Several fourth- and fifth-grade teachers sit at a long, faux-wood table in Room 14 at Nipomo Elementary School. It’s a quarter past 2 on a Friday afternoon, and the adults are chatting excitedly and fidgeting, much like the 10-year-olds they’re used to instructing.
Soon Master Teacher Shanna Rowland takes the floor, and her colleagues settle in for their weekly “cluster meeting.”
If the term “cluster meeting” sounds vaguely familiar, your brain might be trying to recall information about TAP, a teaching system implemented by Lucia Mar Unified School District last fall.
As the Sun wrote in a March 2010 cover story, “The instructional program that started in the late 1990s creates a system of specialized educators. Their goal? To improve teacher and student performance. Their tools? Professional development, merit-based pay, and other resources.”
You might also recall that TAP has its own language, coined Tapenese by one district official, so get ready for some new vocabulary words.
At this cluster meeting, the teachers are reviewing one clever instruction method and learning a new one.
First up is “Talking Chips.” Each person is given a handful of colorful foam circles. When someone lays a chip on the table, he or she is the only person allowed to talk. The group goes from person to person until all the chips are gone.
Today’s discussion topic: Share a TAP success.
“A success, for me, is the way so many of [the students] have become thinkers; they’re not afraid of the challenge,” fourth grade teacher Mary Ungefug said.
To illustrate her point, Ungefug shared a story about a recent lesson she taught and a shy student who’s not a native English speaker.
“She went home and plotted out the problem. Then she came back to me with her reasoning and said, ‘This is the only answer I can think of. Can you help me figure out what’s going wrong?’” Ungefug said.
The fact that that student is so engaged in the lesson, she said, is a huge TAP success.
Studying up
For the past six months, teachers at the district’s six TAP sites have been rigorously studying the system’s 19-point rubric. Under the guidance of their principals and master teachers, they’ve reviewed the elements of good teaching and learned some new instructional methods to use in the classroom.
Educators at the TAP sites just finished their second teaching evaluation cycle. During these evaluations, a master teacher and one other trained individual observe a lesson in the classroom and then assess the teacher’s performance.
After the lesson is over, the observed teacher is told one area in which she or he excelled and one area in which she or he could improve.
“The great thing about the rubric is that there’s a lot of overlapping,” Master Teacher Julie Bowles said. “I always tell my teachers, ‘Just plan a lesson like you always have; plan a good lesson that has a way for your students to achieve [understanding], and everything else really does fall into place.’”
The evaluation, however, is just one component of TAP.
“It’s really a two-tiered process,” Principal Brett Gimlin said. “We’re learning the elements of the rubric and field-testing, and then applying them to the classroom.”
Field-testing means physically implementing TAP in classrooms. Based on state test results, school administrators select a subject in which their students are struggling, like, say, reading comprehension. They then work with the master teachers to provide instructional tools that increase student understanding.
At Nipomo Elementary, where teachers are focusing on reading comprehension, students’ grasp of the concept relies heavily on their ability to summarize a story or series of events.
Summarizing is also a skill used in everyday life. For example, when parents ask their son or daughter “how was your day?” the child must summarize events, Gimlin said.
“[Summarizing] can also be implemented in social studies, reading, and math,” he explained.
The teachers adjust the TAP lesson to their individual classrooms: Students in Kindergarten and first grade will retell the main points of a story. Students in the upper grades will read a story and then answer a handful of questions in their own words. All of the children are graded based on the same proficiency rubric.
“It’s a double bang for our buck, because if you can write down the main details and what’s most important in a story, you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on,” Gimlin said.
Added Bowles, “We’re really building off of each other and adding more information each year.
“I had a Kindergarten teacher tell me the other day that he was really happy to know what students need to know in sixth grade because he could get that ball rolling,” she said.
A second opinion
Despite the generally glowing reviews at some school sites and the district office, there are some people who are unhappy with TAP.
“This is the most stressed out I’ve ever been in my career,” said one teacher, who later declined to go on record with the Sun for this article, worrying that to do so would be a potentially career-jeopardizing move.
Lloyd Walzer, president of the Lucia Mar Unified Teachers Association, said this fear of reprisal for speaking out about TAP is something he’s trying to address.
“It does seem to be Balkanized at some sites. Teachers who like TAP might say, ‘TAP is a great program. If you don’t like TAP, you must be a bad teacher,’” Walzer said.
“I’ve even received e-mails asking, ‘Why doesn’t the union like TAP?’” he continued. “I don’t know where that’s coming from. Yeah, we’re asking questions [about TAP], but we’re working with the sites and teachers because we want it to be a success.”
Walzer, who also teaches at Oceano Elementary School (a TAP site), said the system’s objective is admirable.
“TAP is about getting teachers to focus more on lesson plans. It provides the structure needed to help the students better learn the material,” he said. “I feel we are able to express our own identity in our teaching.”
