Implementing GESA in Small Town and Urban Contexts
Dennis Parsons, Tania Ramalho, Barbara Beyerbach, Marcia Burrell

As part of SUNY Oswego’s Curriculum & Instruction department’s teacher development initiatives the authors were able to support and participate in GESA—Generating Expectations for Student Achievement—study groups in urban (New York City) and small town (Fulton, New York) school contexts.  In this paper we describe GESA, an equity-oriented program, and its impact on teachers in these settings. We aim to provide professional development practitioners with guidelines to implement similar programs.

GESA

The primary goal of GESA is to improve equity in learning outcomes of K-12 students. Its creators, Grayson and Martin, compiled findings of 60 years of research relevant to education and social justice (1997) to identify five areas of disparity in classroom practice that reveal how teachers’ responses to student characteristics such as race, class and gender affect achievement: instructional contact; grouping and organization; classroom management and discipline; self-esteem; and evaluation of student performance.

GESA training involves three stages. First, participants study the five areas of disparity, reading research, sharing stories of how the disparities play out in their own lives and classrooms, and identifying strategies that may reduce them. Second, participants observe each other’s classrooms to collect and analyze data corresponding to the identified areas of disparity and assess needed changes in practice. Third, with this collection of data and analysis, teachers examine the impact of changes on student learning. GESA has been implemented in a wide variety of contexts and evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively (Grayson & Martin, 1997).

Why do we trust that GESA works as a professional development program? Teachers generally seek more strategies to help students learn. The climate of accountability created through legislation such as  NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND also forces teachers to focus on standardized tests and closing achievement gaps. GESA provides a structure for teachers at all career levels to investigate, reflect on and improve practice. We see GESA as subversive in some ways; it uses the dominant discourse of teacher education, i.e. student achievement, teacher behaviors, and learner outcomes, to engage teachers in dialogues that soon lead to discussions of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality.

We are also aware of the many critiques of the process/product model of research in which GESA’s discourse is rooted, and its constraints on the discussions that ensue during teacher training. GESA is individualistic in its orientation; it assumes that it is the sole responsibility of the teacher to identify how to improve and apply the new behaviors and strategies in their particular classrooms. GESA is very much a teacher-centered discourse in which issues of student empowerment and agency, or of social structures of oppression do not necessarily arise. Despite, or perhaps even because of, these constraints, we have found that conversations about empowerment and agency do ensue.

GESA at Lanigan Elementary and Carlears Middle School 56:

The two contexts varied in a number of significant ways including age, race and ethnicity composition of the student body, and number of students.  Lanigan enrolls predominantly white, working class elementary students; 43% receive free or reduced lunch.  MS 56 is comprised of an ethnically and racially diverse mix of Latino-, African-, and Asian-American middle school students, many of whom are recent immigrants, and all of whom receive free/reduced lunch.  The schools differ in approaches to tracking and grouping students. For example, in MS 56 students are tracked into programs of Math/Science (many Asian-American students), ESL (recent immigrants, particularly from the Caribbean), and Scholars (high performing students generally recruited from outside the immediate lower east side neighborhood).  Lanigan students are grouped  heterogeneously, with special education students being included, except students with the most severe disabilities who are placed in self-contained classes.

The urban and small town contexts afford teachers different professional experiences and privileges.  Unlike MS 56, Lanigan is a Professional Development School (PDS) with long-term close ties to the local university and school compensation for membership in study groups. In the city, teachers are contracted for students’ attendance hours; even planning times are often preempted by “coverage duties” for absent teachers due to lack of substitutes.  Although it is much more difficult for urban teachers to have time for professional development activities during the school day, outside grants make study groups possible after school.

The GESA study group format was the same in both schools. At Lanigan, 10 highly experienced White teachers, two college faculty members, and the PDS coordinator met early before school.  At MS56, a group of 7 new teachers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and avenues to certification met after school; these conditions reflect historical patterns of urban teacher composition and attrition.

Data Collection and Analysis

Study group activities generated several sources of data: optional pre- and post- surveys used as teachers’ reflection tool; instructional materials prepared for group presentations; minutes from each session recorded by facilitators; final reflections by participants; and field notes by facilitators at Lanigan, and visiting faculty members at MS 56.

