Beyond School

[I'm happy to introduce today's guest-blogger, Adrienne Michetti, a Canadian teaching in Vietnam whose comments on this blog over the past couple of months have constantly given me food for thought and learning.  Adrienne's response to my "Taking Back Teaching: A Forgotten History" post prompted me to invite this guest-post, and frankly, I suspect Adrienne politely pulled her punches in what follows, and if so, invite her to push back more in the comments.  And FYI, I'm still in transition in my new apartment and more, so expect irregular posting until the dust settles.]

One of the first things I thought of when I saw Clay’s post on grading was the debate happening a few months ago over at The Faculty Room, about “the unthinking habits of grading.”

Clay’s post outlined a (brief and one-sided, but relevant) history of “grading” in the modern world and how it is destroying teaching and learning. His post also characterized how “grading’s evil twin,” over-sized classrooms, devalues learning.  While I agree with much of Clay’s post, I have to start my rebuttal with a strong disclaimer — so strong that it almost feels like a confession:  I hate the word “grading” and all its derivatives.

And that is why I prefer to talk about Assessment.  Yes, Assessment with a capital A.  You see, “grading” is a term that I never used or even really heard until I moved into international education.  I am originally from Canada and where I’m from, we informally call the whole shebang “marks.”  In my more formal discussions with administrators, parents, and colleagues I would use the term I was introduced in my B.Ed. programme:  Assessment.  But then, I moved overseas and my American colleagues started asking me, “So have you finished your grading yet?” 

Huh?

The Word

It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that teachers viewed giving assessments as some kind of way to “rate” students.  A couple of quick searches reveals some of the reasons why I am uncomfortable with the word “grade.”  First, the definitions.  Note that I am purposely including only the first few definitions provided.

From Dictionary.com Unabridged v 1.1:

grade -noun

1. a degree or step in a scale, as of rank, advancement, quality, value, or intensity
2. a class of persons or things of the same relative rank, quality, etc.
3. a step or stage in a course or process.

There are several more definitions, but these first three give you an idea of why I’m uncomfortable with the term.  According to these first three definitions (and similar ones  on Merriam-Webster and the like), essentially, a grade is a rank or classification. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that “grade” (noun) is from Latin, gradus, meaning “a step or degree,” and is related to gradi, which is “to walk, step, go.”  So why are we using grades — and even the term itself –  to classify students’ abilities?

But wait — here is the bit I am looking for.  If I look carefully at the Dictionary.com definition, and scroll down to definition #7, I will see one that says this:

a letter, number, or other symbol indicating the relative quality of a student’s work in a course, examination, or special assignment; mark.

Ahh, that’s it.  A grade can be used to indicate quality — it can be an informant, so to speak.  This is somewhat similar to Definition #3, which is about steps or stages.  And then back to the Online Etymology Dictionary, where at the very end of the entry for “grade” it tells me the history of the term we are using now in 2008:

that of “letter-mark indicating assessment of a student’s work” is from 1886.

Ok, so I’m not so way-off base.  What I’m wondering is how we evolved, as teachers, from viewing (and using) grades as indicators to using grades as ranks and classifiers.  Something is wrong with this picture. 

A Proposal

I’d like to propose that we get back to the meaning that has to do with indicating assessment of a student’s work — that is, as indicators of growth.  And that’s why I prefer to use the term Assessment rather than “grade.”  The term “grade” implies ranking and classification, and this is exactly what we do not want to do with our students.  The reasons are obvious — we all know that ranking and classification of abilities can be absolutely detrimental to real authentic learning.  Ranking and classifying have nothing to do with intrinsic motivation and everything to do with jumping through hoops.

So I refer back to my original comment on Clay’s post:

As Gilbert said in the same comment thread,

If we are going to use Assessment as a way to indicate whether a student is learning or not, then most educators would agree: We Need Assessment!  Instead of using Assessment just to get grades (you know, those silly numbers that need to go in a column or box on a report card), instead, let’s use Assessment to show learners and their parents just how much (or little) growth is occurring.  Heck, while we’re at it, let’s use Assessment to guide our own teaching practices, too.  Are they getting it?  Do I need to teach something differently?  Or never again?

