21st Century Learning – Page 16 – A Floor, But Not a Ceiling

Notions from #NAJDSCONF 5772

This seems to be the weeks of sequels! Last week, I revised my love of Wordle with a second-annual graphic summary of a year’s worth of blog posts (here). I am still waiting for comments (hint, hint parents & teachers!) to see how comparing the first and second Wordles reveals anything about a shift in emphasis or direction. I love hearing that someone is reading the blog…I really love when someone comments on the blog.

This week, I will try to creatively share and reflect on my experiences in Atlanta from which I just returned from the North American Jewish Day School Conference. This year’s theme was “Current Landscapes, Changing Horizons” and you can read all about the conference and find links to presentations and materials from the conference, here. You can check out all the official conference tweets, which includes links, photos and videos not on the website, here.

Coming on the heels of another reflective blog post about Jewish day school conference attendance (here), I don’t want to be repetitive. I did a fair amount of tweeting from the conference, which you can check out, by either clicking above to follow me on Twitter, or by clicking, here. And you will find pictures, videos and thoughts from the conference that I may not get to in this blog post.

I attended the conference with our school’s 21st Century Learning Coordinator Andrea Hernandez and we co-presented a session on the first day called “21st Century Learning in Jewish Day Schools – A Conversation”. It was well attended and augured well for the rest of our conference experience. If you would like to see the presentation, you can click here and scroll down to the entry entitled “NAJDS”.

On Day 2, I had the pleasure to be a part of a panel discussion hosted by DeLeT on the topic of “Teacher Leadership”. The rest of that day was spent exclusively with the Schechter Day School Network. Sitting next to Andrea, I was captivated by a new app she was using and I immediately purchased it and started playing with. As she says on her blog post from the conference,

I am trying to build fluency with my iPad, so I used the Corkulus app to take notes. Not only do I feel that the practice was good for my iPad fluency, I am happy with the notes that I am able to share, not only here on my blog, but I was able to email the notes to the person sitting next to me, as well as others who were not at the session.

I spent the rest of the conference playing with it and loving it! So, for something different, here is my summary of Day 2 of the conference via Corkulous:

Depending on how you are viewing this, I realize it may be a little blurry (even after clicking on it). If you cannot blow it up, and would like to see it (or if you have the app and want me to email it to you in format), please feel free and email me directly. It includes thoughts from a text study, the new branding initiative for the Schechter Network and DeLeT.

On Day 3, I had the honor of playing a (very) small part in Michael Mino’s morning keynote. I don’t have permission to share the presentation, but I can share my small part of it, which you can find here under the heading “Mobile Learning”.

I spent lots of time networking about edJEWcon! I suspect we will be fully enrolled by the end of the month. I look forward to announcing the schools and partners who will be joining us for this exciting opportunity. Our thanks again to The AVI CHAI Foundation for their generous support. Stay tuned!

I closed the conference by live blogging a fascinating session on Games-Based Learning facilitated by Barry Joseph. Here is my Corkulous-produced live blog from the session:

We are in the process of exploring bringing gaming theory into our repertoire of 21st century skills and literacies. We are engaged in serious conversation with a few thought-partners in this field and look to make some announcements of new initiatives soon.

After the conference ended, I stayed on for an extra night to participate in a board meeting for the Schechter Day School Network. Despite all the negative press, the future for Schechter is quite optimistic. We struggle, as all Jewish and private schools do, in a down economy and increased competition. But we also offer a unique and valued product. Good things are coming.

All in all, it was a wonderful opportunity to learn, share, reflect, connect, collaborate, present and feel the power of being with over 600 people who care deeply about securing the Jewish future. I plan to bring the positive energy and innovative ideas I got from this year’s conference back to help secure our own school’s future.

But tonight I rest…

Wordle Up – The Sequel

Please click here for my blog post about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish community.

I’m off on Sunday for the North American Jewish Day School Conference in Atlanta! (Click here for my reflections on last year’s conference.) I am one of many official live-blogger’s for the conference, so please look for posts next week. You can also follow the action on Twitter. You can follow me @Jon_Mitzmacher or the conference @najdsconf. I will share an overall reflective blog post on the experience afterwards.

My first Wordle appeared as a means to summarize my blog post and appeared about a year ago:

I thought it would be a fun way to see what the “State of the School” is by comparing the above Wordle to the one below, which is based on this year’s collections of blogs:

Interesting hmmmm? What do you think it reveals (if anything) about our priorities this school year? Please comment!

