Deep Work: How to Find Focused Success

By Rita Thompson

If you feel distracted in your professional life, you are not alone. 

Book Cover

Deep Work by Cal Newport was the subject of a recent book study sponsored by our EG Collab Lab.  When we approached teachers and introduced the topic–how to combat the rising sense of distraction in your professional life–we found plenty of people who wanted to talk.  Using Zoom, we were able to join with staff across our building and from other schools for a discussion over several weeks.

One point of lively discussion was whether we found ourselves “busy” or “productive,” and how email–certainly a necessity in our profession–can overtake more vital functions.  All of us admitted we could probably spend an entire school day on email, yet none of us would feel a sense of satisfaction at the end.  Our abundant new technology may offer opportunities for richer connections in some instances or perhaps push us toward shallow personal connections. Should we re-evaluate the quality of communication and ideas pouring through these new portals? 

Newport passionately argues that the most satisfying work is craft, a point when we use the full force of our intelligence, attention, focus, and creativity to solve problems.  This is where we humans often find deep meaning.  We cannot develop our craft without “deep work,” a term coined by Newport.

Newport also challenges us as professionals with stark advice to become more productive.  Newport argues that the will power to work deeply is not a momentary whim, but a routine investment in ourselves.  Newport gives a plethora of examples of how to eliminate shallow work and re-focus our energy on deep work.  His advice to embrace boredom rather than constantly filling an empty moment with a swipe of the phone resonated with all of us.  He challenges the reader to re-evaluate the use of social media by examining the value of random connections versus the high value connections we have in our personal and professional lives. 

Our discussion ended with an important challenge – how can we teach and encourage deep work in our students?  We certainly need to make changes in our own lives first.  Newport’s argument has clear implications for our classrooms and students.  Although he does not address the educational setting specifically, we certainly felt pulled to apply these ideas to our own students. 

“Deep work,” Newport concludes, “is a life well-lived.” We all agreed that we hungered for more of that in our lives.

Many thanks to Kim Miklusak, Quinn Loch, Mark Heintz, and Linda Ashida in our Collab Lab for facilitating the Zoom technology and helping us make this happen.

Reflections On "How Things Used To Be"

By Kim Miklusak

As the school year comes to an end and we start planning for next year, I have been hearing people reflect online and in person that students in general are coming in "lower" than previous years on state standardized tests and in reading ability and that this "wasn't how it used to be."  I'm not saying I've never said this before, and I'm not saying we don't have new challenges in areas of testing, technology, etc., but I'm struck by a few thoughts on this and reflected more after following some threads on Twitter.  One in particular by @triciaebarvia pointed out that this Declinism is a bias as well as is deficit thinking about our students--both elements to consider as we plan our curriculum, content, instruction, mindset, etc...

So this led me to reflect on my own beliefs:

• What do we mean when we say "kids are coming in lower and lower" on standardized tests?  In reading?  In writing?  What does that mean as a value judgment on another person?
• Do we believe all students can succeed if we view them as "lower than" someone who came in the past?  Do we hold implicit biases about students or groups?  Further, do students internalize this in their beliefs about themselves?
• Did students actually come in "stronger" before?  How is that determined by our metrics, our assessments, and how they are used?  (i.e. do we believe students used to all read the whole book we assigned outside of class before? has the testing changed? is the testing accurate?)
• Have societal expectations changed?  Are our students, for example, taking on more responsibilities?  Are they working more hours?  Are they taking on more AP classes?  More sports and activities?
• Would we want our own children--if we have children--to be viewed as the "low kid" or one of "those kids?"  And if the answer to that question is, "My child wouldn't be the 'low kid,'" what does that mean for how we view our students?

What if we instead celebrated our students' strengths, as @triciaebarvia says in her tweet--and others have pointed out?  How can we combat deficit thinking about our students: defining them by a perceived what they are not rather than who they are and who they want to be?

As we prepare our curriculum, we set goals of wanting our students to have agency and take ownership and embrace their learning.  Let's reflect on our own beliefs and be sure our mindsets are framed in such a way to create and support those conditions in our classroom!  Another way to do this is to be sure to follow people on Twitter and read resources by others who have been explaining their experiences on this for some time.

Related: I'm currently reading Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed and will have more to share in another post next week!

Learning Moment at Elk Grove

By Mark Heintz

How do we define learning at Elk Grove? 

