School Leader

Dates announced for Summer 2013 Kentucky Principal Test

All Kentucky aspiring school principals must successfully complete the Kentucky Specialty Test of Instructional and Administrative Practices.  Summer dates for this test have been released by the Educational Professional Standards Board.

The paper administration of the Kentucky principal exam will be offered on July 20, 2013.  The online version of the test is available July 29-August 17, 2013.  Click here for more information or to register.

Remember that you must also successfully complete the School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA) to apply for principal certification in Kentucky (and many other states).

Online learning and the future of schooling, Part II

A few weeks back I began a two-part series of posts responding to Francisco Dao's assertion that "online learning is a fantasty."  Dao, a tech/innovation guru, argued that online courses lack the structure and interpersonal component to be effective for unmotivated learners, and will therefore be ineffective for "educating the masses" as some school reformers imagine (or as Dao seems to think some people imagine).

In my first post I concurred with some of Dao's concerns about online learning, based both on my experiences as an instructor in online classes and as a former principal who worked with at-risk high school students.  But I also challenged the notion that many serious thinkers actually believe that online learning - in general - is a silver bullet for solving all the problems in 21st Century education.

Moreover, Dao doesn't ask the most basic question about unmotivated learners: why are so many unmotivated in the first place?  Besides many other factors, what does the structure of schooling itself have to do with that lack of motivation? 

Dao's blog post misses a fundamental point: that schooling as we know it, especially at the high school level, is possibly broken beyond repair.  Or, perhaps more accurately: schooling as we know it no longer functions in any effective way for educating the vast majority of children, given our goals for education in the 21st century and the economic and moral imperative of improving student learning.  We should be seeking strategies and that would help us transform the very structure of schooling rather than continue to (expensively) tinker with a system Richard Elmore has a called "a dying institution."  In whatever renewed form schooling takes, technology is sure to play a key role.

As John Taylor Gatto points out, the present system of American schooling was based on an early 19th century, Prussian model that was designed to rank and sort students into effective roles for a compliant, efficient industrial workforce.  To the extent that this system ever "worked" for students, it did so by standardizing learning in a way that largely brushed over, neglected, or worked around individual student differences and needs.  Creativity, intuition, and especially student choice were largely ignored if not squelched outright. 

The NCLB era brought a demand that all students reach proficient levels of learning (whereas the older era accepted that large percentages of students would drop out or be minimally educated), and established rigorous accountability requirements for school improvement, but preserved the industrial structure of schooling that was never intended to educate all children, while also adding an obsession with standardized tests that remain a clumsy and highly limited measure of teaching or learning.

The 21st Century economy demands a level of individualization in student learning and a focus on innovation, creativity, and human relations skills that the present structure of schooling cannot accommodate.  Moreover, the 21st century digital culture means that families and students have become thoroughly accustomed to a range of individualized choices in all aspects of their life never before seen in the history of humankind.  It's not just that the current structure of schooling will fail to adequately meet student needs; parents and their children will not abide by the stifling, limited, one-size-fits-all format of the traditional school. 

Something will have to change in the way we "do" school, for moral, economic, political, and cultural reasons.

What will the future of schooling look like?  No one can accurately predict, of course, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the future of schooling must be much more highly individualized than in the past.  If we want a future generation with more capacity for critical thinking, perseverance, creativity, and collaboration, one-size-fits-all formats for schooling with fragmented, disconnected curricula must give way to approaches that emphasize student choice, self-pacing, and an integration of the academic disciplines. 

Trevor Eissler and his merry band of brothers have suggested the Montessori method as one strategy for renewing the structure of public schooling, and the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector has been established as a clearinghouse for resources and information on this century-old approach to student-centered learning.  The Sudbury method, pioneered at the famed Sudbury Valley School, offers an even more radically student-focused approach.

But even within the existing structure of traditional schooling meaningful innovations are emerging, like the "Independent Project" at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where students are crafting their own curriculum, assessments, and learning strategies with the support of teachers who truly function as "guides on the side." 

To Francisco Dao's argument that online learning will fail to "educate the masses," at Monument Mountain, as in many other places across the country, technology is playing a key role in helping students and teachers craft new approaches to learning.  In fact, the notion that students must attend a brick and mortar (government-run) building to obtain knowledge and skills is as outmoded as the factory design of schools themselves.  Many states are now experimenting with "a la carte" options for student learning, heavily facilitated by technology, that allows students to supplement their education and add a high degree of flexibility and personalization to learning that doesn't necessarily mean the wholesale replacement of schools by computers.

