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Map Of Your Head, by Daniel Conway

I found Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth’s  Social Media Campaign image a few days ago via Steven Anderson’s (@web20classroom) Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom.  It broadened my thinking about the curriculum map due to my head of school in September.  I work at a middle school that strives to differentiate instruction by content, process, product, and time in hopes of re-engaging struggling students with a love of learning before high school.  Any one, traditional curriculum map I create will, by necessity, be obsolete before I begin writing it.  My state standards are already written; my description of our class structure is done; our coaches and experts have been recruited (including members of the Virginia Experiment and Music Resource Center); we’ve drafted rubrics collaboratively; now we need students and time for the model to take hold.  I’ve been  struggling with writing a traditional curriculum map because I don’t know what it will add to our work.  Enter the image.

After reading Steven’s post, I started thinking about a curriculm map as a picture of a classroom’s learning system.  Thinking about virtual charter schools, authentic engagement with the global community, and the needs of our students, I put together a picture of the “how” instead of the “what.”  I’m not sure it’s “right,” but it represents how I hope our class will learn.

To move past teaching for the test, we’ll need to map past the test, as well.  Maybe one way to do that is to map systems in place of content, or to separate content (the plug-in or add-on) from the learning model (the program).

Please take the curriculum map below to pieces, question it, and help me figure out how to better articulate the model of learning.  Administrators, parents, students, and tax-payers, what else would you want to see from a teacher’s curriculum map?  Teachers, what else would you include?

A curriculum map of "how" instead of "what"

Where’s the game / In life / Behind the game / Behind the game
-Public Enemy, “He Got Game”

Monday 16 February: Work Day and Nelson Mandela Classroom Visits, by KimTD

In reading Sarah Fine’s rationale for leaving teaching, I was stuck by her friends’ question, “Why teach?” Here’s my answer.

• I teach because I want to learn. I want to figure out the best way to foster students’ problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. I want to figure out how to help every student experience success. I want to figure out how break down classroom walls and connect schools to life.
• I teach because I want to believe. I want to be around people who know they’re doing the right thing. I want to be around people who prioritize others’ successes before their own. I want to be around people whose actions change lives for the better.
• I teach because I want to change the world. I want my students to be the experts in my classroom. I want my colleagues to think of our schools as a hub for the relevant learning students experience all day. I want the measure of education’s success to be how much our students’ contribute to their communities before they graduate.

Education is the game in life behind the game behind the game. I love my friends for their generosity, humor, and support, but neither they nor the public will shape for me the worth of my work. My friends can indulge themselves in sidebars about teaching because of the educational privilege of their upbringings. My friends have their perceptions of teaching, and I have mine. My friends have their salaries and titles, and I have mine. My friends have their reasons for doing what they do, and I have mine. Regardless, I’m going to stick around and struggle to replace privilege for some with success for all for as long as my victories and defeats alike allow me to do so.

Sarah Fine explains herself well. We can understand her decision and commiserate with her experiences without sharing her conclusions.

The reasons we stay will never be as publicized as the reasons we leave unless we share them. Please comment, post, and tweet about why you’ve chosen to stay in teaching using #whyistay as a hash tag.

Over at Twitter recently, @mctownsley pointed toward an earlier post at Edumacation about the tension between standards-based assessment and traditional grading.

Assessments, like any kind of data-based research, can be used by many people in many different ways.

One teacher might pump her fist in the air after seeing that 95% of her students passed this year’s reading test.  Another might perseverate on the 5% who failed, knowing that those students are the toughest to reach and no one’s reached them yet.  Another educator might take issue with the test’s validity and discount the results entirely, instead focusing on whether or not her students’ final portfolios demonstrated mastery of reading and writing for a variety of purposes and audiences.

The same can be said of assessment systems.  They, too, can be taken and manipulated in many ways by many people.

Look at traditional grading.  Take two English teachers working in the same grade at the same school.  Despite sharing a common, 100-point scale, two teachers’ students could earn the same scores but learn dramatically different things depending on the curriculum, assessment, and instruction used in the two classes.  Even if those teachers shared a common curriculum, a 90% in one class doesn’t have to mean the same thing in the other class.  What if both teachers gave book tests, but on different books?  What if both teachers gave book tests on the same book, but one teacher’s questions never broke the knowledge/comprehension ceiling?  Or what if both teachers gave the same test and it included analysis items, but only one of the teachers ever modeled or gave practice in answering analysis questions during the reading of the book?

Look at standards-based assessment and reporting (SBAR).  Take another two English teachers working together in the same grade at another school school.  Ask the same questions; you won’t get very different answers.

I ran a SBAR pilot in my classroom for a year and was then fortunate enough to work with a group of peers willing to try it department-wide for another year.  We learned a lot about assessment, grade-book design, and report-card design from struggling with the tension between SBAR and traditional grading.

While I believe standards-based assessment and reporting is better for learning than traditional grading, and while I believe that the two should not be mixed, I don’t worry so much about which system to use anymore.  I worry more about people issues.  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher who provides opportunities for authentic learning?  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher working with colleagues to transform rote content into fuel for life-long learning?  How can you make sure that every student has a teacher who cares more that students’ learning demonstrates mastery than that students’ behavior satisfies the teacher?

