Final exams, SAT and ACT, pop quizzes, state standardized tests…

Why?

Why do we need a test to show us what our students have “learned”?

Seriously. I’m asking.

It would seem to make more sense that what students learn should be transparent from day 1, not just captured in a number or score on day 45, or 180 or 2,160. I mean, shouldn’t we be able to see their learning inform and enhance their practice? Shouldn’t we be focusing on them doing something with what they’ve learned rather than simply telling it back to us at some predetermined hour?

Apparently, we don’t know what they’ve learned until they take that test and get that score. Until they’ve studied or crammed or been tutored or, in some cases, cheated their way to a number.

Because apparently, that makes us “accountable.” That’s what makes it “count.”

We’re sending some pretty unhealthy messages to our kids when we make it about a snapshot in time rather than a lifetime of learning.

I spend a lot of time talking to educational leaders about mission and vision. Without a clear sense of what larger purpose you want your school to serve in the world, and an equally clear picture of what it takes to achieve that purpose, schools are, in a word, incoherent.

And let’s just say, incoherence abounds in education.

But I was thinking the other day that it’s not just about OUR sense of mission and our picture of how to get there. I wonder how many of us in education know what our students hold as their current mission in life and how they plan to achieve it.

I’m not talking about asking them what they want to be when they grow up.

I’m talking about what they want out of this class, this year, this school experience thing. And then helping them create a plan to get what they want.

I wouldn’t be shocked if many (if not most) kids answered that mission question with something along the lines of “I want to get an A” or “I want to graduate.”

But you’d hope that most kids would answer with “I want to learn more about this” or “I want to improve at this.” You’d hope their mission would be to answer some question that’s important to them.

Either way, their answers might just change the way you think of YOUR own mission and the vision you have to achieve it.

One of my least favorite phrases in education is “hand it in.”

Why, instead wouldn’t we say “share it with the world”?

I mean I know that much of what students create isn’t ready for prime time, that it’s a draft or “in progress.” But why at a moment when we can share so easily and widely with audiences around the world would we still be asking kids to “hand in” final work to just the teacher?

“Hand it in” means it’s finished.

“Hand it in” means the teacher is the only judge of the merits of the work.

“Hand it in” is a rule in the larger game of school.

“Hand it in” limits agency and passion and desire to learn.

I remember back when my kids were in 2nd and 4th grade we created the “Hand It In” pile, the place where we put every piece of paper that came home each week in this thing called “The Friday Folder.” In less than a year, that pile grew to almost three feet high.

Three feet!

And the kicker was my kids never looked in that pile again. Once it was “handed in” it was out of mind.

I get it. We don’t want kids publishing everything they do online. But surely it would change the whole interaction if our kids were doing real things for real audiences that mattered.

So what if we moved from “hand it in” to “hand it on”? What might change?

Your Sunday Snip:

“The common view, one that underpins almost all educational enterprises that have arisen over the past 150 years, is that motivation must be instilled from without, by a pedagogically sophisticated educator. This view is understandable when education is considered a way to enforce a particular social agenda on children. From the realization that such coercion inevitably arouses antagonism came the need to convince children that society’s agenda is actually their own agenda, too; only then would children in school be able to learn effectively. The primary activity of schooling became pedagogy, instilling in children motivation to do what the school authorities wanted them to do (or, in plainer terms, seducing children to think they love spinach by looking for ways to cook it that would make it seem delicious to them).

The reason this has been such a dismal failure, especially as the information age unfolds, is that seduction is ultimately a poor tool for a long-term relationship—in this case, between a person and an area of study.”

Russell Ackoff in Turning Learning Right Side Up

Professional learning may be about expanding our own skillset, but professional growth is about testing our own fears.

Change is scary, especially in schools. It’s the unknown. It takes courage to do something new, to try an approach that you’ve never tried before.

Or, importantly, an approach that we’ve never tried before.

But to never feel scared, as an individual or as a community, there is no growth. There is no change.

When we have a clarity of purpose and a deep belief that we are doing the absolute right thing by students, change actually gets less scary than if we were setting out on our own. When we are fully clear on the “why?”, and when we have a shared vision that we’ve articulated clearly and resolutely, testing our own fears becomes a natural path to growth, as an individual and as a community.

And, importantly, it creates a safe culture for students to test their own fears, to grow with us.

No doubt as individuals and systems and communities, we need to keep learning. But it’s only by continually stepping out of our boxes that we keep growing.

One of my favorite stories about living the mission is the one about John F. Kennedy’s visit to NASA a year or so after he announced that we would be going to the moon by the end of the 1960s.

The story goes that as he was touring the facility meeting the engineers and executives, he happened upon a custodian who was cleaning one of the hallways.

Kennedy walked up to him, extended his hand, introduced himself and asked the man, “So what do you do here?”

Without a hesitation, the man looked at the president and said, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”

No question that “putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade” is about as clear a mission that you can have. Honestly, most mission statements in schools are not nearly as succinct or to the point.

But just having a clear mission isn’t enough; that mission must drive the work in every part of the school down to the support staff, maintenance crew, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers.

Creating profound learning environments and experiences for kids means making sure everyone not only knows the mission but understands their role in achieving it.

So, if you’re a school leader, ask the people in your building, “What do you do here?”

See what they say.

See if they’re living the mission, or just reciting it.

When we’re caught in a moment when we really don’t know what to do next, isn’t it safer just to do what we’ve always done?

