As a part of the professional development program at Khan Lab School, we spent a term in 2023-24 reading research papers related to our teaching and learning practice. The rule was that the papers needed to have been published within the last five years, and we needed to identify at least one actionable takeaway from each.
Articles:
The key characteristics of project-based learning: how teachers implement projects in K-12 science education (Anette Markula & Maija Aksela 2022)
Making Sense of K-12 Competency-Based Education: A Systematic Literature Review of Implementation and Outcome Research from 2000-20219 ( Evans et al. 2020)
The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education (Naomi E. Winstone and David Boud 2021)
The key characteristics of project-based learning: how teachers implement projects in K-12 science education (Anette Markula & Maija Aksela 2022)
Major Takeaway: To create hands-on, authentic projects, a unifying theme can be helpful.
Outstanding Questions:
How do our students interact with “projects” in classes, applied learning projects, etc?
How do teachers interact with a central theme?
How does the central theme become visible or relevant for students?
Actionable Learning: We should create a theme for next year (Our Local Community) and develop interdisciplinary projects in small professional learning community groups.
Notes: Things that often make PBL fail include poor articulation of the public product (in this paper, it’s called the “artifact”) and the driving question
Things that teachers struggle with: managing long-term projects and assessing group work
Learning from robotics:
Students are naturally motivated by the end goal of a competition
Students can identify the academic content ingrained in the process
Driving question are difficult to develop because there’s a sense that it needs to cover a priori designed content.
What makes a good driving question?
What is the purpose of PBL?
To make learning fun? That should be a side effect!
To make learning relevant - that's the important takeaway
Making Sense of K-12 Competency-Based Education: A Systematic Literature Review of Implementation and Outcome Research from 2000-20219 ( Evans et al. 2020)
Major Takeaway: The concept of “flexible pacing” that aligns with CBE implies a minimum pace (with reasonable deadlines).
Outstanding Questions: What makes some deadlines flexible and some rigid? What are the benefits (and drawbacks) of more rigid deadlines?
Actionable Learning: Develop a school-wide policy around late work that is manageable for teachers and mission-aligned.
Notes:
What surprised you about the paper? What stood out?
3 R’s (relevance to the organization and its people, readiness to undertake the innovation, and resources to implement) are necessary for success (pg. 17)
Seems strange that CBE and mastery learning is both not that new, and not that well-studied. The paper makes it seem like implementation has been spotty and inconsistent, and therefore hard to reliably measure outcomes. This also makes it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of CBE, generally.
What does proper implementation look like? What training do teachers need?
It seems key to align assessment strategies to the teaching practices - but since the teaching practices focus on personalized learning, the assessment needed is by definition, not standardized. This makes evaluation difficult if not impossible!
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater - what is “traditional education” as defined by the paper, and what useful practices can be extracted from it?
How many studies focus on STEM rather than humanities? What research is available that focuses on humanities courses and the implementation of CBE?
Where did you see connections to our context at KLS?
The paper uses the phrase “flexible-pacing” instead of self-pacing. Self-pacing requires students to be the arbiters of the appropriate pace, which requires them to be able to self-diagnose. “Flexible pacing” implies a minimum pacing target that stretches to encompass most learners. Questions are left for the teachers about how stretchy that pace should be.
Stable definitions of terms are one of the keys to success - where and how should we document our definitions?
As the school grows, we should remember that the flexibility we have to provide students with personalized learning plans requires small class sizes - so the faculty body has to grow alongside the student body. (question: (how) has CBE been implemented at larger public schools?)
What roads forward did the paper seem to suggest?
They suggest developing a “continuum” that spans from “traditional teaching” to the most radical framework you could imagine. There are many useful frameworks on that continuum that we could pull from if we could define them and what teaching practices and administrative policies go with them. This sounds like a large research undertaking
Definitions of terms and curriculum should not be tied to a teacher, but should live within the school and be easy to access.
We should lean on our relationship with B21 to help develop a stable framework for assessment
We should commit to an innovation for more than 1 year before measuring outcomes
We should develop a mechanism for faculty to share what’s working and what’s not in their classrooms.
The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education (Naomi E. Winstone and David Boud 2021)
Major Takeaway: Students don’t read feedback when it is delivered alongside assessment.
Outstanding Questions: How can we provide holistic, thorough, timely feedback without our teachers feeling underwater? How can peer learning be leveraged to provide quality feedback? How can self-reflection be integrated into the feedback process? What are the best practices for drafting and revision?
Actionable Learning: Create Learning Journals and build in time to the schedule for teachers to meet with students and talk through their work in one-on-one meetings. Consider and research portfolio grading systems.
Notes:
This paper focused on the ways in which feedback (directed dialogue with students in which they gain insights into their own work and a pathway to develop their skills further) is often conflated with assessment (a grade given at the end of a term or course). It made the argument that when assessments (grades) are given alongside feedback (e.g. narratives), students often ignore the feedback and focus on the grades. The delivery of this feedback at the end of a term also prevents students from using it in an actionable way. Teachers writing narratives often direct their writing towards the parents reading the reports, trying to avoid conflict by explaining the grade, rather than entering into a conversation with the student.
This article resonated with many of us, and we discussed potential solutions to the problem:
1) Soliciting Feedback: Could feedback be more meaningfully integrated into the coursework itself? The paper suggested having students write cover letters to major assignments in which they ask for feedback on a specific learning outcome. The focused feedback they receive from the teacher is then an answer to a question, rather than unsolicited and unwanted. This would also mimic the peer review process that research journals use - they require resubmissions to come with a cover letter explaining how feedback was incorporated into the revision.
2) Focusing Feedback: Feedback should be parsable for students - rather than redlining an entire paper or providing complex feedback on a wide variety of learning outcomes, feedback should focus on one thing at a time, ideally in response to student-defined goals.
3) Feedback as a Dialogue: We discussed the possibilty of co-writing narratives alongside students, so that they are the first people parents ask when they want to understand a grade. Following a mastery approach, students could present a portfolio of work to their teacher, and in a one-on-one conversation, they could decide what grade the work has earned, and craft the narrative together before the report card goes out.
We then talked a bit about what solution #3 would look like, and what logistics would need to be figured out:
How would we make time for this in the schedule? We'd need a "portfolio week" where there were no classes, but only one-on-one meetings. At the end of each meeting, the grading for that student would be done, so we'd have a clean deadline for all teachers to be finished with grading (and it wouldn't bleed over into the break).
Students would need to do some pre-work for that meeting to be efficient. They could select a sampling of their best work from that class, and do a self-reflection where they draft a narrative for themselves and suggest what grade they believe their work has earned. The portfolio of work could be documented and shared with teachers (similar to MTC) so that they could access the work directly when trying to understand the assessment.
This is all great for narratives that come at the end of a term, but what about training students to engage in a continuous process of self-reflection? The Cornerstone program requires students to keep up a Google Site - that seemed to work well for those students. What if we required students to post their reflection and 3 best pieces of work on a Google Site that's made available to their teachers (and larger community)? It would be sort of a digital exhibition night!