The issue on my mind right now is attendance - especially working with urban schools and remembering what principal Mark Stein used to say at Rangeview High School in Aurora, Colorado:  if you send them, we will teach them.  In other words, he wanted the attendance policy to be simply, come and learn.  If not, you will not learn what we are teaching at the Place Called School.

School personnel spend a great deal of time taking attendance, recording it, and then sending notifications about attendance to homes and district offices.  But, I have not heard of (so send me an update) schools that aggregate the information about the attendance to find patterns to use it to improve learning. 

Last week I was fortunate to spend a few minutes listening to Linda, a social worker in an urban school district, describe how she would start making phone calls at 9:30 am to begin the process of getting more children to school.  All of her notes were noted manually on cards and much of the information is what Linda carries in her head.  It occurred to me that she should be inputting the information onto a spreadsheet -- a criterion-based attendance documentation -- so that she would be able to see patterns and then act upon them systematically, not just by individual absenteeism.

Then, I spoke with Bobby, an elementary principal in Houston, and he said to track tardies. "My absences are not as bad as my tardies," he said.  That said, the "excused absences" may be the area where we can make some gains.  Again, he repeated what Stein said twenty years ago, "If we can get them in the building on time, they will learn better during the six years they spend in the building." 

The leap then to improve may have to come by way of a customized program to track the attendances -excused and unexcused/tardies.  While the attendance employee takes the information, he/she could document it on a program that would ultimately show patterns.  As I think about my conversation with a friend and software developer, Brian, I wonder how schools would receive the idea of a program to do that. 

Then, I remember the story in Supercrunchers (2007) by Ian Ayres.   When given a program (named Isabel) that would show patterns of diseases that could be used to better identify patient illnesses, doctors did not take to using it even though it was provided at no cost.  When a similar situation occurred with airplane pilots, they immediately began to use the program.  Ayres notes that the distinction seemed surprising since both groups of professionals had comparable tools given to them, but the observation made was, "Pilots readily accept software unlike doctors, because doctors don't go down with their planes." (p. 101) 

I began to wonder about us as teachers and educators.  Would we accept the software to track absenteeism better if we found it helped us improve student learning?

In the October 2008 Education Update by ASCD (Volume 50, Number 10), there is an interesting statement made by Stanford University education professor Michael Kamil that technology didn't significantly influence student performance.  Keep reading.  Since the programs (literacy) replaced the teacher about 10% of the time, there was no significant difference between the teacher or the software.  He argues that it tells us that using software programs to "supplement" instruction for a portion of time can work as well as the teacher.  For those teachers working to differentiate instruction by assigning some technology-based tasks, this is  good message and those teachers will use this information and the recommendation prudently. 

Today I worked with Jill Cullis in her Street Law class at Gateway High School in Aurora, Colorado.  Since the class is an elective, we did not find specific standards and benchmarks that seemed "just right" so we began to create them starting with today's lesson on Criminal Law.

The Civics standards offered:
Identify and evaluate how the characteristics of an effective citizen promote the preservation of the republic

A good statement, but a little too general for criterion-based scoring to improve student learning (Chapter 5 in One Teacher at a Time).

So, we worded the standard and benchmarks for today:

Understands economic and social/psychological costs of crime

• Knows various personal prevention strategies
• Knows various government prevention strategies

In her lessons, Ms. Cullis will be able to introduce the new information for each of these areas and the students will receive scores and self-assess on these topics.  Now we just need to GANAG her lessons.  Happy Planning and Scoring.

Camille, 3rd grade teacher, and Julie, Curriculum Support Specialist spoke with me today about the grant their school received to focus classroom instructional efforts toward emphasizing Constructivism, Community Building, and Social Skills. 

In effect, the research does create a nice equation for those three seemingly separate staff development issues.  When a student tries to generate new ideas or think for himself/herself (constructivism), the student will find that self-regulation and interactive skills (social skills) help galvanize the process, and in the end the student finds that the act of doing those results in building a better community.

The epiphany we shared was that the teacher may need (in addition to content curricular benchmarks) a list of the procedures for thinking skills to teach the students, as well as a list of the procedures for the self-regulation and interaction skills, but that the "community building" may not be a set of skills, but instead, the result.  You may find a student more respectful, inclusive and a better citizen of the community when he or she thinks, self-regulates, and interacts with others.

Of course, we do understand that there are programs or research exclusive to the acts of community building, but we were trying to make the connection for ourselves what we could accomplish this year at Franklin Elementary School.

Atul Gawande writes about the book Better (2006):  We're in the machine. All we can do is try to think in morally clear terms about our goals and try to be creative...But there are things that you can do only if you are in such an organization. So you just need to find the patterns of what has worked. 

During this first quarter of the 2008-2009 school year, I hear teachers already talking about the stress and "being in the machine" or the organization, the place we call school.  Gawande reminds us that the machine also gives us the opportunity to make the innovations needed to improve student learning if we "just find the patterns."  So, teachers using GANAG and Scoring, changing their planbooks and their gradebooks, are finding the new patterns -- the new ways to improve student learning for our digital native generation.