The release of the PIRLS 2021 4th grade reading results provides another opportunity for education systems to see if and how the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures affected students’ test performance. In addition to collecting data in the middle of what the PIRLS report called the “COVID-19 disruption,” the latest implementation of PIRLS also entailed a transition to “an innovative digital assessment with 23 colorful and engaging texts delivered to students using a new group adaptive design.” The 2021 PIRLS also included a questionnaire that provided information about the challenges participating schools and students faced during the pandemic, which can help put the results in context.
In all, 57 countries and 8 benchmarking entities participated in PIRLS 2021, providing data from about 400,000 students, 380,000 parents, 20,000 teachers, and 13,000 schools. According to the report, “in general there are downward trends in PIRLS 2021that likely are evidence of the assessment taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“in general there are downward trends in PIRLS 2021that likely are evidence of the assessment taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
As we have with previous PISA and TIMMS results, IEN scanned the headlines to see what media outlets in different parts of the world are emphasizing. Predictably, many of the headlines focus on rankings, often noting sharp rises and drops in performance. In this case, the headlines tout high performance in countries like England – rising to #4 in the rankings — but the reporting also acknowledges that rises like these reflect “significant drops” in outcomes in some countries (like Finland and Poland) that are likely associated with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that some previously highly-ranked countries did not participate this time due to COVID. (At the same time, the headlines in Poland note that Poland, along with Finland, are still at the top of the rankings in the EU.)
In our google search scans, we found a number of headlines from media in the UK, Australia, and parts of Europe, with perhaps the largest number of headlines decrying South Africa’s dismal results. Although headlines in Brazil framed results there in negative terms, Nic Spaull pointed out that South Africa might actually do well to learn from Brazil, given that the results for 4th graders there suggest the that they were 3 years ahead of their peers in South Africa. Notably, no headlines from the US showed up in any of our scans.
“92% of Hong Kong P4 students were at or above the Intermediate International Benchmark, higher than the global average of 75%. The results also showed that 21% of the students were high achievers in reading literacy at the Advanced International Benchmark, which was only attained by 7% of students worldwide.”
The final part of this 3-part interview with Cynthia Robinson-Rivers focuses on some of the changes that have been made in the Whole Child Model over the years as well as some of challenges she faces now that she has moved from the role of founding principal to a partner responsible for helping the model to expand. Cynthia Robinson-Rivers is the founding principal of the Whole Child Model at Van Ness Elementary School in Washington D.C. Robinson-Rivers recently joined Transcend, where she works with schools in Texas, Tennessee and Washington D.C. who are adopting the Whole Child Model. This interview was conducted by Thomas Hatch and students from his School Change class at Teachers College, Columbia University in the fall of 2023. Part 1 focused on the initial development of the Whole Child Model and some of the supports for teachers and Part 2 looked at community engagement and some of the challenges of implementation. These posts build on an interview last year with Transcend’s Keptah St. Julien who talked about the key elements of the Whole Child Model (See part 1; part 2).This interview was published originally on internationaledews.com onMay 10, 2023.
TH: You’ve talked about the depth of knowledge and expertise that goes into all of the elements of the model, but what about changes? Were there particular challenges or things you had to change about the model as it developed?
CRR: Yes, lots of the practices were developed in response to some challenge we were having in the beginning. We didn’t initially have structured recess. One year I found I was spending many afternoons on the phone with parents who were mad that their child had gotten hurt during recess. As a staff, we talked about how we can’t take away recess: a) It’s illegal. B) We know that’s bad for kids. C). Often the students that need to get outside and move their bodies most are the ones who are threatened with losing their recess. So what do we do? We had a wellness team that brainstormed, and we thought of structured recess, which allows students who have been unsafe to learn missing skills without having their recess removed. We piloted it, and then, because we were working with Transcend, they helped us to codify it.
During the pandemic, we also thought a lot about the extent to which the model has the potential to be liberatory by design. We thought a lot about racial equity and whether or not the model allowed students’ to build positive identities or grapple with issues of racial conflict. We looked at Strong Start because there were a lot of opportunities for connection; a lot of opportunities for belonging; and a lot of opportunities to self-regulate. But there were not many opportunities for students to reflect on current events or things that were bothering them. And there were not that many opportunities for creative expression. That’s when we added the Reflect and Share component. Reflect and Share is a part of Strong Start that might not happen every day, but probably once a week. That came directly out of our pausing and wanting to talk about difficult issues of race, and wanting our model to include opportunities for that.
TH: When did those conversations happen where you recognized those problems and made those adjustments?
CRR: Usually in conversations amongst my leadership team or our team that has expertise in socio-emotional learning and mental health. And then we would talk with Transcend and say, here’s what we’re seeing. Transcend functioned as R & D experts for the school. We identify a problem, and they might interview students, coordinate teachers to pilot, create a draft resource, and then get feedback from the larger school as well. The Reflect and Share is a good example of that. We spent most of one school year working on answering key questions: What are the Reflect and Share questions we should ask if we’re going to engage kids around these tough issues? What problems might come up that a teacher needs to be prepared for? What about the pitfalls that you might encounter if kids are upset, and you don’t know how to navigate the conversation? We took a couple of years looking at those kinds of issues and by this spring the Reflect and Share structure will be formally added to our model and website with refinements made based on that R & D cycle.
Scaling the Whole Child Model
TH: Let’s talk a little bit now about your transition. So now you’re working with schools in a couple of different places. How did you select the new sites?
CRR: The first five schools in D.C. that we partnered with had been led by school leaders that I knew, and they and some of their teachers had visited the school. We went to them and asked if they were interested in learning more about and potentially adopting the model. We specifically chose five schools in which one school was similar in demographics to ours, two schools that were specifically different – they had a much higher ELL population – and two schools that were in a different part of the city, with higher poverty levels. Part of that was to see how the model needs to shift, depending on the different contexts.
Our selection process includes a number of different engagements and an application process that schools will go through before they get to the early phase work. Recently, ten schools in D.C. were invited to go through the application and selection process. From there, 5 schools will then do the early stage work towards potentially deciding to adopt the model. We really want to work with schools that opt in. We have to have a school leader who is passionate and willing to lead that hard work, and then we need a critical mass of their staff members who also have the interest and the desire.
TH: That does create some challenges. One thing people say about scaling up these kinds of models is that you need central office support. But if only some of the schools opt in, then the district itself is not as invested. How do you balance that?
CRR: It’s a great question. I think D.C. is a good example of how you can work with individual schools with the support of central office leaders. It’s also an example of how schools become interested in the model after hearing positive stories about it from their peers. We had those five early adopting schools, and they were super passionate, super interested. Then the next set of schools were chosen from a cluster of 10 schools from which 5 became model adopters. One of those principals presented her experience at a professional development session for school leaders, and this resulted in interest from additional schools. Building excitement about something through the enthusiasm of the early adopters is one way to spread without forcing. By next fall we’ll be working directly with 20 elementary schools, which is 25% of the elementary schools in D.C. We then plan to pause expanding direct partnerships with schools to also focus on supporting central office staff members who work on aligned practices with schools that are not direct partners.
“Building excitement about something through the enthusiasm of the early adopters is one way to spread without forcing.”
TH: What’s one of your biggest challenges right now, in terms of adapting or scaling the model?
CRR: We are wrestling with the coaching model. It’s hard because we started this in the 2018-2019 school year. In that spring we started our training with our first group in D.C., and then the next school year, the pandemic happened. So we changed the model to make it applicable virtually. Practices had to really change so we could do them virtually over Zoom or Teams. Schools were faced with such unique challenges. Because of the context changing so much in the past four years, we’ve had to try different coaching approaches. During the pandemic we had virtual coaches, who were only in-person a few times that year at schools. We have had coaches on-the-ground working at schools with intensive needs, such as lots of behavior issues or tons of new staff. We are still refining our approach to figure out what coaching model will be most useful at which type of school. One key learning has been the importance of the school staff leading the work with our support, owning their own vision, and championing the model rather than relying on us as outside consultants to do so.
We are also trying to make sure that this is not just about rolling out different practices. When we facilitate a session, it may be interpreted as “we’re doing Strong Start now,” or “We’re doing Structured Recess now.” Instead I would want people to say, “Student having the skills to self-regulate is important; Here’s why that’s important, based on what’s happening in their brains and their bodies.” We want to be principle and research forward and help schools understand the practices are just the things that get at these underlying much more important ideas. I think that can easily get lost as we’re sharing with schools that get excited about implementing model components versus slowing down to understand the rationale first.
