The 2011 SIM Impact Award honors four Virginia schools that are pioneers in their use of the Content Literacy Continuum™ to promote schoolwide improvements in literacy for all students. James River High School and Central Academy Middle School in Botetourt County and Patrick Henry High School and Liberty Middle School in Hanover County are this year’s recipients of the award, given by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning to recognize schools or school systems that have widely adopted many components of the Strategic Instruction Model™ and that have collected and analyzed data related to their efforts to improve instruction and learning with SIM™.

Though other schools across the country have adopted CLC™, the extent to which the Virginia schools have embraced it is groundbreaking. The CLC™ framework they have put in place includes features not found in other CLC™ projects: They make extensive use of speech-language pathologists at all five CLC™ levels (see our feature on this innovative approach beginning on page 21), and they have transformed relationships made possible by middle school-high school feeder patterns to create meaningful, deep collaboration across schools.

To learn more, visit a profile of the SIM™ Impact Award on the Center for Research on Learning website. A PDF of the profile is also available.

Congratulations to our Hanover and Botetourt schools!

This video, developed with a team of students at the Virginia CLC™ Demonstration site in Hanover County, showcases the Content Literacy Continuum™ and the importance literacy plays in reaching one’s goals. Also available via the Center for Research on Learning’s Vimeo account.

As you take your iPod back to your home and school and begin using it, don’t think of it as an MP3 player so much as it’s a pocket-sized computer. You can browse the web, check e-mail, record and play back video, read books, listen to the news, keep in touch with friends and colleagues, and even play a game or listen to your favorite albums.

You can read about our initial thoughts and ideas about what we’d like to try with the iPods (see link below), but I’m hoping you’ll have ideas of your own of how they can be used in coaching and decision-making. We’re not doing anything to lock down the devices or limit what you do with them, so I’m looking forward to hearing about the creative ways you put them to use.

Here are a few links to help kick-start your thinking:

• Stratepedia Blog: 5 uses for the iPod touch in instructional coaching
• iPod touch product page on Apple’s website
• Getting started with the iPod touch

See you next week in Lawrence!

Amber and I will cross-post anything important from the Ning site here, so you won’t be out of the loop. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused to date but am looking forward to building a strong community with all of you moving forward. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Click the small square near the bottom right corner of the video window to display fullscreen.

• Keith Lenz talks about the Content Literacy Continuum™ as a framework for school improvement. Several schools across the country have adopted CLC™.
• Jim Knight discusses aspects of his widely used instructional coaching model, which he has used successfully across all middle schools in the Topeka, Kan., school district. The model has been replicated in Maryland, as well.
• Barbara Ehren describes the collaborative coaching model that is evolving as Virginia’s State Improvement Grant moves toward statewide CLC™ implementation.

Each of these projects plays out a little differently, but all contain common elements and address common concerns.

CLC™: Literacy-Centered School Improvement

Many schools and school systems are adopting KU-CRL’s Content Literacy Continuum™ as a framework for school improvement. The continuum encompasses five levels of literacy support that should be in place in every school. The levels describe increasingly intensive instruction and services to support student learning.

For schools, the process of adopting CLC™ begins with an exploring phase during which CLC™ teams help schools understand what it means to be ready for the significant changes required of school wide improvement. The teams begin to look at what services, instruction, and programs are already in place in a school, identifying holes that need to be filled.

Questions at each level guide these discussions. Knowing that background knowledge and vocabulary are critical to learning at Level 1, for example, what is the school doing to make sure students who don’t have adequate reading skills are still able to acquire that knowledge?

The continuum emphasizes coordinated, coherent services and programs cutting across levels and content areas.

“Coming up with a thousand and one literacy activities is not addressing literacy,” Keith says. “What it’s doing is giving lots of activities without reinforcing a way of attacking specific learning challenges.”

Likewise, the CLC™ philosophy is that designing one or two courses focused on improving literacy skills does not constitute a literacy program.

“Kids who participate in those classes don’t get sufficient practice to build on those strategies. They need it reinforced across the curriculum,” he says.

Instructional Coaching: On-site Partners

The instructional coaching model that Jim has studied and developed over the past decade defines an instructional coach as an on-site professional developer who partners with educators to identify and assist with implementation of proven teaching methods.

Jim’s work as a professional developer greatly influenced his interest in instructional coaching as a means of increasing teachers’ use of effective instructional practices, such as SIM™.

“My life’s work really has been about how do you get teachers to use this. I could see results and wanted to get it in people’s hands,” Jim says. “What I found was the more forceful I was in working with teachers, really the less effective I was.”

The Instructional coaching approach, rather than mandating teacher use of new materials, focuses on building relationships with teachers. The model is based on the partnership principles identified in Jim’s Partnership Learning work: Teachers are equal and have a voice in professional development and adopting new instructional methods.

(Learn more about Partnership Learning and download the Partnership Learning Field book at www.kucrl.org/partnership)

Instructional coaches on Jim’s projects work with teachers within a frame they refer to as the Big 4: Behavior, content instruction, and formative assessment. Addressing behavior is key, they find, to the success of the three other components.

“Our thinking is if you get those four things in place, you’ve probably got a good classroom,” says Jim.

Virginia State Improvement Grant: A Distributed Approach to Coaching

In Virginia, two demonstration sites consisting of two schools each are implementing CLC™. At the same time, the project team is preparing to take CLC™ statewide, recognizing that a one-size-fits-all solution is impossible.

The team uses the Concerns-Based Adoption model (C-BAM), a powerful set of tools to manage the process of change facilitation and promote systematic decision-making.

Building on Jim’s work, the team uses a modified approach to instructional coaching to help educators throughout the participating schools learn and use new instructional methods.

“We really like to think about it as a differentiated coaching in the same way we talk about differentiated instruction for kids,” Barbara says. “We talk about different models for different schools with different resources.”

