A few years ago my boss Dennis and I were tasked with coming up with some upper school marketing ideas that would fit on a postcard. We bounced around some ideas, but kept coming back to the 3Rs of yesteryear (reading, writing, and arithmetic). We wanted to fight against the notion that our school was a summer camp and we thought we could redesign that traditional academic foundation to fit with our school’s nontraditional ethos. So we started with a new set of R’s - Rigor, Responsibility, and Resourcefulness. Admin rejected those immediately. Evidently rigor and responsibility didn’t mesh with the intended image. We shifted gears and went with the three S’s - Self Efficacy, Sustainability, and Success. We mocked up a tight card. We tipped our hat to traditional academics and moved the idea into the school’s modern, progressive ethos. The first two S’s came right from the school’s “pillars.” The success piece seemed like a natural fit - what parent doesn’t want their student to succeed in some ways at school. Heck, we even wrote about how each student defines success for themself. We felt great about sending this card out and it too was rejected. Sigh...
Years later when I opened DTL I worked to create an easily digestible message around what this school was about. Something that concisely summed up our emphasis on skill development while also conveying our learning philosophy. Oddly enough I have found this much more difficult than my three S work. Keep it simple. Less is more. Focus on what we do. This wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be. Finally I narrowed down the messaging I wanted to convey to four concepts - investigate, communicate, collaborate, and dedicate (the 8s). I listed our four areas of focus as:
Investigate: The search for information and the construction of knowledge through inquiry.
Communicate: Multiple means to present a wide range of information.
Collaborate: Work with other individuals to build knowledge.
Dedicate: Earn it to learn it. Take responsibility for and commit to doing the highest level of work possible.
In my mind, these four skills are what schools emphasize. I was quite proud of my ability to distill my message down. However, at the time, I worked one on one with individuals around town. So while three skills worked well, one of those things was not like the others and it is quite tricky to collaborate with yourself.
The next summer I focused on the next evolution of DTL messaging. I wanted to repackage our focus but not do away with the 8s. How could I reframe these ideas for a one on one learning community? After a rather lively internal dialogue, the Four A’s (4A’s) emerged - Ask, Analyze, Answer, and Assess. And that’s when school tripled in size…
The 4A’s roll of the tongue and map on to the 8s pretty well. Collaborate remains a bit of an outlier and Assess isn’t quite congruent with Dedicate but we’re getting closer. I started getting ready for the new school year by changing up the web page. I add Ask, Analyze, Answer, Assess along the bottom of the page - easy enough. In my mind I put together what I will say when potential families ask me what they mean or what my own marketing material would read like. A more difficult task emerged when I attempted to expand on my elevator pitch explanation.
Elevator pitch description:
Ask: Help students formulate questions of material and to question the information they consume everyday.
Analyze: Foster critical thinking and the examination of multiple perspectives or data sources. Students learn how to think not what to think.
Answer: Develop a range of skills so that students can present their findings in multiple media (emphasis on written, spoken, and visual presentations).
Assess: Reflect on the quality of skills involved in the process (ask and analyze) and product (answer).
Extended dance remix :
Ask: Students have questions and need to ask questions. Sometimes they have their own questions, and other times, teachers assign them questions. Life is about answering questions. If students do not question information, they run the risk of becoming pawns in someone else’s game of chess. Students are bombarded with information. Surrounded by all this content, students have to become critical consumers of information. DTL supports students as they develop their skills around asking questions.
Analyze: To answer questions, students process quite a bit of information and disinformation. In order to build their answers students have to explore multiple perspectives and examine data. This means researching ideas, holding facts up to the light, and connect how information evolved over time. AT DTL we facilitate this process and support each student as they develop their critical thinking skills.
Answer: Questions need answers and how students present their ideas, opinions, and information is critical to their success in school and out of school. Students work to develop their skills in myriad types of presenting. AT DTL we focus on written, spoken, and visual presentations. These three broad categories allow for the development of a wide range of skills within each area so that students can provide strong answers in a variety of situations.
Assess: Grades are a necessary evil. However, how we define that term and assess student work can be supportive for students while holding them accountable. DTL avoids the term ‘grade’ as much as possible. Students are not their grades. We discuss assessment quite a bit however. This provides a snapshot into an array of skills within specific projects or activities. Assessing skills allows students, teachers, and various grown ups to track progress and know how best to support a student and plan out future curricula for each student.
The extended explanations definitely took some thinking, but made sense to me. The real problems emerged when I attempted to use the 4A’s as the framework for my fall report cards.
I planned to use the 4A’s instead of the various subjects as the categories of assessment for my narratives. In theory this was a great idea, but in order to make this happen I needed a rubric of sorts to serve as a skeleton of skills within each category. Really, if I could pull this off, I could reshape how people look at what and how students learn. Ok easy J…. Two things tripped me up. The foremost issue centered on other schools might react to this framework. They couldn’t just glance at the narrative and get an idea of a student’s subject specific skills and understanding. I hear admissions people like to quickly ascertain what a student learned and how they performed. As much as I want to change things, I often feel trapped in a system that talks a good game but often resists change on practical grounds. As they say, the tall tulip gets whacked. The second issue was the difficulty I had constructing the framework of skills within each A. I slowly framed in some of each category, but really didn’t have enough built to hold up each category within the narrative. Since it didn’t feel ready to go, I put this idea back in beta and moved forward with Plan B.
In the end, I created narratives that kept the traditional subjects as the primary categories and used the 4As as a guide to assess student work within each category. And, since I still have a soft spot for the 8s, I also wove those ideas into each subject specific narrative. Baby steps, I guess….
Schools and schooling are a bit bloated and reluctant or unable to change for a variety of reasons. The majority of schools provide an education for a future that went by the wayside decades ago. After years of having students ask versions of the “why do we have to know this?” or “ when am I ever going to use this?” I need to find a different way of doing things. Much of the subject matter inherent in middle school and high school curricula lacks relevance or meaning to the majority of youth. Conversely, many of the subjects that could be relevant remain outside the realm of schools and formal education. However, many of the underlying skills within these subjects do translate to a multitude of futures for our students. Maybe more schools should take up the 8s and have their foray into the 4As to make education matter again.