21st Century Conference Attendance – One Head’s Meta Experience

I spent this past Sunday through Tuesday attending the Day School Leadership Training Institute’s (DSLTI) Alumni Retreat in West Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first conference I have attended this season, with at least two more coming up. I will be in Atlanta, GA in January attending (and presenting) at the North American Jewish Day School Conference and we will be hosting edJEWcon 5772.0, right here at our school in May. There have been years, when in addition to those, there might be other Jewish or secular conferences in education I have attended or presented at. That is, admittedly, a lot of time to be out of my school and (particularly in this economy) a lot financial resources being spent for me to attend theses conferences and retreats. It raises the very legitimate question, “Is it worth it for the school to have you attend or present at all of these conferences”? My teachers, parents, students, board members, donors, etc., all have a very legitimate right to ask what benefits come from this investment.

I had thought (prior to the retreat) about writing a blog post describing what I would learn from the DSLTI Retreat with suggestions of ways it might impact my practice. But then I remembered that I am supposed be Mr. 21st Century Learning and couldn’t I employ another method for delivering that content?

So…my first order of business was to ensure that I captured my experience of the retreat utilizing 21st century technologies. We quickly developed a Twitter #hashtag to organize a back-channel for the retreat; for us to comment, and collaborate, and – for me – to experiment with using Twitter for my own personal professional development. Every time I would have written a note, or typed a note, I sent a tweet. For those who already follow me on Twitter (and you can click on the “Follow” button on my blog if you’d like to), it provided them with a running live experience of who I was listening to, what I was thinking, what questions it raised, and some cases what I was seeing (as I attached pictures to my tweets using my iPhone).

Whether you have a Twitter account or not, you can review the entire #DSLTI Twitter feed simply by clicking here or by going to www.twitter.com and searching for “#DSLTI”. (You will notice that the conversation has continued past the conference – which means it was and will be a meaningful professional development vehicle.) But for a taste, I am going to simply show you my tweets from the retreat. [Warning: I have given this to you as snapshots – NONE of the links will work. You would have to get that from going directly to Twitter.] This is one answer to the question of what the experience meant to me:

So besides tweeting from the retreat, I also took “notes”. Using the “Note Taker HD” app on my iPad, I was able incorporate my hand-written notes, typed notes, and photos. Again, it may not all be legible (I am a doctor now) and it all may not make sense because I wasn’t writing it for public display, I do think it is useful to show for two reasons. One, as above, is to ensure no one thought I spent my time sipping drinks by the pool. But, it is also to provide some meta-analysis about the experience of attending a conference and how 21st century learning has impacted my experience. It may also stimulate some thought about whether we need to train teachers or students about how they can adapt new ways of “taking notes” in a 21st century learning context. Here’s what I came up:

The third thing I did was enter each new book I was stimulated to buy onto my Shelfari page, which you can see to your right on my blog as a widget or by clicking here.

I came back front the retreat jazzed up about what I had learned, how I had learned, and how I hope to have my practice informed by new learning. I hope this blog post does a fraction of any of those things for you!

And if you are interested in where #DSLTI goes from here? Follow us on Twitter!

Is my school any better now that I’m a doctor?

Because isn’t that the only question that really matters to anyone outside my family?

Yes, I take a tremendous amount of personal pride in having reached this academic achievement. It took me 8 years (6 of them ABD) to successfully defend my Ed.D. dissertation at the Jewish Theological Seminary – which was accomplished (pending minor revisions) this past Monday. During that time, I helped found one Jewish day school and assumed the headship of a second. When I started, my wife and I were a recently married couple living in an apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When I finished, we were a family of four living in a house in Jacksonville, Florida. But what matter does it make outside of my own world? My parents are kvelling, but am I a better head of school having gone through this experience? Are the schools I have been blessed with the opportunity to run any better off? (And, therefore, would I recommend that other heads of school, principals, etc., pursue doctorates of their own for the purpose of improving their craft?)

I can only blog for myself, but as challenging as the process was, the answer has been an unequivocal, “yes”!

