Do you remember when all teachers were asked to be teachers of reading? Some responded with feelings of apprehension (“I didn’t sign up to be a reading teacher”), annoyance (“I have content to teach and don’t have time to teach kids how to read”) or frustration (“Isn’t that why we have reading specialists?”).
Today, with the number of English language learners on the rise in communities large and small, we are beginning to ask all teachers to become teachers of language development. How will they react? How are we going to lead the change to ensure success for ELLs and those who teach them?
As consultants providing professional development, we are left wondering what happens after the workshops. Do the strategies really get implemented to their highest degree of effectiveness? Do teachers believe they can use them to help ELLs attain high achievement levels? If so, what structures support teachers’ efforts? Especially, how can leaders ensure classroom instruction is appropriate for all learners, including ELLs?
Guided Work
To address these persistent questions, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning began hosting English Language Learner Leadership Academies in which school leadership teams of administrators and teachers build their skills in ELL strategies that can be implemented in general education settings. Our goal is for participants to learn about research-based classroom strategies to the extent they can help their staff adapt and implement these strategies with quality and fidelity.
Five key elements guide the work of the academies.
Assemble a strong leadership team. In their 2005 book School Leadership That Works, researchers Robert Marzano, Tim Waters and Brian McNulty identified 21 leadership responsibilities that, when fulfilled, have a positive correlation to student achievement. In our academies, leadership teams share a commitment to fulfill these responsibilities. Because these leadership teams include administrators and teachers, accountability is shifted away from the ESL program to the school staff as a whole.
Admittedly, at the onset, not all team members are comfortable with their roles on the leadership team. Some are quick to assume managerial tasks but avoid the challenges of instructional leadership. One leadership team member from a small district near Denver voiced concern about being viewed as “teacher police patrolling classrooms with clipboard in hand.”
To help team members understand how they can lead less formally, we ask them to study the 21 leadership responsibilities and design ways to use them to support others. Afterward, one team member said, “I know now that being a teacher leader doesn’t mean I am the boss. It just means that I am able to support my peers; I’m someone who is able to help them.” Who better to lead instructional change than teachers themselves?
Simply having a leadership team available was important to a participant from a small rural school district in Nebraska, where she is the only English as a second language teacher for the district. Her team is composed of a district administrator and two principals. She said, “Including the administrators in this training was necessary for our district to see what needs to happen. We need to work together, all of us. Some teachers show resistance to becoming teachers of language development because they think it’s my job as the ESL teacher.”
The leadership team has helped her shift the thinking of the staff, who are beginning to share the responsibility for teaching English language learners.
Develop a purposeful community. A strong, collaborative, mutually supportive leadership team that is focused on ELL achievement lays the foundation for what’s termed a “purposeful community.” In School Leadership That Works, Marzano, Waters and McNulty define a purposeful community as “one with the collective efficacy ... to use assets to accomplish outcomes that matter to all community members through agreed-upon processes.”
The development of purposeful community for our leadership team members begins with the question “What can we accomplish together for our ELLs that we cannot do as individual teachers behind closed doors?” How the teams answer this question often expresses their shared beliefs that all teachers, working together, can dramatically enhance the success of all students, including those learning English for the first time.
An essential characteristic of a purposeful community is collective efficacy. In his article in the September 2001 issue of Journal of Educational Psychology, Roger Goddard defines collective efficacy as “the perceptions of teachers in a school that the faculty as a whole can execute the courses of action necessary to have positive effects on students.” Traditionally, student learning has been attributed more to individual efforts than to the collective efforts of the staff, but research by Goddard and colleagues shows that collective efficacy has a stronger effect on student achievement than do race or socioeconomic status.
Collective efficacy can be cultivated over time. One approach that research suggests helps build higher levels of collective efficacy is mastery experience, during which teachers collaborate to learn instructional strategies targeted at specific student needs and, after employing them, see evidence of increased student learning.
We witnessed the influence of mastery experience first-hand when we worked with the staff of a small intermediate school in the Southwest. The staff, wanting to become skilled at one strategy rather than be mediocre at many, selected summarization as their focus because their baseline school data indicated that only 33 percent of students scored at the proficient or advanced level on this skill.
The leadership team helped the staff implement a summary frame strategy to help students be aware of the structure of information as an aid to summarizing. The strategy, described by Robert Marzano, Deb Pickering and Jane Pollack in their book Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, calls on teachers to provide students with a set of summary questions that, when answered, help the students focus on the key information they are reading.
The leadership team communicated the expectation that all teachers use the strategy in their classrooms. When the physical education teacher approached a leadership team member expressing some trepidation about using summary frames, the team member helped by modeling the strategy in the physical education class, thus providing needed, but informal, support.
After six weeks, 67 percent of students were scoring at a proficient or advanced level on summarization. The mastery experience enabled the staff to see immediate improvement in response to their efforts, and this initial success strengthened their collective efficacy. Teachers began to talk about what they were able to accomplish working together rather than independently. Their confidence increased along with their desire and enthusiasm to implement additional ELL strategies.
