Give it your best shot. Assess. Repeat (Project Block v. 2.0)

Tracking student progress in Project Block

"It stings. It stings bad, but this is the fight business. I've been on the end of many defeats in my life and I've rose back, so I will not shy away from it. I will not make excuses for it. I will assess it and come back."

-Conor McGregor

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of evaluating your success in terms of actual results.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for data and evaluation, but what do you do when the data don’t show the success you want?

Option 1: Despair. You suck. Your job sucks. Your life sucks. Lay on the couch and give up.

Option 2: Roll with it. Regroup. Rebound. Reassess your efforts, and adjust. Hey, this is a fight, right? You are in a battle against entropy and gravity and whatever other frictions and fictions are trying to drag you and your clientele down.

For me, I’ll take Option 2. I’ll let that despair roll over me like water off a duck's back. I’ll acknowledge the failure and pain, but then I'll get right back in there for another round. I never thought this would be easy. I always knew it would be a fight. From they day I struggled through the birth canal, I knew this world was a tough place. So let’s go, shall we?

Case in point: Project Block. Our whole school program was founded on the idea that autonomy and independence are keys to motivation and learning. My first year here, students were given several hours per week to work on whatever they wanted to, but the lack of productivity and success I saw changed my mind on motivation and led me to create a more structured approach called Project Block.

In Project Block, students worked through a series of structured science projects of increasing complexity, each of which focused on different aspects of the project process, and then graduated to fully independent projects about midway through the year.

That was the idea, anyway. 

Well, the results are in. While almost all students (88%) finished the 8 structured projects and earned 0.5 science credits, fewer succeeded in completing their first fully independent project (71%), and even fewer succeeded in completing additional independent projects and/or meeting their own deadlines for key milestones after the first 9 projects. Of 19 additional independent projects begun:

8 completed the research step on time (42%),
6 completed their Trello/Bullet Journal planning assignment on time (32%),
2 completed their projects (11%), and
1 completed it on time (5%).

Not exactly the results we had hoped for. My current hypothesis is that these students, many of whom struggle with ADD and related issues, are simply not ready for independent work like this. 

We could give up. Roll over. Play dead.

But it's worth another shot.

We had a whole-school deliberative discussion at the end of last year to talk about how we could regroup and improve Project Block. The students came up with the following idea: Split the school up into groups by credit needs (science, social studies, English) and maintain structured projects throughout the whole year (unless students demonstrate the ability to work independently). 

We will also build in lots of explicit instruction in project planning and execution, and the whole thing will be guided by daily checklists.

Maybe we'll never have a successful independent project program, but we'll learn in the process, and as Marcus Aurelius wrote: 

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

The obstacle becomes the way we hadn't looked for--the way to new strengths and new paths.

Give it your best shot. Assess. Repeat. Advance.

Glittering out again

"Something I discovered was a new love for myself."

-A Depot senior in her valedictorian speech 

Yesterday was our little graduation ceremony at the Depot. We call it "Senior Celebration." Every senior gets to give a short valedictorian speech, and hearing their accounts of their high school experiences was powerful.

They are a diverse bunch, but every one of them overcame tremendous challenges to get there yesterday. Challenges in their pasts led to challenges in their habits, dispositions, and support structures, which led to difficulties in school, which  snowballed until they were too big to handle. "When I first came to the Depot," said one senior, "I was pretty much ready to give up."

But to focus on these disadvantages would not do these young warriors justice. All of us have deficiencies and weaknesses, scars and wounds, hurts and hangups, failures and mistakes. We can all decide to focus on those, stew and fret over them, or accept them and focus on improving. We can lie down in defeat, or courageously move forward.

We can all view ourselves as a static, fixed, permanent set of weaknesses and  collection of failures and mistakes, or we can see ourselves as always growing and changing, dissolving and reforming, every moment as a new beginning.

We can all focus on judging ourselves for our weaknesses and failures, which actually hinders progress, or we can accept ourselves, which opens the door to progress.

We can tell ourselves a story about weakness and injury and victimization, or we can be the heroes of our story.


