SchoolWhyde Initiatives

In my years in education, I’ve seen a lot of schoolwide initiatives. Learning styles, cooperative learning, AVID strategies, technology, differentiation, brain-based instruction, writing-across-the-curriculum, critical reading, 21st century learning (which I think may be different from technology, but I’m not entirely certain), social-emotional learning, block lunch. standards-based grading—the list goes on and on. 

I’m not trying to say anything negative about schoolwide initiatives because I fully believe that, if implemented effectively, a well-chosen initiative can transform a school. I’ve seen initiatives that worked well and ones that have failed more colossally than Crystal Pepsi, the Sony Betamax, Jar Jar Binks, the KFC Double Down, and Scrappy Doo. 

Here’s what I think separates the successful initiatives from the ones that fizzle or simply curl up and die. The problem occurs when the change-makers leave the “Why” out of schoolWhyde.  

I assume that most principals and other educational leaders who launch these plans have thought about, studied, read, and consulted experts about these initiatives before deciding to implement them. Much of this thinking and learning happens during the summer, I assume, when things are a little less busy around the school and the principals aren’t putting out fires (hopefully not literally), or maybe the ideas crop up at conferences or other professional learning opportunities. 

So now we have an educational leader who is excited about an idea and is ready to bring it to life. After all, there’s no time to waste because a truly transformational idea needs to be experienced as soon as possible by as many students as possible. So at the next inservice, faculty meeting, or other opportunity, the new initiative is unveiled to the staff.  

“This year, we are going to allow students to retest for a higher grade and redo homework assignments for full credit.” 

“Since we are focusing on schoolwide AVID strategies, I want to see Focused Note-Taking in every classroom.” 

“I want every student to have a 21st Century learning experience in every class this semester.”

“We’ve got Chromebooks, so I want to see them in use!” 

The What is announced, and the teachers excitedly (in most cases) start planning the How. How are we going to make this happen? 

There will probably be trainings. Before- and after-school seminars and workshops will be offered. E-mails will circulated and videos shared. The staff will plunge into the schoolwide initiative. Teams will meet. Lessons will be planned. And now we’re doing [insert name of initiative here] schoolwide.  

Maybe it will work.  And maybe it won’t. 

The reason it may not work, once again, is because we shortchange the Why. Teachers haven’t had the opportunity to wrap their heads around the rationale for the decision. They aren’t all on board. They haven’t become true believers. 

Truly transformational movements aren’t simple. They’re backed by extensive theory, research, and thought. They’re rarely as easy as they seem. 

Take the redo/retest thing, for example. Allowing multiple attempts to complete homework correctly and retake tests flies in the face of the educational experiences of most teachers who are in the classroom now, so most of us haven’t experienced this firsthand from the student perspective. The theory behind it is complex and multifaceted, but it makes good sense. The problem occurs when teachers adopt the wrong reasons for the initiative. It’s not about making sure every kid gets an A. It’s not preventing hurt feelings and panicky parent phone calls. It’s not about instilling high self-esteem. And it’s certainly not about being able to report lower failure rates. Allowing students to redo homework assignments and retest happens because we believe that learning is more important than recording a grade and that sometimes mastering something involves making some mistakes along the way. 

Getting an entire faculty on board with any initiatives requires time to allow everyone—not just the instructional leaders on campus—to ponder, study, think ideas through, ask questions, raise objections, troubleshoot, and establish a unified vision grounded in a shared understanding of the Why behind the What and the How. Getting one’s head wrapped around the ins and outs of any initiative takes time and effort, but good instructional leaders know that the effort will pay off. 

In the case of Focused Note-Taking (one of my personal favorite AVID strategies), teachers need time to understand that it’s not just about the layout of the paper on which the notes are written. Cornell Notes are one type of notes, and they aren’t the best type of notes in every situation.  When educators have a clear vision of why we ask students to take notes in school, how to establish a clear purpose for the note-taking, what are the various types of notes and why each type is useful, how to teach students to make informed note-taking decisions, why the note-taking process springs from research on learning, and how to incorporate multiple meaningful interactions with notes into the learning process, then (and only then) will Focused Note-Taking take off as a schoolwide initiative. 

