Do not pass Go! Do not collect $200!

Stop! Before you do any more work on Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) implementation, make sure that your staff first understands the six shifts that have to occur prior to any CCLS work. The shifts have to be understood before any other CCLS work because it is the only way that the CCLS has any chance of making a significant difference in our schools and classrooms.

A close analysis of the six shifts (the shifts for ELA are detailed in this edition of NTnews) indicates that some profound and significant changes are necessary in our curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Most significantly, we have to rethink the balance between fiction and nonfiction we ask our students to read and write because we have to rethink our orientation toward our students’ future and away from the adults’ past. Our obligation (and purpose for existing as an institution) is to prepare young people for their future. A consideration of their future indicates a paramount need for skilled interaction with informational (nonfiction) text. Adults, especially in their work, but also in their personal lives, interact with far more nonfiction than fiction. Of course, fiction provides a great richness and pleasure to our lives. Nonfiction, however, occupies all of our work and a good portion of our personal lives, too. As a result, we have to shift the balance of fiction and nonfiction in our schools.

Our primary classrooms have to use more nonfiction informational texts as students learn to read. As students grow older, informational text must be more prominent in intermediate classrooms as students make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. At the secondary level, students must write and closely read authentic texts in each and every content area. This does not include textbooks – they are not particularly authentic. Secondary teachers will have to identify the authentic texts of their discipline and use these in their classroom, teaching students how to read, write, speak, listen, etc. in their content area. If secondary teachers do this, students will learn the material more deeply and permanently as well as be better readers and writers.

These shifts are foundational; the shifts have to occur in order for any subsequent curriculum and assessment work to be productive and meaningful. Stop! Before going any further with curriculum and assessment you have to make these shifts. Then, and only then, can you pass Go!

Ride the Elephant

In his remarks at the Network Team Summer Institute, Commissioner King held up a book about change that he referred to at several points during the institute. The book he held up (and referred to) was Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath. I dutifully noted the title during the institute in August, but it wasn’t until a few weeks later that I got around to reading it. I’m glad I didn’t wait too much longer.

 

Now we all know that there is no shortage of books about change and leadership – our bookshelves are full of them. If you are like me, some of those books influenced your practice; some didn’t. I like Switch and I think it’s already starting to influence my practice. Basically, it uses an analogy previously described by Jonathan Haidt in his book,The Happiness Hypothesis: the elephant and its rider.

The rider, in the metaphor at the center of the books, sits atop a big elephant. The rider (which represents the rational part of human behavior) uses knowledge and reason to guide the elephant – sort of like a leader of a big system. The elephant represents the emotional part of human behavior. Our emotional side is governed by instinct and short term needs. If you can picture a rider perched atop a great big elephant you can get a sense of the struggle the little rider has to steer the big elephant. Most of the time, the elephant is going to go where it wants to go! The challenge is for the rider to persuade the elephant to go in a desired direction to a desired location. A reluctant elephant won’t get anywhere. A directionless leader won’t get the elephant/rider pair anywhere, either. Of course, both the rider and the elephant need each other for this to happen. Working together is not enough, the Heath brothers caution. What also must be clear is the path to take.

 

With a clear path the rider can know where to lead and know how to avoid spinning her/his wheels. With a clear path the elephant will encounter fewer obstacles and distractions. Of course, if you know where you are going you are a lot more likely to get to your destination.

 

If you think about our present situation it’s easy to identify the rider and the elephant. The rider is the reform agenda – the rational places we have to go. The elephant is our present system and status quo – comfortable and reluctant to change. The rider has to work with the elephant. In our roles as educational leaders we have to make sure that the path is clear to both the rider and the elephant. Not always easy to do – but absolutely necessary if we are to get our elephant and rider anywhere. Toward the end of chapter 1 in Switch, the Heaths describe their framework which they suggest can get us through any change situation:

 

• Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity, so provide crystal-clear direction.
• Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can't get his way by force for very long. So it's critical that you engage people's emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.
• Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the "Path." When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what's happening with the Rider and Elephant.

So, as you move ahead, make sure you take care of all three components if you want change to happen. Oh, and in all your spare time, you might want to get Switch and give it a read. I think you’ll like it.

 

 

 

Refill Your Popcorn

If you haven’t gone to the engageNY movies yet you are missing a great [and informative] show. On this enageNY site you can find a wealth of videos that will help you understand the shifts necessary for Common Core implementation. David Coleman, one of the primary authors of the ELA/Literacy Common Core State Standards, is the star of these movies. Coleman, along with co-stars Commissioner King and Regent Fellow Gearson, succinctly explain the shifts we need to make. Bravo!

These introductory videos are a great way to raise the curtain to show the Common Core. Once the curtain is up, the next step is to explore each of the shifts in ELA/literacy and mathematics. One by one, you can watch the trio of stars explain the shifts in ELA/literacy – and you should watch them all. They are short and sweet and can prompt great discussion. I believe that the six shifts have to be understood before any other curriculum work can proceed. Without an understanding of the shifts, the transition to the Common Core will not be transformational. It will merely be another episode of using checklists to realign a few things (think pre March/post March) and not much else. Every moment spent with these videos is a good investment – the reviews of these ELA/literacy videos give them all “two thumbs up.”

