Seeing my chance I enthusiastically declared, “Oh yeah! You are definitely all smart. I’ve only known you for a month and I can see that each of you are really smart and each of you have curiosity about different things.” I had learned by now that at most I would have five precious moments of their attention. “You know being smart starts with being curious and asking questions. But guess what, even if you are smart now, you can get even smarter when you exercise your brains by thinking hard.”

I began volunteering in a middle school in Santa Fe where 120 students who were not thriving in remote learning were invited back into school but not enough teachers elected to return. With incredible dedication, administrators, counselors, and a handful of teachers were scurrying to prepare for students in the schools and educators teaching from home. When the call went out for “internet cafe monitors,” I signed up. The core job is watching fifteen 6th graders take hour-long remote classes, play for 15 minutes, and then get them to refocus for their next class.

The first few days the kids were compliant little robots. The isolation of the pandemic and the experience of remote learning had knocked something out of them. Many students simply stared at their device for an hour straight and some sat at their desks barely moving even during break. Some had friends from their previous elementary school, some knew of each other, and some were meeting their peers for the first time. I redefined my job as an internet cafe monitor to include creating a sense of community, bringing a bit of fun, and building whatever trust I could with the limited time I had with them. Building relationships with them is paying off. My duties have expanded to include on-the-spot tutoring and coaching as the kids try to make sense of assignments, struggle with math, and learn to think for themselves.

This experience, just spending four hours a day with these 6th graders who have grabbed my heart, have made me realize a few things that I missed, underestimated, or got totally wrong in my days of writing for CompetencyWorks. Here are just a few:

Love

Teaching is about loving children. During a trip to Singapore years ago the director of a teacher training program had chuckled in response to the question, “What do you look for in teachers?” He replied, “Americans always ask that question. It’s very simple. We look for people who love children.”

I don’t think I mentioned love even once in all my writing and presentations about competency education. I think about all the time we spend on developing teacher competencies and defining what teachers should know and be able to do without ever mentioning love. However, we can’t stop with just mentioning how important it is. It requires us to think about what type of organizations we are building that values and nurtures love. I remember hearing Dorothy Stoneman, founder of YouthBuild, speak of the importance of love. I scribbled in my notebook: ‘How do we build bureaucracies of love?’

The question has always haunted me. I find it hard to imagine bureaucracies with all their top-downness being able to nurture love. Thus, my question today might be: Can we create a new form of organization that places loving children in the center while still being accountable to the public? Perhaps the answer can be found in New Zealand’s Tomorrow’s Schools effort to create autonomous schools?

Making System 2 Thinking A Habit

At times the chatter and questions feel like they are bombarding me. I do my best to respond to each of the kids. But under pressure, I often respond with quick answers rather than asking questions or engaging them to think with me. I don’t take the time to find out what is really going on behind their masked faces. And it’s just as likely as not that I make an assumption, likely influenced by biases, that is off the mark. And I see in their eyes that they’ve just shut down. And my heart breaks. Not only did I lose a chance to build trust, I may have just dinged them in a place that was already wounded.

By the end of second day I realized that my reliance on System 1 thinking was getting in my way. I’ve read Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman but had never tried to build my capacity to use System 2. Now it’s my number one skill-building effort. I chant to myself as I enter the school every morning, “Slow down. Ask more questions. Slow down. Ask more questions. Observe, observe, observe.” (Try it, you can turn it into a song!) I can’t say I’m operating in System 2 all day, all the time. But I’ve noticed that just asking students questions in response to their questions is changing the nature of our relationships and some are taking more responsibility. (This has been particularly effective when the boys want to lean back on two legs of their chairs. What do you think the pros and cons are of doing that? It’s more comfortable. It’s not safe and I could fall. Whadya want to do? And soon all four legs of the chair are back on the ground.)

I often talk about the importance of System 2 thinking as important in challenging bias and creating equitable classrooms. It’s that but so much more. It’s an essential skill for engaging students, building trust and creating an empowering classroom.

The Heartbreaking Experience of Gaps and The Fixed Mindset

It is way too easy to jump to the conclusion that a student doesn’t understand a new skill when in fact they are missing something they should have previously learned. It happened yesterday as I sat with a student as he worked through learning to test inequalities. He had several Ah-Ha! Moments with big smiles (or so I assumed given that he was masked) as he began to understand the the task and the meaning of the symbols ‘>’ and ‘<’. He cranked through several problems and then came to a quick stop when he encountered -5 > x. His growing confidence collapsed. I thought he was having troubles with the way the equation was structured with the x on the right. But that wasn’t it at all. It was negative numbers. If he had ever been taught, or learned how to work with negative numbers, it had all been forgotten. Promising to work with him again on the next day, I ran home to learn how to teach negative numbers using real life examples such as credit cards.

However, I’m not certain he will even be in school today. Will he be open to trying again? I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on his face when he thought he understood but then couldn’t do the problem.

I’ve always said that students need to be able to get help on the same day, not several days later. However, I always meant it in terms of the importance in terms of achievement and the momentum of learning. What I didn’t understand is that every day we let a student stumble over a gap without helping them identify it and fill it, we are letting the pain of the fixed mindset dig in even deeper.

The Student Experience of Failure is Often Caused By the Little Things

One of the students that was simply going through the motions of school, having whispered to me at one point that he doesn’t like to think, had agreed to work on one of his overdue assignments in science to raise his grade. However, the circle map had remained empty as he stared at his computer for 10 minutes.

I sat down and we stared at the circle map together. As I asked questions to help figure out the assignment it dawned on me that the teacher had not left any directions or prompts. An exercise that was done in class was impossible to do outside of class without directions. And the student was assuming it was his fault that he couldn’t understand. It was a small thing until it wasn’t.

Later that day a math teacher had made a small mistake in his introductory inequalities practice questions that caused havoc for the students. His numbering merged with the questions turning x>3 into 2x>3 and x<-20 into 3x< -20—problems beyond what the students had been taught. Students that had thought they understood were stopped in their tracks. Suddenly paper airplanes were flying, negotiations started about trading snacks, and chairs were tipping again. Anything other than face the fact that they couldn’t do the work and once again were not feeling very smart.

Although I quickly figured out the problem, the momentum that they could tackle the inequalities had dissipated. Trust in themselves had taken a big hit.

At CompetencyWorks we often talked about the value of teacher collaboration often in the context of aligning instruction and assessment. But I underestimated how important daily collaboration is on making sure we are providing students with every opportunity to learn. Small mistakes on the part of adults can get in the way of learning and even contribute to students disengaging from learning. If I had to do it all over again, I would emphasize much more strongly that teachers need to be in constant partnership with each other including checking over each other’s work to avoid these tiny mistakes that cause immeasurable pain for students. We all know that operational excellence is to be found in the small things. We need to design operations so that it is easy for adults to catch those itty bitty mistakes that have an exponentially larger impact on our kids.

To date, my main takeaway from this experience is the fragility of trust. It’s not just about building trust. Trust can also be broken. The nature of trust is that it crackles, breaks, and bursts in a blink of an eye. And it takes intentional effort to repair it. I now consider trust as a scarce resource that requires daily investment and careful monitoring. Just like a bank account, it can go up and down quickly.

In just the way that we need to be able to deeply understand how beliefs about white supremacy get passed on, embedded in personal dynamics, and concretized in our systems in order to meet the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we need to understand how adults disengage from students and break trust with children, usually unintentionally, in order for us to to create trust-rich learning communities where all kids soar.

There is a lot we can do to invest in trust building. It starts by valuing high quality relationships in a school. If learning is a social process that requires high quality relationships then we have to design the school for relationships. Yet our schools, schedules and staffing patterns often fail to fully take it into consideration. In addition, if we consider time as a resource, much more of it needs to be dedicated to relationship building. Finally, teachers that can build strong and enduring trust-generating relationships need to be honored with recognition and salary increases as do those that seek to build their instructional and assessment skills through continuing education.

For more, see:

• Finding Your Entry Point to Mastery Learning
• Mastery Learning in Action
• Shining the Competency Education Light on Education in the Time of COVID-19

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The post What I Missed (Or Even Got Wrong) appeared first on Getting Smart.

Question #1: What are your beliefs about how students and adults learn? How are they aligned (or not) to the research on learning? If you build a shared philosophy of learning in your school, your team can start to make wise decisions along the way rather than depend on programmatic implementation steps. With a shared philosophy based on the research on learning your team can start to make decisions that will enhance student learning the next day and every day.

