This decision creates additional funding opportunities for schools interested in Power2Achieve programming and extending it from school context to the family.

In his speech, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pointed out: “At various times, Congress and the department have promoted parent advisory council meetings, volunteering in school, school-parent compacts, and helping children learn at home. Yet these and other policies have rarely been shown to move the needle on student achievement. It is well-documented—and plain common sense—that parental involvement in a child’s education boosts student learning and improves both behavior and attendance. We know that children with parents who are engaged in their education are less likely to drop out.”

The DOE press release is available here: http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2010/05/05052010.html

Starting several years ago with our initial training at IEE, we have partnered with the Iowa Department of Education, inviting the DE Learning Supports Consultant to attend an intense and inspiring immersion in the Smart & Good research and the evolving Power2Achieve programming. This collaboration has been invaluable as we all work together to define and refine the P2A program and its authentic alignment with Iowa’s Core Curriculum and 21st Century Skills roll out. Our complimentary work together is best captured in a document that was generated by Director, Judy Jeffrey and her colleagues at the Department of Education which I have posted below.

We’ve established the foundation and are looking forward to continued opportunities to work with the DE, administrators, faculty and students in Iowa’s schools with the Power2Achieve programming.

A statement by the Iowa Department of Education on Power2Achieve™ Programming:

Although significant resources have been invested in improvements to teaching and learning, most schools across the nation have failed to close the achievement gap. Iowans want every student prepared for today’s technology-rich, global economy regardless of ethnicity, income, or geographical location. The Core Curriculum helps Iowa Schools deliver that education through a student-based approach that supports higher expectations for all students. It builds on Iowa’s long history of community leadership in education and relies on partners across the state for implementation in high schools by 2012. The Iowa Core Curriculum bolsters Iowa’s education structure through mandated state content standards and benchmarks aligned to improve student achievement. A continuum of learning supports that remove barriers to learning will increase the capacity of the Iowa Core Curriculum to reach all students.

Power2Achieve™ programming is designed to develop the culture and competencies of excellence and ethics needed for teaching and learning in Iowa’s high schools. Implemented together the programs boost teaching and learning in all classrooms (1) by identifying the competencies needed for learning and developing them through everyday teaching and learning, and (2) by reinforcing academic achievement and pro-social development through the whole-school culture of excellence and ethics. The Power2Achieve programming is designed to impact essential elements of the Iowa Core Curriculum and newly required 21st Century Skills. The combination of a highly relevant and rigorous Core Curriculum within a school-wide culture dedicated to the development of excellence and ethics is a recipe for success.

Through collaboration with the Institute for Character Development and the Institute for Excellence & Ethics the Iowa Department of Education will connect the culture and competencies of excellence and ethics with the Core Curriculum (21st Century Skills) and Learning Supports Initiatives. Power2Achieve™ programming is based on the ground breaking research of Dr. Thomas Lickona and Dr. Matt Davidson outlined in the Smart & Good High Schools Report. To support data-driven school improvement, the Power2Achieve programming utilizes the Collective Responsibility for Excellence and Ethics (CREE) Assessment Tools and Processes to benchmark and continuously assess the culture and competencies of excellence and ethics.

Four field research schools in Iowa are implementing Power2Achieve programming (Power2Learn and Power2Teach) during the 2009-2010 school year (along with approximately 20 high schools around the country). The Power2Achieve™ programs are supported by including leadership development, staff and faculty coaching, ongoing professional development and user-friendly multimedia learning support resources.

The innovative Power2Achieve™ programs provide powerful tools for realizing the goals of the Core Curriculum and the 21st Century Skills across the state of Iowa including decreasing dropouts, boosting academic achievement, improving workforce preparation, and preparing youth to become productive citizens and lead fulfilling lives.

In the next few weeks we will finish up our final 2 lessons of Power2Learn and begin incorporating everything we’ve learned this year through our field implementation and our own personal research in the areas of character development, achievement, workforce preparation, student retention, and 21st Century Skills into the development of Power2Achieve Foundations.

There is still an immense amount of work to be done, but with the help of students, teachers, administrators, and advocates across the country we’ve made incredible strides with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (and yes there has been all three).

Be sure to check out some of our latest work on our website by clicking on the Programming tab where you can find updated program descriptions and samples of the IEE developed learning resources that are being used at schools across the country.

Power2Teach was designed to involve the full faculty (not just those teaching Power2Learn) in  monthly, 90-minute Essential Conversations. Teachers discuss issues such as collegiality and student effort, examine relevant school data, and learn instructional tools.

