I won 'Teacher of the Year' for enthusiasm, but kids weren't learning

Luke Morin won "teacher of the year" when he was a young, energetic, engaging -- and ineffective -- teacher, he writes on Holly Korbey's BellRinger. He got flowers from the superintendent and his picture in the paper. But his sixth-grade English students weren't learning very much.

Years later, after visiting effective schools and studying what make them work, he was "the highest-performing teacher in Colorado." Nobody noticed.

In her “Learning from Greatness newsletter, Korbey asked why school leaders don't investigate and emulate what's working elsewhere. Why is there so little curiosity about success?

That led to a conversation with Morin, an English teacher turned instructional coach, who writes The Middle School Literacy Project.

As a novice teacher in Louisiana, he writes, "I was a happy warrior: eager, visible, and genuinely committed." But putting up a "flashy bulletin board and calling families about "big goals" wasn't helping his sixth-graders learn to read.

He visited successful New Orleans schools to study what they were doing. He saw students sitting attentively in class, not lingering in the halls. He saw rapid transitions with no wasted time, "shared expectations and the power of coherence."

He began working with fellow teachers at his school to align routines and expectations.

In 2013, he joined a new school in Denver with "a committed, coherent grade-level team" teaching diverse students.

Strong cultural alignment translated into safe hallways, bought-in students and classrooms where time was treated as precious. With excellent instructional support and a robust curriculum, my students spent their days immersed in rich, complex texts and wrestling with whole novels rather than fragments.

He became a much better teacher. "Class felt alive. . . . Students were producing writing and analysis that genuinely astonished me." In 2017 his students ranked in the 90th percentile for growth on the state exam, the highest for any middle school English teacher in Colorado.

There was no recognition from the superintendent, no story in the newspaper. No teacher asked to observe his classroom. Nobody sought his advice. "Studying excellence" is destabilizing, Morin writes. "Once positive outliers are visible, it becomes harder to explain away persistent underperformance elsewhere."

Many schools are ignoring proven teaching practices and curricula, argues Mike Schmoker in Results Now 2.0: The Untapped Opportunities for Swift, Dramatic Gains in Achievement. Doing what's known to work is "low-hanging fruit," he tells Rick Hess in an interview.

Teacher education is somewhere between "misguided" and "abysmal," he tells Hess. Professional development is based on “whims, fads, opportunism and ideology.”

Schmoker visits a lot of schools. He rarely sees a coherent curriculum, or evidence teachers have been "trained in the most vital elements of instruction — like short cycles of teaching, checking for understanding, and reteaching throughout the lesson, he says. "Instead, we see students spending staggering amounts of time in groups, staring morosely at screens, completing worksheets, or ambling from one low-value, unsupervised 'literacy center' to the next — where, instead of reading or writing, students often engage in cut, color, and paste activities."

Look for evidence of effectiveness, he tells Hess. Celebrate measurable success. And focus research on "how to successfully implement the most long-standing, if less sexy, elements of effective schooling."