Reflections of a Techie

Lifelong learning is a personal responsibility....

My dear friend Bill Ferriter is writing about another one of my hot topics!!!  Go Bill.  His wondering is about how we will change our profession into lifelong learners.  I have to say that this is a topic that is very close to my heart...probably because I really believe in the whole idea of lifelong learner and how it keeps me young and curious....

Also this fall I am teaching another grad school class on Teaching and Learning with Technology.  My introductory unit is all about Lifelong Learning.  I make the case for it by citing some pretty well known stats....only 7% of teachers who use technology use it effectively (ie seamlessly and appropriate for the learning target).  Parker Palmer says it so well.....“good teaching is rather more than technique: 'good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher'.  This is where we find the push to be better than we are today...when it comes from our identity and the integrity of finding out who we are as a teacher.  That is the heart of the reflection process and that I learned during my National Board process almost 10 years ago.  The folks in these grad school classes, for the most part, are very motivated, committed individuals...they are smart and have developed a good sense of their cohort community.  I think they are really helpful to each other although they are mostly online, virtual classmates.  Their discussion forums last summer were inspiring, so I'm excited to see what they do with this kind of challenge.

I am going to be bold in this class I'm teaching.  I designed a learning activity where my grad students will have to join a virtual community.  I picked Classroom 2.0 because it fits the wide range of content areas and age groups that are reflected in my class demographics...and because it offers something for the beginning to the experienced user.  What is bold is that they must pick one aspect of the community to investigate each week and then use a reflection blog to record what they learned.  Many may believe this is too much to do...many may believe I should be more directive...and I'm hoping that many will enjoy the freedom to define for themselves what it is they want to learn while....many will benefit from the requirement to reflectively blog.  I'm not "grading" the blog so we'll see how many will do it.... 
For 6 weeks they'll investigate, try things out and write about it...then we'll post our individual conclusions and do an online discussion to try and generalize the experience beyond what each person found out by themselves.

I think if we gave teachers more learning experiences like this, we might begin to develop more independence.  Yes, they'll hate that it's not more defined and prescriptive.  But as we do more and more like this...places where we can't really fail or there isn't one single path to follow, we can develop a culture that embraces this kind of learning.  How many PD experiences have you attended where this open-ended, long term learning is the target or objective?  I can tell you I haven't been to many.

Great question Bill.  I'll let you know how my 6 week experiment goes.

Science writing for 6th grade--setting the basics in place

I've been setting up my baseline data collection point for my science class.  I have selected a passage that should be very accessible for them (I used a Time for Kids article about earthquakes) and this will give me the ability to figure out where they are starting from, but lead into individual Excel sheets which will help me develop my formatives.

All this seems like so much to go through to get their writing skills amped up but I'm convinced that I have to be much more systematic than I've been in the past.

I also know that I'll be doing many more anchoring activities.  After reading Stephanie Harvey all summer, I think I can begin to understand what to do.  I have selected 4 or 5 pieces to serve as a touchpoint for all that I am hoping to teach them about writing in science.  What Harvey recommends is to use chart paper to work your way through the skills I'm modeling and then to refer back to that chart paper.  I would rather use my Smart Board...maybe combine it with some AirLiners so that I can pass around the tablets to generate a collaborative feel.  I can save these charts as .pdfs and give them to students to add to their science notebooks.  I will do the chart paper, too, because I think posters of what we were thinking are good visual cues.

The whole trick is going to be how to scaffold this with the right amount of support, ever so slightly decreasing and increasing their ability to work independently from my guidance.

Gosh...I have to say that this is hard.  I don't have a clue about how to teach writing and the writing skills they have are so confined to language arts applications.  At the age of my students, 11 or 12 years old, they are cognitively able to see that what they learned about reading a story, summarizing it and answering questions is the same skill as I am asking them to use in science.  Somehow my language arts teachers don't see the value in using nonfiction texts like what they have to read in social studies or science...so we don't get to do much interdisciplinary reinforcement.

