Several years ago, I had the opportunity to serve as superintendent of Danville, a Kentucky district of about 1800 students. There, with a forward-thinking school board who recognized the need for a very different kind of school experience, we began to explore.
From San Diego to New York City, we visited schools with visions far beyond state test scores. Though the contexts were different, there were many similarities. Students were engaged in learning that mattered to them. They were creating real world solutions to real world problems. They were problem-solving, collaborating, and thinking critically. They gave one another feedback, and revised. The teacher was truly a facilitator of learning and a coach—and the quality of the students’ work was unlike any I had ever seen.
Projects and challenges led to products that were beautiful and inspiring, work that had obviously been produced with tremendous pride. The purposes for the students’ work were also authentic, whether partnering with the 9/11 Ground Zero Museum Board to recommend artifacts to display, or building generators from old bicycle parts, it was obvious student success had been defined far above the “accountability” turbulence.
What we saw and learned from those visits gave our work a new—and even more urgent—purpose. Our students couldn’t begin to be able to compete with those we saw in San Diego and NYC, and not because of any shortcoming on the part of the student. The barrier was us, the adults, and our very limited vision for what school could and should be.
Our work focused on one driving question: What does our diploma mean? We realized after only a short discussion that although we could all say what we hoped it meant, there wasn’t a consistent understanding across our team. So we started with the basics: in the most literal sense, it meant students had completed 13 years of school (served their time?!) and met, at least minimally, the requirements to graduate. Our community surely hoped their 13 year investment would result in more. But what? Answering that question seemed a good place to begin.
The response—a document we called “The Danville Diploma,” became the driver for transformational change in the student experience. If we were sincere about fulfilling the promise to our community—one that said we wanted students to persevere when faced with challenges, to create, collaborate and communicate—we had to hold ourselves accountable for our students developing those competencies along with academic content in very different way. The work that followed gave me tremendous insight into just what was possible when a vision beyond test scores was shared by a community, and many across the country began paying attention.
From the Harvard Graduate School of Education to PBS NewsHour to NPR, all of a sudden, our small school district was visited and written about. It was an incredible experience. Most importantly, the kind of work our students were doing became much more interesting and inspiring. Products like, “The Case of the Hungry Hound,” a video created by one of our middle school students as part of his Performance-based Assessment Task (PBAT), thanks to our partnership with the New York Performance Consortium, became much closer to the norm during that time. As result, I have to believe the students who were there were much better equipped for successful futures.
I am always amazed with where life takes you. Having grown up in rural Kentucky, with my first teaching position being at Stamping Ground Elementary School in the very same classroom where my mother taught first grade years before, I had no idea what my future held. I just wanted to show up every day for those fourth graders, and do the very best I could by them. My mission and drive haven’t changed, but my context certainly has as I find myself, 27 years later, serving Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), the largest district in Kentucky and one of the 30th largest in the country, as Chief Academic Officer.
I met the current superintendent years ago when we were connected by a mutual friend because of our passion for deeper learning. The friend had been principal in a neighboring district to Danville, and he’d seen first hand the kind of work our students had started doing. The story he tells is that at the football game, when our students launched miniature pumpkins at halftime with catapults and trebuchets they’d built, a parent said “I know we can’t beat them in football, but can we at least make sure our kids get to do things like that?”
This former principal, in a new role with the state department of education, asked if I’d talk with Dr. Marty Pollio, a principal he’d met in Louisville who was interested in project-based learning. We met, talked, made ambitious plans for his school, and several weeks later, he let me know he’d been hired as the acting superintendent. He asked if I’d join him.
And so we began.
Jefferson County has close to 100,000 students (over 50 times more kids than Danville) and more than 150 schools. When we joined, it was also under threat of state takeover. The Kentucky Department of Education had just completed an audit of all district operations, from special education to transportation to teaching and learning to human resources. Nothing was left untouched.
But there were bright spots. The district was hungry for leadership, and there was so much talent. The board and the teacher’s union had also worked together to create a strategic plan that had, as its number one goal, to ensure deeper learning for all students.
As we awaited the results of the all-encompassing look into every aspect of the district, we cast a vision. As the superintendent often said, we had to take “big swings” to get this right—and we agreed that school, as it was, was outdated at best if not obsolete.
We started with that same question we’d answered in Danville, “What does our diploma mean?” We began by talking with as many groups as we possibly could, and in those conversations, asked four questions:
The responses were consistent, no matter the audience. First, we agreed that academic skills were a given. That, after all, is what schools and districts are required to do. The skills they listed were those you might imagine: the ability to persevere when faced with challenges, to problem solve and to be effective communicators. Thinking critically and creating were also common to the lists along with empathy, and the appreciation of differences in individuals and cultures.
The answers to the second question were always interesting and fun to hear. I would often pose this as a challenge: If I gave you 30 students and said you had one week to create a learning experience that would ensure the students could show some kind of evidence of having developed and grown in one or more of those skills, what would you do?
What I found especially significant is that every group could very quickly describe a learning experience that cultivated the skills they wanted to generate as well as the application of a wide variety of interdisciplinary academic content. Some shared they would take students on a trip, and they would let them do all the planning and organizing. Others said they would ask students to tackle an issue facing the local or even global community. Some said they would have them complete and then design a breakout game. Planning and planting a garden was another I often heard. Even groups who weren’t educators had great ideas! Almost always, they would begin by posing some kind of challenge for students to tackle.
As you might guess, no group ever suggested assignments we might typically see in school. They didn’t answer multiple choice questions or complete a worksheet. They didn’t create sentences from new vocabulary words. None said they’d have kids create some kind of display from posterboard.
Instead, for every experience suggested, there was a real purpose—and a real life connection. The tasks were challenging, to say the least. The audience was authentic, and the products had to come to life. Students didn’t draw a picture of a garden. They created a garden. They didn’t plan an imaginary trip. They planned a trip they would actually take. Certainly, the work would require reading and writing, but would ultimately lead to a bigger end—an end students could get excited about.
