What is it, exactly, that makes great teaching?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, as I think back to my time as a classroom teacher, and reflect on how my practice changed over the nearly 20 years I spent with students before moving to a permanent position as a public servant with the Ministry of Education. In particular, as a parent who is too often underwhelmed with the practice I observe through the experiences of my own children in the school system, I am compelled to consider what, specifically, is the difference between a good teacher and a great teacher. (And perhaps more poignantly, was I ever the latter?!)

The more I learn about the roots of public education (how many of you knew that it was originally intended in many places as a tool of eugenics, not much different in purpose from the residential school system here in Canada?!), the more I am convinced of the truth of Michael Fullan’s suggestion from his book, Stratesphere, that we are nearing the end of our current system’s useful life. (Some might argue, we’ve long exceeeded its usefulness... and yet, in many places right here in this very province, the factory model and all its accouterments continue to shine as an exemplary model of mediocrity!)

So, then, one must ask, what IS the purpose of public education, if not to inculcate the youth of a society with the cultural mores of that society? What is it that we want/need kids to learn?

One problem I’ve observed as a parent, a classroom educator and a system leader in various roles is our lack of courage to ask these very questions: What is our purpose here as a larger system? Why are we doing what we are doing? What are we hoping to achieve?

Though blissfully ignorant at the time (as a young, white, able-bodied settler) of the broader colonial implications, I personally always subscribed to what I interpreted to be a well-intended, equity-minded approach suggested by Susanna Moodie, an early settler to Canada, and a strong advocate for public education, namely, that “the want of an education” is the only thing that separates the different “classes” of people.

Though I know enough now to understand that things are a little more complex than I understood them to be as a new teacher some 20 years ago, I still believe in the potentional for public education to act as an opportunity for universal access. In my ideal world, any student, anywhere could get what they need from a public education system, and use it to lift themselves out of their current situation, whatever it may be, and into a situation that allows them to fulfil their potential. It also allows them to realize the moral imperative of lifting one another up and supporting one another in achieving their potential, but removing barriers they have the power to remove for one another.

But as I am coming to realize, this requires incredible insight and humility on the part of classroom educators and school and system leaders, and a willingness to make themselves (ourselves) vulnerable as we examine the probably enormous unearned privilege, in most cases, that brought each of us to a job in public education.

When I think back to my early years of teaching, I now finally realize just how NOT “woke” I was. Despite thinking I was, and wanting to be. I was a good teacher, but I wasn’t great. I know this because I can think of specific students whom I did not serve well.

There are numerous examples (more in the earlier years and fewer in later years, I think) of students to whom I spoke more harshly than I should have, with whom I was more impatient than I should have been, and for whom I just really lacked a deep understanding of the barriers they faced within the system that had (mostly) advantaged me, and which I — in the very act of being a school teacher — was contributing to upholding.

And there is a more general shortcoming, too. An eager learner and quick study, early in my teaching career, I was already doing many of the things the “good” (well, decent at best, in some cases, I would argue — but I know I’m judgy!!) teachers my own children have do now: I photocopied packages of handouts like crazy, communicated detailed unit plans with parents, and shared specific, graphic, classroom management and behaviour plans with my students and their families. And they loved it, because they didn’t know any better.

It wasn’t until my latter years as a classroom teacher that I began to let go of some of my obsessiveness about my classroom, and began to focus on the students rather than the program. I developed outlines, but left the details to be fleshed out with my learners. I moved away from assigned seating and more into daily circle time (yes, even for intermediate level students!) followed by self-selected seating in one of many work areas around the classroom. I allowed math to flow into language to flow into social studies and back into math again... and while I read with some students, others worked on an art project, or researched something they were interested in from an earlier conversation in social studies, or helped a peer figure out how to upload an assignment into the new online classroom we were all figure it out how to use, or went to the contained class and read with kids who had ASD.

Imagine the chaos! It was beautiful... and the vast majority of the students in the class were engaged.

One of my former students connected with me on LinkedIn recently.

And not just any former student, this was a kid from the very beginning of my teaching career! Back in the day when I had more enthusiasm than experience, more passion than pedagogical knowledge.

I remember this kid. I have often seen his face in my mind over the years, because he was one of those creative souls for whom school seemed just a little too basic. Teachers, I suspect, didn’t really appreciate the true value of this guy’s innovative mind. He wasn’t a troublemaker, in the teachery sense of the word, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that he was rarely if ever intellectually challenged as much as he could or should have been in elementary school.

Naython (not his real name) darkened my door his grade 6 year at the K-8 school where I started my career. It was my second year in the classroom, and I really cared about the kids, but I was a new teacher, and still had lots and lots and lots to learn!

Likely bored to tears by by my basic, beginning teacher lessons, the kid would sit quietly while I droned on, and glue little bits of pencil and eraser to the legs of his desk. Quite creative, actually, if you overlook the fact that he was vandalizing board property.

Yep, The kid was quirky all right. I remember his deadpan query, when I was delivering the slightly over-the-top instructions for EQAO’s written component (it was the first year of the provincial testing, and there were extensive instructions about what students could and could not write for the fiction part of the assessment, and what our responsibilities were as educators, if we had concerns about the violent, bloody/glory, or otherwise troublesome nature of anything a student had written). Pokerfaced and in his usual monotone, Naython wondered aloud, “what should we write about, Ms. Teschow? Rainbows and puppy dogs?”

Indeed!

