EPISODE #352

Hey, Builders, before we start today's episode, I want to talk to the superintendents, the district leaders who are out there who may be struggling right now. Maybe you are trying to get a strategic plan written, or maybe you are trying to get your department or team organized and functioning better. Maybe you are working on trying to get a vision for your department or your district and you're struggling. Maybe you are about to take on a brand new role and you need some help getting everything together. Or maybe you just want something, somebody that you can trust, you can talk things through and get some clarity about the work that you're trying to accomplish in your district. If that's you, I may be able to help you. See, every so often I take on just a few consulting clients and we work together for about a month to solve a very specific problem. Now, if the problem's big and it takes longer than a month, well, we start out with a month, just something simple, and we work together throughout that month to solve the problem.

So it's you and I, one on one. We get together and we meet on Zoom. I also give you a secret bat phone number so that you can reach out to me anytime. We work together. I give you the tools, the templates, the insight that you may be missing to help you solve something that you're dealing with right now. Now, I said on last episode that I had two slots available. One has already been taken, but there is one spot left. So if you want to solve a problem this spring and you want my help in doing that, then what I want you to do is send an email to info inf infoindstepsinc.com or give me a call at 1-888-565-8881.

All right, now onto the show. You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast, episode 352. How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face? How do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage? Teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies, or a lack of time, money or resources? If you're facing those challenges right now, here's where you'll find the answers, strategies and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started. Hey, builders. 

Welcome to another episode of the School Leadership Reimagined podcast. 

I'm your host, Robin Jackson, and I want to talk about testing season, because I. The more people I talk to. I was just traveling this week, and I was talking to a bunch of principals, and, you know the number one thing they said to me? Testing is only 47 days away. Oh, can you help me?

And. And. And. And give me something that will help make my students perform better? Testing is 52 days away. Testing is two weeks away. And so I think this is a good time to talk about testing, because right now, somebody on your team is making a review packet, and somebody else is pulling small groups together. And there's a teacher somewhere in your building right now who's trying to reteach everything that they taught since September.

There's another group of teachers who are looking at the pacing guide and trying to cram everything in in the next two weeks so that there's time for review. Some of you in your school's teaching and learning has already stopped, and you're in full review mode. And the challenge is that everybody's busy, everybody's working, but nobody's working on the same plan. And not only that, your review efforts are kind of all over the place, and they're starting to smell a little desperate, right? That's not judgment. That's the way that we were trained to do review. You know, we. We.

We. We start the year and we think we're just going, okay, Slow and steady wins the race. And we try to design things. We buy whole curricula designed to help kids pass tests. But right about now, you're looking at some data, and the data's not looking good, and you're starting to feel that quiet desperation that happens every year during this time. You know, when I was in the schools, I used to hate February and March because it just. The whole month felt like pressure. And we were doing all these little funny things to try to get kids to pass tests.

We knew the kids who were going to struggle. We knew the kids who we needed to pass. And that's when I first learned the concept of bubble kids, which I hate so much. But, you know, we're pulling bubble kids and trying to get them up where they need to be. We're giving practice tests. We're doing. You know, everything becomes about the test. And so during this time, there are some.

Because of that desperation, because of the pressure that is happening, we stop building, and we start leading again. And so today, I want to kind of help you if you are feeling that right now. I want to help you get through testing season like a builder. So I'm going to talk to you about the three biggest mistakes we make during testing season and then what builders do instead. Okay, so let's start out with mistake number one. And mistake number one is the one that I see the most, and that's we're reviewing too much content. Now, I know you have probably heard just like I have heard that, you know, we have to focus on the power standards, and we have to focus on the, you know, the key insights and try not to review everything. And then people give us the power standards, and they're like, so maybe there are 100 standards, and they give me 80 power standards.

So it's still too much. And so what happens during this time is we panic and we try to reteach everything before testing because we're worried that if we don't cover it all, then the scores are going to reflect that and then we're going to take the hit. But the reason that this doesn't work is because when everything is important, nothing is. And so we're giving kids a very surface review of everything rather than focusing on the content that really matters. And the reason we do that is because we don't have really good clarity about the content that matters. So this is something that I taught when we did the struggling students masterclass a few months back inside of the collective. We talked about how you can determine what is something that really needs reinforcement in terms of content, and what is content you can skip. And what we do is we.

