Using Standards to Drive Change
By Justin Fisk, World Languges
“CHANGE? AGAIN?”
Whenever the subject of change visits an academic department, particularly if that department has enjoyed some measure of success, a feeling of dread can overcome people. Quite often and sometimes justifiably, this anxiety can be borne out of a seemingly Pavlovian response to prior short-lived or stillborn initiatives. “Initiative fatigue,” by another name. Similarly, there can also be a pervasive fear that any effort that effectively rocks the boat will jeopardize hard-won successes. Jim Collins, in his now classic B-school tome, Good to Great, lays it out: “We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools.” All of our divisions are currently engaged in the hard work required of a school that does not want to simply “coast.” My argument is that, despite some continued and much needed dissonance, we are all working to overcome this stagnation of “being good” by collectively committing to two things: 1) teacher- and team-driven change and 2) a firm grounding of our change initiatives in standards.
“IF SOMETHING'S NOT BROKEN, WHY FIX IT?”
In our World Languages/ELL division, this refrain typified some of our early conversations around the need to assess students through performance-based assessments when we began dialogue around that subject some five years ago. At the time, we had just been challenged to examine anew the Standards for Foreign Language Learning through a series of professional development workshops organized by ACTFL (our national content-area professional organization). While there was some initial dissonance, it was this grounding in best practices and the standards of our professional discipline that eventually facilitated a shift in the way we thought about assessing students. We began to move away from a sole focus on cumulative vocabulary- and grammar-based unit tests to one that included assessments that were rooted in the three modes of communication (the centerpiece of our work, as ACTFL would frame it). This first shift, as important as it was, did not entirely transform our curricula, though it did represent an important start—a critical seed had been planted. That said, individual teams’ interpretations of best practices would remain in flux for some time, with most teams still hewing to curricula that were developed based on sequential grammar introduction.
A few short years later, in the summer of 2013, when a small group of Spanish 2 teachers dared to ask if the communicative standards that had portended this initial shift could form the very core of our expectations for our curriculum, our grading, and our assessments, the refrain of “why fix it?” was heard yet again. In fact, many of us (and I count myself in this lot), expressed misgivings about fiddling with a system that produced, by almost any measure, a great number of highly successful students who scored quite well on the standardized exams that many care about. We started by challenging ourselves to distill the entirety of our curriculum into a few core values by asking quite simply: “What do we want our students to learn?” Though we certainly knew better, our curriculum and assessment regime to that point (apart from the few performance assessments we had successfully integrated a few years back) still maintained a decidedly grammar- and vocab-centric slant to it: as a team we hadn’t made the shift in its entirety.
What followed was a light-bulb moment of sorts. Amazingly, every one of us involved in the discussion immediately thought of the three modes of communication as the benchmarks of our students’ learning. When we peeled away what was effectively supporting content—the building blocks of language learning—we were left with communication as the core aim of our course. Consequently, ACTFL’s Standards for Foreign Language Learning became the guidebook for our journey toward a standards-based approach to grading and reporting and the Presentational, Interpersonal, and Interpretive modes became the three overarching standards that would form the nexus around which all assessments, feedback, and, ultimately, grade reporting would focus.
Was the change just that easy? Not at all. We knew where we wanted to go, but our curriculum at that point consisted of sequential and ostensibly thematic units that were, in fact, a progressive series of introductions to discrete vocabulary and grammar sets. The bulk of our assessments—some 80%, perhaps—still consisted of vocabulary and grammar quizzes, with the remaining 20% focusing on the interpersonal and presentational modes. Fortunately, we had seen the incredible value of these performance-based assessments and had already aligned them to proficiency expectations.
What followed over the next couple of years was a beautiful mesh of research-based experimentation and response to feedback (in the form of hard data) from our students. We adjusted our learning targets a couple of times, relegated vocabulary and grammar quizzes to unscored supporting formative assessments, and won the commitment of our teachers and teams in the process. We now have three standards with two scaled learning targets apiece that are universal for all of our EBR courses within our language program. We are actively exploring Integrated Performance Assessment and are igniting the power of these assessments as we purposefully co-construct feedback with our students. Our students (and, more importantly to my mind, more of our students) are achieving more than ever.
Whenever the subject of change visits an academic department, particularly if that department has enjoyed some measure of success, a feeling of dread can overcome people. Quite often and sometimes justifiably, this anxiety can be borne out of a seemingly Pavlovian response to prior short-lived or stillborn initiatives. “Initiative fatigue,” by another name. Similarly, there can also be a pervasive fear that any effort that effectively rocks the boat will jeopardize hard-won successes. Jim Collins, in his now classic B-school tome, Good to Great, lays it out: “We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools.” All of our divisions are currently engaged in the hard work required of a school that does not want to simply “coast.” My argument is that, despite some continued and much needed dissonance, we are all working to overcome this stagnation of “being good” by collectively committing to two things: 1) teacher- and team-driven change and 2) a firm grounding of our change initiatives in standards.
