Measuring Social-Emotional Growth in Students

This week’s article summary is Testing for Joy and Grit. 

Over the past few months there have been a number of published articles about whether or not schools should try to ‘measure’ student social-emotional growth and development. (As you’ll see in the article, the guru of grit in education, Angela Duckworth, is adamantly opposed to trying to objectively measure social-emotional growth in students.)

Most independent-private schools have always had a whole child focus, emphasizing social-emotional development. And even though we comment on students' character growth in our narrative progress reports,  we are rarely asked to provide aggregate ‘quantitative’ evidence.

As public schools are beginning to more formally include social-emotioinal lessons in their curriculum, they are also being asked to design quantitative assessments to justify this emphasis.

This has cause much debate, disagreement, and controversy: What are the most important social-emotional qualities?  Can they be measured with quantitative metrics? Can any measure of social-emotional growth ever be truly objective?

When I read articles like this, I am always thankful that I teach in an independent-private school where evidence of success isn’t based on quantitative metrics.

Yes, we have pressures like aggregate standardized test results and secondary school outplacement, yet by and large we are assessed more on to what extent the daily experience of our students is congruent with the our mission.

Joe

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The fifth graders in Jade Cooney’s classroom compete against a kitchen timer during lessons to see how long they can sustain good behavior — raising hands, disagreeing respectfully, and looking one another in the eye — without losing time to insults or side conversations. As reward for minutes without misconduct, they win prizes like 20 seconds to kick their feet up on their desks or to play rock-paper-scissors.

Starting this year, their school and schools in eight other California districts will test students on how well they have learned the kind of skills like self-control and conscientiousness that the games aim to cultivate — ones that might be described as everything you should have learned in kindergarten but are still reading self-help books to master in middle age.

A recent update to federal education law requires states to include at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance. Other states are watching these districts as a potential model.

But the race to test for so-called social-emotional skills has raised alarms even among the biggest proponents of teaching them, who warn that the definitions are unclear and the tests faulty.

“I do not think we should be doing this; it is a bad idea,” said Angela Duckworth, who has done more than anyone to popularize social-emotional learning, making “grit” a buzzword in schools.

She resigned from the board of the group overseeing the California project, saying she could not support using the tests to evaluate school performance.

And there is little agreement on what skills matter: Self-control? Empathy? Perseverance? Joy?

“There are so many ways to do this wrong,” said Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago. “In education, we have a great track record of finding the wrong way to do stuff.”

Schools began emphasizing social-emotional learning around 2011, after an analysis of 213 school-based programs teaching such skills found that they improved academic achievement by 11 percentile points. A book extolling efforts to teach social-emotional skills in schools such as the KIPP charter network and Riverdale Country School in New York, “How Children Succeed” by Paul Tough, appeared the next year.

Argument still rages about whether schools can or should emphasize these skills. Critics say the approach risks blaming the victim — if only students had more resilience, zest,” or enthusiasm. Groups that spent decades urging the country toward higher academic standards worry about returning to empty talk of self-esteem.

But teaching social-emotional skills is often seen as a way to move away from a narrow focus on test scores, and to consider instead the whole child.

It may seem contradictory, then, to test for those skills.

In education, however, the adage is “what’s measured gets treasured”; states give schools money to teach the subjects on which they will be judged.

Next year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test of students in grades four, eight and 12 that is often referred to as the nation’s report card, will include questions about students’ social-emotional skills. A well-known international test, PISA, is moving toward the same.

The biggest concern about testing for social-emotional skills is that it typically relies on surveys asking students to evaluate recent behaviors or mind-sets, like how many days they remembered their homework, or if they consider themselves hard workers. This makes the testing highly susceptible to fakery and subjectivity.

Students might be tested on performance, as in the “marshmallow test,” in which children were told they could have a sweeter reward if they waited. Those who waited scored higher in self-control. But those tests are too time-consuming to use on a large group of students.

Transforming Education, a Boston-based group that is among the biggest proponents of teaching social-emotional skills, argues that they are so important that schools have to begin testing for them, even if perfect measures do not exist. The group worked with the school districts here — which count one million students in cities including Los Angeles and Oakland — to choose four measures to evaluate: growth mind-set, social awareness, self-efficacy, and self-management.

The districts tested 10,000 students in 2014, and nearly 500,000 students last year, surveying things like how many days the students had come to school prepared (self-management), and whether they believed it was more important to be talented or to work hard (growth mind-set).