Schools are centers of learning.  Each day, the people who walk through the halls of Elk Grove learn, connect with others, and share.  However, much of the learning that takes places goes undocumented; it is not document or shared.  As a community, let us take a moment and connect with one such learning moment in hopes to share a common vision of learning and grow together.  

If you have a learning moment you would like to share with the larger community at Elk Grove, email your request to Mark.Heintz@d214.org  

6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum: Evaluation (Part 6 of 6)

From Kern et al

By Kim Miklusak

Last semester I took a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC. Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.  Earlier steps can be found here.


Step 6: Evaluation & Feedback--the final step!

According to Kern (et al), feedback "closes the loop in the curriculum development cycle" (122).  Gathering evaluative data and feedback from participants helps determine the success of the curriculum and bolster support for it moving forward.  Ultimately the question is: did the design of your curriculum meet your intended goals and resolve concerns brought up in Step 1 of the General and Targeted Needs Assessment?

Benefits & drawbacks of various feedback

The feedback could be formative and ongoing, or summative and final.  It could be based on individual participants or the program as a whole.  It could be qualitative or quantitative.  It could be about the students or from your peers.  However, when it comes down to it, the feedback should be accurate.  So the questions become how do we best gather the information?  Are the questions clear?  Are the results useful?  Are they are on some sort of scale?  Are the questions asked in a fair manner?  Are they replicable?  Are they surveys?  Interviews?  Focus groups?

In Practice:

I know many teachers have developed opportunities for feedback through their year and at the end of their year--especially with increased access to tools such as Google Forms or Schoology polls.  For example, in the past I have asked students before and after our AP exam to rate themselves in various skill and habits of work areas as well as to rank the usefulness of activities I have done throughout the year.  I have used this information to guide planning for the following year.  I know other peers at EG and on Twitter give students more open-ended surveys, allowing broader feedback, as well as specific in-the-moment questions at the start of class or at the end of a unit.  A few years ago we even pulled together a focus group of students to discuss the purpose of school!  You can see their insightful comments in our blog post here!  This was probably one of my favorite moments of the past few years.

Yet as we develop and re-develop our courses every year or every few years I wonder if we truly gather the data we need to consider the effectiveness of our courses.  We can use AP and SAT data, grades, test results, etc.  Does that data help us?  Do we use it to guide our instruction and assessment?  Furthermore, do we ask the students?  I recognize that sometimes they aren't aware in the moment of the usefulness of some things we do, so in some cases their feedback isn't quite as valid as we'd like.  But in those moments I wonder if we've done enough to explain to them why we're doing what we're doing, which is feedback in and of itself!  

In the end I encourage everyone to ask their students for feedback at the end of the year and to analyze data as an individual, as a team, and as a subject if possible.  What you ask and how you ask it should be in whatever manner is most comfortable to you.  But you may be surprised at how useful what the data and students have to say is when it comes to redesigning your course!

Please feel free to share other insights and ideas based on your experiences in the comments below!

6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum: Implementation (Part 5)

By Kim Miklusak

Last semester I took a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC. Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.  Earlier steps can be found here.


Step 5: Implementation

Effective implementation of your curricular design, according to Thomas (et al), would include addressing all of the elements on this checklist displayed in the image below.  The checklist is broken down into several categories with specific considerations below each.
  
The checklist asks, for example, do we the appropriate faculty available for this course?  Do we have time, finances, and facilities to train them?  Do we have internal support from administration and external support, if it applies?  Do we have appropriate communication in place to facilitate between all personnel and operational support to distribute the materials needed?  Do we anticipate barriers and address them before they affect the curricular design?  And, finally, how do we roll out the curriculum and monitor it for adjustment?  Do we pilot a course, phase it in, or fully implement it?  Ideally, all of these steps would be addressed as we plan through our stages.  Considering them in advance would also help facilitate development and lead to smoother implementation--especially when partnered with a smooth first four steps of this design process.

In practice:

On the ground, on a daily basis, I wonder how many of these elements of the checklist are addressed as we plan.  Is it feasible for a classroom teacher to address any or all of them?  Is it the role of the PLC leader--if that structure even exists at your school?  Is it a department/division chair--is that person an administrator or a teacher-leader with possible release time?  Does that person have the ability to make these decisions, or are they more suggestions?


