Hi, good afternoon, everyone, or good
morning, wherever you're tuning in from.
My name is Ezgi Kiriscioglu.
I am on the Product Marketing team here at
Curriculum Associates and have the pleasure
of moderating today's virtual event, Reflect
and Connect: Summer Actions to Prepare
for the First Critical Month Back to School.
Today we're joined by our presenter,
John Hattie.
Hattie is a highly acclaimed education
researcher. His research and
interests include performance indicators,
models of measurement, and evaluation of teaching
and learning.
Hattie, uh, became known to a wider
audience with his two books, Visible Learning
and Visible Learning for Teachers. Visible
Learning is a synthesis of more than 800
metastudies covering more than 80 million
students,
which is the result of 30 years of research
about what works best for learning in schools.
And most recently, he's published Visible
Learning: The Sequel, a synthesis of over
2,100 meta-analyses relating
to achievement.
Hattie also now serves as
a technical advisor for i-Ready
to guide and strengthen our development and research
of i-Ready Assessment as we continue to innovate
on where students are in their learning, what progress
looks like, and how to determine next steps.
Today he'll share insights and strategies
to transfer summer reflection into back-to-
school momentum,
highlighting the critical nature of the first month back
to school. And joining him today are
our Q and A panelists, Tyrone Holmes,
the chief inclusion officer here
at CA. For more than two decades,
Ty has led transformative professional
experiences in mathematics for educators
at senior levels and is called upon by
the district and state leadership to
consult on equitable learning and positive
school culture. And our other guest
panelist, who also joins us from Curriculum
Associates, is Danielle
Sullivan. She brings 10 years of teaching
experience to our role as a national director
of content and implementation at Curriculum
Associates, specializing in establishing
and strengthening middle school implementations,
with an emphasis on student engagement and
motivation.
And without further ado, let's
dive in today's topic.
Thank you very much for that. Just sharing
up my screen and good morning. Good afternoon,
good evening. Wherever you are, I'm here in Melbourne,
Australia and a very early, good morning.
And as Ezgi said,
um,
my background—and, uh, that's
why I'm keen to see what the poll
said on some of these notions—is
looking at
what truly makes the biggest
difference to the learning of students. And
earlier this year, I published as—
as Ezgi said, a sequel to my book based
on the 400 million kids. And my venture
is always what are those big influences.
What's the common story between
those teachers, those schools that
make an above-average effect compared to those
making a below-average effect? And what
I want to focus on here today
is specifically looking at
what you need to think about at the end
of the year as you start, go into your
summer holidays
for the start of the new year, so that the new
year starts off at a dramatic,
accelerated way.
These are the data from the students. Now,
I take many meta-analyses,
and they've been converted into this notion of an
effect size,
and the numbers aren't—what the
numbers actually mean is not that critical. It's the relativity
between them.
But just to be sure,
when you take a study, and you look at a student's
performance today compared to, say, two or three
or four months later, we can calculate
how big that difference is. And
that's the real, true meaning of an effect size.
We can also look at a group that gets
a particular intervention and a group that doesn't,
and we can calculate that effect size. And
overall, you can see there that an effect
size greater than zero is extremely
common. About 98%
of effect sizes are greater than zero, which means
that students’ achievement improv—
improves.
And yes, there are many other things besides achievement,
but I don't know what scores would look like if achievement
wasn't part of the equation. And that's been
the fascination for me.
But you can also see
that the average effect of .40,
there are many teachers
and many schools that have this
above-average effect. And truly,
that's quite exceptional, except excellence
is all around us.
And this is the state of education
in your country, my country at the moment,
that we do have an incredible number of
teachers in schools that are making really, true, substantive
differences to the lives of kids. And it's
just a pity that sometimes in the media
we forget that, and we somehow think
that schools are doing a good job. The evidence
is pretty clear, we're doing a good job.
And so my fascination is the story
underlying those effects in that red zone
compared to those in the yellow zone.
And that's what I want to highlight today.
What are those effects in that red zone?
What's the story that really helps,
particularly when you ask that question,
what can we do at this time of the school
year to think about
over the summer and get really started
in the new year to accelerate the learning
growth of our students?
Firstly,
summer school.
It has a very small effect, but
it is positive,
and that's contrasted with what
is the loss that students make by
having a few weeks off school over
the summer? And you can see it's small.
And it's negative. And in some ways
they counter each other,
which is a bit of a problem.
On the other hand,
maybe the .17 should
be contrasted with the –.09 for the
effects of summer school.
But that's summer vacation school length.
We did a study a few years ago where
we looked at those stu—those
teachers
who went back and
looked at—by the end of the year,
they looked at the performance of the students
in the coming year. They talked with the—
many of them talked with the teachers of the current students
about,
“Tell me about these students so I'm better prepared
for the start of the new year.”
And we compared the results of those teachers
with those who did not do
that. And some teachers, hand
on heart, say, “I don't want to know
what the teacher thought about the students last year, ‘cause
that could bias me.
I don't look at the results of the students last year.
I'm gonna spend the first two or three weeks getting
to know my students.”
Well,
massive difference. Those who
looked at the students by the end of the year,
there was no summer effect.
Summer effect is a teacher effect. And
this is one of the major messages I have is
that if you want an accelerated start for the new
year, get to know those students,
what their performance was like in the past year,
where, if possible, talk to the teachers
about those students so that you don't
waste the first two or three weeks of the new year
getting to know the students and wasting
their time whilst you work out what you
could have done by the end of the year.
So today,
as I say, I'm gonna talk at—at the 13
big messages that have—make
that difference at the end of the year. But if you want
to know more detail, there's a free site out
there called MetaX. All my data
is in there,
all the descriptions of all the different 350
influences. It's a rich trove
of data. You're welcome to play with that.
But that's the detail. I'm gonna come to the big
story. The
big story
is it's not what we do that matters.
It's how we think about what we do.
Those teachers in the red zone think,
sometimes quite substantially differently,
for those that were in that
below-average effect side.
And you can see some of the mind frames that we were working
on there. And whilst 10’s a
big number,
it's literally the first repeated
10 times.
