Diving Further into Data-Based Teaching: Elapsed Time Since A Student’s Last Submission

TL;DR: I discovered how to use my Google Sheets pacing tracker to monitor how long it's been since a student's last submission! You can check out (and even make a copy of) the fully-functioning spreadsheet here, or you can read on if you want more detail on how this works and some context as to why I wanted this feature and how I use it.

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Lately I've been thinking about better ways to keep students accountable while also keeping my class (and my demeanor) as friendly and welcoming as possible. The more objective data I keep, the more I can make judgement-free assessments of my students. All this has me thinking about what data I keep (special thanks to Emily Johb for getting the wheels turning on this on Episode 75 of the MCP Podcast), and what sorts of data-based thresholds I'll use to trigger certain actions (like targeted interventions, scheduling in-class checkins, parent contact, requesting that a student attend tutoring, et cetera).

Recently, a new data point occurred to me: it would be useful to keep track of how much time has passed since a students' latest submission. As more and more time passes since a student's most recent submission, it is increasingly apparent that this student is becoming disengaged, and keeping tabs not only on their overall progress but also on the consistency with which they make progress has really helped me identify students who were slipping through the cracks.

Now, I don't have the bandwidth to track these times myself (with the number of students I teach, manually noting the date each time I review a submission feels like a burden), so I started poking around in Google Sheets to see if there was a formula that would do it for me.

What I wanted was a cell that would automatically show the date on which I last updated the a specific row in my tracker, so any completed mastery check that I checked off by a student's name would cause this cell to update with the current date (i.e., the date of the submission), but if a day passed without any updates to the row, the cell would not change - the cell would always show the date of the most recent submission. I could then use date math formulas to subtract that date from today's date and fill another cell with the difference - the number of days since the student's previous submission.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any built-in formula that perpetually monitors one row and update itself with the date of most recent change to that row. I did, however, find this video that explains how to use Google Scripts (from within Google Sheets) to create a Javascript applet that does.

Frankly, this is way over my head - I can't say I fully understand what's happening here (and I certainly couldn't have come up with this myself), but I tried it out on some mockup spreadsheets (which are linked below), and it does seem to work solidly (and, it's worth pointing out, I feel confident enough in my understanding of the Javascript to conclude that there's no malicious code or anything that would compromise the privacy of the spreadsheet).

Once the applet was in place, I was able to use the date math formulas. In one column, I used the =today() formula to display the current date, and in the next column over I used the =days() formula to subtract the latest submission date from today's date, which gives me the number of days since the last submission. Then I used conditional formatting to flag any students who haven't submitted a lesson in five days or more (for some teachers, that number may seem quite high, but keep in mind that I only see my students twice a week - five days is not an unreasonable lapse between submissions if I don't see a class from Wednesday until the following Monday). It works!

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If this interests you, you can make a copy of this mockup pacing tracker and try it out (here's the link again) - having already written up the steps (which are below), I can tell you that it's rather involved, and the mockup already works, so you can just make a copy. However, if you're technologically inclined and want to try it in your own sheets-based progress tracker, here are the steps:

1. Create three new blank columns, titled something like "Latest Submission" "Today" and "Elapsed Time"

2. In the Extensions menu, select Apps Script.

Change the text on Line 1 "myFunction()" to read "onEdit(e)" (don't change anything else). Then, copy this code into the editor on line 2 (in between the curly { } brackets):

3. In the editor, note the two instances of "XX." Change the first one to the name of the specific sheet (the name in the little tab at the bottom of Sheets) that contains your three columns. Change the second "XX" to the index of the "Latest Submission" column. If it's Column A, use the number 1. If it's Column G, use the number 5. Mine was Column Y, so I used 25.

If you have multiple sub-sheets, just copy and paste the "if" statement of the code again in the editor (not the "var" statement), and update the name of the sheet in all subsequent instances. Save again.

Back in the spreadsheet, you should now see today's date appear in this column in any row that you update! The hard part is over.

4. In the first row of the "Today" column, type =today(), then corner-drag this formula to every row with a student's progress (i.e., any row in which you want to calculate elapsed time).

