What Makes for an Effective School?

Dobbie and Fryer (2011) investigate the key things that make for an effective school. Effectiveness is based on test scores, which is a significant caveat, but most of their results seem reasonable.

Frequent feedback for teachers about their teaching from classroom visits,
Longer teacher hours, (10+ hours per week)

Middle school teachers at better schools worked over 10 hours a week more than lower performing schools.
Interestingly, salary had no discernible effect. It seems that the teachers did not even get paid more for putting in the extra hours. The willingness to put in these extra hours without extra pay implies a different philosophy and culture among the teachers of the “more effective” schools.

Data driven instruction – more effective schools “adjust tutoring groups, assign remediation, modify instruction, or create individualized student goals,” based on frequent feedback from interim assessments.
Feedback to parents – better schools have more frequent communication with students’ parents
High-dosage tutoring – The better performing schools were found to be more likely to offer tutoring where, “the typical group is six or fewer students and those groups meet four or more times per week”,
Increased instructional time – about 8% more hours per year
A relentless focus on academic achievement

This was assessed with a survey of principals. Those who put, “a relentless focus on academic goals and having students meet them” and “very high expectations for student behavior and discipline” as her top two priorities (in either order) scored higher on this assessment of the rigor of school culture.
I have serious reservations about this result. If the key focus of the school is on doing well on tests (as their “academic goals”) they should do better on the tests. This is certainly a good way to score better on standardized tests, but it has serious, negative implications when it comes to creating intrinsically motivated students.

These results come from comparing charter schools in New York City.

Sandra Cunningham has a rather cursory summary in The Atlantic, but her post’s comments section has some very interesting perspectives.

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing

One of the first things we learned at Heifer was the process of group formation. It was also one of the last things they talked about so it must have been pretty important.

The four steps are:

balance-3370 — Forming: Students are quite polite to each other when they first get on the balance board.

Forming: When the group first gets together, people tend to be cautious with one another. But because they’re so careful with what they say and what they do, newly forming groups don’t usually get much done.
Storming: Now the barriers start to break down as individual personalities manifest themselves. People start speaking up. A lot. They become less polite. Conflicts arise. People become accusatory. There’s lots of energy, but because of all the conflict, they still aren’t able to get much done.

balance-3373 — Storming: Vociferous disagreement breaks out.

Norming: The conflict begins to settle down as the group starts to work out its kinks, as all the individuals begin to adapt to one another. Groups may need guidance to get there because everyone has to stop fighting, but as it usually helps that the group will start to see successes because of successful co-operation.
Performing: A well-functioning group can get a lot done. They’re able to communicate effectively, and take action effectively. Their productivity kicks into high gear and they can accomplish much together.

balance-3374 — Norming: The group begins to organize itself. Rules of order are put in place.

Not all groups get through all four steps, and every time the group changes, such as when a new member (like a new student) is introduced the groups will need to go through some version of the four steps as they learn to accommodate the newcomer.

A well established culture will help groups adapt to change. This is yet another benefit of multi-aged classrooms, because a healthy classroom culture eases the transition as older students leave and new students come in.

balance-3378 — Performing: Roles are assigned. Balance is achieved (from 2, to 5, to 57 seconds).

Even so, awareness of the four steps is extremely useful because it helps everyone anticipate that there will likely be some conflict, but that conflict is part of the group forming process and will likely diminish with time.

So you should expect, every year, to have to spend some time group building. Two weeks dedicated to orientation and teamwork is what Betsy Coe’s Montessori Middle School program uses. It’s a fair chunk of time to take out of the year, but because good groups can get so much more done, it’s well worth it to build a good classroom community.

Scaffolding and Peer-learning: Thinking about Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development”

When a student is struggling with a problem, and they just need that little boost to get them to the next level, they’re in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, and it’s appropriate for the teacher to give them that crucial bit of help. The idea implies that students really have been trying to solve the problem so the help they get will be useful.

It also implies that the teacher can recognize precisely the help they need and deliver it, which is often easier than it sounds. As an adult, from a different generation and culture, and with more experience with these problems, I see problems very differently from my students. Indeed, experts solve problems by developing rules of thumb (heuristics) that speed problem solving by amalgamating large volumes of information. Unfortunately, for these heuristics to be meaningful, students often have to arrive at them themselves. Thus the student looking at the details is unable to communicate effectively with the expert who sees the big picture.

Peer-Teaching

One remedy Vygotsky advocated was peer-teaching. By letting students of similar but differing abilities work in groups, they can help each other: often a lot more effectively than a teacher would be able to. The teacher’s main interventions can be with the more advanced students who do not have anyone more knowledgeable to help, but who are best able to communicate with the teacher because of a smaller knowledge gap.