Let’s let the grades STAND for something else, something other than a rank, category, or class.  Let’s let the grades represent the descriptions of the learning.  (That definitely calls for criterion-referenced Assessment, by the way.)  Yes, let’s let the grades BE the description of what has been learned, and then let’s let those grades guide what will be learned next.

How-To

I personally believe that almost anything can be used to arrive at an indication of learning (indication of learning = Assessment).  A test?  Sure — as long as you’re not calculating some kind of percentage total.  An essay?  Maybe, depending on what it is you’re assessing.  A personal journal?  Absolutely — if it’s honest and personal, I bet there’s heaps of evidence of learning.  An overheard conversation?  Definitely!  A blog post, a Tweet, Facebook application, or a collection of shared bookmarks?  Why not?  The question I ask myself as a teacher:  Does this show evidence of the student’s learning? If the answer is yes, even to a small degree, then I see no reason why it cannot be used as some way for me to indicate that learning has occurred.

So the key, then, seems to be to come up with an effective Assessment descriptor.  Traditionally, we have used numbers — I’m not certain of the reason but I suspect it’s because they’re difficult to argue with and they fit easily into a transcript or spreadsheet, thereby making data easy to manipulate and process.  Well, that reason has little to do with the learners (to my mind, anyway) and so I am not sure that numbers are the best route any more.  Some systems use letters — a small difference from numbers, but easily translated and manipulated the same way as numbers.  And let’s face it — how do you usually end up arriving at the letter grade?  (Numbers.) 

I would prefer to use symbols of some kind to indicate to students, parents, and myself how a learner is doing in terms of skills and understanding.  The image I mentioned before is a drawing of a flower in different stages of development from levels 1 to 4. Level 1 = just sprouting; Level 4 = full bloom.  And next to each flower drawing, I might put a description of what it is I expect to see in the student’s work at that level.  So, for example, if I am assessing paragraphs, it might look like this:

(image of a barely sprouting flower)  The paragraph has a main idea, but sometimes goes off-topic.  Sentences are not yet organized and ordered in a way that is logical, but they are beginning to be connected in some places.  An attempt at a topic sentence is visible, though the main idea is not clearly stated, only implied.

(image of a full bloom flower)            The paragraph has a fully developed and explored main idea with very relevant connected details.  Sentences are in clearly discernible, appropriate, thoughtful, and logical order.  The topic sentence is relevant and attention-grabbing with a clearly stated and coherent main idea.

I like this idea because it removes the numbers from the general picture and focuses instead on Assessment as an indicator of growth.  Not only do I like this idea in terms of assessing a particular task or learning goal, but I also like the idea of using this as a holistic way to report on a student’s learning growth over the course of a term or semester.  Even better, perhaps, might be to eliminate the symbols altogether from the “reporting” aspect and just focus on the descriptive comments.  But I suspect that university admissions personnel might not like that idea . . .

However I do want my students to understand that Assessment is important, but that it’s not about the numbers. As I said before — even if I don’t exist and they are teaching themselves, learners must understand that being reflective and “seeing where you’re at” is necessary for learning.  Assessment is just an indicator, it does not have to be a rank and classification system.

Numbers Again

I haven’t really said much about “grading’s evil twin: over-sized classrooms.”  I guess that’s because I think this one is a simple issue. No one actually believes that a lot of learning can happen in a class of 20+ students — do they?  To my mind, this is simply an issue of financial and human resources.  If we provide enough teachers to keep the ratios low (ideally, less than 16), then learning will increase.  That is, I think, a no-brainer.  Unfortunately very few schools or districts are willing to follow through with such a plan because human resources are the most expensive.  

