The Instructional Leader's Guide to Closing Achievement Gaps: Five Keys for Improving Student Outcomes

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Teresa Hill. Dr. Hill is a speaker, author, and leader whose work focuses on underserved communities and making the system work for every child. She is devoted to eliminating achievement gaps and ending what she terms failure as a default. Her motto is, all children can learn, period.

[00:33]

Dr. Hill began her career teaching 31 kindergarten students in Peoria, Illinois, has served as a principal and assistant superintendent, and has served as a superintendent in South Holland, Illinois, since 2012. And she is the author of the new book, The Instructional Leader's Guide to Closing Achievement Gaps, Five Keys for Improving Student Outcomes.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:56] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Hill, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to talk about the book because you have been on the front lines of taking these actions that you talk about in the book. This is not a book that comes from theorizing, but a book that comes from experience. Talk to us a little bit about the experience that led up to you writing the book.

[01:16]

What brought you to that point where you decided to write this book?

[01:19] SPEAKER_00:

Well, the focus of my career has been on closing achievement gaps and serving underserved populations of students. My work as a superintendent really brings all of that together, of my experience from being a teacher and being a principal, and really trying to put together a system that provides the best possible education for children, regardless of their background or the resources that they have at home. And so this book really focuses in on what can we do within our schools on a daily basis, to improve the educational experience for all of our children.

[02:00] SPEAKER_01:

And just as kind of a brief overview, you say there are five keys for improving student outcomes. Do you want to run through the five keys and then we can dive into them individually?

[02:08] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. The first one focuses on what I term as meaningful assessment. So that's really just getting beyond just assessing for accountability purposes and school ratings and really looking at the information we can glean from assessment that will help us to serve our students better. Then the second key really focuses on our work with language and literacy for our children. the biggest area where we see disparities and achievement gaps happen in the area of literacy, but really focusing in on what can we do in schools to build students' language skills and literacy. Then the next key focuses on giving students experience and exposure, which is one of the things that underserved children miss out on the most in their educational

[03:01]

experiences is having those experiences of different areas, different situations, and different fields of study so that they can develop their vocabulary as well as their view of what they could do in the future. There is another key that I call consolidation of knowledge, which is really going beyond Just doing specific activities and helping students to take what they learn from a new activity or a new experience and connect it to things that they've done before or other learning that they have. so that it becomes not just, oh, I studied this for this test that's coming up, and it can go beyond that. And then the final of the keys is focused on perfect practice, which is making sure that when it comes to skills, that we are giving our children the opportunity to really practice and build their skills within the work we do in schools

[04:07]

so that they get a solid foundation of those skills that they can build on for the future.

[04:13] SPEAKER_01:

I wonder if we could talk a little bit first about the nature of achievement gaps and what it means to have an achievement gap. Because it's pretty predictable to look at a list of students, to look at their socioeconomic status and make predictions about their academic outcomes. And the idea of closing achievement gaps presupposes that we can do something about that. We can do better than the default. What fuels your belief that that is? How did you come to that conclusion that demographics are not destiny, that we can...

[04:40]

overcome those kind of statistical probabilities in our work with students?

[04:46] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think the thing that has made the difference for me is that working with individual students and groups of students in real everyday schools, we get to the opportunity to really see what a difference it makes when we provide the best quality of instruction for our students. When we create environments where they can be fully engaged and we provide them with some of the advantages that, quite honestly, other children and families have at home, it can make a significant difference. And so being able to see that with individuals and small groups of children really makes me believe that if we focus in on each school, each classroom, each group of students, that we can make that difference and see that change happen.

[05:42]

The biggest thing about the achievement gap is, yes, it is very much predictable because some of the things that we talk about in the book are not necessarily present for all of our students. And so when you look globally, we tend to see students missing out on developing those language skills that they're gonna need going forward. Students not having the kinds of experience that we would hope that they would have. And so seeing that, you know, I as a parent and many other parents are able to provide some of those things for children before they ever come to school makes it clear that when you provide those things, it does make a difference. So if we can use our sphere of influence and the time that we have with students in our schools to do those things, it does really show up as a difference in what we see for their outcomes.

