My department team was planning our standard alignment plans - basically figuring out what standards from the Common Core we'd cover each year and each semester a student is in high school. The rest of my department (which is filled with brilliant educators who are ten times better at their job than I am, so this isn't a jab at them, just a disagreement) felt that the writing process (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.5) isn't a standard that should be graded, but discussed frequently with students.
And I'm all for discussing. And showing them examples of my own writing that went through 10 drafts. And showing them examples of great published writers who went through 20 drafts. And probably doing some other stuff that showcases the awesomeness of the writing process.
But I'm also for grading it. And I don't think it's a hard thing to do.
As it stands now (as this isn't refined or anything), a student who turns in an essay needs to do four things when they turn in their final paper in order to get a passing grade:
Turn in their prewriting, in whatever form it was, with their final draft.
Turn in their "zero draft," their initial attempt at starting/outlining their rough draft, with their final draft.
Turn in their rough draft with the final draft. The rough draft must be a complete draft - no first-half-of-the-paper rough draft.
On their final draft, highlight all the changes between their rough and final. (I stole this idea from Linda Christensen.) Revisions must be significant - this isn't editing for spelling and grammar, it's revising.
On number four I "help" them out some (they would say "make them do extra work") - I make them write three different kinds of hooks and three different types of conclusions, then choose the best one. Next year, I imagine I could do it with all sorts of different things. Rewrite your thesis. Reorder your introductory paragraph, trying the thesis statement at the beginning and the end. Reorder your paragraphs in another logical way.
To exceed on this standard, students have to schedule a meeting with one of our peer writing tutors and show the changes they made after meeting with them.
I also let student revise their essays, often multiple times, which could be a grading nightmare, except for two things students need to do before I will grade their revisions:
Turn in your original graded rubric returned to you (I scan my stack of graded rubrics and save the final, because about half of the students will lose their graded one).
Highlight all the changes you've made between your final and the revised paper to be graded. Turn in everything you turned in before.
Then I just look at what they added and determine if it addresses the concerns recorded on the original rubric.
But maybe this is foolish and silly. Please correct me in the comments.
This was great. Students were way more engaged in the feedback I gave them, because it was clearer, or it involved technology, or for some other reason I haven't thought of. Students could also hear someone reading their paper aloud and pick up on my enjoyment of beautifully crafted sentences or my confusion when they forgot to proof read. No more did students turn to the last page of their essay and look for the grade - they went through their feedback first.
But the method had it's downsides. It was time consuming, even more so when burning the audio to discs. Also, once I'd burned one piece of feedback, that CD was toast - I couldn't go back and add more tracks unless it was a CD-RW. And for the student, they really had to follow along in their paper word for word; as the reader, I had to be very specific in describing what I was talking about in the paper - they only had my voice to guide them.
This year, however, I started using VoiceThread to give feedback on major papers, and as you can see below, it has some specific advantages that neutralize these issues.
VoiceThreads can be private, shared so that only those with a link can view it (for my students), or made public (like this one).
At the beginning of this year I attended a new teachers academy, as I was a new teacher in Beaverton School District. As expected, some information was a review, and some was valuable new ideas.
One of those ideas was the Brain Dance. This was developed by Ginger Habel, a mentor-teacher in Beaverton, for her Master's thesis. When students find out or enter the classroom to take a quiz or test, they are in a fight or flight mode, with most of the blood in their brain stem. This does not serve them in an academic environment as all the information and analytic prowess is centered in the now oxygen-starved cerebrum.
The purpose of the Brain Dance is to move blood from the brain stem to the cerebrum by getting them active and making them laugh. Which, as you can tell from the video of me leading the Brain Dance before a quiz earlier this week, is well accomplished by the dance routine.
I forgot some of the original moves when I first taught them the Brain Dance, and they have stuck. But here's the original list Ginger Habel was kind enough to send me:
After the Sunrise: 3 big yoga breaths. Start arms low and breath in while arms reach for the sky Chariots of Fire: Slow mo run Staying Alive: Disco move- point left cross body (2) point right cross body (2) both arms (2-3) YMCA: You know this one! Hand Jive: Hit legs twice, clap twice, shuffle twice, pound it twice then point right then left Billie Jean: Moon walk Thriller: Scary hands (right, left right) then walk, scary hands again, walk back finish with scary hands Chicken Dance: You know this one Ice Ice Baby: This is the running man or run backwards (The Jerk- some kids call it) Mony Mony: Ride the pony! Lasso in air, reins in hands and gallop around in a circle Jump Around: Just jump up and down The Rose: Butterfly hands up left, Butterfly hands up right, then swirl from high to low and end with right arm reaching toward sky (like it's growing!) What is Love: Head bobs- 4 to the right, 4 to the left then repeat both sets Cotton-Eyed Joe: Cowboy kick right and left or a variation of jumping around Hey Ya: Shopping cart, Lawn mower start, Sprinkler then end with Yoga breaths as music fades.