What defines these students is not their pasts. It's not their failings. It's their victories over these obstacles. They've gained a new openness to admitting they are wrong and asking for help, the courage to face their deepest fears and anxieties head-on,  and the resilience to bounce back from disappointments and failures. They've grown in self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-compassion, and self-efficacy. They've set high goals and gained academic skills they never expected to master.

It's not the failures that define them, but the constant growth and renewal, and this is an ongoing process. As I wrote my little speech for them this week, it really hit me: though we aim to get them ready for college and career or whatever's next, we can't really prepare them. I don't think we're ever really ready for what life has in store for us. At least, I'm not. Life has a way of serving up challenges I never imagined, and I'm certainly not always "ready" for them. That's why I need to always be learning. That's why I'm always a beginner.

That's what I told them, and that's why I shared my favorite poem with them at the end--Struggle, by Sidney Lanier:

My soul is like the oar that momently
Dies in a desperate stress beneath the wave,
Then glitters out again and sweeps the sea:
Each second I'm new-born from some new grave. 

When I finished, I said, "This is a new beginning for you all. May there be many more to come. I know there will be more struggles, but I know that every time you'll glitter out a again... and sweep the sea."

I caught one senior's eye as I said that last part. I swear her eyes glittered.

She will sweep the sea.

I hope they all will, again and again.

I hope we all will.

This post is for a student

The guinea pig was missing, and they had to solve the crime.

The bloody guinea pig footprints were the most obvious evidence, but they they would have to analyze three more challenging clues: fingerprints, hair left at the scene, and blood spatter patterns.

It was all set up by one of our seniors. She's exactly the sort of student who thrives in this kind of school: independent, self-motivated, and focused on a passionate interest. In her case, that interest is forensic science.

The students, as you will see, loved it, but this senior has such high standards for herself that she could only see what went wrong.

This post is for her and all of my students who've had the wind in their faces for so long they have trouble seeing their successes and strengths.

This is for her, because the students did it. They took notes as she gave them instructions. They looked under microscopes at hair they collected from the scene and compared it to hair from suspects. They experimented with the fake blood, dropping it from different heights until it matched the drops on the floor of the bathroom. They collected fingerprints from suspects and compared the whorls and loops to those found on the bathroom sink.

With the microscopes and hair, they narrowed it down to me and one student. They came to my office with a warrant and dragged me into the Community Room to interrogate me. They asked me about the suspicious bandage on my chin--the one that matched the scenario they had come up with. They asked me about the fingerprints, and finally, they asked me about the search history that had been pulled from my computer which included searches for guinea pig recipes (they are surprisingly common, by the way).

To sum it up, they had fun, even those who said they didn't, and they did a bunch of things they'd never done before, hopefully learning some critical thinking along they way.

But it didn't get off to a good start. The fingerprint dusting technique didn't work, and this student leader was ready to give up. True, she could have been better prepared. For example, she definitely should have tried the fingerprinting technique out before hand. But we've all been there, under-prepared, and every failure is a lesson learned. Next time, I told her, she'll be prepared.

And of course, as every teacher and leader knows,  "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." No matter how much we plan, we need to be ready for the unpredictable interactions of our plan with human beings and the rest of reality. Our plan is not always at fault--it's just the nature of the universe to throw us curve balls, keep us on our toes and keep us strong.

"Failure," as a Honda engineer says in my all-time favorite video, "is the by-product of pushing the envelope." That's one reason I love CrossFit--it makes me push up against that envelope at least 3 or 4 times per week. I fail at something every time I work out. Every WOD kicks my butt and humbles me. Every Olympic lifting movement I do is a messy mixture of correct and incorrect parts, mostly incorrect.

School and work are fitness for the mind. Push the envelope, and aim high enough that you can expect failure, because failure is fuel. It gives us information to improve, and if we persevere, that's why we'll succeed, as Michael Jordan so powerfully put it. SpaceX persevered through four catastrophic failures of their Falcon rocket's ocean landings, but on their fifth try, just yesterday, they hit it: success.

As Mazer Rackham said in Ender's Game, "No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak."

In one sense, failure is our enemy, but in another, our friend. It shows us where we can improve, so that we can.

