School improvement is moving away from highly targeted innovations intended to solve specific problems toward a fluid inquiry into how to make education better day to day. The intent is to make all schools learning communities for faculties as well as students—making use of the most powerful models of learning with both groups.
For many years and through many different reform movements, our schools have been hampered by structural characteristics that make innovation laborious: no time in the workday for collegial inquiry, no structures for democratic decision making, a shortage of information, and the absence of a pervasive staff development system. Essentially, we have tried to engage in school improvement with a series of Catch-22's designed into our organization.
Often, when a problem area has been identified by a faculty—modernize the science curriculum, help at-risk students, or teach more students to read effectively—the usual solution has been to generate a special program staffed separately with new cadres of specialists. New curriculums are “put in place,” with limited training or involvement by the teachers.
What is now envisioned is a quantum leap toward the creation of a setting where inquiry is normal and the conditions of the workplace support continuous, collegial inquiry. The vision is of a “school as a center of inquiry” (Schaefer 1967), where faculties continuously examine and improve teaching and learning, and where students study not only what they are learning in the curricular sense, but also their own capability as learners.
In this changed culture, school improvement plans are viewed as hypotheses to be tested, not panaceas. The process is school-based, involves the total faculty, builds community, serves to increase student learning through the study of instruction and curriculum, and seeks to provide a nurturant organization through collective study of the health of the school (Joyce et al. 1993).
How do faculties get started? We suggest that they explore promising changes and test them as hypotheses, with commitment following a study of the results.
Hypothesis 1
Restructuring job assignments and schedules to build in time for collective inquiry will increase school improvement activity. Some school improvement strategies assume that the schedule of the school will remain the same, but broad change requires time for all members of the organization to work and study together. Without this collective study time, we cannot move forward as a learning community.
Synergistic environments—those characterized by rigorous interchange among people—foster inquiry. Environments that separate people depress inquiry. Many of us have worked in schools that were and still are organized as a loose federation of little schools (classrooms), with minimal adult interchange built into the workplace. Some of us taught without really knowing our colleagues down the hall or even what our neighbors next door were doing.
In such a structure, it is nearly impossible to develop curriculum, create a nurturant social climate, collectively study students and their learning, and analyze the health of the organization. School improvement has been inherently frustrating because time to study collectively as a faculty has not been available. In essence, we need one another's ideas for stimulation, and we need one another's perspectives to enrich our own.
Case in point: Restructuring time. In the Pala Elementary and High School District, the students leave after lunch every Wednesday afternoon. From 1:30 until 4:00 p.m., the faculties meet to develop and tend the learning community. In this district, the assignment has changed from “Here's your classroom and the list of students assigned to you” to “Welcome to a learning community where we study teaching and learning as they occur.” And time to do so is embedded into the work week. Will time for professional interchange result in better schools for the Pala District? We think so, and faculties there are testing the idea.
Hypothesis 2
Active democracy and collective inquiry create the structural conditions for school renewal. The traditional managerial structure for schools and districts has been a loose federation of classrooms somewhat coordinated by principals, their assistants, and a few central office personnel. State departments of education, on the periphery, often serve local districts and schools much like financial backers, with guidelines and standards for the use of public resources. Most state deparments have virtually no structure other than curriculum standards for communicating their educational intents or for supporting implementation.
Thus, those closest to the student carry the educational system. What “managerial transformation” can be made right now to help the school community and its faculty? We suggest that each school form a democratic governing body (Glickman 1993). Rather than being a traditional parliamentary governing group, our Responsible Parties will lead all members of the community in studying the school, its students, and ways to continually make the school better. A small school might include all faculty on the governing body. A larger school might elect representatives. And in both small and large schools, the community elects representatives. Decision-making and leadership roles are expanded. All faculty members and elected representatives participate in major decisions, with administrators serving as executive secretaries of the governing body.
