How to Teach Now: Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

Education

William Powell & Ochan Kusuma-Powell

Drawing on research and years of experience in international schools, the authors identify five critical keys to personalizing learning for students who have wildly different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds: •

Focus on your students as learners through systematic examination of their cultural and linguistic identities, learning styles and preferences, and readiness.

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Focus on yourself as a teacher and investigate your own cultural biases, preferred teaching style and beliefs, and expectations.

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Focus on your curriculum to identify transferable concepts that will be valuable and accessible to all students and further their global competence.

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Focus on your assessments to ensure cultural sensitivity and improve the quality of the formative data you gather.

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Focus on your collegial relationships so that you can effectively enlist the help of fellow educators with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.

$24.95 U.S.

Powell & Kusuma-Powell

The way to teach now is to focus on your students both as individuals and as members of a multifaceted, interdependent community. Here, you’ll learn how to design and deliver instruction that prepares students not just to meet standards but to live and work together in our complicated, 21st century world.

How to Teach Now

In this book, William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell provide a practical map to navigate some of today’s most complicated instructional challenges: How do you help all students succeed when every classroom is, in effect, a global classroom? And what does a successful education look like in a world that is growing smaller and flatter every day?

How to Teach Now Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

Alexandria, Virginia USA BROWSE EXCERPTS FROM ASCD BOOKS: www.ascd.org/books STUDY GUIDE ONLINE

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HOW TO TEACH NOW Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

HOW TO TEACH NOW William Powell & Ochan Kusuma-Powell

Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

Alexandria, Virginia USA

1703 N. Beauregard St. • Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 USA Phone: 800-933-2723 or 703-578-9600 • Fax: 703-575-5400 Website: www.ascd.org • E-mail: [email protected] Author guidelines: www.ascd.org/write Gene R. Carter, Executive Director; Judy Zimny, Chief Program Development Officer; Nancy Modrak, Publisher; Scott Willis, Director, Book Acquisitions & Development; Genny Ostertag, Acquisitions Editor; Julie Houtz, Director, Book Editing & Production; Katie Martin, Editor; Ines Hilde, Senior Graphic Designer; Mike Kalyan, Production Manager; Valerie Younkin, Desktop Publishing Specialist; Carmen Yuhas, Production Specialist Copyright © 2011 ASCD. All rights reserved. It is illegal to reproduce copies of this work in print or electronic format (including reproductions displayed on a secure intranet or stored in a retrieval system or other electronic storage device from which copies can be made or displayed) without the prior written permission of the publisher. By purchasing only authorized electronic or print editions and not participating in or encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials, you support the rights of authors and publishers. Readers who wish to duplicate material copyrighted by ASCD may do so for a small fee by contacting the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923, USA (phone: 978-750-8400; fax: 978-646-8600; Web: www.copyright. com). For requests to reprint or to inquire about site licensing options, contact ASCD Permissions at www.ascd.org/permissions, or [email protected], or 703-575-5749. For a list of vendors authorized to license ASCD e-books to institutions, see www.ascd. org/epubs. Send translation inquiries to [email protected]. Printed in the United States of America. Cover art © 2011 by ASCD. ASCD publications present a variety of viewpoints. The views expressed or implied in this book should not be interpreted as official positions of the Association. All web links in this book are correct as of the publication date below but may have become inactive or otherwise modified since that time. If you notice a deactivated or changed link, please e-mail [email protected] with the words “Link Update” in the subject line. In your message, please specify the web link, the book title, and the page number on which the link appears. PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-4166-1204-9 ASCD product #111011 n6/11 Also available as an e-book (see Books in Print for the ISBNs). Quantity discounts for the paperback edition only: 10–49 copies, 10%; 50+ copies, 15%; for 1,000 or more copies, call 800-933-2723, ext. 5634, or 703-575-5634. For desk copies: [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Powell, William. How to teach now : five keys to personalized learning in the global classroom / William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4166-1204-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Global method of teaching 2. Educational technology. 3. Education--Effect of technological innovations on. 4. International education. I. Kusuma-Powell, Ochan. II. Title. LB1029.G55P68 2011 371.102—dc22 2011007945 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

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To our parents, who taught us the value of education and an international perspective

HOW TO TEACH NOW Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

1. Knowing Our Students as Learners

21

2. Knowing Ourselves as Teachers

55

3. Knowing Our Curriculum

80

4. Knowing Our Assessments

108

5. Knowing Our Collegial Relationships

134

6. The Challenge and the Opportunity

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References

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Index

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About the Authors

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Acknowledgments

There are many individuals who have contributed to this book, both knowingly and unknowingly. The single largest group includes the many students we have taught over the years. We can only hope that they have learned as much from us as we have from them. We are specifically grateful to the following individuals, who have joined us in the exploration of personalized learning in the global classroom: • In France—Arthur vis Dieperink, who has helped us understand how our previous experience can help shape our learning profiles. • At the International School of Kuala Lumpur—Alex Smith, Ochan’s teaching partner in Grade 8 Humanities, and Sharon Peters, who is doing fascinating research on applying cognitive coaching in middle school settings. • At the International School of Brussels—Kevin Bartlett, Kristen Pelletier, and Michelle Brown, our colleagues in The Next Frontier Project, which embodies the values and beliefs of personalized learning in a truly international setting. • At the Jakarta International School—David Suarez, an outstanding middle school math and science teacher who has taught us an enormous amount about how to challenge students appropriately by providing them with choice. viii

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• At the Beijing City International School—Nick Bowley, who taught us what it meant to “move toward the danger” by sharing his experience as a high school principal at the Amman Baccalaureate School during the first Gulf War. Finally, we would like to thank Naomi Aleman, Bill’s long-standing coaching partner, and Bob Garmston, whose recent research into learning resilience has been an inspiration to both of us. Bill Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell Massat, France, 2011

Introduction

Over the last four decades, we, Ochan and Bill, have taught children and young adults in the United States, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We have worked with student populations that were very diverse in terms of ethnicity, culture, linguistic background, socioeconomic status, and religious faith. These students also brought remarkable learning diversity to our classrooms. Some were in the early stages of learning English. Others had learning disabilities, remarkable talents, academic gifts, or attention issues. Many were experiencing profound relocation stress as they moved from country to country and school to school. More recently, we have devoted our time to the professional learning of teachers in international schools around the world. We have had the pleasure and privilege of working with thousands of teachers in more than 40 countries. From Tashkent to Tianjin, from Siem Reap to São Paulo, all of the teachers we have met enriched our institutes with their unique experiences and backgrounds. Amazingly, amid all this diversity, a clear pattern has emerged. Irrespective of nationality, culture, religion, gender, or the type of school in which they work, all of the most effective teachers we have met teach with both a local and a global context in mind. They focus on knowing the individual student and personalizing instruction to match that student’s needs. At the 1

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same time, they teach in a way that considers the whole diverse community of students and prepares them for living and working in our modern, complicated world. We believe this approach is fast becoming what is needed in schools everywhere. While international schools have always enrolled students with different racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, globalization and massive immigration trends are making the student populations of nearly every school increasingly diverse. What was once the particular challenge of international school teachers now faces us all. To accommodate the new makeup of classrooms and the disappearing distances between cultures, teachers need to focus on each student’s learning needs while simultaneously imparting global competence—the ability to understand other cultures, to respect and appreciate differences, and to move gracefully and graciously between cultures. To see our students succeed, we all must embrace this paradox of personalizing learning in the global classroom. Before we move on to discussing what personalizing entails, let’s first remember the way classrooms used to be and how many of us were taught to think about them and about our students.

THE WAY WE WERE: THE ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL CLASSROOM Bill entered the teaching profession in the mid-1970s, accepting a job as an English teacher at a high school in a small town north of New York City. The school was located in a solidly blue-collar community, and its enrollment was almost entirely homogeneous. Ninety-nine percent of the students were white, Roman Catholic, and Italian American. There were two African American students in the school, but they were segregated in a special education program and rarely seen. If there were Jewish students, the teachers didn’t know about them, and there were certainly no Asian or Latino students. The homogeneity was further exaggerated by the fact that it was the year of the Farrah Fawcett hairdo, which made virtually all the female students look alike. At the start of the school year, the Italian American principal, who had grown up in the surrounding community, called a faculty meeting and spoke at length about the subculture of the majority of the school’s students. The

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previous year there had been a number of disciplinary problems, and he was keen not to have them repeated. He explained that students from the local working-class community were used to firm rules and absolute limits. He warned that attempts to negotiate classroom expectations with students would invite disruptive behavior. These students respected strength, the principal stressed, and they would respond poorly to anything they interpreted as weakness or “giving in.” In many respects, the typical classroom at that school resembled a factory assembly line. Control was external, the classes were often repetitious, and many times skills were taught in isolation. Content coverage prevailed over conceptual understanding. The idea that children might have different learning styles and different combinations of intelligence preferences was still a decade or more in the future. It was a one-size-fits-all learning situation, and if children didn’t learn, the responsibility was placed squarely on their shoulders.

THE WAY WE ARE NOW: TEACHING UNIQUE LEARNERS IN THE GLOBAL CLASSROOM Our classrooms and professional perspectives have changed a lot since the 1970s—and thank goodness for that! Around the world, seismic demographic shifts have made monocultural enclave schools, such as the one that Bill began teaching in, increasingly rare. Today it is common for neighborhood schools in cities like Boston, Vancouver, London, and Melbourne to have 30 or 40 nationalities represented among their students. The last 20 years have also changed our understanding of learning and how the brain works. Educators now recognize that students bring to the classroom different learning styles, intelligence preferences, and interests, and the most effective teachers incorporate these factors into their instructional planning. To help illustrate the new learning dynamics of the global classroom, we would like to introduce you to four students. Although each student’s story is unique, together they represent the types of challenges facing 21st century teachers, who must work to understand all the children they teach,

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the complexity of these students’ specific cultural backgrounds, and the ways in which they learn.

Rupa: A Success Last Year Rupa is a very bright girl, or she used to be, when she was a 4th grader in Nairobi, Kenya, and earned straight As. But since Rupa’s family moved to the United States six months ago, her school achievement has taken a nosedive. Rupa’s parents have visited her teachers almost every other day and are hiring a private tutor for math. Rupa’s television and computer privileges have been suspended indefinitely. Although Rupa is ethnically Indian, she has never lived in India. She was born in Africa but doesn’t feel any sense of being Kenyan or African. Her family is Hindu, but because of her education in a Roman Catholic school, she knows more about the catechism than she does the Vedas. Her father and mother retain some ties to their traditional Indian culture, but Western values and commercialism are part of their lives now, too. Rupa’s father owns and runs a successful furniture company, but he doesn’t believe that he will be able to afford to send Rupa to an American university. He sees Rupa going to India for university-level study, even though he is aware of how competitive admission to Indian universities can be, and even though Rupa doesn’t speak Hindi. The medium of instruction in the convent school she attended in the Nairobi suburbs was English, and the language of the playground was a patois of English, Gujarati, and Kiswahili. The emphasis in her previous school was on rote memory. Her American school demands that she engage in critical thinking. Rupa’s teacher expects her to apply knowledge and demonstrate conceptual understanding. All this is new to Rupa, and it baffles her. Ten-year-old Rupa remembers being a success at school last year and grieves for her past life.

Frank: Culture Shock in the International Baccalaureate At the conclusion of Frank’s valedictory speech, the entire audience at his international school in Tanzania is on its feet. Thunderous applause echoes

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through the commencement hall, capturing the enormous pride the school community takes in his accomplishment: a four-year scholarship to Harvard, where he plans to study as a pre-med student. Frank is a local boy—a scholarship student and the son of two teachers at the Tanzanian government school who would otherwise have never been able to afford the international school fees. The centerpiece of Frank’s valedictory speech addresses the culture shock he experienced when he was first awarded his host-country scholarship . . . and first discovered the difference between studying in a traditional government school and meeting the intellectual demands of his new school’s International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma program. For the first three or four months I was at this school, I didn’t say a word in class. I was in a state of total confusion and shock. It was as though I’d landed on a different planet. I didn’t understand what the teachers wanted. I was used to a school in which there were right and wrong answers. You were rewarded for right answers and punished for wrong answers. But here, the teachers wanted you to think. They expected you to have ideas. They were interested in your opinions. You were evaluated not on a basis of right and wrong, but on the basis of how well thought out your answers were. If you have never been in a traditional government school, you have no idea of the magnitude of this change! You have no idea how terrifying it is to appear before a teacher who expects you to think. Now, I recognize it as the greatest gift that anyone can ever receive!

May Ling: Multilingual, but Not Making It Thirteen-year-old May Ling is visibly nervous during the admissions interview at her new school in Kuala Lumpur. She answers questions softly, using single words or short phrases. For most of the time, she scrutinizes her shoes and holds one hand firmly in front of her mouth. She is easily flustered and, at least once, appears on the verge of tears. Although she has been in an English-language school in Macao for the past five years, the ESL placement-test results included in May Ling’s admissions portfolio put her at Level One—a beginner. At home, May Ling’s Chinese mother speaks to her in Cantonese; her Danish father speaks to her in English. When May Ling is not so nervous, her social, spoken English seems competent—fluent, even. However, her written work in both English and

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Chinese reveals that she is struggling with abstract expression in both languages. The fact is that May Ling doesn’t have a strongly developed mother tongue. She is not just wrestling with the acquisition of English; she is wrestling with the acquisition of language.

Matt: A Study in Loneliness Both the middle school counselor and the learning specialist are concerned about Matt. He has had several psycho-educational evaluations and, despite his parents’ persistent denials, his learning disability is well documented. He is reading three grade levels below his age group. His handwriting is almost illegible. In a one-to-one situation, Matt can exhibit surprising flashes of insight, and his critical thinking skills can be astute and penetrating. However, in his 7th grade classroom, he is silent and withdrawn. Matt is an American citizen attending an international school in São Paulo, Brazil. There are 15 nationalities represented in his homeroom, and on the playground, Portuguese is heard as frequently as English. Matt isn’t sure how to go about making friends across the various cultural divides, and over the past semester, he has become the target of teasing. A group of children in the 7th grade have taken to calling Matt “retard.” This namecalling has extended to graffiti appearing on both Matt’s locker and his loose-leaf binder. Unfortunately, Matt’s thick prescription glasses and his poor hand-eye coordination add to the impression of general awkwardness. On one occasion, the learning specialist observed Matt in the cafeteria carrying his tray to a table already occupied by a group of his classmates. When he arrived at the table, his classmates stared at him incredulously. Their body language spoke louder than their unspoken words: Do you really think you’re going to sit with us? Realizing that he had forgotten a fork and spoon, Matt placed his tray on the table and went back to the serving line. When he returned to the table, all of his classmates had disappeared, as had his tray of food. PERSONALIZED LEARNING BASICS What Rupa, Frank, May Ling, and Matt require is a teacher who expects, recognizes, and appreciates student learning differences and incorporates

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these differences into instructional planning. There is nothing new or “faddish” about personalized learning. In one form or another, it has been with us since the first cave-dwelling Magdalenian mother recognized the differing talents of her brood of children. What is new is educators’ concerted and systematic effort to identify and use these differences to maximize children’s learning. Teachers often have three basic yet important questions about personalized learning. Let’s take them in turn.

What Is the Purpose of Personalized Learning? Personalized learning is about making the curriculum as attractive and relevant as possible to the widest possible audience. This is accomplished by providing multiple access points to a high-quality curriculum—access points that will entice students with different readiness levels, interests, cultural backgrounds, intelligence preferences, and learning styles. Once students connect with the curriculum, personalized learning aims to keep them engaged, maximizing their understanding and achievement.

Who Is Personalized Learning For? It’s for students who are culturally diverse, students who are learning English as a second or third language, students with special learning needs, and students with special gifts or talents. In short, personalized learning is for every student, and it serves all students well.

What Do Teachers Need to Do to Personalize Learning? In our experience, to effectively personalize learning, teachers need to engage in five ongoing inquiries. We must work to know our students as learners, know ourselves as teachers, know our curriculum, know our assessments, and know our collegial relationships. Knowing our students as learners entails systematically and deliberately exploring our students’ cultural identities, linguistic backgrounds, family circumstances, learning styles, intelligence preferences, readiness

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levels, interests, and many other individual learning traits and then using that information to address specific needs by providing meaningful and appropriately challenging work. Knowing ourselves as teachers includes probing our own cultural biases and assumptions, discovering our preferences in learning style that may have translated into our preferred and dominant teaching style, and recognizing submerged beliefs and expectations that we have about children in general or about students specifically—all of which should help us to more clearly understand and serve our students. Knowing our curriculum at a conceptual level means being able to discriminate between content and transferrable concepts. Concepts are overarching and applicable to many areas of specific content, offering flexibility in choosing access points for students with a variety of cultural backgrounds and learning preferences. Knowing our assessments encompasses selecting and designing tools to match the learning objectives we want to measure, offering students some choice in assessment in order to increase engagement, and bringing students inside the assessment process so that they become the end users of assessment data. Knowing our collegial relationships involves enlisting the help of other professionals with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, and perspectives to support us in planning how to best serve the diverse needs of our students. Education today is a most complex field. As such, it is absurd and counterproductive for teachers to “go it alone.” The most enlightened schools are promoting coplanning, coteaching, and the collective analysis of student work. Pursuit of advanced knowledge in all five domains of personalized learning is critical to success. Teachers can fall into focusing on one or two domains, which will limit the effectiveness of instruction. We have created Figure A to show how only exploration of all five domains results in the ability to personalize learning. Most teachers have some knowledge in all areas, but we have chosen the extremes of limited focus to make the relationship between domains clearer. For example, a teacher who knows his students and himself well

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FIGURE A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHER KNOWLEDGE AND PERSONALIZED LEARNING Complex Knowledge of Students, Self, and Collegial Relationships “Relationship-Oriented Teacher” •

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• •

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Beginning Knowledge of Curriculum and Assessment

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Creates trusting classroom climate. Demonstrates extensive empathy. Possesses excellent interpersonal skills. Does not always identify meaningful or appropriate learning objectives. Lesson outcomes ill-defined. Assessment may not match learning targets. Often drifts off point when teaching. Questioning is superficial. Does not foster complex thinking.

“Personalizing Teacher” •

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“Beginning Teacher” • •

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May have subject mastery. Shows great enthusiasm and interest. Possesses limited knowledge of instructional strategies and assessments. Has not yet developed collaborative skills. Needs opportunities to develop in all domains.

Creates sense of class belonging. Frames meaningful learning goals. Matches methodology to student readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles. Uses wide repertoire of instructional strategies and assessments. Taps intrinsic student motivation. Sets expectation of internal student locus of control and responsibility.

“Task-Oriented Teacher” •

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Has content area expertise/ subject mastery. Very effective with highly motivated and capable students. Teaches only in own preferred style. Does not respond to individual learning needs. Does not address varying motivational levels. Uses traditional assessments.

Limited Knowledge of Students, Self, and Collegial Relationships

Advanced Knowledge of Curriculum and Assessment

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but doesn’t know his curriculum is likely to be trusted and popular, but he may not have the most robust or meaningful learning outcomes. A teacher who knows her curriculum but doesn’t know her students may have limited success reaching students who are not highly motivated or highly capable. Personalized learning does not mean the teacher creates a separate lesson plan for every student. It does, however, presume that the teacher ensures enough flexibility of instruction, activities, and assessment to enable a diverse group of learners to find a good fit most of the time (Tomlinson & Allan, 2000). This work requires keen and empathetic observation and listening; careful monitoring of student activity and interactions; and continual assessment and instructional adjustment. Nothing in the classroom can be so rigid that it cannot be adapted to facilitate greater learning. In other words, instructional strategies, use of time, use of materials, approach to content, the grouping of students, and the means of assessment all need to be flexible. The teacher is the architect of that flexibility. Everything in the learning environment of the personalized classroom is purposeful. The teacher identifies precise learning goals and determines clear indicators of success. The teacher knows her students as learners, and her planning is thoughtful and rigorous. She is deliberate about how students are grouped and the way furniture is arranged. She understands why Jack needs to get up and move after 10 minutes of seat work and why Zahara benefits from “think aloud” activities. In the personalized classroom, the teacher assumes the role of designer—purposefully selecting and orchestrating the multitude of classroom variables to maximize the learning of all students. Perhaps most importantly, the personalized classroom is respectful. The origin of the word “respect” is the Latin respectus—a combination of re, meaning “again” or “back,” and specere, meaning “to look.” Thus, respect literally means “to look again”—to deem something worthy enough, important enough, to attend to a second or third time. A respectful classroom dignifies the differences that students bring with them to the learning experience. While students have different readiness levels, cultures, languages, interests, and strengths, respectful pedagogy means that every child is presented with tasks, activities, and challenges that are equally interesting

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and engaging and is provided equal opportunity for the development of conceptual understanding. To illustrate the effect personalizing instruction can have, we would like to share a significant experience that Ochan and her coteacher, Alex, had with a student named Nicolas.

Nicolas: A Portrait of the Power of Personalized Learning Nicolas caused his teachers to lose sleep. He entered the general 7th grade humanities class at the English-language International School of Kuala Lumpur in January after completing a sheltered immersion ESL program. Ochan and her teaching partner, Alex, started the class out with a study of Malcolm Bosse’s novel Ordinary Magic. It’s a story about Jeffrey, an American boy who grows up in India. When Jeffrey’s parents die suddenly, he has to be repatriated to the United States. The story explores Jeffrey’s transition from Indian culture to the culture of America. Ochan and Alex set the first journal prompt for the novel: “Have you ever thought about what it might be like to lose a parent? How do you think you would feel if you were Jeffrey?” In his journal, Nicolas wrote this response: Well yes I will not support to lose one of my parents. I would feel really bad and sad and also lonely.

Ochan and Alex were concerned about the impoverishment of Nicolas’s writing. He had had 15 minutes to write, and he produced just 2 sentences, 22 words. In his writing there was virtually no content, the syntax was very simple, and the vocabulary was extremely limited. In the next few days, Ochan and Alex assigned another journal entry, again based on the novel study. This time the prompt was “Jeffrey is struggling to define himself. Culturally he is Tamil, but ethnically he is American. How do you define yourself, and what do you base this self-definition on?” Nicolas wrote this response: I define myself as Mexican because all well most of my family are Mexican and also I was born in Mexico, my culture is from Mexico and I speak Spanish that the language of Mexico and also my passport is Mexican.

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Ochan and Alex had a lengthy conversation. If anything, Nicolas’s second writing sample was even more worrisome than his first. They could not tell what, if anything, Nicolas was understanding from the novel. The vocabulary and syntax were very simple, and the content superficial. Did Nicolas’s poor writing reflect an ESL issue, or something else—maybe a language disorder or learning disability? They also worried that it might be a reflection of Nicolas’s intellectual ability. At the end of their conversation, Alex suggested to Ochan that since they had been assigning a great deal of writing, perhaps they should give the students some other way of demonstrating their understanding of the novel’s various themes. They agreed that in the next class session, they would add a visualization activity to the usual journal entry. Students were told to take any scene from the book and show what they understood from the book by drawing it. Figure B is what Nicolas produced.

FIGURE B NICOLAS’S SCENE ILLUSTRATION

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The scene depicted is the death of Jeffrey’s father. His father is in the bed, and the priest is sitting on the chair. Jeffrey has just run in from school. As you can see, Nicolas’s drawing captures both motion and emotion. And it demonstrates a profound understanding of this poignant scene in the novel. But the drawing was not the only surprise in store for Ochan and Alex. There was also Nicolas’s journal entry, written to accompany the drawing and respond to the prompt, “Discuss some of the issues that Jeffrey faces in his move to the United States.” Nicolas wrote the following entry: Some of the issues that Jeffrey faces in his move to US is that when he want to make friends and invite them to his house he don’t know how to make them happy so they can’t get bored. Because in India when he was with his friends he just looked at the sunset or kill vipers and swim but in America the kids want to do more things and listen to hard rock music. Also how to behave in class and with his friends so he can be there friends. And also how to play basketball and all the sports his friends play because in India he didn’t have that kind of games so he need to learn them so he can do more friends and get used to American life.

While there were certainly problems with grammar, spelling, and syntax, Nicolas’s writing had taken a quantum leap forward in terms of volume and complexity, and he had identified one of the novel’s key themes—transition from one culture to another and how this change affects social relationships. Figure C is Nicolas’s visualization of some of the important values represented in the novel. Ochan and Alex had a hunch that there was a connection between Nicolas’s improved writing and his drawing. Over the four weeks of the novel study, they provided Nicolas with numerous opportunities to use his artistic talents. It became apparent that Nicolas had benefitted tremendously from nonverbal, prewriting activities. Ochan and Alex speculated that the nonverbal brainstorming Nicolas engaged in while drawing provided him access to the English vocabulary stored in his long-term memory, which he could then use in his writing. They believed that Nicolas was basically drawing his way to thinking and writing. (We have noticed that boys often benefit greatly from this kind of nonverbal brainstorming.)

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FIGURE C NICOLAS’S DEPICTION OF THE NOVEL’S KEY VALUES

At the end of the four-week novel study, feedback from Nicolas confirmed Ochan and Alex’s hypothesis. All the students were asked to address three questions: 1. How have you enjoyed this instructional approach? 2. What has gone well for you? 3. What advice do you have for the next novel study? Here is how Nicolas responded: 1. I found this way of learning interesting because you can get to define yourself more and because the book can teach you about a person that change religion and don’t have all his family. Also it tells that he don’t know if he is from India or from U.S. 2. What has gone well for me in this class is that we needed to do a lot of drawing. Because I am good at drawing and also it make me write much but a lot more and I like that. That is good. Also I have good grades and good notes.

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3. My advise that I have for the next one we are going to do is to read a lot more, write a lot more so that I can get better grades and also do more work and put more effort.

It was interesting for Ochan and Alex to note the personal connection that Nicolas had made to the novel in his first response, in which he highlighted the search for identity that is at the heart of every middle school child, and the confusion that may result from relocation. This underscored for both Ochan and Alex the need to be sensitive when working with students transitioning into a new classroom. We followed Nicolas’s progress for many years. On the midyear writing assessment in grade 8, Nicolas chose to write on the topic of terrorism. He filled the margins of his paper with small iconic drawings of terrorists and weapons. The same habit of drawing his way to thinking and writing continued in high school. The reverse side of his mock IB examination papers were covered with drawings. In 2006, Nicolas graduated from the International School of Kuala Lumpur with the full IB diploma. He was accepted at a prestigious university in Canada, where he is studying industrial design. Our hunch is that Nicolas is still drawing his way to thinking, and that when he is 40 and the CEO of a large company, or the Mexican ambassador to some country, the first draft of his reports will be full of small, iconic drawings. Teachers can learn a great deal from our students, and Nicolas taught Ochan and Alex many lessons. He taught them how colleagues reflecting and planning together often have insights that would not have been available to them individually. He underscored how important it is to examine assumptions about students and suspend premature evaluation. He taught them that a personalized and culturally relevant entry point to the curriculum can mean the difference between sustained and sustainable achievement and frustration and failure. In short, Nicolas helped illustrate the power of personalized learning.

A PARADIGM SHIFT FOR THE NEW GLOBAL REALITY At the heart of personalized learning is a teacher’s commitment to teach all of his or her students. Too often in the past, the prevailing attitude has been that in every class there will be a few unreachable children—students who

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are too lazy, too emotionally disturbed, too ESL, too learning disabled, too inattentive, or too lacking in intelligence or self-control to learn. Too often teachers have assumed tacit license from colleagues and administrators to dismiss or disregard the learning of some students. In the high school where Bill started his teaching career in the 1970s, responsibility for the learning of “difficult” students was placed not on the teacher but on the students.

Embracing All In her article “Deciding to Teach Them All,” Carol Ann Tomlinson (2003) writes about the power of a teacher embracing the challenge of teaching all students in the class—not some or even most, but all. Tomlinson suggests that when teachers make the decision to teach each individual child, our perceptual framework undergoes a fundamental shift. We turn from looking at a student’s “labels” to searching for that student’s interests and needs. We shift from focusing on the child’s deficits—what he or she cannot do— to looking at the child’s strengths. We move away from the question “How do I remediate this student?” and toward “What do I do to ensure that this student works at the highest level of thought and production?” Individual teachers and entire schools must make this commitment to equity. It is easy for educators to be drawn into dichotomous thinking—to pit the pursuit of excellence against the desire for equity. This often occurs at a subconscious level. We see it when private schools define themselves as college preparatory and exclude children with special educational needs. The unspoken assumption is that children who learn differently will somehow lower the standards and impede the learning of other, brighter students. How often have we heard someone say, “We can’t be all things to all people”? Instead of such restrictive thinking, we need to embrace what De Bono (1991) calls water logic (as opposed to the either/or thinking of rock logic); it’s what our Asian colleagues refer to as “the search for the middle way.” The creative tension of embracing both excellence and equity is the defining quality of great schools. Good schools often choose to focus on one or the other—either excellence or equity. Some, by practicing selective admissions policies, sacrifice equity. Others embrace a social-reconstructionist

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agenda at the expense of critical thinking and high academic standards. Great schools, however, refuse to compromise either excellence or equity. The International School of Brussels (ISB) is a case in point. It accepts over 1,500 children from more than 40 nationalities, and these students range from extremely capable learners to those with intensive learning challenges. The mission of ISB is Everyone included. Everyone challenged. Everyone successful. 1,500 ways of being intelligent. At graduation, a student with cerebral palsy who was born in Ireland will walk across the stage next to a student from the United States who is destined for Yale. A starting point for integration of excellence and equity is an understanding that neither is mutually exclusive. In fact, we would argue that they are complementary. The startling recognition is that cultural and learning diversity have enormous potential for enriching our classrooms. Inclusive education is not only more humane; it is actually more effective for all students (Florian & Rouse, 1996; Mittler, 1995; Stainback, Stainback, & Jackson 1992; Udvari-Solner & Thousand, 1995). Unfortunately, most of the world’s education systems have been designed to be deliberately exclusive and to serve needs other than those of students.

Historical Purposes of Education For the last two centuries, schools have had three primary purposes. The thinking behind all three of these traditional purposes is now entirely outdated. The first purpose was to sort children and young adults into categories so they would “fit” into a fixed social and economic order. When Bill was growing up in Britain, the 11 Plus exam was still in place. The examination was administered annually to all 11-year-old students, and the results were used to sort children into those who would continue with an academic education and those who would be shunted into vocational training. It served, in many cases, to perpetuate a rigid class structure. Much of education worldwide continues to fulfill this outdated and antidemocratic function. The second purpose of schooling was to instill a sense of national identity and patriotism. In countries as diverse as China, Tanzania, Malaysia, and the United States, we still see the influence of national identity in the classroom.

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Until recently, both Tanzania and Malaysia had strict regulations that prohibited its citizens from attending international schools. The idea seemed to be that citizenship and allegiance to the nation-state would be learned in the classroom. China continues to have such prohibitions. While such restrictions do not exist in the United States, a number of states prohibit non-U.S. citizens from teaching in the public schools. This may be a legacy from the xenophobia of Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s, but as late as 1979, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right, if not the wisdom, of New York State to ban noncitizens from teaching in public schools. The largest group affected? Teachers of French from nearby Quebec! Historically, there has been little international perspective to national education. More disturbing was the fact that instilling a sense of national identity was often accomplished by perpetuating prejudices against and animosity toward other nationalities and cultures. In other words, students were taught to rally around a flag not to celebrate their national culture, but to feel more secure when they felt threatened by someone else’s culture. Such narrow provincialism is antithetical to the interdependent reality of the modern global village. The membership of the United Nations now stands at just under 200 countries. Of those, only about 20 have any real claim to being “nation-states” in the 19th century sense of containing within their boundaries people of common descent, language, religion, and history. Increasingly, nationality is not associated with a single ethnicity or culture. Over 50 percent of the population of Vancouver is ethnically Asian. So what does it mean to be Canadian? The third historical purpose of education was to serve the economic interest of the nation state. In 1998, when Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, declared that the first three priorities of his government were “Education, education, and education,” he was not referring to the education of French or German children. When U.S. President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law, he was not concerned about schools that were failing young people in Indonesia or Uganda. Education has always had vested national and economic self-interest firmly in its back pocket. But our modern, highly interdependent economic world makes such thinking completely archaic. When the sudden decline in housing values in the United States causes the stock markets in London, Hong Kong, and

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Tokyo to plunge, how can we think of the health of any national economy in isolation from the world economy? Schools must make a paradigm change to catch up with the new global reality. Education must keep pace with our rapidly changing classrooms and world and give all students the tools for working in a global context. Climate change, renewable energy, and the other great challenges of the next generation do not have national borders. In 1918, before the advent of commercial air travel, the Spanish flu took less than a month to spread from its first documented appearance in the United States to the presence of documented cases in every state of the union. How much faster has been the recent spread of the H1N1 flu and how inadequate have been the attempts at evoking national sovereignty as a means of protecting citizens. Slowly, we are perceiving the necessity of global interdependence. Slowly, we are understanding the importance of appreciating and understanding cultures other than our own. These are the crucial messages of the global classroom. Education systems, schools, and teachers have an urgent and undeniable obligation to inculcate “international mindedness” in their students. Some national education systems are starting to move in the right direction. In January 2007, the British government released a report titled 2020 Vision. The centerpiece of this report was a clear vision that students learn in different ways, and these different learning proclivities are influenced by culture, gender, societal factors, learning styles, and biology. The report called on schools and educators to engage in personalized learning, to focus in a more structured and systematic way on each child’s learning in order to enhance progress, achievement, and participation: “In personalized learning, teachers use their understanding of achievement data and other information about their pupils to benefit particular groups, for example, the gifted and talented, by matching teaching and opportunities for learning more accurately to their needs” (Department for Education and Skills, 2007, p. 14).

