Julie Storer: Powerful Teaching and Learning

An incredibly full day today and not even really "full" by Summer Insititue standards...we didn't start until 10:45am to allow for folks to attend Church or get a more leisurely start to the day than we will have the remainder of the week. I took advantage of some of the time to stick with my fitness goals and go for a run. Memorial Drive is closed to all but resident traffic on Sunday's in the summer, so I joined what must have been hundreds of folks on the street or adjacent paths and made my way in a loop that took me across the Charles River and back into Harvard Square. Then it was on to class where we worked with only limited breaks for lunch and dinner and did not finish with our final small-group discussion until 8pm.

We started with Powerful Teaching and Learning - what intrigued me most in the pre-reading last night as well as in the discussion today was the work of Carol Dweck on "Mindset Theory." This examines the impact of student mindsets - either fixed or growth - on their ability to succeed in the classroom. The question was raised "How do we instill a growth mindset in students at an early age to help them develop into confident learners in the face of the challenges of secondary and post-secondary school?

Then the highly regarded Richard Elmore (author, researcher, teacher - considered one of the top ten most influential people in education in the country) took over for the first of a three-part seminar on Introduction to Redesign. The data he presented was startling and presented a fairly bleak picture of the state of our current education system. In the research he presented data showed in the last ten years that as more academic courses have been offered for high school students we have:

1. less students meeting national standards for performance
2. less students graduating in four years from high school
3. more students taking remedial classes in college, and
4. less students staying in and earning their 2 and 4 year degrees.

He gave additional data on the increase in student acheivement at the elementary grades in the past 8-10 years paired with a significant drop-off beginning in middle school. Then arguably the most compelling data was a study that found that what class a student was in for a particular course (i.e. what teacher they had) had as much a 6 times the greater impact on students academic gains than what school they attended. This helped to lead us up to Part 2 and 3 tomorrow which are Improving the Technical Core of Instruction and Organinzing for Improvement.

We met with our small groups and facilitator after dinner for the first time and began discussioning our individual problem statements. I was not alone in feeling as though I could already make very meaningful changes in my problem based on what I have learned in just 1-1/2 days.

Julie Storer