School Leader

Letter grades: The dinosaur that needs to go extinct

According to the Trimble Banner newspaper, Board members in the Trimble County Schools (just up the Ohio River from Louisville) are debating the role of the "D" letter grade in the district high school's grading scale.  The school dropped the D in 2007 (making an F a grade of 69 percent and below).  Some board members want to bring it back, and want to hear from high school teachers on the issue.  From what I can infer, proponents of the current "no D" policy believe that it ensures high expectations for student performance, and opponents worry that it encourages dropping out.

I'm sure the board members and educators on both sides of this discussion are well-intentioned, hard working, and thoroughly dedicated to the students of Trimble County.  But these kinds of debates represent outdated thinking about student feedback.  Traditional grading systems (and Trimble County's will remain traditional whether they bring back the D or not) actually hamper educators' efforts to help students master the skills and knowledge they need.  In fact, it's time for educators to scrap the whole system of letter grades altogether.  That's what many elementary schools across the country have already done, and it's time for high schools to follow suit.

Why do we give students grades in the first place?  Ideally, we give grades because students and their parents need feedback that will help them improve their learning strategies and become more proficient relative to specific learning targets.  The thing is, to give that kind of feedback, you don't need letter grades.  Letter grade systems tend not to deliver meaningful, actionable feedback to students.  Mostly they just serve as a proxy for a system of rewards and punishments that has little to do with what students have actually learned.

Letter grade systems don't provide much meaningful feedback to students

Letter grade systems don't provide much meaningful feedback to students for several reasons.  First, learning needs to be organized around very clear objectives (learning targets that articulate what students should know or be able to do as a result).  These learning targets need to be clearly understood by students, guide every stage of the learning process, and provide the precise basis upon which students are assessed.  But in many high school classrooms, learning objectives are still not always clear to students (and sometimes teachers), and scores on classroom assessments don't always translate into the specific skills or content knowledge students are still lacking. 

Additionally, teachers often figure in variables to students' grades that have nothing to do with their actual progress toward the specific learning objectives of the course.  This includes completion of homework, timeliness of assignments, and other subjectively-valued student behaviors.  These behaviors aren't necessarily unimportant, but including them in the student's grade distorts the capacity of that letter grade to tell students what they actually know and are able to do.

Furthermore, in many classrooms once an assignment or unit test is complete, the student has no real opportunity to correct their errors and demonstrate further progress toward the learning objectives.  This makes grades more like an autopsy report, rather than a check up that would let you know how you can improve your health.

And finally, because there are so many of these subjective elements to teachers' grades, what makes for an "A" in one teacher's class many differ wildly from what it means in another's (even when the teachers teach the same course).  For all these reasons, letter grades tend not to give students and their parents the kind of feedback they really need - if what we truly value is whether they learned the knowledge and skills associated the course.

Letter grade systems are a mechanism for rewards and punishments

But in fact, in many schools (especially high schools) letter grades just serve as a kind of mechanism for rewards and punishments that have little to do with student learning, and are often detrimental to real learning.  Letter grades determine athletic and (sometimes) extra-curricular eligibility, for example, providing a mechanism to reward or punish students with the privilege of participating in school activities based on how well they play the game of "school."

Likewise, letter grades are used to calculate grade-point averages that determine scholarship eligibility, like the Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship (KEES), a state program that rewards students with college scholarship money based on their gpa.  KEES is a valuable and well-intentioned program, but its effect is to prop up a grading system that is outmoded and ineffective, and actually encourages grade inflation since high school teachers know their students' "KEES money" is on the line every time they assign grades.

And of course letter grades also help determine class rank and figure into the determination of valedictorians.  In general I don't have much positive to say about that.  Creating a sense of competition among students fosters cheating and academic anxiety and generally undercuts the greater social virtue of learning cooperation and a love of learning for its own sake.  But high schools still very much emphasize the competitive effect of the grading system.

There's a better way

It's time for educators to admit all this and seek a better way of delivering student feedback.  Many schools have developed straightforward systems of standards-based assessment and reporting that provide students and parents specific feedback on their progress toward learning targets.  Students have ample opportunities to continue working on learning targets with which they struggle until they demonstrate mastery.  Such systems emphasize learning as an end in itself and give all school stakeholders a clear understanding of what students actually know and are able to do - and a much better system by which teachers and administrators can know the impact of their work (and adjust accordingly).

