Schmoker, M. (2011). Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

This book is a continuation of a theme that Mike Schmoker hits on in all of his work (i.e. Results Now), being that school leaders already know what works, but too often don’t have the courage to implement a sustained focus on it while ignoring everything else. It affirms the “less is more” leadership advice Doug Reeves gives in Finding Your Leadership Focus: What Matters Most for Student Results that I reviewed in my second post of this blog.  The “it” that Schmoker describes as essential and worthy of being prioritized across our schools is a short list.

Three simple things: reasonably coherent curriculum (what we teach); sound lessons (how we teach); and far more purposeful reading and writing in every discipline, or authentic literacy (integral to both what and how we teach). (p.2)

Basically, Schmoker argues that we don’t need any new initiatives, programs, or technologies to close the achievement gap. We just need to implement a sound and very focused (less is more) curriculum (see Larry Ainsworth’s concept of power standards), be very disciplined in our use of proven instructional strategies (basic good teaching which he reviews, not a fancy new model), and frequent engagement of students with authentic literacy activities (basically reading, writing, and speaking with a purpose, usually argumentative). For the rest of this blog post I’m just going to call these “The Big 3” (D-Wade, LeBron, and Bosh eat your heart out). Schmoker accuses the schools that don’t do “The Big 3” of having students whose attention is too attenuated to build enduring skills, and teachers whose work is too distracted by fad initiatives to provide outstanding “Big 3” lessons every day.

Schmoker puts together a powerful argument for “simplicity, clarity, and priority” which he argues should define all school improvement efforts. (p.12) He weaves together really impressive examples from other books (i.e. Pfeffer & Sutton’s The Knowing-Doing Gap), corporate America (Steve Jobs’ relentless focus at Apple), and a middle school he personally taught at that had a completely common curriculum and a unified and disciplined (yet formulaic) instructional model that achieved outstanding results for kids. He cites studies that assert that deep focus on “The Big 3” could eliminate the achievement gap in the United States in 5-7 years (p.1).

Schmoker also has a little fun arguing that until we have these three elements in place, we should not take on any new strand of program, workshop, or technology. In fact, he argues that any new workshop, training, conference, or book study should come with the following warning:

WARNING: If you or your staff do not already implement a reasonably sound, common curriculum that covers an adequate amount of subject-area content; that is taught with the use of the most essential, well-known elements of effective lessons; and that includes ample amounts of meaningful reading and writing, then please don’t sign up for this. This training will have no effect on learning in your classroom or school. Master the fundamentals first. Then, if you still need this workshop (and you might not), we look forward to seeing you. Have a nice day. (p.14)

The danger of this argument misapplied, of course, is that it could be used as an excuse not to innovate a school’s curriculum or instructional practice in a school system that did not already have “The Big 3” in place. Schmoker’s thesis could then be used as an excuse not to improve.

This, of course, would be a misapplication of Schmoker’s argument.  All of his examples of schools who had adopted this relentless focus on his “Big 3” did so with a dedication that in and of itself would need to be a major “new initiative” in your typical school.  So if a school made fidelity of “The Big 3” its only professional development and PLC focus, and did so with intensive continuous improvement efforts and collaborative reflection, I could agree with Schmoker that bringing in any additional school improvement fad or technology would be doing a disservice to their reform efforts. This would be a bold path to commit too, but he argues it would be extremely effective in accelerating student learning.

After providing the overarching argument for his call to action, Schmoker then outlines the action plan itself in the subsequent chapters. He has a concise chapter on“What” we teach that summarizes the best practices of curriculum design that should be applied to pare down our courses to “tasks that prepare students for college, careers, and citizenship: meaningful reading, writing, speaking, and thinking-around an adequately coherent body of content in the subject areas.” (p. 28) Schmoker also endorses my favorite author on the work that is required for unpacking the Common Core to identify “power standards,” Larry Ainsworth. (p.41) When selecting which standards will be the focus of our pared down curriculum, Schmoker prescribes Doug Reeves’ three metrics of Endurance (will kids need this later), Leverage (will this be valuable in other areas), and Readiness for the Next Level (p.47).

