The Tempered Radical

Technology Facilitates Connections. . .

2009-07-13T18:38:36-04:00

There's an interesting conversation going on over at Will Richardson's blog about "the larger lessons" that we expect students to master and the role that technology should play in well-designed learning experiences.

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One comment that caught my attention was left by digital learning superstar Marc Prensky, who makes a distinction between nouns and verbs when making instructional choices. He writes:

“Verbs” are the skills you, I, Ravich, and everyone else thinks people should know, and learn as students. They include the skills you mention above: to collaborate, to solve problems, to think critically, to be creative, plus many others: e.g. to persuade, to present logically...These verbs or skills, as Ravich points out, don’t change very much over time.

“Nouns,” on the other hand, are the tools (aka technologies) people use to practice and do these skills. Nouns have always changed over time, e.g. memorizing to writing, papyrus to paper, quills to fountain pens, handwriting to keyboarding.

Today nouns are changing extremely rapidly: Powerpoint to Flash, email to IM, Myspace to Facebook to Twitter, encyclopedias to Wikipedia, local disks to cloud, reading to watching short video, laptops to smartphones, etc...

In teaching, our focus needs to be on the verbs, which don’t change very much, and NOT on the nouns (i.e. the technologies) which change rapidly and which are only a means. For teachers to fixate on any particular noun as the “best” way (be it books or blogs, for example) is not good for our students, as new and better nouns will shortly emerge and will continue to emerge over the course of their lifetimes.

Our teaching should instead focus on the verbs (i.e. skills) students need to master, making it clear to the students (and to the teachers) that there are many tools learners can use to practice and apply them.

Prensky's right when he argues that fixating on individual tools is a dangerous trap that schools fall into.

Look around any building in your community and you're bound to see thousands of dollars of wasted resources: Classrooms outfitted with interactive whiteboards that students never touch, sets of student responders used to ask low-level knowledge and understanding questions, one-to-one laptop initiatives arming children with high-tech typewriters.

Too many districts have gotten themselves wrapped up in a digital arms race, trying to convince parents and students that they're delivering a 21st Century education using the latest and greatest gadgets.

It's hard to blame them, though. Gadgets CAN be pretty impressive. They're concrete and tangible. Parents see them on Open House night and leave happy, confident that their sons and daughters are going to be prepared for a globally competitive tomorrow that revolves around the Internet.

Prensky's also right that some of the most important behaviors for students to master are verbs----skills like collaborating, problem solving, creating, persuading, questioning---and that those behaviors haven't changed over time. The only fixation that educators should have, he argues, is in finding ways to use new tools to give students experiences with each of these skills.

The only semantic weakness in his noun/verb schema to me rests in the reality that genuine learning depends on the simplest of nouns: Connections.

Ask any constructivist and they'll tell you that every person holds on to pre-existing notions about the world that may or may not be factually accurate. Learning only occurs when those pre-existing notions are challenged with new and convincing evidence, forcing students---regardless of age---to question their original beliefs.

The result is a mental wrestling match, as learners find ways to justify their long-held beliefs or revise their understandings into new notions about the world.

Simple, right: Mental wrestling equals learning in its purest form.

But mental wrestling is impossible without connections because connections provide the necessary challenge to a learner's pre-existing notions.

A student who struggles to build connections---with other learners or interesting content---outside of their immediate experiences will never work through the mental tension that refines ideas or beliefs. Instead, they'll walk around in a happy little intellectual bubble, convinced that they understand the world.

(See: George W. Bush)

Technology's value to me lies in its ability to facilitate connections. Within moments, I can join conversations (another noun) about any topic that I'm interested in. Edubloggers and the content rolling through my Twitter feed (more nouns) challenge my thinking dozens of times a day, forcing me to reconsider what I know about teaching and learning.

Essentially, our goal as teachers, then, should be to show students how to use digital tools to tap into the incredible information stream (noun) that surrounds them because information leads to more focused, frequent and appropriate challenges; focused, frequent and appropriate challenges lead to mental tension; and mental tension leads to new understandings (all nouns.)

Am I making any sense here?

Remember that I'm essentially polishing my own pre-existing notions on learning. If I'm wrong, I'm going to need some kind of challenge or evidence in order to learn!

(And sorry for the cheap shot, President Bush. I just couldn't resist.)

Pushing Back on Organizing PLCs. . .

2009-07-10T09:03:46-04:00

Scott McLeod—who writes extensively about school leadership over at Dangerously Irrelevant, a must-read blog for anyone involved in education—stopped by my recent post about organizing professional learning teams in a PLC and pushed against my thinking a bit.

He wrote:

Bill, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. The point of a "learning team" of teachers should be to benefit students first, not the teachers themselves. Yes, I want teachers to benefit, but I want students to benefit more.

So... if you accept this premise, then I think you have to go with a PLC made up of role-alike teachers who together can create common assessments, track student learning outcomes, and adjust their instruction accordingly (particularly for the benefit of struggling learners).

In many ways, Scott’s ideas about learning teams aren’t far from my own. I agree that role-alike groups are the best starting point for teachers and schools new to teaming primarily because they are the most efficient forum for accomplishing the kinds of tasks—creating common assessments, tracking learning outcomes, adjusting instruction—that can make a difference for kids.

