Jeff,
Take your time in the writing. Looks like this has been a kick-ass week for ya. Glad we had some time to catch up and hang with Dana on Thursday. Part 1 of the charmed-life theme of this post -- you're right, the life long friends that we've made at the Guild have really changed me. For the better.
Please don't remind me of Big Bang. This will be the first time in six years I won't be there. It feels weird to be the first week in August and I'm not going to Providence.
ARENESSA ROCKS! I am so happy for her and am reminded that we CANNOT lose site of the work we do with (and for) kids like her. Rhodesia Rocks! You are so right, the ideas of what school provides for opportunities to narrow the achievment gap do NOT need to be focused just on what is happening inside the building. This current push to see school as the place where the bulk of the important studnet learning happens is somewhat demoralizing. I would wish for more publicity for experiences like Rhodesia's.
We both know that ain't happening anytime soon.
This week, I got 2 days worth of iCoach orientations. (Like that, dontcha? iCoach! Makes me want to sync myself with other iDevices!) I can now report that I'm on informational and structural overload. Processing all this stuff is gonna take some time. I am working in a very messy and gray area in the DoE -- and it feels GREAT! So far I am defining (and designing) the work that I'm doing and getting some incredible looks into how the system and how the schools operate. The orientation's big happenings were conversations with Arthur Vanderveen and Tomas Hanna, who are co-leading the Office of Innovation. Tomas has just come from Philly, where he knew David Bromley and had some interesting insights into Big Picture's work and design. Nice Guy. Smart and funny. Just like us!
But what I really wanted to write about is how charmed I feel like my life and work is right now. As I've said, in the past couple of years it felt like my leadership skills were deteriorating. I feel like, for a variety of reasons, I just couldn't figure out how to learn and be a learning leader at the Guild. I'm not gonna say it was all the Guild's fault -- I should have been able to work and learn in almost any conditions. But for those many reasons, I had a really difficult time.
Well here I am now. July is over and I've started to dig into my iZone work. And I'm feeling really lucky. No, I mean REALLY lucky. The biggest part of my feeling charmed? I'm working with 6 dynamite principals. Five of the six schools got A's on their last year's report card (and the sixth is only 2 years old, so they didn't get a report card grade). They all have flying colors on their last quality review. So, according to the system evaluation metrics, there is already some great work being done in the schools. So I get to see what the day-to-day operation of these schools look like. And I get to help them plan and implement a change process. So not only do I get to work with some incredible school leaders, I've get to watch them lead their staffs through an interesting change process.
I'm gonna try to write about some of the incredible leadership moves that I see during this process. I'm gonna start at Tompkins Square Middle School and its principal Sonhando Estwick. TSMS has an incredible leadership structure -- the school is run completely democratically. That is to say that all major visioning and implementation decisions are done by staff vote. There are monthly staff meetings that serve as a venue for forming committees, reporting out on work and voting on changes and implementing initiatives. So small committees form and do some work or study that may result in a change of practice for a few (or many) teachers. They present their work to the staff and then Sonhando (pronounced soy-hand-doo) facilitates a vote of the whole staff to adopt the initiative or provide time and space for more study or to drop it all together (or anyt combination of the 3). An initiative must get a 66% majority to carry. Everyone gets one vote. So the principal gets the same vote that the school aids get.
Sonhando sees his leadership role as complete facilitator. He knows he has good people working in the school and he trusts their professionalism, work ethic and intelligence to do right by the kids. So he helps coordinate the efforts and provide the venues for folks to do good works (committee structures, work time during PD times, etc.) But when it comes time for decision making, he has one vote.
I'm going to start working with one of the committees in two weeks. I'll let you know how it goes.
How different would our lives have been if Michael had stuck around and finished that process with the Guild ('cause I felt like that's where he was heading to with the distributive leadership process). Or if Sam had run the Guild with that kind of process? Sonhando has an exceptionally stable staff (he reports that in the past 4 years, he's never had more than 4 teachers leave at a time) and has that same sort of "I love my teachers" vibe that Michael used to give off (both in message and in practice). But the teachers really own the work and own the school. I can't wait to see what it looks like when the school year gets flowing.
Now, you have to excuse me. Pedroia just hit a 2 run double giving the Sox the lead against Chicago in the 7th. I'm a happy man.
Peace,
Al
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
It is not the getting there, it's "the getting there".
Al,
I have been so busy, hard to find time for the blog. Quick recap-
Last week SRI training at NYU - Really good and I will fill you in even more about it. I am going to take the on-going training to get certified. NYU offers and luckily Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom HS (FLHFHS) has a relationship with NYU to get vouchers for classes, I am really excited.
Earlier this week, I spent two days in Asbury Park with Eunice from Newark to present the Big Picture Design and Distinguishers to folks there. It went really well, in my next post I will show the agenda for the two days and the results.
I have read two books this week, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap by Richard Rothstein and Common Sense School Reform by Frederick Hess. They were assigned by my professor from my Baruch class. Two radically different books that look at the Achievement Gap. Really interesting stuff, that I will write more about later. We have a 5-7 page paper due next week, so I have to write about Achievement Gap anyway.
The real reason for the quick post was from this email that I receive from Rhodesia last week
(I got her permission to post this)
How awesome is that? Tell me regular summer school can get a kid active and engaged in their local community and their own professional growth. This totally stems from her LTI and the work Lydia has done with her. I have a bunch of people in my graduate class that are working on Health Policy and I was thinking how in a couple of years Rhodesia will be one of them. The interesting thing about this for me is that in Frederick Hess' book he talks about how schools need to focus on student achievement above all else and that all the work of adults in the building should be focused on that (sometimes with exceptions he says). Rhodesia got this opportunity because of my relationship with one of the "We are The Bronx" fellows that works at Einstein Hospital. Here is the original email that he sent me.
Great seeing you and Dana at dinner the other night. BG really provided me with so many life-long friendships, I am so grateful. I may hit up Big Bang X next week and present with the Roadtrip Nation guys (If I can get my 5-7 pager done). I'll let you know how it goes.
Best,
Jeff
I have been so busy, hard to find time for the blog. Quick recap-
Last week SRI training at NYU - Really good and I will fill you in even more about it. I am going to take the on-going training to get certified. NYU offers and luckily Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom HS (FLHFHS) has a relationship with NYU to get vouchers for classes, I am really excited.
Earlier this week, I spent two days in Asbury Park with Eunice from Newark to present the Big Picture Design and Distinguishers to folks there. It went really well, in my next post I will show the agenda for the two days and the results.
I have read two books this week, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap by Richard Rothstein and Common Sense School Reform by Frederick Hess. They were assigned by my professor from my Baruch class. Two radically different books that look at the Achievement Gap. Really interesting stuff, that I will write more about later. We have a 5-7 page paper due next week, so I have to write about Achievement Gap anyway.
The real reason for the quick post was from this email that I receive from Rhodesia last week
(I got her permission to post this)
Hello and Good afternoon Lydia and Jeff,
I just wanted to give you an update about my summer. The public health program where I'm currently attending on Friday's afternoon from 1-3 is going great. I am the new member of YAB (Youth Advisory Board) and was lucky to be the public speaker of the first class (somebody punked out !). While spending time with the coordinator, we talked about the internship program and now have one. The program is very interesting and awarding each member with a certificate of completion every week for each topic.
How awesome is that? Tell me regular summer school can get a kid active and engaged in their local community and their own professional growth. This totally stems from her LTI and the work Lydia has done with her. I have a bunch of people in my graduate class that are working on Health Policy and I was thinking how in a couple of years Rhodesia will be one of them. The interesting thing about this for me is that in Frederick Hess' book he talks about how schools need to focus on student achievement above all else and that all the work of adults in the building should be focused on that (sometimes with exceptions he says). Rhodesia got this opportunity because of my relationship with one of the "We are The Bronx" fellows that works at Einstein Hospital. Here is the original email that he sent me.
Dear Colleagues,
The Youth Public Health Institute (YPHI) at the Bronx District Public Health Office (Bx. DPHO), part of the DOHMH, was created to increases the public health knowledge and skills of adolescents. This year our training workshops will cover topics such as leadership, time management, epidemiology, sexual and reproductive health, tobacco control, emergency management, public health research, physical activity, immunization, Geo-knowledge, and basic public health efforts that assure health equity in neighborhoods.
Through the YPHI, the Bx. DPHO aims to fill the void that exists around public health knowledge by providing factual data and information on public health issues affecting NYC and the South Bronx as well as create leadership that will help prevent diseases and promote adolescents health. The trainings workshops are designed to serve as a baseline overview of the knowledge and skills expected of emerging public health professionals.
Furthermore, by providing FREE trainings to adolescents, the YPHI strengthens the leadership competence of future public health professionals. Finally, the YPHI works with individuals and local organizations in the South Bronx to introduce youths to the thriving field of public health.
I don't disagree with Hess that achievement is the most important thing that schools should measure, but there are so many ways to get there.Great seeing you and Dana at dinner the other night. BG really provided me with so many life-long friendships, I am so grateful. I may hit up Big Bang X next week and present with the Roadtrip Nation guys (If I can get my 5-7 pager done). I'll let you know how it goes.
Best,
Jeff
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Adobe Youth Voices
Al,
Just a quick post about an amazing happening. Arenessa's Senior Adobe Youth Voices piece was selected to be in the AYV promotional DVD compilation. They put one out every year and they have a panel of judges that select the ones to go on the DVD. AYV has 500 sites in over 32 countries and BG got one on there. Her piece will be showcased at the AYV summit in California this August.
