Читать книгу Giving Students a Say - Myron Dueck - Страница 9

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How can we make the case for student-centered assessment—and why is it important to do so?

Terry O'Reilly's book This I Know (2017) is a must-read for anyone with the slightest interest in marketing. And if you couldn't care less about marketing, you might just enjoy the background stories to the multitude of ads and products that've shaped our lives. O'Reilly bases much of the book on stories and lessons from his popular podcast Under the Influence. One of my favorite tales is that of Steve Jobs attempting to entice John Sculley to leave Pepsi and join Apple. In 1982, Sculley was at the top of his game and firmly entrenched as president of PepsiCo. Starting as a truck driver for the soft drink giant, Sculley had been climbing the Pepsi ladder for 16 years (Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017), though none of his work involved tech (Pollack, 1983). As president of PepsiCo, Sculley was the marketing genius behind the "Pepsi Challenge," which pitted Pepsi against Coca-Cola in a series of blind tastings, and he was considered a strong candidate to become CEO of the entire Pepsi brand. Seeing the effectiveness with which Sculley carved away market share from Coca-Cola—and the inescapable comparison to Apple taking on Microsoft—Jobs was obsessed with poaching Sculley. Unfortunately for Jobs, Sculley wasn't interested in the Apple scene. Although Jobs offered Sculley a huge salary and lucrative stock options, he couldn't be swayed. After months of campaigning by Jobs, Sculley attempted to put the matter to rest in a face-to-face meeting with Jobs:

I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm not coming to Apple. I'm going to stay here in the East Coast doing what I'm doing. I'll be an adviser for free. Let's just be friends, but I'm not coming to Apple. (Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017, para. 41)

Most people would probably have left it at that, but Steve Jobs wasn't like "most people." Upon hearing that seemingly final rejection, Jobs walked up to Sculley and, 20 inches from his face, uttered his now famous line: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" (Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017).

A week later, Sculley was employed at Apple. Ten years later, Apple was the most profitable computer company in the world.

O'Reilly cited this story to highlight the power and importance of the "elevator pitch"—the succinct encapsulation of an idea that takes no more than 20 seconds to convey. In his campaign against the formidable Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan had a simple, successful elevator pitch he posed to voters: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" (O'Reilly, 2017, p. 29). Any product you've purchased, movie you've watched, or book you've read likely came to fruition because it had an elevator pitch that convinced someone that it was worth producing.

According to O'Reilly, a good elevator pitch has a few fundamental qualities. It needs to be concise and captivating and reflect the essence of the organization or brand. "Pitches are an exercise in clarity," writes O'Reilly (p. 20), and they reflect the adage "Less is more." O'Reilly encourages organizations to distill their mission into an immediately digestible and compelling hook. Warning against our desire to elaborate, O'Reilly states, "If [your elevator pitch] takes a paragraph, it's not ready yet" (p. 24).

Steve Jobs may have understood the power of a good elevator pitch more than anyone. He described Apple as follows: "Apple has always had the ability to take really complex technology and make it easy to understand and use by the end user" (Arthur, 2014).

That's compelling—and likely the main reason why I am typing this on a Mac, own an iPhone and an Apple Watch, subscribe to Apple TV, and stop to admire a vintage Apple IIc whenever I pass one.

I've often wondered what responses you might get from a room of teachers if you asked them to produce an elevator pitch for their subject, class, or school. What about an elevator pitch for teaching in the 21st century? How might educators summarize their entire reason for being into a single sentence or two? While I was attending a conference in Australia, John Hattie shared with me his simple quest: Know thy impact (personal communication, May 2018). I liked it. It was simple, powerful, and inextricably tied to feedback—for the teacher!

Based on the experiences of businesses such as Apple and authors such as Hattie, we will want to start with why we are in education, not what we do in education. In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek (2009) encourages us to imagine we sell Apple computers, and he predicts that our sales pitch might start with this: "We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly" (p. 40). Although this may seem logical and describe the essence of our product, this pitch is related to what the computer is, not why we produce it.

