We’re doing the MAP tests on Thursday and Friday morning. This test addresses academic growth. It seemed as good a time as any to address this idea of which is more important, growth or proficiency? It’s a false choice, really, everyone wants both. But if you had to pick one, which would you pick?

Brief summary of the conversation points.

DD: Everybody can’t reach proficient.

TC: Sometimes it’s not good enough for society’s standards. A school or a job might say “if you can’t show proficiency what makes you good enough to be in our place?”

KM: Growth shows that you’re putting in your work, even if it’s not proficient.

VG: It’s more meaningful to show growth. Proficiency is important depending on who is looking at you.

DW: The real world doesn’t really care about how much you grow.

MH: Once you reach a certain level, it has to be about proficiency. Growth is always happening but proficiency feels stagnant.

CB: Even if you don’t succeed (reach proficiency), you’re doing better than you did before.

DW: You can’t be okay with failing.

IK: If you show effort, that’s still something.

SH: If you have growth, you’ll eventually get to proficient.

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I’ll answer this differently depending on the day, but this morning I was feeling proficiency. Yeah, I want you to grow, but I want you to have achieved something, not just have gotten better. Tomorrow I’ll feel differently.

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Tomorrow we’ll talk about growth vs. proficiency as an athlete, a mechanic, a designer, a human being. Does this argument shift depending on the context? In other words, I don’t want a plumber who’s growing into their practice, I want the pipe not to leak. We’re also going to look at how the current Secretary of Ed handled this question…

You sit in classrooms and carefully listen and there’s all manner of comments made by students. When you had an observer, particularly early in your career, you’d learn that you had to stay true to whatever culture you’d built, as the kids would ruthlessly call you out.

“And for homework…”

“Homework? We never have homework!”

But on Friday, we were having a conversation, and as I was facilitating the same old “why are we doing this” discussion, I heard a young man say, mostly under his breath:

“Can’t just do a project for no reason.”

Something is working, I think, if we’ve managed to establish that all project work has a purpose, a clear intention, a reason for doing it beyond a grade.