But what about teaching kids work ethic?  And what about athletic eligibility and KEES money and valedictorians?  How do we address all of those things without letter grades?

Some of these concerns call for straightforward solutions.  If you want to give students feedback about work ethic, timeliness, good behavior, etc., then develop rubrics that would accurately assess these dispositions (good luck with that) and deliver that feedback separately from their actual academic achievement.  Regarding valedictorians - how about we just get rid of such outmoded systems of rewarding competition? Who can honestly say that most high school valedictorians have mastered more learning targets than any other student in their class?  Or have they just played the game of school better? If you insist on rewarding someone for learning more than someone else, then make sure they actually have.

Regarding athletic eligibility, KEES money, etc., I have to be honest.  I don't know what to do about those deeply-rooted (and important) policy-based institutions and practices.  But instead of holding on to an outdated and ineffective system of letter grading because of them, let's apply our collective imagination to finding ways to make athletic eligibility and scholarships conform to effective systems of student learning feedback.

Let's stop wasting time arguing over grading scales, whether our scale should include a "D," and other topics that represent a very 20th century way of thinking about school and focus instead on creating systems of feedback that really value and empower student learning.

For Further Reading:

• The Case Against Letter Grades
• Letter Grades Deserve an "F"
• Can We Get Beyond Letter Grades?
• The Case Against Grades

#AnnualVL2015: Reflections on Day Two

Today was the second and concluding day of the Corwin Press Annual Visible Learning conference featuring the work of John Hattie and associated authors.  You can read my reflections on Day One here.

The day began with a wide-ranging keynote presentation from Douglas Fisher on "Better Learning Through Structured Teaching." Based on his book by the same title, the presentation provided an overview of Fisher's framework for gradual release of responsibility.  Fisher focused primarily on the first phase of the process, focused instruction, in which new information is introduced to students.

Of most interest to me was the great emphasis he placed on clear learning objectives.  Students must know what they are learning in each class and how they'll know if they mastered it.  His comments resonated with the condition I find in most Kentucky schools.  Educators know that we need to post learning targets for each lesson.  But in many classrooms, the effort stops there.  The targets are often not clear or well developed, the teacher rarely references the target in the lesson, and students are often quite oblivious to the real goal of their learning or how it will be assessed.

And without that foundation, none of the other steps in the structured teaching process make much sense.  So I think this points us directly toward a lot of work that remains to be done in area schools around further deconstructing standards, developing new learning targets (sequenced into learning progressions; see James Popham's work on this), and then coaching teachers around the effective use of learning targets in the instructional process.

Later, I attended a great session with Raymond and Julie Smith, authors of Evaluating Instructional Leadership.  If the spirit of Visible Learning is that teachers should know their impact, it's essential that school principals should also know their impact on student learning.  This is no easy task, since research shows us that the leader's influence on student outcomes, while real, is indirect and mediated through his/her interactions with teachers.  The Smiths provided some excellent tools for leaders to identify practices associated with larger school improvement efforts that can become a basis for gathering data and then correlating that data with changes in both teaching practice and student achievement.

After lunch, a whole hosts of Corwin authors came together for a panel discussion.  They discussed many topics, including how district leaders can encourage Visible Learning, how teachers without administrative support can pursue Visible Learning, etc.  The discussion veered toward policy questions and I heard a lot of negativity from the panel about the over-emphasis on testing and our rather crude accountability structures that make it harder for teachers to focus on important improvements in classroom-level instruction.  

To my point of view, Douglas Fisher had the best response when he basically said that testing will simply take care of itself if we attend to the work of Visible Learning without getting distracted by the larger policy issues.  This seems right to me.  As I've written before, we got into this testing regime because of long-standing, unjust achievement gaps.  The public has a right to know how much kids are learning, and while testing may be a limited measure, it's a useful measure when used properly.  And besides that, if you have a strong instructional vision that is based on research and good practice, the tests can be a secondary priority.

One of the most immediately practical sessions of the conference came from a presentation by Jennifer Abrams, author of Having Hard Conversations. For many of the aspiring and practicing administrators I work with, the hardest part of their jobs is dealing with difficult situations that require hard conversations with colleagues, teachers, or other staff.  In general, I don't find a lot of great examples in the field of school leaders who are especially good at this.

