TeacherDrivenChange

Merced High School Positive Deviance Project

Merced High School students, teachers, administrators, and parents are making major strides in improving student attendance and reducing dropouts.   Using the Positive Deviance Approach, the entire Merced School Community is working together to find out not why students dropout out but why students stay in school.  Unlike most school improvement efforts that focus on the negative Merced High School believes that more can be learned from emphasizing the positive and building school structures and procedures around teaching and learning practices that keep students in school.  What makes the Merced effort unique is that improvements to the school are coming from within and not being externally imposed on teachers, staff, and especially students.  As a result, a new sense of commitment has been realized that is paying off for the entire school community.  Visit the Merced High School Positive Deviance Web Site for regular updates.

POSITIVE DEVIANCE SHOWING PROMISING RESULTS

 
The Positive Deviance (PD) Approach is having a major impact on teachers and students at Merced Union High School.  The CTA IFT Positive Deviance Grant from the Hewlett Foundation is designed around the concept that the most efficient way to improve our schools is to use locally homegrown available, sustainable, and effective approaches.

The PD Approach at Merced Union High School examines why students are staying in school – not why they are dropping out.  While still in its beginning stages, the PD Approach is showing teachers and students that improving our schools does not have to be a frustrating, debilitating process where people point fingers or participate in a blame game. PD, unlike most reform initiatives being recommended in Sacramento or Washington DC, focuses and collects data on what works in our schools and uses this information as a foundation for proposing changes that make sense to all school community stakeholders.   Download this podcast for an audio description of Positive Deviance.

Positive Deviance is an approach to behavioral change based on the observation that in every community, there are people (Positive Deviants) whose uncommon but successful behaviors enable them to find
better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite having no special resources or knowledge.  For our schools, this means that there are students that are staying in school, doing great work, and preparing to become successful citizens, even though the odds at times may be against them.  PD helps us to understand why this is the case. 

At the Merced PD Project, students are playing a critical role in the school improvement process.  Students are identifying PD behaviors, possible actions and strategies to reduce dropouts, and evaluation methods for success.

What makes Positive Deviance unique is that PD emphasizes practice over knowledge and the how instead of the why. The PD mantra is: You are more likely to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.  Positive Deviance is a bottom-up approach to change, where there are no external experts, and the capacity for change is embedded in the talents and strengths of the school-community. It is truly a strength-based teacher driven approach to school improvement. To find out more about the PD Approach contact Dick Gale, CTA IFT Manager/Program Director.   

Race to Nowhere: Look for It

A film that deserve your attention – Look for a new documentary about the pressures faced by American schoolchildren and their teachers in a system and culture obsessed with the illusion of achievement, competition and the pressure to perform.  

• Featuring the heartbreaking stories of students pushed to the brink
• Teachers who are burned out and worried students aren’t developing required skills
• Parents who are trying to do what’s best for their kids

Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace, students have become disengaged, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.

Scheduled for the fall are two nationwide screenings:  Sept. 30 and Oct. 4.  Click here  for more information.   

Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens. 

Click here for a Race to Nowhere Trailer.  The film is a dramatic representation why teacher driven strength-based change is so important to students, their parents, and teachers.  Race to Nowhere will help start the conversation around honest and practical discussions on school change.  This film may or may not be the answer, but it is the beginning.  Continue reading.

Student Discipline: A Strength-Based approach

If your school is experiencing high suspension and expulsion rates, you and your colleagues may want to consider practices and procedures based on student assets and strengths?   Click here to learn how a school task force made up of adult and student stakeholders devised a series of interventions that included student-led efforts to improve discipline policies and procedures. These interventions increased personal accountability, leadership, resiliency, self-management, and social competence in students as opposed to merely reducing student deficits in the form of undesirable behaviors.

Slight improvement in Dropouts

California saw a slight improvement in dropout rates over last year, but state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell said newly released figures remain too high. During the 2007-2008 school year, about one in five public school students, or 20.1 percent, dropped out of high school in California. That's compared to 21.1 percent the previous year, data released today shows.  Read on   .   .   .

Positive Deviance Statewide Planning Team

The CTA IFT hopes you will consider becoming part of the Positive Deviance Statewide Planning Team. This Team, as described in the CTA IFT Planning Grant to Increase Student Retention, is to include CTA IFT Board members and staff, CTA local and state leaders, CTA staff, classroom teachers, school administrators, community representatives, high school students, and parents of high school students. Participants are to be ethnically, gender, and geographically diverse. Members of the planning team will be trained in the Positive Deviance Approach. Please contact the CTA IFT or phone 916-212-9297 if you would like to be part of the Planning Team or would like more information.