The collection of the mathematics videos, however, is not quiate as large as for ELA/literacy. It’s not that our three stars didn’t do a good job in the math videos – they did. What I hear from math leaders, though, is that we need more of them that address each shift explicitly. Additionally, math leaders have mentioned that including some of the primary authors of the mathematics Common Core in the stable of engageNY stars would lend additional credibility to the engageNY cavalcade of stars.

Some math videos do exist at engageNY and I recommend that you check them out and think about how you might use them to help make the mathematics Common Core be transformational. Our neighbor, Vermont, has put together a bigger collection of math videos that come straight from the primary authors of the mathematics Common Core: William McCallum and Jason Zimba. Math leaders whom I respect have recommended these videos to me and I, in turn, am recommending them to you. If you go visit Vermont and their video collection you’ll recognize our friend David Coleman in the ELA videos and you’ll get to see the math authors in starring roles. The engageNY videos are great; these additional math videos will help us even more with our work.

Go! Refill your bucket of popcorn, make yourself comfortable, and go [back] to the movies!

Co-Labor on the Right Work

Syracuse was fortunate to host the Professional Learning Communities at Work© Institute just a few weeks prior to the opening of school and the beginning of the hard Common Core and Data Driven Instruction work. One thousand people from all over North America attended, including an [obviously] large contingent from the Empire State. Rick and Becky DuFour were there, as were other presenters from the PLC stable of practitioners and presenters. It was a great three days, which included a Saturday in August! PLC-ers are hard core!

More than the flawless conference logistics and more than the large and enthusiastic audience I was impressed by how closely aligned the PLCs at Work message is with the work before us. Rick DuFour, in his keynote address effectively explained how educators must co-labor on the right work. He doesn’t use the word collaborate anymore – that’s been corrupted to mean something more like just getting along. Co-labor has a stronger connotation and means professionals interdependently working together on shared goals with mutual accountability. It sounds serious, doesn’t it? It is.

It isn’t enough, Rick said, to “merely” co-labor. More than that, we have to co-labor on the right work. This is what he said at the Institute constitutes the “right work.” Check out how it lines up with the RTTT work (with my connections in parentheses):

• Educators work collaboratively and take collective accountability for student learning (sounds like professional practice to me)
• Collaborative teams implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit (sounds like the Common Core Learning Standards to me)
• Collaborative teams monitor student learning through ongoing common formative assessments (data-driven instruction, here)
•  Educators use the results of the common assessments to improve professional practice, achieve instructional goals, and intervene on students’ behalf (data-driven instruction meets professional practice)

 

Why I was surprised to see absolute alignment with Common Core Learning Standards, Data-Driven Instruction, and Improving Professional Practice I do not know. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was struck by the absolute convergence of research and best practice around the same things – the right work. No fad. No flavor of the month. No next new thing. A clear and consistent identification of the work we all have to do in all of our schools. The right work. Our co-labor.

Go!

There’s a core collection of videos on YouTube that are great for use as metaphors of situations we face in education. There’s the BBC’s School Season video that shows the kindergartener heading off to the first day of school – in space. There are all those “Did You Know” and “Shift Happens” videos that make the point about our changing future. And, of course, there’s one of my personal favorites: herding cats. More than any of these, however, another video comes to mind at the beginning of this school year – a school year likely to be different and more challenging than any other we’ve encountered. It’s the video that shows workers building a plane as it flies through the air. It’s not a new video -- most of us have seen it -- but it’s timely.

Why is this an apropos video as we start the 2011-2012 school year? Quite simply, we are building a new airplane that has to take off before it’s completely built, tested, and cleared for takeoff. There’s a lot that we know about that we have to get started on this year: Common Core learning Standards (and a unit per semester), Data-Driven Instruction (and 6-8 week common interim assessments), and Professional Practice (APPR). Each of these initiatives is significant in its own right; implemented at the same time they represent a statewide shift of never-before-seen scope and complexity. To say it’s a heavy lift is an understatement. It sure would be nice to have all our curricula realigned and our units transformed to be standards-based. It would be great if all our teachers were co-laboring in effective and focused teams with common interim and data-analysis protocols all prepared and scheduled. We all wish we had our APPR plans and decisions about rubrics, local achievement assessments, and growth measures all worked out.

The truth of the matter, however, is that we don’t have all of the details all worked out – nobody does. Yet, our students are waiting… waiting for us to better prepare them for their future rather than for our past. Because they (and the world) are waiting, we have to start the year without all the answers. We have to build the plane as it flies through the air. So, the advice is simple: go.

Get the plane going with what we have and keep working on it as it flies. Get going. Go.

Open the Gates

Professional Practice is one of the fundamental principles at the core of education. I described the three fundamental principles (standards, data, and practice) in a recent post.

