Category: Space Explainers

“Just say, how will you walk?”

  By Space Explainers

無門関

Any and all feedback related to your learning starts (and often ends) with this:

Copies of that guide can be found underneath the poster-sized iteration by our door:

This guide is one of many, of course, and only one way we have emphasized the need for in-class focus. Here is another. These are universal skills and traits linked to clear systems for instruction, assessment, and feedback. Any of our guides and essays will help you; this one, on “the keys to the course,” may help you more than others.

The more closely you read this particular guide, in fact, the more clearly you will understand high or low GAP scores. You will even begin to see that some low scores should be lower, based on these criteria, while some high scores are inflated1.

Another way to look at this space: In here, it is almost always easier to do well and harder to fail than you think. This is capitulation to the impact of the final number. It is a process independent from the authentic feedback you receive elsewhere, repeatedly.

If you have not already done so, use this guide to interrogate your performance. Let the verb, interrogate, drive your analysis. The root is rogare, which means “to ask” or “to question.” Put your questions and the answers they generate in writing.

  1. Not enough to call it a floating standard, but enough to link to Jesness in a footnote. ↩

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The Half-Percent Problem

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

0.56%, to Be Precise

You meet in Room 210 for English once a day for 42 minutes. Over 180 days of school, that adds up to right around 7560 minutes. Each class period is, therefore, only 0.56% of your total learning — and that gives us the half-percent problem.

We already work in a system that promotes a factory-line mindset. The system chops learning into periods, rings bells to force a kind of Pavlovian shift in us1, etc, which all compartmentalizes learning and truncates development. It somehow manages to be rigid and arbitrary at the same time.

This is all part of the “gene pool of education,” as Ken Robinson put it. Another part: the belief that each lesson is a discrete, repeatable artifact, with “Do Now” openings and scripted transitions. Traditional lessons are performative, even at their most authentic, and that’s true for students as well as teachers. Units are just larger versions of lessons.

I think this is why so much prescribed instruction is content-driven, and why grades are the transactional currency of it all. It’s also why not every 0.56% chunk is meaningful. Some periods are worth devoting more time and energy to — the period that has a test, the one with a presentation, the one with an essay due. The formative build-up doesn’t invite the same focus. The Skinner box does its job.

In here, you can’t have a half-percent mindset. Your learning is embedded in everything you do. You can’t use the same regurgitation skill you might rely on elsewhere, for instance, and missing or missed work requires your attention. In the past, I was guilty of converting missing work into a zero — at the beginning of this essay is a screenshot of my old gradebook — which does a strange thing: It tells you, the student, that the work isn’t necessary. You don’t need to do it; you can take a zero and move on, which is very much like saying that the assignment was non-essential.

This goes for poetry, novels, and other experiences we have to together, but the best example from the first month of the year is the complete set of grade abatement profiles. If you haven’t studied that yet, you must study it now. Again, most of you are used to a transaction: You don’t complete work, you get a bad grade, and you move on. The course can’t wait for you, so it doesn’t.

But you aren’t a bystander in here, swept along by a content-driven curriculum. You are the course itself.

In other words:

Filling the Time

Terra Incognita

 

  1. The bell rings, and whether you were ready to move on or not, you’re moving on. Your mind lurches to the next thing. ↩

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Filling the Time

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

The Carrot and the Stick

What we do in this class is obviously more complicated than this, but if you needed to whittle it down to one thing, that thing would be how you spend the class period.

This works because the assignments and texts and feedback are all designed to reward investment. The more time you spend on our work, the better. There is no busywork here, precisely because we can change the work to be more authentic if it is busywork. We can tailor the work to be more meaningful and helpful for the individual. So the work is always worth doing.

That said, you don’t need an understanding of the material or an inherent investment in learning to understand that you have to work during class. To understand that, you just need access to a copy of the assessment profiles. And if we want to make it even simpler, and we do, you only need to look at that hyperlinked poster, which is now hanging in our classroom.

And then, if we want to simplify it even further, you only need to consider four words:

  • basic requirements
  • required assignments

Those phrases appear in the profile language that corresponds to a 70 and 90, respectively, in Infinite Campus.

Focus on the fundamental similarities between “requirements” and “assignments.” Assignments usually are more formal, and are usually posted to Google Classroom; they include, however, any assigned task, such as the one indicated by this instructional post. It’s not semantic.You must meet the basic requirement of the course, and if you do not meet it, you must accept the repercussions.

