Students deserve meaningful results, not just progress
My lower back hurts lately. A lot. It started on a recent trip to Oregon to see my son’s art opening, then hang out with some family there and spend a few days at the ocean. What caused my back to flare up, I believe, were bad beds, odd rental car seats, long drives, and four hours on planes there and back. Disaster!
What my back needs is treatment. More than just making progress, I need treatment that is enough to get it back to being able to perform at a level that enables me to do everything I need to do. This has made me think about what students need, right now as they return to school after a long remote experience, and always: not just progress but enough that they can do everything they need to do, enough to produce meaningful results.
I’m going to physical therapy now and it’s working, slowly, in inches not feet per day. I see my PT twice a week and I do all the exercises she gives me. The physical therapist told me today if I plateau and stop making more progress, then maybe she’ll recommend other kinds of therapy to add, like a chiropractor.
On my first visit to the PT, her office gave me a questionnaire to fill out. Some of the questions were, I sense, a kind of pre-test, to see where I was starting in terms of level of pain and to remind me later of where I started. “Can you do these tasks without pain: sit in a chair for ten minutes? Put on your shoes? Walk up stairs?” I answered no to each of these.
I fully expect to get this same questionnaire at the end of my series of PT sessions, whether that’s six or 16 or however many visits. And I expect the pre-post comparison to show I made progress.
They are not promising I’ll be able to do anything physically demanding, like play golf, or play trombone again. Luckily, I don’t need to do any of those things these days (though I had begun playing trombone again before all this back pain started.) The unwritten promise of physical therapy for me is that I will make progress from where I started (lots of pain) to wherever I stop (less or no pain when doing basic activities of everyday living).
What if I needed a certain level of function to do a job in a warehouse without pain? “Progress,” such as being able to sit in a chair for 10 minutes without pain, would not be enough to get me back to work. Instead, I would need physical therapy that helped me be able to sit for 30 minutes, and carry a 20 pound box, and walk up a flight of stairs, all without pain. I would need therapy that made my back strong enough to keep working eight hours a day for five days in a row without returning to pain over time. I am told physical therapists call this “work hardening,” and it involves doing as much work with the patient as is needed in order to get them to this higher level. After all, the patient’s present and future survival depends on it.
Same goes for young children learning to read. If a student is reading 10 words per minute in the middle of first grade and doing the regular lessons make it so that student makes progress and is reading 30 words per minute by the end of the year, that student is going to struggle mightily to do second grade work next year. Some might point out and want to celebrate that child has tripled the words per minute they can read. Certainly that student’s teacher should praise the student for progress and the effort that student has put into improving. But others would point out that 30 words per minute at the end of first grade is pretty far below grade level. Away from the student, adults should be looking earlier than the end of the year at what else needs to be done, what additional methods can be used, to assure that student is making enough progress to do the things the student will need to do to succeed. That student needs “work hardening.”
Same idea applies to schools and even outside organizations when reporting student results. Reporting the number or percent of students who improved from two years behind grade level to just one year behind grade level in reading is telling a story of student progress. This tale suits the school or organization’s need to show some kind of positive result. But it is not serving the real need of the students they serve, which is to make enough improvement to reach a level of performance that will change the students’ prospects for success in school and a decent life thereafter. That is a meaningful result. Isn’t that what we should all be trying to do?
