My 5 ½ year old daughter, Alexandra, is about to transition from preschool to a K-5 elementary. Alex’s teacher is amazing and packs learning into every nanosecond of the day. Teacher Lisa uses a carefully designed blend of play and intentional learning structures to ensure the students of Room 3 blossom into public school-ready students.
Recently, Teacher Lisa introduced the mantra of “Show what you know!” With exuberance, she explains to the kids that since so much incredible learning has taken place over the past 8 months, new learning centers have been set up around the room so the students can now have the opportunity to demonstrate their brilliance and “wow” each other. As I listened to the explanation of what this meant, I was reminded that across the country, millions of students were currently in the throes of accomplishing this very task.
Over the last two months, principals in every state have delivered motivational messages encouraging students to give their best on the state exams. Teachers have customized t-shirts with slogans emphasizing their belief in the potential of their kids to achieve. Parents made certain that their children have an extra helping of breakfast, maybe even packing it with some “brain food,” to ensure focus is front and center. School communities all over the country have rallied around supporting students in “showing what you know!”
Now, as schools submit their test data to state departments of education, I cannot help but ask myself, “Do our existing state tests provide students with the occasion to shine? Are kids able to exhibit their abilities to not only make meaning of rigorous vocabulary, but also show how to incorporate figurative language into their writing? What about creative techniques that students use to approach complex math problems? Do state exams capture the innovative thinking that took place within a child’s brain to arrive at the end result?” Sadly, the answer remains: “Rarely, if ever.”
Our existing state assessments currently provide limited (if any) opportunity to “show what you know.” Thankfully, a tremendous change is on the horizon! The promise of the new assessments that will accompany the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is exciting. Sure, selected responses will still exist in the exams, but soon students will have access to increased opportunities to provide open-ended answers to math and language arts questions. Students will be able to rank order portions of questions via “drag and drop” web technology and use pictographs to represent conceptual understanding. Moreover, CCSS test questions will be situated in real world scenarios that add context for kids to “anchor” the purpose for learning to their responses and overall knowledge.
For the skeptics out there, yes, there remains a very large hill to climb. There is much work to be done in supporting teachers with mastering the new CCSS. Materials need to be identified and leveraged to facilitate this process. The appropriate technology must be secured to ensure efficient administration of the innovative, computer-based assessments. These realities do not discourage me. Instead, I am optimistic that we’re well on our way to tackling these challenges.
At SchoolCity, we’re working diligently to transform the “Show WHAT you know!” message into one that incorporates “Show HOW you know!” Student work is priceless and critical to the understanding of student thinking. Already, STARS™, our assessment management and analysis platform, provides valuable insight to educators through test item answer rationales (i.e., distractors). This information, when presented efficiently, lets teachers pinpoint student misconceptions and select appropriate intervention to accelerate learning. In that sense, we’re making strides in preparing our customers for the imminent changes inherent to the advent of CCSS.
Where is SchoolCity headed? We’re focusing significant resources on transforming our assessment solutions to incorporate innovative item types recommended by the two organizations at the vanguard of CCSS, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). This transformation will soon be evident not only in our data and reporting platform, but also within our online assessment tool. Additionally, our system will soon allow kids taking online tests to show their work using image capture technologies. Teachers and kids will soon be afforded access to a richer experience of cognitive problem solving that will help determine the necessary steps for mastery.
We look forward to partnering with your teachers and kids on our journey from WHAT to HOW!
“I think that one of the things we don’t realize in society is how incredibly difficult it is to be an effective teacher in America today. On the one hand we have to understand that teachers are one of the most important strategies we have to solve the problems that we’re facing in this country. We need to understand that teachers can make an absolute difference. On the other hand we need to understand that teachers are going to need support, too, in order to be successful. […] I think if you talk to teachers across the country they would tell you that they feel that lack of support.” – Michelle Rhee, Founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, excerpted from an interview on Forum with Michael Krasny, KQED Radio, February 12, 2012.
Michelle Rhee is a controversial figure in education. In this case, her statement underscores the results of a recent survey by MetLife. According to The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Teachers, Parents and the Economy, the percent of teachers who see themselves as very satisfied is at its lowest point in 20 years. Many district administrators or parents reading these findings may feel discouraged, as economic factors play a major role in the decline in satisfaction. Teachers reporting low job satisfaction are more likely to be in schools where there have been layoffs, reductions in programs, and more students coming to school hungry.
What may be more powerful is focusing on the bright spots: the factors that are associated with job satisfaction. Teachers reporting high job satisfaction were more likely to report that their district provides adequate opportunities for professional development.
