10/15/2016

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NDCEL 2016[Selected Slides]

What tethers us to ineffectiveness and low

morale? What is no longer supportable in modern

education?

“Courage is not the absence of

fear. It’s the judgment that

something else is more

important than that fear.”

-- Ambrose Redmoon

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To what degree will we allow our

colleagues/teachers to hold beliefs and conduct

practices different from our own, if we believe our

own practices are ethical and effective, and

there’s are not?

Being good at taking

standardized tests

doesn’t qualify

students for creative

contribution to

society or successful

citizenship.

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Identify the Principles Involved, THEN Gather the Solutions

Example: How do I grade English Language Learners?

Principles/Tenets Involved:

• Teachers must be ethical. They cannot knowingly

falsify a score or grade.

• To be useful, grades must be accurate reports of

evidence of students’ performance against standards.

• Regular report cards report against regular, publicly

declared standards/outcomes. They cannot report

about irregular standards or anything not publicly

declared.

• Any test format that does not create an accurate report

of students’ degree of evidence of standards must be

changed so that it does or replaced by one that does. (continued)

Identify the Principles Involved, THEN Gather the Solutions

Example: How do I grade English Language Learners?

Principles Involved: (Continued)

• English Language Learners have a right to be assessed

accurately.

• Lack of language proficiency does not mean lack of

content proficiency.

• Effective teachers are mindful of cultural and

experiential bias in assessments and try to minimize

their impact.

If teachers act upon these principles,

what decisions/behaviors/policies should we see

in their assessment and grading procedures?

With colleagues,

reflect on the bigger questions:

How does my approach reflect what we know about students this age?

Why do we grade students?Does our current approaches best serve students? How do we communicate with parents?How does assessment inform our practice?Is what we’re doing fair and developmentally appropriate?How can we counter the negative impact of

poverty/mobility/issues on our students’ learning?What role does practice play in mastery?What is mastery for each curriculum we teach?What is homework, and how much should it count in the

overall grade?How are our current structures limiting us?

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With colleagues,

reflect on the bigger questions:

Whose voice is not heard in our deliberations?What do we know about differentiated practices and the latest

in cognitive theory and how are those aspects manifest in our classrooms? If not, why not?

Are we mired in complacency?Are we doing things just to perpetuate what has always been

done?Are we open to others’ points of view – why or why not? Does our report card express what we’re doing in the

classroom?How are modern classrooms different from classrooms thirty

years ago? Where will our practices look like 15 years from now? To what extent do we allow state, provincial, country, or

international exams to influence our classroom practices?

Sample Acts of Courage in Schools:

• Ask the larger questions of what we do

• Manifest expertise, articulate our pedagogy and

invite it’s critique

• Forgive others who have wronged us, and forgive

ourselves for how we’ve wronged others

• Require all students, teachers, administrators get

residential, outdoor education experiences of a

week or more

• Study executive function, self-efficacy, and

restorative justice practices for classroom

management and student achievement.

• Teach the way students best learn, not the way we

best learn (Students use that secret code…)

Questioning the Status Quo…

“The value of present education activity [is]

in the vocational “pay off” in the future.”

-- Curriculum theorist, Franklin Bobbitt,

1910, as quoted in Pinar, p. 122

• ‘Still true? Is this what we’re about? What does the modern

public think is the role of schools?

• Do we have a responsibility to influence our community’s

politics regarding schools because we are trained

professionals, and if so, what is universal enough that we

might all agree on it?

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My Response to Mike Schmoker’s

2010 Attack on Differentiation

• “Setting the Pedagogy Straight” (AMLE, Wormeli)

• differentiationcentral.com (Tomlinson)

Dr. Daniel Willingham,

Professor of Psychology

at the University of

Virginia

Books: Why Don’t All the Kids Like School?

When Can You Trust the Experts?

We are hired for how we

are similar to a company,

but we advance based on

how we are different.

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Our future depends

on this one here.

Doubt

Our greatest

Compass Rose:

In order for someone to accept feedback

or take a risk with a new idea, he must

admit first what he was doing was less

effective than his ego thought it was.

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Assumptions and Biases

that Are Hard to Overcome…

• Rubrics by their nature limit the next

generation.

• Teachers impart knowledge to their

students? ‘Not necessarily.