“We want to be principle- and research-forward and help schools understand the practices are just the things that get at these underlying much more important ideas.”
TH: As you’ve shifted from being a founding principal and now to trying to expand the model, what are some things you learned about the model that you didn’t know before or perhaps about being a principal?
CRR: I’ve noticed that it’s much more straightforward to implement the model when baseline conditions are not as challenging, for example if the school has fewer difficult behaviors at school because of students who have been impacted by trauma. I’ve also expanded my understanding of topics like extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation to support schools that want to move away from using systems that emphasize points or ‘school bucks.’ If a school is invested in that kind of extrinsic rewards system, you have to be able to both explain in a compelling way why strategies that take more time and effort are better for students’ long term development and offer alternative ways to foster intrinsic motivation.
I have also realized that how we staff schools can make it inherently difficult for the people that choose to work within schools. The teaching and school principal positions are both so challenging and stressful in the current environment, so as I work with school teams, I try to constantly stay aware of their competing priorities, brainstorm strategies to alleviate stress, and encourage partners to find ways to prioritize their own health and wellbeing. Being able to finally be on the outside of schools also encourages me to talk with policymakers and others with decision making power to let them know the changes that are needed to make these roles sustainable for those already in the profession and appealing to those considering entering it.
TH: That connects to your earlier point about how hard it is to do this work in schools that don’t have the resources or capacity as other schools, and that’s a reality we can’t accept. So the question is, how do we work against these conditions and create conditions that actually will enable these models to take off where they need to, in ways that people can do it within their normal lives. Do you have any specific advice for folks who are interested in creating new school models and new school designs?
CRR: Yes. If you are working within a system, which is what this model does, then everyone implementing needs to understand the “why,” and being willing to go slow versus really fast with rolling it out is critical. Separate from that, though, if you’re thinking about designing a model, I would encourage super unorthodox thinking because that’s what’s necessary right now.
“If you’re thinking about designing a model, I would encourage super unorthodox thinking because that’s what’s necessary right now.“
Really be daring. Don’t pretend that school as it exists is something that we should refine; it’s something we should completely redesign.
The second part of this 3-part interview with Cynthia Robinson-Rivers about the Whole Child Model addresses some key questions about the engagement of parents and community members and some of the key challenges for implementing the model. Cynthia Robinson-Rivers is the founding principal of the Whole Child Model at Van Ness Elementary School in Washington D.C. Robinson Rivers recently joined Transcend, where she works with schools in Texas, Tennessee and Washington D.C. who are adopting the Whole Child Model. This interview was conducted by Thomas Hatch and students from his School Change class at Teachers College, Columbia University in the fall of 2023. Part 1 focused on the initial development of the Whole Child Model and some of the supports for teachers. These posts build on an interview last year with Transcend’s Keptah St. Julien who talked about the key elements of the Whole Child Model (See part 1; part 2).This interview was published originally on internationaledews.com onMay 3, 2023.
Community engagement in the evolution of the Whole Child Model
Thomas Hatch: Understanding how to work with communities so that school models are not imposed on people is a crucial part of the development process. This model is striking because it’s clear and well-informed theoretically and developmentally, but at the same time it’s a community driven model. Can you talk to us a little bit about the community process that went into developing the model and how it has enabled you to build some common understanding of the model?
Cynthia Robinson Rivers: At Van Ness, we engaged in early conversations just to get input from families and that informed what we put into the model and the components of the model. We then continued engaging families in a variety of ways, including through listening sessions with families and through sharing the information that we were learning as a school staff so that families were just as familiar as our teacher with the research that was guiding our decisions.
To be honest, I feel I could have done a much better job with family and community engagement. One place that we were inspired by and that does this really well is The Primary School in East Palo Alto California. Parent coordinators are leveraged there to get family input and feedback through monthly family meetings with a consistently high rate of attendance, which means families appreciate and enjoy them. Our team learned about this during a 2019 visit to the school when our first cohort of principals were able to visit with us. Before I left Van Ness, we were looking to figure out ways to implement practices like the ones we learned about while there.
During the initial phase of our direct partnership with schools, when schools learn about our model, examine their own conditions, and determine if they will partner with us, the school’s design teams interview students; shadow a student, and engage with their current families. One school in Texas had a virtual visit to Van Ness, where they learned about the model and saw it in action. Teachers and school leaders [from Van NESS] did a panel and a Q&A that was attended by about 100 families who got really excited about their school adopting the model. That can then help to sustain the model because you have buy-in and investment, not just from the staff, but from the community as well.
Resistance TH: Those are great examples. What about resistance from parents or teachers or any other challenges you faced in developing the model?
CRR: I made the mistake in my communication early on as a school leader by sharing more of the compassionate side of our approach and less of the structure. I was very clear about the notion that we need to disrupt the traditional ways that we’ve treated kids, and we need to allow them to have more agency and teach appropriate behaviors instead of trying to punish behaviors. I think early on that left parents with the misunderstanding that it was about being too nice with kids. On the one hand, we needed work with our families to make sure we were not misaligned. For example, if, at home, families are punishing children harshly or using corporal punishment, then that’s a misalignment that we don’t want to be present. We knew that engaging families and also sharing knowledge with them about best practices for a child’s behavior is an important next step. But I also needed to share more about assertiveness, structure, consistency of the model and that we are not just being all nice with kids. There is actually a good amount of structure and consequences for inappropriate behavior, and I missed sharing that with the families early on. I’ve encouraged our school partners to talk about compassion and talk about what kids deserve, but also talk about the consistency and structure of this model, so that parents know we’re not just letting children run wild and do whatever they want at school.
TH: What about home visits? How do you feel home visits impact the effectiveness of the model? Do you feel like parents have pushed back with the home visits or do you think that they’re accepting of them?
CRR: Home visits have been so helpful in enabling families to understand and value the model. There’s a little bit of pushback that quickly goes away after a few parents have a home visit and then share how wonderful it is getting to know the teachers in that way. That usually gets other families excited about it. One thing that we do is get the class rosters finished by June so that teachers can complete the home visits over the summer with a goal of having 50% of them done by the first day of school. With that prioritizing, if we know about them, kids who might have a harder time have a home visit and at least one or 2 other touch points. So on the first day of school they really feel connected.
During the home visit, we will also bring a social story, which is a book that helps a child know what to expect with words and pictures. You can do a social story about how to line up, how to go to recess, or what do we do in music? We do a social story over the summer for the summer home visit specific to what to expect at school. This alleviates a ton of anxiety. It also is a time when, with the family and the child, we’re able to share a lot about what we do and what the model looks like in a totally low stakes, relationship-building context. In those ways it’s a very helpful structure.
“We’re able to share a lot about what we do and what the model looks like in a totally low stakes, relationship-building context.”
For families that really feel uncomfortable even after they hear about how great home visits are, we offer to meet them in the community, anywhere that is not school, for example at the cafe or at the park, or at the library, at a neutral location. In that location, we do all the things that we would do during the home visit. The same conversations about “what are your hopes and your dreams for your child?” Nothing academic. It is purely to build a positive relationship with the families. We’ve incorporated home visits as one of our practices in the family circle component of the model, but initially learned about how to conduct them from one of our partner organizations, Flamboyan Foundation, which specializes in family engagement strategies for educators.
TH: you talked a little bit about the need for alignment particularly related to discipline. But I can imagine there are other issues where alignment is important. How do you work on it if there is misalignment with parents and the school?
CRR: We try to do that without judgment and in as asset-based a way as possible. We know parents are the child’s first teacher, and they’re doing the best with the knowledge that they have. If they are engaging in a practice that we would disagree with, like spanking for example, we would try to come to that with understanding and not judgment. What I’ve found over the years, and this is part of why I like the Primary School’s example, is that it’s very hard to influence behavior using a top-down lecture style information-sharing such as at a back to school night or a parent meeting. It can come across paternalistic and condescending. But a different approach is to have discussion circles of parents, led by a parent leader who’s been trained and then empowered to establish this group that shares information both ways, not hierarchically. The example I would give on this is when we had a parent meeting with the topic “We are a healthy school and we want our students to have healthy meals and snacks.” I tried to talk about this in an intellectual way about the impact of nutritious food vs. junk food in a child’s body. I’m sure no one changed their habits in any way after that talk. As an alternative, if you had a parent-led circle, offered a healthy snack as part of that meeting, and a conversation starter like “Oh, how do you plan lunch for the week while buying not too expensive items that are also good for kids?” That’s a session topic where parents are sharing information. They feel valued, they feel heard, and then people are packing better lunches. When there is misalignment, getting lectured and getting told your way is wrong, or “here’s a better way” doesn’t work. We need to create opportunities to slowly and in a trusting environment learn about alternatives.
