TeacherDrivenChange

The Talent Code

Are there specific behaviors that are more likely to lead to success?  Is it more beneficial to focus on what works as opposed to deficits?  According to Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, greatness is not a mystery but it does take practice.  Coyle explains:

If you distilled all the new science about talent development into two words of advice, they would be “practice better.” The most basic truth is that if you practice better, you’ll develop your talent — and you won’t develop your talent unless you practice better.  

The key is to find out what behaviors need to be practiced more than others.  Visit the IFT Bookstore to purchase a copy of The Talent Code.  Click on the video below to learn more about The Talent Code.   

Theory to Practice - The IFT has been working closely with Merced teachers and students to discover those behaviors and practices that keep students in school.  Using the Positive Deviance (PD) Approach, teachers and students are working together to develop new strategies that lead to student success.  What makes the PD approach unique is that it is driven by those individuals that are directly involved in the teaching and learning process: teachers and students.

 

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.

Reducing Dropouts: Creating a Student Future Orientation

From a CTA IFT study of over 800 highly performing African American and Latino students and their parents, results showed that a major factor driving a high school culture of success is a future orientation.  From a theoretical perspective, future orientation is a multidimensional concept that includes such dimensions as planning, realism, and a sense of control.  From a practical perspective, a future orientation may be critical to reducing high school dropouts.  Click the comment link below if you have developed programs and strategies for encouraging a future orientation in your students.  Continue reading for more ideas on creating a student future orientation.     

Reducing High School Dropouts

Reducing high school dropouts is a system-wide problem that cannot be resolved by any single decision, initiative, rule or regulation. Nor, will we resolve the dropout problem by looking for villains or heroes. What is required is a strength-based approach that encourages school community initiatives to identify the (1) values, beliefs, and attitudes (culture), (2) behaviors and practices, and (3) affirmative experiences and skills that encourage student retention and graduation rates. By focusing on strengths, endless possibilities are revealed; allowing school community stakeholders to move beyond traditional approaches to increasing student retention and graduation rates.

Guiding principles to reducing high school dropouts

• Personal responsibility and accountability emphasizing the importance of parents and families 
• A strength-based approach emphasizing the assets that reside within our school communities 
• A unified approach emphasizing cultural factors that drive a successful teaching and learning environment while respecting the individual values and beliefs of all members of the school community 
• An inclusive approach that insures the full participation of all school community stakeholders 
• A strength-based approach emphasizing: (1) Behaviors and practices, (2) values, beliefs, and attitudes, and (3) individual talents 
• An innovative and entrepreneurial approach tailored to the needs and interests of the school community 

Key components to reducing high school dropouts

Behaviors and Practices - Focusing on the behaviors and practices of students that are actually staying in school. Discover what their parents, family and friends are doing to support them. We spend too much time studying students that dropout. As a result, we have become experts on the dropout problem but have very little knowledge about why students stay in school and graduate. Develop interventions and action plans that emphasize behaviors and practices with less emphasis on information and data collection.

School Community Strengths - Valuing the strengths of each of our communities, parents, and families. While it is very easy to criticize and point fingers, it is not very productive and does not resolve the dropout problem. Very few individuals and groups respond favorably to criticism and people respond even less to statistics that place them in an unfavorable light. What is needed is a serious inquiry into the great work taking place that encourages students to stay in school and graduate. What are the expert parenting skills taking place in our African American and Latino communities (demographic groups with the highest percentage of student dropouts) that are keeping our students in school? We need to use this knowledge in the form of community information programs in collaboration with other community-based organizations. This positive and strength-based information can act as a foundation for building programs to support student retention and graduation rates. Finding fault with people does little to build a collaborative and cooperative strategy.

Strength-Based Values that Support Student Graduation Rates - Discovering strength-based values, beliefs, and attitudes in our students, parents, families and communities. Reports and data collection efforts that criticize various individuals and groups tend to be counterproductive. This is especially true if individuals believe that their culture or belief system is being challenged. It makes much more sense to identify how belief systems are working to support and improve a situation – in this case keep our students in school. A locally driven investigation of how student, family and community values, beliefs, and attitudes support student retention and graduation rates is more likely to lead to success. The Cultural Change Institute working with the IFT can be helpful to any community interested in focusing on the strengths of their belief systems and how they are helping students remain in school.

Community Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit - Appreciating the strengths, talents and wisdom of our school communities by organizing and holding a school Community Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit for increasing student retention and graduation rates. An AI Summit is the intervention of choice when the task requires high levels of participation and cooperation. The ratio of monologue to dialogue during a Summit is about 10% monologue to 90% dialogue among participants. There are no formal leadership presentations. Everyone who attends comes with an equal voice. There is not a separate leadership group who gets the 2-hour briefing while everyone else attends the full meeting. All stakeholders attend the meeting and are mixed into discussions that bridge boundaries. The AI Summit is a high participation, full voice process.

