Always Formative

Status Change

2012-01-14T23:25:00.000-08:00

I'm at the Creating Balance conference and have been thinking about status. I'll write more about the conference later.

I've got two things to share, one classroom and one schoolwide (neither are original to me) that I think help address issues of status.

Classroom:
Robyn Jackson had and article on ASCD where she describes a red flag system she used to immediately catch kids as soon as their grades fell to certain levels. I would like to think one day I'd be organized enough to pull something like this off but today is not that day. One thing I liked was that she would preview the lesson for some kids. I know I fall into the trap of just catching kids up and I liked this immediately.

The hard part for science was that so many times I couldn't really preview the content well. We'd be developing a concept in class and it was hard for me to figure out a regular schedule where I'd be able to preview content ahead of time without giving away what he or she was supposed to be figuring out.

Where I modified this to fit was with classroom behavior. If you're a science teacher you know that when you have a lab, there are some kids who you have to just sit on. As soon as you get a lab going they're mixing random chemicals together or wandering around to talk to friends or whatever.

For about 10 kids I started previewing our labs. The day before a lab I'd ask some kids to stay after school and then spend about 10 to 15 minutes showing them the equipment they'll be using and making sure they knew how to handle and use it. I'd show them what their eventual setup would probably look like and some common pitfalls. I'd let them know what they were trying to figure out and, depending on how much I could give away, preview/review some content.

Status change right? These 10 kids didn't start off lost and immediately could contribute something valuable. For half the kids it was magical. They were like new students. They were in there leading the way. I took secret pleasure in watching the low status kid instruct the future valedictorians on how to use the overflow canisters or admonishing someone for grabbing the beam on a triple beam balance. There were another three who would start off well (the parts they had previewed with me) and then start to lose it when they got into new territory. Two kids it didn't matter.

Overall, really good bang for the buck and, just as a teacher, I've had a nice mental shift from always looking for how to review to also looking for ways to preview.

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School:
A couple of years ago I went to visit a nearby school. They dedicated themselves first and foremost to principles of community and it showed. They do this sixth grade orientation that I shared with a teacher at my (former) school and she started it up. She, by the way, is a far better teacher than I am. I take zero credit for this other than sharing the idea.

The middle school first works to identify fifth grade students who are at risk of dropping out, mentally or physically. They invite those students, perhaps a dozen, to a three day orientation a week before any other 6th grader starts school. Those students are all assigned an adult mentor and they're shown around school and introduced to the quirks of middle school life. There's a bbq on the last day and the parents are invited.

Here's the part I love. On the first few days of school those students get a special (colored shirt? a giant button? I can't remember) that identifies them as someone that other students should ask for help. For example, a huge thing for sixth graders at that school is how to open their lockers. These students know because they've been practicing. Again, status change. At the old school, I was the dummy. Here, I'm someone who other kids ask for help. The adult mentors check in from time to time but the bulk of the work is accomplished in those first few days.

At my school, the teacher in charge also teaches the Leadership elective (they do rallies, dances, fundraisers, etc) and she monitors them as sixth graders and tracks them into the leadership elective as 7th graders.

When I first visited the school, the principal reported that since starting the orientation (perhaps 6 or 7 years at that point) every single kid involved had been able to participate in graduation ceremonies after their 8th grade year.

I can't tell you how much I love this.

Our default action for an incoming at-risk fifth grader would be to schedule an extra "intervention" class. In other words, a student comes to a new school and the first thing we do is confirm that his/her status has managed to follow along. And yes, I'm looking directly at you Ms. High School Counselor who gives our outgoing 8th graders math support, reading support and no electives as freshmen.

Addendum: Bree just wrote about a presentation she did at the same conference addressing issues of status.

Managing Feedback

2012-01-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

(I'm going through the queue! Just imagine this all re-written in the past tense. Or the future tense. Either way.)

Good written feedback is hard. It takes time. A lot of time. Here are three things I've been trying to help make it manageable. Only one of them is slightly original.

I've already written about how I help students give each other feedback. That will go a long way but in the end it always comes down to us. As flat as some of us want to make the classroom, we're still the experts.

1. For the nuts and bolts I use Excel. I've got all my students exported into a spreadsheet. I type it out, print, cut strips and staple. Actually my student aide does the cutting and stapling. This is another place where tip #5 comes through. I can go through a pile and head straight down the sheet. When it comes time to staple, the excel sheets and the pile of student papers are in the same order so my aide doesn't have to do any paper shuffling.

I write messy so typing is always good for me. I like having a record. But the biggie? Copy and paste. Students make the same mistakes and need the same help. When it's a long assignment I number sections of the paper or problems and the students match those numbers to the comments.

2. Focus on one or two areas at a time and think long term. I'm going to use a lab writeup as an example here but it could be anything. I used to get these back and write all over them. There'd be so many marks students couldn't even see their original work. They were overwhelmed. Now we focus on just improving one area at a time. Perhaps we all focus on improving the description of the experiment. I want a few more details and better linking between how this experiment will address whatever question they have. They just work on improving one aspect and then we move on to something else later. By the end of the year, we've hit everything. What I didn't get was that a good lab writeup was my end of the year goal. I didn't need a perfect one in October. What I needed to do was improve a little at a time so that it was great at the end of the year. I wrote more targeted feedback and students weren't overwhelmed and knew what steps to take next. Win all around.

3. Delay feedback until the students are going to use it. This is the only piece of advice that goes against the grain. I know we're supposed to kill ourselves with 24-hour turnaround or get instant feedback or their work should be self-correcting. Yeah. That's fine sometimes. But I am very guilty of writing up feedback, giving it to students the next day and then....we just move on to something new.¹ It is far better to wait until that feedback is going to be used. The lab writeups from above are good examples. If you're not having students revise what they wrote then why not wait until just before they do their next writeup?

Another common situation when delayed feedback is useful is when we work to continually revise a concept. Right now we're trying to figure out why things float or sink. I'll ask a student to predict if a certain object will float or sink and justify the answer. We'll work on figuring it out.² Later we get the same prompt, because really that's the whole point of the unit. Before answering the student gets his or her feedback returned and can read it before answering the question. It's fresh and they can actually act on it. As an added bonus, students read what they used to think and see how much their thoughts have changed.

Oh and here's my obligatory BlueHarvest shoutout.

I'm definitely interested to hear if anyone has any good tips for keeping written feedback manageable.

Addendum: I forgot I totally stole Justin's idea to ask students what kind of feedback they want. At the end of a test or paper or whatever I put a little box asking some variation of What kind of feedback do you want? Or What would you like me to comment on? It turns out students respond well to feedback they want. It also turns out that I was often leaving feedback they just didn't care about. Who knew? You'll want to be specific in your questions at first. I found it helped to ask them for a specific area or question number. It will also depress you what students consider feedback. "I would like a gold star at the top of the page and an A."

____________

1: The corollary to this is giving student work back and then getting all hot and bothered when it ends up crumpled up in the bottom of a backpack. If you give a test back and don't want it to end up on the ground, do something with it right away.

2: I usually go from weight to density to forces. Density we get from playing around with film canisters and then later by using different liquids. Forces we get from linking back to atoms. I direct teach Archimedes principles because I think its overrated and don't want to spend more than a day on it but feel free to disagree. If you've got something awesome for floating and sinking let me know so I can steal it.

Survey Results

2012-01-02T21:39:00.000-08:00

Sorry I've been incommunicado lately. I've been working hard establishing that a single person can in fact get the flu three times in a single month. Now that I've figured that out, you don't have to! I'm a full service blogger. Also, my seven day beard doesn't give me a "rugged outdoorsy" look. More like "slice of wheat bread left in the refrigerator for two months" look. So it was a learningful December.

An artist's rendition of my chin.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Mouldy_bread_alt.jpg

Here are the results of the survey I posted umm...like two months ago at this point. I assumed 90+ = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, and 59 and below are Fs. (I should have clarified that ahead of time). If you entered in a letter grade I converted it using that scale and if you did a range I put the mean.

I don't know why I put F first on the graph. It's bothering me now to look at it. Plus I had to keep the next graph consistent. It's depressing me. Let's just proceed. The next graph is broken down a little more.

Scores ranged from 0 to 90. Both As were 90. There was a score of "butt" which I wasn't sure how to code and a certain blogger in the Rocky Mountain State left an answer down to the third decimal place.

What am I supposed to take from it? Well I'm interested in what you think. Comments are definitely wanted.

Take a second to think it over before I tell you a couple of my thoughts.
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I've seen this done a few times and what I think it shows and what the presenters thought it showed were different.

You can't take this as an example of how a (10, 5, 4) point scale or Advanced/Proficient/etc is superior to a 100 point scale. That was the purpose the first time I saw this. Obviously we're going to agree on the results more if we're only given 4 choices. Hey you've got one choice now. We all agree! Moving on.

I also don't think this shows the "arbitrary nature of grading" quite in the way that this has been presented to me either. I'm supposed to look at these results and say, "Same test! Same knowledge shown! Different grades! If only we had a (rubric/checklist/Pearson sales representative)." The whole point of the exercise was for you to make up your own scoring system. If you give us one, we'll agree more. If I had an actual test with actual student answers, then we could start that convo.

This, by the way, is something that's definitely worth doing with your department. Copy an actual test a kid has turned in. Don't mark it first, because it's also important to see what different people actually count as correct. Then talk about it.

What do I like about this? It's not so much the arbitrary nature of grades I think this gets at, but the very personal nature. I like that it helps you confront your own values. The very first time I did something similar (maybe 4 years ago so I'm going to fudge the numbers but the spirit is the same) and my thought process went like this:

Well it looks like this student mostly got it. I mean he got all the easy stuff. The super hard stuff he missed everything but I don't really expect him to always get stuff that I didn't directly teach. He maybe deserves about a B. So...hmm..I'll assign 10 points to the easy MCs, 5 points each to the short answers and like 5 points each to the hardest questions. That way they can get everything right except the hardest and still finish with a B. Plus I don't want the hard answers worth too much because those are kind of double jeopardy points. You miss a little of the easy and you're probably going to miss that part again on the hard part. So add it up and he gets an 85. Yeah that seems about right. I'll keep that.

I turned to the teacher at my table and shared my unassailable logic with him. His response:

I don't give a rat's ass if a kid can bubble in some memorized answers. If he can't think, he fails. 30 points each for the two hard answers. 1 point for the MCs and 5 points for the short answers. He got 35.

And you know what? We were both right. I was amazed at 1) How different our reasonings were 2) How little thought I had previously put into what a grade actually means to me and how it communicates your values.

Did you decide on a grade and go back and tweak points? Did you ignore the point totals entirely and just give a score? Did you assign totals, add them up, and just went with it? Did you add them up, decide you didn't like the final score, and go back and change things around until you did like it?

I am 100% guilty of having printed out a chapter test from whatever CD my textbook came with, giving it to my kids, started scoring them and thought, "Huh. I don't think that paper really deserved that score." ......and then doing absolutely nothing about it. I enter the grade and move on.

Later, I'd think I was being "better" by reading into the answers and throwing them a few extra points when they need it.

I think I know what she meant. I mean, she contradicted herself three times but I guess I know where she was going. I can see how she'd think that. Plus, I know she probably could have got it, she just maybe ran out of time or was distracted by Jacob sitting next to her tapping his pencil the whole time. Jacob was driving me crazy with that. Plus she always works hard so I know she gets it. Maybe she just had an off day. hmm...... B+

Both of these are wrong. My problem with the first is that how I assessed and what I wanted grades to mean didn't align. The second was brutal for me to face up to. I've let her not learn something and told her she's learned it. Why was it so unthinkable for me to just ask for a clarification? Or to tell her she didn't get it and try again. Argh. This is giving me an eye twitch just thinking about it.

There's no right answer to the survey. The important thing is that there's a right answer for you. When you know why it's the right answer, you can go back into your classroom and make sure that everything aligns with that answer.

One minute survey: Grade This!

2011-11-11T23:57:00.000-08:00

Out of 100 points, what score would you give this unit test?

(Edit: In hindsight I designed this survey poorly. Most of us assign points ahead of time for each question and then tally it up. I've changed the setup to reflect that so you only see the content and format first and then the results later. I'll mark on the spreadsheet where I made the change.)

You can use any criteria or scoring system you like.

The first three sections are testing content and/or skills that have been directly taught and are similar to something a student could find in notes, exercises in the book, homework, and classwork.

The essay is asking for a novel application of the content or skills that were directly taught. The question/answer would not be found in the textbook or notes but could be answered given sufficient mastery of the course material.

I realize this isn't a math-friendly format but if you're a math teacher, pretend 1,2 are the easy questions on a test. 3 are the harder ones. For 4, think "problem", not "exercise."

Results:

I've seen something like this in books and various conference sessions and have been wanting to try it. Don't leave any comments about your score just yet. I'll post results in a few weeks and hope to include it in a presentation for my staff. I have no idea if you can see the form at the bottom in a feed reader or on a mobile device. Sorry in advance. Thanks for the help.
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Layering

2011-11-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Overall the class goes something like this:

Pose a problem/Show something/Do something
Do some experiments and figure stuff out
Name/Practice/Refine/Elaborate
Reflect
Do something with what we've figured out
Break model and go back to step 1 (ideally). Less ideally but more commonly: Start over with something tangentially related but its in the state standards and so I need to force a connection.

There are some mini-cycles (epicycles?) embedded when we get stumped or someone asks a really good question but that's basically how things go.

So what's the layering part? Science teachers like to have these process versus content arguments. I know this happens in other subjects too, but we really enjoy a good argument about the value of scientific thinking and skills versus content knowledge. My own thoughts on this argument are tangled but I will tell you that if you're planning on only teaching process or only teaching content, you're actually teaching neither. Now I'm going to appear to contradict myself and add that if you're teaching both at the same time, you're not going to be satisfied with your results for either one.

The layers:

(Layer 1) In step 2 of the list above, students are playing the whole game. They're working with multiple factors. They're trying to decide what's important and what's not and making on the spot choices. They're messing up and messing up again. We're developing both content and process at the same time.

(Layer 2) Step 3, we pull out the content and we address it separately. What do we call what we just figured out? Here's some vocab. You just figured out how to calculate speed. Let's practice that now.

(Layer 3) Step 4, we go back and reflect how we developed our content knowledge. How did we solve the problem? What tools or skills did we develop? If it's something we're going to use again, we name it so we can refer to it later.¹

(Layer 4) Step 5, back to playing the whole game. We've hopefully developed our content knowledge and process skills to a point where we can use it for something a half a step higher. For example, constant velocity collisions instead of just determining speed.² The level of difficulty is crucial here. I tend to go too hard and they're back to trying to figure out new content/tools rather than having an opportunity to put together what we've developed.

I have no idea if layering is the right term, but it's how I picture it in my head. Actually I picture it as a stacked bar chart like this:

Sometimes, I'm embarrassed by how nerdy my brain is. My nerdy brain also needs to reassure you that those percentages are just approximations.

In written form it appears cleaner than it really is. There's a lot of overlap. It would be more accurate to say each layer has a different emphasis rather than truly divorcing content from process but it helps me to think in those terms.

I don't have any research to back any of this up. What I do know is that I've had the most success when we can develop process and content at the same time, separate them out to work on them individually, and then put them back together.

1: This layer is a glaring weakness for me. I never put enough time into developing this step as I'd like and I haven't yet figured out any solid moves beyond standard reflection types of things.

2: My credential is in physics so I feel I'm much better at developing these culminating activities for the physics portion. For chemistry it's never as satisfying. Mainly, "predict what's going to happen," or "why doesn't this behave like our model predicts," kinds of stuff. Note to self: Hang out with more chemistry teachers.

For the non-bloggers: I wanted to write a post about the big picture of what/when/how assessment occurs in my classroom. In doing so, I realized I needed context first so I wrote The Cycle. Now, 4 revisions later, I realize I need more context and so you get another post. It's like I mentioned in the last post about Mylene going down the rabbit hole. I would consider myself a reflective person, but blogging has forced me to take those reflections and make them concrete and semi-coherent. If you don't blog already, do so. Even if you never plan on anyone reading it.

Deserves More Traffic

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here's November's edition of Deserves More Traffic. My inclusion criteria is that 1) Your blog is awesome and 2) You have less than half the Google Reader subscribers that I do.

Teachers who teach teachers

John Golden and David Coffey are colleagues at Grand Valley State University and teach future math teachers. John's got a lot of cool stuff going on with games. David had a recent series called Now What on extending learning through student generated questions.

Brian Frank teaches future science teachers at Middle Tennessee State University. The stuff on misconceptions at his old blogger site is brilliant.

The loneliest Google Reader folder belongs to

Mylene, who teaches electronics at a technical school in Eastern Canada. That is pretty cool all by itself. Befitting an electronic teacher, she is constantly tinkering with how she does things. Her posts on Reading Comprehension were particularly compelling. It wasn't so much what she was researching or trying out that I found most interesting. It was that examining this narrow slice lead her down the rabbit hole of questioning a bunch of other areas of her teaching. Every (good) teacher goes through this multiple times and it was fascinating to watch it happen in real time.

Finally, a couple of new teachers.

Daniel Schneider blogs at Mathy McMatherson and Molly Kate blogs at Mathemagical Molly. Both are high school math teachers although in very different working environments. I lurve me some new teachers. New teachers blogs spill over with angst and frustration and hope and wonder and I love them so. The downside is I get that "parent whose daughter is going to be out past midnight for the first time" feeling when a new teacher goes more than a couple of weeks without posting.

Hi sweetie, just checking in.

Are you OK? I'm here just in case.

Why aren't you responding to my texts? Hello???

Text me back right now so I know you're not lying in a ditch somewhere!!!

Ok. Go visit their blogs and learn something new. I'd say add them to Google Reader but we're fighting right now and I'm not ready to make up quite yet.

Helping Students Give Feedback

2011-10-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

Recently, Frank posted a picture of how his students correct their own tests and John posted a sample of the feedback his own students give themselves. This provoked a lot of discussion among my online colleagues and one thing that came up was how it is difficult to get students to leave good feedback.

I noted in the comments of John's post that I found it really interesting how his students were mainly leaving reminder notes and questions for him to answer. In this case, I'm talking about feedback in a traditional teacher-directed sense.

This is something I've really been focusing on this year. It's definitely been rough. I attribute this to the lack of quality feedback students normally get from us but that's another story. I wish I was friends with more English teachers because this is their bread and butter.

The whole thing is pretty standard but as usual, I buried my big insight. It's Key Point #2 if you want to skip ahead.

First, I narrowed the scope. I tried to teach them to leave feedback for only one type of question. In the topic on Atoms, we focused on the explanation questions—how you can explain different phenomena through the motion of atoms.

Second, I went through the process of how I'd evaluate those question types and wrote out a flow chart. It looks like this but you can certainly just do it as a series of questions or a checklist.

I drew it up on the board but you get it nice and typed. For the science folks, at the time we used the words atoms, molecules, and particles interchangeably.

Students are supposed to go through the flow chart and then write their feedback based on the chart. I gave them a sentence frame where each step they pass is a positive comment and when they hit a "no" they step back and write the improvement step.

For example, if you got to the second "no" you'd write something like, "You wrote an explanation for why water boils when heated. Next time your answer needs to mention atoms, molecules, or particles." or "You wrote an explanation for why water boils when heated and included atoms. Next time your answer should include how atoms move."

