Student Achievement

Dear Elizabeth,

Thanks for commenting on my posting on Confidence–I am so glad that Facebook has made us intellectual neighbors again, even though we live in different countries.  I enjoy reading about your life these days, and freely confess to being envious often of the life you live.

In my current position, where I have the opportunity and the privilege to talk to groups of teachers and administrators fairly often, I talk about you quite a lot.  You are part of my teaching story.  I was a lousy special ed teacher.  I talk about teaching next door to an outstanding special ed teacher, and knowing that it was going to take me 10 years to get as good as you.  So I stopped teaching special ed and went and taught something I was actually equipped to be good at.

The part of my posting that you commented on was about relationships, and how important they are.  You had great relationships with kids; for some of them, I believe that your relationship with them was the only positive relationship they had in school.  But I think you under-sell yourself.  You also had amazing skills.

So here’s my quandary.  Teachers as great as you talk a lot about relationships with kids.  But that relationship wouldn’t be worth anything to an at-risk kid if you didn’t also have the skills to teach them the content and the skills they need.  What you focus on is the relationship, but if I tell a teacher who doesn’t have your skill set that relationships are the most  important thing, what are they supposed to do with that?

Take me, for example.  When I stopped teaching special ed and started teaching geography, I had great relationships with the kids in my class.  When I joined Facebook, I instantly got friend requests from a large group of them, who included lovely messages.  And do you remember when some of my ninth-graders started a Stevie fan-club, and posted fliers around the school?  That was embarrassing, not least because I think many of the teachers thought I had started it myself.

My point is that I was not a different person when I began teaching geography.  What was different was that I had a clue about teaching geography, whereas I was woefully ill-equipped to teach special ed.  So my focus when working with teachers is the skills part.  And I think that’s the right thing to do, because I have more control over that.  So what do you think?

Today is a professional development day in 27J, and I’m not there, which is not ideal.  However, the Drop-out Prevention Summit is scheduled on the same day, so that’s where I am right now, and writing this because I can make so many connections between what’s being said and other things that loom large in my thinking.

We know a lot about why kids drop out, and there is a lot more information now about the differences between why girls and boys drop out.  The major themes are the same: achievement, attendance, and behavior.  Students who are over-age and under-credit are seriously at risk.  More than 20 absences in a school year is a good predictor of dropping out, as is being suspended from school.

Increasing the graduation rate seems to fall into two categories: drop-out prevention and drop-out recovery, and there are things we can do in both.  If you stop thinking about the two categories as separate (because really you’re only talking about the difference in many cases between kids who have dropped out and kids who haven’t dropped out yet), and start thinking about reasons for kids to leave and reasons for kids to stay, then you find something interesting.  Many of the reasons for dropping out are factors in students’ lives that we may not be able to control, such as family instability, need to work, and so on.  But reasons for staying in school include lots of things we CAN do something about.

Relationships are clearly very important, a fact that hit me yet again yesterday at BHA’s graduation ceremony, when the two girls graduating this quarter spoke in very clear terms about the attachment they have to teachers at BHA and how crucial that attachment was to their graduating.

Lt. Governor O’Brien spoke, and I was excited to hear her use her time to talk about instruction.  She talked about the work of John Medina, whose book, Brain Rules, I haven’t read yet.  Medina talks about our being wired as learners, which is a phrase that’s often used, and in fact is in danger of becoming trite.  But at the same time we often reference Maslow, and how his hierarchy of needs shows that kids who aren’t getting their primary needs met can’t be expected to focus on learning.  But Maslow never said that (I have the article if you want to read it) and in fact suggested that learning may be the most primary need, a suggestion that has been validated by decades of research on competence motivation.  As I’ve said before, we as a profession have to update our thinking on motivation.

The lieutenant governor also quoted Medina as writing about the importance of learning from our mistakes.  And here, I think, is another area where education engages in doublespeak.  As you might predict, the classroom that I’m sitting in right now has posters on the wall about learning from failure.  One says “life is all about mistakes and learning from them.”  Another says “failure is not defeat until you stop trying.”  Pretty typical, I’d say.  But the expectations for students posted on the wall don’t say anything about making mistakes (be on time, no cussing, pay attention, no talking or walking around while teacher is talking, do what is asked of you, don’t argue with teacher).  They are all about compliance, which again I would say is typical.  And if I were to ask this high school teacher about his or her grading policy, I would bet real money that failure is not rewarded, recognized, or valued in any way.  Our classrooms are much more about getting the right answer than they are about making mistakes.

