Differing Points-of-View→

The Detroit News:

Michigan’s high school juniors will be required to take the SAT college assessment exam instead of the ACT next spring ...

Quoted in the article, here's Wendy Zdeb-Roper, Executive Director of the MASSP:

Colleges and universities have not even seen the test yet and will need to re-norm their acceptance standards, since it will include a new scoring scale ...

Later in the article:

Jim Cotter, Michigan State University’s director of admissions, said he expects the impact on the admission review process will be minimal.

By my measure, the gap between "re-norm their acceptance standards" and "the impact ... will be minimal." is pretty huge.

Making Dumb Groups Smarter→

Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie writing for the Harvard Business Review:

A smaller but nonetheless substantial body of research—some of it our own—has focused on the decision-making strengths and weaknesses of groups and teams. But little of this work has trickled into the public consciousness, and it has yet to have a noticeable effect on actual practice. It’s time for that to change. We aim to bring behavioral research into direct contact with the question of group performance—to describe the main ways in which groups go astray and to offer some simple suggestions for improvement.

Here are a few takeaways for anyone who frequently facilitates group decision-making:

1. Keep your opinion to yourself, especially at the start, if you are interested in soliciting diverse opinions from the group.
2. Be clear of a problem-solving or critical-thinking outcome (rather than one of group cohesion or collegiality) by emphasizing a need for information disclosure.
3. Emphasize the importance and implications of the group's decision and de-emphasize any apparent gain from individual contributions.
4. Disclose roles by telling the group who is at the table and why.
5. For groups that may otherwise be too similar in their opinions, assign a devil's advocate. Be wary of this excercise, however as it can become little more than a game.
6. For high-stakes decision-making, construct a "Red Team:" a group of individuals who were not part of the original team brought together For the purpose of finding mistakes and exploit vulnerabilities in the plan.

“Without clarity about who is responsible for performing specific tasks, it’s impossible to have accountability.”

— Jeff Grimshaw, Gregg Baron (Leadership Without Excuses)

Five Questions

There are five questions I want to answer through my work during the second half of this year:

1. Who are my teacher leaders and how have I empowered and supported them to excercise greater control over our school?
2. How is the time I structure for my staff moving us forward in our our learning as an organization?
3. Where is our school going next and how am I helping it get there?
4. How are my teachers doing individually, what will it take to truly know, and how do I respond once I figure it out?
5. How are my students doing, how do I know, and what am I doing about it?

Everything else should be noise.

Owning It

I’ve long been obsessed with the idea of personal ownership. For me, the degree to which I achieve my goals is closely tied to the degree to which I own every step of the path toward achieving them. The more ownership I take, the more likely I am to see my desired outcomes.

I find this to be true for collaborative work I am involved in as well. The success of my team is dependent upon each individual’s capacity to own both the steps they have been delegated, and the steps that have been delegated to others. Without such collective ownership, the goals of the group are less likely to be acheived.

Owning the work of others is to support them in the completion of their tasks. Sometimes this looks like staying out of their way. Other times, this looks like providing a helping hand.

Owning it requires doing whatever it takes until the goal is achieved.

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

— Harry S. Truman

How I Started (circa 2007)

I stumbled upon an archive of documents I created in 2007, my third year of teaching. Nested six folders deep inside a directory labeled “School,” I found a document called AP Lesson Plan - Introduction - Day 1. In 2007, I taught two sections of AP Psychology to 11th and 12th graders. This was the document I used to draft my ideas for starting that class. Looking at it, two things stand out to me.

First, I was much more intentional than I remember. In this lesson plan, I listed goals, materials, action steps, and student deliverables. The plan reads like something I intended to hand to someone else down the road, yet that was never my goal. I remember spending a lot of time writing plans like this thinking it would save so much time later in my career. It did.

Second, I didn’t review my syllabus on the first day of class. Instead, I performed a magic trick to get them thinking about the need for control in psychological experimentation. Along with the trick, I shared a long, obviously ficticious, story about hitting my head over the summer and awakening a clairvoyant; I could see the future. The trick backed up my far-fetched claim with some fairly convincing (or at least entertaining) data.

Their task was to identify aspects of my demonstration (variables) that would disprove my claim. I would collect their ideas on the board. When all ideas appeared to be exhausted, I would have them prioritize the ideas down to the one (independent) variable they think would be most likely to disprove my clairvoyance.