O'Reilly (2017) argues that in crafting really compelling elevator pitches, the most successful companies have a clear understanding of the business they are in, and some examples might surprise us. Nike isn't in the shoe business; it's in the motivation business. Michelin doesn't sell tires, it sells safety. The marketing geniuses at Heineken no longer flog beer as much as they sell inclusion, tolerance, and moderation.

Following the lead of these top brands, perhaps educators need to clarify the business they're in, and I'm not sure it's education. I think we would transform our schools if we rebranded ourselves as being in the empowerment and engagement business. As U.S. representative and civil rights leader Barbara Jordan declared, "Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment" (quoted in Newman, 1998, p. 124). If you think about it, throughout history, education is inextricably tied to empowerment.

We explored elevator pitches with our faculty at Summerland Secondary School (SSS) in British Columbia, Canada. Principal Alan Stel and I devoted a significant portion of our staff meetings to crafting individual elevator pitches to answer the question "Why attend Summerland Secondary?" It was an interesting and challenging activity, and the results were as fascinating as they were varied. Here are a few examples:

SSS helps to build students' skills and confidence so that they can be successful in whatever path they choose.

We are small enough and big enough to create amazing opportunities for our students and staff. Our opportunities reflect modern realities and valued traditions to balance all areas of learning and to prepare our students for challenges known and unknown.

Small, Supportive, Innovative, Creative, Flexible … Like Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

I've been working on my own education elevator pitch, and a while back I arrived at this:

I empower my students through authentic learning experiences and engaging assessment practices. In all that I do, I develop meaningful relationships with students so that they become confident learners—better prepared for whatever they might encounter.

I've edited versions of this more than a dozen times, and I'm sure it'll live in continuous development. With each iteration, however, the word assessment seems to remain a constant. As much as I've tried, I can't separate my educational elevator pitch from the topic of assessment and why it must be student-centered.

Assessment is the language of learning. From establishing our purpose and defining the learning objectives, to evaluating student progress and reporting on it, assessment is, in the words of Dylan Wiliam, "the bridge between teaching and learning" (2018, p. 56). I recall teaching my own kids to ice skate, ride a bike, back up an ATV with a trailer in tow, and countless other things. Each experience dripped with assessment components: objectives, success criteria, evaluation, and feedback. In the case of skating, my back never really recovered, and the ATV trailer sessions had me periodically walking away out of sheer frustration. However, eventually both of my kids learned how to skate and back up a vehicle with a trailer—thanks largely to assessment and their part in it.

The word assessment originates from the Latin assidere, meaning "to sit beside" ("Assess," n.d.). Let that reverberate through your mind. To sit beside. When looking at assessment practices in schools around the world, I'm not sure we're reflecting the true meaning of assessment. For far too long, assessment is what we have done to students rather than with them. Students need to stop being the people to whom we apply assessment processes, as if they were inanimate objects. Similar to how a lawyer might become a "partner" in the firm, students need to transform from being the employee to being the co-owner in the learning process.

Furthermore, this is not a student issue but a human one. People want to know the standards by which they are being assessed, how they will be evaluated, and whether they will have some input into the reporting of the result. I mean, seriously, how intrigued would you be as a student if this were the sales pitch:

Welcome, class. I'm going to teach for a while, and then sometime next week I'm going to assess you. After enough of those experiences, I will rank and sort you compared with others based on how well you've recalled the things I've told you. Your scores may affect your future in some dramatic way. Good luck.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, there may be some effects on your grades that have nothing to do with your understanding, but rather how you behave, treat others, display effort—those kinds of things.

I probably lost you at "I'm going to teach for a while … ."

I'm not sure about the rest of you, but that "sales pitch" would largely sum up my assessment model over the first 10 years of my career. Clearly, it needed to change.