I mean, duh! And of course! And who else am I gonna be?!
[Also it makes the librarian in me nuts because it is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, but there is no evidence he ever said it. Additionally, he doesn’t seem to have written it anywhere. But that is a story for another day.]
Honestly, every time I see those words plastered on a wall or shared on social media I think, what does that even mean? What, in fact, does it mean to be me today? Yesterday? Tomorrow? Life, it seems, is about figuring out how to be oneself.
ESPECIALLY in Middle School.
Because early adolescents are experiencing tremendous growth: physically, cognitively, socially, emotionally, and psychologically. And they are asking big questions:
Who am I?
Who do I want to be?
What am I good at?
Who are my friends?
How do I fit into this classroom, this school, this world?
“Build opportunities for identity exploration into the curriculum, both within traditional academic classes and through exploratory classes where students might be introduced to new interests and future passions.” (pg. 64)
“adolescents need opportunities to explore different aspects of their identities and exercise the social and cognitive tools that allow them to develop agency over their lives. Educators must consider how they shape learning environments and practices to support healthy identity development and provide students with opportunities to direct their own actions and learning.” (pg. 10)
So what does that look like in the classroom?
Let’s start with the basics before we explore some examples in practice.
Identity refers to the characteristics that make us who we are.
There are plenty of ways to define those characteristics, and it often helps to start with some pretty simple prompts. For example:
What are your likes, interests, hobbies, and talents?
Who is your family?
Where is your home?
What traditions and celebrations are important to you?
What are your strengths?
How do you hope to grow?
Teachers can invite students to surface and reflect on these aspects of identity in a variety of ways:
Some characteristics that can help us better understand our identity are defined as social identifiers or identity markers.
These include things like age, race, gender, religion, and more. For many students, these concepts require some unpacking.
OES teachers Kyle Chadburn and Andrea Gratton have an excellent slideshow they use with students. Mount Holly educator Margaret Dunne found that her 4th and 5th grade students loved learning new vocabulary for talking about identity.
As you explore social identity markers with students, you might engage them in reflection on their own identities:
No one should have to share their identities with others unless they want to. For example, when I use identity wheels with adults I encourage them to share ONLY what they are comfortable sharing. The tools above are for reflection, and students have every right to leave categories blank or to not share their work with others, including the teacher!
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s connect this work to the content we already teach!
Use identity markers to analyze characters in class read aloud or book group books. Mount Holly teacher Emma Vastola’s class is reading The Flight of the Puffin and mapping the identities of each of the four characters in the book. Similarly, OES students apply what they know about identity to character studies.
Who Am I?: a science, social studies, and language arts project about identity and heredity.
Go beyond identity to community: moving from me to we!
Knowing and understanding ourselves is the first step to knowing and understanding others. Identity work is a great way to begin the year because it helps know and be known, fostering community and belonging. And it’s also a fabulous first step to building community routines and norms. A few fun protocols (yes, protocols can be fun!) can help students share more about themselves as they consider how to work well together:
Take it one step further: from identity to diversity to anti-bias and justice!
Learning for Justice’s Social Justice Standards outline a trajectory towards more just and equitable schools and communities, and it all starts with identity. Use the grade-level learning outcomes to guide you as you extend identity work into learning about taking collective action for a more just world. And check out these examples from Vermont classrooms:
Student-centered and personalized learning begins with knowing our students well.
In sum, identity work, to borrow a phrase from the legendary Audrey Homan, is a seed that feeds many birds! Because, of course, students not only learn more about themselves, they also learn more about each other and can share their understandings with their teacher, families, and communities (hello PLP and Student-Led Conference!).
And so we can’t wait to see all of the ways your students express how they are “being themselves.” After all, everyone else is taken!
Margaret Dunne, a fourth and fifth-grade educator at Mount Holly School in Mount Holly VT, originally presented “Exploring Identity with 4th and 5th Graders” in January 2021. She presented it as part of the 2021 Middle Grades Conference at the University of Vermont.
Below please find a video recording of the workshop, optimized for solo or team playback. Additionally, Margaret shared her slides for your use.
Many schools have an advisory structure to promote strong relationships and a sense of close community. And advisory already serves many purposes. It can be a place for close bonds, adult mentoring, connection and also great fun! But have you ever thought of advisory as a place for practicing mindfulness?
Stress levels are pretty high in schools right now.
Both students and teachers are complying with stringent regulations in order to keep schools safe. Given the tone of stress in the world, it makes sense to bring a little calm and peace to school structures.
When schools start the day with advisory, why not embed mindfulness strategies? Especially now, when stress levels are high. It can be helpful for students and teachers alike. Mindfulness is not only about bringing peace, calm and stress reduction. It also slows the pace of interaction and behavior to support social-emotional learning. I’m so grateful to counselors at Rutland Middle School, in Rutland VT, for bringing me this high powered and simple strategy.
Here are seven mindfulness activities for advisory.
1. Rainbow Walk
A Rainbow Walk is great because it combines movement with careful observation. Follow the directions here to engage in a walk that involves paying close attention and being present. It’s a simple activity: get your advisory outside and turn them individually loose for a set period of time. As they walk, ask students to take note — either internally or with paper and pencil, or even a phone to snap photos — of one item that’s red. And one item that’s orange. An item that’s yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. And finally, violet.
If you pulled all those phone photos together, for instance, where could you store your students’ crowd-sourced rainbow? How could it inspire further moments of mindfulness throughout the day?
2. Yoga!
You can show this six minute video to your students, and all practice together. It involves very small movements and stretches that can be done at your desk. Or try a more explicitly Gentle Chair Yoga practice at your desks, or get outside (yes again) and stretch all over. Yoga plus direct sunlight? Yes please!
3. Following a Breathing Board
Either print out or send to devices the diagrams and visuals in this document (.pdf) to assist in breathing in and out. Just sit for a hot second and… breathe. When was the last time any of us made time for that?
4. Mindful coloring
Very slow and deliberate coloring can be a great way to reduce stress and focus. Use the resources from this site to help yourself and your students find peace and calm.
This is a recognized exercise that people often use to de-escalate anxiety, and it’s quite possible we all could use having something like this in our back pockets right about now.
6. “The Gift of You” Exercise
This exercise may work better with younger children, but there is still something lovely to be learned about the “gift of yourself”. Try it.
7. Box (or square) Breathing
I first learned about “the box breath” from Rising Strong, by Brene Brown. She learned it from Mark Miller, a Green Beret who teaches the breathing technique as it’s used in the military. This explains it well. But basically, you use inhalations and exhalations to construct a virtual box that helps you focus on actually feeling the effects of breathing on your body. It’s an amazing and simple relaxation and mediation strategy.
But you do you.
These are just seven of many mindfulness activities out there that can be embedded into an advisory routine. You might try an activity for a day or two, or you might engage your students in a whole week focused on mindfulness strategies. Whatever you do, make it accessible for the educators in the room, too. Mindfulness is one of many self-care strategies that our teachers need now, too. It deserves to find a time and space within the school day.
I’d love to hear from educators who are using mindfulness in the classroom. Is anyone out there practicing it in advisory? Tell us your stories.
During this COVID-19 crisis, we as adult educators, are collectively mourning the loss of our everyday routines and face-to-face interactions. And students are too.
As educators, we know that routines are important, and so is face-to-face connection. Meaningful connection with other humans is critical to a young adolescent’s health and well-being. Right now more than ever, we need to provide students with those regular connection routines. And as we make use of video conferencing to connect with students, here’s how to maximize our human connection: virtual morning meetings.
Virtual morning meetings are essential
In Southern Vermont, as soon as schools closed, sixth grade teacher Robin Bebo-Long instantly went virtual with her morning meetings. Every day of the school week, she gathers with her students from Cavendish Town School on a Zoom call. It begins each morning at 8:50 am. And Robin greets each student by name as they join the call.
In Northern Vermont, Jared Bailey joined with his teaching team in getting virtual morning meetings up and running. Every day, Jared spends time with his 21 fifth- and sixth-graders via Google Meet. And he too, greets students as they join the call before its 9 am start time.
Virtual morning meetings help preserve and strengthen relationships
Jared says,
“At this time, we have had such an abrupt disruption in schooling, and we have to focus on what is essential for students – to see their teacher’s face and hear their voice. Those relationships come first, and that we see that our students’ emotions are healthy.”
While so much in students’ lives has changed, it must be comforting to these young adolescents to see both their peers and their educators each morning.
What are the elements of a powerful virtual morning meeting?
Robin and Jared are masters of facilitating the virtual morning meeting. Each of them loosely follows the same structure (which is incidentally pretty similar to the one I proposed in Host your morning meeting from home). It’s a structure that encourages students to connect, share and build relationships; it could follow this simple format.
1. The Greeting
As mentioned, Robin and Jared greet every student by name, every morning. Each of them greeted students by name as they entered the call. “Good Morning, Lydia…. Good Morning, Neko….”