“It’s very hard to influence behavior using a top-down lecture style information- sharing such as at a back to school night or a parent meeting… But a different approach is to have discussion circles of parents, led by a parent leader who’s been trained and then empowered to establish this group that shares information both ways, not hierarchically.”
TH: What about shifting a little bit to talk about teachers. Are there particular aspects of the model that the teachers found especially challenging?
CRR: I think all parts of BOOST are hard because it addresses the kids that have some of the most challenging behaviors. So if you’re at the point where you’re meeting to figure out what CARE PLUS strategies will be helpful for a child, that might be a child who has eloped from the classroom multiple times. You don’t know where they are. You can’t leave the class. It’s not safe to leave them alone in the hallway. Or a child who has consistently, physically harmed others. And you have to talk to parents after school whose child was hurt. And you have to assure them that you’re going to keep them safe.
It’s really tough stuff that always, but especially in the past 2 years, is even harder if the teachers are already overwhelmed. There’s a pandemic, the teacher just came back from quarantine, half the class is at home on the computer. Teachers are already stressed, and it’s really really hard especially in those moments when you need to be composed to have that empathy for the child in order to follow through on an intervention that requires you to be fully present and using your reasoning brain. That’s why the model provides structures and language that teachers can practice, and when you understand “the why,” that can make it possible to leverage what you know even when you’re upset, because you have so much practice with it. You’re concerned about and empathizing with the child, instead of being annoyed with them, because you understand what happened to them, and why they’re behaving that way.
I would also say LANGUAGE AND TONE, in general, is one of the hardest parts of the model. The STRONG START set of practices in the morning feel so good. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Greeting kids and classroom design. If you go into one of the model classrooms, you can look and see, this is gorgeous. Of course I would want my room to look like this. But for language, in terms of safety, when you’re doing a transition or routine, like when you need kids to safely get somewhere or safely do something, it is sometimes different from how we actually talk. In the language of safety, it’s important to speak assertively, to be specific, and use concise, not verbose language. The example that has resonated with teachers in clarifying this is if you were in an accident and had to evacuate a plane. You would not want a captain that says something like “Okay, passengers, it seems like it’s an emergency. Maybe you guys should stand up.” No, you’d want the clarity and strength of the captain saying, “Stand up. Walk to the nearest exit door.” In the language of safety, that assertive tone and concision is not a voice that feels natural to lots of people and remembering to say things in that way is hard.
“The example that has resonated with teachers in clarifying this is if you were in an accident and had to evacuate a plane. You would not want a captain that says something like “Okay, passengers, it seems like it’s an emergency. Maybe you guys should stand up.” No, you’d want the clarity and strength of the captain saying, “Stand up. Walk to the nearest exit door.””
Highlighting appropriate behaviors is another thing that can be challenging. For example, when kids are lining up, and they’re mostly in line, but some are not, you would acknowledge a student who is lined up in a way that keeps the hallway safe. It’s hard to remember not to call out the negative, and thereby accidentally reinforce that negative behavior. If a child is hitting the person beside them, we instinctively want to say “no hitting” or “stop hitting” instead of “keep your hands in your lap like this to be safe.” In many schools you’ll hear negative behaviors highlighted “Stop running in the hallway” or “Don’t call out during the story.” We’re often noticing all the behaviors that we don’t want to reinforce, and we have to remember to notice the behaviors we want to see more of, which is a hard language shift to make.
The first part of this 3-part post draws on an interview with Cynthia Robinson-Rivers, the founding principal of the Whole Child Model at Van Ness Elementary School in Washington D.C. Robinson-Rivers recently joined Transcend, where she works with schools in Texas, Tennessee and Washington D.C. who are adopting the Whole Child Model. The interview was conducted by Thomas Hatch and students from his School Change class at Teachers College, Columbia University in the fall of 2023. Part 1 focuses on the initial development of the Whole Child Model and some of the supports for teachers. This post builds on an a 2-part interview last year with Transcend’s Keptah St. Julien who talked about the key elements of the Whole Child Model (See part 1; part 2).This interview was published originally on internationaledews.com onApril 26, 2023.
Establishing the key components of the Whole Child Model at Van Ness Elementary School
Thomas Hatch (TH): Can you tell us about the Whole Child Model and how it originated at Van Ness?
Cynthia Robinson-Rivers (CRR): As we were developing what would later become the Whole Child Model, we talked with teachers, students, parents, and community members and asked: “If we’re successful during our students’ elementary school years – pre-kindergarten through fifth grade – what will our students be like as adolescents and adults?” This generated a long list of words, including, most prominently, “compassionate,” but also words like “critical thinkers.” Those became our graduate aims, and they were for the students to be creative, compassionate, critical thinkers, curious, constant learners and students able to build community across lines of cultural and racial difference. These were the characteristics and dispositions we hoped to cultivate in students during their time with us. From those aims, we then worked together to develop the actions we would need to take in order to be able to develop those traits in our students.
In our second year, we partnered with Transcend and they helped us to codify the things we were doing as a school model that could be shared with others. That work led us to establish three key components:
Student well-being,
Student as a maker
Student ownership for learning
Student well-being is the most developed, as it was the component we started with, and it’s the most foundational to the model.
The work on student well-being also has 3 parts:
CARE is the set of universal “tier 1” practices every student receives. It’s effective in supporting kids, helping them to be successful with their school day for 90 to 95 percent of students.
BOOST is the set of additional “tier 2” and “tier 3” supports that we give to that 5 to 10% of students who need additional support to be successful participating in the routines of school.
FAMILY CIRCLE is our approach to family engagement, and it includes practices that aim to place families as equal partners in education and leverage that support for the student’s development.
Zooming in on CARE, which stands for Compassion, Assertiveness, Routines, and Environment, something as straightforward as the language teachers use and the tone of voice they use when they speak with students is considered a tier 1 support for everyone that walks into the school building.
We start with the physical environment, with the classroom as the “third teacher” and as a hugely important part of the students’ experience. We want them to enter a room that is comfortable, personal, accessible, and a reflection of the students’ backgrounds and cultures.
“We think about the physical environment of the classroom as the third teacher and as a hugely important part of the students’ experience. We want them to enter a room that is comfortable, personal, accessible, and reflective of the students’ backgrounds and cultures.“
There are many ways in which our approach to the classroom environment helps to meet a child’s needs. Most importantly, we want the room to be accessible, meaning students know how to access materials independently and where to find needed items that are in organized bins and are clearly labeled. Ideally, we have lamps and natural light as an alternative to overhead fluorescent lights and access to nature through keeping plants in the room. We have framed pictures of students and their families to not only acknowledge the importance of families and make them visible in the classroom, but also to help calm students when they are upset. We aim for our classroom environments to be trauma-informed, welcoming, predictable and consistent. When kids don’t know what’s coming, they’re much more likely to be dysregulated and to be quicker to get upset than when they know exactly what to expect, and the classroom can help to establish that kind of predictable and supportive environment. Another important part of the classroom is the centering space, a physical space in every room that kids know they can go to if they feel upset and has the visuals and the physical materials that can aid them in doing so.
In addition to the physical environment, we have the Strong Start morning routine, inspired by a socio-emotional learning program that Van Ness utilized in its beginning years, which includes support from students beginning with a greeting at the door when they start the instructional day. The aim is to enable kids to be successful, especially if they have come to school with challenges that day or the evening before.
Strong Start includes:
Greetings: Students get a personal, warm greeting, with a choice of how to be greeted and a meaningful exchange back and forth – serve and return (as in tennis) – that will help kids who may not have healthy attachment to get experience connecting with a trusted adult.
Breakfast in the classroom: As an alternative to a noisy and impersonal cafeteria, students eat together in the more quiet and calm environment of their classroom.
Independent activities: Students journal, conference with their teacher, or engage in partner or small group activities that can include academic interventions.
Community Building: Teachers bring the class together as a group to foster a sense of shared community and belonging.
Purposeful Partnering: Teachers pair students up with at least one other child to engage in activities that create student to student connections.
Breathe and Focus: Teachers give the students an explicit opportunity to practice ways of gaining composure if they’re upset.
Goal setting: Teachers ask students to set an intention for the day. We know that when we set a goal and we tell someone about it, we’re much more likely to meet that goal.
Reflect and Share: Students are able to process current events or recent classroom conflicts through a group conversation the teacher facilitates.
