Systems for TOTAL PERSONALIZED LEARNING
We work in schools because we care, and nothing is ever good enough. But this unyielding urgency to more and more can backfire when new initiatives are shoehorned into schools every September, often without adequate attention paid to modifying existing structures to accommodate the new. Decades’ worth of unrelated initiatives–often implemented by different leaders with different vision at different times–continue to function independent of one another, competing in philosophy and for resources, drowning the team in inefficiencies. Like an orchestra without a conductor, and every instrument now playing different tunes, schools eager to make change before making sense end up producing nothing but expensive noise.
Our school was a traditional good school that delivered traditionally decent results year after year. The students who tend to do well did well, and the students who struggled did not. Our overall school-wide achievement data was fine, but we were almost last place in our effectiveness at closing the gap for our lowest third. The school valued consistency, and doing the same things each year meant there was little chance for mishaps or any dips in performance. But that also meant it was going to be impossible for better outcomes for those who needed it.
The organizational hierarchy of the school itself was perfectly designed for consistency; decisions were made by those at the top of the triangular to meet the needs of those at the bottom: children. In every school, how teachers teach will always parallel the approach of the way its leaders lead. Flexible, student-centered instruction that can bend itself to best meet the needs of both student and the specific learning target was what our lowest performing students needed, and it was a the kind of instruction that was impossible to implement in an environment that relied on rules and conformity in producing the desired student outcomes.
To realize our vision to cultivate students who would “Think for Yourself; Care for Others”, we created a comprehensive 3-year plan by writing the annual plans for the next three years at the same time. Culture and results don’t change by making demands, and we laid out a detailed plan to enact a range of new policies, protocols, and practices that worked with one another to create a learning environment that incentivizes independent thinking and voice, prioritizes compassion over scores, and rewarded “learned-fearlessness” instead of compliance.
I. Departmentalizing Elementary Grades in STEM and Humanities
One teacher teaching all subjects, to one group of students, isolated all day in one classroom, never made much sense; it’s a structure borne of convenience that reliably overwhelms teachers, and implicitly push teachers to do more, not better. Transformative change cannot take place when teachers lack even the space and time to think, never mind grow. When we ask teachers to ensure the wellness of over 30 students on top of planning and teaching five lessons a day, we are also trapping them in conditions perfectly designed for mediocrity.
Departmentalization allows our teachers to focus on delivering just one great lesson per day, and to receive targeted coaching in content teams that offer a space to reflect and share practices. The increased focus in pedagogy demonstrate greater respect for the profession, encourage stronger teacher ownership, deepen adult learning, and finally offer the time and resources necessary for teachers to tackle the most demanding and most fulfilling ways to teach.
Our STEM program combines Go Math!, Seeds of Science, and Elementary is Engineering to deliver the most engaging way to teach Math and Science concepts–using mastery-based practices for the standards that call for it, and project-based/inquiry instruction for the rest.
Our Humanities program infuse culturally-responsive and anti-racist content such as Young People’s History of the United States into TC Reader’s and Writers curriculum, and offer an abundance of opportunity for students to author essays and pieces to share with the world, and not just the teacher, as audience.
II. Focus on Student Thinking
Poor instruction will always be the outcome when there is no clear, unmistakable through-line between curricula, instructional coaching, classroom expectations, and teacher evaluations. Thinking is our through-line. Our curriculum is designed to push learning through thinking, and teachers receives coaching on practices that surface, measure, and respond to student thinking. Classroom expectations and policies support the implementation of these practices, and when they do, teachers receive high marks on evaluations. When systems make sense, the job makes sense.
Our focus on student thinking makes sense too. Traditional lesson objectives identifies student actions or deliverable with the assumption that thinking and learning have taken place. But a student who imagines someone gluing two halves of a snickers bar, despite not performing a single observable task in the classroom, is more likely to develop initial conceptual understanding of fractions than another student who was told to write 1/2 +1/2 =2/2 twent times.
Teachers must develop all student activities, teaching points, expected student outcomes, and assessments in service of a generating a specific piece of student thinking at just the right level of complexity for that “A-Ha!” moment. For example, to understand how geography impacts development, our students are not asked to complete a T-Chart comparing and contrasting the people and culture of two places. Instead, we build lessons around a central “Thinking Generator”: “If Texas were on a coast and New York shared a boarder with Mexico, which states’ residents would favor which political party, Democrat or Republican?”