QUESTIONS FOR TODAY’S EDUCATORS As teachers and schools push past old thinking and outdated purposes in an attempt to meet the new demands of a global classroom and interconnected world, new questions arise:

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• How does a child’s culture affect how he or she thinks and learns? • How can a teacher come to know students as learners in a truly global classroom? • How does a teacher build robust learning relationships with children from a multitude of cultural backgrounds and with many learning styles and intelligence preferences? • How does a teacher’s knowledge and perceptions of culture affect the learning of students? • What should the curriculum for the global classroom include? • What might culturally sensitive assessment look like? • How does a teacher bridge cultural divides when collaborating with colleagues? Although much of culture is intangible, it nevertheless provides the framework for personal identity. We trample upon another person’s culture—even inadvertently—at our own peril. And when we as educators ignore the cultural backgrounds of our students or pretend that these cultural backgrounds do not influence learning in the classroom, we set ourselves up to be perceived as arrogant and disrespectful or, worse yet, alienate our students and erode their sense of membership and belonging in our class community. Pursuing knowledge in the five key domains of personalized learning— knowing our students, knowing ourselves, knowing our curriculum, knowing our assessments, and knowing our collegial relationships—will yield insights into accommodating cultural and learning diversity in the classroom. We will discuss each domain in subsequent chapters of the book, and we have included an Action Advice section at the end of every chapter to get you started in personalizing learning in your own classroom. Although there is no question that a broad repertoire of instructional strategies is an essential component of effective teaching, this “bigger toolbox” is not enough in and of itself. We hope this book will help inspire the deep and inclusive thoughtfulness that underlies all meaningful learning outcomes.

1 Knowing Our Students as Learners

It is easy to dismiss the importance of “knowing your students” as either a vacuous platitude or a statement of the obvious. However, the process of coming to know students as learners is often difficult and challenging, particularly if the students are struggling with schoolwork. Knowing students means more than merely acquiring social or administrative information— students’ names and ages, something about their friendship circles, a bit about their family backgrounds, a few statistics from their academic record. To maximize learning, we need to dig deeper than this superficial acquaintance. In the past, most teachers did not pursue student information in either a systematic or particularly rigorous way. Instead of gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of learning about their students, they were content to put together a general picture based on tidbits from essays or student journals, a hint from an example of student artwork, a guess from an overheard conversation in the corridor, a comment from a parent or last year’s teacher and so on. In some cases, teachers did forge personal connections with students, often when the personality of the student and teacher were compatible or when they shared a common interest (more often than not, this was an interest in the subject the teacher was teaching). In other cases, teachers ended the school year knowing little more about their students 21

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than they had at the year’s start. Overall, coming to know students was an optional and often arbitrary business. Today, research and experience in increasingly global classrooms are revealing the complex interplay of factors that influence a student’s learning. Educators understand that the business of coming to know our students as learners is simply too important to leave to chance—and that the peril of not undertaking this inquiry is not reaching a learner at all. The story of our friend Arthur is a reminder of the consequences of ignoring a student’s unique learning circumstances.

Arthur: Dropping in from Another Planet Arthur was born in the Dutch West Indies, now Indonesia, and had just seen his sixth birthday when the Japanese invaded. For the duration of the war, Arthur, his parents, and his siblings were interred in a Japanese concentration camp in West Java. While Arthur and his family survived the ordeal, life in the camp was hard and brutal. They suffered from chronic hunger, periodic outbreaks of deadly disease, the cruelty of the guards, and an ever-present atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Four years later, following the fall of Japan and the return of the Dutch to Indonesia, Arthur and his family, together with thousands of other camp survivors, were repatriated to the Netherlands, where Arthur was promptly enrolled in a government school. Given the amount of schooling that he had missed, Arthur was placed in a class with children three years younger than himself. There was no question that Arthur’s basic skills in writing, reading, and math were considerably behind his peers, but the school made no provision for the intellectual and emotional learning that Arthur had been engaged in during his time in the camps. The school authorities and the teacher perceived Arthur through the lens of his deficits. They focused on the basic academic skills he was lacking—what he couldn’t do. Perhaps Arthur’s experience was so foreign to these teachers that they were incapable of empathizing with Arthur. Or perhaps they believed that any effort to address his past traumas would only make the present situation worse.

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Arthur, who retired as the managing director of a major oil company and is now in his early eighties, recalls that he was an alienated and confused adolescent: Because I was behind in my reading, the teacher treated me as she would a much younger child. She gave me the same books as the other younger students. No one seemed to understand or appreciate my experience. The other children? They were interested in movies and shopping and clothes. All of which I didn’t know anything about. They were kind and friendly. I just couldn’t understand them. There was nothing I could relate to. I felt as though I had been dropped onto another planet.

Unfortunately, Arthur is not a historical anomaly. He has many more recent counterparts in schools around the world: children whose particular personal histories make it difficult for them to thrive within a paradigm of one-size-fits-all schooling. Bill recalls Christine-Apollo, the 13-year-old daughter of a Ugandan diplomat stationed in Tanzania and another war victim.

Christine-Apollo’s New Shoes The first thing Bill noted during Christine-Apollo’s admissions interview at the international school in Dar es Salaam was that her father did all the talking, and most of it had nothing to do with his daughter. Christine-Apollo presented as extremely shy and withdrawn. Physically, she appeared much younger than 13. Her gaze was downcast and she steadfastly refused to make eye contact. Her facial expression was blank, and her eyes, when she did raise them from the floor, were vacant. Yet she often moved suddenly, casting her gaze around the office like a small animal on the outlook for predators. She was dressed in an ill-fitting, well-worn uniform from a Ugandan government school—clearly a hand-me-down. Her father explained that Christine-Apollo didn’t speak English and that her schooling had been “interrupted.” As Bill probed deeper, a more complex picture began to emerge. Christine-Apollo did not speak Kiswahili, which is one of the official languages of Uganda, either. She communicated only in her tribal language. She was the daughter of the diplomat’s third wife and had been brought

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up in a bush village in Northern Uganda. For the past four years, ChristineApollo had been a nomadic refugee in her own country, moving from village to village, hiding from the horrors and ravages of the civil war that raged during the years following the fall of Idi Amin. At the end of the interview, as Christine-Apollo rose to leave Bill’s office, she tripped and fell to her knees. Both Bill and her father jumped to help her to her feet. Christine-Apollo was clearly mortified by her tumble. Her father apologized to Bill. “She is not usually so clumsy,” he said. “It’s just that this is one of the few times she has worn shoes.” The childhoods of Arthur and Christine-Apollo were obviously traumatic and illustrate how children’s prior experiences can have a profound effect upon their learning. But even children who don’t have such traumas in their past bring to the classroom unique sets of experiences, traits, and learning preferences that deeply influence their learning. When we consider the diversity of the children who fill our classes, it seems foolish to think we could treat them all as a single entity. Every student presents us with a different learning puzzle that we must solve in order to give them the best opportunity. That is the goal of personalized learning—to use what we find out about our students as a key to unlock their learning potential.

THE BENEFITS OF KNOWING STUDENTS AS LEARNERS Later in the chapter, we will discuss what, specifically, teachers ought to learn about their students, but right now we would like to put forward the benefits teachers will reap from this inquiry. Developing an in-depth understanding of each learner enables teachers to 1. Create a psychologically safe environment for every learner. 2. Determine each student’s readiness for learning. 3. Identify multiple access points to the curriculum to increase engagement and success. 4. Develop and demonstrate greater emotional intelligence in the classroom.

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Let’s take a closer look at each of these benefits.

Creating a Psychologically Safe Environment As Maslow proposed in his hierarchy of human needs, basic wants must be met before students can turn their attention to learning (1999). After securing food, water, shelter, and safety from harm, people seek as their next most important needs affection, belonging, and esteem. In the process of coming to know students, a caring and interested teacher can develop rapport and trust not just between teacher and student but among students. This trust and acceptance creates a psychologically safe atmosphere in the classroom, which provides the security students need to experience the intellectual discomfort of new ideas and adjust their pre-existing mental models to accommodate new, deep learning. A sense of belonging and being valued maximizes the chances that students will take such risks. Recall Matt from the Introduction, the socially isolated American student attending an international school in Brazil. There is little doubt that Matt had learning issues, but these challenges were exacerbated by his sense of cultural and personal alienation. According to Matt’s counselor and learning specialist, what turned things around for Matt was not academic intervention but social connection. He auditioned for the middle school play. Amazingly, on stage, Matt’s thick glasses and awkward gait seemed to disappear. He stepped into character and blew away the director and the rest of the would-be cast: “Holy smokes! Matt’s a natural. Who would have guessed that he had such acting talent! He is a completely different child on stage!” As word of Matt’s success got around, his teachers began to get a new and expanded vision of his potential, and their expectations for him rose. His peers stopped calling him names, and he began participating more in class discussions. He and his teachers worked out a plan for improvement, with new goals and strategies. And with a new community of cast-mate friends, Matt stopped eating his lunch alone. In short, as Matt’s teacher and classmates discovered and recognized his strengths—his theatrical talents—his isolation decreased, and his sense of belonging increased. Such a psychologically safe environment is critical for meaningful learning.

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Determining Each Student’s Readiness As teachers, we make decisions and judgments daily about the readiness level of our students. Should we teach Julius Caesar to our 8th graders? What understandings need to be in place prior to introducing the concept of division? At what age or grade should we expect students to be able to produce a five- or six-paragraph essay? These are questions of group readiness. If teachers are to meet the learning needs of a global classroom, they will need to personalize learning, to think of readiness in both group and individual terms. In his classic work Thought and Language (1986), the Russian cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky coined the expression “the zone of proximal development.” The phrase is often used as a synonym for a child’s intellectual readiness for a given task or for the understanding of an abstract concept. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a way of looking at readiness, but it is a very specific kind of readiness: the discrepancy between what the child can accomplish independently and what the child can achieve with skillful adult intervention. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990) also ties readiness to the demands of the challenge that confronts the learner: “Playing tennis, for instance, is not enjoyable if two opponents are mismatched. The less skilful player will feel anxious and the better player will feel bored. The same is true of every other activity: the piece of music that is too simple relative to one’s listening skills, will be boring, while music that is too complex will be frustrating” (p. 50). According to Csikszentmihalyi, “enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with a person’s capacity to act” (p. 50). We would suggest that this is the exact location of personalized learning—on the frontier between boredom and anxiety, which, most likely, is not the same for all students in a class. If readiness levels in a class differ, so must the levels of challenge provided (Jensen, 1998; Sousa, 2001; Tomlinson, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Wolfe, 2001). Teachers often think of learning readiness as dependent on the knowledge, understanding, and skills that an individual brings to a new learning situation. However, educators also need to appreciate that readiness is profoundly influenced by an individual’s prior learning success or failure,

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self-esteem, sense of efficacy, cultural norms, social status within the class or group, life experience, dispositions and attitudes, and habits of mind. When we know our students deeply, we are able to consider all these factors and determine individual readiness with greater accuracy—and then pitch instruction more precisely to a student’s optimal zone for learning. Because readiness is affected by so many factors, it is not a static condition. Ultimately, student knowledge will let teachers influence readiness, foster and anticipate it, and truly ready students for learning. Frank, our Tanzanian valedictorian who won a scholarship to Harvard, offers an interesting example of how complex the readiness principle can be. There can be no question that when he first transferred to an international school, Frank had the intellectual wherewithal to understand and learn the content of the curriculum. He was intellectually ready and able. But at that point, Frank was not culturally ready. He still did not understand the expectations of the new school culture. As he grew to understand and embrace those expectations, his intellectual and cultural readiness merged, and his learning flourished.

Identifying Multiple Access Points to the Curriculum Access points are the connections that make the content and concepts relevant to learners, whether through similar experience, or an interest, or tapping into their way of thinking. As teachers get to know each of their students better, effective access points become more apparent. Access points are often areas of student strength. In the case of Nicolas, it was his talent in drawing and his “need” to express himself in that way. For Nicolas, combining his preferred method of expression with a story that involved cultural self-discovery proved to be a powerful invitation to learn.

Developing and Demonstrating Greater Emotional Intelligence The effort to come to know students is often accompanied by increased teacher emotional intelligence. As teachers learn about their students as individuals, they should enjoy greater flexibility of thought, greater empathy, greater patience, and more accurate attribution of responsibility—that

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critical balance between student responsibility and teacher responsibility, which so often we get wrong because we don’t know or haven’t taken into account all the influences on a student’s learning. When teachers become more emotionally intelligent, they benefit as much as their students do. When teachers develop emotional intelligence, they are able to frame questions about students and suspend negative judgments. For example, we can put aside the notion that Rupa may be lazy and instead ask how her previous schooling may be affecting her present performance. Emotional intelligence is particularly valuable in the global classroom, where students’ experiences, expectations, and norms may be very different from the teacher’s.

LEARNING PROFILES To help you meet the challenge of coming to know your students, we recommend developing student learning profiles to capture five important dimensions of learning identity: biological traits, cultural and societal factors, emotional and social influences, academic performance, and learning preferences. You won’t acquire all of this information at one time, but as you continue to collect and compile student data, a meaningful and useful learning profile should emerge.

Biological Traits Include child’s gender, age, physical development, physical disabilities, health, motor skills, coordination, and diagnosed learning disabilities. Biological parameters for learning are defined to some degree; however, they are malleable with appropriate context and support. For example, it is certainly not uncommon now to see teachers wearing wireless clip-on microphones that are connected to a hearing device for a hearing-impaired child. Computer software makes it possible for students with visual impairments to attend and participate in the general education classroom. We also know that children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or autism spectrum disorders are educable, and our knowledge of these biological

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traits allows us to construct meaningful and worthy learning objectives for these children. As a wise sailor once said, “While we cannot control the wind, we can adjust our sails.” Several years ago we were privileged to observe a very creative science teacher at Escola Graduada in São Paulo, Brazil, as he “adjusted his sails.” The teacher was concluding a lab with his 10th grade students, who were measuring their lung capacity by blowing into probes and then observing how the strength of each “blow” could be graphed on a computer screen. However, one student—Mauricio—was unable to participate in this engaging activity because, having been born blind, he couldn’t see the graphs. So the teacher had Mauricio blow into a balloon and then measure the circumference of the balloon with a piece of string. From this, Mauricio was able to calculate the volume and infer his lung capacity. The teacher’s final instructions to Mauricio were, “When you are finished, you will have to answer exactly the same questions as the other students.” The methodology was personalized; the learning outcomes were not. Knowledge of a child’s biological learning traits can also help a teacher more accurately interpret classroom behavior. For example, it is all too easy for us to fall back on the labels of “lazy,” “defiant,” or “willful,” when, in fact, there may be a biological cause for a student’s behavior. This information might be gleaned from the child’s medical history, family history, and developmental progress. We are learning now that even gender (which in the past some regarded largely as a sociocultural influence on learning) is a biological trait, in that there are some distinctive physiological differences in the male and female brains (King & Gurian, 2006).

Cultural and Societal Factors Include child’s sense of stability, both now and in past; economic status; ethnic and racial background; cultural identity; language; religion; norms and values; and gender expectations. A number of years ago, Bill was interviewing prospective IB scholarship students at the International School of Tanganyika in Tanzania. One student had already completed the first year of the 6th form (equivalent to 11th

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grade or the first year of the IB diploma program). Bill was curious as to why the student had “dropped out.” When he asked about the circumstances, the boy replied that he had left his previous school because the food there was bad. Bill was incredulous. Tanzania was a desperately poor African country. At the time, less than 5 percent of the population was privileged enough to extend their education to the 6th form, and here was a student who had turned his back on such a tremendous opportunity because he didn’t like the food in the school canteen! Later, when Bill mentioned this “immature and spoiled” student to a Tanzanian colleague, he was gently reminded that the boy’s previous school had been a boarding institution in a region of the country devastated by famine. In all likelihood, the school didn’t have any food to provide for its students. Societal influences like famine, war, and economic prosperity or the lack of it play a significant role in the availability, quality, and nature of learning. Cultural identity is equally influential, affecting not only the expectations and values students hold, but also their very thinking. Richard Nisbett (2003) from the University of Michigan proposes that students from different cultures actually think and, to some degree, learn differently. He suggests that people hold the beliefs they do because of the way they think, and they think the way they do because of the societies they live in. Nisbett relates the story of Heejung Kim, a Korean graduate student of psychology at Stanford University. Kim was exasperated by her professors’ constant demands that she speak up in class. Failure to speak up in class, her professors told her, might indicate a lack of understanding on her part. What’s more, by not talking, Kim was limiting classroom interaction and, therefore, limiting her own learning and the learning of her classmates. Kim wasn’t buying it. She felt that she and her fellow Asian and Asian American students would not benefit from speaking because their fundamental way of understanding the material was not verbal. For Kim, this was the essence of the difference between Western analytic thought and Eastern holistic thought. Kim tested her theory by having people speak out loud while solving various complex problems. This had no effect on the Western European and Caucasian American students. They were just as successful—or just as unsuccessful—at solving the problems regardless of whether they were

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speaking or silent. However, speaking out loud had a very deleterious effect on the problem-solving performance of the Asian and Asian American students. While we are not suggesting that it is unimportant for Asian students to participate in class discussions, we are suggesting that we who teach in culturally diverse classrooms are wise to remember the words of Samuel Huntington (1996) in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order: “In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilization clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false, it is immoral, and it is dangerous” (cited in Nisbett, 2003, p. 220).

Emotional and Social Influences Include family structure, family history, recent change or loss in the family, attitude, disposition, peer status, and self-esteem. When Ochan was a child, many of her teachers operated on the understanding that the classroom was an academic setting in which emotions had no place. During a time when Ochan’s grandmother was in a coma and dying, her grades took a nosedive. After Ochan explained what was going on and confided her fears about her grandmother, the teacher’s response was to tell Ochan, “Home is home, and school is school. We are here to learn. Best to leave your emotions at home.” We know now that such a notion is impossible. None of us can separate our cognitive and emotional lives; they are inextricably bound together (LeDoux, 1996; Pert, 1997). When a child has had an intense emotional experience, we must expect that experience to influence the youngster’s ability to attend in school. These experiences can range from the grief of the departure of a friend (all too common in our very transient school communities) to the anxiety of a family member’s illness to the terror of witnessing a violent altercation between Mom and Dad. Attitudes and dispositions teachers see in school are the exterior manifestations of students’ internal emotions. For example, May Ling appears withdrawn and anxious in the company of her classmates. How might this apparent insecurity affect her acquisition of language? Rupa seems to have a

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great aversion to making mistakes. She is visibly ashamed when the teacher points out a spelling or grammatical error. How might Rupa’s obsession with “the right answer” affect her willingness to take intellectual risks? Research in social psychology (Aronson, 1999) confirms what most of us know intuitively—that life tends to be easier for attractive, wealthy individuals who belong to the dominant culture and race. As a generalization, this is also true for students in our schools. It is easier to succeed in school if you are physically able and attractive, affluent, and a member of the dominant culture or race. In a typical classroom, even in primary school, students rank themselves and each other in terms of success as students (academic status) and perceived attractiveness and popularity (peer status). Elizabeth Cohen (1998) notes that “low status members [of the class] talk less than others, [and] when they do speak up, no one takes their ideas seriously, and other members may not even listen to what they have to say. Low-status group members have trouble getting their hands on materials for the group task; they may even be physically excluded” (p. 19). Consequently, low-status children learn less effectively and less efficiently than their high-status counterparts. We saw a vivid example of this phenomenon at the International School of Tanganyika in the 1980s, when the student body included a significant number of Zambian children whose fathers worked for the TAZARA Railroad (the rail line that links Dar es Salaam, Lusaka, and the Zambian Copper Belt). The “otherness” of these students was primarily related to their socioeconomic status. The “TAZARA children” looked different from their Zambian classmates. They generally wore secondhand uniforms and did not bathe regularly. They didn’t engage in the same leisure-time activities as the other children, and their frames of reference were different. It became clear that the TAZARA children were becoming a “minority” group within the school and were perceived by their peers to have lower status. This perception unquestionably inhibited their learning. Cohen (1998) has suggested that teacher awareness of student status can be a starting point to making cooperative learning groups equitable. By assigning group work that requires multiple intellectual abilities and forming groups so that no one person has all the capabilities, the teacher creates a learning situation that requires group interdependence. The teacher can

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then deliberately search out opportunities to assign competence to lowstatus students. As Cohen puts it, “if the teacher publicly evaluates a lowstatus student as being strong on a particular multiple ability, that student will tend to believe the evaluation, as will the other students who overhear the evaluation” (p. 21). Cohen also points out that the effective assignment of competence must have three essential features: (1) the evaluation must be public, (2) it must be genuine and true, and (3) the skills or abilities of the low-status student must be made relevant to the group task. Assigning competence to low-status students is not just about increasing or enhancing self-esteem. It is also about modifying the expectations that other students have for the low-status student. There is, however, a caution. The low-status student knows what he or she has done, so a false or disingenuous assignment of competence will do more harm than good. We have found that a very simple way to assign competence to a lowstatus student is through the use of paraphrasing. Paraphrasing sends three important messages: (1) I understand or am trying to understand what you’re saying, (2) I value your ideas, and (3) I care about you as a person. These are messages that every student, but particularly a low-status student, needs to hear.

Academic Performance Includes evidence of child’s concrete or abstract thinking skills, reading skills, attentional focus, past success, oral language development, written language, proficiency with sequencing, proficiency with categorization, and proficiency in identifying logical arguments. When teachers investigate a child’s academic performance, more often than not they do so by examining and analyzing a piece of student work. This effort requires cognitive empathy—trying to get inside the cognition of the child to see what is being understood and what is being misunderstood. If we were examining a student’s solution to a mathematical problem, for example, we might ask ourselves, “What evidence do we see of conceptual understanding? What ‘sense’ can we make of the child’s mistakes? Is this a problem with calculation? Is it a language issue? What hunches do we want

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to use to frame questions for further investigation?” Cognitive empathy is what distinguishes good and great teachers. Think of May Ling, who was an enigma to her teachers. She was orally fluent in English yet unable to generate any written expression that demonstrated depth of thought. One teacher decided to have a private conversation with May Ling to try to pin down what she understood from her reading of the social studies text. It soon became apparent that May Ling had developed social language in English, Cantonese, and Danish but lacked the academic language that would allow her to engage in abstract thought. For years, May Ling had masked her lack of comprehension behind a veneer of social graciousness. When teachers talk about a student’s academic performance, we often use the term “ability.” We talk about the challenges of teaching to a mixedability class or the delight of watching a high-ability student go beyond our expectations. Given how frequently teachers use the term “ability,” it was a surprise to us that in Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe’s book Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design (2006), they avoid the word almost completely. They even substitute the term “readiness grouping” for the more familiar “ability grouping.” Why, we wondered, would two best-selling authors deliberately use a phrase that would be unfamiliar to many, if not most, of their readership? We paused to examine our assumptions about the word “ability.” Is ability synonymous with the student’s present level of academic performance? Or does ability imply a natural aptitude and talent? Is there something about one’s ability in a specific subject area discipline that suggests potential for future success or failure? How malleable is ability? What is the relationship between ability and potential? What is the relationship between a teacher’s perception of ability and how he or she constructs expectations for a given student? What is the relationship between teachers’ expectations and student performance? What an individual identifies as the cause of his or her success or failure can have a profound influence on future learning. For example, if a student routinely attributes his failure in mathematics to sources outside his control (e.g., to the complexity of the subject or a lack of native intelligence), there is a good chance that he may develop a “learned helplessness” in

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mathematics. If he believes the sources of his difficulty in math are beyond his control, the “smart” thing to do is to stop wasting any more time on the subject. In this way, a student can develop what Carol Dweck (2006) refers to as a “fixed mindset.” Teachers are equally susceptible to this, and the consequences of our making judgments about student ability can be dire. We, like Tomlinson and McTighe, prefer the term “readiness” to “ability” because readiness suggests malleability. It is something that can change and be influenced by skilled instruction, and it will vary considerably depending on circumstance, topic or subject, and a student’s developmental stage. Ability, by contrast, suggests innate talents over which neither the child nor the teacher has much influence. We suspect that teachers are much better able to judge a student’s readiness for the next learning challenge than they are a student’s ability to tackle that challenge. A substantial body of research supports the importance of teachers knowing the level of student readiness. Longitudinal research conducted by Hunt and colleagues in the 1960s established two features of effective personalized learning. First of all, more effective learning takes places when the amount of task structure by the teacher matches a student’s level of development (Hunt, 1971). In other words, students who are functioning at a fairly concrete level might require very explicit and sequential task instructions, whereas students who are thinking more abstractly might benefit from task instructions that are deliberately open-ended and “fuzzy.” Second, there is a strong relationship between student achievement and a teacher’s ability to diagnose student skill level and prescribe appropriate tasks. In a study of 250 classrooms, Fisher and colleagues (1980) found when individual students worked at high success levels, the students overall felt better about themselves and the subject they were studying and learned more. These authors go on to suggest that a success rate of about 80 percent is probably optimal for intellectual growth. This suggests that students who are achieving at a success rate significantly over 80 percent are probably being underchallenged. (What does this say about our straight-A students?) Put another way, student achievement is not likely to improve when teachers ask students to practice what they already know and can do reasonably well.

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In a five-year research study, Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen (1993) found an important correlation between student readiness and student motivation. The researchers studied over 200 teenagers, pursuing the question of why some adolescents become committed to the development of their talents while others become disengaged and neglect talent development. The findings show a strong correlation between the complexity of the tasks developed by the teachers for the students and the individual skill level of a student. Students who had good skills but were underchallenged demonstrated low involvement in learning activities and a decrease in concentration. At the other end of the spectrum, students whose skills were inadequate for the level of challenge demonstrated low involvement, low achievement, and declining self-worth. This mismatch not only failed to stimulate or challenge students but also undermined both their competence and confidence as learners. The researchers write: “This situation, which accounted for almost a third of the observed classroom activities, consisted mostly of reading, watching films, and listening to lectures” (p. 186). According to these researchers, teachers who are effective in developing student talents craft challenges commensurate with student readiness levels. Typically, teachers personalize learning for student readiness levels by addressing content, product, and process in four ways: • By varying the degree of dependence or independence of the learning activity (e.g., task complexity). This can take the form of the teacher dividing complex tasks into manageable chunks for students who might otherwise be overwhelmed. • By modifying the task clarity or “fuzziness.” On occasion, students benefit from deliberately vague instructions. This may especially be the case when the assignment involves creativity or imagination. • By varying the degree of structure or open-endedness of the learning activity. Depending upon the readiness of the students, a teacher can either provide a graphic organizer (e.g., a Venn diagram or a T chart) or have the students develop their own visual organizing structure. • By teaching or reteaching particular skills in small groups as students need them (Tomlinson & Allan, 2000).

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It is clear that teacher adjustments that accommodate student academic readiness enhance both student achievement and student attitudes about learning.

Learning Preferences Include interests, intelligence preferences, learning styles, production styles, and environmental influences. Although identifying and sorting student learning preferences may seem time-consuming, the dividends your students will reap should more than compensate. Having a student lie on the floor to read his book rather than sit in a chair, letting a student explore the concept of life cycles through her passion for beetles, assigning a drawing rather than a writing project to an artistic student—these small modifications can make big differences in the learning that takes place. Interests. There is a considerable research base to support a strong correlation between the degree of student interest and levels of student motivation, achievement, productivity, and perseverance (Amabile, 1983; Torrance, 1995). Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues (1993) have found that student interest is as critical to talent development as the match between task complexity and student readiness for the task. According to Glasser (1988), students who are interested in what they are learning are motivated to pursue learning experiences of ever-increasing complexity and difficulty. There is also a significant correlation between students’ interest in the learning content and their willingness to persevere in learning tasks that are momentarily not interesting. Another important correlation to emerge from the research on student interest and choice is that students who are engaged in work that interested them were overwhelmingly more able to see connections between their present work in school and their future academic or career goals. These connections form the foundation of commitment to future learning and foster self-directedness (Cziksentmihalyi et al., 1993). There are two types of student interests useful in planning for personalized learning. Pre-existing student interests are those subjects, topics, and

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pursuits about which an individual student has an existing curiosity or passion. They may be interests explored at school (areas of the curriculum, extracurricular activities, or athletics) or outside interests in which the student readily invests time and energy. Relevance to the student is obvious and engagement is immediate. Potential interests are topics, activities, or pursuits that the student may not have yet discovered or been exposed to, but that may prove to be ongoing. Potential interests are as powerful as pre-existing interests, but a teacher needs to mediate their relevance for the student. Effective teachers pay attention to both pre-existing and potential interests. Whenever you can link the classroom curriculum to student interest, you tap into internalized achievement motivation—where goals are personal, motivation comes from within, and achievement is deeply meaningful. Mediating connections between classroom learning and student interests is one of the most powerful strategies that teachers can employ toward the goal of creating enthusiastic lifelong learners. During a unit on religious knowledge in our IB Theory of Knowledge class, we asked the students to write about how they personally came to knowledge through faith. Both Jorgen, a militant atheist from Sweden, and Samir, a devout Jordanian Muslim of Palestinian extraction, wrote particularly well-organized, articulate essays. As a follow-up, we asked the class to undertake a self-analysis of their arguments for “confirmation bias”—the tendency all of us have to perceive only that which confirms our pre-existing ideas and prejudices. A rich and respectful discussion ensued, with Jorgen and Samir—both fascinated by God but taking polar-opposite positions— driving the conversation. It was a vivid example of how student interest can support deep, critical thinking. Intelligence preferences. General consensus in education today is that intelligence is not monolithic but made up of many elements. Educators also view it as malleable, subject to a wide variety of influences (Nisbett, 2009). Howard Gardner’s (1993) model of intelligence, identifying eight specific types of intelligence, has been popular with teachers, but many who find it fascinating intellectually also find it cumbersome to apply to classroom instruction. Gardner himself is quick to point out that his theory was never designed for classroom use.

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Teachers may find Robert Sternberg’s (1985) framework of intelligence preferences easier to use. Sternberg proposes three intelligence types: analytical, practical, and creative. • Analytical intelligence is the intelligence most often recognized and rewarded in schools. Students with strengths in this area learn well with traditional school tasks such as organizing information, perceiving cause and effect, logical analysis, note taking, and predicting implications. • Practical intelligence is about relevance. Students with strengths in this area need to solve problems in a meaningful context. Their learning is supported when teachers offer connections with the real world outside the classroom. These students need to see concepts and skills at work. • Creative intelligence involves approaching ideas and problems in fresh and sometimes surprising ways. Students with strong creative intelligence are often divergent thinkers, preferring to experiment with ideas rather than “work” like everyone else. All people have and use all three intelligences, but we vary in particular preferences and in combination of preferences. These preferences may be shaped by “brain wiring,” culture, gender, and personal experiences. It makes sense for teachers to support students as they develop their intelligence strengths while providing opportunities to expand their nonpreferred areas. Sternberg’s model has been well substantiated by research studies of students from primary school through university level. His findings suggest that students can make significant gains when teachers both permit them to explore ideas using their preferred intelligences and teach regularly in all three modes, which deepens student understanding and enhances retention. Learning styles. In recent years, educators have seen some controversy arise over the issue of learning styles. Willingham (2009) and other critics argue that there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that children and young adults learn in fundamentally different ways. In fact, in a September 2009 posting on the Washington Post website, Willingham called learning styles

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“bunk.” This is a remarkable conclusion that flies in the face of what people know intuitively about learning and what educators have learned from observing our students in the classroom. In his book Why Don’t Students Like School? (2009), Daniel Willingham asserts that there is no neuroscience research that supports the use of learning styles in schools. This may be true. But there is also no neuroscience research that establishes the influences of temperament or personality on learning. However, for hundreds of years, teachers have known from experience how powerful these influences can be. There is no question that certain approaches to learning work better for some children than for others. No one, to our knowledge, is suggesting that we use a learning style inventory to pigeonhole children, and no one is suggesting that children’s learning style proclivities may not change from situation to situation. The reality, as we see it, is simply that because many children find learning to be a struggle, teachers are obliged to do what they can to make it easier. Being aware of learning style preferences and building them into instructional planning is one way to do this. Modality preferences refer to a student’s preferred mode of taking in information—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or tactual. Each of us uses all four modalities when we learn, but in different combinations of preference. The largest proportion of the population tends to prefer visual learning; these are students who greatly benefit from a graphic display of the material to be learned. The next-largest groups are those who prefer kinesthetic and tactual learning experiences. (Several of our special education colleagues from schools around the world have observed that a significant number of boys with learning disabilities have a preference for kinesthetic learning; ironically, these are the same students teachers often require to sit still for long periods of time.) The smallest proportion of the population tends to prefer auditory learning. That auditory learners are a minority in our classrooms is significant, given our proclivity as teachers to fill the classroom with teacher talk. Each modality preference may present challenges to learning, but each also offers opportunities for personalizing and ought to be considered during instructional planning. Figure 1.1 lists some activities that may be problematic or helpful for each type of learner.