But my argument is that role-alike groups aren’t the only organizational strategy that allows for this kind of work to be done.

Let me give you an example: Not long ago, I had the chance to cover the sixth grade band class for my friend and colleague Bobby Hinson. While conducting (and who can resist waving the baton around a bit?), I noticed that several of the songs that Bobby was introducing to his kids had themes based in the history that I’m responsible for teaching to my kids.

In particular, one song was about Romulus and Remus—the mythological founders of the city of Rome. What made this song powerful to me as a social studies teacher was that its tone grew in intensity over time, coming to a crescendo and then ending abruptly. This neatly mirrors the story of Romulus and Remus, two brothers who built the Italian capital city together and then fought to the death over what it should be named.

Now, what if Bobby and I decided that we wanted to pair together in a learning team to study the impact that music centered on historical events had on student learning?

Couldn’t we identify objectives from the history curriculum—Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Cold War, World War I and II—select songs and have the students analyze how the composers used tone, beat, pitch, and melodies (am I using the right terms here, Nancy?) to convey messages to listeners?

And then, couldn’t we compare the common assessment results of students who explored history through music to the results of students who didn’t to draw conclusions about music as an instructional strategy? Wouldn’t that kind of work—pairing two teachers with seemingly incompatible roles—be just as productive as the work that I do every day with the teachers on my language arts and social studies team?

Don’t get me wrong: I realize that the kind of learning team that I’m describing here isn’t for every teacher in a professional learning community. Pulling off such a project would take teachers who were incredibly motivated—and who had the kind of personal and professional time to invest in working through ambiguity to find meaning.

I also realize that school leaders would have to carefully monitor the work of self-selected teams to be sure that outcomes were benefiting students instead of just making teachers happy.

All that I’m asking is that principals consider differentiating the structure of professional learning teams for the small handful of creative and accomplished teachers who want to invent something new in their buildings.

Like an over reliance on any one instructional strategy in the classroom, a rigid commitment to any one team organizational strategy in a PLC is bound to come up short for some learners.

Does this make any sense?

Organizing Learning Teams in a PLC

2009-07-05T06:58:24-04:00

A few weeks back, I sat down with a friend named Gretta who is the principal of an area school working to strengthen their professional learning community. Her first question is one that I’m asked all the time.

“Bill,” she said, “how should we organize our learning teams? Is it best to have teachers on the same grade level working together? Teachers in the same content area? What about vertical teams?”

The answer to Gretta’s question is that there is no one “right way” to organize the learning teams in a building!

by zigazou76

Indeed, any group of teachers who are working together to deepen their collective knowledge of what works in schools can be called a “professional learning team.”

And while many principals and teachers find that the most productive learning teams pair colleagues working together in the same grade level and content area—allowing teachers to easily develop and deliver common assessments and to talk about shared instructional practices—I’d argue that rigid commitments to any one organizational strategy can inadvertently hurt the professional learning that takes place in your building.

What does that mean for principals?

When organizing the collaborative groups in your school, remember that some of the best learning teams are short-lived, focused on a specific area of study, and self-selected!

I can already hear half the administrators who read the Radical groaning. In fact, I’ve heard about a million different reasons why school leaders are skeptical of allowing teachers to self-select the learning teams that they join.

Don’t believe me?

Then check out this imaginary back-and-forth, drawn from dozens of conversations that I’ve had with principals in the past five years:

Administrator: Bill, have you ever tried to write a master schedule?! I can’t possibly guarantee on-the-clock opportunities for teams to meet if they’re not on the same grade level or in the same content area.

The Voice of Bill: I hear you---and no, I’ve never even thought about writing master schedules! I failed high school math, remember?

But I also know that if you gave me the opportunity to work with a group of teachers who I respected greatly and to study topics that were incredibly important to me, I’d make time to meet before or after school. For me—and I’d bet a handful of teachers in every building—learning is more important than learning on-the-clock.

Do I know colleagues who will choose to meet with teachers that share planning periods because they’ve got busy personal lives and can’t find the time to meet outside of school hours?

Sure. In fact, I’d even bet that the majority of your teachers would choose to work with peers in the same grade level and content area. Not only is the shared planning period that you made possible important to them, but so is the opportunity to carefully study what they do every day.

All that I’m asking is that you give teachers the freedom to work beyond those set groups if they want to.

Administrator: But how would that work? Are you saying that groups of teachers might come together for a year, study a topic, then join a new group of teachers next year? Shouldn’t learning teams stay together for a long period of time so they really get to know each other?

The Voice of Bill: Sure, it would be great if learning teams stayed together for a long period of time. Relationships built on shared experiences are, after all, the foundation of productive learning.

But how long does your average learning team stay “together” as it is?

With 50% of teachers leaving the profession within five years, with the economy tanking causing families to move to find work, with mothers taking time off to raise their children, with transfers between schools in your own district, and with the inevitable in-house moves that your forced to make to staff your classrooms, I’d bet that you don’t have many learning teams that stay “together” for longer than a year anyway.