I remember being hung up on the difference between psychology, the science, and the kind of psychology my students see and hear about on television. I wanted to make an early impression that, by controlling variables, we can make educated predictions that test psychological phenomenon, and that this was the type of psychology we would be studying in my class: the kind that is testable and scientific.

I never assessed their understanding of experimental design; it wasn’t yet my goal. I simply wanted to demonstrate that clear, nerdy thinking about something as silly as a magic trick, could lead to deeper understanding. And, I wanted to have fun. This was, after all, my students’ first introduction to me, their teacher, and psychology, the subject they would be studying with me over the next year. I didn’t want this day to be about rules, processes, or my pet peeves. I wanted it to be about fun and science!

My first homework assignment for them was to do three things:

1. Read and understand the entire syllabus.
2. Give their parents my introduction letter.
3. Return their signed parent statement by the end of the week.

The very next class started with a quiz over the syllabus. In hindsight, it was pretty nitpicky, but remember this was an AP class and I was trying to instill a high expectation. For most students, it worked. They came in with a firm understanding of my syllabus. For all, it sent the message that I would hold them accountable to the work I asked them to complete.

After quizzing them on the syllabus and answering questions on the second day of class, we’d get to know each other, employing a series of cognitive strategies until everyone knew each others’ names.

We’d start content on the third day, which because of block scheduling didn’t come until the second week of school.

That’s how I started my year as a teacher in 2007.

A New Metric for High School Success

This morning, I was drawn to a Michigan news report that East Lansing and Okemos High Schools are among the "top ten" in the state, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings. Curious, I wondered how these rankings were determined.

According to their website, U.S. News selected schools for their list using a three step process (emphasis added):

The first two steps ensured that the schools serve all of their students well, using performance on state proficiency tests as the benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first two steps, a third step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.

Essentially, they are ranking schools by:

1. First, comparing each school's standardized assessment scores in math and reading to state averages (with an unspecified nod to schools with higher levels of economically disadvantaged students).
2. Then, they compare each school's standardized assessment scores in math and reading for black, Hispanic, and low-income students to state averages for the same groups.
3. Of the schools that perform better than state averages in both of the areas specified above, U.S. News ranks them "using Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate test data" as the benchmark for college-readiness.

   This third step measured which schools produced the best cllege-level achievement for the highest percentages of their students. This was done by computing a "college readiness index" (CRI) based on the school's AP or IB participation rate (the number of 12th-grade students in the 2010-2011 academic year who took at least one AP or IB test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th-graders) and how well the students did on those tests.

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My district is in its first of a three-year initiative to transform our traditional high school into an Early College. From 2007 through 2010, 74% of our students chose to attend a 2- or 4- year postsecondary institution. Of that group, only 44% successfully completed their first year; thirty percent have yet to earn their first 24 credits. We think we can improve upon this and are working with the New Tech Network and the state of Michigan to re-imagine everything we do to get there. Our goal for the class of 2016 and beyond is a first-year postsecondary success rate of at least eighty percent.

To achieve this goal, we will decrease the number Advanced Placement courses we offer, and we have no plans to start an International Baccalaureate program. In fact, we may stop offering any advanced courses at our high school altogether.

We're serious.

Our vision of a future in which all students are prepared for postsecondary education involves:

1. letting any student who is prepared to go to college dual enroll as early as their junior year of high school.
2. increasing our focus on the students who are not yet prepared through changes in curriculum, instruction, and interventions.
3. offering all students the opportunity to "stick with us" for a fifth year so we can offer support and funding for their first year of college.

As students in our Early College, all young adults in our community have an opportunity to earn up to an associates degree from our area community college after five years of high school. The credits earned toward this degree (or non-degree program) are fully transferrable, earned on the college campus (we plan offer shuttle service to and from our building), and are completely free to the student. Students who elect to "stick around" for that fifth year can attend all classes at the community college and never have to step foot back into the high school if they don't want to.

Our early estimate, based on data collected from the class of 2016 during their freshmen year, is that 60-70% of our students will opt to let us pay for their first year of college. Approximately 20%-30% tell us that they currently want to leave immediately after high school to attend a 4-year university. Around 10% of our students have alternative plans involving the military, a trade, or an alternative career.

We are in talks with other institutions of postsecondary education interested in partnering to offer a wider range of opportunities to our diverse student body. For us and our community, success is not defined only by college entrance and success.

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Let's assume that my teachers and I are able to achieve our goal and, in fact, over 80% of our students complete their first year of postsecondary education successfully. Let's assume that this success occurs evenly amongst our diverse population.

