In this article, authors of the new ASCD bookHow to Help Your School Thrive Without Breaking the Bankshare their insights about reshaping the practices of teachers and administrators, encouraging students to own their learning, and using data to make informed decisions.
Q: In these tough economic times with extremely tight school budgets, what important tips do you have for educators struggling to help their schools thrive?
Gabriel: I'm going to cite a line that came up during the recent campaign, which is, you need to take a scalpel—very finely take a scalpel—to practices occurring in the school instead of taking a hatchet [to them]. I think the best way to start doing that is not in a top-down fashion with a principal, but instead by developing a leadership team and having that team of department chairs and school leaders work in concert with the principal to figure out what current practices they should be preserving or examining, realizing it may not be possible to look externally for additional resources.
Farmer: Soliciting the support of your leadership or others within your school or peers in other schools around you can be a very valuable component when you're suffering very serious or severe budget cuts. Other schools are making it. They're surviving, they're doing very well. … Are you using strategies from those schools? Are you modeling what you expect to have happen in the classroom through your leadership team and your teachers?
Gabriel: Schools already have [some of the strategies described in the book] at their disposal. I think we're too quick to say we need to purchase a new program or purchase some new software—and that that's going to help us make a quick fix and get us to a better place—when we have some of those answers already in the building.
Q: You say some current practices must be "reshaped." What are some of these practices, and how can they be reshaped?
Gabriel: Early in the book, in the introduction, we say that there's a ubiquitous phrase that is found in almost all schools, which is, "This is what we've always done" or "This is how we do things around here." I think if you hear that, you need to take a close look at some of those practices immediately.
Farmer: Are your faculty meetings opportunities for learning or are those times used for the dissemination of information? Are teachers harnessed with a lot of nonteaching and learning responsibilities? Or are the practices in the school constructed so that teachers are really allowed to focus their time on student learning, student assessment, and student interventions?
Gabriel: Formative assessment is also something that we need to see teachers do more of in the classroom.
Q: Can you explain what it means to make students partners in the classroom? How does this make the learning environment function better?
Farmer: What we find is that when students are provided with a list of rules, they don't own those rules. Really all they're asked to do is to be compliant, and if they're not compliant, there will be consequences. It's much more powerful in a classroom setting when the students can have some input on some class rules. We're not asking them to participate in writing school board policy. We're asking them to participate in identifying how they will communicate in this class as a community, how they will make decisions, and how they will handle arguments.
Gabriel: I work in a high school, and something I know that is obviously important to adolescents is control and choice. A lot of their interactions, a lot of struggles, stem really from control and choice. The more choice we can give students in the classroom, whether it be in the rules or a choice or control over learning, the better chance we have of building a rapport with them and helping them take a stake in their own education.
Farmer: When a student is a partner in developing an assessment and identifying what proficiency means on the assessment, that assessment is going to be much more meaningful for him. Is the student going to be a part of the assessment process or a victim of the assessment process? Involving the student as a partner in some kind of assessment actually makes the environment function better because the student owns a piece of that.
Q: Why do you think the "increased reliance on data is one of the greatest shifts to occur in the education field in more than a decade"?
Gabriel: Reviewing data is the cornerstone of improvement, and we don't really understand how any improvement can occur without looking at data. It illuminates things that have previously been hidden or that we didn't know existed before. It's an objective way we can examine some of our practices; some of our behaviors; and things that occur in the daily, monthly, even yearly life of the school.
Farmer: Data can tell you where you've been, where you are, and give you a good objective picture of where you want to be.
