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Brookings-AIR Study Finds Large Academic Gains in Opportunity Culture

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Students in classrooms of team teachers led by “multi-classroom leaders” showed sizeable academic gains, according to a new study from the American Institutes for Research and the Brookings Institution.

Students respond to a multi-classroom leader’s question in a classroom in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

The team teachers were, on average, at the 50th percentile in the student learning gains they produced before joining a team led by a multi-classroom leader. After joining the teams, they produced learning gains equivalent to those of teachers in the top quartile in math and nearly that in reading, said the report, released on January 11, 2018, through the CALDER Center.

The gains the study attributes to team teachers are equivalent to those of teachers from the 75th to 85th percentile in math, and, in six of the seven statistical models, from 66th to 72nd percentile in reading.

These results show that students can consistently experience top-quartile teaching in math, and teaching nearly that good in reading, if schools place excellent teachers in charge of small teams of typical teachers.

[Read more…]

How to Lead and Achieve Instructional Excellence

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Opportunity Culture schools nationally achieve far more schoolwide high growth than comparable schools, on average. How have teachers who reach more students than is typical—directly or by leading teams—gotten that high growth? They pursue instructional excellence fast and well.

In new, free online help from Public Impact, we share the critical elements of great teaching and great team leadership. Free of jargon so any school, anywhere can use them, and backed up by experts and research, the elements also link to the work of leading experts and more resources.

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture Voices: A Teacher’s Smart Advice for Serving Students’ Emotional Needs

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Walking into Grant Middle School in 2014 was very intimidating. Gregory LawsonHow many people would willingly move from a successful middle school in Queens to Syracuse’s largest and notoriously poor-performing middle school? Probably not many, but I was seeking a challenge. And I found one.

Grant had a reputation for failing students and ineffective staff. The reality on the ground couldn’t be further from the truth. Grant’s students did not perform well on state assessments, but they were talented, gifted and good children. And Grant’s staff had a deep, burning passion for them and their education. I walked into a building full of people who wanted to improve. With new leadership and a new multi-classroom leader cohort, we had the expertise to work toward a total building transformation.

As the multi-classroom leader (MCL) focusing on the social, emotional and behavioral needs of students, I have frank conversations with Grant’s staff regarding the functions of behaviors—that is, the “reason for” the behavior. I’m there to help teachers and administrators understand this and work together to figure out how we can satisfy the students’ needs within our learning environment.

—–Syracuse, N.Y., Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Multi-Classroom Leader Gregory Lawson in A Teacher’s Smart Advice for Serving Students’ Emotional Needs

How does Gregory Lawson helps other teachers at Grant Middle School figure out how to address their students’ behavior? As he notes, he always starts with the function:

As an MCL, I observe students and teachers together in a classroom. I talk with the teacher, and together, we hypothesize the function of the behavior and that leads us to a plan.

Personalizing their instruction–beyond just academics, to look at students’ other needs–gives teachers a powerful tool, Lawson says. Read more about what does, and one example of a successful intervention, in the latest column in the Opportunity Culture series on Real Clear Education.

Dashboard Shows: As Opportunity Culture Spreads, Teachers, Students Reap Benefits

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Curious about the impact of an Opportunity Culture? dashboardWe’ve just updated our dashboard, as we will every year, with the latest statistics. Such as:

  • 110+ schools at 17 sites in 7 states—and growing
  • 34,000+ students taught by teachers extending their reach—a 50 percent increase from 2015–16
  • 1,250+ teachers with advanced roles or on-the-job development—a 50 percent increase, too
  • Average pay supplements over $12,000, up more than $1,300 in one year
  • $3.1 million in extra pay for teachers via supplements funded sustainably through reallocation
  • Just 8.2% of applicants for Opportunity Culture advanced positions were hired
  • High growth for 46 percent of Opportunity Culture schools—a much higher percentage than among typical schools
  • Far fewer schools than typical made low growth (12%)

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture Voices: My Unexpected Journey to Teacher Leadership

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kristen-duffy

“Come join the exciting new initiative at Meachem Elementary. We are pursuing proven strategies to increase student achievement by increasing adult leadership and the capacity to more effectively reach all students; this will assist in raising our test scores, and provide teachers with more support by their peers, smaller reading-group sizes, classroom management support, and interventions using technology that engage students in their academic journey. Join the Opportunity Culture team and take part in this enriched opportunity! Help lead your school to success!”

Who could say no to this? I wanted in, and signed up without realizing the impact on my future.

Every school using Opportunity Culture models creates a design team to determine how to redesign its teacher roles. Fewer teachers took part in an initial meeting than I expected—they thought it was another “thing” that would come and go. But walking into it was like walking into my destiny. Everyone looked eager. We were thinking so hard you could almost see thought bubbles above our heads.

–Syracuse, N.Y. 2nd- and 3rd-grade Multi-Classroom Leader Kristen Duffy in My Unexpected Journey to Teacher Leadership

As Kristen Duffy’s design team worked on its objectives for the first 90 days of school, the team decided the school would need to use Multi-Classroom Leadership:

To meet our first goal—and its target of a 50 percent increase in student reading scores by day 90—we needed multi-classroom leaders (MCLs), typically described as excellent teachers who continue to teach while leading a team of teachers, modeling, co-teaching, coaching and co-planning with them.

We giggled at first, thinking, “Aren’t we all excellent teachers?” But in reality, that caused many of us to step back from even thinking of being an MCL. I couldn’t imagine labeling myself, one of Meachem’s youngest teachers, that way.

Read more about Duffy’s journey to that job after all, in the first installment of the 2016-17 series of columns by teachers and teacher-leaders in Opportunity Culture schools in North Carolina, New York, and Texas–and thanks to Real Clear Education for its continued publication of the series.

New Vignettes: How 4 Pioneering Teacher-Leaders Led Their Teams

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MCL Composite (002)What does teacher-leadership look like when teachers lead a team while continuing to teach? For four pioneering multi-classroom leaders in high-need elementary, middle, and high schools, it starts with taking accountability for up to 500 students and leading a collaborative teaching team toward higher growth and personalized learning for all those students.

These teacher-leaders took on roles in some of the first Opportunity Culture schools as multi-classroom leaders (MCLs). MCLs keep teaching while leading a team, providing support through co-planning, coaching, co-teaching, and team collaboration. In a new series of vignettes and an accompanying video from Public Impact, these multi-classroom leaders share their view of their roles, the actions they took to lead their teams, mistakes they made, and how they recovered.

[Read more…]

Speaking Up: A Year’s Worth of Opportunity Culture Voices

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Real Clear Composite 1 SM“How many teachers are out there struggling daily because of lack of support?  How many burn out because they’ve tried all they know?  How many leave our profession early because they can’t do it on their own any longer? How many kids suffer because they have access to only one teacher? How many students are falling more and more behind because they have zero control over their educational trajectory?  We need a change; more important, our students deserve change.

“Opportunity is knocking on our traditional educational doors. The question is: Will we answer? Teachers, administrators, policymakers: It’s time. Open the door.”

That was Charlotte Multi-Classroom Leader (MCL) Kristin Cubbage, who kicked off the Opportunity Culture series on Real Clear Education a year ago and wrapped it up this month, extolling what made her advanced role so valuable, and calling for more Opportunity Culture roles. Indeed, the Opportunity Culture initiative has continued to spread.

Cubbage was part of the first cohort of Opportunity Culture Fellows—pioneering teachers in Opportunity Culture schools who stepped up to share their views nationally, and who wrote this series, with accompanying videos, explaining what Opportunity Culture models look like in their schools and what they think about these highly accountable positions:

[Read more…]

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