(Vol. 2, No. 1 - Winter 1998)

Still Shaping Up

During the 1996-97 school year, JCPS middle school leaders recruited a handful of teachers from each middle school to help push forward the district's standards-based reforms. But while the experience has been mostly a good one for members of the "teacher cadre," their influence outside their own classrooms has been very limited.

by Anne C. Lewis

Modern ways so befuddled the tradition-bound king of Siam in "The King and I" that he scratched his head, furrowed his brow and sang "Tis a Puzzlement" while recounting all the things he didn't understand.

Teachers in Jefferson County's middle grades could sing about being puzzled with the same wonderment. They are under increasing pressure to align their teaching to state and local academic standards. They must reverse their instruction, learn how to set goals for student learning and then plan their teaching-rather than teach a unit and then test them to find out what, if anything, students have learned.

Abruptly taken out of their isolation because the state holds entire schools responsible for student progress, teachers must take responsibility for student learning together. That means opening up your own teaching and student work to scrutiny by your colleagues. In order to prepare students to meet the state's standards, teachers and principals need to know thoroughly what the standards mean and use classroom-based performance assessments to be sure their students move toward the state's performance goals (see p. 12 for an explanation of standards).

In the 12 middle schools assigned a Distinguished Educator because of inadequate student academic progress, teachers are expected to change at "fast-forward" speed, documenting everything they do, and often giving up their tradition-bound way of doing things because such instruction won't get their students to the levels where they need to be.

It is a puzzling time.

Schools need their own expertise to pull off such massive changes. Outside help for every school is out of the question for budget reasons, so last year the Jefferson County Public School system launched its own strategy to build expertise in every middle school. It created the "cadre teacher" program.

Principals selected two teachers from each school to receive special training and join a "teacher cadre" network that would help all middle-grades teachers learn to create performance assessments in their classrooms.

The cadre teachers were to design and model performance assessments for other teachers , become resources in their own schools, and help each other hone their efforts through a computer network.
Is the cadre teacher program having an effect on classroom teaching? Are teachers in the middle schools learning to use performance assessments to set goals for student learning? Is the cadre teacher system helping to create greater agreement among teachers as to what constitutes good student work?

Based on interviews with a number of cadre teachers, their principals and other teachers, the answer is: no, in all but a handful of schools.

Some schools have made progress

Some schools managed to show the potential of the cadre system in the first few months it was in effect. For example, until last spring, according to Meyzeek Principal Deborah Baker, "we focused on teaching kids to take the state tests better. This was our survival strategy, but after a time our scores fell, and it was at this point that we started talking about standards and changing teaching." Her cadre teachers-Margaret Lawrence (sixth-grade language arts) and Greta Heady (eighth-grade math)-designed a six-hour professional development day for Myzeek's teachers on performance assessments and standards-based planning.

Lawrence has aligned all of her own lessons with standards and has demonstrated her methods at a middle school principals' training session. Both teachers shared articles on standards and assessments with their peers and try to minimize teachers' fears about developing rubrics (guides that show students the standards for quality work). "Teachers have always sort of known what they wanted done by students, but they didn't have much experience defining it," says Heady.

At Carrithers Middle School, math teacher Sarah Brian and math and language arts teacher John DeBoe modeled their own performance assessments for the whole faculty, provided resources and helped other teachers with their first performance assessments, then led faculty discussions of the results. Cadre teachers at Noe, Jefferson and Johnson did similar activities.

Most of the cadre teachers presented examples of performance assessments at a one-day summer institute last June. Brian's presentation of an assessment required students to design a house to specifications and scale, then write a persuasive letter to prospective clients. DeBoe's assessment, "Drip, Drip," in which students had to solve a family's problem with a high water bill, demonstrated both math and persuasive writing skills.

An unexpected result of working with performance tasks occurred in both teachers' classrooms. They found performance assessments to be a way of engaging students usually turned off by academics. "I had students who were failing who really got into the architecture project," says Brian. "If I had assigned a text on using scales, they would never have done it, but because it was real-life, they became excited."

By using performance assessments as a final activity, DeBoe has found that they help students who are not doing well because they provide a focus and structure for students' efforts, making it possible for them to "feel more successful" than usual.

At Conway Middle School, teachers are coming to cadre teachers Vivian Seaton and Barbara Staples for help on creating the kind of "open response" questions that appear on KIRIS tests-and which DE's require all schools in "decline" to practice. "Helping teachers write questions for open responses gets us into conversations as to what is a good piece of student writing," says Staples. Part of every faculty meeting in Conway's three magnet units is spent on discussing open responses, rubrics and other aspects of performance assessments.