Rather than resisting this reality, refocus the work that learning teams are doing. Make short-term projects with specific objectives and outcomes the norm. Have self-selected teams define exactly what it is that they plan to study during your in-service days in August. In January, require progress reports backed up by student learning results. In June, share what each team has learned with the entire faculty and plan new focus groups for the fall.

When learning teams recognize that there is a beginning and an ending to their work, they’re more likely to work with a purpose.

Administrator: But what if teachers on self-selected teams constantly choose to work just with teachers that they like—and what if I get stuck with a learning team full of professional duds? How will that help kids?

The Voice of Bill: Let’s face it—you don’t have a ton of time to offer teachers to do their collective work on-the-clock, do you? Worst case scenario, you’re giving learning teams an hour a week to meet with one another and best case scenario, they have an hour a day.

What’s more, you probably haven’t been able to take many responsibilities off of your teachers’ professional plates: They still have to grade papers, have parent conferences, plan field trips, supervise in the hallways, take their kids to lunch, and earn renewal credits, right?

That means if your learning teams are going to learn anything, they’ve got to hit the ground running. They can’t spend months building relationships, writing norms, and developing decision-making protocols.

The problem is that the “Forming and Storming” stages of team development are pretty darn time consuming—and while they often lead to stronger teams, they also lead to initially inefficient and incredibly frustrated teams.

So letting the teachers who are interested form teams with colleagues that they like really isn’t a bad thing. The forming and storming that teachers unfamiliar with one another have to work through before a team identity develops has already happened through formal and informal interactions with one another both in and out of school.

Basically, you’re fast-forwarding the team development process.

Are you going to get teams of professional duds? Sure. It’s inevitable. And that’s where you’re going to need to spend the majority of your supervision and professional development resources. You’d better not skip too many of their meetings and you’d better develop your Crucial Confrontation skills because it’s likely that you’re going to need to push a bit more on these teams to ensure that they’re being productive.

But you’re also going to reenergize professional learning for some of your employees, too. Teachers that are motivated to learn with one another and who can get into the meat of collective study without having to muddle their way around in the relationship-nightmare that cause new teams to stumble are going to love their time together.

Can you say that for all of the teachers in your current building? Do they love learning together? Shouldn’t they?

Administrator: I’m not sure if all of my teachers love learning together, but I am sure that the teachers who struggle in my building are in a room with some of my best teachers—and that’s got to improve the quality of instruction in their classrooms, doesn’t it?

The Voice of Bill: You know, your first phrase stings. If you’ve got teachers who don’t love learning with one another, can you really keep calling your school a “professional learning community?” I’d argue that your first concern should be to create conditions that give all of your faculty members the opportunity to feel completely jazzed about learning.

I get what you’re saying about struggling teachers, but I don’t think self-selected learning teams mean that struggling teachers will be pushed aside by their colleagues. You might have to make some suggestions about teams that they might like to join—or have to reach out to a few of the mentors on your staff and ask that they welcome a struggling colleague on to their learning team—but in all but the most extreme cases, I’ll bet that every teacher finds a place learn.

Administrator: Alright, so what if I did allow some of my teachers to self-select their learning teams. How would I evaluate their work? How can I ensure that what they choose to focus on is productive and connected to our school’s goals?

The Voice of Bill: I actually think that evaluation of self-selected learning teams is probably easier than you’d think primarily because teachers who choose to self-select an area of study have some kind of internal motivation, don’t they? If you were a professional dud, wouldn’t it be easier to join your assigned learning team and go through the motions, pretending to collaborate?

As a school leader, I’d think the first step you should take is to require that self-selected learning teams clearly articulate their purpose and their plan of study for the year. If teams can’t connect their intentions to your school’s mission or vision, then you’d definitely have the right to put the squeeze on them until they’d made meaningful revisions.

Then, I’d require self-selected teams to develop systems for collecting evidence of the impact of their work. Much like the common assessments developed by more traditional learning teams, self-selected teams would have to use meaningful data to make decisions and would have to show how they were assessing student learning and changing direction to ensure student success.

Your expectations might have to change a bit based on the composition of the self-selected teams—common assessments for the band teacher working with two history teachers to find ways to connect their curriculum are probably going to be different than anything you’ve ever seen—but the chances are good that teachers self-selecting will have the internal drive necessary to learn together.

And if they don’t, you can always collapse their teams! (That’s the nice part of being the bossman.)

The point that I’m trying to make is that it is important for school leaders to ask themselves whether the organizational strategy that they’ve chosen for their collaborative teams is ensuring that every teacher has meaningful opportunities to learn.

If the answer to that question is no, then it’s time to take action.

Forcing teachers into teams with one another simply because they teach the same content, the same set of students, or the same grade level may make organizing your teachers easy, but whoever said that professional learning communities were easy?!

Being open to a more organic and fluid approach to the composition of the collaborative groups in your building ensures that learning remains at the center of every decision in your school.

Why Test Scores are ALMOST Useless to Me

2009-07-01T16:00:44-04:00

If you've been following the conversation on the Radical recently (see here and here), you'll know that we've been collectively wrestling with the place that the magic bubbles (read: standardized test scores) should have in assessing student understandings.

One question that I haven't had a chance to answer yet was posed by regular reader K. Borden. She wrote:

If that rising sixth grader were entering your class, would you want only her former teachers’ observations or would you want those test results as well? Which would serve you best in providing her an opportunity to be an enthusiastic, confident and competent learner?

