Preparing for the 2023 ARIE Conference

A really interesting part of being a teacher is that a teacher will often teach students how to do something that they themselves haven’t done in some time, or ever. Recently, we submitted to the Access to Research and Inclusive Excellence National Conference 2024 (ARIE 2024) held at George Mason University to present a poster on our research and work to implement a standards based grading, assessment, curriculum, and feedback model, employing the Assessment for Learning Project’s Core Shifts at the core of all shifts. We were accepted. The selection process was tight, and this left us facing a clear reality - neither of us had ever actually built a research poster before. 

So, we started with what we know. We know how to research. Both of us teach research to our students at a variety of levels based on the context. In AP Research course, there’s the building of a rudimentary research poster to present some of the students’ significant literature. Through the course, the students continue to build and iterate upon their poster as they move through their research and inquiry project. In any level of English class that we’ve taught, there’s some element of research work. Right now, in our AP English Language and Composition courses, we’re working through the research and synthesis unit. In this unit, we’re teaching students how to develop keyword searches, develop annotated bibliographies, and construct a discussion between sources to support an argument. So, by leaning into our skills and abilities as teachers we were able to recognize the skills we knew how to do, even if we hadn’t done them or done them in some time. We dove into the process of creating and revising this poster: confident in the knowledge that we know how to do a lot of the work necessary to present our work.

The first step was to consider the scholarly conversation and the gap that we aim to fill through our work. This took us to the bookshelves in our classrooms and offices. We reacquainted ourselves with Jimmy Casas, Robert Marzano, and other publications related to standards-based grading, assessment, and data. We formulated the gap for our research in our most important element - our context, thus our students. From there, we went to the work we had already done. We looked at previous presentations (AP Annual Conference 2023, previous professional learning sessions on standards-based grading, etc.), the sources we cited within them, and the sources cited within the work that we’re doing within our school district and the Communities of Practice work related to shifting assessment practices and models. Adding to our own reading, study, and professional learning, we were able to build a list of citations to guide our poster and the discussion we want to frame our work for a larger audience. This is a research conference with a lot of post-secondary academics, so understanding the larger scholarly conversation that they may know will help us to communicate to our audience. In addition, we know how to help our audience to better understand the Core Shifts at work and their connection to other learning including standards based grading models, social emotional learning, and cultures of belonging in school environments. With that framework locked in, we dove into previous data from students, and we created a first draft.

Our first poster draft relied too heavily on words. Learning is messy, and asking for help is a sign of strength, so we decided to reach out and improve on our mess. We were able to identify areas of the poster that could be moved from words into graphics and redesigned areas of our data discussion to reflect that reality. We also considered the way that people “eat with their eyes” at this type of conference session, so we found space to include more visual representations of our work. The limitations of the static poster format is a challenge - we can’t employ any videos of students or parents, for example. However, including a lot of student representation via the data presented, their work samples, their voices, and their insights help us to pair our argument with our organization and content.

In the end, after several drafts, we created a product which demonstrates our development of theory and practice to disrupt traditional grading, assessment, feedback, and curriculum models to shift to more centering of student voice. Looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to consider the way in which we’ll use the poster as a third presenter at the reception. This is going to present a lot of challenges as we prepare to present and network at the conference. The chance to push ourselves to present our work in a new way to a different audience presented a fantastic challenge, but also a great opportunity to do the same things we encourage our students to do.

Forgive Yourself, and Forgive Each Other

As Jenny’s dad said in Muppets Take Manhattan, “Peoples is peoples. Rats is peoples. Frogs is peoples. Dogs is peoples. Peoples is peoples.” He was looking around his restaurant at his motley crew of Muppets questing for their dreams in New York and reminding everyone that we have more that makes us the same than different. 

In the same way, all of us who find ourselves in educational spaces are peoples. Some of us are children and some of us are grown, but we’re still all peoples. And we all make mistakes.

So, as educators, we need to prepare and adjust for mistakes. We know that our audience is comprised of students, and many of us have upwards of thirty other people in the room with us. For those of us in other roles, like administration, we have the students as well as the staff and teachers. When we predict mistakes, we cease to be surprised by them, and when we make them a necessary part of the learning process, we invite students and ourselves to stumble up our individual mountains together. This process ties back with the last learning norm - learning is messy, and most of that is because people are messy. 

