The Politics of Collaborative Expertise

This is the second of two John Hattie articles on how to improve learning at SCS. [As before, my comments will be in square brackets.]

‘The real problem (of education) is that the locus of system-wide improvement is actually at the individual level. The only way to improve this to get INSIDE classrooms and work with teachers where they do their business – and that takes a ton of courage for all educators (formal leaders and classroom teachers alike) as well as the system overall and time. [The bottom line is that the teacher has the biggest impact on how much students learn.]

‘Expect a Year’s Worth of Progress

The student of high expectation teachers [are] very successful in achieving their teachers’ expectations and the students of teachers with low expectations [are] similarly successful at making lower gains.’ [What I have learned is that it does not matter where one sets the bar; students will always fall just short. So, if the bar is set low, students will just fail to reach it; if the bar is set high, students will just fail to reach it. So set the bar high. However, that is only half of the story. The other half is that the teachers then need to provide the scaffolding and supports needed to help each student reach the high bar. That, to a great extent, is Hattie’s argument in this article.]

‘Develop New Assessment and Evaluation Tools

We need to understand teacher and student expectations to ensure that they are appropriately high – and then to provide teachers with decent assessment and evaluation tools to help them set and evaluate these expectations.’ [This is about what administrators need to provide their staff and not about the failures of teachers. Teachers do the best they can with the tools they are given; it is up to the administration to give them better tools. Just getting data is not good nor enough; it must be the right data. Giving the teachers better evaluation tools helps generate the right data.]

‘Know Thy Impact

School leaders [need to] become leaders in evaluating the impact of all in the school on the progress of all students…. Schools need to become incubators of programs, evaluators of impact and experts at interpreting the effects of teachers and teaching on all students.’ Teachers [need to] be clearer about what success would look like and the magnitude of the impact and we ask them to prepare assessment to administer at the end – before they start teaching.’ [Here we see three different roles set out: administrators as educational leaders, schools as incubators of programs, and teachers as evaluators. This should become a discussion point within SCS and withing SPSD.]

‘Ensure Teachers Have Expertise in Diagnosis, Interventions, and Evaluation

If students are not learning, then it is because we are not using the right teaching strategies….[Teachers need to] have a high level of cognitive decision-making skills; that they are able and willing to say ‘I was wrong in my choice of method of intervention and need to change what I do or say’ or ‘I was right in my choice of interventions as they led to me successfully teaching these students’; and that they engage with others in collaborative inquiry about their diagnoses, interventions and evaluations – based on the evidence of their impact.’ [This requires huge amount of trust. We are not there yet, but this is something that we will be working on next year as it is truly what is best for students. Also, this is what it means for teachers to actually be professionals – working together, based on evidence, to help students achieve academic and spiritual success.]

‘The Implications of Collaborative Expertise

The focus of collaboration needs to be on the evidence of impact, common understandings of what the impact means, the evidence and ways to know about the magnitude of the impact and how the impact is shared across many groups of students…. Led by instructional leaders, the community would aim to have teachers sharing and learning how to become more expert…. The school leader must have the expertise to create opportunities, develop trust, provide the resources needed to understand the impact on students of all the teachers (and their own impact as school leaders) and to lead these discussions among the teachers. The leader’s role is to seek the answer to two major questions: (1) what is the evidence that each student is gaining at least a year’s progress for a year’s input in every subject and (2) what is the school doing in light of this?… The school, not the individual teacher, should be the unit of analysis. [We have known about the importance of collaboration for teachers for a long time. However, that does not mean that we are engaged in collaboration to any great extent. This is something that needs to change (but I know it takes both time and trust). We also need to decide on which assessment tools will actually give us the data we are looking for. This will take some time. It is something that we will be working on again next year.]

Bibliography.

Hattie, J. (June 2015). What Works Best in Education: The politics of collaborative expertise. Pearson.

The Politics of Distraction

This is the first of two articles by John Hattie that I would like to share with you. [I will comment on what I quote within square brackets.]

Hattie’s fundamental argument is that the ‘minimum goal of education, when rightly expressed, should be for all students to make at least one year’s progress for one year’s input, no matter where they start.’ [This is a good basic assumption. Where we go from here is to look at the various suggestions that Hattie makes to ensure that this happens.] Hattie then argues that ministries of education have good intentions, but often the good intentions do not lead to where we need to go. Hattie explains that political leaders and department officials often struggle with the ‘variability in the effectiveness of what happens at the classroom level and instead focus on policies which are politically attractive but which have been shown to have little effect on improving student learning…. The typically expensive proposals…distract us from implementing policies that can make a significant difference, defined here as interventions with an effect size of at least 0.4, the average expected effect size for one year of progress in school.’ [As an administrator, I am all about student learning. How can we, as an administrative team, help our students make one year’s worth of progress with one year’s worth of teaching. Some of Hattie’s suggestions will work at the school level; other suggestions need to be made at the provincial level and so we don’t really have a large say on that issue. Let’s start to consider Hattie’s various suggestions.]