Reassuring to those of us who work in schools that have embraced the Professional Learning Communities model is Schmoker’s recommendation that this work is best done and monitored through a collaborative process in PLC teams. This doesn’t come as a surprise, as DuFour always emphasizes that a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” is a prerequisite to the PLC process, and the first of our four PLC questions is “What do we want students to learn and be able to do?”

Schmoker also outlines the “how” of teaching by providing a primer on what effective teaching should look like. Nothing here is new either, but it still embodies what 95% of the great teachers I have seen work their magic do on a daily basis. Schmoker reviews the key components of good teaching we all hopefully learned as undergraduates: 1. Clear Learning Objectives, 2. Teaching / Modeling, 3. Guided Practice, 4. Checks for Understanding / Formative Assessment. He then outlines specific examples of what this looks like in a typical lesson, an example from Adlai Stevenson high school, and two in depth templates of how these components are implemented with the maximum impact.

Schmoker argues that although these components seem obvious, too many of our typical lessons are poorly built and do not hit on all of these components effectively. He then summarizes research by Dylan William (2007) that makes stark assertions about the impact effective lessons can have. Specifically, he cites the power of effective formative assessment and checks for understanding “would add between 6  and 9 months of additional learning growth per year.” (p.61) This is supportive of evidence Rick Stiggins has collected on the power of formative assessments summarized here in a previous post.

It is these sections of the book that really give you pause as someone passionate about leading positive change in our profession. Rededicating ourselves to supporting teachers in the hard work of delivering extremely sound lessons rife with formative assessment and authentic literacy is a serious commitment. It is also not a commitment that is “new and shiny” like a new packaged reading program or a 1-1 device deployment. After reviewing meta analysis work by Robert Marzano which also reinforces the power of chunking lessons with frequent segments of highly responsive formative assessment, Schmoker acknowledges that his prescription is not necessarily exciting.

Bored yet? Don’t be, despite the fact these elements of instruction are quite familiar. Because the payoff isn’t in knowing these components; the payoff comes from actually doing them. What would happen if we did design and implement this simple universally affirmed structure into our lessons? I’ll say it again: We would make educational history. (p.60)

Schmoker uses the subsequent chapters to go in-depth on what “The Big 3” look like in English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Math. In each chapter, he begins by reviewing the need to reduce standards in that particular curricular area and discusses which type of skills should be emphasized when selecting power standards.

In English Language Arts he recommends tons of writing and assignments that emphasize “simple, redundant literacy” in which we teach vocabulary, establish a purpose for reading, and then lead the students in activities to work with the reading by annotating, discussing, and writing (p.126). Basically, what great English teachers do every day.

He describes social studies courses “with literacy at the core” that make reading the focus of all exploration and debate and utilize a “task, text, talk” approach to assignments where students are given a challenge, use the text to develop an argument, and then discuss the issue in various structures (p.141).

In science, Schmoker also prescribes the “task, text, talk” approach and cites studies that support “effective science inquiry through literacy.” (p.168) More controversially, Schmoker says we could afford to give up many of lab practicums which he claims are often too “cookbook” to make them as good for scientific inquiry as literacy assignments.

In mathematics, he summarizes research on the importance of “extensive practice” in mathematical reasoning, wherein students are asked to express verbally the meaning of the problem and the solution, and then write fluently to explain their reasoning (p.212).

While I agree that we need to replace more poster projects and group PowerPoints with close reading and argumentative writing, I don’t fully endorse all Schmoker’s prescriptions for what “The Big 3” should look like in each area. For example, Schmoker has a penchant for emphasizing literature and long papers in English, whereas I think current research identifies greater leverage in frequent non-fiction and short position papers. In most cases, however, Schmoker’s recommendations are right on and are buttressed by sound research, supportive case studies, and templates that are compelling.

