Make Your Own Heroes: "The Formative Five" Book Review

There are fewer and fewer positive role models for our children.  Parents are scared to let their children idolize a particular athlete, politician, actor, etc. because we've been disappointed time after time.  In the face of this reality, schools are taking ownership of teaching character.  There are at least two great reasons for this.  First, character counts in helping students succeed after they leave school. And second, character and academic achievement are positively correlated (character.org).

I just completed reading The Formative Five: Fostering Grit, Empathy, and Other Success Skills Every Student Needs by Thomas Hoerr (ASCD, 2016).  The author sums up his feelings on character education this way: "Who you are is more important that what you know" (5).  It sounds good, but that phrase runs counter to everything that American schools have been doing for the last ... well ... forever.  If schools live out the philosophy that "who students are" as people is even more important than what they learn academically, think of how it would impact everything from report cards to conferences to daily lesson plans.

Mr. Hoerr argues that there are five "success skills" that students need to continually grapple with and refine (hence the term formative five).  They are empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit.  The author describes how other character traits arise from a combination of these skills (such as courage, curiosity, or responsibility).   In discussing these five success skills, Mr. Hoerr dives into integrity vs. honesty, diversity beyond the numbers, the reason we use stereotypes, student engagement, and the role of failure.  Clearly, success skills do impact everything else we value in schools.

Some other great points to ponder from the book:
• Expanding the meaning of "whole child" from merely offering a wider curriculum to meeting the needs that allow children to become whole, actualized humans.  The Formative Five skills help a person meet the middle levels of Maslow's hierarchy - safety, love/belonging, and esteem (28-29).
• When trying to improve student's success skills, we shouldn't start by trying to change the children. We need to start by changing the culture of a school (134).  From the physical space to the relationships within it, culture is the water we swim in.  It cannot be ignored.
• "Making new mistakes" (149) is a key to moving people forward.  Cultures that make old mistakes or no mistakes at all are unhealthy.  It would be interesting to ask this question at each staff meeting: "What new mistakes did you make this week?"
• "Happiness comes from growth" (14).  Celebrate growth in students, both academically and in success skills.  Recognize students who demonstrate growth as well as achievement.

My favorite part is that each of the chapters that focuses on one of the five success skills ends with a litany of suggestions how to teach and integrate that skill into classrooms.  It would not be a big leap for a culture committee to take the ideas in the book and put together a year's worth of lessons.  The suggestions are differentiated for various age levels (including adults).

So, instead of looking for heroes outside of school to idolize, create an environment that allows students to become heroes for each other.  It is a deliberate process, but success skills can be taught, coached, and ultimately - celebrated!

Spreadsheets for Impact

John Hattie's mantra is "Know thy impact".

But how do teachers measure impact?  Is anyone teaching teachers how to measure impact?  Google Sheets (spreadsheets) has many built-in tools to analyze teacher impact.  Add a little knowledge of some simple spreadsheet formulas and any teacher can be measuring impact.

Last week, I presented a session on "Spreadsheets for Impact".  Here are the resources from that presentation.

Click here to make a copy of the spreadsheet I used in the presentation.

And here is the presentation itself, with some additional resources at the end.

Teacher Evaluation ... Training the Referees

Imagine watching this football game:

The score is tied at 0-0, even though the game is half over.
You soon realize that the reason the score is still 0-0 is because every time the offense gets close to the end zone, the quarterback throws the ball through the uprights.  The referees award 0 points and give the ball to the opposing team, which promptly does the same thing at the other end of the field. This is repeated over and over, up and down the field - until one player finally kicks the ball through the uprights out of frustration, at which point the referees award his team 3 points.
Everyone wonders: "Why didn't the referees tell us that was how to score points?"

Why in the world would we only train the referees in the rules of a game and make the players figure it out for themselves?  Makes no sense at all, right?  But that is exactly what many have done with teacher evaluation systems in recent years.

The impact of NCLB and Race to the Top funding caused states to focus on educator effectiveness in a very systematic fashion.  Many states now mandate the use of a particular framework.  In order to establish validity and reliability, administrators went through extensive training on the chosen framework and needed to pass tests to ensure inter-rater reliability. But nothing mandated that the teachers become educated on the framework, and the "trickle-down" varies on a school-by-school basis.  In the push for teacher accountability and effectiveness, we continue to train the referees and expect the score of the "game" to increase.

And we're not talking about a game here - we're talking about the real lives of children and the future of a nation!