Speaking of rainbows, judging by the young man’s LinkedIn profile (he still looks very much like he did in Grade Six, btw!), I would venture a guess that he might be of my tribe, so to speak. Both his volunteer endeavors and his paid work over the past decade would suggest that he is either part of the LGBTQ family, or a very strong ally.

Assuming the former, I am struck with a nagging sense of guilt.

I did not come out of the closet – – to myself or my students – – until the final few years of my teaching career. And as such, I missed many opportunities to model for the students in my classes what a “normal“ queer adult could look and sound like. And if I’m right in my assessment of my new LinkedIn contact’s sexual identity, then he was one of the statistically 2 to 3 kids in my class that year who did not get to see and hear that it was OK to be gay (or bi, lesbian, trans, 2-spirit, etc.)

Lucky for Naython, he seems to be doing quite well for himself despite having had me as a teacher during his (and my?) formative years.

And now that my days in a classroom are over, and I play a more subtle role in helping to shape education policy at the provincial level rather than more directly influencing students, I must resort to guiding and mentoring other educators to be good allies, or, if they themselves identify on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, to be confident in who they are and embrace this part of their identity for and with their students.

The Naythons of the world might well depend on it!

I find myself with a renewed interest in rubrics.

Some years ago, when I was still married to the idea of a rubric (having been introduced to the concept as a first-year teacher years earlier by a particularly enthusiastic instructional coach), I was rocked into reality while attending a literacy workshop where a "Ministry Person" joked about the "over-rubrification of Ontario". 

Initially shocked that there might be another way when it came to assessment for learning, I eventually became a convert to the idea of Learning Goals and Success Criteria, and have been working on mastery of using these with descriptive feedback to improve student learning ever since.

Lately, however, I find myself wondering about how an amalgamation of the two might better support both student learning and teacher workload.

"Learning" Goal as Step One

Essential for both a quality rubric and the development of effective success criteria is the defining of an initial goal.  What is it that one wants the students to learn, in accordance with one or more overall curriculum expectations, and taking into consideration the student interests and affinities in a particular class?

As a classroom educator, I might express such a goal as, "We are learning to..." followed by some overarching description of the intended learning from the curriculum.

As an Education Officer with the Ministry of Education, I find myself pulling out these skills when considering the ideal candidate for a writing project. As my colleagues and I recently pondered while preparing a memo and call for writers, what, specifically, were we looking for in a group of writers? From this overarching vision, a set of criteria emerged, as they do when we consider how best to describe a curriculum-grounded learning goal.

From Success Criteria to Rubric

Assuming one has developed a clear learning goal, the set of criteria  that is developed (or ideally, co-developed with students) to describe said goal are used to provide descriptive feedback to students as they work though the learning.  This same set of criteria, once firmed up (criteria may evolve during the formative part of the learning) will also be used by the teacher to evaluate student learning for reporting purposes later on, in the summative phase of the assessment and instruction cycle.

Since we currently still have a leveled (or graded) report card system, it is crucial that success criteria be further developed into gradients of achievement, then.  That is, one must clarify (for oneself and the students) what different degrees of performance of each criteria look, sound and feel like. 

This is helpful both for the students and their families as they consider their development along the way, and for classroom educators, who ultimately have to make a judgement based on the evidence of student learning, and then assign that collection of evidence a mark on the report card.

In order to practice our own skill with this, and to develop an example to use in an online workshop , a colleague and I recently used the rubric maker tool on the VLE to co-develop a rubric to assess and evaluate participation in our online workshop.

We thought about what each of our success criterion might look like at each level, and then used this to flesh out a continuum of achievement, thereby creating in essence a rubric.

So, for example, we agreed that one criterion that would be essential in demonstrating our learning goal (active participation in an online learning session)  would be the contribution to collaborative online spaces such as google docs, a Padlet we planned to share, and so on.

A participant who was just beginning to develop these skills might access the spaces (which we could assess for example by noting their presence in a shared Google doc), but might not yet contribute any posts. Another participant, one who was progressing well towards our goal of active online participation in the learning, might contribute many relevant ideas, whereas a participant who was participating to a higher degree would not only contribute relevant posts, but would also build onto the ideas of others, perhaps by contributing a relevant link, or a photo of someone else's ideas or questions in action.

By taking the time to flesh out each criterion, we built a rubric that could ultimately be used to grade participant's attainment of the learning goal, were we to use this sort of evaluative tool in an online AQ course, for example.

Descriptive Feedback: A Formative Rubric

Although Growing Success (2010) tells us in no uncertain terms that feedback is an essential component in supporting student learning, we also know that feedback itself is not enough.  John Hattie’s research tells us that in some cases feedback might even be detrimental. Or, as Stiggins says, “It’s the quality of the feedback rather than its existence or absence that determines its power.”

So it’s important to have an understanding of descriptive feedback as a tool for supporting learning. Positioning feedback within the assessment process, and basing it on the criteria one develops (or co-develops with students) to describe an already-established and public, curriculum-based learning goal ensures that we are using feedback effectively to support student learning.

So how, then, can a rubric leverage the power of descriptive feedback?

The use of descriptive feedback can go hand in hand with a rubric being used for formative assessment, that is, in the middle of the learning rather than at the end. 

For example, a student currently demonstrating "level 2" in terms of online contributions in the isolated row of the sample rubric above should not be left (as my own poor students were 20 years ago when I was first messing around with rubrics!!) to puzzle out their own feedback from some random circles or check marks on a page.  Rather, the feedback that accompanies such a statement could be something like this:

​Once again singing the praises of the rubric maker on the VLE (why didn't I know about this thing when I was in a classroom??!!), this can all be pre-populated for a class in a rubric, and can still be customized for individual students where appropriate.  Better yet, photos (of exemplars) can be included, AND feedback can be audio-recorded if some students are more inclined to listen than read!

