I was asked to offer a series of teacher development workshops on 21st-century skills and student engagement. The principal sent me a rather comprehensive letter outlining their teacher development needs and painted a grim picture of the school, using language that I found honest and direct, but generally unsupported by any specific examples or detailed information about the school, its students, and the teaching staff. I read and reread the letter carefully and, still interested in learning more about the school and its challenges, asked to spend two days at the school before facilitating my workshops. I wanted to get a more complete sense of the place.

On Day 1, at lunchtime, after meeting a number of teachers and visiting a few classrooms, I found a comfortable armchair in the staffroom, placed my laptop on the table in front of me, and prentended to work while I focused on listening to about three or four conversations taking place around me.

Soon, one conversation really grabbed my attention. Three female teachers were talking about Natasha and a group of her friends and classmates. I learned that there was a high rate of teenage pregnancy in the neighbourhood served by the school, that many of the students dropped out to become teenage moms, that it was not uncommon for both boys and girls to be swept into the gang culture and drop out, and — perhaps most importantly — that the teachers felt powerless to effect change, to motivate the students and help them see opportunities that come along with staying in school.

On Day 2, also at lunchtime, the conversation continued, this time with a few more teachers adding their thoughts and experiences. I listened intently, and the more I learned about the students, the neighbourhood, the challenges, the school culture, the more I realized that the workshops I had prepared for my visit needed to be seriously reworked.

I had prepared the workshops based on information received from the principal, information that did not include any of the facts I had learned in two days in the staffroom and from many informal conversations with the teachers. I could not deliver these workshops knowing that they had only a very faint connection to the daily lives and challenges faced by the school’s teachers. At the end of lunch on Day 2 I knew that I needed a completely different strategy — one built upon the realities I had learned about and witnessed, and on the power of dialogue.

My “True Voice”

As I was listening to many negative and discouraging comments about a certain group of grade 12 girls, three of whom had gotten pregnant, were spending too much time with the wrong crowd, or started dressing inappropriately for school, one name continued to pop up — Natasha’s. Of course, I had no idea who Natasha was, but the conversation I was listening to, in the school’s staffroom and as a complete outsider, was gradually painting a picture of someone who was a fairly good student, resposible daughter and sister (often taking care of two younger siblings), good athlete (“girls’ basketball wouldn’t exist here if it wasn’t for her”), and who was also “absolutely gorgeous and likely to end up pregnant, too, like all her friends.” This last statement was acknowledged by a few teachers, some of whom added their own comments, while others nodded, dejected.

The conversation then continued for a few minutes, but that statement about Natasha being destined to end up pregnant “soon” really got to me. Finally, in response to yet another comment about Natasha, I couldn’t resist jumping in and blurted out, “Maybe, instead of accepting the seeming inevitability of her pregnancy or some other mistake she’s likely to make soon, someone here should tell Natasha how proud you all are that she’s not pregnant, that she’s not in a gang, that she’s not going out with some low-life, and that she’s keeping up good grades and being a great daughter and athlete.”

Silence. Oh, I’m sure you can imagine the silence.

Surprisingly enough, I did not make enemies that day. I started a fantastic conversation that provided a valuable and practical building block for the workshops I facilitated the next day. Looking back, I know that this perhaps reckless act, in a still unknown context and in front of teachers I hardly knew, was the sharing of my own genuine voice. What those teachers heard was not some “expert” invited to facilitate workshops at the school, not an official guest invited by school administration, but a human being and a teacher who cares about teaching and learning.

The teachers responded to that voice. The ensuing conversation before the end of the lunch period and after school became the foundation of my workshop the next day. It all worked out precisely because I engaged in the act of speaking my “true voice”, one of the four key practices of what William Isaacs calls Dialogic Leadership.

Dialogic Leadership

Isaacs, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, believes that

In the new knowledge-based, networked economy, the ability to talk and think together well is a vital source of competitive advantage and organizational effectiveness. This is because human beings create, refine, and share knowledge through conversation. In a world where technology has led to the erosion of traditional hierarchical boundaries … the glue that holds things together is no longer “telling” but “conversing” (Isaacs, 1999). 

Of course, the school where I was invited to facilitate workshops subscribed to the traditional model of “telling.” All of the school’s professional development events involved an “expert” who told the teachers what to do in their classrooms. Needless to say, the teachers resented that approach and, faced with a number of serious challenges that the invited “experts” merely glossed over, felt unsupported and disempowered. The professional development strategy implemented to help effect change and improve morale had the opposite result.

It’s important to point out that this approach to teacher development is alive and well around the world. In fact, teacher professional development has traditionally been something done to teachers, not something that we engage in with our colleagues and use to build knowledge. To this day, teacher development often reduces teachers to handout technicians and implementers of other people’s ideas and strategies, many of which are conceived far from the classroom and with no understanding of the specific context where the teachers work every day.

William Isaacs’ organizational leadership work suggests a much different approach: The school’s teachers can play an integral role in helping, supporting, engaging, and motivating Natasha and her friends — they can develop the strategies and solutions the school needs; the only way they can be successful is through what Isaacs calls “conversing”; and the process that can help them achieve their goals and address challenges they face is what he calls Dialogic Leadership.

And so, the next day, having completely abandoned the workshops I had been asked to deliver, I restructured my approach to build on Isaacs’ concept of dialogue, which he defines as a tool that “surfaces ideas, perceptions, and understanding that people don’t already have.” It’s the basis of Dialogic Leadership, “a way of leading that consistently uncovers, through conversation, the hidden creative potential in any situation” (Isaacs, 1999).

