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64: Disrupting the "Same Old, Same Old" with Peter Verdin and Bruce Mansfield
39 Plays5 years ago
Today we are joined by two fantastic educators. First, I will be speaking with Peter Verdin, who is a "movement engineer" at Future Public School in Garden City, Idaho, which is a tuition free, progressively minded lottery-based school. Essentially, Peter is redoing the way we look at physical education with elementary students, and designing curriculum as these students grow older and the school expands.
Then, we have Bruce Mansfield, is an instructional coach in the Bellingham School District in Bellingham, Washington. Bruce has operated a gradeless system in a traditional environment, and showcases the structure of his course, as well as how he has used portfolios and student letters to obtain evidence of learning. It's a great look at how we can spread the practice of gradeless learning to even more educators.
GUESTS
Peter Verdin, the Movement Engineer at Future Public School in Garden City, Idaho, who incorporates place-based and environmentally-focused learning into physical education; host of The Other Literacies; founder of Movement Engineering Project.
Bruce Mansfield, an instructional coach in the Bellingham School District in Bellingham, Washington; former US history teacher of 14 years; a pusher for radical change in assessment via portfolio and student letters.
RESOURCES
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgements
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Human Restoration Project's fantastic patrons.
00:00:11
Speaker
All of our work, which includes free resources, materials, and this podcast is available for free due to our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Matt Walker, Jenny Lucas, and Dan Kearney.
00:00:22
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
00:00:25
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Meet the Host and Guests
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Season 3, Episode 22 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:51
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:55
Speaker
Today we are joined by two fantastic educators.
00:00:58
Speaker
First, I will be talking with Peter Verdin, who is a movement engineer at Future Public School in Garden City, Idaho, which is a tuition-free, progressively-minded lottery-based school.
00:01:09
Speaker
Essentially, Peter is redoing the way that we look at physical education with elementary school students, and he's designing a curriculum that these students can grow into and older as the system expands.
00:01:20
Speaker
Essentially, Peter is redoing the way that we look at physical education, specifically right now with elementary school students, and he's designing a curriculum that will help them as they grow older.
00:01:30
Speaker
Then we have Bruce Mansfield, who's an instructional coach in the Bellingham School District in Bellingham, Washington.
00:01:37
Speaker
Bruce has operated a gradeless system in a traditional environment as a U.S. history teacher, and he showcases the structure of his course, how he used portfolios to grade,
00:01:46
Speaker
how we use portfolios to track evidence, as well as student letters to document everything that his students were doing.
00:01:52
Speaker
It's a great look at how we can spread and mirror progressive education with a traditional educational environment.
00:01:59
Speaker
To start off, here's Peter Verdin.
Peter Verdin's Educational Journey
00:02:02
Speaker
My journey to being a physical education teacher is interesting.
00:02:06
Speaker
I have a non-traditional route into teaching.
00:02:09
Speaker
So my undergrad is in sports management.
00:02:12
Speaker
And then, and that was at the university of Georgia where I played baseball, was drafted professionally by the Washington nationals, but really fell out of love with baseball and was like, I really, what I love is being in the weight room and I enjoy working out and,
00:02:29
Speaker
enjoy pursuing physical growth and kind of the challenges with that.
00:02:34
Speaker
So I went back, got my master's in sports performance at the University of Georgia.
00:02:41
Speaker
And out of that master's program was looking for jobs and the sports performance world is this really, I mean, it's packed with people willing to work for less and work more hours.
00:02:54
Speaker
And so it's really hard to find a job even with experience as an athlete and in a weight room.
00:02:58
Speaker
So I found this job at a school in San Antonio, Texas that was
00:03:03
Speaker
was intriguing because they were hiring both physical educators as well as sports performance coaches.
00:03:08
Speaker
It was a K-12 school and they were looking to partner those two disciplines to further physical education.
00:03:16
Speaker
I was like, that's awesome.
00:03:17
Speaker
That sounds cool.
00:03:18
Speaker
So I got on board, moved down there.
00:03:21
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with my then girlfriend, my now wife, and we got engaged while we were there.
00:03:26
Speaker
And after moving there, the principal's like, we need a lead.
00:03:30
Speaker
You want to lead?
00:03:31
Speaker
I never taught.
00:03:32
Speaker
I'm straight out of my master's and I'm leading a staff of seven other physical educators or sports performance coaches, some PE teachers who have like 20 years experience.
00:03:42
Speaker
So really trying to shift the mindset of what physical education can be as a new teacher with some people have some experience was really interesting.
00:03:51
Speaker
Fast forward a little bit.
00:03:53
Speaker
I had a stint in a private sports performance facility and then went on board to an educational service provider here in in Boise, Idaho, where I am now, where
Innovative Physical Education at Future Public School
00:04:04
Speaker
I.
00:04:04
Speaker
was developing physical education curriculum, developed a curriculum that was about 750 lessons, vertically aligned, progressed from kindergarten to eighth grade, along with a learning management system that went with that.
00:04:20
Speaker
And then I would train physical educators all over the country
00:04:23
Speaker
on that curriculum for a variety of reasons left that organization to where I am now, which is what I'm most excited to talk about.
00:04:32
Speaker
And that is at Future Public School, which is in Garden City, Idaho, which is adjacent to Boise.
00:04:37
Speaker
And Future is currently a kindergarten through fourth grade school because we're only a second year school.
00:04:43
Speaker
It's a public charter school.
00:04:46
Speaker
And our mission is to develop engineers of the community and of the future.
00:04:52
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And I'd say one of the biggest things that I think is really cool about future is our value of equity and diversity in a state that in a city that's like 90% white.
00:05:06
Speaker
that really doesn't value diversity and equity.
00:05:09
Speaker
That's something that our school does a really good job of thinking about.
00:05:13
Speaker
And really that's the student body that we want to serve both, you know, socially, racially, economically diverse student population.
00:05:24
Speaker
So it's a pretty cool school in that respect.
00:05:28
Speaker
So yeah, my title at Future is a movement engineer.
00:05:31
Speaker
which is, I'm sure dive into what that means and what that looks like here.
00:05:36
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's, it sounds like you basically went through zero based thinking.
00:05:41
Speaker
I don't mean this in a mean way.
00:05:43
Speaker
But like, if you don't know what you're doing, you kind of start from square one.
00:05:46
Speaker
And as a result, you develop some really cool things.
00:05:48
Speaker
Because you can think very creatively about it, you're not constrained by what everyone assumes that program should look like.
00:05:55
Speaker
And
00:05:56
Speaker
With that kind of being said, when you first started making these lessons and you didn't really have anything to go off of because you didn't necessarily have an educational background,
00:06:05
Speaker
Were you looking back to phys ed when you were in high school and middle school?
00:06:10
Speaker
And was that like a positive or negative experience?
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
00:06:14
Speaker
I was actually talking about that with somebody yesterday or on Friday about my experience in elementary school.
00:06:23
Speaker
And I really vividly remember my experience.
00:06:27
Speaker
physical education teacher who was from Texas and had this like really country accent and when we were in like health specifically sex ed some of the things he said we would just be like giggling under our breath but that for some reason is the main experience that sticks with me from physical education I wouldn't say I had a bad experience but I didn't have this like amazing experience either so I did look back to that but I think
00:06:56
Speaker
I agree what you were saying about that starting from scratch.
00:07:00
Speaker
Adam Grant talks a lot about that in his book Originals about when you, even when you think you have a good idea, scrap it and start over and see what comes of it.
00:07:08
Speaker
And that's really what I did coming into this new role.
00:07:11
Speaker
I had an opportunity to take the curriculum that I had created with me as part of a contract that I was going to continue working with that organization.
00:07:19
Speaker
And I was like, no, I'm good.
00:07:20
Speaker
I'm going to just start over and see what happens.
00:07:23
Speaker
And it's been really cool.
00:07:25
Speaker
Just kind of reimagining what it what it can be.
00:07:28
Speaker
I was almost expecting you to say that it was a bad experience because I don't know anyone that had a good experience with physical education at school, but I could be wrong, but maybe it's because you were athletic.
00:07:37
Speaker
When you were in high school.
00:07:39
Speaker
I know me and my friends.
00:07:40
Speaker
We were not.
00:07:41
Speaker
Pretty much the opposite.
00:07:42
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So I grew up super nerdy.
00:07:44
Speaker
A little overweight.
00:07:45
Speaker
Especially in high school.
00:07:46
Speaker
And I remember phys ed being the only place ever in school.
00:07:49
Speaker
That I was ever bullied.
00:07:50
Speaker
And the only place where I felt like physical embarrassment.
00:07:53
Speaker
Or just embarrassment in general.
00:07:55
Speaker
Was commonplace.
00:07:55
Speaker
So like everything from.