Question #2: Where is your leadership? Which district staff, principals, teacher leaders believe that the traditional model needs to change? Which ones understand that by giving up some control and investing in more supportive strategies, schools can increase motivation and help students learn to learn? Which ones are comfortable with distributive leadership strategies as compared to top-down? Pick your first entry point based on where you have leadership excited to transform schools. It doesn’t matter if it is elementary or high school. It doesn’t matter if you pick math in ninth grade or an innovative team operating within your middle school. You can’t get to a high-quality competency-based model through compliance. You have to start where leadership is already opening the door.

Resource #1:  Design Roadmap for Implementing Mastery Learning

ReDesign brings a deep understanding of the research on learning and child/adolescent development to their work. By doing so they breathe cultural responsiveness, respect, curiosity, and creativity into the classroom design and curriculum. Their roadmap to mastery learning begins with the original 5-part working definition developed by CompetencyWorks (that was updated to 10 features of CBE and a revised 7 part working definition). Embedded throughout their design is what they call recuperative instructional strategies. This is a phrase that refers to the dynamics of “not yet”. Students don’t always learn things the first time through or within the time the teacher/school/vendor has dedicated to a unit. They haven’t successfully learned the concept or skill…yet. This capacity is why mastery education (or competency- or proficiency-based) requires schools to develop much more flexibility so that they can adapt to student needs. ReDesign also has a deep commitment to sharing design tools and assessments. You’ll find loads of information there to help you on your way.

Resource #2: Journey to Mastery

The Mastery Transcript Consortium has created a web page that provides a high-level five-part framework to help you organize the steps in beginning the transformation: purpose and vision; graduate profile; learning model; alignment; and sustainability. You’ll find case studies of a mix of different schools that describes their different models. You’ll also find Mastery Learning in Action which compares the models.

A final note: None of these resources will answer every question or tell you exactly how you should proceed. Visit some other schools and find a network of others you can reflect with along the way. Or hire a coach to help you and/or your team shake the assumptions underlying the traditional model out of your thinking. And most of all, let the research on learning light your way.

For more, see:

• New Arts Integration Efforts Address Healing-Centered Engagement, Transformative Agency 
• The Biggest Source of Inequity Might Be the Way We Fund Schools 

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This blog was originally posted here. 

The post Finding Your Entry Point to Mastery Learning appeared first on Getting Smart.

There have been plenty of case studies developed at CompetencyWorks, Getting Smart, and Mastery Transcript Consortium. Each can be really helpful in looking at how and why a school design developed and some of the considerations in putting all the pieces together (or understanding why they didn’t fall into place easily). However, what the field has needed is resources that will let you see different types of design choices and the implications of each. Do you want to build your learning framework around competencies or standards? Do you want to maintain academic silos in your courses or move to interdisciplinary studies?

However, there have been a few resources to support schools in thinking through their choices. Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education by Priest, Rudenstine, and Weisstein, was the first paper produced in this phase of competency education and drew from multiple schools. Breaking with Tradition by Stack and Vander Els also offers insights from a variety of schools. Mastery Learning in Action published by the Mastery Transcript Consortium offers a comparative structure based on visits and interview from 5 schools (the links below will take you to the case studies of each):

• Pathways High School
• Champlain Valley Union High School
• Tilton School
• Northern Cass School District #97
• Singapore American School

The paper was written pre-pandemic which means it doesn’t include how these schools adopted remote learning. The paper was also written before the uprising to address racial discrimination in the police and justice system and to cleanse our nation of its white supremacy roots. Everything looks different through these two lenses.

Pathways High School with its philosophy of ‘diversity by design’ and its clear understanding that to overcome educational disparity schools need to be organized around success not ranking will be helpful to any school thinking about what it needs to do to sweep out racist practices from every corner of its operations. Northern Cass, in the fields outside of Fargo, also offers insights into how to move beyond the ranking processes that reinforce concepts of superiority with their emphasis on every person discovering their ‘greatness.’

We need more of these kinds of papers and more conversations that look across design choices and practices to understand how the pieces fit together and how they build schools that can be more adaptive and more flexible in providing services to students in a variety of settings. Most of all, we need to take much harder look at the policies and practices that reinforce racial inequity in schools and the ideas that support them.

For more, see:

• Getting Smart on Mastery Learning
• Podcast: Scott Looney on Growing the Mastery Transcript Consortium
• Getting Started with Design Thinking

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The post Mastery Learning in Action appeared first on Getting Smart.

But transform to what?

Certainly, Covid19 has made it crystal clear that our schools need to be remote-ready—through this pandemic as well as for future unanticipated economic, technological, and climate-related disruptions to come.  But it is a mistake to only focus on the technology and online instruction alone. Remote learning is primarily about where students are learning. Technology is simply the delivery system whether it is used in the classroom or at home. It’s the process of motivating, instructing, and assessing students that shapes learning.

In pre-pandemic days there was a growing consensus for personalized, deeper, mastery-based approaches. However, we must be careful about jumping to the assumption that personalized, mastery learning will be meaningful for students, teachers, and school leaders as they struggle with how to move forward in the time of Covid19. It depends on what challenges are most pressing and how they are defined. If a window of opportunity is truly opening, it will be because the modern education model helps schools respond to the conditions created by Covid19 and our nation’s responses to it.

How can personalized, mastery-based (or competency and proficiency-based) approaches help teachers and schools? Using a few of the concerns mentioned by educators as they confront the future, I’ve highlighted a few ways the modern approaches, drawing on the research on learning, might provide guidance as educators wrap up the school year and prepare for an uncertain fall semester.

I can’t control how students use their time with remote learning.

Teachers have a huge task trying to get thirty students to stay focused on learning. Control and compliance have been the go-to strategy for a century. However, it is actually a total fallacy that anyone can make someone else learn. You can get students to go through the motions of learning but what is happening in their brains (both cognitively and emotionally) is where the action is. And we can’t control that. Never could, never will.

The modern educational approaches, rooted in what we know about learning based on research, seeks to motivate students to put forth their best effort. Thinking and learning is hard. It requires us to manage our thoughts and feelings. It requires us to keep going, to persevere, even when success seems impossible. It requires us to deeply believe that we can learn and that we can be successful.

That’s where personalizing learning and using a mastery-based approach comes in. (There are lots of different definitions of personalizing. I’m referring to the ones that are student-centered and emphasize empowering students to own their education.) It starts with two assumptions. First, we need to empower learners to own and manage their learning. Second, we need to create the conditions and culture that will motivate students to put their full effort towards learning.

Empowering students to be the best learners they can be required intentionally and explicitly teaching them how to learn. They need to understand what the research says about learning. They need to develop a growth mindset and learn strategies for self-regulation of their emotions and their thoughts. They need to learn how to reflect on their learning processes so that they can adjust them if they aren’t working. Our best elementary school teachers do this. We need every teacher to be able to know how to do this as students change as they grow up. Their strategies to be great learners are going to change as well. (See Building Blocks for Learning for an overview of many of the skills and mindsets that are needed for learning.)

Motivating students requires cultivating a sense of purpose, providing autonomy, and organizing around mastery. The sense of purpose can vary across students and change over time. Sometimes just trying something for a beloved or passionate teacher can be enough. Connections to the real world, interest-driven, fun, and a drive towards a future goal can nurture a sense of purpose. Taking pride in learning, taking on a challenge, and getting the rush of endorphins when success is reached, might be enough to get a student to focus on a task. Success begets success.

Autonomy, some control of how and when learning takes place, is created through choice. What book do you want to read? Where do you want to read? How will you demonstrate that you met the learning target? The degree and type of autonomy need to be managed through gradual release. Too much autonomy and a student will flounder. With remote learning, the home life and availability of adults to guide students will make a difference for how much autonomy they want and can manage effectively. Our perceptions shape our experience of control as well. Am I staying at home because I have to because of government orders or because I want to do my best to help my community deal with the pandemic? The mindset of students will influence their sense of control.

The opportunity for mastery, the opportunity to successfully gain new knowledge and skills, is in itself motivating. That’s why so many schools are organizing around mastery learning (or competency or proficiency-based). Transparent learning targets and what it means to be proficient, grading systems that support students understanding where they are in the learning process, the opportunity for more instruction, and revision until students are successful are just a few of the key structures that create a culture of mastery.

Everyone is going to be at a totally different place when we re-open.

That is true, every student will start the next school year in a different place. As they have every year. What’s different is that they may have received different exposure to the curriculum and spent different amounts of time on task. The pandemic is forcing us to look at a truth that has always existed. Our traditional system mistakenly equates the delivery of curriculum with learning.

