Summit 2015
Tenth Annual Summit on Evidence-based Education
Effective School Leadership: A Cornerstone for Improving Student Performance
April 23-24, 2015
Berkeley, California
ANNOTATED SUMMIT AGENDA
THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2015
| Establishing a Context | |
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| Randy Keyworth, The Wing Institute | |
| Keyworth provided an introduction to the Wing Institute and its Annual Evidence-based Education Summit model, including: the process, participants, sequence, and outcomes. He then established a context for the Summit's topic: effective school leadership. Specifically, he identified seven obstacles that must be overcome to build effective school leadership: 1) Inertia: despite 15 years of aggressive school reform initiatives at the federal level and the investment of significant resources, student performance has not improved. 2) Inequity: there are inequities in the system in terms of resources, services and outcomes for children from low-income families and color. 3) Politics: there is increasing politicization and privatization of education. 4) Culture: the professional and public communities have very different views on education issues and solutions. 5) Preparation: teachers and school leaders do not receive adequate training and practice before entering their positions. 6) Turnover: There is significant job turnover in the teacher, principal, and superintendent professions. 7) Sustainability: the education system has an extremely poor track record of implanting evidence-based practices effectively over time. | |
| Striving for Calm: Federal Directions in Education. The End of Reform? | |
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| Sam Redding, Ph.D. Executive Director of the Academic Development Institute and Director of the Center on Innovation & Improvement. | |
| Redding provided an update on the potential reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and how it might impact the education reform agenda, including: testing, evaluation, accountability, Common Core, charter schools, local control, and early learning. He highlighted a "perfect storm" that was sweeping the debate, including: political opposition to Common Core, parent group opposition to "testing", teacher opposition to evaluation based on student performance, state resentment of federal pressures in Race to the Top and ESEA flexibility, shrinking local budgets and big federal stimulus spending, punitive accountability regimes, and waves of reforms. He then discussed the likely changes in the current law that would be part of its reauthorization. | |
| Saying/Doing, Implementation Science, Systems Design, and Leadership | |
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| Ronnie Detrich, The Wing Institute | |
| Detrich's presentation examined the links between implementation science, systems design, and leadership. The history of education reform is filled with initiatives that were never fully implemented. Many of the failures were the result from a poor understanding of what is necessary to effectively implement an initiative and the essential role leadership plays in getting things done. While most initiatives target what happens in classrooms much more is required of the overall educational system if the initiative is to succeed. If we are to see benefit from initiatives, it is necessary that they be implemented with sufficient integrity to actually have an effect. We have learned that implementation does not occur explicit efforts. Implementing any initiative will require participation of all levels of an educational system. To the extent that any level of the system is not involved with implementation the probability of success is diminished. In a system as complex as the educational system effective leadership is required to get everyone on board and keep them on board. There are specific classes of behavior that leaders engage in that result in positive outcomes. |
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| Principals: What Makes an Effective Principal | |
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| Jack States, The Wing Institute | |
| States' presentation examined our knowledge base on principals as agents of change in improving the performance of both teachers and students. Research over the past 20 years reveals that principals come in second behind teachers when it comes to importance for improving student achievement. The increasing pressure placed on educators to show demonstrable improvement in test scores arising from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and initiatives such as President's Blueprint for Reform and Race to the Top has led many stakeholders to hold principals directly responsible for both teacher performance and student outcomes. If we are to hold principals accountable it is then essential that we understand what roles and activities actually make a difference in achieving success. This paper will identify those behaviors that have been shown through rigorous research to be directly related to improving teaching skills and student academic achievement. Unless we provide principals with the correct skills and tools, we place them in an untenable position unable to perform as required in meeting expectations failing the public, teachers, and most importantly students. | |
| The Current state of Principal Preparation, Evaluation, and Support | |
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| Randy Keyworth, The Wing Institute | |
| Keyworth reviewed data, and absence of data, on the process and effectiveness of principal preparation evaluation and support. The challenge of developing school principals is enormous due the scale of need and increasing sophistication of demands on the position. In SY 2012-13, there were 114,330 school principals in public and private K-12 schools with a 12% turnover rate resulting in 13,160 new principals each year. In the remaining workforce, 42% have less than three years experience and 69% five years or less. At the same time, the scope, complexity, and importance of principal responsibilities is daunting, and growing more challenging each year. To meet this challenge, there must be an evidence-based system that effectively prepares, evaluates and supports principals on an ongoing basis. Research suggests that such a system would have the following components: targeted recruitment and selection of principal candidates, evidence-based curriculum content well-trained instructors, effective and systematic coaching in real-world settings, established and measurable standards for completion, and ongoing (on-the-job) feedback and support. | |
| Implementation Science Supports for Instructional Leaders | |
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| David Forbush, Ph.D, Associate Director for the Center for Technical Assistance for Excellence in Special Education (TAESE) | |