Mike Schmoker would do our fidelity checks because he would challenge us to ensure that we were supporting the most important and most difficult work in our schools (great teaching) as a prerequisite to, and throughout the implementation of, any new initiative. He would constantly challenge us to apply and expect what we already know great teaching looks like, and in the process, accelerate the learning of all of our students.

Next On In A Perfect School . . .               Larry Ainsworth Would Select Our Standards . . .

Reeves, D. B. (2010). Transforming professional development into student results. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Those of you who know me (this blog’s entire readership?) know I got to meet Doug Reeves a couple weeks ago! In honor of this fanboy moment, I have altered the original plan for this month’s post in order to write about another Doug Reeves book, Transforming Professional Development into Student Results (click here to read my earlier post on my favorite Doug Reeves book: Finding Your Leadership Focus: What Matters Most For Student Results).

This book came out when I was two years into my dissertation, which addressed concerns that are central to this book, so when I first read it I found it very affirming. It is a really quick read, as the last 30 pages are the results and rubric from a study establishing a model for Planning, Implementation and Monitoring (PIM) of professional development. In the 110 pages which proceed these appendices, however, Reeves provides a pretty scathing indictment of how most systems attempt to deploy professional learning programs, a summary of research on how to  create high-impact professional learning, and an action plan on how to sustain it. The aforementioned Planning, Implementation and Monitoring (PIM) in the appendix provides the capstone to the book as an outstanding tool to assess how close your school is to best practice in your design and implementation of professional development programs.

Reeves exhibits his characteristic style of summarizing research from other giants in the field (e.g. Tom Guskey, Michael Fullan) interspersed with fun illustrative vignettes from scientific research, history, and fictional scenarios. Throughout, he argues that “High-impact professional learning has three essential characteristics: (1) a focus on student learning, (2) rigorous measurement of adult decisions, and (3) a focus on people and practices, not programs” (p.21).

Reeves exhorts leaders to develop a short list of topics (suggesting several that are high leverage in accelerating student learning) around which to provide deep, sustained professional development activities. He then calls for administrators and teacher leaders to remain disciplined.

First, leaders remain fixated on the fact that student achievement is the criterion for evaluating teaching, the curriculum, and assessment strategies. This is the opposite of consumer-driven professional learning, in which teaching professionals select courses and conferences from catalogs. With relent­less regularity, focused leaders ask the question “Is it working to improve student learning?” Every other leadership decision that they make must be seen through the lens of the effect on student learning. (p.70)

Reeves then charges leaders to design implementation plans for the professional learning that don’t just bring in some guru to do a one-day lecture on a topic. The best schools follow up the guru with the expectation of sustained  “deliberate practice,” the components of which include “performance that is focused on a particular element of the task, expert coaching, feedback, careful and accurate self-assessment, and—this is the key—the opportunity to apply feedback immediately for improved performance” (p.66).

Referencing the “myth of linearity” I discussed in my previous post, Reeves presents research demonstrating professional development only impacts student learning after extensive “deliberate practice” takes place on the part of teachers (30-100 hours over 6-12 months! (p.67) ). He acknowledges that these kind of sustained implementations can seem impossible to those of us in traditional school districts with limited time dedicated to professional learning. However, Reeves challenges us to consider what would be possible if we chose to radically harness the admittedly limited time that we do have.

Although this sort of commitment may sound overwhelming in a time of tight budgets and crammed schedules, trade-offs are possible. What would be the effect on professional learning if you combined the traditional opening-of-school inspirational speech, four district-level staff development days, and 18 biweekly staff meetings—perhaps 48 hours of professional learning—and focused all of them on improved literacy instruction? While your immediate thoughts might migrate to all of the content that teach­ers would miss by forgoing those workshops and meetings, weigh that loss against the power of focus on a single area of improved teaching. To make the comparison more dramatic, stop for a moment and evaluate the effect on learning of the school opening, the one-day workshops, and the staff meetings of last year. What aspects of that content are you applying? What would you have missed by being absent those days? If you were to decide in the months ahead to substitute high-impact learning for meetings, assemblies, and workshops, you may decide that you are not giving up very much after all. (p.67)

Reeves argues that professional development programs should not only be evaluated based on student scores on the next subsequent test after the professional development program takes place, but also on the adult decisions that resulted (or did not result) in sustained deliberate practice on the part of teachers. Do we as administrators and teacher leaders hold ourselves accountable to implementing professional development deeply and not get distracted by “If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Brain Research” syndrome (p.48)?

