Inspiring Teachers to Design Powerful Learning Experiences with the CCLS

November 9, 2011 – 9:00 pm

Perhaps you’re more than little bit invested in the idea of increasing job satisfaction for yourself and for those that you work with even as you’re Racing to the Top. Perhaps you can appreciate the importance of starting with vision, of thinking bigger (and smaller) than the CCLS, and of honoring the distinction between evaluation and assessment throughout every phase of this work. Perhaps you understand that this is not the time to simply get stuff done in order to meet the demands of yet another mandate. Perhaps you have a hunch that if reform is going to happen, it’s going to begin with kids and with teachers and with administrators and yes, with parents too. Maybe you’d like it to emerge not from fear but from the collective passion, intelligence, and talent that all of these incredible people can bring to this system….if we let them.

Does this sound like you? Then we have a lot in common. I’d really love to know more about how these realizations inform your planning and your work with others.

Over the last six months, I’ve begun helping teachers from a variety of districts design units and plans that are aligned to the CCLS. I’ve tapped into their vision of the graduate they hope to produce and the teacher they long to become at the outset, and I’ve also invited them to begin these processes by considering questions like these:

  • What are your students longing to learn?
  • What engages them?
  • What do they need?
  • How could you design an incredibly meaningful learning experience for them in a way that will leave you feeling energized and enthusiastic about your work and the difference that you make for kids?
  • How could you position yourself as a learner within this process as well?
  • What are you excited to teach?
  • How would you love to teach it?
  • What’s stopping you from doing any of that?

Then I tell them to go right ahead and do exactly what they dream of doing–I invite them to design a unit or a lesson that truly inspires them and to do it in a way that will empower their kids.

Teachers don’t need to start with standards in order to accomplish this anymore than writers need a lesson on grammar or mechanics when they set out to write something that will set the world on fire. Over the years, I’ve found that starting with standards creates a bit of tunnel vision.

We all know that people don’t become teachers for the money, the prestige, or the (diminishing) amount of time that some of them have off each summer. They become teachers because they love learning, they want to inspire kids to love learning, and often, they have significant expertise about their content area to share. Teachers know more than enough about the conventions of unit or lesson design and standards to begin, and like writers, their work is more inspired if they begin with idea development first.

Voice.

Heart.

I begin unit and lesson design by giving these professionals the permission that they think they need to design powerful learning experiences for kids. Why do they think they need it? Well, I have a hunch that it’s because so many people keep suggesting that they do.

Once teachers have finished designing a unit that is aligned to their vision and to the needs of their students, we visit the standards document and identify those that are most relevant to their work. We unwrap them, and in the process, we often learn a great deal about where and even how we might enrich rigor or relevance. We consider how we could differentiate instruction. We think about what the standard says explicitly and what it implies.We adjust our units in response, and we adjust our perspectives about what might be possible, too.

We use the standards in service to our far, far greater vision.

We also give similar attention to the six instructional shifts that David Coleman speaks to and to the 21st Century skills, literacies, and fluencies that Silvia Tolisano speaks to so well here (thank you again, Silvia).

Each time I’ve approached curriculum design in this way, 95-100% of the total population of teachers that I am working with report that they agree or strongly agree with each of the following statements (via anonymous electronic survey):

      • This work is challenging me to grow my professional expertise.
      • I am feeling energized by my work and enthusiastic about the curriculum I am designing.
      • I feel that this work allows me to be creative.
      • I am approaching my work in a way that is mindful of the standards, my vision, and the difference I hope to make for learners.
      • This work is increasing my confidence and my levels of job satisfaction.

Sometimes, for varied reasons, I haven’t been able to work in these ways though.When this has been the case, responses have been different, so I think I may be on to something here……

These are some of my processes. Next week, I’ll talk more about the products that are emerging from them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aligning to the Indicators of our Vision

November 8, 2011 – 7:41 am

Since last spring, I’ve had the opportunity to ask well over 1000 educators what their vision is for the graduate they hope to produce. I’ve asked them what their vision is of the professional they hope to become as well.

The answers I’ve received have been varied of course, but these are some of the things I’ve heard over and over and over again:

We want our students to be inquisitive about the world and about themselves.

We want them to persevere.

We want them to know what matters to them, what brings them happiness, and what they are good at. We want them to use this knowledge to serve others in school and in their careers.

We want them to be kind.

We want them to know how to connect with others and learn from them. We want them to be comfortable learning and working and serving others globally.

We want them to be courageous.

