Articles by Rob DeBlois
When to Promote Students
by Rob DeBlois
What would it mean if promotion
decisions were based on whether students have actually
learned what we expect at specific grade levels rather than
on their age or seat time? Mr. DeBlois draws lessons from
how one school has made this shift.
JUST FOR a minute, think about how
education in this country could be revitalized if we were
able to separate promotion in grade from time in school.
What would happen if students could advance to the next
grade based on the acquisition of skills and knowledge,
rather than on "time in eat" - usually about 180 days
between the months of August and June? If we adopted such a
practice, what kind of learning opportunities might be
possible for high school students who complete their course
of study earlier than is possible now? In the same respect,
how might we as educators be able to give additional
attention to students who need more time and resources in
order to accommodate their needs and learning styles? Would
we reduce the numbers of kids dropping out of school if we
were able to avoid the harmful practice of holding students
back for a full year when they don't pass all their subjects
in a specific grade?
For the past 15 years, a small
alternative school in Providence , Rhode Island , has been
exploring a way to promote students in a manner that could
make such things possible. What is most interesting about
this experiment is that the decision to advance students to
the next grade is based upon criteria that are no more
subjective than those used by teachers in more traditional
schools throughout the country. What is most significant is
that the program used by teachers at the Urban Collaborative
Accelerated Program (UCAP) might even be called a "system"
with implications for other schools.
UCAP was created in 1989 by several
Rhode Island school districts that were seeking to address
the unacceptably high numbers of students dropping out of
school. Research at that time showed that most kids leaving
school early were regular education students who fell behind
for reasons that usually had nothing to do with academic
potential or ability. A review of data also showed that the
single most reliable indictor of a student's likelihood of
dropping out was rtention in grade, usually before high
school. If there is any single point that stands out in the
research on at-risk students, it is this.
In accordance with these findings, the
UCAP was created with the clear mission of working with
students who had repeated at least one grade. In order to
provide students with a sense of high status and high
expectations, UCAP offered these students an opportunity to
complete more than one grade per year and thereby catch up
to their age-appropriate grade. UCAP was designed to enroll
students entering grade 7 or 8 and to help them move up to
grade level and enter high school in grade 9 or 10.
Although we were not sure how to make it
happen, this, at least, was the plan. We quickly learned
that necessity truly is the mother of invention, as we began
thinking about how we could advance students in grade
according to a new set of rules. And, of course, we wondered
just what these rules might be. We began by looking at the
curricula of three cities with urban cores, and realized
that their similarities were far greater than their
differences. In the core subjects math, English, social
studies, and science we did not have much trouble putting
together curricula that would present students with the
essential content and skills for each grade level.
However, if we were to develop a program
that was reasonably fair and consistent, we realized that we
needed a "currency" by which students, parents, and teachers
could recognize achievement of a specific grade level in a
specific subject. At UCAP, we refer to this currency as
"criteria," and how we determine that a student has
demonstrated the skills and knowledge to amass enough
criteria to move to the next grade level in a subject has
evolved each year.
At present, teachers have decided that
50 criteria are necessary for promotion to the next grade
level. Criteria are awarded for school skills like
attendance and completion of homework; for academic skills
like improved writing, math, or oral presentation; and for
the understanding of big ideas like the scientific method,
reasons for the Civil War, and the effects on society of
changing demographics as a result of immigration. Discussion
has centered on how well we know whether or not a student
has actually learned and demonstrated what we expect of, for
example, an eighth grade student in math. In our early years
we relied on the use of packets that required students to
complete specific tasks related to different segments of the
curriculum, multiplication tables, fractions, decimals, and
so on. In English, grammatical skills fit nicely into such
packets, but writing and literature proved more difficult to
break down into neat subdivisions. We quickly realized that
this approach was not the answer. While packets allowed
students to work at their own pace, their use did not allow
us to present ideas or problems that were not directly
related to the packets' content and arguably to the
criteria. We soon discovered that students embraced the
concept of criteria and the completion of packets,
regardless of whether or not they were learning.
This was a classic good news/bad news
situation. It was encouraging that the students could handle
our system of criteria; however, we had to find a way to
make criteria more valid and reliable. It was frustrating
for us to learn that we hadn't gotten to the heart of the
matter with the concept of criteria. We were not inspiring
students to learn about their world. In many cases, we were
not engaging the students with complex ideas about their
lives or their communities. For the most part, the students
were not seeing a great deal of relevance between much of
the curriculum and their lives. However, we were intimately
engaged in trying to make these things happen.
