for the love of learning

The 25th International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement

2012-01-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Niall MacKinnon is headteacher of Plockton Primary School, Highland, Scotland and attended ICSEI 2012, Malmö, Sweden.

by Niall MacKinnon

A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it. This was the key message of linked keynotes at the 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden.

Pasi Sahlberg outlined how Finland set its own course for education, termed The Finnish Way, whose success offers profound lessons for the world. For Andy Hargreaves the Finnish phenomenon is part of a wider shift of approach, The Fourth Way, one necessary for school education to engage with the vast global economic, social and technological changes underway.

Both agree that most countries have been locked into models of education practice, management and evaluation not suiting today’s needs.

Sahlberg urges new participatory, learner-led approaches, away from standardized testing and the privatisation of education. He views the conventional notion of a lesson as a ‘dead horse’. Though it cannot be revived, education policy makers are driven to try. This forms part of the GERM, or Global Education Reform Movement, a virus of prescription and control infecting and reinfecting national education systems, outlined in his recent book Finnish Lessons.

Certainly new policy shifts in England – no notice ‘morning raid’ OFSTED inspections, one term teacher competency dismissals, grading of teachers and teaching, lambasting ‘coasting’ schools – echo this view, spreading distrust and despondency. But unattainable perfectionism also contains its own danger. From the Scottish angle there was barely trace of talk of ‘excellence’, and certainly not as central imperative. Indeed the term was not mentioned in the congress review report. That gives global perspective from a key international congress on educational change held by a near neighbor. Perhaps the challenges to be grasped and the responses needed are more profound than mere exhortation.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading.

The official theme of ICSEI 2012 was the interplay between policy, research and practice in education. Each annual congress presents a ‘State of the Art’ review, and this year’s was entitled ‘Lost in Translation’, noting that policy makers and the educational research community have drifted apart, with those responsible for policy taking insufficient heed of the accumulated findings of international research.

As a headteacher – and a class committed one – it was refreshing to find many present were practitioners, or liasing directly with them. A group of teachers from Vancouver Island, Canada gave an interesting presentation Walking along the Difficult Path of Education Change, displaying approaches of inquiry-based learning, away from overly fixed pre-determined learning progression. From the other end of the telescope, the Brunei School Inspectorate were keen to bridge gulfs of understanding, searching out commonalities and differences of meaning, seeking to penetrate them in discourse, through stronger working relationships with schools.

The means to establish and enable effective collaboration through professional learning communities was covered by many presentations. The need to grasp new concepts and let go of old ones was a theme throughout. Hargreaves spoke of the fallacies of educational reform, warning against those of speed, substitution (seeing people as the problem), standardization, competition and a ‘fallacy of extremes’ achieved “by remedying or removing defects at the bottom and replicating excellence at the top”.

The pervading themes of the conference stood very much against the prevailing orthodoxies of educational administration, encapsulated in Sahlberg’s GERM. A need for new approaches, methods, concepts and a new participatory bridge between all those involved in education was perhaps the dominant message of the conference.

Next year’s ICSEI will be held in Santiago, Chile, with the theme Educational Systems for School Effectiveness and Improvement: Exploring the Alternatives. Will policy, discourse, research and practice move closer together this coming year? Which countries will embrace and explore genuine alternative approaches, as Finland’s case study was celebrated at this year’s ICSEI? Or will education policy continue to wield the ‘wrong drivers of change’ identified by Michael Fullan, a keynote speaker for ICSEI 2013? Certainly much hangs on the outcome. There was common agreement that through effective educational change the economy, society and culture necessary to establish a new benign internationalism may work in partnership to meet the global challenges of this century, already very different to the last.

This was not a national agenda, but an international one. The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise.

http://www.icsei.net/icsei2012/

Stephen Krashen on poverty and literacy

2012-01-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

Prof. Stephen Krashen 12-08-2011 from Chicago Teachers Union on Vimeo.

Here are some of the highlights:

The tougher standards movement is built on the premise that schools are broken.
If you control for poverty, the US does very well in comparison to affluent students from other countries.
The US has the highest level of children in poverty in the Industrialized world. 1 in 5 children live in poverty in the US (1 in 10 in Alberta and 1 in 25 in Finland)
Better education will only get you a better job if jobs are available.
The STEM crisis is a hoax. There is no shortage of engineers.
If you want to do something about housing and education, first take care of poverty. Housing and education will take care of themselves.
Poverty is the problem.
There is practically zero correlation between international test scores and subsequent economic development.
The impact of poverty on children is gigantic. Lack of food. Lack of healthcare.
Poor children have practically zero access to books.
Study shows that in affluent areas children have access to over 200 books while children in poverty have access to less than 2 books at home. School is not levelling the playing field.
Children in poverty have practically nothing to read.
We must protect children against the affects of poverty. This means three things: food (free and reduce meals). School nurses (medical care). Books and libraries (literacy)

I went offline

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

On December 23, I decided to go "offline".

No iPhone.

No blogging.

No Twitter.

No RSS feeds.

No e-mail.

In part, this break was inspired by a tweet from a colleague, Phil McRae:

Phil's words reminded me of a thoughtful talk by Sherry Turkle where she talked about the need to moderate our "online" diet and be present with those who share our physical world.

But mostly this break was inspired by my wife and family.

This break was a conscious decision in light of the coming holidays where I would be spending a lot of time with family. I didn't know when I would go back online, but I figured it would be sometime after my birthday (December 28). As it turns out, I didn't return "online" until December 30.

At first it was a little tough. Out of habit, I kept grabbing my phone in an effort to check something, but would then catch myself and return it to my pocket. I quickly realized I was better off if the phone wasn't even in my pocket, so I left it at home.

Here's what I learned:

I check my phone for e-mail and Twitter far too often.

The break from being online was liberating in a lot of ways and it's not something that should be reserved for a couple days in December.

Provincial Achievement Tests as final exams for the Report Card

2012-01-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

There are lots of reasons to like Twitter. Today I want to show how Twitter can provide anyone a direct, public line of communication with your local representatives and politicians.

The other day, I tweeted a question to Alberta's Education Minister, Thomas Lukaszuk:

Should teachers use the grade 3, 6 and 9 Provincial Achievement Tests as their final exam on the report card? @LukaszukMLA #abed
— Joe Bower (@joe_bower) January 6, 2012

Thomas Lukaszuk responded with this:

@joe_bower This is not what #abed designed the test for.This would be another misuse of these tests.
— Thomas Lukaszuk (@LukaszukMLA) January 7, 2012

I agree with Lukaszuk that it is a misuse of grade 3, 6 and 9 Provincial Achievement Tests to include them as a part of the students' report card.

In light of this, I have a couple follow up questions for Thomas Lukaszuk:

If Alberta Education never designed Provincial Achievement Tests to be used as a part of the students' report card, why does Alberta Education provide a form letter for schools and teachers to inform parents that the Provincial Achievement Tests will be used as a percentage on the report card? The letter can be found here on page 12. (I blogged about this two years ago, here.)

I know of schools in Alberta that mandate teachers to use the Provincial Achievement Tests as a final exam and a percentage of the students' report card. I also know of Alberta teachers who do this voluntarily. According to Minister Lukaszuk, this is an inappropriate practice that Alberta Education never intended to have happen, so what will the government do to make this right?

In response to some of my questions, Lukaszuk responded with:

@joe_bower that is why I am reviewing the exam and practices surrounding it...
— Thomas Lukaszuk (@LukaszukMLA) January 8, 2012

I am eager to see how Provincial Achievement Tests will change.

Grading Moratorium: Leslye Folmar

2012-01-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Leslye Folmar has joined The Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

I no longer give out letter grades in literacy (reading and writing) and I am working toward the same in Math.

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

Honestly, I abolished grades because my district adopted a continuum system instead of letter grades. However, if they had not done so, I would have abolished grades in my classroom this year anyway.

I would have abolished grades because they have no meaning, they carry no weight...An A means one thing in the Advanced Proficient class and another thing in the Basic Skills class, but on the report card there was no way to distinguish that difference.

I knew something needed to be changed when I looked through one of my struggling students portfolio and saw that he “earned” A’s from k-3rd grade, his grades we not a true reflection of who he was as a student.

I also knew I needed to abolish grades when I noticed my students rushing to see their letter grade and not to see what they got right or wrong. It seemed that they were done with the “learning” once the grade was given.

What do you do in replace of grading?

Instead of traditional letter grades, I place students on a skills continuum. Once a student shows 80% proficiency in a category they are able to move up.

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

This is not an issue for reading and writing but it becomes tricky for math. I no longer put grades on test or quizzes; instead I put fractions (total correct/total number of problems).

I have also created a skill sheet to go along with each assessment. I focus on the skills mastered and those that need more attention instead of the grade.

What fears did you have about abolishing grading?

I fear that cutting out grades will take away some of my students motivation. However, this may just be my issue.

What challenges do/did you encounter with abolishing grading?

Parent-teacher conferences were the first time I encountered any trouble with abolishing grades. Parents needed something concrete (a letter grade) to know where their child fit in with their peers. As I tried to explain the continuum and the skills their child was showing progress with, I was interrupted with, “That’s nice…but what grade is she/he getting?”

Are you willing to provide contact information (e-mail, Twitter,
blog, Skype, etc) for others who are interested in abolishing grading?

lfolmar@gmail.com

@ellewriter

Caring about what we can measure

2012-01-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

I've written before about how we find what we look for by using a popular parable that involves a man looking for his keys late at night.

In his article titled Once Upon a Time, Not Too Long Ago, Teaching Was Considered a Profession, But Then Came Standardization, Tests, and Value-Added Merit Pay Schemes That Ate All Humanity for Breakfast... Joel Westheimer writes:

There is an old parable about a man searching on his hands and knees under a streetlight. A passerby sees him and asks, “What are you looking for?” Hunched over, eyes not leaving the ground, the man replies, “I’ve lost my car keys.” The kind passerby immediately joins him in his search. After a few minutes searching without success, she asks the man whether he is sure he lost the keys there on the street corner. “No,” he replies, pointing down the block, “I lost them over there.” Indignant, the woman asks, “Then why are you looking for them here?” The man replies, “Because there’s light here.”

Behind the onslaught of testing and so-called “accountability” measures of the last decade lurks the same perverse logic of the man looking for his keys. We know what matters to most teachers, parents, school administrators, board members, and policy-makers. But we are far less sure how to find out whether teachers and schools are successful in teaching what matters. Since we have relatively primitive ways of assessing students’ abilities to think, create, question, analyze, form healthy relationships, and work in concert with others to improve their communities and the world, we turn instead to where the light is: standardized measures of students’ abilities to decode sentences and solve mathematical problems. In other words, since we can’t measure what we care about, we start to care about what we can measure.

Of course, I am not being entirely fair. Educational testing enthusiasts do have some ways of measuring, for example, skills related to critical thinking. And the reading comprehension tests are evolving to consider not only whether students can understand the words and structure of a particular sentence or paragraph but also whether they can articulate something about its meaning and implications. But when researchers examine education policies broadly, and the classroom practices and habits that follow those policies, it is becoming increasingly clear that our educational goals and the methods used to assess educational progress are suffering from an appalling lack of imagination.

All this reminds me of the profound difference between measuring what we value and valuing what we measure.

Alberta, Finland and Curriculum

2012-01-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a video that features the speakers from a Curriculum Symposium that took place in Edmonton, Alberta.

It's important to not that one of the speakers is Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons. Another speaker is Irmeli Halinen, head of curriculum in Finland.

A highlight from this Curriculum Symposium was when I asked Irmeli Halinen this question:

Q: I asked Irmeli how often would a teacher in Finland have a grade book where the teacher has a collection of grades for homework, projects, tests, quizzes and attitude and then average those grades together in order to provide the students and parents with a final grade.

A: Her initial response was bewilderment and silence. To be clear, nothing was lost in translation; rather, the context of my question simply didn't make any sense to her. After repeating my question, her response was that in Finland they don't care as much about the numerical data. Instead, they care more about the verbal feedback that occurs between the student and the teacher. Assessment is a discussion not a spreadsheet. It's only in grade 8 when children are about 14 years old that students are by law assigned grades; however, they might receive grading as early as grade 4 when they are 8 years old, but this is a decision that is made at the local, municipality level. Irmeli also went on to say that the grades do not help children learn and often encourage them to compete with each other, which is precisely the opposite of the collaborative community Finnish classrooms are designed to be. She also went on to say that grading in Finland is not directly used with end-of year evaluations.

The face of apathy

2012-01-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

If you complain about how things are but choose to do nothing about it other than to complain, this is what you look like.

Here are a couple posts I've written on apathy and helplessness.

Stop waiting to be told what to do

Cynicism and Apathy

Conduits and Buffers

Capitulation disguised as moderation

Ignore the real world

stuck in our ways

Using test scores to pick a school

2012-01-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Using standardized test scores to pick a school for your children to attend is the equivalent of kicking the tires before buying a car.

To fully grasp why this is true, there's a lot to know about the arcane underpinnings of standardized tests; however, there is a single principle that summarizes what you need to know:

Never treat a test score as a synonym for what children have learned or what teachers have taught.

Again, this too can be true for lots of reasons, but there is a single principle that summarizes what you need to know:

A right answer on a test does not necessarily indicate understanding and a wrong answer does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding.

Show me someone who places high stakes on one single test, and I'll show you someone who does not understand how testing is unavoidably incomplete and inherently prone to error.

The folly of artificial and arbitrary recognition

2012-01-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

I used to teach at a school that had a tradition around Thanksgiving. Every kid in the school was encouraged to run or walk around the school yard perimeter with their peers. We called it the Turkey Trot.

In the early years, we would record the times of the students as they crossed the finish line. It was deemed by someone that every student who finished the race inside of 10 minutes would receive 10% bonus on their physical education report card grade. The student who finished under 10 minutes were eligible to have their name placed in a draw for all sorts of prizes, ranging from free turkeys, movie passes, frisbees and assorted gift cards. The top three boys and three girls from each grade level were also identified and paraded in front of the entire population of the school.

All this was done, following the run, in an awards ceremony in the school's gymnasium for the entire school to see.

As I developed professionally and gained a more sophisticated understanding for the damaging effects of pitting children against each other in an attempt to win artificially scarce awards, I engaged in conversations with my peers about how we could improve the Turkey Trot.

If you were to ask any staff member why we were doing the Turkey Trot, most would have said something like this:

It's healthy to get outside and be active.

Over the years, I started to see a disturbing trend. Some students were very excited to participate while others were very turned off by the whole affair. Some of the keeners couldn't wait to run, while others were willing to risk skipping school, pretending to be ill, or even begged to do their homework in the library. "Just don't make me do the Turkey Trot," they would plead.

Upon closer inspection, I was able to categorize these two kinds of students:

The excited students thought they had a chance at winning. The avoiders thought they had no chance.

Through many conversations, I was able to convince my colleagues to allow all children who participated in the Turkey Trot to be eligible for the prizes and drop the 10% bonus. In short, I was able to convince them that these extrinsic motivators and manipulators were not why we wanted to encourage children to participate in an outdoor, fun run.

When we made these changes, it became a lot easier to honestly say to kids:

This isn't about winning or losing. It's about trying your best, whatever that looks like.

All was well, until one year someone was cleaning out the storage areas of the school and came across a whole bunch of very old, very lame hats. They were like the 1980s gas station ball caps you can find at garage sales for a nickel. I think they even had a pom pom on the top. The school didn't want them, so someone decided to give them away to the boys and girls that finished in the top three for their grade level.

Sounds harmless, right?

Maybe not.

Imagine this. While the top three boys and girls for each grade level finished their run, they eagerly took their hats. While the entire population of the school sat down in the gymnasium for the prize draws, there were two categories of students: the hats and the hatless.

As fast as they could be handed out, the hats became valuable status symbols. Having a hat allowed the students to elevate and separate themselves from the crowd. They were the winners; everyone else was... well, just everyone else, but not quite as good.

As I looked on, I could see clearly what we had done. I leaned over to a colleague and asked them to look at the crowd and tell me what they saw. At first, they didn't notice anything but a gym full of our students, but after a moment they too could see that by passing out hats to only a select few, the students were able to rank and sort themselves.

Don't get me wrong. Those who passed out the hats had no malice intent. In fact, I would go so far as to say they had the best of intentions, but as the old saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." My point here is that we need to be acutely aware of the unintended consequences that accompany our simplest actions. In this context, passing out an artificially scarce number of hats to an arbitrary number of students creates a kind of caste system. Keep in mind that the latin root of caste is castus which means "pure, cut off, segregated"and is etymologically related to carere which means "to cut off".

If we can agree that public education is for everyone and that competition is for the strong, then we have no business creating learning environments that are built on exclusion.

It's important to note that when the students exited the gymnasium, almost every single one of the hats were either left on the floor or placed in the garbage. Because their purpose as a status symbol had expired, there was no reason to continue wearing the hats.

After all, they were awfully lame.

Holding K-12 Hostage

2012-01-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

When I ask people to think about why we grade students, they tend to provide three reasons:

Motivate students
Rank and Sort students
Provide feedback for students

In short, we have no business using grades to do number 1 or 2 and grading has never done a good job of 3. I've written more about this here.

A fourth rational for grading comes up regularly. In fact, you might have even made this argument:

We need testsandgrades in K-12 so our children can get into post secondary education.

I have a couple responses:

Some of the worst forms of teaching and learning exist in post secondary colleges and universities. The only anecdotal evidence we might need to prove this is for those who attended post secondary to remember their experiences in lecture halls that could fit 50 to 400 students at a time. Holding K-12 hostage to such pathetic standards seems irresponsible.

While it's true that some universities look at some of the grades from a student's high school transcript, how many universities look at a student's grades from elementary? Middle school? or even grade 11? Because the only grades that post-secondary institutions look at is from the final year of high school, K-11 can and should be liberated from the clutches of post-secondary's obsession with testsandgrades.

I know more than a couple university professors and I know a president of a local college, and I know that they would all far rather K-12 focus less on testsandgrades and more on inspiring students to have a love for learning. In other words, university folk understand that "a preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but detrimental to, a focus on learning." (Alfie Kohn). The research confirms that an orientation towards improving your learning, rather than proving it sets children up for the most success. In learning oriented classrooms, students are less worried about looking smart and more about becoming smart. The most successful teachers and students understand that proving how good you are over and over again is an inferior use of your time especially when you could be using your time getting better.

We have a dangerous pre-occupation with preparation. College does not begin in kindergarten -- kindergarten begins in kindergarten. Children in middle school are not simply miniature versions of high school or university students. Children of all ages have their own unique, individual needs. What might be appropriate for a high school student might be developmentally inappropriate for a middle or elementary student.

In Alberta, only one-third of students attend university. Does it make sense to mold K-12 public education, which is for everyone, in the image of post-secondary education where two-thirds of our students will not attend.

To sum up, I'm sick and tired of being told I can't innovate and improve my assessment practices in K-12 because of post secondary's archaic grading practices.

#comments4kids

2012-01-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

I have found success with engaging students in reading and writing via blogging.

Reading and writing are social activities that allow us to communicate with others. When we write something, we always have an audience in mind, even if it's ourselves. However, most of the time, students write for other people, and it's even cooler if those other people were more than just their teacher or their peers sitting next to them.

This is why I have had success engaging even reluctant readers and writers in blogging.

One of the hooks I often use is the world map widget that I have on my blog. This map allows a blogger to track the visitors and their locations. When I show this to students, they are often fascinated by how the written word can reach distances that are truly on the other side of the planet.

The red dots indicate the places people have accessed my blog while the ones that are blinking indicate people who are visiting my blog right now. I have yet to meet a child (or adult) that did not find this pretty darn cool.

I have helped a number of students start their own blog, and one of the first things I help them set up is this world widget. Once they have this widget, I get them to write up a blog post. Many of the kids are so excited to publish their post that they rush to their world widget to see if anyone visits - only to see nothing happen.

The problem is that publishing a blog post and waiting for visitors is like hitch-hiking in the Sahara -- no one knows you're there.

This is why it helps for the teacher to be a part of some kind of network. While there is no one right tool to tap into a network of connected people, I have found Twitter to be an excellent companion to blogging.

Once a student publishes a post, I then hop on Twitter and post a Tweet to the hashtag #comments4kids. After I do this, watching their world widget becomes a whole lot more fun!

One of the first times I did this, I had a student who blogged about wanting to get an Iguana, but wanted to ask others for their advice about Iguana's -- when I tweeted his post, he watched his world widget and shouted "someone from France is reading my post!" His smile was from ear to ear. This was a very reluctant reader and writer authentically engaged in reading and writing. Because these red dots kept showing up on the world map, our discussion turned into a geography lesson. When the kids themselves are asking the question, "where's Estonia?" you know you are doing something right.

