Testing Poem

The testing season has arrived for our kids this year
A time where acronyms and data points fill up the space between our earsT
he tests, they say, are great resources for school and teachers to use
And that they can predict the future for children using formulas and cues

So as I lie here about to sleep cosy in my bed

I try to think of where I learned all of the things inside my head

I know I learned a lot from my father the man I respect the most

Who taught me to stand up for others and to never ever boast

I know I learned from my soccer boss his name was Mike Scobie

That I should always push myself so I can be the best that I can be

I also learned from my cousin Chris to laugh with all my heart

And from cousin Maria that caring for people would soon set me apart.

Mr. Ragland taught me how to overcome my fear and thinking that I wasn’t smart

He was there to dry a tear when I thought I failed before I start

I learned that a person is a person no matter shape or size

Thank goodness Dr. Seuss was there to open up my eyes

And for my college entrance essay that I was nervous to even write

I wrote about a Lego Robotics Challenge and wrote it in just one night

On the pitch, the grass, the field I learned some lessons well

That being a good teammate was more important than an W or L

One lesson that I remember best was when I got a 3 out of 10

I learned that day my mother's love would never break or bend

I learned there and then how to pick someone up when they are feeling down

And how to turn their day around to make a smile from a frown

Somehow I grew up with all that knowledge but I learned even more as I grew

I learned how to love and care for kids with each student that came on through

I learned from Noah and from Brooke that being a teacher was more than just a job

Because when you watch your students succeed your heart begins to throb

I learned from Cameron, that just like me, there are kids who need the nudge

And from Kevin that grades in school are not the final judge

I learned from Cheryl, and from John, and Meredith to boot

That having teammates who care for you is the strongest rooted root

But where was that assessment that test I had to take

That would measure all the things I learned there must be some mistake

Because when I sit and look at the bubbles before my eyes

It only asks a narrow view not what makes me specialized

Where are the questions, the performance tasks, the button or the space

That asks me to input all my knowledge I learned during my life's race

In high school during my senior year I had a 3.2 GPA

But that was where I was at not where I was going to stay

And in college I gave a speech on graduation day

Talking to all the students about our journey along the way

I told them not to listen to predictions that are just based on tests

Because in the real world failure happens by the best

The truest skill is how you respond when life doesn’t go your way

You fall back to all the lessons that you picked up each and every day

So as our students take these tests, the snapshots of their year

I hope they know the real lesson is how much they’ve grown between their ears

I hope they know that intelligence is not just measured only on some scale

It’s in every decision that you make as you journey on life's trail

And I hope they know, with all my heart, one last thing that's true

A standardized test will never describe, everything that makes you, you.

Youth Sports

Families,

As many of you know, I coach soccer for the Michigan Jaguars soccer club and this past weekend I had a great conversation with a parent about his son and the year. For context, this parent has been with the club for several years and he is a principal of a middle school in another district. I asked him how the year was going, you know the typical banter when you haven’t seen someone in a while, and he said the year was going better than he could have hoped for. I followed up with, is he scoring lots of goals, the team winning a lot of games? There was a pause, and what he said next was truly one of the first times I have been caught off guard as a coach in the past 10 years.

He said no, the team has actually been struggling here a bit and my son is no longer playing forward. They moved him into the midfield which he was not used to. I was confused here a bit because normally when a parent says the year is going great, in terms of sports, they are talking about wins and losses but in this case, the father was over the moon excited that the team and his son was struggling. He continued to say, “Listen when we signed up for soccer years ago I wanted three things for my son. One to learn and get better at a sport, two to learn how to be a part of the team and everything that goes along with that, and three to learn how to deal with stuff he doesn’t really want to deal with.  He said, “It doesn’t matter how many W’s the team gets if the kids don’t learn the teamwork and how to deal with the adversity part of the game at this age.”

That comment stuck with me this entire week. I remember when I was the youth director for the club I used to tell coaches that teams can win too much.  Winning is fun, it shows great progress, but winning all the time at young ages doesn’t develop the mental aspects of the game that kids will have to learn in order to go the distance.  When you lose, it naturally builds humility, self-reflection, and self-realization. I used to have my coaches teach kids how to deal with a loss or failure in a proactive way and to view failure as an opportunity to grow and get better. In soccer, as in school or life, we will all fail at something, we will struggle, and we will have to overcome. The number of stories you can tell about teams, students, athletes, and people failing before they succeeded are far too many to be a coincidence.  Maybe a small lesson here is that you have to fail before you can succeed and that perhaps you can fail your way into success if you are able to learn from mistakes.