That said, pressure to be pro-TAP can be a challenge for teachers who don’t like the system or feel it needs some improvement. And, according to a survey the union sent out to its members in February, there are quite a few teachers who aren’t 100 percent on board.
Walzer said the survey gave union members three choices:
• “I’m happy with TAP and I want to continue it, as is, into the next school year.”
• “I want to continue TAP next year but with a few changes.”
• “I do not want to do TAP again next year.”
“I’d say about 33 percent [of the union members] were willing to continue TAP with a few changes, and about 25 percent said, ‘I do not want to do TAP next year,’” he said.
Walzer explained that the schools where TAP is most successful are schools where the leadership—the principal and master and mentor teachers—“is effective, responsive, and seen by the teachers as being positive and mentoring.”
Apparently, this isn’t the case for some schools.
“One of the sites is having problems because … the principal is not being receptive, reflective, or supportive,” said Walzer, who has met with teachers from most of the TAP sites.
Because TAP is such a new system, with so many elements, he said, the principals at the impacted schools should be “pulling other things off the table,” such as classes that combine grade levels or requirements for learning intervention programs.
“This principal didn’t take those things off the table, so it just seems like more work for the teachers,” he said.
Of course, the effectiveness of TAP doesn’t depend solely on the leadership. It’s also a matter of teacher perception.
TAP incorporates a 19-point rubric that breaks down the various elements of good teaching. Teachers are evaluated three times a year based on that rubric. After each evaluation, they are assessed on all 19 rubric points and receive feedback on an instructional strength and an instructional weakness.
“Some people think, ‘I can’t hit all of those indicators. I’m not superhuman.’ Some people are perfectionists and a 2 is unacceptable,” Walzer said. “It’s a personality issue.”
It takes teamwork
It might be surprising, then, to learn that a 3 is considered “rock-solid teaching” in the TAP system. Under the district’s old evaluation system, a 3 would have been a C letter grade.
“The two major challenges for the district in terms of TAP will be recalibrating our thinking. To be fair, we’ve never had a metric system in our district describe a 3 as ‘rock solid,’” Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Andy Stenson said.
The other hurdle, he said, is adjusting people’s expectations. For example, the district originally planned to conduct four classroom observations a year for all TAP teachers. After discussing the system with the teachers’ union, they’ve decided to do three this year.
“We changed it because we didn’t want to start observing people until they were trained on the rubric. So we didn’t start evaluations until November,” Stenson said.
Classroom evaluations can cause a lot of stress for some people, he admitted, adding that, in the past, tenured teachers were being observed once every two years.
“Now it’s three times a year—that’s a major shift,” he said. “There may be some people who find [that number] excessive, but I taught for seven years, and I would have loved to have had more feedback on my teaching.”
He said district officials would like teachers to “associate the word TAP with support” and not focus so much on the importance of scoring.
Some teachers, however, would say that’s easier said than done, especially considering the amount of effort the district is putting into TAP. And when evaluation-based teacher bonuses get added into the mix, it can get even more questionable.
But, like anything that proposes change, TAP is going to take some getting used to.
“When we went on site visits to other districts prior to implementing TAP, everyone said the first year of TAP is the hardest because it’s such a mental shift. It’s a lot to wrap your head around,” Stenson said.
But, so far, he’s more than happy with the results.
“The overall quality of teaching we’re seeing in the classroom is off-the-charts positive,” Stenson said.
“It used to be the topic of conversation in the lunchroom and around the coffee machine at the TAP schools was, ‘what are you doing this weekend?’ Now it’s, ‘here’s something I did in my classroom that worked really well’ or ‘how did you go about implementing this in your room?’” he said. “The conversation is so much more focused and so much more about instruction.”
While that may be true at some sites, union president Walzer said he wants the teachers who are, for various reasons, struggling with the TAP system to have more of a voice.
Walzer said things are “mostly going well” at his school in Oceano because “it’s not a top-down thing like some other sites. It’s more of a conveyor belt. It’s a shared experience. It doesn’t feel like we’re just being told what to do.”
But he still thinks there’s room for improvement in terms of classroom instruction and fiscal transparency at the administrative level.
For example, when teachers meet once a week for hour-long cluster meetings, TAP support teachers take over their classes.
“The TAP support teachers, they’re subs, because the district was unwilling to hire full-time teachers because it cost too much,” Walzer said, adding that students’ ability to learn can suffer as a result.
He feels students in his classroom are “losing one hour of language arts instruction a week” because the TAP support teachers’ classroom instruction “hasn’t been consistent.”
These are all things he hopes the union and district will be able to troubleshoot together.
“The district leadership has been receptive to our concerns,” he said, but only time will tell whether TAP is able to reach its full potential on the Central Coast.
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2012.