Quality Teaching: The QTL Blog

This spring a state report said coaching and collaboration are making a difference at Creswell High School.  Now test scores vividly illustrate the impact teachers are having.

Test scores are up sharply at Creswell High School, a grade 7-12 school in rural northeastern North Carolina.  And a recent formal review of Creswell High School by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction cited the Quality Teaching and Learning Initiative as one of the positive actions the school is taking to improve student success.

The review, shared with QTL by the school, says: “The Quality Teaching and Learning Initiative, with its ongoing coaching, has created the structure for collaboration and the discussion of teaching and learning.”

Preliminary test scores attest to the impact of collaboration and more strategic lesson planning, especially in the middle grades, where reading and math scores rose sharply.

Those scores come on the heels of an analysis of Classroom Walkthrough data, which shows improvement in 18 different areas of instruction. Creswell High teachers showed a 63% increase in the variety of instructional practices they used, and a 62% increase in the use of Marzano’s nine essential instructional strategies.

The changes in teaching are evident in the work that students are doing. Observers recorded a 40% increase of student work at the application and analysis level, and a 55% increase of student work at the synthesis and evaluation levels.

Principal Randy Steele says major changes began last year with a new approach to lesson plans. The school increased its emphasis on Marzano’s strategies, Bloom’s taxonomy, and Classroom Walkthroughs. Dr. Steele saw a conference presentation on the QTL Process last year and thought it might be the last piece of the puzzle.

For the past year, Creswell High has partnered with The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning to help teachers find more effective ways to reach students. QTL offers a variety of programs that bring ongoing, structured, effective and affordable professional development programs to schools and districts.  QTL staff customized a plan for Creswell that successfully fit the school’s needs.

Looking back on the first year’s partnership, Dr. Steele says QTL was “the concrete” that held all of the faculty’s efforts together.

“QTL helped us develop a common language, work together as a faculty to problem-solve, and find different ways to incorporate research-based learning strategies with technology and other areas,” he says. “We saw some huge gains in some of the areas that QTL was working with our staff on in the focus groups.”

The staff was divided into four focus groups, and each group showed gains. Literacy coach Kathy Britt, who helped coordinate and drive the teams’ efforts, says there is much to build upon next year. “Now we’re able to apply the process and collaborate using the common language and the techniques and strategies that have been emphasized so much.”

QTL instructor Steve Puls says he’s observed the growth in teachers’ confidence and the change in their teaching.  “The Creswell teachers have established a learning community that promotes innovation and an open discourse of best practice implementation,” he says. “The focus of their work has resulted in significant gains in student performance.”

What do artichokes, plantains and squash have in common with GPS, laptops and wikis?  A Wilson County conference in June challenged teachers to integrate a variety of tools into 21st Century teaching.

SummerSalt stands for Study and Learn Together. Wilson County developed the professional development week as “an acrobatic combination of skills and agilities integrating the best of curriculum and technology.”

Wilson County teachers

This year, The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning proved a perfect workout partner, providing four day-long sessions:

• Engaging Inquiring Minds
• Designing Instruction for Consistently High Levels of Learning
• PLCs That Work
• The Role of Assessment in the 21st Century

Closely aligned with QTL’s emphasis on high quality teaching, SummerSALT’s revolutionary approach included fresh course offerings in a full agenda that improved instructors’ “strength, balance and flexibility in both instructional disciplines.”

So what about those artichokes? “We were told that after lunch we will have a project that involves an artichoke, a plantain, a eggplant and an acorn squash,” said teacher Victoria Bennett.  That piqued her interest. “I wonder what it could be?”

Afterwards she confirmed, “Engaging Inquiring Minds has been very interesting. We have begun talking about information processing models and I am excited to put this to use in my classroom.”

QTL instructor Steve Puls said teachers’ confidence grew as they added creative skills to enliven and enhance student performance. “A learning community that promotes innovation and open discourse helps ensure best practice implementation for everyone.”

Teacher Vanita Sharma added, “It’s nice to get a chance to socialize with everyone across the county in the teaching fraternity.”

Some 450 teachers filled up the SummerSALT sessions with enthusiasm and left with instructional strategies to better reach students.

The sessions led by QTL staff were part of the organization’s 21st Century Classroom Series, sessions which can be offered to school staff during professional development conferences like SummerSALT, or on teacher workdays or early release days.

