Entering the grade 5/6 classroom in New Covenant School in Arlington, Massachusetts, you need to look very closely to spot the teacher. Actually, you may find yourself wondering if the students even require their teacher. The desks are arranged in a circle, a student is at the whiteboard scripting student responses to student questions, while Mr. Utter is discreetly supporting the learning process taking place. In Mr. Utter’s classroom, the students are empowered to be leaders of their own learning. Meanwhile, 3,200 miles west of New Covenant and across the border in Canada, the students in Mrs. Berkenpas’s grade 3 class at Surrey Christian School are nervous because they are about to start loading pounds of metal weights on their personally constructed popsicle bridges. Just before they begin the loading, the students take a moment and create their own learning target for the upcoming activity, endearingly: “I can control my emotions if my bridge fails.” What do these two student-empowered classes in different countries and on different coasts have in common? They are both living the concepts contained in Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment.
This book is a representation of twenty years of assessment experience in Expeditionary Learning (EL) schools <elschools.org> and is EL’s first publication. As presented in the preface, “Expeditionary Learning is one of the nation’s (United States) leading K–12 education organizations committed to creating classrooms where teachers can fulfill their highest aspirations and where students can achieve more than they think possible” (xxi). While EL schools have identified five dimensions—curriculum, instruction, assessment, culture and character, leadership—that shape student achievement, they decided to focus their first book on student-engaged assessment because “these practices are the foundation for building a culture of engagement and achievement in any school. Student-engaged assessment develops student ownership of learning, which makes learning in any subject area, at any grade level, and in any kind of school richer, deeper, and more fulfilling” (xv).
At a very fundamental level, the practices outlined in Leaders of Their Own Learning are honoring to students, and perhaps more importantly, provide opportunities for students to practice being the creative image-reflectors of Christ. Utilizing the assessment practices of this book results in a learning environment where these image-bearers are invited to personalize and set direction for their own learning, empowered to be creative, and have their learning ultimately matter to the world (because it is real work that meets a real need and is intended for a real audience).
Leaders of Their Own Learning is presented in eight chapters; each chapter highlights a student-engaged assessment practice that can stand alone, but is exponentially more potent when used in the context of the other practices highlighted in book. The first four chapters—“Learning Targets,” “Checking for Understanding During Daily Lessons,” “Using Data with Students,” and “Models, Critique, and Descriptive Feedback”—specialize in day-to-day teaching and learning, and are presented in an order logical for both lesson and unit planning. Chapter 1 focuses on learning targets because “learning targets are the foundation of a student-engaged assessment system” (14). They are “I can . . .” statements that empower the students, direct the choice of instructional activities for the assignment, lesson, or project, and require assessment to ensure that both the teacher and student know whether the learning target has been met.
Logically, “Checking for Understanding During Daily Lessons,” is the next chapter because this is what the teacher and student would need to do next in the learning process. Essentially, chapter 2 gives techniques to answer the question, “Has the student achieved the learning target?” Checking for understanding will provide “data” for both teachers and students regarding the level of understanding. Then chapter 3 describes what can be done with the data.
Leaders of Their Own Learning is a rarity in that it is set up as a resource for practitioners that is logically laid out and classroom ready. For schools looking to implement this resource, chapter 1 is a sound starting point. At Surrey Christian, after only two forty-five-minute workshops on learning targets, teachers, education assistants, and administrators were equipped to practice learning targets in their various roles around the school; it translates simply and logically into practice. For many, the use of learning targets is a modest adaptation or reframing of a current practice into a framework that shifts the learning focus from teacher-owned to student-owned. While the adaptation is simple, the shift in learning is significant. After two weeks, teachers began to share that students were adopting the practice of automatically searching for the learning target as they entered the classroom; furthermore, students would ask for the learning target of the lesson if it was not visible upon entry. This student response illustrates the crux of the book: student engagement, empowerment, and ownership.
Leaders of Their Own Learning is elegant in that its structure is crafted in a way that facilitates the implementation of the ideas and theory into classroom practice. Each chapter describes the practice, provides advice for how to start, and identifies what needs to be in place for successful execution. Furthermore, each chapter contains many student and teacher examples, resources, and stories of what it looks like in practice, including common challenges educators may encounter. A most important feature of the book is the accompanying DVD that shows the described practices in action in a real classroom with real students. We watched the DVD segments that demonstrated learning targets as a staff, and we were immediately able to imagine ourselves living in the practice of learning targets.