Never did any group say they’d have the students watch PowerPoints and take lots of notes before getting started. They didn’t say they would start by frontloading all possibly relevant information. Instead, they presented the issue or challenge, and had the students go to work. I found this to be so interesting—more on this later.
Responses to the third question were often consistent across groups, just like the first. There would be a special teacher—“Ms. Jones always has her students create gardens,” or “Mr. Goodwin teaches this awesome unit where students build catapults and trebuchets.” There were also after school, extra curricular kinds of experiences—robotics being one frequently mentioned. They would excitedly share examples, and these always brought smiles. Whether the participants themselves had experienced what they described or knew children who had, it was obvious that they held these dear. This was the learning that brought great memories and good feelings.
It’s the second part of the last question that was always met with a pause. “Do all kids have these experiences?”
The answer, without exception, was no. Some kids benefitted from after school experiences, some kids had certain teachers who created awesome learning experiences, but many never got the chance. After school experiences like Robotics require transportation at the very least—something all kids didn’t have. Each group came to the realization that we had an equity problem, and although news of achievement gaps certainly wasn’t new, this raised a new question: Could we (the system) be part of the problem? As many of us realize, the answer is unequivocally yes.
We had identified our challenge.
There is real beauty in being a little bit naive. The newly appointed interim superintendent of Jefferson County had no district-level experience. He had been principal of two different high schools—arguably one of the most difficult jobs in existence—but he had no experience leading a district, not to mention one with a powerful teacher’s union and a 7-member board—a district that was one of the largest in the country. He had, however, spent 20 years in the district as a teacher, coach and principal.
I had been a superintendent in a district of 1800, and had worked at the district-level in another that had, at the time, about 35,000 students. I would later realize the differences between these districts and Jefferson were far greater than size. Being at risk for state takeover was just one of the challenges we would face in weeks to come.
Students were coming back to school and though our vision was big, the day-to-day was all-consuming. Trying to decide whether or not the special glasses the district received for students to watch a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse were safe was one of our first and most memorable challenges. Fortunately, the glasses worked, everybody’s eyes were protected, and we cleared that hurdle—a relatively small one looking back.
Years of turbulent leadership had eroded trust at every level of the district. This lack of trust showed itself in many ways. The tension in some of our first meetings is something I will never forget. The central office building was a maze of cubicles, creating small, isolated work spaces. This was reflective of the district culture—individuals working hard but siloed, and no one could see past their own workspace. The absence of a coherent vision seemed to impact every aspect of the district.
Thankfully, we truly didn’t know what we didn’t know—and we plowed ahead.
We began by producing a set of “success skills” that every student would graduate with. Every JCPS graduate would be
We knew we had to paint a much bigger picture of student success—and to get everyone focused on making it happen. We wanted to take those newly established “Success Skills” and have students continually add artifacts showing their learning and growth to a digital portfolio, or as we called it, a “Backpack.” And we needed to start now.
Our theory of action was simple—if students were required to show tangible evidence of learning both academic content and in their development of those important Success Skills each year, then they must have learning experiences that would lead them to create these artifacts. As one of our third graders said early on, when he was learning about the Backpack, “Worksheets won’t make good artifacts.”
Exactly.
The Backpack of Success Skills was scheduled to launch at the start of the 2018-19 school year. We’d made our plans and vision very public. We promised that every student would have a digital backpack into which they would upload artifacts each year, beginning in kindergarten, and that they would be ready on the very first day of school.
Not only that, we decided that during key transition points—elementary to middle, middle to high and high to post-secondary—students would be required to do a defense before a panel to publicly show they were ready for a successful transition. We wrote down this new approach—ensuring a much more engaging student experience—in a book we called The New Normal. Inside the book were the purpose, examples of learning experiences that would lead to great artifacts, and the “Tight and Loose” expectations for both what would go inside and what would be shared during defenses. We didn’t ask for lots of input. We just charged ahead.
While the superintendent and I were doing everything we could to promote the vision during the summer of 2018, our district tech team was searching for the right software to serve as the digital backpack. I will never forget the day the tech team proposed that we build our own software. The first day of school was literally weeks away, our district already had a reputation for creating bespoke internal systems that isolated it from the rest of the state. This approach was a factor leading to the state audit, and we were not looking to continue the pattern.
But there was one thing we couldn’t ignore: a team of students had been testing out all the existing software options and found them lacking, and their recommendation convinced us we had to make our own software for the backpack. But every student had to have a digital backpack on the first day of school. In a district where families had grown used to being disappointed by promises from central office,, coming through on our very first promise simply had to happen.
Thanks to the work of our newly formed Digital Innovation Team, when the first day of school came every kid had a digital backpack, as promised. We were on our way.
The school year started and each student had a digital backpack inside their Google Drive. Our newly formed Digital Innovation team was leading the way, creating lots of excitement within and even outside the district. All of the sudden, JCPS, the district that had been somewhat of a mystery across the state, was front and center. It seemed, to us at least, that everyone was watching—and so many wanted to join us. It was a new day in JCPS!
The first full year of implementation of our Backpack, the beginning of our competency-based system, couldn’t have been better. The once-siloed divisions came together to support the kind of work we wanted to see in many different ways. With our Communications team, we created the “What’s in Your Backpack?” series, a collection of short videos that explained the purpose of the Backpacks, and delved into aspects of deeper learning such as collaboration and literacy. We defined “quality work” and used a protocol to look at student work during principals’ meetings, schools scheduled exhibitions of learning and the project-based approach was on the rise.
Defenses began that spring, and we were so proud of our schools. Every student at one of those key transition points was expected to defend—no exceptions. Although there was never any organized pushback, teachers and administrators had a lot of questions:.
“Do you really think our students can do this?”
“Do you really think it’s reasonable to expect a 5th grader to put together a formal presentation, like a graduate student might?”
“What about students with severe disabilities?”
“What about English Language Learners?”
“Do you really expect Kindergarteners to be able to upload artifacts?”
