Category: Students

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What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test?

I grew up in an era of top-down information flow – book publishers, newspapers, magazines, network TV, radio. I was accustomed to someone else making decisions about what I should read, watch and listen to. They created information, I consumed it. Other than writing an occasional letter to the editor, it never occurred to me that I had anything to add to the dialogue – even then someone else decided if my letter would get published. Information came to me according to their schedule. My only option, was deciding what to pay attention to.

School was just a continuation of the informational flow that dominated the rest of my life. Teachers, like their mass media counterparts, defined what was important for me to know and scheduled when I should learn it. I spent hours listening to teachers talk, and then practiced what teachers told me at my desk.  Later, I gave the information back to the teacher on a test – usually in the same form I received it.

A few teachers fostered my critical thinking skills, but at best I was merely asked to assess the positions of competing “authorities.” Great debates texts chose the issues and confined the discourse to re-runs of classic loggerheads such as the Federalists vs anti-Federalists.

I had some skepticism for my informational landscape, but I was quite comfortable with the experts curating my information. What could be more reassuring than Walter Cronkite claiming “… and that’s the way it is.” He reminded me of my favorite teachers.

Fast forward to a digital age which has fractured the information flow – fragmenting it into ever smaller pieces: LP record > CD >  single song download > ringtone. Now we are armed with gadgets that allow us to re-assemble the info bits; by-passing the curatorial function that had been served by the legacy mass media. Who needs a Walter Cronkite? I can be my own editor, reviewer, researcher and entertainment director. I don’t simply consume information – I am a content producer. I blog, I tweet, I review my Amazon purchases, I make sure my Facebook friends know “what’s on my mind.” Forget that much of what I post / tweet about are links to the mainstream media, if they can’t survive, they’ll have to come up with a new business model!

What happens in schools when life has become an open-book test? 

The legacy mass media aren’t the only ones struggling to adjust to the transformation of information. Today, students feel in charge of information – their landscape is explored with an expectation of choice, functionality and control that redefines our traditional notions of learning and literacy. Unlike newspapers, schools aren’t quite yet an endangered species – at least until someone figures who will watch the kids all day. But schools run a greater risk of becoming irrelevant to students.

It’s time to redefine to the information flow in schools. Educators must realize that they cannot simply dispense information to students. They will lose the battle of competition for student attention span. Instead they must teach students how to effectively use the information that fills their lives – how to better access it, critically evaluate it, store it, analyze and share it. 

Students are adrift in a sea of text without context. As the barriers to content creation have dropped, old media (for all its flaws) has been replaced by pointless mashups, self-promoting pundits, and manufactured celebrity. The web may have given us access and convenience, but it’s an artificial world where rants draws more attention than thoughtful discussion. Responsible general interest media are being replaced by a balkanized web where civil discourse is rapidly becoming less civil. 

Schools can become thoughtfully-designed learning environments where students can investigate information and be given a chance to reflect (with their peers) on what they learned and how they see themselves progressing as learners. That can be done with a variety of technologies – even pencil and paper. A social network is already sitting in the classroom that can interact with information and each other without the need to go online. 

Teachers shouldn’t feel in competition with all information permeating their students lives. Instead, they should realize that they can help their students become more skillful curators of their unique digital worlds. Most importantly, they can assist students in becoming more purposeful in their information choices. Despite their claims of multi-tasking, students will someday realize that infinite amounts of information competes for their finite attention. Their ability to critically filter out unwanted “informational noise” may eventually emerge as the most important new literacy.  

Image source: Open book on table
Date 21 March 2016, 04:41:37
Author: Creigpat

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Looking at Student Work: Teacher Led Professional Development

For the last few years, I’ve been working with a high school that serves a population of  high-poverty, urban students. In my previous visits we have looked at strategies to get students to function at higher levels of thinking (rigor) and with more responsibility for their learning (relevance) in a workshop setting, make-take sessions, and in classroom walkthroughs. The centerpiece of our third series of sessions is looking at student work. I met with teachers over three days in groups of 5-6 in 2 hour sessions. A rotating pool of subs covered classes. Some groups were structured by content area, others were interdisciplinary. Both configurations gave us interesting perspectives to review samples of student work and use them as a springboard for  collegial  discussion. Most importantly, teachers supported each other in school-embedded professional development.

Teachers were asked to bring two assignments with at least two samples of student work for each task. When possible, teachers brought in copies of the material to share among the team. Many brought writing samples or other assignments that offered students some freedom in how they approach the task. Extended responses or assignments that required students to explain their thinking led to the most rich discussions. Since the school has a major CTE component, some teacher brought in manufacturing projects.

