Before I discovered blogging as a communication tool, I wrote school newsletter articles. Last year, I wrote an article that connected the lessons I learned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which was new at that time, to education. The question I used to frame that article is worth posing again as we approach the mid-point of the year: what does it take to be successful in school? Gladwell’s answer, which he illustrates with examples from Bill Gates to Michael Jordan to The Beatles, is twofold. The first, necessary but insufficient condition that must be met for success is that the circumstances have to be right. Michael Jordan would not have become what he became if he were 5’6” tall, Paul McCartney would not have become what he became if didn’t have both arms and two hands, and Bill Gates would not have revolutionized computing if he did not have access to a university mainframe computer as a high school student. It is necessary to have the right circumstances, but circumstances alone are insufficient.
And according to Gladwell, “natural talent” is irrelevant. That may surprise, because anyone who ever saw Michael Jordan play basketball thinks “talent.” When we listen to the White Album, we think “talent,” and it’s understandable to think Michael Jordan’s ability and The Beatles’ ability owe to innate talent, not hard work. Gladwell would challenge the statement I often hear from students, “I’m just not good at that,” if the student means “I don’t have talent for math,” for example. That’s because according to Gladwell natural talent does not explain why people are successful. Talent as we see it comes from having the right circumstances and hard work.
Thus the second, necessary but insufficient condition is hours and hours of focused, hard work, ten thousand hours minimum, to put a number on it. It is worth reading his book to see the full discussion of his examples, but one example in particular struck me, and it still resonates as we approach the middle of the year. In the early 1990s, researchers asked instructors at Berlin’s Academy of Music to rate violinists’ ability as world-class, good, or unlikely to play professionally. Then the researchers interviewed the violinists about their practice schedule as far back as childhood. What they found was a correlation between instructors’ ratings and how many hours of practice put it by those judged as world class. Gladwell sums it up this way: “The people at the very top don’t work just harder or much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder” (pp. 38-9, Gladwell’s emphasis).
Now if we asked teachers to group their students into three categories of superior, good, and average and then determined how much students worked on learning, would we see the same correlations? I would like to say yes categorically, but if Gladwell is right it’s not just hours and hours of hard work but hours and hours of hard work on the right things under the right circumstances. That’s why for students who are behind we create plans to help them catch up, which is part of the right circumstances. And of course, students who are behind will have to work on areas of deficiency as well as grade level material, which will require them to work not just harder or much harder, but much, much harder. For students who want to become world class academically, they too will have to work very, very hard. One can earn passing or even good grades in less demanding schools by working less, but to be successful, according to Gladwell, hard, focused work under the right circumstances is everyone’s only golden ticket to success.
I read in the December 2 edition of Education Week an article on a study conducted by Caroline Hoxby. Hoxby looked at student achievement in New York City schools. Because the demand for charter school exceeded the supply, 94 percent of students had to go through a lottery to enroll in charter schools, creating a randomly assigned control and treatment group of 80,000 students over seven years. Although her methods and conclusions will surely be debated in the academy, it is worth noting that of those students who finished eighth grade in a charter school, they “performed nearly as well as students in affluent suburban districts” and closed the achievement gap by 86 percent in math and 66 percent in English. What interests me most is that charter schools were not the reason for the gains. For 14 percent of students in charter schools, in fact, the effects of the charter school were negative. Thus it’s not charter schools that makes the difference but the kind of charter schools. Hoxby identifies the characteristics of charter schools whose students are academically successful, and of those, longer school day and more days in the school year, more time devoted to studying English, and a mission emphasizing academic performance stand out.
So what do effective charter schools in New York City have to do with students’ success in Chicago? Using Gladwell to read Hoxby, we see that the first two characteristics of effective charter schools speak to the circumstances the schools create and their demand for hard work, and the third speaks to the circumstances the schools create for students to succeed. There is nothing special about a charter school unless it creates the right circumstances and the demand for hard work. It’s another question why all schools don’t get that done, or how charter schools in New York City have been able to get that done for 86 percent of its students over the last seven years. What Hoxby describes are the circumstances for success, but it must also be the case that students in these schools worked hard. Just being there may have worked for Chance Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel, but students can’t just show up in a good school and expect to be successful. After reading Gladwell, one can only conclude that students whose luck gained them a spot in a charter school that created the circumstances for their success and demanded that they work hard had to work not just harder or much harder but much, much harder to close the achievement gap. Together, the right circumstances and hard work are the necessary and sufficient conditions for success, what we could call a golden ticket.
I should say, everyone has the opportunity to create a golden ticket if they have the right circumstances. At CVCS, students have the right circumstances for success. We have a robust curriculum. Hours and hours of hard work on a thin curriculum would not meet the condition of right circumstance. Moreover, students have the opportunity to work a longer school day than students in other schools, or perhaps I should say, as long as students in suburban schools (like my daughter, who works from the time she gets home until 7:00 or 8:00 every night). We have teachers and families working together to support children. We create individual paths for students to help them meet their goals. Once the circumstances are right, all that remains is hard work, and that’s up to students. There is only one way to get a golden ticket, and at CVCS, everyone has the opportunity to create one for themselves.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Assigning Middle School Grades and Occam’s Razor: A Grading Exercise
Assigning Middle School Grades and Occam’s Razor: A Grading Exercise
In the Middle Ages, William of Occam made a claim that has come to be known as Occam’s Razor: pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. It means that one should not resort to complexity unless it is necessary, and it is a warning against making anything unnecessarily complicated. I thought about Occam’s Razor as I approached writing this blog, and I wonder if it applies to assigning letter grades to students in a mastery-based school. I would be interested to know your thoughts on that. Perhaps after this exercise in assigning grades you will be able to speak to it.
But more immediately, and more concretely, I have an exercise in assigning letter grades to seventh grade students in a variety of academic situations, and I would like your input and thoughts to help us make grading in middle school better. For each of these students, who are fictional but resemble actual students, please assign the grade A, B, C, D, or F and explain why. The rationale behind determining grades is important because in order to formulate a grading policy for middle school, there must be a rationale that can be articulated and can apply to every student. A clearly stated and defensible rationale ensures that assigning grades is neither arbitrary nor capricious.
Please provide the grades and the rationale you use to assign them in the blog so everyone can see your thinking and anyone can comment on it. When we set out to make sense of assigning grades in middle school, we believed we had a rational plan that could apply to everyone and represent accurately middle school students’ academic attainment. There may be other ways of thinking about grades for middle school students, however, and I am interested in seeing them.
There are three rules for this exercise. First, in some way, math grades for seventh graders must incorporate what Illinois says seventh grade students must know and be able to do in math. Secondly, every student must have a grade, but simply assigning grades without providing the rationale behind the assignment will not further this discussion and probably cannot be considered. You can approach the rationale from the individual cases or you can approach assigning grades by using an articulated rationale, but to be considered in our internal deliberations, there must be a clearly stated rationale that articulates to each grade assigned. Moreover, not having a formula for calculating grades is unfortunately not an option because it puts at a disadvantage our students who want to apply to selective enrollment high schools. When our counselor fills out those applications, the only representation of school work the prospective high school wants to see is a letter grade. Thus every student in this exercise needs a grade. Finally, the data below are all the data given and no other considerations can be made. It seems reasonable to allow teachers to consider, for example, how hard a student tried. Of course effort matters, but grades are a reasonable proxy for effort. That is, if a student works very hard at learning, the outcomes of that learning should show up in results, and by measuring results we are measuring effective effort.
For the purpose of this exercise we will assume that none of these students qualifies for special education. So what grades would you give each of these students at the end of the school year? The first one is easy.
Seventh Grade Student 1
Mastered 90% of seventh grade math in the OLS
Mastered 95% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 2
Mastered 90% of fifth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 40% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 3
Mastered 90% of fifth grade math in the OLS after working two years at fifth grade level
Mastered 40% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 4
Mastered 90% of sixth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 75% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 5
Mastered 90% of eighth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 80% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
When I try to complete this exercise, articulating a rationale that could be evenly applied to all of these students resulting in a grade is complex. The question to answer is given that there is value in OLS math, and given that seventh grade letter grades must reflect what Illinois says all seventh graders should know and be able to do, how can that value and grade level attainment be captured in a single letter grade? Our solution to this problem was an Occam Razor solution, holding that middle school grades reflect grade level skills and ability, but I am eager to consider other ways of thinking that are parsimonious but at the same time sufficiently complex to cover all the students in this exercise. There could be a rationale that accounts for the various academic situations represented above that is as sharp as Occam’s Razor. I look forward to your solutions to the problem of assigning middle school grades in a mastery based program.
In the Middle Ages, William of Occam made a claim that has come to be known as Occam’s Razor: pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. It means that one should not resort to complexity unless it is necessary, and it is a warning against making anything unnecessarily complicated. I thought about Occam’s Razor as I approached writing this blog, and I wonder if it applies to assigning letter grades to students in a mastery-based school. I would be interested to know your thoughts on that. Perhaps after this exercise in assigning grades you will be able to speak to it.
But more immediately, and more concretely, I have an exercise in assigning letter grades to seventh grade students in a variety of academic situations, and I would like your input and thoughts to help us make grading in middle school better. For each of these students, who are fictional but resemble actual students, please assign the grade A, B, C, D, or F and explain why. The rationale behind determining grades is important because in order to formulate a grading policy for middle school, there must be a rationale that can be articulated and can apply to every student. A clearly stated and defensible rationale ensures that assigning grades is neither arbitrary nor capricious.
Please provide the grades and the rationale you use to assign them in the blog so everyone can see your thinking and anyone can comment on it. When we set out to make sense of assigning grades in middle school, we believed we had a rational plan that could apply to everyone and represent accurately middle school students’ academic attainment. There may be other ways of thinking about grades for middle school students, however, and I am interested in seeing them.
