Working Towards Debunking Education's “Big Lie”

Yong Zhao has a new book out titled “Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All Children” which I devoured as soon as it arrived on my doorstep.  Besides the fact that it is a relatively short book and a good read, I think why I found myself not able to put it down was the timeliness of the topic.  In my role as Curriculum Director of our district, I continue to wrestle with the challenges of how best to support teachers meeting the needs of all of our students on a daily basis.   I think Zhao does a nice job of articulating why that should happen while providing suggestions of how it can be done even though it is not an easy task to tackle.  

One thing we, as educators, need to be careful to avoid is thinking and especially stating, “my job is to get the kids ready for  X” with that “X” being ready for:  “next year’s third grade reading guarantee”, “6th grade and the middle school”, “the challenges of high school, because they won’t get the same breaks”, or “college and the real world, because they won’t get do-overs” and many other statements that are well intentioned, but cause us to lose our focus on our job.  The focus for us should be to meet our young people where they are NOW and help them to grow in one form or another.  We need to get them ready for TODAY.   

Getting students ready for “today” means meeting their needs and building on their strengths.  Zhao points out that this is counter to the current belief in education that there are a set of skills and knowledge that everyone is required to have in order to live successfully in the world and emphasizes that assumption is not true any longer for three major reasons:

“...traditional valued skills and knowledge have become obsolete, and we need new human qualities for the new world” (Zhao, 2018, p.8).  

“...each person (has) a unique, jagged profile of abilities and desires, stronger in some areas and weaker in others” (Zhao, 2018, p.9). (also see the TedTalk Myth of Average)

“...in a new world where smart technology has replaced...humans in routine tasks, we need human beings to be unique, creative, and entrepreneurial” (Zhao, 2018, p.9).

Let’s think about that for a minute.  Does the education system, as it currently stands, allow us to nurture our students’ individual passions and strengths (roots)?  One could argue that “the only passion it cares about is the passion to become a good student” (Zhao, 2018, p.17) or worse the system “actively suppresses individual talents and passions by defining what educational success means and convincing students, parents, and the public to accept the definition” (Zhao, 2018, p. 17).  That definition being: follows school rules, completes homework, sits and listens to what is taught, aces the tests, never questions the value of what they are asked to learn. (Zhao, 2018).

Fortunately, Zhao doesn’t end the discussion there, but proposes a number of actions we can take on a variety of levels including within the Government, Public (Parent’s included), Higher Education, and even educators themself.  Focusing on the educators, Zhao suggests that in order to develop a more personalizable education teachers must develop a certain set of qualities including:

The Ability to Identify Strengths and Passions  

“The child cannot be defined by prescribed standards or standardized tests”

(Zhao, 2018, p.79) and teachers should not focus on the weakness

(which leads to mediocrity), but build on each child’s strength.

The Ability to Inspire and Challenge  

This includes holding high expectations for all students and inspiring great

confidence in their strengths.  High expectations is the number one factor in

John Hattie’s research of effect sizes. (see  Confession of a Closet Data Avoider)

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

This is looking at our young people as human beings (not just as students) with

diverse experiences and backgrounds.

(see “Raising Young People as Human Beings…”)

A Broad and Long-Term Perspective of Education

Focus on the development of human qualities more than the acquisition of

knowledge. (see “What is Your One Wish for This School Year?”)  This is more

of a focus on long term educational outcomes than short-term instructional

outcomes.

Management and Leadership

This is not classroom management, but a high reliance on our own executive

function skills to “juggle” or manage various individual projects, student learning

plans, pathways of learning, etc.that take place  in a student centered classroom

Resourcefulness and Collaboration

Supporting Teacher Collective Efficacy comes to mind here along with the fact

teachersare great at “begging, borrowing, and stealing”, a.k.a. being resourceful.  

Everything we do should point to helping our young people to learn to develop and manage their own learning.  This is especially true for our two most important resources to support that learning: Time and Money.  Unfortunately, “The majority of schools do not provide significant financial resources to support student initiated programs out of their regular budgets, nor do they provide time out of the regular school day for students to pursue their talents or passions” (Zhao, 2018, p.17).  However, we can take those steps within our classrooms by developing these qualities Zhao has mentioned as well as keeping our eyes out for George Couros' eight signs of an innovative classroom to help us to work towards debunking “Education's Big Lie” that today's schools are designed for our young people to discover themselves and reach their full potential.  

