Transforming Schools Using Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessment, and Common Core Standards E-Book
Bob Lenz
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
It's not what students know, but what they do with what they know that is important
Schools are changing in response to this reality, and in Transforming Schools Using Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessment, and Common Core Standards, Bob Lenz, Justin Wells, and Sally Kingston draw on the example of the Envision Education schools, as well as other leading schools around the country, to show how the concept of deeper learning can meet the need for students who are both college and career ready and engaged in their own education.
In this book, the authors explain how project-based learning can blend with Common Core-aligned performance assessment for deeper learning. You'll discover how many schools have successfully made the transition from traditional, teacher-centered learning to project-based, deeper learning and find many practical ideas for implementation.
- Companion DVD and website include videos showing how to implement deeper learning strategies in the classroom
- Evidence-based descriptions show why deeper learning is right for students
- Performance assessment experts explain how to align assessments with Common Core by shifting the emphasis from knowing to doing
- Extensive game plan section provides step-by-step guidance for change
Schools are complex organizations, and transformation involves all of the stakeholders, from students to superintendents. But as this book shows, there are amazing benefits to be realized when everyone commits to diving deeper into learning.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Video Contents
Videos
Documents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Foreword
Notes
Introduction
About Envision Education and the Authors
The Common Core Is Not a Hurdle; It's an Opportunity
Deeper Learning
Can This Kind of School Work for All Kinds of Kids?
Transform, Not Reform
References
Chapter 1: Transforming the Graduate
Why Schools Need to Redefine Graduation
“Mapping Backwards” from Graduation
Defining Success: Know, Do, and Reflect
The Envision Schools Graduate Profile
The Nuts and Bolts of Envision's Deeper Learning Student Assessment System
The Power of Portfolio Defense
So That's the Goal; How Do We Get There?
The Rest of Kaleb's Story
References
Chapter 2: Designing a Standards-Aligned Performance Assessment System
Performance Assessment Defined---and Refined
An Old Pedagogy for a Newly Demanding World
The Envision Performance Assessment System
The Challenges Are the Strengths
The Tailwind of the Common Core
References
Chapter 3: Project-Based Learning—It's the How (and the Why)
Why Project-Based Learning
What We Mean by “PBL”
What PBL Isn't
A Tool for the Challenges That Face Us
How PBL Works at Envision Schools
PBL Tips, Envision Style
PBL Can Start in Your Classroom
Answering the Skeptics
What Students Remember: The Story of Their Education
References
Chapter 4: Transforming School Culture
Envision Schools Culture
Which Came First?
References
Chapter 5: Transforming School Systems
Structure Matters
Student Cohorts and Teacher Teams
Project-Based Scheduling
Advisories
Parent-Student-Advisor Conferences
Professional Development
Common Planning Time
Community Meetings
Integrated Classrooms (No Tracking)
Workplace Learning
Grading
References
Chapter 6: Leadership for Deeper Learning
Leading with “Holonomy”
Key Leadership Values
Practical Advice for Leading for Deeper Learning
References
Chapter 7: A Call to Action
Taking Action: Time to Start a Movement
“Is It Scalable?”
Perfect Storm
A Story to Close On
References
Appendix: Supplementary Material
ENVISION SCHOOLS COURSE SYLLABUS TEMPLATE
Envision Schools College Success Portfolio Performance Task Requirements: Scientific Inquiry
Envision Schools College Success Portfolio Performance Task: English Language Arts Textual Analysis
What Is the Most Effective Method for Cleaning Oil, Dispersants or Absorbents?
Envision Schools College Success Portfolio Performance Assessment: CREATIVE EXPRESSION
Performance Assessment Planning Template
SCALE Performance Assessment Quality Rubric (May 2014 version)
Project Planning Template
Envision Sample Daily Schedule
9th Grade Envision Schools Advisory Curriculum
The Six A's of Designing Projects(Developed by Adria Steinberg, Jobs for the Future. Used by permission.)
Project Sharing Protocol
CITY ARTS AND TECH HIGH SCHOOL Holistic Grading Rubric
Envision Core Values
Decision Making @ Envision Schools
Ground Rules for Meetings
Meeting Agenda Template
Tuning Protocol Guidelines
Index
How to Access the Online Materials
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1
Figure I.2
Figure I.3
Figure I.4
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2
Figure 1.3
Figure 3.1
Figure 3.2
Figure 5.1
Figure 5.2
Figure 6.1
TRANSFORMING SCHOOLS
Using Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessment, and Common Core Standards
Bob Lenz
with Justin Wells and Sally Kingston
Cover design by Wiley
Cover image: © by cienpies | Thinkstock
Copyright © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
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ISBN 978-1-118-73974-7 (pbk.), 978-1-118-73970-9 (epdf), 978-1-118-73966-2 (epub)
Video Contents
Videos
Videos can be found at http://www.wiley.com/go/transformingschools.