Just two years ago in her classroom in a trailer here at Visitacion Valley Elementary School, Ms. Cooney struggled with the kind of management problems that often confront young teachers.

Her students were bouncing around the classroom, playing with their phones instead of paying attention, fighting out interfamily beefs. Even if they wanted to learn, they were not.

Ms. Cooney took a two-hour training session in a student-behavior program and began playing “good-behavior games.” They look like regular lessons, except that they begin with students identifying goals for good behavior, and end with her assessing what went right and wrong.

On a recent day, students took notes on their reading as Ms. Cooney moved with a kind of Zen bustle around the classroom, grading papers and consulting one-on-one while she watched for things she would compliment the class on later — keeping bodies still, focusing on the task — and quietly noted bad behavior.

For every 1,000 minutes of good behavior earned, the children win 15 extra minutes of recess.

“I’m really saving minutes that would be lost to transitions, settling disputes and behavior problems,” Ms. Cooney said. It can be exhausting, but not nearly as much as teaching before. As she said, “Would you rather put out fires, or prevent them?”

Social-emotional learning will count for 8 percent of a school’s overall performance score; no teacher will lose a job for failing to instill a growth mind-set.

Noah Bookman, the chief accountability officer for the districts, said he understood the concerns about testing. But, he said, “This work is so phenomenally important to the success of our kids in school and life. In some ways, we worry as much if not more about the possibility that these indicators remain on the back burner.”

What's Your Educational Philosophy?

This week’s article summary is What Is Your Educational Philosophy? 

Just as last week’s article on no-excuses discipline led me to reflect on my beliefs regarding classroom management on the traditional-progressive continuum, this week’s did the same with my ‘philosophy of education.’

As we have spent a good deal of time this year on SAIS accreditation looking at where we are as a school programmatically and pedagogically, we in essence have been identifying Trinity’s ‘philosophy of education.’

What struck me about the article below was less about its content and more about the process, i. e. that the author (a teacher and blogger) periodically re-assesses about what drives him as a teacher and how these values shape the experience he provides for in his students. 

I still remember stumbling mightily with the question “What’s your philosophy of education?”  in interviews as I sought my first teaching job (plus my undergraduate major was history and I had never taken an education course). 

Truth be told, as a 22-year old I had no idea there were different approaches, emphases, nuances to teaching. I could recall teachers I did and didn't liked, but until I taught for a few years and then began reflecting on the type of teacher I wanted to be, a philosophy of education escaped me. 

This article also made me reflect on how fortunate we are to be at Trinity where conversations about educational philosophy occur regularly and we have an ample PD budget so we can all learn about new ideas and research. 

As you read the article, think about the traditional-progressive continuum and the ways in which the author’s philosophy of education contains elements of both.

Joe

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Over the summer, teachers reflect on the year and often redesign and perfect their teaching strategies and plans. In essence, they get back to the basics of what they believe is the best way to inspire learning in their students -- in other words, they revisit and refine their philosophy of education.

A school district might ask a teacher or principal applying for a job about her/his philosophy of education. In this post, I've decide to share mine, and I am curious to see if any of my beliefs resonate with you:

Students need to learn: Students want and need to learn as much as they need food, clothing, and shelter. An educator's primary job is to fill that primal need for learning by creating engaging and relevant learning experiences every day. The greatest gift a teacher can give students is motivating them to experience repeated learning success.

Students need to be active participants in learning: Students learn best by doing, and active teaching encourages active learning. Teachers should treat students as active participants in the learning process, providing them with skills, such as: How to study, How to take notes, How to memorize, How to express themselves effectively. Also, students need to be encouraged to explore and research information beyond the confines of the classroom and textbook.

Learning is a physiological activity involving the whole body: The best way to engage a student is to have a solid classroom management plan and a well-planned lesson that is grounded in relevant, purposeful activities designed to enhance that student's knowledge and skills and leave her/ him wanting to learn more. Teachers should be strongly aligned with student-centered and student-directed learning that embraces exploration, discovery, experiential learning, and the production of academically rigorous products.

Students need timely feedback to improve: Teachers gather data on student performance to adjust the learning environment and instruction so that they can target students' learning needs. Teachers administer pretests to find a starting point for learning and post-tests to determine the students' increase in performance level as well as the teachers' effectiveness.

Students need structure and repetition to learn: A teacher should be able to organize a standards-based lesson sequence, successfully implement the plan, and then evaluate student learning. A teacher should be able to create an exciting learning environment that makes it difficult for students not to learn. A teacher should know how to include all students in learning at their own level, and a teacher should be able to inspire the students to push themselves to the next level.