When you walk into your classroom at the start
of the next year, I want you to say, “My
job here this year is to evaluate my
impact.”
And you could see
as a consequence, your students are
the biggest winners.
Your job's not merely to get through
the curriculum, to make
the students feel comfortable, to come up with real-
world, exciting, engaging activities.
They're consequences. It's every day.
You're constantly nosy.
How am I doing?
What am I having an effect on? What am I not having an
effect on? Who am I having an effect on,
and who am I not? And how big is that effect?
And that constant notion. So you can see why I'm
claiming
that knowing that when the students
walk in the room gives a massive uptake
to the start of the new year.
And I also want you to work backwards.
I'm sure some of you have heard of backward design
before, but it's the same logic here.
And the logic is I want you to say,
what am I trying to aim for
by the end of the first, say, semester,
the first 12 weeks? Think to that
12 weeks, not day one.
Where do I wanna be in 12 weeks?
And it's—understanding where the students
are when they come in at the start of the year
speeds up the acceleration to that.
If you start by trying to say, what are they like
when they first walk in? There is no challenge.
There is no high-success criteria, and
it's just, kind of,
doing the work. But that notion
of setting the criteria for the end of that first semester
and saying, “That's where I wanna be,” and working
to the end. Where are the students now,
and going back. And that's the big claim
that I want to talk about this morning.
It's knowing
when we talk about evaluating impact,
what do we mean by impact?
Well, I would argue there are at least three
things that we need to know of our students
as they come in. What skills
do they bring?
What strategies of learning do they have?
What kind of progress have they been
making over the previous year? What
is their starting achievement?
Because the matter is that it's true.
The teaching, the strategies of learning that
lead to the accelerated progress towards
higher achievement.
How willing are the students to take challenges?
Some of our students, particularly some of our
very brightest students, is terri—are terrified of
taking challenges. They might be wrong.
Well,
there is opportunities to learn.
They're not—should not be embarrass—embarrassments.
So does the student feel OK to
make errors, to go to that edge,
to then seek and
have the safety nets of you? So
that when they get to that edge, they go over. If
they always want to get 100%,
quite frankly, the work's too easy.
Do they feel they belong in this place called
school?
And do they feel invited
to come to your class to learn?
And that's a really critical one. We know
from the Jenkins curve that, uh, 95%
of year one students feel invited to come to
school by the end of elementary school. At
best four out of 10 want to come to
school to learn the stuff you teach them.
They come—they have to—they wanna
be with their friends. But it's that notion,
is this a place where they want to come
and take on those challenges, go
to that edge?
And if they can't
do any of those, that's our job.
That's our job to maximize the impact
across the skill, will, and
the thrill.
So the first of the 13 tips
today is working together
to evaluate your impact. As much
as possible, over the next few weeks before the end
of the year, can you get the time
to work together with some of the teachers from
the students that you're gonna take on next year
to understand their thinking about the
students? You don't have to agree with them,
but you should at least hear their views, hear
their understandings, what the student does when
they make mistakes. What's their reaction to error?
How can they work well by themselves?
Can they work
in teams? What's their growth
development over this past year? And
from that, you're starting to think about over
the summer, I want to make predictions
for my students about where they are to start
with and that projection of where
I want them to be in 12 weeks.
I want you to have very high expectations, ‘cause you
can see there that those teachers who
have high expectations—and they tend
to have it for all their students—
have a dramatically higher effect, .9,
compared to those teachers—sadly,
there are many of these—who have very low
expectations.
Ah,
the students can't do it. They come from
the wrong background. Their parents aren't supportive.
You should know my students. I'm not gonna make
great growth. We work in schools
across all socioeconomic areas,
and we know that that's got nothing
to do with making a difference
to students, compared to
the expectations we have of students.
And that's why that 12 weeks are so critical.
Where do you want them to be? Be bold.
Don't be absurdly bold, but be
bold. Know where they are.
Just doing the work at the start of the year
where they are is not gonna make the difference.
It's that work that leads them to that 12 weeks.
You can see there if you ever look down those two lists,
when we go into classes of teachers with high
expectations and low expectations, they're dramatically
different classrooms. Woah, are they
different.
And the one that always surprises us is differentiation.
Low-expectation teachers, they
think differentiation is giving different activities
to different groups of students.
.03.
Those who have the idea that differentiation
is having similar high expectations
of all our students after 12 weeks.
But we can allow different times and different ways
to get there.
Really powerful, powerful
differences for expectations.
Plus one.
Where are the students now? Add plus one.
Keep adding plus one. Make them go into the territory
that they've never been before,
and increase those challenges.
Yes, success criteria are critical.
And it's the notion of knowing
what your concept of that 12 weeks are. Now,
if you can make that also transparent to the students,
maybe scaffold to get there,
then they are part of the equation. They
are part of the acceleration that we want. And
I know many of you are doing that. Now, how do we
make those success criteria transparent
to the students, both about
the content of the skills we want them to learn
and also about the way we want them to go deeper,
and relate, and extend, and transfer
their work?
My message: determining the—
both the problem solving in the
transfer of skills we desire in 12 weeks
and then asking
for the students to be able to do that problem
solving in 12 weeks. What are the skills
and knowledge needed to do that problem solving,
and then determining the stretch targets
to be attained for both the knowledge and
skills and for the problem solving
and transfer, and then planning. Not the other
way around. It's not planning the activities.
It's asking, what are those
big skills—the knowledge and
the problem solving we want in 12 weeks—
and then work backwards, turning them into
success criteria and then scaffold those
get there, rather than waiting and seeing what the
students can do. That's what makes the difference.
Setting those success criteria using the
Goldilocks principle: not too hard,
not too easy, and not too boring.
Clearly, you need to know where the students are
at the start of the year,
and then setting the criteria relating
to that.
Maximizing effective feedback.
I've spent a lot of time in my work looking
at feedback, and yes,
teachers give an incredible amount
of feedback every day,
but it's variable. A third of it’s negative.
And I'm trying to understand about what happens.