Video 1. Envision Philosophy, Practices, and Design
This overview of the Envision philosophy explores how Envision rises to the challenges of engaging students, accelerating their basic skills, and getting them ready for college. Grounded in equity and social justice, Envision schools help students become self-advocates for their own learning processes, skills that will be with them in college, career, and life.
Video 2. Envision Defense Montage
In this “highlight reel” from several portfolio defenses, Envision students talk about education and why it matters, demonstrating the power of knowing, doing, and reflecting.
Video 3. The Four C's
How do the four C's—communicating powerfully, thinking critically, collaborating productively, and completing projects effectively—help students get to and succeed in college? Listen to teachers and students discuss the difference these skills make in taking ownership of their own education.
Video 4. Tiana: Profile of a Deeper Learning Student
Deeper learning makes a real difference: for Tiana, her deeper learning education at City Arts and Tech High School meant becoming the first person in her family to go not only to college but also beyond tenth grade. Within a few months at CAT, she realized she had what it took to imagine that future for herself. She and other students reflect on the opportunities and the mentors that got them where they are today.
Video 5. Student Profile, Portfolio Defense
An Envision student and teacher talk about preparing for the “final moment” of the portfolio defense; Yvonne reflects on her growth as a student and a learner.
Video 6. The Inferno Mosaic Retelling Project
Watch how Justin's assignment to interpret Dante's Inferno through art helped his students gain a deeper understanding of the epic poem and its themes, enabling them to write more perceptive textual analysis papers.
Video 7. The Envision Assessment Process
Envision Education, in partnership with Stanford University, developed performance assessments linked both to standards and to deeper learning skills, so that all Envision teachers use the same rigorous assessment tools. Watch teachers discussing and evaluating student work in collaboration.
Video 8. The Campaign Ad Project
This video traces the Campaign Ad Project from kickoff to exhibition. Watch students collaborate on producing professional-quality political commercials based on focus-group research with targeted swing voters. Teacher Justin Wells reflects on designing and implementing project-based learning. The Campaign Ad Project serves as a case study through the rest of this chapter.
Video 9. Creating a Driving Question for the Watershed Project
During a planning meeting, a group of teachers (including Bob and Justin) work together to craft a driving question for a ninth-grade project.
Video 10. Impact Academy Student: Government Project
Relevance in education is critical! Impact Academy student Rahil talks about reviewing and analyzing immigration law for an AP Government project—a topic meaningful to him as a member of an immigrant family—and reflects on what deeper learning means to him: “internalizing the information.”
Video 11. Carol Dweck on Performance Assessment
Carol Dweck, Stanford psychologist and growth mindset researcher, shares her insights on the approach of Envision Education, particularly the positive impact of communicating high expectations to students.
Video 12. Dakarai's Digital Story: “Picture Me Black”
Through spoken word and video, Dakarai invites the world to look beyond the stereotype of the young black male, to see what he sees for his future and what he is planning to accomplish.
Video 13. Dakarai's Defense
This short clip of Dakarai's portfolio defense in 2008 highlights Dakarai quoting James Baldwin and vowing to make a positive difference as an African American man.
Video 14. Tiana Fails Her Portfolio Defense the First Time and Revises
In this video, learn how Envision students work with their teachers to prepare for their portfolio defenses and how failure can be an “extremely positive experience” for students on their way to passing. Tiana resubmits a stronger portfolio the second time around and succeeds.
Video 15. Envision Principal's Graduation Message—Revise, Revise, Revise
Allison Rowland, former principal of City Arts and Technology High School, delivers an ode to revision to the 2012 graduating class, describing the rigorous and rewarding process the students went through to earn their spots on the graduation stage.
Video 16. Envision Idol
Envision Education staff show their talent at Envision Idol!
Video 17. Advisory: Check in and Support
At Envision Schools, the advisory is one concrete way we build a culture of support for students. In this video from the Teaching Channel's Deeper Learning series, an Envision teacher talks about creating a positive culture through advisory and describes how advisory benefits both students and teachers.
Video 18. The Workplace Learning Experience at Envision
Five Envision students prove that they can make it in the real world, as they describe their twelve-week Workplace Learning Experience internships. Because of their preparation at Envision, these students were able to contribute in meaningful ways to their work sites, in addition to learning valuable workplace skills.
