GAP 3B Feedback: Developing Systems

The header image in this post is from the RSA ANIMATE of a Ken Robinson speech on educational reform. In this particular section, he’s discussing how counterintuitive and reductive it is to separate students by “their date of manufacture,” as he says. Of course, he’s not advocating for kindergartners to work on the same assignment as high school seniors. It’s more about recognizing that learning is a little more complex than a factory-line model suggests.

I want us to think about this idea, which is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to fill this post with three sets of separate, class-specific feedback, instead of separating them as this site normally does. You are formally responsible only for what’s written to your class, but you now have access to all of it, which is a pretty clear suggestion to read all of it. It’ll show you how style and detail shift between audiences, for one thing, but it’s also an exercise in finding useful feedback wherever you can. As an example (and something else for you to consider reading):

Cooking More at Home Is About Developing Systems, Not Memorizing Recipes

The recipe community makes it seem like one-and-done type meals are the pinnacle of home cooking. And if you crack open a cookbook or browse a few food blogs, that’s mostly what you’ll see. But for people who don’t already have experience in the kitchen, this is wildly inefficient.

When I read that yesterday, my first thought was how perfectly it lines up with lifelong learning and teaching. We need systems that help us learn, not step-by-step instructions. Memorizing “recipes” might help us pass those high-stakes tests, but even then, it’s going to depend more on systematic skills and traits, not what you’ve memorized.

The point is that you can find meaning in almost any feedback, if you trust the source. Trust this one.

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To All Students

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GAP 3B scores will be entered within an hour or two of this post. The recent spate of bad weather upended our schedule, so you’re receiving these much later than anticipated. I also needed a lot more time to determine how to talk to you about your recent work, as you’ll soon see.

You have around two weeks until the end of the quarter, at least in terms of GAP scoring, and you can use that time to conference with me about your GAP 3B scores. But you need to take heed:

1. Don’t stop moving forward because you want to conference.
2. Do not come to a conference without doing your homework for it.

Your homework for a conference is to read the feedback below, dive deeply into your body of evidence, and put your thoughts in writing. Don’t tell me that you don’t understand, and don’t say that you disagree. For 99% of the potential concerns you’ll have, the following feedback is enough. Applying it to your current routine might require a conference, though.

Two other general points:

1. You are going to notice that many of the specific assignments discussed below were due on March 10, which was a snow day. This does not matter at all. The work was assigned weeks earlier, and you were given Monday, March 13, as a day to finish that work without penalty.
2. All of you are being told that this — this post, any photocopy of this post, and any performative lecture based on this post — is direct feedback, and that failure to use this feedback to improve will lower your next GAP score. This is true. It isn’t a guillotine, though, waiting to slice through your neck. It’s more like the bladed pendulum in Poe’s short story, which descends slowly, inch by inch, to cut you in half. The difference is that you don’t have to lay there and let it cut you in half. You can stand up and climb out of the pit.

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To AP11 Students

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As always, your focus in class and the quality of the feedback loop you created were most important. Remember to look at yourself with clear but unyielding eyes, as I do: If you were off-task, you were off-task. Make better choices during the period.

Next, you should consider three particular assignments carefully. I will not provide hyperlinks as I normally do; you are in the third quarter of a college-level class, and we have spent a substantial amount of our time honing your organizational skills. This feedback should be unnecessary in the first place.

#1: On March 10, you were instructed to attach all evidence of your ongoing writing process to an assignment first posted on February 13. After a month, each and every one of you should’ve had something to submit. Missing or insubstantial work here fits a lower profile.

#2: In that same March 10 assignment, you were instructed to tell the story of your month-long writing process, using an instructional post to guide you. You were further instructed to treat that response as you would any essay, developing and shaping it with the same skills we’ve emphasized all year. You were given an article to incorporate into that reflective and metacognitive response, and, again, you had a full month of work to consider. Missing or insubstantial work here fits a lower profile.

#3: Finally, you had a formal GAP assignment, which was given in advance of Friday, March 10. You were told not to complete the form until Friday. You were also given much more than just a form to complete. There was a close reading assignment, too, that compelled you to apply an article’s insight to your own learning process. If you did not submit evidence of this close reading and analysis alongside your form, you could not earn a GAP score of 9.

As you dive back into your own work on these three assignments, I strongly suggest that you track down that last article. There was a reason it was given to you a bit ahead of the scoring process: Many of you are overvaluing and overstating how invested and self-directed you are, and while I have empathy for that, you must hold yourself accountable for what you do, not who you think you are. You are treating that fourth tier of scores as a given. You need to grapple with the requirements.

We are going to slow down, at least in one respect, while we set up our test prep and lay the groundwork for the fourth quarter. That makes your margin for error significantly smaller. You must be better students over the next two weeks.

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To RE11 Students

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As always, your scores come down to how you spend your time in class and how much you invest in our instructional posts. If you want to know why your score is lower than you thought it was, start there. You are closer than ever to senior year, which is a pretty good indication that you’re old enough to have self-control. You have no excuse for being distracted and disrespectful. You never did — only three-year-olds do, and even that’s debatable — but it’s time to face your behavior with clear and unsympathetic eyes.

