Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of
British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
From time to time, one hears about extraordinary individual improvement. The victim of an accident who through enormous effort overcomes near life-threatening damage to lead a life unimpeded by the injuries she sustained. The athlete who by dint of training and hard work becomes a medal-winner.
They make for nice stories: Individuals overcoming significant obstacles to their success. But they are not complete stories. What one rarely hears about are the support from people who made such successes possible. The first responders who extricated the accident victim in time to save her life, the nursing and surgical staff who repaired the damage, the occupational therapist who carefully calibrated an exercise regimen and coached the patient.
Behind each story of individual success there is a cadre of people removing obstacles, coaching, mentoring, encouraging, using their ingenuity and talents to improve performance so that success can be achieved. It takes a village to raise more than children.
The key ingredient in improving performance and achieving success in most – if not all – human contexts is teamwork. Improvement and success are difficult to achieve on one’s own. Not only must individuals do their jobs well, but they must also be conscious of the contributions that others make to the overall effort. There must be a sense of shared, collective responsibility.
Improving student school performance is more difficult than rehabilitating an accident victim or helping an athlete excel. It is more like improving a team of athletes. Schools are collections of students. Teachers can cope with a classroom of students. Some extraordinary teachers can close their classroom doors and improve the performance of all students in their care. Notice my explicit use of the word extraordinary.
Yes, there are remarkable teachers who on their own help students make remarkable gains in achievement. Those gains probably won’t be sustained over time. Most empirical literature indicates that improvement attenuates over time in the absence of collective, sustained effort.
There is much talk about school staff members taking collective responsibility for student achievement. One hears of teachers meeting to review data, plan improvement, share techniques, monitor results, and, when obstacles are encountered, adjust their practice. However, as a participant in education for 50 years, it happens less frequently than one would infer from the literature and is rarely sustained beyond a couple of years – at best.
The obstacles to successful student improvement are many. Individual teachers must be sufficiently comfortable to talk about their practice and receive suggestions from their peers. They must be willing to meet with their peers on a regular basis and consider evidence about student improvement beyond the information they collect by means of classroom assessments. They must be willing to interpret the data and dig in behind the data to try to understand the challenges students face. They must be willing to expose their practice to one another and be accountable for the results they have achieved.
Oh, yes, there is another very important ingredient: leadership. For student improvement to occur at the school level there must be leadership. And, if whole systems are going to improve, there must be district leadership. Schools must have leaders who can bring together the disparate individual teachers and support staff to take collective responsibility, interpret data, create an improvement plan, share techniques, monitor results, and, when obstacles are encountered, adjust both individual and collective practice.
I have described what
I believe are the minimum conditions for improving student achievement. The
literature and my experience tell me that many, perhaps most, are not present in
schools or school districts. Until those conditions are met, one is unlikely to
see much sustained improvement in student achievement.