Amazing, I was thinking about when I was at the PBS conference 4 years ago in the Adobe room trying to get contacts for them to work with us. Of course the real work and thanks go to the people who made it happened, Sarah, Shanita, Stacy and all the students over the last couple of years that have worked hard and participated in Adobe. Great work and another thing we should be proud of.
Just a reminder that this was her piece
http://youthvoices.adobe.com/galleries/partners/62-bronx-guild/media/256?page=1
I will review your last post more carefully and respond. I have been swamped with my SRI training, Education Policy class and Big Picture Learning Asbury Park conference. All exciting work and I want to update you on them all.
I'm out.
Jeff
Just a quick post about an amazing happening. Arenessa's Senior Adobe Youth Voices piece was selected to be in the AYV promotional DVD compilation. They put one out every year and they have a panel of judges that select the ones to go on the DVD. AYV has 500 sites in over 32 countries and BG got one on there. Her piece will be showcased at the AYV summit in California this August.
Amazing, I was thinking about when I was at the PBS conference 4 years ago in the Adobe room trying to get contacts for them to work with us. Of course the real work and thanks go to the people who made it happened, Sarah, Shanita, Stacy and all the students over the last couple of years that have worked hard and participated in Adobe. Great work and another thing we should be proud of.
Just a reminder that this was her piece
http://youthvoices.adobe.com/galleries/partners/62-bronx-guild/media/256?page=1
I will review your last post more carefully and respond. I have been swamped with my SRI training, Education Policy class and Big Picture Learning Asbury Park conference. All exciting work and I want to update you on them all.
I'm out.
Jeff
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Life on the Other Side
Jeff,
First off, Ravitch and Meiers ain't got nothing on us. We're smart and accomplished. All we need is a couple of Ph.D's, some published books, some national policy experience and a huge following. (Really, though, I think we only need the huge following) How hard could those things be?
Thanks for finally reading one of my posts. I was starting to worry that we were gonna stay in the Paul McCartney, Gerry Garcia, Keith Richards world for the rest of the summer. Nothing like old-time rock-and-roll to infuse an education discussion.
I'm gonna skip my planned discussion of Kunskappskollen. Suffice it to say that they are a Swedish Big Picture, minus the internships. Very similar structures, but with systematized ways of accomplishing those goals (their one-on-one coaching questions are awesome). If you wanna learn more about them, go here:
http://www.kunskapsgymnasiet.se/foretaget/inenglish.4.1d32e45f86b8ae04c7fff213.html
Instead, I wanna comment on your post ('cause I actually READ yours) and connect those ideas to the work that I'm doing now.
And, dude, if you keep quoting the NY Post, I'm gonna quit this. Where are we getting our information from next? Gerry Springer? National Enquirer? I mean, come on! I do NOT believe that when questioned about the release from seat time requirements the iLearnNYC principals were quiet -- I believe there was a thoughtful pause in the discussion while principals formulated their answers, which the Post reporter interpreted as silence. I'm betting that, following Scroggin's question and the accompanying pause, there was a decent discussion about performance assessments and personal mastery learning that went RIGHT over the head of the Post reporter. And so s/he reported silence. Cause it made the educators look stupid. And the Post doesn't miss an opportunity to make educators look stupid.
I'm working with 6 of those 42 principals now. There is no WAY those 6 principals would have been (COULD have been) silent at that question. I cannot believe there was a generalized lack-of-response.
Ok, let's leave that behind for a moment. It's funny that you spend so long talking about the Khan Academy. Mainly because using that sort of online environment is how I got Sage (my son) through integrated Algebra (we were using Thinkwell http://www.thinkwell.com instead of Khan, but same idea -- recorded guru gives a lesson and provides practice problems that the student does). You know I fell in love with that process, but it was the at-home availability of a couple of experts (me and Sage's brother) that allowed for continuation and clarification. When Sage didn't understand something, he came to me or Ryan for further understanding -- over what the lesson could provide. Very similar to what the teacher in the Wired article (Kami Thordarson) has done.
But the work that the Wired reporter didn't talk about (what is it with reporters?) is the personalization that Thordarson has HAD to do in response to the Khan software. She now HAS to (and has the tools to) track each kid's progress through the curriculum. She can then respond to (heretofore invisible) blocks in student understanding and create lessons (for individuals or small groups) that solidifies their understanding.
Sound familiar?
Haven't we ALWAYS charged our teachers with doing JUST THAT at the Guild. Tracking how well a student is able to accomplish tasks, figure out what the block is and target the instruction for that block?
Right now, I am in the middle of a 3 day PD for principals in our network. It's not iZone stuff, so I'm just helping out and using it as an opportunity to learn. What the non-iZone schools are learning is Universal Design for Learning. Go here for a look:
http://www.cast.org
What's so interesting about this group and their work is that they are providing lesson planning tools that REQUIRE the teacher to consider EVERY kid in EVERY class. Beyond differentiation, this is a stance to lesson planning that begins with the question "How do I create activities that will allow all learners in my classroom to grapple with this _________" (fill in the blank with skill, standard, content idea, etc.) It forces teachers to begin to KNOW their students before creating lessons -- or to create lessons with the EXPLICIT goal of knowing students.
I, of course, LOVE this. It is JUST the sort of work I want teachers doing -- what I think they SHOULD be doing. But I'm on the other side now, right? I'm now a network guy who is trying to get teachers and principals to embrace different instructional practices. It is a wonder that I actually AGREE with those practices, but I'm now THAT guy. I like to think that they listening to me more than I listened to Maria. But only time will tell. It does strike me (again) how ahead of the pack our thinking is about personalizing learning.
And yes, I'm going to continue to use this blog as a way of patting ourselves on the back. Like Ravitch and Meiers, we have a definitive stance and a body of work that informs that stance. If I don't keep referencing it, I'm gonna lose site of what's important. I don't have kids around me now. It is a bit disorienting.
Last bit. Some of the iZone schools are working with Grant Wiggin's company, Authentic Education. I just sat in on a webinar to give some tools and ideas for performance assessments. Though Grant was very dry and not-so-engaging a speaker, his thinking and materials are cool. If I had a do-over for last year's work, I might have developed rubrics and processes for assessing performance tasks that would make teachers a whole lot more comfortable giving credits. Go here to look at some of that work (the competencies are particularly interesting):
http://www.nycubd.org/
Ok, man that's all for me now. Looking forward to hearing about the facilitative leadership training. I'm trying NOT to be too jealous. How's your Issaquah?
Peace,
Al
First off, Ravitch and Meiers ain't got nothing on us. We're smart and accomplished. All we need is a couple of Ph.D's, some published books, some national policy experience and a huge following. (Really, though, I think we only need the huge following) How hard could those things be?
Thanks for finally reading one of my posts. I was starting to worry that we were gonna stay in the Paul McCartney, Gerry Garcia, Keith Richards world for the rest of the summer. Nothing like old-time rock-and-roll to infuse an education discussion.
I'm gonna skip my planned discussion of Kunskappskollen. Suffice it to say that they are a Swedish Big Picture, minus the internships. Very similar structures, but with systematized ways of accomplishing those goals (their one-on-one coaching questions are awesome). If you wanna learn more about them, go here:
http://www.kunskapsgymnasiet.se/foretaget/inenglish.4.1d32e45f86b8ae04c7fff213.html
Instead, I wanna comment on your post ('cause I actually READ yours) and connect those ideas to the work that I'm doing now.
And, dude, if you keep quoting the NY Post, I'm gonna quit this. Where are we getting our information from next? Gerry Springer? National Enquirer? I mean, come on! I do NOT believe that when questioned about the release from seat time requirements the iLearnNYC principals were quiet -- I believe there was a thoughtful pause in the discussion while principals formulated their answers, which the Post reporter interpreted as silence. I'm betting that, following Scroggin's question and the accompanying pause, there was a decent discussion about performance assessments and personal mastery learning that went RIGHT over the head of the Post reporter. And so s/he reported silence. Cause it made the educators look stupid. And the Post doesn't miss an opportunity to make educators look stupid.
I'm working with 6 of those 42 principals now. There is no WAY those 6 principals would have been (COULD have been) silent at that question. I cannot believe there was a generalized lack-of-response.
Ok, let's leave that behind for a moment. It's funny that you spend so long talking about the Khan Academy. Mainly because using that sort of online environment is how I got Sage (my son) through integrated Algebra (we were using Thinkwell http://www.thinkwell.com instead of Khan, but same idea -- recorded guru gives a lesson and provides practice problems that the student does). You know I fell in love with that process, but it was the at-home availability of a couple of experts (me and Sage's brother) that allowed for continuation and clarification. When Sage didn't understand something, he came to me or Ryan for further understanding -- over what the lesson could provide. Very similar to what the teacher in the Wired article (Kami Thordarson) has done.
But the work that the Wired reporter didn't talk about (what is it with reporters?) is the personalization that Thordarson has HAD to do in response to the Khan software. She now HAS to (and has the tools to) track each kid's progress through the curriculum. She can then respond to (heretofore invisible) blocks in student understanding and create lessons (for individuals or small groups) that solidifies their understanding.
Sound familiar?
Haven't we ALWAYS charged our teachers with doing JUST THAT at the Guild. Tracking how well a student is able to accomplish tasks, figure out what the block is and target the instruction for that block?
Right now, I am in the middle of a 3 day PD for principals in our network. It's not iZone stuff, so I'm just helping out and using it as an opportunity to learn. What the non-iZone schools are learning is Universal Design for Learning. Go here for a look:
http://www.cast.org
What's so interesting about this group and their work is that they are providing lesson planning tools that REQUIRE the teacher to consider EVERY kid in EVERY class. Beyond differentiation, this is a stance to lesson planning that begins with the question "How do I create activities that will allow all learners in my classroom to grapple with this _________" (fill in the blank with skill, standard, content idea, etc.) It forces teachers to begin to KNOW their students before creating lessons -- or to create lessons with the EXPLICIT goal of knowing students.