• “Show me the research that this works!”

• “We have more control when students sit

quietly in their desks for the whole period.”

• Students need to be punished for

infractions.

• “Grades motivate students.”

• Technology integration will improve

student achievement – Not without

pedagogy!

• Common Core will improve student

achievement – Not by itself.

• All English Language Learners should get

the same response.

• Middle school students know how to read

• Anyone of a non-dominant culture is

suspicious.

What Were We Thinking?• Everyone in the same subject in this grade

level is on the same page on the same day of

the week

• Plan accordingly because there is no more

paper supply after January

• The master schedule cannot be changed to

accommodate a compelling guest speaker.

• Students cannot re-do final exams.

• Sacrifice good pedagogy because people

who are untrained are telling you what to do.

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What Were We Thinking?• We can’t incorporate a new “app” in our lessons

because it promotes the use of personal technology

that school hasn’t sanctioned.

• Our new students are three grade levels below grade

level proficiencies but they have to do well on the

final exam anyway.

• “Stop being so creative,” a colleague comments.

“You’re making me look bad.”

“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you

into trouble, it’s what you know for sure

that ain’t so.”

- Mark Twain

“Do they know how to

ask good questions?”

-- Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap,

2008

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“We went to school. We were not taught how to think; we

were taught to reproduce what past thinkers thought….

…Instead of being taught to look for possibilities, we

were taught to exclude them. It’s as if we entered

school as a question mark… …and graduated

as a period.”

-- Michael Michalko,

Creative Thinkering,

2011, p. 3

Embrace the fact that, “[l]earning is fundamentally an act of creation, not

consumption of information.”

-- Sharon L. Bowman, Professional Trainer

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Active Creators, NOT

Passive Consumers!

“The Inner Net”

By David Bowden

Discern the

Pattern and Fill

in the Last Row

of Numbers

1

1 1

2 1

1 2 1 1

1 1 1 2 2 1

3 1 2 2 1 1

1 3 1 1 2 2 2 1

1 1 1 3 2 1 3 2 1 1

- From, Creative Thinkering, 2011, Michael Michalko,

p. 44

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Writer and educator, Margaret

Wheatley, is correct:

“We can’t be creative unless

we’re willing to be confused.”

Do teachers have the creativity to solve their own problems?

• My whole lesson today is based on accessing those three Websites, but the school’s Internet is down, so what can we do instead?

• Small groups are not working in my class, yet I know they’re important for many students’ learning. How do I get these students to stay focused on their group tasks?

• I’ve backed myself into a corner explaining an advanced science concept, and it’s not making sense to me, let alone to my students. What should I do?

• Angelica is far beyond where I’m comfortable teaching, but we have two more weeks in this unit for the rest of the class. What will I do with her that honors her readiness level?

• I’m supposed to differentiate for some of my students, but I don’t see any time to do it.

• My school’s current electronic gradebook system doesn’t allow me to post anything but norm-referenced scores, and I want to be more criterion-referenced in my grades. What can I do?

• Because I’m a veteran teacher, I’ve been asked to be the rotating teacher using a cart and moving from classroom to classroom each period so the new teacher can have his own room and not have so much to deal with his first year. How will I handle this?

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Just because we can’t fathom the logistics doesn’t mean we abandon the principle.

Re-frame.

“A student is not an interruption of our work…the student

is the purpose of it. We are not doing a favor by serving

the student…the student is doing us a favor by giving us

the opportunity to do so.”

-- William W. Purkey from an L.L. Bean Co. poster: “What is a customer?” by J.M. Eaton

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Don’t succumb to intellectual bias.

Build Empathy.

Engaged… Compliant…

Tomlinson: “If I laid out on my kitchen counter raw hamburger meat still in its Styrofoam container, cans of tomatoes and beans, jars of spices, an onion, and a bulb of garlic [and told guests to eat heartily]….My error would be that I confused ingredients for dinner with dinner itself.”

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Tomlinson: “One can make many different dishes with the same ingredients, by changing proportions, adding new ingredients, using the same ingredients in different ways, and so on.”

Time is NOT immutable.

Consider how personal

technology is changing the

way our students do

things.

We’ve entered a 24-7

work cycle. Official

homework as we know it

will soon fade.