A little short term pain in terms of time commitment for the teacher in setting up the rubric for long term gain (being able to use it effectively when assessing and evaluating later on).

Feedback AND Marks?

We know from Dylan William's research that just throwing a mark on a page (even it's virtual!) doesn't move student learning forward, and yet we are still currently (in Ontario at least) stuck with a reporting system that requires grades.  My best advice, then, is to slim it down to four levels, quite possibly removing even the numbers, and replacing these with descriptors like "getting started", "almost there", "progressing well" and "progressing very well", or something to this effect.

How to interpolate the data gathered on a rubric like this and use it to inform final evaluation, or assessment OF learning, is a topic for another blog post. For now, suffice it to say that this method is one way to balance the desire to support student learning with the need to prepare for "marks" or "grades" later on.

Don't Wait Until the End!

When using a rubric for formative purposes, i.e. to provide feedback along the way, timing is key.  Don't wait until the end of a learning cycle to provide students with feedback.  It's too little, too late then.  (Just this week I saw evidence of this in my own household, where I found a small rubric in the garbage in my kids' room.  Clearly, one of them had received this "feedback" on a final assignment; the location of the rubric indicated its value!)

It was with considerable reluctance that I jumped (was hauled onto?) the Twitter bandwagon this past year... but I finally succumbed, and -- with a little help from some very persistent colleagues, I created an account, and even gained a few followers.

Increasingly, I am discovering the benefits of Twitter as a professional learning tool: Depending on who I choose to follow and how much time I spend clicking links in my feed, I am exposed to a wide range of personal perspectives and professional articles on a host of topics from assessment to digital learning to educational leadership and Indigenous issues, to equity and well-being in education.

And today, I participated in my first ever Twitter Chat!

Four of us were interested in a chat on deepening school change and, as three of us were working off site, one colleague set up a teleconference line.  Having multiple people who already knew one another on the phone (or conceivably, in a physical room) together really enriched both the dialogue on the topic in general and specifically as it relates to our work.  

As all four of us had varying degrees of familiarity and experience with Twitter, we were also able to support one another’s learning in real time as we navigated this relatively new (to us) professional learning format.

A more seasoned tweeter in our little group suggested the use of "tweet deck", which allows a user to see activity in multiple customizable columns.  This meant I could follow the hashtag for the Twitter chat while simultaneously monitoring likes and/or responses to any comments I posted.

Not long ago, a colleague of mine came back from a workshop and shared with me an image she had seen.
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“I have something to show you!” she gasped, almost breathless with excitement.  “I know how much you love equity, and I think you’ll really like this.”

The image she showed me served as a stark reminder of the long road ahead of us.

While I have nothing against this image as a starting point for engaging the blissfully ignorant in a conversation about equity vs. equality, her excitement in thinking she had uncovered something new to share with me made me realize how naive I had been, in terms of people’s general exposure to many of the concepts I take for granted.

While my colleague was engaging with the fence image for the first time, I had moved on to reading articles like this one, that challenge its limitations.

A Literal Interpretation

For a long time, I’d been struggling with the fact that proponents of the fence image seemed to be implying that anyone should be able to see a professional sports game for free (yes, literally)... And while I myself am not much of a sports fanatic, I was wrestling with the concept of implying that we (or some) should not have to pay to watch a professional performance.

Yes, yes, I know that in general professional players in sports are HUGELY overpaid in the larger scheme of things -- but apply the analogy to a arts performance then, dance, or a group of local musicians… how are people supposed to make a living if everyone should just get to enjoy their talents for free?!

Making Space for Everyone

Around the same time as I was wrestling with this conundrum, I’d been reviewing a monograph on culturally responsive pedagogy, which included a quote by George Dei:

(It’s also quoted in Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, btw.)

At the time, it seemed like a nicey-nice, lofty statement. Lately, though, I’ve been meditating on it a lot.

What does it mean, exactly, to make a new space?  I mean, why wouldn’t we want to bring people into our great space that already exists?  Don’t we want “them” to have access to “our” sporting (arts, etc.) events?

It’s what I’d been trying to do for most of my career, open access for the students I taught (“them”) who might not have typically had access to the variety of resources and opportunities that I do.

And yet, if I examine the way my own classrooms unfolded over the two decades I taught, I am beginning to realize that together with the students in my care, I did in fact increasingly create new structures, systems and spaces.  Any remaining barriers (class size, lack of thinking and planning time, access to reliable wifi or digital devices and other resources, etc.) were products of the larger system, over which I had only limited control. (More on that later.)

Relinquishing Power

Creating a new space together with the students meant that as the person in the classroom on whom power and privilege had been conferred, I the teacher had to make way for the kids to develop some power, some real power.

It meant that when a colleague and I began exploring the concept of centres as a way to teach math with my Grade 7 and 8 math classes a few years ago, we asked for feedback… and then listened to that (often brutally honest!) feedback the students provided, and modified our approach.

It also meant that the following year, when we started a social studies based, cross-curricular inquiry together in Grade 6, and some of the students wanted to move in a direction with their learning that I had not envisioned, I had to give them the freedom to follow that learning, and support THEIR learning from the side rather than demand from the front what I thought it should be all about.