After that it was pretty standard. We used some generic sample answers to try as a class. Then they wrote peer/self feedback on some of their previous answers. I had them predict some things they hadn't seen yet, like sticking a balloon in a freezer and they traded and wrote peer feedback as well. Each time we wrote a set of explanation questions, we'd do this for at least one of the questions.

After a few tries at this I added another step in the flow chart at the end, "Does the explanation connect the motion of the molecules back to the observation or prediction?" This was much more difficult for kids to get than the first three but it is also a much harder skill.

Two key points:

My real goal here is that they do this enough times and when they're writing their own explanations they have the flow chart running through their head. Is this an explanation? Did I talk about atoms? Did I talk about how atoms move? Did I explain how that's related to what I observed/predicted?
What's really important is what's missing. I didn't have them leave feedback for correctness. This is where kids usually get hung up on feedback. If I don't know the answer myself, how can I give that kind of feedback? I can't tell where you went wrong if I don't know what the right move is. What I want them to look at is the quality of the explanation itself. Every kid can look at a written explanation and decide if it has certain qualities. It is important for a student to understand that he or she can be factually incorrect but can still give a quality explanation and vice versa. These are two different skills and we are going to improve both of these. This is the part I feel like I got right. Student feedback can't depend on the level of content knowledge.

I'm giving this a tentative endorsement. The higher level feedback is still up to me but this has definitely helped move the lower and middle level responses up a notch.

One teacher-bonus I noticed from doing this is how dumb it is when I ask a kid to, "Check your answers." Yes, sometimes there are careless errors they can catch. Mostly, if they didn't know it when they answered the first time, they still don't know it. (Actual quote: "I checked it. I still don't get it.") I really need to do a better job of teaching my students different methods for verifying an answer.

The Best $5 You'll Spend This Week

2011-10-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

John Spencer is having Reader Appreciation Week. You can get each of his books for $1 on Kindle. He's changed positions recently but I still think of him as a sixth grade teacher.

There's something for everyone. He's got a book with help for new teachers (Sustainable Start), YA lit (Drawn into Danger), edtech satire (Pencil Me In), and general thoughts on education (Sages and Lunatics & Teaching Unmasked).

For full disclosure, I consider him a friend in the "I've never met him face to face but interact him with online" category that most of my teacher-friends now fall into. However, he didn't ask me to do this and, in fact, wouldn't even consider asking.

Note that you don't actually have to own a Kindle to read them. You can get the apps for your mobile or download the reader software for your desktop or laptop.

(PS - I didn't forget about the assessment overview I promised in The Cycle but I have no idea how I'm going to translate this crazy bubble-flow-mind-timeline chart thing I drew into a blog post)

My Real World

2011-10-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Warning: I'm going to go off the deep end in a bit.

Inevitably, whenever I start talking about grading practices, someone eventually brings up the real world. They say, that's not how it works in the real world. You have (strict deadlines, only get one chance, get externally rewarded, etc).

I live in the Silicon Valley and so I work at tech companies during the summer. This summer I asked my boss, who presumably works in the real world, about what happens when a project is running late. He basically said "it depends" and then rattled off a whole bunch of things (in no particular order, this is just from memory):

Look at the due date and decide if it really does have to be done by then. Often, it doesn't. Example: Due dates are often projected based on expected sales or on completion of other projects inside or outside the company. If any of those other projections are off, the due date needs to be adjusted.
If the due date really is important, shift more resources their way.
Look at the requirements of the project. Does it really need to be in completed form by that due date or is a beta version ok or even just a proof of concept?
Look at the cost versus benefits. Sometimes it's more cost effective to scrap the whole project. Yes you lose the contract, but sometimes it costs more to complete it than it's worth. (Me: And what you've learned/done up until that time will come in use at another point so you can't consider it a total loss.)

He listed maybe 5 or 6 more options but I can't remember the details and I got lost a couple of times with corporate speak.

These ones stuck with me because I think there are obvious parallels to how we should be handling due dates.

But that's not the point of this post.

There are two.

One is that everyone's real world is different. If I spent my summers working in the service industry this post would be about how the manager told me how important deadlines are. But I don't. My world is not the same as your world so next time I tell you that something doesn't happen in the "real world," ask me, "Whose real world are you referring to?"

(begin crazed ranting voice)

The other is that our students are living in the real world right now. There is nothing more real to a student than right now. Their friends, their enemies, their greatest loves and biggest heartbreaks, their passions, their hopes and their dreams are wrapped up in a few buildings, a quad area, and a blacktop. Saying this isn't "the real world" diminishes everything there is about a student. Stop preparing kids for the real world and prepare them for right now. Teach your children how to think for right now. How to have relationships for right now. How to empathize for right now. Give them what they need for right now and however their real world changes, they will be prepared.

(end crazed ranting voice)

That feels better. Carry on.

Test Deconstruction

2011-10-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

I used to pre-test my students. There were two main purposes. I wanted to use it as a diagnostic to see what they already knew and I wanted to focus them on what was coming.

As a diagnostic, the test was pretty useless. All my students come in with essentially zero content knowledge of what we're going to learn. I mean, a few might be able to shout out a half-remembered vocabulary word, but I haven't had any students that can go beyond that. I get the information I really need from whatever I use to launch a topic. The ball and hoop demo for when we learn about atoms or just having them predict what will sink or float when we start on density/buoyancy.

In terms of focus, well, that didn't work so great either. They'd fail their way through the pre-test and since they had zero pre-exposure, none of what they saw on the test would stick. They didn't have anything to anchor it with.

Now I go with test deconstruction. In the cycle, this happens after they've run their own experiment and teased out the big ideas.

I give them a copy of a test I'm planning to give them. Same format. The questions aren't identical but they're testing the same standards. In their notebooks, they draw four columns. The first column is just the letter of the standard, which is listed next to the test question.

The second column is, "What do I need to do?" They should write what is actually required in the question. Do they need to label a diagram? Explain something? Draw a picture? Fill in the blank? They have a copy of Costa's questions in their notebooks to help them along. I picked up this page either at an AVID conference or somewhere online. Box.net doesn't like the font I used but you get the idea.

The third column is, "What do I need to know?" and the fourth is Key Vocabulary.

Obviously identifying the content knowledge and vocabulary required is an important reason for doing this, but there are two other things I'm trying to accomplish.

Number one, I want them to understand how fundamentally different this question is:

from:

A. Draw and label an atom.

or:

B. Select from the word bank and label the diagram.

or:

C: List the subatomic particles of an atom.

In the first example they'll need to know the parts of an atom, where they are located, and what those little symbols might mean. They're not asked to do the actual drawing from memory as in example A (this comes later on when we start with the periodic table). In B, they're only asked to recognize, not memorize, the names and know the locations. In example C, they're only asked to remember the names but not the locations or know what those symbols are. However, they are required to know what "subatomic" means. These are different questions that will require different levels of knowledge and different skills. More importantly, they need to prepare for these differently. I can't just tell a failing kid to "study." They don't know how to study. It's something that needs to be taught.

Number two, student friendly learning goals! One of my rules for teaching is don't do the thinking for the students. If your learning goals are in teacher language ("Identify and label the subatomic particles of an atom") and you translate that for them, you're doing the thinking for them. I want my kids to know what "identify", "label" and "subatomic" mean. Why in the world would I translate that for them? The columns translate easily into a learning goal for each standard and now when I say, "Today we're going to work on identifying and labeling the subatomic particles of an atom", they've already got something written up to decode what that all means.¹

They write them up in their science notebook next to that topic's table of contents. Whenever we add something to the TOC we can refer to the learning goals at the same time.

1: Now is not the time, but at some point you'll need to remind me to preach for judicious use of the learning goal.

Connections addendums

2011-09-23T18:36:00.000-07:00

In the original post, I forgot to include that I'm going to add pictures along with the storylines when it goes on the board. I'm a big fan of visual anchors. For this one I'm including a picture of the ball and hoop, a picture of the actual superhero Flash (probably not the shirtless Ryan Reynolds one, wasn't he the Green Lantern anyway? I'm confused.), and a photo I have of a student running her experiment.

After posting to twitter, I quickly got these two tweets:

Yeah. That's the goal. My original plan was to have my students fill these in as we go but then I realized I have no idea what's coming up so I couldn't really make the actual graphic until the end. I certainly know what the goal is but I only vaguely know how we're going to get there. This time I just walked them through the first couple of blanks and then left them to flip through their notebooks. It went fine but it would probably work better if I put together a graphic organizer they can fill in along the way and then translate over.

Along a similar vein:

A solid idea but I've got a completely analog class. I can get my hands on a projector maybe once every two weeks and there aren't really computers available for student use. Also, I like having it up all the time and being able to constantly point back to how we got to where we are. I do think this would be cool though and if you do it, let me know.

Connections

2011-09-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

I stumbled onto this post about Learning Journeys the other day and it reminded me I totally forgot to blog about something I'm trying this year. First, a visual.

I'll post the link at the bottom of the page in case you're having trouble reading. What is it? It's a storyline of the things we've been learning. You start in the upper left and follow the arrows. Here's a zoomed in version of the bottom left corner.

Any blank line they're supposed to fill in with a sentence and the boxes should have drawings of the particles.

Here's the part I'm proud of. Do you see that half-line on the middle of the left side of the page? We are going to make another one in a few weeks and connect it to this one. My goal is to connect the entire year together. If I was more organized I could have plotted it all ahead of time and figured out how to get multiple connections (and back to the beginning) but that will just have to wait.

We'll have an ongoing record of how we got to where we are and I'll fill be able to fill up one of those blank bulletin board spaces that my principal is always yelling at me for. Win win!

Here's a keynote 08 version (zipped because I can't figure out how to get dropbox to recognize keynote files) and a pdf. Don't forget to print it without borders.

Edit: Additional comments in next post.

The Cycle

2011-09-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

Subtitle: The one where I defend cookbook labs.

Going back over my old posts I realized I don't really talk about what my class looks like and where this SBG stuff fits in. My teaching is pretty generic and probably looks like any science class in your school.

I'll do this in two parts. In the first part I'll describe my standard teaching cycle. In the second I'll describe where all these assessment/testing/checklists/etc fit in.

Right now we're in the middle of our first topic on Atoms and so I'll describe that one.

Most of the units start off the same. We're going to try to derive the big idea. For this one, I want the kids to figure out that atoms move around. When they're heated they move faster and spread apart.

I start with the ball and ring demo. Unlike Maestro Hewitt, I start with the ball. I take predictions. Do it and then have the kids brainstorm different explanations for why the ball gets bigger when it's heated. Every year the same three explanations are the most popular. We record the less popular ones for later. Explanation 1 is what you guys and gals will recognize as phlogiston. Heat fills up the ball and makes it expand. This year, we called it the "water balloon model." Explanation 2 is some variation on the ball is made of atoms. When the atoms are heated they expand. It's basically the water balloon model for individual atoms. Last year a student referred to it as the Hulk model after the Incredible Hulk and I stole that name for this year. Explanation 3 we named the Flash model (in honor of the guy that's really fast) after the previous student's inspired Hulk model christening. In case you're curious, phlogiston is by far the most popular explanation.

I realize I'm stealing a bit of the thinking by keeping the names this year but I love them so. Oh and I always ask kids to explain what atoms are (or molecules, particles, whatever 5th grade vocabulary word they throw out without really understanding). I've yet to have a student define it beyond "little thingies" so usually we just go with "little thingies everything is made of" until we can drill down on a definition.

After that I toss a bunch of cookbook labs their way. Yes, I said it. Cookbook labs. I heart me some cookbook labs. I'm a fan of analysis. Some teachers are big on the front end of designing an experiment. If I had to choose, I'd spend a day planning and executing an experiment and four days discussing the results instead of vice versa.

So I tell them what we're going to do and they need to be able to explain what the various models would predict would happen. This is rocky and takes a ton of modeling on my part plus I give them sentence frames to start off the year and then fade them out.

First two things we did was take the ball and get the mass before/after heating. We did the same for some ice water that we warmed up. We compiled the class data, pushed all the desks to the side, circled (actually ovaled) the chairs, got out our big whiteboards, and shared what we thought was going on and which models were supported so far.

Next we dropped dye in hot and cold water and dissolved sugar in hot and cold water and then got in the circle again. This was Labor Day week so it took all four days to get all this done (50 minute periods).

On Monday, after some whole class discussion recapping the evidence we've gathered so far, students spent the period designing an experiment to either test one of the three models or one of their own that we didn't address from way back in the original brainstorm. Tuesday they ran their experiment. In the beginning of the year these are usually pretty derivative of one of the four cookbook labs we did. I'm ok with that. There was a lot of dissolving candy, heating and massing of various metals, and switching in different liquids for the dye/sugar labs.

On Wednesday, we circled up and they shared their experiments, results, and what model they think is best supported by the evidence.

From there, I get in to the talking/notes/demos/phet stage where they're getting actual names for things and deliberate practice. We refine the model a few times along the way but the bulk of the work has been done.

And that's pretty much how all the topics go. We figure out the major ideas through cookbook labs. They design their own experiment to test those ideas. We discuss. I drop vocab and some practice at the end. Pretty standard stuff.

Some topics are more lab-based. I do the density/buoyancy topic almost completely through experimentation and just give them the words at the end. Same for the physics stuff. On the other hand, my periodic table and astronomy topics are pretty weak. It doesn't get too far beyond "look at this and tell me if you notice any patterns" and then a whole bunch of me telling them stuff (while I'm not necessarily standing in front of the class lecturing, it amounts to the same).

Other things to know:

For whiteboards they always need a graph and I insist that the graph has no numbers. I just want them to label the axes and draw a line. I'm a big fan of this. They're too used to mindlessly plotting points and connecting dots and not focusing on what relationship the graph is showing.

I don't know how John gets that great discussion going. Mine are basically just report outs and I force some responses by asking questions of other students (Do your results agree or disagree with what she just said?). Most of my students are English learners so I give them what is essentially a fill in the blank paragraph ahead of time. They can't read it out loud though. It's mainly to help them sequence their thoughts. I also give them the questions I will ask ahead of time so they can prepare. I use my index cards to randomly call on one person in the group to give the main presentation and then other students to answer the questions. Having students prepare together in groups and then randomly call on one of them is a consistent feature of my class.

I used to be pretty crazy about formal lab proposals and writeups. Now I play it fast and loose. I really don't need to see a step by step procedure with every step starting with a verb. Yeah, I was that guy. But I'm really big on students being able to tell me what the various models predict is going to happen. I don't want what they think will happen. I really try to push thinking in terms of what the explanation you built says and then interpreting your results based on those predictions. If there's anything you'd say I'm pretty strict about, it's that. Yes, I realize that's standard hypothesis testing. But I stopped saying "write a hypothesis" because whenever I did a kid would automatically assume I wanted him to guess about what was going to happen and then the experiment was to test if he/she was right or wrong. I die a little inside every time a student writes, "My results were XYZ so that means I was right."

Hopefully you've got a sense for my class. I've got to explain test deconstruction first, but the post after that I'll point out where the informal/formal assessments fit in to the cycle.

Addendum: I only defend cookbook labs as a way to quickly generate data to analyze. I am against "Ok, I just taught you that molecules spread out when objects are heated, now go drop this dye in water and confirm what I just said." That's where cookbook labs get a bad name.

Information about the California Standards Test Part 2b

2011-09-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

Part 1
Part 2

I haven't said anything about the students. This belongs in bold:

Do not make any placement decisions solely based on test scores.

I know you do it. We do too. In fact, denying students an elective based on their state test scores is one of the joys of being in Program Improvement. But the state of California, perhaps in word but not deed, agrees. From the Post-Test Guide....and I quote:

Any comparison of groups between years should not be used for diagnostic, placement, or promotion or retention purposes. Decisions about promotion, retention, placement, or eligibility for special programs may use or include STAR Program results only in conjunction with multiple other measures including, but not limited to, locally administered tests, teacher recommendations, and grades. (page 13)

and then on page 14 they give almost the exact same quote directed towards individual students in a bolded and boxed callout:

Decisions about promotion, retention, placement, or eligibility for special programs may use or include CST or CMA results only in conjunction with multiple other measures including, but not limited to, locally administered tests, teacher recommendations, and grades.

WAIT!!! One more because this bears repeating (also on page 13)

While there may be a valid comparison to be made between students within a grade and content area, it is not valid to subtract a student’s or class’s scale score received one year in a given content area from the scale score received the previous year in the same content area in order to show growth. While the scale scores may look the same, they are independently scaled so that differences for the same students across years cannot be calculated using basic subtraction.

Summary: You can't use test scores as the sole method for placement AND you can't use them to determine growth year to year. Wait....but what if a student scores Proficient one year and Basic the next? Shouldn't we put him in a second math class and catch him up? Noooooooooo. Here's the easiest example why.

2nd grade - 62%
3rd grade - 65%
4th grade - 68%
5th grade - 60%
6th grade - 52%

What's this? This is the percent of students in California proficient in math in 2010.

Either: California sticks all of its best teachers in 4th grade. (unlikely). Approaching puberty makes students universally worse at standardized tests (plausible). The test is harder (that's what this study argues).

Here's the percentage of kids scoring Advanced:

2nd grade - 36%
3rd grade - 38%
4th grade - 42%
5th grade - 29%
6th grade - 23%

(7th and 8th grade we start tracking the kids more. At many schools, advanced 7th graders end up in Algebra and then Geometry in 8th. Some kids even take Algebra 2. A direct comparison is harder).

So a student drops from Proficient to Basic. Why? Hard to say. The test looks like it certainly got harder. With standard error and such he could have really been Basic last year. That's not to mention the inanity of deciding an entire year of coursework based on one 60ish question multiple choice test taken 80% of the way into the year. The test wasn't designed to make those kinds of inferences and you're left with too much doubt about the cause of the drop in score (or whether there even truly was a drop).

I didn't include anything about useful information about students because there isn't any. Well, there almost isn't any. You could probably tease out some information in conjunction with local assessments but really, what's the point? Right now I can tell you that Alondra got 9/13 correct in the "Functions and Rational Expressions" strand of her 7th grade math test. In order to figure out exactly what gaps she had, I need to give her a local diagnostic anyway. And that's really the whole point. If Alondra got an F in the class, I'm more concerned about that than her scoring Proficient. But for some reason, we think that because she scored Proficient on a single day of the year, that's more important than the other 181 days she was floundering. We let a single test override an entire year.

The hours that your school is going to spend dealing with this stuff could be spent doing something useful. You know, like standards-based grading.

Yeah I know. I came back to it. But really, isn't the complete and utter nonsense that is our current grading system a major reason for needing a standardized test in the first place? Right now we look and say, "Oh noes! Jason is basic this year! We've got to get him in extra math!" We have to do that because a B in Mr. X's class is not the same thing as a B in Mrs. Y's class. We don't trust that Jason getting a B in math means anything at all. But really, if we trusted the grades we could say, wait, Jason learned X, Y, and Z. He's fine. Or he still needs to learn Z but that's not going to require us to take him out of art or music the entire year.

If there's a moral here it's that we try to make the CST more than it is. The state of California does an awful job of communicating what the state test really does. I don't really think it's in the state's best interest to do a good job though. If more parents/students really knew what decisions were improperly being made off these score, the state would have a lot of 'splainin' to do. I also think from our end, because we have to devote so much time and energy towards it, we feel the need to justify that.

