In my career now spanning over 20+ years in education, I have been blessed to be a part of multiple high quality teams that produced improved results for the students that we have served. In those various assignments, ranging from teacher/coach, assistant principal, principal, and even superintendent, there has been one constant – a common vision for improvement.  This vision served as the goal of the day-to-day work of the organization and the individual teams that supported that organization. The umbrella like concept that guided the work of the organization was this vision grounded in the mission (our reason for being) of the group. Whether at the district, school, or classroom level, this guidepost was preeminent in the work.

As my understanding has matured, and I have reflected on this work over the years, one aspect that was not attended to enough at the beginning of these journeys was the articulation of clear success criteria. That is, as we progressed toward the realization of our vision, what would the indicators of that success be? What would the students be doing, saying, or producing which would provide evidence of a positive impact? 

One person that has had a profound impact on this enlightenment would have to be Professor John Hattie. Most in education circles at this point have become aware of Hattie’s work and the quest that he began to answer the simple question, “What works best?” in promoting student learning. One of the highlights of my career has been being able to get to know John and his work on a deep level. One of the key mantras of Hattie’s work, much more important than the ranking of influences on achievement, has been the ideation that the mindset of focusing on ones’ impact on learning - and - then also the evaluation of the evidence of that impact are essential to having a positive impact on the improvement of learning for students and the adults in a learning organization. To focus this work, there must be clear and objective criteria marking success of the learning. This is where the success criteria really come in to play.

It is not enough to simply have a learning goal at the classroom level, or an organizational goal that the system level. There should be clear and meaningful markers of success that are communicable and measurable. These criteria guide the evidence collected and the interpretation of that evidence against an objective standard that can be communicated across thirty students in a single classroom or a thousand schools across a state. 
Don't skimp on the articulation of clear and communicable success criteria when beginning the journey of school improvement. This also provides an excellent place to collaboratively put the hands, ears, and feet on the statement of vision that is to guide the work at all levels of the system. It takes more than a vision!

I would love to know your thoughts?

Preparing for the opening of school, I went back to my old standby materials around the Visible Learning research from John Hattie to refresh what I have read so many times the pages are nearly worn through; that is the importance of knowing where students are entering the learning process in regard to the capacity they are exhibiting in thinking. In Professor Hattie's book, Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), Hattie does a masterful job of linking the discussion of the importance of understanding student's prior knowledge and the work of Piaget. What is most disturbing is that the research out of the UK, as referenced by Hattie (2012) suggests that students are not moving into the phase of more abstract creative thinking until later and later in life. My belief, like many others, is this has been sparked by a series of accountability measures that have celebrated students' ability to parrot back "facts" rather than measure students ability to apply and actually use what they have learned. It is not that surface level knowledge is not important, it certainly is the foundation for being able to go to deeper levels in understanding. We learn to crawl and walk before we can run. But "fact factories", as some schools have become, are just not cutting it for an ever growing number of kids.

Jim Popham, Professor Emeritus of Education at UCLA, peaked my interest in also being concerned as to whether we are fostering students "affective" needs in regard to learning. That is, are we engaging students with strategies that have a high likelihood to actually foster a "like" for reading and mathematics. Shouldn't these affective measures also be some of the long term goals we set for our schools? It highly unlikely a student will experience the sheer thrill that comes with deep learning with Polly the Parroting of facts as the solitary aim. Schools that are interested in exploring these additional worthwhile aims can find a framework for doing so in the "Student Voice" work of Dr. Russ Quaglia and Dr. Michael Corso. These researchers have developed a model for creating the necessary conditions for engaging the affective side of students as well as the cognitive. In fact, their research suggests neglecting the affective growth of students can steepin the hill for the cognitive learning of students. Therefore, affective and cognitive growth should not be mutually exclusive - they should work in concert.

As you prepare for the start of your school year, what thought have you given to students prior knowledge, capacity for thinking, affective development, and/or the conditions in your school that might foster these attributes?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

I sit writing this blog after having attended a session with Ian Jukes as a part of a Superintendent Conference provided by the Mississippi Department of Education. Mr. Jukes did a masterful job of describing the concept of Disruptive Innovation. Clayton Christiansen originally coined disruptive innovation as a business term. On his website claytonchristensen.com, Christensen describes Disruptive Innovation as, “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”

The market place is scattered with the remnants of companies that did not understand the concept of Disruptive Innovation. Much a kin to the work of Jim Collins and Morten Hansen detailed in the books Good to Great and Great by Choice, companies or organizations that do not remain informed and nimble enough to react smartly to change do not tend to last beyond the collision of innovation and a loss of usefulness.