Having said all of this, I do think it is possible to manage Assessment creatively in classes with more than 16 students.  What it means is that their teacher has to train the students — and rigorously — to be very good self- and peer-assessors.  Note that I used the word “creatively”:  in this situation a teacher has to think about Assessment very differently and be willing to give up some of that “grading power.”  I know I did not do this well in my first 5 years of teaching and I’m still not sure that I do it well.  Managing Assessment with groups this large is perhaps not impossible, but it is certainly difficult, not consistently effective, and definitely time-consuming.  It may even mean having to sacrifice some time at the start of the school year that you would normally dedicate to plowing straight ahead through the curriculum.  I would argue that it’s time well-spent, however.  What students learn in learning to assess themselves and others will take them far further in life than that extra novel study or history paper.  What good learner is not a reflective learner, after all?

Thinking More

I posted about “the unthinking habits of grading” on my own blog a while back, and my conclusions then and my conclusions now are the same:  We don’t need to get rid of “grading” altogether, we just need to change what it means, and think a heck of a lot more about why we are doing it.  (And perhaps we need to call it something different!)

Is there an educator out there who has the digital story-telling* skills Bill Farren shows in this work? If so, I’m not aware of it. From the message (the use of fear in population control) to the medium (archival footage, skillful titling, rhythmic audio-video editing, original music, and so much more), I literally have not seen a better original digital story come out of the edublogosphere. I thought Bill’s “Did You Ever Wonder?” was strong. This out-leaps it twice over.

Shared with permission. Bill’s Education for Well-Being website has transcripts of the quotes used in the video and more, along with some of the most thoughtful and substantial content around. No echo chamber over there.

See Bill’s guest-blogging posts on Beyond School here.

Does anybody else in education have these kinds of A/V skills? Please leave links in the comment, if so. (Actually, Nathan Lowell is doing some great stuff, but I can’t find the exact links on his blog. Scott McLeod featured them last week on Dangerously Irrelevant, though.)

*Who came up with the term “digital storytelling,” anyway? Is it me, or is it far less sexy than – and far too schooly for – the good old word, “film-making”?

[Fourth in a series: 1. My Intro to Bill: "Beyond 'Did You Know?' - 'Did You Ever Wonder?'"; 2.  "Education for Well-Being"; 3. "The Hidden Curriculum"; 4. "Random Acts of Deceleration".  It's been an honor to have Bill guest-blog here.  We need vision like his.  You can subscribe to Bill's Education for Well-Being site here. -- Clay]

I’d like to give a huge “thank you” to Clay for inviting me to guest post on Beyond-School and for helping promote the concept of education as an instrument of well-being. His desire to do what’s best for students, the planet, and for education in general, inspires.

The Age of Paradox

This from a book I’m currently reading:

“We live in the age of paradox. Our buildings are taller, but our purposes shorter. We have more labor saving devices, but less time for neighbors and friends. We have more money but less fairness; more weapons but less security; more power over nature, but a less-stable nature than ever before. We have more science, research, and intellectual capability than ever, but less common sense and good judgment in our public affairs.” David Orr, Design on the Edge

Ours is also a time of skills—skills that far outstrip purpose. We have the skills to put people on the moon, move whole mountains, create 100,000 different chemicals, and build stealth bombers. I’d like to argue, following Orr’s thinking, that it’s not a lack of skills that will keep us from succeeding. It will be a lack of reflection on the values needed to wisely manage an ever-growing skill set.

Almost exclusively, the educational dialogue today centers around the skills students will need in order to succeed in the 21^st century. Discussions about the values needed for success happen with much less frequency. I’m guessing this has to do with the fact that many consider the teaching of values beyond the purview of educational institutions, especially secular ones. There is some validity to this. Who is to say what values should be taught? So as not to walk onto this slippery slope, I’d like to frame the discussion differently. Instead of arguing about whose values should to be taught, I prefer instead to look at the concept of value itself.

We can study value. By doing so, we will be better able to direct our limited cognitive, material, and emotional resources towards more fruitful ends. Our skills can be put to better use. There is an ever-growing body of information about value that is shattering many ideas that are currently the standard fare in our curricula. Redefining Progress believes “that if policymakers measure what really matters to people—health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being—economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability.” The burgeoning field of true cost economics allows us to get a better picture of value that goes beyond the incomplete view taught in most classrooms today. “True Cost Economics is currently creating a sizable ruckus in the academic world, and its value as a system of thought is starting to be recognized by the economic establishment.” [Underline added; source: Utne] We currently spend vast amounts of money training people for military service and for jobs associated with the military industrial complex. (M. I. T. has been dubbed the Military Institute of Technology in the popular press.) Vision of Humanity put out an interesting study which looks at the economic value of peace (among other benefits). On their site they state, “Although we have the concept of a war industry and the economics of war, few people would relate to a peace industry and the economics of peace. Yet it is evident that business wishes to invest in areas where there is minimal violence. The economic benefits of peace seem obvious.”