I've gotten some valuable information out of the test. I've revamped a couple of units. I've gone and visited a few really good science teachers and programs. That's fine. But you're not going to get much more than that. Invest your time and energy into something more meaningful. Oh and never place kids solely based on test scores. Just don't.

Full disclosure: I'm not against standardized testing. I find it useful to have a third party to calibrate my class against. I live in absolute terror that I'm teaching down to my kids. It helps me set a baseline. What I am against is the high stakes part. Even disregarding the punitive aspects of the test, the high stakes nature (and subsequent fear of cheating) has caused California to hide any useful information we might get out of these things that take up so much of our time.

Information about the California Standards Test Part 2

2011-09-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

Part 1

(You have my permission to skip this post. It's not all that interesting unless you're curious about the lengths we have to go to in order to extract any useful information out of the CSTs)

In the previous post I wrote about the most common ways I see our state test scores interpreted. You can't make a straight comparison of API year to year and you can't use it to track student growth from year to year. The quote from page 6 of the technical guide:

When comparing scale score results from the CSTs, the reviewer is limited to comparing results only within the same content area and grade.

The hard part is they're not *really* designed as anything more than a school report card. (Poorly designed, that is)

In this post we're going to see the two pieces of useful information I've been able to extract from the CSTs. Prepare to be underwhelmed!

You can't compare across grade or content, but you can compare districts/schools/teachers to each other as long as its the same grade/content/year. Basically, you're down to comparing teachers who teach the same content at your own school and comparing departments in different schools.

We don't get item analysis or even standard analysis. The smallest grain we get is by strand. For science, there's six. If I'm reading the Algebra test right, you get a whopping four strands. You'd think you could compare how your students did year to year by strand, but alas, California doesn't norm the strands either so you have no way of knowing if your students improved or if the strand just got easier. You can compare the percentage of students who were proficient in that year's strand to the mean California percentage. I've found it moderately useful to look at the difference between the two and look for big gaps. The problem of course is that California won't release enough detailed strand information for you to really tell what's going on. So my kids perform poorly in "Number Properties" or "World History and Geography." Lots of help there. You might as well tell me to "teach better" and expect results. Oh wait. That's exactly what happens.

I have, however, gotten good results from comparing strand information between teachers at your school (or district if you're lucky). The key to this one is acknowledging that every teacher's class makeup is different. At my school, we send certain types of kids to certain teachers. Even if your school does scheduling randomly, chances are in any one year those classes aren't going to be balanced between teachers. If you acknowledge that upfront, you're more likely to get honest conversation rather than people being defensive about their test scores.

Here's what ours looked like. We mostly tracked each other. However, the blue teacher seemed to teach the Solar System section better. I'd probably also say the blue teacher performed a bit worse on the Chemical Reactions section. So that's a good start to a conversation. "Hey Blue Teacher, take us through your Solar System unit." This is pretty fast and worth it.

The other useful information I've gotten is comparing schools. Why compare schools? I visit a couple of schools each year to go observe. An easy place to start is with those schools with excellent science scores. This is a tricky one because demographics are so huge here. I've got three years of test scores for the other middle schools in San Jose and the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch and percentage of students who are English learners both correlate about -0.9 to every 8th grade test score. 1.0 would be a perfect line and 0 is a random scattering. 0.9 is really really close to a perfect line.

I've gotten some good information out of graphing that relationship (science score vs. free and reduced and vs. %ELL) and looked at who stuck out. I visited 2 of those schools and exchanged a few emails with another. Unfortunately, it takes awhile to gather that information and it's not all in the same place. You can cheat a bit by going to the CDE website and looking at what schools are listed as the similar 100 schools to yours. If nothing else, it's pretty interesting what the CDE considers "similar." Spoiler alert: They don't seem very similar to me at all.

A quicker way is to just gather a few of the other subject area tests and compare them. Again, you're just looking for a break in a trend. In 8th grade, you can take the History, Science, and ELA scores. Math is trickier because some kids take Alg, some take Gen Math, and some take Geometry (and a very few take Alg II).¹

The Red Line shows the state averages. The Yellow Line shows the county averages. You can see they track each other almost perfectly. Light blue is my school. Nearly every school I've looked at is reasonably close to that nice straight line. Yeah, we're a little better in science than expected but before I start bragging check out the purple line. They kick butt in science (also shown when I graph vs % free and reduced). The light green school? If I'm a social studies teacher I'm going to go visit that school. As a side note, that light green school actually has a population that's 100% on free and reduced lunch and close to that for % ELL. Every other score across the entire school lines up along expected values. If I'm the principal of that school I'm going into the history classes and figuring out what the heck they're doing and doing whatever I can to spread that. If I was a history teacher at a different school, I'd spend some series time observing those classes.

(wait! This got too long. I'm going to split this up and talk about student placement in post 2b)

1: If you wanted to, you could do what California assumes and bump the Gen Math kids down a level (only count Advanced as Proficient) and then maybe take the Geo kids and bump them up a level. You might get a good approximation.

Thoughts on EdCampSFBay

2011-08-21T21:10:00.000-07:00

I went to my first EdCamp yesterday. Here's my review. (Note: Re-reading this, it sounds overall negative. It's not. It was a mostly positive experience. Just keep that in mind)

The Good:
In a Shifted Learning podcast, Jen Orr spoke of the ISTE conferences as foremost a place to connect with passionate people. I'd say the same thing about EdCamp.

I stood around at lunch talking with Paul Oh and Erin Wilkey Oh from the National Writing Project. We didn't talk about the NWP at all, but as soon as I got home I went home and started browsing the website because if thoughtful people like Paul and Erin were there, I want in.

I spent most of the day hanging with Frank Lee and his colleague Karen, who were up from LA. I'd love to be on staff with them.

Anytime you can hear Dave Orphal say anything (and he says a lot) take that opportunity.

I met Tim Monreal, Jeff Silva-Brown, Catlin Tucker, and a bunch of other folks.

Everyone was just good people.

The Bad:

The sessions were eh. They ranged from moderately interesting to downright terrible. I know, I'm supposed to vote with my feet but the other options didn't really interest me either. At one point I tweeted this:

I don't hold this against EdCamp. I'm not the target demographic for anything edtech and I realized this when I signed up. There were sessions on flipping the class, ipads, collaborize, live binders, and all sorts of things like that. Now, collaborize and live binders both look pretty cool, but tech is like 13974th on my priority list. (edit: I'm adding class dojo to the tech list. Also looks interesting) It ranks somewhere below teen pregnancies but above Accelerated Reader. Even if I thought flipping the class was a good teaching model (I don't for most things), more than half my kids don't have internet access at home. I sat in a session with a guy claiming tablets would completely take over education in "18 months to 5 years." My school is still mostly on overheads and we've got maybe 5 LCD projectors for the whole school.¹ We're definitely on the far end of his time frame. The far, far end.

Honestly, if I could buy two iPads or a set of new chairs for my class (a reasonable cost comparison), I'd take the chairs in a second. It's not that I don't think tech is useful, it's just that I'm not on the same level of Maslow's hierarchy of school needs as most of the EdCampers.

Although this is something you'd see at any place that attracts the EdTech crowd, the low turnout really made it worse. I'd guess we had 40ish people there and slightly more than half of those were classroom teachers. I had 3-5 session to choose from in each time slot. Apparently EdCamp Boston had 300 people turn up. I don't know the deal with us. Bad marketing? Looser knit community? School just starting for most of us probably didn't help.

There's an Ed Camp for social studies in Philly next year. That could be really cool.

The Ugly:
It's not widespread, but there's definitely an ugly undercurrent I don't like both at Ed Camp and within the blogotwittersphere. There are three parts:

There are some teachers who aren't interested in learning or getting better at all.
These teachers are old.
I know this because they aren't on twitter/blogs/EdCamp/whatever conference I go to and whenever I show them Diigo/GDocs/blogging/my wiki they're not interested.

Look. I agree with number 1. 2 and 3 are a load of crap though and I need to do a better job of speaking up. I'm not going to address number 2 because we can all think of teachers at our school who are in their second or third decade of teaching who still kick butt every single day.

As for number three—everyone has a different way of developing. Some teachers use twitter and blogs. I am one of those teachers. Others read books. Others talk to other teachers in...wait for it...real life. Others spend time finding primary sources to give their kids. There are some who spend hours a day reading children's books just in case a kid asks for a recommendation. I know a teacher who just this year has had a baby, finished her PhD, and is teaching two methods classes for science teachers at two different universities and you know what? She's never read my blog. I know. Shocking. At my school I'm notoriously resistant to any district-led PD and I can guarantee you there are teachers in my district that think I'm not interested in getting better. Different methods of access for the same goals. Hopefully that sounds familiar to the SBG people who are reading this.

Second, just because I showed someone how teh awesome #scichat is and they didn't immediately sign up for twitter doesn't make them a crappy teacher.² We just don't all have the same priorities. I have no interest in skyping another class. Why? Because I have to work hard all year just to get my kids to talk to the person in the next chair. And if I have to choose (and in school, you always have to choose), I'm choosing developing good relationships with the people they see every day. Just because you see the need to get all the kids signed up for a blog doesn't mean your colleague does too. And that doesn't make them a bad teacher.

Like I said, it's a small undercurrent but it surfaces every once in awhile. I hate it and I hate it that I don't speak up enough about it.

Final thoughts:

Now that that rant is done here's where I am. I believe in the EdCamp model. I think that's solid. If there were more diversity in the attendees, I'd be happier, but I'm not sure what can be done about that other than better PR. Since this is still a new thing I assume natural growth would occur.

Dan Callahan led a session on bringing the model back to your school. I was at another session so I don't know what he recommends. Me? I'd definitely love to have something like this instead of a district PD with an outside consultant person. I'd probably modify it a bit.

I teach in a K-8 district. Less than 10% of us don't have "reading" as an official subject to teach. I envision a crap load of reading strategy and ELD sessions. The ability to "request" certain sessions ahead of time would be helpful. You could have teachers each state something they'd be interested in and post them. Then we could all look at the list and hopefully there'd be a lot of, "Oh, I know how to do that." and then start proposing the session ahead of time. Teachers would still be free to move around from session to session if they liked but you'd get a wider range of teachers who'd be willing to lead a session.

There's another benefit to planning the sessions ahead of time. I think if EdCamp was mandatory (which it would be if it replaced a district PD) I'd be a little pissed if I prepped for a session and nobody showed up. Since EdCamp is voluntary, it's no big deal. If I was forced to go? I think that'd be different.

As for my recommendation, I'd go again next year, but wouldn't pay if they charged, nor would I go out of town and stay overnight. There aren't too many conferences I would be willing to pay for so that's not necessarily a knock on EdCamp. It just didn't blow me away enough for me to pay for room and board.

If you go, think of it as going for the people and because you believe in the model.

1: You know who buys iPads? The same schools that bought IWBs for each class. Which were the same schools that bought laptops for each kid 10 years ago and the same schools that had classes full of Apple IIe's in the 80s.

2: There also might be the just the teeny tiniest possible chance that I have done a crappy job of showing it off. That's probably not it though because the first time I show my kids the periodic table they immediately take to it and spend their free time pouring over it. If they don't, well, they're not interested in learning.

Bloggy type updates

2011-08-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

I'll be at EdCamp SF Bay in Oakland on Saturday.

I'm also going to Dan Meyer's Perplexity Session on September 10.

Say hello if you're at either.

I've also updated my blogroll. I've come to terms with the fact that people actually read this thing so I figure I should use my powers for good. I streamlined the blogroll to focus on a few blogs that I think "Deserves More Traffic." This is the same thing Scott McLeod used to do with DABA except that I'm too lazy to interview people and those people shouldn't expect a traffic spike. My inclusion criteria is that 1) Your blog is awesome and 2) You have less than half the Google Reader subscribers that I do. I'll update it on a monthly-ish basis and will drop a note at the end of a post.

Currently on the list:

Mimi Yang at http://untilnextstop.blogspot.com/
Mimi would probably be classified as a resource blogger. Her materials are well designed and she's got some good twists on the old standards. She's also got a really interesting life. After finishing teaching in El Salvador she's now starting a new job in Germany where she's teaching 7th to 12th graders. The post on implementing the mathematical practices in the Common Core is excellent.

Organized Chaos at http://welcometoorganizedchaos.blogspot.com/
Organized Chaos is one of my favorite elementary bloggers. She teaches at a really great sounding school she refers to as the Think Tank. She's got some really thoughtful posts on ed policy but what really stands out for me is how much she loves teaching. Kindergarten Book Club is one of my favs.

Dan Finkel and Katherine Cook at http://mathforlove.com/blog/
Go look at the pic here. The money quote,"This picture, to me, is like a little image of what math feels like." You will then spend the next hour reading through Dan and Katherine's archives all the time wishing you lived in Seattle and could attend their workshops.

abrandnewline at http://abrandnewline.wordpress.com/
This blogger is a real life friend of mine and it's probably cheating to put her here. But really I love how she writes. She doesn't usually blog about the nuts and bolts but as much as anyone, she really captures what it feels like to be a teacher. Her end of the year letter gives you a good sense of what she's about.

Dan Anderson at http://dandersod.wordpress.com/
I usually think of Dan's blog as a place to find really cool problems. Going back over it now I realize he's got a bunch of other good stuff too. He's also my Python teacher and the master of Project Euler. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

Grace Chen at http://educating-grace.blogspot.com/
I was talking about Grace with another blogger in GChat and the convo went like this:

Other person: Grace is so freaking smart!
Me: I know. It's like she's always 9 steps ahead and is patiently waiting for me to catch up.
Other person:Yeah, but she's so nice about it.

That's pretty much how it goes. She thinks about education at a different level than I do. This post on pseudoquestioning sticks in my mind.

Brian Carpenter at http://noninertialteaching.wordpress.com/
Brian started slow with only 4 posts in 9 months and I almost gave up on his blog. Then he started churning out posts in May and has really caught fire. His modeling posts are excellent and a recent one on teaching girls (he's at an all girls school) was full of goodness.

Stephen Lazar at http://stephenlazar.com/blog/
He's one of the very few non-math/sci bloggers in my Reader and for good reason. He writes about the way history (always my least favorite subject) should be taught in this post. He's also an important voice in the world of (sane) ed reform.

Group Roles

2011-08-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in the classroom management post that I liked group roles but I wasn't sure what I'd use this year.

I settled on these four:

Facilitator - This person makes sure that everyone understands what's going on and what they're supposed to be doing.

Resource Manager - In charge of the materials.

Process Recorder - Keeps track of how the group made decisions or arrived at conclusions.

Skeptic - Looks for alternate explanations, things that might have gone wrong, or things the group might have missed.

The Facilitator is common so I'll skip that explanation.

I have a spot on my board for the Pre-Flight Checklist (Do Now) and materials. The checklist shows the things a student does right away along with the time they have to complete it. Usually it's three or four steps with stuff like answer the question on the board, open your notebook to page 58, process your notes from yesterday, finish the writeup from yesterday, etc. I used to just start with a question every morning but I found that to be too limiting. I like the comfortable routine of knowing what to do when you come in, but I don't need them to, for example, copy down a learning goal every single day. This gives me a little more flexibility while still maintaining some structure.

The materials section lists what students should have out immediately like notebook or portfolio. There's an additional section specifically for the Resource Manager. He or she gets the whiteboard markers, scissors, colored pencils, etc right away but doesn't distribute them until instructed. They get and put away lab materials when it is time and turn in papers. At the end of the period, the Resource Manager supervises cleanup.

The Process Recorder is new. My goal is to have this person record the discussions and decisions of the group. Why did the group make this decision? What particular piece of evidence led to the group's conclusion? I also wanted the disagreements and dissenters to be recorded.

The Skeptic originally started as the Double Checker but I decided that wasn't interesting enough a job. Their job is to make sure the group ruled out other explanations and to make sure the group isn't missing anything important. In my perfect scenario, the group would end up needing to devise an alternate or modified experiment based on something the Skeptic noticed. I'm not sure I have the ability to help them get to that point on a regular basis but you can bet I'm making it a BFD whenever it does happen.

Especially at the beginning, I give sentence frames and question cards to guide them as they're working. The Facilitator and Skeptic will turn in a brief report. The Process Recorder will submit an annotated procedure.

Here is the handout I give them. They paste it into their science notebooks.

Luann Lee posted hers here and has a whole bunch of different ones if you're looking for some variety.

Other odds and ends:

I number (not physically) the seats at the tables like this:

When we go to rows then I use A/B partners but usually we're in tables of four. I rotate jobs on a week to three week schedule depending on what's going on. I use a poster to keep track and the same numbers will have the same role. It's nice because you can quickly determine who is supposed to be doing what. The numbering/letters work well for lots of other stuff as well. "3s go to station 2." "Bs will go first." "Odds start with the timers."

_______________

PS - I forgot to include this in my classroom management post for noobs. If you're a science teacher buy a multi-tool and carry it around with you. I have a Leatherman Juice S2 I got from Target. You have no idea how often you'll be doing quick fixes of various lab equipment in the middle of a period. Also take a look at your desks and chairs and see what you'll need to tighten them up. I've got a folding hex key set that can fit my random assortment. You ed program probably didn't mention how much of your time is spent fixing stuff.

PPS - If you run an ed program, "equipment maintenance and upkeep" would be an excellent class for science teachers. I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. If it's not a dead battery or a loose screw I'm SOL.

Information about the California Standards Test Part 1

2011-08-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

I was going to do a post on questioning routines but I got distracted by a Twitter convo with David Cox and Jennifer Borgioli. It was about how the results of the California Standards Test (CST) can be used. This information is specifically for my California peeps.

Most of the information comes from the technical report. It's scary to look at but it's mostly skippable data tables so it's not a terrible read. There's also the API Information Guide. I'll try to remember to cite when I can but if something seems wonky, call me on it and I'll verify.

Part 1 I'll explain the basics of test construction and API results.
Part 2 I'll discuss the few useful pieces of information I've been able to extract from test results.
I don't think there will be a part 3 but if I get enough questions I'll see what I can do.

If you don't feel like reading, skip to "What are valid score comparisons?" That's the part you'll want to know. The more appropriate heading would be, "What aren't valid score comparisons?"

How is API calculated?

There are adjustments ~~for certain populations~~ (need to look into this more. Adjustments may just be in order to norm base/growth years), but it basically comes down to a straight mean. Your kids either score Advanced, Proficient, Basic, Below Basic, or Far Below Basic. Advanced and Proficient are good. The rest are bad. Advanced earns 1000 points, Proficient 875, Basic 700, Below Basic 500, and Far Below Basic 200. As far as I know, the only weird thing is a student not taking Algebra in 8th grade (the General Math test) get bumped down a level in API points. So if she scored Advanced in the General Math test, she would earn 875 points for the school. (Edit: A ninth grader taking the General Math test gets two bumped down two levels) Additionally, 7th graders do not get a bump for taking Algebra in 7th and the same applies for 8th graders in Geometry. After that, each test is weighted and the mean is calculated. The CAPA and CMA follow the same weighting rules as the CST. (edit: added)

From the API info guide (page 6):

In high school, the CAHSEE (our exit exam) is also factored in. The arithmetically minded may notice the large drop-off in points from Below Basic to Far Below Basic.

There is an excel spreadsheet to help you estimate your API.

How is the test constructed and scored?

It's a lot. I'll give you the highlights. Tara Richerson has an excellent series on test construction and she's got actual experience at it. Pay attention to how they're anchored to the previous year's test.

