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Self-inspect Your Teaching Professionally to Prevent Meh!

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Meh in the classroom is when a teacher does not know how good or bad their teaching is but just keeps teaching the same way day after day. Children know meh when they see it. They know it long before a teacher is aware of stale teaching practices and behaviors. It takes courage and effort for a teacher to inspect her teaching. And inspection requires professional assistance.

What do we know?

Classroom teaching is a black box profession. Teachers deliver hundreds of lessons without much feedback on whether their teaching practices and behaviors really work to cause children to learn. Their principal evaluates their teaching minimally in compliance with state and contractual requirements and provides formal feedback every three years. State assessments purposefully disconnect from statements about instructional quality. We make inferences only about state report cards and daily classroom teaching.

Even then, self-criticism is not easy. The curricular calendar and classroom dynamics work against a teacher’s understanding of the effectiveness of daily teaching. Grade level and subject area teaching assignments have an annual curriculum that always is more than a teacher can teach in a school year. Even with good planning, school life interferes with emergency drills, special observances, and assemblies, and unplanned “we need to talk with kids about this” topics. No teacher teaches a complete unit of planned instruction without school interruptions.

Also, children are complex learners. Teaching always is within the contextual interplay between children’s socio-emotional lives with their ability to focus on what they are being taught. Seldom is a lesson taught without a teacher’s need to consider or respond to extra-learning needs of students. For example, this month, October, traditionally includes homecoming activities in secondary schools. The rich schedule of pep assemblies, school decorations, homecoming dance, and girls’ and boys’ athletic events associated with homecoming create multiple instructional road bumps.

Lastly, even though teachers are colleagues with fellow teachers, they seldom to never see other teachers teach. While all PK-3 teachers are reinforcing their reading instruction with phonics-based strategies, they never see how the teacher next door is doing it. And the 8th grade math teacher trying to bolster flagging student math achievement never sees how the 7th grade math teacher filled in the math scaffold the year before.

Black box classrooms work against the improvement of teaching.

What does effective teaching look like?

The easy answer is that effective teaching causes children to learn what they are taught. There should be a tight correlation between planned teaching and measured learning assessments. But effective teacher practices and behaviors are more than that assumed correlation. I have known teachers who could plan and deliver a well-planned lesson that should have produced strong learning results. However, the teacher’s unawareness of student needs during the lesson or unawareness of her own speech, posture, language, facial expressions, and lack of connection with children in the classroom doomed the possibility that a well-planned lesson would cause good learning. As teachers make a proverbial “1,000 decisions per hour in their classroom, those decisions cover a myriad of practices and behaviors.

If good planning is not a consistent cause of good learning, then what is? Our teacher preparation programs point us back to the state’s approved professional standards for teachers. These standards were embedded in our license preparation courses with the hope that, at the end of a prep program, a licensed teacher would be imbued with these qualities.

In my work, I asked veteran teachers if they could recite the ten Wisconsin Teacher Standards from memory. Or at least talk about the ten standards. These interviews included veteran teachers with long records of their students achieving high scores on standardized tests as well as rookie teachers. Few teachers could recite the WI standards, though most knew some of the concepts of the standards. Fingertip knowledge of professional standards is not necessarily a correlation with effective teaching.

As another measure, I asked veterans and rookies about the preparation standards of their license. For example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Council for Exceptional Children offer strong supportive guidance for the preparation and continuing professional development of math and special education teachers. Teachers have vague recall of the standards of that preparation and their connections with national organizations diminish over time.

In the absence of other information, we fall back on the end of chapter quizzes, unit tests, and state report card assessments to provide some data of teaching effect. However, these data may or may not correlate with good teaching. Test results also reflect what a child learned previously from another teacher, what they learned on their own out of school, what they infer but did not clearly learn from your teaching, and a lot of good guessing in their test taking.

Effective teaching is a process of connecting teaching practices and behaviors with desired learning outcomes.

