Headline

An Opportunity to Show What You Know

by Kathy Dyer

As I read the first sentence in an Ed Week article, I had to shake my head. “Assessments may change in many ways, but for most students, the stress of having to prove what they know and can do doesn’t go away.” Let me tell you a story about a teacher who transformed her students’ thinking about assessment.

Kathie Morgan taught third grade at the time. Two months into the school year, Nancy, her teammate across the hall, noticed that any time the word “test,” “quiz” or “assessment” came up or was posted on the board, Kathie’s students got excited. Nancy asked Kathie, “Why all the excitement about these words?” Kathie directed her to talk with the students. After chatting with a dozen kids, Nancy summed up what she heard them say: “’Test’ is an opportunity to show what I know, figure out what I don’t know and make a plan with Ms. Morgan to get what I need to know.”

How did Kathie get her students there? As Ms. Sparks says in her article, districts are looking for ways to change how students respond to tests. In Kathie’s case, the integration of formative instructional practices and developing assessment literacy in her students were key elements in this transformation. For me, this was a bit of a mental dance. The partners I ended up with in my mind were growth mindset and assessment literacy. Let me explain.

What makes something an opportunity for us? We might think of opportunity as an “opening” or a “break” — “a chance” to do something we want or need to do. Through assessment, teachers provide an opportunity to figure out where a student is, individually, in their learning. As students learn more, they grow. As students are given a chance to try again — show or demonstrate more — pieces of success get scattered along the learning path — assessments provide students opportunities to “show what you know.”

When teachers provide effective feedback as a result of these assessment opportunities, they actually help students figure out the “what I know and what I don’t know” portions of the path. Let’s pause here for a moment to make sure we are on the same page when we talk about feedback from assessment that moves learning forward. The feedback:

• is focused on the learning targets and success criteria
• is timely for the student, for the task and for allowing the learner to use the feedback; it occurs during the learning
• is accurate
• is appropriate to the learner in form and in word choice and developmentally
• doesn’t do the thinking for the learner
• engages learners in the process and encourages growth in the learner

Some educators express student concerns about the possibility of failure when it comes to assessment. Other educators counter those concerns by building a culture of learning that views assessment as a support for learning with structures and strategies built into the classroom culture to cultivate and build a growth mindset. Teachers do this in a variety of ways focused on five key elements of a culture of learning:

1. Trust: Trust in the classroom between teachers and learners is the foundation that holds all the elements together. Without a strong foundation of trust, you will not be able to put all the other practices in place, and students won’t invest effort, share freely and support one another.
2. Mindset: I heard a seventh grader say, “Smart isn’t what you are; it’s what you get with hard work and effort.” Using assessment and the resulting feedback are ways to help students figure out where they are as learners and support ideas about growth mindset.
3. Engagement: Engagement is about ensuring that students have choice, not just about what and how they learn, but with whom and how they are assessed. Have you ever co-created a rubric or success criteria with students? Learners need multiple opportunities to collaborate, which may involve assessment, such as opportunities for peer review or peer feedback. Challenge also plays a role in helping both students and teachers determine what students are ready to learn.
4. Structures: What do you need to put in place to make trust, mindset and engagement happen? Strategies, processes and tools support the ideas of providing students opportunities to show what they know. Structures help students build skills needed to respond in a calm and focused manner when placed in situations that may cause stress, like an assessment. By providing various strategies for students to use and helping students find strategies that work for them, teachers build metacognition and growth mindset. If learners see and believe that the effective use of the strategy relates to improvement more than to luck (ability and growth mindset), they’ll be more likely to use the strategy.
5. Practice: Providing regular opportunities to practice with authentic activities means everything learners do is helping them prepare for an assessment. Malcolm Gladwell told us that effective practice is deliberate and focused and that it occurs regularly and has a reflective component. (Consider the assessment reflection strategy below.)

As teachers put supports in place that help students be aware of where they are versus where they want or need to be, these supports become part of the culture of learning in a classroom. And engaging learners in the process of planning out how they will get where they need or want to be – becomes part of the opportunity.