There are, however, some ” non-negotiable,” components that the team agrees are important and should be in place–providing consistency and coherence from school to school:

1. Coaching is a component in high-quality professional development, not a separate entity.
2. Professional development occurs in phases. Coaching occurs during the phases of professional development referred to as Do It, Refine It and Use It. The team does not think about coaching as a replacement for the initial pedagogy of learning a new instructional method.
3. Coaching in some form is for everyone, including administrators and change facilitators. It is not a remedial endeavor.
4. Teachers may need different things at different times from different people with varied expertise.

Common Components

Despite differences in the three school improvement approaches described above, they all contain elements that KU-CRL has found to be essential to the success of school change. Among these are effective instruction, choice, values and communication.

Effective instruction. A strong focus on effective instruction- from instructional coaching’s Big 4 to Virginia’s differentiated instructional protocols- is a common emphasis among KU-CRL’s school improvement projects. KU- CRL’s recent research suggests that building a strong instructional “core” yields greater positive results for students.

The instructional core encompasses such components as motivation/ behavior supports, aligned instruction, connected courses and coherent learning, student-informed teaching, and a continuum of literacy instruction.

“We begin to really see the effects of the changes when we get to the instructional core,” Keith says. “We can put in all the infrastructure changes we want, we can put in all the systems for learning, but unless we focus on the quality of instruction in the classroom, we’re probably not going to see the kind of academic changes that we want to see.”

Secondary to the instructional core but still important to school improvement success are infrastructure changes (flexible scheduling, planning and professional development time, extended learning opportunities, for example) and system learning supports (data-based decision making, collaborative problem solving, instructional coaching, and other system that allow a school to learn). These components are necessary to create the context and support system for change.

Foundational to the success of instructional core change is the support of an instructional leader. That role, says Jim, belongs to the school principal.

“If the principal is not the instructional leader, it’s going to be tougher to make it happen. You really need that principal,” he says.

Choice. Choice is another common concept embraced by all three researchers. Schools and educators in this project choose professional development and improvement goals matched to their own needs.

“You have to give schools choice…based on their unique characteristics, their culture, the centers of expertise within a building. Maybe it’s the science department that takes leadership; maybe it’s language arts,” says Keith.

Working with schools in this way promotes the cultural shifts needed for successful change in secondary schools, in contrast to a top-down mandate for change.

In Virginia, project staff acknowledges that a single professional development or instructional coaching model likely will not meet the diverse needs of participating schools. Thus, active involvement of schools helps shape the look of professional development opportunities, including how instructional coaching is carried out, selected to meet project goals.

“We’re going to take our lead from the school to design instructional coaching protocols,” says Barb. “We have some opportunities in Virginia that are perhaps different than in other states as well as different challenges.”

The emphasis, she says, is on making use of existing resources within a school, then refining, shaping, and negotiating changes to develop protocols that make sense to all those involved.

Values. Shared values can help smooth the path as schools embark on large-scale change initiatives. In the CLC™ projects, a set of values topped by respect for teachers and their experience defines the relationship between teachers and the system.

CLC™ projects promote a shared vision, shared knowledge that leads to individual learning, shared leadership, shared responsibility that shapes individual planning and action, shared evaluation, and shared accountability that motivates individual action.

Similarly, Jim’s instructional coaching model is founded on six principles of partnership:

• Equality, to promote relationships among coaches and teachers as equals
• Choice
• Voice, to provide opportunities for participants to express their points of view
• Reflection, to allow participants to consider ideas before adopting them
• Dialogue, to arrive at mutually acceptable decisions
• Praxis, to enable individuals to have more meaningful experiences through practical application of learning.

Jim encourages those involved in school change projects to consider whether these principles reflect their own.

“Even if you don’t embrace the principles, work through what you do believe,” Jim says. “You need to know what your principles are.”

Communication. In many ways, the success of school improvement projects rests squarely on how well individuals and groups communicate. Coaches, Jim says, change the way teachers teach and change the culture of the school one conversation at a time.

“They have to have some pretty powerful communication skills to pull that off,” he says.

Coaches tread a delicate line between establishing close relationships with teachers and maintaining enough detachment to enable them to make solid professional development decisions.

One method they have used effectively is the “show, don’t tell” approach to professional development. Coaches often visit classrooms and present lessons–teaching students a lesson while showing teachers how to apply a new instructional method to their own material. In interviews with 13 teachers who had worked with coaches in this manner, Jim says their No. 1 observation was, “It wasn’t until she came in my classroom and showed me how that I realized I could do it. When she did it with my kids, I knew I could do it too.”

Part of the balance for instructional coaches means clearly separating the role of coaches from the role of administrators to supervise or evaluate.

“We have to keep principals informed, but we do so in a way that honors and respects the collegiality of the coaching relationship,” Barb says.

Consequently, project teams pay close attention to language choices used in describing coaching to teachers and administrators: Coaching is collegial, not supervisory. Coaches coach; administrators monitor and supervise. In Virginia, coaches make classroom “visitations,” not “observations.”

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol. 19 No. 3
Published: March 2007

Our emphasis on the continuum during the conference should not be construed as a mandate that all SIM™ Professional Developers must shift toward conducting CLC™ professional development. Rather, we want to make sure that all SIM™ Professional Developers can answer basic questions that arise during their sessions. You may find yourself in a situation in which a school wants to get ready or believes it is ready to consider whole-school improvement through CLC™. In that case, being able to address basic questions will increase your value to that school.

This article follows the story presented by Keith Lenz and Patty Graner in a session called “Content Literacy Continuum™: What Do I Need to Know?” It begins with the founding of the KU Center for Research on Learning and continues through the development of the Strategic Instruction Model™, explores the changing needs of society, and gives a brief overview of the Content Literacy Continuum™. The pieces of the story are likely quite familiar to you, but it is essential to pull them together coherently to lay the foundation upon which successful CLC™ initiatives can be built.

A PowerPoint presentation to accompany this article is available on SIM™ville under the Content Literacy Continuum™ link.

Back Story

KU-CRL came into being in 1978 as the Institute for Research in Learning Disabilities, with the goal of improving the learning experience for students with learning disabilities at the secondary level.