“QTL added relevant and exciting workshops to a successful and productive conference,” said conference organizer Wynn Smith, Executive Director of Technology for Wilson County Schools.  “Our teaching will be stronger and our students will have a greater learning experience next year thanks to the ideas that were generated and the work that was done at SummerSALT.”

This month, we will look deeper into the third Way to improve student performance in our series, Five Surefire Ways to Improve Student Performance.

Cooperative Learning models have been used at all educational levels, but are also applicable in the fields of business, law and medicine and in all kinds of workplaces.  By using cooperative learning effectively, teachers are not only helping to engage students in their own learning, they are also setting them up to be good employees who work together to solve workplace problems.

Cooperative Learning requires that students work together to accomplish a task or to produce a product in a particular way.  Research shows that when students work in cooperative groups, there is an increase in student achievement, social and emotional skills, confidence and self-esteem and responsibility (Johnson, Johnson and Stenne, 2000).

Cooperative Groups should be used when social and emotional skills need to be practiced, when there is a limited amount of materials or when a task has to be accomplished.  As an example, below you will see some ideas for conducting a field trip/study.  Instead of leading students along and letting them passively listen to the speaker, make them active detectives in search of important information that interests them individually.  Students will focus on the information they gather, but at the end, you will require them to put all this together in a comprehensive presentation so that the BIG picture is seen and students will learn from each other’s groups.  You may have teams set up for finding information, but change the teams for presentation and putting the information together.

There are TWO very important steps to creating cooperative learning teams that can accomplish their learning tasks.  First, the teams need to be set up to succeed.  Have you ever been ‘assigned’ to work (as an adult) in a team that just couldn’t accomplish the tasks at hand?  You had good intentions, you met, you even took notes, but you couldn’t work well as a team.  Have you ever gone back to that time to figure out just WHY it didn’t work?  Let’s work on some ways to set up your teams so that they CAN cooperate and so they CAN learn at high and deep levels.

Secondly, the teams need to have an established and real purpose.  Cooperative Learning teams need to investigate information that is focused on the specific subject at hand.  This is not to say that students cannot go beyond that realm, but you, as the teacher need to set the bar for what they need to find out and what they need to learn (examples in the questions on the field study example below).

Last month we discussed the use of Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles.  We know from looking at these strategies and theories that we don’t all learn in the same way.  By the same token, we don’t all ‘reason’ in the same ways.  But if we group ourselves to ‘like minded’ individuals (not meaning we all agree on the same things, but that we all process information in the same way) we won’t end up with a very diverse learning outcome, will we?

Let’s use Multiple Intelligences (for example) to put our learning teams together.  We will use 6th Grade Science as an example of how I might put together my cooperative learning team.  We are about to visit our local water treatment plant to learn how water is processed and what kinds of contaminants are found in our fresh water sources.

Notice below how I would group students so that they can work together naturally.  They are being asked questions that would naturally interest them and at the same time, the questions act as the general ‘guide’ for the learning.

6th Grade Science
Unit:  Population Dynamics

Culminating Activity:   A visit and tour of the Franklin Water Treatment Plant in Charlotte, NC.

Students will be placed into teams as we visit the Franklin Water Treatment Plant in Charlotte.  Our aim is to see how the water that we drink is processed and deemed ‘safe.’  

From Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, we will put the teams together based on multiple intelligences domains, allowing the class to be grouped according to learning preferences.  The groups will all come back from the field trip and create a project.

Team 1: Logical Mathematical, Musical, Naturalist  (Analytic)

This group, by nature, is driven to analyze their learning or analysis of knowledge.  The mission of this group is to get the facts or to ask the WHAT.  They will gather this type of information:

• How much water is processed each day?
• How many pounds or units of chemicals are used to clean the water?
• How much does it have to rain to increase the water levels in the lake that feed the treatment plant?
• What are the kinds of pollutants or elements that are eliminated from the water?
• How many people are served from this treatment plant?
• The gathered data and materials can be presented on a poster board, on a power point or other presentation method that builds a case, using data for water conservation and preservation.

Team 2: Linguistic, Interpersonal, Kinesthetic (Interactive)

This group is probably the loudest group of the three.  These students express themselves through their intelligences to explore their learning.  They may talk, jump, run and even argue with each other (productive debate).

