I haven’t written often here about Douglass Reeves, but he really is a great resource about leadership and learning (his catchphrase). In an undated piece on ASCD Express (Hey ASCD Express: Date your pieces!), Reeves poses three challenges to educational leaders like myself seeking to foster vigorously in our schools a “genuine commitment to 21st century learning”: these three challenges he calls the Assessment Gap, the Teaching Gap, and the Leadership Gap.
Reeves is right to begin with the Assessment Gap. He explains the problem that very few states measure 21st century skills– either in the way of higher order thinking skills such as critical thinking and innovative thinking, and also key personal and social skills, such as collaboration and communication. If we are to be driven by state standardized testing, and those tests do none of this, then how can we drive learning toward this?
I am far from alone in recognizing that the proper backwards design to reform begins with the end in mind: that we declare clearly and loudly what are our goals, what will be measuring, and what will we report. We do so, we take careful note (over time) of where we are succeeding and where we are doing less well, and then we correct course.
My thinking about assessmenthas been primarily about the school-wide, macro and End-Game assessments, rather than the also incredibly important in-course, small to mid-size, classroom based, formative assessments; this latter area is something I need to spend more time thinking about and developing. We are going to ask our department chairs to begin collaborative work reviewing student assessments, and we are beginning to explore NWEA’s MAP (Measurements of Academic Progress; computer based adapative assessments).
But the Macro is my focus, and recently I have begun to recognize that to best connect with our audiences, we need to lead the charge for 21k12 ed. with an emphasis on 21st century measurements first! Again and again skeptical audiences seem to retreat when I or we advocate for our students vigorously learning critical skills in addition to knowledge, and when we call for authentic engagement and project and problem based learning– because they wonder whether these things will diminish ultimately student mastery and proficiency. I am sure they will not, but just saying so isn’t enough. We need to declare what we are measuring, we need to measure it, we need to report it, and we need to drive our teaching and learning backwards from there. This is why my very first initiatives as newly appointed Head of School were to implement the HSSSE and CWRA, and why we are now working on Dashboards of academic measurements.
Reeves next discusses the Teaching Gap, and I don’t find this discussion very effective at all. “Which approach is most rewarded in your school—great challenges and high expectations, or patronizing praise of inadequate performance?” I don’t find this sentence very compelling– it strikes me as a bit of shallow rhetoric, and not very actionable.
In contrast, the third challenge is an excellent brief, on the Leadership Gap, and it speaks directly to me, someone with great aspirations to be both a 21st century educator and an effective educational leader:
If we aspire to have 21st century teaching and learning, then we must demand 21st century leaders. Specifically, if we require critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and creativity, then leaders must assess now—today, this very hour—the instances in which you can observe these characteristics in classrooms.
Just visit 10 classrooms right now and count the instances in which you observe these skills. Then do the same next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. If 8 of those 10 classrooms show evidence of isolation rather than collaboration, recitation rather than problem solving, regurgitation rather than creativity, and memorization rather than critical analysis, then don’t blame the teachers. That condition stems from leaders who will spend $100,000 and 100 hours to attend a conference about 21st century learning, but who will not devote a 50-cent cup of coffee and five minutes to engage a teacher in a challenging conversation about effective classroom practice.
This passage is greatly resonant with the call by Tony Wagner for “learning walks;” indeed his walks are exactly this, a project to interpret a school’s commitment to this kind of higher order thinking and learning from the evidence acquired by first hand classroom observation. Do I do this now? Some, but not nearly enough. My intent or ambition: to work with faculty members this spring to determine what 2, 3, or 4 of these things (collaboration, problem-solving, creativity, critical analysis, etc.) we most want to work together to grow upon next fall, and then, having established and promulgated that, to do exactly this– to visit ten (or more) classrooms every week, and count, track, and report the instances. Thank you Doug Reeves for this fine, succinct, action-able advice.
He ends his piece too on a fine note, and I will end mine on the same:
If we aspire to seize the opportunities 21st century learning presents, then we must first make the shift from blame to responsibility. When our students confront difficulty and failure, we expect them to respect our feedback, change their learning strategies, and try again. That is the essence of the resilience, self-discipline, and work ethic that are essential for successful students in every century. Therefore, education professionals must embrace feedback, seize personal responsibility, and model the changes required to close the gaps in assessment, teaching, and leadership.
21k12 
January 22, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Thanks, Jonathan, for such a thoughtful and insightful post. All any author can hope for is a reader who examines our work carefully and critically, and you certainly did that.
I trust that your challenge to my point about “patronizing praise of inadequate performance” is a reflection of your observations of challenging teachers and educational leaders in the schools in your area. I only wish that this were the case universally. You are quite right to challenge me to provide some sort of specific actions for leaders, and my counsel would be to consider the work of Stanford’s Dr. Carol Dweck, whose brilliant work “Mindset” does a far better job than I did of making this point. I would also encourage your consideration of the fine work of The Efficacy Institute and Dr. Jeff Howard who for 25 years has built real self-esteem in the nation’s most challenging schools by explaining that “smart is not something that you ARE; smart is something that you GET.”
Thanks for initiating a useful conversation.
Doug
January 23, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Doug, thanks so much for visiting my blog; via your writings, you have long been a great influence upon my work leading and learning, and it an honor to have you read and respond.
To reiterate briefly, I think that your discussion of the assessment and leadership gap were spot on, valuable, and actionable. I thought the discussion of the “teaching gap” was less so, but I should have been more diplomatic and courteous in my choice of words. I certainly agree, greatly, that teaching should be challenging; I think the teaching at my school is challenging, with high expectations; and I fear that this is often not the case universally.
I do agree with you when you write that teachers (and leaders) can get drawn into the trap of playing to student self-esteem, and to their short term popularity and approval ratings, rather than to the long term advantages which challenging high expectations provide for our students. But in my observations, this is less often the gap” of 21st century teaching; it is more often that well-intentioned teachers feel too over-committed to the textbook, to the workbook, to the standardized test, to the AP test, to the “coverage” of the curriculum.
I also felt the rhetorical question posed at the end of the discussion was oversimplifying and added more heat than light to the analysis. Finally, the teaching gap discussion didn’t leave readers with any action to take, in contrast to the other two “gaps.”
I have written here on this blog often about Dweck, who is a huge influence for me; in August I spoke to my entire student body and faculty about the significance of Dweck’s work.
I think we can both agree that 21st learning requires 21st century teaching, (which often is not happening in our schools), which requires of students that they think very hard and very critically about what they are learning, that they create and innovate and collaborate very intensely in their learning, and that they work very hard to produce excellence in their demonstrations of learning.