Students need information, knowledge, and skills: Having access to knowledge resources is as important to a child's education as the actual curriculum content. Relevant and current information must be at the teachers' and students' fingertips to provide answers when the questions are still fresh. Information "on demand" is more valuable than information "just in case."

Students need tools and resources: Students should know how their taxon and locale memory systems work. Students should have skills and strategies to be able to work effectively in the different levels of the cognitive domain as defined by Bloom. Students should be aware of their own learning preferences, and teachers should assist with creating a plan to develop other learning skills. Educational tools are a means to an end. For example, technology used appropriately can greatly magnify the students' capacity to learn and the teachers' capacity to teach, inspire, and motivate.

No Excuses Discipline?

This week’s article summary is Beyond the Viral Video: Debate About No Excuses Discipline.

At the article attests, discipline in schools finds all of us (teachers, kids, parents) "pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.”

This topic has been prominent in our SAIS Self-Study discussions about what we need to focus on in the next few years.

While the video linked in the article (take the minute to watch it) made me bristle as a teacher, the article more importantly made me take stock of where I place myself on the traditional-progressive continuum with respect to school discipline.

First, I clearly want my students to over time develop intrinsic decision-making and control. While an optimist, I also understand that most of us develop these intrinsic habits and skills within extrinsic limits. As a kid, I’d like to say I did my homework because I knew it was helping me learn, but in reality the consequence of not doing my homework was my motivation.

Second, I want a classroom to reflect a growth-mindset approach, meaning mistakes and errors (be they academic or behavioral) are how we learn and grow. How terrifying for me as a kid would it have been if every decision I made (some of which were the wrong choice) seemed like a summative Final Exam. 

Third, I think of Sarah Morgan’s Teacher Feature article a few weeks ago on how paramount the need to belong is and that misbehavior is often more a manifestation of not feeling "wanted, appreciated, and loved.” 

I have spent my entire professional career in prestigious independent-private schools—hence, I can’t judge the merit of no-excuses discipline in the high-poverty schools featured in the article. 

Yet, from the article I can certainly—as we all can—reflect on what sort of discipline/behavioral system to we believe in and foster in our classrooms and schools. 

Joe

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Let’s examines school discipline policies in light of the much-discussed video of a New York City charter school teacher harshly reprimanding a first grader for an incorrect paper.

More than perhaps any other issue in education, the discipline question finds individual students, teachers, and parents pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.

On one side are those who argue that the “no excuses” approach adopted by many charter schools is the only way to keep students on task and solve racial and social-class inequities that are exacerbated by lax discipline. Strict teachers are nothing new, but the no-excuses approach evolved in the 1990s to address the challenge of chaotic classrooms and disrespectful students in high-poverty schools. The approach was partly inspired by the “broken window” approach to community policing, which held that “sweating the small stuff” (fixing broken windows and other symptoms of disorder) created a climate that discouraged more-serious crimes. The “small stuff” in schools includes messy desks, gum chewing, pen tapping, doodling, trash on the floor, untucked shirts, loud talking, laughing at classmates, whining, eye rolling, teeth sucking, loud yawning, noisy movement from class to class, and running in the hallways.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that no-excuses tactics are abusive, racist, and not an effective way to close the achievement gap in a number of ways:

The end doesn’t justify the means. Even if students make significant academic gains in no-excuses classrooms, the argument goes, harsh treatment by teachers and administrators leaves emotional scars. Most no-excuses schools advocate “warm-strict” – a balance of high expectations within nurturing relationships. But it’s clear that some educators get carried away and act in ways that can easily be experienced by students as abusive – for example, the New York City teacher in the video tears up a student’s incorrect paper in front of the class and raises her voice as she sends the girl away from the group. The real question, of course, is what happens downstream for students – how they do in subsequent grades, college, and life. Data are just beginning to be gathered on that.

No-excuses discipline doesn’t teach the habits of success. The absence of misbehavior doesn’t mean the presence of high levels of learning. Additionally, strict, controlling discipline during school hours doesn’t prepare students to handle themselves responsibly in less-structured environments. All the silence had prepared them only for situations with tight supervision and no social interaction. As soon as students find themselves a bit older, on the bus without their teachers, they often don’t have the tools to resolve conflicts without putting themselves in danger. And how could they? The school hadn’t taught them. The same argument is made about teaching very structured procedures in English and math classes. It might produce high scores on standardized tests, but students can fail to develop the independent thinking skills that are essential for success in college and life.