Please feel free to share other insights and ideas based on your experiences in the comments below!

6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum: Educational Strategies (Part 4)

By Kim Miklusak

I am currently taking a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC.  Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.  Earlier steps can be found here.


Step 4: Educational Strategies

In the previous posts, after determining our targeted needs assessment and stating our goals and objectives, we now need to select our content.  For some subjects, the content and objectives overlap.  For others, the content may be more arbitrary.  Regardless of what content is decided upon, it always must build from the objectives and goals.  As stated in Kern, "transformative learning occurs when learners change in meaningful ways" (67). 

The final step in this part of the process is selecting the best educational methods for your content.  The selection must match with goals, yet at the same time be varied to meet the needs of the students, environment, and content.  Additionally, it must adjust to students' learning styles and preferences.  For higher-level, complex skills, oftentimes balancing a few methods works best over the course of a unit or a year.

In practice:

I find this element of curricular design the most interesting as a teacher.  It is true: we all have the methods that we feel most comfortable with day-to-day, and we all have the ones we feel most comfortable using in our content.  However, as Kern's chart shows, not all methods are best depending on our goals and objectives--or our students. 

Are students experiencing trouble reaching their goals?  Are we having classroom management issues?  Perhaps then there are times in our curriculum when we truly want to practice affective/attitudinal goals and could select the appropriate methods to do so.

However, this often requires us to step outside of our comfort zones--especially when coupled with new technology in the classroom or releasing control of our lessons to our students.  One of the ways I have helped work around this in my own teaching is by observing teachers across content areas.  I have learned so much by working with our Collab Lab team as well as learning with and from our peers in learning groups and lesson demos.

Please feel free to share other insights and ideas based on your experiences in the comments below!

6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum (Part 3)

By Kim Miklusak

From Kern, Thomas, and Hughes. See link above.

I am currently taking a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC.  Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.  Steps 1 and 2 can be found here.

Step 3: Goals and Objectives


Once we have identified the needs of our learners, we need to clarify our goals and objectives.  While there may be some differences in how these terms are used in our various institutions, on the broader level, goals are the overall purposeful outcomes while objectives are measurable elements.  

When we state our goals, they help us to define and clarify our content, priorities, learning methods, and evaluation/assessment outcomes.  These are not only important for ourselves as we re/design our courses, but they are also important to communicate clearly to all stakeholders--peers, parents, students, administrators, etc.

According to Kern et al. there are five elements to keep in mind when writing a clear and measure objective: who will do how much (or how well) of what by when?  A key here is to use descriptors that are less open to interpretation.  For example, how can we measure the verb "know" as opposed to "identify, list, recite, define, etc."  

In practice:

For this step I wonder a few things, but many depend on the situations at our individual institutions.  For example, do we know the overall purpose of our course?  If there is not a clear "out" such as an AP exam or placement test, why do we cover the content and skills that we do?  Do we consider the general and targeted needs assessments as described in the previous blog posts?

Furthermore, does our course align to and build upon the goals of the courses before/after it in the sequence?  Does it need to?  If we are unable to articulate these goals and objectives, then we often end up duplicating assessments if not content and essential questions.  

Additionally, we may end up over-emphasizing a specific assessment-type when it doesn't really measure the outcome we are looking for.  For example, is the focus of my English class to read a novel or is the focus to practice skills via the novel?  If we are not clear in the focus of materials versus objectives, we may over-assess in some areas (for example plot of a text) when our main goal is something more sophisticated.  We also may misrepresent the total number and weight of questions that are not the focus of our stated objectives.  If we want students to practice more higher-level skills, more of our assessments should be weighted this way.

This further leads to a question of assessing Socio-Emotional skills and other subjective measures.  If we assess objectives like "paying attention," are those elements we instruct and model?  Are they truly the objectives we want to assess in our course?  If they are, we should be clear about how they are instructed and assessed.  If they are not, we should realign our focus to the objectives we do want to measure.

Once these goals and objectives are established, we are then able to move on to Step 4: Instructional Strategies, which I will discuss in the next blog post.

6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum (Part 2)

From Kern, Thomas, and Hughes. See link above.

By Kim Miklusak

I am currently taking a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC.  Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.  Step 1, the General Needs Assessment, can be found here.

