That Time of Year, again!

The beginning of the instructional year brings renewed excitement, enthusiasm, and optimism. This is as it should be!  Learners and those that provide, facilitate, and deliver instruction as well as those that are charged with supervising, observing, and evaluating teaching and learning share a sense that this year will be different and better. 

Different and better - words associated with improvement, right?  They sound good but often lack the intentionality, deliberateness, and yes planning to make it so.

Improvement is seldom by chance or random.  Yet, the improvement necessary to ensure that each student at a minimum makes a years' growth in a years' time is more often than not, unplanned.

Good intentions without planning will result in broken promises, disappointments, and most egregiously failed learning.

There are however some steps that can assist in moving towards more intentional planning.  The first involves unpacking and analyzing results from the previous year.   Without question this data is informative and helpful in understanding both instructional decisions and student progress toward meeting or exceeding standards.  Yet, last years' results are lagging and after the fact.  Their utility and import are limited but do contain some insights worth mining.

We must use them to understand, raise awareness, and serve as a starting point for the next.  Shifting summative data from a lagging, after the fact statistic to a leading indicator requires discipline and perspective in addition to knowing what to ask for and listen for in conversations with teachers and administrators alike.

Four important questions:

1.    If the results demonstrated growth, improvement, or desired performance outcomes, do we know what caused the improvement? 

2.    If we know what caused improvement, how do we increase consistency, efficiency and ultimately effectiveness this year? 

3.    On the other hand, if our performance did not improve, do we know why?

4.    This is a little more challenging, how do we ensure we modify, adjust, or abandon ineffective practice?

Teetering on mastery of the obvious, teachers and administrators cannot attempt to interpret last years’ results in isolation.  One cannot simply wave the banner for improvement in 5^th grade by using last years’ 5^th grade results. Fifth grade results from last year must be used for reflection and review of teaching decisions and subordinate strategies and actions to ascertain what modifications, adjustments or etc. must be made to ensure improvement.

I submit that if every teacher and administrator intentionally unpacked results by reviewing and reflecting on the decisions, strategies, actions steps and etc. through the filter of last years’ results we will see lesson and unit design that will drive improvement.

Let me foreshadow next week by reintroducing the concept and construct of leading versus trailing or lagging indicators of learning.  As mentioned earlier, last years’ end of course, end of grade assessment data are lagging, trailing indicators of learning.  They come after the fact and are limited in their use.  Conversely, leading indicators are extremely important and have great import for driving improvement.  Lagging indicators are far easier to identify and report.  Leading indicators such as student engagement, opportunity to learn and time on task, home and school partnering, safe and orderly learning environment, frequent monitoring of student learning, and lesson planning, to name just a few are much more difficult to measure and quantify initially.  Yet, leading indicators have greater influence on learning and in determining end of course and end of grade assessment performance results. 

Let’s make this year a great year – by being intentional, thoughtful, and deliberate!