This weekend I had the honor to be able to speak at the Impacting Student Learning Conference in Augusta, GA. Any day that you get to work with teachers, principals, and leadership on how to help ALL students learn is a blessing. The title of the presentation was “The Digital Era of Instructional Innovation: Increasing Student Engagement in Virtual and Blended Learning Settings”. After 20+ years in education and seeing so much change, it amazes me how is still the same (in a good way). The conclusion on the final slide has always held true that people are the most important part of everything we do in education.
While the instructional delivery methods may have changed and the level of technology integration has been exponentially increased.....Best Practices Are Still Best Practices! One of the toughest things for educators to do is to "Keep It Simple!" Simon Sinek talked about being the idiot in the room because he always wanted to keep asking questions until an idea or concept could be explained where everyone in the room could understand it, which prevents people that want to sound smart with the latest educational jargon from trying to talk over everyone's heads. It doesn't have to be complicated to be Great! In the years that we won the most games as a football coach, we probably only had a total of about 6 plays that accounted for 95% of the offense (3 runs, 2 passes, and a bootleg or play-action pass). As the season went on, we got better and better at those few plays where we were almost masters of those and everyone on the team knew what we were going to hang our hat on. The same is true for education. More times than not a school will be highly successful if everyone on staff has aligned instruction, a common instructional framework that promotes high engagement, and constantly assess and use data. Focus on standards and students.....it's really that simple!
One of the pieces of information that I presented was based on Hattie's "Visible Learning" research that links a quantitative measurement with every action by the adults in the school. What's amazing is that the things that have the most negative impact on student learning hasn't changed much over the years, neither has the most positive factors. The questions become: If we know suspension, retention, corporal punishment, summer vacation, transient enrollment, and non-standard dialect use don't work....why haven't we changed our practice by now if these obviously aren't best practices for students? The next question is why don't we do more of the things that we know have a very highly significant positive impact on learning? The research shows over and over the power of attitude and belief in that four of the top factors are collective teacher efficacy, self-reported grades by students, teacher estimates of achievement, and self-efficacy. These factors go right along with the Effective Schools Research (Lezotte, Levine, Edmonds, Brookover, etc.) and the Correlates of Effective Schools with high-expectations for success.
The final portion of the presentation was a digital variance of Marcia Tate's research on brain-based learning and how to engage students at high levels. The 20 High Engagement Instructional Strategies have stood the test of time and continue to be highly effective in classrooms. The #1 reason students don't do well in class is "Boredom." It was boredom 20 years ago and it's still boredom today that is the biggest reason reported that students don't perform well. If we know the retention rate of a lecture is between 5-10% and the retention rate of reciprocal teaching or teaching others is around 90%, why in the world to we want to hang onto the past and the way we were taught. Most of the teachers in todays classrooms were taught in a way very differently than kids today learn. As we learn to engage students and make students active learners, discipline will go down and student achievement will go up. Don't overcomplicate it! The final slide in the presentation really demonstrates, from research after research, the importance of people in every aspect of helping students be successful! Great systems constantly increase the capacity of human capital. The top two things that impact achievement are great teaching and great leadership, the top two school level factors are collective efficacy and making students active stakeholders, and the top factor in a classroom is student engagement. Every top factors focuses on people. The best two ways for a principal to improve a school are (1) hire better teachers or (2) make the ones you have better! Focus on standards and students, keep building and developing human capital, and have a winning attitude and success will take care of itself. Don't overcomplicate winning!
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