Around this time, we were observing that
many practices were in place largely by virtue of the kids
we were serving and how we were trying to operate that could
lead to dramatic improvements in learning. For example, very
little instruction took place with the teacher standing in
front of the students telling them what they should know.
The normal 85% to 15% ratio of teacher talk to student talk
was essentially reversed in our school. Instead, teachers
played the role of coach and spent most of the their time
with individual students or small groups of students. In
addition, because student time with the teacher was so
precious, students automatically went to other students for
help when a teacher was not available.
In all classes, teachers abandoned
textbooks, except for use as occasional resources. Instead,
teachers and students relied on a variety of sources to put
forth and examine essential ideas related to skills or
knowledge. Teachers also worked together to develop lessons
and projects, based on research drawing on a variety of
print and Internet resources. In turn, this allowed teachers
and students to break free from the artificially sequential
presentation of ideas that is common in traditional
classrooms where a curriculum is dominated by a textbook. As
a result, students frequently hopped around in a curricular
area, taking on topics or seeking to develop skills in a
sequence that made sense to them. Naturally, teachers
intervened when an ordered progression was clearly
necessary. For example, when students had to learn decimals
before moving on to percentages.
Since our school was created, teachers
have never depended on tests as a means of judging whether
students have learned the material. Instead, teachers rely
on class presentations, compositions, research papers, time
lines, display boards, diagrams and technology-based
projects to judge a student's learning. In math class,
teachers will also just sit down with a student and talk for
five minutes about something like the relationship between
decimals and fractions to determine whether a student really
knows the material. In English/language arts, teachers
frequently conference with students about reading and
writing. Multiple-choice, true/false, fill in the blanks,
and other kinds of tests are virtually never used.
Throughout our 15 years, we have worked
to make sure that students really understand the material as
opposed to just successfully fulfilling a requirement.
Naturally, we strive for a strong relationship between the
two things, although we realize that this is not always
possible. We have found that students seeking promotion over
learning can generally beat any system we can devise. In
this demonstration of creative problem solving, our students
are not much different from those who learn to get by in a
regular system.
In order to promote students based on
our best judgment of what they have learned, we at UCAP have
tried to answer two central questions regarding what should
be expected of a student for a specific subject and grade
level:
To suggest that we have answered these
questions definitively would be foolish. The answers can
never be static for a group of students in a school from
year to year. There is no answer that can hold for students
from one school to schools throughout the country, despite
any illusions that may exist as a result of establishing
standards, testing, and demanding accountability.
However, in answering questions about
when to promote students based on evidence of learning,
national or state standards can provide guidance. Most of
these standards are thoughtful outlines of our best hopes
and ideals for what students should know and be able to do
by the time they graduate from high school. Therefore,
standards are a good starting point for a discussion about
how to create a system that allows students to advance in
grade when they demonstrate "enough" learning for that
grade.
At the same time, we need to understand
two things about standards. The first is that most
standards, in their entirety, are simply not achievable by
most students since they expect students to master just too
many things. It is likely that most college students and
adults could not meet every standard on a comprehensive test
of most states' standards. Therefore, reasonable adults will
need to make decisions about what is essential and what is
acceptable. It has been said that one of the most important
decisions a teacher makes is on what not to cover.
Developing a system of grade promotion that breaks free of
time will bring discussion of these decisions out of the
closet. Once again, the result will not be much different
from what we have today, where teachers have to pick and
choose what to emphasize and what to gloss over.
The second truth about standards as we
know them today is that they are more valuable and valid
when we are looking at the endpoint of a student's formal
schooling than they are in determining the separate grade
levels that make up this schooling. In other words, it is
much easier for us to agree upon what a graduating senior
should know and be able to do in English than to agree upon
what subject skills and knowledge this student should be
able to demonstrate at the end of the third, fifth, seventh,
or 10th grade. This is because young children and
adolescents all have different ways of learning and
different rates of acquiring knowledge and understanding at
different points in their lives. Our current system of
moving most students forward each June according to what we
think an average student should look like at a certain point
in time is no less arbitrary - and possibly more so than
allowing teachers to make decisions about promotion and
grade level at any time that seems appropriate during the
school year.
A system of learning and promotion such
as the latter reflects the way things happen in good
learning environments away from school. In a job, one is
generally not given a higher level of responsibility (and
compensation) without having shown ability at a lower level.