I, of course, LOVE this. It is JUST the sort of work I want teachers doing -- what I think they SHOULD be doing. But I'm on the other side now, right? I'm now a network guy who is trying to get teachers and principals to embrace different instructional practices. It is a wonder that I actually AGREE with those practices, but I'm now THAT guy. I like to think that they listening to me more than I listened to Maria. But only time will tell. It does strike me (again) how ahead of the pack our thinking is about personalizing learning.
And yes, I'm going to continue to use this blog as a way of patting ourselves on the back. Like Ravitch and Meiers, we have a definitive stance and a body of work that informs that stance. If I don't keep referencing it, I'm gonna lose site of what's important. I don't have kids around me now. It is a bit disorienting.
Last bit. Some of the iZone schools are working with Grant Wiggin's company, Authentic Education. I just sat in on a webinar to give some tools and ideas for performance assessments. Though Grant was very dry and not-so-engaging a speaker, his thinking and materials are cool. If I had a do-over for last year's work, I might have developed rubrics and processes for assessing performance tasks that would make teachers a whole lot more comfortable giving credits. Go here to look at some of that work (the competencies are particularly interesting):
http://www.nycubd.org/
Ok, man that's all for me now. Looking forward to hearing about the facilitative leadership training. I'm trying NOT to be too jealous. How's your Issaquah?
Peace,
Al
Sunday, July 17, 2011
The Future is Now?
Al,
Thanks for posting you last post, of course I posted my next one before I had a chance to read yours deeply. Interesting stuff, I would love to see how some of that is being implemented in the Izone or other schools. This is the closest thing we will get (for now) to your MRI machine that "captures" learning. So much talk around innovation in public school these days, it is too bad you don't see much of it in practice. Maybe the dire economic conditions right now will help make schools more innovative? As we know, the trend is to increase the school day for students to pack in more instructional time to their days and of course, there is the deadly "summer slide". As states and the federal government cut funding to schools, our schools have the possibility to become more innovative.
Makes sense right?
Less money to pay staff and less time spend on instructional time but the value of students spending more time on skills and content remains. Virtual (individual) education is more cost efficient! Schools may change pedagogy, bot because of what is effective but because what makes more financial sense. Look at what our own New York Post reported this week about Virtual Education.
Best,
Jeff
Thanks for posting you last post, of course I posted my next one before I had a chance to read yours deeply. Interesting stuff, I would love to see how some of that is being implemented in the Izone or other schools. This is the closest thing we will get (for now) to your MRI machine that "captures" learning. So much talk around innovation in public school these days, it is too bad you don't see much of it in practice. Maybe the dire economic conditions right now will help make schools more innovative? As we know, the trend is to increase the school day for students to pack in more instructional time to their days and of course, there is the deadly "summer slide". As states and the federal government cut funding to schools, our schools have the possibility to become more innovative.
Makes sense right?
Less money to pay staff and less time spend on instructional time but the value of students spending more time on skills and content remains. Virtual (individual) education is more cost efficient! Schools may change pedagogy, bot because of what is effective but because what makes more financial sense. Look at what our own New York Post reported this week about Virtual Education.
"High school will become a virtual learning experience for more New York teenagers under a sweeping new state policy that promotes online instruction. The Board of Regents approved new rules easing the "seat-time" requirements that spell out how long a student must physically spend in a classroom to earn course credit. The regulations also lessen requirements for face-to-face interactions between students and teachers"
Overturning the "seat-time" requirement, so now students and teachers just have to prove that they have meet state standards for that content area. Isn't that what we have been wishing for? A real way to differentiate the progress of students in an advisory. We also see a lessen of requirements for the face to face interactions between students and teachers, see how we are saving money and being responsible educators (a little tongue in my cheek)?
Well, now that education is saved and all of the innovative educators can take over the world. Oh wait, is that uncertainty that I hear? I am sure you will recognize some of the people here. NYC Department of Education lobbied the State for the easing of "seat-time" but when they got it?
As members of the Innovation Zone’s selective iLearn cohort, which numbered 40 last year but is jumping to 127 this fall, the principals who attend the monthly meetings have used technology to reshaped their schedules, supplies, and teachers’ workloads. When it comes to using technology to change teaching and learning, the principals usually have a lot to say.
But when Scroggin asked them how they were thinking about responding to the change in seat time rules, they were quiet.I don't blame them one bit, change is hard. Figuring this all out is a mammoth issue. I am a big fan of using technology and innovation to help students progress at skills and content acquisition. I was responsible for bringing in ShowmeSat to help the Juniors prepare for the SAT. This is hard to do well, there are so many variables. However, isn't this the change we all want? I am a huge fan of the work of Salman Kahn of the Kahn Academy, I think the technology can change schools and how we learn. It is innovative teaching and will change our schools. Just read this article from the new Wired Magazine about How Khan Academy is Changing the rules Education.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1
You can't argue with how good this is for differentiation and individual learning progressions. Kahn's dashboard apps for teachers to use are a constant data flow that tells you where kids are and what they need help in, it is an instant feedback loop.
In the fall of 2010, flush with the infusion of money from Google and Gates, Khan hired a programmer, Ben Kamens, and a designer, Jason Rosoff, and tasked them with, among other things, building the dashboard. These sorts of performance-measuring apps have become increasingly common in the business world, so the duo didn’t think teachers would be terribly impressed by their software. Wrong: They were astounded. “We’d go collect some data and make a chart, and the teachers were blown away—every time,” Kamens says. “This isn’t taxing the edge of technology. But they were completely shocked, as if this had never existed before.”
Sound familiar? This is from the Learning Progression Summary by Sanda Balaban
A well-constructed learning progression presents a number of opportunities to teachers for instructional planning. It enables teachers to focus on important learning goals in the domain, centering their attention on what the student will learn rather that what the student will do (i.e., the learning activity). A progression also helps teachers see connections between what comes before and after a specific learning goal, both in the short and long term.
You can't argue with this! It will change education.
Not all educators are enamored with Khan and his site. Gary Stager, a longtime educational consultant and advocate of laptops in classrooms, thinks Khan Academy isn’t innovative at all. The videos and software modules, he contends, are just a high tech version of that most hoary of teaching techniques—lecturing and drilling. Schools have become “joyless test-prep factories,” he says, and Khan Academy caters to this dismal trend. Khan’s approach “suffers from this sort of ’school über alles’ philosophy: They’re not going to question anything the schools do. They’re not going to challenge any of the content.” Stager admires the fact that Khan is trying to improve education, but he says research has shown that kids who are struggling at math won’t be helped by a “filmstrip.”
I have a really busy week this week. I start a three day NYU Facilitation course tomorrow and I will be taking my final Baruch class for my Masters in Educational Leadership on Tuesday (It only took me 6 years, I have been busy). I am sure I will post about both experiences in the upcoming week.Best,
Jeff
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Nowhere Man
Al,
I chuckled the other day when you said you envision this blog as like Meier & Ravitch's Bridging Differences blog. It's just like it, except they are smart, accomplished and have a huge following.
Sorry to have another post about music but Sandra and I saw Paul McCartney last night at Yankee Stadium. It was an amazing show, the guy is an icon. The reason I am writing about it is because during the show, Paul stopped between songs and was talking to the audience. In one of these intervals, he told the crowd how much he was trying to ignore the signs they were holding up. He say something like "I'm trying not to read the signs wen I'm up here because I am trying to remember the cords and lyrics and make it sound good for you all." I was struck by this because here is Paul McCartney, a Beatle, a living legend that has been doing this for 50+ years and he has to seriously concentrate when he is up there and these are songs that he has performed hundreds of times. It reminded me of the passage in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers when he was talking about what made The Beatles great:
My next post will be about STEM Education and seat time, it is going to be great (probably not).
Live and Let Die,
Jeff
I chuckled the other day when you said you envision this blog as like Meier & Ravitch's Bridging Differences blog. It's just like it, except they are smart, accomplished and have a huge following.
Sorry to have another post about music but Sandra and I saw Paul McCartney last night at Yankee Stadium. It was an amazing show, the guy is an icon. The reason I am writing about it is because during the show, Paul stopped between songs and was talking to the audience. In one of these intervals, he told the crowd how much he was trying to ignore the signs they were holding up. He say something like "I'm trying not to read the signs wen I'm up here because I am trying to remember the cords and lyrics and make it sound good for you all." I was struck by this because here is Paul McCartney, a Beatle, a living legend that has been doing this for 50+ years and he has to seriously concentrate when he is up there and these are songs that he has performed hundreds of times. It reminded me of the passage in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers when he was talking about what made The Beatles great:
“And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. It didn’t. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They weren’t. Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. They were anything but. It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play.
“Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra:
‘We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.’
[…] ” The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs, in Nov and Dec of 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. But the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary this is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.
“‘They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,’ Norman went on. ‘They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers—cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.’”
Then I started thinking about our students. How are they suppose to understand concepts or get better skilled at things at the pace and rate of school? Last year our Junior team taught the history of the world in one school year and I am not pointing fingers. My Psychology College Now class covers so much material in one semester, it is a mile wide and an inch deep (I would love to post another time about how I could improve that but still feel comfortable that students covered basics) I know you might go back to your "Jaywalking" analogy here and I understand why you do. But I guess this raises the same question for me that I raised in my first post. What is the purpose of school and education? Do we want kids to know a little bit of everything or have a real deep understanding of a select group of concepts & skills. I am sure the answer is somewhere in the middle but this is the thing that I think about when I go see Paul McCartney.My next post will be about STEM Education and seat time, it is going to be great (probably not).
