More about Brooke--Can we do this here?

Periodically, I've been writing about Brooke East Boston, a highly rated charter school with stellar success with students drawn by lottery and large percentages of free and reduced lunch eligible students.  The idea is to use Brooke East to challenge thinking about whether those strategies are worth replicating in Minnesota, and if so, what we would have to change to create the  conditions for replication.  

In a previous post, I linked to a videoed model math lesson that demonstrates a remarkably agile teaching style with first grade math students.  In another post, I pointed out that new teachers at Brooke, receive a fully month of pre-training before their first year of teaching, and that first-year teachers receive significant mentorship support.  They are doing things differently, things that seem to work, and they believe that they cannot make a quantum difference with these kids, unless the entire teaching staff engages in continuous professional development and learns to implement the strategies that have proven to work.   Along with these strategies, the school observes a longer instructional day, and a longer instructional year that Minnesota traditional publics as well. 

 For this post, I've imported a chart describing some of the things that the school does -- in addition to using an ambitious curriculum-- to promote high quality teaching.  Here is their chart:

As a thought experiment, suppose your district leadership decided that they want to duplicate the "great teaching" approach adopted by Brooke reflected in the chart above. It would have to find staff time to implement:

• 20 administrative observations per year
• 15 peer observations per year
• 3 hours each week of targeted professional development
• regular interim data meetings
• daily co-planning
• 10 video self-analysis each year for each teach

The time for these strategies is not paid for by reducing actual instructional time.   Students have more instructional time each day, and many more instructional days than other schools.

To pull this off, a Minnesota school would need the power or resources to buy that time, and it would need the vision to use that time productively, because there is no point in doing peer observations if they don't add value, no point in having administrators observe, if they don't have the talent and wisdom to turn those observations into opportunities to grow.



One senses also, that the folks at Brooke East Boston have a system that works for them and they are constantly refining it through teamwork and mentoring.  They share, curriculum, instructional frameworks, standard ways of garnering attention:  they share things that staff finds successful. They use a common way of structuring math instruction, and that means that each math class moves more readily into the lesson and its parts. As another example, if you view math lesson videos from different grade levels at Brook,  you may see somewhere on the wall or board a ten by ten hundreds grid that seems to be used persistently from class to class and you may see a teacher developing the trade craft associated with using the grid for teaching and solving problems.

In the first grade lesson on patterns that I posted about,  some students don't recognize that if you want to make five hops from the number 9, the hop from 9 to 10 has to be "outside the grid." Several students got confused trying to illustrate that hop. 

The teacher spends time making sure that all students understand that you have to count that hop outside the grid, in order to hop  a specified amount from one number to another.  That's an example of developing tradecraft in using the ten by ten number grid.  Using the same number grid from grade-to-grade helps all teachers anticipate common issues and reach more kids more rapidly.   And, if there is regular co-planning, solutions for issues like this become part of the institutional tradecraft of teaching.  

Brooke has decided that its students need a longer instructional day if they are going to thrive.  It has decided that it needs more instructional days, too, a lot of them.   It has decided that teachers need more observational time, more professional development time and more common planning.  

If a traditional public school system wanted to implement those strategies, it would confront a number of challenges.   Typically, all students get the same number of instructional days, whether they need it or not.   A school district must bargain for, and then pay for, the additional instructional time, the additional planning time, and the state does not provide adequate compensation to reimburse for that time.  And, if the state were to do so, there would be political and tremendous bargaining pressure to use that extra money for something else.  

This illustrates the critical inter-relationship between reforming the delivery of education and the amount of revenues we provide.  If students need more time learning, and teachers need more time collaborating and preparing, simply increasing the revenues allocated to school districts is unlikely to translate directly to reforms that really make a difference.   If we want to make transformations in public education, we have to find a way to change how we deliver instruction, and pay for it at the same time.