Step 2: Targeted Needs Assessment.
With the information gathered from the general needs assessment, the curriculum developer will now address their specific learners and learning environment.  This step allows developers to clarify what is already being taught and how it is being taught, including a focus on unmotivated learner.  Furthermore, the developer can set goals for future planning using information gathered.

There are two areas of focus in this stage: 

• The learner: what are the expectations on knowledge and skills?  What previous education do they have?  What characteristics do they have?  What are the perceived deficiencies and attitudes?  What are their preferences to learning strategies?

• The environment: What other curricula exist?  Who are other stakeholders affected?  What resources are available?  What barriers and reinforcing conditions exist that affect the learners (positively and negatively)

From this, the developer needs to consider by what means they will gather this information.  Each method has its own benefits and drawbacks related to resources, time, reliability, and so on.  For example, will the developer use surveys, interviews, questionnaires, tests, observation, etc.?  Will the results be quantitative or qualitative?  Would results be consistent across all developers?  Are the questions geared toward the targeted goals?

In Practice:
For this step I wonder how often we gather information from our learners when we re/design our curricula beyond looking at grades or testing data.  On Twitter I have seen an increasing number of teachers using surveys and questionnaires to gather feedback from students about things such as various attitudes, prior knowledge, or feedback on lessons.  We have tried this with our Senior English course this year, and from the information gathered, we decided we needed a SEL focus built into our course.  However, these methods are, as mentioned above, time consuming and not always accurate.  What would it look like to have one-on-one or small group interviews?  What qualities would we look for if we were observing a course in order to redesign it?  How do we ask the right questions in order to get the information we need?

Additionally, I wonder to what extent we consider the environment when redesigning our curriculum.  Do we consider barriers students have to success?  Do we consider reinforcing conditions that encourage them to succeed or not succeed?  In fact, do we survey our students who are unmotivated or unsuccessful to see how we can better adjust our curriculum to meet their needs--what would that method of information gathering look like? 

If you have samples of ways you have surveyed your learners in order to redesign your curricula, please share examples below!  Thanks!

In the next blog post I will discuss Step 3 where we analyze our goals and objectives.

6-Step Process to Designing Curriculum (Part 1)

By Kim Miklusak

From Kern, Thomas, and Hughes. See link above.

I am currently taking a Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction course at UIC.  Our textbook, while a medical curriculum textbook, reminds us that curriculum design crosses education fields and that what we are doing in our classes every year has its grounding in research.  Kern, Thomas, and Hughes in their book provide a 6-step approach to curriculum development.  I will cover the first step in the first installment.  My goal is to share the theory behind our current practices to serve as a guide as design and redesign our courses.

Step 1: General Needs Assessment
In the general needs assessment you will identify the problem: something simple like "how do we do a better job of teaching X, Y, Z" or a more complex question like "why are students not able to get through the entire curriculum?"  For instance, how do we improve writing of a research paper?  Or how do we engage students in metacognitive reading practice?  The problem may not deal with content at all and instead focus on areas like teacher qualities or student attitudes.  You will analyze whom the problem affects, what it affects, and the quantitative/qualitative importance of these effects.

In the end, you need to consider the current approach as compared to the ideal approach.  That gap between current vs. ideal is your needs assessment and should be investigated from the angle of all stakeholders--teachers, students, administrators, etc.

In Practice:
What does this mean for our day-to-day lives in curriculum design?  First, I wonder when we sit down to redesign our curriculum, if we start with identifying problems.  If there isn't an identifiable problem, why are we redesigning?  Do we have metrics to show something is missing or not working effectively?  Or do we focus on "I'd like to..." or "wouldn't it be fun if..." thoughts, which have their place, but may not be a priority.

I also wonder in our curriculum designs if we take into account teacher qualities or student attitudes.  Do we consider what other factors may be limiting success in our curriculum such as stakeholders' prior knowledge and attitudes, personal skills and environmental forces, and current rewards/punishments?  Some of this is out of our control, but these are areas we should at least investigate as we reflect upon potential problems to address.

In the next blog post I will discuss Step 2--the targeted needs assessments--where we engage other stakeholders in redesigning the curriculum process.

Grading Practices and Student Engagement

By Kristen Gierman 

As teachers, we are constantly reflecting.  But as the semester winds down, we devote a particular attention to grades.  That’s not to say we do not notice the successes and less than of our students throughout the semester, but we are more in tune with the trends within the grading system as the semester nears its end.