Effective teaching is not a mystery. We know what it is when we see it. Effective teaching also is not an accident. We know how to produce the practices and behaviors of effectiveness. If not a mystery or an accident, then effective teaching is a qualitative state of our professional work we can focus on and improve. Also, the state of our professional work is not a constant quality but a variable that ebbs and flows across a career. Most teachers self-recognize when their teaching is superb, and they feel wonderful about it. They may also feel it when it is meh. However, when it is meh, they usually are unsure about how to change it. This is when professional inspection is needed.

Self-criticism, that is a teacher taking steps to inspect, criticize, and improve her own teaching, got much easier with technology. It starts with recording one’s own teaching and all it takes is courage and a smartphone.

  • Begin by telling all students you are going to make audio and visual recordings of yourself while you teach. They will be heard and seen in your recordings, but you will not use the recordings to grade or evaluate them. Also, tell them that you will ask other teachers to listen to and watch the recordings for the purpose of improving your teaching. Your recording is not about students. Not surprisingly, students will quickly forget the presence of your smartphone.
  • Focus on segments of teaching practices and behaviors. Consider the first ten minutes of a class period. How do you greet students each day? How do you connect this day of learning with prior days – how do you introduce and give context for the lesson? What are your speech patterns? How do you stand – does your posture promote positive enthusiasm? What facial expressions express your interest in their learning this day’s lesson? How do you respond to the initial class period needs of all students?
  • Record your explicit instruction. This is the heart of your lesson plan and where lesson planning and lesson teaching connect. Do you connect new learning with prior learning? Do you pre-teach new vocabulary, conceptual terms, and new skill sets? Do you model correct understanding and performance of what students are to learn? Do you check for student understanding during not just after your instruction? How do you respond to student questions? How do you address wandering or distracting student behaviors?
  • There are so many aspects of classroom teaching you can focus on for self-inspection. Recording an entire class period us necessary occasionally, but only for a global view. Instead, focus on discrete episodes in your classroom work.
  • Listen to and watch your recordings at a suitable time and place when and where you can give your recordings your undivided attention. If you are making the effort to record, also give the effort to view and critique.

Self-criticism is a required professional development disposition. Too often teachers believe that criticism is always negative and defeating. It is not! Self-criticism finds successes and challenges. When you watch Smile and clap hands when in self-approval. Also, take notes -write down – practices and behaviors you want to change.

  • Label your practices and behaviors professionally. Refer to your training and the terms used in lesson planning. I professionally use Madeline Hunter’s Lesson Design and the terms and definitions she used to teach effective instruction. Describe your instructional Purpose. Consider your Objectives in “the learner will …” terms. Be critical of your Explicit Instruction and how it incrementally develops what students are to learn. Replay your Modeling of new instruction to assure fidelity to the Objectives. Replay your Formative Assessments to assure that all students were ready for the next part of the lesson. Labeling across lessons ensures that you are comparing and contrasting practices and behaviors properly.

Be bold. After you have listened to and watched recordings, ask a fellow teacher, a teacher you respect and trust, to listen and watch with you. Explain the purpose and process in your self-inspection and let that professional comment on successes and challenges. Do not be surprised if your colleague has difficulty with labeling and defining as the practice of self-inspection may be new to them as well as to you. Make this a collegial venture.

And do it again. “Again” means

  • Make a second and third recording to find recurring practices and behaviors. Incidentals that do not repeat are hard to change, so do not focus there. Focus on repetitive practices and behaviors.
  • Take enough time to self-inspect, understand the successes and challenges you saw,
  • Plan to change explicit practices and behaviors you saw. Change for improvement is a planned process. Being explicit improves your ability to notice change. Lack of specificity can also be chance.
  • Make follow-up recordings to see the effectiveness of new practices and behaviors.
  • Ask your colleague to view follow-up recordings to confirm your observations.

The Big Duh!

First, a teaching career is supposed to last many years. A successful teaching career is causing all children assigned to you to learn what you taught. The feeling that your teaching is successful helps to sustain a lengthy career. Second, over the years, your teaching practices and behaviors will change given experience and school district priorities. The reality of professional improvement, however, does not change. While a public may criticize education, the educational system only addresses programmatic improvement not classroom teaching improvements. Last, teachers are on their own if they want to improve their professional practices and behaviors. So, pull up your socks and create your own self-inspection. Your career and your students deserve your doing this.