00:07:57
Speaker
The outfit, just like the type of activities because they tend to be very competitive activities where if you're not physically inclined is a place that you're going to struggle.
00:08:06
Speaker
It was just a really bad experience for me and most people I know just because of the way it's set up.
00:08:12
Speaker
And I think that kind of builds into then what it means to be a movement engineer because I think that your focus is less so on...
00:08:20
Speaker
playing dodgeball every day, I don't know what it might be, and more focused on the health and wellness side of things.
00:08:27
Speaker
I've used the words like reimagination, redefining physical education, like a physical education renaissance of sorts, because I think there are times and there are places where physical education has been quality.
00:08:41
Speaker
But if you look back at the history of physical education, it does have a sports focus back to the 1820s when physical education was getting started.
00:08:50
Speaker
It was because of sport and the NCAA's creation of sport.
00:08:55
Speaker
Whenever that was, I forget, 1800s, early 1900s.
00:09:00
Speaker
That really drove the physical education programs in higher ed.
Engagement and Curriculum Strategies in PE
00:09:06
Speaker
But what I, coming into future, I really wanted to think about engagement specifically because where I was at before the curriculum had a heavy sports performance influence, which was good in a lot of ways, looking at a real systematic way of teaching skills, these movement skills within physical education.
00:09:26
Speaker
But there was still a heavy sport emphasis in a lot of ways, especially in later grades.
00:09:34
Speaker
And this curriculum that I created, it had all of the perfect progressions of teaching these skills, but it often, because it was a scripted curriculum, it didn't have the individual in mind when I was writing it because I was writing it to be implemented at a variety of different schools.
00:09:55
Speaker
And so I really wanted to take those concepts of teaching skill, which I think are missing currently in physical education, and
00:10:04
Speaker
figure out a way to do it in a really engaging way and a way that met the needs, especially the interests of students that I was going to be working with here at Future.
00:10:16
Speaker
And so I think in a lot of ways I've accomplished that, but I think there's still room for growth.
00:10:23
Speaker
Sure.
00:10:24
Speaker
Talk to me a little bit about what it is that you do.
00:10:27
Speaker
So what would be a typical day for the movement engineers classroom?
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, so I think, you know, some people probably from the outside looking in would look at it and be like, oh, yeah, that's PE.
00:10:40
Speaker
But if you were to, like, pull back the layers of what I do, there's a lot more depth to it, I think.
00:10:46
Speaker
But, yeah, I mean, I teach kindergarten through fourth grade, so I get everybody twice a week.
00:10:51
Speaker
Kindergarten I actually get three times a week because their classes are a little shorter.
00:10:55
Speaker
So I get half the class on Mondays and Wednesdays, or half the school on Mondays and Wednesdays, half the school on Tuesdays and Thursdays for anywhere between 30 to 50 minutes.
00:11:07
Speaker
And I think what differentiates myself from traditional PE is the content and how I organize it, kind of my alignment towards a more long-term goal.
00:11:20
Speaker
I was actually drawing, I know listeners can't see this, but I was drawing like all of the influences on the content.
00:11:28
Speaker
And it was just like a really messy map.
00:11:30
Speaker
And it's been influenced by everything from gymnastics, which if you look back at the history of physical education, that's what the root of it is, is in gymnastics, especially from this like European influence.
00:11:42
Speaker
But then things like risky play are probably, I mean, if you were to come in, you would see
00:11:48
Speaker
Like tomorrow we're going, we have these woods that are adjacent to the school, a green belt because there's the river, the Boise river right here.
00:11:55
Speaker
And we go out into the woods and it's this semi structured because like I'm kind of driving where we are and what we're doing while we're there.
00:12:03
Speaker
But it's a lot of less structured play that's happening.
00:12:08
Speaker
Um,
00:12:09
Speaker
Risky play, like you'll come out and you'll see like our focus these next couple of days, cause I don't have anything in the gym to hang or climb on is hanging and climbing.
00:12:18
Speaker
So like kids are going to be climbing trees, um, doing stuff like that.
00:12:23
Speaker
So real and risky play has really played an influence in it.
00:12:26
Speaker
Natural movement.
00:12:27
Speaker
So like move Nat is an organization that's really popularized that, but just natural movement in the sense of like these fundamental human movements that we do.
00:12:36
Speaker
And, um,
00:12:37
Speaker
And that's everything from wrestling and rough and tumble play, which is part of risky play to like balancing and hanging and climbing.
00:12:45
Speaker
Like I just mentioned some parkour influences.
00:12:49
Speaker
There is still some of that youth sport in there because that is what some kids like and enjoy jujitsu Brazilian jujitsu.
00:12:57
Speaker
I did.
00:12:58
Speaker
karate growing up and that was awesome i have good experiences there but really i'm not an expert in it but see a lot of benefits in some of the rough and tumble play games that are within jiu-jitsu long-term athletic development and all the social emotional learning stuff that can be embedded within this pursuit of physical literacy um
00:13:23
Speaker
All of that comes into the content.
00:13:25
Speaker
Going back to your question, sorry, I'm on a little bit of a bird walk.
00:13:29
Speaker
But yeah, and so you walk in and it can be a range of any of those things happening or we could not even be in the gym with the outside climbing trees.
00:13:39
Speaker
What's the parent and student reception to that?
00:13:42
Speaker
Like, are they worried because that I mean, at least like the common American like journalist perspective would have you think that parents are freaking out that kids are doing anything that might be risky?
00:13:54
Speaker
Is it accepted?
00:13:55
Speaker
Are people going along with it?
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question.
00:13:59
Speaker
I'd say I can count on one hand on like two three fingers the parents that are not okay with it and specifically just because of the river worried about water safety Idaho's top five for drownings in the country so.
00:14:15
Speaker
But.
00:14:17
Speaker
most parents love it.
00:14:18
Speaker
They, um, I have parents who frequently send me pictures, text me pictures of their kids climbing trees out by the river where we go.
00:14:29
Speaker
Um, you know, I, we just had a share the love event and we did some stuff in the gym.
00:14:32
Speaker
Parents are coming up to me and like thanking me for taking the kids out there and how important it is for them to be outside.
00:14:38
Speaker
And, um, the kids are showing them some of the wrestling games that we do and, um, within our movement class.
00:14:45
Speaker
So,
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, the parent reception, but that's also something I've been really intentional about is informing parents about what we're doing and why we're doing it and why it's important and engaging them.
00:14:59
Speaker
Then let's kind of shift over to students that maybe might struggle more in physical education with the obesity epidemic, but also just maybe are not prone to physical activity in some way, shape or
Building Inclusive PE Culture
00:15:11
Speaker
form.
00:15:11
Speaker
How do you then work with those students?
00:15:14
Speaker
And do you find that then just taking them outside or doing kind of like these alternative things like jujitsu help them learn in different ways?
00:15:21
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
00:15:22
Speaker
I mean, the outside, especially like
00:15:26
Speaker
the majority of students, not more than the majority, like almost all students really thrive out there.
00:15:31
Speaker
Everyday kids are coming up to me being like, are we going outside into the woods today?
00:15:35
Speaker
Like it's this natural environment where I think there's just like some innate
00:15:42
Speaker
human desire to be in the woods and doing stuff.
00:15:47
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, there's still some of the struggle, especially when we do some traditional sports stuff that interests some students, but not others.
00:15:56
Speaker
But I think really it's about creating a culture and creating an inclusive culture where
00:16:01
Speaker
people aren't shamed or meant made to feel uncomfortable because they're not good at something.
00:16:06
Speaker
And that's something that I've been really intentional about is building those relationships with students.
00:16:11
Speaker
And I'd say is one of my strengths is building really meaningful relationships with students so that they know that they're accepted.
00:16:20
Speaker
They're loved when they come into the gym.
00:16:23
Speaker
Um,
00:16:24
Speaker
There isn't, it's not about how good you are now and whether you can do something or not.
00:16:30
Speaker
It's really just about finding a joy for movement and this pursuit of skill and getting better at it and learning and that everybody is respected and accepted within our movement class.
00:16:45
Speaker
But that to be said, there is, you'll come in at any point in time and there are still students who aren't 100% engaged for a variety of reasons.
00:16:54
Speaker
And a lot of times it has nothing to do with movement.
00:16:56
Speaker
It has to do with, you know, we have some challenging home lives or they didn't eat, you know, dinner or breakfast, like stuff like that.
00:17:04
Speaker
So I still am up against some of the same challenges of a traditional PE teacher, but
00:17:10
Speaker
I think just creating a culture of acceptance and is in building that relationship as the foundation is kind of what I see as most important as a teacher, better yet, just a physical educator.
00:17:22
Speaker
Of course.
00:17:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that lack of food is obviously a huge hurdle to overcome.