Students are always at different places in their learning. Teachers know this to be true even though the system of education ignores it. Some teachers face the challenge of 4, 5, or more levels of skills in their classrooms. Our system of education actually produces this situation by passing students on with gaps in their learning. Why do we pass students on with gaps? The system does this because it is built on an assumption that not everyone can learn. Part of the design of our schools is to rank and sort students using grades. Let’s be clear, it’s not just low achieving students with gaps. Straight A students may also have gaps that cause them to stumble later on.

Whereas the traditional education system ignores the variability in student skills and delivers the same curriculum to students based on their age, a mastery system takes into account where we want students to be and where they are in their learning. Instruction and assessment seek to fill gaps and reach grade-level goals. This means some students will need more instruction, more time. Decisions about how to support students are individualized and take into account the discipline, the skill of the teachers involved, where other students are in their learning, and where students are in building the skills and mindsets as a learner.

What are we going to do with so many students that are behind?

This concept of students of being behind is going to get us in trouble. Yes, there is a long-term goal to get every student college and career ready. But learning has never taken place in a straight line. Students are just where they are. The question is how do we help them move forward towards the long-term goal in ways that build their capacity as learners and motivate them to put in their best effort. Giving more curricula on faster timelines is likely to backfire. Again, coverage of the curriculum doesn’t equal learning.

Then, what can schools do?

Introduce performance levels and grade levels in instruction and assessment. One of the first things to do is understand where students are in their performance and start thinking about instruction that takes that into consideration. This doesn’t mean tracking. Heterogeneous and collaborative learning strategies are important instructional strategies and are vital in creating supportive communities of learners. Transparency of learning targets and performance levels contribute to the culture of mastery. Students know where they are, what they need to focus on, and what proficiency looks like. It’s important to celebrate each little step forward. Grade level is still important. The age of students can help us think about students developmentally. It also helps us keep the eye on helping them to reach the goals of college and career-ready.

Relationships matter. Knowing students and where they are in their development and learning is a critical aspect of personalized, mastery systems. Students need to feel safe and part of that is feeling that teachers care about them. Our education system is organized around curriculum, not relationships. Students move on to the next grade, the next curriculum and the next teacher.

Looping can help. Teachers stay with students for two years (although exceptions should be made when there are bad matches). They know the students better. They know the families better. Multi-age classrooms can also help teachers focus on where students are in their learning rather than delivering one curriculum. Why not have students keep working with their same teachers in the fall semester?

The most developed personalized and mastery-based schools I’ve visited have organized co-teaching models with 60-90 students with two or three teachers. Why? Because relationships and collaborations matter for teachers as well as students. Flexible space, flexible seating, and resources to respond to several different performance levels all close at hand are all part of creating learning environments that respond to where students are. Covid19 is also going to demand flexibility in seating as well.

Time is a resource. Be creative. Austria is looking at an on-and-off schedule. Students coming to school for four days on and then 10 days off, trying to time itself with the life of the virus. Maybe some students need to spend more time with teachers in the classroom while others thrive in the online environment. Summer, using outside spaces for learning, might be a strategy for helping students that started last semester out on lower performance levels and didn’t receive any instruction during the months of sheltering in place.

The most important thing is to shift our mindsets. Students are not behind. They are just where they are. Meet them there.

I don’t know how to grade my students.

Covid19 has destroyed the illusion that traditional A-F grading systems had value, just as it is blowing up the illusions that teachers can force students to learn, that learning should be based on age and that students learn in a straight line at the same speed. A-F grading systems—with points for behavior, emphasizing summative assessment, with little opportunity for revision, and rolling up into the GPA ranking system—tell us more about student performance levels and demonstrating the desired behaviors (attendance, participation, and homework) than they do about learning. For those at the top of the bell curve, grades can be motivating. But for all the rest, they are nearly useless to help them in their learning and for some downright harmful.

It’s time for all schools to become standards-referenced. Grading should be aligned with specific targets. The learning target and what proficiency looks like are transparent to students. Students receive the opportunity for more instruction and revision. For those that are ready to commit to a mastery system, take the next step towards standards-based grading. This requires helping students to repair gaps and if by the end of the semester they haven’t reached proficiency on the targets, then plans are made to help them continue their learning through summer breaks and into the next year.

The most important thing in creating a meaningful grading system is to make sure it is aligned with helping students to learn based on the research on learning. In fact, every decision we make about our schools and the policies that shape them need to be checked to make sure we are maximizing learning, including empowering and motivating students, not inhibiting it.

For more, see:

• Remote Learning: Lessons Learned and Reflections to Inform the Future 
• Future Ready: The New Version of School 
• Developmental Reflective Practices Lead to Learner Ownership, Critical Thinking, and Self-Actualization 

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The post Shining the Competency Education Light on Education in the Time of COVID-19 appeared first on Getting Smart.

What’s a student to do? Suggestions for other ways of doing things might help. But it makes no sense to have students coach teachers about how to construct effective courses. Plus, a practice can be effective in one context and ineffective in another. Take the quiz, for example. Great way to move new information into long-term memory and build fluency ….if it isn’t graded. If it is graded without a chance for feedback and revision, it is just a technique for ranking students, not for learning. However, it is certainly fair for students to expect teachers to be using research on learning to design their courses. The research on learning can optimize learning. It can also be an entry point for change.

Let’s take a look at some of the most basic concepts that research has uncovered about how we learn. Remember, you can’t just pick one or another of these concepts. The power lies in drawing across them to design engaging, motivating, and responsive learning experiences.

Cornerstones of the Learning Sciences (Adapted from Levers and Logic Models published by CompetencyWorks)

#1 Learning is Doing: Learning is an activity that is carried out by the learner. Students do not simply absorb information and skills. They need the opportunity to practice, receive feedback, and correct themselves. Watch who is doing the talking in a classroom. If teachers are doing all the talking, it’s likely that students aren’t learning. They may be listening, but listening isn’t learning. Learning and thinking is hard work. It requires active engagement and effort. (See #3)

#2 Learning results from the interplay of cognition, emotion, and motivation. The brain does not clearly separate cognitive from emotional functioning so that optimal learning environments will engage both. It’s important that students feel safe if learning is to be optimized. When we are afraid, our amygdala becomes activated making it harder to learn. Do students feel valued? Relationships matter in creating a culture of inclusivity and belonging. Are schools designed so that teachers and professors have the opportunity to build strong relationships with students? Do students feel that the school and teachers want them to be successful? Do they have chances to receive feedback and revise or do grading practices simply judge them?

Motivation is important to learning but it is also dynamic and changes in response to a number of factors. In fact, as students learn more about their cognitive processes, they develop a greater sense of competence and thereby increase their motivation.

#3 Effort is dependent on motivation and self-regulation. Effort is influenced by motivation. Similar to intelligence, motivation is malleable. Beliefs about intelligence shape the amount of effort students are willing to invest. Those who hold a growth mindset will put more effort toward learning than those who hold the misconception that intelligence is a fixed trait. Providing incremental opportunities to experience growth reinforces that effort will result in success. Learners will be more motivated when they value the task and if they are confident they will be successful with support available if needed.

When learners are able to self-regulate—when they can successfully manage thoughts, behaviors, and emotions—they are better able to initiate and sustain focus and effort on difficult tasks. Students may be highly motivated but not have the skills necessary to manage the emotions they experience in the process of learning. Thus, students need coaching to build the social and emotional skills to manage the stress they experience from situations in or out of school, the metacognitive skills to monitor their learning and the self-regulation skills to change strategies as needed.

#4 Intrinsic motivation leads to better long-term outcomes than extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic or controlled motivation (systems of reward or punishment such as the traditional grading system of 0-100 points for assignments and behaviors) may be useful in the short-run but often produces the unintended consequence of disengagement and resistance. Self-determination theory explains that motivation will increase when learners experience competence (I can be successful), relatedness (there is meaning and connection to what I am learning), and autonomy (I have control over the process). Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, describes this as mastery, purpose, and autonomy. It’s important to remember that motivation is dynamic. It increases and decreases. It can be shaped by cognitive processes, and external expectations can become intrinsic motivation.

#5 Learning is shaped by the way information is processed and transferred into long-term memory. New information is processed in working memory before it can be transferred into long-term memory. Working memory has limitations to how much new information it can absorb, requiring students and teachers to consider the cognitive load. Strategies can be used to reduce demand on working memory and helping to transfer new information and concepts into long-term memory. Stress and anxiety can have an impact on cognitive load — it’s just harder to concentrate when you are worried or scared.