What does it feel like when you hear your name spoken by a familiar and expected voice? Does it help soothe any anxiety you feel?
2. Daily News or Announcement
If the teacher is the leader of Morning Meeting, then he or she gives some updates and news briefs about the day.
In one session I sat in on, Jared told the students, “Today you have a virtual ELA session at 10:30 am, and a Math virtual session at 1 pm. I know that the art teacher sent out a link to you about some art resources, and there is a time tomorrow for you to pick up Spanish packets at school”.
Try to behave like the central hub of communication for kids on that day. Centralize the information they need for the day. Try to organize it for them. Repeat it to them so they have your voice as a touchstone. There is a lot coming at students in their email in-boxes every day, and many students need someone to assimilate that information for them. If you think it’s helpful, you can use visual news or reminders.
3. Sharing
Next, open up a prompt for people to think about and share.
I’ve seen that done well as a prompt *combined* with the greeting. Jared did this in the session I attended. “Please say good morning to us and share with the class what book you are currently reading”. That sharing creates a set of student-contributed resources for other students to consider. It creates community.
I attended one of Robin’s virtual morning meetings on a Monday. So she asked students to reflect on their weekend activities, utilizing a protocol called Roses and Thorns: “Share with us a high from this past weekend and a low.”
Using that protocol is clever, as it captures the reality that many students are going to struggle with weekends, as well as finding joy. It opens the door, on one hand, for students to look for joy in their lives. At the same time, it invites them to share a place where as the morning meeting leader, you might want to check in and ask a student if they need additional support.
4. Game or Activity
Last, the leader can choose some sort of short activity or game.
Robin shared an activity her class loved: “Find a MEME that shows how you’re feeling!” Again she created that space where her students could invite themselves to share joy or positivity but also open the door to asking for additional support. Meanwhile, for his activity, Jared had the class contribute to a Flipgrid where each student shared a joke.
A note of caution about virtual morning meetings:
So many of us are learning a “new normal”, and video-conferencing has taken the place of the handshake. We are quickly learning the benefits and drawbacks of video tools. Some of the positives: students seeing familiar faces, and hearing familiar voices. The power to provide in-time, synchronous support to students.
And the drawbacks: privacy & security
Security and privacy are real concerns, so choose your tools wisely. Whether you are using Google Hangouts, Meet, Zoom, or some other platform, teachers should take precautions to keep virtual spaces safe. For instance, do you know how to keep students from joining or rejoining a Meet without you?
(Speaking of Meet, they just recently added the ability for teachers to run Google Meets from within their Google Classroom platform. Learn more about that here.)
Now, in some ways, video conferencing can be a great equalizer. But they can also unearth certain inequities. You may be joining the call from your (second) beautiful, sunny solarium with high ceilings, while I am sharing myself from the messy closet of a bedroom that I share with two siblings.
If you use a Zoom call, you can allow your students to change their backgrounds. Microsoft Teams allows users to change their background as well, or simply blur it out. These features allow students to show their own clear faces, but not show a less than ideal backdrop. Teachers might even choose to ask all students to hide backdrops, so that everyone can focus on the person, not the setting.
Additionally, some students may simply not feel comfortable enough with their appearance (or surroundings, or the technology) to participate in video-conferencing either regularly or in a particularly challenging moment. In these cases, what’s your backup plan?
Morning Meeting, meet Advisory
While I have been writing about the Morning Meeting, I want to acknowledge its intwinement with advisory.
Often, an effective advisory structure uses morning meetings on all or most days. Morning meetings can take place across many learning settings, hence my dependence on the term “morning meeting” instead of advisory.
We need Morning Meeting now more than ever
Now back to our program…
For me, there are two main outcomes that make Virtual Morning Meeting so essential.
For one, it’s important that students have this opportunity for connection with peers. I observed both Jared and Robin artfully manage their meetings while still keeping it focused on the students and their voices. Some students might make animal sounds, and the chat window might be fluttering. As much as possible, let the meeting be about their authentic student voices.
The second piece that I noted is that a Virtual Morning Meeting provides this critical window of observation for the teacher. The teacher gets a quick glimpse of each student and hears the tone of their voices. That’s really important data for educators while we attempt to run school remotely.
Speaking of data…
Williston Central School asked parents and students to give administrators and teachers feedback about the remote learning so far. Not surprisingly, Jared and his team received clear and positive reactions about the importance of the virtual Morning Meeting. Here are what some of his parents had to say:
“Keeping the daily meeting with her core teacher has been AMAZING! Her whole class was in attendance again today – so pivotal to their happiness!”
“… the Google Meets in the morning, right from the get go, have been the glue holding this House together.”
Now more than ever, we need educators to create very intentional spaces for our students to connect with their peers and their teachers.
Please tell me if you are using a virtual morning meeting with your students. What is working? How’s it going? I’d love to hear from you.
I am, however, a huge fan of reading for pleasure. Stories, real or imagined, build empathy, connect us with the broader world, and help us understand our own lived experience. Getting lost in a book is a real joy, one even the most reluctant readers can experience, as I learned in my many years as a school librarian.
Reading logs, on the other hand, can turn a fun activity into a chore and kill a love of reading. They foster compliance over joy. And they are often tied to extrinsic motivators: grades, rewards, prizes. All of this sends a message: reading is a chore. (For more on the harms of reading logs check out this Atlantic article or this blog post by Pernille Ripp.)
But I am a fan of goal-setting.
Like countless Goodreads users (including many #vted teachers, librarians, and students), I set a reading goal each year: 52 books. Every. Single. Year. For the last 5 years!
Jeanie’s past reading challenge goals and progress.
I don’t feel the need to up my goal, to beat a past record, or to compete with others.
I just know that a regular habit of reading feels good and that a book a week seems to be the right number for me. Goodreads helps me track my reading, and that keeps me from falling into a reading slump for too awfully long. (You know… that moment you hit when you finish a great book and are worried nothing else will ever compare… that kind of reading slump.) I don’t have evidence, but I think it’s made me a more self-directed reader!
Self-direction and reading can go hand in hand
After all, self-direction is all about setting personal goals. And about monitoring your progress, adapting and strategizing to meet your goal, and exercising choice over how you get there.
I reach my personal reading goal by:
listening to audiobooks
giving up on books I am not enjoying
and including a wide variety of texts: professional books, fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and even the occasional picture book.
Keeping track of my reading keeps me on track!
Jeanie’s current reading challenge goal and progress.
So, what might goal setting look like for middle school readers?
Well, a year is a long (looooong) time. Eric Curts of Control-Alt-Achieve has created a reading goal and record document that help readers break their goals into more manageable chunks (brought to my attention by Mount Holly Elementary School teacher Margaret Dunne). Learners can set goals for the number of hours, pages, or books they want to read, or a combination of these.
This definitely ISN’T just an online version of a pencil and paper, fill in the blanks reading log. Rather, it’s a goal-setting, monitoring, and progress charting machine! It helps readers see a visual representation of the strides they are taking towards their goal. It makes it possible for users to adjust their goal as they see fit. And it allows them to document their reading such that they can identify and address any obstacles they encounter as they work to meet their goal.
I’ve modified it slightly for use in #vted schools:
Reading Goals and Record spreadsheet
Goal-setting is a process
I think giving students an opportunity to set their own reading goals and monitor their progress can be an important step towards students become lifelong readers. And I can imagine that this process will look very different for different students. Certainly, there will be some who set an ambitious goal and meet it. Others may need to adjust their goals, course correcting as they realize that their goals were too easy or too ambitious. This is one step along the way to getting better at setting goals, developing a sense of agency, and exercising their rights as readers.
Here is a screencast showing how students might use the Reading Goals google sheet to set goals and celebrate their progress:
Conferencing with readers about reading and self-direction creates powerful synergy.
Imagine a 1:1 conversation with a reader.
They spell out their reading goal and share their progress.
Perhaps they talk about where they got stuck: the wrong (boring) book, waiting to read until bedtime when they are tired, or getting interrupted by a sibling.
And they celebrate their successes: the time they got so swept away by the story that they read for over an hour, when they stopped reading the boring book and chose a magazine instead, or the author they discovered who makes them laugh out loud.
The goal of a conference is empowerment, not surveillance. Instead of focusing on the hours the student spent reading, the teacher focuses on the student’s self-direction. How they adjusted their goal or their strategies for reaching it, what they learned by monitoring their progress, how they managed to overcome obstacles. Perhaps the teacher asks questions to deepen reflection, or suggests other ways to deal with barriers to reading, helping students grow as both self-directed learners and as readers. Ultimately, the two connect reader to reader!
How are you empowering your readers? How are your readers setting and tracking reading goals?
Ideas have been flying around the interwebs. Teachers want ways to connect with their students during remote learning. Creative ways to check in with students, provide a safe space with belonging and community and care at the core.
But first, a few words of background for today’s show.
