Creating a Culture of Grappling: Building Perseverance and Emotional Stamina in All Students

By: Caroline Mwendwa-Baker, Penny Perrott, and Anya Rosenberg

It’s Wednesday morning on a crisp day in early November and students in the Fourth Grade are getting ready for their weekly problem-based task in morning math.   The students begin in a whole group lesson to go over the complex math problem together.  Ms. Jessica, the class’ lead teacher, begins by reading the problem out-loud as students follow along and underline words and phrases that stand out to them. Once a basic level of understanding of the problem is reached, students spend five minutes of independent think time to fill out a Know/Wonder/Ideas (KWI) graphic organizer to share what they know about the problem, what they wonder about the problem, and any ideas they have for how to solve it.  Students then come together as a class and share their ideas to reach a deeper collective understanding.  When students share their ideas, Ms. Jessica, the class’ lead teacher, gives value to every students’ observations and summarizes their ideas to fit in the know/wonder/idea structure, physically filling out a large scale KWI on a chart paper at the front of the class.  This whole group lesson establishes clear and explicit structures and expectations for how to approach the problem, such as the expectation that every student create a clear model of their thinking.  By making the expectations and guidelines clear, students are set-up to grapple at a level that challenges their current understanding but won’t leave them frustrated.  The whole class KWI is created within the first 10 minutes of the lesson, and it remains at the front of the class for students to reference as they delve into their independent work. Minimal guidance about how to solve the problem is given, but many ideas are proposed and discussed.  Once in partnerships, the students begin to work through the problem together.  Using powerful language to express their thinking, students own their opinions and defend their approaches, but are malleable with their thinking so that they can grapple and engage in the challenging work together.

What is grappling?

Grappling is the process of persevering, thinking critically, analyzing data, and constructing an in-depth understanding when faced with a problem that does not have a clear path to a solution.   

Within the intentional community of learners at Two Rivers, we establish a culture of grappling within all aspects of our school culture.  Grappling appears in many forms in our community: whether it be Fourth Grade students working hard and challenging themselves with a complex mathematical problem-based task, Fifth Graders working through a complex text through partner reading, or a group of teachers and administrators coming up with strategies and best practices to institute new testing procedures.  In each of these cases, grappling looks like learners coming together, asking each other questions, sharing ideas, admitting confusions, and coming to new levels of shared understanding.  Grappling is admitting and being comfortable with the fact that the answer may not be instantly apparent; it is working hard and persevering through challenges to form answers and ideas.  

What Does Grappling Do for Students?  

Grappling provides students opportunities to get comfortable making mistakes, taking risks, and feeling the great reward of challenging themselves to reach areas of unknown growth and academic adventure.   It is an indispensable component of a well-rounded educational experience, as it builds critical thinking skills and emotional stamina.  When students grapple with complex tasks on a daily basis, it becomes an attitude that students use to approach any and all tasks in and out of school. They tend to take every opportunity as a learning opportunity, and are willing to fail. It creates a higher order of thinking by investing students in the problems that they are trying to solve, often motivating students to learn more due to their involvement in the problem.

This is best illustrated in the work on cognitive mindsets.  Mindsets affect how students approach and persevere through a task.   Dr. Carol Dweck, one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of motivation identifies two mindsets that students have about their intelligence-- a growth mindset and a fixed mindset (Dweck 2008, 6).  Students who have a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence is one that is already set; they see academic and emotional challenges, making mistakes and failure as threatening to their intelligence and thus avoid experiencing them.  This greatly affects their performance and success in the long run.  On the other hand, students who have a growth mindset believe that their intelligence is one that can continue to grow and develop through hard work, perseverance and mental stamina.  They embrace challenges, are not afraid to make mistakes as part of the learning process, and are lifelong learners.  These students know that they can grow their intelligence through grappling with challenging problems and taking academic risks. In order to create a culture where a growth mindset is the norm, students and teachers must grapple with complex tasks on a daily basis.  

Dr. Carol Dweck outlines the ways in which a growth mindset benefits students; particularly poignant is Dwecks’ data about how students with growth mindsets seek out opportunities to grow as learners and academic risk-takers. Students with a growth mindset exhibit a drive to learn from their mistakes and absorb knowledge from fellow learners, while those with fixed mindsets seek out tasks that confirm--and do not challenge--their pre-existing intelligence (Dweck 2008).

Building a Culture of Grappling

At Two Rivers, we spend the first weeks of the school year working on creating a shared language of grappling. We explicitly name it for students as “grappling;” and discuss why grappling is an important part of our learning community. We set high expectations for all of the tasks that students partake in and make it explicit that our expectations are high because we want students to challenge themselves, make mistakes, and take risks--and because we know that they are capable of the challenge.  We praise students for putting in their best effort and making mistakes, and we intentionally and explicitly establish making mistakes as an integral part of the learning process.  

As displayed in Ms. Jessica’s Fourth Grade class as they struggled with their problem-based Task, as teachers and community members, we work to engrain grappling and language of the Growth Mindset into our classrooms and our school community.  As teachers observe and assist with student work, we praise our students for “working hard” and putting in their best effort in addition to assessing the quality of final products. We recognize that academic risk taking will yield mistakes, but this does not detract from our expectations for high-quality products; we hold our students to rigorous standards for completing their work, and provide opportunities for critique and feedback when these expectations are not met. We veer away from language that stresses “smartness” as an inherent trait and instead employ language that encourages students to keep digging, asking questions, and putting their best effort into their work.  In Ms. Jessica’s Fourth Grade class, this takes the form of teacher observations that begin with “I notice that you….” And “I see that you are working hard at understanding… Did you consider this..?” By providing students with observations about their work, we encourage them to be self-reflective of their own practices and examine how their work can be improved through deeper questioning, intentional risk taking, and attempting new and different ways of thinking.