Teachers must be well-versed in the thinking behind any strategy or initiative so they can “sell” it to students, field questions from parents and colleagues, and make informed instructional decisions about how to bring the initiative to life. Once the entire staff takes ownership of the idea, schoolWhyde implementation succeeds. 

Maybe it's time to do some formative assessment on our campuses to see how well we understand the Whys behind our schoolwide initiatives. Ask one another to explain the thinking behind the movement. If you can't rattle off a list of reasons and explain your thoughts with certainty, ask for clarification, for more information, and for more conversation at the campus level.

If your campus initiatives have stalled out, consider spending some more time in departments, in teams, and as an entire staff to recalibrate your thinking. Read the works of the educational thinkers endorsing these initiatives. Get more professional development. Discuss and clarify the initiative and the research that supports it. Make sure everyone is on board. When all members of the campus community have an understanding that matches that of the ones who are spearheading the initiative, your efforts to spread a practice across a campus will work...and make an impact.

Surprise!

Surprises can be fun, like when a big chocolate cake is delivered to your workplace on your birthday by a former coworker, when kids fix Mom breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day, when teachers receive an e-mail from a former student who, years later, decides to say thanks for making a difference, or when you turn on the tv on a lazy Saturday afternoon and stumble upon a back-to-back showing of Grease and Grease 2.

Other surprises are less delightful: seeing the cop car as you round the bend and realize you’re doing 45 in a school zone, receiving your electric bill for the hottest month of the summer, finding out that you owe way more than you planned on your income tax, receiving a call from your teenager informing you that your new car he borrowed is totaled, or arriving home after a long weekend getaway to discover your hot water heater has leaked and flooded the house. Surprise!

No one likes an unpleasant surprise they could have done something about if they had been aware ahead of time. This statement is especially relevant this week, the week when students’ midterm report cards arrive. As educators, it’s important for us to grade ourselves on how often we surprise our students.

Back in the days before online gradebooks, it was highly likely that the first time a student saw his average was on a report card. Surprises were frequent, and teachers kept their pen-and-ink gradebooks under lock and key. As a student during that era, I don’t recall ever really knowing how I was doing in classes, nor could I tell you what was expected to make a certain grade. Grades just appeared on assignments and projects, determined by some intangible “teacher expertise” scale. I’ve heard teachers since then say things like, “I just know what an A is,” as if that were sufficient criteria to bestow an evaluative grade. It’s a good thing they “just know” because their students don’t.  

Certainly, grade surprises are ones that should be—and, now that we have gradebooks that can be accessed remotely 24/7 even on our smart watches, could be—avoided, but I think the most crucial surprises to avoid are the ones where students are unaware of their levels of proficiency in a course. The grade on the test shouldn’t be a student’s first indication that he doesn’t know how to factor a polynomial, explain the theme of a short story, or trace the path of a potato chip as it passes through the digestive system. At frequent spots along the way to the final grade, the student should have had opportunities to receive crystal-clear feedback about how he is doing. He should understand what mastery entails and where he stands on the ladder to reach that level.   

I’ve found that many teenagers are acutely unaware of themselves academically. Left to their own devices, most students have no idea what they don’t know or when their understanding is sketchy or precarious. They confuse time and effort with mastery (“I studied for six hours. How could I make a grade that low?”). Unless their teachers are explicit in their low-stakes formative assessments and are strategic about how those assessments provide just-in-time feedback and and an action plan for students to improve, students will remain in the fog of self-delusion that leads for future surprises.

Questions like these are worth discussing with colleagues and teammates as you shape your formative assessment and feedback plans:

• How do I communicate what proficiency entails to my students and their parents?
• Does my gradebook provide useful feedback with grades that reflect mastery of curricular objectives or learning targets rather than non-academic factors?
• Do my rubrics and proficiency scales offer descriptive criteria that are used to instruct and offer feedback to students, not to justify a grade?
• Am I grading against end-of-the-year mastery criteria at the beginning of the year, or am I allowing my students to experience success in learning that is tiered with increasing expectations as students progress in their proficiency?
• What am I doing to help my students see themselves as learners, not performers, and to give them guidance about the next step to take, wherever they are on the road to mastery?
• Do I see my students as learners who can improve throughout the year, or do I view some students with a fixed mindset that suggests progress is unlikely?
• How often do I give formative feedback that is not linked to a grade?
• How long do students have to wait to learn how they are doing?
• Do my students know what to do to improve?
• Is the path to improvement for struggling students only available to those students who are willing and able to come in for extra help outside class time?
• Are there daily grades in my gradebook that provide an idea of how well students have mastered the content or skills measured on each major assessment?

