8 Non-Cognitive Characteristics Predictive of Academic Success

The following are eight non-cognitive characteristics predictive of academic success in college (Sedlacek, 2004):

1. Positive Self-Concept: The confidence that leads to the determination to succeed.
2. Realistic Self-Appraisal: The ability to accurately assess your own strenghts and weaknesses and to use this assessment to further your own development.
3. Successful Navigation of the System: Knowing how to access resources and how to use the system to help you achieve your goals.
4. Preference for Long-Term Goals: Knowing how to set and achieve long-term goals, delay gratification, and persevere in spite of obstacles.
5. Availability of a Strong Support Person: Finding someone to confer advice, particularly in times of crisis.
6. Leadership Experience: Having the ability to organize and influence others.
7. Community Involvement: Being involved in a community.
8. Knowledge Acquired in and about a Field: Having the explicit and implicit knowledge of a particular field of study.

When we recognize or cultivate these characteristics in our students, we can leverage them to support their motivation and achievement. 

Further Thinking about Unit Design

"We do not start with content; we start with what students are expected to be able to do with content.  What would real use of content look like? What should students ultimately be able to say and do with content if they 'get it'? And if that's what real learning looks like, what should be taught--and how--to make it most likely that teaching leads to fluent, flexible, and lasting learning?"  --Wiggins & McTight, 2011, p. 7.
As we continue to think purposefully about our planning, I wanted to offer some further thinking about unit design.  Once you have determined what is essential in your curriculum, or what is essential to the two units you department has decided to revisit, you will organize your unit information into three parts:

1.  Desired Results: What students will know, understand, and do (KUD).

2.  Acceptable Evidence:  What the summative assessment will look like and what level of proficiency is considered acceptable.

3.  Learning Experiences and Instruction: Some sample learning experiences.

I will spend some time in future blog posts writing about each of these three parts.  I will also spend some time with department chairs and anyone else who is interested explaining this information.
One of the keys is to balance when you read and access this information.  My goal is to have it accessible to you so that when you begin the work on your unit plan, you have had an opportunity to read and think about these expectations.
My goal for putting this out here now is so that you can begin to get a sense of what all of this will begin to look like.  Our School Improvement Plan (SIP) is written using a similar format.  You may want to take a look at it to see a kind of example.
This work will be challenging, and I believe it will be rewarding as well.

Student Motivation and Classroom Currencies

"What we call 'motivation' in school is really a decision students make to invest their currencies in our classrooms." --Robyn R. Jackson (2011)
Students have different values in different dimensions.  Their behavior is purposeful.  Students make decisions, consciously or unconsciously, on whether or not they have the currencies we are asking for and whether or not they believe this currency will help them achieve a desired outcome or particular need.
In the context of classrooms, their are four primary forms of currency:

• Knowledge: This includes knowledge students are taught explicitly as well as background knowledge and skills. 
• Soft skills: This includes study skills, organizational skills, time mangement skills, cultural competencies, and other skills that help students navigate the school culture.
• Social skills: Learning is socially mediated; social skills inovlve knowing how to read a situation and when to say what to get a desired outcome.
• Network affiliations: "The communities and social groups to which students belong also shape their priorities and give them information on how to behave in various situations."

"Our students' decision to invest in the classroom is directly related to whether or not they have the currency our assignments, activities, and broader academic and behavioral expectations are asking for--and whether or not they believe that currency will help them achieve a desired outcome or meet a particularl need."
As teachers, we can demystify and explicitly teach these skills to our students.  We can also teacher students how to invest in our classrooms so that they can achieve better.
The Hixson book club will be reading more about these currencies in Never Work Harder than Your Students by Robyn R. Jackson (2010).

Next Steps: Thinking About Unit Design

Taking the time to determine High Priority Standards and Essential Curriculum (particularly for the two units on which your department will be focusing this year) provides background, context, and entry points for unit design.  This process is not linear; it is recursive and will require you to think back and forth across several elements as you and your department work to conceptualize and describe your units.
We are engaging in this process for several reasons:

• Focusing our teaching on what is essential deepens our capacity to teach for understanding rather than just teaching to cover the curriculum,
• Teaching what is essential provides more room for all students to access the learning and for us to plan and give feedback on student work regardless of whether we are intervening, extending, or holding steady on their behalf, and
• Engaging in these conversations is to the benefit of our learning community and to our students.

Thinking about unit design is our next topic and following are some thoughts about it:

• The "unit" by definition should embody a meaningful and connected chunk of learning events that build toward some important intellectual outcome in a way that short (often disconnected) daily lessons cannot (Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J., 2011, pp. 38-39).
• Excellent units focus on transfer and how facts and skills are related to an overarching understanding and can be related to the "real life" discipline; excellent units do not focus on discreet facts or skills alone.
• Lessons in a unit build toward complex performances and products.

There are many entry points into unit design.  For example:

• Standards/Curriculum that have endurance, leverage, and readiness,
• Important big ideas, or understandings, themes, or theories that are at the heart of a discipline and worth understanding,
• Compelling questions which can be revisited at several levels of study within a discipline,
• Performance strengths and weaknesses revealed by assessments,
• A strong assessment that indicates a quality level of proficiency,
• A powerful process or strategy that uses many important skills, or
• An inquiry into a complex issue or problem.

Eventually, no matter what the entry point, the unit should provide evidence of all of the above.
In futher posts, I will share more about the structure of the unit as well as a template for creating the unit plan.

Principles versus Strategies

"As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few.  [The person] who grasps principles can success select [his or her] own methods.  [The person] who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."          --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Next week, a few teachers will begin reading together Never Work Harder than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson (2009).  I am looking forward to using the Quick PD section of the Network to report out some of our learning and discussion.
To begin, however, I wanted to share a couple thoughts about teaching principles and teaching strategies.  A teaching strategy is what we do as a teacher; a teaching principle is how we do something.  Teaching principles guide our work; they are flexible, dynamic, and important guides for the strategies we choose.  Teaching strategies tend to be narrow and static.  If we have teaching strategies without teaching principles, then we lack an underlying context or standard for the strategies we choose.
Jackson lists seven master teaching principles in her book.  They are:

1. Master teachers start where their students are.
2. Master teachers know where their students are going.
3. Master teachers expect to get their students to their goal.
4. Master teachers support their students along the way.
5. Master teachers use feedback to help them and their students get better.
6. Master teachers focus on quality rather than quantity.
7. Master teachers never work harder than their students.

Our curriculum work so far this year is particularly related to principle number two: Master teachers know where their students are going.  As we continue with this work, you will see evidence of the other principles as well.
Thinking in terms of teaching principles is consistent with our previous work with mission and vision:

• Mission describes why we exist.
• Vision describes what we will see.
• Principles are our agreements about how we teach.
• Goals hold us accountable for all of the above.

As we discuss each principle during our book study, I will share more in this section of the Network.