I appreciated your thoughtful insights on this. As an educator and parent, this part was particularly resonant: “To me, one of the most frustrating things about soulless teaching is the way it is completely opaque to parents and families. Parents approach the school with concerns that their child isn't learning, and they end up hearing some nonsense alphabet soup about all the hoops teachers are jumping through but nothing about how the school will help their kid learn.” The whole process is a recipe for exhaustion for all parties. That said, I don’t necessarily see tight coupling itself as the problem. Coherent systems and interest in the quality of classroom practice at a system level doesn’t have to translate into a rigid emphasis on fidelity and mindless micromanagement, though you are right that too often it does.
Thanks for the comment. In terms of tight coupling -- I agree that it doesn't have to real to soulless teaching. The question I would ask is, is it possible for a tightly coupled system to operate **at scale** without the negative side effects? I'm skeptical. I don't support a system that works in a few schools with remarkable leadership but almost always breaks down when it spreads to typical schools with typical leadership and resources. That's what I've seen.
Michele, that same sentence resonated with me. When I became a parent of school-aged children, I realized how much I didn't know about what they did all day. As a teacher, I always communicate with parents using regular language, never jargon (I've been in education for nearly 30 years and I often have to google the acronyms!) I'm curious about what you see are solutions to this opaqueness. Particularly at a time when teachers feel under attack and school districts have to increase security at school board meanings, I suspect many teachers are grateful for the opacity. But that just leads to more distrust, and distrust of our public schools can't be a good thing.
Fascinating and good new term re soulless teaching with new definition and application in education plus historical context using that framework, tightly vs loosely coupled. Top down command control vs aligned autonomy being a way I’ve thought of it.
Recently I heard anecdotally more edtech usage being pulled out of teachers hands into district which is tightening and sad because I imagine those going out to get their own stuff likely more motivated and it’s solving something otherwise they wouldn’t use it!
But also cannot loosen the coupling without adequate support and space either (I was talking to a researcher who said Utah used to mandate literacy curriculum thru EISP but are allowing districts and schools to choose, but without enough support and training).
The opacity of schools and learning to parents couldn’t agree more with your point and the comments.
How to scale leadership and recruiting (retaining) teachers and figure out how to empower them locally and nationally, that’s a whole different can of worms…
I have heard anecdotes of districts mandating which tech platforms are allowed or not. I haven't seen that where I work, but I have seen pressure to i.e. have kids on i-Ready for a certain number of minutes a week, even though teachers hate it.
I like your phrase of aligned autonomy. I also see this mindless refrain from admin "we should be consistent." Consistency is good when it's deliberate, but consistency around everything erodes autonomy. Aligned autonomy is a nice way to capture both of those ideas.
Dylan, I just discovered your Substack and am really enjoying it. Your work was helpful to me in crafting a post I just wrote about memorizing the times tables. I put some links in there, linking back to you. I'd be interested in any comments you might have about my post. (https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/memorizing-multiplication-tables)
Your work is so relevant to teachers of any subject, not just math. (I'm not a math teacher." In addition to the part Michele Caracappa highlighted, I also especially liked the last 2 sentences of this post: "Teachers are busy, and should spend their time thinking about learning. The more schools and districts and states try to tightly couple the system, the more teachers will focus on the wrong stuff and lose sight of learning." It seems to me that the amount of paper work and data collection I've been asked to do as a teacher has risen dramatically from when I first started teaching in the 1990s. I wonder if there is true of others' experiences? It certainly distracts from what you point out is the #1 thing we need to do: think about learning.
Jigsaw is, for my money, one of the worst ways to teach…. At least for young students. Let’s let the one kid who did the work from each group teach the rest of the class the important material that they will need to know for the rest of their lives? We should let 6th graders teach the class instead of the expert in the room? This is where misconceptions come from. This is where they learn that social loafing pays off. Every time I see this, it gets more upsetting. Plus, there’s research showing that it’s not useful if your goal is for the WHOLE class to learn ALL of the material.
Thanks, Accidental Critic and Dylan. I've never had a whole lot of success with Jigsaw and felt guilty about it, having been told how awesome it is for student learning. I read your "rant" piece, Dylan, and found it quite helpful for explaining why we should be cautious about Hattie's research.
