Same Way Same Day

A grievance

Reading scores are continuing to decline nationwide. In Colorado, where I teach, our scores are stagnating, though the gap between our highest and lowest performing students is widening. As a result, this year our school district decided to revamp our PLC (Professional Learning Community) process with The 15-Day Challenge.

Based on the Solution Tree book, The 15-Day Challenge: Simplify and Energize Your PLC at Work^® Process by Maria Nielsen, the goal for teachers is to focus on a single learning standard, simultaneously teach that standard to all students using identical Tier 1 instruction, create common, formative assessments to determine which students are meeting (or not meeting) that standard, and then regroup students for standardized Tier 2 interventions and extension support. Once a week, teachers meet to discuss student scores on the formative assessments, and reflect on the effectiveness of the standard pedagogical approach to teaching the identified standard. They call it Same Way Same Day.

I’m not surprised about this latest mandate. We’ve been using Richard DuFour’s PLC at Work model for quite some time. It started over a decade ago when our district began seriously trying to close what was then called the achievement gap within our schools. Since then, in some form or another, we have been prioritizing all things PLC.

An example of Solution Tree’s 10-Day student-learning cycle with 3 Phases of Learning: Pre-Instruction (red); Instruction (orange); Post-Instruction (teal)

Teachers must conduct “student-learning cycles” every 10-15 days ensuring that students master one essential academic standard. Teachers must provide standardized interventions for those who do not master it and extensions for those who do.

Solution Tree has been doing PLC work since the late 90s and has a lot of success stories from schools all across the country. DuFour has authored (or co-authored) over 25 books on teaching, learning, and professional learning communities. These include Professional Learning Communities at Work, Learning by Doing, In Praise of American Educators, and Cultures Built to Last. Their list of credentials is long and illustrious.

And yet, every aspect of this brand of standardized pedagogy makes me cringe.

To be fair, I always hate it school districts spend tons of money on what appear to be silver-bullet fixes to problems in public education. Whether it is technology tools, new frameworks, curricula, or book studies, the results are always the same: expensive educational summer conferences and hours of required time during staff meetings and professional development sessions learning and implementing said solution. I’ve written before about how education is an incredibly complex and adaptive system and what happens when leaders apply technical solutions to adaptive problems.¹

I won’t spend time here debating whether the expensive solutions that Solution Tree offers school districts actually work. I’m not an educational researcher who has the time and means to evaluate whether certain large-scale programs improve schools. I do believe in collaboration and collaborative teams. However, I always get stuck when the work of collaborative PLCs results in cookie-cutter lessons and standardized classroom experiences that lose sight of the actual students they are meant to help. Improving standardized test scores does not improve the schooling experience for students; all this guarantees is that each lesson is identical no matter who is teaching it, and which students are learning. When we focus so much on measuring one-size-fits-all objectives and key results (OKRs), we ignore the dynamic nature of teaching and learning and the individuality of our students. Standardized testing has become a version of Goodhart’s Law; there is very little correlation between high standardized test scores and future academic success. In fact, there is more research showing the harmful effects of high-stakes testing, and that a strict focus on data analysis has not improved student learning outcomes.² Instead of spending so much time (and money³) studying student data so that I can teach the same lesson exactly as my colleagues, I’d rather spend my time improving my craft by learning how my colleagues teach (based on cognitive learning science), and time to experiment in my classroom by creating caring learning experiences that work with my students.

It’s not surprising then that when I hear the phrase Same Way Same Day I immediately tense. I don’t object to focusing on a specific academic standard. I don’t mind breaking abstract and complex standards into concrete and specific pieces. It doesn’t bother me when I teach certain standards. If CO deems that fifth-graders should learn about the American Revolution, it doesn’t matter to me whether I teach that in August or April. What bothers me is when a specific standard is tied to a time frame and includes a set of identical, predetermined teaching strategies. For example, take the Common Core English Language Arts Standard for reading informational texts:

Compare and contrast the overall structure (i.e.: chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.⁴

This is an important skill for students to learn. They should be able to identify, compare, and contrast text structures in nonfiction texts. Students should understand cause and effect, problems and solutions, and chronology. However, teaching this skill for 15 days, reduces it to a set of isolated, performative tasks that are never connected to the holistic act of reading, understanding, and critically responding to nonfiction. Instead of allowing me the creative and pedagogical freedom to explore dynamic nonfiction, I am forced to trudge my students through short articles where we identify the main idea, supporting details, and overall text structure. Instead of learning about and discussing the Battle of Bunker Hill, we must highlight the first and last sentence of each paragraph, and write the central idea with supporting details on a piece of paper to be graded. No matter how well students perform this task, they are sorted into groups. Teachers do this repeatedly for the next 15 days, or until we determine that everyone has mastered this reading skill. Can you underline the main idea in one article? Great! Here are two articles for you to show me that you can do the same thing.

Whereas this standard is an important skill in reading nonfiction, breaking it into isolated component pieces, and then drilling them repeatedly, kills all the things that makes reading well-written nonfiction enjoyable. Reading literary nonfiction is about the real-life stories of fascinating historical characters, and watching them develop throughout a well-written narrative. Vivid language and structure are important, but not more so than what can be circled or written on a standardized test to be graded.

