Resistances in School/Community Co-constructed School Reform: Scaling Up from Research to Practice in a Native American Community

Final Report Executive Summary Principal Investigator: Roland G. Tharp – University of California, Santa Cruz Principal Researchers: Marilyn Feathers – Zuni Middle School Georgia Epaloose – Zuni Public School District Penny Bird – Zuni Public School District R. Soleste Hilberg – University of California, Santa Cruz Hector Rivera – University of California, Santa Cruz Major Research Questions The primary questions that guided project research were: • Is higher performance of the Standards for Effective Pedagogy associated with greater student achievement? • What are the primary obstacles to education reform in resistant schools, and the conditions necessary for overcoming them? Major Goals The goals of our work, in addition to examining our research questions, have been to: • assist the Zuni Public School District achieve school reform to make education appropriate and effective for Zuni students and responsive to the goals and values of the Zuni community; • document the journey of the Zuni Public School District toward school reform, for the benefit of other Native American communities with similar goals; • facilitate opportunities for Zuni Community Involvement; • and extend our research and development of the Standards for Effective Pedagogy. Assistance Our objective in assisting district reform efforts was to tailor the focus and forms of our assistance to the evolving needs, requests, and conditions within the district. Therefore, our assistance, focused on reforming classroom teaching, took many forms, such as the formalization of a teacher professional development portfolio system of accountability; and professional development on: (a) Effective Teaching Strategies for Native American students, (b) student portfolios, (c) student assessment, and (d) Activity Centers. In our final year, we completed two resources to assist future district professional development: Culturally Compatible Teaching for the Zuni Community, a teacher training video on effective Teaching for Native American students; and "Activity Centers" Handbook: A Guide for Teachers at ALL Levels and for ALL Subject Areas, a teacher guide to effective teaching strategies and classroom organization. Documentation During the second year of this project, district reform efforts encountered strong resistance from teachers and some building principals, ranging from disinterest and noncompliance with district requests, to complaints to the teachers' union and threatened lawsuits. Thus, an added focus of our study became the documentation of the dynamics of schools whose personnel resist reform initiated by their communities. Two of our project publications document the experience and insights gained: "Seven More Mountains and a Map: Overcoming Obstacles for Reform in Native America;" and "In Sight of Home: School Reform in a Native American Community." Community Involvement Our stance, since the origin of this project, is successful education reform requires the authentic involvement of parents and community members to achieve reforms consistent with the values and goals of the local community. Authentic community involvement in education can be the single most critical factor for achieving school reform anywhere. Authentic involvement means including community members fully, with equal voice with teachers and administrators, in decision-making regarding curriculum, pedagogy, and administration, and involves the building of mutual respect, self-respect, mutual influence, and shared goals and visions. For a variety of reasons, many of which are articulated in our paper, "Seven More Mountains and a Map," Zuni families have no reliable way of influencing their schools. We therefore worked with the district, community, and tribal council to create opportunities for authentic parent and community involvement, initially through focus groups and the inclusion of parents, community members, parent and grandparent mentors in our inservices and institutes on Standards for Effective Pedagogy, and then through our collaborative community survey. Community survey. The Zuni school leadership consistently asserted that their goals for school reform had the support of the Zuni community. Resistant teachers and administrators contested this claim, typically maintaining that the parents they talk to want their children to learn standard academics, that the teachers, not the parents and elders, know how to teach that subject matter, and furthermore, most Zunis don't care and have little interest in schooling anyway. The Zuni community survey was developed so that Zuni opinions, beliefs and values about education could be examined, documented, and presented to local educators. The development of the survey was a collaborative effort between the Zuni Public School District, the Zuni Tribal Council, and CREDE. The survey became a means to articulate the desires of the Zuni community regarding local education reform efforts and their expectations for the schools. Findings from the survey (Rivera et al., 2001) are summarized below. The survey: reiterated the goals and objectives of the community for the education of Zuni children as outlined in the original charter of the Zuni Public School District; provided valuable information that reassures the community that the teaching strategies proposed in reforms are compatible with community values, beliefs, and every day activities; and provided validation and support for the Zuni bilingual immersion program. Survey findings provided a foundation for an informed course of action to counteract school resistance to change, corroborated that school reform efforts in curriculum, classroom instruction, and bilingual education are compatible with the goals established by the community 20 years ago, and verified that those goals still comprise a reliable consensus among community members regardless of age or gender. The information from this community survey has and will continue to serve the local government, the community, the school district and each school by providing vital data to forward the development of curriculum, school/community relations, bilingual education, and teachers' professional expertise. The survey will also contribute valuable information for other community programs. Standards for Effective Pedagogy One of this project's two primary research areas was the relationship between teachers' use of the Standards for Effective Pedagogy and student achievement. To facilitate such analyses, a quantitative classroom observation instrument was developed, the Standards Performance Continuum (SPC), to obtain objective data on teachers' use of the standards. The SPC demonstrated good to excellent reliability, with a Spearman's Rank-Order coefficient of .96. The development and validity study on the SPC will be published as a chapter in a CREDE book on classroom observation measures (Hilberg, Doherty, Epaloose & Tharp, in press). In the second year of this project, our researchers collaborated with a middle school teacher in a quasi-experimental classroom study to determine the effects of the CREDE instructional model in eighth grade mathematics classes. That study demonstrated that students taught with the CREDE instructional model, incorporating the Standards for Effective Pedagogy: (a) learned more mathematics, (b) retained more of what they learned, and (c) demonstrated greater improvement in attitudes towards mathematics than students in control classes receiving more traditional instruction. A paper on this study appeared in Equity and Excellence in Education (Hilberg, Tharp & DeGeest, 2000). In project year four, systematic SPC data were obtained through both live and videotaped observations to examine in relationship to student achievement. Data on teaching performance consisted of three to five live observations per teacher, and four to nine videotaped observations per teacher. This analysis used students' normal curve equivalent (NCE) scores on end-of-year standardized tests (CTBS) in five subject areas: mathematics, science, social studies, language arts and reading. Because students' language arts and reading performance were attributed to the same teacher, these two scores were collapsed into a single score (language arts/reading). Results obtained in these analyses provide modest support for the value of teachers' use of CREDE's standards: SPC scores were positively associated with achievement gains in language arts/reading and science. Though a teacher or school can account for only 10 to 20% of variation in student achievement (Soar, 1980), inspection of the beta weights of SPC scores revealed a potentially powerful effect on student learning. An increase of 2.94 NCE points in science scores could be predicted from an increase in science teachers' SPC scores of .82 (one standard deviation); for language arts and reading, an increase in students' language arts/reading scores of .92 NCE points could be predicted by an increase in teachers' SPC scores of 1.17. Thus, very small changes in teacher performance as defined by the SPC could have profound effects on student achievement. Though the findings from this study was constrained by a narrow, low-to-moderate range of teacher SPC scores, we are optimistic about the gains students might make when skilled, knowledgeable teachers make effective use of the standards.