My sense is that these hard conversations require a degree of emotional courage that is extremely hard to muster in conflict-ridden situations.  Abrams helped articulate the reasons we hesitate and struggle to generate this emotional courage, but even better she provided several excellent resources for helping discern when to have a hard conversation, how to prepare for it, and even quick scripts to help structure the conversation itself.  These tools will be immediately useful in my administrator preparation classes and for the principals I coach.

But the most interesting portion of the conference for me came in John Hattie's closing keynote at the end of the day in which he discussed the kinds of fundamental changes that must take place in structure of schooling itself to support Visible Learning.  From a recent paper he wrote on "The Politics of Distraction," Hattie outlined five popular "distractions" that get in the way of seriously scaling up student achievement, including various schemes for reducing class size, increasing school autonomy, increasing school funding, revamping teacher training. etc.

Hattie was careful to say these things are NOT unimportant (and indeed, I would argue that some of the "distractions" - like school choice - are goods in and of themselves regardless of student achievement).  Rather, when it comes to student learning outcomes, right now the body of empirical research literature cannot establish any large-scale link between these ideas and achievement.  We can, however, draw empirical links between the instructional and learning strategies that are proven to help student learn.

Hattie advocated for shifting our professional narrative from these distractions to the politics of collaborative expertise.  He insisted that we should ensure - as a minimal expectation - that for every year kids sit in school they should get at least one year's worth of growth compared to where they started.  Researchers and practitioners must work toward agreement on what one year's progress looks like. 

Hattie argued for the development of new assessment and evaluation tools to provide feedback to teachers.  What he's talking about is much more than the complex, if well-intentioned tools familiar to Kentuckians in the new Teacher Professional Growth and Effectiveness System.  Rather, Hattie is talking about mechanisms for providing teachers rich, real-time achievement data. 

Related to this, Hattie argued for developing teachers' expertise in diagnosis, interventions, and evaluations.  Here, I thought of the good work on data teams going on in many of our area schools.  This new version of professional learning communities, coupled with the strategies outlined in Visible Learning, could be a powerful method for accomplishing this goal.

Finally, Hattie argued that the autonomy teachers crave should be linked to this achievement of at least one year's growth for every child, emphasizing that we need to redefine a "good school" as one in which students are progressing - regardless of whether the overall achievement is high or low.  In this way, I think schools that are of greatest concern are those with high-achieving students who are making little progress (what Hattie called "cruising schools").  These schools deserve as much scrutiny, support, and attention as low-achieving schools (especially those that are high progress).

I need more time to process all of this rapid learning, but I'm as excited about Hattie's work and its implication for leadership as anything I've encountered in awhile.  More reflections to come.

 

#AnnualVL2015: Reflections on Day One

I'm delighted to be attending the Annual Visible Learning Conference in San Antonio, Texas, sponsored by Corwin Press, with a contingent of Kentucky educators from the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC). (Update: See reflections on Day Two here.)

Visible Learning is associated with the work of John Hattie, who describes this approach to education as "when teachers see learning through the eyes of their students and help students become their own teachers."  The strategies that make up visible learning emerge from Hattie's decades-long research analyzing the effect sizes of a wide variety of educational interventions.  The conference features Hattie as a keynote presenter, along with a host of other Corwin authors also associated with his work.  This post will capture my thoughts at the end of the first day of the conference.

We were privileged to have Hattie and his colleagues in Bowling Green at a GRREC-sponsored event last February (you can read my reflections on that event here).  I was pleased that in Hattie's opening keynote today he picked up with some of the key concerns I shared with readers after his February talk in Kentucky.

Hattie noted in February that the vast majority of learning in schools is surface level - because that's how we teach and assess our students.  At the same time, he seemed to speak disparagingly about "deeper" learning strategies like problem-based learning and giving students choice in the learning process.  I observed that, to maximize the power of Hattie's work, teachers and should leaders should carefully study the original research as it applies to particular contexts and the impact of how a strategy is used.