Case in point: A responsible democratic community. Rincon Elementary School has 18 teachers and 500 students. The Responsible Parties include all 18 teachers, 18 parents elected by the other parents, and four student-parent teams. At Rincon High School—which has 66 teachers and 1,600 students—16 teachers and 16 parents, along with four student-parent teams, make up the Responsible Parties team. In both cases, the Responsible Parties nurture the learning community, ensure the support of the democratic inquiry process at the individual and school level, and coordinate initiatives within the school.
At these two schools, inquiry is the process that unifies professionals and laypeople. Every practice is open for scrutiny rather than considered a permanent solution. If something isn't working for a child or a group of children, people acknowledge it and try something else, without blame or shame. The realization is that teaching is a never-ending process of trying to reach all the kids in the best ways that current vision permits.
Hypothesis 3
Studying the learning environment will increase inquiry into ways of helping students learn better. Inquiry involves collecting, analyzing, and reflecting on data. In an odd sense, our schools have been both information-rich and information-impoverished. That is, while much information-gathering goes on, schools have lacked the reflective, experimental qualities that make assessment of learning lead to the study of ways to improve it.
Serious inquiry often leads us beyond the information we are accustomed to using. For example, a few years ago we worked with a middle school where only 30 percent of the students earned promotion at the end of each school year. Year after year, teachers knew the students were failing. And yet, year after year, the students failed. Then, a staff development program interrupted the situation by bringing the faculty into the study of teaching. Students began to learn more, and within two years, 95 percent of them were earning promotion with the same curriculum and the same tests still in place.
What happened in this middle school? Faculty members, working as an organizational unit, began to study the learner and the learning environment. Data about student learning came to be used differently—as information sources to analyze as teachers inquired into how their students could become more powerful learners (Joyce et al. 1989).
Every school has large quantities of data available for collective inquiry (Calhoun 1994). Faculties may begin by using information such as grades and referrals, then collect new data, such as how often and how well students are comprehending and composing. But the inquiry doesn't necessarily stop here. At times, faculty members will want to collect data about students' feelings—for example, how students feel about their sense of independence and their developing concepts of themselves as effective human beings. These perceptual and attitudinal data can enrich a faculty's understanding of student behaviors and responses to the learning opportunities provided.
Case in point: Using site-based data. Let's move away from the example of a low-achieving middle school to look at some schools with a history of high achievement. Elementary faculties in the Ames (Iowa) Community School District (which ranks repeatedly in the top 5 percent of the nation's districts) inquired into the quality of student writing and into the teaching of writing. Within two years, student writing had improved several times beyond its predicted rate based on previous years' growth (Joyce et al. 1994).
Figure 1 reports results about the quality of expository writing, based on the scores of collected student writing samples. The faculties compared the results with district baseline outcomes derived from comparisons of fall and spring writing for 1991–92 and with average gains indicated by the National Assessment of Educational Progress for the nation as a whole (NAEP 1988, 1992). The top part of the figure compares the means for two periods—fall 1992 and spring 1993–for three dimensions of writing quality: Focus/Organization, Support, and Grammar/Mechanics. Altogether, 95 sets of samples, representing 95 students and approximately 20 percent of the district's 4th grade population, were compared. Effect sizes computed between fall and spring scores were: 2.2 for Focus; 1.5 for Support; and 1.4 for Grammar/Mechanics. All are several times the effect sizes of the national sample and of the baseline gains determined from the 1991–92 analyses.
