Rachael Gabriel
To the classroom: episode 9
April 17, 2023
Jen Serravallo:
Rachel, welcome.
Rachael Gabriel:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be with you.
Jen Serravallo:
So I've read several chapters out of the recently published book, How Education Policy Shapes Literacy Instruction, that you edited and you wrote a few of the articles as well. It is such an incredible contribution to the field. Thank you so much for it.
Rachael Gabriel:
Thank you.
Jen Serravallo:
I thought we could talk about two of the chapters that you wrote or co-wrote. Start with the chapter focused on teacher quality. Early on you discussed the Bond and Dykstra 1967 first grade studies that looked into whether pupil, teacher, class, school, or community variables were related to achievement. What did they find?
Rachael Gabriel:
They found an idea that sort of undergirded more recent teacher evaluation policy, which is that the teacher makes the biggest difference of all the variables that you listed classroom differences. And in this case, they were thinking about the tools teachers were using, which now we would think of as which Basal reader or did they have a basal reader? What curriculum materials that they didn't make as much of a difference in terms of achievement that teachers could use material, any of the materials could be used to either good effect or to poor effect. And it really just depended who was using them.
Jen Serravallo:
It's so important. And
Rachael Gabriel:
<laugh>, no
Jen Serravallo:
<laugh> a really important thing to keep in mind in this era of approved lists of programs and mm-hmm not approved lists of programs and the way that funding is or isn't supporting teacher professional development. That finding holds up. And I wanted you to talk next about Connor's work because I think that's relevant as well. And what studies were found about beginning literacy instruction and teacher or teaching quality?
Rachael Gabriel:
So I think I can back up a little bit from Connor's because the study, the main finding of Bond and Dykstra has held up and it's been looked at a couple of different ways. And not only within the beginning reading instruction or reading instruction in general it's even held up in terms of things that people, that educators might almost want the finding to be a little bit different with class size that it turns out that the teacher makes a bigger difference than the number of students in the room. And there are some reason we can pick apart those studies and think about why they might have turned out that way. But whenever we have large scale studies that look at what variable is the one, the malleable variable, the one that we could do something about in the teaching learning interaction, in school literacy development it really is the teacher and not the stuff. It's not necessarily the number of kids in the room, although it makes a difference, it doesn't make the biggest difference. And there is an impact of leadership, but it isn't the biggest variable. So we really do keep coming back to, if you wanna make an investment in your school or in your community, the smartest investment to make is an investment in teachers. Partly because they make the biggest difference and also because they're there for the longest.
Like a human will, outlast, <laugh>, any material that you buy. And one of the things that Carol Connor's work does if I'm thinking about the same thing that you're thinking about, one of the pieces that I love of her is that I think about often takes the idea that differentiating for everybody's individual needs is going to mean that you have to have as many lessons as children in your classrooms. And they basically found that there's sort of two groups that need different things in order to be equally successful. And that is students with less developed foundational skills need more teacher directed support and more time with teachers in order to be as successful as their peers who have more developed foundational skills who actually benefit from more student directed practice and student discussion. And when those students that have more developed skills have more teacher directed time, they actually don't do as well.
And that actually explains the main finding of the next generation of the bond extra studies, which were the fourth grade studies and the first and fourth grade studies of the late nineties which found something similar, although weren't asking that question in particular. They found that the moment by moment teacher interactions, even in buildings where the teachers have the same resources and the same student population when teachers make slightly different decisions about how they're using time and how they're introducing tasks and how they give feedback and how they give explanations, they have dramatically different results. So again, it's not the materials, it's how the materials are being framed and deployed.
Jen Serravallo:
Well I think what's so important about, there's so much that's important about this, but spelling out the very many things that are within the teacher's control, no matter the materials you're getting, how are you organizing your day? How much time are you spending on things which children are getting, which activities am I teaching the right thing to the right child at the right time? Are they engaged in the kinds of lessons, whether student driven or teacher driven that are going to help them learn the fastest? It's so much knowledge that teachers need to have, not just about the interactions of how to execute a good lesson, which if you're just following a script, you might be, oh, I just need to deliver this content. That is not what these studies show is not what's going to help kids the most.