Video 19. Teacher Collaboration
Sticky note collaboration! Teachers and learning specialists work together at the beginning of each year to map out curriculum plans and ideas. Because they are collaborating, they can see and make connections across disciplines and then create projects that achieve multiple content and skill learning targets.
Video 20. Calibration: Assessing Portfolio Defenses
In order for Envision teachers to make sure they have a common understanding of the expectations and requirements of the portfolio and defense and that they are all using the assessment tool in the same way, teachers need to calibrate their assessment of student work. This video offers a window into that process.
Video 21. Sha'nice—Nasty Attitude to Bright Future
One student's transformation from having a “nasty attitude” to having a bright future! Sha'nice talks about coming to Envision “not ready for life” and then graduating ready to take on new challenges.
Documents
Envision Schools Course Syllabus Template
Envision Schools College Success Portfolio Performance Task Requirements: Scientific Inquiry
Envision Schools College Success Portfolio Performance Task: English Language Arts Textual Analysis
What Is the Most Effective Method for Cleaning Oil, Dispersants or Absorbents?
Envision Schools College Success Portfolio Performance Assessment: Creative Expression
Performance Assessment Planning Template
SCALE Performance Assessment Quality Rubric
Envision Project Planning Template
Envision Sample Daily Schedule
9th Grade Envision Schools Advisory Curriculum
The Six A's of Designing Projects
Project Sharing Protocol
City Arts and Tech High School Holistic Grading Rubric
Envision Core Values
Decision Making at Envision Schools
Ground Rules for Meetings
Meeting Agenda Template
NSRF Tuning Protocol Guidelines
To the students, teachers, and leaders of Envision Schools—past, present, and future.
Acknowledgments
Without Daniel McLaughlin, Envision cofounder, as well as the original Envision Schools staff and board, there would be no book to read because there would be no Envision. Thank you to Daniel and all Envision founders for believing that schools can transform lives.
We acknowledge and thank all of the Envision teachers, leaders, and students who cocreated this transformational school model through their practice. Having a vision for a transformational school is only half of the equation; the blood, sweat, and tears of our colleagues and students made it a reality.
At the core of Envision Education is a credible and defensible deeper learning student assessment system, which owes its existence to our partnership with the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE). We will always be indebted to Linda Darling Hammond and Ray Pecheone for their belief in and support of our vision. Stanford's Ruth Chung Wei has been an invaluable partner in creating many of the tools that drive our assessment system.
The genesis of Envision, and therefore this book, is Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo, CA. Bob acknowledges his colleagues and mentors at Drake High, whose work has inspired educators around the country and the world to rethink school and learning.
Thank you to Kate Bradford, our editor, whose positive attitude inspired us to never give up on this project. We thank Tony Wagner for acknowledging our work and pushing our thinking.
Finally, we recognize our families and partners for their sacrifices and their inspiration—not only through the writing of this book but also across our careers at Envision. We couldn't have done this without you. We love you!
About the Authors
Bob Lenz is the Founder & Chief of Innovation for Envision Education. He is a nationally recognized leader in high school redesign, deeper learning, project-based learning, 21st century skills education, and performance assessment.
Since Envision opened its first school in 2002, Bob has led the organization's expansion to operating three high-performing schools in the Bay Area and training other educators in the Envision model through Envision Learning Partners. Today, more than 90% of Envision Schools graduates go to college, compared to just 40% of all California high school graduates; the college persistence rate for Envision students is 85%, compared to 60% nationwide.
Seeking to impact education on a broad level, Bob directed Envision's efforts to create Envision Learning Partners. ELP works with education leaders across the country to create vibrant schools that successfully prepare all students for college, career, and life. As Chief of Innovation, Bob works to bring the Envision model to schools across the country, and to guide the national conversation on school reform and student success.
Bob was the first in his family to receive a college degree, obtaining a BA from St. Mary's College and an MA in education from San Francisco State University.
Justin Wells is a founding faculty member of Envision's first school, where he helped develop Envision's graduation portfolio and defense system. For nine years, he taught English and led teacher teams in the design and implementation of semester-long, multi-disciplinary projects that drew recognition, media coverage, and research attention from ABC News, the Buck Institute for Education, KQED, Stanford University, the Oracle Education Foundation, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Along the way, Justin served as the associate research director for performance assessment at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), where he designed prototype performance tasks for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). Currently, he works as a consultant and coach for Envision Learning Partners, helping schools and school districts develop performance assessment systems guided by the principles of deeper learning and project-based learning.