I am sure the growth from 44% to 80% would be noted by someone. The community and the school would all be pleased and as proud of our young people as ever. The Board of Education might recognize our efforts. The news might even pick up on the story of our success.

But ….

Due of the narrowness of criteria used by organizations like U.S. News to define college readiness for their rankings, we will be listed below (far below) the larger schools in our state that offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.

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In the end, I don't care to make it onto these lists; that's not my point. Rather, my hope is that by telling my school's story, and by sharing the methods behind how these lists are compiled, we might start a conversation about the metrics being used to evaluate the success of our schools.

After all, should schools be assessed by the number of students whom are successful at scoring well on complex tests? Or, should they be assessed by the number of students whom are successful at actually completing their postsecondary goals?

Isn't it time that we find a new metric for high school success?

Teaching Accountabilty

Last month, at a staff meeting led by Matt Thompson, my team came to the conclusion that we need to close the year focused on accountability.

Here's the gist of the conversation that brought us to this conclusion:

If we are to see our vision of "graduating all students prepared for success in life, college, and career," then we had better do some serious work on accountability.

It was an honest moment of clarity for my group around the challenges that we think we face:

• Some of our students do not hold themselves accountable for their actions. From this group, we hear a lot of excuses and see the slowest growth.
• Most of our students do not hold others accountable for agreed upon responsibilities. When group norms break down, they simply break down.
• We adults struggle with the exact same challenges.

It was the realization of that last bullet that hurt the most for me. As the school leader, I feel responsible for the systems of accountability that my staff and students work within. If our systems of accountability are failing, shouldn't I be held accountable for that failure?

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The next day, I had a routine meeting with our "culture committee" to talk about our goals for next year. At the top of the agenda was to discuss how we would use a school-wide Advisory to improve the culture of our school. Our staff just recently approved reallocating some non-instructional time in our schedule to Advisory. We have approximately 25 minutes to work with every day in every grade.

The driving question for this committee has been "How do we structure a school-wide Advisory program that strengthens school culture without adding additional prep time for staff?"

At the start of the meeting, I brought up this accountability issue we've been experiencing and the group started talking about the evaluation system we use as adults as a possible pathway for teaching accountability to students. Someone suggested that we have students write SMART goals in advisory. Teachers could help students develop action plans and could use Advisory as time for students to collaborate on and share their goals. This, it was argued would provide ample opportunity to teach accountability.

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Out of this discussion came the following three goals for our advisory program next year:

1. All students and staff will create one SMART goal around the topic of personal accountability by the end of the first week of school and accomplish it by the end of April of that year.
2. Groups of all students and staff will create one SMART goal around the topic of accountability to the school community by the end of the first week of school and accomplish it by the end of April of that year.
3. Groups of all students and staff will create one SMART goal around the topic of accountability to the broader community outside of school by the end of the first week of school and accomplish it by the end of April of that year.

Our plan is to structure our Advisory around these yearlong goals, tackling them each on a different day of the week. For example, we might schedule our advisories like this:

• Tuesday: Personal Growth Day – Every learner would spend 25 minutes working on and reflecting upon their personal SMART goal. Is their goal specific enough? How is it measuring up? Are they following their action plans? Will they complete their goal on time? On Tuesdays, teachers (as advisors) would work with students to help guide their goals while also collecting data on what additional supports are needed.
• Wednesday: School Growth Day - Every Advisory would spend 25 minutes working on and reflecting upon their school SMART goal. What specific aspect of our school can each Advisory directly affect? What action steps can each individual in the group take to ensure the goal is met in the time specified. On Wednesdays, teachers facilitate group work toward the achievement of their Advisory's goal.
• Thursday: Community Growth Day - Every Advisory (or groups of Advisories) will spend 25 minutes working on and reflecting upon their community SMART goal. What specific aspect of our community (or the world)) can people in our school directly affect. What action steps can we all take to ensure the goal is met? Etc.

While Mondays and Fridays have yet to be planned, we're thinking that Mondays need to be about making connections - whether through conversations, presenters from outside the school, or through activities - we want to dedicate time to relationships.

Fridays need to be about celebrations. We want to celebrate when individuals and groups meet their goals. We want to celebrate when great things happen. And, we want to just celebrate being together.

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A larger goal, from my point of view, is to engage my staff and students in the same type of work from the top to the bottom. I want to lead a school of action: one where students and staff all set goals, create action plans, and use data to assess success and next steps. I want to be there when we celebrate individuals and groups achieving their goals. I also want to be there to support individuals and groups when their outcomes fall short of their goals.

