How to Become a Positive Deviant with Your Literacy Curriculum Program

Five suggestions from Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Better

Effective teachers of readers, writers, communicators and thinkers are responsive to students' current abilities and needs. They know their interests, their strengths, and their challenges in order to prepare instruction so every kid can succeed. Each student comes to our classrooms as unique individuals. Implementing a one-size-fits-all approach to literacy instruction leads to poor learning outcomes, boredom, and inequities.

In other words, teachers cannot use a literacy curriculum program like a script and expect excellence for all students.

Yet that is what is being asked of teachers across the country. States are mandating that only certain programs be used. Districts are expecting teachers to deliver these resources lesson-by-lesson. Principals are stuck between what their higher ups are telling them to do and what they and their teachers know is not effective practice.

How can teachers respond in the face of these unprofessional expectations? What I have been advocating for over the last couple of years is for teachers to engage in classroom experiments I refer to as equity projects.

Equity projects are a student-centered approach to action research. They ask teachers to take small shifts in their practice that better address inequities in their classrooms, often due to external mandates like the one just mentioned.

As an example, a secondary reading interventionist, Mary Beth, wasn't finding success with the current programming and available texts. So she engaged her students by journaling on the whiteboard, writing personal failure stories in front of them. Along with the powerful strategy of modeling writing, her students started becoming readers and writers. This led to a number of her kids exiting her intervention.¹

Equity projects position teachers as positive deviants. In his book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance², Dr. Atul Gawande describes positive deviants as individuals who find innovative ways to achieve better results than others within the same system. Positive deviants aren’t fighting an organizational mandate. Instead, they use their creativity, curiosity, and personal drive toward excellence to realize better outcomes in spite of the constraints set against them.

This sounds great. So why aren’t all teachers engaging in equity projects and becoming positive deviants?

A primary reason: teachers lack the support and the confidence to break away from the script.

There are other reasons for inaction:

• They want to be team players and not feel isolated from colleagues who don’t share their beliefs.

• They struggle to carve out the time and the space to think more critically and creatively about their situations.

• They are worried about negative feedback and even administrative repercussions if they don’t deliver the mandated program with fidelity.

• They feel what the program provides is good enough, even if the results suggest otherwise.

• They lack a diverse set of student data, for example reading motivation and engagement, to understand the problems with a scripted curriculum.

All of these reasons are understandable. And yet teachers in a variety of contexts have found productive ways to work through these challenges to achieve profound student results. They see the impact of their work with their kids and eventually with their colleagues and their school as the influence of their ideas spread.

Next are five suggestions from Dr. Gawande on becoming a positive deviant. These suggestions sprung up from the question he asked of himself and of his fellow doctors who also felt at times like cogs in a machine:

How do I really matter?

Each suggestion is followed by an example that briefly illustrates how equity projects could provide the support and the confidence for teachers to engage in this work.

Suggestion #1: Ask an unscripted question.

The intention behind an unscripted question is to press pause on the mindless routines of our daily schedules. They can help us connect with our students and colleagues by simply getting to know them a little better. The outcome is increased trust and better relationships, something you will need as you begin to resist the literacy curriculum script.

These questions are nothing profound; as Gawande notes:

“You don’t have to come up with a deep or important question, just one that lets you make a human connection.” (p. 251)

As a principal, I used to meet with every teacher at the beginning of the school year and started by asking about their personal lives. I learned that one teacher initially went to school as a nurse. Soon after, she became a member of our crisis response team.

Suggestion #2: Don’t complain.

This is difficult, especially in the staff lounge where conversations can devolve into airing frustrations over a student’s or colleague’s behavior.

Part of the problem is the lack of systemic support for teachers in the form of coaching and mentoring. Gawande acknowledges a similar challenge in medicine.

“Doctors are expected to coach themselves. We have no one but ourselves to lift us through the struggles.” (p. 253)

Instead of complaining, turn your challenges into an interesting problem through some reframing. What can I learn from this situation? you might ask yourself. When Mary Beth became curious about her secondary intervention students, she realized that her students could not see themselves in her classroom texts. Hence, failure stories.

Suggestion #3: Count something.

Gawande asserts that “one should be a scientist in this world”, and “in the simplest terms, one should count something”. (p. 254)

Tracking a behavior or action provides immediate data, making it a suitable first equity project—a small experiment that measures something meaningful to you and your students.

For instance, a teacher could keep track of how long a class can sustain independent reading time. The question in mind might be along the lines of how well does the literacy curriculum program support students in becoming engaged, lifelong readers. You haven’t changed anything about the curriculum; you are holding the program accountable for the promise it makes.

Suggestion #4: Write something.

You’ve connected with others. You engaged in a productive challenge. You gathered data and learned something new. Who are you going to share this knowledge with?

Educators are notorious for seeing their work as nothing special. So they keep their wisdom to themselves out of a sense of modesty. But this prevents colleagues from learning from you.

Consider posting your observations on a blog or in a newsletter. Even if no one reads it, the mere act of writing is a process that often leads to new insights.

Debra K Crouch

and

Mandy Robek

are two teachers who offer high-quality newsletters around literacy instruction.

Suggestion #5: Change.

Gawande sees three ways people respond to change:

• Early adopters

• Late adopters

• Persistent skeptics

It might seem like those of us who resist teaching literacy curriculum programs like a script would be labeled as skeptics. However, there is a history of educational reform that shows this approach is less than effective.

So see yourself as an early adopter of simple innovations. I don’t recommend veering too far from the curriculum; it is a school board-approved resource. Rather, consider building on your initial experiments/equity projects. Continue to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible within the resource.

For instance, ensure that more time is devoted to independent reading, with students choosing what to read, by teaching the minimum amount of time recommended in the teacher guide. By maximizing every available minute, you can create more authentic and meaningful literacy experiences for your students.

To be a positive deviant is to be a professional: resisting what we know is ineffective while innovating within the system in a way that the work we do matters for kids. We can become a positive deviant by:

• Asking unscripted questions to build connections, trust, and relationships.

• Avoiding complaining and instead getting curious about our challenges.

• Count something that matters in your classroom.

• Write publicly about what you are learning.

• Embrace change through continuous cycles of improvement.

Take care,

Matt

Want to take that next step on your journey to academic excellence for all students? In my eBook Resist the Script: Five Critical Questions for Teachers to Adapt, Adopt, or Develop a Literacy Curriculum That Works for All Readers and Writers, I provide teachers and leaders with a practical guide for engaging in this curriculum work.

1. You can read more about Mary Beth’s action research in the article she wrote for the Wisconsin State Reading Association Journal here.

2. For more information on positive deviants, check out the chapter “The Bell Curve” plus the epilogue in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Dr. Atul Gawande.