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Connie Hamilton says learning is a partnership
142 Plays2 years ago
Connie Hamilton, an education influencer, showcases a diverse career in impactful teaching, school leadership, and authorship. With over two decades of experience, she smoothly transitioned from teaching to roles as an instructional coach and district administrator. As a principal at both elementary and secondary levels, Connie emphasized innovation and high-quality instruction. Beyond schools, she's a celebrated author of seven books, sharing insights fostering quality teaching and leadership. Connie's dynamic presentations challenge traditional views, leaving a lasting impact and inspiring positive change in education
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Transcript
Introduction to Learner-Centered Spaces
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces Podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Frommer. In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom.
00:00:22
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This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts, or education at large.
Meet Connie Hamilton: An Education Influencer
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The learner-centered spaces podcast is now a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
00:00:44
Speaker
Connie Hamilton, an education influencer, showcases a diverse career in impactful teaching, school leadership, and authorship. With over two decades of experience, she smoothly transitioned from teaching to roles as an instructional coach and district administrator. As a principal at both elementary and secondary levels, Connie emphasized innovation and high-quality education.
00:01:09
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Beyond Schools, she's a celebrated author of seven books, sharing insights fostering quality teaching and leadership. Connie's dynamic presentations challenged traditional views, leaving a lasting impact and inspiring positive change in education.
00:01:25
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Please welcome Connie to our show today.
Engagement Methods: From Teacher to Leader
00:01:27
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We are so excited to have our first guest of season two on with us, Connie Hamilton. And now we can't wait to dig in. So Connie, tell us about a defining moment in your educational journey. I think a defining moment in my education journey would be when I was able to kind of look at teaching and learning outside
00:01:51
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of a classroom lens. As a teacher, I was so isolated to my students and my style of teaching and how they responded. When I became a building leader and looked at all of the different ways that students are exposed to their own education and how they're included and engaged, I didn't realize that there were so many different ways that students are engaging or not engaging. So that was a big eye-opener.
00:02:21
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I think when you're in your four walls, you just kind of think like this is just the way we do business. This is what teaching and learning looks like. And it isn't the same experience for every student as they go from class to class in year to year.
00:02:37
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I think that that's so profound and I totally agree with you. When I left the classroom as my primary place and got to be in many people's rooms all the time, I think that's when it became most clear for me as well. And you started to talk a little bit about those spaces.
Defining Learner-Centered Spaces
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Can you tell us a little bit about what a learner-centered space looks like, feels like, sounds like to you in
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any, you know, in the number of spaces that you work in now. Yeah, I think, you know, we throw around that student centered learning at that big buzzword that comes around so often. And yet, you know, we think what does that really look like ownership of learning? To me, it's when learners are inspired and excited to launch their curiosity and they're inspired to learn. And so it isn't just looking at what the teacher has planned for that specific day, but
00:03:34
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students are just really tapping into the curiosity. And sadly, that curiosity that's so natural for preschoolers and very young students slowly fades as they go through the grades. So when I was a middle school teacher, it often just felt like kids were going through the motions. And yeah, there might be moments here where they were excited about a specific activity or got curious about a single unit.
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But to develop themselves as learners, thinking about how do I learn best? Where are my gaps? How am I going to fill them? Where am I going to use this information in the future instead of pushing back and posing those questions just to the teacher? That's when you know that a learning space is really student centered.
Assessment as Partnership in Education
00:04:25
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And I'm also curious about assessment. I know this is a huge question that can take hours to answer and many books to answer, but how would you describe assessment in a learner-centered space?
00:04:37
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Well, I think it's just a partnership, right? Like if you think any time that you're collaborating or working with someone and you're looking to say, what does success look like and have we reached success? It's less about the student looking to the teacher to say, is this good enough? Which is what we often hear or see when students aren't active parts of their own learning journey.
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And so that role that students play of knowing what am I learning? How am I learning it? How far am I away from being able to really wrap my head around it so that this is learning that I feel confident to be able to retrieve and apply. That's where it's more of a partnership in those scenarios than it is just, I'm gonna do this for my teacher.
00:05:26
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Can you speak a little bit more to that, Connie? How do you counsel teachers to become partners with their students?