‘Fix the Infrastructure

We need more sophisticated diagnostic tools to help teachers ascertain each student’s recent successes and work out the best way for them to progress to the next level.’ [This is true for us here at SCS. There are a variety of assessments we need to complete by virtue of being an associate school. However, there are other assessments that we will start to implement next year that have not been used at SCS in the past. The two main areas across all grades is literacy and numeracy. There is a simple literacy test that we can implement for grades K-6. We will then look for some assessment tools for literacy from grades 7-12. I also have a numeracy assessment tool that we can use for K-8; we then need to find a good tool for grades 9-12. Once we have these tools, we can start tracking students and seeing where we need to make adjustments and which adjustments we need to make. That will help us move forward with each student.]

‘The art of teaching is to balance the need for surface knowledge with deep processing of this knowledge. Deeper thinking skills need content on which to work. You cannot use deeper-thinking skills unless you have something to think about.’ [This has been something I have argued for years. Students need a lot of background knowledge before they can be asked to think critically about it. So let’s give them the background knowledge and then challenge them to evaluate that information critically. This would not require a big change at SCS; it is more that the teachers just need to be more intentional about doing this. In other words, we do this; we just need to know that we are deliberately choosing to do this.]

‘Fix the Teachers

Teachers attain additional expertise (such as studying to become a learning-difficulties coach, assessment coach or literacy coach) and take responsibility for improving the skills of their fellow teachers within a school.’ [This is something that we at SCS already do in some of the elementary grades. We have a data team that is getting further training in assessment and instructional strategies and bringing that information back to SCS and then sharing it with the other teachers in the elementary. It does not work quite the same way in the secondary grades, but several of our staff are also very involved in acquiring greater expertise in the secondary subject areas and then bringing that information back to the secondary departments. We have seen how beneficial this is at SCS. The only real change that needs to happen here is that the efforts should be documented so that we can be even more intentional in making this happen. (Much of what has been done has not been documented and so is not well known.) As we become aware of other areas that are less developed, we will start to send staff to get further training in those areas so that we can help improve the entire teaching staff. This form of professional development has been shown to be the most effective style of professional development.]

Bibliography

Hattie, J. (June 2015). What Doesn’t Work in Education: The politics of distraction. Pearson.

PCAP 2016

SCS just received the results for the latest PCAP (Pan-Canadian Assessment Program) results; this assessment is for grade 8 students. The focus for this year was reading. There are two ways of looking at the data. The first way is to look at how many grade 8 students were able to read well enough to ‘participate effectively in school and in everyday life’ (PCAP 2016 Highlights, http://www.cmec.ca). In this way of looking at the data, Saskatchewan students performed well: 90% of students were able to read at that level.

A second way of looking at the data is to compare Saskatchewan to the rest of Canada. In that way, students in Saskatchewan did not do as well as the Canadian average. The mean score for Canada was 507 while the mean score for Saskatchewan was 491 (a difference in mean score of 16). This, in my mind, is somewhat concerning but something that we, at SCS, can and will address next year.

One other piece of interesting data, based on the work I did for my dissertation, has to do with the differing results between boys and girls. I will quote the pertaining paragraphs from the document: ‘Girls performed significantly better than boys…on the overall reading assessment, as well as in each of the four subdomains…. [G]irls outperformed boys by 27 points in Canada as a whole….Boys were more likely to perform at Level 1 – that is, below expected levels of reading proficiency – and were less likely than girls to achieve Level 3 for Canada as a whole’ (PCAP 2016 Highlights, http://www.cmec.ca).

For May 25 and June 1, I will share some thoughts from John Hattie (a researcher from Australia) on changes we can make to improve the academic standing of our students here at SCS.

 

The Boy Crisis

I just finished reading The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell and John Gray. It is a thick book, which, in this case, means that Farrell and Gray have been very thorough in their documentation. For this week’s blog, I’d like to copy the opening few paragraphs from his concluding chapter and make some comments about them [my comments will be in these square brackets].

“It was December 7, 1941. For years, we had been in denial of the crisis that was Hitler and the Axis powers. With Pearl Harbor, our denial ended.

Transforming denial into a response meant sixteen million of our sons being willing to sacrifice their lives. Yet our sons stepped up. And our daughters and parents joined them.

