"Critical Friendships" Promote School Reform Efforts And Unite Schools Across District Lines.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 1998--Tomorrow, dozens of teachers and principals will gather to learn to coach and critique one another's school reform efforts in full-day workshops that focus on a collegial relationship called "critical friendship."

Betty Achinstein, a visiting educator for the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), the sponsoring organization, says this school-to-school pairing defies tradition not only by crossing school district and county lines, but also by challenging the "enormous isolation teachers experience both within their classrooms and within the school house walls."

That isolation is a major reason why nearly half of all new teachers leave education in the first five years, and it's also a reason veteran teachers find it hard to update their skills.

Other professionals who deal with the complexities of human behavior, psychologists or policemen for example, are guided by individual supervisors or partners when new to their profession, then they are continually monitored once in practice. But teachers, who work alone in their classrooms and whose ability to meet with colleagues is constrained by state law, have few such supports.

Critical friendship - which is 'critical' in the sense of necessary as well as 'critical' in the sense of providing a critique - supports individual teacher's professional growth at the same time it pushes the work of school-wide reform teams, holding them accountable to outsiders who observe their progress. Achinstein says that critical friendship is one of the "most effective" tools the Collaborative has developed to help schools improve teaching and learning.

More than 193 teachers and principals from 60 Hewlett-Annenberg leadership schools have attended full-day workshops on critical friendship in the past two weeks, and BASRC has grouped all 87 of the leadership schools it has funded into 17 critical friends "clusters" of two to five schools each.

The state school superintendent's office has also recently affirmed the value of BASRC's critical friends evaluations by allowing elementary and middle schools to substitute them for the Program Quality Review (PQR) required by the California Education Code.

Critical friends usually meet at a BASRC residential summer institute, then work together throughout the school year. Teams of educators take turns visiting one another's sites, conducting day-long inquiries into a topic the host school has defined as critical to its reform effort.

For example, a host school might ask, "What level of skill and comfort and do 4th and 5th grade teachers say they have with the new math curriculum?" or "When asked about school safety, how do 9th and 10th grade girls respond?" Visiting teachers provide objective feedback on the question, gathering evidence from sources that range from interviews with students, teachers, and parents to test scores, portfolios of student work, attendance data, the school's physical condition, communications home to parents, and observations about which students remain after school and why.

"If schools buy in and establish at least a minimum level of trust, a critical friendship visit can be an incredible experience," says teacher Lisa Congdon. "In your own school, it's hard to objective; you can't see the forest for the trees. But in another school, it's amazing what you see."

Congdon's school, Edward R. Taylor Elementary, which is in the Hunter's Point area of San Francisco, was visited twice last year by critical friends from two other BASRC leadership schools, Paul Revere and Cornell elementaries. (Revere is also in San Francisco while Cornell is across the Bay in Albany.)

All three of these elementary schools have focused their reform efforts on improving literacy, but they are approaching it in different ways. For example, teachers at Revere are improving teaching practices, while Taylor's team is implementing grade-level standards for literacy. When Revere and Cornell teachers visited E.R. Taylor last year, they were looking for specific teaching practices at each grade level.

In third grade classrooms, visitors observed activities designed to help students reach a literacy standard that specified that students should be able to write a paragraph that included a topic sentence supported by four sentences that provided detail. After observing, compiling data and comparing notes on the various teaching methods they had seen, the visitors gave feedback to Taylor's teachers. The visitor's commentary was structured to include "affirming" questions for support, "reflecting" questions that pushed the school to attempt more, and "relevance" questions that asked "so what?"

Congdon, one of the teachers who received the feedback, says that visiting educators "see things that are overlooked, things you didn't know, or things you were in denial about. The feedback - which is after all about something you want to learn - is designed to be gentle but true. It's critical in a helpful way." Each year, BASRC leadership schools are required to participate in at least one critical friends visit, but last year, the cluster that includes Cornell, Revere, and Taylor elementaries participated in a total of five visits.

Angela Addiego, who works with the San Francisco Peninsula "Partners in Literacy" cluster, credits critical friendship with providing her the mentors she needed during her transition from teacher to administrator. Addiego is principal at Belle Air Elementary, a San Mateo school that has critical friendships with four other elementary schools.

Although Belle Air's cluster spans three different school districts and its five schools serve very different socio-economic groups, the schools' reform teams have taken a common approach to literacy, sharing curricular resources, teacher training and community involvement strategies across all the schools. Addiego meets twice a month with principals from the cluster's other schools.

BASRC schools in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin counties hold critical friends visits throughout the year. Reporters who would like to cover a critical friendship in their area may arrange to do so by phoning BASRC's communications director.

BASRC and the Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge were established when former US ambassador Walter Annenberg matched industrialist William Hewlett's $25 million grant to Bay Area public schools. When fully matched, the Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge will provide $100 million for school reform over five years.