And the best way to do that is to turn it on
its head and say,
what is the students’ conception of feedback?
What is it that they hear,
they understand,
and they action?
Students’ conception of feedback
is very simple. They want to know
how to improve.
A lot of our feedback is about how
they've been, where they've come from, about
the errors and their mistakes. And quite frankly,
that's the credibility
for the students to move to the
improvement feedback.
One study we did recently is we constructed
two pages of feedback. Half—half
of the students got two pages that deliberately
had no improvement feedback, and half
got feedback that had improvement feedback.
And I remember this one student,
he was a junior high school, and he said
to me, he waved his two pages in front of me, and he said,
“Sir, I got no feedback.”
And what he was saying is I don't know how to improve.
I got no information to improve.
That's the key notion. So if you want to know
what good feedback is,
ask the students what they understood by the feedback
and what they're going to do next.
Now. If all were to
work at 100%, sometimes it's hard
for the students to see improvement feedback.
But if there's errors and—and challenges, that's
when feedback really comes alive. Students
strive to improve.
Help them do that. And so I ask
you, as you make your comments, you do your feedback
in class, you write, make your—write your comments.
Nothing wrong with clarification,
nothing wrong with correction,
but make sure that improvement feedback
is there as well. And that helps the students,
and they're more likely to hear it, and they're more likely
to action it.
I'm obsessed
with how students learn,
and I have a secret for you.
So in your students.
They kind of don't care how you teach.
They care how you learn.
They wanna know, what are the skills
involved in acquiring information
and consolidating that information? So they can
then move on
to the deeper learning, the knowing how,
and the consolidation and the transfer.
And when we did our study, looking
at one of the best strategies to—to use
as you go about this
engagement in class every day.
Well, it's hard because they differ
depending on whether you're at the different
stages. And you can see looking across
there that outlining
and summarizing is very powerful
when you first start to hear
all the incoming that happens in the classroom.
And so right at the start of the new year,
here's a—a task I want you to do.
Students are going to talk to you for the next 10 or 15
minutes about topic X.
And I want you to take notes.
And at the end, I'm gonna give you some time to organize those
notes,
summarize, and I'm gonna collect that
in. Some of your students
will hand in a blank page,
where some of them will hand in
a script of everything you said, which means nothing was
happening up here.
Five-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 15-
year-olds need to know how to
build coat hangers around
all those ideas—what are the big ideas, how to
summarize.
And if you're like me, I learned to do it when I went to university—
too late.
Classrooms are full of knowledge and facts.
Some of your students think learning is
knowing lots, preparing for Jeopardy.
They don't have those skills of building
those coat hangers and then moving
to that stage of consolidation.
And I'm not sure we're as good at teaching kids
to so consolidate, deliberate practicing,
spinning out, doing exercises
over time and not doing 10 exercises
on one day compared to one exercise every
10 days. It's the latter that you can see makes
a tremendous difference.
And then making sure that the students have consolidated.
Like, think of the student
studying there
and the problem that he's gonna get
in the knowing how acquiring stage involves
nine times six.
And he's trying to work out what nine times six are.
Compared to the student who's over learned that nine and six
is a 54.
You know which student is going to be successful
in deep learning. The one that's consolidated.
And that problem, like, of
making sure you're teaching the strategies at the right
time, take memorization.
After the knowing that at first acquiring stage,
when you're first giving students information,
memorization has an effect of .03.
At the consolidation phase, it screams
at up to .76.
There's a right time and there's a wrong time for memorization.
And we can also look at our teaching methods.
It turns out that the teaching methods
differ in their effectiveness, depending
on whether you're teaching the content and the knowledge
or whether you're teaching the relationships.
Now our answer is simple.
Two.
Give students two assignments,
and tell them, “This assignment is
about the knowledge and the skills. And this
piece of the assignment is about the relating,
the extending of the transfer.”
Be crystal clear about that, and you'll
find a lot of explicit instructions, much
higher effect for the content.
And the knowledge and the problem-based methods
are much more successful for the knowing
how stage. And so to have two different
teaching methods,
and make it very clear that—be greedy.
I want both.
But doing the right teaching and teaching the right
strategies at the right time is critical.
Understand how your students are thinking.
Understand what's going inside their mind.
And if you look down that list, you can see it's,
what is their sense of confidence? What is their sense
of enjoyment?
What is their understanding
of what success looks like in this world?
How do they know
how well they're going from where they are towards
that success?
How do they master—do they wanna come
in and master at—at both
the content and the deep learning?
How do they know how to learn by themselves?
And when they work with other students in their learning culture,
can they and do you invite them to think
aloud? When we did
a study where we looked at 20,000
hours of teacher transcripts of classes,
and we asked the question, “How many times
did a teacher think aloud?”
Or, “How many times did a teacher
ask a student to think aloud?” Of those 20,000
hours, we found exactly zero.
Students wanna know how
you went about doing the problem, how you thought.
And when you look at your students
who are very successful, they are
very good at error detection. They know when they're
starting to work on a problem using a strategy,
whether it's working or not. And if it's not working,
they stop using that strategy and go to
another strategy.
Some of your students
go to a problem, apply a strategy, it doesn't
work, and they keep applying that strategy.
And they don't understand why they can't
learn. Thinking aloud multiple
opportunities to learn,
making sure and checking that students
can hear, understand, and action off the feedback.
They can know what to do when they don't know what
to do. Understanding
these ways of thinking of our students
is very powerful. What greater
respect for a student
than a teacher to be able to stand and those students
choose?
And this is why we're so interested
in that climate and culture of your classroom.
And when we look at the kind of culture and climate
views from the students’ point of view,
the thing they say most of all:
Is this class fair? Are all
the students treated in the same ways?
Are there—is it safe
to not know in this class?
Is it OK to make errors, or is it embarrassing?
And it's not just
your relationships with the students,
it's how you build the relationships amongst
the students that truly matter. And obviously,
in the first six weeks, building
those classroom climates so students
know it's predictable. It's OK
to come to this class and learn. It's
exciting to come to this in class and learn.