Rachael Gabriel:
No, not at all. And I think we've got lots of evidence that teachers teaching in the same school, so arguably with the same set of materials and the same, at least the same recent professional development opportunities, that the differences between classrooms in the same school in terms of instructional quality and the nature of instruction are actually bigger than they are between schools that are cities and states apart. And I've seen this firsthand. The first study I did when I moved to Connecticut was comparing discourse around reading comprehension instruction in two classrooms that were next door to each other in one school that uses a used scripted curriculum. And in a school that didn't, and the classrooms that were literally next door, same group, same everything, same script, same instructional coach had drastic differences in student achievement that were easily traced to the differences in how teachers were using time, how they were responding to student questions, how they were listening student questions. It really has everything to do with the interactions that teachers are using, materials and time and their knowledge to create. It's really not the materials that doesn't mean materials are unimportant, it just means that it just means that the teacher's a whole lot more important.
Jen Serravallo:
And that even great materials in the hands of one person versus another person can be dramatically different outcomes. And I'm thinking about this, just this book that you edited, it's just so timely because we're thinking about or I think a lot about the unprecedented, unprecedented number of teacher vacancies, emergency certification, reduced requirements to get people into classrooms where there, there's still today where it's January and there are still hundreds of classrooms vacant in certain large school districts that I consult in. So that means there's people with less experience, less mentorship, less apprenticeship, less support potentially who are working with students. And I think one intention from publishers sometimes is to try to teacher proof like, okay, well we'll just create this tech product or we'll just create this program so it doesn't matter who's delivering the instruction or even further, we'll create this tech product where kids sit at a desk and just have the computer teach the child and eliminate the teacher variable teachers sort of just like a manager instead. So I don't know, what are your thoughts about the relevance of this research in relation to what's happening today?
Rachael Gabriel:
Yeah I think there's a way of reading the current policy story as ending with, let's just replace the teachers. It's too much of a mess. And you could think that a few different ways. There are more generous readings of the story, but this is a possible there's reason to believe that policies are pointing in a direction that says we wanna remove the variation cuz there is significant variation as you were talking about in teaching quality. We wanna remove the human element of that because we can't really control it. And so we're just going to make it simpler. And I hear the term level, the playing field a lot, which is so funny because I think where that term entered our lexicon as educators was somewhere around, somewhere around the first elementary and secondary education act in the sixties. And when people were talking about level the playing field at that moment in time, they were talking about putting more books in schools, hiring reading specialists for the first time and changing funding formulas so that schools in districts with lower tax revenue had enough funding, not equal, but enough funding to provide a basic level of education.
Speaking of leveling the playing field, this problem of not having educators or not having well prepared or well mentored or well supported educators in every classroom is news to a lot of folks who have been working in schools where mostly there are teachers in every room, maybe somebody, we have this one hard to fill area but the that's not new in lots of communities. That's all been the case for a long time in lots of communities that there weren't any materials, there wasn't a teacher all year long. There weren't adequate supports or adequate training for many of the teachers in the building.
Jen Serravallo:
And calling it high quality instructional materials, you're like high quality. Right? That sounds good. Yeah.
Rachael Gabriel:
Who could argue that, right? Right. Yeah. Sounds beautiful. Right?
Jen Serravallo:
So you’re saying it's not there is, it's really just about standards alignment is what makes it high quality.
Rachael Gabriel:
In our current conversation about, in the US current conversation about it circa the last three years. And part of the reason for that is the rise of Ed Reports is really the only place that you can go to look for ratings of curriculum like comparative ratings of curriculum. They provided something in the marketplace that wasn't there that is really handy. But you have to pass through gateway number one for Ed Reports, is it standards aligned? And if they can't see all of it or if it, it's like it's up to the teacher what text you use or it's up to the teacher which activity, then we can't guarantee that it's standards-aligned cause we don't know what they chose. So there are a lot of things that get knocked out before they get analyzed for anything else. So Ed Reports does analyze for other things but the first thing they look for is standards alignment. And there's logic behind that. That's not a horrible idea, but it's one way to cut it. And so we're not really looking at curriculum quality at the moment or instructional material quality at the moment because we're looking at standards alignment and a couple other things. We could say quality is how well does it work, but we don't have that information or quality is how much do teachers appreciate it? We really don't have that information cause nobody's been asking that question.
Jen Serravallo:
And if you go back to the teacher quality studies that we were talking about before, right? Thinking about what, what are the things that they're measuring when it comes to teacher quality? They're measuring how much time they spend on things, interactions, adjusting for different students. Are they saying, oh, teacher has the leeway to make modifications according to what students need or there's a assessment and instruction cycle built in so that teachers can make decisions? Is that part of what makes a material high quality given what we know from the teacher quality? No.