The most basic requirement is that you work from the time the bell rings until the time it rings again. That’s your persistent, unchanging assignment. If you do that, you are overwhelmingly likely to keep up with formal assignments and writing responses and test prep and so on, simply because you’re going to have to find things to occupy your time. You’re also overwhelmingly likely to get the feedback you need for an upper-tier profile, simply because you’re going to need to ask for direction and help as you work to fill the class time.

That’s the built-in circuit: To meet that basic requirement, you’ve got to fill the time, and filling the time means being productive.

In other words, if you commit yourself to being productive for 40+ minutes a day, you’ll find that your productivity can’t help but move you along in the right ways. You’ll have to read and annotate and re-read the interstitial instruction, if you hope to fill that time. You’ll need to flag down the teacher for help and guidance, if you hope to fill that time. You’ll have to collaborate with your peers, write reflections, or read a book.

Because if you don’t find something to fill that time, you are no longer meeting the most basic requirement of the course. You are no longer completing all required assignments. You can, therefore, no longer say that you fit the profile of a 7 or higher, which means you are at best looking at an 85 for the assessment period. You must also entertain the serious possibility that you fit the profile of a 4, which means you might see a 70 for the assessment period — and it probably is even lower than that.

That’s due to the nature of feedback in a makerspace like ours. The first time you stop working during the class period, it might be an honest mistake, even with the clear language of the profiles and the extraordinary amount of front-loaded instruction in the course. The second time you stop working during the class period, it might be another honest mistake — but it’s a mistake that indicates a lack of self-awareness, a lack of internalization, and a lack of assiduousness. It suggests a lack of amenability, too.

The third time you stop working during the class period? That’s a deliberate failure to follow instructions. It’s a conscious decision to ignore posts like this, face-to-face feedback, redirection during the period, speeches at the start of class, etc. You can’t not know that the single most basic requirement of the course is to work diligently and consistently during the class period.

And that drops a profile into the lowest tiers, where it is certainly possible to see scores of 60 or 50 every three weeks.

Just the Carrot

This system has been built to be modular and responsive, which is a way of saying that it adapts to your needs and has a lot of combinable elements. If you do nothing but invest in the class time we have, you’re going to unlock something you want to do, either for the final grade or because you see the value in it. Your motivations are far less important, especially early on.

I invite you to think about what you could do with what we have in Room 210. Ask questions here about how to fill the time. Ask about how to individualize the work. Ask about how to navigate exhaustion and distraction and that panicky feeling when you have a History outline due next period. I’ll help you to do this.

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Terra Incognita

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

On Reading

Probably the most traditional of all the traditional focuses in an English classroom is learning how to read. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a grade-abated makerspace or listening to a lecture on 13th-century poetry; it all starts with how well you can decode text and understanding its meaning.

This course forces you to practice reading as a slow and deliberate act. That’s why you have posts telling you what to do, instead of a traditional 42-minute lesson. It’s why those posts are much more complicated than a handout or embedded video. It’s why we don’t review directions and other materials at the front of the room1.

You must dedicate yourself to reading in here, and it has to happen well before you’re studying novels and poetry and all the other expected stuff of an English course. It’s about the skill of reading. You learn by doing — “We learn what we do,” Dewey said — and you only get better at a skill through practice.

What I also know after a few years of doing this — first through traditional, performative lessons, then through student-centered lessons, and now through makerspace work — is that you will seek out shortcuts when it comes to more difficult reading. It’s how we’re all wired: If everything else is equal, we look for the fastest route to the goal. So if you’re asked to read a poem or novel closely, you just might hop onto the Internet and ask it to help you.

In here, there is no summary of the instructional posts. You have to read them, and you have to read them carefully, or you will not know what to do. You won’t improve the skill of reading, either, and the deficit will spiral. The same is true of guides and handouts. They are the teaching, which means they can’t be treated as checklists or overviews. The Pareto Project guide, for instance, is written to teach you slowly and deliberately about many things related to the project itself.

If this is tough at first, it’s because you need to get stronger. It gets easier as you gain strength. You have to develop more than a habit of mind; you also need some sinew and muscle to move you through the work.

On Habits of Mind

Now, the tone of that first section is mostly matter-of-fact. There’s no judgment or disappointment, just encouragement to tough it out until you get better at the all-important skill of close reading.

