PLCs and the Power of Embracing Vulnerability

The teachers of Mounds View Public Schools are engaged in a grand social experiment. In response to the state mandate that Minnesota districts develop a new teacher development and appraisal process (or adopt the state created plan), a task force comprised of K-12 teachers and administrators created a system in Mounds View whereby collaborative teams of teachers are appraised based on their ability to cause and respond to student performance, both in ways that deepen understanding for proficient leaners, and in ways that provide different and creative re-learning opportunities for learners that aren't yet proficient.

The underlying theory of Mounds View's system is that the added dynamic of teacher appraisal to the collaborative process would create increased collective accountability for the learning of all students across a grade level or course. It was also believed that collective appraisal would generate necessary urgency for teams to know their cumulative impact on learning, and to continuously improve and implement practices most likely to yield increased learning for all. 

The early returns on Mounds View's investment in teacher collaboration are as interesting as they are formative. While many teams have shown an ability to collaboratively plan a progression of learning aligned to a priority standard and measured by a common formative assessment, great variability exists in the capacity of teams to generate "creative solutions to non-routine learning problems" (Sagor, 2010). For the teams challenged most by data suggesting students didn't meet learning goals, it has become increasingly clear that individual and collective vulnerability is among the greatest barriers to improvement.  Teachers appear fearful of how they'll be perceived by others when their students fail to perform up to expectation.

In her Ted Talk entitled "The Power of Vulnerability," researcher and story teller Brene Brown discusses vulnerability as "the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness."  She shares many important messages, four of which I will adopt as a framework for encouraging teachers to view mistakes and failure as a springboard to finding joy, creativity, and success.

Mindframes for Educators

In Visible Learning and The Science of How We Learn, Hattie (2013) writes that how teachers think is often more important than what they do. To maximize their effect, says Hattie, teachers have to view hard tasks as worthy challenges, and failure, both their own and that of their students, as an invitation to grow. To learn from errors, and to ensure teachers are continually aware of their impact on students' learning, Hattie (2012) suggests that teachers address the underlying mind frames that shape their thinking. Educators who develop the ways of thinking outlined below are more likely to have a major and sustained impact on student learning.

-Mindframes of teachers, school leaders and systems comes from Visible Learning for teachers by John Hattie (2012):

Mindframe 1: Educators believe that their fundamental task is to evaluate the effect of their teaching on students’ learning.

Teachers must become critical evaluators of their effect on students’ learning. When teachers view their students’ results as a major indicator of their effectiveness, they are far more likely to alter their approach to teaching and learning when it’s clear students aren't progressing.

Mindframe 2: Educators believe that success and failure in student learning is about what they as educators did or did not do.  

Efficacy, a teacher’s belief in his/her ability to produce a desired result, is more crucial for learning than any instructional strategy. Teachers must adopt the mindset that all students can learn and embrace the reciprocal relationship that exists between their effectiveness and students’ success or failure.

Developing and Sharing Success Criteria

In response to John Hattie's meta-analyses detailing what works best in education, the Mounds View Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment team developed a list of 10 core instructional practices proven to be highly effective. The developing and sharing of Success Criteria is number two on our list. When braided together, and effectively executed, these core practices will help collaborative teams meet our Equity Promise, which states that a student's race, class or disability will not be a predictor of his/her academic success.

For an in-depth description of best practice for each of these core practices, follow the links in the below list.

1.   Articulate student-friendly Learning Targets
2.   Share Success Criteria
3.   Formatively Assess students' understanding
4.   Adapt Instruction in response to formative checks for understanding
5.   Provide Actionable Feedback
6.   Actively Engage all students
7.   Ensure teaching and learning is Culturally Responsive
8.   Activate students as responsible for their and each others' learning
9.   Effectively integrate technology to enhance learning
10.  Develop students' Habits of Mind

Why is the sharing of Success Criteria with students so important?

Students are more likely to persist when they understand, and can describe, what the end goal for learning looks and feels like. Hattie says that learning targets without success criteria is "hopeless." Students operate with increased clarity around what is to be learned when their teachers effectively communicate learning intentions, and assign activities for students to compare successful end products (exemplars) to a kid-friendly rubric. Sharing targets and success criteria in this way, promotes self-directed learning, self-regulation, and self-assessment; characteristics of learners most likely to experience post-secondary success. 