Do I count how many visits they get on their blog? No.

Have I established a complex algorithm that combines their visits to comment ration? No.

Do I use a rubric that allows me to generate pre & post measurements that allow me to quantify the value added? No.

So how do I know this stuff is successful? If my students show a desire to go on reading and writing through blogging when class is over, then I know I'm on the right track. Where there is interest achievement tends to follow.

No testsandgrades required.

For more on how powerful comments for kids can be, read Kathy Cassidy's post It's Never "Just a Comment".

TedTalk on Finland

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

For more on Finland, check out these posts:

Paradoxes of Finland Phenomenon

Sahlberg's Ten Big Ideas on Finland

What Finland has *not* done

Irmeli Halinen on Finnish Curriculum

Pasi Sahlberg on Finland and Alberta

Accountability

Finland's Paradoxes

What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success

The Children Must Play

The Folly of Ranking Schools by Test Scores

2012-01-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

This was written by Alfie Kohn for the Calgary Herald in February of 2005.

by Alfie Kohn

There’s bad news in today’s Outlook section. It’s not that the test scores listed there are low. It’s that the test scores are listed there at all.

As a rule, the less people know about education – and about exams like the Provincial Achievement Test -- the more willing they are to judge schools (and students) on the basis of such scores. It’s not that standardized test results don’t tell us anything. They’re very accurate measures of the size of the houses near a given school. As many researchers, including Todd Rogers at the University of Alberta, have shown, a school’s test scores can be predicted with reasonable accuracy if one knows the socioeconomic status of its students – and nothing about what happens in its classrooms.

But what if a school’s scores are rising over the years despite having roughly the same kind of students? In that case, the results aren’t meaningless -- they’re worrisome. Better results on the P.A.T. may actually be a bad sign because of what had to be sacrificed in order to make that happen.

Those numbers in the Outlook section do not reflect academic excellence. Indeed, teachers in Alberta and elsewhere often tell me that some of their most impressive students don’t perform well on these exams, whereas other kids get terrific scores just because they’re good at taking tests. The research confirms this: Three studies have found that high standardized test scores often go hand-in-hand with superficial thinking. What’s true of individuals is true of schools. Some of the best may not be at the top of those rankings precisely because they don’t stuff kids full of testable (and forgettable) facts. Rather than slavishly covering the provincial curriculum, teachers in great schools help children to discover ideas. Their students are learning what it means to think like a scientist or an historian, not merely memorizing dates and definitions.

Indeed, in visiting Saskatchewan and Manitoba, I’ve been impressed by the nearly complete absence of standardized tests there. They spend their time and resources on teaching rather than testing, and their schools are better off as a result.

Any attempt to reduce learning to numbers is misguided. Schools just can’t be rated like laundry detergents. As one U.S. educational researcher put it, “Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning.” The damage is compounded when those numbers are test scores. Exams like the P.A.T. tend to measure what matters least.

Worst of all is using these scores not just to rate but to rank, such that the emphasis is on who’s beating whom. This encourages a toxic competition between schools. Educators are less inclined to work together to do a better job at educating all our children because they’re forced to worry about their relative standing.

There are only two explanations for the wretched ritual of publishing these scores. The first is simple ignorance. The second is some sort of political agenda – exactly the kind, come to think of it, pursued by the Fraser Institute, which wants to privatize everything in sight and privilege profit-oriented enterprises over democratic public institutions.

Frankly, if my goal were to make public schools look bad and pave the way for vouchers, I would do exactly what they’ve done: use the language of “accountability” to push for more emphasis on testing -- and set schools against one another.

But a right-wing think tank can’t accomplish this alone. It needs Alberta Learning notonly to force schools to give all those tests but to boil down the results into summary statistics that are ripe for publication. (The State of Connecticut refuses to do this in order to thwart those who would try to reduce schools to a single set of numbers.) Last week, Education Minister Gene Zwozdesky told a CBC interviewer that it’s “patently unfair to make comparisons between schools based on scores.” The question is why he is pursuing policies that facilitate just such comparisons.

The Fraserites also need newspapers like the Herald to do their dirty work for them by publishing these charts. The effects aren’t always easy to see or measure, but every year about this time, Calgary’s schools become a little worse because this paper leads parents and teachers to focus on test scores rather than on more meaningful indicators of quality.

Elsewhere, I’ve written at length about those indicators. Is the focus more on understanding ideas from the inside out (rather than on memorizing facts)? Do students experience their schools as caring communities? Do teachers create democratic classrooms so kids can participate in making decisions? Do children often learn together (rather than alone)? Do parents receive qualitative accounts of kids’ improvement (rather than traditional grades)?

By contrast, the most constructive thing you can do with those pages in today’s Outlook section is use them to wrap fish. The numbers printed there are not only meaningless but dangerously misleading.

One figure, though, is worth looking at: the percentage of “exams not written” at each school. When that number begins to climb, it will mean that Calgary-area parents are realizing that they’ve contributed to the problem by allowing their children to write the exams. When enough of them get organized and decide to boycott the P.A.T.s, Alberta Learning will ask nervously, “What if we gave a test and nobody came?”

That will mean the flourishing of grassroots democracy and a more sensible set of educational priorities. And that, finally, will be something worth reporting.

Grading Moratorium: Mark Skelding

2012-01-10T05:00:00.001-07:00

Mark Skelding has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Professor at Southern New Hampshire University-Vermont Center’s Field-Based Graduate Program in Education, in Colchester, Vermont.

At what stage of abolishing grading are you?

I often wonder if the marking period during high school, when I deliberately tried for all B’s and no A’s, and succeeded, might have been the actual beginning of my fight against grading. I currently teach graduate level courses on formative assessment and grading reform for practicing teachers coming back to school to get their Master’s Degrees. As I tell my students in the grading course, I vowed years ago, after starting to uncover during my 12 years as a middle school teacher what I now know about grading, that I would never grade anyone ever again. Although our program could move to a Pass/Fail (which is still grading) system, school districts in our area still require letter grades as a measure for whether to pay for/reimburse a teacher for the courses they take. Consequently, we still give a final grade. But it is the only grade the teacher receives at any time during the course, and it is a standards-based grade based on their progress (growth) score which they are sustaining at the time the course ends … and I don’t give the grade. I will explain below.

Why do you want to/did you abolish grading?

One title I’ve given my work is “The Theoretical, Technical and Ethical Reasons for Abandoning Grading.” Grades and the whole notion of grading student learning are flawed on every level you can think of. Most obvious is the unfair subjectivity and arbitrary decision-making involved in the practice. But also, theoretically, systems thinking, constructivist learning theory, and cognitive science all reveal that learning is formative. Evaluation (grading) is summative, the antithesis of formative. Technically, practices such as averaging, weighting, composite grading and giving zeros are all unfair on varying levels. And ethically, and I would argue morally, grading and use of cut-score-scales is wrong because it is an inherently discriminatory practice. Please see my accompanying articles that explain each of these in more detail.

The overriding reason I want to abolish grading is because it is a social justice issue. I firmly believe that, whether knowingly, willingly or unwittingly, it is an insidious means by which we are helping reinforce and sustain a class system in this country.

What do you do in place of grading?

The system I’ve been teaching, and simultaneously using with our students, is a formative, standards-based progress scoring approach. Each of our courses is comprised of a set of standards which drives the instructor’s planning and instruction, and which students are given multiple opportunities throughout the course to continue showing growth in. The students are given a course standards checklist at the beginning of the course, the scoring-to-grade process is explained to them first thing, and once they understand how they will be getting graded they determine their own cut- score-scale from which their final progress grade will be determined.

From then on the instructor is responsible for designing learning opportunities that engage the students in those standards every step of the way, and the students are responsible for taking advantage of those opportunities to continue growing in those skills. The students know that their final grade will be based on their continuing progress. In order to be given credit for making progress, every time they are assessed they must show new evidence in their course portfolio, new and different from the body of work looked at for their prior assessment, that they have made progress in the standards since the last time they were assessed.

Periodically during the course the students, whether through self-assessment or peer assessment, share their accumulating body of work (course portfolio) and are assessed on whether their latest body of work shows that they have grown/progressed/ advanced in some way in each of the course standards since the last time their checklist was completed. Their course standard checklist is then marked accordingly.

At the end of the course a final assessment occurs, and it is that final assessment that then gets converted into a final grade (evaluation). And that grade is an individualized, criterion-referenced progress grade (as opposed to a norm-referenced attainment grade which typical cut-score-grading scale grades are) that is simply based on the number of course standards the student is showing sustained progress in at the time of reporting.

So for example, if there are 8 course standards and the student can show during the final assessment that she is sustaining progress in 6 of the 8 standards, she then plugs her progress score of 6 (out of 8) into her personal cut-score-grading scale she gave herself at the beginning of the course and gives herself a grade. If her personal cut-score-scale is 7-8=A, 5-6=B, 3-4=C, 1-2=D, 0=F, she would give herself a B, which we then submit to the Registrar’s Office.

What fears do/did you have about abolishing grading?

Now? Absolutely none. In the beginning I think my greatest discomfort was feeling like I was doing something wrong by not conforming to the system. I no longer have any of those feelings, especially with what I now know about grades and grading.

What challenges do you encounter with abolishing grading?

Although I still encounter some teachers who are set in their belief in the validity, reliability and fairness of grades and grading, most teachers I work with are begging for a better way for accounting for student learning. The biggest challenge for me in my current position is teachers feeling that there are systemic obstacles preventing them from moving forward. These obstacles range from parents wanting grades because that’s what they had when they were in school, to students wanting grades because that’s all they’ve known and in their minds the only thing that counts, to electronic grade books that force teachers to have to give grades (which we reveal during the course can be gotten around).

I remind them that if we can be doing what we’re doing with them at the university level, a level of schooling where typically there is an extremely conservative belief in/emphasis on grades, then they can be doing the same at their school.

Are you willing to provide contact information for others interested in abolishing
grading?

Yes. Please feel free to contact me at m.skelding@snhu.edu.

Opting out of Grading

2012-01-09T05:00:00.001-07:00

My daughter will be attending kindergarten next year and I'm starting to think about how I will support her in making school a place that will nurture and grow her natural intrinsic desire to go on learning.

Let me be clear, I'm as vocal of an advocate for public education as you'll find, but I understand with crystal clarity what Sir Ken Robinson was getting at when he asked the question Do Schools Kill Creativity? or why John Taylor Gatto wrote a book titled Weapons of Mass Instruction.

As an educator who abolished grading in 2004 and initiated a Grading Moratorium, I have an acute understanding for how grading sabotages learning. Because of this, I have drafted this letter for my daughter's future teachers.

Dear teacher,

Kayley loves to learn and is very excited to start school this year.

Because the case against grades has a wealth of anecdotal evidence and scientific research, I am requesting that Kayley's assessments and evaluations only include formative comments. This means that Kayley's learning would never be reduced to a symbol (such as a number or letter). This includes individual assignments, quizzes, tests and her report card.

As a family that plays an active role in Kayley's learning, the best feedback we can receive about Kayley's learning is to see her learning. No reductionist data is required.

If you are interested in learning more about the case against grades, I would be happy to provide you with these resources, and if your school's assessment and reporting policies make this request problematic, I would like the opportunity to discuss this further. Feel free to e-mail me at joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com

I look forward to working with you to support Kayley's natural intrinsic desire to go on learning.

Sincerely,

Joe Bower

Taking a short break

2011-12-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of classes before Christmas Holidays. Over the break, I am going to take a break from blogging. My wife and I are expecting our second child sometime after Christmas. I will be taking a two month leave of absence from teaching to be at home with my family.

I continue to enjoy blogging and want to thank everyone for dropping by and reading.

Daily posts will return on January 9, 2012. I look forward to my third year of blogging with you.

Happy Holidays!

Taught to think

2011-12-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

This letter to the editor appeared in the Sylvan Lake (Alberta, Canada) News on November 23, 1961:

At the regular montly meeting of the Women's Institute, W.W. Blick, principal of the Sylvan Lake School, was the guest speaker.

He stated that education to many of us meant the sum total of all that could be remembered of what was in the text books and the teachers' lectures.

Children are still graded on examinations and parents are concerned mainly on that grading. In this respect, education is failing because it does not teach people how to think.

In this, Mr. Blick stated, we are ahead of the Russians. They are not teaching their people how to think because a thinking socieity would not tolerate a totalitarian society. We know and feel that the future of our world is as H.G. Wells put it, " A race between education and catastrophe."

It is going to take a thinking people in some of the problems that face the world - unemployment, world trade, population pressures. If these problems are to be solved, the young and old must be taught to think.

Testing and teaching are at odds

2011-12-21T18:48:00.000-07:00

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come.

--Lord Molson, British politician (1903-1991)

The Washington Post ran a piece On Leadership July 18 and 19, 2011, that featured responses to the Atlanta cheating scandal from Dan Ariely, Arne Duncan, Howard Gardner and Steven Pearlstein.

Despite the evidence mounting against high stakes, standardized testing, Arne Duncan and many other advocates for test and punish accountability want to stay the course with their "despite cheating scandals, testing and teaching are not at odds" mantra. So powerful is Duncan's need for consonance, his reaction to disconfirming evidence is to criticize, distort and dismiss cheating as the sole responsibility of those individuals who did the cheating.

In other words, Duncan is saying "mistakes were made, but not by me." This mental jockeying is known as confirmation bias, and at the moment Duncan is its poster boy.

False dichotomies make choosing easy. Duncan frames his argument very carefully -- either you are for accountability (with him) or you are against accountability (against him). But in reality, the situation is far from this simple.

In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan writes about "the ostrich instruction":

We all recognize the human desire at times to prefer ignorance to knowledge, and to deal with conflict and change by imagining it out of existence... In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn't exist and that we don't have to change... A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compels us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflict we just don't want to deal with.

Sometimes it's the leaders with the most power and responsibility who are the most blind because they believe they know what they were doing -- or feel like they have to look like they know what they are doing.

In their book Mistakes Were Made but not by Me, Carol Tavris Elliot Aronson write:

In a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information about George Bush or John Kerry, Drew Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored. These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observations that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them.

Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

In light of this, it's not surprising that when test and punish accountability supporters like Arne Duncan are faced with evidence that shows cheating as an inevitable and inherent characteristic of high stakes testing, they simply turn to discrediting the facts and become even more committed to their own argument. At this point, I'll be fair to Duncan and say that this behavior is as predictable as it is unfortunate, especially if he believes staying the course is his only option. Because people become more certain they are right if they can't undo it, nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

At this point, I'm reminded of what Edward De Bono meant when he said:

If you never change your mind, why have one?

This is precisely why we need to listen to people like Bob Schaeffer from Fairtest who say:

The failure of NCLB and its state-level clones cannot be reversed by “staying the course,” “raising the bar” or any of the other faith-based notions frequently invoked by high-stakes testing true-believers.

Think for yourself!

2011-12-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

This is precisely why we need to seek dissent and encourage our students to think for themselves.

Grading Moratorium: Carol Barton

2011-12-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Carol Barton has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Carol Barton
Grade 4
Summerland, British Columbia, Canada

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

For the last two years I have not included letter grades on student report cards. I have not used letter grades to mark student work for many years. I recently completed my Master’s Degree in the summer of 2010 - my research project involved developing an alternative reporting tool to complement letter grades as I was unable to eliminate letter grades completely due to Ministry Policy. I followed up my research project by implementing a pilot project for the 2010-2011 school year where I did not give letter grades on the traditional report card. Parents were given the option to request letter grades for their child if they wanted them.

I have made presentations to my School Board and to representatives from the elementary schools in my district who were part of a 'reporting and grading' committee. Since the committee meetings I've been invited to speak to intermediate teachers at several schools within the district. For now this has been put on hold because of our job action – we are currently not writing first term report cards. I have had great support from our Superintendent, the Director of Instruction, my school administrators, colleagues and parents.

I found an interesting website from Damian Cooper, an independent education consultant from Ontario, who specializes in helping schools and school districts improve their instructional and assessment skills. In his video Does the Drive to Quantify Learning Get in the Way? Damian makes a good point about not being able to eliminate letter grades; but I hope, however, that one day we will be in the position to report student progress without having to use letter grades:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYFiWJ4DtVU

Damian's website has other resources that are also interesting:

http://www.damiancooperassessment.com/index.html

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

The biggest reason I have for not using letter grades is the negative effect that letter grades had on my students. I have included a section from my research project to explain:

At least fifteen research reviews in the last twenty-five years have documented the impact letter grades have on students (Fuchs & Fuchs 1986; Natriello, 1987; Crooks, 1988; Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, Kulik & Morgan, 1991; Dempster, 1991, 1992; Elshout-Mohr, 1994; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Nyquist, 2003; Brookhart, 2004; Allal & Lopez, 2005; Köller, 2005; Brookhart, 2007; Wiliam, 2007; Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Shute, 2008 as cited in Wiliam & Leahy, 2009). The research described how grades reduce the natural curiosity of students to learn. Letter grades decrease students' desire for challenge, and grades diminish their quality of thinking. Schools tend to rely on motivating students extrinsically with grades and positive reinforcement like awards for good marks. This diminishes the students' natural curiosity to learn as their intrinsic motivation, or natural curiosity is extinguished and extrinsic motivation involving getting good grades and having parents excited with good results is now their goal. It is interesting to note that researchers found the more students were pressured to get good marks the less likely they were to challenge themselves. Another downside to letter grades described by researchers is that grades have a tendency to diminish the quality of student thinking. Kohn (1999) wrote about studies which found that if students lost curiosity in what they were learning because of grades, it is likely that their thinking would not be as powerful. One particular group of studies he referred to discovered that students who received grades were considerably less creative than students who received written feedback but no grades. Stiggins pointed out that if assessment was to support student achievement then letter grades should not be a part of a balanced assessment system. He wrote:

If they are to have a productive impact on the learner, the nature of our assessment practices must continue to evolve in specific directions. For instance, the assessment results must go beyond merely providing judgements about to providing rich descriptions of student performance.

What do you do in replace of grading?

I strongly believe in using assessment for learning. Again I've included part of my paper to explain. Researchers (Earl, 2003; Marzano, 2008; Stiggins, 1999, 2008; Wiliam & Leahy, 2009; Wiliam, 2006) are adamant about the use of assessment for learning to improve student achievement. When evidence about student achievement is obtained and used by teachers and students to make decisions regarding the next steps in the learning process student achievement is inevitable. A critical difference with AFL practices is that the student, not an adult, is one of the key users of assessment data and therefore a key decision maker in their education. It was previously thought that parents, teachers, school leaders, and policy makers made the most important decisions regarding assessment data; however, years of research have shown otherwise (Stiggins, 2008). Three important aspects of AFL are to have the students work in collaboration with their teachers, to self-assess, and to know what they are presently learning and what will come next. The benefits of AFL are multi-faceted because the format allows for student success and it increases student achievement and improves student confidence, motivation and learning; something letter grades cannot do for all students.

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

I combine the results of assessment rubrics from student work, which indicate four levels of achievement: not yet meeting, minimally meeting/approaching, fully meeting and exceeding; with student self-assessments and reflections, quizzes, and tests, oral contributions, and teacher observations to see where the students are in their learning.

What fears did you have about abolishing grading?

I approached my research project with a sense of hope not fear. I had resented using letter grades for so long that I was excited to actually not use them. I was also curious to see what the reactions of the parents would be. Since starting on my 'no letter-grade' journey I have made connections with other teachers who have eliminated letter grades as well and I've been pleasantly surprised to have similar results – no negative reactions from parents; in fact many were very supportive.

What challenges do/did you encounter with abolishing grading?

I don't really consider it a big challenge, but the high achieving students (especially straight A students) and most often their parents, though not always, liked to have letter grades. This wasn't a big issue for me because of the option to request letter grades if they were wanted. I included the letter grades on a separate, very plain, document and had only written comments on the official report card. I was given the suggestion by another teacher who has eliminated letter grades as well. It is a subtle way to show that letter grades really don't tell you much about student achievement (what did they do well if they received an 'A', do they have areas to work on?, etc.)

Are you willing to provide contact information (e-mail, Twitter, blog, Skype, etc) for others who are interested in abolishing grading?

Yes, I can be reached via email: cbarton@summer.com

Who needs tests?

2011-12-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

Some people need standardized testing because without them they would know nothing about their schools.

This says less about how good the tests are and more about how little some people know about their schools and their children's learning.

This is precisely why the need for testing intensifies the further away you get from the children.

