When faced with new Illinois learning standards in 1997, our team in my first district worked on aligning each of our units to them. We knew we couldn't teach everything that was in the standards, but what we could teach, we would teach well.
When the PSAE rolled around for Illinois high schools (our annual high-stakes NCLB test) in 2000-2001, our administrators and teachers all collectively freaked out. But after the initial shock subsided, we discussed what we could and would do to help students be better prepared. At my first district, this meant teachers giving up their prep periods to help students during their study halls after they had been identified as needing extra help via a practice ACT test. It meant shifting our focus away from some topics and towards others without sacrificing the thinking skills students needed.
When my department at my last district was charged in 2005 with leading the way in crafting common formative and summative assessments, we were overwhelmed by the fact that we would have to radically alter our thinking concerning how quality assessments were created. This meant creating learning targets first, and then determining what student mastery looked like--and putting that on the test rather than pulling questions that assessed trivial minutiae from the book's test bank. It meant embracing the fact that we could be competent test writers, because we were the ones who had clear visions of our targets, not the textbook companies. It also meant a lot more collaboration and work outside of the work day--but we were willing to put in the time because that's what was best for our students. We started small, with what we could do with one unit mid-way through the year, and we saw huge returns on our time investment.
When we were pulled out twice a month for professional development with our reading consultant, we complained about being away from our students so much. But we took away what we could from that time and started making literacy a major feature in our science classrooms. This meant students were writing more, reflecting on their learning through writing, and learning how to make their own meaning while reading. We didn't stop teaching science; we integrated reading and writing strategies where we could during our class time in order to help students acquire skills they would need for their entire lives.
When we were charged with making learning more authentic and relevant by using techniques found in problem-based learning (PBL), we went through another cultural shift in our classrooms. PBL means letting students take more control over their own learning, creating solutions to problems after research and synthesizing information from multiple sources to create that solution. This involves all of the literacy skills we were teaching students, but also requires that students solve real instead of contrived problems so that they can acquire the skills to become true thinkers and innovators. We started small, doing what we could manage here and there at first until our confidence grew and we saw students on their way to becoming those independent learners that school mission statements always drone on about.
I guess the point of the above little personal history lesson is this: If I hadn't started with "can" when all of these initiatives were thrown at me, I would have stagnated as a professional. I would have stayed in my tidy science teacher comfort zone of giving notes on the overhead and doing the occasional lab or activity, producing students that could spew stuff but not think with the stuff. I never would have experienced the power of students being able to construct their own meaning through reading and writing, or being engaged in a problem so deeply that they take their learning to places I would never have imagined.
We have to start with "can." What else can we do? We can't let "can't" stop us from doing what's good for students.