Lincoln on Leadership

Donald T. Phillips is a leadership consultant with a hobby in Abraham Lincoln. He decided to write a book about Lincoln's leadership when he realized that none existed. In our current times, Lincoln has received increased interest. Our current President has quoted him and held him up as a paragon of Presidential virture. The volume of books and movies about him have dramatically increased. The book, Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times, details Lincoln's approach to leading the country and draws comparisons to current leadership advice.

The book is broken into four parts: People, Character, Endeavor and Communication. Through these parts Phillips artfully weaves a tale of a man of the people who refused to have airs. He walked among the people and soldiers and talked to them. He did not have a perimeter of security personnel at all times.  He had an open door policy in the White House. He travel extensively to monitor the war that he desperately worked to win. He was a genius at persuasion, using plain language and anecdotes to connect with the common people of his nation.

As I was reading the section about his storytelling, it had me thinking about other master texts that promote using stories to make a point. Many ancient communities included a rich history of oral mythology to stress ideas about how to get along with others. In the Bible, Jesus famously used parables to get his message to people. Folk tales were stories of caution to children, showcasing rules to maintain appropriate behavior. Fables teach morals. The book highlights carefully chosen tales, mostly about farmers and small businessmen, Lincoln used to prove points. Being able to tell a story to demonstrate a point paints a picture the listeners will remember far longer than any lecture they likely tune out.

Another point that Phillips emphasized was the consistency of Lincoln's message and vision. Throughout his time running for federal office and as President, his message remained on point: our nation is something special because it provides a fair chance for all and attempts to elevate all. Every speech included this. When we think about the vision statements of most places today we look at paragraphs of sentences chopped full of ideas. Refining them to their essence is not done. No longer is "Beat Pepsi" an adequate vision. Coke's current mission is:

• To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit
• To inspire moments of optimism and happiness through our brands and actions
• To create value and make a difference.

This is succinct and short compared with many school missions and visions. I concluded early on that a mission and vision should be simple enough to be articulated quickly by every member of an organization. A prior department I worked in spent months developing a mission statement that was three sentences taking up 5 lines of text. No one had memorized it. We spent two department meetings unpacking the mission. Schools need mission statements that can be articulated by all. Statements like:

Help every child reach their potential.

or

Working to create model members of society.

showcase what we all want our schools to do and they can be learned quickly by all. Statements utilizing phrases like "environment of educational excellence," "working collaboratively as professionals," and "partner with our community," tell us how they will achieve their mission- not what their mission is. They muddy the water. Lincoln knew that laser focus on mission was critical. In schools we should emulate the simplicity. Our mission is about teaching children. Perhaps we muddy the mission because this like working as professionals and partnering with our community are easier than helping every child reach their potential so adding these other things makes it easier to say we are doing ok.

Does Pre-Assessment Work?

The February edition of Educational Leadership includes an article by Thomas R. Guskey entitled "Does Pre-Assessment Work?" which made me think about the practices I have seen and used in the classroom. Guskey first admits to the lack of research on the value of pre-assessment. This makes it a hard sell in many cases.

Next he discusses the purposes of pre-assessment.

1. Identify exceptional learners: the gifted community embraces this purpose to enable clustering for differentiated instruction and curricular compacting toward acceleration. For example,
   Brulles, D., Cohn, S. & Saunders, R. document research on the effectiveness of clustering and differentiating instruction in their article here. While pre-assessment might be used for placement decisions, especially in math, there is no universal acceptance or practice in this area.
2. establish a baseline for performance to measure growth: in sports programs we often see coaches record times, number of baskets made, distances thrown or jumped, number of balls hit, etc and then use that to measure progress. We see teachers measure score on a spelling list or math facts and then ask students to complete instruction and various assignments that will, hopefully increase the score.