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FIGURE 1.1 PERSONALIZING FOR LEARNING MODALITY PREFERENCE LEARNING CHALLENGES

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

KINESTHETIC LEARNERS MAY HAVE DIFFICULTY

KINESTHETIC LEARNERS MAY ENJOY

• • • • • • • • •

• • •

•

Sitting still and completing solo tasks Listening Spacing letters in handwriting Interpreting nonverbal communications Interacting positively with peers Problem solving Controlling impulses Writing legibly in cursive Spelling, particularly if instruction involves a phonetic approach Recalling what was seen or heard Recalling visual images Expressing emotions without physical movement and gestures Sticking with one activity for long periods

• • •

• • • • • • •

TACTUAL LEARNERS MAY HAVE DIFFICULTY

• • • •

•

•

Keeping hands still Succeeding without teacher approval Working in a sterile environment Working in groups that do not include friends Succeeding without lots of sensory stimuli and the opportunity to touch and feel Engaging in activities that do not involve manipulatives

Activities that involve movement Large motor skill activities Art activities requiring physical movement, such as sculpture and woodworking Field trips that involve physical activity Real-life experiences Dramatic activities, role-play Dance and sports Physical relaxation exercises Frequent changes of learning groups Hands-on activities, working with manipulatives

TACTUAL LEARNERS MAY ENJOY

• • • • •

• • • • •

Working with manipulatives Hands-on science experiments Cooperative learning activities Small group interactions Personal expression, such as sharing time and journal writing Fine motor skills activities Art activities Building and model making Peer teaching Discussion of emotional issues

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FIGURE 1.1—(continued) PERSONALIZING FOR LEARNING MODALITY PREFERENCE

• • •

• •

•

•

•

LEARNING CHALLENGES

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

AUDITORY LEARNERS MAY HAVE DIFFICULTY

AUDITORY LEARNERS MAY ENJOY

Forming letters in primary grades Remembering faces Reading silently for prolonged periods of time Following written directions Taking timed tests that must be read and written Learning in an environment with enforced silence Concentrating when background noises or music sounds are present Seeing significant details

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

VISUAL LEARNERS MAY HAVE DIFFICULTY

• • •

•

•

•

Sounding out words Following oral directions Working in an environment with noise or movement Listening to lectures without visual pictures or graphics Working in a classroom with no decorations Working in a classroom with too much visual stimulation

Phonetic approach to spelling Listening to oral instructions Lectures Student speeches Audiotapes Dialogues and debates Socratic seminars Paraphrasing Storytelling Reading aloud Music, raps, and sound effects Auditory repetition Word games, such as puns and palindromes

VISUAL LEARNERS MAY ENJOY

• • •

• • • • •

• • •

Reading Graphic organizers Handwriting, which is usually neat and well spaced Writing and note-taking assignments Visual arts, such as painting and collages Demonstrations and observations Telescopes, microscopes, and binoculars Videotapes, slides, photos, movies, and optical illusions Visualizations and guided imagery Mind maps and visual organizers Computer graphics

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Environmental preferences are the conditions under which a given student works best. Does Frank do his best thinking in the morning or afternoon? Does Rupa become distracted when the classroom is too warm or too cold? When Matt is struggling to read, does he do better in a hard, straight-backed chair or when he is lounging on a soft pillow on the floor? Grouping preferences refer to a student’s favored interaction—working alone, with a partner, in a small group, or in a large group. Production styles. Allied closely with learning styles, production styles are preferred ways of expressing learning, including through speech, through written language, and through various visual modes. For example, an easily managed model of production styles might ask students to selfselect into four different groups: writers, performers, builders, and artists. The students would then be given a learning task that corresponds to their preferred mode of expressing their learning. Several years ago, Susan Baum and Hank Nichols led a workshop on differentiated instruction at the International School of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. They asked the entire teaching staff to take a quick individual inventory of their preferred and nonpreferred production styles. The teachers were then grouped together in their least-preferred production style and given the following simulation task: Design a product that shows the social and economic structure of a medieval European town, illustrating the relationships between economic classes and different forms of power and authority. As you might predict, the products were awkward, unrefined, and lacking precision. The participants were also noticeably frustrated. Susan and Hank then regrouped the teachers into their most-preferred production style and assigned the same learning task. The new products showed richness and creativity and a depth of understanding that had been entirely absent in the previous products. Had these teachers reached a greater understanding of medieval Europe in the previous half hour? Perhaps, but we suspect not. We suggest that there is a positive correlation between the complexity and sophistication of understanding and learning that a student can demonstrate and the degree to which he or she is permitted to use a preferred production style. We know that the anxiety and stress of being compelled to work in one’s least-preferred production style can actually serve as an obstacle to cognition. The medium does affect the message.

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Another significant learning that emerged from Susan and Hank’s workshop was that teachers tend to be profoundly suspicious of their own leastpreferred production style. We heard a number of teachers express concern that it was simply not possible to demonstrate the depth of understanding in building, for example, that you could in writing an essay. Another teacher dismissed a visual representation of knowledge (e.g., a poster) as a “soft option.” However, when evaluated objectively against a precise and common rubric, each of these production styles can yield products that are rich in conceptual understanding. We, as teachers, need to be aware of our own learning prejudices. Allowing student choice is a powerful learning tool, but it’s an approach that can sometimes get out of hand and actually impair learning. Carolyn Brunner, the director of the International Center for Learning Styles at SUNY–Buffalo, sets out three nonnegotiables students must follow if they wish to alter planned activities in order to use their preferred learning styles: (1) the student’s grades must either remain the same (if they are already acceptable or good) or improve; (2) the student’s behavior must remain constructive and appropriate (if it is already so) or it must improve; and (3) the student’s use of the preferred learning style must not interfere with anyone else’s learning (Brunner, 1994).

STRATEGIES FOR GATHERING LEARNING-PROFILE DATA The work of knowing students deeply as individuals and compiling a learning profile for each one may seem daunting, especially given the limitations of the classroom day. Specialist teachers in elementary schools (music, art, PE, etc.) and middle and high school subject-area teachers often see more than a hundred students each week. Those teachers can understandably ask, “How it is possible to come to know all my students as learners?” While each child is a unique learner, it is often more helpful to think of each child as a unique combination of common learning attributes. So, by coming to know one child as a learner, you are actually coming to know the learning attributes of many children. In other words, by knowing what works in the classroom for one kinesthetic learner, you know what works for many kinesthetic learners.

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To help you get started with compiling learning profiles for your students, let’s look at some sources and strategies for gathering data, framing probing questions about each student as a learner, and developing hypotheses for how best to personalize instruction. As teachers, it is natural for us to be concerned about the students in our classes who are struggling. As a result, we tend to focus on student deficits (what a student is not yet able to do) as opposed to student strengths. Creating a student learner profile can provide a way to shift this focus and “unmask” success. We have developed a series of questions that teachers might want to ask themselves as they develop a learner profile. The questions are categorized under the five dimensions of learner identity. 1. Biological traits – In what ways might the child’s gender be influencing learning in the classroom? – Is there anything in the child’s medical records that indicates a condition that might impact classroom learning? – Does the child have a learning disability? – Has the student been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD? – Has the student been identified as highly capable? 2. Cultural and societal influences – What is the child’s dominant culture (or cultures), and how might it (they) be influencing learning? – How do you think the child perceives the role of the student? – If you were to ask the child what the word “learning” means, how do you anticipate the child would respond? – What might be some ways that you could support the child in coming to better understand the culture of the school? – If the child’s first language is not English, how might this linguistic diversity enhance achievement in the classroom? 3. Emotional and social influences – What are the socioeconomic circumstances of the child’s family circumstances? What is the family’s primary language?

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– – – – –

What is the student’s prior school history? Does the student prefer to work alone or in groups? When have you seen the student take on leadership responsibilities? How would you describe the student’s interpersonal skills? When is the student most self-directed?

4. Learner preferences – What are the child’s strengths as a learner? – Under what conditions have you seen the child doing his or her best work? – What are you noticing about the environmental influences on this student’s learning? – What activities does the child engage in after school or during recess? – If the child were to design a field trip, what are your hunches as to where he or she might choose to go? – What have you noticed about the child’s preferred learning styles or intelligence preferences? – In what ways does this student most prefer to demonstrate learning? 5. Academic performance – What have you learned from your analysis of this student’s work, and how will this influence the design of future instruction? There are a number of ways that teachers can gather data about their students as learners. Three of the most commonly practiced are examining past records, interviewing the child and/or parents, and engaging in structured observation of the child.

Examining Records On occasion, a teacher will tell us that she will deliberately avoid looking at previous school records so as to be able to make up her own mind about

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a child. While we endorse a healthy skepticism toward negative or overly critical comments about a student’s capabilities, previous school records can offer extremely useful information, particularly if the previous teacher has included insights about the child as a learner or comments about how and under what conditions the child learns best. When we review previous school records, we like to look for both patterns and discrepancies. What patterns emerge from the child’s grades and the teachers’ comments? Are there significant discrepancies among subjects, or among school grades and standardized test scores? Is the pattern of achievement on an expected trajectory, or are there unusual dips or spikes in the records?

Conducting Parent Interviews/Surveys Often teachers will view parent/teacher conferences as a time when the teacher is called upon to report on the child’s achievement. This may be one purpose of such a conference. We also like to think of it as an opportunity to learn about the child as a learner. Parents are often very knowledgeable about their children and have useful insights to share. We like to come to such conferences with questions for the parents. Any of the earlier questions about learner identity can be adapted for use in a parent or student interview.

Engaging in Structured Observation Our colleague from UCLA, Barbara Keogh (1998), is fond of saying that a very significant number of the problems and issues that we teachers perceive with student learning—perhaps even most of them—disappear when we engage in regular and deliberate observation of our students. There is something about the act of observation that changes how we perceive students and, as a result, actually reshapes our relationships with them. As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Most teachers have not been trained in clinical or structured observation; however, the fundamentals are not complex, and the benefits can be truly remarkable. We suggest breaking down observation and consequent use of gathered data into six steps:

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1. Suspend judgment. Identify existing conclusions regarding the child, and suspend judgment to enable separation of perception from observation. 2. Collect data. Decide on recording style; collect data. 3. Frame questions. Look for patterns and connections; develop questions. 4. Look for co-variation of data. Triangulate the data points as follows: – Consistency: Does the student always behave in this manner in other situations and at other times? – Consensus: Do others behave in the same way in the same situation? – Distinctiveness of action: Is the student the only one to behave in this manner? (Kelley, 1967) 5. Consider all factors. – Student internal and external influences – Environmental factors, including teacher – Curricular area 6. Develop and test hypotheses. Ochan learned a very efficient way of using clinical observation from a 1st grade teacher at the International School of Tanganyika. In this method, called “sticky note observations,” the teacher records brief observation notes about specific children on sticky notes and sorts these notes based on either the dimensions of learner identity or the actual instructional targets, which may be most useful to the teacher in getting to know the child as a learner. At the elementary level, these instructional targets might correspond to learning domains, like fine motor skills, collaboration in groups, and sight word vocabulary. At the secondary level, categories might reflect particular learning objectives or grade-level benchmarks. All the observation notes should reflect a time of day and should be dated. Over time, the teacher can look for patterns, monitor progress, and celebrate successes. Sticky note observations are also extremely useful data when teachers come to frame questions for either parent or student interviews.

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Structured Reflection Another way to come to know a student deeply as a learner is to partner with a coaching colleague and engage in some structured reflection about that student. We have adapted the following structured reflection map from the work of Art Costa and Robert Garmston (2002). In this map, one colleague (the coach) 1. Expresses empathy (not agreement or sympathy), reflects content, and paraphrases for understanding and clarity. 2. Probes for specificity about the child’s interests and strengths. Example questions: What type of outside interests does the student have? Sports? Music? Pets? If the student were to plan a field trip, where might it be to? What hunches do you have about the child’s preferred learning styles? What are you exploring regarding the child’s intelligence preferences? When have you seen the child at his or her best? In what medium does the child engage most intensely? 3. Supports the colleague in his or her analysis of connections and causal factors. Example questions: What connections are you seeing between when this child learns best and time of day, subject areas, specific learning activities, solitary vs. group work, etc.? 4. Supports the colleague in his or her construction of new learning. Example questions: Over the course of the year together in the classroom, what has this child taught you? How might what you know about this child’s strengths influence your goals for the child? 5. Assists the colleague in his or her commitment to application. Example question: As you go into a new situation, how will you apply your new knowledge? 6. Helps the colleague reflect on the coaching process. Example questions: How has this conversation supported your thinking? What has been most useful to you in this conversation? Following the coaching conversation, it is often helpful to record the highlights of the discussion in writing. We find the Student Analysis Instrument shown in Figure 1.2 to be a useful tool for capturing and summarizing coaching conversations about students for the purpose of eventual personalization.

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FIGURE 1.2 STUDENT ANALYSIS INSTRUMENT Student Name: STUDENT INTERESTS & STRENGTHS

STRATEGIES I’VE TRIED

STUDENT STRUGGLES WITH

MY ATTITUDES AND EXPECTATIONS

QUESTIONS I HAVE ABOUT THIS STUDENT

SOMETHING I WILL CHANGE OR DO DIFFERENTLY

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Student Self-Reporting Students, of course, can tell us much of what we need to know about them as learners, and asking them to self-report and self-reflect also supports them in coming to know themselves as learners. This is a gift for a lifetime. As students begin to understand the influences and circumstances that bear on their learning, they can take control and make changes to learn most effectively and efficiently. David Suarez, a middle school math teacher at Jakarta International School, personalizes learning for his students by providing them choice in the levels of challenge they face (Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2007a). After each unit of study, David asks the students to reflect in writing on their choice, the stress it caused, and what they may have learned about themselves as learners. There are numerous published student interest inventories that a teacher can use to get a quick “read” on the areas of interest represented in a classroom. These are particularly useful at the start of a new school year when a teacher may be faced with the daunting task of coming to know a relatively large number of new learners. One of the most studentfriendly interest inventories that we know of is the Interest-A-Lyzer, written by Joseph Renzulli (1997) out of the University of Connecticut. The InterestA-Lyzer comes in versions specifically designed for primary, intermediate (middle school), and secondary (high school) levels.

Assignments and Activities Teachers can build data gathering right into assignments and activities, which not only helps them to know students better but also helps students to know each other. For some activities that yield student data, please see the Action Advice section that follows.

ACTION ADVICE: BUILDING A SENSE OF BELONGING As we discussed earlier in the chapter, students need to have a sense of membership in the class in order to learn (Maslow, 1999). Ironically, it is

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virtually impossible to personalize learning without fostering this sense of belonging. We offer here a variety of inclusive activators to build a sense of classroom membership. Each strategy requires the involvement and movement of all students—no one can opt out. They set norms for participation (that everyone is expected to be actively engaged) and are designed to be icebreakers in that they give explicit permission for laughter and fun. They also can reveal some useful information about students. BINGO. The teacher prepares a bingo sheet with 25 descriptors in five rows and five columns. The bingo card can focus on anything that is currently of interest to the students or that you’ve recently taught. For example, at the beginning of the year, a bingo card might focus on student interests and include items such as “I love to cook, water ski, read novels, surf the internet, or play football.” Another group of descriptors might include, “If I had a job in the film industry, I would like to be an actor, a costume designer, a script writer, or a set builder.” Students write the names of other students below the matching descriptor on the bingo card. A name can only be used once. When a student completes a row of five, horizontally, vertically or diagonally, that student stands up and shouts “Bingo!” It is a fun way of having them get to know each other and for the teacher to explore some of their common interests. CORNERS. Develop a series of multiple-choice questions that the students will answer by getting up and moving to one of the four corners of the classroom. (Label the corners “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D” to correspond to the answers to the questions.) An example of a “corner” question might be When I am learning something new and challenging A. I need to see it. B. I prefer to hear about it. C. I need to move around the room. D. I like a hands-on activity. GROUNDING. A grounding derives from a Native American ritual performed when people come together either for the first time or after a significant

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absence. The purpose is to build a sense of inclusion and belonging. Prepare for this activity by writing three or four questions, one of which must be answered on an emotional level. To begin the grounding, read the questions one by one, asking students sitting farthest away from you to respond first. A set of grounding questions might include • • • •

Please tell us your name and nationality. What languages do you speak? What is the best thing about your culture? How do you feel about being here today?

LIKE ME. Create a wide-ranging list of characteristics, and read the list aloud, asking everyone to stand when they hear a characteristic that applies to them. For example, you might say, Please stand if . . . • You are right-handed. • You collect stamps or coins. • You hate lima beans. • You sing in a choir. • You speak two or more languages. • You have lived in more than one country. • Your favorite subject in school is recess. • You are a Boy Scout or Girl Scout. • You have snorted spaghetti up your nose. (There should be at least one humorous item to bring laughter into the room.) LINEUP. This activity can be used to reveal interesting information about the students, and it is a good strategy for early in the school year when students are coming to know each other. Once all the students have lined up, they can then number off for purposes of flexible grouping. Here are some examples of criteria. • Distance born from this room. Have students line up in order of the greatest to the smallest distance between their place of birth and the classroom. Check with each student to find out where they were born.

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• Time in country (state or town). Have students line up in order of how long they have lived in the country, state, town, or city. Check student information against the line for accuracy. • Spiciness of chili (or curry or sambal or salsa). Have students line up in order of how spicy hot they like their chili (or curry or salsa). • Birthday groups. Have students line up in order of their birthdays (month and day, not year). Have them try to do this in silence, using only hand signals. Tell them that the record time for a group this large is 63 seconds. Once they are in line, you can check for accuracy (optional but fun). • City of birth. Have students line up alphabetically according to the city in which they were born. Ask students to tell the class where they were born. Some very unusual locations often surface! SNOWBALL TOSS. Students respond in writing to three or four prepared questions, similar in nature to the kinds of questions used in a Grounding (see p. 52). They then crumple up their piece of paper and toss it into the center of the classroom. Each student retrieves another “snowball” and tosses it again. After two or three tosses, each student retrieves a paper “snowball” (hopefully not his own) and introduces the author to the class. (Disadvantage: In a large class, this activity can be very time-consuming.) SONG TITLE METAPHORS. Divide students into small groups of five or six (no fewer than four) and ask them to identify three song titles that could serve as a theme song for the class or for any concept that they have been studying (e.g., photosynthesis, human conflict, probability). Each group then selects the best song title of the three and either sings a few bars or mimes the title, with the rest of the class trying to guess it.

2 Knowing Ourselves as Teachers

The need to know ourselves as teachers is linked closely with the need to know our students. Time and time again, educational research tells us that learning takes place in a social context (Vygotsky, 1986) and that the teacher/student relationship is crucial to student achievement. The simple fact is that most children learn more, and more efficiently, when they believe that their teacher cares about them (Crabtree, 2004). Developing powerful learning relationships in the classroom takes considerable teacher emotional intelligence (Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2010), and the bedrock of such emotional intelligence is professional self-knowledge.

CONNECTING TEACHER SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND STUDENT LEARNING Just how important is it for teachers to have professional self-knowledge? The answer depends on how we see our profession. If we think of teaching as nothing more than imparting information and helping to develop psychomotor skills, professional self-knowledge is probably not that important. In these cases, a teacher can probably be replaced by a machine. (And, as the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is reported to have said, “Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine, should be.”) But what about those of us who believe that teaching aims for more complex and less quantifiable 55

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goals—such as helping students learn to learn, take intellectual risks, manage emotions, develop creativity, think critically and independently, and assess their own achievement honestly and accurately? The pursuit of these objectives requires the development of learning-focused relationships with students, and to do that, professional self-knowledge is critical. Each of us brings to the classroom our own individual traits, preferences, experiences, emotions, perceptions, expectations, and values—factors that influence how we see students, what we expect of them, and instructional approaches we take. Professional self-knowledge is the key to recognizing when these factors negatively affect how we teach and to modifying our behavior and thinking to allow students the fullest learning experience. Knowing ourselves as teachers is even more important in today’s global classroom. When a group of students, with their variety of learning styles and preferences (many of them different from our own), also have different cultural backgrounds and speak different languages, it’s essential that we understand how we have selected and constructed our perceptions of them as learners. What lens are we looking through when we observe Rupa or Frank or May Ling? How is our cultural identity or socioeconomic class influencing the way we perceive their needs and behaviors? Put simply, as teachers we have to see ourselves clearly to see our students clearly. This is not an area that teacher-training colleges explore in great depth. Nevertheless, it is a critical aspect of cultivating emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995), particularly in the areas of self-awareness and regulation, social awareness, and relationship management (Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2010). Every teacher who aims to do more than simply impart information and develop skills understands intuitively that the classroom is a place of teacher self-discovery. It is impossible to meet with children and young adults daily, to interact closely with them, and to feel the emotional weather of the classroom without reflecting on who we are as teachers and how our sense of professional identity may be affecting the learning of our students. Bill learned this lesson during his first teaching experience in a New York high school. When he walked into his 11th grade Regents English class one morning, he realized he had done the unpardonable—forgotten to do his homework. A few of the students already had their poetry anthologies open

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to Robert Frost’s sonnet “Design,” the very poem that Bill had assigned but had not read himself. He had forgotten to prepare the lesson. Unprintable words leapt into Bill’s mind. He was faced with a choice. Should he change the lesson—postpone the Frost sonnet for a day? There were always vocabulary exercises that could fill the time. That was an easy option. Or should he soldier on with the original lesson, doing the best he could? Bill chose the latter, as the fallback vocabulary exercise smacked of deceitfulness. In the past, he had been pretty tough with the students who had not done their homework, and now he had to face his own music. Bill told the class that he had forgotten to read the Frost poem and that he was unprepared to “teach.” What this meant was that they would need to take the lead in analyzing the sonnet. At first a number of students thought this was some sort of clever instructional ploy, but as discussion evolved, the students came to see that Bill truly hadn’t read the poem, meaning their insights really had to drive the discussion. The absence of a teacher expert actually seemed to liberate student thinking. A tremendously rich conversation emerged, featuring contributions from several students who seldom participated much in class. One or two students addressed the theme of the poem by stating with some passion that recurring patterns in nature were God’s signature. Others rejected this idea and spoke about how humankind had imposed such design on nature. At one point, a young existentialist in the back of the room rose to her feet and shouted, “Of course leaves fall from the trees in November! But the fact that you see a pattern doesn’t mean there’s a design to it. Fall’s not a tree conspiracy! Autumn’s entirely in your head.” In fact, the lesson was so stimulating and exciting that Bill knew he had to figure out exactly what had happened. On reflection, he realized that his lack of preparedness had led the class to approach the poem’s discussion not as a “guess what the teacher’s thinking” question-and-answer session but as a shared intellectual exploration. The experience reminded Bill of the father of gestalt psychology, Carl Rogers (1961), who abandoned “teaching” in the classroom in order to focus on “learning” in the classroom—his own as well as that of his students. Bill was used to thinking of himself as expert with insight and wisdom to impart to his students. This experience

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showed him how he and his students would be better off if he joined them in a community of learners.

KNOWING OURSELVES CULTURALLY Students are our partners in learning, and this partnership can be dramatically illustrated in the global classroom, where cultural and learning diversity offer the potential for rich and dynamic interaction. Unfortunately, there is also potential for misconceptions, passive or even active intolerance, and alienation. The key variable is the teacher. As mentioned in the Introduction, much about our own culture remains invisible to us. We have been brought up in it, and every minute of our lives has reinforced cultural patterns. These predictable patterns of thought and behavior are the cohesive glue that binds communities together and fosters a sense of belonging. We become so familiar with these patterns that they become second nature to us. The way we dress, what we eat, how we socialize with our friends and family, the ways we think, and even our values and beliefs seem normal to us. The unfortunate corollary is that we may perceive other cultures—other patterns of thought and behavior—as abnormal or aberrations. While we may be unaware of many of the cultural norms we carry with us, they make up an essential part of our identity and are certainly not invisible to our students. In many classrooms around the world, culture may be the elephant in the room that no one is addressing. In order to personalize learning in a global classroom, the teacher needs to take the lead in exploring how our differing cultures contribute to how we perceive ourselves and how we learn. So what does cultural competence look like in a global classroom? We believe that it is expressed in an attitude of curiosity, exploration, and respect. We come to know ourselves culturally through understanding the cultures of others. Bill recalls teaching an introductory sociology course at the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. His students were exclusively Arab and Muslim. One day, he was using a whiteboard to diagram the structure of nuclear and extended families, beginning with a child, then tracing back to the child’s

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mother and father, the two parents’ mother and father and sisters and brothers, and so on. The students correctly pointed out that in Islam a man can take up to four wives. Bill modified the drawing accordingly. He went on to note that different cultures have different rules for marriage within the extended family, but in most cultures, individuals cannot marry partners from within their nuclear family. A Sudanese student raised his hand and asked about the American rules for marriage to one’s “milk mother.” When Bill asked for clarification, the student explained that in Islam it was forbidden to marry one’s wet nurse. Again the diagram on the whiteboard was modified, and the conversation continued to evolve. When teachers actively explore the cultures present in their classroom with their students, they learn not only about their students but also about themselves. We do this through a process of analyzing our cultural perceptions and assumptions. In this case, Bill was confronted with what, for him, was a culturally strange phenomenon—the idea of a wet nurse. And yet the Sudanese student had applied it accurately to the diagram. Bill learned that the global classroom can be a place of unpredictable connection.

KNOWING OUR PERCEPTIONS OF CHILDHOOD Perceptions are the intersection between ourselves and the external world. They are how we make sense and meaning of all external stimuli and information. Given that perceptions define our experiences, it’s remarkable how little time and effort we put into exploring how we construct those perceptions. For the most part, we let them form and operate on our thoughts and actions without inspection or even conscious awareness. In an effort to help her students in an IB psychology class to appreciate the difference between perception and sensation, or the collection of objective data, Ochan asked Bill to interrupt one of her classes. He was instructed not to knock on the door, not to greet Ochan, to wear an expression of impatience and irritation, and to carry a shopping bag. He would present the shopping bag to Ochan, but he’d let it fall to the floor rather than hand it to her. Then he was to turn and walk out the door. The “delivery” was made as directed, and the students, who knew that we were married, watched in stunned silence. Then Ochan asked the class

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to write down everything they had just seen. There was an eruption of relieved laughter as the students realized that the tense scene had been staged. One student commented that he had been wondering what had made Mr. Powell so angry. Another assumed that we’d had a fight that morning. Still another had been wondering how long our marriage would last! Although individuals often behave as though our perceptions are reality, perceptions are not the same as objective data. They are the sense and meaning that we infer, and they are constructed and based on our ability to predict the development of incoming sensory stimuli (Blakeslee & Blakeslee, 2008). Perceptions are profoundly influenced by a person’s past experiences, peer group, culture, and values and beliefs. Since perceptions are “manufactured,” they are to some degree malleable. We can exert an influence on how we construct our perceptions. But the first step is to become aware of them. As teachers, our perceptions of childhood determine to a considerable degree how we actually interact with the children and young adults in our classes. Most of these core perceptions, however, are held subconsciously. We must actively investigate what our base perceptions are and how they may be affecting our classroom behavior and decision making, and ultimately our relationships with students. For this purpose, we have identified five possible lenses through which childhood can be perceived (Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2010). These lenses are broad generalizations, and we acknowledge that few people see through one lens exclusively. Furthermore, the manner in which an individual views children and childhood is profoundly influenced by personal history and culture. Nevertheless, these lenses can be useful starting points in exploring how we see, what we expect from, and how we interact with the children in our classrooms.

The Child as Untamed Beast (The Hobbesian Lens) Inspired by the 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, this lens on childhood emphasizes the socializing function of education. Schooling

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is seen as the process of preparing children to live in a civilized society. From a Hobbesian perspective, human nature is profoundly influenced by selfishness. As a result, moral order must be explicitly taught to children. Children are seen as lacking control and self-discipline. Accordingly, formal education is a period during which children learn to control their selfish desires. Education is preparation for constructive membership in civilized society. At its most constructive, the untamed beast perception emphasizes that young children should be taught social and emotional skills such as anger management, empathy, and service to others. This lens can also include character education and moral training. We see the influence of this perspective in many schools that include the goal of developing young people into ethical world citizens. When schools teach their students to be more responsible stewards of the environment, we are seeing the influence of the Hobbesian lens. The purpose of education is to prepare young people to lead responsible lives. However, when taken to an extreme, the Hobbesian perception of childhood can be oppressive and dehumanizing. Such physical and psychological cruelty characterized a great deal of education during the 19th and 20th centuries. Because misbehaving children were seen as untamed savages, they were not deemed worthy of teacher respect and were often treated with scorn and contempt. Children were to be “seen and not heard.” Compliance was the order of the day, and corporal punishment was routine. Students were primarily motivated through fear. At its best, the Hobbesian perception combines an academic rationalist approach to education, wherein the primary purpose of schooling is the passing of culture and moral order from one generation to another, and a social reconstructionist belief system in which the primary purpose of education is to help develop a more just, equitable, and humane future for the human family. We see the positive impact of the Hobbesian lens in schools where there is an emphasis on community service and a concern for global issues. We see its pernicious influences in classrooms where teacher control is paramount and students are motivated by fear and intimidation.

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The Child as Father to the Man (The Rousseauian Lens) The child seen through this lens differs greatly from the wild beast of Hobbes. Inspired by the British romantic poet William Wordsworth and the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, this view of children casts them as an embodiment of innocence and a wellspring of natural moral order. Rousseau believed that the innocence of children was corrupted by a competitive, cruel, and controlling society. In fact, he perceived this corruption of natural innocence taking place in the traditional schooling of his age. In Rousseau’s 1762 treatise on education, Emile, learning (as opposed to schooling) is presented as a natural and gentle process that taps into the child’s pre-existing curiosity. Both Rousseau and Wordsworth believed that adults had much to learn from children, particularly in the area of creativity and imagination. We can see in the Rousseauian perception of childhood the later values of self-actualization and gestalt and humanistic psychology. The purpose of education from this perspective is the nurturing of each child’s unique potential. Each child needs to be encouraged to develop personal integrity, a love of learning, creativity and sensitivity, and self-fulfillment. Someone with a Rousseauian perception believes that schools should be child centered, with an explicit emphasis on student choice, democracy, and caring. Teachers who view childhood through this lens are motivated by the idea that every student is capable of success. They believe that a trusting atmosphere is essential to a productive classroom and that student assessment should focus on growth in self-esteem and learning autonomy. They value student independence and self-direction and may have been influenced by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. One example of a Rousseauian perception of childhood applied to schooling was the Summerhill School, founded by A. S. Neill (1993) and described in his book of the same name. Summerhill School was a truly radical experiment in which there were no adult-determined rules, punishments, or negative consequences for antisocial or disruptive behavior. Neill believed compulsion corrupted and that responsible behavior would emerge naturally from freedom. The organization of the school, the schedule of classes, and the actual curriculum were determined by the

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students themselves. Like Rousseau, Neill saw children as inherently good and believed that if provided with freedom of choice, they would gravitate toward constructive behavior and self-fulfillment. The Rousseauian perception comes primarily from the West and can be confusing to members of more traditional societies, such as may be found in Asia and Africa. Students and their parents from traditional societies tend more toward a Confucian lens, which we’ll look at next, so there may be a clash of expectations and values.

The Child as Maintainer of the Common Good (The Confucian Lens) While the word “Confucian” has a historical link to China and the Far East, many of the attributes of the Confucian perception of childhood can be found in traditional societies throughout the world. Confucian values include a central focus on the collective welfare of a family, village, or tribe—as opposed to our more Western focus on (and at times glorification of) individualism. Confucian collectivism is seen in the suppression of individual needs and desires to the furtherance of the goals and aspirations of the larger group. This might play out as loyalty to one’s family, village, or tribe, or in some cultures, even to one’s employer. Social cohesion, fidelity, and the common good are of great importance. We see these values manifest in how the societies are organized. Traditional societies are often hierarchical, with the elders occupying a revered position of respect. The accomplishments of past generations are greatly honored, and stability and social cohesiveness are highly valued. Children are not expected to challenge ideas or think independently, and new ideas and innovation are not rewarded. To the contrary, children are expected to accept and respect the teachings of their elders. One of the greatest compliments that the young can pay to a highly skilled, elder artisan is to imitate the master. This helps to explain why plagiarism can be such a confusing concept for students from traditional societies when they first enter Western-oriented schools. In Confucian cultures, education is perceived to be the transfer of the values and traditions from one generation to the next for the purpose of maintaining the social order. Often the educational system is highly competitive

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and focused on standardized examinations. Success on these examinations frequently relies heavily, if not exclusively, on rote memory. Recall Frank—the Tanzanian scholarship student who spoke eloquently about the enormous challenge he had encountered in his move from a traditional Tanzanian school to the IB diploma program at the International School of Tanganyika. The challenge Frank faced was not related to the rigor or complexity of the curriculum content but rather to the new school’s expectation that he would think for himself, challenge ideas, analyze the material, and evaluate theories and concepts. Confucian and other traditional societies have historically placed a greater value on boys than girls. We see this played out in the gender disparity in literacy rates in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and it makes for a very significant challenge for educators. In Confucian and other traditional societies, Western logic (syllogistic thinking—if x, then not y) is often replaced with an Eastern search for a “middle way.” In The Geography of Thought, Nisbett (2003) speculates that thousands of years of cultural values and behaviors have actually affected the way in which Eastern and Western students think. Recent research with fMRI’s seems to support Nisbett’s ideas. While Western “rock logic,” as De Bono (1991) calls it (“either/or” thinking), lends itself to the development of the experimental sciences, Eastern thinking tends to be more expansive (as opposed to reductionist), more inclusive of both the foreground and the background, and more focused on social cohesion and stability. For a child brought up in a Confucian or traditional culture, education can be perceived as a passive activity. The child doesn’t see him- or herself as the constructor of knowledge, but rather merely a recipient of it. This can provide Western constructivist teachers with a challenge, particularly if they believe that active engagement with the content is a key to effective learning.

The Child as Asset or Liability (The Malthusian Lens) In the midst of Britain’s 19th century Industrial Revolution, Thomas Malthus gloomily pointed out that while the supply of food increases arithmetically, population grows geometrically. He introduced the concept of the scarcity

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mentality. Through the Malthusian lens, children are perceived as either economic assets or liabilities. Historically, children have been viewed as economic assets in agricultural economies. We still see the legacy of the Malthusian lens in Western societies, where our school calendar contains a long summer vacation. A century or so ago, children were needed to work in the fields. In fact, much of the 20th century “industrialized” model of American education (the influence of Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management) can be seen through a Malthusian lens. A century that was ushered in by the innovations of Henry Ford’s factory assembly lines required workers ready for mindless and repetitive factory jobs. The mid-20th century schoolhouse, with its tedious rote learning, provided an appropriate training for this life. The Malthusian lens on childhood plays an enormous role in classrooms around the world. We feel its influence whenever and wherever teachers or parents equate student success to external examination results (and consequent admission to selective universities and lucrative careers), talk about the purpose of education being preparation for the world of work, and equate quality education with national prosperity. Very few schools or teachers escape this influence.

The Child as Inquirer (The Deweyan Lens) Around the same time that America was becoming industrialized, John Dewey (2001) and the progressive movement in education were challenging traditionally held 19th century views of childhood and education. Specifically, Dewey questioned whether childhood and therefore the education of children, should be viewed as “preparation for life.” He reasoned that when childhood is viewed this way, it becomes a means to an end and ceases to have intrinsic value in and of itself. Childhood becomes something that one needs to pass through and grow out of as soon as possible. We hear this when young people are admonished not to “act like a child.” When childhood is thought to be preparation, the child is often not respected. Dewey also challenged the idea that education was the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another. He rejected the idea that children

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were simply empty vessels that were to be filled with facts and knowledge. Dewey argued instead for active engagement in the learning process so that children could develop relevance and personal meaning from the content. Much of the current pedagogical emphasis on the personal construction of knowledge through active engagement and application prevalent in many schools today traces its roots to Dewey and the progressive movement. The global classroom is often a venue for clashes of perception. For example, a teacher with a Deweyan perception of childhood may encounter confusion from children raised in more traditional societies, where education is perceived as the relatively passive transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. These lenses are broad generalizations and do not encompass all the ways in which childhood might be perceived. Each of these lenses offers something positive to recommend it. The only danger would be to embrace one “right” lens to the exclusion of others. Accordingly, we believe that it is critically important for teachers to uncover their own perceptions of childhood, as these will almost certainly color and shape the way in which we interact with students in the classroom. Figure 2.1 is a questionnaire for helping you discover which lenses of childhood are predominant in your own thinking. There is also value in considering how your parents might have influenced your perceptions of childhood. Are there connections between the way in which you were raised and the way in which you manage your classroom? FIGURE 2.1 PERCEPTION OF CHILDHOOD SELF-INVENTORY Directions: Read the following 10 questions and rank the responses from 1 to 5, with 5 signifying the response you agree with most and 1 signifying the response you agree with least. 1. The most important purpose of education is to a. support the student in learning how to learn. b. nurture the unique potential of each child. c. produce morally upstanding citizens. d. inculcate family values. e. prepare young people for the world of work.

