“From the earliest levels, teachers must help students and their families understand that grades do not reflect who you are as a learner, but where you are in your learning journey… Teachers must emphasize to their students that achieving less than mastery doesn’t mean you can’t make it, but only that you haven’t made it yet, and there’s more to do.”

            Thomas Guskey (see item #1)

“Teachers should give feedback when students are working on the assignment, not at the end of the process when they will not act on the feedback.”

            Catlin Tucker (see item #2)

“Across the school years, writing becomes an essential tool for learning and expressing what you know, and a cornerstone for building content knowledge. Writing increases comprehension of what is read, heard, or discussed and boosts achievement. Writing supports learning and development across our lifetimes and is vital to communicating, self-expression, self-advocacy, identity development, work, social and political engagement, and more… Students and adults who have significant difficulties with writing are at a terrible disadvantage at school and at work.”

            Karen Harris and Debra McKeown (see item #6)

“Empathy can happen when we create both formal and informal opportunities to learn from others. For example, we may routinely use surveys or make a point of being visible and seemingly relaxed in the school hallways and staff lounge to encourage people to chat with us. While it’s difficult to not look busy when you have too much to do, you’ll be more approachable if you’re not distracted.” 

Thomas Hoerr in “For School Leaders, Empathy Isn’t Optional” in ASCD Online, November 16, 2022

  “Grades are portrayed as a villain by many in education today,” says Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) in this Kappan article. Grading is accused of stifling students’ creativity, fostering a fear of failure, and weakening interest and engagement in learning. But would going gradeless, as some advocate, or changing the label (to marks, proficiency scales, or progress indicators) make any difference? Guskey is doubtful. “A difficult but more-productive approach,” he says, “would be for educators to clarify the meaning of grades and then radically alter the consequences attached to grades for students.” 

            What are grades? They are letters, numbers, words, labels, symbols, or emojis describing a student’s level of attainment on a particular task or learning goal. They are part of helpful feedback to the student answering three questions: 

-   Where am I going? What the student is expected to know or be able to do;

-   How am I doing? The student’s progress toward the learning goal;

-   Where to next? What the student should do to improve.

Grades answer the second question by telling how close the student is to the goal – based on the first (clear and appropriate learning goals) and pointing toward the third (next steps). Guskey believes grades can provide helpful feedback – and lose their negative baggage – if they have four characteristics:

            • They describe performance, not innate ability. “From the earliest levels,” he says, “teachers must help students and their families understand that grades do not reflect who you are as a learner, but where you are in your learning journey.” In other words, grades are not about talent, skill, or capability, but information on how near or far the student is from a learning goal. This is very helpful to students and families, especially when it’s accompanied by a good description of the goal and guidance on how to get there. 

            • Grades should be based on standards, now how other students are doing. With norm-referenced grading, a C means you’re in the middle of the class, average. With criterion-referenced grading, a C means you are on step three in a five-step progression toward mastery. Using grades to compare kids’ performance within a class creates unhealthy competition, discourages collaboration, and tells students nothing about learning. Students with high grades may actually not be doing that well compared to a rigorous standard; they just did better than their classmates. One more problem with norm-referenced grading, says Guskey: “It diminishes student-teacher relationships, since teachers who offer individualized assistance to students are interfering in the competition.”

            • Grades must be seen as malleable. They should describe a student’s current performance level, which can be changed by effort, strategy, and practice. “Teachers must emphasize to their students,” says Guskey, “that achieving less than mastery doesn’t mean you can’t make it, but only that you haven’t made it yet, and there’s more to do.” This approach to grading also means that grades shouldn’t be averaged; instead, current performance should always replace past evidence.

            • Grades must be accompanied by guidance for improvement. During-the-semester grades are shorthand, necessary but not sufficient. The key is treating them as diagnostic information and, if there’s a need for improvement, providing corrective feedback and different prescriptions (since initial instruction wasn’t effective) for getting to mastery. Used this way, says Guskey, grades are an important component of teaching and learning. 

