Tag Archives: assessment

Burying a Myth About Rigor – It Is Too Easy If Every Student Gets a Good Grade

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As a younger associate principal in a larger 1970s high school, I commented at a district-wide AP’s meeting that I was concerned that so many students consistently earned D and F grades, and our school would be working to improve student achievement and diminish the number of Ds and Fs. Our director of secondary education halted me with this guidance. “If every student gets good grades, the instruction has lost its rigor.” End of discussion and I fought the urge to throw my pen at him.

Bell-curved thinking consigned some students to low grades on every assessment.

One of the tools taught in my teacher preparation was how to create a normal distribution of student test scores. It was not difficult, just tedious. The result was a plotting of scores on the bell curve to achieve 2.35% of grades as As, 13.5% as Bs, 68% as Cs, 13.5% as Ds, and 2.35% as Fs. This tool was consistent. On every test, I and my students were assured that almost 16% of the class would receive a grade of D or F – every time. Voila! Rigor was ensured.

Further investigation at the time confirmed for me that bell curving was not just standard practice in our school and school district, it was Gospel. Every teacher I worked with did the math and created a normal distribution to curve student grading. Tedious work but it was the expected practice. It did not matter if the assessment or assignment was 100-item multiple choice test, a 10-item true-false quiz, a five-part essay, a speech, or a term paper, the bell curved normal distribution ruled.

Sadly, students and parents accepted this alignment of grades because that is way things were done. If a student studied harder and improved their performance the next time, their grade always was a comparison to all other students not of what they learned and 15% of students received Ds or Fs.

In that high school, I could not convince the principal or my fellow APs that we should buck the system and drop the bell curve.

Autonomy can change practices.

Time passed. As a high school principal, it was much easier to implement changes. Autonomy has its privileges. In the mid-80s I found a group of faculty who were interested in changing their usual practices to achieve different outcomes. Not all faculty were of this mind, but enough to start a new beginning. We attended conferences with Bill Spady on outcome-based education (OBE) and quickly appreciated his dictum that “you get what you settle for.” We were no longer willing to accept that rigorous instruction and learning required some students to fail. Accordingly, we adopted A, B, C, I grading. Grades of Incomplete (I) were assigned instead of Ds or Fs.

This led to a second outcome-based change in our teaching. In a traditional classroom, when a grade of D or F is assigned, learning stops. Teachers and students go on to the next lesson and what was not learned completely or was learned with errors becomes permanent. In contrast, teachers using a grade of Incomplete told themselves and students that both teaching and learning are not complete and will not be until the I becomes an A, B, or C grade. Our cadre of OBE teachers were committed to adjusting their teaching or what would later be labeled as Tier 2 teaching so that all students would achieve an acceptable level of learning.

Change does not happen easily in schools. Traditional faculty in our school held to their traditional grading practices and a cadre of teachers began using OBE concepts of teaching and learning. The cadre studied Grant Wiggins’ and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design. Curricular units were reconstructed so that the curricular outcomes teachers wanted students to achieve drove lesson planning and daily teaching.

Cadre members represented most of the school’s curricular departments and grade levels. When the cadre met, they discussed pedagogy not departmental our grade level issues. They discussed student experiences across subject lines not just within a vertical curriculum. The cadre became increasingly student-focused, especially about the challenges that got in the way of student learning. Some of these challenges were institutional and some were student specific.

Things never came to blows but the contrasting practices were noticed by all faculty, students, and parents. An OBE characteristic that became painfully real was that success begets success. Students in cadre-taught were not failing courses. In successive semesters, and student course registrations trended toward cadre-taught courses. Increased student engagement meant fewer disciplinary referrals. Students and parents wanted out of traditional practices.

Rigor redefined.

After several semesters of cadre work, I asked these teachers to define academic rigor in teaching and learning. They quickly responded with these three points.

  • Rigor is setting high quality curricular standards for student learning of content knowledge, academic skills, and dispositions.
  • Rigor is designing teaching that causes all students to succeed in achieving these standards. Time is not a limited variable. Adjustment of initial teaching is expected.
  • Rigor is accepting multiple ways in which a diverse student group can show the learning of the required outcomes.

Today, several decades of working with other cadre groups, rigor in many classrooms and schools is looking more like an OBE definition than my 1970s director of secondary education. However, Madeline Hunter taught us that in every faculty there will be Ernies. An Ernie, not gender-specific, is a teacher who leans back in a chair saying to self and others “this new discussion of rigor (fill in any other change initiative) will come and go. I do not need to change what I do in my classroom, and no one can make me.” She was right. There are Ernies in every faculty, but the cadres of higher quality teaching and learning are gaining on them.

