Want to make your students more responsible for their own learning? Want to create an academic environment in which students thrive and develop a genuine thirst for knowledge? Want to improve your students' standardized test results but avoid a “teach-to-the-test” mentality that throttles creativity and freedom?
In this book, Mark Barnes introduces and outlines the Results Only Learning Environment—a place that embraces the final result of learning rather than the traditional methods for arriving at that result. A results-only classroom is rich with individual and cooperative learning activities that help students demonstrate mastery learning on their own terms, without being constrained by standards and pedagogy.
By embracing results-only learning, you will be able to transform your classroom into a bustling community of learners in which?
* Students collaborate daily on a number of long-term, ongoing projects.
* Students receive constant narrative feedback.
* Yearlong projects target learning outcomes more meaningfully than worksheets, homework, tests, and quizzes.
* Freedom and independence are valued over punitive points, percentages, and letter grades.
* Students manage themselves and all but eliminate the need for traditional classroom management.
Learn how your students can take charge of their own achievement in an enjoyable, project-based, workshop setting that challenges them with real-world learning scenarios—and helps them attain uncommonly excellent results.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Rebelling Against Traditional Methods
Chapter 2: Tapping into Intrinsic Motivation
Chapter 3: Letting Go of Homework and Worksheets
Chapter 4: Teaching the ROLE Way
Chapter 5: Moving from Grades to Feedback: Say It, Write It, Listen to It
Chapter 6: Evaluating While Evolving
Chapter 7: Reviewing Performance
Chapter 8: Testing? No Problem
Chapter 9: Disciplining students? Forget About It
Chapter 10: Joining the Movement: Transform Your School
Chapter 11: Considering the Possibilities
References
Index
About the Author
It’s not just businesses that are still caught in outdated assumptions about performance and motivation. Schools are caught in that same time warp too. Much of how our classrooms and schools are structured and operate are designed to take advantage of extrinsic motivation, and we are finding that in the 21st century, this structure and way of operating no longer works.
But the question is, how can we transform our schools so that they no longer operate under these outdated assumptions about student potential, student performance, and student motivation? If one were to make a list of how our schools still operate and what these faulty and obsolete assumptions about education and schooling are, that list would look somewhat like this.
· Students are motivated by grades.
· Students are incapable of directing their own learning.
· Classrooms (and schools) must operate under strict control with specific rules and consequences governing student behavior.
· Teachers are the primary dispensers of learning in the classroom.
· Education is something “done to students” rather than something in which they engage.
If these basic assumptions about classroom operations and education are faulty, what would would 21st century assumptions about how classrooms and school operations look like? In other words, what would a classroom or school operating under the principles described in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us look like? Perhaps educator Mark Barnes provides with some answers to that question in his new book ROLE Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom. In ROLE Reversal, Barnes describes what he terms a Results Only Learning Environment or ROLE. As the name implies, in a ROLE the focus is entirely on results, or student work. Also, in this environment, the principles of fostering intrinsic motivation described by Pink are implemented fully. According to Barnes, a ROLE basically upends many of the traditional assumptions about education and learning. Here’s some of ways these traditional assumptions are upended.
In a ROLE, or Results Only Learning Environment:
· Grades and grading systems are replaced with a “narrative feedback system” that focuses specifically on student work and improving that work. In Barnes’ result-only classroom, teachers do not use numerical grades to provide feedback because numerical feedback systems fail to provide feedback students need to improve their performance. Instead, students are given extensive, comprehensive, and ongoing narrative feedback on their work. This feedback is specific and can be used by the student for work improvement. In ROLE Reversal, Barnes shows teachers how to provide this kind of feedback.
· Instead of teacher-directed learning activities, students are given broad, long-term projects to complete, and they make the daily decisions on how to complete those projects. The intrinsic motivation model described by Pink demands that autonomy be employed to engage people in the tasks at hand. Under Barnes’ results-only classroom model, students engage in six-week long projects that provide a great deal of choice, or autonomy, on how and what is learned and when. Autonomy is a built-in component of his results-only classroom practice.
· Classroom rules and consequences are jettisoned and the use of opportunities to engage in meaningful work, collaborating with peers, and trust/respect are used instead to manage classroom behavior. Too often, classrooms become more about focusing on the enforcement of rules rather than the learning students are being asked to do. In Barnes’ results-only classroom, behavior is managed through well-designed, engaging, and collaborative learning projects that leave students little time to engage in problem behaviors. Also, the results-only classroom described by Barnes fosters a high-level of respect and trust that makes having rules and consequences less necessary.
· Teachers are no longer the “dispensers of information/learning.” According to Barnes, in a ROLE, teachers become coaches and facilitators of student learning. In the results-only classroom, teachers step away from the front of the classroom and spend more time facilitating student learning and coaching students on their work. Teacher-centered activities like worksheets, quizzes, and homework are jettisoned. Instead, students engage in long-term, meaningful activities that challenge them.
· Education and learning moves from being something done to students to something in which students actively engage in on a daily basis. The 20th century traditional model of education is very much still with us. The heart of that educational philosophy and model sees education as a process by which we subject students to, in order to add value determined by test scores. Under Barnes’ result-only model, education and learning is something students actively engage in every day. They are active participants in their learning.
For the teacher and school leader looking for a model of learning that truly captures Daniel Pink’s principles of intrinsic motivation---autonomy, mastery, and purpose---Barnes’ book ROLE Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom offers just such a model. Best of all, Barnes results-only classroom offers the kind of classroom in which students achieve at higher levels. I highly recommend Mark Barnes’new book, ROLE Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom published by ASCD. This book would make an excellent book study to foster discussions in schools about how we can move toward the student-centered schools and classrooms we so desperately need in the 21st century.
Overview
Want to make your students more responsible for their own learning? Want to create an academic environment in which students thrive and develop a genuine thirst for knowledge? Want to improve your students' standardized test results but avoid a “teach-to-the-test” mentality that throttles creativity and freedom?
In this book, Mark Barnes introduces and outlines the Results Only Learning Environment—a place that embraces the final result of learning rather than the traditional ...