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“What’s that foul

odor coming from

the middle school?”

Never sacrifice sound

pedagogy because

someone above you

isn’t there yet.

“Is my purpose to select talent or develop it?…If your

purpose as an educator is to select talent, then you must

work to maximize the differences among students. In other

words, on any measure of learning, you must try to achieve

the greatest possible variation in students' scores

…Unfortunately for students, the best means of maximizing

differences in learning is poor teaching. Nothing does it

better.”

-- Thomas R. Guskey, Education Leadership,

ASCD, November 2011, Pages 16-21

“If, on the other hand, your purpose as an educator is

to develop talent, then you…clarify what you want students

to learn and be able to do. Then you do everything possible

to ensure that all students learn those things well. If you

succeed, there should be little or no variation in measures of

student learning. All students are likely to attain high scores

on measures of achievement, and all might receive high

grades.

-- Thomas R. Guskey, Education Leadership,

ASCD, November 2011, Pages 16-21

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“Nobodyknows ahead of time how long

it takes anyone to learn

anything.”

Dr. Yung Tae Kim, “Dr.

Tae,” Physics Professor,

Skateboarding

Champion

Time is a variable, not an absolute.

‘Time to Change

the Metaphor:

Grades are NOT

compensation.

Grades are

communication:

They are an

accurate report of

what happened.

It’s what students carry forward, not what they

demonstrated during the unit of learning, that

is most indicative of true proficiency.

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We cannot conflate reports of

compliance with evidence of

mastery. Grades are reports of

learning, not doing.

Student A Student B Student C Student D

Fiction 70 50 87 100

Non-Fiction 70 90 87 60

Writing 70 60 0 60

Speaking 70 80 87 60

Listening 70 70 87 70

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Are We Clear on

the Difference?

• Formative Assessment

• Summative Judgment

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Formative vs Summative in Focus:

Lab Reports in a Science Class

(Or any other lab-like activity in any

subject area)

Two Homework Extremes that Focus Our Thinking

• If a student does none of the homework assignments, yet earns an “A” (top grade) on every formal assessment we give, does he earn anything less than an “A” on his report card?

• If a student does all of the homework well yet bombs every formal assessment, isn’t that also a red flag that something is amiss, and we need to take corrective action?

Feedback vs Assessment

Feedback: Holding up a mirror to students, showing them what they did and comparing it what they should have done – There’s no evaluative component!

Assessment: Gathering data so we can make a decision

Greatest Impact on Student Success: Formative feedback

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Two Ways to Begin Using Descriptive Feedback:

• “Point and Describe”

(from Teaching with Love & Logic, Jim Fay, David Funk)

• “Goal, Status, and Plan for the Goal”

1. Identify the objective/goal/standard/outcome

2. Identify where the student is in relation to the goal (Status)

3. Identify what needs to happen in order to close the gap

…comment on

decisions made and

their impact, NOT

quality of work.

When providing

descriptive

feedback that

builds

perseverance,

Effective Protocol for Data Analysisand Descriptive Feeddback found in many Schools:

Here’s What, So What, Now What

1. Here’s What: (data, factual statements, no commentary)

2. So What: (Interpretation of data, what patterns/insights do we perceive, what does the data say to us?)

3. Now What: (Plan of action, including new questions, next steps)

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Item

Topic or

Proficiency Right Wrong

Simple Mistake?

Really Don’t Understand

1 Dividing

fractions

2 Dividing

Fractions

3 Multiplying

Fractions

4 Multiplying

fractions

5 Reducing to

Smplst trms

6 Reducing to

Smplst trms

7Reciprocals

8Reciprocals

9Reciprocals

Date

Mr./Mrs./Miss ________________________,

I understand….

I need assistance in….

