Most of us have experienced getting report cards assessing our success in school. Vanessa, Ellen, Lisa, and Aron talk about how we can understand and evaluate student success in other ways. Building off of the previous conversation on student engagement, they consider how we can do best by the young people that we've been tasked with helping educate. The five questions guiding this topic are: 

1. [01:40] What is student success?
2. [10:54] Why is student success important?
3. [17:07] What are we measuring success for?
4. [24:26] What are some ways that students can demonstrate or achieve success?
5. [29:12] How might a school go about defining student success for their context? What kinds of things could be considered?

For more info about our team and this podcast, jump to [34:14]. A transcript of each podcast, citations, and additional information accompany each podcast and are also available on our website at nextschoolquebec.com. Music is by Neal Read, he's at nealread.ca. 

Hello and welcome to ChangEd, a podcast that lifts the curtain on educational change and brings you into the room with the people doing it. My name is Vanessa, and joining me in the studio are Aron, who we met in episode one on innovative high school models;

Hello.

Ellen, who joined us in episode two on Design Thinking;

Hi!

And Lisa, who is in our latest episode on student engagement;

Hi everyone.

Thanks for coming in for a chat. Before we dive into our regular five questions, I think it's important to set the stage a bit with this one, especially since it segues nicely from our last conversation. To quickly recap, student engagement is different from student success in that success can be evaluated through metrics such as performance on final examinations or high school graduating rates, for example. Many people consult different ranking directories to inform decisions they make about sending kids to school. Now, those are just a few examples of student success, but that's the topic of today's episode. Student engagement, on the other hand, is much more challenging to measure because of the many dimensions it comprises, including academic, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement. Engagement is also a deeply personal experience. The way you feel engaged may be much different from how someone else does important to this conversation, and in the context of Québec is that student success rates here are very high. We've got something like 80% graduation rates. These numbers, like Lisa said last time, are nice numbers that make it really easy to think, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it.” But just because kids are graduating and have learned to pass tests doesn't mean that they're leaving with some sort of spark or catalyst towards the future, and it doesn't mean that they have learned how to learn. So, let's get into it.

Question one. What is student success?

I mean, I think there's a number of different ways you can frame it, but the most common one, and you said this at the beginning, is around the metrics. So, what are the grades? What are the retention rates? What are the graduation rates? Those types of things. And I think they're a false measure or we put too much stock in them because they don't really tell us about a student's experience of schooling.

Yeah. And I think this idea that success involves this connection to post-secondary is a bit limiting because some students don't go on to post-secondary and schools should still be serving them. So, I think we have to ask, when we talk about student success, who's defining it and why are they defining it the way they're defining it.

I totally agree. Why is it limited to academic success and does not encompass some of these other dimensions of success that the literature talks about?

That's a really good point though, Aron is who's defining it. Because I mean, education in Canada is funded by taxpayers, so everyone feels like they have an investment.

Mm-hmm.

Everyone feels like they know it because they all went to school. So, they do feel connected to it and it's relatable, whereas other aspects aren't necessarily relatable to people's experiences. I don't think people have actually asked the right questions about student success. They compare it to their own experiences. You know, and then, you hear the phrase as well, if it was good enough for me and I was fine, then it's fine for them without any regard for the complexity of the world, the way it exists now. The introduction of, you know, something simple, we talk about the internet and I, I'm not suggesting the internet is simple, but the, the presence of it, is just so ubiquitous now. But that has radically changed how we access information, how we connect with one another. That should factor into how we start to think about education and engagement and how we demonstrate knowledge or understanding. And in some ways it is, but in a lot of ways it isn't. And it is still reflective of what someone's experience was 30 or 40 years ago.

Right, especially if you think about the teacher being the person defining for their classroom what success might look like. I was teaching a course this semester for undergrads who are in the teaching program here, and they're all becoming teachers, and a lot of them really had a very fixed idea of what student success looked like. When they would share assessment ideas or evaluation ideas, they would, uh, always think about it in terms of this idea about post-secondary, like that was the sort of through line with a lot of these students is they're like, hey, how can this help students get into post-secondary or succeed in post-secondary? And I would push back every time, but by the end of the course, they still seemed to have this idea. And there's a concern there where, because teachers have a lot of control in their classrooms, if they really don't think about success expansively, then the types of students who will be served by their lessons are only the ones who are trying to go for post-secondary.