Good question, K, and one that has had me thinking over the past few weeks as our school's end of grade test scores have come back from Scantron Central.

Here's my response: When talking about my initial attempts to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the students entering my classroom, test scores are almost completely useless to me. I have little confidence in them as a measure of an individual child's abilities and---given the choice---would take observations by both parents and teachers in every circumstance.

That's not a very tempered response, is it?!

But it's a response built from the understanding that test scores for individual children can change dramatically from one administration to the next with no apparent explanation. I first learned this lesson while watching the testing results of a boy----let's call him Jamison----that I tutored several years ago.

Like many of the students I tutor, Jamison was the prototypical middle school boy. He was active and funny, but unpredictable on a good day! When he was on, he was brilliant---engaged in deep and meaningful conversations about world events that would force the thinking of every other child in his class. When he was off, he'd be throwing his shoes across the room just because he thought it was funny.

When Jamison took the reading end of grade exam for the first time, his scale score----the primary indicator of a child's progress from one year to the next----dropped by something like 13 points. He went from a Level 3, which demonstrates grade-level mastery of material, to a low Level 2, which (no surprise to me) represents unpredictable levels of mastery.

Now here in North Carolina, students who score a Level 2 on the end of grade exams are given a retest the following week. While teachers are able to give students remediation lessons between the first testing session and the second, there really isn't much that anyone can do to improve a child's reading ability in a week.

So I sat with Jamison and reminded him of how important it was to work from the beginning of the test to the end. We also reviewed a bit of poetry, considering its status as the genre middle school boys like the least! Then, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best! "Work as hard on the last reading selection as you do on the first," I told Jamison the night before his retest.

When his results came back, Jamison's scale scores were something like 10 points HIGHER than they'd been the year before! In the span of one week, he'd seen a swing of over 20 points in his scores. As a comparison, middle grades students see an average of somewhere between 3 and 7 points growth from year-to-year on reading exams.

20 points of academic growth in a week with little to no remediation is simply ridiculous.

Think about what kind of consequences that has for me as both a teacher and a tutor. I'm left to wonder which of Jamison's two scores was "the right score." Was it his first attempt, which saw him struggle mightily? If so, I need to seriously look at the instructional strategies that I'm choosing for students like Jamison because something's not working.

Or was it his second score, which saw him outperform his peers? Because if it was, I need to seriously look at the instructional strategies that I'm choosing for students like Jamison because I've discovered the key to leaving no child behind!

The really sad thing is that Jamison's story isn't unique by any means. Anecdotally, I see Jamisons in my classrooms and schools every single year. Rarely do retested students see their scores drop from one session to the next----and it's not unusual to see a child move from "struggling mightily" to "spot on" in no time.

Why does this kind of thing happen?

My guess: Jamison worked harder on the second test than he did the first. For Jamison, fear of failing the grade level determination to do well---instead of pure academic ability---was the factor that most influenced his final score.

And thankfully, other really, really smart people have seen the same trend in student testing scores. Take Malcom Gladwell for example. In his newest book Outliers, Gladwell reviews the work of Erling Boe, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who noticed an interesting trend while studying the TIMSS exam---a math and science test given to samples of fourth and eighth grade students in countries around the world.

Like most standardized exams, the TIMSS test begins with a survey that asks students about topics ranging from their opinions towards math and the amount of time spent on homework outside of class to the highest level of education that their parents have ever reached.

Unlike most standardized exams, however, the TIMSS survey is nothing short of grueling.

It is comprised of something like 120 questions---and remember, the students taking the TIMSS test are either 9-year old fourth graders or 13-year old eighth graders. (When was the last time that you asked 9 year olds to fill out a 120 question survey?!) As Gladwell notes, the TIMSS survey is a test of student determination. "It is so tedious and demanding," he writes, "that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank."

What Erling Boe discovered next, however, was the really interesting part. As Gladwell writes:

"As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire.

Now what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS?

They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems."

(Kindle Location 2972-2996)

Amazing, isn't it? What Boe discovered is something that every elementary and middle school teacher has known for as long as they've stood in front of squirmy tweens: End of grade reading and math tests really aren't reading and math tests at all.

Instead, they're tests of a student's resilience, determination, and mental stamina.

The kids who do the best on end of grade exams are like those who do the best on the TIMSS exams: They're willing to sit still and concentrate. They take every question seriously---including those that come at the end of a three-hour testing session two weeks before the end of the school year.

Does that mean that kids like Jamison---who score poorly on end of grade exams---are struggling with grade level content?

The sad fact is that it's just plain impossible to say. Jamison could be falling behind academically. But he might also be the kind of twelve-year-old who struggles to concentrate as he plugs through reading passages on topics that he's not interested in or that he has no first-hand experience with.

Don't get me wrong: End of grade tests have their place. They allow schools to make comparisons across large samples of students to identify trends in populations. After looking at the results of all of our sixth graders this year, our teachers may discover that our students struggle with expository text structures or with identifying bias---and those are trends that will help us to tailor our instruction for next year.