“IF SOMETHING'S NOT BROKEN, WHY FIX IT?”
In our World Languages/ELL division, this refrain typified some of our early conversations around the need to assess students through performance-based assessments when we began dialogue around that subject some five years ago. At the time, we had just been challenged to examine anew the Standards for Foreign Language Learning through a series of professional development workshops organized by ACTFL (our national content-area professional organization). While there was some initial dissonance, it was this grounding in best practices and the standards of our professional discipline that eventually facilitated a shift in the way we thought about assessing students. We began to move away from a sole focus on cumulative vocabulary- and grammar-based unit tests to one that included assessments that were rooted in the three modes of communication (the centerpiece of our work, as ACTFL would frame it). This first shift, as important as it was, did not entirely transform our curricula, though it did represent an important start—a critical seed had been planted. That said, individual teams’ interpretations of best practices would remain in flux for some time, with most teams still hewing to curricula that were developed based on sequential grammar introduction.
A few short years later, in the summer of 2013, when a small group of Spanish 2 teachers dared to ask if the communicative standards that had portended this initial shift could form the very core of our expectations for our curriculum, our grading, and our assessments, the refrain of “why fix it?” was heard yet again. In fact, many of us (and I count myself in this lot), expressed misgivings about fiddling with a system that produced, by almost any measure, a great number of highly successful students who scored quite well on the standardized exams that many care about. We started by challenging ourselves to distill the entirety of our curriculum into a few core values by asking quite simply: “What do we want our students to learn?” Though we certainly knew better, our curriculum and assessment regime to that point (apart from the few performance assessments we had successfully integrated a few years back) still maintained a decidedly grammar- and vocab-centric slant to it: as a team we hadn’t made the shift in its entirety.
What followed was a light-bulb moment of sorts. Amazingly, every one of us involved in the discussion immediately thought of the three modes of communication as the benchmarks of our students’ learning. When we peeled away what was effectively supporting content—the building blocks of language learning—we were left with communication as the core aim of our course. Consequently, ACTFL’s Standards for Foreign Language Learning became the guidebook for our journey toward a standards-based approach to grading and reporting and the Presentational, Interpersonal, and Interpretive modes became the three overarching standards that would form the nexus around which all assessments, feedback, and, ultimately, grade reporting would focus.
Was the change just that easy? Not at all. We knew where we wanted to go, but our curriculum at that point consisted of sequential and ostensibly thematic units that were, in fact, a progressive series of introductions to discrete vocabulary and grammar sets. The bulk of our assessments—some 80%, perhaps—still consisted of vocabulary and grammar quizzes, with the remaining 20% focusing on the interpersonal and presentational modes. Fortunately, we had seen the incredible value of these performance-based assessments and had already aligned them to proficiency expectations.
What followed over the next couple of years was a beautiful mesh of research-based experimentation and response to feedback (in the form of hard data) from our students. We adjusted our learning targets a couple of times, relegated vocabulary and grammar quizzes to unscored supporting formative assessments, and won the commitment of our teachers and teams in the process. We now have three standards with two scaled learning targets apiece that are universal for all of our EBR courses within our language program. We are actively exploring Integrated Performance Assessment and are igniting the power of these assessments as we purposefully co-construct feedback with our students. Our students (and, more importantly to my mind, more of our students) are achieving more than ever.
What are the commitments that guide our shift?
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Our teachers and our teams drive everything:
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ACTFL's Communication Standards form the core of our work:
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OUR COMMITMENT
The continuing success of our efforts must be predicated on a firm commitment to team-driven exploration and innovation. Underpinning this are the standards that form the core of our curricula and our assessment and instruction. In the experience of our division, work around the standards of our national content organization became a catalyst for change. What we have seen is that the sharing of best practices through larger professional development opportunities can only create the critical mass needed for actual change when everyone is afforded the subsequent opportunity to engage in dialogue (both structured and informal) around those practices.
The continuing success of our efforts must be predicated on a firm commitment to team-driven exploration and innovation. Underpinning this are the standards that form the core of our curricula and our assessment and instruction. In the experience of our division, work around the standards of our national content organization became a catalyst for change. What we have seen is that the sharing of best practices through larger professional development opportunities can only create the critical mass needed for actual change when everyone is afforded the subsequent opportunity to engage in dialogue (both structured and informal) around those practices.