It worked. We spent a full day together talking about being a teacher in that specific context, about the students and their problems, about the curriculum, about testing, and a myriad of other challenges and — also — opportunities. Solutions and suggestions emerged from dialogue. There were no “experts” in that room; no one had all the answers, but everyone had questions, and it was through these questions that a way forward emerged. We built valuable professional knowledge together. Even my statement, blurted out a day earlier in the staff room, was subjected to serious scrutiny. Many other “true voice” statements were made, and they led to a sense of openness, unity, and possibility. They were treated with respect and as building blocks to help move towards meaning and practical solutions.

We spent many wonderfully productive and inspiring hours together. The dialogue helped us explore “the uncertainties and questions that no one ha[d] answers to.” We began to “think together — not simply report out old thoughts. In dialogue people learn to use the energy of their differences to enhance their collective wisdom” (Isaacs, 1999).

Unfortunately, it’s this sense of collective wisdom that’s often missing from teacher development initiatives. We need more of it, much more. We need to ensure that, as teachers, we always have the time to engage in dialogue and learn with and from each other. The way we learn as professionals must be based on questioning our practice, learning from it, and engaging in dialogue with colleagues. Administrators, education leaders, and classroom teachers must learn to listen and create environments that make dialogue possible, that encourage it and build on it.

The work of William Isaacs gave me a solid foundation to implement professional development that builds on multiple voices and helps access collective wisdom. I believe it deserves wider adoption.

References

Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogic leadership. The Systems Thinker, 10(1), 1-5.

The post Learning from the Energy of Our Differences appeared first on blog of proximal development.

In my last entry I wrote about Learning Stories, an assessment strategy used in early childhood education in New Zealand. Ever since I first learned about this approach, I’ve been interested in how it would translate to middle school or high school. As I wrote in my previous entry:

Learning stories are about documenting, through narratives, what children can do and what they are learning. They represent learning as essentially a dynamic, evolving, and ongoing process. They do not reduce learning to a score that children get at the end of the unit or semester … or a level that defines them as they start a new school year, with a new teacher.

There is no question that this approach can be of tremendous value to any learner, young or not. But, as I continued to research Learning Stories and started working with colleagues to implement them in classrooms (including — many years ago — my own), it became increasingly clear that writing narratives about student progress requires the following:

1. Time in class to observe students as they work individually and with peers
2. Time in class (or after) to compose narratives about student work.
3. Time in class to sit down with individual students and discuss Learning Stories

After a few weeks, the teachers I worked with to implement this approach provided excellent feedback. I summarized it below in three key bullet points:

1. This approach forces me to find the time to observe all my students as individual learners, pay careful attention to their work, behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, and progress.
2. This approach forces me to find the time to talk with my students, one-on-one, about their work and about learning.
3. This approach is too time-consuming. Lengthy narratives are not always needed. They are also not always the best way of recording student learning. I cannot write narratives very frequently – I just don’t have enough time. However, my observations can be captured through other means.

The first two observations resulted in wonderful changes in my colleagues’ classrooms, and in my own. The classrooms became much more student-centred and focused on formative assessment. More conversations started taking place with the students about their own learning.

The third observation made it clear that Learning Stories can be implemented as an approach that’s used only occasionally. It’s just too time-consuming to be used on a weekly basis, for example. My colleagues and I saw value in doing this frequently but had to acknowledge that teachers just don’t have the time to compose narratives in response to all – or even just the most valuable – examples of student progress. What’s more, there are many instances of student learning and success that do not require lengthy narratives. It became clear that we needed a modified approach.

We found that approach in 2010 in the work of Ken E. Blaiklock, who recommends an alternative strategy he calls Learning Notes. Learning Notes, he writes,

…include a description of an event and optional sections that interpret the learning that occurred and suggest ideas for future learning […] Because Learning Notes may be easier to record than Learning Stories, they can be produced more frequently. (2010, p. 5)

Blaiklock also emphasizes the flexibility of Learning Notes:

… a common practice in early childhood centres is to produce just one Learning Story per child per month. Each Learning Story is specific to a particular event and is only a small sample of a child’s experiences at the centre […] Because Learning Notes do not have to follow a story format, they can be recorded far more frequently than is possible with Learning Stories; teachers may find that they can record several brief Learning Notes for each child every week. Teachers can write short Learning Notes while they are working with children and can therefore capture a wider range of experiences. (2010, p. 7)

He goes on to add that this flexibility allows teachers to generate a more “comprehensive record of a child’s learning and development,” make quick spontaneous observations, and abandon the restrictive story format. Learning Notes also make it easier to engage the child in the process of composing, discussing, or responding to recorded observations.

In short, the Learning Notes approach seemed to offer the solution we were looking for after experimenting with Learning Stories in middle school classrooms.

Based on Blaiklock’s work, we created Learning Notes templates that included the three recommended sections: Describe, Interpret, and What Next? We placed stacks of these blank forms on our desks and … began using them on a daily basis! Since the approach was implemented in a one-to-one laptop school, we also created both .doc templates and online forms (built using Google Docs):

Learning Note Template

Since the requirement to compose a narrative was no longer in place, our small team found it much easier to record observations. Once filled out, the forms also provided opportunities to discuss learning with individual students. Below you will find a few examples of the Learning Notes created as part of this project:

Grade 6 Social Studies

Describe
Tomas, you were very focused today during independent work time. I know this isn’t easy for you and that you prefer working with a partner or in groups. Today you focused, and you got a lot done, much more than ever before. This is a big milestone.

Interpret
[Left blank]

What Next?
Staying focused in class is very important. This year we will be doing a lot of independent work, so you will have many opportunities to practice and get better at it.

Grade 7 Language Arts

Describe
Angelika,
I can see that you took the time to proofread your first draft and think about your main examples after we talked about this assignment on Tuesday. You didn’t rush through this part like you used to. This will help bring up your process mark. It will also make it easier to write the final draft.

Interpret
I can see that you now understand how important it is to plan your work and proofread it carefully before handing it in. Have you noticed how many mistakes you caught? Good writers plan and go over their work. I can see you are starting to do that more and more.

