(Vol. 2, No. 1 - Fall 1997)

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LBUSD's full-time middle school reformer
talks about standards and student achievement

"Before standards, it was always "we're doing Greece," or "we're doing Egypt." There was always a map, there was always geography; there were all the bits and pieces about pharaohs and mummies. But the missing piece always was: what is most important for students to learn from this study of ancient civilizations? What's the bottom line?"
by John Norton

Ask Kristi Kahl's friends and colleagues to mention two of her personality traits, and you're likely to hear the words "frankness" and "intensity" a lot.

Both characteristics are illustrated by this story the LBUSD middle school reform coordinator tells on herself.

"It was my first day of teaching. I was supposed to go into an elementary school but I'd been assigned to a middle school at the last minute. I didn't even have any students yet, but I was so scared and nervous, I was throwing-up sick. I spent the whole first day of school lying down in the nurse's office.

"The principal came and talked to me, and I could tell he felt really sorry for me. He must have been thinking, 'Oh, no, she's never going to make it!' "

Fortunately, Kahl says, "He later told me that he saw something in me. He could tell I was enthusiastic and wanted to learn. So the second week of school I found myself in a sixth grade classroom, and I stayed there for four years."

Her first principal had Kahl pegged. She began her teaching career in 1990; by 1993 she was also coaching in LBUSD's mentor teacher program, working on her school's site decision-making council, serving on a districtwide middle school reform committee, and spending her summers facilitating a world history institute for teachers. She earned her master's degree in 1994 and immediately began work on a doctorate in educational leadership, spending every other weekend in classes at USC. Last spring, six months before her 30th birthday, she completed her dissertation on "Principals' Criteria for Quality Classroom Instruction" and became "Dr. Kahl."

It was Kahl's work on the Middle School Advisory Committee and her editorship of the district's "Middle Matters" newsletter that ultimately brought her to the attention of Superintendent Carl Cohn in 1995. When Linda Moore, a "principal-on-special-assignment," decided to accept the top post at Rogers Middle School, Cohn pulled Kahl out of the classroom to become his second "administrative assistant for middle school reform."

Cohn's decision raised a few eyebrows. Some wondered whether the youthful Kahl, with only five years' teaching and no administrative experience, was the best person to help Cohn push forward the district's ambitious reform agenda for middle schools. But Kahl's reform "track record" was impressive. In her first school, she and a team of other first-year teachers tackled the California frameworks a year before they had to. "We worked without a textbook, putting together lessons based on the frameworks, and we worked all the time. We learned a lot, including a lot about what we needed to know to be good teachers."

Kahl, a college English major, was also expected to teach 6th grade history, and her first-year struggle led her to the South Bay World History Project. After a summer as students, Kahl and her colleague Wendy Hayes urged the program's directors to help teachers find ways to use the in-depth history they were learning in middle grades classrooms. "Why don't you do it?" came the response, and Kahl and Hayes spent the next several summers as "teacher facilitators," helping develop hands-on lessons and activities to go with the high-level content.

All of these experiences, Kahl says, made her transition from teacher to administrator a little smoother. "As green as I was in the administrative world, I wasn't green as a teacher.I was very self-confident as a teacher. I really had a passion for teaching and a passion for middle school, and I had done a lot of studying about reform." Although she admits to "a few teethmarks" over the last two years as she's learned her way around the district bureaucracy, "you come out of it stronger, and you learn. The support around here is incredible; everybody is really approachable, and nobody has ever made me feel that I can't go and just ask a question or tell them what I think."

Kahl is responsible for the day-to-day implementation of Long Beach Unified's middle grades reform. The agenda - to help students reach a challenging achievement goal by 2001 - is supported by grants from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and Kahl spends much of her time sheparding those funds, working with teachers, principals and district leaders to improve teaching and learning, and helping the public understand what the district's commitment to "standards-based reform" really means.

It was on this last point that our interview began:

When you meet with parents and other people in the community, how do you explain "standards-based reform?" What are the Long Beach Unified middle schools doing differently?

