Visionary Middle Schools: Signature Practices and the Power of Local Invention

Citation

Cherubini, L. (2007), "Visionary Middle Schools: Signature Practices and the Power of Local Invention", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 45 No. 1, pp. 126-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230710722511

Visionary Middle Schools: Signature Practices and the Power of Local Invention is a concise overview of Morocco, Brigham, and Aguilar's research study of three urban middle schools in the south, northeast, and midwest regions of the USA. The substantial introductory chapter soundly establishes the premise of their inquiry, namely, that the three most prominent reforms on middle grade schools (including school structures, standards‐based curriculum and assessment, and equity) entailed overly‐ambitious targets genuinely disconnected from student learning. The authors are equally critical of the one size fits all solution espoused by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation that imposes federal mandates upon middle school reform and essentially ignores the vast array of local interventions and student demographics distinct to each community.

After outlining the methodical and purposeful selection process that ultimately identified the schools that best represented successful middle school reform, the discussion considers the particular socio‐educational crises of each school community. (The specific research questions, data collection, analytical methods, and instruments used in the study are appended). The subsequent three chapters turn to a discussion of the scope and impact of the signature practice characteristic of each school. Signature practices are described as a means of “organizing learning for all students” and as being “responsive to the particular needs of the student population and to its own district crisis or reform needs” (p. 11). Attention then shifts to an illustration of these organizational learning strategies contoured to the needs of each student population and district predicaments. Each chapter includes sketches of relevant vignettes, the inherently processual features of the signature practice, complementing figures that are not unnecessarily convoluted, and various distinctions and assessments of student, faculty, and community demographics that often mark the most disparity between schools. Be it the co‐teaching approach in Dolphin Middle School, the student‐led exhibitions at Leonardo Da Vinci School, or the systematic investigations adopted by the Carter‐Dean Middle School community, the portraits present the unique signature practice of the population and describes all aspects of the learning paradigm. In each of the individual school environments, the authors contend that local middle school reform affords teachers the necessary flexibility to exercise their professional competence to viscerally engage students in the context of the curriculum. The respective signature practices are predicated on the notion that contextually relevant learning experiences that encompass a genuine connection to students' life histories result in optimally responsive challenges to their academic and social proficiencies. The authors investigate and apply both qualitative and quantitative results to develop a broad conceptual explanation of each school's culture, while remaining particularly sensitive to the relative saliency of the fundamental beliefs that drive the signature practice in each school. Skillfully woven throughout the text are pertinent references to research that support the school's core beliefs and determining principles. The authors' perceptive insights of effective evidence‐based reform developments are informed by scholarship that lead the reader to a further exploration of each topic.

The text concludes with a synthesis of the signature practices that frame the portraits of each school. The authors give due attention to the conceptual reality of each practice as an embedded, customized, and collaborative professional endeavor uniquely tailored to the learning needs of the schools. The final chapter provides an eloquent rationale of the joint responsibility that all educators share regardless of their role to foster student learning within the context of school as community. While the section on support from district leadership is brief and arguably under‐developed, school leaders in the midst of educational reform will benefit from the description of the critical role that district offices play in sustaining the philosophical and operational underpinnings of signature practices in middle schools, especially where past experiences with sweeping educational directives have been discouraging

Visionary Middle Schools is an eminently readable, sharply documented presentation of the limitless capacity of middle schools that manifest their character in effective program implementation to augment student learning and development. Quite impressively, the authors identify the noteworthy shortcomings of each signature practice and explicitly describe the challenges for teachers, school administrators, students, and the community at large to sustain the programs despite staff turnover, changes in leadership personnel, and fluctuating support from school district officers. They are candid in identifying the conditions of specific students, like Steven in Leonardo Da Vinci Middle School to name one, who does not flourish in the learning paradigm despite the staff's best efforts to accommodate the signature practice to suit his needs (p. 69). Further, the descriptions of the sacrifices each school community experienced during the implementation phases of school reform are not discrete and thus contribute to a refined understanding of the difficulties in transitioning towards intersectional practices and student inclusiveness.

Further, in a congenial manner, Morocco, Brigham, and Aguilar subtly detail how the emergent practices of both top‐down and teacher‐led reform initiatives translate into a moral impetus founded on student learning. While at times somewhat redundant, the summaries of each school's reform agenda and signature practice were framed in a discourse that suggested the school community's collective commitment to practicing in the same invitational, transparent, and collaborative spirit that pervaded their pedagogical approach. These learning paradigms, as they are described and interestingly handled, adequately capture the full complexity of a school staff's moral agency to move beyond a compartmentalized approach to schooling. The authors closely couple the emergence of these moral imperatives throughout the text to inform the reader of the realized potential of each signature practice in shaping student development both in and beyond the classroom. In their summary discussion of signature practices, the authors narrow their focus on what they describe as professional learning communities that promote professional collaboration among colleagues and “involve teachers working together on the intellectual tasks of planning, considering students' needs, designing curriculum, teaching, and assessing results” (p. 119).

The book's virtues for current school leaders, as the intended audience, are its breadth of coverage, compact but adequate research data, and its intensely vivid glimpses into three very different school cultures that share a common outcome. In each circumstance, the school communities refused to first lose sight of the nature of their varied cultural and student compositions and second, to forsake meaningful and relevant learning experiences by succumbing to rigid and detached external reform policies such as the imposed Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) testing targets required by NCLB. The guiding principles of each signature practice has a wider applicability to secondary school contexts, as the text accentuates a purposeful and pertinent human dialogue to contend with impersonal and generic large‐scale reform.