The teacher is going to help me improve.
And the teacher is gonna
understand
how I think my sense of confidence
and build it,
so I can go on and make this a really
great year of learning.
How we can determine
what a year's growth looks like for a year's
impact. And that's a really critical notion.
Teachers who think a year's growth is that
are very successful at making that growth. Teachers
who think as a year's growth of that are very
successful at making that growth. And
we argue that this is a very
key part of professional learning in any school.
And we determine that year's growth by looking
at the curriculum expectations.
We do use standardized assessment to have
an anchor to see what the effectiveness is.
We look at the artifacts of students’ work,
bringing along a piece of students work, say,
at the start of three months and saying, is this three months’
growth, and listening to the students’
sense of their—their progress.
And I want to pause here and say that standardized
assessment—
like, this is where i-Ready is
really, really powerful.
In i-Ready, you can look at the students’ performance
over the past year, and you could look
at the performance in the—the
the greenish zone there.
And you could also set stretch goals
to say, this is where if we did the stretch
and raised, not just business as normal,
not just saying the students’ going to develop in
terms of the development progress. I want to set
some stretch goals that I can add value. I
can do that plus one above where the
students are. This is a really powerful
use of the tools that are out there.
And those that are using the i-Ready tool, all that
data is available to you from the past
year and also what you need to
look at from this year to determine
what that year's growth is, so that you set
targets for yourself. You set targets for your
students that's above what they would have done
if it was just business as usual.
So that's a very powerful way. Having that understanding.
And this is where when you get together in
your professional learning teams of
looking at the growth we're making, looking at the
growth other teachers are making, and helping each other
work on problems of practice, problems
of students to really make a difference.
And this is probably one of the most powerful
things that you can do to set yourself up
for the next year.
Be aware of the—be aware of the—the danger
of the Matthew Effect.
This is the notion that the rich get rich, and
the poor stay poorer.
This is the notion that, particularly,
some of our students who come to us
may be struggling with their reading, may be struggling
with some of the basic skills and number. And
sometimes we're just too
nice.
We accommodate those students,
and we find ways for them to learn the material
that we have to confront in the new year, so they
don't have to go about
and be hindered by their skills, or their reading, or their skills
and numbers.
We're doing those students no favors,
no favors at all. Because
take, for example, by
age 8,
if students haven't got the basic skills
in reading and number, they
never catch up.
There's no such notion of a developmental
lag. That happens to so few students.
It's us being too kind.
So attending to those basic skills
and making sure we just don't perpetuate them.
We've had a study here in Australia that came
out last week, looking at high school students, and
a quarter of them haven't got those basic skills.
A quarter of them.
Our kindness has overwhelmed those students.
And so attending to those skills and finding
out at what they have
at the basic skills of reading and number and
making sure that's what we accelerate. And
we don't just perpetuate the Matthew
Effect.
Good readers, we want to improve. The poor
readers, we don't want them to say at that bottom
of the heap. And sometimes
it means we may—we may need to get some assistance
with coaching those students so that
they've got those skills so that they can also
enjoy that trajectory of accelerated
learning.
We talk a lot
about how we can get students to be part
of this equation along with us as
the teachers.
And we talk about assessment-capable students
in our new book coming out in the next few weeks,
on teaching students to drive their learning.
Some of our readers got a little bit,
um, worried when they saw the first book
and thought it was about tests, assessment capable.
It isn't really. It's about
what it is actually.
When a student is given an assessment. So let's
give him an i-Ready assessment. Our argument
is that it's our job to teach
the students how to interpret the results,
how to action the improvement from
the assessments. The—it's the students’
data. They own the data. We
want to teach them to know their current level
of understanding.
Give them confidence to know where they're going.
That success criteria. Obviously teach
them—the students the tools so they
can guide their learning.
We wanna teach them how to
know how to get that improvement feedback
and action it,
how well they’re going in their learning. Because
if we don't do that,
they know it anyway. And sometimes they think
from their previous classes,
“I'm not very good at doing this. “
Well, no matter where they start
on the achievement continuum, they could all
make that progress. And so this notion
of the assessment capable, the visible
learner, the student who knows how to be
their own teacher.
Now, sometimes you've got massive
jargon for these notions, and probably the most
common one is self-regulation.
I want you to think of it as much more simpler.
I want your students to be their own teacher.
I want them to know for them to know what
to do and they don't know what to do. I want them to
know how to work, to seek help,
to work with others, to know how to
make
comments about whether the information is,
uh, they—they get off the internet, or ChatGPT,
or the other tools that are out there. Is
it believable and incredible?
Is it shallow, or is it deep?
Teaching them those skills is really critical.
It's that—and that confidence to
take on challenges and be assessment
capable. It's—
tests have got a bad name too often,
because too often the students think when they get
a test, they get a score, the work
is over. No, it's not.
That's where it starts—from this
assessment.
The students can be taught how
to take that information and improve.
When you look at
this confidence to take on challenges,
you can see the effects there are very,
very high.
And this is one of the things that we really want
you to think about as the students start the school
year. What confidence do they have?
We know, for example, that many of our gifted
students, particularly as they get into high schools,
or later prior at elementary schools,
they're terrified of being wrong.
Sometimes their parents could have
pressure on them if they don't get 100%.
Well,
here's my problem.
Why is it the majority of gifted
kids do not
go on to be gifted adults?
Less than 2% of child prodigies
go on to be gifted adults because
when they get into territory that they're not too familiar with,
they're terrified of error. They're terrified
of being wrong.
And so this notion of making it safe,
the climate safe for students to
be wrong and learn from that is probably
the most powerful thing in those first few
weeks of schooling.
But a very famous study
many years ago looked at the transition
of students from one year
to the next year. They looked at the transition
of students who went from one school to the next school.
And they said, what was the biggest
predictor
of the success of students?
And it turned out that the biggest predictor
of the success of students is not the 12
that I've done so far.
Do they make a friend in the first six weeks?
Now, I know
our job's not a dating service. That's not what I'm talking
about. What I'm talking about is making
sure that the students, in those first six
weeks, meet multiple students, have an opportunity
to meet multiple students across the classroom
to make it safe so that they can learn together.