As Sugata Mitra and Charles Leadbeater have vividly documented in their TED talks, adults grossly underestimate what students can do all by themselves given the right tools.

Ultimately, I don't believe these kinds of innovations can succeed in a system wherein the state has a total monopoly on schooling for the majority of families.  Of all the structures that must change to accommodate 21st Century learning, the notion that the government can adequately plan, direct, and deliver education is perhaps the greatest, and serves as the chief obstacle to moving us forward.  Meaningful structures of school choice must be developed and implemented so that a far wider range of educational options are available to families.

So is "online learning" the answer to education's ills?  Certainly not, if by simply grafting online learning onto traditional notions of schooling is what we mean.  But technology could play an essential role in the total transformation of schooling as we know it.  And that's what all of us should be working toward.

"That's Me!" Enneagram profiles for school leaders

The Enneagram personality typing system figures prominently in my work with aspiring and practicing school leaders.  Unlike most other personality systems, which primarily just describe a typology of behaviors, the Enneagram goes deeper, exploring the deep system of inner motivations that explain and drive each type.  Understanding why we do the things we do can provide enormous leverage for personal and professional growth.

Along with my Contemplative Learning Solutions partner, Dr. Tom Stewart of Austin Peay State University, we have been writing a series of profiles examining how each Ennea-type functions in the role of school leader.  Because the context of P-12 schools and the role of school principal in particular are so unique, the Enneagram shines a bright light on the work of education administrators and how they function as leaders.

We are pleased that an excerpt of our profiles is featured in the current issue of Nine Points magazine, an official publication of the International Enneagram Association.   Nine Points has just be redesigned in a fully online format and we're honored to be included in its inaugural edition.  Read our article, "That's Me: Using Ennea-type Profiles to Enhance School Leader Effectiveness."  And read our complete series of profiles here.

Online learning and the future of schooling, Part I

Our friends at the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) recently shared this blog post by Francisco Dao on "Why online education is a fantasy."  (AERO emphasized they were just promoting discussion, not endorsing Dao's ideas).  The blog post challenges the notion that online learning, MOOCs, and the internet "will cure all of our education problems."

While Dao raises some important points, I think his blog post misfires on several levels, and suggests the need for a much broader, more thoughtful discussion about online learning and the future of schooling itself.  I'll respond to Dao's argument in two posts.

Dao's chief complaint seems to be that if students aren't motivated to learn online, then online learning won't be successful.  The library has been a source of free, self-directed, self-paced learning for decades, and yet you don't see every kid turning himself into a "self-taught entrepreneur" by biking to the local library instead of going to school. Dao goes on to note that completion rates in online courses are lower than in traditional classes, which have a "fixed structure and ... sense of belonging."

Some of Dao's concerns are certainly merited.  There is a great abundance of poorly-structured, low-rigor online learning opportunities out there, often appearing as components of a "traditional" university learning environment.  The university principal certification program where I teach has struggled against cheaper, fully-online competitors that, I believe, offer a lower-quality learning experience.  But convincing students that they should pay more for a hybrid program like ours, which allows us to have face-to-face interactions and stronger personal relationships, has been a challenge.

And motivation obviously plays a role in all learning settings, whether face-to-face or digital.  I spent four years as principal of an alternative high school for at-risk students.  This was the time when online courses were emerging as the most popular solution for credit recovery, and I quickly discovered that many of my students needed a high degree of monitoring, structure, and support to be successful with these programs.

But I do not see how Dao can draw the sweeping conclusion that online learning "will fail to be the solution to educating the masses."

First, who exactly is suggesting that online learning in general is such a solution?  The abundance of failed one-to-one laptop programs or SmartBoards as glorified overhead projectors has abundantly demonstrated that just putting technology in the hands of students or teachers doesn't really do that much to change the quality or character of schooling. 