One strategy that helps build a growth mindset and metacognition at the same time is the use of a post-assessment reflection, completed in two parts: first by students individually and then shared in a small group. After an assessment, the teacher provides a list of questions so learners can reflect on their assessment experience. During group discussion, the teacher collects new information to support students to better prepare for and engage in future assessments and to use the results as more of a support for learning. The teacher might consider these or similar questions:

• How engaged were you with this assessment? Why?
• What did you feel most confident about? Why?
• What did you do that led to your success or confidence?
• What was the most difficult part of this assessment? Why?
• What would you do differently next time?
• What was most confusing? Why?
• What do you know about the topic that the assessment didn’t allow you to show or demonstrate?

Engaging students in active thinking about assessment as a support for learning and their individual role in the process supports the development of a growth mindset and metacognitive skills, building both self-efficacy and self-regulation in students. This specific assessment reflection strategy gives the teacher information about student understanding of assessment and students’ role in preparing for, engaging in and using the results to support their learning process. This strategy lets learners clarify and build their ideas of success and struggle, which helps promote stronger engagement with future assessment.

The idea about developing a culture of learning where the role of assessment as a support for learning rather than measurement reign is transformative. The use of formative instructional practices supports teaching skills to help students prepare for assessment—the opportunity to show what they know. When teachers and students collaborate to figure out what learners know and don’t know, opportunity exists on both sides. Making the plan about what to do next is a collaboration in growth.

Author Kathy Dyer is a senior professional development specialist for NWEA, where she designs and develops learning opportunities for partners and internal staff. Follow her on Twitter.  
Further Reading

1. Herald Bulletin – Test a four-letter word? Not if it’s formative assessment
2. EdWeek – This Isn’t Your Mom’s Parent-Teacher Conference
3. AL.com – Alabama schools superintendent finds replacement for ACT Aspire testing

Being a better writer and teacher requires a daily practice

by Angela Stockman

When was the last time you curled up with your favorite pen, a bit of high-quality paper, and a bunch of ideas that you were truly interested in writing about? Devices might make for quick and efficient work, but they can be rather soulless writing instruments. If you want to fall in love with writing, and you will need to love it as much as you might loathe it if you ever hope to teach it well, then writing with soul really matters. Leading with it inside of your classroom does as well. How do we achieve this?

Most begin by becoming writers themselves: people who make a dedicated practice out of communicating their ideas purposefully, about things that really matter. We don’t have to publish, although many make this a goal. Some begin by keeping notebooks where they gather and tinker with new ideas, while others commit to reflective writing each day, using their practice as a vehicle for professional or personal growth. Many set goals that motivate them to get their work out into the world, but going public isn’t a requirement. It’s a choice. The one thing that all writers seem to have in common is the desire to use their words with intention and their willingness to do so habitually. Discipline is soul-work, after all.

The Bigger Challenge

That few teachers identify themselves as writers is troubling, but the notion that their vocation undermines their potential to do so is a bitter irony that is worthy of greater attention. Teachers struggle to find the time and energy to sustain writerly habits, as many over-scheduled working people do. The consequences of limited writing practice may be greater for teachers, though. When teachers aren’t writing, their productivity and progress isn’t the only thing that suffers. They fail to develop the confidence or the skills necessary to support their students as well. According to Duke University political scientist and scholar writer Michael Munger, consistency is key for those who intend to become writers and especially, for those who hope to teach writing. “We train people in methods, and theory,” he suggests, “but we don’t tell them that writing is something you have to practice.”

The history of writing instruction in the United States seems to confirm this. Fifty years ago, writing teachers provided direct instruction of spelling, punctuation, grammar and mechanics. The rules mattered more than the consistent practice of writing, and while some students became proficient writers this way, others did not. This inspired schools of education to shift away from traditional instruction as they embraced a far more creative and collaborative approach. Students were invited to experiment with diverse modes and genres, share their works in progress, and seek feedback from peers as well as teachers. This movement turned teachers’ attention to the process of writing and the development of certain habits and attitudes. Many students thrived in this new culture, but some did not.

Today, writing teachers struggle to balance students’ attention to quantity and quality as they fight for time to consistently coach writing in their classrooms. Some have reduced their curriculum to quick assignments and lessons that attend only to the surface of a text. They hope that teaching the mechanics of writing will be enough to build better writers, but as poignancy takes a back seat to proficiency, writing becomes formulaic and unimaginative, and teachers lose confidence in their abilities to coach the craft well. As the demands of other content areas and the special needs of students grow, those who were never able to fully realize the potential of quality writing instruction often choose to eliminate it altogether.