We call it the need to knows and the nice to knows. 

And there are three criteria. For something to be a need to know. It has to have leverage, it has to have permanence, and it has to be transferable. And so we talk about those three things, and we then. And you can take your team through that and sit down and say, now listen, we're not going to cover everything that we probably need to cover before the test happen. So let's make sure that we are focusing on the need to knows versus the nice to knows. It's one session that you have with your team.

You sit down and you do it. This is not power standards and all of that. This is just, okay, let's take a look at the test, the past test, what we know about the test, the information that's been released based on this, what are the need to knows and the nice to knows, and you take them through a very simple process to help them figure it out. It's one meeting, and then you just focus on the need to knows. Another concept that we teach inside the collective. We have this great masterclass called five ins, five outs. So if you've done five in five outs, same thing applies during this review time. You are looking at the five outs, the five ins, and the five outs.

That's it. And so if you're having teachers to start reviewing with students around preparing for the upcoming test, you're not going to cover everything. You're just going to cover those need to knows versus nice to knows if you're using that framework or your 5Ns and. And 5 outs if you're using that framework. That's it. That's it. So the thing that you want to kind of ask yourself is, all right, we can't review everything, but we need to review the content that counts. And just taking a moment as a school to sit down and spend some time prioritizing what you're going to review saves you a multitude of headaches later on.

What often happens I see in schools is that we leave it up to teachers what to review. And so the review is kind of all over the place. Or we try to narrowly restrict and dictate what teachers review, but teachers approach that review with, because we haven't explained the priorities we just handed them do these things, they approach the review differently. And so you still have these uneven results. When you sit down with folks one meeting, have that time, prioritize, talk about why these are the most important things. And it's beyond the test, right? During testing season, we think that the test is the only thing that matters. The reason those things are on the test in the first place is because those are the parts of the curriculum that matter the most.

And so having that conversation with teachers helps anchor them in not only what they're going to be reviewing, but why these things and not these things? So that teachers have the understanding that they need to approach that review in a meaningful way. And it stops being this kind of. All right, okay, open up the books now. We got to review. Give me the paper again. What is it I have to do? Instead of teachers thinking about that, they are sitting there really understanding why these concepts matter.

And so when they review them, they review them in a way that matters. And that leads me to mistake number two. You see, the second thing that happens a lot of times is that we review content. We review stuff, we have kids practicing stuff, but we don't review with students the thinking. We don't strengthen their thinking, Right? So we just think if they've seen enough Questions, if they get enough practice exercises, if they get enough review packets, that they'll be okay. But a lot of students struggle not because they need more practice. They struggle because they don't really have the mental models that underlie the understanding of the content and concepts that are going to be on the.

The test. So they don't. They. They don't. They know the surf. They have a surface understanding of what's happening, but because they don't have that deeper understanding of what's happening when they encounter a question that is. That has unfamiliar content, they don't understand enough of the underlying concepts behind it to actually be able to think through an answer.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

So I learned early on, I had some really great middle school teachers, and they taught us. They taught us how to. Not just how to think. I mean, not just the content, but how to think about the content. So one of the things that they regularly did with us was they gave us stuff that was, you know, we were learning concepts like, say, a concept of math. They gave us a problem we'd never encountered before, a problem that was kind of beyond our skill level. And then they said, okay, you're struggling with a problem. How do we figure this out?

What do you know already about this mathematical concept that can help you figure it out? They did it. I remember my English teachers doing the same thing, that they would sit down and they would come across a word, and because we understood how words were formed, we could tease out some approximation of a meaning of that word, even if we'd never seen that word before, because we understood how words worked. So one of the things that distresses me when I go into classrooms is we're teaching the surface level content, but we're not teaching kids how to think. So a student who understands the concept can, you know, if I give them the same concept in the same way that they've always encountered it, they're going to give me the same answer. But if they understand the concept and they really. What did I say? I said content before.