What Next?
Let’s work on adding more “meat” to your ideas.

As you can see, these Learning Notes did not take long to compose. In fact, both were written during class while the students were working. Both were given to the students before the class ended, allowing them to share the notes with their parents that same day.

The fact that the students started receiving this kind of feedback on a regular basis (each day the teachers composed notes for 2-5 students) led to three interesting developments:

1. Students started expecting and even asking for their Learning Notes on a regular basis.
2. Many students started paying attention to their own work and asking for notes on specific tasks they had done, or whenever they thought they had done something well.
3. Some parents started writing short comments on the Learning Notes.

We saw these developments as an opportunity to engage both the students and their parents in the process of either composing or responding to Learning Notes. We modified the template to include an opportunity for students to co-create the notes and for parents to respond:

Learning Note Template (Modified)

Here’s one of my favourite examples of teacher, student, and parent engagement after we modified the Learning Note template:

Grade 7 Language Arts

Describe
Jonathan,
The blog entry you wrote today (the one on abuses of power in Animal Farm) included detailed support from the novel. We talked about how important it is to support your ideas with quotes or examples from the novel many times before, but your writing didn’t always have this much detail. This is a big step forward, Jonathan. You used three excellent examples.
I also noticed many more sticky notes poking out of your book. I see that you’re reading and thinking about what you’re reading.

Interpret
You are becoming a more careful and critical reader.
You are beginning to use many “Good Reader” strategies we talked about in class this month.
You are thinking more about how to communicate your ideas and back them up.

What Next?
Use this blog post as an example of good writing.

Student Comment
Thank you for giving us the sticky notes. They are very good for tracking important stuff in the book.

Parent Comment
We’re very proud, Jon! Looks like you are ready to tackle that Independent Reading Assignment next month!

Learning Notes proved to be quite successful as a formative assessment strategy because they helped the teachers make student progress and development visible. They made it easier to document, respond to, and also – over time – revisit episodes of competence and growth. As a result, the students started paying attention to learning, and to notice, recognize, respond to, and build on their successes and challenges.

References

Blaiklock, K. (2010). Assessment in New Zealand early childhood settings: A proposal to change from Learning Stories to Learning Notes. Early Education, 48(2), 5-10.

The post Learning Stories – Part 2 appeared first on blog of proximal development.

A few years ago, after facilitating a session on assessment in the 21st-century classroom, I was approached by one of the workshop participants and asked what initially prompted me to start reconfiguring my classroom practice and my approach to classroom assessment. I said: “I asked myself a few basic questions: What do I want my students to be now and when they’re older? What skills do I want them to have? Who do I want them to be as human beings?”

“What was your answer?” She asked.

I found the answer to my questions in an early childhood education curriculum and policy document, titled Te Whariki, developed by the government of New Zealand. It’s a bicultural and bilingual document (English and Maori) founded on the following aspirations for children:

… to grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.

That sentence captures what I hope my students will and have become. It drives my classroom practice, my approach to student engagement, and my assessment practices. It now also powers my understanding of teacher development and my research in this field. Why? Because it focuses on things that are important to me as an educator:

• Competent and confident learners and communicators
• Healthy in mind, body and spirit
• Sense of belonging
• Valued contribution to society

These are key to my understanding of education – its role in our lives and its transformative power. The passage from Te Whariki is a maxim I use regularly to guide my classroom practice and my work with teachers around the world. It is the lens through which I view education and teacher development. I believe every teacher needs to have such a set of guiding principles that helps us overcome challenges, stay focused and committed, and steer clear of distractions. Above all, that passage from Te Whariki that I selected as my professional mantra guides my views on assessment – once I defined the purpose of education in my classroom I was able to best decide on the tools and activities needed to ensure that the children get there.

And that is where another element of the Te Whariki approach comes in, an element that I have found to be key in helping me re-think assessment and student engagement and support strategies: It is known as Learning Stories (Carr, 2001). Although used almost exclusively in early childhood education, it has played an important role in my professional development and in helping me learn how to best support young learners in middle school and high school classrooms. Learning Stories is an alternative approach that

… involves observations in everyday settings aimed at providing a cumulative series of qualitative snapshots or written vignettes of individual children displaying one or more of the five target domains of learning dispositions. These learning dispositions are based on the [curriculum] strands of Te Whariki: Mana Atua (well-being); Mana Whenua (belonging); Mana Reo (communication); Mana Tangata (contribution); and Mana Aoturoa (exploration) (Rameka, 2007, p.132).

Learning stories are about documenting, through narratives, what children can do and what they are learning. They represent learning as essentially a dynamic, evolving, and ongoing process. They do not reduce learning to a score that children get at the end of the unit or semester … or a level that defines them as they start a new school year, with a new teacher. As opposed to our well-established modernist approaches to assessment, Learning Stories do not highlight deficiencies, weaknesses, or mistakes. They recognize that each child is a unique individual who interacts with the world around her and learns differently, through a process that is uniquely her own. Learning Stories view learning as a holistic endeavour, not a collection of subjects or skills that the child must master, and they therefore focus on learning as exploration and a process of inquiry. Teachers who use this approach are also well aware of the fact that learning takes place all the time, not just in the classroom, and they involve parents and other family members in documenting the child’s development and commenting on narratives written by the teacher.

Even though Learning Stories is an approach used in early childhood education settings, I have always been very interested in how the key principles behind Learning Stories could be used to revolutionize how we assess and evaluate students when they’re older. Over the past few years, I have had a number of opportunities to build on the Learning Stories approach in middle school and in high school settings. I’ve worked with teachers who were open to experimentation and whose assessment narratives – often co-constructed with parents and the students themselves – made an impact on student motivation. I’ll share some of them in my next post.