Knowing Ourselves as Teachers

2. A high school graduate should be a. intrinsically motivated. b. an independent thinker. c. respectful and humble. d. self-actualizing. e. self-regulating. 3. Successful students are a. obedient and responsible. b. hard working and ambitious. c. true to themselves. d. altruistic in serving others. e. analytic problem solvers. 4. The most important educational outcome for students is a. personal integrity and self-fulfillment. b. curiosity and intellectual discernment. c. appreciation and application of the wisdom of the past. d. university acceptance and career success. e. a sense of membership and belonging in a supportive community. 5. The most important pursuit is a. moral character. b. wealth. c. happiness. d. welfare of family and friends. e. learning. 6. The most effective form of discipline for children is a. coercion. b. reasoning. c. peer pressure. d. positive reinforcement. e. gentle guidance. 7. The problem with many schools today is that a. there’s not enough emphasis on character education. b. the curriculum is irrelevant to the real world. c. they perpetuate an undemocratic power structure. d. many teachers aren’t lifelong learners. e. there is an absence of respect in the classroom. 8. Rank the following life goals: a. truth. b. freedom. c. social responsibility. d. success. e. a disciplined life.

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FIGURE 2.1—(continued) PERCEPTION OF CHILDHOOD SELF-INVENTORY 9. Rank the following quotations by how much you agree or disagree with the sentiments: a. “So long as a man enjoys prosperity, he cares not whether he is beloved.”—Marcus Annaeus Lucan b. “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”—Theodore Roosevelt c. “I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives, not individuals for the development of the State.”—Julian Huxley d. “Be yourself is the worst advice you can give some people.”—Tom Masson e. “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”—Mignon McLaughlin 10. Rank the following statements in order of your agreement: a. Each child is unique, and his or her potential must be nurtured. b. The primary purpose of early childhood education is to help the child navigate his or her social environment. c. Attentive listening is the genesis of respectful behavior. d. Success is just a matter of luck. Ask any failure. e. A school should not be preparation for life. It should be life. Scoring: Record the number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) you assigned to each response (A, B, C, D, E) for every question. Total the numbers in each perception column. The perception with the highest score is your predominant lens on childhood. The perception with the lowest score is the lens you use least. Question #

Hobbesian

Rousseauian

Malthusian

Confucian

Deweyan

1

C=

B=

E=

D=

A=

2

E=

D=

A=

C=

B=

3

D=

C=

B=

A=

E=

4

C=

A=

D=

E=

B=

5

A=

C=

B=

D=

E=

6

A=

E=

D=

C=

B=

7

A=

C=

B=

E=

D=

8

C=

B=

D=

E=

A=

9

D=

C=

A=

E=

B=

10

B=

A=

D=

C=

E=

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KNOWING OUR EXPECTATIONS AND PATTERNS OF ATTRIBUTION There is a substantial body of research that indicates a strong correlation between teacher expectations and student achievement. Expectancy theory suggests that students will generally attempt to meet the expectations that we have for them, whatever those expectations may be. Rosenthal and Jacobson’s well-known 1968 study, Pygmalion in the Classroom, dramatically demonstrated the effect of teacher expectations on student scholastic achievement. Teachers in the experimental classrooms were told that they were receiving a class of “bloomers” who could be expected to make great intellectual gains in the coming year. In fact, the students’ class placements had been made at random and not because of any distinguishing intellectual capability. However, as the year progressed, students in the experimental groups outperformed their peers in control classes. Rosenthal and Jacobson attributed the gains in academic achievement to teacher expectations. These teachers treated their students as though they were gifted, and the students responded accordingly. Out of this research came the concept of “the self-fulfilling prophecy.” Essentially, the Rosenthal and Jacobson study, confirmed by later research (Brophy, 1983; Cooper & Tom, 1984; Good, 1987), suggests that how a student performs in school is influenced heavily by what teachers believe and think that student is capable of. Our own perceptions, past experiences, and cultural norms definitely affect the way that we think and the things that we believe; it just makes sense that these factors would also influence what we think of and expect from students. We must remember that as teachers we construct expectations, whether consciously or unconsciously. Often teachers develop expectations in comparison to other students and allow them to be profoundly influenced by colleagues, both negatively and positively (Powell & KusumaPowell, 2010). In order to personalize learning, we must build expectations for individual students that support their learning. When we’re not sure of what students are capable of—and, generally speaking, we shouldn’t be—we ought to give them the benefit of the doubt, assuming they can understand, do, and achieve more. Most importantly, we should remember that expectations are malleable and subject to revision.

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Another way to examine expectations is through the lens of attribution theory, considering the ways in which we attribute students’ success or failure to particular causes or courses of action. Our patterns of attribution influence the messages, both subtle and explicit, that we send students about their achievement. Hunter and Barker (1987) identified three ways that both students and teachers look at success or failure in the classroom: locus, stability, and control. Locus refers to where the responsibility for achievement lies. The locus can be internal to the student, for example, with achievement attributable to the student’s native intelligence or the amount of time the student took to study for a test. Or the locus can be external to the student, attributable, for example, to luck or task difficulty. Stability is the degree to which it’s assumed that the cause of success or failure is constant. Effort would be an unstable cause, for example, whereas natural talent would be relatively stable. Control is related to an individual’s sense of efficacy, or the influence they believe they have in shaping future events—their potency and optimism. Effort is a controllable factor, whereas talent, intelligence, task difficulty, and luck are most often perceived as beyond influence or control. A teacher’s conclusions about why a student is or is not learning have a profound effect on expectations and can influence that student’s future learning in significant ways. The influence is even greater when a student is struggling. We want students to see the relationship between effort and achievement and to feel they have some measure of control over their academic success, but our own perceptions and attributions can interfere. Let’s see how two sets of expectations and attributions about the same student, Yasmin, might directly affect her learning outcome.

Yasmin: Two Different Views Yasmin is a 17-year-old in grade 11. She was born in Egypt but grew up in a Middle Eastern ghetto of South London. She is failing all subjects except PE and music. She is often truant, and her teachers suspect she may be experimenting with drugs. Yasmin’s teachers know, based on past conversations with the school counseling office and with their colleagues, that the girl’s family situation is seriously dysfunctional. Her father left the family

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when Yasmin was 5 years old. Her mother, who works as a waitress, is an alcoholic with chronic anger management issues. Mrs. Felton, Yasmin’s homeroom and English teacher, has a very different cultural and socioeconomic background. She is British middle class, brought up in Ealing in a family both functional and intact, and is university educated. Mrs. Felton returns each day from work to a relatively stable, comfortable, and predictable social environment. It is easy for Mrs. Felton to attribute Yasmin’s rebellion and academic indolence to her dreadful home life. However, to do so would be to credit causal factors that are uncontrollable, external, and also depressingly stable. From that perspective, there is probably not much that either Yasmin or Mrs. Felton can do about the home situation, and with that belief, expectations for Yasmin will remain low. It’s assumed she will make little or no improvement—and that her teachers are essentially blameless. There is another way of looking at the situation—one that attributes Yasmin’s failure to causal factors that are controllable, internal, and unstable. Suppose Mrs. Felton sees her not as a regrettable statistic of an inherently unjust society, but as a young woman of intelligence who is not making very good decisions for herself at the moment. What if Mrs. Felton decides she needs to find ways to support her in gaining access to her own inner resources and find opportunities in the classroom for her to discover her strengths? Suppose she sets out to help Yasmin develop greater selfconfidence in her learning because she perceives Yasmin as facing more challenges than most students, thus having a greater need for those inner resources. The research on resilience in children is clear. One of the most powerful variables in youngsters who grow up to be healthy, loving adults in spite of traumatic and abused childhoods is the presence of a single adult figure who was caring and supportive. In order to be that person, Mrs. Felton needs to escape from her own cultural confines and see Yasmin as an individual with possibilities—not as a lost cause facing a dead end.

KNOWING OUR “STATES OF MIND” In the book Cognitive Coaching (2002), Art Costa and Robert Garmston identify five “states of mind” that, taken together, influence not only an

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individual’s perceptions of the world but personal and professional identity as well. These states—efficacy, consciousness, flexibility, craftsmanship, and interdependence—“drive, influence, motivate and inspire our intellectual capacities, emotional responsiveness, high performance, and productive human action” (p. 124). While the states of mind are invisible, they can be perceived in the language we use, the behavior we display, and the decisions we make. In Bill’s experience, there is a strong correlation between high degrees of efficacy, consciousness, flexibility, craftsmanship, and interdependence and outstanding teaching (Powell, 2003). Teachers who work at becoming aware of their states of mind can develop influence over them. For example, when we become conscious that we are not feeling efficacious, we can make a choice of whether to become deliberately defensive or to simply ask for help. Teachers who are aware of these states of mind are better able to build strong learning relationships with their students. Let’s take a closer look at each of Costa and Garmston’s states of mind.

Efficacy Efficacy is that “can do” attitude that reflects personal empowerment. It is predicated on an internal locus of responsibility—the individual’s belief that what he or she does will make a difference in the outcome of a situation. It is the hallmark of optimism and hope. People with high degrees of efficacy are resourceful and self-confident. They set challenging goals and persevere in the face of adversity. In the 1970s, a landmark study by the RAND Corporation (Berman & McLaughlin, 1977) identified teacher efficacy as the single most important variable in effecting successful school reform. Neither the curriculum nor the instructional methodology mattered nearly as much as the teachers’ belief in themselves. This becomes even more important in the global classroom, where there is the likelihood of conflicting cultural expectations and perceptions. Highly efficacious teachers are able to control performance anxiety in the classroom and thereby reduce stress and teach more effectively. They are also more likely to seek feedback from their students on their performance and therefore to be self-assessing and self-modifying.

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Efficacy, like the other states of mind, is situational. When we find ourselves in a new or unfamiliar situation, we may feel reduced efficacy. However, a teacher who is highly self-aware will recognize this and be able to draw on other states of mind—interdependence, or sense of belonging to a community, for example—to compensate. In the employment interviews he conducts, Bill frequently uses scenarios to assess a candidate’s degree of efficacy. The following situation often yields interesting insights: You have recently been hired at a school that prides itself on its program of professional development. You have registered for an evening course titled “Neuropsychology of Learning.” Twenty minutes into the first lecture, you find yourself completely lost. You don’t understand a thing the professor is saying. What do you do?

Despite the fact that teachers claim they want students to announce when they are confused or if something is not understood, when given this scenario, very few of the teachers Bill interviews actually say they would raise their hand and say, “I’m not understanding this.” We hear a lack of efficacy when teachers perceive that the roadblocks to improved student learning are external to self. We hear it when teachers say, “The administrator would never go along with it” or “The schedule won’t permit it” or “The parents will never support it.” Genuine efficacy is cross-culturally contagious. It transcends national backgrounds, energizes, and stimulates.

Flexibility As considered here, flexibility is the ability to perceive situations from multiple perspectives, to shift between egocentric and allocentric viewpoints, or from self-centered to other-centered. It is both the capacity for empathy and the ability to disengage and take the metaphorical “balcony” view. Recent work in differentiated instruction (Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2007c) is pointing to a strong correlation between effective instruction and the ability that teachers have to come to understand their students’ individual viewpoints as learners. Flexible thinkers are able to project themselves into the minds of other people and anticipate reactions and consequences. This is particularly

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important when there are multiple cultures represented in the classroom and multiple opportunities for misunderstanding. Bill recalls an example of inflexible thinking in a school at which he served as principal. The middle school counselor was designing a new curriculum for a course on personal and social development, and it included a unit on sex education. Thinking that she might generate conversations between parents and children on the topic, she wrote a questionnaire for parents, asking them to provide information about their first sexual experience. Without discussing the matter with anyone else, the counselor distributed the survey to a large group of 7th graders and instructed them to return the surveys the following day. The students appeared to have greater flexibility of thought than the counselor, because all but 1 of the 75 surveys handed out apparently went straight into the trash bin. The only student who actually delivered the survey to his parents was Bill and Ochan’s youngest son, and he did so because he found the questions hilariously funny. (A sense of humor is often an attribute of flexible thinking.)

Consciousness Consciousness is awareness of one’s own thoughts, emotions, viewpoints, and behaviors and the influence that they may have on others. It involves being aware of how we select and construct our perceptions, being cognizant of the personal and cultural experiences we carry into situations, explicitly exploring how congruent our values and our behaviors are, and “mining” our experiential insights. Consciousness begins by being attentive to verbal and nonverbal behavior of self and others. Math teacher Colette Belzil, who took a course from Ochan and Bill at the International School of Brussels, provides an example of how becoming more conscious of behavior can improve relationships. As part of the course, Ochan and Bill invited participants to explore their cognitive styles—specifically, whether they had a preference for field independence (a tendency to want to work alone, with an emphasis on logical analysis and task completion) or field dependence (a proclivity for work with others and a sensitivity to relationships and the needs of others). The participants were provided with an instrument and asked to reflect on how their cognitive

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style might affect others with whom they interacted. Following the course, Colette had this to say: I wanted to tell you that we had our parent interviews the week after our weekend cognitive coaching session. Following some of our class activities I recognized how my field independence sometimes made me less approachable for the parents who need [something] more “warm and fuzzy.” For this set of interviews I was very conscious of this and did a lot of paraphrasing, eye contact, pausing, breathing, and a lot of mirroring. This last one seemed to get the most results. I didn’t feel that a single parent left not feeling heard. And it wasn’t because I wasn’t saying what I felt needed to be said, it was my body language and my paraphrasing that made them receptive to my suggestions. I discussed this with a few of the participants [from our class] . . . they had observed that I had “listened” differently during the interviews as well. I was amazed. I also know it worked because the students have been even more receptive to me in class so the discussion that inevitably takes place between parent and child was positive. I guess I am saying that I may never be a great cognitive coach but the skills I learned and am practicing are proving to be so useful in many, many situations. (Personal correspondence, 2009)

Craftsmanship Craftsmanship in pedagogical technique is always a goal for teachers, and nurturing craftsmanship in self and others is an explicit professional responsibility. One of the challenges of the master craftsman in the global classroom is to understand and appreciate the diverse frames of reference of the students in order to frame lessons in a way that will be relevant. An example of less-than-effective craftsmanship was when Bill first started teaching the British “O” English course at the International School of Tanganyika. One of the possible texts for the course was Graham Greene’s marvelously ironic The Power and the Glory, a story of a whiskey priest in Mexico during a period of religious persecution. It was when the class was two chapters into the novel and not appreciating the irony that Bill discovered that not only did he not have any Roman Catholics in the class, he didn’t have any Christians, either! The entire class was made up of Muslims and Hindus, and none of them had the background knowledge of Christian iconography necessary to grasp the subtleties of Greene’s prose.

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Craftsmanship in the classroom might include executing a masterful unit plan or effectively assisting a middle school student to improve her expository writing skills. Within the larger learning community of the school, craftsmanship might include adeptly implementing a targeted program of professional development, thoughtfully coaching a colleague, or successfully boosting one’s own teaching skills. Several years ago, Ochan team-taught an elementary class with a teacher who was a master craftsperson in the area of questioning. This teacher’s questions were provocative, age-appropriate, open-ended, and invitational. They had multiple access points and evoked deep and creative thinking on the part of her students. Ochan shadowed this teacher for two years, learning from her and ultimately improving her own questioning technique.

Interdependence Interdependence is that sense of belonging and connectedness all humans seek. Interdependent people value collective work and, in collaborative situations, know when to assert themselves and when to concede to the judgment of others. Teachers who have a high sense of interdependence are willing to give and receive help and support and are able to be simultaneously an autonomous individual and a member of a collective learning community. One powerful way to support interdependence is through a supportive mentorship program. While some mentorship programs are geared to young and inexperienced teachers, increasingly, schools with culturally diverse student and teacher populations have implemented mentorship programs to support teachers new to the school (some of whom are very experienced) in coming to understand and appreciate the cultures represented in the school. Mentorship programs make interdependence explicit in that the institution gives its members permission to seek and receive collegial support. None of the states of mind exists in isolation, and they often interact in complex ways, depending on the situation we find ourselves in. For example, an individual with high efficacy but low consciousness might be perceived as arrogant: a bull in the china shop or a leader in a great hurry to make

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large changes but unaware of how those changes might affect others. On the other hand, a person with high craftsmanship but low flexibility might be perceived as rigid, resistant to change, or even a perfectionist. As we become more aware of the states of mind, we increase our selfknowledge and enhance our ability to self-modify and ultimately to build stronger relationships, which are the foundation of learning.

BECOMING WHO WE WANT TO BE Teachers, like everyone else, want be successful. We want our students— all of our students—to learn. And one of the surest ways we can do this is by establishing and maintaining effective relationships with our students. Teachers who honestly and bravely try to know themselves better as professionals and invite students and colleagues to assist them as colearners will only benefit from this self-inspection—because their students will also benefit. Being interested in and respectful of different cultures in our classrooms, recognizing our base perceptions of childhood, carefully constructing our expectations and examining our attributions of success, and being more aware of our own states of mind in our professional lives will help us to be successful. By coming to know ourselves, we determine the kind of teachers we want to be.

Suzanne: An Out-of-Self Experience A number of years ago, a woman named Suzanne joined the International School of Tanganyika as a newly hired teacher. She had a difficult time adjusting to life in Tanzania and to the culture of the school. She had also never lived outside the United States and found the international culture of the school bewildering. Suzanne sought out Ochan and confided to her the trouble she was experiencing settling into her new life in Africa. In the 30-minute conversation, Suzanne used the word “hate” 11 times. She hated the climate. She hated the lack of air conditioning in the classrooms. She hated the local shops with their empty shelves. She hated the dirt of the city and the bureaucracy of the government. She hated the schedule of classes and the absence of

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familiar resources. At the conclusion of their conversation, Ochan said, “Wow, you really hate a lot of things.” Suzanne didn’t speak to Ochan for almost three weeks. But when she finally broke her silence, it was not to complain. Suzanne began by saying that she was really embarrassed about her earlier behavior. She wanted to thank Ochan for helping her to see how negative she had become. We learn about who we are not by experience but by reflection on our experience. In this case, Suzanne was able to engage in what we refer to as “echo empathy.” She was able to step into Ochan’s perception and see herself. The echo empathy liberated Suzanne from the cell of self-absorption. She had a brief “out-of-self experience” that allowed her to examine and assess whether she was becoming who she wanted to be. Suzanne was able to get distance from her relocation stress. She served at the international school for six more years, and after she left, she wrote to Ochan to say that her years at the school were the most professionally stimulating of her entire career.

ACTION ADVICE: GETTING TO KNOW YOUR PROFESSIONAL SELF Students are often experts in their own learning. They know what works for them in the classroom and what doesn’t. Teachers can gain powerful insight about their professional selves by soliciting feedback from students and reexamining instructional approaches through students’ eyes. Here are some feedback-gathering strategies that we recommend. DAILY FEEDBACK FORM. At the end of class (or unit of learning), ask students to complete a feedback form. The questions might include • What was the big learning in the unit of study? • How was the pacing of the lesson(s)? • What specific advice do you have that will enhance your learning? EXIT CARDS. Exit cards are simple and quick ways to get a reading on the level of understanding or misunderstanding that students may have about the concepts being taught. We recommend asking two questions: What

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was one insight that you took away from our work together today? and What questions about the lesson or content do you still have? FEEDBACK ON FEEDBACK. We firmly believe that all teachers should regularly solicit student feedback on what is supporting their learning and what is not, and that they should share the information gathered with all students. We call this “feedback on feedback.” Feedback on feedback serves several important functions. It dignifies the comments of the students, it signals that you are taking their comments seriously, it reinforces that you are willing to act on student ideas and suggestions, and it fosters the idea that you and your students are learning partners. I USED TO THINK/NOW I THINK. This strategy draws on the work of David Perkins (2009b) and the Making Thinking Visual project at Harvard University. At the end of a unit of study, ask students to complete these two sentence stems: “I used to think . . .” and “Now I think . . . .” PLUSES AND WISHES. This is a quick way to solicit feedback at the end of a lesson. Draw a T-chart on a whiteboard or piece of chart paper, labeling one side “Pluses” and the other “Wishes.” Solicit and record the pluses first—aspects of the lesson that the students believe helped them learn, things they found particularly interesting or relevant, and activities that they enjoyed. Then ask for and record what students “wish” to see or do in tomorrow’s lesson. Teachers might want to examine the “Pluses” and note how these strategies are connected to educational learning theory and research. This is often a very validating experience. In addition, teachers might want to analyze the “Wishes” to determine what, specifically, the students have identified that will enhance their learning. STOP, START, CONTINUE. Occasionally, it may be useful to solicit from students what they think you should start doing, stop doing, or continue doing. The comments could relate to classroom management, organization of lessons, or instructional strategies. This information—submitted anonymously, in writing—can give you a clearer picture of how your assumptions about what is effective and engaging for your students align with their reality.

3 Knowing Our Curriculum

A number of years ago, we were working with the faculty of a large international school in Southeast Asia that had identified two schoolwide annual goals: (1) to develop a “standards and benchmark framework” for its curriculum, and (2) to promote personalized instruction in every classroom. It was not long into our session before a teacher raised her hand and asked if these two goals weren’t diametrically opposed. “Don’t they contradict each other?” she asked. “For example, defining standards and benchmarks requires us to identify exactly what knowledge and skills we expect the average 5th grader to have. To me, that sounds like standardizing the curriculum and our expectations of children. But personalized learning asks that we look at each child as a unique learner. How on earth can we do both at the same time?” We were grateful for this question, because it opened up a lively and insightful conversation on the relationship between setting standards and catering to diverse learning needs. On one level, the questioning teacher had a point. Setting standards and benchmarks for student achievement may seem contradictory to the efforts we make to personalize instruction. However, rather than begin from the position that they are mutually exclusive, let’s assume that they may be mutually dependent. Let’s ask what would happen to one without the presence of the other. 80

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In the absence of a personalized-learning approach, with its concern for and response to different students’ learning needs, a standards-based curriculum can translate into a narrow focus on so-called objective, highstakes testing. In some instances, these supposedly objective tests of student achievement have asserted a tyrannical hold over not just assessment but also classroom instruction. The emphasis is on quality control and accountability, not on meeting the needs of the learners—particularly not the needs of diverse learners. No matter how thoughtful and thoughtprovoking the curriculum is, the voice of the student is lost—deemphasized or even dismissed. On the other hand, imagine what would become of the personalized classroom if there were no clearly defined learning standards and benchmarks for student achievement. We would see either the individualized programmed learning of the 1960s, in which lesson-plan objectives are individualized out of existence (25 different programs for 25 different students, with virtually no cooperative learning or direct instruction from the teacher) or muddled and disorganized “activities-based” instruction lacking in clear learning outcomes and objectives. Either way, a curriculum without standards and benchmarks is a curriculum that loses rigor and credibility. Rather than success for all, it gives us confusion and mediocrity for many. Clear and coherent learning standards need personalization, and vice versa. High-quality curriculum ensures that what we are focused on in the classroom is worthy of student time and attention, that the content is meaningful and relevant, and that our approaches are intellectually challenging. Personalization ensures that the invitation to access the high-quality curriculum is extended to all learners. Benchmarks of student achievement provide clear attainment targets for teachers; personalized learning provides a multitude of paths for learners to reach those targets.

CORE CONSIDERATIONS FOR CURRICULUM Although the relationship between standards and personalization (or differentiation) is mutually supportive, a strong curriculum comes first. As Tomlinson and Allan (2000) point out, “We need to stress continually what best-practice curriculum and instruction look like, and then help teachers

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learn to differentiate it. Differentiation as a magic potion loses much, if not most, of its power, if what we differentiate is mediocre in quality. . . . Excellent differentiated classrooms are excellent first and differentiated second” (p. 81). As you think about what the standards and benchmarks of an excellent curriculum should be, we ask you to keep two core considerations uppermost in your mind. Together, they will help you place curriculum decisions in the widest context possible.

All Knowledge Is Tentative We need to be prepared to find that whatever we teach as truth to our students today may be declared false or irrelevant tomorrow. There was a time when the very best minds believed, among other things, that Earth was the center of the universe, monarchs ruled by divine fiat, people with darker skin pigmentation were inherently inferior, women had prescribed domestic duties, and children with disabilities were better educated in isolation from their “normal” peers. The idea that knowledge is tentative and temporary has several profound implications for curriculum and instruction. First of all, it suggests that knowledge is not a goal or end achievement but an exciting, stimulating, and ongoing process—an intellectual adventure that generation after generation engages in and builds upon. Even more important, the tentativeness of knowledge allows us to give equal time to what we don’t know—those intriguing mysteries that never fail to pique the curiosity of our students. For example, we might want to ask students to consider the psychological effects on our species if we were to discover extraterrestrial, intelligent life forms. We might want to engage students in a discussion of whether mathematics was “discovered” or “invented.” Or we might ask where evolution is going next. Topics like these allow us to discuss our attitude toward uncertainty, which is a quality that Elliot Eisner (1998) believes to be woefully unappreciated in most schools. The tentativeness of knowledge reminds us that we need to approach our work as teachers with a degree of humility—always a good idea! An

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understanding of and appreciation for ambiguity and uncertainty are especially important to teachers in the West, where our tradition is to think dichotomously. If something is bad, then it cannot be good. We often define our terms by reference to what they are not. (For example, we know Ochan is short because she is not tall.) The multitude of cultures and perspectives present in the global classroom invite us to think beyond the limits of our own systems. In order to genuinely respect other cultures, we need to question our assumption about what is “normal” or “right.”

There Is Too Much Content to Be Taught The rate at which human knowledge is expanding is nothing short of breathtaking. Experts estimate that the sum of information is doubling in less than a year, and it seems that our content standards are doing their best to keep pace. In a world where there is more to teach than there is time to teach it in, it’s vital that educators prioritize what goes into the curriculum and be willing to make thoughtful judgments about what’s most important and what needs to be expunged. Of course, this is easier said than done. The curriculum in many schools is like Bill’s mother’s attic—many things go in and few come out, even long after they’ve ceased to be useful or relevant. When, for example, did you last divide fractions? And yet, dividing fractions is still part of the curriculum in many, if not most, schools. The conclusions reached in the ACT National Curriculum Survey 2005–2006 seem to confirm the idea of the overgrown curriculum (ACT, 2006). While state-mandated curriculum standards may help high school teachers focus their coursework, the university faculty responding to the ACT survey reported a “significant gap” between what high school teachers teach and what university professors think entering students need to know. “States tend to have too many standards attempting to tackle too many content topics,” a spokesperson for the ACT concluded. “High school teachers are working very, very hard at following and teaching their state standards, but college faculty felt it was more important for students to learn a fewer number of fundamental but essential skills” (Marklein, 2007, p. D11). These two core ideas—that (1) students are inquirers in an ongoing learning process where knowledge is temporary, and (2) students need to

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learn transferrable concepts and skills applicable to many content topics rather than focus on specific information—represent a profound shift in how educators are coming to think about curriculum.

A CURRICULUM REVOLUTION Back in the early 1970s, when Bill interviewed for his first English teaching job in a public high school in the New York City suburbs, “knowing your curriculum” was synonymous with “knowing your stuff”—that is to say, synonymous with subject-area mastery. Bill recalls an hour-long interview during which the principal (who was remarkably well read) rattled off a list of English and American authors. Bill was supposed to indicate which of these works he had read and what he thought of them. The principal asked Bill nothing about what he thought high school students needed to know about literature or what the important ideas, key questions, and necessary skills of the discipline were. This emphasis on subject mastery rather than on the nature of curriculum was no anomaly. In 1993, Brooks and Brooks shared their research on the status quo of curriculum in U.S. schools. (We suspect that there would have been similar findings in other countries). They summarized their findings in five major points: 1. Classrooms were dominated by teacher talk. Teachers were perceived to be the dispensers of knowledge and students the consumers. Student-initiated questions and student-to-student interactions were atypical. 2. Most teachers relied heavily on textbooks in lieu of a thoughtful, clear, and coherent curriculum. Information was often presented from a single (noncontroversial) perspective. 3. Most classrooms structurally discouraged cooperation and required students to work in relative isolation. 4. Student thinking was devalued in most classrooms. When teachers posed questions to students, more often than not, they were not asking students to think through complex issues, but rather trying to determine if students knew the “right” answer.

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5. Most schools had curriculum documents predicated on the notions that there was a “fixed world” that the learner must come to know. The emphasis was on the students’ ability to demonstrate mastery of conventionally accepted understandings—not on the construction of new understandings or connections. A revolution in the way educators think about curriculum has taken place since Bill’s first interviews 30 years ago and since the survey of American classrooms conducted by Brooks and Brooks. Perhaps “revolution” is too strong a word to describe the effect the constructivist movement has had on education; after all, there are many schools around the world in which traditional, didactic instruction is still the order of the day. However, where it has been embraced, constructivism has shifted the emphasis away from the teacher as master of subject content and dispenser of essential knowledge. At the center of constructivist thought is the idea that learning is not a passive absorbing of information—achieved by teachers’ “coverage of the curriculum”—but rather an active search on the part of the student for intellectual connections that will promote the “construction” of personal meaning. This shift has allowed for the mutually supportive relationship between standards and personalization, as we’ll see as we look at four key aspects of integrating personalization with a high-quality standards-based curriculum: teaching primary concepts, framing essential questions, knowing what should and should not be personalized, and using backward instructional design.

Teaching Primary Concepts Most students attempting to construct understanding find whole-to-part learning easier and more meaningful than a part-to-whole approach. Teachers facilitate whole-to-part learning when they explicitly present the primary concept—what Wiggins and McTighe (2005) call the “big idea” or the “enduring understanding.” As Brooks and Brooks (1993) put it, “When concepts are presented as wholes . . . students seek to make meaning by breaking wholes into parts that they can see and understand. Students initiate this process to make sense of the information; they construct the process and

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the understanding rather than having it done for them” (p. 47). A primary concept is not something that can be simply memorized for a test. When mastered, it’s something that makes sense to the student, is connected to prior knowledge, and is applicable to a wide spectrum of content information. These big ideas are tools for future understanding—what students need in order to be able to process all kinds of specific content. Several years ago, Bill was making a presentation to the parents of elementary school children on why the math curriculum was structured around an understanding of primary concepts as opposed to the memorization of algorithms. At one point in the presentation, he asked the members of the audience to stand if they currently used algebra in their daily lives. About a quarter of the audience stood. Bill’s comment was that those parents who used algebra in their daily life probably learned it conceptually. Their conceptual understanding was both enduring and transferable. Whole-to-part learning places responsibility for identifying those big ideas on teachers. Sorting “teachable concepts” from “topics to teach” can be difficult, but there is a critical distinction. Topics to teach might include green plants, the Industrial Revolution, or ratios and percentages. The content of each of these topics is unquestionably important. However, when we teach topics, we do not connect the content with the reason for learning it. Primary concepts would encompass these specific topics and point to the learning goal. For example, instead of teaching the topic of green plants, we could teach the primary concept of life cycles with the learning goal of understanding that there are similarities in the development of all living things. Green plants, butterflies, frogs could all be topics under this concept. Likewise, instead of teaching the Industrial Revolution, we could teach the primary concept of human progress, with the learning goal of understanding that human advancement has unforeseen consequences. Or, instead of teaching ratios and percentages, we could teach the big idea of part-to-whole relationships, with the learning goal being the understanding that these relationships can be expressed in different ways. As teachers move from teaching topics to teaching concepts, we suggest that they “test” the big idea or primary concept for its worthiness by passing it though four “filter questions,” articulated by Wiggins and McTighe (2005):

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1. Does the concept have enduring value beyond the classroom? We liken this to the 20-year test: What value will this understanding have for students in 20 years’ time? If we struggle to answer this question, it probably means that the concept we are exploring is not worthy of student time (a provocative example: quadratic equations!). 2. Does the concept reside at the heart of the discipline? For English, a concept that might reside at the heart of the discipline could be that “literature is manufactured”—meaning that novels, short stories, and poems are crafted by authors who have specific purposes and are using deliberate strategies and literary devices in order to achieve those purposes. 3. To what extent does the concept require analysis and deep critical thought? In order for students to translate isolated and fragmented information into personally meaningful knowledge, they must engage in such higher-order thinking. We also need to ask ourselves what aspects of the concept the students will have difficulty grasping. What may be counterintuitive? What are some common misconceptions? For a strategy that involves students in analysis, please see the description of “segmentation” in the Action Advice section at the end of this chapter. 4. To what extent might the concept engage students? The big idea does not need to have ready-made student interest. Not all students arrive at the classroom door interested in the French Revolution, baroque music, or the conjugation of future tense verbs. However, skillful teachers can mediate relevance by framing the primary concepts in deliberately provocative ways (as problems, questions, or issues). For example, the question “How do we recognize justice?” not only serves as an essential question for a number of topics in social studies (e.g., the American Revolution, colonialism, racial persecution) but also connects with middle and high school students’ intrinsic preoccupation with fair treatment. Primary concepts that have enduring value usually are recognized as worthy of understanding across cultures, whereas topics may not seem universally relevant. This yields great opportunity for personalizing in the

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global classroom. For example, the American Revolution may not capture the attention of Arthur or Christine-Apollo or Frank, but the primary concept “sources of human conflict” might prove both inviting and meaningful. That is a concept that’s relevant to everyone and can be accessed through a variety of content topics—from the American Revolution to World War II to the civil war in Uganda to genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. Teaching to primary concepts also opens up many opportunities to differentiate for process, product, readiness, and learning styles. It is virtually impossible to personalize the teaching of topics such as “green plants,” because the actual learning objectives are so vague as to make the desired results of the lesson nebulous or nonexistent. Remember that personalized learning is a means to an end; if the destination is unclear, the journey is at best confused. However, if we are teaching not the topic “green plants” but the primary concept “life cycles,” the content can vary broadly (frogs, green plants, moths, etc.). Students can produce different products to demonstrate their learning, and these products can reflect their interests, learning styles, and readiness levels. The process that the teacher goes through in identifying the primary concept actually makes explicit to the teacher why the topic is worthy of student time and attention and, in our experience, liberates instructional energy and motivation for dynamic classroom implementation.

