Tag Archives: accountability

Do It Differently, Smarter – Student Rounds

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“I spend the first days and weeks of the school year getting to know my students so that I can meet their needs as learners.”  I have heard this statement each September since the 1970s and I frown.  What hubris!  Unless the child is new to your school, teachers have a wealth of relevant and reliable information about every student’s needs at their fingertips.  There is no need under the sun to waste the first days and weeks “getting know” your students.  Why don’t we do it differently and smarter and do educational rounds just as medical doctors do patient rounds?  And, do these rounds at the end of the preceding school year so that a teacher has all summer to use solid information to plan for each child’s instruction in the fall.

Current Practice

On the last day of school in the spring, the experts who know the most about the students in a teacher’s next fall assignment go home.  Historically, the last days of school are all about ending the current school year.  Records are updated and classrooms are closed.  School is vacated for the summer recess.  The knowledge next year’s teachers need departs for the summer.

Ten weeks later teachers return to school in the last week of August to prepare for a new school year.  The major focus of August work is getting classrooms ready for children and teaching.  As a rule, more professional time is spent reviewing school rules and regulations and putting up bulletin board displays than is spent in discussion of student learning needs.  We are compelled to get ready for the first day of school and most teachers sitting in August PD meetings wish they were in their classrooms doing their physical preparation tasks.

Check this out.  A teacher who cannot pronounce the name of a child in their classroom on the first day does not know that child’s learning needs.  Mispronunciation of the names of children who were students in the school last spring occurs in almost every classroom.  Not knowing how to pronounce a continuing student’s name is a sign that no teacher-to-teacher discussion of learning needs has taken place.

At best, we hold rushed meetings in which counselors share information about various students and their learning challenges.  There is scant time for a teacher to delve into those needs and plan instruction.  We prioritize classroom readiness not instructional readiness. 

The closest current practice comes to rounds is an IEP or 504 Plan meeting that includes all of a child’s teachers plus parents and advocates.

Student Rounds in the Summer

Better practice is to extend contracts for all teachers beyond the last of school and use time at the end of a school year for this year’s teachers to tell next year’s teachers what they know about promoted children.  There are many ways to implement and schedule rounds. 

Grade level to grade level – Within a schedule, 4K talks to 5K, 5K to first grade, until all grade level conversations are completed.  This organization favors more global discussion as teachers discuss each child across all instruction.  All teachers of a grade level, including special subjects and special education participate.  Grade level to grade level applies to children 4K into middle school or until the next year’s student schedule is dominated with elective or leveled courses.

Subjects within grade levels – This organization focuses on each subject areas of instruction and completes one subject area before starting a next area.  Regular, special education, and second language teachers share in discussing each child’s development in one subject at a time.  If there are different art, music, PE, and technology teachers at different grade levels, subject area sharing is the pathway for “specials” teachers to share student information teacher-to-teacher.

Secondary Subject departments – The daily class pathway for children in secondary school fans out, especially in high school with multi-grade classes and electives and an array of teachers.  Using the next year’s already developed student schedules, children are ordered alphabetically and information about their learning preferences, challenges, and uniqueness is shared. 

Face-to-face – School leadership may choose to organize students rounds as a whole school, all teachers at the same time and in the same place activity.  Every student-based meeting is face-to-face.

Virtual – We became better than average facilitators of virtual, group meetings in the pandemic.  Rounds can be held with teachers in school or at home or other locations using virtual platforms.  Virtual rounds accommodate teachers and administrators’ preferences to work from or home.

Why Rounds?

Fresh details matter.  In primary grade transitions, the current teacher has fresh knowledge of the child’s mastery of phonemic sounds and letters and ability to pronounce new words and spell words on demand.  Because these details are fresh, the current teacher can anecdotally describe what works best to support this child’s learning.  Freshness details are diminished over the summer as each former student melds into the greater group of former students.  This just simply happens.

Magnify this across all the children in a school and fresh details become even more important.  There is no reason for next year’s teachers to await similar experiences to arise when they can learn from and plan using the expert commentary of their colleagues.

Learning styles and preferences matter.  Although there is current literature that devalues learning styles profiling, the truth is that some children prefer to watch, listen, or do.  Whereas teachers want to develop broader learning modalities for all children, starting a school year with a child’s preferences creates early school year success and nothing succeeds greater than early success.