Before you think to debate this perception of your assiduousness and focus, your score also depended more than anything else on two specific assignments. Both were due on March 10, and both were the culmination of your work over the previous month. Missing, incomplete, or insufficient work on either assignment outweighed anything else you might have in terms of GAP evidence.

#1: On March 10, you were told to scroll down the assignment feed until you found the assignment posted on February 13, nearly a month earlier. You were then instructed to attach any and all evidence of your writing process. Regardless of your progress on the essay itself, you should have found something to attach. Failure to do so is a failure to follow directions, to be organized (a skill we have also been studying for more than a month), and to be productive.

#2: In that same March 10 post, and in the instructional post attached to it, you were invited to tell the story of your month-long writing process. You were given an article to fold into that writing, too, which gave you an approach to this reflective writing. You were then told explicitly to shape and develop this writing as you would any essay.

Look at what you submitted for this reflection, if you submitted anything, and ask yourself if it looks substantial enough to reflect a month of writing. Then remember that you were also given Monday, March 13, to do this. You were told that your in-class work on the 13th would count for this GAP score, too, and I think it’s important we recognize that many of you did not listen to that warning.

We are almost at the end of the third-quarter, and we will spend the next two weeks working in class on either Regents Exam prep or a personal essay prompt. You will keep to the Pareto and GAP schedule outlined in our calendar. Start planning how to demonstrate growth, in class and at home, with each and every assignment. If you don’t change your habits, you will fall into the lowest tiers of our system, where you will find scores of 60 and below.

If you’d like to schedule a conference about your latest GAP score, make sure you’ve read the instructions at the top of this post. Your teachers aren’t going to entertain baseless complaints, but we’d actually like to give you clarity and direction.

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To RE10 Students

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If you’d like to understand your latest GAP score, load Google Classroom and scroll through the list of assignments posted over the last month or so. Every missing, late, or incomplete assignment cost you. You shouldn’t need us to point out what is missing or late, since it is recorded automatically.

If you got permission for a late assignment, that was, of course, okay. If you were given an alternative assignment, that, too, was okay. For 90% of the missing work in this course, however, there was no extension or alternative assignment. You just didn’t do the work.

If you’re not sure how you’re missing work, let’s meet to go over your recent organizational efforts. Your teachers will help you sort through your current system and develop a better one. We can talk about procrastination and distraction, too.

If you are confused about why the work you’re submitting isn’t sufficient or complete enough to boost your overall GAP score, you should schedule a conference. Your teachers will show you anonymous work from your peers that is acceptable. For the most part, though, you can trust your common sense: If you have a lot of time to finish an assignment, you’re expected to use that time, and if you do genuinely finish early, you can always reflect, be metacognitive, and help others. It really is about effort, in the end.

Effort is also responsible for how you spend each and every class period. Your in-class focus remains the single most important part of your GAP score, whether we look at how you performed over three weeks or in a single day. Every time you are off task, whether you are playing a game or texting a friend or studying for a test or just staring mindlessly into the void, you cost yourself a higher profile.

This GAP scoring process is ultimately about things you can control:

1. You can stay focused during every moment of every class period.
2. When you’re not sure what to do next, you can ask for help.
3. You can submit every assignment.
4. When you’re not sure if what you’re going to submit is substantial enough, you can ask for help.

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To All Students

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If you are not working hard every day, completing every assignment, and asking for help whenever either of those responsibilities seems difficult, you run the risk of failure. Failure, for you, might mean a GAP 6, or it might mean a 60 on the report card; whatever you think it is, that’s the risk you face.

For those of you who’ve come to appreciate what this environment offers you, this is about navigating the exhaustion and distraction of the end of the year. It’s about becoming the best version of yourself. It’s about finding meaning in that NHS application. It’s about beating the SAT and Regents and AP at their own game. It’s about adjusting how you learn while you are pouring your energy into Mary Poppins. (Break a leg, by the way.)

For some of you, though, it’s about correcting the mistaken belief that the bare minimum in here will allow you to pass the course and stumble, blissfully ignorant, into next year. You have forgotten what “the bare minimum” really is in our classroom. This course builds on itself, so that your success grows exponentially — as does your failure. The evidence for a particular profile resets every three weeks, in that what you gather and categorize for a profile resets; growth or resistance are based on everything that came before, however, so you must always deal with the past. That should be obvious. How else could we talk about improvement in writing, reading, thinking, or any of our other skills or traits?

Perhaps it’s even simpler than that: Do the work. Avoid your friends, if they prevent you from doing the work. Listen when you are reminded to do the work. Ask for my help if you don’t see the value in the work, because I’ll either show you the value or create something else for you that is valuable.

Remember that this is a makerspace, and that gives you a chance to rebuild yourself. It’s a process that will take you a lifetime, but every day you can tinker a little bit more with the blueprint.

As always, ask questions in the comments here.