Start with why

I was recently talking with a colleague about the need to change education but the challenge being that a change needed to be a complete redo, not redressing the same thing. Such a change would require a huge cultural shift. In order to achieve that there would need to be a Martin Luther King Jr. for schools; someone to inspire and lead the pack to change society. Someone not afraid of beating his head against the wall. Someone charismatic who could lead the charge to move schools to the 21st century. That someone has not emerged yet.

The irony of this conversation is that I had just begun reading Simon Sinek's book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Simon's thesis is that in order to successfully lead you need an inspiring leader who is focused on the WHY surrounded by people who can plan and execute the HOW in order to accomplish the WHAT. He cites several examples including Martin Luther King, Jr., Steve Jobs, and JFK. These people had a vision that changed the world.

Over the last centuries, the why of education has changed. Women in ancient Sparta were educated to run their family business because Sparta's why was military might to protect and the men folk might be absent. Puritan education was premised on the need to read the Bible to better understand God. Children on the industrial revolution were educated to get them off the streets, provide care while parents were working 14 hour days in factories and to prepare them for the workforce. Today the WHY is foggy. Are we trying to produce an educated workforce? Are we trying to stage kids for college?  Are we trying to do as my districts mission statement says: develop "the whole child physically, emotionally and culturally?" Our diverse nation struggles with answering the why of education and so it is no wonder that we can improve education. All the new things we want will only be moderately successful because we do not know what we as a nation want our schools to do.

If we want to educate a populace for the 21st century, we need someone who can inspire and articulate the WHY of education of today. Sinek says, "Passion comes from feeling like you are part of a something that you believe in, something bigger than yourself" (p. 111). Our young people leave college and enter teaching with the passion, but the reality of teaching often tarnishes it quickly out of the start. They need to find the motivation to keep up the hard work of educating children so that they do not simply go through the motions. If we can collect the passion with a leader we can magnify it and change the world. We need to start with a willingness to challenge the status quo. If we want our schools to truly prepare students for the 21st, we need to articulate what that means, get the general population on board and make sweeping changes to the field. Education must cease to be the job you take so you can have summers off and be home with your children of the future, and must become a job where the constant pursuit of professional improvement is essential, where instead of whining about union hours, all teachers put in the time that needs to be put in, the job that spreads itself throughout the whole year because we are fully committed to developing students who can thrive in the ever-changing environment that is our today. If we want life long learners, we must become life long learners. If we want people to believe that the world owes us something, let the era of entitlement continue.

My answer to the WHY of education is to create independent thinkers and learners who can navigate the world of tomorrow. If we all were to be willing to engage in the changes that the goal encompasses, think where we could go.

Learning Targets

Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart's book, Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson, reinforces some of my thoughts and introduces some interesting refinements. To start, they identify learning targets as uniquely different from objectives. As someone who went to college in the 80's taking special education classes, objectives are something with which I am intimately familiar and skilled at developing and assessing. The idea that objectives are not broken down far enough is intriguing. Moss and Brookhart see the differences as illustrated in the chart below:

objectives for the teacher	learning targets for the student
span one or more lessons	span one lesson
describes content knowledge and skills students should be able to demonstrate	asks, “What am I going to learn?”
teacher language based	language, model, illustration and/or demonstration based
general	specific to the performance chosen for the lesson
includes criteria and performance standards	includes student look fors to identify success
ex. student will be able to solve problems using 3-digit addition with carrying in the one’s place. (p. 166)	ex. I am going to be able to use a method called carrying to solve problems like these accurately and smoothly: 438 + 152 =        (p. 166)
ex.  explain the literal meaning of the Gettysburg Address and make connections among ideas in the Gettysburg Address and other historical documents.( p. 119)	ex. I can put the speech into my own words. I can explain how the Gettysburg Address echoes some ideas from the Declaration of Independence. (p. 120)

The differences may seem somewhat subtle. The learning targets may be thought of as specifically telling students what they exactly can do and the objectives are more adult oriented. As students get older the two ideas may get closer together. Some of the examples the authors use to illustrate learning targets are leading questions. Students who are not metacognitively aware or are not honest may simply respond, "Yes, I can explain three differences between latitude and longitude," with no basis in reality. The authors never confront this concern. Perhaps it is enough to put it to kids so they know the truth inside.