There are three rules for this exercise. First, in some way, math grades for seventh graders must incorporate what Illinois says seventh grade students must know and be able to do in math. Secondly, every student must have a grade, but simply assigning grades without providing the rationale behind the assignment will not further this discussion and probably cannot be considered. You can approach the rationale from the individual cases or you can approach assigning grades by using an articulated rationale, but to be considered in our internal deliberations, there must be a clearly stated rationale that articulates to each grade assigned. Moreover, not having a formula for calculating grades is unfortunately not an option because it puts at a disadvantage our students who want to apply to selective enrollment high schools. When our counselor fills out those applications, the only representation of school work the prospective high school wants to see is a letter grade. Thus every student in this exercise needs a grade. Finally, the data below are all the data given and no other considerations can be made. It seems reasonable to allow teachers to consider, for example, how hard a student tried. Of course effort matters, but grades are a reasonable proxy for effort. That is, if a student works very hard at learning, the outcomes of that learning should show up in results, and by measuring results we are measuring effective effort.
For the purpose of this exercise we will assume that none of these students qualifies for special education. So what grades would you give each of these students at the end of the school year? The first one is easy.
Seventh Grade Student 1
Mastered 90% of seventh grade math in the OLS
Mastered 95% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 2
Mastered 90% of fifth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 40% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 3
Mastered 90% of fifth grade math in the OLS after working two years at fifth grade level
Mastered 40% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 4
Mastered 90% of sixth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 75% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
Seventh Grade Student 5
Mastered 90% of eighth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 80% of Illinois Math 7 Standards
When I try to complete this exercise, articulating a rationale that could be evenly applied to all of these students resulting in a grade is complex. The question to answer is given that there is value in OLS math, and given that seventh grade letter grades must reflect what Illinois says all seventh graders should know and be able to do, how can that value and grade level attainment be captured in a single letter grade? Our solution to this problem was an Occam Razor solution, holding that middle school grades reflect grade level skills and ability, but I am eager to consider other ways of thinking that are parsimonious but at the same time sufficiently complex to cover all the students in this exercise. There could be a rationale that accounts for the various academic situations represented above that is as sharp as Occam’s Razor. I look forward to your solutions to the problem of assigning middle school grades in a mastery based program.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Mid-Year Course Promotions: The Background
Mid-Year Course Promotions
It comes as a surprise to no one that not everyone at the same age is at the same place academically. Two unrelated eleven year old students born on the same day in the same year share the same age, but that age is only a very rough predictor of what each child knows. Whatever else their shared age could predict, we can be confident that age does not predict that those two children will have the same academic ability. Teachers and schools attempt to cope with these differences, and coping with different academic abilities is what we call differentiation. At CVCS, we are able to operationalize differentiation in a variety of ways. Students in kindergarten through grade eight can work at a pace appropriate to their individual ability and academic goals. They can also work at a curricular level appropriate to their ability.
Significant philosophical and educational issues underly this discussion of mid-year course promotions. Although I will not discuss those issues here, I need to point out that surface discussions of an issue like mid-year course promotions, which is what I am engaging in here, rely upon but have in no way worked out those underlying philosophical and educational issues. There certainly is a pragmatist approach to these issues that would approve working out the particulars and then determining the principle—our system of common law works precisely this way—and if that’s what we are doing here, we should at least examine the principles thus extracted from our decisions. But I digress.
Last year, mid-year course promotions came as late as the end of the third quarter. At that time, the practice had been to promote students to the next course when the previous course had been completed. Teachers started pointing out that what students knew when they were in the Learning Center looked different from what their learning looked like in the Online School. In some cases, very different. That discrepancy could owe to teachers’ faulty perceptions. The other, more worrisome explanation was that in someone’s haste to finish a course there was more of an emphasis on completion than learning. So we did what any responsible educator would do: we sought to verify what students claimed they knew. We learned through that process that there was an emphasis, perhaps an overemphasis, on marking lessons complete rather than on learning. The upshot of that is course promotion may not indicate student learning.
This year, we have focused on what students know and can do, especially in mathematics and language arts. Coursework in the Online School can add great value to students’ learning, of course, and students who are behind in their coursework or who are able to accelerate should be able to obtain mid-year course promotions. Because we are so focused on what students know and can do, and for a variety of other operational reasons, we moved mid-year course promotions to their eponymous place in the school calendar, January 29.
Some parents had legitimate concerns about that move. What appeared as operational obstacles last summer are now less of a problem. For example, K12 is scheduled to roll out a new math program next fall, and students who began a new math course under the old math program might have faced an inefficient transition between the two. Students who accelerated through courses could run out of curriculum in high school, but K12 has made arrangements with the University of Maryland to offer qualified seniors in any K12 school a year of university courses for the price of the books (more on that soon as details emerge).
Effective immediately, students will now be able to receive a course promotion after January 29. We will still need to validate that the student has in fact learned the material from the previous course, and that validation can come in a variety of ways. The important thing is that whatever individual plan we have for a student continues to be in the best interest of that student. Removing the deadline for course promotions should have nothing to do with that.
It comes as a surprise to no one that not everyone at the same age is at the same place academically. Two unrelated eleven year old students born on the same day in the same year share the same age, but that age is only a very rough predictor of what each child knows. Whatever else their shared age could predict, we can be confident that age does not predict that those two children will have the same academic ability. Teachers and schools attempt to cope with these differences, and coping with different academic abilities is what we call differentiation. At CVCS, we are able to operationalize differentiation in a variety of ways. Students in kindergarten through grade eight can work at a pace appropriate to their individual ability and academic goals. They can also work at a curricular level appropriate to their ability.
Significant philosophical and educational issues underly this discussion of mid-year course promotions. Although I will not discuss those issues here, I need to point out that surface discussions of an issue like mid-year course promotions, which is what I am engaging in here, rely upon but have in no way worked out those underlying philosophical and educational issues. There certainly is a pragmatist approach to these issues that would approve working out the particulars and then determining the principle—our system of common law works precisely this way—and if that’s what we are doing here, we should at least examine the principles thus extracted from our decisions. But I digress.
Last year, mid-year course promotions came as late as the end of the third quarter. At that time, the practice had been to promote students to the next course when the previous course had been completed. Teachers started pointing out that what students knew when they were in the Learning Center looked different from what their learning looked like in the Online School. In some cases, very different. That discrepancy could owe to teachers’ faulty perceptions. The other, more worrisome explanation was that in someone’s haste to finish a course there was more of an emphasis on completion than learning. So we did what any responsible educator would do: we sought to verify what students claimed they knew. We learned through that process that there was an emphasis, perhaps an overemphasis, on marking lessons complete rather than on learning. The upshot of that is course promotion may not indicate student learning.
This year, we have focused on what students know and can do, especially in mathematics and language arts. Coursework in the Online School can add great value to students’ learning, of course, and students who are behind in their coursework or who are able to accelerate should be able to obtain mid-year course promotions. Because we are so focused on what students know and can do, and for a variety of other operational reasons, we moved mid-year course promotions to their eponymous place in the school calendar, January 29.
Some parents had legitimate concerns about that move. What appeared as operational obstacles last summer are now less of a problem. For example, K12 is scheduled to roll out a new math program next fall, and students who began a new math course under the old math program might have faced an inefficient transition between the two. Students who accelerated through courses could run out of curriculum in high school, but K12 has made arrangements with the University of Maryland to offer qualified seniors in any K12 school a year of university courses for the price of the books (more on that soon as details emerge).
Effective immediately, students will now be able to receive a course promotion after January 29. We will still need to validate that the student has in fact learned the material from the previous course, and that validation can come in a variety of ways. The important thing is that whatever individual plan we have for a student continues to be in the best interest of that student. Removing the deadline for course promotions should have nothing to do with that.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Is Hybrid Education a New School Paradigm?
John Goodlad in A Place Called School observed that “Schools differ; schooling everywhere is very much the same” (p. 264). There are probably many reasons to account for that observation, but one reason is likely that we have a massive, dominant understanding of what school is supposed to look like. At the risk of oversimplifying the idea, that dominant way of thinking could be called a paradigm, a word Thomas Kuhn used in 1962 to describe why certain scientific theories hold sway and how they are replaced. Think astronomy before Galileo or physics before Newton. or weather forecasting before satellites. Paradigms are powerful because they almost force us to make sense in predictable ways of things we see. Paradigms determine what we are allowed to ask and what the answers can be. We would not think, for example, that a thunderstorm was the result of someone melting beeswax, which is what the Andaman Islanders reasonably thought given the weather paradigm through which they viewed the world. You can try this yourself the next time you are in a school for the first time. You can also test this idea by telling someone about CVCS, for the surprise you hear refers to the paradigm used to make sense of what school should be.
Another paradigm we use to make sense of schooling is home schooling, which has been around since the beginning of education in the US (see, for example, Edward McClellan’s Moral Education in America) The Illinois Supreme officially sanctioned home schooling in the 1950 case People v. Levisen, which held that the “object [of compulsory attendance laws] is that all shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular manner or place” and thereby established home school as a private school in the eyes of the law. Setting the legal equivalence aside, in the US, children are school in school or at home.
It is difficult to create a new paradigm of education. No Child Left Behind has made a significant impact on schooling, but it has not created a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense of the term. Computers and technology have changed many aspects of our lives, but even schools that are technology rich are for the most part paradigmatically the same as they were when chalkboards were the great technological advance. When you tell someone about CVCS, the two major paradigms of education, the brick and mortar school and home school, shape how people make sense of what you are saying. I have even heard people in the CVCS community struggle to describe how we do school. That’s because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to step outside a paradigm to see the world differently.
According to Kuhn, the impetus for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs when science, or what is accepted as true science, cannot account for all the facts scientists encounter. Likewise if less dramatically, the two paradigms of brick and mortar schooling and home schooling cannot account for all aspects of hybrid education. We are not a brick and mortar school, yet students attend a school building and encounter a school-based curriculum and teachers who teach and assess. We are not a home school, but there are certain aspects of what we do that can be found in home schooling, namely the involvement of parents in students’ education. Is a new paradigm of education emerging? Maybe. If hybrid education is part of one paradigm and part of another, does that provide sufficient cause to make it a new paradigm? No, but the question of paradigm shift remains.
