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.

‘Two Rivers University Series’ Part 2: Parents as Learners

By: Elaine Hou

In continuing the ‘Two Rivers University’ Series, this piece explores parents as active learners in a school environment like Two Rivers. Parents actively engage in learning rhythms through participating in back-to-school nights, family conferences, parent education workshops, celebrating learning at our end-of-semester expedition showcases, as well as engaging in informal learning conversations with teachers and fellow parents. Through both the culture and structures we have, parents, like teachers, have opportunities to learn and grow so that they can better partner with the school to help their children thrive toward our mission of life-long learning.

Why is parent learning so important?

In Learning By Heart, Eric Hoffer’s quote emphasizes the importance of life-long learning:"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." The world that parents experienced school in is very different than the one in which their children are currently learning to navigate.

At the heart of this change is a dilemma that parents find themselves in as they support their children’s success in school: The definitions and measurements for success in the 20th century, which is the familiar educational world parents know, have unfortunately not caught up to the outcomes that are necessary to measure and cultivate in the 21st century. As students, many parents grew up with rigor that was defined and measured by the teaching of basic skills, practice with using formulas, and broad coverage of content assessed by standardized testing. Many of us associate rigor with the hefty textbooks of our childhoods, full of dense text and practice problems, coupled by hours of studying to replicate success on the same types of problems taught in class. Project-based learning, problem-based task teaching, and creative problem-solving was considered more of an enrichment, rather than what rigor needed to be for every student. However, in the 21st century, what was an enriching add-on for those considered advanced is now an urgent redefinition of rigor for all, in which every student must not only build a set of basic skills and knowledge but also be able to flexibly use their skills to solve increasingly complex problems. Memorizing long strings of facts, regurgitating content in the same types of assessments or contexts, and learning in homogeneous, tracked systems-the hallmarks of 20th century school success-are not enough for our students anymore to compete for rich and varied options in a globally connected 21st century.

Parents who are learners are willing to seek out knowledge, resources, and experiences to adapt to this evolving definition of rigor. They are open to engaging with models of rigor that characterize the great schools that the 21st century world demands-ones like Two Rivers in which depth over breadth is valued. Parents who are learners value collaboration with diverse individuals in settings and experiences that mirror our increasingly diverse, integrated world.

How do parents learn at Two Rivers?

Back-to-School Night and Conferences

At Two Rivers, every classroom hosts a Back-to-School Night at the end of the first month of school. At this event, families have an opportunity to both actively participate in and learn about their children’s classroom community, goals for the year, structures for learning, and on-going ways to communicate and partner with the school. Parents experience a day in the life of their child, as well as explore the full scope of what is to come for their child in that new grade level. Throughout the rest of the year, parents refer back to this night as an anchor and lens for understanding future learning experiences, having experienced a slice of the world their child engages in every day.

Following Back-to-School Night in September, parents participate in three important parent-teacher conferences throughout the year. The first conference in November is the critical beginning conversation about how their child is acclimating to the classroom environment, participating in learning expectations, and what strengths, affinities, and learning needs have emerged for the student. The parent learns the full “data story” for their child, in which teachers share the multiple snapshots that Two Rivers provides about every student in the core content areas of math, literacy, science and social studies inquiry in expeditions, and social-emotional development. Parents learn not only how students are developing in basic skills and knowledge in core areas, but also how students are cultivating the transferable skills of flexible problem-solving and healthy risk-taking to solve any type of problem. They also learn how students are specifically doing in relationship to their grade-level peers, and actively participate with teachers to create an action plan for progress in the next months before the January conference. It is also important to highlight that the first November conference builds the foundation for a positive parent-teacher relationship, which will foster on-going communication and partnership throughout the rest of the year. The next two conferences in January and June are both timed intentionally to provide important follow-up to action plans created, evaluate what progress the student has made in all core areas, and have crucial dialogue about the student’s readiness for the next grade level. In these conferences, parents and teachers learn from one another how to best support the child’s learning and development. This learning ensures that no matter where the child is at the beginning of the year, there is intentional dialogue and partnership throughout the year to support the growth of every child.

Parent Education Nights

At Two Rivers, parent education provides an important means to achieving the mission for every student at Two Rivers. We know that our parents are our students’ first teachers. Our parent education nights are intended to educate and empower parents, inviting them into essential partnership for every child’s life-long learning.

