meet a minimum of once a month.
Now, if you have two goals, that's two monthly meetings. And even if those monthly meetings are in the area of 30-some minutes, which is really enough time to get a lot of good work done, in many cases—I've seen lots of schools do this—you're still talking about two meetings a month. Two meetings, in the economy of all the stuff that goes on in any school, is probably about as much as we can handle.
Why is it important for goals to be measurable?
One of the things that marshals our desire to reach a goal, our energies, our imagination, is a vivid sense of [the desired outcome]. To use Stephen Covey's concept, we "begin with the end in mind." If we really know what that end is, we'll know if we've gotten there, or if we haven't, or if we have even exceeded the goal that we're trying to reach. If you take that [clarity] out of the game, you remove a lot of good motivation, and that's essential to anything we accomplish.
Do teachers find it motivating to work collaboratively?
I think they do. It's pretty innate in us to want to learn, to want to get better at something that we've decided to commit our professional lives to. When you get a regular dose of expertise from other people, plus the opportunity to share your own expertise with other people, and in fact even to see it impact student learning [as shown on] assessments, that's a pretty powerful combination of things. That makes professional life richer.
What kind of process should teacher teams follow?
You've got to begin each meeting not with a big long agenda, but with a fairly simple one—simple sometimes is best. What we want to do for the most part is have agendas that consist of problems that kids are having, then generate solutions to those problems, and then gather and analyze those results. If it gets much more complicated than that, it tends to bog down; it's nowhere near as productive.
What are the benefits of analyzing data, in terms of seeing patterns?
It's more important to look for patterns as opposed to every individual child's performance. . . . If you've got 30 kids, or 150 kids, and you can find the predominant patterns of weakness amongst those students, the time and creative energy that you devote to those predominant patterns is going to pay off for the greatest number of individual students.
Why do you have confidence in the principles you discuss in Results and The Results Fieldbook?
Every few months or year that goes by, I see more evidence that this basic approach works. Lots has been written that indicates that if people get together on a regular basis, and they look at data and information that tells them where they're weak, where they're strong, and they organize their inventive capacities—which is to say, their collaboration—around those areas where they're not doing so well, and invent and refine, and invent and refine, always and forever, improvement is inevitable there.
Now, what kind of evidence do we have for that? Scads and scads of schools. Just to pick one instance: This kind of goal-oriented, data-driven collaboration is exactly what was characteristic of the 366 schools that were both disadvantaged and extremely high-achieving in [the Education Trust study, Dispelling the Myth: High Poverty Schools Exceeding Expectations]. That's just one example that, for me, provides landmark documentation that this fairly simple approach, number one, is rare—and, number two, is hugely effective.