Fractal Patterns, Playing Jazz, and Other Variations on a Metacognitive Theme

This is not another education think piece on "measuring what matters." I'm not writing to echo the clarion call for more and better assessment of 21st Century skills, noncognitive factors, metacognitive learning strategies, or whatever the nom du jour may be.

That's not to say these factors don't matter. Quite the contrary: there is widespread agreement among researchers, business leaders, educators, and policymakers that success after high school requires more than content knowledge and academic skills. Dr. David Conley and my colleagues at the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) have synthesized two decades of research into a definitional model of college and career readiness that includes metacognitive components such as goal setting, self-direction, and self-efficacy. Surveys of major employers consistently identify "soft skills" such as creativity, collaboration, and communication as critical attributes for the 21stCentury workforce. Drs. Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth have added growth mindset and grit, respectively, to the aspirational vernacular of "what our kids need to succeed."

The Innovation Lab Network (ILN), a group of states convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers, has worked over the past four years to develop a shared understanding of college and career readiness across dimensions of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Individual states are increasingly codifying commitments to the deeper learning outcomes of their high school graduates; see Colorado's Postsecondary Workforce Readiness criteria, Maryland's Skills and Success, Maine's Guiding Principles, New Hampshire's Work Study Practices, and Hawaii's definition of readiness that incorporates the indigenous concept of wayfinding. Proclamations like these send a signal to the field that skills and dispositions are important, essential even, yet leave us wanting in terms of how to support, compel, and incentivize the education system to actually incorporate them into regular classroom practice.

So how do we operationalize essential skills and dispositions into policy and practice? EPIC is partnering with the University of Kentucky's Center for Innovation in Education (CIE) and a group of school, district, and state leaders to address this very question.

There's an instinct here to jump right to assessment as the policy solution: "Now that we've proclaimed, we need to assess. Assess to define, assess to measure to hold accountable." But that poses a whole new set of problems: these things are notoriously hard to measure using large-scale assessment instruments (though people far smarter than me are doing incredibly interesting work in this area); these things are often ill-defined for the field as fixed standards of practice (or worse, fixed character traits); and it assumes the current configuration of measurement and accountability (and responsibility) can deliver the deeper learning outcomes we seek. "If only we could find the right test, we could drop that sucker into our school quality index, high five ourselves for using multiple measures, and call it a Next Generation day."

My colleagues and I are proposing a different approach: to lead with the learning. We're working with educators from around the country to unpack and explore how a set of essential skills and dispositions - collaboration, communication, self-direction, and creativity - develop across content areas and over time. Adapting a model of skill acquisition inspired by how people learn to play jazz, we've created developmental frameworks that describe the progression of these skills from beginner to emerging expert, from rules to analysis to intuition, from tinkering to practice to flow, from controlled context to far transfer across domains.

As a community of practice, teachers use the frameworks to inform how they design learning experiences, learning environments, and learning relationships. Take, for example, the classic and dreaded group project. You know, the kind where one person ends up doing all the work. Why? Because it's just easier that way. Why? It might be because group members aren't very good collaborators, but more often than not, it's because the project isn't truly a collaborative task. A deeper understanding of collaboration helps a teacher construct learning tasks where the division of labor produces efficiency and where combined contributions increase the quality of work product. Frameworks can also help identify collections of evidence that make the collaborative process visible alongside the final work product (e.g., reflective journals, process portfolios, or think-alouds).

Understanding the development of essential skills and dispositions, we can better understand the contexts and conditions in which they thrive. Understanding contexts and conditions, we can make better policy choices. Our work is fairly nascent, but we've got a few hunches based on observations of early innovators. First and foremost, these deeper learning outcomes have a fractal effect on the whole system. The very skills and dispositions (and mindsets and behaviors) we hope to foster in students, we need them present in the adults of the system: to be self-reflective, proactive, willing to try new things, with the courage to fail.

