Notes From the North Country

For a long time, as I have written before, I have wondered how the various educational movements that pre-date the 2013 advent of Proficiency-Based Learning in my home state of Vermont fit together.  As I’ve said in the past, the speed and stealth operation of education reform is truly a wonder. The more I study educational history, the more I’m in awe of how often big, sometimes-state- or country-wide changes in practice and policy occur (and then usually disappear . . . ); and rarely the proponents of such reforms seem to have any inkling of the past efforts from which new ideas have sprung, sometimes nearly unchanged.

The 2013 adoption by the state of Vermont of the Vermont Educational Quality Standards, which included a provision for Proficiency-Based Learning, was just such a trend.

This post is my third attempt to try to understand where that trend came from. The two previous posts under this heading were snapshots, but starting now, I’ll aim to more carefully fit the pieces together in order. This post is based on the research I have been doing this summer.  It’s far from the full picture, and I make no claim to scholarly validity, but I consider this a working teacher’s first, iterative, good-faith attempt to get at the truth.

Continue reading “The Origins of Proficiency: Part 3 — Mastery Learning”

One of the most interesting contrasts in grading philosophy is the question of whether grades are meant to identify talent or to develop it.  

This is a simple, basic distinction that I have encountered over and over again in my research into the work of Thomas Guskey.  It is also a profound distinction that I believe all teachers are advised to consider.

Continue reading “Bloom’s Curve”

I believe that when you arrive at a certain point in life, perhaps even a certain “midway” point, it’s important to understand what you’re against, but it’s also high time to start fleshing out just what it is that you are for.  To me, that’s a mark of maturity: knowing who you are, what you’re all about, who exactly you really align with, and how it is that you view the world.  

A thinker like John Dewey of course, an evolutionary Pragmatist, would surely respond that who we are is always changing.  That’s true.  But I think it’s also true that every now and then you read something that strikes a deep chord with you, something that’s bone deep inside you, something that vibrates to a particular tuning fork.  I’m talking about in your work, in your personal life, in politics, and above all, in philosophy.

Here’s something I just learned:  so far, I really, really identify with the political worldview embodied in The Federalist Papers.

Continue reading “The Wisdom of The Federalist”

Alright, I had to take a pause briefly from my research into Thomas Guskey to write about this absolutely fascinating article I just found that really explains to me so much about where Proficiency-Based Learning (PBL) came from.  

The article is a 1992 interview with William Spady, the founder of Outcome-Based Education (OBE), an educational philosophy I’d always known was some kind of direct predecessor to PBL, but which seemed to have been wiped clean from the American ed scene since sometime when I was still in elementary school. 

This article is truly a fascinating look into where PBL came from. In it, Spady really explains OBE, analyzes how it’s different than Mastery Learning (ML) and is put to some tough questions that inadvertently show you why OBE is going to be doomed in and forgotten in just a few years . . .  only to return many years later in the Northeast, as OBE-lite, under the name of Proficiency-Based Education.

So there it is:  PBL is just OBE-lite.  And almost no one knows what that movement even was.

Continue reading “Origins of PBL, Part II: PBL is just Outcome-Based Learning (lite)”

I think every educator should “go down the rabbit hole” each summer.  This is a practice I started at the National Writing Project’s summer institute, where it’s more properly known as “undertaking a research project about some aspect of your practice.” I prefer the rabbit hole metaphor, or perhaps, as sportswriter Bill Simmons would say, “going into ‘binge mode.’”

I pick a topic relating to this wonderful, varied profession of ours, some trend, fad, current issue, some school or approach and delve into the research.  More specifically, I like to understand where it came from, to pore over the evidence, to put the puzzle pieces together until I can trace the timeline that helps me understand how that idea ended up in my classroom.  Education is an interesting mix of the immediate, the live, the day-to-day — but also of the intellectual, the political, the ideas and the debates.  It’s cyclical but also evolving.  Schools and teachers roll through trend after trend, often with little or no justification from the higher-ups, no understanding of much of where it’s all coming from.  I like to go back and figure it all out.  There’s nothing more interesting than realizing that some hot new trend is actually coming out of some prior movement that the older folks would like you to forget ever existed.  I like to go back to the source, to read the important works, to scour the academic journals, see the reports in newspapers, study the books by the authors who were there when all of this was first booting up.  That, as I’ve said before, is the path to freedom.  To know your history is to be liberated.  

That’s what going down the rabbit hole is all about: liberation.