[06:40] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, because our sphere of influence is not everything, but it's not nothing either. There are things that are within our control. And in talking about what is within our control in the book, you start with assessment. So why was the first key that you identified assessment? Because I think to a lot of educators, assessment has become a bad word. They believe in using assessment within the classroom.

[07:04]

But I have the feeling that you're talking about assessments that go beyond the individual teacher assessment. And sometimes that makes teachers wary. People are not necessarily excited about assessments that are perhaps for other audiences other than themselves. So what do you mean by assessment?

[07:19] SPEAKER_00:

Well, the thing that I really focus in on is using meaningful assessment. So that means, you know, as I talk about in the book, there are different reasons that we do all of the assessments that we do. Many of them have nothing to do with actual student learning. And so this assessment as one of the keys really is focused in on how do we assess for student learning? How do we figure out what does this particular child know and what are they able to do? What is it that they need next in their educational career?

[07:54]

What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What are the ways that we can pinpoint those things? And so I really focus in on doing assessment two ways. The first is just as a way to figure out where our students are, what they know, what they're able to do, what they need next so that we can plan for that as educators in our schools. But then the second part of that is for those students that we know we have concerns about.

[08:22]

They're falling behind in a particular area or a particular skill. Getting that assessment information that can help us plan what do we do specifically for that child. Many of the things that give assessment a bad name really don't lend themselves to actually making decisions about how we teach individual or groups of children. And so those are not the things that will can actually help with the achievement gap. What I'm talking about is the assessment that individual teachers, teams of teachers or schools can use to identify what should we do next for this particular child.

[09:03] SPEAKER_01:

Talk to us a little bit about how we know when we're not doing enough of that kind of assessment. Because again, I think everybody would say, oh, we do too much assessment. There's too much testing. How do we know when we're not doing that for those purposes? And what are some actions that you talk about in the book to put some of those systems in place so that we are figuring out what students need from us on a frequent enough basis?

[09:27] SPEAKER_00:

Right. So the biggest way that we know if we're not doing that, if the idea of assessment makes us anxious, as it does for many of us that work in schools and have to deal with state assessments and accountability, then we know that we're not doing enough assessment for the right reasons. You know, unfortunately, there are some assessments that we have to do. The system works in that way and we have to continue to do those. But what we should be looking for is if we're having trouble identifying what the children in front of us need, if we maybe know that they're not where we want them to be, but we don't know exactly what that means. or we know that they're struggling in an area, but we don't know what we should do next or how we should approach it, then that means we're not doing enough of the right kind of assessment.

[10:23]

So this kind of assessment really is about what we do on a daily basis within our classrooms. So these kinds of assessments may not ever go beyond the classroom or the team of teachers and certainly not beyond the school. The idea is that we have assessments, whether we identify them, whether we adopt them, whether we design them, that allow us to say, you know what, we're concerned about how this group of students is doing in reading at the fourth grade level, and we have concerns about their comprehension or whatever it may be. What can we do to find out more information about that? And if we are finding that we know there's an issue or a concern, but we don't know what to do about it, then we know that we need to do more of this kind of assessment.

[11:17] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. And I think that really sharpens the focus on teaching, the content. What can we actually teach to get our students to where they need to be? And often if you look at the off-the-shelf assessments that are available from lots of national vendors, they can give you data that But it probably is not going to give you that type of information about, you know, what do we actually need to teach that's within our subject, that's within our grade level, and that will actually meet the instructional needs of our students. Often we default to these standardized assessments that are, you know, perhaps reliable to have a lot of, you know, research that's gone into them. But at the end of the day, the point of all of this is that we teach better, right?