Do you see this changing?

I think the idea of competency-based assessment is getting more popular and that allows students to realize, or potential teachers to realize that the way that we measure success doesn't have to include every single thing a student does. They can have multiple opportunities to demonstrate that they've figured a competency out. So, I think there is a little bit of openness to, to this idea that, success can be demonstrated in different, uh, learning opportunities. But still, I feel like there's a lot of students or potential teachers who are thinking about what that competency is supposed to aim towards as fitting within a, like a conventional going on to university kind of headspace.

Maybe this is a good time to talk a little bit about the context here in Québec for people who are not familiar with competency-based curriculum models.

Sure. The way the curriculum works here with the competencies, it's less skills based in that, you know, there are certain skills you have to demonstrate. The competencies, you have multiple ways, and you can use multiple skills to demonstrate your mastery of a competence. There's about three of them per subject area now.

So, I pulled up the Québec Education Program just to give some examples of competencies: uses information, solves problems, exercises critical judgment, uses creativity... these are all examples of competencies.

And really it's giving students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their competence or their mastery of that competency throughout the grade level and the course that they're in. You master it by the time you're finished your academic career, here in grade 11, that's what you're striving towards as opposed to check, check, check, check, in Grade 9, check, check, check, check in Grade 10. The curriculum is one thing and to have a competency-based curriculum, but if you don't have a competency-based assessment model, then you're asking students to kind of tap dance around things that I don't think it's necessarily fair to ask them of. And there are people that are pushing back on that and recognize the discrepancy between them, but it's, it's a difficult system to try and shift and change. It takes a lot of investment of time and effort that is not always available for people to make the kind of change that may very well be agreed upon but takes a considerable amount of time to enact.

Totally agree. What Vanessa was just saying, 'uses information' is way more complicated to assess than does this student know what a mitochondrial DNA is?

Yeah. And I think the ministerial exams that still exist, they do, um, fit within a skills-based approach to teaching. It doesn't really work with what we're discussing, this competency-based approach. And so, if the assessment still is skills-based and if teachers were raised in that system, and if admin were raised in that system, then all of these stakeholders, their assumptions about student success still are not going to allow that expansive understanding of what it might be for a different student who might have a different idea of what they want to do with their life.

Right. And so, there's no alignment between the ministerial exams that lead you to post-secondary school and the evaluation of competencies that could actually help discover this kind of spark or catalyst for the future that does not align with post-secondary. So that's how they're misaligned in terms of the way that society privileges and prioritizes the trajectory to post-secondary.

Yeah. I think it's important to note that, you know, in all of this, there's some balance that's required. So nowhere in this discussion are we suggesting that testing should be eliminated. That's not it exactly, though, in certain capacities, I would certainly say that's true. I'm not sure that the ministerial exams achieve what they're intended to, and the weight that's placed upon them is reflective of what a student actually knows and understands. We're not suggesting that, you know, exams are out and let kids do whatever they want. And this is the argument I get from students all the time, is they think it's one or the other, and it's not. There is a place for all of those types of tools, but I think what's lacking when we try to measure student success is the bigger picture.

Right.

We're so good at creating a snapshot in that particular moment, but what does that actually mean overall? And so, it's not hard to do a quiz or a test or exam just to check people's understanding in order to develop a more complex concept, that's not a bad thing. But then is it realistic to think that a student's understanding of a particular subject area can be distilled into two hours, in the month of May, you know, in Grade 11. Like, I'm just not convinced of that. And I've heard the argument too, that, well, we need to teach them, you know, how to take an exam as a skill, but if you think about as an adult, how often you actually do that…

Never.

It's, it's not right.

Never.