Rachael Gabriel:
No. And there's a piece of that, I think there's an attempt toward it. So it's not completely missing and ignored. There's an attempt, it's an incomplete attempt. And then there's also, if this is the story of sort of education measurement period, the tools for teacher evaluation are asking for a version of teaching that assumes a bunch of things about what good teaching is. And they don't always line up with, with research on good literacy teaching in particular, or good foreign language teaching in particular, or good music teaching in particular. There's actually some contrast and contradictions in there. And then people need to make judgements about what do we want good generic teaching, whatever that is. Or do we want good literacy teaching? Which is a little bit different than what many teacher evaluation rubrics are looking for in part because it's really important that students have a lot of practice reading and writing and talking about text.
And that doesn't look like anything <laugh> like, to be honest, if you walk into a room and kids are all reading, there's not a lot to take notes on. I mean I guess you and I probably could find lots of things…
Jen Serravallo:
Sure, are kids engaged…
Rachael Gabriel:
But on rubric it says, I'm not counting participation like the equitable participation. I'm not counting, I can't look at question types. I can't look at most of the things that show up on teacher evaluation rubrics. If the kids are just writing, that's all they're doing. Are you kit in? That is one of the marks of some good literacy instruction but it doesn't show up as the teacher doing anything. Which actually I think is great if they've created conditions for learning that they don't have to manage it at all moments. But it doesn't show up the same way.
And similarly, things we know about really great instruction and the role of instructional materials and teachers using them flexibly and going between them and matching them to readers to students and making adjustments based on assessments really kind of contradicts the idea that we need to see curriculum that is where the scope and sequence is the same for everybody. Where it's all, it's pred and it's pre pasted and we know exactly what you're going to do in what order no matter who you're teaching or when. Mm-hmm. There's a contradiction there. There's like why would we teach something? Some kids already know that. Waste their time and disengage them. Yes, yes it would. But mm-hmm difficult to measure it without saying, we basically, we want it to be a model we want folks to have on paper this sort of idealized version, which actually I don't think we would want the ideal.
It really reminds me of the images for advertisements for the diet, wellness, fitness industries of this is the idealized human form, but you actually don't want that.
And so we might say, wow, this is a beautifully written unit plan or curriculum map. Everything fits perfectly and everything is sequenced beautifully and it's super logical and it's vertically aligned and horizontally and it isn't gorgeous on paper. But you don't actually want to live that because kids don't come in <laugh> needing exactly the same thing, knowing exactly the same thing and moving at the same pace. As soon as you start teaching from instructional materials, they are the least important thing and the students are the most important thing and it's only as good as it is flexible. So we can't rate that unless we're rating it in use. Yeah,
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, yeah. It's only as good as it is flexible. I think it's really, really important. And I think not exactly what a lot of the state approved lists, if you looked closely at the materials that are considered to be high quality, I would not say that. I mean you've done more of this looking than I have say that they're super flexible.
Rachael Gabriel:
No, and
Jen Serravallo:
If you think about, you know, talked a little bit about skills and the kinds of skills kids need and tracking those skills and there's also, you talk in a second article, a second chapter in this book about knowledge building curriculums and how those are very common on state approved lists along with the phonics program to build phonic skills. And you raise important questions around whose knowledge is in this knowledge building curriculum, where does culturally and linguistically relevant instruction fit in? And you talk about both in this chapter and in the previous one, how critical culturally and linguistically relevant practices are to be considered high quality, high quality teaching, high quality materials. What are you seeing in relation to that?
Rachael Gabriel:
What we're seeing is not very progressive at all. None of it's new. Most of it is pretty sort of, it's in the spirit of teacher proofing, it's in the spirit of let's make sure that there is sort of a lowest common denominator that everybody's got. At the very least we can say that we covered everything in order for a reasonable amount of time and then we can say that we covered that. It wasn't the curricula, it wasn't the material's fault, it was something else.
No one would say I actually, I'm fine with having low quality curriculum, nobody's fine with that. But that also is a distraction largely because we have pretty good evidence that materials are a variable. Yes, they cause some variation, but they don't cause significant variation.
And one of the main moderators of that is, is how well the teacher uses them. So it may actually be that there is a good curricular program for you and a good one for me and they're different. I'm a better user of this kind of program than you are.
And that's only because of my preparation and training and my disposition and what I'm allowed to try and not allowed to try.