In case you haven’t spent quality time with the spectacular wrongness of Industrial Revolution philosophers, it will help to know the following:
Frederick Winslow Taylor was a 19th century industrial engineer who spent a lot of time during thinking about how to improve the efficiency of factories. He wanted to get more product out of workers, faster. And when psychologist Edward Thorndike came along and read Taylor’s ideas? His own thoughts naturally turned to — where else? — school. When not avidly playing tennis, Thorndike spent his time trying to figure out how to make schools work more like factories.
Frankly, both of them needed flinging in a pond.
But that brings us to Todd Rose, a high school dropout who now runs one of Harvard’s most prestigious thinking departments. Rose has some ideas that would have made Taylor and Thorndike’s hair curl, but that just might explain why proficiency-based learning is so important to keep pursuing in Vermont schools.
This is Vermont Ed Reads, books with educators, for educators and by educators.
Let’s chat.
Jeanie:I’m Jeanie Phillips and welcome to Vermont Ed Reads. We’re here to talk books for educators by educators and with educators. Today, I’m with Emily Gilmore, and we’ll be talking about The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness, by Todd Rose. Thanks for joining me, Emily. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Emily: I’m so excited to be here! My name is Emily Gilmore and I am a social studies teacher at South Burlington High School, and a Rowland Fellow. I spent two specific years really diving into proficiency and personalized learning. So I’m really excited to talk more about the End of Average because it’s just the most validating book I think I’ve ever read in my whole life.
Jeanie: Excellent. I’m so looking forward to this conversation! I have so many post-it notes in this book. Tell me, what are you reading now?
Emily: Yes. So I am reading There There by Tommy Orange. And I picked it up when I was in Michigan, and sitting on the beach reading about the peoples who inhabited the land originally? Their stories now in modern day are just heartbreaking and so powerful. I just can’t stop reading it and I’m like slowing down, so I can really sit in it. And really feel all of the feelings that come from it.
Jeanie: Yeah, that’s a really powerful book. I love that book. Tommy Orange is indigenous himself, Native American himself. And then he’s writing about urban Indians. Urban Native Americans in Oakland, California. That book was *really* powerful.
Emily: Even the prologue is so incredible. Every educator should read at the very least those first 10-15 pages, going into the history and why the book is so important for everyone to read.
Jeanie: Yeah. I found those pages hard.
Emily: Yes, very…. Like, that was so engaging for me to then really get into the characters too.
Jeanie: Yeah, it’s a great book, great recommendation. So this one, I saw that you tweeted about one day on Twitter and reached out to you right away and said, “Let’s talk about it on the podcast!” And you gave an enthusiastic yay. I found this book to be so enlightening!
My number one takeaway I think was right away at the beginning of the book. The book is divided into three sections. And it illuminated one that we all hold without really thinking about it, or why we hold it. That is what Rose calls “averagarianism”. Is that what he calls it?
I found it so fascinating. And it’s that everything in our contemporary lives is ruled by averages.
How we look at testing in schools, how we place kids in schools, the way we give grades in schools, right? How we think about healthcare and our medical lives, are all about averages. The average blood pressure, the average cholesterol level, the average…
Emily: The size of your foot when you’re born! How long you are. How wide you are.
Jeanie: Right, and the way doctors look at the milestones you hit as a young child, and whether you’re in what percentile. And then in our workplaces, the way we’re evaluated for our jobs, the way we do our jobs, is all impacted by this concept of average. I just want to talk a little bit about the way that Rose lays out how that came to be.
So let’s introduce Quetelet.
Emily: Oh, *Quetelet*. This whole part was really, I think, the most enlightening for me because I spent so much time in college really learning about ideology and sociology. I took a course that was The Sociology of Ideology and Religion, that ended up being focused on really the evolution of communism, but also cults. And also really had an emphasis on eugenics. So this was for me like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe Quetelet was really at the center to spark what became such a key part in really modern history.
Jeanie: He was an astronomer who — for a bunch of reasons — didn’t have the access to his telescope. In astronomy I’ve learned this concept where because people measure the distance between stars or planets with time, and the times that they had weren’t always accurate, they average them. So at the same time that his telescope became inaccessible to him, all of this social data was suddenly available.
Emily: Yep, and he became *obsessed*.
Jeanie: And Quetelet started looking at this social data, which was like, some of it was like measurements of soldiers or like the ages when people died, and he started applying these concepts that he used in astronomy on social data. He determines that being average is ideal and any disparity from average is a flaw. Which is fascinating. Because that’s not how we think about it!
And what was really interesting, what Todd Rose I think is really interesting points out, is that even when you set up an average, like they do it with the average soldier or the average pilot, the average woman — nobody even comes close to the average when you do all those measurements or all those things, right? Nobody, actually. Most people have more disparity from the average than they do likeness. Like more than half.
Emily: Right! And there are actual competitions to see if there was the most average person. Which sounds like the most boring competition of all.
Jeanie: Right.
Emily: Are you going to file your nails before you go? How do you know what exactly you need? Are you going to stand up straight? Anyways, it’s mind blowing that those were those things that people focused on and valued was being the most 50% possible.
Jeanie: All because of Quetelet.
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: But then some time goes by and we meet — *dun dun dun-dun!* — the villain of our story, Galton.
Emily:Yeah, Sir Francis Galton. What an interesting fellow. So he saw Quetelet was I think learning from him at the time and saw that Quetelet was comparing people to the average. So Galton says, “I think you’re better or worse than the average. If you’re above average, you’re better. And if you’re below average, you’re worse.”
Jeanie: He’s related to Darwin, right? He’s a cousin of Darwin.
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: And the founder of Social Darwinism I believe. And he’s an upper-class Brit and he has this notion that if you’re good at one thing, you must be good at all things and that these below-average folks bring society down.
Emily: The “imbeciles”.
Jeanie: Yes, these terms! Like he makes this whole scale of humanity: “imbeciles” all the way up to “the eminent”, “the uncertain”. And as this is the case all the time, Galton defines himself as eminent, of course. Above average.
Emily: Of course, but Queen Victoria is also an eminent. And I thought: she might be the only female [eminant]. Which I would like to look more into.
Jeanie: Right! So, Galton starts looking at standard deviation. Average is only average. And he’s the first person that gets us as a society looking at social data and thinking about being above average or below average. Which really gains a foothold, first in work through Taylor — who focuses on standardization of work to meet the average. But then through standardized testing, IQs, Thorndyke and his standardized tests and his notions, and so I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about that.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I think Taylor really stands out to me as somebody who, during the Industrial Revolution or post-Industrial Revolution, the whole Western society is trying to figure out how to do things bigger and better and faster and more efficient. For cheap. And that’s where Taylor really makes a huge shift in the whole dynamics of Western society. A shift of “we should have people who are not physically doing the work, but telling people how to do the work”.
Which I think everybody listening and not listening has probably felt: “I’m doing something and the person above me may or may not know what I’m actually doing”. You can thank Taylor for that.
Jeanie: Right. Also humans as cogs. You do the job and that’s it. Someone has decided what the most efficient, best way to do it is.
Emily: Yeah.
Jeanie: There’s no room for innovation. This is like, factory model, where you do the same thing over and over again.
Emily: Yeah, there’s a great quote that I found, hold on one second. So in 1918, so at the end of World War I, Taylor says, “the most important idea should be that of serving the man who is over you his way, not yours.” It’s on page 47 from my book.
Jeanie: Talk about disenfranchisement! And what’s really interesting is that education followed suit.
So Edward Thorndyke who apparently was a very efficient man, who did a lot quickly, was also one of the creators of standardized tests. And he believed, and this is a quote from page 53,
Thorndyke believed that schools should clear a path for talented students to proceed to college and then onward into jobs where their superior abilities could be put to use leading the country. The bulk of students, whose talents Thorndyke assumed would hover around the average, could go straight from high school graduation or even earlier into their jobs as Taylorist workers in the industrial economy. As to the slow learning students? Well Thorndyke thought we should probably stop spending resources on them as soon as possible.
I wonder in what ways schools still produce these results even if they don’t intend to.
Emily: Absolutely. This is also putting it into context, which Rose does, is in 1900, two percent of Americans were graduating from college.
So that is a massive– it’s a massive growth that we’ve seen in the United States, which Rose also talks about not taking that for granted. Like, yes, Thorndyke and Taylor had huge impacts on America, and without that, many people would be in totally different places. And yet those really, really negative consequences are still things that we’re trying to unpack today. Especially the worth of serving those who deserve it, those who are skilled. What does that mean? Who is actually being served then?
When he’s writing this, women didn’t have the right to vote. The Civil Rights Act had not been passed. So we’re looking at such a small section of America, and it’s post World War I. We haven’t seen the Great Depression yet. We haven’t seen World War II. The world is so vastly different that it’s fascinating to think about what this landscape looked like, that he was really talking to.
Jeanie: Right. It’s also a really narrow definition of talent? Who gets to define what talent is and what it isn’t. I worry that it’s really a double whammy for some students. Not only are they not given the resources they need to thrive in our world, they’re also stripped of their own talents because they’re not recognized.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely.