How can we assess ourselves in relation to these high standards? Well, Reeves provides a tool. In Appendix A, Reeves sites a major study that “makes the essential link by showing that effec­tive assessment of adult learning processes is directly related to improved student learning.” In Appendix B, he then provides the assessment instrument used for the study called the “Planning, Implementation, and Monitoring” (PIM) rubric, currently used in more than 2,000 school plans in the United States and Canada.

It includes the following elements: compre­hensive needs assessment, inquiry process, specific goals, measurable goals, achievable goals, relevant goals, timely goals, targeted research-based strategies, master plan design, professional development focus, pro­fessional development implementation, parental involvement strategies, monitoring plan, monitoring frequency, and evaluation cycle. For each of these elements, the planning, implementation, and monitoring process was assessed on a three-point scale. (p.96)

As a school administrator, I can attest that one glance at the PIM rubric is a pretty humbling experience. It sets a high bar. Here’s a sample of the descriptor on the “professional development implementation” domain. Before you read the descriptor, please note that this describes a school that achieves a TWO on the three-point scale. This isn’t even the top score!

A majority of key initiatives described in action steps are supported by specific professional development and research-based strategies. Professional development support is evident. Examples include time, patient and persistent coaching, mentoring linked with initiatives, and multiple opportunities for training or retraining to support teachers. In a majority of professional development action steps, consideration of adult learning needs and change processes is clearly evident and reflected in time, strategies, and resources (limited initiatives, focused professional development, integrated planning, related support structures, etc.) to sus­tain growth over time. (p.97)

In a perfect school, Doug Reeves would still write our SIP Plan because it would include a short list of professional development topics, carefully chosen to support student learning, implemented through many hours of deliberate practice. The evaluation of the professional development would consist of ongoing assessment not only of student results, but of the decisions made by administrators and teacher leaders to sustain implementation.

Next On In A Perfect School . . .               Mike Schmoker Would Do Our Fidelity Checks . . .

O’Connor, K. (2009). How to Grade for Learning, K-12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

As I discussed in my post on Rick Stiggins, we ultimately need to get away from the industrial age fixation with sorting students. When we do, the report card will become an anachronism. Unfortunately, as I explained in that post, outside pressures will slow our journey to this point no matter how rapidly we seek to reform our conceptions of grading as practitioners concerned with helping all of our students learn.  These pressures include the majority of universities still asking for class rank or relative GPA, parents who want to evaluate their child’s competitiveness in relation to their peers, and students themselves who have been conditioned to the extrinsic feedback loop of norm-referenced grading.

The steep ascent of the climb, however, should not be an excuse to abandon the expedition. School systems across the country, especially at the elementary and middle levels, have increasingly begun to adopt grading practices that intentionally move away from this sorting mission. Instead, they have moved in favor of communication of student mastery with the purpose of accelerating the progress of all students towards skills-based standards, not sorting strata of students in a rank order in relation to their peers. As Ken O’Connor summarizes this charge in How to Grade for Learning, K-12, “as it is virtually impossible to do away with grades, it is necessary to find ways to make grades more meaningful.” (p.23)

Grading doesn’t have to be bad. In fact, grading as effective feedback can be very powerful. In my post on John Hattie’s Visible Learning, I discussed how his research sought to rank order the effect size of different initiatives we focus on in schools to improve student learning. The effect size for student feedback was off the charts (.79), demonstrating that if we can use grading as a form of effective feedback to clearly communicate a student’s progress towards mastering key performance objectives, grading systems can be powerful tools to accelerate student learning.

