Leading the way

Houston teachers play key roles in school improvement initiative

By Joan Richardson

Results, November 2004

Julie Breaux-Bliss admits she was one of the naysayers when Houston's Reagan High School began involving teachers in more decision making, and being resources for their own professional development.

"At first, I thought, 'This won't work. Who wants to hear this from the redhead down the hall?' " she said.

Five years later, she's singing with a different choir as leader of the school's professional development team. "Well, it does work. We started drawing on the expertise of the faculty. We have a bigger turnout when faculty presents, and the respect level in the room is much higher. When you need to find someone who knows something, that person is just down the hall," said Breaux-Bliss.

Has it made a different in student learning? Not yet. "We can't say yet that we've seen the payoff in student achievement because we haven't been at this long enough. But I don't think that it can help but pay off there," she said.

Reagan is one of the schools in NSDC's 12 Under 12 initiative. These 12 schools are challenging themselves to reach No Child Left Behind's academic proficiency goal well before the legislation's 2014 target date. (See the web version of this article for a complete list of the 12 Under 12 schools.) NCLB will hold districts and states accountable for ensuring that all students meet or exceed their state's proficient level of academic achievement by 2014 - 12 years after passage of the act. "These schools have committed themselves to working ahead of that schedule and NSDC is committed to assisting them in that process," said NSDC Executive Director Dennis Sparks.

Reagan's journey of reform actually began five years ago with the launch of Transformation Reagan, a school improvement plan that envisioned "restructuring, reorganizing, and reculturing" the comprehensive high school into a school with smaller learning communities that would embrace teacher leadership.

Teachers were concerned that too few students were graduating from high school and that too few high school graduates were continuing their education. "Sit-and-get wasn't working for our students. We needed to change the way we were doing school," said Tracey Lewis, one of the school's two half-time school improvement facilitators.

Students would be better served, they believed, by creating more intimate learning communities that would allow students to have closer relationships to their teachers and allow their teachers to have a bigger voice in school decisions.

Since then, the 1,700-student high school has been restructured into five themed academies for students: business; fine arts; health science/technology; industrial arts and engineering; and magnet-computer. The magnet and industrial arts and engineering are the two largest academies with about 400 students each; health is the smallest with 250. Entering freshmen select the academy that most appeals to them and remain with that academy throughout their high school career. Students take their core courses - math, science, English, social studies - and the specialty courses in their subject area with their academy teachers. But they mix with students from other academies in foreign language, physical education, and health classes.

Every teacher is assigned to a single academy, which also gives teachers the opportunity for a smaller professional community than they had during the comprehensive high school days, Lewis said. Each academy has about 15 teachers, one counselor, and one administrator who meet as a team once a week for 30 minutes.

ACTION TEAMS

Along with the restructuring into academies came a reorganizing and a reculturing effort to move more teachers into leadership positions. Of the 105 teachers at Reagan, 35 now have a formal leadership role at the school.

In addition to the academy teams, Reagan has six teacher-led "action teams" that flesh out the infrastructure of leadership. These teams are actively involved in implementing strategies embodied in the school improvement plan. They meet once a month, and membership is voluntary.

The School Organization team does the school's master schedule and focuses on large, structural issues involving the school day. It was this team that took the lead in doing the research that led to the school's decision to create the academies. Team members researched existing models to learn their benefits and drawbacks and ultimately presented a plan to the entire school faculty for its approval.

A 10-member Professional Development team oversees all aspects of professional learning. Along with academy team leaders, they plan the week-long professional development institute that precedes the start of school each year. Then, during the year, this team plans other professional development days which are typically led by Reagan's own home-grown expert teachers. The team also approves all teacher requests to attend conferences or any other off-site learning. Their approval of these requests hinges on whether the requested learning is appropriate for the teacher and whether it matches a school or district goal.

An Advocacy team designs curriculum that all teachers use during a weekly advocacy class with students. The advocacy class is roughly like the advisories used by many middle schools. Students are assigned to an advocacy and remain in that group and with that instructor throughout their high school career. This ensures that a student is known well by at least one teacher in the school. With 90 advocacies in the building, only 14 to 16 students are in each group. Because the groups loop, only a few new students are added each year.

The school chose the name "Advocacy" because "I am their advocate. I am the person they turn to when they have problems. We build relationships with them," said Lewis.

The Instructional Focus team (known as InFocus) is charged with ensuring that all teachers are focusing on the instructional goals for the year. During 2004-05, teachers are expected to focus on literacy, which is a district goal, and study skills, which is a primary school goal. Working with the school's literacy coach, the InFocus team writes lessons that teachers use to emphasize each month's literacy focus. This team is also developing what they hope will be a mandatory freshman course on study skills.

A new 20-member Student Voice team has replaced the school's student council. Unlike a traditional student council, the Student Voice team works on such questions as whether the school should shift from its current single-lunch schedule to a schedule with multiple lunches, whether students should wear identification badges or uniforms, and what rules should govern backpack use at school. One teacher leads this team and she is selected by the 20 students. Unlike the other teams which meet monthly, Student Voice meets weekly.

The final team is the Community Engagement team which focuses on issues that range from recruiting more volunteers, improving relationships with neighbors, designing activities to build community among the staff (such as celebrating birthdays, having a schoolwide picnic), and monitoring facilities concerns while the school undergoes massive renovations.

Sitting at the center of all of these teams is the Leadership team, which is comprised of the leaders from every academy team and every action team, the principal, and counselors.

STILL IMPROVING

As with every plan for change, Reagan has experienced bumps along the way.

"Were we 100 % on board with this? No. But, as we implemented it, little by little, teachers saw the benefits," Lewis said.

The school also lost a number of teachers who either didn't like the plan or didn't like the changes required by it. Last year, about 30 of the school's 105 teachers retired or resigned. The advantage that came from that glut of departures was the ability to bring in new teachers who believe in the school's mission and the reform process.

Team leader Breaux-Bliss admits that, as much as she likes the new arrangement now, it's not perfect. "We are not where we want to be yet. And there is a lot of stress sometimes. There is a lot of 'stop the world, this is moving too fast for me,' " said Breaux-Bliss.

Lewis agrees. "The teachers here really have a voice in the decision making that goes on on this campus. It's a very bottom-up mentality here. And it does get overwhelming at times for the teachers who are involved in these teams. But, for the most part, they want to be there. They want to be in the heat of things," Lewis said.