We also engage in a broader set of CARE practices – that include strong start, classroom design, intentional language, and other components – and many people visit schools that we work with and think, “Oh, this is great!” and comment on how “warm and fuzzy” the practices seem. So we often explain that, while the environments we create are warm and that’s important, the practices are rooted in brain science and each have a purpose. We try to share as much as we can about what happens inside students’ bodies and brains when their development has been impacted by trauma and the importance of schools being trauma-informed.
The Whole Child Model is inspired by Dr. Bruce Perry’s neuro-sequential model. It helped us to understand that if kids come to school fearing for their physical safety, which is the case in some of our highest need schools, they first need to regulate. That’s where practices like Breathe and Focus come in. If students are not regulated, they’re not ready to learn. We also know that if they are upset, they might be controlled by their limbic system. Their amygdala might be over reactive and they may be scanning for threats. In that state, they are also not ready to learn. Where we want them to be is in their prefrontal cortex, regulated and ready to reason and think abstractly and critically.
A typical day with the Whole Child Model
TH: The extensiveness and comprehensiveness of the support is really noteworthy and as you emphasized, it’s not just a set of features or elements but they are grounded in a particular approach and theory about children’s development and children’s behavior. Could you give us a sense of how all of this plays out in a typical day?
CRR: Students arrive, receive a greeting, and have breakfast in the classroom. As students are arriving, those already in the classroom engage in independent activities, including journaling and reading, until the teacher gathers students together for strong start group activities. While many social-emotional learning programs call for a daily or weekly block of activities, we believe that students should experience positive and supportive interactions throughout each day and should have frequent opportunities to practice their skills in authentic ways. So, you would see this come to life in language a teacher uses when working with students, to either help them be successful because of the clarity or concision of language or help them think critically because of open-ended questioning. You would see students learning independently in all parts of the room – the maker space, the art center, the small group reading table, and other areas – in ways that promote autonomy and choice to empower students. Social stories – visual stories that help students know what to expect – might be used to support students moving to a new activity or individually to help students who have difficulty with transitions. These are just a few examples of how a whole-child, student-centered approach would live throughout the day and not be confined to a narrow block of time.
“You would see students learning independently in all parts of the room – the maker space, the art center, the small group reading table, and other areas – in ways that promote autonomy and choice to empower students.”
Key Supports for the Model: Staffing for Socio-Emotional Development
TH: Can you talk a bit about what it takes to support the model? For example, do you need a lot of support staff to be able to make it happen? Do the teachers have any coaching?
CRR: Yes, the socio-emotional, behavioral, and mental health staff require in-depth training, but within these roles the staffing and capacity vary widely at our schools. In DC, many schools have “behavior techs” who respond if there is a child in immediate need. The behavior techs are also the people who run structured recess and restorative in school suspension.
In other regions using the Whole Child Model, staffing approaches are very different and, in some cases, have less support and capacity. Some schools have only an itinerant social worker, no behavior techs, and no positions like dean of students to coordinate behavior responses. We work with schools to determine who can own some of those systemwide approaches in lieu of the behavior techs. Typically, we are able to work with schools to figure out who on the staff would be most appropriate to take the lead and make sure interventions are running.
Before implementing intensive behavior interventions, it’s important to focus on CARE Plus, theset of interventions that happen in the classroom before a student is referred to outside supports. If the teacher has a student who could benefit from additional support, there are many CARE Plus strategies that can be used. For example, a child might get an individualized daily schedule in addition to the classroom posted schedule, because they need to know exactly when transitions take place and need to see that in a personalized way. Students may have specialized seating or they may get the additional responsibility to be the line leader because being in line is a part of the day that the student may have a hard time with. Students may get to have a movement break or use their break card to go get a break. These are all interventions within the classroom but teachers need the support of an administrator to help think through which strategies would help the child before more intensive interventions are considered.
Book Studies and Professional Learning for Teachers
TH: What about professional development for teachers? Can you talk about your book studies and how other professional development activities are integrated into the school day?
CRR: Yes, when I was at Van Ness, we would read one book for a school year, and we usually read a chapter or two per month and one book every summer. The summer reading was on your own, and we would debrief it during the first week of professional learning at the beginning of the school year. The year-long book study would be the focus of every monthly staff meeting, where we would talk about what we learned in that chapter and how we would apply it. Then that would line up with how we would do observation and feedback as a leadership team, giving feedback on those specific practices that teachers were learning about and implementing. We were able to use those forums because we had other opportunities for other types of professional learning. DCPS implements LEAP, a structure that allows for weekly 60 to 90-minute content area meetings when early childhood, ELA, math, or enrichment teachers gather in a PLC to improve their practice.
“We found that when you define the times and places where you will prioritize different focus areas, it helps ensure you don’t forget about the non-cognitive aspects of a child’s development.“
In addition to monthly staff meetings and weekly LEAP sessions, there are quarterly PD days where we usually have a year-long focus area. One year was focused on racial equity and ways to mitigate against implicit bias. Another year our PD days focused around maker-centered learning, and we brought experts from Project Zero at Harvard to come do training with us. Defining the times and places for different kinds of professional learning helped us to decrease the tension that teachers often have, where they feel like they have so much to do on reading and math and raising test scores that they don’t think they have time for social-emotional learning or well-being. We found that when you define the times and places where you will prioritize different focus areas, it helps ensure you don’t forget about the non-cognitive aspects of a child’s development.
This week, IEN continues to look at the developing work of the Central Square Foundation (CSF) and its efforts to build the capacity for improving learning outcomes in India. The post draws from an interview with CSF’s Co-Managing Director Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja. Last week, partone explored the first five years of the Foundation’s initiatives (2012-2017) and how they developed their current strategy focusing on foundational learning, educational technology, and affordable private schools. This week, part two concentrates on the “four pillars” of their approach to foundational learning and the lessons they have learned in trying to improve learning at scale in India. This interview was published originally on internationaledews.com onApril 14, 2022.
“Four pillars” of work on foundational literacy: Partnerships, aligned instruction, professional development and assessment
Thomas Hatch: Tell me a bit about your work on Foundational Literacy now.
Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja: After almost four decades, India came up with a new education policy that highlights that unless we solve for early learning, any other reform, whether we do it in higher education or in secondary schools, will become irrelevant. Just last summer, the national government launched the policy with the introduction of the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) The initiative aims to ensure that, by 2026-27, every child in India attains foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Grade 3. CSF has had a small but a catalytic role in the development of the policy, and this initiative is now phase three of our mission.
It’s important to know that India doesn’t have a formal early childhood education system. Our Right to Education Act starts at age six and grade 1. Prior to that, you can go to the Anganwadi Centers, which are under a different Ministry, the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD). Those Centers, by the way, have done an incredible job when it comes to vaccination, nutrition, and health, but, unfortunately, the system is overloaded, and they also now have to take care of education. The new education policy talks about the need to address this problem in the three-to-eight-year age group and to have a strong pre-primary section, but it’s not yet institutionalized in the education system.
TH: So this is a new focus area – it still follows your same general approach – but it’s not a totally distinct endeavor?
SS: Exactly. It’s what we call radical prioritization of early learning. The idea is how do we equip the existing education system to raise the floor of their approach to early learning so that it translates into learning outcomes? And it’s particularly crucial right now because, with COVID, enrollment in India is back to being a problem, especially with some socio-economic groups. For example, a girl who walked into grade three now would never have gone to grade 1 or grade 2, and India doesn’t have a pre-primary school system. The girl is probably eight or nine years old and is expected to start working at the third-grade level. That’s why the early learning focus is so important from a COVID learning loss perspective as well.
“Now a girl would walk into grade three never having gone to grade 1 or grade 2, and India doesn’t have a pre-primary school system. The girl is probably eight or nine years old and is expected to start working at the third-grade level. That’s why the early learning focus is so important from COVID learning loss perspective as well.“
Building a lot on RTI’s approach in Kenya, we are pursuing what we call a four-pillar approach. The first step is to do a system diagnostic – “What are the critical enablers we need?”. One of the challenges in India is that learning gains are very intangible in the early stages of education. In India, the first high stakes assessment happens in grade 10, which is a board exam. That’s very critical and private schools will advertise how well they do, but it’s very late in the cycle of education and there’s no ownership or accountability for earlier stages of education. Actually, the system allows a child to pass out of primary and upper primary school without really having learned. That’s why the first step is How do we get alignment on goal setting and communication?” From the Chief Minister of a state to a parent or an illiterate parent who’s sending a first-generation learner to school, do we all understand what we mean by the mission of education and what we are hoping to achieve? What does learning to read with meaning mean? What does it mean to be able to do basic arithmetic? That becomes the first pillar.