Progress in annual strategies prepared by a teacher and a child’s parents’ matter.  We tout and encourage parents to engage with teachers to create student-centered partnerships.  There is no reason to recreate new partnerships every time a teacher assignment changes.  Our current practice of starting a new discussion about their child confirms for parents that teachers are independent contractors and do not cooperate or collaborate.  This is not the storyline we want to perpetuate.  Just share what you know and build upon what you collectively know.  Be professionally seamless.

SEL challenges matter.  Children face developmental challenges as they transition from pre-school to 4K-5K, grade school to middle school, from pre-adolescence adolescence, and into semi-independent learners in high school.  The pandemic and remote education caused challenges for children returning to in-person schooling.  These mean that teacher-to-teacher discussions about children are even more important.  In-school behaviors and dispositions about school, respect and consideration for teachers and fellow students, and consistent school attendance all took hits from the pandemic.  Lack of shared knowledge hampers a child’s next teacher understanding of what she needs to know on day one of a school year.

What To Do?  If you believe your current practices optimize your teachers’ knowledge of the children they will teach in fall, continue with your current practices.  If you believe your current practices are not preparing all teachers for their next year’s students, develop your version of student rounds.  You have a wealth of knowledge about your students, use that knowledge to their advantage in preparing for the 2022-23 school year.  Do student rounds.

Summer – School’s Necessary Fifth Quarter

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I always smiled when Click and Clack, as NPR’s “Car Guys”, welcomed listeners to the third half of their hour-long radio broadcast.  The “third half” was how they partitioned and used their time on the air not about the  arithmetic of three halves making a whole.  In a like manner, summer is an educator’s fifth quarter.  After the four quarters of a school year are completed, summer is the interlude, the fifth quarter for professional reflection, analysis, and  planning. There is scant time in the four quarters of a school year for these three activities because daily teaching is all about meeting the immediate needs of students – it is on-demand work.  The fifth quarter is all about review, consideration, and design. 

In earlier blogs, I have made the professional case for teachers to be calendar year employees not just school year.  Today, I let the needed work of education provide the argument.

The case for reflection.  A wonderful young teacher in our school district assembles and makes an online posting every Monday of the coming week’s school activities.  The weeks of May and early June are loaded to the gills with events – school for all ages is non-stop, on-the-go motion.  The spring musical and spring sports schedules, grade level trips to Madison and Green Bay, the spring music concerts, Senior Banquet, and graduation make the days and evening of spring a mad dash to the finish line for teachers.  It is acceleration into a quick and final deceleration – and the school year is over. 

On her weekly postings of school events there is no time designated for reflection on the school year soon ending.  There is not one minute of a school day invested in our teachers’ retrospection about the 2021-22 academic year.  Everyone is engaged in the forward motion of ending the school year. 

Incorporated in the definition of a professional is the capacity and commitment to being reflective about one’s professional work.  Candid reflection affirms the good practices leading to positive outcomes and leads to improvement or elimination of weaker practices.  Professionals are reflective yet our school provides no time for reflection.  We need to make professional reflection a planned reality in our school year of days.

The case for analysis.  Earlier in May our students sat for their spring assessments.  Elementary children completed the spring end of their annual universal screener assessments.  Elementary and middle level children completed their spring ACT Aspire assessments.  High school children took AP exams and final whacks at the ACT.  Every child in our school was tested, some multiple times.  All of these were calendared on our weekly announcements.  What I didn’t see was scheduled time for reflection and analysis of these data.  Nada.

We assume teachers have time in May and early June before the last day of school to reflect on their school year and the end-of-year data.  But when?  Time for teachers in the last quarter of the school year is fully subscribed.  Then, the school year is over.  Classrooms are closed and teachers depart for the summer. 

As of this date, no data meetings have been held in our school for the analysis of spring assessments, evaluation of each child’s fall to spring growth, or the effectiveness of our instruction.

If not now, when?  An organized reflection and analysis of instruction and learning is placed on the back burner of school life until late August and the return of teachers for a new school year.  The summer “quarter” is reserved for summer school and vacation.

Does this fly in the face of what we know is best practice?  You bet it does!  We know that mental retention is influenced by “meaningfulness”.  When information is compellingly meaningful we pay attention to it.  When information is current and relevant we pay attention to it.  When information affects our ongoing work we pay attention to it.  Postponing the reflection and analysis of spring assessment data until late August treats these data as irrelevant to our teaching and learning. 