Every time, I answered by saying, “I am not sure. But I do know if we don’t expect it, they definitely won’t. I’m also positive that our students deserve the opportunity.”
From my previous experience, I knew if we could just get to defenses, even the toughest critic would see the value—and they did. Stories were shared across the district about defenses that had panelists in tears. Just as I expected, we were blown away by what the students could do when just given the chance. I remember a 5th grader who’d only been in the country a matter of months. He was dressed in a suit and tie, looking the part of a young professional. He’d invited his dad. This was a big deal.
He looked each panelist in the eye and shook our hands. He introduced himself and began talking about his progress and his goals. He highlighted several artifacts he was especially proud of. He talked about how he wanted to become a doctor because he’d learned so much from helping take care of his grandma. Everyone in the room cried.
There was an 8th grade student at our Newcomer Academy, a school for students very new to the country with little if any formal schooling. She started in English but stopped abruptly. She was looking at her notes, but struggling with the language. It just so happened that the mayor and the superintendent were sitting in along with a district staff member whose native language was the same as that of the student who by now was looking very close to tears. All of the sudden, the panelist began speaking to the young girl in her native language. Then, the student stood up straight, took a deep breath and started again. To say that those who were watching were moved would be a tremendous understatement. Witnessing first hand this student’s struggle and success was something I doubt any have forgotten who were there that day.
The stories like this go on and on. For me, one of the most memorable moments was when one of our teachers introduced herself to me, telling me she taught in one of our schools with a very fragile population. She told me about a students’ defense she had watched, and described how, for the first time, this student was able to express herself in a way that allowed her to show her special talents and creativity. She talked about how the student smiled, something very rare, as she spoke. Before walking away, the teacher said, “I just want you to know you are saving lives with this.”
Students sang, played instruments, danced, shared quotes and performed monologues as part of their defense presentations. One even shared his credit score with tremendous pride. He worked with his dad’s body shop, and knew this was important for his future.
After that first year, we’d realized our students could do more than we ever thought possible. They had special skills, talents and interests that we hadn’t realized. For the first time, we really knew them—just when they were leaving.
Over the next several months, we spotlighted awesome defenses, held artifact design studios, and discussed the many instructional implications based on what we saw (you can see the debrief document we created here). We created videos of all kinds, from showing great examples of artifacts to directions for students on how to upload. The Backpack, and the defenses, provided an invaluable look into classrooms and the kinds of learning our students were doing.
In some schools, every student had the same collection of artifacts. In others, it was pretty obvious that students didn’t really know yet what the Success Skills meant. Many didn’t exactly align with the “tight expectations” outlined in The New Normal. But all had jumped in and we were so very proud. Students defended, and panelists talked with them about their learning. They asked them questions and listened to students’ responses. Every student in a transition year had their moment in the spotlight and had the chance for meaningful conversation and reflection with a group of adults. Definitely a win.
We continually looked for ways to build teacher capacity for the kind of learning experiences we knew were vital to our students’ futures. We formed a partnership with the education design lab 2Revolutions and two local universities to launch an opportunity for teachers to earn a competency-based certificate. The experience for the teachers would be fully competency-based, immersing them into the same structures their students were experiencing.
We provided many professional learning opportunities focused on project-based learning and inquiry:
After that first year, we found that many teachers were on board. They wanted to design awesome learning for students, but there were barriers that went beyond not knowing where to begin.
Then, we had a pandemic.
Just like for the rest of the nation, it was surreal. Once the shock faded and reality began to set in, we began working frantically to flip our system from one that had, just a short time before, been behind with technology, to one that was fully functioning in the virtual world. Not only did students need devices and internet, our resources had to be converted. Stopping to think too long about what needed to be done was completely overwhelming. We never stopped.
Just as it happened with the implementation of the Backpack, our teams came together and somehow pulled it off. Within weeks we were rolling. Students had Chromebooks and hotspots, and teachers who weren’t already using Google Classroom got a crash course. Thanks to the creation of a district Digital Learning Channel, our teachers could learn about that as well as many other aspects of virtual teaching on-demand.
Although we’d gained tremendous momentum with the Backpack the prior year and during the first half of 2019-20, the superintendent and I agreed that now was not the time to push. The last thing we wanted was to cause more stress for our already overwhelmed teachers and leaders.
It’s likely that some thought the pandemic was the end of the Backpack and the defenses. They had a great start but we were really still there—the start. We had plans for our next steps, but they’d been surpassed by the immediate needs of distance learning.
But in the spring, an amazing thing happened: new additions started appearing in our district-wide Defense Calendar. This was the place where schools added their defense schedules so panelists could then sign up to participate. Was it possible that despite the pandemic’s challenges, and the fact that we’d only launched this new initiative a little over a year before, our district community had seen enough value to keep it going, even when it wasn’t required? They had. Not all—but many. This seemed significant.
The students were amazing (and no doubt, thanks to amazing teachers who’d helped them prepare.) They had been learning about presenting virtually right alongside their teachers. They could share their screens and move between slides and videos with ease. Interestingly, the quality of the defenses seemed even better than before. Students had much to say and really good artifacts to share. They’d had to be creative—we saw more artifacts resulting from spending more time at home.
Some talked about cooking. Others talked about working and helping to support their families. They talked about helping younger siblings with their on-line classes. They didn’t have the traditional academic measures to discuss as many often did that first year—MAP and even the ACT hadn’t been administered. But they found new ways to represent their growth and goals. The virtual context required students to be more independent, and their defenses were better because of it. Those were truly some of the very best—and I was even joined by world renowned educational scholar and leader, Michael Fullan, as well as Justin Wells from Envision Learning Partners (both instrumental in the development of our work) for a few defenses during that virtual time. I couldn’t have been more proud.
There is still a long way to go in the district before the school experience is truly transformed for every student, but we made progress. Just in May, we, as a group of district leaders, revisited The New Normal, the Quality Work protocol and descriptors, the Performance Outcomes, and looked closely at school defense rubrics to see how they compared to the expectations outlined in those original documents. It was refreshing to again focus on the bigger vision for the kind of learning experiences we wanted for our students.
