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Evan Robb says Grading ≠ Learning
140 Plays2 years ago
Evan Robb has over twenty years of experience serving as a building-level principal. Prior to being a school principal, he was an English teacher, department chair, and Assistant Principal. Evan is a recipient of the Horace Mann Educator of the Year Award. In addition, the NCTE Commission on Reading selected him to serve on its national board.
A TEDx Speaker, Evan offers inspirational keynotes, workshops, webinars, and ongoing professional learning opportunities on leadership, mindset, culture, impactful change, and how to improve literacy in schools. Evan has shared his ideas with thousands of educators at dozens of workshops across the United States and in other countries.
His first book titled, The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook: Practices, Tools, and Strategies for Building a Thriving School Community was published by Scholastic in the fall of 2007. His next book, The Ten-Minute Principal, was published by Corwin in May 2019. Evan and Laura Robb collaborated with Dave Burgess Publishing to write, Team Makers, which was published in August of 2019. In addition, Evan partnered with Laura Robb to write, A School Full of Readers, with Benchmark Education, which was published in January 2020. Evan’s newest book with Corwin, Aiming High: Leadership Actions to Increase Learning Gains, was published in February 2022.
Facebook - The Robb Review
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LinkedIn - Evan Robb, MBA
Amazon author page: https://amzn.to/3U18esi
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio. And I'm one of your hosts, Star Saxton. I'm another host, Emma Chapeta. And I'm Crystal Frommert. In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom.
00:00:30
Speaker
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. So get ready to be inspired as we dive right into the conversation with today's guests.
Guest Introduction: Evan Rob
00:00:54
Speaker
Today we are talking with Evan Rob. He has over 20 years of experience serving as a building level principal. Prior to being a school principal, he was an English teacher, department chair, and assistant principal.
00:01:08
Speaker
Evan is a recipient of the Horace Mann Educator of the Year Award. In addition, the NCTE Commission on Reading selected him to serve on its national board. A TEDx speaker, Evan offers inspirational keynotes, workshops, webinars, and ongoing professional learning opportunities on leadership, mindset, culture, impactful change,
00:01:31
Speaker
and how to improve literacy in schools. Evan has shared his ideas with thousands of educators at dozens of workshops across the United States and other countries. His first book, titled The Principal's Leadership Source Book, Practices, Tools, and Strategies for Building a Thriving School Community, was published by Scholastic in the fall of 2007. His next book, The 10-Minute Principal, was published by Corwin in May 2019.
00:02:01
Speaker
Evan and Laura Robb collaborated with Dave Burgess Publishing to write Team Makers, which was published in August of 2019. In addition, Evan partnered with Laura Robb to write A School Full of Readers with Benchmark Education, which was published in 2020. Evan's newest book with Corman, Aiming High, Leadership Actions to Increase Learning Gains, was published in February 2022.
Career Transition and Leadership Experience
00:02:30
Speaker
Welcome, Evan. Rob, it's always great to catch up with you. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your role, location, journey, or some interesting facts?
00:02:39
Speaker
It absolutely starts. Always great to catch up with you too and Crystal great to catch up with you also. My name is Evan Rob. I have recently retired from public education where I served the last 24 years as a building level principal. Prior to being a principal, I was an English teacher, a team leader, a department chair, assistant principal. And since I have retired from public education, I am now working in private education as the head of an upper school
00:03:10
Speaker
in a school that's actually fairly close to my house and interesting a school where I actually attended from kindergarten to eighth grade a long, long time ago. Along the journey, I've had opportunities to write several books and I've written five books, most recently two books for Corwin. And I have also had opportunities to speak about education, leadership, to educators in Virginia and really all over the country. So that's been a fun second kind of career that I've
00:03:40
Speaker
dipped into along the way also. I do live in Winchester, Virginia. I am happily married. My children are grown. And right now it is my wife and I and our two lovely little dogs, which occupy my time when I'm not doing the work of being an educational administrator.
00:04:00
Speaker
Thanks so much for introducing yourself, Evan. We're so excited to talk to you today. And it sounds like you've had such a wide variety of experiences across educational institutions.
What are Learner-Centered Spaces?
00:04:10
Speaker
So what I'm curious about is what does a learner centered space look like, feel like, sound like to you?
00:04:19
Speaker
But it's a really good question. And I think at its core, a learner-centered space is a classroom where an educator teacher has a very clear understanding of the individual learners that are in the classroom and is able to
00:04:39
Speaker
differentiate and balance the delivery of instruction and the learning to meet each student's individual needs. And so I guess so the opposite of a learner-centered classroom would be a classroom that it's founded on a belief that one size fits all and everyone simply has to move through the curriculum and their learning would fall along a bell curve.