We know that August is “ramp up time” for the start of a new school year.  The scant time in our August in-service days is loaded with getting classes, classrooms, and new colleagues ready for Game Day – the first day of school.  Inserting data analysis into the week before school starts leaves every teacher in the room wishing they were somewhere else getting ready for Game Day.  Analysis of SY 21-22 data the week before Game Day is lip service to data analysis.  Administrators and teachers alike know this for what it is – not meaningful and not productive.

The Fifth Quarter – Oh, the good we could do with time outside the school year calendar.  First, a fifth quarter is outcome-based not time- or place-based.  Work time can begin at 9:00 or later.  Work place can be at school or not – how about a coffee shop.  Shorts and sandals or whatever is the garb of the hour.  We know how to do remote and work from home and this fits well into a fifth quarter.

The critical attributes are the reflection upon our work and the analysis of our data each directed at an informed planning for the next school year.  In our small, rural school, fifth quarter should mean a  reflection and data analysis on a student-by-student basis resulting in an informed plan for each student’s teaching and learning in the next school year.

Fifth Quarter For All – The fifth quarter is all about school responsibility and accountability.  It applies to all school faculty and staff.  Food service, cleaning and maintenance, transportation, guidance and counseling, athletics and activities and arts – every facet of the school enterprise benefits from fifth quarter work.  We focus so much attention upon teaching and learning that we tend to ignore the other necessary work that makes a school function with efficiency and effectiveness.  Fifth quarter review, consideration and design improves the next year’s work of every school worker.  Too often it takes a seismic event to change practices in transportation, food service, and maintenance.  Instead, allow thoughtful and timely review and consideration change the design of that work.

Commitment to a Fifth Quarter – School boards need to commit dollars to the fifth quarter; the boards are buying professional time.  Administrators need to commit responsibility and accountability to the fifth quarter; making time and resources available and engaging with teachers in the reflection and analysis.  And at the end of the fifth quarter, the administration is responsible for ensuring that the quarter’s work shapes teaching and learning in the fall of the new school year. 

Even though review, reflection and design are inherent in teaching, if they are not explicitly constructed in the school calendar, they fall to the wayside of passing time.  And, then we wonder why one school year feels like the same old, same old of the previous. 

Covid Provoked Reforms – Proficiency in Standards-based Learning

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The status quo thrives when there are few challenges to disrupt its normal.  Newton taught us that a body at rest will remain at rest unless it is acted upon by a force.  The lack of compelling forces for change have kept much of public education in a Newtonian normal for decades if not a century.  We should not squander the forces for change that the pandemic presents.  Make plans now for stopping practices that do not work and shaping your new normals.

The grading of student work and students emerges every few years as a consistent problem for educators considering best practices.  Like a groundhog on its annual day, we examine grading looking for something new to know and do as if we want to change.  But, not liking what we see as options, we put our grading practices back into the inertial nest of ongoing poor practices.

Then, comes the pandemic.

How does a teacher apply traditional grading practices for a child whose attendance is disrupted by the pandemic and whose engagement with learning is somewhere around 50-60% of the school year?  How do we assign a value a student’s learning of a grade level or course curriculum when we only taught parts of that annual curriculum?  How do we compare a student’s academic work in 2020-21 or 2021-22 with any other student’s work prior to the pandemic?  How do we grade students who are learning the virtual curriculum of a commercial provider not our school district’s approved curriculum?

We stop the questions because they all point to the same conclusion.  Past grading practices cannot be applied in the pandemic.  We must stop applying past practices that are not valid or professionally defensible for current times.

It is time to replace A, B, C grading that conceptually is an aggregate of academic improvement and achievement, student effort, participation and attendance, and collegiality and collaboration with peers all topped with a smidgeon of extra credit or whatever the teacher adds to make the grade seem to fit the student.  No matter the teacher I have talked with over 50 years of observing grading practices, most teachers follow the Golden Rule of Grading – I grade my students as I was graded when I was a student.  There are modifications, but most practices fall within the shadow of past, personal experiences.  It is time to do better.

Educational standards are not new to educators.  Standards anchor teacher preparation and licensing.  The reauthorization of PI 34 by the Wisconsin legislature says “PI 34 restructured teacher education, educator licenses, and professional development for Wisconsin educators.  The system is based on Wisconsin Educator Standards with demonstrated knowledge, skills, and dispositions for teaching, pupil services and administration.  Initial licensing is based on an educator’s successful performance as measured against these standards.”  Teaching licensing is proficiency-based on the learning and demonstration of specified standards.

https://dpi.wi.gov/licensing/programs/rules-statute

Standards are described in state statute and by state departments of instruction of education.  State standards anchor contemporary curriculum development.  Every subject area taught in Wisconsin is supported by DPI-adopted curricular standards.  “Wisconsin Academic Standards specify what students should know and be able to do in the classroom.” 

https://dpi.wi.gov/standards

These standards provide the scaffold of student learning that creates the basis for standards-based proficiency grading.  It is valid and appropriate to align the evaluation of student learning with these curricular scaffolds.  The scaffolds are laddered by grade level and broadened at each grade and course.

