Running head: Review of Literature

Review of Literature:

Module 2 C&T801

Michael Medeiros

University of Kansas
Review of Literature

When learning about a School Improvement Plan (SIP), it may become very easy

to think that we learn in a bubble and that the things we read and see will not have an

impact on our real-world setting. The entire purpose of seeking higher education is to

be able to use what we learn in the environment that we teach in. Thus, when we are

looking at literature written about school improvement, we should be thinking of the

ways that this literature fits into our current situations. In this article, I will be

discussing the consideration of five factors used when planning for school improvement,

how my personal school environment affects these factors and how I think we should

approach each of these factors. I will be discussing: using feedback in school

improvement; how leadership affects school improvement, what affect teacher attitude

has on improvement; whether Professional Learning Communities (PLC) have an

impact on student achievement; and the effects of teacher turnover on student

achievement.

My current position is that of Teacher of Mathematics in a Catholic private high

school in the Midwest. Our school is part of a larger network of 32 schools in 21 states

(Schools, n.d.). Each school uses the network standards and End of Course Exams but

we are free as an individual school to decide how we are to present the benchmarks and

means of instruction. Each of the schools in our network looks and operates very

differently from one another. Most of this is due to local conditions that drive the goals

and actions of each individual school.

Anytime we take a college course or use any online service these days, it seems we

are always asked to take a survey and give some feedback. The question remains, at

times, what happens to that feedback? Do colleges make changes from our comments?

Do companies really listen to their customers? Kim Schildkamp and Adrie Visscher
Review of Literature

(2010) were curious about this very thing. They wondered what affect using school

performance feedback would have on SIPs and, ultimately, on school improvement.

They studied 27 schools in Louisiana that used a School Analysis Model (SAM) to gather

and interpret feedback. After the 27 schools reported back to the researchers about the

extent they used the SAM, they selected five schools for a more thorough study. The

conclusion of the research found that each of the schools were working under

challenging circumstances and there were opportunities for school improvement in each

of these schools. The researchers felt that a more detailed study would render more

accurate results. Each school self-reported so it is possible that biased reporting

occurred in their descriptions (Schildkamp & Visscher, 2010).

Even though this research admitted to being flawed, it is still very important that

we use feedback from stakeholders in our school improvement plans. To attend my

school, you must come from a lower socioeconomic background. The criteria we use is

qualifying for free or reduced lunch. This means that 100% of our students are what

could be labeled as financially disadvantaged. Many of our families are immigrants that

work two jobs a day. Many of our families are single parent households where there

may be no one home when the student arrives home. It has proven difficult to get

feedback from many of our families at times. We send all surveys and letters home in

both English and Spanish but many do not return. We have a parent night once a

month when any parents may come to the school in the early evening and ask any

questions or discuss any concerns they may have. With a student body approaching

400, perhaps 20-30 parents come to these meetings. But what do we do with the

feedback we do receive? This is only reported to me anecdotally, but I do see this

feedback used and I have seen it guide our decision making at times. I will mention an
Review of Literature

example. I have daily tutoring in my class during study hall. Volunteers from the

community come in and help students with any mathematical difficulties they may have.

We used to do this tutoring in the lunchroom because it was a big space and the tutors

could move around. Students reported that they did not want to go because anyone can

walk by the cafeteria and see them needing help. They also felt embarrassed to ask the

tutors to come over to them as they walked around so sometimes they did not get any

help at all. We listened to this feedback and the next year, we moved the tutoring into a

classroom with the tutors seated instead of roaming. I have found that I rarely have to

go get students to come to tutoring because they voluntarily come on their own. They

enjoy that it is a semi-private space and they can interact with the tutors one-on-one.

This is one example, but it stresses the importance of not only collecting feedback, but

then using it to make improvements.