No one should assume that just replacing a face-to-face course with something online will contribute to any kind of magical results.  Technology is a tool that may be used well, used poorly, or not used at all.  For at-risk learners, there's no doubt that online learning experiences will need to be well-structured and accompanied by a generous dose of personalized attention.  In some cases, that might require face-to-face interaction, but my own experience of teaching in online environments has taught me that the technology itself can help to facilitate personal interaction, whether through synchronous video conferencing, discussion boards, e-mail, or other media.

All things being equal, would I prefer to also meet my students face to face?  Sure.  And hybrid formats permit me to utilize the best of both online and face-to-face learning.  But increasingly I'm finding that, when carefully planned and utilized, strong interpersonal connections among students and between students and instructors is possible even in fully online environments.

When I consider my own personal and professional learning as an adult, this becomes obvious.  Almost all of the meaningful learning I've engaged in since the end of my formal schooling experience has been mediated by online environments.  I get interested in a topic, usually through some encounter on the Web (often from a social media source), Google to learn more, tweet about it and follow others on Twitter who share the same interest, establish new learning networks, and eventually share ideas and engage in new collaborations with people from around the world via e-mail, Skype, and other platforms. 

Of course, in this respect I am the motivated learner that Dao acknowledges will thrive in an online world.  What about the unmotivated?

Here, I think it's important to ask two questions.  First, why are there so many unmotivated students in our traditional schooling environments?  And second, why do we assume that there are only two options for educating "the masses:" traditional or fully online?  Why aren't we contemplating the full-scale dismantling of schooling as we know it, or pondering what might replace it?  I'll explore these questions in a future post.

Schools needed to pilot teacher perception survey

If you are an administrator or teacher leader of a Kentucky school, I'd like to ask you to please consider volunteering your school to participate in an exciting pilot research study being developed by my WKU colleagues, Dr.  Steve Miller, Dr. Kyong Chon, and me.  We are creating a survey designed to measure how deeply and effectively teachers believe their school is implementing the Standards and Indicators for School Improvement (SISI).

The Standards and Indicators are a research-proven framework for measuring a school's improvement efforts.  If we are able to validate our new survey, tentatively called the Standards and Indicators Scholastic Review (SISR), schools will get reliable data on their progress that mirrors what has normally required a five-day audit from an external review team.  The SISR will be superior  to other teacher perception instruments like the TELLKentucky or AdvancEd stakeholder surveys because it is built on a strong base of research.

We eventually hope to use the SISR with hundreds of schools across the state, but first we need to pilot the draft instrument with a handful of schools to make sure our design works.  Please consider volunteering your school for the pilot administration of the survey.

A member of our research team will visit pilot schools during a regularly scheduled faculty meeting (or a special meeting, if appropriate) to explain the survey.  Then we will ask teachers to go directly to a school computer lab to take the survey, which will take approximately 45 minutes to complete.  This is obviously  a lengthy survey, but each participating school will receive a complete profile of anonymous teacher perception data relative to the nine Standards and Indicators for School Improvement - a potential wealth of valuable information.  Plus, your school will be contributing to
ground-breaking research that might eventually help distinguish how teacher perceptions differ between high-performing and low-performing schools, assisting leaders in better predicting future trends and engaging in meaningful long-range improvement planning.

We hope to conduct this pilot survey before the end of the current school year, so time is of the essence.  If you are interested in having your school participate in the SISR pilot, please email me as soon as possible at gary.houchens@wku.edu so we can coordinate a time for administration.  Even if you cannot participate in the pilot at this time, let me know if  you'd like to be included during the full validation study, which we'll be conducting this fall.

I'll blog regularly about the progress of this study.

Uniting the adults in schools around a common purpose

I found the short video below via the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector Facebook page.  It features Dr. Katherine Merseth of the Harvard Graduate School of Education discussing school improvement and the necessity of "creating a common culture of coherence:"

 

Among the highlights:

•  No one (including education reformers) seems to agree on the actual purpose of schooling.
• The bureaucratic structures of schooling appear to be more designed for the benefit of adults rather than students.
• In high functioning schools (which are, in fact, student centered), every person in the school can answer the question, "What is your purpose?  Why are you here?"
• Teachers in high functioning schools function as advocates for children, with whom they have strong personal relationships, know their content deeply so they can answer (or, I would add, help kids answer for themselves) the big "why" questions, knows how to personalize learning for individual student needs, and is continuously learning from and with other educators.