There are two things that really interested me. The first was how cut scores for the different levels of proficiency were created. I'm just going to snip and let you read. From the technical report (257):

The Modified Angoff is used for the ELA tests and the Bookmark Method for the rest. Nutshell: A panel reads the questions and estimates what a barely proficient/basic/etc person would get right. Then the median of the panelists is taken. This becomes the cut scores. Science uses the Bookmark Method, so they put the questions from easiest to hardest. Someone then says, "I think a barely proficient person would get it right up to this question about 2/3 of the time and miss the ones after about 2/3 of the time." A bunch of those people are asked and the median becomes the cut scores. ELA works basically the same way except they rate each question and the cut score is computed based on the score. The cut scores and all raw scores are then matched to a table to align the scale scores from year to year (actually they only really align in two-year pairs). This isn't useful to know at all, but I just find it really interesting.

The second thing I'm pointing out is actually useful. Based on the test results, CA has generated proficiency level descriptors. If I recall correctly, these were generated based on a few years of test results and so are supposed to be things that, for example, a Proficient science student actually knows. These are useful, especially for those of us who need to decide on the level of depth for our standards. It's located here and the good stuff starts in appendix A. 8th grade science starts at A-102. Here's an example:

What are valid score comparisons?

There are two main ways people (teachers, parents, admin, everyone) mess this up. People think you can compare scale score from year to year and that you can compare API scores year to year. You can't do either. This is crucial to understand.

In the example that got this started, Student A got a perfect 600 in 7th grade and a 550 in 8th grade. It's a natural question to ask why the student dropped from 7th to 8th. You can't though. California does not vertically align its scores. A 550 in one year has no relation to a 550 the other. Additionally, a 550 in the same year has no relation to a 550 in a different content area. You CANNOT make this comparison.

Horse's mouth (Technical Report, 6):

You are fine comparing the same year/content to other classes, schools, districts, the state. Anything else, and I mean anything else, isn't valid. Jennifer tweeted this link out earlier. If you take a look at the graph you'll see certain test cut scores are harder than others. MS math scores will be lower than elementary scores because our tests are harder to score proficient on.

If you go back up to how the test cut scores are created, you'll noticed they're defined for "Proficient Algebra student" or "Proficient Science Student." They are not scored based on growth from the previous year. Some states do that.¹

The API results are similarly misleading. You'd think you can just look at your school's API each year and see if it goes up. Turns out, you can't. That's because how the API is calculated varies each year, for example the weights of different tests and which tests are included. So a 2006 API score can't be compared to 2011. It makes sense when you think about it but it's completely unintuitive and everybody in the entire world thinks you can create a line graph and see how your school is doing.

You CAN compare between base and growth APIs. These will be matched (page 14 of the Info Guide)

and you CAN compare the growth from year to year. Take the Growth API and subtract the Base API. Also on page 14.

Repeating myself in case you missed it: Base and Growth scores in the same cycle compare different year's test scores with the same calculation method. If they are not in the same cycle, they could (and likely do) use a different method for calculation. It is not valid to compare API scores in different cycles.

Does anyone know this? No. Everyone, understandably, compares scores year to year. This is important to know though because if your scores take a dip, it might be because the calculation methods have changed. For example, until the 2010-2011 cycle, high school APIs didn't include the CMA, which is the modified test usually taken by students in SDC.

Summary: You can compare your student scores only within the same grade level and content area. You can compare API scores within cycles (Base to Growth) and you can compare growth between cycles. THAT. IS. IT.

In part 2, I'll write about what useful (for me) information you can get out of it.

1: Vertically aligned scores usually come in 2 flavors. Either the same score indicates the same equivalent level. If you score a 550 one year and 550 another, that means you made the equivalent of one year of growth. Or the score is like the "Reading Level" reports we get and all students are scored on the same scale. One year you get a 400 and the next a 520. You've made 120 points of growth that year. Smarter states will make one year equal 100 points so you can easily see if you made a year of growth.

Classroom Management Stuff for New Teachers

2011-08-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

Warning: If you've taught more than 3 months, you should probably stop reading. This is going to be very boring.

I participated in a twitter chat for David Coffey's Facilitating Learning Environments (#FLE11) class about the first day of school. While it's in my head, I figure I can leave some advice for new teachers.

Remember, context is everything. So my advice is based on 6 years of teaching 7th and 8th grade science in a school located in an urban area. I'm going to focus on classroom management stuff because that's the only reason my school doesn't renew a new teacher. I attribute that more to admin focus than any particular deficiency in our new teachers but that's a conversation for another day.

For most of you this will be entirely obvious. For me it wasn't. I (am still) not a "natural."

Most of this stuff I use because it allows me to be even lazier. Of these, I'd say #3, #5 and #6 save me the most time during the day.

Oh, and best advice? Get comfortable shoes. Actually get a few and rotate.Trust me.

Classroom Management Stuff:

In the first few days, reading the rules and expounding your philosophy have a (small) place, but really what you need to do is get the kids doing something so you can walk around and learn their names. I get their names when they come in. I get them going with something and then I walk around the class and keep practicing out loud. Guess and let them know it's ok to correct you because how else will you learn. Use a mnemonic or some other memory technique. For the hard ones I ask them a question and picture them doing it. "What's your favorite sport/movie/book/etc?" Then it's, "Jesus who likes the Raiders" and I picture him dressed like fans in the Black Hole. My school starts on Wednesday. I can learn 150 kids by Friday, although I usually forget a few on Monday. Trust me here. Nothing will pay bigger dividends for a tween than you knowing their name.
Don't make gloop and air rockets on the first day of school and then it's worksheets and notes the rest of the year. The first few days should be a snapshot of the whole year. They need to understand what you're about. If you're about worksheets and taking notes, then do that. Well, do that and then talk to me. We have some soul searching to do. My first days are here.
Make sure you establish signals. Everyone talks about procedures but it's signals that will make them work. You'll definitely need a "stop, shut it, look at me" signal. Teach it like a routine. I raise my hand. They raise their hand. Get others attention. Turn your body. Quiet. After they're quiet, you need to keep the silence for an extra beat or two. That's the big one. You'll need to stop kids in the middle of busy and noisy labs. Sometimes it'll be for safety reasons. No matter how open you want your classroom to be, you'll need something like that. The hand raise is (theoretically) my school's universal sign for quiet. If you can get the rest of your teachers on board for a universal quiet signal, your life will be sooooooooo much better. I've tried a few other signals for this (counting down, squeaky toy) but the hand raise is good because it requires them to physically respond and doesn't require you to shout over anyone. I'm not a fan of clapping or chimes but some people really like them. I play a song for clean up (So Fresh, So Clean). Before giving instructions I start with "When I say go..." because whenever I would say "Everyone is going to need a ruler" half the class would stand up and walk over to get it before I was done.
Find your sweet spot for procedures and routines. I know admin go crazy for them but in my first year I probably spent more time teaching procedures than I did actually using them. Stupid Harry Wong. Turns out I don't really care how a kid gets water or goes to the bathroom. Go with a few high yield, frequently used procedures and do them really well. Opening the class, cleaning up labs, and turning in work are good starts. I also teach my kids how to move the desks to get in and out of groups.
I give my students numbers. 3 digits. The first digit corresponds to period number and the next two are unique. So first period goes 101-130, second period 201-230. Kids get them assigned alphabetically. That goes on everything. During random in-between times (like a group finished cleaning up early), give a stack to a kid and have her put them in order and paperclip. Have her put a post-it on the front of the stack with any missing numbers. Especially for the first few papers turned in, try to get this done immediately so you can track down the kids who don't turn in anything right away. They need to know you noticed these things. When you're putting stuff into your gradebook, your papers are already in order so you can just go right down the line.
I do ROYGBIV color coding for each period. Actually OYGBP because red is too inflammatory and I have no idea what the difference between indigo and violet is. Each kid in first period has an orange portfolio and for calling on kids I use colored index cards. I like them better than popsicle sticks because you can put little notes on them.
Teach students how to work in groups. Walk around and comment on how people are working together. Sam's post on participation quizzes is interesting although far too organized for me to ever pull off. Read Sue's post on Complex Instruction and work on assigning competence. I was too structured my first year. I took the reins off too much my second. I'm finding a good middle ground between Kagan and chaos.
I've gone back and forth on group roles but I've decided overall they're a positive. My first year I used Facilitator, Materials Manager, Recorder, Presenter. I wasn't happy with the Recorder or Presenter roles because they were things I wanted everyone to be doing. I liked the Facilitator a lot. It came through especially when I'd need to give mid-course instructions. I could just call over the Facilitators. The Materials Manager is good for a science class. Those middle school kids love to pile around the supply table. I've changed the other two roles a few times and also gone without roles. I've wanted to try these Thinking Roles but I just never get around to it. Riley posted his here.

Update: The ones I use this year are here.

Non-classroom Stuff:

Get to know your school secretaries, your custodians, the tech person, and whoever works in HR in your district as soon as possible. Everyone gives you this advice because it's true.
Every principal has a "thing." Figure out what that is. I've had a principal who was big on bulletin boards and classroom look, another who was big on EL instruction, and another who cared mainly about classroom management. I'm not saying compromise your values, but it won't kill you to spruce up the room (my principal would laugh if she read this. My room is always a mess).
Find allies. You've probably heard "avoid the lunchroom" talk. I used to do it. But truthfully teaching is lonely. Between yard duty and working with kids at lunch and after school, I can go days without talking to another teacher. Don't do that.
Committees are a huge sucker of both time and soul. Sports, while more fun, will take at least double the amount of time you predict. Unless you were specifically hired to coach a sport, it's totally OK to turn down all committees and sports. I know a lot of new teachers feel they have to impress the admins, but I have never seen a teacher denied tenure because she didn't volunteer for PTA or coach the soccer team. I was elected (by the other teachers) school site committee president my first year. It was like hazing the new guy. Some contracts say you need to agree to X amount of committees or extra duties a year. First, find out if that's enforced. My unscientific sample of twitter teachers says that it's usually not. If it is, volunteer for things with set time limits and no chance of spilling into extra work. Extra yard duty, scorekeeping, dance and other event chaperoning are all good choices because they have a set start and end. Committees, coaching and anything that involves "organizing" will take up much more time than you expect.

If you've got any other good classroom management advice let me know. I'll be happy to steal it.

More info:

Zach Shiner has a really cool thing going on here. It's got tons of practical stuff.

The MS Math Wiki has got a few things as well.

Virtual Conference on Core Values: I betcha think this post is about you

2011-07-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

Well you're wrong. This post is not about you. It's not about my school. It's not about my students. When Riley asked, "What is at the center of your classroom?" I had a simple response—me. Me me me me me. Me. This post is about me.

I'm not ashamed to admit it. I have needs.

I need to feel competent.

I need to feel like I'm getting better.

I need to feel respected.

Most of all, I need to feel like I matter.

I'm not good at my job every minute of every day. I'm solidly mediocre most of the time and downright terrible more often than I'd like. However, every so often I am precisely what a student needs. At that exact moment, at that exact place, with that exact student, there's nobody in the world that should be there but me. I peer over a shoulder and ask the perfect question to get a student unstuck. I hear a response and we perform an experiment that suddenly connects a month of disparate facts.

I crack a joke at my own expense and the two boys who were going to fight, instead laugh at me and we spend the next few minutes playing the dozens.

I sit with a student long after the bell has rung while she tells me about her mother being deported. She is scared, but not for her mom. She's scared because she doesn't think she can be a good enough mother for her little brothers and sisters.

Am I really the perfect person for that moment? I don't know. What I do know is I believe it and that belief is what pushes me.

And that's where the Ed Reformers miss the point. Maybe a computer can teach the Periodic Table better than I can. Maybe a scripted curriculum will fill the holes in my astronomy unit. But they're telling me that anyone can turn on the computer and anyone can read the script. They're telling me that I don't matter. Most of the time, they're right. Most of the time, you could switch me out for anyone and not much would change. But for brief intersections of time and space, I matter more than all the youtube videos and core standards in the world. My classroom is about me. When it stops being about me, they'll need to find someone else to push the Play button.

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Read more at the Conference Center.

Flow Control

2011-06-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

I know. It's supposed to be all about my students. I'm supposed to say something about helping them focus on learning versus work completion or helping them learn to self-assess or whatever. Yeah. That's all true. But even if that wasn't true, even if standards-based grading was no better at that stuff than traditional grading, I'd still do it.

Why? Because I know of no better way to inform me about what I need to do next. I need to know what I can do to help get a kid from point A to point B. Getting 90% on a Chapter 14 quiz or a B+ on Worksheet 1.6 won't tell me that. I need to be able to tell a student, not that he's failing, but that while he gets how to calculate the average speed of an object, he's still struggling with graphing that motion and here's something that will help.

And I need to be able to do it quickly.

Pre-SBG, I'd have needed to open up a packet of work (that's assuming I still had it or that he still kept it), flipped through each page, and then prayed that some sort of recurring pattern jumped out at me. Even if by some miracle that worked, I'd have NEVER done that for every kid on my own. It's just too much work. I would wait until a student took the initiative to actually ask me what he or she was struggling with. I'm sure I justified it as "helping students take responsibility for their own learning." Because, you know, after a student has spent her whole life getting Fs in everything, my F is the magic one that bestows upon her the gift of knowing how to respond to failure. It's like the Triforce. Now that she's collected all of those Fs she can now wish herself into being an A student.

So here's my advice for those of you who are working on standards-based grading for the summer: As you're setting things up, look at each piece and you should ask yourself, "Do I know how to respond? If I look at this, can I determine what to do next?"

When you're setting things up (or revising them) think of everything you're doing as a bunch of If-Then statements. On an assessment, if this happens, then this should happen. In my gradebook, if I see this, then I should do this. The strength of standards-based grading isn't that it gives you better information, it's that it gives you better direction.

Bonus Power User tip: Take a single question, a full quiz, your Do Now or whatever. Write out a bunch of If-Then statements. Depending on the type of assessment it might look like this - "If you miss #3, then..." or "If you get a 2, then..." or "If you answered 8 m/s, then....." Give the assessment, correct it in class right away in whatever manner you prefer, and then put up the If-Then statements on the board.

Upcoming Events: GPD and EdCampSFBay

2011-05-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

Two cool things coming up:

Global Physics Department

I should have blogged about this earlier. Every Wednesday at 9:30 Eastern, there is an elluminate session to discuss various topics in physics education. There have been slightly more than 20 participants each week. I've got dinner/family time then so I can never make it live. Luckily, all the sessions are recorded.

Next week (May 18) Brian Frank will be discussing how to build on student misconceptions (His title: The wrong ideas I love my students to have, and the right ideas I worry about). He's got a bunch of really good posts on misconceptions. In this post, Brian links a John Clement paper on bridging misconceptions that is FANTASTIC.

Normally you can just show up. But the following week SEAN (OMG I'm geeking out!) CARROLL is going to host it. Due to space limitations, you'll need to register here.

The perma-link for the elluminate sessions are http://tinyurl.com/RundquistOfficeHours

EdCampSFBay

When: Saturday, August 20 8-4
Where: Skyline High School, Oakland

If you don't know what an EdCamp is, hit the link and watch the video.

You can follow @EdCampSFBay for updates.

I'm definitely planning to be there so say hello if you see me. And no, I don't plan to run a session.

Formulating Measures

2011-05-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

Back to assessment! Not technically research so it's not getting the edresearch tag.

I found this via Sarah Cannon who blogs at Sarah's Development. The full paper was written by Judah Schwartz and can be found on his old Harvard page. This work came from the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics project.

The sample prompt is really all you need to figure out what's going on here:

If you can't read the questions, they are:

Which of the rectangles is the "squarest"?
Arrange the rectangles in order of "square-ness" from most to least square.
Devise a measure of "square-ness," expressed algebraically, that allows you to order any collection of rectangles in order of "squareness."
Devise a second measure of "square-ness" and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of your measures.¹

I love these -ness problems. There is a ton of high level thinking here and the formulation of measures is the first step in model building. One of my ongoing struggles is helping my students become more precise with their language. What does, ".....works better," mean?

I know the paper says, "Please do not quote," at the top, but I'm going to ignore that:

Formulating a measure requires one to be explicit about the constituent elements of data that one believes are important in a given situation. (p. 2)

Standard measures included rates, ratios and area. Non-standard measures that were listed included crowded-ness, sharp-ness (as in curves), disc-ness (of cylinders) and developing a "size of task" measure given this data set.

On page 10, the author lists the proposed components in formulating a measure.

Observing
Comparing
Ordering
Making Measurements
Analyzing Data

At the end of the paper (starting on page 11), the author goes on to differentiate between measures and models (models having the ability to predict in untried instances and being falsifiable).

Other than the very obvious ones (formulating a measure for speed or for density) I fully admit to slacking on this.

1: Did you start with (Horizontal/Vertical) with "most square" being closest to 1 as your first measure of square-ness? I did. But Schwartz pointed out that the measure then changes if you rotate the figure 90 degrees. Should this occur for a measure of square-ness? Great great GREAT conversation fodder.

Ed Research: From Studying Examples to Solving Problems

2011-05-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Atkinson, Renkl, Merrill: Transitioning From Studying Examples to Solving Problems: Effects of Self-Explanation Prompts and Fading Worked-Out Steps [pdf] [edit:fixed link]

I'm sharing this paper for two reasons. First, the suggested modifications require close to zero added instructional time and energy. Always a win. Second, it is a good illustration of one of the reasons I read so much research. I don't consider myself an instinctive teacher. Many of you will read this and be like, "Well.....duh." Me? Not so much. I have to put deliberate effort into improving what I do and stuff like this isn't as obvious to me (until I read it) as I'd like it to be.

Summary: The researchers combined worked examples with self-explanation prompts at each step to help facilitate far transfer.

Worked examples are something that most teachers use. They've got a low instructional cost, both in terms of time and energy. When students are working on solving problems in class, I will tape a few answer keys will the problems worked out around the room so they can check when they're done or when they're stuck. It's effective. The problem is that worked examples, while very good for near transfer (problems that are similar to the example) have been pretty disastrous for far transfer. Which totally makes sense since usually students are learning steps rather than engaging in the problem.

The researchers did two specific things to improve upon the standard work example.

Fading: The steps in the worked examples would be removed in reverse order. So the last step would be removed, followed by the second to last step, and so forth until the student did not need the examples anymore. Makes total sense but not something I normally do. My problem solving scaffolds go from the full structure (entire worked example) to being completely removed (solving independently). In an earlier study, one of the authors (Renkl) found that this worked well for near transfer but not for far. This study in the paper was designed to help remediate this problem.

Self-explanation prompts: In addition to the backward fading procedure, the authors added self-explanation prompts to each step. These were computer based examples so those prompts consisted of selecting a rule/principle from a multiple-choice set. Here's a pic from the paper:

Adding this prompt increased both near transfer and far transfer when compared with just backward fading.

There's an interesting discussion at the end of the paper about cognitive load. Previous researchers found mixed results for similar treatments. The authors speculated that cognitive load may be an issue. In one study, the examples were spread out over multiple pages and in another participants were asked to type in the principles rather than just selecting them.

Cognitive load theory is interesting but often misapplied. But that's a post for another day.

Ed Research: IMPROVE

2011-05-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'm shelving the Hattie post for now. I can't do it without it turning into a 3-part series on meta-analysis. I'm hoping if I walk away from it for a little bit I'll be able to turn it into something more concise (and coherent).

