Tag: Evaluation

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First Day of School? Here’s How to Get Students Thinking

As a social studies high school teacher, I faced over 25 years of the first day of school. When I first began teaching, I did usual thing – working through the class list (“do you prefer Patrick, or Pat?), a dry recitation of the class rules, passing out the textbooks. Blah, blah, blah – think of the message it sent to my students.

As my teaching style evolved from the lecture / work sheet model into a more engaged learning environment, I redefined how I wanted to introduce my students to my course. I also came to understand that it was imperative that I get all my students to contribute a few comments to the class during those first few days. Very quickly classes learn which students are the talkers and non-talkers. Once those roles are locked in – it’s very difficult for student for break out of them.

So I didn’t waste the opening week of school introducing the course – my students solved murder mysteries. I took simplified mysteries and split them into 25-30 clues, each on a single strip of paper. (Think of a fortune cookie).  I used a random count off to get the kids away from their buddies and into groups of 5-6 students. Each group got a complete set of clues for the mystery. Each student in the group got 4-5 clues that they could not pass around to the other students. They had to share the clues verbally in the group and that guaranteed that every student is a talker on day one.

Two different mysteries you can use:

Murder Mystery 104KB pdf

Bank Robbery 109KB pdf

My instructions to students:

“Today we are going to play another game that will help improve your discussion skills. Each of the pieces of paper I am holding contains one clue that will help you solve a mystery. If you put all the facts together, you will be able to solve the mystery. Any time you think you know the answers and the group agrees on the guess, you may tell me. I will only tell you whether everything is correct or not.  If parts of your answers are incorrect, I will not tell you which answers are wrong.

You may organize yourselves in any way you like. You may not, however, pass your clues around or show them to anyone else, and you may not leave your seats to walk around the group. All sharing of clues and ideas must be done verbally.”

Discussion Guide

  1. How were decisions made in your group?
  2. Was a leader needed?
  3. Was time lost getting organized?
  4. Was it ineffective for everyone to talk at once?
  5. Did problems arise because some people didn’t present their clues?
  6. Did any members ignore the clues of others?
  7. Were attempts made to encourage the participation of all members?
  8. Did anyone monopolize the discussion? Was this productive for the group?
  9. How did you organize the information to solve the mystery – time, person, location, etc?
  10. Could you have organized the information more efficiently?

Follow up:

Over the next few days we would process their problem solving skills, group dynamics, differences between relevant and irrelevant information and introduce the idea of higher-order thinking like analysis, evaluation and creating. We might even have time to try the second mystery to see if their group process and problem solving skills improved.

Suggestions:

Want more mysteries? The teacher can easily write clues for a mystery of his own creation, simply making sure that not every clue is relevant to the task. Some of the clues can serve as distractors, but these must be contradicted by other clues. The group might wish to attempt transferring their new skills to a subject-matter problem, one in which all students are in command of the basic information needed for solving it. Students can be supplied with units of information and use the same technique to organize and evaluate data and to draw conclusions. In some cases they can be assigned the task of simply organizing the information into categories. Or students could be assigned the task of organizing the material and then developing conclusions or hypotheses. Material can be drawn from a variety of primary or secondary sources, or you may wish to assign students the task of assembling their own information.

~ Updated from an older post from August 27, 2008 ~

Photo credit: Flickr / walknboston

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Ninth Grade Academy Planner: Skills + Motivation = Success

I'm proud to have been part of the creation of two small learning communities – a Ninth Grade Academy and a Summer Prep School for at-risk learners. In each case, we first assembled a team of educators to forge a common vision of teaching and learning. Then schools were organized to accomplish this vision.

As a consultant, I've had the opportunity to share my practical experience with educators from across the country. See my website Small Learning Communities that Work for more info.

Last week, I had the opportunity to work with a talented group of teachers and administrators from Helena-West Helena School District in Arkansas. We put the finishing touches on plans for a new ninth grade academy. Their development began earlier this school year with strategic planning and site visits. To get our work started, I sent them this NGA-planning-guide (40KB pdf) in advance.  Their responses were a great starting point for our two-day session. By the time we concluded, we had produced a detailed implementation plan as well as mission, "mantra" and key features. As I reminded the team, you need a concise response to the question you'll get in the grocery store, "So what's this new ninth grade academy?"

Judging from the session evaluations, participants felt ready for the academy launch. 

"This workshop helped us catch the "ah-ha's" that we never thought of."

"The best part was the collaborative efforts, insights and involvement."

"Thank you for increasing the momentum."

"Our roles and goals are now clearly defined."

Mission Statement – Our mission is to create a safe and supportive environment to enable students to make a successful academic and personal transition to high school. The NGA will provide students with the skills and motivation necessary to take increasing responsibility for reaching their college and career aspirations.

NGA Mantra:  Skills + Motivation = Success 

Ninth Grade Academy Key Features

1. Dedicated Space: Located in the 9/10 building on the first hall. Each room in the NGA contains a SmartBoard that will be utilized during classroom instructions. The space will provide a safe and supportive environment to assist students in transition to the high school. 

2. Team of Teachers/Administrators: The ninth grade academy will be led by the principal, Mrs. Davis along with the team of teachers. This staff will be trained and dedicated to working specifically with the incoming ninth grade class. The goal is that each teacher will become familiar with all students academically and personally. This will support the familial environment of the NGA. 

3. Student-Centered Approach to Learning: Teachers will be trained in instructional strategies that support students taking increasing responsibility for their learning. 

4. High Expectations: The NGA administration and teachers will hold students to a clearly defined set of high expectations, both academically and behaviorally. 

5. Curriculum Designed to Support Skills and Motivation: In addition to the state mandated curriculum, a new course designed specifically for freshmen will be instituted. This course will focus on skill development, life-long learning, and career exploration. 

6. Timely Communication to Parents and Community: Online Engrade updates will be available to parents and students. In addition, parents will receive regularly individualized student reports. Via the district website and other district communications, the community will be updated on the progress of the Ninth Grade Academy. 

Photo credit: Flickr: Leeroy09481

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Forget About Remembering, It’s Focus That’s the New Literacy

 
focus page
focus page

The cost of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as price of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. Despite all the claims of multi-tasking, we are stuck with a finite attention span. Thus the ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as a new literacy.

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. Educators must help students make more effective use of the information that fills their lives – how to better access it, critically evaluate it, store it, analyze, share it, and maintain their focus. An essential goal of the Common Core standards.  For more on how we need to redefine the information flow in school see my post “What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test?“

Recently David Dalrymple, a researcher at the MIT Mind Machine Project, made an insightful contribution to the The Edge Annual Question — 2010 “How is the internet changing the way you think?“ He wrote, 

“Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. … Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.”

If you need a visual reminder of the swamp of information that your students are wading through take a look at this video “InfoWhelm and Information Fluency” from the 21st Century Fluency Project

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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.