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Building capacity for instructional practice: the CCII project
Fritz Mosher's abstract for the international seminar "What are the strategic challenges behind the implementation of accountability in education policies?"
Fritz Mosher
Fritz Mosher’s remarks at the INRP Seminar in Lyon May 25/26, 2009 are likely to be based on the forthcoming report from CPRE’s Center on Continuous Instructional Improvement on the concept of “learning progressions” as that concept is being realized in science education. The report expresses CCII’s conviction that standards based reform and assessment- or outcomes-based accountability are unlikely to have their hoped-for effects of leading schools to succeed at ambitious levels with substantially all of their students unless teachers accept the norm that it is their responsibility to gather timely evidence during instruction on whether their students are progressing adequately in their learning and to adapt their instruction to try to meet each of their students’ needs, if they are not so progressing.
Acting on that responsibility in turn requires that teachers have both tools and techniques for gathering this evidence of students’ progress or problems and their own sophisticated understanding of the nature of students’ learning in the subject(s) they are teaching, that would enable them to interpret and respond to the evidence, including a repertoire of tested pedagogical reactions that would be appropriate and effective given what they see in their students’ progress.
So what is required is both a shift in norms, from an approach based on content delivery and student grading to one based on accepting shared responsibility for students’ success or failure, and also the development of much more detailed knowledge of the paths students’ are likely to follow in learning school subjects and skills, along with detailed evidence of the kinds of instructional experiences and pedagogical responses that will keep them moving or get them back on track at any point along those paths. In fact the shift in norms is not likely to occur fully, or to be sustained, unless teachers have the required knowledge and some confidence that their adaptive responses will work.
We think that the knowledge required does not now exist at the level needed to support truly adaptive instruction, perhaps with some exceptions in limited but hopeful segments of student learning. Developing the knowledge further will require sustained and iterative research and design work, and cooperation between practicing teachers, researchers, and designers. We suggest the concept of learning progressions provides a useful way to define the focus of the ongoing empirical work that will be required. If they were well grounded empirically and captured the understanding of the contingent nature of progress over time, what are termed “curriculum frameworks” might serve as well.
We are convinced that policy cannot hope to reach all the way to practice without having its ambitions mediated by the iterative development of knowledge of the kind that the empirical refinement of learning progressions would exemplify. It would be wise policy to support this kind of work and to devise accountability schemes that try modestly to keep in step with what is currently known to be possible, and to grow in ambition in tandem with, or perhaps only a little ahead of, the evidence that the best of what we know how to do within the resources that could be available to schools in fact meets these ambitions.
Fritz Mosher’s remarks at the INRP Seminar in Lyon May 25/26, 2009 are likely to be based on the forthcoming report from CPRE’s Center on Continuous Instructional Improvement on the concept of “learning progressions” as that concept is being realized in science education. The report expresses CCII’s conviction that standards based reform and assessment- or outcomes-based accountability are unlikely to have their hoped-for effects of leading schools to succeed at ambitious levels with substantially all of their students unless teachers accept the norm that it is their responsibility to gather timely evidence during instruction on whether their students are progressing adequately in their learning and to adapt their instruction to try to meet each of their students’ needs, if they are not so progressing.
Acting on that responsibility in turn requires that teachers have both tools and techniques for gathering this evidence of students’ progress or problems and their own sophisticated understanding of the nature of students’ learning in the subject(s) they are teaching, that would enable them to interpret and respond to the evidence, including a repertoire of tested pedagogical reactions that would be appropriate and effective given what they see in their students’ progress.
So what is required is both a shift in norms, from an approach based on content delivery and student grading to one based on accepting shared responsibility for students’ success or failure, and also the development of much more detailed knowledge of the paths students’ are likely to follow in learning school subjects and skills, along with detailed evidence of the kinds of instructional experiences and pedagogical responses that will keep them moving or get them back on track at any point along those paths. In fact the shift in norms is not likely to occur fully, or to be sustained, unless teachers have the required knowledge and some confidence that their adaptive responses will work.
We think that the knowledge required does not now exist at the level needed to support truly adaptive instruction, perhaps with some exceptions in limited but hopeful segments of student learning. Developing the knowledge further will require sustained and iterative research and design work, and cooperation between practicing teachers, researchers, and designers. We suggest the concept of learning progressions provides a useful way to define the focus of the ongoing empirical work that will be required. If they were well grounded empirically and captured the understanding of the contingent nature of progress over time, what are termed “curriculum frameworks” might serve as well.
We are convinced that policy cannot hope to reach all the way to practice without having its ambitions mediated by the iterative development of knowledge of the kind that the empirical refinement of learning progressions would exemplify. It would be wise policy to support this kind of work and to devise accountability schemes that try modestly to keep in step with what is currently known to be possible, and to grow in ambition in tandem with, or perhaps only a little ahead of, the evidence that the best of what we know how to do within the resources that could be available to schools in fact meets these ambitions.
