A Plea for Nuance
And help with a new book I’m writing
Hot polarizing takes are a dime a dozen these days.
From opinions on the job President Biden is doing to what you think of Brown University Professor Emily Oster’s advice around reopening schools, many of the takes tend to lack… nuance.
People are often either for or against something.
Unpacking an issue and finding the middle ground tends not to find its way into headlines and the media or attract eyeballs.
And yet, as Diane Tavenner and I argue in our final episode of Season 2 of our Class Disrupted podcast, the nuance of issues is where the paths to new sets of solutions that will work better for every individual often lie.
As we wrapped up this season (and mark your calendars, as we’ll be back next August!), we tried to carve out more nuanced positions on four topics that impacted schooling over the past year, were recurring themes in our podcasts, and have important ramifications for the future of learning:
Politics
Testing
Where students learn
Doing something with versus doing something to a community
Politics
On politics, several months ago there were plenty of calls for less political interference in the scientists giving us guidance on COVID-19. But when the scientists recommended we no longer needed masks without giving the politicians much of a heads up—or a say—just a couple months ago, something seemed awry.
We tried to dissect the issues at hand—and the role of policymaking—in education in the episode. One takeaway? What we do with the latest in scientific research is often a tricky judgment call with real-world tradeoffs that, yes, sits squarely in the realm of policymaking.
Testing
A vignette I shared in a previous newsletter spoke volumes:
Maria Armstrong, the executive director of the Association for Latino Administrators and Superintendents, said it’s critical that educators lean into using data. As she said, “That which gets assessed, gets addressed.”
But Dan Jennings, the technology and assessment coordinator for the Hagerman School District in New Mexico, said he wanted to move beyond today’s onerous assessment system.
When I pushed and asked how could we leverage data or move to mastery-based learning without robust systems of assessment that educators, families, and the public could trust, Jennings clarified quickly that he’s not anti-testing—after all, he’s been the assessment coordinator for his district. And testing is critical for learning. What he is against is the current system of summative, grade-level assessments that are not tightly linked to a student’s in-depth exploration of content that take a couple weeks to administer where results only appear well after the fact and are unusable for driving student learning. What he wants is smaller, on-demand, more authentic assessments that could be checked for validity and reliability but that are driving both learning and transparency.
In today’s time-based system, psychometricians (experts in the science of measurement) will tell you that assessments can’t do both. But in a mastery-based system, there are plenty of counter-factual case studies that show we can do better.
You’ll also want to tune in and listen to hear what Summit Public Schools was able to do in California this year with its own assessment system.
Where students learn
On the question of where students learn—I’ve written much about how barring full-time virtual learning doesn’t make sense—but Diane and I went a step further to think about what the ability to learn any place means and the policy implications.
Doing something with versus doing something to a community
And we talked how solutions can’t be done to populations because they’ll reject them, but that doesn’t mean just taking a poll and following what the majority wants. Overly relying on the averages of what people say they want to create one-size-fits-all solutions will often backfire and create a lot of gaps.
Check out the podcast here.
How One School’s Fitness Classes Are A Good Model for All Learning
I interviewed Pete Driscoll, a beloved PE teacher in Hartford, Vermont, where he’s brought the ethos of CrossFit into the district’s schools, for this YouTube Live conversation.
There were several takeaways from the conversation, but three highlights for me were:
1) Pete changed PE in the school to focus on personal progress, not having students compare themselves to each other. How? By eliminating the dominant PE focus on games and such and instead creating a cycle in which students set personal fitness goals for themselves, plan how they’ll get there, workout, and then assess and reflect on their progress. It’s basically the same as Summit’s learning cycle—and one that ought to inform all learning.
2) That in turn has led to a lot of students gaining confidence and self-efficacy through the class—which has improved other parts of their life, to say nothing of the lifelong fitness habits Pete’s helping them build.
3) Some research suggests that exercise primes the brain for learning—and anecdotally Pete has heard other teachers notice improvements in students’ capacity to learn after they work out.
Watch the whole conversation here.
New book
Finally, I’ve got some exciting news. I’m working on a new book about how educators and our communities should redesign schools and opportunities for learning as they return from the pandemic. I’ll share more as I write, but if you have recommendations for schools and districts that are taking some big steps toward redesigning to create more student-centered learning and not going back to business as usual, I’d love to hear from you!
As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.