Discussions

A collaborative, cross curricular, skills and habits of mind based language for all - A must in personalized learning

Your Name and Title: Dr. Nitzan Resnick, Co-Head KSA

School or Organization Name: Kehillah Schechter Academy (KSA)

Co-Presenter Name(s): Mrs. Ivonne Krasnick

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Boston, US

Language in Which You Will Present: English

The building of the Tower of Babel required a unified language for all mankind. Once this unity was destroyed, the tower collapsed. Our students are not any different - they are our mortar and bricks and in order to assemble them into a growing, strong and impressive tower, all builders (educators) of that child must need to communicate using the same language.

Such a language, not only will contribute to the growth of individual students in their own academic institute, but will also allow, or at least facilitate the collaborative writing of Global curricula, and promote initiatives of global professional development for both teachers and educational leaders based on skills and habits of mind.

The stumbling block in creating such a unified language is the misconception that subject teaching, such as math, language arts, science or music, each require a different set of skills.

We, at KSA, put the student, rather than the subject, at the center of our teaching.

Every student is unique in his/her own personal learning journey. We, the educators need provide them with the skills and habits of mind to drive their learning, to help them own their learning and to set for them clear expectations. The ability to progress on the personalized learning path has two requirements:

1) The educational team has a collaborative language

2) Each students has a set of SMART academic and social cross curricular goals.

Common language: In order to create such a cross curricular skills habits of mind based language,  we had to define areas that  are common to all subjects. Inspired by the Big Picture Schools’ learning goals we divided the process of learning into five pillars.

Three of these pillars are more “academic”, while the two others relates to the ability of students to recognize the world around them and to bring into the process of learning habits of mind that promote independence. The five pillars are: 1) Communication -  the skills that are involved in reading, writing, speaking and listening. 2) Empirical reasoning - the skills of asking questions, breaking down problems, analyzing data, identifying useful resources. 3) Quantitative reasoning, or  the skills of understanding value, scale and proportion, time measurements, making predictions, decontextualizing and contextualizing . 4) Social reasoning involves skills of awareness of the other side of the story, to other learners around the table, to ethical problems and to the world around us. 5) Personal reasoning consists of the skills that one brings into his/her work - grit/persistence, respect, wonder, reflection, flexibility or the 16 habits of mind.

To be more specific on the exact meaning of each pillar, we developed lists of skills or verbs (similar to the ones associated with Bloom’s taxonomy) that relate to each pillar. Some of these skills overlap several pillars

Our discussions about students by the educational team, with parents and with students all use the common language of these five pillars and the skills related to them.

Crafting SMART goals for and with students: The process of crafting the SMART goals has three parts:

1) Creating a learner’s profile and identifying areas of growth within the five learning pillars.

2) Crafting skills/habits of mind based goals that are cross curricular

3) Putting in place systems to create, track and collaborate on these goals with students and parents.

1) Learner’s profile: With the educational pillars identified we turned to our students, and ask them and their parents each to fill out a  “This is Me” survey, gathering data about their learning style, preference and passion.  We use data from the survey, along with data that each child’s teacher has accumulated throughout the years, as well as, external evaluations and tests to create a learner’s profile. At the end of each learner’s profile  one can find areas of strength and areas for further growth and development that are based on one or more of the five learning pillars that are modified as students advance in their learning paths.  

2) Goal setting: With our learning Pillars and our learner profiles close at hand we craft personalized SMART goals for each child.  The language of each goal, is skill based and is crafted using the language of the National ELA, math and science Common Core Standards. In areas where the National Common Core did not provide a sufficient language, all teachers as a team crafted the language of the goals. The goals are shared with students and parents, and each partner has an equal voice in crafting and adjusting the goals.

Each “big” SMART goal is then broken into objectives. The objectives are different for students in our lower and upper school. Lower school: Since many subjects are taught by the homeroom teacher and the subject teachers work with the homeroom teachers as a cohesive team, very much like the goal itself the objectives for the goals were designed collaboratively.

The objectives are small steps designed to break the “big SMART goal” into manageable components. Upper school: The high number of subject teachers, teaching practices and styles necessitated that objectives serve a different purpose than in the lower school. For the upper school, each subject teacher, created an objective that described how the goal will look specifically in his/her class.

Therefore, each subject teacher owns now one or more objective per student in his/her class.

This enables the teacher to map the class (by creating spreadsheets with all the objectives), and hence craft each lesson with these objectives in mind.

3) Creating systems in place for goal tracking and collaboration: Two systems were put in place to allow the crafting, tracking, communication and collaboration around goals. First, we partnered our students with an adult from their educational team who is in charge of overseeing the progress of the student towards achieving the goal. In some cases, this is the homeroom teacher while in other it is a designated advisor who meets with the student at least once a week.

The second tool was an online system for creating  and tracking SMART educational goals as a collaborative effort of teachers, parents and students. Our school partnered with GoalBook

and with Goalbook Toolkit  which facilitates crafting goals using the National Common Core standards, modifying goals based on the Universal Design (UDL) language, creating objectives for each goal and tracking the goals - all as a collaborative effort of the educational team, the students and the parents. Each of these collaborators has access to the online system and communication around the goals is done via messages that are left on the student’s goal page.

Each subject teacher tracks the progress of his/her student towards achieving their objectives.

As Goalbook is not a notebook or a scrap paper, continuous progress is recorded in each teacher’s files. Twice per each semester, each student’'s progress in discussed by the whole educational team. This is the time when the homeroom teacher or advisor will synthesize the information from all subject teachers and will update the information and tracking on goalbook. 

Now imagine, how simple it would be to encourage teachers to create global curricular modules, once they share a similar skills and habits of mind based educational language? These curricular modules would use digital badges that would be based on mastery of skills or habits of mind, rather than mastery of subject matter.

How advantageous it would be when professional development initiatives, and MOOCEd courses for teachers and leadership teams in schools and colleges use a language which is not subject specific, rather is based on skills and habits of mind and the progression of each student mastering these skills?

“It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.” Helen Keller

It is for us educators to challenge our students to dream, to help them carve a path, and to provide them with the tools so they can progress on this path, until they fulfill this dream.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: www.ksa-ne.org