My research questions were how do theories of educational leadership help understand the founding of a new Jewish day school, and how does the head of school’s understanding and implementation of leadership theories impact the founding and growth of a new Jewish day school. You can see that I had the opportunity to make my work the subject of my doctoral research and, therefore, I was not only able to further my own education, but (hopefully) I was able to contribute to the school(s) I was employed to head. Had I chosen a different research topic, perhaps, I would feel differently, but I’m not entirely sure. The discipline of doing doctoral research in education – the books I have read, the methodology I have mastered, the academic vernacular I have had to learn to write in, the necessity to defend my work to tenured professors of education – all of this has undoubtedly caused me to reflect more deeply on practice and, thus, made me a better practitioner.

Once my dissertation is published, I may (or may not) choose to edit it into an academic article or another vehicle for publication. But because my work actually included an investigation as to to the worthiness of academic degrees in being a head of school, I thought I would share a snippet of my research to close this post:

The importance of credentials

There was no doubt that my credentials, primarily being an alumnus of the American Jewish University (then called the University of Judaism), a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a member of the Day School Leadership Training Institute, played a significant role in my hire (as founding head of school). The hope of the search committee was that I would bring best practices learned from those schools and programs to my job so that the school could be successfully founded. To the degree that I was able to utilize my leadership skills, I believe this hypothesis has been proven accurate time and time again. I have little doubt that without the training I received, particularly the experiences of the Day School Leadership Training Institute, I would have fallen on my face from day one.

My experiences were largely spent trying to move the school’s leadership and to understand and endorse the best practices I believed were, in fact, ‘best’ because of what I had learned through my academic and professional programs. Founding committees should rightly consider the importance of academic credentials and that programs such as DSLTI should continue to be promoted and taken seriously. There are no guarantees that it will take the specific skills mastered in the specific toolbox of each academic or professional program provides to successfully perform the job of founding a new school. It is, however, reasonable to assume that the more skills available to the practitioner, the higher the likelihood is for success to occur. Both the literature review and the data have clearly demonstrated how educational leadership is as much about knowing which skills to apply when then it is about mastering one best specific set of skills.

I do think it is reasonable to make a few conclusions about how academic and professional programs designed to prepare people for the headship could increase the odds for success. There is great value to emphasizing real-world and real-work situations. DSLTI does a terrific job presenting mini-case studies for fellows to struggle through in a learning environment prior to confronting them in the workplace. Mentoring and coaching are essential components. Opportunities to shadow and reflect with experienced heads would be useful as well. It is impossible to replicate and role-play every situation that could occur in the headship, but it is possible to shift the emphasis from theory to practice, particularly in professional preparatory programs. This also holds true for the schools. New schools and schools preparing for new heads should seriously consider building coaching into the normal practice of professional development.

Discuss. 🙂

Dr. Jon Mitzmacher

edJEWcon 5772.0 – Ride the Wave!

It has been a topsy-turvy week in the life! I have a lot to be thankful for and will make that the subject of next week’s blog post. The benefit of rest and reflection will hopefully render me more articulate on the topic than I currently feel capable of.

In the meanwhile, let me thank those heads of school, foundation partners, researchers, and colleagues in the field for their continued interest and support for edJEWcon! Your emails, tweets, Facebook comments, etc., has helped spark the fire and fuel the applications.

Check out the trailer here:

If you are interested in edJEWcon 5772.0 and want to learn more…click here. If you are ready to apply while spots still are open…click here. We are working on creating additional tracks and opportunities for those of y’all who are not part of school teams, but want to be part of the experience.

Our team is in conversation with many interested parties these days and exciting new ventures are brewing! I have no choice, but to leave that as the simple tease it is. As ideas become realities, we will have much to share in the upcoming weeks and months. But the snowball is cresting the hilltop…and the educational revolution is underway. We look forward to playing our part and learning from those walking down the road with us.

It isn’t just good education; it’s good business.

I feel similarly to how many synagogue presidents must feel heading into Kol Nidre this evening as I prepare to write my first business blog nearing the eve of Yom Kippur! The rationale is hardly the same. Synagogues reserve Yom Kippur for their annual “High Holiday appeals” because this is the time they have the most people in the seats, not necessarily because the message of fundraising fits with the theme of atonement. I do not presume that as families are preparing for the holiday that I will have a similarly huge burst in blog readership!

A personal note…

…apropos of the time of year. Let me take this opportunity to offer my sincerest apologies to anyone whom I may have hurt or offended over the past year. Let us forgive each other (and ourselves) for our all-too-human foibles and pledge to make this new (Jewish) year one of growth and community-building.