Dylan Wiliam quotes a poster from a teacher’s wall that says “Stuck?  Good.  It was worth coming to class today.”  But that is completely meaningless unless our other structures and systems support that sentiment in a concrete and compelling way; in a way that convinces the student, not the teacher.  Sometimes I think that the teachers who display the posters extolling the virtues of failure think that they are the ones who are supposed to create the failure the student has to rise above.  But the lieutenant governor is right; it has to be safe to fail, and the failure has to be about the learning and not about the grade and not about compliance.

OK, I hate to be a name-dropper BUT… I had a little e-mail exchange with Rick Stiggins the other day.  I wrote to ask him about what he says in his presentations with regard to the role of experiencing success in building successful, motivated students.  He is particularly eloquent on that topic.  He pointed me to a book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter called Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.  I highly recommend this book!

Partly I like it because I think the finding that people who are successful when they try to do something become more likely to take risks in the future is especially pertinent in education.  (This self-reinforcing spiral is also known as an efficacy-performance spiral or a high performance cycle.)  We want students to be intrinsically motivated, self-directed learners, and getting them on this upward spiral is the absolute best way to do this.  I have written before about the belief that effort, not genes, is what makes you smart (Mindset), and I think getting students on the efficacy-performance spiral contributes to their developing that belief.

Partly I like it because there are so many examples from sports.  I think the sports connection is very important in our getting better at formative assessment.  Good coaches are doing that all the time.  They have a picture in their heads of what quality performance looks like, and they can communicate that to their students.  They are constantly assessing where their students are, and constantly giving them feedback to move them towards higher quality performance, whatever the sport is.  Of course, the corollary benefit of this is that coaches, and other teachers of performance-centered subjects such as art and music, are front and center in our district focus on formative assessment.  I have not known this to be the case before.  So I would be grateful if you would pass this blog post along to the coaches and elective teachers you may know, especially if you know that they’re doing a good job of getting their kids on an efficacy-performance spiral.  I know that teachers in non-CSAP tested subjects, which of course includes all electives as well as athletics, have rarely felt that the professional development in schools has had much to say to them, and now they need to know that I consider them some of our absolute best models of what good practice looks like.

And partly I like it because she’s a great writer and she tells great stories.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why Overland Trail’s professional development was so good.  Here’s my list:

• It built on what they’ve already done.  Last year they worked on clarity of target, and providing feedback is crucial in moving students closer to the target.
• It was really well planned.  A lot of thought, a lot of time, and a lot of conversation must have gone into putting that together, involving a lot of people.
• It was taken seriously.  Really, it was an enormous role-playing exercise, and if not taken seriously it would have bombed.
• It combined making an abstract concept concrete with an emotional experience.  That means the people will a) remember it and b) think about it.
• It set the stage for future learning.  Not a one-off, a drive-by, a random act of professional development.

During the debrief, the teachers identified through their experience all the important features of effective feedback.  They can look at summaries of the research and see how close they were and how it can best be used.  And all that will mean more to them because they experienced it themselves Friday morning.

Is that a useful and accurate assessment?

I visited four schools on Friday, and enjoyed myself very much.  I’m sorry only that I couldn’t visit every school.

I started the day at North, which is in a good place, having improved greatly in their growth scores and made AYP.  They are working on consolidating all their good work, and I really wanted to be there to help set that stage and provide encouragement.  I was sorry to leave, but I saw the teachers’ reactions at the end of the day and they looked very positive.

I went to Overland Trail.  The focus there this year is effective feedback.  They did something very clever just before I got there.  The elective teachers taught two lessons to the other teachers, one deliberately badly, and the other with good feedback.  I got there for the debrief, and was fascinated.  The teachers who participated in the exercise, either as teachers or as students, were very insightful about what constitutes good feedback and what does not.  It was a great start to an important focus.

I went to BHA to talk about performance and learning goals, as described in this post.  I also tried to make the link to motivation, which I know is a crucial topic for teachers.  That’s another school that I love spending time in.  All the staff are committed to reaching out to a sometimes challenging student population, and are equally committed to their own professional development, and I love them for it.

And I finished my day at Vikan, where they were just finishing up, but I had several people talk to me about the data conversations they had in the morning.

Those of us who have been in education a long time know that what happens on any given professional development day is not as important as the momentum created and the clarity achieved.  The quality of the conversations carry a school forward for many weeks to come.  People remember how they felt about those things more than they remember the agenda and the content.  I was impressed by the feeling in the buildings on Friday, and I know that that bodes well for us.  I thank all those responsible–leaders and participants–for creating a positive, forward-looking experience in their buildings on Friday.  It is more important than you know.