[11:57]

That we more effectively meet the needs of the actual kids that are in front of us and not see them just as numbers, but as kids who need to be taught and who we can reach and we can make a difference for. Let's talk a little bit more about language, because I think the exposure to language, the exposure to reading, being read to, I think we're aware generally that differences in exposure to language and experience with language, and especially around reading, contribute significantly to achievement gaps in ways that are difficult to make up for later, especially later in elementary school or after elementary school. How can we think about language and literacy and what we can do at the school level?

[12:37] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think the biggest thing about language in schools is having an understanding that much of what we call college and career-ready standards and those kinds of things are really based in language. They're based in building students' vocabulary, their understanding of language and different sentence structures. And so by building our students language, understanding and skills, we are working toward the college and career ready standards from the very beginning. And that it is very important that we pay attention to and define what our expectations are for the use of language within our schools.

[13:29]

Because what I find is particularly for our schools that serve underserved children is that there can be a tendency to do too much of everyday social language. or of lowering the level of our language as adults so that we are not providing the exposure that we can even within our school walls. So then not only do the students come with less exposure, to language and vocabulary and different sentence structures. But then we replicate that often within our schools if we never take the time to define what it is that we want from language and what our expectations are. So the thing I really focus in on, on in the book is to create a collaborative understanding of what our expectations are for the use of language and making sure that we as adults do that as well as working with our students.

[14:31]

So for example, even in my district where I serve, one of the things that we had to start working on was speaking in complete sentences. we found that our students would come in as kindergarteners speaking in complete sentences. But one of the things you quickly learn in elementary school is that you tend to do better if you give a quick one or two word answer. And if that answer is right, then you can move on. And so we found that students were learning to not do what we would hope that they did do. And so we had to change our expectations, the way we spoke to the children and the way we shared with them our expectations and the guidance we provided.

[15:15]

for that use of language. And that is a little thing that makes a major difference in a very short amount of time when students are now using complete sentences, when we're reflecting the vocabulary, a broader vocabulary with them and asking them to use that broader vocabulary with us.

[15:38] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And that feeds directly into the idea of experience and exposure. And as we talked about earlier, students who have more socioeconomic privilege have more opportunity. They may have the ability to travel and see different places and may have more people talking to them about, you know, just different concepts and places. And that creates a gap that is difficult for us to make up for at the school level. What are some strategies that your schools use and that you talk about in the book to give students that exposure at the school level and that richness and connection to ideas that may not be part of their day-to-day experience, but that matter for their education and their future?

[16:18] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think the first thing that we try to do and that I talk about in the book is understanding the difference between doing activities with students and engaging students in experiences. And that what allows something to be an experience has to do with the level of engagement that we have with the students. them being able to have cognitive engagement, but also being able to have an emotional engagement, physical engagement with what they are doing. And then making sure that we tie that to their previous learning, to things that are coming up, making sure that not only do they, for example, go to the field trip to the museum, but that actually They're engaged in things while they're there, that they are talking and debriefing about that, maybe writing about that, asking questions while they're there and having that opportunity afterward to build in those new vocabulary words that they've experienced

[17:21]

into their everyday language and speech and getting them to the point where they are so used to that, having new experiences be a part of their lives, that that is their expectation. that they're going to have a new experience, they're going to learn some new things, they're going to learn some new words. And that makes a big difference. One of the things that we've done in our district and that I talk about in the book is curating experiences for kids based on where you are and what experiences they have, but also thinking about what are the different areas that we want to expose them to so that we can build their vocabulary. So whether it's going to the theater for our students, you know, we're in an urban area. So going to a farm, an orchard, you know, that kind of thing makes a big difference.

[18:11]

But then deciding what are those things that we're going to make sure that all of our students experience? And then how are we going to build those experiences, the vocabulary and discussion of those types of things and writing about those kinds of things? into our curriculum. So our schools, for example, we have what we call curriculum field trips that are built into our actual curriculum. So every grade level has certain things that all students get to experience because we know that for our students, although we're a short hop to Chicago, most of them had never seen Lake Michigan. And even though when I first got here, before we started this, our eighth graders would take a trip and they would go to Lake Michigan, which is, as you know, one of the great lakes, but they thought it was the ocean because they had never been to the ocean.