But I simply can't believe that end of grade tests are reliable indicators of an individual child's academic ability when I see students raise their scores by 20 points in a week. Such unpredictability calls into question the meaning of every score generated by the magic bubbles, regardless of whether they are higher or lower than expected.

Want to Buy My Book(s)?

2009-06-28T08:53:24-04:00

Having been approached by several different publishers interested in seeing my name on a title in their collection, I've spent the better part of the past few years toying around with the idea of writing a book about teaching and learning.

The whole process has been a bit intimidating, actually. A book just seems so much more overwhelming than a blog---or the columns that I write for NSDC and Ed Leadership. Worse yet, I couldn't figure out how to justify setting paid part time work aside to draft an entire manuscript.

Well---thanks to Solution Tree and Parry Graham, my persistent co-author----I'm about to see a bunch of my ideas in print!

Solution Tree started the whole process by hiring me to write two chapters on assessment for their newest Associate Anthologies, titled The Teacher as Assessment Leader and The Principal as Assessment Leader. By offering to pay for my chapters----something that few publishers do for anthology contributors---Solution Tree gave me the breathing room necessary to write for a living.

And I'm excited about the chapters I've written!

In The Teacher as Assessment Leader, I detail the work that I've done with a few of the colleagues on my professional learning team to make our curriculum standards more approachable for parents and students. While we're constantly polishing our processes, this chapter is a practical look at the kinds of first steps that responsible teachers take when translating state standards documents into actionable tools that can encourage learning at the classroom level.

In The Principal as Assessment Leader, I tackle a topic that I'm asked about often: How can digital tools be used to help teachers collect, manipulate and analyzed classroom learning data. This chapter is a nuts-and-bolts kinda' bit, arguing in favor of basic tools like Excel spreadsheets, handheld student responders, and districtwide formative assessment systems.

While it drifts from the "create, collaborate and communicate" message that I write about so often here on the Radical, it, too, is designed to be a practical introduction to the basic tools that learning teams need access to if they're ever going to become data-driven organisms.

Easily the most exciting development in my professional writing life, however, is the full-length, real-live, bona fide book that I've co-authored with my brilliant friend Parry Graham---a principal at a local middle school. Titled Building a Professional Learning Community at Work, our title---built from our extensive experiences working with learning teams as members, supervisors, and consultants---serves as a guide to the common pitfalls that cause professional learning communities to stumble.

We work to show readers how effective mission and vision statements can provide a solid foundation for decision-making in buildings. We detail the kinds of action steps that teams take to work through conflict and to make communication efficient. We wrestle with data, push against assumptions about leadership, and share interesting and approachable research on the nature of human organizations.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

Of course, Parry and I thought so----it's our work. We weren't sure exactly how good our ideas were, though, until Rick DuFour, Rebecca DuFour and Bob Eaker----three of our learning community heroes read our manuscript, gave it two thumbs up, and volunteered to write the introduction to our text!

(If they like it, we figure, our book has got to be at least halfway decent.)

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work is in the editing/pre-production stages right now. Parry and I just churned through about 100 hours worth of revisions and sent a final manuscript off to Solution Tree. They're going to polish it to perfection with a plan to publish in September. Pre-ordering goes live in just a few weeks----so if you're interested in rolling around in our minds a bit more, get your credit cards ready!

Not a bad year's work for a guy who is still "just a classroom teacher," huh?!

Assessment's Either/Or Conundrum. . .

2009-06-24T15:52:41-04:00

I'm enjoying the give and take of the conversation that has developed in the comment section of my recent blog post on the Danish system of assessing students because it is forcing me to think! As always, diversity of opinion provides the kind of external challenge necessary for new learning.
While listening, I've noticed two distinct viewpoints developing. The first argues that an overemphasis on standardized testing as a form of assessment leaves parents and teachers with a superficial understanding of what it is that a student knows and can do.
As Simon argues:
The point of education has to be to teach kids to do something that they couldn't do before. That's what learning is. Frankly, it's uninteresting how well a bunch of 14 year-olds can cough up the periodic table or list off the members of the Triple Entente in 1914. That kind of information is easily available when you need it and listing it is proof of memorization, not learning.

What is interesting is what you can do with such information. Analysis, critical thinking, using technical terminology - these are skills, and skills that are very hard to measure in a multiple-choice quiz. They are also fairly easy to judge in a conversation. If it is unclear whether the pupil is parroting or not, just ask another question.

The second argues that teacher observations alone are not always enough to paint a complete picture of a child's strengths and weaknesses. Standardized tests can, therefore, be a valuable tool in the assessment arsenal, filling in gaps between a teacher's observations and a child's performance.
As K. Borden writes:
Please remember I come at this from the perspective of what happens when the teachers’ observations fail the student, but the tests open the doors of opportunities.

Thanks to tests (Pre-EOGs, Cog-AT, ITBS, EOGs) a different picture than the one being reported by teacher observation emerged. Those results led to seeking more answers, largely via more tests (WISC, Standford Binet, Woodcock Johnson). And those tests revealed a remarkably able and creative student, hindered by a previously unrecognized handwriting disability. In one year via tests we learned far more about one young learner than teachers’ observations ever yielded.

