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Richard Halverson

Teaching does not begin and end in the classroom. A teacher’s experiences with other faculty members, with the school’s leaders, and with its organizational structure all have a profound effect on the teacher’s influence on students.

UW-Madison education administration professor Richard Halverson and colleagues are documenting the practices of public school principals from a variety of communities who have succeeded in increasing the achievement of students of color and low-income students. To take one example, they recently found a Chicago public elementary school that raised its student achievement scores after the school principal launched a voluntary, monthly “breakfast club” at which teachers could gather to discuss their practice.

Halverson was particularly interested in this innovative program as a model of distributed leadership—that is, leadership that emerges through the interaction of leaders and followers in the execution of both the everyday tasks of leadership (the micro tasks) and the school’s overall instructional goals (the macro tasks).

Adams School is a Chicago neighborhood elementary school with about 1,200 students (largely African American) housed in two sites. Adams is widely recognized as a school with a well-articulated vision and a record of instructional change. Over the past 10 years, Adams has recorded demonstrable gains in student performance on high-stakes district and state assessment measures, and school leadership is given much of the credit for these improvements.

The breakfast club originated in 1995, when Adams School began hosting the monthly meetings to create professional community and provide an opportunity for teachers to review research on best instructional practices. Although several teachers at the school already kept abreast of current developments in the field, the school’s professional development efforts, rested largely on outside expertise, and they were too intermittent and variable in quality to have a long-lasting impact on student achievement scores.

In interviews with the school’s administrative team, Halverson learned that

• faculty members did not want the breakfast club to be mandatory;
• the substance of the discussions needed to sell the program;
• the club should meet in the morning, so that teachers would be fresh and ready to entertain new ideas;
• the assigned readings should be kept short;
• teachers should be permitted to select the readings and lead the discussions; and
• the readings should align with the school’s instructional priorities and the teachers’ classroom practice.

Innovation becomes institutionalized

The breakfast club was designed to acquaint teachers with relevant research in reading and writing, to help them “work smarter, not harder,” in their efforts to help students improve their reading and writing skills. A persistent underlying goal was to improve student test scores in language arts on district standardized tests.

The Adams school leadership team recognized that improvement of student test scores might not result from a traditional professional development program using external consultants. Principal Brenda Williams realized that long-term gains in student test scores would more likely come when teachers had the opportunity to talk with one another about their teaching and that the breakfast club would be an opportune vehicle for such conversations.

After 2 years, attendance at the breakfast club averaged about 75% of the school’s teachers. The program was modified over time to add incentives for teachers to participate. For example, the principal encouraged teachers to lead a breakfast club discussion. Attendance increased as the veteran faculty members realized that they would be asked to lead discussions and therefore needed to find out what the breakfast club was about.

More than 6 years later, the breakfast club has become an institution at Adams School, and over the past 4 years, student achievement scores have risen 22%. Teachers and administrators credit the breakfast club as a key element in creating the kind of professional community necessary to develop a programmatic, cross­grade level approach to teaching reading and writing in the school.

Adams School experienced significant constraints in designing the breakfast club. The school calendar did not provide time for extra professional development meetings, and the union contract did not require tenured teachers to pursue professional development opportunities beyond those specified in the school calendar. Further, teachers’ and administrators’ schedules were already stretched by their teaching, committee work, student advising, and extracurricular obligations. Teachers and administrators could well have been unwilling to participate in yet another time-consuming program designed to improve their teaching, especially since past professional development efforts using external consultants had not resulted in demonstrable test score gains. Somehow, the breakfast club had to lure participants through its promised benefits rather than through mandated attendance.

The breakfast club resulted in several significant gains for Adams staff. It provided an opportunity for a school-wide professional community around language arts instruction. This professional community, in turn, was credited for student test score gains in reading and writing. The club also helped make teachers take ownership of their professional development. And the documentation of breakfast club practice has given Adams School leaders an opportunity to reflect on their practice, discern patterns, and make sense of instructional initiatives that originally evolved in practice.

Through a retelling of the breakfast club story, Halverson and colleagues have identified several of the guiding principles of leadership practice at Adams School, including

• the importance of patience while waiting for a voluntary program to take hold;
• a commitment to considering research that is directly relevant to teacher practice; and
• a continued willingness to use collaborative design as a method for solving emergent school problems.

Halverson’s research is funded by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

For more information, contact Halverson at halverson@education.wisc.edu.