Continue reading “Proficiency-Based Learning: Where Did it Come From? Part 1”

Any time Jonathan Rauch has a new book, I preorder it. 

Why? First let’s start with the fact that the man is, quite simply, a genius. He is a unique synthesis: a heterodox thinker who challenges convention, a classical liberal grounded in tradition, just enough of an academic to be meaningful, and just enough of a professional journalist to be clarifying. Forged in the fires of the Gay Rights Movement, of which he has been an integral part since the 1980s, Rauch is an astute critic of both the Status Quo and of the Resistance. He is a tireless advocate of identity politics *and* the most articulate defender of unfettered free speech this side of John Stuart Mill.

I have written before about his monumental and towering 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors, possibly the most illuminating analysis I have ever read about contemporary liberal society, and surely the best argument for free speech and debate written since the mid-19th century.  When I heard that Rauch was revisiting these topics in a new, more expansive work due out this summer, I pre-ordered the book and spent the next four months devouring any articles or podcasts the man did to promote it.  In particular, Rauch’s conversation and debate with fellow gay rights luminary and free speech defender Andrew Sullivan — the rare time when someone has gotten the better of Sullivan on his own turf, I’d say — got me particularly excited. Last week, I finally received my copy of The Constitution of Knowledge.

It didn’t disappoint.

Continue reading “The Constitution of Knowledge”

Over the past week or so since school let out, I’ve been undertaking a short research project to try to understand the different approaches that various Vermont high schools have been taking toward Proficiency Based Learning (PBL).  Too often over the past five years, I have felt a nagging sense that my coworkers and I were going it alone, left to our own devices to practically invent a brand-new system of teaching from the ground up, isolated from our counterparts in other schools down the road, toiling away in their own classrooms, all of us making the same mistakes, reinventing the wheel, unable to learn from each other’s missteps.

Now that the dust has settled from the pandemic year and from the first (and now second!) senior classes to graduate under PBL, I wanted to pause to examine what everyone else has come up with for PBL systems — my coworkers and counterparts up and down the Green Mountain state: surely there is something I could learn from their ingenuity and improvisation.

I’m not quite finished yet — so far I’ve researched about 35 of the 50 or so high schools in Vermont — and I’m not exactly calling principals to inquire about the inside dirt; I’m just going on the materials that districts make publicly available. But there’s quite a bit online, much of it reasonably up to date, and with some digging and close reading, I think I’ve managed to surmise what most Vermont secondary programs have put in place. I’ve studied up on their graduation requirements, their PBL initiatives, their transferable skills, their grading scales, and anything else relevant to this strange and interesting new system we’re all designing in our own way.

It’s a little like one of those TV shows where they give cooks ten minutes to put together original creations using wacky, unorthodox ingredients. Time to take a stroll and see how the others have made it work.

Put it this way: It was fascinating. 

Continue reading “Different Approaches to PBL in Vermont High Schools, A Study: Initial Impressions”

(Author’s Note: I wrote this last May but haven’t gotten around to putting it up until now.)

It’s the Spring of 2021 and more than a year into this whole mess, the pandemic is finally starting to come to an end.  I am fully vaccinated and my wife will be two weeks from her last shot in another week and last night I went to pick up takeout from a restaurant in town and every table was filled with unmasked diners grinning and laughing and leaning in close and drinking and everything looking a heck of a lot like normal.  I just hope when this is all over we’re still allowed to keep ordering takeout alcohol.  What would be the problem there? There’s nothing like walking back to your car on Main Street with two massive blue margaritas.

Continue reading “Screaming in Public”

In my last post, I looked at Proficiency-Based Learning in Vermont — focusing especially on my surprise that it has lasted so long, and examining reasons why.  

I also talked about several of the surprising things that stood out to me during the implementation.

Today I want to go a little deeper by looking at the pros and cons of PBL itself.  I realize that with something as vast, nebulous, de-centered, and hazy about its origins as PBL, it’s hard to comment with any real certainty about what it really is.  It’s not quite as bad as “Personalized Learning” — whatever that is — but it’s still, as I mentioned in the last post, a little like the blind man and the elephant.  

That said, I actually think you can get to the heart of what PBL really is, especially if you’ve used it for a few years like I have.  It’s taken me a while to get this far, but I think I’ve started to understand what’s really going on with PBL — both the good and the bad.

Let’s start with PBL’s main selling point, the heart of what it’s all about.

The Paradox of Clarity

PBL is focused on clarity.  Its main tenet is that greater clarity improves learning.  It promises sharper learning targets, distinctions between work habits and subject proficiency, more actionable feedback, and more specific data.