So grading is a necessary evil at worst, and at its best, not an evil at all. But what does effective grading look like? O’Connor provides extensive research, case studies, self-assessments, and rubrics practitioners can use to implement some key best practices. At a very basic level, effective grading moves our communication to students away from a norm-referenced evaluation to that of a criterion-referenced evaluation. We are comparing students to their progress towards a performance objective, not comparing them to their peers. Secondarily, it is key to select meaningful criteria towards which to evaluate progress, otherwise criterion-referenced systems are just good ways of evaluating progress towards bad goals.

The common core standards, currently in place for Mathematics and English Language Arts, provide excellent performance-based criteria for us to evaluate students’ progress towards. So half of our work is done. O’Connor says that it is important to report student progress and achievement in relation to clearly identified performance standards and “the meaning of grades (letters or numbers) should come from clear descriptions of the standards.” (p.47)

The performance standards should be clearly identified to students and students should be given the chance to practice the types of summative assessments used to assess their achievement before they are asked to demonstrate mastery on that type of assessment for a grade.

Only summative assessments should be used to determine a student’s achievement grade in a course. Formative assessments assigned to monitor student progress or provide students an opportunity to practice should not be included in their grade. Instead, O’Connor recommends we “provide feedback on formative performance using words, rubrics, or checklists, not scores.” (p.247)

The grade a student receives should only be based on their individual achievement in relation to the performance-based standard. Group grades, “as well as effort, participation, attitude, and other behaviors should be reported separately.”(p.247)

Students should be given an opportunity to make-up summative assessments and zeros should never be recorded for missing assessments. Eliminating zeros is not the only change in the math of grading O’Connor calls for. As we transition from the sorting goal of grading, it is important to consider “the body of evidence” testifying to a student’s mastery of an achievement goal. We should seek to “determine” rather than “calculate” a grade, and when math is used the median or the mode is a better metric than the mean. (p.248)

These ideas are not new, but O’Connor does a great job of providing specific research and case studies to bring them to life. Many districts have already moved from norm-referenced grading philosophies that seek to reliably sort students into a bell curve distribution. They have bravely transitioned to criterion-referenced grading systems that seek to move all students towards clearly identified achievement goals, not identify the distance of the interval between a student and their peers. The most common term you will hear used to describe these systems is “standards based grading”, and many districts have adopted these reporting systems in conjunction with a separate “work habits” or “civic responsibility” rubric that allows them to report to parents on the progress of their child’s movement towards positive traits unrelated to academic achievement.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of districts who have moved to standards-based grading are K-8, and the class rank, GPA, and college admissions competition looming at the high school level still has a huge impact on grading systems 9-12. However, this progress at the elementary and middle grades is encouraging. It provides hope that we can soon transition to an entire public education system that values reporting a child’s success in relation to their progress towards valuable knowledge and skills rather then their relative outpacing of their peers.

Next On In A Perfect School . . .               Grant Wiggins Would Be Our Curriculum Specialist . . .

Barr, R., Yates, D. (2009). Turning your school around: A self-guided audit for school improvement. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Barr, R., Yates, D. (2010). The kids left behind: Catching up the underachieving children of poverty. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Robert Barr directs the Center for School Improvement and Policy Studies and Boise State University. If you have seen him speak, you know he lends a powerful voice to his work which focuses on practical strategies to help schools actualize the conviction that we must maintain high expectations for children of poverty. His books bridge the gap between the established belief that we must have high expectations for poor kids (a core belief that a writer like Jonathan Kozol has done a great job compelling us to embrace) and the inevitable next question of We are working as hard as we can, but what can we change about what we are doing to help increase the success of our students from poverty? The gap between believing we can accelerate the learning of poor students and actually taking real next actions to achieving this growth can be daunting. Barr is a great voice for coaching us through this knowing-doing gap.

