Adam Carter, Chief Academic Officer of Summit Public Schools presented a webinar for Next Generation Learning Challenges in October 2013 to share some of the tools Summit was using to build an aligned system of content, individualized playlists, and assessments. The webinar archive is available at http://nextgenlearning.org/event/building-aligned-system-digital-content-individualized-student-playlists-and-deeper-learning
Similaire à Summit Public Schools: Building an Aligned System of Digital Content, Individualized Student Playlists, and Deeper Learning Assessments (20)
2. A minute of reflection:
What educational
challenges are you
currently trying to solve,
and what technology
tools may help you solve
them?
Feel free to share these
reflections in the Chat window
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. Who is Summit Public Schools?
• A charter organization founded in 2003
• 6 Summit Schools with 1,600 Students
across the Bay Area
• Expanding to serve more communities
• Serves a diverse student population
12. Summit Public Schools prepares a
diverse student population for success
in a four-year college, and to be
thoughtful contributing members of
society.
Our Mission
13. Summit Students Eligible
to Apply to a Four-year
College
Where are we today?
Summit Graduates Accepted
to a Least One Four-year
College
Summit Graduates on Track to
Complete College within Six Years
(Nearly Double the National Average)
14. Students empowered to drive their own
learning, ensuring they are prepared for
success in college, career and life.
Summit’s Next Generation School Model
15. Professionalizing Teaching
High Impact & Value to Students
Beyond College Acceptance
College & Career Readiness
3 Key Elements
of Summit’s Next Generation School Model
Culture of Innovation
Student Centered & Data-Driven Improvement
32. Habits of Success (Non-Cognitive Skills)
Self-Awareness & Self-Management, Social Awareness
& Interpersonal Skills, Decision Making
& Responsible Behaviors
Habits of Success
ASSESS
LEARN
DAY
40. Publishable & Publicly
Presented Performances
Application of Content Knowledge,
Cognitive Skills and Habits of Success
Expeditions
ASSESS
LEARN
DAY
45. Bringing It All Together
Personalized Learning Plan (PLP)
Set Learning Goals, Track Progress, Receive Immediate
Feedback, Access Learning Resources
Notes de l'éditeur
Welcome
We’ll come back to this question shortly.
Introduce myself
Introduce this presentation: Summit Public Schools' Academic Model: Building An Aligned System of Online Content, Individualized Student Playlists, and Deeper Learning Assessments
Indonesia – school in the middle of a rice padi
Construction supplies piled in the back of the room
Blackboard in the front of the room (you can’t see it in this picture)
Do you have chalk?
Yes – runs to bag
When do you use it? When something really important needs to be understood.
Like what? Solving math problems. Especially place value.
Prior to beginning the NGO programme, I had been working at the most expensive international school in the country of Indonesia. They were just getting Smart Boards.
Maybe you know where this is going.
I spoke with one of my friends, the head of the math department, and I asked him why he wants a SmartBoard.
“It’s cool.” He said
But what will it add to your class?
“Well, for one, it’s a calculator.”
A calculator?
A really big calculator, he said. The whole class can see it!
“A really big calculator.” Okay…
He was getting annoyed. I wasn’t understanding.
“It’s a giant calculator! What’s wrong with that?”
There’s obviously nothing wrong with a giant calculator. A giant, $5,000 calculator is obviously really neat. But, will students learn more math because of it?
I propose that the Indonesian teacher with minimal secondary education, in a school so poorly funded that she has to stash her chalk in her purse, was using a donated chalkboard just as effectively as my Ivy League educated friend used a $5,000 piece of equipment shipped entirely around the world.
For more proof, here’s a major public school district’s 2004 technology budget, currently being processed in Texas before getting shipped to Ghana to become toxic flower pots.
I propose that the crux of the issue was raised by professor Larry Cuban of Stanford University with the question that opened this presentation:
What educational challenges are you currently trying to solve, and what technology tools may help you solve them?
In his 35 years of studying the use of technology in education, he writes that, too often, he has seen educators instead ask, “we know what our technology ‘solution’ is, can you please help us direct it at the right problems?”
At Summit, we quickly realized that we didn’t want a bigger calculator, and we didn’t want to cram a square peg into a round hole. So what did we want to do, and do better? What problems did we want to solve?
To understand how we approached the issue of the problems we are trying to solve, let me introduce our organization.
Ten years ago, “preparing a student for success in a four year college” was synonymous with “getting a student into a four year college”
We know that’s not the case today.
Research from David Conley, the University of Chicago Consortium, Mandy Savitz-Romer, Suzanne Bouffard, Angela Duckworth indicate that there is much more to gaining a college degree than entering college.
So how were we doing?
This slide makes it look like we’re proud of our 55%, but we’re not happy with this number at all. It’s abysmal that only 30% of students who enter college graduate in 6 years, and 55% is an improvement but nowhere near where we want to be.
