Formative Assessment - Part 1 - A Story on Why it Matters

Let me tell you a story from almost 22 years ago. I had been teaching science for a few years when I got hired in a small private school. A week before school started, I got my schedule (this was pre-checking on the internet when you got a printout during teacher week), and it said I was teaching Algebra IB. Since I am a science teacher and not a math teacher, I went to the principal to show her the mistake in my schedule. Her response surprised me.  "If you can teach physics, you can teach Algebra I.  To this day, I don't know if that is true, but it was a small school with a need, and I was game for most things. So I gave it ago.

I looked at the curriculum, and it was mostly things that had steps, graphing quadratic functions, factoring binomial expressions, exponential growth problems, FOIL, and the like.  I decided the best way to go about this was to teach them to follow the steps in the same way one might follow a recipe, and since there were only 9 students in the class, it seemed like a good way to keep them engaged was to do the problems together as a class. "Thanks for doing step 1, Liz. Now, who wants to tell me what to do next."

Math teachers out there, I can feel you cringing.  I know that you are thinking, "This is not how you teach math! They will never learn mathematical thinking that way!"  

Rest assured that I know that.

Now.

I didn't know it then, but remember you are on my side in this story. I didn't know how to teach math and was just doing the best I could.

Anyway, during class, things seemed like they were going well. 

Then, I gave them a test. 

Things were NOT going well. 

One student could do the first step of a problem before getting lost while others didn’t even know how to begin.  I was confused by the differences in their approaches because it seemed like they should be getting stuck in similar places. 

I had been relying on a classroom vibe as measure of how things were going and didn’t have enough math experience to recognize that the scaffolds I provided weren’t leading them to independence. I started analyzing my classroom practice and found the problem.  When we solved problems together in class, we were solving them together as a group.  What had seemed like the best way to engage every student was masking individual deficiencies in understanding. I had fallen into the pitfall of the using the classroom vibe.

Just because a group can solve a problem doesn't mean all of the individuals in the group can.

They could only solve problems together.  It was like an assembly line.  Liz knew how to do step one, which gave Eric just enough momentum to do step two.  Drew could do step three. 

So we all suffered from the Illusion of Competence until they had to do problems on their own without help.

This was my first real life lesson in the need for formative assessment. I realized that I needed to check in with them individually and frequently.  I started giving a problem every day as an exit ticket that they had to solve on their own. I didn't expect them all to do it perfectly, but it let me know where they were.  And we started having a 3 question, low stakes quiz every Friday over what we had done on Monday through Thursday.  

Once I started doing those things, I had a better sense of where each student was with competence in each skill.  Their test grades improved (to be fair they had nowhere to go but up), and we all learned more.

What I did then helped a lot, but I would handle it differently now to get more information during the teaching so I could adapt in real time.

For the next couple of weeks, I will write about how to collect good data in both formal and informal ways so you can be responsive to the students in front of you and avoid being surprised by upsetting tests scores.

Credibility First - Part 2 - Take Your Work Seriously

Imagine this scenario.  

You go to a gym and hire a personal trainer, excited to meet your fitness goals and willing to pay for it. When you arrive, the trainer:

• gives you snacks.
• chats with you about movies and music for 10 minutes. 
• jokes with you throughout the session.
• asks you about your hobbies. 
• About halfway into the session, she hands you a relatively small weight and asks you to do bicep curls but doesn't show you how to do it properly.  
• You do a few with very poor form because you don't know the right way to do it. The poor form is okay with her because "the point is that you do it, not how you do it." 
• She praises you for your effort and says, "Look how strong you are." 

When you leave that session, you may like your new trainer on a personal level, but you will leave feeling that your time and money has been wasted.  You won't be sore the next day, indicating that you didn't challenge any muscles. You won't know any more about fitness when you leave than you did when you entered. And, I'm going to guess that, while you may like your new trainer, you won't respect her work.

You won't achieve your goals, and you won't return to this gym.

Yet, there are people who think this is what classroom teachers should do. Give snacks, make it fun, and build relationships first.  And the result with students is the same as it was in the above scenario. They like the fun and relationship-y teacher, but they don't achieve their goals, and they don't respect the teacher's work.

