Student achievement is impacted by external factors beyond the control of students and teachers. Originating outside of the classroom, there are two distinct types of factors interrupting the daily rhythms of teaching and learning: personal circumstances in students’ lives, and the increasing demands of education system policies and mandates. Teachers struggle to make sense of and manage the influence these factors bring to bear on their students and themselves.
“It’s exhausting for teachers [to have] so many students in need. Social systems need to support these students and their families because that is who is in our schools.” —principal, public middle school
“Understanding what’s happening in a student’s life is at least half my job as an educator.” —math teacher, private middle school
To create this environment, teachers first work to create an appropriate classroom climate where all students are empathic citizens and then devise engagement strategies that encourage all students to achieve. While this essential work is under the control of teachers, widely divergent circumstances such as poverty, hunger, homelessness, exposure to crime and violence, divorce or a death in the family, relocation, stress, bullying or peer pressure, hormonal changes and other socioeconomic and life factors that influence each individual student in episodic and chronic ways is not. Effective teachers know that these factors do not determine if a student can learn, but they can overwhelm students and make it very difficult for them to properly tune their minds to learning. This can severely impede a student and teacher’s ability to reach learning targets on a timeline in sync with summative assessment schedules. As much time and effort is put into understanding a student’s external factors and providing a stable, safe place for children to learn as is put into lesson planning and teaching, yet, this is rarely evident in teacher evaluations. It’s also little comfort to teachers and students that value-added measures are designed to account for extenuating circumstances, it’s information coming far too late for teachers and students to act on. It also puts students and teachers at a disadvantage as teachers need to find time to re-teach prior lessons, and students find it harder and harder to correct poor summative assessment scores.
Staff at a turn-around school expressed deep concern for the large population of children who were deemed “homeless” by state definition. They cite the daily impacts of scheduling transportation to and from the homeless destination, be it a park or group home, as well as the hurdles in communicating with families over issues of homelessness and hunger.
A middle school math teacher told us how he delivers multiple summative tests throughout the semester to help even out the bumps in a student’s life. He talked about the relationship between divorce or the death of a grandparent on formative and summative assessments stating the impact to the student’s overall grade can be profound when the frequency of assessments are small.
“Feedback in the current system has become so complex and detailed that we need feedback on the feedback and the real purpose gets lost in translation and complexity. The other thing that I have realized is that we need to be really sure that we design feedback for the purpose served and make sure that it is really providing us with the correct data and not something else. Standardized tests are a good example to illustrates this. They are used to gauge student skills but I feel that what they are really providing feedback on is socioeconomic status and how well the individual can fit into the little box we call school.” –11th grade History teacher, Public High School
“We are not making widgets. We are making humans!” —principal, public middle school
In a single year, school districts must enact national and state policies and mandates along with local initiatives. Just this year alone, school districts all across the country are looking to implement new teacher and principal evaluations, teacher effectiveness standards, classroom observation rubrics, data-driven assessments, Common Core standards for English Language Arts and Math, the Dignity for All Students Act (to protect children from discrimination and bullying) and the Healthy Hunger Free Child Act—all set to take effect simultaneously. These external mandates affect classrooms and teaching in subtle but important ways. Whereas teachers usually talk about an activity in the service of student needs, they now begin to talk about what they should do in the service of the rubrics and mandates and in the process losing a sense of flow and purpose in their teaching.
Teachers also struggle to process and interpret data sets and apply what they learn within the classroom. Teachers must process results of district assessment tests (sometimes given several times within a period of weeks), assessment tests that the school creates and comprehensive state assessments. Teachers themselves often need to input test results and this process often takes away from lesson planning time. With little training in data analysis and no time to reflect and absorb the results, teachers feel “data-drowned” versus data driven. There is a feeling that mandated assessments, evaluations or professional development programs are overemphasized or misinterpreted.
“When you talk about feedback, I can tell you what I do is look at data constantly. I have a stack of data right now that is this thick and in a week, when I go to my next subject or a meeting I will get more to add to that stack...I can analyze data from my class, I can analyze data from another school, I can analyze data from school-to-school, I can analyze data from our state or our county against the state, I can analyze data from student-to-student and from class-to-class.” –6th grade science teacher, public middle school