In the feedback on Power2Teach, some schools have said they want the program to be more closely correlated with the student Power2Learn curriculum, to give them the skills they need to teach that program well. (An online Power2Learn support program is being designed to do that.) Finding time for Power2Teach has also been an issue. Both the benefits and challenges of Power2Teach are reflected in one principal’s comments:

To strengthen the connection between Power2Teach and Power2Learn, we post the weekly student Power2Learn lesson right above the copy machine for all faculty to see. At the beginning of each Power2Teach session, we also present an abridged Power2Learn lesson and video clip so the faculty can experience what the students are experiencing. This is powerful-our teachers say they really appreciate it.

She concluded: “Our biggest challenge has been keeping Power2Teach a priority when faculty time is so limited for discussing curriculum matters, scheduling issues, and needs of our students and parents that arise throughout the year. Despite this, Power2Teach has helped us implement our core values and improve our school culture.”

In response to school feedback about time constraints, Power2Teach has been redesigned as Power2Teach Toolkits, independent professional development modules from which schools can choose according to their needs and available time.

From the forthcoming Winter/Spring 2010 issue of Excellence & Ethics (to be published 3/10/10).

1. TEACHER LEADERSHIP. Students say they prefer it when teachers actively teach a Power2Learn lesson by asking questions and explaining the ideas; sharing personal stories and inviting students to share their experiences; and muting the PowerPoint voice-over for some or all of the lesson. One teacher said:

My Power2Learn class participated really well today because I did more to direct their activities and facilitate the discussion.

2. CHOICE OF VENUE. Context matters. In schools where advisory period is now used for Power2Learn, some students have objected to losing what was a time for talking with friends. They’ve also asked, “Why do we have to do work when we’re not getting any credit?” Other schools have solved the credit problem by teaching Power2Learn within a regular academic course (e.g., freshman English) or within the school’s for-credit seminar class.

3. EXPLAINING THE PROGRAM’S PURPOSE. Students find it helpful when teachers take time to explain how Power2Learn will help them. One girl said:
“Throughout a lesson, our teacher talks about how these ideas will help us in school and in life and how they’re still relevant to her as an adult-because all through life you have to manage your time and deal with stress.”

4. ACTIVE LEARNING. Some teachers have devised strategies for increasing students’ active involvement. One teacher, after his class watched a clip from the movie “Drumline,” made a masking tape “continuum” on the floor and told his students:

I want you to stand on the point that represents your opinion. This end of the continuum is VERY FAIR; the other end is ABSOLUTELY UNFAIR. My first question: “Was the band leader’s decision to discipline the whole band because of the actions of some, fair or unfair?” Okay-now move.

“Even my stick-in-the-mud students had to get involved,” this teacher said.

5. EFFECTIVE DISCUSSIONS. How much students get out of any lesson depends to a considerable extent on what the teacher does to draw out the learnings and help students apply them in other contexts. One teacher describes how, after a Power2Learn tower-building activity, she guided a class discussion to help students generalize their learnings:

At the beginning of the activity, students complained about the building constraints imposed by the instructions. In our discussion, I asked them for examples from life where they put more energy into complaining about a problem than into coming up with a solution. I challenged them to use what they learned from this to better focus their energies in my regular classes. That’s the real benefit of these lessons-developing a common vocabulary and set of understandings that can be transferred.

6. A CLASSROOM COMMUNITY THAT SUPPORTS AND CHALLENGES. To help build a community that supports and challenges, each Power2Learn class had to create a Compact for Excellence-rules for best work and respectful behavior.  However, whether the Compact really influences behavior depends on what the teacher does with it. Many students said their Compact was just “words on the wall.”  Said one girl: ” We never talk about it. We’ve got kids in our class who call other people ‘stupid.’” But in other classes, the Compact was a living document because of the teacher:

Our class really got involved in discussing how we treat each other. Our teacher sometimes reviews our Compact at the start of class and points to it when somebody isn’t following it.

7. GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY FOR APPLICATION. Students said they are learning practical tools like goal-setting and time and stress management but need reminders from their teachers to use them (“Let’s hear how you’re doing with the time management plan you made last week”). One boy commented:

It feels like we’re writing all these goals and things we should do, but then you walk out of class and forget about it. If we kept coming back to them in later lessons, it would help us use them more.

Students also felt they should take with them something from their Power2Learn folders (now collected at the end of class) that would remind them of their goals. Finally, they proposed having a “goal partner” because “you wouldn’t want to let yourself or that person down.” One school did this by creating “accountability buddies,” as a girl explained:

I’m Andrea’s accountability buddy. Her goal is to not get any referrals. Sometimes in class I’ll whisper, “Andrea, you’re about to get a referral . . . ”

When the buzz from that activity subsided, she said, “Okay, guys, today we’re continuing with our Power2Learn unit on managing stress. We’ve all got stress in our lives, right? One of the stressors in my life right now is a graduate course. My final exam is tonight!