So bash away at those ovals and that data. Meanwhile, one child and her parents thank them.
As both K and Simon note later in the comment conversation, teacher observations and standardized tests should each play a role in a well-rounded system for assessing our students. Both recognize that assessment should never be an either/or proposition. Instead, we should get our hands on as much information as possible when trying to diagnose a course of action for our kids.
The problem---and correct me if I'm wrong----is that American schools HAVE made student assessment an either/or proposition. Teacher observations have become increasingly irrelevant as districts and states try to meet the testing targets set by the No Child Left Behind legislation.
Let me give you an example of how this shift has played out in my classroom: Not long ago, I had a parent ask for a conference to learn more about her son's abilities in my language arts classroom. Having had a great relationship with her boy over the course of the year, I knew his strengths and weaknesses better than I knew the strengths and weaknesses of most of the kids who roll through my classroom, so I was looking forward to our meeting.
During our time together, I went into great detail with this mother, providing writing samples that highlighted strengths and weaknesses, reviewing classroom assessments that had caused struggle, and sharing observations about verbal ability and vocabulary based on countless interactions over the entire year. I actually felt pretty darn good about the "assessment" that I'd made of my student.

The first words her mother said when I was finished: "That's all great, but what does the test say?"
With nine simple words, she'd completely dismissed my professional opinion, opting instead for the cold, hard, seemingly-more-accurate facts. And when you look at the kind of weight we place on standardized tests as a tool for measuring everything from student performance to school quality, it seems like pushing the professional opinions of classroom teachers to the sideline has become common practice.
So I guess that's why I'm drawn to a system of assessment that places teacher observations first, K. While I'm all for standardized tests that are used to diagnose student strengths and weaknesses, I think we've moved beyond using standardized tests for diagnosis in our country. Instead, standardized tests have become our primary tool for evaluation and accountability----of students, of teachers and of schools.
And as Dan Koretz---author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us---wrote in this recent interview, using standardized tests for accountability rather than diagnosis is a narrow-minded practice:
Let’s start with test-based accountability, which is perhaps the most pressing issue today. As both a former schoolteacher and a parent of two children who went through public schools, I am convinced that we need more effective ways to hold educators accountable, and I believe that testing has to be a part of an effective accountability program.

Doing this the way we do in many places now, however — treating one test as a comprehensive indicator of student achievement, pretending that scores taken by themselves are a trustworthy indicator of school quality, and rewarding and punishing teachers and students for scores — is just too simple.

It ignores not only what we know about testing, but also what we know from many other fields, such as healthcare, about the effects of incentive systems. We face an enormous challenge in designing better educational accountability systems, and the first step in doing that is recognizing the limitations of what has been tried to date.

Does any of this resonate with anyone? Has the proverbial pendulum swung too far in the direction of oval filling as a form of assessment?
Will we ever get back a comfortable---and professional---middle ground where teacher observations are paired with diagnostic tests to paint a clear picture of what our students know and can do?

Assessing Learning the Danish Way. . .

2009-06-21T18:37:19-04:00

As most Radical readers know, I’ve spent the past eight days touring Denmark as a part of a program run by the Center for International Understanding—one of North Carolina’s most important professional development organizations for teachers.

While I completely enjoyed the opportunities that I had to learn more about the European Union and Denmark’s social welfare system—topics that are a part of the curriculum that I teach—my favorite experience of the entire week was observing two different students go through the only official examination that generations of Danish children have ever taken, which comes at the end of 10th grade.

by ccarlstead

Kind of geeky, huh? I mean who spends the better part of 8 days in a 1,000-year old land full of history, cultural geography and really good beer observing tenth grade final exams?!

The thing that drew me to the testing room—besides the fact that exams are public events that can be observed by anyone (including parents and community leaders) who asks for permission ahead of time—was that Denmark’s final exams are probably the most responsible system of student assessment that I’ve ever seen in action.

Here’s how they go:
1.) Classroom teachers put together a collection of readings and audio recordings related to content studied during the course of the school year. In the sessions that I observed—both English exams—there were packets of materials on 20 different topics ranging from racism and role models to terrorism and global warming.
2.) Also included was a list of related lessons that students had completed on the topic in their regular classes. These lists included things like articles read, videos watched, and seminars completed. While the supporting materials for each lesson were not included, these lists allowed students to dig into their background knowledge while attacking new texts.
3.) Each student arrived at a pre-scheduled time, entered the examination room and randomly selected a number corresponding to one of the predetermined topics. Then, he/she spent twenty minutes studying the new materials: taking notes, filling out reading guides, listening to recordings, and planning a personal response to the topic that they’d selected.
4.) After 20 minutes—a time period that was closely monitored—the student returned to the assessment room where his/her classroom teacher was waiting with a teacher of the same grade level from a school in a nearby town. The rest of the assessment consisted of an ongoing conversation between the student and the assessors about the topic selected.
5.) The assessors carefully listened to each student, looking for evidence of reflective thinking and for the ability to connect new texts to previous materials or experiences. While students did the majority of the talking during the 20-minute assessment period, both assessors asked prodding questions to challenge students and to test the depth of their knowledge about the topic selected.
6.) When the students finished working through their thoughts, they were asked to leave the examination room. Then, the assessors—guided by a predetermined rubric—engaged in a 10-minute conversation with one another to determine the student’s level of mastery.
7.) To ensure that final scores weren’t biased, the outside assessor—who had no relationship with the student being tested—took the lead in the conversation and in determining the score given, but both teachers interacted with each other and came to general consensus around each bullet point on the rubric. If there had been disagreement, the school principal would have been called in to determine a final score.
8.) Finally, the student returned to the room to receive feedback from both teachers. Suggestions for future work were offered, compliments were given, and the final score was awarded.