I advocate that every teacher be trained in the same way administrators are trained, in regard to the use and understanding of teacher frameworks.  Level the playing field so that the teams on the field - the teachers - have the greatest chance of success for students.  Make sure the referees, coaches, and players share a common language for how the game is played.   Make sure the referees, coaches, and players have a common vision of how to succeed together.   Make sure everyone know what expertise looks like in order to maximize impact.

Principals must take it upon themselves to delve into teacher frameworks with staff.  Create conditions for rich discussion about what those frameworks contain.  Create cognitive dissonance in the minds of teachers who recognize current practice vs. expertise.  Create a shared language to talk about high-quality instruction.  The various teacher frameworks (Danielson, Stronge, Marzano, etc.) are rich with possibilities, and Frontier & Mielke in their new book Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter say "We've seen tremendous professional growth among teachers who have used frameworks as the starting point for a comprehensive self-assessment process" and that frameworks "clarify how [teachers] should invest their efforts" (19).

So - stop exclusively training the referees.  We need the referees and coaches to provide direction and create conditions for success.  But at some point, the players need to know the rules if everyone is going to achieve success together.

More Than Just Evaluation

Your principal walks into the room while you are teaching.
Here are some of the possibilities that go through your head while you continue to teach:
• Does she need one of the students for something?
• Does she need me for something?
• Is this just a quick 1-minute pop-in visit?
• Is this one of those 20-minute long "informal observations" that is actually formal ... because there are going to be forms involved?
• What am I supposed to be teaching right now?

I recently finished Tony Frontier & Paul Mielke's new book Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter (ASCD, 2016).  The title speaks for itself: are you developing processes that grow teacher expertise, or are you just developing processes?

The authors contend that evaluation, supervision, and reflection are three sides of a triangle that build teacher expertise.  All three are necessary if growth is your expected outcome, but pull on one side of the triangle too hard, and the entire system gets out of balance.  This is what happens when we put all our eggs in the "evaluation" basket - we end up with bitterness instead of betterment.

Frontier & Mielke clearly define their three components and offer protocols that can be implemented to improve practice in each area.  Evaluation is what you'd expect it to be - valid and reliable rating of performance - which is what teachers hopefully do with student work at the end of a term.  The problem is that most teachers (and principals?) do not know when the administrator is functioning as an "evaluator" and when he/she is functioning in a different capacity.  Was that walk-through part of an evaluation or something else?  Was that quick hallway conversation about what was seen in your room an evaluatory or a coaching conversation?  Trust is built upon transparency.

System out of balance

Supervision means the way a supervisor "creates conditions for teachers to uncover and close the gap between their current performance and the next level of performance" (72).  The authors make an analogy between evaluation and supervision this way:
   • Evaluation is the state accountability assessment
   • Supervision is the curriculum that students engage in order to do well on the state assessment
What conditions does the principal create between evaluation cycles in order that growth might occur and expertise develop?  This takes trust, feedback, and deep knowledge of the chosen teaching framework (Danielson, Stronge, Marzano, etc.) by both the supervisor and the teacher.

Reflection seems self-explanatory, but the bigger question the authors offer is this: "When everyone reflects in a different way, how do you leverage reflection for school-wide improvement?" Reflection is about creating an internal dialog that drives your own improvement, and it is perhaps the biggest motivator of continuous improvement towards expertise.

The question we must ask ourselves as educators and leaders is this:
Are we trying to measure effectiveness or are we trying to improve effectiveness (160)?
There is a time and a place for measuring effectiveness - that's what evaluation seeks to do.
But if we are trying to improve effectiveness, we need the other two sides of the triangle - supervision and reflection - to create conditions that will drive true growth.

A New View of Growing Teacher Expertise

Recently, I finished Susan Brookhart's book How to Make Decisions with Different Kinds of Student Assessment Data (ASCD, 2016).  We have so much student data coming at us as educators - it is important to remember that not all data can be treated the same, and it is not all meant for the same people to use.  

Brookhart creates four quadrants by placing assessments on a spectrum of "formative vs. summative" and "large scale vs. classroom-focused" (yellow boxes below). But all this data is meant for different people, so I have added the red boxes to represent who are the prime users of each type of assessment data (see also Stiggins & Chappuis for more on this).

But as I was reading, I couldn't help but think about how we use data from teacher evaluations. (Or rather, how we do not use data from evaluations.) What different kinds of data do we collect?  Who are the prime users of this data?  Our quadrants might look like the chart below at first.  Note that the users of the data do not change, but the yellow boxes are empty.  In essence, we are asking, "What kind of data would be most valuable to each user?"  This also leads to dangerous discussions such as "What kinds of data promote expertise?"