Tidy test scores not true indicators of real learning

2011-12-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

My letter to the editor appeared in the Edmonton Journal:

Our new Premier Alison Redford has committed to ending Grade 3 and 6 provincial achievement exams while offering “regular but sensitive measurements of academic performance and expected outcomes.”

The case against standardized testing goes something like this: It’s not that standardized test scores don’t tell us anything. A child’s test score is a reliable and accurate way of assessing the size of the houses near a school. This means that too many tests are reporting on what children bring to school and not necessarily what they learn at school.

It’s also important to note that a correct answer on a test does not necessarily signal understanding, and a wrong answer does not necessarily signal an absence of understanding. Real learning is really messy. Standardized tests are nothing if not tidy. See the problem?

The bane of reducing learning to a test score is that it inevitably overvalues whatever can be quantified and undervalues what cannot.

This is why any attempt to reduce learning to numbers is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful, and anyone who calls the process of reducing the messiness of teaching and learning to a tidy test score a "public service" is neglectfully ignorant, willfully blind or outright lying.

Ultimately, accountability should be about transparency. That is, people should be privy to the information they need to get a feel for the quality of their schools.

Because standardized testing conceals far more than it reveals, it cannot tell us what we need to know about our schools, which provides Alison Redford with all the mandate she needs to rightfully do away with the grade 3 and 6 Provincial Achievement Tests.

Open letter to Peter Cowley

2011-12-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Peter Cowley is the Director of School Performance Studies with the Fraser Institute. Here is an open letter I wrote to him. Feel free to help me send this link via Twitter to Peter Cowley and The Fraser Institute.

Dear Peter Cowley,

Despite the research that builds the case against the use of standardized testing as a measure for the quality of a school, you continue to use Provincial Achievement Test scores to rank and sort schools.

Because you are a supporter of standardized testing and your website says, "If it matters... measure it", I would like to invite you to take the Math 30-1 and English 30-1 Diploma Exams this January so that your results may be published for all to see.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Joe Bower
Teacher, Farmer, Albertan

Provincial Achievement Tests are optional

2011-12-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

In Alberta, the grade 3, 6 and 9 Provincial Achievement Tests are optional.

To exercise your democratic right as an Albertan parent, you can opt out of Provincial Achievement Tests by simply writing a letter to your child's principal. As a parent, here is the letter I have drafted:

Dear Principal,

My child will not participate in writing any of the Provincial Achievement Tests.

Sincerely,

Joe Bower

You'll notice that I am not required to provide the reasons why I am doing this. Instead, I am only required to inform the principal that my child will not participate.

If your child's teacher has chosen to count the Provincial Achievement Test as a part of the report card mark, here is the letter I have drafted in anticipation for this:

Dear Principal,

My child will not participate in writing any of the Provincial Achievement Tests. Because the PAT is counted as a portion of the report card, I request that my child write the teacher's test in place of the PAT.

Sincerely,

Joe Bower

For more on Provincial Achievement Tests here are a couple posts:

Assessment and Provincial Achievement Tests

University of Saskatchewan waives PATs and Diploma exams

Alberta teacher excuses their child from PAT

Accountability and the Provincial Achievement Tests: Myth and Reality

Are Provincial Achievement Tests in Alberta High Stakes Exams?

The fear of Provincial Achievement Testing

The Folly of Provincial Achievement Testing

Exempting from Testing in Alberta

Alberta Provincial Achievement Test Taking Tips

Alberta axes written portion of PATs

Teachers know best

Standardized Testing is Dumbing Down our Schools

Misuse of Provincial Achievement Tests

Thomas Lukaszuk on Standardized Testing

Enough of tiger moms and wolf dads

2011-12-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Amy Chua gained some serious attention when The Wall Street Journal ran her story Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.Yong Zhao wrote a brilliant critique of Chua's take on Chinese parenting, and now so has Berlin Fang. This was written by Berlin Fang and appeared on ChinaDaily.com here:

By Berlin Fang

Thomas Friedman wrote in his column, "How about better parents?" (The New York Times, Nov19), that parent involvement is key to student success.

Fed up with the status quo of American education, and desperate for an alternative model,some readers peppered the word "Asian" throughout the comments section for Friedman'sarticle. One reader wrote: " the question among the coaches was the usual, why were so many of our top students are Asian. I asked when was the last time they had an Asian parentcomplain about too much homework."

This statement, however, proves nothing except the theory of relativity in human opinions.Asian parents in the United States rarely complain about children's homework because it is apicnic compared to what we had to go through in our younger days in our home country. But inAsian countries, like any other, complaints abound. In China, I constantly hear parentscomplain that their children cannot go to bed till 11 pm because they have too manyassignments.

Active involvement of Chinese parents is at best a myth, and the myth is running wild in themedia. After discussions on the "Tiger Mom" (Yale Professor Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymnsof the Tiger Mom), the Chinese media recently brought to light a certain "wolf dad", Hong Kong-based businessman Xiao Baiyou, who used chicken feather dusters to spank three of hischildren into Peking University, one of China's top institutions of higher learning.

First tigers and now wolves, I suppose we'll get the entire animal kingdom covered pretty soon.Such reports of Spartan parenting instill fear among Western parents and complacency amongtheir Chinese counterparts, none of which is healthy or justifiable.

Generally speaking, Chinese parents lag far behind their American peers in participating in theeducation of their children. In the Chinese countryside, many parents leave home to earn aliving as migrant workers. Their children thus live with grandparents, who often have little or noeducation. Pre-school is either unavailable or expensive. Many such children, often called "left-behind children", grow up without either proper parenting or school education.

Though children in middle class families live with parents, real involvement is far from desirable.Many Chinese families in towns and cities are dual-income families, some by necessity, othersby choice. Some American moms quit their jobs after childbirth to take care of their children.Chinese moms often quit their children to take care of their jobs. While parents are busy withtheir jobs or careers, many children are brought up to a large extent by grandparents, or"outsourced" to private tutors or even nannies.

In either situation, a predominantly materialistic worldview drives parents to spend their timeand energy making money to "guarantee" their children's future. Most spend money generouslyon children's education, buying them good things and sending them to private classes. Moneycan buy some relief from the guilt of staying on the margins of their children's development, butchildren do not get what they really need from parents: their time, for instance.

Friedman quotes a report by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) thatparent-child reading time correlates to student achievement in PISA tests. When was the lasttime you saw a Chinese parent returning with bags of entertainment reading from libraries orbookstores as American parents do? How often does a Chinese parent actually read a booktogether with his/her child?

Many parents even forbid their children from reading "useless" books such as novels, fairytales or poems for fear that such reading will distract students from preparing for exams.

The wrong focus on exams frees parents from participating in their children's education. Apartfrom not reading, parents don't work with children on school projects, because much ofhomework is exam-related which children are supposed to work on individually.

Parents' role is thus reduced to that of an alarm clock - to prompt children to do this or that atcertain hours of the day. No wonder, nannies can do substitute parenting. Fortunately, even analarm clock has its virtues. Chinese parents do a fairly good job of ensuring their childrenspend adequate time studying. Such increased time on educational tasks partially explains whythey excel in international benchmarking tests.

That being said, involvement can be deeper and richer in a child's path of growth. Chineseparents should spend more time with their children, rather than keeping time for them like aclock. Parents should work with children as a developing person, not just a test-taker. Parentsought to meet the kinetic, artistic, mental, social, psychological and spiritual needs of theirchildren.

Remember that children are human beings in stages of development. So why not forget abouttiger moms and wolf dads, and focus on being human parents instead?

The author is a US-based instructional designer, literary translator and columnist writing oncross-cultural issues.

---------------------

You can read more about more here:

And you thought the Tiger Mother was Tough

A Memoir Of A Tiger Mother's Quest for Perfection

I have written a number of posts on rethinking discipline that act as sharp critiques of the Tiger Moms and Wolf Dads in this world.

I also suggest you read Alfie Kohn's book Unconditional Parenting.

Why I don't like the Edublog Awards

2011-12-15T12:55:00.001-07:00

Because I believe learning should always be framed as a collaborative activity and never a competitive one, I am critical of the Edublog awards.

Before you run off hating me, I would ask that you suspend judgment long enough to at least hear me out -- then you can run off hating me.

I realize this isn't going to win me many fans, and I'm likely to lose followers on Twitter and subscribers to my blog, but I guess that would be my point. How many people have jumped on the Edublog Award bandwagon and think it's a good idea? Is anyone out there giving pause long enough to think about whether educational leaders should be "recognizing excellence" in a way that pits us against each other as we vie for artificially scarce awards?

That I can count on one hand the number of people who publicly speak their doubts about these awards, leads me to believe that many have resigned themselves to groupthink or simply don't feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Either way, this is can't be okay.

There are many responses to my criticism for the Edublog Awards. Here are a couple followed by my rebuttal:

Competition might be bad for kids, but we are adults.

Even if this were true, there is an award for "The Best Student Blog". This year, five children who attend K-12 schools somewhere in the world named Jaden, Miriam, Jake, Jarrod and Gemma were pit against each other so adults could vote for their favorite. Would this be an appropriate way to "recognize excellence" in your classroom? If not, then why is this okay? On top of this, scientific research and anecdotal evidence both tell us that collaboration trumps competition. Always. This is true for children and adults alike.
It's also important to note that the children are always watching. While we flood Twitter with our support for this competition, we are modelling for our students and colleagues that competition is more important than collaboration, recognition is something you get when you defeat others and success is arbitrarily scarce.

Why do some people feel compelled to rain on others' parade? Can't we recognize excellence?

Labelling doubts about Edublog Awards as a personal attack on the winners misrepresents the issue as personal when it is a systemic problem. The issue isn't over who was nominated or who won, rather, the real issue is that anyone is nominated or that anyone wins or loses. I don't disparage the winners anymore than the losers (full disclosure: I was nominated) -- but I do wish that this kind of recognition was not artificially scarce and dispersed to only a select, popular few.

Can't we celebrate excellence? Why are you so against naming names?

I'm not arguing that nobody can be named. In fact, I'm all for recognizing excellence and naming lots of names. But I am against the notion that we arbitrarily name only a select few names while arbitrarily excluding others. Recognizing excellence and declaring winners are not the same thing.

So if you're against awards, does this mean you will not accept awards? Does this mean your children will not accept awards?

That it is really, really hard for people to say 'no thank you' to being nominated or winning should tell us something about the bullying nature of awards. Someone who turns down a nomination or an award is likely to be seen as ungrateful and someone who does not win or is not nominated and criticizes is likely to be labelled jealous. Either way, the idea that we should compete for artificially scarce recognition remains unscathed. The status quo has remarkable momentum.

I have seen with my own eyes how awards can rupture relationships between winners and losers. I've seen people placed in situations where they were made to win over and conquer their peers and they wanted nothing to do with the situation. This sounds awfully like bullying to me. This is precisely why I helped abolish award ceremonies at one of my previous schools. Chris Wejr has a remarkable list of links on rethinking award ceremonies and has started a movement for Honouring All Students. What's good for the kids is equally good for the adults.

These awards allow us to expand our Professional Learning Networks by introducing us to new blogs.

I agree. It's true. These awards can be used to grow your network but I would argue that this is better done through collaboration rather than competition. Do we need the Oscars to tell us which movies to watch or Oprah to decide which books to read? If you want to find a good book, go to a library that has lots of books. If we really cared about expanding our PLNs, why not make the EduBlog Awards like the phone book or a dictionary where all blogs are listed for all to see all year long?

Our belief in the value of competition is built on a great number myths. It takes courage to cultivate a community of learners without resorting to killing it with competition.

Misuse of Provincial Achievement Tests

2011-12-15T05:00:00.002-07:00

I was listening to Alberta's Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk speak about the misuses of standardized test scores when I thought of a time I saw with my own eyes how standardized test scores are misused by high schools.

For nine years I taught at a middle school. Every April, we took our grade 8 students to the high school for an orientation in preparation for their transition to high school. Every year, the gym was packed with anxious grade 8 students. Every year, the slideshow presentation went through all the cool extra-curricular clubs and interesting courses the students could choose from.

Every year, one of those slides was a graph showing how this high school outperformed other high schools in the city on the Provincial Achievement and Diploma Exams. The narrative went something like this:

Come to our school because we have good test scores which means we take academics seriously and you'll get a better education here.

Every time I had to endure this rhetoric, I would look around the gymnasium to see if others were as disgusted by this misuse of test score data as I was, and colleagues of mine (who have a very good idea how I feel about all this) would look my way and give me a smirk and a shrug.

When I shared this experience with our former Education Minister Dave Hancock, he immediately asked me:

That is ridiculous. Who is holding them accountability for this misuse of scores?

My response:

No one. But I am talking to you.

After listening to our new Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk talk about how third parties like the Fraser Institute misuse standardized test scores, and seeing for myself how even schools misuse them -- my question to Lukaszuk is this:

Keeping in mind that asking the Fraser Institute to use standardized test scores responsibly is like asking an alcoholic to drink responsibly, what are you prepared to do to ensure that standardized test scores are not misused?

Confronting Poverty

2011-12-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

In the New York Times Opinion Pages, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske conclude their op-ed Class Matters. Why Won't We Admit It?

Other countries already pursue such strategies. In Finland, with its famously high-performing schools, schools provide food and free health care for students. Developmental needs are addressed early. Counseling services are abundant.

But in the United States over the past decade, it became fashionable among supporters of the “no excuses” approach to school improvement to accuse anyone raising the poverty issue of letting schools off the hook — or what Mr. Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Such accusations may afford the illusion of a moral high ground, but they stand in the way of serious efforts to improve education and, for that matter, go a long way toward explaining why No Child Left Behind has not worked.

Yes, we need to make sure that all children, and particularly disadvantaged children, have access to good schools, as defined by the quality of teachers and principals and of internal policies and practices.

But let’s not pretend that family background does not matter and can be overlooked. Let’s agree that we know a lot about how to address the ways in which poverty undermines student learning. Whether we choose to face up to that reality is ultimately a moral question.

To say that poverty is not an excuse for why children have trouble learning is to make excuses for not doing something about poverty. A "no excuses" attitude towards poverty is ultimately nothing more than a lack of commitment towards making things more equitable for children.

However, what good does it do to care about children, if we no longer give a shit about them when they become adults?

Diane Ravitch has a brilliant post here and Helen Ladd's paper Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence here.

Thomas Lukaszuk on Standardized Testing

2011-12-13T18:18:00.001-07:00

Here is an interview on CBC with Alberta's Minister of Education Thomas Lukaszuk on standardized testing.

Here are some key points made by Thomas Lukaszuk:

The misuse of standardized test results is concerning.
Initially, Provincial Achievement Tests were suppose to inform the province about how well the curriculum was taught, but there are third parties (like the Fraser Institute and the media) who use the results to rank and sort and blame and shame schools.
Raw scores on a standardized test does not take in to account the socio-economic conditions of the neighbourhood, how many children speak English as a second language, and how many children have special needs. Using these scores as a reflection for the quality of teaching misrepresents what is truly going on. In other words, these scores do not reflect the quality of teaching that goes on in the school.
Often superintendents and administrators place the strongest teachers in classrooms and schools that host the hardest to educate students, and yet their scores will remain low because of the context of their student population.
High scores tend to indicate a high level of parental engagement and high levels of literacy for children before they even come to school.
Alberta Education wants to make changes to the Provincial Achievement Testing so that they can get the information they need on Curriculum, but at the same time these tests don't get misused.
Provincial Achievement Tests are not designed to test the quality of teaching that takes place in a classroom.
Grade 3 and 6 Provincial Achievement Tests will no longer continue in their current format.
Parents deserve to know if the curriculum is being taught but also deserve to be protected from the unintended consequences that arise from the use of Provincial Achievement Test scores.

For more on Provincial Achievement Tests in Alberta:

Assessment and Provincial Achievement Tests

University of Saskatchewan waives PATs and Diploma exams

Alberta teacher excuses their child from PAT

Accountability and the Provincial Achievement Tests: Myth and Reality

Are Provincial Achievement Tests in Alberta High Stakes Exams?

The fear of Provincial Achievement Testing

The Folly of Provincial Achievement Testing

Exempting from Testing in Alberta

Alberta Provincial Achievement Test Taking Tips

Alberta axes written portion of PATs

Teachers know best

Standardized Testing is Dumbing Down our Schools

Making trouble

2011-12-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

The problem with teaching children to think for themselves is that they might start thinking for themselves.

Jumping through hoops

2011-12-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

This is precisely what test-based accountability looks like in the classroom.

ConnectED Canada

2011-12-10T05:00:00.001-07:00

ConnectED Canada will be a gathering of teachers, students, and parents designed to share innovative practices that are happening all around Canada. Rather than traditional presentations, this conference is built around conversations on how we can continue to move forward as educators.

I submitted an application to facilitate a discussion. Here is my proposal:

Affiliation:

Alberta Teachers' Association

Title of the Conversation:

Assessment is not a spreadsheet -- it's a conversation.

Short Description:

Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information. Because grading can only ever be experienced as reward or punishment, they have to go, and that’s okay because anecdotal evidence and scientific research have shown us that the best educators never need tests to collect information nor grades to share it.

Extended Description:

Are you tired of students asking you: "What's this question out of?" or "Is this for marks?" Ever been frustrated with students who see every learning experience you provide for them as just another chore? Have you experienced disappointment with students who continually avoid challenges and choose the lazy way out of learning? Have you felt discouraged with grade grabbing students who are unhappy even when they get 99% or students who couldn’t care less about receiving a failing grade?

Reflecting upon one's beliefs can be a very productive use of time, and I can think of no better time to do so than when we have come to mindlessly accept something as a given truth. When questions are no longer answered because questions are no longer being asked, it's time to pause and reflect. It’s time we stopped simply asking how we can grade better and start asking why we are grading at all.

Assessment and measurement are not the same thing. By definition, measuring is any attempt to reduce learning to a symbol on a fixed measurement scale, whereas the latin root for assessment is assidere which means ‘to sit beside’. Anecdotal evidence and scientific research is telling us that we waste far too much time ‘perfecting’ measurement while ignoring assessment.

Ultimately, grading conceals far more than it reveals. It’s time to abandon our mania for reducing everything to numbers and subscribe to something far more authentic and supportive of real learning.

My Struggle With Letter Grades

2011-12-09T05:00:00.001-07:00

This was written by Tia Henriksen who is a vice-principal of an elementary school. Tia blogs here.

by Tia Henriksen

Much of my teaching experience, prior to becoming a vice-principal was teaching primary students. When teaching primary students, we do not assign letter grades. Instead, we look at each prescribed learning outcome for each student on a continuum of learning: not yet within expectations, approaching expectations, meeting expectations, and exceeding expectations. I very rarely indicated a student was “exceeding expectations”, unless a child is quite far above in certain reading, writing, or math learning outcomes.

When I became a Vice-Principal, I had the opportunity to teach a variety of classes, some of which had to be given letter grades. I wasn’t all that comfortable giving letter grades, but I did it the way many teachers did at that time – gather many, many assignments, and give them each a score (I had a 1-4 levelling system – not letter grades), then add them all up at the end of the term and then average them all out, etc… and come up with a letter grade for that subject. This was not the worst method, but it was still not great. That was 5 years ago. I’ve learned a great deal since then and have not taught/assessed this way this year.

This year, I am teaching 4 classes to whom I have to give letter grades as a representation of their learning at the end of each term. I teach French to two Grade 5 classes and Health and Career Education to a Grade 5/6 class and a Grade 6 class. While these are all new subjects for me to teach, I feel it has been going well this year so far.

In the Health and Career Education classes, we’ve been discussing, working in groups, working individually, blogging, watching youtube videos, watching educational videos on learn360, and talking about what we’ve learned. The students have been motivated and have been learning.

In the French classes, we’ve been singing, talking, watching funny french youtube videos, making posters, making booklets, and asking and answering questions. We have been just generally enjoying ourselves along with our learning.

In addition, and possibly most importantly for many students, but especially those from inner-city schools, we have been building relationships in all four classes. We have been getting to know one another, our learning styles, our likes, our dislikes, our hobbies, and learning to trust one another. Sometimes, I must admit, the curriculum has taken second-fiddle to relationship-building since we only see one another for 2 – 50 minute blocks each week.

We’ve had some assignments which the students have self- and peer-evaluated. I have also evaluated some of these assignments, but not many, to be honest. Too often, the kids would ask, “Are we being marked on this?” or “Does this count for our mark?” I cringed each and every time I heard this question. And, I would respond, “Everything ‘counts’ – it’s all about our learning. The process is much more important than the product. Stop thinking so much about grades and start thinking more about your learning.” This response seemed to pacify them for the most part. The learning and excitement continued. We also do not have homework in my classes. We work on the work in class. It may take longer to do things, but I feel with all the other work they have in their other subjects, the last thing I wanted was to add more work on them at home with our class as well.