5. In the first row of the "Elapsed Time" column, type =days( and click the "Today" cell, then click the "Date of Most Recent Submission" cell, then close the parentheses. Think of it as a subtraction - today's date minus the most recent submission equals the difference, or elapsed time. As an example, if your "Last Submission" is in the Y column, "Today" in the Z column, and you're calculating elapsed time in the AA column, the formula for the first row should read =days(Z1, Y1), and when you hit Enter, it should display the elapsed time.

6. If you want to, you can apply conditional formatting to your "Elapsed Time" column to highlight students who haven't submitted any work in several days.

One thing to watch out for is that some of your "Date Since Last Submission" cells may be blank (if you only just implemented this, and some students haven't submitted any lessons since you activated the applet, no date will display until they do). In this case, I found that the elapsed time displayed as 44,609 days, which, as of the date on which I'm writing this, means that this student submitted their last assignment on January 1st, 1900, which must be what Google Sheets considers the beginning of time.

Also, the automated calculation looks at any and all updates you make to the row, meaning that it doesn't differentiate between an update showing that the student demonstrated mastery and an update showing that the student needs to revise. My priority, however, is to make sure kids are keeping on top of their lessons - as long as they're submitting work consistently, I can use other data (and teaching strategies) to make sure they're revising and actually learning the lessons.

Those issues aside, though, after a few days of submissions from most students, the "Elapsed Time" column should quickly show an accurate readout of the days since each of your students has submitted work. When that number gets too high, you know it's time to kick into gear and use those teacher tricks - conference with the student, reteach, contact home, etc.

I've really been liking this metric of elapsed time since a submission - it's one thing to tell a student "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons," but it carries a little more weight to say "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons, and you haven't completed any lessons for the past seven days!" I encourage you to give it a try! If you think of other data points that would be good to track, I'd love to hear about them and see if I could find a way to automate them into this tracker.

var range = e.range;
var spreadSheet = e.source;
var sheetName = spreadSheet.getActiveSheet().getName();
var row = range.getRow();

if(sheetName == 'XX')
{
var new_date = new Date();
spreadSheet.getActiveSheet().getRange(row,XX).setValue(new_date).setNumberFormat("MM/dd");
}

3. In the editor, note the two instances of "XX." Change the first one to the name of the specific sheet (the name in the little tab at the bottom of Sheets) that contains your three columns. Change the second "XX" to the index of the "Latest Submission" column. If it's Column A, use the number 1. If it's Column G, use the number 5. Mine was Column Y, so I used 25.

If you have multiple sub-sheets, just copy and paste the "if" statement of the code again in the editor (not the "var" statement), and update the name of the sheet in all subsequent instances. Save again.

Back in the spreadsheet, you should now see today's date appear in this column in any row that you update! The hard part is over.

4. In the first row of the "Today" column, type =today(), then corner-drag this formula to every row with a student's progress (i.e., any row in which you want to calculate elapsed time).

5. In the first row of the "Elapsed Time" column, type =days( and click the "Today" cell, then click the "Date of Most Recent Submission" cell, then close the parentheses. Think of it as a subtraction - today's date minus the most recent submission equals the difference, or elapsed time. As an example, if your "Last Submission" is in the Y column, "Today" in the Z column, and you're calculating elapsed time in the AA column, the formula for the first row should read =days(Z1, Y1), and when you hit Enter, it should display the elapsed time.

6. If you want to, you can apply conditional formatting to your "Elapsed Time" column to highlight students who haven't submitted any work in several days.

One thing to watch out for is that some of your "Date Since Last Submission" cells may be blank (if you only just implemented this, and some students haven't submitted any lessons since you activated the applet, no date will display until they do). In this case, I found that the elapsed time displayed as 44,609 days, which, as of the date on which I'm writing this, means that this student submitted their last assignment on January 1st, 1900, which must be what Google Sheets considers the beginning of time.

Also, the automated calculation looks at any and all updates you make to the row, meaning that it doesn't differentiate between an update showing that the student demonstrated mastery and an update showing that the student needs to revise. My priority, however, is to make sure kids are keeping on top of their lessons - as long as they're submitting work consistently, I can use other data (and teaching strategies) to make sure they're revising and actually learning the lessons.