Jeanie: I remember being– I’m a bit older than you. I remember taking standardized tests in the 2nd or 3rd grade. On paper. With bubble sheets! And crying when they got too hard for me because it was progressive, you kept going. I believe they had the name Thorndyke on them. I have this pretty solid memory of the name Thorndyke from my elementary school years. So his tests stuck around, right? Like that model stays with us today through NWEA and SATs and ACTs and all of the standard aspects, all the standardized tests that are norm-referenced. That they’re referenced against an average.
Emily: Right, and even in conversations today with students about when you should sign up for the SAT? Recommendations are being made that you should be taking the SAT when more students are taking the SAT because your chance of being above average is greater because more students are taking the test. That is *absurd*. Especially for students that are saving money, their own money to take the tests when they should be, first of all, not having to spend their own money and not having to pay for a test that is not giving valid results.
Jeanie: Right, because that still only measures certain kinds of talent, right, reading, writing, math. The ACT is a little bit broader, but that’s still a very narrow notion of what talent means.
So, as I was reading this book and learning about the ties of standard deviation and average and standardization and norm-reference tests to the eugenics movement? I was also learning about the IQ test and its link to the eugenics movement. And Galton’s language, which sounds very like the eugenics movement, and just feeling like: *ugh*. This grief or this, I guess, rage. That we still use these tools that were used to strip people of their humanity. These tools that were linked to genocide, and to all sorts of horrors are still in our toolbox.
Emily: Right, the forced sterilization that’s still happening today because of ideas that are centuries old and have been proven to be fairly irrelevant.
Jeanie: That gets us to this fascinating part of the book called the Ergodic Bait and Switch. Do you know what I’m talking about? This was thrilling to me on page 62 of the book. Because it’s not just that they were old, they were wrong!
Emily: Right?
Jeanie: “Molenaar recognized that the fatal flaw of averagerianismwas its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality. He gave a name to this error, the ergodic switch. The term is drawn from a branch of mathematics that grew out of the very first scientific debate about the relationship between groups and individuals, a field known as ergodic theory. If we wish to understand exactly why our schools, businesses and human sciences have all fallen prey to a misguided way of thinking, then we must learn a little about how the ergodic switch works.”
And he proceeds to tell us in this chapter about how the math is wrong. The math we’ve used for centuries? Is wrong.
Emily: It makes sense! *laughs*
When any person talks about their experiences. Even my mother talking about how her three daughters were born on their due dates and how that’s bizarre. Then why have a due date? When you’re measuring and you’re seeing the development of children over time — and he gets into this later in the book — about learning to crawl versus learning to walk and how babies will do that at different times and at different rates? We see it every day. But we’re told something different and somehow we still believe what we’re not seeing.
Jeanie: Yet parents worry over those developmental milestones, and we’ll talk more about that later, and the science that’s debunked them as useful. So the thing I really love that Todd Rose, the point he makes again and again in this book is that: averages just don’t work. Not just don’t they work for everyone, that they’re outliers? But for anyone. There are a ton of anecdotes in the book about how nobody’s really average. I don’t know if there’s one you want to share or if there’s something from your classroom that you’ve noticed.
Emily: First of all, what stands out to me is right after reading the book, I listened to Todd Rose, his interview with Dax Shepard on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Experts, which I love. They both talk about individuality versus individualism and that the focus is really on individuality, the individual person. And they spend a lot of time talking about Todd Rose’s experience and his own educational career, and how, when he was in high school, he failed out. And yet now he’s a professor at Harvard. Very well renowned and is running the Mind, Brain & Education program. Is just phenomenal, and you would never know that he was somebody who failed out of high school.
Jeanie: All of his teachers are in shock that he’s in Harvard. They’re all going, “How the heck did that happen?”
Emily: Right? Exactly! The individual has different needs. And his dad saw that and so his dad was really able to help him. That was when he really became that teacher figure, that one to really intervene and say this, this is why you haven’t been successful yet.
Jeanie: I love that this book comes out of Rose’s own lived experience.
Emily: Yes.
Jeanie: Right. Like his passion for this comes out of his own lived experience as somebody who went back to college and with kids who struggled. Who had to find a different path.
Emily: Yeah and I think, from the other articles that I’ve read in the interviews, he really is so drawn on trying to prove himself wrong and he keeps finding more and more evidence as to why the End of Average is constantly a necessary piece of life.
We need to get rid of the average because we’re all individuals. We love ourselves. And we want to love our potential. As teachers, that’s what I want to see every day.
That’s my goal at the end of the day is for each student to feel like they know themselves a little bit better.
Jeanie: A lot of his stories wrap again and again around this idea of pilots. And building a standard, average-sized cockpit for pilots. And it fitting no one. So there were a lot of errors and unnecessary crashes, because it fit no one.
Then he tells this great story. I almost don’t want to tell it because if you read the book, you should totally read this book. I’m not even going to tell it. Because it’s so great when you realize more about the specific pilot who does this amazing thing.
But when they design for average, no one wins. Like I said, it’s failure for everyone. I think about that in our schools. Because I think unfortunately because of our workloads and our class sizes and the amount of courses we teach and our little prep time? I think it can be really easy to plan for the average.
Emily: Yeah and that’s the visual that immediately comes to my head is in every professional development that has anything to do with personalization, there’s always the image of: don’t teach to the middle! And there’s the row of desks, and one student in the desks and then you have the students on the outside who are below and above. Really it’s just those different pieces of the individual that we see highlighted in that particular classroom.
Jeanie: Yeah. I love this quote that he has on page 66 about that. “Averages provide a stable, transparent and streamlined process for making decisions quickly. And in a way, we stuck with averages because of efficiency, but I just think of all we lose. And what do individual students lose in a system that’s still using norm-referenced tests and focused on how if you’re on grade level or off grade level. That’s part of averagarianism is this idea of grade level.”
Emily: Right. I think that was a really interesting concrete takeaway for me when he talks about Khan Academy and the beauty of Khan Academy, and how it can really meet students where they are. He keeps coming back to this idea that speed does not equal success. And that is something that keeps coming back, and it’s so powerful to really sit and seep in. It doesn’t matter how fast it takes. He gives a great anecdote about driving and he says: “A driver’s license does not record how many times you failed the written driving an exam or the age when you finally obtained it. As long as you pass the driving exam, you are allowed to drive.”
Jeanie: Right. I think we in schools privilege fast processors.
Emily: Oh, absolutely.
Jeanie: All the time.
Emily: It’s easier.
Jeanie: I am a fast processor. And school really worked for me because I’m a fast processor, and I don’t just mean like wait time. I think a lot of teachers try with wait time, but the fast processors, the kids who get it quickly, maybe not deeply but get it quickly, are really rewarded in our school systems.
Emily: I think that looks different too. I have a lot of students in my classes that look visually like they’re understanding what’s happening. Right, if you’re quiet, she’ll move on. She won’t ask any questions.
Jeanie: Yeah.
Emily: That doesn’t mean learning’s happening.
Jeanie: Right. We have a lot of kids who slip through the cracks that way, right?
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: Yeah. Now this book is just *full* of research, and he delves into this idea of pace later on in the book. He mentions an experiment where students are learning probability theory, this math. And they do a control group that learns at a fixed pace. They learn the same material at a very fixed pace. And then they have a self-paced group and they can learn it however long it takes them. At the end when they do the test, 20% of the fixed-paced group achieved mastery and they have defined mastery in a particular way, but 90% of the self-paced group did.
And that data really blew me away. How can we go with fixed pace when that’s the difference, right? So providing varied pacing is challenging in public schools. I get it. It’s really hard.
Emily: Yeah.
Jeanie: I think we have to shift our paradigm of what school looks like in order to make really widely varied pacing work? But it seems really worth it!
Emily: You’re right, the evidence is right in front of us. *laughs* Over and over again.
Jeanie: Ninety percent achieve mastery, and this is statistics! This is not three digit addition. This is statistics. So I’m wondering, have you experimented with pacing in your classroom?
Emily: I’ve definitely used more and more as the years have gone on with really self-driven summative assessments. That really has been a game changer.
Today was the first day going back into the school building for actual work. Going back and thinking about: what are my goals for my students this year with the new crop of 9th graders? And looking at their pictures from 8th grade knowing that they had yet to experience that school year — because we get those little pictures from the incoming students — and going back and then thinking about: what was the experience, the reaction of my students from last year, my 9th graders leaving their 9th grade experience?
Seeing some of the still 8th grade pictures because they didn’t get their school pictures updated and thinking about the growth that happened when you don’t assign them a topic. That, for me? Is a small jump into the self-paced.
A lot of the work that we’re doing in the world history classroom is removing those immediate definitions and terms that went along with the old, very Eurocentric curriculum that I learned when I was in high school. And really opening it up to look beyond things that you know.
So when we’re learning about forms of government, we’re going to look at pivotal shifts in forms of government, so you need to be able to show me:
What was one form of government?
Who was trying to change it, and why?