Every year, Two Rivers hosts four parent education nights around the following core areas: Expeditionary learning, culture and Responsive Classroom, math, and literacy. This year, our Expeditionary learning night focused on the model of rigor we provide for every student through our expeditions and problem-based task teaching. On that night, parents had the opportunity to participate in a slice of a rigorous sixth grade expedition on the economics of food. Just like our middle school students, the parents investigated multiple perspectives of the problem of healthy eating in the face of environmental, economic, and personal factors. The parent night provided a window into the rich learning and complex problem-solving that our sixth graders engage in throughout the 12 weeks of their expedition. For our parents who attended this night, they walked away with a more complete understanding of the expeditionary learning model, as well as the outcomes we work for in our students that extend beyond factual knowledge into expert thinking and complex communication. Parent nights like Expeditionary Learning night also enable parents to begin asking more informed questions around their students’ learning, so they can better understand and partner with the school in reaching common, powerful outcomes for their children.

Following our parent night on Expeditionary learning, our parents participated in a culture parent education night in which they learned about parenting using the growth versus fixed mindset. This workshop gave parents the opportunity to dialogue with and learn from one another through a common framework of mindsets. Parents who participated in this night walked away with tools and new questions about using the language of descriptive feedback versus general praise, connecting the hopes and dreams they have for their child’s life-long success to what they can actively do here and now.

Coming up in the spring semester, families will have the opportunity to participate in our math festival night in January and literacy festival night in March. Unlike the Expeditionary learning and culture parent nights, parents can bring their children to math and literacy festival nights and are highly encouraged to engage in learning together! These two festival nights give families the opportunity to participate in fun, simple, and interactive learning experiences that foster mathematical inquiry and a love for reading and writing in both parent and child alike. There is more of a center approach and room for engaging in informal learning conversations with your child, with staff, and with other parents. At Math Night, parents also have an opportunity to try an array of exciting, mind-boggling ‘Mathemagical Wizardry’ problems with their children, learning how to approach open-ended problems that invite multiple, creative solution paths. In fact, through whole-school community meeting celebrations, parents get to participate in the ‘Mathemagical Wizadry’ experience every week beyond Math Festival Night. Through solving each problem as a family and turning in the solution together, parents learn how to love math, love tackling challenges, and model that love and perseverance for their children.

In each of our parent nights and our weekly math celebrations, there is always a thoughtfulness that characterizes the learning conversations we have as a parent community, reflecting the on-going learning that parents engage in about themselves, their children, the school’s mission, and their imperative role in helping their child achieve that mission.

Showcase Nights

There is an excited buzz in the air around mid-December and mid-May, when families attend showcase learning nights at Two Rivers. Showcases are culminating celebrations of learning, in which every class presents the story of their learning process and authentic learning products within expeditions. Parents have heard pieces of expeditionary learning throughout the semester, and have perhaps even participated in field studies related to the expedition. Showcase night is where all the pieces come together and parents learn the full picture of how students investigated and solved the problem-based task at the heart of their expeditions. Parents learn both the content and process of learning that students engaged in. This includes not only the fund of knowledge at the core of the science or social studies discipline, but also the big ideas and expert thinking involved in tackling the rich problem that drove the entire expedition adventure. Parents also experience first-hand how the arts are integrated into content learning through the dramatic and musical expedition performances. They see how our arts program gives students creative avenues to both learn and communicate their learning. Over the past seven years, Two Rivers is proud of a consistently high parent attendance rate for every showcase night. This strong representation of parents reflects the parent culture of commitment and excitement we have in celebrating student learning.

Through each of these school-wide experiences, parents are evolving learners as they work hard to support their children’s learning. As a learning community, families are committed to learning and using common language and experiences between home and school to support both academic and social-emotional success for our students. Moreover, Two Rivers strives to foster a culture of respect and trust in our parent community, in which parents have formal and informal opportunities to reflect on their personal journeys, find connections, and learn from the wonderfully diverse community we have. This powerful adult learning translates directly into expanding the possibilities of what our children can learn, achieve, and become.