00:17:26
Speaker
And it's something that requires
00:17:28
Speaker
Resources really beyond what the school can offer in most cases.
00:17:32
Speaker
But something that I would imagine you might cover, they might be a little bit too young, but I guess it could affect K-4, would be like food choice, like nutrition.
00:17:41
Speaker
Do you get into like the health side of things beyond just moving around?
00:17:44
Speaker
So like how they choose to feed themselves or how they think about food?
00:17:48
Speaker
That's a great question.
00:17:50
Speaker
I would say, I mean, this is my first year at the school, second year as a school.
00:17:53
Speaker
That's not something that we've gotten into yet.
00:17:57
Speaker
I also have the role of wellness director as part of the federal school lunch program.
00:18:03
Speaker
And so we're thinking about what does that look like year two?
00:18:07
Speaker
So yeah, within a primary ed setting, usually you don't have health.
00:18:11
Speaker
It's embedded within the classroom setting, science or whatnot.
00:18:16
Speaker
So
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm thinking about what does that look like?
00:18:18
Speaker
How do we do that?
00:18:20
Speaker
And how do we do that?
00:18:21
Speaker
Well, I think one thing that does really impact, especially with our student population, is the social emotional side of things.
00:18:29
Speaker
And so when you do get into some sort of competitive thing and somebody's frustrated, like how do you deal with that without just
00:18:36
Speaker
getting upset and wanting to go sit out.
00:18:39
Speaker
So I'd say that is the biggest hurdle is when it comes to engagement and building that culture is building also those social emotional skills to deal with failure when it comes and deal with competitiveness.
00:18:54
Speaker
So, yeah.
Health and Wellness in Education
00:18:55
Speaker
So I started coaching esports this semester, which has been honestly awesome.
00:19:01
Speaker
We're the largest esports organization in Ohio at this like little tiny small school.
00:19:06
Speaker
But part of our curriculum that they hand down to us from this league is calorie counting, food choice, exercise, step counting.
00:19:13
Speaker
Like all that kind of stuff.
00:19:15
Speaker
It's really intense.
00:19:16
Speaker
Like it's about health and wellness, not about competitiveness or sports.
00:19:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think I mean, that whole idea of food choice and calories and steps and fitness is an interesting one, because that is a trend in physical education.
00:19:29
Speaker
And I in a lot of ways, I see it as like a harmful trend, because we see this obesity epidemic,
00:19:36
Speaker
within the United States, especially within children.
00:19:38
Speaker
And our solution for it has been fitness and calorie counting and in a lot of ways trying to push down adult ideals on how to be healthy.
00:19:50
Speaker
And it doesn't work.
00:19:53
Speaker
So this shift to moderate to vigorous physical activity, which is what the Society of Health and Physical Education promotes a 50% MVPA per class.
00:20:03
Speaker
Most of the research doesn't support that as an intervention for obesity within children.
00:20:10
Speaker
And it really comes from, I think, a lot of the adult ideals.
00:20:13
Speaker
Like you look around with, you know, if adults want to lose weight, what do they do?
00:20:17
Speaker
Like they go run on a treadmill or they go outside and they start counting their calories and then they want to try and calories in versus calories out.
00:20:25
Speaker
And so we've started to try to impose that on children rather than just saying, okay,
00:20:32
Speaker
Chris Steininger, We're going to live a healthy life by making really good food choices and we're going to live a healthy life by finding a joy in being physically active, whatever that means for you.
00:20:44
Speaker
Chris Steininger, Because most people they don't like you look at gym dropout rates within adults and it's pretty high go in January and then go back in June and and see the difference of a gym so.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's one of the interesting trends in physical education.
00:20:59
Speaker
Now you got my mind racing.
00:21:01
Speaker
I got to reconfigure our own program because I don't know any better.
00:21:05
Speaker
Let me ask the expert.
00:21:06
Speaker
If you have students then that are a little older, let's say you're like a high school physical education teacher and you have students that are struggling with their weight and want to lose it.
00:21:16
Speaker
What advice would you then tell those educators to provide to their students to help them kind of realize their goals of losing weight?
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a great question.
00:21:27
Speaker
And that's something I get like goosebumps talking about because I'm super passionate about.
00:21:31
Speaker
We've tied food and physical activity together because they're related.
00:21:36
Speaker
But a lot of times what we do is we're like,
00:21:39
Speaker
We use one as a punishment for the other or one as a reward for the other.
00:21:43
Speaker
Like, oh, I just ran six miles.
00:21:45
Speaker
Like I'm going to go reward myself with a cheeseburger or I just ate a cheeseburger.
00:21:50
Speaker
So I'm going to go punish myself with running six miles because I need to burn that off.
00:21:55
Speaker
And in a lot of ways, it creates this push and pull of an unhealthy relationship with physical activity and food, rather than saying, like, I'm going to make good choices.
00:22:05
Speaker
And if I decide to indulge on a cheeseburger once every so often, like, I'm not going to go and punish myself with physical activity.
00:22:13
Speaker
Like, I'm going to be physically active because I enjoy it.
00:22:17
Speaker
And so that doesn't really like that's not like a prescription of like this is what a program should look like.
00:22:21
Speaker
But it's like, how do we inspire this passion and joy, just like any other subject?
00:22:28
Speaker
If you think about reading, like we can either say you need to learn how to read and you need to learn these topics.
00:22:35
Speaker
So we're going to read X number of books every single week.
00:22:38
Speaker
Or like, how do we inspire a love and joy of reading so that they want to keep reading into the future?
00:22:45
Speaker
I think that's the difference in mindset of is, I guess, what I'm trying to explain.
00:22:50
Speaker
I don't know if that makes any sense.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, I think that makes perfect sense is that the same is that concept of if you give extrinsic rewards for reading, you're going to have a lot of kids that really like pizza as in because they always get pizza rewards for reading X number of books.
00:23:05
Speaker
And over time, you just start taking shortcuts because it's easier to seek out that reward instead of focus on the thing that is that you're doing.
00:23:13
Speaker
I'm kind of like,
00:23:15
Speaker
gears are turning here trying to figure out what that would look like in a program outside of, I guess, just exposing students to a lot of different types of activities that they could do and then hoping that one sticks outside of the school day.
00:23:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:28
Speaker
And that's kind of, that's a, that's a part of this program and a key element is this exposure to a variety of activities.
00:23:36
Speaker
So there's a trend in the long-term athletic development, um, kind of discipline of this approach is, uh, multi-sport sampling.
00:23:45
Speaker
And so I've kind of re-termed it to multi-activity sampling within our movement class.
00:23:51
Speaker
And my hope is that every trimester,
00:23:54
Speaker
kind of grade level bands.
00:23:56
Speaker
So like K one and then two, four is how I'm separating it right now, but it eventually it'll just be two grade level bands are experiencing different activities every trimester.
00:24:07
Speaker
So not next week, but the week after we're launching a skateboarding, um,
00:24:14
Speaker
Sampling of activity and like you want to talk about engaging kids that normally wouldn't be engaged.
00:24:20
Speaker
We did a skateboarding club in the fall as kind of so I've partnered with an organization, a school, a high school, which I think fits really well with the human restoration projects mission, one stone.
00:24:32
Speaker
So we, I partnered with their project, which is like how they started was through this philanthropic arm of their organization of doing good in the community.
00:24:41
Speaker
And we've partnered with them and the project is inspiring a joy of movement and we're doing it through skateboarding.
00:24:48
Speaker
So we're using the design thinking process to launch this project.
00:24:54
Speaker
And we kind of started the iteration through a skateboarding club.
00:24:59
Speaker
And it's funny because I was recruiting students into the skateboarding club and I had this waiting list that was like triple what I could support but.
00:25:08
Speaker
The students who are in it like one is like you're you're gamer like he doesn't ever do anything physically active and half the time he was like laying on his stomach on the skateboard riding around but like he was out being active enjoying.
00:25:21
Speaker
being with friends, which was really cool.
00:25:24
Speaker
And then we had a lot of our students like who are your, you know, special education students who were like, man, like you,
00:25:32
Speaker
you have a lot of these challenging behavior students in this club, like, do you think you'll be all right?
00:25:36
Speaker
And I was like, oh, they'll be fine.
00:25:38
Speaker
And they're just so engaged in what they're doing, never had any issues.
00:25:42
Speaker
But anyways, so we're launching this skateboard sampling.
00:25:46
Speaker
In the fall we did, or in the winter, we did some snowshoeing with third and fourth grade.
00:25:51
Speaker
We went up to Bogus Basin.
00:25:53
Speaker
We did golf with everybody in the fall as well.
00:25:58
Speaker
Younger kids, I'm working on jujitsu and parkour.
