ALP: Storytelling and Story Catching in Tucson

By Gary Chapin

Writer, Educating for Good

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Assessment is storytelling!

Any demonstration of learning tells a story of that kid’s learning. It’s got an arc. The kid starts at a place where they want to know a thing and move to a place where they begin to know that thing, and then to where they know it better.

Similarly, the Assessment for Learning Project is a learning project. What I mean is it’s not just about learning, it is learning. We all are learning. The 2020 Conference in San Diego was a demonstration of learning done by ALP of our learning from the previous three years. For the ALP Tucson convening we’ve decided to have the demonstration and learning emerge side by side. That’s our storytelling effort.

We have already begun recruiting folks from throughout our ALP and Tucson community to serve as story catchers and story tellers at the convening. These folks will be there not only to tell the story of what they see going on at the convening and on the excursions; they will be there to help you tell your story of what you’re doing and seeing. They will catch your stories and then share them.

We’ll have a bunch of activities and protocols throughout the convening that promote story thinking. We’re looking at setting up a story booth (“C’mon over and talk into the can!”)

We’ll take advantage of exit slips and our phones to dip in and out in all sorts of ways. Also … other stuff.

Here are some things to consider that might help this make more sense.

1. Stories can be big. Stories can be small. Stories can be very small. We might ask you to text us two sentences about what you are doing right now! That’s some story going on.

2. We use the word “story,” but encourage stuff from any media that works for you. We’ve done Ignite Talks in the past. I’ve written an ALP song. We’ve had giant murals tracking our conversations through the day. Photos are amazing. At some point, one of you will take me up on interpretive dance.

3. There is no one story. We are doing storytelling not to come to one story, but to weave a network of stories.

4. Stories can be planned or impromptu. Edited or raw. Improvised or composed.

5. SO. MANY. STORIES. We will gather so many stories, of all sizes and types, from all sorts of people, that patterns will emerge from the vast mix. “Quantity has a quality all its own.” You will be telling your stories and bringing them into a great murmuration. We—the nominal organizers of ALP—won’t have to decide what our story is. Our stories will tell us.

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Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

Deciding to lean into story has a bunch of implications. I talk about those in this piece, Talking Story: Embracing Our Humanity on a Deeper Level. It’s an amazing topic to dive into, and I am indebted to our friends in Hawai’i for opening that rabbit hole for me.

We hope to see you in Tucson to become a part of your story, and you a part of ours.

ALP? How Does it Work?

By Gary Chapin

Writer, Educating for Good

Our Theory of Action

A Theory of Action is a predictive if-then statement. Anytime you’re trying to make change you’ve got an if-then statement, whether you recognize it or not. When you put on a sweater, you are hypothesizing, “If I put on this sweater, then I will be comfortably warm.”

The Assessment for Learning Project is like a sweater in that it also is encompassed by a theory of action. The theory of action tells you what you hope to see happen (then) and what you’re going to do to make it happen (if).

The ALP 2.0 theory of action is still simmering on the stove, but it’s coming together nicely enough to take a taste and offer comment.

Here’s our goal: “We will use scaling of AFL to transform public schooling into an equity enacting system of learning.” A lot to delve into! We are going to transform public schooling, not merely reform it. We are no longer tinkering towards Utopia. We are going to make it into a new thing: an equity enacting system of learning. We aspire to being an anti-racist and anti-colonialist org. We will do this by scaling ALP, but we’ll be scaling it in new ways (some of which haven’t been devised, yet). As I pointed out in a piece, Control, Innovation, and Scale in Our Public School System, our traditional model of scaling initiatives is problematic. We’ll be thinking hard about this.

The four corners of the Theory of Action show how we are proposing to get to the goal. Spoiler: it’s not a straight line. One of the ALP mindsets is recognizing the complexity and mutuality of all aspects of our system. Rather than a path leading to a single destination, think of it as throwing irons in the fire, or, for sports fans, flooding the zone. Think of it as an ALP inundation. We propose to:

1. Deeply understand and become fluent with ALP practices (and mindsets). ALP is a new way of doing learning, a new way of thinking about it, and a new way of envisioning what kids ought to be. Relationships are realigned and deepened. Conversations become different. BELONGING is a primary value. Every conversation carries with it the possibility of opening a rabbit hole for you to dive down.

2. Learn how to use ALP practices to promote academic learning while validating identity and expanding belonging and agency of individual learners. This reflects the fact that, on one level, ALP is a massive R&D program. We are ambitious in our reach, but the thinking and the doing go hand in hand. In Tucson we’ll spend time talking in the passionate abstract, and time on the ground (or, rather, in the schools). Having an idea that doesn’t influence practice is functionally the same thing as having no idea at all.

3. Learn how to use ALP principles of practice to bring groups of individuals into equity-seeking learning communities. This IS EXACTLY WHAT WE’RE DOING IN TUCSON IN FEBRUARY! WE’RE EXCITED AND … OKAY, I’LL STOP YELLING! Academic priorities don’t unfold alongside issues of identity, belonging, agency, and equity; all of these things are deeply and profoundly connected. Seriously, though, you should come to Tucson.