But here’s the paradox:  Clarity requires both specificity and simplicity.  It’s like good writing: as an English teacher, I teach my students they need to use specific details but also simple, effective organization and clear, jargon-free language.  In fact, this balance is one of the perennial challenges of teaching itself: you must be specific with your expectations, feedback, and goals, but you must also be simple and targeted, too, so that you don’t lose or overwhelm students: Comprehensive, but also streamlined.

PBL embodies this paradox of clarity — both the potential benefits and the pitfalls. 

First, the benefits.

Clarity of Goals

For starters, PBL’s push for teachers to more clearly define their goals has been positive for everyone involved, for all the reasons that greater clarity of objectives is always valuable.  I think it’s safe to say that an entire generation of teachers has a much clearer understanding of what’s important subject knowledge in their discipline, and where the “bar” should be for high school graduation.  PBL has asked some fundamental questions of teachers, and I think it has helped us come to greater clarity.

For example, here’s an awkward question we faced early on:  If we set the bar at a place that can be reached by a majority of our students by 12th grade, aren’t there a number of students who can reach that bar two or even three years prior?  If a student can demonstrate proficiency by the end of 9th grade, why is that student expected to stay around and finish three more years of high school classes?  (We had to find a good answer!)  Or, if you suggest that the bar should be raised . . .  then you’re back to the classic “bar raising” challenges of any ambitious reform (for example, what happens when 20% of your seniors won’t be graduating in June?).  Either way, having to clearly delineate what a graduation “proficient” skill level truly is, with so little room to muddy or to hide our answer, was deeply instructive for us as teachers.

Clarity of Assessment

I also think that the use of fewer gradations in our grading scales — 1 to 4, rather than 0 to 100, for example — has also helped teachers flesh out clear differences of levels of proficiency within their disciplines.  I often find myself telling students, “Here’s what a 3 is — and here’s what a 2 is” in a really clear way that I was never able to do between an A and a B.  Yes, there’s a far bigger range within each step on the scale (a 2 encapsulates a whole range of 70s and 80s under the old system) but the fewer categories allow teachers to draw clearer distinctions between levels, which in my view does give students greater clarity about what the next level requires.  Not to mention that now teachers must carefully define what “exceeding the standard” requires. 

Clarity of Standards

PBL has not only asked teachers for clarity, but schools as well.  Because PBL requires a very precise enunciation of goals, schools have been forced to rethink what is important to teach.  This too has raised positive questions: Should content determine graduation standards?  Or should so-called transferable skills be included as well?  How should work habits be assessed and valued?  

One of the promising distinctions that many PBL systems make is that between subject area proficiencies and habits of work.  This (theoretically) allows for clearer focus on prioritizing real learning rather than compliance, while also isolating exactly what habits of work schools expect (and hopefully teaching those habits).  Once again, the promise is that clearer understanding on the part of schools leads to greater clarity of expectations and therefore better teaching and learning.

A Clear Focus on Proficiency, Not on “Passing”

Here’s another place that PBL is more clear: It focuses all of our conversations — with students, with parents, and with fellow educators — around the pursuit of proficiency, instead of around “passing.” This is positive because it keeps the focus on learning, rather than on compliance.  Plus, because PBL prioritizes demonstrations of proficiency rather than the accrual of points, PBL keeps the focus on substantive and (hopefully) authentic demonstrations of learning, rather than on completing enough worksheets.  This is incredibly promising.  There is something so different about telling a student, under PBL, “You need to show me evidence” compared to saying, under the old system, “You need to do your work.” It’s a subtle but powerful change.

Now, for some negative aspects of PBL.

The Downside of “Clarity”: Too Much Detail

But here’s the problem.  PBL aspires to make everything clear by being really, really specific.  But that push for specificity fundamentally inclines PBL toward complexity. It pushes teachers to parse everything, to break it all down into skills and sub-skills, to enumerate standards and performance indicators, to describe more, to report more. Done wrong, this specificity leads to report cards with too many standards to digest, rubrics with too many words, data collection instead of assessment.  Before you know it, you’ve sacrificed clarity in the name of detail and data. This fundamental problem can be seen in many facets of the system, some of which are described below.