In the interest of being self-reflective myself, I'll return to my early assertion that this post is not about measurement and assessment. That's not entirely true. We can't do this work, we can't "lead with the learning," without good assessment. Good assessment, however, reaches back to the Latin origin of the word "to sit beside." We need rich and authentic means of collecting evidence and providing feedback to guide the continued development of these skills and dispositions. Student self-reports, teacher observations, and curriculum-embedded performance tasks hold promise as evidence of learning, more so when combined with other information. And just as learning tasks need to make product and process visible, measures of school quality may need to be designed to make visible both student outcomes and school enabling conditions. Each of these evidentiary approaches bump up against validity, reliability, and feasibility constraints of accountability policy as it is currently conceived.

But a classroom designed to foster essential skills and dispositions will look very different than one focused on the compliant transfer of content knowledge. So, too, will a policy system. What that looks like, we're still figuring that out. Like learning to play jazz.

Common Core Implementation Requires Better Teacher Recruitment and Support

This is the third of a three-part series cross-posted at the National Center for Education and the Economy and Education Week. In this multi-part interview, Marc Tucker talks with Gene Wilhoit about why he thought it so important to create the standards and what he thinks will be needed to fully implement them.

Marc Tucker: The best professional development I have seen is in Shanghai, where teachers work together, without facing students, for a substantial part of every day. They have well-developed career ladders, and the teachers near the top of the ladder lead work teams composed of teachers further down the career ladder to improve instruction in the school and to address a myriad of challenges the school faces. In Shanghai schools, professional development is not a matter of “workshopping” teachers, but of organizing schools so teachers are the drivers of improvement, and they are learning all the time. They have to do that in order to meet the expectations of their fellow teachers.

Gene Wilhoit: First, this issue of how we expect teachers to use their time is one of the most important differences between our system and the systems in the top-performing countries. When I first started visiting schools in the top-performing countries, one of the first things I noticed was that those countries understand that sustained conversations among teachers are critical to the improvement of student learning. Something has to give to accommodate that. For example, districts in the United States decided to make reduction of the ratio of students to teachers a very high priority. We do not have unlimited resources, so conversations about what we compromise to capture precious time will be very hard, but it is very important to do so.

Beyond the issue of time, like you, I noticed how other countries identify the best in the profession and give them leadership responsibilities and the opportunity to mentor new and underperforming teachers. They find time for faculty to operate as a team. It’s regrettable we have institutionalized professional development days as the means for growth. We must make more time available for teachers to work with each other in teams. I can see a model in which every professional in a school is a member of one or more teams, each of which is working to improve some aspect of the school program, whether that is a particular lesson or the way the school handles student disciplinary problems.

Teachers interact with each other daily and are in each other’s classrooms all the time, critiquing and learning from their colleagues. The teachers would be linked to the best teachers and researchers in the country, using those connections to constantly improve their own practice. When I go into a hospital for an important procedure, the whole process is recorded, and, when appropriate, shared across the medical community. The medical community is constantly learning from one another. I can see this happening in American schools. We need to have the capacity to share problems and solutions. This is a completely different model than the one we now have for professional development in the United States.

MT: Let’s go back to the issue of the nature of the pool from which we recruit our teachers and the way they are trained. Top performers recruit from the top one-third to the top five percent of their college-going high school graduates. We recruit from the bottom half. Not only is the quality of our pool low, but it is also true that the criteria for graduating from these institutions and entering the teaching work force are very weak. How important is this issue?

GW: The evidence is overwhelming that strong academic background, along with high verbal capacity and broad and deep content knowledge are essential to good teaching. We must recruit high quality people into the profession. But we’ve dug ourselves into a much deeper hole on this issue than we realize. It will not be easily addressed. We will have to make a career in teaching much more appealing to capable high school graduates and we will also need to make the prospect of attending a teacher education institution much more appealing. Neither will be easy. Making a career in teaching more attractive will certainly involve improving teacher compensation. But capable high school students will need to see that teachers are treated as real professionals, too. That will require us, among other things, to use aggressive career ladders to create a rewarding career, and, as we were saying to each other a moment ago, to create opportunities to work collaboratively with other professionals in their school and beyond.