And now what’s the new form of government if there was a successful change?
Or what was the form of government that they wanted in the attempt to overthrow the status quo?
And through that, students were looking at everything from what was happening in Venezuela to what was happening in Mexico. I’m sure there’ll be a lot looking at what’s happening in Hong Kong right now. And students were looking at 500 years ago to what was happening in modern day and they’re having these conversations together. Comparing what’s happening with democracy and how democracy looks in so many different ways.
But they had weeks to work on it in class. And so some students were working on the first step of the project up until the final day because that was what was most interesting to them. It didn’t mean that they weren’t interested in analyzing the pivotal shifts and the different forms of government. They were like, “But what is this government? It’s so complex.”
And that to me was more valuable than having them jump through the five steps that I had put together to eventually look in deep analysis — which I’m realizing is more of like a college project.
But by having those really varied opportunities for students, they’re able to choose how they’re using their time each day.
Jeanie: So it sounds to me like you are using pacing and voice and choice in really powerful ways. One of the things I hear from teachers a lot is, “But how do you manage all of that? How do you manage so many kids on so many different topics?” I hear that you have this overarching topic and on different paces, so I’m asking you: how does Emily Gilmore manage this?
Emily: *laughs* It takes a lot of control actually, to let go of the old curriculum.
When I first started working at the school I’m at right now, I had had a totally different teaching experience and a totally different upbringing through the education system than what I was experiencing in my first year teaching. I was looking at this really, *really* Eurocentric, very confusing curriculum that went from the Renaissance to the Berlin conference in Africa.
So you went from “Germany doesn’t exist” to “Germany’s imperializing a country and committing genocide”. So what happens there?
That was very confusing and felt like a lot and very stressful. Every day I was walking into school, how am I going to teach the enlightenment? World War I’s really important. How do I teach the Industrial Revolution? Those things aren’t there. How do you make those connections?
The next two years I started to really think about: that’s okay. I can introduce it and I can give anecdotes, but the bigger idea is that students care about what they’re learning in world history. They’re in 9th grade.
I can’t tell you how many — particularly, it just so happens to always be this group of 49 to 70 white men — who are reading Civil War books and World War II and are all: “You’re a history teacher? Now what are you teaching about the Civil War? What are you teaching about World War II? Have you learned about these different battles in World War I?”
I’m like: “Hm. Mm-hmm.”
I have no reason to teach my kids the specific battles of World War I as 14 year olds! They need to learn about the world around them. And that there are different people. And that different people are good and that they are interesting. Your experience is different than the person sitting next to you. We’re going to build empathy and understanding of that first. And that, to me, is world history.
Jeanie: So do you find that your kids are more invested because they have this choice of pace, product, and topic?
Emily: I think it takes a lot at the beginning of the year? And that’s really the biggest source of anxiety? Is a lot of students unlearning the passive form of education that they are mostly accustomed to.
And that’s not saying that all of their learning experiences by any means, but a lot of insecurities really bubble up.
Especially 14 year olds who are right at the cusp of figuring out who they are and what they’re interested in and worrying about,
“If I say I’m really interested in the French Revolution, is the person next to me going to make fun of me?”
That is a really tough spot. And so that is really the focus of the beginning of our 9th grade experience. It’s like who are you? Everyone’s going to be vulnerable together. And we’re going to build trust. We’re going to build an environment that’s inclusive.
And from there the students really begin to think about, oh so when she gives us choice, it’s not overwhelming.
Jeanie: This is perfect. I was going to have to say, let’s get back to the book, even though Emily’s classroom is way more interesting. But actually what you’re talking about? Directly applies to the book. Which is: Rose introduces this idea — and I’m sure he’s not the only one to use it — called the jaggedness principle. This idea that two people who have the same IQ? Can have vastly different sorts of talents and skills, or strengths and weaknesses within an IQ test. That they’re not the same, even though they both have the same number. So I’m wondering about how you use this idea of the jaggedness principle to really help students get to know themselves? And for you to get to know students and know them well, as learners and as humans?
Jagged profiles for intelligence from page 89 of The End of Average
Jagged profiles for size from page 81 of The End of Average
Emily: What really stood out to me is thinking about personality tests and the jaggedness principle. It’s just something that I really continued to come back to as I kept reading about. And eventually he does make that connection. That people are complex and that, in its own right, is important. And that is what teachers see in their students. I think that for me is the part that I have embraced the most. And I now I’m getting back into, okay, so how do I take the complex identity and teach them the world history curriculum that I’m required to by law? That’s like trying to make that work.
But the personality tests keep coming in from me. When I was in high school and taking psychology, we took the Myers Briggs personality test. And I was INFJ. It was INFJ is the least common personality type. I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool.” Jerry Seinfeld, you’re an INFJ!” and as I’ve grown up–
Jeanie: I’m so unique! *laughs*
Emily: I’m so unique! I’m in a percentage of people who are also INFJ! *laughs*
The really important part is the first part of INFJ, it’s I, it’s introverted. In high school I felt very, very introverted. I knew I wanted to be a teacher and I would sit back in class totally silent and just absorb. And then as soon as I entered college and was studying teaching, I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to have a self-talk. I can’t actually be an introvert.”
And it gets to that idea that your personality actually it changes in different situations. Which jaggedness principle then connects to all these different ideas that he pulls in with Bloom and lots of fabulous people.
Jeanie: I just think if we could really help our students begin to understand their own jaggedness, their strengths, their places of challenge or places for growth? We could really transform their lives.
Emily: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that also builds that compassion that when you see students who are maybe struggling with a creative project, because it’s called a “creative project” and a student previously hasn’t seen themselves as creative. I remember that feeling when I was in high school where you had options for your summative assessment. It was your final project. and it was a test. You could take the multiple choice test. You could do a book report. I remember one teacher always wanted us to make a rap. Or you could do something creative and you’d have to talk to the teacher. And I was like, “Oh, essays sounds great to me.”
Jeanie: Rapping is hard. I am older than you because nobody ever gave me the option in high school of making a rap. I remember we could write a play, maybe.
When you’re good at school, it can be easy to say, “Oh, I’m not doing the creative thing. I’ll take multiple choice test please, thank you very much.” I think it can get really frustrating for students when we ask them to step out of those comfort zones, especially those kids who are good at doing school.
This is where proficiency-based education really frees us up, right? Because the criteria is the same but you can demonstrate it in so many ways.
And that leads us to the next principle that Todd Rose outlines, which is the pathways principle.
I think this is so relatable to Act 77 and to our work in schools right now. The kind of things we’re still figuring out. He’s suggesting that, like it or not, whether we want this to be the case or not, we all take different paths as we learn and grow. He gives countless of examples of different ways people learn to read. Different ways science shows us, research shows us, different ways that people learn to crawl or walk. That we all develop differently. That there’s no such thing as a single ladder of development. There are many different pathways or webs. So I’m just curious. I think that we’re still on the cusp of figuring out flexible pathways for students. One way I hear you doing it is saying, here’s the learning, here’s the big thing. Find what interests you and apply it to that.
Emily: Yeah, and the more that you learn about your students too. That’s been the greatest takeaway for me, is that I feel this deeper sense of love. And the environment is so much more positive, when you see students sitting at their desks or walking around the room looking at other people working and you don’t see anybody judging one another and they’re asking questions like, “Hey, where did you find that?” or, “I read this really good article, but it actually, it connects more to your project. Do you want me to send it to you?”
Jeanie: I was in your classroom once last spring, and it was such a calm and focused place when I was in there! So I’m going to share a quote, another quote from Rose that I really loved from page 129 because I think it’s really relevant to what we’re talking about, and we’d almost forgotten about him.
Emily: Oh no.
Jeanie: And The End of Average! We got so interested in what we were talking about.
“The fact that there is not a single normal pathway for any type of human development, biological, mental, moral or professional, forms the basis of the third principle of individuality, the pathway principle. In all aspects of our lives and for any given goal, there are many equally valid ways to reach the same outcome. And second, the particular pathway that is obstacle for you depends on your own individuality.”
I feel like this needs to become the heart of schooling.
Emily: Absolutely.
Jeanie: There’s no one way. There’s no one valid way. And I think he goes on to say that talent lies in all the different paths. I was really inspired by that. It makes me so happy about the flexible pathways portion of Act 77. And thinking about how we can help more students be successful by broadening the scope of pathways available to them.
Emily: I think it even comes down to what “successful” looks like and feels like. Because that’s so tied to this idea of success according to Thorndyke might look different than success according to Galton. And success according to you and I! That is so important to really unpack. Success for whom and where and how do you achieve that, again, comes back to those pathways. But success is so I think tied to a certain set of values that we see in society.
I see the hinge of the status quo of what we’re working towards, really in Vermont of: we want all of our students to be successful.
And I think also the caveat there is whatever success looks like for them and feels like for them. Not what I think is successful for a certain student or their family or whatnot. But how that student is defining for themselves. I think that’s such the central piece of what we are really talking about is how do we get students to really have that metacognition of: what does it look like and feel like when *I’m* feeling successful? How can I bottle that up and take that with me for the rest of my life?
