Three Models of Collaboration: Engaging Higher Education in School Improvement
The following summaries are highlights from panel discussions at the Partners in Literacy Symposium 2006.
Model 1: Texas Higher Education Collaborative
Audio & SlidesParticipation in the Texas Higher Education Collaborative is completely voluntary. "We never tell participants how or what to teach," explained Director Marty Hougen. "We provide them with opportunities."
These opportunities include several thousand dollars worth of literacy materials, from videos and PowerPoints to books, articles, and regular seminars with reading experts. In a large state like Texas, where access to cutting-edge reading researchers can be limited, the Collaborative brings representatives from teacher preparation programs together with researchers such as Marilyn Adams, Jim Shanahan, and Joe Torgesen several times a year.
The Collaborative grew out of work by the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, which brought more than 100,000 teachers together in 1997 to examine scientifically based reading research. Center leaders quickly realized that despite strong interest from practicing teachers, they were not reaching teacher educators.
Formed in 2001, the Collaborative has grown rapidly under Hougen, expanding from four to a group of educational institutions whose nearly 300 representatives gather regularly to analyze, debate, and strategize the use of scientific research findings in reading in teacher preparation courses. A number of research and publication partnerships have also emerged from the Collaborative.
Membership entails seminar participation, classroom visits, and sharing class syllabi. The intention of the visits and syllabus examinations is not evaluative, Hougen stresses, but descriptive: she and her colleagues seek to document the use of scientifically based reading research in teacher preparation classes. Participant evaluations show increases in educators' knowledge and use of scientific reading research; student surveys record gains in pre-service teachers' reading knowledge and understanding of differentiated instruction to meet all students' needs.
A new outreach effort has targeted school administrators, who have seized the opportunity. Grasping their critical role in supporting the teaching of reading, some 80 Texas administrators meet regularly, their goal, Hougen said, "to make sure precious resources are not wasted on materials that will not make a different in student learning."
Any state can use Reading First funds to bring evidence-based reading research and data to teacher educators. For more information visit the Texas Higher Education Collaborative website at www.texasreading.org/utcrla/pd/hec.asp
Model 2: The University of Connecticut's School-wide
Reading Improvement Model
Well-designed and carefully controlled school based studies suggest that at least 95% of students can attain at least average word-reading skills with intensive and systematic interventions. "That's very encouraging," said Michael Coyne of the University Connecticut and key actor in the School-wide Reading Improvement Model. "But carefully designed and well-controlled research studies are very different from real teachers working with real kids in real schools." Effecting real reading achievement "takes more than simply announcing the existence of a knowledge base and requiring teachers to use it."
To support teachers in the use of that research, the university works with districts or schools on school-wide reforms that raise reading outcomes. Drawing on research-based documents such as Connecticut's Blueprint for Reading Achievement, detailed curriculum maps, and DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) benchmarks, the School-wide Reading Improvement Model tells teachers "what to teach and when," as Coyne noted, in the context of clear and measurable goals for all students at each grade.
Through long-term collaborative relationships, university-based researchers offer schools and districts a continuum of reading supports, from "universal" to "targeted and individual." Universal supports are designed—and redesigned, as needed—to enable 80% or more of students to attain school-wide reading goals. Targeted supports, which entail more frequent progress monitoring and reading instructional time, are intended to enable the remaining 20% of students to reach those goals. All supports include the use of a core, scientifically based curriculum and a protected reading block.
Betsy Fernandez, principal of Jack Jackter School in Colchester, Connecticut, presented with Coyne. She described how the collaboration benefits both parties, building teacher skills and knowledge while enabling researchers not only to collect data, but to test some of their ideas in situ.
Model 3: Strengthening and Sustaining Teachers
in Portland, Maine
The Portland, Maine educational collaborative is one of those rare partnerships that "didn't die when the funding ran out," explained Betty Lou Whitford, Dean of the College of Education and Human Development and Professor of Education at the University of Southern Maine. The Strengthening and Sustaining Teachers project began in an effort to systematize professional development across the continuum of a teacher's career, but evolved into a strong collaboration that uniquely transcends the "turf" boundaries that bedevil other complex collaborations. In 2000, the Portland Education Association, the local teachers' union, formally joined a long-standing partnership between the University of Southern Maine and the Portland Public Schools administration.
Portland educators had done considerable work on teacher preparation for a number of years, so the collaborative chose to focus instead on teacher induction, specifically on mentoring.
Karen McDonald, representing the teachers and teachers' union explained that mentoring is building-based; each building has a teacher leadership team that oversees mentoring. This both keeps control local and creates some teacher leadership roles. Initially offering two-year mentorships for first and second year teachers, the mentor program now matches preservice teachers with mentors, oversees mentor certification, and recently expanded to include three- and five-year teachers and added short-term mentoring for teachers facing new assignments.
Mentors receive three days of training and twice-yearly cohort meetings to continue their professional development and deepen their knowledge of mentoring. The building leadership team observes mentor-mentee matches, gathers feedback about the match, trouble shoots, organizes observation time for new teachers, and serves as a resource for mentors who may be struggling. And, as building leaders, they focus attention on the culture of the whole school. "It's no longer 'that's what I went through,'" explained McDonald: "it's trying to shift the culture to 'what can we all do to support people who come into the profession?'"
A key part of the discussion concerned "what's good teaching?" recalled Melody Shank, a researcher at the University of Southern Maine. Over the course of the discussions, participants worked to find common language and standards so that people working at all levels of professional development shared a sense of "what it meant to be a good teacher in the Portland Public Schools," Shank added. They also realized, Shank said, that a continuum was only one metaphor for teacher development. "The way it plays out on an everyday level is much more situated that. We started talking about it as being nested," she said. A school might contain new teachers, pre-service interns, mentors, three- to seven-year teachers, and veteran teachers. Whatever happened, Shank said, "was played out in that context and that context needed to be nurtured and paid attention to."
Benefits have flowed in all directions "Giving teachers voice and actually inviting them to join the leadership, take some of that heavy lifting and work with the district to help do what we know is right for students" has been a big, and powerful, step for the unions, recalled Jeanne Whynot-Vickers, Assistant Superintendent of the Portland Public Schools. For administrators, shifting more responsibility to teacher leaders taps into "the brilliance" they provide, while the university involvement "helped us take data collection and assessment more seriously," Whynot-Vickers said. The university researchers found that "practitioners have a more concrete baseline of operation—so what's going to happen tomorrow in my classroom? The university had the connection to what the prime research is. They could read that and come back with the next best question to ask."