Live and Let Die,
Jeff
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
But will Garcia fix your AC?
Jeff,
You may never have wanted "this" -- I'm sorry to have widened out the audience on you -- but you have not left me, nor will you. I'm still talking to you about my job and hope you'll continue to share your thinking and practice as the summer winds down and you head into your new work at Fannie Lou. In the meantime, keep on reading, those bits on Garcia were really interesting!
Today was the second day of the "Advance" and I'm getting to know the school leaders and teams of teachers who are engaged in the iZone implementation. Dude, I gotta say again, these are some very deep thinking and hardworking folk. We always talk about how hard we worked at the Guild and how hard our teachers work. But we ain't the only ones. I started doing work with one team creating learning progressions aligned to the common core standards. What're are learning progressions? Go here to read a white paper on them:
http://www.k12.wa.us/assessment/ClassroomAssessmentIntegration/pubdocs/FASTLearningProgressions.pdf
I've included a summary of this white paper that Sanda Balaban wrote at the end of this post.
The fascinating thing about this for me is how we were ALWAYS wrestling with these ideas (what kids know, what they can do, what learning experiences and in what order do we have provide for kids to further their development) at the Guild. It's interesting to me that, toward the end, the Guild was slipping back into traditional teaching structures to address the gaps in kids knowledge and skills, and how the schools I'm working with now are trying to break OUT of the traditional practices in order to address those same gaps. It reminds me of that foundations-explorations tension that happened about year 3, where the foundations teachers thought explorations was what kids needed and explorations teachers thought foundations was what kids needed.
To change the subject, I believe with Michael, that the history of tracking of minorities into Voc-Ed has completely poisoned the structure and swung a pendulum in a bad direction. As a system, we've responded to that by trying to make Voc-Ed MORE rigorous than college prep. (Think about it, in NY a CTE student has to pass Regents exams AND satisfy the certification requirements for their trade. So an Mechanics student at Aviation HS not only has to pass the certification tests that will allow her to work on planes, she ALSO has to pass the Global History Regents)
I wonder how many Jerry Garcia's were lost in the 60's because there were no Dwight Johnsons teaching in all the Voc-tech schools that all the black kids got shipped too?
Listen, to marry these ideas, the learning progressions I mentioned above are interesting because they can be used across domains. So you could sequence out and teach the steps for solving a problem with a car's engine as easily as you could an algebraic problem. It reminds me of the Learning System we tried to create in our leadership internship.
I'm meeting some great people and learning a whole bunch about Kunskopsskolan's methods for personalizing education during this week. More about that this weekend.
Keep on coolin'
Peace,
Al
Learning Progression Summary by Sanda Balaban
Summary of Learning Progressions: Supporting Instruction for Formative Assessment by Margaret Heritage (a 2008 white paper for The Council of Chief State School Officers)
By its very nature, learning involves progression. To assist in its emergence, teachers need to understand the pathways along which students are expected to progress.
The purpose of formative assessment is to provide feedback to teachers and students during the course of learning about the gap between students’ current and desired performance so that action can be taken to close the gap. To do this effectively, teachers need to have in mind a continuum of how learning develops in any particular knowledge domain so that they are able to locate students’ current learning status and decide on pedagogical action to move students’ learning forward. Learning progressions that clearly articulate a progression of learning in a domain can provide the big picture of what is to be learned, support instructional planning, and act as a touchstone for formative assessment.
While individual teachers often think about the learning progression within their class, too little attention is given to how students' understanding of a topic can be supported from grade to grade, and although meeting standards is the ultimate goal of instruction, most state standards do not in fact provide a clear progression for understanding where students are relative to desired goals.
It is fair to say that if the standards do not present clear descriptions of how students learning progresses in a domain, then they are unlikely to be useful for formative assessment. Standards are insufficiently clear about how learning develops for teachers to be able to map formative assessment opportunities to them. This means that teachers are not able to determine where student learning lies on a continuum, and know what to do to close the gap between current learning and desired goals. Explicit learning progressions can provide the clarity that teachers need. By describing a pathway of learning they can assist teachers to plan instruction.
There are a number of reasons why many curricula are also problematic for planning learning and formative assessment. Curricula are often organized around scope and sequence charts that specify procedural objectives to be mastered at each grade. Usually, these are discrete objectives and not connected to each other in a larger network of organizing concepts. In this context, assessment is of how well the student completed the task but does not necessarily provide details about the status of the student’s learning relative to the desired learning goal--the hallmark of formative assessment.
Curricula organized into “units” of instruction around particular topics are better, but still less than optimal, opportunities for instructional planning and formative assessment. In a unit context, teachers are ill-equipped to locate students' learning status on a continuum of development and are confined to seeing learning as a chunk of content that has to be mastered in a given timeframe. By contrast, learning progressions describe a trajectory of learning in a domain that spans a much longer period and provides multi-year image of successively more sophisticated performance levels.
There are a variety of different definitions of learning progressions, but inherent in each is the notion of vertical development over an extended period of time. Learning is envisioned as a development of progressive sophistication in understanding and skills within a domain. An important point to note is that none of the definitions contain references to grade or age level expectations in contrast to many standards and curricula. Instead, learning is conceived as a sequence or continuum of increasing expertise.
Another idea represented in these definitions of learning progressions is progression, that is, there is a sequence along which students can move incrementally from novice to more expert performance. Implicit in progression is the notion of continuity and coherence. With clear connections between what comes before and after a particular point in the progression teachers can calibrate their teaching to any missing precursor understanding or skills revealed by assessment, and determine what the next steps are to move the student forward from that point.
A well-constructed learning progression presents a number of opportunities to teachers for instructional planning. It enables teachers to focus on important learning goals in the domain, centering their attention on what the student will learn rather that what the student will do (i.e., the learning activity). A progression also helps teachers see connections between what comes before and after a specific learning goal, both in the short and long term.
This means that teachers have the opportunity to build explicit connections between ideas for students that thread the development of increasingly complex forms of a concept or skill together. Recent research has underscored the importance of clarity for teachers about what comes before or after a particular learning goal. Many teachers, even excellent teachers, have considerable difficulty determining what they would do next instructionally, and what feedback they would give the students to move their learning forward.
To be able to know what to teach next or what feedback to give students, more detail and connections among these ideas is necessary. With the ideas providing the spine for a more detailed progression, it should be possible for teachers in a school or district to pool expertise and figure out the interlocking parts between the core ideas, and to spell out, for example, what is involved in understanding.
It is not difficult to imagine the improvements to teachers’ knowledge, to instruction, and to formative assessment that would accrue from such a process. Teachers would have sufficient knowledge be able to pull out short-term goals for manageable chunks of instruction and formative assessment (e.g., teaching one of the properties of arithmetic), while being able to locate the purpose of any one lesson in a trajectory of instruction that supports student learning over time.
Formative assessment has three key elements: 1) eliciting evidence about learning to close the gap between current and desired performance; 2) providing feedback to students; and 3) involving students in the assessment and learning process. Learning progressions are foundational to these elements. Evidence of learning needs to be elicited in systematic ways so that teachers have a constant stream of information about how student learning is evolving toward the desired goal. A constant stream is necessary because if assessment is used effectively to inform instructional action then that action will render previous assessment information out of date: student learning will have progressed and will need to be assessed again so that instruction can be adjusted to keep learning moving forward. With clear learning goals outlined in a progression, teachers can match formative assessment opportunities to them, and can make plans in advance of and during instruction about when, what, how and who to assess.
Cognitive theories note a central role for metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking, in students’ learning. In the context of formative assessment, metacognition involves students in monitoring and evaluating their own learning process to determine what they know and understand, and to develop a variety of learning strategies so that they can adapt their learning to the task at hand. Sharing the criteria for success with the students at the outset of the instructional segment not only provides transparency on the learning process, it also means that the students can monitor their learning while engaged in the learning task.
Perhaps one way to resolve this tension is to provide a big picture, multi-year progression that outlines essential building blocks and then drills down from the building blocks into more detailed descriptions. Teachers who are responsible for a particular range of the progression could have the detail they need for planning and for formative assessment. They would also be able to see how the focus of their instruction connects to a larger picture of learning, and in the case when assessment information shows that one or more of their students are performing outside the range, they would know what precursor understanding or skills need to be developed for students to move forward.
Clarity about how core ideas develop from their earliest to more sophisticated forms presents a number of advantages for teaching and learning. First, the description of the ideas at each of the attainment levels helps teachers keep the big picture in mind, and enables them to see where their focus of learning fits in a larger trajectory. Thus, they expand their knowledge of the domain and can connect prior and successive learning to the students' current learning focus. Knowing that at a later stage students will be learning that representations and interpretations of history differ, for example, could prompt a teacher of an earlier stage to not only help children understand there are different sources of evidence about the past, but to also lay the ground work for the future by connecting the idea of who provided the source of evidence and what that person's role was or is.
Second, the descriptions of attainment at each level provide sufficient detail for instructional planning and help teachers to map formative assessment opportunities on to the key elements of learning in the description. The criteria become the focus for determining how learning is progressing and enable teachers to provide descriptive, criterion-based feedback that can help students understand their current status in learning and provide pointers so they know what to do to move forward. The feedback is in manageable chunks and learning is transparent – students know where they are and where they are going. Additionally, sharing criteria with the students at the beginning of the instructional sequence establishes the expectation that students will be involved in the learning process and helps them monitor and adjust their own learning. While both are linked to levels of attainment, neither is specifically linked to grade level expectations.