In my experience, Middle school students who have been raised in fairly traditional classrooms have become very “comfortable” (complacent?) with their lot. While perhaps unfulfilled and possibly bored, they generally do what they are supposed to -- including acting out and “misbehaving” in ways that are expected -- perhaps because they don’t know any other way.  They’re like prisoners who have lost their scope for the imagination of any better reality!

So when you introduce a new way of doing business (“You can write about it or show me by taking a picture of your work and recording a verbal explanation”, or “will you choose to work on your own today, or with a partner?”, or “are you ready to come and talk with me about your assignment, or do you want to get some feedback from your group first?”) middle school students (and heck, even adults!) can get very antsy.

They’re not used to being treated like capable, competent people with potential!

​They’re not sure what to do with the freedom and the ability, nay, the provocation, to think!  This is hard work, they realize, this participating fully in my learning....  And at first, they rebel.

Using the structure of a classroom circle early and often as we got to know one another as co-learners helped… as did regular read-alouds (yes, middle school kids still love a good read-aloud, especially when Ms. Teschow cries at the sad parts, as she notoriously does!!) 
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Surfacing challenges, discussing and sharing people’s feelings and behaviours openly, honestly and matter-of-factly, and sharing ideas for next steps helped -- in my experience -- to validate all members of the class.  (As an added bonus, our regular community circles really built their learning skills and work habits, and helped me get to know kids more personally, which was a huge bonus come report card writing time!!)

Eventually, fear at this “new” way anxiety was replaced with pride and commitment.  Pride their classroom family, and commitment to working hard (both academically and socially) for the benefit of all.

Discomfort was replaced with safety, and students flourished, even the most “unlikely” learners!

Scalability

Now, after 18 years in the field, I’ve become part of that larger system I mentioned earlier, the one that sets up barriers that directly impact kids in classrooms… and I still only have limited control!  (I thought working at the ministry of magic would enable me to change the world in six months or less -- ha!)

But while the systemic work is different than I thought it would be, and the workplace MUCH larger than I had imagined, the need to co-create new space together exists here as anywhere. Systems and structures that worked at some point in history for some group(s) of people are being challenged as new technologies disrupt the status quo and allow (and indeed encourage) an increasing diversity of voices in the workplace.

I’m interested how those in power in this large system approach their leadership role.

I’ve observed that some try to include by bringing people into an existing culture.  Others actively seek out newcomers that will help to shape a new space, a space where everyone is welcome, even if it means that they (the leader) will need to rethink their pre-existing assumptions. Still others speak of making space, but are reluctant to relinquish the comforts afforded to them for so long by their positions of privilege and power.

As a public educator who has spent most of her career working in, or facilitating work about, the elementary panel, I've often reflected on the "generalist vs. subject specialist" debate.  Now working as an Education Officer in the Student Achievement Division, I occasionally have the opportunity to revisit this question from a more research- and policy-oriented perspective. 

A bit of a die-hard generalist at heart, I recently was faced with a situation that challenged my viewpoint.

A former secondary school history teacher had been asked to speak at a staff professional learning day. She and some colleagues were sharing details of a trip they had taken to a history site earlier in the year, and linking the experience to the concept of leadership.  Her role was to set the historical context of the event.

As she spoke, we were riveted; all 200 people sat glued to her every word.  The manner in which she presented made it clear that she was both an expert on the topic, and a passionate educator about said topic.  She "lectured" in a way that engaged us far more deeply than I could probably sustain a group's interest on pretty much any subject (unless maybe when regaling my pre-service teacher candidates with classroom management stories from the field)!

The first thing I thought about afterwards was the one big flaw of my generalist mindset, namely, that I know a little about a LOT of things (in terms of elementary level curriculum subjects and strands), but that said knowledge and understanding is in most cases quite superficial.  Due to the fact that I've pretty much always taught many subjects to a single group of students (rather than one or two subjects to several classes), and that I've only ever taught one grade for a maximum of two years at a time, any depth or breadth of knowledge and understanding on my part has typically been acquired alongside the students in my care, as we research, think and learn together. 

This really made me begin to rethink the "must be a generalist" position I had held for so long.  Perhaps, if ALL subject specialists were as knowledgeable and passionate about their topic as my colleague was about hers, AND assuming they were also good pedagogues (i.e. had a firm grasp of the assessment for learning models outlined in Growing Success, and understood UDL and DI principles and used them regularly in their practice), then maybe having subject specialists WAS the way to go.... ?

I puzzled over this for some time, as I still had a nagging feeling about it all. 

Despite being able to take care of systems and structures like timetabling (to avoid having middle school students run across the school from class to class) and other things that typically bothered me about the specialist model, I still felt a real sense of loss when I thought about giving up the generalist model altogether.

Finally, it dawned on me: Achieving a high degree of expertise in a particular field necessarily precludes considerable knowledge in other fields.  While becoming an expert in an area is important for some professions, in teaching, it can actually create barriers for our students.  Where a good generalist can help learners uncover connections between subject areas, and can facilitate meta-cognitive growth by highlighting skills and competences that transcend a variety of areas, a subject specialist risks becoming a "one trick pony", from whom students may even learn only one perspective on an event or skill. 

​Being forced to reach across curricula as a generalist breeds new knowledge for not just the students, but more importantly, the teacher, who begins to see things from different perspectives, and may often be encouraged to reexamine her own long-held beliefs.  (Less of a danger from the comfort of the subject specialty the specialist has always taught.)