You know, the closest thing you get is your driver's exam, and you're allowed to do that again if you don't pass.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so there's certain things that I think, and I'm not saying exams, I, I think it's a flawed argument to say that exams are a skill that you need to learn in life, because there's the assumption that people can internalize what that experience means and then transfer that over to other experiences in their lives and I don't think that's normal for most people to do without some help or some instruction. But at the same time, we need student success measures. We can't just throw them out. So, I think the greater challenge is how do we incorporate engagement as a measure of overall student success? How can we say that a student may not have a 90 or an A or whatever other measure there is, but they are really good and really passionate about this and here's how it's going to help them. Here's how it models creative thinking or the kind of, um, critical thinking that perhaps is really going to serve them well in whatever path they choose afterwards. That's really difficult to do. You can't distill that to a number on a report card.

So I'm just going to summarize and recap what we are defining as student success: as subjective, as relevant to the context and the parameters that you, in particular your community or group is setting to be defined as success, and the measures that you choose in order to define that.

Yeah. And I think that we, um, we're four white people here having this discussion, and I think we sometimes forget that cultural, uh, conventions often define what we see as success. Like the idea in, uh, our Eurocentric culture that everything has to be written is something that a lot of other cultures don't agree with. So, when you have such diverse classrooms, it's sort of irresponsible and I think unfair to just assert one's own understanding of what success means. So, this conversation we're having here, maybe these kinds of conversations should be happening explicitly in schools with students so that there's less assumptions and more shared understandings of what success might look like.

Question two, why is student success important? You were talking about the metrics, Lisa, and we were talking about how you can't just throw it all out and not pay attention to what metrics are telling us about student success. So why is it important to have those numbers? Why is it important to set a definition and then measure it against what you have outlined as your definition of success?

I don't I think it has to be numbers. It just has to be some kind of feedback, some kind of information to know whether or not what it is you are teaching or practicing or doing together as a group is landing or not, or needs to be iterated or serving the community or not serving the community that you're working with. Some kind of input so that you can alter your behavior or assessment or whatever it is you're doing, if necessary.

Yeah. And how are those metrics being used? Education is accountable to the public because the public funds it. And so numbers or grades or statistics, they're easy to distill into information. That's deeply ingrained in people, how they measure things. And I remember one of the challenges when we brought in the IB program, when you're using the grading scale, if it's a six-point scale and a student gets a three, that is not equal to 50%. That's the achievement that they have. So, to get people to really think less numerically and just about what the, the value, the descriptor attached to that value actually means. That was working with teachers and it was radical. Now try to share that information with the wider public, when you're saying to people, this band of students, have an achievement level of a three on a six-point scale, the immediate reaction is, oh my God, they're all failing, they have 50%, which here is a fail. And that's not it. And so, there's a, a real re-education about how we can use the metrics to actually explain achievement. But that, again, it's a radical shift. I mean we're talking mostly amongst ourselves about people familiar with education. Imagine the people who are less familiar but rely on their own experience to draw from, which is normal, everyone does that, how do you get them to understand that? And the immediate question I always get is, well, why do we have to do it that way? Why can't we just keep it the way that we do? And my argument is always, what is the message that is sent to the child, and it often is a child at that point. It's this, we're talking about going all the way back into third and fourth grade where it becomes really pivotal. People keep track of these grades. If they get a 50%, their self-worth goes straight down. How on earth could you be engaged and excited about school if the feedback that you're getting is that you're not good enough. You are a failure. And they internalize that very quickly and then disengage from school at a very young age. And I, I remember reading it, I don't have the study off the top of my head. I can look it up. Around fifth or sixth grade, this is a pivotal moment, especially for boys. I think it about even be fourth or fifth grade, where if they become disengaged and the message they get is that they're not good enough, they're not good at, they're not good at math, they're not good at spelling. They stay there. They stay not good at those things because they don't see another path, because that's the feedback they've gotten consistently. And it's not feedback in the sense of, we've talked to you, we've worked with you, we've had conversations. It's not the kind of student-teacher conference, kind of...it's the number.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That's really what it comes down to is the number.

