In 2017 my first book on educational methods, titled It’s Like Riding a Bike-How to make learning last a lifetime, was published. With more than 10,000 copies printed, I decided that now is the time to share my thoughts with the world for FREE.
Over ten weeks in the summer/fall of 2023 a chapter of the book will be shared each week via this blog. Feel free to read in any order that works for you. Feel free to bookmark entries to read all at once at a later date. Feel free to share with others. Feel free to disagree with anything you read or to scream your affirmations from the mountain tops. This is for YOU. This is for our kids. This is how we teach so that it lasts a lifetime.
Chapter 9
Engagement or standards? Which is it?
I have been blessed in my career to do several things outside of my classroom and my office. I get to speak and do presentations to a variety of audiences sharing some of what I have learned about Standards Based Grading, assessment, and student engagement with some of the most amazing people in the world. Some of you may be reading some of the words in this book and thinking, “I’ve heard this before.” GREAT! That just proves my point. You didn’t need this book to teach you anything. You were able to learn without reading. Maybe we talked at a conference recently. Maybe you sat in one of my audiences. However, I also understand that reading may allow you to revisit concepts again, or to have the time to self-pace your own learning. It also allows me to share my ideas or the ideas I have borrowed from others, with an audience that may not have heard them before.
Aside from my ability to speak before audiences, I also do some work for the accreditation agency known as Advanc-Ed. With this responsibility, I have been able to work side by side with some amazing educational leaders from around the world and visit some incredible schools and classrooms across the country. The work Advanc-Ed does on these accreditation visits is not focused on identifying a school or district’s successes and failures. As an accreditation team, we do not look for evidence to judge a system as good or bad. We believe that is an internal process. The role of an accreditation team is to evaluate a system’s own process for self-assessment and reflection. Does a school system have its own process and procedures for examining what is working and what needs improvement? Do they have a way to determine how to grow and meet the needs of more students? In essence, is the system learning? It is not a question of pass/fail; it is a question of where the system on its journey is. Systems are not good or bad. They are all at different levels of development. As complex entities, it is not feasible to simply identify a system, comprised of multiple individuals with varying experiences and roles, as simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory. I have been on many external reviews, as we call these visits, where the school buildings and systems do not understand that this is what we are there to explore. Often times we, the visiting team, get the red-carpet treatment. Many places see this as a final exam and do all they can to just let us see their best and brightest so they can earn a passing grade and get a nice little story in the local newspaper. They put their best foot forward and prep for days so that the team can come in and see results of all of their hard work. As a team though, we are not all that concerned with the show we see. We are there to examine evidence of a process that was in place before our arrival and one that will hopefully continue after we leave.
We are all guilty of doing things like this every once in a while. A politician a few years ago described this as “putting lipstick on a pig”. We try to disguise our struggles or flaws so as to not really address them. We create a facade and mask what is really going on. Have you ever experienced something like this in your own classroom or school? If you are an administrator, do you ever see the teachers put forth a tremendous effort to create an artificial show on observation day because they only want you to see a finished and polished product? They don’t want you to see “the man behind the curtain” but only want you to see the magical wizard. How about your students? Are they expected to study for tests and quizzes every Thursday night because Friday is test day? Come Saturday they can forget it all, but on the day of the big test, they better know it and show it. There is no push for endurance, no focus on the learning process, only a quest for short-term memory, for a quick experience, and content regurgitation. What goes in, must come out. The problem is if we are only focusing on producing results that are replicas of what we already know, we will never move forward. If this is all we put in, it is all we will get.
There is a reason that in America we have strict trademark and copyright laws. Sure, we want to limit copycats for the sake of financial gain. The laws go beyond trying to protect financial interests though. By limiting replication in commercial and intellectual enterprises, we are also forcing innovation and creativity. When a law forbids others from simply stealing an idea, we are forced to try and create something better. We cannot just accept what is and make it ours. We must take what is and make something new and better. Similarly, some of you may decide to take some of the ideas presented in this book and try to copy them, but what I really want though is for some of you to take these ideas and either enhance them by finding some of their flaws or by completely discrediting them and finding a better way to do things. When we can’t copy, we must create.