Framing Essential Questions The structure of the curriculum affects its outcome—or, in the words of Marshal McLuhan, “the medium affects the message” (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967). If one of the goals of the curriculum is to promote an inquiry-based approach to learning, it would stand to reason that the curriculum would be designed around questions as opposed to knowledge statements, and that these questions would be central to what we want children to learn—they would frame the primary concepts we’ve identified. As Wiggins and McTighe (2005) put it, “Only by framing our teaching around valued questions and worthy performances can we overcome activity-based and coverage-oriented instruction, and the resulting rote learning that produces formulaic answers and

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surface-level knowledge” (p. 27). In other words, the curriculum needs to be both thoughtful and thought provoking. Very few students can resist genuinely thought-provoking questions. Since questions are among teachers’ most common instructional tools, we have a tendency to take them for granted. The truth is, skillfully crafted questions don’t just happen, and they are rarely the product of spontaneous classroom discussion. We know that there is a positive correlation between the depth of critical thought that a teacher puts into his or her planning and the depth of critical thought the resultant instruction engenders in students. Not all questions are created equal, and we need to give time and attention to crafting questions that generate deep student thought rather than a simple regurgitation of the content as it was presented. A very counterproductive questioning practice stems from a misunderstanding and misuse of Bloom’s taxonomy and other hierarchies of thinking skills. At the lowest level of most of these taxonomies are cognitive processes such as recall and rote memory. At the highest level are processes such as evaluation, synthesis, and prediction. Bloom attempted to use “degree of difficulty” as the criteria for distinguishing between levels in his taxonomy. However, Marzano (2001) points out that the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy are not always more difficult than the lower ones. Sousa (2001) perceives this distinction as being between difficulty and complexity. We do well to remember that arduous tasks—tasks that require more effort or time—are not the same as rigorous tasks, which are tasks that require more complex thought at high levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (Dodge, 2005; Kusuma-Powell & Powell, 2000b). Some teachers mistakenly assume that students with processing difficulties or learning disabilities, or students who are simply struggling with basic skills will find questions that rely on recall and rote memory “easier” and more accessible than questions demanding higher-order and more complex thinking. However, recall and rote memory questions usually have a single right answer. You either know it or you don’t. Questions that embrace higher-order thinking are often open-ended and have multiple entry points that students can access at their particular readiness level. For example, the question “Who discovered America?” requires a single right answer.

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You either know it or you don’t. Contrast that with the multiple ways a student might respond to this question: “If you were planning a voyage of exploration at the end of the 15th century, what might be some things you would want to consider?” A student can choose to address such a question at his or her own level of readiness—everything from a concrete level (e.g., in terms of food and water needs) to quite an abstract and sophisticated level (e.g., focusing on navigational difficulties, such as the lack of latitudes and longitudes, or sailor morale on such a long voyage). The other, even more disturbing misconception held by some teachers is that students must master the basic skills of reading and writing before they engage in higher-order thinking. Students who are struggling with basic skills have just as much—if not more—need for intellectual stimulation as their more apparently school-successful classmates. Ralph Butterfield was the student of Bill’s who taught him a great deal about questioning. Ralph, an African American senior at the International School of Tanganyika, was remarkably bright but had a severe learning disability that made reading and writing excruciatingly difficult for him. At the conclusion of a class discussion of W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (in which Ralph had been a very active participant, although he could not decode the words), Ralph asked Bill if the discussion questions he had asked were designed to “control student thought.” The question disturbed Bill and caused him to reflect. Were the specific questions he had asked the students designed to lead them to his interpretation of the poem? Was he assuming that they would be unable to make their own meaning out of the poem? In what ways did this expectation affect student learning? Would it be more effective to ask questions that were more vague, such as, “What are you noticing in this poem?” or “What are you more aware of as you continue reading?” or “What connections are you exploring?” We believe that the curriculum should be framed around provocative, open-ended questions. In our experience, the most successful curriculum questions are ones that we take into the classroom without knowing the answer ourselves. Putting yourself in the category of learner is always a powerful way to demonstrate that constructing understanding is an ongoing process.

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What Aspects of the Curriculum Should and Should Not Be Personalized? Parents often ask us whether personalization of learning doesn’t “dumb down” the curriculum. And high school teachers often ask why they should personalize learning when the external examinations, such as Advanced Placement (AP) or IB exams, aren’t personalized. The answers to both of these questions hinge on which aspects of the curriculum we choose to personalize. There are some things in every curriculum that are nonnegotiable. For example, every student who leaves high school should be able to write a well-organized and coherent essay. Learning to read is another nonnegotiable. Even with all our advances in technology and our so-called digitally native children, basic literacy and numeracy will continue to be the currency of individuals who successfully navigate the complexities of the 21st century. Just as learning to write a coherent essay would remain a universal outcome for all students, we would not jeopardize a student’s potential success on an external examination. The learning standards and the instructional goals—what Wiggins and McTighe (2005) call the “desired results”—should not be personalized. In the case of an AP or IB course, the desired outcome would be a successful exam result. This would remain constant for all students. Every student deserves the richness and stimulation of primary concepts and essential questions. However, as we have discussed earlier, the specific content that we use to achieve those enduring understandings can be personalized. When students come to explore “life cycles,” they can focus on frogs or trees or human beings. The skills that we select to focus on can also be personalized. One of the benchmarks for the Grade 8 Humanities course Ochan taught was writing a well-organized five-paragraph essay. She recalls teaching this course to a fairly large class with a great range of readiness levels. Some students had started the school year with fairly sophisticated writing and were able to focus on transitions and framing insightful conclusions. Other students were still working on constructing a well-organized paragraph. One student, who had a severe learning disability, was working on a well-organized sentence. Ochan was able to personalize the skill focus in accordance with individual needs, but she kept the

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standard and benchmark (writing the five-paragraph essay) the same for everyone. The fact that personalized learning holds the standards the same for all allows us, as teachers, to put a hand to our heart and tell parents that personalized learning does not dumb down the curriculum. The only exception to this would be when a child is following an individualized education plan (IEP), in which case it might be necessary to personalize the standard. However, we suggest that even if a child has an IEP, the determination of whether a specific unit should be modified should be made on a case-by-case basis considering the content, the level of challenge and complexity, and the child’s strengths and areas of need. Because we know that the medium in which students work affects the quality of their demonstrated learning, assessment of student learning can definitely be personalized. We can invite students to demonstrate their learning in different ways (see the description of production styles in Chapter 4), allowing students to use their strengths and avoid media that might be so anxiety-producing that students put all their attention into the process of production and little into the content itself. While assessment can be personalized, the criteria by which we evaluate the assessment should not be. We need to hold all students to the same high standards. For example, it is possible to have students demonstrate their understanding of the power and authority structure of feudal Europe by way of an essay, a model, a graphic design, or a skit. However, the rubric that is used to evaluate each of these different learning products should be the same, because the enduring understandings that we are looking for are the same. Finally, the learning experience itself should be personalized. We need to design learning activities that will have a personalized appeal in respect to content, process, product, learning style, student interest, and readiness level. In conversations with colleagues, we have come to understand that part of the conflict between a rich and stimulating curriculum and personalized learning comes from conflicting ideas that teachers hold about student success. Many teachers perceive “student success” as monolithic. In other words, some teachers may be willing to concede that one size may not fit all in terms of intelligence preferences or learning styles, but the successful

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outcome for a unit of study must look the same for all children. Equality— treating all children in exactly the same manner—is further reinforced when it becomes emotionally associated with a misguided sense of fairness. Our preferred definition of fairness is to provide each child with whatever that child needs to achieve individual success, and support measures might include everything from eyeglasses to hearing aids to extra time on tests to additional scaffolding on assignments to voice recognition software. In fact, this standardized vision of student success can actually prevent teachers from perceiving individual student growth. The worrying deficit in a child’s achievement can actually blind us to a child’s accomplishments and strengths. In some cases, particularly where a student is not meeting grade-level benchmarks, individual student success literally needs to be unmasked before it can be celebrated.

Planning Instruction with Backward Design In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey (1989) suggests that to begin with the end in mind is like starting a journey with a clear understanding of your destination. It means knowing where you’re going so that you have a better understanding of the steps you need to take in order to move in the right direction. With primary concepts and some essential questions identified, you are well on your way to planning an effective unit of instruction, because you have the destination in mind. The method of beginning instruction planning with desired results, generally known as backward design, comes to us from Wiggins and McTighe (2005). In their book Understanding by Design, they present a logical threestep process of lesson and unit planning based on the idea of beginning with the end in mind: 1. Identify desired results. 2. Determine acceptable evidence of student learning. 3. Plan learning experiences and instruction. We have discussed how to find and filter for primary concepts, which should be the first step in planning. This can be a difficult transition for teachers, because many of us often start planning with a textbook chapter,

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old favorite activities, or lesson plans that we have taught many times before and feel we know well. But without primary ideas and essential questions, or the destination of learning, instruction often results in an activity-based learning experience that has little conceptual substance. This can also be the case when the integration of subjects (social studies, science, math, and language arts) is artificially forced. You may find the second stage of backward design counterintuitive. For most teachers, once a learning goal or objective has been identified, the next logical step is to design a learning activity that will allow us to achieve that outcome. However, it is critical to think of the assessment piece as an embedded component of the planning process and not simply as a summative event that occurs at the conclusion of the unit. We need to ask ourselves how we will know that students have achieved the desired results. What will we see our students doing that will indicate that they have mastered certain skills? What will we hear our students saying that will indicate understanding? What evidence will we come to accept as valid for the outcome of our unit of study? By placing the assessment evidence before the planning of the actual learning experience, we are obliged to visualize the outcome of the unit, which in turn increases the likelihood of alignment between learning goal, assessment, and actual instruction. Figure 3.1 is a model for unit planning for personalized learning. It follows the backward design structure and provides a metacognitive script for teachers. The script suggests questions we might ask ourselves about the intersection of a high-quality curriculum and the actual intelligence preferences, learning styles, strengths, weaknesses, cultural diversity, and content interests of a class of students. The figure shows a sample of how a teacher might respond to it. Although the model is presented in a linear format, we would urge you to use it recursively so as to capture spontaneous ideas and capitalize on creativity while keeping the overall structure in mind.

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FIGURE 3.1 SAMPLE PLANNING FOR UNIT OBJECTIVES AND PERSONALIZED LEARNING Note: The questions provided in the metacognitive script are suggestions to support teacher planning. This is not intended as an algorithm, nor should it be followed in a lockstep fashion. Metacognitive Script

Planning Step

• What is the primary concept or enduring understanding I want to teach? • Why is it important for the student to know this 20 years from now? • What essential question guides my planning?

Concept: All knowledge is tentative, and renaissances in human history illustrate the tentative nature of knowledge. What is truth today may be considered a falsehood tomorrow, reflecting developments in human progress. Essential Questions 1. What makes a renaissance? 2. In what ways does authority help or hinder human progress? 3. In what ways does a renaissance illustrate the tentative nature of human knowledge?

• What are my content objectives related to this primary concept?

Content Objectives Mastery of key factual information about the European and Harlem Renaissances, including time frames and key contributors.

• What are my learning goals? What do I want my students to know and understand?

Declarative Knowledge Learning Goals Students will know/understand that • A renaissance has specific characteristics and can occur in different times and places — Vigorous intellectual and artistic energy. — A sense of pride. — A “spirit” of the day that is reflected in artistic, scientific, literary, and humanistic developments. — Challenges to existing authority, including the established knowledge of the day. — A search for, sharing of, and flourishing of new ideas. — Renewal. — Some sort of lasting legacy. • Ideas, thoughts, and knowledge change and evolve during such periods of renaissance.

(Specify one or two goals only.)

What do I want my students to be able to do? (Specify one or two goals only.)

Procedural Knowledge Learning Goals Students will be able to • Analyze how known truths may change to apparent falsehoods, reflecting our progress as a species. — Categorize renaissance characteristics. — Perform Internet-based research.

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FIGURE 3.1—(continued) SAMPLE PLANNING FOR UNIT OBJECTIVES AND PERSONALIZED LEARNING Metacognitive Script

Planning Step — Detect point of view and analyze for bias in informational text. • Evaluate some current truths that may be perceived as falsehoods tomorrow.

• How will I know that I have achieved my objectives? • What criteria are most important to assess? • What feedback will I use to monitor that the lesson/ unit is working? • What will my rubric look like? • Will students be able to access the language of the rubric? • What kind of formative assessment will I use? • What tools will I use to judge whether students have learned what I set out to teach?

Assessment of Student Learning Students need to be able to identify knowledge that was once held as truth that is now considered to be false, and to analyze events that contributed to the change in perspective. 1. You are a historian who is uncovering the falsehoods that were believed to be true during the time of the European Renaissance. Assemble and produce a “Book of Lies” that documents the falsehoods, the reasons they were believed, and the knowledge as we know it today. 2. On completion of your research on the European Renaissance, consider whether there is any accepted knowledge today that might be proved false at some time in the future. Include at least one of these in your Book of Lies. As part of formative assessment, I will work with students to develop an evaluative rubric that includes clarity of response and precision of historical analysis of how specific truths have changed.

• What special populations do I have in my class (ESL, LD, highly capable)? • What specific learner needs (learning styles, social needs) do I need to remember and consider in my planning?

Diverse Learner Characteristics Lots of kinesthetic learners, whom I’ll engage through a jigsaw activity for text on Italian Renaissance. (Jigsaw will include movement.)

• How will I activate Preteaching Activities students’ prior knowledge I will ask students for examples from their own countries of periods of possible about the content? renaissance. • How will I make the content meaningful and relevant to culturally diverse students?

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Planning Step

• Are there particular preteaching activities I need to consider for any special populations (ESL, LD, highly capable)? • How does the task ensure that all learning goals are included? • How have I ensured that a wide range of talents, interests, and intelligences is required? • How have I planned to engage all students in active learning? • How do I anticipate the most “challenging” students in the class will respond to this activity/lesson?

Checklist for Task:

Open-ended Interesting … Challenging … There is more than one way to address it …

Description of Instructional Assignment Over six weeks . . . 1. Students will read two novels: Daughter of Venice and The Girl with the Pearl Earring. 2. Students will conduct an analysis of one of the characters from either novel by presenting a graphic and written product. 3. Students will engage in a “jigsaw” reading activity that focuses on the Italian Renaissance and the different areas in which new ideas challenged the status quo. 4. Student will engage in a simulated trial of Galileo. 5. Students will compare the lives of girls and boys in the 15th century and in the present day. 6. Student will be introduced to the poetry of Langston Hughes and invited to explore how “The Dream Deferred” might connect to the theme of what makes a renaissance.

…

• What are the verbatim Instructions for Reading Jigsaw Activity instructions that I will give 1. You are now in your expert groups. You have 20 minutes to read the piece my students for this task? of text and become experts in your specific area of the Italian Renaissance. Specifically, you need to identify what new ideas emerged in your area (Having reread my instruc(art, science, social roles, medicine, or religion) and how these new ideas tions to the students, what is challenged the existing ideas. You also need to prepare a nonverbal graphic the likelihood that students (a logo or design) that captures the essence of your area. will be confused by lack of clarity or ambiguity?) 2. When time is called, you will be regrouped and given five minutes to teach your area of the Italian Renaissance to a new group.

What materials will I need? Working Guidelines • Materials for reading jigsaw: What materials will students need? – Five different pieces of text on different aspects of the Italian Renaissance. – Drawing paper and colored markers for students. • •

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FIGURE 3.1—(continued) SAMPLE PLANNING FOR UNIT OBJECTIVES AND PERSONALIZED LEARNING Metacognitive Script

Planning Step

•

How will student learning be monitored during the assignment? • How will student work be graded? • What is the timeline for this assignment? • In what way will grouping be formed?

Timeline for jigsaw: – 20 minutes to become experts. – 25 minutes to teach others (5 minutes for each of the areas). • Grouping strategy: Random grouping. I will ask students to line up by dream holiday locations then count off into fives.

•

How will I synthesize and bring closure to the lesson? • In what way will I return to the essential question or enduring understanding? • What homework will I assign?

Bringing Closure In the final two sessions, I will ask students to apply what they have learned about renaissances in history to the present day: In what areas might we consider that our present world is undergoing a renaissance (in terms of the role of women, technology, education, etc.)?

• How did the lesson go? (Summarize Impressions) • On what data or evidence do I base my impressions? • What are some of the contributing factors to my impressions of the lesson? • What connections am I seeing between the lesson I planned and the one I taught? (Analyze causal factors.) • What are some ideas that I want to take away from this teaching experience? (Construct new learnings.) • How will I apply these new ideas? (Commit to application.)

Reflections on the Lesson • I was disappointed with the engagement of the English language learners (ELLs) early in the unit. They did not contribute to classroom discussions and, frankly, the novels may have been at too high a reading level for them. When we came to the reading jigsaw, I provided them with the technical vocabulary in advance, I conducted a short preteaching session, and I allowed them to use electronic translators. The reaction was dramatic. Much, much greater engagement! I need to keep this in mind when we go into Langston Hughes’s poetry. I will plan short prelessons for the ELLs on the vocabulary and background to the Harlem Renaissance.

•

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Critics of linear models of lesson planning such as backward design suggest that these models do not reflect the inherent complexity and dynamism of the classroom. The argument is that these models artificially separate outcomes from instructional approaches and so fragment unit planning into successive steps rather than consider them as part of a creative gestalt (see John, 2006). To us, this criticism seems to represent a false dichotomy. There is no necessary contradiction between a logical step-by-step approach to lesson preparation and the iterative, simultaneous creativity that is part and parcel of the real world of unit planning. The former provides us with structure and accountability; the latter allows us to cater what we do to the context of our specific classroom and our specific students. As we see it, backward design is structured to ensure that learning objectives are clear and that assessment and instruction are aligned to each of these objectives. This provides for coherence in unit planning. The importance of lesson clarity and coherence was underscored in research undertaken by Seidel, Rimmele, and Prenzel (2005), who set out to measure clarity and coherence of learning objectives and to determine whether there were correlations to the development of student motivation and achievement. Clarity and coherence of lesson goals were measured by analyzing videos of physics lessons and rating the criteria on a Likert scale using specific indicators. The researchers found a strong correlation between clarity and coherence of lesson goals and (1) student perceptions of supportiveness of the learning conditions, (2) students’ learning motivation, (3) types of cognitive learning activities, and (4) the development of student competence in physics over a one-year period. Figure 3.2, adapted from the work of Tomlinson and Allan (2000), makes explicit some of the connections between high-quality curriculum and personalized learning in the classroom. We have grouped these indicators according to the stages of backward design, as articulated by Wiggins and McTighe (2005). Underneath each principle, we have included examples of how teachers might personalize instruction at the same time that they ensure high-quality curriculum.

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FIGURE 3.2 A PLANNING GUIDE LINKING THE PRINCIPLES HIGH-QUALITY CURRICULUM AND QUALITY PERSONALIZED LEARNING Planning Stage 1: Identify Desired Results … Curriculum must be based on rich and important ideas and skills that have enduring value beyond the classroom. •

•

The teacher plans units to address learning that is focused on important and big ideas that are developmentally appropriate and will stand the test of time. The teacher plans how to help each student achieve this learning by varying scaffolding, support, and materials.

… Curriculum must help students understand the discipline and practice it in ways similar to experts or professionals in the discipline. •

The teacher employs processes that are at the heart of the discipline and designs assignments that require students to use higher-level thinking skills.

… Curriculum must be relevant and coherent to students, connecting to their lives and helping them understand both their world and the discipline being studied. • • • •

•

Learning objectives are aligned with assessment tasks. Unit planning includes work that demands student investigation, planning, and evaluation. Students share their learning products with meaningful audiences. The teacher uses a variety of materials at different levels of complexity to address student readiness levels. The teacher gives students a choice of materials, topics, products, or processes to help them develop personal interests and connections.

… The teacher and students must be able to explain what learners should know, understand, and be able to do as a result of each learning experience. • • •

The teacher begins instruction for each unit with an explanatory overview of the material to come. Learning objectives are clear. Essential questions provoke curiosity and inquiry from students.

Planning Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence … Assessment criteria must be established before the unit is taught. • •

The teacher clarifies the performance standards and descriptors for each learning objective. Students understand the purpose of assessment.

… Assessment is an essential component of the learning process. • • •

Assessment is used to analyze student progress toward the attainment of specific learning objectives. Assessment is used to enhance opportunities for further learning. Students are provided with a variety of ways to demonstrate their learning.

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… Students must clearly understand the criteria for high-quality work in activities and products. • • • • •

Students understand how their learning will be measured. Rubrics or lists of criteria serve as a guide for student performance. Students develop personalized goals within the units of study. The teacher scaffolds questions to encourage participation from all students. The teacher welcomes a variety of processing formats to encourage students to make connections and meaning with the material.

Planning Stage 3: Plan Learning Experiences & Instruction … Instruction, activities, and products must clearly focus on the key learning goals of the unit of study. •

•

Students may use different materials at varying levels of complexity, but all work toward the same learning objectives and goals. The teacher uses part-to-whole and whole-to-part instruction to help students make connections.

… The classroom environment must be respectful of each student and the group as a whole. •

•

• •

•

•

The teacher uses flexible grouping (e.g., small- and whole-group) strategies to optimize support for each student and to ensure the development of interdependence within the class. The teacher uses a variety of ways to know all students as individual learners: their individual learning styles and strengths, intelligence preferences, educational histories, and biological traits. Materials and resources in the class reflect the different cultures represented. Students have a choice in the kinds of products they use to express their learning (e.g., building, drawing, writing, performing). Students have options for varied modes of working: individually, in pairs, in trios, in small groups, and as a whole class. The teacher ensures that each student is able to contribute to the work of the whole in a meaningful way.

… The lesson must interest and engage all students in the class. • •

•

•

Students receive instruction in a variety of ways (e.g., oral, aural, visual). The teacher varies the type and pace of instruction to appeal to different learning styles within the class. Learning tasks, materials, and products are at different levels of complexity to match the readiness levels of students in the class. In group work, the teacher ensures that each student has an important role to play and an important contribution to make.

… Activities, discussions, and products must call on students to think at high levels and to grapple with complex problems, ideas, issues, and skills. •

The teacher uses mediative questions to provoke student thinking at high levels.

Source: Adapted from Leadership for Differentiating Schools and Classrooms (pp. 54–55), by C. A. Tomlinson and S. D. Allan, 2000, Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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TAKING THE LANDSCAPE VIEW OF CURRICULUM Although we have stressed that “knowing our curriculum” means more than “knowing our subject,” there is no question that teachers should know the content they are to teach. Jones and Moreland (2005) describe the perils of implementing a new curriculum when teachers have limited content knowledge. Their study describes “learning activities” that had little or no conceptual substance, and teachers who were unable to give feedback to students beyond praise-based responses. It is clearly important for an English teacher to know about the various genres of literature and for a social studies teacher to understand how the great thinkers of one century influenced the events of the next. But general content knowledge can no longer be synonymous with “knowing the curriculum.” To accommodate the tentative nature of knowledge, the explosion in information, and the increasing diversity of our students, we must redefine knowing the curriculum to mean that in-depth knowledge that allows the teacher to identify the primary concepts and to distinguish between enduring understandings (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) and the peripheral information that may be interesting to know but is not essential to conceptual understanding. Knowing our curriculum allows us to make learning whole for all learners—as opposed to something that’s fragmented, fractured, and episodic (Perkins, 2009a) and seems unrelated to the lives they lead. The specific content of an academic discipline, no matter how interesting or seemingly important, can be likened to the specific physical features of a landscape—for example, a pond or meadow, a cluster of oak trees, or the path of a stream. All of these are important physical features of a specific landscape, but none of them, in and of themselves, gives us the big picture of the geography of the region. As teachers, we need to be able to identify the metaphorical geography of our academic discipline. We need to be able to construct the big picture—to identify the primary concepts or enduring understandings that we want our students to take away from our classroom. We need to be able to synthesize what is truly important for students to know, to understand, and to be able to do. We need to be able to articulate these major learning outcomes and plan learning activities that are aligned

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to them. We also need to collect data and evidence that will indicate how successful our students are in achieving these learning outcomes. This is not a simple task. It is intellectually demanding. It requires time and energy. It also requires collaboration with valued colleagues. But unless we have this deep understanding of what we teach and why, we will not be able to give students the skills they need to be a part of the ongoing inquiry that is learning, to apply the ever-increasing sum of information that technology puts at their fingertips, and to appreciate and synthesize the differing points of view they will meet in this globalized century.

ACTION ADVICE: USING INQUIRY TO DEVELOP STUDENTS’ CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING Teachers help students develop deep understanding of curriculum by presenting them with primary concepts and asking them to engage in higherlevel thinking about these ideas. The key is to give students time to process big ideas and make personal connections to them; these connections are the foundation of personalized learning. Use the following instructional strategies to support processing, critical reading, and personal connections to content. Please note that these activities are effective only when the teacher has first done the work of knowing the curriculum. 10–2. The 10–2 strategy comes to us from the work of Mary Budd Rowe (1983), who also gave us “wait time.” Generally speaking, the optimal length of auditory concentration for adults for semantic or declarative information is somewhere between 9 and 12 minutes. Essentially, 10–2 calls for you to chunk direct instruction into lecturettes of approximately 10 minutes and follow each of these with 2 to 4 minutes of processing time. The processing can be as simple as asking the students to turn to a neighbor and discuss the key ideas or how the content relates to them. The 2-Minute Essay and the 3-Minute Stand-Up Conversation are variations on this processing activity. Processing time allows students to make personal connections to content and promotes metacognition about learning. This supports students in monitoring their understanding and helps them take control of their own learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000).

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ANNOTATED READING. As individuals read a selected piece of text, they mark sentences or passages with a check if they already knew the content of the passage, with a question mark if they have a question or are unsure of the passage’s meaning, and with an exclamation mark if the passage represents a new idea or insight. Follow up by asking paired learning partners to compare their annotations. FINAL WORD. Strong readers have learned to make connections to the text and to question or challenge what they read. “Final word” is a particularly effective reading and processing strategy that models what strong reading looks like. Everyone participates in interacting with text at a deep level. All members of a mixed readiness group read an assigned piece of text and highlight or underline what they consider to be the key ideas and concepts. Once all members of the group have finished reading, the group members number off, and the process begins with Group Member #1 sharing a highlighted item, but making no further comment. Working in round-robin fashion, each group member comments on or gives a personal response to Group Member #1’s selection. There is no cross-talk or interrupting. The first round wraps up with Group Member #1 reflecting on his or her highlighted item after having the benefit of hearing what everyone else has had to say about it, thus giving “the final word.” The “final word” often includes comments on how the insights of others have modified the original interpretation of the highlighted text. Then, the process repeats with Group Member #2 and continues until all the group members have had a chance to share their thoughts, get feedback, and give their final word. JIGSAW. A jigsaw activity involves breaking the class into groups and assigning each group to read a selected piece of text or focus on a particular aspect of lesson content for the purpose of becoming “experts” in it. Then regroup the students into new groups, each with at least one representative of the original expert groups. Working in a round-robin fashion, each student teaches the rest of the group about his or her area of expertise. The power of the jigsaw is that it compels interdependence. PAIRS READ AND PARAPHRASE (PRAP). In this pairs-based reading comprehension activity, Partner A reads the first paragraph of an assigned text

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out loud. Partner B listens as Partner A reads but does not follow along in the text. When “A” finishes reading the paragraph, “B” paraphrases the main idea or key concept of the paragraph. Then they reverse roles and continue reading, listening, and commenting until time is called. Paraphrasing is a much underrated learning strategy. Skillfully done, it requires the learner to identify key ideas and concepts and synthesize them. POSTER BRAINSTORM. Distribute chart paper and ask small groups to brainstorm a list of characteristics of the subject under discussion (e.g., behaviors that enhance collaboration or similarities between the Federalist Papers and the New Deal). Remind students of the rules of brainstorming— that no criticism or rejection of contributions is permitted, so as to encourage the most flexible and creative thinking. At the conclusion of the brainstorming period, all groups post their brainstorming for review and discussion. A variation on the poster brainstorm is to give each group a different question to respond to. This is an efficient way to explore multiple perspectives, with each table group making a brief presentation. Still another variation is to have the groups fold the chart paper in half. On the left-hand side of the poster, students explore the topic under discussion through a verbal brainstorm (using words), and on the right-hand side, they do so via a nonverbal brainstorm (using symbols, pictures, or logos). This kind of cross-modal activity, involving writing, drawing, and speaking, can enhance student processing. SAY SOMETHING. Working with a learning partner, students read a selected piece of text. At the end of each paragraph, each person “says something”— gives a brief summary, identifies key points, asks a question, raises an interesting point, or notes a personal connection. SCRAMBLED SENTENCES. In this strategy, each member of a small group of five or six students thinks of a single word related to the subject under discussion and writes it on an index card. Then, the group members share their cards and construct a sentence out of the word that conveys the best explanation of the subject, using the fewest possible additional words.

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SEGMENTATION. This strategy for group analysis and synthesis can foster deep critical thinking. It’s based on having students identify big ideas within content and then “segment” the content according to those concepts, and it has built-in opportunities for personalization. Segmentation is more easily illustrated than described. The example we offer is from an 8th grade humanities class that was reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The teacher divided students into groups and asked them to identify the motivators of the main characters in the play. Students brainstormed in small groups, then shared their ideas, which the teacher recorded on a whiteboard. The motivators they identified included power, fame, ambition, patriotism, self-knowledge, honor, and greed. The teacher then asked each group to draw horizontal and vertical axes on a piece of chart paper and select motivators that they would plot along each axis. This involved personalization in the sense that each group needed choose two descriptors they wished to work with—the ones that had the most resonance for them or that they found the most interesting. Group A chose honor, which they set up on the horizontal axis—labeling the left end “low honor” and the right end “high honor,” and ambition, which they set up on the vertical axis, labeling the bottom end “low ambition” and the top end “high ambition.” The teacher then asked each group to come up with descriptors for each of the quadrants formed by the intersecting axes (e.g., “How would you describe the combination of low ambition and low honor? What would that look like?”), select characters from the play they believed exemplified each of the quadrants, and explain their choice. Some quadrants were fairly straightforward. For example, Cassius appeared quite quickly in Group A’s high-ambition/low-honor quadrant. Other quadrants were more challenging to populate, with Group A debating whether Caesar should be placed in the high-ambition/high-honor quadrant. The teacher also asked the groups to find quotations from the play that supported their specific quadrant assignments. Finally, groups were asked to write a synthesis statement about what they had learned about the motivation of the main characters of the play. Segmentation is easily adaptable to other subjects, and it has been used in social studies, science, foreign language, and even math classes.

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SYNECTICS. These are a fun and creative way to get students engaged in metaphorical thinking by prompting them to see similarities between two seemingly dissimilar objects or ideas. There are any number of ways of presenting a synectic, but usually the comparison includes a key word from the lesson and something from everyday life. For example, you might ask student groups to make list of favorite foods, hobbies, or activities they enjoy and then select one item from the list. Then you would supply a word or concept related to your instruction and ask them to complete the synectic, which might look like the following: • Personalized learning is like a tossed salad because . . . • Critical thinking is a game of tennis because . . . Another way of using synectics is to present four or five pictures of particular objects (e.g., a basket of fruit, a kitchen utensil, a sport) and ask students to draw the similarities. Note that completing synectics is extremely difficult if students don’t have a fairly deep conceptual understanding of the lesson. Thus, synectics can offer you a useful dipstick assessment of your students’ understanding. VERBAL GYMNASTICS. This fun activity is something you can use as a processing strategy or as a warm-up to start the day. The instructions are for the groups to construct a grammatically correct, meaningful sentence having something to do with the unit of study utilizing three given words. You may give the groups words that are relevant to the unit of study to help students remember and connect key words and concepts. Alternatively, you may want to give words that are totally irrelevant to the subject in order to make the activity more challenging and creative. At one of our teacher workshops, we gave groups the words assegai (iron-tipped spear), papadum (thin, crisp Indian flatbread), and zeitgeist (general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era). One table group constructed the sentence “No Child Left Behind shattered the American educational zeitgeist like an assegai going through a papadum.”