Any plan for improving student achievement must ultimately in some way involve teachers. As a result, teachers are presented with an overwhelming array of new initiatives every few years on top of their everyday classroom prep.
Teachers presented with a new product often say, “I don’t want to learn how to use THIS product, I just learned how to use the LAST product!”
Teachers want to be respected as professionals. According to the MetLife survey, teachers with lower job satisfaction are more likely to report that they are not treated as professionals by the community. As professionals, teachers want tools that save them time and that allow them to collaborate with colleagues. They need to know how this product applies to them and to their students, and they need to be called upon as experts.
The MetLife Survey report goes on to state that “Teachers with high job satisfaction are more likely than other teachers to agree that their school…has a plan for parent and community engagement that is linked to specific goals for improving student learning and healthy development (93% vs. 81%).”
Data analysis at the district and campus level allows campus leaders to draft those specific goals for improving student learning, laying the foundation for a plan for engagement with parents and the larger community. Data analysis in the classroom informs instruction in order to meet those specific goals for improving student learning. Data-driven collaboration after school can help teachers identify individual students needing additional support. From planning sessions with district and campus leaders to data analysis in and out of the classroom, SchoolCity can support you and your teachers through this process.
Ultimately, providing ongoing professional development support for teachers will boost student achievement because teachers know their students. Teachers are the experts and are the most important element in improving student outcomes. Teachers have a profound influence on the students that they teach. Helping your teachers means helping your students learn.
(Continued from last week...) In visits to Youngstown so far this school year, we have had the opportunity to present model lessons that involve students in their own data and amp up instruction through the use of specific focus strategies. We have presented these lessons to coaches, district leadership, and building administrators and the few lucky teachers whose classrooms were utilized. This week, we returned to
Youngstown to provide an opportunity for the coaches to practice delivering those model lessons themselves and build unconscious
competence. We also met with building administrators to develop a plan of attack for getting the model and necessary support to each teacher to make change happen at the classroom level.
Every time we visit Youngstown, we see amazing progress. On this visit, we saw student data posted in the halls highlighting student progress. We heard coaches say that the training provided them with great new ideas to bring back to their buildings and teachers. Sharing these ideas is the next step, as it is only through concerted action in each classroom that the twitch of the wheel at the district level is magnified and the movement is shifted. The Youngstown ship is moving, and a continued unified effort will set it on the right course. The day after a Professional Development led by our VP, Erika Benadom, one Math Coach told me, “Yesterday was great. I looked up some of those [resources] that Erika mentioned online last night and they were awesome. I really think our students are going to do better this year. I really do”.
Interested in learning more?
Running a large school district can be like steering a cruise ship: the 20-story kind with climbing walls and water slides and an entire shopping mall. Each tiny twitch of the wheel has the power to create a magnified response, and yet this response is delayed, as the signal must be passed through the bowels of the great ship and eventually to the huge rudders, which then slowly shift their position, gradually altering the path of the water and eventually translating this motion back to the ship as a lumbering whole.
As one principal in Youngstown stated,
“It can be done, but-
it
takes
time.”
Intervention is a process: a process of implementation, evaluation and adjustment. Although tools to aid in this process may be purchased, intervention is not just shiny new lesson plans- sometimes it is also new attitudes. In order to be successful, intervention must be implemented and embraced by the entire district community.
The SchoolCity team is in the second year working with Youngstown City Schools and guiding them through this implementation process. The district has administered common formative assessments and fostered a culture of data among teachers. The course has been set at the helm, but the message takes time to travel to the teachers. This year, the ship is beginning to shift. As one Literacy Coach enthused on our most recent visit, “I am really excited about SchoolCity [and other new intervention programs]. Finally everything is on the same page.” SchoolCity has enabled teachers to use the same language, the language of data, to communicate between classrooms and across campuses. As the same Literacy Coach noted, “[The use of data is important because] what you think you know and what is actually happening are often very different.”
NEXT WEEK--Part 2, How Things are Going at Youngstown.
I remember driving to Fairfield-Suisun USD (FSUSD) early one late winter morning last year. I was with a SchoolCity colleague and we were going to make our first foray into the district’s schools. It was the first time that SchoolCity had entered into classrooms with the expressed purpose of showing teachers and students how to use STARS™, our assessment reporting and analysis platform, to examine their test data and set upon a course of action to address content areas of concern. That’s a fancy way of saying we were about to put our money where our mouth is.
The stakes were high. The district had recently adopted an effective Program Improvement Model to boost student achievement. Six of their schools had been designated as Program Improvement schools. And those were the six we were brought in to work with. We weren't just going in to train teachers and site leaders on how to use our product. We were also going into classrooms, teaching model lessons, and working with students in order to begin the process of engaging FSUSD kids with their own data.