Developing and Sharing Student-Friendly Learning Targets

John Hattie's Visible Learning meta analyses and subsequent books provide evidence-based clarity for what works best in education. In all, Hattie studied six areas that contribute to the learning of a student. His research included Student effects, Home Effects, School Effects, Curricula Effects, Teacher Effects, and Approaches to Teaching and Learning. Using his work as a guide, collaborative teams can now begin to adopt the instructional practices proven to maximize impact on students' learning. The below list of ten core instructional practices was derived in part from Hattie's work, and incorporates much of what Mounds View PLCs are doing, or must do, to meet our Equity Promise.

For an in-depth description of best practice for each of these core practices, follow each of the links in the below list.

1.   Articulate student-friendly Learning Targets
2.   Share Success Criteria
3.   Formatively Assess students' understanding
4.   Adapt Instruction in response to formative checks for understanding
5.   Provide Actionable Feedback
6.   Actively Engage all students
7.   Ensure teaching and learning is Culturally Responsive
8.   Activate students as responsible for their and each others' learning
9.   Effectively integrate technology to enhance learning
10.  Develop students' Habits of Mind

Why are learning targets so important?
When teacher teams view a content area standard as a destination for learning, they can then write and articulate a series of learning targets that become the map their students will follow. When each day's target for learning is measured through a formative assessment, the results become a student's GPS; an indicator of their current location in relation to their end destination. This approach to instruction, whereby learning is visible to students such that they know and are able to articulate what they're learning, as well as where their current level of performance is in comparison to the success criteria, is critical if teachers are to integrate the other eight core practices.

What are best practices for Developing and Sharing Learning Targets?

Brookhardt & Moss (2012) write that when meaningful learning occurs in a classroom, it is often the result of a teacher's well written, well communicated and effectively measured target for learning. Whereas a learning objective is written broadly and from a teacher's point-of-view (students will be able to...), Moss & Brookhardt (2012) write that a learning target is to describe, in language that students understand, a lesson-sized chunk of information, skills, and reasoning processes that students will come to know deeply and thoroughly.  

The targets most likely to illuminate learning for kids are those that state the condition(s) under which students will show what they know or can do, as well as the criteria for success. Teachers can use the below A,B,C,D criteria to determine the extent to which their daily target makes the next step of the learning journey visible to kids.

A - Audience - is the target written using language students can understand and from a student's point of view? What vocabulary might need to be learned as part of communicating this target?

B - Behavior -  what verbs (action words) will you use? Is the level of today's learning surface or deep? How are the verbs in your learning target classified in Bloom's taxonomy?

C - Condition - Have you stated the condition(s) under which students will show what they know or can do? 

D - Degree - Have you stated the degree to which students will show their understanding?

Encouraging Students' Effort and Persistence

In 2010 Cognitive Psychologist Daniel Willingham authored a book that asked Why Don’t Students like school? His answer? Thinking is hard. It’s hard for everyone, but especially young learners who are still developing habits and strategies that will help them remain engaged. Willingham writes that the human brain naturally reduces engagement during routine activities, as though it's taking a vacation from the effort required to think deeply. Yes, thinking and learning is hard, but it’s also never been more important. The kindergarten students that learn in 2014 classrooms will retire around 2074. Is there any doubt our schools are preparing students for a future we can’t predict? As Dylan Wiliam says, today’s learners must be capable of success in situations for which they are not specifically prepared.

It is because our brains are not wired to think and learn that teachers need to act in ways that encourage their students to persist.  To be clear, I am not arguing that it is a teachers job to motivate students. Rather, I believe teachers are responsible for creating the conditions by which students motivate themselves. We can begin to create these conditions by first eliminating the unintentional things we’re doing that discourage students effort and persistence.