My students come up to me each day while I am on supervision and ask, “Do we have HACE (Health and Career Education) today?” They would either cheer (if I said yes) or moan (if I said no). Same with my French classes. They love our classes. They are motivated, they are learning, and they are having fun!

Yah, okay, now reporting time is coming and I am struggling. This is my struggle. I really don’t want to give these students grades for their work this term. It all seems so subjective to me. We’ve read so much on letter grades and how letter grades actually hinder their learning, not enhance/motivate the students. In a recent article,The Case Against Grades (http://bit.ly/tEeNRE), Alfie Kohn, asserts that,

“Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.”

Kohn goes on to discuss the effects grades have on students. In fact, he states that,

“when students from elementary school to college who are led to focus on grades are compared with those who aren’t, the results support three robust conclusions:

* Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.

* Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.

* Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.“ (Kohn, November, 2011).

Furthermore, Kohn goes on to state that,

“the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing.”

In today’s age of disengaged students, we need to do more to engage our students, not further disengage them and discourage them from challenging themselves and learning to the best of their ability.

One may think that there are not any alternatives. In fact, Kohn states that an alternative to giving letter grades is not a “utopian fantasy”. Some classes and schools are

“Replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or conferences — qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a conversation.”

Furthermore, with this new reporting practise, these schools have found that,

“their students are often more motivated and proficient learners, thus better prepared for college, than their counterparts at traditional schools who have been preoccupied with grades.”

While I would love our current system to be like the one described in this article, that is not the case. I will have to give letter grades to my students. As one way to mitigate the difficulties associated with giving students letter grades, Kohn says that

“although teachers may be required to submit a final grade, there’s no requirement for them to decide unilaterally what that grade will be. Thus, students can be invited to participate in that process either as a negotiation (such that the teacher has the final say) or by simply permitting students to grade themselves.”

What an interesting concept. I could have the students themselves grade their proficiency in the prescribed learning outcomes for the term. I wonder how accurately they would assess themselves. I wonder how parents would react? I wonder how the other teachers would respond?

Do you have experience having to give grades, not wanting to, and then finding another alternative? If so, what alternative have you used?

Testing is not teaching

2011-12-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

If a child learns something but no one is there to test them, did they learn anything?

#takethetest

2011-12-07T20:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a two part story where a School Board Trustee in Florida took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT.

Part 1: When an adult took standardized test forced on kids

Part 2: Revealed: The school board member who took standardized test

This story reminds me of an excerpt from Alfie Kohn's Confusing Harder With Better:

How many adults could pass these exams? How many high school teachers possess the requisite stock of information outside their own subjects? How many college professors, for that matter, or business executives, or state legislators could confidently write an essay about Mayan agricultural practices or divergent plate boundaries? We would do well to adopt (Deborah) Meier's Mandate: No student should be expected to meet an academic requirement that a cross section of successful adults in the community cannot.

(In the same spirit, I propose Kohn's Corollary to Meier's Mandate: All persons given to pious rhetoric about the need to "raise standards" and produce "world-class academic performance for the 21st century" not only should be required to take these exams themselves but must agree to have their scores published in the newspaper.)

On Tuesday, I came across this Will Richardson Tweet:

Richardson's tweet inspired my brief Twitter discussion with Alberta's Minister of Education Thomas Lukaszuk:

Join #takethetest and invite your politicians to take your state or province's standardized tests and publicize their results.

Resisting Resignation

2011-12-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

I often find myself teaching explosive children who are as lethal as they are insecure. After a full day of constantly de-escalating explosive behavior, I am often physically and psychologically exhausted.

Despite my dedication to working with children, I am not immune to feelings of frustration and resignation. To fight off these thoughts of despair and hopelessness, I often have to remind myself over and over again that:

The children who are hardest to like are often the ones who need us the most.

My friend Sean Grainger reminds me that Hurt people, hurt people. Rather than indicting them for their actions, we are better off asking them:

What has made you feel so bad in your life that you feel someone has to share your pain?

Grainger explains:

Behind every bully is first a victim, and we need to learn victim's stories if we are to understand their victim - turned - bully behavior. Once we have this insight we can begin to help victims heal; to deal with their pain so they aren't inclined to inflict pain on others.

We spend too much time dealing with bullies, and not enough time supporting victims. I have yet to meet even one child who entered the world wanting to hurt people.

Behind every bully is a victim with a story. If you want to break the bullying cycle, learn this story.

I also find refuge in Marilyn Watson's book Learning to Trust:

As adults, we believe that others like us when they joke with us, give us a soft nudge, tell us they care, do helpful things for us, ask about our lives and tell us about theirs, and make an effort to spend time with us. If it turns out that someone did any of these things in order to get us to do something for them, then we feel manipulated and mistrustful of them. The same is true for children. If we want our children to trust that we care for them, then we need to display our affection without demanding that they behave or perform in certain ways in return. It’s not that we don’t want and expect certain behavior; we do. But our concern or affection does not depend on it....

Martin Haberman calls this "conscious, premeditated caring", and he reports that it is characteristic of teachers who are successful in teaching children in poverty. "Such caring," he argues, "is not predicated on children always doing the right thing. On the contrary, it assumes they frequently will not. At that point, the professional caring springs into action and demonstrates to the child that he is worthy and capable - even at the lowest and worst moment of his offense". Others have called such caring unconditional love or unconditional regard. And it is this kind of caring that meets our students' basic need for belonging...

Knowing that all children want and need to belong - to be loved and protected by caring adults and to fit in with their peer group - can help us look through their troublesome behavior to see the vulnerable child behind the bothersome or menacing exterior.

It’s not easy to think of children who are misbehaving, particularly children who misbehave frequently, as vulnerable and needy; they often seem so powerful and defiant...

Children with history of insecure attachment to their caregivers build “working models” of relationships as coercive and of themselves as unworthy of care. These children are apt to withdraw from social relationships or become focused on satisfying their own needs through dependency, control or aggression. They look for ways to test our caring, often by refusing to comply with our most reasonable requests, and they fully expect us to fail their tests. They fail to appropriately receive our care and to believe in our care, and we frequently feel at a loss how to achieve a mutual or cooperative relationship with them.

If we try to teach children to want to be cooperative and prosocial by rewarding their good behavior and punishing or controlling their unacceptable behavior, we will only succeed in confirming their view of relationships as coercive and encourage their tendency to be self-focused. If we become angry and withdraw our affections or acceptance, we will further alienate them and reinforce their negative view of themselves. If, instead, we do nothing and simply let them withdraw from learning activities or behave inappropriately, we will likely grow to resent or dislike them and fail to help them develop cognitively, socially, or ethically. To help these children, we need to find a way to keep their negative working models of themselves and of relationships from becoming self-fulfilling prophesies.

From the perspective of attachment theory, to build the desire of these children to be cooperative and prosocial, we need to build a responsive and nurturing relationship with them; by so doing, we help them change their working models of themselves and relationships. The building of caring and trusting relationships becomes the most important goal in the socialization of these children. Of course, while we are building these relationships, we must find non-punitive ways to prevent the children who are aggressive and controlling from harming others and to encourage self-reliance and confidence in those who are withdrawn or dependent.

Might there be students who do not necessarily love me or my teaching?

Yes.

Might there be students who I do not necessarily love?

Yes.

Am I able to teach students who I might not love or might not love me?

Of course.

Do I allow my likes and dislikes to determine which children I dedicate my efforts?

Absolutely not.

I may not love all children, but I dedicate myself to respecting every one of them unconditionally. It's a lot harder to respect all children than it is to claim that you love them all, and it's even harder to maintain that unconditional respect and acceptance for children who spend most of their day behaving in disrespectful and unacceptable ways.

And yet this is precisely what the best educators do.

I'll finish with another gem from Sean Grainger:

As much as we need to prepare victims for a world that will hurt them, we need to prepare bullies for a world that will love them.

On my good days, I don't need to remind myself of these things, but on my bad days, it's sometimes what gets me through.

New elementary school in Red Deer

2011-12-06T12:29:00.001-07:00

New Timberlands school will have public library branch

(Red Deer, Alberta) – As part of this year’s capital budget, City Council approved funding for a public library branch in the Timberlands elementary school set to open in September 2014. Council approved up to $450,000 in 2013 for the new branch that will provide library services to the school and the public.

City support for the project allows for approximately 150 square metres of additional library space, and allows for the public library branch to operate similar to the arrangement at the G.H. Dawe Community Centre.

“This is a great opportunity for partnership in our community,” said Mayor Morris Flewwelling. “The library will be a great resource for students, and provide a gathering space for the community to use and to enjoy the programs offered by the public library board.”

A public library branch will create stronger connections in the community and emphasize the importance of literacy and education in the community, said Lawrence Lee, Board Chair of the Red Deer Public School Board.

“Literacy is a top priority for Red Deer Public Schools as it really is at the heart of education,” Lee said. “Working in partnership with the library and The City will be a tremendous benefit to all the students in our new school.”

Red Deer Public Library will operate the facility and offer public and school programs.

“We are very excited about this project and partnering with the school board and The City,” said Dean Frey, Director of Red Deer Public Library. “We want to continue to grow library service in the city and offer great programs for residents.”

The Library Board will be applying for provincial grants to support the project and will also explore fundraising options with corporate and service clubs in the community.

The partnership between the three organizations comes at a time of milestone achievements. 2013 marks The City’s centennial and Red Deer Public Schools celebrate their 125th anniversary the same year. Red Deer Public Library will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2014.

Quotes on my classroom wall

2011-12-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

Over the years I have been collecting quotes that strike me as profoundly insightful so that I can post them on the walls of my classroom. Here is a list of some of the quotes that I have on the walls of my classroom and hallways in my school:

Students should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning.
The passion for learning is not something you have to inspire kids to have; it’s something you have to keep from extinguishing.
A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.
Is understanding passively absorbed or actively constructed?
Should learning be more about thinking or remembering?
When students are simply told the most efficient way of getting the answer, they get in the habit of looking to the adult or the book instead of thinking things through.
Think for yourself. Your teacher might be wrong!
Question Authority
“If you punish a child for being naughty and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and discovers that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.”
"I don’t want to feel good when someone else fails, but I’m so afraid of failing that I feel relieved when someone else does. I feel bad, but it makes it easier for me to get a good grade."
The more you use power to try and control people, the less real influence you’ll have on their lives.
Mistakes are our friends.
We must constantly remind ourselves that the ultimate purpose of evaluation is to enable students to evaluate themselves.
It is better not to make merit a matter of reward, lest people conspire and contend.
Who would have thought that play could be turned into work by rewarding people for doing what they like to do?
Children have an intrinsic desire to learn. Praise and manipulation can only serve to stifle that natural motivation and replace it with blind conformity, a mechanical work style, or open defiance toward authority.
We are interested in observing how students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce knowledge.
If you never change your mind, why have one?
When the mind is thinking, it is talking to itself.
A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.
Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results
The purpose of education is not primarily to help children know more; rather, it is to help children become better able to think, care, imagine, understand, and adapt – to become autonomous learners.
Too many people fail to understand the difference between harder and better – or, for that matter, between working and learning. It reflects a naïve belief that one can get meaningful results from coercion.
Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
People don’t grow into creativity. Unfortunately, we tend to grow out of it.
Learning, after all, depends not on what students do so much as on how they regard and construe what they do.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Technocrats value what they measure instead of measuring what they value.
When kids do something bad, something bad must be done to them – Perhaps it’s time to rethink this archaic strategy!
Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.
The ultimate goal of authentic assessment must be the elimination of grades. But rubrics actually help to legitimate grade by offering a new way to derive them.
Just as standardizing assessment for teachers may compromise the quality of teaching, so standardizing assessment for learners may compromise learning.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.
Students who have been led to focus on producing the right answer or scoring well on a test tend to think more superficially.
No one succeeds all the time, and no one can learn very effectively without making mistakes and bumping up against his or her limits. It’s important, therefore, to encourage a healthy and resilient attitude toward failure. As a rule, that is exactly what students tend to have if their main goal is to learn: When they do something incorrectly, they see the result as useful information. They figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
The more we want our children to want to do something, the more counterproductive it will be to reward them for doing it.
Children, after all, learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
Relying on power to induce conformity rarely produces lasting solutions
You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.
A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to its job.
The best things in life aren’t things.
If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

Grades and the fear of failure

2011-12-03T17:33:00.001-07:00

In a study that appeared in the Journal of Educational Psychology (August 2011), Caroline Pulfrey et al., took Swiss students who were in their upper teens and mid twenties from an English as a foreign language class and asked them to do assignments that involved listening and comprehending.

There were 3 experiments.

In the first experiment, one group of students were told that they would receive a grade for their learning while the other group was told they would not receive a grade. In the second experiment, on a single assignment students either received only a grade, only a comment, or a grade and a comment. The third experiment was similar to the second experiment, but this time the students received their respective feedback and completed a second assignment.

Together these three experiments revealed that the anticipation of a grade, as opposed to no feedback or a comment, increases performance avoidance, a fear of failure and a loss of interest. It's important to note that this was true of both high and low achieving students. While conventional wisdom might tell us that grading should inspire learners to do their best, this is not what the research is telling us.

Common sense might also convince us to adopt a "more the merrier" kind of attitude towards providing students with both a comment and a grade, but again, research shows that the presence of a grade (with or without a comment) is responsible for lower levels of motivation, a loss of interest for learning, and a preference for easier tasks. Unfortunately, the positive benefits of a formative comment is overshadowed by the negative effects of the grade.

All this supports Ruth Butler's (1988) research from twenty years ago that grades and grades with a comment are responsible for lower levels of intrinsic motivation for learning.

If you are looking to increase a child's anxiety, desire to escape and fear of failure, or decrease their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy then it makes perfect sense to grade students.

However, if you are interested in helping children learn, you might want to consider leaving the grade out and only providing them with the formative comments they need to improve.

If the idea of abolishing grading incites a cold case of cognitive dissonance, the Grading Moratorium is a group of teachers you can collaborate with and join.

For more anecdotal evidence on why we should abolish grading, check out my Abolish Grading page. For more on the scientific research on why we should abolish grading, check out Alfie Kohn's articles The Case Against Grades, From Degrading to De-grading, and Grading: The Issue is not How but Why,

Standardization is stifling

2011-12-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Because fair isn't always equal, we can have high standards without standardization. We don't all need to be doing the same thing the same way to be successful. For me, this picture is the definitive reason why it's important to remember that all children have unique needs and thus need to be treated as an individual.

A system smothered in standardization has convinced some that they need permission to personalize learning for kids. Look at that little girl - should we need permission to supply her those legs? Should that man need permission to run with her? Standardization is about meeting the system's needs, even if it means ignoring an individual's needs.

Standardization alienates and marginalizes the people who need us the most. Personalization and differentiation promotes diversity. In short, standardization is dehumanizing.

We are all different and we are all better for it.

Diversity makes us stronger.

Yong Zhao is coming to Alberta

2011-12-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, Red Deer, Alberta was proud to play host to Pasi Sahblerg and Dennis Shirley. Last year, Red Deer was ecstatic to welcome Sir Ken Robinson, and this year I'm pleased to be a part of the effort to bring Yong Zhao to Red Deer to continue the dialogue on progressive education.

click to view

Yong Zhao will be speaking in Red Deer on February 8, 2012. Harvest Centre at Westerner Park 4847A 19 Street, Red Deer, Alberta.

Real assessment for learning

2011-12-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

Most educators have come to differentiate between assessment OF learning and assessment FOR learning. (I actually don't - I differentiate only between supportive and unsupportive assessment, but that's a different post)

Assessment OF learning is typically defined as a summative evaluation that usually takes the form of a grade that judges a student after they are done learning.

Assessment FOR learning is typically defined as a time for formative feedback that helps students learn from their successes, failures, mistakes and misconceptions. This feedback is timely and informative in nature rather than judgemental or evaluative.

While it is true that the prospect of abolishing grading from school entirely may be controversial, the idea that we should never grade or judge students during formative evaluation is not up for debate. The point here is that grading practices have no place while students are still learning.

Some forms of conventional wisdom have teachers using rubrics to provide students with feedback during the assessment FOR learning process. As a classroom teacher, I have come across a lot of different rubric designs; yet, despite their differences, there is always one common denominator:

Every rubric I have ever seen involves the use of a fixed measurement scale.

By definition, a grade is any attempt to reduce learning to a symbol. While it's true that these scales can be represented in a number of different ways (numbers, letters, descriptors, smiley faces, stickers, stars, etc) these reductionist scales are inevitably experienced by the student as a judgment. It's important to note that 75%, B-, and "proficient" have distinctions without a difference. A grade by any other name is still a grade.

While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that we should not evaluate and judge students while they are still learning, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. We often seriously overestimate the effectiveness of judgement and evaluation as a precondition of learning.

Assessment guru Dylan William puts it this way:

Grades cause an emotional reaction – either positive or negative. Feedback causes you to think and engage, which is reflective learning.

Alfie Kohn suggests:

Never grade students while they are still learning something and, even more important, do not reward them for their performance at that point.

Paul Dressel explains:

A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgement by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.

Jerome Bruner proclaims:

Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

A more profound statement than Bruner's about how children should be assessed is hard to imagine. Bruner's law provides us with both what we should not be doing while simultaneously suggesting a superior alternative to grading and manipulating students. Because learners can only experience grading and other fixed measurement scales as a reward or a punishment, they have no constructive role to play in the learning process. This is precisely why rubrics and their fixed measurement scales have no place place in assessing children while they are still learning.

In other words, we need to fight back the urge to marinate children in our praise, disapproval, bribes, threats, rewards and punishments and dedicate ourselves to providing children with nothing more than the information they need to improve.

Here is a Prezi that explains the three-step process I use as an alternative to grading and judging students in an effort to provide them with information they need to learn.

Formative Assessment on Prezi

While it is true that I use this to guide both my written and verbal interactions, the majority of the feedback that I relay to children is done verbally. The two-way nature of a conversation almost always trumps the one-way nature of written comments.

Assessment's latin root is assidere, which means "to sit beside". This is why it is critical we remember that assessment is not a spreadsheet or a judgement - it's a conversation.

Inspected by No. 24

2011-11-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association.This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website.

Alison Redford’s campaign platform for leadership of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta included a pledge to eliminate Grades 3 and 6 provincial achievement tests.

Elimination of the tests will come as welcome news to teachers, who have advocated against them for more than 20 years, but much work is required before Redford’s campaign pledge becomes government policy. Pressure from the Alberta School Boards Association and the Fraser Institute, both of which look for measurable results, could convince the government to keep the tests.

High-stakes standardized tests view education as an assembly line and treat students like boxes to be stuffed full of facts and figures. The provincial achievement tests are like inspectors at the end of the assembly line who open the lid and look inside the box to ensure that all the pieces are present. The statement of results sent to parents might as well come with a slip that reads: “Inspected by No. 24.”

Such a view of education is appropriate if you want your education system to push out identical cogs that take their place on some assembly line. This model is fantastic for ensuring high productivity when pushing out widgets. But how valuable is it in creating the 21st-century thinkers that we spent two years envisioning as part of Inspiring Education and that we’ll need for our future generation of leaders?

The Alberta Teachers’ Association has a vision for public education in which students are presented “with opportunities to develop ingenuity, creativity, critical-thinking skills and a strong sense of citizenship.” These attributes can’t be stuffed into a box and can’t be evaluated by simply lifting the lid and peering inside. They need to be assessed over time by a professional with an ongoing relationship with students, and they must be reflective of students’ individual circumstance and educational needs.

The Association’s vision of public education is neither confining nor uniform; rather, it is an organic process, similar in nature to a garden, which makes teachers gardeners who ensure that soil conditions are ripe for growth and that the plants get the right mix of sunlight, water and nutrition to grow healthy and strong. The serious gardener observes each plant’s behaviour, tracks its progress and makes adjustments when needed to encourage growth.

At a time when we want to create engaged citizens for a rapidly changing world, we also need to examine the tools we use to assess our students and to evaluate the public education system.

The proponents of achievement tests have an oft-repeated mantra: "If it matters, measure it." I agree to a certain extent but only if you add, "Measure what matters, because what is getting measured soon becomes what matters most." If we do it right, we’ll no longer rely on a tired model of assessment that churns out cogs; instead, we’ll nurture citizens for the 21st century.

Competition Kills Community

2011-11-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

The case against competition is rich with both anecdotal evidence and scientific research. Alfie Kohn's book No Conflict may be the definitive work for helping us see why the right amount of competition for children is none at all.