Our first set of studies investigated the demands placed on students in secondary schools, comparing students with learning disabilities, students who were low achieving but did not qualify for special education services, and normally achieving students. From these studies emerged a set of demands students face in secondary settings. Our belief was that if we could help students meet these demands, they would graduate and probably do well academically in postsecondary settings. As a result, we developed the Learning Strategies Curriculum to help students learn the skills they need to acquire information (reading strategies), remember information (storage strategies), and express themselves in writing and on tests.

Next, we began to question how a general education teacher could teach content in ways that compensate for the fact that not all students have those skills. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we completed a study on how general education teachers plan for academic diversity in their classrooms. We worked alongside history and science teachers and asked how they planned for and made accommodations for specific students in their classes who had learning disabilities. These teachers were honest with us: They were indeed concerned about those students with LD, but they needed ways of teaching that they could use to reach the whole group of students as well as that one student.

Based on this feedback, we began looking at planning routines, encouraging standards-based instruction, and focusing on curriculum content. Results from this and other studies led to development of the Content Enhancement Series. General education teachers use these routines to plan and organize their instruction; present concepts; explore text, topics, and details; and increase student performance.

We also have developed a host of supporting programs to enable cooperative learning, social skill development, self-advocacy, and problem solving, among other skills.

Societal Changes

In presenting the Content Literacy Continuum™ as a framework for school improvement, it’s important to touch on the changing needs of society as underlying the urgency for schools to evaluate whether their literacy programs prepare their students for the future.

In their book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane contend that technology is changing our expectations and resulting in the need for more expert thinking skills and more complex communication skills. Employers value employees with the proven ability to be strategic, to solve problems, and to engage in higher-order thinking skills. Schools must respond to these needs and foster development of these skills in students, or employers will look elsewhere for new hires.

In light of these societal demands and our findings over the years, the message for schools is this: If you really want to pursue literacy-centered school improvement at the secondary level, you must change the culture of the school. By this, we mean substantial change that is more complex than any infrastructure change, such as block schedules or small learning communities. If schools don’t approach content and complex thinking skills differently, they probably won’t succeed in improving literacy and preparing students to be competitive in postsecondary settings and future employment.

Enduring Gap

Another facet of the realities within which schools must operate is represented by the performance gap. As SIM™ Professional Developers, you are very familiar with this gap, which we identified as a challenge in our earliest studies. Essentially, the gap shows that students who have not mastered the needed literacy skills begin to struggle with content by fourth grade. As they continue in school, the gap between what teachers expect them to accomplish and what they are able to do widens. The assumption in secondary education is that if schools “raise the bar,” or increase expectations for student learning, students will naturally develop the literacy skills they need to meet this challenge. We have found that does not happen. Instead, the skill level these students have attained when they enter high school is the same level they will exhibit when they leave high school.

The adoption of SIM™ Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement Routines has made a difference–closed the gap–for individual students. Likewise, infrastructure supports such as block scheduling and after-school programs have addressed some difficulties for some students. System learning supports– progress monitoring or instructional coaching, for example–also contribute to some gains. We have found, however, that the biggest difference in academic performance across whole schools comes from focusing increased attention on the instructional core. The Content Literacy Continuum™ provides a framework for analyzing and improving that core.

Successful Systems Change

After making the case for the need to launch whole-school improvement efforts, it’s important to establish expectations for how the change process will work most effectively. We’ve found, for instance, that mandating change in a top-down fashion rarely works in the long term. Instead, each school must create its own set of goals and activities based on research-proven methods and interventions within a comprehensive framework, such as the CLC™.

Successful change involves honoring the work the school has already done and building on its accomplishments. In doing so, strive to balance the following critical values:

• A shared vision that allows individual contributions
• Shared knowledge that leads to individual learning
• Shared leadership that seeks the voice of individuals
• Shared responsibility that shapes individual planning and action
• Shared evaluation that guides self-assessment
• Shared accountability that motivates individual action

Slide 1 depicts these values wrapped around the other factors we have identified as components of literacy-centered effective school improvement efforts. These components– instructional core, system learning supports, and infrastructure supports–work with the critical system change values to result in college readiness and postsecondary success for students. Note the central placement of the Content Literacy Continuum™ in the instructional core component. The crucial message of this slide is that all of the components of school structures, systems leadership, and values must work together and build upon each other to create a continuum of literacy instruction.

Content Literacy

A final foundational point in introducing the Content Literacy Continuum™ is a discussion of just what content literacy means and why it is important for students and teachers. Content literacy refers to the listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills and strategies necessary to learn in each of the academic disciplines.

Slide 2 on page 4 lists five key ideas related to content literacy, first among them that an important application of literacy is to learn critical information.

As every classroom teacher can attest, the amount of time teachers have to teach has remained steady for decades. The amount of content they are expected to cover in that time, however, continues to grow. Teachers can get through that content and make it to the end of the year, but the real concern is whether all students in their academically diverse classes will make it, too, and more importantly, whether the students will master the critical material along the way.

The key ideas listed in Slide 2 echo themes we have emphasized for years, and there are obvious connections to SIM™. The Word Identification Strategy, for example, is our tool to help students decode fluently (key idea No. 2). SIM™’s Content Enhancement Routines can help teachers focus on and present content that is really critical for students to know.

However, a school may already have a program or intervention in place that addresses decoding or another aspect of content literacy. If so, it is important to acknowledge that when introducing the CLC™.

The ideas that all teachers must teach and reinforce common strategies and that all students must master some critical content often raise warning flags among teachers. One concern that arises early in professional development related to CLC™ is that content teachers don’t have time to be reading teachers in addition to all of their other responsibilities.

Our answer to this concern, first, is that the content teacher’s role in literacy development is limited and focuses on building the background knowledge and teaching the vocabulary that students need to master the content of that course. All students must acquire some degree of content to function successfully in society. It is not acceptable to assume that most students understanding the content is good enough. The content teacher’s role, then, is to identify that critical content and concentrate on presenting it in learner-friendly ways to ensure all their students understand.

The second part of our answer is that content teachers must explicitly demonstrate– through modeling, reinforcement, and clear expectations–that literacy skills and strategies are valued. This helps combat one of the main reasons students don’t maintain skills: They don’t have sufficient opportunities to practice strategies in relevant core areas. The benefit to students is increased ability to learn and understand the information presented in class; the benefit to teachers is increased success of their efforts to teach.