The use of standards-base proficiency grading is not a newly made recommendation.  Teachers have sidled up to this idea in the past, but the pull of the Golden Rule of Grading has consistently overpowered change.  Now that the Golden Rule is broken, standards-based grading makes more and more sense.

To do this, we need to make two types of decisions.

  • What evidence demonstrates secure proficiency of a standard?
  • What aggregate level of proficiency demonstrates secure completion of a grade level or subject course?

While these may be argumentative questions, they are not difficult to answer.  The evidence demonstrating secure proficiency of a standard derives directly from unit and lesson planning.  Using older language of lesson planning, “The learner will …” describes the demonstrated outcomes of interest.  A properly constructed standards-based instruction provides the standards which will be proficiency assessed.  The evidence of completion also is in the unit design; it is in the statement of “extent and degree to which the student will demonstrate the standard”.  Standards-based proficiency grading is using the outcome statement of your standards-based curriculum.   Record keeping of the outcomes for which a student has demonstrated secure proficiency provides a grade book of achievement and growth. 

If your curriculum is not standards-based, you have foundational work to do.

A school’s instructional committee can readily collaborate to determine the extent of the checklist/grade book needed to indicate grade level/course completion.  Collaborative agreement of what demonstrates completion of a grade level or course is essential to balance student work across the curriculum.  Successful completion of one grade level or course should not be disproportionate to another. 

Teachers should thankfully welcome a standards-based proficiency design as it eliminates the problems of measuring effort and adding an extra credit to allow students improve an assigned grade.  This is defensible.  Without expecting an answer, why did we feel compelled to allow extra credit to erase the facts that student did not complete the basics of a grade level or course?  Emotion overcame reality.

The alignment of grading with the demonstration of standards-based proficiency overcomes the dilemma presented by interrupted school attendance and engagement due to covid 19.  Demonstration of learning is not clock or learning place-bound.  This design overcomes the issues of remote versus in-person.  Proficiencies are what proficiencies are – a student can or cannot demonstrate secure content knowledge or skills or dispositions about her learning.

Using standards-based proficiency grading creates a new practice that improves upon the older practices that failed the test of the pandemic.  Standards-based proficiency grading creates a best practice for our future.  We can and should create this as a new normal.

Our Children’s Eyes Are On Us

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A fellow school board member reminds us frequently, “Our children are watching us”.  These words alone cut to the quick of every discussion and issue before a school board.  The board’s actions must reflect decisions that are in the best interest of the children attending our schools.  Noble words?  Yes.  Mission-based words?  Yes.  Easy words to enact?  Not always. 

In the politics of school government each constituency except children has leverage.  Parents hold the choice card.  If they disagree with board decisions, they can choose a different school.  Teachers and staff hold the employment card.  There is a statewide shortage in every category of school personnel and a school board knows it.  Decisions that cause an unexpected resignation or retirement may create an opening that cannot be filled or, if filled, with a less experienced and qualified person.  Community residents hold the voter card to be played at board elections and more importantly in the constant flow of district referenda.  A failed referendum denies school needs.  And, recall elections of school board members are at an all-time high in 2021.

What about the children?  Children do not choose their school.  Children do not provide a necessary employment to the school.  Children do not vote.  Yet, children loom constantly in every board action as their education and nurturing are the only things that really matter in public education. 

Two questions should haunt every board member’s mind in their discussion and voting on board motions.  How will this decision affect children?  What lesson of responsible adult behavior are we teaching our children?

Today, it may be that the second is the more important question.  Are adults, board members and constituents speaking and acting like role models for children?  If children said and did the things they are seeing and hearing in our behaviors, would we discipline them for their inappropriateness? 

I was always whipsawed as a child between adults who said “Do as I do” and “Do as I say”.  The lesson of growing up right was to take the best of what you are shown and the best of what you are told to create a model for your adult behavior. 

Yet, when I watch YouTube clips of adult behaviors in some school board and local government meetings this year, I wonder where the adults went.  What I see in too many stories are not the role models we want children to emulate.

