Tools created by TFA help Kim and her students as they climb their individual trajectories:
In math and reading, I keep a spreadsheet of every single New York State standard for the grade level I’m teaching. Standards may be tiered or ranked from the absolutely essential to the less important. If a student has not demonstrated mastery of a standard—80 percent or higher—that cell is coded yellow, for 70 to 79 percent mastery, or red, for 69 percent and lower. It is easy to scroll down a column for a particular standard and say, “The majority of cells are yellow or red. I have to reteach this standard. Why did the kids perform poorly on that standard? I may not have taught it effectively, or maybe the kids need more repetition. Perhaps I’ll incorporate manipulatives, the interactive SMART Board, or review remedial skills.” By analyzing the data across standards or students, you start to notice patterns that help you differentiate your instruction. It is a great reflection tool that TFA provides for its corps members.
From her TFA mentors and fellow corps members, Kim has also picked up a host of simple yet powerful methods for engaging students in the challenge and fun of learning. She starts by setting high standards, “Higher maybe than they think is possible. But you know it’s possible. And how do you know? Because you map it out, and you show them that it’s possible.”
Visit Kim’s classroom and you immediately see how she applies these principles every day. Whether working with individual students on a writing challenge or presenting a new math concept to the entire class, Kim is continually interacting with students on an individual level, her eyes quietly scanning the room for signs of confusion, uncertainty, disengagement, excitement, and understanding. Based on the subtle, often nonverbal feedback she receives from each of her seventeen students, she repeatedly adjusts the tempo, style, and structure of her instruction. She senses when an example needs further discussion and when a small joke, a reminder, a gentle prodding, or a friendly cajoling will work best to keep the class focused and learning.
It so happens that the ability to make these kinds of artful adaptations is one of the six traits of highly effective teachers identified by TFA researchers. These teachers understand that “great implementation” in the classroom isn’t a matter of simply following a wellmade lesson plan. As Steven Farr explains, “Great implementation means I’m making smart adjustments to my plan when I’m on my feet, because no classroom I’ve ever taught is exactly the way I thought it would be when I wrote my plan out on paper.”
Kim considers such adjustments crucial to her classroom effectiveness. “I think ninety-five percent of my effort in teaching is about adapting to the needs of individual students,” she reports. Over the course of a school year, she learns which students absorb information best through words, which through images, which through hands-on activities; she gets to know the family situation of each student and uses her understanding to help her determine how best to connect with a particular child. These are techniques that gifted teachers have always employed, often instinctively; TFA helps its corps members to learn and use them more quickly, consciously, and effectively.
As her students grow in skill, knowledge, and confidence, Kim makes a point of rewarding small victories along the way. Her “Club 80” honors any student who earns a score of eighty or higher on a weekly assessment; Club 80 students see their names posted in the classroom and earn Club 80 certificates in a small Friday ceremony. Kim’s kids also publish their essays on an online e-zine and create their own poetry podcasts, discovering the thrill of seeing their names in print and of having their peers listening to and appreciating their creative work. The ripples spread outward from there. “So much of teaching is investing students, families, or guardians in the learning process,” Kim says, “and then just celebrating like crazy when you get there.”
Kim’s TFA colleague, Parker Rider-Longmaid, taught math and science to seventh and eighth graders in Philadelphia. He describes the experience as “emotionally draining.” Yet he too was obsessed with how to keep improving his own effectiveness and the classroom experience. He attended the monthly workshops TFA program directors organized to enable TFA teachers to share techniques and learn better ways to teach. He also constantly exchanged notes and modules with his peers. “I prepared great notes for math, they did the same for science, and we swapped. Saved us both a lot of time.”
Seeking a motivational tool for his eighth-grade class, Rider-Longmaid wrote to eighty different colleges and universities, asking them to send a school pennant. Twelve responded. He hung those pennants in his classroom, along with drawings of the colleges. What had been a distant idea to most of Rider-Longmaid’s students began to look very tangible, very concrete.
“We then used preparation for high school entrance tests to some of the city’s best schools as a sort of ‘dry run’ for preparation for college entrance exams,” Rider-Longmaid recalls. In the process, more and more students started thinking differently about college.
Consider the impact of TFA on the mind of the customer. Parents’ initial perspective is often “School didn’t do much for me. It won’t do much for my children. They’re not going to college anyway, so what difference does it make?” And many students, their enthusiasm for learning dampened by peer pressure and low societal expectations, share the same feelings.
But after a few weeks with a teacher like Kim or Rider-Longmaid, some things begin to change. Students start to say, “The teacher cares about me, talks to me, goes to my games, talks to my parents.” And parents begin to say, “This is not a standard classroom experience. I read my child’s essay online, I hear a podcast of his poetry readings. I can see how my child is picking up computer skills, and I know that will be useful to him.”
