April 2021
Newsletter No. 6
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Rethinking Progress Reports at Red Bridge
A founding goal of Red Bridge is to use system redesign to empower students as agents of their own lives and rethink the traditional compliance-based systems of school that we are accustomed to, and which have produced unequal outcomes for many kids.
As the school to prison pipeline demonstrates, the school system design choices we make have consequences well beyond the K-12 experience. One such aspect of schooling that has the potential to be punitive or motivating, limiting or empowering, is student assessment, most often epitomized in the end-of-term report card. At Red Bridge, our goal is to design an approach to student assessment that reflects our core principle of student agency and avoids the worst aspects of traditional assessment methods. This winter, we were able to take a step toward creating student evaluations that empower learners.
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At Red Bridge, we recently completed our second term. On the schedule for term-end was sending home student progress reports. Our team sat down to discuss what the end-of-term report should look like and what information to include. It’s not often a school has the opportunity to think through report cards from first principles, so we took advantage of the moment to imagine how these reports could best serve students and also be maximally informative to parents.
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We knew that sharing too much information would not be meaningful to parents, but that sharing too little information might lead to skepticism about what students did all day. We knew that just focusing on the individual child would lead to unavoidable questions about how they compared to others, but including too much data on standardized performance expectations would not align with our intention to honor students’ individual learning paths.
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Our admin team sat down and sketched ideas for the design of these reports. We shared our illustrations of what the report could include and undertook three rounds of iterations, attempting to make each version as different as possible, and building off the features we liked from one another’s sketches.
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Inspired by the work of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, and the portfolio-like transcript they’ve created for high school seniors, we imagined what that approach could look like at the elementary level and decided to ground our reports in artifacts of student learning. We ran this idea by the teaching team, and everyone was eager to present student learning in this way. The challenge then became finding the right student artifacts. We decided the progress reports would be digital, so we could use video, photos and student quotes to demonstrate student learning so far. We set about capturing students’ current work and brought what we’d recorded to our next staff meeting.
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Some of the work samples teachers captured showed students successfully solving word problems or demonstrating fluent reading skills, but other work samples showed students stumbling over their words, or not quite understanding the big idea behind decomposing numbers we thought they had been taught. In addition to illuminating skills that needed reteaching, this experience led to an important realization: Progress reports should show students at their best. It’s not motivating for a child to see themselves struggling with a skill as the summation of their term’s work, and it’s not particularly informative for a parent to see what a child cannot do.
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We set back out to capture students working at the peak of their abilities – the outer limit of their zone of proximal development. That level may or may not be at grade level equivalent, but our goal was to capture students working at the edge of their capacity, so we could accurately reflect on what they need next.
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Unlike receiving a grade on a report card that labels the child as an “A student” in math or a “C student” in reading, these progress reports show where each child is today, knowing they will keep moving forward. One student report might show a student explaining the features of 3D shapes, and another could be demonstrating how to use base ten blocks to add two-digit numbers. We applied this approach to non-academic skills as well, including a picture of a student bending down to tie another’s shoes for a character habit or the research organizer a student created as an example of the work habit “goal management.” In the final version of our first Red Bridge progress report, students were not defined by their deficiencies, but they were seen for their strengths. This allows us to appreciate the diverse skillsets students bring to the group.
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These reports offer prospective potential rather than retrospective judgment. This ethos is conspicuously absent in many parts of society today from the legacy of the American justice system to more recent moments of cancel culture.
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At Red Bridge, my hope is to bring a mindset of seeing individuals at the top of their game to our work with students and teachers. During the hiring process, we ask teacher candidates to submit videos of themselves teaching. Presumably, they would submit samples of their very best, and it could be hard to differentiate between candidates, but there’s a lot of variation in people’s best. For teachers and students, it’s much easier to accept feedback if you feel you have been seen at the top of your game, rather than at your low point. When we judge people at their best, we create a culture of trust and encouragement. When we judge people at their worst, we create a culture of resentment and caution.
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We will continue to refine our progress reports and think more about our systems of assessment, and as we do so, we will keep in mind these teacher words of wisdom: “Good, better, best, never let it rest until your good is your better and your better is your best.”
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It’s amazing what hasn’t changed about being seven years old. The same knock-knock jokes are hilarious (“Who’s there? Boo. Boo who? Don’t cry, it’s just a joke!”), slime is still the coolest, and wooden blocks still provide endless opportunities for entertainment. One thing seven-year-olds have on their minds that I don’t recall my friends and I thinking much about is a deep concern for the environment and health of the planet.
Student questions about pollution, waste and the cleanliness of our oceans led us to a whole school investigation of “Where does our trash go?” for two weeks during our last deep-dive project.
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Our students are our best hope for the future of our planet. In a joint effort to support the Red Bridge mission and to bring nature into our school space, we’re asking our supporters to consider a lasting donation that will be memorialized in our space as a bonsai tree. The tree will live on in our welcome bookcase and can be dedicated to anyone or anything you choose. Bonsai trees can live for hundreds of years, so your gift will have both a long-lasting physical impact and the donation will help sustain our program into the future.
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Red Bridge is growing!
We have a few spots remaining for next school year. Applications are still open for students ages 5, 6, 7 and 8. Start your application on Ravenna or spread the word to Bay Area families you know who are looking for an excellent learning experience for next school year.
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Red Bridge strives to serve a student body that reflects the diversity of our community. We have an individualized tuition model that allows Red Bridge to be within financial reach of all families.
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Join our team!
If you are craving an opportunity to build deep connections with students, and empower them to set and reach meaningful goals, check out our Autonomy Level II Learning Guide position. If that's not you, but you know of a fantastic elementary school teacher who could be interested, please pass this opportunity along. We also are looking for a part-time PE teacher for 2021 - 2022. More information about both roles can be found on our website.
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Thank you for your interest and support. We look forward to sharing more with you as our Red Bridge community grows and as we refine our learning model. We love hearing from you and hope you will reach out with your feedback, questions and thoughts.
Sincerely,
Orly & The Red Bridge Team
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If this sounds like a model more children deserve a chance to benefit from, you can support us by
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