When a school takes a particular cohort of focal students, concentrating on them relentlessly for three consecutive years, 100% success is achievable for that group – the kids who many thought would never succeed.
Some students will accelerate and be succeeding by the end of the year; some will accelerate towards those goals and require additional support for following years. But they will be accelerating, not just progressing at the expected rate. Consider, these are the learners who have experienced the least educational success so far; they are not the kids just below a benchmark.
We are all shifting the whole system together, many of us without realizing it.
Here’s how it happened in classrooms:
In each classroom where a teacher has chosen to focus on just three to five focal students, they begin a deep connection with those learners and their parents, to know them as people, find out what interests them, what they already know, and then work out how to create learning experiences that bond with those interests and teach what they need and want to know next.
Focusing on a small number in one class is manageable, with the benefit of escalating the mind shift across the class.
When test scores are used as the sole or primary measure for evaluating performance of students, teachers, and schools they feel pressured to “teach to the test”. That makes both learning and teaching uninspiring for everyone – and ineffective for most kids.
The Learner First work is using Authentic Mixed Method Assessment to track student outcomes. Standardized test scores are but one data point used alongside all other evidence teachers have to understand where a student is aligned on the relevant outcome.
President Barack Obama recently called for a capping of standardized testing at 2 percent of classroom time and said the government shares responsibility for turning tests in the be-all and end-all of American schools.
The Lighthouse digital data collection platform radically changes the way teachers, schools and districts measure and track student and district progress toward achieving target outcomes.
Among other features, Lighthouse allows the district to do the following:
- Determine and enter student success ratings using a range of student success rubrics, surveys and tools, as well as formal assessments.
- Administer student, teacher, and parent surveys across the district for specific groups.
- Output reports demonstrating where the district and individual is currently positioned and indicating areas that need to be accelerated.
Rather than simply entering student ratings based on a limited range of performance indicators, teachers learn to take into account everything they know about each individual student when determining their ratings. This Authentic Mixed Method Assessment (AMMA) approach drives teachers’ understanding of each student’s current position in their learning progression, and is embedded within the Lighthouse system to guide teachers through the rating process.
