Creating and Expanding Effective Learning Cultures

Jayden Hardacre on February 23, 2011 in School Stories

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Alan: Dennis, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today for my upcoming book ‘The Answer is in the Room’. I am very much looking forward to our conversation. I am interested in your thoughts on the challenges we face in our nation’s schools.  What has been your experience on the impact of quality teachers in a school?

Dennis: I am always amazed that talented teaching can be found in even in the most impoverished schools. The answer is in the room, but the problem is also in the building. The problem is in the building because we don’t do a very good job of taking knowledge and spreading it around.  We first need to identify this quality teaching, and then we need to lift it up and disseminate it.

From an organizational perspective, a school or district needs to figure out how to change. I don’t mean that nothing is ever changing in a school; curriculum can be changing all the time, new technology comes in, and principals come and go. But districts don’t change the deep grammar that is entrenched in their schools. The unwritten contract many teachers have is ‘you don’t bother me and I won’t bother you’. A school may have a great 5th grade team or a great special education team, but the larger issue is: How do you create an effective learning culture throughout the whole building? That is still fairly rare in my experience. 

Alan: Do you see professional learning communities helping to create this schoolwide learning culture?

Dennis: I believe that was the intent of PLCs, but most have turned into data systems where ‘data teams’ sit down and stare at spreadsheets. We are being driven to distraction.  The data says our third or fourth grade students are struggling with language, so we decide our kindergarten teachers need to start drilling the kids more and we need less recess in 1st grade. That kind of reactivity is deeply embedded in the system and that is why 40% of elementary schools no longer have recess.  We react in a mindless way to data instead of being more thoughtful and saying we have to figure out a way to improve our instruction. We know if kids get a chance to move around and get some of their excess energy out they are in a better position to concentrate. Let’s make sure that they are getting the opportunity to move during the day.

Alan: So you are saying that when it comes to data there has not been a correct analysis and understanding of it and consequently wrong actions are often derived?

Dennis: That is one problem I see. Another problem is regarding the reliability of the data itself. It is fairly common in urban areas in crisis in our northern US jurisdictions that kids are taking tests with gloves and hats because it is 50 degrees in the building.  I have seen this year after year in one high school I’ve been working with. Well, it is hard to sit still for any amount of time in these circumstances. There is also faulty test design and excessive testing. After a while kids find it hard to take testing seriously.  I think some low test scores are from kids quietly going on strike.

We have known for a long time that our urban students are struggling when it comes to academic achievement; the teachers could have told us that. I am more interested in trying to humanize the interactions teachers and students have at this point in the process. Instead we’re shutting down struggling schools. It is taking our attention away from teaching and learning and putting it on organizational change which usually does not produce sustainable improvements.

Alan: Since you said that the human element is of greater importance for you and there would be a bigger payoff if dealt with more concretely, what would you say are the elements within that are most critical to address?

Dennis: Great question Alan. There is some new research coming out of Baltimore with Andrés A. Alonso, CEO of Baltimore Public Schools. He is really improving the high school retention statistics in Baltimore. He is energetic about having the truancy officers and the teachers call absent students to encourage them to come to school. We know the reason many students don’t pass, especially at the high school level, is their erratic attendance. We can’t teach them if they are not physically in the building. I think it is really a heartening story because adults are showing the kids that they do care about them, and want to see them succeed and have opportunities in life. It is not that they are bad kids; they are kids that have lost their way and need to be encouraged and persuaded to come back to school. That is a real concrete example of district leadership having an impact.

A lot of strategies are fairly simple Alan and I find sharing this a little bit embarrassing because it is so easy to do but is neglected in so many schools. Almost every one of our high achieving charters in Boston has a very simple policy they implement every day. When the kids arrive at the front door of the school the principal asks them: “Why are you here?” The kids have to say “I am here to learn” or “I am here because I want to achieve something.” “I want to be a teacher.” “I want to be a social worker.” “ I want to be a fire fighter.” “I want to have a high school degree.”