For some of us, the answers to these questions reveal some uncomfortable truths about practices we’ve held onto for years. The answers aren’t easy, but the discussion that follows can be a rich opportunity for transformation of your teams, departments, and campuses, which will lead to greater student achievement and so many fewer surprises.

Thanks for all you do to minimize the unwelcome kind of surprises for your students. 

Failing at Passing

“What’s your failure rate?”

That’s a question principals, department heads, and other interested parties may be asking teachers in upcoming weeks. It’s a question that causes anxiety, tension, and cognitive conflict for many teachers. The expected or “right” answer to that question had better be a really low number or, preferably, zero. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to make sure everyone passes, right? No child is left behind. We don’t let kids fail.

Receiving messages like these--ones teachers may interpret to mean they are not allowed to have any Fs in their gradebooks—causes angst because not letting kids fail isn’t as simple as it seems. When teachers look at their gradebooks and notice that students are failing, they’re faced with a dilemma that seems resolvable through several pathways:

• Devise some sort of do-over plan (or, in the case of some students who are missing assignments, a “do” plan), which could involve retaking tests and/or amnesty for incomplete or missing work.

• Add in a few “extra” assignments that struggling students are sure to do well on to counterbalance low grades already in the gradebook. This solution typically involves participation grades or “creative” assignments with low standards for success.  

• Lower their standards. Make tests and assessments easier. Grade work for completion rather than accuracy. If students can’t reach the bar, lower it.

• Do some gradebook magic tricks that cause some assignments to simply disappear and some grades to rise on their own. Presto! No more failing students!

Each of the these solutions is problematic, and some are completely unethical. But we all know that when feeling trapped in a no-win situation, sometimes people make poor choices.

The thing that frustrates and frequently infuriates teachers faced with the mandate to eliminate student failures is that it’s hard to give a passing grade to a student who has put forth no effort in class. This student doesn’t deserve to pass. He’s done absolutely nothing all semester. One problem with the no-fail classroom is that some students have learned to work the system. They know that the teacher is going to reach a point of desperation and are hedging their bets that things are going to get easier for them so that they can pass without earning the grade.

Here’s the truth as I see it:  A student who hasn’t mastered the objectives and standards for a course shouldn’t pass the course.

Here’s the caveat that accompanies that truth: Most gradebooks measure things other than objectives and standards. If a student is failing a teacher’s class because of factors unrelated to objectives or standards, that failure is difficult to defend.

In other words, if the student is failing because of a lack of compliance but knows and can demonstrate what he or she is supposed to know, that student deserves to pass. If passing a class hinges on completion of activities and assignments that don’t relate to the state standards, teachers ought to rethink what they are putting in their gradebooks.

I can’t find a Texas state standard that says that students have to demonstrate the ability to complete work on time. There aren’t standards that stipulate that students color maps neatly in social studies class. I’m pretty sure that following a correct heading format isn’t a state objective, nor is having a parent sign a syllabus, letter, or reading/practice log. Anything related to actual classroom behavior should be off-limits in a gradebook. Finding words in a word search? Nope. Baking a cake or cookies should probably only count for a grade in Family and Consumer Science classes as there isn’t a state objective in academic classes that involves food preparation, procurement, or consumption. And there’s no objective that says students must donate tissues, paper towels, or other classroom supplies.

In my days as a student, I received grades or suffered numerical penalties for every one of those things at some point, and I have given grades or deducted points for many of them over the years as a classroom teacher. I’m sure most of us have. But when we know better, we have to do better.

Before I knew better, some students failed my class who probably had mastered the objectives of the course, and other students received inflated grades in my class because of their compliance, their art skills, and their participation, not because of their high-level mastery of the objectives. Looking back, both of those bother me.

Gradebooks have one job: to communicate whether a student has mastered the objectives of a course. Recording grades based on completion or on aspects unrelated to standards misleads parents and students about students’ progress. It also unfairly penalizes students who know the content and skills but can’t be bothered to jump through the extraneous hoops.