So this is my message to you, my forensic-scientist-to-be senior, and all of my students who have met with frustration so often that they can't see their success--whose lives have been just one huge obstacle after another:

1. Be open to seeing your successes, like the fun our students had with your workshop, even if they're mixed with failure, because you really are capable and successful, and

2. Embrace failure, because it is just a by-product of growth. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It means just the opposite: It means you are improving.

3. Don't expect perfection. It's a myth. Expect improvement. Demand constant improvement from yourself. You deserve it, and you are capable of it.

4. And you are improving. You're already awesome, you've already passed through so much fire, and you're only getting better. I can see it.

This week started rough, but then I remembered...

Depot students making fund raising muffins.

I knew I was in trouble when I felt tired before the students even came in.

I really knew I was in trouble when they started coming in, and there weren't many smiles. Negative vibes seemed to be rippling out of them (or were they coming from me?).

There weren't any more crises than usual, just a vague feeling of weight.


Maybe it was just a sort of regression to the mean: Friday was so cool, the new week had to be a bit of a let down. Or maybe it was the effect of a weekend of stewing on all of the troubles of my students. Or maybe I had fixated on my own recent failures to reach them. Whatever it was, it weighed on me... until I remembered.

I knew that constant crucial conversations are needed, but I also knew they drain energy. They're heavy. And that's all I felt coming into this week--the weight.

By the time Tuesday rolled around, things were brightening a bit--I had some great convos with students as they cleaned and baked (part of their Depot Tier 2 Internship work), and a powerful conversation with another student about strategies for dealing with stress and relationships.

But then on Wednesday that same student crashed again.

And then my Quantitative Reasoning group went into meltdown mode--angry, hurting students rebelling against math.

That was the low point, and turning point, of my week. As I reflected on the meltdown later, I realized it would have been a great opportunity to talk about anger and social skills. I made a note for a future lesson adjustment strategy. We emphasize basic life competencies here at the Depot, and my plan is to change gears as needed during lessons to address them explicitly: "Soooo, what's happening with your mood right now, and how is that affecting the rest of us?" It's about explicitly teaching things like social/emotional skills, goal setting, organization, and self-control. (I'm so fortunate to have a teacher on staff, Shannon, who is a master at this sort of thing, so I can learn from her.)

This principle was driven home again on Thursday. As I talked with one student in the morning about the career skills rubric and setting goals for productivity, we set a goal for him of two job shadow letters by noon. He frowned and hung his head, not believing he could do it. He ended up sending out five job shadow letters.

A tough conversation later that morning with another student led to questions about depression, and later, there were conversations with students about sharing food they'd received while volunteering--all great opportunities to mentor kids and help them develop the key skills they need.

As Thursday wrapped up, I had remembered something. While talking with a staff member about issues she was having with student motivation, I remembered that this is a process. We can't expect instant success, either from ourselves or our students.

This work is heavy, and sometimes pretty rough, but it also has tremendous meaning, and it's more than worth it. Every little success is a reminder of that.

I'm not sure how I lost sight of those successes coming into this week, how I lost sight of that progress, the slowness of the growth process, or how I lost my patience, but it doesn't matter. What matters is these young people and their success, not mine.

Family, radical acceptance, and embracing failure: Week 5 at the Depot

The coolest thing about the Depot is that it really is like a family. The way one student put it, it's just like a family, complete with the bickering, people who like to complain, and people you like to hang out with. In fact, the most common strength of the school mentioned by staff and students is close, caring relationships between staff and students.

There's an image in my head from this week: two students huddled around a third who came to school seriously out-of-sorts. They're all squatting on the ground trying to find out what's wrong, looks of genuine concern on their faces.

And there are other pictures: images of a radical kind of acceptance many of the students have for their peers who may have poor hygiene or other issues that might make others steer clear. It's a kind of love that doesn't even seem to notice, but embraces them and seems to understand. I'm guessing it comes from having gone through  excruciating struggles in their own lives.

I was feeling irritated with one student who came in with a seriously bad attitude one day this week, until another student explained, as if to defend him, that "he was just grumpy because he was tired." It may seem silly or naive, but it fits with Chip and Dan Heath's powerful principle from Switch: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

I didn't get to that part of my pick-me-up talk Friday morning, but it was a slide I needed to remind myself of this week: When dealing with people...