Below, you will find a number of Learning Stories exemplars that inspired me to modify this approach for use with older students. As you look through some of the exemplars below, think about how this approach could be used in your context, be it middle school, high school, or even post-secondary. Imagine documenting – with your students and for them – their learning and development as learners, thinkers, creators, contributors, and communicators through narratives and “qualitative snapshots.” What would these stories look like? Would they involve parents? Other teachers? Could they be multimedia texts? How would they fit into your assessment and evaluation practice?

“Oh, no! That’s not right!”
“I’m getting better and better.”
A Budding Archeologist
Teaching Others
The artists
Mahdia’s Story

References

Carr, M. (2001). Assessment in early childhood settings. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.

Rameka, L. (2007). Mäori approaches to assessment. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 30(1), 126-144.

The post Learning Stories: Part I appeared first on blog of proximal development.

A few years ago, I ran into an old colleague of mine at an educational conference. He was using the lunch break to catch up on his marking. His backpack, placed on the chair beside him, was full of what looked like 2- or 3-page compositions.

“Don’t you need a quiet place to focus to mark these?” I asked.

“Nah … I’ve been doing this for years. I don’t mind the noise around me, and I know very well what I’m looking for in these essays. After reading once, I already know if it’s a D or an A or somewhere in between. Then, I read again and focus on sentence structure and other details.”

Whatever your thoughts on my colleague’s approach to assessment, one thing is clear: What he was referring to when he said “I know very well what I’m looking for in these essays” is the evaluative knowledge he had acquired over the years as a teacher. Teachers tend to be very proud of this expertise. There is no question that, over time, we develop the ability, in our subject areas, to assess specific examples of student work with just a quick glance. Our understanding of good work, of specific standards, of quality, is generally tacit knowledge — it’s been called our “guild knowledge.” It’s an integral part of our profession, generated through years of practice and experience. When my colleague said that a quick glance was enough to determine the quality of each essay, I was not surprised at all. Had he given me one of those essays to look over, I probably would have taken under a minute to respond with something like, “This one is definitely a B-.”

Whenever I think about our guild knowledge and assessment, I am reminded of the following statement by D. Royce Sadler:

“… the guild knowledge of teachers should consist less in knowing how to evaluate student work and more in knowing ways to download evaluative knowledge to students” (Sadler, 1989).

In other words, teachers should help their students become competent and confident critical thinkers and evaluators of their own work and the work of others. We should be experts at ensuring that our students leave our classrooms with the kind of evaluative knowledge they will need in order to be lifelong learners who make judgments, reflect, interpret, and ask critical questions. In addition, in order to succeed in the 21st century, young people need to be skilled in exercising control over their own learning. Effective ongoing assessment can help them learn how to ask critical questions, how to monitor their own progress, and how to pay attention to how they learn and what happens when they learn and engage in what we commonly refer to as schoolwork. Effective, timely, meaningful formative assessment, delivered through a variety of means — but mostly through ongoing critical conversations with our students about their work — will help engage them in developing metacognition: knowledge about themselves as learners as well as self-regulation knowledge (planning, monitoring, self-assessment, setting goals).

We need to use classroom assessment to engage our students in interactions (with us, their peers, and their own thoughts, goals, and ideas) that help them independently define their own learning goals, monitor their progress, engage in ongoing assessment of and reflection on their work, and make adjustments to their learning trajectories and their work itself. The kind of feedback I shared in my previous post is a key ingredient in this approach because it gradually encourages the development of self-monitoring and critical thinking about one’s work.

But let’s now look at the big picture: How do we create the kind of environment where students are encouraged to be independent thinkers and critical evaluators of their own work and that of others? If it is our responsibility to “download evaluative knowledge to students,” then how do we reconfigure classroom instruction to create an inquiry-based, student-driven culture of learning where the teacher assumes the role of a more experienced peer and conversation partner, and not the omniscient evaluator and sage? How do we create environments in our classrooms that nurture the development of self-monitoring and self-regulating learners?

I can think of one example that worked quite well in my own classroom: Several years ago, I taught grade eight language arts using blogs. The students had their own blogs connected into a class community of bloggers/writers. All of their work was posted on their individual blogs and an engaging and supportive learning community emerged, mostly as a result of all the interactions inside the class blogosphere.

But I want to focus today just on how I got this community started. When I first introduced blogs to my students in September, I did more than just present blogging as something that would replace the students’ notebooks … as a mere digital portfolio, let’s say. Instead, I focused on how our blogging community had the power to reconfigure how we understood teaching and learning. There were two key explicit messages in how I introduced our reconfigured classroom to my students: First, we are a community and blogs help us learn from and with one another. Second, your blog is something you cultivate all year. It’s not just a place to post assignments; it represents you and your learning. It’s a long-term commitment.

To get them started, I handed out the following diagram and pointed out the timeline (September to June). “This is a living entity that you will grow for the next ten months,” I said. Then, we looked at the three sections of the flower in the diagram – The Goals, Habits and Commitment, and The Right Habitat – and discussed the specific questions in each section. I then gave my students plenty of time (well over a week) to formulate their answers.

(For a high-resolution version of this diagram, please click here. For a more extensive discussion of this tool, please see my blog post, How to Grow a Blog.)

As a result of this approach, I got to know the students very well throughout the year, and learned how to best support them as individuals. Over time, they started looking at schoolwork as their work. Their blogs became sites of inquiry and engagement. In growing their blogs throughout the year, they developed their own understanding of what it means to be a writer, a reader, and a learner. They started thinking about how they learn, how they write, what they find challenging and why. They started reflecting on their own work and provided readerly critique in response to the work of their peers. They learned to self-assess, set short-term and long-term goals, and to track their own progress.

