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Archive for the ‘Assessment’ Category

Our Four Big Boxes for Professional Learning

Posted in Assessment, Personalized Learning, Professional Development, SD45, Social Media, tagged , , on December 10, 2010| 4 Comments »

 

The question most often asked in education is “where are we going?”  It should be such a simple question – but the answer is actually very complex. One challenge is, when you try to do everything, you may end up doing nothing well. And then, when you select a few areas on which to focus, people may feel they are being excluded.

In West Vancouver, I have presented on four major areas of professional focus. While we will always have content, and need to be well-versed in changes and updates, we are focusing less on the “what” and more on the “how” and “why”.   With that in mind, here are our four, big boxes for professional learning which the district guides and supports:

Strong assessment practices:

At its core, our work around assessment is similar to that in almost all jurisdictions — a focus on formative assessment.  We are now in our fourth year of supporting teachers around Understanding by Design (UbD).  I have described this as one of the least-sexy professional development activities we do.  It is hard work, time-consuming and for those who commit to it, a fundamental change in practice.  We are lucky to have our own UbD guru, Sue Elliot, to lead these sessions.  Beyond UbD, our work in assessment is largely teacher and school-based.  The Network of Performance Based Schools has been an encouragement for assessment projects, for many of our teachers — notably, a group of teachers from Rockridge Secondary, who have had their work highlighted around the province, and have also taken their presentation to China.  Assessment is also the core of collaborative time at our schools, including some excellent work at West Vancouver Secondary.  Of the four boxes, assessment is likely the one we have spent the most time in over the last three years.

Instructional expertise:

If assessment is the box we have spent the most time in over the last three years, instructional expertise is the area where our time commitment has diminished.  Particularly, when it comes to issues of classroom management, this is an area that can really help.  As we have focussed on backward’s design (for very good reasons) for our lessons and units, we have placed a lesser emphasis on professional development around instruction.  Throughout B.C. you can hear comments like, “We have already done Barrie Bennett.”  We know there are some strategies which work better than others, and we need to come back to them.  Robert Marzano has a great list (here) covering high-yield strategies.

Child development expertise:

This is an area of focus that likely would not have made the list only three or four years ago.  With the implementation of Full Day Kindergarten and StrongStart Centres, there is a clear policy move in this area. There is also mounting research about the key role the early years play in setting up children for the rest of their life.  We have become versed in the Early Development Instrument (EDI) and are working with our local preschools in new ways we would never have considered five years ago.  This spring we will welcome Dr. Fraser Mustard to West Vancouver for a Community Forum focussed in this area.

21st century learning

I don’t love the title — it feels dated and cliché.  From a district perspective, this is largely connected to digital literacy supporting teachers with the skills to have students create blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other spaces that promote skills like critical thinking, collaboration and creativity (see here for a full list of “the 8 Cs”).

This is not a surprising list.  It is probably very similar in most progressive jurisdictions around the world.  As we talk about it more, hopefully, it will help to create a framework for our work as professionals.  I have written previously (here)  about our wonderful model in West Vancouver, balancing the importance of individual, school and district professional learning.

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Our World Cup – PISA 2009

Posted in Assessment, Change, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2010| 17 Comments »

Today marks the release of the PISA 2009 assessment results.  And just what is PISA:

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment that was jointly developed by participating economies and administered to 15-year-olds in schools.

Tests are typically administered to between 4,500 and 10,000 students in each country.

And just what does PISA look at?

PISA assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society. In all cycles, the domains of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy are covered not merely in terms of mastery of the school curriculum, but in terms of important knowledge and skills needed in adult life.

PISA, has absolutely become the World Cup of education excellence.  Over the last three years I have spoken to, hosted, and toured groups from around the world who specifically came to British Columbia to understand our high results.  Of course, the interest in Finland can also be traced directly to these assessments.  Finland has become education’s equivalent of soccer’s Brazil.