| Forbush provided an overview of school leadership training offered by The Utah Professional Development Network (UPDN), which is delivering a three-course implementation science offering (i.e., Foundations of Implementation Science; Advanced Implementation Science; Implementation Science Applications). UDPN staff offers Utah's instructional leaders 12 live, interactive web-based sessions. Collectively, the courses move from concepts, principles and theory to applications in implementing evidence-based practices (EBPs). The courses are the collaborative effort of the Utah State Office of Education, the UPDN, and the Utah Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Team. The overarching objective is increasing Utah instructional leaders' knowledge, skills, and effectiveness in institutionalizing EBPs in school settings, and to good effect for all students. At the close of the final course, participants will join a 1x a month V-CoP (i.e., virtual community of practice) to keep discussions going, problem solving active, and continue offering technical assistance. |
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| Principal Leadership and Why It Matters | |
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| Brian McNulty, Ph.D., Partner at Creative Leadership Solutions | |
| McNulty outlined what we know from both the research and the field in terms of principal leadership. Within the last 5 years or so there has been a significant amount of high quality research on principal leadership actions that positively impact student performance. While these practices are easy to understand, helping principals implement this work has been more of a challenge. This session will address both research and implementation challenges. The presenter will also talk about an eight-year statewide continuous improvement and collaborative inquiry project that he has been deeply involved in. | |
| Work Group I | |
| (activity) | |
| The work groups had two assignments related to the previous presentation. The first was to process the information and, as a group, generate follow-up questions for Q&A with the speaker. After Q&A, the groups reconvened to identify further questions, observations, issues, and recommendations regarding the topics presented. | |
FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015
| A Research-Informed Design for Preparing Principals: What We Could Do Differently and Why It Might Work | |
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| Tom Bellamy, Ph.D., is a Professor of Education and Founding Director of the Goodlad Institute at the University of Washington Bothell | |
| Bellamy's presentation: (1) explored what might be gained through an alternative principal development program that is imbedded in the work of teacher leadership; (2) proposed a set of critical features that existing research and practice suggests could make such an approach effective and scalable; (3) outlined a possible approach to development and testing. The goal was to to simulate discussion of alternative approaches that combine the development of shared leadership and individual leaders as schools pursue their learning-improvement agendas. A secondary aim is to gain participants' insights about how such an approach might best be developed and tested in today's policy and funding environment. | |
| Work Group II | |
| (activity) | |
| The work groups had two assignments related to the previous presentation. The first was to process the information and, as a group, generate follow-up questions for Q&A with the speaker. After Q&A, the groups reconvened to identify further questions, observations, issues, and recommendations regarding the topics presented. | |
| If We Want More Evidence-based Practice, We Need More Practice-based Evidence | |
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| Bryan Cook, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Special Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa | |
| Cook discussed the importance of using practice-based evidence in conjunction with evidence-based practice. Evidence-based reforms tend to emphasize rigor (e.g., evidence from internally valid studies using designs that reasonably establish causality) rather than relevance (e.g., external validity, feasibility of implementation) of evidence. However, practitioners and other stakeholders often prioritize relevance when making instructional decisions. Practice-based evidence, drawn directly from the world of practice, represents an alternative paradigm to determining what works. Although less rigorous than evidence-based practices, practice-based evidence is highly relevant and may hold considerable promise for influencing practice. In this brief presentation, I will introduce the concept of practice-based evidence, discuss strengths and weaknesses of different types of practice-based evidence, and propose that practice-based evidence be used to complement rather than compete with evidence-based practice. | |
| PBIS Leadership: Arranging Opportunities for Successful Implementation | |
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| George Sugai, Ph.D., Professor at the University of Connecticut, Neag School of Education; Co-director the National Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports | |
| Sugai provided an overview of the impact of school leadership and contributing factors on student learning. He discussed a distributed leadership model, leadership dimensions, and issues with implementing and sustaining these models including: common language, common experience, and common vision/values. He provided a detailed analysis of how the Positive Behavior Intervention Support Model addresses these issues. | |
| Installing Tier 2/3 Behavior Supports in Schools: The Principal's Role | |
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| Lucille Eber, Ed.D., Director of the Midwest PBIS Network | |
| Eber's presentation described the development, content and delivery of a professional development course for Principals regarding their role in multi-tiered systems of school-wide positive behavior supports (SWPBS), with specific focus on higher level behavior supports. This course for Administrators, which grew out of experiences with a federally funded "Tier 3 PBIS Demonstration Project" (2007-2011), focuses on the role of the building principal to support the installation of the systems and practices needed to ensure effective supports for students with complex behavior needs. This includes establishing structures and procedures for screening and progress monitoring of interventions, repositioning staff time to systems and data functions, and to ensure adequate practice and feedback for staff learning to deliver complex behavior interventions. | |
| Work Group III | |
| (activity) | |
| The work groups had two assignments related to the previous presentation. The first was to process the information and, as a group, generate follow-up questions for Q&A with the speaker. After Q&A, the groups reconvened to identify further questions, observations, issues, and recommendations regarding the topics presented. | |
| Struggling Toward a Behavioral Consideration of Culture | |
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| Susan Wilczynski, Ph.D, BCBA-D, Professor of Special Education and Applied Behavior Analysis at Ball State University | |
| The concept of "culture" is a critical element for explaining and understanding human behavior in all of the behavioral sciences except ABA. Culture is not inconsistent with ABA. In fact, by considering culture in behavior analytic terms, we may provide a framework for graduate students and beginning behavior analysts to better understand how treatment acceptability and treatment fidelity can be improved. We have generated two distinct models for conceptualizing culture and ABA Our goal is to obtain feedback on model that is most likely to be accepted and adopted by the field of ABA. | |