Sally Kingston, PhD, is senior education analyst for Applied Engineering Management Corporation. She has over 25 years of experience as leader and teacher across the P-16 pathway, including serving as executive director of Envision Learning Partners. Sally writes about education for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. She is co-author of Leading Schools: Distinguishing the Essential from the Important and The Leadership We Need: Using Research to Strengthen the Use of Standards for Administrator Preparation and Licensure Programs. She holds an MA in Education and a PhD in Educational Leadership and Organizations from the University of California Santa Barbara, where she was named Distinguished Alumnus in 2008.
Foreword
This important book describes some very different approaches to teaching and learning for high school students, which are proving to be much more successful than the conventional methods widely used in schools today. Bob Lenz and his colleagues understand that a good education means much more than preparing students to take a test. They focus relentlessly on teaching and assessing the skills that matter most for college, work, and learning in the 21st century. They motivate students by giving them authentic and challenging work; they assess students' portfolios of work to determine college readiness, and require every student to present and defend their work. Perhaps most important, even though their approach is both challenging and demanding, they have been especially effective working with the students most at risk.
In their introduction, the authors describe some of the reasons why a very different approach to education is essential today. But in my experience, many educators, parents, and community leaders do not fully understand the economic consequences for our students and for our country if we do not reimagine America's schools.
The global economic meltdown that began in 2008 has hastened the elimination of many kinds of jobs. In their important book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee discuss the accelerating pace of robotization of jobs. Half a dozen years ago, no one thought that machines could handle a task as complex as driving in heavy traffic. The Google driverless car has proved otherwise, and computers now compile and write complex financial reports and compete successfully against humans in chess and Jeopardy!
Although the popular media have reported the declining rates of unemployment as good news, the reality is that growing numbers of people—especially young people—have given up looking for work altogether. As I write this in the spring of 2014, the percentage of Americans who either have jobs or are looking for work is 63 percent and is at the lowest point since women began entering the labor force in significant numbers in the late 1970s. Young people in their twenties have been hardest hit of all, with one in five neither in school nor employed.
Nor does the unemployment rate say anything about the quality of jobs available. The vast majority of jobs that have been created in recent years are minimum-wage service and sales jobs. The result of all of these trends, economists tell us, is that the gap between the rich and the rest of us is greater than at any time in this country's history since 1929.
Historically, college graduates have always had an easier time finding jobs and earned considerably more than high school graduates over the course of their work life. It is no surprise, then, that an increasing number of young people are enrolling in college in response to this jobs crisis. Indeed, the mantra of many of our policymakers and educators is that all students should graduate from high school “college ready.” As a result, the college attendance rate in this country is the highest it has ever been.
However, there is a growing body of evidence that attending college might not be the good investment it once was. College tuitions have increased 72 percent since 2000, while income earned by twenty-four- to thirty-five-year-olds has declined nearly 15 percent and median family income has declined 10 percent. To close this gap, students and their families are borrowing more money than ever. College debt recently exceeded credit card debt in this country—over $1 trillion. Students now graduate with an average combined family debt of more than $30,000.
That is, if they graduate at all. Colleges have done nothing to stem the horrible attrition rate of students. Of the students who enroll in colleges, only about half complete any sort of degree. The completion rate at our community colleges—where many of our most disadvantaged students enroll—is less than 30 percent.
Then there is the problem of the job prospects for our recent college graduates. The combined unemployment and underemployment rate of recent college graduates is 53 percent—and is up slightly from a year ago. Far too many of our college graduates are finding that the only kinds of jobs they can get do not require a BA degree and certainly do not pay a college-graduate wage. We talk a lot about government debt in this country, but the debt I worry about most is the debt of our college graduates. It is the only form of personal debt that cannot be eliminated by filing for bankruptcy.
This dismal employment picture for recent college graduates exists at a time when employers say they cannot fill available positions for highly skilled workers. This is because there is a profound mismatch between what students learn in college and what employers say they need. It is not merely a matter of students picking the wrong college major. Employers say they do not care what job applicants' college majors are. They care about skills. According to a recent survey of employers conducted on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, “Nearly all those surveyed (93 percent) agree, ‘a candidate's demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.’”1 The Seven Survival Skills that I wrote about in The Global Achievement Gap are more important than ever to employers.
As necessary as these skills are, they are no longer sufficient. Employers want something more from new hires now. Over and over again, business leaders have told me that they want employees who can “just go figure it out”—who can be creative problem solvers or innovators. In my most recent book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, I explore what parents and teachers can do to develop these capacities. I describe the teaching methods that most successfully develop the skills needed in an increasingly innovation-driven economy—precisely the same methods, in fact, that Bob and his colleagues are using.
