Pursue School Improvement Through Persuasion, Not Vilification

Pursue School Improvement Through Persuasion, Not Vilification

I’m working on my new book (tentatively titled The Great School Rethink).
It’ll be out next spring from Harvard Education Press and aims to help
educational leaders meet the challenges of the post-pandemic landscape. To the
surprise of none of my regular readers, I suggest that doing this well is less
about “innovation” than helping parents, teachers, and policymakers get
comfortable thinking about schooling differently.

That’s a tall order in a world where education reforms routinely crash in the
face of reservations, routine, and resistance. Yet, it’s a challenge that
educational leaders should be well-equipped to tackle. After all, educators
are experienced at helping others see new things, master new ideas, and
wrestle with uncomfortable questions.

Unfortunately, the track record when it comes to school change is heavy on
haranguing or preaching to the choir and light on persuasion. And it’s no
great surprise (especially in a polarized era) that neither haranguing
opponents nor talking to the like-minded is likely to change minds or locate
common ground.

There are better paths. They start with taking a deep breath and mustering all
our patience. After all, research shows that changing minds is always a slog.
If parents or teachers have deep-seated notions about how schools should work
or what classrooms should look like, it’s always going to be tough to get them
comfortable with another tack.

As my old boss, Harvard’s Arthur Brooks has put it, “If you want a chance at
changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon
and start offering them as a gift.” In fact, researchers have long known that
insulting someone in the course of an argument leads them to dig in their
heels and oppose you more firmly. This phenomenon even has a name: the
“boomerang effect.”

Fight the temptation to shout “you’re wrong!” at doubters and then just repeat
your talking points, slower and louder. Instead, try to listen, appreciate the
concerns, and invite them in. Rather than approaching school improvement as a
morality play, approach the act of persuasion as a chance to more fully think
through and explain what you’re doing.

Brooks has known a number of religious missionaries and notes that they
routinely have their core beliefs rejected at doorstep after doorstep and yet
manage to remain remarkably cheerful. (He tells of the missionary who wryly
observed, “No one ever said, ‘Great news: There are missionaries on the
porch.’”). Brooks asks, “What explains this apparent dissonance? The answer is
that effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift.”

Avoid “othering” others. Ensure that those who disagree or have doubts don’t
feel like they’re off the team. If you’re rethinking teacher roles or the use
of school time, don’t force those comfortable with the status quo to see
themselves as outcasts under siege. Watch your language, keep lines of
communication open, and take every opportunity to extend a hand to those who
aren’t on board. One benefit of this approach is that it gives you a chance to
build trust with your opponents, which can make things easier with time.

Don’t take rejection personally (or as final). Hesitance and reluctance are
normal. They’re healthy. If anything, they’re useful warning signs as to where
the community really is. Take them that way. A big mistake education reformers
have habitually made—in so many efforts like No Child Left Behind or the
Common Core—is they ride roughshod over doubts and concerns. Too often, this
yields a “with me or against me” mindset, which turns fence-sitting doubters
into sworn enemies.

And listen more, much more. One of the things I realized when Pedro Noguera
and I wrote our book A Search for Common Ground a few years back is how easy
it is to approach conversation mostly as a chance to convince the listener
that “I’m right.” It struck me that we too rarely appreciate that the
opportunity to listen, by illuminating shared values and perspectives, is what
ultimately helps us persuade. In fact, researchers at Yale and UC Berkeley
have found that deep listening is more powerful than talking when it comes to
changing minds.

One of the great disappointments of my professional life is how frequently
champions of educational change seem to imagine that the way to win hearts and
minds is to vilify their opponents. Yet, all those efforts—on both left and
right—have one thing in common. They haven’t led to much actual change, in
public sentiment or in schools. Perhaps it’s a good time to try a different
tack.

Linda Darling-Hammond Wins International Prize for Education Research

Linda Darling-Hammond—the president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute,
Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University,
and routinely at the top of the leader board in the annual RHSU Edu-Scholar
rankings—has been awarded the 2022 Yidan Prize for Education Research. The
$3.9 million prize, arguably the world’s most prestigious education award,
credited Linda’s scholarship with “reveal[ing] the diverse ways children learn
and how best to teach them—and feed[ing] those insights into robust educator
development programs and transformed schools.” While Linda and I have
disagreed plenty over the years, I’ve great respect for her remarkable
contributions. So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to ask her a few
questions about her work, the award, and the issues of the day.

