The first is an exhaustive study of three in classroom reform approaches:
More than 7,000 schools in the United States, with the help of outside contractors and an infusion of grants under the federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program, put tested, off-the-shelf programs in place in the hope of improving learning.
Accelerated Schools model, developed at Stanford University 23 years ago, uses staff development to build a school culture organized around its vision of learning, which calls for students to “construct” their own knowledge through interactive, real-world activities. But it offers teachers no prescriptions on how to go about doing that, saying instead that teachers must devise their own strategies.
Process based
Success for All program, developed in the 1990s by Johns Hopkins University researchers Robert E. Slavin and Nancy A. Madden, uses a highly specified plan for instructional improvement and highly specified routines for teaching reading. It organizes students into cooperative-learning groups and provides teachers with a weekly lesson sequence and scripts to guide them through the 90-minute reading lessons
Prescription based
America’s Choice falls somewhere in the middle. Grounded in the movement for standards-based education and focusing mostly on writing, the program gives teachers curriculum guides and instructs them in routines for teaching writing. But it also requires schools to appoint coaches and facilitators, with whom its staff works to develop core writing assignments and scales for grading them. The coaches and facilitators also work with principals and teachers in their schools to carry out the program.
Prescription based
Results:
- teachers in the 28 schools using the Accelerated Schools model were most likely to feel a sense of autonomy and trust in their schools, their teaching practices were not significantly different from those used in the 26 comparison schools. The study’s preliminary analyses suggest that students, likewise, did not learn any more than their control-group counterparts did.
- The Success for All students excelled from kindergarten to the end of 2nd grade. The learning gains at that level, in fact, were strong enough to move the average student from the 40th percentile at the start of the study to the 50th percentile 2½ years later.
- The America’s Choice students outperformed all the other groups from 3rd grade to 5th grade.
Now I haven’t read the whole report but I know that it some classrooms AcceleratedSchools was effective although the statistical evidence puts that approach 3rd. Research shows statistically which approach did best overall, but each approach was successful somewhere.
Secondly, and more importantly we need to know whether it was the specific curriculum-prescription, or whether that curriculum encouraged the teachers using it to adopt certain classroom approaches that were successful in educating their kids.
By this I mean was it the clarity of the program itself or did using the program make the teachers express their directions with greater clarity and offer expectations that were spelled out in details.
I offer this specific because it’s what effective teachers do. They are not vague and nor do they leave lots of room for interpretation of what the kids need to do.
If the two prescriptive programs produce teachers who function that way once the specific curriculum is gone, we will have made a dent in teacher development. If these programs get kids to learn to read better, then they have done one job but not changed the teachers’ overall performance.
It’s not exactly the baby and the bath water again but it would be awfully difficult to develop prescriptions for every subject taught in grades k-5. It would be great if the teachers internalized the approach.