00:26:02
Speaker
So sampling trimesterly activities to expose them to a variety of things is kind of a key component to this movement program, long story short.
00:26:11
Speaker
What is your thought process on
00:26:15
Speaker
Another trend that at least I've seen in physical education, which is a movement towards entirely individualized phys ed.
00:26:20
Speaker
So kind of nixing the gym, like as in the like NBA style gym, like the old school gym in lieu of the adult gym, like having like exercise equipment, Pilates, you know, like all the different things that you could do.
00:26:34
Speaker
And then you just kind of log what you did.
00:26:36
Speaker
Like there isn't really an emphasis on any team sport whatsoever.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, I would say I would be fully against like putting, you know, a bunch of machines in the gym and saying log your minutes on a treadmill.
00:26:49
Speaker
I think that's kind of the opposite of what I would promote.
00:26:53
Speaker
But I think at the high school level specifically, there is a
00:26:58
Speaker
a huge benefit to like a project-based learning approach to physical education where students are designing their experience in physical education, because that's what our goal is, is to set those students up for success once they leave high school and being physically active.
00:27:15
Speaker
Now, what that looks like, I, I, you know, the, the whole American movement to, and really world movement of structured physical activity to again, burn calories, I think is not,
00:27:27
Speaker
what I would point kids to.
00:27:30
Speaker
But, you know, designing a experience where they're learning a specific skill that they would want to pursue.
00:27:38
Speaker
Like, you know, I chose two years ago to start learning how to river surf on our standing wave here in Boise, something I had never done.
00:27:48
Speaker
So I started researching it and, you know, understanding the equipment.
00:27:51
Speaker
And I think that's where you can then integrate some of the other subjects in a project-based learning approach.
00:27:57
Speaker
Like this skateboarding project is going to be integrated within our computer science, which is really like a design class where they're going to design a cardboard skate park and do stop motion video to teach the skills that they're learning in movement.
00:28:10
Speaker
So then integrating, you know,
00:28:13
Speaker
you know, some of these other disciplines.
00:28:14
Speaker
But yeah, I think that individualized approach in older grades is something that's intriguing.
00:28:20
Speaker
High school, I taught that one year in San Antonio, ninth grade, but that was a while ago.
00:28:26
Speaker
And my mindset has shifted a lot since then.
00:28:29
Speaker
So high school is definitely not my expertise, but it is an interesting concept for sure.
00:28:36
Speaker
I like the idea too of multimodal learning phys ed through different forms of
00:28:42
Speaker
literature that maybe don't kids don't normally associate with his ed.
00:28:45
Speaker
So like when I can think off the top of my head, I teach photography.
00:28:49
Speaker
And we do a lot of photography outings where we walk downtown, or walking downtown, or even like walking through like the park and getting into like the hiking side of things.
00:28:57
Speaker
That's it's grueling.
00:28:59
Speaker
That's like a five to 10 mile endeavor.
00:29:01
Speaker
Get like some of like the free solo videography, you know, like that specialize in rock climbing video.
00:29:07
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of ways to integrate movement into everything.
00:29:10
Speaker
And
00:29:11
Speaker
that's really my end goal and vision for what this program could be is like
00:29:17
Speaker
we're doing these projects in the classroom that integrate movement in some sort of way, rather than it being this standalone class.
00:29:26
Speaker
But going back to your question about the design of the gym, right now at our school, we're actually partnered with the Boys and Girls Club in Garden City.
00:29:34
Speaker
So it is a very traditional looking gym.
00:29:36
Speaker
But if I could do it, I'd probably have an open space that's some sort of rubber flooring.
00:29:44
Speaker
as half the gym and then the other half of the gym you'd see like a parkour uh type gym where you could do all kinds of different stuff of jumping and balancing and um kids love that all kids love that regardless of ability level there's something that they can i imagine like first graders doing like assassin's creed uh like jumping off the buildings and stuff exactly yeah exactly uh so peter what
00:30:09
Speaker
resources would you want people to go to?
00:30:11
Speaker
What would you want to share with them?
00:30:13
Speaker
What would kind of be your final statement?
Movement Education Resources
00:30:16
Speaker
Well, I'm in the process of just launching a resource, a kind of a curriculum and some resources to go with it.
00:30:24
Speaker
It's movement engineering project, movementengineeringproject.com.
00:30:28
Speaker
And on there, I have like suggested resources, which are some things that have really heavily influenced me.
00:30:34
Speaker
And so that's a great place to look.
00:30:35
Speaker
But yeah,
00:30:37
Speaker
Again, long term athletic development, youth physical development models are some things that have really influenced me.
00:30:45
Speaker
The constraints that approach and ecological dynamics, something we haven't we didn't really talk about today is another thing that really has influenced me with regards to skill development and how to teach skill to kids and to do it in a really engaging way.
00:31:00
Speaker
digging into risky play.
00:31:02
Speaker
Mariana Bursoni is somebody who does a lot of research on that.
00:31:06
Speaker
There's the Real Play Coalition.
00:31:09
Speaker
Move Nat is an organization that talks about natural movement, really great resource.
00:31:15
Speaker
All those things are linked on that movement engineering project website.
00:31:20
Speaker
So, and I hope to be launching some stuff this summer.
00:31:27
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast so far.
00:31:30
Speaker
If you are interested in diving deeper into progressive education or you want to just support the Human Restoration Project in some way, I encourage you to visit humanrestorationproject.org to learn more about our Patreon, which is the way that you can support us, as well as see all of our fantastic resources, materials, and other podcasts to share.
00:31:50
Speaker
Now, back to our discussion.
Bruce Mansfield's Transition to Instructional Coaching
00:31:54
Speaker
Next up is Bruce Mansfield, an instructional coach and former U.S. history teacher in the Bellingham School District.
00:32:01
Speaker
I spent 14 years at the classroom teacher, and I spent the last two and a half years, well, I'm in my third year now as an instructional coach at an alternative high school and a comprehensive high school.
00:32:10
Speaker
So I'm split between two buildings this year for the first time in my career.
00:32:14
Speaker
Basically, the whole prompt for you becoming an instructional coach was based around
00:32:19
Speaker
Kind of like this move towards a almost a progressive style system for assessment.
00:32:25
Speaker
You know, people said that if you leave the classroom, it gives you a really unique opportunity to think about think back on your own practice.
00:32:34
Speaker
And get a new perspective and I something I didn't quite understand until I started working with teachers who are interested in shifting their own assessment and grading practices that grading in many ways for high school classroom, at least as a linchpin and.
00:32:46
Speaker
I could see that as I was pushing on grading practices with folks, they were telling me, well, I have to change my conception of tasks and how we run the classroom and how we engage with each other and how students interact with me and with their peers.
Reforming Assessment Practices
00:33:00
Speaker
And I think really grading is, my colleagues kind of make fun of me here because we're still talking about grading anytime with anybody and I will.
00:33:10
Speaker
And I think it's because it's such a perfect avenue for getting into other aspects of instruction.
00:33:16
Speaker
that are, I, I don't know.
00:33:18
Speaker
I just, I love the whole, I love the whole process.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:21
Speaker
Cause I mean, if you change how assessment works, you have to change the rest of your classroom, which I'm sure is something that comes up, um, as an instructional coach, you can't just say, Oh, we're just not going to give any traditional letter grades anymore than expect the whole classroom to flourish.
00:33:35
Speaker
Um, there's going to be many other changes that need to take place in order to ensure that intrinsic motivation actually drives the classroom.
00:33:42
Speaker
And I want to talk about how you have your portfolio system set up because
00:33:47
Speaker
I myself use a portfolio system and a few of my colleagues do as well, but they all kind of differ from each other based off the teacher's preference.
00:33:54
Speaker
What kind of portfolio system are you utilizing?
00:33:58
Speaker
I call it from grades to growth.
00:34:00
Speaker
And it initially started as an opportunity or really a interest of mine to make class as authentic and meaningful as possible.
00:34:09
Speaker
And to get away from the game of school at really any cost.
00:34:14
Speaker
And I have been
00:34:15
Speaker
I think thinking about, I know I went back and I was looking at some of my teacher college materials from 20 years ago, and I could see that even when I started teaching, I wanted a classroom where I had students first, student voices and interests and passions were elevated and were a core part of the classroom.
00:34:34
Speaker
And I think I struggled a long time.
00:34:36
Speaker
I think the why of shifting in a portfolio was there early.
00:34:40
Speaker
It took me a long time to figure out the how and the what.
00:34:42
Speaker
And I tried different elements of standards based grading.
00:34:46
Speaker
I had a very, how should I say, I try to emphasize revision and mistake making and students sort of selecting the best examples of their work.
00:34:58
Speaker
And it really culminated in this ungrading practice.
