In the early afternoon, two days after the end of the school year, on the first day of what was to be a two-day planning workshop for the newly awarded Houston Annenberg Challenge Beacon Grant schools, groups of teachers from eleven Greater Houston area campuses gathered in the darkened ballroom at the Lake Conroe conference center in Texas. We had spent the morning “learning” from school district leaders and researchers how we were to plan and document our collective school reform work—in a manner which ironically reminded us of business-as-usual, that is, our being told what to do and how to do it, with each of us having little voice in the reform. Cheryl Craig, a planning and evaluation researcher who worked with our five schools, recalled the scene of the event this way:
Looking worn-out and in serious need of a break, the principals and teachers from the 11 schools participating in the grant programme assembled along with their planning and evaluation consultants and representative community members. From the outset, no one seemed pleased about attending two days of meetings at the conclusion of the academic year. (Craig 2010, p. 1293)
Worse yet, we learned from the morning’s presenters, that even though our schools had just been awarded substantial amounts of funding for the five-year grant period based on our submitted proposals, we would now need to write and submit another request for funding by the end of the conference gathering. Concerns mounted quickly among us. The template we would use “would satisfy the business community and/or would serve as a ‘readying up process’ (Schwab 1971, p. 9) that would make our data easily accessible to the external evaluator” (Craig 2010, p. 1293). The template, developed with little to no input from the majority of the schools, was introduced and discussed at length. It seemed school reform in Greater Houston was off to a sadly predictable start and would seem destined to land on national editorial pages as a failed educational attempt just like the Chicago and Los Angeles Annenberg Challenges had done.
Cheryl recalls what happened next:When the scheduled time for school teams to work together came, I requested a space for the five school teams with whom I had been working. My intent was to give them a room where they could talk frankly with one another. We gathered with their respective community leaders in an amphitheater down the hall.
Tim remembers a distinct hush that fell over the room as the researcher from a local university (Cheryl), who had been specially chosen to help our schools, asked a few simple questions along the lines of: “Were your campuses involved in the planning of these documentation practices? Do you feel that your voices have been heard? How are the needs of your unique campuses and teachers being met?” The researcher sat in the background listening intently, while the school-based educators began to voice their disappointment over what had taken place thus far in the retreat. One principal of an elementary school, for example, expressed his concern that the schools which had been publicly recognized as successes were not being listened to as he had anticipated. Eagle High School’s principal took the position that reform automatically “implies that evaluation will be done differently,” and a third principal of a middle school spoke of the emergence of a whole new set of challenges related to reformers duplicating the behaviors of school district bureaucrats as they, too, became increasingly technocratic. As Sandi Capps tactfully worded it, “their [far-away] questions were not our [close-up] questions” (Craig 2010, p. 1296). Her wise comment cut to the quick of the core issue around which everyone was skirting. In the end result, the five teams, their supporters, and the researcher (Cheryl) left the retreat without the formulaic written plans in hand as the reform movement had demanded. Instead, we departed with a solid cross-school commitment to work together to improve public education for all children in Greater Houston.
Thus began our complete rethinking of the reform project, how knowledge communities develop and evolve, how schools work, and the need for new models of teacher evaluation (Craig 2010). We also quickly discovered an ally in our planning and evaluation consultant, Cheryl, who would help us negotiate and navigate through the difficult times to come. According to Cheryl,
This was a responsibility that I took seriously, despite the glaring irony that I, as a narrative inquirer, did not consider myself a reformer (although others considered me one) due to my desire to hold everything, including experiences of organized reform movements and their agendas, open to scrutiny. (Craig 2010, p. 1294)
As Cheryl later explained,
In an effort to support the campuses and to secure the necessary funding, we all were desirous of exploring alternate approaches to formative planning and evaluation. After a few sessions, we agreed that Schön and McDonald’s “theory of action” framework (1998), with roots that traced to Dewey, fit the schools’ preferences. Individually and collectively, we awakened to the fact that, like it or not, we had become the school reform movement as far as the teachers and principals were concerned. The onus was now on us to figure out how to make things work. (Craig 2010, p. 1294)
Introducing the Schools and the Houston School Reform Context
The Houston Annenberg Challenge (HAC) was awarded a five-year, $20 million grant from the national Annenberg Challenge, which was matched by another $40 million contributed by the local community. The HAC theory of action for the school reform centered around three imperatives: Teacher learning—transforming teacher professional development; School isolation—breaking down barriers to communication and collaboration between schools and districts; and Size—creating small personalized learning environments geared toward improving learning for each student. The HAC initiative started with an initial cohort of eleven “Beacon” schools which were awarded large multiyear grants to build and disseminate reform models. (The HAC ultimately impacted 88 plus schools by the end of the five-year grant cycle.) In 2002, HAC received another $30 million to continue the work for an additional five years.