I think the challenge at the moment with these tools is not that they are good or bad, it's that the conversation around them suggests that they, they're going to solve the problem and that teachers are going to have to, are being asked to get out of the way and follow the program to get in line and do the thing.
And what we really need to be asking teachers to do is learn their students well and respond effectively. That was always the name of the game. That is always going to be the name of the game. And we can get in teachers' ways by requiring that they do certain actions requiring that they do certain assessments requiring that they spend a certain amount of time on X, Y, and Z. And that will get in the way of them being responsive, which was always what we should have been going for. And it'll look like high achievement or low achievement. It'll look like, oh this program's great or that program's great, but a lot of that is just what it looks like. What's happening underneath is that teachers making decisions and their decisions are limited in part by what they're allowed to try and what they know about.
Jen Serravallo:
Just a final synthesizing question. If you were to design a classroom for early literacy, What would it look like?
Rachael Gabriel:
I'm excited about this question <laugh> partly because I don't have an easy or ready answer for it. And partly cuz I have a kindergartner right now and so I'm thinking about this all the time.
So the easiest place for me to start is like non-negotiables. Gotta read, write, and talk about reading and writing every day. And I don't wanna hear the whole, but they don't know how to read or write yet cuz everybody <laugh> is literate one way or another. And we need to see the ways that they're using literacy in their everyday lives or even in their school lives. Notice it, name it as what it is and build on exactly what they've got going on.
If I had to pick my favorite part of all lessons, I really love interactive writing in a writing lesson. I think it's super cool. I really love interactive read alouds in a lesson. I think they are super cool and partly cuz they're the mix up part of, not necessarily expert in artists, but there's someone who already has someone who can demonstrate and manipulate a reading writing process and someone who's exploring it with support so they can't actually fall down.
Somebody's kind of holding the back of the bicycle on that one.
I remember this might sound real silly, but I remember guitars and pianos in kindergarten classrooms and that somehow magically all kindergarten teachers would play them. I don't know what that was real, but that was, that's part of my way back hazy memory of things maybe because my mom was one of those guitar wielding kindergarten types.
But I think about the protective factors of the arts and the enjoyment, engagement factors of the arts and the neurological supports for literacy that are engaged there. And I think about we don't have to be sitting at our desk holding books to be developing literacy. And so much of what we're doing right now with this explicit phonemic awareness instruction happened as song and chants and poetry and other sorts of social and culturally engaged if not relevant, at least engaged activities. And I wonder what it would look like if they were more relevant back but relevant.
So I don't know, kindergarten would be, there'd be a garden, there'd be singing, there'd be dancing, there'd be instruments for kids to make rhythms with because we know that rhythm is a good predictor of literacy. And also developing rhythm is a much more engaging way to develop some of the underlying skills for early literacy than some of our other options. And there'd be audiences to write too, and messages that are sent to the kids that they have to understand. So they really are decoding cuz they wanna know, not decoding to demonstrate their decoding prowess.
Jen Serravallo:
So integrated, highly engaged, relevant playful,
Rachael Gabriel:
Because it should be joyful.
Jen Serravallo:
It should
Rachael Gabriel:
Be, yeah. Yeah, to read. Cause play teaches better even if it's just for the instrumental reason, play teaches better. I appreciate that you used the word integration there. Cause I didn't stumble my way into it, but I feel like when I work with third and fourth graders who are struggling in school, they have the skills in isolation. They just haven't had the integration practice. Integration is the name of the game.
Jen Serravallo:
Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate the conversation.
Rachael Gabriel:
Thank you so much for having me, and I always learned from talking to you. Thank you so much.
Rachael Gabriel:
Me too. Thank you, Jen.
Jen Serravallo:
And now I'll welcome my colleagues, Molly Wood, Macy Kerbs for a discussion about that interview with Dr. Rachel Gabriel. Molly Macy, what's on your mind? What are you thinking about?
Macie Kerbs:
Oh my goodness. She painted a picture with, as a parent and a teacher, I would want my kid to be in that school and I would want to teach in that school.
Jen Serravallo:
That's a good test. Do I wanna teach in that school? Would I want my own children to be in that school?
Macie Kerbs:
And think it might prevent some of the compliance we see because as kids progress through these really scripted or schools that have them go through the motions of doing school without the play and opportunities to just be okay making mistakes, they become a little bit more quiet. They become compliant. We see a rise in behavior issues.
Molly Wood:
The first thing came to mind was actually this conversation I had recently with this phenomenal kindergarten teacher that I work with.