00:35:00
Speaker
So for me, what it eventually evolved into, and this was probably a three year process of just jumping into replacing
00:35:11
Speaker
numbers and like points on assignments for more meaningful feedback for students.
00:35:17
Speaker
And what I ended up having coming up with was a category system where I'd have categories of growth goals.
00:35:22
Speaker
Students will be collecting evidence of their growth in those categories.
00:35:26
Speaker
And then four times a month at each quarter where I was doing midterm and semester grade reports, we would, students that I would, we'd meet for a set amount of time and we would go over their portfolio.
00:35:37
Speaker
And we really would have a pretty frank discussion about
00:35:39
Speaker
where their growth was and what goals they would have for the upcoming term.
00:35:43
Speaker
And then that culminated in a letter that students wrote to me where they talked about their growth in detail and made specific reference to their assignments.
00:35:51
Speaker
And that ended up culminating in a grade.
00:35:54
Speaker
And we would just negotiate on a letter grade, the students and I, and that's what I would put on a grade book.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that system works.
00:36:01
Speaker
Did you find that when you initially transferred over to standards-based grading, because I did the same exact thing, that
00:36:09
Speaker
It just kind of like was a another way of saying the exact same thing.
00:36:13
Speaker
I don't know if your standards based grading initiatives were similar to ours, but we still use numbers to associate with standards based grading, like as in like you're a four and the standard.
00:36:23
Speaker
Do you feel like the transition to being completely gradeless as necessary in order to get the goals that you're looking for in the classroom, the goal being extrinsic motivation?
00:36:33
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:36:34
Speaker
And the.
00:36:36
Speaker
I think my experience bears this out and working with teachers and the research I've done, I think the best way, I think Dale and William might have said this first, but the best way to stop students from learning is to assign points to them.
00:36:47
Speaker
And sometimes with my coaching, I remind teachers, like there are moments where we're doing sublet of assessments, like we need a final on this particular date, we need to accurately assess student performance and achievement.
00:36:58
Speaker
And it's not a learning situation in that case, but for myself and my coaching, I try to push that off as long as possible.
00:37:06
Speaker
And that anytime we've got kids in front of us and we have time to work together, it should be in a more of a formative learning process.
00:37:13
Speaker
And so I jumped right in and just got rid of all the grades mid-year when I started doing this.
00:37:20
Speaker
And what led me to it was looking over my grade reports for, I was in winter break, so I had two weeks to kind of think about and reflect on the year so far.
00:37:31
Speaker
And I thought I would see our online
00:37:34
Speaker
our online recording system is called Skyward, which is our grade book.
00:37:39
Speaker
They had some features where you could look at students' progress over time and come up with a graph.
00:37:44
Speaker
So I pulled up some students and I thought I will see this upward trend because I thought I had a system that would be reflecting student growth and improvement in ability over time.
00:37:54
Speaker
And I was kind of shocked to see that student after student after student had flatlined.
00:37:57
Speaker
The grade just settled in on the percentage and it stayed there for months on end.
00:38:04
Speaker
And so I went to my students and I had this idea over winter break that something that I don't know where it came from, but it sort of it planted itself as a seed in my brain of why don't we just get rid of the points?
00:38:16
Speaker
We'll keep everything else the same.
00:38:17
Speaker
We'll just get rid of the points.
00:38:19
Speaker
And I went to my students and I said, you know, we're going to be ending the semester in about three weeks.
00:38:24
Speaker
And what would you think about not having points for next semester?
00:38:28
Speaker
And they were a little hesitant.
00:38:31
Speaker
Their first question was, what would you have said?
00:38:33
Speaker
So we're going to, we're still going to do the same assignments.
00:38:36
Speaker
We're going to have conversations and seminars and we'll work together.
00:38:40
Speaker
We'll keep learning.
00:38:41
Speaker
We just, we'll talk about your growth and your learning using a language that's a little more meaningful than seven points, eight points, 27 points.
00:38:51
Speaker
And it took a while for them to get used to it.
00:38:54
Speaker
I think it took about eight weeks for them to retrain themselves because they, I was really asking them not to play the game of school anymore.
00:39:01
Speaker
And a lot of students had a lot of that game.
00:39:04
Speaker
And I think that's a huge part of it too that I think sometimes gets lost in the conversation, which is the equity side of things, which is, you know, grades are really just a ranking and filing system.
00:39:16
Speaker
And all teachers know that it's very rare for a student who's not doing very well academically to all of a sudden start doing very well academically as a result of achieving a low grade.
00:39:27
Speaker
And there's a lot of research that supports that concept.
00:39:30
Speaker
And did you find that when you transitioned and kind of like
00:39:34
Speaker
I like calling it deprogramming.
00:39:36
Speaker
You deprogrammed your students from this language of grades.
00:39:40
Speaker
Did you see them doing better across their assignments?
00:39:42
Speaker
Like were they submitting more or doing more?
00:39:45
Speaker
Oh, that was the most surprising aspect of it.
00:39:48
Speaker
I think I had bought into some shibboleth of education that upon really close reflection and looking more deeply into this, I don't have any basis.
00:39:57
Speaker
So I hear this from colleagues a lot when they hear about what I'm doing and I say, well,
00:40:01
Speaker
students won't do work unless you grade them, unless you give them points.
00:40:05
Speaker
And I didn't want to believe that was true.
00:40:07
Speaker
I think I kind of was inculcated in the traditional system when I started teaching.
00:40:12
Speaker
But it sounds that actually students did more.
00:40:15
Speaker
They did more work.
00:40:16
Speaker
They did harder work.
00:40:17
Speaker
They did more.
00:40:18
Speaker
They were willing to alter or even give themselves assignments.
00:40:24
Speaker
And part of this was shifting for me and being really clear about what my focus was, was on student growth.
00:40:31
Speaker
That was it.
00:40:32
Speaker
We wanted to focus on student growth more than anything.
00:40:35
Speaker
And so for students who traditionally struggle in a classroom, I was kind of flipping the narrative and where I was, we were moving from a system where let's record how good you are to let's record how you're getting better over time.
00:40:46
Speaker
And let's take that, the progress or achievement assessment, and let's make that simply a marker for where did you start in September and where are you getting in October, November?
00:40:57
Speaker
And we tried to, I tried to use a two week gap that seemed to be a good amount of time.
00:41:01
Speaker
for students to assess their ability.
00:41:05
Speaker
So for kids to struggle, it was really great because I was able to say like this on the grade level text that you struggle with in August or September at the beginning of the year, that's okay.
00:41:17
Speaker
Well, I want to see your mistakes.
00:41:18
Speaker
I want to see where you're not fitting expectations because that's going to be our base level.
00:41:23
Speaker
Then we'll look at your work in two, four, six, eight-week agreements out.
00:41:27
Speaker
And if we see improvement, it's that growth that we're going to measure.
00:41:30
Speaker
So I use standards-based methodology as a way to assess where students were in, in over time.
00:41:37
Speaker
But what we, what I, when I was measuring it or putting out to stakeholders, like what ended up in the grade system was the measure of that growth.
00:41:44
Speaker
And I think that opened up a door for a lot of kids.
00:41:46
Speaker
There's no reason to like, if a student who's trying, especially since that's going to have so many negative consequences on them in the future.
00:41:53
Speaker
And let's kind of get into the nitty gritty of how exactly this is being implemented in certain strategies that you might use.
00:42:00
Speaker
So let's talk about the student letter component, because I find that kind of unique.
00:42:05
Speaker
What is the student letter?
00:42:06
Speaker
How is it set up?
00:42:07
Speaker
What are students doing?
00:42:08
Speaker
All that kind of stuff.
00:42:09
Speaker
Yeah, I initially set it up so I would have something to share with parents and with folks outside the classroom.
00:42:15
Speaker
And I was pretty nervous jumping into this, and I didn't know how it would be received.
00:42:20
Speaker
I was kind of surprised that even within a few months of doing gradeless, I didn't really receive any negative feedback at all.
00:42:29
Speaker
an initial trepidation from students that faded as they got to know the system.
00:42:32
Speaker
But from parents, I was getting emails every couple of weeks that would say things like, thank you so much for giving my kid breathing space.
00:42:39
Speaker
They're really excited to be in control of their learning.
00:42:41
Speaker
I wish I had a class like this.
00:42:44
Speaker
I did hear through the grapevine after the fact in some cases that parents, because I wasn't putting a lot of points online or kind of unsure about how things were doing.
00:42:54
Speaker
So I replaced that with a weekly letter home
00:42:56
Speaker
Just a quick email to all my parents explaining here's what we did in class.
00:43:01
Speaker
Here's some of the, I really wanted to focus on let's support students' growth around thinking.
00:43:07
Speaker
So it wasn't here are the assignments, here's one of the due dates.
