The Instructional Core

Many of you know that I am an avid tennis player and fan.  I enjoy playing it, watching it, and following it.  While I would not qualify myself as "good" at it, I am completely committed to getting better every time I get the opportunity.  The frustrating part is that it seems that every time I walk out there I have to relearn something that I already knew.  It is like I have a tennis disability.  Unfortunately my job here is like that a lot of times as well.  I find myself hitting my forehead and saying that I knew better than that.  (Some would argue that I have an administrative disability as well).

This phenomenon occurs often when I am going through some stuff that I have learned over the years.  As a matter of fact, I just reread one of the more influential articles that I have read in my career.  I felt like it was a good place to start with this conversation, and I thought it might provide a little insight into what is important to me as an administrator.  Here is the link to the article:

The Instructional Core

I find myself coming back to the contents of this article time and again, and relearning, as it were, the concepts embedded within it.  The article is written in such plain straightforward language that it really doesn't take much translation.  One of the things that seems so interesting about it is that it seems to explain so many of the different issues that have arisen in education over the years.  Why do we seem to struggle to make significant changes in instruction?  Why do so many "initiatives" fail? Why does professional development always seem so useless?  What is wrong with our education schools? 

All of us do so much throughout the course of a day that is probably is worth spending some time thinking about which of those things that we do actually touch the instructional core.  Probably a lot less than we think.  I have reflected on this quite a bit as we talk through our data in PLCs.  While the conversations are necessary, and may even be helpful, unless we are able to translate them into terms which impact the core, we are probably not really accomplishing much.

I also received this week a document from DPI asking me to look at our readiness to adopt the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) model in our school.  I was thinking about this terms of the idea of instructional core, because the two seem to go together so nicely.  How do we get our tier one instructional practices in order such that we know exactly who to move into tier three or tier two?  It is even more relevant if we embrace the ideas in the article surrounding "tasks predicting performance."  We often think of how well we did something in terms of how well we did the task.  But in education how well we do something is really connected to how well others did their work.  That is a tough mental hurdle to get over for some, but it is absolutely necessary.  Is the work that we are asking students to do really accomplishing what we are trying to get done?  It is the central question of Tier 1 in MTSS.  Is our core instruction teaching students.

I will leave you with this thought.  If our students are getting good grades, but our nationally-normed achievement test scores are dropping are the tasks that we are assigning them teaching them what they need?