These strategies can’t be mechanical. They have to come from the heart, and they can be done in any school. If it is mandated that every principal ask every child, however, then it is sure to fail because each school has to have its own signature practice of transmitting that message of caring. By the way, ‘caring’ is the second principle in my book with Boston Public School teacher leader Elizabeth MacDonald entitled The Mindful Teacher (Teachers College Press, 2009). The fourth principle is ‘professional expertise’ so caring should not be put in opposition to actually knowing your subject and knowing how to teach in a way that kids can understand. Part of caring is respecting the mind of the student.

Alan: You mentioned a couple of strategies in particular, relative to the students and the practices that are working well in a school or district, that invariably begin with the adults. So how do you create the culture where the teachers are sharing among themselves?

Dennis: That is a million dollar question for me. I think what happens to many teachers is that they get cynical and disengaged in response to new curriculums continually being introduced. They don’t have the opportunity to build their knowledge base throughout their careers because we have a top down culture of change. For example, first we introduce a basal curriculum for a few years, then we switch to something more whole language, then it will be a balanced curriculum, and then we go back to the basal.    We have to stop this pendulum swing and really work on building the craft knowledge.

That is where the title of your book, The Answer is in the Room, is fantastic. You are absolutely right that there is a lot of latent knowledge that we never make manifest. Every teacher should feel like they are on an exciting journey because they get to learn throughout their whole career. Something learned in the first three weeks can still be in use 5, 10 years later, not out of a repetition compulsion, but because there is richness in that practice.

Second, we need to get beyond ‘privatism’ in our professional learning communities. This is a tough one and we really have to own this in the profession.  People have got to open their doors, and we have to start building structures in which it is commonplace for teachers to be visiting each other in their classes and giving each other feedback. That is so hard because it violates everything that people assume about the profession:  that it is practiced in isolation from colleagues.

There are ways to slowly create those cultures. I was in a K-8 school in Alberta that was pretty far along this path and visited an 8th grade class.  I was chatting with a kindergartner teacher and mentioned I was just in the 8th grade class and said I guessed she might never get over to that part of the building. She responded, “Oh no, I was just there yesterday. I am always visiting their class and they are visiting my class because we want to build a strong sense of community.” So that is part of the professional learning community that I think is really great. The PLCs must also allow teachers to develop their own questions; the principal or superintendant cannot mandate what the PLC’s project is going to be, and reduce it to a power point slide show at the end of the year.

The third part is to give teachers the opportunity to explore best practices so they are not just fixated on getting through the day or the week. They need to go back and ask themselves  “Where were we 5, 10, 15 years ago?” and then ask themselves “Where do we want to be 3, 5, 10 years from now?”  We need to ask ourselves what our goals are and then plan backwards to help us achieve them. In a number of districts we have gotten a bit better at this; for example in the Boston Public Schools we have instructional leadership teams for teachers. This is just kind of taken for granted in high learning environments as what professionals do, but we still have many schools where the teachers just do what they are told and their creativity and experience isn’t tapped.

Alan: Dennis, this discussion has been fascinating. Thanks for taking this time with me, I really appreciate it.

Dennis: I’m really looking forward to reading your new book, Alan. I like the title The Answer is in the Room because it points educators to the knowledge that is right in front of them that they often don’t see.

About Dennis Shirley

Dr. Dennis Shirleys work in education spans from the micro level of assisting beginning teachers to the macro level of designing and guiding large-scale research and intervention projects for school districts, states, and nonprofit agencies. Dr. Shirley recently collaborated with Andy Hargreaves on a study of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Raising Achievement Transforming Learning Project, which raised pupil learning results in over 200 schools in England at double the national rate in a 2-year period. The findings of that research have been presented in Hargreaves and Shirleys first collaboratively authored book, The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change.

For 6 years, Dr. Shirley has led a teacher inquiry project along with Boston Public Schools teacher-leader Elizabeth MacDonald; their research has been published in The Mindful Teacher. Dr. Shirley serves on the Scholars Forum of the Public Education Network, advises the One Square Kilometer of Education school improvement project of the Freudenberg Foundation in Berlin, and collaborates with the California Teachers Association on improving 480 schools in struggling circumstances. He has led three school improvement efforts with more than 13 million dollars in funding, and his research has been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, and French. He holds a doctorate from Harvard University.

Dr. Shirley’s web site is and you can email him at: 

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