However, we know that learning does not proceed uniformly, so what happens if students do not master the concept(s) in the expected time frame? Does the unit as a whole get repeated later that year or during another year? If not, how do teachers know how to connect the concepts that have not been fully understood to later learning?
A developmental progression spanning a longer period and tracing how concepts and skills build progressively can be organized into increments for instruction.
In Knowing What Students Know (KWSK), a committee of the National Research Council advanced an ambitious vision for a system of assessment based on three critical principles: coherence, comprehensiveness and continuity. The authors of KWSK also stress the importance of alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment so that all three parts of the system are working toward a common set of learning goals.
However, we remain at some distance from the implementation of this vision. We lack comprehensive models of student progression in many domains. Teachers cannot wait for the research community to catch up. They need better tools than standards and existing curricula to realize the promise of formative assessment to student learning. Moreover, there is considerable value to the development of teachers’ knowledge about a discipline when they define a progression of learning. It is doubtful that there would ever be complete agreement on the sequence of a progression but that should not preclude school-based communities of teachers from crafting their own progressions of learning.
In general, the different approaches to creating learning progressions can be loosely described as 'top-down' or 'bottom-up'. Progress maps, developed by the Australian Council of Educational Research, are considered a 'bottom-up' approach to developing a progression. The goal of the progress maps is to “obtain an estimate of student’s current location on the map as a guide to the kinds of learning experiences likely to be most useful at that stage in the student’s learning and as a basis for monitoring growth.” Once an initial sketch is outlined, it is tested against a set of questions including: Do other teachers agree with this? What is the empirical evidence for this map? Is this picture consistent with theoretical understandings of how learning occurs? How useful is the resulting map in practice? Once in use “the maps are constantly checked, updated and enriched.”
A top down approach was utilized in NRC’s Taking Science to School. First, the scientists organized the learning progression around big ideas important to the discipline. Second, both teams identified several high- level abstract ideas that go into building the core ideas, but which are accessible to children at the start of schooling, thereby acknowledging that young children have the important domain-specific ideas that serve as the foundation for their learning.
Another ' bottoms-up' example was undertaken by Heritage and Osmundson, working in collaboration with the Wisconsin State Department of Education, to develop learning progressions in reading. Teams, comprising curriculum content experts who had a district-wide or school wide role and current classroom teachers (elementary, middle and high school), first reviewed the Wisconsin content standards and isolated the subcomponents. With a Goldilocks metaphor in mind, a challenge they faced at this stage in developing the progression was the level of detail for building blocks – in other words, deciding on the ‘just right’ ‘grain size.’ Teams decided that the issue could not be resolved at this stage in development, and progression would be adjusted when experience with them showed what building blocks were providing too little or too much information to be helpful for instruction and formative assessment. Once the initial progression was completed the following questions prompted further discussion and planning:
· Are the major building blocks (i.e., critical concepts/skills) in the learning progression addressed?
· Are they linked in way that helps build understanding and skills?
· Do other teachers agree with this description of the progression?
· What is the research evidence for this progression of learning?
Although the process started with individual grade- level standards, the intention was to ultimately develop a K-12 progression. Though standards may be the "benchmark" along the way, teachers would have a multi-year trajectory of learning rather than simply chunks of a progression for each standard. Collaborating to develop the progressions forced participants to think deeply about learning, an undoubted benefit of the process.
A few words of caution about learning progressions are in order here. First learning progressions are not developmentally inevitable but are dependent on good instruction. Second, the notion of a learning progression implies a linear sequence. While concepts and skills may have specific precursors, learning does not always take place in a linear trajectory. Perhaps conceiving of progressions as a braid of interconnected strands might be a useful way to show connections among ideas of discipline.
A major obstacle to the creation of a learning progression representing a trajectory of development of increasing sophistication in understanding and skills inheres in the way that many state standards are conceived. Routinely, standards for each subject area provide teachers with a long list of what needs to be covered for each grade level, which in turn leads to a burgeoning and often disconnected curriculum that centers on coverage rather than on understanding core ideas of the domain from their least to most sophisticated manifestation over the K-12 period of schooling. Moreover, ideas are often given equal weight so that a core concept in a domain is not differentiated from a less significant skill in terms of its importance.
Ideally, learning progressions should be developed from a strong research base about the structure of knowledge in a discipline and about how learning occurs. Yet, the research base in many areas is not as robust as it might be. The authors of KWSK propose that to develop progressions, the necessary content expertise should be gathered together, and this expertise should be informed by research on how students learn in specific domains. To this end, they suggest "research centers could be charged with convening the appropriate experts to produce a synthesis of the best available scientific evidence of how students learn in particular domains of the curriculum" (NRC, 2001: 256). They also observe "findings from cognitive research cannot always be directly translated into classroom practice" (NRC, 2001:258). Therefore, they conclude that research syntheses would need to be couched in ways that are useful for practitioners. However, until we have such syntheses, and indeed research that fills the gaps in existing knowledge about learning, educators and others involved in constructing learning progressions will have to draw as best they can from what research does exist. Perhaps what is really needed is for domain experts, researchers, content experts and experienced teachers to unite in a common effort to develop clear conceptions of learning. It is not difficult to imagine the benefits of pooling expertise and perspectives on how children learn to create progressions that make sense to both the research and practitioner communities. Once constructed, such progressions could be empirically verified.
Why is it that so many teachers have difficulty in separating a learning goal from the context through which it will be achieved? Surely before entering the profession they should know the difference. The fact that they don’t speaks volumes about the nature of their preparation
Realizing learning progressions in all domains is no small task. Ultimately, it is an undertaking that will have to involve the combined effort of researchers, teacher educators, administrators at the state, district and school levels, teachers, and policy makers. Of course, this represents a considerable investment in time and resources. But the potential benefits to teacher understanding of how learning progresses in a domain, how ideas within the domain are inter-related, and how instructional planning and formative assessment can be mapped onto the progression are surely worth the investment. Our students deserve no less.
You may never have wanted "this" -- I'm sorry to have widened out the audience on you -- but you have not left me, nor will you. I'm still talking to you about my job and hope you'll continue to share your thinking and practice as the summer winds down and you head into your new work at Fannie Lou. In the meantime, keep on reading, those bits on Garcia were really interesting!
Today was the second day of the "Advance" and I'm getting to know the school leaders and teams of teachers who are engaged in the iZone implementation. Dude, I gotta say again, these are some very deep thinking and hardworking folk. We always talk about how hard we worked at the Guild and how hard our teachers work. But we ain't the only ones. I started doing work with one team creating learning progressions aligned to the common core standards. What're are learning progressions? Go here to read a white paper on them:
http://www.k12.wa.us/assessment/ClassroomAssessmentIntegration/pubdocs/FASTLearningProgressions.pdf
I've included a summary of this white paper that Sanda Balaban wrote at the end of this post.
The fascinating thing about this for me is how we were ALWAYS wrestling with these ideas (what kids know, what they can do, what learning experiences and in what order do we have provide for kids to further their development) at the Guild. It's interesting to me that, toward the end, the Guild was slipping back into traditional teaching structures to address the gaps in kids knowledge and skills, and how the schools I'm working with now are trying to break OUT of the traditional practices in order to address those same gaps. It reminds me of that foundations-explorations tension that happened about year 3, where the foundations teachers thought explorations was what kids needed and explorations teachers thought foundations was what kids needed.
To change the subject, I believe with Michael, that the history of tracking of minorities into Voc-Ed has completely poisoned the structure and swung a pendulum in a bad direction. As a system, we've responded to that by trying to make Voc-Ed MORE rigorous than college prep. (Think about it, in NY a CTE student has to pass Regents exams AND satisfy the certification requirements for their trade. So an Mechanics student at Aviation HS not only has to pass the certification tests that will allow her to work on planes, she ALSO has to pass the Global History Regents)
I wonder how many Jerry Garcia's were lost in the 60's because there were no Dwight Johnsons teaching in all the Voc-tech schools that all the black kids got shipped too?
Listen, to marry these ideas, the learning progressions I mentioned above are interesting because they can be used across domains. So you could sequence out and teach the steps for solving a problem with a car's engine as easily as you could an algebraic problem. It reminds me of the Learning System we tried to create in our leadership internship.
I'm meeting some great people and learning a whole bunch about Kunskopsskolan's methods for personalizing education during this week. More about that this weekend.
Keep on coolin'
Peace,
Al
Learning Progression Summary by Sanda Balaban
Summary of Learning Progressions: Supporting Instruction for Formative Assessment by Margaret Heritage (a 2008 white paper for The Council of Chief State School Officers)
By its very nature, learning involves progression. To assist in its emergence, teachers need to understand the pathways along which students are expected to progress.
The purpose of formative assessment is to provide feedback to teachers and students during the course of learning about the gap between students’ current and desired performance so that action can be taken to close the gap. To do this effectively, teachers need to have in mind a continuum of how learning develops in any particular knowledge domain so that they are able to locate students’ current learning status and decide on pedagogical action to move students’ learning forward. Learning progressions that clearly articulate a progression of learning in a domain can provide the big picture of what is to be learned, support instructional planning, and act as a touchstone for formative assessment.
While individual teachers often think about the learning progression within their class, too little attention is given to how students' understanding of a topic can be supported from grade to grade, and although meeting standards is the ultimate goal of instruction, most state standards do not in fact provide a clear progression for understanding where students are relative to desired goals.