There are two books Barr wrote along with Debra Yates that together really provide a practical roadmap fro optimizing your school’s efforts to best maintain high expectations for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

In the first book, The Kids Left Behind, Barr and Yates provide a meta-analysis of 18 published studies of diverse types of schools from across the country which identifies “eight specific strategies and practices found in successful high-poverty, high-performing schools” (p.9). I found their analysis compelling in its integration of a data set that was more diverse than previous studies pursuing this same insight into the persistent nationwide achievement gap between poor students and students of means, such as Doug Reeves’ acclaimed but relatively narrow research on 90/90/90 schools. It also buttresses large meta-analyses such as the one I discussed by John Hattie, which demonstrate some factors we can control (such as effective feedback) can have a greater impact on student learning than major outside factors such as poverty which we can only hope to mitigate.

Jarvis, J. (2009). What would Google do?. New York: HarperCollins.

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- Customers are now in charge. They can be heard around the globe and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant.

- The most successful enterprises today are networks-which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible-and the platforms on which those networks are built.

- Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is. (p.1-2*)

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If you replace “customers” with “students” and “success” with “learning” in the above quote you start to get the idea of how revolutionary these ideas will inevitably be in a public high school.

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Jarvis is one of the best communicators of the idea I discussed in last week’s post from Milton Chen that “the lecture is dead”. This will be the first and most obvious impact 1-1 programs will have on high school teachers. I already saw this in my doctorate classes as we all had laptops and could factcheck our professors on the fly. Jarvis explains the new realities of schools succinctly.

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All the world’s digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing.” (p.225*)

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 ”Curating” is a word Jarvis uses a lot in his work. Basically the idea is that information is power, but the trick is no longer in having enough information. Instead the trick is being able to sort through all of the information that is out there and like a museum curator, put that knowledge into some kind of coherent story that can convey meaning, express ideas, and solve problems.

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Put simply, the digital natives in our classroom understand that the concept of the teacher presenting one version of knowledge is an antiquity. They understand that learning is now about curating and utilizing extant knowledge to solve problems. It is no wonder our students often disengage from instruction that focuses on consuming one version of knowledge. They understand the skills they need to be happy and successful are curation and creation.

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This does not mean we should close our schools, give kids a google tablet and trust they will learn everything they need to in time to have a fulfilling life. I still need a job after all! Don’t disintermediate school administrators! We still need schools because the skills of curation and creation are sophisticated and do not develop organically. The internet makes schools as conveyers of knowledge obsolete, but makes schools as developers of curation, creation, and collaboration skills even more essential.

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The last major impact Jarvis identifies for teachers and administrators is the shift towards open curricula learning. The days of each teacher, school, or district having its own unique snowflake of a curriculum for its students will also soon be gone. The common core standards, developed since his book was published, are quickly helping us stop arguing over the “what” of our work.

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The “how” certainly need not be the same in every classroom, as that is where the art of pedagogy takes over. However, the best designed curricula for the courses we teach will soon be a living online document that we should all utilize, edit, and improve. If a U.S. History curriculum written by a district wide team of teachers is better than one written by just me, imagine how good one written by a world wide team of teachers would be!

* Page numbers are from the Google Books E-Edition

Chen, M. (2010). Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The Thinking Edge: “changing our thinking about the enterprise itself” (p.11)
The Curriculum Edge: “transforming what students are taught and how their learning is assessed” (p.35)
The Technology Edge:  putting digital tools in the hands of all students and utilizing them to improve learning (p.87)
The Time/place Edge - “destruction of the old view of education happening within the four walls of the classroom, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.” (p.139)
The Co-Teaching Edge - “teachers, experts, and parents as coeducators” (p.189)
The Youth Edge: Capitalizing on the abilities of “digital learners, carrying change in their pockets” (p.213)

Scriven, M. (1967). The methodology of evaluation. In R. W. Tyler, R. M. Gagné & M. Scriven (Eds.), Perspectives of curriculum evaluation (Vol. 1, pp. 39-83). Chicago, IL: Rand McNally.