As part of the dissemination process, the Portfolio Group initially came together in 1998 consisting of teachers and administrators from five campuses who agreed to work with Dr. Cheryl Craig (as we knew her then) as a planning and evaluation consultant. This combination of schools spanned two school districts—Central and Northside school districts—in the urban core of Houston, Texas and included elementary, middle, and high school campuses. T. P. Yaeger Middle School (which had an existing relationship with Dr. Craig) and Heights Community Learning Center represented the Central School District; Eagle High School, Hardy Academy, and Cochrane Academy (which also had a relationship with Cheryl Craig) were from the Northside School District. In the third year of the grant cycle, another school, Gray Middle School from Central School District, joined the group after several teachers attended a summer institute session on teacher reflective practice and school portfolios. In addition to the cross-section of schools comprising the group,
the original members of the Portfolio Group came from a wide variety of school contexts, including elementary, middle, high school, and university teachers of fine arts, mathematics, language arts, science, and social sciences, as well as administrators from different levels of schools. Yet, all of these schools shared important characteristics that caused the educators’ stories to resonate with one another. They are all being asked by the educational powers-that-be to meet the needs of diverse student populations including high levels of ethnic, racial, and linguistic minorities, students who are classified by the state as “economically disadvantaged,” and students who are also considered by the state to be “at-risk” of dropping out of school before graduation - all of whom are typically disenfranchised by the American educational system. (Gray 2008, p. 3)
Because of the state education system’s reliance on standardized assessment scores to measure and evaluate these campuses based on “E. L. Thorndike’s prevailing philosophy that schools can be run and evaluated using behaviorist ideas and measurement-oriented results” (Gray 2008, p. 3), teachers in the Portfolio Group were receptive to examining their individual and collective practices as a way of moving beyond the prevailing “grand narrative” of education (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). The initial Portfolio Group members often dwelled within the tensions between the grand narrative of education and the individual stories told about their school campuses by individual teachers and students (Gray 2008).
As Cheryl already had an existing relationship with the principal at Yaeger and a somewhat later relationship with the principal at Cochrane, word spread quickly to other campuses that they too could capitalize on those already-established collaborations. In the end, the five original schools participating in the Portfolio Group invited her to be their planning and evaluation consultant. A narrative researcher from Canada who studied with both D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Cheryl
would only agree to work with the schools who selected her if they would, in turn, agree to work collaboratively to document their own work and their collective work. She did not want to mediate rivalries between and among the schools and personalities of the teachers in the group. Nor did she want people or schools competing for her attention. She wanted everyone to focus their full attention on improving schooling for urban youth, a shared enterprise that broke down school and district human differences. (Gray 2008, p. 17)
As a result of the eventful retreat at Lake Conroe, and with several school principals advocating for a more holistic approach to evaluating the school reform work, the schools that initially agreed to work with Cheryl decided to use portfolios to document their school reform work (Gray 2008). This approach was meant to counter the predetermined use of standardized test scores that the conference planners had determined the schools would use to show the impact of the reform work on student learning. The Houston schools were determined to document their own reform work so as not to fall into the trap that doomed campuses in a sister reform grant in Chicago where participating schools perceived their evaluations as being unfair as the schools did not collect data themselves, but totally relied on the data collected by outside researchers and evaluators. The creation of school portfolios would allow schools to show that they had been faithful stewards of the Houston Annenberg grant monies. Against the complexities of this backdrop, the Portfolio Group had its beginning.
During the 1997–2002 funding cycle, the Portfolio Group met regularly and with Cheryl’s guidance were able to produce school portfolios that not only documented the reform work on each campus, but also told and showed each school’s story from multiple perspectives. These early portfolios were
not just a collection of artifacts; they included stories of learning that occurred on each campus; learning from administrators, teachers and students that contributed to each school landscape. The school portfolios also contained reflection s on the stories from teachers, students, and administrators. (Gray 2008, p. 19)
In addition to their work on the school portfolios, the members of the Portfolio Group presented their narrative research at prestigious national conferences such as at American Educational Research Association (AERA) meetings, the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) Conferences, the International Teacher Research Conference (ITRC), and the Castle Conference of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP), as well as collaboratively w...