On the previously released results, Canada, and in particular Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, have performed among the very top performing jurisdictions in the world alongside Finland, Hong Kong and Korea (here is a summary of 2006 results).  Since education is under provincial jurisdiction in Canada, our results are further  broken out by province, while other jurisdictions are typically by country.  The PISA results are the often used antidote against those who question the quality of education in British Columbia and Canada.  We have a system looking to improve, but we are improving from a place of strength, and envy from around the world.

Today is announcement day.  There is a lot to dig into beyond the headlines, but my quick read indicates:

  • Korea and Finland are the top performing OECD countries, but Shanghai-China (a first time participant) outperforms them by a significant margin
  • Girls outperform boys in reading in every participating country
  • Canadian students continue to be near the top of OECD countries
  • British Columbia students perform above Canadian averages
  • Since 2000, British Columbia results have improved in science and declined in math and reading

From the OECD Press Release this morning, here are a few more key items they highlight:

• The best school systems were the most equitable — students do well regardless of their socio-economic background. However, schools that select students based on ability, show the greatest differences in performance by socio-economic background.
• High-performing school systems tend to prioritize teacher pay over smaller class sizes.
• Countries where students repeat grades more often tend to have worse results overall, with the widest gaps between children from poor and better-off families. Making students repeat years is most common in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain.
• High-performing systems allow schools to design curricula and establish assessment policies, but don’t necessarily allow competition for students.
• Schools with good discipline and better student-teacher relations, achieve better reading results.
• Public and private schools achieve similar results, after taking account of their home backgrounds.
• Combining local autonomy and effective accountability seems to produce the best results.
• The percentage of students who said they read for pleasure dropped from 69% in 2000, to 64% in 2009.

There is much more to dissect, and there is a lot of excellent data produced going deeper into the rankings, which will garner much of the attention.  PISA 2009 results are available here and the Executive Summary (a very good read) is available here.  Ontario has also released a summary of its results including a series of tables listing all Canadian provinces available here.

As the results are further examined, there is a lot to consider when looking at jurisdictions that have undergone major reform initiatives, and how this has translated into results.  A quick read indicates Ontario will likely be getting a lot of attention for its efforts in coming days.

Update: This link (here) is a summary of the results from Stats Canada.

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Thinking About Change

Posted in Assessment, Change, Personalized Learning, tagged , , , on October 8, 2010| 12 Comments »

With all the discussions swirling around personalized learning, and school reform, I have been thinking a lot about change, and how we do it right.

I found a recent  “Management Tip of the Day” from the Harvard Business Review on 3 Ways to Quietly Promote Change — very reassuring and instructive as we look at our work around teaching and learning in West Vancouver:

  1. Model the change. Demonstrate the way you want things to change through your own language and behaviour. Often, seeing a leader do something first gives people the courage to try it themselves.
  2. Turn negatives into positives. Find ways to reframe people’s resistance as opportunities for change. This requires that you listen carefully, understand the underlying reasons for the opposition, and address them directly.
  3. Find allies. Chances are someone else in the organization wants the change as badly as you do. Find that person and pool your resources and ideas.

This fall, I have been amazed and impressed with the energy in our district around personalized learning and how teachers are using technology to support it in their classrooms.  While it has taken many forms, and actually very few use the term “personalized learning” and opt instead for differentiated instruction, grouping for learning, inquiry-based learning, among a host of other terms, we have profound examples of teachers feeling they have “permission” to experiment and be creative, and students owning their learning in new ways.

Of course, this is not a race.

Earlier this week, we spent some time with all our principals and vice-principals looking at our successes and challenges during the first month, as well as what we want to do during the next 90 days, with personalized learning and using technology.

One theme constantly emerged: the need to continue to focus on learning goals and then, if appropriate, see how technology can support them.  We also discussed the opportunities and challenges of students publishing for a public audience, and how we work with students and parents as we do this in an authentic and secure way.

The discussions we are having may be about schedules, content or technology, but almost all of them come back to being about change – schooling looking different for students than it did for their parents; schooling looking different for staff than it did when they were students.