Figure 1a. Grade 4 Scores on Expository Writing for Fall 1992 and Spring 1993
School Renewal: An Inquiry, Not a Formula - table
Dimensions | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Period | Focus/Organization | Support | Grammar/Mechanics |
| Grade 4 Fall | |||
| Mean | 1.6 | 2.2 | 2.1 |
| Standard Deviation | 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.7 |
| Grade 4 Spring | |||
| Mean | 2.8 | 3.2 | 3.0 |
| Standard Deviation | 0.9 | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| After an elementary school faculty began a collective inquiry into the teaching of student writing, the quality of writing in the 4th grade improved noticeably. |
Spring scores for the 4th grade (above) surpassed those of grade 6:
Figure 1b. Grade 6 Scores for Fall 1992
School Renewal: An Inquiry, Not a Formula - table 2
Grade 6 Fall | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | 2.1 | 2.9 | 2.9 |
| Standard Deviation | 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.7 |
To illustrate the magnitude of the difference, the district compared mean results for the spring 4th grade assessment to the fall 6th grade results (shown in the bottom part of fig. 1). District staff found that it was possible to increase gains per year to several times the average gain.
What made these gains possible? The district secured two hours every week for faculty members to study together. During 1992–93, teachers spent half this time studying the inductive model of teaching in reading and writing. In brief, the district focused collective attention on moving forward in a major curriculum area, studied what students were able to do as writers, provided staff development that helped staff members inquire into language arts and the development of powerful communication, and continuously studied staff implementation and student effects.
In schools with histories of low student achievement and high student achievement, then, the faculties found that their own attitudes and beliefs became part of the inquiry. In both settings, they had not really believed their students could learn so much more effectively. And neither did the parents. Collective efficacy increased as these faculties “proved” that their students could learn far more than they had been expected to learn.
Hypothesis 4
Connecting the faculty to the knowledge base on teaching and learning will generate more successful initiatives. Many faculties have attempted to improve their schools without easy access to the accumulated knowledge relevant to their needs. Much to the benefit of all parties concerned with school improvement, the study of teaching, curriculum, and technology now has a substantial knowledge base that can help faculties think about possible solutions to problems. (See Bloom 1984, Joyce et al. 1992, and Wang et al. 1993.)
This connection to the knowledge base of our profession and use of it for collective inquiry can expand the possibilities for effective action, as faculty members locate efforts and perspectives that they may not have been aware of. For example, as Responsible Parties seek ways of motivating students to learn, their inquiry may lead them to “motivational” programs. A broad look at the literature, however, will reveal that some teaching strategies and curricular approaches have very large motivational effects—something that might not be found in a search for motivational programs alone.
Case in point: Moving beyond what we know. The faculty and parents at Soquel Elementary School were working together to improve student writing from K–6th grade. Dismayed by the number of students in grades 3 through 6 who were performing poorly, they knew their students could do better. Working together, teachers and parents developed an action plan filled with exciting activities—for example, a Write-Night Sleep-in, visits from renowned children's authors, a family night writing workshop, and surveys of students' and parents' attitudes about writing. Meanwhile, members of the Responsible Parties were examining journals, videotapes, and textbooks to locate promising resources for schoolwide study and reflection.
When the students again produced writing samples, the quality had improved, but very little in relation to the amount of energy expended. As faculty members and parents reflected on the year's experiences, they reached an important conclusion: Although they had done much to celebrate writing, they had done nothing to change instruction or curriculum. As a result of this collective self-examination, the 1993–94 action plan emphasized three instructional strategies with a history of improving the quality of student writing: the inductive model of teaching, group language experience with an emphasis on modeling and metacognition processes, and the inquiry approach.
Hypothesis 5
Staff development, structured as an inquiry into curriculum and instruction, will provide synergy and result in initiatives that have greater student effects. Staff development must not be offered as “Here is stuff that has been researched, so use it!” Rather, it should be an invitation to new inquiries. Consequently, the content of staff development—curriculum and instruction—should be organized so that as new practices are identified and tried, the faculty can immediately and systematically study their effects. Models of teaching are not static practices to simply put in place; they are models of learning that launch further study of students and how they learn (Joyce and Showers 1995, Joyce et al. 1992, Wang et al. 1993).
Case in point: Teacher inquiry, alone and together. Earlier we shared student achievement data from the Ames Community School District. Now let's look at how teachers there felt about inquiring alone and together.