Our work with FSUSD began as a mutual challenge: we said "Give us your lowest performing schools, and let us show you what can happen." We were challenging ourselves as much as they were challenging us to help them turnaround low-performing schools. Working with the district, we created dozens of formative assessments that teachers and administrators could analyze with STARS™. And we committed ourselves to conducting Professional Development, including teaching model lessons in actual classrooms, in order to further the schools along the short-cycle, formative assessment process --- whose power largely derives from kids and teachers taking an ownership role over their own data and learning.
How'd we do? Did we manage to show how a product can be integral to formative assessment success?
See for yourself.
Greetings from sunny (today!) Boston, MA. SchoolCity is in town as a member of The Council of the Great City Schools' Blue Ribbon Corporate Advisory Group.
CGCS is the only national organization exclusively representing the needs of urban public schools. Composed of 65 large city school districts, its mission is to promote the cause of urban schools and to advocate for inner-city students through legislation, research and media relations. CGCS' Annual Fall Conference brings together representatives from across the country to discuss issues relevant to large, urban school districts.
This morning, I had the honor of addressing conference attendees at the day's first General Session assembly. Here's what I said:
Buenos días, me llamo Jorge Navarro. Soy hijo de Jose y Rita Navarro. I am a product of Miami-Dade public schools. Mis padres vinieron de Cuba en el mil noveciento cincuenta y nueve …. para darme a mi una educación y ciertas oportunidades that would not have been possible in Cuba. As you can probably tell by now, I am bilingual.
I came to my company, SchoolCity, after 15 years of classroom teaching and teacher training in Florida, New York City, and, most recently, at the highest-performing urban school district in California, San Francisco Unified.
I've had the pleasure of attending several ELL-related sessions yesterday and I look forward to doing so today. One of the research-based themes, touched upon by panelists and presenters, is that from a cognitive, pedagogical, and social perspective, dual-language proficiency is a benefit that can improve schooling for a majority of our kids, as well as our society as a whole.
Bilingualism is a form of linguistic and cultural capital. Bilingualism and multilingualism also happen to hold a valuable analogy for school districts.
Now, more than ever, district data systems have to be 'multilingual.' ¿Que? ¿En que sentido? What do I mean by that? I mean that we can no longer afford, literally, that our divisions', our individual departments' data exist in silos, making it over to others outside the department in the form of powerpoint slides or presentations or reports. No, hoy, today, more than ever those silos have to speak to each other directly, they have to understand each other to the point of speaking in one language while maintaining fluency in their home language.
Tienen que ser multilingual.
Districts have made significant investments in technology. Assuring and the most return from those investments is paramount.
Just as we must tap and continually the develop the rich and powerful linguistic and cultural capital of our students, so must we take what we already have with our technology, our ways of managing data, and make it better. Make it fluent in the language of whoever happens to be before it.
Imagine: a teacher evaluation system that brings together multiple measures of effective teaching while speaking fluently with student achievement data -- having such a beautiful conversation, on one screen, that data once disparate becomes understandable to the point of spurring growth.
Not benefiting from, not leveraging the resources one already has is one way to look at how we've treated foreign languages in our schools.
Just as we are finally realizing the global, intellectual, and academic importance of proficiency in more than one language, so are we finally coming around to the idea that our data systems must also be multilingual.
A move to realign resources is well underway. Sure, strategic planning depends on it, but so do your kids. Yesterday a presenter from Boston Public Schools, in speaking about the district's ELL programming said:
"For systems to provide services for students, we need to become students of the systems."
Just as we are finally realizing our kids stand a better chance of being ready for college, ready for a volatile job market, through their ability to understand multiple languages, so are we finally realizing the need for such communicative competence in turning data into understanding.
I am proud, orgulloso, to say that SchoolCity can help your district fulfill that need.
We’re proud to announce a new alliance with a company called VersiFit Technologies. VersiFit’s flagship product, EdVantage™, is a leading analytic and reporting platform that combines advanced data warehousing with business-intelligence. The power of EdVantage™ solutions has come to SchoolCity!
Our new alliance makes it possible for districts to access their student assessment data from SchoolCity’s STARS™ platform and simultaneously view ancillary data as it relates to student achievement.
Teachers and administrators can now use a single login to access the full spectrum of student and teacher performance data with K-12 enterprise data.
Oftentimes, school district data exists in ‘silos.’ For instance, the HR or business office uses one database, while the education services department relies on a student information system (SIS) alongside separate data sets housed in different databases. Imagine being able to bring it all together. And imagine doing so affordably. Well now you can.