Test Less and Converse More

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How do you really know what your students know? Is a student’s learning only the composite score of tests, quizzes, papers, and projects?

Too often students in our classrooms are not children. Students are the grades and points behind their names in our grade books. In the long slog of a school year, each student in your class becomes what their line of grades says they are. A student is – passing or not passing, exceeding expectations or not meeting expectations, or the child who will always give the right answer versus the child who does all he can to avoid being asked a question. The reality of classrooms is that one student is only a single student in the totality of a teaching assignment, one amongst the many, and the speed of curricular coverage blends them all together. This is the web we weave when the only source we use to know how well children are learning are whole group assessments.

As negative as the second paragraph reads, it is the truth in too many classrooms. We prove it’s true when a parent or your principal asks how Alexa is doing in your class, and you immediately need to consult your grade book to answer. School, not just Alexa’s teachers define Alexa’s learning progression by the data in a grade book. How sad for Alexa and how sad for education. We can do better.

What do we know?

First, a child is one among many children. If the average public school teacher’s career is 14 years long and a class assignment averages 25 students, then a grade level elementary teacher teaches approximately 350 children and a secondary subject area teacher teaches 2,100 children in that span of years.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/who-average-us-teacher

It is probable that an elementary teacher who sees the same faces for an entire school day is more familiar with each student than a secondary teacher who sees the same faces for only one class period each day. However, the same portrait of what we know about our students holds for elementary and secondary classrooms – students are characterized by the grades they are assigned by the assessments the are given.

Second, we do not plan for a teacher to know each child in the classroom. In their college preparation courses, teachers learn that a teacher’s knowledge of each student’s prior school learning achievement, their so-called learning styles, their academic strengths and learning challenges, and their cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds help the teacher to better instruct each student. Theory does not always find its way into practice. The short cut answer most teacher take to the idea theory of learning about their students prior to teaching them is “I will find out what I need to need to know as I teach them.” This is not necessarily a teacher’s fault. Contracted in-service time includes several days at the beginning of the school year for a teacher to get ready for the first day of school. But after mandatory district and school staff meetings and required organizing of a classroom, there is little to no time for a teacher to study and know what they should know about their new students. Theory is pushed aside and all they know will know of Alexa is gained through daily in-class interactions in the running stream of school days.

Third, successful teaching is about the success of a statistical majority students not individual students. Instructional school goals want 80% of the students to 80% or better learning success 80% of the time in class. The Rule of 80% is commonly applied is schools using Tier 1, 2 and 3 instruction and Response to Intervention concepts. Sometimes teaching really is an industrial quality control model or at least a cattle drive.

Last, we prioritize efficiency over effectiveness. Each teacher is assigned a grade level or subject area curriculum to teach. In the continuity of PK-12 education, these are building blocks that create an educated school graduate. If the teaching of a single building block is incomplete, there are consequences to the integrity of the education. Completing the total annual curriculum is more important than assuring what is taught is learned well by all students. Emphasizing totality of instruction over quality of learning ensures that the 80% rule becomes 70% or 60% or 50%.

An alternative – talk with Alexa.

An alternative model is Socratic-like: A teacher often sits with Alexa asking Alexa key questions as a verbal quiz AND then asks Alexa to explain her answers. Alexa talks about the background knowledge of her answers, the context for her answering, her problem-solving, and her conclusions about what she knows. When done with proper frequency, this takes 15 minutes. In the aggregate of meetings with Alexa, the teacher’s conversation models what Alexa should know and how she should know it and the conversation coaches Alexa’s personal learning strategies over time. Alexa may have scored only 5 of 10 correct on a written quiz but scored 8 of 10 in an oral discussion of what she knows and how she knows it. Alexa knows more than what a quiz can extract from her.

The conversation is not a complete Socratic model. It stops with a personal assessment of what Alexa knows and how well she knows it. Instead of leading directly into personalized new instruction, the conversation informs the teacher about Alexa’s learning as well as all the Alexas in the class so that the teacher can best confirm what has been learned well by all all students and clarify or correct what has not been learned well. This modified Socratic conversation helps the teacher move the quality of learning above the 80% Rule.

