Chapter 7: Evaluating the Effects of the Pedagogy for Improving Resiliency Program:The Challenges of School Reform in a High Stakes Testing Climate

This chapter reports the results of the Pedagogy for Improving Resiliency Program (PIRP) that was implemented in six fourth-and fifth-grade classrooms in an urban elementary school serving predominantly Hispanic English Language Learners (ELLs) from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. The year-long PIRP consisted of training that incorporated several components designed to help classroom teachers improve their instruction and the learning of resilient and non-resilient ELLs. The findings from the present study are both promising and discouraging. The promising aspects are: (a) the treatment teachers’ classroom instruction was better than the comparison teachers on some important aspects of teaching (e.g., more explanations, more encouragement of extended student responses, more encouraging students to succeed, more focus on the task’s process), (b) students in the treatment classes reported a more positive classroom learning environment than students in the comparison classes (e.g., higher Cohesion, Satisfaction, and Teacher Support and less Friction), and (c) students in the treatment classrooms had significantly higher reading achievement gains than students in the comparison classrooms. The discouraging aspects of the PIRP relate to issues that impacted teachers’ implementation of the PIRP program, such as the district’s emphasis on high-stakes testing.