In sports, a child does not move to the varsity team or to a
starting position without having demonstrated competence. In
such cases, a demonstration of skills and knowledge - not
the accumulation of time - is the standard on which
promotion is based. In his most recent book, The Red
Pencil, Ted Sizer talks about several of the "silences" on
which we build our concept of schooling and thereby limit
everyone - teachers and students alike - from achieving
their greatest potential. One of these silences has to do
with our focus on how we teach rather than on how on how
kids learn. Schools are structured in a manner that allows
us to deliver a wealth of information and ideas to young
people who lack our experience of and sophistication about
the world. For the most part, educators assume that, if we
cover something, the students have learned it. We talk, they
listen. We present, they absorb. At the end of a year, when
we have covered everything according to our plan, the
students are deemed ready for the next level - at least most
of them are. In some cases, students who do not make
progress are subjected to another year of the same material,
usually presented in the same way, usually with the same
books, and often with the same teachers. Then, if they fail
for a second time, we usually move them ahead anyway,
because keeping them back at this point makes even less
sense.
The first step in moving toward a system
that is based more on how kids learn than on how we teach is
giving kids greater choice and responsibility for their
learning. This would mean that educators have to give
students - and parents - a better picture of the
requirements for a specific grade. But to do so, we first
must become clearer about our expectations. Then we have to
structure our time in a way that allows students to make
some reasonable decisions about the method and sequence of
their learning - all within the practical constraints of the
places we call school. This may mean that we take a broader
look at standards and how students can demonstrate their
mastery of them. And doing this may require us to focus more
on the strengths students can demonstrate than on the skills
that standardized tests show they have or have not
"learned." By doing these things, we may unleash the
motivation for learning that lies dormant in many students
while they are subjected to a curriculum that is packaged
and then unwrapped by teachers. We may also learn - quite
quickly - what our students perceive to be most relevant in
our curriculum and methods of instruction.
The second "silence" that Sizer talks
about in The Red Pencil is the one that lies at the eye of
the storm that will surely be stirred up by a promotion
policy that breaks away from seat time. This silence is our
obsession with order. We need not belabor this point. We
know that our current method of schooling is based on our
need to move kids from kindergarten through grade 12 in a
manner that is efficient, acceptable to the public, and
understood by everyone. School buildings are built to
accommodate such a plan, and teachers are assigned their
responsibilities according to the same plan. However, our
current plan seems to confuse order (and reasonable silence)
with structure. In other words, structure can still exist in
a different kind of system.
While there are too many details to
explore here, I will suggest some points to consider. In a
school where people are committed to change, students in
different grades could be in the same classroom with the
same teacher. This would dramatically expand our notion of
heterogeneous grouping and would present an array of
challenges and opportunities. Students could also move from
one classroom to another during the school year and be at
different grade levels in different subjects at any point
during the year. Pedagogy could focus much more on groups of
students involved in different tasks or lessons than on
whole-class instruction. Reliance on textbooks and a
predetermined sequence of presenting material could be
exchanged for more freedom regarding how and when, to learn
something. Promotion practices for lower grades may be
different than they are for middle grades or for high
school, and all levels might benefit from more thought about
evaluating intangible affective qualities of maturity and
other similar issues that should be considered for
advancement. More attention could be given to students who
are not meeting expectations in specific areas. Advanced
students might have the option of graduating early or
undertaking projects in other learning environments (like a
junior college).
My purpose here is not to answer all the
difficult questions surrounding a change in how we move
students through school in a way that enhances their
learning and our teaching. My aim is to propose an idea that
has worked in one school and might work in others. In
thinking about this, our collective goal as educators should
not be to see whether we can design a foolproof plan that
will never need our attention and continued creativity. Our
goal should be to develop a method of schooling that might
be better than the one we have now. In all honesty, we are
not risking that much if we try breaking away from our
current way of doing business. If nothing else, serious
consideration of a change in promotion policies will lead to
a great deal of learning that can be beneficial to our
current practice.
The Carnegie Foundation, which created
the Carnegie unit about a 100 years ago, has decided that
it's time for a change. In Rhode Island recently, as in many
states throughout the nation, there has been considerable
discussion about how to capture more time for learning.
Almost without exception, these discussions have looked at
minutes per day, hours per week, or days per year. As noted
in the title of the 1994 report from the National Commission
on Time and Learning, our students really are "prisoners of
time." However, until we break the viselike grip that binds
all students to grade levels according to their age, we will
all remain captives of a system that fails to explore the
role of time in learning. And the potential of our students
and our schools will remain unrealized. It is time to
seriously consider a change.
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