Increase Hope, Efficacy, and Achievement – How Agile Are You?

“A culture of learning, therefore, is a culture of thinking”

“The truth is that assessment is relationship building” 

“… feedback that inspires”

 

These three quotes continue to resonate with me in my work after my summer reading of Instructional Agility by Erkens, Schimmer, & Vagle.  It has changed my lens and inspired some innovative work specific to  homework and feedback in the K-12 math classrooms I support.  

I had never thought about assessment as a relationship builder, but now I see how assessment (as a verb, not a noun) plays a critical role in getting to know our students as learners and propelling their learning forward.  Through many analogies, especially sports analogies, the authors illuminate the power of “responding to assessment with real-time decisions”.  

I love the analogy between teachers and elite players in the NBA on page 2, “The key is not just the ability to dribble the ball from one hand to the other – all NBA players can do that – but the ability to dribble with athletic agility and the ability to read the situation and make a real-time decision about when to pause, when to fake, and when to attack at maximum speed and intensity.”

So what does being instructionally agile mean?  Replace the “NBA players” with the word “teachers” and there you have it.  The book centers on a framework of assessment practices that overlay to create six tenets that bring hope, efficacy, and achievement into the classroom, one of which being Instructional Agility. I was thrilled to see connections between many of the effective math teaching practices and math practice standards to the strategies that are highlighted in this book.  Engagement in discussion with groups and roles, questioning, observations, effective feedback, self-reflection and monitoring, and more are all tied back to real-time assessment and relationship building.  

As teachers we work towards the agility described in the NBA analogy above.  I think we also work to replace the “NBA Players” with the word “students”. We aim to build their math understanding beyond the skill of “dribbling the ball”.  We need our students to be thinkers, to be agile in their use of mathematics to ask questions and solve problems in a flexible and responsive way.  

Check out Instructional Agility – you won’t be able to resist the urge to stop reading, or thinking about it, or shouting about it from the rooftops!

Courtney LaRoche president@mctm.org