EXPLORE: How to Plan a Math Thinking Lesson
III. Mastery-Based intervention, FOR ALL
When we assign special “intervention” to students who were unable to successfully acquire the intended learning the first time around, the implicit message is clear: “normal” students are supposed to get it on the first try, and those who don’t are outliers who need something else. We don’t buy that: we really do believe that rigorous and meaningful learning, by definition, almost always require repeated attempts, for everyone. Not getting it the first time is normal.
Our Total Personalized Learning program includes two periods per week for where all students from the grade are re-grouped not by homerooms but by skill gaps and need. This process is facilitated by an interventionist–we have one per grade level–who tracks individual student mastery on priority standards, and design different stations each week during a common flex period where cluster, teachers, content area teachers and instructional assistants come all support to deliver personalized learning opportunities. Those who need mastery-based practice do so on iPads in one room, while others who need time with their groups to explore ideas and complete projects do so in another room. Teachers who want to pull small-groups are able to do so as well while other adults each supervise a flexible group, and we keep working with students on the same standard–trying something new each week if necessary–until they’ve mastered it.
We don’t expect students to “get” it the first time, but we also don’t accept any students not getting it. By deliberately designing systems demanding adult thinking, reflection, and nimbleness in planning, grouping, and teaching, we create an adaptive adult culture where we are unfazed by problems and issues, and respond by working together to solve them.
IV. REORGANIZING STAFF STRUCTURE TO TEACH AND REACH
All students have the capacity learn, but not all students come to school each day willing or ready to learn. And so we created a team of teachers whose focus is not to teach, but to reach those who might not be willing and/or ready to learn, and find out why. Our School Climate Team include social workers, guidance counselors, and adults from every grade, and works closely with grade level teachers to reach each and every student who appear unwilling to learn, or feel they have a more important priority than learning. Our team then do whatever it takes to work with families to address these issues quickly and appropriately, until the child can once again focus on learning when they come to school.
The readiness to learn is independent of both the willingness and the capacity to learn. Our SCT team, in addition to making sure students are willing to learn, also teach students to support their readiness to learn. The two core instructional imperatives of the SCT are 1) help students develop capacity to recognize and manage their emotions to promote positive outcomes (when accused of something you didn’t do, do you lash out and start yelling? Or do you respectfully ask the accuser for evidence and gently suggest that a mistake was made?) and:
2) monitor and quickly respond to the emotional climate of our students. Which students are having a hard time emotionally? Who needs a reminder on how to not let negative emotions consume them? How can we make sure all students are emotionally ready to learn?
No matter how often we repeat platitudes such as “All children can learn”, schools that don’t attend to student readiness and willingness to learn always plan intervention that presumes students can’t learn.
We know differently. So our Total Personalized Learning focus of student willingness and readiness to learn, and never capacity.
LEARN MORE:
A Case Study in School Transformation (The New 102)
A Word on Change Leadership
Change that doesn’t make sense isn’t change; it’s increasing workload. But if the changes made sense to the people already in the organization, it wouldn’t have needed the change in the first place. You can’t change practice without changing minds, and you can’t change minds without having in hand positive results from changed practice. And often the most important moves are the ones that won’t make much sense to the team until enough of the smaller shifts have successfully taken place. That’s why change leadership is so hard in schools: it’s much more than just coming up with a great plan that contradicts existing beliefs and practices; and it’s much, much more than people-pleasing and acquiescing to unsatisfactory practice in the name of managing culture.
Change leadership is servant leadership. It’s about the enduring commitment to the long-term vision, while being able to anticipate both ups and downs accurately so each can function as catalysts for the next shift. It’s understanding the context and team so deeply and with such empathy that things not in control would not lead to the overall project being out of control.
The capacity to execute change and attend to all of its complexities is one-half the equation. The other half is trust; no one would would risk investing in change without knowing where it would lead. We earn trust by being congruent in all the things we say and do, we earn trust by anchoring all decisions based on the values that motivated the change in the first place. We hire for attitude and reward the willingness to take risk and learn; we create policies and practices that respect teachers as artisans, allowing time for self-guided thinking and reflection; we set appropriate and clear expectations for team autonomy and accountability in service of nimbleness, and we routinely monitored for the unmistakable through-line that connected our beliefs to vision to curriculum to coaching to evaluation to assessments to schedules.
Think for Yourself; Care for Others. It’s what we do.
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