As a faculty, we have been wrestling with this paradigm issue, but not as a question of paradigm shift. Nor are we approaching it by asking what educational practices constitute a hybrid education. Any hybrid school will have a collection of educational practices that separate it from a brick and mortar school or home school, but defining what a hybrid school does is more than writing down a collection of educational practices. Moreover, approaching the question that way would require us to start within the two current paradigms of education, which means hybrid school would simply be a mixture of those two and not something different. Rather, we are approaching the question of hybrid education by asking what virtues such an education promotes. I mean virtues in the Aristotelian sense, where the purpose of anything is a matter of determining the virtues that thing fosters, rewards, and honors. For Aristotle, before understanding what the ideal constitution for a polis should be, one had to know what purpose the polis served, and the only way to understand purpose is to understand the kind of citizens the polis wanted to create. In our case, we seek to articulate not only what kind of students we want to graduate from CVCS but what kind of faculty we want to become, for it the question of virtue includes both students and faculty.
We are having dialogue all across CVCS about what the purpose of hybrid education and the values we think it should represent. Teachers are working in their departments, led by their teacher representatives, to articulate our shared hybrid education values. Teachers also have the opportunity to contribute directly to the conversation through posts to administration. Administration will meet with teacher representatives to discuss what the dialogue tells us, and then we will take that to the whole faculty and staff to give final shape to hybrid schooling values and the academic, social, and civic virtues we want to promote in ourselves and in our students. Then I will present to the CVCS Board the instructional design that will best allow those values to flourish.
I invite you to become part of this dialog.
Another paradigm we use to make sense of schooling is home schooling, which has been around since the beginning of education in the US (see, for example, Edward McClellan’s Moral Education in America) The Illinois Supreme officially sanctioned home schooling in the 1950 case People v. Levisen, which held that the “object [of compulsory attendance laws] is that all shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular manner or place” and thereby established home school as a private school in the eyes of the law. Setting the legal equivalence aside, in the US, children are school in school or at home.
It is difficult to create a new paradigm of education. No Child Left Behind has made a significant impact on schooling, but it has not created a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense of the term. Computers and technology have changed many aspects of our lives, but even schools that are technology rich are for the most part paradigmatically the same as they were when chalkboards were the great technological advance. When you tell someone about CVCS, the two major paradigms of education, the brick and mortar school and home school, shape how people make sense of what you are saying. I have even heard people in the CVCS community struggle to describe how we do school. That’s because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to step outside a paradigm to see the world differently.
According to Kuhn, the impetus for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs when science, or what is accepted as true science, cannot account for all the facts scientists encounter. Likewise if less dramatically, the two paradigms of brick and mortar schooling and home schooling cannot account for all aspects of hybrid education. We are not a brick and mortar school, yet students attend a school building and encounter a school-based curriculum and teachers who teach and assess. We are not a home school, but there are certain aspects of what we do that can be found in home schooling, namely the involvement of parents in students’ education. Is a new paradigm of education emerging? Maybe. If hybrid education is part of one paradigm and part of another, does that provide sufficient cause to make it a new paradigm? No, but the question of paradigm shift remains.
As a faculty, we have been wrestling with this paradigm issue, but not as a question of paradigm shift. Nor are we approaching it by asking what educational practices constitute a hybrid education. Any hybrid school will have a collection of educational practices that separate it from a brick and mortar school or home school, but defining what a hybrid school does is more than writing down a collection of educational practices. Moreover, approaching the question that way would require us to start within the two current paradigms of education, which means hybrid school would simply be a mixture of those two and not something different. Rather, we are approaching the question of hybrid education by asking what virtues such an education promotes. I mean virtues in the Aristotelian sense, where the purpose of anything is a matter of determining the virtues that thing fosters, rewards, and honors. For Aristotle, before understanding what the ideal constitution for a polis should be, one had to know what purpose the polis served, and the only way to understand purpose is to understand the kind of citizens the polis wanted to create. In our case, we seek to articulate not only what kind of students we want to graduate from CVCS but what kind of faculty we want to become, for it the question of virtue includes both students and faculty.
We are having dialogue all across CVCS about what the purpose of hybrid education and the values we think it should represent. Teachers are working in their departments, led by their teacher representatives, to articulate our shared hybrid education values. Teachers also have the opportunity to contribute directly to the conversation through posts to administration. Administration will meet with teacher representatives to discuss what the dialogue tells us, and then we will take that to the whole faculty and staff to give final shape to hybrid schooling values and the academic, social, and civic virtues we want to promote in ourselves and in our students. Then I will present to the CVCS Board the instructional design that will best allow those values to flourish.
I invite you to become part of this dialog.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Our Two Moments of AYP
First, we need to celebrate. For the 2008-09 school year, CVCS has made “adequate yearly progress, or AYP, a federally determined, state-defined benchmark for school performance. AYP is a composite measure, drawing on attendance, percentage of students tested, academic performance in mathematics and language arts, and for high school, graduation rates. Schools and school districts either make AYP or they do not. We made it. More importantly, student performance is not taken just as a whole but also potentially in ten sub-groups. If a school has enough students in sub-groups of specified races, limited English proficiency, low income, and special education, each of those groups must make adequate yearly progress for the school to be said to make adequate yearly progress. I am grateful for this part of the legislation, for schools can no longer rely on those groups who historically have done well in school to carry the school. Every group of students must demonstrate proficiency in mathematics and language arts, and while it is certainly true that we need to focus on individual students, as a society we recognize that individual student achievement gaps are not evenly distributed across all groups but tend to accumulate in certain minority groups. As educators, we now have no choice but to look at student achievement from the standpoint of the academically least advantaged. Apart from the social justice this part of No Child Left Behind promotes, there is the great educational challenge of solving a problem that for a long time was ignored and now appears to be very, very challenging. Yet in spite of these hurdles, CVCS made AYP. Again.
While we are in the moment of celebration, you should also know that the academic bar schools have to clear to make AYP becomes increasingly higher over time. That is, making AYP this year represents even more of an accomplishment than making it last year or two years ago. The fact that CVCS made AYP for the third year in a row is a tribute to the students, families, and teachers of CVCS, and we should all take this moment to indulge ourselves in this accomplishment.
But now it’s time to get back to work. On a more reflective occasion we can discuss the merits of No Child Left Behind, the name given to the legislation enacted in 2001, for it has its flaws as many people have pointed out. Its principal virtue, as I claim above, is that it forces us to lift every student up to ever higher levels of academic performance regardless of their sub-group membership. This year, 77.5 percent of all students at CVCS must demonstrate their proficiency against state learning standards, which is 7.5 percentage points higher than last year and 15 percentage points higher than two years ago. Taking our current overall percentage passing of 74.6 percent, you can see why I say let’s take one moment to celebrate and then get back to work. Looking ahead, by the 2013-14 school year, every student from grade three on is required to demonstrate a proficient knowledge of mathematics and language arts.
As parents in grades two through eight know, we are working hard this year to improve our success, to extend it to more and more students. Our K-8 Learning Center program now focuses on reading and writing, and every week students take grade level math exercises to see if there are deficiencies we need to target in our instruction. Students’ work samples have a published writing rubric to guide students’ work and our feedback. It is enormously hard work as everyone knows by now, but constant improvement requires hard work. And we have no choice but to constantly improve. The bar has been raised.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
‘Getting It Wrong’: Scantron Achievement Exercises as Best Practice
‘Getting It Wrong’: Scantron Achievement Exercises as Best Practice
In education, a “best practice” is the belief that one activity or method produces a better outcome than alternatives. As educators, we crave best practices because it allows us to place better bets for optimizing student learning. When we began the practice of holding weekly math exercises to see what students knew, I thought it was a best practice because those assessments are based on grade level state standards and allow us to pinpoint our teaching to what students did not know. Spreading out the standards across the year allows us to monitor student math attainment in grades 2-8 in fine detail and to remediate where necessary on very specific skills. In some cases, students had already learned the material, in others they had just learned it, and in still others students had never seen the material before, but every Monday, students in grades 2-8 have the opportunity to show us what they know in math.
At least two parents have asked whether it makes sense to assess students on math concepts and skills they have never seen and then teach those concepts and skills after the assessment. Intuitively, their concern makes sense, because students typically do poorly on material they have not been taught, especially skilled subjects like math. In fact, most of us learned this way: the teacher instructs the class, the students study what they are supposed to learn, and then the teacher gives some kind of assessment to determine what learning has taken place. Our intuition about that process being the right one probably comes from our experience in school.
Recently published research in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied lead us to a startling, counterintuitive conclusion: students actually learn more if they are assessed on material before they are taught the material. When I read about this research in the October 20 edition of Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong), I had to read what it implies twice, so I will write it again in case you think that you misread something or that I mistyped it, this time quoting from the article: “Learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so students make errors.” For us, that means that students who are behind in math and have to fight their way through weekly math exercises and then learn the concepts learn more than if they had studied for the exercises ahead of time. To put it another way, from the perspective of this research in experimental psychology, Scantron weekly math exercises are a best practice for those who are behind in math.
The claim that one practice is a “best practice” is not a claim to absolute truth, and certainly not the end of the discussion of how best to educate students. Rather, it is a belief that must be continually tested. We rarely have the kind of conditions that would allow us to test our practices scientifically, but if we measure the outcomes we are getting, we can at least reduce the uncertainty about the effectiveness of our educational practices. One measurement of the effectiveness of the Scantron math exercises is the attainment of students over time. I will be reporting on that measurement, and others, in the presentation of the dashboard at the November Board meeting.