In her book Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms, Mara Sapon-Shevin summarizes the case against competition nicely:

Low achievers are rarely motivated by competition because they do not perceive themselves as having a chance to win. A small number of high achievers may be motivated, but they are generally motivated to "win" rather than to learn. Competition often encourages cheating, poor interpersonal behavior, and sometimes even lower achievement (if there's a prize to the first child who finishes a book, I am unlikely to undertake reading the long and challenging book that might actually stretch me). And for all students, competition damages community and student's willingness to help one another succeed.

For more on competition:

Treating Kids like Pets

Competition is for the strong. Public education is for everyone. See the problem?

No Grades and Group Work

United States: How not to reform education

2011-11-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

While it's true that modelling is important, keep in mind that sometimes we learn as much from the negative exemplars as we do from the positive ones.

When it comes to education reform, there are a lot of different models to look at. Here in Alberta, our education system is doing very well, we have an appreciation for resisting the urge to rest on previous successes.

Alberta's former Education Minister Dave Hancock put it this way:

In Alberta we can be proud that we have one of the finest education systems in the world. This is a testament to the dedication of our teachers, administrators, school board staff and other educational specialists and professionals who are committed to doing the best they can every day.

But we know that the world is changing, and that education must change with it to prepare students for a future none of us can predict. And the change is well underway.

In their article Testing, Testing, Larry Booi and J.C. Couture make the case for why Alberta has a lot to learn from the Finnish model of education. Meanwhile, they also make a point that Alberta has a lot to learn from the United States which acts an an anti-model. In other words, the United States has a lot to teach the world about how not to reform education.

By contrast we can also learn what not to do from reform in the US, whose education system is in decline. Its elements, implemented over the past two decades, are largely ideological: "market-based" reforms (the application of "business insights" to the running of schools); an emphasis on standardization and narrowing of curriculum; extensive use of external standardized assessment; fostering choice and competition among schools, often with school vouchers; making judgements based on test data and closing "failing schools"; encouraging the growth of charter schools (which don't have teacher unions); "merit pay" and other incentives; faith that "technologically mediated instruction" will reduce costs; an overwhelming "top-down" approach which tells everyone what to do and holds them accountable for doing it.

President Obama's education policies have largely reinforced this overall approach, to the great dissapointment of many educators. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has pushed states to include merit pay, charter schools and standardized testing in order to qualify for federal funding in the key "Race for the Top" program (soon dubbed "Race to the Bottom" by critics). These directions are popular with large corporate interests, notably educational publishing companies. K-12 education in the US presents an estimated trillion dollars in opportunities for potential privatization.

When I read about the education deforms that are taking place in the United States, I take careful notes so that when I play my role in transformational change in Alberta, I will be prepared to do the exact opposite.

All this makes me extremely thankful that Alberta has leadership in both Alberta Education and the Alberta Teachers' Association who understand that while the Americans may be our neighbours geographically, they are pedagogical strangers.

Grading & Commenting

2011-11-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

There is plenty of evidence and research to make up the case against grading. But you have to look for it and want to see it for it to mean anything.

When I write and speak about abolishing grading, I draw on a balance of anecdotal evidence and scientific research. One of the studies I often use is summarized nicely in Alfie Kohn's article Education's Rotten Apples:

In a study that appeared in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, Ruth Butler took 5th and 6th graders, including both high- and low-achieving students, and asked them to work on some word-construction and creative-thinking tasks. One-third of them then received feedback in narrative form, one-third received grades for their performance, and one-third received both comments and grades.

The first finding: Irrespective of how well they had been doing in school, students were subsequently less successful at the tasks, and also reported less interest in those tasks, if they received a grade rather than narrative feedback. Other research has produced the same result: Grades almost always have a detrimental effect on how well students learn and how interested they are in the topic they're learning.

But because Ms. Butler had thought to include a third experimental condition—grades plus comments—she was able to document that the negative effects of grading, on both performance and interest, were not mitigated by the addition of a comment. In fact, with the task that required more original thinking, the students' performance was highest with comments, lower with grades, and lowest of all with both. These differences were all statistically significant, and they applied to high- and low-achieving students alike.

Anger is the enemy of instruction

2011-11-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

When I watch this commercial, I see the the mad chef as the corporate reformers who wish to control what goes on in the classroom from outside of the classroom by publicly shaming and manipulating teachers.

Phil Jackson represents the educators whose collective knowledge and experience routinely go unrecognized.

The sad irony is that no high performing country has ever become high performing by pursuing strategies that villainize teachers.

In the context of this commercial, Phil Jackson has nothing to gain from confronting the mad chef, and so he smartly just walks away. For a long time, teachers have put up with what I call "initiativitis" which is an acute condition educators experience when flavour of the month proclamations come from education departments on Mount Olympus. In response to these popcorn initiatives, some of the best teachers have simply retreated to their rooms, closed their doors so they could do what they do best -- teach their children.

Because corporate suits have upped the ante, passive defiance will no longer suffice. All it takes for ignorant policies to prevail is for good teachers to say nothing. If teachers are not willing to stand up and refuse their cooperation in an effort to reclaim their profession, no one else will do it for them.

Not even the Zen Master.

Formal & Traditional vs Progressive Education

2011-11-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

I teach in a psychiatric assessment unit in a hospital for children under the age of 18 who present with a wide range of complex psychiatric symptoms.

Some of these children are in mainstream schooling. Some are in special education.

Some are in mainstream looking to move to a special education placement. Some are in special education looking for a mainstream placement. Many just want to get out of the hospital so they can get back to their regularly scheduled lives.

Preconceived notions about what school should look like heavily influences what some believe children should be doing during school. These notions tend to frame school around a pedagogy of poverty where the children are marinated in non-reflective acquiescence. When school is seen as something done to children while they play a passive role, compliance and obedience become the gold-standard. If a child can sit quietly through a morning's worth of lecture followed up with an afternoon of filling in worksheets, then they are considered ready for school.

As a progressive educator, my challenge is to engage those who have never been invited to reconsider their assumptions about education. The truth is that many people are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence.

By the time students get to me in the hospital, they tend to have received more than their fair share of formal-traditional education. Despite their prevailing problems in and out of school, I find it sadly ironic that conventional wisdom tells us to simply double the dose of the formal and the traditional. But if this worked, many of these children wouldn't need to come to the hospital.

This is precisely why spending all of our time trying to get kids better acquainted with a kind of formal-traditional education that they already know all too well is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful.

Mara Sapon-Shevin writes in her book Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms:

More restrictive placements do not prepare people for less restrictive placements. Students are unlikely to be able to work themselves down the continuum. Being in a segregated classroom almost always makes the transition to general classes less likely and more problematic. Though certain isolated skills can certainly be taught "away" from the setting in which they will ultimately be displayed, the nature of that isolation often makes it difficult to transfer those skills or to even envision what "typical" behavior looks like. We become so focused on teaching Kevin to sit at his seat and attend to the task in front of him in a segregated setting that we lose sight of what typical fifth graders are required to do in the regular classroom. Learning to swim in the bathtub doesn't ensure that you will be able to swim in the ocean. Particularly because many students with disabilities have trouble transferring skills, it is far more effective and efficient to teach the necessary skills in settings that are authentic and normative.

The elements of "mainstream" education should not be built on the ability to sit passively during a lecture in order to regurgitate prefabricated facts on a worksheet. In fact, elements of real learning are built on characteristics that make formal-traditional education almost unbearable.

Debra Stipek, dean of School Education at Stanford University puts it this way:

Drill-and-skill is not how middle class children got their edge, so why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?

It's important to note that a pedagogy of poverty is not just for the economically disadvantaged; children who present a wide range of mental health problems and children in special education often get more than their fair share of sit and get, spew and forget.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning. The best way to nurture and support those who are hardest to educate is to see their learning difficulties less as problems with the child and more as problems for the curriculum to solve.

I'll close by making my point this way: Look at that chart again. Which kind of education do you want for your son or daughter and which one is good enough for other people's kids?

The Politics of Personalization in the 21st Century

2011-11-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

This was written by Dr. Phil McRae, an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers` Association.This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website.

By Phil McRae

The world’s education systems are in the midst of change (aka informed transformation) unlike any other time over the past century. It’s a historical moment where governments, teachers, parents and school communities are exploring visions of an education system that would embody increased flexibility (curricular and otherwise), innovation (technologies and pedagogy) and more individualized and self-directed approaches to student learning. Within this 21st-century parade of change, the notion ofpersonalization in education is moving to the forefront. It’s an ambiguous and often broadly defined notion that has been hotly contested in the United Kingdom over the past several years. It’s a movement that could be as influential to how public education is conceived as privatization was in the 1980s.

The intent of this article is to provide a brief introduction to the discourse on personalization and encourage a space where Alberta teachers can raise their voices to (re)define and (re)shape this fragile idea as it gets positioned as the next big educational reform.

Struggling for an Identity

Personalizing learning is not new to the skilled practice of teaching and learning in Alberta, or to the pedagogical work of teachers around the world. Personalization is in many respects a case of déjà vu. It’s bound up in assessment for learning, which is a focus of the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI), and with differentiated instruction, which for many years has been weaving together pedagogical practices aimed at tailoring a student’s instruction, curriculum and learning supports to meet their specific interests, learning styles and aspirations. Every day, legions of teachers enter classrooms in Alberta to engage diverse minds across multiple activities and to support each student as he or she inquires into problems. These same teachers, who hold a keen awareness of each of their student’s particular learning styles and passions, are also simultaneously contending with issues of poverty, lack of parental involvement (or conversely helicopter parents), large classes, familial and community influences, student effort and numerous digital and popular culture distractions that add to complexity of their professional practice.

Personalized learning is not a pedagogic theory nor a coherent set of teaching approaches, but an idea that is struggling for an identity. As Michael Fullan (2009) suggests, the concept is most commonly associated in the United States with differentiated instruction. David Hargreaves (2006), a principal architect of the idea, refers to “personalizing” learning rather than “personalized” learning, in order to emphasize that it is a process, not a product. Given that language is the fundamental medium for the social construction of meaning, the term is currently under construction and being (re)defined in many quarters. To give it a new flavour from differentiated instruction and assessment for learning, the terminology is often positioned as uniquely in step with the 21st century (Leadbeater 2008). As the International Network for Educational Transformation (iNet) indicates, “Personalised learning is the challenge to meet more of the needs of more students more fully than has been achieved in the past ... It is concerned with a transformation of education and schooling that is fit for citizens in the 21st century” (iNet 2010a).

Origins in the United Kingdom

Historically, the term personalized learning was coined in a September 2003 speech in Britain by the Honourable David Miliband, then-minister of state for School Standards for the United Kingdom, who pronounced that “Personalised learning demands that every aspect of teaching and support is designed around a pupil’s needs” (Hargreaves 2004). This speech was driven by Tony Blair’s Labour government’s desire to reorganize the way services were delivered, given a concern that public institutions and government were lacking legitimacy in the public’s eyes. Over time, the government’s reorganization entailed moving from the universal provision of services by government toward a more personalized approach that was hinged on each citizen’s actions.

Thus, in the UK, personalized learning has been bound up in a larger framework for the personalization of public services. In both the healthcare and education sectors, the appeal is to the consumer side of a citizenry looking for a promise of choice, greater flexibility and efficiencies for the individual. People are participants in the design, delivery and co-production of those public goods that they feel are of most worth to them. Of course, the benefit to the financially strapped state is to encourage citizens to take on more personal responsibility for the public good. In this framing of personalized services for the citizenry, UK policy makers do not necessarily distinguish between children and adults.

David Hargreaves (not to be confused with Andy Hargreaves of Boston College) has been instrumental in defining this idea in the education sector by establishing nine gateways to personalizing learning. In David Hargreaves’ view, personalized learning represents a larger movement that needs to be put forward on several fronts to (re)shape teaching and learning. His nine gateways to personalizing learning are assessment for learning; learning to learn; student voice; curriculum; new technologies; school design and organization; advice and guidance; mentoring and coaching; and workforce development (Hargreaves 2006).

The close association of personalized learning and new technologies has been a central strand since the inception of the idea, and is part of the all-embracing creed of technocrats looking to enter system level educational reform. Of note is that David Hargreaves was a former chair of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, which was the UK government’s main partner in the strategic development and delivery of its information and communications technology (ICT) and e-learning strategy. This agency has been shut down by the British government and will cease to exist November 2010.

Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley (2009) have critiqued David Hargreaves’s approach to personalization as being a new way to manage and market learning in their book The Fourth Way:

Indeed, he [David Hargreaves] initially referred to personalization in terms of its “synonym, customization in the business world”. With customized learning, students access existing and unchanged kinds of conventional learning through different means—on site or off site, online or offline, in school or out of school, quickly or slowly. . . . [B]ut the nature of learning is not transformed into something deeper, more challenging, and more connected to compelling issues in their world and their lives. . . . [T]wenty-first century schools must also embrace deeper virtues and values such as courage, compassion, service, sacrifice, long-term commitment and perseverance.
Customized learning is pleasurable and instantly gratifying. Nevertheless it . . . ultimately becomes just one more process of business-driven training delivered to satisfy individual consumer tastes and desires. (p. 84)

Personalizing Learning in Canada

Personalized learning is part of the mantra of many educational reform efforts across Canada, where it is often coupled with technology as a means for more flexible learning delivery (as if learning can be delivered like pizza pie). For example, New Brunswick’s Department of Education has produced a document entitled NB3-21C: Creating a 21st Century Learning Model of Public Education Three-Year Plan 2010–2013, that speaks explicitly to personalization, where learning can be delivered 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year (anytime, anyplace and at any pace), all facilitated by a multitude of technologies. As with other advocacy positions around personalized learning, emerging technologies are positioned as the force(s) to bring personalization to all students. The New Brunswick agenda emphasizes technology as a main strategy for system level accountability to support “progress monitoring for all students, and to provide data on cohorts of students at all levels of the K–12 system” (New Brunswick Department of Education 2010, p.20). This particular advance of the personalized learning concept may, unfortunately, be travelling down a precarious path of centralization, standardization and narrow outcome-based accountability that distracts reformers from the broader goals of 21st-century skills.

In Alberta, the ministry of education’s 2010–2013 business plan addresses personalized learning as both an opportunity and a challenge. In fact, the first goal and strategy of the current business plan articulates the intent to “support a flexible approach to enable learning any time, any place and at any pace, facilitated by increased access to learning technologies (Alberta Education 2010a, p. 70). In the plan, personalization is addressed in the same breath as technology, where one is the facilitator of the other. In many ways this is a natural reaction of a government looking to create/support public services in a more digitized society, where people are experiencing (or perceiving) greater choice, more voice and increased scope for self-organization throughout their (digital) lives.

In the more recent recommendations from Inspiring Action on Education (2010b), Alberta Education’s vision for policy directions, legislative change and transformational shifts for education in the province, personalized learning is not equated solely with emerging technologies, but positioned as extending students’ learning experiences into community. “Personalized learning means that … students have access to a greater variety of learning experiences that include and extend beyond traditional education settings and benefit from increased community involvement in their learning” (Alberta Education 2010b, p. 14).

Technologies and (Hyper)Personalization

We now have many deep cultural undertows that are worth supporting; primarily differentiation that recognizes the diversity and complexity in the classroom, and the taking up of emerging technologies to engage learning. Yet we must draw carefully on these cultural shifts to make sound pedagogical decisions in the best interests of students within a commitment to public education and core values of innovation, creativity, social responsibility and community.

Obviously, we’re entering a digital age where students access the information they want—how they want it, when they want it and where they want it (think personalized learning at any time, place or pace). This will have a profound effect on critical thinking as people are increasingly fed only the exact type of information (specific political views, topical book themes and local environmental conditions) and sources (individual blogs, new media and ethnically oriented online spaces) to which they digitally subscribe. In many ways, hyperpersonalized (customized) digital spaces have the potential to limit students to only the content that they want to see, hear and read about. While considering personalization and technology, we need to think about the role of critical thinking, diversity and chance (serendipity), and their importance to learning and society, and to the long-term implications of driving digital personalization (customization) in terms of the future of public education.

Personalization of learning and emerging technologies are engaged in a policy handshake that must be examined. There are, for example, questions of teacher and student efficacy in a K–12 education system when personalization is coupled primarily with the discourses on emerging technologies and their benefits. Especially if the focus is on individualized learning (between student, technology and content), in the relative absence of collective learning, socio-constructivism and relationships with peers, teachers and the community.

We should also not be distracted from other critical issues by a focus on personalization empowered by emerging technologies. Issues engendered by the pervasive digital connectivity of young people and society are critical if we hope to achieve a healthy balance in our society. There is a growing call for studies on the physiological effect of digital technologies and new media on children’s brain development—a neuroscience of children and media (Anderson 2007). Based on this concern, we should consider the personal cost to 8–18-year-olds who average 10 hours and 45 minutes a day per day exposed to media (Kaiser Foundation 2010) or the Canadian Paediatric Society’s recent policy recommendation of no screen time for children under two years of age and a maximum of two hours for children older than two (Canadian Paediatric Society 2009).

Finally, we should be mindful of saving stillness in a digital age where a kind of solitude that refreshes and restores a person is valued. Stillness is a particular concern that distinguished professor Sherry Turkle, director of MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, argues is essential to identity formation and healthy adolescent development in the 21st century. Turkle speculates that “If we identify our need for stillness as something that is part of our human purposes, we will find ways to bring it back into our lives. If we only get excited about what technology makes easy, we will say that this is a kind of … 18th century completely passé thing and that it is not essential. I think that part of K–12 education now should be to give students a place for this kind of stillness, because I don’t think that the rest of their lives is making it easy for them” (Dretzin 2009).

Educators need to be committed to exploring these issues with parents, health professionals and the wider education community so that the transformations to the education system associated with technologies are truly informed.

Conclusion

Much of the impulse behind personalization of learning is laudable. This stance is in line with many promising new forms of assessment, differentiated learning and instruction, and redesigning high schools beyond age cohorts and class structures. More flexible approaches to education moving away from an industrial model are necessary, and finding ways to personalize learning will be important to adequately develop the skills and knowledge in society that will help the next generation creatively navigate an uncertain future. However, as Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley suggest, personalized learning is often a Third Way reform effort driven by business-like customization, and deeper learning is constrained by the forces of accountability and performance.

Personalized learning is often represented as a novel approach to enhancing the pedagogical practices of educators to broadly reorganize schooling in the 21st century. The personalized (re)shaping of teaching and learning is generally to be achieved through assessing the strengths of individuals and then addressing the specific needs and learning styles of each student in a school community. To achieve this end, governments and school jurisdictions around the world are pulling together a mélange of policy priorities that range from focusing on emerging technologies to increasing students’ active community engagement in learning. Just as with past educational reform efforts, personalized learning is now being represented by a complex collection of voices ranging from those who are critically informed to the misleading and myopic zealousness of those who focus on technology as the metaphor for all change in an education system. Alberta teachers need to add their informed voice and pedagogic experience to this conversation.

Perhaps an immediate and personal action that teachers can take is to embrace the wiki way of influencing meaning by visiting Wikipedia.org and contributing to or (re)shaping the definition of personalized learning. As educators and others search out the meaning of this term, you will then have put your personal stamp on the concept as you see it lived out in your own unique educational contexts. Ultimately, we need to individually and collectively (re)define this term, and in doing so be empowered to share a vision of what knowledge and pedagogical approaches are of most worth in the 21st century.

References

Alberta Education. 2010a. Education Business Plan 2010–13. Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta. Retrieved August 12, 2010, at http://education.alberta.ca/media/1213923/20100122educationbusinessplan.pdf.

-----. 2010b. Inspiring Action on Education. Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta. Retrieved August 12, 2010, at http://engage.education.alberta.ca/inspiring-action/.

Anderson, C.A. 2007. “A Neuroscience of Children and Media?” Journal of Children and Media 1, no. 1: 77–85.

Canadian Paediatric Society. 2009. Impact of Media Use on Children and Youth. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Paediatric Society. Retrieved August 12, 2010, at www.cps.ca/english/statements/CP/pp03-01.htm#RECOMMENDATIONS

Dretzin, R. (Producer). 2009, September 22. “Interview with Sherry Turkle.” Frontline

[Television Broadcast]. Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved August 2, 2010, at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/concentration/saving-stillness.html?play

Fullan, M. 2009. Michael Fullan's Answer to "What Is Personalized Learning?" Microsoft Education Partner Network. Retrieved August 19, 2010, at http://cs.mseducommunity.com/wikis/personal/michael-fullan-s-answer-to-quot-what-is-personalized-learning-quot/revision/3.aspx

Hargreaves, A. and D. Shirley. 2009. The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin Press.

Hargreaves, D. 2004. Personalising Learning: Next Steps in Working Laterally. London: Specialist Schools and Academics Trust.