4 Knowing Our Assessments

In the 10th grade, Bill faced a major test in American history. The teacher had stressed how important the test was and how it was modeled on the kind of tests that students would encounter at university level. Bill spent hours studying for this test, reviewing chapters in the textbook and poring over his class notes. Entering the classroom on the day of the test, he felt fairly well prepared. However, when Bill received his test paper and began to read the questions, he was shocked by what he saw. The test focused on content that he hadn’t studied at all. It was as though it had come out of a different course altogether. Panic and self-doubt swept through him. Bill scored poorly on the test, and the teacher wrote this comment on the top of the test paper: You must learn to study harder. This test does not represent what you are capable of. More than 30 years later, Bill can still remember the lesson he took away from this experience, and it has little to do with American history. First, he learned that although his teacher might have seen it differently, there isn’t necessarily a relationship between trying hard and doing well. The effort Bill put into studying for this test did not pay dividends in terms of achievement. There is no causal relationship between effort and achievement, only a correlation when the assessment is reasonably predictable—and in the case of Bill’s history test, the assessment was not at all predictable. 108

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When teachers, however unwittingly, lead students to disassociate effort and achievement in this way, they do these students a major disservice. As discussed in Chapter 2, when the controllable aspects of causality (e.g., effort) are perceived to be connected to achievement, individual potency and efficacy are enhanced, and the likelihood of future success is increased (Hunter & Barker, 1987). Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. When students feel like their effort doesn’t matter, they tend to stop trying, and this sets them up for even more academic difficulty. Bill prepared for that history test expecting a fair assessment of the content the course had covered: the major ideas and concepts of the Great Depression and President Roosevelt’s response to it. Instead, he encountered an idiosyncratic collection of questions—some of which were tangential, some of which were merely trivial. The test was clearly a “gotcha assessment” in which the teacher attempted to uncover what the students didn’t know as opposed to what they had actually learned. The takeaway for Bill was that school was sometimes not as much about learning or achievement as it was about being able to outguess the teacher. This was not only bad assessment practice, it was malpractice. Although standards-based curriculum and common assessments have made such idiosyncratic assessment practices rarer today, there is still too much about assessment that’s mystifying to both teachers and students. In 1998, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam authored an article about the assessment of student learning in the United Kingdom titled “Inside the Black Box.” The title is an apt metaphor for much assessment practice in schools, suggesting something mysterious and unknown, something removed from our daily experience, something that happens to us and is therefore outside both our understanding and our control. Research from Black and Wiliam (1998), the Assessment Reform Group in the United Kingdom, and the Assessment Training Institute in Portland, Oregon (Chappuis, Chappuis, & Stiggins, 2009), stresses that there is a profound difference in learning results when teachers strive to bring students “inside the black box”—inside the assessment process—for the purpose of making the student a critically important end user of assessment data. Why is it so important for students to use assessment data? Because although teachers unquestionably create the conditions for learning, it’s

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students who ultimately make the decision as to whether they will engage with what’s being offered. Just as a gardener cannot compel flowers to grow and bloom, a teacher cannot mandate that learning will take place. Individual students make the decision as to whether they will learn based on the interplay of numerous factors, including their perception of their readiness, self-esteem, self-confidence and efficacy, social status in the classroom, cultural background, interests, intelligence preferences, and learning styles. Because students are the ultimate authority in their own learning, they need to be active participants in the assessment process. In this chapter, we will connect best-practice assessment with personalized learning. We will do this by surveying the traditional purposes of assessment, taking some first steps in understanding assessment fundamentals, and examining a relatively new paradigm of assessment, called assessment for learning (AfL), that appears to complement personalized learning. We will also look at the knotty and conflicting issues surrounding the grading of student work and offer some strategies for promoting student self-assessment.

CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON ASSESSMENT Just as educators’ view of curricula has changed dramatically, our understanding of assessment is likewise undergoing a tectonic shift. The educational establishment is not just considering assessment practices and classroom strategies but reflecting on and reexamining assessment’s very purpose. In the Introduction, we talked about ranking and sorting students as a traditional purpose of education, and testing as a means to this end. Given the class hierarchies and the stratified job market of the 20th century, it was imperative to have a way of funneling young people into productive employment. Britain’s old system, in effect when Bill was growing up in Britain in the 1950s, is a prime example. At age 11, schoolchildren took the Eleven Plus exam, which determined if they would continue academic study or be shunted into vocational training. At age 16, students who had remained in an academic program were further ranked and sorted for college admission by the “O” Level exam, which functioned in a manner similar to the

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SAT in today’s United States. Students whose scores put them in the top 10 percent (irrespective of their actual performance on the examination) received As, the next 20 percent received Bs, and so on. This ranking and sorting of students into distinct paths by assessment results persists in highly competitive educational systems around the world, including those in India, China, and South Korea. Another traditional purpose of assessment has been to motivate students by doling out punishments and rewards. Students who did well received accolades, were placed on the honor roll, and were given awards and prizes. Students who didn’t do well were also recognized, sometimes publicly, with criticism, scorn, and even ridicule. We can see the Skinnerian hand of operant conditioning at work. In the traditional perception of assessment, fear was seen as a powerful motivator of student achievement, and teachers deliberately set out to create an urgent sense of assessment anxiety. As Chappuis and colleagues (2004) put it, “We all grew up in classrooms in which our teachers believed that the way to maximize learning was to maximize anxiety, and assessment has always been the great intimidator” (p. 32). We still see the legacy of this connection between assessment and anxiety when we assign students a task and their first question is “Will it be graded?” or “Will it count?” About 40 years ago, a few educational systems began to focus attention on criterion-referenced assessment. This represented a dramatic change in thinking about the purpose of assessment in schools. In criterionreferenced assessment, a student’s achievement is not compared against other students, but rather evaluated against predetermined achievement criteria. For example, the criteria questions for a well-written paragraph might include • How well organized is the paragraph? • Is there a topic sentence? Supporting sentences? A concluding sentence? • Does the paragraph have a variety of sentence structures? The purpose of criterion-referenced assessment is to chart student growth in regard to valued skills and knowledge. The bell curve is jettisoned, and in theory, all students who meet the predetermined criteria for success

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can get As. The advent of criterion-referenced assessment truly stands as a milestone in our educational journey to balance and marry excellence and equity. Teachers who grew up in norm-referenced systems can find it difficult to think about assessment as something that’s not primarily concerned with comparing students against each other, even though this kind of comparison inevitably works to the detriment of all students. Students at the bottom of the teacher’s achievement hierarchy tend to experience lower expectations and achieve less. Even those students “fortunate” enough to be sorted and ranked at the top of the heap are not compared against their own potential, meaning they’re often underchallenged. They may become the victims of benign neglect, since “they will learn it anyway.” Another critical advantage of criterion-referenced assessment is that it allows individual teachers and schools to use data gathered through the assessment process to help in planning the most appropriate learning experiences for specific individuals and groups of students. And so enters the idea that the results of assessment can and should inform future instruction. Teachers can analyze data and learn from the assessment results. For example, let’s imagine that 25 students take the same test in 9th grade mathematics. The teacher grades the tests and reviews the results to determine if a pattern is emerging. She sees that on questions 7, 12, and 15, more than half the students got the wrong answer, and she concludes that these questions warrant her focused attention. First, the teacher tries to determine if the questions were clumsily worded. Was there ambiguity or the possibility for confusion? She looks at each question and decides that, no, they were all clearly worded. Yet half the class answered them incorrectly. This degree of misunderstanding suggests that the problem lies not with the students but with the teaching those students received (Guskey, 2002). It is clearly time for some reteaching. Criterion-referenced assessment of learning has come to play a central role in the movement toward developing standards-based curricula. In other words, we determine what we want the students to learn—what we want them to know, understand, and be able to do (schoolwide standards). We set benchmarks of grade-level quality, and then we design assessments that allow us to determine the degree to which our students have achieved

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these standards. Schools around the world are wrestling with this process and are developing principles of assessment that both link to schoolwide learning standards and offer students a variety of ways in which they can demonstrate their achievement. FIRST STEPS IN KNOWING OUR ASSESSMENTS Truly meaningful assessment has two components: quality and variety (Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2004). Quality depends on the purpose, validity, and accuracy of the assessment; on how results are communicated; and on the degree of student involvement in the process. Variety in assessment tools provides balance in our evaluation of student learning. Assessment should be a photo album of learning, not merely a snapshot. In order to ensure that the picture of the learner compiled is as accurate as possible, teachers need to ask some fairly pointed questions about their assessments. The questions that follow, inspired by the work of the Assessment Training Institute (Stiggins et al., 2004), provide a good start.

What Is the Purpose of the Assessment? Educators generally agree that there are two primary purposes for assessment: (1) to analyze student progress to determine the status of learning, and (2) to serve as an essential component of the learning process in order to promote and enhance further learning. We describe the first function as assessment of learning and the second function as assessment for learning. Although it is important to understand that these two types of assessment are not mutually exclusive, and there is no need to choose between them, it is useful to distinguish between their purposes and outcomes. Is the assessment summative, in that the result will sum up learning achievement and be used to give students a grade? Or is it formative, in the sense that the teacher and students will use the results to shape further instruction and learning?

What Are the Targeted Learning Outcomes? For assessment results to be useful, we must be very sure about what these results mean, and that requires that we have a clear picture of the learning

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objectives the assessment is measuring. Learning outcomes usually fall into four general categories: knowledge (including factual recall), critical thinking (including analysis, comparison, evaluation), skills (e.g., writing a paragraph, dribbling a basketball, playing a musical instrument), and the generation of products (Chappuis et al., 2009).

Is the Type of Assessment Appropriate for the Targeted Learning Outcome? The four types of assessment teachers most frequently use are selected response, extended response, performance tasks, and personal observation and communication. Each is appropriate for assessing some learning outcomes, but less appropriate for others. Selected-response assessments, which include multiple-choice tests, matching exercises, and true-or-false quizzes, are appropriate measures for the assessment of knowledge—specifically, factual recall. They are less effective when used to evaluate reasoning and very ineffective when used to measure skills or the ability to create a product. A classic example of a mismatch between assessment and outcome occurred back in the 1970s in the United States when the College Board removed the writing sample from the SAT examination and substituted a multiple-choice test that simply asked students to recognize standard written English. Recognizing standard written English (factual knowledge) and generating coherent and well-organized prose (skill, reasoning, product generation) are two very different processes. Extended written-response assessments, such as traditional essay tests, are appropriate for measuring knowledge and reasoning but ineffective for evaluating skills or the ability to create a product (except, of course, when the product is a piece of writing). Performance tasks are not effective in assessing knowledge in that they usually have a fairly narrow focus and can rarely cover all the content. They can be effective in determining student reasoning, and they can be highly effective in assessing student skills and ability to create a product. They also appeal to students with a preference for practical intelligence in that they call upon students to engage in authentic problem solving. Personal observation and communication includes interviewing, questioning, and informal classroom observation conducted by the teacher. This

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can be an effective way of assessing students’ knowledge and reasoning (especially during think-aloud activities), but it is extremely time-consuming and labor intensive. It is very difficult for a single teacher to observe more than a few students at a given time.

Is the Design of the Assessment Valid? The question here is whether or not the assessment actually measures the desired learning targets. Is the content covered the content that was taught? Or does the assessment include extraneous factors that could lead to an inaccurate conclusion about what a student understands or can do? For example, on a math test, the direction “explain your answer” leaves unsaid whether the explanation needs to be in mathematical notation, in words, or in pictures, diagrams, or drawings. For some teachers, the word “explain” means “use words,” and they might well dock points from a student who does not do so, even if the student’s drawing, say, demonstrates clear conceptual understanding of the problem and solution. The pictorial explanation of students who think in pictures may not even be understood by the teacher. In the global classroom, the lack of verbal explanation may also penalize a student who understands the math but is still in the process of learning English.

How Will the Assessment Results Be Communicated? Generally, teachers give two kinds of feedback: evaluative feedback and descriptive feedback. Evaluative feedback might be a number score or letter grade (A+, D–) or a few words (“well done” or “outstanding job”). Research has shown that, although there is no correlation between evaluative feedback and enhanced learning (some might argue that there is actually a negative correlation), there is a powerful and necessary correlation between descriptive feedback and ongoing student learning (Sanford, 1995). Descriptive feedback informs students of what they need to do next in order to improve. Comments like “You maintained eye contact with your audience throughout your presentation” and “Your essay had a compelling

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introduction but lacked a conclusion” help the recipient understand the assessment results and put these results to use.

What Role Will Students Play in the Assessment Process? Students learn most effectively when they take responsibility for their own learning. It stands to reason that they need to understand the assessment process so that ultimately they will be able to engage in accurate and frequent self-assessment. They need to be brought within the “black box.” Practices such as sharing learning goals and criteria and the use of rubrics containing the key criteria that are being assessed and descriptions of various levels of student achievement can be valuable tools for this effort.

STUDENT-CENTERED ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING There is an anonymous saying that speaks volumes about current assessment practices in many countries around the world: You don’t fatten a cow by weighing it. Although assessment of learning, otherwise known as summative assessment, can contribute to the overall picture of learning we are compiling of our students, we must remember that it can only be a part of that picture. It offers little flexibility for accommodating different learners and little information for adjusting instruction to fit individual student needs. As we think about the kind of assessment that supports personalized learning, we need to start by asking some very basic questions about what we do in classrooms and why. If our purpose in the global classroom is to provide the maximum access for all learners to a high-quality curriculum, a curriculum that puts the learner center stage as the constructor of meaning, then we need an assessment framework that does the same. Assessment for learning is an assessment paradigm that does just that. Both AfL and personalized learning strive to make student learning success their central purpose. Both initiatives assert that instruction and assessment should be seamlessly integrated for the well-being of the learner. Both are centrally concerned with how students learn most efficiently, recognizing that students’ emotions and self-confidence are inseparable from

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cognition and that motivation plays a critical role in furthering learner success. Perhaps the most striking commonality is the emphasis that both personalized learning and assessment for learning place on recognizing and building on student strengths in order to further develop learner selfdirectedness and self-management. The Assessment Reform Group in the United Kingdom has played a key role in bringing the research evidence about assessment for learning to the attention of the educational community through the commissioned work of Black and Wiliam, published as “Inside the Black Box” (1998) and the follow-up Assessment for Learning: Beyond the Black Box (1999). The Assessment Reform Group (2002) continues to advance this field and has identified 10 research-based principles of assessment for learning to guide classroom practice: Assessment for learning 1. Is part of effective instructional planning. 2. Focuses on how students learn (not just “what” they learn). 3. Is central to classroom practice. 4. Is a key professional skill. 5. Is sensitive and constructive. 6. Fosters motivation. 7. Promotes understanding of goals and criteria. 8. Helps learners know how to improve. 9. Develops the capacity for self-assessment. 10. Recognizes all educational achievement.

Fostering the Growth Mind-set Principles 5 and 6 of assessment for learning, which call for assessments that are sensitive and constructive and that foster student motivation, remind us of the importance of growth mind-sets. Dweck (2006) suggests that as we grow up, we develop either “fixed” or “growth” mind-sets. As noted in Chapter 1’s discussion of student “ability,” individuals with fixed mind-sets attribute their success or failure to causal factors outside their conscious control. We hear the voice of the fixed mind-set when we hear people say, “I’m just no good at math” or “I don’t have the ear for learning

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a foreign language.” These “failures” are, in the speakers’ mind, beyond their power to change. Such learned helplessness is, unfortunately, all too prevalent in our schools. Ironically, attributing success to causal factors outside our control can also be problematic. For example, if I believe my success in school is the result of my native intelligence, this can result in an aversion to intellectual risk taking (mistakes are not seen as opportunities to learn but as evidence that I’m not as clever as I thought). Growth mind-sets, on the other hand, attribute success or failure to causal factors that are within our conscious control (e.g., effort, time management, planning, practice, etc.). When we develop a growth mind-set, we also develop learning resilience—so that when we do fail, we fail forward. Our colleague Sharon, an experienced middle school teacher, tells a story about how a casual comment from her high school PE teacher convinced her not only that she “couldn’t run,” but that any kind of athletic endeavor was beyond her (something she remains convinced of to this day). We don’t imagine that Sharon’s teacher meant to cut short an athletic career or lifestyle, but his untimely and inappropriate assessment led Sharon to attribute her less-than-impressive performance on the school track to an innate lack of ability, a fixed mind-set she has not overcome. Contrast Sharon’s experience to this story of a 10th grade science class at the International School of Brussels. In 2009, this class was declared the European winner of the Project Earth competition for their work to make their school more environmentally sustainable through composting and by growing herbs and vegetables for the school kitchen (see www.projectearth. net for details). What was unusual about the science class was its composition of mainstream, general education students and students with cognitive or developmental disabilities who were usually educated in a self-contained classroom. Students take the science class, which is called Environmental Sustainability Through Practical Application, for either academic credit in science or for CAS (creativity, action, service) credit as part of the IB diploma program. The coteachers of the class—one a science specialist and the other a learning support teacher—worked hard to integrate the diverse student

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populations to create a common class identity, part of which is sharing a common learning goal. We asked one of the teachers, Michelle Brown, if she had informed Project Earth evaluators that half the class was composed of students with intensive special needs. She responded, “No, the organizers were not aware of the special composition of the class. I wanted the students to enter the competition as equals, based on the merits of their work.” We were struck by the growth mind-set (Dweck, 2006) that the teachers had established within their class; clearly, all the students developed a belief in themselves as students who were capable of performing important work. Their teachers’ confidence, demonstrated by ensuring the class was evaluated by the same criteria as other groups competing for the award, powerfully confirmed this belief in their own capacity.

The Power of Student Choice As the Assessment Reform Group (2002) notes, assessment “should enable all learners to achieve their best and have their efforts recognized.” For teachers in the global classroom, this requires sensitivity to cultural differences. As teachers, we need to be aware that our own culture and the dominant school culture can permeate and influence assessment just as they can all aspects of instruction. One way to personalize assessment for these learners is to allow some choice in assessment. When assessments are aligned with primary concepts of the curriculum, content used to demonstrate those ideas can be personalized. Additionally, teachers can let students work in a preferred production style to help them best show their learning. Remember that how a student demonstrates his or her learning can be as influential on the quality of the product as the student’s knowledge or skill and that working in a nonpreferred medium (e.g., requiring shy individuals to perform in front of an audience) can produce levels of stress that actually interfere with the demonstration of learning. For an example of how giving students a choice in assessment can enhance both engagement and learning, let’s take a look inside Kyung-Sam’s high school English class.

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Han-boks and Jang-gums: A Korean Look at the Danish Prince Fifteen-year-old Kyung-Sam stands in front of the English class next to a beautifully designed miniature theater, built of cardboard. His face glows with confidence and pleasure. Just last week Kyung-Sam told his teacher that, in Korean, his name means “honor and achievement.” His present expression reflects both. It is obvious that Kyung-Sam has spent many hours working on this project. The scenery is intricately painted. The furniture is perfectly to scale, as are the figures of the actors and actresses, who are meticulously dressed in flowing robes. Kyung-Sam has reconstructed the scene from Hamlet in which Polonius is stabbed to death in Queen Gertrude’s chamber, but a North American or European English teacher would be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the famous scene. The queen’s bed has been replaced by an e-bool (a low wooden platform covered with a thin mat). The wall-hung tapestry has been replaced by an oriental screen with brush paintings of long-legged birds and bamboo forests. Queen Gertrude wears a red han-bok (the traditional flowing, high-waisted Korean dress). Instead of a sword, Hamlet wields a jang-gum (a miniature, straight-bladed saber with a red hilt). Kyung-Sam has presented the scene as it might have appeared in Korea in the 16th century. Despite the fact that Kyung-Sam is an ESL student who is still receiving specific English language support, he has just completed an oral presentation on how Hamlet might have been staged in a Korean context. It was well received by the rest of his class. He also has prepared a written explanation of his project. Kyung-Sam’s English teacher helped him to design this creatively personalized performance assessment. Both teacher and student acknowledge the effectiveness of the project. “I knew Kyung-Sam was proud of his Korean cultural heritage, and I thought linking our literature study to something in which he had expertise would not only increase his understanding of the play but also provide a boost for both his motivation and self-esteem. Kyung-Sam is quite a talented artist. The total project—the model building, the oral presentation, and the essay—demonstrated that he has really made a personal connection to the play.”

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Kyung-Sam’s comments were equally enthusiastic: “Before the project, Hamlet was just some reading for school. I had no feeling for it. Just a lot of acts and scenes, a lot of entrances and exits that had to be read for homework. But when I thought about the play in Korea, it joined together into full meaning. I could understand Hamlet’s problems. I mean, I could understand the whole of it.” May Ling’s teacher came up with a similar idea. The students were all expected to use English when making an oral presentation in front of the class, but each student was free to select the topic they would present on. May Ling chose to make her presentation on the Chinese horoscope. In advance, she collected the birth dates of the middle school teachers and prepared brief descriptions of them according to the Chinese astrological cycle. To the delight of her classmates, May Ling presented the principal, Mr. Pershing, as the dependable and hardworking Earth Ox; the PE teacher, Mrs. Farrell, as the vivacious and playful Monkey; and the science teacher, Mr. Straffon, as the strong and a little bit scary Tiger. The ESL teacher noticed that as May Ling’s presentation went on, she seemed to become more self-confident and relaxed, and her language fluency increased accordingly.

Learning to Learn Bringing students inside the assessment process is one of AfL’s chief goals. In an outstanding article titled “Helping Students Understand Assessment,” Jan Chappuis (2005) writes that students need to be able to answer three basic questions about their learning: • Where am I going? (What, specifically, is the learning target?) • Where am I now? (What can and can’t I do?) • How can I close the gap? The fundamental point here is to engage students in assessment so that they are actively involved, understand the process, and ultimately learn to set and move toward learning goals on their own. There are a number of ways to promote this kind of engagement: providing clear learning goals, giving feedback and requiring revision, and embedding self-assessment.

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Providing clear learning goals. Understanding the learning objectives is critically important for students. They shouldn’t have to guess or infer what the learning targets are or what high-quality work that hits those targets looks like. Good ways of providing clarity include the use of rubrics and allowing students to study models of both strong and weak work. Teachers can provide students with a rubric and an anonymous work sample, then ask them to evaluate the work and be prepared to discuss the criteria applied using the language in the rubric or scoring guide. Such an activity will assist students in understanding what high-quality work looks like and will support them in learning how to self-assess. For some procedural knowledge, rubric construction can be fairly straightforward. There are many excellent rubrics, for example, to guide the assessment of expository writing. However, when we get into areas of declarative knowledge and critical/creative thinking, rubrics can be more problematic. Because the descriptors of quality in the rubric need to be clearly understood by the student and reasonably easy to measure, teachers will often quantify the description of quality rather than attempt to qualify it. For example, the highest level of achievement on a social studies rubric might demand that students include in their essay at least three reasons for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but the rubric may make no mention of the appropriateness or meaningfulness of the reasons. We can be faced with the temptation of measuring only that which is easily measurable. Our colleague Ron Ritchhart, a researcher with Project Zero at Harvard University, reacts skeptically to the idea of rubrics as a panacea. He sees shallow rubrics being used by students as a “paint by number” approach to classroom “success.” Such rubrics actually limit student critical and creative thought. He cautions that the value of a rubric will always be measured by how well it promotes student growth in learning (personal conversation, 2007). Giving feedback. Teachers who provide students with regular descriptive feedback enhance their learning. We’ve already made the distinction between descriptive feedback and evaluative feedback, which consists of marks or letter grades or comments such as “excellent” or “good job.” Such

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evaluative feedback often signals to students that the learning associated with a piece of work is finished. Descriptive feedback gives students insight about current strengths (success) and how to do better next time (corrective action). We also know that quality in feedback is vastly more important than quantity. In the Action Advice section at the end of the chapter, we recommend providing students with data followed by an open-ended, mediative question. Research (Sanford, 1995) has shown that this powerful combination enhances self-directed learning. Requiring revision. Teachers need to insist that students revise their work. Using descriptive feedback to revise and improve a piece of work involves not only learning academic skills but also learning how to learn. We need to model how to use feedback in the revision process and support students in framing questions that will allow them to make sense out of the feedback they receive. Generally, it is better to focus on a single aspect or quality at a time; don’t allow students to bite off more than they can chew. Providing students with practice assessing and preparing descriptive feedback on an anonymous, poor-quality piece of work can be a very useful activity. It can serve to make the standards of quality more explicit and supports both peer- and self-assessment. Embedding self-assessment. We believe that the goal of all assessment should be healthy and accurate self-assessment. Students, eventually, should not rely upon external sources for evaluation. Accordingly, teachers at all levels need to embed frequent self-assessment into their instruction and support students in regularly collecting evidence of their own progress. We recommend that teachers use a variety of daily strategies in the classroom that require students to articulate specifically what they are learning and the progress they are making (see the Action Advice section at the end of the chapter). Students can use the results to set goals focused on closing the gap between where they are now relative to the desired learning outcome and where they need to be in order to meet learning standards. By coming inside the assessment process, the student comes to know him- or herself better as a learner. The student, not the teacher, becomes the most important end user of assessment data.

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GRADING AND PERSONALIZED LEARNING: A PROCESS AT WAR WITH ITSELF During a teacher workshop we were leading, we asked participants to brainstorm all the various reasons for grading. We recorded the teachers’ contributions on a flip chart and stopped at 35—not because we had exhausted the subject, but because the page was full and we thought we had made our point. Teachers grade for many different reasons, some of which may be entirely contradictory, and some of which may inhibit student learning. Take, for example, the teacher who wants to use grades as a means to encourage a struggling student. She perceives that a positive grade will bolster the young person’s self-confidence and serve as a boost to his motivation. However, the grade will also go on a high school transcript that will be used by universities to make selective admissions decisions. In this case, the encouragement of future learning and the need for an accurate indication of achievement are at odds. The fact that we are trying to use grading for so many different purposes, some of which are mutually exclusive, helps to account for why so many teachers feel conflicted about the subject of grading. Teachers who personalize for diverse learners may have an additional source of conflict. As Tomlinson and McTighe (2006) note, the process of grading often leaves student-centered educators feeling uncomfortable and compromised . . . . Their classroom practice honors and attends to variance in student readiness, interest, and learning profile. In their classrooms, student variability is viewed not as a problem but as a natural and positive aspect of working with human beings. Seemingly in contrast, the report card and its surrounding mythology looms as a reminder that at the end of the day, students must be described through a standardized and quantitative procedure that seems insensitive to human difference. (p. 128)

Guskey (2002) points out that grading is not an essential part of the learning process. Checking on student work and providing high-quality feedback is essential, but placing a grade or mark on a piece of work is tangential to the learning process. An important decision that teachers need to make is what work will be graded and what work will not be graded. Sometimes,

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an ungraded piece of work can provide students with a much deeper and more meaningful learning experience. Some elementary schools don’t use grades at all, preferring to use a continuum of achievement from not yet apparent to emerging to consistently applied. This approach is much less common in middle schools and high schools. For a wide variety of reasons, grading in the secondary school appears to be a process that will be with us for some time to come. The goal, then, is to minimize the pernicious outcomes of grading and to make the process as compatible as possible with personalized learning. When grading, we are wise to heed the medical profession’s adage of “Do no harm.” The following principles, informed by the work of Tomlinson and McTighe (2006), provide a solid guide for grading in the personalized classroom.

Base Grades on Clearly Defined Performance Descriptors Being crystal clear about the learning objectives that we have for students is the foundation of quality assessment and meaningful grading. As we have discussed, learning targets can be in the areas of knowledge, skills, reasoning, and performance tasks. For targets in each of these domains, we must establish grade descriptors that operationally define our expectations. Much like high-quality rubrics that describe criteria for levels of student achievement for particular assignments, a meaningful grading scale gives descriptions of what each grade of achievement (e.g., A, B, C) would look like (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006).

Base Grades on What You Set Out to Assess Assessment should reflect intended learning targets. For example, one of the requirements of the IB diploma program is Theory of Knowledge, a course that introduces students to ways of knowing and the structure of knowledge in different disciplines. By the end of the course, students should be able to analyze knowledge claims and issues, and relate these to their personal experience. In the 1980s, student learning in the course was assessed through two student essays. It was our contention (and that of

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other course teachers) that students who could write well also did well on the course assessments, whether or not their analysis of knowledge issues was productive. The IB has since changed the assessment of this course to make it a more valid reflection of the course objectives.

Base Grades on Set Criteria As we have stated earlier in this chapter, norm-based assessment and grading suffers from three problems: it doesn’t provide the student with any useful information about his or her strengths and deficits; it doesn’t provide the student with ideas or advice on how to improve; and it promotes unhealthy competition, which can undermine efforts at cooperative learning, studentto-student collaboration, and the development of a constructive classroom community. We second Tomlinson and McTighe (2006) in strongly recommending that teachers avoid grading “on a curve.”

Resist the Pressure to Grade Everything There are some assessments that should not be included in the grading process. These include diagnostic assessments, pre-assessments, and most of the data-gathering devices used for formative assessment (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006). The purpose of formative assessment is to get the most accurate read possible on the state of student learning so that the teacher can adjust instruction to better support mastery. It’s about taking an “in process” measurement at points in the instructional process as students are practicing skills and engaging in intellectual risk taking. Our assumption is that student products (e.g., paragraph writing) will always be better at the end of an instructional cycle than at the beginning or in the middle of it; therefore, calculating grades based on summative assessment results—or student work at the end of the cycle—allows us to report a more accurate description of student achievement and progress over time.

Avoid Averaging We agree with Tomlinson and McTighe (2006) when they write, “We join with other grading experts in challenging the widespread practice of averaging

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all of the marks and scores during an entire marking period to arrive at a numerically based final grade” (p. 132). The problem with averaging scores is it can lead to misleading results. If learning is the goal and the student masters the desired outcome in the fifth or sixth week of the marking period, why would we penalize the same student for not having mastered it in the second or third week? Learning is not a race to the finish. When we average all the scores of a marking period, we turn progress and achievement in the classroom into a race that only the fastest can win. Tomlinson and McTighe (2006) support the use of teacher professional judgment when it comes to assigned grades. They suggest that grades should be determined from a variety of sources, rather than calculated in a strictly quantitative manner, and go on to suggest that if a school policy requires averaging, it makes more sense to use the median or mode than the mean as a basis for grading. As alternatives to averaging, we recommend that teachers consider giving priority to • The most recent evidence. Again, student performance at the end of an instructional cycle is a more accurate reflection of the learning that has taken place than performance at the beginning. • The most comprehensive evidence. Not all assignments are created equally, and we would weight more heavily those assignments that require greater complexity of thought. • Evidence related to the most important learning goals or standards. Not all standards are equivalent, and we would highlight the most significant ones.

Make the Grade Reflect the Student’s Achievement— and Nothing but the Student’s Achievement Teachers have a tendency to want to include everything in the grading process. We see teachers factoring in effort, timely completion of work, class participation, attitude, attendance, and behavior. Such inclusiveness makes interpretation problematic. The grade should reflect achievement in reaching defined standards. Students and parents should be able to rely on grades for information about learning.

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We also strongly discourage the use of assigning zeroes for missed or incomplete work. This is often a contentious recommendation, but when zeroes are factored into the achievement grade, grades are used for punishment, and the clarity of the message is compromised. Parents don’t know whether to hire a tutor or “ground” their child. There are other ways for teachers to respond to assignments that are not handed in. One way is to assign an “incomplete” and to communicate to the student and his or her parents that there is “insufficient evidence” to assign this student a grade. Developing effective work habits is a critical aspect of personalizing learning, and this information is some of the most important that teachers can share with students and parents. Work habits, more than student academic achievement, are an accurate predictor of the young person’s success in higher education and the real world of work. We recommend that schools report on three distinct aspects of a student’s schoolwork: • Achievement of the learning goals. Teachers typically use grades to report achievement. • Progress toward those learning goals. A student may not be reading at grade level but may have made huge progress toward that goal. These personal achievements need to be tracked, reported, and celebrated. • Work habits. These include effort, persistence, and using feedback for revision. Different schools report on work habits in different ways. Some invite teachers to comment on work habits in a narrative that accompanies the report card. Other schools have actually developed rubrics for the assessment of work habits. For example, the International School of Bangkok is developing a so-called HAL assessment (Habits and Attitudes toward Learning). Recall the Tanzanian scholarship student, Frank, from the Introduction. Bright and very hardworking, Frank never had a problem with his grades. However, his move from a traditional government school to a Western-style international school caused him some initial confusion: I remember early on at IST getting back a Theory of Knowledge essay on which the teacher had written, “You have a clear organizational structure, and you summarize the arguments on both sides of the case succinctly. But where are

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your own ideas? What is Frank thinking? Written Expression: A+. Personal Reasoning: C–.” I had never had a C– before, and it shocked me. But at least I then knew what the teacher was expecting.

MOVING TOWARD PERSONALIZED ASSESSMENT In many countries around the world, current assessment practices serve as a major obstacle to improved pedagogy and learning. In conversations throughout Asia, we have heard enlightened national educational leaders rail at the perceived tyranny of the examination system. Some countries, including Singapore and, more recently, China, seem to understand that traditional examination systems do not reward critical or creative thinking. In 2010, China launched the “Internationalizing Chinese National Education” reform initiative, focused on breaking away from the rigid, examinationfocused pedagogy of the past and embracing more innovative instructional practices. The Yuecheng Education Innovation Center (YEIC) in Beijing is leading the way in this initiative. The most recent PISA (OECD Program for International Student Achievement, 2009) results from Shanghai suggest that such innovations may be having positive results. Teachers and administrators at the International School of Kuala Lumpur are an example of educators working collaboratively to make a schoolwide shift to learner-focused assessment. Figure 4.1 shows the result of their efforts. Note that this document stipulates that “nonacademic evaluations” will be included in assessing for standards and benchmarks. It’s a key point; some of the most important standards are difficult, perhaps impossible, to assess objectively or through traditional academic means. For example, an important learning standard for schools should be the enthusiasm and joy that children are developing for the learning process. This is virtually impossible to measure by an “objective” assessment. So educators are faced with a choice. We can simply not measure achievement toward the standard; in which case, more often than not, developing an enthusiasm and joy for learning will be moved to the column of desirable but optional standards that may happen by spontaneous combustion, but won’t be part of the planned curriculum in most classrooms. There is truth to the old adage that what is measured is taught.

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FIGURE 4.1 A PLAN FOR LEARNER-FOCUSED ASSESSMENT: THE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF KUALA LUMPUR, ESSENTIAL AGREEMENTS ON ASSESSMENT Preamble: Student progress toward achieving curriculum standards is assessed in a variety of ways. A combination of classwork, common assessment tasks, and unit projects are routinely used to monitor learning. Teachers use student work to make adjustments to the pace of instruction, to differentiate learning activities, and to modify teaching methods in order to promote greater student achievement. One of the most important purposes of assessment is to support students on their journey toward realistic and healthy internal (self) assessment. Our assessment essential agreements and practices are guided by the following research-based principles: 1. Assessment must be aligned with curricular standards and benchmarks and shall reflect separate academic and nonacademic evaluations. 2. Assessment tools (e.g., tests, portfolios) and criteria (e.g., rubrics) will be matched to learning tasks and used to improve learning by both teachers and students. 3. Major assessment tools should be determined before a unit of study begins and their integration should follow the Understanding by Design (UbD) process. 4. A balance of assessments should be used and could include common assessments, contextual performance assessments, mastery/proficiency, baseline, student self-assessment, and teacher observation. 5. Students should receive major assessment criteria and models of work at the start of a unit of study to improve performance and ensure assessment transparency. 6. Assessment should be collected and analyzed regularly to inform instruction and refine curriculum and performance expectations. 7. Results from assessments should be communicated to students in a timely manner. Source: International School of Kuala Lumpur, Essential Agreements on Assessment—Revised October, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

Alternatively, teachers and administrators can accept the challenge that some assessment must include a degree of subjectivity. For the most part, this is a challenge that teachers are ready to embrace when they understand how to go about it and when they are given permission to do so. While subjectivity is often associated with a lack of reliability resulting from either bias or caprice, it doesn’t need to be so. When teachers use informal assessment, when they gather data and evidence, when they engage in clinical observation of students, this subjectivity can be transformed into sound professional judgment.

