Over time, I have learned neither the school principal nor any other administrative “leader,” can fire staff as a pathway to their personal excellence.  Effective principals understand it takes time for a teacher to grow and develop the skills necessary to integrate best practices into a student-centered environment.  Effective principals understand that at times, a variety of supports can improve teachers’ practice and class management.  It’s important to understand this: a principal cannot build a positive student-focused culture by removing staff in hopes of the perfect teacher showing up for an interview.

A point before reading further:  I want to make it clear–there are times when a teacher should not be offered a contract.  However, these kinds of decisions should be few and far between and put into action only after considerable intervention and support.  

The principal either helps staff grow or not.  A commitment to helping staff grow is the best path to teacher improvement.  Every school has some rock star teachers, and every school has some staff who struggle.  An effective school has layers of support, and it’s my belief that every school should have key elements in place to provide support for staff who struggle.

What is the quickest way to improve a school?  Hire the best and most highly skilled teachers for every classroom.  But this is not possible.  Hiring is competitive, and the best in any profession have more choices than others.  There are two choices for the principal who wants to improve a school: believe the falsehood of firing to achieve excellence or commit to making your staff better.  Effective principals value all school community members and dedicate themselves to improving teachers’ skill. Providing support teachers require to improve their practice takes time, energy, communication, and a commitment to growth.  That’s why schools leadership is hard work.

There is no fast track to help principals shift to a more supportive culture.  However, change can happen when the principal is committed to a healthy, positive culture for the school.  Schools, where teachers feel supported to grow and improve, have some commonalities.  Does your school have my top five?

1. Hire the Right Staff:  When positions are open, effective principals set up interview committees with several teacher leaders who collectively know the skills the teacher needs and what person is the best for the school.  Effective principals are patient and do not mind doing many interviews to find the best candidate.  The best principals know experience does not necessarily equal a great teacher.  Talent will always make a difference and can be more valuable than experience.  Opening the hiring process to groups of teachers can support a school’s culture and prevent the challenges a poor hire brings.
2. Formalized Mentor Program:  New staff need support.  Effective schools have well planned and coordinated mentor programs for teachers.  Effective principals make sure all new staff have a mentor in their school who will be supportive and great role model for the new staff member.
3. Professional Development:  Effective principals work with their staff to plan ongoing professional development based on the needs of the building.  As I have stated in other posts, one and done professional development does not work.
4. A Student-Focused Culture:  Effective principals know the impact of a positive culture focused on students.  A positive, student-centered culture makes a difference and is always lead by the principal.  Schools with positive cultures have positive principals.  The opposite is equally true–a principal can create a negative environment.  Often, this occurs when the principal blames other factors for the negative environment instead of looking in the mirror and reflecting on his or her words and actions.
5. Competitive Wages and Benefits:  Yes, I said it.  This is whispered by many but not often stated.  People who teach need wages and benefits they can live on, and they must be competitive with surrounding districts.  Effective principals know if salaries are not competitive they will face challenges to retain staff and they will have a hard time attracting the best staff.  

Helping others grow is part of leadership.  Every school leader was once a new teacher. A new teacher with hopes, dreams, and challenges.  Always remember someone took a chance on you, and some or hopefully many helped develop you into the person you are today.  Extend the same support to those who struggle. Always keep in mind, whether spoken or seen on T.V. news, you cannot “fire” your way to excellence.

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Several years ago I was working in a school district in southern Virginia and one experience still replays in my mind.  I collaborated with a special education teacher engaging seven students in guided reading.  Her materials were eight or sixteen-page books she downloaded and put together—poorly written and illustrated texts that bored students.  The district had put all their money into a basal program with downloadable texts for guided and independent reading; there was no extra money for real books—beautifully written and illustrated books.

Here’s the question to ponder: Why do school districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for basal reading programs?  When scores on state tests are low, it’s tempting for districts to turn to programs making seductive promises such as: faithfully implement all parts of this program and test scores will rise.  Grade level programs can’t help children reading three or more years below a specific grade.  Moreover, they also don’t support students reading above grade level improve because in the program these students read at their independent level.  Unfortunately, when students’ reading performance on annual high stakes tests define a school district’s and a state’s success, the quest for the magic bullet begins.

