AIM at Middle Grades Results: About Aim

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About AIM > Voices > Starkville Leadership Feature

FEATURE STORY

CHANGES THAT STICK: BUILDING LEADERSHIP CAPACITY TO SUCCEED WITH AIM IMPLEMENTATION
By Mitch Bogen and Ruby Midkiff

Ask Bob Fuller, principal of Armstrong Middle School in Starkville, Mississippi, to describe his students and he gets right to the point. "Students in the middle grades are at a very exciting and sometimes frightening age," he says. "They never run out of energy. It is that energy that makes you both exhausted and exhilarated at the same time."

Exciting yet frightening. Exhausted yet exhilarated. Bob's ability to embrace these creative tensions gives us a clue to his success-not only as the most recent Middle School Principal of Year, as named by the Mississippi Association of Middle Level Education, but also as one of the most effective school leaders currently implementing AIM at Middle Grades Results (Note 1). Just as young adolescents make the awkward and difficult transition out of childhood, so, too, schools that enter into comprehensive school reform must leave behind their traditional ways of doing things. Using AIM tools, and with AIM guidance, Fuller has taken the lead in making Armstrong a school that now stands as a model of school improvement.

One key to Armstrong's success is a firm commitment to collaborative leadership--a commitment shared by the Starkville School District as a whole. In fact, Armstrong and Starkville have been effective in developing what Linda Lambert (1998) has defined as the two key dimensions of leadership: 1) broad-based staff participation and 2) the strong understanding and skillfulness of those involved.

Broad-based Participation
Taking the lead in an AIM school means sharing leadership roles. When Armstrong was selected as an AIM pilot school and started participation in the initial start-up phase, collaborative leadership was a new concept for Fuller and for the school. Fuller quickly demonstrated his commitment to the concept by selecting strong and experienced teachers and administrators to form the leadership team that would participate in Creating Tomorrow-AIM's comprehensive and intensive process of assessing strengths and weaknesses and planning for school improvement.

As a first step in ensuring that leadership at Armstrong would be truly collaborative, the Armstrong leadership team re-named itself the Armstrong Communication Team (ACT), since the word "leadership" has traditionally connoted concepts of hierarchy and elitism. For his part, Fuller has not hesitated to delegate meaningful authority to ACT members. For example, following their participation at AIM's February 2003 Leadership Symposium, he asked the ACT members to take the lead in training the rest of school in the leadership skills learned during the Symposium. They chose a training-of-trainers model, working first with seven teachers, who then trained additional staff during the spring 2003 semester.

Collaborative leadership is not the abdication of leadership and authority on the part of the principal, though. This is something that Bob Fuller understands well, according to Janet Henderson, Assistant Superintendent for the Starkville School District. "He builds leaders among his staff and delegates easily to others," she observes. "He is a member of the team and not an omnipotent dictator. He's not afraid to make decisions, but he is knowledgeable about what decisions he should make and what decisions the stakeholders should make."

Skillful Practice
The fact that leadership is shared does not necessarily mean that it is successful. To succeed, all leaders need to be clear about their purposes. Janet Henderson is succinct on this point: "I believe that leadership has only one focus and that is results." For AIM schools this means helping faculty develop new skills to improve teaching and learning. Fuller explains:

AIM has helped our school focus more on the teaching and learning process. Through our Faculty Inquiry Teams [also called teacher study groups], our school is experiencing school improvement where it must take place, in the individual classrooms where our students learn. The assessments our teachers are developing for our students are assessing more for understanding rather than mere knowledge as before. We have established learning communities that focus on instruction, assessment, and meeting the diverse needs of our students. Our teachers are using the [AIM] protocols in their work together and [engaging in] focused dialogue on the teaching and learning process.

The work of the Communication Team provides a good example of skillful practice at Armstrong. The ACT recently reviewed a variety of data around student achievement and identified the following dilemma: "What are some strategies for dealing with seventh graders who achieve minimal proficiency on the Mississippi Curriculum Test [MCT]?" Team members took this dilemma to their study groups, where another member of the study group facilitated a conversation using the consultancy protocol (Note 2). After these small group sessions, each study group reported back to the ACT. As a result, the ACT created several short- and long-term strategies to help Armstrong seventh graders prepare for the MCT. Using a variety of AIM structures and protocols, the Communication Team and the teacher study groups are now better able to focus on specific learning needs.

Teacher study groups provide all teachers with the opportunity to develop their skills as instructional leaders. In these groups, teachers use a variety of protocols to look at student work, assess student performance, and identify specific areas for investigation. Another important leadership practice at Armstrong involves having veteran teachers mentor first-year teachers, informing them about AIM and helping them to begin to master AIM's core approach to curriculum, instruction, and assessment: Teaching for Understanding.