I probably should have. I messed up, okay? If the students understand the content and they can get the content in the same way, they'll give me the same answer every single time. So they'll get. It's consistent. But if they understand the concept, if they encounter that content in a completely different way, they will still be able to answer the question correctly because they have a conceptual understanding. And we are spending a lot of time drilling and killing kids to review, and we're not spending Enough time teaching kids how to think, how to think through these concepts so that even if they encounter something that they've never seen before, they're ready. I remember when I used to teach AP English, and so some of you immediately tuned out because the AP English.

Granted, AP English is not trying to teach a second grader how to read enough to pass and show reading proficiency. But stay with me. My students were very underprepared for ap. Many of them had never had an honors class before. And the AP test was a, a totally different kind of test for them. And the AP test really tested not just do you know these things? But they tested, do you have a conceptual understanding of these bigger ideas? And so I remember drilling my kids with a test and I'm teaching them, I was an English teacher.

So they have to understand rhetorical terms, ethos, logos, pathos, things like that. So there's some tests in the multiple choice tests that are like, ethos. What is it? They give you a definition of ethos. Some of them were things like, here's a passage. What is the author relying on? Ethos, logos, pathos.

And so they had to kind of read through and understand that there's no real clear answer there.

They have to be able. I mean, you can't find a line and circle it and say, this is the answer the kids had. So I was realizing that a lot of my kids were struggling on the multiple choice practice test because they didn't have the conceptual understanding down. And so instead of reviewing ethos, locos, pathos, and you know, this is that, this is, that is one to one match, we started going, going through and giving them scenarios and teaching them how to think through the scenario and rely on their conceptual understanding. We worked on building their conceptual understanding because it was a higher leverage strategy, right? If they understood the concept, they could answer all kinds of questions. If they understood the question and the content, they could only answer questions like that given in that way. So it limited kids.

So what we were trying to do, it's helped them understand the conceptual, get a conceptual understanding. And the more that we did that, the better they performed. And we actually practiced that. We actually, you know, I would work with my kids to give them test examples that, that were outside of their knowledge, things that I'd never taught them before. And then together we would say, okay, now let's. How do we take the concept, what do you know already? What do you understand conceptually? And how do we do attack this question?

Same thing is true and the same thing can work with Things that are not AP tests. In fact, after I saw the success of doing it with my AP students, I started doing it with my on level English students, just my regular 11th graders. And they also had a test that they had to pass before they could graduate. So we started doing the same thing. We started taking. I spent more time building their conceptual understanding and having them practice on content that they'd never seen before, content that they'd never practiced before. This does two things. One, it expands the kinds of questions students can answer.

But two, it helps students go to the test and not panic. Because when my kids encountered a question that was just completely something they'd never seen before, and it happens, no matter how well you teach the curriculum, there's always a couple questions that are outliers, right? So they would see that question and then they would say they had something they could fall back on. Okay, what do I know? And it helped them make better guesses. It helped them not panic. And quite frankly, half of the reason that a lot of our kids aren't doing well on our tests are because they're panicking, because the test itself is creating anxiety or frustration. And that leads me to mistakes number three, which is that a lot of times we are so focused on trying to cover the curriculum that we ignore the conditions students will actually test in.

And so we don't teach and we don't prepare kids for the experience of the test itself, right? So kids lose points all the time for misreading directions because they run out of time. They panic when they get a question that looks unfamiliar. They don't know how to skip questions strategically, so they think they need to answer every single question, or they skip all kinds of questions. You know, they just give up and shut down, right?

So we are not preparing kids for testing conditions. 

Now, I know, I know you've probably have heard this before, but stay with me because there's one testing. Even if you prepare them, you know, you work on helping them read the directions, you work on helping build their pacing, and so they don't run out of time, you help work, you work with them to, you know, go over all the question types they're going to encounter.

You work with them to show them how to skip questions or how to make a good educated guess. Even if you're doing all of that, one thing that we ignore is that when you are sitting down for the test, as much as you may understand those testing conditions, there are times when you panic. I remember I was taking, I was going for a national board certification Now I'm a teacher. I've been teaching for a long time. I'm going through the whole process. One of the things you have to do for National Board Certification is you have to do. Do a huge portfolio. And I was.