Ames provides strong, balanced support for initiatives generated by individual teachers (for example, Individual Growth Fund); by school faculties conducting action research (School-Based Action Research); and by the district as a unit (for example, Models of Teaching/Language Arts).
In the spring of 1993, a team of local teachers and administrators interviewed 64 teachers—a random sample drawn from the district's nine elementary schools—about their perceptions of the content of the three initiatives and their satisfaction from participating in them. For cross-initiative comparisons, the critical items were four questions: (1) Should Ames continue the initiative? (2) Would you recommend it to another district? (3) Did it have an effect on students? and (4) How do you feel about the program in general?
The majority of teachers favored continuing all three initiatives, but the largest percentage (61 of the 64 teachers) favored the district's Models of Teaching/Language Arts effort. What was surprising to district personnel was the similarity in the distribution of responses across the four parallel sets of questions.
For example, of the 64 teachers, 56 percent said they would recommend the Individual Growth Fund to another person, 78 percent would recommend School-Based Research to other districts, and 88 percent would recommend Models of Teaching/Language Arts to other districts.
Fifty-five percent of the 64 teachers said that the Individual Growth Fund had an effect on their students, 75 percent said that School-Based Research had positive effects, and 84 percent responded positively about the Models of Teaching/Language Arts initiative.
As for general feelings about the programs, 64 percent of the teachers felt “good” about the Individual Growth Fund, 80 percent felt good about School-Based Action Research, and 95 percent felt positive about Models of Teaching/Language Arts.
The 64 teachers also answered open-ended questions. In general, they described changes in students, in instructional strategies and materials, and in effects on themselves, including their morale. Overall, 26 teachers mentioned specific, positive changes for the Individual Growth Fund, 39 teachers did so for the School-Based Action Research, and 49 teachers, for the Models of Teaching/Language Arts initiative.
In Ames, initiatives at all three levels—individual, school, and district—were operating, and the district conducted an action research study to find out how each was doing. The findings that surprised many were: (1) initiatives generated at all three levels were well accepted, and (2) the district initiative fared very well in the opinion of teachers, probably because its governance base was so broad and its design so carefully constructed. Through collective inquiry at the district level, educators in Ames are in a position to make each initiative even better.
Hypothesis 6
Working in small groups, with teachers sharing responsibility for their own learning and for helping one another, a faculty can become a nurturant unit. A major dimension of schooling is creating caring communities for children. Much less attention, however, has been directed at how to develop schools as organizations that nurture the professionals who work within them. Building closer professional communities, developing democratic interchange, and embedding the study of teaching into the work day can have a considerable effect on professional ethos. And, as a structural process supporting these changes, inquiry can also benefit our collective mental health.
Our assessment of the literature on organizations suggests that the caring dimension depends to a large extent on creating organizations where many small groups—often composed of only three or four people—see themselves as not only working together to get the job done, but also as responsible for supporting one another in developing personally and professionally. Thus, the larger community both supports and is supported by small groups charged with: (1) inquiring into teaching and learning, and (2) supporting one another and the organization as a collaborative unit.
Case in point: The caring dimension. The Ames Community School District's renewal program illustrates many of the features of the school as a center of inquiry: embedded time for colleagueship; a system for shared decision making; an information-rich, formative study environment; the study of research on curriculum and teaching; and a comprehensive staff development system (every teacher in the district is a member of a study group). In these ways, the district fosters the evolution of schools as organizations that nurture the professionals within them and, in the process, reduces feelings of isolation, stress, and alienation.
Inquiry Never Ends
In essence, school renewal seeks to create environments that promote the continuous examination of the process of education at all levels. To launch and test specific, deliberated improvements is the continuing goal because we, as individuals and as organizations, are never complete, never “finished.” Classrooms, schools, and districts are social entities that, like the human spirit, require the challenge of growth to maintain themselves in optimum health, but even more important, to soar.