As teachers, counselors, administrators, and instructional leaders, we work to adapt a growth mindset that encourages grappling within our community of educators as well as a culture that permeates the walls of our school. Our hope is that by nurturing a growth mindset in our school, our students will develop a habit of mind that will give them emotional and academic strength to face challenges in school and out.  When students and teachers grapple together, our classrooms feel supportive, safe, and connected.  As observed with Ms. Jessica’s Fourth Graders, every student feels comfortable asking questions and being inquisitive about the thinking processes of other students.  There is tremendous buy-in by students, and because the support and safety has been so well established, students are comfortable making mistakes and asking questions of one-another that push them outside of their comfort zone and into the zone of proximal development where they feel challenged and can learn.

Experiences in which students grapple can be messy.  As teachers working to find the best ways to support students in grappling, we don’t have all of the answers, but we believe wholeheartedly in giving students opportunities to build their critical thinking skills and emotional stamina.  As we work to build a culture of grappling, our work will surely yield mistakes, but we do not fear these challenges. Rather, we welcome the opportunity to grow our mindsets and practices together as learners, students, leaders, and teachers.

Further Reading:

Dweck, Carol. 2008. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books.

“Getting Students Ready to Grapple” Expeditionary Learning.

http://elschools.org/sites/default/files/Getting%20Students%20Ready%20to%20Grapple.pdf

Spiegel, Alix. "Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning." NPR, 12 Nov. 2012.

What’s in a Grade?: The Importance of Shifting the Way We Think About and Use Grades in Our Schools

By: Jeff Heyck-Williams

What’s in a grade?  Why do we grade? What do grades communicate?

These questions may seem to have obvious answers, but they warrant consideration as we realize that grading is a major way that schools communicate both how individual students are doing and how our schools are doing at educating our children.

The most basic way that we answer the question of why we grade is to communicate the progress and achievement of students within a class.  But this begs the question of what, exactly, these grades are communicating about progress and achievement. 

Unfortunately, traditional grades too often have been a bit vague at communicating the achievement of students.  At Two Rivers we have intentionally designed a grading system that communicates the complexity and depth of student learning.  We recognize that our system is different and therefore creates dissonance with traditional notions of grading. 

There are three basic ways that traditional grading systems fail that we address through our grading system at Two Rivers:

1.    Traditional grades compare students to each other or to assignments.  Two Rivers’ grades compare students to standards.

2.    Traditional grades are general and one-dimensional.  Two Rivers’ grades are specific and Two Rivers’ reports acknowledge the multiple dimensions of learning.

3.    Traditional grading compartmentalizes learning.  Two Rivers’ grading recognizes that learning occurs along a continuum.    

TRADITIONAL GRADES COMPARE STUDENTS TO EACH OTHER OR TO ASSIGNMENTS.

At their worst, traditional grades are assigned by comparing students to one another.  This system of assigning grades comes out of a misapplication of the famous bell curve.  If grades are assigned in this way, only the top 10% or so can receive an A because grades are assigned on the curve.  With a system of comparative grading the majority of students receive C’s and inevitably some students fail the class.  This system of assigning grades is flawed from the start because it assumes that schools are in the business of ranking students versus teaching them.  A teaching perspective would necessitate the possibility that all students can achieve and thus receive the highest marks possible in the class. 

Slightly better – though not by much -- are grading systems that evaluate students on assignments.  In this system of assigning grades, tests count for a certain percentage, homework counts for a different percentage, projects for a different percentage and so on.  The problem with this system is that schools aren’t just teaching kids to take tests or create projects.  Rather, it is the content of the tests and skills applied in the projects that we are trying to teach. An effective system of grading should assess the knowledge and skills that we actually want kids to develop, not the assignment.

TWO RIVERS GRADES COMPARE STUDENT PERFORMANCE TO STANDARDS

At Two Rivers, we have responded to this by developing a standards-based grading system.  This means that students are not graded either in comparison to each other or on how well they did on a given assignment, but rather on the degree to which they have mastered a given standard.  A single assignment may require students to call upon content knowledge and skills from several different standards. Thus, any given assignment  -- whether a test, quiz, or project -- can potentially have more than one grade associated with it.  Multiple grades would reflect the level of proficiency in each of those standards.  In this way, students can look at their grades and know specifically what content and skills they have mastered or still need to work on, information that a single grade for an assignment cannot capture.

TRADITIONAL GRADES ARE TOO GENERAL AND ONE-DIMENSIONAL

If your experience around grading has been similar to mine, grading at its best has always been an amalgamation of scores created by taking into account mastery of content, development of skills, and the amount of effort and focus.  Those scores are then boiled down to a single letter grade for the class.  Even with a syllabus that outlines weighting of assignments, it is often difficult to understand how each of the component assignments led to the final grade. 

More importantly a single letter grade can’t tell you much about what a student actually knows and can do even.  After all, what does an “A” in physics mean?  An “A” does not tell you if a student understands quantum theory or if they can balance an equation.   It also doesn’t tell you how much effort they had to put into their work to earn the “A.” 

Furthermore, while some traditional reports clump multiple dimensions, such as effort, skills, and content, into a single letter grade for a class, others effectively boil all learning in that class down to a single dimension -- usually content knowledge.  This single grade from a given class thus conveys only information on how well the student mastered a given set of information.

However, as I’ve have written before, we know that students need more than a set of content knowledge to be successful in the 21^st century economy.  They also need what we term expert thinking and complex communication skills.  A single grade -- even a grade that takes into account multiple dimensions of learning -- masks these dimensions by lumping process skills, collaboration skills, and content knowledge into the same bucket.

TWO RIVERS GRADES ARE SPECIFIC AND TWO RIVERS’ REPORTS ACKNOWLEDGE THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING

In contrast to traditional grading systems, Two Rivers intentionally provide grades on specific standards rather than giving omnibus grades for a given class.  By focusing on specific standards, a student and her family can know exactly what skills and knowledge she has mastered and what skills and knowledge continue to need work.  On our progress reports, we report on strands that comprise a group of standards, once again giving students a more specific understanding of the discrete areas on which they need to improve.

