1/ The TOE for Education

Is there one unified theory for education? In short - no. However, research has coalesced around a few key ideas that must be present in all successful schools. We outline those three key concepts:

Think of it in terms of an equation.

Great schools = staff with high expectations + learning tasks (curriculum) that require deep thinking, writing, defending, and exploration of knowledge + teachers capable of motivating and engaging students to engage in those tasks for the maximum amount of time possible (instruction).

Great Schools = Expectations + Curriculum + Instruction

This is based on a few different axioms.

• Students learn what we teach them.

• Adult expectations play a critical role in what kind and how much learning occurs each minute.

• Great instruction has a huge influence on students’ time on task.

• The more challenging a task students are engaged in, the deeper the learning. There are, of course, limits to this.

Fundamentally, what you should be seeking to achieve is maximizing the amount of time students are engaged in deep, meaningful, relevant, and rigorous learning tasks.

To achieve this you need a staff with insanely high expectations for students and a belief that their (the staff’s) actions make a difference; a great curriculum to ensure the learning tasks are deep, meaningful, relevant, and rigorous; and strong instruction to engage and motivate students. Yes, part of great teaching is motivating students. If your attitude is, “I teach it, it’s their job to learn it.” You can’t work at my school.

Over the next three weeks, we will deep dive into each concept in our Theory of Everything (for education) and provide actionable tips and strategies for you to use when bringing these systems to life. Today, a brief overview of each. Keep reading!

2/ Collective Efficacy

Collective Efficacy is a concept, but we will also use it as the basis to unify all our systems. You can think of it as the space-time of our unified theory. All of the systems we will develop will function, in part, to build collective efficacy, and building collective efficacy will be a purposeful function of each of the systems.

So, what is it? In her authoritative book (linked below) Jenni Donohoo quotes Tschannen-Moran & Barr to define it: “collective self-perception that teachers in a given school make an educational difference to their students over and above the educational impact of their homes and communities.”

Achieving collective teacher efficacy, according to Hattie’s meta-analysis of 26 studies, has one of the greatest impacts on student learning of anything his team studied with an effect size of 1.57.

So, how do you achieve collective teacher efficacy? Just give great motivational speeches, right? Nah, Donohoo notes there are four primary ways to increase collective efficacy.

1. mastery experiences - your staff implemented a change idea and achieved the desired results

2. vicarious experiences - your staff saw someone else accomplish something that achieved the desired results

3. social persuasion - your staff heard about something that would help them achieve desired results from someone they believe and trust

4. affective states - your staff is excited about a change idea and is willing to give it their best shot

3/ HQIM

At their core high-quality instructional materials are meant to be leveraged to ensure students are spending their time in school engaged in deep, meaningful, relevant, and rigorous tasks. The more time they spend on tasks that meet this description, the more they learn.

The education world has toyed with fads that have changed the curriculum landscape dramatically. There were times when every school in the country it seemed had boring basal readers and lame textbooks, then we spent some time completely ditching textbooks, more recently there have been fads (that’s right, I said it, FADS) promoting the use of project-based or STEM-based approaches that in theory aren’t a bad thing, but as implemented, failed to get results.

Much more to come, but here’s what you need to know now.

• We don’t give teachers enough prep time to create great curriculum resources.

• Teacher-created resources distributed on websites like Teachers Pay Teachers don’t meet the bar.

• When students are engaged with grade-appropriate assignments, they learn significantly more.

• The most efficient route to great learning is by adopting great curriculum.

4/ Great Instruction

Remember the moment in the education world when we thought having great teacher evaluation rubrics was going to solve everything? It was shortly after NCLB was passed and many states adopted new laws requiring new evaluation rubrics. The sentiment wasn’t terrible but focusing on instruction alone is pretty pointless…as we all learned.

If you’re a school leader you probably have an idea what great instruction is, but have you ever really tried to define it concretely? Here’s my attempt. A great teacher should be able to accomplish the following things:

• The classroom culture is such that students are eager and able to learn.

• The content is on grade level, relevant, meaningful, and engaging. Yeah, I know, this is in the HQIM bucket, but teachers make a thousand microdecisions each lesson that has an impact on what students are doing and thinking.

• The teacher should purposefully and regularly check for understanding.

• To the greatest extent possible, students should own the work.

My last word on instruction is this: direct instruction works. It’s time for direct instruction to have the moment that the science of reading is having. I’ll expand on this much more deeply, including instructional models (the gradual release method among those) that fit within direct instruction. But direct instruction works and it works more efficiently than any other approach. If you care about doing what works, make sure direct instruction is at the core of your instructional practices.