So far, we mainly have qualitative data to support the impact of the Backpack on student learning. However after five years, with three being heavily impacted by the pandemic, I can say this about our district of almost 100,000 students:
We know our students like never before. Defenses helped us to realize we were missing out on many of our students’ interests and special talents. Some schools have made new efforts to get to know students much more personally long before they are ready to transition.
We realize our students can do more than we imagined possible—and many need less direction than we had been providing. We have to give them opportunities to solve problems, create and collaborate if we want them to learn. Having to figure out how to represent their learning and growth in new ways was a new challenge for our students, and they did it in ways the adults might never have considered.
We are talking about “evidence of learning” beyond test scores. It’s so important that everyone understands that the word “data” just means information. It is not a synonym for score. We miss out on such important details about our students when we only consider numbers.
We are allowing our students to show what they know in many ways. It’s so important that we consider which standards and skills can be measured in a more traditional way and which need a “driver’s test,” or performance assessment.
We are using a shared definition of Quality Work across the district.
We are thinking about Bloom’s Taxonomy as a web instead of a ladder. (Mehta, 2018).
We are finding powerful implications for professional learning needs through the artifacts students share during defenses.
We are investing in new ways, like what the Modern Classroom Project suggests, to structure classroom time for students, teachers and space to provide a much better chance for teachers to be able to personalize learning, and make time for the kind of deeper learning experiences we are striving for.
We are investing in professional learning that immerses teachers in the kind of competency-based experience we want for our kids—and we are providing ways for teachers to be credentialed and recognized for this work.
Through our statewide Laboratories of Learning initiative, we are starting work to create a competency-based path that will allow students to credential learning that happens outside of the school day and school walls.
I am not sure I even fully realize yet the learning that has occurred for me over the last five years. I am forever grateful to the superintendent who invited me to join him for this journey, and cannot say enough about the many people who came together over and over again to do the impossible.
There are a few learnings that really stand out.
There are times when not knowing and understanding the full scope of your context is a gift. This allows you, as a leader, to make bold moves without considering the complexities of the system or community that might get in the way.
Beginning by establishing, collaboratively, what kinds of outcomes you want for your students—and the knowledge and skills they will need to achieve those outcomes—provides a firm foundation on which to build. I didn’t know what a graduate profile was when we were trying to determine what we wanted our diploma to mean in Danville. It just made sense to start with what we wanted to achieve and then to build the system and experiences most likely to lead to those outcomes. There are certainly other ways to dive into deeper learning, but I haven’t found another that provides such a foundation and a springboard both in a small, rural district and a very large urban one. This also goes a long way with establishing the why.
Worth repeating many times over—students are capable of far more than we often give them the opportunity to do. So are teachers.
You can’t overestimate the power of spotlighting the kind of work you want to see. The creator feels motivated to do more and many who see it are inspired to try.
It is so important to help others see what school can be. The experiences I had at High Tech High and in the iSchool in New York changed my entire view of what school could (and should!) look like. There was nothing like seeing kids—who looked just like my kids in Kentucky—completely engaged in work that really mattered to them. I am constantly thinking about how I can recreate this experience for those I lead.
As teachers, my guess is that most of us went into teaching to create awesome learning experiences for kids—to inspire passion and curiosity. High stakes accountability as we have known it over the last several years causes both teachers and leaders to be fearful of trying anything that takes them too far from the norm. I have been in the room when the state department of education says to a principal, “You were found through the audit not to have capacity to lead the work that needs to happen in this school.” The fear is very real—and rooted in reality.
Deeper learning can be a game changer for students in high poverty, urban areas. However, it’s those schools where the threat of consequences due to poor performance on traditional academic measures cause the most anxiety.
Even those who are not educators can come up with a general deeper learning experience—and without one day of PBL training. Although this is certainly needed to really refine the experience, it seems that we know intuitively how to create engaging experiences. It’s the way we naturally learn.
I’ve realized we don’t approach learning the way we do in school in any other context. If you’ve ever coached a team or taught someone to play an instrument, bake a cake, or do any other kind of real-life thing, we teach by doing. We naturally describe what to do, show and then ask the learner to try. We give them specific feedback until they get it right. The goal is success, and we work at it with them until it happens.
Can you imagine approaching one of those activities as we do in school? It seems completely absurd to think about teaching someone to ride a horse by first introducing vocabulary, then having them read about riding horses, then having them do research about horses and reporting to the class and even drawing pictures of horses with the goal of maybe, after the unit test, taking them to see a real horse. (Riding would be out of the question!) This is laughable—yet this is how we often structure learning in school. We can’t wonder why students aren’t engaged.
And, using that same example, there would be some students whose families could give them the real life experience of riding a horse. But many could not. So again, the students who probably most need the experience are not getting it.
We have to continually work to connect the dots with what we are asking our educators to do. There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like you are being tasked with a list of seemingly unrelated “to dos.” We have to be coherent in our messaging—and we have to be clear about what we mean by deeper learning, competency-based education, personalized learning…the list goes on. It is so important to clearly define the terms we use. Otherwise, anything goes.
Finally, I am positive of this—if leaders in a district aren’t continually steadfast and intentional about transforming the school experience and aggressively moving forward, the progress we made will be lost. Some schools will continue, at least with the Backpack and defenses, but those who still see this as something extra and not a component of an entirely different approach, will stop. The district will still be ahead of where we were—individual teachers, leaders and schools will build on what they’ve learned and continue to evolve, but the system as a whole will not.
In the bigger picture, I have to believe our work has made a significant contribution to the field. It is difficult to disrupt and impact practice even in the smallest of school districts. We were able to make what I believe is significant progress toward the kind of school experience our students deserve. In a district of 100,000 students. During a global pandemic. Because of this, I am incredibly optimistic about what is possible.
Lots to think about. Lots of work left to be done.