And here’s what I learned: By reconfiguring what learning looked like in my classroom, I realized that my primary responsibility was not to evaluate everything they did, but to provide ongoing support and opportunities for them to plan, talk, think, revise, make mistakes, and reflect.

The post Downloading Evaluative Knowledge appeared first on blog of proximal development.

In my last post, I wrote about the value of Assessment for Learning as an approach to supporting and engaging students. Whenever we talk about Assessment for Learning, we must also address its key element — timely, effective, and meaningful feedback.

Let me take you back in time once again to when I was a young English teacher, facing a loaded curriculum and a semester that, in my view at least, seemed very very short. I had a lot to cover and not much time. Back then, feedback in my mind looked like this:

In fact, this image above is a collage of actual corrected student essays (one image shows a scan of an essay corrected by me). Why am I sharing this with you? I’m sharing it because all too often when we talk about feedback, this is what we really mean: correcting – an activity that teachers don’t even particularly like. As a young teacher faced with a lot of material to cover, I thought the only way to give feedback was to read student work, correct it, and assign a grade. I was convinced that my students would read their corrected papers, take notes, and learn from my corrections so that they would not make the same mistakes again. Did they? I think I can safely say that this assessment or feedback practice by a young inexperienced teacher did not contribute to a lot of learning. It just wasn’t feedback.

According to Hattie and Timperley (2007), feedback “… needs to provide information specifically relating to the task or process of learning that fills a gap between what is understood and what is aimed to be understood.” “Specifically,” they add, “feedback is more effective when it provides information on correct rather than incorrect responses and when it builds on changes from previous trails.” Corrections, like the ones in the image above, never focus on things that a student performed well. They zero in on what went wrong. They are also very definitive and authoritarian. They show weaknesses in student work, they point out mistakes and errors.

Feedback, on the other hand, is about supporting the student in the process of moving toward the goal and closing that gap between where she is now and where she needs to be. As teachers, we must help our students answer three questions:

1. Where am I going?
2. How am I doing?
3. What actions do I need to take next?

In other words, effective feedback focuses on goals, progress, and next steps. It’s important to keep in mind that our role here is to guide, not to answer these questions for our students. Feedback that helps them answer these three questions will provide exactly the kind of guidance that’s needed. Over time, it will also teach the students to become effective evaluators of their own work and that of others because what they will learn from effective feedback is not just how well they are moving toward finishing that independent project on volcanoes, for example, but also — perhaps most importantly — how to exercise control over their learning, how to self-monitor and work independently. Maria Montessori was right when she wrote: “The greatest sign of a success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” You know you’re doing your job when your students and their work begin to demonstrate that your presence is getting more and more unnecessary.

Let’s look at an example. The following comes from a grade 8 science teacher in Vancouver, Canada, who is commenting on a student project on biofuels:

There’s so much more detail in this draft, Vanessa! Last time we looked at your project you just had an outline and some great ideas. Now I see you added your research. Remember when we talked about including specific examples and practical uses of biofuels? You made it happen here. That section now reads like something written by an expert!

I see that you organized the information more visually and added a chart. Have you thought of making it bigger? I think it would make a very nice large format pull-out/ insert. Ask some of your friends for their opinion. You could still keep the paragraphs you have but the graphic organizer you created could get lost in the middle of all that text. I could book computer lab time for you to work on that.

Any ideas on the video component? What do you think would be better – you, summarizing the information as the author of this report, or the Discovery Channel videos you found? Both?

Have you thought about re-writing the introduction – remember? We talked about how your focus has changed a little since you started.

Next conference: Monday, May 12th.

Doesn’t this written feedback make you want to be the one working on that project? What comes across most strongly, in my opinion, is that Vanessa is treated like someone who’s building her own expertise in a topic she cares about.

Let’s evaluate that feedback by looking at the list of key feedback components. According to Sue Swaffield (2008), effective feedback should:

• Focus on student learning
• Focus on the task rather than the learner
• Focus on process rather than the product
• Focus on progress
• Focus on particular qualities of the work
• Advise how to improve
• Encourage the student to think
• Require action that is challenging yet achievable
• Be specific
• Avoid comparison with others
• Be understandable to the student

I think Vanessa’s teacher scores rather high on the list above. I am especially fond of how well she suggests improvements. Notice that throughout her note, she focuses on helping the student think about next steps and asks Vanessa specific questions about her work. She doesn’t impose anything; the questions are designed to help Vanessa focus on very specific aspects of her work and to address them. When she read the note, Vanessa knew the answers to the three key questions:

• Where am I going? Finished project on biofuels that includes detailed research as well as multimedia components and solid organization.
• How am I doing? “That section now reads like something written by an expert!” “There’s so much more detail in this draft, Vanessa!”
• What actions do I need to take next? “Any ideas on the video component?” Have you thought about re-writing the introduction – remember?”

These prompts are providing the guidance and the encouragement she needs to keep going and keep thinking about her work. There is also nothing quantitative here — no letter or number grades. There are also no meaningless comments, such as “Good Job, Vanessa!,” which focus more on the learner than learning and the task at hand. What this note from Vanessa’s teacher shows to me is a conversation with a student about the work she’s doing. The date of the next student-teacher conference confirms that this note is part of an ongoing conversation.

I don’t really see Vanessa failing, abandoning this project, or getting a C, do you?

References:

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.

Swaffield, S. (2008). Feedback. The central process in assessment for learning. In Swaffield, S. (Ed.). Unlocking assessment. Understanding for reflection and application. New York: Routledge, pp. 57-72.

The post The Power of Feedback appeared first on blog of proximal development.