Merseth seems to have fairly conventional perspective on what schooling is all about (no real mention of Montessori, Sudbury, or any of the radically student-centered approaches I've become interested in).  Nevertheless, I think in this three-minute video she gives a terrific summary of some of the key problems vexing schools and the absolute necessity of uniting the adults in a school around a common purpose.  It's a message relevant for leaders of any school.

Still "widgets:" Data from other states bodes ill for KY's new teacher eval system

I've previously written with guarded optimism about the massive overhaul taking place in Kentucky right now relative to teacher evaluation.  If all goes according to planned, next year teacher performance in Kentucky will be assessed using a variety of fairly sophisticated measures, including the traditional supervisor observation, but also peer observations, self-reflection, student feedback, and growth in student learning (among others). 

The whole thing is a massive undertaking, and school administrators around the state are bracing for a 40-hour training program that must be completed prior to actually carrying out any evaluations.   I really want to believe the effort will be worth it, as data from the now-infamous Widget Effect report, as well as the experience of millions of educators nationwide, verifies that teacher evaluation in the United States is, frankly, a joke.  In the vast majority of schools and districts, the teacher evaluation process does nothing to really distinguish between high and low performers, or to use performance data to guide professional growth and development or leadership decision making.

To be sure, Kentucky's effort to improve teacher evaluation wasn't based entirely on a conversion to clearer thinking about how to improve teaching and learning in our schools.  As an applicant for federal "Race to the Top" funds, Kentucky was mandated to carry out reforms of the teacher evaluation process.  Nevertheless, I have been pleased to see the state taking the whole issue seriously.  My biggest concern has been whether school leaders can be sufficiently trained - and evaluated themselves - to carry out the new system with fidelity.

Now, data from states that have already revamped their teacher evaluation systems suggests that these reforms aren't really working.  The vast majority of teachers are still getting the highest performance marks, in clear contradiction to what administrators, parents, students, and the teachers themselves know to be reality.

According to a recent New York Times story, nearly half of all states have revised their teacher evaluation systems and the results are disheartening.  Examples:

In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”

In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.

With all due respect to the thousands of hard-working teachers in these states, it just flies in the face of reason that these astronomical percentages of teachers are satisfactory or better in their performance.  As an Education Week blogger put it, "The 'Widget Effect' endures."

What's most alarming about these figures for Kentucky is that under our new education accountability model, teacher evaluation ratings will eventually be included as a component of every school's overall performance scores. 

I recently attended a meeting of school district leaders who were putting hard questions about all of this to staff members of the Kentucky Department of Education.  As one district administrator pointed out, we know how badly inflated teacher evaluations have been in the past.  Now, principals will have more incentive than ever to rate their teachers highly, in spite of the multiple measures now included in our evaluation system.  How can this possibly work?

The KDE representative acknowledged that this was a risk and that the Department would be monitoring the situation to look for signs that schools were inflating their own ratings.  But the representative provided no details on how this will work, and one superintendent voiced concern that schools would be singled out for scrutiny because they might be doing exactly what the Department wants: improving teacher performance.

I suspect how this will unfold in practice is that KDE will start looking for discrepencies between student performance and teacher evaluation.  If students are performing poorly but teachers are being evaluated highly, that should be a red flag.  But no mechanism for identifying such a school currently exists in law or regulation, and this approach has its own inherent flaws.  Many schools are high-performing in some part because of their student demographics, not their stellar teaching.  In fact, such schools can mask mediocre or poor teacher performance and will have even more incentive not to jeapordize their high ranking by pointing out teacher growth needs.

So I am growing increasingly pessimistic about the chances of this reform effort to make any real difference in teacher performance.  We run the risks of wasting massive amounts of time and money.  And as some folks like Mike Schmoker have pointed out, you don't need a complex approach to properly evaluate teacher performance.  You do, however, need effective leadership.

And if we really can't do any better at identifying differences in teacher performance - one of the most fundament variables in student achievement - then maybe all of these education reforms really are, as Richard Elmore put it, "palliative care for a dying institution."

The great "Ability grouping" misnomer

A flurry of headlines in the education media has recently announced the return of "ability grouping."  The news stories cite a recent study by the Brooking Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy that found a major resurgence of "ability grouping" after the practice had fallen out of fashion for many years.

