Performance vs Progress

A teacher I use to support some years ago, was trapped in a vehicle with me recently as we ventured to a city 200 miles North of Houston for a Math Conference. The conversation that disrupted the silence was pertaining to her recent release of state assessment scores. She wasn't so excited about the fact that she had set the expectation for the percentage of her students who would pass at 80% and fallen short by 20%.

Searching for the words to cheer this young gazelle up, I had to be strategic in my approach because I care so deeply about students and those who stroke their propensity to learn. What I said could either leave this teacher entering another year of setting unreasonable expectations and falsely striving for perfection or could steer her into purposeful and intentional goal setting with her students.

Goal setting seems to be set on performance. Students record their performance at benchmark moments when summative assessments are taken. But the real conversations and thought are centered around the differences that occur between each performance tracking. And ultimately when a student in May looks back on their performance from August/September, they should see some semblance of growth over the course of their time of learning.

It is down this path that I took this teacher who would be entering her 4th year of teaching. Research says that most teachers make their decision to either leave or jump ship between their 3rd and 5th year in Education. If I were to let a teacher who primarily deals with students with severe gaps in understanding and though aren't defined by their background, are bringing with them to school each day a disparity in terms of experiences- go on thinking it was SMART to set these expectations, I'd be doing her a great disservice.

Our conversation instead centered around sharing with her the importance of her digging into the Progress Measure of her students between 3rd and 4th grade. Often a component that is overlooked when the scores are initially released. Of course without being in front of a computer screen, the conversation didn't go as deep. She was able to physically look at whether or not her students had made any growth. Her vantage point was still very performance based and she went into what was left of her summer frustrated but hopeful.

Two months later we briefly revisited the conversation. This time, I was in my vehicle and she- in her own house. By this time she had been able to sift through and dissagregate her data. She had also gathered some observational data by engaging in conversation with her colleagues. This time she brought with her argument a more subjective stance because she was concerned that the students coming to her from the previous grade level might be entering with significant deficits. This bit of information gave me leverage for my entry way back into a pursuit to encourage this teacher towards goal setting.

I posed the following scenarios for her to ponder:

A. Let's say the students who enter your classroom this year have had 3 years of poor instruction (either by way of high mobility/turnover on their end or on the teacher end). Would you expect that group of students to score 70-80% passing or would you expect 70-80% of your class to pass STAAR?

B. Let's say the students who enter your classroom this year have had 3 previous years of very stable teachers who are veterans with instruction, no mobility and solid in terms of pedagogy. What would you expect your students' level of passing to be?

For the third scenario, I drilled down to specifics...

C. Let's say you are teaching a class the unit on Place value with whole numbers and decimals. If a majority of your students have lacked solid instruction in the unit of place value for 2 or more years, then you're dealing with a Tier 2 issue that needs to be addressed through re-mediation alongside a Tier 1 framework for an entire unit. Can you realistically expect mastery of place value to the hundredths place when your students lack a fundamental understanding of the base ten system?

When a grade level or even a school experiences some level of proficiency within performance over a score such as 90% or higher; or receives various distinctions within a certain subject matter, it shows that there is a solid system in place. Once that has had the chance to weather time, and change. Perhaps teachers & teams are veterans and have stayed in one place for a sustained period of time. But it can also be that students are bringing in a high level of independent knowledge and intrinsic desire for learning.

However, when a school experiences the opposite and for years tends to perform below sufficient performance levels, we automatically blame the Teachers' ability to perform or perhaps the classroom management. It might even get so nasty that we blame the behavior of students and their socio-economic backgrounds. When really, it's a systemic issue. Perhaps that system lacks creditable leadership, suffers from high mobility and staff turnover (inclusive of staff members who lack a strong knowledge base and experience). 

Both of these are realities and yet performance is the constant of this reality. But progress is not dependent on either of these realities. Often progress is stifled in places where students' performance have no bearings on the ability of a teacher to lead learning. But that doesn't have to be the case. Even a student with high levels of performance can be enriched and deepen their knowledge base through a series of rigorous tasks and set their own growth path. 

Similarly, in systems where performance is low, students have the luxury of charting their growth path and moving their abilities far beyond what they thought capable. 