4. Support/sponsor/participate in co-created redesign of local and state assessment and accountability policies. The elephant in the classroom. Sometimes I find myself thinking of ALP as a form of civil disobedience. This is a reasonable way to think, but it won’t get the job done. We have to think at the accountability policy level, where the inequities of the status quo are baked into the bread.

I wasn’t kidding about this document being in process. Any thoughts, comments, or questions you might have are welcome.

Dispatches from the Field: Carissa Duran

By Gary Chapin

Writer, Educating for Good

It’s striking, when you look down the list of folks involved in ALP, how many are still part of the ALP community. Many—most?—have moved away from the jobs they held back then, but they’ve carried the Assessment for Learning values and ideals with them into new settings and roles. This is the ALP diaspora.

Carissa Duran was central to the ALP funded Competency X project at Del Lago Academy of Applied Science, Escondido Unified High School District (CA), but unlike others leading that project, Carissa did not get involved with ALP on purpose. She was not part of the project’s founding team. I talked to Carissa about the happenstance power of ALP. Here are excerpts.

“I absolutely just found myself in the middle of [the ALP work] … I don't have a clear entry point in my memory. I remember being part of reviewing the grant documents. I was an English teacher, so maybe that was part of it too. I could edit these documents.”

“I think largely I became more central to the work because it fascinated me and energized me. I've tried in lots of different ways to center the student learning experience in a way that was meaningful and just, purposeful and equitable. That's the thing that I was most drawn to. The idea of creating these nontraditional pathways and honoring the learning students were doing that wasn't being captured in all of the other ways we assessed. I just kept myself involved.”

ALP conversations helped Del Lago examine its assumptions.

“[Our ALP coach] (disclosure from Gary: I was their ALP coach) helped us to understand that a lot of what we thought we were doing, we weren't really doing.

We would say we did competency-based education and we never actually articulated what those competencies were. And it took you pointing that out to us, for us to be able to ask, ‘Are we going to pursue a more pure version of this or are we going to remain with this sort of modified system? Who are we actually? What do we actually want to do? What's best for our learners?’”

Carissa interacted deeply with other ALP folks. At the San Diego 2020 ALP Conference, the team from Hawai’i led a session about their HĀ framework (go to their website for more info). The framework uses the acronym, BREATH: Belonging, Responsibility, Excellence, Aloha, Total wellbeing, and Hawai’i. Carissa was struck by the deeply place-based structure.

“At the end of the BREATH framework is the word “Hawai’i” … [we want to] create these beautiful, context specific frameworks that are meant to support our learners. We know how important it is to design things with our unique community or context in mind. And you were asking, ‘How do we use [the HĀ framework] on the East Coast when we're not Hawai’i and we need a new age? Like how do we get a new age that still captures this?’ I said, ‘What if the H in Breath is Here?’ For our friends in Hawai’i, obviously, Hawai’i is here. But for any of the rest of us, our home is here. Here is here … I'm always thinking about that as a focal point. What does that mean here? How does this community impact this learner? How are they involved? What do these particular learners need? Centering that in all my work has been probably the most impactful learning that I've taken from ALP.”

After some years, Carissa left Del Lago and worked with Instructure, the developers of Canvas. This year she’s returned to Escondido’s district office as A-G Coordinator. She also began a new stage of graduate work focused on—get this—assessment.

“I started a doctoral program a few weeks ago, my PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy. And I wrote my policy paper, part of my admissions process, on assessment and the impact of accountability policy and its trickle-down effect on what assessment looks like in classrooms. My whole life has become about assessment.”

“Even when it's not about assessment, it's about assessment. Assessment is at the center of all things, teaching and learning. It's literally become the center point of my whole life now. Everything I'll be doing and designing and learning, at least for the next four years, is going to be around assessment.”

“That may be a little bit obsessive. It's maybe a little bit obsessive? But I feel like that's the impact the ALP has. It draws you in because it's assessment, but it is assessment situated within justice.”

At the 2019 Aurora Institute Symposium, Carissa was awarded Teacher of the Year for being an educator “whose efforts as a personalized learning teacher exemplify a commitment to student success, knowledge, and skill as a professional educator and dedication to his or her students.” The video of her acceptance speech can be seen below.

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About Carissa

Carissa Duran is an educator in pursuit of justice and currently serving as A-G Coordinator with the Escondido Union High School District. She has worked in the field of education for over 10 years, serving 7 years at Del Lago Academy, an innovative, competency-based high school, teaching Humanities and coaching other teachers in literacy, language development, assessment, and educational technology. Fully committed to disrupting inequities in education, she spent those years leveraging Assessment for Learning, Project Based Learning, Standards-Based Grading, Restorative Practice, and personalized learning to serve her students. In 2019, Carissa was recognized as the Personalized Learning Teacher of the Year by the Aurora Institute (formerly iNACOL). She believes that as long as we're serving diverse students with diverse backgrounds— which we are— we need to leverage technology and personalization to bridge the opportunity gap and give all students an onramp to success.

Carissa can be found on Twitter at @seejodee.