I could never figure out my specialist colleagues who would marvel at how I could spend SO. MUCH. TIME. with one group of students (my last year in a classroom, I taught everything except French and Phys.Ed to a single group of Grade 6 students, and we often spent the better part of a day together in the same physical space). 

​But when you think in an integrated fashion, time flies!

I remember preparing a Science lesson, on flight, for that class... though really it was a lesson in dissecting non-fiction text... and also a digital and visual literacy lesson, as we had begun to experiment with mind maps.  And all that while we focused on developing perseverance and task-commitment while working effectively with a partner.

Similarly, the year before, the students and I dug into the stats on carding, as we examined racial profiling through data management and probability.  Was it a math lesson?  A social studies lesson?  A lesson in research and note-taking skills?  A expository writing and debate lesson? 

It was all of these.

Indeed, the layers of complexity were seamless; with a well-planned lesson, it was all happening at once... and it was really good!

Perhaps the answer is not generalist or specialist.  Perhaps the answer lies in new systems and structures at both the elementary and secondary school levels, structures that allow for a small group of diverse educators to work together to support the learning needs of a group of students.

I imagine a system where -- rather than one teacher having responsibility for one class, and a few periphery teachers are enlisted to fill in gaps like french or phys. ed. --  instead 3-4 educators are collectively in charge of teaching all subjects to a group of 60-80 students.  Ideally each educator team is carefully selected to include diversity: newer and more experienced teachers, gender, racial and other diversity, too.

Among themselves, the educators decide who will teach what to whom and when.  The flow of the learning is fluid, as different adults in the group may work with different students at different times. Sometimes I am teaching a focused reading lesson with a small group of 5 students while two of my peers are facilitating a science lab with 35-40 other students and our fourth colleague is reviewing a math problem with 8-10 other kids.  Another time, each of us has 18-25 students for a 40 minute mapping or fractions or health lesson... and then we switch.  And at other times, still, two of us work together with a group of 35-40 students between us.

Sometimes I am teaching math while my colleagues are teaching music, visual art or science, and at other times, they is teaching math while I teaching these other subject.  Sometimes one of us is teaching a specified subject, whereas at other times, the learning is so integrated, a visitor would be hard pressed to identify which subject is the focus of the lesson that morning or afternoon.

The fluidity of the structure here, and the positive interdependence built in for the adults to work together, would also enable the sort of collaborative, cross-curricular planning that a few of my colleagues and I tried to do with our collaboratively-planned Canada: Fair and Just? Inquiry last year.

​But instead of 90 hours outside of the work day, this sort of collaboration is built into the very fabric of the way school is structured.  All four of us could begin the work one morning before the school day starts, and then two of us could continue the planning while the other two run an hour-long math clinic with the whole group of students.  The next day, one of us works with one of them to continue to develop the inquiry plans we've started, while the other works with the other teacher to follow up the math clinic, or writer's workshop, or whatever.

As the group of educators works together, each on brings her special knowledge and skills and expertise to the table, and they learn from one another as -- together -- they build something quite profound with and for the students they collectively serve. As each individual educator comes with distinct schema, she contributes to the evolution of understanding of her colleagues... both about the skills of teaching, and of the subject matters taught.

The students, too, get the benefit of four consistent expert learners.  They see their teachers as collaborators, communicators and team players, effectively working through problems together. 

This serves not only to model the global competencies we hope to engender in students, but also allows students to seek out the support of different mentors from the educator team at different times to serve emergent needs, both academic and social-emotional.  No one student is stuck with one teacher with whom they may not have a positive chemistry. (Conversely, each teacher on the team has three colleagues to consult when they face a difficulty with a student or family, as happens from time to time. )

Both in the subject specialty as in the  pedagogical skills associated with teaching in general, each educator lends a different perspective that serves to help their colleagues learn and grow, and, as a result, directly benefits the group of students that the team is responsible for. 

​These teams of 3-4 teachers attend some professional learning together, and some individually.  They do some learning on their own as a team, and some with other teams in the school.  Oh, and they keep their group of 60-80 students for at least two years, allowing the development of strong relationships with both the students and their families.

Well, now that we've developed the perfect model of schooling, I'll just have to convince my colleagues to write the policy... or maybe it's time to win the lottery and open my own fully publicly accessible private school!

Growing Success, Ontario's provincial assessment policy, is a bold piece of work. Released in 2010, it was, in some sense, a policy ahead of its time.  It's a visionary document, and Chapter 4 in particular is a key factor in my decision to leave my board employer of nearly 20 years and move to a permanent position at the Ministry of Education last fall.

With today's Ministry foci on Equity and Well-Being, the 7-year-old assessment policy embodies much of the "how", for educators who understand and implement it effectively. (Good grief, Growing Success 2010 specifically mentions the word "equity" no fewer than 10 times, and includes the following statement: "The policy outlined in this document is designed to move us closer to fairness, transparency, and equity"!)

Ahhh, but there's the rub: Understanding!  For some reason, despite pockets of excellence throughout the province, a great deal of misunderstanding about assessment evaluation persists, nearly a decade after the policy's release.

As both an Education Officer with the Ministry of Ed., and a parent of two school-age children, here are three misunderstandings I see most often in my work with Ontario's educators, including school leaders:

1. Feedback should be Provided to Students at the End of each Assignment

Perhaps one of the most powerful strategies within our reach as educators is the development -- ideally with students -- of criteria that describe the desired demonstration of learning, and the provision of feedback to describe learning, so that students know where they need to be, where they are at, and where to go next.  When and how to provide said feedback, however, is sometimes a challenge for educators.

