Greetings! I’m currently in Cambridge, MA, attending the annual Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) Conference. I’ll have a fuller posting on what went down at the conference, but in the meantime I’ll be updating you with a day-by-day report.
First of all, the conference is pretty swanky. The venue is the Harvard Business School, and the conference center feels more like a hotel than a university campus. A nice change of pace for a profession that often ends up at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to resources.
And I’m glad that the teachers and administrators have the dignity of presenting their material in a place like this, because there are some pretty impressive presentations. The theme of the conference is improving the quality of teaching at the high school level, and most presenters are from schools that are succeeding at closing the achievement gap in one or more areas (typically math or English).
That means there are more teachers in the room than consultants, which is a good thing. And the few “experts” participating in the discussion actually are experts, people like Ron Ferguson at Harvard, and Jon Saphier, co-creator of The Skillful Teacher – one of the best professional development systems for teachers out there.
The teachers and admins who are presenting have come from schools across the country. Ferguson (the conference organizer) et al have put together a mix of schools both large and small. One high school in Texas has less than 300 students, another in Massachusetts has more than 4,000. All are closing the achievement gap.
How? That, of course, is the million-dollar question. While there are no simple answers, a couple of themes emerged during this first day.
One is the importance of community. All of the schools have focused intensely on the “soft” elements of running a school: building buy-in among teachers, building strong relationships among teachers and between teacherse and administration. In most cases, teachers, not outside experts, are doing the work of making their own schools better.
A second is a focus on skills – codified in standardized tests – by digging deep to uncover and teach the skills behind the tests. And a third is the importance of working across departments and curricular areas to teach these skills. Lots of schools talk about writing across the curriculum; all of these schools have found ways to actually do it.
One surprising insight: for the conference participants, friction with teacher unions is a non-issue. Not that these schools don’t have strong unions – many of them do – but they’ve found that when good relationships exist between teachers and administrators, conflicts with unions subside.
I’ll have more over the next few days – these are just some first thoughts!
Of course, all very cleverly written, but not everything is so natural as it seems, at first glance and it is quite possible that the opinion of the author does not coincide with public opinion, is too often the case. But clearly we can say one thing: thanks to the author of articles for such a fresh and objective look at this aspect of the issue.
It’s onerous to find knowledgeable folks on this matter, but you sound like you realize what you’re talking about! Thanks