[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_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Mike Schmoker. Dr. Schmoker is a former administrator, English teacher, and football coach who's written several best-selling books, as well as numerous articles for leading publications. He is the author of Focus, Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, as well as Results Now, The Untapped Opportunities for Swift, Dramatic Gains in Achievement, the second edition of which we're here to talk about today.
[00:41] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:43] SPEAKER_00:
Dr. Schmunker, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:45] SPEAKER_01:
Hi there, and great to be here with you, Justin.
[00:48] SPEAKER_00:
I'm very excited to speak with you and honored to speak with you because your book, the first edition of Results Now, was one of the books that I read while I was studying to become a principal. I remember reading it on the bus. I was an aspiring administrator in Seattle, and I rode the city bus to my internship job every day. And this was one of the books that I remember reading during that time. Talk to us a little bit about the reaction to the first edition of Results Now and why you wrote a second edition.
[01:15] SPEAKER_01:
This book and its second edition probably had more pleasure writing it than anything else because at a certain point I began to notice I was really struck by this enormous gap between what the research, even the sort of entire community of research, educational researchers seemed to settle on as the most potent stuff from which we get the biggest bang. huge gap between that and what actually occurred in classrooms, which I didn't really, really realize until I began to do more classroom tours in multiple states. That gap, this is an extravagant claim, but gap is not bad news. That represents the largest opportunity for large immediate gains, if we just saw it clearly, large immediate gains in anything we've ever come across.
[02:00] SPEAKER_00:
In other words, there are a lot of things that we could be doing that we're not doing and a lot of things that we're doing and spending time on that we don't need to. Is that the idea?
[02:09] SPEAKER_01:
It sure is. You put it well. I mean, there's really, if I may say just briefly, there's three things we ought to be doing. placing at the very, very top of our priority list, and that is that every teacher for every course has a clear curriculum. Curriculum, I'm just going to use Linda Darling-Hammond's nice formulation. She said that's a schedule of what to teach and when.
[02:31]
The second piece is part of the first, and that is it's got to be literacy-rich. There has to be a curriculum that is heavy, amply infused with Plenty of reading, vastly more than we have kids do now. Way more writing and writing instruction. I just wrote an article about this for the American Educator. It's got to include, for just about every text we read, it's got to include meaningful information. open-ended civil discussion.
[03:00]
Now, that's literacy. The third part is, you could call it structured instruction, you can call it explicit instruction, but it's basically instruction built around clear objectives or targets, followed by step-by-step instruction, not for every lesson. Some lessons, some instruction, some education is done more independently, sort of project-based, but a large enough amount of it should be done step by step with checks for understanding, formative assessment, call it what you will, throughout the lesson to make sure all the kids are staying up, completing the lesson, and succeeding by the end. So it's curriculum, literacy, and instruction. Very simple, very ordinary definitions of those three. There's nothing competes with those three, and those three are the rarest, least implemented elements in all of K-12 education.
[03:52] SPEAKER_00:
You make an incredibly strong case for those three. And one of the things that's so striking as a reader is just how much stands in the way of those three priorities. So when it comes to, and we can start wherever you'd like, but when it comes to curriculum, literacy, and effective instruction, what are some of the things that we're doing instead? Because it's not that we're doing nothing. It's not that we should be doing some things and we're doing nothing. It's that we're doing a whole bunch of stuff that we don't need to.
[04:19]
You talk about this idea of stuff. What is some of that stuff that stands in the way of these three priorities?
[04:24] SPEAKER_01:
The stuff, believe it or not, a lot of it comes down to things like giving students sort of weak or not very substantive tasks to complete in groups. I actually read in one study that said about 70% of the school day has kids working in groups. I've been in classrooms where kids are working in groups. I've walked in to see every kid sitting at a table with a stack of three by five cards. And they are told to put the cards in the order of the food chain. You know, you got large animals and then medium sized and smaller animals.
[04:52]
They're supposed to slam these into the right order. So the teacher quickly gives them that instruction. One or two of the five kids in each group kind of does the work. It takes about one minute once they get to it. And the other kids sit there and kind of free ride. We all know this happens.
[05:07]
And I always like to ask my audiences, how long do you think those kids were given to do that? They were given about 20 plus minutes. This is the way too much of the school day goes. I walk into classrooms, Justin, where I see worksheets, combination of worksheets, group work, and students sitting at screens. Some of them kind of on task, many of them not. Students sitting at centers in, goodness, K through those precious hours at the beginning of the day in primary grade, so-called literacy classrooms.
