Student Learning Cycle

First of all let me say Happy Fall!  With the changing leaves comes a transcendental feeling that helps me understand Thoreau and Emerson.

If you are one of the few outside of the Crawford County School Staff that reads this blog I will go ahead and apologize to you up front.  This blog is geared more towards the focus of the school and school initiative, so this may not interest you as much as if you were in the trenches with us.   

Staff, if you have not already realized the focus of Crawford County Schools this year, I will state it, to make certain everyone understands.  We are focused on both Teaching and Learning.  You may be thinking to yourself, “well we are a school,” and I agree it should be understood that teaching and learning should be the focus, I do not know if we are prioritizing it to the extent we should.  There are four areas or questions that should guide us in all that we do in education and I want to take a minute to go through them with you.

1. What do students need to know, understand, and be able to do?  We must begin with the end in mind.  As we are preparing what we should teach in each unit we have to plan our expected outcome.  These outcomes must be specific, not too vague, in order to be effectively analysed.  This outcome does not have to be a unit test per say, it can be a project, an interactive presentation, an essay, anything that shows mastery of the standards that are built into unit one.  This is also known as backwards design.  Teachers design the summative assessment then work backwards.  These summative assessments should be common.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.  If at the high school level, 2 teachers are teaching the same class (i.e. Coordinate Algebra) then the summative assessment at the end of unit one should show mastery of the same standard.  Regardless of the “level” of the student. This leads to question 2.
2. How do we teach effectively to ensure all students are learning?  This is one of the differentiated instructional pieces.  This is also about teacher delivery models.  Teachers must interact with students and know where the students truly are in the educational process.  There may be a student that is labeled gifted who is struggling with reading comprehension or a student that is labeled sped who knows all his/her times tables in second grade.  Educators must have an in depth knowledge of their students and be willing to individualize their instruction.  There is a way to gain this knowledge without waiting on the Milestone tests.
3. How do we know students are learning? The F- word, Formative Assessment! (The assessment for learning!)  There are a plethora of ways to assess students formatively and every assessment (even a summative) should be used to let teachers know what a student knows.  We should never test just to have a grade or to fill the gradebook.  Teachers will have some common formative assessments and many individualized formative assessments, but every formative assessment should let teachers know if the students are struggling with a concept or if maybe the teacher didn’t cover the concept in depth enough.  When I was in the classroom I liked using graphic organizers as formative assessments, and often times I would just allow the students to create any organizer they wished to use on a blank sheet of paper.  I did this to prevent me from guiding them too much.  I had taught the acts and events that lead to the American Revolution and I was on a roll.  To check for understanding (this was what we called our formative assessments before that was the buzzword) I put seven events and acts on the board and told my students to create a graphic organizer explaining the items on the board and their significance.  Only about 3 students out of 28 put the American Revolution on their graphic organizer.  They could describe the events, but they had no idea these events lead to American Revolution.  I had missed my mark.  I had to assess what I was doing and go back and connect some dots.  That example shows a situation where the concept was not taught, even though I was convinced I had done a great job teaching it.  There can also be a situation, and this is more often the case, where some get it sooner, some get it on time, and some need more time or different strategies to get it.
4. What do we do when students are not learning or are reaching mastery before expectation?  We enrich and remediate.  This is the second and probably the most difficult differentiated instruction piece.  Teachers must take the initiative to push the students who mastered early and assist the students who are struggling. This cannot be achieved by moving students from one classroom to another or by pulling sped students to a resource room.  The rigor nor standard mastery is there.  For many of the younger grades (K-8) there are resources available on SLDS as you get into high school the resources are limited on that platform.  

These four questions are going to be used as guiding principles as we move forward.  Strategic Goal number one is Student Achievement and these questions are a major part of that.  As our collaboration and planning moves forward this student learning cycle should guide us and every lesson should be planned by asking:

1. What do students need to know, understand, and be able to do?
2. How do we teach effectively to ensure all students are learning?
3. How do we know students are learning?
4. What do we do when students are not learning or are reaching mastery before expectation?

I appreciate the hard work that is going into these initiatives.  There is no switch that can be flipped to make these changes happen.  Collaboration and true teamwork will make Crawford County a System of Excellence.

Excellent Teachers - Excellent Leaders - Excellent Schools