Young people making career choices will need to have confidence that the leaders in the schools have a handle on curriculum, instruction, and the skills to manage a cadre of professionals. That implies a real focus on leadership in our schools and more latitude in decision making for professionals. These are not challenges that can be addressed with silver bullets. We will have to tackle all these simultaneously to rebuild the profession. We have allowed the status of teachers and teaching to degrade over the years. We have accepted an inferior product from our schools of education and accepted lower standards in our professional workforce. Capable young people aren’t excited about entering a profession where they see little opportunity to advance and be rewarded. Yet, there are outstanding professionals in U.S. schools. We can identify them, put them into leadership positions, and restructure our schools. It is not the fault of the teachers that we are where we are. Society has done this. We know the importance of teachers. But we have not yet acted on our knowledge.

MT: Recruiting our most capable into teaching was one issue you identified. Talk a bit about the teacher education institutions and their programs. In Finland they have nine teacher education institutions and they are in research universities. In North Carolina there are 49 and few of our teachers are taught in our best universities. What do we have to do to reinvent our teacher education institutions?

GW: The states have a major role here. Programs exist, both strong and weak, because we have allowed them. States need to make much more aggressive use of their authority to approve the preparation programs of the teacher education institutions. We should not allow any program to exist without a high quality design, and good outcomes. The criteria for admission to and exit from teacher education programs must be high. Third, when we have a teacher shortage, we simply lower the standards for hiring teachers.

We need very high standards for entry into the profession. Those standards need to be based not on a paper and pencil test alone, but on a demonstration of high teaching competence. Until we make these tough decisions, we will continue to have a proliferation of programs with limited capacity.

MT: You’ve covered the whole territory. We see the world in very much the same way–to really implement the common core in the spirit in which it was designed requires a transformation of the whole system.

GW: Yes it does. I sometimes feel people put too much weight on the Common Core. Standards by themselves will have no effect if not translated into strong instructional design, professional development, and support for the profession, all things that this country has not yet had the will to do.

MT: Most of the countries with the best student performance committed to wrenching changes in their education systems because they saw that the dynamics of global competition have changed, and they would face a bleak economic future if they didn’t produce a globally competitive workforce. It is unclear to me if we are in that place. Our relative economic success, based on a workforce schooled twenty or thirty years ago, is making it much harder for Americans to understand that there could be a crisis waiting if we don’t transform our education system.

GW: I still hear people say the great recession was just an adjustment. The reality is they are not seeing the big shifts that are right at our doorstep. This is characteristic of a country which has been very successful for a very long time. Most people don’t understand what is likely to happen if we fail to transform our education system.

Quality Curriculum is Key to Common Core Implementation

This is the second of a three-part series cross-posted at the National Center for Education and the Economy and EducationWeek. In this multi-part interview, Marc Tucker talks with Wilhoit about why he thought it so important to create the standards and what he thinks will be needed to fully implement them. In the first round, Wilhoit identified four arenas that would have to be addressed to make the Common Core a success: 1) high-quality, coherent and powerful curriculum frameworks and materials matched to the Common Core, 2) high-quality assessments matched to the standards and curriculum, 3) vastly improved programs of initial teacher preparation designed to produce teachers capable of teaching the Common Core well, 4) a revolution in professional development for currently serving teachers, also designed to enable teachers—in this case currently serving teachers—to teach the Common Core well to students from many different backgrounds.

Marc Tucker: Of those four arenas you identified as keys to the successful implementation of the Common Core, there is only one that is underway and that you think may come out OK. That is assessment. Let’s discuss each of the others. How can each of the states develop a powerful curriculum fully informed by the standards? There appear to be only a few options: commercial publishers, the states themselves and non-profits. I see a few publishers behaving in creative ways, but most appear to be just sticking gold stamps on existing products declaring them to be aligned with the standards when it is patently clear that they are not aligned. I see foundations investing in enabling third party institutions to stick good housekeeping seals of approval on clumps of instructional materials that do not add up to a coherent curriculum. I don’t see the foundations or the federal government stepping forward and investing in large-scale programs of curriculum development, in the way both did in 50s and 60s. Do you see any way that we will be able to develop the kind of standards-based, first-rate curriculum frameworks and curriculum to match the quality of what we see in the top-performing countries?

