Recently, we were advertising for a job opening at the school. The week after the competition closed, a young woman arrived at my office with her resume. I explained to her that the application was too late for the current position (we had filled it that morning), but that I would keep her package on file should something else arise in the future. She was flabbergasted. "How could it be closed?", she demanded, "the deadline was only last Friday!"

When I was growing up, the fear of missing a “deadline” was all consuming. There were deadlines for assignments, deadlines for applications, deadlines for tax returns; you name it, and there was a deadline. Miss that key date and you were dead in the water! 

But, to be honest, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have become a society of “fudgers”. Everything seems to be up for negotiation. Payment deadlines get routinely missed, airline check- in times are ignored, movies buffer their published start time with a raft of previews and ads; and even the concept of “last call” at the pub seems to have blurred. We are more than willing to pay a little extra, argue a little harder, or lie and obfuscate a little bit more if it means that we don’t have to be held to a hard and fast rule (that, of course, should apply to everyone else!) We live in a society that feels that it always has the right to renegotiate. Even the so-called "fiscal cliff" that kept me awake over the holidays turned out to be something that actually could be pushed back a few months without serious consequences. 

Is it any wonder that our kids sometimes take the same attitude towards their bedtimes, their computer use, or their homework? At Kenneth Gordon, we work with many students who have challenges with their "executive function" (that is the ability to organize and execute a specific task in a time-effective way). We help them to develop organizational strategies and external, intermediate "deadlines" to pace themselves and to create short-term, attainable goals. It is hard work for them to rewire themselves to think in this fashion especially when all of the empirical evidence from the outside world would seem to indicate to them that it is not that important!  
So, the question is, do deadlines really matter? Are we simply more enlightened about things than a generation ago, or have we slowly begun to miss the point? 

In his book, “Predictably Irrational” MIT Prof. Dan Ariely tried an experiment with three classes of undergraduates taking the same course. In Class A he announced three assignments with due dates of: October 15th, November 15th, and December 15th with penalties for lateness. 

In Class B, he announced the same three assignments and stated that they could be submitted anytime on or before December 15th. And, in Class C he gave the students a choice, they could opt for the same ground rules as Class A or the same open ended approach as Class B. Class C, split pretty much down the middle. 

At the end of the term he had his TAs mark the papers (he was a university prof after all!) and found that the class with the deadlines — who were forced to be organized and systematic - scored the highest, the class with no deadlines (who could procrastinate and then rush at the end) scored the worst, and that the other class split the same way depending upon what option they chose.

So what does this mean for us and our kids? The research is clear, deadlines and clear, well-defined goals do work (just ask anyone who has to report weekly to weight watchers!) Secondly, it is our responsibility as parents and educators not to just ensure that our children meet deadlines but that they learn how to effectively set, and follow them as well. There will come a time when there won’t be a teacher or parent setting and enforcing the rules, and our students have to be prepared and supported, by us, to master that skill for themselves.

It is time that we adults began to model the attitudes and behaviours that we expect from our children. So hurry up and take care of this, you are on a deadline! 

Years ago, I was taking an additional qualification course in Special Education being offered by York University. A couple of weeks into the course I submitted my first assignment, which was subsequently returned the next class. In red ink at the top of the first page was a large “B+”. There were no other comments or notations on any other page of the paper. After class I went up to the instructor and asked what I could have done to have improved my essay to an “A”.  Her response was: “When a paper is worth an “A” it just jumps out at you, and yours didn’t jump out!” Needless to say, I took this valuable feedback to heart in all of my future assignments!

If you talk to teachers about marking student work, most of them will tell you that it is the least favourite part of their job. In many cases, evaluating student work is seen as a means to an end, and that end is having a spreadsheet full of numbers that can be synthesized into a “grade” on a published report. Consequently for many educators, at all levels, assessment of student understanding and mastery of the core knowledge and skills is the part of the teaching and learning process that gets the least time and attention. It is viewed as a necessary “evil”, is frequently viewed as drudgery, and is all too often done on the couch while watching television. Having said that, children, parents, and receiving schools, colleges and universities who are trying to gauge student ability and performance, depend upon the numbers generated by this process to give them an accurate picture. I once, briefly, had a teacher working for me who felt that if he simply gave all of his students high marks, he could avoid any questioning of his teaching or his students’ achievement. Besides giving little meaningful feedback, he also demonstrated the weak point of much student assessment – it is subjective, and it is disproportionately dependent upon the skill and professional integrity of individual teachers.

Assessment is a tricky thing. To be effective, it needs to be based on clearly articulated outcomes, valid methodology, and either criterion or rubric based evaluation tools.  It also needs to be validated against external standards or benchmarks to ensure that a student’s stated performance in one classroom or school is a dependable predictor of their future performance elsewhere. This external validity is of critical importance to not only to parents and students, but to educators as well.

Recently in the media, there has been the re-emergence of the annual debate about the Province’s FSA (Foundation Skills Assessment) testing for Grades 4 and 7. The detractors decry the testing as a narrowly focused tool for school and teacher assessment. In a sense, they are correct. As a stand-alone measure, the FSA does not provide reliable, comparable school to school or classroom to classroom data. To see it as such is a misuse of the information.

On the other hand, as a snapshot of student performance and a measure of skill development in language arts and mathematics, standardized testing like the FSA or Canadian Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) or DIBELS such as we also use at KGMS is a critically important tool not just to look at how our children are doing, but to inform instruction and to benchmark school assessment standards. Over the next month, many of our students will be completing the FSA in Grades 4 and 7. It is our plan to use the resultant information to help us to measure their progress; to identify peaks and valleys in their performance; and, to help us to improve our own practice in order to more effectively meet their needs.

At KGMS the lines sometimes become blurred between achievement in terms of our programme expectations, and the norms outlined in provincial guidelines. This kind of external measure helps us to bridge that gap and ensure smoother transitions both ways for our students.