Our grading system is also designed to provide information across multiple dimensions.  The grades on given standards only reflect how a student is performing in comparison to that standard and not their level of engagement, participation, and collaboration in class. 

Two Rivers addresses these type of intrapersonal skills through our Scholarly Habits: I work hard, I am responsible and independent, I am a team player, I care for my community.   Currently we provide narrative reports on how students are achieving these Scholarly Habits, separating them from assessment of whether or not a student understands a concept taught in class.  In this way we acknowledge that there are multiple dimensions of learning that can be teased out and reported on separately, and that each component builds on the other to form a well-rounded learner.

Consequently we don’t include homework as a component in determining grades for two major reasons.  First, independent work completed outside of class is not a reliable measure of whether or not a student has mastered content.  Second, homework completion is often a sign that a student has integrated a combination of organization skills and motivation that have less to do with understanding of a standard and more to do with what we would describe as intrapersonal skills. 

Ultimately, reporting in this way provides us with the opportunity to acknowledge the specific strengths and areas for growth of each individual student.  Thus the student who needs to work on developing understanding but has excellent study skills can be acknowledged for the effort that he puts into his work while focusing on the area for his growth.  Similarly, the student who has a strong conceptual understanding but struggles to work with peers can be acknowledged for her understanding and focus on building her collaboration skills.

TRADITIONAL GRADING COMPARTMENTALIZES LEARNING

The last way in which traditional grading systems fail is they operate under the assumption that learning has a clear beginning, middle, and an end -- at which point grades are reported.  While there inevitably is a beginning and an end to the school year and there must be a point in which grades are reported, learning itself does not occur this way.  This assumption about a beginning, middle, and an end compartmentalizes learning into discrete elements of learning.  However, compartmentalizing learning in this way breaks up knowledge and skills into pieces that are often unnatural.

One result of compartmentalizing learning is that a student can’t achieve higher than an A or 100%.  This suggests that after a student has earned the A they have nowhere to grow in the class.  What this guarantees for a great many of our students is that they come to class having already mastered the content and effectively learn nothing more, though they achieve the A.  It is a reality in our schools today as always that there is a wide range of student ability in every class and some students will master the given content faster than others.  If our grading system doesn’t provide a place to report on students who meet the challenge to move beyond the outlined standards for a grade level or class then there is little incentive for the teacher to provide experiences that provides that challenge or for the students to strive to meet it.

TWO RIVERS GRADING RECOGNIZES THAT LEARNING IS ON A CONTINUUM

Our scale acknowledges that learning is on a continuum and that knowledge doesn’t end with the mastery of a discrete standard.  Thus, a 3 in a given standard shows that students  have met or are on target to meet the standard by the end of the year; indicating that they are on grade level and performing the skills and acquiring the concepts we would expect of a student at that grade level. A 4 means they have exceeded the standard by no more than one grade level, while a 5 indicates that they are performing in relation to a given standard more than one grade level above their current grade. 

Grading in this way communicates that learning – and the grades associated with learning -- is a continuous process and that students can not only master a concept but can also continue to deepen their understanding and application of the concept.

While we realize that our grading system challenges the assumptions of traditional grading systems, we do so with the intent to fix what is broken about those systems. While our system may not be perfect, it better captures the essence of a community of learners that recognizes the necessity for authentic feedback to learners so that they can become leaders of their own learning.   By empowering our students with the  knowledge of what they need to improve upon, we uncover for them the process of learning and provide a foundation to make learning a life-long endeavor.

Six Shared Expectations for Math

By: Jeff Heyck-Williams

At Two Rivers we have made a conscious effort to change the way that everyone thinks about, talks about, and engages in math.  We have shifted the expectations to place the emphasis away from just memorizing math facts to also understanding the math.  We have shifted from pushing students to memorize lots of algorithms so that they can solve specific kinds of problems on tests to applying the math concepts they understand to solve any complex math problem.  We have shifted from a school where it was OK to say, “I’m not really a math person” to a place where everyone celebrates working hard to solve a math problem.

The foundations of this shift can be described in six shared expectations for math: 1. Math is fun.  2. All students can learn math.  3.  We have a common approach to problem solving.  4.  We value multiple representations.  5.  We value concise and precise communication. 6.  We value reasoning and proof.  These six expectations, shared publicly with staff, students, and families, codify our beliefs about mathematics and have made the shift in the culture of numeracy at our school real.

1. Math is fun: Time is built into lessons to play with math. 

I don’t recommend to anyone that they ever lie.  In fact, I encourage people to tell the truth.  Math is hard… or at least it can be.  However, being difficult is a long way from being impossible, and there never is a reason to say, “I can’t do math.”  First this statement is a gross overgeneralization.  Everyone can do math.  Second, it only reinforces negative stereotypes about math and math ability that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for our children.

Instead, I recommend that we start from a place of positivity.  Math is fun.  Spending time working on something that is challenging leads to huge rewards as you discover the underlying patterns and, yes, beauty of the mathematics.  Simply shifting our orientation in the way that we talk about math has huge benefits.

2. All students can learn math: Every student has the capacity to learn deeper conceptual knowledge in mathematics. 

The emphasis here is in two places.  First I mean ALL students when I say all students.  I mean special education students with IEPs.  I mean English Language Learners.  I mean students who qualify for free or reduced price lunches because their household income is below the poverty line.  I mean girls as well as boys.  I mean all students. 

Second is that learning math is not just learning a set of algorithms.  Instead we mean, that students learn to not just compute fluently, but also to understand the mathematics that they are working with and to apply it to appropriate situations.

3. A common approach to problem solving: We use the K-W-I to teach steps to problem solving in and outside of math.

To aid students in developing the strategic competence to solve any problem that they face, we utilize a common approach to problem solving across the school, both in and out of math classes.  This approach emphasizes three key points.  First we work for students to first understand the problem by describing what they know.  Then we have students describe what they need to find out.  Finally, before problem solving they identify ideas for how they might approach the problem.  By slowing students down and using the same process with every problem we face, students develop a habit of mind towards all problems that emphasizes first understanding a problem before searching for answers.