Transforming vision into reality requires an action plan. We have to be clear about what the indicators for these standards look like too. We may not call them standards or indicators, but that’s what really what they are. We have to be clear about where we hope to go and what it will look like when we arrive. This enables powerful planning. It helps us carve a path with greater intention.

So if a student is inquisitive about the world, what does that look like? What will they know and be able to do as people who are inquisitive about the world and themselves? What learning opportunities would we need to provide to students? Which ones would they need to create for themselves? What would that look like?

How do teachers design curricula, instruction, and assessments that enable learners to accomplish these things while progressing toward the CCLS, and how do we know when that’s happening?

These understandings have provided me a great deal of perspective as I’ve begun the required work of unit/module/lesson design inside of schools this fall. More on that tomorrow…..

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How Can We Race to the Top in Ways that Increase Job Satisfaction?

November 6, 2011 – 7:16 pm

I think this is a critical guiding question for every educator in New York State right now, particularly those who are facilitating work with the Common Core Learning Standards, APPR, inquiry teams, and assessment design.

If ever there were a time when mindfulness would take a back seat to panic and job satisfaction would be sacrificed to perceptions about imposed mandates, that time would be now.

We run the risk of losing some incredibly talented educators with all of this.

What’s worse is that we run the risk of losing kids too.

If we maintain a singular focus on what needs to be done without thinking deeply and planning thoughtfully about how it happens, I fear we may do some damage here.

How can we Race to the Top in ways that increase job satisfaction?

What if we did more than simply articulate a clear vision for the graduate we hope to produce and the teacher we hope to become?

What if we transformed that ideal into standards or performance indicators of our own?

What if we wrapped them around the Common Core Learning Standards (and our content-specific standards)? What if we aligned to them in ways that ensured we were attending to everything we hope our students will know and be able to do as graduates?

What if we aligned to them in ways that would challenge us to grow our professional expertise? Increase our energy and our enthusiasm for the work we do? Nurture levels of creativity? Promote mindfulness? Improve our confidence and job satisfaction? Standards like those are not articulated here, and that’s okay. That’s not the point or purpose of that document.

We still have the power to move mindfully in these directions.

We aren’t taking anything away. We’re adding some perspective by focusing on the how instead of the what. We’re also expanding our understanding of the why.

I think this matters.

What do you think?

 

 

 

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By Angela | Posted in Change, Common Core Standards, Curriculum Development, Leadership, Professional Development, Race to the Top | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Increasing Creativity, Learner-Centered Instruction, and Levels of Job Satisfaction WITH the CCLS?

November 4, 2011 – 5:54 am

In addition to sharing as much as I can about my work with the CCLS inside of schools this year, I’m also taking more time to reveal the workings of the WNY Young Writers’ Studio over here.

Studio is a writing community comprised of teachers and writers of grades 1-12. We also identify mentors within our program who are interested in becoming teachers themselves one day, and we provide them opportunities to learn and apply their growing expertise about best practices.

This year, we’ll be considering how the CCLS can be used as a framework for reflecting on and improving what we do at Studio.

Does that sound crazy? I imagine it might, to those who struggle with the notion of standards and those who assume that using them looks like passionless standardization, teacher-driven instruction that fosters disengagement, or copious amounts of skill and drill test prep. What frightens me most about this perspective is that if this is our vision, it’s what we’ll make reality.

I’m hoping to share some examples of how the CCLS can  increase levels of creativity, enrich learner-centered instruction, and even nurture job satisfaction. What we make of this will depend on our mind-set, our willingness to seek understanding before rushing to conclusions, and our willingness to take some risks and innovate.

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By Angela | Posted in Change, Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, WNY Young Writers' Studio | Comments (0)

Gap Analysis and the Common Core Learning Standards

November 3, 2011 – 4:42 am

This week, I’m sharing out some of the processes I’ve used to help teachers build a fluency with the Common Core Learning Standards.

And today, I’m going to talk about Common Core gap analysis. By this, I mean the process of examining a standard and using evidence to determine if curricula aligns to it. There are different levels of gap analysis and different protocols that support this work. For instance:

  • It is possible to glance at the standards and begin having conversations about what they might mean and where we think our curricula is aligned. This enables us to orient ourselves with the standards and begin making initial connections between what we think they might mean and our curricula. I think of this as a perfunctory gap analysis, and the understanding is that when I work this way with teachers initially, there is far more to come in the future.
  • A deeper gap analysis could involve unwrapping the standards by defining explicit and implicit meaning, content, concepts, skills, and levels of rigor. This enables us to articulate what the standards mean with far greater specificity, in order to design or align curricula with far greater precision. If this is our purpose, it is important to use evidence to support the decisions we make about where alignment may exist or not. This is where curriculum maps, unit guides, lesson plans, assessments, annotations and other data begin to play a very critical role.