Jeanie: What you’re saying reminds me that– and I think Rose would agree — we’ve got a really narrow notion of what success looks like in schooling. So if you’re good at math, reading and writing, you’re a success.
Emily: And athletics.
Jeanie: Yes, but academically, we have this notion that math, reading and writing are the pinnacle, right? So if you take calculus, you are one of the smartest kids in the school, and we fall back on Galton and we assume that if you’re good at calculus, you’re good at everything else, right? You’re just smart.
And I just really think, not just because it’s the right thing to do for individuals but also because our economy is demanding it of us, that we need to broaden our notion of the many ways there are to be successful and talented in this world, of the many ways in which there are to thrive. Back to that podcast, the Radiolab G podcast. One of the hosts on there points out that in Darwin’s world, in true Darwinism, variability is a strength. In the standardized world, variability, doing things differently, being an outlier is not a strength. You have to succeed in these ways, in these categories instead of really appreciating the full broad spectrum, the broad ecosystem that is humanity.
Jeanie: Just reading this book made me realize, made me think about how a lot of teachers I know are really struggling with implementing proficiency based education because they’re like, “Kids don’t want it. They want to go back to the way things were.” Part of that’s comfort, right? Like just give me the quiz, right? Don’t make me *really* demonstrate anything, just give me the quiz.
But part of it is I think that our whole world is set up in this way that demands conformity and sort of asks us to compare ourselves with each other.
And when we start shifting schooling to be more about:
Who are you?
What’s the right path for you?
How do you access learning in the way that’s best for you?
We’re not just fighting against years of schooling that didn’t ask that, we’re fighting against a whole world that doesn’t ask that of kids. It’s countercultural in a way.
Emily: So what happens when we’re seeing how proficiencies work naturally in the classroom? And fit so many of the good practices that teachers have? Just like you were saying, students may say that they don’t know what it is and they don’t understand it and whatever, but if you take that out of the conversation and you just let the students learn and you’re using that language? They get it eventually. And they move on. They’re adapting to everything. Everything is new for them, and that’s life for all of us is the next step is always new.
Throughout the whole book, Rose keeps bringing up that; with all of these examples, there’s groups of people who are being hurt in the process. And that’s the greatest risk of all: by not doing anything, we’re hurting more people than we are helping.
Jeanie: We’re under-serving some and over-serving others.
Emily: Right, but we’re over-serving so few. And we’re under-serving *so* many.
Jeanie: Right, and disenfranchising them from their own sort of learning. Their own ability to learn.
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: And the way they think of themselves as learners. We have a lot of power.
Emily: We do. It’s overwhelming!
Jeanie: It is. But we have a lot of power to do good, to help students find themselves and feel good about themselves and cultivate their own awareness of their jaggedness so that they can navigate their learning well into the future.
Emily: Yeah.
Jeanie: I am just starting the doctoral program here at UVM, and I feel like, “Oh, I know myself as a learner so well, now.” I’m sure there are challenges ahead, but I wish I knew myself as well as I do now when I was an undergrad.
Emily: Yeah, or even in high school. I just think like, “Oh, the stories I could tell myself. And my friends, whisper in their ears: you won’t believe what you’re doing in 10 years. Stop doing that.”
Jeanie: Are there resources that you use to help students get to know themselves or that you use to get to know students better?
Emily: We keep trying new things each year and I think especially with the more and more resources that Teaching Tolerance is putting out around identity and social justice and really making sure that the work that we’re doing is productive and not harmful? Has really helped me be reflective in getting to know you activities. Because so many of them are alienating to so many of our students.
That’s really been an important learning process for me of how to best learn about our students.
I would say that’s definitely been the most useful of how can we really set up the learning processes for our students. So I start the year off with my identity iceberg. What do you know? What can you make assumptions about? Then what’s below the surface? What are the things that you need to learn about me in order to really understand who I am? So that’s some of the work that we do at the beginning of the year, and it’s amazing. It’s *amazing*.
Jeanie: I’m also just thinking about how equity work is such a natural fit here because it’s about celebrating difference and honoring difference. And noticing difference. And isn’t that what we want for our students? For them to understand their own difference. In order to make the most of it.
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: In order to develop their talents, to know where their gifts are.
Emily: And to love themselves.
Jeanie: They all come with gifts! And we need their gifts in this world. We need *all* of the gifts we can get in this world. We need all of the genius we can get in this world. There’s so much to do.
Rose ends with these recommendations really for higher-ed, and I just thought, “Oh, we at Vermont are so ahead of the game!” Because he starts with the idea that there are three concepts to transform education. One is to grant credentials, and not diplomas. This idea that you get credentialed because you demonstrate a competency or proficiency at skills which I think we’re sort of using that competency based approach even if we’re not giving kids specific credentials.
Emily: Although some schools around the state are using credentialing and they’re really powerful.
Jeanie: Micro-credentialing and badging, and so… I just combined those two, micro-credentialing and badging. You’re right, they are. Do you have any examples you’d like to share?
Emily: I think about the work that Jen Kravitz and Erica Walstrom and Marsha Castle did at Rowland with their STEM and their global studies badging credentials. I’ll come up with the right term eventually, but their programming is fantastic. Where students are really choosing a path that’s interesting to them while maintaining the curriculum that is in place at the school, but they’re navigating it through a particular lens and field of interest.
Jeanie: Then the second concept is to replace grades with competency. So we’re beginning that work. I think a lot of people are really navigating the hard road of getting rid of letter grades and moving towards a competency-based system. Not easy.
Emily: Not easy and lots of learning and self-reflection I think is the really big takeaway in this process.
Jeanie: It requires a lot of educating parents.
Emily: Yes.
Jeanie: Yes, your kid will still get into college.
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: Yes, they’re still a good student even if they don’t have straight As.
Emily: Right.
Jeanie: They’re still a good learner. And the grading system we have is not ideal anyway. It doesn’t really tell us anything. So scrapping it for one that actually defines what they’re proficient at seems worthwhile to me even though the road is hard.
Emily: Yeah, and I think there’s more meat behind it too. Now students have products to prove their proficiencies rather than maybe some conversations with teachers to bump up grades.
Jeanie: Yeah, evidence.
Emily: You’re right, evidence.
Jeanie: Evidence of learning.
Emily: Yeah.
Jeanie: Right. Then the final principle is to let students determine their educational pathway. I think we’re still on the road with this one. We’re still figuring this one out.
Emily: Yeah. I think there’s definitely more and more options available pre-K through 12. Then it’s that jump from, well, what does undergrad need for the application process and what will they accept and how will they compare the applicants to one another?
Jeanie: Yeah. Well, I think these things going hand in hand. You need to be able to define proficiency to have a competency- or proficiency-based system in order to create flexible pathways that lead to the same credentialing, if you will. The skills are really important. It’s not that we’re saying throw those out and let kids wander around wherever. They’re still aiming towards that learning goal. We’ve defined it such that kids can get there in a lot of different ways at different paces. They can demonstrate that in different ways. The core skill, the core learning is the same, but the pathway is different. And those things are interdependent. And! Dependent on knowing students well and helping them know themselves well. And helping them communicate their identities as well to the adults who are there to coach them and provide them the opportunities they need.
Emily: Absolutely. In the long term that makes our world more successful as we have individuals who are aware of their behaviors and the impact of their behaviors and have real confidence in their abilities to move the work forward. Whatever that work may be.
Jeanie: Yeah because we don’t need any cogs in machines right now. We really need creative people who are able to use their talents, whatever they are.
Emily: And to continue to adapt to do that as well.
Jeanie: Yeah. I am *so* grateful to you for introducing me to this book. I think I just saw you tweet about it and was like, if Emily’s reading it, it must be good! Because I enjoyed every second of it. I must have 600 post-it notes in it, and we’ve just scratched the surface. Are there any other quotes you’d like to share?
Emily: Oh boy. Let me see. I will leave us with a little bit of a scare maybe. This is what we want to avoid at all costs that I think is important to leave us thinking to grapple with a little bit. This was on page 33, Sir Francis Galton, and he said, “What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.” How we apply that? I think is really what sets the tone from the rest.
Jeanie: Yeah. In a healthy ecosystem, lots of things flourish, right? In a healthy ecosystem, there’s diversity. We can also create diversity in our schools.
Emily: We’ll let our kids flourish.
Jeanie: Let all our kids flourish. Thank you, Emily, for all you do to help students at South Burlington flourish and thanks so much for taking the time to talk about this book with me right before school begins. I really appreciate your time and your thoughts and your many examples from your classroom.