 1. Grading student performance inaccurately and inequitably
 Traditional grading methods rank among the greatest drains on students’ effort and persistence. Reeves (2010) argues that grades elicit an emotional response and wrongfully signal an end to learning. Worse, letter grades provide poor feedback on learning. If you disagree, ask an “A” student to list their academic strengths. Many will struggle to specifically articulate learning strengths, mostly because the primary feedback they receive is in the form of a single letter. Even when teachers litter student work with all kinds of feedback, most students won’t read much past the letter grade atop the page. When that letter grade is consistently average or below, students develop a mindset that they’re “just not that smart,” thus reducing effort and persistence.

 2.  Focus on weakness
Schools are conditioned to focus on students’ weaknesses rather than their strengths. Yvette Jackson (2010) writes of the Pedagogy of Confidence, and states that student motivation to learn is directly affected by teachers' confidence in their students' potential. We show confidence in students when we work to illuminate their strengths and help show them that learning is a talent developed over time, as opposed to some innate attribute that some are born with and some are not. If educators don’t act in ways that express belief in their students’ capacity to learn, their kids will likely opt-out right at the moment when sustained effort and targeted practice would stretch them most.

Mindset in the Classroom.

Today's submission comes via Dr. Mary Sande, Instructional Strategies Facilitator and College Chemistry teacher at Irondale High School. Dr. Sande is leading the Professional Learning of teachers at Irondale around Growth Mindset. Follow Dr. Sande on Twitter at @mesande9 

Mindset in the Classroom

“I’m a terrible artist.”

“I’m just not a science person.”

“Speak English.  I don’t understand Spanish.”

“This is too hard.”

Have you heard these comments from students in your school?  Chances are high you have heard these types of comments because they are not uncommon in classrooms.  Many students, as well as their parents and teachers, believe that intelligence is a fixed trait that does not change over time.  This is a misconception.  Dr. Carol Dweck exposed fixed and growth mindsets in her groundbreaking book, Mindset,The New Psychology of Success. 

Dr. Dweck states that a fixed mindset is characterized by a belief that each person has only a “certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality and a certain moral character“(p. 6).   A person with a fixed mindset wants to appear intelligent, in calm control of the situation (as, of course, do we all).  Working to solve a problem, on the contrary, might appear to be an admission of weakness or inadequacy; much better to quickly give up on a difficult task and move on to something easier.  People with a growth mindset believe that a “person’s basic qualities are things that can be cultivated through effort” (p.7).  A person with a growth mindset is driven to improve.  Thus, effort, seeking out challenges, and persisting in the face of difficulty are welcome activities.  I certainly do not want to hear “I’m just not a science person” in my classroom.  I want my students to expend effort, persist in the face of difficulty, seek out different strategies, work with their classmates, and love the act of learning.  Only students with a growth mindset have the qualities I long for in my classroom.

But, not all of my students come to my classroom with a growth mindset.  How can I help my students foster a growth mindset?

Fostering Student Grit

A major emphasis for learning in Mounds View schools is the development of grit proficient students, or what Tough (2012) would define as students with a passionate commitment to a single mission, and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission. In her Ted Talk entitled The Key to Success? Grit, Angela Duckworth asks "What if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn fast and easily?" There is ample evidence to support Duckworth's query. Despite knowing colleges are increasingly interested in measuring applicants' performance character, and that Fortune 500 companies like Google view grit as the it-factor,  neither we, nor science, know much about fostering academic grit in students. With luck (and by luck I mean sustained effort, resilience and grit), we'll one day be able to measure grit as well as we measure IQ. Until then, what follows are seven things teachers should consider when helping their students become determined and irrepressible learners.

1. Learn students' stories.
Disadvantaged students rarely view their unwillingness to succumb to the obstacles in their life as a potential school strength. They're often too busy thinking intelligence is fixed. To develop resilient learners, we have to illuminate the ways in which our students are already grit proficient. The kids that challenge us most are puzzles, not problems. They often arrive to school immersed in struggles far greater than anything teachers have experienced. When educators work to intentionally discover what gives students their edge, they can then validate their personal experiences of hardship and grit, with the goal of building an important bridge to academic perseverance.  Student grit further develops as a result of authentic teacher-student relationships. We have to learn about our students' lives in order to recognize and build upon examples of their performance character.