Parents and Teachers as Learners: Closing Thoughts

What distinguishes a good school from a great school? It is one in which every adult member of the learning community works in service of the child, engaging in personal and collective learning so that children can become active learners and participants in their own education. Parents, teachers, and school leaders all participate in this learning so that our children can learn better and achieve fuller visions of themselves. At ‘Two Rivers University’, everyone is a student no matter how old you are or what role you play. The degree received is an ever-evolving one of life-long learner.

A New Vision for Proficiency: A Call for Expanded Outcomes for Education

by Jeff Heyck-Williams

Anyone who has had a conversation with me about education or has taken time to read any of my previous posts on this blog knows that I am passionate about what I have come to describe as expanded outcomes for education. This idea is at the heart of the mission of Two Rivers and of what we believe defines innovative education for the 21st century. My earlier writings on our mission, on the nature of curriculum, and about the types of tasks and experiences that we need to provide for our students are founded on this idea.

So what is this idea?

To explain, I’ll share my reactions to a report that I recently finished reading on the state of math education in the United States and recommendations for improvement. Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics is a report written by the Mathematics Learning Study Committee of the National Research Council published in 2001. As I read, I was struck that this report both reaffirmed my commitment to expanded outcomes and disheartened me as I considered how little has changed in the 10 years since this report was published. Both reactions are part of my own response to the state of education in the US and where we need to go. Together they illustrate what I mean by a new vision for proficiency as the outcomes for education.

Ironically the same year that the National Research Council published Adding It Up, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I say ironically because as Adding It Up laid a firm rationale for an expanded vision for what it means to be mathematically proficient, Congress passed a well intentioned law that ultimately reinforced and calcified an existing reductionist view of the outcomes for math education. To be fair, NCLB does not dictate what it means to be mathematically proficient. It leaves that up to the states. However, NCLB did force states to create state standards in two areas, math and reading that raised these two subjects over all others in the curriculum. On their own initiative, states created standards and aligned assessments that too often reinforced a limited view of what it means to be mathematically proficient. Namely that most of what students needed to develop was rote procedural fluency in mathematics (i.e. quick arithmetic). Thus over the ten years since the publication of Adding It Up and the enactment of NCLB, we find ourselves nationally with possibly a more limited view of educational outcomes than when we started.

However, Adding It Up is a clarion call for a broader vision for what it means to be mathematically proficient. In the report, the authors argue that mathematical proficiency is defined by five interwoven strands. They include conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and a productive disposition. While proficiency does include the ability to solve standard computational problems efficiently, procedural fluency is encompassed in only one aspect of what it means to be proficient. Unfortunately most state assessments only test students procedural fluency in a multitude of strands of mathematics. However, students also need to be able to make sense of what they are doing when computing or solving a problem and demonstrate understanding of the underlying concepts. They need strategies for solving non-routine problems and an ability to reason effectively about both their methods and solutions. Finally the report argues that an equally important outcome is productive disposition. In other words, students need to love math or at very least see it as a useful worthwhile discipline in which to engage.

As Adding It Up addresses what it means to be well educated in mathematics, works like Frank Levy and Richard Murnane’s The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market and Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel’s 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times address what it means to be proficient more generally across disciplines. Two Rivers has taken the terms expert thinking and complex communication from Levy and Murnane’s work to describe what these expanded learning outcomes look like. However, regardless of the terms we use, the point is the same. To fully realize the potential for all of our students and to provide each of them with rich and varied options for their futures, we must see beyond providing proficiency on any single test. We must have a new vision of proficiency that encompasses the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills of life-long learning. To do anything less is truly leaving our children behind.

Five Things Families Can Do To Support Their Children in Math

By: Jeff Heyck-Williams

Math can be one of the most challenging areas of school for children, and many parents don’t have an idea about where to begin to help their kids be successful within the discipline. A lot of websites, video games, and materials are produced that are designed to help kids develop procedural fluency with computation, but they sap the pleasure out of a subject that can be as fun as it is difficult. Helping our children be successful in math we need to recognize the full breadth and depth of mathematics learning. This means we need to take into account what kids understand about all of the domains of math, how they problem solve, their attitudes towards the subject, and of course their ability to calculate accurately as well. So what could this look like for a parent working and playing with their child at home. Here are five things that I share with parents that can have a huge positive impact on their child’s mathematical life.