Personalized Learning Plans (PLPs) across the state have taken many different forms and serve a few different purposes. One common thread among educators is a wondering of how to increase student engagement in the PLP process. How to make it more meaningful and relevant. Michael Willis, Jared Bailey, and middle grades student Hudson, accepted this challenge and over the course of the year, conducted action research on what might actually work. The three of them presented the results of that research to a packed audience at the Vermont Middle Grades Conference at the University of Vermont, this past January. Below, you’ll find a video recording of the presentation that includes the presenters’ materials. And below that, we’ve laid out that recorded presentation as a text for you to read, again accompanied by the presenters’ materials. A huge thank you to Mr. Willis, Mr. Bailey and Hudson, for sharing this story.
Solving the mystery of PLPs
Mr. Willis: “Last summer was the fourth MGI (Middle Grades Institute) that I’ve been to and I decided that I would do something around student engagement in PLPs. One, I don’t know that much about them. I hadn’t had any practice with the kind of official version using Protean, which we use in Williston. As a third and fourth grade teacher, I had done goal setting and reflecting and using blogs. But, that was all fine and good until you put the label of “PLP” on it. Then it seems that the attitude, as probably a lot of you know, starts to suddenly change.
I was just texting my daughter (who is now in high school) and she asked what I was presenting on, and I told her and she went, “Oh, that’s boring. PLP is so boring.” I asked her why? She said she didn’t know. So there’s this shroud of mystery around them. So I thought I would try to engage students differently by just giving them some different options of how to reflect.
Putting the pieces together
I did want to try and give students some options of how to reflect. The idea of setting a goal wasn’t brand new. The idea of collecting evidence wasn’t brand new, but the idea of how to reflect? That was kind of a sticky wicket. I thought, well, maybe video, maybe audio, maybe some photos, which they were pretty comfortable doing. Maybe just: how could it be less about writing? So that’s where this came from. I did this survey in the beginning of the year:
What did our data say?
Well, the opinions were all over the map in terms of what students think about PLPs, specifically. But in terms of what they thought about reflecting, the majority of students still prefer written reflections. I thought it was interesting if given the choice, students chose writing, yet nobody’s seemed to like the idea of having to do that writing. It’s a mystery!
The fifth graders were really my trial group. Two times a week we meet in skills group and we do a number of things. But over the last month or so we’ve been thinking about PLPs.
Enter Sketchnoting!
Can you Hudson, talk a little bit about what your experience has been with goal setting and having to collect evidence?
Hudson: I did start out. I did write a goal but it was just hard because I had to write all the other responses to that goal, like my evidence. Then I did something called sketchnoting and it’s like you basically draw a quick sketch and then you draw and then you write like a few little captions. And it just like helped me out a lot.
Mr. Willis: When I said that they were clear in their opinions about having choice, I wondered if they really believed that they have a choice. It occurred to me after talking to Hudson was that maybe they didn’t know they had all these options. You’re going to find that both the fifth and the sixth grade believe that having choices is important yet… I don’t know if they thought they had choices available.
Reflection doesn’t have to be museum quality
Last summer, I first heard of sketchnoting. Now, I’m a writer. I communicate better in writing and I’m not a drawer. I told Hudson my sketchnoting would be stick figures and well you said to me—
Hudson: It doesn’t really have to be like a perfect sketch, like museum or any kind of… quality.
Mr. Willis: That to me? Is perfect news. And I think that’s the message that so I just dove right in. Now, I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t necessarily do all of this reading first, to be honest. I just dive in. We did a month-long integrated unit about trash and waste, relating to content areas. We called it garbology. That’s a new word, Google Docs didn’t recognize it. We piloted it. Thank you. I showed them a video from Brainpop about waste management and said there aren’t a lot of rules here, go for it. Not every student liked it. Below you can see definitely one of the kind of flashier, more complete versions that I got. But the idea that a student could do this without much instruction, without much guidance really sold me on the idea of, well, maybe it could be used for a reflection on your PLP.
One student’s sketchnote on waste management. Click or tap to enlarge.
Sketchnoting from a student perspective
Hudson, the reason that you’re here is that sketchnoting did appeal to you. Right? You said it doesn’t have to be a museum piece. How does writing make you feel?
Hudson: It gets me a little stressed and I just feel like it’s writing [the same thing] all over again every week.
Mr. Willis: What is it about writing that kind of gives you that feeling?
Hudson: Just staring at a screen and typing the whole time when you could be drawing and doing quick little like notes just like what I really like to do.
Examples, organizers, and responsibility, oh my…
Mr. Willis: I learned that students would reflect on their PLP after the summative activities in the unit. One of their complaints is that we only do this after summative activities and I thought, well that’s true, but one thing at a time. How can we make that action, that activity perhaps be a bit more engaging, and have this idea of choice? Here’s a student example I thought was interesting:
Mr. Bailey was doing the social studies piece. This idea of this graphic organizers came first and I thought was interesting with this student taking responsibility. They’ve got the goal listed to take initiative and responsibility for learning. This person actually, you see the picture of the house. We don’t always chat. I’m busy teaching the math piece and they’re doing theirs and seeing the student reflect and say, look, I did some of this at home. I did it in class.
That was new for me. I had no idea that student was even doing that. I know the student loves to draw. So, this seemed like a natural choice for this one but the learning that I got from it, I’m not sure would have come out in writing. I appreciated that piece.
An example of visual reflection via sketchnote
Now, Hudson and his tablemate, Tommy really were two that dove into this idea of being able to use sketchnoting, this idea of visually reflecting. Hudson, what does this show about your work on the integrated unit?
Hudson: Well, this just shows all my classwork that I did on computers and on paper.
Mr. Willis: What made this work for you?
Hudson: Well, it wasn’t really writing, but it was, so, I used like a cycle WeVideo and it was kind of cool and just like put in like little clips of videos. Then I got good sources. Like what I said, good sources makes for good products. I don’t mean a product like a computer kind of product, I mean a good piece of classwork.
Mr. Willis: I like that you’ve got those visuals. So those people who don’t end up in Washington that have no idea about what we did during our unit, I’m feeling like we look at this graphing shows up in math. What’s this on the left hand side? You said it brought up a genuine problem.
Hudson: It was about how marine animals and animals are getting sick in the oceans
Hudson: Yeah, are getting hurt by that.
Mr. Willis: Then the top left hand one, what does that detail mean? So, you’ve got this drawing, it’s pretty detailed…
Hudson: By detail I mean, I added stuff for like color coding and…
Mr. Willis: Now, was that a goal of yours, detail?
Hudson: Not really.
Student opinions on sketchnotes
Mr. Willis: A couple of the top two students, you can see this idea of what Hudson was saying. “I don’t feel the pressure”, “I don’t feel this idea that has to be perfect when I do it”, “I can see my thinking” and they can communicate visually. The bottom two I thought were interesting because they are people that actually, students that actually do choose the words that they’re feeling like either not a fan of drawing or if it’s notetaking, it’s hard to keep up.
A sign of success: students revisiting their reflections
Mr. Willis: I’ve got to wrestle with this idea of how using it to take notes during learning, which is I think maybe the next step into math as I was saying earlier. But also I think the reflection piece though, there is no real timeline. It isn’t really like you have to be done at the end of the class. Hudson saying it’s something I can revisit. I’ve noticed students want to revisit a sketchnote more than they want to go back and revise the paragraph. I’m sure that that’s not something that I’m sure that’s something you’ve heard before as well.
“Let’s Recap”: A tool for reflection
Mr Willis: I did go back to something that I had used in the past. It’s called Let’s Recap. Let’s Recap is great because it organizes video reflections from students. You can send out a prompt, they get to join code. They with their Chromebooks have the ability to film and record answers to a question you put out there. They get a little window that pops up and they record themselves. Then you can then take this video and embed it in something, or share a link. Students can download it to their own files. My students downloaded their videos and inserted them into their Protean PLPs. That’s what Williston is using; they all have their own Protean accounts.
Video reflections from Let’s Recap
Here are four Williston students reflecting on… reflecting on their PLPs.
We did have them practice off a script here. Some will be just kind of, and this is me and here’s my reflection. You can tell you in practice a bit more. The fact that you get him to talk with those transferrable skills language. We did have them set goals and in the past I believe it was maybe as something as simple as I want to get my spelling homework.
Transferable skills help students see cross-curricular
Mr. Bailey: Now with these transferable skills goals, they’re able to pull evidence from other places. Our district has transferable skills which go on to become graduation standards in grades nine through twelve.
Champlain Valley School District’s transferable skills, along with the evidence students provide to show they’ve achieved them. Click or tap to enlarge.
We’re having students pick one of those transferable skills as their goal, to really help them see the cross-curricular piece of all the transferable skills. It was much harder to track them last year when a kid had a personal goal of scoring in the soccer season, because then they were like, well, it’s not soccer season right now. So we have no evidence this week. Most importantly, what we’re doing with intentionality is having them take a deeper dive into that transferrable skill, see it spread across their day and outside of their life in school rather than having them pick a personal goal, an academic goal, and trying to juggle the two. Pick one goal and let’s go deeper on that and see it kind of come through in all your classes.
What did we accomplish?
Mr. Willis: If you had to choose now and or say at the end of the work that we’ve done over the last couple of months, do you feel like you have more choice now?