Reimagining Assessments: Beyond Tradition
00:05:36
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I think a lot of that work, Star, comes from my conversations with you. I get a lot of really great ideas from you as far as how to support teachers and even just partner with teachers to think about
00:05:49
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how to broaden assessments. And so beyond the work that I've learned from you about having authentic assessments and things that are relevant and having the students even think about what would be evidence of my learning is more about how do we get students interested in that in the first place? How do we get them to care about their learning and kind of make that shift into, oh, education is important and I want to know myself as a learner.
00:06:19
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And from there, I really think about how do we create opportunities for students to notice that they are learning and see that progress. I think of it as if you
00:06:32
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If you don't get on the scale every day or you're not really keeping track of your weight or your fitness, in six months time, all of a sudden it seems like, gosh, I put these pants on and they don't fit me anymore and I just don't even know how that happened. And so things change so slowly and incrementally. Student learning can be that subtle as well. So if we don't develop systems where students can track their progress and really be able to see like, oh, I am,
00:07:01
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I am learning and I am getting better at this or I'm getting more efficient at this or I do have a deeper understanding of it. If we don't create those opportunities for reflection so students can follow their own learning, then we really miss an opportunity to onboard them to the excitement of celebrating the success that they have because it's hard for them to notice when they're so close to it.
00:07:28
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And you know, you're totally speaking my love language right now. So, I mean, I kind of want to throw a little lob your direction.
The Power of Group Work in Learning
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One of your more recent books, Hacking Group Work, talks about how different ways you could do this, not just with independent learners, but
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you know, in group settings. And I know that many teachers struggle with assessments specifically in the group work arena. Can you give a tip or two to specifically creating these learner-centered spaces with group work at the center of that?
00:08:04
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I think it's a shift in the way that we think about what the purpose of the group work is. And usually when teachers are struggling with assessing groups, they're looking at how do I give a group grade and how do I use grades to motivate students to do their role and contribute and so on. And when we shift the perspective through the lens of group work is a way for students to deepen their understanding so they individually
00:08:33
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have a mastery or a comprehension of whatever it is that they're learning, but the group work is simply the vehicle that they're going to test out their hypotheses or they're going to explore their conversations. They're going to make sense out of what maybe isn't clear to them yet. And so when we think about how we want to assess, rather than giving a group grade or assessing individuals as a unit,
00:09:02
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As opposed to their individual learning, we have to make sure that the assessment assesses whether each individual student was able to pull information and make good use out of their opportunity to collaborate or have conversation with individuals. So like in the adult setting, it's sort of like if you have a task or an assignment or a project that you're working on,
00:09:27
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and you know some people who are really good at it and you tap into them and say, hey, I need some help thinking about this, how I should organize it or whatnot. And then you take that information and you still apply it to your own, you own it, you take it everywhere with you. So group work isn't the ends, it's the means to individual learning.
00:09:51
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I love all of that. I think our listeners will take away so much from what you're saying. And when you were talking about the partnership of assessment, what immediately came to my mind was a mutual respect that we have between the teacher and the learner. And when I say learner, I really should include all of us because we're all learners. But in that particular relationship of
00:10:14
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me being the teacher of the class and the students being the learners of that particular unit or course, that we have a respect for each other.
Starting with Learner-Centered Practices
00:10:23
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I can give you an example. I teach seventh graders, and I've told this story before on this podcast, but it's been a while. So I hope people have forgotten. But I remember seeing some of my students before class and asked them if they wanted to take their quiz today or if they felt like they would like to take it tomorrow.
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And they were baffled because this was so early in the school year. They looked at me and they're like, we don't know. You're the teacher. You tell us when to take the quiz. And I'd realized that they really had never had that.
00:10:54
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partnership. And now, of course, I know it's not always an option. I can't always say, you know, hey, our standardized test, you want to take it today or next week? I mean, that's not always an option, I know. But sometimes it is an option and we can let kids have a say in what's happening in their learning and let them have choices. So my next question for you, Connie, is what advice do you have for a teacher who might be completely new
00:11:22
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to this. Maybe they work in a traditional school. They've always had traditional style of teaching and running a classroom. How do they even get started in this journey? Well, I think just piggybacking off of what you said is just to begin with some choice. And if the teachers at the beginning stages of shifting more to a learner centered space are comfortable with the time flexibility,
00:11:46
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they likely are more comfortable with the mode that students are showing what it is that they learned. And so offering different ways besides your traditional paper-pencil test of how students can exhibit their learning and really speak about that. With the younger learners, I feel like it's so common and yet not noticed that teachers use their observations
00:12:14
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regularly in their conversations with students as assessment tools. And so broadening that, what do you see? What do you notice? How can you have that dialogue? That is evidence of learning. So bringing it down to the student level where you feel that the mode that they're discussing their learning or showing evidence of their success is in a way that's comfortable to them. We can bring students into what would be the best way you want to have
00:12:44
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about this? Do you prefer to write? How can we talk about this? And usually what you can tap into for a teacher who is right on the cusp of this is when they have the feeling or the experience of, I gave an assessment and I know the student knows more than how they performed on the assessment.
