Introduction

1. Introduction Kurt B. Richter, Ed.D. Indiana University, Bloomington Email: k.richter@comcast.net Accompanying data and handout page: http://www.indiana.edu/~syschang/decatur/aect_2009/

2. Introduction • Purpose: • To assist Decatur Intermediate Learning Center engage in a • redesign of their school • To improve some of the process guidelines described in the SST by using the qualitative research methodology described as formative research (Reigeluth & Frick, 1999). • Participants: • Metropolitan School District of Decatur Township • Decatur Intermediate Learning Center (Grades 5-6) • Indiana University Researchers and Doctoral Students

3. General Findings • Mindset change –Significant. • It seems that product has been emphasized by participants • Motivation/commitment displays as evidence of mindset change

4. General Findings • Mindset change –Significant. • It seems that product has been emphasized by participants • Motivation/commitment displays as evidence of mindset change • Readings and school models promoted most substantial mindset change. • This process was ended prematurely. • They weren’t “there” but were ready to begin design process as result of mindset change.

5. General Findings • Mindset change –Significant. • It seems that product has been emphasized by participants • Motivation/commitment displays as evidence of mindset change • Readings and school models promoted most substantial mindset change. • This process was ended prematurely. • They weren’t “there” but were ready to begin design process as result of mindset change. • Process was successful in generating: • Mindset change • Motivation • Commitment to the process

6. Short History of Redesign Process 2001-2002 M.S.D of Decatur Township engages in discussion with IU assisting in redesign of School District 2002-2003 M.S.D. Decatur engages in Core Team (5 stakeholders) discussion of principles of redesign according to GSTE 2003-2005 Decatur Forms a Leadership Team and discusses a Framework of Beliefs to guide the redesign process. 2005-2006 Decatur High School engages in successful implementation of redesign employing Small Learning Communities

7. Short History of Redesign Process 2006-2007 Middle School Redesign Process (Not initially successful). Initial appointment of Assistant Superintendent of Systemic Change 2007-2008 Adoption of SST protocol (Reigeluth & Duffy). Principles of SST NOT applied to Middle School Redesign Process (Process is not successful…) 2008-2009 Redesign process based on SST applied to DILC. Interrupted in spring of 2009 due to district-wide redesign effort (Enrollment Management Design Team) that begins at the same time. (Avoid AYP penalties and redistribute enrollment at lower achieving schools)

8. Tools of Redesign School System Transformation protocol Phase 1: Prepare Step 1.4 Develop District Capacity Task 1.4.2 Select co-facilitators Task 1.4.3 Prepare co-facilitators Step 1.3 Develop Additional Capacity Task 1.3.3 Develop school leaders

9. Tools of Redesign School System Transformation protocol Phase 2: Envision - Each Intermediate School Designs a New Paradigm Task 2.1.1 Form and Develop Design Team and Input Groups for each school. Task 2.1.2 Elaborate the Decatur Framework Task 2.1.3 Ensure political support Task 2.1.4 Develop a broad strategy

10. Tools of Redesign • School System Transformation protocol • Phase 2: Envision - Each Intermediate School Designs a New Paradigm • Task 2.1.5 Decide on high-leverage structural changes • Task 2.1.6 Develop learning goals • Task 2.1.7 Develop criteria for evaluation • Task 2.1.8 Develop methods, practices, and tools

11. Tools of Redesign • School System Transformation protocol • Phase 2: Envision - Each Intermediate School Designs a New Paradigm • Step 2.2: IMPLEMENT THE NEW PARADIGM • Task 2.2.1 Implement Initial changes • Task 2.2.2 Foster External Alignment • Task 2.2.3 Transform the Remaining Schools • Task 2.2.4 Continue to Transform the Central • Administration

12. Redesign Schedule

13. Redesign Schedule

14. Redesign Schedule Important Note: All dates refer to One Academy with approximate time frames. Similar agenda items were the subject of each school’s redesign plan, though meeting content was not always identical

