Walking the Talk

by John Norton and the Focused Reporting Project team

Upbeat talk from a school administrator about reform and improvement doesn't really soothe the doubting mind -- not like the testimony of a satisfied customer.

With Chris Dominguez, you get both.

Dominguez sits at the juncture of school change in Long Beach Unified. She's the assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum, instruction, and teacher improvement. Several times a week she meets area superintendents and her counterpart in research and testing to help plot the course of standards-based school reform.

Her upbeat report: "I see more and more examples of teachers who are committing themselves to do whatever it takes for kids to learn."

And her consumer testimonial: "I brought both my daughters into Long Beach schools this year. I said to myself, 'I've got to walk the talk.' I'll have to admit I was a little nervous. But the instructional program they are getting here is as good and in some cases better than what they were getting in Orange County."

One of Dominguez's daughters attends Stanford Middle School-recently singled out by Time magazine as a national leader in urban education. While Stanford may be further along in its reforms than some other district middle schools, the difference is mostly one of degree, she says.

"What I'm finding is that if a child is having difficulty, as my daughter is in algebra, the teachers are ready to take action. That's a change in paradigm that we didn't have five years ago."

Hard work paying off

We've heard similar stories at middle schools across the school system-at Washington and Rogers, Hill and Hamilton. While it's far too early to say that all schools and classrooms have been transformed into places where every child is challenged to learn, the district's progress over the past two or three years does set it apart from many other urban systems that have been waving the banner of school reform in the 1990s.

The Focused Reporting Project has followed the progress of LBUSD middle school reform since 1994, when we first visited classrooms and interviewed principals, teachers, parents and administrators. Although district leaders expressed confidence in those early days that all students could achieve at higher levels, many front-line educators were openly skeptical.

"We can't work any harder or do any more for these kids," some said. "There's not enough time. There's not enough parent support. What else can we do?"

Over the next two years the district searched for answers and for ways to convince teachers that learning could improve. Much of the impetus for change was fueled by actions in the middle schools, where seed money from outside foundations bought teachers some of the time and help they needed to explore fresh ideas about teaching and learning.

The district reexamined its approach to professional development and began investing more dollars in substantive programs. The "one-shot" workshops began to give way to summer seminars. Teachers took more of what they were learning off-campus back into their classrooms where they experimented with new techniques and brainstormed about the results with other teachers and outside experts. District and area curriculum leaders and teachers on special assignment began to spend more time in direct contact with individual teachers, helping them improve classroom practice.

By the 1995-1996 school year, the circle of reformers was growing, extending outside the confines of the central office. The discussion began to revolve around standards -- and the idea that the pursuit of high standards in behavior and academic performance could be a powerful enough engine to break loose from the inertia of business-as-usual thinking and low expectations.

The discussions, and a timely grant from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, sparked a two-year campaign to create and refine academic content standards-a difficult process of consensus-building that eventually involved teacher design teams, administrators, community members, and national experts.

The subsequent effort to move the standards from paper to classroom practice has forced LBUSD leaders to rethink every phase of district and area operations-teacher hiring, new teacher support, testing and assessment practices, programs for second-language and special education students, and-most important of all-the way the school system helps teachers be-gin to "think outside the box" of traditional classroom practice.

Leadership changes have been key

During this period of creative foment, key administrative changes have also helped propel the reform movement. Supt. Carl Cohn has made instructional leadership a higher priority when selecting principals. He attracted a top-tier assessment expert to head research and testing. He filled two area superintendency vacancies with strong instructional leaders.

Cohn's most significant move may have been the selection and promotion of Dominguez, who has become a driving force behind the reform movement. "She has just been outstanding in pulling all of this together," he says.

Cohn remains modest about his own contributions to reform-although he (with the support of a gutsy school board) is generally given credit for pushing controversial measures like the district uniform policy and programs to rein in social promotion.

"What I like to hear is people who leave our district talking about how outstanding the people are at the level below the superintendent," he says. "There's a lot of good feeling about that. And the other thing they will say is that our leadership group works so well together."

In a 90,000-student school system-with all the bureaucracy and communications issues that can entail-the importance of teamwork at the top can hardly be overestimated. When the FRP team first began working in Long Beach Unified, middle school reform efforts were frequently stymied by a fractured management system in which the district's three area superintendencies operated more or less as separate fiefdoms. Communication up-and-down and across area lines of authority was sporadic at best, and districtwide reform initiatives often faltered as a result.

But while some reformers still complain privately about the time and energy required to maintain strong area-to-area communications, most observers agree that Cohn's current leadership team has united around the goals of standards-based reform and is less turf-conscious and more likely to share good ideas and coordinate strategies for improvement.

After a visit to LBUSD middle schools last fall, a team of independent evaluators hired by the Clark Foundation wrote: "More than ever before, we observed a unity and shared sense of purpose between the district and area offices, among the areas themselves, and between the area offices and the schools in our sample."