Changes That Stick
Concrete practices, such as those outlined above, begin to change the culture of a school, which makes it easier to sustain meaningful school reform. "Our goal is to demonstrate that AIM is not just another new reform-it is changing the way we think, the culture of our school," says Fuller. "Those are the changes that stick." Teacher and leadership team member Rosemary Cuicchi confirms that deep, sustainable change is happening: "The atmosphere of the school has changed for the better. Teachers now spend more time collaborating on lessons and helping each other." This changed culture at Armstrong demonstrates Lambert's assertion that reflective and innovative practice becomes the norm at schools functioning with well-developed leadership capacity (1998, p. 13).

Lambert (1998, p. 13) also contends that this changed culture will result in high student achievement. This is the case at Armstrong Middle School, which has shown progress on the Mississippi criterion-referenced exams in reading, language, and math. More seventh and eighth grade students scored at a higher level in each area during the 2002 school year than during the 2001 school year. What's more, learning is also more engaging, as evidenced by this seventh grade student reflection:

I really enjoyed creating the African Mask. I was able to be creative on all of the projects and get a better grade than doing a written test. I also enjoyed researching and learning about my country, when completing the travel brochure. This was another way I showed my understanding of the topic.

Engaging the District
A high level of institutional support is needed to bring about comprehensive school reform, and the Starkville district is fortunate in this regard. Assistant Superintendent Henderson believes in the AIM approach because it is grounded in solid research (Note 3) and because it focuses on building a learning community, which is "instrumental to the success of building capacity for best practices." With Armstrong serving as a primary inspiration, Henderson is working to spread AIM principles and instructional strategies throughout the district.

Scale-up methods include a Teacher Leadership Program, a District Curriculum Council, and the development of study groups at every school site in the district. The Teacher Leadership Program works to develop more leaders at each school. Each year, two or three teachers from every school in the district go on a retreat where they form a learning community, learn how to be effective leaders, and are responsible for planning the retreat for next year's participants. At one retreat, two Armstrong teachers led a session for the whole group on Looking at Student Work. The District Curriculum Council includes representatives from each school, serves as a liaison between each school and the district office, and acts as an advisory committee to Assistant Superintendent Henderson.

In addition to forming teacher study groups at each school in the district, district administrators are currently implementing their own AIM-based study groups. At the first administrators' meeting, a principal presented a dilemma, Henderson facilitated a session utilizing the consultancy protocol, and administrators used structured discussion to identify key learnings. Henderson draws special attention to the increased use of study groups as a "significant" development in the district. In the process, she says, "we have broken down so many…of those competitive barriers that existed between schools….We are creating avenues for teacher and administrator dialogue that never existed before. We are tapping into tremendous resources that already exist in our district-our people."

While some Starkville schools are joining Armstrong by implementing selected practices recommended by AIM, one additional school has made a full commitment. Henderson Intermediate School is the newest Starkville school to adopt the AIM program. Assistant Superintendent Henderson notes that this staff has made impressive progress toward change, achieving meaningful transformation in "the shortest amount of time" she has ever seen.

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) agrees with Henderson's positive assessment of growth at Armstrong, Henderson, and throughout the district. NSDC has recently chosen Starkville as just one of six districts in the nation to participate in its study called "Amplifying Positive Deviance," which seeks to identify and disseminate leadership strategies that spread best teaching practices to wide numbers of teachers and schools. On a recent visit to the Starkville district, NSDC's Joan Richardson told Janet Henderson that few districts in the U.S are doing as well as Starkville, especially with a population of students in which 70 percent qualify to receive free and reduced lunch. Richardson added that she did not see signs stating that "all children can learn," but she did see teachers actually helping all children to learn!

Commitment and Attitude
With Bob Fuller being named Principal of the Year and the Starkville District being honored by NSDC, Armstrong and Starkville are more committed than ever to continuous school improvement. Assistant Superintendent Henderson believes that such recognition can serve as a catalyst for continued high expectations and norms of excellence in the district. She also observes that "our commitment and attitude are critical to the process of real growth in the pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning."

Bob Fuller is grateful for the strong commitment and positive attitude of the Armstrong faculty. "It is both exciting and rewarding to have a faculty that is truly committed to the students in the middle grades, and that is constantly looking for better practices to reach students more effectively." Letting go of old habits as new ones are adopted is not easy. But a quick look around their classrooms reminds Armstrong's middle-grades teachers that the results are worth the hard work involved.

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Reference
Lambert, L. (1998). Building Leadership Capacity in Schools. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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