But however noble the motivations, fragmentation is associated with significantly lower levels of student learning. Indeed, schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families, students learning English, and special education students are the least likely to have high levels of focus (Reeves, 2011b). In our studies of more than two thousand schools, those with six or fewer initiatives have the greatest gains in student achievement (Reeves, 2011b).
We are aware that the danger of focus is FOMO—fear of missing out. If a neighboring district has a new initiative and you don’t, then you think that you might fall behind. This logic undermines deep implementation of initiatives. We have seen this many times in schools as they journey to become PLCs.
Leverage
Archimedes (n.d.) said, “Give me a place to stand on and with a lever I will move the whole world.” He was right, as any high school physics student can tell you. It would require a very, very long lever to move the mass of the earth (though probably not any longer than the lever required to move schools and classrooms). Educational leaders face a bewildering array of strategies that claim to work—that is, practices that influence student achievement. But this “What works?” approach to making choices is ultimately futile because, as John Hattie (2009) has joked, anything with a pulse works. The more insightful question to ask is, “What works best; what has the most leverage?” Leaders need to make the distinction between the much-vaunted standard of statistical significance and the more important standard of practical significance, or what in medicine is called clinical significance. Although marketing literature overflows with claims of statistical significance, usually followed by multiple exclamation points, statistical significance is actually a very low bar. A difference in student achievement of only a few percentage points may be statistically significant—that is, the difference between the control group and the experimental group is unlikely due to random variation. In general, the larger the sample size, the easier it is to establish statistical significance, even if that difference is very small.
The more relevant question for educational leaders and teachers to ask is: “Does this proposal have practical significance—does it have so great an impact that we should stop doing other things in order to start doing this new initiative?” Most educational systems adopt initiatives one on top of another—the additive mode. But the principle of leverage suggests that you can’t move the earth while you are also attempting to move every other planet. In order to move the educational planet, leaders must stop attempting to move everything else in the solar system and focus on those elements of leverage that have the greatest potential for student gains.
So, what are the leverage points in education? Our research suggests three central points of leverage. The first leverage point is the comprehensive use of PLCs as the central organizing principle for every school. In a review of 196 schools including more than a quarter million students (Reeves, 2016b), we find that when schools implement PLCs at Work® with depth and duration, significant student achievement gains in reading, mathematics, and science occur. The longer the implementation, the greater the gains. This clearly distinguishes the schools that go to a conference, gain superficial buy-in, declare victory, and move on from those that have long-term commitments to PLCs. The greatest gains happen in those schools that, year after year, maintain a laser-like focus on successful and deep PLC implementation. With each additional year after initial implementation, achievement gains grow, from three to five to seven to ten years (Reeves, 2010). This dogged persistence and focus prevents schools from yielding to the siren call of the latest fad and helps them remain committed to the collaborative processes that matter most for student results.
Feedback
Feedback is the second leverage point. Of all the tools that teachers and leaders have available to influence student achievement, effective feedback has some of the greatest impact on student results. No matter how good the curriculum, data analysis, projects, or other elements of instruction that schools use, all of these have little value without effective feedback. Indeed, we have argued that many tests masquerading as formative assessments are better described as uninformative assessments (Reeves, 2011b). Even the most sophisticated assessments are useless unless teachers use the results to inform teaching and learning. The most elegant curriculum is valueless if educators merely deliver it and do not accompany it with effective feedback on the degree to which students are learning it.
The acronym FAST summarizes the four elements of effective feedback: (1) fair, (2) accurate, (3) specific, and (4) timely (Reeves, 2016a). You can identify feedback you have received—from, say, a great coach or music director—that energized or encouraged you. Similarly, you can think of times when you received demoralizing and inconsequential feedback. Imagine that during your anniversary dinner, your spouse announces, “Honey, it’s time for your annual performance review. Here are some areas where you have exceeded my expectations, and here are some developmental opportunities.” If that example makes you cringe, then so should the vast majority of educational feedback systems, which provide vague, inconsistent information to students, teachers, and leaders, and deliver it long after anyone can do anything about it.
The greatest potential for leaders to improve feedback and achieve great short-term, 100-day goals lies in two areas: (1) how leaders provide feedback to teachers and (2) how teachers provide feedback to students. Most teacher evaluation systems are the opposite of FAST; they are unfair (different administrators evaluate the same performance differently), they are inaccurate (observation rubrics are ambiguous and student learning scores are widely inaccurate), they are ambiguous (teachers do not routinely get specific feedback to improve performance), and they are late (end-of-year observations are toxic and demoralizing).
Similarly, the way that teachers grade students’ work violates every element of the FAST framework. Fairness is all about consistency, and our research reveals that the same student could receive grades of A, B, C, D, or F for identical performance, based on differences in teachers’ idiosyncratic grading systems (Reeves, 2015). Grades are notoriously inaccurate because the grade may reflect not the student’s proficiency in the subject being graded, but a host of other factors, ranging from parental support to literacy. Grades are rarely specific, as four students could receive a grade of C for entirely different reasons, such as proficiency, attitude, participation, and parental advocacy. And grades are rarely timely—the first sign of trouble is a low mark at the end of the semester when, in fact, schools know within the first two weeks of the semester whether students are in danger of failure. We have seen schools that have elaborate and sophisticated data warehouses and the information they need to identify and intervene for students who are at grave risk of failure, but they fail to transform this information into decisive leadership actions. It is as if the students are patients who submit to an expensive and detailed diagnostic procedure that yields important information for life-saving treatment but the hospital sends them home without a treatment plan or a word from the physician.
In sum, even though leaders know that feedback is a critical ingredient of success, they often squander this essential resource, and the feedback to teachers and students fails to meet the essential requirements of effectiveness.
The third leverage point is nonfiction writing. When students write to describe, compare, evaluate, or persuade, they engage their critical-thinking faculties and build literacy skills. Our research concludes that nonfiction writing is associated not only with improved composition skills but also with improvements in reading comprehension, mathematics, science, and social studies (Reeves, 2002). Our research in successful high-poverty schools reveals the profound impact of nonfiction writing. In low-performing schools, the vast majority of student writing was fiction, fantasy, poetry, or personal narrative. In high-performing schools with similar demographic characteristics, there was a much more balanced approach in student writing, including expository, persuasive, and descriptive writing (Reeves, in press).
Change