4. Representations:  We value the multiple ways that ideas can be modeled or demonstrated and encourage making connections between various representations.

As students work and produce final products in mathematics, we don’t value one way of doing things over another.  Rather the emphasis is first on understanding.  Students utilize representations of mathematics whether manipulatives, drawings, or numbers to understand and solve the problems.  No one representation is valued over another.

Once a student feels confident in their understanding of their work, we then shift the emphasis to communicating.  Students explore whether or not their representations clearly express their understanding of mathematics for their classmates, teachers, and often an outside audience.  If not, they revise their representations to better express their understanding to others.

Only after we have ensured that students understand the problem and have communicated their solution effectively do we shift our attention to whether their solution method and representation was efficient. 

5. Concise and precise communication: We reinforce precision and brevity during class discussion.

With the question of efficiency, we push students to utilize accurate vocabulary and language to express their ideas.  As students explore ideas as a class, we have opportunities to reinforce concept development and vocabulary learning as we refine the way that we talk about mathematics.

6. Reasoning and proof: Mathematical arguments are weighed on the merits of their logic NOT on the status of the speaker or beauty of the language.

Last but not least, we emphasize that it is logic that is weighed most heavily in our classrooms.  As many of us know, many arguments are won by the popularity of the person speaking or the complexity of the words that he or she uses.  However, we want students to develop a critical ear for arguments that places value on what makes sense.

It is with these six expectations for how students, staff, and families engage in mathematics that we have created a foundation for changing the culture of numeracy at Two Rivers.

2, 4, 6, 8: Social Learning by the Numbers

By Jeff Heyck-Williams

At Two Rivers, we often say that social learning is just as important as academic learning.  This isn't just talk.  We believe that time spent teaching our students about how they can effectively interact and the personal skills needed to persevere and thrive in their work is just as important as the time we spend teaching them academic content.  In the world of high stakes academic testing and accountability, focusing on social learning can seem counterintuitive.  After all, you only have so much time to cover all of the things that kids need to know.  However, we have seen over and over again that an investment in a child's social skills has payoffs far wider than a single test score.  Students who have developed habits of perseverance, commitment, responsibility, and productive collaboration are more successful in and outside of the classroom.  

The questions remain, what does our social curriculum look like?  And how do we help students develop the habits listed above?  What I have found helpful is to think about social learning by the numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8.  We have identified 2 types of character that kids need to be successful.  We have 4 scholarly habits that articulate what those types of characters look like on a daily basis.  We take 6 weeks at the beginning of the school year to introduce the scholarly habits and develop the culture of learning.  This all forms a foundation of 8 hours each day during the school year when we can craft the experiences for students that foster the development of their social learning.  So here is social learning by the numbers. 

2 Types of Character Development

Building on the work of the Character Education Partnership (CEP) in their position paper, "Performance Values: Why They Matter and What Schools Can Do to Foster Their Development," we define our social curriculum with an understanding of two types of character that people need to be successful: moral character and performance character. 

Moral character is defined by the traits that "enable us to be our best ethical selves in relationships and in our roles as citizens."  It includes character strengths like empathy, fairness, trustworthiness, generosity, and compassion.  Developing strong moral character is essential to living and working in productive communities whether they be our schools, workplaces, or neighborhoods.  Generally, moral character can be understood as interpersonal skills, or how individuals relate to each other.  

In addition to moral character, performance character is the type of character that "enable[s] us to achieve, given a supportive environment, our highest potential in any performance context."  The qualities of performance character include traits like effort, initiative, diligence, self-discipline, and perseverance.  These personal character traits are what individuals need to reach their potential and accomplish personal goals.  Where moral character can be understood as interpersonal skills, performance character generally encompasses intrapersonal skills, or what individuals believe about themselves and how they act on those beliefs. 

4 Scholarly Habits

At Two Rivers, we believe that both of these two types of character are essential for lifetime success, but people aren't just born with these character traits and that they can be fostered in everyone.   We believe that character must be taught and fostered intentionally in our interactions with children and the experiences that we create in our classrooms.  Which brings me to our 4 scholarly habits.  Across our school we have identified 4 habits that embody the traits we want all students to develop in both moral and performance character.  The habits stated as “I statements” for students are: I work hard.  I am responsible and independent.  I am a team player.  I care for our community.  In the broadest sense, the first two, working hard and being responsible and independent, encompass the performance character traits that we teach.  The second two, being a team player and caring for our community, encompass the moral character traits.

Beginning with performance character, by teaching students the scholarly habit of I work hard, we focus students on the concepts of a growth mindset, perseverance, and risk taking.  We want to engender in all students a personal belief that through their own effort they can improve both their understanding and abilities in any context.  This comes with developing a willingness to attempt difficult tasks and having a set of coping skills to deal with situations when they become more challenging. 

The second scholarly habit of I am responsible and independent focuses students not just on the outward manifestations of responsibility like being prepared for class and using self-control, but also the inward manifestations like being attuned to both the quantity and quality of the work that they produce every day.  Through these first two scholarly habits, we work to make performance character concrete traits that every student can improve upon.

Shifting to our focus on moral character, we define the scholarly habit of I am a team player by talking to students about how their actions in a community directly influence the accomplishments of the whole community.  Consequently we name for students that their actions need to help everyone learn and they need to take ownership for their share of the work.  More importantly, we talk about the difficult work of collaboration and how cultivating a set of skills to negotiate differences, develop shared understanding, and ultimately build trust are essential in developing moral character.

The fourth and final scholarly habit that we teach to students, I care for my community, speaks to how we develop habits of compassion.  This means that we look for and name acts of kindness explicitly at our school.  In addition, it means we talk about the types of actions that students can take to make their school community a better place from keeping our shared space clean to treating each other with care.

By naming these scholarly habits and teaching them explicitly to students, we make performance character and moral character concrete and real.  They have examples of traits that exemplify working hard, being responsible and independent, being a team player, and caring for their community.  They can draw on these examples as we work through the course of a school year.