And that number is so, um, it's the only thing students can see when they're presented with it. I, um, I did some research with a bunch of grade eight students and the school I was working at, they had two different digital portals where they could check their mark. One was like the grade book portal, and one was Google Classroom. And on Google Classroom, the teachers would, uh, provide feedback in the form of written responses. Whereas the grade book just had the number. The teachers at the school were all required to make sure that their grade book was up to date, but the Google Classroom feedback wasn't as important to the administration. And so, most of the teachers didn't have as much of the written feedback. And when I went to ask teachers about it, they all said that they thought the written feedback was more important, but the requirement was to have the grade book updated. And then when I talked to students, they said that they also would prefer to have written feedback, but when I pressed them on it, they said that they only really checked the grade book, the numbers. And so, when you have those numbers, it's actually harder to see or acknowledge the written feedback. And it's, I think when we are talking about student success being something that is, uh, diverse and personal, these numbers are not diverse and personal. They're measuring each other, each student against one another, and I don't know that serves anyone.

It's the same, you know, if you're marking an assignment and you write comments on it and, uh, give them feedback, and then the grade comes on the last page. How many times have you seen students flip, flip, flip, flip, flip right to the grade? They never actually read the comments and then the teacher will say, well read the comments because they'll help you next time. But unless that task is being repeated, they're actually not helpful for next time in a lot of cases. They're isolated to that particular task and can no longer be of assistance to the student anymore. They really should be getting the feedback early, so that they're allowed to make the changes based on that feedback, and then have it be assessed. And that makes way more sense.

But then it takes time, which is something that we talked about before. In that model, you are required to read that assignment twice, which, if you don't have the time to read it once, providing feedback, getting it back again, assessing it, and then having more feedback, it winds up being a lot of work. And even if your values are in line with that and it makes sense as an assessment model, you can get lost in the moment of well, I need to get these done. I have two hundred students. I need to provide the feedback, pass it back, give them the number, and wipe my hands of this.

Because I got to move on.

And I think that segues nicely into this philosophical question of what is measuring success for? What is the purpose of actually taking these measurements? What do they tell us and what are we using that information for?

Question three, what are we measuring success for?

I think we've talked around this notion of most of it being to attend a post-secondary institution. But for those students who are not attending a post-secondary institution, and it was never their intention nor their goal, what does information about their success and along what vectors of success is important for them to know in order to use that information effectively?

Well, because we're situating this all around academic success, and we're not really thinking about personal success, and what that looks like for people in different capacities. I think in society we need all different types of people to be able to contribute to that kind of success. And if we tip the scales too far in one direction, then we create that imbalance and we're constantly trying to either rebalance it or fix a problem that we've created for ourselves. So how does a student, say at...grade three, what is that, grade you're eight or nine in grade three? How do they then, start to conceptualize of their own success, their own confidence, their sense of self-worth, their ability to solve problems for themselves? How does that factor in? Because I, I would argue that all of those things, if you feel confident even in the idea of failure, then you're willing to engage in new ideas and complex challenges without as much fear and anxiety. But if we don't set the stage for that, then you can see why people recede, especially young people recede, and aren't willing to take those risks. And the number of times I've heard teachers say how important it is to take risks and don't be afraid to fail, that's a lie. It's just a flat out lie. You should be afraid to fail because that is the only currency you have in order to move forward. And if you aren't able to access that currency, then you are very limited in the directions that you can take in your life.

Yeah. How do we start shifting that mentality towards a balance between academic and personal success?

And I think we've touched on this before in different aspects, but how do we bridge that space between some of the things that are already happening in elementary school and translate them into a high school environment?

But we have that. We have the Broad Areas of Learning and the Cross-Curricular Competencies in the Québec curriculum. They've been there for ages, like since its inception, but they're not utilized. So, there's a few schools that have a section for comments on that, on the report card. But again, it's not really referred to and it's not taken very seriously because it doesn't offer the currency that they need. When you read the document itself, and we've done this in some of the classes that I've taught, when you read the document about the Cross-Curricular Competencies or Broad Areas of Learning, they are pretty good.

Yeah.

And they actually start to talk about these things in very real terms. And we were talking earlier about the competencies and how you translate that. The information's there, but the problem is it's not useful.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't fit with that assessment or evaluation model that is in existence. How do you write an exam based on the Cross-Curricular Competencies on 'exercising critical judgment', 'using creativity', 'solving problems', like those are examples that you need over time and you can provide the feedback. Like, in elementary school, you know, where you can extend on that, where you're actually reporting on how...on a person. And I think that's a key moment where we transition away from thinking from a very empathetic perspective about, this is a young person learning how to learn to this is a subject that they need to know.