As a teacher of 25 years, I do understand that relationships matter, but I also understand that they cannot come first.  In fact, adolescents find it kind of creepy when you try to establish a relationship too early. They can sense a scam a mile away, so they know if you are forming a relationship in a manipulative way. After one first day of school, my nephew (who was then in middle school) said, "She's weird. She smiled way too much." For him, her relationships first approach came off as false.

So, please allow me to propose a different model - credibility first.  If you give students confidence that you know what you are doing and will help them achieve, they are more likely to be open to the teacher-student relationship you hope to establish.

Let's revisit the gym. You show up for your personal training session and you:

• notice the trainer has her certifications posted on the wall. This helps you feel confident that she is trained.
• see that she has weights already laid out in a circuit. You know your time won't be wasted and she isn't depending on your to tell her what you should do.
• hear explanations of proper form, explanations of what you should feel as you lift, and feedback on what you are doing in an encouraging and jovial way. This helps you feel confident you could do it later on your own.
• feel challenged throughout the session even though she has a lighthearted manner. You know she is getting the best out of you, and you'll be the good kind of sore tomorrow.
• have a nice chat after the session. You like that she wants to get to know you a little and may feel inclined to share a little more after next week's session.

Do you see the difference? Knowing the trainer takes her work seriously makes you more comfortable with her, not less.

Let me divert to yet another context.  I have been attending a liturgical church for about a year.  For those who don't know, liturgical churches involve a lot of scripted time that is repeated regularly. Every week, we say the creed and the Lords' prayer. Every week, we sing the doxology. There is some call and response (e.g. Officiant: "This is the Word of the Lord" Congregation: "Thanks be to God.") 

Having had little prior experience with that kind of service, I assumed before my first visit that it might be kind of dry. In fact, it has been quite the opposite. Not having to generate my own response to everything has allowed me to notice certain parts of the creed differently in different weeks. 

• Some weeks, it may be "Creator of heaven and earth, all that is, seen and unseen" that sticks with me.  
• Other Sundays, it might be the fact that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate" that my mind dwells on. 
• Replying to an officiant's "Peace be with you" with "and also with you" encourages empathy throughout my week.  
• After communion, we say a post communion prayer.  It includes the line, "And now, send us out to do the work You have given us to do."  Because we say it so often, I look forward to that line and think about it throughout the week.  

This is is so far from a dry recitation; it buries words deep within me in a way that only repetition can. And it happens because the clergy take their work very seriously.  This is never more obvious to me than when they prepare and administer communion.  During the offering, one of the ministers lays out the wafer plates and pours the wine and water into several goblets. They each do it a bit differently, but they all do it with care.  It's clear that it is a responsibility they don't undertake lightly.  Lest you think this means they are stone faced about it, let me assure you that watching them administer communion is one of the highlights of my week because they do it with such joy. They look the congregant directly in the eye as they hand them the wafer, saying, "Take this in remembrance that Christ died for you." They know my name, so I get a very personal, "Beth, take this in remembrance that Christ died for you." They pray for and fist bump small children who are not yet taking communion, and those kids walk away knowing someone cares for their spiritual health and also enjoys their presence in the church.  As I described watching my pastor during communion to a friend, "I love watching his joy during communion.  It's like he just can't believe this is part of his job."

I said all of that to say this.  Credibility first isn't sour and joyless.  You can show your care, your passion, and your knowledge of content simultaneously. And this will attract students to your work. You will still end up with relationships if you don't make them first.  You may never establish credibility if you do.