Until then, I'm changing it up. I read a lot of educational research. At least, a lot for a teacher who isn't enrolled in any grad school program. I'm going to start sharing some research I've already been incorporating and later move on to just things I've found interesting but haven't figured out how to implement.

First up: IMPROVE: A Multidimensional Method for Teaching Mathematics in Heterogeneous Classrooms

IMPROVE is an acronym created by Zemira Mevarech and Bracha Kramarski out of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and describes the method they devised for mathematics instruction. It's based on three principles: metacognitive training, learning in heterogeneous cooperative grouping, and provision of feedback-corrective enrichment.

IMPROVE stands for:

Introducing the new concepts
Metacognitive questioning
Practicing
Reviewing and reducing difficulties
Obtaining mastery
Verification
Enrichment

Sounds cheesy. I know. But I'm only going to focus on one part—metacognitive questioning. The authors drew from Polya for these but I like this structure a bit more .

For the study, Mevarech and Kramarski designed a series of questioning cards. I picture them as index cards with questions written on them but I don't have any actual examples. The questions were first used when the teacher was modeling problem solving for the class. In groups, students then took turns solving problems while answering the questions. The teacher would also circulate the class and take a turn at each group (solving problem and answering the questions along the way). Students wouldn't move on to the next problem until they reached a consensus based on discussion.

There were three categories.

Comprehension Questions - Students were asked to reflect on the problem first. They read it out loud, described the concept in their own words, and what type of problem it was.

Examples: What's the problem asking? What is it giving you? What type of problem is it? What are the essential features?

Connection Questions - Students focus on the similarities and differences between the current problem and the previous problem or problem set.

Examples: How are....and....similar? How are....and....different?

Strategic Questions - Students were asked what strategy they selected to solve the problem and for what reason.

Examples: What strategy is most appropriate? Why is this strategy most appropriate? How can the suggested plan be carried out?

The authors state that, "...students were introduced during the year to a large repertoire of strategies from which they had to select the appropriate one...." Examples given were constructing a table, drawing a diagram, and selecting the appropriate formula.

I'd love to see the selection of strategies but unfortunately they were not included.

I also have Reflection Questions (How do you know it's right? How could you have solved it differently?). I'm pretty sure the authors added this in future versions of IMPROVE but I could just be making it up.

I've been using these questions for three years now. I like having frameworks for my students to work within and if I just said, "Talk about science," I'd get many conversations about the last Chivas game and very little actual science. I don't use cards. I just put problems on the left side of a paper and leave a column on the right side for students to fill in with the answers to the metacognitive questions. They don't do them every time, just when they're working on something new. I also use them when students are planning labs.

On my part, I model them when demonstrating something and try to reference them as explicitly as possible when I'm prompting students who are stuck.

I've been happy with it although I need to work harder at having the students generate and refer back to a list of strategies.

Addendum: Talking with @park_star on Twitter she mentioned that this is how teachers in her ed program taught problem solving. So if you're in Canada, nothing new I guess. Also, I forgot to mention is that after I've worked a bit at building the habit, I've found that it's something I should only push when it's truly problem solving. The students need to be working on something difficult so that these metacognitive questions are actually useful. Otherwise it becomes just another task that's forced on them and is the metacognitive equivalent of showing your work.

Session 7: A Picture is Worth A Thousand Numbers

2011-04-02T00:08:00.000-07:00

The whole "data is plural" thing is going to kill me. I'm going to jump back and forth and avoid using the word data by itself as much as possible. Sorry grammarians.

Main idea: Visualization helps draw out the story of data.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with.

Tara has a wiki here and her preso is here. For full disclosure's sake, I'll just point out that she's a friend of mine. This may bias me. On the other hand, my friends would tell you I'm not one for empty compliments.

Since she's shared all of her stuff I'm not going to recap very much and to save your eyes I'm not going to italicize. You'll just have to figure out what's me and what's her. (Hint: If it sounds smart, it's Tara.)

It was easily the prettiest set of visuals of the weekend and the pdf version doesn't do it justice. On the pdf, some of the slide transitions were lost or smooshed together. On page 2, in the left column, the sample health and academic reports had makeovers but the pdf hides them behind the original.

Tara had three rules for good data visualization.

Story
Interactive
Glanceability

Story has to do with purpose. What are you trying to communicate with your data and who is the audience?

Interactive was about surprise and emotional pull rather than "I can click and drag stuff."

Glanceability, which is a quite awesome made up word, was about being able to take in the meaning quickly.

Tara demoed a few tools (motion charts, fusion, mapalist) and showed her sample report card. All these links come from the wiki page.

One thing I hadn't seen before was she took all the teacher comments off student reports in one school and put them into a word cloud. Then she contrasted them with a word cloud generated based on what the teachers thought was important. In a stunning upset, there may be an actual use for wordle and the like.

The only one of the the three elements I might disagree with, or at least wish to clarify, is glanceability. I think this one comes down to purpose. In a presentation, report card, or any other type of purposeful summary I'd want glanceability. I want to be able to quickly survey the data and see what are important. On the other hand, sometimes I want information density and the chance to sit there and really work through the relationships. There's an xkcd comic showing character interactions that is pretty awesome but incredibly confusing until you stare at it awhile. Click to embiggen:

It is very information dense but I'm not sure you could take anything meaningful out of it quickly.

There's also this data viz of Napolean's army in a Russia campaign that Tufte made famous:

It contains the size of the army, the path, a time line and temperatures. It certainly is information dense. It also is certainly an improvement in terms of story and interactivity over a table of numbers. On the other hand, I wouldn't call it glanceable. I'd argue that the amount of glanceability should directly relate to how strongly you wish to communicate a specific message. Tara may have mentioned this but it was 8 a.m. on Monday morning so all my synapses weren't firing at full capacity.

Now, in my typical style, I will boost my word count by talking about something tangentially related!

For awhile now I've been interested in this idea of district and school dashboards. Stephen Few wrote a book with some nice examples, but business based. I'd love to do something like this, but less ugly. Every school and every district should be making our goals transparent and public. And before you freak out about reducing kids to data points and all that, notice the district is also tracking things like the percent of kids enrolled in extracurricular programs. Most districts keep this data. They just hide it or they don't aggregate it. A good data visualization can keep the important stuff front and center. Now if I could only get Tara down to San Jose.....

Takeaway: Data visualization can help the story come out. Keep purpose in mind and design accordingly.

Wrapping up on the notes. One more session to definitely blog (John Hattie!). Maybe two if I can pull enough out of my last session. Thanks for staying with me.

Session 6: Transforming the Early Childhood Classroom

2011-03-30T16:31:00.000-07:00

I couldn't find the presenter's name in my notes. (Edit: Meghan Callahan. Thanks Jenny) I'll update the post when I find it.

I went because I wanted to see how the presenter integrated Patterns of Thinking in her class.

Main idea: Guided play is part of a rich learning experience.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with. My quick thoughts are in italics:
The presenter is a head start teacher. Her presentation was on a cycle of play so the notes will focus on what that cycle looked like.

Assess literacy skills and background knowledge. Provide relevant experiences and make connections to current topic.
In a guided play session, give the play structure and occasionally step in to elaborate and move it forward.
Connect the play experiences with topic discussion, focusing on roles, actions, and vocabulary.

The thinking skill she was working on was part-whole relationships. While I'm describing what happened, imagine the teacher constantly emphasizing, "This is a part of.... This is a whole made of ...."

For step one, she asked the students to make predictions about a firefighter visit. She prompted them to look and see if their predictions were correct and to notice what else the firefighters bring that we didn't predict.

When the firefighters came she had them engage in guided discovery. In addition to the previous prompt she asked them to walk around the fire engine and, "If you see something you're curious about, ask about it." The firefighters later commented that her students asked far more rich questions than other questions.

I always appreciate these kinds of loose structures. I know some people argue for open choice but it's paralyzing to have too many options. There's an example I've seen a few times where people are asked to, "Name things that are white." vs. "Name things that are in your refrigerator that are white." The second prompt generates more examples. This also relates to a point that Fisher brought up about cueing. How we perceive things is directly related to our level of expertise. I look at most art and can't tell the difference. I look at it but I don't really see art. If you said, "Pay attention to how the artist uses color to convey emotion," I would have a far richer experience.

The next section was probably a more typical school experience. Students discussed what they saw. Created labels and drawings and a concept web. They read related books. One point the teacher brought up is that students would often describe things in terms of function so she needed to stay persistent with using the vocabulary.

That's true for my 8th graders as well. I don't know how many times I've heard a triple beam balance described as "the mass thingy."

They then planned and built a fire truck. There was a lot of nice stuff here. They were practicing sorting and comparing sizes. Best of all they kept referring back to their plan.

At some point you probably asked, "Why is Jason going to watch an ECE presentation?" Well, here's another reason. My kids will create elaborate build or lab plans and then completely abandon them when the tools hit the table. Obviously it's something I need to reinforce.

Next came the guided play section. The main things that separated this from standard free play is that the teacher set the scenarios (Pretend you're going to the fire, then at the fire, then coming back) and that she was there to help extend them.

When my oldest daughter, who is the same age as the students in the videos, plays firefighter it looks like this: She's sleeping. The alarm rings and she gets up and runs to wherever this fire is. She sprays it with an imaginary hose for 3 seconds and then returns to the fire station and goes back to sleep. Repeat ad infinitum. If I were helping extend her play I might ask her, "What else would a firefighter do at a fire?" And yes, this is completely relevant to when students are conducting their own investigations.

Finally, they wrapped up the cycle with discussion and various literacy experiences. Again, focusing on part-whole relationships. The whole process took about 2 weeks.

Takeaway: The focus of the presentation was on guided play and integrating part-whole relationships into the standard curriculum. That was good. But for me I was struck by the false dichotomy that science teachers tend to put forth about process and content. This was a rich learning activity that focused on both process and content. It's not either/or. This teacher did both. The students learned about relationships, sorting, planning, and questioning. But they also practiced literacy and counting and learned the "facts." Content and process are not in competition. If you think you're going to teach one and not the other, you're not actually teaching either.

I admit I may have completely missed on this one. Novices experience things differently remember? I'm going to defer to Jenny here to catch me in my errors.

Session 5: Gap Closing Strategies in Mathematics

2011-03-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'll admit I was skeptical going into this. However, there's a lot to like about this program and there are definitely a few good lessons here.

Main idea: Ontario Ministry of Ed created an intervention program for 6th grade students. It had great results for the students but also led to sustainable change in teaching.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with. My quick thoughts are in italics:

They shared everything (way to go Canada!) and so I won't waste your time describing the specifics of the program. As an overview, teachers identified kids who were struggling in math. The Ministry sent over binders for each student. It was up to the teacher whether to use this as pull-out, after school, or in class.

There's a lot I like about the program. They had a diagnostic table (If student missed number 1, then they should...). It focused on open ended questions, metacognition, and generating visual representations. Students didn't have to do the modules they understood. Download a couple of them. I'm betting you could steal a few of those ideas even if you don't teach math.

Using a pre/post test model the kids in the program completely eliminated the gap between them and the kids not in the program. The gender gap disappeared as well.

In interviews with students, they requested(!!!) more practice. The Ministry obliged and created e-modules.

Now here's the part I really like:

After talking to the teachers, the Ministry found that the teachers were changing their own practices after observing both the students' enthusiasm and seeing the results.

I heart this so much. I didn't ask, but I feel like this was intentional. At least, I feel like the ministry had hopes that this would happen. I fully support this kind of subversive change.

They also found this weird trend. It turned out that teachers who were just told to do the program by their principals, as opposed to opting in, were more supportive of the program. They felt they had more support.

Takeaway: I like how Ontario approached this. First, they didn't try to attack some broad nebulous goal. Something, oh I don't know, I'll just pick something random like, "All 8th graders in California must take Algebra 1." Each module is very specific and targeted. They deliberately set out to model good teaching practices. They also deliberately did something different. I don't know about your programs, but whenever we get some sort of targeted intervention curriculum at my school it looks exactly the same, but more. Oh, you didn't get how to divide fractions after 30 problems? Here's 50 more! I'm dangerously close to turning this into a 1500 word rant so I'm going to end here.

Session 4: Responding When Students Don't Get It

2011-03-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

Eventually, the session will be archived here. I recommend it. It peters out a bit at the end with the teacher vids but the first part is definitely informative. I'm guessing this is information from the book Checking for Understanding but I didn't confirm that.

Like Guskey, Fisher is worth seeing. He's an engaging speaker and he's able to add a lot more subtlety than what's in his books. I wasn't a huge fan of his work before but now I'm definitely going to take a second look.

Also, I don't know the details here, but at least at one point he was actually in K-12 schools and even teaching classes. A higher ed guy who's actually working in schools? Insane concept. Frey is less interesting as a speaker but I think they realize that. She has smaller speaking parts but they make a good team.

Main idea: When a student doesn't get something, we do the work and jump in. Don't.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with. My quick thoughts are in italics:

Fisher focused specifically on what we do when a student doesn't "get it." In this case, he's talking about either doing a skill or answering a question, not in a global failing-the-class kind of way.

There was a flow chart in his preso, which I think you can download, about what to do at each step if a student was stuck. The flow chart went like this:

Start with a robust question.
Prompt
Cue
Go to direct explanation and modeling.

Robust questions are designed figure out what a student is thinking. They should uncover what the errors and misconceptions are so we can respond. Fisher identified six types of questions.

Elicitation
Elaboration
Clarifying
Inventive
Divergent
Heuristic

Our difficulties problems come after the question. We don't have a strategy planned if a student gets something wrong and our instinct is to automatically go to step 4 and explain. If we immediately move to explaining, the student becomes dependent on the teacher.

I like things like this. I don't think of myself as an instinctive teacher. However, I'm very good at identifying certain weaknesses, researching how to improve, and putting that into action.

When we identify an error, we need to prompt, not takeover. A prompt is about getting something going in a kid's brain. The most common prompts are background knowledge or process prompts. For example, prompting the broken rule (PEMDAS) or recalling certain knowledge. We also use reflective prompts, like, "Does that make sense?" He also talked about heuristic prompts. These were prompts for strategies, like "Why don't you make a graph and check?" Fisher stressed the importance of students developing their own strategies that worked for them.

The next step was to cue. Cues say, "Pay attention here." Cues let novices see things through the eyes of the expert. Fisher gave a good example of when you watch Olympic diving. It all looks the same to most of us. An expert can slow it down and point out certain things. When you're an expert, you can pay attention to more things simultaneously.

This is a good point about cues. I know I can fall into that huge trap of expecting students to experience something the same way I do.

Types of cues:

Visual
Physical
Gestural
Positional
Verbal
Environmental

Ultimately the idea is to get kids to pay attention to the relevant details. Fisher brought up a good point that we're really good at using cues in our initial teaching, but when a student gets stuck, we usually just tell them additional information.

When all else fails, go for direct explanation. Even then, Fisher had some good advice. First identify the error and explain. Think aloud while you're explaining the error. Finally go back and monitor. Re-assess somehow to make sure they actually get it.

"Telling and leaving" could describe a large portion of times when I say I'm helping a student. Modeling by going through the think aloud process and then going back to monitor are crucial, but often forgotten steps.

He finished with some extended videos. They weren't great but I liked that he acknowledged they weren't perfect. He also acknowledged that this whole process is much easier in small groups. You'll lose the whole class if you go through all this with one student. You have to have them engaged in something else.

He finished by talking about what a huge challenge it is to undo the expectation by a student that they'll just be told the right answer.

Takeaway: I don't know if there are better models out there. I wouldn't argue it's perfect. But I do know that it's better than our standard, "Ask a question-if wrong-answer it ourselves," method. It's not just a poor learning strategy. Any high school teacher with a student who is used to just being told the answer can tell you what kinds of damage we do to a student's feelings of self-efficacy with our standard methods.

When the archive goes up, I recommend you watch at least the first half.

Addendum: The Science Goddess blogged this session as well. She's got her notes and a link to the handouts.

Session 3: We All Make Mistakes

2011-03-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

I'm skipping over a few sessions. I didn't take much out.

Main idea: Great teachers create a culture of redemption in their own classroom.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with. My quick thoughts are in italics:

Homewood City Schools examined the teachers in their own district. After identifying the teachers who stood out, they created a list of five things that separated those teachers.

Ability to question effectively with probing rather than evaluative questions.
Planning, but not in a "weekly lesson plan" kind of way. The presenter phrased it as, "The daily grind of who has it, who doesn't, what do I have to do tomorrow to make it work."
Clear learning goals that were shared by both the teacher and student.
Relationships. Not caring friends, but focused on learning.
Culture of redemption. How they treat failure.

The focus of the presentation was on number 5.

Again, like the McREL session I don't think there was anything surprising but it's nice to see these same things come up again and again. Bryan Goodwin from the McREL session had a nice quote, "People ask what innovation is most needed now? Applying what we know."

It turned out this session ended up being on low-stakes, ongoing formative assessment. Not new for any regular reader of this blog so I'm going to skip the presentation and just focus on what interested me.

I found it far more interesting the attention to teacher quality in this tiny district. They had created a data warehouse even before NCLB went into action. I don't have the full list of what went in there but it included at least a dozen things. I caught SAT 9, DIBELS, teacher qualifications (degrees, SAT scores, experience, etc) and attendance.

The example she used was based on SAT 9 results. They took the student data from spring to spring and looked at growth. Then they found the teachers who were three standard deviations above the average. From that group, they then took only those teachers who managed to do it for three consecutive years.

Then they went into the classrooms and did observations, interviewed the teachers and students and found their five things. I don't know how deeply this went, but I know to some degree they focused their professional development on these things.

I have to say I love this. I'm not saying you should base everything off SAT 9 results, although I'd argue that those same teachers would have kept popping up on whatever meaningful metric they used.

But I'm impressed that this district was focused on teacher quality and set about to figure it out. We get into these big arguments about how to measure teacher quality and we don't end up actually doing anything. They just went ahead and did it. It was the same lesson as the Apgar test. The measure might not be perfect, but it's better than the big nothing we had before. It wasn't punitive and they didn't tell teachers, "Anyone scoring below xyz is going to get fired." They also dug deeper with the interviews and put the data into context.

Takeaway: I don't think it's possible for me to stress how important it is for a district to do these sort of studies on their own teachers. I read a ton of research. I'm a fan. But one thing you always need to keep in mind is that context is everything. I can read about grit, or high expectations, or warm demanders or whatever comes up in the research but how this looks for your group of students is what matters.

Session 2: Grading Exceptional Learners

2011-03-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

I'll want to blog more in depth on this later. This is going to be a ton of notes that I'm dumping on you.

First, if you ever get the chance, go see Thomas Guskey in person. He's passionate about his topic and wasn't afraid to draw a line in the sand. I've found his books to be dry so he really surprised me. His co-presenter was Lee Ann Jung.

Main idea: Grades should be both fair and meaningful.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with. My quick thoughts are in italics:

A high quality grading model would include the 3 Ps: Process, Product, and Progress. They don't necessarily have to all be number/letter grades but they should all be kept separate. He doesn't advocate for one being more important than the other. That can be a site decision.

Teachers argue that grading the 3 Ps takes more work. Teachers who actually do this in other countries argue that it takes much less work. They're gathering the same information as us, they just don't bother to use complicated formulas to combine them into one score.

This is my argument too for the "it takes more work" complaint.

