Video: The (only) three ways to improve performance in schools
HGSE Professor Richard Elmore

You don't change performance without changing the instructional core, the relationship between the teacher and the student in the presence of content. If you can't see it in the classroom, it's not there. If you push on an organization and you don't have a theory about how it shows up in teaching and learning, you're causing people to do rain dances basically. You don't have a way of connecting instruction to management organization and accountability, you're behaving irresponsibly.

What this means is there are basically only three ways you can increase learning and performance. One is to increase the knowledge and skill of teachers. The other is to somehow affect content. And the third is to somehow alter the relationship of the student to the teacher and the content. Actually, as a sidebar, other industrialized countries work a lot more on the student's role in learning than we do. We work mainly on the teacher's role.

But what the instructional core does is it helps us identify where we're trying to improve. If you change one, you have to change them all. Alter the skill and knowledge of the teacher and you stay in a low level curriculum, you've got tensions between what teachers can do and what the content is capable is doing.

If you alter the content without changing the skill and knowledge of teachers, you're asking teachers to teach to a level that they can't-- they don't have the skill and knowledge to teach to. If you do either one of those things without changing the role of the student in the instructional process, the likelihood that students will ever take control of their own learning is pretty remote.

The philosophy that we've tried to promote here is one where we take a responsible attitude toward what goes on between teachers and students in the presence of content in classrooms, and try to design an organization that makes that work.

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