I always try to translate the field back into the school environment so when I reflect on that I always come back to maybe getting the A isn’t the end game. Maybe the endgame is what we’ve learned on our journey. Maybe if students haven’t lost or struggled in school we’ve missed a major part of elementary school, and perhaps getting a C could be the best learning opportunity for a child throughout the year. Or if I take the same soccer comment and change the W’s to A’s it would read, “It doesn’t matter how many A’s the student gets if he/she doesn’t learn the collaboration and how to deal with the adversity part of school at this age.”

                Regardless of stance, I am glad this family is getting what they want out of youth sports at a young age. I know the lessons he learns this year will translate into his future and he will be a better student, player, son, and friend for learning those lessons as a 10-year-old.

All the best,

Riding A Bike

I just bought a new book the other day called The Creative School by Ken Robinson.   It’s a great book about creativity, original thinking, the educational models of different areas and countries, and other topics. Someone who loves the educational world would really enjoy it. One great quote from the book is “We stigmatized mistakes. And we’re now running a national educational system where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the result is that we are educating people out of creativity.”

I remember when I was first learning how to ride a bike. I had this orange and black bike which I thought was the most amazing piece of machinery ever constructed. Turns out it was a 20 dollar bike from Target, but that is a story for another time. My father took me out for my first ride, and I made the mistake of trying to gun it right out the gate and fly. I fell down about 4 seconds after he let go of the seat. I tried for about another 30 minutes and in the end, I made a bunch of mistakes, and I failed. If I was getting a grade on my bike riding ability I would have gotten the lowest mark.

But my father, thankfully, outsourced the job to my older cousin Brian who put me back on the bike and stuck me in the grass instead of the cement sidewalk. He told me to pedal around on the grass, and when I would fall he would show me where I messed up. He would talk to me about balance and he would watch again. He would show me how to break by not smashing the handle brakes super hard, and he would watch again. He didn’t give me a grade, he gave me meaningful feedback. Slowly I learned how to ride the bike. By the end of it I went from not being able to ride a bike to thinking I was unstoppable over the course of a few weeks.

In schools, sometimes we focus too much on the grade and not enough on the meaningful feedback that teachers give to students each and every day. That is what truly drives the learning.  Our staff has been working on utilizing smaller group instruction K-5 in all subject areas and conferencing with kids more and more. We’ve worked on making feedback to students more than just a yes or no and pushing them to dig into reasons and evidence to prove what they know. We’ve focused on Visible Thinking to make sure the students are aware about how they learn just as much as what they are learning.

I didn’t learn how to ride a bike, speak English, kick a soccer ball, write poetry, solve complex math problems, or analyze historical documents because I got a grade for it. I learned how to do all of those things because people gave me specific, targeted, meaningful feedback, in a positive manner on how to improve. The “grade” was a just a quick reference point for how I was doing.

Are grades important? Absolutely, but so are mistakes. They all fall under the big umbrella of feedback. I challenge us to think about how we can use mistakes in the same importance as we use grades to help guide students towards what we want them to truly learn.

What Is Learning?

I was in Kindergarten on Monday morning and I had a question from one of our students which caught me a little off guard. He came up to me and said, “Mr. Moore what is learning?” I know what he was getting at with his question because the word learning was on his paper, but I answered the question by trying to define the concept of learning. It was tougher than I thought. I ended up with explaining to him that learning is a change, you used to think one thing and then you learned and now you know something more or something different about it. He liked my answer, even though it probably didn’t quite make the most sense.
            Google told me that learning is “the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught” or this definition “Learning is about any experience for a person that leads to permanent capacity change, and not necessarily biological in nature or related to age” (Illeris 1999)
            Most research studies suggest that learning occurs more deeply when the student can apply the classroom gathered knowledge to real world problems, and they do that when they take part in projects. A higher level of learning occurs when those projects require sustained engagement and collaboration. Gone are the days when I was a child and I would go and ask my teacher if I could, “just do it by myself.” We are living in an increasingly more connected and collaborative world than ever before.