Hudson: Yes, like I said before, I thought it was just writing for a long time. Now, I have like three or four new choices that I can do.
Mr. Willis: What does that feel like, in terms of when the assignment comes now?
Hudson: I can just think into it instead of thinking, oh, I have to write again. Do another sketch here or maybe do a video recording.
Mr. Bailey: You were saying in the lobby that it kind of feels more freeing. That you’re able to think more about what you want to say in the reflection, rather than having to worry about making it fit into a writing piece.
Mr. Willis: Right.
Mr. Bailey: He’s able to focus much more on actually what he wants to say and the quality of the reflection, because he’s not having to try to figure out how to do a high quality reflection and then transfer that as a writing piece. Additionally, I did use Let’s Recap as a way of having students reflect on: how do you feel about the newer choices?
What’s next?
For me, the Protean learning curve is what we all need to keep working on. I think just the micro of it, the minutia of sharing and making it public? Just the pieces of that. As I’ve heard from a lot of workshops, finding more time to do it is tricky, and that’s what makes me think that this evidence collection needs to be able to happen anytime. I’ve yet to really do that as well as I want to. I do want to give an actual survey using Google Forms, but the video feedback is what I use for now. I don’t know if people are familiar with Protean or if you’re using it, but these videos and sketchnotes can be uploaded right into the evidence of a PLP in Protean.
These are flexible pathways for reflection
Kind of like taking a flexible pathway and putting it in a flexible pathway! It’s that idea of if we’re going to give students flexible pathways for learning, let’s give them flexible pathways for reflecting on their learning. Subsequently, what we found at Sterling and what Michael’s brought to the table and is his year with us, is this idea of giving them multiple cause. We were so text driven in their reflections. However, that doesn’t really seem to fit with the philosophy of a personalized learning plan.
The idea is to find tools that make you successful and to learn how to play to those strengths. As a result, coming up with a variety of options for reflecting on a personalized learning plan is a light bulb moment for us and the rest of the team. So that’s been great.
Hudson, thank you for coming. I appreciate you presenting with me. Thank you very much.
What do I stand for? What is the good life and how can I live it?
These are questions that most middle schoolers (and adults)-hopefully- grapple with at some point. And this philosophizing usually begins in middle school. Which means that middle school is prime time for guiding students through an exploration of their identity, values and character strengths. And spoiler alert: they think it’s pretty cool, too!
My students made visual representations of some of the character traits as we explored their meanings. Doesn’t he look curious?
My school year typically started off with a lot of community building and exploration of self. We used things like learning style quizzes and interest inventories to gather data about ourselves. We shared our data with each other and used it to understand who we were as a community and how we could support ourselves and each other in learning.
This exploration laid the foundation for our personalized learning environment: we all knew that Simon was more focused when he stood and that Ana needed to hear and read something to really get it.
As I’ve gathered resources and tools for this work, I’ve come across a few that are too good not to share!
Flexibility means moving in unexpected directions with grace. (And it can make your face red, but just go with it!)
This little film is a GIFT! In 8 minutes it inspires, explains, and instigates discussion and curiosity about character.
Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself.
I used this film to launch our work on character traits. Cloud Films also provides some great supporting resources for digging deeper including discussion guides. I’m especially fond of the Periodic Table of Character Strengths. We used this table to explore some new vocabulary and make connections to our literature studies.
Think all of this sounds good? Let It Ripple also provides resources for National Character Day, which happens annually in September. The timing is really perfect!
2. Character Growth Card
This lovely little PDF was a game changer in my classroom.
This little form narrows down and explains 8 main character traits (grit, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence, curiosity, and zest). Once my students had a clear idea of what each trait was, they assessed themselves on each trait on a scale of 1-7. Then they gathered feedback from others- the form suggested that students ask 5 teachers to assess them for each trait, but for a couple of reasons we found it better to seek input from both other teachers and peers.
Once they had their feedback from 5 other people, they averaged those 5 scores and then compared the average to their self-assessment.
Check out how zesty she is!
Then, using that data, they identified one character trait to grow and develop. And it wasn’t necessarily their lowest score- it really came down to which trait they wanted to work on.
This provided a great opportunity to connect to their PLP– my students did a little research on their trait, developed a SMART goal, and documented both the goal and their progress in their PLP. One student, for example, wanted to work on gratitude. See her plan, below.
This little gem was created by Angela Duckworth’s Character Lab (see #3, below), but it doesn’t seem to be available there anymore. Never fear though, it’s still available in a few other places online, like here and here. If you like it, you should definitely save it somewhere in case it ever disappears completely!
Angela Duckworth’s Character Lab website provides a wealth of fabulous -FREE- resources. Based on the aforementioned 8 main character traits (grit, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence, curiosity, and zest) this site offers a variety of tools for both teachers and students. These tools are new, so I didn’t get a chance to use them with my students, but they look great. Dig deeper into each trait and learn about the ways they show up in our lives. And be sure to check out the Playbooks, which help you and your students explore and grow these traits.
Part of the power of implementing a negotiated curriculum is that it doesn’t just center student voice, it actually moves the learning space towards a democratic classroom, a place where students can advocate for themselves and their learning interests, goals and styles. It’s an important piece of the personalized learning plan (PLP) picture.
The Edge Academy at Essex Middle School, in Essex Junction VT, has been doing project-based learning alongside negotiated curriculum for the past six years. Facilitators Lindsey Halman and Phil Young explain what makes it work and what makes it especially powerful for middle schoolers.
Measuring how students approach goal-setting in the 5th and 6th grades
Educators at Wallingford Elementary School and Shrewsbury Mountain School, in central Vermont, undertook an action research project measuring how their use of digital tools — specifically Google Docs, Forms and Sites — changed how middle grades students approached setting goals and reflecting on their achievements.
This presentation, delivered by Harwood Union High School teacher Lissa Fox at the 2016 Middle Grades Conference, describes an Action Research project that looked at the implementation of a one-semester 9th grade course focused on goal setting within Personal Learning Plans (PLPs).
At Manchester Elementary Middle School, sixth grade students speak fluently about their Personal Learning Plans (PLPs). They’ve been working on setting goals in a PLP for years; some students in this school have been doing so since third grade.
Manchester educators Seth Bonnett and Melissa Rice, share what they’ve learned about the necessary supports as teachers and students collaborate around goals.
Students at Peoples Academy Middle Level in Morrisville, Vermont, are exploring the theme of identity in their humanities class. In part, they’re doing so by “speaking” for presidential candidates, using their research and argumentative writing skills with an app called Chatterpix Kids.
In my experience as a teacher and administrator, I noticed a pattern to goal-setting in my school and classroom. We would do some good goal-setting at the beginning of the year and then at some point during the dark depths of winter I would realize that I was too overwhelmed or embarrassed to try to resurrect them.
There were some notable instances when goals were powerful for students, though.
In those cases I saw the potential of goals to cultivate so many important things in my students: self-direction, a sense of efficacy, and a connection to schooling, to name a few.
Shifting the conversation from “the future” to my future
When “21st century skills” first emerged as an educational term, we were just on the precipice of our new century, and talking about the next one hundred years felt future-forward. Now, fifteen years in, “21st century” to me implies current more than future.
“21st century,” then, as a descriptor for a set of skills, gets confusing.
Give your students ownership over their learning through goal-setting activities
Happy New Year! With school back in session and a new year upon us, why not use this time as an excuse to take a deep breath, reassess your goals, and refocus on what you and your students are striving to achieve?
As your students are creating their typical New Year’s resolutions of being nicer to their siblings, being more creative in their twitter posts, and vowing to clean their room at least once a month, why not encourage academic goals? When given a chance to take ownership over their learning, perhaps students will be more committed to the steps needed to achieve in the classroom.
Now, Hudson and his tablemate, Tommy really were two that dove into this idea of being able to use sketchnoting, this idea of visually reflecting. Hudson, what does this show about your work on the integrated unit?
For me, the Protean learning curve is what we all need to keep working on. I think just the micro of it, the minutia of sharing and making it public? Just the pieces of that. As I’ve heard from a lot of workshops, finding more time to do it is tricky, and that’s what makes me think that this evidence collection needs to be able to happen anytime. I’ve yet to really do that as well as I want to. I do want to give an actual survey using Google Forms, but the video feedback is what I use for now. I don’t know if people are familiar with Protean or if you’re using it, but these videos and sketchnotes can be uploaded right into the evidence of a PLP in Protean.
Part of the power of implementing a negotiated curriculum is that it doesn’t just center student voice, it actually moves the learning space towards a democratic classroom, a place where students can advocate for themselves and their learning interests, goals and styles. It’s an important piece of the personalized learning plan (PLP) picture.
In my experience as a teacher and administrator, I noticed a pattern to goal-setting in my school and classroom. We would do some good goal-setting at the beginning of the year and then at some point during the dark depths of winter I would realize that I was too overwhelmed or embarrassed to try to resurrect them.