15. Research Methods • Formative Research Methodology (Reigeluth & Frick, 1995) : • What worked Well? • What did not work as well as planned? • What activities should be improved? • Attention to elements of… • Process Mindset Events

16. Research Methods Interviews with participants: September 23, 2009 – October 3, 2009 Interview participants:

17. Interview Question 1: When can a district begin the process of school redesign?

18. Interview Question 1: When can a district begin the process of school redesign? Response: District Level Administrator I think that the district has to be supportive before you can even attempt to do things at a building level. My opinion is that is why things fall apart so quickly, because schools try to do things without the support and the physical coordination of the district. The shortest point for me to be is to make sure the district is all thinking in the same direction and then I think you can jump right in. But, it’s not going to do you any good at a building level unless you know that the big guy upstairs is going to support what you are doing both monetarily and philosophically because there’s lots of bumps.

19. Interview Question 1: When can a district begin the process of school redesign? Recommendation: Work first at the district level to ensure cooperation before beginning school level redesign…

20. Interview Question 1: When can a district begin the process of school redesign? Supporting Literature: Joseph, R., & Reigeluth, C. (2005). Formative research on an early stage of the systemic change process in a small school district. British Journal of Educational Technology, 36 (6), 937-956. Joseph, R. (2006). The excluded stakeholder: In search of student voice in the systemic change process. Educational Technology, 2006 (March-April). Richter, K. (2007). Integration of a decision-making process and a learning process in a newly formed leadership team for systemic transformation of a school district. Unpublished Dissertation. Indiana University. Lee, I. , & Reigeluth, C.M. (1994). Empowering teachers for new roles in a new educational system. Educational Technology, 34 (1), 61-72. Watson, W. (2007). Formative research on an instructional design theory for educational video games. Unpublished Dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

21. Question 2: How did you become a member of the redesign team? Comments on the process… Comments on satisfaction with joining the team…

22. Question 2: How did you become a member of the redesign team? Comments on the process… Comments on satisfaction with joining the team… Response: …from Principal (on parent selection) With each respective grade level, we had a community forum that talked about the need for change, talking about the shift from the industrial age and all of those kinds of things. From that group of parents who participated, we asked if they would be interested to further their participation and from that list I sent out invitations for a few parents that I thought would be willing to participate – able to participate – and able to be involved. I say that more so than just showing up [as to ensure] that they would be active participants.

23. Question 2: How did you become a member of the redesign team? Comments on the process… Comments on satisfaction with joining the team… Response: …from Principal (on teacher representation) Teachers, we had three teachers and my goal was to have fair or equal representation of the teaching staff, so I allowed my entire fifth grade group of teachers, my sixth grade teachers, and then the special ed and special area [each] to have one representative. That way the three teachers could go back and speak to their constituency just like the parents could go back and speak to their friends and other parents in the community about what is going on. The last group was other faculty – school social worker, academic coach, secretary, even our day custodian – to give a cross-section of everyone that is influential to the day to day operation of the school.

24. Question 2: How did you become a member of the redesign team? Comments on the process… Comments on satisfaction with joining the team… Response: …from a Teacher (on positive experience) [This was a] smaller tight-knit group that you felt very comfortable with. You felt like you were great thinkers. You were hanging out in the forum thinking great thoughts and discussing big ideas for the betterment of the world. It sounds very idealistic, but I think we almost felt that way. I don’t feel that way now. I don’t know how to make it happen, but I almost feel like everyone needs to have a similar process to what we had with the core team at some point. Maybe it means we need to re-look at how we are doing learning communities in our school.