It is fair to say that if the standards do not present clear descriptions of how students learning progresses in a domain, then they are unlikely to be useful for formative assessment. Standards are insufficiently clear about how learning develops for teachers to be able to map formative assessment opportunities to them. This means that teachers are not able to determine where student learning lies on a continuum, and know what to do to close the gap between current learning and desired goals. Explicit learning progressions can provide the clarity that teachers need. By describing a pathway of learning they can assist teachers to plan instruction.
There are a number of reasons why many curricula are also problematic for planning learning and formative assessment. Curricula are often organized around scope and sequence charts that specify procedural objectives to be mastered at each grade. Usually, these are discrete objectives and not connected to each other in a larger network of organizing concepts. In this context, assessment is of how well the student completed the task but does not necessarily provide details about the status of the student’s learning relative to the desired learning goal--the hallmark of formative assessment.
Curricula organized into “units” of instruction around particular topics are better, but still less than optimal, opportunities for instructional planning and formative assessment. In a unit context, teachers are ill-equipped to locate students' learning status on a continuum of development and are confined to seeing learning as a chunk of content that has to be mastered in a given timeframe. By contrast, learning progressions describe a trajectory of learning in a domain that spans a much longer period and provides multi-year image of successively more sophisticated performance levels.
There are a variety of different definitions of learning progressions, but inherent in each is the notion of vertical development over an extended period of time. Learning is envisioned as a development of progressive sophistication in understanding and skills within a domain. An important point to note is that none of the definitions contain references to grade or age level expectations in contrast to many standards and curricula. Instead, learning is conceived as a sequence or continuum of increasing expertise.
Another idea represented in these definitions of learning progressions is progression, that is, there is a sequence along which students can move incrementally from novice to more expert performance. Implicit in progression is the notion of continuity and coherence. With clear connections between what comes before and after a particular point in the progression teachers can calibrate their teaching to any missing precursor understanding or skills revealed by assessment, and determine what the next steps are to move the student forward from that point.
A well-constructed learning progression presents a number of opportunities to teachers for instructional planning. It enables teachers to focus on important learning goals in the domain, centering their attention on what the student will learn rather that what the student will do (i.e., the learning activity). A progression also helps teachers see connections between what comes before and after a specific learning goal, both in the short and long term.
This means that teachers have the opportunity to build explicit connections between ideas for students that thread the development of increasingly complex forms of a concept or skill together. Recent research has underscored the importance of clarity for teachers about what comes before or after a particular learning goal. Many teachers, even excellent teachers, have considerable difficulty determining what they would do next instructionally, and what feedback they would give the students to move their learning forward.
To be able to know what to teach next or what feedback to give students, more detail and connections among these ideas is necessary. With the ideas providing the spine for a more detailed progression, it should be possible for teachers in a school or district to pool expertise and figure out the interlocking parts between the core ideas, and to spell out, for example, what is involved in understanding.
It is not difficult to imagine the improvements to teachers’ knowledge, to instruction, and to formative assessment that would accrue from such a process. Teachers would have sufficient knowledge be able to pull out short-term goals for manageable chunks of instruction and formative assessment (e.g., teaching one of the properties of arithmetic), while being able to locate the purpose of any one lesson in a trajectory of instruction that supports student learning over time.
Formative assessment has three key elements: 1) eliciting evidence about learning to close the gap between current and desired performance; 2) providing feedback to students; and 3) involving students in the assessment and learning process. Learning progressions are foundational to these elements. Evidence of learning needs to be elicited in systematic ways so that teachers have a constant stream of information about how student learning is evolving toward the desired goal. A constant stream is necessary because if assessment is used effectively to inform instructional action then that action will render previous assessment information out of date: student learning will have progressed and will need to be assessed again so that instruction can be adjusted to keep learning moving forward. With clear learning goals outlined in a progression, teachers can match formative assessment opportunities to them, and can make plans in advance of and during instruction about when, what, how and who to assess.
Cognitive theories note a central role for metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking, in students’ learning. In the context of formative assessment, metacognition involves students in monitoring and evaluating their own learning process to determine what they know and understand, and to develop a variety of learning strategies so that they can adapt their learning to the task at hand. Sharing the criteria for success with the students at the outset of the instructional segment not only provides transparency on the learning process, it also means that the students can monitor their learning while engaged in the learning task.
Perhaps one way to resolve this tension is to provide a big picture, multi-year progression that outlines essential building blocks and then drills down from the building blocks into more detailed descriptions. Teachers who are responsible for a particular range of the progression could have the detail they need for planning and for formative assessment. They would also be able to see how the focus of their instruction connects to a larger picture of learning, and in the case when assessment information shows that one or more of their students are performing outside the range, they would know what precursor understanding or skills need to be developed for students to move forward.
Clarity about how core ideas develop from their earliest to more sophisticated forms presents a number of advantages for teaching and learning. First, the description of the ideas at each of the attainment levels helps teachers keep the big picture in mind, and enables them to see where their focus of learning fits in a larger trajectory. Thus, they expand their knowledge of the domain and can connect prior and successive learning to the students' current learning focus. Knowing that at a later stage students will be learning that representations and interpretations of history differ, for example, could prompt a teacher of an earlier stage to not only help children understand there are different sources of evidence about the past, but to also lay the ground work for the future by connecting the idea of who provided the source of evidence and what that person's role was or is.
Second, the descriptions of attainment at each level provide sufficient detail for instructional planning and help teachers to map formative assessment opportunities on to the key elements of learning in the description. The criteria become the focus for determining how learning is progressing and enable teachers to provide descriptive, criterion-based feedback that can help students understand their current status in learning and provide pointers so they know what to do to move forward. The feedback is in manageable chunks and learning is transparent – students know where they are and where they are going. Additionally, sharing criteria with the students at the beginning of the instructional sequence establishes the expectation that students will be involved in the learning process and helps them monitor and adjust their own learning. While both are linked to levels of attainment, neither is specifically linked to grade level expectations.
However, we know that learning does not proceed uniformly, so what happens if students do not master the concept(s) in the expected time frame? Does the unit as a whole get repeated later that year or during another year? If not, how do teachers know how to connect the concepts that have not been fully understood to later learning?
A developmental progression spanning a longer period and tracing how concepts and skills build progressively can be organized into increments for instruction.
In Knowing What Students Know (KWSK), a committee of the National Research Council advanced an ambitious vision for a system of assessment based on three critical principles: coherence, comprehensiveness and continuity. The authors of KWSK also stress the importance of alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment so that all three parts of the system are working toward a common set of learning goals.
However, we remain at some distance from the implementation of this vision. We lack comprehensive models of student progression in many domains. Teachers cannot wait for the research community to catch up. They need better tools than standards and existing curricula to realize the promise of formative assessment to student learning. Moreover, there is considerable value to the development of teachers’ knowledge about a discipline when they define a progression of learning. It is doubtful that there would ever be complete agreement on the sequence of a progression but that should not preclude school-based communities of teachers from crafting their own progressions of learning.
In general, the different approaches to creating learning progressions can be loosely described as 'top-down' or 'bottom-up'. Progress maps, developed by the Australian Council of Educational Research, are considered a 'bottom-up' approach to developing a progression. The goal of the progress maps is to “obtain an estimate of student’s current location on the map as a guide to the kinds of learning experiences likely to be most useful at that stage in the student’s learning and as a basis for monitoring growth.” Once an initial sketch is outlined, it is tested against a set of questions including: Do other teachers agree with this? What is the empirical evidence for this map? Is this picture consistent with theoretical understandings of how learning occurs? How useful is the resulting map in practice? Once in use “the maps are constantly checked, updated and enriched.”
A top down approach was utilized in NRC’s Taking Science to School. First, the scientists organized the learning progression around big ideas important to the discipline. Second, both teams identified several high- level abstract ideas that go into building the core ideas, but which are accessible to children at the start of schooling, thereby acknowledging that young children have the important domain-specific ideas that serve as the foundation for their learning.
Another ' bottoms-up' example was undertaken by Heritage and Osmundson, working in collaboration with the Wisconsin State Department of Education, to develop learning progressions in reading. Teams, comprising curriculum content experts who had a district-wide or school wide role and current classroom teachers (elementary, middle and high school), first reviewed the Wisconsin content standards and isolated the subcomponents. With a Goldilocks metaphor in mind, a challenge they faced at this stage in developing the progression was the level of detail for building blocks – in other words, deciding on the ‘just right’ ‘grain size.’ Teams decided that the issue could not be resolved at this stage in development, and progression would be adjusted when experience with them showed what building blocks were providing too little or too much information to be helpful for instruction and formative assessment. Once the initial progression was completed the following questions prompted further discussion and planning:
· Are the major building blocks (i.e., critical concepts/skills) in the learning progression addressed?
· Are they linked in way that helps build understanding and skills?
· Do other teachers agree with this description of the progression?
· What is the research evidence for this progression of learning?
Although the process started with individual grade- level standards, the intention was to ultimately develop a K-12 progression. Though standards may be the "benchmark" along the way, teachers would have a multi-year trajectory of learning rather than simply chunks of a progression for each standard. Collaborating to develop the progressions forced participants to think deeply about learning, an undoubted benefit of the process.
A few words of caution about learning progressions are in order here. First learning progressions are not developmentally inevitable but are dependent on good instruction. Second, the notion of a learning progression implies a linear sequence. While concepts and skills may have specific precursors, learning does not always take place in a linear trajectory. Perhaps conceiving of progressions as a braid of interconnected strands might be a useful way to show connections among ideas of discipline.
A major obstacle to the creation of a learning progression representing a trajectory of development of increasing sophistication in understanding and skills inheres in the way that many state standards are conceived. Routinely, standards for each subject area provide teachers with a long list of what needs to be covered for each grade level, which in turn leads to a burgeoning and often disconnected curriculum that centers on coverage rather than on understanding core ideas of the domain from their least to most sophisticated manifestation over the K-12 period of schooling. Moreover, ideas are often given equal weight so that a core concept in a domain is not differentiated from a less significant skill in terms of its importance.