“Can Grades Be an Effective Form of Feedback?” by Thomas Guskey in Kappan, November 2022 (Vol. 104, #3, pp 36-41); Guskey can be reached at guskey@uky.edu. 

“Traditional grading practices are exhausting and unsustainable,” says Catlin Tucker in this online article. “Too many teachers are grading everything. They worry that if they do not grade everything, students will not do the work.” The result is hours of work that may not be productive. And yet many teachers, even if they’re unhappy with the grading practices they’ve been using for years, are reluctant to give them up.

Closely tied to this pattern of after-hours grading is front-of-the-classroom teacher talk, which makes it more difficult to form meaningful connections with students. For years, Tucker looked for ways to cut down on frontal instruction, get to know students better, and cut down on grading. 

For starters, all-class content can be packaged in teacher-made videos, curated online resources, or podcasts that students can experience on their own time, pausing and repeating as needed. For curriculum content that will be different for different students, she suggests putting students in groups and having them rotate through stations. 

            But what about the grading burden? Tucker asks us to think about the purpose of each stage of the work students do, and suggests the level of attention and grading she believes each should get:

-   Practice and review – No feedback or grade, students self-assess and do peer review.

-   Working toward a product – Focused, actionable, side-by-side teacher feedback; no grade.

-   The final essay, test, or product – The teacher’s grade based on a standards-aligned rubric, no additional written feedback.

What, no detailed comments and suggestions on the final stage? Those are not a good use of the teacher’s or students’ time, says Tucker: “Teachers should give feedback when students are working on the assignment, not at the end of the process when they will not act on the feedback.” 

            Rather than writing those laborious and probably unproductive comments in isolation at home in the evening, she suggests shifting that time to in-the-moment feedback when students’ work can still be improved – and when relationships with students can be nurtured and strengthened. Here is Tucker’s step-by-step guide to what she calls side-by-side assessments:

            • For work that involves practice and review, shift the work to students. “They (not you) should think critically about their work,” she says, “identify errors and areas of strength, and collaborate with classmates to correct their assignments.” 

            • For major assignments, performance tasks, and projects, develop a standards-aligned rubric with two or three criteria, and go over it with students so they know exactly what’s expected and how it will be assessed. 

            • Plan a lesson where students can work independently or in groups without your active supervision – perhaps a choice board, playlist, hyperdoc, choose-your-learning-path adventure, or student-centered inquiry. 

            • Set up a space where you can work one-on-one with students while keeping an eye on the class, and decide on how much time you can spend with each student going over their work (it might take two or more periods to get through the whole class). 

            • When launching the side-by-side time, start by explaining the purpose and value of the process to the class, telling students what to bring with them when it’s their turn, and get the class started with the independent activity.

            • With each student, start a timer and conduct a think-aloud as you review their work: What am I noticing? What aspects are strong? What’s missing or needs to be developed? Circle the language in the rubric corresponding with those observations, give it to the student along with their work, and ask if they have any questions.

            • If a student asks for support, write their name on a list. “These are assessment sessions, not instruction sessions,” says Tucker. “You don’t have time to provide personalized instruction given the limited time you will have with each student, but you can document those requests.” Ideally the student takes the highlighted rubric sheet and improves their own work without the teacher’s help. When that isn’t enough, the teacher can follow up later, either individually or in groups of students with similar needs. 

            “Side-by-side assessments turn grading into an opportunity to connect with learners and create transparency around the grading process,” says Tucker, “which often feels opaque from a student’s perspective.” And that evening time previously spent writing detailed comments on final assessments? It’s yours.

