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The Tension of High Expectations

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Tension.  Anxiety.  Investment.  These are tangibles most of us want to diminish in our daily lives.  Tension, anxiety, and pressure can be aggravants and we see them as undesirable for our general well-being.  Yet, without degrees of tension, anxiety, and an investment to move forward, it is hard to cause learning.  Highly effective teachers know how to use positive attributes of external tension, anxiety, and investment to raise a child’s internal motivation to learn and keep learning. 

Primary schooling for most children begins with excitement.  School is new and exciting for a 4K or K student.  It is a new place with lots of children who will become friends and new things to do.  The blaze of early social excitement wears off with time.  While some children rise every morning with a “I can’t wait to get to school”, most need our assistance in answering the school bell every day.  Motivational theory helps us to keep children from sinking into the drudgery of compulsory education, the grind of getting through school.

Madeline Hunter taught us how components of tension assists motivation that leads to successful student learning.  (Hunter’s name and teaching reverberate in many discussions of teaching and learning.)  Motivation starts with a teacher setting a positive yet challenging feeling tone about learning.  A feeling tone has a friendly edge to it; an edge like a tool that is constantly pushed into new information and skills to be learned and the tension of that pushing causes learning.  That edge is a tension that the teacher sets and controls over time.  It is a friendly edge because effective teachers coat it with more Hunterisms – personal interest, challenge, the rewards of success, and how what is learned is useful in a child’s future.

Motivation is jump started by a teacher’s understanding of each child’s readiness to learn and beginning point for learning and adjusting initial instruction for early, meaningful success.  Motivational tension is enhanced when the challenge of what comes next is “just beyond the current reach” of student knowledge and skills yet within a student’s grasp with guided work.  There is a tension in that distance between what a child knows and can do now and what she needs to know and do next.  Effective teachers make this a positive tension because it results in success.

Bill Spady taught us that “successful learning begets more successful learning”.  When he laid out the outcomes to be taught and learned, he relied upon sound instructional practices to cause learning.  Students become invested when the outcomes set by the teacher are important and meaningful.  The drive to achieve important outcomes carries an element of anxiety to succeed.  Teachers monitor each student’s sense of internal anxiety knowing that too much causes a student to shut down or make poor decisions.  Just the right amount of anxiety keeps a student properly and positively pointed toward learning success.

All children need to see that what they learn is beneficial to them personally.  They need to see and feel personal gain or improvement in order to invest themselves in school assignments.  If a child does not feel personal interest and connection to a curriculum, it is easy to see school assignments as just a long line of work assigned by teachers and required to pass to the next grade.  Drudgery.  When this is a child’s mindset, any distraction or other thing to do moves a child’s interest from learning to something more immediately rewarding or fun to do.  Gaming and other Internet links are perfect and available for distracted and disillusioned students who have no personal investment in their school education.  A child may not see herself in every assignment, but there has to be enough and frequent enough personal interest to keep her invested.

Effective teachers purposefully tell students that “what comes next” holds special interests for aspiring artists and musicians, or is very hands-on for students needing tactile learning, or is necessary for students who see themselves in a medical profession.  Good teaching tells them then shows them.  Investment in the future is a wonderful subliminal tag for any new subject or skill set.

Teaching and learning carry many caveats, some more meaningful than others.  One of the most potent is “low expectations are connected to low achievements and higher expectations to higher achievements.”  Raising expectations is more than just declaring them or sending them in an e-mail.  Higher expectations are built by teachers with rigorous instruction of knowledge, skills, and dispositions AND by students who elevate their work, their commitment, and their performance.  There is a lot of “doing” in teaching and learning to higher expectations.  Higher achievements are a continuous push-pull between teachers and students.

Tension, anxiety, and investment are used by effective teachers in setting the right tone and providing rigorous teaching toward the knowledge and skills learning children need to learn.  Expectations won’t rise on their own – they are constructed on sound principles of motivation and instruction.  Constructive use of tension is a necessary component for teachers and students to achieve successful teaching and learning.

Highly Effective Teachers are Masters at Adjusting Instruction

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October.  Four weeks into the school year and it’s time to adjust.  Unless a teacher is gifted with the “all seeing eye”, true omniscience, the reality of September’s class time changed any informed assumptions a teacher made before the first day of school about a child’s readiness to learn and anticipated success in learning.  Summer regression, summer experiences, the effects of time on a child’s interests and preferences, and how a child reacts to September’s instruction and new teachers alter the best of assumptions and plans.  Adjustments are a necessary stage in successful teaching that is committed to causing every child to learn.

