Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented... by Michael J. Schmoker

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Description

According to author Mike Schmoker, there is a yawning gap between the most well-known essential practices and the reality of most classrooms. This gap persists despite the hard, often heroic work done by many teachers and administrators. Schmoker believes that teachers and administrators may... read more

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Memorable Quotes

“Place a good person in a bad system, and the system will win every time (Page 1).”
“And scores went up the next year as well - in all subjects. We're talking about the same teachers, same principal, same levels of funding - but leadership, at both the school and district level, underwent a sea of change. The school set goals and identified areas of weakness. The staff made arrangements for teachers to work regularly in teams to share, prepare, assess, and then adjust their teaching on the basis of formative assessment results - a virtual definition of a true professional learning community. Along with these steps, school leaders employed the talents of their best teachers - their in house experts - to coach their colleagues toward better practices Page 6).”
“A long line of critics have remarked on the crippling, if unintended, tradition of averting our eyes from what actually goes on in the classroom for the sake of harmony (Page 14).”
“Unlike other professionals, and despite near-universal agreement on the importance of teaming, teachers do not work in teams. They do not prepare lessons and assessments together, and they do not test and refine their lessons regularly on the basis of assessment results (Page 18).”
“Lack of academic preparation, not financial need, is the chief reason for college failure. It should therefore disturb us that only 32 percent of our college-bound students are academically prepared for college (Page 20).”
“Secondly, isolation masks the starkly different results achieved by different teachers. Without any point of comparison, the isolated teacher never has to confront the fact that (1) the teacher next door may be three times as effective as I am, or (2) much of my teaching is inferior (though parents and principals seem to like me as much - or maybe more than - the teacher next door) (Page 24).”
“elements of good instruction: being clear and explicit about what is to be learned and assessed; using assessments to evaluate a lesson's effectiveness and making constructive adjustments on the basis of results; conducting a check for understanding at certain points in a lesson; having kids read for higher-order purposes and write regularly; and clearly explicating and carefully teaching the criteria by which student work will be scored or evaluated (Page 25).”
“I believe that the majority of "incompetent" teachers are potentially quite competent - if given the opportunity to work in a redefined system with colleagues and with cooperative supervision (Page 28).”
“Like no other profession, we are denied the all-important opportunity to study and learn from our actions and our results. Hence, instructional decisions get "buried in the individual decisions of classroom teachers and buffered from external scrutiny (Page 28).”
“No one can lead effectively where constructive feedback is regarded as an invasion of privacy, an affront to professionalism (Page 29).”
“Some of the most conscientious, well-educated parents have a hard time believing that the apparatus of leadership and supervision - teacher evaluation, improvement planning, and staff development - has almost no impact on what teachers do in their classrooms (Page 31).”
“Because people conflate "change" with improvement, schools are almost always aboil with some kind of "change" but they are only rarely involved in any deliberate process of improvement, where progress is checked against a clearly specified instructional goal (Page 31).”
“Ironically, I know of several cases where staff members spent years of their time and energy helping a school or administrator win the most prestigious state and national awards. But genuine instructional improvement occurred only and immediately after the departure of the award-winning administrator (Page 33).”
“Years ago, a group of us called a handful of these award winners to find out how they had (presumably) raised achievement. To our surprise, none had. Although these schools had launched lots of programs, we found not a single case of exceptional achievement or improvement (Page 33).”
“It turns out that "simple plans" work best - those with a direct focus on straightforward actions and opportunities . . . To address these clear shortcomings, our best "plan" is to arrange for teachers to analyze their achievement data, set goals, and then meet at least twice a month - for 45 minutes or so. That way, they can help one another ensure that they are teaching essential standards and using assessment results to improve the quality of their lessons (Page 34).”
“You can walk into any school system, large or small, and ask to see samples of work that's proficient from five different 4th grade classrooms. You'll get five radically different qualities of work (Page 38).”
“They found that "curriculum didn't match" the assessed standards, so they organized standards into three 12-week units to create a "more focused curriculum." The result: 92 percent of 8th graders scored at the top two levels compared with 66 percent of students statewide (Page 39).”
“The highest-scoring countries attempt to teach less than a third as many topics as those found in U.S. textbooks. "Narrowing the curriculum," when done right, is not just permissible but essential (Page 40).”
“The district where this school is located recently hired a new superintendent. Upon arriving, he boldly announced that he had found the district to be "a ship adrift." He found "no consistent curriculum" in any of the schools. Teachers worked in isolation and never talked to each other (Page 42).”
“Every day of their school lives, students should be reading texts critically, then weighing evidence for or against people, ideas, and policies, and forming opinions. These activities foster a set of essential, intellectual "habits of mind" (Page 55).”
“England found that the ability to read well is the single best indicator of future economic success - regardless of family background (Page 57).”
“Despite the importance of academic dialog, most students don't engage in it until college or later - when people actually judge our level of "literateness" on how we discuss common texts (Page 66).”