One of my most striking findings in interviews with young creative problem solvers in their twenties is that many became innovators in spite of their excellent schools, not because of them. Students who went to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon all told me that it was the rare outlier teacher who had truly made a difference in their development.
Too many of our college graduates are not learning any of the skills that matter most. In a recent study that involved twenty-three hundred undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa analyzed data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a state-of-the-art test of writing, problem solving, and critical thinking skills. They found that, after two years of college, 45 percent of the students tested were no more able to think critically or communicate effectively than when they started college. Their book, Academically Adrift, makes a compelling case for the need to fundamentally rethink the nature of a college education and accountability for results.
Employers are beginning to wise up to the fact that students' college transcripts, GPAs, and test scores are a poor predictor of employee value. Google famously used to hire only students from name-brand colleges with the highest GPAs and test scores. However, according to recent interviews with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, these data are “worthless” as predictors of employee effectiveness at Google. The company now looks for evidence of a sense of mission and personal autonomy and is increasingly hiring people who do not have a college degree. Even the interview questions they pose have changed. In the past, Google interviewers asked prospective employees brain-teaser questions like how many Ping-Pong balls can you get into a 747 or how many cows are there in Canada. Now they want them to talk about a complex analytic problem they have tried to solve recently.2
Our schools are not failing, as many claim; rather, they are obsolete. We continue to focus far too much time on teaching and testing content knowledge that can be retrieved from the Internet as needed. Knowledge has become a free commodity, like air, so the world no longer cares how much our students know. What the world cares about—what matters most—is what our students can do with what they know.
The Envision schools are successfully preparing all students for college, as the results of the recent SCOPE studies show.3 And they are doing so much more than that. Through their project-based approach to learning, they are equipping students with the skills needed to be “innovation ready,” as well as preparing them for the complex challenges of continuous learning and citizenship in the 21st century. Finally, the Envision schools are contributing in significant ways to the essential “educational research and development” needed to reimagine our schools for the twenty-first century.
Tony WagnerTony Wagner currently serves as Expert In Residence at the Harvard University Innovation Lab and is the author of five books. Previously, he was the founder and codirector of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for more than a decade.
Notes
1
Hart Research Associates. (2013).
It takes more than a major: Employer priorities for college learning and student success
. Retrieved from
http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/2013_EmployerSurvey.pdf
2
See Bryant, A. (2013, June 19). In head-hunting, big data may not be such a big deal.
New York Times
. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
. Also see Lohr, S. (2013, April 20), Big data, trying to build better workers.
New York Times
. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/technology/big-data-trying-to-build-better-workers.html?pagewanted=all
3
Cook-Harvey, C. M. (2014).
Student-centered learning: Impact Academy of Arts and Technology
. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE); Lewis-Charp, H., & Law, T. (2014).
Student-centered learning: City Arts and Technology High School
. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE).
Introduction
My first year in college was amazing. Everything that you guys taught us here, I use. Every, single, thing.
—Envision Schools graduate (2011)
You've either heard the claim or reached the conclusion on your own: the world is changing, and our schools are not keeping up.
If you still need some convincing, there are entire books that lay out the argument persuasively. There may be some disagreement around how we got to this point and which facet of the complex problem is most pressing, but those who worry about our schools point to the same facts. America's public education system once led the world; now it wheezes in the middle of the pack. A system meant to break down walls of class and race is now implicated in building them up. Because of globalization and advances in technology, the kinds of jobs that created and defined the American middle class are vanishing before our eyes. A troubling number of kids don't like school; a tragic number are dropping out. And despite generations of rhetoric around reform, the typical student's day-to-day classroom experience has hardly changed in a hundred years.
Great Books on the Need for Educational Change
Ted Sizer (1985),
Horace's Compromise
Deborah Meier (1995),
The Power of Their Ideas
Linda Darling-Hammond (1997),
The Right to Learn
David Conley (2005),
College Knowledge
Tony Wagner (2008),
The Global Achievement Gap
It's this last fact that most concerns this book, not because it is more important but because it is the one that educators can act on most concretely. It is also a fact easily overlooked. In recent years, education has enflamed intense debate. You would think it was the direction of change, rather than the absence of change, that could provoke such anger. But examine the labels on all our hot buttons: testing, tenure, teacher evaluation, charter schools, vouchers, trigger laws, unions, rubber rooms, No Child Left Behind. . . . While these controversies crash into adult sensibilities, they barely ripple into the typical day of the typical student at the typical school in America. Harvard education professor Jal Mehta (2013) sums up the last hundred years: “On the whole, we still have the same teachers, in the same roles, with the same level of knowledge, in the same schools, with the same materials, and much the same level of parental support.”