Decades ago, a principal would ask to see a teacher’s instructional units and lesson plans at the beginning of the school year.  A teacher prepared units and lessons for the entire 36 weeks of a school year.  This meant the teacher was locked and loaded with a plan for teaching.  It is also true that decades ago teachers did not use universal screening and most school assessments were summative.  We taught the “book”.  There was a test at the end of each chapter or unit that preceded the beginning of the next chapter or unit.  Teach and test, teach and test.  The school report card was a single indicator, usually the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and a child’s ITBS scores marked her school standing for the year.  Instruction was a straight line continuum from September until June.  Decades ago.

Today, adjustments in instruction are the name of the teaching game.  Adjustments to instruction begin in student teaching when teachers-in-training must demonstrate their proficiency using adjusted instruction to qualify for an initial teaching license.  As a consultant working with the DPI on educator preparation programs, I have firsthand experience in creating standards-based pre-student teaching and student teaching requirements.  Student teachers must demonstrate their ability to “plan, teach, assess, adjust teaching, and assess again” to pass their clinical semester.  The emphasis is on each child learning from the lesson and units not the coverage of texts or a calendar of class time.

Teaching student teachers to make in-unit adjustments is easy.  They do not know a different process.  Working with veteran teachers to stop the progression of a unit because some children were not successful learners and to adjust teaching to cause them to be successful is a more difficult professional challenge.  Adjustment is not reteaching but teaching differently.  “Why now?” and ““why me?” are common responses.  “Because you are responsible for the success of every child” is the singular answer.

The best “… teach, assess, adjust…” process is collaborative.  Explaining one’s work and thinking and planning to another educator provides a teacher with a reality check.  “Does it make sense?”  It is easy for a teacher in a closed classroom to recline into the flow of school weeks and the check off of the units and chapters and activities taught.  This is especially true if principal visits to the classroom are infrequent and aligned only with annual evaluations or effective educator documentation.  Better practice is for the principal to make many informal “look ins” and “check ins” across a semester.  Looking in is a physical, first person, in the classroom visualization of teaching and learning.  “Checking” is a conversation about the teaching that is more than a “how is it going?”.  Checking in asks the teacher to provide stories, in-class data, and to explain how reflection informs her ability to bring all children to success.

Collaboration may be easier between teachers than a teacher and principal because evaluative accountability is not present.  Lesson studies create a “let’s focus a group conversation on a lesson I just taught.  Here are the assessments from that lesson.  What is the best next thing to do?”.

Adjusting is not a negative.  Some may perceive the need for a teacher to adjust and teach again as a failure of initial teaching.  Far from it.  Even when a lesson is aimed properly at children’s readiness to learn and all children have the prerequisite information and skills for the new lesson, the nature of challenging material and rigorous expectations will mean that 20-30% of the children will not achieve solid and secured learning with initial instruction alone.  Challenging and rigorous learning goals mean that some children need adjusted and extra teaching to achieve success.  If the lesson target is too easy to achieve, it was not properly targeted and not worth the time to teach.  Good planning expects adjustments to teaching.

It is October, a time for serious consideration of effectiveness of your first units to instruction considering the data from multiple assessments now at hand.  Consider your assumptions about your class and about each student.  Consider your assumptions about the rigor of your lessons and how you challenged all children.  Consider the effectiveness of your tier 2 in-class grouping of children who needed adjusted instruction to be successful learners in September.  Consider the adjustments you need to make in the units and lessons to be taught during the next eight months to cause every child to learn.

This will not be the only time for instructional adjustments.  Adjustments should occur continuously throughout the school year.  October, though, is a wonderful second month of school for principals to do their diligence and assure that the entire faculty is in adjustment mode.  October adjustments set the tone for best instructional practices throughout the school year. 

So that the rest of the staff does not feel left out, October also is prime time to review school lunch menus, assignments of aides for instructional support, routines on the school bus as the weather turns cold, the maintenance of outdoor fields for winter, protocols for safety and security, and every other thing that seems routine in the school.  Check it out now and make necessary adjustments.

Never Take Good Teaching For Granted

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Looking in through classroom doors at teachers and children at work is a treat.  It is like watching the conductor of an orchestra cause an ensemble of musicians to perform complex pieces of music, or the pilot of a plane take off, fly a thousand miles on a constantly altered flight plan, and land safely at the planned destination, or watching a sculptor size up a block stone knowing there is a mermaid in it waiting to be exposed. 

Good teaching is not magic, though causing some children to understand the division of fractions disproves the statement.  First, good teaching is understanding strategies of pedagogy and the ability to create a string of exercises that result in a learned and understood outcome.  Second, good teaching is knowing your students and their readiness to learn.  Put those two requirements together, and no matter the grade level or course content, good teaching is very identifiable and predictable.