The tone in this section will shift slightly to be more critical, both as an explicit model of how to use tone and because you need something more critical2. These instructional posts exist to help you strengthen your reading skills, yes, but they also exist to fight a particularly dangerous reflex: learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness isn’t unique to you, your age group, the year 2017, etc. It’s human nature to want things to be easier than they are, and it’s human nature to adapt to what we’re given. The educational system was built to spoon-feed students information, and it will take many more decades of reform to undo that ethos. Students are used to the spoon.

There’s no spoon here3. You need to be resilient and tough. You need to be okay with the feeling of being a little lost. Everything has been built for you so that hard work and focus will teach you what you need — from how to read more carefully to how to get organized to how to write essays.

Learned helplessness makes confusion and uncertainty much worse. But if you feel lost in this room, you can trust that there’s a route forward. There’s a map. There are even people who will read the map with you. They will help you figure things out.

But they won’t read for you. They won’t do the work for you. You have to help yourself first.

In old maps of the uncharted world, cartographers would sometimes use the phrase terra incognita to indicate the unknown. There’s a bit of a myth that this sometimes took the form of “Here be dragons,” which is, even if it’s untrue, still much more interesting:

It meant that there were dangers in those unknown waters. In here, the sections you haven’t charted yet have no monsters in them. Or if there are monsters — I probably shouldn’t assume; they say that makes monster food out of you and me — you’ll know how to fight them. You’ll have allies.

The point: If it’s true that some of you have learned helplessness, you can also unlearn it. You just have to be willing to struggle.

While you think about that, here’s a video remix of the Reading Rainbow theme song from PBS:

  1. Well, that and the fact that we don’t have a front of the room. ↩

  2. It’s also important to show you that “critical” doesn’t mean “insulting.” Pointing out flaws can be ameliorative, which means to make something better. ↩

  3. I’d rather this not be an allusion to The Matrix and, instead, an allusion to the allegory of the long spoons. Either one works, though. ↩

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How Feedback Should Work

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

As you submit assignments, the limbic system of your brain may skitter to life and wonder when you’ll “know how [you] did.” That part of you, conditioned by years of formal schooling, will want a number. It might recognize grade abatement as an attempt to eliminate the toxic stamp of grades on each assignment, but it won’t immediately understand how we can upend the traditional feedback model entirely.

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A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils

  By Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

This is a lightly edited repost of instructional material from May of 2017. It has a little more universality and a little less class-specific feedback.

Shrapnel

The focuses of this instructional post are in-class focus and feedback. The impetus is that it is never too early to warn you against straying from the path. We shouldn’t wait until the spring to discuss poor decisions; we should talk about it now, at the end of the first week, before any bad habits metastasize. The worst habits, like wasting class time and ignoring instruction, will slowly poison you.

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Mongering and Congeries

  By Space Explainers, Triage

Photobombing

This post is a snapshot of the teaching and learning that takes place in Room 210 in Brewster High School. The picture was taken on May 3, 2017, and it’s one of those snapshots where you eventually notice that someone has photobombed it:

In this case, I like to think that the people are photobombing the turtle, not the other way around.

The day of this writing is a Wednesday. I’m at work today. Yesterday, I was out, because my entire family was diagnosed with strep throat and pinkeye1. For four days last week, I was in North Salem for a conference, which is why I’ve dragged myself back to work today — that’s too long way from the classroom, regardless of how I feel or how I teach.

The result of all this illness and conferencing is that students in Room 210 have only seen me once in person since Monday, April 24. We are only a few days away from the AP exam and a month from the Regents , and I can’t force my voice above a whisper, if “whisper” means “husky frog that’s been screaming all night.” There’s also what you might imagine is acute exhaustion, not just from being sick myself, but from helping a three-year-old and a thirteen-month-old deal with being sick2.

Five years ago, this situation would have put me in such a heightened state of anxiety that I’d have probably been wheeled out of here3. Now? Well, now we can talk about how the course is built for this. It’s built to continue during a planned three-day absence for a conference. It’s built for unexpected catastrophes, like a sick household, and expected ones, like the stress of AP week. It doesn’t matter if I can shout or barely speak: The entire course has been redesigned from nuts to bolts so that we learn interstitially, when we can and when we need to.

Nowhere is that paradigm shift more evident — and therefore more in need of the occasional spotlight — than in how feedback works. Assessment and feedback are the backbone of instruction; when they no longer resemble traditional assessment and feedback, our time is never wasted when we talk about that change.

But let’s talk about rumors first.