Mehta, J. A pernicious myth: basics before deeper learning. (2018, January 4). EducationWeek. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-a-pernicious-myth-basics-before-deeper-learning/2018/01
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to serve as superintendent of Danville, a Kentucky district of about 1800 students. There, with a forward-thinking school board who recognized the need for a very different kind of school experience, we began to explore.
From San Diego to New York City, we visited schools with visions far beyond state test scores. Though the contexts were different, there were many similarities. Students were engaged in learning that mattered to them. They were creating real world solutions to real world problems. They were problem-solving, collaborating, and thinking critically. They gave one another feedback, and revised. The teacher was truly a facilitator of learning and a coach—and the quality of the students’ work was unlike any I had ever seen.
Projects and challenges led to products that were beautiful and inspiring, work that had obviously been produced with tremendous pride. The purposes for the students’ work were also authentic, whether partnering with the 9/11 Ground Zero Museum Board to recommend artifacts to display, or building generators from old bicycle parts, it was obvious student success had been defined far above the “accountability” turbulence.
What we saw and learned from those visits gave our work a new—and even more urgent—purpose. Our students couldn’t begin to be able to compete with those we saw in San Diego and NYC, and not because of any shortcoming on the part of the student. The barrier was us, the adults, and our very limited vision for what school could and should be.
Our work focused on one driving question: What does our diploma mean? We realized after only a short discussion that although we could all say what we hoped it meant, there wasn’t a consistent understanding across our team. So we started with the basics: in the most literal sense, it meant students had completed 13 years of school (served their time?!) and met, at least minimally, the requirements to graduate. Our community surely hoped their 13 year investment would result in more. But what? Answering that question seemed a good place to begin.
The response—a document we called “The Danville Diploma,” became the driver for transformational change in the student experience. If we were sincere about fulfilling the promise to our community—one that said we wanted students to persevere when faced with challenges, to create, collaborate and communicate—we had to hold ourselves accountable for our students developing those competencies along with academic content in very different way. The work that followed gave me tremendous insight into just what was possible when a vision beyond test scores was shared by a community, and many across the country began paying attention.
From the Harvard Graduate School of Education to PBS NewsHour to NPR, all of a sudden, our small school district was visited and written about. It was an incredible experience. Most importantly, the kind of work our students were doing became much more interesting and inspiring. Products like, “The Case of the Hungry Hound,” a video created by one of our middle school students as part of his Performance-based Assessment Task (PBAT), thanks to our partnership with the New York Performance Consortium, became much closer to the norm during that time. As result, I have to believe the students who were there were much better equipped for successful futures.
I am always amazed with where life takes you. Having grown up in rural Kentucky, with my first teaching position being at Stamping Ground Elementary School in the very same classroom where my mother taught first grade years before, I had no idea what my future held. I just wanted to show up every day for those fourth graders, and do the very best I could by them. My mission and drive haven’t changed, but my context certainly has as I find myself, 27 years later, serving Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), the largest district in Kentucky and one of the 30th largest in the country, as Chief Academic Officer.
I met the current superintendent years ago when we were connected by a mutual friend because of our passion for deeper learning. The friend had been principal in a neighboring district to Danville, and he’d seen first hand the kind of work our students had started doing. The story he tells is that at the football game, when our students launched miniature pumpkins at halftime with catapults and trebuchets they’d built, a parent said “I know we can’t beat them in football, but can we at least make sure our kids get to do things like that?”
This former principal, in a new role with the state department of education, asked if I’d talk with Dr. Marty Pollio, a principal he’d met in Louisville who was interested in project-based learning. We met, talked, made ambitious plans for his school, and several weeks later, he let me know he’d been hired as the acting superintendent. He asked if I’d join him.
And so we began.
Jefferson County has close to 100,000 students (over 50 times more kids than Danville) and more than 150 schools. When we joined, it was also under threat of state takeover. The Kentucky Department of Education had just completed an audit of all district operations, from special education to transportation to teaching and learning to human resources. Nothing was left untouched.
But there were bright spots. The district was hungry for leadership, and there was so much talent. The board and the teacher’s union had also worked together to create a strategic plan that had, as its number one goal, to ensure deeper learning for all students.
As we awaited the results of the all-encompassing look into every aspect of the district, we cast a vision. As the superintendent often said, we had to take “big swings” to get this right—and we agreed that school, as it was, was outdated at best if not obsolete.
We started with that same question we’d answered in Danville, “What does our diploma mean?” We began by talking with as many groups as we possibly could, and in those conversations, asked four questions:
The responses were consistent, no matter the audience. First, we agreed that academic skills were a given. That, after all, is what schools and districts are required to do. The skills they listed were those you might imagine: the ability to persevere when faced with challenges, to problem solve and to be effective communicators. Thinking critically and creating were also common to the lists along with empathy, and the appreciation of differences in individuals and cultures.
The answers to the second question were always interesting and fun to hear. I would often pose this as a challenge: If I gave you 30 students and said you had one week to create a learning experience that would ensure the students could show some kind of evidence of having developed and grown in one or more of those skills, what would you do?
What I found especially significant is that every group could very quickly describe a learning experience that cultivated the skills they wanted to generate as well as the application of a wide variety of interdisciplinary academic content. Some shared they would take students on a trip, and they would let them do all the planning and organizing. Others said they would ask students to tackle an issue facing the local or even global community. Some said they would have them complete and then design a breakout game. Planning and planting a garden was another I often heard. Even groups who weren’t educators had great ideas! Almost always, they would begin by posing some kind of challenge for students to tackle.
As you might guess, no group ever suggested assignments we might typically see in school. They didn’t answer multiple choice questions or complete a worksheet. They didn’t create sentences from new vocabulary words. None said they’d have kids create some kind of display from posterboard.
Instead, for every experience suggested, there was a real purpose—and a real life connection. The tasks were challenging, to say the least. The audience was authentic, and the products had to come to life. Students didn’t draw a picture of a garden. They created a garden. They didn’t plan an imaginary trip. They planned a trip they would actually take. Certainly, the work would require reading and writing, but would ultimately lead to a bigger end—an end students could get excited about.
