Our Students Have Spoken

I had a great conversation with a group of students last week.  The power and significance of the conversation resonated for me in a way that made me reflect on how we in education can sometimes become unintentionally disconnected from our true intentions. Sometimes I think we become so focused on what we believe is in the best interest of our students that we forget to ask them what they want. In education, we are a very caring group, we dedicate our life's work to ensuring student success. This deep caring can at times narrow our focus and lead us to make decisions without consulting the very ones we work for.

A recent educational tweet by Leadership and Learning (@LeadAndLearn) encapsulates my thoughts: “It's important to ask the question: Why do we exist, are we the best we can be & why should parents send their kids to our school?"  This strikes a chord because it speaks to the heart of our work: providing a service to our community.  As educators, we exist to serve. We should never lose sight of this. 


The work we do as educators needs to be distributed proportionally. We need to fuel industry and economic needs and at the same time, support, nurture and develop  cultural, passionate and creative needs of our students. If we just provide for the needs of society, we lose the individual voice of our young.


The conversation I had with our kids was a thoughtful discussion about our school's Mission, Vision, Values and Goals. The focus group was a cross section of grades, backgrounds, and genders and was a fair representation of our school.  Here is what they had to say:

Student Focus Group Responses (From the mouths of students!)

The school MISSION statement should be a powerful statement about why you come to school everyday.  If you were in charge of defining the school mission statement what would you change about it?

• A Mission statement should be more about the kids and less of what the school offers.
• It should inspire creativity and learning in life.
• It should speak to feeling safe and being safe at school.
• It should address acceptance.
• It should include aspects of health and fitness. 
• It should include healthy living; healthier food with more motivation from the teachers.
• It should speak to peer acceptance and equality for all students (LGBTQ and BASES)
• It should speak to being safe to express ourselves; free from being bullied.
• We should be spoken to like individuals not a group of stereotypical teenagers.
• It should address now more then the future, because the future is now.
• It should speak to having good morals and being a good person. You could be the smartest person in the world with the most money, but without character and compassion, you will not be loved.  Morals and being a good human being are what matters!
• Once we decide on a statement, we should actively promote it. No one knows it.
• More action, Less talking.

Does our school VISION meet your expectations for what you envision for your own success? What would you change?

• The vision should show that students will be supported on what they want to pursue. Not an outline of what one is expected to do.
• It should include a greater emphasis on life skills.
• It should include leadership opportunities for all ages.
• Our vision should speak to teaching in a way that caters to all students.
• It should include being respectful and caring.
• It should speak to student’s social and emotional health.
• It must include aspects of developing creativity
• We need to raise awareness of our vision and mission statements.

Do our school VALUES align with what you value?  Is there something you would add, change or delete?

• Make the values more understandable and student based because at the end of the day it’s for students to understand.
• There should be more student-teacher interaction.
• Students need more freedom in the say of their education.
• It needs to show the need to respect everyone.
• Be more specific and less broad.
• Value GSA (LGBTQ) – needs to speak to being be more accepting.
• Needs to state the importance of having a safe environment and feeling welcome.
• Needs to indicate an emphasis on individuality – mold into a successful/unique person.
• Should indicate valuing cultural diversity – appreciation and acceptance of all cultures.
• Needs to address the need to value and respect teachers.
• Should indicate the value of health and fitness and participation on sports teams and clubs.

What do you think we need to work on as a school?  If given the opportunity to define school GOALS, what would you say we as a school need to work on?

• Our school needs more diversity of extracurricular activities and clubs so students can express themselves better.
• We need to work on building stronger connections, both student to student and teacher to student.
• We need find ways to help students make better choices in their life. To find ways for students to connect their passions to school and life afterwards.
• We need to work on finding ways for students to feel more accepted in school society.
• We need a better definition of what it means to be safe at school.  Safety is more than free from physical harm… The school needs to work on being safe for freedom of self-expression.
• We need a greater emphasis on eco-friendly events and caring for our environment.
• We need a goal that addresses healthy living and healthy eating habits.
• We need to make teaching and learning more fun. 

     

Re-Educating Our Parents

In public education, the pressure to keep doing what we’ve always done is rooted in societal expectation and filtered through the lens parents remember their own education.  If there is going to be a change in how we deliver public education, it is going to take a re-education of our communities. Our parents need to see the value and recognize the need for the change.  As Dr. Demming would say… We need to drive the fear out!  Just asking our parents to take a leap of faith and embrace change is not good enough.  Our children are too precious to take that kind of risk.