Grading is a concern the authors address. I have long been against grades that do not reflect what the student can do but rather how compliant, effortful or well behaved he is. As I have explored grading practices, I have become increasingly supportive of standards based grading that reflect the current level of knowledge a student has rather than the mean of his grades or the behaviors he exhibits. For the students that I directly teach material to, I have divorced compliance and effort from content grades. These are definitely areas in which I comment, but they are not allowed to impact grades. For the classes I teach for my homeschooled students, I use a standards based report that lists each objective and where the student performed at the end of instruction on that objective. If I had to reteach a skill, I retaught and then re-administered a summative assessment. If the key is learning the material, it is incumbent upon me to teach the material until some level of success is achieved- not until the time for learning that objective per a curriculum map has passed. The authors concur. They support content and behavior reporting as separate on a report card. They argue for using a median score rather than an average, unless steady progress has led to the decision that a mean would lead to a more accurate report of student knowledge. An entire chapter in the book is dedicated to how to incorporate learning targets into grading. For teachers who are responsible for assigning grades this is essential.

A concern I have is with the time required to plan using the author's guide. Starting with the standards, developing objectives and learning targets that match is only the beginning. Then they describe identifying multiple activities that meet those targets (a task that enables differentiation). The teacher then develops individual descriptions and rubrics for each activity. The process is extensive and time consuming. Planning in teams might help. Slow adoption of the full process might help as well. The easy part is identifying what the students should be able to do at the end of the lesson that they were unable to do at the beginning of the lesson. (This assumes your class does not have any students who could perform the task before the class started.) Creating a series of 1-5 "I can ..." statements for a lesson could be fairly simple. Having a clear direction of exactly what the students should be able to do at the end of the lesson benefits instruction and helps create a road map of learning that helps everyone.

The book offers some interesting insights to the process of organizing and planning lessons. A skilled professional could pull refinement tips and a novice could pull big steps forward from the text. The authors might think of providing a sample set of unit plans across grade and content areas that demonstrate CCSS referenced standards, objectives that meet those standards, learning targets that focus on those objectives, activities that students could engage in to learn those standards and sample rubrics to use throughout. While they do offer a few sample ideas, for many practitioners, this could be inadequate to support their learning and adopting suggested instructional behaviors. The appendix provides some resources for helping plan a lesson or observe one thoughtfully, but time required to use them will be extensive.

The goal of education is becoming

Marc Prensky is an education professional who finds complete dismay with the educational system. His commentary, The Goal of Education is Becoming, demonstrates his lack of respect for learning. He feels that school should be about "becoming a 'good' person and a more capable person than you were before."

Dictionary.com defines learning as the following:
1.  knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application.

2.

the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.

3.

Psychology . the modification of behavior through practice, training, or experience.

It also defines becoming as:

1. that suits or gives a pleasing effect or attractive appearance, as to a person or thing: a becomingdress; a becoming hairdo.

2.

suitable; appropriate; proper: a becoming sentiment.

noun

3.

any process of change.

4.

Aristotelianism. any change involving realization of potentialities, as a movement from the lower level of potentiality to the higher level of actuality.

Apparently he sees knowledge and the process of learning as incompatible with any process of change especially those involving realization of potentialities. How he divides these two is intriguing. He criticizes education as being especially test and test prep drive- a fair analysis in some schools more than others. He fails to acknowledge that there is an essential component to assessment. While our methods may be far from perfect, we do need to determine how students are progressing and  how our teachers and schools are doing. Employers do this all the time. They set quality standards that their employees are expected to meet: for example, the cash box must balance the receipt count, there are so many pages that must be edited a day, a police officer must follow procedures precisely. Having standards and accountability is important.

Do educators want students to realize their potential? Yes! Personal growth is a critical component of education. There are not, however, any national standards surrounding this issue because it is both subjective and variable. Quantifying it would be a mistake. Most school mission statements include lines about reaching potential, being prepared for life after school, and nurturing children. The problem may be that the concept character development is different for different people. Social, ethnic and religious groups see character differently. The Jewish school I am currently working in would be offended if we pushed the middle school girls to aspire to high powered career lives rather than only motherhood. If I deprived fathers and male relatives from attending concerts in which their daughters performed in a public school, I would lose my job, but in the Jewish school to not do so would also lose me my job. Some schools are more overt in their push for developing character. These are usually small private schools who draw their populations from homogeneous cultural bases. In our society, it would be wrong to impose these beliefs on everyone. Mr. Prensky can argue for "becoming" something greater and I would respond that when you truly learn to critically think about things that you know and learn- a goal of the CCSS, you become something greater than you were before. We may need to reform our methods of instruction to further critical thinking, self-regulation and personal development, but we also need a population with a baseline level of cultural and intellectual knowledge. We truly cannot have one without the other.