The first time Growing Success mentions descriptive feedback is on Page 6, as part of the seven fundamental principles on which the policy is based:

If feedback is to be "ongoing", it needs to happen more than once.  And if it's to be "timely", then feedback can't wait until the end of the learning cycle to reach the eyes and/or ears of the students working on demonstrating learning. 

​Indeed, on page 28, the policy states,

The term "coaching" speaks to the ongoing nature of feedback, and implies that students will have an opportunity to apply feedback to their work.

Below is an interactive image, made with Thinglink, to describe where and how descriptive feedback fits into the assessment process:
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The timing and nature of descriptive feedback seems obvious to me now, but as a classroom teacher, I will confess that it was the thing I struggled with the most, when it came to assessment.  It took me a long time to get over my implicit bias that allowing students to apply the feedback I had given them to a piece of work and resubmit that work for evaluation was "cheating". 

​It wasn't until I became involved in the early years of theStudent Work Study that I began to realise the true value of feedback, and to use it effectively to improve student learning.  (It was also then that I gleaned a better understanding of the distinction between assessment and evaluation!)

Providing feedback at the end of the learning cycle, after an assignment is submitted for evaluation, is in some sense useless.  The average student won't read it, and if there is no opportunity to apply the feedback to improve the work, why bother?

2. Group Assignments are Easier to Evaluate

Speaking of reducing my workload, as a classroom teacher in the throes of giant classes, I often turned to group assignments, not just because I believed in the power of collaboration, but also because I hoped for an easier time "marking the work".   Alas, as Growing Success points out,

This became a real conundrum for me, as I mined the internet, colleagues' resources and my own understanding to find or develop tools for tracking student demonstration of learning on group assignments. 

By no means brilliant or perfect examples, nevertheless, a few of my favourite attempts, below...
​

I will say this: An understanding of triangulated data (described in more detail below) helped me better discern each student's demonstration of skills and understanding from that of the whole group.  Rather than focusing on the finished product, I constantly listened to and observed students working, providing feedback and adjusting my teaching as needed.

3. Test in King, at least in Math

A lot of educators (and parents, for that matter), appear to be under the impression that -- especially for subjects like Math -- the most reliable way to discern what students know is by having them write a paper and pencil test.

While tests can be one way to gather data, Growing Success invites us to consider the plethora of ways students may demonstrate their understanding.  From page 34:

Teachers can gather information about learning by:

• designing tasks that provide students with a variety of ways to demonstrate their learning;
• observing students as they perform tasks;
• posing questions to help students make their thinking explicit;
• ​engineering classroom and small-group conversations that encourage students to articulate what they are thinking and further develop their thinking

This was no more clearly demonstrated to me than in a Grade 6 class where I had the pleasure of spending my final year before heading to the Ministry: Dolores (not her real name) was a strong student in mathematics.  I knew this because whenever I observed her working on a math problem in class, I could see and hear that she understood the concepts quickly.  She used relevant math vocabulary (despite English not being her first language), and reasoned her way through even the toughest problems, often explaining them to her peers by sketching out a diagram to show how something worked. 

But when it came to math tests (yes, even in my final year in the classroom, I still resorted to these occasionally!), Dolores froze.  

The learning demonstrated on the pencil and paper tests she handed in could at best be summarized as level 2, approaching provincial standard, while all other evidence consistently pointed to a thorough understanding and communication of mathematical concepts (Level 4). 

This reinforced for me the messages I had hither-to been preaching as a former school vice principal, board instructional coach, and school level colleague. The truth of differentiated assessment was confirmed for me in the classroom, and I applied this truth to my assessment practice with all students, finding ways for them to show me what they knew and could do.

As pointed out on page 39,   

Imagine if I had only used quizzes and tests to evaluate Dolores' understanding in math class:  Her performance on these product demonstrations would have belied the strong mathematical understanding that lay beneath her test anxiety, and I would never have known what a bright thinker she was!

These are by no means the only misunderstandings alive and well in classrooms across the province, but I hope the above blog post dispels at least some of the more common myths about assessment and evaluation in Ontario, and encourages a more practical discussion of assessment for learning and application of equity and well-being strategies for students. 

As a former colleague at the Ministry used to point out, "we're not self-employed, people, and the policy is not invitational!", ie. we don't get to follow it only if if we want to.  A better understanding the policy can keep us out of hot water as public educators, and as an added bonus, actually enable us in doing a better job of supporting equity, well-being and academic achievement for all learners.

​Are you a parent?

If you can read this sentence, you have a moral obligation to read at least one ministry curriculum or policy document, and get actively involved in your child's schooling.  More specifically, you need to engage your child's teacher.  Yep, even if your kid is doing well at school.  (Actually, maybe especially if!)

As a classroom teacher, I often referred to the students in the classes I taught as "my kids". 

​This proprietary label stemmed primarily, I believed, from a place of love and caring.  So dedicated was I to my chosen profession, that it just sort of slipped out whenever I was sharing a funny anecdote from --  or telling about a lesson that had transpired in -- my classroom.

With the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Report in 2015, and as a result of the subsequent recommendations and calls to action, I have more recently availed myself of several opportunities to learn about the systemic cultural genocide our government attempted against its country's first peoples. 