Children respond to this alternative differently. Some will love the opportunity to talk with their teacher and gladly explain what they know and how they know it. On the other hand, some children will be intimidated by the face-to-face time with their teacher and not want to risk talking. These are the same children who do not volunteer in class and of whom the teacher knows the least about their personal learning using traditional assessments. As they are intimidated by all assessments, it is easier to wean them away from fear or their teacher than it is fear of a test. Most children will respond positively to their teacher’s sincerity in wanting to know what they know and how they know it.

Personal conversation models instruction as well as assessment. Children quickly learn that simple yes or no answers or one-word answers only cause the teacher to say, “Tell me more.” Children learn that conversation is like composing an essay. The teacher is looking for the second and third sentences that provide evidence for the answer the child gives to the first question. The child also learns to summarize and give a conclusion.

The conversation also instructs the teacher. She can easily understand from a variety of conversations how well her instruction caused children to learn the curriculum she taught. Some children will need clarification or correction if their learning had errors. The conversation tells her more than which students have errors in learning; she knows the dimensions of their errors. The conversation also affirms that children are ready for the teacher’s next instruction.

This modified Socratic conversation takes time. What do other children do while the teacher converses with Alexa? Individualized and collaborative learning advanced immensely with the pandemic. Classrooms have the technologies for a teacher to readily make individual assignments for students or organize a collaborative activity for groups. Classrooms no longer live in the whole group instruction only era. A contemporary teacher has the resources to provide ongoing instruction for other children while she converses with Alexa.

We get what we settle for.

The traditional model of “teach and test, teach and test” efficiently moves children through the school year’s curriculum. That model drives children from grade level to grade level and course to course. It is a “ready or not, here I come” model.

When we consider that most 4th, 8th, and 10th grade students show “less than proficient” scores on state assessments in reading and math, we should understand that the traditional model is not achieving the 80% Rule but a less than 50% reality.

The traditional model gives us an incomplete understanding of what each child knows and how well she knows it. Based on an incomplete knowledge of what children have learned, we only create an incomplete design for their next instruction.

We can do better when we use better practices.

Weep Not For NAEP – Rely On Local Data

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Data about how children are doing in school is a lot like the price of gasoline. The only meaningful data is the cost of gas at your local gas pump. Likewise, the only meaningful data about student learning are assessments at your local schools. National report cards are irrelevant and misleading. If we are to be data-based, we need to consider and use the right data. Stay local!

What do we know?

Everyday the media posts the average price of a gallon of gas on national and state and regional averages. For example, today AAA posted that the national retail price of a gallon of regular gas is $3.319. AAA says that the retail average for Wisconsin is $2.924 per gallon. I disregard these data because the gas prices are always higher in rural, northeastern Wisconsin. Today’s price in northern Door County is $3.37 per gallon. The price of gas depends on location.

The quality of education also depends on location. And the only location that matters is the quality of education in the school teaching your children. I always read educational data in this order – national, state, local school district. Then I consider the data in reverse order – district, state, nation. I do this because the only data that is meaningful and classroom-related is that of my local school district. National education policies and commitments are political not educational. While federal politicians lament the United States’ falling status internationally and the annual negative slope of reading and math scores nationally, their commitment to education is always partisan. Even though the US Constitution assigns responsibility for public education to state governments, national politicians consistently try to implement policies and programs to “ram” change into the 16,200+ school districts in our country. Their “carrot or stick” efforts are guided by political hubris and constantly prove futile.

Last week the 2024 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data were published. The latest NAEP assessment always reports data from the prior school year. NAEP assessments tell us that national student achievements in reading and math continue to decline. The data displays current scores compared to a decade of pre-pandemic scores and most recent post-pandemic scores. The graphs show a consistent decline in reading and math scores with a sharper tick downward after the COVID pandemic.

As expected, commentary about this week’s NAEP report once again asked what can be done to reverse the national data trend and strengthen student achievement in reading and mathematics.  “We need to fix this problem,” our politicians said. However, the current administration’s work in dismantling the US Department of Education shows that all we will hear from Washington DC is an exaggeration of the “economic effects” of the reading/math score decline who to blame for it.