[05:39]
sitting at centers where they're supposed to do, again, very non-literary kinds of tasks, or kind of paging through the pages of a book without any supervision because the teacher's working with only one small group. These are the kinds of things that eat up, according to one TNTP study, about 500 hours of a school year, enough to completely change the educational landscape in America. 500 hours per year has almost no academic value.
[06:09] SPEAKER_00:
There always seems to be some sort of movement of the moment or trend or fad that is maybe not explicitly pushing against the three fundamentals that you emphasize in results now. But there are these kind of cultural forces within our profession that make us think, well, group work is good. Centers are good. Stations are good. All of these things are good. And we don't really see the cost of them.
[06:33]
What do you think about group work in particular when it comes to this almost kind of ideology that group work is better than whole class instruction?
[06:41] SPEAKER_01:
Yes, yes. A lot of things that are good in right measure are really bad when they're overdone. That's all. Two things about group work. Number one, I don't want to say you never use group work. Group work ought to occupy, I don't know, some percentage.
[06:55]
Let's say 10%, which is way, way less than currently is the case. There are certain things really ought to be done in groups of four or five. But even people like David Berliner found that the most talk about cooperative learning. Kids need to talk to their student peers routinely. in their lessons. This should be a regular feature.
[07:13]
But the most powerful form of cooperative learning is what he calls dyads, fancy name for Mike and Justin pair sharing, and always with a time limit. And then followed by, say, cold calling, where you say, Justin and Mike, what did you two determine was the answer to this question? open-ended question, whatever, a math problem, whatever it might be. This is the way we get lots of mileage out of, say, group work. Don't overdo it. If you love cooperative learning, and you should, confine most of it to pair share.
[07:45]
That's where the power is. And always give kids time limits.
[07:49] SPEAKER_00:
You give a number of examples in the book of activities that, as you were saying just a minute ago, take far more time or given far more time than students actually need. Do the part of the task. And there's a lot of sitting and talking. And, you know, just so much of this opportunity seems to be just making better use of our time. So if we think very purposefully about what we want students to learn, if we're following a curriculum, talk to us a little bit about the structure of lessons. Because if we have lessons that are driven by group activities that take an ambiguous amount of time and it just kind of stretches out, we're going to miss a lot of the opportunities we have to really keep our focus on an objective and keep students moving toward a learning target.
[08:31]
Talk to us a little bit about the lesson structure and the idea of checking for understanding.
[08:37] SPEAKER_01:
The first thing to realize, I think, is that people differ on what exactly the elements of a good lesson are. But if you start out with a very clear aim, when you tell a kid, you tell an adult, look, this is the task we want to complete, or this is the goal or the target or the objective. And they know that all their little efforts are going to aim right at that one thing. I've read research that says you're going to have two or three times as many students not only succeed on that task or meet that target, but enjoy it more. Number two, if you give it to them in small, manageable steps. Daniel Willingham talks about the supreme importance of acknowledging cognitive load, the limits of cognitive load.
[09:20]
Yours, mine, a young child. If we give them a little bit at a time, tell them what to do, and then see if they can complete it, and again, in a very short time. nice rapid enough clip. They're going to enjoy that. They're going to feel goal-oriented. They're going to see that if they're not succeeding, you're intervening to say, okay, class, hold on now.
[09:39]
I just gave you 30 seconds or one minute to complete this task. I see a lot of you are struggling with this. Let me take another shot at this, explain it a little more carefully, or this is huge. Break it down into more than one step. And when you're teaching writing, anyone who's had success teaching writing breaks one seemingly simple step into, say, two or three when they see the kids struggling with it. That's where the success comes.
[10:04]
I mean, I love to tell these stories. I have quite a few of them. But I just think about Sean Connors, who comes into a school. and teaches in just the fashion I just described. Clear objective, step-by-step instruction, where he left no child behind on any phase of a day's lesson. He typically taught a lesson in 25 to 30 minutes, and then he cut the students loose to, say, write or complete the assignment on their own, because they were ready.
[10:30]
They could do it now. In one year, I was invited to watch him, you know, the principal calls me up one day and goes, You got to come watch this teacher teach. So I come in, sit in the back of the class, and I'm going, yep, right down the line, he's doing the right stuff. Very good, solid, explicit instruction. Doesn't require a lot of charisma. You just have to kind of give kids just enough to complete everything.