1. Assume the best.
2. Seek to understand.
3. Have the conversation.
4. Compromise.

Yep, our "family" has it's share of conflicts. The student running up the stairs on the warpath, looking for the one who did not clean up the smoothie jar, was just one instance of the ongoing struggle with messes in the kitchen. But we're all a work in progress. When you're working with people (including yourself), your work is never done. Progress is sometimes slow. It takes relentless, never-give-up effort.

I feel like the kitchen crew could become a really powerful way to teach healthy eating, leadership, science, math, while strengthening our community. Messy counters and piles of dishes in the sink may seem to threaten that dream if we don't expect failure and embrace it as part of the process.

We had a "tribal council" meeting Friday and asked the students to think of rules or policies to solve the problem. At first many simply said, "Clean up your own mess!," until I reminded them that that was the current policy, and it clearly wasn't working "and when some thing's not working, you don't keep doing it. You change it." They came up with some good ideas we're going to try out, but I'm sure this isn't the end, and that's OK, because it's worth it.

Some of the bumps in the road will come from me. Case in point: I enjoy helping students explore their interests, find their passion, and pursue internships they might like, but I forget that these students have histories, advisors who know them better than I and may have developed other plans with them. It's hard to admit mistakes, and criticism is hard to take, but I need to embrace it, just like failure, just like every other step along the path to a goal. Challenges, effort, patience, failure, acceptance, small wins, joy, relief, fear, exhilaration, disappointment, exhaustion--all steps along the same path.

Every challenge or goal we hash out as a staff, every tough conversation with a student or parent, is a step. I love the steps we are taking toward measuring student mastery, clarifying our roles, building our relationships, and just improving the lives of these kids, and I love becoming a part of this family.

As for more failure? Oh, I know it's coming, but bring it on.

Positivity ratios for buoyancy on a sea of rejection

I checked today, and my positivity ratio was 0.50. According to Daniel Pink and Barbara Fredrickson, the ratio of positive feelings to negative feelings has to get to at least 3.0 (3 positive feelings for every negative feeling) in order to get real emotional well-being.

I'm going to try tracking it over the next week and see if I can get it up there. Thankfully, Pink suggests a practical strategy for boosting your ratio: Strategically seek out experiences, encounters, conversations, people, etc. that will boost it.

It's a few chapters into his book, To Sell Is Human, in the section on buoyancy, the attribute we all need to be good movers of people. He says we are all confronted every day with an "ocean of rejection," and Pink suggests three general strategies for staying buoyant:

1) Before we attempt to move people (before class, before I apply for that job): replace negative self-talk AND positive self-talk with questions: Will I be able to move these people? And how?

2) During the process, while we're trying to persuade, stay buoyant by staying positive. That's where the ratio comes in.

3) Afterwards, if you're rejected, ask yourself three questions: Is it permanent? Is it pervasive? Is it personal? The answer is probably "No" to all three. "The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity." Dispute and "de-catastrophize" your knee-jerk negative explanations.

He even suggests writing yourself rejection letters (this site will do it for you) to stay buoyant, and tells the story of one entrepreneur who kept all of his, and framed them when he became successful. Or try keeping track of every time someone doesn't "buy what you're selling" for a day or week. Pink says you'll be surprised by the sheer volume of small failures you actually survive.

Reminds me of what I was thinking last week when I wrote "Failures aren't failures, they're fuel." In fact, I guess as soon as I wrote it I wondered what I was thinking. But there's truth to it. It's all in the attitude. You just have to stay buoyant--see those failures as external.

For me, I think I'm starting to get to that place... some days. Not that I want failures, but maybe I don't fear them as much. They're like the water I'm swimming through, pushing off of, gaining strength from.

But I can see that this kind of Sisyphean perspective is not going to be enough. That's why what I liked best about this section in Pink was this practical plan: make it a priority every day to seek out positive interactions.

Failures aren't failures, they're fuel

Ever feel like you're on a roll...

with failures?

Like you're "in the zone"...

with rejections?

Like they're becoming your special area of expertise?

Then you're in luck, and not just because you can keep me company down here. Failure's good.

Didn't feel good today, though.

Twice.

When I read that feedback this morning.

And when that phone call didn't come this afternoon.

Didn't feel good two weeks ago when I realized how far behind I was.