Those issues aside, though, after a few days of submissions from most students, the "Elapsed Time" column should quickly show an accurate readout of the days since each of your students has submitted work. When that number gets too high, you know it's time to kick into gear and use those teacher tricks - conference with the student, reteach, contact home, etc.

I've really been liking this metric of elapsed time since a submission - it's one thing to tell a student "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons," but it carries a little more weight to say "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons, and you haven't completed any lessons for the past seven days!" I encourage you to give it a try! If you think of other data points that would be good to track, I'd love to hear about them and see if I could find a way to automate them into this tracker.

Upgrade your Gradebook

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"Simplify, simplify"

- Henry David Thoreau

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In keeping with the grading theme from my last post, I'd like to delve a little further into the structures I use to keep my assessment as objective as possible and eliminate, the personal, emotional connection that students often perceive between their grades and their identity. I've spent many, many hours discussing this topic with my coaches and supervisors and trying to discover new and better ways to grade, and I think that's because, quite simply, grading is hard. As is usually the case, I've found that the best solution to the challenging problem of grading isn't to work harder, but rather to adopt an entirely different approach - to change the underlying structure of my gradebook and my grading scheme. Before diving into the solution (which is to use binary, mastered/not mastered grades on single tasks arranged in a sequence; a process strongly influenced by the Modern Classrooms Project, of which I am a fellow), let's explore what makes grading such a difficult process.

When you grade something, your task is to examine a piece of student work and, from it, determine objectively how much the student has learned of the topic at hand. There's a lot to unpack in this seemingly simple task: we must find a way to quantify learning in a way that applies to all our students, but each individual student brings so much to bear on each task that it's nearly impossible to come up with an objective heuristic, rubric, or measuring stick of knowledge and learning that can be calibrated to produce a true and fair grade in every individual case. Furthermore, if teachers haven't thoroughly considered and designed a system for objective grading, they may not be able to assess work without unconsciously surfacing other considerations. In my first few years, when I was presented with a piece of student work, I would consider the student's personality and how they may react to the grade I gave; I would consider the student's previous performance and whether this submission was an improvement or a decline; I brought to bear unexamined biases and even prejudices (that, frighteningly, may have been borne out in the patterns I saw in my gradebook demographically). While none of these things are on the rubric, they would pass through my mind as I graded, and I felt that to be "objective," I needed to learn to just ignore them, which would create a sort of cognitive dissonance that made grading a difficult and stressful series of decisions I had to make while factoring in some considerations and discarding others.

Now, there are tools and techniques for dealing with this by objectively describing whether and how the piece of work conforms to certain standards (rubrics are one of the best); but even so, there is always ambiguity in assessing the quality of a product if there are multiple levels that we have to choose between (especially if some aspects of the work conform to one level, but other aspects conform to another level, lower or higher). Grading this way is mentally exhausting and time consuming - I teach between 160-200 students whom I see every two days, so daily grading means putting myself through this intellectual and emotional wringer 90 times a day, which was not something I could conceive of as a young teacher (it was one of those "ok, but how on Earth do you actually do that" questions). And I was right - without careful planning and an intentional approach, daily (or even weekly) grading is not sustainable; neither the world's greatest rubric, nor any amount of hard work, planning, or time management could have made this possible without burning me out. There is a better way, and, unsurprisingly, the solution is not to grind harder, nor is it to learn to ignore the conflicting thoughts and feelings that swirl around as we seek to land on a perfectly objective grade; rather, we need lean our ladder against an entirely different wall to approach formative assessment in an unambiguous way. The solution is progress tracking.

Through the self-pacing structures of the Modern Classrooms Project, I've learned that the best way to address to this problem (and the key to in-class grading) is to limit my formatives to a simple task that requires mastery of one single skill or piece of knowledge. Importantly, the task must be so simple as to negate the need for a grade at all. Rather, a simple "mastered" or "not mastered" must suffice to determine whether the student can move on to the next lesson or assignment, and there is no ambiguity as to the quality of the product - either it's done or it's not, and no rubric is involved because the task can only be successfully completed if the student has mastered the content.