Policy and commitment to public education at the state level resembles national futility only at a smaller scale. Conservative statehouses are more willing to engage in legislating cellphone policy, book banning, and LGBTQ issues than discussing educational outcomes in their state’s schools. The ultimate truth about state responsibility for public education lies in the language of the state constitution. The Wisconsin State Constitution tells us there will be schools, schools will be mandated to teach core subjects to prepare graduates to become productive citizens, and responsibility for funding schools will be shared by the state and local school boards. There are many chapters and verses, but this is the gist of our state’s responsibility.

The policies of local school boards and their schools are where public education lives best and thrives.

Treat local educational data with care and commitment for improvement.

There is an interesting tipping point in school districts about their understanding of educational achievement data. If the school district is a large, urban district, the data becomes disoriented by the tens of thousands of students and the hundreds of teachers. Yet if the school district is a small, one building rural district, the data can be isolated to a classroom of students and an individual teacher. It is dangerous to draw conclusions about all schools in a large district and equally dangerous to drill too deeply in a small district.

However, conclusions want to be drawn. Always consider educational data clinically and from a respectable distance. The positive care and humaneness schools show about their data aids their future improvement; negativity gets in the way of improvement.

A healthy school board and district administration look at local educational data as indicators of school success not failure. Their assets-based approach says, “80 percent of third graders are reading at grade level and what can we do to raise that percentage?” An unhealthy approach focuses on the 20 percent reading below grade level and deficits that must be contributing to their lower achievement. A healthy approach assures and reassures that the reading program includes strong instruction and then extra instructional time for positive aid for below grade level readers. That approach does not ignore the learning needs of students who need more instruction in reading, nor does it trash can a reading program that causes 80% of the students to be successful readers. An unhealthy approach is sum-zero and takes time and resources from other curriculum just to bolster time and resources where deficits appear. To be Gump-like, positive, and healthy school leadership is as positive and healthy school leadership does. We want local school leadership to be healthy and positive in their data consideration while constructively working to improve educational programs for all children.

If annual data says that the annual achievement of students in reading is declining, constructive school leadership looks at all the data and considers it without knee jerking a response. Leaders disaggregate the data. They want to know for whom the program is and is not causing success and where and how separation between students who are successful and unsuccessful takes place. Knowing about that separation is essential for closing gaps in student learning performances. A decline in some students’ reading and math achievement does not happen overnight but over time, yet it always has a beginning and characteristics that begin a definition of successful and unsuccessful performances. This is how data can and should be used to improve education for all students and this careful and considered use of data only takes place at the local school level.

The consideration of local school performance data must be macroscopic as well as microscopic. Educational data about students in our community is not impersonal; these are our children. As we consider microscopic annual reading and math data, we also must consider the full profile of the educational programs for these children. Are they equally engaged in the school’s academic, activity, arts, and athletic programs? Are they growing in creative ways as well as performative ways? Are they well-adjusted and integrated as a student body without outliers? Are the school’s programs preparing all students for post-secondary college and career entry? Is the school creating an informed and prepared pathway into local citizenry? A macroscopic perspective allows school leaders better adjust reading and math programs, or any program that is not microscopically creating success for all students. Too often a look at data causes knee jerk responses that cause more harm to students than help.

The Big Duh!

The data about student reading and math achievement on a national level is an ongoing story that is always historical. The data tell us about what happened last year and in years past. Federal and state attempts to affect that data through line over all students and over time consistently have proven politically and educationally futile. As readers of national educational news, we should remember that the only data that matters is local data. Change in national trends will not be the result of action by federal or state governments, but only by careful and healthy consideration and use of data at the local school district level. Know your local data and help your local leaders to use it effectively.

Children In Our Safekeeping

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Nothing in the daily news causes more parent angst than a school shooting or traffic accident involving a school bus. An event may happen a thousand miles away in a community completely different than our own, yet the immediate response is fear that such a tragedy can happen to my or a neighborhood child.

We give our children to the school of our choice with the expectation that our child will be safeguarded and returned to us at the end of school day. School in this sense includes everything a child takes part in that is under school supervision. For some children school begins and ends with a bus ride. For some children, school is not only on the school campus but on field and athletic trips. For some children, school is between the school bells and for others school begins and ends well outside the bell system. No matter, the parental expectation is that a child will be safeguarded always.