Yes! The rant is fantastic. I’ve tried to explain this as well…on the spot, in grad school classes, but next time I should just hand out copies of this! 🙂
Not mine, it comes from David Labaree in his book "Someone Has to Fail" (which is excellent).
I'm pretty skeptical that tight coupling can work at scale. I'm sure there are great leaders who do a good job of managing a tightly coupled district/school, but there are lots of mediocre and incompetent leaders out there. My take is that without great leadership, tight coupling degenerates into soulless teaching, and I don't think that kind of leadership scales very well in education.
I think test scores are a decent proxy. A school with very low test scores probably isn't producing much learning. A school with high test scores is probably producing a lot of learning.
But here are two things that come to mind that I've seen in my district when we obsess over raising test scores: we had a big meeting about school improvement a few months ago, and the superintendent and principal announced that they would be buying steak dinners for any students who scored in the top 10% for growth in both ELA and math. That was the first, best idea they had for improving our school, and it has nothing to do with learning. And second, we barely teach science and social studies in elementary school here because they aren't tested subjects.
So test scores are one decent proxy, but when we only care about improving test scores we do things that aren't helpful for learning.
To me, test scores should be one data point, along with curriculum-normed assessments, in class formative assessment, and lots of other stuff, and we give teachers lots of resources to make sense of that data and respond to it.
One thing that I have a hard time with in the entire educational space - people seem to be much clearer in their view of what isn't learning than what learning actually is. I include myself in this, by the way.
Everything in the world seems either to be a decent-but-not-excellent proxy for learning, or, more frequently, a sideshow that doesn't really impact learning at all.
To me learning is invisible. It happens in a student's brain. So everything is a proxy.
If all you have are proxies, you want to have a lot of data and not put too much stock in any one measure. But that's hard because it requires dealing with a lot of complexity. And when we put a lot of stock in one proxy, we often end up chasing a sideshow -- or we pick that proxy because it's easy to measure, not because it's particularly useful.
I appreciated your thoughtful insights on this. As an educator and parent, this part was particularly resonant: “To me, one of the most frustrating things about soulless teaching is the way it is completely opaque to parents and families. Parents approach the school with concerns that their child isn't learning, and they end up hearing some nonsense alphabet soup about all the hoops teachers are jumping through but nothing about how the school will help their kid learn.” The whole process is a recipe for exhaustion for all parties. That said, I don’t necessarily see tight coupling itself as the problem. Coherent systems and interest in the quality of classroom practice at a system level doesn’t have to translate into a rigid emphasis on fidelity and mindless micromanagement, though you are right that too often it does.
Thanks for the comment. In terms of tight coupling -- I agree that it doesn't have to real to soulless teaching. The question I would ask is, is it possible for a tightly coupled system to operate **at scale** without the negative side effects? I'm skeptical. I don't support a system that works in a few schools with remarkable leadership but almost always breaks down when it spreads to typical schools with typical leadership and resources. That's what I've seen.
Michele, that same sentence resonated with me. When I became a parent of school-aged children, I realized how much I didn't know about what they did all day. As a teacher, I always communicate with parents using regular language, never jargon (I've been in education for nearly 30 years and I often have to google the acronyms!) I'm curious about what you see are solutions to this opaqueness. Particularly at a time when teachers feel under attack and school districts have to increase security at school board meanings, I suspect many teachers are grateful for the opacity. But that just leads to more distrust, and distrust of our public schools can't be a good thing.
Fascinating and good new term re soulless teaching with new definition and application in education plus historical context using that framework, tightly vs loosely coupled. Top down command control vs aligned autonomy being a way I’ve thought of it.
Recently I heard anecdotally more edtech usage being pulled out of teachers hands into district which is tightening and sad because I imagine those going out to get their own stuff likely more motivated and it’s solving something otherwise they wouldn’t use it!
But also cannot loosen the coupling without adequate support and space either (I was talking to a researcher who said Utah used to mandate literacy curriculum thru EISP but are allowing districts and schools to choose, but without enough support and training).
The opacity of schools and learning to parents couldn’t agree more with your point and the comments.
How to scale leadership and recruiting (retaining) teachers and figure out how to empower them locally and nationally, that’s a whole different can of worms…
I have heard anecdotes of districts mandating which tech platforms are allowed or not. I haven't seen that where I work, but I have seen pressure to i.e. have kids on i-Ready for a certain number of minutes a week, even though teachers hate it.
