[I am teaching a Leadership for Deeper Learning elective for one of our doctoral cohorts this summer and thought that I would share what is happening each week.] I wasn’t happy with how Class 04 went. I didn’t think our flow was smooth. Our timing felt off. It just didn’t feel right afterward. And my […]
[I am teaching a Leadership for Deeper Learning elective for one of our doctoral cohorts this summer and thought that I would share what is happening each week.]
I wasn’t happy with how Class 04 went. I didn’t think our flow was smooth. Our timing felt off. It just didn’t feel right afterward. And my students thought… it was great. Maybe I was just too hard on myself as an instructor (it’s been known to happen). Or maybe it was because in Class 04 we started to redesign!
Our chapter from In Search of Deeper Learning focused on IB High, which my students appreciated because they could empathize with the goal of increasing academic rigor without concurrently-heinous disciplinary practices (looking at you, No Excuses High and others…). As doctoral students, they could identify with the high-level, college-oriented, academic thinking that is intended to occur in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme. They also recognized that raising cognitive complexity alone is not the same as implementing a full suite of ‘deeper learning’ practices. We started class by identifying the learning theories that we thought were present in IB High (compared to Dewey High and No Excuses High), articulated both theories of action and some competing ones, and added IB High to our Continuum Wall in between No Excuses High and Laguna Beach Unified.
We then dove into our main act for the evening. I talked briefly about the Resister, Passenger, Achiever, and Explorer categories from The Disengaged Teen and the need to move more students toward Explorer. I had asked my students to read Richard Elmore’s thoughts regarding the instructional core, and we used sets of questions to move through his Description, Analysis, Prediction, and Evaluation phases. We watched a 5-minute snippet from a middle school math lesson twice. Each student chose two of three lenses – Teacher(s), Students, or Content – and looked for evidence in the lesson. They then discussed the lesson through each of Elmore’s phases in small groups, and captured some ideas in the notecatchers that I provided them. We did all of this rather quickly and I wished that we had more time.
My students had familiarized themselves with the basics of the 4 Shifts Protocol before class, so after our instructional core conversations we were ready to move into a Redesign phase. We focused on Section C of the protocol and, as always occurs, they generated in a mere six minutes numerous great ideas for giving students in the observed math lesson some more agency and ownership. Throughout our redesign conversation with the 4 Shifts Protocol, I kept emphasizing that we can begin to do this work in smaller shifts rather than asking fairly-traditional educators to make the giant leap into full-blown, ‘gold standard’ project-based learning. As the Lego-style image in this post shows, a few teachers are somehow ready to bake the whole pie through a quarter- or semester-long project (green). Most need to start building their capacity by taking just one or two bites of the apple through a smaller redesign of that thing they are doing next Tuesday (red)…
We spent the rest of our evening in our student-led, small group discussions, and every group opted to sit or walk around outside for those conversations. Some of the questions that my students posted beforehand on the Class 04 Padlet included:
- How can leaders redesign systems and learning environments so that student resistance is addressed as feedback rather than treated as a behavior problem?
- We cannot keep kids trapped as compliant “achievers” or “producers.” As leaders, how do we help elementary teachers build true student agency when the system (and parents) are perfectly happy with kids who just follow instructions and get an A?
- The Disengagement Gap describes Resister, Passenger, Achiever, and Explorer modes as student behaviors shaped by learning environments. But this raises a concern: if students shift between these modes based on context, then are we accurately diagnosing “student engagement,” or are we actually observing responses to instructional design conditions and system pressures?
- Up to what point should students be allowed to choose what they learn?
- How can structure be maintained while still granting students choice?
- The more we try to measure student agency, the more we risk defining a “correct” version of it that reflects system values rather than student expression. Is it possible to design accountability systems that preserve flexibility and authenticity in agency, or does measurement inevitably narrow what agency looks like in practice?
- I’m curious if others in our cohort have had success creating the common language needed to engage in [Elmore’s] seventh principle effectively, “Description before analysis, analysis before prediction, prediction before evaluation.” What are the best ways of establishing common language for teachers to describe what they see and do in classrooms?
- To what extent can the IB framework, given “elite European origins,” be equitably adapted to meet the diverse needs of ‘IB for All’ initiatives in non-traditional school communities?
- How do we balance the benefits and professional desire for teacher/classroom autonomy with the real fact that teaching in a certain way does result in better student outcomes? Is scripting really bad, or are we just giving teachers bad scripts?
We will continue our redesign discussions over the rest of the semester. We also will expand our frame from classroom- to building- to school district- to state-level, assisted by some upcoming guest speakers. My students submitted their audio/video Mid-Semester Reflections assignment over the weekend. So far, so good.
Our readings / viewings for Class 04 are listed below. The theme for the evening was Can We Build It? End-of-class evaluations were again very positive.
- In Search of Deeper Learning, Chapter 4
- Producers v. thinkers
- Resisters, Passengers, Achievers, and Explorers
- Improving the instructional core
- The resilience of teacher culture
- Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning, Chapter 2 and either Chapter 3 (elementary) or Chapter 4 (secondary)
- 4 Shifts Protocol
- Using a learning map to build exemplary PBL units
- EXAMPLE: Voices of justice
- EXAMPLE: The voiceless
Previous posts
- Leadership for Deeper Learning, Class 01
- Leadership for Deeper Learning, Class 02
- Leadership for Deeper Learning, Class 03
