Great Teaching Can’t Compensate for a Broken System

I used to believe that knowledgeable and skilled teachers would be the solution to low literacy rates. In training sessions for teachers, I often displayed a quote from Maya Angelou:

 “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

I aimed to give teachers the professional development that I wished I had received. I had no idea how unfair it is to assume that teachers can get better results while working within a system that doesn’t support us.

Knowing Better Isn’t Enough

An example:

Despite learning about the problems with predictable books, primary grade teachers in my Community of Practice were keeping leveled books in their classrooms. At first, I assumed that they needed more training about how to teach decoding and why the F&P leveling system was problematic.

But soon I realized the problem wasn’t the teachers — not their knowledge and not their skill.

Teachers were keeping predictable books in their classrooms because:

• Removing leveled libraries felt wasteful and their schools had limited resources.
• They imagined they might have to bring the materials back if “the pendulum” of reading instruction swung the other way.
• They didn’t have replacement books for students to enjoy during their school’s “drop everything and read” time.
• They worried they’d be evaluated poorly by district leaders if bins with leveled books weren’t visible during “walk-throughs.”

So leveled libraries had to stay put in the classrooms despite teachers “knowing better.” I told myself that as long as they weren’t being used for instruction, it was no big deal.

But soon, I discovered that many teachers were still teaching with predictable books. I came to see that the system around us implicitly required Guided Reading:

• Teachers were expected to regularly assess students’ reading levels using the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System
• They knew that students who couldn’t “read” predictable books would fail the assessment
• They had to add students’ reading levels to their school’s data tracker every two weeks
• District report cards required that they include each child’s reading level using the F&P system
• Parents asked teachers, “What’s my child’s reading level?”

Pressures to continue Guided Reading could not be overridden by my training or coaching of teachers. The system that determined what school schedules prioritized, how teachers were evaluated, and the data that was collected and displayed out-powered teachers’ knowledge and skill.

There’s a Science Behind This Conundrum

Implementation Science describes “drivers,” the forces that shape what people actually do day-to-day. The three categories of drivers are:

Competency drivers– how practitioners are selected, trained, and coached

Organization drivers– the data systems, policies, and leadership structures that support the work

Leadership drivers– who is steering and how

Strength in one driver can partially offset weakness in another. A highly skilled, well-coached teacher can work within a weak system for a while, but eventually we realize that our job is more difficult than it ought to be and the results we’re getting aren’t as good as they should be. We burn out and many of us leave the profession.

Implementation drivers must reinforce each other. 

When one driver is missing or misaligned, it creates drag on the others. Poorly developed district systems create problems for teachers and school site leaders, just as poorly run schools and classrooms can drag down the quality of district initiatives.

Bottom Up? Top Down? Actually, Neither

I used to think that a grassroots effort, led by knowledgeable and skilled classroom teachers, was the way to improve reading instruction at scale. I believed this because top-down initiatives such as Reading First and No Child Left Behind had failed to shift teachers’ daily instruction. But I’ve learned from Implementation Science that I was wrong. According to the science, sequentially improving the drivers (building teacher competence followed by district leadership or vice versa) doesn’t work. They must be improved simultaneously to get results. 

Even the highest-quality training of teachers can’t defend against a dysfunctional system. And the best-laid policy won’t result in academic gains if teachers aren’t supported in their classrooms.

Getting It Right

So what would happen if highly-skilled teachers worked in a functional system that had good leadership? How might education be transformed? We would eliminate the barriers that impede our ability to teach all children to read.

• We’d set clear expectations for what teachers should know and be able to do, and provide compensation that reflects the skills required. 

“If we expect teachers to have training and skills equivalent to engineers, then we need to pay them like engineers.” – Reid Lyon

• Teacher preparation programs would move away from theory-heavy coursework toward clinical training, demonstrating what good instruction looks like, letting us practice, and giving feedback so we can improve.
• Teacher contracts would be more standardized, ensuring adequate time and compensation for the planning, coaching, and professional development we need to build new skills and transfer them to classroom instruction.
• We’d end the system’s churn through teachers and administrators. Our persistent “teacher shortage” is not a shortage of credentialed people — it’s a shortage of people willing to teach in poor conditions for low pay.
• School schedules would change to accommodate dedicated time, as needed, for in-classroom coaching for teachers and intervention for students.
• Quality-control measures would be put in place so that only research-based, implementable programs are permitted in schools.
• Leadership training programs would develop administrators who understand implementation science and evidence-based instruction — and who can create the conditions teachers and students need to succeed.

Each of these changes will require coordination across every level of the system and none of them will happen on their own, but Implementation Science can guide the improvement process.

We Can’t Wait

Other professions waited for a visible crisis to force change– a shipwreck, a market crash. (For more on this, I recommend Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices (And What It Would Take To Make Education More Like Medicine.) Education’s crisis has been here for decades, evident in low student achievement and high teacher turnover. 

We don’t need to wait for a dramatic catalyst to allow scientific evidence to guide education. We can choose to learn from the science of reading and the science of implementation, and apply both — not just to how we teach reading, but to how we build the systems in which teaching happens.

implementation instructional change leadership school improvement