Collaboration on a Pre-Snow Day

My kids always teach me a lot about thinking and learning.  Today, we were home because my wife had to have a surgical procedure on her foot.  While she was resting, my kids came to me and said they wanted to make chocolate eclairs.  Chocolate eclairs.  They have been watching the Food Network and have seen the Kids Baking Challenge, Chopped Junior and Cake Wars.  This was all they needed to see: young people making eclairs and other fun stuff!  So, they started on the eclairs.  I have never made eclairs, but they are a determined group!

What I learned about learning today.  One, children are still natural inquisitors. They watched the show, rewatched the show, wrote down directions, and found the recipe on foodnetwork.com. After our inspiration and entry activity (We had to go to the store!) and research, we were ready to begin.

We went through trial and error to determine if we were on the right track! We had a visual exemplar, directions and a model.  Well, they did.  They went through the recipe like troopers, collaborating all along the way.  They took turns mixing, stirring, reading, and because they were engaged, there was no arguing.  They had a problem to solve and were on a mission, and that engagement made them motivated.  I have talked about identity on this blog before. Today, my kids identified themselves as bakers; therefore, they pressed on.  As the facilitator of their learning, I asked questions, answered questions and sometimes demonstrated.

In the end, they made perfect pastries-- they even added in cinnamon and maple syrup to give distinctive flavor to the filling and decided that instead of chocolate, they used caramel and created a bacon, pecan, and brown sugar topping to top it all off.

Here are the eclairs after baking.  Nice and flaky

Here they are with the caramel bacon topping!

 The 4 C's were alive and well in our house today, so here are my takeaways:

1. Children need the time and space to delve into curiosity: When my children came to me, my first inclination was, "Can we just relax and watch the Disney Channel"-- that translates into them watching the Disney Channel and me playing a game on my phone.  They needed the time to satisfy their curiosity, and I was able to give them that space and time.
2. The end result is sometimes satisfaction in completing the project and not a test; the reward is an eclair: In our testing society, the sense of accomplishment and figuring out something is the better reward than a test score.  My kids learned about tempering an egg mixture with warm milk, mixing a batter for the right consistency, and knowing when the pasteries were done!
3. When kids are engaged, collaboration comes naturally. My kids get along OK, but they do fight like siblings, and they do often.  However, with a common identity and common mission, collaboration became a necessity to complete the task.  They naturally figured out what parts they could do and set out to collaborate and communicate to make  this happen.
4. When faced with a challenge, kids need the time for innovation and problem-solving: My kids had never made eclairs before.  Mostly what they have done is made a sandwich or microwaved some macaroni and cheese, so to take on this challenge was quite the task.  Once they felt comfortable with the process, they were able to innovate. They added maple syrup and a pinch of cinnamon to the filling.  Instead of chocolate covering, they covered with caramel and made pecan maple covered bacon to sprinkle on the top.  This was similar to what the kid on  the baking show did, but they were creating and felt confident to add this or that. When things weren't going exactly the way they thought, they had to figure it out so that the filling wasn't soupy or the fact that they did not have heavy cream for the caramel topping, so they improvised.
5. As a facilitator, I must know my role:  I have always seen myself as a facilitator in the classroom when I was an English teacher.  I would strive to design experiences for students, and that is where I need to know my role.  When we were making  the eclairs, I had to allow for failure and I had to design the space for problem-solving.  At times I was the guide, modeling.  In the end my power is giving them the power, skill and knowledge to do this again without my help.  I am confident that they could go in and replicate this recipe or find another one and apply their learning to the new one.

This experience on a day when I would have probably checked emails, played a couple of rounds of a virtual trivia game or watched television was the most powerful example of the work we are doing in our schools--or should be doing in our schools--We need to work on the identities of children, of teachers, of administrators to take us to that level where we need to be.   I have used the iceberg image in a previous post and the one below is more linear.  

Here, as we often do in schools, we work on changing the environment-- add technology or make collaborative spaces. Or, we focus on changing the behaviors of teachers or students, or we focus on skills development and drill skills or develop professionals professionally.  When we get to values and beliefs is when we start seeing the change.  When students believe in their work, they invest in in more.  When they identify as critical thinkers or collaborative learners, they think critically and collaborate.  This state does not just happen, but it is a process, and that is why teachers need the skills to help students reflect on values and beliefs.  That is why administrators need to be able to help teachers uncover their values and beliefs.  When we identify as learners, innovators, collaborators, chefs, or thinkers, our behaviors display this identity!