But, forgiveness is learned. It does not come naturally. So, the only way to make sure your learning environment forgives its participants is to begin with yourself. If you are not willing to be open and transparent with your educational practices, philosophies, planning, and grading then no one else in your space will be open either. Learners learn from their leaders, so we have to model and be comfortable with practices before we can ask them to do it themselves. When I have a typo on my slides, as I did today (apparently ordeal has an “A” in it…), I laugh at myself and make a joke of it. I choose to forgive myself. When there’s a schedule conflict because of a snow day make-up meeting, you ask for forgiveness and reschedule again. There are so many voices in the word looking to bring you down: don’t add your voice to their chorus. 

However, forgiveness of the occasional gaffe is not enough. Forgiveness has to be baked into the practices as well. Forgiveness must be constant. Evaluation needs to be forgiving as well. When evaluating learners in process, there has to be room for growth, and if we are averaging the beginning of the year with the end of the year, it punishes instead of forgives, and the one who is being evaluated gets that message. There are many instances of people giving up because they weren’t good at something instantaneously. That’s a learned behavior through years of punishing evaluations. Rather, when we practice forgiveness in evaluation, we can show how we are forgiving our peoples for being peoples, and allow them to grow into better peoples. Don’t average: assess. Sit beside them in the current context. Show them their mistakes, and show them yours. Guide them through to better understandings. Be their educational sherpa: guide them up the mountain. Hold your own pack, and pick each other up when you make mistakes. And next time when we see the same type of rock in the path, learn from the mistake and don’t punish yourself for making it before. Let’s always be here for each other and forgive each other and ourselves.

Embrace the Messy Nature of Learning

One of the things that we have to understand as leaders and educators is that learning takes time and doesn’t look the same for everyone. Unfortunately, in the zero-sum game of schooling, learners are afraid of the messy because they equate messiness with failure or see a messy product as a failure on their end. When we force learners to display perfection or mastery on their first attempt, their stress and ours is through the roof, and as we know, nobody really performs well under stress – even if that’s a lie that we sometimes tell ourselves. When we help learners to understand that learning takes time, repeat performances, and revision on a process or product, then we help our learners to see the larger process and their progress in a positive direction. 

It really doesn’t matter if we’re teaching skills – how to be literate, communicate, teach, plan, lead a school - or if we’re teaching content – naming ionic compounds, conjugating for the past tense in French, factoring an equation in Algebra – when we use products to track progress toward learning and demonstrate that growth, then our learners are more likely to stay involved in the process. One of the practices that has made so much of a difference is the act of not grading practice assignments. The feedback is given, but the grade is unimportant, because the learner is learning. A grade would, for some, stunt their process of development and lead to unnecessary stress or anxiety. I can remember the old days in which I would use a grade on an assessment in early September to determine which students could “make it” through my Honors course. One family called me to task on this one year, and they were right. I was actively limiting that student because of the grade and feedback I gave. It took me a lot of reflection, but I realized that I was the barrier to student success by holding them accountable for what they hadn’t learned yet. My job is to teach, so my job is also to create an environment conducive to learning. These are environments where learners don’t feel judged, anxious, or stressed by their teachers. Let’s aim to reduce that stress whenever possible and focus on growth, learning, and development. As we find ways to shift that conversation with our learners and embrace the messy, we can find ways to shift the conversation from the past and present to the present and future. 

When thinking about the best aspects of embracing the messy nature of learning, it’s important that we all think about the first time we tried something that we now do well. My first time living abroad and trying to speak and live the language 24/7 was a challenge. I knew that there were times I was speaking sentences that a two year old could correct, but I still was able to go to the grocery and buy the food I needed to survive. I was still able to point at the tub and say “it doesn’t work” to the plumber who came to my pre-revolution era apartment. I could understand when a sixty-year-old fashionista at a bar wanted to dance with me. It was messy, but it was good enough, and when I came back from that first summer, all of my professors were impressed with how much better I was speaking and the sound of the language I was making.

When we recognize, embrace, and lead others into, through, and out of the messiness — sometimes to more messiness — we facilitate learning. We get to take our learners on a journey with its twists and turns, its successes and failures, but we always keep focused on progress and moving ahead. Messy learning is still learning, and learning that lasts is what we want the most. Recognizing the messy nature of learning allows the learner to be where they are in the moment, and encourages them to move on into different phases of the process. This allows students to continue to grow and hang with the challenge because they know they’ll be supported through it. We can all be a bit messy sometimes, and we can embrace our common humanity and progress together. Through this, we create an open, honest, and transparent learning space that allows each person to be as they are and develop into the person they want to become.

