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.
I'm a fan of thinking along the lines of "learning progressions." It's much more useful than standards by themselves or a rigid scope and sequence. Great tool. However, I think one needs to anticipate that many people will tend to lock into them in a way that Sanda warns against. She writes, "A few words of caution about learning progressions are in order here. ... the notion of a learning progression implies a linear sequence." and goes on to say it's more like a braid.
ReplyDeleteWell (1) I think it's even more complex than a braid and (2) The word of caution is actually referring to something that could be a big deal. Folks love to lock in to things (like scope and sequence). I hope learning progressions are used wisely and in sophisticated ways that respect the constructivist nature of learning. I would hate for it to get a bad name because I think it is useful. Like any tool I suppose.