And I will link to the CD track in this post next week - the CD lives next to my school CD player right now.
Update: 12/21/2011 - Sorry this took so long, y'all. Here's the CD track. I'm not sure how much bandwidth I have, so if you have trouble downloading it, come back and try again the next day.
My copy of Classroom Assessment & Grading that Work just arrived. This evening or tomorrow, I'll start the reading due Saturday, this year tweeting responses as I read with the hashtag #PIPreading. If you're reading or have read Classroom Assessment, hopefully you'll help make this more than a one sided conversation. I'll be searching Twitter for that hashtag, but if you'd like to leave your Twitter ID in the comments, I'll just follow you. Mine is bleckley.
I've blogged about this before, but recently I made some essential tweaks and stumbled upon the scientific basis for it from . . . wait for it . . . Marzano. Bam! That's right! Oh yes, I most certainly did! Get ready, as Tom Fuller would say, to pick up what I'm about to throw down1:
First, credit to Tonya for showing me this originally for use on OAKS, Oregon's state test.
Your students take a test. In this case, it's a multiple choice test on identifying figurative language in Romeo & Juliet. You spent a day or two going over the many different types of figurative language Shakespeare employs, using 2.2.1-30, where we first meet Friar Laurence (O'Brien, 1993, p. 156). Then, you give them a short test on identifying some examples of simile, metaphor, personification, classical allusion, and soliloquy from Romeo & Juliet.
Now, if you're like me, you give your answer key to your student TA and ask her to mark wrong ones and put the total out of 13 at the top. You just happen to check out Marzano's Classroom Assessment and Grading that Work from the professional development library on the same day. You get home and sit down with a cup of tea for some easy reading, and get this:
(2006, p. 5)
And you're like "woah, -3% gain in student achievement! That's not good!"
So the next day, you give your TA the tests again and ask her nicely to write the correct answer next to the ones she crossed off, explaining that it's not her fault, while she rolls her eyes. Then you pop open Excel, because you want that .70 effect size.
So yeah, a class wide graph of their results. That's cool. You know what's cooler? When every student gets a personalized copy of one of these2:
You know you need to hit simile through classical allusion on your reteach. This student knows they need to study up on personification first, with a little bit of simile and classical allusion2. You reteach, grade, graph. The student gets a new chart that looks like this:
You get a new graph that looks like this:
A 24% improvement on similes, 30% on classical allusion, and 13% on soliloquies. It feels awesome to know that your students can identify a simile or classical allusion written by the Bard over 80% of the time. Not bad, but for the third test you know to prepare them by hitting metaphors and personification over the head since you're grading by proficiency, and your student is just a couple points below your required 10 out of 13.
One could use this on more than just multiple choice tests. Rubrics that were used multiple times throughout the year, like 6-traits, could be charted to show student's growth in writing and areas to improve.
To give you a jump start, here's the blank Excel file - I've left the formulas in so you can see how they work. I'm also including all the materials I used for this lesson, just in case you want to use it for Romeo & Juliet.
1. My here intention is unbridled enthusiasm rather than any sort of pretentious arrogance. Hopefully that's what's coming across. Go back.
2. The first time you make this in Excel, it does take some time - up to an hour depending on how savvy you are. But once you have that chart created, you can just adapt it for every test afterwards. Maybe 30 minutes for data entry, depending on how many sections you have. I know time is precious, but try it once and go over the results in class with the graphs, and I think you'll see that it's worth it. Go back.
This is what I'm introducing to my 8th grade reading workshop tomorrow. How you like them high-expectation-apples, foo?
Research Paper
Assignment: You will write a 3-5 page paper on a topic of your choice. Choose something you've always been interested in or have questions about. You need to have a total of 10 sources that you look at for the paper. Three need to be books, three need to be journal articles, and the remaining four can be from any source (books, journals, websites, newspapers, etc.)
You will practice previewing each of the 10 sources you choose. You must use all of THIEVES with two. You may choose parts of THIEVES with four others and use KWL with the remaining four. THIEVES works best with journal articles and websites – not so well with books – you wouldn't want to read every first sentence of every paragraph in a book, right?
Rationale: Completing this assignment will put you ahead of the game for high school, where you'll have to cite sources starting freshman year and write a research paper sophomore year. It will also give you an opportunity to try out different strategies for previewing and reading informational text and decide which ones work best for you.
Format: Your paper must be typed in Times New Roman font, 12 point, double spaced, with one inch margins. Your paper must have a title. It must also have an annotated works cited and works referenced page. This means with each source you use, you will need to write a brief summary (using the Keep/Delete/Substitute strategy we learned in class). The paper must also include at least five in-text citations from different sources. You must also create three text features (diagrams, pictures, graphs, etc.).
Grading: This paper will be read and graded using the same five point system we've used all year. However, it will receive numerous grades, one on each of the following skills:
Summarizing
Previewing text
Citing sources in text
Creating a works cited page
Using and creating text features
These skills will make up most if not all of your grade for third quarter.
