Most Likely to Succeed sounds more like a yearbook tagline than the title of a documentary. Watching the documentary (below), I wondered what made High Tech High students more likely to succeed, and how could I apply this in my own practice.
The documentary follows (among others) Brian, a grade 9 student at High Tech High. The students culminate their learning through a hands-on project in his joint math and social studies course. Brian’s class was tasked with representing their theories on the rise and fall of civilizations through a wooden/ mechanical medium. These projects culminate in a presentation night, where parents, staff and community members come to see what the students have accomplished. However, Brian failed to present a working model that night.
I was struck by how High Tech High gives students the room to fail. And not just failing but learning from failure.
Instead of a summative evaluation of the (un)finished product, Brian’s work gets a second chance. I really appreciated how the opportunity to finish the assignment wasn’t just an ‘extension in spirit.’ As I watched Brian’s teachers hold a verbal reflection panel with the students, I was struck by how autonomous Brian was in evaluating his performance. It wasn’t the educator solely telling the student areas for feedback, but rather, the student being open about their performance. Brian (in a way) fails at first. However, with gentle guidance from his teachers, he has the motivation and ability to improve on his project over time. That’s grit.
At the end of my Link2Practice at a local high school, I asked a Dual Credit teacher how to best prepare students for university. He answered resilience—the resilience to fail and learn from it. Moving forward, I think I’ll incorporate resilience in my lesson plans.
At least it sounds less coarse than “Grit.”
Chances are, in my first few years, I won’t be co-teaching with the technology education teacher and assigning students to create a mechanical model explaining the process of Confederation in Canada. However, I can weave teaching resilience into my assessment practices. Perhaps I could incorporate ways to hold off on stamping a final mark until a project or assignment has been ‘polished’ a few times, or break larger projects down into smaller chunks to give feedback on individually.
In my English teaching methods course, the professor shared the #EduCrush podcast with the class (https://educrushpod.libsyn.com/32-pointless-assessment-practices-w-sarah-m-zerwin). Please note, you may need a UVic login to access this link. This episode features Sarah Zerwin, who gives some tips on formative assessment, and her philosophy of not assigning a mark until the last moment. When I listened to this podcast, I thought of Brian’s teachers, not marking his work until it was done.
If an assessment model stresses a student’s one chance at demonstrating their learning and then ‘freezes’ a grade at that moment- does that student really learn? Looking back, I wonder if that’s partly why High Tech High has a 98% university acceptance rate- despite not teaching to the SAT.