They don't have to be buddy buddies.
Uh, because you know what students are like
right across the ages. They change their friendships
very, very often.
Well, one of the studies we did a few years ago, I was asking,
uh, with a webcam, how many students in
the class, on any one day, did
no one
initiate a conversation? No teacher,
no other students. It's one in five.
Schools can be very lonely places.
And this notion of making a friend was one of the
best predictor of success during
the year.
And so my message here today
is getting ready over the summer
to come back
involves looking at
doing work now to understand
our students—
what they come to in the start of the year. Not
wasting that first six weeks getting to know your
students, but knowing them when they walk in that
classroom.
Over the summer, looking at some of their artifacts
of their work. Looking at the
expectations that you have for that first
12 weeks. Where do you want them to be at the end
of that first 12 weeks? Making
sure that that climate of that class from day one
is seen as fair, predictable,
and an inviting place to come and learn.
Teaching the strategies of learning.
Going on and transferring,
and making it transparent to the students about
what it means to be critical.
Now, I hope during the session that you've used
the—the tools to get with
questions and answers. So I'm gonna invite the team
in now to—let's do some
decoding of what we've been talking about,
and
let's hear it from you.
Thank you, John. That was
a lot of great information. I'm happy
to pull Danielle and Ty back in with
us if we can get them a spotlight here,
so we can kick off our Q and A panel.
Alright. So thank you, everyone, for
tuning in for that first half. Now, we're
gonna transition into our Q and A, and we've,
um, peppered this session with some
questions from folks who had submitted
them prior to the webinar today, but don't forget
to use our Q and A so that you can submit your
own questions, upvote those of your
educator community that you're also interested
in learning more about so that we can, um,
share that with our great panelists here today.
So to kick us off here, John,
you know, you named, um, the development of
assessment-capable students as a key
strategy to be thinking about. And
as a new technical advisor here for
i-Ready, what do you believe is the value of using
one coherent program, like i-Ready,
that uses assessment data that drives
personalized instruction to
help formulate assessment-capable students?
Well, Ezgi, my attraction to
to what you folk are doing is that you—
my mantra is it's true progress
that should get achievement.
I worry sometimes that teachers
and schools are obsessed with high achievement,
and that's not our job.
Some of our students start high achievement,
they need progress as well, not just
cruising.
Every student no matter what their background,
no matter where they start needs that progress.
And there are not as many tools that look at both,
and remember, Ezgi, I'm a very greedy
person. I want both. I want progress,
and I want high achievement. But it's through
that progress and looking, as I showed
that graph earlier and—and maybe Tyrone
or Danielle want to comment on this too—but
how do you set those stretch goals? That's a really
powerful notion. So it's not just business
as usual. Our job is not just to get
students through 12 weeks of work. It is to
stretch them. It is to challenge them. And building
that in as well. So Danielle and Tyrone,
do you—do you want to comment on that, particularly the notion
of the stretch goals? Because I think that's one of the most powerful
parts of the tool. And just before
I finish that, it's—it's going back to what you
said, Ezgi. How do we show our students
their progress to higher achievement
so that they're with us? So that tests
are not something we do to them. Tests are something
that they want to also see how they're
going, how's my learning going.
Danielle or Tyrone?
Yeah, so I'll—you know what, I'll—I'll jump
into that John, thank you. So when
it comes to—to Stretch Growth, one thing,
uh, to note is that a
lot of districts, right, will use interim
assessments, but most interim assessments
are normative by design. And
what that results in is when
these interim assessments that are normative by design
are used to set growth
targets,
they set peer-based, or comparison,
targets.
So if you know, my
friend Ezgi is in the 70th percentile
of kids, but my friend Danielle is in the 10th
percentile of kids, Danielle is going
to get growth targets that are basically
checking, like, are you growing like your 10th percentile,
uh, peers? But that growth
target may have little or nothing
to do with where Danielle
is in relationship to grade
level. In fact, Danielle could
reach that growth target year after year and
in some cases get further away from
grade level.
So what Stretch Growth is
is an ambitious but attainable
growth target that puts
students on a path to
grade-level proficiency, and we can do
that with the i-Ready assessment because
the i-Ready assessment is criterion
referenced.
That's great. Thank you for sharing, uh, more
about Stretch Growth. If you're not
familiar with i-Ready and our Stretch Growth,
um,
we're dropping some links in the chat so you can go check
that out. Uh, but Ty, you mentioned
criterion-referenced data. I'm curious,
uh, John, what your thoughts are around
criterion-referenced data versus
norm data.
Again,
I'm greedy.
I want both, and I agree with Tyrone
that sometimes the norm—let—let's
take one of the—the crazy things we do in
our business. We set curriculum up
for year levels.
Now you could be at
year seven. And so it may
be that none of your students
are working at the year seven level.
And so this is where the norm data is
sometimes very limited.
Um, the criterion data can
be much more powerful, but sometimes
you also need to know what the expectations
are so you can set those stretch goals. And sometimes
that's where the norm data can be quite useful.
So this is the attraction of the tools
that we're talking about here today is you can get both.
And so I want to make that switch that the
criterion is, what is it relative to that
12 weeks or that nine weeks? It doesn't really matter
whether it's nine or 12 weeks as long as it's not three
or four, ‘cause, yeah, in three or four weeks,
it's sometimes very hard to see change.
Uh, you know, kids don't make a linear progression,
they're kind of quite up and down
as they make progression. And so setting
out that nine or 12 weeks’ worth growth and saying, well,
what is expected
relative to the curriculum? Which is more than almost.
What is it expected relative to what I'm
actually teaching at the moment? The notion of the
criterion of success and getting both
of those in the equation is really powerful.
Uh, that's why looking at where
students are at the start and then
seeing their progress, uh, some of
those students at the end of that 12 weeks may not
be at
the norm.
But it doesn't mean to say you've done a bad job.