25. Question 2: How did you become a member of the redesign team? Comments on the process… Comments on satisfaction with joining the team… Response: …from a Principal (on problems with teacher selection): I would still let the teachers pick their own representatives. But the representatives turned out to be those that had the time to do it. The sixth grade got together and the representative was chosen by forfeiture. This teacher has a family to get home to, this teacher has this to go to, [they said], ‘Hey, this is a young single guy who doesn’t have as many responsibilities, let’s let him represent us.’ I don’t think the teachers made the selection with the thinking of, ‘Let’s have the best representative.’ In that respect, I would rather pick the teachers that had the most influence, that have the best open vision for the change process as opposed to people who just got selected by their peers because nobody else wanted to do it. That may sound a little negative but I think that it happened that way.

26. Question 2: How did you become a member of the redesign team? Comments on the process… Comments on satisfaction with joining the team… Recommendation: Commitment to the redesign process requires leadership, collaboration, and dedication. Selection of Redesign Core Team needs to focus on individuals who display these qualities over time, and who are opinion leaders among their peers.

27. Question 3: How effective were the readings?

28. Question 3: How effective were the readings? Response: from Teacher (who has been involved in extensive professional development using some of these readings: “[It’s a matter of] recognizing there are people you have already had as an audience or who have done similar things before. Sometimes I feel like it’s almost disrespectful. It’s like you think I didn’t get it before. There’s no acknowledgment of the fact that I would have already heard this information, which is frustrating. When you start off, you want to start off on a good foot and when we were at the retreat – you have that inner groan of ‘Oh, no. Here we go again.’ We got past that and there were good things, but knowing that you are there for a full day and that maybe the first one or two hours is all repeat information for you is very frustrating, so you are maybe not in the best place to start off doing good work.”

29. Question 3: How effective were the readings? Response from Parent “(When you read these articles)…some of it seemed redundant for those of us already in education and aware of thinking in those terms where I think some of those were brand new concepts for, for example, for parents or people who don’t have educational background in education. I think sometimes it was rather staggered, and that’s not really a bad thing. To have (difficult) articles so early on when parents were not sure what to expect insofar as their roles…could be a little overwhelming or confusing as to what their goal was going to be.

30. Question 3: How effective were the readings? Recommendation: To empower parents, devote 1 or 2 meetings exclusively with parents discussing current literature that has already been addressed by professional educators. Create a website that makes literature available in advance to any and all participants. Ask all members to have articles read before meeting. If there is concern that parents may not be able to read or comprehend literature intended for the group, create audio versions of the literature.

31. Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned?

32. Question: Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned? Response: …The Facilitator I think it was successful. I kind of looked around, they had their articles and you could see they made notes. They were underlined, they were highlighted, so I saw activity on them, moreso with our parents than with our teachers. It’s just that the parents probably didn’t have to grade papers or some of those kinds of things.

33. Question: Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned? Response: …The Facilitator …I asked them the meeting before, when I was passing out their materials, I said, ‘How do you feel about getting these ahead of time so you have time to work on them?’ …and they liked that. We were doing a lot of reading where if we could do it ahead of time, that would give us more conversation time during the meetings, and that seemed to go well.

34. Question: Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned? Response: …from Parent 1: …if you are going to read the articles, you should let people know what they are going to read it for. One person didn’t understand the article at all. Questions on each article might help them get the purpose out of the article.

35. Question: Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned? Response: …from Parent 1: …if you are going to read the articles, you should let people know what they are going to read it for. One person didn’t understand the article at all. Questions on each article might help them get the purpose out of the article. …from Parent 2: …when it came time to discuss the articles we would only discuss parts of them. It would have been good to know what I was looking for.

36. Question: Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned? Response: …From staff: It’s like anything: the more you discuss it the more you are going to learn, but at least reading it moved their background knowledge a little more where we’re going and what we’re doing.

37. Question: Question 4: Amount of required reading – Was it too much? Too little? Were participants prepared with the literature that was assigned? Recommendations: Make all articles available in advance. Set the purpose for reading before assigning the article for consideration.

38. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation?

39. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? Model presentation: Discussion led by educators who have implemented a redesigned model with the school district. Engaging in visitations to educational models in remote school districts.

40. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? • Model descriptions presented in Decatur Intermediate Learning Center Redesign Process: • Decatur Central High School Elementary School Redesign • Small Learning Communities ? • Expeditionary Learning • New Tech HS National Model • PBL Curriculum

41. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? HS Response: …from District Administrator Travelling to other school districts is quite pricey, which is why we were lucky with the high school because we had a [corporate] grant so we didn’t have to worry about cost. What we did at the high school and I think we would do if we had it all over to do it again, we had a core group of people doing all the travelling. Our reasoning behind that was, when you take people somewhere, they generally like what they see. So if you see something and I see something else and a third person sees something else, we’ll never reach any kind of consensus in where we want to go. But if all of us see all things, then we have common knowledge to discuss and think about where we want to go.

42. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? HS Response: …from District Administrator …the important part in there is that you have to have commonalities. It can’t just be taking different people to different places. At [the intermediate school], we didn’t go very many places, we saw New Tech because we had it here. We saw New Tech in elementary school which was also quite successful. We saw things that we were talking about that could work.

43. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? HS Response: …from District Administrator We’ve also walked into a couple of places that we thought, ‘Oh, my God…why did we take a group of people here?’ What is vital…is knowing what you are going to see before you go. [The high school principal] and I got to where we would go and see things first before we would decide to take people.

44. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? HS Response: …from teacher: They were very down-to-earth. They were very honest – candid – about things that happened. The good things, the bad things, the things that they would do differently, the things that worked and didn’t work, and I appreciate that. It did not just feel like a presentation to me. It felt real. It felt like valuable information we could use. They really used the process and they learned from it.

45. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? HS Response: …from Staff: Even though it was at a different grade level, that meeting was helpful to me because it felt like we were getting some concrete information on what the process might look like. I actually think, and I forget the instructional coach who came with [the high school principal], but I felt that the input was valuable because they were sharing some of those things from the teacher’s perspective.

46. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? HS Response: …from Faculty I think the picture of the end result wasn’t accurate. Being [a faculty member] at this school…some of the things that were being said [in introductory remarks to the combined redesign team] in terms of the outcomes on student behavior wasn’t an accurate reflection. A comment was made, ‘There has only been x amount of fights,’ At the same time, I could count more specific cases I was aware of kids in fights at school. For someone who doesn’t teach there to know of so many, how could that be it for the entire school?

47. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? Elementary Model Response: …from Staff: It was helpful in that it was good to know that an elementary school had gone through the process and come out on the better end of it. But, I had a hard time relating to it because I guess I didn’t know that they were – had been doing this all along. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say… I didn’t realize that [the elementary school in question] was such a changed school. I’ve been here four years and didn’t realize it wasn’t like the other elementaries and how it ran itself in terms of their PLCs [professional learning communities] and that they were already doing PLCs.

48. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? Elementary Model Response: …from Faculty: It was interesting. It was clear to see differences in what we were doing to what they had done. They went to someone – [an expert in curriculum design] – and it seems they had in mind the end product where we really haven’t. The other thing I felt uneasy about was their process had stopped. One of my questions was ‘What’s next? Where are you going next?’ School wide procedures [the suggested next step] didn’t correlate with where they were. They didn’t seem to have an evaluative tool for their process. That made me think about how we would handle our [evaluation of the redesign process].

49. Question: Question 5: What is the value of Model Presentation? Recommendations: Models should not be introduced until participants have begun to demonstrate information age thinking. Criteria for selection of models should capture the essence of the information age paradigm. Visitation to information age models should occur as a culminating activity as opposed to a formative activity so that participants are not boxed into single solutions.

50. Introduction Kurt B. Richter, Ed.D. Indiana University, Bloomington Email: k.richter@comcast.net Accompanying data and handout page: http://www.indiana.edu/~syschang/decatur/aect_2009/