Getting rigor right is a continuous struggle.

I always hope that lessons learned create new practices. But practices made permanent require little change in the teaching faculty. That is never the case. Forty years later and a new generation of teachers we still battle with the definition of rigor. Too many students receive permanent grades of D or F as educators continue to use D and F grades as a method of labeling student learning. Ds and Fs once again are permanent grades, even with RtI practices.

We have work to do.

When Labels and Data Contradict

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I invite you to read the WI DPI State Report Card for your local high school and you also may learn two contradictory facts.  I use my local high school’s 2022 school report card for this purpose. 

  • 65% of the students in the high school are proficient in reading and 25% are proficient in math, and
  • the DPI says this school’s achievement significantly exceeds the state’s expectations for high school reading and math.

Based on the DPI labeling Niche claims these achievement scores rank the school 83rd out of 496 high schools in the state and US News and World Report banners on the school walls recognizing this as a school of excellence.

https://apps2.dpi.wi.gov/reportcards/home

https://www.niche.com/k12/d/gibraltar-area-school-district-wi/

https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/wisconsin/districts/gibraltar-area-school-district-103996

What Should We Know

There should be a head scratch arising when we assign excellence to a school where 35% of students are not proficient in reading and 75% of students are not proficient in math, especially the math statistic.  How would we interpret these school results if the headline on the report read “One of every three students lack proficiency in reading and three of every four students lack proficiency in math”?  This is more than seeing our world as a glass half full as compared to a glass half empty.  35% of high school students not proficient in reading and 75% not proficient in math is not good news and is not excellent.  Not!

Perhaps our understanding of schooling excellence is like Billy Bean’s answer to Peter Brand after disconnecting his phone call with another team’s general manager in the movie “Money Ball” – “when you get the answer you want, hang up (the phone)”.  Such thinking tells us “Don’t argue with US News and World Report when they say your school is excellent or with the Department of Public Instruction when they say you significantly exceed Wisconsin’s expectations”.  However, what do we say to the too many students who are not proficient?  Your school did well even if you did not.

Using labels to describe how well schools cause children to learn is political appeasement.  In general, everyone wants to feel good about their local school.  Parents don’t want to think badly of the place they send their children to be cared for and educated.  Secondly, like parents, taxpayers don’t want to think badly about the schools their taxes support.  Sadly, property taxes in support of schools are generally higher in many of our districts where achievement is lowest.  Thirdly, political leaders know they have little power to change educational outcomes at the local school level, so they create labeling that does not rock their political boat.  For these three reasons, we are given inflated words in our annual school report cards that often do not align with statistical truths.

The bar for school excellence is a low bar.  Few want to tear the scab from the historic dilemma faced when school report card data is disaggregated by the socio-economic characteristics of schools in our state.  It is a fact that students in urban schools with neighborhoods of poverty, high numbers of children of color,  and children with significant educational challenges generally fare poorly on academic state report card measures.  As a result, the bar for school excellence in our state is set very low so as to not exclude all such schools and the bar is obfuscated by including measures of annual growth from preceding school report cards.  We applaud upward changes in annual tests even though the measures may never achieve proficiency.

What Needs Doing

As a mentor would tell me years ago when we faced a difficult task, “Let’s pull up our socks and get about doing better”.  When we stop labeling and address the data, the work before us changes immensely.

  • Label the data as if we were grading a student’s daily academic assignment.  Use a generally accepted grading scale.  Why grade schools differently than we grade our children’s schoolwork?  Soft sellers will tell us that there are many other variables to consider when evaluating the success of a school, but do they also use those variables when grading a student’s daily assignments?  No.  So, use a grading scale even children will understand.
A+97 – 100
A93-96
A-90-92
B+87-89
B83-86
B-80-82
C+77-79
C73-76
C-70-72
D+67-69
D65-66
E/FBelow 65

https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/plan-for-college/college-basics/how-to-convert-gpa-4.0-scale#:~:text=Common%20examples%20of%20grade%20conversion,D%2D%20(below%2065).

Using the College Board’s grading scale, our local high school would receive a D grade for reading proficiency and an F grade for math proficiency.

  • Urgency attaches to how we label the quality of our work. The current rating of “exceeds expectations” conveys very little urgency, even though 35% of students are not proficient in reading and 75% are not proficient in math.  From our students’ perspective, there is immense urgency.  And if we graded our work accurately, grades of D in reading and F in math would indeed be urgent.  In fact, there may be hell to pay for such results.  The use of current labeling blinds us to real urgencies.
  • Instructional analysis and change follow how we label our schools.  Analysis is short-lived when a school is labeled as excellent.  The general conclusion is “if we are excellent, little needs to be changed”.  And that is the case in most schools taking comfort in the current DPI labeling.  However, if we base our analysis on a grading of our schools, how we instruct children in reading and math is in for extreme rethinking.  A reading program that results in 35% of students being non-proficient and a math program that results in 75% of students being non-proficient are not acceptable reading and math instructional programs.  Instruction needs to change.

