Best year ever.
Not one kid failed. Not one.
I’ve never been able to say that before. If you’d asked me two years ago, I would have said this goal was impossible due to factors out of my control, or worse, a sign of low expectations.
That isn’t so.
We created an environment in which kids got constant, immediate feedback about their progress. I built strong relationships with them through the process. One of the teachers on my team said, “I used to teach English. Now I teach kids.”
I worked with a team of the best teachers I’ve ever met. We set high expectations for ourselves and our students and held each other accountable. We used multiple pathways to get things done. We created a “suspended curriculum” the first two weeks of school to define the shift in expectations from what middle school was, (the kids ran that school) to what high school will be.
Maybe most importantly, we tolerated some friction in the group because we needed to really talk about our beliefs and why we hold them. It’s the first step to thinking about what best meets the needs of our students.
My assistant principal and principal are the kind of mentors I wish I could have found ten years ago. I know that I can count on them to move obstacles out of my way. They give me permission to articulate and implement the plans I make.
What was the secret? No new resources or technology, just new ways of thinking about what a grade is and reflecting on seat time vs. proficiency. We used an “Incomplete” or “I” grade instead of giving “Ds” or “Fs” and helped students do alternative projects to demonstrate that they knew the stuff. These “I Contracts” took the stress off of learning and gave kids who are used to giving up as many chances as they needed to get it right.
I had half-expected to get gobs of inferior work through this process, but the reverse was true. My mainstream teaching produced horrible results by contrast. By the end of the year, all assignments had become progress marks towards projects requiring higher-order thinking.
These real-world based projects engaged even my reluctant learners. As team teachers, we never really know how our “Quad D” problem-based learning projects are going to turn out because they are real life. But we guide them and give the kids good feedback along the way.
I guess I lucked out. I spent the last ten years trying to create small models of this, in my classroom and with small groups of like-minded teachers. Now I work in a place where the entire school is headed in this direction. The most wonderful thing about teaching World History is that everything is fair game for the curriculum. I spent the first two months surveying student interests and then used them to design projects connected to the standards. It meant that I had terrific buy-in from kids who otherwise described themselves as lazy and disinterested in school.
I never lowered my standards. Evidence of that resides in the scores from the district final exam. There was a strong correlation between their grades in my class and their score on the final. The only exceptions were my “I contract” kiddies. They scored poorly on the standardized test from the district but they reworked every class assignment to get grades that averaged between “B’s” and “C’s”.
We made notebooks cataloging what we learned. We made state test learning gains. We wrote essays about human nature. We danced conga style to memorize Greek timelines. We entered web quest competitions. We applied for and won scholarships. We gave recitation and taught others what we read. And they voted me teacher of the year.
I am deeply grateful.
p.s. now I have a new goal: to share this experience! Two weeks ago, my principal enlisted my team to help present to another school. I wish you could have seen the sparks fly when they discussed what a grade means!
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