Never did any group say they’d have the students watch PowerPoints and take lots of notes before getting started. They didn’t say they would start by frontloading all possibly relevant information. Instead, they presented the issue or challenge, and had the students go to work. I found this to be so interesting—more on this later.
Responses to the third question were often consistent across groups, just like the first. There would be a special teacher—“Ms. Jones always has her students create gardens,” or “Mr. Goodwin teaches this awesome unit where students build catapults and trebuchets.” There were also after school, extra curricular kinds of experiences—robotics being one frequently mentioned. They would excitedly share examples, and these always brought smiles. Whether the participants themselves had experienced what they described or knew children who had, it was obvious that they held these dear. This was the learning that brought great memories and good feelings.
It’s the second part of the last question that was always met with a pause. “Do all kids have these experiences?”
The answer, without exception, was no. Some kids benefitted from after school experiences, some kids had certain teachers who created awesome learning experiences, but many never got the chance. After school experiences like Robotics require transportation at the very least—something all kids didn’t have. Each group came to the realization that we had an equity problem, and although news of achievement gaps certainly wasn’t new, this raised a new question: Could we (the system) be part of the problem? As many of us realize, the answer is unequivocally yes.
We had identified our challenge.
There is real beauty in being a little bit naive. The newly appointed interim superintendent of Jefferson County had no district-level experience. He had been principal of two different high schools—arguably one of the most difficult jobs in existence—but he had no experience leading a district, not to mention one with a powerful teacher’s union and a 7-member board—a district that was one of the largest in the country. He had, however, spent 20 years in the district as a teacher, coach and principal.
I had been a superintendent in a district of 1800, and had worked at the district-level in another that had, at the time, about 35,000 students. I would later realize the differences between these districts and Jefferson were far greater than size. Being at risk for state takeover was just one of the challenges we would face in weeks to come.
Students were coming back to school and though our vision was big, the day-to-day was all-consuming. Trying to decide whether or not the special glasses the district received for students to watch a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse were safe was one of our first and most memorable challenges. Fortunately, the glasses worked, everybody’s eyes were protected, and we cleared that hurdle—a relatively small one looking back.
Years of turbulent leadership had eroded trust at every level of the district. This lack of trust showed itself in many ways. The tension in some of our first meetings is something I will never forget. The central office building was a maze of cubicles, creating small, isolated work spaces. This was reflective of the district culture—individuals working hard but siloed, and no one could see past their own workspace. The absence of a coherent vision seemed to impact every aspect of the district.
Thankfully, we truly didn’t know what we didn’t know—and we plowed ahead.
We began by producing a set of “success skills” that every student would graduate with. Every JCPS graduate would be
We knew we had to paint a much bigger picture of student success—and to get everyone focused on making it happen. We wanted to take those newly established “Success Skills” and have students continually add artifacts showing their learning and growth to a digital portfolio, or as we called it, a “Backpack.” And we needed to start now.
Our theory of action was simple—if students were required to show tangible evidence of learning both academic content and in their development of those important Success Skills each year, then they must have learning experiences that would lead them to create these artifacts. As one of our third graders said early on, when he was learning about the Backpack, “Worksheets won’t make good artifacts.”
Exactly.
The Backpack of Success Skills was scheduled to launch at the start of the 2018-19 school year. We’d made our plans and vision very public. We promised that every student would have a digital backpack into which they would upload artifacts each year, beginning in kindergarten, and that they would be ready on the very first day of school.
Not only that, we decided that during key transition points—elementary to middle, middle to high and high to post-secondary—students would be required to do a defense before a panel to publicly show they were ready for a successful transition. We wrote down this new approach—ensuring a much more engaging student experience—in a book we called The New Normal. Inside the book were the purpose, examples of learning experiences that would lead to great artifacts, and the “Tight and Loose” expectations for both what would go inside and what would be shared during defenses. We didn’t ask for lots of input. We just charged ahead.
While the superintendent and I were doing everything we could to promote the vision during the summer of 2018, our district tech team was searching for the right software to serve as the digital backpack. I will never forget the day the tech team proposed that we build our own software. The first day of school was literally weeks away, our district already had a reputation for creating bespoke internal systems that isolated it from the rest of the state. This approach was a factor leading to the state audit, and we were not looking to continue the pattern.
But there was one thing we couldn’t ignore: a team of students had been testing out all the existing software options and found them lacking, and their recommendation convinced us we had to make our own software for the backpack. But every student had to have a digital backpack on the first day of school. In a district where families had grown used to being disappointed by promises from central office,, coming through on our very first promise simply had to happen.
Thanks to the work of our newly formed Digital Innovation Team, when the first day of school came every kid had a digital backpack, as promised. We were on our way.
The school year started and each student had a digital backpack inside their Google Drive. Our newly formed Digital Innovation team was leading the way, creating lots of excitement within and even outside the district. All of the sudden, JCPS, the district that had been somewhat of a mystery across the state, was front and center. It seemed, to us at least, that everyone was watching—and so many wanted to join us. It was a new day in JCPS!
The first full year of implementation of our Backpack, the beginning of our competency-based system, couldn’t have been better. The once-siloed divisions came together to support the kind of work we wanted to see in many different ways. With our Communications team, we created the “What’s in Your Backpack?” series, a collection of short videos that explained the purpose of the Backpacks, and delved into aspects of deeper learning such as collaboration and literacy. We defined “quality work” and used a protocol to look at student work during principals’ meetings, schools scheduled exhibitions of learning and the project-based approach was on the rise.
Defenses began that spring, and we were so proud of our schools. Every student at one of those key transition points was expected to defend—no exceptions. Although there was never any organized pushback, teachers and administrators had a lot of questions:.
“Do you really think our students can do this?”
“Do you really think it’s reasonable to expect a 5th grader to put together a formal presentation, like a graduate student might?”
“What about students with severe disabilities?”
“What about English Language Learners?”
“Do you really expect Kindergarteners to be able to upload artifacts?”
Every time, I answered by saying, “I am not sure. But I do know if we don’t expect it, they definitely won’t. I’m also positive that our students deserve the opportunity.”