Why won't you just tell us the answer

Bruce Lesh's "Won't You Just Tell Us the Answer?" is an interesting text describing an investigational approach to social studies classes. He begins the thesis with a rationale for teaching history differently. For over a hundred years, he contends, we have bored students who recall little of what is "taught" and who feel that the class is useless. The method of instruction that history teachers have utilized for this time period is lecture and reading. If we want a different outcome- students who are engaged, interested and actually learning history- we must change our presentation method.

Toward this end, he proposes teaching students history in the way that historians approach it: as a study of often conflicting sources that must be interpreted to determine the answer of a question; history can come alive.  Examining primary sources is critical. He describes this methodology as historical investigation

Lesh describes seven American history lessons that he has used, some of which he has presented at a variety of workshops. These lessons cover Nat Turner's Rebellion, Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal, the rail strike of 1877, the Bonus Army March, Custer's last stand, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Truman-MacArthur debate. Five of these lessons use a jigsaw approach. The others use both collaboration and whole class presentation.

Lesh begins his investigations with visual and/or musical pieces to stimulate the students's thinking. He poses a question and sets the class up with a limited number of sources to evaluate. Unlike the traditional DBQ essays which also involve primary sources, Lesh's investigations include no "correct" answer. They demonstrate different sides of an issue and require that students evaluate the text, subtext and the context in order to formulate an opinion that answers the question.  "What is Roosevelt doing on his autobiography (lying, telling a half-truth, exaggerating, rationalizing or obfuscating) and what role did the US play in the acquisition of territory used to construct the Panama Canal?" is one of his questions (p. 60). This open ended question does not have a definitive answer, but does lead to discussion and a deep understanding of the situation.

Lesh offers suggestions for identifying sources, selecting questions, and determining time frames (keep the investigation less than 120 minutes). He provides some sample graphic organizers and worksheets to use with the described lessons. Although he offers interesting descriptions of his lessons, lots of room is left for interpretation. The author confirms that setting up investigations is time consuming. Sifting through the volumes of sources available, selecting ones that support understanding differ viewpoints and pieces of information, and preparing lessons around the question takes copious time. Slowly introducing investigations and limiting the number of thorough ones is important. Lesh does assign textbook and survey reading, especially for homework to prepare students for the investigations. He is not using the investigations to present what happened, but rather to analyze why did an event occur, how are events interrelated, which perspective should be understood, and how have things changed over time. This is the higher level thinking we aspire toward that is often missing in traditional history classes.

The book was written while the CCSS were being developed and rolled out. His methodology, while not referencing the standards, is compatible with them. They utilize all the reading standards. For example, the CCSS list the following standards in the 6-8 strand.

• Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources- he uses primary sources for investigations themselves and secondary ones to set the stage.
• Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions- if students cannot understand the text, the rest is moot.
• Identify key steps in a text's description of a process related to history/social studies (e.g., how a bill becomes law, how interest rates are raised or lowered)- the entire approach is process oriented.
• Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies- Lesh advocates using the language of the source and the writing. Scaffolding in this area is for students who would struggle too much with the source material- handwritten pages can be typed, unusual words and language can be debated in small groups  
• Describe how a text presents information (e.g., sequentially, comparatively, causally)- Lesh structures his concepts around issues such as causality and sequencing.
• Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author's point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts)- this the subtext that is critical to understanding primary sources; one of three aspects of reading primary sources that Lesh focuses on throughout all investigations.
• Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos, or maps) with other information in print and digital texts- Beginning lessons with images and music and moving on to more wordy sources integrates the visual and the print.
• Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text- the questions require students to analyze these issues as part of both the text and subtext.
• Analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic- by providing secondary source homework, occasional lectures and movies, Lesh sets the stage for the investigations. This enables students to see how the sources are related. 
• By the end of grade 8, read and comprehend history/social studies texts in the grades 6-8 text complexity band independently and proficiently- Although the text is used less than in a traditional classroom, students are expected to read the text or teacher written historical summaries of events.

All of these aspects are evidenced within his structure. Since historical investigations do meet the Common Core standards, this approach should not be as controversial as it was when Lesh began using it over a decade ago. Students have responded well to having to do the process of historians as opposed to having to recall detailed lists of facts.  He has also discovered success with student performance on both AP and NY Regents exams. Using an increasing number of primary sources with ambiguous interpretations enables students to sample the task of historians in an active and engaging method. Being careful to be sure to cover the material that is critical to the mandated state exams, can be done while at the same time presenting history in an manner that students will actually learn the subject and perhaps not dread the class.