Like, let’s just keep creating the five-year plan even though we have little idea what five years from now will look like.

Or let’s keep teaching the same curriculum even though the existential conversations and contexts in the world today are rendering much of what we teach irrelevant.

Let’s just keep competition at the core of the school experience even though it’s clear the arc of the world must bend toward cooperation.

And by all means, let’s constrain and limit our use and understanding of technology even though technology is impacting almost every aspect of our lives in both good and nefarious ways.

What would happen if, in response to not knowing, we did something different? What if we met not knowing with more not knowing?

We don’t know what would happen if we ditched the plan, cut the curriculum, stopped the ranking and sorting and grading, and worked to open access rather than close it. But that strategy would certainly generate all sorts of new learning, learning that may just help us make more sense of what to do next.

Because when everything around you is breaking, standing pat probably isn’t the best strategy.

From the “Stories I Never Thought I’d Read Department” comes this little discovery from Yahoo News:

A high school that requires some students to wear ID badges announcing their failing grades.

Yes, you read that right.

At Mingus Union HS in Cottonwood, AZ “upperclassmen who struggle in classes must also wear red badges (aka “scarlet badges” of shame) with numbers that indicate their repeated grade level if their marks don’t improve.”

I don’t even know where to start.

I’m trying to imagine that leadership team meeting where someone said “Hey, I’ve got an idea…” and others went “Let’s do that.”

I’m trying to imagine educators so far removed from a basic ethic of care for children that they would think humiliation would be a great motivator for learning.

I’m trying to imagine how a school community could go so far off the rails to accept a policy and a culture like this.

Shame on all of them.

I’m hoping this school is an outlier. But how many other practices and policies are there out there that don’t start with a deep sense of concern for the children we serve? How many others don’t comport to the supposed values and beliefs that our learning environments are supposedly built on?

Might be time for a review.

Here’s your “Sunday Snip:”

“It is impressive, on one level, that we spend billions of dollars and innumerable hours creating this perfect, practice-based environment in which children’s abilities to sit still in classrooms are honed. Furthermore, we have built a reward structure to praise those students who can sit in classrooms better than anyone else. We let them run our planet. However, given that this model is economically running economies into the ground and obesity is a global epidemic, it may be time to collectively build and reward different skills. Learning is a full contact sport. To learn something new, a student has to do something new and often be somewhere new…

Rather than viewing and treating students who want to do something new as troublemakers who need to be fixed, we should recognize that they will be the engines of improvements in our standard of living. Point of fact, they always have been.”

~Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules

If you want to make real, serious change in schools stick, don’t underestimate the time it takes to till the soil.

This week, another district in Maine decided to scale back its proficiency-based assessment regime and reinstate letter grades because the new system was “too hard to explain.” And so, understandably, parents were in an uproar. They demanded “a grading system that is accurate and understandable.”

Let’s be clear: proficiency-based assessment programs can be “accurate and understandable,” but only if we make them so. Only if we build the capacity of parents and teachers and students to understand why a change like that is beneficial to kids and how it operates.

But that takes time. Years. Many years, in fact.

The difficulty rests in the narrative that we’re all inured to in education. Success in school means good grades, plain and simple. It’s what shows up in the parent portal. Specifically, it’s numbers and percentages and averages. It’s not skills or portfolios or problem solving.

Right now, we’re in between narratives. That old one is on its way to breaking. But without a clear, more modern, more effective vision to take its place, we’ll cling to the old.

This is the work. Write a new story, then honor the time and effort required to make it take root.

What if every morning as your students walked into school they were met with huge sign that said “Fail Harder”?

And what if you were told to “walk in stupid” to your classroom every day? 

Might change the experience on school a bit, no?

Interestingly, those are the exact messages that greet the creatives at one of the most renowned ad agencies in the world.

Could it be that in a world where change seems to be happening faster and faster, our emphasis on “success” in school is misplaced? Since school cultures are so focused on avoiding failure and being stupid, have we limited our ability to learn? To try new things? To get out of our boxes? To see the reality of this moment clearly?

The beginner’s mind admits that he knows nothing and is therefore open to everything. The possibilities expand, the paths forward become more numerous. The opportunities to learn, and to learn from failure, multiply.

We can’t learn if we lack the courage and or the cultures to fail.

So, what if we en-couraged it? What if we changed the rules to read “failure is success, so fail harder. Much harder”?

I’m thinking it would make our kids much more prepared for a world in flux even though they may be less prepared for the test.

If you’re an educator and you haven’t read any John Holt, you might want to. His is an interesting, and provocative perspective on schools.

In Instead of Education, Holt writes this: “I have learned that no one can truly say ‘Yes’ to an idea, mine or anyone else’s, unless he can freely say ‘No’ to it. This is why, except as an occasional visitor, I will no longer do my teaching in compulsory and competitive schools.”

It begs the question, what can our students truly say “yes” to in today’s schools?

They can’t say “yes” to attending, for while some options exist, most are compelled to show up each day.

They can’t say “yes” to the curriculum because most of it is required and organized and paced by someone else.

They can’t say “yes” to being assessed because of our dependence on grades and scores to measure and rank both the kids and ourselves.

The impact of not being able to say “no” is far-reaching. Disengagement. Compliance. Dependence. Misplaced priorities and goals. (See the attached Tweet for an example.)

How might school be different if students were able to say “no,” giving them then the freedom to say “yes?” What might change if we honored their inherent agency to make serious choices about their learning experience?

If they opted in instead of acted out?