Charlotte Huck, a champion of using the finest children’s literature for reading said: ”We don’t achieve literacy and then give children literature; we achieve literacy through literature.”  Not only do children learn to read with outstanding books, but such books are often their first introduction to art and visual literacy—incredible illustrations and photographs.  Children deserve books that help them make sense of their world, that show them how others have struggled as they struggle now, that use stories to transmit diverse heritages and cultures from one generation to the next, that invite children to reread beloved parts and share these with friends.

Fifteen Reasons Why Children Deserve the Best Books     

By offering students outstanding literature, you can:

1. Nurture their hearts and minds and bond them to books that compel them to reread and share with others.
2. Change their thinking on a topic a culture, and different lifestyles by using story to construct understanding.
3. Boost imagination and creativity using beautifully written books that enable readers to visualize.
4. Expand experiences and knowledge about the world providing books on a wide-range of topics.
5. Take us into the past, present, and future so we can better understand past and present worlds and imagine the future.
6. Build visual literacy so students can make meaning from an illustration, photograph, or diagram.
7. Stir meaningful student-led discussions encouraging readers to raise their own questions and move beyond literal to inferred meanings.
8. Tell the stories of diverse cultures and enable students to develop tolerance and compassion.
9. Enlarge vocabulary, for the more students read, the more they see and understand words used in diverse contexts. Vocabulary is comprehension!
10. Introduce and develop a knowledge of literary language so students can understand complex sentences and appreciate figurative language.
11. Improve stamina and concentration through sustained silent reading of self-selected books.
12. Develop emotional intelligence and empathy through the ability to walk in a character’s shoes and understand life as he or she lives it.
13. Offer readers hope because even the darkest books hold out hope and stimulate a desire to solve challenging problems in the world.
14. Develop literary tastes because students, not programs or teachers, choose books.
15. Show students books are excellent entertainment by reading aloud adding entertaining books to class libraries.

Reminders

Remember, letting students self-select books invests them in the reading.  Remember, volume of reading matters, and enlarging classroom libraries means students have, as one of my eighth  graders stated, “books at their fingertips.”  Remember, your responsibility is to teach every child to read well and cultivate each child’s personal reading life.  You can engage and motivate students to read, read, read when you provide the opportunity and the finest books!

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Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D. 

For many of you, the title of this blog entry may sound a bit nonsensical — Why teach something and then not use it?  But let me ask you to think a bit more deeply about phonics.  If you are reading this you are likely a proficient reader.  When reading how often do you have to stop and analyze or “sound out” individual words?  My guess is that more than 99.9% of the words you encounter in reading are not analyzed or “sounded.”   Most words we encounter as proficient readers are sight words – they are recognized instantly and near effortlessly.  Phonics is hardly used at all when proficient readers read.

We need phonics and other word analysis skills in order to get words into our heads.  But after a few encounters with analyzing specific words, those words become “imprinted” in our brains as sight words.  We need phonics to get words into our internal lexicons.  But once those words are automatized or made into sight words phonics is no longer needed.

Getting words to the point of automatization is critical to proficient reading.  The problem in reading is that all of us have a limited or finite amount of attention or cognitive energy.  Analyzing words, as is done in phonics, uses up a lot of that cognitive energy.  And that energy that is applied to word analysis cannot be applied to the more important part of reading – comprehension.  So what often happens are readers who can read all the words correctly, but because they are spending their precious cognitive resources on word analysis their comprehension falters.

Carol Chomsky noted this phenomenon in her 1976 classic article entitled “After decoding: What?”  Working with struggling readers, she taught them to decode words. However, despite the fact that they were able to decode words accurately, “albeit slowly and painfully (p. 288),” they continued to struggle with reading comprehension and general proficiency in reading.  The answer to her question of “What?” was helping students develop automaticity or fluency in their reading.  She did this by having students read interesting and challenging materials while simultaneously listening to an audio-recorded version of the text.  In a 15 week intervention period (less than four months), her students made approximately 8 months progress in reading!

Phonics is important, no question about it.  It is a tool that readers use to get words into their internal lexicons.  However, proficiency in phonics should not be the goal. Rather the goal should be to get students to the point where most of the words they encounter are automatically recognized so that their attention can be devoted to making meaning.    

The way to get young readers to the point of automatic word recognition is the same way a person develops automaticity in any activity – practice.  However, the practice needs to be the kind that allows children to move to proficient reading.  Two of the best ways of providing proficient practice is through assisted reading and repeated reading.