A student, then, who doesn’t master the objectives of a course might receive a failing grade. But what about that lingering refrain that says, “We don’t let students fail”? Educators should be relentless in their efforts to teach students so they can master objectives. That doesn’t mean that teachers give up on students, saying, “If they’re not going to try, then that’s their decision.” Students are not adults and don’t get to make that decision. It also doesn’t mean lowering the bar—as long as the bar is at the level expected by the state, not a bar set at an extra-high level because teachers believe they are teaching a grade much higher than the one they actually teach.

This whole discussion about grading and assessment is a thorny one, and most of us are still struggling to find the answers. As we search for solutions and try to reach a shared understanding, it’s essential that teachers talk with one another and with administrators about practices and expectations. What grades are needed to provide an accurate and reasonable picture of a student’s learning? What do we want our gradebooks to communicate? What are the standards to which we intend to hold our students accountable? How are we measuring progress toward those standards? What is acceptable evidence of mastery? What role does daily work play in the gradebook?  What does an A mean? What does a C mean? How are we encouraging our students to become learners rather than performers and completers? What legacy practices are we holding onto that violate what we claim to believe about assessment?

Assessment that is not meaningful is a waste of effort for students and a waste of time for teachers. And discussion about failure rates is only meaningful when teachers, parents, administrators, and students understand what passing and failing truly mean and when teachers focus on learning goals instead of compliance.

Hearts and Grades

Hearts and Grades

How My Valentine’s Day Craft Project Helped Me Clarify My Thinking About How Students Learn and How We Assess It

Last Wednesday at work, two of my new coworkers placed Valentine’s Day cards and candies on my desk. Generally oblivious to holiday gift-giving occasions at work, I had given little (actually, no) thought to providing any red-and-pink merriment for my teammates, so this took me by surprise. In the ensuing discussion with my officemates about how awful I am at this sort of thing, one of the bunch threw down the challenge that I make something for them. “We want a handmade card,” is what I believe she actually said.

My new work friends have already learned that I enjoy (and can be cajoled into) making things. I once brought some homemade bread to work just because I felt like baking; a few weeks ago I responded to a joking request that I bake cookies for the next day’s planning meeting by bringing in several dozen pecan sandies. And I caused a bit of a stir with my slightly-irreverent set of decoupaged ornaments at the end-of-semester white elephant gift exchange. I think it’s become a bit of a game of “let’s see if Craig will do it,” and I fall victim to the challenge nearly every time.

The challenge of handmade Valentine cards seemed so unchallenging. A more miraculous feat, I thought, would be to learn to crochet tiny Valentine hearts. Wouldn’t that be a fun new skill to teach myself...and a delightful gift for my team!

That night, I sat on the sofa and tried to learn to crochet. Six days later, on Tuesday the 16th, I delivered three mostly-heart-shaped crocheted creations to my teammates.

Between the time I began and completed my task, I had the chance to hear an interesting and challenging presentation by Tom Schimmer, who spoke to many of our secondary teachers about assessment during our professional development day on Monday.

As I was working on my craft project Monday night, I couldn’t help but think about how my own learning effort related to what I’d gleaned from Schimmer. By the time I had finished the final stitch, I had answered a few questions and raised some new ones about learning and assessment.

First of all, my heart-making drove home the point that not everyone starts off on an equal playing field. I quickly realized that the maker of the YouTube video claiming to teach “beginners” like me how to crochet a simple heart had failed to preassess her learners and had presupposed that I already knew things like how to tie a slip knot, how to hold the yarn, how to make a chain, single crochet, double crochet, and triple crochet, and more. Try as I might, this beginner couldn’t keep up with her nimble fingerwork during the 15-minute video.

To catch up, I embarked on the adult equivalent of remedial tutorials by watching a 30-minute video that taught me the basics of crochet. I appreciated that the instructor on that video tried his best to provide me with mnemonics and plenty of practice so that I could--after pausing it frequently and rewinding dozens of times--complete all of the basic stitches with semi-confidence. (Sadly, students can't typically pause and rewind our classes as easily.) It was time for me to rejoin the “class,” and I was already at least two hours late.