Rumor-Mongering

Rumors are an interesting species of information, especially in a high school. When I was first hired to teach in Brewster, for instance, the rumor was that I’d previously had a career as an underground rapper and DJ. I’ve never determined how that rumor started, just that it persisted for years4.

Other rumors are less hilarious. As I began changing the way I teach, the first rumor to take root was that I don’t teach books. I remember a colleague saying to me one day, as if remarking that rain makes one wet, “You don’t like books, right?” I think I was too perplexed to answer, which she might have taken as agreement. “Yes, of course — this rain is making us wet!”

As part of a focus on modeling writing and flipping instruction, I’ve written about my love of literature and the importance of teaching it. I still show this video on the power of literature as part of different units on empathy. And I also still, you know, teach literature, in the sense that it is assigned and expected of students:

Reading the Room

That’s the intricate framework for a unit about reading 1984, among other canonical works. Juniors ought to recognize it, since it’s taught to some extent every year. It includes literature and students reading literature, as near as I can tell.

The rumor that I don’t assign/teach/like literature is easy to trace, though, which is important. I teach Paul Graham’s “Age of the Essay,” and I make no secret of how much I agree with his conclusions. I also agree with John Holt’s idea of what makes children hate reading. I don’t think their perspectives negate the teaching of literature, but they are complex and uncomfortable ideas that challenge long-held assumptions about English Language Arts. They force us to talk about resonance5 and efficacy and technology and neuroplasticity, among many other elements. It’s far simpler to build a straw man — or an English kind of Scotsman — than to grapple with, e.g., Graham’s logic, which forced me many years ago to realize that a syllabus in the Humanities might need to look different.

(It might also be worth a moment’s consideration that the straw man built from my desire to teach literature differently doesn’t really match up with, you know, the guy who was interviewed in Harper’s.)

The Hydra

A much trickier rumor, and the impetus for this post, is that I don’t give students feedback on their writing. That one pops up every so often, especially during periods of high student stress, and especially if I am absent for any length of time6. Using an assessment system like grade abatement dislocates a lot of student expectations, too, But one of the biggest reasons that this feedback rumor rears its head again and again, like history’s least-informed hydra, is that it’s true. Sort of.

Over the past 5-6 years, I’ve torn down and rebuilt the way I give feedback, using the same iterative framework I use for everything else in the classroom. It’s makerspace thinking, which is outlined in the syllabus I linked to before, and which is exactly what I ask students to do. Instead of trying to make the old system faster or more efficient, I started thinking about new systems. I began looking at how feedback works in real-world situations. I tested ideas, learned from their failures, and ended up with this:

View at Medium.com

That post, as it explores the different facets of the system of feedback here in Room 210, seems to dispel the rumor that I don’t give feedback. The problem is that it does this by questioning the very nature of feedback, including how a classroom is structured and where the onus for learning rests. So it’s complicated. It takes time to understand. Reading all of the ramiform hyperlinks alone would require more time and attention than most of spend on anything online, even when it’s demanded of us, and that’s well before we look at other connected and helpful instructional posts.

Still, Sisyphus is our mascot for a reason. Here are other connected and helpful instructional posts about feedback:

(1) Directional Discomfort | The “open hand” section is the key, as it details the more ameliorative aspect of the feedback system. The whole post is itself an example of feedback, too, and it’s actually an archive of performative feedback — that very teacher-centric, front-of-the-classroom, dark-clouds-gathering kind of feedback that I used to give. That stuff, like most traditional feedback, is more about the teacher than the student. It has its place, but I don’t think that place is at the center of the learning environment.

(2) The Enigma of Grade Abatement | One of many feedback posts — part and parcel of the course, to paraphrase Emerson7 — that concerns itself with the end of a grade-abated period of study. This one talks explicitly about how feedback works, what kind of agency students have in their learning, and how transparent the system tries to be.

(3) Molecular Learning | An extended analogy used to introduce the philosophy of the course (and to teach extended analogies by modeling one). That philosophy is centered on how an expert cook/writer/learner might differentiate instruction for students of differing abilities and interests. It also argues, like most everything I write for students, that learning is about flexibility and advocacy and taking risks.

(4) “Observe, question, explore, reflect.” | This offers a deeper look at how the feedback process functions during a “real” assignment, but the reason to read it is the essay on preschool crafts embedded early on. Dahl articulates why we should shift feedback away from product toward process, because it forces us to examine the purpose of the work. Are we after a perfect essay, made perfect through rigorous dissection and revision and resubmission? Do we want to act as editors8 who strip away all the authenticity of the writing until it’s just about what we think? Or are we after a process that can travel with a student?