00:43:09
Speaker
It says here are the topics we covered this week.
00:43:12
Speaker
Here's some interesting questions you can talk with your kids about.
00:43:15
Speaker
Here's where you could press a little bit on some of the thinking skills that we're developing and some of the content areas.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I think trying to shift that conversation a bit
00:43:23
Speaker
And at the same time I was doing this, I was also a parent of a high schooler.
00:43:27
Speaker
My stepson is 19 and he graduated last year.
00:43:30
Speaker
So I was able to kind of see a little bit of the shift from elementary, very connected as a parent.
00:43:36
Speaker
We knew just what was going on in all those classes.
00:43:38
Speaker
Middle school, we had a bit of information that dropped off as he got into eighth grade.
00:43:42
Speaker
High school, we had no idea.
00:43:43
Speaker
High school teachers were not communicating with us.
00:43:46
Speaker
So I wanted to kind of cross that gap.
00:43:49
Speaker
And then I wasn't sure about admin.
00:43:51
Speaker
I wasn't sure about district admin.
00:43:53
Speaker
And after the fact found out very supportive, I did talk to my principal before I jumped in and said, this is what I'm going to do.
00:43:59
Speaker
I'm not asking permission, but I'm going to tell.
00:44:01
Speaker
So I'm going to go, here's my research.
00:44:02
Speaker
Here's my reasoning.
00:44:03
Speaker
Here's what I'm going to support.
00:44:04
Speaker
Here's how I'm going to be meeting the expectations that he had for me as a teacher.
00:44:10
Speaker
And I felt pretty supportive.
00:44:13
Speaker
So that's kind of where I started with the letter.
00:44:14
Speaker
What I found out as I started getting into them is, oh my God, kids were so expressive and were so
00:44:23
Speaker
just so mature and responsible and engaged with the process of their own learning and development that the letters blew me away and i got a number of letters from students who would not be able to verbalize to me in person even when we would do our end of term 20 30 minute conference and we would sit down the hallway and it would be kind of private so kids could talk with me um sometimes they have a hard time right with adults talking saying what they're really thinking so i would get letters that would be very
00:44:52
Speaker
I don't think they were just, I think, so honest and open in ways that 15, 16, 17 year olds are thinking and feeling.
00:45:00
Speaker
And it was, I treasure the letters.
00:45:02
Speaker
I kept everyone over the last three years that I did this work.
00:45:07
Speaker
And when I talk to teachers now, they're like, oh, we'd like to do conferring.
00:45:11
Speaker
We'd like to do, and I'm not sure about the letter piece.
00:45:13
Speaker
And I really say you should
00:45:15
Speaker
Jump into the letter piece.
00:45:16
Speaker
It is really, it's just mind boggling what kids are capable of that we often miss if we just talk to them face to face.
00:45:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really solid point.
00:45:25
Speaker
I think that too often students' voices are marginalized in the classroom.
00:45:30
Speaker
Like we really need curriculum people, instructional coaches, et cetera, really pushing for the fact that students are a lot more intelligent and mature than many give them credit for.
00:45:42
Speaker
And placing learning in the hands of students has usually like way better results than anything that you might plan because students tend to come up with some really cool ideas on their own.
00:45:52
Speaker
Did you find that when you switched to gradeless learning that there was less pressure on you?
00:45:57
Speaker
Like as did you find that your job was easier?
00:45:59
Speaker
To kind of give some backstory for that, like I know when I switched to gradeless learning, I found myself doing most of the quote unquote assessment at school.
00:46:07
Speaker
Like I used to take home like all this stuff and have to go through like all the numbers.
00:46:11
Speaker
And it was just a lot of pressure because you have to get those done at a certain point or else someone complains and they want to know what their grade is.
00:46:17
Speaker
Whereas when you switch to gradeless learning, a lot of those conversations have to happen face to face.
00:46:22
Speaker
So even though there are certainly a lot of discussions that need to happen at school, that work isn't coming home.
00:46:28
Speaker
It shifted it dramatically and it again, I find it it's a struggle as a coach to try to convince my colleagues that you actually can.
00:46:38
Speaker
You can work less.
00:46:39
Speaker
You can work more effectively.
00:46:40
Speaker
You can increase student learning and you could do it all with less stress.
00:46:44
Speaker
It seems like it's too good to be true.
00:46:46
Speaker
And what I think what it was was really being clear with myself and my students that shift the goal and the purpose of the activities that we do, whereas
00:46:55
Speaker
As a younger teacher, and I was taught in a fairly traditional system, it's assignments for points and homework, and we're going to average and sum and come up with a score at the end.
00:47:05
Speaker
The purpose of giving a kid a task was to get the points out of it and to record, really what I was recording was compliance effectively from students.
00:47:15
Speaker
And when I went grade list really shifted into, I saw myself as not a
00:47:22
Speaker
content expert or I'm transmitting information to kids heads or I can manage, you know, focusing on management where I'm here to control students or something.
00:47:32
Speaker
I really shifted it into I think my my job as a teacher was to better understand the thinking of the students in my classroom.
00:47:38
Speaker
And the best way to do that is to have them do lots of different kinds of tasks, some written, some out loud, some small groups, some individuals, some whole group, lots of lots of different opportunities for kids to make their thinking visible.
00:47:50
Speaker
And that my job was to take in that information
00:47:53
Speaker
And then to give appropriate feedback for students so that they could move forward and make the next appropriate stuff.
00:47:59
Speaker
And doing that on paper is really, really difficult.
00:48:02
Speaker
The traditional taking assignments in, taking them home, marking them up, sending them back, it's an inefficient process.
00:48:09
Speaker
And I think it's very difficult to get kids the kind of prompt, just the right time feedback to move them forward.
00:48:16
Speaker
So even before I started doing grading completely, I'd already shifted my grading process or my feedback process so that I would only
00:48:23
Speaker
interact with students when they're right in front of me.
00:48:25
Speaker
I didn't really collect a lot of work.
00:48:27
Speaker
I eventually did and I had to turn the box, but students had to demonstrate what kind of feedback you're looking for, show me that you've tried a couple different avenues.
00:48:36
Speaker
First, you've gone to peers, you've gone to your classroom resources, that there's some reason why at this moment I needed to get involved.
00:48:44
Speaker
Why can't we do this face-to-face?
00:48:45
Speaker
I had to put some barriers in front of kids explicitly so that they wouldn't just throw me work and say, here's something that
00:48:53
Speaker
put in the gradebook, it was, why do I need to look at this right now?
00:48:55
Speaker
You know, to explain to me what it is that you need.
00:48:59
Speaker
And that was part of a larger conversation in the classroom of shifting toward the purpose of classes for students to make evidence of growth.
00:49:05
Speaker
And we don't know, you know, looking forward to what that best evidence might be.
00:49:09
Speaker
So let's just make a bunch of stuff.
00:49:11
Speaker
We're going to collect everything we make.
00:49:13
Speaker
We'll go through a sorting, sifting, organizing process later.
00:49:16
Speaker
And we'll look back and we'll see the emerging story of your growth.
00:49:19
Speaker
But right now, just go do stuff.
00:49:21
Speaker
And because I shifted away from, well, you have to do the assignment because otherwise you're going to have a zero and that zero is going to impact your homework category.
00:49:29
Speaker
It's you need to do this assignment because it helps me get a better insight into your thinking right now.
00:49:34
Speaker
And we need something for this week because you're going to do something different next week.
00:49:37
Speaker
And we can't track growth unless we've got evidence scattered over time, which, by the way, when I tell teachers about, oh, do you have a due date?
00:49:45
Speaker
I said, I'll take work from kids in any form at any time.
00:49:48
Speaker
Like, I don't have due dates.
00:49:49
Speaker
Well, how do you keep kids from turning in a whole pile of stuff at the end of the end of the term?
00:49:52
Speaker
Well, if the kid does that, I would say this is amazing evidence for the last week that you did work.
00:49:58
Speaker
I have missing evidence for the previous 17 weeks when you weren't doing the work.
00:50:02
Speaker
So that's great.
00:50:03
Speaker
That's one week's worth of evidence.
00:50:05
Speaker
And that would help take care of that.
00:50:07
Speaker
But I almost never had to have that conversation because kids got it pretty quickly, but really anything they did.
00:50:14
Speaker
I even have situations where students would say, I don't really, this assignment, this isn't clicking or I don't get what's going on.
00:50:21
Speaker
And I would say, well, look, if this text this week isn't a really good opportunity for you to show evidence of growth, then we'll do it again next week.
00:50:30
Speaker
I didn't lose any sleep over individual students not doing individual assignments.
00:50:36
Speaker
And there was a trend of students not doing work.
00:50:38
Speaker
We had a conversation, but it wasn't framed around, hey, you're not doing stuff.