When I taught high school biology, one of the topics I taught my students was the old axiom of “adapt, migrate, or die.” That is, when conditions change to the point of becoming threatening to existence, biological organisms have three choices. They must adapt to meet the challenges caused by the change, or they must migrate to an environment that is more conducive to their ability to maintain stasis or life. If the organism is unable or unwilling to do either, then the hard facts of life are certain death.

We have seen this scenario play out time and again with large companies and even whole industries. Examples abound, from records, to rotary phones, and on to the U.S. Postal Service. It would seem that the concept of Disruptive Innovation is all too real.

What about the connection to education? Has the enterprise of public schooling come to be the next one to face the music when it comes to Disruptive Innovation? Ian Jukes makes a compelling case that I see being all too close to home as an educator.

The message it would seem is that if educators want to continue to teach and lead schools in the industrial model of schooling that has been the predominate way of doing things in schools for the past 150 years, then for these educators, there is-

• No need to explore new partnerships in learning with students,
  
• No need to be attuned to teaching students how to utilize Learning Intentions and Success Criteria,
  
• No need to teach and model for students the effective use of high quality instructional feedback,
  
• No need to understand and to teach students to harness the power of formative and ipsative assessment,
  
• No need to utilize and teach the “soft” critical skills of the next century which include teamwork, perseverance, problem solving, etc.,
  
• No need to develop collaborative learning networks within and across schools to study, critique, and grow the profession of teaching and leading in schools.
  

What will be needed is for these educators to be prepared to become obsolete!

Like the great camera giant Kodak, there is no reason to believe that the traditional model of public schooling is to be immune from Disruptive Innovation. Whether driven by misinformed politicians, or well-intentioned educators with their proverbial heads in the sand, we see an ever increasing number of students and adults turning the channel on public schooling every day.

What is one to do? Do we throw our hands up? I would advocate against a premature surrender. As radical as the idea of free public schooling was once, I believe that the American spirit is alive and well, and is more than capable of innovating (adapting) itself out of this tar pit.

It will first take an awareness of the dangers. Then it will require a guiding coalition to recognize and accept the challenge to tackle the pitfalls and trip wires that lie in wait. From there, it will take a deep dive into asking ourselves as a nation, what skills will our students need in the next 15, 20, or 50 years. The path to innovation will also require us to confront how the accountability systems we have built for our schools have promoted and even stifled the development of critical skills. Now, with eyes on the clearly articulated opportunities that students will have in the future, we must then set out to map out by backwards design to where we are in the present.

This change must start one individual, one school board, one school district, and one state at a time.

Will you be that one that begins the cycle of innovation?

I would love to hear your thoughts…   

One of the great professional highlights of my career of twenty-plus years as an educator has been getting to know some of the giants in the field on a first name basis such as Jim Popham, John Hattie, Larry Ainsworth, and others. One of the most influential has certainly been Dr. Jim Popham, Professor Emeritus at UCLA. The tenor in which Dr. Popham has challenged me on issues related to assessment literacy have been some of the greatest points for my professional growth beyond anything a Master’s or Doctor of Philosophy degree have afforded.

This coincides with an unprecedented bastardization of the use of educational assessment to name, shame, and blame educators regardless of the adverse effects on the very results some of these assessments claim to improve. One such case of shabby assessment use is what has come to be known as the “Third Grade Gate.” This assessment has most recently been implemented as a part of a state law in Mississippi as part of what has come to be known as the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. The premise is that students in 3rd grade must take and score (at the time of this writing the score has not been set and it’s March) a certain number on a standardized reading assessment or be retained in 3rd grade. Thus the name, “Third Grade Gate.”

Now when I look to Merriam-Webster Online for the word “Gate,” I find it to mean “a city or castle entrance often with defensive structures (as towers).” This is hardly the picture I would suppose the pioneers of educational assessment intended.

One issue with the 3rd grade assessment is the disingenuous ways in which these results can be reported to parents and the public. The idea of using a single assessment as the sole determination of whether a student is reading on grade level is problematic. From what I understand, the scale score - not yet set - will be reported (somewhere in the neighborhood of 530). In addition, the “screener” also reports the grade-equivalent score as well. In the study of tests (psychometrics), it is widely accepted that a test scale score, and especially a grade-equivalent score, is an estimate of actual performance in the skill to be measured. The problem with grade-equivalent scores is these scores are created on the basis of estimation, not real test-score data. This being the case, if a 3rd grader gets a grade-equivalent score of 7.5, it is not accurate to say, “The 3rd Grader is doing well in 7th grade reading.” It is more accurate to say that a grade-equivalent score of 7.5 is an estimate of how an average 7th grader “might” have performed on the 3rd Grader’s reading test (p. 336).” (Popham, 2014)

The key take-away here being that these estimations that we may be using to decide as to whether a student is retained or not in 3rd grade could be in error based on issues with sampling and the nature of estimates. Now I assume that at best, all test related inferences are estimations, but are these estimations worthy of being the sole factor as to whether students (or teachers for that matter) are retained?