Residential Schools

Of particular horrific fascination for me has been the unearthing of grisly facts about the Residential School System in Canada, a system through which the government of Canada removed -- against their or their families' wills -- school-aged children from their homes, and sent them to overnight schools to unlearn their language, their culture, their identities (and often, to be victims of physical, sexual and/or emotional assault). This happened for several decades.

The inter-generational trauma that resulted is well documented, as the FNMI children which the primarily white Anglo-Saxon patriarchal government claimed as their own grew into a generation of young adults who had little to no understanding of who they were as parents, as indigenous Canadians, as human beings, even. 

And those are the ones who survived the mass abduction.

Discrimination Against Children on Reserve

A close second topic of horrific interest for me has been the story of Cindy Blackstock and the "successful" court case against the federal government. 

I write successful in quotation marks because even though after nearly a decade of struggle with the courts, the case claiming the government was systemically discriminating against children on reserve was finally heard, and a judge found the government guilty, children (and their families) living on reserve continue to experience a different (lower) level of child welfare service than their off-reserve counterparts. 

​Despite the issuing of a second compliance order by the courts!
 
(If you want to learn more about this story, check out the film, "We Can't Make the Same Mistake Twice", directed by the graceful yet powerful, 80-something-year-old Alanis Obomsawin, herself a survivor of the system.)

"Our Children"

These two lessons in particular have made me reflect on my own use of "my" when describing the children in my care as a classroom educator over the years.

In a recent slide deck some colleagues and I had prepared for a professional learning session we were planning, we used the heading, "What we Believe about Our Children", intending to facilitate a conversation about the positive messages we, provincially, were collaborating on, based on the program document we were promoting.

Our director drew our attention to the use of the word "our".

An interesting discussion ensued with the team, about our intent in using the word, vs the possible perception by people for whom a government appropriation of children gone wrong was all too close in the collective memory.

Despite our aim in sharing the message that educating our province's children was a collective responsibility, a partnership that we should take very seriously, not underestimating their gifts, talents and competencies, I understood our Director's concern: In the Kantian sense here, impact outweighs intent, regardless of how benevolent that intent is!

"My" Kids

On my desk at work, I have many photos of children. The oldest is a class photo from my third year of teaching, when I had the great privilege of spending my days with students in Grades 1-8 who were learning English. The photo was taken on the steps of the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara, on a cross-grade field trip I had convinced my principal at the time was absolutely necessary in order to build a sense of community amongst the often-ostracized members of our school's ESL population. Gazing in wonder at the butterflies surrounding them, the little ones sat obediently for the camera (their middle school counterparts were in a different section of the building at the time). On the bus ride home, most of them fell asleep in the laps of their older peers!

The second group photo on my desk is also from the early part of my career, a shot from picture day at school, this time a contained class of students in Grades 1-3, all of whom had been identified as having special learning needs. Not long after that photo was taken, one of the youngest students in the class came to me after having spent a few period in another classroom... she was perplexed: "Are we the only children who sit on balls?" she asked in bewilderment, referring to the class set of therapy balls the parents had purchased for me at the end of the previous school year, after seeing the positive impact of daily movement on their childrens' ability to focus. It had never dawned on the dear little sweetie that the students in other classes might sit on "normal" chairs! (As a quirky aside, I met a former classmate of hers, now in her 20s, in an Uberpool earlier this year.)

The third group of children that has been immortalized in a frame on my desk is perhaps the most unique: A group of no fewer than 9 sets of multiples (well, 8.5; one twin was home sick) -- with parental permission, I had invited a board photographer to the school to capture on camera the phenomenon of a twinning rate that was more than double the norm! The 18 of us crowded into my office (I was an acting VP at the time) to take the group shot that still sits on my desk 10 years later, and then the photographer took individual headshots of each twin, which we later made into a matching game; one went home with each kid, and a few copies stayed in the school library. (The missing twin was monozygotic, so we just took two photos of his brother!)

I recognize now that while each of children in these photos holds a special place in my heart, as do the many students I have taught since then, they are not "my" children. They are kids who were -- for a short time -- entrusted to my care by families who courageously sent them off to me and my colleagues. Sometimes we did a pretty good job of earning that obligatory trust. Other times, I have no doubt we let them down.

Alex and Simon

The only real photos of my kids on my desk are the ones of two little blond boys (sometimes mistaken for girls, due to the length of their locks).

One small yellow frame depicts a three-year-old painting at the kitchen table in the old house, his chubby fingers gripping the brush purposefully. A nearby frame of equal size (but in blue) shows his brother sitting at the outdoor dining table at a friend's cottage, a giant sausage he'll never eat on the plate in front of him.

An unframed print of one with the other in a headlock, visible through the open door of their playhouse on PEI sticks to the magnetic door of one of my cabinets. On another cabinet door, behold one photo of a boy standing while his brother insists on lying down on the ground near the lighthouse on the island's south shore. And then there are two small black and white shots from photo day at Simon and Alex's school in Toronto, taken a long time ago -- Grade 2, maybe?

The best of intentions aside, these are the photos of my real kids, the only children I have the right to claim publicly as my own. And even that is changing as they grow older and become more and more their own people, and less and less "my" children.

I got to hang out with some secondary school teachers this past week, and it really made me more empathetic to the cause of my secondary colleagues who want to pursue equitable assessment practices in their classrooms but find themselves running into roadblocks.

Assessment is a big, often anxiety-inducing topic. So is equity. Put them together and you get a giant behemoth of an issue in public education!  I’ve written about both subtopics discretely as well as the behemoth in the past, but today I want to bring to light a very particular issue about equity and assessment that is in some ways unique to secondary (and post-secondary) education.
 