Tentative Schedule:
January 26 – Topic Proposal Due
January 27, 31, & February 1 – Research in the library
February 3, 21, 24, & 28 – Drafting in the computer lab, additional research as necessary
February 28 – First Draft Due
March 3 & 7 – Self revision in the computer lab using STAR, conferences with Mr. B
Note to readers: this post involves me thinking aloud. This has been proven in the state of California to cause dizziness and fainting. Consider yourselves warned.
So I have this great idea. On International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I'm going to dress up like a pirate and do a lesson on how dialogue can give us information about characters; we can make inferences about the character by the way they speak. Splendid idea, yes?
Problem is, my first unit isn't on character. No sir. It's on fix-up strategies. Inferences are fix-up strategies. But they are very complex fix-up strategies that should probably be taught after a student has mastered questioning, clarifying (of which inferences are a pseudo-subset), and predicting. And teaching a random lesson that has nothing to do with your unit assessment is poor backwards planning (you know, when you plan the assessment first, then the lessons - whatever that's called).
So I am left with the following options:
Dress up like a pirate on the day I teach dialogue as a way to analyze a character.
Dress up like a pirate on the day I teach inferences.
Dress up like a pirate on International Talk Like a Pirate Day and do it anyway; this is going to be one memorable lesson and I can refer back to it when we touch on inferences and character.
Give a boring lecture on character/inferences.
Please vote using the poll at the top right hand corner of the blog1. If you're reading this on Facebook, you'll have to go to the blog: http://pedagogypractice.blogspot.com. The poll closes in one week.
1. Yeah, I probably already know the answer. Humor me. Go back
In Chapter 1 of Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning, Chappuis presents readers with her seven strategies:
Provide students with a clear and understandable vision of the learning target.
Use examples and models of strong and weak work.
Offer regular, descriptive feedback.
Teach students to self-assess and set goals.
Design lessons to focus on one learning target or aspect of quality at a time.
Teach students focused revision.
Engage students in self-reflection, and let them keep track of and share their learning. (Chappuis, 2009, p. 12)
In Chapter 2, Chappuis begins moving students to meaningful self assessment by establishing clear learning goals for them to pursue. She points out that strategies three through seven rely heavily on the first two - without successful implementation of the first two strategies, the rest will not be successful either.
Provide students with a clear vision of the learning target
For the first strategy, Chappuis (2009) gives three steps (p. 22).
1. Share the learning target with students
Many teachers I know, including myself, post learning targets for their students on a whiteboard/blackboard or towards the beginning of class with a digital projector. Yet often we make the mistake (myself included) of using eduspeak:
Today's Learning Goals:
EL.08.RE.05 Match reading to purpose--location of information, full comprehension, and personal enjoyment.
As soon as the student hits EL.08.RE.05, their attention turns elsewhere. Not to mention the whole "match reading to purpose" bit; I didn't learn what that meant until college, despite the fact I'd been doing it since I started reading.
2. Use language students understand
Instead, it would be much better to say:
Today we will learn:
How to determine a goal or purpose for reading a text: looking for information, understanding a point of view, or for entertainment.
Chappuis has some pointers when rephrasing a learning target. She suggests stating the goal within the sentence structure "I am learning to _____________" or "we are learning to ___________." She also states that teachers should identify words or phrases that need clarification for their age group and use a dictionary definition to help decide the best way to simplify them.
3. Introduce students to the language and concepts of the rubrics you use Chappuis encourages the use of rubrics for all the learning goals. Taken at face value, this could seem painstaking at best and insurmountable at worst. However, Chappuis stresses that the rubric should be both general and descriptive; they should be applicable to different assignments and use "language that explains characteristics of . . . performance at increasing levels of quality" (p. 40).
In the past few years in the blogosphere, at least, rubics have gotten a bad rap. I have at least a couple unpublished drafts that defend the rubic, but I'm forced to make their case here. Good.
The firestorm started shortly after Alfie Kohn published "The Trouble with Rubrics" in the March 2006 edition of English Journal. Kohn correctly admonishes teachers who use rubrics solely because they "make assessing student work quick and efficient, and they help teachers to justify to parents and others the grades that they assign to students" (Andrade 2000 as cited in Kohn 2006). There's plenty wrong with that statement that one can read about in Kohn's article.
He continues by stating that rubrics should only make up one piece of assessment because they too exactly spell out just what students need to do in order to squeak by, stifling the pursuit of learning. This, Kohn (2006) argues, is why "all bets are off if students are given the rubrics and asked to navigate by them" (p. 13), author's italics. I agree that this is a common symptom of students in our schools, but I doubt rubrics are the sole culprit. Any form of grading system that tells students they need to receive so many points in order to receive n grade is asking for trouble. "Smart" students care about grades. The "dumb" ones are smart enough to know that grades don't really matter - it's whether what they're learning is relevant enough and they are proficient enough to survive in society.