But what the Brown Center study describes is simply good practice and should not be called "ability grouping," a term that does indeed need to remain on the scrap heap of history.

The Education Week story on this topic is a good example.  It defines "ability grouping" as "the practice-primarily in elementary grades-of separating students for instruction within a single class."  Reporting findings from the Brown Center study, the story goes on to describe the increasingly common practice of using assessment data to flexibly sort students for intervention and enrichment.  In the best-case scenarios, these groups are truly flexible: students move in and out of the groups based on their progress toward benchmarks.

I've seen some pretty poor and primitive excuses for flexible grouping, like assigning students to groups based on a single assessment measure, and then leaving them in a group for an entire semester or longer before reassessing their progress.  And in many schools "enrichment" groups don't provide much meaningful enrichment. 

But the effort to do flexible grouping is still an important step toward implementation of a truly "balanced" assessment system.  Ideally, schools should be constantly measuring student progress toward learning targets (using frequent, ungraded formative assessments) and making immediate instructional adjustments based on this progress.  Adjustments could include grouping students based on their progress to provide additional (or differentiated) instruction (or enrichment). 

This practice, however, has nothing to do with a student's "ability," a word which suggests a child's innate capacity to learn.  On any given day, any student could require some intervention or enrichment based on progress toward a particular learning target. 

It is not splitting hairs to make this distinction.  Much of the tracking that took place in past decades had everything to do with educators' perceptions of children's innate capacaties to learn.  With relatively little meaningful data to go off (and lots of prejudicial attitudes based on race, poverty, or family education background), teachers assigned students to groups based on "ability" and the vast majority of students never left their track.  "Lower" tracks were distinguished by profoundly lower expectations for what students would ever be able to achieve.  And this probably explains as much about historical achievement gaps as nearly anything.

Tracking practices like this have greatly declined at the secondary level in recent years, and rightly so.  For adults to decide on a child's behalf - when that child is 14 years old or younger - whether he or she is "college material" reeks of paternalism and a profound unfairness, and sets up those who might desire more for themselves to be perpetually unprepared for learning at the next level.  Most high schools have replaced multiple tracks (for students without disabilities) with two today: "honors" and "regular."

But even these distinctions seem problematic to me.  When I ask high school educators the difference between their honors and regular courses, uncomfortable squirming often ensues.  The honors classes move "faster" and "go deeper," I'm usually told, but the content is the same.  I have trouble seeing how the content could be the same if the class is moving "faster."  There's no way getting around the fact that our expectations for "regular" classes are lower.  Are none of these students capable - or worthy - of higher expectations?

Lest readers misunderstand, I do believe there are differences in students regarding their "ability."  Like almost all human characteristics, intelligence (in all its forms) falls along a bell-shaped curve pattern for large populations.  And these innate capacities do shape the rate at which students learn, and for a few perhaps, a maximum capacity for achievement.  But when educators use these differences to make decisions that profoundly shape the entire curriculum and learning program for vast numbers of students, we have given "ability" far more prominence than it deserves and institutionalized low expectations and a reluctance to do what truly needs to be done: meaningful individualization and differentiation for all students.

Would we even need "honors" classes if we knew how to really differentiate?  And could the institutional structures of schooling ever allow us to differentiate in this way if we actually knew how?

This is the kind of debate we need to have in education.  Misnomers like "ability grouping" are a major distraction.

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School

I started seeing Nikhil Goyal's name about a year ago and immediately took notice.  I follow the work of a group called the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), which advocates root-and-branch transformation of education to make schooling far more democratic and student centered.  AERO had just published Goyal's book, One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, with a subsequent torrent of media attention. 

One Size Does Not Fit All is a scathing indictment of American schooling that synthesizes a lot of arguments familiar to people who closely follow the various streams of education reform.  But what makes Goyal unique is that, at the time of the book's writing, he was a 17-year old New York high school student.  Now 18 and a graduate, Goyal travels widely and writes copiously in his advocacy for new ways of thinking about schooling.  I've been pleased to follow Nikhil on Twitter and correspond with him via e-mail, and I was happy to finally get a chance to read his book.  While One Size Does Not Fit All has some flaws, Nikhil Goyal's message is worthy of every educator's attention and consideration.