In his keynote this morning, Hattie expounded upon this issue in a way that finally made sense to me.  He discussed how we need to be striving for a much greater balance between acquisition of surface-level knowledge and deeper processing skills.  Schools should be criticized for over-emphasizing surface-level learning (though this is a product of what standardized tests really measure).  But likewise, today's educational innovators should be careful not to also over-emphasize "21st century thinking skills" in the absence of meaningful content knowledge. 

"If students are going to think deeply, they must have something to think deeply about," Hattie said.  He presented a framework that categorized various instructional and intervention strategies along a continuum of learning that starts with the introduction of new knowledge (surface) then proceeds to deep acquisition and consolidation of knowledge - all geared toward helping students transfer that new learning to new contexts and situations (a skill that is virtually unaddressed in most schools).

He offered examples like memorization - a skill that is highly-frowned upon today - but noted that memorization is an excellent technique for embedding new information into memory; but if the student does not move immediately into deep processing of that new information, the value is minimal.  Likewise, higher-ordered activities like problem-based learning are often ineffective when students are lacking sufficient content knowledge, but for the purpose of deep consolidation of information and transfer - it is a powerful tool.

This perspective addresses a problem I have been struggling with recently - how to find a balance between curriculum (what we learn) and pedagogy (how we learn it).  My dismay with the one-size-fits all, factory model of American education calls for a new pedagogy (how), but still requires effective methods for imparting meaningful content (what).   (See my recent post on the perceived tension between classical education curriculum and the Montessori Method). 

Hattie's framework actually gives educators stronger leverage to personalize learning - by directing our attention on students wherever they are; at any given time, some of them need surface learning, some need deep processing, and almost all of them need to learn the skill of transfer.

Later in the morning, I heard Ainsley Rose present Viviane Robinson's research on the impact of education leadership on student outcomes (Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008).  Robinson and her colleagues identified five leadership behaviors that impact student learning:

• Establishing goals and expectations (Effect Size: .42) - articulating a vision of improvement and both short- and long-term goals for how to achieve the vision
• Strategic resourcing (Effect Size .31) - marshaling human, physical, and financial resources to support the vision.
• Planning, coordinating, and evaluating teaching and the curriculum (Effect Size .42)
• Promoting and participating in teacher learning and development (Effect Size .84)
• Ensuring an orderly and supportive environment (.27) - student discipline and creating a positive climate and culture

Note that principals being actively engaging with teachers in learning and evaluating new instructional strategies is twice as powerful as the next strongest two behaviors.  Also note that the "managerial" behaviors associated with resource allocation and student discipline are the lowest.  But Rose emphasized that, despite these effect sizes, from a practical standpoint principals should approach these practices in the order listed above.  Vision comes first, followed by marshaling resources around that vision, followed by working actively with teachers in planning and evaluating curriculum and teaching, followed by engaging in new learning.  And then a supportive and orderly environment will just about take care of itself.

 In the afternoon I had to come late to another session facilitated by Ainsely Rose, Peter DeWitt, and Kara Vandas.  These presenters highlighted the linkages between Visible Learning and instructional coaching - a topic I've written about previously as a powerful strategy for principals to actually carry out the third and fourth practices outlined by Robinson et al. above.

Finally, I'm listening to Yong Zhao deliver the afternoon keynote on the five myths about technology and education.  He's been highlighting the poor track record of American schools in leveraging technology for improving student achievement, and how technology must be used to help personalize student learning and pursue new knowledge.

In summary, I'm so pleased that today's workshops have connected the dots for several of the topics I've been studying and wrestling with in my own work.  It seems that Visible Learning could provide a meaningful framework for linking the many seemingly disconnected initiatives taking place in many of our area schools.

UPDATE: Regarding the five leadership practices Ainsley Rose shared via Viviane Robinson: it occurs to me that we need to map these in our administration program at the university.  I'm quite confident we address all five practices, but it might be possible to do so with much greater intention and thoughtfulness and embed them in every course.

 

 

Classical education, Montessori, and the tension between the "what" and "how" of learning

In recent years my philosophical thinking about education has focused far more on the how of learning than the what.  That is, I've become much less concerned about curriculum and far more concerned about pedagogy as I've been convinced that the industrial, one-size-fits-all model of American education needs to be replaced with something that is much more student-centered.

