embed an I can’t mindset. It’s not hard to imagine how much it affects a student’s psyche to only hear what’s wrong. This would negatively impact the confidence and motivation of many adults, let alone students. By balancing both strengths and areas needing improvement (and by ensuring that all students experience a similar process), teachers send the message that everyone is a student and that addressing areas needing improvement is what students do.
Strategy 3: Respond to Assessments
Assessment result use doesn’t just happen. After interpreting and communicating, teachers can create or embed routines of correction within their classrooms. By creating an expectation of correction, teachers will proactively send the message that learning is continual, regardless of what an assessment reveals, and that correcting errors is a natural part of learning. Even still, creating collaborative correction habits undercuts any competitive aspects of assessment by overtly supporting the notion that everyone can and will contribute to all learning.
Create the Routine of Correction
Teachers who create routines and habits of responding to feedback and correcting errors can instill a learning mindset in their students. When teachers build instructional correctives into typical routines, they make it clear that they anticipate some error and there will be more to do postassessment. Using feedback is where the real power of formative assessment lies, and when students come to know how to go about making improvements, they can maximize opportunities going forward. Planning to be instructionally agile includes creating routines of correction after eliciting evidence. Through self-assessment, students can also discover what needs improvement. (We explore self-assessment in more depth in chapter 5, page 99.) For now, know that establishing a culture of learning includes planning for more learning through corrective action on the students’ part.
Use Collaborative Corrections
Students don’t have to go at it alone; corrections and responses can be a collective effort. The benefit for all students is exposure to the wide range of perspectives available within any given classroom. This can be part of the peer assessment process, or it can be a stand-alone process of collective response to teacher-based assessment. Again, the message of anticipated error can put all students at ease since the teacher will require a postassessment response from them. In addition, the collaborative correction process can create an everyone helps everyone culture that can counter the inherent competitive environment in some classrooms. Collaboration can occur in a reciprocal partnership or within an entire group in which all students collectively respond to assessment evidence. Either way, having access to others’ thoughts on how to improve only adds to a culture squarely focused on learning for all.
Conclusion
Being instructionally agile is contingent on a culture of learning. Learning creates culture, and culture influences learning, so intentionality is key to evolving a classroom culture away from a task completion mindset. Completing tasks is important, of course, but implicit in the task completion mindset is the idea that completing the task is the end, not the means. Real-time instructional maneuvers lean heavily on a norm of correction and growth. When students believe learning is eventually possible, they are more likely to invest at all points (design, interpretation, and response) along the way.
Both teachers and students nurture and develop cultures of learning, and while it might seem obvious that a culture of learning focuses on learning, without the habitual processes connected to learning goals, success criteria, learning progressions, feedback, correctives, and expected growth, a culture of learning is unlikely to emerge. A culture truly anchored in learning means viewing evidence of learning (and the corresponding instructional maneuvers) as an opportunity rather than an onerous event.
Pause and Ponder
Take a few moments to reflect on the following questions.
■ In your classroom or school, does learning create culture or does culture influence learning? Explain.
■ Of the eight forces that transform classrooms (see table 1.1, page 15), which ones represent areas of strength in your classroom or school? Which ones do you think need more attention in your classroom or school?
■ When was the last time you used assessment evidence to make realtime instructional maneuvers? Describe what you did, why you did it, and the impact it had on students.
■ How consistently do you communicate learning intentions, success criteria, and learning progressions? Is there more you could do to embed these aspects into your assessment routines?
■ Is the time to act on feedback proportional to the amount of feedback you provide to students?
CHAPTER 2
ENGINEERING ENGAGING CONVERSATIONS
The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
—B. F. Skinner
The practice of engineering engaging conversations in the classroom provides a significant foundation for a successful culture of learning. Despite its invaluable contribution to learning, the process of engineering engaging conversations is completely underused when it comes to making real-time instructional adjustments. Teachers should not consider dialogue or active, social learning as strategies for rare occasions. Rather, engaging conversations should happen intentionally and consistently, not merely when it is convenient or when students seem ready. In other words, working collaboratively with peers in a learning context is vital to the process of learning and is imperative to being instructionally agile. Engineering engaging conversations marks a change in modern teaching and learning, as even direct instruction must include a pathway of provocative questions and compelling conversations that students drive themselves.
The Main Idea
Dylan Wiliam (2011) notes that engineering engaging conversations is a critical formative assessment practice. What does it mean to engineer conversations? During instruction, teachers design engaging conversations (for example, topics of interest, worthy questions, collective inquiry, provoked thinking, collaborative learning) within a wide variety of discussion formats, such as Socratic seminars, philosophical chairs, debates, and juried forums, and varied groupings (large group, small group, and one-on-one options), as a primary means of helping students explore the concepts at hand. While direct instruction provides the easiest pathway for dispersing key concepts and is the most teacher-controlled option for dispensing and then monitoring learning, it can fall short of helping students make meaning as they do when teachers invite them to co-create understanding with their peers through conversations. There are five significant reasons why a culture of learning must embrace engaging conversations as a cultural expectation and a core instructional practice. The first three benefit students, while the last two benefit teachers.
1. Developing speaking and listening skills
2. Promoting productive group work
3. Co-creating meaning
4. Gathering emerging evidence
5. Shifting power
Teachers benefit when students do the heavy lifting during the instructional process.