Adding to my difficulty was the fact that I have a learning difference. I am left handed. This wouldn’t be an issue if almost all of the videos available for the heart-making tutorial weren’t made by right-handed crocheters for right-handed students. As I watched the videos of unfamiliar moves and tried to mimic them, I had to concentrate extra hard to transpose each move by flipping it from right to left. This must be what it feels like to be a student who struggles with the very act of seeing text as most of us see it. Concentration was difficult yet mandatory if I hoped to succeed.

Suffice it to say that I went to bed that first night without a satisfactory final product. In fact, the result of my efforts was a lumpy tangle of yarn that resembled the shape of an actual human heart more than the familiar Valentine’s version.

If a teacher had graded the outcome of my homework that night, I would have received an F (or perhaps a low C if the teacher were feeling generous). What my teacher would not have known is that at the beginning of the evening, I didn’t even know how to hold a crochet hook and that four hours of hard effort later, I had created something that showed (to me) some promise that I might one day conquer this task. I felt hopeful about my progress; I’m not sure that I would have remained motivated at this point, though, if a grade had been entered in the gradebook to remind me that I still had far to go.

The next night, life got in the way of my progress. I had other, more pressing, work to do for a presentation I was giving on Friday, so I didn’t return to my handicraft. If there’d been a homework grade for that night’s work, I’d have a zero in the gradebook.

Things went from bad to worse the next evening when I turned on YouTube to learn more about how to proceed. I determined that perhaps I should view a different video on the same subject and was shocked to learn that there are multiple ways to crochet a tiny heart. Some began with an elusive contraption called a “magic circle” while others wanted me to create a chain and join it to itself. There’s lots of talk of crocheting into holes, but it was never clear to me which of the many holes in my sloppy creation should be the home for the stitches. So many mixed messages! So many teachers delivering instruction at breakneck speed! Each of my attempts turned out different from the previous, and not in a good way.

Fortunately, I knew that the next day I would be riding in a car on a roadtrip with my friend Elaine, who happens to be an expert at all things yarn-related. I sent a quick message (along with my pitiful photo of my attempt) asking for an in-person tutorial, and she gladly agreed. Even better, she complimented my efforts and reassured me that hope was not lost.

We spent about an hour of next-day’s journey working on my hearts. Elaine was a patient teacher, but my disability threw her for a loop. Teaching someone to crochet is hard; teaching someone who crochets with the opposite hand is even more of a challenge. Because my stitches were backward and because I had to work around the circle in the other direction, Elaine had a tough time analyzing the source of my mistakes and figuring out how to redirect my efforts. At several points, she took the emerging heart away from me and, in attempting to diagnose what was wrong, finished the project itself. This resulted in a pretty heart--much prettier than the ones I made on my own--but didn’t help me learn to do it myself. How often as a teacher have I been guilty of doing all the work for my students and assuming they understood because they witnessed it?

What I found most useful was when Elaine took me on a tour of a completed sample and showed me the “why” behind its construction. Once I understood the philosophy behind each section and how they fit together, I felt much better equipped to tackle the rest of the project on my own.

Creating a suitable final product took longer than anticipated. On Monday night, I finally put everything together and managed to produce a few passable hearts. Since it was already two days after Valentine’s Day, I could wait for no further improvements.  I decided to deliver the hearts on Tuesday.

My crocheted hearts weren’t perfect; I would have given them a B+ if I’d been grading them because I clearly demonstrated understanding of the objective, produced a product that fit the criteria, but didn’t exhibit advanced understanding. If I had had more time, I certainly would have attempted to create an A+ heart, but I’m happy with my B+.

There’s just one problem. I delivered my hearts two days late. With Valentine’s Day on Sunday, they were due on Monday, so would I receive a late grade penalty? How many points off? 15? 25? Ouch! I am going to have a failing grade on my report card.

My grade gets even lower if you average in my near-failing first attempt and the zero I received for not having time to do my homework the next night. So what is my grade in the gradebook communicating about my learning?

If we agree that the purpose of grades is to provide an accurate report of what students have learned, shouldn’t my final grade for this project be a B+ since I can make a B+ heart? If my report card says something different, how is the grade useful to me or to anyone else who sees it and wants to know about my mastery of the performance objective?

These were the kinds of questions Schimmer brought up in his presentation. And, like most challenging questions, these raised more questions than answers. I’m completely on board with beginning discussions on how to make our grades meaningful and useful in directing and motivating further learning. Making this happen, however, means that teachers and campuses are going to have to wade into some murky waters, turn a critical eye on time-honored and comfortable practices, and completely rethink what teaching and assessment look like.

