7 Disciplines for Strengthening Instruction
A focused and deliberate effort to improve teaching and learning in the classroom must be at the heart of any successful school improvement initiative. Harvard’s Change Leadership Group has identified seven disciplines enacted by to improve instruction district-wide. Districts as diverse as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and New York City's Community School District 2 have been pioneers in the development of these practices, but each has implemented them in its own, unique way. So, "The Seven Disciplines for Strengthening Instruction" should not be seen as a blueprint. It is, rather, an outline of both a process and a set of intermediate goals that are most likely to significantly improve student achievement.
The seven disciplines are:
- The district creates an understanding and a sense of urgency among teachers and in the community for the necessity of improving all students' learning, and it regularly reports on progress. Data are disaggregated and are transparent to everyone. Qualitative data (for example, from focus groups and interviews), as well as quantitative data, are used to understand students' and recent graduates' experience of school.
- There is a widely shared vision of what good teaching is, which is focused on rigorous expectations, the quality of student engagement and effective strategies for personalizing learning for all students.
- All adult meetings are about instruction and are models of good teaching.
- There are well-defined standards and performance assessments for student work at all grade levels. Both teachers and students understand what high-quality work looks like, and there is consistency in standards of assessment.
- Supervision is frequent, rigorous and entirely focused on the improvement of instruction. It is done by people who know what good instruction looks like.
- Professional development is primarily on-site, intensive, collaborative and job-embedded and is designed and led by educators who model the best teaching and learning practices.
- Data are used diagnostically at frequent intervals by teams of teachers, schools and districts to assess each student's learning and to identify the most effective teaching practices. There is time built into schedules for this shared work.
Go to 7 Disciplines for Strengthening Instruction to read the entire article.
Assessment Through the Student’s Eyes
The current issue of Educational Leadership magazine contains an article by Rick Stiggins entitled “Assessment Through the Student’s Eyes.” In the article, Stiggins reflects on how the role of assessment has changed over the years.
Historically, a major role of assessment has been to detect and highlight differences in student learning in order to rank students according to their achievement. Such assessment experiences have produced winners and losers. Some students succeed early and build on winning streaks to learn more as they grow; others fail early and often, falling farther and farther behind.
Stiggins goes on to say that we must “embrace a new vision of assessment that can tap the wellspring of confidence, motivation and learning potential that resides within every student. To enable all students to experience the productive emotional dynamics of winning, we need to move from exclusive reliance on assessments that verify learning to the use of assessments that support learning—that is, assessments for learning.”
You can read the entire article by going to Assessment Through the Student's Eyes.
Quotable Quotes
“We can’t let students who have not yet met standards fall into ‘losing streaks,’ succumb to hopelessness and stop trying.”
Rick Stiggins