The Source

• Your Voice, Your Vote! by Pam Vogel and Jodi Grover
• When the Core Needs More: Revisiting What Matters Most in Your District by Dr. Darcie Kress
• Overcoming the Implementation Dip in Standards-based Grading by Matt Townsley
• Moving from Engagement to Deeper Thinking by Heal & Goodwin
• Using AI by Debra Jacoby

There is an election coming soon.

At Iowa ASCD, we believe it’s important for educators to understand the changes that have taken place in the last legislative session in Iowa, as we each prepare our ballots by or on November 5.

The 2024 Legislative Session

As Iowa lawmakers ended the 2024 legislative session, Republican leaders said they passed their priorities, including changes to Iowa’s Area Education Agencies, many K-12 education initiatives and income tax cuts. The course of this year’s session was dominated primarily by the governor’s proposal making major changes to Iowa’s AEAs, the nine agencies providing special education services in addition to other education and media service support for K-12 schools throughout the state.

Click to read about what was signed into law!

By Dr. Darcie Kress, Curriculum Coordinator for Iowa City CSD and Iowa ASCD Board of Directors

Remember when the phrase “Know your WHY” was abuzz in every professional development at district in-services and rampant in sessions at educational conferences across the country? Simon Sinek’s Start with Why (2011) really struck a chord with a lot of people - and rightfully so. He challenged current and aspiring leaders with his words: “For those who have an open mind for new ideas, who seek to create long-lasting success and who believe that your success requires the aid of others, I offer you a challenge. From now on, start with WHY” (p. 7). Leaders across the country were invigorated to define and clarify their purpose and really make a difference in our field. In the educational sector, many districts were entrenched in exploring evidence-based ideas and practices from resources such as Understanding by Design (Grant & Wiggins, 2005), The Art and Science of Teaching (Marzano, 2007), the introduction of Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2024) and John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), which described the effect size of 252 interventions related to student achievement from his ground-breaking meta-analysis. Many of his rankings continue to be referenced today.

These resources implore educators to ditch the “coverage” approach of academic standards and teach with rigor, relevance, and personalization in mind. Now, living several years post-pandemic, we realize that we are experiencing many updates to existing standards and materials, new legislation, and new strategies to reconnect with students. We are also facing teacher shortages in just about every teaching role across the state (educate.iowa.gov) and continued large gaps in proficiency among different subgroups of students. Relying on a focus to teach the Iowa Core standards as a “coverage” task will not be enough for our students, but it is where we begin.

Click Here to Keep Reading!

Overcoming the implementation dip in standards-based grading

One of the things we know about leading second order change — such as when a school transitions to standards-based grading practices — is that it often involves an implementation dip (see McRel’s Balanced Leadership research). For example, we should anticipate that students will initially question the value of completing homework if there is no point value attached to it. After all, our schools have often (in the past) trained these very students to complete their assignments for the sole purpose of earning points: “Be sure to do this one, it is worth 50 points!”.

Accelerating out of the implementation dip

One question I am often asked by educators beginning to implement standards-based grading is “How do we help students accelerate out of this inevitable dip?” Refocusing the classroom and school culture on learning rather than earning takes time, but it can be done! *Below is one classroom action and one school action that may help students accelerate out of this dip.

• Classroom - Ask students to self-assess their homework (i.e. using emojis or a Red (no idea), Yellow(still unsure), Green(got it!) before turning it in. After the teacher provides some narrative feedback, he/she will also assess the students’ learning using the same emoji or color scale before turning it back to the student the next day. This self-assessment and quick feedback strategy often adds value to the assignment from the student’s perspective. When teachers value an assignment, students are likely to value it as well.

• School - Hold students accountable (outside of the grade book) for not completing their homework assignments. Unfortunately, some students will need additional time and support to understand the nexus between completing purposeful assignments and learning the course standards. Some schools have created a catch-up time during or outside of the school day for students (see one example here) who frequently do not turn in their assignments. For example, if a student has not turned in any assignments for a course within a five day window, they may be required to attend catch-up time.

Interested in learning more about accelerating out of the implementation dip? Consider reading our 2020 Solution Tree book, Making Grades Matter: Standards-Based Grading in a PLC at Work.

[*Author’s note: Unfortunately, there are students who do not choose to complete many assignments, regardless of the grading system that is used. Therefore, none of these strategies are intended to be all-inclusive or viewed as a “silver bullet” solution.]

Dr. Matt Townsley is an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa and an Iowa ASCD board member.

by Jim Heal and Bryan Goodwin

ASCD April 1, 2023 Vol. 80, No. 7

To make learning last, educators need to design instruction that reflects how the brain works.

The term engagement has evolved to mean many things in education. Some teachers believe it's found whenever students are diligently focused on a task. For others, engagement represents the joy in creativity that happens when students are fully absorbed in the flow of learning. But there's another form of engagement that's all too common in many classrooms that cuts against these definitions: the illusion of engagement. Students may appear engaged—creating ornate dioramas, glitzy posters, exploding volcanos, or other "busy" projects, for example—but ultimately, they do very little actual learning or thinking about their learning.

Next time you're observing a lesson and see students in the middle of what appears to be an engaging task, ask them: "What are you working on?" and "What is this task teaching you about?" If the activity is truly engaging them in substantive learning, the students' response should be equally substantive. But that isn't always the case. What can educators do to differentiate between the illusion of engagement and actual learning? And what would it take to create the instructional conditions for engagement-as-learning to occur?

Student Thinking vs. Student Engagement

To address this question, we'd like to posit an alternative to the term student engagement. A guiding term that might not sound as, well … engaging, but might offer a more accurate description of what we should be paying attention to, which is student thinking.

There are a few ways to consider student thinking, each of which is supported by the best research we know about how students learn:

• Students make sense of new information through reference to their existing knowledge.

• Students are more likely to durably retain information that they think about deeply or "effortfully."

• Therefore, the choices teachers make around how students will encounter and process information are fundamental to the success of the learning that takes place.

A Blend of "Known" and "Unknown"

Many students struggle to pay attention to new information—or if they do pay attention, the information still might not stick. One effective way to counter this is for teachers to prime students for new learning by tapping into and cueing up their existing knowledge.

Cognitive science shows that students make sense of new information in relation to what they already know—and what we often put down to "curiosity" on the part of learners is actually them recognizing how something new fits into, alters, or exposes a gap in their existing knowledge and conception of the world (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000).

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Learning is a treasure which accompanies it's owner everywhere.

Chinese Proverb

By Debra Jacoby (10/25/24)

These tips for using artificial intelligence with younger learners guide teachers to age-appropriate exploration of this technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) both for student work and to speed up teachers’ tasks is on the minds of many educators, augmented by the number of platforms available to integrate with systems to make them usable for educators. But how can teachers integrate AI in teaching elementary students?

The heart of the challenge is to remember that when we evaluate how new tools work with our students, those tools may change the process of instruction, and that’s OK. As an elementary technology specialist, I’ve researched what are the most appropriate and private tools utilizing AI that can be used with our younger students. Below are some of the options I’ve found to be successful.

So Much Great Information!

Read More!

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