1. Be Positive

Some of us had awesome experiences with school mathematics or despite our experience with school mathematics have come to love the subject anyway. Unfortunately that isn’t the norm. Most adults (parents and teachers included) are indifferent to mathematics at best if they don’t downright despise the subject. These attitudes have been passed down from generation to generation both through the way that we talk about math with friends and family as well as math programs in school that emphasize a lock-step algorithmic approach to mathematics. These programs place computational fluency above any other form of mathematical proficiency. Math is portrayed as a subject in which you must follow these exact steps and your answer is always right or wrong. There is little room for creativity or fun. Thus math becomes the required hoop to jump through and not a joyful end in and of itself. This is a distorted view of a vibrant exciting subject with a rich history.

For our children to reach their potential, we must break a cycle of negativity. If we truly are dedicated to providing rich and varied options for our children’s futures, we must give our students a positive disposition towards this amazing subject. This means never saying “I hate math” or “I don’t like math,” phrases which are unfortunately all too common. When applied to other core skills like reading and writing, these phrases would be considered taboo. For some reason they are expected in regards to math.

So even if math is not your favorite subject (and everyone has a least favorite subject), don’t make it out to be a distasteful requirement by the way you talk about it. There are plenty of nasty things to be negative about doing and that you want your children to think of in a negative light. However school subjects and math in particular shouldn’t be one of them.

2. Have High Expectations and Communicate Effort Matters

All students can develop a conceptual understanding of mathematics and solve complex problems using math. However, not all students learn in the same way or at the same rate. With this in mind, it is worth acknowledging that math can be difficult. However, it is this very nature that makes, mathematics so enjoyable. After all, consider the level of satisfaction one achieves when accomplishing a task that initially seems impossible.

Thus we need to expect our children to work difficult problems without giving them the answers or insisting on a single particular path to a solution. This means allowing them to use the mathematics that they do know to solve problems, and allowing them to make sense of the solution paths that we might show them. It also means we need to show them that we will support them and that they will be successful as they take classes that require high levels of mathematical proficiency. Ultimately, we expect them to take statistics and calculus whether in high school or college and that they will understand it.

Connecting this idea to the previous one, we shouldn’t ever tell our children “I can’t do math” or “I can’t do this or that problem.” Instead we should communicate to them honestly that a problem may be difficult and we might not find an answer immediately, however with effort, support, and persistence then we can succeed. Carol Dweck outlines the research that supports this point of view in her work Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She argues that with effort and a growth mindset we can improve our performance. It is when we have a fixed mindset and are convinced that we won’t succeed that we don’t.

All of our children can learn to love mathematics, enrich their understanding of the world through a greater appreciation of the mathematical structures in everything around them, and can ultimately be successful in doing high-level mathematical work. Few of us as parents have all the tools to help our children reach their full mathematical potential. However, we have one of the most powerful tools available for setting them on the right path. That is we can help shape our children’s attitudes and beliefs about math. Help them to see it in a positive light and that with persistence, effort, and support they will reach the high expectations we set for them.

3. Recognize the Math Around You

Mathematics is all around us. We just need to stop to recognize it and point it out tour children. Whether it is having young children sort the laundry, or helping an older child create and maintain a budget, we are showing our children that there is mathematics all around them. From measuring for cooking to statistics in sports, mathematics permeates our lives.

Building off of my previous two recommendations seeing the mathematics around us, provides for students an opportunity to see the importance of understanding concepts that are formalized in their mathematics classrooms. It provides for them a motivation to understand this math and to use it to help explain the world around them.

4. Play with Math

Math is fun. To really believe this, we need to play with math. This can include tons of things you already do like building with blocks, stringing beads to make jewelry, completing jigsaw puzzles, or playing board games. It means looking for the math imbedded in each of these activities. Look for opportunities for counting, making patterns, sorting, and problem solving. All of these illustrate mathematical concepts that provide real world experience for how math is fun.