After all, my reasoning has gone, the digital natives who occupy America's classrooms now have the entire body of human knowledge at their fingertips.  What they need are thinking skills that help them process this wide world of information and use it to solve problems.   This emphasis on "21st century skills" has been accompanied by a concern for the widely varying developmental needs of children who are often ill-served in schools that have arbitrarily decided that all children sharing the same birth year should be grouped together and taught the same, fragmented curriculum at the same pace.

In response to these concerns, my interests have turned toward Montessori, Sudbury, homeschooling, personalized learning, and other methods that place a much heavier emphasis on the agency of the individual child in the learning process.

But saying a child should have a lot more control of what, when, and how she learns does not necessarily mean there is no place for curriculum.  Adults still have a critical role to play in these decisions.  As a Catholic Christian, and especially now as a parent, I believe that education serves a greater purpose than to simply prepare children for adult life.  Indeed, the well-guided journey of the human soul is the ultimate purpose of education.  And not just any learning facilitates such an essential and important process.

This is why I've become interested in the use of student-centered pedagogies in Christian education, where the possibilities of blending such methods with a rigorous, soul-supporting curriculum are quite rich.  As I wrote on this blog a few months ago, rediscovering Montessori (as one example) might be a key strategy in the revitalization of Catholic education, which has suffered setbacks in recent decades in terms of enrollments, vibrancy, and religious identity.

That blog post was spotted by a friend who connected me with Corpus Christi Classical Academy, a tiny but thriving independent Catholic school in Simpsonville, Kentucky (Shelby County).  My friend, whose wife is a teacher there, wanted me to know about Corpus Christi's aspirations to integrate classical education and Montessori in the same school.  So on a hot spring day during the busiest time of the school year for both me and my hosts, I carved out some time and drove to Simpsonville to meet with Corpus Christi principal Leslie Genuis and visit her school.

Corpus Christi has had a long-standing presence in the Shelby County community, but nearly closed last year due to declining enrollments and the retirement of its long-time principal.  Genuis took over with a mostly new school board and a vision for revitalizing the school.  During my visit, it was a pleasure to see middle school students reading and thoughtfully discussing Homer, with other classics like Wuthering Heights and As You Like It tucked in their desks. 

Genuis, whose has experience both in homeschooling and Catholic education, showed me school's curriculum, which draws heavily from materials developed by Memoria Press, an offshoot of Louisville's Highlands Latin School.  But the staff at Corpus Christi has thoughtfully modified and adjusted the selection of materials to best meet the needs of their students. 

"Classical education" is now a very hot topic in the world of non-public education.  Memoria Press defines classical education as "the cultivation of wisdom and virtue through meditation on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is accomplished in two ways: first, through training in the liberal arts; and secondly, through a familiarity with the great books and the great thinkers of the Western tradition."  Classical education, done well, is a traditional liberal arts education with a strong emphasis on the development of Christian virtues.  In this sense, it is a curriculum that is rigorous, thoughtful, and structured in such a way that a natural coherence of all subjects is maintained and emphasized.

But Genuis and the parents and staff at Corpus Christi recognize that a rigorous curriculum does not preclude alternative pedagogies.  This is why they are launching a Montessori pre-school program for the 2015-2016 school year.  Genuis is participating in online Montessori training and has already started incorporating Montessori elements at the school.  I visited the classroom and saw the familiar pink tower, tracing letters, and other distinctive hallmarks of a Montessori pre-K environment.  And while the school only plans to institute Montessori in the preschool for now, visiting the lower primary class it was evident that the Montessori philosophy is making inroads there as well.

Is there a natural tension between a structured curriculum and a student-centered learning approach?  Probably, but Genuis and her staff seem eager to explore this tension and discover what is possible.  The Montessori Method includes its own, well-developed curriculum, after all.  And there appears to be nothing in classical education that precludes the possibility of students exploring that curriculum with a high degree of choice and self-pacing.

Corpus Christi Classical Academy is not alone in its faith that Montessori and classical education go together.  This fall I look forward to visiting Bob Nardo and the Libertas School of Memphis, a new charter school that will blend Montessori and Core Knowledge, a secular curriculum that nevertheless shares many of the same features as classical education.

It will be in schools like Corpus Christi and Libertas that educators will pioneer new modes of learning that embrace the student-centered, personalized focus emerging in conventional schooling but with the wisdom and accumulated human knowledge of classical approaches to education.  I am most eager to learn from their journey.