2021 - The year of Simplicity
“Simple is power. Simplicity comes out from the synthesis of experience and wisdom. Simple is natural, easy, nice, unpretentious.”
Prior to my experience with the COVID19 pandemic, I would have dismissed the notion that simple is power with an ignorance born of contentment. I liked my life. I embraced everything that life had to offer, happily rushing around from one thing to the next, alternating between family time, work, travel, and more. I hurried through days with total unawareness that we are guaranteed nothing in our lives. (see previous blog here.)
And then everything.
Just.
Stopped.
I have been in mourning for the life that I miss, often finding it difficult to focus as day after day drags on in this new normal. As weeks have turned into months, in what is soon to turn into a year, I have had time to reflect. I now realize that the life that I treasure IS simplicity cloaked in distractions of the unimportant. Underneath all of the busy-ness, all of the hurrying, the planning, and the day in and day out flow of life, are those things that matter. Health and relationships. Nothing else actually matters without those two. They have always been there, they are just now front and center, where they belong.
As I turn the page of the calendar from 2020 to 2021, I have settled on my one word which I will use as a teaching point as I lean into what I am meant to learn this year. That one word is Simplicity.
While I work on this journey personally, I am left wondering, what does simplicity have to do with education? How are those two connected? How can I carry this message throughout the work that I do? For now, I have come across two pieces of advice.
Become a “Keeper of the Core” - Simplifying WHAT we Teach
In his book Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning (ASCD 2108) Mike Schmoker writes, “The key to success is not innovation; it is a combination of "simplicity and diligence" applied with fierce, exclusive devotion to what is truly most effective (Collins, 2001b, p. 104) … Leaders must be seen as clarifiers, focusers, "keepers of the core" who incessantly "cut through the clutter … to distinguish between what is merely important and what is imperative … those few things you must never forget.”
How can you be a “keeper of the core?” This begins with a deep understanding of the critical knowledge for each grade level. If there was ever a time for this, it is now. With less time for learning, hybrid and concurrent teaching models in play, we need absolute clarity on what matters most. Achieve the Core provides Priority Instructional Content advice which can be used as a springboard for that conversation. As you consider how to narrow the focus, I encourage you to complete this sentence: “The 3 most important things my students need to learn in mathematics this year are …” Come back to these big ideas in multiple ways. Provide opportunities for students to revisit and learn these concepts over time. Create routines, problems, assessments and activities around these 3 big ideas so that deep learning can occur.
Break the Addiction to doing too many things - Simplifying HOW we Teach
Apparently the problem of over complicating life has existed for a long time because Confucius shared his sage advice with us somewhere around 500 BC: “Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated.” Today, Schmoker writes, "social-sector organizations" must overcome their addiction to doing too many things. To succeed, they must "attain piercing clarity" about what is truly most effective and "then exercise the relentless discipline to say, 'No thank you.’ It is critical that schools learn that "best practice" is rarely new practice. On the contrary, the most effective actions are "well-known practices, with the extra dimension that they [are] reinforced and carried out reliably.” - (ASCD 2018)
Educators feel and instinctively know this. Many have thought or said out loud, “Not another initiative,” or “Here goes that pendulum swinging back again.” The key to simplifying how we teach is to focus on those well-known practices that have the best results and then “Carrying them out reliably.”
Simple, right? Then why don’t we do this? It seems that everyone has an idea, a solution or a plan. We are bombarded with messages and ideas that hold promise for our classrooms. But when we bounce from one idea to another, never fully implementing and staying the course with an idea, we end up on an instructional roller coaster. We travel through twists and turns, and flips and loops, but end up right back where we started. In keeping with the idea of simplicity, it is imperative that we know which ideas are worthy of focus and intention.
We can take our cue from John Hattie, Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey and colleagues in their work Visible Learning for Mathematics: What works best to Optimize Student Learning (Corwin, 2017). In this book, Hattie et. al. share their meta-analysis of data of the instructional practices that have the greatest impact and those that actually have a negative impact.
This information is powerful, and should be considered by all educators. The researchers have used the barometer of influence to answer the question of what has the greatest impact on student learning. In a normal year, we would see an effect size of 0.4. Any influence with a effect size greater than 0.4 means that factor impacts learning greater than what we would expect to take place in a typical year. To date, more than 200 instructional strategies have been sorted using this scale. Here are the top 10 influences:
You can read about each of these influences and use the website here as a way to easily search through the instructional strategies that have been studied. Equally important to those strategies that work, is understanding those that either have little or negative impact.
The comprehensiveness of this research can be overwhelming, and so I’d like to walk us back to the theme of this blog: Simplicity. How do you take this enormous body of information and bring it back to simple actionable steps? Like the exercise around becoming a keeper of the core, select one instructional influence to focus on. This does not need to be one in the top 10. Let me give you an example.
Not labeling students has an effect size of 0.61. This means that if we stop labeling students, we will see growth in one year that exceeds what we would typically see in a normal year. If we make a commitment to stop labeling students as “my low kids” and “my high flyers,” we can help students significantly. We take this information and we stay the course on this. We learn why this is harmful, how to better describe students' understanding, and how to work with and group our students in more effective ways. I offer suggestions around not labeling students in my blog A World without Labels.
Perhaps you choose to focus on strategies to integrate prior knowledge with an influencer rating of 0.91. You stay the course on that idea, keeping the message simple, “We are working on strategies to integrate prior knowledge because we know this makes a difference.”
It matters less what you focus on, and more that you focus. By embracing proven, impactful influences, positive change happens.
Now it’s up to you …
Ironically, keeping things simple is not going to be a simple lesson to learn.
I know it will be a conscious decision for me to tune out the clutter. But, I also know, that we are at a tipping point in what we can handle as educators during this traumatic year of instruction. By combining a plan for simplifying WHAT we teach with simplifying HOW we teach, we have a simpler roadmap to go forward. Not only do we owe simplicity to our students, but we owe this to ourselves.
Kind wishes for a simpler 2021!
Sue
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