The second type of pre-assessment lends itself to misuse when students are graded on improvement (I can score a 0 on the pre-assessment and then not do well on the post-assessment and still ace the class) or teachers are evaluated on student gains (the pre-assessment doesn't matter kids, don't worry about it verses this is very important and will be graded). Other confounding factors include:

• natural growth and maturity- a six year old will hold a pencil better and have more writing stamina than a 5 year old, a student who grows five inches in a year should be able to jump farther and sprint faster, a student in the concrete stage of development will see the world differently than one at an abstract stage.
• life circumstances- a trauma like a family divorce, accident or death, or exposure to violence will likely influence student performance. Getting adequate sleep and a good diet will help student perform better. Students on medication for focus, anxiety, depression or other mental health concerns will do better if they do not forget to take their meds.
• instructional practices around the testing- "This one does not matter," versus "This one is a major grade in the book." My son was exposed to many of these pre-assessments. He made it one of his missions to come up with the craziest responses imaginable (too much Calvin and Hobbes) on pre-tests. 

Then Guskey talks about measuring different types of learning goals. Cognitive tests assess academic goals (what causes the seasons, how many regular figures can you name, What is a simile), affective ones assess attitudes, beliefs and interests (do a project on snakes, sharks or flowers or how and what do they read); behavioral ones assess skills (athletic or musical performance, ability to cut on a line or use a protractor). Often these goals might appear on the same pretest- for example I want to know if you can identify various angles, use a protactor and how you feel about geometry.

Then he gets to the nitty gritty of the forms of pretests. Again there are overlaps.

• prerequisite- What do you need to be able to do before you start this unit? Dribble before you play a game of basketball. Have good reading decoding before you read a chapter book. Use a ruler before we measure volume of prisms. Have you ever cared for a pet? before learning about personal responsibility.
• present- measure current knowledge. What do you know about Shakespeare? Can you multiply by fives? What do you know about adding fractions? Tell me what you know about glaciers. Tell me about a book you read that you enjoyed.
• Preview- comparisons of student growth come from this category. If you know how to add fractions, I do not need to cover that in my instruction. If you have no idea about the i before e spelling rule, I should probably teach it before I assess your spelling of words like conceive, weigh and thief. If most kids think that the seasons are based on closeness to the sun rather than tilt of the planet, I do not need to waste time to pre-assess it.

Guskey then presents one high quality study of pretests from 1983. Leyton-Soto randomly divided students into four groups: pretest with traditional instruction, pretest with instruction in prerequisite skills, pretest with mastery learning instruction, pretest with both prerequisite skill instruction and mastery learning. He worked in Algebra 2 and second year foreign language classes with clear prerequisites, assisted in the development of pretests and provide support in the instructional phase to ensure design integrity. Students in the prerequisite skill instruction groups received two weeks per semester of mastery learning on missing skills. Results indicated that all three interventions significantly outperformed the traditional approach. The combination of mastery learning and prerequisite instruction resulted in students performing at mastery level on a comprehensive final exam with almost eight times the frequency of students in the traditional group. Yes, this was two subject areas with clearly defined prerequisites with students who probably did not have lots of learning problems or issues with success- using upper level classes tends to weed out poor performers. That being said, a two week intervention in teaching prerequisites seems really doable if it results in a three x increase in success. Using mastery learning seems like a good choice of instructional techniques if it results in a 5 x increase in results.

Providing effective pre-assessments, intervening with instruction in prerequisites and using mastery learning techniques appears to be a highly successful plan to increase performance of our students. Since that is the name of the game it makes sense to use them for instructional purposes. If we grade based on growth or hold teachers accountable based on student gains, however, we pollute the data and invite misuse. We might as well just ignore the pretest all together. If you will not use the pretest information to inform instruction skip it and use the time a different way.

When my daughter scored an 83 on the Earth Science pretest in September and then had to sit through ten months of instruction with the whole class in order to achieve a 98 on the final I was disappointed. Her teacher did not offer her much in that time. Although she made some growth, for most kids a 13 point increase would be a devastating failure. (The class average on the pretest was under 50.) The entire course was really a waste of her time. We suggested letting her use a college level text and assignments rather than the ninth grade one- it did not happen. The pretest merely made me angry because there was no benefit to her- the teacher was required to administer it for his professional rating and her score as a significant outlier was eliminated from the data set of even that activity. It is time to get serious about using our data in a smart way rather than a poor formulaic manner.