The new enemy is not Hitler. It is dad deprivation. [Dad deprivation has been linked to all sorts of issues, including ADHD and school shootings. According to Farrell and Gray, all of the school shooters in the US since Columbine have suffered from dad deprivation.] It is not the Axis powers. It is a ‘purpose void.’ It is not a need for your son to sacrifice his life but to find a purpose for his life. [This lack of purpose is a significant issue for boys in terms of education, vocation, and marriage. We should have a better track record because we are a part of the church, but it has not worked out like that. According to the Shorter Westminster Catechism, ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever’. The Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry defined our purpose in this fashion: ‘According to the Bible, our purpose, the reason we are here, is for God’s glory.  In other words, our purpose is to praise God, worship him, to proclaim his greatness, and to accomplish his will.  This is what glorifies him.  Therefore, in this we find that God has given us a reason for our existence, a meaning for our existence.  We were created by him, according to his desire, and our lives are to be lived for him so that we might accomplish what he has for us to do.  When we trust the one who has made us, who works all things after the counsel of his will (Ephesians 1:11), then we are able to live a life of purpose.  How the particulars of that purpose are expressed is up to the individual’. It seems to me that we have lost sight of this purpose: we are not effectively communicating this to the next generation (I don’t think we have communicated this well to our generation).]

How do we get our sons to step up to a crisis for which there is no Pearl Harbor? A crisis that is more internal than external?

Whether our sons step up depends on how they are brought up. In the past, boys learned ‘I exist, therefore I serve.’ Today, many boys learn ‘I exist, therefore I deserve.’ [These two statements accurately describe the shift in culture; this is not merely generational but symptomatic of society in general.]

Being needed to serve creates a sense of purpose. Being served creates a sense of entitlement. Most parents know this intellectually, but our own need to be needed seduces us into serving our sons rather than teaching him to serve. [This is true. Leonard Sax, in his book The Collapse of Parenting, explains this phenomenon by reporting that parents desire to be buddies with their children rather than authority figures. Because parents have abdicated their role, their children, sons in particular, take the easiest road which, in this case, means being served. They see this example in the media (music videos and the like). As a result, the sense of entitlement grows and creates a greater downward pressure to be served.] Which contributes to our sons’ purpose void.Once our sons value serving over being served, they are more likely to step up when we both alert them to a crisis – such as the crisis of dad deprivation and the mission to be a great dad, and therefore an inspiration to others to be the same. [This is actually our responsibility to our sons, biblically speaking.]

Boys who become a failure to launch are most frequently devoid of the two Ps: purpose and postponed gratification. Boys devoid of the two Ps are often also devoid of the equal checks and balances of the other two Ps: two parents. When your son is dad enriched, he not only avoids the crisis of being dad deprived but is inspired with the mission to become a great dad.

Becoming a great dad is not a mission for every son. [Matthew 19:12 For there are eunuchs who were born thus from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who is able to accept it, let him accept it.”] Your mission is to guide your son to discover his mission. [Not quite true. As parents, it is our mission to guide our sons to find their mission, but that includes helping him understand the role of the Holy Spirit in this process (according to Eph. 2:10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them).] No piece of cake, because there’s no precedent. Our fathers did not learn to discover their mission; they learned to fulfill a mission someone else discovered. The ‘discoverer’ was the need to survive. His mission was provider-protector. [In one sense, fathers did not ‘discover’ their mission; they were given their mission by God. We are called to provide for our families (1 Timothy 5:8 But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. This provision also includes the idea of protection. Robert Lewis, Raising a Modern-Day Knight, Michael Gurian, The Purpose of Boys, The Wonder of Boys, Leonard Sax, Boys Adrift, The Collapse of Parenting, Steve Farrar, King Me, Point Man, Standing Tall, Eric Ludy, God’s Gift to Women, and David Murrow, Why Men Hate Going to Church, The Map all deal with the topic of the purpose of men. There are many other books and authors on this topic, and we ought to look into this more in schools, in our homes, and in our churches.]

Your dad had two options: be the provider-protector or be a loser. Which didn’t allow for questions like, ‘What creates the glint in my eye?’ He learned to be a human doing first, and a human being second. Or not at all. Which often led him to withdraw from loving himself, and ultimately from the family he loved [This process has been around for a long time, but accelerated after WW II. This also speaks to our identity in Christ and our understanding of what God has actually called us to. Somehow we need to bridge the idea of being a provider-protector AND being able to do that which ‘creates a glint in my eye.’ With the messages that society is sending to our youth, most of our youth seem frozen in terms of what their purpose is and what they want to achieve/accomplish as they move into adulthood. Dads are sometimes required to provide in ways that take them out of the home for longer than they want. One issue around this, as Farrell and Gray explain, has to do with expectations. There is a much higher expectation of a fathers involvement with his family today at the same time that there are increased obligations on a father to fulfill his work obligations. Most jobs now require a father to be on-call almost 24/7 and to bring work home.] To him feeling that his life insurance policy is more valuable than his life [This reminds me of It’s a Wonderful Life].

Your mission to help your son discover his mission begins with helping him discover himself as a human being first, and then helping him find a way of being a human doing – of making a living – that supports him as a human being” (pp. 388-389).

Bibliography

Farrell, W. and Gray, J. (2018). The Boy Crisis: Why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books.