My upgraded gradebook, therefore, is an ordered sequence of binary switches, of 0's and 1's, and when a student submits an assignment, it takes only a few unambiguous and stress-free moments to glance at it and see which they get (i.e., whether they mastered the lesson and can move on or should go back and revise). Each assignment is a single step toward completing the project; for example, in my current unit students are making a remix and the initial sequence is: 1) Choose a song (which is very easy for me to tell if the student did or didn't), 2) Set the tempo and key in our DAW (again, easy to tell at a glance), 3) Import the song into the DAW (easy to tell - you get the idea), 4) Line up the song with the DAW grid, and 5) Add new loops and sounds from the DAW loop library. These steps may seem inane and overly simple, but that's actually the point - chunking the lessons into incredibly small steps makes them both achievable for students and very easy for me to "grade." The ease with which I can evaluate these tasks also allows me to transform my role from grader of quality into gatekeeper of content - if you haven't mastered this task, you can't move on to the next one until you do. This means students who are moving along have demonstrably learned something, and the progress data quantify that learning rather than me having to try to figure out how "smart" a student is from what they've produced (in other words, achievement is measured objectively by progress, rather than subjectively, by quality, and a student who is struggling is behind, not dumb which is a huge distinction in terms of developing a growth mindset).

My upgraded gradebook - a progress tracker!

But the benefits don't stop there. My gradebook is more of a progress tracker than a record of each student's performance, and as such it serves more roles than just record-keeping (although it serves a record-keeping function as well - a student who has completed 4 of the 5 steps has learned 4/5ths of the content in an objective way). A student who is behind stands out on my tracker; without having to delve into their work and try to determine how much they know through interpolation and divination, I can very easily narrow my focus on those students who need help to catch up. Extrapolated across the entire class, the progress tracker provides actionable data on how the entire group is performing (traditional grades don't provide this data, because if there is any more wiggle room in assessing a piece of work than yes/no, the aggregate data of how every individual kid does on that particular piece is ambiguous; every kid in the class might get a 4/5 on the same assignment, but the missing point may be different for each of them, indicating a different misunderstanding in each student! I would separate those 5 points into 5 separate, tiny assignments). Furthermore, having this aggregate data on where every student in the class is at in the unit allows me to strategically group them together and find effective student helpers (since I can see who's ahead).

It's important to note that a gradebook set up as a progress tracker has implications for the very structure of your curriculum, and requires careful planning to establish a sequence of tasks, each with a clearly demonstrable and binary (mastered/not mastered) response, that leads students to the final outcome of possessing the knowledge and skills required to pass a unit. In my music class, every lesson represents a single step in the process of creating a song, and their learning is represented quantitatively by how far into the sequence they progress: if they complete all the lessons, they will have a song that meets all the requirements (and therefore demonstrates full mastery) of the unit, whereas if they fall short of completing the sequence, the song will be missing some components from later in the unit. More practically, every aspect of my class is structured to guide students linearly through the sequence, which is canonized in my gradebook - the first "grade" (i.e., 0 or 1) is Lesson 1, the second is Lesson 2, etc., and everything about my class (my gradebook, my LMS, and my actual teaching) is purpose-built to ensure my students can follow this path and to make it easy for me (and them, and also their parents) to tell how far along the path they are.

Of course, at the end of each unit I do grade the final product as a summative assessment, using a rubric, and by that time I have a very good sense of where each student is in their learning process; the quality my students' songs tends to hew closely to how far into the sequence they've advanced. More importantly, however, the overall quality of my students' songs has improved since I implemented this structure because the data in my gradebook give me the opportunity to intervene more frequently before we get to the end of the unit. As a young teacher, so much of what I did felt reactive, like I was constantly putting out fires that had already engulfed my classroom (and my students' learning, and my relationships with students, and their parents), and the transition to a gradebook that provides unambiguous data as to where my students actually are (not data based on a hunch or a vague sense of learning that I came up with myself) has allowed me to support my students proactively, which is one of those things young teachers are told they should do but rarely told how (if you're relying on your own observation to come up with the data, it's very easy to miss kids who are slipping through the cracks until it's too late). There are ways to improve our classes, but sometimes they look different from what we're accustomed to - certainly the idea of a progress tracking checklist feels different from the traditional conception of what a gradebook is - but if we open ourselves to change and adopt new practices (like upgrading our gradebooks and using progress rather than quality to measure achievement), we learn to teach, and we can do a better job of supporting our students.

