Our school motto at Aki Kurose is “Reaching Excellence Together.” A major factor in our success as a school is how much we believe and buy into this vision. All students can learn and achieve at high levels - but not if we do everything as we always have. We need to take a hard look at our data - often - and do the work of figuring out what will help our students who are currently failing.
Working in our classrooms, we often feel that every contribution to our students’ success must come from us. To an extent, this is true - we are responsible for what they achieve during their time with us. But we are not left to figure out everything on our own. As I gain experience, I am finding more things that work. Sometimes I invent these strategies, but usually I am stumbling upon an idea I found elsewhere and had neglected to implement previously.
Finding ways forward for our students will require research. We are all experimenters in our classrooms, but we need to go a step farther and become researchers. The difference is that researchers begin with what others have found through their own research and experience, and conduct experiments to extend what they have learned. In other words, the good ideas are out there, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
But how often do we use research in our teaching? Usually only when someone we trust convinces us to try a specific approach, or when our school, district, or state adopts something system-wide. The result of this reality is that we keep doing what we’ve always done until we’re forced to make a change.
But there is another way. If we make the choice as faculty members to become a community of researchers, we can learn from the research that has already been done, learn from our own experience, and share with and learn from each other.
Life is too short, and we are all too busy, to figure everything out for ourselves. There are strategies that lead to tremendous success with students similar to ours, and we don’t know, much less use, all of them. The best way to find them is for all of us to be professional learners, try what we learn about, and share our experiences with each other.
One book to begin with, if you’re interested, is Classroom Instruction that Works, by Robert J. Marzano et al. This book was handed out to all NUA participants (at least in my cohort), so there are several copies among us. Marzano reviews nine instructional strategies that have been proven effective, with percentile gains from 20 to 45 percent. These are huge effect sizes - differences so big we’d be crazy to ignore these strategies in our teaching. But it begins with knowing what the strategies are, what the research base is, and how others have used the strategies in their classrooms. Imagine if all of us implemented all nine strategies - what performance gains would our students realize?
Now for the practical part. If we want to reach excellence together, we need to research excellence together. When you find something good, email it to all staff. If you implement an idea that goes well, turn one of our staff meetings into a mini-workshop and train your colleagues in it. See yourself and your co-workers as learners and professional development leaders, not just teachers. And we will move closer to the reality of our motto: “Reaching Excellence Together.”