When planning initiatives and interventions to reach Performance Excellence for All Kids, it is helpful to first identify the impact factors that affect student success in school.
- Learning time – Learning anything to any depth requires time.
Learning occurs over time in gradually deepening and broadening increments. For deep and lasting learning, people require incremental development and continued practice correctly done to achieve and maintain levels of mastery. Teachers using this knowledge teach concepts and skills over time with distributed practice to ensure deep and lasting knowledge. - Family and home background – What students encounter at home impacts their learning.
Family socioeconomic status, educational background, and value for education can profoundly impact student readiness, motivation, access to needed resources and success. Unique support systems are required to meet the needs of both sides of the bell curve. - Differentiation – The more diverse the students, the more challenging it is to teach.
Students learn in different ways and at different rates. Another important consideration is that student learning is affected by motivation drivers. Because students’ actions are driven by the need to feel successful, they behave in ways that help them succeed or avoid failure by exhibiting hiding behaviors. Emotions play a part, both positively and negatively in learning. Differentiation is also impacted by our need to prepare students for the rigor and standards of college and the workplace. As educators, we are held accountable by standardized tests required by our districts. Finally, all of the above challenges are compounded by the reality of too much content. - Paradigm Challenges – It is always a challenge to see anything outside what we know and expect.
When we are learning something new, our brains automatically look for patterns and relationships to prior knowledge. Our perceptions get in our way. We are blind to nuances that we assume are similar to what we already know. - Implementation Leadership and Support – Critical to complex change efforts. For teachers and principals to be successful with new interventions, they need and deserve expert modeling by their leaders, effective training, and on-going coaching and support as they go through the stages of change. This is particularly true with second order change that is typically required for significant achievement gains.
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