The Who is More Important than the What

When it comes right down to it, every single learner is a person. And, as educators, so are we. We have families, so do they. Some of them have tenuous relationships and some have fulfilling ones. Like so many, there’s probably a mix in their lives when it comes to relationships, just like for us. Some of our learners remember some of the things that we teach them, but generally, they remember how they feel in our spaces. Overall, it’s more important to take care of the individual rather than the content knowledge or the curriculum or the pacing guide. Without putting the individual first, and recognizing their humanity, learning will not happen.

Think about COVID, and the beginning of the pandemic. Some students were worried. Some lost family. Some worked jobs to help financially. Most everyone was struggling to survive: mentally, emotionally, or physically. So if they took time to relax, to take a mental health period, to be sick or take care of another person, that was okay. The who - the person - is more important than the what - the subject matter. COVID laid bare what was always true - crises happen and they affect the individual and their performance at life. What COVID did was make all of us share in a collective crisis that affected, and still does affect, all of us. And, at the end of the day, we are all people.

In the long run, the time we spend with our learners is a blip in their lives. Learners will rarely recall the formulas, the strategies, the literature, or the dates, but they will remember how they felt during their time in the space with their educators. So, foundationally, when we make them feel good and supported, that matters. As teachers of children, we’re acting in loco parentis - and a parent must ensure that the individual is loved and cared for, no matter what. No matter our role in the educational space, we must always remember to lead with the ethic of care and remember to be good stewards to leave people and spaces better than when we found them. “Above all, do no harm.” Once we start to center our learners, and see who the learners are at the moment, then we can really create space for them to grow. School is not life, it’s just a part of it. 

During virtual school, I had a student who reached out to me in crisis, and I answered the call. I put the who ahead of the what. I called the parent, the head counselor, the department of student activities, and just asked them to do a wellness check. It was scary. Their situation read to me as a crisis. So, I had to jump in. She told me she was drowning, not waving. That experience centered this idea for me: a person is more important than any lesson we teach, any idea we articulate, any test we give.

It all comes back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The foundational elements need to be secured before we begin to build upwards. So, we center the who. When we think about vision and development and all of the acronyms of education, we have to remember to put humans first. We are in the business of humans and their development; we have to remember that they are what we are. We’ve been where they are. They’re doing what they do for a reason - everything is feedback, so keep the door open. Recognize that the who is always more important than the what.

Controlled Burn > Controlled Chaos

Nowadays, a good learning environment is often described as one of “controlled chaos”. Visitors to classrooms expect to see students in motion: active and engaged. The room should be loud. The learning should look messy. The instructor should be everywhere all at once. Keynote speakers and presenters at conferences have sermonized from the lectern about these words and told educators how to “curate”, “construct” or “design and plan” this vaunted “controlled chaos.” 

The problem is the word chaos. Chaos is a mess. Chaos is frightening. People don’t want chaos. It’s the antithesis of control. How on earth is a lesson plan and slide deck going to be able to “curate” chaos? How can we “design and plan” standardized yet chaotic assessments? How can we “construct” a welcoming learning environment rife with uncertainty and mayhem? Imagine the dynamic, authentic, varied, differentiated, controlled chaos classroom through another metaphor: a controlled burn instead of controlled chaos.

In a controlled burn there is designing and planning and curating, but there is space for the moment to be. It’s a space for reality. A controlled burn is an attempt to use fire to both destroy and create. A chaotic thing - fire - in a dynamic environment - the forest - elements shift in each and every moment. These realities determine what the forest rangers and firefighters will do to keep the burn going. That’s the goal. To keep the fire going to accomplish the greater goal - create space for the new. As the facilitator, leader, coach, teacher, or whatever, educators are forest rangers and firefighters. There’s the education and skill acquired from training and the benefit of the experience that results from fighting fires year over year and growing through past successes and failures. The forest is the space that education inhabits. The goal is to clean out the old growth and trees to allow space for the new, for the forest to grow and thrive. In this way, the forest is also the individuals with whom we work as guides, facilitators, mentors, teachers, and yes, sometimes firefighters and forest rangers.