This year I noticed a striking oddity when it came to my particular gradebook for World History.  The lowest category across all of my classes was reading.  Now that’s not to say that my students cannot read, dislike reading, or just avoid it altogether.  But perhaps there was a flaw in the way we were assessing it OR in the strategies students were using to be successful.

Put simply, the reading of our World History sophomores is elevated compared to that of the Human Geography freshmen.  While most would argue that this would seem or should be a natural progression in a school setting, what I mean by this is that the stakes are raised tremendously.  As a member of both the Human Geography and World History teams the past three years, I have noticed that students generally succeed or find reading in Human Geography “easy” because the curriculum is about the world that they live in and in doing so help create.  For instance, analyzing the impact the media has on stereotypes is a normal process because the students live it, feel it, and perhaps have strong opinions on the matter.  World History, on the other hand, asks students to take a trip to the past, analyze verbiage from a different time, and find interest in the unfamiliar.  Comparatively speaking, for a student the task of reading becomes more complex or daunting than ever.  


As a result, I have made it a personal goal to incorporate more document-based work in the classroom this semester.  I am doing so in the hopes that students experience growth in their reading skills and confidence.  Furthermore, it will also require that they become engaged in historical inquiry.  The usage of documents forces students to ask questions, collect evidence, and produce claims about the past.  The difficulty with document-based work is that it can be extremely complex and time consuming.  The benefit, as I have already seen, is that the students have become more engaged in the process and their learning has become more authentic as we continue to practice this skill regularly.  

What is the Purpose of School: students' perspective

By Kim Miklusak

We talk about purpose a lot in the Collab Lab, so much so that it's become a running joke.  But it's true: knowing the purpose of why we do what we do in our classrooms is the center of everything.  It guides everything from our goals to our assessments to our grades and everything else in between.

We decided it would be interesting to hear students' perspectives of school and classes--not any class in particular, but overall.  So we invited in a small group of juniors and (literally) grabbed some seniors as they were on their way out the door.  This is a group limited in that they are mainly AP English students.  We realize that this is just a small representation of our student body, and we hope to host this same type of meeting with other groups of students on the same and additional topics in the future!

We could write a year's worth of blogs based on what they talked about, and they could have talked another hour!  You can follow this link to read the entire summarized transcript of the conversation as it happened, but here are some points I found most insightful and interesting:

• Students felt that while academics held a great importance, obviously, that "soft skills" such as time management, character, networks of support, etc. are all equally as important.  We talked about whether these were skills teachers should teach or if they were simply expected.  Surprisingly (or not surprisingly based on this group) many students said it was self-accountability and self-awareness that were most important although they admitted that not everyone has a support structure or that it took some people more time to develop these skills.  This, interestingly, relates back to a previous post we had about Executive Functioning Skills.
• Students discussed at length the process vs. product of school.  They discussed why some teachers require notes and assignments to be completed in a certain way even if it wasn't the way a student learned best--again while conceding that it's not possible to completely individualize instruction.  They do advocate for options in the process of learning.  There were disagreements about whether habits of work and task completion were truly useful in the learning process.  There was also great discussion about why we average grades (unprompted, seriously!), that if by the end of the year they are able to demonstrate mastery, why were grades averaged from earlier in the year when they were not yet mastering materials.  Again, however, the conversation came back to the idea of grades being a reflection of where you are and thus not including "task completion" activities simply to bump up grades.
• Students brought up the importance of clear standards, the need to clearly know what they need to know and be able to do.  They talked about how class needs to be a reflection of the proportion of the assessments; that is, do we as teachers spend the appropriate amount of time on skills and topics in our instruction and in our assessment, and is that then reflected appropriately in our grade books?  Do we provide appropriate and timely feedback when we return assignments, holding ourselves to the same standards that we hold them?  This led into a conversation about the importance of critical inquiry and critical reading (again, unprompted!) with one student saying: 

  “The way we critically analyze or think, most of my classes taught me how to be a better writer or thinker, how to look through a different lens.  That’s what they’re trying to teach…when we leave this school there are a lot of” people who are not like you.  This will make you well rounded.

So many thanks to these students for their time and insight!  We appreciate their speaking with us today, and we definitely look forward to hosting more sessions like this in the future!