We are All Coaches

This week, I edged back into the second week of work after the holiday.  The first week was a nice ease into work, but this week came in like a ton of bricks.  I had the opportunity to do some good learning, but it is exhausting.  I participated in two days of Cognitive Coaching, delivered some professional learning for Instructional Technology Facilitators and ended the week doing some work with Adaptive Schools.  It was good to get back into learning to help me reflect on the work that I do as a supporter of Instructional coaches in our district.   I had the chance to ponder on a lot this week, but the main theme that kept circling back around is that in a dynamical system like a school system, we are all coaches or at least need to be coaches to move the district forward.


I love this graphic that depicts Robert Dilts's Levels of Logic:

Image: http://tomorrowsconsultant.com/journal-club-month-1-week-2-logical-levels/

As the graphic above shows, the environment and behavior are what is at the top, so those are the elements that get attention.  When we focus on the beliefs and values and a person's identity, then the behavior and environment change.  I am convinced that this kind of change comes only from communication and dialogue among educators. Here are some ways that I think we will impact change in our district with a focus on coaching skills:

School Leaders Are Coaches:

I cannot tell you how many times I sat with a teacher to go over their last evaluation, and the crux of the conversation was what the teacher did well and what the teacher could improve upon.  Our discussions centered around where the teacher landed on the rubric for teacher evaluation.   Inevitably, I would interject some strategies that the teacher may want to consider or offer some ideas that I know would help achieve higher ratings on the rubric.  When the teacher left my office, I had sufficiently shared with him or her how he or she can improve, and inevitably and unknowingly, the change I wanted to see-- the change our school needed to see-- had a small likelihood of happening because I had not really gotten to the underlying ideas and identity that the teacher held.  I offered strategies, but many of the teachers that we needed to see change in needed more than strategies.  Now enter coaching.  I have played back in my head some of the teachers that I have worked with that I know needed to change to be innovative and effective, and I wish I understood that as an administrator I was a coach, but I was not coaching; I was judging.  I wish that I had asked questions to the teacher about their practice:  What might be some possible ways that you could engage students in your class?.  I wish I had the skills to paraphrase and to listen to the teachers: "One thing that you hold value in is students' having passion for the content that you have."  Or, you feel frustrated because students do not have the passion you have and you are looking for a way to make that happen." The good news is that in my role I can help spread the word about the need for administrators needing coaching skills to have the impact that we desperately need to change schools.

Teachers as Coaches:

I see this as twofold:  Teachers need to be coaching each other, asking questions to each other about what they value and what they see through peer observations.  Teachers are also coaches to the students.  If we want students to be be critical thinkers, innovators, collaborators, question askers, creative participants, and communicators, they have to identify themselves as these. Coaching skills help all of us help others understand though processes to think about how they identify as a learner. We can bring as many strategies as we want to the classroom, but unless teachers and students identify themselves as innovators, we will not have innovative environments.

District Leaders as Coaches:

Often times at the district level, we design professional learning with the best intentions, but this professional learning focuses on changing behaviors or changing the environment.  We make mottos and statements that paint a picture of the end result.  This end result, if it is a god one, will require people in the organization to have common beliefs, values and in turn a collective identity of innovation and change.  Often, we fall short of impacting these deeper rooted characteristics and stay focused on the surface.  As district leaders, we must focus on what is underneath the surface.  It seems simple, but this kind of change is difficult.  If changing behaviors changed cultures, then we would have turned that corner a while ago.  As leaders, we need to employ the skills of coaching so that we ask the right questions, listen to those we guide, and focus on what is beyond the surface.  To have change that is sustainable, we have to challenge the beliefs of those we are trying to change and often guide some through the thinking that engenders that change.

I am a believer that a lot in this world happens for a reason.  The role that I am in in my district is giving me the opportunity to have the time to reflect and the ability to help influence change.  I am convinced that we can change the culture of a school and a district, but we have to be asking the right questions and authentically listening and communicating to see the change we want.  Together, I am convinced that we will get there.

Tweet

The Case for Hands On Learning

This week, my son and I worked on his Science Fair Project. I am not fond of Science Fair projects because I think that every day in school should be a science fair project kinda day.  I am bothered by the fact that inquiry learning and investigation is carved out as a "special" kind of learning that takes place in the fall or spring of the year, and we showcase it once a year.  However, we persevered and tackled the science fair project.

My son came to me n the outset of this with much enthusiasm.  He had already decided that he wanted to do his project on the volcano.  I immediately went to the "oh no, here is the classic volcano project."  And it was,  I could not ignore  the enthusiasm, though.  My son, not unlike many, does not really get excited about school.  He really sees it as a necessary part of life peppered with worksheets for math, the occasional field trip, the reading levels and the recess.  He lives for the specials in the day, actually.