Integration Preamble: The Generalist
 
As an elementary school teacher I found integration of subject areas both delightful and necessary in my teaching, in order to “cover” the many curriculum documents I had to ultimately report on students' achievement of. With few rare exceptions, my elementary classroom teaching experience was that of a generalist rather than a specialist, and this meant that I would typically see one "main" group of students for most of the school day. This arrangement made it possible me to integrate quite easily.
 
A cross-curricular, integrative approach to teaching and learning allowed for pedagogical practice that was responsive to both student learning needs and interests, and also emerging hot topics in the media.  
 
An example that springs readily to mind was the Syrian refugee inquiry my instructional coach and I facilitated my Grade 6s through when then-prime-ministerial candidate Justin Trudeau pledged to usher in a specified number of refugees by a certain date if elected. So many of my students that year came from the middle east, and so their interest to engage with this news topic was keen.  
 
By examining the context of many refugees’ journeys from their homes, and their subsequent arrival in far away places like Canada, we expanded our vocabularies, increased our writing skills and commitment, explored math concepts like measurement and unit rate, and engaged with social studies curriculum expectations addressing the stories, contributions and systemic struggles of different people groups in Canada. By doing much of our research watching videos (many in Arabic with English subtitles) and using photos from news articles, my class and I were also able to attend to a number of media literacy expectations from the Language curriculum.
 
Teaching in this way has become second nature to me, and I find ways to differentiate assessment tools and opportunities in ways that meet the learning needs and leverage the affinities of my students, while still being grounded in criteria that we co-construct to meet our overarching learning goal(s).  It’s an ever-evolving instructional design that is both equitable and robust.
 
The Specialist
 
My secondary colleagues, by contrast, often teach one specific course, allowing them the luxury of focusing on one subject.
 
Unencumbered by the need to report on 12 or more subject strands, they can and often do become experts in their field, zeroing in on the overall and specific expectations of the curriculum document that forms the foundation of their particular course.
 
Advance Notice
 
As I am discovering while working with my secondary colleagues, it is often considered best practice (and indeed, some schools or boards may have a policy that insists on this) to share a course outline, with specific assessment dates, with students at the outset of a course in high school.
 
Some course outlines even include the exact percentage each assignment and/or test will be worth.
 
The thinking is something along the lines of “by making sure students know ahead of time when and how they will be evaluated, we are giving everyone the same shot at getting good marks”.

As we know, however, giving everyone the same thing does not constitute an equitable system.  And, while I applaud the noble intentions behind providing an overview of what a student (and her family) can anticipate in a given course, the idea of such a "fixed" approach to assessment makes me a bit tense.
 
Emerging Criteria

As is becoming more and more clear to me (both in my last few years as a classroom educator and in my current role as an Education Officer with the Ministry of Ed), the power of Assessment AS Learning can only really be harnessed effectively if students are heavily involved in co-constructing success criteria with their teachers, and if the teacher allows these criteria to emerge throughout a teaching and learning cycle.

While a teacher should certainly create and share a curriculum-based learning goal with his students at the outset of an inquiry or a unit of study, and would do well to have criteria in mind ahead of time, an authentic learning climate will engage students in such a way that the students feel they truly have at least some ownership in the classroom, and this ownership manifests itself very effectively when they can contribute to the co-creation and ongoing editing of success criteria to meet a learning goal throughout a course or unit of study.

Descriptive Feedback

If student learning is to improve according to the principles of Growing Success (our province's assessment policy), teacher, peer and self feedback must not only describe a student's progression towards an established learning goal as described by the criteria, but the student much also be allowed to act on this feedback to improve his performance and demonstrated achievement of said goal.

The Conundrum

From what I can see, and based on my experiences with the average learner, pre-communicating assessment (evaluation, really) dates and assignments inhibits a growth mindset stance to learning: Why would a student take seriously descriptive feedback throughout the learning cycle if in fact "it doesn't count" as part of their much-coveted final mark?

Gleaning a better understanding of the existing culture and practice in many secondary schools is helping me to appreciate the hurdles faced by my high school colleagues when they are prodded by assessment workshop keeners like me to be "responsive" in their assessment and instruction practices with students!

A Broader Understanding of Equity

Communicating ahead of time with students about course expectations, assessment practices and the like are an important part of a "no surprises" equitable approaches diet for teachers and their students. However, I would argue that in order to use assessment for and as learning effectively, and establish -- as Growing Success calls it -- a climate that is "fair, transparent, and equitable for all students", we need to broaden our understanding of what it means to adopt an equity perspective when it comes to assessment.
Inviting students into the conversation about what a specific learning goal might look, sound and feel like when demonstrated by the learner is one piece of the puzzle.  Allowing enough open-endedness in a course or class that criteria can be properly co-developed, refined and edited as needed, and that feedback based on said criteria can be given, received and applied throughout the learning cycle before a final grade is determined, is another important piece, and one that may require significant rethinking of how far in advance (if ever!) a course outline is etched in stone.

We can't change the world, says a particularly fatalistic-minded colleague of mine, but we can and should improve the world of those in our immediate sphere of influence. 

I believe making the world a better place for the students in our care begins with an equity stance when it comes to learning and assessment. Lucky me in my job I am surrounded by deep thinkers and experienced educators who will have lots to say about this matter.  I look forward to seeking their wisdom as I consider how best to preach the messages in Growing Success in ways that honour and respectively stretch (where required) the existing culture of secondary school educators.