Through one classroom door I saw a veteran teacher with 30 years experience in the district quietly reading and reviewing the lesson plan she would teach later in the day.  I know this because she looked up and we spoke.  She was reviewing a plan she had taught many times to ensure that she knew exactly how to cause each of her students to learn from the lesson.  She might as well have been an Olympic gymnast mentally moving through all the gyrations of a floor exercise routine, eyes closed and envisioning each change in motion she must perform.  This teacher was making a preparation for good teaching and taking nothing for granted.  As many times, as she had taught this lesson, she committed time and energy to ensuring and pedagogy and student readiness were aligned to create learned outcomes.

Good teaching is an intellectual design transforming the lives of learners.  There are 98,000-plus public schools in our nation.  The most important thing we do to assure that every child in every school is receiving good teaching is understanding that good teaching is professional work requiring dedicated professional teachers.  We cannot take good teaching for granted.  Appreciate it when you see it.

Don’t Sweat NAEP Scores.  What Did We Expect?

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Life has recently given educators many things to worry over.  Pandemic!  School shootings!  Teacher shortages!  Low pay!  Chaotic school board meetings!  Book banning!  NAEP score decline!

I take the last one back.  As we indeed should worry about disease, bullets, teacherless classrooms, and surging radicalism, we should not sweat the reported decline in the National Assessment of Educational Performance scores.  The reason we should not sweat this is – what did we expect assessment scores to be after three semesters of emergency teaching and learning?  Improved? 

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported scores for 4th grade students declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics.  In terms of trend lines, NCES says these were the largest score declines since 1990 and the first ever score decline in mathematics.

I return to the question – what did we expect?  Actually, the scores represent what we expected, and these are not a calamity.

The decline in reading scores was expressed broadly across all demographics or within a point or two for differentiated groups.  Pick your target population – urban, suburban, rural; ethnicity; gender; wealthy or impoverished; English or non-English speaking – reading and math scores declined.  When schools went into emergency mode due to the pandemic, reading and math achievement amongst all children suffered.  What did we expect?

Interestingly, among higher performing students, those with constant access to computer or tablet, reliable Internet, consistent access to a quiet place to do school work, and consistency of an on-line teacher available top help them with assignments demonstrated less decline in reading and math.  Exactly what we would expect.

Correspondingly and without great surprise, students with low performance in reading and math prior to emergency education, especially children of color, demonstrated greater decline in reading and math.  Many of these children were at the opposite end of educational supports during the pandemic.  They had little to access to computers or tablets, unreliable or no Internet access, no quiet places, and were not connected with on-line teachers.  Exactly what we would expect.

NAEP measures only reading and math.  What of student learning in science and social studies?  What of achievements in art, music, and second language?  As a result of the pandemic, all areas of student learning suffered and expected overall achievement diminished.  Another expectation.  It sounds like educational disaster, but it is not.

What do we know?  First, these diminished student achievements are associated with emergency education and not with usual education.  I recall smashing my leg and spending 16 weeks in a cast and walking with crutches when I was fourteen.  Life, for a while, changed due to that emergency.  Once the cast came off, it took months before I regained strength and flexibility in my right leg.  I had to unlearn living with the emergency as well as living anew without it.  In emergencies, we compensate by doing things differently when we cannot do what we usually do.  Compensatory life is not the same.  When the emergency is over, we typically stop compensating and life returns to normal, although I am more duck-footed.

2019-20 through 2021-22 data were emergency-based data.  The casts we wore during that emergency are off.  We need to look at that data for what it is – emergency data – and not consider it as normal data.

Second, over time, all data resettles around its historic mean.  It will take renewed implicit teaching to cause children who limped through pandemic education to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need; this learning will not happen without focused education.  But it will happen.  Students who in 21-22 were not solid in their reading and math will achieve improvements in 22-23 and 23-24 and their data will move back toward usual norms.  School bands that suffered developing instrumentation will find new players and students not ready for Spanish 3 will find growth in blended Spanish 2-3.  We know how to teach these children.

Third, our world is too attuned to reports of calamity, and what may not be calamitous gets reported as “disaster”.  Across the 14 years of 4K-12 public education, emergencies will rise, be faced, and we will trend toward normalcy.  The real calamity and disaster of the pandemic was the number of lives lost to death.  Those we cannot recover.  Everything else can be recouped.

Lessons learned.  Don’t sweat what you cannot affect.  The NAEP data is already in the books, and it reported the kind of data we were expecting.  We were in an emergency and now we are not.  Today, we pull up our socks and get at the 22-23 data.