(5) Tilting at Windmills | The TL;DR is the most important part, because it mentions feedback in two of the three basic components of successful learning. Work ethic is the first component, but the other two are about interacting with new forms of feedback and instruction, working with peers, and “goal-oriented feedback looping with the teacher.” In other words, feedback only works when it is a circuit. Break the circuit (e.g., by never talking to the teacher or reading instructional posts like this one), and the feedback dies — just like it would if the student didn’t read comments on an essay or zoned out during a lecture. The major difference in this course? The student starts the loop, not the teacher.

There are many, many more examples of developing and deepening these ideas, and for every generalized post (like this looped work on organization and self-awareness), there are dozens of examples of proxy, radial, and individual feedback during the class period itself — a period identified early and often as more important than any other part of the feedback loop. The interstitial stuff was created as part of an “anywhere, anytime” learning environment, but the idea of interstitial learning means that everything is feedback, or at least is intended to be feedback.

An Example

AP exam prep began in January with a front-loaded look at exams and our first practice essay. Three months later, students began their individual preparations through this final, organizing post. Part of that post and its in-class counterpart was feedback on multiple-choice data, including analysis of various patterns in the AP sections, and a drill-down discussion into the resources provided to each student for their last few weeks of interstitial prep.

That’s a lot of looped feedback and student-centered learning. It took a long time to stagger it out to students without overwhelming them, too. And it’s why I was able to dedicate an entire period on Wednesday, May 3, to one student and one student only. Her 30+ peers were left to their own devices, and after an initial conversation about what to work on, she was given feedback on a rhetorical analysis essay from 8:50 until 9:15. To continue the snapshot of Room 210:

She and I sat at a desk with her response to Question 2 of the practice AP exam we are studying. In front of us, we had her metacognitive notes on the writing process, the samples provided by the College Board, and my notes. We had other resources, including the many guides prepared for each section of the exam (here’s the one for that prompt), up on the computer screen next to us.

And then we talked. I marked up the essay, offering suggestions on universal elements like approach and style, and more specific feedback on blending quotations and arranging ideas through transitions of logic. The student took notes, asked questions, and clarified her next steps.

Certainly every student would gain something from just such a conference. Not many advocate for themselves as that student did, but that’s not surprising; what is surprising, at least to me, is that I would not want them all to advocate like that. Replacing handwritten commentary with conferences is functionally no different in terms of teacher-centered learning. There is a better way.

Because this student left our meeting ready to teach. She knows that her GAP score depends on her ability to transfer knowledge, to embrace the Protégé Effect, and to be collaborative and metacognitive; shifting the burden of feedback boosts her final score, boosts her understanding, improves her eventual performance on whatever high-stakes game waits for her, and boosts the understanding of her peers. If that instructional essay on feedback is the blueprint for what we do, this student’s efforts on May 3 are the product: Radial and proxy feedback that helps the individual and the group. Anything else is a ramshackle attempt to do the old thing more effectively or efficiently.

In the Wind

This is a lot to take in, sure. It’s a paradigm shift. If it didn’t require a lot of study and research and effort to understand, it would just be another flashy and ultimately meaningless attempt at “reform,” and our demand for simplicity borders on cynicism. Catchphrases and soundbites and aphorisms actively prevent education from evolving, in fact; it’s a complex system, and it takes complex thinking to fix it. Perseverating about “grit” and “creativity” and how students are staring at their iPads all day isn’t helping them to learn better, and neither is giving feedback exactly like teachers did in 1987.

What ought to stand out clearly, if you’ve made it this far, is the constant layering of meaning. You should see an ongoing, evolving conversation about feedback that is, itself, often a part of feedback. Everything is connected, and the mechanisms are all transparent; therefore, if you invest in the system, you’ll understand it, which is why there are so many students reading this right now and thinking, “This doesn’t apply to me,” without an ounce of Dunning-Kruger denial. Their understanding took hard work, and they know it.

Of course, the folks who need the information in this post often don’t read these posts, or don’t read them all that well. They’ll pick up on the occasional frustration or sarcasm9 and skip right over the good stuff. And that was a serious flaw — I knew I was preaching to the choir, but I kept singing like I wanted to burst some alveoli — until I started printing posts, making photocopies, distributing paper, and teaching the lesson in small groups. We’ve done that, I’d guess, 25 or 30 times this year? We’ll do it again with this one, forcing even the most reticent readers to grapple with this kind of flipped lecture. And that’s during a year when we had every intention of going paperless.