00:05:00
Speaker
So within the learner-centered classroom, again, a focus on meeting the needs of individual learners. And my experience as a principal is teachers who are highly learner-centered also have a strong degree of personal efficacy. They believe that all children can become successful. And they tailor their instruction and they tailor their lessons to help them achieve that belief.
00:05:27
Speaker
Thank you for that.
Assessment Practices: Public vs Private Schools
00:05:28
Speaker
And before we started recording, this is Crystal, by the way, and before we started recording, you mentioned a little bit about how assessment looks different from your transition from a public education field to into private education. And I myself am a private school educator, formerly a public school educator. And I agree with you about how assessment looks different. I'm curious if you could elaborate on that and and how does assessment fit in to what you were talking about with
00:05:56
Speaker
the learner-centered spaces and where you are now. Well, one of the ways that it looks different certainly in the state of Virginia is private schools in Virginia are not accountable to the state standards assessments that public school
00:06:12
Speaker
teachers have to make sure that they're preparing students for. So that feeling of high stakes assessment, the tensions that high stakes assessment brings into a school and brings into a classroom and unfortunately to an individual child does not exist in the world that I'm working in right now. And I would say that's actually incredibly positive. I would say in general, there's
00:06:38
Speaker
There's more flexibility with how the teacher goes about assessment with the autonomy that teachers have of the assessments that they give in their classrooms that I'm typically used to within a private, within a public school. I'll give you an example.
00:06:53
Speaker
I've worked with, and I've worked in schools before where teachers need to record a certain amount of assessments every week or every six weeks. And assessments are recorded into a digital grade book and parents can have access to those grades, typically anytime that they want. And those elements of grading assessment do not exist within the private school that I work in. And again, I would say that's also quite positive. I would say one of the
00:07:23
Speaker
Challenges that I work on and I'll continue to work on is because assessment isn't as codified and in some cases curriculum is not as codified as it is based on my experiences within public ed. Want to make sure that you know if teachers leave or if teachers retire that we can carry on the curriculum in a way that gives honor to what has been there prior.
00:07:47
Speaker
So those are a couple of things that resonate with me. I'd be interested with your perspective too, because you've said that you've had a private school experience also. Yeah, thank you for that.
Balancing Teacher Autonomy and Equitable Assessments
00:07:59
Speaker
So when you talk about teacher autonomy, which was one of my favorite things about where I work, it's a blessing and a curse at the same time, because we have some teachers who are doing assessment that looks completely different than the teacher down the hall.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I'm curious as a school leader, how do you help reconcile that difference with the teacher autonomy that you have? Like some teachers might be giving the pencil and paper assessments that are more traditional with a number grade attached and some might be doing more conversational interview style assessments. How do you balance that as an educator and keep it equitable for all the students?
00:08:38
Speaker
I've absolutely noticed that. So that's certainly something that I've seen also. I have been careful to not go too, too quick to make people uncomfortable or to make people start thinking significantly different right away. Because one of the other challenges that I work with is since we don't have a lot of external assessments, the indicators that a professional may use to judge their effectiveness are different than indicators that they may use within public yet.
00:09:07
Speaker
So as an example, a public ed teacher may think they're a wonderful language arts teacher, but if their state scores keep coming back, very, very deficient. I'm not saying that everything, the be all and end all would be on the state scores, but I would say that there's an opportunity to reflect and perhaps reflect on one's practice. But that, again, that does not exist where I am currently.
00:09:30
Speaker
This year we're working on a couple key focus areas. One of them is differentiating and I am focusing on bringing PD into the building, article study, getting people to have conversations about what differentiating looks like in their classroom, creating opportunities for people to share and for people to dialogue. I have, although my school is small, I think that we have opportunities for enhanced communication and
00:09:58
Speaker
There's a lot of things that go on within the typical day of a private school, but creating opportunities for conversation or structured conversation on topics that can bring people together, I think are very positive assessment would be a really good example of that, but also delivery of instruction, whether.
00:10:17
Speaker
Someone delivers very traditional and traditional instruction may exist a little bit more in private schools and public. I'm not 100% sure. I haven't had a broad enough sense to be able to gauge that from looking at other private schools across the Commonwealth of Virginia or across the country.
00:10:34
Speaker
We certainly have some parents who grew up with very traditional methods of instruction and they like them and they want to see that continue. So trying to honor the past, get people to think a little differently, create opportunities for people to be more creative and to create opportunities for people to discuss and share are the avenues that I'm going down right now. And we'll see how that goes. We'll probably be in that mode for another year or two.