#6 Acquiring new knowledge and skills requires effective feedback and the opportunity to revise. Effective feedback focuses on the task (not the student) and on improving (rather than verifying performance). Assessing student learning, identifying misconceptions or gaps in understanding, and providing feedback are critical steps in the learning process. Assessment information is as important to helping teachers to adjust their teaching strategies or improve their skills as it is for helping students adjust their learning strategies.

#7 Learning builds on prior knowledge and context. People learn new knowledge optimally when their prior knowledge is activated. Learners need to have structures to organize and retrieve information. Thus, attaching new information to what they already know in a context where that knowledge is accessible, relevant, and responsive to cultural understanding can be helpful in mastering new ideas and skills. Students will have different sets of skills and experiences. Teachers need to find out what students know and can do so that they can help them make progress.

Think about the traditional classroom. A teacher stands in front and lectures. Maybe they ask a question and call on one of the students who raise their hands. All that is expected of students is to listen, take notes, and participate when you are confident that you know the answer. Students aren’t using the knowledge. They aren’t building skills (except for note-taking). Teachers don’t have any idea of a student’s prior knowledge or their levels of understanding.

Eventually, students will be given a test and then a grade. The teacher doesn’t have the opportunity to give feedback to students or for students to revise their work. The grade is then rolled up into a GPA whereupon students are ranked. A culture of judging, not safety, is created. (See this article for an analysis of the flaws of the traditional system.)

Modern schools, ones that fully draws on the research on learning, are designed to enhance relationships, provide flexibility so that teachers can respond to students who need more help or attention, and there is time for high-quality project-based learning where students get to apply their learning.

In the modern classroom, a community of learners is created at the beginning of the semester. Teachers ask students about their goals, and together, they create a set of expectations in which they all commit to supporting each other in their learning. The learning targets and what it means to be successful are transparent. Students are involved in learning experiences, sometimes individual and sometimes in groups, that allow teachers to understand where students are in their learning and give them feedback along the way. It may take some students longer or have to do more revisions to reach success. Grading isn’t used as a form of judgment or ranking. Instead, it provides feedback, helps teachers improve their instruction, and students get guidance on where they need to focus their efforts. Summative assessments like a report or an exam are used for teachers and students to see the progress being made and plan for how to help students be successful in meeting course or program goals.

Students can be powerful advocates in helping motivate colleges and high schools to transform by engaging them in conversation about the research on learning. Before you sign up for courses ask department heads, teachers, and professors about their pedagogical philosophy. What are their beliefs about how students learn?  What research are they using to design their courses and instruction? To what degree are they committed to every student being successful? (Beware: Some departments like engineering and finance are likely forcing teachers to use a bell curve. The US News and World Report’s ranking of colleges tends to reinforce this behavior. ) How have they designed their courses to motivate students?

It’s likely that somewhere in most districts, colleges, and universities there is someone tasked with improving instruction or teaching professors how to do online learning. It’s possible you can find some allies for advancing the idea that institutions of education need to draw on the research on learning. If not, why not? It is possible that they simply cannot imagine a world different from the one they operate within. Build some creative tension and move the conversation into a place where you can help shape solutions together.

For more, see:

• As Distance Learning Turns On, Students Increasingly Tune Out 
• Searching for the Other Side of the Tunnel: Leading Through COVID-19 
• CUE Leads, Facilities Professional Learning in New Virtual Environment 

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

This post originally appeared on LearningEdge.com

The post How the Research on Learning Can Drive Change appeared first on Getting Smart.

In fact, one could argue that this makes a difference in success for school and district leaders. The leader’s ability to manage people, which requires growth in terms of evaluations, now must include support for building relationships and the ability to acknowledge and respond to the adult’s emotional needs. Not long ago, school structures were more adult-based than student-based, and as we adapt to provide a more personalized educational environment to meet the needs of all students, this requires existing structures to change.

And initially, when these structures change, it mostly impacts adults in the process, which requires dynamic and responsive leadership. Principals and superintendents know they cannot lead this work alone, and successful systems practice distributive leadership. Sometimes this level of change for an organization can best be accomplished by a relatively ‘flat’ team in terms of roles, which allows for adaptability and increased responsiveness, as well as time for forward planning. One of the ways this can be structured is through a Holacracy Structure.

The following blog is the story of a mid- to large-sized comprehensive district restructuring their system. Since the blog was originally posted, the superintendent who led this system change, Steve Schultz, has retired. Many of the meeting structures remained even with changes in leadership because of how they aligned to the district beliefs. The belief in having knowledge and talent at the closest level of implementation and having all levels of involved stakeholders at the table for designing is still very much in play at District 51, and these beliefs are embedded into their culture.

A version of this blog ran on CompetencyWorks as the fourth in a blog series sharing Mesa County Valley School District 51‘s journey as it shifts to a competency-based education model (D51 uses the phrase performance-based learning).

Posted inside the conference space at Mesa County Valley School District 51 (D51) is a Managing Complex Change chart describing the conditions for successful change implementation. It identifies five elements to consider (vision, skills, incentives, resources and action plan) and five results if any are not well-managed (confusion, anxiety, resistance, frustration and false starts).

Although the chart is very simple, it does provide language and concepts that jumpstart conversations around identifying if something isn’t working well. For example, in a leadership meeting I attended at D51, I heard someone say, “I don’t want to false start them by putting them in a meeting that is too deep in the weeds,” referring to not having a formal plan to introduce new ideas. In other meetings, attention was given to possible anxiety and angst if teachers don’t have the chance to access supports based on where they are in their own learning.

But how do you make sure that vision + skills + incentives + resources + action plan are all in place and all aligned to bring change? D51 knows, as pretty much any district leadership involved in the conversion to competency education knows, that top-down hierarchical structures aren’t helpful. They force decisions to the top when what we want is to create empowering, flexible organizational structures.

So what’s a district to do? D51 is testing out if holacracy will do the trick.

What Is Holacracy?

D51 isn’t comfortable just saying that the district is going to be more supportive. They aren’t comfortable just saying that transformational leadership strategies are important. They are seeking to replace the bureaucratic organizational culture and structure with a holacratic one (the management approach used by Zappos).

Holacracy is a system for self-organizing so that as context changes, so can the organization. There are a few key pieces to this model:

1. It assumes a highly flexible organizational structure that will change as needed.
2. It depends on clarifying roles and scoping out their realm of autonomy and authority. In other words, individuals and teams know that they are empowered to act.
3. It clarifies intersections or cross-links. When a team, referred to as circles, wants to act, it needs to engage the other intersecting circles.
4. Meeting protocols are important. There are two kinds of meetings with two different protocols: governance (who is doing what) and tactical (what are we going to do). Agendas are created right there in the meeting so that everyone contributes. No one can control the agenda. There is a brief presentation of the tension and solution with an opportunity to amend and clarify. Members are then asked to raise a hand if there is an objection. The objection is discussed and resolved, and then it’s on to the next agenda item. There is little room for personal issues, turf-battles or power dynamics as everything is happening in real-time. If there is a problem, everyone revisits the domain (scope) and authority.

A software platform supports the holacratic structure in staying focused and communicating decisions. There are several different views, including a personal one, with the overall organizational structure of my circles, my roles, my projects, my tensions (issues you are trying to resolve) and my authority.

Essentially, holacracy is designed to tap into the knowledge of an organization by bringing together multiple perspectives without falling into the trap of the most powerful dominating one that rises to the top of agendas and how it is interpreted. We all know how organizations create a dynamic and narrative that is difficult if not impossible to penetrate. Holacracy is designed to let the organization breathe so that it can seek ways to act in ways that are more aligned with the espoused values and vision.

While at D51, I sat in two meetings using the process. It definitely feels awkward (one person described it as “appropriately uncomfortable”), but not as awkward as sitting through a meeting where no decisions are being made. Superintendent Steve Schultz explained, “Our previous top-down structures for decision-making and communication often resulted in no decisions and miscommunication. There were a lot of meetings and everyone was advocating for their own agenda. We weren’t being driven by a shared vision. In the holacratic model, we focus on the work and our roles, not personalities.”

The holacratic protocols also don’t prevent districts from putting their values first. A few days after a student tragically took his life, the opening process of checking in (What’s on your mind? What you want to get done this week?), which was designed to be a rapid go-around, was instead heartfelt, as slow as it needed to be and wrapped the group in love.

How Is Holacracy Being Implemented In D51?

One important thing to remember is that whatever is described here may change, even as early as tomorrow if D51 finds that the form of the structure isn’t meeting their needs.