 I am going to digress here with the with the word,"Specials" in my son's elementary school.  The students each day rotate to a different specialist to do art, physical education, computers, guidance, and music.  The word "specials" is great for these teachers,but it pretty much stinks for the teacher who has the kids for most of the day.  They are going to leave the room to go do something special and then come back to good 'ol boring learning.  It is not surprising that these specials are pretty much hands on learning where the student are discovering, creating and interacting. Well, this brings me back to the volcano.

We followed the design process for this project, and you have never seen a kid more enthusiastic about learning.  He wanted to know all about plate tectonics and how pressure builds in a volcano.  He actually made an analogy to a soda bottle that he shook up and exploded in our kitchen one day (A sad day), and he made the connection.  In that project we talked about acids and bases and how they mixed to form the "eruption."  We were having fun and learning!  We were learning.  In that one project, we counted that he had done science, research skills, writing, art, math, and a lot of technology. He wanted to learn more and the more he learned the more he wanted.  This kid was not the same kid who struggled through worksheets for homework and lamented that school was not fun.

He could not wait to get to the next step!  His enthusiasm wore me out.  He pummeled me with questions, "When can we work on the volcano?"  "I have watched some videos on YouTube to find out how to make the volcano explode. Is that what we are doing?", "Can we make one of those codes for people to scan for more information?"  In the middle of the project, we saw the story about the volcano eruption in Chile, and he started to ask about the impact that volcanoes have on the areas where they erupt.  Questions engendered other questions, and I became downright giddy learning about volcanoes and the ring of fire, and the earth moves, and how they are formed and erupt.  I am sure that I went over this in an Earth Science class some time, but never had I been so interested.

So, naturally I began thinking about learning and pouring all of thoughts into my time in  the classroom, as an administrator and now as a Professional Learning Specialist.  It reaffirmed what I knew all along and how I morphed as a teacher when I was in the classroom: the more students do and ask questions, the deeper and richer the learning is. Learning is not a passive activity, but we have made it so, particularly with the onslaught of more testing and the Common Core.  Now, I am a fan of the common core, but I am not a fan of the implementation of the common core. When we got updated standards, our response was testing and more testing, so the response in the classroom becomes more test prep. Guess what?  I am more than confident that id we take our students at all levels on educational journeys through questions and inquiry, and we pose problems to students to solve, these kids will knock the socks off any test that we may give them.  Students do not need more test prep; they need to visit with ideas and collaborate with others on ideas and brainstorm and ask questions and make connections.  They need to read and research to find information.  They need to build and create.

Students need places where their ideas are embraced and where they can embrace ideas.  They need a place where they can build skills within the context of something bigger.  That place for deeper learning, for discovery is the classroom, and we need to open the door.

Assessmentology- Why We Need Assessments

My seven year old son is way into sports, and we have tried them all it seems-- soccer, baseball, basketball, you name it-- we are holding off on football.  It is necessary for me to say here that I like some sports, but I am not the sports fanatic.  I like basketball the best, but I do not have to watch games to survive.  I did not play organized sports growing up, so I have had to adjust my thinking as my son has been in many sports.  I always have my  teacher hat on, so I was recently observing him at baseball practice, and through I had drawn the analogy before, it came clear to me how important formative assessment is.  The coach knows exactly where his weaknesses are (throwing the ball and batting), and that has given him the opportunity to hone practice for him, and it has given me an idea of how to help him at home.  So, when he is home and we are practicing, I know that we are batting (Today, he hit 7 out of 9), and we are still working on that throwing. But I see how sports relates big time to formative assessments.  I am sure that a coach would not want a player to continue to practice something incorrectly or have to correct something during the game.  That is why we have practice.

I have shared this analogy with teachers, and I immediately get the quick retorts:  Yeah, but kids out on the field want to play and want to be there.  Sports are different from learning.  I reply that kids are engaged in the sport usually and they see progress.  My son was highly discouraged as he watched all the balls fly by and he swung, just to miss the ball.  When he began hitting, he built up confidence.  Kids want to be engaged in learning, but they want and need success. Often in classrooms we ask for students to go to the big game without practice and expect greatness without emphasizing the process. When we slow down and teach the process, students do excel