Rubrics break down complex processes that take years to master into bite size chunks that help students understand how they can improve. Grading writing (or anything) holistically is acceptable only summatively, and for me that means at the end of the year.
The best, most understandable means of formative assessment for students is that presented in rubric form. As Kohn (2006) says, "it matters whether the objective is to (1) rank kids against one another, (2) provide an extrinsic inducement for them to try harder, or (3) offer feedback that will help them become more adept at, and excited about, what they’re doing" (p. 14).
It would be interesting to get Kohn and Chappuis in a room together; Kohn (2006) writes "any form of assessment that encourages students to keep asking, 'How am I doing?' is likely to change how they look at themselves and at what they’re learning, usually for the worse" (p. 14), my italics. I'll reserve final judgment until I finish Seven Strategies, but in my mind Chappuis is winning.
Her rubrics seem to deal with many of the causes of Kohn's concern. The rubric should avoid evaluative ("excellent organization of thoughts") or quantitative ("thoughts are organized into three paragraphs") language and focus on descriptive ("the writing is organized using any of the various conventions of language [punctuation, sentence fluency, paragraph breaks, headings] to make thoughts easily understandable to the reader") and diagnostic language. Evaluative and quantitative language focus on the work, while descriptive language focuses on the learning.
Use examples of strong and weak work
The creation of rubrics moves fluidly into Chappuis' second strategy.
Showing students examples of strong and weak work allow them to compare their own work to a final product. In addition, Chappuis suggests having students choose weak and strong examples from a number of examples and state why one is strong or weak, either with a set rubric or as a precursor to creating a rubric together as a class.
Chappuis also emphasizes how important it is that the work shown to students is not from their class. In the past I have shown work from students in the classroom, thinking they would not reveal their identity. Unfortunately, this was not always the case. More than once, a student's first response to seeing their work on the screen is “hey, that's mine!” Whatever lengths the teacher may go towards making the work anonymous can be unknowingly sabotaged by the very student the teacher is trying to protect.
Instead, Chappuis suggests choosing or creating at least three samples for each trait on a rubric from other classes or previous years – a strong, mid-range, and weak example. Give these samples to the students one at a time either on the overhead or, better yet, as individual copies. Have them Think-Pair-Share. First, students individually decide how they would score the product on the rubric; students decide if the work is predominately strong or predominately weak. If strong, students start on the high end of the rubric moving down, if weak, the opposite, before settling on a score that meets most of the criteria. They then discuss with a partner, using the language in the rubric. The class then votes and gives reasons why they chose the scores they did before the teacher reveals the score they gave the example. The process is then repeated for each remaining example or until students understand the language and concepts in the rubric, whichever comes last.
This would be an excellent way to teach 6-trait writing. I attempted it last year, but stopped when I ran out of examples but before students fully understood the concept. Hopefully this year I have more samples to draw upon.
Works Cited
Chappuis, J. (2009). Seven strategies of assessment for learning. Portland, OR: Educational Testing Service.
Kohn, A. (2006). Speaking my mind: The trouble with rubrics. English Journal, 95(4), 12-15.
Last year I had the opportunity to attend a conference for teachers in their first three years. One of the breakout sessions focused on teaching students to self-assess and set learning goals.
The session was led by Jan Chappuis, who wrote Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning. Self-assessment and goal setting is one of seven strategies Chappuis presents for helping students take ownership of the formative assessment process. Attending the session greatly affected how I taught during the second semester, particularly by providing students with clear learning goals in their own language and offering examples of strong and weak work, Chappuis' first two strategies. As a result, Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning made my summer reading list.
In the first chapter, Chappuis takes time to emphasize the difference between formative and summative assessment. For her, formative assessment must involve feedback, while the product of summative assessment is a grade in the grade book. She also points out that these two type of assessment are not exclusive of each other. This is probably not news to many readers, but what seems innovative to me is that Chappuis places greater importance on student use of the formative information than the teacher's use. A teacher can provide remedial instruction, change differentiation grouping, provide individual tutoring, or any number of other adjustments in response to formative results. Yet often these changes are met with resistance from students: “we already learned this,” “why are you putting me in the 'dumb group' now?” or “why do I have to work back here with you when everyone else is reading?” Students who are aware of their formative results and understand what the results say about their understanding of classroom material are more likely not only to readily accept reteaching and remediation, but are also more likely to meet benchmark. Two instances stand out to me from my previous semester teaching that reinforce this belief.
Tonya Arnold taught me this first trick that completely changed the way I examine test results and what information I share with my students. When I did administer a test, which was rare, the process was very summative: write test questions based on what I think students should know after a unit; review possible test questions in class; administer test; grade test; record grades; return tests and ask if students have any questions; when met with silence, begin the next unit.