When I was going for National Board Certification, I was like, in one of the very earliest of cohorts, right? So that portfolio was. I mean, it was just a mountain of work. I think they've fixed some things since there and then you had to send it in by a deadline. It had to be organized a certain way. That portfolio was a huge thing. I got my portfolio sent off, and then it was time for me to do the written test. And I'm a good test taker, so I wasn't really worried about the written test I had prepared.

I'd gone through all the things, and I show up on the test site the day of the written test, and it's a computer test. And I'm like, okay. Well, I mean, okay, I can use a computer. But here's what I was not prepared for. For each of the questions where they write essays, they give you a question, and you have to write this long essay about it. In the top corner of the screen was a countdown timer. No big deal. It seems like it's a good thing to have, right?

So I know how much time I have left. That countdown timer distracted me so much that I couldn't. I had a hard time focusing, and I found myself doing something I'd never done before. I was sitting there staring at the screen, and the more I stared, the more the time counted down. The more the time counted down, the more I panicked. The more I panicked, the more I stared. If I'm a teacher who's accustomed to taking tests, who is a good test taker? If I can be thrown off by a countdown timer in the corner, Imagine our students, and there are all these things that we take for granted, and they're little, but those things can stop a student from doing well on the test.

Hey, builders, real quick, before we get on with the rest of the episode, I want to talk to you about the 100% collective. If you are interested in becoming a builder and developing that 100% mindset, then the 100% collective is for you. Not only do we have monthly masterclasses, live masterclasses, where I show you how to take some work that you are are already doing, but do it like a builder. Do it in a way that is more effective, more efficient, in a way that takes the work and stops it from being drudgery and makes it actually something that feels meaningful, that moves you forward. We also have done for you toolboxes with all the tools you need to be able to implement. And we have step by step playbooks that lay out the entire process for you so you don't have to even think about it. You just take the playbook and you can, you can implement it right away in your schools. And we have a supportive community.

So this is a safe place where you can bring your challenges. 

And there are other people, other builders just like you, who are encouraging you, who are applauding you when you win, and who are giving you their experiences as well so that you can learn from each other. If you are tired of just kind of going through and doing the work the way you've always been doing it, and you're ready to stop being a leader and to start building something amazing, the 100% collective is where you need to be. Join us@brewershipuniversity.com community now. Back with the program. So are we thoroughly auditing what the testing conditions look like? And are we preparing kids for the testing conditions? You see, if we're not preparing them for the testing conditions, they may know the information, but they may get so caught up in the conditions that they can't show it.

So yes, we need to show them how to read the directions. And yes, we need to help them understand the structure of the test. And yes, we need to help them understand how to pace themselves and just skip questions. You know, there's some tests where you're penalized for skipping. There are other tests where you're penalized for the wrong answer, helping kids make those decisions. We need to spend more time preparing kids not just for the test, but the testing conditions, because they matter. Now here's the big point. Even if you know all these three things, even if you know them, do your teachers.

You see, most of the time when schools go into test mode, the message that teachers get is pressure. We start doing the countdowns, we gotta make sure we're reviewing our data. Meetings are like, okay, kids still don't know how to do addition with carrying. So we need to focus on that. And then here's some review materials and do this. And it's all pressure and it's all panic. But when you have a school wide review system in place, you can avoid all of these mistakes and you can avoid the panic and you can actually move scores. So here's what I mean by that.

Part of the reason that we have these mistakes is even if you know it, not all your teachers know it. And we're relying on our teachers to figure it out on their own or to figure it out in their PLCs and everybody's doing something different. Also, the main message is not, hey, listen, tests are coming up and we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to be fully prepared. The real message that we're sending people is testing is coming up and our behinds are on the line. So you better help these kids move these numbers. And even though it's a subtle shift, it's an important one because it determines whether or not you are going into the test calm and confident, or you're going into the test panicked and stressed. And that starts with you. You've heard me say it so many times before.

The fish rots where from the head. 