Goyal makes the case that American schooling is stifling to children's creativity and treats learning as a kind of industrial, input-output process that promotes rote memorization and behavioral compliance.  Drawing inspiration from the work of John Taylor Gatto (whose book Weapons of Mass Instruction I reviewed here and here), Goyal explains how schools are still configured for the 19th-century industrial workforce and a mission based on ranking and sorting students.  He argues that if schools are going to properly prepare 21st century students, a shift to emphasizing innovation, creativity, and student-directed learning must take place, and here he borrows liberally from the work of school reformer Tony Wagner (whose book, the Global Achivement Gap, I reviewed here; I think the links between Goyal's interest and mine are probably becoming very clear).

Goyal lays most of the blame for the poor condition of schooling on the test-obsessed culture of education, which started emerging with A Nation at Risk and its concern for America's education standing relative to other leading countries, and then rapidly accelerated with the ill-conceived No Child Left Behind Act.  Goyal draws heavily here from the work of Diane Ravitch (more reviews here and here), who makes one of the best cases for how standardized testing has been misused to improperly measure student learning and mischaracterize the work of teachers and schools.  And like Ravitch, Goyal disparages the move toward for-profit educational alternatives and "corporate" educational reforms that he believes work hand-in-hand with the drive for test-based school accountability.

Goyal calls for a radical transformation of schooling to include far more student voice in school governance and especially in learning and a richer, broader curriculum infused with the arts and real-world learning, enhanced and facilitated by new technologies.  His vision closely aligns with my own interests in dismantling the structure of schooling and rebuilding it into something that is far more student centered (like the Montessori Method).

I would recommend, however, that Goyal rethink his allegiance to Diane Ravitch and her crowd of educational traditionalist because their ultimate goals and methods will not bring about - and in many cases stand diametrically opposed to - the kinds of changes in school that he envisions.  As I have written elsewhere, Ravitch makes a vital contribution to the debate on education reform by raising questions about the place of high-stakes standardized testing, but errs in conflating the school choice movement with testing and "corporate" interests. 

The transformation Nikhil Goyal is looking for will best be accomplished by establishing meaningful school choice options for all families that will foster new innovations in teaching and learning.  Simply paying teachers more, giving them more autonomy, and forgetting about testing and accountability will give us the educational outcomes of the 1970's - not a time when schooling was particularly student centered or conducive to rigor and higher-ordered thinking.

These disagreements notwithstanding, I am thoroughly enamoured with Nikhil Goyal and his book, in no small part because he speaks with the passion, and above all the authority, of someone who has just lived the experience of schooling as a high school student.  On a personal level he reminds me of myself at the same age, all full of idealism and hubris, but with far more drive, organization, and follow through (after all - how many high school students write books and then launch worldwide speaking tours?). 

Nikhil Goyal represents our future.  As one of the best and brightest - both because of and in spite of our flawed educational system - we need to heed his warnings, and his calls for how to make schooling better for all students.

 

Free SLLA test prep session returning to WKU in April

My WKU colleague, Dr. Mike Putnam, will be reprising his hugely popular test prep session for the School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA), required of all aspiring school principals in Kentucky and many other states.  The session will be held on Saturday, April 27, from 3:00 to 9:00 p.m. Central time, continuing on Sunday, April 28, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Gary Ransdell Hall Room 3096 on WKU's main campus.  There is no charge for the session.  Participants are asked to pay $25 for access to online materials (see note below).

The next round of SLLA testing will be the week of April 29 through May 4 at a cost of $425.

Dr. Putnam developed this test review with Dr. Dennis Bunch of the University of Mississippi.  Kentucky currently has a passing cut score of 160 on the SLLA.  Previous prep sessions at WKU have resulted in a 100 percent pass rate for participants.

The session will include a review of the six ISLLC standards upon which the SLLA is based, and feature timed test prep exercises and hands-on activities and discussions.  Participants must agree to confidentially share their SLLA test score results with Dr. Putnam, as he and Dr. Bunch use this data to continue refining the test prep process and may publish an analysis of results in the future.

Contact Dr. Putnam at michael.putnam@wku.edu by end of the day on April 17 to register.  Space is limited and late registrations are not permitted.

Note: Dr. Putnam will be utilizing his new online SLLA preparation book, which is slated for publication on April 15.  If publication is delayed, print materials will be supplied free to all attendees.