Another problem with this paltry policy is the awful and persistently negative impact that “retention” has on students in the first place.  How many more studies do we need to show that having students repeat a grade has a negative impact on learning? John Hattie conducted one of the largest syntheses of educational research of all time entitled Visible Learning (2009, 2012). Hattie found that “Retention,” or having low performing students repeat a grade, was one of the few things that we do in education that in every single study had a negative impact on student learning (effect size = -0.16). When a student repeats a single grade, the chances of that student dropping out of school doubles, and when the student is retained twice, this all but ensures the student will drop out of school. (Foster, 1993) This is based on a synthesis of over 207 studies on the subject.

Please understand that I am passionately committed to student learning. Going further, I am passionately in favor of the measurement of that student learning by instructionally sensitive assessments that provide teachers, students and parents important information about learning, or the lack thereof.  But, what we must question is if tests, and tests alone, can truly take the place of human judgment when it comes to the evaluation of human beings? In addition, is the trade off of using single estimations of ability to decide if we inflict one of the most harmful practices on kids we can worth the risk of getting it wrong?

What are your thoughts?

There's been a great bit of discussion across the country regarding the type of test, or tests, that will be used to measure student progress or achievement on the Common Core State Standards. After having come back into a school district as a superintendent, I have been privy to many of these conversations. Most interesting has been discussion of the use of a commonly used aptitude assessment utilized by high school students wanting to go to college as the end of year state assessment for Common Core Standards. The problem with this type of an assessment is it is an aptitude test. There are marked differences between aptitude and achievement tests. Aptitude tests date back to the early 1900s as the US was preparing to enter World War I. These assessments were utilized to determine who would be the best candidates for officer training school. These tests were used to predict the likelihood of success of various candidates in such type of training. Today, such tests are used to predict the likely college freshman grades for incoming high school students in college courses. So for all intensive purposes, aptitude tests are designed to predict future performance.
The problem arises in the fact that these aptitudes that are measured by such exams may not necessarily be a result of the instruction that students have received in school. Some of these aptitudes may even be inherited (e.g., visual-spatial, etc.)
On the other hand, we have what are called achievement tests. These assessments were developed after aptitude tests primarily to make a determination about what a student has learned. Thus, these types of assessments have long been identified as a more suitable way to get at what a student has learned from schooling. So one predicts future performance, and the other one measures what has been learned. The problem with using an aptitude test to measure what a student has learned is that this causes one to use such a test outside of the purpose for which it was developed. This can cause issues with the reliability and the validity of the inferences drawn from the results. Since even some achievement tests have a hard time with instructional sensitivity, it only makes sense that aptitude tests certainly wouldn't pass the muster. That is, a teacher may do a bang up job teaching the standards students are held accountable to in regard to the curriculum only to have that bang up teaching NOT show up on improvements on such tests used outside of their purpose.
We can certainly design achievement tests that will tell us whether or not students have been well taught or not, or whether or not they have learned. The problem is not any old test will do. Recognizing the fact that "one use does not fit all" in regard to tests will help us to get at assessing what students have learned more accuratly. 

In addition, tying leadership and teacher evaluations to such assessments lies completely outside the realm of defensible educational psychometry. 

So remember, when it comes to measuring achievement, let's make sure we use an achievement test. When we want to predict future performance, an aptitude test may be more fit for the task. Regardless, using an assessment outside of the purpose for which it was developed will always cause problems.

What are your thoughts?

One of the most interesting things that has surfaced in the research as of late when it comes to school improvement is the idea of engaging in conversations with students about what is working "best" in schools and what is not. We have for many years asked for student input on things like the theme of prom, the cover of the yearbook, and other such surface level aspects of education. This new attempt at truly engaging students in a conversation at a deeper level around what they feel are successful attributes in regard to learning, successful teaching and leadership, have not been around as long. 