“Side-by-Side Assessments: Grading with Students” by Catlin Tucker, May 13, 2022

 In this Review of Educational Research article, Lois Ruth Harris, Lenore Adie, and Claire Wyatt-Smith (Australian Catholic University) report on their review of studies on learning progression-based assessments – that is, formative checks for student understanding. The researchers were interested in whether in-the-moment assessments could:

-   Help teachers and students make sound judgments about learning and students’ growth;

-   Help teachers and students take appropriate actions;

-   Facilitate teachers’ learning and development;

-   Improve students’ academic achievement.

The answer was affirmative on all four, with these qualifications:

-   Formative classroom assessments need to be aligned to the required curriculum.

-   Assessments need to be high-quality and the right grain size to be usable by teachers.

-   PD is needed to guide teachers and teams in the most-effective use of assessment data, especially using results to tune in to students’ thinking.

-   There’s less data on the use of formative assessments for students’ grades, summative assessments, and accountability measures.

“Learning Progression-Based Assessments: A Systematic Review of Student and Teacher Uses” by Lois Ruth Harris, Lenore Adie, and Claire Wyatt-Smith in Review of Educational Research, December 2022 (Vol. 92, #6, pp. 996-1040)

In this Middle School Journal article, Hilary Dack and Arrinna Poessnecker (University of North Carolina/Charlotte), Ellie Chiles (Conover Schools, NC), and Lesli Kathman and Emilee Strohl (Charlotte Schools, NC) describe how a teacher recently told one of the authors that she didn’t differentiate because she believed it was inequitable. Asked why, the teacher said that in her school, differentiation meant using test scores to group students into high, middle, and low groups that never changed, giving rote basic-skills tasks to the low group, and challenging the higher groups with critical thinking and complex skills. 

            This was not the first time the authors encountered this definition of differentiation: “It seems middle-grades educators across diverse contexts have heard the term ‘differentiation’ used to justify practices that: attach unhelpful, permanent labels to early adolescents; reflect deficit orientations toward students, their families, or their communities; and restrict access to high-quality curriculum and instruction to ‘high flyers.’” One colleague called this “fake differentiation” – coopting the term to refer to something that is far from the aspirations usually associated with the idea. 

            Equitable differentiation, say the authors, starts with assessing students’ readiness for a particular curriculum unit – how close they are to the finish line or targeted learning objective. “Readiness is fluid,” they say; “it changes as new learning leads to stronger proficiency with a given objective. This conceptualization of readiness stands in contrast to the static traits of ‘ability’ or ‘intelligence.’ While teachers typically do not perceive ability and intelligence as changing much over time, readiness with a particular objective will likely change frequently and significantly.” The focus for the teacher and student is the next step in the learning progression.

            What does this look like in the classroom? Rigorous, grade-appropriate goals for all students; students often working with different groups of peers on specific learning objectives, receiving differentiated, scaffolded, just-in-time assistance to bring all students along. The authors call this tiering and describe these steps:

-   Students take a pre-assessment to see where they are compared to learning goals.

-   If there are wide differences in results, tiering is appropriate, and the teacher decides on certain lessons in the unit to implement the strategy.

-   The teacher groups students by need and patterns of proximity-to-goal. 

-   Each group engages in a different task specifically designed by the teacher to move the group’s proficiency toward the goal – or beyond.

-   All tasks are aligned to the same general proficiency target, but vary according to each group’s “next learning step” toward the goal.

-   Each group works on equally powerful and engaging tasks that require critical thinking or problem solving and lead to meaningful learning. 

“When used effectively,” conclude the authors, “tiering can help students make great strides toward a learning destination that probably would not be possible with one-size-fits-all instruction. However, it can also be used in less-equitable ways if a teacher is not intentional about avoiding common pitfalls.”

            What are those pitfalls? Four of the authors (Poessnecker, Chiles, Kathman, and Strohl) tried tiered differentiation in their North Carolina classrooms and identified these challenges:

-   Alignment – crafting assessments that match curriculum objectives and identify students’ proximity to the goal;

-   Anticipating readiness – envisioning the full spectrum of student proficiency;

-   Crafting responsive tasks – those that match the needs of students in each group;

-   Rigor – creating learning tasks that are engaging for students in each group and match demanding class-wide learning goals. 

