Henry Ford’s assembly line strategies revolutionized industry. In a Ford plant, all work was piece work – an employee did one task repeatedly as the car chassis passed down the assembly line. The speed of the “chain” determined work productivity. Optimized speed of assembly and quality control were the abilities of all workers to do their assigned piece work in a predetermined number of minutes. The image to consider is a naked car chassis at the beginning of the assembly line and complete and drivable car emerging at the end of the line. It takes an extreme emergency for the speed of the assembly line chain to slow or stop – it never backs up.
What we should know.
Transfer that image to school. A 4K child is at the beginning of the assembly line and a graduate emerges at the end of a school’s edu-assembly line. In the early 1900s schooling took on an assembly line process. Thank you, Henry Ford and John Dewey, and 1892’s Committee of Ten. Elementary schools build the chassis and secondary school does the finishing work. The chain runs 180 school days. Teachers apply grade level or subject content knowledge and skills to the student as the child moves through the K-12 system. Quality control is measured by standardized tests and displayed on a bell curve – some children demonstrate a higher quality of education than others, but any student within the parameters of two standard deviations below the norm is promoted and graduated.
Most educators do not like the image or analogy of schooling to assembly line work. It offends their professional sensitivities. However, current, and usual school operations look like, feel like, sound like, and are like assembly line work. If you doubt this, try to change the speed of the school chain, or modify the work done at each grade level or subject along the edu-line. It should not be difficult to do, but it is. Try to diminish the school year by 10 days or make it longer by ten days. The system will fight back and after much argument the chain will remain set at 180 days with its traditional work being done at each workstation.
What to do?
Accept that school is an assembly line and change the nature of the work along the assembly line. It is the work at each teaching station along the line that matters.
My work with the WI DPI on teacher licensing requirements says that the teaching act is a sequence of six steps. Each teacher candidate is required in pre-student teaching and student teaching to demonstrate evidence of their proficiency in:
- Planning – creation of unit and lesson plans
- Teaching – using a variety of teaching strategies, including explicit teaching
- Assessment – formative assessment of initial student learning success
- Reflection – the use of formative assessment data to help the teacher clarify, correct, enhance student learning
- Adjustment of teaching – tactical use of differentiated teaching strategies to clarify, current, enhance student learning
- Re-assessment – summative assessment at end of lesson or unit
This sequence is built into every unit and lesson design. Each step is plain to see and document and verify.
What Makes the Edu-line Different?
It is the emphasis on the three middle points points – assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching – that separates education from piece work. Henry Ford did not want an assembly line worker checking the effectiveness of their work, stopping the chain for a closer inspection, talking with other workers about how to fix an error in the car’s assembly, or to check for quality after the fix was applied. We do. In education, this is what makes good teaching effective teaching.
A child is a very messy car chassis. Unlike a metal frame, a child moves, speaks, has personality, and individuality. A child’s mind may still be on recess during a late morning lesson in reading or thinking about lunch while doing arithmetic. A child may wriggle and moan when called upon to sing a solo or be bashful in showing an art project. Messy is anathema to assembly line work. The truth is teaching children is messy work and time effort committed these three essential steps – assessment, reflection, ad adjustment – is how we ensure that every child is a successful learner.
What does this look like?
We need to insist that every lesson and every unit has built in requirements for assessment, reflection, and adjustment. Bell curve be damned. The lesson does not move to re-assessment or to a next lesson until a teacher has demonstrated assessment, reflection, and adjustment and exercised all efforts to ensure successful learning.
Assessment, reflection, and adjustment require teacher time. These tasks are not accomplished while a teacher is driving to school in the morning or home after school. They are not accomplished during a teacher’s lunch time. And they are not accomplished while a teacher is doing daily prep period work. Interestingly, the number one function of teacher prep time is a bathroom break. The next most important functions are talking to another adult, checking correspondence, and just taking a break from being on the classroom stage. The assessment, reflection, and adjustment of daily teaching rarely surfaces in a teacher’s usual school day. We need to face this reality – daily prep time before, during and after the school day is inadequate for the assessment, reflection, and adjustment of ongoing teaching.