[19:04]

They had never been to the lake. And so being able to build in those experiences and plan for that has made a big difference in what they know and what they can expect from their lives.

[19:15] SPEAKER_01:

That is a fascinating type of curriculum mapping that I don't think I've heard anyone ever talk about the experiences that we want students to have, not just the content we want them to learn, not just the units that we're going to teach, but the actual experiences that we want to take them out into the world to have on field trips and through other learning opportunities. Wow. that is powerful i wanted to tap into your expertise as a superintendent who you know is responsible for and thinks at the system level about students who reach high school well below grade level because i think one of the challenges that a lot of schools face is they want to deliver grade level instruction they want students to meet grade level standards but they know we might have students who are three four five years below grade level in reading in math And they really lack a lot of the, you know, what we see as foundational skills that they need to succeed with that grade level work.

[20:06]

And as a result, too often, they don't get grade level instruction. So recognizing that this may not be squarely within the topic of your book, how do you think about that issue of grade level instruction and students being below grade level as a superintendent?

[20:20] SPEAKER_00:

So I think the biggest thing is there comes a point as we're planning for kids that we have to take it in two different ways. So of course, as a system leader, our role is to make sure that we have the grade level curriculum and that we have those certain standards and those expectations. At the same time, we also know that we are working with specific individual children that need to be able to make it in life and need to be able to to move forward with what they're doing. And so I think it's really important, especially as we're getting to the high school level, to begin looking at, are there things that we should be doing differently?

[21:10]

that can impact those students that are so far behind. For example, it may be necessary to provide some accommodations or other supports for students. One of the things that I talk with teachers about often is that just because a student is significantly far behind in the skills of decoding, for example, does not necessarily mean that they are not able to understand the conversation, to contribute ideas, to build on their thoughts or to communicate things that they want to say. It does not mean that they cannot think in that particular area. And so when we have those kinds of situations, we've got both things that we have to do.

[22:01]

So as a system leader, of course, we need to make sure that we are providing grade level instruction and things like that. But by the time a student is in high school, if, for example, they still struggle significantly with decoding, we should be looking at what are the ways that we can allow this student To continue to grow in their knowledge, in their ability to interact, in their ability to communicate, in their ability to move forward while adjusting and accommodating for the fact that they struggle with decoding or maybe are not able to decode. So, you know, for example, for a student with a disability, we might provide them with the ability to use speech to text or text to speech, which would allow them to participate and be a part of moving forward.

[22:56]

There comes a point when we have to look beyond what we want to do for our overall curriculum. and look at the needs of that individual student. There are so many. And I tell people all the time, this book was written largely with speech to text. That not because I don't know how to type, but that is what works for me. And there are so many options to provide assistance to give kids access.

[23:24]

And it's very important that we not remove them from having that access to continue to grow, to interact, to share ideas and move forward in other ways if they are struggling with those particular skills.

[23:39] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Hill, thinking about that system level, of course, so much of what matters in education happens at the individual level between the teacher and the student. But zooming out to the kind of 30,000 foot view that you operate at as a superintendent, that policymakers operate at, you talk about in chapter nine, what policy can and cannot do. How do you think about policy? And what do you say for policymakers in that chapter?

[24:04] SPEAKER_00:

So the big thing for policymakers is that My experience has been that there are so many people that want to address disparities in schools and want to address achievement gaps. But unfortunately, the only ways at their disposal at that level to address things like that tend to lean toward the addition of rules, the addition of tests, the addition of policies that actually when it gets down to the school, classroom, and student level can actually hold us back from being able to do some of the things that we need to do And it really pulls us back from some of the areas we need to focus on. So what I try to do is give them what I call a stoplight of there are some things that it would be really helpful if policymakers would just stop doing or not do.