Enter the Continuum

The Content Literacy Continuum™ is our answer to how you put together everything we’ve learned over the years in a whole-school model. The information in the preceding sections of this article paints a strong rationale for improving literacy programs and establishes the continuum as a framework for evaluating and planning improvements in those programs. Now, your audience will need more information about the continuum and how it helps schools respond to the challenges we’ve outlined. The Content Literacy Continuum™ consists of five levels of increasingly intensive literacy support. You will find several handouts on SIM™ville that will help you present the CLC™. It is important to emphasize that the levels refer to how a school delivers instruction and the intensity of instruction. They do not refer to student ability. Students are not “Level 1 students” or “Level 3 students.”

Level 1: Enhanced content instruction. All students must learn the critical content required in the core curriculum regardless of literacy levels. Even students who are not fluent readers should master a certain amount of content before they leave their ninth-grade history class, for example. Teachers compensate for limited literacy levels by using explicit teaching routines, adaptations, and technology to promote content mastery. The CLC™ PowerPoint presentation that accompanies this article (available on SIM™ville) contains a series of slides to help illustrate the thinking at this level of the continuum. The series begins with defining a unit of content, then depicts how units are held together by critical ideas, and how to focus on what content is critical for students to understand. Once a teacher has identified the truly critical information, he or she should focus direct instruction on that. Students can explore related, but not critical, information through independent learning, homework assignments, or group work, but those should not be the sole means for students to obtain critical information.

To build your own background knowledge of content enhancement and teacher planning related to critical content, we refer you to Teaching Content to All, edited by Keith Lenz and Don Deshler. Some of the chapters deal specifically with identifying critical content, the concept of less is more, and SMARTER, standards-based planning. Chapter four, especially, talks about the planning process.

Level 2: Embedded strategy instruction. Teachers embed learning strategies in core curriculum courses through direct explanation and modeling and require the application of these strategies in content assignments. For example, a biology teacher may instruct students to use the Paraphrasing Strategy while reading the biology text and may reinforce this expectation by modeling how the strategy applies in the science classroom.

Level 3: Intensive strategy instruction. Students who have significant deficits in key areas or have difficulty mastering strategies presented in core classes are taught specific strategies through specialized, direct, explicit, and intense instruction. Support personnel such as resource teachers or reading specialists deliver this instruction, often in smallgroup settings.

Level 4: Intensive basic skill instruction. Schools provide more intensive interventions for students who need work on basic literacy elements, such as foundational decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills. Reading instruction is specialized, direct, and intensive. Intensive instruction in listening, speaking, and writing is often a part of these services.

Level 5: Therapeutic intervention. This level provides for intensive clinical options for students with underlying language disorders to learn the linguistic, related cognitive, metalinguistic, and metacognitive underpinnings they need to acquire content literacy skills and strategies. Speech-language pathologists become integral to the literacy work of the school and must understand what components are in place at levels one through four so they can engage students in curriculum-relevant therapy.

CLC™ and SIM™

The Content Literacy Continuum™ is a framework for evaluating and developing schoolwide literacy programs. We developed the continuum because we believed, based on our research and experiences, that this framework addressed the very serious needs of schools struggling to improve literacy among all students. As such, the continuum stands apart from SIM™. Clearly, SIM™ interventions may be part of a school’s comprehensive approach to literacy instruction, especially at levels one, two, and three. However, it is important for schools to examine what they are already doing that fits this CLC™ framework and to consider what research based programs or interventions–SIM™ or other–are needed to supplement existing programs.

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Sratenotes Vol. 12 Issue 2
Published: November 2006

Panelists consisted of KU-CRL’s Barbara Ehren and Jim Knight as well as Reed Deshler, a senior consultant with Aligna Solutions and Don’s son. Don moderated the discussion.

Each panelist had the opportunity to share three big ideas about change. All three know a great deal about the process of change, but each has a slightly different perspective.

Barb Ehren

Drawing on the work of William Bridges, Barb’s first big idea involves understanding the human side of change.

“Events change, but people transition,” Barb says. “Really, the process is more about helping people move and grow than it is altering events.”

A building-level principal might, for example, declare that the school will begin implementing the Content Literacy Continuum™ and order the guidebooks, manuals, and other materials necessary to make the change. However, Barb says, this approach does not account for some of the very important psychological variables connected with the people who are expected to participate in the change.

“One of the key constructs in transition is the notion of loss–that when you accept something new, you are really giving up something that you’re used to,” Barb says. “To really pay attention to this process, you have to understand the grief process in the sense of losing comfortable ways.”

Consequently, as we think about helping schools or districts adopt the CLC™ or SIM™ components, it’s important to pay attention to the people involved in the process and to the variables connected with helping them make the transition from their old, comfortable ways to the new way.

Barb’s second big idea is that change facilitators–people who are heading up or participating in efforts to help systems move and grow and people transition–should be “Labrador retrievers,” not “pit-bulls.”

“There’s nothing wrong with pit-bulls. They’re a wonderful breed,” Barb says, “But we certainly don’t want them within the change/ transition process. We need Labrador retrievers. They have to be kind, gentle, but ever so persevering.”

People working for change/transition have to understand that change is difficult for everyone, including themselves, Barb says. “We have to be kind to ourselves as well as kind to others, allowing ourselves to have a learning curve in terms of our change/transition work.”

Barb’s last big idea has to do with picking best bets. Always look for the golden opportunities and work to cultivate the people, places, or things that are going to prove most helpful in the change/transition process.

“Sometimes when you go into a school, you want to have change and you want to involve the whole faculty,” she says. “Well, the whole faculty might not be your best bets up front because there may be some folks who need some convincing. In order for some people to get on board the change train, they have tosee results. They are not the risk takers. They have to see the other social studies teacher getting better success in content mastery from using the content enhancement routines.”

Barb advises thinking about this big idea as akin to a marketing tactic: How can we use the successes of our “best bets” to convince others that the change is worthwhile?