00:13:08
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When there is that mismatch when you just instinctively or you have evidence through observation of learning tasks that students have learned something but yet the assessment suggests otherwise, that discrimination between what they can do and what they show is that should be a red flag to say, all right, what is wrong with the assessment and how can I adjust the assessment to make it more accessible to students? And bringing students in on that conversation
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can take a little bit of the load of, I don't have to think about the methods, but I can include students in communicating in what way that they feel most comfortable in sharing what it is that they know and understand.
00:13:53
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Okay, Connie, so you just opened up a major thing here talking about ways like this mismatch, right? So we have got feelings about things and sometimes we recognize that the assessment we provided to students really didn't do the justice we hoped it would. How do you counsel teachers who might have that gut instinct but don't
00:14:18
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know any other way to assess kids and they still don't understand that observational data is as valid as a test, a common formative or a common summative that's been created for them, for example. How do you get them to start trusting their instincts and talking to kids about this stuff?
Trusting Observational Data in Education
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Well, the first piece is really,
00:14:45
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So let me start over because my computer just froze. So the first piece of what you said, Star, is helping teachers to have faith and believe that what they observe is data. It's observation data. So just giving that label sort of gives them permission to be, I have test data, I have conversational data, and I have observation data.
00:15:13
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just bucketing those different components. You know, as I mentioned, we do this at the early levels all the time. We pull a kid back. We say read to me. We listen to them read. We're taking notes. And all of a sudden, you know, it shows up in on a reporting component of this is what I observed or noticed students doing. We do it all the time. And nobody bats an eye or questions that a teacher is capable of taking a running record and observing how students read.
00:15:43
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for whatever reason we let go of that over time. So the first piece is just bringing that back. Sometimes it can be in the lens of just aligning it to a trip to the doctor's office, right? You go to the doctor and the doctor doesn't necessarily have to have a test for every single thing. They interview you, you describe your symptoms, they get curious about it. And a lot of times they can make a diagnosis or a pretty good recommendation just based on that dialogue. It's professionally accepted that experts
00:16:12
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teachers are experts, that experts are capable of using the observation skills that they have. If they feel like, ooh, I need something concrete, fine. Create a tool that allows you to take some notes that say, yes, the student was able to do this when I interviewed them with no support, the student was able to be successful with minimal prompting and support, or the student was only able to be successful with scaffolding and support. So now we have those three stages
00:16:42
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We don't have an artificial sense of, yes, the student can do it, but we scaffold the heck out of them. And now we have a document for teachers who feel like I need something tangible that I can look at. We just create a way for them to archive what it is that they're observing. And usually that first step into just taking a peek at it from that perspective gives the confidence and the empowerment and really validates
00:17:11
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Yeah, when I observe a student talking about science or social studies, history or whatnot, and they're able to describe something in great detail, that's evidence of knowledge and understanding, even if they can't write a five paragraph essay about it.
00:17:29
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And to further your analogy about going to a medical professional, I heard this on another podcast and it was saying, you know, if you're late to your appointment or you don't show up, you're not going to dock your cholesterol score by 10 points every day. Um, and I thought that's amazing because that's what we're doing to kids. Like we're, we're penalizing them because of something.
00:17:54
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executive function, they're late on something or they didn't write with the right color pen, but really that's what assessment is. It's looking at where you are with your progress and with your learning.
Separating Skills from Content in Assessments
00:18:04
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Does it make sense to reduce my score in a blood test by 10 points just because I showed up late? So I really liked the medical professional analogy. Thank you. Right. Or if you don't show up at all, right? Are you dead? You're dead. Flatlined. You didn't show up. So that just took a morbid turn. Right. Sorry. It's all good.