“In fact, by postponing students' "intellectual awakening" until college, we ensure that many never develop an intellectual disposition (Page 67).”
“It's a shame that many teachers don't seem to realize that students can participate in such invaluable discussions much earlier than college - 2nd grade is an excellent time to begin this intellectual adventure (Page 68).”
“We come to know our minds only by explaining ourselves to others (Page 70).”
“With all of these approaches, the common problem has to do with how class time is squandered. Elaine McEwan, a well-known laborer in this field, describes elementary school students who spent 37 hours - the equivalent of an entire month of language arts- building a papier-mâché dinosaur. "Those kids, " writes McEwan, "couldn't read well, but they spent all that time messing with chicken wire and wheat paste." School leaders were so proud of this activity that they made sure it was featured in the local newspaper (Page 91).”
“. . . my daughters never received instruction on how to infer or interpret, to comb through a text to support assertions with evidence, or to analyze an author's purpose or bias. She did, however spend months of class time on what can only be called "literature-based arts and crafts" (Page 93).”
“Three to four weeks of effective, full-day literacy instruction would allow the average student to gain an entire year of academic growth (Page 97).”
“Professional learning communities have emerged as arguably the best, most agreed-upon means by which to continuously improve instruction and student performance. For reasons that will become clear, they succeed where typical staff development and workshops fail (Page 106).”
“We have to be very clear about what true teamwork entails: a regular schedule of formal meetings where teachers focus on the details of their lessons and adjust them on the basis of assessment results. The use of common assessments is essential here (Page 108).”
“Whether we are talking about short or long meetings, most teachers admit that they have seldom, or never, met to create a detailed lesson or unit with colleagues in their entire professional lives. Fewer still have ever reconvened to look at the results and enjoy their success or make adjustments to the lesson (Page 112).”
“I have worked with teams, who, within a meeting or two, were able to produce lessons that enabled almost 100 percent of their students to master standards where the majority had previously failed (Page 112).”
“As Block warns us, we have to resist the "default mechanism that directs us to study and learn more rather than take action using what we already know" (Page 116).”
“Best of all, it turns out that every organization has such "positive deviants," whose accomplishments are routinely overlooked (Page 119).”
“A number of real schools demonstrate that when we grant these teams both autonomy and responsibility for short-term results, we find that their on-the-ground expertise has an incalculably larger and more direct impact on instruction and achievement. Virtually every enterprise has realized that people work smarter, faster, and more happily under such circumstances. Goal-oriented teamwork trumps remote, large-scale strategic planning and "teacher-proof" programs any day of the week (Page 121).”
“"generate short-term wins" "Win small, win early, win often" Our goals should be "designed to produce short-term wins" "steady stream of success" "the magic of momentum" (Page 122).”
“DuFour came to the profound realization that teachers learn more from one another, working in teams, than from a single harried supervisor, running frenetically from teacher to teacher, giving advice (Page 125).”
“. . . met with his teachers quarterly to review common assessment results. As a consequence of these simple meetings, the passing rate on the New York Regents exam increased from 47 percent to 93 percent - in a single year. No new program, no strategic plan brought these results, just leadership focused on common curriculum taught on a common schedule, guided by formative assessment results (Page 132).”
“Forgive me, but I'm struck by how some administrators spend precious days attending conferences, year after year, without ever implementing what they learn at conferences they have already attended - without taking action to ensure more effective instruction or a guaranteed curriculum. Our leadership evaluations inadvertently encourage this (Pages 142-3).”
“For evaluation purposes, principals should be expected to document that teams at their schools have analyzed annual achievement data to set one or two measurable subject-area goals and to formally identify the lowest-scoring areas within those subject areas - where teams will concentrate their efforts. Principals should be able to document that each team has constructed a curriculum or standards map containing only the most essential learning outcomes for every course, and that each map is truly guiding instruction. Checklists and notes from monthly or quarterly curriculum and assessment reviews would be useful here (Page 143).”
“If we're serious about better schools, we must be "as bottom-up as possible; as top down as necessary" (Page 144).”
“More recently, the Gallup database revealed that praise and recognition were among the top four factors essential to success; in the best organizations, the average employee received specific recognition or praise at least once a week. This may be the single most powerful strategy for educational leaders who ask "How can we get buy-in and overcome resistance?" (Page 147).”
“We've looked at leadership practices that would greatly improve teaching and learning in any school. Teachers and school leaders will succeed when they focus on what's vital, monitor it, and celebrate successes. Even a single team or a single school has the power to "create pockets of greatness" (Page 150).”
““Despite some small progress, a coherent curriculum and productive collaboration are still all too rare - even among those who have attended the right conferences, read the right books, and are well acquainted with the fundamental concepts of collaborative learning communities (Page 150).””
“Very difficult for an individual school to become a professional learning community if the district leader shows a different set of priorities, or priorities that are in another direction (Page 151).”
“Then we capped the number of such goals at two per team - ending years of addiction to time-consuming annual improvement planning that guaranteed far too many goals and the overload and fragmentation that make improvement possible (Page 153).”