The mission of this group is to ask questions that go beyond finding simple answers.  This group may have a water official sit down for an interview on camera.  They edit the material as a program on water quality focused on their selected topic, such as WATER SAFETY or call their program “What are You Really Drinking?”  They can ask questions such as:

• Why is there a need to put chemicals in the water to make it safe?
• What kinds of pollutants are in the water?
• Where do the pollutants come from?
• How much does it cost to get rid of the pollutants?  Or how much does it cost to make our water safe?
• Who is the biggest polluter?

Team 3: Visual, Existential, Intrapersonal, Spatial  (Introspective)

This group is more emotional than the other groups in that their emotions tend to drive what they want to learn. The mission of this group is to ask questions to find out WHY. This group may:

• Draw flow charts that represent where the water comes from (rain), how it goes into lawns that are fertilized then runs into the lake where it is drawn into the water treatment plant. 
• Create a project that represents WHY people pollute unknowingly.  The project allows the group to express their feelings and their position on protecting the environment and our precious water supply.  
• Create a drawing or model that represents how much water from the processing plant goes into homes only to be used for irrigation.  Why do people care about beautiful lawns and is it at the risk of our water supply?

From this activity and field trip, students are allowed to express their learning in a real-world situation.  They transfer what they learned about the environment, pollution, laws and regulations, etc. to something that affect their own lives.  They apply the knowledge to this new situation.

———-

Another way to group students for cooperative learning teams is to use learning styles.  As the teacher, you know your students and you know how they prefer to learn, probably more than they do.   Using learning styles as a guide for forming cooperative groups will give you a completely different outcome.  This technique is best used to accomplish a finished task or problem that is diverse in nature.  

In putting these groups together, DIVERSITY is the key.  From the Learning Styles Chart from last time, look at the different types of personalities, such as the NUMBER 2 person. This student is very ‘task’ oriented; they are driven to get things done.  They will be the ‘task master’ of the group, but you don’t want more than one of these in the group or all they will do is ‘FINISH.’  Perhaps not the outcome you want.  You’ll need a person who will lead the ‘discussion’ about what needs to be done and a person who sees the Big Picture—review the chart below.

A new report from the National Staff Development Council concludes that American teachers spend more time in the classroom than many of their peers around the world - but student achievement doesn’t reflect the extra work.  Many factors can contribute to that scenario, but one conclusion they draw: teachers in the U.S. need more and better opportunities for on-the-job training. 

It isn’t that American teachers don’t get professional development.  It’s that the opportunities for growth often are not job-embedded, but happen in isolation.

In the report, NSDC Executive Director Stephanie Hirsh notes that Title I and Title II funding both include requirements that money be spent for professional development, and the vast majority of states have standards in place to define and call for ‘effective professional development’ for educators. But she says numerous studies have found that “effective schoolwide collaborative learning” is critical to schools’ success, and that type of professional development experience is not the norm.

Experts have long advocated intensive and sustained professional development as opposed to one-off workshops that may bring about enthusiastic but short-lived changes.  Continual and ongoing effort are what turn theory into practice.

Recent research, though, has indicated that it’s also critical that the learning experiences be job-embedded and collaborative.  Participation in Professional Learning Communities where peers can discuss and examine their classroom issues and practices is essential, says the NSDC report, but making those opportunities a reality has been challenging for many reasons.

All of this comes at a time when advancing technology is making online learning more ubiquitous.  The NSDC report does not directly address the effectiveness of online professional development efforts.  On the surface, individuals completing online coursework would seem to run counter to the call for more personal, collaborative, face-to-face connections within the school.  But it’s not an either-or proposition.

To be sure, online courses have made it possible for many to be exposed to ideas and content they would not have had the opportunity to experience otherwise.  But they don’t replace the need for collaborative communities within a school, for observation and discussion and cooperation.

The NSCD report is much to in-depth to summarize in a blog post, but it raises interesting questions about how schools should approach staff development. At QTL, we are in agreement with the need for intensive, sustained, job-embedded and collaborative efforts that focus on helping teachers engage students and teach their content effectively.  

What do you think?

Looking for ways to engage your students and motivate them to be self-directed learners?  Here is the second of five installments of surefire tips!  This time we focus on Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences and find out “WHAT KIND OF ‘SMART’ ARE YOU (AND YOUR STUDENTS)?

WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT HOW KIDS PREFER TO LEARN?
Dr. Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences has strong implications for how our students will develop into adults, get jobs and support families.  Many adults find themselves in jobs that do not make optimal use of their most highly developed intelligences - for example, the highly bodily-kinesthetic individual who is stuck in a linguistic or logical desk job when he or she would be much happier in a job where they could move around, such as a recreational leader, a forest ranger, or physical therapist.

The theory of multiple intelligences gives adults a whole new way to look at their lives, examining potentials that they left behind in their childhood (such as a love for art or drama) but now have the opportunity to develop through courses, hobbies, or other programs of self-development.
The implication for students is that educators who understand the concept of multiple intelligences have a better understanding of how to reach young people.  When a student struggles to understand a concept, teachers have this ‘tool’ to try alternative ways of getting kids to understand and grasp the information.

LEARNING STYLES
The most successful learning environment for a child is one that incorporates the conditions or manners (preferences, tendencies, strategies) under which he or she learns best.

Individual learning style is a combination of environmental, emotional, sociological, and physical responses that characterize how each person learns.  Learning style is a function of heredity and experience, and develops individually over the life span.

The Dunn and Dunn Learning Styles Inventory concentrates more on learning environment, while McCarthy’s 4MAT approach deals more with how students learn curriculum.    You may use learning styles to broadly assess your students learning preferences.  Multiple Intelligences allows you to go much deeper into how students learn and to see how they might better grasp concepts.

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
There are several distinct intelligences that a person/student may possess, according to Dr. Howard Gardner.  These intelligences are developed in different ways and at different times, that allow each to approach tasks with different strengths. Dr. Gardner identifies these as verbal, logical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intra-personal, and naturalistic. The existential intelligence has been added to Gardner’s original eight.

Use a learning styles and/or multiple intelligences inventory like this one to assess yourself and your students.  It is important to know your own learning style in order to understand how it affects the way you deliver instruction.

QTL helps teachers begin to design lessons so that all of their students’ learning styles are addressed – every student every day – increasing the probability that the learner will grasp the learning more easily and at a deeper level.

Teachers should not strive to meet all ways of learning at one time but over the span of teaching a concept give students the opportunity to process the information in a variety of modalities.  The brain uses different representations to store different types of information in different areas of the brain.  The goal for teachers should be to help students make as many connections as possible.

Take a look at the LEARNING STYLES diagram below, keeping in mind the MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES we just talked about from Howard Gardner.

What kind of learner are you?  Are you a visual learner?  Do you need to see it to know it?  If so, you are probably described or describe yourself as being imaginative, social.  When someone tells you something new, you will ask WHY?  You want to know WHY that is so.

Now, think about the multiple intelligences theory.  Where are you on that?  Are you a math teacher?  Are you analytical?  If so, you probably know you fit into Gardner’s MATHEMATICAL LOGICAL intelligence and on the learning style chart, you are probably task oriented. You ask WHAT and need the facts.  You likely are an auditory learner.

Now that you see how this all works together, you might start thinking about your own students.  Who are they?  How do they prefer to learn?  Does this help you to understand better how to reach them in your instruction and in authentic assessment?

By allowing your students flexibility like this in authentic assessment, do you think student engagement will increase?  Will your students be more apt to ‘buy into’ the learning process when they are allows to express their learning in their own way?  Students will begin to see the WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME.

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES INTEGRATED INTO LESSON PLANS
Here is an example of how you might integrate multiple intelligences into a science curriculum (6th Grade, Population Dynamics, studying Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”). Each of the examples allows students to express their learning in their own unique ways, based on Gardner’s theory.  See how you can adapt some of these ideas into your own classrooms.

Kinesthetic learners may find it interesting to draw a model in their homework summary or in their PowerPoint presentation in the Jigsaw activity of how the pollutants enter the ecosystem and some of the effects.

Musical students may find it interesting to listen to the song Big Yellow Taxi and transcribe the words, then interpret the words and discuss its significant in respect to Silent Spring.  Do they think the song was inspired by Rachel Carson?  How do the key words fit the song?

Interpersonal students are ’people-smart,’ often visual learners who might interview a company and ask them what they do with their contaminants in respect to the key words (for instance, ask how would your product harm the ecosystem?).

