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Making, especially to educators and administrators unfamiliar with it, can seem to lack the academic rigor needed for a full-fledged place in an educational ecosystem.

“Sometimes the best things going on are happening in your own building, and you might miss them because you’re doing your own thing,”

teachers meet regularly outside of class time to examine their students’ coursework as a team.

“The reason we look at student work is to help teachers become better teachers,”

“are better able to guide and facilitate a deeper level of student learning.”

community of learners who use planned, peer-to-peer feedback to help raise student outcomes throughout the school.

Each three-hour teacher lab focuses on a specific instructional topic that teachers choose to explore together, such as student engagement strategies.

To encourage more teacher collaboration in your school, you’ll want to consider: Time: Where will you find time within the regular school day for teachers to step outside their own classrooms and learn together? Structure: How might a protocol or specific observation prompt help to focus the learning experience? Who will play a lead role in facilitating the teacher experience and encouraging reflection? How will you capture takeaways? The National School Reform Faculty publishes a number of protocols for professional learning, such as this one for looking at student work. Follow-up: How are teachers applying what they learn together? How do students benefit as a result of teacher collaboration?

Timely feedback has been shown to deepen one's memory for the material assessed

Finally, studies suggest that marking answers right or wrong (as in multiple choice tests) has little effect on learning. However, providing the correct response only after a student has spent time "struggling" to find the correct answer significantly increases retention of the material

having students reconstruct what they know through alternative assessments leads to deeper understanding and consolidates learning in more powerful ways than traditional testing

While students manage to keep enough dates, facts, and formulas in their head to pass the test, this knowledge never made it to long-term declarative memory, it was never truly learned at all (only memorized in the short term).

By creating norms and averages we are drawn to comparison and rank–rather than to our children’s curiosities about what they want to learn, become or aspire to be.

If praise is tied to the child’s perception of success, and success is tied to narrow definitions of achievement, then children work towards that common standard against which Zhao cautioned us. If they are less likely to take risks then they will seek a single right answer rather than embrace both creativity and curiosity. The standardized test will always be the measure of success.

The overwhelming bulk of our personal growth happens in open environments, without constraints or schedules, and often without guidance.

Scholarly research on implicit learning and anecdotal studies of self-taught experts (musicians, chefs, athletes, and more) speak to the power of unstructured study.

In truth, courses are not how we organize learning; they are how we organize assessment.

what are the alternatives?

Perhaps schools would do well to offer up learning experiences rather than formalized courses in all grades

Schools can honor learning opportunities that exist outside of traditional coursework.

Schools can look for ways to decouple reporting on student performance from arbitrary time frames.

how can we create space for students who need more time to consolidate their learning, to master a curriculum or set of skills?

Administration and faculty should be willing to acknowledge that courses offer venues for intellectual and personal growth but do not have a monopoly on it.

Progress and Performance Portfolios

students can curate a body of work that represents their progress as well as their performance to show their thinking throughout their learning experiences.

when we encourage students to capture their thinking on a daily basis, reflection is no longer merely a task at the end of a project.

Teachers can also leverage visible thinking routines to scaffold student reflection.

As educators, our challenge is ensuring that students have an opportunity to engage in reflection such that they create a meaningful product to actually visit (and learn from) again and again.