Kind of amazing, huh? And remember that until recently—Denmark has instituted a much smaller system of standardized testing within the last two years that is designed to give quick feedback to teachers, principals and parents—this was the only “end of grade exam” that Danish kids had to suffer through!

Quite honestly, my Danish friends who teach are completely shocked that we begin giving exams to students in third grade here in the States. They can’t understand what we think we can learn from tests that we can’t already learn from a teacher’s year-long observation of a student’s performance in the classroom.

Now, I could ramble on for hours about the pros and cons of the Danish system of assessment, but I’m interested in what you think. Let’s wrestle with this together in the comment section, huh?

Here are some questions to get the conversation started:

What can we admire about Denmark’s system of assessing students?

Are there parts of Denmark’s system of assessing students that you’re not sure are as responsible as they seem to be? Why?

What can we admire about our own system of assessing student learning? (And there has to be something admirable—after all, Denmark has moved a bit in our direction!)

What barriers might prevent American teachers from using the kinds of assessment practices that I saw in Denmark? Are these barriers worth trying to tackle?

I’m really looking forward to reading your thoughts on this one. I’m afraid I may have swallowed a bunch of Danish Kool-Aid in the last few days and I know that a good conversation will push my thinking deeper.

I need someone to help me remember that different isn’t always better—or to reinforce for me that in this case, it just might be!

Watch My Danish Adventures. . .

2009-06-12T20:24:05-04:00

So I'm heading to Denmark tomorrow, serving as the Educational Facilitator on a professional development trip for the Center for International Understanding. I'll be helping a group of 20 North Carolina teachers to think about how they can connect their experiences abroad to their classroom instruction.
A side benefit for me is that I teach sixth grade social studies, and Europe is a major part of our curriculum. Specifically, we look carefully at the European Union, studying the differences between social welfare nations like Denmark and free-market nations like the United States.
While I'm in Denmark, I'll be recording a bunch of instructional videos for my students to watch. I figured that would be a great way for me to keep in touch with them while away----the sub is going to love having a new video to share with the kids every day----and a great way for me to build an archive of teaching videos to draw from in the future.
If you're interested in seeing what I'm up to, check this post regularly. IF I've set things up right, the media player below will update itself each time that I post a new video----and if I haven't set it up right, you can always go directly to my channel on Blip TV.

(Note that the only videos on my Blip TV channel right now are a few clips that some of my old students shot for a recent project. The Danish Adventures will start to appear once I get there!)

The Problem with Scripted Curricula. . .

2009-06-10T19:35:03-04:00

I had the chance to spend about an hour today talking about education with a parent who is also a business woman. It was one of the better conversations that I've had in the past few months. She started by mentioning how "over the top" our state's end of grade testing program is:

"This kind of testing doesn't tell me anything about the students that you'll turn out and that I'll want to hire someday. The kinds of skills that it takes to answer a multiple choice question aren't the kinds of skills that I need students to have in the workplace."

She went on to describe what she'd like to see students doing in my room:

"You're a science teacher. Why can't you pair with the math teacher to study buoyancy. The students could build boats in your classroom made of different materials, experimenting with density and floatation. They could study friction and resistance. And in math, they can study surface area when making sails.

You have a pond outside. You could set up races on the pond and hand out awards for the students who can figure out the best ways to get their boats from one side of the pond to the other. Learning between your classrooms should be completely joined. Imagine how excited the kids would get!"

As our conversation went on, I mentioned how the kinds of learning experiences that she was so passionate about were becoming less and less common in many classrooms simply because teachers are bound by pacing guides that don't leave a ton of room for experimentation. Literally, instruction in most subjects is spelled out day-by-day in some of the thickest three-ring binders you've ever seen.

"I know how many days I'm supposed to spend on light, sound, heat, the solar system, the rock cycle, and the carbon cycle," I explained, "and if I get behind because of an activity that takes too long, I feel incredible pressure, knowing that the only thing I'm going to be held accountable for is performance on the standardized tests."

She was pretty shocked by the idea that there was no room for exploration in the school day---and she picked up on something that few parents ever notice:

"That amount of structure has to take the joy out of teaching, doesn't it? So why are these kinds of rigid pacing guides even used?"

Good question, huh? And one that I've figured the answer out to: Rigid scripting of the work of classroom teachers is designed to raise the quality of instruction in classes with underqualified teachers---and I'm ashamed to admit it, but scripted curricula often produce "measurable results."

That shouldn't be too hard to believe, though. After all, with scripted curricula, teachers who knew little about their content areas are given lessons that cover the kind of critical content that they regularly avoided in the past, teachers who spent months on their favorite subjects are forced to touch on objectives that they may never have taught, and teachers who have little time to plan no longer have any excuses because every lesson---down to the words that teachers should say---is assembled ahead of time by instructional experts working beyond the classroom.