It's a challenge, to put all these ideas into plain language. The way I explained it to parents at the Parent Institute last spring was to ask them to recall their own memories of going to junior high school. I asked them how many remembered going from page 1 to page 250 of a textbook, answering the questions at the end of each chapter, and taking the tests at certain points along the way. For most of them, that's what they were expected to do from the beginning to the end of the year.

We're making the decision in Long Beach not to base what we want students to know and be able to do just on the textbook. We have spent a lot of time deciding what's really important for students to know, and those decisions are represented in our district academic standards. The textbook is no longer the driving force of instruction; the standards are the driving force. The textbook becomes one of several resources the teacher uses to help the students learn the knowledge and skills that the standards represent.

That is a shift in our way of thinking about school. It doesn't mean that we throw the textbooks out. Teachers need them; kids use them; it gives them a tool to work with at home so that parents can help them with homework. Textbooks are still important, but we're no longer expecting a textbook publisher to define everything we should teach and learn in Long Beach Unified.

How is teaching different when you rely on standards to guide you?

When we wrote the standards, we involved not only educators but business community members, higher education representatives, parents and other community people. Our standards really represent what our community thinks is important for kids to learn. Sometimes that conflicts with what a textbook publisher in Texas decides needs to happen.

Here's an example. I'm very familiar with one of our textbooks, "A Message of Ancient Days," which was the 6th grade textbook. When I was teaching, my main tool was that textbook, and then I had my activities. I found myself rushing through this large, detailed textbook, trying to cover everything in it. The textbook doesn't tell you what's most important to teach, and many teachers feel like they have to cover it all -- or as much as they can. We used to call it the "civilization of the month" method of teaching.

If I had had the standards, I would have had a way to make some choices that might have narrowed the breadth of what I was teaching but would certainly have added depth. The standards would tell me what's most important; I would have started with the major civilizations and then explored the natural connections between the standards and some of the major civilizations.

Give us a specific example of how teaching might have looked before and after standards.

Before standards, it was always "we're doing Greece," or "we're doing Egypt." There was always a map, there was always geography; there were all the bits and pieces about pharaohs and mummies and so forth. But the missing piece always was, what is most important for our students to learn from this study of ancient civilizations? What's the bottom line?

If I've finished with Egypt and the students can tell me what the double-crown means; if they can tell me that hieroglyphics was the Egyptian form of writing; if they can name the gods and goddesses, is that the important part? As a teacher, without standards, I don't know. If you look at the test that the textbook publisher gives you, it focuses on little bits of knowledge like this. That's okay, as far as it goes, because you have to focus on bits of knowledge sometimes. But I think those little bits have to add up to something bigger -- to a larger understanding of something. And that's where the standards come into play.

Let's take a specific history standard and dig into what you're saying a little deeper. Here's a standard that says "students will understand the roots of democracy."

In the old textbook approach to teaching, students would have studied ancient Greece as a "civilization of the month," and they would learn a lot of facts about ancient Greek civilization, including the fact that it is the birthplace of democracy. But this standard moves teachers and students beyond a particular country or civilization to a larger concept that begins to help students make sense of history as something more than just a lot of facts.

Once a teacher begins to plan teaching around a standard like this, it affects everything. For example, when you're studying civilizations that don't have democracies, you can help your students begin thinking about what conditions are required for democracies to emerge. What was it about the Greeks that made democracy flourish? And what impact did democracy have on the ancient world? What happened when the Greeks met others along the Silk Road? How did the ideas of democracy spread? One of the problems, of course, is that the standards are necessarily broad because they represent concepts not just facts. And that can really frustrate teachers. But there are benchmarks and curriculum objectives that help break down the standards into more manageable pieces -- they say more specifically what is most important to teach.

Most of us memorized lots of facts when we studied history in school. Are you saying facts aren't as important in today's classroom?

Facts are just as important as they ever were. We're not saying do away with the learning of facts. But there are millions of facts -- how do you figure out which ones kids really need to know?