Whenever I think of assessment in the classroom, I am reminded of a rubric I created a long time ago to go along with a short writing assignment for my grade eight Language Arts class. You can see it below. Many would agree that rubrics are excellent tools — they show the students exactly what the expectations are and the scale we’ll use to assess their work. True. However, as a young teacher many years ago, I used this rubric alone and nothing else. I did not have an assessment and evaluation strategy to support my students and learn from my classroom practice. My students submitted work, and I evaluated it. That was it. What I’ve learned since is what every experienced teacher knows very well: that assessment for learning — an ongoing process that provides students with timely and meaningful feedback, informs us about how well the students are doing, and gauges the effectiveness of our classroom practice — must be an integral part of our role as classroom teachers.

Let’s look closely at my rubric. What exactly is it telling Terry about his work in my classroom and his grasp of the content we’re studying? Here’s one point of view: Terry received a rubric with detailed descriptors. If he takes the time to read them, he will see what he did well and what prevented him from getting a better grade. He can also see that he received a very good mark (80%) and a nice comment. Doesn’t this note contribute to Terry’s understanding of how well he’s doing in my class and how well he’s grasped the material? Perhaps. But here is another point of view: What does “Well Done!” really mean? What does it really teach Terry? How helpful is it in ensuring that he does well on the next assignment? Is it a scaffold that he can use to improve, to scale new and more challenging heights in Mr. Glogowski’s class? Is Terry (who is 13 years old) going to take the time to read the descriptors carefully? Does he truly understand how he achieved that A-, and how to repeat that success next time?

My point of view is that, based on this rubric, Terry now understands one thing very well: That assignment is now behind me, I’ve jumped through yet another hoop, and quite well. In other words, as a teacher, I missed an opportunity to engage Terry in a conversation about his work and his learning because the one thing that this rubric does very well — when used alone and not as part of a larger, more complex assessment strategy — is the following: It terminates opportunities for conversations with students about their work. The work is done, the grade assigned. It’s time to move on to another topic, another assignment, another hoop.

What if, instead of writing that short comment and assigning a grade, I took the time to write the following:

Terry, you took some risks with organization but it worked out beautifully. I know you know that topic sentences need to be at the very beginning, but by starting with an anecdote you totally pulled me in! Let’s chat about this next time we discuss your writing.

I also want to ask for your permission to share your work with the class tomorrow — there are some good examples here of how to be an effective storyteller. Is that OK? Talk to me if you think this would make you uncomfortable.

Finally, when I read this piece I see another important thing: Ever since you stopped giggling with Michael in class during writing time, your work has improved significantly. Did you notice that too?

Be ready to discuss your next draft with me tomorrow.

Is this assessment? I certainly think it is. It points out to Terry what makes his work good, provides loads of constructive encouragement, and shows that writing — and learning — is a process, one that involves conversations. Of course, in order to make this work, I would first have to ensure that the assignment requires several drafts, but that’s just basic common sense. How else is Terry going to become a good writer unless he understands that writing is a process? But what did my original rubric teach him? That school is about handing things in and getting a grade. My second attempt shows a very different conception of school and learning.

In too many classrooms, work is assigned, handed in, receives a grade … and any opportunity to engage students in thinking about and learning from their work is lost. In a classroom devoted to meaningful, timely, and effective feedback, and to assessment for learning, not mere assessment of learning, we engage students in conversations that provide them with the support and guidance they need to be successful. These conversations and the feedback we give also provide us — the teachers — with valuable information on how well we’re reaching and supporting the learners in our classrooms. And yet, in many classrooms around the world, assessment for learning is just not present, which begs an important question: what’s stopping us from providing this kind of ongoing and meaningful support to our students? Why is it so challenging to implement?

The post Assessment for Learning appeared first on blog of proximal development.

Take a close look at the photograph above. What do you see? School courtyard? Teachers? Children?

Let me tell you a little about what I see when I look at this photograph. This is East Africa. The photograph was taken a couple of years ago, at an elementary school in a small town. I was standing inside the school’s staffroom, looking out the window at the school’s playground.

At first glance, there’s probably nothing extraordinary about this photograph: it looks like it’s recess and the children are enjoying their time away from their desks and textbooks. There are two teachers interacting with the students.

But look closely. Look at the teachers’ faces.

This story begins with those faces because they are not happy faces of teachers interacting with their pupils at recess. Both faces are serious. The teacher on the left seems lost in thought. She seems sad.

Let me tell you why.

Only 10 or 15 minutes before I took this photograph, these students were in class. Many of their classmates remained in class. But these students, the ones you see in this photograph, were asked to assemble in the courtyard. If you look closely you will see that the teacher on the right seems to be checking something, perhaps a clipboard or some notes. What she is holding in her hand is a list of students who have been asked to leave their classrooms and assemble here. The reason they had been instructed to leave class and meet the teacher here in the courtyard is because their parents have not paid their school fees. These students are being sent home.

Why am I telling you this? I wanted to share this story because today is Human Rights Day. As a teacher, whenever I think about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whenever I think of Human Rights, and whenever Human Rights Day comes along, I think of Article 26:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

And that’s exactly what I kept thinking about on that cloudy morning in East Africa, standing in front of that window, looking at a group of elementary school children pulled out of class to be told that they were being sent home. I wanted to help, and I knew I couldn’t really do much. I was angry. I was devastated.

All of this took place in a country that had abolished school fees several years prior to this morning assembly that I recorded with my camera. Yet, this was not an isolated incident, and later on the teachers explained to me that this happens throughout their country and many others in their part of the world. Yes, the tuition fees have been abolished, they said, but parents are still asked to pay for meals and for uniforms. In some cases, they have to pay to help cover maintenance fees. In many areas, parents chip in to cover the teachers’ salaries. So, yes, it’s true, the teachers said to me, the tuition fees don’t exist anymore, but education still costs money.

I live in a country where Article 26 is taken for granted. It is taken for granted by teachers, parents, children, teenagers. I also know of many other places around the world where Article 26 is taken for granted. But, I also know of and have visited places around the world where Article 26 and many, many other articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are fundamental human rights only on paper and where, for many different reasons – some of them very complex – human rights, including the right to education, are not respected.