The process

Each teacher began by giving a brief background to their artifacts  – course, students, context of the assignment. We then spent about 45 minutes individually reviewing the sample assignments / responses. Teachers were supplied with sticky notes to make observations on the student work. This provide useful feedback to the originating teacher. Many teachers shared their impression verbally via informal side conversations.

I then guided teachers a discussion using four levels of prompts  We kept our conversations focused on the evidence found  in student work – rather than specific students or teachers.

Level 1: The Details: What details do you see in the student work – voice, content, organization, vocabulary, mechanics?

Level 2: The Student’s Perspective: Looking at the work from the student perspective – what was the student working on? What were they trying to do? What level of thinking were they using? What choices were they making about content, process, product, or evaluation? How much responsibility do they take for – what they learn, the process they use, and how they evaluate it?

Level 3: Patterns and Conclusions: Do you see any patterns across the samples of student work? Did you see anything that was surprising? What did you learn about how a student thinks and learns?

Level 4: What’s Next? What new perspectives did you learn from your colleagues? What questions about teaching and learning did looking at student work raise for you? As a result of looking at student work, are there things you would like to try in your classroom to increase rigor, increase relevance, promote reflection?

Teacher Responses

Teachers were also provided with written version of the prompts so that they could write their feedback. Here are some of the comments / questions raised by teachers. For more on how I used my iPhone Dragon Dictation program to gather comments click here.

  • Choice is motivation!
  • I need to devote more time to students reading and evaluating each others work.
  • We need more sessions like this one. It’s great to hear different perspectives on the same groups of students.
  • Am I making my expectations clear? Can they see the value in the assignments?
  • I’d like to add a student reflection every each day.
  • I’m seeing new ways of looking at / evaluating student work.
  • When students create for themselves, they see greater value in their work.
  • I’ve got ideas how to make learning more independent, interactive – I want to stress more project, inquiry based instruction.
  • We need to reinforce the idea of more “open” solutions to projects and assignments.
  • Students are accustomed to answering questions that require memorization of facts and formulas, but the work that reflected student understanding used higher-level questions and left room for student interpretations.  
  • Incorporating reflection into answers reinforces the fundamental concepts
  • This session helps us develop consistent expectations throughout the school
  • This is a great model for sharing – must be efficient and concise like this so teachers are willing to participate.
  • What are we expecting our students to know and be able to do in preparation for the global society?

The National School Reform Faculty has many resources for looking at student work that helped me in developing my process and questions. Thanks! Additional kudos to dear friend and colleague, Patricia Martin for helping me to frame the workshop.

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The Reflective Student: A Taxonomy of Reflection (Part 2)

Reflective Student
reflective student

Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It’s not something that’s fostered in school – typically someone else tells you how you’re doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning – patterns, connections and progress.

In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I’ve developed this “Taxonomy of Reflection” – modeled on Bloom’s approach.  It’s posted in four installments:

1.  A Taxonomy of  Reflection
2. The Reflective Student
3. The Reflective Teacher
4. The Reflective Principal 

See my Prezi tour of the Taxonomy

2. The Reflective Student

Each level of reflection is structured to parallel Bloom’s taxonomy. (See installment 1 for more on the model). Assume that a student looked back on a project or assignment they had completed. What sample questions might they ask themselves as they move from lower to higher order reflection? (Note: I’m not suggesting that all questions are asked after every project – feel free to pick a few that work for you.) Remember that each level can be used to support mastery of the new Common Core standards.

taxonomy of reflection
taxonomy of reflection

Bloom’s Remembering: What did I do?
Student Reflection: What was the assignment? When was it due? Did I get it turned in on time?

Bloom’s Understanding: What was important about what I did? Did I meet my goals?
Student Reflection: Do I understand the parts of the assignment and how they connect? Did my response completely cover all parts of the assignment? Do I see where this fits in with what we are studying?

Bloom’s Application: When did I do this before? Where could I use this again?
Student Reflection: How was this assignment similar to other assignments? (in this course or others). Do I see connections in either content, product or process? Are there ways to adapt it to other assignments? Where could I use this (content, product or process) my life?

Bloom’s Analysis: Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?
Student Reflection: Were the strategies, skills and procedures I used effective for this assignment? Do I see any patterns in how I approached my work – such as  following an outline, keeping to deadlines? What were the results of the approach I used – was it efficient, or could I have eliminated or reorganized steps?

Bloom’s Evaluation: How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?
Student Reflection: What are we learning and is it important? Did I do an effective job of communicating my learning to others? What have I learned about my strengths and my areas in need of improvement? How am I progressing as a learner?