First 6 Weeks

To develop these habits, we recognize that teaching anything well takes time.  If we are serious about developing students' social skills, then we have to spend the time to help kids learn these skills.   With this in mind we begin to teach towards the 2 types of character through the 4 scholarly habits in the first 6 weeks of school.  In focusing on social learning during the first six weeks of school, we draw from the work of the Northeast Foundation for Children's Responsive Classroom approach to education.  

Thinking about how we teach towards social learning in those first 6 weeks, it is useful to think about the twin priorities of social learning and academic learning on a balance scale.  As the school year opens social learning is raised to a priority and is high on the scale.  This doesn't mean that we don't address academic learning, but it is recognized that it is the secondary goal at the beginning of the year and is relatively lower on the scale.  As the first six weeks progress, the scales slowly shift from a priority on social learning to a priority on academic learning.  The goal being that at the end of the first 6 weeks the scale has shifted to academic learning as the priority and social learning as the secondary goal.  Intentionally dedicating the first month and a half of school to the moral and performance character of our students pays off as the year progresses and students are able to draw on the skills and concepts that they learned in the first 6 weeks as work gets more difficult.  

So the first 6 weeks functions as a time to explicitly name, model, and explore the 4 scholarly habits and how they will live in the lives of our students over the course of the year.

8 Hours a Day

Which brings me to my last number of social learning, 8.  Our school is designed to work with kids in approximately an 8 hour day.  Within those 8 hours we craft experiences for students to optimize their learning.  In 8 hours each school day, we have the opportunity to provide experiences that help kids learn reading, writing, math, social studies, science, PE, Spanish, and visual and performing arts.  We also have the opportunity to provide experiences where kids learn the skills that embody the 2 types of character articulated by our 4 scholarly habits in the first 6 weeks of school.

I end with the number 8, because school doesn't end with the first 6 weeks.  Rather the 8 hour days continue, and within those time frames just as we craft amazing lessons in social studies and math, we also are mindful of crafting amazing lessons in social learning.  In fact, only when students are challenged by the level of work and demands of living in a vibrant learning community are they ever able to develop scholarly habits.  While the first 6 weeks introduces them to the traits of character, it is the work that happens during the 8 hour days for the rest of the year in which students develop and master their own scholarly habits.   

The Two Rivers Instructional Leadership Team: Guiding Our Educational Mission

By: Laura Lorenzen with Jeff Heyck-Williams

From the initial founding of Two Rivers, we have been guided by the belief that to be a truly great school, we must reflect upon our progress; research, explore and analyze best educational practices; and evaluate student data  -- all with the aim of providing the highest quality of instruction to prepare our students to have “rich and varied options for their future.” 

The Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) is a little-known part of Two Rivers that plays a large role in guiding our educational practices.  Composed of teacher leaders, Instructional Guides, the Elementary School and Middle School Principals, Executive Director and other members of the school leadership, the ILT meets regularly to explore cutting edge issues and to seek continuous improvement in our classroom instruction.  The primary charge of the ILT at Two Rivers is to give direction to the entire organization in reaching our mission through defining an instructional focus each year and developing action steps related to our instructional focus that help us continually improve learning.

The ILT, perhaps more than any other group at Two Rivers, takes time to analyze and reflect upon the ways in which our organizational structure and day-to-day activities are contributing to the accomplishment of our mission.   From this view “on the balcony”, the ILT is then in a unique position to develop forward-thinking action steps.   

GROUNDING OUR WORK IN RESEARCH

To guide our reflection, members of the ILT take time engaging in rigorous research: reading, writing, speaking with experts in and outside of education, and participating in dialogue about best practices.   For example, in the last couple of months, the ILT has read two articles about organizational leadership; the article “The Work of Leadership” by Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie and a chapter from The Power of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky.  Both pieces highlighted the difference between adaptive and technical challenges.  Technical challenges are challenges that can be addressed with the current skills and beliefs simply by changing how an organization acts.  In contrast, adaptive challenges are challenges where a response requires a change in beliefs or core values.  These readings inspired rich discussions about our vision for the school, adaptive challenges facing Two Rivers as we move forward to accomplish our mission, and steps that, as leaders, we can take to help the school overcome those adaptive challenges.

However, our observations and plans for improvement are not simply based in consideration of current organizational and educational theory alone.  The ILT also conducts robust analysis of school-wide and classroom data.  We view data broadly as anything that can be used as evidence for a given perspective or argument.  Thus we certainly look at the standard testing measures that have become a norm in American schools.  However, we also take into account other vital forms of data including classroom observations, personal interviews with teachers, students, and parents, as well as examining the products that students produce in class. 

To collect these other forms of data the ILT has spent time making observations in classrooms at Two Rivers and other schools with reputations for high quality programs.  In these observations we explore the best practices, to learn what works and what would fit within the mission and culture of Two Rivers.  This year, our observations began at home with a Two Rivers’ learning walk.  In visiting three classrooms – Ms. Jane’s 1^st grade class, Ms. Kathleen’s Kindergarten class, and Senor Cody’s 5^th grade Spanish class – we were able to observe how teachers have already begun to live our instructional focus for 2012-13.  Children were active, engaged, and independent.  Five and 6 year olds were playing with math concepts and explaining their thinking about those concepts.  Our learning walk inspired still more discussion about how to deepen the work at Two Rivers and how to bring this inspiring vision to the broader community.

As stated above a key function of the ILT is to examine data from a variety of assessments, including the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) from the Northwest Evaluation Association and the Achievement Network (ANET) tests, as well as our state test, the DC-CAS. In this analysis, the members of the ILT identify overall patterns of achievement as well as where to target individual student needs.  Our analysis of the data last year led the ILT to overhaul our Middle School math program, resulting in gains of over 15% in our MS student DC-CAS math scores over the previous years.  This was one of the largest gains in the entire city, and makes Two Rivers Middle School one of the top performing Middle Schools in DC. 