Losing the Big Picture

Along those lines, PBL can engender a kind of myopic focus on minute sub-skills — rather than on a holistic, authentic approach to the wider goals of growth and learning.  The old system had this same issue too, of course.  And I actually think that the simultaneous implementation of Act 77, a piece of legislation very much focused on holistic educational success and authentic learning, has helped buffer this issue.  That said, the old system, with its “hodgepodge” grade calculation, watered down by a (sometimes oblique) mixture of content and work habit grades, did incline more toward holistic conversations about a student’s progress than any system whose business it is to monitor well-parsed, well-differentiated standards and skills. Again, that’s not to say that the new, PBL-inspired conversations aren’t more focused on learning than on compliance, just that too often “learning” can mean “Math subskill 482.4a” rather than “critical thinking” or “reading ability.”

More Data Is Not Always Better

I often think that opening up online portals for parents and guardians and students to view, which most Vermont schools did relatively recently, created a new expectation of transparency that has subtly shifted our thinking about scoring and reporting.  The question of to what extent gradebooks should be decipherable to the layperson is an interesting one that I don’t think we have fully sussed out.  That said, PBL does market itself as providing clarity laypeople — especially students and families and colleges — about exactly what a student knows and can do. One of its strongest arguments against the old system was the “black box” critique — the old system told us very little about what a student knows and can do.

But part of the problem with PBL is that in its push to more carefully define everything, PBL creates new complexities in scoring and reporting.  There was something simple and intuitive about the sole course grade derived from a simple average.  It had a clarity to it (flawed as it was): it allowed both students and parents a quick, easy way to judge how a student was doing.  Yes, some of it was focused on compliance (is a student turning in work?), but it was a simple way to tell if a student was learning.  It was not only the fact that daily assignments were built into the grade, but also the differentiation of 0-100 grading scale.  That made it a lot easier to tell just how well a student was really doing.  Whereas a system with fewer levels really lumps a lot of students into the same designation.  It’s nice for clarity of learning objectives, but it’s less instructive for parents wanting to understand how their child is doing.

Yes, many schools still give students course grades under PBL, but if the student must still complete a portfolio of proficiencies within a variety of standards, the simplicity of the course grade is undercut by the complexity of the portfolio.

Think for a moment about the complexity:  Each student (and parent or guardian) must keep abreast of progress on, at the very least, three standards for seven disciplines, most of which require at least two different demonstrations.  That’s 42 different items that must be reported and understood.  There is simply a lot of room for confusion on the part of everyone involved.  Don’t get me wrong — I think portfolio demonstrations are important, but their inherent complexity can be at odds with the notion of clarity that PBL was designed to engender about learning in the first place.  

Portfolio-Based Reporting Systems are Hard to Maintain, and Hard to Report

Again, not all schools report this way, but generally a Mastery- or Proficiency-based system lends itself to being scored as a portfolio.  It makes sense: anytime you need to demonstrate skill on a specific kind of task (rather than just accumulating points in a points-based system), teachers must keep a record of these specific performances, rather than just a running average of your scores.  This is, at heart, a portfolio system.

But unless you’re just assessing students on a single standard within a course (“Geometry,” or “Physics,” say), portfolios can quickly become very complex to score and report.  Normal grading systems must report date, assignment title, and point value; portfolio systems must also report which standards were met, and — this is critical — how many times they were met.

This gets particularly challenging when students are able to address certain standards across multiple years.  Such a system demands that you have a central place where you can “house” the portfolio: next year’s English teacher needs to know how many times Johnny was proficient in my class, so where do we house this information?  And how to get the data to this central location (without spending lots of extra time)?  Such a system can quickly turn into a logistical nightmare, with lots of places for human error, and indecipherable to outsiders.

Of course, you can avoid some of this problem by restricting proficiencies to single courses (all Geometry proficiencies must be done in Geometry class, etc.), but then you run into the old problems of students needing to take classes over again (which is not in the progressive spirit of PBL, and which can come perilously close to simply asking that students merely “pass”).  And you also risk having far too many standards because each course now has its own, separate ones.

But go in the other direction and you’ll quickly realize that the fewer standards you have, the more you need a centralized portfolio — which is . . . tricky to create and to report.

This all sounds like something a computer should be able to handle, but very few grading systems are actually set up to accommodate such requests at all, let alone to convey them in a visually appealing, intuitive display for the layperson.

And any coherence is predicated on the notion that all departments expect the same number of proficient demonstrations.  At my school, one department requires three, while another requires just two (though each must be from a different class).  In some departments, 10th grade or even 9th grade courses present graduation-level opportunities, while in other departments, they don’t.  How could one grading software accommodate all this? 

In the next post, I’ll explain some last thoughts about PBL.