Reed Deshler

Although much of Reed’s work has been done in the context of the business world, he believes that all organizations in the midst of change have certain characteristics in common.

Reed’s first big idea is that change occurs at many different levels–the district, the school, and the classroom, in the case of education.

“Many of us, I believe, think that we can affect all of them, and sometimes it’s very, very difficult to do,” he says. “That leads to this notion that you have to have some tools in your toolkit that help you do more than just influence your sphere.”

Reed’s second big idea is that the emerging area of change mastery is an imperative for educators and administrators alike.

The importance of developing a skill set related to change mastery is evident when considering the many factors that combine to make an individual who he or she is, factors that also contribute to how the individual performs his or her professional role. Personal attributes, subject-matter expertise, and teaching mastery combine to define an individual teacher. Similar characteristics apply to administrators–personal attributes, administrative effectiveness, and organizational leadership. When these individuals are inserted into an organization, things change.

“The organization itself creates new dynamics that are no longer in the control of the person,” Reed says, reinforcing the importance of developing change mastery skills.

“It’s facilitation skills. It’s planning skills. It’s the ability to ask questions. It’s the ability to take various piece of information and make decisions,” says Reed. “It’s also tools: the ability to take frameworks and techniques and move groups of people through them.”

Reed’s third big idea involves determining whether the time is right for change.

“The real question is how do you know if you’re ready for this?” he says.

After identifying what is going to change, organizations must ask themselves “How big is this for us?”

“There are some organizations, some schools, that have the capacity to bring about a significant amount of change. They’ve done it before. They’ve succeeded. They’ve got people with change mastery skills,” Reed says. “Other organizations don’t.”

Among the components that organizations need to consider are whether there is a compelling need for the change, whether people understand what the organization is doing and why, and whether there is leadership commitment. Other questions to consider include are the tools and resources needed to make the change available both to the people involved and to the organization, how will stakeholders respond to the change, and are there competing resource demands or events that might prevent the organization from moving forward successfully.

“Good intentions aside, great interventions aside, if we’re not ready, it might not be the right time,” Reed says.

Jim Knight

Jim’s first big idea is that “learning conversations” are at the heart of leading change.

“When we are effectively leading change, we should and the people we work with should be better for the experience,” Jim says. “It usually involves some kind of conversation.”

Learning, he says, should be energizing, empowering, enjoyable, and fun. It should bring us alive. Too often, though, just the opposite occurs when the subject is change. Jim points to the idea of identity issues as the root of difficult conversations about change, drawing on the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen.

“They say an identity conversation is all about who we are and how we see ourselves,” Jim says. “When you find yourself in some kind of conflict with another person, more often than not, it’s because of some kind of identity conversation. If they feel somehow the conversation is telling them that they’re not a good person or they’re not competent or they’re not skilled, you’re going to encounter resistance.”

To counteract such perceptions, Jim recommends using “partnership feedback,” in which a teacher and an instructional coach conduct a dialogue about data. Instead of presenting the conversation as a means of “fixing” the teacher, he says, the attitude should be “here’s what I saw.”

“If you set yourself up as the only expert in the room, you’re likely going to get drawn into identity conversations,” Jim says. “We have to turn the conversation away from that. What we’re trying to do is protect their identity so we can focus on what matters, which is improving instruction for kids.”

Jim’s second big idea is that enabling change involves discontinuity.

“Since we started the Pathways to Success project in Topeka, we’ve had nine different principals in our first three schools, we’ve had three superintendents, and they introduced this thing called No Child Left Behind,” he says. “If we had made a six-year plan and expected it to be implemented, we would have found ourselves with a bit of a problem because things change dramatically.”

Jim says planning for change means incorporating a mechanism for adapting when the course alters.

His third big idea is that enabling change involves deep thinking. To really be a change agent, he says, you have to get clarity on what you want to accomplish and look for simple words to express complicated concepts.

When explaining modeling or constructive feedback, for example, “it’s critically important to go deep in your thinking so you can find the words to explain it. If you’re not sure why that relationship box is there or what it’s for, you need to figure it out,” he says.

Jim recommends going so far as to put a paragraph or two in writing to prepare for presenting the information orally.

“It’s very, very useful to use writing as an act to help you become a better communicator,” he says. Helpful exercises include writing out the stories and anecdotes that will support the points you want to make.

A second aspect of deep thinking involves formulating implementation plans.

“If you’re going to lead change in school, you need to break it down,” he says. “You need to say what’s going to happen when, what that professional learning community is going to look like. There may be people who are going to be dysfunctional–how are you going to deal with that? To plan for execution is really key.”

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Stratenotes Vol.14 Issue5
Published: February 2006

Resources

• Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (1999) Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most. New York: Viking Penguin.
• www.instructionalcoach.org
• www.kucrl.org/partnership: Download Partnership Learning Fieldbook.

For years, CRL has used the “performance gap” as a framework for trying to understand the challenges that struggling adolescent learners face and to conceptualize ways to improve their academic outcomes. Historically, we have explained how two of the major lines of CRL research (namely, learning strategy interventions and content enhancement routines) can work together to help close this gap. That is, on the one hand, learning strategy interventions have been designed to change students as learners by teaching them how to learn. As students master an array of learning strategies, it is hoped that the trajectory of the curved line (which represents student achievement in relation to curriculum demands) will move closer to the straight line. The content enhancement routines, on the other hand, have been designed to change how teachers think about, select, and present critical subject matter information to students. Consistent use of these routines has been shown to make the subject matter easier to understand and to remember.

Moving beyond the original performance gap framework

Although this framework has been useful, the new realities that schools face today as a result of adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements called for by the No Child Left Behind Act have underscored some of its limitations. As currently conceptualized, this framework lacks the power to adequately explain all of the factors that must be taken into account by teachers and administrators to truly close the gap. To this end, we have adopted a new model to guide our thinking as researchers and our actions as change agents working in schools. The goal of this new framework is to provide a tool that is sufficiently broad in its scope to identify those variables that need to be addressed to optimize our chances of dramatically improving the performance of struggling adolescent learners.