------.2006. Personalising Learning 6: The Final Gateway: School Design and Organisation. London: Specialist Schools and Academics Trust.

iNet—International Networking for Educational Transformation. 2010. What We Do: Our Priorities: Personalising Learning. Taunton, Somerset: Specialist Schools and Academics Trust. Retrieved August 30, 2010, at www.ssat-inet.net/whatwedo/personalisinglearning.aspx

Kaiser Family Foundation. 2010. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8–18 Year Olds. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Leadbeater, C. 2008. What's Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning. London: The Innovation Unit.

New Brunswick Department of Education. 2010. NB3-21C: Creating a 21st Century—Learning Model of Public Education. Retrieved August 31, 2010, at www.gnb.ca/0000/publications/comm/NB3-21C%20consultation%20document%202nd%20edition.pdf

Phil McRae is an ATA staff officer in the Government program area.

Reporting Real Learning

2011-11-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

If 70% of tax payers in Alberta do not have children in school, will they take the time to look beyond the limited and superficial information that a standardized test score can provide?

Likely not.

I don't really blame them for this; after all, we all have only so much time and effort to expend, and if a tax payer doesn't even have a child in school, they've got better things to do than study the quality of their neighbourhood school.

Be assured this is less of an indictment of the public and more of a wake up call for educators, school boards and governments to do a better job of exhibiting and sharing real student learning.

In Alberta, the Alberta Teachers' Association, Alberta School Boards' Association and Alberta Education need to collaborate in a far more effective and efficient way to replace standardized testing with something far more authentic.

Ultimately, real accountability really means that the public can access the information they need to know about their schools. In other words, accountability is really about transparency; and yet accountability begins and ends with standardized test scores which are anything but transparent.

This is true for a variety of interesting reasons. One example I often use is that if you want to know if a child can throw a ball, you don't give them a multiple choice test, you watch them throw a ball. And yet this is precisely the mistake we make with standardized testing.

We say we want kids to be happy, creative, responsible, ethical, honest, respectful, autonomous, and resilient, but then we give them standardized tests that are incapable of assessing any of these things. And yet how many people see standardized test scores as prima facie evidence that our schools are good or bad?

The best feedback parents can receive about their child's learning is for them to see their child's learning.

Back in the old days, show-and-tell, science fairs and barn dances were exhibitions of learning. Communities came together to observe and listen to students while they performed their learning - and if things went really well, parents and community members might have actually interacted with the students.

No one needed to translate the results - everyone could see with their own eyes that learning was or was not taking place. However, when we use something as artificially simple as testsandgrades to report something as complex as student learning, is there any surprise that many of us mistake testsandgrades and real learning as the same thing?

When we are offered the choice between the inconvenience of spending the time and effort required for observing the messiness of real learning with the arbitrarily convenient tidy testsandgrades, I fear we will be seduced by the spurious precision of the numbers.

This is precisely why educators have a professional obligation not to provide the public with such reductionist data.Truly no good can come from it.

Do you "get" this?

2011-11-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

If you're not a gamer, there's a chance you don't "get" this.

If you're a teacher, what's the chance you're a gamer?

If you're a teacher and not a gamer, there's a chance you don't "get" your students.

What if the characters in this commercial were from books and Michael was the reader?

I've often found that my personal experience with gaming has been a real asset when initiating conversations with kids. If nothing else, I get a sense that because I'm a gamer and a teacher, I'm just a little bit more relevant to my students.

Here are a few posts that I've written about video gaming and learning:

How I use Angry Birds in the classroom

More on How I use Angry Birds in the classroom

Learning and Gaming

Pleasantly Frustrating

Gaming in the Classroom: Rock Band

Assessment and Technology

Student assessment vs system assurance

2011-11-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

Too often we confuse student assessment with system assurance. In other words, assessment is a tool for students and teachers to use while they are engaged in real learning; and yet for accountability purposes, some governments hijack assessment as a tool to meet their needs.

If we are collecting information about student learning for parents then the teacher is in the best position to provide such information. A teacher who has spent months with a child is going to be able to provide far more authentic information than a test that sat in front of a child for an hour.

Teachers should be able to give a good account of a student's learning but that's not a test score, nor is it a grade.

Alberta Education Survey on Curriculum

2011-11-18T05:00:00.001-07:00

I completed Alberta Education's online survey for Albertans to provide input on rethinking curriculum.

Here are my responses:

1. Curriculum evolves in response to emerging student and societal needs.

I agreed and commented: Curriculum and course outlines that are created without student input is like a bride planning her wedding, honeymoon and life without a husband.

2. Curriculum enables student-centered learning.

I agreed and commented: Too often curriculum is done *to* kids when it should be done *with* them.

3. Curriculum enables broad exploration and deep understanding

I agreed and commented: Coverage is the enemy of understanding.

4. Curriculum enables the development of competencies for living, learning, and working.

I agreed and commented: Anything worth learning is worth doing so in a context and for a purpose.

5. Curriculum enables ways of learning - acknowledging that students have diverse needs and preferences for learning.

I agreed and commented: We do not need standardization to have high standards -- and those standards need to be as vague as possible.

6. Curriculum enables ways of knowing - recognizing that one's knowing is influenced by personal identity, experience and culture.

I agreed and commented: This is only possible if we have both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment.

7. Curriculum enables learning through flexible timing and pacing in a variety of learning environments.

I agreed and commented: This is only possible when both class sizes and curriculum outcomes small.

8. Please add up to three ideas that you consider important to guide future curriculum development. Provide rationale for your ideas.

Curriculum should involve project based learning that is done in a context and for a purpose, collaboratively with students.

When children have trouble learning this should be seen not as a problem *with* the child, but a problem *for* the curriculum to solve.

Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

Test scores are low, make them go up

2011-11-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.”

~ John Dryden

Some people make the case that good teaching and real learning are the best ways to achieve high test scores. The argument goes something like this: Help your students become thinkers and learners and the scores will take care of themselves.

Let's for the moment ignore the evidence that suggests this might not be true.

There is a growing body of evidence that shows you can improve test scores without improving learning. Some of these strategies range from illegal cheating such as changing students answers -- to legalized cheating, otherwise known as teaching to the test.

Cheating has always been frowned upon, and at one time so was teaching to the test, but in response to the ever increasing demands for higher and higher test scores, teaching to the test has gone from something even the test-makers vehemently opposed to something that is encouraged as best practice. And when the pressure to raise scores threaten the very existence of schools and the employment of educators, system-wide forms of cheating are encouraged from as high up as administrators and superintendents.

In reaction to this systemic pressure, many educators now experience professional development as nothing more than "test scores are low, make them go up."

Anyone who has played the game of school as a student knows that there are ingenius ways to achieve high grades without learning too much and there are also ways to learn a lot and still earn low grades.

Here's what I mean. Here are two students:

One student has a teacher that artfully guides them to play an active role in constructing and discovering a love for learning; the other has a teacher that focuses on scripted test preparation and direct instruction that has this student play a passive role in reproducing right answers on tests. The former experiences school as something done by them -- the latter as something done to them.

Here are their testsandgrades data:

So which student is which? Which one sees learning as a means to an end and which sees it as an end in and of itself? Which one has a teacher that artfully guides them and which has a teacher that does test prep?

The information provided about Liam and Samantha is as common-place as it is limited, which means we can't possibly know which student is which based on the (lack of) information provided --and when I say we need more information, I don't mean we need more testsandgrades.

The ultimate point here is that inferences made from testsandgrades can be undermined leaving the successful and superficial students indistinguishable. The reductionist data gleamed from testsandgrades is by definition necessarily incomplete -- making the use of this limited and narrow kinds of data to make any kind of decisions or judgements about a student at best unhelpful and at worst harmful.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole debacle that I call chasing "testsandgrades and calling it learning" is that there is a whole generation of beginning teachers who have known no other education than one that makes testsandgrades both the means and end to learning. The distinction many people make between real learning and testsandgrades makes no sense to them because they have been taught from the beginning that testsandgrades are good teaching and learning; they simply do not have any other model to draw from.

The mantra of test scores are low make them go up and the cult following we have in our culture of education for testsandgrades may prove to do more long-lasting harm to our education systems than we can fathom.

Are badges an alternative for grading?

2011-11-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

When I share with others that I abolished grading from my classroom years ago, I often get two reactions. The first looks something like stunned bewilderment; for these people, they can't even begin to conceive how school could function without grading. They might even go so far as to feel that I am not doing my job. The second reaction is one of interest, followed quickly by uncertainty for what would act as an alternative to grading.

Since I started blogging almost two years ago, I have received numerous e-mails from teachers asking me what I do in place of grading. Some teachers e-mail me asking me for my opinion on the alternatives they have derived. Recently, badges have surfaced as a potential alternative. (You can read about badges here, here, here, and here)

Before we can properly assess whether something is a worthy alternative of grading, we must first be crystal clear why grading is so harmful.

Here's a short list:

Learners of any age can only ever experience grades as a reward and punishment. The kind of motivation matters more than the amount, and because we know that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are inversely related, we have absolutely no business prying on children's extrinsic motivation to learn. To do so would sabotage our ultimate goal of life-long learning in vain attempts to gain short term compliance.

Learners experience grades as an external focus of control which ultimately works against our goal that children find autonomy, mastery and purpose in their learning. (See Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's Self Determination Theory)

Grading distracts learners from learning by encouraging them to focus on the grades. There is an enormous difference between focusing on stretching one's intellectual boundaries and proving to others how smart you are. Most of our attention should be spent on *what* we are learning and only rarely would we ever pause to reflect on *how* well we are doing so.

Grades provide no feedback for learners to understand what they've actually done well and what they can do to improve. In fact, the research has been showing us that the best forms of assessment have no judgment or evaluation at all. Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

There is a big difference between valuing what we measure and measuring what we value. The proponents of testsandgrades have an oft-repeated mantra: "If it matters, measure it." I agree to a certain extent but only if you add, "Measure what matters, because what is getting measured soon becomes what matters most." Some take this further and say that "measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning." Ultimately, reducing something as magnificently messy as learning to stickers, stars, smiley faces, grades and graphics conceal far more than they ever reveal.

Grading has encouraged teachers and students to see learning (and assessment) as a linear progression from one label or category to the next. This places very heavy stigmas on children convincing them that assessment is something that is done to them by someone else. This kind of labeling, ranking and sorting creates all kinds of problems, including a competitive climate where children feel like their success is contingent on other's failure. Under this climate, learners come to see their peers as obstacles to their own success. All this is made that much worse when some levels of excellence are artificially scarce.

Campbell's Law warns us that any indicator or measurement (grades or badges) that has high stakes associated with it will be gamed and bastardized in a way that skews and misrepresents what ever that indicator was meant to observe, making any decisions based on this information compromised.

Paul Dressel once coined the phrase: "A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgement by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material." Alfie Kohn puts it this way: "What grades offer is spurious precision, a subjective rating masquerading as an objective assessment."

I once had a karate instructor contact me about his disappointment in his students for caring more about getting their next colored belt than loving Karate. Can you see how suggesting that he simply change or rearrange the color of belts or change the belts to hats would have missed the point of his disappointment?

I see a move from grades to badges as like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. In other words, it is a massive exercise in missing the point. Badges, as far as I can tell, don't address even one of the issues above.

What's missing from this picture?

I am also concerned that like hyper-personalization, badges are a trojan horse that carries an army of economists and shadow industries who have been stalking public education for a very long time. It's as if grades are seen as bad because they are dispensed by a subjective and biased teacher but badges are good because they are dispensed by an objective computer. Want proof? Check out this picture to the right... I see a student on a computer learning specific content... hmm, what's missing?

Because grading is defined as any attempt to reduce learning to a symbol, it's important to note that 75%, B-, and "proficient" have distinctions without a difference. A grade by any other name is still a grade.

Any attempt to reduce learning to a symbol is ultimately wasting our limited time, effort and resources that should be spent on allowing a child's learning to speak for itself. Real learning is found in the children's exhibitions of learning not reductionist data.

Like grades, badges will always conceal more than they reveal.

Assessment and Provincial Achievement Tests

2011-11-16T05:00:00.001-07:00

This was written by Don Wielinga who is an elementary principal in central Alberta.

by Don Wielinga

This Is What I Think:

"Assessment for Learning is the ongoing exchange of information between students and teachers about student progress towards clearly specified learning goals for the purpose of improving learning and informing instruction." Adapted fromAlberta Assessment Consortium, 2005.

PATs measure a narrow set of skills, which can be easily be memorized, and measured by multiple choice questions. They do not inform day to day instruction and do not support current educational research on assessment for and of learning. Also, few questions challenge the intellectual capacity of students, "dumbing down learning".

The tests reflect students' abilities on one day as opposed to providing an accurate portrait of a year's worth of leaning. Other issues which concern me is the stress it causes for students, that the PATs assess only a portion of of the curriculum and the results are not available until months later, hence they are of no use in the area of assessment for and of learning.

Recent research and practice in education has raised awareness about the impact of classroom assessment practises or student learning. More and more teachers are looking to explore and develop strategies in classroom assessment that improve teaching practices and student learning. As a result, classroom assessment and reporting practices look very different today from the practices that parents remember from their school days. Again, the practice of PATs do not support our current classroom practices and beliefs of assessment.

The word "assess" comes from the Latin root "assidere" which means "to sit beside". The phrase Assessment for Learning turns day to day assessment into a teaching and learning process that enhances student learning, unlike PATs. Teachers work alongside students to assess their learning as they move through the learning outcomes in the curriculum.

Assessment for Learning strategies are used in the classroom by both students and teachers in order to gather information on their learning. These strategies provide teachers, students, and parents with valuable information about student progress, and the next steps required for growth and improvement. The PATs are only a "snapshot" of student progress and do nothing for inform teaching and learning.

In summary, good assessment practices do the following:

Increase student success when the students have clear learning targets.

When students are involved in their own learning they are more likely to understand what is expected of them, assess prior knowledge, take ownership of their leaning and provide information to their teachers on how to adjust their teaching.

Improve communication for parents about student achievement in relation to the learner outcomes from the Alberta Program of Studies.

Provincial Achievement Tests do none of the above!

Grading Moratorium: Tia Henriksen

2011-11-15T05:00:00.001-07:00

Tia Henriksen has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Tia Henriksen

Elementary Vice-Principal

henriksen_t@sd36.bc.ca

@henriksent

henriksenlearning.wordpress.com

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

I am at the beginning stages of abolishing grading. As a Vice-Principal in an inner-city elementary school Surrey, British Columbia, I spend 70% of my admin assignment teaching. 30% of this teaching assignment includes being an Intermediate Prep teacher. Each class comes to me for 100 minutes each week. During this time, their classroom teacher is given "prep" time to prepare lessons, mark, etc... I teach French to 2 Grade 5 classes and Health and Career Education to a Grade 5/6 class and a Grade 6 class. I have not given any grades this term, but I have given students ongoing feedback on the work they have been completing.

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

I care too much about my students not to abolish grades! Being a primary teacher for much of my career I haven't had to give letter grades a lot. However, whenever I have taught intermediate grades, giving letter grades has always been a real issue for me. I feel that grades put undo stress on students and do nothing to help their learning. In fact, it has been my experience that grades actually impede learning (and attitude toward learning). There has been too much focus placed on these letter grades and not enough placed on the process of actually learning, retaining and really understanding what is being learned, instead of memorizing and forgetting. This has been what Alfie Kohn has found as well. Recently, I read an important article of Kohn's, The Case Against Grades. This article substantiates all that I have thought about grading and giving letter grades.

Working in an inner city school, the students in the classes I teach have had many negative experiences with school. A number of my students are low-incidence students who have Chronic Health designations, many have diagnosed Learning Disabilities, and even more have not been designated with any label, but many of their previous teachers wonder if they may also have undiagnosed learning disabilities. A small number of my students are "typical" students. ALL of my students are passionate, fun, love learning, and have great senses of humour. Knowing the history of many of my students, their past and present struggles with the education system and self-esteem, I knew that I could not give them grades. I didn't want grades to squash them and to ruin any relationship I have worked so hard to develop this year.

What do you do in replace of grading?

Instead of grading, I have given a lot of feedback to my students. We talk a lot. I have written them detailed, specific feedback on their work. The students have also completed some peer and self-evaluations as well.

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

Well, since I am in the beginning of my process of abolishing letter grades, this is still a work in progress. With report cards going home in less than a month, this is something that I am thinking a great deal about right now. First of all, to establish a letter grade, we are very clear on the Prescribed Learning Outcomes (PLO's) which we have been studying this term. We are going to be looking at the Ministry Definition of letter grades next week and discussing what each letter grade means. I am then going to give the students the opportunity to tell me what letter grade they would give themselves. They will write down their letter grade and reasons why they chose that grade. We will then have individual conferences where the students and I will sit together 1-1 and discuss their letter grade for the term. While I would rather not even give any letter grade at all, we are mandated to do so, at this time. I am hopeful this will change in the future though.

What fears did you have about abolishing grading?

I have many fears. Are parents going to understand? Will my students all give themselves A's? Will it really matter if they do? What will the other teachers think? What impact will it have on student-learning? Will this backfire on me?

What challenges do/did you encounter with abolishing grading?

My challenges are ongoing and just beginning. I'm sure I will be able to write about more of my challenges as I continue with the process of abolishing grading.

Are you willing to provide contact information (e-mail, Twitter, blog, Skype, etc) for others who are interested in abolishing grading?

Yes, my email is henriksen_t@sd36.bc.ca . You can find me on Twitter at @henriksent . My blog is henriksenlearning.wordpress.com.

Other posts I have written on this topic, can be found here and here.

If you would like to join the Grading Moratorium, you can find information here.

If you would like to read more Grading Moratorium stories, you can find them here.

Grading Moratorium: Pernille Ripp

2011-11-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Pernille Ripp has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Pernille Ripp
Middleton, Wisconsin, United States
Elementary
psripp@gmail.com
@pernilleripp
www.mrspripp.blogspot.com

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

I am in my second year of this now, but it doesn’t seem to get easier as far as making sure that I am doing it all correctly. I love not having the focus on grades, and yet still have to produce report cards. It is always a process in progress.

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

For two years I fudged grades, handed out worksheets to make sure I had enough grades to average as well as see kids flourish or wither away depending on their report card. This is not what learning or
school should be. I want to create an environment where students know what they need to learn to move forward. They need to able to explain to their parents exactly what they are working on and what they have mastered, grades do not provide this. I also want parents to get a full picture of what their child knows and where they are headed.

When I remove the letter grade, the focus becomes on the skills and learning rather than that letter.
It has been remarkable to see the change in my students as they are freed from letter grades.

What do you do in replace of grading?

I provide a lot of feedback, and I do have to give trimester report cards. the kids decide their grades with me and we discuss how they want to move forward. Some assignments get rubrics filled in and other are handed back and discussed. Much of our work is a work in progress.

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

Through conversation with the students. they are much harder on themselves and clued in in different way than I am to their own skills and needs. It is such a rich discussion and I walk away knowing my students even better. I also trust myself as a teacher; how often do we feel that we have a more accurate reflection of a child’s abilities than what a test tells us. By removing letter grades I get to finally trust myself.

What fears did you have about abolishing grading?

Backlash from parents, teachers,and the students. However, it hasn’t been bad. Many agree and many feel that they have a good idea of what their child knows. The students find it peculiar but then move on. Administration has been supportive as long as I do a trimester report card. My district is exploring standards based grading as well so there seems to be a good discussion about grades starting to happen.

What challenges do/did you encounter with abolishing grading?

Just that I have to discuss and defend it. It is important to have your reasoning straight and also to have a network. I blog a lot about it because I want other teachers to feel comfortable reaching out. I am very transparent with my own struggles and I don’t ever want someone to feel alone in this. It is a big decision but for and for the kids, it was the only right one.

Are you willing to provide contact information (e-mail, Twitter, blog, Skype, etc) for others who are interested in abolishing grading?

Oh heavens yes; please! You are not alone in this so reach out. I am on Twitter @pernilleripp, I blog www.mrsprip.blogspot.com and you can always email me as well psripp@gmail.com

The Damaging Effects of a Grade

2011-11-12T05:00:00.001-07:00

Here is a guest post by Cherra-Lynne Olthof. She teaches middle school math, language arts and social studies. She tweets here and blogs at Teaching on Purpose. This post was originally seen here.

by Cherra-Lynne Olthof

I’m going to step out of my teacher shoes for a minute and put on my mom shoes (acknowledging that really it’s tough to separate the two when you have a child).