Maybe to the contrary, some of those students
have made dramatically good learning over that
12 weeks. And obviously, you're gonna continue
that, but if you think those students not
had success and say, “Oh, I failed with those students,
they're not doing a good job.” You missed the point.
You've made a dramatic difference. So my
argument is both extremely powerful,
and if you only use one, criterion or not norm,
or norm, not criterion, you miss the point.
Thank you for that. I'm seeing the chat here blowing
up with a lot of our i-Ready community
here talking about some of the great success
that they're seeing with Stretch Growth. I have Carrie
Castillo who says we're familiar with Stretch
Growth goals in our district, and my school is moving
to be more focused on Stretch Growth
as opposed to Typical Growth goals. And I think
that aligns really well here, uh, John,
with what you've shared with the group. So thank you for that feedback.
Um, so Ty, thinking about how educators
can help students understand the,
you know, purpose of assessment, what do you—
what do you recommend to them? How can they really hone
in on that?
So what our educational
partners know, Ezgi, is that
the—the purpose, if you will, of assessment
is to drive instruction,
right? And this is a shift for
a lot of students. A lot of us were raised
under the notion that the purpose
of assessment is to evaluate us,
right? But it's really to evaluate
what you've learned and what you have
yet to learn so that we can better
engineer our instruction
to support your progress.
Yeah, I'm seeing some folks commenting again
in the chat here that this is a great conversation
to have with families as well. So that's great to hear.
Uh, Danielle, can you share
with us what are some actionable steps you can
take with i-Ready specifically,
um, to really, again, hone in
on that assessment and learning where our kiddos
are at? Yes. So
we have several high-impact practices
as part of the proactive
implementations with i-Ready. We can call
them HIPs if you will, because everyone loves
a good acronym in education.
You need to get the good data,
share the data, celebrate
the data. So let's unpack that just a little
bit. More specifically, making sure
that you have the right buy-in and understanding,
like to Ty and John's points,
what is the purpose of getting this data? How
are you gonna use this data? How are we getting
buy-in from students and educators who
administer the Diagnostic?
Then the next critical step is sharing
the data with everybody. I love that people
are talking about sharing with families in the chat.
Students need to know where
they are and where they need to go in order
to grow. We're gonna put some links
in the chat and some resources on how to have
those goal-setting conversations using data,
making sure that you are enrolling
students and setting their own goals, making them
the assessment-capable learners that they
can be, and finally, we need
to celebrate progress. Celebrate
growth. Students are working
very hard. Educators are working very hard
every day. So those pause points to
bring the human aspect back
and to celebrate the growth is really critical.
That's great.
Um, I know that we've had a few folks on our
Back to School webinar series who are really,
um, utilizing a lot of those great resources
to drive those conversations with parents,
and have those data chats, and create
those assessment-capable students. So that's,
um, great to know that we have all those resources
and links coming to you if you're, um,
part of the i-Ready community here.
So next question actually comes from
Stacey, who submitted a question, um,
prior to the webinar. So, Stacey, out in Washington,
if you're with us today, hello, if
not, um, I'm hoping you'll get this recording
and see your question asked here live today.
So what is one thing—uh, Stacey
wants to know what is one thing I can prepare before
I close up my classroom that will make my fall
self thank my spring self?
Um, and this is really open
to the whole panel. So, you know, John,
if you have any thoughts on this, feel
free to dive in, or Tyrone, Danielle.
Well one thing I—
it’s probably critical to mention. We haven't mentioned it
so far. Summer is also a chance to
recharge the batteries.
And so we certainly don't want to say that over
the whole summer, you should devote yourself
to preparing for the next year. Recharge
those batteries. Go and read a good book. Go and have
a—a good time out there as well. But
in the back of your mind is that notion
as, where do I wanna be in that first
12 weeks? I—I noticed in the chat,
uh, Christi did say that she starts with compliance
goals. I—Christine, I don't wanna wait. I want
you to go to those stretch and growth roles from day one,
and at the same time have compliance
goals. Don't wait. So you start the year,
the accelerator—foot’s on the accelerator,
and so it's what can—what can
I learn about those students,
and what kind of success do I wanna have? Like,
stop teach—thinking about how you're gonna teach, think
about how those students are learning about what we
need to know about them. What are we gonna do
that is gonna get us the fastest way
to get to those—that—that 12-week or
nine-week goal, whatever. Uh, that's the
kind of thing I want you to think about over the summer.
Think about those students. Know them when they walk
into that classroom. That's my biggest, best
advice for the summer besides sitting on the beach.
Ty, Danielle, any thoughts or tips from you?
I'm gonna toss that to Danielle,
because, uh, folks may or may not
know this on the call, but Danielle Sullivan is
a professional whose heart is so big
that I refer to her as the heart of CA,
and since John mentioned recharging
batteries, I think—I think Danielle is gonna
have something for us here.
Yes, and
thank you, Ty. Please,
everyone, take time to rest.
Rejuvenate. And before
you leave your classroom, maybe take a little minute of reflect.
What went well? You could do a quick three-
two-one strategy: three things I loved
this year, two things I wish I could
change, given that—
the circumstances, and one thing I'm
grateful for.
While you're in it, write it down,
and then leave school at school and
take a long break,
rejuvenate, read Visible Learning on
the beach, and then when you're ready
and you've rested, come on back, and your
mind will be reset to
really take some awesome action next year.
Alright,
you heard it here first.
Um, so next question, I'm
actually gonna shift us back towards Stretch
Growth here for a second.
Ty, um, the strategy around
the year's growth for a year's
input.
Um, what does that look like for,
you know, teachers when they're thinking about implementing
best practices and teacher actions
that can result in students reaching and
achieving their Stretch Growth target with i-Ready?
So, Ezgi,
I've had the good fortune of talking to, uh,
educators around the nation who
have a—a sizable amount of students
who reached their Stretch Growth target last year.
And they—they shared,
uh, a good number of things that came up
over and over and over again. The first,
of course, was really—and this
ties to what, uh, you know, John
has been sharing for many years—
the—the first is having high expectations.
And the way those high expectations
actually manifest themselves,
like, in the—the material world, one
of the ways is through
data chats at multiple levels.