In education, a “best practice” is the belief that one activity or method produces a better outcome than alternatives. As educators, we crave best practices because it allows us to place better bets for optimizing student learning. When we began the practice of holding weekly math exercises to see what students knew, I thought it was a best practice because those assessments are based on grade level state standards and allow us to pinpoint our teaching to what students did not know. Spreading out the standards across the year allows us to monitor student math attainment in grades 2-8 in fine detail and to remediate where necessary on very specific skills. In some cases, students had already learned the material, in others they had just learned it, and in still others students had never seen the material before, but every Monday, students in grades 2-8 have the opportunity to show us what they know in math.
At least two parents have asked whether it makes sense to assess students on math concepts and skills they have never seen and then teach those concepts and skills after the assessment. Intuitively, their concern makes sense, because students typically do poorly on material they have not been taught, especially skilled subjects like math. In fact, most of us learned this way: the teacher instructs the class, the students study what they are supposed to learn, and then the teacher gives some kind of assessment to determine what learning has taken place. Our intuition about that process being the right one probably comes from our experience in school.
Recently published research in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied lead us to a startling, counterintuitive conclusion: students actually learn more if they are assessed on material before they are taught the material. When I read about this research in the October 20 edition of Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong), I had to read what it implies twice, so I will write it again in case you think that you misread something or that I mistyped it, this time quoting from the article: “Learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so students make errors.” For us, that means that students who are behind in math and have to fight their way through weekly math exercises and then learn the concepts learn more than if they had studied for the exercises ahead of time. To put it another way, from the perspective of this research in experimental psychology, Scantron weekly math exercises are a best practice for those who are behind in math.
The claim that one practice is a “best practice” is not a claim to absolute truth, and certainly not the end of the discussion of how best to educate students. Rather, it is a belief that must be continually tested. We rarely have the kind of conditions that would allow us to test our practices scientifically, but if we measure the outcomes we are getting, we can at least reduce the uncertainty about the effectiveness of our educational practices. One measurement of the effectiveness of the Scantron math exercises is the attainment of students over time. I will be reporting on that measurement, and others, in the presentation of the dashboard at the November Board meeting.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Let's Talk
Using blogs to communicate to a school community is new to me. I wrote guest columns for the local newspaper in the town where I used to work, I have written columns for newsletters, and I have used blogs and discussion boards in my university teaching. Last summer was the first time I put up a blog for a school community. I have learned a lot since then.
Here’s how I came to blogging for the school community. Last June, a couple parents at a Board meeting said they wanted to see the school’s strategy map and have the opportunity to comment on it. Someone from the Board suggested I put up a blog. So I did. Then I put up the narrative that explained what we meant by strategic objectives like “Improve Communication” and “Improve the Quality and Depth of Instruction.” After that, it occurred to me that blogging was a way of providing easy access to the school community to what I was thinking, on what as a school we are working, etc. Instead of writing a newsletter article, I would write a blog. As a result, I began using blogs to share my thoughts on school issues, books I was reading, and the importance of data. I still see blogs as the occasion to share what I am thinking because as the leader of the school what I am thinking will have an effect on how the school goes, and I want you to know what’s on my mind when it comes to the school. Those kinds of blogs will continue. But a blog has one dimension newsletters do not have: the opportunity to engage in a conversation.
So this blog and future blogs have another purpose, which I learned from the parent handbook I put up once a draft of it was complete. That blog aimed to give parents the opportunity to comment on the handbook draft so we could consider their ideas and suggestions as we approached a final draft. The comments poured in. I made the decision at that time to read the comments, share them with my team, discuss parents’ concerns and suggestions, but not respond to any posting. I thought that responding would take too much time because if I responded to one person, I would have to respond to everyone, and that could become my full time job. Was I wrong. Not responding to anyone online was a mistake, and I want to fix that.
That is why this blog and all future blogs are an invitation to you to write anything that is on your mind. I will respond to as many questions as I can, and responding to all questions is my goal. Moreover, I plan to blog on issues that have come up here, like the weekly Achievement Exercises in grades 2-8 and high school late policy. I look forward to engaging you in dialogue on what the school is doing to empower students to flourish.
In addition, I have created a Twitter account, which you can follow by going to http://twitter.com/cvcshos. With Twitter I can send out quick questions and advise you in 140 characters of an issue going on at the school at a given moment. And if you have a Twitter account you can respond, which is another way to get your feedback. I just posted last week’s attendance rates—and it was good news.
Twitter is completely new to me, and like any new tool, I will need to use it a while to learn how to use it effectively. And blogging as a way to engage parents is also new. The important thing is that we open up as many lines of communication as possible. Let’s talk.
Here’s how I came to blogging for the school community. Last June, a couple parents at a Board meeting said they wanted to see the school’s strategy map and have the opportunity to comment on it. Someone from the Board suggested I put up a blog. So I did. Then I put up the narrative that explained what we meant by strategic objectives like “Improve Communication” and “Improve the Quality and Depth of Instruction.” After that, it occurred to me that blogging was a way of providing easy access to the school community to what I was thinking, on what as a school we are working, etc. Instead of writing a newsletter article, I would write a blog. As a result, I began using blogs to share my thoughts on school issues, books I was reading, and the importance of data. I still see blogs as the occasion to share what I am thinking because as the leader of the school what I am thinking will have an effect on how the school goes, and I want you to know what’s on my mind when it comes to the school. Those kinds of blogs will continue. But a blog has one dimension newsletters do not have: the opportunity to engage in a conversation.
So this blog and future blogs have another purpose, which I learned from the parent handbook I put up once a draft of it was complete. That blog aimed to give parents the opportunity to comment on the handbook draft so we could consider their ideas and suggestions as we approached a final draft. The comments poured in. I made the decision at that time to read the comments, share them with my team, discuss parents’ concerns and suggestions, but not respond to any posting. I thought that responding would take too much time because if I responded to one person, I would have to respond to everyone, and that could become my full time job. Was I wrong. Not responding to anyone online was a mistake, and I want to fix that.
That is why this blog and all future blogs are an invitation to you to write anything that is on your mind. I will respond to as many questions as I can, and responding to all questions is my goal. Moreover, I plan to blog on issues that have come up here, like the weekly Achievement Exercises in grades 2-8 and high school late policy. I look forward to engaging you in dialogue on what the school is doing to empower students to flourish.
In addition, I have created a Twitter account, which you can follow by going to http://twitter.com/cvcshos. With Twitter I can send out quick questions and advise you in 140 characters of an issue going on at the school at a given moment. And if you have a Twitter account you can respond, which is another way to get your feedback. I just posted last week’s attendance rates—and it was good news.
Twitter is completely new to me, and like any new tool, I will need to use it a while to learn how to use it effectively. And blogging as a way to engage parents is also new. The important thing is that we open up as many lines of communication as possible. Let’s talk.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Data Hounds
I used to have a beagle named Mabel who was probably the cutest dog I have ever seen but impossible to walk. Mabel was a data hound, and the instrument well-suited to her pursuit of information was her nose, which made every square inch of territory she encountered a moment of wonder. I observed that it was not the wonder of the world that kept her nose to the ground, however, for what caught her olfactory attention then became the need to reduce uncertainty about what she was smelling. The world is full of observable phenomena, and Mabel wanted to smell it all and figure out what it was.
Like Mabel, we are all data hounds, but unlike my little beagle, we use data to reduce uncertainty about our world in order to make better decisions. In fact, our decisions would be considerably worse if we did not use data in making them. To take my morning as an example, in the hope of illustrating my point but at the risk of being tedious, I woke up and measured how long I had until I had to get up in order to be at school on time. Along with that measurement was the measurement of my wakefulness. While taking those two measurements, I made a quick measurement of my day and quickly decided that I needed to get up. First stop was the shower, where I turned on the water and measured its temperature, made an adjustment, measured it again, and adjusted again. At breakfast, I made coffee, and measured its temperature before drinking. It was too hot, so I decided to let it cool a bit. I measured it again, and decided it was cool enough to drink but hot enough to have that deep coffee flavor we coffee addicts love. I checked the newspaper for the weather, for I needed a measurement of the day’s heat and precipitation. Now strictly speaking, those data were forecasts and not observed phenomena, but weather forecasts are based on observed phenomena and use statistical models to forecast what meteorological phenomena I would encounter that day. Rain later and a high of 62. Now the paper lists weather conditions all over the world, but I limited the data I used in making my fashion decisions to Chicago. I could see stars in the early morning sky, but I trust Tom Skilling so I grabbed an appropriate coat and an umbrella. Measuring the time once again, I left for school. Without data to reduce my uncertainty about the temperature of the shower, temperature of the coffee, weather, and time, I might have frozen or parboiled in the shower, scalded my tongue, got soaked, froze, and been late. Or perhaps I would have avoided all those unfortunate events by guessing, but why take the chance when the world is full of data the measurement of which allows me to improve my decision making?
All that data measurement to reduce uncertainty and improve decision making in 30 minutes. You do the same thing, all day long, every day.
I must admit, I am a data hound when it comes to educating children. To function, schools have operations, and those operations produce effects. Students attend class and schools take attendance. Schools instruct and students learn. Programs are offered and parents benefit. If anything that takes place in a school makes a difference, that difference is an effect that can be measured, and I want to know what difference our efforts as a school are making in the education of children. To do that, we measure effects, but not just any effects. We do not have the resources (time, budget, personnel) to measure everything, and in fact we do not need to measure anything. For if the question is what difference we are making in our school operations, we should be looking at those differences that make the biggest difference in the education of children. The government has chosen to measure once a year what students have learned, on one test, using, as we say, one modality. We can do better than that. We can measure how much students are learning along the way in several ways, and we can measure how well we are operating as a school, and we can make decisions based on the data we get from those measurements. There is much uncertainty in school operations: how much are the students learning? How effective is our teaching? How well are we communicating? How satisfied are our parents with our programs and services? We can observe the difference our operations make, measure that difference, and reduce our uncertainty about how well we are doing as a school. Data hounds.
