Tag Archives: response to intervention

Student Engagement vs Student Discipline

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With all the talk of classroom management, we seem to have made (or are making) a statement which reflects arrogant self-aggrandizement. The statement goes something like this: if students were more disciplined and civil, I could instruct my class so that more students could learn what I have to teach them. This idea is, by and large, hogwash. By putting the onus of a disciplined and respectful classroom primarily on the backs of the students, we deemphasize the need for quality, engaging instruction.

Having completed a second year of observing teacher instructional practice using the Charlotte Danielson-based REACH Students frameworks, a glaring, but intuitive, phenomenon has emerged. Teachers with student-centered, standards-based lessons invariably have high marks for student engagement. When teachers with high marks for student engagement (REACH 3c) are compared with their student discipline (REACH 2d) rating, the ratings are similar. Likewise, teachers with low marks for student engagement have low marks for student discipline. Middle or so-so marks for engagement seem to have little bearing on discipline. It could be good; it could be bad.

Altogether too many educators want to blame students for disruptive, impolite and disrespectful behavior. An entire sub-culture within education has developed an industry focused solely on how to create a positive learning environment – from the student discipline perspective. I’ve been to some of these professional development seminars. They’re based primarily on creating and reinforcing positive structures and public affirmation of good behavior. In reality it attempts to promote behavior that is merely not “bad.” They try to help teachers envision a classroom focused on civil obedience. “If we can get the children to sit still, behave themselves and pay attention, we can teach them something of importance which they may come to appreciate one day.”

It has become increasingly difficult for me to accept the absurdity of such a notion. These educators have conveniently left out the most important elements of quality instruction and put the kids at fault. Never mind that there are, in fact, ill-tempered children in our fold. But ask yourself a couple simple questions. Why are some kids great students with some teachers and thugs with others? Why are some teachers burning up the Dean of Students’ phone with student misconduct while other teachers barely know his name? Again, accounting for the occasional, continuously ill-tempered child, with some teachers the students respect the environment and come to class to learn. With some teachers the students arrive to class prepared for conflict. And these students are rarely disappointed.

The solution to classroom conflict appears less and less to do with behavior protocols, expectations and interventions, although these structures are absolutely necessary ingredients. The solution appears to be well-planned, student-centered lessons which optimize student learning. Planning and ultimately executing rigorous and relevant standards-based learning activities trump a hundred structured protocols, expectations and interventions. Students know when they’re being pandered to. Neither the well-behaved, academic minded students nor the socially inept, unmotivated students appreciate poorly designed, irrelevant instructional drivel.

What do I see in classrooms with poor student behavior? I see independent reading packets wherein students are asked to complete the pre-fab questions at the end. I see teachers presenting lectures wherein students are told to take good notes (a la Cornell notes, etc.?). I see teachers reviewing outlines of key information, often requiring students to put them in their notebooks to study for the test. I see students being made to copy key vocabulary, write the definition, and use the term in a sentence. I see writing assignments whose only criteria for grading is quantity of words, sentences or paragraphs “covering” (mentioning in whatever application) a list of nouns. I see the mindless dumping of unit content with no real purpose for the children – content whose only relevance to the students is that it will be on the test, whatever that might entail.

All of the above examples are fairly easy for a teacher to pull together. At the same time, however, this is all pretty boring for the students. The students need useful instruction. The mindlessness of too many classes is evident in the amount of student misconduct, suspensions and ultimate dropouts. Surveys of students who’ve dropped out of school more often than not identify sheer boredom as a major cause of leaving school. While they are undergoing the social and emotional upheaval of adolescence, we are boring them to death. It’s no wonder they can’t sit still.

On the other hand, I’ve seen otherwise problem children totally engrossed in math talk. Why? Because they’re challenged at a level they can access and understand, yet they have to think about what they’re doing and saying. I’ve seen the all-to-often restlessly disengaged upperclassmen seriously attuned to discussions of, well, discourse. Why? Because they can relate to a topic of meaningful social policy that requires evidence of their position, yet that which they present must have meaning beyond a personal opinion or a teacher’s interpretation. When students learn new skills or advance current skills to new levels, they are like putty in the hands of a skillful teacher.