At some point, both student and parent cross an invisible line. The expectation changes. It becomes “Maybe I can go to college,” and then, “I will go to college.”
Once those words are uttered, the demand for “education that really works” begins to materialize among more and more students. For some it becomes intense.
That shift from “I don’t care” to “I really want to” is the moment when the demand happens. And it is as hard-edged and tangible as the moment when a consumer shifts from “I don’t care” to “I want a Zipcar,” “I want Netflix,” or any other product.
That little miracle is now happening in classrooms hundreds of times a day.
We need it to be millions. But the secret code for creating that demand has been cracked. Now what’s needed is to scale up.
BY CREATING A SYSTEM to help school districts identify skilled teachers and train them in proven methods of motivating and inspiring kids, TFA is working to improve on the third and most challenging dimension of all—changing American attitudes about education.
No one has been more deeply discouraged by the current state of teaching in America than educators themselves. Some have given up on at-risk kids, competing instead for the handful of jobs in high-prestige suburban school districts. Others, feeling beaten down by the lack of support they receive in lackluster school systems, have quietly resigned themselves to waiting for retirement while making as few waves as possible. And still others have become incapacitated by living in the miasma of what Steven Farr calls “the smog of low expectations”:
Sometimes we breathe that smog through personal interactions, like when a stranger stops [TFA teacher] Crystal Brakke in Walmart as she buys school supplies to say how sorry she is that Ms. Brakke has to work with “those kids at that school.” Or when a cynical school administrator suggests that second-grade teacher Alaina Moonves stick to “finger painting and puppets” with her students with special needs.
TFA’s research provides hope that teachers, principals, and school administrators can finally stop breathing smog and start building effective programs that serve all kids—not just in the schools directly served by TFA, but all across America.
Many of the TFA tools for helping teachers improve their effectiveness are publ
icly available through published materials and online sources, and anecdotal evidence reveals that growing numbers of teachers around the country are taking advantage of them to enhance their skills. Steven Farr reports that more and more school districts around the country are asking TFA for help in designing their own teacher recruiting, evaluation, and training programs. Researchers at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made school reform a priority, are supporting TFA’s research program and spreading its findings throughout the educational community. And the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” educational initiative is providing extra funding to school districts that implement effective new tools for recruiting, training, and retaining the best teachers. It’s a subtle broadening of the traditional emphasis on school accountability (in other words, testing) to include TFA’s focus on finding and developing great teachers. Educators who believe in this approach were galvanized by the change. Timothy Daly, president of the nonprofit New Teacher Project, called it “the big bang of teacher-effectiveness reform … It’s huge.”
TFA has its critics. Some consider TFA’s model a mere Band-Aid that supplies bright young teachers for a few thousand classrooms while failing to address the systemic problems, including under-funding, that plague our nation’s school systems. Others say that TFA’s standard two-year teacher enlistment produces mere dilettantes rather than the dedicated career educators our kids need. The expanding impact of TFA’s methodology on American education suggests one response to the critics. Not every classroom can be led by a TFA corps member, nor should it. Yet in time, the most powerful lessons from TFA’s research into teacher effectiveness can become part of every teacher’s toolkit.
Even more important, Kopp and her supporters stress the value of having TFA alumni in influential posts throughout society; many are already serving in state and local governments, for example, where some are spearheading education reform movements. In fact, Steven Farr suggests that one of Kopp’s key insights has been that TFA should not be viewed as “in the teacher-production business,” but rather “in the leader-production business,” creating thousands of young people in many walks of life—including teaching—who are transforming the demand for education throughout American society.
ALTHOUGH ONLINE MOVIE RENTAL and education reform may not have a lot in common, the stories of Netflix and Teach For America have converged in some remarkable ways. Both organizations were founded by insightful leaders who glimpsed potential demand lurking in hassle maps that millions of other people ignored or resignedly accepted. Both have grown rapidly by dramatically improving a local service through a national system designed with close attention to detail and an unrelenting focus on what people really want as opposed to what they have traditionally settled for. And both are now creating steep improvement trajectories based on unprecedented research that is enabling them to serve customer needs with greater precision and effectiveness with every passing year.
Armed with these powerful demand-creating tools, Wendy Kopp and TFA aim at nothing less than a transformation of the United States, their goal a country in which educational inequalities no longer doom half our citizens to lives that are unproductive and unfulfilled. And while this process still has a long way to go, the progress attained so far has been remarkable, as she explains in this interview from April 2010:
We have made extraordinary progress in the twenty years I’ve been at this. Twenty years ago there were a very small handful of visible examples that it is possible for students in low-income communities to excel academically when given the opportunities they deserve. Today, there is overwhelming evidence—in the form of hundreds of visible examples of teachers and schools that are attaining extraordinary results. Today, dozens of communities have at least one and in many cases growing numbers of schools that are effecting not just incremental progress but transformational change in students’ trajectories. So, the conversation has changed. Now the question isn’t whether we can put students facing socioeconomic pressures on a level playing field, but rather whether it is possible to accomplish this at the level of the whole system.
