Teacher Leadership Today

RTI Issue of PD Sourcebook features TLN Experts

If you haven’t spotted the spring issue of Education Week’s Professional Development Sourcebook, it’s well worth your attention, with many useful articles about Response to Intervention (RTI), including an interview with Richard Allington who says the initiative may be “our last, best hope” for achieving full literacy in the U.S (although he’s not all that optimistic that it will happen).

Best of all, from our perspective inside the Teacher Leaders Network: There are two articles featuring members of our daily discussion forum. First, there’s a bylined article by Elizabeth Stein, giving her take on RTI from inside the classroom and from her perspective as a special education teacher on Long Island NY. Her article was highlighted in a recent issue of the CEC SmartBrief published by the Council for Exceptional Children.

There’s also a substantive interview with TLN’er Donalyn Miller and her Keller TX principal Ron Myers about their school's RTI implementation story. Donalyn, author of the popular book and blog The Book Whisperer, offers a frank and nuanced view of RTI’s promise and potential pitfalls. "The important thing," she says, "is that, if there’s not a common understanding of what good quality instruction looks like, then it really sets a program like RTI up to fail in a school."

The entire PD Sourcebook is full of smart stuff about a timely topic. Here's the index.

Empower ELL Students to Learn

TLN Forum member Larry Ferlazzo's popular teaching resources blog began with a strong focus on teaching English Language Learners, then exploded into one of the best general resources for teachers across the K-12 spectrum.

A community organizer turned ELL teacher himself, Larry is now sharing key ideas from his own classroom in a new book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work. He proposes that the best way to empower ELL students as they master English is to abandon the "deficit model" common in many schools and develop their self-efficacy and leadership skills. He elaborates in a recent article for Teacher Magazine:

During my organizing career, I participated in efforts that won many concrete community improvements in jobs, affordable housing, citizenship, and child care. But the most important results were seeing how dramatically people changed themselves based on what they learned through community organizing—how to give and receive constructive critique, how to lead and guide diverse groups, how to confidently confront challenges, and how to take the initiative to create change. Many developed a burning desire to learn, and often surprised themselves with their capacity to excel with difficult tasks.

Seeing these kinds of results caused me to wonder how much better people’s lives could be if they developed effective leadership skills at a younger age. I wanted to help people learn to think critically and act confidently as they were growing up, rather than waiting until they were adults. That desire, and my belief that many of the organizing strategies that worked successfully with adults could benefit teenagers and younger children, prompted my decision to become a teacher.

In his book and in this Teacher Magazine piece, Larry describes a five-part Organizing Cycle that "can help students become co-creators of their education, without being constrained by their limited English skills. I have used it successfully in my classes for the past six years." The steps in the cycle include: (1) Build strong relationships with students: (2) Access prior knowledge through stories; (3) Identify & mentor students’ leadership potential; (4) Promote learning by doing; and (5) Model reflection.

If you agree that ELL and other students considered "high-need" are often treated as individuals with deficits to be addressed rather than potential to be developed, you'll find important messages in this article and In Larry's latest book.

Fighting to Save RIF and NWP

In her blog Walking to School, high school English and journalism teacher Mary Tedrow writes:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is proposing to de-fund two of my favorite government programs - Reading is Fundamental and the National Writing Project. Both programs…have been constants in my adult life.

Both are examples of how a small amount of funding can energize and reform teaching, learning, and literacy by engaging volunteers and professionals at the grass roots level.

Both are examples of how the "big stick" of government endorsement can assist and support local initiatives.

I am distressed.

Duncan’s proposals, says Tedrow, will dismantle “two national networks supporting literacy based on good pedagogy” and replace them with a grants system sure to favor large corporate publishers.

NWP and RIF will essentially be five yards behind the starting line when the next "race" to literacy begins. Both will have to establish grant writers and glitzy marketing packages to compete with what big players already have in place. It won't be a fair fight.

Generally, corporate-supported programs are presented and sold to districts but provide little to no follow up support. Both NWP and RIF engage their participants in longitudinal development and change.

Both RIF and NWP develop and sustain the teachers and volunteers in the program, creating systemic, cultural change through a network that extends over years of development.

Tedrow, a former Fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network who writes frequently on education policy and practice, has a long association with both programs. She notes that

Currently, most of RIF money is spent on books. EVERY child gets free books. Text-deprived homes no longer suffer the huge disadvantage from text-rich homes. The change is immediate and goes directly to the heart of one problem in literacy — access.

In NWP, teachers are trained, do the consultancy work (at a fraction of what outside 'experts' charge), own and study their classroom work, and continue to be lifelong students of pedagogy. School buildings grow in-house literacy experts who model and spread strong classroom instruction throughout the system and remain in the building as an ongoing resource and model of professional engagement.

You can read Tedrow’s complete case for protecting and sustaining these long-standing and highly successful programs at her blog. The threat to the National Writing Project will be of direct interest to teacher leaders — it is perhaps the premiere national example of a research-based professional development program that has been developed, led and sustained by teachers over many years.