Coordinating Council: The purpose of the Coordinating Council (CC) is to design and align operations, ensure efficiency among the supporting teams and solve problems that arise. It also defines clearer lines for communication. The President of Mesa Valley Education Association sits on the CC as part of the district leadership.

Superintendent Schultz emphasized, “Partnerships and relationships are important to successful adaptive change. We are growing our system to be agile and responsive. Representation from the Mesa Valley Education Association and feedback loops to other employee groups are critical components of our Coordinating Council.” Individuals have a responsibility to bring items forward to the CC, but always with a suggestion for solving the problem. Each member of the CC is on at least one other circle. Everyone remains empowered.

The focus is on topics that might impact the entire system. The CC wants to be able to identify trends that are emerging early on so they can address them quickly. The CC also keeps an eye on governance to ensure that all circles are working well, with the right people, with the right scope and with the right authority.

Teams (Sometimes Referred to as Circles): There are as many teams as are needed. For example, in shaping their circles, D51 has established a School Leadership Support Team that is focused on the instructional leaders in the schools. They’ve removed compliance and complaint issues from their scope of work so they can stay focused on improving the quality of instruction throughout the district (complaints now go to the Advocacy and Support Team).

Teams include Advocacy and Support (complaints and compliance); Budget and Financial; Learning Systems Design; School Leadership; Community and Family Connections; Human Resources; Support Services; Student Support Services; and Technology. Please note, the size of the circles below reflect defined roles and do not suggest greater influence or importance.

The team leading much of the design work for the new PBL system is the Learning System Design Team. Each team uses the same meeting protocols for governance and tactical issues. D51 is in the process of trying to identify the need for cross-links and the people who will take responsibility for ensuring two-way dialogue. Eventually, they will each have leading indicators to monitor their work.

Below are a few examples of the types of topics discussed at the Coordinating Council:

• A key staff person is out on extended leave. Should someone replace her and have the same domain and authority so that decisions can continue to get made?
• There are many people engaged in the design processes underway but many of them had not been formally assigned to major circles. How are they getting information? Are they clear about their domains and accountabilities?
• The Assessment Circle is operating in isolation rather than as a sub-circle or with cross-links to broader Teaching and Learning Framework. Should a sub-circle be organized?
• D51 has been participating in a school climate survey pilot. Do they trust the data? Is the data available in a timely fashion? Do they have a way to use it? If not, do they want to expend resources on it?

Why Holacracy?

Superintendent Schultz knew he needed a different way to manage the district but didn’t know exactly what it was–until he discovered the concept of holacracy in small font in the midst of KnowledgeWorks’ Future of Learning. “We know that districts have formal ways of handling issues…and then there are all the informal ways. They may help resolve issues in the short run, but they also undermine trust. Trust is an invaluable quality we need for change and for educating children. We need mechanisms that build trust.”

Schultz also said that the values of holacracy are highly compatible with D51’s values, which are shaping the transformation process and that of performance-based learning. “We don’t have anything to hide,” he said. “Just as transparency is an important quality of performance-based learning, so too are we trying to model transparency in everything we do, including decision-making.”

Schultz describes the difference between the bureaucratic processes and the holacratic processes as the speed and quality between a farm horse and a thoroughbred stallion. So the question is, can holacracy expedite the process of converting districts to personalized, performance-based systems?

Building Leadership Skills

“Autonomy and accountability are an important part of how holacracy works. When people discover problems they have a responsibility to bring it to their team leader or the Coordinating Council,” said Schultz. “If you discover a problem and do not raise it, the question then becomes about clarifying your scope and authority. If the problem is an issue of skill, we can help people build the skills they need.”

D51 is engaging leadership in the district and at the school level in thinking about the leadership and communication skills they need. They are using Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers to increase awareness and choice about the type of leadership they use. As always, they aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They’ve been using an Organizational Health Improvement tool for years to provide management feedback. Now they are cross-walking the four types of language choices–calibrating, consulting, collaborating and coaching–across the diminisher and multiplier traits described below.

Virgel Hammonds of KnowledgeWorks introduced the D51 team to Multipliers. It’s an interesting model, as the six diminisher traits all sound pretty good: The Rapid Responder (moves fast with decisions); The Rescuer (solves other people’s problems); The Optimist (always looks on the positive); The Pacesetter (sets high standards for quality and pace); the Idea Guy (presents ideas first to stimulate others): and the Always On (holds infectious energy and points of view). But when you think about the impact on others, you realize that they are likely to be causing unproductive reactions, failing to build trust, failing to empower others and failing to deal with the challenges at hand.

The multiplier traits are all designed around empowering others, building knowledge and developing more leadership: The Liberator (creates space to think, speak, and act); The Challenger (seeds the opportunity, lays down the challenge); The Talent Magnet (finds people’s native genius, utilizes them to their fullest); The Debate Maker (frames the issue, sparks the debate, drives a sound decision); and The Investor (defines ownership, invests resources, holds people accountable).

Of course, the real trick is that for each of the traits, it’s best to become skilled in all of them and know which one will be most suitable to the situation at hand.

For more, see:

• Growing Into The Framework: A District’s CBE Implementation Strategy
• The Vision of Performance-Based Education at District 51
• Building Community Consensus for District Change
• Getting Smart Podcast | District 51 On Building a Performance-Based Education System

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

This blog was originally published on Competency Works.

The post Holacracy: Organizing for Change at D51 appeared first on Getting Smart.

As Leigh Grasso, Director of Academic Achievement & Growth at Mesa County Valley School District 51 (D51) emphasized, “We are shifting from a focus on professional development to professional learning.”

And there are a lot of people focusing on helping the adults in the system learn. In the district decision-making/ communication structure, there is the Learning System Support Team (LSST) that includes Content Facilitators (CFs), as well as a team of Professional Learning Facilitators (PLFs) who organize Design Labs for teachers.

In the past, D51 didn’t have a lot of systematic professional development. Four days a year were dedicated to event professional development with little choice available to teachers. In 2009-2010, D51 completed the Comprehensive Appraisal for District Improvement (CADI) process and, in so doing, the emphasis on pedagogy went to an extreme emphasis on regimented delivery of curriculum and direct instruction.

This left some teachers feeling as though they had little autonomy and limited flexibility to meet the needs of their students. PLF Heather Flick explained, “We have the perfect storm to bring performance-based learning to the Grand Valley. They are ready for a system that is focused on our students.”

Feedback: The Key To Continuous Improvement For Designing Professional Learning

In considering this new strategy, the LSST wanted to embrace the same values that undergird performance-based learning: transparency, empowerment, voice, choice, relevance and meeting people where they are. It was important to design for transparent voice and choice opportunities–teachers had not had ongoing opportunities to voice their opinions thus far, either negative or positive. It was also going to be important to ensure that teachers knew the LSSTs were not only listening but responding to their opinions. The professional learning system needed to generate trust if teachers were going to feel safe taking risks and changing practices.

The team attended a Learning Forward conference to learn more about how to build learning communities. One of the most important tips they brought back was on how to generate productive feedback. It’s simple: Make sure you use the feedback.

PLF Amy Shephard-Fowler explained, “We used to ask for open feedback and much of it wasn’t very useful. When we started sharing the feedback with teachers and describing how we made adjustments based on it, the feedback became much more useful. We now use feedback protocols for everything we do. It helps teachers think about the type of feedback they are giving and they are confident that we will consider it for improving professional learning.”

There was also a shift to include more staff in the design and implementation of professional learning. Calls for proposals went out in designing the professional learning days. However, they learned that offering more voice and choice isn’t enough–there has to be a clear purpose. Shephard-Fowler recalled, “When we just asked teachers to submit proposals for presentations, we had a large range of topics and practices. There were a lot of options for teachers, but overall it was hit and miss in terms of driving a transformation in the district. So the next year we organized the professional learning and calls for proposals under the title ‘Tools for Transformation’ as we better understood we were not going to change practice unless we were more clear about the purpose.”

They also began to coach teachers who were presenting in adult education (based on andragogy, the adult learning theory of Malcolm Knowles), introducing the very same concepts of growth mindset, personalization, relevance, transferability and presentation skills. As a result, D51 is building their cadre of trainers who will be able to coach other trainers as the demand for professional learning increases.

Design Labs

D51 uses the term Design Labs to describe the professional learning sessions on the core concepts and skills related to the transition to performance-based learning. Rebecca Midles, D51’s Executive Director of Performance-Based Systems, said, “Designing is empowering. We all stay empowered when we think we can design and change the world around us.”