Motivation occupies much of my thoughts.  I mean motivation as a topic, not my own personal motivation, which is boundless, in case you were wondering.

I find this topic fascinating, because motivation is powerfully linked to classroom formative assessment.  And yet, many teachers’ beliefs about motivation are contrary to the relationship as I understand it to work.  But this post is not about that…

In searching for useful research on motivation, I came across a body of literature on goals; specifically, the difference between learning goals and performance goals, and when each should be used. 

A performance goal is to hit a particular target, such as getting an A in a class, having 70% of students be proficient or advanced on CSAP, or making a certain quota of sales.

A learning goal is when the goal is not the target itself, but to become better at doing something.  The target still exists, but is not the focus of activity.  Performance is a by-product of the learning.

To measure how effective different goals are, participants in research studies have been given different types of instructions:

• Do your best!
• Learn as much as you can about getting better at this (whatever it is)
• Try to meet a particular target

Turns out that when people already know how to do whatever it is that’s being measured, a performance goal gets the highest performance.  But when the task is more complex, and when people don’t already know how to do it, then trying to meet a performance goals elicits lower performance than just asking people to do their best.  And telling people to focus on learning how to do the task actually elicits the highest performance.

I find this fascinating.  I have spent untold hours planning, writing, or discussing School Improvement Plans, some of them very long indeed.  I figured out a long time ago that long plans were death to actual improvement, and was glad to find research (documented by Doug Reeves and Mike Schmoker; I confess I haven’t read any of it myself) that the FORMAT of the plan is NEGATIVELY correlated with student achievement.  The goals part of School Improvement Plans was particularly problematic, and now I am ecstatic to find that there’s really good evidence that the most effective thing you can do to raise performance is to focus on learning! 

That doesn’t mean that the target is not important.  But I think it does mean that we shouldn’t spend time thinking about the target.  Instead, we should work on targets set by the school board (see the post from earlier this evening on our academic performance), and frame those in terms of what we need to learn how to do.

Here’s the excerpt I used with the principals, and hope to use with other groups, to talk about this idea.  The principals certainly had a very rich discussion prompted by reading it.

And in case you don’t remember Schmoker on the topic of school improvement planning, here he is…  And I would say that I would reframe the part about what teachers need to do to include a focus on a learning goal.  I don’t think teachers should be setting goals, if those goals are performance targets.  I think they should be focused on getting better at what they do.

Have you missed me?  It’s been a little busy, but even so I’m embarrassed that it’s been a month since I added anything to this blog.  It’s not like I haven’t been working.  In fact, you can view one fruit of my labor: the Global End Academic Monitoring Report.  This will tell you a great deal about academic achievement in 27J, and I highly recommend you take a look.  I should also point out that I’m not the only author; the superintendent wrote the first part, and for the rest, while I wrote the words, the charts and the work behind the charts belong to Peggy and Evelyn.  Enjoy!

Go see the movie!  Very touching, very clever, complex characters, and has something useful to say about the lives of students  (unlike, for example, High School Musical or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).  I did not know what was going to happen, much of the dialogue was seriously funny, and I really wanted everything to turn out well for the characters because they were believable and decent humans.

You know the feeling you get when something intuitively strikes you as true?

My job is about raising student achievement, and that implies for many people doing things differently.  But teachers frequently resist doing things differently, which is often seen in a negative light.

I talk about this little moment a lot, but I don’t think I’ve written about it in my blog before: I went to an ASCD conference in New Orleans about 15 years ago, and attended a session with Debbie Meier, who was principal of a famously successful small school in New York City.  One of the things she said, and I paraphrase her loosely, was:

Let’s face it, new things come along in education all the time, and most teachers are unaffected by them.  And Thank God for that.

Her point was, I think, that if teachers tried to change their practice every time some new book was published, or a new training program marketed, the education system would be in chaos.  This struck me as inherently true and wise.

So how do teachers decide when to change and when to stand firm with their current practices?  I think I could write a dissertation on this.  (Hmmm, what a good idea.)  I was working on some other topic over the summer, and came across a couple of sources that I think help to answer some of this question.