As someone who cares deeply about education, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I can do and what my colleagues – teachers around the world – can do to ensure that education is not taken for granted and that access to education is respected around the world as a fundamental human right. I believe that it is our responsibility as teachers – the largest professional group in the world that currently includes almost 60 million of us – to teach, every day, about Article 26 and the other, equally important articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Whenever I raise this issue, I am often asked to recommend organizations that accept donations to help improve access to education around the world. I am not going to do that here. In fact, I want to challenge you today not to donate money. Instead, I hope that you will do what you do best: teach.

Make sure that the students in your own classroom know about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that they know that education is a fundamental human right (most of them don’t, believe me), and that they also know and are deeply troubled by the fact that there are children around the world who do not attend school and who, for reasons beyond their control, cannot attend school. In doing this, you will be helping to build an army of human rights advocates, of young people who will grow up valuing their education and committed to human rights and global peace. That alone, that focus on human rights in your classroom, will do much more to advance human rights than your cash.

Think also about your own professional development. Teacher professional development needs to be more than attending conferences, reading professional journals, and engaging in online communities to exchange lesson ideas or links to valuable resources. Teacher professional development includes a responsibility to raise awareness about issues that affect teachers, classrooms, and students around the world. If our colleagues working in states run by dictatorships or rebels, in places plagued by conflict or poverty, or in places affected by natural disasters, cannot count on their fellow teachers around the world to make their stories heard and work towards global peace, who can they count on?

The photograph I shared with you at the beginning of this post does not depict an isolated incident. You and I know that access to education is being curtailed around the world. According to estimates by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 68 million children of primary school age were out of school in 2008. The reasons are varied, but this fact remains the same: millions of children around the world do not have access to education, to a fundamental human right.

Take a look at that photograph again and imagine being one of the teachers in that courtyard who have been told to interrupt their class, stop doing what they so passionately love, assemble a group of students, check off their names on the roster, and send them home.

Then, imagine walking back into your classroom to face their classmates, those fortunate enough to be allowed to stay, and to learn.

There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but I am hopeful that we’ll manage. After all, there’s almost 60 million of us.

The post Article 26 appeared first on blog of proximal development.

Then another issue arose quite quickly – assessment. Once I started responding to student work in a readerly fashion and participating as a contributor, reader, and not just an evaluator, I realized that it would be unfair to the students to reduce all their rich interactions and complex online presence to a B+ or a 13/15. I realized that I needed to develop an assessment strategy that would take into account the complexity of student interactions online and recognize the process as much as the final product.

The students themselves helped me arrive at this realization. Only two days after I asked the students to compose a written response to the work we had covered, they began to use their blogs not only to brainstorm but also to request feedback from their peers and engage them in discussions about the work they were doing for this assignment. The assignment itself gave my students a lot of freedom – they could compose a personal reflection, an essay, a narrative account of their engagement with the material, or even a creative response in the form of a short story or a collection of poems. Two days after we discussed this task in class, I noticed that they turned to the class community for help. What follows is a list of individual blog entry titles that I found in the class community two days after the task was assigned:

Here’s my plan – could you comment?

Work in progress. Please comment everyone.

Rough draft. Comments would be greatly appreciated.

My essay unfolds … any thoughts?

Thesis improved (again). Tell me what you think.

Essay … it’s coming along. Pls post ideas and suggestions.

Improved introduction (after some comments and suggestions)

New and much improved planning post – expecting comments. Thanks.

I was very impressed – the students had turned to the community of their peers to request feedback. Then, I realized that none of the children asked me for feedback. It didn’t take long to realize that, a) they didn’t see me as a contributor in the community, and b) they associated me with corrections and grades. At this stage, they were not ready for corrections yet – they were simply interested in having conversations about their ideas. They needed somebody to talk to and, as their teacher, I was not at the top of their list.

Hardly surprising, I know. But this experience helped me realize that we don’t spend enough time providing feedback for our students and that most of what teachers consider teaching and assessment consists of marking and correcting student work. This kind of practice does not engage our students in those rich interactive processes of talking about their work and their ideas.

Initially, my role as a teacher was limited to first presenting the material (and engaging the students by initiating conversations) and then marking their work. I was absent from that rich part that happened in the middle where the students continued our classroom conversations online by brainstorming on their blogs, requesting and providing feedback, and engaging in conversations about some of the key ideas in the course. Instead of engaging with them, I just waited for them to submit their work.

As my research continued, however, I realized that I needed to spend more time with them in the community that we had created together. I needed to not only give them the freedom to interact online but also support them as they engaged in virtual conversations about their work and posted planning/brainstorming entries. That complex and interactive process of knowledge building (represented by the middle square in the diagram above) required more of my involvement. It offered a great opportunity to support student learning and to learn more about the students as learners and individuals.

Unfortunately, teachers often don’t know how to participate in that process and tend to focus on assessing the finished product. They tend to concentrate on the two areas in the diagram above where their roles are clearly defined. They focus on presenting content and then evaluating the quality of student responses to assigned tasks. These roles represent familiar territory, but they fail to take into account that teaching, learning, and assessment are interrelated. The problem with limiting ourselves to teaching and evaluating is that these roles alone ignore the potential to initiate and sustain rich interactions with knowledge. They ignore the opportunity to support our students as learners.

These traditional roles of provider and evaluator also reinforce the hierarchical relationship between teacher and student. However, a teacher who enters a community of independent learners/writers/researchers to support and encourage student learning removes that hierarchical structure and encourages students to become more involved in the assessment process. Assessment in this situation can become more collaborative because the teacher and the student have opportunities to discuss/co-construct the task itself, the criteria, the process of learning.