Linda: Thanks, Rick. I became interested in teacher learning because of my own
experiences as a high school English teacher. I fell into teaching after
college, entering through an alternate-route intern program in Philadelphia
that placed me in a full-time teaching position after just a few weeks of
student-teaching during the summer. While I had taught in an urban
after-school program during college, I quickly realized how underprepared I
was to meet the needs of all my students—including high schoolers who could
not yet read. The professional development I experienced was limited and
unhelpful. While I was enthusiastic and hardworking, and the students liked me
well enough, I could not find the knowledge base for teaching that I was
desperately seeking at that time. When I met some extraordinary teachers and
began to study how they had learned to teach, and conducted research on
teacher preparation at RAND and, later, at Teachers College, Columbia
University, I discovered a deep knowledge base that few teachers could access.
I determined then to work on understanding high-quality preparation for
teachers and figuring out how it could become widespread.

Linda: As you know, there is a deep divide between research and practice and
an even deeper divide between research and policy. That schism became apparent
during the last years of No Child Left Behind, a topic about which you and I
penned a joint op-ed as the law’s implementation became more and more
dysfunctional. As I have engaged in the policy process, I have learned more
about the constraints and considerations policymakers have to take into
account and what it takes to get past infatuation with a single silver bullet
to actually build a thoughtful system of supports and incentives. At the
Learning Policy Institute, my colleagues and I seek to understand how to bring
solid evidence to the policy arena, particularly in ways that are
evidence-based, easy to understand, and practical for policymakers. That is a
huge translation task that requires regular engagement and communication with
respect on both sides.

Linda: In many places, professional development has been designed as a
torturous “sit and get” event where some outsider comes in and talks at tired
teachers, who are meant to simply listen: one of the most ineffective
approaches to learning. Of course, more effective approaches exist. My LPI
colleagues and I screened the literature for high-quality studies that found
professional-development models that changed teacher practice and enabled
student-learning gains. We found that these models had a number of features in
common: They were based in the curriculum content being taught; engaged
teachers in active learning as teachers tried out the practices they would
use; offered models of the practices with lessons, assignments, and coaching;
extended over time (typically at least 50 hours of interaction over a number
of months) with iterative opportunities to try things in the classroom and
continue to refine. In addition, these efforts were almost always accompanied
by in-person or on-line coaching, sometimes using classroom videos as the
grist for those conversations.

Linda: I think a solid group of teacher-preparation programs have been
improving since at least the late 1980s, when the Holmes Group of Deans and
the National Network for Educational Renewal worked with flagship universities
and other committed colleges to design a new model—a coherent, content-rich
program linking students to partner schools demonstrating state-of-the-art
practice for training and engaging candidates in a full year of graduated
responsibility with expert mentors. This supports school and university
improvement at the same time. However, there has been no policy support for
this work for the last 20 years or for the training costs of prospective
teachers, and teacher salaries have declined since the early 1990s. As a
result, the quality of teacher education has grown more variable as shortages
have grown, and many programs have been designed to cut corners to get
teachers into classrooms quickly.

Rick: As the Yidan Prize Foundation noted, you’ve spent a career as a leading
voice for equity. It seems to me that one ensuing challenge is how to ensure
that a healthy concern for equity doesn’t morph into an unhealthy disdain for
the notion of excellence. How do you think about this issue? How do you advise
practitioners and policymakers to proceed on that count?

Linda: I think equity has to be all about excellence: Equity involves getting
all students access to excellent teaching and rigorous, rich, relevant
learning opportunities. It means helping students learn as much as they can,
developing their particular passions and interests, and meeting their needs
along the way. Equity, however, is not about standardization—doing exactly the
same thing with or for all students. We now know from the science of learning
and development that most of human potential is constructed by the
relationships and experiences people have throughout their lives, not assumed
at birth. Given that students come to school with different experiences,
starting points, and ways of learning, the teaching and learning process has
to be personalized to a great extent. Sometimes this may mean expert use of
collaboration and differentiation within the classroom. Sometimes it may mean
intensive tutoring at key moments to help students accelerate their learning.
It may mean after-school and summer school learning opportunities. It should
never mean holding back some students from opportunities in favor of equal
outcomes. Instead, it should always mean leveling up the opportunities to
learn so that we have more accomplished, contributing members of society.

Linda: I would encourage educators and policymakers to use this moment of deep
disruption to reinvent the way we do school: to move beyond the assembly-line
factory model we inherited 100 years ago to new models that are more flexible,
equitable, and successful. Innovators have created many new designs that allow
for more personalized and experiential learning; stronger relationships among
teachers, students, and families; time for teachers to collaborate around
curriculum, teaching, and decision making; and competency-based approaches
that vary time and methods—from high-intensity tutoring to creative uses of
technology—rather than accepting disparate outcomes along a bell curve. To get
to this new future, schools of education should partner with such innovative
schools for training up the teachers and leaders of the future. Policymakers
should remove the constraints and regulations that were designed to prop up
the factory model. They should work to ensure resources are supporting
well-prepared educators who can innovate and make good decisions for children,
rather than trying to micromanage schools themselves.