Many reform efforts to reduce high school dropouts are in competition with one another. An Appreciative Inquiry Summit serves as an umbrella process for integrating multiple change initiatives. As a philosophy and methodology the AI Summit provides a set of principles and practices that when enacted can enhance broad-based community participation and hence commitment to change. If we are to reduce high school dropouts, for example, we must develop a phased process weaving new ways of relating and working throughout the entire school community. With this in mind, the AI Summit serves as an integrating process by putting order, discipline, and personal accountability into the change process.

Through the AI Summit, the IFT brings a new approach to reducing high school dropouts by focusing and appreciating the strengths, talents and wisdom of our school community, rather than seeing our students and school community as a problem to be solved or fixed.

Teacher Driven Change - Recognizing the importance of teachers in driving the school change process is critical to the success of any change initiative; especially reducing high school dropouts. The IFT has special expertise when working with teachers, both the challenges and opportunities.

Nothing Breeds Success Like Success

It's not a newsflash to most classroom teachers that our high schools were never designed to meet today's economic and employment challenges. From farming to factories, public high schools have been driven by schedules, structures and procedures, all grounded in America's past. In response, there has been a chorus of business leaders and corporate officials who are promoting business-based remedies to fix what they believe are the shortcomings of our educational system. Not surprisingly, these market driven advocates have combined forces with numerous philanthropic foundations interested in supporting school change. Unfortunately, while many of these initiatives have been generally successful in the private sector, they have ignored the complexities of improving public education. In addition, too often school reform proposals have ignored the role that culture plays in encouraging a successful teaching and learning environment.

Over the past several years, many school improvement proposals, both public and private, have diminished the role of the classroom teacher. Generally portrayed as doers and not thinkers, teachers too often have ironically been held responsible for a system that has shown a basic disinterest in educating all children. In addition, when teachers have attempted to initiate change and challenge conventional thinking, they have felt constrained by externally imposed rules and regulations. No wonder, when it comes to educational reform, most teachers and teacher advocates are a little skeptical.

Still, when it comes to school change, teachers are ready to meet the needs of a highly diverse student population. Teachers have shown a keen interest to close the achievement gap for all students and reduce high school dropouts if they have the support and confidence of the educational community. Classroom teachers are prepared to place themselves on the frontlines if they understand the overall purpose and direction for the changes being proposed. As one classroom teacher recently told the CTA IFT: I am not going to waste my time and energy on someone else's pipe dream. However, I will do whatever it takes if I believe it will help my kids.

So what steps can classroom teachers take to close the achievement gap and make our schools dropout proof? How do we move from theory to practice and develop a few concrete steps that teachers, administrators, students, and parents can unify around to reshape and reorganize our high schools for all students? To answer these questions, we do not necessarily need new rules, regulations, or mandates. Rather, school improvement may be as simple as teachers and other school community stakeholders paying attention to what is working in our high schools and producing desired outcomes for students. In other words, nothing breeds success like success.

To take the first step, the CTA IFT with the support of the California Teachers Association and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has formed a partnership with The Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University to identify teacher, student, parent, and administrator behaviors and practices that increase student retention and graduation rates. What makes this proposal unique is that teachers, with administrators, students, and parents, will be asked to develop action plans and strategies based on what is working in our school-communities and not problems. While most reform measures focus on problems and deficits, the CTA IFT initiative will concentrate on those students that remain in school and graduate and the great things taking place in our school communities that support them. Positive Deviance is a development approach that is based on the premise that solutions to community problems already exist within the community. The positive deviance approach thus differs from traditional "needs based" or problem-solving approaches in that it does not focus primarily on identification of needs and the external inputs necessary to meet those needs or solve problems. Instead it seeks to identify and optimize existing resources and solutions within the community to solve community problems.

We hope you will join with the CTA IFT to organize a Statewide Positive Deviance Planning Team to develop a broad-based, all inclusive strategy to end high school dropouts. On August 29 – 30, 2008, in Sacramento, CA, the CTA IFT will hold a two-day session to inform and educate participants on the Positive Deviance Approach to school change and the CTA IFT Dropout Proposal. Participants will also be asked to provide input on how the high school dropout proposal application process should be constructed and distributed to interested high school communities. Up to three high schools will be selected as part of this statewide proposal to end dropouts. High school teams are encouraged to attend, along with individuals who have expertise and experiences with preventing high school student dropouts. Click here to register for the August 29 – 30, 2008 sessions.