Students receive feedback, is the point. They create their own, too, which requires the kind of uncomfortable metacognition I invite everyone reading this to do — and that means everybody. I don’t know anyone, myself included, who wouldn’t benefit from looking with clear but sympathetic eyes at the person in the mirror. I welcome the feedback that comes from that introspection. I welcome all feedback, in fact, because that’s the maker mentality: to collaborate and innovate and problem-solve together.

There’s just one thing to keep in mind: You are entitled, as Harlan Ellison once said, only to an informed opinion. That’s an opinion informed by research and discussion and knowledge and perspective. You are entitled to that opinion. Opinions that are uninformed or misinformed or drawn from an echo chamber that just repeats everything you already believe? You’re not entitled to that. You can have one of those uninformed opinions, sure, but it has about as much worth, to paraphrase Ellison again, as a bit of methane in the wind.

  1. It was also my birthday, which I mention in order to help you imagine the scene. Candles are lit, the children are singing, but everyone sounds like they’ve been smoking for 50 years and looks roughly like a zombie that’s been through a 12-round fight. ↩

  2. It’s the existential piece that really gets to them. ↩

  3. This quite literally happened once. It’s amazing the perspective you develop while elevated on a stretcher. ↩

  4. I was never challenged to a rap battle, though. It feels like a missed teaching opportunity. Or it would, if I had actually been an underground rapper and DJ. Who can know such things? ↩

  5. Including Northrop Frye’s definition of it, which really ought to inform every so-called “assured experience” we give in literature. The canon can’t be unassailable, but it exists for a reason; and having an open mind about it isn’t some kind of pedagogical blasphemy. ↩

  6. Another snapshot: I missed an entire week one year because of severe recurrent corneal erosion, which means my cornea split in half. I couldn’t see for a week or so, and that recurred three or four times, which meant a system without this new kind of feedback would have collapsed completely. ↩

  7. Like using Edwards’ “Sinners” to talk about disappointment, using Emerson is a transparent attempt to model what reading and allusive thinking looks like, not just what it theoretically might look like if students were more like literature professors. In that same essay, Emerson wrote that “[t]he greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” So I use it. ↩

  8. I had a colleague once say, “I missed my calling as a copyeditor,” and that’s exactly it: We develop the skills we need, and if we treat student writing as an artifact to be cleaned up and presented, we become copyeditors, not mentors. ↩

  9. Which is being left in as another transparent kind of teaching-by-doing. Sarcasm has its place, and that place is probably when the writer has to explain something he’s explained dozens of times already to a group that has no business remaining ignorant. It’s like watching someone try to force a vinyl record into a CD player. That calls for some sarcasm. ↩

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Grade Abatement Triptychs

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

From “Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter.” In here, we’re hacking a different DK.

TL;DR: Panel by Panel, a Picture Emerges

Roughly every three weeks and fifteen class periods, you will earn a profile score that will be posted to Infinite Campus. This will happen three times each quarter. Your final grade for each quarter will be the average of those three profile scores. This will gives us a three-panel “triptych” of your performance, with each panel showing the body of evidence you produced in that time.

The protocol for scoring will always be the same:

  1. You will review the profiles, skills, and traits.
  2. You will review the basic guide(s) to self-assessment.
  3. You will review the handout on in-class focus and feedback.
  4. You will complete a self-assessment form, online or in class.

The form will always be assigned through Google Classroom. Your teacher(s) then review the self-assessment, their observations and notes, and any evidence you’ve submitted. Then an accurate GAP score is entered in Infinite Campus.

“The Salience of Those Grades”

There are some advantages to having more numbers, even though it is hard to argue with Alfie Kohn: “In fact, posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” In a perfect world, the system would not require numbers. In our world, Sisyphus always ends up back at the foot of the mountain, so we need to imagine ourselves happy.

One key to how students are assessed in a triptych model like this is the bolded line from a favorite quotation in here:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Postman articulates a sensibility that is present in nearly every iteration of this GAP system. If you look at one of the first guides, it’s called a “rhinoceros test,” which uses Dürer’s Rhinoceros as a metaphor for seeing the obvious picture in spite of any weird or inaccurate details. In that obvious picture, we look for how you learn, first and foremost.