What does this look like in the classroom?  I imagine there are a number of ways it could look, depending on your context, but I'll tell you what I did in mine:

• I started the first day by telling students why I went into education, what degree I had (diploma posted on the wall next to my teaching certificate), and my years of experience. I said, "I'm not bragging; I just want you to know you are in good hands.")
• I gave them an outline of the year, so they knew I had a plan from the start.
• I assigned seats in rows. I know that is a controversial one, and I'm not saying you have to do it. For me, it communicated from the start that there was someone in charge and that I was the person to whom they should pay attention.
• I promised that, while not everything would be fun, everything would be worthwhile.  I made it fun where I could, of course, and I had an amiable classroom demeanor, but I made it clear that fun wasn't the goal; learning was.
• We established some procedures and routines that I assured them would make things run more smoothly.
• I meant what I said. There were never false promises or empty threats.
• I explained my reasons for what I was doing whenever possible.
• I laughed at myself when I made mistakes. Taking your work seriously doesn't have to mean taking yourself too seriously.
• When I screwed up, I did everything I could to make it right for my kids.
• If I got through all of the planned things with a few minutes left, it was only then that I chatted with them about hobbies or pets. I also used lunch duty, morning door duty, and after school interactions for those kinds of conversations.  I attended sporting events and concerts and plays to show that I cared about their extracurricular interests. 

I assure you, most of my students felt we had a friendly relationship. I just didn't start there.  

When I left at the end of last year, I got a lot of lovely notes and emails from colleagues and parents and students, but the one that touched me the most was an email that came from a former student. I can't make a better point about credibility first than she did, so I'll end this post with the opening line of her email. 

"I want to thank you for quite literally changing my life. You were the first teacher to take my grades seriously and helped me when I needed it." 

Credibility First - Part 1 - Why it Matters

Warning: This post ended up a little angrier in tone than I intended.  So let me start with this.  I know that those who believe in "Relationships First" are well intended and loving.  This post is meant to address the outcome of the belief, not the heart that causes you to believe it.  Second, I had great relationships with thousands of students.  I'm not saying that they don't matter.  I'm making the case for why they are not first and cannot be built in isolation from doing your job of content teaching.  With that out of the way, my rant:

Stay part of EduTwitter for longer than a few minutes, particularly at the start of a new semester, and you will eventually find the "relationships first" people.   

• Kids bouncing off the walls? The answer certainly isn't to implement your school's discipline policy. Clearly, you didn't spend proper time building relationships. 
• Student playing on their phone rather than paying attention? It isn't because billions of dollars have been spent making their phones addictive. It's because you would be more engaging for students if you took less time teaching at the beginning of the semester and more time building realationships.
• A student isn't making a good grade. That's obviously not from lack of study time or ineffective study techniques (or even improper teaching techniques). They aren't learning because you didn't spend the first two weeks of the semester building relationships and "kids only learn from people they like." 

There's never any practical advice about how to build a relationship or evidence offered for the notion that they can't learn from you if they don't like you (despite centuries of experience to the contrary). They sell the idea that relationships are the golden key that unlocks all doors, and you should spend all of your class time doing that before you do anything else.  I actually read a tweet suggesting that you should teach no content for the first two weeks and spend all of that time on relationships.

This leads to weeks of time spent on games.  Icebreakers, getting to know you activities, team building exercises, and lots of chatting - all in the assumption that the time spent doing this is an investment that will pay off later because they will learn better and behave better once they "know how much you care." When you visit their classrooms later in the year, it turns out that it just isn't true.  There is a lot of relationshipping going on, but there is little learning and lots of poor behavior. There was a teacher across the hall from me years ago that playing hackysack with his students for 20 minutes 3-4 days a week well into the year.  It was so loud that I had a hard time teaching.  I asked him one day when he taught his content, and he said, "I usually get in 15 minutes, but I want to make sure they know I love them."

I'll talk next week about what I think the right way is, but I wanted to set up the problem with this approach first.  The problem is that it does not actually communicate that you love them; it communicates that you don't value their time or learning.  I know because:

• They come to my room and talk smack about you behind your back, using phrases like "thinks he's cool" and "tries too hard to be like us."
• They tell me about their lack of appreciation for you as a teacher and the non-academic atmosphere you have created because they call your class "a waste of time."  
• If I need a student to make up a test, yours is the class they know it's okay to leave.  They say, "Yeah, we never learn anything in there.  We can do whatever we want." 

Another problem:  Substitute teachers don't have relationships with the students in front of them, and you have sent the message to your students that they don't have to behave properly with anyone they haven't bonded with.  