Three concepts from ages past pertain.  Respect, civility, and common good.  Almost every school mission statement or list of student goals contains words about respect.  On an everyday demonstration, we want children to show a considerate regard for the feelings, wishes and wants, rights, and traditions of others.  Children tend toward outbursts of the moment, brashness, and acting and saying without a second thought. 

It is the second thought of consideration that reigns in disrespect. These are learned and practiced behaviors that help children over time to achieve the second word – civility.  Civil behavior, somewhat of an archaic term, is courteous, restrained,  responsible, and accountable.  Civility follows the Gold Rule of treating others as you wish to be treated.  Accountability is an essential part of civility.  An adult does not get to say whatever comes to mind without consequence.  Respect and civil behavior combine to shape discussions for the common good. 

Teaching children to consider what is best for others not just self advances their progress toward maturity.  The common good is not ethereal, it is tangible.  School boards face decisions in which special interests are apparent.  Any decision that gives advantage to some at the disadvantage of the many is not in the common good.  On the other hand, a decision that improves the condition or status of a small group and equally shares that improvement with all is in the common good.  The pandemic is providing school boards with a constant arena for considering their decisions in terms of the common good.  This is a test; are we up to this test.

The children are watching us, their school board, to observe and learn from us.  While they may not have material leverage, children have the moral leverage.  We adults know we are supposed to be adult-like in our interactions with each other in our board meetings.  Very often I would like to use instant replay mechanisms from televised sports.  “Time out!  We are going to review what these people said and how they acted toward each other.  We will break down this clip to identify respect, civil behavior, and working for the common good.  Let’s see what we can learn.”

At the end of the day, children will grade us using the same rubrics we use on them everyday in school.  They have been watching and they know us for what and who we are.

We Are Known By What We Prioritize

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Not one.  As a school board member, I have not received one letter asking what can be done regarding depressed student proficiency scores displayed in the fall 2021 assessments.  Not one letter or phone call asking what actions our school will take to teach children the content and skills they missed while in remote education or reteach what children forgot while disconnected from instruction.  Not one person pointing at the increase of students whose assessment results fall into the significantly below proficient category this fall.

Beyond reading, ELA and math, not one communication regarding a child’s loss of learning in art, music, or foreign language.  Not a word about a child’s stagnant growth in business education, marketing, and computer science.  Learning in every school curriculum has been stymied by the pandemic, yet there is scant discussion regarding lost learning experiences.

Not one inquiry about how diminished proficiencies affect our junior and senior students’ preparation for post-secondary education, work, and military endeavors.  Without doubt, a graduate’s transcript and activity resume’ will be different in 2022 than a pre-pandemic resume’.

I grant that many children profited from their instruction in remote education.  They benefited from an optional return to in-person instruction in 2020-21 and a more complete return to in-person instruction in 2021-22.  We owe much to our teachers who labored through virtual and hybrid venues to teach their students.  Yet, every curriculum no matter how it was instructed remains behind its times in the winter of 2021.

Instead, letters, phone calls, texts and parent attendance at school board meetings demonstrating anger about masking protocols.  The demand for parental rights to choose whether a child will wear a mask overwhelms discussion of a child’s educational progress.  Am I dismayed?  No but yes. 

This observation informs us about the evolution of our culture and what we value.  We should not generalize any conclusions to the population of all parents but only to the sub-set of vocal parents.  We should not diminish our educator’s work on closing instructional and learning chasms but understand that this work is done because we, educators, know that it is the most important work before us.  It would be better if parents and school boards and teachers were all on the same page about how to repair student learning at this time of the pandemic, but we are not.

The issue of masks will resolve itself either when all school-age children have had access to the protection of vaccination or when school leaders acquiesce to the loudest voices in their community.  At that time, viral mitigation protocols will not be generalized across school districts, schools, and grade levels but will be responsive to breakouts as we ordinarily treat influenza and measles in schools.  These events will happen, and the response will be very local to those in contact with the outbreak.

The purpose of this writing is not to encourage parents to become enflamed about the status of their child’s educational progress, but to independently review what really matters and consider if their attention aligns with those matters.  For this writer, causing all children to learn with special regard for our most challenged learners is what matters.  Their challenges are not only intellectual but include all concerns that affect their total education and wellbeing.  Children today demonstrate varieties of gaps in their 4K-12 education, gaps we can close if we are able to give this teaching and learning our focused attention. We will be known by what we prioritize and how we meet our priorities.