“From the Chief Minister of a state to a parent or an illiterate parent who’s sending a first-generation learner to the school, do we all understand what we mean by the mission of education and what we are hoping to achieve? What does learning to read with meaning mean? What does it mean to be able to do basic arithmetic? That becomes the first pillar.“
Teacher professional development and teaching and learning materials – the second and third pillars – are related. With our literacy and numeracy partners, we are working on a structured pedagogy approach to ensure that there is a common learning outcomes framework reflected in lesson plans, workbooks, and learning activities for children in the classroom as well as deeply aligned teacher professional development. One of the learnings of all teacher training initiatives in India has been that teacher training by itself – which isn’t aligned to our curriculum or pedagogical approach – might inspire teachers, but doesn’t always translate to benefits in the classroom. So it’s designed to be a very integrated approach. In other words, it’s capacity building for the entire value chain, including teacher education and including all the materials and layers of academic support which are supposed to be helping teachers in the classroom.
The fourth pillar is assessment and developing a monitoring framework. What will the assessment and monitoring dashboard look like at the district level, at the state level and then at the national level? Unfortunately, in India right now assessment is equal to testing and testing means we are judging children, whereas the intent has to be to assess so that we can support children wherever learning gaps are coming up.
Then, in order to support adoption and behavior change around these four pillars, we have to take into account things like, in India, teachers don’t retire. As economists say, there’s a “stock” but not a “flow;” there’s not an active “churn.” “I’ve been a teacher for two decades. What’s in it for me to truly change how I teach children language or another subject?” That’s why we’ve specifically called out behavior change along with things like home learning and community engagement. How can we augment the teaching time that children are getting in school with the time they’re getting at home? But I want to stress that the idea is not to shift the responsibility of education to the parent, but can they play an enabling or facilitating role?
These four pillars capture the work we are doing in our key states (Haryana, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh) with a focus on learning. Overall, our role is to leverage other NGO’s in the eco-system. The coalition that works with the state government in each case includes the Central Square Foundation, and we typically play a project management role and help to leverage other NGO’s in the eco-system, including a literacy expert and a numeracy expert. This approach reflects the principle that to solve this complex need, we need different organizations to bring their expertise and co-create a solution with the state. And it’s not proprietary. We want Gujarat to run it as Gujarat’s Foundational Literacy and Numeracy program. For it to actually scale and sustain, the budget, the branding, the operational costs has to come from the State itself.
Reflections on the challenges and opportunities of supporting learning at scale
TH: What kind of pushback have you gotten as this work has evolved? Are there particular areas where the government has resisted or you’ve had to change in order to move the partnership forward?
SS: It took us a while to land on this four-pillar approach, but it’s what we have done strategically and theoretically. Actually bringing it to the ground with other partner organizations, as you can imagine, is easier said than done. There was a learning curve that we ourselves needed to go through.
It’s easy for me to say that we are bringing together a project management partner, a literacy expert, and a numeracy expert. But historically in India, NGOs haven’t collaborated well. I think we NGO’s and civil society organizations tend to be in love with our own IP [intellectual property]. We think we’re the only ones who can do it, and it has to be done “our way.” But if I’m a teacher in a government school, and I’ve been teaching a certain subject for two decades, I’ve seen many programs and many missions and many NGOs come and go, but I’m still here. You can’t expect me to learn a different way of teaching language and a different way for numeracy and then do assessment. It all has to come together in an integrated manner.
“If I’m a teacher in a government school and I’ve been teaching a certain subject for two decades, I’ve seen many programs and many missions and many NGOs come and go, but I’m still here. You can’t expect me to learn a different way of teaching language and a different way for numeracy and then assessment. It all has to come together in an integrated manner.“
The devil in the details is how will all the partners work together? How will we establish accountability? That’s been a learning experience. Because organizations are also people, understanding the chemistry of different partners – first at a coalition level, and then with the government stakeholders – has also been an interesting journey.
From a government perspective, everyone understands why early learning is important so they latch on to the need for early learning, but I think the biggest challenge has been assessment and putting a strong monitoring system in place. Again, this comes from a legacy of assessment being equated with tests and exams that are used for selection. But it’s been much harder to make the transition to using assessment to inform instruction and to make course corrections so that everyone is that grade level and year-end remediation is not required.
The other classic challenge is how prescriptive should a structured pedagogy approach be? Is teaching a science or is teaching an art? With our approach with the instructional materials and guidebooks for the teachers, we are trying to solve for the part that is science. And if you are a teacher who gets the art part right, your classroom will be more engaging, your students will be more engaged, and it will show up in their work. Whereas, if I’m an average teacher with average motivation, and I just want to get my work done, if you can provide me with a scientific solution that is prescriptive to a certain extent, at least it will ensure that my children get to grade level.
So, all in all, I would say our own learning has been around four challenges. First, what does it take to build a coalition for the four-pillar approach: What will our role be, how do we establish accountability? Second, how do we land that approach with a government so they see we are not coming with our own NGO program, that we want to help strengthen their early learning program? Third, how do we solve the assessment problem, so that assessment is both a check for understanding in the classroom and a way of monitoring so we know the health of the system overall? Fourth, what does having a scientifically defined learning framework with micro competencies and related lesson plans, do to the autonomy of a teacher? Those have been the biggest challenges and areas of learnings for us.
“What does having a scientifically defined learning framework, with micro competencies and related lesson plans, do to the autonomy of a teacher?”
TH: What have you learned and what have you had to change in order to shift, particularly that NGO mindset of “I have the solution?”
SS: The first thing we’ve learned is we don’t have to start with a solution that we are proposing. First, we have to do a diagnostic and understand – and help the government understand – what their current approach is. How do they do early learning? What have their gaps been? What’s happening in the classroom and what are teachers experiencing? Then one of the things we’ve had to change is to get the conversation started on learning goals, teaching and learning materials, and on an assessment framework with the government as an equal partner. We’re not presenting the framework to them. We’re actually discovering it together. We’re peeling the onion to see what ‘s amiss, what can we contribute? How can you support that or this is sacrosanct and you can’t touch it? For example, in India, you can’t touch textbooks. Textbooks come from NCERT/SCERT (State Education Department) and they just get followed. However, if you want to reorder or the sequence or if you want to skip two chapters and augment them with some supplementary material, we can have that conversation. It has been crucial to understand the constraints and the appetite for change. It has taken us a while to realize that we’re not helping states start the early learning program we are helping them augment their early learning programs so that kids learn on grade level.
“It has been crucial to understand the constraints and the appetite for change. It has taken us a while to realize that we’re not helping states start the early learning program we are helping them augment their early learning programs so that kids learn on grade level.”
NOTE: This interview I did with Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja originally appeared in internationaledews.com
Over the next two weeks IEN looks at the first 10 years of the evolution of the Central Square Foundation (CSF) and its efforts to build the capacity for improving learning outcomes in India. The posts draw from an interview with CSF’s Co-Managing Director Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja. Part one explores the first five years of the Foundation’s initiatives (2012-2017) and how they developed their strategy for the next five years focusing on foundational learning, educational technology, and affordable private schools. Part two concentrates on the “four pillars” of their approach to foundational learning and the lessons they have learned in trying to improve learning at scale in India.For more on the 10th Anniversary of CSF’s founding see #10YearsOfCSF: Leaders at CSF on Their Vision for the Next Decade.
Central Square Foundation’s first five years: Developing a “wide-portfolio”
Thomas Hatch: Can you tell me about the background and evolution of the Central Square Foundation (CSF)?
Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja: We started in February 2012. The founder of CSF, Ashish Dhawan, has one of the largest private equity funds in India. He always had a deep desire to move to the development sector, and he started by serving on boards of other NGOs to try to gain an understanding of education. I joined CSF in July 2012, and for the first five years, we were only funded by our founder which allowed us to be very entrepreneurial in how we looked at education. The only “guardrails” he put up were that we would be a non-profit; we will look only at school education (K-12); and we would support young social entrepreneurs. As a result, venture philanthropy shaped a lot of the work that we did in the first phase of our journey.
Without external funders, we had the flexibility to look at a diverse set of issues from education technology to early childhood education to data and assessments. During this time, grant making was one big part of our work. Second, we supported research, particularly research from the perspective of how it can inform policy. Since we are neither a university, or an evaluation agency, our research was always oriented more for policymakers and for other education leaders and on how our research can help the ecosystem develop a collective voice. Third, we focused on government engagement. Even while we were doing grant making and looking for innovative solutions, we knew that for any solution to scale and be sustainable it needed government adoption. Early on, we weren’t even sure what government engagement meant, but we began by trying to come up with innovative solutions, having smart researchers lend their voice to it, and then handing it over to the government to run with it. But, as in much of the developing South, government demands typically include asking you to work in partnership with them, so we ended up setting up a number of project management units both at the central and the state level.