The full article linked below has detailed descriptions of tiered instruction in social studies, science, ELA, and math.

“The Key to Equitable Differentiation” by Hilary Dack, Ellie Chiles, Lesli Kathman, Arrinna Poessnecker, and Emilee Strohl in Middle School Journal, November 2022 (Vol 53, #5, pp. 14-32); Dack can be reached at hdack@uncc.edu. 

In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez says that although lectures are often frowned on in classrooms – better to use inquiry, projects, and cooperative learning – we can learn a lot from a good lecture. That’s why TED Talks, online courses, and YouTube are wildly popular. Lectures get a bad reputation, says Gonzalez, when they’re overused and poorly executed, as in Ben Stein’s economics class in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 

            When is a lecture appropriate? The University of Tennessee’s Walker Center suggests the following criteria:

-   Important background information is not available to students.

-   The content may be confusing and needs explanation.

-   The teacher’s expertise will help bring clarity.

-   The content needs to be delivered quickly.

Since knowledge is an essential precursor to creative, higher-order thinking, lectures would seem to be the most efficient way to help students build that foundation.

But wouldn’t it be better to have students pick up key information in an inquiry project, constructivist activity, or self-directed reading? Gonzalez suggests doing an experiment, with one class listening to lectures, another using student-centered methods. She believes brief lectures will be more efficient and effective, provided that the teacher keeps these ten pointers in mind: 

            • Give it structure – There are a number of ways to package information for maximum impact: cause and effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, definition or description, sequence. It’s helpful to start with an attention-grabber, an anecdote, an anticipatory set.

            • Keep it brief – Gonzalez suggests 5-10 minutes, with longer content chunked into mini-lectures interspersed with interactive segments. 

            • Engage students – Polls, discussions, and notetaking can involve students in the content and allow the teacher to check for understanding and make adjustments if necessary.

            • Use visuals – A lecture without displaying photos, charts, graphs, graphic organizers, or visual models won’t be nearly as effective, according to the theory of dual coding. 

            • Give examples – Adding “crunchy details” is essential to getting abstract concepts through to students, says Kelly McGonigal (Stanford University); the more examples, the better.

            • Include analogies – These make the abstract come to life, and are especially effective when they link new information to what students already know. 

            • Tell stories – Using believable narratives has always been in good speakers’ toolboxes. “Stories create new mental images and strong emotional responses in listeners,” says Gonzalez, “and they provide a familiar, non-threatening way to ease students into learning. Listening to stories activates parts of the brain that are unresponsive when taking in non-narrative content.” 

            • Think out loud – It’s “incredibly helpful,” says Gonzalez, “if you verbalize your thinking process along the way” – for example, explaining your own worries and stumbles as you solve a math problem or compose a piece of writing. 

            • Make it dynamic – This includes varying voice intonation and volume and facial expressions, moving to different parts of the classroom, using vivid gestures to emphasize a point, and including humor, personal details, and weird, surprising facts. 

            • Use the mini-lecture as a closer – Gonzalez says it can be effective to place brief lectures at the end of a lesson, after students first wrestle with ideas or materials, think about an essential question, or engage in a discussion. 

            “What’s so lovely about this work,” she says of teaching, “is that it truly is a craft that can be honed over time, and part of becoming masters of our craft is knowing when to use the right tool at the right time.” 

“10 Ways to Give a Better Lecture” by Jennifer Gonzalez in Cult of Pedagogy, November 15, 2022

In this Theory Into Practice article, Karen Harris (Arizona State University) and Debra McKeown (Texas A&M University) explain why writing is so important in K-12 and beyond: “Across the school years, writing becomes an essential tool for learning and expressing what you know, and a cornerstone for building content knowledge. Writing increases comprehension of what is read, heard, or discussed and boosts achievement. Writing supports learning and development across our lifetimes and is vital to communicating, self-expression, self-advocacy, identity development, work, social and political engagement, and more… Students and adults who have significant difficulties with writing are at a terrible disadvantage at school and at work.” 