ASSESSING EXPERT THINKING

From this research and the rich discussion it spawns comes rich and exciting work.  In the past two years, the ILT has led several key initiatives at Two Rivers.  Among the most groundbreaking was to develop and field test an assessment of expert thinking.   Our focus on expert thinking is grounded in the belief that, in order to succeed in the 21^st Century, students must be able to do more than simply memorize rote information or perform routine procedures.  Yet while leading educational experts have begun to describe what it means to engage in expert thinking, little to no guidance exists on how to measure whether students are truly engaging in expert thinking.

The ILT Task Force on Assessing Expert Thinking developed a tool that proved it is possible to assess the ability of students at multiple grade levels to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information – in other words, to engage in expert thinking – in one class session.  The Task Force’s work also provided important information about the type of instructional practices that are needed in order to build expert thinking in students.  And, finally, the Task Force developed a Two Rivers Taxonomy of Expert Thinking that grouped the different dimensions of Expert Thinking into five distinct categories consisting of specific actions.    

This year, the Task Force on Assessing Expert Thinking will continue this work in order to expand our assessment of expert thinking school-wide.  By defining the specific expert thinking categories and creating an assessment tool that gives information on individual student’s level of mastery of those skills, we will both have a better sense of how our students are growing as well as give clear direction to our teachers about the kinds of skills our students should be developing.

DEFINING OUR INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS

Finally, the ILT also defines and refines our instructional focus for the school year.  The Instructional Focus becomes the center of our professional development activities for the year and guides our practice.  This year’s instructional focus is to provide daily opportunities for students to construct and demonstrate in-depth understanding by creating and facilitating tasks for all students that help them cultivate expert thinking and complex communication while applying basic skills and knowledge.  As the ILT’s recent learning walk made clear, the Instructional Focus is already being lived out in the classrooms, with remarkable results.

Throughout the year, we will be sharing some of the cutting edge work engaged in by the ILT and the Two Rivers community.  Few schools in the country are engaged in the type of rigorous research, reflection, and analysis that characterize our community.  We are proud of this work and our continued commitment to excellence in education that have made us a leader in 21^st Century education. 

The Importance of Professional Development

by: Jeff Heyck-Williams

Wednesday afternoons at Two Rivers look and feel different.  The hustle and bustle of kids diligently working, problem solving, and collaborating during the school day is replaced by the hustle and bustle of teachers diligently working, problem solving, and collaborating to improve their instructional practice.  This past Wednesday for example, teachers spent half an hour reading a chapter on how to differentiate a mathematics task from Math for All: Differentiating Instruction by Linda Dacey.  They followed this with another half-hour discussion of the selection, and then hour figuring out how to apply the strategies for differentiation that they learned from the reading to a sample problem-based task for a math class. They concluded the afternoon, planning for how they will differentiate in their own classes.

We dedicate a lot of time to professional development of teachers at Two Rivers.  We start off every school year with a three-week orientation before students even arrive.  Then, every Wednesday afternoon, we set aside three hours for our teaching staff to focus on their practice.  In addition, we have several full days of professional development throughout the year.

All of this begs the question: why would we allocate such a precious resource of teacher time to growing and developing our teachers?  Wouldn't time be better spent by giving kids more instructional time?

With these questions in mind, we make the precious allocation of time to teacher professional development without hesitation because we believe (and our data has proven this to be true) that improving our students' learning is contingent on improving our teachers' learning.

To meet the needs of the diverse community of learners, teachers have to be able grow and adapt their skills. Teaching is not a job in which a teacher can take a scripted lesson plan and come up with effective learning for all of her or his students every time.  Teaching is dynamic, challenging work that requires a huge volume of specialized knowledge and skills to do effectively.  In other words, teaching is a profession.  As a profession, it requires continuous targeted growth and development.

That is to say, we must maintain in the words of Carol Dweck a growth mindset.  In her work, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck delineates two broad mindsets that people potentially bring to a task or their work: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.  She writes "In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits...  They... believe that talent alone creates success - without effort," and in contrast "In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work - brains and talent are just a starting point."  Through her work, she has shown that people who have met with success time and time again have done so with a growth mindset, a belief that through effort we can get better.  This concept applies to any endeavor, and thus it applies to teaching.

If we are serious about improving the outcomes of education we must maintain a growth mindset, engender that in our students, and also significantly engender that in our teachers.  This means spending time and money on having great educators improve their craft.  I intentionally point out that I'm not just talking about the struggling teachers that are failing students everyday in too many schools.  These teachers definitely need support to improve their work.  However, I'm also talking about our best teachers that teach at successful schools like Two Rivers.  By allocating the resources of time, money, and energy to growing these professionals, teachers get better at what they do.  This translates into better outcomes for kids.

Rigor Redefined

By: Elaine Hou

What is rigorous teaching and learning, and what does it look like across the grades?

As students, educators, and parents, we have all come across varied definitions of rigor in past and present schooling experiences. When one wants to understand a school’s framework for rigor, a great place to start is the school’s mission. The mission statement articulates what type of student the school strives to develop through its curriculum, programming and structures, teacher professional development, parent involvement structures, and overall culture. The mission provides the school community with a vision for the type of future that is important for all its students.

Before trying to understand different frameworks and examples of rigor, it is important to first assess rigor in the cohesion between a school’s mission and how it is lived out daily within, across, and outside of classroom life. A truly mission-driven school is first and foremost rigorous in its integrity, found in a true mission-reality match. To understand rigor, it is also important to assess how a school’s mission and work prepare students for the future world beyond its walls-a future that is rapidly changing in the 21st century. Finally, rigor must be examined in the learning opportunities that a school provides its students across the years, as well as for all its students in their diverse learning affinities and academic and social needs.