[10:51]
in manageable steps. At the end of that lesson, principal and I are walking around and we're seeing, no kidding, that every kid has written, for instance, one of the days I was there, a really decent, if not quite exemplary introductory paragraph. Every kid, 90% free to reduce lunch at this school. And we just kept thinking, surely one of these kids is not completed this assignment properly. But no, every one of them. So we go into the teacher's lounge afterward and the principal's got a huge grin on his face.
[11:19]
And he goes, last year, I didn't know this, I just moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, nothing about their achievement. He says, last year, we made the largest gain in the state of Arizona on the writing exam. When we looked at the data, 90% of the gain came from one teacher's classroom, Sean Connors. They moved from 59% of the students passing, get this now, an exit exam. Pass it. If you don't pass, you don't graduate.
[11:43]
59% to 85%. 26% more actual students passed that exam just because the teacher taught explicitly. Now, there's days they just always have to add this. There's time and room for productive struggle in instruction, in math and other places. There is. There's times to kind of expand the steps, give kids a little bit more time to figure something out by themselves, struggle, what have you.
[12:11]
This kind of instruction does not quarrel with that. But we need to make sufficient, I want to say ample room for explicit instruction because the impact is massive, as much as anything we know about effective schooling.
[12:24] SPEAKER_00:
One thing that's easy to miss in that answer there, that if anyone who's read the book will pick up on this, that this is a teacher who is doing something unusual in that he's actually teaching writing explicitly. You had a story of people who told you, you know, we haven't gotten to writing yet this year. And often this was in language arts classes. This was in English classes. Why do we not get to writing so often in this profession?
[12:48] SPEAKER_01:
If I may even expand your question out of Justin, I want to go to the top. I want to cite Richard Elmore, who says, look, right from the start, here's an education professor. And I always like to tell people the biggest critics of undergraduate teacher preparation, as well as administrative training, it's all the same. The biggest critics are the brightest bulbs in the education professoriate. The really big, some of the most prominent, respected education professors are the ones that say, we simply don't emphasize the right stuff. In my undergraduate training, no teacher, my English methods course, fill in the blank.
[13:23]
They never implored us to make sure that kids read a lot. that we had students write regularly and we taught them to write. They didn't teach us how to teach writing or how to grade a paper, nothing like it. So I really think, and I want to turn this on its head and say, as much of a critic as I am of say undergraduate preparation, which by the way, spills right into the PD community, PD has not taken up that gauntlet themselves. Both of those entities, undergraduate professors, education professors, and the PD community has a huge opportunity to make our schools vastly better. According to people like Tom Kane, a Harvard, get this, he's at Harvard, education professor.
[14:09]
He says, if we began to train in PD and undergrad, and focus on the right things, the highest priorities, the things with the biggest payoff. In two years, we'd have a school system that's as good or better than any in the world with the same outcomes. Two years, he says. I have a whole list of people in Results Now 2.0, the book I just wrote, who say we would have Doug Lamov, who I just had lunch with yesterday, by the way, here in town. Massive breakthrough.
[14:36]
Bob Marzano, he says there would be unprecedented era. Tom Kane, education professor, two years, we'd have a revolution if we just, the undergraduate level and our PD community broke away, again, in the words of an education professor, broke away from the whims, fads, opportunism, and ideology that crowd out and prevent us from seeing how much better we could be.
[15:05] SPEAKER_00:
You make the point early on in the book that administrators, school principals, are not really taught to supervise this type of thing, especially around curriculum. We're not really taught to monitor the implementation of curriculum or even make sure that the curriculum is in place. What's going on there with supervision in particular?
[15:27] SPEAKER_01:
I've got an EDD, okay, a doctorate in education, and a slew of courses in administration, educational administration. No one ever really, again, implored me to monitor. I mean, your work, this overlaps very much with your work. Principals and their designees, assistant principals, maybe coaches, that combination, they don't have to go in every day, but they need to regularly be visiting classrooms just in the simplest terms to make sure that there is, number one, there has to be a curriculum. They have to go into classrooms looking to see. They don't have to have a perfect view, but they should be able to tell.