If we continue to teach children in our elementary school the same way we taught our current high school students when they were elementary students, that instruction will cause similar statistical results.  The changes needed are K-12 not in the high school alone.

The requirement for honesty in reporting school data is essential because we use the data as our perception of education in our schools.  Words like “succeeds expectations” and “excellence” cause a warmth of pride followed by complacency.  When schools are told they are good, they smile and relax.  When told they are not good, they frown and are prodded to do better. 

The Big Duh!

What a difference it would make if a school’s banner read “Grade A School:  More than 93% of students are proficient in reading and in math”.  That truly would be a school of excellence that significantly meets expectations.

More importantly, what a difference it would make for the children of the school who would be proficient in reading and in math.

We need to pull up our socks and get about the work of being better.

Righting the Second R

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Take a breath, pause, and then jump back into the restructuring of our 3 Rs.  Our modern Thirty Years War over how best to teach Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic is not yet over.  While our national and state-based educational generals have cast their critical eyes on reading and math, the second R, writing, has slipped into the backwaters of school subjects.  We need to correct this.  Said simply, reading is the development of understanding and writing is the demonstration of understanding and more.  As we teach children to be skilled readers, we must teach them to be skilled writers.  We must do what is right by writing.

What Do We Know?

No Child Left Behind and the Common Core focused national educational systems on student achievement in reading and math.  These two initiatives provided a warlike educational scenario.  NCLB was the mandate that made improvement our only option and the Common Core was our dictum.  The reading, ELA, and math Core standards became the subjects that mattered.  If you want proof, check your school’s official state report card.  What gets tested gets taught.  Although writing is appropriately and very well addressed in the Common Core, the two expressive sides of reading, writing, and speaking, get short shrift. 

We finally are back on track in our instruction of reading.  Elementary teachers have slogged through more than thirty years of reading wars.  A resurgence of explicit instruction of reading in the larger, well documented Science of Reading is moving the needle of student achievement in reading.  The two-pronged attack of language comprehension and word recognition are moving all children into the realm of skilled readers.

The Missing Link Between Information and Knowledge

Today we face a “now what” question.  As children become skilled readers, what do we want them to do with the information they read?  How do we use input reading skills and meaningful reading material to generate useful student knowledge?  We teach all children to expose their learning through writing.

All children need a complete education.  NASA does not send astronauts to the moon without having planned for their return to earth.  When we ask a child to read a book, we don’t say “Good.  Job well done.  You can read.  End of story”.  We ask them “to do” something with what they read.  Our something modalities are speaking, performing, or writing.  The first two modalities are predicated on the third – plan what you want to say or how you want to demonstrate it by writing it.  The reading trip is not complete without a child writing about what they read.

 Input skills Become Output Skills

The Science of Reading teaches us five elements that create language comprehension.

  • Background knowledge
  • Vocabulary
  • Language Structures
  • Verbal Reasoning
  • Literacy Knowledge

With learned word recognitions skills, these five building blocks help a reader understand the printed letters.  They interpret letters into sounds, sounds into words, and words into the writing of Shakespeare.  These same five building blocks help students tell us what they think about Romeo and Juliet.  They use verbal reasoning to craft summaries, interpretations, comparisons and contrasts with other works, evaluate what they read, and create their own original written “masterpieces”.  They use their vocabulary and background knowledge to form what they want to write and language structures and literacy knowledge to tell their story.   One does not write well without language comprehension faculties.  Reading skills are writing skills. 

Some educators are attempting to construct a Science of Writing to mirror the Science of Reading.  Unnecessary.  The skills sets are known.  All we need to do is turn inputs into outputs.

When we provide children with exciting things to learn, we also provide them with exciting things to write about.  At all grades and in all subjects, writing is essential for students to tell us and others about what they are learning, the music they are playing, the art they are creating, the experiments that go “bang”, and the difference between “bull” and “bear” markets.  Stephen King tells us “The scariest moment is always just before you start”.  The teacher’s job is to get the writer started.  They will write.