If the result of this work is nothing more than rooms full of messy conversations about the challenges of meeting personal and group expectations, then I think we'll be successful. That will be many rooms full of messy conversations about accountability more than we have now.

Bammy Nomination

I'm pleased to announce that I have recently been nominated for a Bammy Award!

Presented by the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences International, the Bammy award is a cross-discipline award recognizing the contributions of educators from across the education field.

I was nominated by the one and only Theresa Shafer, Online Community Manager for the New Tech Network. It is an honor that she would consider me for this award. I feel humbled just to be recognized alongside other school leaders nomininated such as Eric Sheninger and Chris Lehmann. Thank you, Theresa!

Round 1 of the selection process is a screening of "public influence and popularity within the education community." To vote for me, simply go to my nomination page, register, and cast a vote! Your ratings and comments will be displayed publicly for all the world to see.

The nominees with the most votes in a category automatically receive the Educator's Voice Awards and become eligible for consideration by the Academy for the Bammy Award in their category. The open nomination and voting for the Educator's Voice Awards allows for the discovery of new people, programs and organizations who are making a difference in education but may be below the radar screen of the education community.

I think I qualify as just below that radar!

If you have ever worked with me and have nice things to say about that, please take a moment to cast your vote. If nothing else, your kind words mean a lot and I appreciate your time!

Thank you!

Creating College & Career Readiness

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to start a new high school designed to prepare all learners for college and career. My first task: to define what "being prepared for college and career" actually means.

With a clean slate and support from the New Tech Network, a team of teachers and I set out to reduce college and career readiness down to what we believed were five essential skills that all graduates should have before leaving high school. Then, we created rubrics for each skill and agreed to measuring them all school-wide.

We thought we were on fire.

This past year, I've had the opportunity to do the same thing with a second group of teachers engaged in full-school reform. While the exact skills this second group identified were unique, the essential outcomes were not.

Having gone through this process twice now, I have some reflections and next steps I think are worth sharing. If you're part of the New Tech Network, what follows are my thoughts on developing school-wide learning outcomes in two separate communities with different design models. If you're not in the network, the reflections below will still be helpful assuming the additional burden of deciding how to measure your outcomes school-wide.

Let's all agree that we'd like to graduate students who are productive, life-long learners who collaborate locally and globally to communicate critical change in their world.

While I find great value in teams working together to define and thereby "own" their particular set of lofty outcomes, I sometimes wonder if we're all unnecessarily working on something that's already been done. Let's stop re-inventing the wheel.

Take the first step and ask your team to draft their vision for a college and career ready graduate. The shared experience here will pay off, but don't get carried away. Rely heavily on the work of others and steal everything that fits your vision. Otherwise, you're just going to create what's already been created several times before.

After all, this is only step zero on the long path to ensuring these outcomes actually make it into your school curriculum.

Start with the end in mind, but don't forget to begin.

Once your team has defined their set of outcomes and have agreed to measure them school-wide, it's logical (and necessary) to create rubrics that define how each outcome will be measured. Is "collaboration" on your list? If so, what does your ideal collaborator look like? What does a poor collaborator look like? Can collaboration be measured that simply or will there need to be sub-skills or outcomes? If you skip this step or stop here, you'll have little more than a fancy statement on your website.

For this, I recommend dividing the outcomes amongst individuals or pairs of individuals to research existing rubrics (they're out there). Don't even dream of writing these outcome rubrics as a large group. The conversations you'll have about wording alone will kill your momentum and waste time.

Provide a template. If your team isn't already trained in rubric-writing, do that first. You want to have already decided whether to use a 2, 3, 4, or 10 column rubric, how many points (if set) each column will be worth, and what each column should be called. In short, ask yourself how you'd like your team's time to be used: discussing rubric formats or drafting outcomes?

Designate two individuals, preferably an idealist (probably you) and a wordsmith, to rewrite each team's outcome rubric in a single voice. The goal is to ensure a consistent language and format throughout each outcome rubric.

While rewriting, think critically about whether the criteria measured will actually assess whether the outcome has been reached. If the assessment seems insufficient, send it back to the drafter(s) with feedback for revision. Whatever you do, don't settle for incomplete or poorly written rubrics.

Having school-wide outcomes & rubrics is great, but it's not enough.