00:50:42
Speaker
I'm going to have to give you zeros.
00:50:44
Speaker
It's really hard for me to see where you need help if I can't see work that you're doing.
00:50:48
Speaker
And it was amazing how many kids stepped up and got that piece of it.
00:50:52
Speaker
I know that a lot of teachers seem to be of the mindset that you should be kind of unfriendly or strict towards students in order to get them to do things.
00:51:01
Speaker
And it seems like it's actually the exact opposite.
00:51:04
Speaker
Like as in if students trust you and feel like you're on their, your side.
00:51:07
Speaker
And even like adopting policies like this, when you start talking about like, here's why grades don't work.
00:51:12
Speaker
Here's why like we're doing it this way.
00:51:14
Speaker
It has this revolutionary tone to it that I think a lot of students buy into because they know it too.
00:51:20
Speaker
And it kind of brings them into the fold with you so they trust you and they actually.
00:51:24
Speaker
feel like they want to contribute in your class just because you're on their side.
00:51:28
Speaker
You've been kind of alluding to it here.
00:51:30
Speaker
How is the portfolio system literally set up?
00:51:33
Speaker
So like, are they turning in like one thing per week, one thing per month?
00:51:36
Speaker
Like, how does that work?
00:51:38
Speaker
All right.
00:51:39
Speaker
So first I'll start, big structure is I created categories of growth.
00:51:43
Speaker
And I needed to come up with, I needed to come up with a language for students and me to talk about growth over time.
00:51:50
Speaker
And one of the things that I really liked about the grade list system, you'd asked earlier, is it less work?
00:51:54
Speaker
And I think overall it is because I'm doing less of the things that drive teachers crazy, taking work home and marking up the text.
00:52:01
Speaker
I mean, just talk to English teachers, right?
00:52:03
Speaker
They spend an hour in an essay and they give it back and the student looks at the score and tosses the rest of it.
00:52:09
Speaker
It's just wasted effort.
00:52:10
Speaker
So I wasn't doing that.
00:52:11
Speaker
But what I needed to do was I couldn't just say, well, this is five points.
00:52:15
Speaker
I had to be really clear, like, why are we doing this assignment?
00:52:18
Speaker
How does it connect into the larger goals and what are those goals?
Portfolio System and Gradeless Learning
00:52:22
Speaker
And so it really forced me to really plan the whole year backwards in a sense of, I didn't know where I was going and how the pieces fit together.
00:52:31
Speaker
So the categories helped us think about how students were demonstrating growth in specific skills.
00:52:37
Speaker
So for my general ed classes, these became reading, writing, patterns of history as a social studies teacher and historical thinking skills.
00:52:47
Speaker
then reading was really explicitly reading informational text in the social sciences and then writing in a social sciences format so those are kind of my four categories for for my advanced placement classes because I taught AP classes in the system also I used the AP college board categories that were aligned for preparation for the exam so a little bit slightly different but the idea was that you're collecting evidence of growth in particular categories
00:53:14
Speaker
And this is where the system, I think the flexibility of an ungraded system really, really helped me and helped my students because for say, the reading category, well, for each category, I should back up.
00:53:25
Speaker
Each category had a format that we used all year and that format didn't change.
00:53:30
Speaker
So for reading, I just said, there's five types of thinking that social science readers do.
00:53:36
Speaker
And it was essentially annotation strategy.
00:53:38
Speaker
So things like,
00:53:39
Speaker
We look for main ideas.
00:53:40
Speaker
We make connections to text and things outside the text.
00:53:43
Speaker
We ask questions.
00:53:45
Speaker
We identify areas that we don't know.
00:53:46
Speaker
I don't remember what the top of my head was.
00:53:48
Speaker
It was a pretty standard annotation structure.
00:53:51
Speaker
This went up on an anchor chart, went up on the wall, stayed there all year.
00:53:55
Speaker
Every time I give kids a text, it was, how do we use this text and our annotation format to demonstrate improving ability to read over time?
00:54:04
Speaker
So the first text was probably a paragraph or two.
00:54:07
Speaker
It was at or just below grade level.
00:54:09
Speaker
I assigned the kids and said, we're all going to do one of the annotation strategies.
00:54:15
Speaker
The second text, I might have assigned them two.
00:54:17
Speaker
I probably did a read aloud or a modeled annotation in front of them.
00:54:21
Speaker
And then as we went along, was able to differentiate with students where if I knew that they were able to do, say, main idea pretty well, then I would say, okay, everyone's going to do main idea.
00:54:30
Speaker
You pick the second one of the five, make your own key, and go in and practice with it.
00:54:36
Speaker
So I was able to, over time, increase the rigor of that particular assignment.
00:54:40
Speaker
I did the same thing for the other element.
00:54:42
Speaker
So for writing, I had a seven-part structure that seven elements of writing all started with the letter C, so we called it the seven Cs.
00:54:50
Speaker
It was things like commentary and concrete details, kind of like Lucy Culkin's kind of base writing structure.
00:54:59
Speaker
Patterns of history, I used historical
00:55:03
Speaker
It was essentially collecting historical evidence.
00:55:06
Speaker
So we would talk about people and events and places and objects and maybe, maybe, uh, uh, basically who, what, when or why is what the structure was.
00:55:19
Speaker
So just collecting historical data.
00:55:21
Speaker
And then for historical thinking skills, I just used thinking maps.
00:55:23
Speaker
So we did a lot of analysis, a lot of comparison, a lot of change over time, a lot of cause and effect, a lot of sequence analysis were kind of the big ones that we did.
00:55:31
Speaker
So those all had structures, those all had formats.
00:55:34
Speaker
So I would give an assignment.
00:55:35
Speaker
I have a formalized assignment every week and it would include, it would kind of be centered on one or more of those categories.
00:55:43
Speaker
And I had a consistent assignment sheet that would go on top of the assignment.
00:55:46
Speaker
I used a single column rubric where I clearly defined what a meeting standard was, but left the below and above standard open for students to negotiate with me and then would have the materials and all the, everything ready to go.
00:55:58
Speaker
So because,
00:55:59
Speaker
we structured everything around these four categories and the category structure was consistent all year.
00:56:06
Speaker
I didn't have to say, like, here's how I want you to do this writing assignment.
00:56:09
Speaker
It was to do a piece of writing.
00:56:10
Speaker
So the first couple were, I'm going to write a paragraph and I'm going to give you the prompts.
00:56:16
Speaker
I'm even going to give you some options for the thesis.
00:56:20
Speaker
And then collectively, we're going to find concrete detail of a text we read.
00:56:24
Speaker
And your job is to put the commentary and to write the closure.
00:56:27
Speaker
And that might be very structured early, early in the year.
00:56:31
Speaker
By the end of the year, I was able to say things like, here's the prompt.
00:56:35
Speaker
Here are five texts.
00:56:36
Speaker
You need to collect evidence of reading and writing from these.
00:56:39
Speaker
Go.
00:56:40
Speaker
And kids would have to negotiate through.
00:56:42
Speaker
And they would know it because at that point, it would be eight months of conversation about how they're going to collect and make evidence.
00:56:47
Speaker
So we have those.
00:56:48
Speaker
And that's what I would record in a grade book was a just a marker of, again, I used a four-point scale.
00:56:55
Speaker
It sounds like pretty similar to what you were doing.
00:56:58
Speaker
For those formalized assignments, are you getting those done to the point where you have evidence so that when we get to the portfolio piece at the end of the term, that you'll have things to talk about and put together?
00:57:10
Speaker
So it was a bit of a dance where with kids, you need to get stuff done.
00:57:14
Speaker
And I know where this is going, and you may not be able to see that.
00:57:16
Speaker
So just trust me that you need to do these assignments and collecting evidence if you're doing them or not.
00:57:24
Speaker
We'll have individualized conversations about how we can help you get more done
00:57:28
Speaker
But the real weight and the meat of the conversation was going to happen when we did the portfolio collection and the letter writing, which happened four times a year.
00:57:35
Speaker
The systemic shifts that we can place into our classrooms are
00:57:40
Speaker
probably the most interesting ones as opposed to just like these like little workshops or like one thing that we do one random day that takes a lot of planning.
00:57:48
Speaker
When you plan it all up front and you just change how a whole system works, it really does radicalize how the classroom functions and operates.
00:57:55
Speaker
And it's really cool to hear that the system works no matter kind of what context you're in.
00:57:59
Speaker
Like you said, you use it in an AP class, which AP history is like probably one of the most content heavy classes you can potentially teach.
00:58:06
Speaker
And if it works there, it pretty much can work anywhere.
00:58:09
Speaker
you're an instructional coach and you mentioned that you, you know, you bring up the portfolio system within that context.