Bloom’s Creation: What should I do next? What’s my plan / design?
Student Reflection: How can I best use my strengths to improve? What steps should I take or resources should I use to meet my challenges? What suggestions do I have for my teacher or my peers to improve our learning environment? How can I adapt this content or skill to make a difference in my life?

Image credit: flickr/Daveybot

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How to Teach Summarizing: A Critical Learning Skill for Students

Close reading (in the Common Core) requires students to consider text (in it’s different forms) through three lenses: what does it say, how does it say it, and what does it mean to me? Summarizing is an essential skill for learning, but too often in school we simply ask students to “guess” what the teacher (or author) thinks is important.

An essential part of a summary is that it needs to be expressed to an audience. In life, we purposefully craft summaries for a specific audience (directions for the out-of-towner, computer how-to for the technophobe). In school, the tacit audience for most summaries is the teacher. Imagine how a student feels when asked to summarize a textbook passage for the teacher. In effect they have been asked to summarize one expert’s writing for delivery to another expert – the teacher.   “…and remember, be sure to use your own words!”

If students are going to learn to summarize they need to be given a chance to genuinely share what they think is important for an audience other than the teacher. Here’s a three step process I followed in a second grade classroom using a popular Currier and Ives print, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” (1868)   Link to larger image

Source

Step 1: Start with the concrete “right there” observations. 

I projected a digital image on the screen and asked student to talk about the people, things and activities they could identify. They replied, a train, native Americans, a village, people digging, steam from the train, houses, trees, a lake, maybe a harbor, a road, dry grass, covered wagons, poles, mountains, a school house, people working, people waiting for the train, a train track, etc ….

Step 2: Give students a chance to tell what they think is important.

I managed this aspect by asking each student to draw a picture of what they saw in the projected image. The details they included were what they thought was important. Here’s a few samples. Click to enlarge.

West 1
West 2

     

Step 3: Give students a chance to frame their summary into a narrative explanation for another audience. 

I digitally divided the image into multiple sections and photocopied them (in B &W) into packets of  image details. I gave groups of students the packets and asked them to work in teams to assemble the images into children’s “a story book” with a caption under each image.

Detail 1
Detail 2

Here are some of their captions: (spelling corrected) 

  • Water would come from the mountain and fill the lake. You could get fish and drink water. Water is very important
  • People were moving west. They moved by wagon at first, then but train, which is faster.
  • Life was tough. People had to do everything for themselves.
  • It maybe was lonely because people missed their friends back home.
  • The people were building a town. They could get wood from the trees. It was a small town at first.
  • The Indian see the people coming. They knew things were changing. They got sick from the smoke.
  • The school was different from our school. People had different clothes than us.
  • The train split the old life from the new life.

While summarizing has been shown to be one of the most effective strategies for building content knowledge, that gain only applies when students are allowed to make their own judgements about what’s important and frame their summaries for an audience. When we ask them to “learn” the teacher’s summary – they are reduced to memorizing “another fact.”

When we ask our students to create authentic summaries (with audience and purpose) we give students a chance to reflect on their learning. Instead of simply testing them for factual knowledge, students can be asked: 

  • What did I think was important?
  • How did I share that with my audience?
  • Did my summary match audience and purpose?
  • Is my summary accurate? 
  • Did I use my own words and style?
  • What did I learn from the activity?

For more learning strategies see my blog post: 18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers – Defining, Summarizing and Comparing  

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The “Simpsons” Debate the Role of Social Media and Cell Phones In the Classroom

The latest episode of “The Simpsons” (Oct 5, 2009) nicely satirizes the debate over the role of social media in the classroom. Watch this episode and you’ll see the debate framed as “Social Media as Classroom Distraction vs. Social Media Instructional Gimmick.”


Bart Gets a Z

Much of the debate over the role of technology in the classroom is clouded by stereotypes of Luddites vs. Techies. What’s often missed is the point that it’s not about the technology, but the level thinking that technology can support. A PowerPoint can easily dumb down information into a series of shallow bullets, while a Wordle can help us to visualize text to support revealing insights.

Schools should be thoughtfully-designed learning environments where students can investigate information and be given a chance to reflect (with their peers) on what they learned and how they see themselves progressing as learners. That can be done with a variety of technologies – even pencil and paper. A social network is already sitting in the classroom that can interact with information and each other without the need to go online. But at the same time, handheld technology can support a level of investigation and teamwork that far exceeds the traditional classroom discussion group. 

I’m always looking for the cheapest, most dependable, and accessible instructional tool to get the job done – depending on the situation – chalk or Twitter may fill the bill.