And now to the topic at hand…

I have been asked by our good friends at the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE) to become a guest blogger on the topic off “How 21st century Jewish education is an issue of financial sustainability?” First off, thanks to my new, good (and for now virtual) friend Ken Gordon, PEJE’s fantastic Social Media Manager for the opportunity! I’m excited to wrestle with that question and share my thoughts with colleagues in the field. [My posts with PEJE will appear here on their home page for blogs impacting the Jewish day school field. I recommend the page for regular viewing or subscription if you are interested in the field. I am cross-posting this first one in my own blog as a trial run.]

From PEJE’s 2009 strategic plan, they define “financial sustainability” as “increasing the resources available to schools and professionalizing the development capacity”. This is part of PEJE’s overall shift in mission from an organization dedicated to growing the number of Jewish day schools to an organization dedicated to sustaining Jewish day schools. (I’m oversimplifying a bit.) So…how can being a 21st century Jewish day school increase resources and professionalize development capacity?

As I have been thinking about this question, my initial reaction is to try to avoid providing obvious answers. If this is, however, to be my introductory blog post on this topic, I do want to share my initial thoughts on the subject because they may be crossing your minds as well. This was my off-the-top-of-my-head response when Ken first asked me to blog on the topic:

…to me it fits very much with why we feel 21st century learning is so vital – with increased competition from Hebrew charter schools, independent schools, and suburban public schools AND a perilous economy – we have to brand Jewish day schools as being the kind of school most likely to provide a high-quality 21st century learning experience – that we are the future of SECULAR education because we are JEWISH.

Totally flips the script on prospective parents. “Too Jewish?” No such thing. Parents looking for excellence in 21st century education should be more concerned with “Jewish enough?”

Now the truth is that I could not be more passionate about this idea. Over the last year and change of my current headship, I have seen firsthand the power of 21st century learning in action and have been convinced that this is the only viable path forward for Jewish (particularly non-Orthodox) day schools. To be financially sustainable really only (!) requires two consistent streams of revenue: tuition and fundraising. You can only increase tuition revenue by adding students. You can only add students if you have a great product. So if embracing 21st century learning values increases the quality of your product, being such a school should drive enrollment and, thus, tuition revenue up.

And I absolutely believe this to be the case. But as a philosophical concept, it doesn’t really answer the question. Because all I’ve done is suggest that if you want your school to be really successful it should be a really good school. You don’t need me to point that out. The more interesting question, to me, is how being a 21st century Jewish learning institution impacts the business of schooling? What I am interested in exploring through these occasional blog posts is how we can apply the pedagogies of 21st century learning to the managerial and business aspects of running a Jewish day school to ensure they maximize financial sustainability as defined above.

[Disclosure: I have been the head of two Jewish day schools owned and operated by synagogues. Neither school has a dedicated “Development Director” or a “Business Manager” or a “Department of Institutional Advancement.” Both schools outsource a fair amount of their business functions. I do have an MBA from the American Jewish University, which has come in extraordinarily handy in light of those two prior sentences. So the good and the bad is that I have, as a head of school, had a fair amount of experience doing development and business operations without a lot of the training. I am particularly interested in seeing how development directors, business managers, fundraisers, etc., respond to the ideas I am proposing.]

What are the 21st century pedagogies I am suggesting be applied to the business of schooling?

Transparency, collaboration, technology, reflection, global connectedness, authenticity, and prosumerism (which I will define as the paradigm shift wherein the learner is the producer, not the consumer, of content.)

How can these ideas increase the sustainability of Jewish day schools?

Please lend your voice to the conversation – comment freely and often or email me directly ([email protected]) if you are still a bitsocial media shy. With your feedback, I look forward to exploring these and other ideas at the nexus of 21st century learning and financial stewardship that will be focus of this yet-to-be-named blog to be published however-often!

Jon’s #NoOfficeDay – The Results Show

You can read, here, all about the history and reasons for the #NoOfficeDay I took this week at our school.

So…how was it?

It was super fun!

So much fun that I was telling someone that evening that I didn’t want to go back to work the next day because I knew I’d have to make it Jon’s #OfficeDayToMakeUpForNoOfficeDay!

But it was well worth it! It was so great to spend the day where the real action is – in the classrooms and hallways and lunch rooms and parking lots. Will it have the desired carryover? I am really going to try. If your budget is the most honest reflection of your values, than your schedule has to be a close second. It is time to put my time where my mouth is.