The current evolution of the story of professional practice is being told with the APPR. Across the state, districts are working on their APPR plans -- plans they hope will not only comply with regulations but also result in better teaching and leading. While districts are working on their APPR plans, administrators are being trained to be Lead Evaluators. The APPR regulations describe nine components about which Lead Evaluators must be trained. Those nine required components are all well and good, but they are not compelling. Being trained in those nine components might not result in effective evaluations. The nine components of training and the best district-made APPR plan can't result in improved student learning if certain conditions are not first in place.

Duffy Miller (and other past and present members of the Danielson Group) is training Network Teams from across the state about how to do teacher evaluations. Before the training about teacher evaluation proceeded too far, Duffy described the three conditions that must be in place for teacher evaluation to have any shot at making a difference; he called them the three "gates" of evaluation. These gates have to be open in order for you to pass through: fairness, reliability, and validity.

You can't pass through to the land of effective and productive teacher evaluation unless teachers perceive the system as fair. Think about how acutely tuned a child's sense of fairness is. Adults are no different. If we don't feel like a system that is being used to judge our performance is fair there is absolutely no way that we will be able to receive and respond to feedback. Our fairness radar works 24-7; we have to have a system that is fair and perceived as fair -- that's the first gate.

The second gate is reliability. A system of evaluation has to be reliable, which means that different evaluators and different contexts result in a similar evaluation and in similar provision of feedback. If the system works differently for different people on different days it is easy to recognize how unlikely it is that the system will produce meaningful learning or change.

The third gate swings on whether the system is valid. This means that the system has to provide the right feedback at the right time. Neither nonspecific feedback nor inaccurate feedback is helpful feedback. It is not valid, growth-producing feedback; it won't produce growth.

So, it is critical that you attend to these gates and make sure you leave them open and unlocked. No APPR plan and no Lead Evaluator Training program hold the key to these three gates if locked. Make deliberate and thorough plans to open them and keep them open.

Stop Speaking in Tongues

Doctors have it. Pilots have it. CPAs have it. Educators do not. What don't we have that doctors, pilots, and accountants do? Why, they have a common language. While we can talk about our craft in general terms and we can describe the decisions and judgments we make in classrooms with sufficient specificity to get along, we don't have a common language. Common language, however, is a primary characteristic of a profession.

Consider the medical profession. Now there's an example of a common language. Generalists and specialists and nurses and doctors have to employ a common language. The repercussions of an imprecise and inexact language can be literally life threatening. We depend on their common language. Our life depends on it.

Consider another example of how important it is to have a common language among pilots and air traffic controllers. Bad things could happen on the ground if a precise and shared language wasn't used to direct planes to the correct runways and taxiways. And if common language wasn't used to direct pilots as they take off and land the results would be quite catastrophic. They depend on their common language (and we do, too).

Here's our chance to employ a common language in schools and classrooms across the state: The NYS Teaching Standards. These have to become our common language. Leaders have to use the language as they interact with their teachers. Teachers have to use the language when they talk to each other and co-labor on the implementation of the Common Core, common interim assessments, and the new APPR. Just imagine if the daily, routine conversations in schools were more often about learning and teaching. That can't happen if we don't share a common language. The Teaching Standards. That's our language. Let's use it.

It's The Principle of the Thing

In a post at the Network Team Institute I described a shift in my thinking with regard to the three deliverables: Common Core Learning Standards, Data-Driven Instruction, and Teacher/Leader Evaluation. I explained how I had previously compartmentalized the three deliverables and how I was rethinking that compartmentalization. Of course these deliverables are interconnected and interdependent. As a result of this shift in thinking we had to adjust the way were planning our work. Rather than separate components for which implementation would proceed in parallel, we reoriented our design to be more integrated with greater overlap. I thought I was enlightened. Not so fast!

Now I've experienced another shift in my thinking that I think is important to write about. This work is not about deliverables. It is not about the next generation of reform. If we speak in terms of deliverables and initiatives and reforms we will simply be the bringers of another new thing. We've all heard the "flavor of the month" or "this too shall pass" remarks. We might be headed in that direction with those same epitaphs on our tombstones. These easy excuses for avoiding change can be averted. Thanks to Giselle Martin-Kneip and the coaching she is providing for a group of Network Teams in Central New York, there's a better way to think about this work. This work is about principles, not deliverables.

When doing this work, we have to talk in terms of principles. Principles of teaching and learning are far superior to any plan, reform, initiative, effort, or deliverable. Don't talk about the Common Core as if it is a unique thing. That can imply that it will pass. The Common Core is the next phase of the evolution of standards. We've always had standards and we always will -- standards are the things we teach; the goals of our system.

Common interim assessments and inquiry teams are discreet manifestations of the use of data. The principle here is data and that's where the focus should be: How do you know?

The third principle at work here is professional practice, not evaluation and supervision. Our practice is the "how" principle. What do we need to do to be effective teachers and leaders whose actions result in the right learning? If we think (and talk) about our practice like physicians talk about practice we are then talking about the principle rather than a specific technique, development, trend, or fad.

In our work, we’re going to change our language and talk about enduring principles of education rather than deliverables and another set of reforms. We think it will make a difference.