Craig Vezina Interview with Trevor Mackenzie, June 14, 2020

Trevor Mackenzie: We’re talking about student agency and empowering students, we also need to be talking about teacher agency and empowering teachers, and really what that lends well to is a culture of inquiry. If we want inquires for students we also need to support our teachers as inquires and questioners of their own practice, but also as the coach and model inquiring and questioning and being curious and full of wonder. Authentic learning it’s not prescribed, it’s not complacent. We are working with students to explore genuine wonders, curiosities, authentic problems that we’ve identified in our community whether it’s local or global and we are unpacking these questions together. There’s a lot of co-designing of learning so what we’re really try to do is flatten out the educational experience for our students so it’s not teacher student but there’s a co-design of all the learning experiences that our students are experiencing in the classroom setting.

Let’s ask these big ungoogleable questions, I love that phrase the ungoogleable question, let’s ask a big ungoogleable question about what it is that is happening around us in this world with regards to this global pandemic. So, I’m seeing schools around the world right now really ask their students how are you doing right now? How are you feeling? What are you learning about at home? What curiosities are you exploring? And then they begin to plan learning from that data, from that information that we’re collecting. And so, that’s the co-designing isn’t it? That’s the constructing of the learning pathway and it’s not teacher to students it’s teachers asking students, students coming into the conversation and providing that really rich authentic information that allows both of us to co-construct the learning together.[01:35]

Question: Are there specific things that are exciting to you about this format of remote learning or whatever you want to call it that you think will be durable and long lasting or you hope will be?

Trevor Mackenzie: Yeah. I hope it’s flexibility to be honest. I hope teachers around the world are experiencing, you know, I suppose I should say I don’t hope they’re experiencing challenges but I hope it’s really challenging our thinking around flexibility and not coming into learning with a preset notion or prescribed idea of the learning standards we’re going to cover it with students, but rather a stance of let’s explore the learning together. And I think flexibility is really something that all teachers are sharpening right now and I think it’s forcing teachers to really co-design and co-plan based on the realities of what students are experiencing at home. And I think equity is a really key issue throughout this remote learning landscape. Some families have access to technology, some families have parents who are both working from home and also supporting students and learning from home and I think it’s really demanding teachers to be flexible in the learning that we’re co-designing with students throughout this remote learning landscape. So, I would say flexibility is the biggest piece that I’m hoping teachers return to the brick and mortar with and that flexibility allows us to be much more agile in our curriculum. I think curriculum, the notion that curriculums is something that we have to cover or that we have to get through is a misconception, curriculum is something that we explore and we discover with our students. It takes a really, really solid understanding of our curriculum to have that kind of confidence to be agile in our curriculum and invite our students into the curriculum, but I think this remote learning reality that we’re all experiencing is allowing us to discover a certain level of flexibility that’s going to allow us to intern flip the curriculum on its head and invite our students into learning to explore and discover rather than to cover content if you will.

Question: I wonder if you can share your own insights into what great assessment should look like?

Trevor Mackenzie: Assessment is a verb - it has to be something that we are doing in class with students not to students and I think that’s a mindset shift is that the teacher is the strongest assessor in the room. I think we need to cultivate a culture in our classrooms where we are co-designing assessment tools and then we are empowering our students to have more of an authentic voice in the assessment process. And that’s a big mindset shift. When I started my career I used to take my assessments home with me and stay up late into the evening marking essays or marking tests and now I quite simply refused to do that. Not just because it’s better for my mental health but also because it was doing nothing for my students understanding themselves better as learners. Assessment needs to be done in learning with learners not outside of learning to learners so that’s a big idea. If I were to break that down into some fine pieces I think one is we need to co-design our assessment tools with our students so that they actually have an authentic voice in the assessment process from the beginning of learning. And then we need to empower them with the language of assessment. Once we’ve co-designed those tools we actually need to give them time and space to be assessors of their learning. So, that looks like many things, that looks like modeling that fishbowl activity where students are watching other students assess themselves, assess others, maybe it’s student assessment conferences where students get to sit down with their teacher and assess a piece of learning together. And it can even look like co-assessing or co-writing report cards. This is something that I really enjoy doing with my students I write all my report cards with my students during school hours where we sit down and we open up the gradebook, we open up the computer and through a series of questions we write those report card comments together. And we choose a number that gets put on the report card based on their portfolio of learning throughout the year.

In inquiry the assessment happens in the learning, it’s not something that happens outside of the learning. And, again, that is a mindset shift, it is a shift in how we use time with students, but if we’re not having students leave our classrooms with a better understanding of themselves as learners I honestly think we’re doing them a disservice. There’s tremendous value in recognizing where we are at now and what is working in education and I think there’s a lot that’s working. I look back at the last 20 years of my career and it wasn’t all for not, there are certain aspects of my teaching, there are certain aspects of the way schools live and breathe that are working and I want to take those with me into the future of education, it’s not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, really having a clear understanding of what is working and then, of course, what isn’t working and how we can revamp that. There’s this notion in high school that if you don’t get a certain mark or if you don’t get into a certain university or if you’re not in AP if it’s like a remedial course that you’re not worthy or that you’re not as good as someone else and that’s just is not the case. All of those that I just described are social constructs, those are constructs that our educational institutions have created to organize students. And what I’ve seen over the course of my career is the more I lean into finding failure, the more I lean into the discomfort of learning the better person I become, the more I end up learning. And sadly, I think our schools are built around numbers, high schools especially are built around numbers and there’s this misconception that failure is a bad thing. So, if I were to talk to my 17 year old self I would encourage that young man to lean into discomfort, lean into failure, find it often and be reflective in learning and understanding that learning is a process, it’s not an outcome, it’s not a destination. And again, so many of our high school setting assessments I should say are so destination focused, product focused and we really need to shift our focus to the process of learning.