Our To Do

Stephen King, again.  “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others:  read a lot and write a lot”.  We have launched our students as readers.  Now we need to land them as writers to make the reading-writing connection complete.  If I can be appreciative of anything we received from the pandemic, it is school technologies.  Almost all children have a laptop or IPad for their writing instrument.  They can write anywhere anytime.  They can save, delete, and send.  They can share and edit.  I watch actors in role of Shakespeare use a quill and rough paper to simulate his writing.  Ink-stained fingers and balled up discards abound.  Today’s writers have the ease of technology.  They know how to get information as readers, and we can teach them how to tell us what they know as writers.

Our Not To Do

Teachers: Don’t should thyself with reading everything a student writes.  Writing for learning assessment purposes is only one of many reasons for student writing.  Student writers need to read their own writing many times in the writing process.  They need to reciprocally read and comment on other student’s writing.  Parents need to read their child’s writing.  Other teachers need to read student writing.  Your principal’s need to read student writing.

Once you stop shoulding thyself to read everything, do right by writing.  Write away!

How Do We Measure a Rounded Education When the School Report Does Not?

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“Ya, buts…” abound in October whenever the WI State Report Cards for school are published.  When the criteria for school success are limited to achievement and sub-group growth in reading and math with weighting for cohort promotion and graduation every educator and parent who believes that schooling is broader and richer than two subjects should groan their “Ya, but”.  The groaning does not change the report card or the perception of which schools outperform others, but it gives voice to different ways to measure our children’s educational experience by looking at a whole education.

The classic retort against the narrow focus on reading and math involves children with passion for the arts.  The Report Card takes no notice of achievements in our schools attained by children in art studios or music halls.  In the No Child Left Behind era, we boonswoggled art and music teachers with how they contributed to a school’s report card achievement by collateral instruction in reading and math practices in their non-ELA and math classes.  Boonswoggle is the appropriate word.

That retort was echoed by teachers of science and social studies, business and technology, second languages and physical education and health.  And, what of Driver Education, the one course in high school that had immediate impact on the well-being of everyone in the school community?  These educators and their teaching does not matter in the School Report Card.  Student achievement in reading and math is all that is measured.

School districts post their mission statements on their websites.  Most speak to the district’s goals in teaching all children to be well-rounded, educated graduates ready to contribute to the community in their adult life.  Something like that.  Our local mission prioritizes the Four As – academics, activities, arts, and athletics.  I have not read a mission statement yet that purports to educate children only in reading and math, yet those are the two academic subjects by which we rate our school effectiveness.

What does matter and what ought to be measured?  What are the values expressed in a local, public education?  We fill our athletic grandstands and gymnasiums with parents and resident fans who put great store and value in the success of their school’s athletes.  Children in athletic programs spend as much, if not more, daily time practicing and playing in season as they do in reading and math instruction in their classrooms, yet their gains in athleticism, self-esteem, team play, and commitment to and achievement goals are not measured and reported.

If we want a description of educational growth, we should measure and report how a child handed a trumpet in 7th grade learns and improves and perfects her play through band class whole group and individual instruction.  Growth from “I can’t make a sound” to “hitting the high notes and harmonizing” is worth our measurement and reporting as an educational outcome.   Or, we should report how a student who frowns in math class is lit up in tech classes when learning the skills of an electrician.  This is the child who will be your “go to repairman” when he graduates.  The educational achievements of these students are school-based, school-caused, and school-ignored.

In the past two decades, educators were tasked with teaching “soft skills” to all children.  These were thought to be essential 20th Century skills.  Collaboration, cooperation, and team work.  Listening and questioning.  Problem-solving.  Soft skills were differentiated from the harder skill sets of academics, like reading and math.  Quite rightly, soft skills assist our children in many of their non-curricular school activities, like DECADES, Destination Imagination, Debate, and Forensics.  The economic driver of our local school community is small business, yet DECA and our Business Education program are invisible in our measure of school achievement.

A high-quality, well-rounded education results from a broad cadre of teachers, coaches, advisors, counselors, administrators, custodians, food service, and drivers interacting with children every school day.  Such an education takes place in schools were children and adults feel safe and cared for by each other and by a community that wants its children to be wholly-educated. 

Teachers and administrators do not get to choose the metrics used in the State Report Card.  Governments that need single indicators for comparative purposes make that decision.  Hence, the comparison of nations by the OECD using reading and math achievements.  The USA ranks in the middle of the pack.  Hence, the comparison of states and school districts within states based upon two academic measures.  The need to rank and differentiate is more essential than the want to understand and illuminate.  If only life were that simple. 

The quality of an educated school graduate ready to be a law abiding, contributing and productive citizen as an adult will not be predetermined by reading and math achievements alone.  Let’s talk about the well-rounded, wholly educated adults we want our children to become.  We are so much more successful than we give ourselves credit for.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Teaching and Learning Is Not Piece Work

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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.