Assessment.  This word gets a lot of attention, and frankly a bad wrap.  I vividly remember when I began teaching at Athens Drive High School, I was recharged.  I had finished three years of grueling learning and teaching in another county, and I came to Athens loaded with optimism.  I remember that year (1996) that I stopped using he word "test" and began using the word "assessment" when I was trying to gauge understanding. In fact, my students fond this humorous, and I would always remind them that I was assessing not testing.  "Testing" has a connotation of trickery, and that is not what I was doing. In this post, I want to look specifically 1) the kinds of assessments that we should be using   2) Why high stakes assessments are not the evil we paint them to be   and 3) how we need to use assessment to move instruction forward

So, I will start with the easiest-- kinds of assessments-- and the least controversial of assessmentology.  Most of s educators are aware of formative and summative assessment and many of us are probably aware of Benchmark assessments.  All of these are important to the learning process, and I argue that diagnostic assessment is an oft overlooked form of assessment. I also content that education often focuses more on summative assessments.  I begin with the basic definitions of assessments:

• Diagnostic assessments were always important to me in the classroom.  These assessments are an amalgamation of previous work and pretty much previous scores on high stake tests.  Looking at overall patterns over time gives me a good idea of where students are when they enter my classroom.  However, it is important to assess students in different ways- even diagnostically.  Vocabulary assessments, writing assessments, and prior content knowledge assessments can be important for students.  Also, it was important for me to get to know students, so I wanted to know their likes and interests and how they learn, so I spent the time gathering this important information.  I used this information all year to group students and to plan instruction. 
• Formative Assessment: This is the buzz word of the day, and they take on many forms.  Warm-ups, exit tickets, question trackers, observations, short quizzes, any form that gathers information about how students are understanding during learning.  These assessments to me are the most important because they are low stakes, highly informative and often given the least attention. Teachers will say (and I do understand) that students will not take these seriously if they know they will not count, but my experience has been different.  Students quickly learn that because I use assessments to differentiate and design curriculum this information become personally important to them.  I have seen the power of formative assessment as students are able to tackle the curriculum focused on their ability. 
• Benchmark Assessments: These are not used as often, but they can be powerful.  Unfortunately, it takes a great deal of time to make because the benchmark should cover a body of material and gauge understanding at a particular time in learning.  This information can then be used formatively.  I used to give a midterm exam that I used as a benchmark to help plan instruction for the rest of the course.  It is important here to explain that my assessments had to be skill driven and not content driven.  
• Summative Assessments: This is the form of assessments that we dwell in most often in education.  We may term them unit tests, chapter tests, etc. These assessments by design are intended to measure what the student has learned.  There really should be little surprises here if teachers have assessed in different ways during the learning process and adjusted curriculum based on the assessment. The pitfall here is that often summative assessments take on a traditional format of multiple choice, matching, fill in the blank, and short answer.  There is nothing inherently wrong with these types of assessments, but mostly they support a content driven summative.  I came to the conclusion that students have End of Course tests, End of grade tests and they have been tested to death, so I moved toward more alternative assessments and assessments where students could show me that they could apply information and create from learned knowledge.  Again, this is a great place to differentiate products for mastery.

Formative assessment with diagnostic assessment can be powerful.  Take this example:  When I went back to the classroom two years ago to teach a restart English III class (another future post), I began by quickly assessing students' reading levels through a short reading assessment that I administered to students the first two days of class.  I was able to quickly identify and group my struggling readers, my on level readers and advanced readers in the class.  Early on in  the class, I was going to teach the Transcendentalists, so I grouped students based on their reading levels.  I used different strategies with my different levels, but our outcome was the same. As the year rolled on, students moved reading groups as some showed weaknesses in reading literary works but not informational works.  I was able to work with the students and gradually release responsibility.Each passing day, students gained confidence.  Did this work for all students? No. Did it work for most? Yes.

One of the biggest arguments that I get about formative assessment in the classroom is that if we do not grade them, students will not take them seriously, so I want to address this portion a bit because it is important.  I will say that I fell into this trap.  A couple of years ago as an Assistant Principal for Curriculum at my school, I decided to teach a class to test out some of the ideas that I had preached: differentiation, grading practices and assessments.  I began every class with a warm-up- a strategy I learned from my math friends. I took them up and graded them and gave students the paper back the next day-- usually 5 questions, so grades were usually 0, 20, 40, etc. I put them in the gradebook, and moved on.  The catch is that when I placed them in the electronic gradebook, they were weighted as 0 weight, so they did not impact the average.  Of course, as students do they began to compare with one another and some healthy competition arose.  After a while students were checking to see who had the higher grades, and I was using the data to customize instruction- high impact, low stakes.  By the way when I printed progress reports, all of the grades for these warm-ups were there, and I never really said if I was counting or not, because in my classroom- "Everything Counts for something."  I used this strategy a lot, and it did work.