Shepherd-Fowler enthusiastically agreed. “Design is the teaching, learning and assessment cycle,” she said. “Kids can take this same process – where are we, what are the ideas, let’s try this one – and take it back to an authentic audience to get feedback. By introducing design thinking into the core of the pedagogy, we are laying the foundation for students to become independent learners.”

She described their approach as “contextualized design thinking” that is very clear on the context of the learners and the end result. Some might call it strategic design thinking. They’ve drawn a bit from Stanford’s approach as well as the design thinking processes promoted at the Colorado Education Initiative.

Flick emphasized, “If you want to personalize professional learning, you are going to end up using design thinking to do it. There just isn’t any way you can actually meet people where they are AND get to where you want to go. Our design process is completely iterative, as we are designing within a context of the culture of a growth mindset, effective practices to support more agency and independence in our learners, and eventually, the graduate competencies based on the graduate profile the community is creating.”

Currently, there are five offerings of Design Labs organized around three themes:

• Culture (Social & Emotional Learning and Growth Mindset);
• Learner-Centered Environment (Backward by Design, Shared Vision & Code of Cooperation, and Workshop); and
• Transparency (Assessment for Learning & Rubrics).

The LSST has also drafted a Learning Continuum for each of the Design Lab modules, running from emerging and exploring to applying and refining (see Growth Mindset Learning Continuum). There are indicators for each of the five steps: the brain, understanding mindsets, self-talk, growth feedback and goal-setting.

The modules and the continuums mean that professional learning can become more personalized and teachers can eventually become more independent in their learning. In current professional learning sessions, you might walk into a room with 120 teachers, where some are clustered together learning about the adolescent brain and others on self-talk.

The PLFs hope to continue to personalize the modules, as not every teacher will learn in the same way and reactions to instructional materials will vary. They are also hoping at some point to be able to put the modules online so they are available 24/7. This will help with the issue of scaling professional learning so that all 1,500 teachers have access when they are ready for the next step.

Tips For Designing Professional Learning

What would the professional learning advisors recommend to other districts getting started?

• Meet Teachers Where They Are. Always ask teachers what they need.
• Use Feedback to Build Trust and Accountability. Be transparent with your feedback. Intentionally share the feedback from teachers and show how you used their feedback. In other words, hold yourself accountable.
• Include Transferability. Professional learning has to be clear about how it can be used in the classroom. This requires making it explicit, using the practices, and modeling them for teachers. Tools need to help teachers and also be examples of what classroom tools might look like.
• Make Connections. Don’t assume teachers learning new practices are going to make connections. Intentionally make the connections.
• Be Prepared for a Variety of Learning Styles. Remember that teachers will have different styles and pacing of learning. Some will take small bites and practice until they feel confident before taking another bite. “Omnivores” may go after new ideas until they are overloaded, at which point they will back off, cool down and then throw themselves back in.

For more, see:

• Laying the Foundation for Competency Education with Culture and Climate
• Building Community Consensus for District Change
• The Vision of Performance-Based Education at District 51
• Growing Into The Framework: A District’s CBE Implementation Strategy
• Holacracy: Organizing For Change At District 51

Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures please see our Partner page.

The post Supporting Teachers with Professional Learning at District 51 appeared first on Getting Smart.

Posted inside the conference space at Mesa County Valley School District 51 (D51) is a Managing Complex Change chart describing the conditions for successful change implementation. It identifies five elements to consider (vision, skills, incentives, resources and action plan) and five results if any are not well-managed (confusion, anxiety, resistance, frustration and false starts).

Although the chart is very simple, it does provide language and concepts that jumpstart conversations around identifying if something isn’t working well. For example, in a leadership meeting I attended at D51, I heard someone say, “I don’t want to false start them by putting them in a meeting that is too deep in the weeds,” referring to not having a formal plan to introduce new ideas. In other meetings, attention was given to possible anxiety and angst if teachers don’t have the chance to access supports based on where they are in their own learning.

But how do you make sure that vision + skills + incentives + resources + action plan are all in place and all aligned to bring change? D51 knows, as pretty much any district leadership involved in the conversion to competency education knows, that top-down hierarchical structures aren’t helpful. They force decisions to the top when what we want is to create empowering, flexible organizational structures.

So what’s a district to do? D51 is testing out if holacracy will do the trick.

What Is Holacracy?

D51 isn’t comfortable just saying that the district is going to be more supportive. They aren’t comfortable just saying that transformational leadership strategies are important. They are seeking to replace the bureaucratic organizational culture and structure with a holacratic one (the management approach used by Zappos).

Holacracy is a system for self-organizing so that as context changes, so can the organization. There are a few key pieces to this model:

1. It assumes a highly flexible organizational structure that will change as needed.

2. It depends on clarifying roles and scoping out their realm of autonomy and authority. In other words, individuals and teams know that they are empowered to act.

3. It clarifies intersections or cross-links. When a Team, referred to as Circles, wants to act, it needs to engage the other intersecting circles.

4. Meeting protocols are important. There are two kinds of meetings with two different protocols: governance (who is doing what) and tactical (what are we going to do). Agendas are created right there in the meeting so that everyone contributes. No one can control the agenda. There is a brief presentation of the tension and solution with an opportunity to amend and clarify. Members are then asked to raise a hand if there is an objection. The objection is discussed and resolved, and then it’s on to the next agenda item. There is little room for personal issues, turf-battles or power dynamics as everything is happening real-time. If there is a problem, everyone revisits the domain (scope) and authority.

A software platform supports the holacratic structure in staying focused and communicating decisions. There are several different views, including a personal one, with the overall organizational structure of my circles, my roles, my projects, my tensions (issues you are trying to resolve) and my authority.

Essentially, holacracy is designed to tap into the knowledge of an organization by bringing together multiple perspectives without falling into the trap of the most powerful dominating what rises to the top of agendas and how it is interpreted. We all know how organizations create a dynamic and narrative that is difficult if not impossible to penetrate. Holacracy is designed to let the organization breathe so that it can seek ways to act in ways that are more aligned with the espoused values and vision.

While at D51, I sat in two meetings using the process. It definitely feels awkward (one person described it as “appropriately uncomfortable”), but not as awkward as sitting through a meeting where no decisions are being made. Superintendent Stege Schultz explained, “Our previous top-down structures for decision-making and communication often resulted in no decisions and miscommunication. There were a lot of meetings and everyone was advocating for their own agenda. We weren’t being driven by a shared vision. In the holacratic model, we focus on the work and our roles, not personalities. ”

The holacratic protocols also don’t prevent districts from putting their values first. A few days after a student tragically took his life, the opening process of checking in (What’s on your mind? What you want to get done this week?), which was designed to be a rapid go-around, was instead heartfelt, as slow as it needed to be and wrapped the group in love.

How Is Holacracy Being Implemented In D51?

One important thing to remember is that whatever is described here may change, even as early as tomorrow if D51 finds that the form of the structure isn’t meeting their needs.

Coordinating Council: The purpose of the Coordinating Council (CC) is to design and align operations, ensure efficiency among the supporting Teams and solve problems that arise. It also defines clearer lines for communication. The President of Mesa Valley Education Association sits on the CC as part of the district leadership.

Superintendent Steve Schultz emphasized, “ Partnerships and relationships are important to successful adaptive change. We are growing our system to be agile and responsive. Representation from the Mesa Valley Education Association and feedback loops to other employee groups are critical components of our Coordinating Council.” Individuals have a responsibility to bring items forward to the CC, but always with a suggestion for solving the problem. Each member of the CC is on at least one other circle. Everyone remains empowered.

The focus is on topics that might impact the entire system. The CC wants to be able to identify trends that are emerging early on so they can address them quickly. The CC also keeps an eye on governance to ensure that all Circles are working well, with the right people, with the right scope and with the right authority. 

Teams (Sometimes Referred to as Circles): There are as many teams as are needed. For example, in shaping their circles, D51 has established a School Leadership Support Team that is focused on the instructional leaders in the schools. They’ve removed compliance and complaint issues from their scope of work so they can stay focused on improving the quality of instruction throughout the district (complaints now go to the Advocacy and Support Team).

Teams include Advocacy and Support (complaints and compliance); Budget and Financial; Learning Systems Design; School Leadership; Community and Family Connections; Human Resources; Support Services; Student Support Services; and Technology. Please note, the size of the circles below reflect defined roles and do not suggest greater influence or importance.

The team leading much of the design work for the new PBL system is the Learning System Design Team. Each team uses the same meeting protocols for governance and tactical issues. D51 is in the process of trying to identify the need for cross-links and the people who will take responsibility for ensuring two-way dialogue. Eventually, they will each have leading indicators to monitor their work.