The reality is exactly that. Children in school are safeguarded.

  • The odds of a child being exposed to a school shooting are .00051 to 1. Even though the news of school shootings is horrendous and the frequency is increasing, the odds are exceptionally small that a child will be exposed to a school shooting. There are 54,000,000 children enrolled in 130,900 different schools in the US. The number of schools where shootings do not occur is so high that it dwarfs the number where shootings happen.

Truth rather than reality, however, is that even with exceptionally low odds, when a parent’s child is shot or exposed to a school shooting the world is never the same again. And no one predicts a school shooting; they happen without immediate warning.

  • Children are more at risk of being shot at home or in their home community than at school. Gun violence is the leading cause of child death. More than 17,000 children are gunshot each year or about 60 children each day of the year.

The incidence of children killed by guns and mass shootings at schools has not changed gun laws one iota. One can argue that Americans are more committed to protecting the 2nd Amendment than they are to protecting their children.

  • School safety and security measures have drastically improved and increased in the last five years. The days of unrestricted access and unlocked doors are no more. More schools are surrounded by camera systems and require identification before a person, even parents, can enter the school during a school day. However, not every window is bulletproof, and few backpacks or coat pockets are inspected at the schoolhouse door.

The next layer of school safety security will affect after school, evening, and weekend school activities. Few schools screen attendees at high school games.

  • The NHTSA rates school buses as one of the safest modes of transportation for children. A child is eight times more likely to be injured in an accident in a family car than on a school bus. School bus accidents involving a fatality are less than 1% of all fatal accident each year and most of the deaths in school bus accidents are not children.

However, seeing an overturned school bus causes immediate images of injured and bleeding children and worry about school transportation systems.

  • Safety features on school buses have improved in recent years. And driver training and school-to-bus communications also have improved. Additionally, the Hollywood image of a school bus driver who is friendly and caring about each child aboard the bus is more reality than not.

These facts do not mean that children are free from all harmful events while in school. Playground and athletic injuries happen. Our school soccer-playing grand daughter is recovering from ACL surgery following a game time injury. More than 200,000 children each year are treated for playground injuries, most of these from falling or tripping. There are 3,500,000 or more sports-related injuries each year. The likelihood of injury is still small; about 2.9 injuries per 1,000 athletes. These facts are facts, yet they do not dissuade parents from promoting and encouraging their children to be active at recess or joining school teams.

Bullying and harassment of children in and out of school is real. These peer-to-peer problems call for constant school vigilance and support. Approximately 20% of students report some form of bullying or harassment each year; one in five children. The degree of impact varies and is difficult to discern. For too many children, bullying and harassment is a PTSD injury that leads to significant socio-emotional issues.

Mental health for growing children has become a national issue with multiple layers. Because they are school-aged, all mental issues for children have some connection to their school. Schools that traditionally focus on academic, activities, arts, and athletics now add social-emotional health to their school programming. We will see state-funded resources for mental health education and programming increase soon.

The Big Duh!

Children are vulnerable to all sorts of accidents and tragedies. As I write this, a media note flashed on my screen telling of a child in our state struck in a school crosswalk this morning by a motorist. No one saw this event coming, but it happened.

Additionally, we read and hear of “bad” people who have access and do harm to children, in and out of school. Whenever the story is about a school person, we wonder if children in our school ever encounter such harmful adults. Sadly, school shootings and illegal, harmful adult behaviors do happen. Each of these stories re-energizes parent and school scrutiny of their child/student’s life so that such events are increasingly unlikely to happen.

Often, we hear it said after a child tragedy, “We have to make sure this never happens again!” Truth be told, “never again” is not attainable. However, creating an unlikelihood of tragedy and living safely and sanely within our reality of facts are attainable and school is a good place for children to be. Do not be surprised when your local school installs bulletproof windows and walks children and school guests through metal detectors in the near future. Safeguarding means safeguarding.