The biggest problem.  You have students who genuinely want to learn, and you spend a lot of time not teaching them.  There are nerds like me, but there are also kids from low income backgrounds who know that education is their only way up.  The students who can afford tutors usually end up okay because they pay someone to do the teaching you aren't doing while you build relationships, but the ones who can't afford that are left to fend for themselves. And the relationship you have with them does nothing but widen the opportunity gap.

I know your intent is loving when you say "Relationships First," but in reality, it just isn't helpful.  For kids, it comes off a little creepy when they don't know you at all, and you are digging into their personal lives on day 1 of the school year.  Next week, I'm going to suggest an alternative.  

Credibility First

Establishing your credibility will give kids a reason to want a relationship with you, help them know you value their time and take your job seriously, and ultimately result in better behavior and more learning.  I'll give you practical examples of how to build credibility from day 1.  See you next week.

Learning From Defeat

This week, my friend and I went to see an exhibit about the works of Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strips.  There were many quotes from Schultz himself to explain his vision behind each character or his method, and one right at the beginning stood out to me. He thought failure was funnier than success, so he made the characters lose at everything they did.  He said,

"The Peanuts is a chronicle of defeat.  All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; the football is always pulled away."

My first thoughts when I read this were that:

• We love the Peanuts characters and their stories because we can all identify with failure.  
• Current children's media is just the opposite. We try to make kids believe they will always be victorious with enough trying.

Then, I remembered an interview I once heard with Lemony Snicket, author of the Series of Unfortunate Events, a hilarious series of books in which orphaned children are sent from horrible relative to horrible relative while their evil uncle is out to kill them for their inheritance, and the one time they find a good caretaker, he is killed by the bite of a snake.  (I promise the books are funny and not at all scary for children in spite of this plot line - such is the genius of Lemony Snicket.). In the interview, he referenced that the popularity of his first few books rose in the months after September 11th.  Children were asked why they liked the stories, and they said, "Adults keep telling us everything is going to be fine, but we know that's not true.  We like that he tells the truth."

And here's the truth.

• Life is hard (but there are joyful times in it).
• Some people are more talented than you are at some things (which is okay because you are more talented than they are something else).
• You will have bad hair days (and sometimes they are on school picture day).
• You will fail a test (which is why your grade is an average and not based on only one thing).
• Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the other team wins (or the other guy gets the job you want or the man you love loves someone else or you don't get into your first choice college).

Yesterday, I overheard a conversation between two coaches.  They were having trouble with the parents of two of their athletes (not the athletes themselves).  These parents were insistent that their sons must compete in a competition for which they had not qualified because, without it, they would not make the special elite team.  The coaches were also talking about their own past, when they didn't make the team they wanted and how much they learned from it.  They wished they could communicate that to the athletes, but their parents were preventing them from having that conversation.  As I overheard this, I was reminded of a student's parent I once dealt with who worked herself into all kinds of anxiety, the kind that makes you email a teacher at 3AM, because her daughter couldn't get into honors biology at her new school of her grade in my class dropped by one point.  Both sets of well meaning parents were hanging all of their hopes for their children on ONE event.  That's a lot of pressure for a fourteen year old, the belief that God's plan for them will be derailed by one sporting event or high school class.  

But here's another truth:

• You learn more from failure than you do from success.
• Character is built from learning to be gracious when you win AND when you lose.
• Your life will take a lot of turns that you cannot foresee in middle school.
• It is only in exceedingly rare cases that failure results in death.  (Most of the time, you just feel sad for a few days while you figure out where to go from here.)

Parents and teachers, I know it is hard to see kids hurting.  It's natural to want to fix it for them. But tears dry and hearts heal with time and perspective.  The lessons they learn are far more lasting.  How many times have you looked back and been grateful that you didn't get what you thought you wanted?  How many times have you looked back on a lost job and been glad you have a different job?  

I know this seems counterintuitive, but kids will actually have less anxiety if we let them fail sometimes.  It will teach them resilience - that they don't have to be afraid of failure because they lived through it last time.  It will teach them to show class - another way to be successful.  It will teach them not to find winning mundane - and savor the times they do win.

This leads me to a quote from another artist whose work I've recently seen exhibited, the great Bob Ross.

"You can't see the light without the dark."