From my previous experience, I knew if we could just get to defenses, even the toughest critic would see the value—and they did. Stories were shared across the district about defenses that had panelists in tears. Just as I expected, we were blown away by what the students could do when just given the chance. I remember a 5th grader who’d only been in the country a matter of months. He was dressed in a suit and tie, looking the part of a young professional. He’d invited his dad. This was a big deal.
He looked each panelist in the eye and shook our hands. He introduced himself and began talking about his progress and his goals. He highlighted several artifacts he was especially proud of. He talked about how he wanted to become a doctor because he’d learned so much from helping take care of his grandma. Everyone in the room cried.
There was an 8th grade student at our Newcomer Academy, a school for students very new to the country with little if any formal schooling. She started in English but stopped abruptly. She was looking at her notes, but struggling with the language. It just so happened that the mayor and the superintendent were sitting in along with a district staff member whose native language was the same as that of the student who by now was looking very close to tears. All of the sudden, the panelist began speaking to the young girl in her native language. Then, the student stood up straight, took a deep breath and started again. To say that those who were watching were moved would be a tremendous understatement. Witnessing first hand this student’s struggle and success was something I doubt any have forgotten who were there that day.
The stories like this go on and on. For me, one of the most memorable moments was when one of our teachers introduced herself to me, telling me she taught in one of our schools with a very fragile population. She told me about a students’ defense she had watched, and described how, for the first time, this student was able to express herself in a way that allowed her to show her special talents and creativity. She talked about how the student smiled, something very rare, as she spoke. Before walking away, the teacher said, “I just want you to know you are saving lives with this.”
Students sang, played instruments, danced, shared quotes and performed monologues as part of their defense presentations. One even shared his credit score with tremendous pride. He worked with his dad’s body shop, and knew this was important for his future.
After that first year, we’d realized our students could do more than we ever thought possible. They had special skills, talents and interests that we hadn’t realized. For the first time, we really knew them—just when they were leaving.
Over the next several months, we spotlighted awesome defenses, held artifact design studios, and discussed the many instructional implications based on what we saw (you can see the debrief document we created here). We created videos of all kinds, from showing great examples of artifacts to directions for students on how to upload. The Backpack, and the defenses, provided an invaluable look into classrooms and the kinds of learning our students were doing.
In some schools, every student had the same collection of artifacts. In others, it was pretty obvious that students didn’t really know yet what the Success Skills meant. Many didn’t exactly align with the “tight expectations” outlined in The New Normal. But all had jumped in and we were so very proud. Students defended, and panelists talked with them about their learning. They asked them questions and listened to students’ responses. Every student in a transition year had their moment in the spotlight and had the chance for meaningful conversation and reflection with a group of adults. Definitely a win.
We continually looked for ways to build teacher capacity for the kind of learning experiences we knew were vital to our students’ futures. We formed a partnership with the education design lab 2Revolutions and two local universities to launch an opportunity for teachers to earn a competency-based certificate. The experience for the teachers would be fully competency-based, immersing them into the same structures their students were experiencing.
We provided many professional learning opportunities focused on project-based learning and inquiry:
After that first year, we found that many teachers were on board. They wanted to design awesome learning for students, but there were barriers that went beyond not knowing where to begin.
Then, we had a pandemic.
Just like for the rest of the nation, it was surreal. Once the shock faded and reality began to set in, we began working frantically to flip our system from one that had, just a short time before, been behind with technology, to one that was fully functioning in the virtual world. Not only did students need devices and internet, our resources had to be converted. Stopping to think too long about what needed to be done was completely overwhelming. We never stopped.
Just as it happened with the implementation of the Backpack, our teams came together and somehow pulled it off. Within weeks we were rolling. Students had Chromebooks and hotspots, and teachers who weren’t already using Google Classroom got a crash course. Thanks to the creation of a district Digital Learning Channel, our teachers could learn about that as well as many other aspects of virtual teaching on-demand.
Although we’d gained tremendous momentum with the Backpack the prior year and during the first half of 2019-20, the superintendent and I agreed that now was not the time to push. The last thing we wanted was to cause more stress for our already overwhelmed teachers and leaders.
It’s likely that some thought the pandemic was the end of the Backpack and the defenses. They had a great start but we were really still there—the start. We had plans for our next steps, but they’d been surpassed by the immediate needs of distance learning.
But in the spring, an amazing thing happened: new additions started appearing in our district-wide Defense Calendar. This was the place where schools added their defense schedules so panelists could then sign up to participate. Was it possible that despite the pandemic’s challenges, and the fact that we’d only launched this new initiative a little over a year before, our district community had seen enough value to keep it going, even when it wasn’t required? They had. Not all—but many. This seemed significant.
The students were amazing (and no doubt, thanks to amazing teachers who’d helped them prepare.) They had been learning about presenting virtually right alongside their teachers. They could share their screens and move between slides and videos with ease. Interestingly, the quality of the defenses seemed even better than before. Students had much to say and really good artifacts to share. They’d had to be creative—we saw more artifacts resulting from spending more time at home.
Some talked about cooking. Others talked about working and helping to support their families. They talked about helping younger siblings with their on-line classes. They didn’t have the traditional academic measures to discuss as many often did that first year—MAP and even the ACT hadn’t been administered. But they found new ways to represent their growth and goals. The virtual context required students to be more independent, and their defenses were better because of it. Those were truly some of the very best—and I was even joined by world renowned educational scholar and leader, Michael Fullan, as well as Justin Wells from Envision Learning Partners (both instrumental in the development of our work) for a few defenses during that virtual time. I couldn’t have been more proud.
There is still a long way to go in the district before the school experience is truly transformed for every student, but we made progress. Just in May, we, as a group of district leaders, revisited The New Normal, the Quality Work protocol and descriptors, the Performance Outcomes, and looked closely at school defense rubrics to see how they compared to the expectations outlined in those original documents. It was refreshing to again focus on the bigger vision for the kind of learning experiences we wanted for our students.