The study from 1998 in England by Jo Boaler, the study done in 2000 from Challenge in Silicon Valley, and the 2006 study on Design Thinking from the University of Wisconsin also speak to the finding that students are most successful when they are taught how to learn as well as what to learn.

So what does that mean for the students here at Hutchings? It means that we are on the right track to creating the proper environment for students. It means the project-based learning path we embarked on last year, the visible thinking path we are on this year, and the design thinking process that our teachers are taking part in, are one great path to creating the most well rounded students we can.

I wish I could go back in time and give a much better answer to my Kindergarten friend, I would say, Learning is the journey you go on as you grow up, and if you do it right the journey doesn’t stop.

Holiday Break

It is crazy to think that the holiday season is already here and in a few short weeks we will be celebrating the coming of 2018. I am always amazed at how fast time goes from the start of school until the holiday break, and in general how quickly students move through elementary school. You can ask any parent of a 5^th grader and they will confirm that in fact the time does actually fly and by the time you blink the child you dropped off at Kindergarten, in what seems like yesterday, is in 5^th grade getting ready to meet with middle school counselors and plan out their schedule.
           
 As we enter the holiday break, I hope you all get the opportunity to take a step back from the daily grind and truly enjoy some quality family time. I remember when I was in 3^rd grade my father bought me a Talkboy (think the toy used in Home Alone 2) it was the coolest toy, used by the coolest kid in movies, and I loved it. I would run around the house recording everything that I said and then play it back so I could laugh at it 45 seconds later, I was an easily amused child. However the best part of that break was when my dad came into the office and we recorded our, what I thought was going to be number one chart topping song, Dinosaur Feet. I remember everything about those 40 minutes with my dad in his office. I remember the horrible ugly Star Wars sweater he had on, and how when he spun around in the black office chair with a goofy look on his face, I absolutely lost it with laughter. I remember the brown fold out couch that I would throw myself into every time he played the song back. I remember trying to hide myself under the Red Wings blanket when he would go to tickle me as if the blanket was going to stop it.  But, mostly I remember how in those 40 minutes my dad made me feel as if I was the most important person in the world. It didn’t matter that we had limited Christmas presents that year, or that he had just sold his company. It didn’t matter that my grades weren’t the best, and that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play hockey anymore. It didn’t matter that the in-laws were coming over, that we had dinner to prepare, or that the house was a mess. What mattered most to me was that my dad found 40 minutes to spend with me doing literally nothing but laughing and singing about Dinosaur Feet. It was a lasting memory that I will carry with me always, I still cannot believe how fresh the memory year some 20 years later.
          
  I hope this holiday break you can find your 40 minutes, you can find some time to put the phones away and disconnect from it all. Who knows maybe in 20 years your child will be sitting at his desk writing a letter about their 2017 holiday break and how their parents created a memory for them that will last their entire lifetime as well.

All the best,
Mr. Moore

Food Trucks

So to give some context to the photo above, Betsy DeVos was talking about school of choice and charter schools being related to the food truck market. Besides the general lack of thought in the analogy, it did get me thinking about a good analogy for schools and what they could be related to. The president likes to compare schools to grocery stores and talk about how the competition between different stores is good for all and that people can choose which store they want to go to.

I think of this very differently. I think schools compared to grocery stores is a terrible analogy because of the end goal. The point of a grocery store is to deliver food (in schools information) in a much quicker process than before. Fifty years ago you had to walk down the street, visit a ton of stores, and wait at super long lines.

If we think of this in terms of school we have already lost to the internet, we cannot deliver information faster than the internet in the typical school manner. We can implement more technology and access more information much quicker but at the end of the day, the internet is still delivering the content faster than we can. So just looking at a school as a grocery store to me is a poor analogy because what we do here is different than just solely providing our consumers with goods.

When thinking of what schools do I think a much better analogy would be a Kitchen. Anyone can functionally go to the grocery store and buy things, just like any kid can show up at school and pick something up. We may all pick up different things, but nevertheless, we are picking things up.