What Grades Actually Mean, and How to Interpret Them

One of the most difficult things about being a new teacher was that I often didn't know how to respond to a student who leveled criticism against me - kids can be ruthless, and I remember countless nights that I actually literally tossed and turned in bed replaying conversations and wishing I had come up with better retorts to my 13-year-old students who were rude to me! One of the things more experienced teachers (and I now consider myself to be on the cusp of becoming one) understand is that there is no perfect heuristic or logical flow chart of interaction that will provide the best response in every situation; rather, as one increasingly clarifies their understanding of what matters and becomes more confident, it becomes easier to find an appropriate response in the moment. This is the substance of learning to teach, and to that end this post is a deep dive into my own learning, in particular the understanding and perspective I've developed in discussing grades.

Some of your students will inevitably receive bad grades, and some of them (and even some of their parents) will be very vocal about it (follow my meaning - they're not going to be nice to you), so report card season can be emotionally charged. My school sends home quarterly report cards, but we only report final grades at the end of the two semesters, which means that the 1st and 3rd quarter grades are more like a progress report, or a check-in to see how students are doing so they can course correct if necessary. I find, however, that this distinction is difficult to tease out with families. In the 18 parent-teacher-student conferences I gave last Friday (what was that about teacher workload?), this topic came up quite frequently, and having these discussions over and over again, I had to clarify for parents and for myself just what the progress report does represent.

In a mastery-based grading system (which, in my opinion, is the gold standard all educators should aspire to), a grade represents what you know, period. In a completely idealized and objective interpretation, mastery-based grades are like inches on a measuring stick: in the same way I can report how tall you are in feet (or meters), I can report how much you've mastered using a grade in letters or numbers. I brought up this analogy in my conferences, and it helped parents to disentangle their emotional reaction from their understanding of what grades meant - if you measure how tall someone is, he probably won't become upset or take the measurement personally because there is not a normalized emotional association with such a measurement. Grades, on the other hand, are interpreted as deeply personal, and bad grades in particular tend to feel like an appraisal of character and intelligence (especially for students who get low grades in most of their classes and consider themselves "dumb" - easily one of the most pernicious and anti-productive manifestations of the emotional importance we associate with grades, and one that works at cross-purposes with students seeing themselves as learners, which is what really matters).

The measuring stick analogy was particularly useful in looking at cases in which students received low grades from teachers whom the student (and family) felt had failed to teach the content effectively. While for the most part families respectfully reserve judgement and use kind language when describing situations like these, the underlying implication is that such a grade is not fair. The notion of fairness suggests that the student was somehow entitled to a higher grade (or at least should not have been subjected to a low one), in part due to the fact that it wasn't her "fault" that the grade was low. Tumbling further and further down this logical rabbit hole, the absurdity of this emotional attachment to grades is (hopefully) becoming clearer - the fact of the matter is that if the student didn't learn something for whatever reason, she doesn't know it. If her math teacher did a poor job of teaching her how to divide by fractions, she may be absolved of some of the responsibility of having learned it, and feel vindicated defending herself that way, but that responsibility isn't what the grades are measuring.

Looking at grades this way has implications for students and teachers. The hypothetical student described above may make a fuss about her teacher not having taught her well, but the grades don't evaluate who was responsible for her learning, or even how hard she worked to learn, but rather the knowledge she acquired (or didn't), so complaining about it isn't a productive use of her time or mental energy. Instead, she should look carefully at her lowest grades and focus her attention there in the coming weeks until she masters that content. Now, it's quite difficult for a 6th grader to look at low grades without an emotional reaction: if they feel the content wasn't taught well, the reflexive "but it wasn't my fault!" defensiveness is quite natural for young kids (and even some adults!); alternatively, if the student knows that he himself was responsible for the low grades (perhaps he was slacking off or forgot to submit an assignment or two), coming to terms with one's own failure in an objective and unemotional way is staggeringly difficult, and it's our job as teachers to help students recognize that emotional reaction (and indeed still feel it), but separate it from the more useful lens of viewing failure objectively as an opportunity for growth.