We analyzed this data through a recursive process, first reading through all documents, looking for resonant themes and categories, careful not to exclude anomalous categories. We generated a table synthesizing preliminary findings about the structures of the schools, the process of GESA implementation, the participants, and themes expressed in teachers’ writing. As the study dynamics progressed, the changes in individual’s thinking is expanded and changed through evolving relationships between the teachers involved in the interactions.  We tried to capture some these shifts through examining teacher talk, as reflected in their journals, and particularly examined their use of metaphoric language. 

Discourse Patterns.  A commonality afforded by the GESA experience in both groups, also a central element in study group literature (Ramalho & Cullen, 2001), is the issue of trust-building and emotional safety.  As feelings of safety developed, more honest self-disclosure and authentic engagement in conversations about personal bias and other diversity-related issues were likely to take place.  Among the Lanigan teachers, more ‘polite talk’ that ‘moved around the topic’ initially, with rare confrontation, characterized utterances and interactions, in a style researchers have well documented (see references cited in Russo & Beyerbach, 2001).  In MS 56, teachers engaged in the issues more directly, grasping situations with political awareness and sensitivity, voicing and arguing from different perspectives. Participants in both groups expressed a heightened sense of awareness of their sphere of influence, of their responsibility to their students, and of equity issues.

We identified some broad differences and commonalities in both new and experienced teachers across study group contexts. The more experienced teachers focused on issues of equity concerning gender, ability and social class.  In particular, they noted children with disabilities or from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who sometimes suffer from taunting and condescending behaviors from peers. They expressed apprehension about religious beliefs affecting curricular decisions and had reservations with respect to what teachers may say or do in classrooms.  Despite concerns, teachers believed they could create equitable classroom environments, and were confident in the ability to manage their community of learners.

The new urban teachers focused more on race and ethnicity, examining differences and teacher biases related to height, skin shade, personality, articulation and levels of ability and engagement in schoolwork. They noticed racial tensions that resulted in some middle school students bullying others. They described girls as generally being strong and resilient, not as constrained by gender role expectations as the literature might imply.  Neither gender nor poverty backgrounds were as salient as race and ethnicity in the conversations of the new urban teachers.  Low economic standing was a common denominator for their school’s student population, and social class receded to the background. 
The urban group seemed to value the multiple perspectives that their own diverse backgrounds provided during the GESA experience. However, teachers in both contexts talked about how GESA made them aware of previously unconscious biases.

Recommendations

            When planning GESA study groups:

1. Consider the context, finding what resources are available to support teacher participation (e.g. district supported professional development credits, grant funds, college credit).
2. Select cases or examples that teachers in a particular context can relate to (e.g. examples with ability or gender in rural contexts, situations of inter-ethnic understanding for urban contexts)- Start with the familiar and then move to examples from other contexts.
3. Be aware of the culture of the schools—In the small town elementary school the norms of ‘polite talk’ are often in play; Alternative certification urban teachers may engage in more direct forms of discourse.
4. It would be ideal to have teachers from diverse contexts interact, if not in building based groups, then at least at regional GESA institutes (as we do in NYS), or via interactive videoconferencing. The more diverse the group, the richer the conversations and learning.
5. Acknowledge that teachers may be initially apprehensive about discussing some issues or topics. Our experience has been that teachers do show a commitment to fairness for all students, and once a safe learning community is established, become increasingly more willing to engage with issues of social justice in education.

References

Grayson, D. & Martin, M. (1997). Generating expectations for student achievement: An equitable approach to educational excellence, Teacher Handbook. Canyon Lake, CA: Gray Mill.

Ramalho, T. & Cullen, K. (2001) Study group in professional development school investigates the State of New York’s Grade 4 English Language Arts assessment.  Journal of Research in Education. 11 (1), 116-119.

Russo, P. & Beyerbach, B. (Spring 2001). Moving from polite talk to candid conversation: Infusing foundational issues into a long-term professional development project. Educational Foundations, 1-20.