One is the research on tacit knowledge, which, as soon as I started reading it, also struck me as true.  The idea here is that we know more than we can articulate.  We acquire knowledge about our craft through practicing it, or by observing others, and only partially through formal instruction.  While I’m sure this is true for all professions, I have most knowledge of teaching, and I know from my own experience the intuition you build up about what will work and what will not, what to say in certain circumstances, how to deal with challenging students, and so on.  I also know that I learned almost none of this from my teacher training program, and almost all of it from watching other teachers and from trial and error in my own classroom.

I went through the same experience when I became an administrator.  A lot of my classroom-based expertise was of no use to me in the new setting, and I had to go through the same process of building up tacit knowledge, using what I had learned in educational leadership classes as a foundation, certainly, but only a foundation and not the whole structure.

Teachers value their tacit knowledge greatly, for good reason.  It’s what makes them an asset to their students and their schools.  And it is hard-earned; there is no pride to be had in something that anyone could just pull off the shelf and start using.

The corollary of this is a degree of skepticism about new knowledge (let’s call it research) that is presented without attention being paid to how it fits with one’s tacit knowledge.  I think it’s this skepticism that is often interpreted as resistance to change, but I think it’s a healthy thing.  In fact, I think a professional has an obligation to examine critically new information, to see how it fits with what has worked for them in the past.

Looking back on the change efforts that I have witnessed or participated in, I see a failure to account for teachers’ tacit knowledge.  New things are presented without consideration for how they fit with what is working for teachers.  This is an easy mistake to make, and is related to what we talk about regarding clarity of target in the classroom: the teacher has to know what the objective is, but what matters more is that the students understand it.  The same is true when we talk about improving student achievement: the leader has to know what the objective is, but what matters more is that the people charged with implementing it (principals, teachers, paraeducators)  understand it.

Reading that last sentence, it occurs to me that this example illuminates what it means to understand.  It is more than comprehending the words.  To understand means that it makes sense to you; it fits with what you already know and what works for you.  Teachers are often asked to implement things without truly understanding it.

The other thing I came across that was helpful was an article that talked about how to harness tacit knowledge and make it explicit and therefore accessible to others. And really, that’s about asking people to share their tacit knowledge, and test it against new knowledge, and see where the gaps are, and try to fill them.  It puts teachers in the driver’s seat regarding improvement of their practice, and engages them in action research.  I like this concept very much, and will try to expand upon in it in the work I do.

Tacit knowledge is important, but it is not sacrosanct, and just as teachers should not be willing to adopt new strategies without asking good questions, they should not be willing to rely on their tacit knowledge without asking good questions.

Oh, and the title of this post?  I couldn’t think of what to call it, which got me thinking about titles in general, which reminded me of this poem.

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

Wendy Cope

It was a dream I had last week

And some kind of record seemed vital.

I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem

But I love the title.

This was New Teacher Orientation week.  It’s an amazing event.  I don’t know of any other district that extends the contract of its new teachers a whole week to given them a solid grounding in the organization they are joining.  It represents a significant investment by the organization in its most important asset, its people.

Of course, trying to fit the reach of a school district into one week makes for a pretty intense experience.  I feel for the participants, because there is so much to try and absorb.

My task was to describe and explain the 27J instructional model, and of course that in itself is a big topic.  I try to keep the message as simple as possible, but that’s hard.  Here’s the bulleted version:

• Our goal is that all students will reach Essential Learning Targets
• In order to accomplish this, some students will need to make up a lot of ground, and they need increased time, focus, and intensity of instruction
• We will endeavor to provide students with the instruction that they need, regardless of what services they happen to qualify for
• 27J embraces a district-wide approach to instruction, and at Tier 1 of the instructional model, that approach is classroom formative assessment
• Classroom formative assessment was chosen for many reasons, including its research base, its strong relationship to other successful programs in 27J particularly AVID, and its tie to motivation

I love getting to talk about the instructional model and formative assessment.  I think they are so important, and have so much potential for increasing student achievement.

Also this week, I got to spend two half days at Brighton High School with some of their teachers and administrators.  They started off taking the classroom formative assessment training, but that wasn’t remotely meeting their needs, so we offered them a different venue and I’ve spent quite a bit of time with them.  That’s been great; very thoughtful and thought-provoking conversations with people who are very dedicated to their school.  The teachers are experienced in the classroom and in leadership positions within the school, so they bring layers and layers of tacit knowledge to their discussions.  They seem very committed to incorporating more classroom formative assessment into their practice, and I can’t wait to see how they decide to do that.  I hope they know how much I want to support them, so they’ll bring me along for the ride.

And I’ve been asked for the powerpoint I used for new teacher orientation, so here it is.