This alliance lets districts better utilize data for strategic questions, such as reviewing the impact of programs on student performance or building multiple measure reports, across departmental databases, to tackle strategic questions and, ultimately, improve teaching and learning.
What does all of this mean? It means that teachers and administrators now have a seriously powerful and cost-effective tool with which to conduct critical, predictive data analyses to improve student performance. It’s about time.
I recently spent a week in Youngstown, OH, joining colleagues in Professional Development work. Personally, I saw it as a chance to get back in the classroom, albeit temporarily, and spend time with teachers and kids. SchoolCity went there to support Youngstown City Schools’ improvement efforts.
Unfortunately, the district holds the ignoble distinction of being the worst performing district in the state. How bad is it? When the district posted small gains in state test scores from last year, allowing it to move from Academic Emergency to Academic Watch, the State Superintendent publicaly claimed that the district had absolutely nothing to celebrate. He decried the gains as pitiful, saying “It hurts me to look at the data. It hurts me to think about those kids.”
Thankfully, the situation is not as bad as it appears in the press. As is often the case, what happens in the classroom differs from what gets discussed in the papers, policy meetings, and legislative debates.
Here's what we saw: A district just starting to understand the potential of testing to inform classroom instruction and student learning, caring, professional teachers eager to put test data to work but needing guidance and encouragement, and classrooms full of kids open to the idea that tests could do more than just determine who passes or fails.
Here's what we did: We went into classrooms and taught model lessons for students and teachers, then conducted daily debriefing and reflection sessions with teachers and site leaders. In the classrooms, we used reports from our STARS™ platform to show students precisely where they stood on particular content standards, and we taught students how to quickly identify patterns in the reports to see where they excelled and where they needed some work. Then we guided the kids through activities designed to help them discover why certain incorrect item responses were chosen by a majority of the class. Oh, and we made it fun.
Engaging students with their own test data, fun? Really?
Admittedly, when I was asked to go to Youngstown, my inner Recovering HS English Teacher initially recoiled at the very thought! Would these students happen to be pinned down, eyes forced open a la that ‘rehabilitation’ scene from A Clockwork Orange? Well, I'm happy and relieved to report that, no, they didn't need tying down or having thier eyes forced open. All they needed was a visually appealing and easy to understand reporting format and the ability to identify color patterns. We gave them the former, they already had the latter, and the work took off from there.
Part of our mission at Youngstown Public Schools is to help students and teachers benefit from formative assessments. Student engagement with- and ownership of their own test data is a critical hallmark of the formative approach. It also happens to be among the most powerful. It was an honor and a pleasure to see how well the kids took to the task. That in iteslf is something to celebrate.
My son started Kindergarten four weeks ago. The Program Improvement notification letter arrived yesterday. His school just entered Year 5 PI. Already, I find myself worrying about the school’s focus on improving its test scores. I suppose I should be dreading more immediate things, like his first school-day tears, but, hey, I work for a company specializing in data and assessment management. Given my job as well as the ever-increasing pressure put on public schools to improve test results, it’s all too easy for me to start worrying about how my son’s school views and administers testing.
Will they test him too much? Earlier this summer, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, asked a similar question in her What Matters Most column. Her answer could be described as one big, lamentable "Yes." Weingarten argues that our schools' "current test-driven mania" is wrongheaded and damaging to both students and the teaching profession. If one defines testing in strictly conventional terms, then many of us would have to agree with Ms. Weingarten. Her argument, however, like my worry about testing at my son’s elementary school, suffers from the very thing lacking in most public discussions of assessment in our schools: a failure to distinguish among different kinds of testing.
Conventionally speaking, when pundits and news reports talk about testing, they're usually referring to summative assessments such as the standardized tests states make kids take every spring. As Weingarten and many others rightly point out those kinds of tests can be rife with problems, not the least of which is their inability to inform instruction when it matters most: on a weekly or daily basis, not simply at the end or beginning of a grading period or school year.
Outside of professional circles, seldom is any distinction made between summative and short cycle assessments such as formative and/or adaptive ones. Such broad strokes applied to testing and its shortcomings are understandable from political and journalistic standpoints. What eludes understanding, however, is the fact supporting why the generality exists in the first place: our schools’ over-reliance on summative testing. Mountains of research, as well as anecdotal evidence indicates that formative and adaptive testing yields the kinds of results most capable of improving teaching and learning: timely, diagnostic, and relevant to teachers and students.
One doesn’t need to be Dylan William or Diane Ravitch to know that short-cycle assessments deserve a bigger seat at the public discussion table as in our schools. After all, if the purpose of assessment is to inform instruction then, by their very definition, formative and adaptive testing hold profound promise in service to students and teachers. I hope my son gets to experience some of that promise fulfilled.