Identify and respond to the magnitude of change. McREL uses the terms “first order” and “second order” to refer to the magnitude or implications a change has for individual stakeholders. For example, when a change is perceived as more of an extension of the past, consistent with prevailing organizational norms, congruent with personal values or implemented with existing knowledge or skills, it has first-order implications for the individual.
A change has second-order implications for an individual when it is perceived as inconsistent with the prevailing norms, is incongruent with personal values and requires new knowledge and skills to implement. Recall the earlier example of the content-area teachers who were asked to become teachers of reading. Their negative feelings illustrate the implications of second-order change.
In asking all teachers to teach language development, we are asking them to pay close attention to language, examine it, dissect it and teach it, which requires new skills and represents a shift in professional focus and values for most teachers. School leaders might hear, “We’ve never been asked to pay attention to English and language development in the past” or “I was hired to teach science, not language development; that’s the ESL teacher’s job.”
Our academy leadership teams learn how to estimate the magnitude of the change they are implementing so they can anticipate the reaction. When faced with individuals who perceived the change to be second-order, teams address the four research-based leadership responsibilities that McREL’s factor analysis reported to be negatively correlated to second-order change: culture, communication, order and input.
This correlation is not surprising. Anyone who has dealt with the implications of what is perceived as a second-order change knows that people feel their sense of well-being is diminished (culture), that communication has broken down and the leader is less accessible than usual (communication), that their world has become disordered (order) or that they have lost their voice (input). We suggest attention to these leadership responsibilities be shared by the leadership team members.
To address second-order change, the academy teams we worked with generated the following advice:
• Establish structures that give teachers opportunities to collaborate and talk about the implementation of a strategy to bolster culture, including being the first to open their classroom to peer observations.
• Encourage communication by setting up a question-and-answer box for teachers to submit questions regarding the implementation of a strategy, to be answered by the leadership team and distributed to the staff.
• To address order, review and revise building schedules and other procedures that may be affected by the implementation of a strategy.
• Gather feedback on the progress and future direction of the implementation of a strategy through informal focus groups or staff surveys if additional input is needed.
While working with one metropolitan district in Colorado, we realized the concept of a leadership team was itself a change with second-order implications. As a result, the teams were not able to move the implementation forward. After some discussion, everyone decided the academy teams would read an article detailing an implementation similar to the one they were trying to initiate. In a small-group discussion that followed, each team recorded the perceived challenges and opportunities the change was presenting for them and their staffs. After the central-office staff received feedback from this activity, they adjusted the rollout of the implementation.
Monitor and evaluate programs. As academy teams discovered ways to support the implementation, they recommended broadening the evaluation of English as a second language from an appraisal of the program itself to monitoring and evaluating the efforts to support ELLs in the regular classroom. They began to ask questions like these:
• Are staff members united and working toward meeting the needs of ELLs in both content knowledge and English language acquisition?
• Is instruction for ELLs inclusive of the academic, cultural and social needs of ELLs?
• Is development of language infused throughout the day in all classrooms?
• Is ESL instruction integrated with the general education program?
• Is there a system that supports teachers in conducting detailed and continued analysis of their teaching?
With responses to the questions above, the leadership teams determined next steps. Questions they considered included:
• Should we be more intentional about developing a purposeful community?
• Can we provide teachers with additional professional development in implementing ELL strategies?
• Do we need to reassess the magnitude and the implications of the change?
• How can we adjust the system to accommodate increased integration and ongoing support for the implementation?
Make it systemic. A small school district north of Denver with a growing population of English language learners and a strong commitment to raise expectations for all learners provides an example of systemic change. As part of the initiative to close the achievement gap, the district hosted an English Language Learner Leadership Academy for staff in its 10 schools. The effort aligned with the district’s strategic plan and was one of four focus areas identified in the district’s improvement plan. It also was directly linked to each school’s improvement plan.
Expectations were high at every level. At the building level, principals monitored progress through regular classroom walkthroughs. At the central office, administrators collaborated with school support teams to identify evidence of implementation. Monthly follow-up meetings included, among other things, visits to every classroom in the schools. Finally, after collecting evidence of implementation and other indicators of progress, the district reported outcomes to the board of education during a study session.
Leading Together
Those school system leaders who are facing the challenges and the opportunities inherent in asking all teachers to become teachers of language development are more likely to succeed with the ongoing support of a leadership team. The team’s thoughtful attention to the development of a purposeful community; awareness of the implications the change has on teachers and administrators alike; and ability to support their peers in knowing what, how, when and why to employ the skills and strategies are key components to successful implementation.
Jane Hill is a lead consultant for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Denver, Colo. E-mail: jhill@mcrel.org. Anne Lundquist is principal consultant for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.