This is one of the key differences in the reform model known as Visible Learning Plus. Visible Learning Plus is a systematic reform model developed by Cognition Learning-New Zealand offered exclusively by Corwin Press in North America. The model is based on the groundbreaking research of Professor John Hattie called Visible Learning (2009). Visible Learning is groundbreaking due to the volume of research based on the synthesis of more than 50,000 research studies containing over a quarter billion student data points. One of the key messages from the research into the core attributes that have the greatest effect on student achievement relate to engaging students in the conversation of what is being learned, how the learning is progressing, and based on this knowledge, what next steps should be taken to meet learning targets or accelerate learning if targets have already been met. Key in this process is the use of student voice through surveys, student focus groups, and interviews. Students are critical stakeholders in helping all adults in the school evaluate the effects of the school on learning and make adjustments where evidence dictates improvement is needed. Evidence about students perceptions of safety for making mistakes (creating an environment for learning to thrive), perceptions of the effectiveness of feedback that provides real time information students find useful, and clarifying learning intentions/success criteria all provide valuable feedback critical for making decisions to improve schools on the core attributes that Hattie’s research found have the greatest impact on student achievement.

Engaging student voice on aspects at a deeper level than traditional schools have in the past can help to take student learning and school effectiveness to new heights. Going further, the key is not to simply to elicit the evidence from students, but also being willing to “listen” to what students are saying and act on the evidence to make real changes when a totality of the evidence suggests that it is not “more” that is needed, but “different.”

How does your school or system honor student voice and use this valuable feedback to improve critical aspects of schooling?

Is student voice used to improve the effectiveness of deeper level aspects of schooling (feedback, clarity of learning intentions/success criteria, and environment for learning, etc.) or more of the surface level aspects (prom theme, yearbook cover, and etc.)?

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning. New York, NY; Routledge Press.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. New York, NY; Routledge Press.    

It has been found by multiple research studies that teachers are responsible for as much as 80 percent of the talking that takes place in classrooms on a daily basis (Hattie, 2012). What has often been found to be the norm is a teacher stimulus statement, followed by a short (many times less than 5 seconds) student counter, capped off by an ending evaluative statement by the teacher. This sort of back and forth cycle then repeats over and over till the bell sounds. As Hattie (2012) asserts, it would appear that "students simply come to school to watch teachers work (p. 82)!" The myth then perpetuated by this exchange is that the teachers are "owners" of the subject being studied and students are simply along for the ride. Is this really the most powerful use of classroom communication? Research would support not so much. When teachers engage students in rich dialogue about the topic at hand interesting things begin to happen. Most notably, students engage and contribute at deeper levels and begin to relish more challenge. Highly effective teachers were found to engage students in richer dialogue which led to these teachers showing nearly two-fold student gains in deeper levels of knowing as compared to other teachers. This is a rather significant outcome arising from simply balancing the levels of teacher and student talk. In addition, these highly effective teachers learned a great deal about the levels of understanding in their students by listening to students talk. What is the proportion of teacher to student talk in your school or district? What is the overall quality of these conversations?

You might be surprised.

Synthesizing multiple research studies regarding effective central office support of student achievement, I see some clear winners that are represented in multiple studies. These studies included Waters & McNulty (2006) which encompassed 2,817 districts and the achievement scores of 3.4 million students, Ansingh (2012), and Zavadsky (2013), to name a few. Some of the key practices found to have a high likelihood for improved student results can be coalesced into 3 key domains: Learning, Culture, and Relationships.

In regard to learning, this learning is for both adults and students. Furthermore, this learning is also in relation to instructional leadership on the part of central office, school level administrators, and classroom teachers. The key is to recognize the axiom paraphrased from Richard Elmore, “There are no schools in which the learning curve for students is moving upward, and the learning curve for adults is flat!” Like Michael Fullan has said, “Learning is the work.” When we power up this conception with systems thinking, then we position ourselves to be able to scale improvement from islands of excellence within individual schools to systemic improvement across districts. “When we stop learning we have become in perfect homeostasis with the environment,” which is “old” science teacher talk for your dead!

This type of focus on learning does not take place in the absence of a “growth” culture. In my experience, the “growth” mindset, as described by Carol Dweck, might start with the leader or other passionate educator, but unless this view of the world becomes prescribed to by at least a strong guiding coalition across the school or district, improvement will be tough to manage. In addition, this growth mindset is not just in reference to student results, but is also important in relationship to how colleagues view the other adults within the system. Culture is critical, but much like goals, it is not the aspiration of culture that is as important as the actions we take in the journey to create the culture that supports learning for all, both students and adults.

Lastly, relationships are critical to school effectiveness. John Hattie has found strong evidence to support that one of the most important factors influencing student achievement can be related to a healthy student/teacher relationship. Relationship between the adults in schools can also impact colleagues being willing to engage in a search for positive and negative evidence of the impact of teaching on student learning. Only when relational trust is high, when people feel safe, can the crucial conversations that lead to growing professional practice and the dispensing of effective formative feedback be given and have a higher likelihood of being received. We measure what we treasure, but if we have very low trust relationships we will never talk about it!

I would love to hear your thoughts.