Ideally, learning progressions should be developed from a strong research base about the structure of knowledge in a discipline and about how learning occurs. Yet, the research base in many areas is not as robust as it might be. The authors of KWSK propose that to develop progressions, the necessary content expertise should be gathered together, and this expertise should be informed by research on how students learn in specific domains. To this end, they suggest "research centers could be charged with convening the appropriate experts to produce a synthesis of the best available scientific evidence of how students learn in particular domains of the curriculum" (NRC, 2001: 256). They also observe "findings from cognitive research cannot always be directly translated into classroom practice" (NRC, 2001:258). Therefore, they conclude that research syntheses would need to be couched in ways that are useful for practitioners. However, until we have such syntheses, and indeed research that fills the gaps in existing knowledge about learning, educators and others involved in constructing learning progressions will have to draw as best they can from what research does exist. Perhaps what is really needed is for domain experts, researchers, content experts and experienced teachers to unite in a common effort to develop clear conceptions of learning. It is not difficult to imagine the benefits of pooling expertise and perspectives on how children learn to create progressions that make sense to both the research and practitioner communities. Once constructed, such progressions could be empirically verified.
Why is it that so many teachers have difficulty in separating a learning goal from the context through which it will be achieved? Surely before entering the profession they should know the difference. The fact that they don’t speaks volumes about the nature of their preparation
Realizing learning progressions in all domains is no small task. Ultimately, it is an undertaking that will have to involve the combined effort of researchers, teacher educators, administrators at the state, district and school levels, teachers, and policy makers. Of course, this represents a considerable investment in time and resources. But the potential benefits to teacher understanding of how learning progresses in a domain, how ideas within the domain are inter-related, and how instructional planning and formative assessment can be mapped onto the progression are surely worth the investment. Our students deserve no less.
So Many Roads..
In my effort to do some summer reading that doesn't involve education, learning or leadership, I picked up two books this weekend. As some of you know, I love biographies & autobiographies. I have read hundreds of them, they have ranged from Che to Disney. There is something about the stories of people and their journeys in life that I find fascinating. This summer, I decided to combine two of my passions, music and biographies. As you can see, Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson and Life by Keith Richards were my choices. I love the Grateful Dead and I think Jerry Garcia led such an intriguing life full of sorrow and joy. The thing that interested me most about Keith Richards was his chronic addiction, terrible relationship with Mick Jagger and his mysterious public image. So why am I writing about this on a blog about education? Sixteen pages into the Garica book, it talks about his experience at school.
Jerry moved to Menlo Park (not NJ, outside San Franciso-Jeff) when he was ten and was there through early adolescence, from part of sixth grade through eighth grade, which he had to repeat because of poor grades. "I was too smart for school," he said in 1984, a chuckle in his voice. "I knew it; I don't know why anyone else didn't know it. I went to school; I just didn't do any work. It's not that I had anything against school or even learning. The point was I was reading things and I had my own education, my own program going, and I was really bored with school. I already had things decided for myself. I had things I wanted to do, I had plans, and I had my own interests and my own rate of learning and I couldn't see slowing down or stopping and wasting my time for schoolwork."
Sound familiar? He had his own plans, own interests and own rate of learning that he didn't want impeded by the work at school. So then, what kept the future leader of one of the highest grossing rock bands in history and someone that current business gurus call a "business visionary" in school?
"I had incredible luck with teachers," he said "I had a couple of teachers that really opened up the world for me. I was a reader, luckily, because I was sickly as a kid. I spent so much time in bed because I was sick, so I read; that was my entertainment. That separated me a lot from everybody else. then when I got down to the Peninsula, I had a couple of teachers that were very, very radical, absolutely far-out. I was lucky."
Well, maybe they just let him play guitar all day or experiment with LSD. How useful is that in higher education or society? Well, Jerry?
In interviews, Jerry often cited a teacher at Menlo-Oaks Middle School named Dwight Johnson for broadening his outlook on life and learning. "He's the guy who turned me into a freak," he said. "He was my seventh grade teacher and he was a wild guy. He had an old MC TC, and he had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time and he was out there. He opened lots and lots of doors for me. He's the guy that got me reading deeper than Science Fiction(Ray Bradbury was Jerry's favorite writer). He taught me that ideas are fun."
Ahh, the relationship. Knowing the student, accepting their thoughts, plans and ideas and pushing them in the right directions and they do it because......they trust you. Jonathan Kozol said today at the Constructing Modern Knowledge 11 Conference "The most important thing is the intimacy of the bond between the child & teacher"
It was through the influence of teachers like Dwight Johnson, too, that Jerry was admitted to what he called "a fast-learner program" in school, sponsored by Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. "So I had the advantage of this elaborate accelerated program at school and a couple of far-out teachers who were willing to answer any questions and turn me on to where to go-"If you want to find more, this is what you read."
I am grateful (pun intended) that Jerry's teachers were able to fulfill his amazing creative, artistic and inquisitive needs. I will think of them a lot in the upcoming year.
This is from the last Grateful Dead show, Jerry would die a month later.
So Many Roads
The life of a complex man, I am looking forward to finishing the story this summer.
Keep on Truckin'
Jeff
Sunday, July 10, 2011
I ain't calling a English major to fix my AC in August
Let me start by saying that I never wanted this. I didn't want to write a blog that people I respect would read. I was really intrigued by Al's new position at the Izone and I thought that using a blog we could keep in contact and share our new experiences. So then he went and invited all of our mutual friends to follow the blog, no wonder I left him. Well there is a whole new pressure for me now. Now that I know you might be reading this (I'm sure you won't be) I have to make it somewhat interesting. My posts will not be as long as Al's, I don't have the ability to write as well as him (he is good, don't you think?) and writing long posts would severely slow my ability to post. Well, wish me luck for your sake and mine.
I came across two articles today about the state of our vocational schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/business/vocational-schools-face-deep-cuts-in-federal-funding.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
This was in today's New York York Times, it talks about how the Obama Administration is dealing with vocational schools.
"The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent."
It is another example of how the Obama administration has made some questionable decisions on education (excluding when he highlighted The Met in one of his speeches on Education). There are less and less options for students coming out of High School. What will the choices be in the upcoming years? Will a 4 year school or work in retail/fast food job be the only choice that you have? This is a frightening thought, especially when studies show that connecting vocational skills and academic subjects can boost academic achievement.
"In another study of 200 teachers and 3,000 students in nine states, James R. Stone III, director of the National Research Center for Career & Technical Education at the University of Louisville, similarly found that high school students whose teachers were given specific training in how to incorporate academic concepts into vocational classes scored, on average, 17 to 21 percentile points higher on standardized math tests than students in classes where vocational teachers had not been trained in academic integration."
So if we have evidence that this works and is effective how do we get past our stigma of vocational studies? Especially since other countries are doing it.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1GbXS7/www.good.is/post/can-brazil-teach-us-how-to-get-over-our-vocational-education-snobbery/
Brazil, the favorite country of my 9 year old and an up and coming superpower is making a "serious investment in vocational education". How are they doing it?
Brazil has smartly set up the institutes to "offer everything from basic education to graduate courses and doctorates in professional areas." That means, for example, that people who want to be math teachers can attend a technical institute, right alongside people studying to be plumbers. And, if someone starts out taking technical courses, they can easily switch to a degree program.
They are providing their students with options while helping them see the relevance of their academic studies. I hope I can get a Brazilian AC repairman in August if I need it.
To watch more about the rising star of Brazil (Even though our USA Woman Soccer team beat them in an unbelievable game today), check this out:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7143554n
Joga Bonita,
Jeff
I came across two articles today about the state of our vocational schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/business/vocational-schools-face-deep-cuts-in-federal-funding.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
This was in today's New York York Times, it talks about how the Obama Administration is dealing with vocational schools.
"The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent."
It is another example of how the Obama administration has made some questionable decisions on education (excluding when he highlighted The Met in one of his speeches on Education). There are less and less options for students coming out of High School. What will the choices be in the upcoming years? Will a 4 year school or work in retail/fast food job be the only choice that you have? This is a frightening thought, especially when studies show that connecting vocational skills and academic subjects can boost academic achievement.
"In another study of 200 teachers and 3,000 students in nine states, James R. Stone III, director of the National Research Center for Career & Technical Education at the University of Louisville, similarly found that high school students whose teachers were given specific training in how to incorporate academic concepts into vocational classes scored, on average, 17 to 21 percentile points higher on standardized math tests than students in classes where vocational teachers had not been trained in academic integration."
So if we have evidence that this works and is effective how do we get past our stigma of vocational studies? Especially since other countries are doing it.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1GbXS7/www.good.is/post/can-brazil-teach-us-how-to-get-over-our-vocational-education-snobbery/
Brazil, the favorite country of my 9 year old and an up and coming superpower is making a "serious investment in vocational education". How are they doing it?
Brazil has smartly set up the institutes to "offer everything from basic education to graduate courses and doctorates in professional areas." That means, for example, that people who want to be math teachers can attend a technical institute, right alongside people studying to be plumbers. And, if someone starts out taking technical courses, they can easily switch to a degree program.
They are providing their students with options while helping them see the relevance of their academic studies. I hope I can get a Brazilian AC repairman in August if I need it.
To watch more about the rising star of Brazil (Even though our USA Woman Soccer team beat them in an unbelievable game today), check this out:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7143554n
Joga Bonita,
Jeff
Sorry Jeff! Read Paul Tough's Piece in the Times!