Yeah. I think that really points out how important it's to sort of break down that divide between academic and personal successes. I remember reading some research a few years ago about standardized exams and how we think they're measuring what someone's learned in school, but they actually correlate much more to someone's socioeconomic situation or what types of supports they're getting outside of school. And so, when we think about what does it mean to succeed academically, that's very tied to this idea of what it means to succeed personally. And I think as we are discussing, in elementary those connections are understood and sort of, um, taken for granted. But in high school, we try to really purify this academic thing and act like it doesn't have to do with what types of successes students are having, outside of school. But of course, if someone's coming to school well fed, had a good night's sleep, had a place to do their homework, they're going to quote unquote, academically succeed much more readily. So I think we need to, especially in Canada, where education has such a history of trying to assimilate everyone to a certain idea of what it means to be like a upper middle class Eurocentric, um, knowledge holder, I think we need to start pushing back and be like, hey, we have to look at success on a personal basis, on a cultural basis, and then build that into what we mean by academic success.

Can the public system do that?

I think it has to.

I wonder if now is not a good time to talk about the bridge to NEXTschool and student success? How that model might offer a way forward, because to date, we have not actually given a lot of information about what NEXTschool is. Using the ministry requirements for education in Québec, Noel Burke, who we heard from in the first episode, has come up with a blueprint for what's possible, and then different stakeholders are invited to give feedback on that model. And in one particular context, the different people involved agreed on a timetable that allows them a chunk of time for collaboration or professional development.

Like a full day every third day, I believe, right?

Yep.

Right.

Yeah.

Yep. Two really full days of teaching, one day of time to commit to what their specific needs are. Importantly, like Lisa was saying, gives time for teachers to come together and work together.

With NEXTschool, one of the things that we're trying to do is get people to continue to critically think about what they're doing and that's both the teachers and the students. So, asking teachers to think more intentionally about what they're doing and providing the time for them to be able to do that, and that's often the biggest obstacle is time. So, when they have that reflective time, not only individually, but in these collaborative groups, then they can start to think of things more dynamically and they can start to have more conversations that are intentional. They're still talking about students, especially students who are experiencing challenges or things that students need. They're still talking about those things, but it's often on the fly and in between, and it lacks a certain amount of coherence because they don't have the time to make it coherent. And now, with NEXTschool and the, the schedule that we're, um, piloting with these entire days where teachers have planning time together, I think there's hope for that. So, intentionally carving out the time. The other part is really getting people to think about the students as learners and individuals and as people. So, pushing that empathy piece I think is a really important one. And I'm not suggesting that teachers don't have empathy. That's not it at all. But again, it comes with a piece of intentionality, is having the time to be able to think through these things and to make decisions and create action from those, in the moment and not at the end of the term when we finally have a minute to breathe. When we have these now times and spaces embedded within the, the timetable of the school, teachers are able to do these check-ins every three or four days. That's amazing. Like, and the idea that they'll all have the opportunity to do it together and they're not chasing each other down, I think that's really pivotal to moving the needle in the direction that we're trying to.

Question four. What are some ways that students can demonstrate or achieve success?

Anyway? Like that's honestly the answer, right?

Yep.

Any way they possibly can. It's your job as the teacher to set the parameters for them within reason. And so, we talk about you have, um, obligations to the curriculum, you have obligations to reporting structures. All of those things still exist. It's our job to figure out that system for them, not their job to fit within it. And so, if they come to me and they say, I want to build a model of this. Then we have a conversation about, okay, why? What does that mean? Here's the criteria based on, and I try to create the criteria, so it's always based on the learning and not the outcome. So, here's the learning criteria. Tell me how your idea is going to allow you to demonstrate your understanding of these criteria. I find it's the conversation that is so key.

I totally agree.