This book is for those who agree that school should be different and are wondering how to go about making it better. It is a book about school design. It's not the only thing that must change to fix the problems of American education, but it's an essential one and the one our experience speaks to.
About Envision Education and the Authors
Over ten years ago, after earning acclaim for his leadership of an innovative academy within a comprehensive high school, Bob founded the first Envision school, dedicated to the ideas of performance assessment and project-based learning. He recruited a team of teachers before he had a school building secured. Justin was the second teacher hired.
The summer before we opened our doors, there was a building but still no furniture. For two months, we sat on the floor of an empty room and designed our school. That initial design grew into three schools, a small charter management organization, an educational consulting division, and now the book in your hands.
Along the way, Envision Schools garnered national recognition for its innovations in performance assessment, its graduation portfolio system, its rigorous and integrated approach to project-based learning, its workplace learning internships, and its personalized learning environment that have been so successful in getting students into college who were statistically not likely to go. We serve students who come from low-income families (almost 70 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch) and whose parents did not go to college (almost 80 percent of our students will be the first in their families to graduate from college). (Figure I.1 details the demographics of Envision Schools.)
Figure I.1 Envision Schools' Demographics, 2013–2014
Because college success is the goal we have for our students, college success is how we measure our performance. Case studies on our schools, published by Stanford University researchers (Cook-Harvey, 2014; Lewis-Charp & Law, 2014), found that Envision Schools graduates are entering and persisting in college at rates far ahead of their demographically comparable peers. One hundred percent of African American and Latino 2012 graduates completed the courses required for University of California/California State University eligibility at Impact Academy, an Envision school. Statewide, the rates are 34 percent and 39 percent, respectively. Whereas only 8 percent of all low-income students nationwide earn a bachelor's degree by their mid-twenties (Mortenson, 2010), at our City Arts and Tech High School (CAT), 72 percent of 2008 graduates and 85 percent of 2009 graduates are persisting into their fourth and fifth years of college or have already graduated. Figure I.2 provides more detail on how Envision's college persistence rates compare to relevant national averages.
Figure I.2 College Persistence Rates
Note: Nationwide numbers indicate the percentage of students who attained a bachelor's degree within six years of matriculating at a four-year college (2004–2009). Adapted from Persistence and Attainment of 2003–4 Beginning Postsecondary Students: After 6 Years. by A. W. Radford, L. Berkner, S. C. Wheeless, and B. Shepherd, 2010, Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011151.pdf. The Envision Schools number indicates the percentage of all Envision alums who are enrolled in college and working toward a bachelor's degree or have already earned one. Based on data from the National Student Clearinghouse.
From this success was born Envision Learning Partners (ELP), a division of Envision Education that partners with schools and districts nationwide that are inspired by our school design and the results it has generated. (Sally served as the executive director of ELP from 2013 to 2014.) Currently ELP is working directly with teachers and schools in seven states (New York, Delaware, Washington, Massachusetts, Michigan, California, and Hawaii), impacting more than ten thousand students; in addition, we are supporting the efforts of several large school systems, including Los Angeles Unified, the Educational Achievement Authority in Detroit, Sacramento City Unified, Oakland Unified, and awardees of the US Department of Education's Race to the Top - District competition.
The Common Core Is Not a Hurdle; It's an Opportunity
Envision accomplished all of this during a time of enormous pressure not to. The organization was founded in 2001, at the same tine as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation was passed. That law, while broadening awareness of the achievement gap, simultaneously narrowed the purpose of our nation's schools, boiling the whole endeavor down to the incremental movement of some numbers attempting to say something about student literacy and numeracy. Like many others (we've never been alone in our thinking), Envision defined success for its students as something bigger, more aspirational, and with a longer time horizon. For us, it has always been about preparing students for college and life success, and we never believed that standardized testing alone would get us there. We did what NCLB told us to do, but stayed true to our philosophy of building schools predicated on deeper learning (more on that in a moment).
Fast-forward to today, where we seem to have entered the era of Accountability 2.0. Performance assessment is “trending,” and fast. A concept that for decades—and especially the last decade—has been fervently tended to by a small and forward-thinking group of educators is now on the tipping point of becoming mainstream practice in schools across the nation.
That's because of the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Improbably, over just a few years, the Common Core was adopted by forty-three states and territories and became a de facto set of national standards for math, reading, and writing across the curriculum.
Many factors were at work in the Common Core's swift adoption by so many states, but significant among them is the increasingly shared verdict that NCLB, for all its good intentions, demanded accountability without offering any educational vision. All value was placed on the act of counting, with scant attention paid to what it was that was being counted. A few states held themselves to a high standard, invariably one that was established before NCLB was passed. Most states, however, opted to test themselves on what could be bubbled in. We now have a decade of evidence to support the aphorism that “what gets tested is what gets taught.” And when bubble tests define what gets taught, we end up with narrow and shallow curriculum.