Stiggins, R., Arter, J., Chappuis, J., & Chappuis, S. (2011). Classroom assessment for student learning: Doing It right-using it well. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Stiggins, R. (2005). From formative assessment to assessment FOR learning: A path to success in standards-based schools. Phi Delta Kappan. 87(3), 324-328.

So why would the perfect school pay the surely ridiculous fee Rick Stiggins would charge to work for us full-time? Because assessment is far more important now than it ever has been. We should be assessing kids more frequently now than ever before. I’m even willing to use the bad word for it: TESTING ! Sure, we should be testing students more now than ever before. But we should be doing so in a way that provides students frequent clear feedback about how they are progressing towards learning targets that are completely transparent. We should then make this information the focus of our daily instruction, so that students are constantly using the feedback from these assessments to help themselves move towards high expectations.

This kind of assessment is what was originally labeled “formative” by Michael Scriven in 1967 (Scriven, 1967). It is different than “summative” assessment, which is used to judge how a student is doing for some evaluative purpose such as a grade, and is most likely what springs to mind when you think of taking a traditional test. Formative assessment is what we need to be doing more of today. I warned you that this blog would sometimes be self-indulgent, so please allow me to go on a brief self-indulgent rant as to why:

Forty years ago, infrequent summative assessment fit the bill for a United States economy that still had an abundance of career options for high school graduates who never attended any college or vocational training after 12th grade. This economy of 40 years ago even had a good number of career options for students who didn’t graduate high school! There were still good union manufacturing jobs that could provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle, without requiring any kind of coursework after high school.

Very few of these career paths exist in 2011. Our high school graduates need to be college-ready, whether or not they plan to enroll, because any good job they take is going to require college level skills and additional high skill training. Meanwhile, the two most populous nations on the earth have greatly accelerated their educational attainment percentages, while a globalized economy is giving their workers access to jobs that were formally reserved for applicants who lived in the United States.

This current reality dictates that schools in the United States get out of the business of using infrequent summative assessments to sort kids, and into the work of using frequent formative assessments to help move as close to “all” kids as possible to high levels of academic achievement. It is no longer acceptable to be OK with a bell curve distribution of grades, that leads to a bell curve distribution of graduates, that enter a bell curve distribution of career paths – Oh wait, there is no bell curve distribution of career paths!

Now I understand that there is no getting away from the sorting business in the short term. Most colleges still request GPA and class rank. As a result, most parents demand that we sort students, as not doing so would make it more difficult for their child to distinguish themselves as exceptional when competing for scholarships and admission to selective schools. Still, we must commit ourselves to helping all students reach a reasonable set of outcomes that will prepare them for success in today’s world, while still allowing for competition among the students who exceed these core competencies.

OK, enough with the rant on our current reality and back to why formative assessment is so important to meeting the needs of our current reality.

Formative assessment, done well, provides frequent information to teachers about how the students in their class are doing in relation to clear learning targets identified for the course. Formative assessment done extremely well provides frequent constructive feedback to students to help them remain positive and resilient in the face of high expectations. In short, the best formative assessment is used by students and parents as well as teachers.

But allow me to let the man himself explain it to you:

It starts by providing students with a clear, student-friendly vision of the achievement target to be mastered, including models of strong and weak work. These examples reveal to learners where we want them to end up. Then the teacher provides learners with continuous access to descriptive feedback, which consists not merely of grades or scores but also of focused guidance specific to the learning target. Thus a foundation is laid for students to learn to self-assess and set goals. In this way, assessment FOR learning keeps students posted on where they are in relation to where they want be. By teaching students how to improve the quality of their work one dimension at a time and teaching them to monitor their own improvement over time, assessment FOR learning helps them close the gap between where they are now and where we want them to be. (Stiggins, 2005, p.328)