[25:01]

One of which, and we talked about assessment, one of which is thinking that by assessing more, we're going to get student learning to improve more. knowing that the assessments that are created for policymakers are designed to provide information for policymakers, which means they're not designed to provide what's needed for teaching and learning. I also talk about some things that they should really be cautious about. So one of those is really thinking about how we license or certify or prepare teachers, making sure that while we want to uphold certain standards for people becoming teachers, that we do not create a situation where we're making it harder to become a teacher, knowing that that job is extremely complex and there's no amount of years of schooling

[26:00]

that are going to prepare someone to be a master teacher, that there has to be a baseline level of what our expectation is. And then we support them once they get into the classroom as they continue to build their skills. And then I talk about some, what I call green light strategies, which are things that it would be very helpful if we move forward with, which includes really supporting some of the things that we've talked about in the five keys of making sure that that we are giving schools the flexibility to use assessment in real and meaningful ways, that we are focusing on providing schools with the resources necessary to provide kids with experiences, to build their libraries and to support their development of reading skills and those kinds of things.

[26:50]

If we can focus on that, that will provide a much bigger difference and do what policymakers are really trying to do.

[27:00] SPEAKER_01:

And it's so interesting, you and I have both been in this profession for quite some time. It's so interesting to hear the re-emerging wisdom of school libraries, purposeful school field trips. I mean, these are not, frankly, things that we've heard a lot about over the last 10 or 15 years. We've gone in a lot of different directions, but- I think everything that you've mentioned today would be familiar to someone who had been asleep for the last 20 years. If you woke up and said, hey, these are the things that really moved the needle, somebody from a while ago might say, yeah, absolutely. But recently, in just the last couple of decades, we've been kind of blind to those things.

[27:37]

So I don't know, maybe this is a speculative question, but why have we missed some of these fundamentals in recent years?

[27:44] SPEAKER_00:

Well, honestly, I think many of the schools where there is a struggle over student achievement serve underserved children and families, which means that in many cases, they have not necessarily had the resources to provide some of these things, which if you went into a school district that serves high income families, these things would be things that would happen all of the time. The student's you know, have these experiences, they go on field trips, they do all of these kinds of things. But largely, you know, schools that may be in under-resourced communities don't always have these things. And so then when we look at, especially, you know, policymakers and leaders look at, you know, we need to do something differently to close these achievement gaps, to raise student achievement, there tends to be a focus on

[28:41]

How will we let people know that they're not doing good enough by our standards? They're not meeting our standards. And so that focuses on testing. There's a lot of focus on the things that you can do. So if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like it's a nail. And so there tends to be a big focus on the rules that we can make that can apply to everyone, the things that we can force everybody to have to do, which means that there tends to be a lot of focus on, okay, more testing, more accountability, which then lends itself to we can't take the time out to go to that field trip because we got to get ready for that state test that's coming up.

[29:24]

And so it becomes this vicious cycle of we're not where we want to be. We've got these tests that we've got to be held accountable for. So now we need to take more and more time away from these other things. You know, we can't have recess. There's all of that kind of thing that tends to happen and it becomes a vicious cycle so that you end up with schools that are historically high performing, which tend to be schools where the schools, the communities, the families are very well resourced. And they don't need to worry about the accountability.

[29:58]

So they continue to do what they've always done. And then the schools where the students need these things the most are very much under the high lens of accountability. And so they actually get to do less and less of this kind of thing.

[30:16] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Hill, I really appreciate the clear guidance you've provided in the five keys and the focus, honestly, on student learning. I think anytime we're focusing on student learning, we're headed in the right direction. And I think you've just done a tremendous service to the profession here. So the book is The Instructional Leader's Guide to Closing Achievement Gaps, Five Keys for Improving Student Outcomes. If people want to get in touch with you and talk about doing some work together, where's the best place for them to go?

[30:42] SPEAKER_00:

They should look me up on LinkedIn. It's T.D.

[30:45] SPEAKER_01:

Hill, E-D-D. Dr. Hill, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[30:50] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for having me.

[30:52] Announcer:

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