But these types of lessons require planning. They are not easy – at any level. They require the teacher to know his/her students, to know their individual capacities for learning particular skills, to know student academic performance data. They must design lessons that take advantage of cognitive proximal development theory in a way that students can access conceptual understanding and apply it to new processes of content manipulation. Teachers must shed the cloak of intellectual superiority and challenge students to demonstrate skills in which they, the teachers, are challenged themselves.

When teachers are not afraid of being outed by a student, students will rise to the occasion. It’s a glorious thing. In such situations behavior issues of any sort are, for the most part, non-existent.

The Educators’ Guide to Skills-Based Learning and Assessment Curriculum – 9: Grading

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SBLAC 9: Grading

How does a person grade student achievement within a Standards-based Instruction system? We must keep in mind that if failure is not an option, then we must stop making it one. Think of the 18-point safety check a person might get from having his oil changed at a Firestone Service Station. Let’s say this person had sixteen of the eighteen points checked off but received a red X on two of the points. Does he/she drive off knowing that there is no brake fluid in the brake lines and that the battery shows insufficient charge to start the engine in freezing weather? The question becomes, “Do you feel lucky?” Is it a money issue? Is it a time issue? What would it take to stop you from doing something that in all likelihood will cause significant heartache down the road if it’s not addressed? If we don’t know something (like no brake fluid in the master cylinder) and smash our car into a toll booth on I-90 we might legitimately call this an accident. But what do you tell the victim’s family when you just left the service station where Joe, the car guy, told you that your car failed the 18-point safety check? “Well, I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith. He was feeling lucky.”

Once we establish our Critical Benchmark Skills List (CBSL) we must own it absolutely. We must be willing to do anything to ensure the students have demonstrated proficiency or mastery of the skills before they are set free upon the world. Not only that, but if one is a 9th grade teacher, what does he/she say to the 10th grade teacher when Harvey Schmirdlapp cannot perform tasks on the 9th grade CBSL? It is simply unacceptable to utter the phrase, “I taught it, he just didn’t learn it.” If we believe that all students can learn, can we assume that all teachers can teach? There is something obviously wrong with the formula. When the CBSL is selected it must be grade-level appropriate and it must be skill-level appropriate. We limit the skills we put on the CBSL so that we can ensure they are taught and learned to the level of the Tasks/Conditions/Standards (T/C/S) of Performance which we have created. We must own them outright. We must own them with passion. We must be sure that what we do in the classroom is directly related to these skills because the student’s future, as well as his/her grade, hangs in the balance.

As for grading, everyone should peruse Dr. Doug Reeves’ article, Leading to Change; Effective Grading Policies (See http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb08/vol65/num05/Effective-Grading-Practices.aspx. This is an article from Educational Leadership, February 2008, “Teaching Students to Think,” pp85-87.) . It cannot be emphasized enough that incorporating zeroes for missed assignments into a final semester grade is similar to emotional manslaughter which can kill a child’s motivation to continue struggling and learning when the hole seems to be getting deeper and deeper. We must be cognizant of the idea that zeroes and mistakes made along the way to proficiency and mastery are not failures. Reeves tells us that we must treat them as lessons learned on the way to success. A child can practice now or practice later, but as long as the Critical Benchmark Skill is mastered by the end of the semester, credit must be given. That’s the agreement.

When we accumulate a multitude of practice scores as we slog through the semester showing progress toward our goal, the average is merely an indication of potential success (or failure). This is all good information which can be used to motivate, inform, and target instruction. But after the 15- and 35-week progress reports go out, we must concentrate on our short final approach to the official semester grade. Whether a child met the T/C/S standard when the skill was introduced or whether he/she mastered the skill upon landing, if the entire CBSL has been assessed and all the tools are in the student’s tool kit, the student passes the class. Regardless of how brilliantly or how abysmally the student’s semester advanced, if he/she met the Task / Condition / Standard of the entire Critical Benchmark Skills List, this student will pass this class.

