A Talk With Mike Schmoker

What are the brutal facts educators must face about themselves?

In his new book, Results Now, Mike Schmoker takes a long, hard look at the state of education and its shortcomings.

"We need to shake up the education system to say, look, the average lesson simply doesn't conform to the most simple but best and most widely known practices around which good lessons, good units, and assessments need to be built. I have to admit, it probably is time for a bit of a wake up call."

For Schmoker, "waking up" involves studying what's actually happening in classrooms, and what outcomes these practices produce.

"You can do all the strategic planning, and comprehensive planning, and program adoption, or whatever else we do in the name of school improvement, and still not touch, not have much impact at all on the actual state and quality of instruction, or its supervision. . . . We work in a system that does not give enough attention to simple things like, how effective is this lesson? How effective is this unit? Are supervisors, team leaders, teams of teachers themselves constantly asking the questions: Is there a common curriculum? Is the lesson effective? Is the unit effective? What evidence do we have that it's effective? If those questions were asked instead of so much else that goes on in the life of a school, we'd have vastly better schools."

Schmoker lays out research-based practices for overcoming the obstacles to success that are entrenched in the education community. Among these practices, he advises

• Educators need to find and study effective teachers. Honor and learn from people who do what they do well.
• Good teaching is not about charisma, it's about doing the simple things we learn will work.

You can hear Schmoker hit these points and others, by going to his audio interview, part of the ASCD Talks With an Author series.