But there's more to the teacher's role in the measuring stick analogy - in particular, we (the teachers) need to ensure that our measuring sticks (our grading schema and our rubrics) are being applied consistently and, yes, fairly. Imagine telling a person how tall they are in inches, but using a ruler graded in centimeters - the measurement isn't unfair, it's just wrong. One excellent practice to combat this issue is rubric norming, in which multiple teachers apply the same rubric to the same piece of work - by discussing aspects of the sample and hashing out the particular language of the rubric, we normalize our approach to grading (in my measuring stick analogy, we calibrate our inches to all be the same). Furthermore, if the assessment criteria are clear and precise, we can better communicate them to students, who, with so much on their plates, need to be told clearly and precisely how to meet our expectations of learning (i.e., how to master the material and have it measured accordingly, resulting in high grades). I have a whole other set of opinions on the importance of standardization for assessment (i.e., consistency in how we measure "inches" on our metaphorical measuring stick) and its implications when looking at medium- and long-term trends in grades data (these trends are meaningless if we're not measuring on the same scale from class to class or from year to year), but that's not my focus here.

Finally, while there are many, many factors that are beyond our control (and frankly we should learn to cut ourselves a little more slack), it is nonetheless incumbent upon us to teach our content effectively so that our kids can learn it ("effective" teaching is obviously a massive topic, and one I won't address here, except to say that it involves a close partnership between teachers and students in which the responsibility for learning is shared, not placed entirely on either party). It bears repeating that systemic, societal issues and other mitigating factors such as behavior, trauma, and truancy, for which teachers themselves are not responsible, can be the cause of low grades (although in an ideal world, these should not be barriers to effective learning). Still, if the students' grades are an objective measure of how much they know, then in a sense they are also an objective measure of how effectively they were taught, which means the grades, in part, reflect back upon us as the teachers. Low grades are a red flag that we may need to critically address some aspect of our teaching.

I'm cringing a little thinking back to all the failing grades I gave out as a first year teacher, but let me be crystal clear: it is not my intention to further stress out young teachers who are struggling to coax better performance out of their students - quite the opposite in fact. I hope that dissociating emotional reactions from value-free measurements helps first-year teachers adopt a growth mindset. Just like our students, it is not productive for us to wallow in our own failures, regardless of who or what is responsible for them. However, it's even worse to shrug off a student with low grades and place the responsibility for success entirely on their shoulders, defending ourselves behind the "if you don't do it, you get a zero" mentality - we do have a responsibility to intervene where we can. Even in the classrooms of the world's greatest teachers, students receive low grades - it's part of the reality of teaching, but the best teachers (many of whom are striving to change this reality) recognize low grades as an area for targeted intervention and improvement on their own part (not the students').

Again, this is the substance of learning to teach, which is an ongoing and never-ending journey: a confident teacher who gives out low grades will reflect objectively upon her own practice and also upon the practice of the student (or the class in general) and consider what may have gone wrong and needs to change (change = growth = learning [to teach]). Where possible, she'll develop improvements to her teaching or her curriculum, or interventions with specific students to address shortcomings revealed by low grades, which she views purely as data. If we adopt this growth mindset, we can instill it in our students by articulating to them that grades are not a reflection of their character but rather an objective measurement of what they've learned (or haven't). If we do, they'll not only be better learners who get higher grades (since they'll know to target specific misunderstandings, which they can easily identify on their report cards); they'll also grow up into rational, reasonable adults, bringing a growth mindset to their practice (and in particular their mistakes), and thus be poised to innovate and improve in whatever field they chose to pursue.