TH: What’s the advantage of an organization like yours taking some of that work on in a partnership with the government?
SS: The reality is that most people in the government understand the issues and challenges that the system is facing; they’re not blind to it. but the education production function is so complex that it’s difficult to pick out one part of the problem and solve it. The government is in the business of setting up the policy, and they are doing the regulation, and they are also the service provider of education. Working with an external partner enables them to hire people with a different profile – with different backgrounds and more specific expertise about a particular issue. The external partner becomes an extension of the government but they’re also able to bring a different profile of talent and to be razor sharp on the issue that they’re working on.
“Working with an external partner enables [the government] to hire people with a different profile – with different backgrounds and more specific expertise about a particular issue. The external partner becomes an extension of the government, but they’re also able to bring a different profile of talent and to be razor sharp on the issue that they’re working on.“
For example, working on a partnership focused on school leadership was my first project at CSF. At that time, school leadership as a term was not even being used in India. But, in 2012- 13, we were able to bring a group of people together, including myself, from the US and India, with expertise in organizational leadership to create the India School Leadership Institute (ISLI) which worked with principals of “low-fee” private schools. (For an overview of the evolution of ISLI see IEN’s conversation with ISLI Founding Director, Sameer Sampat.) But then the government was able to set up a National Center for School Leadership that built on a lot of our learnings in ISLI even though “low-fee” schools aren’t even part of the government sector.
The development of India’s national online platform for teachers provides another good example. As you know, the growth of technology in India has always had the advantage of better device penetration, cheaper internet, cheaper hardware but the software solutions have been the problem. In this case, states started building their own portals for teacher education but their first version was basically just a PDF of their teacher manual that they put on their websites. So there was a huge opportunity for a platform to be built, not just a portal, but a platform on a national level that states could connect to.
The national teacher platform called DIKSHA relied on core technology that came from the EkStep Foundation. Their own legacy is from AADHAR which is a platform enabling the Government of India to directly reach residents of the country in delivery of various subsidies, benefits, and services by using the resident’s unique 12-digit Aadhaar number only. They already had sophisticated technology at a level that no state government would have been able to develop itself. CSF then took on the project management responsibilities to integrate and adapt the technology for the state governments so that it aligned with their needs and had the look and feel of their website portals. It was a logical opportunity for CSF to start working with the government, but it was dependent on identifying a strong need where the government wanted support and where CSF had the ability to provide that support. It’s one of my favorite examples of a government partnership, because it involved a foundation like EkStep that brought in the technical capability; we brought in the project management capability, and we also had a much deeper understanding of teacher education, having worked on that for about four years. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the most successful examples of a public good being created in partnership with CSO’s and NGO’s and different parts of the government. By 2020, the Prime Minister described DIKSHA As “one nation one platform” for the entire spectrum of education, now serving students and families as well as educators.
Shifting to phase 2: Focusing on “impact”
TH: The examples you talked about illustrate how you were operating during those first five years?
SS: Yes, and this was the time at the end of what we call the first phase of our work that our Board put the question in front of us of “What will CSF’s work look like?” During that phase, we were an operating organization which doesn’t actually work on the ground with students and teachers and school leaders. We incubated ISLI.
We helped to bring the leader in from the US (Sameer Sampat who went on to co-found, with Azad Oommen the first Executive Director of CSF, Global School Leaders on the ISLI model), but I was the donor on the team. I wasn’t running the organization. We were also working with states who had different interest areas. In Delhi at one point, we were working on the school-to-work transition and department restructuring. Two very distinct areas of work that are not directly related to student learning outcomes. It’s a long value chain for department restructuring: it depends on department re-structuring leading to better pedagogy and better curriculum that reach classrooms in schools and teacher education programs that then leaders to better teaching and learning. Our board left it up to us to decide: would it be better for CSF to continue with the “wide portfolio” approach and continue to engage with state and central government, when an opportunity and interest appeared? Or should we take stock and pick a part of learning outcomes where we could have a more direct impact? And we felt that the breadth of our work allowed us a space where we could narrow down our focus and make a more meaningful impact. We essentially said: Let’s pick out an area. Let’s be more outcome and measurement and evaluation driven in our work overall and also in how we work with our partner.” We always say for education reform to stick we need to zoom in to a district and go deep. Similarly, we decided to pick an issue within education and go deep.
“Would it be better for CSF to continue with the “wide portfolio” approach and continue to engage with state and central government, when an opportunity and interest appeared? Or should we take stock and pick a part of learning outcomes where we could have a more direct impact?“
This was around 2017 and about the time that the Gates Foundation began looking at doing work in education in India. Our first validation came when they chose CSF as an “in-country” partner. We were still a relative rookie in the education space when they saw potential in us.
As we moved into this second part of the CSF journey, we shifted from the portfolio approach to three focus areas:
Foundational learning
Technology in education
Private school sector
Landing on the need for foundation learning was very evident for us. There is a rural household survey called ASER which has been going on in India for 20 years, and it shows that the problems with basic skills are quite deep.
The second area, building on some of our earlier work, was education technology. The widespread availability and use of mobile devices and data put India in a unique position relative to many other countries. There was also a lot of for-profit entrepreneurial activity happening in India, so we saw an opportunity for solutions to be created and designed locally. We also had a unique advantage because CSF had already been playing an evangelizing role for how tech can be leveraged for education within the government system.
The third issue area is private schooling. We are very unique as a country where over 40% of children do not take advantage of the free education provided by the public education system. Education in India, like it is worldwide, is aspirational. The moment a family can afford to pull their child out of the free government school, they would rather send their child to a private school with fees beginning at roughly $10 a month. For the most part, the government has looked at the private school system mostly from the perspective of regulation, and there hasn’t been a strong focus on quality. But in the first phase of our work, because a lot of us, including our founder Ashish, came from the management and the corporate side of the world, many people assumed “Oh you guys must be pro-private schools,” and it took us a while to clarify that whether it’s a government school or low fee private school the school is accountable to deliver quality education.
Our approach to these three areas has been similar to what I described for our first phase:
Working with the government and creating a reform agenda with a collective voice of other education leaders
Evidence building and supply shaping comes from the work we do with our partners, with other NGOs in the ecosystem with a sharp focus on the public good – making sure that whatever we are creating is available to others in the education ecosystem – and an emphasis on research
Deepening our government engagement efforts by shifting from working across multiple issues in multiple geographies to focusing our work in certain states on the issue of foundational literacy and numeracy
Getting to scalable and sustainable solutions in these areas became an extension of our approach in phase two. Across focus areas like education technology, we are trying to be more sharply focused on early learning, including at home, and in our work in private schools, we are trying to raise the bar for quality at the primary level. From a measurement perspective, we are targeting the learning poverty index the World Bank has highlighted (measuring the percentage of children who can read and understand a simple text by age 10), asking “how can we contribute to bringing down learning poverty in India?” with an ambitious target of bringing it down from 55% to 15% over the next five or six years. We’ve found this is both a directional goal– requiring us to articulate how our work contributes to it – and an aspirational and inspiring goal that connects our work with others.
TH: Given how hard it is to achieve these goals, have you also established some benchmarks to see if you’re headed in the right direction?
SS: Unfortunately, because of COVID, the plan to get a baseline is still on paper. The whole principle of system reform is that you’re doing it – not just with the approval of the government – but in partnership with the government. However, with the situation worldwide with COVID, that’s been impossible. We actually adapted a tool that USAID uses, the Early Grades Reading Assessment and the Early Grades Math Assessment. We’ve partnered with an assessment agency, and we’ve piloted it in English and in Gujarati so the tool is ready, but quite honestly haven’t even asked the government for permission yet because it’s just unfair. We’re also acutely conscious that whenever we get an opportunity to do the baseline, it will actually be lower than it would have been before COVID first hit. But, in a way, it will also capture a more picture from ground right now.