Now, every summative test I give is also formative. Every test question I write is individually linked with a specific learning goal from the unit, and there are multiple questions that address each learning goal. The next change comes after I grade the tests, when I use an excel spreadsheet to tie each and every test question to it's learning goal and tally it up to give students and me an individual and class percentage of their performance on each learning goal addressed in that unit. In class, we compare this to the same learning goals students were presented on the pre-test. Bam! Student immediately see, “wow, I scored 12% on such and such learning goal before this unit, but now I'm at 86%! I'm awesome” or “geez, I got the same percentage on such and such learning goal before and after this unit while the class average increased by 60%. Maybe I should actually do all those [not-so] stupid assignments Mr. B gave us . . .”
Admittedly, we still moved on to the next unit after students saw these results, but students had an open invitation to work with me outside of class and retake the test to bring up their scores. No one took me up on it. So I need to be more proactive in getting students to remediate on their own time and provide this feedback throughout the unit. There is room to grow, but this is a great starting place.
Here's a sample excel spreadsheet in excel and open office format if you'd like to adapt it for your own students. It completely blew my mind as well as the minds of my students – hopefully it will do the same for you.
The second instance of worthwhile feedback that came to mind was our second round of state testing. I presented students with data from their test results, which is automatically broken down by strands. I placed the students in differentiated groups by the strand they scored the lowest on. Each group worked on different tasks for the week - those who had low vocabulary scores received explicit instruction in context clues; students who scored poorly on literary text got to make flash cards of different literary terms. When we took the test, all but nine students improved their overall score, and 15 more students passed the exam, meaning they have one less hurdle to jump in order to graduate.
But the real proof is in the strand scores. Students in differentiated groups averaged a 6 to 10 point increase on their target strand, compared to a 0 to 4 point increase in non-targeted strands. Not only were the activities helpful, but I would argue students saw how those activities would help them pass the test - the activities were directly related to areas they struggled with. As a result, students were more invested in the process.
Next year, I want to do this more than twice. There is an added bonus when giving students formative assessment. Chappuis (2009) quotes Sadler (1989):
The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point.
Students understand why the teacher is reteaching and how it will help them, and while learning are monitoring the quality of their work - whether it is a strong or weak example, demonstrates proficiency of the learning goal, and helps them make progress. Sounds like a pretty good deal.
Chappuis offers seven strategies to make this happen. I mentioned these earlier this year. As these strategies are the topic of the remainder of Chappuis's book, I'll be posting about them in greater depth in the following weeks:
Where Am I Going? 1. Clear learning targets 2. Models of strong & weak work Where Am I Now? 3. Offer regular, descriptive feedback 4. Teach students to self-assess & set goals How Can I Close the Gap? 5. Design lessons that focus on one learning target at a time 6. Revision is focused 7. Students track their progress and self assess
Chappuis, J. (2009). Seven strategies of assessment for learning. Portland, OR: Educational Testing Service.
My 9th grade students just finished taking the 10th grade Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills1 (OAKS) test. There are a few students still finishing up, but these young scholars kicked the test's posterior clear to the moon. On average, students increased their score by 3 points, but what is really impressive is that 13 of these 54 students passed the 10th grade test and now have one less hurdle to jump before they can graduate high school. I am so proud of them and their hard work.
But tonight I'm wondering how much of a role enthusiasm/motivation/confidence played a part. Is there a sort of placebo effect that helped out my students?
I have this thing that I do before I take students to the computer lab to take the test each day. I don't think it's something I do that affects their performance, necessarily, though the intent is to get them pumped up. But it is definitely a gauge for their level of this-class/test-is-such-a-joke-and-I-don't-care-what-I-get-on-it factor.
"I say 'fired up,' you say 'ready to go!' FIRED UP?" "READY TO GO!" "FIRED UP?" "READY TO GO!" "FIRED UP?" "READY TO GO!"2
So we yell that, disrupt the classes on either side of us as much as possible (sorry, Dusty), and then we go kill some tests. With a vengeance. Just like John McClain.
But I have three periods. And second period doesn't get so fired up. They don't seem so ready to go. I yell; they mumble. I yell louder; they tell me how "gay" this is. I ask them if they really used "gay" as synonymous with stupid; they say "sorry, sorry, we mean 'dumb.'" Fantastic.
But second period has the lowest average test score for all three periods. Only three students passed in that class, while first period, which most definitely gets fired up and ready to go, boasts eight students who passed the test and an average test score 5 points higher.
Both classes have their negative Nellys, but in first period they aren't negative about getting fired up. Second period has more students who just guessed and blew off the test, but that could be a result of failing to get fired up. I'm just trying to figure out why there's such a big difference when both classes received the same instruction. And if it's something as simple as confidence, how do I give it to all my students, who happen to be sarcastic teenagers (and just so we're clear, I teach them because of it, just so you read my intonation there correctly that it is a term of endearment).
1. As if a test can assess something as broad as knowledge . . . (back) 2. Yes, I did steal that from the 2008 Obama campaign. Not because Obama's awesome, just because it's a really great cheer. I am being completely politically neutral. (back)
About three weeks ago, I began presenting my students with a learning goal at the beginning of each class period. "Make predictions when reading a text." "Identify and discuss settings, character, conflict and plot in selected micro fiction." "Describe the concept of 'exploding a moment.'"
