Expectations

The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), which sent a visiting team to assess ConVal last April, requires member schools to come up with a list of student learning expectations. ConVal’s are as follows.

     A ConVal student will demonstrate:
     -- Effective communication
     -- Effective problem-solving
     -- Effective use of knowledge
     -- Respect for self and others
     -- Service to school and community

     Last week was the beginning of the second semester, and Lisa Cochran and I decided to start Freshman Honors English by challenging our 46 extremely bright young people to define those terms. What does effective communication look like, sound like, feel like? How do we measure problem-solving ability in English? What’s the difference between acquiring knowledge and using it? How should students serve the school and community, and how will teachers assess those efforts? What is respect?

     We began by dividing the students up into ten groups of four or five, two groups to each of the expectations. After 15 minutes of furious brainstorming, we united each of the pairs of groups, so that we now had five groups of eight to ten students, one for each expectation. Now their task was the merge their original findings and present them to the whole group for discussion.

     That’s when we hit the wall. We began with communication, and that group had a list that started with ‘contributing to class discussions.’
Okay, we said. How do we assess that? Should we count the number of times each student speaks up?

     Whoa, said some of the other students. What if you want to say something, but somebody else in class says it first? What if you are a shy person? What if you say something that’s silly or irrelevant? Shouldn’t the quality of the contributions count for more than the quantity? The bell rang and we promised to go on with the discussion the next day. But Lisa and I returned to the English office feeling discouraged. This was going to be harder than we thought.

     What happened in our classroom was similar to what happened when the faculty tried to do the same thing more than a year ago.  We had created the learning expectations, but when we tried to translate those expectations into schoolwide rubrics, which would allow us to assess a student’s success or failure in meeting those expectations, we stumbled. We produced some models, but the language was vague -- we couldn’t come up with the ‘looks like, sounds like, feels like’ part.

     About the closest we came to that level of clarity last week was at one point when Lisa  suddenly stopped talking and looked around. There were 46 students watching her and listening intently. Not one of them was whispering to a friend, shoving a rival, playing with a cell phone, or dozing off. It was what respect looks like, sounds like, and feels like.

     ‘How do you do this?’ she asked them. ‘In my next class, I have another group of freshmen, who went to the same schools you did, had the same teachers, and were taught the same rules about behavior. It will be nothing like this. Why is that?’

     None of us knew the answer. But it’s a great question, and we’re working on it.