The reason we have progress reports and formative and interim assessments is to shed light on a student’s skills development and improvement as we progress through the year. We avoid “semester killers” by maintaining clear and constant vigilance of the CBSL and the skill mastery it represents. We cannot consider all of our eggs in one basket when in November we know that the main body has demonstrated proficiency on 15 of 18 Critical Benchmark Skills covered thus far and Harvey Schmirdlapp has but only six tools in his tool kit. Joe, the car guy, will tell us that Harvey needs to spend a little more time in the shop. But if Harvey works hard in December and over the Winter Break and meets the established T/C/S proficiencies, we cannot punish him for earlier failures on quizzes and missed homework. If he walks out the door at the end of January with all 20 tools in his tool kit, he is as good as gold.

Once we have determined the skills we will instruct, grading the Critical Benchmark Skills List becomes the most prominent aspect of the standards-based instruction (SBI) system. Assessing for mastery is a relatively simple process. However, when we incorporate SBI into an unyielding grading structure (such as that required by GradeBook®) things can get a little messy. The highly successful Kansas City, Kansas Benchmarking curriculum (KCK) for high school math was subjected to this type of system a few years ago which essentially negated one of its finest innovative qualities. Within KCK, students who had not met all of the benchmark standards of the semester were afforded an ‘I’ for “in progress” (or incomplete, as the case may be). Rigid grading systems cannot accommodate that kind of innovation. While it was marginally acceptable on a small-time basis for the mid-term grade, it was out of the question for semester grades. Therefore, within rigid systems students must master the entire CBSL by the end of the semester in order to be awarded the semester credit.

To be sure, the entire cumulative grading process which Dr. Reeves condemns so heartily (he calls it “toxic”), is the same system we have at Chicago Public Schools. But it is also true that the standards-based philosophy of Dr. Daggett is diametrically opposite to the published instructional frameworks(1) of CPS. And Dr. DuFour’s Professional Learning Community (See http://www.allthingsplc.info/pdf/articles/DuFourWhatIsAProfessionalLearningCommunity.pdf. This is Dr. DuFour’s 2004 article which appeared in Educational Leadership, May 2004, “What is a ‘Professional Learning Community?’,” pp6-11.) contains several premises which render it unworkable within a rigid, traditional grading system. We are running uphill. It is a situation which places teachers and administrators in an ethical dilemma every day of the school year.

So now what? So now we take the moral high ground. When the best minds in the nation tell us what we ought to be doing, well, we should seriously consider doing it. We must accept at some level that what we are doing “ain’t cuttin’ the mustard.” Average kids should perform at an average level. Our average kids, however, are performing at a level significantly below the state average. The average 11th grader in Chicago is performing at a pretty low level. And these are the students being targeted for intervention. But, the longer we cling to probationary and remedial type practices the more we fit into the mediocre mold. At mediocre schools, the education specialists can just as easily come to your building and train you to do the wrong thing but with greater precision.

For all intents and purposes, we have a high speed, information sharing, and internet accessible, gee-whiz typewriter. With all of its applications and reports, GradeBook® and other rigidly systematic grading systems really only do one thing at the classroom level. And they do it poorly. They take the old blue grade book and put it onto a computer. In and of itself, this is relatively benign, although quite honestly it is also no technical improvement. Teachers have less control, access and prerogative than ever before. The transfer to online grading systems merely allows others to peek at classroom attendance and grading records. The difficulty lies in the necessary formatting protocols which make district-wide access possible. The problems come into play when districts tell the teachers how to walk the grade book grading dog. Perhaps they do so necessarily but in the process create a cookie-cutter, one-over-the-world grading formula. And in the online default mode, these systems violate the principles of Reeves, DuFour, Marzano and Daggett, among others.

Traditional online grading practices which incorporate cumulative assignments will often not allow teachers to target Critical Benchmark Skills assessments without bringing previous work to bear. If one student achieves proficiency early on, that score cannot be calculated into his/her final grade without including that assessment into the calculations of every student in the class. But if everyone who took the assessment did not pass, those who came up short will have their “failure” included into the final tally as part of the same weighted average. This can be over-ridden by simply placing the new “passing” or “improved” grade over the benchmark assessment, but student toil in this area must be documented separately.