Headed for "kitchen table talk"

Standards-based school reform is headed toward what Superintendent Cohn likes to call "kitchen table talk." The school district's area support offices "are more proactive and more 'hands-on' with regard to standards implementation in the middle schools," the outside evaluators wrote.

And while parents, for the most part, are still in the dark about the big picture of standards-based reform, some of the particulars are becoming a part of mealtime conversation.

"I hear it from my sixth and eighth grader at the dinner table," Cohn says, "when they come home and start that sibling rivalry, about who can get a 5 on a rubric and who once got a 6." (Rubrics, of course, are an important feature of a standards-based classroom, where students are told in advance what the standard is and what they must do to achieve it.)

"This stuff is really starting to take hold when kids have it as part of their everyday conversation," Cohn says. "Parents are getting used to hearing about rubrics and new ways of talking about the quality of work that students are doing."

As more and more principals and teachers get on-board the reform bus, says outside evaluator Barbara Berns, the conversations in schools are turning to issues of how standards can become a part of everyday classroom instruction. Principals, she says, "are clearer about their own responsibilities for helping teachers with instructional strategies and curriculum that will put the content standards into action."

Her findings match the observations of the Focused Reporting Project team. In a few schools, teachers and administrators are having "advanced" discussions about building standards into everything they teach. Many other middle schools are at earlier stages of readiness.

Paul Jenkins, the history department head at Rogers Middle School, could be speaking for many teacher and schools when he traces the impact of standards from the time a few years ago when they were first shared with teachers as wall charts:

"In the beginning, the standards made nice wallpaper. At this point, the standards have helped us find the gaping holes in our curriculum and plug those up with different assignments and different techniques. So I think we're a little beyond the wallpaper stage, but so far as saying every lesson is tied to standards, we're not there yet."

Implementing the standards

Teams of teachers, led by central office staff, have worked all year to develop performance tasks for students that can help teachers decide whether the kids have met a standard. Examples of student work that do meet the standard are being selected and shared with larger groups of teachers. This kind of effort can trigger deeper discussion and thinking among teachers who must ask "what does work look like that meets a high standard? Do my students do this kind of work? What else can I do as a teacher to get them to this level of achievement?"

Professional development is the best way to cultivate these kinds of conversations.

Four years ago, the district's professional development "pink book" offered a cafeteria selection of continuing education courses. Teachers could choose what they pleased, for the most part. Since few of the offerings were tied to the district's long-range improvement plan, there was little hope that the district could orchestrate significant changes in teacher practice.

The professional development catalog evolved over time to include meatier offerings. Programs like Writing to Learn and the National Faculty had the power to help teachers think more deeply about effective teaching. But teachers were still under no obligation to choose them as part of their required in-service hours. Teachers who did take these courses frequently emerged as leaders in classroom innovation and often found themselves offered coaching and mentoring opportunities by the district.

This school year, Long Beach Unified took a bold step -- one that Dominguez and the area superintendents agreed must happen if standards-based reform is going to become business-as-usual in every school.

Every middle grades teacher of language arts, math, history, and science will be required to participate in a series of standards-based institutes specific to their discipline.

Teachers can choose to attend the institutes in the summer-for extra pay-or on release time during the school year. Dominguez estimates it will take two years to get all teachers through a particular institute, and teachers at the lowest-performing middle schools will have priority.

Each institute will focus on one or two content standards, she says. Teachers will learn how to design instructional strategies for students' different learning styles, and they'll learn how to create classroom assessments that let them know how students are progressing towards the standards. They'll also study the content they teach in more depth.

"When the teachers go back to their classrooms, they will actually have a unit that they can use to teach the standard they've been examining," Dominguez says. "They're required to implement the lesson unit with the help of department heads, and we'll keep a database on every teacher that goes through the institutes, so we'll have information about their progress."

To support the department heads, the district is adding nearly a dozen expert teachers to its area coaching staffs-each teacher will be a content specialist who has used standards-based instruction successfully in the classroom.

Pilot math institutes "have been very popular," Dominguez says. "Once we get the teachers in for the first institute, they want to sign up immediately for the next one. But we're trying to have them focus on one institute a year, rather than take all of them, because they can get overwhelmed."
"All this reform work-it requires so much time of teachers, talking about what kids are doing, and getting out of their classrooms, sharing work," says Dominguez. "That's not comfortable if they're not used to doing it. And not only sharing the work, but sharing the assignments that generated the work. That adds another level of anxiety. But it's so important for teachers to look more deeply into their work and ask, 'What am I doing as a teacher?'"

This comprehensive approach to professional development is rare in any district-and especially rare in large urban systems. LBUSD leaders believe the strategy can leapfrog the district forward by quickly developing a critical mass of teachers who not only understand how standards-based instruction can raise achievement, but are actually practicing the approach under the system's watchful eye.

Bringing new teachers on board

LBUSD has hired nearly 1000 teachers in the last two years, and 80 percent of them are first-year. "In the past," says Dominguez, "the new teacher support program we had was not uniform across the district so there wasn't a common foundation that everybody got. It was haphazard. Some new teachers got the support and some did not."