My conversation with this old colleague was based on this premise. That regardless of the system you work within, your belief and practices must be grounded in progress over performance. Performance will come. But in some places performance will not be based on your ability as a teacher to facilitate learning. Perhaps, you realize that no matter how great you are within your current reality, performance is still showing to be constant. What you CAN affect, however, is the progress your students make. That is true no matter what students you serve and in any system you serve them in. Shoot for progress and performance will follow! But performance might not hang on the hinges of your 1 year influence in these students' lives...it might not show up until 3 years down the road. 

Trust, however, that when that body of students out-performs that year, credit is not due to the teachers they currently have; credit is due to the history of strong instruction they've encountered over a period of time within a system that was structured well.  

 

Balanced Leadership

Growing up with two parents who were both very doting on my 4 siblings and myself, there was a thread that I witnessed as I got over. That was their ability to bring two very key components to raising a family.

-Compassion
-Firm Discipline

Too often parents can lean to one side over the other. It's easy to look at a child's irresistibly cute face and as a result overlook the mischief they just got themselves into. Or, it sometimes happens that parents are overly critical and punitive in their approach to a child's behaviors that they lack the compassion children need in their formative years.

Thankfully my parents were able to see through our cute faces and to our devious hearts enough to warn us when we were headed down the wrong path, correct us through punishments and then love on us compassionately during and after the punishment process. This balance of the two components served us well as we grew into adulthood.

Being an Instructional Coach, Specialist and Program Director over the last 5 years has taught me to exercise this same level of balance. How?

Well in my first few years of leadership, serving as a Coordinator over a Charter's Math Program and in that same vein operating as the Instructional Specialist/Coach, naturally it was my pleasure to be at their beckon call ready to do whatever it took to make their job easier. If they needed someone to come help them wipe down desks that were delivered the day before "Meet the Teacher", then I was there with my Clorox wipes.

When I moved into a District Specialist position, I was placed at a campus that had run through it's course of Specialists and possibly grown some residual resentment towards me (rightfully so) due to the high mobility they'd experienced. With teachers apprehensive about whether I would "stick around" or even care enough to sincerely support them, I made it my priority to simply be in their proximity asking the same question every hour, "Is there anything I can do to help you?" Sometimes this meant grabbing additional base ten blocks for them while they were in the middle of their lesson, from the hallway manipulative closets. I was more than happy to do it. Service was my mission.

While servant leadership is the soul of a good leader, it is equally pertinent that a leader be grounded in research based practices and deeply convicted on matters that serve as the basis for their practice. In this case, Education. And more specifically in my case, Mathematics. As a leader responsible for bringing in a viable curriculum, vetting and creating assessments, planning and disseminating professional developments and modeling best practices, it was critical that my theoretical concepts be rooted in research and serve the needs of the teachers and students. I had no room for opinion (this is what I like/think is best) nor the attitude "this is how I used to do it".

It was my professional service to stay abreast to what was moving pedagogy forward and best serving the growing diversity of student needs. When a teacher would approach me about a school of thought or practice they wanted to start/continue, I could NOT in good faith just jump on board with their methodology. I had to vet it through the lens of research, best practice and educational pedagogy. If I was inclined to lean more heavily towards my servant leadership style, I would be jumping on board every question, desire, and request that crossed my path and doing students a grave dis-service. However, if I leaned more heavily towards my studies, I would become this rigid, dictatorial leader whom teachers would grow to abhor.

Balanced leadership raises the whole program, the total teacher, serves the entire child. It combines the willing heart and soul of a person with the sound doctrine needed to practice and serve a group with fidelity and exactness.

Now, when people in my profession approach me with an ideal, although my heart of service is inclined to be there to support them in any way I can...the deeper heart of me calls out and reminds me that in order to best serve the needs of students in a preventative manner, I must vet the inquiry through the lens of research. John VandeWalle has been the guru for Mathematical Pedagogy for years and his desire to 'help teachers help kids' has been my go-to because he not only helps teachers make sense of math but his work is grounded in foundational mathematics education.

As coaches/Specialists, it is educational malpractice to simply serve. We must be the backbone of our craft by seeking to know what our teachers don't know. To researching the mathematical ideals behind our standards and the implementation that best supports student development. Although Pinterest and Teacher pay Teachers are great places for teachers to not "reinvent the wheel", we must be the vetting tool that helps teachers understand the fundamentals first so they know exactly what to "shop" for. Although there are plenty of free (and not so free) digital resources out there that mix gaming with math practice, we must be the beacons that filter what's first developmentally appropriate before we look solely at what's "fun" and engaging. This is balanced leadership at it's best!