The seven strategies are grouped into three overarching concepts:
Where Am I Going? 1. Clear learning targets 2. Models of strong & weak work Where Am I Now? 3. Offer regular, descriptive feedback 4. Teach students to self-assess & set goals How Can I Close the Gap? 5. Design lessons that focus on one learning target at a time 6. Revision is focused 7. Students track their progress and self assess (see Dan Meyer and his updated concept checklist)
It was emphasized that the last five won't work without the first two already implemented. But I could do better about telling students exactly what I want them to "get."
So, numbers one and two, check and check. This week's mantra starts on number four:
At the end of each class, revisit the goals and ask students to write on their exit slips how they feel they're doing on each one.
Last year, for the second time I attempted an assignment asking students to create their own individualized education plan (IEP). My first attempt as a student teacher was poorly designed and even more poorly modeled. Last year, the design was much more in depth (perhaps too much) and the product was modeled extensively. But the process was not. The concept of multiple intelligence theory got a 5 to 10 minute overview in class before I threw them into the computer lab to complete their self assessment. I asked my students to create goals for the semester, but offered no guidance on how to define short-term goals that lead to their long-term ones. I asked them to consider accommodations that would help them learn, but I never explained fully enough what an accommodation was.
This year was different.
First, I'm broke up the design more. The first assignment sheet could put anyone in cardiac arrest, particularly a freshmen who just started high school and isn't very pleased that they get to take reading workshop again. So a toned down some of the reflection questions and broke the thing into parts instead of the menu1. Turned out this assignment sheet was also confusing, so next year maybe I'll just scrap it, or give students a checklist of all the items they need to turn in when all is done.
Day One - What's an IEP?
I had some terrific help from my special education department where a special education assistant came to the room and gave a little introduction to the federal IEP and some examples of the accommodations students receive. This was generally well received, though I had a few students this year who thought I was saying they were stupid because they can't read. Could be because I'm teaching reading workshop this year, or could be because of the longer presentation from special education and the lack of respect some students have for their classmates served by sped.
Days Two through Four - Multiple Intelligence Theory
Multiple intelligences were taught over three days, the first giving an overview of each intelligence and then students experienced a lesson teaching a language arts skill exclusively using one of the intelligences. This packet was supposed to be their guide as they rotated in groups to the different areas. In the end though, we went through each exercise together as a class. Putting together the packet turned out to be easier than I expected, as I was able to pull pieces from lessons I've used previously.
Musical Intelligence
For this section I used a lesson on avoiding sentence fragments using the Schoolhouse Rock song "The Tale of Mr. Morton." I prefer the Skee-Lo version found on the album Schoolhouse Rock Rocks!2 Students listen to the song and then are asked to identify the subjects and predicates of some sample sentences. In the original lesson some subordinate conjunctions are thrown in and students eventually are asked to fix a couple sentence fragments as well. For the purposes of the packet, however, I just wanted to give them a taste.
Naturalistic Intelligence
Here I asked students to group like words together, same as you would with the natural world - kingdoms and phylums and everything else. I'm not satisfied that this is the closest language arts can get to naturalistic intelligence; it seems like Thoreau or Emerson should be involved somehow.
Interpersonal/Intrapersonal Intelligence
Sometimes I ask students to do what I call a multiple intelligence explication on some text that they've read. They can choose to come up with a soundtrack, a mind map, or write a letter to the character, which is what this activity consists of. For many of the exercises, we read "Waiting," a piece of microfiction by Peggy McNally from the anthology Micro Fiction edited by Jerome Stern.3 Students were then to write a letter either to the speaker in the story or to the speaker's boyfriend who she wants to see but can't.
Visual/Spatial Intelligence
This mind map activity I stole from Carrie McCallum, another language arts teacher at my school. Students respond to a text by drawing some of the things that might be going through a character's mind. We did the same for "Waiting."
Logical/Mathematical Intelligence
For the person who reads this who has discovered how to bring logical/mathematical intelligence into the language arts classroom, you need to comment on this post or e-mail me. My failed attempt involves translating a formulaic transition statement for essays into some sort of algebraic equation.
Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence
I have a bunch of pieces of green construction paper with random words on them like "hope," "rain," "love," "clouds," and "bagel." They're cut out in the shape of lily pads, and students hop across the pads writing a poem.
After trying out each of the multiple intelligences, students wrote a short reflection on the activities and which intelligences they thought were strong in them. Then they took a questionnaire, just as they did last year, to determine which were strong or weak.
Day Five & Six - Reflection Questions
In an effort to prompt more thoughtfulness when deciding on goals and accommodations, I remodeled the reflection questions from last year and came up with these five.
When was the last time you struggled in school or received a grade lower than usual? What do you think made it difficult? Consider all the players: you, teacher, parents, classmates, class subject, outside factors (illness, death in family, divorce). Of the things you or the other players could control, what would you do differently if you could do it all over again?