The fact that the organization at the forefront of this nationwide revolution sprang from the dream of a twenty-two-year-old college student speaks volumes about the incredible power of long-suppressed demand, once unleashed, to transform society.
THE BEST LUNCH EVER: PRET A MANGER AND
THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT SANDWICH
Demand creation never happens “once and for all”—with the triumphant launch of a product, for example. If it happens at all, it happens day after day, in a prolonged and complex process that unfolds in hundreds or thousands of often unlikely places.
Consider, for example, the surprising demand-creation role played by Tracy Gingell, general manager of the Pret A Manger sandwich shop at 60 Broad Street in New York’s financial district.
When Gingell took over the job in 2009, he quickly made a discovery concerning his store’s chief obstacle to successful demand generation. It wasn’t competition from the many other food vendors in the neighborhood. It wasn’t the difficulty of getting enough super-fresh tomatoes, lettuce, and avocados to make a new batch of crisp and flavorful sandwiches every morning, or the high price of the free-range organic chicken he ordered for the shop’s most popular sandwiches. It wasn’t even the economic woes that had forced many regular Pret customers to start brown-bagging to save a few dollars.
Tracy Gingell’s biggest enemy was none of these. It was entropy.
He figured that out the first time he climbed a ladder to inspect the crystal chandelier that was one of the most striking decorative features of his shop.
It was dusty.
If you’ve ever been in a Pret store, you know that they are all remarkably clean. (People tend to use words like sparkly and dazzling to describe the typical Pret.) And Gingell admits that his Broad Street store was perfectly clean as far as any customer was likely to see. But when he got within a few inches of the chandelier, he realized that the crystals bore a thin layer of dust and that a few burned-out bulbs had gone unchanged.
As a Pret A Manger veteran, Gingell was horrified—and energized. He got right to work. “I spent two hours taking all those crystals off and polishing them, four at a time. I replaced all the lightbulbs with big, bright new ones. It ended up looking great. I felt so good!”
The dusty chandelier turned out to be only the most obvious symptom of a bigger problem. Talking with the store’s staffers, Gingell gradually pieced together the story. During the previous year, as the economy worsened and sales slumped, the previous store manager had cut back on workers’ hours, causing Pret’s sky-high standards of cleanliness to slip just a bit. Employee morale suffered, and the perpetually cheery service for which Pret stores are famous became inconsistent. Sales declined further. Downward spirals start small, but they tend to keep going. After a while, they are very hard to reverse.
The shop at 60 Broad was succumbing to entropy—the gradual dissipation of energy and loss of order that is the natural tendency of any system that is not constantly reinvigorated from outside.
Gingell got on the phone to his boss. “I’m not going to make any money here for a while,” he explained. “I’ve got to fix the store, and I’m going to do it according to the Pret recipe—the right people, amazing service, delicious food and drink. Then the shop can grow and get profitable.”
Over the next six months, Gingell carried out his plan. He recruited new employees, including some he’d personally trained at other Pret locations. He organized a storewide cleanup and freshening campaign. For several weeks he deliberately overstaffed the shop and stocked the stainless steel display shelves with too much fresh and appealing food. The idea was to combat entropy, and start the flow of demand, through an unmistakable infusion of energy.
It worked. Within a few months, the shop at 60 Broad had been transformed into a gleaming store plentifully stocked with delicious-looking sandwiches, soups, sweets,
and other treats and staffed with smiling workers who serve a steady stream of customers with efficiency and charm. It’s “the best Pret in the city,” according to a friend who has visited them all, and Tracy Gingell is “the quintessential Pret person.” And Gingell’s team has continued to push the shop up a steep improvement slope. “We have three people who spend two hours a day doing nothing but organizing the food displays. We want our food to look sexy at all times. The avocados have to be placed at just this angle in the salads—for aesthetics, but also to make sure that every item in the salad is visible so you can see what you’re purchasing. We have a bin here in the back where food that the chef doesn’t think is picture-perfect gets rejected and thrown away.”*
Entropy is a persistent danger in business—and never more so than in fast food, where thousands of stores in far-flung locations must serve millions of meals both quickly and affordably, all while maintaining consistently high standards of quality, flavor, nutrition, and service.
Fast-food industry behemoths fend off entropy through rigid standardization, the creation of vast centrally managed supply chains (starting with industrial-style factories for “manufacturing” foodstuffs from beef and chicken to apples and potatoes), and the breakdown of labor into its smallest possible components, so that employees with minimal skills and training can be shuttled in and out of jobs interchangeably at a moment’s notice. The standards are strict—but also low.
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