I can think of no better way to start this newsletter than by interviewing Daniel (Dan) Joseph, my collaborator in this adventure and someone who’s been in the trenches working with teachers, school district leaders, and even states to build better systems for learning.
Dan began his career in education as a high school history teacher, rising to assistant principal before becoming principal at the James W. Russell School, an early elementary (PreK-2) school in Gray, Maine. During his eight years at Russell, he pioneered a personal mastery system that resulted in increased student engagement and academic performance. Educators from across the country came to see what he was doing.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Nancy: So Dan, I like to tell people that this newsletter is about ‘doing school’ differently. I wanted to start this conversation by asking you what drove you to take this turn, what does it look like, and how do kids and teachers benefit?
Dan: I started my career as a teacher of high school students who were disaffected, who didn't see value in schooling. This was in (at the time) a blue-collar community, a mill city in Maine. I saw there was an absolute disconnect between the students' view of education and their aspirations for any future. And that was not just for our disaffected learners.
Later, as an assistant principal in a neighboring community, I saw that we had students who were going through what they felt were rigorous programs of study, but they also had this mindset: They were there because they were supposed to be there. I don't know if they really saw education and learning as part of this bigger piece of this puzzle that they were putting together for their lives.
Now we see students who are graduating schools with four-year college degrees and not using them for what they majored in. Students are taking more than four years to graduate college because they're not adequately prepared, and that’s not even talking about the college debt that they may be accumulating.
I came to see that this system is really designed for a particular outcome, and that particular outcome may or may not resonate with that student’s or the family's vision for their future. So that was my first aha moment.
Nancy: The particular outcome being four-year college?
Dan: Four-year college, exactly. Later, after 14 years at the high school level, I became an elementary principal. It was here that I started to realize that there are teachers doing foundational and amazing things, working super, super hard for very little gain in terms of student learning. I asked myself, why are we working so hard for little gain, for such little benefit? It wasn't the teachers, it wasn't the students — it was the system. We had a system that perpetuated this model that's kind of driven by a one-size-fits-all approach. We would say all kids could learn, but we didn't have a system that met kids where they were.
Nancy: What did you decide to do differently?
Dan: So that was an evolutionary process. RTI came out — Response to Intervention — which, generally speaking, is a system that is designed to identify students in need of increasing levels of support called tiers. I was, like, all right, we're going to be able to meet kids where they are. This is going to be awesome! We spent two years doing paperwork — progress monitoring — but we never really looked at the instruction that they were getting. We were just looking at data that told us what we already knew; that the student was behind in their learning!
Then I learned about the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition and their personal mastery system and realized they were taking a systemic look at student learning. They called it “bleeding edge,” second-order change, deeper change. And we really started to look at the role of curriculum, the role of assessment, the role of instruction, and how our current systems needed to be taken apart and rebuilt around this model.
We wanted a student-centered school, not teacher-driven. We wanted teacher-friendly schools — obviously nobody likes to come to work in an environment where they don't feel respected. And I think that when we evolved into this model, my teachers re-discovered the love of teaching. They were teaching again. They were not just following a [curricular] program. They were teaching in such a way that they knew exactly what skill or scaffold of skills was needed, and where a student was, and how to engage them so that they would progress. We called this “intentional instruction,” and we measured student progress based on the impact of instruction. We did this daily with exit slips and with weekly conferences led by students. Seems pretty simple, however, it’s a challenge if you are not willing to look at the system and culture that supports the current system.
Nancy: So how did you reorganize the school to do all this?
Dan: We created learning pathways based on standards that we called “progressions.”Within each progression, we created a scaffold of skills needed to meet those standards. We targeted all of our instructional strategies to meet kids where they were — on grade level, beyond or below.
We created flexible groupings across a whole grade level. So, if I had four or five first-grade teachers, our lowest kids on a particular standard or skill were with my strongest teacher. And those 10 to 15 kiddos also had additional support funded through Title 1 or special education services. So I had a 90-minute instructional block with 10 to 12, maybe 15 kids in an area of concern with my best teacher and two other adults for support. That's how you reorganize a system to meet the needs of a learner.
And we didn't have a lot of behaviors to begin with, but I would definitely say you could walk through the school prior to this and say, “Oh, what a nice school.” Well, that was just compliance. After, you'd walk by a classroom and you could not walk by without wanting to jump in and say, “What is going on?” It was that different.
Nancy: What do you mean? What did it look like?
Dan: There's a productive hum. It's not the teacher standing in the front talking all the time. It's literally kids navigating resources, checking their learning binders to determine what they can do to work on their goals. Every student had access to learning opportunities that were targeted to where they were in relationship to where they need to be going next. They're actively going through the learning process at their own pace. And you could walk in and talk to any one of those kids and ask: What is it you're working on? Why are you choosing to do this activity? And how will you know when you've mastered this?
They could answer those three questions as well as, who's in charge of your learning? My kids would say, I am. And then you could say, well, what does that look like? And they can show you. What does that sound like? And they could tell you. And then, more importantly you could say, what does that feel like? And they will tell you: It feels hopeful, or, I have some more work to do. It's not, I can't do something. It’s I’ve got to figure out a way to do this, I want to level up; meaning go on to the next skill on the progression.
So that was my journey. It was coming to a place where I realized that —and I say this all the time — our most plentiful and valuable resource in education is our students. We need to start investing in them, not buying a program, but really investing in meeting them, having our kids articulate where they are, what they need, and creating a system around delivering that.
Nancy: How do you take a traditional school and move it into this mastery system where kids are in charge of their own learning?
Dan: I believe it's an evolutionary process. Competency-based education is the goal. Just in a nutshell, competency-based education is providing students a variety of ways and opportunities over time to demonstrate mastery. So, it provides equity of access and also it provides equal accountability. We're not lowering standards. We're providing different avenues and ways for students to demonstrate high standards. I think that, for me, is where we're all heading. But I think it's an evolutionary process.
Nancy: So describe that process.
Dan: In the districts I work with, it's a three to four-year process. The first step in moving to a competency system is what I call standards-referenced. This means the teachers understand what rigor looks like and the cognitive demand required of a student to demonstrate a level of learning that is valid and reliable across a variety of settings.
The next step is moving to a standards-based system. Now that we have high standards, how do we ensure that all students can navigate to them? And that's where you start to activate informal assessments and feedback so that as students are working toward the standard, they know where they are in relation to where they need to be.
Important to note that this is not grading, it is verbal feedback on areas of strength and areas of improvement. This feedback supports the learner in understanding where they are and what they need. It also supports the teacher in finding “just right” level materials and instruction that are needed.
Now you're pulling in curriculum materials, which will be used for targeted instruction, flexible grouping, whole group instruction. You're evolving from teaching chapter one, unit one, lesson one to putting out a particular standard or skill and then asking, how has this hit my learners? And what do I need to do beyond that? So that's still kind of teacher-centric, but driven by the learners' needs.
The next step is to move to personalized instruction in which students understand what the expectation is and what evidence they have to produce to show they have learned something and can even apply it. The students at this point are in the driver’s seat and they could provide that evidence of learning in a variety of ways. Possibly they could provide it in a variety of settings.
For example, at the high school level you can have a student who's really, really good in science or in social studies, and they produce a piece of writing that's about one of those subjects. They should be able to take that piece of writing that they were super jazzed about and hand it to an English teacher as an example of expository writing. Not for the English teacher to grade the content, but the structure of that paper. Now we're starting to get into personalized instruction and evolving into competency-based education.
Tomorrow, we’ll post Part 2 of my conversation with Dan. Stay tuned!
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