Change From All Around

It is often suggested that the school environment or culture must change if we are to reduce the number of high school dropouts. Others assert that the problem lies with students and that they must change and adjust to established standards and expectations. A growing number of educators believe that we must focus more on the teaching and learning process through dialogue and conversations for change to take place. Still others believe that the public schools will not change on their own and that only through increased regulations and controls will the public schools improve. These points of view represent the general attitudes or evaluations held by many in the educational community -- evaluations that tend to be problem-centered and filtered by deficit thinking.

The CTA IFT Dropout Conference on August 29 – 30, 2008, is offering school-community stakeholders an alternative line of thinking about school change:

• Change from the inside out.
• Change not from the bottom or the top but from all around.
• Change based on mutually shared respect, support and trust.
• Change that encourages commitment and accountability.
• Change that energizes and increases collaboration

Three key themes link together the CTA IFT Conference to End High School Dropouts: (1) Focusing on strengths and assets to reframe how we think about school change, (2) Appreciating what values, beliefs, and attitudes drive school change, and (3) Identifying locally driven behaviors and practices that create, maintain and sustain school change. Each of these themes is based on a common sense view that rejects the deficit model, externally driven solutions, and a dependency approach to school change.

The overall direction for the CTA IFT Conference is that for school change initiatives to be successful, they need to be grounded in the great and positive things taking place in our school-communities as determined by stakeholders who can act on their own volition. Too often we underestimate the knowledge and expertise of stakeholders to invent new possibilities for improving our schools. As a result, many school reform initiatives are prescriptive and top down, with limited internal commitment making them difficult to sustain without ongoing external resources and support. In contrast, understanding the dropout epidemic through the lens of strengths and assets provides numerous opportunities for sustainable change and the commitment of all stakeholders.

High School Dropouts in America

Over a million of the students who enter ninth grade each fall fail to graduate with their peers four years later. In fact, about seven thousand students drop out every school day. Perhaps this statistic was acceptable fifty years ago, but the era in which a high school dropout could earn a living wage has ended in the United States. Dropouts significantly diminish their chances to secure a good job and a promising future. Moreover, not only do the individuals themselves suffer, but each class of dropouts is responsible for substantial financial and social costs to the communities, states, and country in which they live.

Register Today: End the Dropout Epidemic: Focusing on What Works

The Dropout Epidemic has generally been framed in deficit terms; a problem to be solved or fixed. Conventional thinking has been that if we collect the right data, do proper analyses, conduct the necessary studies, and impose specific initiatives, we can reduce the number of high school dropouts. While the logic to this approach is certainly reasonable, at some point we have to wonder why we have not been successful in our efforts to increase student retention and graduation rates.

For some, the answer is more of the same; we simply have to do a better job. Others suggest that we need to broaden our expertise and knowledge of student populations; we need to become more familiar with the needs and interests of students and their families. Still others have concluded that we need directives that impose greater restrictions and control over the public schools.

Unfortunately, few have suggested that we should focus on what is working in our schools; what students, parents, teachers, and administrators are doing to increase student retention and graduation rates. While strength-based thinking is often viewed as counterintuitive, the CTA IFT with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation believes it is an approach worth trying. Arguing against the deficit model, the CTA IFT believes that focusing on school community strengths and assets is as much a plan for change as it is a philosophy. Appreciating what is keeping our students in school and using this as a basis for individual and collaborative action, however, requires not only a transformation of the head but also the heart. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Positive Deviance (PD) Approach to School Change: The PD Approach is a cutting edge model that may significantly reduce dropouts while improving relationships between school community stakeholders. The PD Approach involves, engages, and empowers teachers, administrators, students, and parents in collaboration around school change. Through the Positive Deviance Approach school-community stakeholders can create viable strategies and action plans to reduce high school dropouts from the ground-up. The Positive Deviance approach is a discovery process aimed at identifying and leveraging the behaviors and practices of students who stay in school and graduate. While the focus will be to increase African American and Latino student retention and graduation rates, using the Positive Deviance Approach will generate results and information that can be applied to all students.  _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To move from theory to practice, the CTA IFT is hosting a statewide Conference to present the PD Approach to increase African American and Latino student retention and graduation rates. You are invited to the End the Dropout Epidemic: Focusing on What Works Conference in Sacramento. School-community stakeholders (teachers, administrators, students and their parents/guardians, community and business leaders, public and elected officials) are invited to the CTA IFT August 29 – 30, 2008 Conference to end the dropout epidemic.

The purpose of this Conference is to introduce the CTA IFT PD Approach Grant to increase retention and graduation rates for African American and Latino students. The CTA IFT Grant will be offering high school communities an opportunity to focus on those stakeholder behaviors and practices that encourage students to remain in school and graduate.

High school teams are encouraged to attend.  Teams will learn about the IFT High School Grant to increase student retention and graduation rates, including the goals, the timeline, and grant overall design.  Teams will be asked to provide their ideas and feedback on the most appropriate way to encourage high school participation and success.