From the principal's desk, a slow burn
How one principal got his elementary school on board with the science of learning
Welcome back to The Bell Ringer and our “how to understand” journalism focused on the science of learning. If you love what you’re reading and find it valuable, consider becoming a paying member and receive The Novice Issue coming in April—an entire issue dedicated to research, interviews and analysis of what it means to be a rookie learner in school.
Over the last decade, principal Jason Smith* has trained and guided the staff at his Midwest elementary school in the principles of the science of learning. The changes have helped students make impressive gains compared to their peers.
“At the elementary level, we do explicit, direct instruction,” in all subjects, Smith said. While the rest of his district is focused on project-based learning, he has doubled down on evidence-based techniques, and has seen his students’ state test scores rise by 18 points.
Smith says he didn’t wake up one morning and say, “We are a science of learning school now.” It was more of a process—reading books, sharing research with staff, and providing professional development to dive deeply into certain researched principles of teaching and learning.
On methods that weren’t working for kids, “we turned it around and changed course,” Smith said.
The Bell Ringer spoke with Smith about how he got interested in the science of learning, and how over time he persuaded his staff to join him. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
* Jason Smith is a pseudonym, granted at the principal’s request to enable him to speak more freely about his experiences.
The Bell Ringer: How did you first learn about the principles of the science of learning? Did your non-traditional route to becoming a school principal have something to do with it?
Jason Smith: Absolutely. I went into school psychology, and it didn't give me any superpowers, but it did give me training that really focused on the science of learning—what comprises a curriculum, and how we approach it through a mastery lens rather than this never-ending, loose spiral.
My graduate program was my introduction, from really smart people about explicit, clear instruction, and how to build these steps [for students]. I learned how to provide enough repetition for students to get to mastery, how to put specific error correction procedures in place. I just assumed this is what school must be, right? But coming into the school system, I was not seeing what I learned in my graduate program.
But I had a new job to learn, myself. I did my school psych thing for a couple years before I was opening my mouth a little louder. I was able to help from the edges. And then the opportunity arose for me to apply for the principal job.
The Bell Ringer: Many teachers who go through the traditional training route come out with a totally different understanding of learning. It’s changing a bit now with the science of reading movement, but maybe when you're a school psychologist, and you’re commonly working with kids for whom learning is harder, you learn this other way of teaching that ends up helping everybody.
JS: Are you familiar with Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg? His chapter 11 hits the nail on the head. He explains the massive disconnect between schools of education and schools of educational psychology. One side does not talk to the other. But to your point, school psychologists and special education teachers, what they are exposed to is much more research-based. And the average teacher coming out of a teacher ed program just never hears that stuff. And I think it's one of the biggest correctable problems in all of education: why don't we teach educators about the research?
The Bell Ringer: Before we get into how you built a foundation in the science of learning, let’s define our terms: what do you mean when you say you’re a ‘science of learning school’?
JS: Well first—if you were to put a microphone in front of the average teacher’s face, they wouldn't say, “We're a science or learning school.” They’d probably say, “What are you talking about?” We just do it. It wasn't an adoption, it wasn't a program. It was just every moment, around every corner there was new territory to claim related to evidence-based teaching practices.
It really comes down to cognitive science, and what we know works for securing skills, regardless of content area. And that's rooted partly in behavior, partly in cognitive science and partly in academics, and it touches everything.
Here’s an example: a few years ago, you could catch me on a professional development day talking to teachers about the forgetting curve, the rate at which we forget information. And so if we know about the forgetting curve, then what will this mean regarding our curriculum? What does this mean regarding assessment?
(In an email, Smith described all the science of learning principles that form the foundation for learning at his school. He’s listed them below)
Minimal distraction, to avoid cognitive overload. Extra noise, visuals, interruptions, kids juggling too many materials, etc, steals from the intended learning.
Lots of opportunities to respond to the instruction—frequent questions/prompts to students, in a variety of formats, so that they can practice newly delivered content. Staff aims for anywhere between 4-9 opportunities to respond per minute. This depends on the manner in which responses are taking place, because some take longer than others (long division, writing an essay, thumbs up, spell a word, etc.).
Informal review of prior material: In the opportunities to respond, it should be clear that some of the content is from a week ago, a month ago, or from the beginning of the year, etc. This is because of the forgetting curve.
Cumulative assessments: Bringing back prior material in cumulative math assessments, or a couple of spelling or vocabulary words from 2 months ago that are back in this week's lineup.
Interventions to help struggling students occur in addition to core content, not in place of it. A student should not be pulled for math help during the same time he is receiving core math instruction.