The work of creating college and career ready graduates only begins with the creation of school-wide outcomes and rubrics. Armed only with these two tools, you'll end up with a whole lot of assessment of skills that were never explicitly taught.

This is the equivalent of a college professor who provides study guides yet does't teach the class any of the content that will be on the test. It feels unfair and it doesn't lead students in any particular direction.

Particularly skilled students will figure things out on their own; students who struggle will fail.

To ensure that all students graduate with the knowledge and skills needed for success after high school, it's important for teams to scaffold the learning of school-wide outcomes across time and contexts. Skills that we believe students need to be successful must be viewed as a curriculum to be aligned horizontally and vertically throughout the school.

Here's an example: three weeks ago, I started meeting with a group of teachers from various subjects and levels in my high school. We call this group the "College and Career Readiness Curriuclum Committee (CCRCC)". It's not pretty or easy to say, but it's an important step toward the goals we're trying to accomplish.

Using Conley's 2010 book College and Career Ready and our previously created school-wide learning outcomes as a foundation, we're taking the next step of determining when and where our outcomes should be taught.

For example, if we believe that metacognition is an important lifeskill that young adults should master, where might be the best place to have students start journalling? Should this be the focus of just one class or all classes? Across all grades or just the first year? If all grades, then should our expectations be lower in earlier years and increase over time?

These are all great questions that must be answered as part of the conversation that creating a curriculum will generate.

Getting from outcomes to a curriculum is a big step, but there's one last step.

Even with outcomes, rubrics, and a curriculum, you still need a plan for establishing and sharing best practices on how they will be taught. For example, we all want our learners to graduate with a repertoire or note-taking methods and to apply them appropriately in different learning contexts.

Let's say that your team determines that students should learn to outline first. Once outlining is mastered, perhaps they learn mind-mapping, and then onto Cornell. Can you be certain that your entire staff is on the same page about how to teach outlining to reasonably assure that all students will have mastered outlining before moving onto mind-mapping? What does research say is the most effective method of outlining?

Without explicitly sharing the best known instructional practices for teaching your college and career readiness curriculum, your school-wide outcomes will only be met haphazardly and your vision will be tougher to reach.

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What I've done here is not exactly unique. Anyone engaged in designing courses around content standards have followed similar steps. That's the point. If your goal is for students to be successful in college and career, then the same care and intentionality given to content planning should be given to the scaffolding of skills.

Help Wanted

I'm looking for someone to join me in leading a team of teachers on the sometimes insane but always fulfilling adventure of progressive school reform.

My district in its first year of a four year initiative to transform a traditional comprehensive high school into a New Tech Early College. What that means is that:

• Our top priority is maintaining an empowering culture of mutual trust, respect, and responsibility.
• We strive for 100% of learning to be project- or problem-based.
• We are not threatened by state initiatives to standardize learning. Rather, we use standards as our foundation for creating curriculum centered on deeper learning.
• Our teachers partner with outside businesses and organizations to add real-world relevancy to their projects. We have a local support network to make this easier.
• We are a one to one laptop school with an open technology policy.
• We integrate courses and subjects whenever meaningful connections can be made (e.g. GeoDesign, BioLit, American Studies, etc.).
• We have a strong yet supportive, flexible, and understanding teachers' union.
• Staff collaboration is a rule. Teachers work together to solve school-related issues, critique projects, and to build school school culture.
• We understand the power of protocols. We use them in both adult and student learning.
• We assess "soft skills" (like collaboration, professionalism, communication, and critical thinking) in addition to content as part of every course grade.
• Our future graduates will earn forty hours of community service and 100 hours of job shadowing, exploration, or internship.
• Our stated goal is to double the number of graduates successfully completing 24 credits in college before the summer of 2017. We are confident that we will get there.
• All of our students will have an opportunity to earn up to 30 college credits during their first four years of high school.
• In 2016-17, we will begin offering a "fifth year" to all students interested in having us pay for and support them during their first year of college. This means that students could graduate from our high school with an associates degree in five years. We estimate that approximately 60-70% of our student body will take advantage of this opportunity.
• As the only full-school New Tech Early College high school in the state of Michigan, we are innovators in our field. This comes with a great deal of pride, but more importantly, it requires a great deal of energy and time.

I've been very fortunate to start these initiatives with a very skilled and experienced administrator who has decided to retire at the end of this year. To replace him, we will need an instructional leader who understands change leadership and believes in the principles of progressive education.

Do you know such a person? If so, please encourage him or her to apply. The formal posting for the position can be found here. For more information, visit our website.