The post Thoughts on Assessment appeared first on blog of proximal development.

Annabel (SL: Annabel Recreant) has been busy creating a very unique project. As a teacher of history, she is interested in creating a virtual learning space where visitors can learn about “settlement / colonisation in the south east of Australia.” Specifically, she is interested in creating a space where students can explore and experience “the impact that colonisation had upon indigenous communities in Australia.”

Annabel wants to create a space where the students can interact with the virtual land, where they experience the life of early settlers:

My idea is that when someone first visited the site they would be faced with a simulation of the Australian bush as it appeared pre settlement. Uncleared. Perhaps with evidence of Indigenous inhabitants. Features of the natural landscape.

Visitors may have read documents in class (hence the working with not around) or read some of the documents provided in another part of the space regarding elements of Frontier life such as the process of settling on a new land, difficulties faced, the ways these were solved (if at all) etc.

Once armed with some of this foreknowledge, visitors would be invited to clear the land themselves taking into account the topography, geography and physical elements of the landscape. Provided with a ‘box’ visitors would be invited to build their own hut, or settlement.

What I like about her project is that Annabel wants her virtual learning space to be a place where the visitors can build and create, not just view, watch, or listen to whatever has been prepared for them. She wants the visitors to not just read about early settlers in Australia but also to interact with the virtual landscape, to make it their own and, in the process, learn about issues faced by settlers. This idea emerged from some very critical questions about the educational potential of Second Life:

[...] I think I became a little disengaged at the end of last year with Second Life … because I had reached a ‘now what?’ stage. Having been part of the community of learners on the Islands of Jokaydia was great, but personally I felt I had plateaued in what I could offer or do. More than that I think I started to find it difficult to see the other uses of Second Life other than that main one of being connected to a network of great teachers.

[...] what I began to obsess over was this: if anyone came to my plot .. why would they? Why would they come into Second Life merely to click on a few urls that would take them to the internet? To me, that wasn;t a good use of the platform.

To me, the problem Annabel describes here has always been a major weakness of how Second Life is used in education. It is often a place where artifacts are built for visitors and where mere reproductions of real-life lecture halls are quite common. Annabel wants to use Second Life as a place where students can build their own understanding while (virtually) building a homestead and clearing the land. She wants to engage visitors by providing them with primary and secondary sources that will then enable them to make well-informed decisions as virtual settlers. Her virtual classroom will never really be finished – it will be more of an empty canvas where visitors can construct their vision of early settler life.

Annabel envisions this project as an opportunity to show other educators how students can be encouraged to use virtual environments such as Second Life to build their own understanding of history so that it becomes visible to anyone who visits the virtual space. This is not going to be just about building a virtual space where students can click on some URLs and read secondary sources. Annabel wants to develop a virtual resource to engage students in Historical Thinking by providing them with resources they can consult and artifacts they can use to build their own understanding of history. It’s almost like creating a virtual world wiki where instead of being confronted with a carefully designed space, a student is given access to a variety of resources and tools to build that space and, in the process, demonstrate his or her understanding of the material. The wonderful part about this is that this process will make learning visible in 3D. A student who builds with the resources provided in this virtual space and by using her own understanding of the time period will create an artifact that other learners can explore, interact with, and also rebuild or redesign.

I hope that you will follow Annabel’s work by reading her blog, checking out the Virtual Classroom Project Flickr group, and exploring her work inworld.

The post The Virtual Classroom Project Continues appeared first on blog of proximal development.

Heard while driving home from Tess’s basketball game earlier.

“But Dad, I’m the only one in my class who doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“I know Sweetie, but that’s not a great reason for getting one.”

“But Dad, it’s like embarassing.”

“I’m sorry Tess, really. Mom and I will talk about it again, but for now…”

“Ugh.”

Silence for a few minutes.

“So, anything happen at school today?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Ugh. We got a writing assignment.”

“A writing assignment? What kind?”

“We’re learning persuasive essays.”

“Persuasive essays? Well that’s kind of appropriate.”

“Like, what do you mean?”

“Well, don’t you have something you want to persuade me to do?”

She looks at me and smiles. “Cell phone!” Pause. “Ugh.”

“What?”

“I can’t do it on cell phones.”

“Why not?”

“Because our teacher said we should focus on things we’re really interested in.”

“Aren’t you interested in getting a cell phone?”

“No. Well, yes … but this is … different. I wanna write about sharks.”

“Makes sense. You know a lot about them. But how would you make your essay persuasive?”

“People are prejudiced against sharks. Everyone thinks sharks are bloodthirsty, violent creatures. It’s not true. Not all of them are … and they can work together, too. I wanna write about that.”

“And your teacher said yes?”

“She did, and … get this, she said I could interview this expert on sharks from the University of …  uhm, I forget. But she is a researcher and an expert on sharks.”

“Is … she coming to do a talk at school?”

“No, dad. I will be meeting with her online, and with some other researchers that work with her.”

“Online? Just you? What about other kids?”

“They have other topics, so they’re working with other people.”

“Online?”

“Yes, online.”

“So, you’re going to find out more about sharks from this researcher in … where is she again?”

“Somewhere in California, I think … yes, she has a blog and some of her research is also online. She posted movies from her previous research trips on YouTube … we’re chatting tomorrow during class.”

“That’s soon!”

“We have to meet this week. She’s leaving for a research expedition, for two months …”

“… so you won’t be able to get in touch with her after she leaves.”

“Well, she’ll be sending updates to her lab from her cell phone … I guess her assistant could email them to me.”

“… or you could get your own cell phone.”

“Exactly!”

Paulo Freire always claimed that we should use our imagination to reframe our reality – to see beyond that which we find oppressing. This re-working of Will’s conversation is my attempt to imagine a better classroom and to emphasize that what teachers need today – and more today than at any time in the past – is imagination.

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