Pal, I know I just got on you for publishing the latest battle in the education-reform wars. You can rip me a new one if you want, but Paul Tough just wrote something that has me firing on all cylinders. Please read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/reforming-the-school-reformers.html?_r=1&ref=education
The last 2 paragraphs say it all for me. Isn't that EXACTLY what we were trying to do at the Guild and will try again in the future? Isn't that what you and I have been trying to do since starting our careers? Especially the "supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom" part! Not to mention the "providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support" part!
I LOVE THIS PAUL TOUGH PIECE!
I keep going back to Sedlacek non-cognitive variables. If we could convince someone that tracking those are as important (and should be counted as much) as tracking academic progress, couldn't we create a school that serves every student?
Ok, 'nuff for tonight. READ PAUL TOUGH!
Peace,
Al
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/reforming-the-school-reformers.html?_r=1&ref=education
The last 2 paragraphs say it all for me. Isn't that EXACTLY what we were trying to do at the Guild and will try again in the future? Isn't that what you and I have been trying to do since starting our careers? Especially the "supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom" part! Not to mention the "providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support" part!
I LOVE THIS PAUL TOUGH PIECE!
I keep going back to Sedlacek non-cognitive variables. If we could convince someone that tracking those are as important (and should be counted as much) as tracking academic progress, couldn't we create a school that serves every student?
Ok, 'nuff for tonight. READ PAUL TOUGH!
Peace,
Al
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Whatcha doin' to me, buddy?
Jeff, man, you gotta cut me some slack.
I know this power/politics/education-war is on your mind now, but those three pieces made me want to slit my education-wrist. Klein and Brooks say it's all Ravitch and the Union's fault. Merrow says it ain't that simple. And most of the replies on his blog contain one or another form of the hatred vitriol that seems to be fueling this "debate."
Dude, I'm trying to fight my way out of the emotional iron maiden that's encased me since leaving the Guild. I'm trying to find the pragmatic course that will combat both the mechanistic reformers AND the adult-centered union. And it'll be the reformers who are paying me for at least the next year. So WTF!?!?
Ok, I'm gonna sit here by the campfire (yes, I'm upstate), drink this glass of wine (cheap Moldavo - I forgot to stop at the wine shop), ignore these helicopter-sized mosquitos (Deep Woods Off ain't workin') and tell you about my first day at CFN 101. It was Thursday. I had a great day.
First, I got a cubicle. (Don't say NOTHIN'!) I got introduced to the incredibly nice and friendly CFN 101 team. (Nick, Nikki, and Courtney A. were particularly nice and fun to talk to.) Then my network leader, Marina Cofield, and I sat down and had a (roughly) 3 hour talk about the schools that I'll be working with. She's fabulous, man. You'd really like her. Though she used to be a KIPP principal, she is psyched to have me aboard. She says she wants to have a team with as much diversity of thought as possible. She then proved that to me by engaging me in a real, practice-oriented, and humane conversation that helped me understand each of the principals that I'll be working with and some of their teams. We also got to talk to one of those principals (who was in the office) and another instructional coach on the team (Courtney A.). It was a heady conversation, involving everything from educational philosophy to computer keyboard preferences.
She reminds me of Michael.
At the end of that, I got to set up my work station and then it was off to meet with Sanda Balaban - the current liaison to Kunskapsskolan (our lead support partner in the innovation work of the 6 schools I'll be working with). We met at a cafe (with lousy air conditioning - so I was the sweat-master) right around the corner from Baruch. We had a shorter version of the same conversation. Sanda is great, but she'll be leaving Kunskapsskolan next week - I won't be working with her much.
Then it was back to the office for some more set-up and internet research on the schools I'll be working with. (BTW those schools are: School of the Future, West Side Collaborative, Global Technology Prep, The Young Woman's Leadership School, Tompkins Square Middle School and IS 289). Then a nice train ride home.
Starting on Monday, I'll be at an Innovation "Advance" (not "retreat" but "advance" -- again, DON'T SAY NOTHIN!) getting face-time with each of the principals and starting to get the lay of the land. 4 days of workshops and meetings around the work the schools are engaged in. It's not Big Bang, but it'll be fun.
What strikes me about my first day is the sense of work that all of the people I've interacted with. There was very little lollygagging in that office. Everyone was purposefully active all day. They weren't killing themselves, but there were no hour-long conversations that weren't work related. It's a work-ethic I could relate to.
Hey Jeff, two peanuts were walking through the park. One of them was assalted...
Peace,
Al
I know this power/politics/education-war is on your mind now, but those three pieces made me want to slit my education-wrist. Klein and Brooks say it's all Ravitch and the Union's fault. Merrow says it ain't that simple. And most of the replies on his blog contain one or another form of the hatred vitriol that seems to be fueling this "debate."
Dude, I'm trying to fight my way out of the emotional iron maiden that's encased me since leaving the Guild. I'm trying to find the pragmatic course that will combat both the mechanistic reformers AND the adult-centered union. And it'll be the reformers who are paying me for at least the next year. So WTF!?!?
Ok, I'm gonna sit here by the campfire (yes, I'm upstate), drink this glass of wine (cheap Moldavo - I forgot to stop at the wine shop), ignore these helicopter-sized mosquitos (Deep Woods Off ain't workin') and tell you about my first day at CFN 101. It was Thursday. I had a great day.
First, I got a cubicle. (Don't say NOTHIN'!) I got introduced to the incredibly nice and friendly CFN 101 team. (Nick, Nikki, and Courtney A. were particularly nice and fun to talk to.) Then my network leader, Marina Cofield, and I sat down and had a (roughly) 3 hour talk about the schools that I'll be working with. She's fabulous, man. You'd really like her. Though she used to be a KIPP principal, she is psyched to have me aboard. She says she wants to have a team with as much diversity of thought as possible. She then proved that to me by engaging me in a real, practice-oriented, and humane conversation that helped me understand each of the principals that I'll be working with and some of their teams. We also got to talk to one of those principals (who was in the office) and another instructional coach on the team (Courtney A.). It was a heady conversation, involving everything from educational philosophy to computer keyboard preferences.
She reminds me of Michael.
At the end of that, I got to set up my work station and then it was off to meet with Sanda Balaban - the current liaison to Kunskapsskolan (our lead support partner in the innovation work of the 6 schools I'll be working with). We met at a cafe (with lousy air conditioning - so I was the sweat-master) right around the corner from Baruch. We had a shorter version of the same conversation. Sanda is great, but she'll be leaving Kunskapsskolan next week - I won't be working with her much.
Then it was back to the office for some more set-up and internet research on the schools I'll be working with. (BTW those schools are: School of the Future, West Side Collaborative, Global Technology Prep, The Young Woman's Leadership School, Tompkins Square Middle School and IS 289). Then a nice train ride home.
Starting on Monday, I'll be at an Innovation "Advance" (not "retreat" but "advance" -- again, DON'T SAY NOTHIN!) getting face-time with each of the principals and starting to get the lay of the land. 4 days of workshops and meetings around the work the schools are engaged in. It's not Big Bang, but it'll be fun.
What strikes me about my first day is the sense of work that all of the people I've interacted with. There was very little lollygagging in that office. Everyone was purposefully active all day. They weren't killing themselves, but there were no hour-long conversations that weren't work related. It's a work-ethic I could relate to.
Hey Jeff, two peanuts were walking through the park. One of them was assalted...
Peace,
Al
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
On my mind
As the summer settles in and I try to take care of the thousands of things I have neglected over the past year, this is what is on my mind right now:
There are three links that have me thinking about the people who run education. I have read the following articles in the last couple of days.
Joel Klein- The Failure of American Schools
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/06/the-failure-of-american-schools/8497/
David Brooks - Smells like School Spirit
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01brooks.html
John Merrow responds to David Brooks' article
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=5183
It is such a confusing landscape and it gets uglier when politics and power are in the mix.
The thing that resonates with me the most is Merrow's talk about Faster Ponies. We could improve the Pony Express with "Faster Ponies" but is that what we want. Do we want to improve the system that exists? When Klein talks about the demise of our national standings in NAEP and College graduation, the question that I wonder and is never addressed is, "Does it matter?".
Once again it comes down to the question that always haunts me.
What is the purpose of school and education?
Maybe this blog can help me figure it out.
Best,
Jeff
There are three links that have me thinking about the people who run education. I have read the following articles in the last couple of days.
Joel Klein- The Failure of American Schools
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/06/the-failure-of-american-schools/8497/
David Brooks - Smells like School Spirit
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01brooks.html
John Merrow responds to David Brooks' article
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=5183
It is such a confusing landscape and it gets uglier when politics and power are in the mix.
The thing that resonates with me the most is Merrow's talk about Faster Ponies. We could improve the Pony Express with "Faster Ponies" but is that what we want. Do we want to improve the system that exists? When Klein talks about the demise of our national standings in NAEP and College graduation, the question that I wonder and is never addressed is, "Does it matter?".
Once again it comes down to the question that always haunts me.
What is the purpose of school and education?
Maybe this blog can help me figure it out.
Best,
Jeff
Welcome!
So Al Sylvia and Jeff Palladino have separated. That's right, after 8 years of working together at the Bronx Guild, we will no longer be together day in and day out. Jeff has taken a position as AP at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx. Al has taken a position as innovation coach in CFN 101 - Bridges for Learning Network. We've decided, though, that our collaboration and partnership was too important to us to just separate. So we've created this blog to share our current work with each other and anyone else who is interested in our ideas, jokes and sarcasm.
So read on...
Peace,
Al
So read on...
Peace,
Al
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