I used to give my kids mapping activities, where they would have to memorize certain points on a map. I would give them a blank map and they would have to fill in certain cities or countries from memory. I was testing a discrete bit of their geographical knowledge. I was having them do like 20 points on the map. If I were to try to take that test today, I probably couldn't name many of those ancient cities. They were just names kids were memorizing and putting on the test, and they didn't connect to anything.

But suppose I had been teaching with our history standard in mind that says students will "gain an understanding of the effects of climate and natural forces on the environment." I'm not saying we didn't talk some about that, but there are only so many hours in a day, and if the kids are spending their time labeling the map and memorizing it for the test, and then forgetting it the next day, I've wasted time that could have been spent on deepening their understanding.

One of my most devastating moments as a teacher was the last day of school one year. I was wearing a brand-new t-shirt I had just bought. I was so excited to be wearing a new t-shirt with a statue of Buddha on the front. We had studied Buddhism in March, I guess, and now it was June. One of my students came up and said, "Oh, Ms. Kahl, that's...that's...that's the Sphinx!" And I felt so deflated -- like I had failed completely. My sixth grade student couldn't even identify Buddha. "Come on. Think!" I said. "What does this represent?" and I went through the whole lesson again about how to recognize Buddha. But it wasn't there -- it had completely flown out of the child's mind. And that's because I was trying to teach all these little bits of things, not connected to a larger, more important idea. It was devastating. I probably "did" Buddhism in a day and a half and moved on to the next topic. Did they learn anything? If I had had a standard to guide me, I would have had a clear idea what I expected them to learn. And I would have been able to assess what they knew before we moved on.

How do standards change the way teachers test and assess students in their classrooms?

Ideally, once you build your teaching around the academic standards, you are able to take the next step and devise types of assignments that can be used to tell whether students are making progress towards standards.

I think that's the hardest part for teachers. We aren't typically trained in how to design assessment. In our courses in college, we're taught how to deliver instruction, how to create activities, how to write units, how to have objectives. But the piece that was consistently missing from my preparation was really assessing whether or not the kids are getting it. That's an area we're trying to move toward now in this district, with a lot of our professional development. Whether the kids are getting it, if not why not, and what do you do about those who are and are not and still march through your year of teaching. It's a huge job.

How is this kind of assessment different from what most of us did in school?

I think the difference with standards is that, first of all, it's not a "mystery test." In the mystery test model, the kids make note cards and try to memorize every fact they can -- many of us have done this in college -- so that when the test comes, you've got all these factoids and you can pull them out of your head. Sometimes we want to test their knowledge of facts; that's never going to go away. There's a place for the end-of-unit test that's heavy on factual knowledge.

However, part of the whole idea behind standards is that you let the students know up front what they are expected to learn. And it's not "I'm expecting you to learn all of ancient Egyptian history in four weeks and feed some of that back to me on a test." Instead, it's that we are going to focus on historical perspective and cultural anthropology. Here are the benchmarks you are expected to meet. Then when it's appropriate, I can assess how well they are meeting the benchmarks, using one of the many kinds of performance assessment -- maybe it's a written test, maybe it's an essay, maybe it's a project, maybe it's an oral presentation, maybe it's a combination of those things.

I've laid out the criteria for them ahead of time. I've said at the beginning, "this is what you will need to know and be able to do." And by the time the students do the performance assessment, they should pretty well know what their grade is going to be, because you have told them what's expected. And teachers can use scoring guides and other kinds of descriptions to lay out very clearly how their work will be graded. It shouldn't be a mystery. In some cases, it still is, but that's usually a communications issue.

So the Long Beach Unified schools want to reach the point where they're constantly assessing what students know in the classroom?

That's the heart of all of this. I am not saying that right now we expect teachers to be able to say, for certain, that a student is meeting the standard of "understanding political systems," for example. That wouldn't be fair at this stage in our implementation of standards. Systemwide we haven't entirely defined the answer to that question. We won't be able to do that until we have set performance levels for each standard. We're well on our way to having these "performance standards" but it will take time for teachers to learn to use all of this effectively in their everyday teaching.