References

Zhao, Yong (2018).  Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All Children.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

We Need to Change the Story

Let me start by saying that schools are not the problem when it comes to gun violence taking place in our schools today.  I want to be clear on that from the beginning.  At the same time, I believe we should continue to look to schools for help with the solution.  This is especially true when it comes to working with all types of young people, including those who struggle with mental illness.  Although I have believed this for a long time and have addressed these thoughts in a number of posts on this blog (Schools as a Greenhouse, Change a Practice-Change a Life, Raising Young People as Human Beings…, and others) the idea of the importance of nurturing our students roots hit home when I opened the paper this morning and saw this political cartoon that was just too analogous to the “roots theme” from our district to not address.

It is not the best picture, but hopefully you can see the title “The Root of Evil” below the picture with the “roots” growing underneath the most recent school shooter’s identifying traits including: indifference, detachment, disaffection, ambivalence, etc. all growing from mental illness with the culmination or “fruit/product” being the school shooter.  When I saw this image, I immediately contrasted it with this image taken from a T-shirt our high school staff have worn over the years emphasizing the importance of focusing on “nurturing our students roots”.

What stood out to me was the contradiction of  the “roots” descriptors:  empathy, compassion, sacrifice, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, etc. between the two images and what role we as educators can play in helping our young people grow as they travel throughout our schools.  

There is no such thing as 100% guarantee of safety in schools and as we fielded calls concerning questions about metal detectors to A.L.I.C.E. training this week I go back to the “roots” and what we can control.  In my mind, the best thing we can do is to create and support a school culture which focuses on nurturing the roots of our young people.  This will create a culture which provides a “mentally and emotionally” safe place for all of our young people, no matter their background, and will naturally lead to a more “physically” safe place as well.  One example of how we are trying to build such a culture took place yesterday (2/16/18) during our most recent Professional Development Day.  We invited  Dr. Jay Berk  in as a guest speaker  to address students struggles with mental illness.  As expected, he did a great job of helping us to become more aware of what our students might be going through and gave many great insights and suggestions.  I highly recommend inviting him in to speak with your staff.   I am also in the middle of reading a book titled “Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them” by Ross Greene who just posted this editorial on “Why We Shouldn't Always Expel Kids…” on the TIME Magazine website.

In “Lost at School” Greene points out three ways we tend to address kids when they are a behavioral issue in class.  In short they are:

Plan A (Which we often start with, but shouldn’t be our go to.)

-Impose your will on the student as the adult and solve the problem unilaterally.

Plan B (How to pull this off is the focus of the book.)

-Work collaborative with the student to solve the problem together.

Plan C (C doesn’t stand for “caving”, but more prioritizing)

-Triage the problem and potentially set it aside temporarily.

I bring up the book because it goes a long way in providing ways to help both educators and students develop a culture of caring.  Most times students understand what the expectations are in schools and when they become a behavior problem it is not because they are trying to cause a problem.  Many times it is because they are not equipped to handle the problem as it is currently presented.  How we help our young people to develop the skills to handle the problem (nurture their roots) goes a long way to helping them mature (grow emotionally).   As a small example, when using Plan B there are three steps  to address a behavior, Greene points out that “Plan B always starts with the Empathy step, continues with Define the Adult Concerns step, and is capped off with the Invitation” (Greene, 2014, p.133).  

The empathy step is basically hearing the young person out in order to understand their concern.  It is a step that can not be skipped, but is most often done so because we are pressed for time to solve the issue or want to tell the students our expectations. Once you do complete the empathy step, you have a better understanding of what the student is thinking and the next step is to share with the student what you are thinking via “define the adult concern” step.  Finally, in the Invitation step, the teacher allows the student to have the first opportunity to develop a solution and the two work together to finalize a solution that they both agree to try.   You really need to read the book to get the full picture, but what I am trying to emphasize here is that school should be an environment which allows our young people to develop the skills they don’t currently possess and isn’t that why they come to school...to develop skills they do not currently possess?

   I think that goes back to the purpose of schools.  If we approach schooling in the light of a “preparing for life model” over a “curriculum transfer model” (see “What is Your One Wish for This School Year?”) we will work toward nurturing our students roots.   Emphasizing  meeting each of our students where they are and building those skills as needed will go a long way toward meeting all of our young people’s needs.  Our story can’t be about testing and accountability, it has to be about the responsibility we have to nurture our students roots which will help us to work toward changing the story for all of our students.

References

Greene, Ross. (2014).  Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are

Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. New York, NY: Scribner.