And if you are panicked and if you don't have a plan, and if you're just grabbing everything out of desperation, what do you think is gonna happen in the classrooms? So what you need to do is right now, even at the beginning, if you've got two weeks, if you've got a month, if you got six weeks, whatever it is left between now and the test, you need to take some time and come up with a school wide plan that helps everybody go into test calm and confident. And that plan needs to take into account these three things. It needs to take into account, how are we going to determine what content we need to really be focusing on for the next period of time? Before the test, your plan needs to talk about what mental models do students need to have in place so that the kids are confident. So that no matter what kind of question they encounter, they have a mental model available to them so that they can confidently engage with that question and show what they know. It's not surface level cramming, it's that thinking that shows kids how to think under these testing circumstances in a way that helps them to really shine.

And then three, how are we preparing kids for the actual testing environment? If your plan doesn't cover all those three things, then you know you're gonna stay stuck in panic, your results are not gonna be what you want them to be, or you're gonna drill and kill kids to death. When you think about it this way, teaching doesn't have to stop just cause it's testing time. When you think about it this way, it doesn't have to be about the test. Because all of these things, when you do them right, actually feed into what you're ultimately trying to accomplish through your school vision. It's not about giving kids tricks and strategies to help them pass the test. And then after they do that, they still don't know anything. It's really about, you know, especially that part about teaching those mental models.

Those. Those are transferable. Those mean that, though, if you do that, the content review and the mental model review, if you're doing those things, you're moving kids forward and it lasts beyond the test. So it's not. I remember I used to hate this. When I was a teacher, there was a test that the kids had to take. It was the state test. It was a writing test.

And because I was a writing teacher, I had to. The kids who didn't pass and had to retake the test because kids had to take the test in order to graduate. I had to give up my planning period every spring to work with kids. Not my students, but just any student who didn't pass the test during my planning period. They'd get pulled from, I don't know, whatever, so long ago. But it got pulled from somewhere and put in my room during my planning period. And I had to teach them the test.

It was a writing test, and there were two writing sections.

One was narrative and one was expository. And I remember being handed a set of materials to work with these kids, getting them ready for this writing test that they'd failed already. And the materials were so prescriptive and just, I don't know, asinine. I mean, that's how I felt, right? Because for the narrative test, the thing that we had to teach kids was if the. We had to show them how to recognize this is a narrative question. And for the narrative question, the kids had to start it. I am going to tell you.

And for the expository question, kids had to start their writing prompt. I am going to explain to you. And we taught the kids those exact words, and they used them every single time. And. And there were some kids in my session who were really good writers. And the reason they had failed the test was because their writing was more subtle and nuanced. And they didn't say, I'm going to tell you or I'm going to explain to you. So the test graders had to mark them off because it wasn't clear that they were writing a narrative or were they writing something expository.

Other kids were struggling writers, and so they were having a hard time doing their thoughts. So we're giving them, I'm going to tell you. And then they'd go off and be Random. We weren't teaching them how to write, we were teaching them how to pass the test. And I hated it. And what was really bad was after the test because that's the way that they were, you know, we were teaching them to pass the test. When they came back to class, they thought, okay, that's the way I'm supposed to write. So then we spent the next month undoing all of the bad writing that we taught them to pass the test.

That's what's happening in so many schools now is that test prep is about teaching kids really bad thinking habits, really bad ways of understanding content so that they can pass the test. And then after the test they're left with these bad ways of thinking. They're left with this very superficial understanding of the content. And it's compounds next year, they bring that into next year and we gotta undo that so they can learn something. But then the test comes and we haven't had time to get them to learn everything. So forget all that stuff I taught you about learn, do it this way. It's confusing to the kids, it is hypocritical to the adults.

So we have to find a better way.

Now if this is something that you are interested in doing, but you feel overwhelmed right now because you're, you know, you're saying that makes sense, Robin, but still. I got a countdown timer that says I got 27 school days left before testing and you want to get this done right away. We are doing a masterclass next week inside of the collective. And in that masterclass, we're going to give you the plan so you don't have to come up with it. We're going to give you a three part test review plan, including some strategies that you can hand to teachers, giving you a structure for how you can do this school wide, giving you the emails that you send to teachers to help them kind of, you know, get together with the plan, giving you the whole structure. And we're going to build the plan together. It's going to be 90 minutes it live. If you can't make it live, you should still join it because if you can't make it live, the recording will be available within 24 hours afterwards.