But the teachers are at a point where they can say, according to a set of criteria they have established based on the standards, "this is how my students are progressing." They are not necessarily saying the student has accomplished everything we might eventually expect -- that's what the performance standards will tell us -- but they can at least say whether students have learned what the teacher expected them to learn, based on the teacher's own lesson design and the criteria she or he gave to the students at the beginning of the lesson or unit.

Parents can probably understand this best if they think back to a time when they have gotten a paper back with a "C-plus" grade, and they have no idea why they got that grade or what they needed to do to get a "B" or an "A". We want every teacher to reach the stage where they are telling their students exactly what they have to learn and do to earn a certain grade.

Once teachers begin to do this kind of classroom testing and assessment, doesn't it begin to feed back into the way teachers and students do their work?

Absolutely. What is really going to be changing as a result of standards are the things we ask kids to do. Instead of labeling the map with all the different dots and memorizing all the obscure cities of the ancient world, maybe I'm going to pick out the five most important dots and take it to the next level. I'll have the kids develop a deeper understanding of how those five cities got where they were, and how they affected the history of that region. So what the kids are doing is actually different. And because we expect them to learn more deeply, we have to assess them at a deeper level. We can't only give them a ditto test and tell whether they're coming close to meeting a standard. We have to ask them to demonstrate their knowledge and skills on assessments that require them to really assemble what they know.

What's the hardest thing about trying to shift to standards-based teaching and learning?

If I put on my teacher hat for a moment, it's overwhelming to be given all these standards and told you're teaching to them, and that you have to really rethink the whole way you approach your school year, and really, your whole job.

I read somewhere that the problem with education reform is that when something new comes along and we tell teachers "this is good," the inherent message seems to be that what they were doing before was bad. So when something new comes along, some teachers get in a defensive mode, saying something like, "you mean to tell me I've been teaching wrong all these years?"

The message we want to get out is that we can try to do our work better without rejecting what we've done before. It just means that we've learned some new ways of doing things that can help more of our kids get closer to where they need to be.

We're asking teachers to re-examine all of their favorite activities and ask tough questions about them. Is drawing the Egyptian gods and goddesses on a poster and writing their names in hieroglyphics, which takes three days as a project, going to get the kids to one of these standards? And if it isn't, then it either needs to be dropped or it needs to be retooled.

In defense of teachers, some teachers will say, "Well, that's just one thing my students are doing -- we're doing all these other things, too." I think the hard part is accepting that when you're working with a lot of kids that are not at grade level or are not performing where they should be, you have to start asking yourself really painful questions. Every single minute counts, and you have to ask: "Do I have the luxury of spending three days on something that makes my classroom look pretty, but yet doesn't give the students the opportunity to learn or demonstrate that they've learned something really important?" That's the hardest thing we're asking teachers to do. There will be times when we make a decision to do something that's fun or traditional but not really important. But we can't afford too many.

Do you feel encouraged about reform? Can you see positive changes in the quality of teaching and learning over the last three or four years?

We are moving toward a time when teachers routinely work through a cycle that involves them looking at the standards, planning their lessons around the standards, looking at the quality of the student work based on the performance standards, and then examining the teaching that took place to determine how effective it was. We have taken a lot of steps in the last several years in this direction.

One thing that's changed completely is the kind of conversations teachers are having with each other. In the past, we didn't talk much about our teaching with one another. We talked about students and the business of running the school, but we didn't talk very often about what it means to teach well. As teachers look at the standards, I think they soon realize they have to begin to talk among themselves in new and different ways.

How is professional development for teachers changing?

More and more of our professional development is aimed at helping teachers really begin to think about student work differently. I can honestly tell you that as a teacher there were times when I gave an assignment and until I got the assignment back and began to look at the students' papers, I had no idea what I was expecting or wanting from them. I was figuring out what I wanted after I got the work from my students.