So far, we mainly have qualitative data to support the impact of the Backpack on student learning. However after five years, with three being heavily impacted by the pandemic, I can say this about our district of almost 100,000 students:
We know our students like never before. Defenses helped us to realize we were missing out on many of our students’ interests and special talents. Some schools have made new efforts to get to know students much more personally long before they are ready to transition.
We realize our students can do more than we imagined possible—and many need less direction than we had been providing. We have to give them opportunities to solve problems, create and collaborate if we want them to learn. Having to figure out how to represent their learning and growth in new ways was a new challenge for our students, and they did it in ways the adults might never have considered.
We are talking about “evidence of learning” beyond test scores. It’s so important that everyone understands that the word “data” just means information. It is not a synonym for score. We miss out on such important details about our students when we only consider numbers.
We are allowing our students to show what they know in many ways. It’s so important that we consider which standards and skills can be measured in a more traditional way and which need a “driver’s test,” or performance assessment.
We are using a shared definition of Quality Work across the district.
We are thinking about Bloom’s Taxonomy as a web instead of a ladder. (Mehta, 2018).
We are finding powerful implications for professional learning needs through the artifacts students share during defenses.
We are investing in new ways, like what the Modern Classroom Project suggests, to structure classroom time for students, teachers and space to provide a much better chance for teachers to be able to personalize learning, and make time for the kind of deeper learning experiences we are striving for.
We are investing in professional learning that immerses teachers in the kind of competency-based experience we want for our kids—and we are providing ways for teachers to be credentialed and recognized for this work.
Through our statewide Laboratories of Learning initiative, we are starting work to create a competency-based path that will allow students to credential learning that happens outside of the school day and school walls.
I am not sure I even fully realize yet the learning that has occurred for me over the last five years. I am forever grateful to the superintendent who invited me to join him for this journey, and cannot say enough about the many people who came together over and over again to do the impossible.
There are a few learnings that really stand out.
There are times when not knowing and understanding the full scope of your context is a gift. This allows you, as a leader, to make bold moves without considering the complexities of the system or community that might get in the way.
Beginning by establishing, collaboratively, what kinds of outcomes you want for your students—and the knowledge and skills they will need to achieve those outcomes—provides a firm foundation on which to build. I didn’t know what a graduate profile was when we were trying to determine what we wanted our diploma to mean in Danville. It just made sense to start with what we wanted to achieve and then to build the system and experiences most likely to lead to those outcomes. There are certainly other ways to dive into deeper learning, but I haven’t found another that provides such a foundation and a springboard both in a small, rural district and a very large urban one. This also goes a long way with establishing the why.
Worth repeating many times over—students are capable of far more than we often give them the opportunity to do. So are teachers.
You can’t overestimate the power of spotlighting the kind of work you want to see. The creator feels motivated to do more and many who see it are inspired to try.
It is so important to help others see what school can be. The experiences I had at High Tech High and in the iSchool in New York changed my entire view of what school could (and should!) look like. There was nothing like seeing kids—who looked just like my kids in Kentucky—completely engaged in work that really mattered to them. I am constantly thinking about how I can recreate this experience for those I lead.
As teachers, my guess is that most of us went into teaching to create awesome learning experiences for kids—to inspire passion and curiosity. High stakes accountability as we have known it over the last several years causes both teachers and leaders to be fearful of trying anything that takes them too far from the norm. I have been in the room when the state department of education says to a principal, “You were found through the audit not to have capacity to lead the work that needs to happen in this school.” The fear is very real—and rooted in reality.
Deeper learning can be a game changer for students in high poverty, urban areas. However, it’s those schools where the threat of consequences due to poor performance on traditional academic measures cause the most anxiety.
Even those who are not educators can come up with a general deeper learning experience—and without one day of PBL training. Although this is certainly needed to really refine the experience, it seems that we know intuitively how to create engaging experiences. It’s the way we naturally learn.
I’ve realized we don’t approach learning the way we do in school in any other context. If you’ve ever coached a team or taught someone to play an instrument, bake a cake, or do any other kind of real-life thing, we teach by doing. We naturally describe what to do, show and then ask the learner to try. We give them specific feedback until they get it right. The goal is success, and we work at it with them until it happens.
Can you imagine approaching one of those activities as we do in school? It seems completely absurd to think about teaching someone to ride a horse by first introducing vocabulary, then having them read about riding horses, then having them do research about horses and reporting to the class and even drawing pictures of horses with the goal of maybe, after the unit test, taking them to see a real horse. (Riding would be out of the question!) This is laughable—yet this is how we often structure learning in school. We can’t wonder why students aren’t engaged.
And, using that same example, there would be some students whose families could give them the real life experience of riding a horse. But many could not. So again, the students who probably most need the experience are not getting it.
We have to continually work to connect the dots with what we are asking our educators to do. There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like you are being tasked with a list of seemingly unrelated “to dos.” We have to be coherent in our messaging—and we have to be clear about what we mean by deeper learning, competency-based education, personalized learning…the list goes on. It is so important to clearly define the terms we use. Otherwise, anything goes.
Finally, I am positive of this—if leaders in a district aren’t continually steadfast and intentional about transforming the school experience and aggressively moving forward, the progress we made will be lost. Some schools will continue, at least with the Backpack and defenses, but those who still see this as something extra and not a component of an entirely different approach, will stop. The district will still be ahead of where we were—individual teachers, leaders and schools will build on what they’ve learned and continue to evolve, but the system as a whole will not.
In the bigger picture, I have to believe our work has made a significant contribution to the field. It is difficult to disrupt and impact practice even in the smallest of school districts. We were able to make what I believe is significant progress toward the kind of school experience our students deserve. In a district of 100,000 students. During a global pandemic. Because of this, I am incredibly optimistic about what is possible.
Lots to think about. Lots of work left to be done.
Mehta, J. A pernicious myth: basics before deeper learning. (2018, January 4). EducationWeek. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-a-pernicious-myth-basics-before-deeper-learning/2018/01
