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Improving instruction is the linchpin to improving student learning. This is especially crucial for our lowest-achieving students, too often underestimated & poorly served by our current school systems. The core mission of public education, as we see it, is to ensure that ALL students experience rigorous, grade-level curriculum & instruction that maximizes their opportunity to learn by balancing appropriate challenge with sufficient support. And yet, despite steady investment of time & resources to improve instruction through professional learning, our systems for instructional improvement continue to produce alarmingly wide variation in instructional quality from classroom to classroom.
Improving instruction is the linchpin to improving student learning. This is especially crucial for our lowest-achieving students, too often underestimated & poorly served by our current school systems. The core mission of public education, as we see it, is to ensure that ALL students experience rigorous, grade-level curriculum & instruction that maximizes their opportunity to learn by balancing appropriate challenge with sufficient support. And yet, despite steady investment of time & resources to improve instruction through professional learning, our systems for instructional improvement continue to produce alarmingly wide variation in instructional quality from classroom to classroom.
"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets."
"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets."
Paul Batalden
healthcare improvement leader
If we want our systems for instructional improvement to produce different results, we need to change the design of the system. But complex adaptive systems like schools & districts are notoriously difficult to change. The dynamic interactions between a complex system's many moving parts (people, resources, policies, etc) produce emergent behavior that is not possible to predict within the simple linear conception of cause & effect that tends to guide our thinking, decision-making & change efforts. This is why "silver bullet" solutions tend to fizzle and fail to generate lasting improvement.
If we want our systems for instructional improvement to produce different results, we need to change the design of the system. But complex adaptive systems like schools & districts are notoriously difficult to change. The dynamic interactions between a complex system's many moving parts (people, resources, policies, etc) produce emergent behavior that is not possible to predict within the simple linear conception of cause & effect that tends to guide our thinking, decision-making & change efforts. This is why "silver bullet" solutions tend to fizzle and fail to generate lasting improvement.
Leverage Points: Where Small Shifts Produce Big Changes
Leverage Points: Where Small Shifts Produce Big Changes
Instead of continuing to place bets on quick fixes, systems thinkers like Donella Meadows encourage us to focus instead on the system's leverage points: those places in the complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
This is why we call our approach High Leverage Instructional Improvement (HLII). Each of the paradigm & practice shifts we advocate targets what we've observed to be the crucial leverage points in our systems of professional learning & instructional improvement. In HLII, small but intentional changes, practiced iteratively & with reflective discipline over time, garner the power to fundamentally transform how the system works to achieve our shared goals.
Paradigm & Practice Shifts for
High Leverage Instructional Improvement
1. Build instructional improvement work around a clear & robust shared paradigm for equitable, high-leverage instruction, instruction that maximizes all students' Opportunity to Learn. We call our model The HEAT (Heuristic for Equitable & Adaptive Teaching). Check it out!
2. Clarify & reinforce the instructional paradigm through specified, high-leverage core practices. In improvement science, the term "standard work" refers to the current best-known method for performing a given process, articulated clearly to establish a common reference point for learning-by-doing. We formulate instructional standard work as Core Practice Recipes.
3. Rearrange collaborative structures to situate instructional improvement in the work of small, commonly focused teacher teams--we call them Core Practice Test Kitchens--who convene frequently to test, reflect & improve upon shared "recipes" for equitable & ambitious instruction.
4. Shift the paradigm for instructional leadership, from leaders as evaluators & feedback-givers to leadership as a matter of creating conditions for instructional improvement teams to thrive. Next Level Instructional Improvement demands a fundamental shift from direct to indirect instructional leadership.
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