I suggestion the following four steps for me to take in

order to learn these content and skills:

Sincerely,

_______________________

Teacher Action

Result on Student

Achievement

Just telling students # correct

and incorrect

Negative influence on

achievement

Clarifying the scoring criteria Increase of 16 percentile points

Providing explanations as to

why their responses are

correct or incorrect

Increase of 20 percentile points

Asking students to continue

responding to an assessment

until they correctly answer the

items

Increase of 20 percentile points

Graphically portraying student

achievement

Increase of 26 percentile points

-- Marzano, CAGTW, pgs 5-6

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A child is attempting to ride a bicycle, and the

bike falls over. Another child, learning to walk, loses

her balance and lands on her bottom. A baby’s green

peas slide off his spoon as he moves it toward his

mouth. How do their parents respond? Good parents

don’t say, “You fail, you’re not able to meet bicycling

standards,” “I’ll develop a rubric for walking without

falling,” or, “We need a Common Core curriculum to

help you keep your food in your spoon.” ….[They]

simply say, “Try again.”

- Richard L. Curwin, Education Leadership,

ASCD, September 2014, p.38

Students should be allowed to re-do assessments until they achieve acceptable mastery, and they should be given full credit for having achieved such.

F.A.I.L.

First Attempt in Learning

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Recovering in full from a failure teaches more than being labeled for failure ever

could teach.

It’s a false assumption that giving a student an “F” or wagging an admonishing

finger from afar builds moral fiber, self-discipline, competence, and integrity.

Re-Do’s &

Re-Takes with students

and their teachers:

Are They Okay?

More than “okay!”

After 10,000 tries,

here’s a working

light bulb. ‘Any

questions?

Thomas Edison

A Perspective that Changes our Thinking:

“A ‘D’ is a coward’s ‘F.’ The student failed, but you didn’t have enough

guts to tell him.”

-- Doug Reeves

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We don’t let a

student’s

immaturity

dictate his

learning and

thereby his

destiny.

Consider graphic representations of

student achievement…

“I used to think…,

but now

I think…”

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‘Bold Actions that are Possible

When We are Brave Together:

• Remove Honor Roll. It has little to do with students’

academic achievement and personal maturation.

• End averaging of grades.

• Build and use full ropes initiatives courses on

school property.

• Put vocational training back into middle schools.

• Be open to students skipping grade levels.

• Get trained in gifted education so we can meet

advanced students’ needs in regular education

classrooms, if necessary.

• Practice restorative justice instead of invoking

punishment.

• Turn middle schools into true middle schools, not

junior versions of high school, a.k.a. junior high.

• Start all secondary levels at 9:30 in the morning or

later.

• Conduct impact surveys about our teaching and

professional development experiences.

• Invite students to use personal technologies in the

classroom and teach them to use them ethically.

• Walk side by side with a student who makes a

mistake – moral or immoral -- rather than label him

and assume the label builds moral fiber.

• Negotiate with subject-like colleagues what is

important and non-important in the curriculum.

• Open our practices to the close scrutiny of

respected colleagues.

• For leaders and colleagues: Help struggling

teachers instead of dismissing them, and when they

don’t respond at first or second, help them even

more.

• Teach in the ways students best learn, regardless

of whether or not it’s the way we best learn. Let’s

do the same with teachers and their professional

development.

• In a world in which everything can be looked up,

emphasize the power of memorization.

• Speak up about schools at community events.

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• Adjust the school’s master schedule to support

best practices; don’t sacrifice best practices to

support the master schedule.

• Revise our thinking in light of new evidence –

be open to correction from parents,

colleagues, and students.

• Participate in the national/international

conversations of your field. Start the

extended, candid conversations about

grading in your school.

• Put previous curriculum on subsequent tests,

even months later, and record the marks,

higher or lower, accordingly.

Accept the fact that teachers are no longer the

final arbiters of knowledge and teach

accordingly.

Accept the fact that schooling is not limited to

learning job skills so they can contribute to our

economy. Ultimately, it’s about passion and

meaning-making.

Embrace the very real positive effects of fiction

reading on critical-thinking, scholarly analysis,

problem-solving.

End the relentless reduction of every learning

element to a singular number, and fight the use

of single test scores for high stakes decisions.

• Accept a teaching or leadership position in a

low performing school.

• Accept a teaching or leadership position in a

high performing school.

• Take steps to resolve the growing disparities

between the have’s and have-not’s

• Make it the policy that we cannot take students

out of P.E., fine/performing arts, and tech

classes to double-up on remediation for

exams.

• Cultivate personal and professional creativity.

• Dedicate yourself and your faculty to ethical,

accurate grading practices. Real futures are at

stake.

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What goes unachieved in students because we chose to be politically safe?