00:58:15
Speaker
Do you find any hesitation or like a lot of pushback from teachers as opposed to students?
00:58:22
Speaker
It's one thing to say to students, Hey, you know, you're in the system, we're going to counteract it.
00:58:25
Speaker
You know what it's like versus a teacher who may have been using grades and the huge proponent of grades for years that now you're saying, Oh no, you should actually do it this way.
00:58:35
Speaker
Or here's a different idea.
00:58:36
Speaker
How do you go about convincing them?
00:58:38
Speaker
What kind of feedback do you get?
00:58:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's been a lot of learning as a coach and trying to shift from being with the classroom of students.
00:58:47
Speaker
Right now, I know I have them for nine months and that's all.
00:58:50
Speaker
And I have to make some pretty quick moves to shift the system.
00:58:53
Speaker
And, you know, working with adolescents, they'll pretty much do what I'll tell them to do because there's a lot of, I mean, just being the adult in the room, I've got a lot of inputs of power.
00:59:04
Speaker
that I don't necessarily have when I'm working with adults.
00:59:06
Speaker
And I had to learn that, actually I was kind of wondering when I first started coaching, it's like, how similar is this to working with students?
00:59:13
Speaker
And the good news for me, at least, it's almost entirely the same.
00:59:17
Speaker
The two big differences are it's all adult learning is opt-in.
00:59:22
Speaker
So the teachers say, I'm not gonna do something.
00:59:25
Speaker
I don't have any power to make them do something.
00:59:27
Speaker
I'm not their administrator, I'm not their evaluator, so I can't, like you have to.
00:59:31
Speaker
So that's been interesting.
00:59:33
Speaker
having a long-term multi-year timeframe as opposed to a nine month timeframe has really shifted things for me also.
00:59:40
Speaker
So I think my first semester coaching, it was a lot of, I felt like I could walk in, give teachers my system and that would be it.
00:59:49
Speaker
And it took me a while to realize that like that's not where they are.
00:59:53
Speaker
It took me 13 years of practice to get to the point where I was ready to shift my own practice on my own and to give teachers a little bit of grace and leeway
01:00:02
Speaker
So part of that is kind of shifting my own expectations about what where teachers are really ready and willing to go.
01:00:07
Speaker
And then realizing that grading is probably the most personal part of for high school teachers is kind of that's my that's where I work.
01:00:17
Speaker
That's my experience.
01:00:17
Speaker
I think I found that for high school teachers, decisions they make about how they grade students are so wrapped up into their philosophy of education, the reasons for doing school, for becoming a teacher, for participating in the system.
01:00:32
Speaker
And I have had some experiences of teachers just essentially saying, I'm not going to do that because that's not what school is for.
01:00:39
Speaker
We're here to see which kids are able to do biology, not necessarily to grow every kid.
01:00:44
Speaker
And there's been some philosophical debates about that.
01:00:46
Speaker
And I say, okay, I have an alternative perspective.
01:00:49
Speaker
I'd love to talk with you.
01:00:50
Speaker
Doors always open.
01:00:51
Speaker
Again, I'm not a program administrator, so I can't make that shift just by fiat.
01:00:58
Speaker
But what I've also found, too, is that a lot of
01:01:02
Speaker
these practices, the benefits seem almost too good to be true.
01:01:06
Speaker
And that I've had some interesting experiences where teachers are willing to shift the practice just a little bit and they're kind of amazed at how much better students are responding to, say, a more open-ended assignment structure where teachers are taking points away from the center.
01:01:22
Speaker
They're still there, but it's not the reason why students should be doing assignments anymore.
01:01:26
Speaker
And they're finding that their kids are much more willing to try things and to
01:01:31
Speaker
and to be flexible and to take risks and to do all the stuff that we know is necessary for growth.
01:01:36
Speaker
And that once I take that first taste, they ask for a little bit more, and then I can kind of lay it out and go through.
01:01:43
Speaker
But like any instructional situation, it's relationships first, getting the teachers to know me.
01:01:49
Speaker
I think I'm lucky I'm teaching in the same district.
01:01:53
Speaker
So I spent 14 years as a classroom teacher.
01:01:56
Speaker
So a lot of folks knew me as a teacher first and not as an outsider jumping in.
01:02:01
Speaker
But it's been hard to find teachers, I don't know, it's almost like giving them permission to try something new, even when they know it may not work the first time.
Student-Centered Learning and Classroom Management
01:02:12
Speaker
And teachers are so overloaded that having them
01:02:16
Speaker
be willing to take on something that is just extra work and it's extra thinking when they're so overloaded has also been a challenge.
01:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
01:02:23
Speaker
I find that, at least in my context, that a lot of those conversations go better when it's framed as a way to lessen teacher workloads, which is why I mentioned that because, I mean, to me, when you make your classroom more radically student-centered, you yourself have to work less because students are taking on more of the workload in a sense.
01:02:44
Speaker
but it's like a positive workload, not just like a stack of papers.
01:02:48
Speaker
It's like something that they're actually interested in and actually care about.
01:02:51
Speaker
It's not a silver bullet.
01:02:52
Speaker
There's certainly a lot of other things that have to change as well, but it's something that can work in multiple contexts that doesn't require as much of a radical shift as some other initiatives, like purely self-directed education or something like of that nature.
01:03:04
Speaker
So it's cool to hear that it's working and that it's supported by your school district because in many school districts, that's still a very outlandish concept.
01:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think maybe just the big thing is the
01:03:14
Speaker
it is quite a big shift and it's interesting to talk about the district response.
01:03:18
Speaker
And sometimes I don't think the district really gets what I'm doing here because in some ways I'm kind of flipping the traditional norm of education upside down.
01:03:28
Speaker
And in my classroom, we had these, and I think students probably came up with them and then we just kind of adopted them, but these kind of slogans were like, how do you describe what's going on?
01:03:39
Speaker
And earlier we talked about how students are a little bit hesitant
01:03:43
Speaker
And I remember my very first year doing this, I had about six really high-level students come to me after school.
01:03:49
Speaker
They're very polite and essentially said, we are very good students.
01:03:53
Speaker
We have our A. We don't like that you're rocking the boat.
01:03:58
Speaker
It makes us super nervous.
01:04:00
Speaker
And I essentially said, me too.
01:04:02
Speaker
I think it's worth it.
01:04:03
Speaker
Give me six weeks.
01:04:04
Speaker
If you still don't like non-graded after six weeks, I'll go back and I'll give grades for you.
01:04:08
Speaker
Like, I understand grades don't mean anything to me, but I know that as a
01:04:12
Speaker
future college student, they're extremely important.
01:04:14
Speaker
So I don't want to wreck that for these kids.
01:04:17
Speaker
So we did our bit.
01:04:18
Speaker
They came back after six weeks and they said, we want to keep the ungraded system.
01:04:23
Speaker
We don't think you can ever go back to giving grades.
01:04:25
Speaker
We think it's that important.
01:04:26
Speaker
And we'd like to come back and talk to next year's class at the beginning of the year and tell them how things function because they're going to freak out and we want to let them know it's going to be okay.
01:04:34
Speaker
And that kind of amazed me that students were willing to take that level of buy-in.
01:04:38
Speaker
But I think you have to be in that system and really see it work
01:04:43
Speaker
and see how the shift really goes from me as the center to the kids at the center.
01:04:50
Speaker
And we've talked a lot about student centered should be where we are.
01:04:54
Speaker
I don't think we're really thinking of the system about how we make that work and how we actually make kids the center, which means letting kids make choices, even when those decisions are not the best decisions and letting them sit with the consequences of that, not in a punitive way, but in a, I learned from the mistakes and I'm gonna share what I learned from others and I'm gonna move forward.
01:05:13
Speaker
I'm not going to, you know, we're not going to collect your best and worst moments and averaging them together.
01:05:17
Speaker
We're going to tell a different kind of story.
01:05:19
Speaker
And so in the classroom, it allowed me to push on kids in ways that I didn't really see when I started it.
01:05:25
Speaker
So getting rid of points means we don't have points to risk.
01:05:29
Speaker
So I can give them things that are really hard to do, things I know they're not going to do successfully the first time.
01:05:35
Speaker
I can go to my kids and say, this is basically an impossible task.
01:05:38
Speaker
And you've got 15 minutes and let's see what you come up with.
01:05:40
Speaker
only thing we've got to gain is is learning about ourselves as learners and and they were hesitant at first but once they saw that they jumped right in visitors would come in and they'd be like oh my god your kids are running the classroom and yes that took 12 weeks of effort to training to get to that point so there's a lot of work that goes into it but i find it was completely worth it and i would and i plan to go back to the classroom eventually and i'm pretty excited to to experience that again
01:06:09
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
01:06:13
Speaker
I hope that this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:06:18
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.