“What if this is a moment when we can re-imagine education?” But “What if it isn’t? What if, despite the changes wrought by the pandemic, the conditions that sustain conventional schooling remain in place?” These are the questions I asked in a commentary I published in the Journal of Educational Change in August 2021 and that were excerpted in a post on International Ed News (Full commentary available at the Journal of Educational Change website). My commentary is the second in a series launched by Corrie Stone-Johnson Editor of the Journal of Educational Change and builds on the first commentary by Yong Zhao and Jim Watterston – “The changes we need post-Covid” My commentary is part of a new project exploring school improvement efforts and educational innovations in both developing and developed contexts post-pandemic (following-up on issues my co-authors and I raised in The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021).
“We will now resume our regular programming…”
The times are always changing. The question this year is whether we can build on some of the changes schools made in the face of the coronavirus and reimagine education altogether. Like many, I am hopeful that we can take advantage of the current moment to make at least a few meaningful steps in some of these directions.
Nonetheless, my work over the past thirty years on school improvement and school reform efforts in the US and in “higher” and “lower-performing” countries also makes me deeply skeptical. Time and again, I have seen how ambitious plans and visions fall short of their aspirations. As a consequence, although I believe this may be a crucial time to ask: “What if this is a moment when we can re-imagine education?”, I also know that we need to ask a second question: “What if it isn’t?” What if, despite the changes wrought by the pandemic, the existing institutional structures, practices, incentives, and beliefs that sustain conventional schooling remain in place?
Is there a real opportunity to re-imagine education post-pandemic? Or will the existing institutional structures, practices, incentives, and beliefs that sustain conventional schooling remain in place?
I don’t see this as a pessimistic take. It’s imagining the future and understanding the past that enables us to take off on journeys where the exact destination is unknown. When getting ready to climb a mountain, adventurers don’t just hope that the path they envision does not lead to an impassible ledge; they don’t rely on the hope that the weather will hold. They try to imagine what might happen when they turn a corner or reach a new level, and they get prepared. When the unexpected happens, when the conditions predictably change in unpredictable ways, we need to be ready to respond and rise above.
As my colleagues Jordan Corson and Sarah Van den Berg and I argue in our new book, The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict, education systems all around the world find themselves in this situation today. Now more than ever, it’s clear that we do not know exactly what lies around the corner, and we cannot determine, with certainty, what today’s students will need as adults or what roadblocks or supports societies will put in place for helping them to get there. But we can build on what we know about why it’s so hard to improve schools, and we can imagine what it will really take to create more powerful and equitable educational opportunities in the future.
We can build on what we know about why it’s so hard to improve schools, and we can imagine what it will really take to create more powerful and equitable educational opportunities in the future.
In my commentary in the Journal of Educational Change, I explore what it will take to support real changes in schools post-pandemic by exploring three questions:
Part 1: Why don’t schools change?
Part 2: How (and why) did schools change during the pandemic?
Part 3: How can schools change post-pandemic?
My responses to those questions build on several key principles derived from my working in and studies of a variety of efforts to create more powerful learning experiences in both developed and developing contexts:
First, new possibilities for schooling are most likely to take off when their goals, capacity demands, and values fit the common needs, existing capabilities, and prevailing conditions in the schools and communities where they’re supposed to work.
Second, this first principle leads to a corollary or second principle that seems particularly problematic for those who want to reimagine schooling altogether: the more radical our visions are for education and the more they diverge from conventional practice, the less likely they are to take hold on a large scale. However, that does not mean that it is impossible to pursue the new visions for education that Zhao and Waterston and others imagine. It means that the demands and pressures of conventional schooling make it easier to bring those visions to life in particular circumstances and contexts – ecological “niches” in a sense – rather than across entire school systems.
This tension between the nature and extent of reform efforts, however, yields the third principle and opens up another avenue for change: There are places – “niches of possibility” – where the conditions are more amenable for transforming education. That does not mean that we have to accept every aspect of the conditions or ignore those that are deeply problematic. But we have to figure out how to challenge and work with and around the conditions in order to change them.
From this perspective, the specific vision for learning remains important, but that vision has to be accompanied by the recognition that it is not the vision itself that will change schools; schools will be transformed, over time, with changes in the conditions and the construction of the infrastructure for more powerful learning. Rather than aiming to develop a program and scale it across contexts, the focus shifts to the student level and to making sure that all students, particularly those left out and systematically disadvantaged by conventional schooling, encounter more and more opportunities inside and outside schools to engage in powerful learning experiences. Those experiences create new emergent possibilities for education that build directly on the specific conditions in which students live and learn every day.
(Full commentary available at the Journal of Educational Change website)
In February, the Getting Smart Podcast featured a conversation with me and Tom Vander Ark about my new book The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict. Tom talked with me about the key stages of my career and we walked through the key sections of the book. I was particularly interested to learn that Tom first encountered my work through my article “When Improvement Programs Collide,” published almost 20 years ago. That set us off on a discussion of how I see may work as focusing on what we need to do to improve school reform and to build the capacity of the whole eco-system of organizations, agencies, services, and people who are engaged in the work of school improvement.
What do we need to do to improve school reform efforts and build the capacity of the whole eco-system of organizations, agencies, services, and people who are engaged in the work of school improvement?
Here are some of the key takeaways that Tom highlighted: [:51] Thomas shares the origin story of NCREST as well as its mission. [3:01] Tom shares his appreciation for Thomas’s early work on the concept of coherence. [3:39] Thomas takes us to the early beginnings of his work around coherence and explains what it is and why it is important. [7:54] Thomas tells about each of the sections in his book, starting with part 1: “Why Should Schools Change?” He headlines the case for change and provides some suggestions on how to create agreements around them. [11:40] Tom shares the key insights he appreciated in the first section. [12:27] The second section of the book covers barriers to change. Thomas lists some of the barriers and what we can do to make progress in overcoming them. [15:39] In section three of Thomas’s book, he writes about how schools can improve. In particular, he focuses on high-leverage problems. Thomas explains what these are, why they’re critical, and shares some examples. [17:33] The next section of Thomas’s book is on how education can change where he introduces the concept of micro-innovations. Thomas explains what these are and what they can do to move a system agenda forward. [20:18] Tom shares how 4.0 Schools have been teaching this idea of micro-innovations. [21:07] Chapter 5 of Thomas’ book is on systems change. Thomas speaks about two critical elements of systems change that are covered in this chapter: capacity building and collective responsibility. [25:28] Would Thomas agree that it takes a decade-long push on all three of these primary levers to really promote systems change? [27:44] Thomas reflects on his career, professional learning, and how he has seen education change over the years. [30:29] Would Thomas say that writing is part of his learning process? [32:00] What’s next?
Along with the devastation of the coronavirus outbreak and widespread school closures come hopes for reimagining schools as they reopen. These hopes for the future, however, rest on making the concrete improvements in schools that we know we can make today.
Despite the enormity of the challenges and the massive race and income-based inequities in society and schools that the coronavirus exposed – again – the pandemic has also made visible the fact that many communities already have the capacity to address at least some of these challenges. In New York City, in the first month of the school closure, the Department of Education worked with businesses like Apple and Microsoft to provide almost 500,000 computers and iPads to students who needed them. Across the US and around the world, even with limited digital infrastructure, communities are opening up hotspots for public use, equipping buses with Wi-Fi (and sometimes solar power), and pursuing other innovative ways of getting students online. Given the existing possibilities, one commissioner for the US Federal Communications Commission testified that the connectivity gap could be closed “virtually overnight.” If it can be done, then it should be done. No need to wait any longer.
Getting students connected to the Internet is no panacea for educational challenges, however, particularly in many parts of the developing world, where almost half of all students don’t have a computer at home and over 40 percent lack access to the internet. We also know that even with Internet access and online opportunities, significant improvements in students’ learning depend on developing more powerful instructional practices and providing better support for educators. Nonetheless, the responses to the coronavirus show that we have the capacity to address some inequitable learning opportunities, and we can take these steps right now by responding to high-leverage problems.
High-Leverage Problems
My colleagues in the New Jersey Network of Superintendents and I argue that those efforts can begin by developing a coordinated response to what I call high-leverage problems:
High-leverage problems concentrate on issues widely recognized as central to the development of more equitable educational opportunities and outcomes.
They present opportunities for visible improvements in relatively short periods of time.
They establish a foundation for long-term, sustained, systemic efforts that improve teaching and learning.
Addressing high-leverage problems depends on developing a keen sense of what matters to people and what matters in an organization. It requires careful analysis of multiple problems and continuous reflection on the process of addressing them. It relies on a powerful repertoire of strategies that meet the specific demands of different situations and on developing new practices and resources when necessary. All together, these steps can lead to the “quick wins” that help propel organizational and social changes in many sectors.