Describe your favorite lesson you've ever been taught in school and what you learned from it. What about it or the teacher do you think made it so memorable and/or effective?
Who was / is your favorite teacher / role model / mentor? Describe them. What are some of the things they did that made you appreciate them? What did you learn from them and how? If you were going to be a teacher / role model / mentor to someone, what lesson would you take from them on how to do it well?
What specific things help you to study or stay focused in class? Are there techniques you use when learning like mnemonics (like Never Eat Soggy Waffles for remembering the points on a compass), jingles, or rhymes (“i” before “e” except after “c”)? Give a few examples.
Now that you've taken the multiple intelligences and modality strengths self-tests, what are some specific examples of lessons that have helped you in the past that relate to your strong intelligence areas and your modality strengths?
Judging from the responses I received, questions 1 and 2 are the most essential. Question 3 is definitely out and while some students have good answers for 4 and 5, others haven't done the kind of meta-thinking required to answer those questions.
Last, the students received this sheet, which I modeled filling out using my own answers to the questions. This was an improvement over last year's cover sheet which didn't include the ladders for small steps leading to the ultimate goal.
That first day, students had a lot of difficulty filling out the sheet. For a brief period of about a day, I was almost convinced that this unit was awash, that I was trying to teach months of material from an IB theory of knowledge course in a couple of weeks and that I was asking too much. Of course, my students rose to the occasion and expectations and proved me wrong.
After modeling the cover sheet a second time the next day (I didn't change how I modeled it, so I don't know what the difference was; maybe it was that the assignment was worth 100 points pass/fail and one had to turn in all the pieces for credit; maybe they just needed to see it twice), my fears proved to be mostly unfounded. Last year, out of my 75 students, I received two really good IEPs. This year, I got almost 30 initially, and I'm hoping the number will grow now that we've had conferences and I've been able to give the assignment to parents as well. Over the next few weeks I can start to set up my students with the accommodations they've asked for:
Spelling instruction
Longer time on tests
Reminder when work is due
Short breaks
Preferential seating (away from others)
Extra warnings
Listen to iPod (to avoid other distractions)
Read in the hall
Reminder when work is due
Organization
Additional bathroom passes
Preferential seating (Right to Read Anywhere)
Read in the hall
Don't call when hand isn't raised
Grade reports every 2 weeks
Time to study before a test
Read in library twice/week
Extra time to complete assignments
Patience and some slack on reflection sheets (the negative end of our positive behavior managment program)
Allowed to eat food in class
1. The menu just confused students. Probably because it was a dumb way to set up an assignment that wasn't really differentiated; I was just trying to make it look that way. (back)
2. If you haven't heard Pavement's version of "No More Kings," you have not truly lived. (back)
3. Stern, J. (Ed.). (1996) Micro Fiction. New York, W.W. Norton & Co. "Waiting" is about a substitute teacher, a story better suited for a room full of teachers. But there's a lack of young adult microfiction, so I figured that was a pretty relatable piece; we've all had substitute teachers. (back)
4. I should point out that for my reading and literature workshop classes, we also took the Scholastic Reading Inventory to get a lexile score and a diagnostic assessment from the 9th grade Holt Literature teacher's suppliment. (back)
My wife recently started her masters of social work at Portland State University. Her first major assignment was a paper connecting her bachelor's level experience and learning with what she has now begun at her master's level internship. The paper is a pass / fail assignment (as is the class).
The result I see is that she is less stressed during the writing of this paper than she has been with her entrance essay, scholarship essays or any of the other countless pieces of writing she needed to complete to get accepted to the university. The stakes were so much higher.
Since my wife is a member of the "new" or "knowledge class" (a term from one of her social work readings), she didn't cut corners on her paper. I'm wondering what balance I would have to strike to get my student's best work and also offer this nerve-liberating form of grading for papers or assignments. I could always ask students to revise specific pieces of a paper to get it to a passing grade, but at what point do students say "why bother, I'm never going to get it good enough for him to be happy." And I can think of a few students who would cut every corner they could - some of them did it last year. But then again, maybe they shouldn't have passed because of it.
I don't get it. Maybe it's because I was too much of the nerd in school, and never was a part of punk culture, so it doesn't resonate with me like it does with Alec. Or maybe I'm missing a crucial part of the definition. The Wikipedia stub states:
"Edupunk is an ideology referring to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude."
If that's all there is too it, edupunk to me doesn't seem new, revolutionary, or going against any system. The cost or corporate ownership isn't an issue to me. If it works, use it. If is doesn't, don't.
Ms. Michetti beat me to the punch here. If you don't improve improve on something that already works really well, why do it yourself? If all the available resources stink, of course you would do it yourself. It's what a good teacher would do. As Ms. Michetti says, "it's just good practice."
Case in point: I'm co-teaching grade 7 English next semester. Since I'm in a sense mentoring the other teacher, I started planning my units by using the same textbook he is, because I saw it as the easiest way for him to improve his teaching.