Natural capitalism and the understanding of ecosystem services can also help us better judge value. During his annual Independence Day address to congress, Leonel Fernandez, president of the Dominican Republic, referring to a $2.6 billion deal struck with gold companies giving them mining rights on the tropical island, announced to applause, “This will be the largest investment ever realized in the history of the Dominican Republic.” One wonders though, had the leadership of this fragile island been better educated in the issues of value, would they have struck such an unfavorable deal? It’s easy to look at $2.6 billion as pure gain when no consideration is given to what is lost.

The paradoxes we see today are largely the result of our pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, our ideas about what will make us happy are often wrong. On the positive side, subjective experiences like happiness are starting to be studied scientifically. As this new area of inquiry matures as is given more prominence, schools would be wise to incorporate the findings into procedural and curricular domains. The scientific evidence available to date should have schools questioning the pursuit of high test scores in the name of high-paying jobs. (For more about our poor choices related to happiness, watch this video:

Author Juliet Schor, in her book Born to Buy, notes in a survey of students that, more than half agree that, “when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are,” and 62 percent say that, “the only kind of job I want when I grow up is one that gets me a lot of money.” She later goes onto say, “American children are deeply enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending, and they are getting more so. We find that the more enmeshed they are, the more they suffer for it. The more they buy into the commercial and materialist messages, the worse they feel about themselves, the more depressed they are, and the more they are beset by anxiety, headaches, stomachaches, and boredom.”

If educational institutions have as their mission the improvement of lives, then they should consider how they are preparing students to critically deal with the dysfunctional value systems that permeate our lives. If looked at objectively and approached scientifically, we can discuss the pedagogy of values as easily and frequently as we do that of skills.

Bill Farren

[This is guest-post number two by my long-time global partner Chris Watson in Honolulu, with whom I've collaborated in Seoul for over a year now. See Chris' first guest post here. -- Clay]

Remixing Curriculum: An Interview with Lisa Stewart

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. The areas of focus were: brain plasticity, learning styles, reading development, emotional responses, and mindsets. If you’re interested in more details in these areas, I’ve been posting my notes, albeit slowly, to Watsoncommon. What I want to write about in this post is a question I asked at the conference for which there wasn’t a research-based answer.

It goes like this:

I was in a session about engaging students’ emotions with curriculum and leveraging their brains’ social needs with activities in class. As you can imagine, the examples covered in the session were things like group work, task-specific stations, anticipatory sets that give students the opportunity to generate the essential questions for a unit. And there was all kinds of brain research to show that these kinds of activities trigger the best hormone balance for long-term, meaningful learning to happen. My question was if virtual social environments and activities also create the same ideal brain chemistry for learning.

Apparently, there is no research in this area yet, according to the presenter. So at my school, this has become somewhat of a guiding question. What are effective practices with technology and what are the results? And there are a handful of teachers who are purposefully employing and reflecting on new kinds of activities with these questions in mind. To frame the creation of these activities, we’ve been using Marzano’s research on effective instruction as structure: Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing, Reinforcing efforts and providing recognition, Practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting objectives and providing feedback, Generating and testing hypotheses, Cues, questions, and advanced organizers. Let me know if you’re interested in the full article.

Lisa, mentioned in my first guest post, is one of the teachers (she’s a technology resource teacher too) designing and implementing activities in her class that not only use the technology but explore these essential questions. The other week, I subbed her class and learned about a remix project that she’d given to her students. It was an opportunity to create a nonlinguistic representation of their understanding of Holden Caulfield. In this podcasted interview, Lisa describes the design of the assignment, some observations of the products, and how it led to a different kind of essay. Also embedded below are some example projects, one of which she references in the interview. The Voicethread blew me away! Enjoy.