Federal pressure certainly played a big role in its spread, but the Common Core would never have caught on if it wasn't riding a groundswell of recognition that in order to succeed in the 21st century, our kids need to not only learn content and basic test-taking skills but also achieve deeper learning outcomes.
The change that the Common Core demands from us is considerable, but it's not radical. Two simple ideas sum up the Core:
College and career readiness is the primary goal of school.
Higher-order thinking skills, communication skills, and conceptual understandings are just as important as fact-based content knowledge, if not more so.
Is the Common Core an important agent of change? Yes. But is it the driver of change? No. The Common Core is following, not setting, the direction of education. Hundreds of schools, including ours, were Common Core aligned before the standards ever existed. Properly viewed as an opportunity rather than as a compliance hurdle, the Common Core makes it easier for educators to do what they've been wanting to do all along.
The next generation of assessment is coming. By the 2014–15 school year, standardized tests, as administered by the two major assessment consortia, Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), will look different from what we've gotten used to. These new performance assessments are being designed to measure skills in higher-order thinking, research, argumentation, modeling, data analysis, reading across the curriculum, even speaking and listening. (We know this firsthand: during a stint as an educational researcher at Stanford, Justin was part of a team that prototyped performance tasks for the Smarter Balanced test.)
Many educators welcome the coming challenge, but they also need help. After ten years of working within the cramped confines of NCLB, teachers and school leaders are crying out for tools, examples, and coaching that will help them guide their students into the next generation of assessment and, ultimately, the 21st century.
This book is an answer to that call.
Deeper Learning
Put simply, here is the message of the book:
Define a unified, schoolwide, mission-level outcome for your students.
Map backwards from that goal.
Rely on performance assessment and project-based learning to get you there.
Obviously, as anyone even remotely connected to a school can attest, there are lots of moving parts to this, and the complexity is in the details (thus seven more chapters). But the reason we can distill our message into just three steps is that they operate as a coherent system.
Deeper learning is the term we (and others) use to name this coherent system of school design. It is at once a statement of goals (or desired outcomes), a commitment to certain methods (or pedagogies), and a declaration of beliefs (or principles).
The Competencies of Deeper Learning
The Hewlett Foundation is among several forward-looking organizations that have taken up the term deeper learning to advance the cause of education. Envision Education has been a leading member of Hewlett's Deeper Learning Network.
Hewlett's list of desired student outcomes is representative of what is emerging all over the country when groups of thoughtful educators sit down and inventory what students should know and be able to do in the 21st century:
Master core academic content
Think critically and solve complex problems
Work collaboratively
Communicate effectively
Learn how to learn
Develop academic mindsets
We define the goals of our schools in chapters 1 and 2 and detail the methods in the chapters that follow. Underlying all of this is a set of beliefs—an educational philosophy—that suffuses the entire book. We list those beliefs here so that you're better able to notice how they inform our school design.
Deeper learning …
Insists on depth over breadth
Creates something that did not exist before
Attends to the present, not just the future
Is learning you can tell a story about
Is best realized through an integrated approach within a “holonomous” organization
Think of these as our design principles.
Deeper Learning Insists on Depth over Breadth
Teachers have long struggled with the tension between breadth and depth.
It's a hard choice, hard enough that one is tempted to avoid it or dismiss it as a false choice or contend that it is a dilemma that can be dissolved through tinkering. Maybe we don't have to choose between covering a lot of content and focusing on a particular concept or skill. Maybe we can find a way to do both at the same time.
We shouldn't kid ourselves. The tension is inescapable, and the choice is unavoidable: go with depth.
Depth is what this world demands from us. The explosion of human knowledge is not a 21st century phenomenon; it happened in the last century. Now, in this era of Big Data, explosive can hardly describe the rate of growth of human knowledge. “Every two days,” says former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003” (Siegler, 2010).
But those days aren't getting longer. And our minds aren't growing faster than evolution allows. And although we have prolonged adolescence over the last couple hundred years and added a college degree to what it means to be an educated citizen, it is doubtful that we can, or should, extend adolescence any further.
So the answer to exploding knowledge is not more schooling but a different kind of schooling. This is what the concept of deeper learning is all about and why it came to be. To pretend that we can “cover” everything that students need to know is to tilt at windmills. We must rid ourselves of any residual notions that education is the transmission of needed knowledge. Rather, we are teaching skills, and one skill most generally: how to ride a tsunami of knowledge whose future content we can't even begin to imagine.