I chose a unit called "Dragons." Dragons are cool, right? The students would have fun with it, I could read aloud Eragon for the first few minutes of every class, and there was an assignment in the textbook where students pretend they're on a radio show - perfect for making podcasts. And technology is great for at-risk students.
So I started writing my first lesson plan.
Luckily, built in safeguards stopped me before I got too far. Theory into Practice has been around for a while, but Relevancy/Schooliness is new. I considered adding it a while ago, and Clay convinced me of it's importance. There will be at least one kid in class who won't see the immediate relevancy of learning about dragons. Or drawing one. And that kid will be right. Not to mention the fact that the textbook wasn't using any educational theory I'm familiar with, nor did it differentiate. So no more Dragon unit, and no more textbook. The textbook doesn't work for me, so I'll do it myself.
I plan a unit on gender roles; relevant because the girls get stuck cleaning the classroom way more often than the boys. The girls have something to gain and the boys have something to lose, maybe even beyond the schoolyard (I hope). We'll read A Girl Named Disaster aloud as part of the unit, which will fit in nicely with our next unit on immigration, which has it's relevancy in the riots that happened last month in Johannesburg and just down the road 30 km in Jane Furse. And I'll differentiate and scaffold as much as I want. Just as much as I did before anyone was calling it edupunk.
Here's the thing though: my counterparts at the school have spent the majority of their professional careers teaching under the Bantu education system. They were taught during Apartheid. They are going to need a lot of additional professional development to get to the point where they can connect lessons to specific educational theories. So when I teach my coworkers to lesson plan, we use lessons from the textbook. In the teacher's guide, each lesson is already paired with it's Learning Outcomes and Assessment Standards (standards set at the federal level). Instead of listening to a 30 minute to hour long lecture everyday1, they're getting direct instruction, followed by modeling, followed by guided practice. Occasionally, they get to do group work, science experiments, or create authentically assessed projects. For the teachers, the textbooks work relatively better. They may be sold by a corporate power like Oxford University Press, but it's closer to good practice. So they use it. Why not?
1. I'm not saying lectures are the root of all evil, I'm just saying you don't use them every time you teach. Go back.
A few months ago, I wrote about the grade seven math class I'm co-teaching and the rote memorization of multiplication facts. The basic thesis is that I know my students need to learn the multiplication facts, but I cringe at the monotonous repetition of multiplication tables and skip counting (the comments suggest I didn't convey the former as well as I did the latter).
After a few weeks of helping my counterpart get started with the instruction and use of mad math minutes every morning, I let her take over and moved on to other projects. Last week I checked back in.
"How is mad maths minutes going?" I asked.
"You know, I can say now, though it is not one hundred percent" she said, "I can say that I am satisfied."
She is an excellent teacher who receives much respect from her students and co-workers, but I was skeptical that the six week mad math minute program with only two weeks of instruction would yield results we could both be satisfied with. Together we've been focusing a great deal on assessment and it's three main uses as I see it: assessment of instruction, feedback to learners in the form of evaluation, and grading. So I suggested we perform a post-assessment to check our instruction.
We gave the learners five minutes to complete 50 multiplication facts. Using the rules of mad math minute, a learner could only receive points for the number of problems they consecutively and correctly solve starting with problem one. So for a learner to get 10 points, the first 10 answers must be correct. They may have missed number 11, but if number 12 is correct, it makes no difference. The reason for this harsh grading is to get the students to know all 390 of the math facts, not just the easy ones.
As I feared, the highest score out of 98 students was 17. Few learners completed more than 10 questions and the vast majority could not answer the first problem - 9 x 9.
My counterpart felt that the students had relaxed since she had finished doing mad math minute a couple weeks before. I agreed with her, but added that our instruction did not make the information stick, and so this Monday, we're starting fresh. All grade seven students are arriving at school an hour early for 50 minutes of multiplication instruction. (South African students, unlike most of their American counterparts, are more than willing to arrive before school for additional learning.)
I've written up six weeks worth of lesson outlines (here they call it a work schedule) and this weekend I'll write up the lesson plans for each day next week. We're throwing everything we can think of at them - flashcards on yarn, 1-100 squares that you color in the numbers on, touch math mini-lessons, and mad math minutes is back on a daily basis. If our lessons prove successful then we can hit grades 3 to 6 next and hopefully end this game of catch-up. I'll post my lesson reflections here, but they'll only appear on the complete feed with lessons.
I think the portfolio system works really well with certain kids. But it also, in my experience, sets up another kind of kid for a hard fall. The kid I'm thinking of is the somewhat unorganized kid with a lot of outside interests who has a tendency to let things slide until its just past the time when it's possible to actually get it done. They tend to assume, in the absence of other feedback, that they're doing fine, that everything is okay. Then when they find out it's too late and they've let the work pile up too long, and that their grade is going to be a D or an F, they freak out. As do their parents.
That sounds like a good 25% of all my former students. I can be so blind!