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Harold Kelley (1967) suggests that many of us have a tendency to be “naïve scientists” in that a single piece of data is sufficient to confirm our perceptions, opinions, and prejudices. Kelley recommends examining three pieces of data—triangulating our data, in other words. Taking a more comprehensive view transforms subjectivity into professional judgment, and we would argue that such professional judgment is a critical and indispensable component to assessment. Without it, some of our most meaningful learning standards are lost, the assessment of student achievement is shallow and one-dimensional, and the teaching profession is denuded of its professionalism. Knowing our assessments means understanding all the learning objectives and standards we wish to track progress toward and understanding which assessments and practices best reveal how far students have come and need to go to reach them. It means striving to personalize and differentiate learning, to capitalize on student strengths, to utilize descriptive feedback in order to promote student learning, and ultimately, to make the student a partner in the assessment process. The combination of personalized learning and assessment for learning offers teachers a powerful means to balance excellence and equity in the classroom and maximize learning for all students.

ACTION ADVICE: HELPING STUDENTS LEARN HOW TO LEARN High-quality assessment promotes further learning and student reflection on the learning process. Here are a number of strategies that can help bring students into the assessment process. DATA PLUS MEDIATIVE QUESTIONS. The most powerful descriptive feedback is the combination of student assessment data along with a well-crafted mediative question—one that’s open-ended and contains positive presuppositions, plural forms, and tentative language. For example, we might ask, “As you reflect on your research, what ideas are you exploring regarding the causes of the Great Depression?” The word exploring here represents tentative language and invites students to take intellectual risks. Too often, feedback heralds the end of learning; combining feedback with a mediative

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question focuses the student forward, prolonging and enhancing the learning experience. Carol Sanford (1995) suggests that this combination has the power to enhance self-directedness. Here are some examples of feedback featuring data plus mediative questions: • You chose to write a first-person narrative. Knowing what you do about how stories can affect the readers, what are your hunches about what the reader might be feeling at the conclusion of your piece? • During your six-minute oral presentation, you maintained eye contact with your audience for about three-and-a-half minutes. What decisions did you make about when to make eye contact, and what effect might it have had on the audience? • On your math test, you answered 15 of the 20 problems correctly. What patterns are you seeing among the problems you got wrong? • You have recognized that the results of your science experiment are inconclusive. As you reflect back on the process, what aspects of the experiment might have contributed to the outcome? FREQUENT SHORT JOURNAL REFLECTIONS. This strategy involves setting prompts that encourage students to reflect not only on what they have learned but also on how they have learned it. For example: • • • •

How will you know that you have written a good essay? What are some effective ways of organizing your class notes? Write a cookbook recipe for how to make a comparison. What connections are you making between our unit of study and your own life? • Given what you know about yourself, what are you going to be mindful of when you budget your time for homework? • What are some of the attributes of powerful public speakers? Sometimes it is useful to allow students several minutes of dialogue with one another to get ideas going about the journal prompt before they start writing. Other times it is useful to allow them several minutes of dialogue after they have completed their journal entry so that they can compare thoughts.

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SYNTHESIS STATEMENT. Research suggests that students who are able to clearly articulate what they are learning outperform those who cannot (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). The synthesis statement activity is a good way to train students to think explicitly about their learning. After dividing students into small groups, pass out index cards and ask every student to complete the sentence stem I am learning . . . . After a minute or so, group members share their sentences and craft a single sentence that reflects the thinking of the entire group. Groups can share their statements orally or on posters displayed for a gallery walk. One of the values of sharing statements of learning is the positive modeling and reconfirmation of big ideas that students will inevitably hear from one another.

5 Knowing Our Collegial Relationships

One of our most memorable learning experiences on the subject of relationships happened on a trek through the Malagasy rainforest in search of the elusive indri, the largest of the Madagascar lemurs. We started out in the early morning, and by about 10:00 a.m., we had spotted a troop of the black-and-white lemurs high in the canopy overhead. Indris are known for their calls, some of which are truly eerie and can be heard for miles in the dense undergrowth. Olivier, our guide, explained that indris actually have five distinct calls. They have two warning calls: one for the approach of ground predators and another for aerial predators. They have a communal territorial “song” in which each member of the troop has a designated part—the duration of which corresponds to the individual lemur’s age and status. Each troop of indris also has its own “love song,” which is sung to neighboring troops of indris to advertise the calling group’s mating potential. But, Olivier explained, the loveliest and most mournful call of the indris is the “song of reunification.” Whenever one of the younger members of the troop becomes lost, the elders join together in this song to help the youngster find his way home. We found the songs of the indris humbling. Together, we—Ochan and Bill—spend much of our professional lives trying to help school staffs establish collaborative relationships, and here the lemurs, with their efficient, 134

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effective, and well-established system, seemed to be well ahead of us humans. Indris demonstrate with their songs a community that is protective, that recognizes each member, that instills a sense of group belonging. This is the type of environment our students need in order to learn and thrive, and it’s the type of environment we teachers need as well. Schools must create a sense of belonging, support, and psychological safety— trust—in order for teachers to grow professionally and learn how to meet the demands of a rapidly changing profession and classroom.

OPENING OUR CLASSROOM DOORS Historically, teaching has been a very isolated profession. Back in the 1970s, when the chairman of the English department introduced Bill to his first teaching colleagues, he explained that Bill would be working with a highly educated and very professional group of teachers who shared a common parking lot! It ended up that the parking lot was just about all the staff shared—the lot and, in winter, the heating system. Each day, all members of the faculty trundled off into their separate rooms and closed the door. If the door had a little window in it, they covered it with construction paper to complete their isolation from the rest of the adult world. A teacher’s classroom was his or her castle, and territoriality was the rule of the day. Even a principal would hesitate to enter a teacher’s classroom without tacit permission or prior warning. Peer observation was unheard of, and peer coaching was still 10 or 15 years in the future. Lesson plans could be commandeered by the principal but otherwise were not seen by anyone else. Instructional strategies, like secret recipes, were considered private, intellectual property and for the most part were not shared. In many schools, there was an unwritten rule that teaching and learning would not be spoken about in the faculty lounge. A novice teacher was likely to be given the most difficult students or the class that no one else wanted to teach. When a master teacher retired from the profession, she took her wealth of craft knowledge with her so that each new generation of teachers had, to some extent, to reinvent the wheel. It was an inefficient and ineffective system—one that the indri lemurs would have found puzzling.

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As anyone in a profession that values high-quality outcomes will tell you, the days of flying solo are over. Designing high-quality, thought-provoking unit plans and then devising ways of personalizing these plans to meet the needs of a multitude of diverse learners is highly complex, cognitive labor. It is unreasonable, unfair, and counterproductive to ask teachers to do this kind of work in isolation. Every week, we see the publication of more and more research findings in education, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and anthropology that have implications for our classrooms. This barrage of information serves to both enlighten and confuse our work as teachers. In addition, we are regularly battered with competing educational claims. This software package helps to rewire the brains of dyslexic children. This phonemic approach to reading will raise standardized test scores by 20 percent. The adoption of this math scheme will increase children’s conceptual understanding. The sheer volume of information and misinformation is enough to produce vertigo in even the most clear-thinking individual. The diversity in experience, culture, languages, and learning preferences we now find in our classrooms demands creative thinking and openness to different perspectives. As we try to absorb all this information, identify needs, and personalize instruction accordingly, the support of fellow teachers is essential. We would have little confidence in a doctor who refused to consult with colleagues on a diagnosis or treatment. The same standard needs to be applied to education. We should invite and welcome our colleagues’ review of our analysis of learning needs and instructional responses. This exchange is the nature of all true professions, and it’s the hallmark of professionals. Fortunately, we are seeing an increasing number of schools attempting to break down teacher isolation by emphasizing the importance of adultto-adult collaboration. We see it in high schools when teachers sit together to moderate standards on IB internal assessment work. We see it in the common planning of middle school learning communities and in the collective assessment of student work in elementary school. We also see it in the increase in coteaching situations and the team approach that special educators and general classroom teachers are developing.

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The move away from teacher isolation represents yet another shift in education that is nothing less than a sea change. As a profession, we are slowly coming to recognize that our teaching colleagues are the most valuable educational resource we have, barring none. We say that we “are coming” to recognize the value of our colleagues because schools are at different points on their journey toward professional interdependence, which might be defined as the union of individual teacher autonomy with a profound sense of professional community. In our professional development work with teachers, we visit more than 20 international schools each year. Within an hour or so of talking with teachers, we get a very clear sense of the school culture, and the cultures vary dramatically. Some school cultures are characterized by conviviality but little collegiality (“Let’s be pleasant to each other, avoid conflict, and maintain our own turf”). In other, healthier school cultures, we see trust and generosity, a common vision and focus on student learning, and a collective emphasis on professional development. These faculty members are truly a pleasure to work with. Occasionally, we enter a school with a toxic culture, where arrogance, insecurity, and competition among adults make for an atmosphere of fearfulness and suspicion. Today’s research is finding the vital connections between high-quality adult relationships and high-quality student learning (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Garmston & Wellman, 2009; Louis, Marks, & Kruse, 1996), which is something educators have known intuitively for some time. In his classic work Improving Schools from Within, Roland Barth (1990) asserts that the quality of adult-to-adult relationships within a school is one of the most accurate barometers of school quality. It is these adult-to adult relationships that define the school culture. Barth (2006) writes that when relationships between administrators and teachers are trusting, generous, helpful, and cooperative, then the relationships between teachers and students, between students and students, and between teachers and parents are likely to be trusting, generous, helpful, and cooperative. If, on the other hand, relationships between administrators and teachers are fearful, competitive, suspicious, and corrosive, then these qualities will disseminate throughout the school community. (p. 8)

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Michael Fullan (2000) goes so far as to say that “no school improvement initiative will be successful unless it also improves relationships within the school.”

TEACHING COLLABORATIVELY The highest-quality teacher-to-teacher professional relationship is collaboration. But it is a deceptively simple concept. We say collaboration takes place when members of a learning community work together as equals (irrespective of positions of authority) toward a common goal. Collaborative partnerships may be between students as they work in groups, between students and teachers, and between teachers as they work to assist students to succeed in the classroom. Irrespective of the partners’ identities, collaboration is based upon mutual goals and shared responsibility for participation and decision making. Collaborators also share accountability for outcomes (Friend & Cook, 1992; Kusuma-Powell & Powell, 2000a). However, high-quality professional relationships are made, not born. Olivier, our guide in the Malagasy rainforest, described to us how the elder indris explicitly train youngsters in behaviors that are critical to the collaboration of the entire troop. For many people, however, the idea that collaboration is a set of skills that must be learned is rather a novel one. Our unexamined assumption has been that we would naturally know how to work effectively and efficiently in a partnership or as a member of a team. Experience has shown that, for the most part, this is a hit-or-miss proposition. Sometimes, when staff members have natural gifts in the areas of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence and the chemistry is right among them, collaboration does seem to come easy. But many people don’t have these gifts, and most of the time, collaboration isn’t easy. When it’s not, we tend to externalize blame, attributing the difficulty to someone else’s arrogance, egotism, autocratic leadership style, communication problems, defensiveness, rigidity, sarcasm, hidden agendas, poor listening skills . . . the list could go on and on. In terms of developing a culture of collaboration, explicit training for teachers is vital. The Adaptive School, by Bob Garmston and Bruce Wellman (2009), offers one of the most effective models of collaboration that

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we know of. The authors identify seven norms of collaborative work. Norms are behaviors that have become habits—in this case, positive habits that, when carefully employed, will create opportunities for groups to undertake their work in an atmosphere of relaxed alertness (Caine & Caine, 1991, 1997). Relaxed alertness is the state that permits individuals and groups to experience low threat and high challenge simultaneously. Research has shown that threat and fatigue inhibit brain functioning (LeDoux, 1996), whereas challenge, accompanied by safety (but not comfort) and a sense of personal or group efficacy, leads to peak performance (Caine & Caine, 1997; Jensen, 1998). Let’s look briefly at each of the seven norms. Pausing. The goal of pausing is to slow down the number of “frames per second” of a conversation or discussion. It provides for precious wait time, which has been shown in classrooms to dramatically improve student critical thinking. Pausing creates a relaxed yet purposeful atmosphere by giving tacit permission for participants to think. We do not need to come to the conversation or meeting with all our thoughts and ideas ready-made and well rehearsed. Pausing greatly enhances the quality of both inquiry and advocacy and results in better decision making. Steven Covey (1989) suggests that in animals there is no gap between the stimulus and the response. When Pavlov rang his bell, the dogs salivated. However, in humans there can be a space between the stimulus and the response. We think of this space as the arena of consciousness in which we can access, consider, and choose from a menu of response behaviors. Pausing signals to others that their ideas and comments are worthy of deep thought. It can also serve as a powerful preventative to personal conflict when used to break a rapid and escalating cycle of interchange. Paraphrasing. To paraphrase is to translate into one’s own words what another person has said or written, maintaining the originator’s intention and the integrity of expression. Paraphrasing is the same as summarizing, which was identified by Marzano and colleagues (2001) in Classroom Instruction That Works as one of the nine research-based strategies that have a powerful effect on student learning. It requires the individual to listen carefully, to attend to both the verbal and nonverbal behavior of the speaker, and to distill the essence of what has been said. When teachers collaborate, paraphrasing helps team members understand each other as they analyze

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and evaluate data and formulate decisions. Paraphrasing can also serve to deepen thinking. “The paraphrase is possibly the most powerful of all nonjudgmental verbal responses because it communicates that ‘I am trying to understand you’ and that says ‘I value you’” (Costa & Garmston, 2002, p. 49). In schools where the teaching faculty represent diverse cultures, the opportunities for misunderstanding are many. Paraphrasing serves to reduce miscommunication and the possibility of personalized conflict. Putting inquiry at the center. Both inquiry and advocacy are necessary components of collaborative work, yet they have very different functions. The purpose of inquiry is to create greater collective understanding. The purpose of advocacy is to make decisions. It is often very helpful for collaborative groups to explicitly identify which process they are engaged in, for the purpose of avoiding misunderstanding and frustrated participants. A common mistake of work teams is to bring to premature closure the problem identification stage (inquiry for understanding) of the discussion and rush into possible solutions (advocacy for specific remedies). While meeting time is always in short supply, a rush to advocacy can often lead to decisions that need to be remade a few weeks or months later. Maintaining a balance between advocacy and inquiry inculcates the ethos of a professional learning community. Probing for clarity or specificity. Probing seeks to clarify something that is not yet fully understood. More information may be required, or a phrase may need more specific definition. Clarifying questions can increase the precision of a group’s thinking and can contribute to trust building. It is often useful to precede a probing question with a paraphrase. When we probe for clarity, we also send these important messages: “I am listening. I care about what you are saying. I am trying to understand.” Putting ideas on the table. It takes self-confidence and a degree of courage to offer an idea for a group’s consideration. It is vital that collaborative groups nurture both qualities. Ideas, particularly those driven by data, are at the heart of meaningful inquiry. Groups must be comfortable in processing information by analyzing, comparing, predicting, applying, and drawing causal relationships. Skillful facilitators will recognize when participants put forward ideas and will explicitly value the contribution.

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Paying attention to self and others. Collaborative work is facilitated when each team member is explicitly conscious of self and others—not only aware of what he or she is saying, but also of how it is said and how others are responding to it. “Understanding how we create different perceptions allows us to accept others’ points of view as simply different, not necessarily wrong. We come to understand that we should be curious about other people’s impressions and understandings—not judgmental” (Costa & Garmston, 2002, p. 59). As Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee (2002) have described, social awareness is the key to the healthy and constructive management of relationships. Presuming positive presuppositions. Of all the seven norms, this one may be the most important, because it provides an essential foundation of trust. Simply put, this is the assumption that the other members of the group or team are acting out of positive and constructive intentions. However much we might disagree with their ideas or methods, they are making the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have available. Presuming positive presuppositions is not a passive state; it’s something that has to be actively integrated into a faculty’s work together. It permits the creation of such sophisticated concepts as “a loyal opposition,” and it allows one member of the group to play devil’s advocate. It builds trust, promotes healthy cognitive disagreement, and reduces the likelihood of misunderstanding. It is also one of the most powerful antidotes to destructive, personalized conflict.

Coteaching Coteaching offers enormous promise for improving learning for all students, but particularly for those students for whom school learning is a struggle. When two or more teachers plan together, execute instruction together, and then reflect on the experience together, we see dramatic improvements in student learning and significantly increased teacher professional fulfillment. Teachers who share responsibility and accountability find that genuine learning partnerships emerge—among adults and among teachers and students (Kusuma-Powell, Al-Daqqa, & Drummond, 2004). In these partnerships,

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coteachers complement each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses, and they exchange and explore new insights and perceptions about students and learning. Figure 5.1 is a rubric that suggests some of the possible relationships between dimensions of coteaching and levels of collaboration. Let’s examine how, specifically, coteaching and structured reflection can enhance student learning and teacher self-knowledge. For the past decade, we have cotaught both students in classrooms and teachers in professional development workshops. One of the crucial issues in all such learning situations is the pacing of the lesson or workshop. Pacing has to do with estimating how much time to allocate to a specific learning experience. It is a complex process that requires the teacher to understand the complexity of the concept to be addressed, know something of the readiness levels of the learners, anticipate the degree of engagement the activity will generate, and estimate the attention span of the learners. Over the years, we noticed that we had different approaches to pacing when we coplanned our workshops. Bill’s tendency was to prepare a workshop script that contained more content than the participants could possibly process. A pattern emerged in workshops where Ochan would suggest that the participants needed additional processing time, and we would make an in-the-moment decision to jettison some of the content we’d intended to cover. This pattern was intriguing and led us to some structured reflection. Together with a coaching colleague, we went through a cognitive coaching conversation in which we examined and analyzed the tension between having sufficiently rich content and providing adequate processing time. Both were necessary, but balance was critical. During the conversation, Bill questioned his need to overplan. He recognized that he was anxious about running out of material. As he reflected on this, he also realized that this anxiety was leading him to focus on the presentation of the content, perhaps at the expense of the participants’ learning. Bill took away from the structured reflection a deeper understanding and appreciation of the mutual responsibilities in the teaching and learning situation. He came to a much clearer understanding that the purpose of professional development

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Classroom space is shared when the second partner is present; the second partner feels welcome and comfortable.

•

Coteacher roles are clearly defined, following a pre-arranged script.

•

Classroom space is perceived as shared space. • Joint ownership of the lesson is valued and celebrated. • Positive intentions are presumed. • Mutual trust is evident. • Partners disagree without being disagreeable. •

Attitudes

There is a clear, coequal partnership between the teachers. • Trust allows for selfcriticism, good humor, and spontaneity. • Interaction between planning partners energizes both; strengths are complementary. • Mutual coaching is evident. • Ideas are shared openly.

•

Roles and Relationships

One partner dominates the development of lessons and materials. •

There are coequal contributions in the development of lessons and materials. • Lessons are scripted and clearly linked to learning theory and objectives. • Think-time and silence are incorporated and respected. • Inquiry and advocacy are balanced. • Active and reflective listening skills are evident. •

Planning and Development

Coteachers primarily take a tag-team approach—one “on stage” and one “off duty.” •

There is seamless, integrated codelivery from both partners. • Sufficient trust and rehearsal of the script allows for spontaneity. • Coteachers evaluate lesson effectiveness during delivery. •

Delivery of Instruction

DIMENSIONS OF COTEACHING

FIGURE 5.1 RUBRIC FOR A COLLABORATIVE COTEACHING RELATIONSHIP

There is some clinical observation of student learning. •

Coteachers both engage in clinical observation of student learning. • Dynamic and continuous assessment is aligned with instruction. • Coteachers moderate assessment of student learning, achieving high interrater reliability. • Assessment informs future instruction. •

Assessment of Student Learning

There is frequent reflection on content and process of the lesson by individual teachers. •

There is structured, regular, and joint reflection on lesson content and process. • There is a constant effort to improve. • Coteachers engage in effective self-criticism. • Student feedback is regularly sought and considered. •

Evaluation of Lesson Effectiveness

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Classroom space is shared with the second partner, but the second partner does not feel totally at ease. • Partners have some uncertainty about each other’s intentions. •

There is a clear hierarchical structure evident in the coteacher relationship. • Trust and spontaneity have not developed.

•

There is some joint ownership of the lesson. • Positive intentions are presumed. • Tasks are shared equally, but responsibility isn’t. •

Attitudes

Trust is evident, but spontaneity may be missing. • Partners volunteer for tasks but complete most individually. • Some coaching is evident. • Ideas are shared.

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Roles and Relationships

One partner usually dominates in development of lessons and materials. • Lessons are at times linked to learning theory, and objectives may be clear to one partner. •

Lessons are usually linked to learning theory and objectives. • Some probing for understanding is evident. • Inquiry and advocacy are usually balanced. • There is some pausing and reflective listening. •

Planning and Development

Instruction is primarily delivered by one partner; the other takes on special topics or tutors special students. • There is infrequent interaction between the partners during lessons. •

Coteachers occasionally interact as coequals during instructional delivery. • There is some simultaneous assessment of lesson effectiveness during the lesson. •

Delivery of Instruction

Assessment is usually aligned with instruction. • Coteachers rarely moderate assessment of student learning; there is a low level of interrater reliability. •

Assessment is aligned with instruction. • Partners sometimes moderate the assessment of student learning, achieving some degree of interrater reliability. • Assessment usually informs instruction. •

Assessment of Student Learning

There is infrequent reflection on lesson content and process. • Some efforts to improve are in effect. • Insufficient trust prevents reflective self-criticism. •

Improvement efforts are in evidence. • Reflective selfcriticism is usually present. • Student feedback is sought periodically. •

Evaluation of Lesson Effectiveness

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FIGURE 5.1—(continued) RUBRIC FOR A COLLABORATIVE COTEACHING RELATIONSHIP

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Classroom clearly belongs to one of the partners; the other partner is seen as a temporary guest. • Resistance to partnership may be evident. • Conflict may be personalized, as positive intentions are questioned. •

•

Consultant partner provides ideas to other. • Lessons are frequently based on activities or isolated topics rather than on primary concepts; learning objectives are unclear. • Advocacy dominates. • There is almost no silence (pausing/ listening) in dialogue; partners interrupt each other. • Nonverbal language may be dismissive.

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One teacher is directive toward the other. • There is little evidence of trust or spontaneity in the coteacher relationship. • Materials are not shared. • No coaching takes place.

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Planning and Development There is more advocacy than inquiry. • Little pausing, paraphrasing, or probing is used. • Active/reflective listening is inconsistent.

Attitudes

One partner prepares material for the approval and use of the other. • One-way coaching is evident.

•

Roles and Relationships

Instruction is delivered primarily by one of the partners; the other acts as assistant or subordinate. • There is infrequent or no interaction of coequal value during the lesson. • One partner may not be physically present during the lesson. •

There is little simultaneous assessment of lesson effectiveness.

•

Delivery of Instruction

DIMENSIONS OF COTEACHING

Assessment is not aligned with instruction. • Assessment of student learning is not moderated. • There is no clear link between assessment and instruction. •

Assessment does not always inform instruction.

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Assessment of Student Learning

There is little reflection on lesson content and process. • Efforts to improve are missing or not evident. • Coteachers fear that self-criticism may be perceived as weakness. • Student feedback is mistrusted. •

Student feedback is rarely sought.

•

Evaluation of Lesson Effectiveness

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workshops (of any classroom situation, in fact) was not for him to teach but for participants to learn. Anything that interfered with that learning (including the needs of the teacher) had to be put aside. Coteaching is our vision for future high-quality schools, but schools often balk at the idea of paying two (or more) teachers to teach in one classroom. There are creative ways around this obstacle. In some situations, the increased cost can be offset by larger class sizes. At the International School of Kuala Lumpur, Grade 8 Humanities is team-taught by three teachers who plan, teach, and assess together. (All three teachers have a solid grounding in the humanities content area. In addition, one has a background in ESL and another in special education. Their combined expertise makes unit planning and the analysis of student work a particularly rich and valuable experience.) Over the past few years, the class size in Grade 8 Humanities has ranged between 45 and 55, but since the physical space is available and virtually all classroom work is done in small groups, the large size is not an impediment to student learning.

Creating Learning Communities Wellman and Lipton (2004) identify four forces that are driving constructive change in education: 1. Schools are moving from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning. Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in the changing face of teacher supervision and professional development. Supervisors are now looking for learning in the classroom as opposed to simply observing teacher behavior. Educators are coming together to collectively analyze student work and are interviewing students about their learning. 2. There is a shift toward deprivatizing teaching practice. Teachers are encouraged (and in some schools even expected) to engage in peer observation and collective reflection. Administrators and teachers together are forming “walk through” observer teams. 3. We are coming to understand that school improvement is no longer an option but a necessity. We know that there is no status quo in schools;

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schools are either improving or deteriorating. Periodic accreditation underscores this reality. 4. Perhaps most important, we are moving from a sense of accountability to one of responsibility. Accountability is external to self; it is dependent on outside evaluation and usually associated with extrinsic rewards and punishments. Responsibility is internal to self; it is closely linked to intrinsic professional motivation. Responsibility, not accountability, is the foundation upon which professional learning communities are built. Together, these trends move us toward a vision of professional learning communities (Louis et al., 1996). This is the vision of what schools that embrace collaboration can become. These are schools where people share common professional norms and values, have a collective focus on student learning, actively practice collaboration, deprivatize teaching practice, and encourage reflective dialogue. Professional learning communities are places in which the challenge of personalized learning is embraced collectively. However, it would be unrealistic to deny that some obstacles exist to developing collaboration in schools. These obstacles can include • • • • • • • • • •

Fear of criticism or judgment of colleagues A toxic school culture (unhealthy adult-to-adult relationships) Territoriality Fear of change (“What does collaboration look like anyway? What will I need to give up—classroom autonomy?”) Perception that collaboration is optional—for those who want to embrace it Absence of training in the skills of collaboration Absence of leadership support for collaboration Lack of planning/reflecting time Scheduling problems Increased costs

Most of these roadblocks can be removed by effective and committed leadership. In order to genuinely improve learning for students and implement effective personalized learning, school leaders needs to do three things: (1) provide time for collaboration within the working day (e.g., time

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for common planning, collective assessment, and analysis of student work); (2) provide explicit training in the specific norms and skills of collaborative work; and (3) maintain an unwavering expectation that collaboration is how we do business in this school. The time teachers need for collaboration, in most cases, represents a significant budgetary increase. Nevertheless, we would argue that few budgetary expenditures are as important as providing teachers with the time to deliberately and collectively work on improving student learning. In our experience, the competing demands on teacher time and attention— particularly in high-quality schools—mean that collaboration simply will not happen unless schools provide faculty members time to engage in it. However, time, by itself, is not enough. Teachers need to be trained in the skills of collaboration, and the school leadership needs to have an iron resolve in insisting on a partnership or team approach to every aspect of student learning. The response of Melville’s quixotic Bartleby the Scrivener—“I prefer not to”—is no longer acceptable. School leaders also must insist that the skills learned within a collaboration workshop are actually transferred to the workplace. This means that the administrators should have the same training and serve as role models. In some schools we work in, administrators join the teachers as participants in the professional development workshops. The message about collaboration that these school leaders give to their teachers is profound—we are all learners. We are all here to focus on student learning. The effect on school culture is transformational. Administrators effective in leading the way in collaboration also support their teachers by helping them address collaborative issues such as • What behaviors foster shared goals, greater trust, and interdependence? • What can each of us do to promote shared accountability? • How can each of us support the deep thinking of our colleagues? • How can we handle conflict in our groups? • How are high-functioning teams developed and maintained? Ochan recalls the 8th grade team meeting in which the new team member, a math teacher, exclaimed, “Well, those new ESL students sure are poor

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at math! They hardly have enough math to get by in grade 8, and neither of them passed my last quiz.” Ochan and her coteacher, Alex, taught humanities to the entire 8th grade, and both immediately wondered how they might support the learning of these new ESL students as well as the work of their new colleague. They asked which students, specifically, the math teacher was referring to. He named twin sisters from Taiwan, who had started in the school the previous month. “That’s odd that they did so poorly on your test,” Alex said. “It’s true they didn’t have any English before they started here, but they’re really hard workers, and they’ve integrated themselves into our class and made a lot of progress.” Another team member asked to see the math quiz, and when it was produced, probed further to find out exactly which items the sisters had missed. As the team reviewed the quiz, it soon became apparent that all items the girls had missed were language-dependent word problems. “So what do you think?” Alex asked their new colleague. “What are you noticing about the items and the errors the girls made?” “Well,” said their new colleague, “I guess the real question is whether they’re struggling with the math or with English-language comprehension. I’m going to have to go back and take another look at the quiz questions that didn’t involve English and see if I can come up with a better way to figure out what level the girls’ math is really at.” The collaborative process had provided all team members with an opportunity to perceive the sisters’ situation from a different perspective. Team members had begun collectively to analyze data. A mediative question had led the new team member to suspend his judgment and dig deeper into what might actually be going on for the Taiwanese twins.

START SIMPLE AND SOCIAL Teachers are often either overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the prospect of personalized learning. Either reaction is problematic. The overwhelmed teacher perceives the demands and complexities of personalized learning as beyond his or her ability. There are simply too many balls to keep in the air,

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and personalized learning is dismissed as an interesting theory but an unrealistic expectation in “the real world of my classroom.” The underwhelmed teacher selects particular aspects of personalized learning practice (e.g., a specific instructional strategy or approach) and says to him- or herself, “I’m doing all that already.” From the opposite end of the attitude spectrum, personalized learning is again dismissed. In order to help them avoid being either over- or underwhelmed, we counsel teachers when they are setting personalized learning goals in diverse global classrooms to be realistic and kind to themselves. We suggest that the incremental steps on the journey toward personalized learning be kept simple and social. By simple, we mean that our professional goals are manageable and doable. By social, we mean engaging in professional collaboration. Knowing our collegial relationships will make the work lighter and keep us from missing ideas and practices that could improve learning in our classrooms. As teachers redefine what it means to work together, and as we collectively journey toward the vision of a professional learning community, we are wise to take a humble lesson from the indri lemurs. Whether in the rainforests of Madagascar or within your own school, collaboration is too important to be left to chance or the individual whim of the players involved. The commercial world has known this for many years, and businesses have invested many billions of dollars in helping employees learn how to work together in teams. The good news for schools is that, like emotional intelligence, collaboration skills can be learned. But they must be deliberately developed and self-consciously practiced.

ACTION ADVICE: SUPPORTING COLLABORATION AND DEVELOPING COLLABORATIVE SKILLS Because we are not used to thinking about collaborative skills as something to be explicitly learned, this process can make us feel awkward, and the practice can initially feel artificial. It is helpful to reinforce that these skills are useful and expected. Here are some strategies that invite collaborative groups to reflect on their practice.

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NORMS INVENTORY. About once every five or six weeks, reserve the last 10 minutes of your team’s meeting to reflect on how you have been using (or not using) Garmston and Wellman’s (2009) norms of collaboration: pausing, paraphrasing, putting inquiry at the center, probing for clarity and specificity, putting ideas on the table, paying attention to oneself and others, and presuming positive presuppositions. Based on the inventory and the outcome of ensuing discussion, set a norm-focused goal for the next month. For example, your team might agree that your collective goal for the next four weeks will be to extend the use of paraphrasing during collaborative work. ROUND-ROBIN REFLECTION. Many times highly task-oriented teams will focus on the content of their work to the exclusion of an awareness of the process they are going through. A round-robin reflection is a brief activity that focuses the attention of the group on how it is working together. The strategy works as follows: at the close of a meeting or work session, all members of the team should number off. Person #1 answers two questions: (1) What decisions did I make about how and when I would participate in our teamwork? and (2) In what ways did my participation affect the other members of the group? Person #2 paraphrases the first person’s comments and then answers the same two questions. Person #3 paraphrases Person #2’s responses to the questions and then answers the questions him- or herself. The pattern repeats until everyone has had a turn. Interruptions and cross-talk are not permitted.

6 The Challenge and the Opportunity

Bill is an avid collector of antique maps. Generally, a map is valued for its accuracy in showing land forms, topography, and distance. But it is the inaccuracies of the antique maps that fascinate Bill, because they provide a window into the cultural perspective and misunderstandings of the age and people that produced them. Take for example, the so-called “Slug Map” of Africa. Drawn in 1771 in Britain, this map includes a reasonably accurate depiction of North and West Africa, but East Africa is a profusion of inaccuracies. One of the most striking is that Lakes Victoria, Albert, Tanganyika, and Nyasa are depicted as a single body of water—a slug-like mass that gives the map its nickname. In the cartouche at the top of the map is the inscription “Africa According to the Best Authorities.” Presumably these authorities were European explorers and the previous maps of the region and anecdotal information these Europeans had provided. It’s highly unlikely that the Africans who lived on the shores of Lake Victoria or fished the waters of Lake Tanganyika were included among these “best authorities” or consulted at all. We can learn many lessons from antique maps, and perhaps the most important of these lessons is humility. There can be no question that the 18th century British cartographers who drew the slug map considered themselves the best authorities, and perhaps at that time they actually 152

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were. However, from a contemporary perspective, their self-aggrandizing suggests ethnocentricity and arrogance. These are the age-old enemies of international mindedness. Ultimately, without the consideration or inclusion of other perspectives, the resulting view of the world was skewed, incomplete, and not as useful.

