Chapter 1
Transforming the Graduate
I get it. This is about learning.
āCarlos Ramos, Envision student, reflecting on a realization that came to him halfway through a portfolio defense
It's twenty-seven days until Kaleb Lawson's graduation ceremony, and he has just been told that he is not ready to graduate.
Standing alone at the head of the room, Kaleb can't believe what he has just heard. His face is losing color, and he is struggling to maintain composure. The lights are too bright. The fan of the digital projector whirs too loudly.
The audience, loosely packed in rows of chairs that face Kaleb and the screen behind him, numbers around twenty, an assortment of fellow students, interested parents, and supportive teachers. Fronting the audience is a long table, behind which sit four adults who have been asking questions and taking notes. Obvious to anyone who has ever seen an episode of American Idol, this is a panel of judges.
One of the panelists, a digital media teacher named Mr. Harris, breaks an uncomfortable pause: āYour reflections on your leadership skills don't show the depth that we are looking for. Plus, we don't see evidence that you have practiced this presentation enough. You relied way too heavily on your notes. You didn't make enough eye contact with your audience.ā
Staring at the floor, Kaleb nods slowly to acknowledge what he has heard. He is taking this hard. Preparation for this presentation was not a matter of days, weeks, or even months. This was years in the making. For the last forty-five minutes, he gave a presentation that told his entire high school story. He showed examples of his best academic work, reflected on his successes and failures, tried to make a case that he was ready to graduate.
āYou're not ready, Kaleb,ā Mr. Harris continues. āYou can do better than this. Work with your advisor to revise your reflections. Polish your delivery. In ten days, you need to make a second attempt.ā
Why Schools Need to Redefine Graduation
We'll follow up on Kaleb's story later in the chapter. (Unsurprising spoiler alert: he passes on his second attempt.) But first, let us explain what we just witnessed.
In order to graduate, every Envision Schools student must go through what Kaleb did. We are not referring to the failing part, but the standing before a panel and making a sustained, evidence-based claim that one is ready to move on from high school. It is the culminating moment of what we call a Deeper Learning Student Assessment System, and it is what defines an Envision Schools education.
The concept is nothing revolutionary, an idea as old as the trial of the hero's journey and as traditional to education as the relationship between apprentice and master. It is the PhD defense, the bar exam, the IPO presentation, and the playoff game. Many learning journeys culminate with a challenge that draws on everything that you have learned to meet it, proving to all that you are ready to move on.
But how do we know when a high school student is ready to move on?
In most high schools in America, the de facto answer to that question seems both arbitrary and abstract. Four years of seat time, 120-something ācredits.ā Perhaps a certain number on a standardized test. We count the inputs with one abstraction (course credits) and diffusely assess them with another abstraction (letter grades). After decades of this approach, our high schools have lost touch with any concrete sense of what their students know and are able to do at the end of four years. And with vague purpose have come uninspiring outcomes.
It's not OK. Every organization should know its purpose and should design itself accordingly. For institutions of learning, that purpose must articulate the future for its students. What do we want for our students? What are we preparing them for? What do we want them to know and be able to do by the time they move on? What kind of people do we want them be?
Transforming a school must start with thoughtful answers to these big-picture, purpose-driven, goal-oriented questions. Although there are different ways to answer these questions legitimately, there are kinds of answers that we should not accept.
For one, the answers must come in the form of words, not numbers or symbols. Test scores, numerical school ratings, and statistics on grades are abstractions of reality, not descriptions of reality.
And a school's overarching goal must be framed around its students, not reflect circularly back on the school. A student's success is its own end; its purpose is not to make the school successful, which is effectively what happens when a school defines its goals in terms of its ranking based on test scores.
The mission of Envision Educationāour particular answer to the question of purposeāis to prepare all students, especially those whose parents did not go to college, to succeed in college, career, and life.
Our mission may sound straightforward, but there is an ambitious nuance in the way we have framed our mission. Getting into a college is not how we define success for our students; graduating from college is where we have set the bar.
Having clearly defined the goal, we could now design our school. Once we had a vision for our students' future, we could establish what it would require to graduate, with all the skills and content knowledge and habits of mind that it would take to succeed in college.
Although the answer to that was not and is not easy, it is easy to see that the traditional graduation requirements are not adequate. An arbitrary number of credits earned over four years, perhaps a standardized test thrown in, will not cut it. Indeed, they don't.
āMapping Backwardsā from Graduation
In 1998, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published a seminal book called Understanding by Design, a culmination of two decades of evolving thinking on how to assess student learning. As with many watershed moments in a field, their thesis resounded not because it was radical, but because it crystallized what our common sense already knew.
Teachers are designers, they argue, and belong to the field of design professionals that includes architects, engineers, and graphic artists. Students are the primary clients, and āthe effectiveness of curriculum, assessment, and instructional designs is ultimately determined by their achievement of desired learningsā (p. 7).
Curriculum, then, is a means to an end. Therefore, the most effective way to design curriculum is ābackwardā: you start with the endāidentifying the learning goalāand then map out the steps that will get you there.
Again, this is good common sense, but what made Understanding by Design such a landmark was not simply its call to map backwards but its challenge to make assessment the entry point of design:
Rather than creating assessments near the conclusion of a unit of study . . . backward design reminds us to begin with the question, What would we accept as evidence that students have attained the desired understandings and proficienciesābefore proceeding to plan teaching and learning experiences? (p. 8)
Though built on the thinking of those who came before, Wiggins and McTighe's eloquent spin on curricular design caught us at the right time, a turn-of-the-century moment when the American collective consciousness started to question its approach to education. Fifteen years later, āmapping backwardsā is now a stock...