And we were thinking about a specific child and he's was very quiet. He's developing his proficiency, the use and acquisition of the English language, and he's not showing his best self at times in the day where we would typically think of assessing him. And so I had asked her, I said, okay, so where does he come alive? Where is he? What part of the day is he most engaged? And she said, well, when we're playing, when he is in the kitchen actually specifically, So I said, so what kind of work could you do with him in the kitchen?
And this is just coming back to play choice time, all the work around that I take no credit for. I mean, that's just like when kids are playing, that's the big work. And can he label parts of the kitchen? Can he make functional writing in the kitchen? Can he make menus or label make to-do lists or how-tos for washing his hands or recipes in his own emergent writing with those skills.
Jen Serravallo:
Well, I think that question you ask when does he come most alive or when is he most himself? Those questions if we can ask that to understand any child and then consider thinking back to Rachel's findings from teacher quality and from material quality. It's about giving teachers the flexibility to say, okay, well given what I know about the student, I'm not going to proceed with this lesson as scripted because that's not going to support this particular student. There has to be flexibility and there has to be room for responsiveness, just like you said, Molly and creativity, honestly, in the same way that we're envisioning these classroom spaces that are filled with creativity and joy. There's so much creativity and joy in teaching when teachers are given the flexibility to do that, to study children, to appreciate what they do to honor their current strengths and to follow up from that to wherever you're trying to go. Of course you have end of year objectives and standards in mind, but how you get there, the extent to which you can make that unique for each learner. I think it's just really powerful and it makes the classroom an even more joyful space.
Macie Kerbs:
It kind of makes me wonder if maybe we've been too putting too much weight on materials. As a teacher, I've seen what she was talking about, these recycled programs coming back that I used my first year of teaching that are now being, they look very similar, but they've been revised. So I wonder if that weight would disappear if we just valued teachers decisions and invested, like she said in our teachers by providing good quality PD that's not focused on a curriculum, but focused on knowledge, building up teachers and being responsive to kids.
Jen Serravallo:
What I'm reminded of too, Macie, is I'm thinking back to that study, I can't remember the authors offhand, but I could link to it in the show notes. That study we read as a consulting team about what's the PD that has the best impact on teachers and also on students. And it wasn't PD on materials, it wasn't even going too deep into content. It was more about teacher practices. And the more the PD could center on teacher practices, the more impactful it is. So I know we talked a little bit as the team about just how of course you're building knowledge of children, of reading process of writing process as you practice conferences and small group instruction. But yeah, it's not programs. It's not PD around programs. Definitely.
Macie Kerbs:
I appreciated that she brought up the fact that it's not going to look the same in every single place. And these materials should be just that a guide and lesson planning.
And so how she was talking about coherence is like we have to find that middle ground where we're not requiring this scope and sequence to be delivered in a systematic robotic way, but a way where we can still honor teacher decision making without it feeling compliant or a free for all. And so I don't know what that happy medium is, but I know a lot of schools have achieved that coherence. And I think that's, to me when you ask what should a classroom look like or what should a school feel like? That to me was what she described was that middle ground between not too loose but not too tight.
Jen Serravallo:
And I think it's also a really hard thing to define or to spell out precisely if you're honoring that a good classroom is responsive to the students in the room and a good teacher is a teacher who's teaching to the kids in front of them. So it's hard to say 30 minutes a day for independent reading, that's the magic number. And you should allot X number of minutes for, do X number of small groups a day. It depends. It depends on so many things. But I think keeping the principles that she talked about in mind are helpful when we think about designing the classroom. And the literacy block,
Macie Kerbs:
You know, said something interesting. You said a good teacher, and I think we all go into classrooms assuming they're good teachers. When I meet a teacher, that's my first assumption. I just assume you are a great teacher. You can feel their passion, you can feel their desire to learn. That's just what I assume. I think some of these alternatives of the curriculum she was describing that are considered high quality, but they are saying that that teachers don't have this knowledge or they might need more scaffolds. I kind of wonder if maybe they're assuming teachers in that deficit view instead of the asset-based way of approaching a teacher with professional respect and knowing that they've worked really hard to get into this profession. Not only passed all of these certification tests, but taken really rigorous courses. They've done really rigorous field work.
Jen Serravallo:
Very well said. Totally agree with you.
Jen Serravallo:
Let's end there with our last, as a last thought. Thank you both so much for joining me today. I really appreciated the conversation.
Macie Kerbs:
Thank you. Me too. Thank you, Jen.