How do successful controlled burns happen? Read the wind, taste the air, put your hands in the dirt and see how it feels. Respond to the context and the moment, listen to the echo from the data from weeks ago, and the lesson first taught decades ago. But live in the now. Respond to what is seen and understood currently; there’s a fire! Planning and preparation are supports that facilitate the ability to change on the fly with success. Good preparation enables the ability to reflect, fail forward, and change when needed - especially when the wind shifts, the fire jumps the highway, and a few houses burn down. 

So fail forward, own the mistake, and move on with the knowledge of what happened and why it went bad. We are people who are dealing with other people. We cannot have chaos because it breeds more chaos. We have to have control with the ability to adapt, especially because the conversations, lessons, policies, discipline, or assessments of the past might not work in the future, for the future. With a controlled burn, we can plan for the best, while still leaving room change and growth for all of us.

Be Present, Participate, and Produce Learning Artifacts

Our norms and principles begin with “Be Present, Participate, and Produce Learning Artifacts.” Candidly, this is a late add on to the norms and guiding principles, but it is first for a reason. Like all of the norms, this emerged from “COVID school”; in the virtual setting, there were kids who were doing one or two of the three, but never all of them. There were students who were producing learning artifacts, but they weren’t really present. There was no interaction, so their learning artifact was limited. There were others who participated, but who weren’t fully present or producing artifacts. They picked and chose their spots where they wanted to engage comfortably. They excused themselves, and we excused them when it wasn’t comfortable or easy.

True learning and growth comes from all three of these in tandem. This is where we move beyond just accomplishing a task and create the space for real learning. Students are present by engaging both mentally and physically in class activities. They participate through their using their voices and adding to discourse. The production of the learning artifact then acts as a marker of how far the person has come by continuing to be present and participate. 

As for the students, same for us, right? We, as educators, must find ways to continue to walk our talk and continue to be present for our fellow teachers and students — our fellow learners. To always model. We fail to be fully present when we simply give an assignment or task and retreat behind our big desk. We are absent when we continue to think and practice education as it was. Lack of presence means we’re not fully participating. 

We’re not fully participating when we refuse to see our students where they are in each current moment. When we respond to the learner in their fullest context then we are fully present. This participation requires a relationship with the learners. If we are not participating, we cannot understand the context of their needs or strengths.  

The challenge that we face is to both exist in the learning and to curate it at the same time. So, how do we do this? We have to do double duty in our learning artifacts in that we produce many: our unit and lesson plans, our slides, handouts, content, assessments, and especially feedback. The feedback exists as an artifact not just for the students or for our fellow educators, but also for us as educators, coaches, and learners. By continuing to live in the present, we can continue to give ourselves - educators and learners - the grace that we need not to escape from learning but to fully lean into the messy nature of learning.

Welcome to Education ReNormed…

Here’s our opportunity to take ideas and make them into words. To start to share those words with others who know that there’s another way forward for education. We’re educators who saw the potential to change education for the better when we returned to school after COVID-19, only to have those hopes dashed by education’s rush to “what it was before”. This put us in a panic response: we couldn’t accept going backwards, so we decided to fight. We took the best parts of COVID school and kept them going. We changed and continue to change to meet the context of the moment in one of the most dynamic environments on Earth - a classroom with other bodies in it. 

This blog is an attempt to spread that fight outside of our little corner of the universe - our attempt to engage in the coaching and collaboration discussion on a wider scare. To share. To discuss. To debate. To argue. To chart a path forward. To make a larger impact in more classrooms because we know what we do works, and we want to know what works in other classrooms. 

So, who are we? We’re Dave and Dani - high school English educators - both of us with seventeen years in the high school classroom. We’ve taught in affluent districts, Title 1 schools; a mixture of ESOL, Special Education, Advanced Placement. We’ve taught Russian Language, Peer Tutoring, run writing centers, and coached athletic teams. After COVID, where we are with our careers, testing and revising these ideas, and engaging in coaching and reflection, we’ve come to the conclusion that although some life-long educators may claim that no changes need to be made to classroom or school structures, it is clear that in a post-COVID reality, education needs to be ReNormed in order to be reformed because all of us need to change as the world changes.

That brings us to this blog, Education ReNormed. To begin, we’d like to share some of our practices and philosophies. Let us know what sticks and where you think we’re flying off the handle. Our next post is going to go into our teaching philosophy and how we start our classrooms and coaching conversations with colleagues.