Tony Frontier > Quotes

“we educators continue to remodel the kitchen, we're continuously surprised that the food does not taste any better.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Ultimately, students—not only teachers—must be able to use standards to guide efforts toward achievement and mastery. Implementation of new standards must be done in a manner that ensures that they result in different experiences for students; curriculum, instruction, assessment, and rubrics should look different in a classroom where a new set of standards is being used to guide student learning.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Effective curriculum, instruction, and assessment can occur without textbooks or technology. New resources can be used in a manner that augments the quality of the curriculum and transforms student learning. Schools and districts that most effectively leverage the acquisition of new materials invest significant time, effort, and energy in establishing the professional skills and strategies, standards, assessments, and curriculum that will be used to drive students' use of those resources.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Planning for transformational change requires those implementing the change and those participating in the change to think differently about the nature of the work that they are doing. In addition, the previous skills and habits of mind are no longer useful or relevant.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Obviously, the presence of choice and control gives voice and power to the lever of self. This statement does not imply that learners necessarily are given unlimited choice over what they are to learn but, rather, that they are given a choice over how they might approach their learning. It is important to recognize that this strategy is also a part of building motivation, engagement, and self-efficacy.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Learning is a process of thinking about one's own thinking. To recognize this principle is to understand that the most profound questions that further learning are rarely asked on a test; they come from the learner.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“The challenge of leveraging standards is in how they are used. Standards can be used in a transactional manner that maintains the status quo of student experience and achievement in schools, or they can be leveraged in a manner that transforms the roles of teachers and learners.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“How might students complete this prompt if the sampling change is implemented effectively? Before this change, I used to _____________, but now I _____________.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“A common distinction made between leadership and management is that leadership is focused on doing the right things, whereas management is about doing things right.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“A group of teachers may use a new strategy and express concerns that the approach is ineffective because after initial attempts, students didn't learn as well as when the previous strategy was used. However, when developing proficiency in a new skill or strategy, even experts are prone to errors (Ericsson et al., 1993).”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Too often, learners see questions as evidence of ignorance rather than as pathways to understanding. If students are to reach their full potential, teachers need to create classroom environments where it is OK for students to acknowledge that they are confused, that they are struggling with challenging new ideas and skills, and that they don't understand yet (Dweck, 2006).”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“What outcome are we trying to accomplish? What changes will have the most direct effect on achievement of this outcome? Does this change require a transactional approach (remodeling) or a transformational approach (changing cooking approaches and strategies, ingredients, and related processes)?”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Goal setting has been demonstrated to be a useful strategy in building learners' self-efficacy (Schunk, 1991). Close-at-hand goals with specific performance standards help learners to understand and judge progress and then translate that to their sense of self.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Our professional currency is understanding each learner's current level of understanding and the desired level of understanding, and using instructional strategies to close the gap between the current status and what might be.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“The paradox of education reform is this: The levers that are good at changing schools are often least associated with improving student learning. In other words, too often we remodel the kitchen when we would have had more impact if we had simply put some salt and pepper on the table.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“From millions of students, thousands of studies, and hundreds of components that influence student learning, he concludes his work by arguing that learning occurs most effectively when two things happen: (1) each teacher sees his or her classroom through the eyes of his or her students, and (2) each student sees him- or herself as his or her own best teacher (Hattie, 2009, p. 238).”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“How are students empowered to self-assess and direct their efforts in developing skills associated with the standards?”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“The concept of the hinge point is critically important to frame conversations about what works in schools. It is the starting point for focusing discussion and consideration of practices that might not just leverage student learning but most effectively and efficiently leverage student learning.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Education is often mired in arguments about factual knowledge versus conceptual frameworks (phonics versus whole language, computation versus mathematical reasoning, important dates versus historical thinking). The reason these either-or debates are so difficult and contentious is that they're often framed as a false dichotomy. Factual knowledge is meaningless unless it can be organized and put into operation through broader conceptual frameworks. Conceptual frameworks are useless unless they can be put into operation using specific facts.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“we cannot necessarily expect that educators hold and act upon the belief that intelligence is malleable and intellect can be increased. Furthermore, it is often assumed that nothing can be done to address students' perceptions of themselves as learners;”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“When looking at agendas for board, faculty, team, and other meetings, to what extent do agenda items and meeting minutes deal with processes and criteria related to placing students in different programs versus classroom processes and strategies that can best meet the needs of these learners?”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“honor learners' current understandings, integrate facts and concepts, and support learners' ability to be self-reflective as they strive to make meaning.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“The components associated with instructional strategies and conceptions of self were found to be, on average, eight times more effective at improving student learning than those practices associated with structure and sampling (Hattie, 2009, p. 244).”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Time and again, research shows little or no difference in student learning based on structure”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Ultimately, neither the standards themselves nor the new accountability tests designed to measure student progress toward those standards will do anything to improve student learning. The leverage advantage of standards will only be realized if students—not only teachers—are empowered to use standards to guide their efforts.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Leadership practices associated with change include the specific things that leaders do to help organizations balance the need for appropriate levels of challenge, so they can move beyond their current state, while supporting the development of the new knowledge and skills required for success.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Hattie found that influences associated with the home and the school have a less significant effect on student learning than the characteristics of the teacher, the quality of the curricula, and the quality of the teaching.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“The key understanding for educators is to focus on strategies that build intrinsic motivation in learners to retain their natural sense of curiosity to learn, rather than undermine this force by incenting them to comply or achieve an external reward, such as a grade.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“These problems resulted in frustration among teachers and a failure to reap the potential benefits of the framework.”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

“Consider those semantics. What type of system is in place when only those who are failing are "punished" through a plan of improvement? If expertise is acquired through deliberate practice over many years, who shouldn't be on an improvement plan?”
― Tony Frontier, Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School