Be Bold and Emboldened About Your 2025-26 Educational Goals

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Every new school year brings a discussion of the educational goals a school will strive to achieve for its students. This is not the time for a complete rewrite of goals; there is no time to retool for new goals. But August is the right time to confirm existing goals and ensure commitment of all school resources to achieving those goals. In the weeks before children walk into school, be bold in publicly broadcasting your educational goals for your students and embolden all educators to achieve your/their goals.

Achieving educational goals is not a New Year Resolution; be loud, be active, be honest!

Where are your school’s or your classroom’s achievement goals published today? Most often they lie in the humdrum posting of school mission statements, the finer print in newsletters, and are announced on day one but seldom to never mentioned after day one. It is no wonder that so few are achieved. We allow the busy urgency of school days to overwhelm the goals that our school business is supposedly committed to achieve. State and restate your achievement goals every week in order to keep them vibrant.

Educational goals are not like an annual new year resolution. Most of us break those resolutions before the end of January, if not before. First, educational goals are about children, not our proverbial self-promise to lose ten pounds of body weight. Instead of looking at our image in a bathroom mirror, we look at the faces of classrooms of children who are counting on our commitment to advance their education. Each child’s face stands for our promise to cause that child to learn and grow because of our work. Every time we look at a child’s face, we need to tell ourselves “Advance this child’s education today!”

Achievement goals are a public commitment

Educational achievement goals are public commitments to cause children to learn and grow. They are not silent, personal promises to give up late night bowls of ice cream. Publish your educational goals as a school and as individual classrooms. One of the reasons new year resolutions fail is that we keep them to ourselves. We do not tell anyone that we want to lose ten pounds; we make it a silent, personal struggle. Instead, we need to enlist all educators, school parents, and school community in helping our goal achievement by telling them on day one and all school year-long what we will achieve this school year for our students.

There is a positive and active snowballing effect when goals are loudly published. Snowballing occurs when a small effort begins to accumulate more mass and more membership because it is in motion. As goal achievement occurs, individuals want to be part of the snowball; they want to be identified with its positive imaging. We need to celebrate snowballing and proclaim every classroom that is joining in the achievement work.

Achievement is personal

We need to make our educational goals for children personal. Teaching and learning are essentially personal activities between teachers and children. It is extremely personal, yet we always depersonalize the outcomes of teaching and learning. We aggregate the data of goals achievement, and we drop names and drop accountability, usually because we do not achieve the goals we published. Instead, we need to keep the data disaggregated and personal. If a teacher knows that her students’ learning achievements will be averaged with all other students’ data, there is diminished urgency every day to “push” on those goals. We see data obfuscation clearly with high achieving schools whose high averaging practices hide the reality of low achieving classrooms. Or with low achieving schools whose averaging practices hide the reality of high achieving classrooms. We need to disaggregate data to make goal achievement real at the classroom level where achievement is measured. There always is a worry that disaggregation allows data to identify students. The equal worry is that fully aggregated data makes those students disappear. Let’ see – using data to effectively educate all children or using data to hide children who are never fully educated. As our practices are FERPA-compliant, we shall decide to educate all children.

Be bold with honesty

Honesty about goals and goal achievement is a necessity. Too much of our culture today is hammered by “big lying” about data and practices. Without commenting on our “big liars”, consider the big lie effects. Lying makes facts untrustworthy and fact checking is ridiculed. Honesty is what honesty does; it builds trust. We need to talk about our positive achievements, and we need to talk about when we fail to achieve the goals we set. And, after explaining our failure to achieve, we need to recommit ourselves to achieving success by honestly discontinuing failed efforts and beginning new efforts. No one likes to hear that a school or classroom failed to achieve its goals, but they dislike even more the lies that are told to hide the honest facts. Educators, parents, and community will respect honest effort with honest reporting that is followed by honest changes in effort.

This August, publish your student achievement goals. Publish the work efforts that will achieve your goals. Publish and talk about the team commitment of educators, parents, and community to accomplish your 2025-26 student achievement goals. Publish the date of your first reporting of progress on your goal achievements. And publish your commitment to every child in school that they will be goal achievers.

Be bold and be emboldening regarding your student achievement goals for the 2025-26 school year.