What this means, ultimately, is that content, though still vitally important, is always a means to the end of some underlying, conceptual understanding. Decades of research bear this out: when deep, conceptual understanding is attained, learning is enduring, flexible, and real.
Some educators have paid attention to this message; unfortunately, most policymakers in our country seem unaware of this research and its implications. It is commonly observed in our field that “Singapore is where good ideas born in America go to grow up.” It is tempting to roll your eyes when you hear about Singapore's test scores, while you imagine a classroom where kids sit politely and homogeneously in neat little rows, their creativity starved by a diet of drill-and-kill. But the reality there is different, and Singapore's own educational mantra, announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in 2004, sums it up best: “Teach less, learn more.”
general
“Teach Less, Learn More” (TLLM) is a call for all educators to teach better—to engage our students and prepare them for life—rather than to teach more for tests and examinations.
—Singapore Ministry of Education press release, September 22, 2005, retrieved from http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2005/pr20050922b.htm
Deeper Learning Creates Something
One of the highest forms of learning is creation. The act of creation allows for the deepest expression of understanding.
Educational theorists have been telling us this in different ways for many years. The pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget concluded that “education means making creators” (Bringuier, 1980, p. 132). Lorin Anderson, a former student of Benjamin Bloom, led an effort to revise Bloom's famous learning taxonomy so that the verb create went to the top of the hierarchy (Anderson et al., 2001; see Figure I.3). According to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1998), the fullest assessment of students' understanding is through the exhibition of created products or performances (p. 127).
Figure I.3 Bloom's Revised Taxonomy
Source: Adapted from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Complete ed.), by L. W. Anderson (Ed.), D. R. Krathwohl (Ed.), P. W. Airasian, K. A. Cruikshank, R. E. Mayer, P. R. Pintrich, J. Raths, & M. C. Wittrock, 2001, New York, NY: Longman.
As designers of schools and curriculum, we distill all this wisdom into the following rule of thumb: for learning to be meaningful and long lasting, it should culminate in the creation of something that never existed before.
Creativity is strongly associated with the arts, but here we define the word expansively. The “something” created can be an argument, a scientific conclusion, a story, an interview, a research report, a short film, a photograph, a relationship, a script, a slide deck, a lesson plan, a video game, a puzzle, a proposed solution, an advertisement, a recommendation, an editorial, a website, a blog, a proposal, a logo, a sign, a map, a dramatic performance, a historical interpretation, a business plan, a piece of music, a cost-benefit analysis, a symposium, a caption, an exhibit, a slogan, a translation, a letter, a computer program, a blueprint, a data chart, a brochure, an app, a review … You get the idea, and probably have many of your own to add to the list.
As elastic as it is, this conception of creativity does not stretch to include much of what kids do at school: multiple-choice tests, worksheets, fill-in-the-blanks, formulaic essays, banks of math problems, memorized lists of words, follow-the-recipe science labs, and the recall of historical names and dates. And it almost goes without saying that what standardized testing has done to the two skills that have commanded its attention—numeracy and reading comprehension—has been to strip them of their creative potential.
Of course, many hours of important, noncreative work must often happen before creative acts are possible, but creation should always be the conscious end goal of what students do at school. Creativity is what this new global, digital economy values and almost the only thing it rewards. Creativity is what Americans are traditionally known for. (Imagine an education system that deliberately plays to our national strength!) And, most significant, creativity is what excites and engages us, forging an emotional connection to our learning that is as critical to the process as the content of learning itself. What we learn cannot be untwined from how we learn it.
Look upon an object that you've made by hand. Compared to the received objects that surround it, notice how much more alive it is to you—its detail, its beauties and its imperfections, the pride it evokes, the memories it triggers. That's how it should feel to reflect on your education.
Deeper Learning Attends to the Present, Not Just the Future
Learning is inherently forward looking. It is, after all, the work of fulfilling potential. Much of what schools do for children is done with an eye to the payoff down the line.
Equally, problems in education are painted with tomorrow's implications, often in economic terms. You don't hear about the high school dropout rate, for example, without hearing that the lack of a diploma will cost the dropout hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime.
But this focus on the future, though natural and appropriate, makes us vulnerable to forgetting the value of the present. Children are precious to us for who they are now, not for who they will become. Time spent learning is not any less valuable than the time spent doing what you learned. Practice isn't less critical than the performance it makes possible. As John Dewey famously declared over a century ago, “Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living” (1897, p. 7).
What this means is that the design of a school must pay as much attention to our students' present as it does to their future.