The Importance of Mission

First, a school tells its story of rigor and shows its heart through its mission. A review of a myriad of school missions across D.C. and in the nation brings up the common words of “future”, “citizenship”, “society” and even the word “rigor” itself. In our current national trend, most urban schools that serve predominantly disadvantaged students are driven by the commitment to give students access to college. The means to this future is primarily through working hard toward achieving proficient standardized test scores as a gateway to high school and college admissions. As a contrast, most private, ‘progressive’ schools that serve predominantly advantaged students in background and academic level are driven by a commitment to rigor through cultivating creativity, innovation, and global citizenry. Since their students are chosen and admitted based on their incoming proficiency, and they are often not held accountable through standardized testing, these schools focus their attention on cultivating what is both valuable and does not need to be so easily measured in high-stakes tests. Beyond trying to reach out to underrepresented minority students in the ‘gifted and talented’ category, most progressive schools usually do not find themselves taking part in the dialogue about closing the national achievement gap.

Bridging the 21st Century Rigor Gap

As we examine these polar opposites of schooling trends, one must wonder about progressive models for diverse, integrated student populations that have a vast range of background and learning needs. Expeditionary Learning schools like Two Rivers take a compelling position in between the polarities of rigor, through both focusing on high-stakes test performance and rigor through projects and performance tasks outside of standardized testing. Expeditionary schools use a project and inquiry-based approach to give all students access to rigorous learning experiences, while also making sure their students have strong performance on basic skills tests. In this context, rigor is defined by teaching to transferable and sophisticated skills and understandings while also ensuring all students develop a strong fund of knowledge and skills. Here, the mission is not solely defined by standardized testing, nor does it sit completely outside of its accountability. Instead of this either-or paradigm, this type of mission acknowledges the value of testing in making sure we are serving all our students, while also acknowledging that everything a student needs in the 21st century is not captured by traditional testing itself.

Progressive schools like Two Rivers, who strive to give their diverse student body access to rich and varied options for their futures, understand that there cannot be two separate definitions of rigor for those behind in basic skills and those with proficient or advanced basic skills. In closing the achievement gap, a school’s definition of rigor must include a mission to give all students, no matter what skill level they come in with, opportunities to develop creative thinking, higher-level questioning, meta-cognitive habits of mind, and opportunities to solve different types of problems instead of the same set of problems found on a high-stakes test. This definition of rigor acknowledges that proficiency as solely defined by current standardized testing is no longer enough to prepare our students for college admissions, as well as success through the demands of college and work life in the 21st century. To not have one cohesive standard for rigor for all students is not just a debate about different models of education-it is essentially an equity issue.

The Role of Common Core

The transition to the Common Core standards provides an interesting and timely window into the evolving story of rigor across our nation’s schools. Schools like Two Rivers find themselves well positioned for the change, since they have always organized the standards around deeper conceptual understandings and assessing higher levels of thinking, questioning, and problem-solving. The mission of these schools has driven this type of rigorous instruction long before the Common Core came into the picture. With the Common Core, teachers in schools like Two Rivers now find that standardized testing is changing to more accurately capture how they have always planned and organized teaching and learning in the classroom. Schools who from the beginning were driven by a commitment to the same type of rigor for all students, do not need to suddenly undergo an adaptive change in their curriculum, instructional structures, and assessment practices to be ready for the Common Core. Instead, these core pieces are already in place to support proficiency in new standards and tests that have finally caught up to the type of rigorous learning that should be high stakes for everyone.

Rigor Across the Grades

In Teaching What Matters Most, Strong, Silver, and Perini argue for a definition of rigor that extends beyond the level of work itself. They define rigor as “what students are able to do as a result of the work they are engaged in.” A school that is driven by a mission for rigor is committed to providing the same rigorous opportunities across its grades for all ages and all students. It articulates an intentional curricular framework and implements instructional strategies that weave a strong continuum of learning and teaching from its earliest grade to its graduating grade. The core learning that takes place in each grade is always building toward what students should be able to do and understand in the next grades and beyond the walls of the school. Rigorous curricular and instructional design is defined by a thoughtful and skillful balance of developmental appropriateness and scaffolding toward higher and deeper levels of understanding and proficiency. In fact, a commitment to developmental appropriateness and student relevance should work in service of cultivating students as expert thinkers and complex communicators through the years, so they are fully equipped to be successful in the 21st century.

Expeditions

As a preschool through 8th grade Expeditionary Learning school, Two Rivers has designed a strong curricular framework that ensures every student experiences both depth and breadth of learning throughout his or her school career. Every grade delivers its social studies and science curriculum with authentic literacy integration through two expeditions per year. Every expedition is situated in either a discipline of science or social studies, and is driven by a compelling topic and expert role that brings standards to life with relevant local and global issues. A strong continuum of rigor is woven through the the transferable types of thinking and understanding that underlie and tie together expeditions across the grades. In addition to the mastery of important content knowledge and basic skills each year, students also have the opportunity to build on transferable conceptual understanding and an increasingly sophisticated thinking repertoire for solving complex problems.

A Rigor Continuum Snapshot

Two Rivers just finished a semester of rich expeditions, culminating in showcases of learning for families and the larger community. These expeditions offer a compelling snapshot of how the school offers a continuum of rigor to its students throughout the years. For example, students in preschool begin to learn how people communicate their ideas and stories through music, dance, rhythm, expression, and organization in their fall storytelling expedition. As expert storytellers, they learn how they each have a story to share, and how they can use a combination of strategies and mediums to best share that story with an audience. When these preschoolers reach first grade, they build on their understanding of storytelling to become expert journalists in their fall culture expedition. The first grade journalists learn to research and tell the stories of diverse immigrant groups in a local D.C. market that is in danger of being closed. Developmentally, they are ready to move their storytelling expertise from a story centered around self to their expanding world of community and diversity.

When these first graders move into fourth grade, they again build on their understanding of culture and storytelling to move into a more complex role of historian and archaeologist. In their expedition on Jamestown, the fourth grade archaeologists work to reconstruct a more complete story of the Jamestown settlement by examining the artifacts and narratives of three distinct cultures that encountered one another and created history together. They learn to analyze primary and secondary sources, thoughtfully discern the perspective and bias found in the telling of history, and learn to equally seek what is told and what is left out when trying reconstruct history as a story. Through the Jamestown expedition, the students uncover and discover the past as an ever-evolving story that needs continuous investigation and examination. From preschool to fourth grade, their understanding and work as storytellers has blossomed in complexity from understanding self to understanding community, and now telling stories that tie past, present, and future together through multiple perspectives.