Below are a few example of the types of topics discussed at the Coordinating Council:

• A key staff person is out on extended leave. Should someone replace her and have the same domain and authority so that decisions can continue to get made?
• There are many people engaged in the design processes underway but many of them had not been formally assigned to major circles. How are they getting information? Are they clear about their domains and accountabilities?  
• The Assessment Circle is operating in isolation rather than as a sub-circle or with cross-links to broader Teaching and Learning Framework. Should a sub-circle be organized?
• D51 has been participating in a school climate survey pilot. Do they trust the data? Is the data available in a timely fashion? Do they have a way to use it? If not, do they want to expend resources on it?

Why Holacracy?

Superintendent Schultz knew he needed a different way to manage the district but didn’t know exactly what it was–until he discovered the concept of holacracy in small font in the midst of KnowledgeWorks’ Future of Learning. “We know that districts have formal ways of handling issues…and then there are all the informal ways. They may help resolve issues in the short run, but they also undermine trust. Trust is an invaluable quality we need for change and for educating children. We need mechanisms that build trust.”   

Schultz also said that the values of holacracy are highly compatible with D51’s values, which are shaping the transformation process and that of performance-based learning. “We don’t have anything to hide,” he said. “Just as transparency is an important quality of performance-based learning, so too are we trying to model transparency in everything we do, including decision-making.” 

Schultz describes the difference between the bureaucratic processes and the holacratic processes as the speed and quality between a farm horse and a thoroughbred stallion. So the question is, can holacracy expedite the process of converting districts to personalized, performance-based systems?  

Building Leadership Skills

“Autonomy and accountability are an important part of how holacracy works. When people discover problems they have a responsibility to bring it to their team leader or the Coordinating Council,” said Shultz. “If you discover a problem and do not raise it, the question then becomes about clarifying your scope and authority. If the problem is an issue of skill, we can help people build the skills they need.”

D51 is engaging leadership in the district and at the school level in thinking about the leadership and communication skills they need. They are using Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers to increase awareness and choice about the type of leadership they use. As always, they aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They’ve been using an Organizational Health Improvement tool for years to provide management feedback. Now they are cross-walking the four types of language choices – calibrating, consulting, collaborating and coaching – across the diminisher and multiplier traits described below.

Virgel Hammonds of KnowledgeWorks introduced the D51 team to Multipliers. It’s an interesting model, as the six diminisher traits all sound pretty good: The Rapid Responder (moves fast with decisions); The Rescuer (solves other people’s problems); The Optimist (always looks on the positive); The Pacesetter (sets high standards for quality and pace); the Idea Guy (presents ideas first to stimulate others): and the Always On (infectious energy and points of view). But when you think about the impact on others, you realize that they are likely to be causing unproductive reactions, failing to build trust, failing to empower others and failing to deal with the challenges at hand.

The multiplier traits are all designed around empowering others, building knowledge and developing more leadership: The Liberator (creates space to think, speak, and act); The Challenger (seeds the opportunity, lays down the challenge); The Talent Magnet (finds people’s native genius, utilizes them to their fullest); The Debate Maker (frames the issue, sparks the debate, drives a sound decision); and The Investor (defines ownership, invests resources, holds people accountable).

Of course, the real trick is that for each of the traits, it’s best to become skilled in all of them and know which one will be most suitable to the situation at hand.

For more, see:

• Growing Into The Framework: A District’s CBE Implementation Strategy
• The Vision of Performance-Based Education at District 51
• Building Community Consensus for District Change
• Getting Smart Podcast | District 51 On Building a Performance-Based Education System

Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures please see our Partner page.

The post Holacracy: Organizing For Change At District 51 appeared first on Getting Smart.

Mesa County Valley School District 51 (D51) Superintendent Steve Schultz doesn’t ask “How are we going to implement a new performance-based system?” Instead, he asks, “How are they each of our forty-four schools going to grow into the framework?”

The answer is through a more personalized approach that lets schools and educators start where they are in their current learning and move forward from there.

Five Phases of Implementation

Everything is in motion at D51, and everyone is moving forward with the understanding that the different pieces will eventually need to be aligned. Thus, everything is a draft and everything stays open until related work is done. Paul Jebe, Director of Educator Effectiveness, likened it to the whirling teacups at Disneyland, bringing back that experience of loving every spin while simultaneously praying that it might be over soon.

Still in their first year of implementation, D51 has intensive activity in three of their five phases of work underway–and phase number does not necessarily suggest sequence. There is a cohort of seven demonstration schools hungry to put the entire model into place as soon as it is ready (it’s important to understand that they are not pilots, as pilots can be interpreted as experiments and are often a set of classrooms rather than district-wide).

The trick is that, given the simultaneous development of many of the pieces, the demo schools might find themselves operating in the third phase even if they are missing some pieces from phases one or two. In a few more years, there will be efforts underway by the schools and educators in all five phases as they continue to design, refine, skill-build and engage.

The journey and the implementation strategy are separate things, and both are important – the journey captures the new conditions (strong learning culture, shared vision, collective ownership, personalized, transparency and data-driven) that will shape the system (i.e., the paradigm shift), and the phases are how the work is being organized. Below is a quick scan of the phases and the different sets of work underway.

1. Laying the Foundation

There are many pieces for laying the foundation, including clarifying the pedagogical philosophy, making sure everyone understands why the shift to performance-based learning and the implementation strategy are necessary, and putting into place the essential ingredients for moving to implement a full performance-based learning system.

The essential ingredients really are the core of the work: laying the cultural foundation, emphasizing growth mindset and building social-emotional learning (SEL). Consider this the bedrock of the pedagogical philosophy at D51 of what is needed for students to learn, grow and become self-directed learners. The demonstration schools are supported in introducing these into their schools, and some others schools have already moved into this stage on their own.

Another part of this phase is the courageous step of developing new processes called holacracy, which replaces any bureaucratic routines. Below is the outline of steps in this phase:

2. Supporting Effective Practices

Demonstration schools receive intensive support, while other schools and teachers in the district can take advantage of Design Labs to build skills in practices related to growth mindset, workshop instructional models and the practices for self-directed learning such as codes of cooperation and standard operating procedures.

There are also efforts underway to revitalize professional learning communities within schools and to prepare principals to be ready to take on strong instructional leadership as teachers begin to look at student work, calibrate proficiency and identify areas for continuous improvement. Here is the outline of steps in this phase:

3. Building Performance-Based System

The goal of this work is to create the bones of the transparent, coherent and aligned system. There are a number of very important pieces of this work that are all underway, which means that the process is both simultaneous and iterative.

The pieces of the performance-based learning include graduate profile and corresponding graduation competencies; district-wide shared vision (complemented by school-wide shared vision); guiding principles; competency infrastructure (graduation competencies and standards with corresponding rubrics); and the Teaching and Learning Framework that defines the structure and processes.

The steps in this phase are below:

4. Beginning Personalized Learning

D51 is very specific about discussing personalized learning as something that will happen in the future. Leadership does not want to discuss personalizing education unless it is something that all students will benefit from – not a little bit here and a little bit there. Their goal is to have a coherent pedagogical approach to personalization to ensure the quality of choices and opportunities students have.

Most of all, they want to to make sure that the performance-based Learning system is in place to ensure personalization is actually adding up to something: students reaching, demonstrating and advancing upon mastery.

5. Refining Our System

This will be a process of mid-course corrections, a continuous improvement of the system itself and, as we see in other districts, waves of capacity building, improvement and innovation regarding instruction and assessment.

Midles emphasizes, “Districts need to stay in phases 1 and 2 as long as they can. The teachers in the demonstration schools will be learning what it means to integrate growth mindset and build new practices, but that doesn’t mean that they have mastered them to the point that they are routine. For all the teachers in the other schools, you want to keep those phases open and valued within the districts for years and years so that it is always okay for those last teachers who were waiting and seeing what was going to happen to build those schools.”

