In a recent opinion piece for Education Week, Craig Hochbein and Bradley Carpenter, assistant professors of K-12 leadership at the University of Louisville, reflect on what they call “disciplined improvement.” Using examples such as Ty Cobb and Ernest Hemingway to illustrate that disciplined improvement encompasses both “the commencement and termination of actions. In addition to modifications and improvements, successful professionals identify the detrimental practices or behaviors they must extinguish.”
They contrast this type of reflective practice with the current climate, where talking about how and why teachers fail is avoided by teachers and administrators alike. Rather, the discussion on how to improve education focuses on “improvement strategies” for school performance and student achievement. However, these strategies “can also obscure the learning that occurs through the purposeful examination of failure. Specifically, efforts focused solely on improvement may fail to eliminate the unnecessary and avoidable operations that preclude classroom and school improvements.”
Hochbein and Carpenter discuss the daily failures of even the most talented educators: well-planned lessons that somehow fail to capture student attention, experiments that should create “aha!” moments for students somehow fall short, etc. The authors argue that these failures should be framed as teachable moments that educators themselves can learn from and use to improve their practice. Like all other professionals, teachers must learn from their mistakes through analyzing their failures and devising solutions. Instead, we “scour the data searching for ways to improve faltering performances, while infrequently investigating the behaviors and actions that may have contributed to the unintended results.
The current focus on school turnarounds and the associated retinue of traditional interventions have as their basis the assumption that poor performance is a result of the absence of improvement efforts. This, combined with the short timeline generally given for school turnarounds, “often compels education reformers to add more initiatives and responsibilities, rather than revoke ineffective policies and procedures.” Therefore, educators are spending their time and resources solving the wrong problems.
Hochbein and Carpenter suggest two specific ways for promoting disciplined improvement, one of which is heard often in reform discussions:
1. Increase instructional planning time, and relieving teachers of some of the administrative tasks that tend to cut into planning time
2. Concentrate resources to diminish the causes or triggers of disciplinary infractions. By analyzing data on student discipline referrals, principals may be able to identify certain times of the day or activities as particularly problematic and take steps to eliminate “flawed procedures” undertaken by the school during these peak referral times.
The authors note that the success of people like Ty Cobb and Hemingway was their ability to identify their own practices that interfered with success and make improvements. Educator success in the classroom is more important to society than a well-written novel, but in being so, it is also more costly to society when education fails.
“Stakeholders interested in the improvement of public education can no longer afford to avoid difficult discussions about failure. If educators can begin embracing the meaningful learning that occurs through the disciplined analysis of failure, we can equip ourselves with empirically informed insights, and apply our diligence and expertise to solving the right problems.”
To read the full article, please visit http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/26/09hochbein.h31.html
