Ted Kolderie told me about teacher-led schools 2000. He convinced me to visit Minnesota New Country School
(MNCS) where teachers had created an innovative project-based and fully individualized school -- and they were in charge. MNCS teachers had formed a co-op
and applied for a charter and operated with full autonomy. I announced that it was “the coolest school in America.”
Trusting Teacher With School Success
, a new book by Kim Farris-Berg and Edward Dirkswager, is an in depth look at teacher-led schools--why and how they work and the key ingredients of
success. Every teacher should have the opportunity to work in a teacher-led environment and should read this book to find out why.
The central question of the book is “what would teachers do if they had the autonomy not just to make classroom decisions, but to collectively--with their
colleagues--make the decisions influencing whole school success?”
Join an online discussion about the book starting November 29, 2012 at TrustingTeachers.org. Every few days the
authors will address a new chapter. Discussions will run through January.
The authors outline 10 key autonomies:
Selecting colleagues
Transferring and/or terminating colleagues
Evaluating colleagues
Setting staff pattern (including size of staff and the allocation of personnel to teaching and/or other positions)
Selecting and deselecting leaders
Determining budget
Determining salaries and benefits
Determining learning program and learning materials (including teaching methods, curriculum, and levels of technology); and
Setting the schedule (classes, school hours, length of school year).
The authors identified and studied 11 schools that had at least six of the autonomies and had been operation for at least three years. The 11 schools
showed high correlation with the attributes of high performing organizations and shared eight practices:
Share purpose
, which always focuses on students as individuals, and use it as the basis of decisions aimed at school improvement.
Participate in collaboration and leadership for the good of the whole school
, not just a classroom.
Encourage colleagues and students to be active, ongoing learners
in an effort to nurture everyone’s engagement and motivation.
Develop or adopt learning programs
that individualize student learning.
Address social and discipline problems
as part of student learning.
Broaden the definition and scope of student achievement and assessment
.
Encourage teacher improvement
using 360 degree, peer- and self-evaluation methods as well as peer coaching and mentoring.
Make budget trade-offs
to meet the needs of the students they serve.
The book refers to “autonomous teachers,” which is slightly misleading, these are partially autonomous schools that are teacher-led. The semantics matter
because, having visited most of these schools I find teachers in these environments highly accountable to each other, students and parents. They are
actually less autonomous than teachers in traditional schools, but they operate as owners, which makes all the difference in the world.
We’ve had a high level of nearly autonomous individual practice in most schools for decades and it doesn’t work very well. In some respect, teachers in the
studied schools have less autonomy than what is considered traditional. Teachers in the studied schools are bound together in an accountable
collective with a shared mission with a great deal of responsibility to each other and their students.
The key ingredient, that I would have emphasized more, is the performance contract that creates conditions of partial-autonomy and describes the
relationship with the authorizer.
The new push for better teacher evaluation may create problems for some of these schools -- another reason the performance contract is so important.
The success of these schools may start with the governance model -- teacher led charters -- but they are also small, focused, mission-driven,
student-centered, and (for the most part) competency-based. They say it’s not about small, but it would be hard to make this work in a building with 100
teachers.
There’s little mention of cooperatives in the book but that’s how the original schools were formed and I find it both descriptive and a useful
organizational structure. As education shifts from a place to a bundle of personal digital learning services, it creates opportunities for teachers to ban
together to provide online and blended services, for example: an online AP teacher co-op, an online speech therapy co-op, a foreign language co-op.
Another reason for exploring co-ops is that the 11 case studies are hand-crafted schools (as Deborah Meier would say, recreated daily in a meeting of the
faculty) and it begs the question of scalability. Co-ops strike me as scalable structures for supporting teacher-led schools.
One of the exciting things about the shift to personal digital learning is the explosion of career options for learning professionals -- more school
models, more learning services, and more ways to contribute. In every other profession, there is a choice of working for a government services, a large
private practice, a professional partnership, or as a sole practitioner. Teachers should have the same options.
Teacher-led environments aren’t for everyone. There’s a lot of responsibility and hard work that goes with being an ‘owner’, but it does reframe
accountability as a gift, a promise, and a practice.
Teacher-led schools are a great idea. As the authors admit, they are not for everyone. But given the advantages outlined in this book, there should be
thousands not dozens.