The problem with our grading systems is we don't agree on the purpose of grades. So we come up with systems that try to support all purposes and end up not serving any of them. Most schools fail with report card reform because they disagree on the purpose. Consensus amongst the staff of the purpose of the report card is the first step for report card reform.

Grading programs only make this worse. They're based on "antiquated" notions of grades. The best schools develop their own systems.

Shout out to ActiveGrade.

There isn't a grading style more prevalent that does more damage than a percentage system. Nobody can distinguish between 101 levels of quality. He also brought up the zero issue.

Not only do we disagree on the purpose of grades, we disagree with what counts. For kids it ends up as a big guessing game and grades become a mystery.

Grading and reporting are not essential to the instructional process but checking is. Grading is evaluative but checking is diagnostic. Teacher is asked to be both advocate (checking) and judge (grading). We are aware of the tension when it comes to principals being asked to be both advocates and judges of teachers, but don't acknowledge we are in the same position as a teacher.

Grading and reporting should always be done with reference to learning criteria, never on a curve. A hidden example of grading on the curve is selecting a class valedictorian. Guskey pointed out that the word "valedictorian" actually comes from "to say farewell." They're the person that gives the speech. There's nothing that says that they have to be GPA #1. Even colleges don't do this. They give criterion-referenced awards (e.g., cum laude).

Guskey gave some interesting statistics. For the entering class of 2008, Duke rejected 58% of valedictorians, University of Pennsylvania rejected 62%, and Harvard rejected 9%. Highly selective schools are more concerned with the rigor of your coursework than your class rank. He gave the impression that this had to do both with the preparation needed to succeed in college and with the general meaningless nature of comparing grades from school to school.

I'd add that comparing grades from teacher to teacher at the same school, even within the same course, is also meaningless.

I'm going to summarize about 30 minutes here: We're screwing over our kids by modifying grades for them. The kid who "tries really hard" so you change her grade to a B. The mainstreamed kid who you don't want to fail, but don't think he deserves an A or B, so he gets a C or D in every single class he takes.

Accommodations level the playing field but don't change the standard. Probably what you get in an IEP are accommodations, like a student getting extra time. These do not need to be reported on a report card.

Modification do change the standard. These must be communicated. Modifications, at most 5 or 6 per student, need to be specific, measurable, attainable this year. After modification is created, apply standard grading practices to it. It should be written out and reported on the report cards and the transcript.

The gen ed teacher is valuable in this case to define grade-level criteria.

It is illegal to report the exceptionality of a student, however it is legal to report the level of skill. Thus you can report the levels of skills on the report card.

We should collect data. Most commonly in these cases we have narrative reports. Some argue these are more rich, but nobody ever goes back and summarizes.

Guskey and Jung then spent the next twenty minutes sharing an example of a report card which I don't have a copy to show. It was a standard report card with an asterisk next to modified standards. Attached was a report showing more detailed information for that modified standard. It included an annual goal and a quarterly objective. There were narrative reports of what specific accommodations were made. The modified grading scale was shown. In this example they used a 1-4 system. The 1 represented where the student was right now. The 4 was the objective goal.

Takeaway: When creating a reporting system, start with the purpose and then work backwards. For exceptional learners, modify the expectations to make them attainable but report those modifications. Don't leave it up to the teacher to make arbitrary grade modifications.

I plan to blog more in detail about this when I can get a hold of some visuals to show you. It was a good session and a lot of food for thought.

Session 1: Changing the Odds for Student Success

2011-03-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

Well, Option A ended up being two blocks away (not walking in the pouring rain). Option B was packed. So I snuck into a session by Bryan Goodwin from McREL. The session was a review of this report. Here's a quick-ish report. When I get around to reading the full report I'll give you more.

Main idea: Great schools have layers of support.

Things I found interesting, but not necessarily that I agree with. My quick thoughts are in italics:

The primary job of a principal is to raise the quality and reduce variability in the quality of teachers in his/her school.

The primary job of the district head is to raise the quality and reduce the variability in the quality of schools in his/her schools.

I don't think you'd find people arguing about the quality issue, but you start talking about reducing variability and people start freaking out (sometimes legitimately, sometimes not) about racing to the middle. It's like watching The Incredibles. I actually agree with the variability issue. I'd take a group of reliably good teachers/lessons/schools/etc over the occasional chance at greatness. I have no idea what the majority would take.

Five qualities of Changing the Odds schools:

Engage in collaborative goal setting
Establish non-negotiable goals for achievement and instruction
Ensure school board alignment and support
Constantly monitor goals for achievement and instruction
Use resources primarily in support of instruction and achievement goals

Probably nothing new here. There was a list of things that didn't matter as much, which is probably more interesting. I didn't have time to write it down though.

He brought up district and school dashboards, which we definitely don't have. I'd be interested in seeing any schools or districts that really put out all their data for display. Dan Meyer had a post a while back on that but the links are busted now.

Goodwin called low performing schools "Forrest Gump Schools" because you open them up and you never know what you're going to get.

Goodwin also took time to point out the What Works series by Marzano. It doesn't work as a checklist. You can't put the 13 things on a list, check them off, and get great instruction. Great teachers know why they work and when to use them.

I found McREL to be more touchy feely (in a good way) than I expected. Goodwin spent a lot of time talking about "warm demanders," Dennis Littky and this school, the HighScope Perry study, creating literacy and imaginative play environments at home, and "personalized pathways that tap intrinsic motivation." It was a nice turn of events for those who argue that these kinds of research focused organizations see kids as just data, not people.

Takeaway: The key is both challenge and support. You need high expectations but you also need a support system to help get there.
(EDIT: I forgot to add this and I really liked it, quoted from Goodwin, "People ask us what innovation is most needed now? A: Applying what we know.")

Personal story: The state of California set a goal for all students in 8th grade to take Algebra. They "encouraged" this by docking points off the API scores of kids who took a general math class.¹ Our school responded accordingly. But did we provide the supports? No. We responded by simply eliminating our general math class. High expectations are not enough. It seems obvious but so often people, and I'm including feds, state, local, and teachers, seem to think that just by raising the standards we'll automatically see better results.

1: A kid scoring proficient in General Math is equivalent in terms of API points to a kid scoring basic in Algebra.

Blogging the ASCD Conference

2011-03-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday I'll be blogging the ASCD Annual Conference in San Francisco. Check back on this blog, and a few others, this weekend. I'll try to shoot out some quick posts after each session and a few longer ones later when I've had time to reflect and digest. Saturday is assessment heavy but I promise to be more diverse on Sunday and Monday.

If you're going to be there, say hello.

I'm going mainly on session title and a few recommendations but I'm planning on switching up if it turns out they're selling something.

As of now, here's my Saturday. If you've got any inside info (good/bad) about the presenters or presentations let me know. The program booklet is online:

8:00 (wait...what?!?!? 8:00 in the morning???)

Option A:
1129 Conferring with Students: Practical Strategies that Close the Achievement Gap - Patricia Reynolds from the NYDOE.

Option B:
1102 Beyond Reteaching and Regrouping: Using Data to Dramatically Improve Instruction - Trent Kauffman, Education Direction

10:00

Made to Stick with Chip Heath. (Loved this book and also Switch.)

The over/under on how many times I make the joke, "I won't take notes on this, because I'll just remember it." = 6.5

1:00

Option A:
1222T Fair and Meaningful Grades for Exceptional Learners - Thomas Guskey

Option B:
1254 Doing Whatever it Takes: Barrington's Journey to Extraordinary - I really wanted to go to this one because I've been trying to get my school to put in a flexible time schedule, but I can't pass up on Guskey. If you're going, let me copy your notes.

3:30

Option A:
1302T Leading by Design: Leading Understanding by Design-Based Reform at the School Level - Grant Wiggins

If Wiggins ends up just reading from his book I'm going to sneak out to go to

1347T Boosting the Cognitive Complexity of Instructional Tasks and Assessments - Rebecca Stobaugh, Western Kentucky University

5:15

I'm pretty meh about this time slot. I'll take any recommendations.

Option A:
Finding and Keeping Great Teachers - Scott Herrman, Margaret Clauson

Option B:
Interventions to Improve Students' Cognitive Abilities - Rhoda Koenig

I'll finalize my Sunday and Monday schedules after I've had a chance to get the inside scoop from conference vets.

Assuming wifi is working, you can follow me on twitter. I'll be using the #ASCD11 hashtag for updates.

Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions

2011-03-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

"Hey Jason, you must be pretty interested in what's happening in Wisconsin."

"Yeah of course."

"Good that people are finally standing up to the unions."

"Yeah, it's......Wait......what?"

"The unions. You always seem pretty anti-union."

"Why's that?"

"Well you're always complaining about how they're getting in your way."

.......

I can't deny that last statement. I do. I complain about my union regularly. I've fought with them, actively or passively, numerous times over my career.

But I support unions and I especially support my own union. As soon as I saw Stephen's post about edusolidarity I knew I'd do it.

I have this go-to phrase. I use it all the time when I'm making a decision. In fact, it overrides most other considerations.

"It'll help our students."

When I hear it, I can't say no.

Three years ago, we never filled an SDC class position. Instead of hiring a substitute, I agreed to roll the SDC class into my newcomers (non-English speakers) class. I did it because I thought it would help our students.

Last year, we had an open position in science. I alternated teaching every single section of science through the week while also creating lessons for the rotating subs. I was responsible for more than 300 students for a few months. I did it because I thought it would help our students.

This year, we had two hours a week added to our schedule. No warning. No increase in pay or other types of compensation. I went along with it. I did it because I thought it would help our students.

And this is where my union and I fight. We disagree because I am only thinking about my students. The union? The union is thinking about me. They're protecting me from me. I ~~won't~~ can't say no. I keep pushing and pushing. My union pushes back. They tell me that the district could fill that open spot. We shouldn't have our schedule arbitrarily lengthened without something in return. They tell me to hold firm and the school will do what needs to be done.

So we fight. And I complain.

And my friends and family only hear the "unions are bad" narrative.

But without my union I would not be here. Without my union I would have burned out long ago. I see 150 kids without a teacher and I don't think, I just act. The union kept pressure on, and the next year, we found an SDC teacher. The union didn't let my school forget about the open science position and so we had a new teacher by January. The union helped us get some of that added time back for staff collaboration.

My union thinks about me so I can think about my kids. I support my union because I can't support myself.

One Test to Rule Them All

2011-03-11T22:47:00.000-08:00

Nearly 60 years ago, an anesthesiologist named Dr. Virginia Apgar devised a simple test that all parents are familiar with. The Apgar test looks at five criteria to quickly determine the health of a newborn. A healthy newborn will generally score between 7 and 10.

The story of Dr. Apgar's test is an important lesson.

On the face of it, the Apgar test is ludicrously simplistic. In theory, a baby could have no pulse but still score a perfectly healthy 8.

But the Apgar test is good enough. And more importantly, it's better than nothing. Because that's what doctors used to have.

In the book Better, my man crush Atul Gawande states, "the score turned an intangible and impressionistic concept—the condition of new babies—into numbers that people could collect and compare (p. 187)."

Basically, doctors now could tinker and gather the results to see what worked. There's a lovely passage about how doctors are supposed to be "evidence-based" but in obstetrics the doctors just tried stuff out and looked to see if results improved.

They had a number and if it went up, they knew they probably did something good. If it went down, then back to the drawing board. Before the Apgar test, 1 in 30 newborns died at birth. Now, it's 1 in 500 (p. 187).

but.....

Gawande also points out that the number of Cesareans has increased dramatically. In part, because of that all important Apgar score. He uses the phrase "tyranny to the score" here, which I love. Doctors, being the type A overachievers that they are, seek to maximize their score as much as possible. Sometimes they do so at the expense of other considerations. Again, quoting, "While we rate the newborn child's health, the mother's pain and blood loss and length of recovering seem to count for little. We have no score for how the mother does....(p. 198)" Being the good ~~teacher~~ doctor that he is, he goes on to suggest multiple measures.

So what do I take from all this? I used to spend hours creating and revising the perfect assessment. I'd stress about word choice. I'd wonder if I was giving too much away or not enough info. I'd try for that perfect balance of academic vocab and accessible language. I'd try to cram in 60 questions in 50 minutes or have them write a full lab report in complete silence.

Except that there aren't any perfect assessments. What's perfect for Student A is highly flawed for Student B. It does not exist. But there are certainly better and worse assessments. So like the Apgar test, I try to make my assessments good enough. Multiple "pretty good" assessments give a more complete picture than any single "great" one possibly can.¹ And NEVER EVER let any one score dictate everything.

1: Falling in love with a single assessment, lesson, lab, demo, whatever... is one of the cardinal sins that very good teachers make. I know I can become enamored with a lab and stop being critical of it and working to improve. I start to think it does more than it actually does. And yes, I try to work to keep my SBG love in check.

PS - I've gotten more out of the Atul Gawande's books than any other of the "not in education" gurus we end up reading, like Dan Pink, Malcolm Gladwell or Jim Collins. I keep meaning to blog about the chapter he wrote on cystic fibrosis care. Best chapter ever. Go to the library this weekend and read it. The chapter is titled The Bell Curve and it will burrow deep into your brain.

Make it Right

2011-02-10T21:45:00.000-08:00

We've got about 6 weeks before our state tests so I just sent out an email to the other two teachers in my department detailing a list of standards they need to teach and how those standards will be assessed. I had to say things like, "Skip inertia because it is not tested." I'm feeling a little dirty right now. On the plus side, it reminded me of one of my favorite test prep techniques.

I call it Make it Right but I'm sure it goes by other names. The instructions are simple. After selecting the correct answer the students need to rewrite the question so that the other choices now become correct. Example:

After selecting A as the right answer, they then redraw the problem three times to make the answer correct for B, C, and D.

This year, with my spanking new whiteboards, I'll just assign each kid a letter and have him/her take that letter for every question (Student 1 is responsible for all the A responses, Student 2 for all the B responses, etc). We can quarter the whiteboards and have the kids share around their four-person group.

Sometimes it gets a little weird like in this one:

There really isn't a situation (at least that would ever come up in our level of science) where anything but C would be correct. In this case I just ask them to justify why A, B, and D can't ever be the correct answer.

My only other guide is that they should keep the spirit of the question intact. Thus for:

I want them to try to adjust the numbers in the table, rather than, for example, write an F=ma problem where the answer is 13 N.

Even for the plug and chug questions, this exercise takes a good amount of understanding and number sense. I don't feel bad about doing it and when asked I can say that I've been test prepping so it's a win-win.

Any other test prep suggestions are welcome.

Disclaimer - I'm not a big believer in test prep, but my school is. We're a "persistently low-achieving school" according to various governing bodies so I don't fault them for feeling the squeeze. One of the things the higher ups in my district think might be helpful (editor's note:no comment) is to print out a copy of the released test questions [pdf] for every CST a student will be taking. So every 8th grader has 4 packets (math, ELA, science, social studies) crammed into the bottom of his or her backpack. Since my school spends 4 digits on these copies (editor's note:again, no comment) I feel I should use them somehow. They could have at least thrown me a bone by removing the multiple choice answers but alas......

Help Request: Physical Science Resources in Vietnamese

2011-02-05T21:23:00.000-08:00

I got a couple of new students last week. Both are brand new in the country and understand very little English. I'm hoping someone out there in internet-land can point me to some physical science resources in Vietnamese.

I'll take pretty much anything. Digital or print. I have a Vietnamese-English glossary and a few helpful bilingual students. Mostly though, they just stare at me.¹

Anything at the 8th grade intro level for....

Chemistry: Atomic Theory, Periodic Table
Physics: Motion (one-dimension, mostly finding speed/distance/time), forces and Newton's laws
Astronomy: Especially, objects in our solar system

I'm also struggling with helping them socially. The kids who come in from Mexico find a place pretty quickly. These two kids are truly "foreign." Oh and it's just coincidence they both came the same week. They are strangers, opposite sex, and have no befriended each other at all.

Leave a comment, twitter, or email me jybuell at gmail. Thanks.

1: I teach in a majority EL district, but that majority is almost entirely Spanish speaking. Before we cut a science teacher, I used to have a class devoted entirely to the CELDT 1 and 2 groups. I've always felt that teaching ELs was one of my strengths. It's been an incredibly jarring experience to feel completely lost here.

The Problem with Creating Problems

2011-02-03T08:59:00.000-08:00

Words of warning, I have no answers here. I'm just thinking out loud and wanted to post a quote for future reference.

The third chapter of The Art of Problem Posing begins with an anecdote of a speaker relating the following observation to a group of math teachers:

There are nine Supreme Court Justices. Each year, in an act of cordiality the Supreme Court session begins with each judge shaking hands with every other judge. (p. 19)

He then asks what the question was for this setup.

What would you ask?

If you're like me you asked the, "How many handshakes..." question. The book states that the question was so obvious the speaker treated it as rhetorical, stated the question himself, and moved on with his talk. The authors then drop kick me in the head with this:

Many of us are blinded to alternative questions we might ask about any phenomenon because we impose a context on the situation, a context that frequently limits the direction of our thinking. We are influenced by our own experiences and frequently are guided by specific goals (e.g., to teach something about permutations and combinations), even if we may not be aware of having such goals.

The ability to shift context and to challenge what we have taken for granted is as valuable a human experience as creating a context in the first place. (emphasis added because it's so awesome)

I had a strong reaction to reading Ashli's experience working with Dan Meyer's Boat in the River problem. When I sat in to watch Dan present this video (IIRC, there were about 20 of us and presumably, most of us were teachers), the "right"question was asked by nearly all of us. I recall being shocked that Ashli's students were so all over the place and only one group got the "right" question. In her shoes, I can imagine myself being mildly irritated at what appears to be kids shouting out random questions in attempts to be, ummm, kids.

Look at this question - "Why does he put the headphones in?"

I would definitely get this question. I would get it from the kid who is always trying to not-so-smoothly listen to his ipod by resting his head on his hand and running an earbud through his sleeve. He'd probably follow up the question with a statement about how Dan's ipod is old and the newer gen is much better. I'd be dismissive and move on.

Except.... I'm the one at fault here. It's actually quite interesting why he needs headphones and is certainly worth investigation. Discovering that Dan needs to maintain a constant speed only enriches the problem that I had intended for us to investigate originally. If you want to get crazy, the followup question, "What if he didn't maintain a constant speed?" opens up a whole new, and perhaps more interesting, investigation.

My tunnel vision is only exacerbated when I've taken the time to develop and create the problem myself. It's fairly easy for me to divorce myself from a lab I found on google. On the other hand, when I've taken hours to create a lab or demo in order to launch a specific investigation, I find myself invested in the idea that this demo so wonderfully elicits the question I'm hoping my students will ask so I can teach the thing I wanted to teach.

Stepping back and allowing the process of problem solving and problem posing to grow organically is something I struggle with daily.

It hurts my brain to think about how often I've limited questions because I've imposed my own context.

The Weekly Portfolio

2010-12-13T23:17:00.000-08:00

I'll admit something. I've never liked the portfolio system of grading. As it was explained to me, and as I've seen it implemented, students gathered their work throughout a grading period. At the end of it, they submitted a portfolio. In better systems, students would sit with teachers and explain each piece that was submitted. The teacher and student would talk about it, like an artist talking about his/her work. It sounds wonderful. In practice though, I never got it.

Two big issues. The first is that it seemed to represent what a student knew, not what they currently know. I'd have issues with someone's best work being done in October. Second, it didn't seem to guarantee any sustained performance. Throw enough crap at the wall, eventually something will stick (this blog is a good example of that).