Practically, this suggests multi-aged classrooms, and a high level of vertical integration of the subject matter. Consider, for example, which topics from algebra, geometry and calculus might be appropriate for students from middle to high school to be working on together at the same time in the same room.

Scaffolding

Another, more typical, approach to this problem would be to provide all the extensive scaffolding – all the information including explicit demonstrations of ways of thought – that students need to get started, and then gradually take the scaffolding away so that they have to apply it all on their own.

In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their own.

Slavin (2005) (online resources): Classroom Applications of Vygotsky’s Theory.

In Combination

Elements of both these approaches are necessary – and they’re not mutually exclusive. The scaffolding perspective is most important when introducing something completely new, because they’re all novices at that point. But as you build it into the classroom culture in a multi-aged classroom where there is institutional memory and peer-teaching, then the job of the teacher evolves more into maintaining the standards and expectations, and reduces (but does not eliminate) the need for repeatedly providing the full scaffolding.

Building the Machine: The Role of the Teacher in a Montessori Middle School

With students working on different things at the same time, sometimes collaborating, sometimes working individually, a fluidly function Montessori classroom is somewhat akin to a complex but well-oiled machine: there are lots of individually moving parts that sometimes interact and sometimes not, in an ever-changing configuration. As a result, the job of the middle school teacher is less to convey information than it is to develop a successful classroom culture and ensure its efficient working.

Building the machine starts with the teacher as a role model. The teacher is a role model at all levels, but in middle school this takes on a slightly different color. After all, your adolescents are furiously figuring out how to be adults, so they’re taking a lot of clues for their behavior from the adults in their presence. The key things they’re looking for are, in Montessori’s (1948) words, “a sense of justice and a sense of personal dignity.” The trick is that underneath all the cynicism, they’re all idealists.

Justice is a particularly important and delicate concept because students want justice badly, but they tend to see it as distributive justice, where everyone is equal and get equal rewards and punishments. Unfortunately, this view tends to lead to an over-expansive expectation of rights and often to a sense of entitlement: the belief that if that person is getting something, I should get the same thing too. What’s too often missing, is the recognition that beyond the basic human rights, rights and privileges have to be earned.

This is something I find that I have to explain again and again for everyone to internalize what it means. It does not help that adolescents’ frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for critical thinking and impulse control, are not yet fully developed. What makes things even more interesting is the fact that girls tend to cognitively mature a lot faster than boys.

In addition, my own philosophy is that there are two key things I want to impart to my students: a love of learning and the willingness to try new things. This is somewhat contrary to where students are going developmentally. Adolescents tend to chase certainty as they change physically and mentally, all the while trying to establish their personal identities and place in the world; their focus tends to narrow toward what they’re good at and where their interests lie; there is “an unexpected decrease in intellectual capacity” (Montessori, 1948).

To encourage independence and creativity, and to build the sense of personal dignity through accomplishment, I sometimes break the pattern of the Montessori three-part Lesson (introduction, practice, application), and throw them assignments that they should have most of the background tools and knowledge to deal with, but have never encountered in this particular way. The Student Run Business is great for this, as unexpected problems are always cropping up, and, in case of emergency, it’s easy to create extra problems and challenges if you need to. When our bread-baking ovens started acting up, the oven calibration provided a great opportunity. It needed to be done, and students could figure it out on their own. Mostly. Eventually.

Developing a good classroom culture is probably the hardest challenge for those new to Montessori, especially with early adolescents who tend to have their own ideas and know everything already. However, with a few carefully designed lessons and exercises, the machine takes care of most of the teaching and learning of math and science and social studies and whatever else the curriculum requires students learn, peer-teaching and collaborative learning are all part of the classroom culture. The best part though, is that, once well established, the teacher ends up with a lot less work to do, and with a culture that propagates itself from year to year in our multi-aged classrooms.

So while we want to create a well organized, fluidly functioning classroom, it’s sometimes useful to introduce a little extra friction to keep things interesting. Of course, most often you don’t have to do this yourself. A lot of friction will come from the students themselves, and then the trick is anticipating it, allowing students the chance to deal with it, and then finally using it as a lesson so students learn from their experience if it gets beyond them. All the while, you must recognize that your every word and action is being carefully scrutinized with an eye for justice, even though you and they may not have the same definition for the word.

References

Grazzini, C., 1996. The Four Planes of Development, The NAMTA Journal, 21 (2), 208-241.

Montessori, M., 2005. From Childhood to Adolescence, The Montessori Educational Research Center, Trans. New York: Schocken. (Originally published in 1948).