As teachers and educators, we will have a very difficult time getting our students to do something that we are not comfortable doing. Creating is about risk-taking. We must be willing to create new realities and try things that nobody before us has tried. We need to create creators. We need to create risk-takers. We need to create students willing to change their own destinies. We need to create students not intimidated by failure and the true learning process. But how? How can we teach students to do something that we ourselves do not know how to do? How can we get kids to move beyond where we are able to take them? How do we create new thoughts? As teachers, we have spent our careers feeling comfortable being the smartest one in the room and encouraging our students to simply mimic what we already know. We are now asking to flip that script. As teachers, we will become facilitators of learning not keepers of knowledge. We will become feedback providers, not graders and labelers. We will encourage our kids to take what we give them and make it better.
*********************************************
Standards-Based Grading and its cousin Standards-Based Learning get a lot of attention from progressive educators today. Using the phrase coined by Stephen Covey “Begin with the end in mind”, we want to know where our students are going before we start them on their journey. The standards are the goal, what we want to teach them, or more specifically what we want them to demonstrate evidence of learning. How we get them there is the art of teaching. As educators, it is our responsibility to measure our students’ progress toward reaching their goals. It is our job to move each of them forward and closer to seeing success. At the heart of these movements is the idea that teachers must learn how to interpret standards and then measure student work, commonly described as evidence, against a standard. Many teachers fall short in their understanding of this, however, because of their belief that knowledge is binary. Knowledge is not something that you either have or don’t have. It is not like the proverbial on/off switch illuminating a light bulb above a cartoon character’s head. It is more akin to a dimmer switch being raised causing ever-increasing amounts of light to be cast. It does not come on all at once but rather is a progression of ever-increasing illumination. Our minds do not become bright all at once. They require a buildup.
Some of you may have heard me make the seemingly redundant statement, “A standard is only standard if it is standard”. Whether I am driving through Alabama or Michigan I know that when I see a mile marker sign on the side of the road I will have to travel 5,280 feet before getting to the next marker. I know each of those feet is twelve inches long. No matter where I am in the country, the standard for measuring a mile is the same. The standard is standard. It does not change depending on the season or the car I drive. The standard is not adjusted based on the state in which I am driving or the speed I am traveling. A mile is a mile. To help us have clarity in communication and expectation while driving we must have a uniform method of interpreting a measurement. This keeps us safe, allows us to understand our limits, and helps us predict and plan for what is still to come. The standard is not up for interpretation, but how we do have tremendous latitude in how we use that standard for our own benefit. The same is true with the standards presented to teachers. Standards are not the focus of this debate. How we use those standards and what standards we choose to use, however, is where we can make some subjective judgments.
Why is it for example that as we drive down interstates, we see mile markers and not foot markers? It would be an extraordinary expense and waste of resources to see our landscape littered with literally millions of such signs. Why have any signs at all to mark our progress? Why not just let every driver figure out their own way to chart progress? After all, some might choose to use the kilometer, others may want to measure their progress in yards, and maybe others want to simply use time intervals. Why would anyone in government have the audacity to force us all to measure our progress in miles?
An inch is an inch on every ruler. It is a standard measurement. When I was a kid my goal was to grow up and be six feet tall. I would measure myself often against a standard measurement looking at my progress towards meeting my goal. If I ever got to my ideal height (I am only 5’10” today) I would not automatically stop growing. I may continue to develop and could still use my standard measurement to chart my progress. Being tall is not standard, nor is being short. These are what statisticians would call norm-referenced or subjective interpretations. They are relative. Tall and short are descriptive words that require a comparison to another object. Based on our opinions or comparisons we make a judgment. In a classroom a teacher may privately label one child “smart” and another as “slow”, basing these opinions more on the relative nature of the two students to each other than on their ability to understand or articulate an individual learning target.
To a child, 6 feet tall may seem an impressive height. To an NBA champion being only six feet “tall” may seem short. In a standards-based classroom, the goal is to have a constant measurement as free from personal bias as possible. This does not necessarily mean we are looking to eliminate teacher autonomy, creativity, or individualism. In fact, it is the exact opposite. The goal is to create objective measures of learning not of teaching. A standards-based classroom actually enhances a teacher’s ability to be creative and free. The standard is the WHAT. The creativity of teaching is the HOW.