The new framework

As shown in Figure 2, the new framework ties improved student outcomes to two critical factors: (1) an instructional core (which is primarily related to high quality teaching), and (2) an infrastructure core (which is primarily related to strong administrative leadership). As will be seen shortly, all of the interventions and instructional practices that we have come to associate with the Strategic Instruction Model™ (SIM™) are present within these two core factors. However, other critical elements have been included within both the instructional and infrastructure cores that we now consider to be essential to achieving significant student outcomes. Among the outcomes that should be used to measure the effectiveness of our efforts are the following:

• Reading (and other learning) proficiency
• Improved attendance
• Persistence in school
• Challenging courses
• Graduation

It is important to note that the first core depicted in Figure 2 and discussed below is the instructional core. This is not by accident. Historically, the vast majority of initiatives aimed at improving secondary schools have focused on non-instructional factors (e.g., moving to block scheduling, changing from a middle school to a junior high school configuration, etc.). The prevailing assumption has been that the quickest and most effective way to improve student outcomes was to change infrastructural factors. Instruction, if considered at all, was largely an afterthought in most secondary school improvement efforts. CRL’s research, however, has clearly underscored the vital role of high quality instruction in improving student achievement. Hence, this framework thinks of and specifies the instructional core first. In light of what is required to provide high quality instruction, the infrastructure core is then chosen and used to support the instructional needs. In other words, “form follows function!” Regrettably, most school improvement efforts have first changed the structure and then expected instructional practices to conform to the new structure (whether it made pedagogical sense or not)!

The instructional core consists of five elements and the infrastructural core of four. 1 These elements should not be seen as isolated elements in an inventory of potential elements, but rather as a group in which elements have a dynamic and powerful interrelationship. As we conduct additional research, we expect to better understand the relative power of each of these elements and the optimal mix that needs to be in place for different types of schools and instructional circumstances.

The instructional core

Figure 3 depicts the five key elements in the instructional core. Each is seen as being essential to creating an ideal set of instructional conditions.

Motivation/positive behavior supports. To optimally capitalize on the limited amount of instructional time available to closing the performance gap, we must first create a learning environment in which students can be fully engaged in productive academic work. A 2004 study titled Teaching Interrupted notes that 77 percent of secondary teachers report significant behavioral disruptions occur in their classrooms that markedly affect their ability to provide effective instruction. Of equal concern is the large number of adolescents who are disengaged and unmotivated. Before we can be successful in teaching critical content or strategies to students, we must take steps to create a positive and productive environment for learning. To this end, CRL has formed a formal partnership with Randy Sprick, who has created a broad array of classroom and school-based systems for creating productive academic environments. All of his programs are based on positive behavioral support principles. (An interview with Randy appeared in the May 2004 issue of Stratenotes, Vol. 12, No. 8; an extended version is available on our web site at http://www. kucrl.org/archives/classroom/sprick. shtml.) Similarly, the sole purpose of our research in the area of Possible Selves has been to validate procedures that teachers can effectively leverage to engage and motivate students.

Engaging/diverse materials. One of the greatest challenges facing those who work with struggling adolescent learners is finding ways to make learning relevant to their lives and sufficiently engaging that students will choose to invest themselves in the learning process. To become skilled and fluent learners, these students need ample opportunities to practice applying newly learned skills and strategies. To accomplish this, they need access to a rich array of reading materials that are engaging and diverse. Too often, students become frustrated when they are forced to read materials that are well beyond their skill level or that hold little interest for them. Instructional materials should:

• Be below students’ frustration level
• Be responsive to a wide range of student abilities
• Cover a broad array of engaging topics
• Be relevant to students’ backgrounds (SES, culture, etc.)

These first two elements–motivation/ positive behavior supports and engaging/ diverse materials–are listed first in this section for a simple reason: These elements are vital to “hook” students. Without fostering student interest and engagement, other instructional reforms will likely lack effectiveness.

Continuum of literacy instruction. To bring about dramatic changes in the state of adolescent literacy, significant changes are required in (a) how secondary teachers see their role in teaching literacy, and (b) how basic literacy skills should be considered as an integral part of the secondary school curriculum. Because of the broad array of student needs and the complexity of the problems presented by adolescents with poor literacy skills, no single program or approach can meet the needs of all. Thus, the best adolescent literacy programs are ones that consider both the unique needs of students with literacy problems and the realities of secondary schools. Some students will need more individualized, explicit, intensive instruction of basic literacy skills, while other students will need opportunities to practice fluency and comprehension skills within the context of their regular classes. Others might need extended day tutoring in before- and after-school achievement centers. In short, it is important to meet students where they are in their literacy development.

A continuum with five different levels has been conceptualized to be responsive to the needs of struggling adolescents. We’ve called this continuum the Content Literacy Continuum™ (CLC™). Additionally, since the problems of adolescents with literacy problems are so significant, intervention outside of the school day may be warranted. Hence, secondary schools should consider the important role that before- and after-school tutoring programs can play to support services provided across the Content Literacy Continuum™. The following is a synopsis of the five levels:

Level 1: Enhance content instruction (mastery of critical content for all regardless of literacy levels)

Level 2: Embedded strategy instruction (routinely weave strategies within and across classes using large group instructional methods)

Level 3: Intensive strategy instruction (mastery of specific strategies using eight-stage instructional sequence; individual Strategic Tutoring)

Level 4: Intensive basic skill instruction (mastery of entry-level literacy skills at the fourth-grade level)

Level 5: Therapeutic intervention (mastery of language underpinnings of curriculum content and learning strategies)

Intense-explicit instruction. CRL researcher Jim Knight concisely defined the nature and purpose of intensiveexplicit (IE) instruction for at-risk learners. Specifically, IE instruction refers to a set of instructional procedures that together efficiently and effectively enable teachers to convey content clearly to students in a manner that leads to students mastering information. IE is intensive because it involves teaching practices that ensure students are engaged in learning and actively mastering content. IE is explicit because it involves teachers clearly modeling covert thinking and providing detailed feedback as students move toward mastery of content. A primary goal of IE instruction is for students to understand, remember, and generalize content taught by a teacher. Simply put, instructors use IE instruction so that students will have a picture of knowledge in their heads that is similar to the picture teachers have in their heads. IE instruction uses most of the following instructional stages to achieve this goal: describe, model, vocabulary memorization, practice and feedback, and generalization.