This continuum of storytelling as expert thinking culminates in seventh grade, when students are able to transfer their conceptual understandings about storytelling and perspective in the social studies disciplines to a science-based expedition on disease and outbreak. As expert epidemiologists, students engage in scientific inquiry using research, data, and experimentation to understand the inner workings of cell biology and disease. This work is enriched by language arts research of historical, fictional and dystopian storytelling about disease, plague, and outbreak. The weaving of these multiple strands of science, history, and language arts allow the seventh graders to apply their previous understandings of storytelling in this rich, interdisciplinary middle school expedition. In the context of disease and outbreak, they are now able to create stories that show the interplay of scientific discovery and social consequence on a personal, societal, and historical level.

Building on the increasingly complex and transferable cognitive and social skills of storytelling, these seventh graders will again be able to transfer their understanding and thinking to a new context beyond the walls of Two Rivers. The continuum of rigorous thinking and performance they have traversed since preschool has equipped them to be effective global citizens when they enter the work force and a rapidly changing society. They will be able to use storytelling as a means to understanding and solving the most pressing 21 century problems for which there are no solutions yet.

Similar continua of expert thinking are found in other developmental strands across the grades at Two Rivers. Throughout prekindergarten, kindergarten, and eighth grade, expeditions situated in construction, simple machines, and the nature of progress build on conceptual understandings and increasingly sophisticated skills of hypothesizing, planning, testing, and revising theories. Across second grade, third grade, fifth grade, and sixth grade, students engage in expert thinking in law, geology, chemistry, and food economics through learning how to solve problems that demand close examination and synthesis of increasingly complex factors and sometimes contradictory data points. In all of these continua of rigor across the grades, schools like Two Rivers provide the fertile soil of meaningful and enduring learning from which students can grow 21st century strong!


Rigor for All Students

A school can have a rigorous mission, curricular framework, and instructional model that works for some or even most students, but if it does give all students equal access to the same type of rigor, then it is not a truly rigorous school. Many schools define and provide their rigor predominantly through the tracking of students, but the students in lower tracks are often not given the opportunity to develop creativity, innovative thinking, and problem-solving skills in authentic contexts. While schools with tracking tend to have a more diverse student body, they continue to perpetuate the 21st century rigor gap. It takes not only intentional curriculum design but also a broad, more multi-faceted, and skillful model of differentiation within and across classrooms to give rigor to all students.

If groupings were only defined by proficiency on assessments of basic skills and knowledge, and determined only after teaching and learning has already occurred, then that is all a school would have--static, unchanging groups that defeat the purpose of differentiating to specific student strengths, interests, and needs across learning experiences over time. A school that is truly committed to rigor for all its students makes sure to ask the two essential questions: 1) What are we differentiating toward? and 2) How will we get all students ultimately to that same outcome through different pathways? If the mission of the school is to help students cultivate basic skills in service of expert thinking, then it will make sure to assess students in factual, procedural, and conceptual understanding. With more broad data that is regularly collected and used while learning is still happening, teachers will make groups that are more flexible within and across learning units. Students in different flexible groups will be working within their present knowledge, skill, and understanding level, all tied back to the larger conceptual understandings at the heart of the learning. A model of differentiation based on continuous assessments for learning around content, process, and concept will also be flexible in how students learn and represent their understanding. Finally, differentiation with rigor for all in mind involves a teaching model in which all staff in their various roles (general education teacher, special education teacher, assistant teacher, etc.) work hard to collaborate and use a variety of teaching structures such as co-teaching, parallel teaching, guided instruction, centers, and conferencing with fluid groups of students to meet their changing needs and accelerate growth for everyone.

For example, in our fifth grade chemistry of cooking expedition, the teachers begin each investigation with a robust pre-assessment to determine where students are in their knowledge of states of matter, specific skills in the scientific method, and understanding of chemical change. They then use the data to determine flexible groups to meet students’ specific content, skill, and concept needs within a focused period of learning. Differentiation is driven by the intent of moving students to the next level of skill and understanding, as students move through the on-going cycles of teaching, collecting and analyzing data, regrouping, re-teaching and extending. All the teachers in that grade-level collaborate in creating assessments, analyzing the data, creating flexible group plans, examining new data to shape next steps in teaching, and share in the teaching responsibilities for different flexible groups of students. Unlike the traditional model of differentiation, students will often work with different peers across learning periods because of the intentional, on-going use of data to create new groups and move students forward in thinking and understanding. For students’ final products of learning, their work often represents the growth they made in an area of focus, demonstrating both a differentiated and connected aspect of conceptual understanding. In this past chemistry of cooking expedition, students were able to present the chemistry of food preservation at lab stations and in their individual persuasive guide writing pieces. Both final performance tasks allowed students to demonstrate the specific level of expertise they mastered in the expedition, while tying that focused area of knowledge, skill, and understanding to transferable expert thinking work. This model of differentiation in both process and product shows how differentiation and rigor truly go hand in hand.

Closing

In 21 Century Skills: Learning For Life in Our Times, Trilling and Fadel state: “The crux of success or failure is to know which core values to hold on to, and which to discard and replace when times change.” The work of a single educator, a school, and nation-wide education reform should always be rooted in equity for every student that participates in the American school experience. What needs to change is the fragmentation of that American school experience when it comes to how rigor is defined and provided for students of different backgrounds and needs. We need to redefine rigor through connecting education reform to the thinking dispositions and cognitive and social skills needed in 21st century college and workforce demands, learn more about innovative models like expeditionary learning, and collaborate across disciplines and areas of expertise. Our own learning will ensure that learning is not merely informational for some students and formational for others, but transformational for all.