“Today’s lesson focuses on ‘turn-around’ stories-responding to stress by changing the direction of your life. We’re going to look at a video showing one young woman’s turn-around story, but first I’d like to ask Marcus [name changed here] if he’d be willing to share his story.  Marcus is one of the most mild-mannered students I know.” (Later she told us she knew he’d be willing to tell his story because he had done so in another class.)

With all eyes on him, Marcus, about 6′ 4″ and 250 muscular pounds, spoke softly:

“When I was younger, I was part of a gang. We beat up some boys pretty bad and put them in the hospital. I went to jail, a juvenile detention center, for 13 months.”

“What did that teach you?” Mrs. Erickson asked.

“To control my anger.”

Erickson asked the class, “Marcus is an example of what?”

“A turn-around story,” a boy said.

It was a moving moment.  The stage was set for the rest of the lesson.

She then showed a You-Tube video, “Homeless to Harvard.” In that story, college student Liz Murray tells how she grew up with parents who were drug addicts, lost her mother to AIDS at age 15, and soon found herself living on the streets wondering, “Am I going to end up like my mother or do something different with my life?” She decided to go back to high school and persevere no matter what-and ended up getting accepted into Harvard University.  Students in Power2Learn classes say they find videos like these “inspirational.” One boy said:

“Homeless to Harvard” showed someone who didn’t seem to have a future but worked really hard to get to where she wanted to be. If she could get into a good college in spite of all her problems, then with all the support I have from my parents, I should be able to do it, no problem.

Program Feedback on Power2Learn and Power2Teach

We were in Kansas, Iowa, and New Jersey observing Kate Erickson and other teachers to gather feedback on the field-testing of two new programs that are the leading edge of our Smart & Good Schools Initiative: Power2Learn for students and Power2Teach for faculty.

Power2Learn is a high school curriculum (7 units, four lessons each) designed to develop academic and social competencies within a classroom and school culture of excellence and ethics.  It can be implemented in one grade level (e.g., 9 grade or, if a school prefers, grade 8), or in heterogeneously-grouped classes.

Lessons are structured to be teacher-taught with the aid of a teacher script and multi-media slides and, in version 2.0 of the program, will include greater use of authentic assessment approaches and some form of accountability/acknowledgment for the work accomplished.

Based on the conceptual framework presented in our 2005 Smart & Good High Schools report (www.cortland.edu/character), Power2Learn seeks to help students acquire:

• performance character competencies such as work ethic, organization, and perseverance and moral character competencies such as honesty, respect, and justice;
• practical tools (life map, effort and attitude rubric, integrity-in-action checklist, etc.) that help students actually use their performance and moral competencies in their academic classes and other areas of their lives.

Power2Teach is a companion professional development program for a school’s full faculty aimed at developing a strong Professional Ethical Learning Community that supports Power2Learn.

What Are the Conditions for Success?

As part of the field-testing, we’ve observed lessons being taught, conducted student and faculty focus groups on Power2Learn and Power2Teach, and solicited anonymous online lesson critiques from teachers and students. Our goal: to identify “conditions for success,” factors that significantly influence program effectiveness, including:

• programmatic features: design features of the lessons we provide, teacher training to prepare faculty to teach them, and guidance from us while they are teaching them;
• implementation approaches:  strategies teachers and schools have used to maximize success of the programs.

Feedback from schools is helping our design team strengthen the programmatic features as we create version 2.0 of Power2Learn and Power2Teach.  The next installment of this post will share some of the implementation approaches that pilot schools have used to enhance effectiveness.

In my 15-minute talk at the luncheon, I was able to include a brief
account  of our current field-testing of Power2Learn in four states, with
an example of a lesson we had just observed at Junction City High School,
a large, multicultural school (about 50% African-American) and one of our
leader schools in Kansas. Junction City is implementing Power2Learn with
freshmen, having faculty teams (who teach Communications, Math, Science,
and English) take turns teaching the lessons of a given unit.

The day Sue Kidd (coordinator of the Kansas federal character ed grant)and
I visited, we were able to observe Communications teacher Kate Erickson
(also her school’s  Internal Power2 Coach) do a wonderful job of teaching
the lesson from Unit 2 (on stress management) that includes the inspiring
You-Tube clip, “Homeless to Harvard.”

If you haven’t seen that You-Tube, it tells the story of a young woman
named Liz Murray. She recounts how she grew up in a dysfunctional family
with parents whose idea of life was having a good time dancing and doing
drugs. When Liz was 15, her mother contracted AIDs, and died within a
year. Liz found herself on the street and wondering, “Am I going to end up
like my mother, or am I going to do something different with my life?”
She decides to work hard in school, believe in herself, and persevere no
matter what-and gets accepted into Harvard.