How do we get data from our school operations? At CVCS, I believe the most important school data reveal what students have learned. We can reduce our uncertainty about what they have learned by observing their progress in the OLS or LMS, but we can also measure what they have learned in smaller chunks, which allows us to target our instruction at any area of deficiency. That’s why K-8 students take Achievement Exercises every week. I have been working with teachers to articulate in a rubric what we believe effective virtual and face-to-face instruction is, and together we are working to improve our instructional effectiveness. The relationship between the data on the quality of instruction and gains in student learning is not necessarily direct, but the instructional rubric allows us to reduce our uncertainty as a school about our collective instructional effectiveness and make inferences about its effect on student learning.
As for how parents perceive our efforts, we could wait to see how many families stay at CVCS, but that measurement lags behind the conditions that led to it. To get at families’ perceptions about our programs and services, I will be using random surveys. That means I will use either a table of random numbers or a web site like randomizer.org to randomly select Learning Coaches to call and ask a few questions. I can get information from focus groups, and I like SurveyMonkey, but neither of those instruments is as accurate for understanding the population as a random selection. A group of people who choose to answer a survey is not a random sample. A focus group could be a random sample if participants are randomly selected, but a group of people discussing an issue is just a group of people, not a sample I can use to generalize onto the population. And there is lots of power in random samples. If you are making soup, it is unnecessary to eat the entire pot in order to know if it needs more salt. One spoonful will tell you that, provided that that spoonful has all the ingredients distributed in it that the whole pot has.
This desire to know is more a moral imperative than a curiosity about statistics. Schools stand in a relationship with children’s individual pursuit of happiness, for schools can operate in a way that empowers students in their pursuit of happiness. I am not suggesting that the sum total of a student’s future happiness is tied to the work of school. I would argue, however, that in 2009, students’ ability to flourish will be partly determined by their success in school, and the condition of our civil society will rest in the hands of students who currently work together in schools. Thus the desire to reduce our uncertainty about how our students are learning and how we are doing as a school answers a moral imperative to become the best school we can be.
Postscript: After a sunny start the rain indeed came on my way home. Tom Skilling was right.
Like Mabel, we are all data hounds, but unlike my little beagle, we use data to reduce uncertainty about our world in order to make better decisions. In fact, our decisions would be considerably worse if we did not use data in making them. To take my morning as an example, in the hope of illustrating my point but at the risk of being tedious, I woke up and measured how long I had until I had to get up in order to be at school on time. Along with that measurement was the measurement of my wakefulness. While taking those two measurements, I made a quick measurement of my day and quickly decided that I needed to get up. First stop was the shower, where I turned on the water and measured its temperature, made an adjustment, measured it again, and adjusted again. At breakfast, I made coffee, and measured its temperature before drinking. It was too hot, so I decided to let it cool a bit. I measured it again, and decided it was cool enough to drink but hot enough to have that deep coffee flavor we coffee addicts love. I checked the newspaper for the weather, for I needed a measurement of the day’s heat and precipitation. Now strictly speaking, those data were forecasts and not observed phenomena, but weather forecasts are based on observed phenomena and use statistical models to forecast what meteorological phenomena I would encounter that day. Rain later and a high of 62. Now the paper lists weather conditions all over the world, but I limited the data I used in making my fashion decisions to Chicago. I could see stars in the early morning sky, but I trust Tom Skilling so I grabbed an appropriate coat and an umbrella. Measuring the time once again, I left for school. Without data to reduce my uncertainty about the temperature of the shower, temperature of the coffee, weather, and time, I might have frozen or parboiled in the shower, scalded my tongue, got soaked, froze, and been late. Or perhaps I would have avoided all those unfortunate events by guessing, but why take the chance when the world is full of data the measurement of which allows me to improve my decision making?
All that data measurement to reduce uncertainty and improve decision making in 30 minutes. You do the same thing, all day long, every day.
I must admit, I am a data hound when it comes to educating children. To function, schools have operations, and those operations produce effects. Students attend class and schools take attendance. Schools instruct and students learn. Programs are offered and parents benefit. If anything that takes place in a school makes a difference, that difference is an effect that can be measured, and I want to know what difference our efforts as a school are making in the education of children. To do that, we measure effects, but not just any effects. We do not have the resources (time, budget, personnel) to measure everything, and in fact we do not need to measure anything. For if the question is what difference we are making in our school operations, we should be looking at those differences that make the biggest difference in the education of children. The government has chosen to measure once a year what students have learned, on one test, using, as we say, one modality. We can do better than that. We can measure how much students are learning along the way in several ways, and we can measure how well we are operating as a school, and we can make decisions based on the data we get from those measurements. There is much uncertainty in school operations: how much are the students learning? How effective is our teaching? How well are we communicating? How satisfied are our parents with our programs and services? We can observe the difference our operations make, measure that difference, and reduce our uncertainty about how well we are doing as a school. Data hounds.
How do we get data from our school operations? At CVCS, I believe the most important school data reveal what students have learned. We can reduce our uncertainty about what they have learned by observing their progress in the OLS or LMS, but we can also measure what they have learned in smaller chunks, which allows us to target our instruction at any area of deficiency. That’s why K-8 students take Achievement Exercises every week. I have been working with teachers to articulate in a rubric what we believe effective virtual and face-to-face instruction is, and together we are working to improve our instructional effectiveness. The relationship between the data on the quality of instruction and gains in student learning is not necessarily direct, but the instructional rubric allows us to reduce our uncertainty as a school about our collective instructional effectiveness and make inferences about its effect on student learning.
As for how parents perceive our efforts, we could wait to see how many families stay at CVCS, but that measurement lags behind the conditions that led to it. To get at families’ perceptions about our programs and services, I will be using random surveys. That means I will use either a table of random numbers or a web site like randomizer.org to randomly select Learning Coaches to call and ask a few questions. I can get information from focus groups, and I like SurveyMonkey, but neither of those instruments is as accurate for understanding the population as a random selection. A group of people who choose to answer a survey is not a random sample. A focus group could be a random sample if participants are randomly selected, but a group of people discussing an issue is just a group of people, not a sample I can use to generalize onto the population. And there is lots of power in random samples. If you are making soup, it is unnecessary to eat the entire pot in order to know if it needs more salt. One spoonful will tell you that, provided that that spoonful has all the ingredients distributed in it that the whole pot has.
This desire to know is more a moral imperative than a curiosity about statistics. Schools stand in a relationship with children’s individual pursuit of happiness, for schools can operate in a way that empowers students in their pursuit of happiness. I am not suggesting that the sum total of a student’s future happiness is tied to the work of school. I would argue, however, that in 2009, students’ ability to flourish will be partly determined by their success in school, and the condition of our civil society will rest in the hands of students who currently work together in schools. Thus the desire to reduce our uncertainty about how our students are learning and how we are doing as a school answers a moral imperative to become the best school we can be.
Postscript: After a sunny start the rain indeed came on my way home. Tom Skilling was right.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
A Whole New Mind
A Whole New Mind
I just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (Riverhead Books, 2005). In this book, he argues that we are headed toward a conceptual age of work, which he describes as “high concept” and “high touch.” That argument depends on an accumulation of advances and accomplishments that he traces over the last 150 years, beginning in the industrial age and then on to the information age. In the industrial age, what mattered most was a person’s strength. Next came the information age, and then it was a person’s knowledge that mattered most, and not just any knowledge, but the logical, analytical functioning typically associated with the left half of the brain. Of course, Pink is painting an economic and not social picture as the basis for his argument. A social history of employment would have to include the reality that millions of workers faced, that their race, ethnicity, and religion mattered more than their ability to perform work well. Even to acknowledge where we were or how far we have come socially would be beside his point, but readers who know the history of that social struggle know well that an economic thumbnail sketch of work tells but part of the story. Economically, most would agree that from hunters and gathers we have evolved to farmers and then to industrial workers and then to an era of work where analytical, rational thinking mattered more than one’s physical capacities. Pink claims to have insight into what comes next.
According to Pink, we have entered the conceptual age, and it is important to observe how he thinks we got here. In scale and extent, the industrial age has produced an abundance of goods unprecedented in economic history. Three percent of all families had electricity in 1900; among poor families in 1970, 99 percent had electricity. In 1900, one percent of all families owned a car; among poor families in 1970, 41 percent owned a car (S. Lebergott, The American Economy, Princeton University Press, 1976). In 2004, 92 percent of all American families owned cars (http://www.hwwilson.com/print/RS_car_preface.htm, accessed 9/20/09). Again, Pink is speaking generally, but the point is that the supply and demand for manufacturing goods on which we rely have been transformed. That transformation has been driven by the increasing connectivity in the world, or as Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat, Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2006)describes it, the flattening of the world. It is the case that as the world has become more educated, the jobs that were once done here can be accomplished by people with the same education but for much less money. We understand this phenomenon as consumers: if you could buy the same television for $700 or $2,500, which one would you buy? Manufacturers face the same question, but the difference is if your competitor can sell televisions for $700 but you have to charge $2,500, you will either a) find a way to compete or b) go out of business. I am not defending globalization, or neo-liberalism as it is called everywhere but the US. That phenomenon has happened before in history, but what is new is its reach. Pink is only observing what is happening, not necessarily approving neo-liberalism.
Not only manufacturing, left-brain work is being done somewhere else, and for the same reasons. Increased connectivity and a more educated world mean the skills of the much heralded knowledge economy are increasingly performed outside the US or by a computer. Thus Pink’s three questions for all future workers:
1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance?
If the answer to question one or two is yes or if the answer to three is no, Pink asserts, ‘you’re in big trouble” (p. 51). Workers in the conceptual age will need the eponymous “whole new mind,” which has six senses: Design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Most of this book elaborates what he means by these six senses.
Only time will determine whether Pink’s conceptual age comes about as he describes it or in some altered form. It is probably significant when the new CEO of General Motors describes that company’s work as “the art business” (p. 53), and it may also be significant that the consulting giant McKinsey hired 18 percent fewer graduates of graduate business schools in 2003 than it did in 1993 (p. 54). The question for us at CVCS is whether as a school we are preparing for an economic era that is moving past the knowledge worker. Historically, schools in the US have, since the 1840s, been the social institution to carry out the work of society, the place where society’s anxieties about its social or economic future are played out (David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia, Harvard University Press, 1997). It is difficult to predict educational fashion, but if A Whole New Mind becomes the latest thing in state legislatures, schools will be called upon to deliver.