Implementation Strategy

D51 created their implementation strategy the way it stands for a number of reasons:

• Urgency: They have momentum and they don’t want to lose it with a long implementation roll out.
• Enthusiasm: The schools and educators on board would prefer to keep moving forward where possible, knowing that the performance-based system won’t be designed and ready to begin implementation until fall of 2017.
• Open Learners: I met an extraordinary set of educators at D51. These innovators and early adopters all understand that they are on a steep trajectory curve and they are along for the ride. Knowing the phases while having the time to deepen their learning is actually a luxury.
• Valuing the Process of Laying the Groundwork: D51 thinks it is very important to take the time to lay the foundation of growth mindset and the right set of values. Midles remarked that other districts shorten this process too much and pay for it later. Integrating the growth mindset in school culture might take longer in some schools than others, and that’s okay.
• Iterative Process for Designing the System: There are several pieces that need to be developed, all of which are interdependent. No matter how it is done, it will require iteration. Thus, D51 is working on them simultaneously with attention to identifying the points of intersection.
• Investing in Ownership: Even though they brought Midles in to help guide the process, there is a commitment to ownership and ensuring the D51 model builds on what they had in place. Thus, the district isn’t designing the system in its conference rooms and sharing it with the schools. An inclusive, co-constructed design process is an important part of building ownership and tapping into the expertise and creativity of the educators across D51.

Personalization: The Last Frontier

Midles emphasizes to everyone she speaks with that personalization is a phase that doesn’t begin until the P-BL system is in place. There will be aspects of it, including more opportunities for self-directed learning and more flexible pacing the minute teachers start implementing the core set of effective practices (shared vision, code of cooperation and standard operating procedures) and the workshop model.

However, the full concept of personalization is a system-wide approach in which students fully get the support they need to succeed, receive coaching in the skills necessary to be lifelong learners and are engaged and motivated through rich opportunities for voice, choice and co-design. D51 understands personalization as a commitment of schools and districts to ensure that students are successful. 

The only way that schools can monitor equity–at a minimum ensuring that historically underserved populations are getting a quality education and progressing towards graduation–is when the performance-based learning system can be put fully into place. Without it, personalization can quickly slip into the new realm of inequity–different and not equally valuable to learning. The question that D51 will be taking on after they have designed and implemented the system is what a system of personalized learning looks like where students get the support they need, the coaching and opportunities to take responsibility for their learning and the confidence that the same expectations of mastery are being held for every student.

Emphasis On The Structure of Teaching And Learning

If I was to map out the journey districts take on the path to performance-based learning, I would include the Swamp of Unpacking and Revising the Standards and Competencies, where many districts get stuck and lose their way. The precious time educators spend revising the wording of the competencies, standards and rubrics could be used to test them out and to open the door to the much richer conversation of calibrating the understanding of proficiency, instructional strategies and assessment literacy.

D51 is not spending a lot of time worrying about the design or texture of the competency framework. They’ve adopted the Colorado Academic Standards as the academic core to be complemented by an integrated framework of Social & Emotional Learning and Habits of Mind. There is a team thinking through the structure for the rubrics that can then be developed to begin the process of calibrating proficiency across the district and empower students. 

D51 is putting a lot of creative resources toward co-designing the Teaching and Learning Framework with representation from both demonstration and non-demonstration K-12 sites, and it is now being vetted by teachers across the district. This Framework essentially describes the system and how it will work. In some ways, it is the map of the system and will help to identify all the points of alignment that are needed. It’s the tool that will spark conversations about when and how students are assessed for their learning and when and how students are able to advance upon mastery into higher grade levels.

For more, see:

• The Vision of Performance-Based Education at District 51
• Building Community Consensus for District Change
• Getting Smart Podcast | District 51 On Building a Performance-Based Education System

Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures please see our Partner page.

The post Growing Into The Framework: A District’s CBE Implementation Strategy appeared first on Getting Smart.

1. Do I feel valued, safe and supported in this class?
2. What am I learning?
3. Why is this important?
4. How will I know when I learned it?

It feels a bit like a riddle. You see these four “Guiding Questions” in different places throughout Colorado’s Mesa County Valley School District 51. The district is still in the early stages of ensuring that students can answer all four questions, and seeing them frequently helps remind everyone that this is what they are striving for.

This technique sparks reflection and opens up minds to performance-based learning (also referred to as competency-based learning) and the ultimate goal of personalized learning. These questions go to the heart of what it means to have a transparent system that engages, motivates and enables students to build lifelong learning skills.

They start with the important question ’Do our students feel valued, safe and supported?’ If that isn’t in place, students won’t take risks, they won’t ask for the help they need and they won’t strive to reach their personal best every day.

The Values Leading To The Vision

The D51 team thinks about their efforts toward building a personalized, performance-based system as a transformational journey–transformational in that it is being grounded in a set of very different values. This system is more understanding of learning and capacity than the traditional education system and includes:

• A culture rooted in a growth mindset
• A shared vision
• Transparency and alignment
• Data-driven processes
• Personalized learning
• Collective ownership

What Does it Mean to Be Performance-Based?

Performance-based learning is described at D51 as a systemic framework that starts with a transparency of expectations and is designed to create high levels of reliability in learning. Personalization is rooted within the entire system design and system-building, however they have placed personalized learning as a later phase in implementation.

In order to understand the reasoning behind this, let’s look at their description of personalization. At D51, the core of personalized learning is schools helping students learn how to take responsibility for their own learning. Thus, D51 is working to “embrace a culture where each student has ownership of his/her academic, social and emotional learning resulting in readiness for success in life.”

As a feature of the transformational process, personalization is also about embracing the idea that in order to engage all learners, we need to understand where they are starting from, including the social and emotional aspects of their learning. The entire implementation strategy is shaped by this feature of personalization.

The Elements of Performance-Based Structure

D51 is also in the middle of designing the elements of the performance-based structure, or the points of intersection and alignment that need to be managed to create a transparent, coherent system. These elements include:

• Graduate Profile: Defines graduate competencies, school design and learning experiences. Great Schools Partnership, through a partnership with Colorado Education Initiative, has been helpful in shaping the profiles.
• Shared Vision, Mission and Guiding Principles: Helps make decisions and allocate resources from school board to classroom.
• Teaching & Learning Framework: Guides policies, professional learning and feedback loops to teachers, as well as new capacities and functionality in the system. It includes a set of core effective practices that enable students to take ownership and teachers to create the capacity for personalization in their classrooms.
• Competency Framework: The graduate competencies, standards and rubrics create transparency for what students should know and be able to do at each performance level. In addition, it serves as the structure by which teachers can calibrate proficiency and ensure alignment of instruction and assessment to levels of rigor.
• Growth Mindset and Social & Emotional Learning (including Habits of Mind) Standards and continuum used to help students build the skills needed to become a lifelong learner.

In The Classroom

Teachers who are working to create more learner-driven classrooms are likely to describe performance-based learning as a set of practices, especially given where they are in their implementation and what they have been exposed to. The goal is to create learner-centered classrooms that include:

• A growth mindset culture
• A vision that defines and stretches the learning environment
• Student-created norms
• Transparency of expectations
• Personal goal setting for behavior and academics
• Behavior expectations that are taught and growth that is celebrated
• Systems in place to support self-directed learning
• Infused choices for students within their learning
• Structures to support student voice
• Feedback loops

The current emphasis of the professional learning environment is on these effective practices: 

• Culture (Social & Emotional Learning and Growth Mindset)
• Learner-Centered Environment (Backward by Design, Shared Vision & Code of Cooperation, and Workshop); and 
• Transparency (Assessment for Learning & Rubrics).

Once the performance-based learning structure is designed, there will be much more transparency, and demand for high reliability will increase and require additional Design Labs. 

As we walked through classrooms together, Principal Lea Kreuter of Lincoln Mesa Orchard Elementary described what she looks for in the classrooms given their stage of development. She said, “In addition to evidence of teachers and students using a growth mindset, I am looking for engagement of students in the classroom. I want to see students talking more and teachers talking less, a gradual release of responsibility and teachers leveraging the time and learning experiences in the classroom.”

During another school visit, a teacher at New Emerson Elementary explained that she is seeing immediate value in some of the effective practices. “Unpacking the standards helps students see the end point,” she said. “By increasing transparency, it increases drive.”

Rebecca Midles, Executive Director of Performance-Based Systems at D51, explains that just as we all shift between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, students will also flow through different levels of dependence and self-directedness. What she hopes is that teachers will be skilled in four of the instructional techniques based on where students are in the continuum of engagement so that students are building the skills they need for self-directed learning after high school.

D51 is in the midst of an enormous process of designing while also providing support to teachers and principals in the demonstration schools. The actual model D51 will use will become much clearer after the Teaching and Learning Framework is complete.

A version of this blog ran on CompetencyWorks as part of the Designing Performance-Based Learning at D51 series.

For more, see:

• Growing Into The Framework: A District’s CBE Implementation Strategy
• Building Community Consensus for District Change
• Getting Smart Podcast | District 51 On Building a Performance-Based Education System

Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures please see our Partner page.

The post The Vision of Performance-Based Education at District 51 appeared first on Getting Smart.