My next steps with teachers in most of the schools I work in involves performing a perfunctory gap analysis relevant to what the standards have made explicit.

I think this works well if:

  • You are just beginning to work with a group of teachers you do not know well
  • Teachers haven’t had much experience with curriculum design or mapping
  • People haven’t read or unwrapped the standards yet

In these cases, a perfunctory gap analysis can ease people into the process of making meaning from standards and comparing what they learn about them to what they are doing. They can also enable facilitators to learn more about the teachers they are serving and their needs. When we listen carefully, teachers will often reveal what they think the standards might mean. You can also take some time to ask  important questions about how well they think their curricula aligns. This often prompts them to share information about different kinds of evidence that can inform future work and what they feel needs to be done. This  can help you refine your strategic plan. If this sort of perfunctory analysis suits your purposes, a deeper analysis must happen later and part of your work will involve helping teachers build the capacity to do this greater work.

I noticed that as we moved through this simple gap analysis process, teachers in different schools and districts began voicing similar uncertainties:

“I’m not sure if I really teach this standard because I don’t remember what happened last year very well. We don’t have curriculum maps.”

“We have pacing guides but they don’t say much about these standards. They really focus on the resources I’m using and when I need to use them.”

“I haven’t taught this course yet, so I don’t know if I will be aligned to this standard.”

“Well, I teach this at least once I think, but is this about what I DO or is it about what STUDENTS DO?”

“When we say we’re addressing a standard, does that mean we’re teaching it, assessing it or both?”

“If I am not checking how well each of my students performs against a standard, how can I confidently say that my curricula is aligned? More importantly, how do I even know if they are getting it? Just because I’m teaching it doesn’t mean they are getting it.”

“Is it okay that my curricula is aligned but that my assessments are not? I’m not so sure anymore…..”

“If a standard says that students MUST do X, Y, AND Z, that’s much different than saying students MAY do things such as X, Y, OR Z.”

These were some of the good questions that emerged from this very early work, and landing in this place was critical. Successfully “Racing to the Top” can’t be about rushing to “get stuff done” in order to meet a set of requirements or check activities off of a list of things to do. Reform involves changing the way we think, continually revising the work that we do, and shifting practice in significant ways.

If the work of unwrapping has already occurred, gap analysis can attend to implicit as well as explicit meaning. It can also attend to additional indicators generated from visioning work or the study of things that the CCLS don’t attend to but that matter to your district or school.  For instance, some of the teachers I am working with have also explored various resources in order to define indicators of 21st Century Skills, Literacies, and Fluencies. Silvia Tolisano’s work is grounded in meaningful research and incredibly reader-friendly. She also connects theory to practice and shares so much from her work with kids. I’ve been sending many teachers her way throughout this process. Teachers can also articulate indicators that are aligned to vision. Designing high quality units and lessons requires alignment to these greater understandings that emerge from deeper learning and work.

I believe that all of this work should be about helping schools become communities of learners. If this is the case, then gap analysis isn’t an end unto itself. Any of the processes and protocols we use are catalysts for change. The creative tension, cognitive dissonance, and questions that emerge as we use them are one indication that change is beginning to happen at one level of the system, but there is so much more work to be done. These are the things I’m left wondering:

  • What other levels of the system must be considered? For instance, where does policy align? Where do we need to advocate for change?
  • What kinds of changes should be made there?
  • Which processes and protocols can be used as catalysts?
  • How will we know when change has begun?
  • What will it look like when we’ve finally arrived where we want to be?

 

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Unwrapping the Common Core Learning Standards

November 2, 2011 – 5:13 am

 




In order to mine a standard’s true meaning, you typically have to unwrap it a bit. The purpose of this work is to distinguish the standard’s explicit and implicit meaning.

Implicit meaning?

Aren’t standards supposed to be articulated with precision?

Well, that’s the hope, but even the best standards require skillful interpretation. This is informed by the professional conversations that we have with others and the expertise they we are all willing to share.

For instance, consider the explicit expectations of this standard:

RL.4.10 By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poetry, in the grades 4–5 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

Now, think about the implicit expectations. What isn’t clearly defined? Comprehension is a pretty loaded concept, and often, questions arise relevant to what a “text complexity band” is. Also: what does it mean to read and comprehend proficiently?

Answers to questions like these need to be clearly defined and articulated. Often, this requires deeper investigations into meaning and the location of other resources and people who can guide us.