I'm guessing that the majority of the evidence that you collect (if you are an evalutor) or that is collected about your practice (if you are a teacher) is on the "summative" end of the spectrum.  And since many states are systematizing the collection of teacher practice and SLO data, you could make an argument that most evaluation data is in the upper-right quadrant.  Look whom that data is meant for - district leaders, boards, and state officials.  Perhaps if you have an evaluator who makes more time for it, or if you have an observation cycle where not every year is a summative year, you might get to the lower-right quadrant.  But the left side is largely empty.  What to do?  Especially if these are the areas that benefit practice and innovation.

Here is one possible view of a "balanced" system to growing teacher expertise.  I have adapted it from Brookhart's quadrants.  

In the upper-left quadrant, we have schools studying themselves using school-chosen, educator-gathered, non-judgmental, iterative data.  The principal works with teachers to answer the question "What practices do we want to see and study?"  And then someone gathers that data and reports back to the staff on a regular basis to see if it is happening and with what level of quality. What to measure?  Consider what the instructional vision for your school is.  Or consider some top-tier Hattie strategies.  

In the lower-left quadrant, we have teachers studying themselves.  This is where instructional coaching and reflection come into play.  I often wonder: some doctors are "hospitalists" who specialize at overseeing the care of a vast array of inpatients.  Principals should develop the capacity to be seen as "instructionalists".  Leaders who are experts at strategies, coaching, and spurring reflection.  Teacher reflection is perhaps the strongest of the motivators towards innovation and expertise. 

I had these thoughts while reading Brookhart's book, but the next book I am starting is Frontier & Mielke's book about redefining the process of teacher evaluation and growth.  I think there will be many more connections in it to the quadrants above.  

Getting Better at Innovation

I recently wrote four posts about innovation in education, all inspired by the book "Better" by Atul Gawande.  The bottom line is this: Innovation does not need to be a disruptive practice, but it certainly doesn't happen by accident.  Improving existing practice is innovative, even when it happens incrementally.  Here are links to the four posts I wrote.

Better (link to post 1) - A doctor writes about innovation in the medical world.  Small innovations over the years from around the world have made us the healthy society we are today.  You can replace "doctor" with "educator" throughout this book for takeaways of your own.

Educators - Innovators or Researchers? (link to post 2) - Innovators must be researchers. The focus on PLN's, SLO's, data based decision making, and the "Plan-Do-Study-Act" cycle are all ways of saying teachers must reclaim their role as researchers.

Innovation: Start with the Basics (link to post 3) - You can't innovate unless you know your impact. And as a teacher, you can't know your impact unless you have the basics of lesson design down. Leaders who leverage a common definition of "learning target" and "success criteria" create measurable clarity across a school.

Leading Innovation (link to post 4) - Innovation that isn't shared is wasted.  Sharing your innovations multiplies your impact.  Leaders must expect the sharing of innovation across a school, and educators must help each other realize their strengths.

Thanks for reading,
Chris

Leading Innovation

Last in a series about improving practice and creating a culture of innovation

The three qualities I said were necessary for fully innovative schools:
1.  Teachers claiming their roles as researchers, since research leads to innovation.
2.  Teachers knowing their impact, since professionals seek to increase their impact.

And, for this blog post:
3.  Innovation loves company: Leaders must expect transparent innovation across the school rather than supporting pockets of innovation.


At Google, employees are expected to share their passion projects.  This transparency eliminates silos and leverages the power of group-think to solve problems.  A recent article on IBM's Almaden Lab, one of the last corporate pure research labs, talks about how the researchers have switched from working in isolation to projects that co-evolve.

We need to develop schools in which teacher-researchers freely share their innovative projects with one another.  And leaders need to set the tone by sharing their own passion projects and expect the sharing of innovation across the board.  Remember: innovation does not have to be a disruptive practice, and sometimes we happen upon it by accident.  New educators may need assistance from others to discover what their passion is.  As we learned in the book Better (prior blog post), making daily practice better with consistent small innovations can be just as effective as searching for the miracle cure.

Impact is a measure of innovation.  If principals want to increase impact, we need to first ask how we are increasing innovation.

So what is YOUR innovation?  Your passion project?
Math talk ~ Personalized learning ~ Increasing feedback ~ Technology for achievement ~
Character ed ~ Building relationships with special ed students ~
Using achievement data better ~ Service learning ~ Parent relationships ~
Goal setting ~ Coaching other educators ~ ???

The list doesn't end.  Because innovation doesn't end.
Because getting better can't end.