We can do better

I am going to pick up where I left off in my last post, when I shared the statistics from Jenkins' Loss of Enthusiasm for School Curve and I said I wasn't okay with just over 1/3 of our high school freshman still loving school.  Well, today in the car, my 16 year old daughter said to me, completely out of the blue, "I don't want school to start up again.  I just don't like it.  It's way longer than it should be for what I get out of it." and then she looked at me with a very sad and distraught face.  She goes to a good school, she does not get in trouble,  she knows the value of an education, she wants to go to college, and it is not hard for her.  She shouldn't feel this way.  My heart broke a little today as it does every day when she tells me how much she doesn't like going to school.  What makes it harder is that I know that many other children are uttering the same phrase, and that many of them have even more reason to say it.  Some of them do not have a nice school to go to, and some of them find school very difficult because it is not welcoming to them or it is not equipped for them.  I know we can do better.

I really started to believe this about a year ago.  Last July (2018), I experienced my first Annual Visible Learning Conference in Chicago.  Despite the fact that I had already read much of the work of Hattie, Nottingham, and Fisher & Frey, hearing them share how their ideas have been applied in schools and classrooms around the world was impactful for me and left me energized and excited.  I was fortunate to join John Hattie, his son Kyle, and Sarah Martin for the Lunch and Learn where they talked about Stonefields School in New Zealand and how the Visible Learning practices are embedded in everything that they do.  I came back from the conference with big dreams of opening a brand new school for our region built on the practices that I had been so excited to hear about at the AVL.  I shared this idea with my boss and he didn't say no.  This was a big deal to me because I have always been a dreamer, but had often been met with reasons why my ideas would not work.  No money, the parents won't understand it, the community won't support it, our kids can't do that, there is no time....  This time what I heard was that I needed to find other models, figure out funding options, decide what my vision is, and start talking to people.

Fast forward one year.  I now know for certain that we can do better because there are places all over the world where educational communities have worked together to be innovative and brave as they create schools that do not look like what we have always had.  And it is working!  Stonefields School in New Zealand, is one example.  They have grown from 50 to 600 in their first 8 years and they have remained innovative and learner centered and have been very successful.  This year at the AVL, Ka'Imiloa Elementary School in Hawaii was honored as a Visible Learning School.  They had a complete transformation in their culture as a result of a community commitment to Visible Learning.  Highweek Primary School in Newton Abbot, UK has worked with Challenging Learning since 2016 and has already seen significant changes in student and staff mindsets and they have seen all members of their learning community join in their efforts to make learning a priority.  Michael Fullan introduces deep learning in his books Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World and Indelible Leadership and he discusses the successes of  New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) Partnership which includes hundreds of schools engaging in systemic change.  I could keep going, because there are a lot of schools making significant changes in response to the research.   They are making shifts in their schools to more closely match the flexible learning needs of all students in the 21st century.  There are schools where achievement gaps have almost disappeared, where dropout rates have plummeted, where all children seek challenges because they want to learn, and where community involvement is constant and effective.  Clearly, we CAN do better.

Robert F. Kennedy once said- "Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom, decency and justice."  At this point, at least for myself, I do not believe that I can continue to close my eyes and ears.  I know that we can do better, and therefore to do nothing is to tolerate what I know is wrong.  I am absolutely frightened about this next part of my journey, but there are great models out there, I know where to find sound research, and I also know that I have met and continue to meet a lot of brilliant people who will have ideas that will build on my own.  One thing I have learned in the last year is that I am definitely not alone on this journey.  And my motivation?  It is, and will always be, all children.   However, there will be this constant echo in my head that will keep me fighting... "I don't want school to start again.  I just don't like it."