Intrapersonal students are ’self-smart’ and would rather work alone than in groups or with other students.  These students might work on the Jigsaw activity by blogging, rather than face to face.

Naturalist students are nature-smart and enjoy the great outdoors.  A naturalist student might gather soil samples near a river or plant (under the supervision of a parent or adult) and have the soil tested at the county to see if the samples are different than samples taken at home and tested.  Again, the key is to use the target vocabulary words to guide the work.

Verbal Linguistic learners are word-smart and might find it engaging to write their own essay about their own community as did Rachel Carson.  Or they might write about why they believed Rachel Carson wrote the book and what she hoped would be achieved by letting others know her thoughts, beliefs and her findings.

Spatial students are picture-smart students who might draw a picture that represents the invisible or hidden elements of “Who Polluted the River?”

Mathematical/Logical students are number-reasoning-smart and might find it interesting to dig deeper into the data compiled on the website activity for WHO POLLUTED THE RIVER and compare and contrast the findings by how the rivers flow into each other and where the water is drawn for public consumption.

The bottom line is that different assignment will engage different students. A teacher who understands that and makes an effort to accommodate these differences in learners has a much better chance of reaching them.

Resources:
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic,1983
Gardner, Howard. Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. New York: Basic, 1993.
Gardner, Howard. Intelligence Reframed:  Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century.  New York:  Basic, 2000.

The “Five Surefire Ways” Series:

1. Brain Based Learning
2. Multiple Intelligences & Learning Styles
3. Cooperative Grouping
4. Graphic Organizers
5. Inquiry Based Learning

Driving to work this morning, curiosity got the best of me and I found myself pulling ever-closer to the car in front of me in an effort to read the tiny print on an intriguing bumper sticker. When I finally managed to make out what it said, I realized it was a rant against tailgaters.  

Now that was ironic. Obviously the poor woman has had some issues with tailgaters.  But I’m willing to bet she gets tailgated at least twice as often now that she’s driving around with that ill-conceived bumper sticker on her car.  The bumper sticker was a knee-jerk response to a problem, NOT a clearly thought-out strategy for dealing with the issue.  Someday it could turn out to be disastrous.

It’s the same with instructional technology. Almost everyone would agree today’s students need more and better technology than we had back in the day. But simply throwing money into equipment is not the answer. The best equipment money can buy is useless without a strategy for using it to teach the content students need to learn.  

But how do you come up with the best strategy? Much is written these days about The 21st Century Classroom - a concept that incorporates all the tools and concepts that add up to a learning environment that prepares today’s students for tomorrow’s world.

That certainly doesn’t look like the traditional classroom where students are lined up in rows, listening to a teacher lecture about subjects that don’t seem real to them.  But there is not yet a true consensus on how the 21st Century Classroom should look.

Should every student have his or her own laptop?  Should cell phones be banned from the classroom or used in service of learning?  Are tech tools a panacea or Pandora’s Box?  Is collaboration the key to success or the gateway to chaos?

As the debates play out, we’d like to know what you think.  Feel free to add your comments below…

Diane Ross
The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning

I sparked a conversation in my graduate Human Development class not long ago when I mentioned the ring tones that most adults cannot hear.  This was ‘news’ to every person in the class, including some who can probably still hear the young-eared frequencies.

You see, a few years ago a British Company marketed a new technology to schools in England.  Using a frequency that older adults cannot hear (due to age-related hearing loss that everyone experiences), the school could broadcast the frequency in places they don’t want kids to congregate.  The frequency hurts kids’ ears, and they leave the area.  Instead of telling kids to keep out, the frequency does it and adults are not affected by the sound.

That British company, called Mosquito, decided that its products were so successful they began to market their product to kids to download onto their cell phones.  That way, when a student gets a call during class (or a text message) the alert is sent using the kid-only frequency.  Kids know when they are getting a call, teachers don’t.

The problem with this technology is that it is a double sided sword.  One side is the side of educators using it to ward off kids, as if they were truly ‘mosquitoes’.  The other side is the students getting away with breaking the rules by receiving calls or text messages during class.  I guess this text messaging could be used to cheat, but who knows what kids send on their texts?

The bottom line is that technology is what it is, a tool. We can choose to use it wisely or we can use it to gain an upper hand.  It seems to me that either case, the Mosquito needs to be swatted from schools.  It’s not a good idea to use it against kids and then allow kids to use it against schools.