Another amazing way to play with math, is to work math puzzles or solve math riddles like the Mathemagical Wizardry Prize at Two Rivers. Each week I provide a problem for the whole school to work. A couple of features about these problems make them ideal for playing with math. First, questions typically have lots of different pathways to solutions and occasionally they have multiple solutions. This allows for a wide variety of children and adults to engage in the problems. In addition, it reinforces the conceptual understanding of the problem as it can be approached from multiple perspectives. Second, they are designed to allow for children to work on with their families, with their classmates, or alone. So they can become a regular tradition that allows everyone an opportunity to dig into the problems.

Regardless of how we approach it, we need to learn to find pleasure in math, and help our children enjoy it as well.

5. Support Math Homework through Engagement with Your Child and the Math

Last, but not least, I would be remiss if I didn’t make a recommendation about the one area of school mathematics that parents have some hand in: homework. The purpose of math homework at Two Rivers is twofold. First, homework is a mechanism for teaching children skills of independence. Specifically, homework teaches students responsibility for their work, perseverance when the work is challenging, and self-advocacy skills in the upper grades as they talk to their teachers about the level of difficulty of the work: whether it was too easy or too difficult. Secondly, we intend for math homework to provide an opportunity for students to reinforce procedural fluency. In other words, homework is a place to practice the foundational basic skills and knowledge of mathematics.

With all of that said, homework, does not communicate the whole of our curriculum. Students are not tackling the most challenging open-ended tasks that we give to them while in school through homework. More importantly, homework addresses two goals that are important for mathematical proficiency, namely independence and procedural fluency. However, as outlined the National Research Council’s 2001 report, Adding it Up, they recognize that proficiency is not defined solely by procedural fluency, but also by strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, conceptual understanding, and productive disposition as well. Goals that are not well suited for homework assignments. That is to say we believe that mathematics is more then developing efficient methods of computation, but also include understanding the mathematical structure behind problems, solving problems, reasoning effectively about problems, and having a positive outlook towards math in general. Keeping in mind that homework only addresses two of our larger goals for mathematical proficiency, there are several considerations that go into homework. The first one is around the level of difficulty. If the homework is very easy for your child, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is an opportunity for them to practice independence. If it is too difficult for them, similarly you should encourage them to work the problems the best they can, and for your child talk to the teacher the next day to gain understanding.

Secondly, consider the amount of time homework takes. Homework shouldn’t be a battle that ruins an entire evening at home. We use the national PTA’s recommendations for the amount of time a child should spend on homework each night which amount to 10 minutes per grade level. So a 1st grader should have about 10 minutes of homework and a 6th grader should have about an hour of homework each night. For families where homework becomes a nightly fight to get done and it seems to stretch on forever, I recommend setting a timer for the number of minutes that is appropriate for the grade level, and then having the parent write a note at the top of the assignment saying the child took that amount of time to work on their homework to whatever degree of completion.

Finally, in considering homework, many parents worry that their children are working problems in ways that are totally unfamiliar to them. Many parents say to me that they don’t understand how their child is working a problem and thus don’t know how to help them. This simply reflects that children are learning different algorithms or steps to solving problems, and shouldn’t be viewed as a roadblock but as opportunity. When a child comes home with a solution method to a problem that you haven’t seen before, use this as a place to have a discussion. If you have a different solution method that you learned in school, use that method and see if you get the same answer as your child. You should. If you don’t, then there is probably something faulty with one of the methods. Regardless if you get the same or different answers, explore how your child is working the problem. Have them explain it to you. Explain your method to you. Find similarities and differences. All of this will build both you and your child’s understanding.

Regardless of how you engage in math homework with your child, there are a couple of key points to keep in mind. First, homework is intended to foster independence. So don’t do the homework for your child. They should be able to accomplish the homework on their own. If they can't complete it independently, this is an important piece of data for the teacher. Also, only engage in a conversation about the work if you have the time, energy, and a positive outlook on it. Otherwise you may both go away from the experience frustrated and it undermines the goals of the homework. Second, always communicate with the classroom teacher about homework. If you have questions about time. level of difficulty, or solution methods, he or she is the best person to answer those questions.

We have an amazing opportunity to broaden the opportunities for our children. Mathematics is a brilliant subject that can open doors for both you and your child. Supporting them with a positive attitude towards math, high expectations, pointing out the math around us, time to play with math, and supportive engagement around homework can make the difference.

For additional resources check out the family resources page at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics at: http://www.nctm.org/resources/families.aspx.