Before teacher Erickson showed the video and had the students discuss the
suggested questions (“What do you admire about Liz Murray?” “What
questions would you like to ask her?”), she explained that the clip was an
illustration of how we can turn our lives around if we want to. The most
moving moment of the lesson came next when she asked **Jason, a tall
African-American boy (about 6′ 4″, 240 lbs.)in the back of the room, if he
would be willing to share his story. (Later she told us she knew he
wouldn’t be embarrassed to do so because he had done so in another class.)
She added, addressing the class: “Jason is one of the gentlest, most
mild-mannered, and polite people I know.”

Speaking softly, with all eyes on him, Jason then told his story:

“When I was younger, I was part of a gang. We beat up some boys pretty bad
and put them in the hospital. I went to jail, a juvenile detention center,
for 13 months.”

“What did that teach you?” Mrs. Erickson asked.

“To control my anger.”

“Jason is an example of what?” Mrs. Erickson asked the class.

“A turnaround story,” a boy said.

It was a powerful moment.  Many teachers have brought a Power2Learn lesson
to life by sharing a story from their own lives.  Kate Erickson
demonstrated the power of eliciting a pertinent story from a student’s
life. This was one of many things she did to make this lesson a memorable
one for her kids. It was a pleasure for Sue and me to see the potential of
a Power2Learn lesson in the hands of a passionate and talented teacher.

And I was grateful to be able to share this story with the folks at
National Liberty Museum’s Heroes of Character event.

***Note: name changed

“The Innovator’s DNA” by Jeffery H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, provides a perfect example of where successful business strategies cross over into education.  After spending six years studying some of the most innovative minds in the business world including people like Jeff Bezos, Niklas Zennstrom, and Pierre Omidyar (imagine life today without Amazon, Skype, or eBay) the authors identified 5 “Discovery Skills,” that drive innovation:

1. Associating
2. Questioning
3. Observing
4. Experimenting
5. Networking

When I look back on my own teaching career, I can see how these five skills were present when my teaching and my students’ learning were at their most effective points.

To deliver dynamic and meaningful lessons we as educators strive to [1] make associations using real life examples that drive critical thinking and aren’t always within the walls of our classroom (or content area); [2]we ask ourselves questions during instructional planning such as “If my students asked me why learning how to find the square root of a number matters, how would I respond?”; [3]we observe things like students’ interests and their energy level in class to inform our instructional and classroom motivation methods (i.e. SPURS jumping jacks for my students in San Antonio when energy was low); [4]we are unafraid to try bold new instructional techniques with the understanding that while we might miss on some, we’ve got to take some shots to make a basket; [5]we don’t close our door and hole up inside our classrooms, but rather we seek out and share ideas with other educators in our building and through workshops, continuing education, and professional organizations.

Even if you don’t feel like you’re an “innovator,” the authors provide some excellent examples of simple things you can do to strengthen your Discovery Skills.  For example:

“Try spending 15 to 30 minutes each day writing down questions that challenge the status quo in your company.”  (Here we can easily substitute classroom, school, or instructional practices for company)

While spending a hundred dollars on a subscription to HBR might not be in all of our budgets, a trip to the local public library with a mug of coffee or tea, a legal pad to take some notes, and a reflective spirit might just give you the boost you need to push your innovation skills to the next level whether you’re in a school, at work, or beyond.

Reference:  Dyer, Gregerson, Christensen.  (2009, December).  The Innovator’s DNA.  Harvard Business Review, 87(12), 61-67

I have also finished the first round of reliability and validity analyses of CREE-P2L data, and the results are extremely encouraging. Chronbach’s alphas range from .85 to .90 in student data and from .87 to .94 in faculty data, which are excellent. I have posted these findings on the CREE-P2L page on IEE website.

We are now in position to run data reports quickly for the remaining schools in Kansas and Iowa, and will do so as soon as we get word that they are done with data collection. It is exciting to report that the assessment component of Power2 programming is taking shape, and schools can begin to use their own data for benchmarking, reflection, and planning further efforts.

This stage of research and refinement is critical to providing the strongest product we can to schools.  Students in Urbandale provided insight about various parts of their introduction to Power2Learn lessons.  Not every comment was positive, but that is helpful in shaping future lessons and subsequent versions of the curriculum.  The IEE team is spending time going over surveys with critical eyes and sharp minds to see how we can meet both the wants and needs of students as well as target the competencies that are so important to their success in school, work, and beyond.

One student in Urbandale notes that they, “liked that [we] got to learn about groups and teamwork.”  Another adds that it “helped [us] connect with all of our classmates,” “we got to work in a small group and share some of our achievements and goals.”  How often do we have students studying elements of good teamwork, collaboration, intentionally sharing achievements, and even more importantly meaningful goals for the future?

The feedback, including both the pieces of praise and the areas that need polish are furthering the efforts of Power2Program development and future improvement.