We asked ourselves, “why?” Why--with our dedicated teaching faculty, with our 40 days of dedicated PD per year, with our mentoring program, with our belief that every student can succeed—why are 45% of our students not going to graduate in six years? Because we know that not graduating doesn’t simply mean a potentially less fulfilling career, with fewer open doors. We also know that it can mean being saddled with loan debt for years to come, and without the skills, and the degree, that come with graduation.
Looking In:
Remediation rates keeping students in college longer
Students struggling without Summit’s high supports and scaffolds
We had to do something about this disturbing trend, and so we began crafting a new vision to meet the problems we faced.
Looking Out:
Research on the importance of college and career ready skills to success (Cognitive & Non-cognitive Skills)
New technologies that enable personalized learning experiences for every student
We’ve always believed that students should be at the center of their learning, but we haven’t given them the tools to make decisions and quickly see the results of those decisions. We placed ourselves at the center of the classroom and, in doing so, added constraints to learning:
--Adults determined pace
--Adults directed class time, often on content knowledge acquisition
--Adults provided learning resources
Through a one-year blended pilot in 9th grade math, and then a subsequent pilot with 400 math students, we saw what was possible, if we worked together to remove these constraints.
Although all of these elements are deeply important to us, and all 3 are made possible by the catalyzing force of technology, I will limit this presentation to our first element:
Beyond College Acceptance
While being the result of a conscious effort to professionalize teaching and made possible by a culture of innovation, it is a focus on college and career readiness that is most important to us. We zoomed in on our mission.
First, we had to define college readiness in terms we had never made explicit in the past.
We had to define competencies and build towards them.
In every domain of college readiness, we believe that Grant Wiggins is right:
We must assess what we value, and value what we assess.
We must also articulate why the acquisition of content knowledge is important, and define what it looks like for our students.
We took the following curricular frameworks and broke them down for our students:
The Common Core literacy standards
The Common Core math standards
The NWEA MAP’s Descartes Continuum of math standards
The Next Generation science standards
The California social studies standards
The ACTFL Foreign Language standards
AP expectations and assessments
And we created competency-based guides that articulated what every level of content knowledge looks like from grades 5 – 12, including many AP courses.
These guides are the foundations of our content knowledge. They are essential for college readiness. They were built based on widely accepted frameworks but vetted and consented to by all of our subject-area teachers.
We needed a system to assess this content.
Illuminate:
--Excellent reporting capabilities
--Ability to easily push and pull student achievement data
--Solid item banks
--Innovative, interested partner
Two years ago, our CEO and I flew to Irvine and spent a day with the Illuminate team. At that time, we sketched out what a reporting tool could look like: one that gave students immediate assessment feedback and guided them towards the resources that would be best suited to help them learn. Some of the reports currently in Illuminate came from this discussion. We were hooked by this vision of on-demand assessments, which students can take when they are ready, and which are directly linked to learning resources.
So if we have a system to assess students’ content knowledge, it is important that we have a linked system that offers students the tools that they need to learn.
This was the second portion of the sketch on an Illuminate whiteboard two years ago. How could we do what no SIS was doing at that time? How could we take in-the-moment assessment information and give that information to students so that they could direct themselves towards the learning resources that were best suited for them, based on assessment results?
With the support of the Girard Foundation, Activate Instruction was born.
This free, open, online resource platform organizes resources into playlists, and these playlists are linked directly to the illuminate assessment database. It is not necessary to be an Illuminate customer to use Activate. You can start building rich playlists today just by logging into Activate. However, we have found that the power of linking assessments to resources, and reporting assessment results by objective within each focus area, is incredibly powerful in giving students the ability to direct their own learning.
Obviously, for this work to take place, we needed to support it with time and resources.
Thus, our school day was built around the belief that students need the time, space, and knowledge to interact with the resources that will help them learn, as well as to the assessments upon which they can demonstrate content proficiency.
Perhaps even more important than content knowledge are the cognitive skills
Problem Formulation
Research
Interpretation
Communication
That allow students to use content to acquire more knowledge, to think deeply about a topic, and to express their understandings in creative and novel ways.
Thus began an odyssey to build an assessment tool that would capture students’ cognitive skill development.
The first step in this process came in a brainstorming session in which we explored the idea: “are cognitive skills cognitive skills, or are cognitive skills discipline specific?”
We looked at:
The CCSS Math Practice Standards
The CCSS Literacy Standards
The Next Gen Science Standards
UCLA’s National Framework for Historical Thinking Standards
EPIC’s Key Cognitive Strategies
The AP’s assessment criteria
The IB Programme’s evaluation metrics
And from these, we distilled a draft of cognitive skills spanning a range of “no evidence” to “approaching professional quality”
We shopped these around with our faculties, and they agreed that these were excellent representations of cognitive skills, but…
We partnered with the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity – who writes all of the performance tasks for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Constorium – to revise this rubric, and we are using it today to appropriately level and scaffold projects.