First, a bit of background information: My eldest child is in Grade 2 and is very lucky to have two fabulous teachers who share the duties of the classroom in a 60/40 split. She’s in a class of 26 and both teachers have admitted that makes things very “busy”. Luckily my daughter is a strong student and really an independent learner. If you don’t believe me, check out my post on how she learned algebra when she was sick last year. We are lucky that she enjoys school so much and thrives on learning.

However…I wasn’t prepared for some of the ramifications she’s been having this year. She writes a spelling test every Friday. We found out at Parent/Teacher conferences that Kaitlyn is working off of a grade 4 spelling list, and we were ok with that. They felt she needed a challenge and the regular Grade 2 spelling list wasn’t cutting it. Again, I was fine with that. I have yet to meet an elementary teacher who doesn’t have spelling tests so it’s not the test that I object to per say….it’s how her father and I (both being teachers ourselves) have handled how she receives grades and the importance she places on them.

Up until this year, there wasn’t a single test she didn’t get 100% on. She was proud of this and we congratulated her on her accomplishments (our first mistake probably). This year, with the more challenging lists, she’s been getting questions wrong. They are little things like reversing the i and e in thief (a mistake I make myself as an adult) or choosing one homynm of a word over another (dew instead of do).

We took the first test she scored one wrong on as an opportunity to explain to her that grade weren’t everything and making mistakes was natural. We thought she understood. We thought we had covered it well. When we asked her, “Do you understand it’s ok to get things wrong?”….she nodded and said yes at the appropriate time. We thought she knew.

We were wrong.

Today I drove her to school and we were running late. To make matters worse, we got caught on the wrong side of the tracks by the train. While we were waiting there I had a conversation with my child that disturbed me.

She told me she doesn’t think she’s a good speller anymore because she no longer gets 100%. On every test she seems to get at least one wrong and sometimes as many as 4 out of 18 wrong (her “worst” score so far this year). I was shocked! I hadn’t seen this coming at all. She was very focused on the score at the top of the test paper and since it no longer equated to 100% she had convinced herself she must no longer be a good speller.

So I asked her a series of questions, trying really hard not to mention anything about test scores. Throughout the conversation I got her to admit that the words she is spelling this year (thief, neighbour, snowflake) are much more difficult then the words from last year (I, it, he, we, she, they). I also managed to get her to admit that this is a huge improvement from last year. There was the reminder her that even though she got a few of the words wrong, the mistakes were so small that I still knew what the word was, even if it wasn’t spelled correctly.

She made the connection to her e-mail buddy, a pal that she has in her class who e-mails with her back and forth after school (I know….it’s starting already! yeesh). And I asked her, does she always have perfect spelling? Well no, she admitted. Do you still understand what she is trying to tell you in the message? Yes! She agreed. And slowly she decided that spelling wasn’t as important as being able to read a message, or a story, or directions someone might give you. (A message I try to drive home with my own students when it comes to focusing on spelling.)

As I was congratulating myself on a a great conversation while we pulled up to the school, she finished off by saying: ”I still wish I could get them all right.” Grrr……

So we will keep working on this one. What I will continually draw her back to are these three reminders:

1. Are you improving? (Because in the end, this is all we really care about as parents and even as a teacher).

2. Are you feeling confident in yourself and your ability to learn? (Self confidence in a learner is far more important then the grade they score).

3. Can you take your mistakes and turn that into an opportunity to learn something from them? (There’s a reason why pencils have erasers).

I still feel like taking a bottle of whiteout to the 14/18 score at the top of her spelling test…..

But I also can’t help using this moment to reflect on my own teaching. And my decision to eliminate as much grading from my own practice as possible. I will be joining Joe Bower’s: Grading Moratorium very shortly….and you will find my full story there.

Finnish Lessons for Scotland

2011-11-11T05:00:00.001-07:00

Here is a guest post by Niall MacKinnon who is a principal of a primary school in Scotland.

by Niall MacKinnon

I am the principal of a small rural primary school in Scotland. I am honored that Joe has asked me to write a guest blog. It is an exciting time to do this.

From half way round the globe I share the excitement of Pasi Sahlberg’s new book Finnish Lessons. Its subtitle What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? has come at the right time for us here in Scotland.

We have just gone through a curriculum review seeking to re-vision education. A welcome policy mix was coming in: opening up wider capacities, de-cluttering, deepening learning, personalisation, choice, creativity, professionalism, and a visionary ‘building the curriculum’. This explicitly gave us local ownership of pathways forward in our own institutions.

The official message here is that the big curriculum change debates are settled. But now there is an overlay. As we embraced principles to ‘build’ in our schools, our inspectors gave us ‘required’ characteristics of successful ‘implementation’. We were asked to declutter through rounded, non-target-driven outcomes based on experiences, but were handed a specified listing hundreds and hundreds strong and told to cross-match our practice to these. We had to continue grading to the existing audit indicator schedules, then were told that inspectors had ‘increased expectations’ in inspections. Now we are to get standardised testing. What happened?

It is Sahlberg who shows how this happened, from the Finnish alternative. We tried to bring in a new curriculum approach without re-thinking the basic underpinning values which would frame it. Whilst our new curriculum asked us to rethink practice, it did not give us the means to think. Scotland could not break free from audit indication, inspection and targetised attainment. Its culture remained top-down.

The critical shift needed is to purposes and principles, giving professional ownership of the means to realise them at the local level. Sahlberg shows that this is what Finland got right. It embraced dialogue basing practice change in reflection over theories and models of education. This is not possible if loaded down with top-heavy audit indication schedules, micro-specification of actions and of curriculum content from the center.

The central message of Sahlberg’s book is that Finland established a high performing education system by adopting policies counter to that which came in across most Western education systems. Sahlberg calls these the GERM – the Global Education Reform Movement. The features of the GERM are: standardizing teaching and learning with common criteria for measurement and data; increased focus on core subjects, particularly literacy and numeracy; teaching a prescribed curriculum; transfer of models of administration from the corporate world; high stakes accountability policies – control through testing, inspection, division between schools and an ethos of punishment (for educators).

That is what went wrong. These remained in place in Scotland and so our new vision was never going to succeed. Finland’s success has been achieved by the simple solution of framing the development of the system around professional dialogue. We need to do the same. But to do that we have to strip out the blockages. If we want to rediscover our professionalism and our ‘love of learning’ we need to be GERM free. The real problem in a GERM ridden system is that the simplicity of professional conversation is lost. Of course, what we may then talk about is anything but simple.

This is a lesson for Scotland, and for the world. We all need a course of Finnish Lessons.

What's your blind spot?

2011-11-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

The paradox of blindness:

We think turning a blind eye to the truth will make us safe even as it puts us in danger. As long as the work or learning environment convinces us that it is safer to say and do nothing, injustices can and will likely continue. There is a real danger in having a fixed view of the world and not being open to evidence that you're wrong until it is too late. Ironically, some of the most educated professionals can end up the most blind because they come to see their expertise as definitive.
We all have blind spots.

This isn't up for debate.

The question is: What are you doing about this?

The Finnish Education System in 2011

2011-11-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

Pasi Sahlberg writes in his book Finnish Lessons:

One of the key messages of this book is that unlike many other contemporary systems of education, the Finnish system has not been infected by market-based competition and high-stakes testing policies. The main reason is that the education community in Finland has remained unconvinced that competition and choice with more standardized testing than students evidently require would be good for schools. The ultimate success of a high-stakes testing policy is whether it positively affects student learning, not whether it increases student test scores on a particular test. If student learning remains unaffected, or if testing leads to biased teaching, the validity of such high-stakes must be questioned. Finnish education authorities and especially teachers have not been convinced that frequent external census-based testing and stronger accountability would be beneficial to students and their learning.

Based on this paragraph alone, I can think of many people who would have a vested interest in ensuring that educators around the world would never read Sahlberg's book. For many, this book would prove to be ideologically inconvenient.

Grading Moratorium: Mark Barnes

2011-11-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

Mark Barnes has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Mark Barnes

mark@thepaperlessclassroom.com

@markbarnes19

www.resultsonlylearning.com

www.learnitin5.com

Two years ago, I went through a remarkable transformation as a teacher. I’d been in the classroom for 15 years, running the traditional teacher playbook in nearly every way, including putting points, percentages and letter grades on all activities and projects. Then, I read Daniel Pink’s Drive, several books by Alfie Kohn, articles by Stephen Krashen and blogs by numerous educators who were moving to more progressive teaching methods.

Tired of being nothing more than a classroom manager and grader of homework, bell

work and worksheets, I decided that I was going to change everything -- including

grades. I built what I call a Results Only Learning Environment, based on a similar business model, created by two former Best Buy executives. The ROLE is student-centered and eliminates all traditional practices, including grades.

I wanted to do away with grades, because my research told me that real learning involved intrinsic motivation. Grades are extrinsic motivators – the central part of the carrot-and-stick system that traditional educators use to control students, and control destroys learning. It was time for me to get away from this abusive way of teaching.

Number and letter grades have been replaced by ongoing narrative feedback. This formative assessment helps bring meaning to evaluation. As students work on projects, I give them detailed verbal and written feedback that often directs them back to a prior lesson or presentation, so they can apply it to their work, demonstrating mastery learning. This cycle of production, feedback and change eliminates the one-stop-shop method of

teaching that exists in the traditional world.

Since my district mandates report card grades, I meet with all students at the end of the marking period, and we conference about their production and how they’ve handled my feedback. Then, I ask them to grade themselves, based on their self-evaluations. Remarkably, the students pick grades that I would have assigned about 75 percent of the time; most of the remaining 25 percent are harder on themselves than I would have been. Some even give themselves “Fs”.

I was never afraid of making this change. I was a little anxious heading into our first self-evaluations and report card conferences. Perhaps students would not be honest with themselves, I thought. Of course, I was pleasantly surprised when I realized how remarkably honest they are. Not that I wanted them to receive low grades; I was just happy that they understood how to be self-critical, which is important in a results-only classroom.

This transformation has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, as I love teaching again and feel that I’m impacting lives like never before.

* Note: Mark's assessment practices are further explained in an upcoming book titled ROLE Reversal: How Results-only Learning is Changing Education as We Know It that will be released in 2012.

Sahlberg's ten big ideas on Finland

2011-11-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

In his book Finnish Lessons, Pasi Sahlberg identifies ten big ideas:

1. Finland has an education system in which young people learn well and performance differences among schools are small -- and all with reasonable cost and human effort

2. This has not always been so.

3. In Finland, teaching is a prestigious profession, and many students aspire to be teachers.

4. Therefore, the Finns have probably the most competitive teacher education system in the world.

5. As a consequence, teachers in Finland have a great deal of professional autonomy and access to purposeful professional development throughout their careers.

6. Those who are lucky enough to become teachers normally are teachers for life.

7. Almost half of the 16-year olds, when they leave comprehensive school have been engaged in some sort of special education, personalized help, or individual guidance.

8. In Finland, teachers teach less and students spend less time studying both in and out of school than their peers in other countries.

9. Finnish schools lack the standardized testing, test-preparation, and private tutoring of the United States and much of the world.

10. All of the factors that are behind the Finnish success seem to be the opposite of what is taking place in the United States and much of the rest of the world, where competition, test-based accountability, standardization, and privatization seem to dominate.

That last point should be displayed on Google's home page for all to see.

Grading Moratorium: Kelly Aleman

2011-11-08T05:00:00.001-07:00

Kelly Aleman has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Kelly Aleman

Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

Middle School Councillor

Social Studies

@flamesstamp

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

I have been giving only report card grades for the last 7 years.

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

After becoming a counselor, I found so many students of all abilities that were being degraded by grading. Low achievers were defining themselves as not able to learn, and high achievers were being destroyed by the odd low grade and were so competitive that they were no
t caring about their fellow classmates.

What do you do in replace of grading?

This would be my recipe:

Engaging lessons
Lots of verbal feedback
Specific written feedback
Letters to parents informing them of my reasons for no grades

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

Mostly I decide in consultation with the student.

What fears did you have about abolishing grading?

Mostly that parents would not understand and that administration would field calls and tell me to stop.

What challenges do/did you encounter with abolishing grading?

Mostly from the students. It is such a paradigm shift that some felt that the rug was going to be pulled out from them. After a short while, however, when grades were removed, almost all students soon forget about the carrots and sticks and focused on their learning instead.

The other challenge that I welcome is creating engaging material for students do so that they are immersed in the learning and I do not have to threaten them with a low grade for completing the work to the best of their abilities. They are having too much fun in the activity to worry about being bribed or punished.

Are you willing to provide contact information (e-mail, Twitter, blog, Skype, etc) for others who are interested in abolishing grading?

Yes

kaleman@rdpsd.ab.ca

flamesstamp - twitter

What has Finland not done?

2011-11-07T12:10:00.001-07:00

In his book Finnish Lesson, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

The dominance of cognitive psychology, along with the emergence of constructivist theories of learning and the advances in neurosciences on the horizon, attracted Finland educational researchers to analyze existing conceptions of knowledge and learning in schools. Several influential and teacher-friendly readers were published and sent to schools. They included "Conception of Knowledge" (1989), Conception of Learning (1989), and "About Possibilities of School Changes" (1990). Questions like "What is knowledge?", "How do pupils learn?", and "How do schools change?" were common themes for teacher in-service training and school improvement until the end of the 1990s.

From an international perspective, this first phase of educational change in Finland was exceptional. At the same time as Finnish teachers were exploring the theoretical foundations of knowledge and learning and redesigning their school curricula to be congruent with them, their peers in England, Germany, France and the United States struggled with increased school inspection, controversial externally imposed learning standards, and competition that disturbed some teachers to the point that they decided to leave their jobs. In England and the United States, for example, deeper analysis of school knowledge and implications of new research on learning remained mainly issues among academics or reached only the most advanced teachers and leaders. Perhaps it is due to these philosophical aspects of educational change that Finland remained immune to the winds of market-driven education policy changes that arose in many OECD countries in the 1990s.

You don't make change by simply making those who have less power than you do what ever it is you demand. To believe otherwise is to ignore what research has been telling us for a very long time.

A prominent researcher in the field of motivation and psychology Edward Deci explains in his book Why We Do What We Do:

The proper question is not, "how can people motivate others?" but rather, "how can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves?"

On what planet would the cartoon above be considered an environment where people could nurture a desire to motivate themselves to learn?

In the forward for Sahlberg's book, Andy Hargreaves writes:

One of the ways that teachers improve is by learning from other teachers. Schools improve when they learn from other schools. Isolation is the enemy of all improvement. We have spent decades breaking down the isolation of teachers within and between our schools. It is now time to break down the ideology of exceptionalism in the United States and other Anglo-American nations if we are to develop reforms that will truly inspire our teachers to improve learning for all our students -- especially those who struggle the most. In that essential quest, Pasi Sahlberg is undoubtedly one of the very best teachers of all.

I hear a lot of people ask "What has Finland done to improve their education system", but it might be equally as important to ask, "What has Finland not done to their education system". While most Anglo-American cultures have spent their limited time, effort and resources on content-bloated, standardized, prefabricated, top-down mandated curriculums with test-based accountability and market-based competition, Finland has focused on broad & creative learning, personalization, professional responsibility, collaboration and trust.

If you look at that comic above and think to yourself, "there has to be a better way", there is... and it starts with examining the Finnish Way and reading Sahlberg's book Finnish Lessons.

While you do this, keep in mind that we should not be interested in cloning Finland, rather we are simply looking to them so that we can begin to imagine how we can be different.

Kathy Olmstead on changing education in Alberta

2011-11-07T05:00:00.001-07:00

Kathy Olmstead

Here is a quick summary of Kathy Olmstead's talk on curriculum and transformational change in Alberta education . She is Associate Superintendent, Education Services, Livingstone Range School Division No. 68, Claresholm, Alberta.

All students can access curriculum according to their strengths and interests.
Inclusive learning environments need to be in place that mirror our heterogeneity of our society. This is one step in moving our society from a culture of disability to one of strengths. We spend way too much time focusing on our deficits and disabilities and not enough on our diverse abilities.
Teachers must build relationships with students. They need the spaces to do this, and this means small class sizes.
We need to redefine and broaden our current narrow definition of success. We need to move away from the norm-referenced tools that we have used for so long to
We need to rethink and focus intensely on curriculum design. Teachers are going to need time to do this. We need to abolish "teacher-proof" supplies that sells teaching as something that anyone can do.
First and foremost, we have a responsibility and accountability to students and families. Not to jurisdictions, corporations or government.
Decisions are best made by those who are closest to those who the decision affects. The further away a decision is made from the student, the more stupid the decision is.
Hierarchies sabotage collaboration.
Humanity prospers when people work together. This is not about compliance to someone else's rules.
Collaboration cannot be done on found time.
We need to learn to love the messiness of learning interactions and not manage them away.
"We need to reformulate learning difficulties as a problem for the curriculum rather than a problem of the child." Mary Drummond

It was this last point that truly resonated with me. For too long, school has established curriculum as this fixed round hole of content and delivery that children of all sizes and shapes must be made to fit. When curriculum is framed in this rigid, inflexible and inhumane way, drop out rates of 25 to 50 percent suddenly make a lot of sense.

It's time we see curriculum as a kind of clothing that needs to fit the child. This means curriculum must be far more flexible, personable and humane.

Irmeli Halinen on Finnish Curriculum

2011-11-05T13:14:00.002-06:00

Irmeli Halinen and me

I had the privilege of listening to Irmeli Halinen who is the head of curriculum development unit with the Finnish National Board of Education.

Background on Finnish Education

early years of education and care belongs to the ministry of health but is moving to the ministry of education and culture. This includes children until they are six years old. At 6, they are eligible to attend pre-primary education, and compulsory school begins for 7 year olds.
Formal education is not for these young children. They learn through play. Research tells us that to begin formal, systematic education for children younger than 7 is developmentally inappropriate.
No streaming or tracking at all.
Voluntary tenth year of education.
Basic Education goes for 10 years and then children can go an academic route (matriculation) or Vocational route.

In Finland education providers have a central role in the governance structure. Government, ministry of Education and Culture, National Board of Education and state regional organizations all work together with educators who work in schools to develop and implement school.

Minimum teaching hours for every grade (by law)

19 hours for grades 1-2
23 hours for grades 3-4
24 hours for grades 5-6
30 hours for grades 7-9 (grade 10 is optional)

Maximum daily working hours for students (by law)

5 hours per day for pupils of 1-2 grades
7 hours per day for pupils of 3-9 grades

Important quality indicators

Practically all children in Finland complete school.
Politicians in Finland understand how important music, visual arts, crafts, physical education and home economics are very important.

The Ethos of the Finnish Education system is built on professionalism of teachers, supportive formative assessment for student learning and high standards for all that are enabling and encouraging. In Finland, there are no instrument of inspections that control teachers from afar. In Finland, their system is built on trust.

We have two kinds of teachers in Finland. Teachers follow their children all the way from grade 1 through grade 6. In grade 7 to 9 there are subject specialists. They have very high quality training and it is very hard to get into become a teacher. It is not unheard of for only 10% of applicants to be accepted for university teacher education programs.

In Finland, half of students go the academic route and half go the vocational route; however, the vocational route is becoming more and more popular,

All post-secondary education in Finland is paid by the government.

Every school in Finland has a special education teacher who helps teachers in their school with meeting student's needs.

Class Sizes

Grade 1-2: average is 20. No larger than 25
Grade 3, 4, 5, 6: average 25-30. No larger than 32. Efforts have been made to reduce these classes to about 15. Study groups are designed by children around subjects of their choice. These groups can be as small as 9 or as large as 30.

Curriculum and Assessment

Curriculum and assessment in Finland are intertwined and can not be separated. Three times since the 1970s, Finland has reformed their curriculum and assessment Through out these years, the common theme: growing municipal autonomy and empowerment of schools and teachers.

All parts of the Finnish system aim at supporting teaching and learning - national norms form a strong basis for local provision of education. Those at the government level really listen to teachers questions, concerns and suggestions for improving the system.

Assessment in Finland is built on self-assessment.

There are three layers of curriculum: national, municipal and school. These curriculums are less about a finished product and more about a living process. Curriculum is not just a group of subjects - curriculum is more about what they value and their ultimate goals for their children. To do this there must be a balance between academic achievement and student welfare.

While there are some standards that are dictated at the National level, most decisions about curriculum and assessment are made at the school level.

In Finland, there are no standardized exams that test all children of a certain age and subject. However, there are national-sample based tests of learning outcomes. Because Finnish teachers do not have to waste their time on high-stakes exams, they can focus on improving their teaching and supporting student learning. This is also works as a huge financial cost savings.

In Finland, students receive grades on a scale from 4 to 10.

Assessment in Finland is seen in three ways:

assessment of learning
assessment for learning
assessment as learning

Assessment as learning is becoming more and more the focus of assessment in Finland.

