Get Ethical Before You Get Technical

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are underway around teaching and learning and many plan to or are assessing student learning as part of this work.  Best practice would suggest that teams would have or also are creating common assessment to determine the effectiveness of their instruction and impact on student learning.  These teams have spent time engaging each other in what proficiency looks and sounds like, and may have started the work of developing pathways for students to demonstrate their learning in ways that maximize the agency of the students themselves-by providing the students with choices about how they bring the consolidation of their learning to life.  In their article One Step At A Time,  Parry Graham and Bill Ferritier cite the step of building common understanding, disposition and skills around student assessment as one of places where teachers will begin to rumble within their teams.  These places within the PLC process require our teams to "Get Ethical", before they get "Technical" to build productive data-practices that actually improve teacher planning, instructional delivery, as well as the student experience and impact (Franklin Campbell Jones, 2005).   

When lawyers are preparing cases, both in defense and prosecution, they start with discovery.  These teams spend time gathering as much information as possible about the context, people and events of their cases before going to trial.  Discovery is the time when these teams begin the tough equity work.  Before, during and after the process of discovery within our teams we must wrestle with both the data we gather and the predictive nature of the outcomes for students of color, multi-linguals and those with diverse needs.  I'd emphasize the recursive process of crafting both the assessment as well as the discovery of the data it produces.  Let's remind ourselves as readers that test results have been used to rationalize discriminatory practices which can result in more harm than good (ie. tracking, using single data points for course placement, etc.).    So how to we continually develop our dispositions so that our work leads to better and best practice, and increased impact on our most marginalized students.

So how is it that well intentioned teams fall short in building the engine of their PLC (to use assessment and discovery) to enhance and inform their practice and instructional impact? Research from Brene Brown, author of Dare to Lead, suggests that to get to the conversations around teacher's instructional impact on all students, to arrive at a place where teams can recognize in personal ways that our/my practices are not equally effective with all learners and to transfer this problem of practice from the "learner as the problem" to new inquiry, learning and application, requires vulnerability and courage.  Brown offers that teams will struggle most with the core work at these phases because of individual assumptions around vulnerability, specifically that;

• Vulnerability is weakness
• I can do it alone
• I have to trust first, before I show vulnerability
• Vulnerability is disclosure 

I offer leaders the suggestion to prepare teams for the challenge of vulnerability during the difficult process of creating assessment of student learning and addressing the data on the effectiveness of it-with the suggestion that our teaching skills have something to do with the outcomes. 

1. Prepare your teams to address their beliefs around "being vulnerable".
Our experiences outside of school, our deepest and most formative experiences, have shaped our disposition towards vulnerability.  Provide the opportunity for your staff to define vulnerability in lower risk ways to address the challenge in vulnerability itself.

I grew up believing vulnerability is _______________

2. Prepare your teams to engage in conversations that enhance the concept that the team is the resource.  Support your teams to ask:

What does support from our team look like around this problem?  

3. Engage your teams to recognize and communicate about situations that are going to really engage the chicken and egg paradigm around trust and vulnerability.  When are those situations in which teams will need to be more vulnerable with each other, to build trust, rather than be "more trusting" to become more vulnerable.  Do teams struggle with getting started?  Do they have the language?  How can we build skill and strategy around this when teams need it?

4. Normalize the struggle.  Stages 4, 5 and 6 is where the disruption lies.  Disruption must lead to growth.  It does not always. How can we continually normalize, prepare for and expect disruption?  Are SAIL teams talking about how to nurture teams into disruption?  How do SAIL teams support this critical work?

5. Recognize that data has no meaning.  People apply meaning to data from how they see the world from perception of their influence.  Data can be and we must work towards it becoming a catalyst for questioning our assumptions, especially assumptions about learners, and our responsibility for practice.  We must define the purpose of collecting it and guide teams on ways to examine their beliefs about student learning so that we position the data in a way that ensures response that that helps us examine our deepest beliefs.

In closing, we must view our relationships as an intermingling between trust and vulnerability.  To get ethical, we need to make regular investments in our teams "jar of marbles".  Each marble of kindness, patience, and warm demanding.  Brene Brown shares that we trust people who have earned marbles in our lives.  More marbles, more trust, more vulnerability, more ethical behavior around how we approach our teaching, learning and assessment.

See next weeks blog on Assessing Multilingual Students-getting Ethical Before Getting Technical.