Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2000 (Vol. 21, No. 1)

Editor's Note: Mike Schmoker is an independent school improvement consultant and author of Results: The Key to Continuous Improvement (ASCD, 1996).

JSD: Data-driven staff development means different things to different people. Some people think it means using student achievement data to establish school improvement goals. In your work, you emphasize another important use of data in staff development decision making.

Schmoker: I think data should play a crucial role even before staff development begins – by helping to select the best, most results-oriented initiatives. Every staff development proposal should be vetted on the basis of data that indicates that it has led – and will lead – to higher achievement. This really is what NSDC is all about, but I’m not sure educators are there yet.

Because all school districts have limited staff development resources, they should put the lion’s share of those funds into staff development that is aimed as directly as possible at the schools’ or teams’ measurable student achievement goals. Initiatives should be very carefully selected to have the most powerful impact in the classroom. Those areas then become the core of the conversation about improvement efforts for the school. Alignment, then, means more than just making certain that you teach what you assess. It should also include providing staff development that’s geared to what students are learning and what you are assessing.

I’ve seen schools with large numbers of low-achieving students devoting the majority of their staff development resources to new, unproven teacher evaluation schemes, grand, comprehensive school improvement designs, or methods like Multiple Intelligences, brain-based learning theory, or technology training – presumably to raise achievement in reading or writing or math. Is this interesting stuff? You bet. And the theory that informs these approaches may have powerful implications for the future.

But let’s be honest. Right now, these are not world-class ways to promote literacy and numeracy. All these programs refer to research – but that is a very different thing than having a proven, reliable method with a record for getting both short- and long-term results. Larry Cuban and others have written trenchantly about the disappointing results of technology training. And John Bruer’s recent book and cover article in the May 1999 issue of Phi Delta Kappan add to the evidence that brain-based education is still in the development stage. Neither it nor Multiple Intelligences has yet to demonstrate its effectiveness in the classroom. When or if that ever happens, we can then devote more resources to them.

But, in many cases, we are denying teachers and students the benefits of methods that ensure that even the most disadvantaged students can achieve at levels we once only dreamed of. There are schools, for instance, in Pueblo, Colorado, Milwaukee, Inglewood, California, and in Brazosport and Houston, Texas, that are demonstrating that certain methods, structures, and attitudes can ensure that virtually every kid can learn just about anything.

Our highest priority ought to be to ensure that teachers learn about these structures and practices and – most importantly – engage in frequent, focused, sustained dialogue about how best to implement and refine them to achieve better results. They include elements and clever, teacher-invented adaptations borrowed from programs like Success for All, Reading Recovery, Joplin grouping, reciprocal teaching, and Direct Instruction. We’ve heard all of this stuff. But we’ve failed to stay focused on them while giving teachers frequent opportunities to collectively critique and refine – and even improve – these methods in light of short- and long-term results. Instead, we’ve had this shallow, shotgun array of ever-novel presentations we call staff development.

JSD: What are other uses of data that have implications for staff development?

Schmoker: Another important use of data is to monitor and refine the strategy and its implementation as you go. This is most powerful when you do it quarterly, if not more often. People need to get together to determine how many more kids are able to do a particular thing than before the initiative began. For example, how many more kids can now write good introductory paragraphs? How many more kids are now excited about and have mastered the addition and subtraction of positive and negative numbers?

JSD: What are the barriers to teachers using data as you’ve described?

Schmoker: Two important barriers are fear and fatalism. Everyone has natural fears of punishment and failure. Districts need to create a data-driven environment that is as non-threatening as possible by making it clear that the primary use of data is to help schools improve achievement. One way to do this is for districts to constantly provide success stories about how other schools have used data. Any time we say to teachers that they ought to devote their time and heart and soul to something, we ought to be able to show them several places where it worked.

Sociologist Dan Lortie found that teachers do not believe that their influence on student learning is as powerful a factor as the socio-economic status and the neighborhood in which the student lives. They feel that student learning has little to do with them and had everything to do with things over which they have no control. Teachers’ doubts about their efficacy have hobbled them. This fatalism has kept schools from accelerating the rate of improvement, of realizing the power of getting teachers together on a regular basis to decide what’s the most important student learning to concentrate on right now, to determine what they can do differently to get more students to learn those things, and to gather simple data that tell them whether they are getting closer to that goal.

We need to bombard teachers with examples of data-driven staff development that got student results and is eminently doable. In her article (Results, Oct. 1998) about the great success they’ve had in Brazosport, Joan Richardson says that this district is using methods that just about any district could replicate. The closer you look at successful teacher teams, schools, and districts, the more you find things that just about anyone could do. The entire teacher development apparatus, including preservice and graduate school, needs to respond to these new realities.

There’s a school in the Denver area, for instance, that made enormous gains in 1st and 2nd grade reading. The data they focused on as a guide were the number of sight words the students mastered. Each quarter they charted the number of kids who were at or above what they thought was a reasonable number of sight words. That was incredibly simple and meaningful data for these teachers which led to enormous gains on the 1st grade reading test in Jefferson County.

In Johnson City, New York, they wanted far more kids to pass the New York State Board of Regents Exam in mathematics. Teachers created three 25-item tests that they administered at the end of the first, second, and third quarters. The tests were derived from the kind of problems that appear on the exam. Each quarter, teachers identified the items with which their students were having trouble and talked about how they would teach those things more effectively and how they would reteach those kids to bring them up to speed.

Here’s still another example. In a Tucson-area district where I worked, successful teams of teachers would stand up in front of the entire administrative group to talk about their work. We did that so administrators could see how doable and accessible the use of data was in terms of reaching learning goals.

JSD: What’s the role of the district office in helping schools more effectively use student achievement data or research on various kinds of interventions?

Schmoker: People in district offices need to constantly be on the look-out for places where student learning is high, gather information, and create menus of options for initiatives in various areas. An example of a place that districts ought to be looking for is the Brazosport Independent School District south of Houston that I referred to earlier.

The district office must search out the very best staff development initiatives to open people’s eyes about what is possible. The best district work of this sort is done with a representative district team that includes principals and teacher leaders. They should be the gatekeepers for what happens in staff development, always with reference to where something worked and what can be learned from it.

JSD: In your book, Results, you wrote: "There is a marked difference between vague, well-intentioned improvement efforts and carefully targeted, goal-oriented, short-term efforts aimed explicitly at getting measurable, substantive results quickly." Are you saying that measurable, substantive results can be achieved quickly?

Schmoker: Yes, I am. I know that sounds like heresy to people who have not had that kind of experience. I agree with Bruce Joyce who says that you should expect measurable improvement within a year. I like to tell the story of a group of teachers who got together in March to look at a stack of papers on which most of the kids performed very poorly on one element of the writing rubric. They literally spent only 15 minutes focusing on a better way to teach a skill in which only four of 88 students were successful. They got together one month after beginning to use the new methods and found that 85 of the 88 students could now write extremely good descriptive settings. Using this type of process, teachers hack away at the toughest, most unyielding set of teaching challenges and invariably make progress.

JSD: If a school was not very far advanced in doing the things you are suggesting, where should it begin?

Schmoker: The school should concentrate on three very simple things-focused, collaborative learning, measurable goals, and data. Begin by looking at the data to establish one or two measurable goals. Have teachers get together in the summer when they have time and can be more relaxed to select or create periodic assessments by which they will measure progress related to that goal. Then have teams of teachers get together regularly to talk about their progress, focusing like a laser beam on specific emergent problems preventing students from doing well relative to that year-end goal. If a school does these things, it is all but certain to make some real progress.

Dennis Sparks is executive director of the National Staff Development Council.