The Change

It’s true that those who fail to write well often underperform in other content area classes, but what’s more disturbing is that weak writers typically lack the ability to successfully advocate for their own needs and the needs of others. Perhaps poor test scores aren’t enough to inspire significant change in how teachers support writers, but this reality should: inequities in writing instruction and performance inspire social inequities and injustices as well. Confident writers stand up and speak out while those who lack confidence fall silent.

Developing a robust understanding of quality writing and the skills necessary to produce it is the work of a lifetime, and the result of consistent practice. Becoming a quality teacher of writing is the work of an entire career, and it requires just as much dedication. Systems that nurture the development of writers and teachers of writing cultivate curriculum that attends to far more than state or local standards. Here, specific habits, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are defined, modeled, and assessed with great intention. Most importantly, everyone, including teachers and administrators, writes daily.

Professional development moves beyond events intended to merely build awareness or deepen knowledge. Writing and learning communities are established by and for teachers, and differentiated pathways for building capacity are created. The theories of change that drive these initiatives include one critical goal as well: the need to build and sustain teacher-writers and encourage their leadership at all levels of the system. This includes making teachers the true leaders of professional learning and positioning traditional facilitators as their mentors who serve them instead of experts to be obeyed.

In healthy systems where writers thrive, data drive the decisions that are made by students, teachers, and administrators alike. Nuanced understandings about data and its uses are encouraged as well. Rather than relying on numbers generated by tests, teachers learn how to code and establish hunches from qualitative data that are gathered from rich and rewarding learning experiences. People are consistently invited to share their interests, expertise, and needs. Audio and video recordings are captured, making the writing process and the learning that students engage in far more visible. Those who plan for change consider how it will be reflected in the ways people behave and feel rather than focusing exclusively on activities and performance outcomes. Everyone within the system becomes a learner, and all learners engage in consistent reflection. Documentation inspires deeper learning, and time for this kind of data analysis is regularly scheduled and carefully protected.

The Next Generation of Teachers and Writers

As social media inspires more frequent and deeper global connections among teachers, opportunities to begin and sustain powerful habits abound. Those in need of writing inspiration, support, and a bit of accountability can easily find it inside of thriving virtual communities. What’s more, the relationships built there and the learning that transpires often helps teachers begin to identify as writers and gain the confidence they need to experiment with new and improved practices in their classrooms. These teachers become beacons for others who know how important writing is and how much courage it takes to practice it regularly.

The next generation of writers and teachers will likely require fewer reminders about the importance of writing and more opportunities to get better at it. The fact is that most of them are writing outside the classroom for authentic purposes daily, if not hourly. They have meaningful things to say about their lives and their experiences, and they’re connected inside social networks where opportunities to raise their voices and support or even challenge others are ready and waiting for them. Those who are unable to use their words with discretion suffer immediate and even long-lasting discomfort, while others who have a way with words find their abilities to influence others and make a positive difference in their world rewarding.

This raises new questions for teachers of writing who are committed to regular practice. Is it important for them to engage on social media? How might they use their words to make a difference inside their networks? What does soulful social media engagement entail? How might they coach the writers they support to pursue this kind of writing as well?

As I consider these questions and the challenges we continue to face in our endeavors to build better writers, I’m reminded of one simple truth: when we run out of problems to solve, we run out of opportunities to teach and learn. Finding the right problem to address is worthy work, and chasing new problems once we’ve found our first solutions is even better. If history has shown us that our attention to the mechanics, the process, and even the culture we build around writing has helped some thrive while others continue to flail, perhaps it’s time to revisit the influence of consistent practice on the development of young writers. Perhaps it’s time to invest ourselves in our own daily writing practice as well.

Author

Further Reading

1. The Irish Times – The pros and cons of being a writer
2. EdWeek – Education Leaders Write Collaboratively
3. UCONN Today – Improving the Teaching of Writing

Keeping Teachers in the Classroom by Celebrating Awesome

By Monica Genta

Three out of 10. A statistic that those in education don’t like to talk about. It’s a startling stat about the number of teachers who leave the profession after just five short years. To put that into perspective, if students earned a three out of 10 on an assessment, that would be a failing grade. Schools across the country are earning an F in keeping their educators in the classroom.