            Far too many American students are not good writers. In the 2012 NAEP report, only 24 percent of eighth and twelfth graders were writing at the proficient level; the percent of African-American and Hispanic students, and those with disabilities, was even lower. Harris and McKeown believe there are two reasons for these troubling results. First, writing is a complex and challenging process for many students and their teachers. To write well, students need to:

-   Evaluate the writing task;

-   Consider the audience, text characteristics, and desired effects;

-   Marshal the skills and strategies needed;

-   Decide when and how to use the writing process;

-   Manage working and long-term memory, peer interactions, attention, and time;

-   Self-regulate.

The second reason for students’ sub-par performance, say the authors, is that writing instruction is uneven through the grades.

            The good news, say Harris and McKeown, is that there are solid, evidence-based strategies to teach writing. Since the early 1970s, most teachers have moved away from teaching skills in isolation, diagramming sentences, and marking up students’ sentences and paragraphs in red ink. Today, most teachers use a process or writers’ workshop approach, along with some skill instruction – a blended approach endorsed by the National Writing Project. 

            But the process approach is not a panacea; studies show an average effect size of .34 and the lowest success with students who have difficulty writing. In a 1995 interview, Donald Graves, an early proponent of the process approach, worried that too much was being asked of teacher-student writing conferences and that spelling, grammar, and writing conventions weren’t getting enough attention. “There was more writing going on in classrooms,” said Graves, “but the writing wasn’t getting any better.” 

            Harris and McKeown say that teaching writing strategies to the whole class is much more effective – an effect size of .80 and above – and there’s no reason it can’t be integrated with process instruction. But many educators believe whole-class strategies instruction is antithetical to the writers’ workshop. This “paradigm war” is unfortunate, say Harris and McKeown, “further intensifying division among those who should be natural allies and partners in improving writing instruction for all of our students.” 

They describe one evidence-based model, Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), and how it can be used to successfully teach writing in grades 1-12, in tandem with the writers’ workshop/process approach:

-   The class reads, analyzes, and discusses a model text in one genre (informative, persuasive, or narrative).

-   Students become familiar with academic vocabulary and genre knowledge.

-   The class then reads and discusses a weak text in the same genre. 

-   The class collaboratively revises the weak text using what students have learned about good writing in this genre. 

-   Students are guided to think with a “writer’s eye” about topic, audience, and purpose.

-   The teacher works to develop students’ growth mindset and self-efficacy as writers, saying that we all need to learn to write – nobody is born a good or bad writer.

-   Self-regulation is explicitly taught – that we improve through effort, goal-setting, self-assessing progress, and positive self-talk (which the teacher models).

-   The teacher helps students use these strategies and gradually reduces support.

-   The teacher also helps students engage in close reading, marking up a text, and taking notes to use in their writing.

“SRSD instruction is learner-centered, but teacher-guided,” say Harris and McKeown. “Peer, group, and teacher collaboration are critical and learning is active. Peers collaborate in many ways, such as planning, writing, providing feedback, revising, and editing.”

            SRSD works, say the authors, but it’s been the target of six “critical fictions” that have limited its adoption in classrooms. The authors rebut each in turn:

-   SRSD is for students with learning disabilities or difficulties with writing. Although it was initially developed for students with learning disabilities, say Harris and McKeown, it’s effective for all students.

-   Researchers get better results with SRSD than teachers. Actually, studies show teachers getting results as good as, or better than, researchers.

-   SRSD is difficult to learn and use. Although teachers are already using many of its components, differentiating based on classroom and cultural context and students’ needs is challenging and requires PD support.