With a framework for assessing cognitive skill development, we continued our research by finding the best ways to develop cognitive skills in our students.
Project Based Learning
The Buck Institute of Education
Rich, open-ended projects
Our faculties began curating their best projects and developing new projects based on the Buck Institute’s guidelines for PBL and linked explicitly to the cognitive skills rubric
But we still needed a platform for displaying and assessing the resulting student work for these projects.
Enter Show Evidence
In Show Evidence, we found a product that:
--Could visually display all the steps for completing a project-based performance task
--Could provide a range of options for helping teachers develop projects
--Could provide students with granular assessment feedback from teachers, peers and others to post and get feedback on their work
We spent much of this past summer with our teachers, building out projects and posting them to Show Evidence, where they are on the SE exchange. Anyone who is a Show Evidence customer can pull our projects and assessments, copy them, and adapt them as needed.
We continue to iterate on our assessments so that they are always improving
We needed time in the day given to this highest-value time for students
And in this time, teachers facilitate high-quality project-based learning.
Students engage in individual and collaborative activities such as:
Socratic Seminars
Complex Instruction and groupwork
Peer Editing
Writing
Researching
Drafting
Problem Solving
Students have twenty hours of facilitated project time per week in which they have access to structured learning opportunities, facilitated by our teachers.
Please take a moment and complete the poll.
Underlying students’ success on both cognitive skill development and content knowledge acquisition are students habits of success.
These are qualities such as:
Self Awareness
Self Management
Relationship Awareness
Relationship Management
And also include David Yeager’s dispositions of a self-directed learner, including:
Persistence
Strategy Shifting
Challenge Seeking
Appropriate Help Seeking
Response to Setbacks
We took the CASEL framework, developed using research from Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and others, and worked off of the Illinois standards for Social Emotional Learning to develop our Habits of Success Continuum.
Here, students, teachers, and families can see exactly what the next steps are for a student in terms of habits such as growth mindset and recognizing personal qualities and external supports, and can develop plans to progress as a learner.
Mentors are dedicated to coaching students at every stage of the learning process.
This work is woven into the fabric of everything we do.
Habits of success must be practiced in the context of individual and group work, of play, of goal setting and reflection.
Thus, all students continually go through what we call the Self Directed Learning Cycle.
Mentors support students in their learning through dedicated time: 10 minutes with each student, built into each school week.
Additionally, we support students’ development of habits of success through Socratic Seminars around topics such as:
Brene Brown’s work on Vulnerability
Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset
Daniel Pink’s research on Motivation
Students meet in weekly seminars to apply these topics to their own lives to support greater understanding of themselves and of each other. This work is supported by a community blog that is updated every week.
Additionally, as we consider the best ways to support students’ ongoing literacy development, we have partnered with Gobstopper, a tool to deliver texts with resources and high-quality assessments to students.
This work is supported through a schedule that includes time for reading, community seminars, and 1:1 mentoring.
Finally, we have expeditions that are led by a team in house
We badge students’ performances.
These expeditions expand on students passions and interests, and are framed around topics such as:
Cultural Awareness
College Readiness
Career Explorations
Community Contributions
Health and wellness
Eight weeks of the year are given to these expeditions, and this is time in which our teachers are released for further professional development—time in which they can plan coming projects and lessons, review student learning information, collaborate meaningfully with colleagues, co-teach across sites, and further develop as teachers, leaders, and mentors.
These pictures are from our first series of expeditions, which roll throughout the school year and are happening right now in Daly City and San Jose.
Even with all of these data systems designed to solve problems from providing competency-based resources to students to fuelling collaboration to providing actionable assessment feedback in real-time, we needed to bring it all together. It was a problem that no system in existence seemed to adequately address.
Illuminate, an off-the-shelf SIS, can report students’ real-time learning of content.
Activate, and close partner who is free and open to everyone in the world with internet access, can direct students to the resources they need, exactly when they need them, given assessment information.
Show Evidence, a paid product, can display projects and link students’ performance on project to our cognitive skill rubric.
Gobstopper, a reading tool, can offer students reading support through curriculets.
But we did not have a way to pull from all of these sources, as well as others, and organize this information around the self-directed learning cycle. We could not show students their grades, and let them see how to improve their overall performance.
Thus, we hired a developer to create the Personalized Learning Plan.
PLPs of the past: 1x/year, sat in a drawer
PLPs today: data-rich, real-time, resource-linked, accessible by all members of the school community
And that’s where I want to take us now. After a five minute demo, I would love to take any questions that you have.