End the Dropout Epidemic: A Call for Experts in the Field

Why do students stay in school? What do parents do each and everyday to make sure their daughters and sons appreciate and value education? What do teachers and administrators do to keep students in school? How do we begin to identify and replicate the behaviors and practices that support student retention and graduation rates? These questions and others will help guide the CTA IFT Positive Deviance Approach to dramatically reduce high school dropouts in California. Beginning with a few high schools, the CTA IFT will utilize the Positive Deviance Approach – an approach designed to identify what works well in each school-community – to end the dropout epidemic and insure academic and social success for all students.

But, the CTA IFT can't do it alone. We need the experience, expertise and wisdom of researchers, scholars, classroom teachers, administrators, policy makers, and elected officials to help us define important parameters, objectives and expectations for reducing high School dropouts and increasing student retention. We are hoping key individuals from around the state will join us on August 30^th from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm to develop a broad-based action plan to make our schools dropout proof. Click here to register for the August 30^th forum. You are also encouraged to attend the August 29^th information session on the Positive Deviance Approach and the CTA IFT Planning Grant to end high school dropouts.

End the Dropout Epidemic: Focusing on What Works

The high school dropout problem is not something that can be fixed by a single initiative or change in policy. To make our schools dropout proof we need to consider an alternative approach, one that treats high school dropouts not as a problem to be fixed, but more like a virus or epidemic to be cured or prevented. From a health related perspective, an epidemic tends to have few boundaries, takes place over a long period of time, and impacts a large number of individuals. Portrayed in this fashion, it makes more sense to describe student dropouts in epidemic terms.

As a society we are determined to eradicate disease – not for 75 percent, 85 percent or even 95 percent of the population. When it comes to disease, we have only one goal: 100 percent eradication. For example, no one in the United States would have been satisfied with only marginal success when fighting the polio virus. As a matter of public policy, we demanded the complete elimination of this dreaded disease. Teachers, administrators, and other school community stakeholders should expect and work for the same results and end the dropout epidemic.

To turn things around and eliminate dropouts, school-community stakeholders need to focus their attention on those students that stay in school and not those that dropout. Using the epidemic metaphor, requires an approach that is culturally appropriate and tailored to the specific community in which it is used. This is generally contrary to conventional wisdom and current educational thinking which does not view the dropout crisis as a disease or illness but rather as a systemic challenge. In every community there are certain individuals whose unique practices, strategies, and behaviors enable them to find better solutions to prevalent community problems than their neighbors who have access to the same resources. For example, staph infections have been significantly reduced by hospital employees who simply wash their hands. This knowledge came about from watching and observing those hospital employees where staph infections were relatively low.

The lesson here is that the fight against disease may be more of a behavioral and cultural challenge than it is a technical and medical problem. For those of us who want to end the dropout epidemic the implication is to identify the behaviors and practices of students that remain in school and the behaviors and practices of parents, teachers and administrators who develop a culture of success that encourage student retention. Once these behaviors and practices are identified we can then begin to replicate them throughout the school community with the goal of having all students stay in school and graduate and making our high schools dropout proof.

The Positive Deviance Approach, Professional Learning Communities, and Dropouts

The Positive Deviance Approach moves professional learning communities and teams to a new level of engagement and support: one that focuses on what's right and great about our schools. While professional learning communities (PLC) have been configured in a number of ways, in some sense they have become a metaphor for teacher driven change. Unfortunately, most PLCs tend to be based on deficit thinking that views the public schools as something to be fixed. The Positive Deviance Approach (PDA) brings to PLCs a new dimension – one that asks teachers and other stakeholders to use what's working in our schools as a framework for improving student learning and outcomes.

For a topic as complex as high school dropouts, it will take more than an honest and open dialogue to dramatically increase student retention and graduation rates. Using the PDA, however, students, teachers, administrators, and parents can actually investigate the behaviors and practices of their respective groups to determine which behaviors and practices are aligned with and encourage student retention and graduation. While a number of public and private organizations advocate for dramatic changes in our schools (making classes more interesting, enforcing truancy laws, increasing the number of role models, offering financial assistance and support, and reducing poverty, violence, and drugs) in order to reduce high school dropouts, there is little evidence of success when dropouts are framed as a problem to be solved,

In fact, it is becoming increasingly clear that the cure to the dropout problem will not likely result from any particular reform initiative, strategic plan or political mandate. While the accumulation of research data is important and serious conversations on student dropouts are essential, the instrumental design generally undertaken to study the public schools has not been found to produce any beneficial results. Teachers and students are not instruments to be tinkered with, either from forces within or outside the public schools. While it is understandable that our public schools are viewed from this point of view – a machine which can be fixed or repaired with the right set of tools – it is ironic that those who claim that our schools must move into the 21^st Century are using 19^th and 20^th century models to bring about change.