-   It’s expensive. SRSD is not a commercial product, say Harris and McKeown, and they note that many free materials are available to support implementation. 

-   SRSD instruction is teacher-centered and results in formulaic writing. Not true, say the authors, arguing that this approach was “‘built’ to be owned by both teachers and students. Students own the strategies and knowledge they develop, using them like a jazz player uses a melody – riffing and twisting what they know to address their goals, readers, and purposes as writers.” 

-   SRSD writing is potentially racist and harmful to students learning English. To the contrary, say Harris and McKeown, this approach has been used successfully in under-resourced schools and with students of color. Learning to write well is “a tool for self-understanding, self-expression, self-advocacy, and social and political engagement.” 

“No single theory adequately addresses the monumental challenges we face in our culture today regarding equity and social justice,” say the authors. “However, nor does allegiance to any single theory provide moral superiority. Rather, we must work together using all that we have learned not only to teach our children, but to work against the ‘wicked problems’ that confront us in society and education today.” 

            Harris and McKeown conclude by addressing four barriers to successful implementation of SRSD:

            • Insufficient teacher preparation and PD – Many teachers’ lack of confidence teaching writing contributes to the subject’s low priority in the curriculum. Given the complexity and demands of good writing instruction, there’s a need for effective on-the-job professional development and support. The authors estimate that 14-16 hours of PD are required to implement SRSD well, including choosing the best writing passages, differentiating to meet students’ needs, using assessments to inform instruction, integrating SRSD into existing programs, and planning follow-up support.

            • Curriculum adoption – Commercial materials purchased by school districts aren’t always those with the best research evidence behind them, say the authors. 

            • Time for writing instruction – Only about 15 minutes a day is spent on writing from grade 4 to 6, and at the secondary level, most writing is on worksheets. There’s little realization that writing is a powerful way to improve student achievement in reading, math, and other subjects. 

            • High-stakes testing – Although writing is tested in most states, it’s assessed only in certain grades, and that’s where teachers are pushed to emphasize writing – in the format that’s tested. “This narrowing of the curriculum,” say Harris and McKeown, “privileges quick, template-based fixes rather than robust, evidence-based, and generalizable instruction such as that offered by SRDS instruction and other evidence-based practices. It is important that high-stakes standardized assessment not define the writing curriculum… Writing is far too important to be relegated to only a few grades or writing for limited purposes… It is imperative that we make writing and writing instruction a priority.” 

“Overcoming Barriers and Paradigm Wars: Powerful Evidence-Based Writing Instruction” by Karen Harris and Debra McKeown in Theory Into Practice, Fall 2022 (Vol. 61, #4, pp. 429-442); the authors can be reached at karen.r.harris@asu.edu and debramckeown@tamu.edu. 

In this Review of Educational Research article, Salome Wörner and Katharina Scheiter (University of Tübingen) and Jochen Kuhn (Technische Universität Kaiserslautern) report on their analysis of studies of student science experiments that were conducted hands-on, virtually, and using a combination of hands-on and virtual approaches. Their conclusion: combining real and virtual methods was most effective, and there was no best sequence. The researchers encourage teachers to use both approaches and decide on the sequence based on the topic, the learning objectives, the specific functions that each learning experience can contribute, and students’ prior knowledge.

“The Best of Two Worlds: A Systematic Review on Combining Real and Virtual Experiments in Science Education” by Salome Wörner, Jochen Kuhn, and Katharina Scheiter in Review of Educational Research, December 2022 (Vol. 92, #6, pp. 911-952)

In this School Library Journal feature, Abby Johnson suggests books students might read as they view Disenchanted, a Disney series starting November 24th:

-   The Whatever After series by Sarah Mlynowski, grade 3-6

-   Midsummer’s Mayhem by Rajanni LaRocca, grade 4-7

-   Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, grade 5-8

“Books for Ever, Ever, After” by Abby Johnson in School Library Journal, November 2022 (Vol. 68, #11, p. 16)