[16:02]
When you walk in and you see a lot of worksheets and movies, you know that the curriculum is not being implemented, okay? They need to oversee and monitor. That's one of my favorite words too, Justin. that curriculum they need to see that and see evidence that the students are writing and that they're being taught to write and they need to see that whether or not teachers need additional support on explicit effective instruction before our pd improves before undergraduate preparation improves our leaders by themselves again with or without training could collaborate with colleagues to simply help each other maybe using work like yours to know how to go into classrooms see what's happening and then coach support adjust and train big word train we don't train you know maybe i'm rambling but i just have to throw this in
[16:53]
This is related, but a little off your question. The hallowed AERA, American Educational Research Association, has literally in print come out four square against training teachers how to teach. There's a kind of wackiness there. in the system that starts with undergraduate preparation. And I think that pattern seeps into PD and hence into our schools, prevents all of us, not just parents and communities, but educators themselves from seeing we ain't doing this stuff. It doesn't social justice require that once we identify, and we have identified it, the most potent actions and interventions.
[17:34]
Doesn't social justice demand that we provide that in our schools? Our system right now does not do that.
[17:42] SPEAKER_00:
Mike, one of the things I've been really impressed with as I've gone through the second edition, years after reading the first edition of Results Now, is just how much you have updated in terms of the research. One of the things we know clearly now is that for reading instruction, we need to focus for a time very intensively on explicit phonics instruction, and we need to focus on knowledge building in it. our listeners will have listened to Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast on how phonics is essential. And many of our listeners will be familiar with Natalie Wetzler's book, The Knowledge Gap, and she has a new podcast that I'm looking forward to listening to as well. Talk to us a little bit about phonics and knowledge, because I think we've both been dismayed to see the amount of reading instruction that doesn't actually involve reading and writing instruction that doesn't involve writing, but instead involves a lot of worksheets and kind of quasi-literacy adjacent activities.
[18:39] SPEAKER_01:
You mentioned Emily Hanford and, of course, Mark Seidenberg. His research was central to the importance of phonics. I mean, simply put, of course we need to teach phonics. My take on phonics is this. We ought to teach all kids heavily, intensely in K-1. By that time, they've got the code.
[18:57]
If we're doing it right at all, they should have cracked the code. And let me just add one element to that. One of the reasons... we take so long to teach phonics to kids is because, and I know this is going to sound like heresy to some people, but I've written about it extensively.
[19:12]
Education Week and multiple sources in research have come out to say We grossly underestimate the harm done when we only teach phonics and primary grade reading, you know, the fundamentals of reading and decoding, to students in small groups. You can do a lot of that, most of it, to whole classes all at the same time. My own children learn from a wonderful first grade... K-first teachers, especially a first grade teacher, whereby by the end of first semester, every child, no matter where they were on the spectrum of knowing or not knowing phonics or how to read, they all had a good grip on phonics and then immediately went, and even along the way, even that first semester and beyond, those kids were reading, being read to, and beginning to write, you know, paragraphs by the end of first grade.
[20:01]
If we cut back a good bit only teaching phonics and the fundamentals of reading in small groups we expand at least by two or three times the amount of time students have to learn phonics read be read to read along write and discuss what they're reading all that stuff can be done with great benefits especially when you compare it to what the research tells us, and this will shock. It sounds hard to believe, but there are people who I cite in Results Now 2.0 who say about two-thirds of that precious literacy block is spent on activities that contribute virtually nothing to a kid's ability to acquire decoding skills, to read, write, or talk about what they read. Two-thirds of that time going down the sink. We can recover and repurpose that.
[20:50] SPEAKER_00:
And I think one consequence of having students spend so much time working in small groups, especially when it comes to reading, is that you say that perhaps 80% of the reading that students do in school is below grade-level reading. Say more about grade-level reading and how teachers can support on-grade-level reading.
[21:10] SPEAKER_01:
Number one, the research is plain. Timothy Shanahan and many others, you know, basically say some reading kids should do on their own level, especially self-selected. There's this misunderstanding, this misconception. If you're reading aloud or having students read text that isn't at their tested grade level, that no value comes from it. Not true. Here's the way to look at this.
[21:31]
We talk about scaffolding a text. Bob Marzano, just to take one example, Bob Marzano found that I'm about to teach Jack of the Beanstalk, but there are words in there that some of the kids don't understand. Or I use when I do demonstration lessons, I use an article on nuclear power. I know full well that the seventh and eighth or ninth graders to whom I teach this piece understand. There are words in there they don't know. So I teach those words beforehand, real quickly.
[21:55]
And I put them on the board or on a piece of paper so that they have at least a decent acquaintance with those words that might make them stumble. Then I give them, now Barzano found that that gives kids reading at the fourth grade level, just doing that vocabulary scaffolding raises their ability to read that text and understand it by almost about 2.8, almost three grade levels. Add to that a question. The moment a kid has one question, not five questions, you know, to answer at the end. You've got to stop doing that.