 

It appears that premade historical lab information is not as easy to locate as one might desire. Simulations are the most often occurring samples. While some simulations offer insights into why some events occur, students shuffling students into situations so they can try to "feel" the way people did in the past is ingénue. Empathy is important to develop, but we need to develop empathy in a historical sense. If all we get out of slave ships is indignation, we cannot understand the historical events that led to them and why it took so long to eliminate such events. We do not need to agree with slavery to understand the social complexity of it as an underpinning of early American society.

Notice and Note

Kylene Beers and Robert Probst's book, Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, prompted a great deal of thought as I read. I wrote about their thoughts on text having a single meaning and rigor in previous posts. The authors presented ideas in a way that made me think differently about how I approach reading, both personally and professionally. Labeling the features that make us pause and think while reading is key to providing instruction around them. The authors present their framework as a progressive method for helping students identify text features that provide clues about literary elements and comprehension.

The origins of the book are pre-CCSS so the central concept is about increasing comprehension rather than meeting the close reading thoughts of the Common Core. They did input some information about the CCSS, but it is a sideline, not a main focus. Fiction is the obvious application of their framework, but they are working on a nonfiction adaption and do suggest some ways to think about the signposts in non-ELA subjects around nonfiction.

The book is organized into three sections-background questions that guide their understanding of reading, the signposts they identified and lessons to teach each signpost. Each chapter in the first section contains a Talking with Colleagues section to promote discussion of personal beliefs and how they relate to the ideas in the text. This part of the book would be a great professional learning community beginning.  The other two parts of the book end with a Questions you may have segment, organized like FAQs. Concrete scripts for how to teach the lessons enables a clear description of how to present each part of their framework. It is easy to see how this might work in a classroom. The target audience does appear to be secondary, but with some modifications, it can be adapted to elementary classes.

I modified their summary chart to include the final column, features that were included in the text, but not on their chart. As an itinerant teacher currently working with a homeschooled family in a library, I do not have walls on which to post charts. Having the entire framework on a single page helps me because it is portable. I can put it in a page protector and carry it with me as we go along. The bookmarks that are included in the appendix are another tool I can see myself utilizing with students because of their portability.

I do not think that I will present the lessons one a time to my current English 10 student. I think that I can present the complete list of signposts and walk him through the signposts as we read. Since we have a class of one, student discussion is limited. I will need to promote discussion with me, a tricky role since I cannot be seen as the only purveyor of information. Discussion needs to be full of prompts to get him to think and provide bounce points to build upon. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Notice and Note- does a text have a single meaning?

When I was a junior in high school, my English teacher gave us the freedom to write a literary essay about our recently completed book, Ethan Frome. A friend of my suggested that I could reasonably write a paper about anything, even the relationship between the cat and Zeena. I took up the challenge, reread a book that I did not like the first time, located every reference to the cat and began crafting my argument. While I did not believe that this was a reasonable assertion, I did my best to carefully defend my ridiculous claim with support from the text. My long suffering English teacher did not know what to do with this paper. It was clear I had read the book carefully and I supported my claim with evidence from the text, yet my claim was absurd. She passed it around the English department, none of whom had anything helpful to add to her dilemma of what grade to assign to the work.

A few years back, I was working with an English teacher who shared that the analysis of Cliff notes regarding a particular symbol was wrong. She knew what the symbol meant and the students needed to arrive at her answer, not any of the assorted other thoughts that other scholars had arrived at.

These two stories highlight the idea that a text can be interpreted different ways. This challenge of how to use text dependent questions is explored by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading. They share their interpretation of David Coleman's (leading author of CCSS and now President of College Board) idea of text dependent questions- one right answer found in the text. Using Coleman's thoughts multiple choice questions can clearly be answered, computers can evaluate short responses and determine if the student found the correct evidence to support the claim.

Beers and Probst, however, suggest something else. That a text can mean something different to different people depending on their background knowledge and how the reader interacts with the text. Having highlighted two incidents involving different interpretations of the text supported by evidence, I know that I would argue that there are multiple understanding of a text, all of which can be potentially correct, even if diametrically opposed so long as the assertions are guided by reasonable logic and the text. The authors refer to Rosenblatt's work in which she defines two criteria for validity of interpretation:

1. it cannot be valid if there is no verbal basis in the text
2. it cannot be valid if it can be clearly refuted by the text (p. 43).

Using this criteria multiple choice questions and computer evaluations of short answer responses with evidence listed are far trickier. For gifted students who have a tendency to look deeper into questions than other students, multiple or diverse understandings of texts and the questions posed by adults lead to challenges when a teacher, evaluator or computer "knows" the correct answer and it differs from what the gifted child thinks. For students of different ages and experiences, Animal Farm can be a story about animals taking over a farm where power makes them bad or a satire about the Soviet Union. Both are correct, but different learnings lead to different understandings.

