How do we help students achieve academically
and socially? As a teacher, I have lofty answers. But challenges — and
questions — arise when I try to translate my ideas (and ideals) into
concrete lessons, delivered in 90-minute increments to a very particular
set of sixth graders, each as individual and evanescent as a snowflake.
To help teachers succeed, schools offer
“professional development,” universally known as P.D. Like a lot of
teachers, I’ve come to regard such training with a mix of optimism and
disappointment. Over the last 20 years, I’ve attended more education
“workshops” than I care to remember. Such courses typically lasted no
more than an hour or a day, and nearly always contained valid, even
vital ideas, but were too superficial, too removed from the realities of
my classroom to alter my teaching very much, even when I yearned for
change.
Then I started work at a school that takes
P.D. seriously. This summer, my school sent me to a weeklong, intensive
course for middle school teachers called Developmental Designs, which
derives from a teaching approach known as Responsive Classroom.
Among its guiding principles is a belief that
students who develop social skills like cooperation, assertiveness and
empathy can achieve more academically. The idea is similar to the
“character education” Paul Tough advocates in his new book “How Children
Succeed.”
I’d already watched colleagues attain
enviable classroom management through this technique. Still, given my
previous P.D. experience, I initially harbored skepticism. I imagined
catching up on e-mail during the course’s slow moments. But, it turned
out, I didn’t send e-mail all week. The program was a model of effective
P.D. and what it can achieve.
The Responsive Classroom approach centers on
several ostensibly mundane classroom practices. Each morning students
form a circle, greet one another, share bits of news, engage in a brief,
fun activity and review the day’s agenda. The idea is to build trust,
ensure a little fun (which adolescents crave) and confront small
problems before they become big. Students might welcome one another with
salutations from a foreign language. An activity might involve tossing
several balls around a circle in rapid succession. Students share
weekend plans or explore topics like bullying before lessons begin.
If this sounds obvious or intuitive, it is,
but so is being loving and kind. That doesn’t make it easier to achieve.
Part of what makes the approach effective is that each routine is
highly structured, and so replicable, but allows for student input and
choice.
The fun and games have an ulterior purpose.
My instructor emphasized how, at the end of each activity, we should
bring the exercise back to concrete classroom skills. Tossing a ball,
for example, is like the exchange of ideas, requiring students to follow
a discussion’s trajectory with their eyes.
Another tenet is that teachers should avoid
indiscriminate praise in favor of neutral language that encourages
specific behaviors so children can precisely identify and so replicate
their triumphs. (The research of Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor
at Stanford, has separately come to similar conclusions.) Finding the
best words, however, can be surprisingly difficult after years of
crowing, “Great job!” So the course had us devise and rehearse the
verbal and nonverbal cues we wanted to use.
In my classroom, the shared routines have
already led to a greater sense of calm and purpose, which has led to
more productive lessons. I’m not alone in enjoying concrete results from
the Responsive Classroom method. In one study, presented in September,
researchers looked at 24 schools randomly assigned to training in the
Responsive Classroom or to a control group, which did not receive the
same teacher training or support. When faithfully implemented, the
approach correlated with a substantial rise — a roughly 20-point gain on
average — on state standardized test scores in reading and math.
Why does Responsive Classroom work where
other approaches do not? Sara E. Rimm-Kaufman, the study’s lead author
and an associate professor of education at the University of Virginia,
theorizes it’s because teachers not only received intensive training but
also had follow-up coaching once they returned to their classrooms,
which increased the chances that new practices would take hold. Teachers
also praised the program’s pacing: coaches encouraged teachers to adopt
steps slowly over a sustained period, instead of trying to transform
their classrooms overnight.
“The take-home message,” Dr. Rimm-Kaufman
says, “is that interventions that take a long time to learn and that
require more resources also produce more change.” The required financial
investment isn’t enormous, and the findings suggest that schools and
districts would do better to devote limited resources to a few sustained
programs, rather than providing scattershot offerings in teacher
training.
Schoolwide buy-in also appeared critical to
the approach’s success. Where principals and administrators supported
the use of the Responsive Classroom method, gains on test scores were
greatest. But, if the program was just one of many randomly tossed at
teachers, then test scores remained flat or even declined.
In other words, teachers can’t go it alone.
They need sustained training and support using empirically tested
methods in concert and collaboration with one another. This is how
schools succeed.