When we unwrap standards, we also distinguish content and concepts (typically articulated as nouns within the standard) from skills (which are typically articulated as verbs). This enables us to design and align curricula with greater precision. Considering adjectives and adverbs can help us think critically about levels of rigor as well. Some teachers begin to design essential questions and big ideas during this phase of the process as well. The video below can walk you and others through the unwrapping process fairly simply if you don’t have someone facilitating it for you. Thanks to Shelly Wilcoxen from David Douglas School District for sharing her process here:

We concluded this phase of our work together asking ourselves: what do we still need to learn about these standards? How will this happen? Are there other standards that need to be brought to the table? Whose voices and perspectives might be missing here?

An important note about timing: the first time I worked with teachers around the CCLS, we jigsawed the document and unwrapped all of the standards at each grade level in teams. Our findings were housed online, where others could access and amend them as we learned more. Others who are facilitating this work timed this phase of it a bit differently. They began by designing high quality units with teachers and then aligned the units back to the standards. It was at this point in the process that they unwrapped the standards, and in doing so, units were revised along the way. I’ve played with this process a bit as well in recent months, and I’m finding it far more effective. When teachers unwrap as they design units, they consider what they are learning about a standard and immediately revise their thinking and work within the unit to reflect these deeper understandings. It seems to narrow the distance between standards and curricula and allows alignment to happen more efficiently and effectively.

 

Photo credit: Angela Stockman, August 2011

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By Angela | Posted in Change, Common Core Standards, Curriculum Development, Race to the Top | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Developing a Fluency with the Common Core Learning Standards

November 1, 2011 – 6:34 am

At first glance it might seem like we are doing this already, but teaching confidently with the CCLS challenges us to understand them with depth. Glancing at the standards is what we do when we say we are reviewing the standards….exposing ourselves to the standards….. or introducing the standards to teachers.

Developing a fluency with the standards? Well, that’s a whole other ball game.

This week, I’ll try to share as much as I can about my efforts to help teachers become fluent with the CCLS. I’m hoping that each of these short posts will leave you a strategy or idea that can help you or those you are serving accomplish the same. What did this look like in the beginning?

We began by assessing what we already knew (or thought we knew) about the standards. Where do they come from? How were they designed? How is the document itself organized? How do different components connect together, and to what end? How can we use the standards purposefully? What do they look like at our individual grade levels? What questions do we have?

In some cases, I also sliced the standards into strips and challenged teachers to:

  • Read each of them
  • Consider their individual meaning
  • Consider the relationships between them and
  • Organize them into a coherent framework without referencing the CCLS document, which they were also provided

The beginning also involved asking teachers to create a visual representation of the CCLS. They were able to use the document itself and any other resources that they found helpful to inform this work. This was intentional.  I know that creating visual representations often helps make complex information clearer.  Chunking dense texts into meaningful parts and defining the connections between them is helpful too. This experience also required teachers to open various documents and begin digging into them in purposeful ways. For many of them, this was the first time they had the opportunity to do so. It was important to me that they didn’t turn directly to grade level standards and dive into the work of gap analysis or alignment. I wanted to be confident that they had time to peruse and discuss the document as a whole as well as the appendixes that enrich its meaning further.

As they designed their visuals, I got a feel for how well teachers were able to navigate different resources, which of those resources seemed to be of most value to them, which ones I needed to design in order to be of better help to people, and where meaning was being made. I also identified where confusion was creeping in. Their final products enabled me to assess how people “saw” the CCLS and the ways in which different aspects of the standards connected together. Listening to the kinds of questions that they asked along the way offered me valuable perspective about what was known and where I could begin to help everyone more.

You can click on the images below to see larger versions of them.

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By Angela | Posted in Change, Common Core Standards, Race to the Top | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Strategically Planning to Realize Vision

October 31, 2011 – 5:41 am

Last week, I began sharing some of the thinking and work that I’m doing relevant to Race to the Top. As I began facilitating sessions with teachers and administrators last spring, my entry point wasn’t curriculum, instruction, or assessment. It was mind-set.

And I have a lot to learn.

What happened once our visioning work was done?

We sized up the task before us and began to strategically plan. This  looked a little bit different in each of the districts I’m working in, but one thing remains the same: the vision we created is on the table every time I design, work, reflect, or set goals with others.

Most of our first efforts involved unwrapping standards and designing the first drafts of CCLS units. As this phase of the work winds down, I’m returning people to the vision they began with.

“This is the portrait of the graduate you wanted to shape,”  I’m reminding them. “This is teacher you want to become.”