So we're going to just give it to you so you don't have to figure it out on your own. You bring your data, you bring whatever it is you need to the session. I'm going to give you the framework and the structure and all the pieces, all the tools, everything you need so that you can literally take it we're going to work together for 90 minutes on the call and then the next day go into your school and implement it so that you can get through the testing season with some sanity. So if you are interested in joining us for that masterclass, even if you're not a member of the collective, you want to go to buildershipuniversity.com Masterclass buildershipuniversity.com MasterClass One word and you can go ahead and join. We have a limited number of tickets available, public tickets available for people who want to join us. We're going to keep it small and intimate so that you have time for me to coach you and you have time to actually build the thing on the. But what if you. So if you go to the website and you know it says that it's not available, it means we've sold out.

But of the, of the public facing tickets, everybody in the collective, you all are going to get an email. You may have already gotten emails having you sign up. It's just part of your membership. If you can't make it live, don't worry, it'll be in the collective 24 hours later so you can watch it later. All the tools. You also get a step by step playbook as well. That way you don't have to go into testing season panicking. You don't have to go into testing season doing all these little funny little tricks that you know we've been taught to do.

You don't have to go into testing season and all good instruction stops for that month before test. And then afterwards you spend the rest of the year trying to undo all the tricks and hacks and all the other bad stuff that you've been teaching kids bad habits you've been teaching kids over testing season so that they actually are learning. Instead, you can make your review part for the test consistent with the kind of teaching and learning that you're really trying to build in your school. And it doesn't have to be panic. It can be something that is intentional, something that you can approach with calm and something that you can walk out of this with with confidence. As kids go into the test knowing that you have prepared them, that they are ready. And then when you see the test results, that's the big kicker because you really see how those hacks and strategies bubble kids. Teaching, review strategy, circling the verbs and the directions and all, all those things that we have been taught to do.

Those things give you superficial results. 

But when you do it this way, when you, when you, you, when you do it like a builder, you can get, you can still get the bump in test scores. And you know, most the builders from Buildership University can tell you that when they're doing it, when they're, when they're approaching work like a builder, you don't get this little bump. You know, you get double digit gains in one year. I mean, I mean, I'm thinking about a builder who went through this process and went from 54% of her kids proficient to 82% of her kids proficient in one year. This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about. You all are out here chasing these little teeny incremental gains and killing yourself for those and thinking that, hey, this is all we can get. But when you approach things like a builder, it all changes.

So I'm gonna challenge you this year that I know you're feeling the pressure of testing season, but you feel that pressure every year and you do all the things every year and you still don't see the gains that you wanna see. Why not try something different this year? Instead of cramming and covering all the content, why not be very, very surgical and intentional about what content you are actually going to review for kids? Just kind of doing all the review, drilling, killing kids. Why not sit down and think about what mental models do kids really need and spend some time developing those so that you get the immediate payoff for how they go into the test, but you get the long term payoff in terms of how kids are performing in your classrooms. And instead of just kind of sending kids into the testing environment or maybe doing some sort of superficial review of how the test is structured instead, why not really set kids up to be successful so that they can approach the test with calm and confidence? In other words, instead of spending another test in season panicking and being desperate and doing all the things and not seeing results, why not spend this testing season doing things differently, like a builder? I'll talk to you next time.

Hey, builders, before we close today, during today's episode, I mentioned that we are doing a live map masterclass next week and it's all about testing season. So if you want a complete plan for testing season so that you're not out here scrambling and you want to build it right there on the call with me coaching you and supporting you and helping you, if you want all the frameworks, the tools, even the emails that you send to your staff, everything you need to make this testing season different and better, then I want you to go to buildershipuniversity.com that's buildershipuniversity.com masterclass and join our upcoming Masterclass. Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at Buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have inside, you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars, and monthly live office hours with me where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hearing hitting obstacle after obstacle and you're sick of tiny little incremental gains each year, if you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join Buildership University. Just go to buildershipuniversity.com and get started writing your school success story today.