Based on Henry Oliver’s wonderful book recommendation, I’m currently reading The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor. It is an incredibly well-researched and fascinating story of the turbulent times after the rule of Edward III. Castor does a brilliant job comparing and contrasting cousins Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, while simultaneously weaving a complex tapestry of political gains and losses throughout the late 14th and early 15th centuries. As an American who is only familiar with Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV, it took me a while to get all of the characters organized in my head, but once I did, I fell into Castor’s storytelling. What if I was expected to highlight the central idea and supporting details of each chapter? Could I do so? Perhaps, but why? That banal task wouldn’t add anything to my experience as a nonfiction reader. Do I need to understand the complex nonfiction structures Castor is using to intertwine the lives and motivations of Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke? I don’t think so. Castor does an amazing job comparing and contrasting Richard II and Henry IV, but I don’t need to fill out a venn diagram to learn history and enjoy the story. Reading nonfiction is more about learning and connecting with important people from the past and present, than it is about about identifying text structures, central ideas, and key details.

Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash

What about fidelity?

If you’ve been teaching long enough, chances are you’ve heard the phrase, teaching with fidelity. When a school or district implements a new curriculum, they expect that everyone teaches the curriculum exactly as it is written, omitting nothing and making no adjustments or changes. If every teacher is teaching the curriculum with fidelity, it allows administration to evaluate whether the curriculum is effective. If a maverick teacher decides to stray from the curriculum (or teach it in a way that is not approved), it affects what generalizations one can make as to the effectiveness of the curriculum.

In a perfect world, school districts would spend a great deal of time researching and vetting various curricula based on the cognitive science of learning and recommendations from experts in specific academic fields. Unfortunately, in my experience, curricula programs come and go as quickly as fashion trends and slang. Administrators are under pressure to find and implement a curriculum that works, so are easily influenced by education companies’ assertions. The result is spending a great deal of money on curricula programs that make big claims, but are ineffective. Any company can put a sticker on their program that says “research-backed” or “data-based” in order to sell more textbooks, and are not required to provide much proof of their effectiveness. If the program is well-funded and well-advertised, looks good, and appears to be based on educational research, there is a good chance a school district will purchase it and mandate that everyone must teach it with fidelity.

Instead of teaching a program with fidelity, following a rigid pacing guide where every teacher is on the same lesson on the same day, I want to focus teaching academic standards using high-quality resources that are well-researched in cognitive science and how humans learn. As a professional teacher, I want the autonomy to make adjustments as needed for my students. As a skilled practitioner in pedagogy, I want the creative freedom to collaboratively plan with equity in mind so that our entire team can engage students in well-crafted, equitable learning experiences.⁵ It doesn’t matter to me if I’m teaching the same standard in the same way and on the same day as my coworker. What matters to me is whether how I’m teaching is effective and affirms my students as dynamic and individual learners. I will choose fidelity to my students and how they learn over fidelity to a standardized program every time.

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Needless to say, I’m not enjoying this 15-Day challenge. Not only do I despise forcing poorly written, artificial texts onto my students,⁶ but I really hate feeling like my personal pedagogy is being dampened because of the pressure to quickly get my students to perform a meaningless and standardized task. Same Way Same Day doesn’t feel like teaching. It feels more like one-dimensional, schooling banality. Standardized teaching is a sameness that devalues teachers’ expertise and craft, and dumbs-down learning experiences for students. Instead of raising my students’ reading scores, I want to encourage them to be actual readers who engage in meaningful reading. My students may score a few more points on the state’s standardized tests this month, but at a great cost: their ability to read and connect to history, to feel and think and learn in ways that will serve them beyond schools and tests and 15-Day Challenges.

Have a great week!

— Adrian

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Resources

Education Standardization: Essential or Harmful? | Marie Bjerede | Getting Smart

• I really appreciate how this article is organized with Advantages, Disadvantages, and Conclusions to standardization. Obviously, standardizing teaching and learning are complex issues that don’t have clear answers.

Fidelity to a Program Requires Teachers Who Can Adapt by Jennifer Serravallo

• Jennifer Serravallo’s claim that “making adaptations is actually critical to maintaining fidelity to a program” really got me thinking about that word, fidelity. I love her suggestions for meeting students' needs and interests.

• I can’t believe it has been 24 years since NCLB! It was the education system I entered into as a young teacher. I have no experience teaching before NCLB. Unfortunately, my entire teaching career has been under the watchful eyes of this federal mandate. It shaped my early experiences as a novice teacher as I learned new curricula and began to understand how standardized testing would be a part of our collective schooling experience. So, did it work? I think Trevor Muir’s answer will not surprise anyone.

• I love PBS! They always create such great educational materials for both teachers and students. In this video, they elaborate on all the ways in which standardized testing is harmful to students. Do the ends justify the means?

• Todd Rose’s The End of Average is an incredible book. In it, he details the science of individuality and highlights three core concepts: The Jaggedness Principle (talent is never one-dimensional), The Context Principle (personality traits do not exist), and The Pathways Principle (we all walk the road less traveled). So much of this book resonated with me and I wish more educational leaders would read it.

• In Anindya Kundu’s TED Talk, he discusses the term, opportunity gap and the social and institutional challenges that keep all students from succeeding in American public schools. If you like this talk, I highly recommend you read his book, The Power of Student Agency.

1. In short, technical problems are easy to identify and oftentimes have expensive, quick solutions making them easy targets for financial solutions. Usually a small change sold by an outside authority, if implemented quickly, can solve a technical challenge. Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, are difficult to identify and require systemic changes, such as a change in one’s mindset and value system.

2. Hence, reading scores continue to decline and inequitable gaps based on race persist.

3. Money that would be better spent on great novels, school supplies, and high-quality teaching materials for my classroom.

4. CCSS: RI.5.5

5. Planning with Equity in Mind from Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy by Dr. Adeyemi Stembridge

6. I consider a text “artificial” when I believe it was created solely for the purpose of testing isolated reading skills for a standardized assessment.