Even if schools are not called upon to prepare students for Pink’s “Conceptual Age,” it is worth asking how we measure up. I divide Pink’s six conceptual age senses into two groups.
The first group consists of design, story, and symphony. In those senses, a strong academic foundation strikes me as particularly important. Design must continue to be functional even if its aesthetic dimension is all the more important (think iPod, but also think airplane), and functionality will continue to follow the laws of nature. It does startle that medical students at Columbia University and at other medical schools study “narrative medicine” (p, 52), but to make sense of a medical narrative requires both a sensibility for storytelling and the medical knowledge to discern what is significant in the story the patient is telling. Symphony as a sense involves synthesis, and the more one knows the more profound the synthesis.
As for the other group, empathy, play, and meaning, those senses are best learned in a partnership between families and schools. John Rawls (Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1996) argues that social institutions should be organized on principles we all agree to, those that we can hold in common while maintaining our religious or comprehensive philosophical views. Although not writing about schools, as a social institution, the limits on schooling and the responsibility of families can be drawn along his public/private lines. That line has been challenged philosophically, but it works pretty well in schools as long as it is not a line of separation but a division of responsibilities. In our school, students do learn the values of empathy, play, and meaning, but parents are much more important in teaching those values. Whereas we teach them from the standpoint of what we have in common as citizens in a diverse society, families have the responsibility of teaching values from points of view that a public school according to Rawls cannot occupy. And yet as anyone who has been to our school knows, the empathy, play, and meaning students learn complement and do not compete with what families teach their children at home. CVCS represents what is possible when schools partner with families in empowering students to flourish.
I should point out that Pink does not say that analytical, logical thinking is no longer necessary. It will still be required. His point is that it will not be enough. Thus we should be gratified that our curriculum, with its emphasis on building a strong academic foundation, will continue to be important in whatever era comes next. We should also be confident that we offer CVCS students the foundation for the six conceptual age senses, relying once again on our strong partnership with families not only for the left-brained education of our students but for developing right-brained sensibilities Pink says everyone will need.
I just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (Riverhead Books, 2005). In this book, he argues that we are headed toward a conceptual age of work, which he describes as “high concept” and “high touch.” That argument depends on an accumulation of advances and accomplishments that he traces over the last 150 years, beginning in the industrial age and then on to the information age. In the industrial age, what mattered most was a person’s strength. Next came the information age, and then it was a person’s knowledge that mattered most, and not just any knowledge, but the logical, analytical functioning typically associated with the left half of the brain. Of course, Pink is painting an economic and not social picture as the basis for his argument. A social history of employment would have to include the reality that millions of workers faced, that their race, ethnicity, and religion mattered more than their ability to perform work well. Even to acknowledge where we were or how far we have come socially would be beside his point, but readers who know the history of that social struggle know well that an economic thumbnail sketch of work tells but part of the story. Economically, most would agree that from hunters and gathers we have evolved to farmers and then to industrial workers and then to an era of work where analytical, rational thinking mattered more than one’s physical capacities. Pink claims to have insight into what comes next.
According to Pink, we have entered the conceptual age, and it is important to observe how he thinks we got here. In scale and extent, the industrial age has produced an abundance of goods unprecedented in economic history. Three percent of all families had electricity in 1900; among poor families in 1970, 99 percent had electricity. In 1900, one percent of all families owned a car; among poor families in 1970, 41 percent owned a car (S. Lebergott, The American Economy, Princeton University Press, 1976). In 2004, 92 percent of all American families owned cars (http://www.hwwilson.com/print/RS_car_preface.htm, accessed 9/20/09). Again, Pink is speaking generally, but the point is that the supply and demand for manufacturing goods on which we rely have been transformed. That transformation has been driven by the increasing connectivity in the world, or as Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat, Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2006)describes it, the flattening of the world. It is the case that as the world has become more educated, the jobs that were once done here can be accomplished by people with the same education but for much less money. We understand this phenomenon as consumers: if you could buy the same television for $700 or $2,500, which one would you buy? Manufacturers face the same question, but the difference is if your competitor can sell televisions for $700 but you have to charge $2,500, you will either a) find a way to compete or b) go out of business. I am not defending globalization, or neo-liberalism as it is called everywhere but the US. That phenomenon has happened before in history, but what is new is its reach. Pink is only observing what is happening, not necessarily approving neo-liberalism.
Not only manufacturing, left-brain work is being done somewhere else, and for the same reasons. Increased connectivity and a more educated world mean the skills of the much heralded knowledge economy are increasingly performed outside the US or by a computer. Thus Pink’s three questions for all future workers:
1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance?
If the answer to question one or two is yes or if the answer to three is no, Pink asserts, ‘you’re in big trouble” (p. 51). Workers in the conceptual age will need the eponymous “whole new mind,” which has six senses: Design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Most of this book elaborates what he means by these six senses.
Only time will determine whether Pink’s conceptual age comes about as he describes it or in some altered form. It is probably significant when the new CEO of General Motors describes that company’s work as “the art business” (p. 53), and it may also be significant that the consulting giant McKinsey hired 18 percent fewer graduates of graduate business schools in 2003 than it did in 1993 (p. 54). The question for us at CVCS is whether as a school we are preparing for an economic era that is moving past the knowledge worker. Historically, schools in the US have, since the 1840s, been the social institution to carry out the work of society, the place where society’s anxieties about its social or economic future are played out (David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia, Harvard University Press, 1997). It is difficult to predict educational fashion, but if A Whole New Mind becomes the latest thing in state legislatures, schools will be called upon to deliver.
Even if schools are not called upon to prepare students for Pink’s “Conceptual Age,” it is worth asking how we measure up. I divide Pink’s six conceptual age senses into two groups.
The first group consists of design, story, and symphony. In those senses, a strong academic foundation strikes me as particularly important. Design must continue to be functional even if its aesthetic dimension is all the more important (think iPod, but also think airplane), and functionality will continue to follow the laws of nature. It does startle that medical students at Columbia University and at other medical schools study “narrative medicine” (p, 52), but to make sense of a medical narrative requires both a sensibility for storytelling and the medical knowledge to discern what is significant in the story the patient is telling. Symphony as a sense involves synthesis, and the more one knows the more profound the synthesis.
As for the other group, empathy, play, and meaning, those senses are best learned in a partnership between families and schools. John Rawls (Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1996) argues that social institutions should be organized on principles we all agree to, those that we can hold in common while maintaining our religious or comprehensive philosophical views. Although not writing about schools, as a social institution, the limits on schooling and the responsibility of families can be drawn along his public/private lines. That line has been challenged philosophically, but it works pretty well in schools as long as it is not a line of separation but a division of responsibilities. In our school, students do learn the values of empathy, play, and meaning, but parents are much more important in teaching those values. Whereas we teach them from the standpoint of what we have in common as citizens in a diverse society, families have the responsibility of teaching values from points of view that a public school according to Rawls cannot occupy. And yet as anyone who has been to our school knows, the empathy, play, and meaning students learn complement and do not compete with what families teach their children at home. CVCS represents what is possible when schools partner with families in empowering students to flourish.
I should point out that Pink does not say that analytical, logical thinking is no longer necessary. It will still be required. His point is that it will not be enough. Thus we should be gratified that our curriculum, with its emphasis on building a strong academic foundation, will continue to be important in whatever era comes next. We should also be confident that we offer CVCS students the foundation for the six conceptual age senses, relying once again on our strong partnership with families not only for the left-brained education of our students but for developing right-brained sensibilities Pink says everyone will need.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Year Four
CVCS is about to begin its fourth year, but where are we as a school? There are many ways to locate a school. We are in the fourth year of our five year charter. We are in the Merit School of Music. Ask Learning Coaches or teachers, “Where are we as a school?” and it is unlikely that the response would be temporal (“in our fourth year”) or geographical (“38 S Peoria Street”). Much more likely would be the response that locates the school in reference to its ideal future. In fact, that response is the most important, for it speaks to the purpose of the school. At CVCS, we are striving to empower students to flourish, and we cannot stop working until we have accomplished that mission. This year, we will be involved as a school in our students’ education, instructing them and learning what they know and can do, and then working with Learning Coaches as partners to empower all our students to flourish. We always want to know where we are with each family in that mission.
Asking outsiders is another way to find out where a school is. Last year, I used grant dollars to hire the same firm that will conduct our charter renewal evaluation in year five to conduct a mid-charter evaluation. I wanted a heads-up on how CPS will view the school when we apply to have our charter renewed. You can see their report by clicking here. I would like to discuss some of these evaluators’ major findings and report on our response to them. The mission of CVCS is to empower students to flourish, not to have our charter renewed. Yet it would be irresponsible of me not to provide the CVCS community with an overview of what we are doing as a school to make sure that CVCS remains open after its first charter expires as an option for parents in Chicago who want to work with us as partners in empowering students to flourish.
The first strength the report names is the curriculum (p. 2). In fact, it is the only “consensus strength” (p. 10) in the final section. The evaluators describe the curriculum K12 offers CVCS students online as individualized, offering students “the ability to move at one’s own pace, flexibility, and autonomy” (p. In the same area of curriculum, however, an “area for improvement” is the “lack of expectations around…comprehensive scope and sequence, delivery of instruction, and use of assessments” (p. 3). It was recommended that CVCS “[set] expectations for the amount of time teachers spend on instruction; [increase] the use of Elluminate to deliver instruction to all students , not just those who are struggling; and [incorporate] higher-order activities into on-line [sic] and learning center lessons” (p. 3).