Gene Wilhoit: I agree totally with the picture you have just painted. Also, there doesn’t seem to be the capacity in school districts, which is the one addition I would make to your list. This country has to figure out how to make a big investment in this area. I am pessimistic about federal funding. I’m not advocating that the U.S. Department of Education have a role in designing any of this; their role should be supporting research, not curriculum development. We need to go back to our foundations and make the case. Good housekeeping seals of approval are not going to give us what we need. Quick fixes of this sort will not do it. Far more will be required.

There are international models that could help us. The board examination systems—tightly integrated systems of standards, curriculum and exams—that come from Cambridge Assessment, and that can be found in New South Wales in Australia, Singapore, and several provinces in Canada—just to name a few—provide some outstanding models of curriculum design and tons of expertise on which we could build to create very strong curriculums in the United States. The idea is not to adopt these other curriculums but to identify what others have done internationally and learn from them. They have gone deeply into issues we have not considered. These systems all use curriculum to drive instructional practice to very high standards. Our leading foundations need to understand how critical it is to have curriculum designs that can drive fundamental improvements in instructional practice. Though the will is there in some of our state departments of education, I don’t think they have the needed deep expertise. So it will be up to our best universities and our leading not-for-profits. And they will have to decide that this is a major priority for them. I can see a coalition of strong, thoughtful faculty across a number of top universities providing this guidance and leadership, perhaps in association with one of more not-for-profits that have the necessary management expertise.

MT: Education Development Center, where I started my career in education years ago, did this back in the 60s and developed some of the finest mathematics and science curriculum this country has ever seen, so there is a precedent here. When we look around the world for powerful curriculum designs, we find board examinations built around standards and syllabi.

GW: Some of the most respected programs in the USA are just that: the Advanced Placement program and the International Baccalaureate have those characteristics.

MT: Most of the top-performing countries have systems of this sort. Their assessments aren’t directly based on standards but on the course as it is described in the syllabus. The best example worldwide is the work of Cambridge Assessment, used in more than 150 countries. Their exams cost about what the Advanced Placement tests cost, between two and three times what the new consortium tests will cost. One reason is that they are scored by human beings rather than computers, and the other is that they release all the questions every year with examples of papers that received good scores and analyses of why they got those scores. That means that teachers know, parents know, and kids know what good student work looks like. It is actually these pieces of student work that set the standard. But American test-makers won’t release the questions in the tests each year and they won’t show you examples of the student responses that get top grades. They won’t show teachers how their students do on particular test items, so the teachers don’t know after the tests are given what their students need to work on to do better the next time. So, compared to students and teachers in other countries, our students and teachers are flying blind. Their curriculum and exam system, unlike the systems of the top performers, is designed to measure student performance, but not to improve it.

GW: All that is true. It is also true that the system you just described provides the best professional development for teachers I have ever seen. When you release the items and provide examples of student work that meets the standards, you can then engage teachers in conversations about why a particular piece of student work meets the standards. When teachers bring the work of their own students to a meeting with other teachers, it promotes a conversation about why your students were able to meet the standards, while mine did not. These conversations quickly get to the most important issues in teaching and learning. Not enough of this is happening today in the US. There is too little deep professional exchange about content, pedagogy, and student work going on in our schools, and, until there is, the Common Core will not be implemented as it should be implemented.

When I was commissioner in Kentucky, we did have opportunities of this kind for teachers. Again, the point is that we do not have to create new models. In some cases, we can resurrect very good ones we’ve used before. The longer we delay providing these types of support, the more frustrated we will become.