[22:25]
The one question is a meaty, substantive, interesting question, which the kids know they're going to both discuss and write about. So you read some of it out loud to them. They know some of those. They've learned the vocabulary words. You read some of it out loud with them reading along. And you make sure, you know, you're scanning to make sure they're reading along.
[22:45]
And you give a little bit of background on that text. When you do all those things combined, kids get, listen, the brilliant kid is going to get more out of that nonfiction or fiction text than the less capable kids. But all of them are going to get far more than they get than when we just keep appeasing their current grade level, which does what? Just causes them to fall further and further behind. In the cases of kids who do catch up when teachers use grade level text are very impressive. That data is very impressive.
[23:18] SPEAKER_00:
So Mike, give us a little bit of a perspective on what can happen when we get these three priorities right, when we focus on curriculum, on literacy, and on effective instruction. If we kind of zoom back, what's the impact of this focus?
[23:32] SPEAKER_01:
I love to tell these stories. Some of you know Kim Marshall of the Marshall Memo. He's at a school, and he is a hardworking, earnest administrator, if there ever was one. Nine years of academic stagnation at Mather Elementary in Boston Public Schools. The 10th year, his school collapsed. made this breakthrough from the bottom third in achievement in Boston public schools to the top third.
[23:57]
One year, one thing made the difference. For the first time, they laid out what Linda Darling-Hammond calls a schedule of what to teach and when. Now, if you do that in accordance with Massachusetts standards, and Massachusetts has pretty decent standards, I would want to add, That means there's going to be plenty of reading and writing infused into that curriculum. One year, that kind of a dramatic difference. My own wife taught down the road here, Tempe High. The moment they instituted a curriculum, they went from being a school with 90-some percent free and reduced lunch, mind you, the lowest math scores in the district.
[24:33]
The school was marked for closure. The assistant principal goes into the department head and says, bring the math department together. We've got to do something. Someone came up with a brilliant idea, and people are shocked by this. In two or three hours, they looked at algebra, geometry, and beyond in teams, laid out a rough schedule of what to teach and when, and then had to be monitored. Both the assistant principal, and this has leadership implications, and the department had, for the first time, checked in regularly and had discussions about, are you following that schedule?
[25:09]
At the end of one year, they made the largest gains in years. At the end of two years, the gains were so large that I went to the awards ceremony where they got an award for being one of three high schools in the state that made, once again, the largest math gains in the state of Arizona. literacy i just have to tell these stories a principal notices just kind of accidentally because they're not encouraged to do these things but noticed samples of writing the kids couldn't write well at all so this is a little bit draconian he tells the faculty every one of you have to have the kids write at least twice a week a paragraph or two about what they're learning i could go into more detail but that's all they did one year these are all one or two year stories In one year, they went from, and these are pretty close, my statistics, if memory serves me, from about 37% of the kids passing the California ELA assessment to something like 67%.
[26:04]
And they doubled the number of kids passing math. I've told you the story about Sean Connors. Doug Lamont's schools were, again, schools with 97% free and reduced lunch. Similar populations, maybe 40% of the kids passing state exams passed. At Doug Lamont's school in the Uncommon Schools Network, 100%. When they introduced the new state tests, which were much tougher, some of you remember this, sort of in the wake of the Common Core, all the scores plummeted.
[26:32]
But whereas public schools with their same demographic profile say 27% of the kids passed, 75% of the kids passed. in the schools and the Uncommon Schools Network. I could go on and on, but maybe your school won't get that much or that dramatic an impact, but you can bet that when you do these things, the impact will show up within a school year. If, I would just add, you focus on those repeatedly and monitor whether or not the good things are being implemented.
[27:04] SPEAKER_00:
Well, thank you for emphasizing the importance of monitoring. And people are probably sick of hearing me say that it's so important for administrators to get into classrooms and to talk with teachers to see what's going on and just have that awareness because, yeah, it doesn't happen without that. So the book is Results Now 2.0, The Untapped Opportunities for Swift, Dramatic Gains in Achievement. And just loaded with examples of success. schools that have made those swift and dramatic gains.
[27:33]
Mike, if people want to get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do so?
[27:37] SPEAKER_01:
My contact information is in the back of the book, of course, and my email. It's schmoker, S-C-H-M-O-K-E-R, at futureone, F-U-T-U-R-E-O-N-E.com.
[27:53] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