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DuFour, R., DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (2008). Revisiting professional learning communities at work: New insights for improving schools. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Reeves, D. B. (2011). Finding your leadership focus: What matters most for student results. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Reeves, D. B. (2008). Reframing teacher leadership. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

First of all. Worst. Cover. Ever. The cover of Finding Your Leadership Focus: What Matters Most for Student Results (2011) looks like the worst 1982 self-help book you could find in a Reagan era Kroch’s and Brentano’s. It is really a shame, because I think this 150 page handbook should be at the side of every school administrator. I think it may have had a better chance at best seller status if it just had uh . . ., any other cover.

I bought this book after seeing Reeves’ keynote at the 2010 Learning Forward (formerly NSDC) conference in Atlanta. I was at the conference to present a session on implementation strategies for professional development programs. In my session, I summarized by own research on focus being a major challenge for those of us interested in effective, sustained professional development programs for teachers. So maybe I was primed to hear Reeves’ message, but his indictment of wide and thin implementation cut across a broad range of school reform initiatives far beyond my own interest in professional development. It really resonated.

Reeves’ books are great because he does an excellent job of collecting compelling research along with practical ways to reflect on the impact the findings can have on your own practice in the real world. It was Reeves’ summary of Hattie’s work that made me go back and read Visible Learning, which has become foundational for me personally. His books are unrelenting without being polemic. Can polemic be used as an adjective? Good thing none of the three of you are English teachers.

Reeves basically presents a powerful argument against the idea that our public schools are capable of implementing many new initiatives at the same time (Or at least capable of doing so in a way that would improve student learning). He argues that while there are many valuable foci a school could take on to improve student achievement, a successful reform effort must make choices and select a few excellent improvement programs from this list and dedicate itself to implementing these few initiatives deeply.

He recommends that schools not only be very selective about which new reform efforts they take on (see Hattie), but that they be disciplined in an effort to “weed the garden” of current initiatives in order to ameliorate “initiative fatigue”, a term that will resonate with most public school teachers (p.43; p.1).

The awesome thing about Reeves’ work, however, is that he doesn’t just rant about these ideas, but he also provides practical exercises, graphic organizers, self-assessments, and additional resources a school can use to try to practice what he preaches.

One of my favorite exercises he suggests in the book requires only a white board and a marker. He challenges school leaders to make a list of all of the initiatives they have adopted, and then draw a line and list all of the ones they have evaluated and eliminated within the last five years. Anyone in our profession can imagine what the likely distribution of those two lists would look like!

As a practicing school administrator, I can understand what critics might not like about this book. They might say the idea of deeply implementing a few initiatives is naive and unrealistic in a public, comprehensive high school with competing constituencies and demands.

I think Reeves actually answered these critics in an earlier book, Reframing Teacher Leadership (2008). In this earlier work, Reeves compiled extensive research on whether the depth of the implementation of a given reform is correlated with indicators of student achievement. This study found that there was a correlation, but that it was not linear.

In his discussion of the results, Reeves argues that one of the biggest challenges reformers face is “the myth of linearity,” under which educators assume that there is a one-to-one correlation between how deeply an initiative is implemented and how much it impacts student results (p.39). He noted that we too often fall prey to the assumption that minor implementation will equal minor achievement gains and moderate implementation will result in moderate achievement gains. Instead, the study indicated that the impact of implementation is nonlinear and that even moderate gains of student achievement are only realized once a reform has reached an extensive level of implementation.

Doug Reeves would write our School Improvement Plan because the plan would be short. The plan would identify a few powerful things we could work on to improve student learning, and then explain an action plan with goals, names, and due dates. It would also include a plan for monitoring the actions of the adults in charge of implementing the plan to chart their progress and identify ways to support them. The adults in charge of implementing the plan would not be given the excuse inherent in an unrealistically long list of so-called “priorities”.

Next On In A Perfect School . . .               Rick DuFour Would Run Our New Teacher Orientation. . .