00:18:32
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You know, don't even get star and me talking about the grading and docking points and so forth, because then we'll be on this here for about two hours and everyone's blood pressure will be off the charts. But you know, I usually look at it from this perspective is that you taught a lesson and you're a good teacher. And so if you're very best guessed in the absence of concrete evidence of homework and assessment, whatever it is that you are using to gather data,
00:19:01
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If the student doesn't do that, if your very best guess is that your awesome teaching taught nothing, that zero is a value. So when you substitute zero in and say, I don't have any evidence of learning, that says something about how you feel about your ability to teach and what you were noticing in the classroom. So zero is a value. And if that's your best guess at how much students know, then yikes. Yeah, that's really,
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really well put. I never really thought about the zero as an indictment of my teaching.
00:19:38
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But I certainly have spoken to enough teachers to help them understand that it's highly unlikely that kids have absolutely zero evidence of learning, even if they didn't submit a single task that we've asked them to do, which is why those conversations that you talked about earlier are so important to helping kids, like giving them another opportunity to share what they know maybe in a different way.
00:20:07
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Sure. And we can all predict the pushback on what you just said, right? But we have to teach responsibility and so on. And so I think kind of going back to the question that Crystal asked about group work is
00:20:23
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That's a really great place to assess students' communication skills, their cooperation skills, all of those soft skills, and explicitly provide them with feedback about how well they're listening, how their questions help to clarify for the group or move them forward, or how
00:20:42
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They're flexible, thinking allowed for them, their group to be innovative or to look at things from a different perspective, but really highlighting those things as distinctly different than what they know about the content and separating any kind of feedback or assessment information that you provide to students in those two different camps. So my collaboration skills, very separate than my content knowledge.
00:21:12
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And that is often a good starting place for people, too, who are just looking to wrap their heads around how can we be more student-centered, but still feel really committed to holding kids accountable or making sure that we're supporting them as they mature into adults, make sure they have good habits.
Influencers in Learner-Centered Education
00:21:34
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So Connie, when you think about who you'd want to shout out in this work, specifically folks you think other folks should be reading, listening to so that they produce better learner-centered spaces, who would you recommend? Well, you. And I don't say that because you are my dear friend, but I mean,
00:22:02
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star the work that you do and the multiple facets that you look at assessment and really honoring and valuing students for the contributions that they bring. I wish my own children had had you as a teacher and I think that they would look at education a bit differently.
00:22:23
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And so anything that people could get their hands on by Star-Saxedine is gonna be a winner. I recently visited a classroom teacher in Livonia, which is outside of the Detroit area in Michigan where I live. Her name is Sarah Williams, and I don't know that she has a social media presence or whatnot, but I can tell you that this teacher that I had the privilege of visiting her classroom
00:22:50
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was so in tuned to what her students were capable of doing. She just let them bathe in productive struggle. She was so slow to intervene because she had confidence in her students and their ability to problem solve. And at the end of the lesson, the students were so successful
00:23:13
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And we were able to just celebrate and talk about, did you see this and did you hear that? And could you believe it when they had this aha moment? It was a genuine celebration that she gets to have every day with her students and they are celebrating their learning. And so when we have students who are so quick to say, I need help, I can't do this, that shift can happen with the right faith.
00:23:42
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and belief in our students so that they have the confidence to be able to take those risks and experience really true success. And as far as that, I think the other person that I would say is really thoughtful is looking at Nathan Maynard and the work that he's doing in restorative circles and social and emotional learning.
00:24:09
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He's definitely a thought leader in that space, and I look to him as an expert of how to reach some of the students that aren't as reachable in traditional methods that require a little extra effort to touch.
Connect with Connie Hamilton
00:24:25
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So Connie, where would our listeners find you if they wanted to find out more about your work online? Probably the easiest place is just my website, ConnieHamilton.org.
00:24:37
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Easy enough. I like that. Well, thank you so much for being on our show today. And I think we probably could talk for a couple more hours about all of this. We could dig deeper. But I really hope our listeners do go to your website, find out more about your amazing books, and learn about learner-centered spaces. So thank you.
00:25:00
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Thank you very much, Connie. And she has a new book out right now with Todd Whittaker and TJ Vary and Joseph Jones about investing in your best. It literally came out like last week. It's true. Check it out. Thank you for learning with us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes.
00:25:27
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Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com. You can follow us on Twitter at masteryforall and on LinkedIn on the Mastery Portfolio page. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.