And, and to people listening, it's like, well, when do you have time to do that? And I'm, I'm not suggesting it's easy. But there are ways when you can have student conferences and you have tasks set up in your classroom where students are doing good work and gives you time to bring, you know, a group of three students aside to have a conversation with them. I think too often we're not having those conversations that facilitate that kind of confidence in a student to choose a method that maybe is a little less traditional. But is going to allow them to show the depth of understanding in ways that no piece of paper ever could. It's more of a theoretical question, is we have to allow them the space to mess up, and not have that be their grade. How do we disrupt that?

That links to how we can incorporate student definitions of success. Building in student self-evaluation from the very beginning where they're learning how to give feedback and learning how to evaluate one another based on the criteria that they define for themselves. When we give feedback and engage in feedback loops, it's really important to say, hey, I've decided that I need specific feedback along these parameters because this is where I'm learning to grow. I already know that I'm really terrible at...public speaking, but I'm going to work on that another time. Right now I'm working on this. So, understanding yourself as an individual and creating those circumstances as an educator - I'm not saying that's easy - there's a lot of front loading that that kind of approach requires. But it is possible to work towards including students' own understandings of success and linking their own learning to the things that we are evaluating. To helping them look at the curriculum, look at the Broad Areas of Learning, and make those connections themselves to support their own understanding or trajectory and discovery of sparks and catalysts for future planning, that kind of thing.

And I a hundred percent agree that that's the best practice. Because that's so difficult, we need to remember it's not just on teachers' back, like this is a funding issue. This is an issue related to the resources that teachers have to do the kind of work they want to do. And when there's such limited resources and teachers are teaching too many classes, or students are attending too many different classes, nobody has the time or the energy to do these best practices in measuring a success or thinking about success. So, I just wanted to push back a little bit on the idea that this is all on teachers, because...

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

NEXTschool is...

Absolutely.

...a great example of how, without the support of admin and, uh, even the school board in terms of rethinking the schedule, this isn't going to happen.

Mm-hmm.

Well, and that's what's allowing it to work, I think is that commitment, and there's a collective willingness to try. And I think we also have to acknowledge that for students, we can give them these opportunities, we can ask them to engage in conversation with us, but we can't be disappointed when they don't know how to do that or when they don't do it well because we've trained them extremely well not to do that. To only answer the question the way that the teacher wants it to be answered.

Yeah, everybody knows how to beat the system.

It takes persistence. And I think one of the advantages of the commitment that the schools that we've been working with NEXTschool is there is a collective will from a small group of people to figure out how this works. And as we document it, we get more evidence to show people so that they say, that's a great idea, but how do I do that? Then we can show them this is how you do it, because this is how it's being done by teachers just like yourself in this particular context.

And you don't have to do it exactly how they did.

Mm-hmm.

Take it and run with it, adapt it to your context. But yeah, I agree with what you said, Aron. Yeah. Thanks for saying that. I think that's really important,

Especially in schools with like 40 kids in a classroom. How are you going to work with each of them on a personal basis. Like I think one of the biggest issues with education is funding and that's, uh, I think when we have these conversations, it's all well and good to try to fix the system, but it's sometimes external factors that need to actually be leveraged.

Question five. How might a school go about defining student success for their context? What kinds of things could be considered?

You gotta know your people. You gotta know the students because one of the things we've learned throughout the trajectory of NEXTschool is how important it is to allow space to create something that works for the context that you're in and not create this recipe that everyone has to follow. You know, the example that we had from the school in New Zealand, it was a ground up school, brand new, self-selected, recruited the students, recruited the teachers. That's a very different context than when you're working in an uh, area that has different kind of demographic than one that can be recruited for. One of the schools that we're working with, the number of students who actually end up having to repeat a grade is quite high. And so, you have to acknowledge that in the system that you're working in because that's a reality that you have to deal with. You might be working in another school where that same reality doesn't exist, but you have a high influx of individuals whose first language isn't the language of instruction. And so, then you have to work with a different context and really get to know them. And I, I think sometimes we make assumptions about students, and we see this happen a lot when teachers comment about the students in their class. They comment with things, um, about what they believe they know about the students, but they haven't actually asked the students. And so, an undercurrent or a foundation in all of this is how do we position student voice and student input and student decision making in all of this. Because we can't really talk about student success without factoring in the voice of students.