Recently the county I work with implemented Benchmark assessments in the high stakes area of testing. So, off we went with benchmarking.  When we got the results back and I disseminated them to the teachers, and we discussed how to use them, I was surprised at the positive feedback that there was for the assessments.  Teachers felt that the information that they gained from the assessments helped them better hone in on areas of weakness for students.  I will pause here because somebody is out there thinking, "Well, there we go teaching to the test."  I will say again, we always teach to some test, so the information that is on the benchmark is aligned to the curriculum that we teach, and we want students to learn the curriculum, so I am not sure what the controversy is.  Again, high impact, low stakes! I have seen some good things happening with teachers and this information:  teachers are customizing learning goals for students based on data, teachers are able to incorporate some on-line help for students based on results, and teachers are able to assign lunch time help with a focus.  Students are able to work on the areas that they need support in and not continue to work on those they do not.  Back to baseball.  There is a kid on my son's team who can hit the ball like nobody's business, so while my son is having drills in batting, this kid is drilling catching.

Recently the state of NC has implemented common assessments for most courses in high school in Math, Science, English and Social Studies.  This has, as you can imagine, caused a rip current of dissent.  Outcries of let me teach, teach to the test, micromanagement...on and on. Again, I go back to the fact that if we are teaching the curriculum, the test will take care of itself.  It is important to take a look at these assessments.  Are they perfect, no! Is any assessment? What is good about them is that most of them have constructed responses on them which requires students to synthesize information and write responses to explain these outcomes.  The assessments ask students to do something with information.  I hear teachers say all the time that a multiple choice test cannot measure what a student knows, and often these are the kinds of tests that I see teachers give to students.  So what makes my multiple choice test better or more valid than a "standardized test"?  Most teacher I hear complaining about these assessments are the ones who give primarily objective tests anyway.  Some of these common exams are going to actually be better than some teacher made exams.  I will get into validity of assessments later in another post, but teachers are not typically trained in test creation.  The difference is that teacher (I am as guilty) is in control of the teacher made exam up to the  day or even the period it is given.

 I cannot say how many inaccurate assessments that I probably gave. Take for example, a teacher who may count all the fill-in-the blanks as three points each, but clearly 4 out of the 10 questions require a deeper understanding than the other 6.  Most of us do not take the time in our teacher-made tests to rank questions according to difficulty or level of thought (Depth of Knowledge comes to mind here), and we can change the test at the last minute.  I cannot tell you how many times that I have heard (and said myself) that a teacher does not want to use an assessment created by another teacher (usually a bad idea anyway) or an assessment created by a PLC group (a good idea) because "I teach this differently."  This idea I do not understand! How does one teach the standards differently if the assessment is aligned to the standards.  The approach may differ, but if the curriculum requires that students are able to apply historical thinking to explain the impact of the American Revolution, then that is what students should be able to do.  I hearken back to the Backward Design idea.  If a question asks students to look at primary documents to come to a conclusion about how the American Revolution impacted different groups of people on an assessment, then any student taking the same course with any teacher should be able to tackle that question successfully.

I hear all of the banter about state mandated assessments and how we are teaching to the test, and I truly do understand where this is coming from. As I have said before, high stakes assessments are necessary- they should not be the be all and end all of a students' demonstration of mastery (hence, they are only 20%-25% of a final grade in NC), so we are still responsible for 75%-80% of demonstration of mastery of content in our classes. I often hear the argument that the real world is not like this--and we need to prepare students for the real world.  Well, doctors and lawyers have to take high stakes assessments to practice; hair stylists have to pass an exam; teachers have to pass exams to get a license, insurance salespeople have to pass a test to get a license; we have to pass a driver's assessment to get a license and the list goes on.  I think that what has happened in education is that we have allowed the assessment to become bigger and more important than the learning.  Assessments were never intended to take over a classroom.  It all has to do with what we do with them.  Think of  the creation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein who took over and hunted down the creator.  The assessment is a creation and a measurement that was intended to measure understanding and mastery of content.  It was never intended to become a lesson plan for an entire semester or year, but sadly that is how it has begun to unfold.  As educators, we need to learn how to live with this creation harmoniously. We need to continue focus on powerful teaching and capturing those moments for why we became teachers anyway.  As an administrator I have vowed to stop emphasizing the assessments and emphasize teaching and learning. Will we do benchmarks? Yes.  Are they aligned with the curriculum and designed to support success on the high stakes test? Yes.  As humans, we have extraordinary power to shape how something works for us.  We are in control of this creation, so go forth and teach and focus on solid teaching and learning based on the prescribed standards, and the high stakes assessments will take care of themselves