Revisiting “Inside the Black Box”

During a discussion at a professional development session earlier in the week the

question of the difference between being “diagnostic in your practice” and the “practice of formative assessing” came up.  When I reference “being diagnostic”, in my mind, it is not the same as giving a diagnostic assessment. The latter references a pre-assessment designed to determine where a student’s understanding about a topic is prior to introducing that topic, whereas the former is more of an “in the moment” informal assessment focused on a specific set of skills a student appears to be lacking,  is designed to try to gain an understanding of the student’s thinking, and ultimately determines the next best situation to put the student in based on that diagnosis so the student can build on current understanding.  Being diagnostic in your practice is also not necessarily the same as using formative assessments in class and that is where I was originally going with this post, but I am going to hold off on that thought until a later time because I got side tracked on the purpose of formative assessments when I revisited a Phi Delta Kappan article from 1998 titled “Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessments” by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam.  I suspect many of you have read or at least have heard of  “Inside the Black Box”, but when I began to re-read the article I honestly think we have gotten away from the authors’ original intent when it comes to formative assessments and thus the detour and encouragement for all of us to re-visit the article.  

As a reminder, Wiliam and Black point out, “A focus on standards and accountability that ignores the process of teaching and learning in the classroom will not provided the direction teachers need in their quest to improve (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p. 1).  In other words, educators need to focus on not what goes in or comes out of the mysterious “black box” of schooling, but what is taking place within the black box by focusing on practices within the classroom everyday.  Hence the term formative assessment or assessment “for” learning versus summative assessments or assessments “of” learning.  However, where I think we have diverged from the authors’ original intent is in the definition of learning.  In our rush for improvement and pressure from outside of the black box we, as educators, have tended to look at student learning to be equivalent to students gaining knowledge of a topic versus our young people understanding a topic.  Gaining knowledge of a topic ends up being much more shallow, yet can be measured and taught much more easily.  Determining if a student knows certain facts about a topic can be checked formatively and can be addressed quickly by telling them what they need to know and then formatively checked again.  In the end, we assessed for what we wanted the students to learn (a.k.a. the facts), but we didn’t assess for understanding.  “If the teacher assumes that knowledge is to be transmitted and learned, that understanding will develop later, and that clarity of exposition accompanied by rewards for patient reception are the essentials of good teaching, then formative assessments is hardly necessary” (Black & Wiliam, 1998,  p.9).  A curriculum transfer model for schools (see “Guilty as Charged!”) is not what Black and Wiliam had in mind when discussing the positive impact of formative assessments.  In order to improve formative assessments they suggest “concentrating on several essential elements:  the quality of teacher/pupil interactions, the stimulus and help for pupils to take active responsibility for their own learning, the particular help needed to move pupils out of the trap of ‘low achievement’, and the development of the habits necessary for all students to become lifelong learners” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p.9).  They also warn us of the dangers of focusing on external test as “they can lead teachers to act against their own better judgement about the best ways to develop the learning of their pupils” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p.11) and emphasize “delivery and coverage with poor understanding are pointless and can even be harmful” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p.8).  These suggestions and warnings should cause us to pause and reflect on the practices taking place in our own classrooms.

How often do we find ourselves rushing through the content in order to get to everything that needs to be covered before “the Test”?  Can we verbalize  where each of our students understanding of a topic or skill level lies?  Do we set aside time for our students to make their own connections based on  their current level of understanding?  Is our school culture focused on nurturing our students roots? (See Instructional Leader = Questioner not Expert).  I am not pointing fingers, I am asking these questions to myself as well and that is why I feel we have gotten away from the message found within “Inside the Black Box”.  However, I think  we must still ask the questions to ourselves.  Black & Wiliam emphasized that “this process will inevitably be a slow one...if the substantial rewards promised by the evidence are to be secured, each teacher must find his or her own ways of incorporating the lessons and ideas... (from formative assessments)... into his or her own patterns of classroom work.  Even with optimum training and support, such a process will take time” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p. 11).  As mentioned, “Inside the Black Box” was published 20 years ago this October and therefore much time has passed, but if we are optimizing on the wrong definition of learning then the amount of time won’t matter.  That is why I think it is important to focus on Black & Wiliam’s definition of formative assessments and to confront the question they pose to each of us, “Do I really know enough about the understanding of my pupils to be able to help each of them?” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p.8).

Questions to Myself (Especially in February)

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                      Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

-Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass-1892)

Shout out to Walt for summing it up.  #justkeepswimming  :)