So what happens in that short period of time? How does a teacher go from passionate about making an impact on kids to totally burning out? It is the frenzy of paperwork that hits their desk? Is it the lack of support from administrators or other educational leaders? Maybe it’s the crazy parents? It’s gotta be the crazy parents, right? Or perhaps we should point a finger at the lack of preparation at the university level? Is it one variable that leads teachers to packing up their cardboard boxes, walking through the front doors and never looking back, or is it a perfect storm of all of these?

I’m not here to research the why of the problem. I’m here to examine the how. Let’s answer a complicated question that has a simple answer. How do we keep great teachers in this great education system? The solution: celebrate awesome!

I’m not talking about just in those big, obvious “wow” moments. Don’t get me wrong, when the whole class is well-behaved and earns off-the-charts assessments scores that is great! I’m also not referring to when your instructional coach gives you a level four rating in all domains. That’s great too, but that isn’t what keeps teachers walking into the jungle of education. I’m talking about those little tiny moments of awesome that fit together perfectly to build one great, big awesome year! Like when you sit down at your desk for the first time all morning at 10:42 a.m., have your first sip of coffee and it’s magically still hot. Or when a student dances down the hallway because they have a beat stuck in their head. Let’s step back and cherish those.

It’s time to be honest. I’ve been in the classroom for nine years. I have beaten the scary statistic. I lasted more than five years. (Break for a dance party celebration) But the reality is this, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. After year four I found myself having one, big holy freak-out. I loved my job, but I wasn’t in love with my job. What scared me even more was the fact I was calling it a job. Before I preferred terms like career or calling. Now it was a J-O-B. Gross. I was considering selling used cars and even considered taking an application as the local Wal-Mart as they were hiring greeters. I knew I had to do something fast to change my mindset.

The following year I promised myself I was going to journal every day. I went on a quest to find the awesome each day for a whole year and documented it each night. To make a 365-day journey short I will explain it in one simple statement. It was a game changer! You see, I became intentional about looking for awesome. What I realized quickly was, it was there the whole time. The passion and purpose I had my first years teaching was right in front of me. Maybe too much Axe from the middle school hallway had fogged my vision. I simply had to step back to see things from a different perspective. Overall, my 365-day journal informally became something I called 365 Days of Awesome.

Let me be clear, it’s wasn’t the writing that changed things for me. It was the celebrating. I once read that a simple answer to one question sums up your perspective in life. The question format is every student’s favorite, fill in the blank with no word bank. Life is a ___________. How would you fill in the blank? I know my answer. Party. I believe each and every day we get the opportunity to celebrate this awesome gift. And as teachers, this celebration isn’t a party of one. It’s a party of 28 kids in your classroom. (ok so maybe 32 if your budget is tight) It’s a party with numerous other teachers. It’s a party with parents and school leaders and community members. Tons of people have RSVP’ed for this awesome celebration of education so take a seat at the head table and embrace the educational confetti and the jello surprise.

So what is the secret to success in keeping great teachers where they belong? It could be a mentoring system or a really great PTO that brings in pizza every Wednesday. But I actually think it can be summed up in three words: Passion, Purpose, and Positivity. When educators focus on the awesome of each day, they will teach with passion, live their purpose, and positivity will pour out of the four walls of their classroom.

Just remember, awesome is all around us. Every day you walk into your school something amazing is bound to happen. Some days that awesome is easy to see, it comes in the form of laughter, academic progress, achieving goals and building relationships with kids.

As the calendar rolls around to August and you start the next 180 day quest, learn to focus on those little awesome moments that have the power to change everything. Because sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.

Author

Further Reading

1. Forbes – We Need To Stop Teachers Leaving Or Our Students Will Suffer
2. Education Week – Program aims to help teachers stay in profession
3. Press-Enterprise – Is housing built for teachers a solution to California’s staffing shortage?

A Conversation with Mark Wu, Co Founder and CEO of Answerables

Crossing the Chasm in Education

The education market is crossing into the digital reality that other markets, like manufacturing, insurance, and retail, have already crossed. Typically, individuals make millions of small efforts to gain sufficient momentum to carry an initiative or company, or in this case, a whole market like education, out of the wading pool of novelty start-ups into the big leagues. With the dramatic influx of tablet computers in the last several years, loads of educators nationwide started this journey, carrying the sector into a digital transition.

