Edna Varner Associate,Leadership Development

How is this for stating the obvious?

Schools must help students meet state standards.

District officers, principals, teachers, and education partners know this. We have said it, read it, reformed to enable it, created schedules to observe and discuss it, and assessed to monitor it. State departments and the federal government have threatened sanctions to force it and followed-through on those sanctions hoping to make good on it. Yet, (and this is also stating the obvious) too many of our nation's schools spend each year worrying that their test scores will not be high enough to achieve average yearly progress. Even those who achieve AYP this year, know that the anxiety begins anew in September.

What else is left to recommend other than

• provide instructional leadership,
• align the curriculum with state standards,
• engage staff in high quality professional development,
• plan rigorous, research-based instruction, collaborate,
• look at student work,
• assess,
• use the data,
• engage parents,
• provide appropriate district resources, and
• partner with adult learners across the network?

Isn't this also stating the obvious? So why aren't all of our schools doing these things to help students meet standards year after year after year?

In the upcoming Cornerstone Regional meeting our plan is to answer that important question by illuminating what may not be so obvious through Lesson Study and work with the Mark O'Shea text, From Standards to Success. Many of you have read or heard about Japanese Lesson Study, described as follows in the Standards:

" This planning and analysis protocol typically consists of three sequential activities. First, teachers collaborate in the planning of a lesson, pursuing a common goal of learning that they hope their students will achieve. Next, a small group teaches the resulting lesson while other teachers perform action research on the lesson as it is taught. Finally, researchers and observers disclose their finding in a follow-up session, identifying the lesson's successful elements and collaborating to suggest needed revisions before the next lesson is taught."

In a number of ways, lesson study requires more than your usual planning. Teachers engage in the rigorous activity of drawing on standards to articulate teaching objectives that clearly describe standards-meeting student behaviors. Principals and coaches who participate in the planning sessions observe to determine what professional development, facilitation, additional knowledge and resources teachers need to craft objectives that inform standards-based lesson plans. Principals and teacher leaders also know that their enabling role at this stage of lesson study includes the following:

• Getting standards documents into the hands of teachers and ensuring that they learn the structure and content of their standards and frameworks.
• Helping teachers identify the critical standards to be achieved in each grade level and in each core subject.
• Modifying the school schedule to include collaboration time for lesson planning.
• Conducting political advocacy for the standards and setting the stage for professional development.

The lesson study classroom observation also has a different purpose. Instead of charting evidence about beautifully designed bulletin boards, diversity of students responding, or numbers of questions at each level of Bloom's taxonomy, observers are fellow teachers (not just the principal), and the work is observing students using standards language and demonstrating standards-meeting behaviors. The instrument for the classroom observation is likely to require evidence of the following:

• Students are appropriately informed of standards that they are achieving or will achieve.
• Students are informed of the performance or product expectations.
• Activities unfold in a coherent sequence as described in the lesson plan.
• Student performances and products described in the lesson's objectives can result from the learning activities in the lesson plan.
• Student performances and products demonstrated during the lesson meet proficiency levels described in the lesson's objectives.
• Evaluation activities expect students to provide products or performances that are described in the lesson's objectives.

After the classroom observation, teacher researchers and observers disclose their findings in a follow-up session, identifying the lesson's successful elements in relation to objectives, and collaborating to suggest needed revisions before the next lesson is taught. Here coaches and other teacher leaders can model asking tough questions that ensure rigorous examination of the lesson and its delivery. For example, "How close to the descriptions in objectives are students' thinking and performance as demonstrated in what they say? Do? Produce?"

Coaches and other teacher leaders can also model facilitation skills as teachers discuss revisions that increase the likelihood a particular lesson will elicit and enhance the quality of standard-meeting student performance. As teachers look at student work, principals may want to observe for several key purposes—to study the extent to which the products demonstrate standards-meeting performance, to determine the extent to which teachers can identify standards-meeting performance, and to identify professional development needs for looking at student work.

Because the District also has a key role in moving beyond merely stating the obvious to acting on it, the Regional meeting will give central office support staff an opportunity to study the context needed for successful school work. Key elements include the following:

• Enabling principals to change school schedules so that they provide teachers with the time needed for collaborative planning and student work evaluation.
• Selecting essential state standards for each grade level and subject.
• Aligning curriculum guides with the scope and sequence of the selected standards.
• Developing a coherent system of assessments that measures standards achievement without imposing more test time on teachers and students.

This may be stating the obvious, but it is clear that teachers, principals and other leaders need more specific instruction on how to do the things we constantly talk about in the education literature—provide instructional leadership, teach to standards, enable schools to achieve—and we need the feedback that helps us all improve. The teachers, principals, and Cornerstone staff who have been planning for the Regional meeting invite you to experience the doing in a powerful way with our work on lesson study for standards achievement. I have experienced lesson study first hand at the Talladega Lab School and vicariously through the literacy fellows' planning with coaches and principals. Unlike the latest gimmicks that promise teaching will be a no-brainer, it is hard work, it requires high levels of capacity, it depends on collaboration and trust in colleagues' capacity, and it demands deep commitment to achieving results. It makes me want to teach again.

Reference: From Standards to Success, Mark R. O'Shea