While chapters 5 through 8—“Student-Led conferences,” “Celebrations of Learning,” “Passage Presentations with Portfolios,” and “Standards-Based Grading”—do affect the day-to-day learning, the authors describe these practices as distinct communication structures that represent “a significant moment in time when students and teachers reflect on progress and understanding, describe achievements and challenges, and mark important transitions” (14). While the ideas in these chapters are not new, and many schools have already attempted to implement variations of these ideas, the communication structures scaffolded by the student-engaged practices of the first half of the book provide an implementation approach that will have a much greater chance of success with a higher level of purpose and quality.
The practices outlined in chapters 5 to 8 provide teachers and students with an authentic mechanism to have their learning become visible and available to an audience beyond the classroom. While producing work for the teacher can be motivational for younger students, having the teacher as primary audience for student work loses both its motivational capability and authenticity as students become older. For schoolwork to be real work, it must lead to opportunity for a student to co-create with God in making all things new. As Mark Shaw suggests in Work, Play, Love, “In its essence, work is creative and good, critical to human fulfillment. Work is playing creation with God” (65). This real work will demand a real audience beyond the classroom because it is meeting a real need of the world. Leaders of Their Own Learning provides the tools to make this work visible beyond the classroom walls.
The assessment practices of this book enable Christian schools to respond practically to philosopher Jamie Smith’s challenge in Imagining the Kingdom to provide an education that recognizes students as “actors, doers, engaged makers and muddlers in a material world that is our home, our environment, our milieu, our dwelling” (32). In other words, Christian education must not relegate students to passive spectators or observers; Christian education needs to capture students’ imaginations and invite them into a better story. Leaders of Their Own Learning is the practical, pedagogical invitation for both teachers and students to become actors in their education in the realm of assessment practices, a facet of education that remains stubbornly rooted in a Victorian mind-set of education. For this reason alone, Christian schools need to consider seriously the potential of this book to affect change.
That said, we need to think about the implicit intentions of assessment. Perhaps the potential weakness of this resource intersects with the greatest potential of Christian education. Whether attending the National EL conference or working through Leaders of Their Own Learning, one hears the message that the purpose of student-engaged assessment is high academic achievement for the self-serving goal of attending college. High academic achievement is not bad in itself, and all schools, Christian or not, should encourage their students to achieve well. However, as Smith points out, “what appears to be ‘micropractices’ have macro effects: what might appear to be microhabits are, in fact, disciplinary formations that begin to reconfigure our relation to the wider world” (Imagining the Kingdom 143). For what purpose will Christian schools utilize the formational microhabits of student-engaged assessment in this book?
Christian schools implementing the practices in this resource must ensure that these practices are embedded in the grand story of the biblical narrative, so that the vision of the good life, the telos of Christian education, aims beyond the self-serving achievement of good grades for entry into a good college. Student-engaged assessment needs to align with the telos of enabling students to become co-creators with God in the building of the kingdom. Before we create habits around assessment, Christian schools must ensure that the assessment is embedded in stories that are worth telling. Furthermore, that this good story aims beyond the high achievement on assessment, the telos of the story aims for the“formation of a peculiar people—a people who desire the kingdom of God and thus undertake their life’s expression of that desire” (Smith, Desiring the Kingdom 34). The decision for Christian schools is not whether they focus on assessment or the formation of these peculiar people, but how can they utilize the assessment practices in the formation of these peculiar people.
At Surrey Christian, the implementation of Leaders of Their Own Learning is combined with the core practices of “Teaching for Transformation” as developed by the Prairie Centre for Christian Education <pcce.tftshare.ca>. “Teaching for Transformation” ensures that we remain faithful to our telos of inviting students into the Story and provide learning opportunities by which students can form habits of practice that build the kingdom, while Leaders of Their Own Learning provides a means by which we can invite students to become actors and doers in the Story. It is through this combination that we aim to have our teachers and students become actors and doers, leaders of their own learning and peculiar people that co-create with God in the making of all things new.
Works Cited
- Berger, Ron, Leah Rugen, and Libby Woodfin. Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014.
- Shaw, Mark. Work, Play, Love: A Visual Guide to Calling, Career, and the Mission of God. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2014.
- Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009.
- Smith, James K. A. Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013.