EQUIPPING STUDENTS FOR THE FUTURE In many respects, education is a mapping of something we are not yet sure of. Its success depends on conjuring up a portrait of how life will be sometime in the future and then designing learning experiences that will develop understandings and skills that are a good fit with that picture. It takes an imaginative leap to equip the next generation cognitively and emotionally to deal with the environment they will inherit. A century or two ago, the future was easier to predict than it is now. At the beginning of the 19th century, the future looked a great deal like the present. Changes were relatively small, and they occurred incrementally. So the 19th century educator could feel justified in evoking the past in order to prepare students for the future. Consider that Latin and Greek and the “classics” were staples of the curriculum for most of the 20th century. Today, it is much more difficult to envision the future. Changes are happening too quickly. In the past two decades, we have seen what Yong Zhao (2009) calls the “death of distance,” with developments in both technology and transportation making the world a much, much smaller place. We live our lives now in an interdependent web of global relationships. What happens in Beijing matters in Berlin. As Friedman (2006) has written, we essentially live in a flat, global village. The concept of a homogenous local community is increasingly something of the past, and it is a truism to say that our children and their children will live in an even more globalized world than we do. The adaptive challenge facing the next two or three generations—our children and grandchildren—is probably one of the greatest that our species has experienced since that small, intrepid band of early humans walked out of Africa some 50,000 years ago.

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We believe that in order to navigate the complexities of the 21st century, our children will need to become globally competent. Harvard University professor Fernando Reimers (2010) defines global competence as the ability to interact effectively with people who speak different languages, believe in different religions, and hold different values. Global competence involves “attitudinal and ethical dispositions that make it possible to interact peacefully, respectfully, and productively with fellow human beings from diverse geographies” (Zhao, 2009, p. 165). Global competence is not just about the accumulation of knowledge. It is about using that knowledge to develop attitudes and dispositions that will allow the construction of a more complete picture. It is about learning a second or third language; traveling not as a simple tourist but as a curious scholar. It is about perceiving what different cultures have in common and developing a shared frame of reference—a truer map. Unfortunately, this competence is not innate. Indeed, we all naturally operate under our own cultural bias.

Cultural Bias as a Way of Knowing We have discussed how our understanding, our construction, of the world is filtered through our perceptions, most of which are held at a subconscious level and remain unexamined. Keith Stanovich (2009) and his colleague Richard West from James Madison University have conducted an interesting research project that reveals the influence of one of those filters—cultural bias—on decision making. The researchers presented two different groups of students with two different scenarios: The German Deathtrap Imagine that the U.S. Department of Transportation has found that a particular German car is eight times more likely than a typical family car to kill occupants of another vehicle in a crash. The U.S. federal government is considering restricting the sale and use of the German car. Please answer the following two questions: Do you think sales of the German car should be banned in the United States? Do you think the German car should be banned from being driven on American streets?

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The American Deathtrap Imagine that the German Department of Transportation has found that the Ford Explorer is eight times more likely than a typical family car to kill occupants of another vehicle in a crash. The German government is considering restricting the sale and use of the Ford Explorer. Please answer the following two questions: Do you think sales of the Ford Explorer should be banned in Germany? Do you think the Ford Explorer should be banned from being driven on German streets?

Among the American subjects surveyed there was considerable support for banning the car when it was a German car for American use. Almost 80 percent of the respondents said its sales should be banned, and almost 75 percent thought it should be kept off the streets. But for the respondents who thought it was an American car on German streets, the results were significantly different. Only 51 percent supported a sales ban, and just under 40 percent thought the car should be kept off German streets. Stanovich sees this tendency to evaluate a situation from our own cultural perceptive as a “my-side-bias” and suggests that it contributes to a preponderance of irrational thought involving otherwise very bright individuals. He has termed this syndrome “dysrationalia.”

Beyond Food, Flags, and Festivals So how do we overcome this bias, this dysrationalia? How do we teach global competence? To start with, we probably need to go beyond food, flags, and festivals. These “three Fs” are the most common school practice for addressing cultural diversity. For example, if you visit an international school in the weeks leading up to United Nations Day (October 24), you’re likely to find the school community celebrating its diversity by staging international food fairs and cultural shows that include music, dance, and national costumes from around the world—all against a forest of flapping flags. Some schools build festivals into the curriculum and have units of study designed around the themes of Eid’l Fitr or Divali or Chinese New Year. Often these units culminate in opulent assemblies that are much enjoyed by parents and children alike. However, we are compelled to return to that key to personalized learning that has to do with knowing our curriculum. We need to ask, What’s the big

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idea? What is important for students to know about food, festivals, or flags? The answer is probably “not very much.” The three Fs are topics that are indeed worth being familiar with, but they are not the truly important teachable concepts—they are not the enduring understandings. When we teach at the level of topics, the big ideas often remain hidden from our students. Matt White, the IB Coordinator at Geelong Grammar School in Australia, writes about the three Fs: “I sometimes think this approach is too limiting. It reduces the richness of cultural diversity to marketable pieces, becoming a method, which seems to characterize so many international programs of education. I think sometimes we can fall into the trap of being glib in our understanding of international mindedness if we simply believe we are all shards of a shattered mirror reflecting common humanity” (2008, p. 19). At the heart of being internationally minded is the understanding of self—the recognition that I, too, am a product of my culture, and out of this recognition may come a broader, more balanced view of the world. The role of the teacher is to facilitate this understanding. As Hill (2008) puts it, “The teacher must be sensitive to cultural differences and manage the discussion so that each student realizes that there are perspectives which are valid, however alien they may be to his or her own beliefs” (p. 16). In other words, the teacher engages students in reflection on why differing points of view exist. Together, they all explore the historical, social, economic, political, and emotional roots of different cultural perspectives. For example, during the IB social anthropology class at Jakarta International School, the students were examining various creation stories from different religions. The teachers invited them to find similarities and differences. This produced a lively exchange about the Garden of Eden story. A young Chinese student raised his hand and observed, “Had Adam and Eve been Chinese, the world would be a different place. Because they would have eaten the snake!” While the young man’s playful conclusion is open to debate, the anecdote illustrates the rich potential for meaningful conversation when we explicitly invite students to bring their cultures to school with them and to consider them thoughtfully—when we personalize learning in the truly global classroom.

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ADAPTIVE CHALLENGES Darwinian evolution theorizes that a species adapts over time in response to the challenges the environment presents to its survival. Such physiological adaption takes a very long time. Clearly, in order for our children and our children’s children to survive a rapidly changing environment, they will require a different kind of adaptation—one that takes much less time and one over which we can exert some control. Their best chance is cognitive adaptation, which means learning new and more complex ways to think about the issues that threaten us. It’s a matter of prioritizing the making of meaning over the acquisition of information (Drago-Severson, 2009). In other words, we need to support our students in learning how to learn. This is transformational learning.

Oscillating Systems The 21st century began with a series of cultural collisions. A number of them were tragic. These ongoing clashes of cultures are examples of the type of problems facing the next generation: oscillating systems. An oscillating system is one in which a problem’s solution in turn creates another problem, and so on. The dialectical opposites oscillate back and forth like a pendulum. Many of the most serious global issues facing us in the 21st century can be thought of as oscillating systems. A very simple example of an oscillating system is Bill’s return from a holiday in which he has overindulged his passion for good food. The problem is clear: Bill feels overweight. The solution is also clear: a firmly enforced diet. However, when Bill diets, he becomes depressed; when Bill is depressed, he eats. The problem renders a solution that creates another problem. We cannot find our way out of oscillating systems using traditional linear problem-solving techniques. Oscillating systems present us with what Garmston and Wellman (2009) call “wicked problems,” for which there are no simple or easy solutions. Let’s look at what happens when an individual is trapped in one of these systems, in one of these wicked problems. In early November 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old U.S. Army psychiatrist, told his landlord that he would be vacating his apartment in

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two weeks. He gave away his furniture and his food. He paid visits to his friends to say goodbye and presented at least one with a copy of the Koran. Friends and acquaintances from his local mosque reported that he appeared calm and unperturbed. Several days later, Major Hasan entered Fort Hood military base and allegedly opened fire on a large group of soldiers waiting to have medical examinations. At the end of the bloody carnage, 13 soldiers were dead and 29 others were wounded. As Dr. Stephen Diamond (2009) asked in his blog on the Psychology Today website, “What could have possessed an apparently polite, pleasant, quiet, reserved, compassionate, forgiving, and deeply religious psychiatrist to commit this incredibly evil act?” We may never know the actual motivating factors behind this heinous crime. However, it would seem obvious that a clash of cultures played some role. Major Hasan is an American-born Muslim of Palestinian heritage. It is reported that he frequently argued with military colleagues about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is quoted as saying that he believed these wars were being “waged against Islam.” When Hasan’s deployment orders to Afghanistan came through, he attempted to have himself discharged from the military. Diamond speculates that the impending posting to Afghanistan as a combat stress counselor may have been the trigger that sent Hasan over the edge. It may be that Hasan’s inability to address and make sense out of what he perceived to be powerful, mutually exclusive pressures led to his increasing isolation and alienation. We know that in such isolation, extremist beliefs can flourish. The Fort Hood massacre is a dramatic and extreme example of global incompetence—a failure to deal constructively with complex and conflicting cultures. There are thousands of smaller and less significant examples of provincialism and cultural ignorance. One of the greatest challenges educators have before them is helping young people live, work, and interact with people from different cultures. This is no longer a nicety; it’s a necessity.

Supporting Transformational Learning One way to approach the wicked problem of an oscillating system is by engaging in what Michael Fullan calls a “ruthless re-examination of reality”

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(2000) and we call transformational learning—learning that involves taking a critical look at beliefs in order to develop new ways of knowing. Here’s an example.

The Bringing of Light to South Africa Ochan and two other teachers from the International School of Tanganyika in Dar es Salaam organized an interdisciplinary field trip to South Africa that involved a group of 30 high school students and 3 teachers spending a week studying history, psychology, and biology in the Johannesburg-Pretoria area. The trip was carefully planned and included visits to historical sites, research at the University of Pretoria, lectures, a tour of Soweto, meetings with political leaders, and even a firsthand observation of a radical prostatectomy at Pretoria Urology Hospital. Despite the careful planning and exciting agenda, by the end of the second day’s historical tour of Pretoria, everyone was feeling troubled, students and teachers alike. Probably the most distressed were Annelise and Stephanie, two white South African 12th graders. The tour had focused exclusively on white South African history and had culminated at the Voertrekker Monument, in front of which is a large statue of a white woman standing with her two children. The white South African guide explained that the woman symbolized “bringing the light of civilization to the Dark Continent.” The international school students, many of whom were African, Asian, or mixed race, listened to this presentation in stony silence. Before class that evening, Ochan and the two other teachers on the trip met in closed session. While no student had said anything so far about the day’s tour, the teachers agreed that a number of the students had showed signs of hurt, anger, and outrage. The teachers planned how they would handle the class. It was agreed that one of the social studies teachers would introduce the topic by attempting to create a historical context for apartheid. Ochan would then pose a series of mediative questions that related to what they had all seen and heard during the tour and would help everyone consider the underlying assumptions and perceptions of that view of South African history. While this was going on, the biology teacher would monitor the emotional climate of the class, playing close attention to the reactions of

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Annelise and Stephanie, the two white South African girls who were clearly proud of their country and pleased to show it off to their classmates. As predicted by the teachers, that evening many of the students revealed that they had been upset and hurt by the tour of Pretoria. Once the subject had been introduced, a number of the students spoke passionately about the one-sidedness and bias that the tour represented and about the deep resentment that they felt. Annelise and Stephanie remained silent and withdrawn until just before the end of the class meeting, when both rose and walked out of the conference room. The biology teacher waited a few minutes before heading off to Annelise and Stephanie’s hotel room to help them process their feelings. At the same time, Ochan and the social studies teacher asked the remainder of the students why they thought Annelise and Stephanie had walked out. A discussion ensued that ended with several of the non-Caucasian students exploring ways that they could depersonalize the racism they had experienced. They decided to make sure that Annelise and Stephanie were included in all class activities planned for the following day. In essence, they decided that even though they were feeling angry about the racial oppression South Africa was just emerging from, they would not respond by behaving in a way that would perpetuate feelings of division. Happily, Annelise and Stephanie responded well to the other students’ overtures and were soon reintegrated into the group. Two weeks later, when everyone had returned home to Dar es Salaam, Annelise confided to Ochan that the experience had allowed her to see South Africa for the first time through nonwhite eyes, and that she had learned a lot about her country and herself. For many of the students, the experience was transformational. Instead of entering into a futile cycle of anger and misunderstanding, the examination of their beliefs had revealed other ways of seeing.

Moving Toward the Danger We believe that the way to foster global competence is through personalized learning in the classroom. When teachers welcome and celebrate individual student differences in cultures, languages, interests, values and

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beliefs, talents, and even aptitudes, we create the classroom climate that can support transformational learning. Rather than attempt to standardize informational learning into some sort of input-output factory model, we need to encourage and explore our differences. This is not always easy or comfortable—and on occasion it can require us to move, in Michael Fullan’s (1998) words, “toward the danger.” Ochan and her coteachers moved toward the danger when they invited their students to express and examine their feelings of anger and hurt. We would like to share two other very powerful instances of educators helping their students confront and work to solve an oscillating system in order to bring about transformational learning. At the outbreak of the Gulf War, the administration of the United Nations International School in New York faced a dilemma. The school had over 80 nationalities represented in the student population, including a number of Iraqi students and students from other Arab nations. There were also American, British, and Israeli students enrolled. Tensions were running very high. The school administration chose to move toward the danger. They called a high school assembly and allowed the students to speak about their emotions, their fears, and their anger, but in an atmosphere of respect and tolerance. It was the combination of deeply felt emotions expressed in respectful terms that contributed to what was reported to be for many a transformational learning experience. The simple act of listening actually diffused tensions. A similar situation played out at the same time at the Amman Baccalaureate School in Jordan. It was January 1991, and the American-led forces had just begun an aerial bombardment in the initial stages of trying to drive the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Unlike the student body at the United Nations International School in New York, the students at the Amman Baccalaureate School were overwhelmingly Jordanian and Palestinian. However, many of the teaching staff were British or American. Anger among the students was evident, and it seemed very possible that they might direct this anger at the foreign teachers. Like his counterparts in the New York international school, the then–high school principal, Nick Bowley, moved toward the danger. He called for a student assembly. It was a courageous act. Nick wanted to ensure two understandings. First, he wanted the students to understand

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that the adults in the school respected their feelings and their anger. Second, he wanted the students to understand that they could express their emotions without compromising their feelings, but they had to do so in a respectful manner. Strong feelings were acceptable, but destructive behavior was not. It was not an easy or comfortable assembly, but out of it came the idea for the first International Baccalaureate Student Conference on Global Issues, which Amman Baccalaureate School hosted the following year. This was an example of being able to see opportunity in crisis.

DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL COMPETENCE A recent MetLife survey of American teachers (cited in Crow, 2010) showed that a majority of U.S. teachers and principals now consider the preparation of students for competition and collaboration in a global economy to be “very important.” However, the shadow of the 19th century is still with us. Many national systems of education make provincialism into an unspoken creed. The U.S. statistics are frightening. The Asia Society (2008) found that 83 percent of young Americans could not locate Afghanistan on a world map. According to a Committee for Economic Development report (2006), 80 percent of young Americans surveyed did not know that India was the world’s largest democracy. The National Commission on Asia in Schools concluded that Americans are “dangerously uninformed about international matters” (cited in Zhao, 2009, p. 161). The danger isn’t just the ignorance of factual knowledge but also the narrow and intolerant attitudes and perceptions that go with it. Being globally ill-informed is a kind of isolation and, as we have seen in the case of Major Hasan, such isolation can be very dangerous. Global competence is not developed through informational learning. Knowing the capital of Zambia or being able to locate Afghanistan on a world map is no measurement of attitudinal and ethical dispositions. However, without a degree of informational learning, transformational learning may not be possible. Reimers addresses this issue by including three dimensions in his concept of global competence. He calls these dimensions the affective, the action, and the academic. The affective dimension includes ethical

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considerations and can be defined as a “positive disposition toward cultural differences and a framework of global values to engage differences” (cited in Zhao, 2009, p. 166). The action dimension includes the ability to speak and think in another language so as to understand some of the subtleties and nuances of different cultures. The academic dimension has to do with knowledge of world geography, history, and global issues such as economics, health, and the environment. The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) warns, though, that “a global focus can’t be an add-on, just one more thing a school has to do. Schools that see the benefit of integrating a global focus will have to look carefully at the implications for curriculum, instruction, assessment, and support for educators” (Crow, 2010, p. 2). The NSDC has recently published a series of questions and a matrix on global competence to support teachers and schools in bringing a greater global focus into their settings. Together, these dimensions of global competence can serve to produce internationalminded young people. Another tool for helping students to work toward international mindedness is the Global Issues Network (GIN). Inspired by the book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them by former World Bank vice president J. F. Rischard, the organization was founded in 2003 with a mission to help students realize they can make a difference by empowering them to work internationally with their peers to develop solutions for global issues. In the years since, GIN has formed a series of satellite networks of more than 100 international schools around the world. Thousands of students are currently involved in conferencing, both face-to-face and electronically, on issues such as global warming, deforestation, conflict prevention, children’s rights, and the global spread of infectious diseases. Rischard (2002) points out that the existing institutions responsible for addressing such issues—namely, nation states, government departments, and international organizations—are self-serving, bureaucratic and, more often than not, inadequate for the task. He calls for an alternative model of global governance based upon independent global networks that are flexible and highly responsive. Although most of the schools in GIN are international schools, membership is open to government schools as well. Students can be encouraged

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to think systemically about real issues while also taking action to improve the human condition. This approach involves collaboration rather than competition, where students assume leadership of their own program.

A GIFT FOR THE NEXT GENERATION Personalized learning is a strenuous ethic. It demands that we teachers come to know our students as learners and ourselves as professionals. It requires a high-quality curriculum and teaching at a conceptual level. It focuses on student strengths and readiness and strives to provide an invitation to all learners by way of multiple access points. When we “globalize” the classroom, we connect it with the real world. We invite students to bring their cultures and national heritage with them to school. We celebrate differences and recognize commonalities. We engage and explore assumptions and analyze beliefs and values. We do so in an atmosphere of respect and appreciation. In such an environment, informational learning can become transformational. When we personalize learning, we emphasize effort over achievement, and we strive to instill in all student learning efficacy and healthy selfesteem. We seek a variety of ways to engage students in meaningful and respectful work and to welcome their diverse cultures into our classrooms. Personalized learning in the global classroom is a gift to the next generation, a way of approaching the new world we are facing and its many challenges. It is an inclusive method of mapmaking that will produce a more accurate and useful picture of our world and guide the next generation in navigating a shared course.

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Index

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. assessment—(continued) of learning versus for learning, 113 meaningful, components of, 113 personalized, 92, 129–131, 130f planning using data from, 112 purposes of, 17, 110–111, 113 ranking and sorting of students by, 17, 110–111 rubrics for, 116 students’ role in, 109–110, 116, 131–133 targeted learning outcomes and, 113–115, 125–126 assessment data, 109–110, 112 assessment for learning (AfL) fostering a growth mind-set, 117–119 learning to learn with, 121–124, 131–133 personalized learning compared, 116–117 principles of, 117 student choice in, 119–121 Assessment Reform Group, 109, 117, 119 assessments, knowing our defined, 9f, 131

ability, 34–35 academic performance, 33–37, 39, 46 achievement and effort, 108–109 expectations and patterns of attribution, 34–35, 69–71, 117–119 fear as motivator for, 111 grades and grading, 127–129 The Adaptive School (Garmston & Wellman), 138–139 advocacy and collaboration, 140 alienation, cultural and personal, 6, 25 analytical intelligence, 39 Annotated Reading activity, 104 Asia Society, 162 assessment in backward design, 93–94 changing perspectives on, 110–113 criterion-referenced, 111–113 design validity, 115 feedback in, 115–116, 122–123 grades and grading for, 124–129 idiosyncratic, 109 International School of Kuala Lumpur Plan, 130f 171

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assessments, knowing our—(continued) first step questions, 113–116 Assessment Training Institute, 109, 113 assignments and activities, 51 attribution theory, 34–35, 69–71 auditory learners, 40, 42f backward design model for, 94–99, 95–98f planning guide, 100–101f stages of, 93–94, 100–101f belonging building a sense of, strategies for, 51–54 examples, 6, 25, 32 interdependence and, 76–77 big ideas, 85–88 Bingo activity, 52 biological learning traits, 28–29, 45 Bloom’s taxonomy, 89 the child as asset or liability, 64–65 as father to the man, 62–63 as inquirer, 65–66 as maintainer of the common good, 63–64 as untamed beast, 60–61 China, 18, 129 choice, allowing, 44 Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano et al.), 139 classrooms global, 3–6, 155–156 historically, homogeneity in, 2–3 opening metaphorical doors to, 135–138 personalized learning environment in, 10–11, 25 present-day, diversity in, 3 psychologically safe, 25 class structure, education in maintaining, 17 cognitive adaptation, 157–162 Cognitive Coaching (Costa & Garmston), 70–71 cognitive empathy, 33–34

collaboration. See also collegial relationships coteaching and, 141–146, 143–145f in developing learning communities, 146–149 norms of, 139–141 obstacles to, 147 skills development, 148, 150–151 time needed for, 147–148 collectivism, Confucian, 63–64 collegial relationships. See also collaboration knowing our, defined, 9f opening classroom doors to, 135–138 school quality and, 137 commitment to future learning, 37 communication, collaborative, 139–141 competence, effective assignment of, 33 concept versus topic teaching, 85–88 Confucian lens on childhood, 63–64 consciousness, 74–75 constructivism, 85 control factor, responsibility for achievement, 70 Corners technique, 52 coteaching, 141–146, 143–145f craftsmanship in teaching, 75–76 creative intelligence, 39 criterion-referenced assessment, 111–113 cultural bias in decision making, 154–155 cultural competence, 58–59 cultural diversity beyond the three Fs, 155–156 cultural influences on learning, 29–31, 45 culture of collaboration, 138–139 culture shock example, 4–5 curriculum changing perspectives on, 85 core considerations all knowledge is tentative, 82–83 too much content to be taught, 83–84 identifying multiple access points, 27 knowing the defined, 9f, 102 landscape view of, 102–103

Index

curriculum—(continued) 1993 status report on, 84–85 standards-based, 80–81, 112–113 curriculum integrating personalization aspects to/not to personalize, 91–93 backward design for model for, 94–99, 95–98f planning guide, 100–101f stages of, 93–94, 100–101f framing essential questions in, 88–90 instructional strategies, 103–107 teaching primary concepts in, 85–88 Data Plus Mediative Questions strategy, 131–132 decision making, cultural bias in, 154–155 descriptive feedback, 115–116, 122–123 Deweyan lens on childhood, 65–66 dysrationalia, 155 echo empathy, 78 education in Confucian cultures, 63–64 Deweyan purpose for, 65–66 global reality, present-day, 19 Hobbesian purpose for, 17–19, 60–61 industrialized model, 65 Rousseauian purpose for, 62 efficacy attitude, 72–73 effort and achievement, 108–109 emotional influences on learning, 31–33, 45–46 emotional intelligence, 27–28 environmental preferences, 43 equity-excellence integration, 16–17, 112 essential questions, 88–90 evaluative feedback, 115, 122–123 evolutionary theory, 157 exclusion. See belonging; equity-excellence integration Exit Cards, 78–79 expectations and patterns of attribution, 34–35, 69–71, 117–119 extended written-response assessment, 114

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fairness, 93 feedback, 115–116, 122–123 Feedback Form strategy, 78 Feedback on Feedback strategy, 79 Final Word activity, 104 flexible thinkers, 73–74 food, flags, and festivals (three Fs), 155–156 formative assessment, 113 The Geography of Thought (Nisbett), 64 global classrooms cultural diversity beyond the three Fs, 155–156 examples, 3–6 global competence, 154–164 Global Issues Network (GIN), 163 globalization, 153 grades and grading, 124–129 Great Britain, 17, 19, 110–111 Grounding technique, 52–53 growth mind-set, 117–119 Hasan, Nidal Malik, 157–158 helplessness, learned, 34–35, 118 High Noon (Rischard), 163 Hobbesian lens on childhood, 60–61 identity, professional, 55–58, 70–71, 78–79 Improving Schools from Within (Barth), 137 indris, 134–135 inquiry in collaboration, 140 Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design (Tomlinson & McTighe), 34 intelligence preferences, 38–39 interdependence, 76–77, 137 Interest-A-Lyzer inventory, 51 interests, student, 37–38, 51 International School of Bangkok, 128 International School of Brussells, 17, 74, 118 International School of Kuala Lumpur, 11, 15, 43, 129, 130f, 146

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International School of Tanganyika, 29, 32, 48, 64, 75, 77, 90 isolation, teacher, 135–138 I Used to Think/Now I Think strategy, 79 Jakarta International School, 51, 156 Jigsaw activity, 104 Journal Reflections strategy, 132 kinesthetic learners, 40, 41f knowledge, tentative nature, 82–83 learned helplessness, 34–35, 118 learner identity, dimensions of academic, 33–37 biological, 28–29 cultural and societal, 29–31 emotional and social, 31–33 learning preferences, 37–44 learner preferences intelligence and, 38–39 interests in determining, 37–38, 51 in learning styles, 39–43, 41–42f in production styles, 43–44 learner profiles, data-gathering strategies assignments and activities, 51 considerations, 45–46 examining records, 46–47 observation, structured, 47–48 parent interviews/surveys, 47 reflection, structured, 49, 50f student self-reporting, 51 learning communities, 146–149 learning goals, clarity in, 122 learning partnerships, 141–142 learning styles, 39–43, 41–42f learning targets, 113–115, 125–126 learning to learn, 121–124, 131–133 Like Me technique, 53 Lineup technique, 53–54 listening, 139–141, 161 locus of responsibility for achievement, 70, 72 Malaysia, 18 Malthusian lens on childhood, 64–65

McCarthy, Joseph, 18 modality preferences, 40–43, 41–42f motivation, 36–37 National Commission on Asia in Schools, 162 nationalism in the classroom, 17–18 National Staff Development Council (NSDC), 163 No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 18 Norms Inventory activity, 151 observation, structured, 47–48 observation and communication assessment, 114–115 oscillating systems, 157–162 otherness. See belonging; equityexcellence integration Pairs Read and Paraphrase (PRAP) activity, 104–105 paraphrasing, 33, 139–140 parent interviews/surveys, 47 patriotism in the classroom, 17–18 pausing, 139 Perception of Childhood Self-Inventory, 66–68f perceptions of childhood effect in the classroom, 60–66 Self-Inventory, 66–68f reality of, 59–60 performance tasks, 114 perseverance, 37 personalized learning. See also specific domains AfL compared, 116–117 basics, 6–11 classroom environment for, 10–11, 25 commitment requirements, 15–17 to develop effective work habits, 128 domains of, 7–10, 9f as dumbing down the curriculum, 91–92 effective, features of, 35 effectiveness, example of, 10–15

Index

personalized learning—(continued) grading and, 124–129 location of, 26 purpose of, 7 setting standards vs., 80–81 personalizing teachers, characteristics of, 9f Pluses and Wishes strategy, 79 Poster Brainstorm activity, 105 practical intelligence, 39 primary concepts, 85–88 probing and collaboration, 140 production styles, 43–44 Program for International Student Achievement (PISA), 129 psychologically safe classrooms, 25 Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal & Jacobson), 69 questions data-gathering for learner profiles, 40 framing essential, 88–90 probing for clarity or specificity, 140 readiness, 26–27, 35–36 records, examining previous, 46–47 reflection, structured, 49, 50f relationship-oriented teachers, 9f relevance, 39 respect, 10–11, 161 revision, requiring, 123 Round-Robin Reflection activity, 151 Rousseauian lens on childhood, 62–63 rubrics, 122 Say Something activity, 105 scarcity mentality, 64–65 school reform, 72 Scrambled Sentences activity, 105 Segmentation strategy, 106 selected-response assessments, 114 self-assessment, student, 123 self-directedness, 37 Singapore, 129 social awareness, 141 social influences on learning, 31–33, 45–46

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societal influences on learning, 29–31, 45, 63–64 Song Title Metaphors activity, 54 stability factor, responsibility for achievement, 70 standards-based curriculum, 112–113 standards vs. personalized learning, 80–81 states right to exclude non-US citizen teachers, 18 sticky note observation technique, 48 Stop, Start, Continue strategy, 79 Student Analysis Instrument, 50f student records, examining previous, 46–47 students. See also learner identity; learner preferences global competence in, developing, 154–164 knowing as learners benefits of, 24 complex vs. limited understanding, 9f consequences of ignoring, 22–24 to create a psychologically safe environment, 25 to determine readiness, 26–27 emotional intelligence and, 27–28 to identify multiple curriculum access points, 27 traditionally, 21–22 role in assessment, 109–110, 116, 119–124, 131–133 soliciting feedback from, 78–79 student self-reporting, 51 success. See achievement summative assessment, 113 Summerhill School, 62–63 Synectics strategy, 107 Synthesis Statement activity, 133 tactual learners, 40, 41f Tanzania, 18 task-oriented teachers, characteristics of, 9f teachers. See also collegial relationships consciousness in, 74–75

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teachers—(continued) as craftsmen, 75–76 effective, 1–2, 72–73 flexible, 73–74 interdependent, 76–77, 137 isolation in classrooms, 135–138 knowing ourselves as to become who we want to be, 77–78 culturally, 58–59 defined, 9f in expectations and patterns of attribution, 69–71 learning, relationship to, 55–58 perceptions of childhood in, 59–66, 66–68f personalized learning relationship to, 9f states of mind influencing, 70–77 strategies for increasing, 78–79 professional identity, 55–58, 70–71, 78–79 10-2 strategy, 103 3-Minute Stand-Up Conversation activity, 103 the three Fs (food, flags, and festivals), 155–156

topic vs. concept teaching, 85–88 transformational learning, 157–162 trust, foundation of, 141 2-Minute Essay activity, 103 Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe), 93 United Nations membership, 18 United States, 18–19 Verbal Gymnastics activity, 107 visual learners, 40, 42f war victims, students as, 22–24 whole-to-part learning, 85–86 Why Don’t Students Like School? (Willingham), 40 wicked problems, 157–158 work habits, 128 Yuecheng Education Innovation Center (YEIC), 129 zone of proximal development, 26

About the Authors

William Powell has served as an international school educator for the past 30 years in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Malaysia. From 1991 to 1999, he served as chief executive officer of the International School of Tanganyika in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and from 2000 to 2006, he was headmaster of the International School of Kuala Lumpur. Ochan Kusuma-Powell received her doctorate from Columbia University and has developed and implemented inclusive special education programs in the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Tanzania. She is an associate trainer for the Center for Cognitive Coaching and an adjunct faculty member at Buffalo State College and Lehigh University. Together Ochan and Bill have coauthored Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent Teacher (2010), Making the Difference: Differentiation in International Schools (2007), and Count Me In! Developing Inclusive International Schools (2000). They are currently working on a project to support the inclusion of special needs children in international schools, through a grant from the U.S. Department of State. They also focus on teacher professional development, 177

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school leadership, and governance training as consultants for Education Across Frontiers. When they are not facilitating teacher workshops or speaking at conferences, Bill and Ochan can be found on their farm in the French Pyrenees where Bill, together with a handful of sheep, fights an annual battle with the European bramble. You can reach both authors by e-mail: Bill at [email protected], and Ochan at [email protected].

Related ASCD Resources: Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom At the time of publication, the following ASCD resources were available (ASCD stock numbers appear in parentheses). For up-to-date information about ASCD resources, go to www.ascd.org. You can search the complete archives of Educational Leadership at http://www.ascd.org/el. ASCD Edge Exchange ideas and connect with other educators interested in global education, differentiated instruction, the whole child, overseas/international schools, assessment for learning, and 21st century learning on the social networking site ASCD Edge™ at http://ascdedge.ascd.org/ Multimedia Educating the Whole Child: An ASCD Action Tool (#709036) Online Professional Development Embracing Diversity: A Look in the Mirror (#PD09OC35) and Embracing Diversity: Global Education (#PD09OC36). Visit the ASCD website (www.ascd.org). Print Products Connecting Teachers, Students, and Standards: Strategies for Success in Diverse and Inclusive Classrooms by Michele J. Sims and Deborah L. Voltz (#109011) Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (#109008) Educating Everybody’s Children: Diverse Teaching Strategies for Diverse Learners, Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition by Robert W. Cole (#107003) Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design: Connecting Content and Kids by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe (#105004) Managing Diverse Classrooms: How to Build on Students’ Cultural Strengths by Elise Trumbull and Carrie S. Rothstein-Fisch (#107014) Videos 21st Century Skills: Promoting Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom (15-minute DVD and associated professional learning materials) (#609096) Assessment for 21st Century Learning (3 DVD set) (#610010) Problem-Based Learning for the 21st Century Classroom (2 DVD set) (#610014) The Whole Child Initiative helps schools and communities create learning environments that allow students to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. To learn more about other books and resources that relate to the whole child, visit www.wholechildeducation.org. For more information: send e-mail to [email protected]; call 1-800-933-2723 or 703-5789600, press 2; send a fax to 703-575-5400; or write to Information Services, ASCD, 1703 N. Beauregard St., Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 USA.

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Education

William Powell & Ochan Kusuma-Powell

Drawing on research and years of experience in international schools, the authors identify five critical keys to personalizing learning for students who have wildly different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds: •

Focus on your students as learners through systematic examination of their cultural and linguistic identities, learning styles and preferences, and readiness.

•

Focus on yourself as a teacher and investigate your own cultural biases, preferred teaching style and beliefs, and expectations.

•

Focus on your curriculum to identify transferable concepts that will be valuable and accessible to all students and further their global competence.

•

Focus on your assessments to ensure cultural sensitivity and improve the quality of the formative data you gather.

•

Focus on your collegial relationships so that you can effectively enlist the help of fellow educators with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.

Powell & Kusuma-Powell

The way to teach now is to focus on your students both as individuals and as members of a multifaceted, interdependent community. Here, you’ll learn how to design and deliver instruction that prepares students not just to meet standards but to live and work together in our complicated, 21st century world.

Teach Now

In this book, William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell provide a practical map to navigate some of today’s most complicated instructional challenges: How do you help all students succeed when every classroom is, in effect, a global classroom? And what does a successful education look like in a world that is growing smaller and flatter every day?

How to Teach Now Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

Alexandria, Virginia USA BROWSE EXCERPTS FROM ASCD BOOKS: www.ascd.org/books STUDY GUIDE ONLINE

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