In our last post, we made reference to assessment being one of the biggest levers to effect change in public education.  The use of assessment FOR and AS learning is where the change needs to take root.  We need to move past the summative evaluation that concludes, “You got an A or a B”.  This is the re-education of our parents that needs to happen.  We must move our parents away from the need to receive marks and percentages as a definition of learning.  Assessment should be part of the learning process, a step towards a better understanding, a way to engage and spark a child’s interest not a conclusion to the learning.

In Elementary school, parents enjoy in-depth, comment-based feedback on their child’s learning. Why do we move away from this model in secondary school? Once in secondary school, the system leads families down a path of letter grades and percentages. For us at the secondary level, moving to a more descriptive formative feedback style will free our students and make them more accountable for their own learning.

 

How do we phase out this dependency on numbers, percentages and or letter grades?  The key is to instill a change process that shifts the emphasis off the numeric value and more onto descriptive feedback that speaks to the growth of the child. This is the core emphasis of the work that needs to be done. The factory model of bringing in students as “raw materials” and grinding them out within a statistical spread of a normal distribution doesn’t apply anymore. Society has changed and our students’ needs have changed.  And on top of this, we as educators now know more than we ever did about individual learning styles and needs. The educational community is realizing that we must change. It should therefore be our responsibility as public educators to lead the way by educating our communities and helping them navigate the change. It’s about time we started to question why we demand letter grades and percentages from our schools when society clearly doesn't demand it for itself.

Formative assessment with descriptive authentic feedback will improve learning and make students more engaged and promote independent learners.  If it’s all about creating life long learners, then we have no choice! Are our parents ready and willing to move past a letter grade on a report card?  If you knew that your child would be more engaged and spend more time working to improve themself, would you make the shift?

Are you ready for your child to engage you in their learning?  What a novel concept it is to have your child sit down with you and discuss their learning. Parent Teacher Conferences will become Student Centered Conferences where we all gather to hear what the child has to say about their own learning.  A conversations where they eagerly articulate, explain, support and endorse their own learning.  

Assessment: The struggle and our hope!

Assessment is and always has been a hot topic in education primarily because the teacher, with a huge amount of sacred trust, is bestowed with the absolute power to evaluate, assess and assign grades to our children.  As parents, we know all too well the lasting impact a letter grade can have on a child. It can open doors to acceptance, affirmation and success and it can also demotivate, discourage and deny entrance.

It is clear the educational community is well aware that change in assessment practice is in the air. The "Assessment conversation" is happening in the halls of all our schools. We say it’s about time to start asking the difficult question. Is assigning letter grades and percentages really helping our students achieve to their fullest potential?  The predominant answer to this question appears to be a resounding … NO!  So, what are we going to do about it?

The old arguments are not good enough anymore: “I would like to try new ways but... the system does not allow it”, and “I don’t have enough time”, and “the system often requires us to use a percent, and parents want to know.” These are only a few of the excuses we give as educators. We are doing students a disservice by using numbers and percentages to define success. Far too often, our assessments have the opposite effect: they demotivate, instill frustration and cause disengagement. The challenge we face is to change the way we as a learning community view assessment. It is a tough task, but not an impossible one.

Making the distinction between formative and summative assessments is the first part of the process. For many teachers, this will involve a significant change in practice. From the outside looking in, the shift from assessment of learning to assessment as and for learning is easy to see, however, from the practitioner’s view inside the classroom, the struggle continues. Dylan William, 2012 asserts that “Assessment is the biggest lever we have to raise student achievement”.  We need to continue to support teachers in this struggle and remind them of the overwhelming importance of their good work. 

When teachers teach classrooms full of diverse learning needs, and they engage the use of rubrics, detailed feedback and peer & self-assessments, they open the door to different expressions of learning: exit interviews, presentations, graphic organizers, stories etc.  The students are more likely to value the process and become highly motivated architects of their learning. It is not uncommon to hear these students say “this made me like school again!” or “I like how I can choose” or “I didn’t know I could do that!” Although every classroom is different and every teacher has a different style a key goal of every teacher is to have engaged students who are passionate about learning.

As Clark, Owens, and Sutton (2006) state, “By adopting assessment for learning practices the focus shifts to the learner. Teachers will find that their students’ performance will improve because they are more likely to see themselves as active, participating learners. More students will be successful in achieving the curricular outcomes as the teachers learn how to target their lessons and help the students identify problem areas in their own work.”

Our hope is that assessment as and for learning becomes the standard for all teaching and learning.

Stayed tuned for next week’s blog where we address the need to help our parents navigate the change in assessment practices so they can see the benefits of assessment as and for learning for their children.