In districts that embrace scripted programs, every teacher in every classroom has at least an AVERAGE lesson that they can deliver-----and that means that every child in every school is getting some kind of "education." The greatest impact of these attempts to control the work of teachers are seen in our poorest schools---where undercertified or inexperienced teachers are common and where scripted curricula have resulted in HIGHER test scores than ever before.

Of course, the hidden damage is that scripting curricula DOES take the joy out of teaching for our most accomplished teachers----and those teachers flee classrooms, looking for positions where they will be given the professional flexibility to explore their field and leaving their schools struggling to find competent replacements.

After listening to me describe the impact that scripting has on schools, my parent said something brilliant:

"That's crazy. Schools are letting an HR problem----attracting enough accomplished teachers that you can trust to do the job well without a script----create a curriculum and instruction problem. Address the HR problem instead."

She's right, isn't she. Now, what do we do about it?

Can teachers take the lead, working to make the impact of scripted curricula transparent to parents and policymakers? Is this an issue that parents have to champion, standing up for the kinds of instructional experiences that they want their children to have? Are we all waiting for a legislator willing to put his neck on the line and advocate for new salary structures that reward the best and brightest who choose to teach?

I get all worked up because everyone----including parents and business leaders----seems to realize that what we're doing isn't enough and yet nothing ever seems to change! I want to take action, but I don't know what that action should be.

Can anyone help?

The REAL Transparency of Teachers TV. . .

2009-06-07T08:24:00-04:00

An email landed in my inbox this week from a woman named Christianne Birtwistle who is working for Teachers TV, which has to produce the most interesting "makeover show" on "television" today. Titled From Good to Outstanding, this show spotlights teachers working to improve their instruction with the help and guidance from around the digital world.

Each webisode begins with a teacher being observed teaching a lesson by an expert "inspector," who rates the overall quality of the teacher's planning and presentation.
Next, the teacher spends two to three weeks meeting with experts and (here's the interesting part) interacting with helpful viewers offering feedback and ideas in electronic discussion forums in an attempt to improve the original lesson.
Finally, the teacher returns to the classroom to deliver another lesson in front of the inspector, who decides whether the instructional practices and presentation have moved from good to outstanding.
The Teachers TV website organizes episodes and conversations about instruction by grade level and content area---making it possible for visitors to explore lessons directly connected to their curriculum. It has also organized collections of lessons titled "learning journeys" that visitors can work through to systematically study common professional questions.
Teachers TV's From Good to Outstanding----which has a new collection of webisodes beginning on June 9th spotlighting the work of a secondary science teacher and an early years teacher---has a ton of potential in my book.
Not only does the program make the elements of effective instruction transparent to the broader world, it provides an inside look into the kinds of work that reflective teachers do on a regular basis---a part of our profession often hidden to outsiders.

From Good to Outstanding also makes it possible for educators to engage in an ongoing study of the instructional practices in their own grade levels and subject areas from the safety of their own living rooms and on their own personal schedules----something that face-to-face interactions in schools with colleagues and professional development providers cannot match.
The risk of reflection----being rated as a poor teacher by one's peers----is removed by From Good to Outstanding. Practitioners can easily compare their instruction to the instruction being offered---and rated---in similar grade levels and content areas.
The only real concern that I have about programs like From Good to Outstanding is that they might understate the amount of mental energy and effort that goes into improving instruction. In my experience, practices never move from "good to outstanding" in a two or three week period. Instead, the best practices are polished over a period of months or even years.
Here's an example: My buddy Mike and I teach a daily current events lesson to our kids. We started doing so almost 7 years ago. It began as a simple process to teach geography where we read a current event and began tracking the locations of each event on a world map.
Over time, we've incorporated daily reading mini-lessons into our current events readings, tied those lessons to our county's reading curriculum and formative assessment system, and begun tracking the growth of our students in both geographic understanding and reading mastery.
Our latest improvement: We're just now beginning to explore how Diigo---a tool that allows users to read and annotate websites together---can be used to engage kids in conversations about current events beyond our school.
I would hate for the general public to watch a few episodes of From Good to Outstanding and then believe that improving teaching can be done in three weeks if "those lazy teachers would just start working harder."
I also worry a bit about the conversations that develop in the electronic discussion forums. While it looks like the conversations are moderated by an indentified instructional expert---guaranteeing a measure of quality control over the kinds of comments added to the ongoing conversations----I'd hate to see what could be meaningful conversations about instruction watered down by a sea of unmonitored comments that add little to the developing dialogue.
Not only would such conversations make it difficult to find quality buried in the chaff, they would leave outsiders confused----thinking that they understood quality instruction based on the comments left in each electronic conversation. I can just see a parent challenging a teacher's instructional decisions based on something that they've drawn from a strand of conversation on a From Good to Outstanding episode.
But overall, I like the idea. Anything that can make the work done in schools a bit more transparent for everyone----practitioners, policymakers and parents alike----is a good thing in my eyes.
What about you? Do you think From Good to Outstanding is a program worth watching? Will you share it with your colleagues? Could you use it in your own professional development efforts?
Better yet, would you allow your own practices to be spotlighted in this way?