Switching from progress reporting to final grading is difficult. Adjusting the weighting formula is no solution because whatever grading scheme is in place at the end of cycle 1 (common terminology for the 10-week mid-term grade) will necessarily be used throughout cycle 2 (end of the first semester). This precludes using this application for progress reporting, which would include formative assessments, homework, and non-summative assignments, as well as using it for summative grading purposes.

Of course there is value in tracking cumulative progress throughout the 5-, 10-, and 15-week periods. These reports can tell us much about how a student’s progress is, well, progressing. Does he/she require intervention and/or other special attention? However at the end of the semester, all that really matters is whether or not a student has met the objectives of the course. How long it took him/her to get there is immaterial and can be prejudicial to the final grade. If a student receives a Go on each of the Critical Benchmark Skills on the CBSL, that is all we need to know for the final grade. The fact that he/she got sub-standard scores on four or five formative assessments should not matter in the least. And clearly a “slower” student should not be penalized for taking a little more time to get it right. Such a practice, on its face, is contrary to our educational philosophy of rigorous, differentiated instruction for diverse learners.

Classroom teachers should maintain a hard copy ledger of student performance just as in the Blue Grade Book style. Each quarter, the CBSL is identified along the top columnar headings (x axis) in column groups of three. The class roster is listed in row headings (y axis). As a student achieves requisite proficiency of a given Critical Benchmark Skill, the assessment date is recorded in the appropriate column within the student’s row. Each student must achieve three (occasionally two) proficiency Go’s per Critical Benchmark Skill in order to have achieved requisite mastery. The third column per Critical Benchmark Skill grouping is for teacher notes, scheduled retests and the like.

Instances where a student receives a No-Go on a Critical Benchmark Skill assessment are recorded within the online system as a “progress” item. It is noted here so that all who have access to the information can see that Harvey Schmirdlapp is having difficulty and, perhaps, requires intervention. The prejudicial aspect of traditional cumulative grading, however, makes this early failure a blemish on Harvey’s work record. Regardless of whether he can overcome this unsuccessful attempt, he will be punished at the end of the semester due to the cumulative weighted average method of computing grades. We should treat Harvey better than this.

The established grading scale for a school should be posted in the Student Handbook, the Staff Handbook and on the school website. How each course is arranged and weighted within this grading scale is essentially at the discretion of the teachers teaching the course. But three things must be clear. First, all teachers of a common course must use the same formula. Second, the weighting formula must be widely published and in the course syllabus. Lastly, the final semester grade must be a reflection of student proficiency within the Critical Benchmark Skills List created and agreed to by the teachers of a common course. Final grades are not and cannot be based upon homework, semester projects, subjective “class participation,” or assignments not directly associated as assessments of the CBSL.

Classroom failure cannot be matter of deliberate choice. We must listen to Joe, the car guy, when he identifies problems and we must get them corrected. Then, a student who successfully completes all skills within the CBSL shall, at a minimum, receive a score of 70. Regardless of possible cumulative averages which fall below the minimum average of 60% (in this case, 59% represents failure or “F”), a student meeting minimal attendance requirements and demonstrating mastery of the CBSL shall not fail any course. We must remember that traditional grading schemes include interim and formative practice and progress. But practice toward and unsuccessful attempts at demonstrating proficiency cannot and shall not be held against a child. When teachers establish the minimal standards for achieving proficiency based upon established T/C/S skills, students who achieve these published objectives cannot be punished for the road they took to get there. This is the essence of standards-based instruction.

1) See http://www.cps.k12.il.us/CurriculumResources/OHSP/curriculum.shtml#English. This page contains links to the core instructional frameworks of English, Math, Science and Social Studies and is still posted as of 11/19/2012. As you peruse them, try to find references to the College Readiness Standards. The freshman English themes, for example, are not skill-based but based upon “The quality of mercy,” “Alienation,” and etc. At the bottom of the page are some WorkKeys® posters. But how are these skills incorporated into the instructional frameworks? Throughout CPS the absolutely crucial WorkKeys® tasks (Day 2 of the PSAE) are relegated to “bell ringers.” Yet they make up a significant portion of the Meet/Exceeds formula. Not only is this a disservice, but the posters promote skill levels below what is needed to meet the state PSAE requirements!