Schools are for learning and learners- PERIOD

Anyone who knows me knows that I am passionate about finding ways to remove any of the static that causes our focus on learning and learners to be fuzzy or unclear. I know that we need to be engaged in the hard work of change in education and I am dedicated to doing my part. I had yet another amazing experience at the Annual Visible Learning Conference where I gathered many nuggets of information that had already set the gears in my mind into overdrive. Then I read this article from Alfie Kohn and started putting some of the pieces together. I especially loved the last line- "Everyone may not get there, but at least in theory all of us could." In the article, he talks about how standardized tests and comparative grades create rankings that make it impossible for all students to experience success because someone always has to be failing. His point is well made and I strongly encourage educators to read the article.

If we believe that everyone is entitled to an education, and if we truly want all children to have a shot at being successful in this world, we cannot continue to let the classroom be a place of such intense competition. There will always be playing fields, courts, pools, concert halls, chess tables, etc... where we can foster and encourage competition for those children who crave it, but education should be for ALL children in ALL contexts.

There is no question that rankings and that aura of competition impact the performance of students. Very early in their learning, students become aware of their "position" in relation to their peers and the subsequent expectations of their teachers and they perform accordingly. During a session on feedback, Shirley Clarke shared that 88% of 4 year olds who are placed in an ability group remain in that group throughout their schooling. During his keynote address at the AVL Conference, John Hattie shared a number of differences that had been noted in the classrooms of teachers with high expectations of students verses teachers with low expectations. Teachers with low expectations put students in ability groups and develop different activities for each group, whereas teachers with high expectations work with all students and expect them to do the same work, but they realize they may need different levels of support and different amounts of time. The children who are placed in ability groups and who are given easier assignments will never be pushed to perform beyond that level. They will meet the low expectations held by their teacher. On the other hand, the students who are given the time and support needed to complete the work will live up to the high expectations of their teacher.

The good news here, is that there is a lot of great information out there to guide our work. John Hattie's meta-analysis is an amazing collection of evidence about which variables in education can have the greatest effect and many other education researchers have complimented his work by clarifying how and when these variables do have the greatest positive impact on student learning. Of all variables, he found that the average effect size was .40 which is known as the "hinge point" point or the growth per year. We know that collective teacher efficacy, with an effect size of 1.39 can have a tremendous impact. However, it is important to read Jenni Donohoo and Peter DeWitt"s work related collective teacher efficacy and collaborative leadership and Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan's work on Professional Capital to truly understand how collective teacher efficacy can be leveraged.

One of the variables that I see as a potential game changer and that was the topic for a lot of sessions, is feedback. It only has an effect size of .66, but many believe it could be much higher if the feedback is used effectively. James Nottingham, in his session on feedback, pointed out that 1/3 of all studies on feedback showed a negative impact on learning. He emphasized the importance of the timing of feedback, specifically that feedback should not be given until after the teacher and students have agreed on the criteria. Shirley Clarke also talked about the importance of co-creating and communicating learning intentions and success criteria in order to provide effective feedback. Similarly, when Hattie shared the differences between teachers with low and high expectations, he noted that teachers with low expectations focus on activities and behaviors and communicate the details of the activities to be completed, whereas the teacher with high expectations focuses on learning and communicates learning intentions and success criteria.

The 2007 publication of The Hidden Lives of Learners, which documented the extensive observational research of Graham Nuthall, uncovered important information that can be used to inform the effective use of feedback. He found that in the classroom, 80% of the feedback that students receive during the day comes from their peers and that 80% of that is inaccurate. Knowing this, it is important to teach students to accurately offer and reflectively process feedback. You can find excellent strategies and guidance for for creating this culture in the classroom in James and Jill Nottingham's book Challenging Learning Through Feedback, or Visible Learning: Feedback (Vol. 2) by John Hattie and Shirley Clarke.

I do not think many of us need motivation to lead this charge of change in education because we see and hear evidence of the need every day. However I want to end with a statistic that has haunted me since seeing it during John Hattie's keynote. He shared this graphic which captures the data Lee Jenkins collected when asking 3,000 teachers the following questions: “What grade level do you teach?” and “What percent of your students love school?”. It shows that from kindergarten to grade 9, student enthusiasm for school drops from 95% to 37%. I don't know about you, but I am not okay knowing that just over a third of our students still love school by the time they start high school.