I talked to a middle schooler recently who is a proficient reader and has been participating regularly in class, albeit virtually. She shared how frustrated she was that she had to read in Round Robin style and couldn’t get into the book. For a refresher round robin is going around the classroom or the video screen reading a section at a time. Research shows, “Round robin reading (RRR) has been a classroom staple for over 200 years and an activity that over half of K–8 teachers report using in one of its many forms, such as popcorn reading. RRR’s popularity endures despite the evidence that the practice is ineffective for its stated purpose: enhancing fluency, word decoding, and comprehension.”

I am using Round Robin Reading as an example of many strategies and practices that have persisted despite their lack of effectiveness. These strategies are often about compliance and keeping everyone at the same pace and exposure to content but rarely are effective for learning. I think it is important to address this as there is fear of Covid loss and administrators are looking at solutions like adding more school days to support students. In this effort to improve outcomes for students we really have to confront the reality that if students get more time doing worksheets and get more exposure to strategies like round robin reading, we aren’t likely to improve outcomes. 

Are You Creating Dependent or Independent Learners?

Zaretta Hammond, the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, describes this as the difference between dependent and independent learners. When students are dependent learners, the cognitive load falls on the teachers. To get through the curriculum and stay on pace we often over scaffold the learning process, especially for learners who we consider to be behind, and often students fail to develop or use skills to solve problems and engage in the productive struggle that learning requires. An independent learner has strategies, habits, and skills to tackle challenges. They seek resources to solve problems such as mentors, videos, books, and experiences and have the ability to navigate the challenges and persevere. Instead of creating systems that demand compliance, what if instead we take the time to model and guide students to develop skills like time management, goal setting, focus, and self-regulation to become the independent learners they need to be. 

Here is an example that I shared in Learner-Centered Innovation:

When I was the literacy coach for our school, we noticed that many students were going through their day without the opportunity or expectation to read. Many students were performing below grade level on standardized tests and struggled to read the textbooks and assigned novels. Attempting to support students, teachers had resorted to creating PowerPoint presentations to summarize and convey key facts; books were read aloud, and teachers played audio recordings of novels so everyone could follow along at the same pace while short passages and multiple-choice worksheets were widely used to assess comprehension. 

These strategies, although well intended, do not help students to become independent readers. As I observed classes and talked to students, it became very clear that if our students never read on their own or made meaningful decisions for themselves in school, they were going to struggle with these things out of school. While we as teachers grappled with this very real issue, our professional learning consisted of disparate events that offered no help. Our English language arts team department wanted to do better for our students, but I also knew that if they knew a better way, they would have been doing it already. We needed to learn new strategies to improve, and we had to shift the culture of our desired student outcomes and align how we were designing and facilitating the learning expectations. 

To achieve our goal of increasing reading practice and ultimately literacy, our English department had to shift our meeting structures from examining what we wanted and what we were teaching to reviewing student work to find out what they were learning. To learn about new strategies that we could teach our students, we read the book 7 strategies for Comprehension and came together after school to engage in collaborative conversation that allowed teachers to experience the new strategies in their own reading and learning. We then planned ways to support students in their diverse classes. Each week, we independently read about a new strategy, rotated modeling lessons for our colleagues, and collaborated on a plan to put the new ideas into practice. 

One distinction here is that we did not create a plan for one specific lesson; we thought about how to integrate the new strategy across various lessons and develop multiple iterations of the strategy to inform our practice. To ensure we were working to close the knowing-doing gap, we partnered up each week to observe each other and learn from the variety of methods we were each putting into practice. At the beginning of our weekly meetings, we shared what we were learning. The open reflection not only allowed us to create a culture of transparency in our team but also pushed us to try out new ideas and build off one another’s successes and challenges. 

We shifted our conversations from what content and page number we were teaching that week to what we were learning and how we could impact student outcomes. This also meant that we had to bring evidence of learning from all students connected to our desired outcomes. We had to move beyond the spreadsheets and percentages to actually understand what was happening in our classrooms. We spent our time digging deep into our problems of practice, looking at student work, and interrogating our practices to ensure we were truly meeting the needs of the learners. 

In spite of the pressure to focus on short-cycle passages and tests to assess comprehension skills in isolation, we continued to let students choose books that interested them, read and discuss books and other types of text with peers, and further investigate relevant questions. Given what we learned during those eight weeks, we maintained our relentless focus on learning, experimenting, refining, and analyzing the impact our new methods had on students as the year progressed. We were empowered educators who were moving beyond standards and scripted curriculum. At the end of the following year, we continued to work together to improve our practices, and we had almost doubled reading proficiency from 34 percent to 66 percent, which has continued to improve in subsequent years. Most importantly, we learned that we could break a cycle and redesign a system to achieve better outcomes for our students and our teachers.

It’s Not More, It’s Different

This learning cycle didn’t require adding more learning time; it required changing how we used our time. We looked at the existing time and adjusted priorities to align our work in staff meetings via grade-level collaboration. The clear priorities provided a focus for administrators and coaches who worked with the teachers. Learner-centered innovation is not just about creating something new but doing something that yields better outcomes because of what we have created. With that in mind, we asked questions like, “How do we know that our idea is working?” and “What is the impact on desired student outcomes?” 

When we focus our efforts on what we want to accomplish, not simply the metrics or data from an isolated test or standards but on the type of student we want to create, we might find that our meetings and our learning experiences become more impactful. As we think about options to address the challenges that Covid has caused, the tendency is to continue to add on and do more. What if the goal is not to keep adding more or cover it all, and instead we make intentional choices to prioritize, integrate and do things differently based on your vision and values to help achieve you achieve your desired goals?

Innovation in education is not just about adding; it’s also about subtracting. Prioritizing what matters most can help us go deeper and create better learning experiences that meet today’s and tomorrow’s desired outcomes.