Still, Conway Principal Steve St. Clair acknowledges that his cadre teachers have not been used as much as intended because of the extra demands on teachers from the school's Distinguished Educator.

Low on the priority list

In most other middle schools, the cadre teacher effort became lost in the shuffle of conflicting priorities or faltered because the cadre teachers were as confused as everyone else. Their effectiveness has been uneven, according to Marcia Lile, the Clark Fellow who focuses on standards and assessments for middle school reform.

When the cadre teacher idea was begun last spring, principals probably did not understand its purpose as well as assumed. They chose cadre teachers for various reasons, not all of them based on the teachers' expertise or leadership. "It comes down to whether the person was ready to make a leadership move," says Lile, and "if the principal has the insight and capacity to use the cadre teachers effectively."

Since the cadre teachers were organized last February, 12 members of the network have been replaced. The replacements, Lile says, are more ready to take on the challenge.

Even so, although the capacity of the cadre teachers to change their own practice is evident in most schools, she believes, "we don't have evidence yet that this strategy is changing the practice of other teachers." she says.

Cadre member Curt Matter, a social studies teacher at Highland Middle School, caught on early to the purpose of performance assessments and has been one of the most committed cadre members. But even Matter can't be sure of the impact he's having. Building on lessons learned from his first attempt at a performance assessment-based on the flooding in Louisville last winter-Matter redesigned all his teaching units around performance assessments that relate to standards. He has also aligned the social studies curriculum at Highland to standards documents. He works with other teachers on performance assessments, but he can only "guess" they are using them from the displays of student work in the school library.

Why didn't the plan work better?

The goal of the cadre teacher plan when the school year began was for them to demonstrate performance assessments in their buildings and then help every teacher do the same. By late fall, this was happening only occasionally.

The lack of initial principal support may be one problem. Few used the cadre teachers in a focused, consistent way to help teachers move their practice toward standards. Principals now say they understand the purpose more clearly.

Another problem may be that the cadre teacher plan became too complicated and didn't fit with what so many teachers in the middle grades already were trying to do. The cadre teachers, for example, took back to their schools a "template" for creating performance assessment tasks that was highly prescriptive, even after the cadre teachers revised it. It set out "achievement targets, criteria for building rubric/scoring guide, modes of performance, genres of performance, rubrics to be used, feedback to be given to students, the task description as it will be given to students, other evidence to be collected as part of the overall assessment, prerequisites for student success, approximate number of hours required for task, and evaluation and reflections."

That's a large and semantically confusing guide for teachers to absorb. It led Brian to comment that teachers need a common terminology for what they are trying to do. Matter says he tossed the template because it was "too cumbersome."

Another problem is lack of time. Those who voluntarily attended the Summer Institute (not all schools were well-represented) had only one day to learn about and practice performance assessments. Two months passed before they needed to think about them again, and if principals did not set aside time in faculty or department meetings to work with performance assessments, teachers probably did not make them a priority.

Brian and DeBoe had only a half-hour of a faculty meeting to present the whole idea of performance assessments to their colleagues. "We're being asked to do too much, and the expectations are unrealistic in the time we have," comments Matter.

The cadre teacher plan also ran into a perennial issue-how can professional skills be improved across a school or district when the initiative depends upon voluntary participation of teachers? Many teachers believe their instructional days already are too complicated and burdened with extra demands, particularly among those in middle schools in decline. Until they are required to participate in such professional development-or convinced it will pay off quickly-such teachers are reluctant to take on more.

Where principals are using the cadre teachers' developing expertise, teachers' attitudes may be changing. For example, Meyzeek's Greta Heady believes the concepts behind performance assessments are important, "and I think we are beginning to see teachers accepting the idea because they realize it is not all new, they can build on what they have done before."

Broader training effort in the works

Marcia Lile points out that the district is no longer putting all of its eggs in the teacher cadre "basket." This summer, JCPS will bring together larger teams from every school in the district to learn about performance standards. Each team will decide how to share what they've learned with other teachers in their schools and begin a on-going discussion about standards-based teaching. Lile also notes that principals are going through their own professional development experiences around standards. "The cadre teachers won't have to do this alone, but they've had a headstart and they are in a position to be leaders in their schools."

The JCPS middle-grades reform effort relies on a strategy known as "training trainers of others." Research in other school districts suggests it's very difficult to give a few teachers enough knowledge, in the limited amount of time JCPS has set aside, to lead all of their colleagues into a very different way of instruction.

Perhaps John DeBoe at Carrithers expressed it best. At first, the teachers were called "cadre leaders," but, he says, "a lot of us didn't want to be known as experts. Like everyone else, "we are all working our way through the same process."
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