Our commitment for the next 90 days is around providing more support to teachers around pedagogy and technology, to build greater capacity at each school, and to continue to invite participation from students, staff and parents on this journey.  We all agree that education is changing, and there are some amazing examples in our district of what is possible, right now.

There is not one right answer, and to finish this where I started, it is not a race.

For more on personalized learning, here is an earlier post referencing a presentation I first shared last June on:  Teaching, Learning, Technology and Personalization

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What We Assess and What We Value

Posted in Assessment, SD45, tagged , , , , , on September 30, 2010| 1 Comment »

If you want to open up a contentious conversation with any group of teachers, or the public at large, engage people in the topic of whether late work, or plagiarized work should factor into a high school student’s mark.

Since the start of the school year both Ontario and Saskatchewan have waded into this debate.  Earlier this week the focus was on Saskatoon:

Saskatoon’s public high school students will no longer be penalized for plagiarism or for turning in assignments late under a new evaluation method for report cards.

Last month, the focus was on Ontario, which had been seen on the leading-edge of separating assessment from work habits, and made the following adjustment:

New guidelines from the Ontario Ministry of Education will allow secondary school teachers to give students a grade of zero if they fail to hand in assignments on time — something teachers have been discouraged from doing in the past.

Regardless of which direction jurisdictions follow in the debate, the discussion is very entrenched.  On the one side, there are those who point to the need to separate students performance related to a set of outcomes from their behaviours (including whether assignments are in on time or whether they copied some of the work).  On the other side, are those looking for students to be real-world ready, where there are deadlines and consequences.

We do often equate the information we use to determine grades as being synonymous for what we value.  If we don’t include behaviours like participation, timeliness of work, or academic honesty, how do we show they are important?

There are a number of leaders in this field.   Ken O’Connor is a regular presenter in many British Columbia districts and says:

I continue to support the idea of not giving zeros, late penalty mark exclusion, and failing to provide extra credit opportunities that count for grades because they are educationally undesirable practices.

O’Connor, along with Damion Cooper (another sought after presenter in B.C.), are co-authors of the Communicating Student Learning – Guidelines for Schools in Manitoba.  It is interesting to see that in line with the Ontario discussion, some of the same discussions are happening in Manitoba.

Student understanding of the importance of deadlines, guidelines giving proper credit when others’ work is shared, amongst a host of other work-ethic habits, are very important.  As a parent, I want feedback not only on my children’s progress in relation to the outcomes of any given course, but their growth in a host of very important behaviours, as well.

I just don’t want the two mixed up, so that I can’t understand where the assessment of learning ends, and where their development of work habits begin.

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Teaching, Learning, Technology and Personalization

Posted in Assessment, Change, Personalized Learning, Professional Development, SD45, Technology, tagged , , , on September 9, 2010| 2 Comments »

Teaching, Learing, Technology and Personalization is a presentation I first gave this past June for our West Vancouver Administrators Association, and have since used with several other groups.  It was my first effort to try to pull together some of the ideas about “21st century learning” and “personalized learning” which  have become the great buzz words in our profession.

This summer at the BCSSA Summer Leadership Academy, Superintendent of Achievement Rod Allen, and Deputy Minister of Education James Gorman shared an update from the BC Ministry of Education on their learning agenda, which outlined a system that was clearly focussed on increased personalization.

This presentation, in turn, has given some new life to my presentation from June.  This past week, Vancouver Sun Education Reporter, Janet Steffanhagen, Vancouver Board of Education Chair Patti Bacchus and others have shared my presentation on Twitter.    After sitting quietly for the summer, several days this past week the site has had over 100 visitors.

The wiki is quite dense and worthy of several separate blog posts but I am thrilled that it might help spark conversations about the future of schooling in B.C.

I have heard it described we have a once in a generation chance to look at education in our province.  We need to have lots of discussion to make sure we 1) don’t miss a great opportunity and 2) get it right.

While I am not as excited by it as some, this video from New Brunswick’s Department of Education, which is part of the wiki, seems to be generating a lot of enthusiasm:

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