I am an expert A+ student at the grocery store, I am in and out of there quickly, I have my list, I get the same things, I know where those things are, I know the self-checkout lane by the fruit section is much faster than the main ones by the medicine, and I know their tricks for pricing items on discounts, and how to avoid the cart that has the squeaky wheel (hint there is normally some debris stuck in the wheel that won't move)However, when I get home, I cannot cook. I have all these great ingredients, I followed my list, and I have most of the tools, but I have not learned along the way how to combine it all, how to put the final pieces together. Truth be told I haven’t practiced it enough to become good at it, not a natural talent of mine.

A school to me should be more kitchen than a store, it should be a place where we can experiment, try new things, and actually USE what we picked up at the store. The goal of a school isn’t to answer a pre-determined question correctly, rather the goal is to transfer the knowledge learned here into the world in new and different settings.

I link this back to instructional practices, assessments, and generally how we ask kids to use this knowledge and one area that stands out to me a bit is spelling.

If I were to say that all growth data for the 5D tool had to be focused on spelling (I’m not doing this but can be fun to pretend!) and that we could only use spelling tests as the growth data, I guarantee we would see mass hysteria, because we all have those students who struggle every week with the spelling test. Yes I know that spelling tests do not make up the entire spelling grade, but then I ask myself what is the formative feedback that we give with spelling test if we are using it as an instructional tool? Do we go back and make kids redo all the spelling words they miss or do we move onto the next list? Is there dialogue after each test that goes back and tries to find the patterns of spelling errors to address the errors? I struggled with spelling test feedback as a teacher because the kids didn't really care what I had to say about spelling if they got a 2/20 on the test. The other part I hear is, “Well that is the curriculum” or “We have to get them ready for middle school.” I asked the middle school, no one is giving spelling tests and nowhere in the curriculum do I see anything about required weekly tests, in fact, this is directly from the book:

“Consider the needs of your students and use the Sourcebook to select the instruction that best suits their abilities. You decide how long it takes to move through a unit, which skills and concepts to address in certain units, and which follow up-activities are appropriate for your students. Remember, that the focus now is not on a grade from a Friday spelling test, but on how well students apply spelling in their writing and on their long-term learning of spelling words, skills and concepts.”

I also think back to the fact that I need a list to go to the store in order to shop, I still need to know my priority words, my sight words, and have some sound systems in place to help with spelling. We have a plethora of kids who can pass spelling tests but cannot spell and a plethora of kids who cannot spell but can pass a spelling test. The answer is somewhere in the middle, there is a place for the spelling tests, a place for word study, and a place for embedded spelling assessments.

I wonder what our students would say would be the best way to assess their spelling skills, would they pick a test, would they pick their writing, would their choice on which style impact their level of focus on those areas? Could we mix it up for kids depending on their self-assessments and needs?

The answer will come in time for sure as we play around with what works best for our students, but I do know one thing. Schools aren’t like food trucks, if the goal is just to get information quicker than we’ve missed the point, schools are more like kitchens where we explore, use, and create.

Amazon

Amazon came out and said that Detroit was not making into the top 20 places because of two major reasons mass transit and talent. When asked on the issues spokesperson for Detroit said “Detroit’s lack of a robust regional transit network hurt, but wasn’t pivotal. The defining role was talent”

By talent being so vague it actually umbrellaed a ton of issues from K-12 education to lack of tech-savvy graduates, and the ability to retain the talent our universities develop here. In fact, we were in the bottom two of all cities that applied for young adults who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher with a whopping 34% of people. (Boston 58%, Nashville 42%, Washington 54%)

There are tons of reasons why this could have happened, from poverty in metro Detroit, income gaps that directly influence graduation rates, financial cutbacks in state aid, the massive recession, and the alike. However the reasons shouldn’t be the focus, it is super easy to speculate why the rates and data are the way they are but in reality that isn’t the focus. The responsibility is for us to keep preparing kids to fill the talent gaps that exist.

One cool stat that came out of this whole process though was from the Census Bureau saying that the percentage of Detroiters age 25-34 who held degrees grew by 11% from 2013-2016 which was a much faster rate than numerous other cities that are in the top 20 for Amazon. (Boston, Chicago, New York, etc)

Obviously, this is not a Hutchings Elementary issue, but we can be a part of the solution. We can immerse students into technology, we can promote Genius Hour / Wonder Workshop, we can teach them critical thinking and problem solving, and we can put them on the right path to those tech-savvy, problem-based jobs that companies are clearly looking for.