This is the finished product – Jon’s #NoOfficeDay – The Movie! Thanks to Talie Zaifert, our Admissions & Marketing Director, for the iMovie tutorial. My goal was to use this opportunity, not only to get out of the office, but to role model the attempt to master new 21st century learning tools. This was my first attempt at using a Flip camera (hence the horrible camerawork) and using iMovie – so all mistakes belong to me alone.

Thanks to all the other agencies and school leaders for inspiring me to join them outside the office!

Enjoy! (And you might want to take a motion sickness pill…)

edJEWcon 5772.0

This is one of those weeks where it is difficult to decide who I am writing to and what I should be writing about. It is a good problem to have because there are so many exciting things happening! We just finished an amazing Preplanning Week highlighted by a Lower School “Meet the Teacher” on Thursday and today’s Middle School Orientation.

Here we all our decked out in our brand new MJGDS Marlins gear…Go Marlins!

And thanks to our super-fast, movie-making-maven, Marketing & Admissions Director Talie Zaifert, we have this awesome welcome back to school video:

So…with all of this excitement and with the first day of school coming on Monday…I just couldn’t wait to share the extraordinarily exciting news of a groundbreaking new conference in Jewish education that will take place at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School this year. In cooperation with the Schechter Day School Network and with a generous grant and support from The AVI CHAI Foundation, we will bring to you this spring (“Save the Date” coming soon!) an amazing conference dedicated to 21st century learning in Jewish day school education…

Introducing: edJEWcon

Great thanks to our 21st century learning team, particularly Silvia Tolisano and Andrea Hernandez, in putting together the proposal for what we are hoping will become a paradigm-shifting experiment in professional development with the power to bring more and more Jewish day schools, beginning with the Schechter Network, down the 21st century learning path we try to blaze here at our school.

Idea

We are envisioning a conference based on 21st century professional development where attendees can experience a Jewish day school in transition to becoming a dynamic 21st century learning environment. We are sharing a vision of teaching and learning that transcends physical boundaries and connects across geographic borders and time zones. We acknowledge that Jewish day schools need to chart a new course, not only by adopting and adapting a secular educational movement, (The Partnership for 21st Century Learning http ://www .p 21.org/), but positioning Schechter Network schools, in particular, at the forefront of an exciting paradigm shift in education.

This first year pilot will create a template of a 21st century conference with the flexibility to grow beyond it and expand with the ultimate goal of becoming a premier destination for all forward-looking Jewish education stakeholders.

21st Century Professional Development

Professional development in the 21st century is rooted in the belief that educators need to experience the same skills, tools and teaching strategies that they are expected to develop and implement in their own classroom practice. The Partnership for 21st Century Learning points out that we need to give teachers and administrators opportunities and the tools to “identify what activities they can replace/de-emphasize”. 21st century professional development takes advantage of a virtual learning network that is available anytime and anywhere. New literacies of the 21st century, such as information, network, media and global literacies, demand that educators be fluent in communicating, collaborating and connecting through face-to-face, virtual and blended communities of global educators. Veteran educators who embrace this change are energized when they acquire these new skills and competencies; they engage their students with new media and technologies, incorporated into their deep and vast experience in the classroom.

What will make this conference distinctive and unique

A conference planned to meet the needs of Jewishly observant educators and the calendar of Jewish day schools
Specifically tailored to individual cross-disciplinary school teams in Jewish day schools with hands-on applications
The first conference to present a vision for 21st Century Jewish Day School Education and a roadmap to reach this desired desintation

Proposed Tracks

Administrators – how to lead a cultural change in your school
Technology & Curriculum Coordinators – what innovation could look like and how to drive it
Admissions and Marketing Directors – how to convey a compelling message to current & prospective parents who want their children to have the best of 21st century education;
Lay Leaders – how to understand and generate excitement about a unique approach to teaching and learning throughout the community;
Classroom Teachers – how to increase your students’ motivation and engagement in learning…and yours!

Implementation

The participatory nature of the conference will combine hands-on training, using 21st century tools, with an experiential component. The conference will include expert presentations, hands-on training and direct experiences in new practices. Using Alan November’s model of the Digital Learning Farm we will use authentic, meaningful roles and contributions to our learning community as a means to empower all learners.

The conference website (http://www.edjewcon.org) will be a collaborative environment for reflection and sharing as well as the hub for live social media feeds. Participants will be responsible for contributing to the site during the conference by sharing and reflecting on their learning. 21st century learning is participatory learning. Through collaboration, participants create a long term hub for dissemination, reflections, resource sharing with and for other Jewish educators and administrators.