Leadership within a school may influence school improvement as well. Heck and

Hallinger (2010) conducted a study on the longitudinal, multi-level model of change in

distributed leadership. They were attempting to determine if changes in leadership had

any effect on school improvement and growth in student learning. Using data from 197

elementary schools within a state, they surveyed fifth grade students, parents, and

teachers. To determine growth, they used a comparative analysis of math and reading

scores. While the study did not answer the question of whether changes in leadership

led to any affect, they did conclude that when schools made student learning a priority

when placing leaders in school improvement roles did have a positive effect on student

learning (Heck & Hallinger, 2010)

Using the results of this study and thinking about how this compares to my own

setting, I agree that it is important to place the correct leaders in roles when making
Review of Literature

improvement plans. I feel I was misplaced a few years ago as our network attempted to

improve our benchmarks and standards in mathematics. I was part of a five-teacher

committee, composed of math teachers throughout the network, that met online once a

week and reported back to our individual departments with notes and feedback. I felt I

was in over my head because I had no experience in creating standards and

benchmarks. The feedback we did provide was not used in the update which points back

to the earlier section in this article about using feedback. The network is having any

available teachers meet in Chicago this summer to update the standards yet again. I was

invited to attend and I feel I am much more qualified this time because of the masters

classes I have taken. However, because of continued enrollment, I cannot attend.

Though the study did not conclude that changes in leadership had any effect, I am

fortunate that in my setting, there has been little leader turnover in the five years I have

been at the school. The Principal and Assistant Principals have remained unchanged.

This school year will be the last for our school President, so I am curious to what

changes will be made when our top administrator changes this summer.

Attitudes among teachers about school improvement plans will vary in any

setting. Renita Ubel (1998) in her Doctoral Dissertation asked three questions: Do

attitudes of teachers differ on assessments chosen for SIPs? Are attitudes different

among teachers involved in the SIP as opposed to those who were not? Are attitudes

different among teachers regarding types of assessments? She asked 352 teachers in

fifteen schools to complete a survey that would try to answer these questions. She

collected data on who was and was not involved in creating the SIP. She then asked

questions related to their attitude toward the SIP and the assessments that are now used

within the district. Her study found that teachers of younger students had a more
Review of Literature

negative attitude toward high-stakes testing than did teachers of older students. She

also found that teachers who had more input into the SIP process had a more positive

attitude toward it (Ubel, 1998).

In the previous section, I wrote how I was on a five-member teacher committee to

update the math benchmarks and standards. Even though I felt I was unqualified to be

on the committee, I tried my best and gave honest thorough feedback. After the

committee reported our findings and then we realized that they did not use any of our

feedback on what we believed the standards should be, we all felt a little cheated. I did

not agree with the benchmarks we were presented with so I did not put all my energies

into their implementation. This speaks to Ubels finding that when a teacher has more

involvement in a SIP, they will have a better attitude toward it. I did not feel I had

positive involvement so I did not have a positive attitude toward the results. It is my

hope that, since teachers will be face to face in Chicago this summer, the new

benchmarks will more positively reflect what actually goes on in the classroom.

Professional Learning Communities are becoming more common in schools

today. All Things PLC tracks successful PLCs and reports good PLCs in over forty

states (All things PLC, 2016). A study was conducted to see if PLCs had a positive

effect on student achievement. Including 2919 students and 130 math teachers in 130

different schools that used PLCs to varying degrees. Using math achievement as the

indicator of success, the study did find a positive correlation between schools that

scored higher on working successfully in a PLC and higher achievement among

students. The study was also specific on what makes up a PLC and this the criteria I will

use as well. A PLC must: have reflective dialogue among members; ensure activities are
Review of Literature

collaborative; observe one anothers classrooms; share purposes and responsibilities;

focus on learning and achievement (Lomos, Hofman, & Bosker, 2011)