School reform would never take root, Dominguez says, if large numbers of teachers regularly entered the system without much awareness of the reform agenda or much training in the basics of standards-based teaching. Drawing money from "nine different pots," Dominguez and her colleagues have fashioned a $1.2 million induction program for new teachers.

An experienced teacher-coach -- who goes through a week of training "in how to support the range of needs and feelings new teachers go through"-- works with no more than two new teachers on a weekly basis and submits a progress log to the principal. For every six new teachers at a school, the district designates a coordinator trained in assessment who works with the new teacher and the coach.

Principals, coordinators and coaches are providing feedback about the new program, and improvements-like requiring all new teachers to attend orientation training before school opens-will continue to be made, Dominguez says.

One responsibility of new-teacher coaches, Dominguez adds, is to make sure incoming teachers understand the district's standards-based approach to teaching. But exposing inexperienced teachers to the subtleties of content standards and performance assessments while they're learning the basics of classroom management and lesson planning can be daunting-and some coaches admit the former often gives way to the latter.

One way to bolster the effort is to intervene earlier in the teacher candidate's training program. Three years ago, LBUSD had an arms-length relationship with teacher training programs at Cal State-Long Beach and Cal State-Dominguez Hills. Today, LBUSD confers regularly with the CSULB school of education-the district's largest supplier of new teachers- about its expectations for new teachers. And the district's curriculum leaders frequently teach classes at both campuses.

Sharpening the skills of principals

Schoolwide reforms are impossible without strong principal leadership. In the past Long Beach Unified left principal professional development up to area superintendents and there was often minimal coordination across area lines. The training seldom focused on standards-based reform, and many principals admit they had a fuzzy understanding of its inner workings.

Last summer, a five-day institute for middle grades principals marked a turning point in the district's approach. In the fall, a national expert conducted a one-day workshop on supervising a standards-based school-and the reaction was so enthusiastic the district agreed to sign a two-year contract to continue her work with principals.

As a result of training and conversations over the last year, says Area B superintendent Karen DeVries, "Our principals are talking about what a teacher actually does when they're seeking to understand student (performance)-what does it look like when a teacher does that?

"We've never talked about that before. And if a teacher is good at working with students and has a good classroom atmosphere, what are students doing in these strong classrooms? As we learn to answer these questions, we get better at evaluating teachers."

Hamilton Middle School principal Cynthia Terry says the district's new emphasis on principal leadership in standards-based reform is filling a real need for her. "As our teachers begin to attend these standards institutes, it will be very important for principals to understand just what we should expect to happen back in our buildings-and how to support those changes."

Terry hopes the district will also train assistant principals and other school staff who supervise teachers. "They're the people I rely on to move my school forward," she says. "The understanding has to be infused throughout my entire administrative staff if we're going to really change things."

Superintendent Carl Cohn acknowledges that rapid principal turnover in the district's middle schools has retarded improvements in the past. As the emphasis on principal leadership development increases, Cohn says he's willing to "take the pledge" and leave good principals in place for longer periods of time.

"I'm sitting here saying that and then in June somebody's going to walk in and say, you know there's a vacancy at so-and-so high school, and this is what we need to do," he told us in January. "But I'm determined that we're going to say no. If there is anything these middle schools need, it is sustained outstanding leadership that can stay five to seven years."

Changing the metaphor

Most school reforms fail because teachers adopt the jargon and structure of reform but not the heart. Teachers don't bear all of the blame for this-like the rest of us, when faced with a truly daunting task, they cling to what they know.

In her new book, Teaching for Achievement in Urban Middle Schools, Beverly Bimes-Michalak warns that it's easy to go through the motions of standards-based reform and fail to make the changes in teaching practice that can help all kids achieve at higher levels. Michalak, whose work as a consultant in Long Beach Unified has been crucial in establishing a core of highly skilled, standards-based classroom teachers, writes: "As teachers seek to implement standards, two different instructional approaches are emerging." One, she says, is the "boxcar approach," where teachers move from standard to standard, matching them to current lessons and activities.

At the end of a year or semester, the teacher could quite honestly boast that all of the standards were covered. However, the instruction is hopelessly fragmented and students leave more confused than ever, not understanding how to connect any of this knowledge....

A more preferable approach to standards' implementation is a concentric circle approach. In this approach, standards are at the core of all instruction; they have their birth in the planning of instructional units and the framework for authentic instruction. This approach is somewhat like throwing a pebble or stone in water...the circles get bigger and bigger, eventually encompassing a whole section....the standards are placed in the center, and all learning radiates from them-encompassing all we do in the classroom.

I have a great optimism for urban schools. If standards are truly adopted and become the basis of all learning, the dream of all students learning can become a reality. No longer will good instruction be the exception; it will be the expectation for all classrooms. Good teachers will no longer feel isolated, for schools will have a common thrust... administrators and teachers will have the responsibility of assuring that schools are, first and above all, places to learn....students will understand that they, too, must take the responsibility for their learning....parents will have to become vigilant of their children's progress, letting them know that they are expected to learn and achieve.