Student Achievement

I had an amazing day yesterday.  We hosted a workshop for 54 people from all schools in the district and the Achievement Team (if you have a problem, if no one else can help, maybe you should call…).  It’s very challenging to plan a meaningful day for these folks, because they represent our best and brightest, and they set a very high bar for themselves, and therefore for me. Here’s the PowerPoint from my portion of the workshop:

And here’s the packet I put together:

Here’s my synopsis of the feedback:

1. People appreciated the time we allotted for reflection and discussion.  I’m glad about that.  It was amazing to me how fast the time went.  I cut out a couple of chunks of the plan so that we could keep to the timeframe I had laid out, and I would look up at the clock and still be fifteen minutes behind.  That was most the intense part of the day, that distorted sense of time passing you get when you’re completely wrapped up in something.
2. People liked thinking about change as a personal mission rather than as a task to change others.  This is, I think, one of the most important ideas to get your head around when you’re in a leadership position: you’re the only person you can control, and so the only way to completely bring a situation under your control is to figure out how you can change in order to make something happen.  I think this is what Gandhi meant when he said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  I am not surprised that some people were sorry that no one shared, and some people were glad they didn’t have to share.
3. People were intrigued by the concept of tacit knowledge, but struggled to completely understand it, and struggled to connect it to the learning target.  So we will come back around to that and I will figure out how to make it more meaningful.  If you want to read more about it in the meantime, email me and you’ll send you stuff.  I think it’s a really useful idea, so it’s worth coming back around.  Maybe this post would help?  I also have to do a little work to get back up to speed on action research–if anyone has any good resources for that, I would be grateful if you would send them to me.
4. People didn’t talk as much about feedback as I expected.  They did identify the need for more information and to practice, so I’ll work on that.
5. People want to make sure that we get to the parts of the packet I skipped.  They also want to see and talk about other groups’ webs.  So let me clarify: my idea is to spend part of each day on these big leadership ideas, and talk about each of them at least twice, maybe three times, maybe every day.  We will get to everything in the packet more than once.
6. I was called on whether we met, or didn’t meet the target, which was great.  I realized that I should have set a target for the four days in the aggregate, like a unit target, and then targets for the individual days.
7. There were lots of other useful and thoughtful comments, showing me that people are getting good at providing feedback!
8. A lot of people were very honest and transparent about their thinking, which was remarkable and touching.  A good example: “I’m not sure yet how to become who I need to be to help my staff.”
9. My favorite question, which I really don’t have an answer for yet: “when does feedback seeking cross the line and become learned helplessness?”
10. I don’t think the day worked for a couple of people, and I need to figure out how to respond so that their time is not wasted.

A Big Idea that we will be talking about next time is the distinction between performance goals and learning goals. If you haven’t read this excerpt before, it will help you to do so before next time:

I am totally convinced that I have the best job on the planet. I can’t wait until the next day of the workshop.

Thank you, Liann, for posting a link to this blog from EdWeek on yammer.  It’s a little dry, I admit, and not as charming as my own humble offerings.  However, it does reinforce points that I think we’ve been talking about, but compiling them in a handy-dandy list of pointers to follow in order to make formative assessment a positive experience, and therefore a more useful tool:

1. Assessments are interwoven throughout all lessons
2. Use a wide variety of assessment methods
3. The classroom should provide protection from adverse consequences for initial failures
4. The climate must provide clear standards by which student work will be evaluated and promote an affirmation of student progress

A very helpful post, check it out.

At the October AP meeting at Stuart, I asked those present to pair up and visit classrooms, and come back and talk about what they were looking for.  Here’s a sampling of what was said:

• Objective on the board
• Clarity of Target
• Student engagement
• Time-on-task
• Student interaction with other students
• Student interaction with the teacher
• Supports for L2 and struggling students
• SERVE – Support, engagement, respect, vision, evaluation

We then had a discussion about the difference between:

1. acceptable variation among teachers, because they are in different places along the continuum towards the target of what we define as good instruction;
2. unacceptable variation among administrators, because they have different targets, and therefore the feedback they give to teachers is not consistent.

I asked people to reflect on that before our next meeting, and got this very thoughtful email from one of the APs:

Thanks again for the meeting today. I have been talking (to myself) about the reflection of finding clarity of target between admin. At first I was thinking that we were way off track listening to the conversations. However, the more I think about it, it seems like most schools are focusing on Assessment for Learning in some aspect of their target. It seems like most of the schools are looking at objectives, feedback, assessment etc. All of these are looking at clarity of target and the 7 seven strategies. The scary thing for me is that as I was sitting there trying to collect my thoughts on your question I was not able to identify that. (I could be totally off, but that is what is going through my mind right now.)

I love getting this kind of email, because it tells me that the writer has been reflective about their own practice and their own thought processes.  And it tells me that my point wasn’t lost.

Today, at the AP meeting at North, we talked about this.  At the last meeting, I very deliberately did not tell people what to look for, because I wanted to see what they would do without direction.  People have a schema that they have built up over the years based on their own experiences as a classroom teacher, training that they have had, books they have read, and the policies and procedures of the various districts in which they have worked.  Given no direction, everyone goes to what they are most comfortable with, which may or may not be the latest thing they have been working on.

In other words, the fact that people were looking for slightly different things is not in itself a bad thing.  In fact, it shows that they are bringing to bear their experience and expertise to their work, which is exactly what we expect of a professional educator.  It becomes problematic when the lack of consistency means that teachers get mixed messages about what is important.  This is a very high stakes topic for the following reasons:

1. We have embarked on a quest to bring our instruction in line with the best research and practice on classroom formative assessment, and so everything should be aligned with that;
2. We are working on revising our teacher evaluation system, and the consistency among administrators is a VERY BIG DEAL for teachers, as it should be: they deserve no less.

So before I asked those present at North today to go look at classrooms, we talked about the following quotation from Sadler (1989) and the implications for what me might expect to see in classrooms:

The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point.

I talked again about the corollary benefit of this vision of instruction: that this is what the best coaches, performing arts, CTE, and PE teachers have been doing for years, which means that classroom formative assessment honors their work in a way that hasn’t necessarily happened before; and I bragged again about Overland’s professional development, and the classrooms I just visited at Stuart.

I gave today’s participants the attached learning walk protocol to use, with the caveat that it’s a year since I wrote that protocol, and I will be changing it before we do our next learning walk, because classroom practice has changed in the last year, and I am much less likely to see missed opportunities than I am to see a good start that I could coach a teacher how to build on.

Next month, the AP meeting will be at Brighton High School.  So the APs’ homework, before then, is to write about and bring to the meeting:

1. what they need in order to bring us closer to a common understanding of what good instruction looks like;
2. what they expect to see in terms of classroom formative assessment at the high school level.

Reference

Sadler, R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18(2), 119-144.

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!