Beers and Probst propose a structure to get students to ask the questions and then explore answers- inquiry learning- rather than posing the questions when the teacher knows the correct answers, as a way to increase interest and ability to use rereadings and references to unravel the meaning of a text. Students may bring their background to the text, view the text through that lens and then use the text to support or refute their understandings. Using the authors's structure is more authentic in that eventually we want students to be able to interpret text on their own, not only in the vicinity of an expert. Students must be able to independently create questions and search out answers. Merely relying on the teacher for confirmation of correctness is a dependence we cannot afford.

We must think about how we want to evaluate students and be cautious to ensure that their deep thoughts and wonderings are supported, even if they veer from where we think they should be going.

Notice & Note- Rigor

I have been reading Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst's book, Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, and the chapter on rigor has me thinking. They describe rigor as "not an attribute of a text, but rather a characteristic of our behavior with the text. Put another way, rigor resides in the energy and attention given to the text, not the text itself" (p. 21). This is counter to how I usually see rigor used.

The inclusion of the term rigor in the CCSS documents has led to a tidal wave of publications regarding rigor and debate among professionals about what it really means. Without the standards committee defining the term, we are left to define it ourselves.The Common Core standards criteria document describe the standards as being "inclusive of rigorous content and applications of knowledge through higher-order skills, so that all students are prepared for the 21st century." This description seems to balance both the content and the stuff students do with it as requiring rigor.

Dictionary.com defines rigor as:

1. strictness, severity, or harshness, as in dealing with people.
2. the full or extreme severity of laws, rules, etc.
3. severity of living conditions; hardship; austerity: the rigor of wartime existence. 
4. a severe or harsh act, circumstance, etc.
5. scrupulous or inflexible accuracy or adherence: the logical rigor of mathematics.

The final description of rigor here seems to meet the intent of CCSS authors. Accuracy not challenge seems to be the goal. If we look at the other definitions, however, we see some ways that rigor is being used in classrooms- severe and harsh readings and an austerity of scaffolding and support. I do not think the authors meant to have the word take on the negative connotations of rigor when regarding education, but maybe they did. Is their intent that education be some expedition to the south pole, fraught with dangers-- such as, failing grades and tests, exceedingly slow examination of texts, elimination of the enjoyable and fun reading of fiction, and hours of homework for young elementary students? I do not think that was their intent, but it does seem to be a side-effect of how it is being implemented.

 

The authors describe an English teacher who selected the most difficult reading Beowulf she could find, purely because it was difficult and inaccessible. We can predict what students did- some gave up before they started; some puzzled through the Old English vocabulary, merely focused on trying to understand the verbiage; some went home to online cliff notes and were able to work with the material as a result of knowing the summary and some other author's interpretation of the material. Did any of them engage in rigorous learning? Probably not. Difficult for the sake of difficult is not good. If we do not get kids to engage in the higher-order skills because they cannot get through the text, they are not engaging in rigor. If we send them to seek out easier sources with the higher-order thinking presented to them, they are not meeting our goal either.

 

Somehow we need to get students to engage in the thinking piece. This means that higher reading levels may not be the answer. In some ways the standards acknowledge this when they suggest multiple media sources as important. After all reading a full page magazine ad and identifying bias does not require complicated or advanced "reading" per se. While there is a time and a place for presenting challenging reading material to students, we need to balance that with their ability to apply higher-order skills to the material. I think that we have forgotten this in our application of the concept of rigor. Although I do believe learning how to puzzle through a difficult text is important- not a higher order skill, but an important one nevertheless, we also need for them to think deeply about accessible texts as well. There remains a place for Dr. Seuss' Butter Battle Book in a high school class covering the Cold War. Understanding the parallels Seuss draws and his criticism of the time period are higher-order skills, but on accessible and enjoyable reading. We need to ensure that students deal with this type of assignment as well as being able to read Regan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech and understand the cultural and foreign policy ramifications of it.

 

Is our behavior with the material the critical component of rigor? I think that without thinking deeply about the material we merely engage in hard work. It does not take great thought to move a pile of rocks with a shovel and a wheel barrow, but it does require lots of sweat. Is this rigorous work when one could use the loader sitting idly nearby? Or is it merely cruelty, inflicting unnecessarily hard work on a person just because we can? We need to carefully examine each "rigorous" text we use and determine if the students will be spending their energy purely on the reading rather than on the thinking.