The evaluators found that the variety of assessments is a strength (p. 2). Scantron as a tool allows us to learn what students know as judged against Illinois state standards and to tailor curriculum to meet individual students’ academic needs. We have a program for determining early literacy abilities among our kindergarten through second grade students. K12 provides online assessments for online learning that Learning Coaches use to gauge students’ mastery of academic content. Those assessments, the evaluators found, “are not being used systematically to validate student mastery in multiple ways” (p.4). They recommend that CVCS “establish a systematic method for monitoring student progress at various intervals throughout courses” (p. 4).
Of all the “areas of improvement” the evaluators found, we have focused most attention on this section, teaching and learning. At the K-8 level, K12 has aligned for us math and reading standards to OLS lessons, and further aligned those standards to lessons in Study Island and Odyssey. We also have exercises for reading and math standards that will allow teachers to know what students have learned. Teachers will become better partners with Learning Coaches by instructing students both online and at the Learning Center and then have the tools to find out what they have learned and to have the resources to help students who need it. In this way, we will honor the commitment and time Learning Coaches make by finding out what students know and making available additional resources as appropriate. We have made the Home Room teacher the same person as the Learning Center Teacher. All students will be learning on Elluminate in targeted, virtual sessions, and the “method for monitoring student progress at regular intervals” will be “systematic” (p. 4) and more robust than the evaluators could imagine.
The evaluators found that we do not use Learning Center time “to provide maximum benefit to the teaching and learning process” (p. 4). The evaluators found “limited evidence of differentiated instruction,” with direct observation of Learning Center instruction revealing that “teachers deliver[ed] the same lesson to all students …across almost all classrooms visited, including classrooms that incorporated students at several levels. It is not clear how whole group lessons are providing instruction to students who are progressing at different rates throughout the curriculum” (p. 4). The evaluators recommend that we “[establish] clear expectations for learning center [sic] time, which are focused on maximizing instruction and benefit to student learning” (p. 4).
The relationships CVCS teachers built with Learning Coaches last year is clearly a strength (p. 5). An “area for improvement,” however, is the lack of a “shared understanding of the purpose or philosophy of the school program,” which has resulted in “a fragmentation in some areas of the school culture” (p. 6). They recommend that CVCS establish a “common program purpose” and create “uniform expectations and clearer guidelines around roles and responsibilities for stakeholders” (p. 6).
The evaluators included the following “area for improvement” in the section on “Learning Community,” but it also belongs to the previous section, “Teaching and Learning”: “There is no clear system for feedback to improve teaching and learning” (p. 6). Nothing in this review surprised me, and this observation least of all. After all, if there is no shared purpose as a school, and if there are no expectations for teaching and learning, there was little feedback that could be given beyond the general instructional virtues of promoting higher order thinking and differentiating instruction. The evaluators recommend CVCS “[provide] formative feedback to staff” and take advantage of the” hybrid nature of the CVCS program” (p. 6).
I read this review of CVCS holistically, not as a laundry list of to-do items. That is, we cannot meaningfully discuss providing formative feedback to teachers and taking advantage of our “hybrid nature” without a mission the school is trying to accomplish. Moreover, the feedback to teachers throughout the year is best when it is linked to the school’s identified objectives. Those objectives have to be established. We have done all this. Last spring, I engaged Learning Coaches and faculty in a discussion of the school’s purpose, and we have concluded that our mission is to empower our students to flourish as individuals and as citizens in a diverse, global society. What do we need to accomplish in order to empower our students to flourish? Teachers and staff worked in June and August to articulate and refine what our objectives as a school should be, and because those objectives are linked to our mission, they are strategic in nature. That is why we call our school wide objectives “strategic objectives.” Those strategic objectives cascade down to departments and then down to individuals. Thus when we provide formative feedback to teachers this year, as the evaluators suggested we do, that feedback is tied to our purpose as a school, which the evaluators suggested we find. Best of all, the feedback we give to teachers use criteria the teachers helped create. Finally, we have created a mentoring program for new teachers and opportunities for teachers to make their teaching a clinical, rather than an isolated practice. The evaluators took issue with goals teachers had outlined for themselves in their professional growth plans, citing a lack of clarity in how these goals lead to improved outcomes (p. 7). One look at our strategy map indicates clearly how teachers’ individual goals lead to improved outcomes. Finally, the evaluators recommend “developing a targeted, purposeful plan for professional development for all parties that is linked to a strategic plan” (p. 7). Accordingly, we planned for a month of professional development in August, created certification programs in teaching virtually and using communication tools, and have planned professional development throughout the year that is directly linked to our strategy map.
In the section on governance and leadership, the evaluators found confusion among teachers when asked, “To whom do you go with questions?” (p. 8). As they recommended (p. 8), we have created an organizational chart, but it is probably too early in the school year to know whether it is clearer to teachers to whom they go when they have a question. The question of “clear systems for communication” needs more than organizational chart for an answer. It is actually a question of culture, and culture takes time to develop.
Finally, an area of improvement for leadership was to develop strategic plan (p. 9). The evaluators recommended the school “[create] a plan that provides a clear roadmap for the school and its stakeholders—currently and into the future” (p. 9). It was the last recommendation of the report, but it was the first thing we did. We call the “roadmap for the school and its stakeholders” a “Lesson Plan,” a strategy map that illustrates how we plan to align what we do with accomplishing the mission of empowering students to flourish. It addresses all aspects of the school, from online and face-to-face instruction to communication to the problems the evaluators found in last year’s attendance procedures (p. 9). Our strategy is to put the school on the road to greatness, which for us means empowering students to flourish, and have our charter renewed along the way.
What can you do in year four? At CVCS, Learning Coaches are partners in the work of educating our children. All schools are supposed to teach students and then find out what students have learned. We will do that like other schools (only better), but unlike other schools, we rely on a partnership with Learning Coaches to empower our students to flourish. The “Third Year Review” indicates that the school needs to more comprehensively and systematically do its part in teaching students and in finding out what they know, not in fragmented ways, but as Shakespeare wrote, “as many arrows, loosed several ways, come to one mark.” Our efforts as a school to become more involved in teaching and in finding out what students have learned will make us better partners. As we become full-fledged partners with Learning Coaches, you can help CVCS and the children we share by familiarizing yourself with the assignment the external evaluators gave us and by helping us complete our assignment. It is important to know what these same evaluators will be looking for when they return in year five. Right now, in year four, teachers and staff want to work more closely than ever with Learning Coaches to achieve our strategic objectives and to accomplish our mission of empowering all our students to flourish. You can join us in working with us to maximize our opportunities as a hybrid school and to fully realize the potential of our curriculum. No one, teacher, staff, Learning Coach, or student, comes to CVCS thinking the work will be easy, but not one of us came here because we wanted easy work. We all came here to flourish.
Asking outsiders is another way to find out where a school is. Last year, I used grant dollars to hire the same firm that will conduct our charter renewal evaluation in year five to conduct a mid-charter evaluation. I wanted a heads-up on how CPS will view the school when we apply to have our charter renewed. You can see their report by clicking here. I would like to discuss some of these evaluators’ major findings and report on our response to them. The mission of CVCS is to empower students to flourish, not to have our charter renewed. Yet it would be irresponsible of me not to provide the CVCS community with an overview of what we are doing as a school to make sure that CVCS remains open after its first charter expires as an option for parents in Chicago who want to work with us as partners in empowering students to flourish.
The first strength the report names is the curriculum (p. 2). In fact, it is the only “consensus strength” (p. 10) in the final section. The evaluators describe the curriculum K12 offers CVCS students online as individualized, offering students “the ability to move at one’s own pace, flexibility, and autonomy” (p. In the same area of curriculum, however, an “area for improvement” is the “lack of expectations around…comprehensive scope and sequence, delivery of instruction, and use of assessments” (p. 3). It was recommended that CVCS “[set] expectations for the amount of time teachers spend on instruction; [increase] the use of Elluminate to deliver instruction to all students , not just those who are struggling; and [incorporate] higher-order activities into on-line [sic] and learning center lessons” (p. 3).
The evaluators found that the variety of assessments is a strength (p. 2). Scantron as a tool allows us to learn what students know as judged against Illinois state standards and to tailor curriculum to meet individual students’ academic needs. We have a program for determining early literacy abilities among our kindergarten through second grade students. K12 provides online assessments for online learning that Learning Coaches use to gauge students’ mastery of academic content. Those assessments, the evaluators found, “are not being used systematically to validate student mastery in multiple ways” (p.4). They recommend that CVCS “establish a systematic method for monitoring student progress at various intervals throughout courses” (p. 4).
Of all the “areas of improvement” the evaluators found, we have focused most attention on this section, teaching and learning. At the K-8 level, K12 has aligned for us math and reading standards to OLS lessons, and further aligned those standards to lessons in Study Island and Odyssey. We also have exercises for reading and math standards that will allow teachers to know what students have learned. Teachers will become better partners with Learning Coaches by instructing students both online and at the Learning Center and then have the tools to find out what they have learned and to have the resources to help students who need it. In this way, we will honor the commitment and time Learning Coaches make by finding out what students know and making available additional resources as appropriate. We have made the Home Room teacher the same person as the Learning Center Teacher. All students will be learning on Elluminate in targeted, virtual sessions, and the “method for monitoring student progress at regular intervals” will be “systematic” (p. 4) and more robust than the evaluators could imagine.
The evaluators found that we do not use Learning Center time “to provide maximum benefit to the teaching and learning process” (p. 4). The evaluators found “limited evidence of differentiated instruction,” with direct observation of Learning Center instruction revealing that “teachers deliver[ed] the same lesson to all students …across almost all classrooms visited, including classrooms that incorporated students at several levels. It is not clear how whole group lessons are providing instruction to students who are progressing at different rates throughout the curriculum” (p. 4). The evaluators recommend that we “[establish] clear expectations for learning center [sic] time, which are focused on maximizing instruction and benefit to student learning” (p. 4).
The relationships CVCS teachers built with Learning Coaches last year is clearly a strength (p. 5). An “area for improvement,” however, is the lack of a “shared understanding of the purpose or philosophy of the school program,” which has resulted in “a fragmentation in some areas of the school culture” (p. 6). They recommend that CVCS establish a “common program purpose” and create “uniform expectations and clearer guidelines around roles and responsibilities for stakeholders” (p. 6).