The SBAR process does a better job of pushing teachers to tackle those questions than traditional grading does.  However, there are multiple obstacles in the status quo to implementing an SBAR classroom or school-wide grading system, including grade-books and report-cards which are commonly adopted by a whole school or system and not often up for change.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle is our conditioned impulse to equate a 4- or 5-point scale with the 100-point scale used for traditional grading.  They do not match up.  The should never be cross-walked.  They are irreconcilably disparate.  Don’t do it.  When you tell a student that mastery equals 80%, or that approaching mastery equals 60%, you effectively squelch any intrinsic motivation the student has to move forward in learning by equating formative feedback with summative grades.  The 100-point scale and its letter grade equivalents exist to sort children by summative, lag indicators.  The 4-point scale exists to promote student learning by articulating the characteristics of different levels of mastery.  The 100-point scale suffers from inflation, discrepancy, subjectivity, and the confusion of student behavior with learning.  The 4-point scale, while adaptable, concentrates on learning and makes public the teacher’s commitment to providing clear benchmarks for students to reach.  There’s not a lot of wiggle room in the 4-point scale to fudge with decimals, to reward extra credit schoolwork less demanding then the learning, or to take points off of mastery for too much talking.  Ultimately, it’s better to take the assessment and feedback lessons learned from SBAR and to apply them in practice using a 100-point scale than it is to ever try to crosswalk the two.

It’s a reform-crippling irony that the public thinks number- and letter- grades provide more hard data about student learning than rubrics built on 4- and 5- point scales do. If your school or public is unwilling to publish or accept “grades” based on SBAR and its scales, make traditional grading mean more.

All criticisms of the 100-point scale aside, I still think it can be used to promote learning if teachers work together to make sure that the grades stand for real learning benchmarks, and to make sure that students can always improve their grades by demonstrating higher levels of mastery over time.  If teachers working together agree to tier assessments, for example, so that no one gets a B without applying knowledge, and no one gets an A without analyzing or evaluating  “new” information with “old” skills, then it becomes likely that both of those teachers will provide some instruction and practice on the kinds of thinking that make work personally meaningful for students.  I want teachers to design assessments and instruction that promote student meaning-making, regardless of the grading scale the teachers use.

Ultimately, any scale needs to be used to value, promote, and reward authentic learning.  The scale is a construct – it’s a communications technology; it’s not the learning itself.  Does your quarterly message to parents and students promote learning?  Even if your division requires you to use a scale with which you disagree, you can call home or re-purpose school postage or bandwidth with a newsletter or narrative report that more accurately describes students’ learning in your classroom.  You can pilot student-led conferences.  You don’t have to stop communicating at your grading scale.

In fact, it’s not this scale or that scale that’s the problem.  The problem lies in how we use the scales and how much care we take in making sure that the scales encourage learning and academic risk-taking instead of discouraging them.  Our problems with grading are people problems.  They come from grading in isolation for too long and from believing for too long that the 100-point scale is enough to unite us and our work.  We need to network with one another, as well as with experts in the outside world, to provide personally-meaningful, autnehtic learning and feedback for our students.  We need to expand our PLCs into PLNs.

What does a 90% or a 4 mean to you?  What do you think it means to your students?  How does it move forward their learning?  What do you think it means to world?  How can you be sure?  How authentic are the “grades” in your classroom?

Beware getting caught up in arguments with your peers about how to label learning; unite with your colleagues instead to align assessment, instruction, and feedback to ensure that learning is authentic and happening in the first place.  Make your standard authenticity and make sure to share out how it goes.

Trevor Przyuski works as an instructional coach for Albemarle County Public Schools.  In, “Let Them Own It,” he writes about the tension between children’s authentic engagement with personally meaningful work and their struggles with traditional school work.  By sharing an anecdote from his own experience as a classroom teacher, Trevor offers a model of instructional decision making that favors following the “happy accidents” of authentic engagement over sticking with the teacher’s plans.

Trevor’s post makes a startling point: the genius of a lesson plan may be in its failure.  If a plan prompts students to follow their interests and passions in taking the work in another direction, then its failure can provide more authentic engagement than its success.  Indeed, to move past thinking about our own lessons as successes and failures, we need to make students equal partners in the differentiation of their learning.

After reading Trevor’s post, the big question for me is: how do we shift our mindest and planning practices to prepare for the “accidents” of authentic engagement?  Even in a classroom rich with opportunities for authentic engagement, students will make discoveries about themselves and their learning that will take them in unanticipated directions.  When planning for authentic engagement, what’s the right balance to maintain between familiar structures and the unknown?

Trevor’s blog is here, and you can follow him on Twitter via @trevorprzyuski.  Please read on and comment!

I’m very grateful to be able to share with you the work going on at Murray High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. Murray High School is “the world’s first Glasser Quality Public High School.” The school uses William Glasser’s Choice Theory and Quality Schools framework to re-engage students with the joy of learning. The creation of “Quality Work” and “Quality Product” in a joyful place drives success at the school.

Murray specializes in making work personally meaningful to its students. The school engages students with both rigorous academics and an equally challenging process of self-discovery and -management through Choice Theory. The work Murray invests in building trusting relationships throughout the community also plays a key role in creating an environment safe for academic risk-taking.

Murray Choices Teacher, NBCT, and Practicum Supervisor for the William Glasser Institute Charlotte Wellen has written “Walter’s Struggles and Accomplishments” to share with us what authentic engagement with learning and authentic work look like at a Glasser Quality School. You can read about “Walter,” a composite of students’ experiences at Murray, here.

You can also hear from Murray’s students here, as well as see state measurement of the school’s impact on student achievement here.