00:11:01
Speaker
I mean, you're right, it varies from school to school, even within public, even within private, especially from state to state. So I'm curious, I don't mean to dominate all the questions, you're just so interesting to talk to, but to follow up on that, you mentioned, you know, that public schools do have, I guess it's a benefit, I suppose, of the external indicator of a state test.
00:11:27
Speaker
to help teachers and parents see where their students are as far as the progression of learning for that school year. What does your school use as some sort of third party indicator of how the students are doing in that particular subject?
Importance of Non-High Stakes Assessments
00:11:43
Speaker
And do you follow standards? I know this is a huge question, so you can take any part of that to answer that question. We are not beholden to the state standards that
00:11:55
Speaker
guide public schools in the state of Virginia. We pay attention to them. And there's certain subjects that students would take in my school that we may pay even more attention to because they'll receive a high school credit for them. Algebra one, geometry would be another, and also Spanish year one and Spanish year two. So in those particular content areas, there's
00:12:18
Speaker
more focus on the state standards to make sure that we're meeting or we're exceeding them. If you could refresh me on the other part of the question.
00:12:28
Speaker
Well, I was asking about standards that you might refer to or third-party testing that you might use, and you're not beholden to the state test, just like it is here, where I teach. But what other indicators, besides the families knowing what they experienced 25, 30 years ago, what other indicators do teachers have to go off of to adjust their instruction?
00:12:54
Speaker
Well, let me just dip back for one moment and say that the state testing or the national testing that we give, we give the ERBs.
00:13:01
Speaker
and that's what my school has given for several years. I'm not 100% sure about how popular those norm reference assessments are in other private schools. I'm just simply not able to answer that. That will give us some indication about how our students are doing, but as you both know, it's a norm reference test, so it's not a test that is assessing specific content that was taught within the classroom. So a lot of the,
00:13:31
Speaker
judgments that teachers will make, you know, in terms of how kids are progressing through the curriculum are based off of, they've done it for a while. I have a staff that's certainly, I would consider a veteran staff here. And the quality or the performance rather, the kids show off of the assessments that they have created. And that is an area that is definitely different than in public ed.
00:14:00
Speaker
Now I would say one of the things that I'm interested in is looking at some other assessments that are not high stakes assessments that could give some additional information for teachers. So a language arts example would be Lexile assessment. So we are considering
00:14:17
Speaker
testing kits for Lexile that can help guide independent reading choices. It can help guide instructional reading. I'm hoping it can be something that we could potentially keep some longitudinal data on students to get a feeling or an understanding of their growth. And kits, of course, who are weaker, we can use that to be a little more diagnostic on the specific skills and strategies that they're exposed to, in this case, through Language Arts.
00:14:44
Speaker
I definitely appreciate your cancer here, Evan, because I mean, you know how I feel about assessment in general and formative assessment too, and having to, like part of the questions that were coming up for me is like, how do you reconcile some of those differences between the beliefs and practices of the school that you're in now and the ones that you know to work well from your various experiences from before?
00:15:14
Speaker
Yes, that is something that definitely has some challenges. What I can say and what I've seen, just if I was to be very general about private ed, is I don't see weaponizing of grades. Star U and I have talked about that before. That would be kind of under the umbrella of teachers giving zeros to really punish kids, teachers not allowing retakes, teachers
00:15:38
Speaker
failing kids as a means of increasing their belief rather that that would increase their motivation to learn. So those elements I don't experience. What I'd like to do is get folks thinking a little differently about how grades are calculated, how grades are communicated, particularly something even as simple as the average. And so average in grades is something that I definitely have teachers that do.
00:16:07
Speaker
There's some inherent problems with average and grades, and one of them is that the prior transgressions of a student can be held against them in the future if they've demonstrated that they have an understanding of the material at a later time.
00:16:21
Speaker
I think that standards-based assessment, and I know, Star, that's something that you're very familiar with, could have a place in my current school and could have a place in private ed, but there are some other challenges that I would have to think about that I wouldn't necessarily have as high if I was in public ed, one of them being parents have a fairly traditional mindset about grading, and not grading or recording grades in a different way would be,
00:16:47
Speaker
would be very different than what some of the parents whom I work with think about grading and how a child should be, how a child's grade should be recorded and even their perception of their child based off of the grade. Yeah, that's always challenging.
Challenges in Changing Grading Practices
00:17:05
Speaker
I think regardless of the setting that you're in, when it comes to changing grading practices and the community's reaction to those things,
00:17:14
Speaker
So to that end, what advice or tips would you give someone who wants to create these more learner-centered spaces with different kinds of grading paradigms and different kinds of differentiation? Where should they start? I think, again, another great question. There are a couple of things that I guess come to my mind.