It will be an interesting year.

AllThingsPLC » Blog Archive » Three Rules Help Manage Assessment Data

Just read a great article that started with a Dickens quote about it being the best of times and the worst of times....what a great way to summarize how NCLB has effected my classroom and those around me.  Thomas Many wrote  Three Rules Help Manage Assessment Data. to discuss some wonderfully practical rules that would help teachers.

1.  Getting access to data must be timely.  There isn't anything that I could second more loudly than this idea.  Getting information about your students after they have left your classroom or are several months past when they are studying the topic...well, why bother?

2.  This rule involves the principal making sure data is easy to read and formatted in such a way to help teachers.   Help them without having to learn how to be an statistician or decipher some obscure formatting that probably made sense to the IT guy but not to a practicing teacher.

3,  The last rule states that data needs to be dicussed publicly.  This is another great idea.  As practitioners, we need to lighten up and realize that we can only improve if we risk talking to each other about what happened.  There's too much to learn from this kind of post-test analysis to worry about your ego...you just need to look at what the numbers say and try to improve.

This was a great little article, well written and full of wisdom that someone has learned by working with real teachers doing a good job at using data to drive their instruction.

Guest expert voices on formative assessment

This has been a wonderful day.  I'm building my Assessment class and thought I'd try and use interviews to spruce up the online content a bit.  I wasn't sure how this would go...but I ventured out today.  Took my computer to work along with my Snowflake microphone and started interviewing people.

I had thought about the questions I wanted to get answered before I talked with them...mostly wanted to hear their expertise on what works in terms of preassessment and formative assessments.  This is something that we've been very busy working on district wide so I know tons of people have good stuff going on in their classrooms.

But as I listen to my colleagues describe what they do...I'm blown away.  So effortlessly they chat about this amazing body of work they do in the name of making students into successful learners. I swear that policymakers need to hear testimonies of these teachers + the loads of other teachers who do the same thing....it's work and innovation that creates this incredible backdrop for students.   I honestly think you'd have to try to fail with thoughtful practitioners like I spoke with today.

Using formative assessment and empowering students

Fishbowls and Mathematical Discourse

I've been working at amping up our mathematical conversations.  It's hard because my classes want to sit around at giggle, wait for me to affirm/correct their comments....so conversations just falter.

My district coordinating teacher gave us all a set of crib notes on promoting mathematical discourse.  These notes were based on the book ,Classroom Discussions; Using Math Talk to Help Students Learn.  So I decided to take some of those ideas and blend it with the good 'ol standard fishbowl discussion format.

I broke the class into two parts...and used the Mathematical Reflection questions from our CMP book called Variables and Patterns.  The job was to discuss the advantages of displaying data as a table or as a graph.  When it most advantageous to do one vs the other in analyzing the relationship between the variables.  I had the outside of the fishbowl concentrating on whether the inside discussers covered whether their examples covered all cases and could explain what they meant.  AND If the discussers could think of a counterexample to disprove the conclusion that was made by another speaker.

Whenever the discussers got repetitive or stumped, I gave it a "T" timeout...and the outside circle used their question to help get them over the hump.  The outside gave the inside suggestions for what they should ask each other or what concept was being overlooked.

Then they switched positions.

This worked great.  I'll have to say that we are just beginning this journey, but I think it's taking us down the right path.  I think they walked away with a much better notion of how to have a math conversation.

Dynamic feedback loops OR Formative Assessment in Math & Test Prep

Having spent weeks on reviewing Number Sense, it was time to see how much students knew in a simulated testing situation.  I created a series of 3 - 10 question formatives which covered rational numbers.  I needed that dynamic situation for independent practice...something where I could watch all of them do their problem set but without interacting with them.

Today we dragged the mobile carts into the pod and got started.  As they took their quizzes, I would watch their questions stream into my grid.