But we are truly able to withstand the “salience of those grades” because a grade abatement profile doesn’t allow for any weird or conflicting details. We’ve ironed out the process so that every version of the profiles, skills, and traits — from this set of tiered notes to the annotations of those notes to the general syllabus uploaded in 2018 — tells us exactly what goes into a particular profile. Each score out of 100 points can be unpacked and parsed to tell a specific story about the student, with no need to adjust for any of the bizarre machinations of traditional grading, like the ones on display in this old gradebook of mine.

GAP scores have internally consistent logic. That’s why the threshold mechanics delineated in this tiered guide and further detailed in all current protocols are so critical: The profiles have been interpreted to offer a series of logical imperatives, all built around the interstitial and student-driven structure of the course. That means that we can determine a new GAP score for each student once every three weeks without needing an essay, report, or conference, although all current protocols are clear about what sort of student artifacts are necessary in each tier.

That protocol will be constantly rewritten to be a little cleaner and clearer, but the crux won’t change: Every choice a student makes during a particular three-week period counts for or against him, all the way up to the start of the day when the self-assessment form is assigned and collected. Of all those choices, in-class focus and feedback loop matter most, because those are the two most impactful kinds of evidence. Otherwise, the focus is on self-awareness and accountability — an end to the Dunning-Kruger effect and a crusade against procrastination and akrasia.

Outward Order, Inner Calm

In order to transform the GAP process from a teacher-dependent one into a system-dependent one, we need organization. There is an old Medium essay on this subject that might be worth reading, but it is course-specific and deals with an older version grade abatement. Still, it underscores how critical organization is to the other universal skills and traits of our learning.

How instruction is organized also serves as an example: When coupled to our various universal languages for learning and writing, the interstitial classroom creates ongoing, embedded, student-generated learning. It’s a feedback loop. If the student isn’t organized, however, the feedback never comes. There’s no Skinner box to punish and reward choices, so organization is the difference between agency and frustrated delusion over what success looks like.

There are always three central focuses:

  1. Interstitial instruction is always a central reading focus. These posts and essays are written so that they teach everything from new vocabulary to argumentation. That they are flipped and frozen online just makes them accessible anywhere; the real value is in how they are written.
  2. Metacognition and reflection are always the central writing focus. This kind of writing overlaps significantly with critical thinking, of course, which plays out in this version of the GAP protocol: “Remember that the most effective kind of metacognition is uncomfortable; it challenges your preconceived notions and expectations. The enemy of critical thinking is, therefore, a kind of Dunning-Kruger capitulation.”
  3. Individualizing the course is always a central thinking focus. The idea is to make the course work for you, which is why individual learning is emphasized so strongly in the fourth tier threshold mechanics in this guide.

I want to teach small groups and individuals about those central focuses. I’d like to workshop essays, discuss an author’s ideas, brainstorm about lessons and entire units… but I can’t do any of that if my students aren’t ready. I can’t serve as an expert if we don’t have a lingua franca between us, and that only happens if we’re all organizing our learning in the same way. The class, every weird chamber of it, must be sacrosanct.

As an example, look at the lessons organized and taught to juniors in AP and Regents classes at the start of the third quarter in 2016-2017, during the first three-week GAP period ever attempted:

These instructional posts cover the three weeks from January 30 (when the 1/29 Orwell post was read with students) to the GAP 3A date, as indicated on the course calendar for those students. Each lesson builds on the previous one, which is why there are so many hyperlinks and embedded posts. It’s a deliberate kind of systems redundancy: If a student misses critical material the first time, he’s likely to see it another dozen times throughout the year.

The skill of organization, for instance, is made the subject of lessons, which teaches and tests organization at the same time. Students must hone their organizational systems through the concurrent study of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” which also emphasizes a clarity in the loop between thoughts and writing. That’s how we end up applying Orwell’s logic to a student-generated essay prompt two weeks later. Meanwhile, students are asked to watch two videos on empathy and blame, writing a short response to both, which further reinforces the universal skills and traits introduced and studied and practiced elsewhere.

If all of these ideas have been inculcated, link by link and choice by choice, then the GAP scoring takes care of itself, with minimal effort and time needed to separate out the 7s, 8s, and 9s. Student choices throughout the three-week period are highlighted, sorting happens naturally, and then we rededicate ourselves to the next cycle of assessment. The work continues, unimpeded by the assessment cycle. The work is ongoing.