How Self-Paced Classes Reduce Stress as Distance Learning Reaches a Tipping Point

The last few weeks of an academic quarter are always challenging and stressful - grades are due (and, therefore, assignments are due), and the workload ramps up for everyone involved, and this year I (and many of my students) found the pressure to be overwhelming and all-consuming.

A few weeks ago, my school surveyed the student body, and the kids overwhelmingly voiced their frustration with the work load. “Too much work,” “too many assignments,” and “not enough time,” et cetera, dominated the responses. There are really no lines to read between here - this isn’t our students being lazy: they’re unified in their message, and now the teachers need to figure out how we can reduce the workload without compromising their learning. This amounts to killing our darlings, so it is a difficult, emotional task.

I’m of two minds on this. My “learning to teach” mindset, which is one of radical and revolutionary growth, would suggest that perhaps we’ve been overloading our curricula anyway, and this is an opportunity to pare them down. On the other hand, my “empathy first” mindset (not mutually exclusive with the growth mindset, by the way) centers on the teachers who have been tasked with choosing between (and discarding) lessons and materials that they developed with time, effort, and care.

I had a long conversation with one such teacher - a department coordinator - who reached out to me because of my (well established and outspoken) connection to the Modern Classrooms project, which utilizes a lesson-classification scheme as part of it’s self-pacing structure. The workload reduction process he’s undertaking with his team reflects the “Must-Do,” “Should Do,” “Aspire To” system used by MCP, and he wanted to ask me, of all the different materials they had planned to use, which struck me as “should do’s,” or, in other words, could be cut from the curriculum.

As we talked, it dawned on me that the missing piece wasn’t prioritizing and cutting material, but rather the logistical structure for dealing with assignments that were “optional” (“Should Do” assignments).

(As an aside, one of my biggest struggles as a first-year teacher was discovering these logistical, classroom structures - and to be clear, I didn’t discover them on my own; it was other teachers and, in particular, Modern Classrooms that taught them to me. Anytime I was taught anything about classroom teaching - differentiation, relationship building, content delivery, in-class grading, accountability - my response was always “ok, but how do you actually do that?” With regards to learning to teach, data and project management and classroom workflows seem, in my uninformed-except-by-having-attending-lots-of-unhelpful-PDs opinion, to be one of the most useful and highest-leverage sets of skills and knowledge that excellent teachers posess, yet also one of the aspects of teaching that is focused on the least when training teachers. Expect more from me on these skills in the future.)

Returning to my conversation with the department coordinator: we discussed several different issues - would the optional assignments be graded? Would kids even do optional assignments at all? The conversation focused on these abstract questions, but the turning point came when he asked me a much more practical question: “what will my students do in class if they choose not to do the ‘should do?’ They won’t have anything to do.”

The crux of the problem lies in the fact that he wasn’t accounting for students working at different paces, and he needed to consider and implement a self-pacing plan to meet some of their needs. The solution is to instruct kids who are up-to-date with the class to complete the Should Do (for them, it isn’t optional), while instructing kids who were behind to complete last class’ assignment (or whatever they’re missing), using class time to get caught up, and getting a little boost by skipping today’s Should Do. This provides the students who are feeling overwhelmed with some time (actual class time, no less) without cutting curriculum except in the most extreme cases of specific kids who need it to make it to the end of the unit .

Stepping back onto my soap box, this is the kind of concrete, action-based problem that I think teacher training should prioritize. There are structures and workflows like this facilitating all of the wonderful things happening in effective classrooms, and they are a result of strong planning, but can be easily shared and implemented by all teachers, new and veteran alike. This particular one related to pacing, but it also differentiates a unit by providing a path to success for students with particular needs (i.e., kids who need more time to work).

Suffice it to say, allowing kids to do work from a previous lesson during today’s class relieves some of that pressure our kids were so vocal about at the end of the quarter. If the stress of distance learning is keeping our kids up until midnight just trying to get their work done, we need to show them we’re able to prioritize and make concessions for them. But that doesn't have to come from curriculum design; it can also come from the way we structure our classes. Allowing for some self-pacing and giving students the time to catch up in class not only helps them to succeed academically, it also shows them we hear their voices, we care about their wellbeing, and we are willing to put students before content, as every teacher knows they should.