The Power of Showcasing: Publicly Celebrating Excellent Student Work
An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati.
Accompanying podcast episode:
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Research has shown some proven methods to improve your kidâs memory power. It includes eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, and also following some memory improvement techniques to help the kids to get more concentration on their studies. These types of techniques are followed by the child health education institute. The right brain training helps your kids improve their concentration and focus more on their studies.
Studies have found that grit is more predictive of success in school and work than any other attribute, including intelligence or talent. This would suggest that emphasizing a school culture of perseverance and determination, as well as an emphasis on skills that can be used across disciplines in both higher education and the workforce such as teamwork, problem solving and critical analysis, should go a long way toward closing the achievement gap, regardless of the starting point of any student.
Why Tony Bennett renewed my interest in education and numbers
Reading the emails between then Indiana schools chief Tony Bennett and his staff is fascinating, frustrating, and harrowing as someone who cares about the feasibility of reliably rating and rewarding or punishing schools. But it is also terrifyingly recognizable.
Regardless of what side you take in the debates about accountability and reform, this whole episode reveals a broader challenge in education policy: the undue trust we have in numbers. On average, policy makers have adopted the concept of data-driven reforms, but are still coming to terms with the subjectivity of quantitative measures.Â
Data is always chosen, churned through analysis, highlighted and interpreted to serve a purpose. When a researcher or an advocate condenses their nuanced assumptions and their understanding of value into a single sentence, it becomes dogma. If instead, it coalesces to a single numberâor letter gradeâit becomes a fact.Â
These great posts on the situation discuss the many challenges of boiling a system as complex as a school down to a single grade. This, from Mike Petrilli, rang especially true for me:
Yet weâve never been good at explaining to the public that a school rating (whether AâF or anything else) is the sum of a multitude of judgments about what makes for successful (or failing) schools. For instance: How much should the attainment of a particular performance level (like âproficientâ or âcollege readyâ) count, versus studentsâ progress over the course of the year? Which subjects are included in the measure? Are they weighted equally? Should all studentsâ scores count the same, or should we put greater stress on those of the lowest-performing kids? What about high-performers? What role should the size of a schoolâs achievement gap play, and how should we measure that? Should the performance of students with cognitive disabilities count? Children who are new to the country and canât yet speak (or read) English? What about graduation rates, or attendance data, or other indicators? And, quite relevant in this case: If a school spans the elementary, middle, and high school grades, should it get one grade or three?
Decisions about how to weigh these considerations are inseparable from experience and subjective value judgments (though, to be fair, the experience of receiving a campaign contribution should be easier to remove from the calibration). From the beginning, I imagine the goal was to create a system that measured schools against the success Bennett had seen or thought he saw at Christel House.
Still, the frantic last minute recalibration on display in the emails from Indiana are troubling to read, particularly given that political donations are impossible to extricate from Bennettâs reluctance to revise any of his assumptions in the face of results. But this sort of recalibration, squaring prior understanding of what makes a good school with the data that can prove it is a good school, is kind of how models get made. Itâs hard not to wonder whether anyone would pay much attention to this story had the model not betrayed Bennett at the last minute.
As research and as politics, the scramble to change a C to an A comes off as devoid of integrity. But anyone whoâs ever built something they believe in knows how hard it is to wait for success to be proven in a reproducible trial.  While weâre still human, itâs worth remembering that we made the numbers, too.