What we test is what we teach. What we teach is what we value. Have you ever tried to question another teacher on his/her grading scale, grade weighting, or their classroom rules? Have you ever tried to debate due dates, redos, and retakes just to feel the tension in the room ever increase? I associate talking about grading and class norms with a teacher to talking about politics and religion at Thanksgiving dinner with extended family. When you bring up the topic, even in the most innocent and exploratory manner, you are seen as questioning a person’s values and priorities. This puts others on defense feeling like their core is being challenged. Go back and re-read the first two sentences of this paragraph again. If you test it, you value it. Sure, we can argue that our students are over-tested. We can say states and districts require us to test our students on things that we see little value in. Yet, for some reason, we continue to do it. For many, this is something not worth fighting over anymore. Rebelling against the onslaught of testing could be career suicide. I am in no way advocating for that. In fact, I actually do see tremendous value in testing, but we’ll explore that later on. What I am saying here is simply, a test displays value. If a state or district mandates a test, they are saying the subject areas are valuable. If you as a teacher give up class time to test your students, you are implying value. In order to administer a test, you are sacrificing time that could have been spent doing any other number of activities. The problem is not that we are testing our students so much. The problem is we don’t all explicitly see the value that we are implicitly implying. We test our students religiously on Fridays, at the end of semesters, prior to entrance to kindergarten, seemingly in every classroom, every day. We do this because someone, somewhere has determined that testing students is important. As teachers, we often play along with the game, and you know what, I have no problem with that. As a matter of fact, I would even argue that in many classes we don’t test enough. What?!? Did I just put that in print? So far in this book I have said “I don’t care if my kids can read” and now I am saying “We need to test more often.” Before you put this book down and rattle off that e-mail to me and my publisher, let me explain. I think what I am attempting to say is actually what most of you already believe. I am just saying it in a way that you may not have heard before.
Six years ago, I was in my first year as a school principal. I had spent my three years prior as an assistant principal learning the ropes of managing adults and trying to inspire growth and change, but I still had a lot of things to learn. As a first-year principal and a young one at that (I was 32), I felt like I had a lot to prove. I was working in a building that had stagnated in regard to their student achievement data. We had amazing teachers doing amazing things, but we just were not seeing the results. I was a believer, and still am, that the greatest way to inspire change is to provide great descriptive feedback. As a building administrator this meant that I needed to do a focused job of using the teacher evaluation process not just to label teachers as good and bad (satisfactory or unsatisfactory) but to provide a reflective lens in which each teacher could grow and develop. To this date, the single most effective evaluation I ever provided, was my first evaluation.
As a new principal, I made a calculated decision to start the evaluation process with what I thought would be an easy path. I wanted to observe the teachers that had the best reputations, those who everyone believed were doing a great job, and just go in and validate all they were doing well. I wanted to use these teachers as guinea pigs. I thought that these teachers would be a piece of cake. Boy was I wrong, but in the most amazing way possible. The first observation I went on was career-changing, and as a matter of fact, is the inspiration for this book. The teacher I observed had her students engaged and interacting. There was student-owned collaboration and student facilitation of classroom management. The teacher had a well-oiled machine. She was doing so many things the way that a textbook on effective teaching would tell us it should be done. I had spent forty minutes watching a master teacher. I packed up my notes and laptop and began walking out of the room. It was on my way out of that teacher’s classroom that my perspective on teaching and learning evolved as never before. I noticed two small words written on that teacher’s classroom calendar that sent my career on a path that has included speaking to thousands of other educators, moving across the country, and now writing this book.
This teacher was extremely organized. She was the envy of her peers because of her ability to have a lesson plan crafted for every day for an entire month. She had parent phone numbers on a Rolla-deck on her desk and had a reputation for returning all student work within twenty-four hours. Her organization was wonderful and became the pivot point for all future conversations about effective teaching and learning at that school. On a bulletin board just inside the door to this teacher’s classroom was an assignment calendar. On it, the teacher listed upcoming sporting events, band concerts, homework, and field trips. She also was so organized that on this given day she was able to write that the following Friday (I remember this observation was on a Thursday-eight day prior) was “Test Day”. She had planned her instruction so far in advance that she knew what her students would be doing eight days later. As a matter of fact, I learned that she wrote that date on the calendar the week before. “Test day”- two words written on a bulletin board calendar have inspired every presentation I have made since that day.