I would love to have a PLC in my school but we do not. The closest we get to a

PLC is the one hour a week we all meet as a freshmen teaching team and discuss

upcoming events and student concerns. If you include the impromptu meetings we have

in classrooms and hallways, we get a little closer but we still do not achieve the

researchers criteria. We do have reflective dialogue, share purposes and

responsibilities, and focus on learning and achievement. However, we do not ensure

activities are collaborative nor do we observe one anothers classrooms. One of the

reasons we do not and probably cannot be a successful PLC is a matter of time. A quick

Google search for, early release for PLC has nearly a million hits and quickly clicking

through the first five search pages shows all the links are school PLC schedules for

school districts. We would need to have an early release once a week to have an effective

PLC. The problem is in our unique situation that our students work in the community

once a week. They work real jobs at law firms and businesses that require they are there

all day. It is how we fund 50% of our school. If we were to call these students back early

to release them, we would lose funding so a true PLC is not in the cards. However, we

can still do things that PLCs do to add benefit to students such as cross-curricular

projects and peer classroom observations.

The final factor discussed in this article concerns teacher turnover and student

achievement. We would assume that high teacher turnover would lower student

achievement. Some recent studies showed this is not true in all circumstances

(Ronfeldt, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013) A study was conducted to answer in a

qualitative way if high teacher turnover does indeed lower student achievement.
Review of Literature

Student data of fourth and fifth graders was collected over eight years in New York

comprising 670,000 observations. The study confirmed that sometimes teacher

turnover is good. This would be the case when a teacher is not a good fit for the students

they serve. However, overall, higher teacher turnover does lead to lower student

achievement score. Scores dropped between 8-10% when teacher turnover reached

100% compared to years when there was zero turnover (Ronfeldt, et al., 2013)

Even without this study, we could conclude with a high degree of confidence that

high teacher turnover must have a negative effect on students. We see it every year in

our school. A few years ago, there was a physics teacher at our school that the students

absolutely adored. He was funny and brilliant, and he had the ability to make physics

come alive for his students. He left for a higher salary and I can see that students do not

have the same feelings for his replacement. We are a private school with limited funds.

Our teachers are not unionized so our salaries are lower than our public-school

counterparts. Many times, our school is a path into the profession. Teachers arrive

fresh off their student teaching, stay a few years, and move on to greener pastures. This

will be my scenario as well, as I was hired before I even graduated college because they

were in dire need of a math teacher. I have seen many teachers come and go at our

school. It seems we have to start over with various programs on a continual basis. A

teacher will come into the school, start a great program that dies as soon as they leave

because no one picks up the program. If we could start a SIP in our school that would

include a protocol for moving responsibilities to others when a leader leaves, I think that

we could have a better opportunity for these programs. It may also help if these items

were not handled by just one instructor in the first place but as departments.
Review of Literature

References

All Things PLC. (2016). Retrieved July 9, 2016, from http://www.allthingsplc.info/plc-

locator/us

Lomos, Catalina, Roelande H. Hofman, and Roel J. Bosker. "The Relationship between

Departments as Professional Communities and Student Achievement in

Secondary Schools." Teaching and Teacher Education 27.4 (2011): 722-31.

doi:10.1016/j.tate.2010.12.003

Ronfeldt, Matthew, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff. "How

Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement." American Educational

Research Journal 50.1 (2013): 4-36. doi:10.3102/0002831212463813

Schildkamp, K., & Visscher, A. (2010). The use of performance feedback in school

improvement in Louisiana. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(7), 1389-1403.

doi:10.1016/j.tate.2010.04.004

Schools. (n.d.). Retrieved July 8, 2016, from

http://www.cristoreynetwork.org/page.cfm?p=353 Heck, Ronald H., and Philip

Hallinger. "Testing a Longitudinal Model of Distributed Leadership Effects on

School Improvement." The Leadership Quarterly 21.5 (2010): 867-85.

doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.07.013

Ubel, Renita Kathleen Pohl. The Attitudes of Teachers in One County in Kansas

toward Their School Improvement Plan Assessments. Diss. U of Kansas, 1998.

KUScholarWorks. Web. Retrieved 3 July 2016.

http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7976