Education Week - September 17, 2014 - 6

'IMPROVEMENT SCIENCE' IN ACTION
Austin School District
Tests New R&D Model
With Novice Teachers
Research-to-practice time condensed
By Sarah D. Sparks
Washington
What if school districts could
speed up and slow down research at
the same time?
The 86,000-student Austin, Texas,
district is part of an unusual research
partnership intended to
solve school-level problems quickly,
while also helping school leaders
and policymakers step back and
take the time to study how day-today
issues fit in a larger system.
In the first major test of "improvement
science" for K-12 education,
Austin schools have overhauled
the way they support and
improve teachers in their first,
most challenging years of instruction.
They have used a cycle of deep
data collection; tailored intervention
development; short, narrowly
focused testing; and adjustment.
The cycle, developed by the Stanford,
Calif.-based Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of
Teaching, is garnering interest as
a way for districts and researchers
to partner on work with an immediate
impact in the classroom.
"A lot of us hold assumptions about
what works, but articulating them
so they can be tested is critical," said
Sandra Park, a senior associate for
improvement science and the director
of the Building Teacher Effectiveness
Network initiative at the Carnegie
Foundation. She introduced researchers
to the research cycle at popular
professional-development sessions at
the Society for Research on Educational
Effectiveness conference here
earlier this month.
"If we had been able to test them
first, we would have abandoned some
of these [school improvement strategies]
a lot earlier, before we tried to
implement them across the district
or across the country," Ms. Park said.
To respond to a problem in the
field, such as new-teacher burnout,
Austin officials used a 90-day
research cycle, in which school
leaders and researchers planned
and implemented a single change,
based on available research, then
studied the effects and tweaked
the change. One intervention may
go through several of those cycles
in a single school year, working
from at first only a single teacher
or classroom and then moving to
districtwide deployment.
"It took me a while to feel that you
could ever learn anything from a
single case with two people, ... but
this [research process] gives us an
opportunity to look at systems and
processes," Karen M. Cornetto, a senior
research associate for the Austin
schools, said in a presentation
TEST UNDER
AUSTIN'S
'HUNCHES'
DEVELOP
A CHANGE
TEST UNDER
MULTIPLE
CONDITIONS
INCREASINGLY
VARIED
CONDITIONS
MAKE
THE CHANGE
PERMANENT
SYSTEM
CHANGES
The Austin, Texas, public schools used a cyclical research process developed by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to test new ways to give novice teachers feedback.
1 / PLAN
* Define the change.
* Make predictions about
what will happen as a result.
* Design a way to test the change
on an appropriate scale.
2 / DO
* Carry out the change.
* Collect data and document
how change was implemented.
3 / STUDY
* Analyze the data.
* Compare what happened
to predictions.
* Glean insights for next cycle.
4 / ACT
* Decide what to do next
based on what you learned:
* Abandon the idea?
* Make adjustments?
* Expand the scale?
Trying it out
One school,
one administrator
Five schools,
many
administrators
SOURCE: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Increasingly
diverse teams
of teachers and
administrators
as part of a Carnegie Foundation
forum on the initiative here.
"We have a safe space to innovate,"
she said. "We would never have three
years to [implement a change at] 19
schools-usually it's more like, let's
start with all the elementary schools."
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David Kauffman, the principal of
Lance Corporal Nicholas S. Perez Elementary
School in Austin, said he was
skeptical when his school was asked
to test a new protocol for providing
feedback to new teachers. Mr. Kauffman,
previously a founding member
of Harvard University's Project on
the Next Generation of Teachers, a
longitudinal-research project, said he
had already "checked all the boxes"
for new teachers: induction, observation
and feedback, and peer support.
Yet he and Daniel Girard, the
principal of neighboring Akins High
School, said they still saw too many
exhausted new teachers leave their
school or the profession.
Both leaders said plans for more
frequent classroom walkthroughs or
more helpful teacher-feedback sessions
often were akin to New Year's
resolutions-"I will get into classrooms
more," Mr. Kauffman said he
pledged again and again, before the
day-to-day distractions of the principalship
got in the way.
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"The work really forced us to
think about the flow of communication
that we have with new teachers,"
Mr. Girard said. "What we
used to do was basically, 'Hey, new
teacher-good job,' and we did provide
feedback but it wasn't targeted;
we tried to do everything all at once.
"By focusing on one little thing at
a time," Mr. Girard said, "we were
able to get a whole lot of bang for the
buck," he said.
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By coupling development of the
new observation and feedback protocol
with brief surveys of new teachers
every six weeks, the school leaders
were able to identify specific challenges
for their teachers and help the
newcomers improve their skills.
The research cycle's broader data
analysis also made Mr. Kauffman
take a more objective look at his
work in the school context and learn
how to delegate activities that had
distracted him from working with
new staff members.
"What in the system of the school
is preventing us from having these
important conversations with
new teachers? " he said. "When we
looked at that, it was much better
at making things happen than just
self-flagellation."
Next Steps
While the Carnegie Foundation is
winding down the Building Teaching
Effectiveness Network, school
officials in Austin are trying to keep
the process going, and other districts
and states have expressed interest
in the model.
However, the process may be most
helpful for school districts if it never
gains a national profile, argues Brad
Jupp, a senior program adviser to U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Improvement science seems to
Mr. Jupp "incredibly relevant at the
schoolhouse level," but he cautioned
against "the horrible thought of trying
to turn it into a requirement at
the federal level or turn it into a law."
Michael Cohen, the president of
the college-readiness group Achieve,
based in Washington, agrees that
not every district has the capacity
to build in research on a regular
basis, but he still approves of the
federal Institute of Education Sciences'
efforts to encourage researchpractitioner
partnerships to explore
similar research models.
"I think the time is right for a conversation
about improvement science
in the policy arena," Mr. Cohen
said. "It is all about data, but it is
not accountability on steroids-it's
very local data, collected more often
to advance local priorities. That's a
very different approach."
Scan this tag with your
smartphone for a link to
"Getting Ideas Into Action:
Building Networked
Improvement Communities in Education."
www.edweek.org/links
Districtwide,
all administrators

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Education Week - September 17, 2014

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