Feedback: Recalibrating the superlative

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Say what you mean and mean what you say.  Words matter and the selection of words used as educational feedback to children matters greatly.  As teachers, coaches, directors, and mentors, we provide thousands of feedback words to children every day.  How calibrated are your words so that you are saying exactly what you should say?

I observe that feedback to children over time becomes gratuitous and conversational.  Listen to the feedback you hear around you.  We typically say what the listener expects and wants to hear and we say it without specific learning context.  We make our feedback pleasing, non-critical, and uninformative – easy feedback is easy to give.  As we launch the 22-23 school year, the words we choose as feedback should be recalibrated so that we are saying not only what we mean to say but what children need to hear as we to cause them to learn.

Apply the term “authentic” to the distribution of feedback.  But, know what authentic means.  Merriam-Webster tells us authentic means “being actually and exactly what is claimed”.  Authentic is a clear and precise razor to apply to feedback.  Sharpen your vocabulary so that your feedback to a child explicitly describes the learning the child demonstrates and provides the necessary description, praise/criticism, reinforcement/correction, self-building, and direction that the child needs to hear.

The bell-shaped curve of statistical distribution can be applied to giving feedback.  Picture the bell in your mind’s eye and apply it graphically to the student work and work effort you observe.  The greatest amount of work from children daily meets our general expectations; it is the great space under the dome of the bell, especially when we apply the rule of 80 – 80% of children should successfully learn 80% of what we teach through initial instruction 80% of the time.  Statistically, we expect 66% of student work to be in this zone – the rule of 80 expands this zone that we think of as statistically average.  The margins of difference under this dome on either side of the true mean are small enough that minimal corrections through adjusted teaching move children to improved performances of learning.    

Sadly, we have maligned the word average – no one wants to be labeled average – but authentically, average describes the quality of learning children show us when they actually and exactly learn what they were taught.  Average is “on the target”.  As a better descriptor, use “expected” instead of average.

“That is exactly and clearly what I expected you to do.  Good work” is the qualitative feedback that should describe 80% of student work in school under the rule of 80.  How often do we hear these words?  Not very.

Our contemporary world values esteem over productivity and has difficulty with the word good.  Inspirational speakers at educational conventions and conferences tell us that good is not good enough.  Jim Collins told us how to Get From Good to Great and good has never been good enough since.  “Great” and its synonyms became the new gold standard driving feedback.  If good is average, then we must strive to be better than good and feedback on what we are told to expect has never been the same.

Blink twice every time you hear these words in your school today: excellent, fantastic, outstanding, superb, tremendous, terrific, wonderful, exceptional, splendid, phenomenal.  These are both synonyms for great and the most frequently used words to describe student work.  That is a lot of blinking.  Is all that we claim to be great really great or is great how we now label what we expect?  This is not what we mean, I think.

Recalibration of feedback means

  • understanding what is expected and describe it in actual and exact terms.  Don’t inflate to deflate, just describe what you observe against what you expect.

“You sounded out and pronounced those words exactly as they are spelled.”

“Your practice is paying off – you played that piece exactly as the music is written.”

“Your use of color and shading are very good and show you are paying attention to our demonstrations.”

“The corners in the box you built are exactly 90 degrees to each other.  Good job.”

“You all are keeping pace with each other as we walk to the cafeteria.  Thank you.”

  • using comparatives to describe things that are more than you expected.  Comparatives work because they describe more than you expected but keep you clear of over-exaggeration.

”Your mathematical reasoning is getting better.  You went beyond the numbers and gave an example of how we use rectangular shaped fields in athletics.”

“You are improving in listening to spoken Spanish and hearing it as Spanish not translated English.”

“You show a growing understanding of the scope of the universe beyond the stars we see at night”.

  • using superlatives to describe things that are well beyond what is expected and are so exemplary that they are unusual in frequency.  Superlatives add -est to your descriptors.

”That was exceptional – the best I have seen in years.”

“Outstanding.  You performed that as well as a person who has been playing for many years.”

“Your explanation was superb – college-like in your understanding of the concepts and how they work.”

“Perfect.  I could not have done better myself.”

“You get the blue ribbon.  That is the best lab work I have seen in years.”

Keep the model of what you expect students to say, do, perform, behave, and be in mind as you give them your feedback.  Then make your feedback exactly and actually descriptive of what you see and hear and feel about their work.

Lastly, keep a second thought in mind.  Children know honesty and sincerity when they hear and read it.  Your smile and a nod of approval may be all the honestly and sincerity a child needs to understand that they are meeting your expectations.  And, that after all, is what most children in school want to do – meet the expectations of their teachers.