The Master Teacher Blog
Providing you, the K-12 leader, with the help you need to lead with clarity, credibility, and confidence in a time of enormous change.
Latest Posts
In Your Corner, Student Learning
Adopt Four Assumptions to Fuel Summer Learning Success
Lack of learning progress appears to be a near universal concern among administrators and teachers as we enter the final quarter of the school year. Disruptions, distractions, and disinterest are blamed for lower grades, increased course failures, and other indicators of diminished academic success. Attention is now shifting to how to catch students up and counter learning loss.
Educators across the nation are hurriedly designing summer classes, bootcamps, academies, and other summer instructional activities to counter what they see as learning deficits. However, one thing is clear: Doing more of what hasn’t worked, or not worked well enough in the past, will not result in better outcomes now. The truth is that traditional summer school structures and approaches have generally not been effective at improving academic outcomes. In fact, world-renowned researcher John Hattie has documented traditional summer learning experiences as among the few educational practices that may actually counter learning progress.
In light of the urgency to make a difference for students and the challenges associated with making meaningful learning progress with students who have fallen behind, where can we turn to find useful tools to guide our design of learning experiences for the coming summer? Among the most powerful design elements reside in the assumptions we make about learners and learning. If we design and plan based on powerful, learning-supportive assumptions, we are far more likely to create experiences for students what will meet their learning needs and accelerate their learning progress. Here are four key assumptions on which the design process can rest.
Assumption #1: Learning starts where the learner is. The best place to start is with what learners know rather than what they don’t know. For the most part, new concepts, skills, and knowledge will be connected to and build on what students already know, regardless of whether they learned it in school. We need to take the broadest view possible when we explore what students already know. Administering a standardized test alone is unlikely to provide all the information needed. When we confine our search to narrow academic content and skills, we are likely to miss some of the most important insights, skills, and knowledge students already possess, but may be embedded in non-academic contexts. Understanding a student’s life outside of school can provide useful hints and starting points to surface prior knowledge and stimulate connections that otherwise may be overlooked. This observation is even more crucial for students who have spent a good portion of the past year outside of traditional classrooms.
Assumption #2: Relevant, meaningful learning is most effective. Most important learning in the lives of students is driven by purpose. When instruction connects to students’ experiences, goals, and interests, they are most likely to learn. Understanding what is important, interesting, stimulating, and even provoking for learners can be a starting point for connecting to what they see as relevant and tapping what may be meaningful. The key is to manipulate what is to be learned rather than manipulating the learner. For example, gamifying certain content and skills can make them more attractive and position students to make learning them a goal they willingly choose and ardently pursue.
Assumption #3: Learning can be stimulated in multiple ways. Designing summer learning experiences based on the assumption that instruction alone will be adequate is not likely to be successful. Engage students in activities that generate curiosity, stimulate imagination, and support exploration. Consider giving students access to interesting text that they can and want to read. Create activities in which students will want to participate that also develop intended skills. Direct instruction can and should be a part of the mix, but if we depend too heavily on explicit instruction and ignore other learning stimulators and drivers, we can expect learning to slow, retention to diminish, and success to be small.
Assumption #4: Students are most likely to succeed when we believe in their ability. When we believe in the probability of success, we provide more targeted and supportive feedback, try more options, offer more authentic encouragement, and focus more on strengths than deficiencies. Success is expected and communicated. We are more likely to see mistakes and missteps as evidence of learning acquisition than as proof that success is not likely. Interestingly, some of the most powerful messages we send to students about our belief in the probability of their success is not communicated via our words. They are embedded in our non-verbal behaviors. Every sigh, every glance, and every shrug communicates what we believe about whether a student is going to succeed. Trying to fake it is not a good strategy.
For many students, the learning they experience this summer will likely be determinative of their success in the coming year. We need to do all that we can to get it right. Starting with the right assumptions and designing experiences that place the learner and learning at the center is the best approach to ensure our students experience the success we want for them.
In Your Corner, Student Learning
How You Use Time Matters More Than How Much You Have
Recent data on slowed learning growth and increased percentages of failures during the pandemic has schools across the country searching for ways to increase time. The theory of action is that if students have more time to receive instruction, they can make up learning growth and get back on track.
At first glance, this theory seems to make sense. After all, learning takes time, so more time must be the answer. However, an experiment tried by Washington D.C. schools presents a cautionary example of why such an approach may fall short.
A few years ago, D.C. Public Schools added twenty days to the school calendar on 13 of its lowest performing campuses. The increase meant that over the course of time these students spent in school up until eighth grade, they would add the equivalent of an additional year. The idea was simple. They expected that students in these struggling schools would benefit from having more time to learn. Test scores would improve, and the schools would become more successful. After three years the school district collected performance data for each school and discovered there was little evidence of any academic improvement. Attendance rates remained low, and reports of teacher burnout grew (Stein, 2019).
The fundamental flaw in the theory of action was assuming that just adding time would result in more learning. We cannot assume that doing more of what is not already working will somehow make it work better.
There was no evidence that the students involved were incapable of learning. Nor was there evidence that the teachers were incapable of or not committed to teaching. The problem was not the people.
This is not an argument that time doesn’t matter. However, adding time without changing instructional strategies and learner experiences offers little promise of improvement. As we think about efforts and initiatives to help students get back on track, we would do well to ask how the time that is available can be used to address the reasons for slippage in the pace of learning. We need to focus on how we might engage students in ways that lead to acceleration and recovery. Here are some ideas to consider.
We can start by reestablishing and reinforcing our relationships with students. This year has been one of isolation and loneliness for many students. Try as we might, we have not always been able to maintain strong, positive, influential relationships with many of our students, nor have they always been able to maintain relationships with each other. Now is a good time to refocus on relationships.
We can design learning experiences and opportunities that learners find attractive and engaging. Most educators and students are exhausted, especially with the often awkward and inefficient teaching and learning context we have experienced. What students find interesting and worth doing can be a good place to begin. Community-based experiences, gamification of content, and project and problem-based activities can offer the connections students find worthwhile, while also learning academic content.
In areas of learning where students need to fill skill and knowledge gaps, we can focus on essentials. We can design experiences that are focused and efficient while looking for hooks and pulls to engage students. Resorting to instructional strategies and structures that did not work the first time hold little promise of producing different outcomes now.
As much as practical, we can cluster students with classmates who are friends and acquaintances they may have missed if they spent the past year in remote instruction. Recreating familiar learning groups and clusters can reduce awkwardness and increase social support. We can also employ social learning strategies such as having students work in pairs, groups, and teams as they learn.
Of course, we need to begin learning and instructional activities in response to learner readiness. We do little to stimulate and build learning confidence and skills when we ask students to learn what they are not ready to learn or lack adequate background knowledge and skills in to be successful.
Stein, P. (2019, February 21) District eliminates extended school year, invests more in classroom technology. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/district-eliminates-extended-school-year-invests-more-in-classroom-technology/2019/02/21/e9478500-3484-11e9-a400-e481bf264fdc_story.html
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
Communication, In Your Corner, Supporting Families
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
Share Your Tips & Stories
Share your story and the tips you have for getting through this challenging time. It can remind a fellow school leader of something they forgot, or your example can make a difficult task much easier and allow them to get more done in less time. We may publish your comments.
Send Us An Email
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
Communication, In Your Corner
In Your Corner, Student Learning
We’re In Your Corner!
Sign up to have the weekly publication delivered to your inbox.
"As we enter Teacher Appreciation Week, we want to highlight our year-round appreciation of teachers. We thank each of you for your dedication to and investment in this invaluable profession."
More Featured Articles
Categories