CREATING THE FUTURE
Perspectives on Educational Change

Compiled and Edited by Dee Dickinson

EDUCATIONAL RESTRUCTURING
Robert McClure, Ph.D

There was very little involvement of teachers or other practitioners in the several commissions that shaped the effort to renew schools in the early 1980's. In an attempt to bring the voices of teachers to the national discussion, Mary Hatwood Futrell, President of the National Education Association, in 1983 appointed a commission to make recommendations about the future of schooling. Comprised of twenty classroom teachers from across the country, the task force produced An Open Letter to America About Schools, Students, and Tomorrow (National Education Association, 1984). Using that report as a springboard, the Mastery In Learning Project began in the spring of 1985.

The focus of the project is on the essentials of schooling -- learning, curriculum, teaching -- and how these interrelate to define the culture or climate of the school. The resources of the Project are used to enable the faculty to create the conditions necessary for students to master important knowledge and skills. MIL asks the faculty and its community to recreate their school to reflect:

• The best that is known about teaching, learning, curriculum, and school climate;

• The faculty's and community's best aspirations for its students.

In other words, the project did not predetermine what schools should be like as a result of reformation and then set out to achieve that vision. Rather, it set out to test the idea that school faculties which had access to current knowledge, research, and exemplars of good practice could, given the authority, "grow a school" that would better serve its students than one reformed by outside mandates. Many school renewal efforts, particularly those initiated by state legislatures and governors' offices, had relied on a mandated, top-down approach to improvement.

To demonstrate to policy makers and others the efficacy of another approach, MIL created in 1986 a demographically representative network of twenty-six schools. As a group, the schools in the network are representative of all schools in the country regarding socioeconomic levels, ethnicity, race, type of community, and nature of the organization of the school.

As the teachers and administrators talked about curriculum, teaching, learning, and school climate at the outset of the Project, several findings emerged:

• Principals and teachers relied heavily on textbook manuals, mandates from outside the school, directives from supervisors, and advice from others in similar roles. They accepted the status quo and doubted that challenges to it would have much impact.

• Most of the practitioners in the network knew about or had experienced previous efforts to improve schools and believed that much of that work had been misguided and done more harm than good. They believed that it was their responsibility to resist efforts that would, once again, do damage to educational quality.

• Most staff members did not describe themselves as risk takers. They saw their school system as closed organizations uninterested in input from "low level" staff, organizations that punished those who took risks.

• School staffs accepted, almost unquestioningly, the technologies that control schooling: behavioral objectives, textbooks, and standardized tests.

When asked to select words that described their school, the following were often used: memory, textbooks, uniform, classrooms, separate subjects, broad curriculum, student testing that stresses recall, central decision making, teacher burnout.

Although the local faculty (defined as teachers, administrators, and others that held the school responsible for the educational program) now design the reform agenda, the Project provides the processes by which their restructuring would occur:

• Phase One: PROFILING THE SCHOOL (several weeks). Through structured interviews with teachers, students, parents, and administrators, a description of the school is created to serve as a benchmark for the Project's efforts.

• Phase Two: INVENTORYING THE FACULTY (several days). Through a process that reveals similarities and differences in priorities and aspirations among faculty members, the school faculty establishes initial priorities for improvement.

• Phase Three: FACULTY ENABLEMENT (two to three years). The faculty works to create the skills, attitudes, and inclinations necessary for sustained inquiry into the assumptions and practices that define their school.

• Phase Four: COMPREHENSIVE CHANGE (ongoing). Having developed skills and habits of collaboration and collegiality and a clearer vision of what is desirable for their school with regard to learning, teaching, curriculum, and school climate, the faculty engages in ongoing systemic school improvement.

For the most part, faculties in the network schools are different now from the way they were at the outset of the Project. They are increasingly aware of the knowledge base that undergirds their work and are more likely to consider it useful in solving their problems.

They see themselves as powerful shapers of the future of their school; are more collegial and less isolated; more savvy about the politics of school systems; better able to view their school in a comprehensive manner. They think they can be influential in affecting student learning. They are more passionate about the values they hold.

Charles Thompson, who examined reports of several MIL faculties' efforts to improve their educational program, commented on the enabling, empowering aspect of this work:

These revolutions are not, however, simple redistributions of power. These revolutions multiply it. New knowledge . . . emboldens teachers to think, to examine their practice. And there is an almost electric sense of energy release that accompanies this realization, a sense of excitement that raises the energy level throughout each building.

Faculty-led school improvement efforts that are context-specific, student outcome-oriented, intellectually valid, and professionally enabling offer a significant opportunity to make fundamental improvement in America's schools.

---

About: Robert McClure

Dr. Robert McClure is former director of the National Education Association's site-based restructuring program of the Center for Innovation. He was also director of the NEA's Mastery In Learning Project, a five-year national research and development effort in which knowledge about teaching, learning, and curriculum was used by faculties to improve their schools.

Dr. McClure's dedication to improving the quality of education nationwide is evident in his long-standing efforts in the field. He joined the NEA Center for the Study of Instruction in 1964 to help create the Schools for the Seventies program, and in 1975 developed a federally funded research utilization program which led to the inservice education programs of the Regional Educational Laboratories. A seventeen-volume report is still used as a reference guide to those programs.

As a champion for enhancing the role of teachers as key decision-makers in education, he has written and spoken widely, and he served as editor of the School Restructuring Series of the NEA Professional Library. He edited the Seventieth Yearbook of the National Society of Education, The Curriculum: Retrospect and Prospect, and has written chapters for more than a dozen other books.

Dr. McClure received his master's degree in Curriculum Development and School Administration from the University of Southern California, and his doctorate in Curriculum and Social Psychology from UCLA. In the mid-seventies he was Distinguished Scholar at the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development.

---

Copyright © 1991 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.

http://www.newhorizons.org
E-mail: info@newhorizons.org

For permission to redistribute, please go to:
New Horizons for Learning Copyright and Permission Information

Go to Creating the Future Front Page