Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach, The. Anthony Muhammad
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Displayed Student Work and Images of Students
Building a Responsive Learning Environment
About the Authors
ANTHONY MUHAMMAD, PHD, is a much sought-after educational consultant. A practitioner for nearly twenty years, he has served as a middle school teacher, assistant principal, and principal, and as a high school principal. His tenure as a practitioner has earned him several awards as both a teacher and a principal. Anthony's most notable accomplishment came as principal of Levey Middle School in Southfield, Michigan, a National School of Excellence, where student proficiency on state assessments more than doubled in five years. Anthony and the staff at Levey used the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ model of school improvement, and they have been recognized in several videos and articles as a model high-performing professional learning community (PLC).
As a researcher, Anthony has published articles in several publications in both the United States and Canada. He is author of Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division and a contributor to The Collaborative Administrator.
To learn more about Anthony, visit www.newfrontier21.com.
SHARROKY HOLLIE, PHD, is a tenured assistant professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in the Teacher Education department. Sharroky teaches reading for secondary teachers, classroom management, and methodology. From 2007 to 2009, he was a visiting professor in diversity at Webster University in St. Louis in the School of Education. In Spring 2011, Sharroky was a guest lecturer at Stanford University.
Sharroky is the cofounder of the nationally acclaimed laboratory school Culture and Language Academy of Success (CLAS) in Los Angeles. CLAS is a K-8 independent charter school that espouses culturally-responsive pedagogy as its primary approach. At CLAS, Sharroky directs and develops the curriculum, professional development, and teacher development. Sharroky is also the executive director of the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing stellar professional development for educators desiring to become culturally responsive, where he serves as a national expert, traveling around the country training thousands of teachers.
Sharroky is a featured author for Pearson publishing, coauthoring with Jim Cummins in the Cornerstone and Keystone series and contributing to its Prentice Hall anthology. His work has appeared in several edited texts, including Teaching African American Learners to Read and Talkin Black Talk. He is also the author of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning: Classroom Practices for Student Success.
To learn more about Sharroky, follow him on Twitter @validateaffirm, or visit his website, www.culturallyresponsive.org.
To book Anthony or Sharroky for professional development, contact [email protected].
PART I
WILL and SKILL
Introduction
The question of how to improve schools has long plagued practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and community members. Some have argued that the problem with low-performing schools is cultural—related to the people within the system and their beliefs, norms, attitudes, and behaviors (Green, 2005). Others have argued that the problem is structural—related to the structure of our educational system and its policies, practices, and procedures. They believe that low achievement is the product of a bad system (Viadero, 2010). We assert that it is a combination of the two—not one or the other—that has led to poor outcomes for students, particularly for struggling and underserved students, many of whom are from minority groups.
With the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, closing achievement gaps among diverse student groups became a focus of the federal government in the United States, as schools and districts were required to disaggregate student test scores and other performance data by student characteristics. This legislation created both a greater awareness of racial disparities and a rising concern about other kinds of achievement gaps, such as socioeconomic. In the decade since the law passed, most achievement gaps have not been closed to an appreciable degree, despite the introduction of more targeted interventions for different groups of students.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an annual test distributed to a diverse cross-section of students in the United States, shows that, over time, Black and Hispanic students have made small strides in improving their performance in reading and mathematics, although their still exists a gap between their achievement and that of their White peers. For example, Black and Hispanic students trailed their White peers by an average of more than twenty test-score points on the NAEP math and reading assessments at fourth and eighth grade, a difference of about two grade levels (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011).
The problem of disparity among racially and economically diverse students does not stop with standardized testing. A National Center for Education Statistics report cited that while 82.7 percent of Asian students and 78.4 percent of White students in the class of 2008 graduated on time, only 57.6 percent of Hispanic students, 57 percent of Black students, and 53.9 percent of American Indian students graduated on time (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011). In addition, low-income and minority students tend to have less access to the most effective, experienced teachers with knowledge in their content field. One study of forty-six industrialized countries found the United States ranked forty-second in providing equitable distribution of teachers to different groups of students. For example, while 68 percent of upper-income eighth graders in the United States in this sample had math teachers deemed to be of high quality, that was true for only 33 percent of low-income eighth graders (Braeden, 2008).
We assert that, despite these statistics, student ethnicity and social class are not barriers to learning; rather, schools that do not properly respond to the needs of these students are the barriers. Schools must adopt a new, more comprehensive approach to ensure learning for all students, especially underserved minority students and those from poor communities: a healthy learning environment coupled with responsive learning activities developed around the specific needs of diverse students. This, we believe, is the right formula for universal school success. The student is the center of the school universe, and the learning environment and learning activities must be responsive to student needs if we are to avoid achievement gaps.
Will and Skill
It is our belief that successful school improvement requires that educators have a combination of both will and skill to ensure a quality education for every child in every classroom. Will is the belief that all children can learn and perform academically. Educators must be leaders of this will within their school culture. Skill is the use of responsive instruction that is the practical key to ensuring that students learn at high levels. For underserved students especially, it means engaging and reaching students on their own terms with attention to their cultural, home, and community experiences. Educators can have the will to lead, but if they lack the skill to teach, then student learning will fall short of our desired outcomes. Above all, our teaching must be tailored to student needs, not to the needs of educators.
The