“How did completing this work move you closer to that vision? Where did it pull you off course?”

“How can we create better alignment between our vision, our actions, and the work that we do as we continue moving forward?”

What do we need to study?

What needs to be revised?

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What’s at the Top, Anyway?

October 27, 2011 – 5:11 am

What does it mean to Race to the Top?

Ensuring that students leave schools prepared for college and career is the ultimate goal of course, and as a Network Equivalent Team member in an urban school district, it was tempting to get the race to that top underway as quickly and painlessly as possible. It seems there is a lot of work to do over the next four years. The same is true in other districts, where I’m facilitating ELA curriculum design initiatives in alignment with the Common Core Learning Standards.

Last spring, it felt as if there was little time to lose in establishing a time line and carving out a list of activities. The following questions quickly rose to the surface of our pre-planning process though:

  • Will simply “getting the work done” make any real difference for kids?
  • Is it possible to translate Race to the Top  in ways that actually nurture each teacher’s individual passions, increase job satisfaction, and enrich school culture?
  • What is the vision of the graduate that educators within this system hope to produce? What is the vision of the teacher they hope to be and the system they want to shape along the way? How can we strategically plan in ways that serve this greater vision?
  • Most importantly: where will we be five or ten years from now if we further the Race to the Top agenda without answers to those other questions first?

I think it was five years ago when I first heardSheryl Nussbaum Beach liken the influence of technology on the field of education to the process of building a plane while flying it. I appreciated the metaphor and remember nodding my head in agreement when Sheryl shared that video with the PLP team I was a part of at the time. It worked so well, in that particular context.

Like others, I’m not so sure that’s the metaphor I want to leverage for this initiative though. It may be an accurate reflection of how people are feeling, but as a facilitator, I know we need to work together to create very clear blueprints. We need to be crystal clear about why we are going where we are going, how we hope to get there, and what we think it will look like when we arrive. Also? Our top needs to reflect a greater vision than the one framing the Race to the Top initiative. A lot of other things can be overlooked or even lost in this race. We have to define what all of this truly means for us and what kinds of systems empower kids in the ways we need them to.

So, I had to begin this work by taking a breath and asking the questions above of myself and of all of the people I’ll be working with over the next four years. The answers that were produced left us starting in a far different place than I initially imagined. I’m hoping to share some of the processes and protocols I’ve used with teachers during the first phase of this work in the days and weeks to come, as well as what we’re learning along the way.

 

 

 

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What Conditions Create People Who Act Like…..

October 26, 2011 – 5:22 am

This:

And what conditions create people who act like this?

These videos punctuated early conversations I had with teachers and leaders relevant to Race to the Top.They prompted the articulation of some important beliefs:

    • RTTT will be translated differently inside of every system it lives in.
    • We believe that all teachers have a vision of the difference they want to make and distinct expertise that must be mined in service to kids. We can choose to use this initiative to uncover and align vision. We can use the next four years to uncover this expertise and leverage it in better ways, too.
    • We’re aware that our own frameworks, mindsets, and vision are critical to our success. We also know they can prevent us from recognizing and acting to our full potential on behalf of kids. We need to learn as much as we can from every opportunity that comes our way, especially from those who are different from us.
    • We need to create the conditions wherein collaborative learning can occur. This can’t happen when people are feeling afraid.
    • RTTT can’t be about “giving teachers stuff” in order to ensure they “get the work done.” It must be about collaborative and personal goal setting, engaging in inquiry that allows us to define quality together, determining how we will measure our success, and continually revising our thinking and our work in response to new things we discover.
    • This will be a slow, uncomfortable process. We need to celebrate our willingness to engage in it. We also need to act in ways that will enable people to tolerate discomfort, take risks, and persevere as well.

We agreed that we don’t want to behave like the people on the escalator. We also agreed that we might not want to function like the pieces of the whole in the Honda Accord commercial either. The bigger conversations were about creating the conditions that would enable learning for everyone within the system and checking what we typically do against this new belief system as we move forward. Exciting and potentially daunting, too.

These were not superficial activities intended to secure some fleeting sense of buy-in. Rather, these initial conversations began to shape a deeper vision for HOW the work of RTTT would unfold within each of the systems I’m serving. We will need to return to this over and over again as we move forward. It’s important that these beliefs and the vision that emerged at the outset of our work together play a leading part in every planning meeting, work session, and building-level conversation that unfolds over time.

This will be the greater challenge of our work.

 

*These videos were first shared during Communities for Learning: Leading Lasting Change sessions last fall. I gain such inspiration from this group. Interested in joining us?

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