Curriculum is a pedagogical, empowering tool for us. Schools cannot be intellectually challenging and socially supportive of pupils if they are not there for teachers.

Finnish teachers feel like they are respected enough to have the authority and responsibility to create and conceptualize curriculum with their students. School-based curriculum work is the process of consciously creating the operating culture of the school.

On one hand curriculum can be used for administrative and controlling purposes as a ready-made tool by experts. While on the other hand, curriculum can be a common learning process and an empowering pedagogical tool for teachers.

Challenges

Learning is like navigating. We have to know where we are right now. We have to know where we want to go and how to get there. And we have to be able to read and interpret the weather conditions.

Because the world is becoming more and more complex, navigating is becoming a difficult task. This task is best undertaken together as a community rather than as individuals. But you will get lost if you try to use the map of Edmonton while navigating in Helsinki. Highly prescribed, standardized curriculums make no sense.

It is becoming more and more important for us to focus less on what we are learning in school and more on how are we going to do it.

In order to act in a competent way, you need to be able to engage in self-reflection.

Questions I asked Irmeli Halinen

Pasi Sahlberg on Finland and Alberta

2011-11-04T14:14:00.001-06:00

I had the pleasure of listening to Pasi Sahlberg at the Curriculum Design for Informed Transformation Invitational Conference.

One of his messages was:

Both Finland and Alberta are education reformers and performers.
Both Finland and Alberta have new governments.

Because of this, Finland and Alberta are in a state of crisis. It's not that our test scores aren't high enough. The real problem is far more sophisticated than what high scores on bad tests can solve. Rather, we run the serious risk of falling into the status quo trap. Status quo brings with it an impressive amount of momentum.

Finland has as much to learn from Alberta as Alberta has to learn about Finland. In particular, Finland can learn a lot from how Alberta has so successfully nourished the multi-cultural diversity that makes up their province, and Alberta can learn from how Finland does teacher education.

The reason we should all pay attention to Finland is not because we want to copy or clone Finland, but so that we can begin to imagine how we can be different. School hasn't always been this way, and so it doesn't need to be this way.

We can improve, but that means we have to change.

Yet, when you just copy others, you run the risk of making mindless mistakes because you are busy simply replicating when you should be adapting. Replication can be accomplished mindlessly. Adapting requires an acute awareness.

A problem that is occurring in Finland is that educational tourism is at an all time-high. People from all over the world are now paying attention to Finland. This means that Finland runs the risk of spending all of its time showing the world how good they are when they should be working hard to get better.

Sahlberg talked about how Steve Jobs relentlessly chased improvement. Showed this video of Jobs and a quote:

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

We have to love what we do in order to preserve. Are we encouraging this in school? Are we ruining the schools with rigor when we should be inspiring children with vigor?

Sahlberg then shifted gears and asked us what are the problems in Alberta?

Some might say that our 25% drop out rate The drop out rate in Alberta isn't the problem. Rather, this is a symptom of much larger problems that have been created by certain kinds of reforms:

we limit our schools by organizing them with the Industrial model
we narrowly define intelligence and success with the academic model
we stifle our interactions by investing in the competitive model

Systems that are built around these archaic models are destined to suffer from some very predictable problems including disengagement.

To conclude, Sahlberg suggests we talk about:

Less classroom time. Cut instructional, classroom, sit and get time in half. Replace this sit and get time with get up and go do real project time. Projects that are in a context and for a purpose.
More personalized learning. My personalization, he does not mean simply handing out electronic devices. Rather, children should play a collaborative role in developing their learning opportunities.
Focus on social capital. Seriously regulate how our children are isolating themselves. An emphasis on social learning is imperative.
Help everyone to find their talent. Support each child with the opportunity to find their passion and themselves. Too many children experience school as a place where they go to be told how incompetent they really are. We need more of a strengths based system.

I can't wait to read Pasi Sahlberg's book Finnish Lessons.

For more on Finland, take at my post The Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon.

Alberta, Curriculum & Finland

2011-11-04T05:00:00.001-06:00

Today, I'm in Edmonton for the Alberta Teachers' Association and Alberta Education's Invitational Curriculum Symposium.

I see this as an opportunity to continue the ATA's collaboration with the Alberta Government while furthering our partnership with Finland as we rethink curriculum in Alberta. I'm excited to hear from Irmeli Halinen, head of curriculum development in the Finnish National Board of Education and Pasi Sahlberg, whose new book Finnish Lessons is making its release. Dennis Shirley from Boston College and Joan Engel from Alberta Education will also be joining us.

As the day progresses, I will be sure to blog more about what I've learned and experienced.

I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbour can do

2011-11-03T05:00:00.000-06:00

The central lesson of the traditional school: how to be alone in a crowd.

This might sound something like this:

I want to see what you can do not what your neighbour can do.

This turns out to be code for:

I want to see what you can do artificially deprived of the skills and help of the people around you. Rather than seeing how much more you can accomplish in a well functioning team that's more authentic like real life.

This of course is not the way teachers and parents put it, but it is precisely what we mean and so we shouldn't ever be surprised that this is what kids hear.

Is this really what school should be like?

* This post was inspired by a presentation given by Alfie Kohn.

Charmed by Choice: Undermining Public Education

2011-11-02T05:00:00.000-06:00

The assault on public education is not just an agenda pursued by some Americans. In Canada, there are those who would like to dismantle our public education system, and in Alberta they are the Wild Rose Party.

Of course they don't come out and say they want to destroy public education -- instead they sell their privatization agenda by talking about the freedom to choose.

It's quite ingenius really -- I mean who in their right mind would object to having more choice? This assault on public education is phrased very carefully so to make it very difficult to oppose -- because if you do oppose it, the quick response might be "what's wrong with you, you don't want choice?"

At this point, it's important to remember that when something looks too good to be true, it's usually not what it appears -- and when it comes to those who are selling choice as a means to authentically improve public education, they are either neglectfully ignorant, willfully blind or outright lying.

Pedro Noguera explains why school choice is not what it seems in his guest post for NBC's Education Nation:

The problem with using vouchers as a means to expand access to quality schools for poor children is that it is based on the premise that parents are the one's who do the choosing. The truth of the matter is that schools are the ones who choose and not parents.

When a low-income parent shows up at a private school, especially an elite school with few poor children of color, there is no guarantee that their child will be chosen for admission - even if the parent has a voucher. This is particularly true if the child has learning disabilities, behavior problems or doesn't speak English very well. As we've seen with many charter schools, such children are often under-served because they are harder to serve and possession of a voucher won't change that. Many private schools maintain quality through selective admissions and vouchers won't change that either.

Moreover, choice assumes that a parent has access to information on the choices available and transportation. Neither of these can be assumed. Many parents choose a school based on how close it is to their home or work, rather than the school's reputation. Many are unwilling to send their children to schools in neighborhoods far from their homes, particularly if transportation is not provided.

The idea that vouchers would solve the lack of access to quality schools in poor, inner city neighborhoods is based on the belief that the free market is a better regulator of goods and services than the government. While this idea sounds good in theory, it's not borne out by the facts.

In most inner city communities in the United States, the free market is not effective at providing healthy food at affordable prices, banking services or safe, affordable housing. That's because the poor in the inner city constitute a "captured market" and suppliers of goods and services are typically able to get away with low-quality products because community members have few available alternatives.

Systems of school choice only work when there are lots of good choices available and a means for parents to exercise their choices. This can only be done when government insures quality by holding schools accountable for the quality of education they provide. Of course, our policymakers have largely failed to do this because they've focused on accountability as measured by student test scores, rather than concentrating on insuring that all schools have the resources and support systems in place to meet the needs of the students they serve, and holding themselves accountable if they don't.

Today more than ever, we need public education to educate all children to a standard that at one time may have been reserved for the elite. This means we can no longer afford to ignore the challenge of educating those who are difficult to educate.

In his publication Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform, Marc Tucker tackles education funding:

Two decades ago and more, elementary and secondary education in most of the provinces was funded much the way it is funded in the United States, with each locality raising much of the money locally, with the provinces providing additional sums intended to moderate the disparities in per student funding that such a system inevitably produces. But, about 20 years ago, this began to change. Conservative governments, in response to complaints from citizens about skyrocketing local tax rates, initiated a move to steadily reduce reliance on local taxes and to increase the portion of the total budget paid for by the province. In the biggest provinces now, little if any of the money for public education is raised locally. All or almost all comes from the province. Not surprisingly, the gross inequities that came with raising money locally are gone, too, and Canada, like the top performing countries elsewhere, is moving toward a funding system intended to promote high achievement among all students, which means putting more money behind hard to educate children than children who are easier to educate.

Vouchers and choice tend to benefit those who have already "won the lottery" and often alienates and marginalizes those who can least afford it. Competition and the free market is for the strong. Public education is for all. See the problem?

In some US states, there is a movement underway called the "Parent Trigger" which is being sold as a way to empower parents in reforming and improving their children's schools. However, upon closer inspection this is no more than another fraudulent ploy with a charming name whose objective is to undermine public education. Diane Ravitch writes:

In early 2010, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, the state legislature passed the "Parent Empowerment Act." This law is commonly known as the Parent Trigger. It allows a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school. These are similar to the options in the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant program. All of them are punitive, none is supportive of changing the school for the better, and none has a shred of evidence to show that it will improve the school. Neither the Parent Trigger nor the federal SIG program offers any constructive alternatives to unhappy parents, only ways to punish the school for low scores.

Supporters of the Parent Trigger say it empowers parents, especially poor parents, and gives them a tool with which to change their school. They say that it enhances not only parent power, but school choice.

Throwing educational funding to the competitive free market via school vouchers and selling it as the freedom to choose may allow politicians to look good but it offers a hollow promise to the families that can least afford to compete. It's sadly ironic that education reforms built around choice, competition and parent empowerment tend to victimize the very people they profess to be supporting.

Assessment: Timing is everything

2011-11-01T05:00:00.000-06:00

How often are our assessments affected by nothing more or less than timing?

This comic made me think of my two favorite quotes in regards to grading:

A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgement by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material. (Paul Dressel)

What grades offer is spurious precision, a subjective rating masquerading as an objective assessment. (Alfie Kohn)

Grading Moratorium: Justin Nanu

2011-10-31T05:00:00.001-06:00

Justin Nanu has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Justin Nanu
Grade 3 & 4
Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada

jvnanu@gmail.com
@jvnanu
http://mrnanu.edublogs.org is my classroom blog.

I’ll preface these answers by giving a bit of background about myself. I’m 23, and in my 2nd year as a full time teacher. I’ve been in school since I was 4, and will continue to be in school until January 26th, 2041, as my pension fund recently informed me. Beyond the 2 (or 4 in university) month summers, I have not experienced any break from school since I started kindergarten. I guess that among my colleagues, I’m one whose experience in education is more closely related to that of my students. I teach a grade 3/4 combined grade, and I myself was in grade 4 only 15 years ago. I would have hoped, entering the profession in 2010, that things had changed since I was a kid. In many cases they have not. For this reason I started doing some research and finding books, articles, blogs and edchats in an effort to learn about what others were doing. I feel that as a new teacher my new teacher colleagues and myself are in large part responsible for affecting the kind of progressive change that we see outside of education. So now for the questions that you provided:

At what stage of the abolish grading game are you?

I guess I’m emerging. I’m only 2 months in as of the time I’m writing this, and so far I’ve given one math test. It somehow felt wrong though. There are a few students who didn’t get their “level 3” on the test and I’m giving them opportunities to conference with me and tell me what they know. I’m also using what I know of the kids from their conversations in class, problem solving work, inquiry work etc. to develop the report card grade. It’s not just the test.

Why do you want to or why did you abolish grading?

Kids focus too much on the grade. There is so much pressure from home on getting the grade. Kids will do whatever it takes to get the grade, and parents aren’t helping when they offer grade-based incentives at home. The focus should be on learning, and learning doesn’t stop with a grade. The idea of a grade just seems so wrong. So what… I got a C in geometry… does this mean that I’m done? We’ve moved onto something else and I’m stuck with a C in geometry? It perpetuates the idea that students only need to remember the material until the test rather than understand the material and be able to apply it for the rest of their lives.

What do you do in replace of grading?

Right now I’m using anecdotal notes of student conversations, conferencing (1 on 1 conversation) and descriptive feedback. I also want to use some Flip cameras to create a reflection center where students can tell me what they’ve learned, rather than me tell them what they’ve learned.

How do you establish a grade if you have no grades?

For me, grades are curriculum based. We don’t give students a letter or a percentage but rather we give them a level. Level 3 means that they demonstrate competence in the curriculum expectations; a 4 means that they’ve gone above and beyond; a level 2 means that they’re approaching the provincial standard. I’m bound by this curriculum… legally, so when it comes to report cards I’m going to have
the expectations on one side of the computer and all of my anecdotal records, descriptive feedback etc. on the other side to decide on a grade.

What fears did you have about abolishing grading?

Mainly I fear the pushback from parents who have been expecting grades over the years. I’m also a little weary of the inconsistencies across classrooms. How much does it benefit a student who goes through JK, SK, 1, 2 and 3 being graded, comes into my grade 4 class and receives this differentiated type of feedback, and must then go back into a grade 5, 6, 7, and 8 class using grades?

What challenges do/did you encounter with abolishing grading?

I anticipate some concern from administration who likes consistency within a grade. If we have 3 grade 4 classes then traditionally the teachers have been sharing assessment tools for all units and using common assessment. One class being different would raise questions within the community.

Are you willing to provide contact information for others who are interested in abolishing grading?

jvnanu@gmail.com
@jvnanu
http://mrnanu.edublogs.org is my classroom blog.
Personal blog coming soon.

Common Assessment = Undifferentiated Assessment

2011-10-30T05:00:00.000-06:00

Here is a guest post by Dave Martin. He tweets here and blogs a lot about math here.

by Dave Martin

I would like to challenge the idea of common assessment. Not just common throughout a department but common even in a single classroom. From this time further I will refer to these assessments as their true name “Standardized Assessments”. The definition of a standardized assessment is:

a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent.

Also, I refer to these as standardized assessments as they are designed in such a way the class average should fall in a “reasonable” zone. This zone may differ from teacher to teacher and from class to class but this underlying bell curve does exist. I have heard of meetings where discussions such as “The average was low, so the test should be made easier” or “The average was too high, so we need to increase the difficulty” have been had. This saddens me as we are requiring students to fail such that others can feel success.

Since by the definition and the manner these assessments are designed, usually, they must fall on a specific day, common to all teachers of the same course, and also consist of some mixture of the following:

· MC 5-10 questions
· NR 3-5 questions
· WR 2-5 questions with bullets

Usually the test days, and requirements are decided before the first day of schoolI have asked why do teachers give common assessment? I will provide the two top reasons I heard, and then my counter-argument.

1) Standardized assessment allows for fair and equal assessment practices between the same courses throughout the school.

Counter: What is fair is not always equal and what is equal isn’t always fair. If we truly want equal assessment, then should we not require all students to write with the same hand, take off their glasses, set the temperature in all the rooms to be the same, and have all students write with the same type of pencil? I know this sounds absurd, but where does the fair and equal practice stop? Each and every student, in my class, has a different set of needs and abilities yet these exams will force each student to be put through the same hole. Alberta Education recently, wrote:

Differentiated assessment means selecting tools and strategies to provide each student with the best opportunity to demonstrate his or her learning. As you get to know your students, and as student differences emerge, assessment naturally becomes more differentiated, because its purpose is to meet students where they are and to coach them to the next step. In this way, assessment and instruction continue to support and inform each other.

By making these decisions before ever “knowing my students” how is one to decide which would be the “best opportunity for each student to demonstrate his or her learning”? I do not see standardized assessment as a fair and equal practice at all.

2) Standardized assessment allows for fair and equal instructional practices between courses throughout the school.

Counter: This seems like the standardized assessment is more assessing the teacher than the student now. Even if two students, in two different classes, receive the same mark this does not guarantee the same instruction has been given. One teacher could be “teaching to the test” and involving daily test prep activities while the other is implementing quality instruction and critical thinking.

Now, the problems I see with common assessment:

First and foremost: It is the duty and responsibility of the classroom teacher to determine how and when to assess each student. I am confused and distraught when people, outside the class, control the assessment strategies, without even knowing the individual students they are impacting.

Alberta Education’s ideas are:

Differentiating assessment involves rethinking the standard practice of having all students do the same assessment tasks at the same time, regardless of their individual learning needs or the learning they have already demonstrated. Rather, in this new paradigm, teachers customize the selection and use of assessment information to reflect each student’s highest level of achievement.

By having standardized exams, we are going against the research and knowledge of our government. Also, it should be the freedom of the teacher to decide, and indeed, the freedom of each student to decide how and when they will be assessed on their knowledge. Of course we all know that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job, but by forcing everyone to assess, and ultimately, teach the same way it does not improve these “bad teachers” – but actually hobbles the good ones.

This school almost made me cry

2011-10-29T13:59:00.000-06:00

I came across an interesting blog today called Autodizactic.

The post that grabbed my attention is titled This school almost made me cry:

The students are lined up outside the school doors. In matching navy blue sweat suits, sleepiness hangs over them like a morning haze. I attribute their silence to the same tiredness I remember my own students wearing as they entered my eighth grade classroom.

The door to the school opens and the flood of students I remember witnessing as a teacher and experiencing as a student doesn’t happen. The students remain in a single-file line. The groggy morning murmurs have ceased. The line has moved from quiet to silent. Just over the threshold, the principal meets each student and asks them to lift their pant legs so she can see their socks. The few students wearing blue jeans are asked to lift their shirts so the principal can see their belts.

The students file down the hall - still silent - and sit in “community circle” and wait to be dismissed to their classrooms. The teacher overseeing community circle this morning is the only voice to be heard in the room, “I’m sorry eighth grade. Seventh grade is so quiet, I’m going to have to dismiss them first.”

Without a word, the seventh graders gather their backpacks and lunch boxes and file past me back down the hallway. One of my host teachers says, “Don’t be surprised when they don’t speak to your or acknowledge your presence. They’re on silent.” If a student were to turn to look at me or say “hello,” she explains, the student would receive a demerit. I later learn the principal’s spot checking of socks and belts also held the potential of demerits. Anything other than plain white socks or jeans without a belt are grounds for a demerit. “They are symbols of status,” the host teacher explains.

I bite my tongue at this. I am a guest, and it is not my place to point out the school’s treatment of its students is a constant reminder of status.

The last paragraph of this post should hit us all like a double-decker bus.

Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

All that is necessary for the triumph of damaging educational policies is that good educators keep silent.

The bane of economic reasoning

2011-10-28T05:00:00.000-06:00

When we allow education to be driven by the same economists who were the architects of the 2008 economic collapse then we shouldn't be surprised when we get what we pay for.

Education reform that is dominated by economists, rather than educators, will forever be plagued by the bane of economic reasoning:

Overvalue whatever can be quantified and undervalue what cannot.

The Case Against Grades

2011-10-27T17:25:00.001-06:00

ASCD's current issue of Educational Leadership Journal features an entire issue on grading. Among the journal's articles is Alfie Kohn's The Case Against Grades. I was pretty excited to see Kohn cite some of the work I have done on abolishing grading in an effort to improve formative assessment.

You can view a list of educators and their stories about how they abolished grading in favor of more supportive assessment practices at The Grading Moratorium, and you can read about how to join The Grading Moratorum here.

Stop writing the objectives on the board

2011-10-27T05:00:00.000-06:00

How often have you been told that writing the lesson's objectives on the board is best practice? Can you think of even one reason why doing this might be a bad idea? Because the prevailing wind of conventional wisdom consistently blows in favor of content-bloated, prefabricated externally mandated standardized standards, it takes courage to pause and reflect.

Mike Fishback offers this post titled Objectively Speaking where he identifies three reasons why we should question the wisdom behind writing the lesson's objective on the board.

Communicating objectives to students sends a strong message about who is driving the learning.
Communicating objectives to students gives away the ending before the uncovering even begins.
Communicating objectives to students discourages students and teachers from pursuing potentially constructive lines of inquiry that appear tangential to the objectives.

I often share this clip of Alfie Kohn telling a story of a grade one class discovering the need for standardized measurement.

Watch this clip and think about what affect writing the objective on the board would have had on student learning.

I think we can all agree that writing the objective on the board might have ruined this experience in some way for some of the kids. When I hear that teachers are mandated to write the objectives on the board and are subject to being evaluated based on their compliance, I become concerned.

At the very least, teachers should be afforded the professional responsibility to decide whether writing the objective on the board is pedagogically appropriate.

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This school almost made me cry

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The Case Against Grades

What has Finland not done?