Toss in the fact that almost nobody has time for the critical interview portion—unless it's a schoolwide thing like a student-led conference—and you have a system that's assessing Young MC on Bust a Move and not the rest of Stone Cold Rhymin'. Or only using Sixth Sense when considering M. Night Shyamalan for a lifetime achievement award for film making.

It wasn't until a few weeks ago I realized that I had been using a portfolio system. It was just weekly.¹

I've already mentioned my students keep track of their quiz scores in a folder. In the prongs they keep the tracking sheets and any other thing I need them to keep handy, like their benchmark scores and their periodic table. On the left side pocket they just keep stuff. Usually current quizzes. I don't really look at that side. On the right side they put anything they definitely want me to look at. Usually these are the quizzes, worksheets, or whatever that they think represent their current best efforts.

Additionally, in their science notebooks, they're supposed to put a sticky note if they want to draw my attention to anything they think I should look at. In practice, I've been bad about keeping up with the sticky notes because I suck about going to office depot and they're champs at turning all my post-it notes into flip books. My students are pretty good at drawing my attention though, either by folding a corner or drawing pink glitter hearts that say LOOK HERE.

A more organized version of me would also have them occasionally write justifications for why they want me to look at each piece of work. Maybe that me will arrive next year. As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that simply writing the standard number on anything submitted would be a good start and is so obvious I feel dumb for not thinking about it sooner. Hooray for blogging!

I still look at other things. I think it's important to take a look at the whole game. But the thing that's always appealed to me about the portfolio system is having students self-select what he or she perceives as quality. Developing the skills of self-evaluation is probably the most important thing I want a student to get out of standards-based grading.

1: And by weekly I mean, 3 out of every 5 weeks when none of my children are sick.

Edublog Awards

2010-11-28T23:46:00.000-08:00

I wasn't going to do Edublog Awards, but it's Sunday night after Thanksgiving and I'm trying to procrastinate in every way I can. So here we go:

Best individual blog: Think Thank Thunk
Shawn has a special place in my heart. Most people around these cyber parts think I'm a math teacher. I actually teach science. I just hang out with the math folks. Mainly because when I first started looking for blogs to call home I found a ton of really good math blogs and....umm.... Michael Doyle and Ben Wildeboer for science. He came out and started blogging about the redunkulus things he was doing in his physics (and math and comp sci) class. Oh and standards-based grading. Lots of that.

Best individual tweeter: Sam Shah / @samjshah
Like his blog, his tweets are a nice mix of personal and professional. He created his own tshirts and a map of his twitter friends. I look forward to his favorite tweets every time he posts them. He also gave a great presentation on the joys of the blogotwitterversphere that I always send people towards when they ask me, "Why blog/twitter?" Basically, Sam has become his own meme.

Best group blog: InterACT
I generally stay away from education policy. It's just not a rabbit hole I want to fall into. However, the InterACT blog is a collection of California teachers (huge emphasis on teachers) that blog about the state of education both in California and in the rest of the nation. Always a good read.

Best new blog: Educating Grace
I could also have gone with two great new bloggers - Frank Noschese and John Burk. But like American Idol, these two physics bloggers are going to split the vote. I also don't double nominate, otherwise Cornally is a shoe-in. Instead I'm going with Grace Chen's blog. The best compliment I can give her is that I hardly every comment. Usually when I comment it's because I can quickly shoot off a response. With Grace, I need a few days to think it over. Then I realize I don't really have anything to add because she's so much smarter than me and has already thought things through. She technically had one post in 2009 but I'm not really counting that. It's like a redshirt year right?

Best resource sharing blog: Science For All
Obviously, this is a science resource site. I'm not big on the dozens of sites around that are just post after post of things like the Top Ten uses for Animoto. Kirk does a good job of finding and posting a balance of resources. I trend more towards the reports he finds but if you need to find cell animation videos he's got that too.

Most influential blog post: Without Geometry Life Is Pointless - Habits of Mind
It went viral and got picked up in random non-math and non-teaching places. Up until this post I felt like a super cool hipster guy who knew about this secretly awesome blog and if you guys new about it you'd be jealous of me. It turns out Avery and I are practically neighbors so you can continue to be jealous of me.

Best teacher blog: f(t)
I won't say too much about Kate's blog, mainly because there's close to zero chance that you haven't read it before. It wasn't the first blog I read, but it was the one that got me hooked. It's great. Kate's great. Her skin is great. Hugs all around.

Best educational wiki: SciDo
Perhaps technically it's more of a GDoc but there's a wiki for it so I'm counting it here. I've blogged about it already.

Best educational webinar series: Math 2.0
A lot of good stuff on math and math education. If they put the archives into a form I could download to an iPod it would be even better (hint hint).

Best use of a PLN: Virtual Conference on Soft Skills
Riley put together a murderer's row of presenters and I still find myself going back and checking old posts. It also got many of us to blog outside of our comfort zone which was cool to see.

Best educational podcast: Math/Maths
This is an enjoyable weekly podcast about what's going on in the world of math. It's a show about math current events rather than learning about math. Hosts Samuel Hansen and Peter Rowlett include a list of links to go with each show and you can find good resources to use in class.

Runner up: A History of the World in 100 Objects
I just wanted to link this because it's so awesome. I've never had occasion to use any info from this in class so I didn't feel I could nominate it. It's great though and currently takes up over half of my iPod space.

Lifetime achievement: The Science Goddess
Over 1500 posts is an achievement by any standard. The Science Goddess was the first blogger I read regularly. Her blog roll served as the source of all my initial Google Reader feeds and in her comment section I was first introduced to a newly National Board Certified Teacher named Frank Noschese. She's been through controversy and career change and still manages to publish quality posts each time.

Belated Blogoversary

2010-11-21T00:02:00.000-08:00

Today is my birthday. Thinking about it I realized I must have missed my first blog birthday. It was back in September but I didn't really take this thing seriously until the spring and it didn't even occur to me that I'd been blogging that long.

I went back and read some earlier posts. Your first few posts are like looking at what people wrote in your high school yearbook. It's embarrassing and you're a little ashamed but you can't help but smile when you read it.

Blogging itself has been valuable. I recommend it even if you just want to keep it private.

But more than anything, blogging has brought me into a wonderful community of teachers. Through blogging and Twitter I've interacted with more good teachers in that last year than I thought I would in my entire career. My computer is full of saved conversations and blog posts I reference when I'm struggling through planning a unit or helping a particular student. Not only has it accelerated my own development, but I've had to knock down and rebuild (multiple times) my image of what being a great teacher looks like.

Originally, I went online to get help. I was, and still am, frustrated with my pace of professional growth. This community has certainly helped in that way. But there was another unexpected outcome.

At some point, these people who are miles and miles away, become your actual friends. I've had dinners with Sam Shah, the pseudonymous Sophie Germain, Dan Meyer, Avery Pickford, and Bree Murray. I've joyously celebrated a few recent births.

This community has filled a need that I didn't know existed. I run a Lego League team, a MATHCOUNTS club, and an after school boxing program (sequentially, not simultaneously). I've got kids in my room before school, at lunch, and after school so I never have time to socialize with other teachers. When we actually are together, I'd rather talk about vocab strategies than go through the typical teacher chitchat. At staff meetings, I can be harsh and impatient with my colleagues. Sometimes fairly. Sometimes not.

I spent my Veteran's day evening at a math circle. For my birthday? My family members all chipped in for a ticket to the ASCD conference. (If you're going, let me know.) Basically what I'm saying is that I'm crazy, but you guys get me. I'm not a people person by any stretch of the imagination. But teaching is lonely, even for me. And I didn't realize how lonely I was until I met you. Thank you. You've helped me more than you can imagine.

Facts that only interest me:

Frank Noschese was the third commenter ever, followed by Matt Townsley. Sarah rounds out the top five. Stacy Sidle was six and Shawn Cornally was seven.
Mrs. L and Nancy were the first two but unfortunately I don't have any information about them. If that's you, leave a link to your blog or Twitter if you've got one.
According to the blogger stats thing, the most popular posts were SBG Gala #2 and SBG Implementation: Topic Scales with over 1000 pageviews each.
Most posts will get something like 300-600 pageviews. The number of views is only moderately correlated with how good I think the post is.
I get the third most hits, by country, from South Korea. I can only assume that's spam or some kind of bot. That is, unless teachers in South Korea are super interested in standards-based grading.

Quick Math Teacher Survey

2010-11-19T22:23:00.000-08:00

Sean Sweeney and Kate Nowak are collecting responses for a "Welcome to the internet" page for math teachers. The survey is fast and you'd be helping everyone who is new to this whole online community thing. Here's Sean's post and the direct link to the survey.

PS - It's my birthday on Sunday (my wife, the kindergarten teacher, constantly brings up that being a November baby explains my lack of maturity) so be prepared for a little self-indulgent navel-gazing.

Followup Post: SET

2010-11-11T00:12:00.000-08:00

This one I enjoyed and it was surprisingly successful. I've had numerous occasions now where I've asked a kid to compare/contrast something and he/she has given me a blank look. Me or another student will saying, "You know, like in SET" and it'll click and they'll get going.

I was just looking for some sort of anchor and I got it. Also, a bunch of the kids really liked the game.

Notes for next time:

They caught on pretty quick to the simpler version. I went home and made the full deck (keynote and pdf). The full deck was too hard for a few of the kids but most of them had more fun with it.
I explained the rules but nobody got it. Like nobody. Then I showed a few "This is a SET" "This is not a SET" examples and they caught on pretty quick. The final example was a group of 12 cards on the screen and we found various SETs as a class. Easily creating sample slides was one of the nice things about having done it in Keynote.
It turns out that the right margin is too big so the cards are uneven when printed. However, my cutting skills are actually the limiting factor so it didn't matter in the end.
If you make multiple card sets, just scribble a different color crayon or marker on the back of each group. You'll find stray cards on the ground or mixed in and matching the color is much easier than numbering or having to count up the cards.
I didn't get a chance to take up Sue Vanhattum's idea of generating their own cards, but put that one on the wishlist.

Other stuff that might interest you:

The blogger known as Sophie Germain uses the SET daily puzzle with her math kids at the end of class. She says they really dig it.

Bree also has an interesting post about looking at solved deductive puzzles and using those to figure out the rules of the game.¹ SET can definitely be introduced in this manner.

1: This is a good time to point you towards a fun, and totally free, game called Zendo.

Nobody Fails...Almost

2010-11-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

For three, almost four, glorious weeks I had no Fs. And then life got in the way. Let me explain.

One of the nice things about the benchmark is that it gave me what Robyn Jackson referred to as a red flag early warning system. I had a simple cutoff and everyone below that cutoff had automatic actions to take. I could definitely have done that with my standard assessments but I'm pretty relaxed about their progress. For better or for worse, I'm not the type of teacher that's constantly pressing kids to maintain a certain pace. The benchmark forced a deadline.

Because of the common assessment plan, I'd been doing lunch time and after school tutorials. The groups were small, 3-8, so I'd still had time to eat. All I'd been missing was the lunchtime socialization with other teachers. To paraphrase Peter Gibbons, I wouldn't say I'd been "missing" it, but that's another story.

The kids were coming until they learned whatever it was they needed to learn. Some of the kids made it out in the first fifteen minutes. Others spent nearly every lunch with me for two weeks.

What I realized midway through the tutorial sessions was that if they had learned it now, I should have been updating their grades. For some reason it didn't really occur to me that learning stuff from the benchmark wasn't any different from learning stuff from my class. It's the same stuff. Ok. I had to sneak in a little bit extra that wasn't on the benchmark, but it was basically the same stuff. I had forgotten one of the fundamental tenets of standards-based grading. It doesn't matter when you get it and it doesn't matter how you get it as long as you get it in the end. Once they made it out of tutorials, I updated their score to passing (2.0 in my case).

What was nice was that I didn't plan to do this so it wasn't like, "Come to tutorial and you'll pass the class." They came because I ~~told~~ ~~threatened~~ politely asked them to come.

And then?

In a comment, Bill Ferriter mentioned the problems with sustainability if planned intervention isn't a schoolwide thing.

Shortly after that comment, a couple of off-campus gang incidents made their way onto campus. The members of the smaller-in-number gang started hanging out in my classroom during brunch and lunch. They act cool, play music off my computer and pretend like they're setting up shop in a teacher's classroom, but truthfully I'm protection.

Lunch tutorials have been canceled for awhile and so tutorials just aren't available anymore for a good amount of kids. Not coincidentally, the kids who just can't come after school (safety reasons, have to babysit siblings, have to work, secretly live out of district) are the kids who are most in danger of failing.

This might not be a specific problem at your school but it's a good example of "something always comes up."

Like Bill said....frustrating. Systems to prevent kids from failing need to be built into the school day. We need to allocate time, resources, and people - from bell to bell - that we can use to catch our kids before they fail. Failing kids is easy. Guaranteeing learning is not.

Postscript: Today I checked out It's Being Done and How It's Being Done [Amazon links] by Karin Chenoweth from the library. It's really interesting to read about different schools and what they're doing to guarantee an education for all. She's picked a variety of schools that have differing approaches.

Followup Post: Common Formative Assessments

2010-10-24T00:08:00.000-07:00

So we did it. Was it worth it?

Recap: Students were given a benchmark. The benchmark was broken into 4 topics—Matter, States of Matter, Atoms, and Chemical and Physical Changes. The following week they spent Monday through Thursday in leveled classes. Monday was Matter, Tuesday was States of Matter, etc. They retested on Friday.

For all the classes, 294 kids, 26% were proficient in the first go and 43% in the second. 35% of the kids were in the lowest range (scoring 35% or less) in the first round and that went down to 18% in the second.

On the downside, only 2/3 of the kids made any growth which means that 1/3 of them were flat or went backwards.

I made 60% proficient and 75% advanced for this benchmark. It was somewhat arbitrary but I figured all students should, at minimum, know the first three questions for each topic.

All students who scored less than 60% have another level of intervention. For students scoring less than 50% on their benchmark they signed up for an after school or lunch tutorial this week based on their lowest topic score. They also signed up for an additional tutorial for any topic that they got 0 or 1 correct.

I'm signing them up on a week by week basis. They can exit out of tutorial sessions with a half-sheet quiz taken sometime before the next session. It's just two or three questions that are representative of the middle level questions. They'll need to get 100% to exit.

Students who scored 50% or 55% were given the option to instead do the relevant section from a workbook. They showed me they had it completed on Friday and took the exit quiz. Maybe 70% of those students took that option.

This week I had Lego League meetings twice and a staff meeting so I met with them twice after school and every day at lunch. It's been fast. 15 minutes at lunch and maybe 20 minutes after school (larger crowd). I'd say there's a 90% attendance rate with a few extra kids that just come with their friends. Talking with the absentees I'm fairly sure they're just honestly forgetting (especially the kids who sign up for lunch but I don't see them normally until after lunch) so I need to start sending notes out 4th period and before school gets out.

I have no idea why they're coming. I've made it pretty clear that the benchmark doesn't directly affect their grade, although if they're behind right now it will get more and more difficult to keep up. That's not to say they're excited about coming, but I think we often underestimate how much our students really do want to learn.

Other observations:

The test was noisier than I would have liked but I'm not too worried about it. I don't want to fall into the "must have more data" rabbit hole. It's super low stakes and the worst that happens is a student is placed in the wrong level for a single period or that they need to come for extra tutoring. I can live with that.
Clearly the skill-based lower level stuff had more bang for the buck. The earlier questions, which mainly were vocab and simple skills, made huge growth. The latter questions which required more conceptual understanding barely budged. It makes sense given the time constraints but I'm not quite sure what the best approach is here. Do we acknowledge the limitations and just target high growth skill-based stuff? Or do we take another stab at higher-level concepts and hoping it clicks for whatever reason? My natural inclinations says to always go higher-level but then again, perhaps needing a stronger base is what's holding back the higher-level stuff. I don't know yet.
The periods where we were able to have 3 teachers for 2 classes worth of students made a HUGE difference. Probably obvious, but the difference was big at every level of student for every topic. I'm putting out feelers to non-science teachers to come the next time we do this. I'll help in your class during my prep sometime in exchange for your help that week. Nobody has committed yet but a few have sounded interested.
Greg suggested using 1, 2, 3, 4 for the MC answers instead of A, B, C, D. This was super clutch. Data entry was blazing and it took me less than 30 minutes to enter in the scores for all the kids. Another teacher has this 10-key USB keyboard he uses with his laptop and says he was able to get it all done in less than 20 minutes.
I did pre/post class graphs and they're on the bulletin board. I don't know how I feel about it.
To sort classes, we wrote all our students names on index cards with topic scores down the right side. We just sorted them into piles each day.
Switch up what teacher takes the "high" kids. Students started thinking they were in the dumb class when they saw me every day. There was a fair amount of movement between levels though. I probably saw about 80% of the 8th graders at one point or another. I loved meeting new students. For me, that was one of the highlights.
Our secretaries were not fans because our attendance kept getting messed up. By the end we had a system but the first two days I marked a few kids absent who just wandered off into the wrong group.
We didn't get to collaborate beforehand at all. I was home with a sick kid on Thursday and Friday everyone is outtie as soon as the bell rings. I ended up doing the first day rosters myself over the weekend and emailing them. I'm pretty sure one of the teachers didn't think I was serious about this whole plan so it caught him off guard Monday morning. The first day we had some overlap in what had already been done in other classes. We sorted it out but next time I'm going to have us really talk it out.
Letting them sign up for their own tutoring session has been helpful. They don't mind coming with friends and they've been good about reminding each other.
I was the only one who looked at everyone's data. I'm not sure how to introduce the next stage of having us compare and figure out how to teach certain parts better. Seems touchy. Also, both teachers are probationary so I don't know how much me being their evaluator would be in the back of their heads.
Certain students are kept in different classes on purpose (usually rival gang reasons) so we were worried about mixing them up. We mainly lucked out. We cheated and put one kid in the wrong level. He ended up being suspended for the week anyway but it's a bridge we'll have to cross next time.

A story I have to share: One of the frequent flyers to the office was 1 of 2 students in the school to score 95%. He first claimed he copied. When it was pointed out he couldn't copy and do better than the person he copied from he claimed to have just guessed. We told him it was nearly impossible for him to guess and get 19 out of 20 right. Finally, he told us to be quiet about it because he didn't want anyone to know he was smart. He got sent to the office later in the day and mentioned his high score to the vice-principal. Then he explained what we were learning about. Then he told her not to tell anyone. I've seen him twice since then and both times he's managed to mention his score.

I'm planning to keep this going for the year. The part-time teacher was really enthusiastic about her results (from 25% to 55% and the boy mentioned above) and so she's on board. The other teacher has been out sick this week so I didn't get a chance to talk with him about it. I'm not sure about his buy-in and, for better or worse, he's not the type to openly fight it.

There are some details we're going to change for next time but it's mainly procedural. We like the general format. The attendance issue was a big problem and we're going to try to keep better track of how we teach certain topics.

I'm also not sure what to do about the pre/post tests. I just gave the same one twice but gave zero feedback on their scores the first time. The dummy/smart kid class thing is something I've really tried to avoid so I was hoping by not letting them know their results they wouldn't be so focused on which class they were in. The SBG monster inside me is yelling to give them immediate feedback so they know what they need to actually focus on during that week. We framed each period as, "You're here because you probably need to work on...." or "You probably missed questions about...." but I'm not sure if that's enough. This is something I'll need to experiment with.