Outcomes

Create a Professional Learning Network (PLN) for 21st Century Schechter Schools.

Each school will leave edJEWcon with its customizable road map for becoming a 21st century learning school. Depending on the school (and the members of the team able to participate), the pathways and timing of each journey will differ, but the destination remains the same. Heads of School will meet with Heads of School; Admissions Directors with Admissions Directors; Curriculum Supervisors with Curriculum Supervisors; etc.

Provide school team members with hands-on experiences of 21st century learning so they can not only return with information, but firsthand experience to share with their schools. We envision the conference operating fluidly between the tachlis (How do I most effectively blog or Tweet?) and the meta (How might my learning of best practices for blogging or using social media impact the classroom teachers in my school?).

I cannot wait to hear your comments and suggestions. I cannot wait to see what new partners come on board. I cannot wait to see which schools will look to join us on this grand new adventure in 21st century learning in the Jewish day school. I cannot wait to see how our school – parents, students, and faculty – will prepare to host this event. I cannot wait to see what our school will learn from you.

This is going to be a big year.

A (School) Year in the Life…

Forty-one posts later…

…I have spent some time rereading the titles of the forty-one blog posts I have written this year and cherry-picked a few to reread so that I would have some sense of how to tie up in a neat bow my adventure in blogging this year. Rather than regurgitate that which you are welcome to reread yourself, I though I would share an illustrative anecdote that took place last week:

I received an email a few weeks ago from the head of a community day school in the Midwest asking if I would be willing to Skype with her and her technology teacher about how our school began its path towards 21st Century Learning. I went through some of my prior blog posts, did a little searching on Twitter, reviewed a chapter or two in Curriculum 21 and scheduled the call. We had a lovely hour-long chat on Skype – during which I had occasion to reference, among other things, blogfolios, digital farms, back-channels, digital immigrants, nings, wikis and GoogleDocs. It was a very nice call and I look forward to continued collaboration with our new friends.

When it comes to reflecting on my own work and having that reflection made transparent – one raison d’être for having a blog in the first place – my big takeaway from this school year that was, is that prior to July of last summer, I would have been utterly unable to define any of the words highlighted in red let alone speak of them intelligently. The idea that during the course of one school year, I have come from almost utter ignorance to presenting at conferences and fielding requests for consultation is almost preposterous. And yet here we are…

There is nothing unique about me that allowed for this to happen. I promise. It took a village (and a book) to teach me basic skills and the (peer) pressure of trying to live up to the expectations already put in place by the school I had been hired to head. I kinda had no choice, but to begin blogging and Tweeting or else I’d be left behind my own teachers!

My story is really the story of the last two years of our school writ small. There was nothing particularly unique about our school that would have led you to conclude that it would one day stake out a leadership position in 21st century education. We were, and are, a relatively small K-8 Solomon Schechter Day School in the relatively small Jewish community of Jacksonville, Florida. And yet here we are…

It doesn’t take millions of dollars and it doesn’t take a surfeit of faculty. It doesn’t require expertise in advance and it doesn’t require knowing the end of the journey before you take the first step. You don’t need SMART Boards, iPads, and laptops to adopt a 21st century mindset. It is not about the “stuff” (not that the “stuff” doesn’t help…it does)!

We have tried in our school to stop using “21st Century Technology” as a synonym for “21st Century Learning”. Technology requires “stuff”; Learning requires “people”. It isn’t that the technology is unimportant – there are certain minimum thresholds of technology necessary to walk the path. But most schools can reach that threshold with creative budgeting and fundraising. Harder than accumulating the stuff is changing the paradigm. It doesn’t take an endowment to revolutionize your educational philosophy – it takes teachers, administrators, parents and students. And every school has those.

We have exciting plans here at the school for this summer and the year to come. I look forward to planting those seeds next week. As I prepare to turn the page on this school year and begin writing the chapter on the next, let me pause to thank those who read this blog and even more those who comment. I am frequently challenged trying to produce a blog post of sufficient quality each week to be worthy of publication. I don’t know that I always reach the goal, but I am always grateful for the opportunity.

Let summer begin…

Testing, testing, 1-2-3…

I spent an hour yesterday working with our Academic Resource Specialist trying to decide exactly which set of scoring results will make the most amount of sense for the battery of standardized tests our students have now completed.