[Note: "Talking Story" is an expression we use in Hawaii to set the tone for a conversation. Instead of focusing on solving a problem, coming to a conclusion, or debating an issue, talking story means to share experiences and anecdotes that relate to the issue at hand. I think it's an appropriate expression for web 2.0 too, since this is a place for stories to be shared and new thinking to emerge.]

I work as, what we call here, a Technology Resource Teacher. Essentially, I’m an English teacher who’s been willing to experiment with integrating technology into curriculum, and I’ve been asked to only teach one class so during the rest of the day I can collaborate with other teachers on all things tech. The high school side of my school has a brand new 1:1 program this year, and there are four others who do what I do to help 150 or so faculty (we have 3700 students K-12). What I quickly learned this year is that no matter how many and what kind of workshops we run, how many emails with links and descriptions we send, or who we bring to speak at our curriculum days (these are all amazing resources!), what works best and what people seem to appreciate most is one on one time to work together and talk story about classes, students, curriculum, and where the laptops fit. So I thought I’d do a little of that here in my first guest post.

Two years ago, I hardly knew what a blog was, and, frankly, I didn’t feel the need to spend any more time in front of my computer than absolutely necessary. Then, at the beginning of last school year (06-07), I was assigned to teach an upper level Composition course. Pretty generic title, which really should have read: creative non-fiction essay writing. In an English department of nearly 30 teachers, there was only one other person teaching the course that semester. Our weekly meetings were talking story about writing, student writing, the purpose of writing, authenticity of audience, amongst other Englishy (not schooly) topics. At some point Lisa, my colleague, started to tell me about having her students blog their compositions and journals. She explained the idea of a blogosphere, a network of writers interested more or less in the same topics, reading and commenting on each others’ posts. Then, it was the concept of the blogroll, something called del.icio.us. Organically, the next move seemed to be to try this thing out for myself and my students. Where blogs seemed like they’d fit best was as digital commonplace books; we ask all sophomore to keep an analog version for a quarter to follow and reflect on essential questions and critical thinking exercises. That sounded good, and Watsoncommon began.

I realized a lot of things during the first few months of blogging. Namely, it could easily take over my life. But I welcomed the intellectual insurgency. I didn’t write great stuff, but I had a reason (and an audience of one, maybe two) to pay patient attention to what happened during my day, in my class. I needed material. This went on, and in early 2007, my wife stumbled on a wiki where edubloggers and blogging classes were listing themselves. (Do you remember this one Clay?) Near the top: “B”eyond School, where there was a call for blogging classes to collaborate. I replied.

Creating our own 2-class blogosphere was a noble first effort, and some really interesting conversations emerged here and there. What became apparent after this collaboration was that the web 2.0 tools were more powerful than we knew, yet the challenge was the same as ever: getting students to be active participants in their own education. Clay’s 1001 Flat World Tales writing project on a wiki came next. Being far more teacher-driven, the students had an easier time moving through the project. But Clay, Michelle, and I spent many weekends skyping at respective odd hours and driving the wiki for the kids. Not to mention we had committed ourselves to a grueling 6 week time frame. In the end, we had an annotated and podcasted trail of breadcrumbs, an ebook, some good stories, some engaged students, and a lot of new ideas for the next collaboration. Now, I’m a week deep in 1001 Flat World Tales #2 with Deb Baker’s class in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and I’m getting far more sleep this time around.

Since that semester of enlightenment, it’s been Moodle, Twitter, Diigo, Ning, the list goes on. Not to mention planning and implementing the vision for our 1:1 program. At some point a couple months ago, I found myself coming full-circle, away from the tools, widgets, and gadgets to stories. The story of collaboration, the story of communication, the story of empowerment, the story of sustainability and stewardship, the story of apprenticeship, the stories of learners. And the stories have me asking these questions:

What is an education?

How can we engage the emotions, passions, and original ideas of students more?

How does a large, successful independent school become a culture of technology?

How can we empower students with an understanding of the way they learn and then nurture it daily?