Assisted reading is what Carol Chomsky used with her students.  Students read texts while simultaneously listening to a fluent reading of the text.  This can occur by reading with a more proficient partner, reading with a group of others, or reading while listening to a recorded version of the text.  In all of these situations, the assist of another reader provides students with a scaffold that allows them to approach fluent reading on their own.

Repeated reading simply involves reading a text multiple times until a student can read it at a level that approaches proficiency.  When students who struggle in reading read a text, the initial reading is not proficient.  However, when they read it a second, third, and perhaps even a fourth time their proficiency improves until they are able to read it much like a proficient reader.  The “magic” behind both assisted and repeated reading is that the improvement that comes from reading one text with assistance and/or repeatedly transfers to new texts that students have not previously read.  In essence, students begin to pull their reading up by their bootstraps.   

While I don’t want to get overly technical in this blog, I do want to mention that, in this age of scientifically based reading instruction, a good deal of research supports both assisted and repeated reading, especially with students who find reading difficult.  In a recent review of research related to fluency interventions Stevens, Walker, and Vaughn (2017) conclude that “Results showed repeated reading,… and assisted reading with audiobooks produced gains in reading fluency and comprehension” (p. 576). My own research on the Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, 2010), a lesson that integrates assisted and repeated reading consistently results in improved performance in word recognition automaticity and comprehension.    

While it is critical that we provide students with solid instruction in phonics or word decoding, it is equally important that we keep in mind that we need to take students to that next level word reading—fluent, automatic, and proficient reading.  

References

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53, 288-296.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

Stevens, E., Walker, M., & Vaughn, S.  (2017). The effects of fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities:  A Synthesis of the research from 2001-2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50, 576-590.

You can find resources for teaching accurate and automatic word recognition (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

Daily Word Ladders by Timothy Rasinski

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Many years ago my principal asked me to attend a conference and then train staff at our school. I tried to learn more about what training the staff meant. Was this a common practice? It seemed intimidating to me. The train the trainer model, taken from the business world, was becoming a popular term in education. It did not work for me.

Yes, I attended the conference, had a good time, and learned some. What was not good for me? The faculty meeting I had to lead a month later where I was to “train” the staff on what I learned.  A horrible experience.  I was not confident in the new information I learned while attending the conference and less confident to train a faculty where most were more experienced than me. Does your school or Division sing the praise of “train the trainer” models?  I hope not.  I have rarely seen them work.  Many times staff can be great in front of 25 students but not comfortable at all in front of peers who they need to teach.  I propose a new method, well not exactly new, I propose ongoing professional development.  Professional development meeting the needs of the school, occurring at the school, and for all staff in the school.

There are two ways to start ongoing professional development in a school: hiring a paid consultant or a school-wide book/professional study.  I will address both in two posts. In this post, I will give tips for using a paid consultant.

Assuming your school has access to professional support, the first step is to figure out what your faculty needs.  This can be accomplished through conversation, data analysis, and observation.  Pick one focus area all staff can benefit from in all disciplines.  As an example, in my school, our year-long focus is differentiating instruction.

Tips for successful year-long professional development:

• Know what you want to focus on and work with staff to build a commitment.
• Secure an educator who can meet with your staff at least six times during the school year. Add the dates and times to your staff calendar, so staff knows when each session is over the course of the year.  I like to focus on professional development days or use time in the place of regular faculty meetings.
• Along with several staff members, meet with the presenter to grid out what topics will be addressed during each session.  Know what the outcome should be at the end of all sessions and communicate this to staff throughout the year.
• I am a stickler that a consultant will let staff know at the start of the session what they will learn.  Also, there must be collaborative opportunities during the sessions, and a task staff will try in preparation for the next meeting.
• It is critical for the principal and other administrators to be part of all sessions.  In my school all teaching staff, guidance staff, and administrators attend.

When reading this, you might think, O.K. it’s great, but it could be expensive. My counter, it is not if you cut back on sending staff to conferences and trainings.  It is not costly if you consider the gain of all staff in your school receiving training instead of a few, or replacing “train the trainer” models which I do not feel are very successful. Bring on-going professional development to your school it is the best way to generate excitement and energy for a full year.  It is a positive and significant shift away from the one and done sessions and the false expectations that this method can bring change to a school.  You want positive change to impact students and staff.  Choose a school focus that is inclusive and work on it all year long through purposeful professional development.

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