Data chats at the
district or building leader level,
data chats at the teacher level,
and data chats at the student level.
And the design of each of those
data chats is to give all
parties agency.
So
the leaders can get a sense of,
you know, what they're hoping for what
they're driving for, you know, in the district.
The teachers have data to get a sense of the places
where they need additional support. And what's
been amazing, um, and really
instrumental for a lot of districts is that
students are taking ownership
of their data.
There are even in many cases in the data
chats, students are telling teachers
where they want to end up
by the next assessment.
And teachers are responding by saying
like, OK, well, what are you willing to do
to grow to this level,
you know, by the next assessment? And then
students are listing out action
items.
The other way that high expectations
have been manifesting themselves
is through high-quality
Tier I instruction with
great scaffolding.
So those are the things I'm hearing from our educational
partners who've actually reached a
Stretch Growth goal or who have students
who have reached their Stretch Growth goal in the past
year. Nice.
John, it looked like you had something to maybe
say about that. I saw you kind of leaning in there.
Yeah, look, uh, I echo
what Tyrone says.
Here's the mind frame I want you to have about assessment.
I want you to say, assessment is
information back to me, teacher,
about my impact—
my impact about what,
and what I did well, what I didn't do well,
our impact about who I did well with, who I didn't
make the difference to, and then impact about that
growth over that 12 weeks or over
the year.
And if you have that mind frame, you actually come
up with better assessments.
Um, and I challenge you the next time
you do an assessment to pause at the end of it and say,
what did I learn?
Now, if you learn nothing, I can
guarantee you your kids learn nothing from the assessment.
But if you learn something, the kids pick that
up. Oh, she understands me.
Oh, he understands where I need to go next.
He works out what I can and can't do.
And then what Tyrone said, which is kind of a big
theme in our work, is, you know, the students
actually do want to improve from
where they are,
and them knowing and them seeking
that improvement, as you say, uh, Tyrone,
to want to improve, want to improve.
Whereas if assessment is seen, this
is where you are in some hierarchy, this is your place
in class.
They know that.
And now my challenge is the next time you do
a test,
say to the students before they start, before they even
see the test, what grade—what mark
do you think you're gonna get? After 88,
that's pretty accurate. The job of assessment’s
to mess that up.
The job is for you to learn
so that they then want to learn from the assessment.
Assessment is a point to move to the future,
not a point about the past. And look, I—
I've been a psychometrician my whole life.
I know I'm the culprit here. I create
tests that show students where they've come from,
where they are.
I want you to see assessments as
the motivator for improvement,
both from the teacher and the student. So I'm
echoing what you're saying, Tyrone.
Well, thank you for that. Um, now we're gonna
actually shift over to our live Q and A chat
here. So just a reminder if you
have any other questions coming up or you wanna
upvote any of these, feel free to
do so.
So the first one here is coming from Jennifer
Doyle, who wants to know when i-Ready data
is not promising, how can I encourage
teachers to see potential and believe
in student success? Is changing
teacher mindset an administrative job
at all? And I wonder if we start with the
second question here, um,
and maybe, uh, Ty or John,
you have some thoughts around how administrators,
um, need to partake in changing teacher
mindset.
OK. Alright. Well—well,
here's what—here's what educators and
administrators have shared, uh, with me
in regards to that question.
It
starts with, um,
helping
their educators and their staff understand
that, like, every single student has unfinished learning.
There's literally no such thing as a student
who's mastered every single thing 100%,
you know, all the time. So all students have
unfinished learning, and that the purpose
of the i-Ready data is to give
a sense of what students have already
learned, what they can do, and what their next steps
are. And one of the things that
some of our, like, high, uh, growth
schools really focus on.
They focus on the growth mindset
starting with the can dos—
looking at all the amazing things that
students have already learned,
right? And then understanding
that what they're doing is engineering
that high-quality instruction to
effectively focus on what's next
and know that students can
actually learn. And the data backs this up.
I mean, students grow a ton
in a year,
right? They literally grow a ton in a year. So
growth is, you know,
all but guaranteed. It's,
can we use the data to help us be strategic,
right? And giving students what they need?
OK. And I do want to just
add one more thing to what Ty was saying.
Yes, it is leaders’
roles in enrolling educators
in a mindset shift.
And it has to go back with beliefs. And
in my travels, what I've noticed with educators
is that it is the adults that can make
a huge difference. So if leaders
out there listening, please rest
this summer, but then go back and
really dig into belief work. But the—your
educators in your building need to believe
that you, they are capable of change
and changing students' lives. And then
the students need to believe that the teacher
believes that they're capable. So it all is
a trickle of belief, and the leader sets
that condition
for those beliefs to uncover
and blossom in schools.
John, anything to add to this?
Look, leaders, you—your biggest power in the school
is you set the narrative of the school. And
that narrative I want to be about the Stretch
Growth, about knowing where students
need to be 10 or 12 weeks ahead of the time,
and making sure that in your staff
room, it's the same as a classroom.
Is it a fair and predictable place? Do you hear
teachers thinking aloud? Is it a safe
place to bring a problem of practice, or if
I bring a problem along about a student, am I
seen as a failure if I do that? Is
it a place where I can bring, “I'm having difficulty teaching
this idea. Look at my data, this
group of students, can you come and help me watch
these students? Help me better understand
what I can do with this group of students I'm not getting
the growth with. Why am I getting the growth with
these students?” Having those as your common
discussions. I want you to look
at your cla—your staff room discussion.
Who's doing the talking? Is it shared?
Is it always about teaching, about curriculum,
about assessment, or is it about what Danielle's
talking about—the success we have.
And you saw the data at the beginning. We have an incredible
amount of success in our schools. Are those
voices being heard? Are we thinking aloud?
That's the power of school leaders making those staff rooms
places where you bring problems of practice,
places where you bring success places,
where you reinforce that no—notion of, look
at the incredible job we're having
and the growth of these students. Now, let's do it
for all.
That's fantastic.
Um,
our second question here from Kimberly,
can you share how to invite parents to
be involved in the learning process for their children?
