The September 2013 issue of Educational Leadership, titled Resilience and Learning, has several thought provoking articles. Two of them connected with the work I am doing with a few districts examining grading, motivation, and engagement.

A Conversation with Angela Lee Duckworth (pages 14-20) explores the significance of grit (earlier blog).  She states that “grit and talent either aren’t related at all or are actually inversely related”.

Duckworth describes a study of taxi drivers; Rainy days can be a goldmine for taxi drivers as everyone wants a cab and fares are plentiful. So you would think that drivers who are earning more per hour on rainy days would work more hours… but they tend to work less hours on rainy days. It appears they have a fixed amount they need to earn per day in their heads and on rainy days they get there quicker and go home early.

She suggests it’s similar with grit and talent in academics. If students are just focused on getting an A, the really talented student gets there easily and works less hard. If you are trying to maximize your outcomes, there is no ceiling. Your goal is,” How can I get the most out of my day?”.

I met a high school English teacher who has students continually improve a piece of writing across the whole school year. Each month they get their work back with her comments on the strengths and how it can be improved. In May she returns the work with a grade. If the grade is an A, which in most cases it is, she also includes the date at which it was scored an A. Many students find that they improved their work, three or four times beyond an A. Exactly what the teacher wanted to communicate. “Don’t allow a grading system to set an arbitrary limit on what you are capable of achieving.”

In the same issue of Educational Leadership, Tom Guskey (earlier blog)  provides an article titled, The Case Against Percentage Grading. He identifies a 2011 study that replicated a 1912 study illustrating the inaccuracy of much that happens with grading:

90 High school teachers –who had received nearly 20 hours of training in a writing assessment program- were asked to grade the same student paper on a 100 point scale. Among the 73 teachers who responded, scores ranged from 50- 96.

Guskey raises these concerns

•  If  60 or 65 is a passing score, a 100 point scale contains more distinct levels of failure than of passing. In affect students can receive a more finely distinguished degree of failure than of success.
• In the absence of a truly accurate measuring device, adding more gradations to the measurement scale offers an illusion of precision. (I’d suggest that few of the assessments used in school are highly accurate measuring devices.)

This statement by Guskey in the closing of the article (page 72) identifies for me what must become the work of educators in Professional Learning Communities at all levels.

“Assigning fair and meaningful grades to students will continue to challenge educators at every level. The process requires thoughtful and informed professional judgment, an abiding concern for what best serves the interest of students and their families, and careful examination of the tasks students are asked to complete and the questions they are asked to answer to demonstrate their learning.”

School leaders and instructional coaches need to be engaging teacher teams in these conversations. I often find building or districts guidelines regarding “recording grades” pushing teachers’ decisions that are not “best serving the interest of students”. Designing assessment and grading practices that promote student achievement must be a continual teacher learning process.

As this school year has gotten underway I have been working in several systems with principals and instructional coaches to prepare their plans for the professional learning of staff that is focused on increased student achievement. Sometimes this work produced a principal/ coach partnership laying out the roles that each would take, resources that might be needed from central office, and the commitments to each other.

I built my work around the three big ideas pulled from the work of DuFour for PLCs  and created questions to drive the leaders’ conversation.

#1 Results: Every teacher-team participates in an ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement, establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress.

So as the school year begins teachers should have assessment data, from the previous year or newly collected, to identify their students’ level of performance and then set end of year goals that focus instructional planning and formative assessments. I often find teachers hard at work “teaching” without goals. This creates what I would label as an acceptance of results (When the test comes this is what we’ve got).  I also find that higher achieving students are often overlooked as teachers push for the proficient standard.

Questions:

How will principal and coach work with staff to establish learning goals for students?

How will you hold staff accountable for consistent assessment (monitoring) and planning for the goals achievement?

#2 Focus on Learning: The assumption is that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn.

For me this means clearly identifying the student behaviors, actions, and experiences that are needed to gain the learning result (the element that I continually find being skipped), then deciding the teacher behaviors that will generate the student actions. With these identified, principals and coaches have clear “look fors” as they observe in classrooms.

Question:

#3 Collaboration: Educators recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.

Collegiality and teamwork rarely happen by happenstance. It is most often the hard work of leaders with purposeful design.

 Questions:

What leadership behaviors on the principal’s part are focused on increasing shared accountability among staff for student success?

What role should the coach play in building staff collegiality?

In what ways are the principal and coach modeling the vulnerability and collegiality that you want the staff to embrace?

Lastly, I provided some questions to examine how teachers would receive feedback as they worked to reach the goals for student achievement.

What should be the focus of observations that are geared to your school improvement efforts?

How might teachers be involved in observations?

When conducting coaching conversations around your school improvement efforts, what will be critical questions to pose?

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