"OK, Bill...be sure to check #2 again"....squint a bit more at the screen and realize that everyone was missing #9.  Buggers that means I really need to do more with teaching estimating with percents.  New numbers would post to my screen and I could tell the 2 kids in the back of the room where messing around, clicking through and not showing me what they knew/didn't know.  I walked back there and set them straight...by the time I returned to monitoring my screen they were in "review" mode and changing their answers.

Here is proof to me that dynamic test results can be powerful.  All the groundwork I had invested in teaching the concepts, having them drill on the concepts, allow a little time to go by and let it sink into long term memory (or escape) and blam.  See what they remembered and what they could still do.  The capability to watch their scores pour in, question by question, is remarkable.

I thought they were getting messed up on estimation problems.  Turns out I was all wrong.  They were missing the multi-step problems.  Without instant results, I would have operated from the wrong assumption and addressed a need they didn't have.  This is powerful stuff.  It is a feedback loop that can change how kids feel about math...

If I know what they "get" and "don't get", I have a much better chance at helping them learn the tough stuff.

It will be interesting to compare tomorrow's results with today's.  I will be watching to see if they soar and falter in the same places they did today.  Whatever the outcome, it will inform my decision about what to teach the next day.  That's just cool and humbles me to think about the potential we have together because of the leveraged knowledge I have with technology.

Homework, Feedback and Improving Grades

I've been working on turning over responsibility for grades to my students.  This is a complex and very puzzling dance we've been doing.

I started the year by announcing I was no longer grading homework.  I told students that I thought homework was their practice sessions and they needed to not face the pressure of getting a grade for practice.  We talked all sorts of analogies (soccer practice, piano lesson practice etc etc etc) and I think they "got it".  I also believe that the practice that you do at the beginning of a concept shouldn't show the same quality of product as when you are nearing the end....hopefully they're getting better over time.

Actually this has worked out pretty well.  We still grade everything in class the next day.  I have them review their answers with a shoulder partner and they decide which problems they want worked on the board.  Gosh this used to take what seemed like hours.  Now we've gotten pretty efficient at it.  (You also figure out that if you assign 30 problems it's going to take the whole hour!!!)  Part way through the 2nd quarter, we started trying to categorize the types of problems that they needed me to clarify to see if there were patterns.  Sometimes it is very clear what they dont' get...and it becomes a great source of data information for me...and sometimes it's just a bunch of stuff.  The one thing they've gotten really good about knowing...is their error a result of "not getting" it or rushing through/careless mistake.

I think that was one of my first successes.  Helping students to have a way to know about their set of math skills...helping them be able to describe how well they could/couldn't do something that had no correlation to a grade!!!!!  My colleague, Bill, has written about how students have felt like the challenger in American Gladiator...beat about the head with grades.  He asks the question...where does that get either the student or the teacher and concludes that it does little if anything.

It's been grueling to design all the formative pieces that go along the way.  I teach with another person and we've gotten it together....I seem to be really good at designing the pre-assessments and the tiered assignments and she is really good at the review lessons and finding practice problems from which to pick.  Without her help to share the burden, both of us would have drowned by now.

The other big hurdle is for the kids to realize that they get fewer grades so they mean so much more.  I think they were nervous about this.  They had different kinds of experiences with assessments...maybe not knowing what to expect on the test or what kinds of problems they really need to be able to work/answer.  Now I think they believe me when we pass out the targets at the beginning...they sort of check those off as they know they can do the skill there...and then they know that they better be good at the review packet.

One student yesterday told me that there was nothing new on the test..he smiled and added, as always.  Cracked me up.  But I think he was trying to tell me that he felt like he was in control of his learning.  He knew what to expect and he'd studied for those things.

My class average is actually up this year even though last year's students were much stronger math students.  I think I have a better system of collecting feedback and I think students are beginning to see that I don't "give them" a grade, they "earn it".