Dive Brief:
- Ramy Mahmoud, a ninth grade teacher in Texas' Plano School District, tried a new approach to getting ready for a new batch of students last year: not looking at their data at all.
- In the past, Mahmoud had closely examined students’ assessment records, IEPs, and past report cards in order to get to know students before they arrived, grouping them based on scores to prevent clusters of low-performers.
- Last year, however, he organized students alphabetically and promised them he wouldn’t look at their records for the first two weeks of class, giving them a fresh slate.
Dive Insight:
Mahmoud’s approach defies conventional wisdom and he knows it. In the past, he’s followed commonly held best practices. But after a decade of struggling with his classroom, he wrote in District Administration, he got a different view of that first day, when he’d typically group a top-performer with two in the middle and one at the low end. He decided instead to look at things from the viewpoint of the low performer: “My teachers hate me because I’m dumb and the smart kids laugh at me. There’s a seating chart. I’m in the front. Looking at my group, one kid’s smart and gets everything right. The other two are good students, too. I’m obviously the dumb one. This is my role. This is what I’ll always be.”
With the “clean slate” approach, Mahmoud found that students were more engaged, and their records, when he looked at them, surprised him. “Kids I had pegged as gifted-and-talented were not. Those with horrible assessment scores were many of my group leaders. The low socioeconomic status kids were actively engaged with smiles on their faces,” he wrote.