One hour.

What should be cross-checked with what and which version should be sent to whom?Longitudinal data over how many different data points in which sections from when to when? Do we err on the side of sharing too much information and run the risk of overwhelming and confusing the parents? Do we err on the side of sharing too little information and run the risk of appearing to have something to hide?

What exactly is the value of standardized testing and how do we use the information it yields?

It sounds like such a simple question…

My starting point on this issue, like many others, is that all data is good data. There cannot possibly be any harm to knowing all that there is to know. It is merely a question of how to best use that data to achieve the fundamental task at hand – to lovingly move a child to reach his or her maximum potential. To the degree that the data is useful for accomplishing this goal is the degree to which the data is useful at all.

Standardized tests in schools that do not explicitly teach to the test nor use curriculum specifically created to succeed on the tests – like this one – are very valuable snapshots. Allow me to be overly didactic and emphasize each word…they are valuable – they are; they really do mean something. And they are snapshots – they are not the entire picture, not by a long shot, of either the child or the school. Only when contextualized in this way can we avoid the unnecessary anxiety that often bubbles up when results roll in.

Like any snapshot, the standardized test ought to resemble its object. The teacher and the parent see the results and say to themselves, “Yup, that’s him.” It is my experience that this is the case more often than not. Occasionally, however, the snapshot is less clear. Every now and again, the teacher and the parent – who have been in healthy and frequent communication all the year long – both look at the snapshot and say to themselves, “Who is this kid?”

When that happens and when there is plenty of other rich data – report cards, prior years’ tests, portfolios, assessments, etc. OR teacher’s notes from the testing which reveal anxiety, sleepiness, etc. – it is okay to decide that someone put their thumb on the camera that day (or that part of the test) and discard the snapshot altogether.

Okay, you might say, but besides either telling us what we already know OR deciding that it isn’t telling us anything meaningful, what can we learn?

Good question!

Here is what I expect to learn from standardized testing in our school if our benchmarks and standards are in alignment with the test we have chosen to take:

Individual Students:

Do we see any trends worth noting? If the overall scores go statistically significantly down in each area year after year that would definitely be an indication that something is amiss (especially if it correlates to grades). If a specific section goes statistically significantly down year after year, that would be an important sign to pay attention to as well. Is there a dramatic and unexpected change in any section or overall in this year’s test?

The answers to all of the above would require conversation with teachers, references to prior tests and a thorough investigation of the rest of the data to determine if we have, indeed, discovered something worth knowing and acting upon.

This is why, beginning this year, we will be scheduling individual meetings with parents in our school to personally discuss and unpack any test result that comes back with statistically significant changes (either positive or negative) from prior years’ testing.

The results themselves are not exactly customer friendly. There are a lot of numbers and statistics to digest, “stanines” and “percentiles” and whatnot. It is not easy to read and interpret the results without someone who understands them guiding you. As the educators, we feel it is our responsibility to be those guides.

Individual Classes:

Needless to say (but you just said it!), if an entire class’ scores took a dramatic turn from one year to the next it would be worth paying attention to – especially if history keeps repeating. To be clear, I do not mean the CLASS AVERAGE. I do not particularly care how the “class” performs on a standardized test qua “class”. [Yes, I said “qua” – sometimes I cannot help myself.] What I mean is, should it be the case that each year in a particular class each student‘s scores go up or down in a statistically significant way – that would be meaningful to know. Because the only metric we concern ourselves with is an individual student’s growth over time – not how s/he compares with the “class”.

That’s what it means to cast a wide net (admissions) while having floors, but no ceilings (education).

School:

If we were to discover that as a school we consistently perform excellently or poorly in any number of subjects, it would present an opportunity to examine our benchmarks, our pedagogy, and our choice in curriculum. If, for example, as a Lower School we do not score well in Math historically, it would force us to consider whether or not we have established the right benchmarks for Math, whether or not we teach Math appropriately, and/or whether or not we are using the right Math curriculum.

Or…if we think that utilizing a 21st century learning paradigm is best for teaching and learning then we should, in time, be able to provide evidence from testing that in fact it is. (It is!)

So…the bubbles have been filled in, but the fun has just begun! Here at MJGDS, we eagerly anticipate the results to come and to making full use of them to help each student and teacher continue to grow and improve. We look forward to fruitful conversations. That’s what it means to be a learning organization.

You may put your pencils down now.