Heavy emphasis on vocabulary and background knowledge, not as an "add on" but as essential to student learning.
Explicit and direct instruction, with examples and non-examples, demonstration of the content in successive steps, with the teacher demonstrating the skill first (I-do), then multiple repetitions of teacher and students going through the skill together (we-do), and then numerous practice problems where the students do it themselves (you-do), with teachers providing positive and corrective feedback.
The Bell Ringer: How did you introduce the concepts to teachers who weren’t familiar? What did you focus on?
JS: We were a reading workshop/balanced literacy/writing workshop school and our scores were in the toilet. I have some graphs where I compare schools like us across our state who have the same percentage of free and reduced lunch students, about 50%. When I took over 10 years ago, we were 20 percentage points below our peers. And now we are 18 percentage points above where we started, and 6 points above our comparison peers, because their scores decreased.
When I took over, our school did not have any element of science of learning, the science of reading. Absolutely none. So at first it was a year of just observing and thinking—I was brand new as a principal! But by the end of spring in my first year, I had good rapport with teachers, I started working with them on Tier II intervention (small group instruction for struggling learners). We were trying to get away from the workshop model, and we adopted an online reading program called Lexia. It has not been a savior, but it's been helpful. It helped teachers see things that they didn't know. Just by watching over students’ shoulders, teachers began to say—”Oh, that's nowhere in our curriculum.”
It started a conversation that was probably the very first spark. It was an easy inroad, and that initial success for students, that initial moment where teachers said, “Oh crud, we were missing something,” that was the first domino. And each domino after that became a lot easier.
The Bell Ringer: Have others in your district taken notice of your success and what you’re doing?
JS: No. Even though we're getting better and better data. I'm reaching out to other schools across the state. I’m emailing them, calling them on the phone, saying, “Let's talk.” Because isn't that the point? To do well, to improve learning?
But it's the hardest work. My assistant principal and I always say—if it weren't for supporting teachers, student behavior problems, and trying to improve student learning, our jobs wouldn't be that hard! Trying to improve student learning, that's the hard stuff, you have to know what you're doing, and the trick is sticking with it for the long haul. Change is slow, it's hard and there's always something else out there that's shiny, that comes with all these promises. But the real work, the hardest work, is learning and figuring stuff out, and understanding research and all that.
The Bell Ringer: How have students fared under the changes?
JS: What we're seeing in the data is that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ Naysayers often say this work is only for the most struggling learners. With our commitment to the science of learning, we are seeing a steady increase that goes up and to the right for everybody, with more kids reaching advanced levels on our state assessment. As our overall data goes up and to the right, our “proficient” levels go up and to the right, and our “advanced” levels go up and to the right. And so it's just simply not true that this is only for the most struggling learners, and that we need something better or more enriching or more application-based for those who are at grade-level. That's what we've noticed.
The Bell Ringer: Do you have advice for other principals?
JS: There's no single book you're going to pick up to tell you, here are steps A through Z. It has to become your way of life, for years and years. This is my 10th year, and I can't wait for what I might know 10 years from now, and how I can grow from knowing research to winning at it in classrooms, and across the entire building.
Also: join a community. I think it's so necessary. Become part of a group that’s sharing out books and research, sharing out trainings to go to, sharing ‘here's how we got this concept into our master schedule.’ ‘Here's how we got that concept into teacher evaluations.’ ‘Here's how we got that concept into the protocol we use for walkthroughs and professional development.’ It's a journey.
This was really interesting, and kudos to "Jason Smith" for undertaking this work. I do find it dismaying, though, that he felt he needed anonymity to speak freely. I'm not blaming him, but while it's great to know about the work being done at this school somewhere in the Midwest, it would be even better to know its name so that interested people could find out more and perhaps even visit the school to see a science-informed teaching approach in action.
I'd also love to know what elementary curriculum the school is using. We're told that they used to use a "reading workshop/balanced literacy/writing workshop" approach, which didn't work well, but we're not told what replaced it. From what I've seen, a content-rich curriculum is not a guarantee that instruction will align with the principles of cognitive science, but you do need that kind of curriculum in order to then apply the principles. And it generally doesn't work well to rely on teachers to supply the content themselves.
Enjoyed the interview. Props to "JS." This was interesting: "Have others in your district taken notice of your success and what you’re doing?" / No.
Wild guess: District people noticed. They didn't like those outlier results. The Jason Smith story is the Jaime Escalante story is the Rafe Esquith story is the Lorraine Monroe story. All of them had to build community *outside* their districts.