Formative and summative assessments. At the core of quality teaching are data that profile the strengths and weaknesses of students on key learning targets. These data enable teachers to make adjustments in the instructional process to better meet student needs. In the absence of these data, students’ progress can be stifled and progress slowed or stopped altogether. Summative data tell teachers and students whether educational goals have been met at the end of a specified period.

When all of the elements of the instructional core are in place, considerable progress can be made in closing the performance gap, as shown in Figure 4.

The infrastructure core

Figure 5 shows the elements embodied in the infrastructure core. Generally speaking, these elements are ones that are a function of strong administrative leadership–certainly at the building level but often from central administration, as well. As argued above, school improvement should, first and foremost, be driven by the instructional core; however, if these infrastructure elements are not present, much of the power represented by changes in the instructional core will be minimized. A critical role played by the building principal is to communicate and help all staff embrace a shared vision of a school-wide approach to addressing the literacy problems of its students.

Professional development. Professional development grounded in the principles embraced by the SIM™ Professional Development Network is essential in supporting teachers in the acquisition and effective application of research-based practices from SIM™. In short, the professional development must be focused, sustained, data driven, personalized, designed to create a learning community, and about system change. Additionally, it must provide to teachers ample opportunities to practice and receive feedback on the new practice and to receive continuing coaching to support the refined and sustained application of the innovation.

Teacher materials and resources. Quality instruction of research-based practices is dependent, in large measure, on teachers being supplied the appropriate support materials required to deliver their instruction. At a minimum, this consists of well-designed teacher manuals, student learning sheets and activities for practice, scoring rubrics that enable high-quality feedback to be provided, and the necessary technology supports, such as tape recorders, DVDs, or computers. CRL’s longstanding commitment to developing teacher manuals and other instructional supports underscores the importance of this element.

Instructional coherence. One of the greatest challenges that struggling adolescents and their teachers face in secondary schools is the problem of “fragmentation.” That is, because the school day is structured around class periods and each student having multiple teachers, they generally experience an instructional program that is much more fragmented than what they experienced in elementary school. In elementary school, most students have one teacher throughout the entire day; this fact alone greatly reduces fragmentation in learning. This can best be understood with an example. If a third-grade teacher teaches a given skill in the morning, she can emphasize that skill throughout the course of the day and capitalize on natural teaching moments when the targeted skill can be showcased when opportunities surface during the day. She has an understanding of the whole picture of a given student’s educational program and can provide coherent, wellintegrated instruction to that student. In secondary school settings, there is often little, if any, planning or orchestration across teachers. Thus, if a teacher in the first period teaches a skill, it is highly unlikely that that skill will be reinforced at any time throughout the day by other teachers simply because they are unaware of what is taught by their colleagues. Hence, relative to the instruction of critical skills, strategies, and content elements, secondary schools are very fragmented and lack coherence. To avoid this dilemma, principals need to promote shared planning times and class configurations that promote reinforcement of what is taught across teachers, classes, and schools.

Extended time. Because of the magnitude of the performance gap, students need sufficient time to receive highquality instruction in deficit areas and to have ample time to practice the skills and strategies they are lacking. Regrettably, in secondary schools, there generally isn’t a “reading class,” per se. This problem needs to be addressed. Educational leaders in schools that are having the most success with struggling adolescent learners find ways to create increased time for literacy instruction. In the absence of this challenge being addressed, it is highly unlikely that the gap will be closed. As a part of the solution, some schools have included before- and after-school tutoring programs.

Conclusion

Closing the large performance gap that many struggling adolescent learners face is a daunting task. The challenge will not be addressed through token efforts or minimizing or neglecting any of the items detailed above. The solution requires major changes and investments on both the instructional and infrastructure fronts. In addition to these factors, it is important also to remember the important role that families, out-of-school organizations, and other community supports can play in bolstering adolescent literacy programs. The resulting new framework for closing the performance gap is shown in Figure 6.

Don Deshler
KU-CRL
Stratenotes Vol.13 Issue 4
Published: January 2005

1 The recently released report by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on adolescent literacy titled Reading Next: A Vision for Action in Middle and High School Literacy was influenced by CRL researchers and, in turn, has influenced our thinking about how to best close the performance gap. The complete report can be downloaded from www.all4ed.org.

As a result of our work, we believe that of all the things an administrator can do to promote improvement in learning and literacy skills, the most important is to maintain a relentless focus on high-quality instruction. Our Content Literacy Continuum™ is a framework that can help administrators maintain this focus. It helps administrators analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their existing literacy instruction, clearly define the important and unique roles each teacher on a secondary school staff plays in improving outcomes, and design comprehensive adolescent literacy programs spanning content areas and grade levels.

We have identified four key spheres of influence for administrators in relation to launching and leading successful whole-school improvement initiatives:

1. Clarifying that high-quality instruction is indeed the top priority
2. Ensuring that day-to-day activities reflect the commitment to instruction
3. Tailoring the school’s organizational structures to match the instructional needs of students
4. Overseeing a coordinated professional development plan that supports instructional goals

Attention to each of these areas can significantly influence the outcomes of whole-school initiatives.

Content Literacy Continuum™

The Content Literacy Continuum™ describes five increasingly intensive levels of literacy support that should be in place in every school, underscoring that some students need increased intensity and explicitness of instruction to learn critical skills, strategies, and content in secondary classes.

The continuum calls for general education teachers to present content in learner–friendly ways at the first level and to embed strategy instruction into their core classes at the second level. At the third level, students receive specialized, intensive instruction from someone other than the general education teacher.

At the fourth level, reading specialists and special education teachers work together to provide specialized, direct, and intensive instruction in listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. The fifth level provides for speech–language pathologists to deliver curriculum–relevant language therapy to students with underlying language disorders and for other support personnel to teach literacy skills.