Interestingly, once a market reaches a certain amount of momentum, typically at around a 15 percent adoption, widespread change can happen. It starts to be noticeable, with more “buzz.” It’s a sort of magic point.

The 1991 book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore argued that there is a gap that exists between the early adopters of any technology and the mass market because, typically, the groups are more conservative. He explained that many technologies initially get pulled into the market by enthusiasts but later fail to gain wider adoption because of this inherent market inertia. Institutions and markets tend to hold their form resolutely, decrying change in service to what they know or have known of structure. It has worked.

The education sector is famous for having many enthusiastic “one-offs,” or teachers who stand out from the rest in their tech and app use. School administrators often wonder how they can get “everybody else,” meaning all the other teachers in their school, to be the same.

Getting uniform adoption and competency by users is the bane of all technology adoption in every sector. There is not just a chasm to cross for markets but for individuals. Some cross it more quickly than others, and some run to it, while others hold the form of their structure, primarily if it has worked for them in the past.

The “chasm” is typified by a bell curve showing that after technology enters the scene, about 2 percent are the early “Innovators.” Culturally, we have been known to call these the “lunatic fringe” when discussing politics or social anomalies. In education, they are a more interestingly rare type – those who find, figure out and alter their teaching practice to give their students something entirely different than what was done before. They are minor miracle workers and those that buck the norm.

The next group is the “Early Adopters.” These constitute another 13 percent plus the original 2 percent for 15 percent. In education, these teachers are willful about their teaching and may not be the first to try new tech, but they are always on the prowl for things that improve learning.

As soon as someone else legitimizes it, they are behind it, and soon. What’s interesting is that in the U.S. today, we have exceeded the 15 percent norm for alternative educational paradigms already. The chasm is between this 15 percent and the “Early Majority,” or the next 34 percent leading up to the top of the bell curve. This “Mainstream” group is the hard part. This is where we work to get every other teacher to remain fully digital and have new levels of administrative change to facilitate a difference across the board. It requires a determination by leaders to lead through change, to gain, themselves, the mindset of the “Innovators” at the beginning of the curve where running entirely on technology has never been done before. It’s a changed viewpoint.

We are likely in the stage of “crossing the chasm” as a society with education into a new digital reality. This is because once the early adopters and the early majority begin to transition to new technology or adopt change, a certain momentum creates inevitable for every other part of the market.

There is a potential that learning consumerization is the bridge across the chasm for education to a place where the majority has adopted alternatives to traditional institutional public schooling.

In the U.S., we are already at the critical tipping point of children in the K-12 Education sector in various flavors of alternatives to traditional public education. The options to the historically typical school in the public system reached 17 percent in 2012, according to the data sets of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES 2013 study) depicting which types of schooling environments have what numbers of the total student body in K12. Granted, a large part of this was still public, just moved over into charter schools or “School Choice.”

What’s remarkable is that when this data is updated through 2016, it will probably show a much higher percentage have moved to alternatives since the charter schools and unschooling movement are stating record growth numbers.

Based on that data, the alternative shift is at least 20 percent, and indications are that it will continue to be pushed politically. These are also indicators that the technically sophisticated among us have allied with the monied interests to take advantage of the potential of digital learning, particularly items with consumer-like distributions.

This means learning consumerization has more than a slight chance of structural significance in the future of learning distribution. The change will not be like a tsunami, despite these numbers indicating a fast-moving crossing for this last great market, education.

Tools for sharing information, working systems, new best practices, digital lessons, and complete district-wide digital curriculum inventories (and making them accessible to all instructors) will become critical. 

Schools still have time. Building high-value digital curriculum software is not as simple as an animated game. Rigid materials packaged together into flawless experiential learning take much money and time. We will see a gradual evolution as more like the fast-moving and wide Gulfstream – teaming with life and possibility.

1. Education Week – 3 Shifts in the Use of Ed Tech: Exploring, Personalizing, Closing Equity Gaps
2. EMS1 – EMS education technology: 7 questions to answer before buying
3. Education Week – Research-Based Tech Implementation: Q&A With Eric Sheninger and Tom Murray