Tracking Progress Makes a Difference

I like gardens.  To be clear, there is a difference between liking gardens and liking gardening.  (It’s not unlike fishing.  I actually prefer catching!)  Gardens are peaceful.  They bring beauty to our surroundings.  They smell good.  They tie us to the Earth.  They bring us food.

My wife is primarily in charge of our numerous flower gardens.  She plants at least a dozen flats of annuals and nurtures perennials each year, and they are gorgeous.  The vegetable garden is my domain.  I like having a vegetable garden.  It seems to connect me to my family’s agrarian past.  I also like to model for our daughters that people must get their hands dirty in order for us to eat.   I like the smell of dirt, and I am proud when in the fall I can say, “I grew this.  I’m “providing” food for my family.”  In my never-ending combat with nature’s critters, I’ve learned to plant items that do not seem to attract rabbits, deer, woodchucks, or chipmunks.  So I plant garlic, beets (The rabbits always win on these, but I keep trying.), and squash.  Also, I take care of rhubarb, asparagus, and two 30 foot rows of raspberries.  Last weekend I spent the better part of Saturday with our raspberries.

It’s a fact that gardens get weeds.  My raspberry patch is a weed magnet.  No matter what I do with mulch, the weeds appear.  I’ve tried ignoring the weeds.  (Not a good strategy.)  I’ve tried pulling weeds.  (The roots always remain, and the weeds come back stronger than ever.)  I’ve learned nothing seems to work better than getting to the weeds as early as possible with a small shovel and actually digging them out.  So I commenced to digging out quack grass, crab grass, bluegrass, and any other unwanted “gift” from Mother Nature that had decided to creep into my berry patch.  After about an hour I started to ask myself, “Is this really worth it?”  Is it really worth my time and effort to spend an entire afternoon on my hands and knees digging weeds, hauling away weeds, and generally complaining about weeds?  However, I kept reminding myself how much I enjoy fresh-picked raspberries.  I like them by the handful, but even more, I love to put raspberries on ice cream.  Then I noticed something very important...I could see I was making progress.  The first row was almost finished, and the second row wasn’t as filled with weeds as the first.  Even though I won’t get any berries until almost September, I could already taste the raspberry sundae now!

My very first “real” job was working for Henry Seeds in the summer between my 7^th and 8^th grade year.  (I told you my family had an agrarian past.)  Henry Seeds grows and sells seed corn to farmers.  In late July they hire local teens to walk their seemingly endless rows of corn and pull the tassles off the top of the corn plant.  Removing the tassles or detassling helps control the pollination of the corn which leads to hybrid corn seed.  The job is rather simple.  Start at the end of a row of corn and pull the tassle off every plant on the left.  When you are at the end of the row, turn around and repeat.  The rows are long.  The weather is always hot.  The early-morning dew on the corn means you are soaked at sunrise.  It’s a pretty horrible job, but I did learn a valuable lesson:  Tracking progress towards a set goal is motivating.  It’s fairly easy to track your progress when you are detassling corn or pulling weeds, and the goal is obvious.  You either see the tassle or you do not.  If you do, you can fix the problem relatively easily.  While it was hard work, I have fond memories of detassling that summer because of learning how to track my progress.

As you can imagine, tracking progress for learning is not so simple, but our teachers and students have been working this year to improve how thy track progress.  Teachers define clear learning goals for students to learn based on state and district expectations.  Then, the class and teacher use a “scale” or a rubric to measure their progress as individuals and as an entire class towards meeting that learning goal.  Teachers document learning through assessments.  Some of these assessments are summative meaning they are used as a final measure of learning.  Most assessments are formative meaning the results are used to inform or plan future instruction.   Each of our students has a Data Notebook where he or she tracks personal progress towards academic and behavior goals.  We have data walls in our classrooms that help us see progress.  All of this information better helps the student, teacher, school, and even the district allocate development time and human and financial resources to make sure all of our students are successful.  It’s been an exciting year of research, learning, and trial and error, but every teacher and student (and principal) in my building has gotten better at tracking progress.  We are looking forward to continuing our efforts next year.

Yes, tracking progress for learning goals is not as easy as detassling corn in a field or seeing how many weeds are left to go, but the concept is the same.  The key for schools is to empower the students that they are in charge of their own learning.  Our staff and parents work valiantly to support learning and to plan lessons and activities that to help all students be successful, but learning is ultimately up to the child.  I’m fortunate to work in a building and a community where students understand this and our teachers and parents expect it.

Now, if I could just get the weeds to understand that leaving my garden should be up to them!