I envision gradebooks with a few essential grades each six weeks, grades that can be entered and adjusted throughout the grading period as students evolve in their mastery. Maybe there will be some unweighted grades recorded to show parents about students’ practice attempts along the way. These could help guide students to know where they need to improve on each individual skill that is part of the final assessment but wouldn’t penalize the students who took a little longer to catch on or took an unsuccessful risk. The time teachers used to spend grading and recording a multitude of assignments can be reallocated to helping students in their various paths on the road to mastery. All of this sounds great to me, but it’s not going to look like any classroom I attended or have taught in. For one thing, the gradebook is going to be less full and more meaningful. More important, though, students should be doing the work to demonstrate what they've learned, but it will be happening in different ways and at different paces. Things might get a bit messy.

The outcomes of this transformation might not be perfect at first--like my early attempts at crocheting a heart--but with enough introspection, troubleshooting, study, and vision, schools can transform to have a  culture of learning that empowers all students to continue to strive to be the best they can be. I’m ready to wade into these waters. Who’s coming with me?

Read more about assessment from Tom Schimmer and his associates here.

Rubrics! Who Needs Them? You and Your Students

When I first started teaching English back in the day of dot matrix printers, I had never heard of that thing we call a rubric. Sure, we had criteria for assessing student work. but it was mostly in our heads. We viewed the product and, in our all-knowing English teacher wisdom, bestowed the grade the work deserved. I'd scrawl comments in the margins (mostly ones I would have to later interpret for a handful of conscientious students who couldn't read my red-penmanship) and hand the papers back. The great and powerful McKinney had spoken!

Fortunately, I've come a long way in 20 or so years. I now believe in the power of the rubric. I've written before about the importance of sharing rubrics with students before the assignment is completed and helping them to use rubrics to inform their work, but I've recently come to value to an equal degree the use of rubrics after assessment to guide their future efforts. 

In my humanities class, I have a recurring assignment called a Humanities Arts Experience, colloquially referred to by the pronounceable acronym HAE. In a nutshell, students venture into the real world for an arts experience at a theatre, museum, gallery, or concert hall and compose a newspaper-style review of their experiences. The rubric I've used for years is holistic, combining a number of skills and criteria for each grading designation. A "B paper," for instance, is more general than specific, relies more on summary than analysis, and contains errors in conventions that cause some minor difficulty for the reader. 

On the most recent essay,however, I developed a more detailed rubric. This one had eight criteria, and each criterion was detailed in a spreadsheet with descriptors for exemplary, proficient, acceptable, needs improvement, and unacceptable work.  

Here's a bit of technical stuff. Skip this paragraph if you're a technophobe. Students submitted their essays online on a Doc via Google Classroom, and I used the apps and extensions Doctopus and Goobric to attach my rubric electronically to each essay. All I had to do was "digest" the spreadsheet rubric using Doctopus, open the rubric on Goobric, select the tab for each criterion, click the appropriate descriptor in each category, type comments in the box, and press submit. Goobric pasted the entire rubric into the student's document, which I then returned to the student electronically. (Really, this is the easiest thing in the world. If technology appeals to you and you're tired of killing trees, grading mounds of physical papers, and listening to "my printer didn't work" excuses, you need to give this a try.)

Tomorrow in class, I will ask my students to open their documents and reflect on the rubric. If I deemed their introduction "acceptable" or told them their analysis "needs improvement," they can view my rubric's written explanation of what an exemplary product looks like in each of those categories, and they have something concrete to work on to improve next time. With eight categories to look at, the students will receive ample guidance to help their next HAE rival this one.   

Life was certainly easier for me when the great and powerful McKinney could bestow a grade on sight. What didn't occur to me then, though, was that the grade was not the most important thing. Student learning was. If it's my job to take these students in whatever condition they arrive in my classroom and lead them to where they need to be when they leave, I owe it to them to provide feedback and concrete steps for improvement. Students aren't naturally reflective, and many of them see the grade as the endpoint, but forcing them to spend some time thinking critically about their previous work and establishing a plan for improvement will help them develop the growth mindset and the tools they need to become exemplary.