Seeing those two words sent my mind racing in a lot of directions. I can honestly look back on it now and say I had no idea what I was thinking but I simply knew I wanted to know more. Taking a page out of my law professor’s playbook I decided to ask the teacher a question, or more specifically a series of questions. After first complimenting her for her attention to detail and organization I asked, “How do you know your students will be ready for a test next week?” This was an innocent question intending no judgment whatsoever, but came across more like, “So tell me why you are a Democrat?”. After hearing her explain all the instruction she would be providing to her students each of the next seven days and all of the “informal” assessments she would be administering as a part of each day’s lesson plan, I followed up with “If you know what the kids will know, why do you need to test them.” Seeing a puzzled look on her face, I then interjected with, “Or if you don’t know that the students will be ready, why to give them a test?” I was on a roll. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just stumbled on the test giver’s catch twenty-two. A series of questions that with each answer only complicates the prior response. Do you give a test only when you know the students already know it all or do you give a test when you do not know what the students know? If your students already have proven to you what they know are you just giving a test because you feel you’re supposed to. Are tests given to prove something that you think you already know or to confirm a hunch? In the real world, the answer is that we give tests only when other evidence has already confirmed something.
Because I have four kids at home, I know a thing or two about pregnancy tests. I know that most women do not wake up every Friday, pull a test out of their medicine cabinet, and pee on a stick just to see if they are pregnant. I apologize for the crudeness of this example, but the fact of the matter is that very few women take a test unless they have some other cues prompting them to. More than likely a woman will only take a pregnancy test if she already feels like she knows the result. The test provides confirmation one way or the other. In our classrooms, we have too many teachers who simply open their file cabinets on Friday and tell our students to test with no indicators letting us know it’s time and no plan for what to do once we get the results. Each time my wife has taken a pregnancy test she has confessed to me that in the three to five minutes while awaiting results she has thought through how to tell me another child is on the way, visualized baby names, and tried to reconcile whether there would be disappointment or relief if the results were negative. To her, the tests were a confirmation of a hunch, predicated by other evidence, that led to future action. In our classrooms, we need to stop giving tests to label our students as “got it” or “failing” and start using tests to see how students are learning and progressing and for determining what we as teachers are going to do about it. We need to stop trying to determine whether our students have memorized every word we have said or every word they have read and start focusing on where our students are in becoming learners. Testing learning is not the same as testing for pregnancy in which we can simply label the results as positive or negative but are more like measuring the growth of a child at an ultrasound and comparing that to an anticipated due date. As teachers, we help students conceive an initial thought, and our job then must be to provide frequent and regular well visits to ensure growth and vitality. If we see areas of concern, we then intervene and remediate them. This is a different way of thinking for many, so how do we as classroom teachers and school administrators test that? It’s actually pretty simple.
We need to stop worrying about knowledge and start worrying about learning. If we value it, we test it. If our mission statements are going to state that we are creating life-long learners, we need to start measuring our ability to do that and stop measuring whether our students have memorized a bunch of text. Memorizing a spelling word does not create a person with an affinity for learning. Memorizing the dates of Civil War battles does not help students learn how to avoid similar conflicts in the future. We must begin to see all assessments as formative and must be willing to see all learning as a process not a yes, no proposition. Learning is not as simple as “got it” or “nope”. All learning builds upon prior foundations and requires new understandings in order to grow to higher heights. The job of a second-grade teacher is to not only provide a seven-year-old with a prescribed set of learnings but to also build a foundation for the learning that will occur in third grade. As a parent, our job is not to create perfect kids but to provide the building blocks for future successful adults. As teachers at6 every level we must first embrace the process of learning and begin to cast off the illusion that our job is to get children to simply memorize facts. Until that occurs, we cannot move forward with our own learning progression.
Read early chapters by visiting https://schmittou.net
Lasting Learning: Serving leaders, educators, and students. 