Or a few weeks ago when that show didn't go so well.

Oh, and don't forget all of the micro-failures interspersed in among the bigger, more noticeable ones.

The accumulated effect can be bad, if you let it--if you brood on it, let it get inside of you, let it define who you are.

That was me today.

But then I remembered, "Failure is a by-product of pushing the envelope."

Just one of the awesome lines in probably the most important video I've ever watched: Honda on failure.

I'm tempted to quote the whole thing right here--it's that powerful.

And then I think of Elon Musk and SpaceX and their hard-core, bring-it-on attitude about their failed rocket landings, and the title to Katie Palmer's article on their latest try: "Look it's hard to land a rocket on a boat, OK?"

After all, Palmer, writes, "Today’s failure is still another step toward the ultimate goal of landing, and then reusing, rockets for SpaceX’s space delivery service."


In short, failures aren't failures at all. Each one is a barrier we're breaking through.

And not just that. They can be more than that. They can be fuel. We can feed off of them, knowing they're making us stronger--knowing they mean we're pushing the envelope, and confident that it's moving outward, maybe imperceptibly, but still moving, and who knows when it will blow wide open.

Behind the curriculum, but...

If you read my last post, you either:

1) Think the mastery-based system is an abject failure (if your priority is coverage of the curriculum), or

2) Still hold out hope, if not.

But I thought I should balance that last post with some additional info. that suggests another reason to "hold out hope."

1) I forgot to mention that, while I'm several weeks behind where I was last time I taught the course (2 years ago), I am only a week or two behind my colleagues teaching the same course (with traditional methods) this year.

2) More importantly, I thought I'd compare student performance across the years, and threw in a previous year for good measure. First, there's the grade distribution:

 

Note the blue line is this year: mastery-based, project-based, and differentiated, with a no zero policy.

In 2013, I had begun the project-based, differentiated approach, but without the mastery and no zero components.

In 2012, I ran it as a traditional course.

Telling?

Maybe it's obvious--give kids second (and third) chances, more interesting work, and more time, and they succeed at a higher rate. But keep in mind: the mastery, "no zero" model also includes the requirement that they must do all of the assignments and meet a minimum standard on each one. There are no opt-outs (zeros) allowed.

In the first semester this year, my students completed a total of 8 projects, each taking several days, 14 video quizzes and shorter assignments, 8 labs, plus tests, quizzes, and other assorted tasks.

So is the bar lower or higher?

And what's the point of the "bar" anyway? Isn't the point to see them learn how to learn, master the material, and value hard work and quality and perseverance?

Is school just some sort of filter--a gateway or obstacle designed to keep certain kids from passing through to a productive and happy life, or is it a springboard to make sure they all do?

Well, that performance didn't go so well. Now what?

The guitar playing got progressively worse as the song went on. I could tell when I glanced out at the faces in the audience, which I couldn't do too much, because I had to focus so hard on my playing and singing, which was going downhill fast.

I knew what was happening. The adrenaline was kicking in, and the fight-or-flight response was draining the fine motor control from my fingers. I was powerless to stop it. I also knew it didn't sound too good, so later I felt this sense of failure. Even a desire to quit and not try it ever again.

Then I realized that was just my fixed mindset talking--the belief that abilities are fixed. The fixed mindset makes us want to avoid situations in which we might fail, because that would mean we're no good. It's especially powerful when we believe we are good at something, because then that belief is threatened by failure. It's what's behind the common belief that effort is bad, because it means you're not naturally smart or talented enough. It believes that success should be instant. And breeds a fear of failure.

The growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that success always requires effort, failure is a necessary part of the process, and growth is always possible.

While I have a growth mindset in some areas, I  have fixed mindset in others, like my singing. I guess maybe it's because I grew up being told how good I was at singing, and so it became a part of my identity, and I guess failure threatens that.
But it's time to approach musical performance like any other challenge: failure is just the by-product of pushing the envelope.

So bring it on.  I'll keep working on the self-accompaniment as long as there are folks patient enough to put up with my failures.

Come to think of it, that's a big part of my role as a teacher--to put up with my students failures, and not just to put up with them, but encourage them, because failures are necessary stepping stones to success.