Education provides meaningful structure for an organic process called learning.
Where to
One afternoon while bending left to exit my Edisto High School cafeteria for another academic awards ceremony, a group of students discharged from detention turned right toward the parking lot. I stood in the courtyard for a moment observing. Contrasts emerged in our diverging paths. “This is not okay.” The sentiment repeated and reverbated through my mind. Later, I learned about the foundations of education in America and how those and subsequent machinations had groomed those specific paths that appeared so cleared on that spring day. After that day, I sketched fewer shoes, tables, libraries, and determined my life would be better spent designing better, broader pathways. These past 12 years I have spent teaching, learning, crafting, and creating. “RenewEd” is part syllabus and part blog, a “syllablog” to share some of these designs with you.
Suspended Realities
Change is inevitable; design is not. Our education systems should operate with a forward looking agenda. If education is preparation then we must skate to where our world is going. Better yet, we communities should create the world they wish to live in. Zigzagging between imagination and pragmatism is disorienting, like looking a pile of unsorted puzzle pieces. For efficiency, I invite you to suspend your logistical nightmares involved to stitching these ideas into our current frameworks. Question, yes! Challenge the value, impact, and implication of the ideas, absolutely! Abandon concerns of “likelihood”. Can we live in a dramatically different world than ancestors? For my family at least, the answer is a resounding certainty. Have the chutzpah to imagine that world and build it. Let’s begin with the end in mind. Let’s reimagine the report card first.
Who Says
We begin RenewEd with spectrum reports because the reports are an evolution of the report card. Report cards are used to measured progress in education. The notion that we should know about where we want to go before we set off is also considered ‘best practice’ in multiple disciplines, including education. So, we begin with the end in mind, and that endpoint is checkpoint. At the checkpoint, we find a measuring stick labeled with our values.
We measure what we value
Be it weight, clarity, volume, accuracy, or area, what we measure spEAkS TO what we think CARRIES value. How we choose to measure our values identifies where we believe those values originate. Spectrum reports evaluate the quality of our projections, the degree of our insights, and the progress of our process. Spectrum reports evaluate these by observing students, parents, and teachers, the significant contributors in a child’s life. Any significant contributor to the child’s life may appear on the spectrum report. The child is always considered a significant contributor in their own report. The degree to which a child is responsible for their own progress is an important factor to measure, and may change significantly over time.
Significance is measured via the amount of time and volume of resources the person contributes to the child’s wellbeing. Does the child live with this person? What percentage of food resources a month does this person provide to the child? Beyond legal guardians and the child, additional significant contributors are determined by a ranked choice ballot with the guardian, child, and requisite school leaders as the electorate. Each of the electorate may elect the same number of contributors unless they choose to defer. Significant contributors may be people outside of the school.
Spectrum reports consider the life of the child
Our Goals
Current report cards offer a truncated view of a child’s development. Reports today focus on a child’s academic and behavioral outcomes. Targets by which the child (and by proxy the faculty, parents, and programs) is measured often come from distant county, state, or federal policy pushers. Often, policy pushers have little to no direct involvement in life of the school and even less to do with the life of the families. As such, the goals offer few guarantees for the interest of the children. Spectrum reports place the responsibility for defining appropriate targets at the hands of the significant contributors.
If you wish to go far, go together
Each significant contributor, including the child, offers goals to be measured. There are shared and individual goals. Each goal comes with a timeline. Individual goals exist for each significant contributor. All contributors, including the child, may offer goals for themselves and all other contributors. Individual goals are submitted anonymously prior to the collaboration meeting. Each contributor is able to offer goals toward every other contributor’s slate. Contributors select shared goals together, ideally through discussion, if needed by vote. Goals are communicated as desired prevailing outcomes.
Many Measures
In most education report cards circa 2019, faculty provide almost all of the feedback for reporting. The data used for reporting is sometimes outlined and rarely described. Centralizing critical information limits critical analysis and over emphasizes the role of faculty in the growth of the child. Privileging a teacher’s view in this way often narrows insight and privileges a narrow band of reality. With goals outlined, Spectrum reports are designed to ensure multiple contributors lend their perspective on an individual’s progress.
A broader view of progress
Each contributor evaluates their own progress on shared and individual goals. Then other contributors evaluate the individual on goals they share and individual goals. Those evaluations are oberseved as data points, evidence, and anecdotes that provide a comprehensive composite. For example, a child is evaluating their progress toward a set of social emotional goals. The child’s spectrum report will include a self evaluation, evaluation from the child’s guardian, and a relevant faculty member. The report may also include data from peer or classmate. Including multiple perspectives offers a broader or bolder view of progress.
Timeline Progress
Part and parcel of this approach to reporting is an understanding that goals can be individual and independent. Knowing what goals are important and why they are important becomes more useful when we also understand when they will become important. Often, timelines help us evaluate our commitment to the goal. Timelines can also help us appreciate the effect of a goal. When a goal is assigned, we also outline a timeline for when we can expect proof of specific progress. Because goals can run along asynchronous timelines, it is nonessential for spectrum report data, evidence, or anecdotes follow a single update cycle. Timelines are informed by the goal.
Timelines reveal the urgency of the goal
Report Sharing
Teachers and curriculum designers often shrink-wrap goals into manageable chunks. Nine-week intervals, quarters, semesters, weeks. We know that children learn at different rates. We know that certain skills require more or less time to cover. Still, these truths rarely weigh out in the design of educational programs. Respecting these facts means allowing disparate goals to have their own timelines agnostic of a general calendar of events.
When we create spectrum reports can be as important as what the report reveals. The report means to offer a wide lens of progress toward all active goals. Due to its comprehensive composite nature, collaboration is necessary to effectivley generate one. The report itself is a living ledger being updated and maintained as new anecdotes, data, or evidence emerges.
While progress toward goals is updated individually, having a full spectrum report issued is an important opportunity. Do we wish to take stock in growth we have measured up to this point? Do we wish to “check the oil”? Dates for spectrum reporting can be determined either by random selection or by community request.
Random Selection
Every calendar is structured to include various celebrations and events. These details allow everyone to consider the school calendar. If no specific dates have been determined to issue spectrum reports, a random date generator may be used to determine the next issue date within the present year.
Community Request
Sometimes the community may wish to have spectrum reports issued outside before the next assigned issue date. When the community request for spectrum reports succeeds, the process for generating a spectrum report begins at the next avaiable work date. A successful community request requires backing. This backing can come from one strong majority of students, faculty, or family or two soft majorities of students, faculty, or family. A strong majority counts more than 59% of a community. A soft majority counts more than 29% of a community.
Learning is an ocean with social surface tension guarding layer upon layer of depth.
Modeling Progress
There’s so much more to figure out. What kind of language will the report use? How do we effectively collect and responsibly share report details?Our language and design are ready for addition, subtraction, refinement. Adjustment. The spectrum report models progress.
[to be continued]