That doesn't sound like the best way to go about teaching, and it isn't, but that was what I knew how to do. I knew how to come up with a writing assignment -- maybe we just read a novel and I'm going to ask you to compare and contrast the lead character from this novel with another lead character. And I might say something like "make sure you include an introductory paragraph, and a concluding paragraph -- and use proper English." So I get these papers back, and I know kind of vaguely what I'm looking for -- compare and contrast -- and I look at a paper and say, "Oh, this kid got it; she described the character's important traits in the way I wanted." But I was just lucky, or she was just lucky, because I hadn't really told my students what I expected -- what was good enough. What I should have done was create a guide for them that told them the components of a good character analysis, how to cite different personality traits and use examples from the text, how to use vivid and exact language.

What's happening now is that more and more teachers are having these conversations among themselves. They're meeting together and putting their lesson plans and examples of their students' work on the table. They're asking each other hard questions about the work and how to make it better. (See the story about Hoover Middle School's history teachers on page 6.)

I worked very seldom individually as a teacher. My style was to work with my team -- people from the same content area as well as my team partner for my grade level. I think if you try to do this by yourself as a teacher, you're going to be very frustrated. I think what you need to do is work in a group, doing some things cooperatively and some things collaboratively, where you each take a piece and try it and come back to the group to report on what happened. That's what I did with my partners. And that's what we're seeing more and more in our schools. Accepting responsibility for improving as a team -- as a school -- not just as an individual.

Do you see the idea of what a middle school is changing in the district?

I do. Like most school systems that went from junior high to middle school, the first thing we did was to focus on the structure of the reform. The tendency was to emphasize the special components of the middle school -- the teaming and the different scheduling, the student advisory program and intramurals. And the understanding became that once you had all the pieces in place you were a "middle school."

But I think that what we eventually came to understand was that yes, those things are important in a middle school and need to be in place, because together they help create a place that's going to support good instruction for this age group of kids. But what was missing from all that was the focus on the classroom. I think everybody in our school district agrees now that the focus of the middle school has to be on achievement, at the classroom level, for every child. We can have teams and block scheduling and any number of things that "look" like a middle school, but if it doesn't effect what happens in the classroom on a daily basis with students, then you really haven't accomplished much.

Our reform is shifting from those kinds of structural changes to changes in curriculum and instruction, to student work and assessment. And everything we're talking about now is in that context. That's a major shift.

What's the hardest thing about school reform?

That's a difficult question. Well, no, it's not. I know the answer. The answer is time -- finding the time to make shifts in thinking and to do the actual work of change.

Changing people's thinking takes time; changing what you do on a daily basis takes time. We just never have enough time. Teachers are just so busy. They're asked to do more things now than ever. They're asked to serve on site-based decision-making committees. They're asked to serve on school improvement committees; they're asked to serve on parent involvement committees; they're asked to serve on district-wide committees; they're asked to become mentor teachers and help others; they're asked to teach classes on the weekends; they're asked to go back to school and get another credential. They are asked to do so many things, their time is spread too thin.

When we ask teachers to change what they do in the classroom every day, they need a whole bunch of time away from the classroom to work on that. But finding that time has been a struggle for everyone. I think we've done a pretty darn good job with it. Principals are giving up faculty meeting time that once would have been about administrative stuff and turning it into professional development time. We're seeing department meeting time being used more for collaboration around teaching. We're seeing teachers being given more release time. But still, it's time, time, time. Limited resources are also an issue, and they play into the time issue. With more resources, you can buy more time.

In Long Beach, it's not about attitude. I know that in some places, the biggest obstacle to change is people's attitudes. But that's not true here. We are very lucky. Our teachers are dedicated and hard-working and they really want what's best for kids. They just don't always have the time to make it happen the way they want it to happen.

Does that mean ultimately you will not achieve your achievement goals?

No. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that this is not going to happen overnight. And we knew that going into it. I don't think anybody ever expected that this would happen overnight. But I think that the changes that have taken place have just been unbelievable -- phenomenal in some cases. It's going to happen because we have our timelines and goals and people who are very focused on getting from point A to B to C. We have accountability. We have a superintendent who's focused on accountability and support for principals and teachers. So it's definitely going to happen.

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