A Year’s Growth

1.18.10 By Jesse Solomon

When Residents begin their year in BTR, we ask them all to focus on one core goal: helping each student in each of their classes make at least one year’s worth of academic progress in the year.
We do this because what matters most is what students learn.

There are lots of ways to be a good teacher, and many (many!) things that teachers do all day to support their students.  And yet, there is a bottom line: student learning.  We want to make sure that every BTR graduate is focused on this bottom line and enters the teaching profession obsessed with student learning.

This is not easy; it’s hard to figure out what constitutes a year’s worth of growth.  Here are a couple of big reasons why:
1.    The fact of the matter is that the assessments of student learning we have are, as a whole, not up to this task.  In many subject areas and in many grade levels, we don’t yet have good ways to measure what constitutes a year’s worth of growth.  But these will get better.
2.    Another huge issue – as any teacher knows – is that there are so many factors that enter into each child’s learning gains over the course of a year, and over the learning of a whole class.  The academic history of the students, the school culture, events outside of the school, to name just a few, are examples of factors are at play – and mean that from year to year a particular teacher might experience widely different gains with students.

Despite these obstacles, we believe that the establishment and support of this goal – at least one year’s worth of growth for each and every child – helps keep everyone focused on what is most important.  We purposely did not set a goal that called for average growth – as an average can hide some students who do not make a lot of progress (think about a class in which half the students make two years of progress and half make none – the class as a whole would make an average of one year’s growth but half the students would have made no progress).  The goal is that every student make progress.

To support this goal, BTR asks Residents and mentors (and all others involved with BTR) to engage continuously in an inquiry process.  Residents and mentors regularly analyze student achievement data and plan instructional interventions to respond to patterns in the data.  Throughout the year, they collaborate to hone their practice - to get better and better at meeting the needs of each and every child in the classroom.

A key element to this practice is the skilled development and use of student learning assessments.  In order to know where each student is, teachers learn to administer and use the data from carefully-designed assessments on a regular basis.  When I started teaching high school math (yes, the Model T was still the car of choice), many of us just started teaching on the first day – we didn’t give any initial assessments.  We gave a quiz each Friday and a test at the end of a chapter, but these assessments always looked backward.  Rather than using these tools to help us figure out what to teach next and how, they helped us know whether we had taught well up to that point.  While that information was useful, it didn’t really help us move forward.  Teaching in a way that focuses on student learning means that assessment has to play a different role.  Teachers now administer assessments at the beginning of the year, to find out where their students are starting, and throughout the year, to check progress against their overall goals and to make adjustments in their instruction.  An assessment is a chance for teachers and students to figure out what kids know and what they still need to learn, and then to be strategic about trying things to help them get where they need to be.

Setting this goal is a challenge for all of us involved with BTR.  It makes us accountable for something we influence but don’t ultimately control.  And yet we believe that if we don’t set this goal, we have no chance of achieving it – and that’s what we care about.