Key Educational Shifts/Trends: What's Next?

By Mary Kay Sommers

Kim Marshall, a teacher, principal, educational leader, and editor of the well-known on-line Marshall Memo, shared compelling research that defies commonly held beliefs about education in a special presentation at the 2015 NAESP Conference. Kim identified proven strategies for educational leaders to increase teachers’ impact on learning for all students as well to influence policy makers to make 180 degree adjustments to legislation that currently has minimal to negative impacts on student learning.

Have you heard these beliefs within yourself and among your staff, community and policy makers? Kim’s extensive collection of valid research refutes these eight commonly held beliefs while he provides a list of strategies and resources that would instead and predictably improve education:

• Intelligence and talent are affixed at birth.
• Poverty is your destiny.
• Principals only have time to be managers.
• Great teachers are born not made.
• Teacher evaluation doesn’t make such a difference.
• Students’ input can’t be taken seriously.
• Tests don’t add value.
• Teachers can’t be held accountable for student learning.

Kim provided specific and doable ways to convince others to shift their attitudes. He advises creating a strong vision for how your system works, using data and research that challenges these commonly-held beliefs, and with strong emotion and belief advocating for how education must shift to produce higher results.

Kim also provided multiple resources attached to each of those beliefs, such as the book Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov, which identifies proven strategies that helped schools of poverty perform exceedingly well. Such resources are clearly identified in his slides that are available on the NAESP website related to conference sessions.

A number of strategies related to supervision were provided to better ensure the process actually assists teachers to become more effective. Supervision strategies should not be the annual long checklist and cumbersome document done twice a year, but be several times a week even for 10 minutes. Principals need to develop a good eye for effective teaching and learning for these brief encounters to reveal critical observations as well as learn powerful ways to share these insights.

We often discount student opinions yet the research shows they are usually more accurate than supervisors because they are the daily classroom participants. However, their ideas should never be used for evaluation purposes but only to genuinely help teachers learn how their teaching is impacting student motivation, understanding, and learning. He suggests teachers ask these three questions twice a year and then use that information to make changes in instruction:

1. What are you pleased with?
2. What surprised you?
3. What two things would you change?

The most exciting revelation was the research surrounding attempts to correlate student achievement with the teacher evaluation system. Recent findings suggest the complexity of teaching confounds the data measured by individual performance on standardized tests. Confidence intervals were used to show the high rate of variability that naturally exists when trying to use such data to determine teacher effectiveness. Kim predicts court cases over this issue will soon show that rating teachers this way is unsound, unfair, and not statistically accurate.

Kim suggests a different approach that positively can impact learning:

1. Local measures are used to provide baseline assessments.
2. Teaching teams set smart goals using that data.
3. Teams assesses and makes adjustments all year using interim and “on the spot” assessments.
4. Teams seek student input to make additional teaching adjustments.
5. Teams assesses students again at end of the year with these local measures.
6. Teams present data to principals as a team.
7. Teams share the evaluation of their teaching effectiveness with principals using this evidence.
8. Principals give each teaching team the same rating.

In addition, if indeed learning is not occurring as expected, problem solving strategies are presented and selected to improve that performance. Frequent observations will give principals the valid data to guide these discussions and make necessary decisions.

Kim Marshall developed a powerful website in 2003 for sharing valid research that is highly useful for K-12 educators to make effective decisions. He recently published a new book, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, that shares this compilation of powerful research, recommended resources in print and online, and clear suggestions to ensure a more effective collaborative learning culture and practice for all students to reach our highest expectations regardless of their challenges. As he ended this session, he reminded us how ALL children are important, and educators must do all we can to help them be successful, productive, and caring citizens in our world.

—Mary Kay Sommers, educational consultant in the Fort Collins, Colorado area.

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