I like your phrase of aligned autonomy. I also see this mindless refrain from admin "we should be consistent." Consistency is good when it's deliberate, but consistency around everything erodes autonomy. Aligned autonomy is a nice way to capture both of those ideas.
Dylan, I just discovered your Substack and am really enjoying it. Your work was helpful to me in crafting a post I just wrote about memorizing the times tables. I put some links in there, linking back to you. I'd be interested in any comments you might have about my post. (https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/memorizing-multiplication-tables)
Your work is so relevant to teachers of any subject, not just math. (I'm not a math teacher." In addition to the part Michele Caracappa highlighted, I also especially liked the last 2 sentences of this post: "Teachers are busy, and should spend their time thinking about learning. The more schools and districts and states try to tightly couple the system, the more teachers will focus on the wrong stuff and lose sight of learning." It seems to me that the amount of paper work and data collection I've been asked to do as a teacher has risen dramatically from when I first started teaching in the 1990s. I wonder if there is true of others' experiences? It certainly distracts from what you point out is the #1 thing we need to do: think about learning.
Jigsaw is, for my money, one of the worst ways to teach…. At least for young students. Let’s let the one kid who did the work from each group teach the rest of the class the important material that they will need to know for the rest of their lives? We should let 6th graders teach the class instead of the expert in the room? This is where misconceptions come from. This is where they learn that social loafing pays off. Every time I see this, it gets more upsetting. Plus, there’s research showing that it’s not useful if your goal is for the WHOLE class to learn ALL of the material.
I agree. Here's a rant I went on last year after that PD when I was told jigsaws are amazing: https://fivetwelvethirteen.substack.com/p/hatties-visible-learning-research
Thanks, Accidental Critic and Dylan. I've never had a whole lot of success with Jigsaw and felt guilty about it, having been told how awesome it is for student learning. I read your "rant" piece, Dylan, and found it quite helpful for explaining why we should be cautious about Hattie's research.
Glad it was helpful!
Yes! The rant is fantastic. I’ve tried to explain this as well…on the spot, in grad school classes, but next time I should just hand out copies of this! 🙂
Tight v Loose coupling is insightful phrasing. Are these terms you are coining or picking up from elsewhere?
Also, do you see tight v loose as a zero sum game or do we need a bit of both to have meaningful and effective environments for teaching and learning?
Not mine, it comes from David Labaree in his book "Someone Has to Fail" (which is excellent).
I'm pretty skeptical that tight coupling can work at scale. I'm sure there are great leaders who do a good job of managing a tightly coupled district/school, but there are lots of mediocre and incompetent leaders out there. My take is that without great leadership, tight coupling degenerates into soulless teaching, and I don't think that kind of leadership scales very well in education.
Do you not think that test scores are a valid way to evaluate learning? And if not, what can we use to determine whether our students are learning?
I think test scores are a decent proxy. A school with very low test scores probably isn't producing much learning. A school with high test scores is probably producing a lot of learning.
But here are two things that come to mind that I've seen in my district when we obsess over raising test scores: we had a big meeting about school improvement a few months ago, and the superintendent and principal announced that they would be buying steak dinners for any students who scored in the top 10% for growth in both ELA and math. That was the first, best idea they had for improving our school, and it has nothing to do with learning. And second, we barely teach science and social studies in elementary school here because they aren't tested subjects.
So test scores are one decent proxy, but when we only care about improving test scores we do things that aren't helpful for learning.
To me, test scores should be one data point, along with curriculum-normed assessments, in class formative assessment, and lots of other stuff, and we give teachers lots of resources to make sense of that data and respond to it.
One thing that I have a hard time with in the entire educational space - people seem to be much clearer in their view of what isn't learning than what learning actually is. I include myself in this, by the way.
Everything in the world seems either to be a decent-but-not-excellent proxy for learning, or, more frequently, a sideshow that doesn't really impact learning at all.
To me learning is invisible. It happens in a student's brain. So everything is a proxy.
If all you have are proxies, you want to have a lot of data and not put too much stock in any one measure. But that's hard because it requires dealing with a lot of complexity. And when we put a lot of stock in one proxy, we often end up chasing a sideshow -- or we pick that proxy because it's easy to measure, not because it's particularly useful.