00:17:39
Speaker
wherever a place is, any school, public or private school, I always kind of operate under the mindset that it took time to get to that place and it'll take time to move to a different place. So the whole mindset of change is a process, it's not an event.
00:17:54
Speaker
The other thing that I think is important, maybe incredibly important, is really working on collective efficacy of the school and personal efficacy of the staff members, making sure that if new staff are brought into a building that they have a high degree of personal efficacy. What I have found over the years is that teachers who really believe that they can make a difference in the lives of kids
00:18:19
Speaker
are much more open-minded to being learner-centered. They're more open-minded to being flexible with their grading and make sure that the grading is the best and most accurate communicator of where a child is currently as a learner. And they're just in general more flexible. So on the opposite of that, and this does not exist in my school, but in Crystal, maybe you've had an experience with this before in the past.
00:18:45
Speaker
I would imagine that there can be some schools where if the efficacy is not strong for the teachers and within a private school, the desire to differentiate may not be that high and the excuse to not differentiate may be blamed on accepting the students into the school. So in other words, what's not the teacher's role to differentiate, it's the school's role to make sure that all the kids that are accepted are able to do the work at a very high level, thus differentiation isn't needed.
00:19:13
Speaker
I am not experiencing that, but I would guess that that could exist in places. So for me, it comes down to really understanding the belief system of the individual, the leadership responsibility of building and cultivating collective efficacy within the faculty, and then providing opportunities for people to have conversations, for people to article study, to book study,
00:19:39
Speaker
to think about new things, to share ideas for new things, in combination with the administrator setting the tone and creating an environment where people can take risks, where people feel supported if they take risks, where changing instructional methods is encouraged, and people feel that it's safe. Because if people don't feel that it's safe to try new things, they never will.
00:20:06
Speaker
That's such great advice, Evan.
Recommended Resources for Differentiation and Mindset
00:20:08
Speaker
And something that you mentioned was teachers kind of like expanding their network and reading, having conversations with each other. So if you had to point to teacher who's trying to learn more about creating their own learner centered space, who would you point them to? Who are some people you'd like to shout out in this universe? I think the first place that I typically point people is
00:20:33
Speaker
teachthought.com, that blog site, I think it's fantastic. It's loaded with a tremendous amount of articles for people to quickly gather information. I typically like to just get information out to people in short chunks and to get them thinking, to get them asking questions, to get them reflecting, and to not feel necessarily overwhelmed by overly academic writing or something that's particularly daunting.
00:21:00
Speaker
I am a big fan of the work of Carol Tomlinson and the differentiating work that she's done. That is also someone who I always guide teachers for as we start thinking about innovation, me about differentiation. And then kind of in tandem with that, Rick Wormly's work, he has a book called Fair is Not Equal. It's a great book that I like to guide people towards to get them thinking differently about assessment and learning.
00:21:27
Speaker
And then I like to guide people towards the work of Carol Dweck, George Kurose's innovator's mindset to get people thinking about their thinking and how they can empower themselves and how they may need to think differently in order to feel free to try different things. So that's a lot.
00:21:51
Speaker
This is amazing.
Connecting with Evan Rob and Podcast Conclusion
00:21:53
Speaker
I know that we could probably talk for many more hours, but the listeners who want to connect with you, learn more about your work, where would you send them on social media to work with you, connect with you? Thank you very much for asking. I am reasonably active on Twitter.
00:22:09
Speaker
even though Twitter seems to be changing all the time. But I am at eRob Principle and can be found there and love connecting with educators and really enjoy my PLN and like to always work to expand my PLN. I have a blog site called the Rob Review Blog where
00:22:28
Speaker
I write, my mother writes, my mother's Laura Rob, and we have a lot of guest submissions from educators all over the country, primarily focused on literacy, but we do dip into other parts of education also. And you can connect with me on LinkedIn and on Facebook also. On Facebook, it's at the Rob Review, and on LinkedIn, it's Evan Rob, MBA.
00:22:54
Speaker
This has been fabulous. Thank you so much for talking with us today. And I hope our listeners gained a little more insight about learner-centered spaces. And I hope they find you on social media just to continue the conversation as well. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation with you all and appreciate the work that you're doing. You all continue to do great things for educators all across the country. And thank you so much for allowing me to be on your podcast.
00:23:23
Speaker
Thanks so much, Evan. We appreciate you. Thank you, Starr. Always a pleasure connecting. 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. Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com.
00:23:50
Speaker
You can follow us on Twitter at masteryforall and on LinkedIn on our mastery portfolio page. We'd love for you to engage with us. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or know someone who would be an inspiring guest, please fill out the survey found in the show notes. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.