Student Achievement

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.

As promised, here are my answers to the questions asked at the latest round of classroom formative assessment training.  Don’t like the answer?  Have more to add?  Please comment!

This was fun.  What other questions do you have for me?

As regular readers of this blog already know, we offered four days of classroom formative assessment training to teams from 27J schools last spring.  We offered each session twice, and trained something like 140 people.  I want to keep you up to date on what has happened since then, and what will happen next.

Professional Development at Schools

I or someone else from my team has met or will soon meet with each principal to talk about their professional development plans for the upcoming school year.  We are using a planning template that asks about topic, venue, and relationship to classroom formative assessment.

We have a couple of objectives beyond knowing what each school is doing.

1. We want to be involved in the conversation about how to link next year’s professional development with both previous years’ professional development and with classroom formative assessment.  For example, there is a very clear link in my mind betweeen classroom formative assessment and AVID strategies, but if you haven’t had AVID training, that may not be really clear to you, and when your school does training on AVID strategies, you might appreciate knowing how that connects to classroom formative assessment, which you know the executive director for student achievement spouts about all the time and therefore must be really important.
2. We want to be involved in the conversation about how what happens on a professional development day links to what happens in team meetings to what happens in staff meetings.
3. We want to make sure that schools get the support they need to deliver high quality professional development.

Classroom Formative Assessment training for Special Education and ESL teachers

The slots we had available for the training last spring were limited, and so we didn’t have as many special education teachers and ESL teachers trained as we would have liked.  So this summer (in fact, we just finished), we brought around 35 of those teachers together for training on classroom formative assessment, and how it links to the instructional model and their role in their buildings.  What a great group.  I got to spend half a day with them yesterday talking about the instructional model, and they had great things to say and asked great questions, one of which I want to address here, and some of which I’m putting in a separate blog post.

The same question was asked several times to different members of my team (which tells me that a) there’s quite a lot concern about this and b) they’re testing to see if they get the same answer each time).  What is our responsibility with regard to carrying this training back to our buildings?  The answer is couched in a negative: we do NOT advocate a trainer of trainers model where we expect teachers to go back to their buildings and train other teachers.  The Achievement Team supports building principals in developing and implementing school improvement plans and professional development plans for their buildings.  Principals are the primary meaning-makers for their schools, and hold the responsibility for putting in place plans that meet the needs of the building in that moment, which includes honoring what has been done in the past.  We provided the teachers at the training with a planning template for their own plan for how to support classroom formative assessment, because leadership is taking responsibility for what matters to you, and any change effort has to begin with yourself.

Focus

I don’t think there’s anyone left who hasn’t heard me say that the instructional model is all I’m ever going to talk about.  One of the things we know is that we need to be thoughtful and cautious about what we focus on and how fast we move.  Two years ago, we focused on ELTs.  Last year we focused on clarity of target.  The way things are shaping up, we will spend this year focused on descriptive feedback.  In other words, we will work our way slowly through the seven strategies of assessment for learning.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other facets of the instructional model that require development.  The trick will be not to bite off more than we can chew, and to make sure we provide people with the opportunity to make those part-to-whole connections.

I’ve talked a lot about the relationship between AVID and classroom formative assessment.  Here’s work done by the AVID coordinators a few weeks ago making the connection between AVID strategies and the seven strategies of assessment for learning.

For those of you who haven’t heard me give this presentation…  If you like, you can download the presentation in order to read the notes that are attached to the slides (use the menu button).  This is a way cool tool…

The work on ELT revision proceeds under Kevin’s capable management.  He scrapped the website I set up as being inadequate for our needs, so please check out the new website.  And please publicize it to others in your personal learning network.  We want people to know what’s going on, and to provide feedback.  I will send out the address again when teachers are back.  Note also that I took the old site off my blogroll and added the new one.

Thanks for your help!

Here’s my preliminary list, which I’ve been promising to post for quite a while now.  I’ve already received several suggestions for books to add, so I’ll update when I can.

Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D.  (2004). Assessment for learning: Putting it into practice. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Brophy, J. (2004). Motivating students to learn (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chappuis, J. (2009). The seven strategies of assessment for learning.

Chappuis, S., Richard J. Stiggins, Judith Arter, and Jan Chappuis (2005). Assessment FOR learning: An action guide for school leaders. Portland, OR: ETS.

Covey, S. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people. New York: Free Press.

Deming, W. E. (1982). Out of the crisis. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Educational Services.

DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional learning communities at work: best practices for enhancing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

Goleman, D., McKee, A., & Boyzatis, R.E. (2002). Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B.Z. (2007). The leadership Challenge (4th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.

Tschannen-Moran, M. (2004). Trust matters: Leadership for successful schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Lots of things running through my head.  Here’s an update.

I know I just wrote about Michelle Rhee, but here’s another post from the same blog, this time about Arne Duncan.  That’s another job that I really want and really don’t want, both at the same time.  And I’m no danger of getting it, so that’s OK then.

Lots of technology issues:

1. Kevin Marlatt is running our middle school summer school, and has created a site for the program that you can find here.  Check it out.
2. We have started yamming.  Or yammering.  Whatever.  This is like Twitter for professionals.  You have to have a 27J email address in order to sign up to follow your colleagues.  We have been using it to communicate informally with one another about what we’ve been working on.  It’s a great way to tap into the collective wisdom in the organization, or just stay current with what’s going on.
3. Other people in the district have started, or are working on starting, a blog.  Or posting their work online in some format.  I am excited about this because we produce a lot of work, and when it goes online then it becomes more easily accessible for people, and they (maybe I’m speaking about myself here) don’t have to create their own filing system for printed information that they want to retrieve at some point in the future.
4. As a result of the blogging impulse, Ian Jones has created a wiki for people to share their blogs.   Add your blog at http://27JBloggers.pbworks.   You may need to set up an account, but that’s easy enough to do.  Ian will monitor what is posted.  Or just go there to see what else you could be reading.
5. A notable new blog belongs to Janet Wyatt, who just went live.  As a lawyer and an English teacher, Janet is a great writer, and now her legal expertise will be widely available.  A great asset.

I have taken some time from work to read and write.  My last topic was wisdom, which was really fascinating.  I learned a lot that has already been very useful to me.  I really want to write about this some more, including posting something to this blog, but I don’t know where to start.

ELT revision continues, although we have been delinquent in posting to the blog we started to document that process.  I have asked Kevin to apply his formidable technological and project management skills to managing Student Achievement systems, starting with curriculum revision, but I’m hoping he will also be able to help with managing other aspects of what we do, including, for example, adoption of instructional materials.  This should help us be more transparent, more collaborative, and more organized.

And on a much more personal note, I have been re-reading, for the millionth time, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.  Hence the title of this post.  For those of you who’ve only seen the movie, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Douglas Adams was a brilliant thinker and a terrific writer, and I use ideas from his books all the time.  I met him once at a book-signing, and it makes me sad that he died young.  You know that party game where you have to name the people you’d invite to a dinner party?  He’d be top of my list.

I love my job.  We are doing exciting, creative, and important work in the service of raising student achievement and closing achievement gaps.  Nothing could be better.  I wish Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan the best of luck.  They probably want my job, but they can’t have it.