Two portraits of practitioner scholarship from program graduates:

Shayna and Jane

CPED Convening, October-November 2017

1.Shayna: A principal focuses on increasing student engagement: Shayna was an elementary school principal in a school with a high percentage of racially minoritized students living in poverty. She described how her increased focus on the performance of these students led to a careful examination of various indicators of school engagement and learning. She collected data that showed that some fifth grade students participated in few activities that could motivate their learning. After sharing these data with the teachers, Shayna created, and then systematically studied the effects of, an intervention.

In Shayna’s words. One of the things that I've done most recently was I pulled up every piece of data I had on every child in the school up through December…then [this is] the impactful piece. What I did is I printed these into massive poster sized documents and then I took these dots, like [small, colored sticker] dots and I created a color coding system and I put a dot by every kid’s name for every single interaction that child has at this school besides their daily learning. So…if they have a mentor there's a different dot there…If they're in an after school club there's a certain color dot there…So I see that [a certain student] has six dots by his name so…he's very well connected to the school but then the child above him has no dots by her name. This girl is in class, but beyond that she's kind of being overlooked. It's not that every kid has to be in everything, but in my opinion if I've got students who have no other significant adult or connection to the school, this child is at risk to me especially in a high poverty school. So I…had every team of teachers come in…and I went through their grade level chart and every child on that chart. This was so shocking to them.

…I was also working on a “bridging the gap” plan for our school. We have a significant achievement gap between our overall population and our African American students and between our overall population and our Hispanic students…so it's a problem and it's significant in reading and math with both of those subgroups. Teachers need to know this because then they need to examine their practice…so what I did is I pulled all those teachers and then reviewed it. There were 12 African American students in fifth grade that had no dots by their name. So I said, “What's this about?...[What] is the issue with these kids, and what do we need to do about it?”

As an example, one of the things we did is we took all 12 of those kids and we put them in what we call a computer coding club. So right now…teaching kids to code, is a huge national issue. So we decided, what if we taught those 12 kids to code and suddenly their knowledge level is elevated beyond their peers and now they're becoming tech experts? Can we significantly change their personal agency…? These are kids that are just quietly sitting there in class. So my [staff members] have been meeting with them twice a week [for] almost two months now. These kids are on fire and their knowledge level has skyrocketed.

My intent with the data is to look at these students specifically, and the data that I collect on them from now through the end of the year, what do I see regarding their growth? If it's nothing, fine. I can visibly see them excited about learning. But my expectation is I'm going to see a spike in their achievement data…a couple of them were already kind of high performance but a lot of them were midlevel performers, maybe level two [out of five] on [the state standardized test], maybe level three—not getting service because they weren’t struggling and they're not completely at the top... So [this is] just as an example of one way that I'm doing my own…inquiry with this group of kids to see if we can make a difference. But it started with this massive data collection and drilling down child to child to see where we are.

2.Jane: A district level administrator focuses on teacher retention: Jane worked at the district level and oversaw teacher retention. Her district faced the same challenge experienced by administrators in many countries: How to keep good teachers in schools with the students who need the most. This problem was particularly severe in some schools where principals could not fill all of the teacher vacancies before the beginning of the school year. Jane took a systematic approach to understanding the problem and applying a solution in her local context.

In Jane’s words. I know many large districts started off the year with multiple vacancies, so that’s an ongoing problem of practice that we have. We’ve paired up with a team of people that span across all positions in our central office…and what we’ve done is we’ve looked closely at the reasons that teachers voluntarily leave our district. Then we developed an exit survey to send to them. Then we’ve systematically drilled through the exit survey and whittled it down to what schools people are leaving out of their own voluntary accord, [such as by] gender; who’s leaving, [more] males or females? What levels of schools are they leaving? Is there a relationship to the race of the teacher where they’re leaving? What are those overarching reasons they attribute to why they leave? So that’s something we’ve been doing [in an] ongoing [way], and [we have] narrowed it down to five [reasons] why [teachers leave], which schools our teachers leave voluntarily…

[One statement the leavers disagreed with was] “I was supported and evaluated in a way that affected my professional growth.” So what we’ve been trying to do is work with the assistant principals. We had a training Monday night where I showed them a video aligned with one of our teacher evaluation domains and then we went through the whole instructional coaching model and the questioning process and they had the opportunity to role play and question each other as if they were giving feedback to the teacher in the video.

Some of the aspects of the [Ed.D.] program, in terms of survey construction, gave me the opportunity to collaborate with the committee that’s looking at this because they knew I had that knowledge base. So I helped them review items and craft questions from my familiarity of the knowledge of the research as to what items would be good on that survey that went out to the teachers. [I could] also back up some of the responses the teachers have given with different research…I think the way I approach my work has changed since I’ve been in the program. I rely a lot on research if I’m going to look at strategies, so how can we support the assistant principals and the growth of the new teachers in the building…not that I didn’t do that before I was in the program but I did not do it as loyally or as regularly as I do now. For any big project I cast my feelers out there to see what’s already been done in the field and what were the results and could we replicate something similar within our own district? So that is one way, but also how do you evaluate if what you’ve done is effective? I do that now in a more systematic way than I had done in the past in terms of just creating different surveys for people that I interact with as well as [conducting] small focus groups of people that we have worked with in the past, our different mentor teachers that were highly effective and [sharing results] with different leaders in our district as well as to what made them highly effective. So it’s twofold: I go to the research that’s been published but then do my own deeper and systematic investigating.

Elizabeth Bondy, Ph.D.

University of Florida

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