Priorities and foundations

The first sphere of influence for administrators is personal: They must be very clear in their own minds and in the examples they set that high–quality instruction and schoolwide improvement are their top priorities. It is fashionable for school administrators to proclaim that instruction is their top priority, but if their actions don’t match their words, school improvement efforts will likely falter.

“You’re starting a really significant school reform effort, and you have to make time for CLC™, make it a priority,” says Ken Geisick, principal of Riverbank High School in Riverbank, Calif., and a veteran CLC™ administrator who strongly believes in the power of CLC™ and SIM™ to change instruction for the better. “This isn’t managing a program. This is true instructional leadership, where you’re changing teacher behavior and administrators also change the way they do business.”

At Riverbank, Ken has demonstrated his commitment to a successful initiative through a thoughtful, systematic approach to introducing CLC™ to his staff. He laid the foundation by first bringing the entire administrative team on board. He and SIM™ Professional Developer Peggy Graving–Reyes organized several CLC™ professional development days for administrators starting the May before launching CLC™ schoolwide in August.

“It was important that the administrators had that time to wrap their heads around what was being trained,” Ken says.

The administrative team worked toward creating a common vision for the school, defining their expectations for the two to four years they would be working with the external CLC™ professional development team, and learning a common language.

“When you get into SIM™ and CLC™, there’s so much vocabulary that’s foreign to people,” says Ken, noting that repeated sessions with the CLC™ professional development team helped administrators acquire the language they needed to discuss and support the initiative.

“I’ve been working on it for four or five years. Finally last year, it sort of jelled and I really get it. I can talk about it, and I sort of am fluent in it,” he says.

Ken and his vice principals continue to build their knowledge of SIM™ and CLC™ and demonstrate their commitment to the change process by attending workshops alongside teachers, a highly visible difference from the days when administrators handled paperwork in their offices while teachers attended in–service sessions.

“It never struck me as odd at the time, but now I couldn’t imagine not being a part of those trainings,” he says.

Attending the workshops gives him the knowledge he needs to support teachers as they implement new teaching methods, even though he may not be expert enough to teach a specific intervention to students.

“I know the strategies and routines fairly well,” he says. “I still would be hard pressed to teach DISSECT, but I know why we do it. It’s OK that I don’t know how to teach it.”

Day–to–Day Action

In the second sphere of influence, administrators determine how their commitment to instruction is reflected in day–to–day activities. The complexity of schools mean many legitimate, competing interests can distract and capture an administrator’s attention. Riverbank administrators and faculty have developed tools to refocus meetings on literacy instruction and adopted SIM™ methods such as modeling in faculty meetings to keep SIM™ and CLC™ at the forefront. Department chair meetings, literacy team meetings, and faculty meetings follow agendas topped by specific literacy items. Reformed faculty meetings devote 40 of their 55 minutes to discussions of CLC™, literacy, and what’s happening in classrooms.

Administrators don’t just talk the talk at Riverbank. They seize opportunities to model use of SIM™ interventions when they arise. They have developed a Course Organizer specifying eight to 10 essential questions related to the school’s planned work scope for the year, and they revisit it during each faculty meeting. In this way, they subtly reinforce the idea of yearlong use of the Course Organizers teachers develop for their own courses.

Organizational Structures

A third sphere of influence for administrators is to ensure that the school’s organizational structures facilitate the instructional mission. Rather than grasping new structural ideas–such as block scheduling or small learning communities–and then altering instruction to accommodate them, administrators must first understand student needs. Once these instructional needs are identified, the school can build the structures needed to support them.

The struggling student who needs extra support at the beginning of the year, for example, may be capable of joining a grade–level class at mid–semester once she or he masters the prerequisite skills. Administrators can encourage flexibility in scheduling to allow such movement among classes. They also can creatively build time into teachers’ schedules to allow joint planning and collaboration.

Riverbank’s collaborative approach in its CLC™ initiative begins with a site literacy team, which Ken views as vital to the school’s long–term success.

“It’s starting to change the culture of the campus, so that when I leave and my VPs leave and the CLC™ team leaves, everything will still run,” he says. “It will change, it will morph, but it will certainly still be there.”

The site literacy team evaluates professional development sessions, looks at student work, and makes determinations in conjunction with the CLC™ professional development team about what the school should do next.

Another structure that is critical to bringing about sustainable changes in the culture of the school is the identification and nurturing of teachers who have the potential to become on–site professional developers. Four Riverbank teachers began the process of becoming certified SIM™ professional developers last summer. In time, they will be the on–site experts in SIM™ and CLC™, providing immediate coaching and trouble shooting that will continue long after the CLC™ professional development team leaves.

A system of data collection is another organizational structure that informs instructional decision making at Riverbank. Teachers are expected to collect data on all students. Administrators periodically pull in students representative of all performance levels to hear their perspectives about classroom instruction, then report their qualitative findings to faculty and the site literacy team. During one three–week period, administrators dropped in during 80 class periods and recorded the instructional methods and interventions they observed. They saw a lot of teachers using Frames, for example, and some using Course Organizers, but fewer using Concept Diagrams. These observations helped determine what SIM™ refresher sessions might be beneficial to encourage increased use of interventions.

Effective Professional Development

A fourth sphere of influence involves ensuring that precious professional development dollars are spent wisely: making sure all workshops and in–service programs are aligned with the school’s vision and instructional goals, arranging for coordinated and coherent staff development programs, and building in an accountability system that ties the professional development investment to student outcomes.

“The one thing I like so much about the CLC™ is it’s such a great decision–making lens for administrators,” says Ken. “What CLC™ does for administrators is it puts out the decision–making process for everybody.”

Decisions about sending teachers to workshops or conferences are based on how the proposed topic or new skill fits within the CLC™ framework, whether it complements or competes with current initiatives, and whether it supports key instructional goals.

Conclusion

Routinely reviewing these spheres of influence and evaluating how administrative actions and activities support the school’s goals will help ensure that instruction really is central. Instruction, after all, gets to the very core of what we, as educators, are all about. As the instructional leaders in a school, administrators who keep all eyes focused on the importance of these issues nurture the kinds of long–lasting school improvements that will benefit all students.

Julie Tollefson and Don Deshler
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol.19 No.1
Published: October 2006