The evaluators included the following “area for improvement” in the section on “Learning Community,” but it also belongs to the previous section, “Teaching and Learning”: “There is no clear system for feedback to improve teaching and learning” (p. 6). Nothing in this review surprised me, and this observation least of all. After all, if there is no shared purpose as a school, and if there are no expectations for teaching and learning, there was little feedback that could be given beyond the general instructional virtues of promoting higher order thinking and differentiating instruction. The evaluators recommend CVCS “[provide] formative feedback to staff” and take advantage of the” hybrid nature of the CVCS program” (p. 6).
I read this review of CVCS holistically, not as a laundry list of to-do items. That is, we cannot meaningfully discuss providing formative feedback to teachers and taking advantage of our “hybrid nature” without a mission the school is trying to accomplish. Moreover, the feedback to teachers throughout the year is best when it is linked to the school’s identified objectives. Those objectives have to be established. We have done all this. Last spring, I engaged Learning Coaches and faculty in a discussion of the school’s purpose, and we have concluded that our mission is to empower our students to flourish as individuals and as citizens in a diverse, global society. What do we need to accomplish in order to empower our students to flourish? Teachers and staff worked in June and August to articulate and refine what our objectives as a school should be, and because those objectives are linked to our mission, they are strategic in nature. That is why we call our school wide objectives “strategic objectives.” Those strategic objectives cascade down to departments and then down to individuals. Thus when we provide formative feedback to teachers this year, as the evaluators suggested we do, that feedback is tied to our purpose as a school, which the evaluators suggested we find. Best of all, the feedback we give to teachers use criteria the teachers helped create. Finally, we have created a mentoring program for new teachers and opportunities for teachers to make their teaching a clinical, rather than an isolated practice. The evaluators took issue with goals teachers had outlined for themselves in their professional growth plans, citing a lack of clarity in how these goals lead to improved outcomes (p. 7). One look at our strategy map indicates clearly how teachers’ individual goals lead to improved outcomes. Finally, the evaluators recommend “developing a targeted, purposeful plan for professional development for all parties that is linked to a strategic plan” (p. 7). Accordingly, we planned for a month of professional development in August, created certification programs in teaching virtually and using communication tools, and have planned professional development throughout the year that is directly linked to our strategy map.
In the section on governance and leadership, the evaluators found confusion among teachers when asked, “To whom do you go with questions?” (p. 8). As they recommended (p. 8), we have created an organizational chart, but it is probably too early in the school year to know whether it is clearer to teachers to whom they go when they have a question. The question of “clear systems for communication” needs more than organizational chart for an answer. It is actually a question of culture, and culture takes time to develop.
Finally, an area of improvement for leadership was to develop strategic plan (p. 9). The evaluators recommended the school “[create] a plan that provides a clear roadmap for the school and its stakeholders—currently and into the future” (p. 9). It was the last recommendation of the report, but it was the first thing we did. We call the “roadmap for the school and its stakeholders” a “Lesson Plan,” a strategy map that illustrates how we plan to align what we do with accomplishing the mission of empowering students to flourish. It addresses all aspects of the school, from online and face-to-face instruction to communication to the problems the evaluators found in last year’s attendance procedures (p. 9). Our strategy is to put the school on the road to greatness, which for us means empowering students to flourish, and have our charter renewed along the way.
What can you do in year four? At CVCS, Learning Coaches are partners in the work of educating our children. All schools are supposed to teach students and then find out what students have learned. We will do that like other schools (only better), but unlike other schools, we rely on a partnership with Learning Coaches to empower our students to flourish. The “Third Year Review” indicates that the school needs to more comprehensively and systematically do its part in teaching students and in finding out what they know, not in fragmented ways, but as Shakespeare wrote, “as many arrows, loosed several ways, come to one mark.” Our efforts as a school to become more involved in teaching and in finding out what students have learned will make us better partners. As we become full-fledged partners with Learning Coaches, you can help CVCS and the children we share by familiarizing yourself with the assignment the external evaluators gave us and by helping us complete our assignment. It is important to know what these same evaluators will be looking for when they return in year five. Right now, in year four, teachers and staff want to work more closely than ever with Learning Coaches to achieve our strategic objectives and to accomplish our mission of empowering all our students to flourish. You can join us in working with us to maximize our opportunities as a hybrid school and to fully realize the potential of our curriculum. No one, teacher, staff, Learning Coach, or student, comes to CVCS thinking the work will be easy, but not one of us came here because we wanted easy work. We all came here to flourish.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
CVCS Strategy Map: The "Learning Plan"
Follow this link to the strategy map I posted earlier this summer, now built out to include departments and individuals.
This document is a narrative that describes how we arrived at our strategic and performance plan. This work began with discussions last spring in faculty meetings and was the focus of our staff retreat in June. I discussed it further with teachers before they left for their summer break and with teachers and staff when teachers returned in August. Strategy, as Michael Porter defines it, is those activities at which an organization chooses to succeed. In this document I describe those activities at which we have chosen to succeed as a school, in departments, and as individuals.
These are the activities that guide our professional development efforts and focus our work, and these are the activities for which we hold ourselves accountable to you. Our mission is to empower every student at CVCS to flourish, and our "Learning Plan" lists and describes the hypotheses we have for accomplishing our mission.
I look forward to your comments.
This document is a narrative that describes how we arrived at our strategic and performance plan. This work began with discussions last spring in faculty meetings and was the focus of our staff retreat in June. I discussed it further with teachers before they left for their summer break and with teachers and staff when teachers returned in August. Strategy, as Michael Porter defines it, is those activities at which an organization chooses to succeed. In this document I describe those activities at which we have chosen to succeed as a school, in departments, and as individuals.
These are the activities that guide our professional development efforts and focus our work, and these are the activities for which we hold ourselves accountable to you. Our mission is to empower every student at CVCS to flourish, and our "Learning Plan" lists and describes the hypotheses we have for accomplishing our mission.
I look forward to your comments.
Learning Coach Handbook Draft: Input Requested!
Follow this link to a draft of the Learning Coach Handbook. I am very interested in reading your comments on my blog. I am asking that you direct all your comments, questions, and recommendations to the blog rather than to me directly so everyone can participate in the conversation. I need to send it to the printer on Friday, August 21, so please post whatever comments you have here by August 21 so those comments can be considered as we create a final draft.
Among the sections you might find particularly important are the following:
On page five is the day-to-day working of the school with a list of important dates.
The section entitled, "School Policies, Procedures & Expectations," which begins on page 14. Of particular importance is the discussion on attendance. And in that section is the proposed language on dress code (p. 15). In discussions with teachers and the Parent Advisory Committee, I have not heard much support for school uniforms. Here's your chance to weigh in on this issue.
The requirements for Work Samples are changing, and those are described beginning on page 26.
What we communicate to you in progress and report cards is also changing, and you can read about those changes on page 28.
The date for mid-year course promotions is now mid-year: page 29.
Eighth grade graduation requirements align more with the knowledge and skills students need to be successful in high school. See page 30.
Every high school student will have an Academic Success Plan, as described on page 32.
TheBigThinK is an important new communication tool for CVCS. Read about it on page 40.
We have a Learning Coach Mentor Program, new this year, which is outlined on page 41, and a certification program for mentors, which can be found on page 65.
The Parent Advisory Committee is a new parent organization this year, and they have written an entry describing who they are and what they do, which appears on page 41.
The Appendix, which begins on page 46, has lots of documents we think will be important to you. Please feel free to suggest others you would like. Please know that once this document is in final form, it will be available electronically on TheBigThinK.
Thank you so much for your input! We look forward to reading your thoughts!
Among the sections you might find particularly important are the following:
On page five is the day-to-day working of the school with a list of important dates.
The section entitled, "School Policies, Procedures & Expectations," which begins on page 14. Of particular importance is the discussion on attendance. And in that section is the proposed language on dress code (p. 15). In discussions with teachers and the Parent Advisory Committee, I have not heard much support for school uniforms. Here's your chance to weigh in on this issue.
The requirements for Work Samples are changing, and those are described beginning on page 26.
What we communicate to you in progress and report cards is also changing, and you can read about those changes on page 28.
The date for mid-year course promotions is now mid-year: page 29.
Eighth grade graduation requirements align more with the knowledge and skills students need to be successful in high school. See page 30.
Every high school student will have an Academic Success Plan, as described on page 32.
TheBigThinK is an important new communication tool for CVCS. Read about it on page 40.
We have a Learning Coach Mentor Program, new this year, which is outlined on page 41, and a certification program for mentors, which can be found on page 65.
The Parent Advisory Committee is a new parent organization this year, and they have written an entry describing who they are and what they do, which appears on page 41.
The Appendix, which begins on page 46, has lots of documents we think will be important to you. Please feel free to suggest others you would like. Please know that once this document is in final form, it will be available electronically on TheBigThinK.
Thank you so much for your input! We look forward to reading your thoughts!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
CVCS Strategy Map
Below is our strategy map, created by teachers and staff June 17 and 18, and presented to the CVCS Board June 25. Please know that our strategy map represents strategic objectives at the school level, and that we are working to cascade these objectives to departments and to individuals. Updates will be posted as the work progresses.
If we improve staff knowledge and competencies and improve opportunity for staff collaboration and input, we will improve our internal processes and procedures, all the activities CVCS does as a school, including teaching practices. And if we improve our processes and procedures, we will improve our communication as well as improve the quality and depth of teaching and our programs and services. If we do that, we will maximize our resources, which includes financial resources and teachers’ time and efforts. We also believe that improving the quality and depth of teaching and our programs and services will have a direct impact on student achievement, student and family and engagement, and our families’ satisfaction with our school. Moreover, maximizing our use of resources and making the very best use of teachers’ time will result in improved family satisfaction, increased student achievement, and increased family and student engagement.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)