Mm-hmm.

And we don't typically do that.

And I was going to say, trusting relationships, I think is super key in evaluating student success. Especially when we're looking at student engagement, because I think we've all been in situations where we've been evaluated or received feedback from someone who we feel doesn't know us or doesn't know the situation very well. And that information doesn't feel indicative of the situation. But, had the person taken the time to get to know you and to provide feedback in a way that felt genuine, you might have been more receptive to it.

And that's, that's a product of not having a culture of dialogue. You need a culture of dialogue. You need a culture of reflection, a culture of intentionality.

My brain keeps going back to thinking about grades and how grades seem to set people up for not having a chance to share their personal context. It really flattens everything in a way that doesn't seem to make space for people who might think about taking a risk for an assignment or want to explore a different way to approach a competency.

Even with the grades, you can create a grading rubric where there's a descriptor for what an A is, a descriptor for what a B is. But I think by including that you've already capped it. You've already limited what's possible. And so, in my mind, whenever I include rubrics, an A is something that I can't describe, cause I don't know what it, I haven't seen it yet.

Mm-hmm.

So, you have to be able to tell me what that looks like for you. If you're meeting the criteria, then you're probably at a solid B+, A-. That's where you're aiming for. But show me something I haven't thought of, I haven't considered. That's what excellence really is in a lot of ways, is it incorporates that level of creativity of what's possible. As a teacher, you have so much control and power over what that looks like, and it's amazing how often we cap it, we limit it, and then are disappointed with the results.

Right.

There are parameters that we have to work within. We're not suggesting that those disappear because they don't. There's reality. And so, there's teachers that are going to listen to this and think, oh, those people don't know what they're talking about. We do know what we're talking about. It's more of a call to challenge the system in ways where you can, with the idea that how can we do best by the young people that we've been tasked with helping educate? And how do we make space for the innate knowledge and experience that they have? We need a more of a, a collective willingness to challenge the system. But I do recognize that in the current educational climate, people are tired. And probably tired is an understatement. They're exhausted.

Mm-hmm.

They feel the pressure from both the public and the institutions themselves to get kids through a system that is not perfect, but arguably works if you're looking at those measures.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And works is not good enough. We have so many resources available to us, in a society that has a tremendous number of gifts, we can do better.

So, thanks everybody for coming into this conversation on student success. It was awesome.

Awesome, awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Those were the not so fast five questions for today's podcast. Tune in to ChangEd every third Friday of the month for more content on educational change. Next time we introduce another member of our team, Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, who chats with Joe, Aron and I about student voice. Joe is co-editor of the recently published volume Student Voice Research: Theory, Methods and Innovations from the Field, and fun fact, Ellen and I co-authored a chapter in it. See you next time!

You've been listening to ChangEd. My name is Vanessa Gold and I'm your host. I'm a PhD candidate and part of a research team at McGill University interested in educational change. Each of us brings diverse experiences and expertise to an ongoing investigation of this topic within a current school change initiative being piloted in Quebec called NEXTschool. You can find more information about this initiative and the work our research team has done on our website at www.nextschoolquebec.com. Part of our goal in producing this podcast is to share what we're doing and involve you, our listeners in the research process, speaking with members of our team, other academics, experts, and practitioners amongst others, each episode explores one of many complex facets of educational change. You can expect topics like how to lead change, getting past inertia, the politics of change, and people's lived experiences of school change as it happens all within, but not exclusive to the NEXTschool context.

Spearheading the initiative is Noel Burke. Dr. Lisa Starr is the principal investigator of McGill's Research Team and Dr. Joseph Levitan, Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, and Dr. Bronwyn Low are co-investigators. Five graduate students round out the research team, including myself, Ellen MacCannell, Aron Rosenberg, Anna Villalta, and Natalie Malka. You'll be hearing from all of us as we explore the tricky and important work of making schools better for everyone.

This podcast and our research about NEXTschool is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Changed is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by Neal Read he's at nealread.ca. A transcript of today's podcast, citations and additional information are on our website, www.nextschoolquebec.com. Thanks for tuning in. We're looking forward to engaging with you.