“The future of education, as defined currently, is not promising …”
Thus began the Distinguished Lecture by education thought-leader Richard Elmore, the Gregory Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, at last week’s annual Learning Forward conference.
You could hear a pin drop in the vast room filled by educators. Elmore followed his opening remark by sharing his view that if we shift our focus from “schooling” to “learning,” the outlook is much brighter. Education “as a social process” has an unlimited future. Young people will always be learning outside of the classroom and outside of the curriculum. The problem lies inside our traditional school structure.
A true thought-leader in education
For more than 30 years, Richard Elmore has thoughtfully shared his research, views, and practice with his students, colleagues, and a much-larger audience through his articles and publications.
My first encounter with his work came when I read his research on school improvement practices in New York City’s School District Two (which no longer exists). Elmore offered a birds-eye view of a district-level system organized around this principle: To dramatically increase student learning we must have a laser-like focus on increasing adult learning. Here’s an excerpt from a 1998 report by Elmore and Burney, Continuous Improvement in Community District #2, New York City.
“The key elements of the District #2 strategy …are
(1) a focus on specific content, mainly literacy and mathematics, sustained over a long period of time;
(2) heavy investments in multiple forms of professional development for teachers and principals, designed to provide them with the skills and knowledge necessary to engage in new forms of instructional practice in content areas;
(3) creation of strong professional networks among teachers and principals across schools, designed to reduce isolation among practitioners and to create a strong normative environment that supports and encourages deeper knowledge of what the district endorses as good instructional practice;
(4) creation of an accountability process whereby principals are directly accountable for the quality of instructional in all the classrooms in their schools and teachers are accountable for learning and using good practices; and
(5) creation of a process of negotiating and adapted district-level demands of accountability to differences among the schools in the types of students they serve and the unique demands of individual schools and their communities.” (Elmore and Burney: 1998, p. 5)
Elmore told the Learning Forward audience that in District #2, the traditional norms of teacher privacy (e.g., MY practice, MY classroom, MY students) had been totally eradicated. The “eccentricity of practice” — the concept that personal teaching preferences were acceptable without regard to effectiveness — became nonexistent, replaced by a norm of inquiry and causal reasoning connecting teacher practices to student learning.
Elmore found the causal reasoning in District #2 to be striking and, sadly, noted that few districts operate in this way, even today.
Looking to other professional models
Believing that “current school practices were headed in the exactly wrong direction that will be incredibly costly to students,” Elmore recalled for us his decision to examine other professions — particularly the medical profession — to glean ideas for systematic and precise processes focused on continuous improvement.
To learn more, Elmore followed physicians around at the Harvard Medical School, intrigued by the medical rounds process used to improve the knowledge and skills of physicians in training. He came to believe that by adapting medical rounds to the education profession, the process could serve as a vehicle for improvement — creating more rigorous and standardized norms for educational practice.
Many in the room nodded knowingly. It was clear that a good number of Learning Forward attendees were familiar with the resulting work from Elmore and his colleagues: Instructional Rounds.
Why does current educational practice lack rigorous and standardized norms? Elmore pointed to the following:
• Tradition of low-skill practitioners
• Distrust of expert knowledge and rigorous causal analysis among practitioners
• Pervasive low-level expectations about skills and knowledge needed in instruction and leadership
• Enduring conflict between “teacher-proof” curriculum and teacher-driven instructional practice.
• Current accountability regime focused on short-term, cross-sectional results
Contrasting teaching practices in high-performing countries, where inquiry, reflection, and teaching practice linked to student learning are the norms, Elmore posited that it is very hard to get U.S. practitioners to engage in this type of causal analysis:
“In this country, most schools exist in the shadow of low-skills norms: Don’t trust smart people because they don’t know your world and they will say lots of abstract things that you won’t understand.”
Elmore’s antidote? To create high-functioning districts and schools that serve all students well, he advocates that educators be invited to engage in direct descriptive observation and analysis of practice that will:
• Develop skills in drawing causal connections between teaching and learning
• Develop norms of practice and promote coherence
• Develop collective efficacy
Resistance to transformational change
Then Elmore said something that surprised many of those participants who were nodding knowingly about Instructional Rounds. He noted that like many initiatives, some schools and systems had “institutionalized” Instructional Rounds — or tried it and set it aside. Why? Elmore suggested several reasons:
• Practitioners find it “difficult-to-impossible” to sustain practice norms in their daily work because of the current pervasive privatized school culture
• People began “doing” Rounds (just going through the motions) and the process became marginalized
• Some districts viewed Rounds as being only marginal to producing better test results
• Some committed participants became demoralized and expressed frustration at being unable to sustain and develop the practice.
Done properly like Medical Rounds, said Elmore, vibrant and rigorous clinical practice should change the school culture from one of isolation to one where building collective collaborative capacity is the norm. In places where Instructional Rounds are being actualized, like in a Connecticut superintendents network, there is some good news: Practitioners love doing the work, especially when it gives them bad news!
Noting the surprised expressions in the room, Elmore said that the phenomenon was also surprising to researchers — but it was something he and his colleagues saw consistently among districts and schools embracing Rounds. Bad news triggers the search for solutions — re-norming, revisiting and reconsidering standards, re-evaluating rigor.
Elmore added that committed participants became “fluent” in the language of practice and many reported a transformational experience in the way they see and understand practice and in the way they understand and change the organization and functioning of the school.
Dire predictions rooted in current realities
Concluding his formal remarks, Elmore made five predictions:
- In education, transfer of knowledge will continue to occur at the margins, not in the institutional core.
- Society’s attention will shift to “learning” and away from schooling.
- Expertise and clinical practice will migrate away from the traditional education sector into the knowledge and learning sector.
- Education, as traditionally defined, will lose its monopolistic control over decisions about the what, how, and why of learning.
- Policy will lose its authority to control practice.
Participants left Elmore’s lecture with much to ponder. I’m still reflecting on his remarks. And, lest you think I’m done, my next post will address Elmore’s question and answer period and an opportunity I had to “eavesdrop” on a dialogue between Elmore and several participants after his formal remarks. Watch for it later this week!