So, interesting we've been talking about the adults
in the children's lives in the school.
What about the folks back at home? How can we
invite them into the learning process?
Well, every afternoon,
20 or 30 of your students go home,
and they should be the best advertisement to the parents.
They are the ones that should be talking to the parents about
the joy of learning today. And at
the dinner table parents, please
never ask, “What did you do
at school today?” Tell me about a problem
that you had today. Tell me how about a struggle? What—
tell me about—the question I asked
my own kids right through their school life, and they went to
school in North Carolina,
what feedback did your teacher give you today? Really
fascinating question. It may take you many months
before they understand what you're saying. I want
them—I want them to be open
for listening and interpreting the feedback.
And, uh, there are lots of apps out there
where you can get the kids to send a—a piece
of work that they're doing today or a question they did today
home to the parents. I see we don't
use our students enough to tell them
about, learning is exciting in this
classroom and having that conversation. Like,
there are—there are other ways that I'll let Danielle and Tyrone
talk about how you can use the assessment
information to the parents. Sometimes
we—we forget that our biggest advertisements
are in front of us.
Well, something that's really exciting that we
are hoping to increase access for family
communication is that we, coming back
to school, the family report
is going to live in the student experience
of i-Ready.
It's really empowering, so families
know where the students are performing so they can be
an educational ally. And
then another best practice that I've seen work
very well in a lot of schools, high-growth schools,
are when students lead the parent–
teacher conferences with the data
chat. Students are actually sharing with families.
It's not a teacher-led conference, it's a student-led
conference. So that's another high-impact practice.
I'm seeing the snaps going. If other people are
feeling the same, feel free to drop a snap into
the chat for that one. Ty,
anything to add on, or I think
the snap said it all, but if you have anything?
Oh yeah, yeah. The—the snaps did say it
all, and—and I do see in the chat, uh, post—
uh, folks are posting that there are resources
on i-ReadyCentral.com
that are literally designed, right,
to get parents engaged
in these conversations with
their kiddos.
Nice. Alright. So our next
question here is from
Amila, I think, hopefully I'm not pronouncing
that wrong.
Uh, so the question here is how can I know
the effect size of my impact? I think
this is probably top of mind for a lot of folks,
right? How do you know if you're impacting
your students, um, with the work that you're doing?
I'd love to hear from John about this specifically.
Yeah, like, to me it's—to me it's a triangulation.
Yes,
I do use the test scores, and I'll
get Tyrone and Danielle to comment in a moment about
getting that information from the test scores.
Yes, I do want to know the teacher’s
noticing. What's their views about
progress?
Yes, I do want to look at the artifacts
of students’ work by looking at students’ work three
months apart and seeing as how that
helps me understand their—their progress,
and having discussions with my fellow teachers about
that growth. And yes, I want
the student voice about their learning. If students don't
think they're learning, they're probably not.
But if they are thinking they're learning, sometimes,
how do they calibrate that?
And it's the triangulation of those four sources
of information
that help me understand whether
I'm having an effect or not. So I use all
four of them, but
the easiest one, the anchor one,
is the assessment information. It's not the only
one. Sometimes we can be surprised. Our
job's to check out if we don't understand
or—or—or agree with the assessment information.
But in the i-Ready tool, you can calculate
the effect sizes. You can see that difference.
But easier than effect sizes,
just watching those graphs, watching that graph change,
watching that acceleration. You—your
job is to speed up growth.
Tyrone, Danielle?
Yeah. I mean, you, uh, definitely
covered and touched on the
assessment. I—I might touch on something, uh, a little
different. What I've seen—even with
my own kids—is
the teachers they work the hardest for are the teachers
who make them feel like they belong.
Mhm. So, if you have a classroom
where student thinking is
elevated,
especially if they're a student
who traditionally struggled in X
subject, right, then
you're having a tremendous impact.
And I think you can trust, um,
that you are, uh, overall,
because teachers—teaching
is literally the only profession
where humans can literally name,
you know, their teachers 10, 20, 30
years later. Most of us can't
remember what we binged watched
yesterday.
Right. But we remember
our third grade, and our seventh grade,
and our 10th grade, and whoever the teacher is
that, you know, made that impact on
us. And I want to add to
all of the educators watching, listening.
I think it's time to change our business cards
from educator to developer
of human potential,
because that is what every single one of
us is hoping to create in our classrooms.
And we make the data easy for you to read, and
understand, and take action, but it's the
human element that's the most important
part too.
Uh, we did a study once of looking
at, asking adults,
who was their best teacher and why.
And across our many, many adults came out of two
things:
tha—that teacher turned you on to
their passion,
and/or that teacher saw something
in you that you didn't see in yourself.
How difficult is that, teachers?
That's our job.
Yeah. Well, on
these lovely notes, and I've seen a lot of hearts
in here and folks saying that they love what Danielle
shared, um, I wanna be respectful
of everyone's time here. We are at 5 p.m.
I just launched a poll here. We
had a question sent in from Tanya in Florida
who wanted to know what's one tool or strategy
that I can implement towards student achievement?
And rather than asking our panelists,
I want to hear from the folks here who are live. Just
take a moment to respond and let us
know which of the strategies that John shared today
are really giving you life
and making you feel inspired to take
back to your learning community, and really think
about and recharge over the summer with.
And on that, I want to thank
our panelists here so much for
this really engaging conversation. The chat
was engaged. I think this is
gonna be a great, um, tool for folks to
go back to and rewatch.
And I just want to close out here and
share with folks, um,
where you can catch up with Ty and Danielle
in the podcast.
Um, if you aren't familiar,
Curriculum Associates has a podcast called
The Extraordinary Educators.
And if you're not familiar, check
it out wherever you listen to podcasts, but we're doing
a limited series, uh, on
Stretch Growth stories. So, if that was something that
you were interested in learning more about,
we encourage you to tune in and
check it out.
Um,
you can catch Tyrone and Danielle here,
and I just want to say thank you so much to everyone,
uh, and we look forward to seeing you again at
another event.