Here are arguments made by supporters of the no-excuses approach:

No-excuses consequences don’t have to hurt kids. If practiced with skill and within a day-to-day climate of warmth and high expectations, strict consequences can be very helpful to students. Taking the example of correcting students’ grammar and speech patterns, which might inhibit students from speaking, John King (founder of a successful Boston charter school) says, “If done well, you’re giving kids lots of opportunities to speak. You say the sentence back to them grammatically correctly, or you ask them a question.” The challenge for rapidly expanding charter networks is ensuring that balance of warmth and strictness in every classroom. “The more ‘replication’ schools emerge,” says Green, “the farther away each new school is from the good intentions of those who created the philosophy – and the higher the risk of teachers misinterpreting the idea and falling down the slippery slope toward a disconnected desire for control and compliance.”

No-excuses schools are capable of change, and they are changing. Schools are learning from early mistakes and fine-tuning their approach to discipline. There’s more staff training, close monitoring of classrooms, and clear statements by school leaders like this one from Stacy Birdsell-O’Toole to her teachers: “We are not a yelling school. We do not yell at kids. If I see you yell at a child, I’m going to pull you to the side, I’m going to have a talk with you, and then you’re going to go back and you’re going to be successful.”

To me, the no-excuses approach to teaching needs radical overhaul. The behavior first, learning second formula prescribed by broken-windows theory – and for that matter, by most American schools – can successfully build compliant, attentive students, at least in the short term. But it cannot produce students who think creatively, reason independently, and analyze critically. Students cannot just ‘track’ the teacher, follow every direction, and repeat right answers in choral back-and-forths; they also need to learn to track arguments, pay attention to their work, and evaluate evidence in order to agree or disagree respectfully. And they need to have ample opportunities to make mistakes, both behavioral and academic, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their teachers. I’m saying that educators need to embrace new, more complicated structures that feel messier in the short term but build more permanent learning in the long term.

Fostering Critical Thinking in Students

This week’s article summary is “Misunderstanding Critical Thinking” (no hyperlink available). 

As teachers, we strive for our students "to think deeply, to be empowered in their learning, to be engaged in their learning now and in the future, and to be critical and creative thinkers.”

When I taught humanities, I kept on my desk a list of verbs that spanned the gamut of Bloom’s Taxonomy—knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation—and used them in class discussions and on test questions. My hope was that the higher-thinking verbs would guide students to become deep, critical, and creative thinkers.

As the article below attests, there is much more nuance to (and a lot of misperceptions about) facilitating deep and critical student thought. 

I didn’t fall prey to all five of the misperceptions below (I was never guilty of misperception 2), but this article is a reminder of how much work and planning it takes to guide students to move from being consumers to true creators of content and ideas.

Joe

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Below are five common conceptual errors about critical thinking:

1. Critical thinking is only for high-achieving and gifted students: All students are capable of higher-level thinking. Critical thinking should not be limited to one group or one age level of students.

2. It’s okay to have students review for a test by using the same critical-thinking questions that will appear on the test: With this approach, the test will assess only students’ ability to remember answers, not their ability to think through unfamiliar questions. Teachers need to integrate a variety of thinking questions throughout the curriculum (analyze scenarios, interpret graphics, evaluate quotes) and make sure students are seeing test questions for the first time.

3. Using higher-level verbs in assignments ensures that students will think critically: Unfortunately for novice teachers relying on commonly used critical thinking verb charts, things aren’t that simple. For example, in this task – Synthesize the passage and identify the main character – even though a higher-level verb is used, students won’t be doing any critical thinking. Another example of how explain can be used in a lower-level and higher-level task: (a) Explain who is the main character; (b) Explain what the main character fears the most and how he or she is resilient.

4. Higher-level thinking is best assessed through oral questioning: Students need time to process high-level questions. If students can produce a quick verbal answer when a question is fired at them in class, it’s probably a lower-level question. Better to let students ponder good questions and discuss them with a classmate before being asked to respond.

5. Any teacher can facilitate critical thinking: All teachers need PD on framing good critical thinking questions, modeling high-level thinking themselves, and revising their lesson tasks and assessments so they spur critical thinking. One of the best ways for teachers to improve their skills in this area is working with colleagues to create curriculum unit plans, assess student work, and focus on effective practices.