We need to build new organizational structures to ensure that all teachers have the time and resources for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of new teaching.
Intermittent breaks.
The administration provides individual teachers with a substitute teacher for a school day and the classroom teacher engages in assessment, reflection, and adjustment work. That is the only assignment the teacher has on this day. Prior to the intermittent day break, the teacher and administrator select the unit(s) of instruction to be the focus of the break day. They discuss the assessment data to be examined. The teacher uses this day to make a full evaluation of student learning via the teacher’s observations, existing assessment data, and any personal education plans (IEPs and 504s) for her students. Reflection is reviewing the lesson plans for this unit(s) and notating parts that were successful and parts that were not as successful. Reflection also is consideration of the teacher’s expectations for student performance on the assessment(s). Adjustment is a planning of a necessary lesson(s) that will assist all children to achieve the teacher’s expectations on re-assessment that will follow these necessary lesson plans.
Intermittent breaks assures that all children in the school have continuous instruction AND rotates all teachers into their intermittent day break. Every teacher in the school is provided intermittent breaks several times each school, perhaps once each quarter.
An intermittent break fits every teacher because the assessment data is the teacher’s data – it is not state assessments that are narrowly academic. All subject area teachers, e.g., art, music, PE, second language, shop, use their intermittent break to assess, reflect, and adjust their subject area teaching and learning.
Whole school breaks.
The advantage of whole school breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment is that all teachers are available for this work. The administration places a whole school break day on the school calendar so that parents can plan for a day when children are not in school. Whole school breaks are scheduled once each quarter of the school calendar.
On whole school break days, all teachers are available for grade level, subject area, special grouping collaboration. A team of grade level teachers can provide each other with insights and observations and alternative adjustment strategies.
Whole school break days can also be in-person and/or remote workdays. Whole school break days also contribute the mental health of the school by releasing all students and teachers from the usual routines of continuous school.
Reduced daily assignments to create daily time.
A school that wants to institutionalize teacher availability for assessment, reflection, and adjustment can build time for these three activities into teachers’ daily assignments by removing one or more classes for each teacher’s assignment. For example, instead of assigning a teacher to teach five classes per day with one period of preparation time, assign the teacher four classes per day with one period every day for assessment, reflection, and adjustment and one period for preparation. This requires hiring additional teachers to be assigned the teaching of class periods removed from other teacher’s usual schedules.
Costs – Pay Now or Instead of Later
There is cost to providing breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching. One cost is the employment of substitute teachers, or the employment of more teachers. There is the cost of additional resources for adjusted teaching – the same old, same old will not produce new results. There also is the cost of institutionalization and constant prioritization of assessment, reflection, and adjustment in the school.
When considering the cost of hiring more teachers, consider the cost to student learning of not providing consistent time for assessment, reflection, and adjustment. Because schools are edu-assembly lines, we keep the edu-chain moving until after student failures to learn have piled up and we play catch up trying the remediate students out of sequence with their learning. We spend more annual revenue hiring intervention teachers, tutorial aides, and assigning students to summer school and other make-up venues than we need to. Instead, use those financial and professional resources to ensure adequate assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching in the real time of lesson and unit instruction.
The Key Essential for Breaks
The essential element for making an assessment, reflection, and adjustment break successful is an administrator/teacher conversation about the goals for the break. This is laser focused work on teaching and learning – what worked to cause successful student learning, what did students NOT successfully learn, how can teaching be changed and improved to cause all students to be successful learners, and then teaching using those changes and improvements.
Teaching that is carefully targeted for students with enough rigor and challenge will always cause a distribution of learning successes. Teaching that all students succeed at in at their first exposure is undertargeted. Conversely, if no students succeed in the first exposure, then teaching has been overtargeted. Assessment, reflection, and adjustment are how teachers practice this sequence – aim, fire, adjust your aim, fire again – instead of our usual fire, aim, fire again
This is effective teaching and effective teaching is not piece work.