#Learningloss & Learning to Read
Take the critical concern for the “learning loss” likely to be created by the massive disruptions to schooling that so many children around the world are experiencing. That term – now almost a one-word hashtag – actually obscures a host of challenges that have to be unpacked to be addressed productively. First, different children experience learning loss to different degrees; they may experience it in some academic areas and not others; learning loss may also be affected by experiences of trauma and the stresses and socio-emotional challenges that come with the pandemic; it may result from inaccessibility to online learning and school support services including free meals and counseling; and it may stem a loss of relationships with peers and teachers, disengagement with school, and prolonged absences from learning in person or online. Such a litany of problems can make any first step seem inadequate and pointless. Nonetheless, breaking down a high leverage problem like learning to read yields a coordinated series of strategies that many communities already have the capacity to pursue:
Make books by authors from a variety of backgrounds freely accessible.
Find children with vision problems and provide them with glasses.
Develop and understanding of why some children are chronically absent from school/online learning and support regular attendance.
Identify children who are struggling to learn to read and provide targeted interventions.
The logic is simple: when children have access to books, when they can see, when they’re in school, and when they receive targeted support if they’re struggling, they’re much more likely to learn to read.
The logic is simple: when children have access to books, when they can see, when they’re in school, and when they receive targeted support if they’re struggling, they’re much more likely to learn to read.
Even in countries like the United States, children in high-poverty areas have a much harder time getting books than their peers in middle-income areas, but a number of programs (including one sponsored by the country singer Dolly Parton) have taken advantage of book vending machines, doctor’s offices, and other mechanisms to address this issue. Organizations like EmbraceRace and the Jane Addams Peace Association post lists of books by authors from different racial and cultural backgrounds so that there’s no excuse not to provide all children with access to materials that reflect their heritage.
Of course, making books and print materials available in a variety of languages, by authors from a range of backgrounds, is just one step. Children still need to be able to read those books once they get those books into their hands. Nonetheless, 25 percent of school-aged children in the United States have undiagnosed eye problems that inhibit their ability to read, and one in three children haven’t had their vision tested in the past two years (if at all); but relatively low-cost programs to test students’ vision and get glasses to those who need them do exist. In the developing world, it may be complicated to create a supply chain that makes print materials readily available and ensures every child who needs glasses gets a pair, but it can be done.
We know that chronic absences from school have a devastating effect on children’s learning and have a disproportionate impact on students in communities of color, but that knowledge has also led to the development of a number of successful strategies for helping many children to get to and stay in school. Despite the re-emergence of the “reading wars” over the best approach to teach reading, there are a number of well-established strategies and supports that many teachers and schools are already using that target the specific needs of at least some of the students who experience difficulties in learning to read when they are in school.
Improve Schools and Transform Education
These first steps may not reach every student right away, and any initial success has to be followed by developing educational activities that foster more advanced skills and a broader set of developmental needs – an even more challenging proposition. Ultimately, addressing these challenges will depend on truly reimagining schooling, and, reconceptualizing notions like “learning loss” that ignore the mile-wide and inch-deep curriculum and age-graded pacing that make it almost impossible for students to catch up once they’re left behind.
We need to reimagine schooling, reconceptualizing notions like “learning loss” that ignore the mile-wide and inch-deep curriculum and age-graded pacing that make it almost impossible for students to catch up once they’re left behind
In short, the pandemic itself will not change schools: Nothing will change in schools unless we change it. Yet the strategies to provide glasses, to address chronic absences, and to provide targeted support in reading can lead to real improvements in schools – even in the midst of a pandemic – if we choose to dedicate the time, resources and commitment to put them into practice on a wide basis. We can take these critical steps to make the schools we have more efficient, more equitable and more effective today and to lay the groundwork for transforming education as a whole in the future.
In a recent article in Forbes, Tom Vander Ark outlined 15 “invention opportunities” that can support the development of equitable high-quality learning opportunities in the future. Among the fifteen are challenges to create “accountability 2.0” and develop the mechanisms that can bring people together to share diverse perspectives and support community agreement on the aims and purposes of education. These mechanisms are essential for fostering the common understanding and collective responsibility that fuel the social movements we need to dismantle systemic racism, create equitable educational opportunities, and transform education.
Re-defining accountability itself serves as a first step in developing these new mechanisms. For too long, accountability in the US has been synonymous with answerability: Answerability reflects the beliefs that individuals and groups should be accountable for meeting clearly specified and agreed-upon procedures and/or goals. Yet the focus on answerability ignores responsibility another crucial aspect of accountability. Responsibility reflects the belief that individuals and groups should be held accountable for living up to and upholding norms of conduct and higher purposes that are often ambiguous and difficult to define in advance.
Individuals and groups should be held accountable for living up to and upholding norms of conduct and higher purposes that are often ambiguous and difficult to define in advance.
Although carefully specifying outcomes that need to be achieved and establishing consequences for failing to meet those targets can increase efficiency, it also ignores many other valued outcomes, and it can undermine the discretion and expert judgment that may be needed to make many decisions. When taken to extremes, this approach spawns a compliance mindset and leads to efforts to game the system that make it look like the goals have been achieved when they haven’t.
At the same time, simply leaving individuals and groups alone is not the same thing as supporting the development of individual or collective responsibility. Developing responsibility also involves developing the capacity—the investments, materials, abilities, commitments, and relationships—needed to carry out responsibilities effectively. In short, accountability comes from the capacity to support a balance between answerability and responsibility.
Finland’s PISA scores have slipped a bit in recent years, its education system still excels in many respects and continues to stand out as one of the most equitable high-performing systems. Even though many analyses highlight the autonomy of teachers as central to that performance, those analyses often fail to mention several other key aspects of Finland’s education system that support the development of the relationships, trust, and common understanding in education so central to developing collective responsibility and achieving equitable outcomes:
A well-established social-welfare state that supports all members of society by connecting education, health, social services, and other sectors
A national curriculum framework and a strong, coherent infrastructure of facilities, materials, assessment and preparation programs to support teaching and learning
A curriculum renewal process in which stakeholders from all parts of society participate in reflecting on and revising the curriculum framework
The use of a variety of high-quality informal and formal assessments that inform efforts to improve practices and performance throughout the education system
The Finnish approach to assessment play a particularly important role in supporting the development of common understanding and common aims. That approach includes diagnostic and classroom-based assessments that elementary teachers can use early in children’s school careers to identify those who may need some additional help with academics and to ensure that all students stay on track. In secondary schools, well-known exit exams anchor and focus the system. The National Board of Education in Finland also regularly gives tests to samples of students and schools, providing an overview of national and regional performance in key subjects, such as Finnish and mathematics. Although the National Board doesn’t use that information for ranking (and can’t, because not all students and schools are assessed), it shares school-level information with the schools that participate and municipal-level data with the municipalities involved. In addition, the National Board makes these sample assessments widely available for free, so that any teacher, school, or municipality that wants to administer these tests can do so. As a consequence, even without national testing, Finnish schools and municipalities have government-paid tools that link directly to the core curriculum that they can use to benchmark their performance against regional and national samples.
Under these conditions, students don’t have to pass tests that require them to demonstrate proficiency by third grade; they hardly ever “fail” or have to be held back; and most students reach at least a basic level of educational achievement. At the same time, this approach both supports considerable autonomy for educators and schools and builds the common connections that steer the system toward broad education goals without having to rely heavily on rewards or punishments.
This approach contrasts sharply with those in contexts like the US that focus almost exclusively on answerability by using tests to hold teachers, school leaders, and schools “accountable” for reaching specified benchmarks and other outcomes. Rather than using assessments to look back to see whether educators did what they were supposed to do, educators and system leaders in Finland use assessments to look forward and to see if people, classes and schools are headed in the right direction. Such an approach doesn’t require data on every single aspect of student, teacher, or school performance, but it depends on making sure no one gets too far off course. It means using assessment to look for outliers and listening for signs of trouble, not to check on each individual or make sure everything is done a certain way or in a certain timeline. In the process, Finland supports the development of the collective responsibility central to guiding education into an unpredictable future.
Rather than using assessments to look back to see what educators did, we need to use assessments to look forward and to see if people, classes, and schools are headed in the right direction.
New technologies, artificial intelligence, and many other kinds of innovations can help to improve education. But those technical achievements will not accomplish much without the personal commitments and broader social movements that can transform our communities. If we are truly to develop collective responsibility in education, then we have to develop collective responsibility for education. We have to hold ourselves, our elected officials, and our communities accountable for making the changes in our society that will end segregation and discrimination, create equitable educational opportunities, and provide the support that everyone needs to thrive.
Thomas Hatch 