Overall I'd say it was worth the effort. Generally the results were positive and at least one teacher is enthusiastic about it. I tried some feedback forms from the kids but they were less than helpful. Their satisfaction basically tracked their improvement from pre/post. I should have seen that one coming and I should have given the feedback form to them before they got their results back.

If you've made it this far and have any advice or questions - comment, twitter, email.

Channeling David Cox

2010-09-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

The Mr. Miyagi of questioning

"Mr. Buell, I don't get it."
"Get what?"

"I don't get the states of matter thing."
"Tell me what you do get."

"When things get hotter they usually expand."
"And why do you think that?"

"Well you showed us that ball-hoop thingie plus the balloon was getting bigger when we boiled water in the flask."
"What do you think that means?"

"I think it means the molecules are spreading out."
"And why do you think that?"

"We weighed the flask so I don't think heat is going in making it bigger......and then the dye spread faster in hotter water........" [we dropped dye in hot/cold water and watched it spread]
[...wait for it....]

"So when something melts it's really just the molecules moving around and not something different then?"
[...wait for it...]

"Nevermind Mr. Buell. I got it."

Massive Post on Common Formative Assessments

2010-09-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

This one's long. Even by my wordy standards. Skip to the The Prep and The Intervention if you just want to see what we're doing.

I'd like to say a huge base of research has led me to wanting to start common formative assessments (also called benchmarks or interim assessments), but I think the results are mixed at best. "Works when it's done right" can be applied to almost every ed reform I've ever seen. Really there were two factors.

1. My kids.
Unless you're Steve Poizner, you don't look at East San Jose and think, "Isn't this where they filmed The Wire?"¹ On the other hand, we've got our own issues. Many of my kids don't come in with a lot of background knowledge or outside support.² Thus, their academic success is almost entirely dependent on my abilities as a teacher. If they don't get something at the end of the year, it's because I couldn't teach it in the right way for them to get it. I'm not the best teacher for every student. I don't want them to fail because I wasn't the right fit.

2. My teachers.
It's my 6th year. Here are the teachers I've worked with in 8th grade science:

Year 1: Mr B and Mrs. D
Year 2: Mr. S and long-term subs
Year 3: Mr. S and Mr. F
Year 4: Mr. S and we couldn't fill the spot so we dropped it and loaded our classes.
Year 5: Long-term subs, including a two month period where I taught every single 8th grader on a rotating schedule.
Year 6: Mr. L and a teacher who teaches a single section of 8th sci during my prep.

Stability hasn't been our strong suit. By my second year I was the most experienced teacher, so if you've ever wondered why I spend so much time reading blogs and twitter, now you know. You are all my mentors.

Common assessments are my response to those two factors. I needed to allow my students not to be limited by my teaching abilities and I needed to create some sort of stability in my department. Oh wait. I'm supposed to say something about test scores. Yeah. That too. If my principal is reading this (Hi Diane!) I did it to help us get to an 800 API.

Note: In California we use the terms Advanced, Proficient, Basic, Below Basic, and Far Below Basic. I'm going to use those here because we have a reasonably shared definition of them, not because I agree with the terms.

Grace, Greg, Dan and David all helped me out on this directly or indirectly. Hooray again for twitter/blog mentors. If you've read any of the DuFour books it's obvious we borrowed heavily from the PLC model.

(Edit: I should also mention the book Building a Professional Learning Community at Work by Bill Ferriter and Parry Graham. I let my principal borrow it in the spring and never got it back and I can't remember what ideas I got from it)

The Prep:
We're giving them about every 6 weeks. We met the day before we started this cycle and will do so again at the beginning of the next one. We looked over the test, suggested some changes and agreed on specific scoring criteria for the two short answer questions.

We give the benchmark on a Tuesday. Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon we spend just punching in data into a spreadsheet that Greg sent me and then go home and take a look. On Thursday we meet and formulate a plan. Share what worked. Share what didn't. Write out some lessons. All that good stuff.

Friday, kids get their results back broken down by standard.

The Intervention:
Monday the kids line up at our doors and are called into different rooms based on results. They get targeted instruction. Right now our current benchmark is on four standards (matter and its properties, states of matter, structure of atoms, chemical vs. physical changes). Only two of us are teaching at any one time so we are playing it by ear based on the results on how we want to separate the kids. As of now we anticipate four groups:

A very small group of kids who blow everything away. These kids we're planning to just set free during the week with whatever project they'd like. We figure some will want to perform their own investigations, some will want to serve as small group tutors, and some will want to create something (digital or something that goes boom or whoosh or boom then whoosh). Before you object, we're not ignoring them. They're going to be elbow deep in awesome.

Almost to just barely proficient kids will get their own teacher.

Basic and Below Basic will get their own teacher.

Far Below Basic will get the third teacher who normally would be on prep. We're all going to be working for free through our prep this week, the part-time teacher is going 4 unpaid periods per day. Yeah, she's a champ. If you're in the Bay Area, offer her a full-time job.

Tuesday, line them up and call names based on the next standard. Wednesday repeat. Thursday repeat. Friday, same benchmark a second time. We keep a graph of the class results on the bulletin board.

Kids who don't score at a proficient level on the second one come after school for small group help until they are caught up.³

Monday, back in our normal classes to start the cycle all over again.

The Discussion:
Pretty much everyone I know hates their benchmarks. I get it. The math teachers and English teachers (district-mandated) hate theirs too.

Here's the key: The three of us have 100% control over our common assessment. Our district and our admins don't touch it.

Benefits
We wrote our assessments. Yours suck because you bought them from Pearson and they don't align to the standards in your classroom or your state. I mean, they say they align to the state standards. But they don't ask the questions in the same way or at the same depth as your state test and there's just no way your class standards are in there so the information you get is pretty meaningless.

We all have hard and soft copies of the assessments we can refer to. How in the name of Zeus's butthole am I supposed to get any meaningful information if I'm just randomly guessing at what actually will be on the benchmark? Crazy idea: How about instead of guessing and surprises, I look at what's being assessed and target that. That way I can see if my methods were actually effective instead of seeing whether I guessed right.

No stakes. I'm not worried teachers will just give out answers or "teach to the test" because we own it. There's no admin looking at our test scores and hinting that we need to step it up because—even though you've got all the English language learners and we stick the trouble kids in your class because you're good with those kids—your test scores are 3% lower than the school average.

Fast turnaround. Our math and ELA department get their benchmark results anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks after taking it. Useless. We're going from test to plan in 48 hours.

Focusing on a few key ideas. Our math department benchmarks sometimes have 1 or 2 questions per standard. You can't get any useful information from that, especially on a multiple choice test. We went with four key standards tested with 20 multiple choice questions. Five for each standard with the level getting increasingly more difficult (i.e. The first question on states of matter is the easiest. The fifth question is the hardest). We added two short answer questions focusing on the two thinking skills we're emphasizing right now. Benchmark #2 will be about 80% current unit and 20% review. We're sticking with 5 questions per standard so some of our benchmarks are slightly longer or shorter depending on how many standards we've been working on for that cycle.

We can respond to conditions on the ground. One of the science teachers had some personal things come up and had to miss some time. He won't be able to teach what's in the benchmark by the date we had scheduled it. We moved the date back.

Drawbacks
Without admin or district support, we're putting in a whole lot of extra time. No early release or paid subs. We have zero collaborative time built in to our school year. No fancy electronic scoring so it's all hand coded. I might need to just take a sick day and spend it entering in scores and looking at the data.

I'm not sure how sustainable this will be. On the other hand, if we can get all of our students across the stage at the end of the school year, it'll be worth it.

My required plug for standards-based grading.
With department-wide standards-based grading, the benchmark test itself is unnecessary. We would already have the necessary data in our gradebook and would be able to team up as needed. I get excited just thinking about how great it would be to have an ongoing stream of data to compare with other teachers. I don't have that right now.

However, SBG still lends its own brand of awesome. Take a look at the three steps a student might go through. First, the student has an opportunity to learn in class. Second, in a targeted and leveled remediation. Third, after school. Three different levels. In standards-based grading, it doesn't matter when you learn it, as long as you learn it. Carlos drops major knowledge on the first benchmark and has an A in the class already. Brenda has some issues with states of matter, goes through the week of intervention and learns what she needs to learn. Brenda now has an A too. Mikey sleeps through both step 1 and step 2. Now, he's coming after school. Every week. With me. Special time. Mikey finally learns something because he's sick and tired of seeing my striped polo shirts every day. Mikey knows that it's not acceptable NOT to learn. Mikey also knows that I believe he can learn and that I won't give up on him. And yes, he's got his A. Mikey likey.

Am I making every kid come after school until they've got an A? Nope. No Ds or Fs would make me plenty happy. But you know what? If you've gone from an F to a C, all of a sudden, it's not too far to an A.

In case you're wondering how benchmark fits into the actual gradebook we've decided on two things:

The benchmark score will be reported but not computed into the grade. We're just going to manually input it into the comments section of the report card.
We all have our own system of grading (don't get me started) but we've agreed on a policy that if you pass the benchmark, you can't fail the class. I admit this one wasn't my idea and I worried that once you attach a grade you start worrying about cheating and I always hate using a single-assessment for anything permanent. However, it was pointed out that a student who can pass the benchmark demonstrates a minimum level of understanding and a few basic precautions can minimize cheating.

Here's a copy of the first benchmark in case you're curious. As an aside, writing the benchmark helped me empathize with the writers of the state tests. You kind of have to make it boring and vanilla. Whenever you introduce anything interesting, you have to worry about kids being freaked out by the strangeness and screwing with your data. It has to be straightforward and cut right to the point. Not to say that this is a good thing, but it was interesting for me to experience that.

Let me know if you have anything you think I should change/add/remove. What works for your school's benchmarks? What doesn't work? What would you change to make it work?

1: If you're not in California, Poizner ran in the GOP primary for governor. He wrote a book called Mount Pleasant which is the high school my kids feed into. It was his reflection on teaching (a single period, one semester) in the school. It was less than glowing. Our neighborhood does not smell like garbage and high school seniors aren't menacing anyone. On the flipside, everyone really does call the school Mount Pregnant. He's an outsider though so....not cool.
2: Just to be clear, the parents are supportive. They just often lack the ability, resources, or time to help their child at this point in their schooling. We often confuse unable with unwilling.
3: To answer Matt's question, reassessment is optional. Learning is not.

SciDo

2010-09-15T23:17:00.000-07:00

A group of science teachers on Twitter have created #SciDo. In its current form, it's a shared Google Docs folder where science teachers upload lessons to share with others. Mike Ritzius has been the primary force here but I don't know the history behind it. It's like BetterLesson but with actual lessons in it.

There's a Flickr group for science pics. It looks like they're also forming a student blogging network. There's also talk of setting up mentoring programs for new teachers on Twitter and creating a video tutorial library. Sounds cool and definitely the more the merrier.

If you're interested, go to http://scido.wikispaces.com/ to request GDoc access.

EngDo has also sprung up for the English teachers. My GDoc folder shows something called MathDo as well but it's currently empty. If I find out the status of that I'll update this post. I'm interested in seeing how this evolves.

Aside: I have often lamented the fact that many science teacher bloggers are actually covert edtech bloggers. They don't blog about science teaching. Every post is "101 ways to use WallWisher" and how PollAnywhere revolutionized their lectures. It's not my bag of chips so I rarely follow those blogs or the developments in the world of SMS response systems. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm a science teacher and I have never actually blogged a science lesson.

However, SciDo was started by a group of teachers so I'm totally supportive of that.

Compare and Contrast with Set

2010-09-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

As a department we've decided to focus this trimester on two thinking skills: Classifying and Compare/Contrast. All this really means is 1) It's going on our common assessment and 2) We're planning to throw those two things at the kids whenever possible. My kids are fresh of 7th grade life science, which is all about classifying (angiosperm or gymnosperm? eukaryote or prokaryote?) so they're pretty strong on that. Asking them to actually create their own criteria usually throws them off for awhile but they get the hang of it pretty fast.

Compare and contrast is a different beast. I'm not sure why, but it's something we've always struggled through. This year, I'm using the game Set to introduce it.

Set is pretty common in math classrooms, they even have a resources for teachers page. I'm sure Sue VanHattum has a few extra decks around her living room.

In the interest of not spending $96 on 8 decks of Set I used Keynote '08 to make a version. I'm just going to color print and laminate them. I'm not a designer in any way so if you're interested in making a better version I fully support that and will post yours.

I was too lazy to figure out how to make the squiggly character so I made rectangles instead. I also changed the colors because my kids are weird about anything that is red or blue.

Set
Edit: Scribd is pretty much the worst thing ever so if it's not showing just click through and it'll work. I had to zip the keynote file because I can't figure out how to get box.net or dropbox to share them. Here it is if you want to edit.

Mine prints out in landscape automatically.

Here are the rules for the uninitiated. It's the simplified version. Normally there are different shadings (striped, solid, outlined).

Nine cards are placed face up on the table.
The students take a look and yell out "Set" when they see a set.
The student who yells set has a few seconds to pick up his/her three cards.
That player gets 1 point.
Three more cards are laid face up on the table.
If everyone agrees there are no sets on the table (really rare, but students have a hard time seeing them at first) then three more cards are put out. These are not replaced when depleted.
Play ends when the deck is depleted. Most points wins.

If you're playing the full version, 12 cards are on the table.

What's a set? Each card has three features: Shape, Color, and Number. In order to make a set, each feature must be the same on every card or different on every card. If you go try out the Daily Puzzle it makes a lot more sense.

I had written out a whole tutorial but found these screens here, which are much better. These are a set:

These are NOT sets:

Remember, I'm not using shadings.

It helps if students go through three questions:

Are they all the same shape or are all different shapes?
Are they all the same color or all different colors?
Are they all the same number or all different numbers?

So here's the flow.

First day I introduce the rules and just let them play. Although the box says it's suitable for ages 6 and over, the thinking behind this is difficult at first so it'll take awhile for kids to get it.

Second day we play a little more. Then I formalize it. I like to use a comparison matrix for compare/contrast. Venns don't really do it for me, although bubble maps are alright.¹ After a little play I put this on each of their tables:

Mid-game they stop and take one set (3 cards). They put one card over each spot on the top. Then fill in the boxes for each attribute. The far right box they write a sentence, "Card 1 has a squiggle, Card 2 has a........All of the cards have different shapes."

After the game is finished I ask them to shuffle the deck and pull out three random cards. They fill out the comparison matrix again and use it to decide if it's a set or not.

I'll update this post when I actually do it. I'm looking forward to it. I really just want something I can point at. When I want a kid to compare/contrast something I want to be able to just point to the Set deck or say, "Remember that card game we played?" and have that memory do the work. It turns out "something I can point at" drives a lot of my instructional decisions.

1: The problem with Venns is they're not forced to compare specific attributes. I get things like, "Dogs bark. Cats like tuna." umm...ok.

Standards-Based Grading Gala #2

2010-09-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the September 6, 2010 edition of standards-based grading gala. This time we have 25 posts. We've got some veterans from last time and a few new faces. We'll start off with some words from Lorna Earl:

Assessment as learning requires the involvement of both students and parents. It is not a private activity for teachers, and certainly not a process that governments can control. It is a personal, iterative, and evolving conversation....(Assessment as Learning, p. 45)

To continue our conversation we're starting off with Dan Goldner who presents Inquiry standards for math posted at Work in Pencil. He figures science shouldn't get to have all the fun.

Surani Joshua presents Standards-Based Grading: Year 2 posted at Sines of Learning, saying, "The who, what, when, where, how and why of my second year teaching - and first year implementing SBG."

Cliff Pate presents My First Shot at Standards Based Grading posted at Eight where he describes his steps for implementation of standards-based grading.

Lisa Henry presents Grading Explanations posted at An "Old Math Dog" Learning New Tricks, saying, "This is a copy of my student/parent explanation of how I am implementing SBG in my classroom."

Ms. Miller presents My SBG Pitch posted at Take It To The Limit, saying, "This post summarizes the problems I have with standard grading and what I hope to achieve with SBG."

Raymond Johnson presents 2004-2006: My Adventures in Standards-Based Grading (And Why I Stopped) posted at MathEd.net. His story of having to work in isolation (and why that's not as true anymore) applies to all of us.

Stephen Lazar presents Bump and Space: Reporting Letter Grades from Standards Based Assessments posted at Outside the Cave.

Geoff Schmit presents I Like Reading Lab Reports posted at Pedagogue Padawan describing his shift away from grading lab reports and towards reading them.

Ashli Black presents "A tale of my dog, cars, sbg, and how I use assessment to help my students recover from mathematical hit-and-runs." in How My Dog Learned Fear and How I'm Driving It Back posted at Learning to Fold

Jerrid Kruse presents Grading homework-a waste of time? « Teaching as a dynamic activity posted at Teaching as a dynamic activity, saying, "Not directly tied to SBG, but when we ask critical questions about homework, we raise questions about what exactly we want students to get out of school...leading to a stronger rationale for SBG."

Jami Danielle presents Why Bother? My SBG Manifesto posted at Undefined.

Barbara Gajda presents The straw that broke the camel's back posted at Large Q Quality.

Sam Shah tells us about getting over one of his big fears in transitioning to a standards-based system in Something I Realized About Myself and SBG at Continuous Everywhere But Differentiable Nowhere.

Stephen Davis presents Students Get to Their Destinations posted at Rush the Iceberg, saying, "The purpose of my post is to remind educators that our students will get to their destination no matter what form of assessment a teacher uses..."

No SBG discussion would be complete without Shawn Cornally who presents Standards-Based Grading: Shifts posted at Think Thank Thunk, saying, "What philosophical shifts must predate and implementation of SBG?"

Colin Graham presents Irrational numbers posted at Sine of the Times: Dividing the Universe by Zero, saying, "This is a reflection on the meaning (or lack of it) of applying grades which have been based on normalized percentages - without any indication of what students can or cannot do." You should also click through if you're curious about the UK system of grading.

park_star gives us Sometimes You Can Change Everything by Changing Nothing at Between Me and the Door where she tells us that if you're overwhelmed with overhauling your assessment system there's one thing you can do tomorrow—Stop marking exams, in fact, stop marking altogether.

Amanda Dean presents her reflections after two weeks of standards-based grading with Two Weeks In: SBG Thoughts on Praxis of Reflection.

Tyler Rice presents how he hopes to rid his class entirely of grades this year with a Grading moratorium posted at Wisdom Begins with Wonder

John Burk presents a few thoughts about how to change how students approach assessment with Assessment Prep posted at Quantum Progress.

Matt Townsley presents Standards-based grading in a non-math classroom posted at MeTA musings, asking, "What does standards-based grading look like in a non-math classroom?"

Ellena Bethea presents My Grading Policy v 2.0 at TEACHING | Chemistry describing her attempt to remove unhelpful grading practices from her assessment policy.

Frank Noschese presents SBG Free and Clear on Action-Reaction, a post about the freedoms that SBG provides.

Dan Anderson works through his sticking points with Standards Based Grading posted at A Recursive Process.

Finally, we present Ken Kozar. He doesn't have a blog but has shared his LHS 2.0 Grading Summary posted at LHS 2.0, saying, "We are a group of high school teachers (math, English, social studies, and science) who have the same students and are working collaboratively to incorportate SBG, PBL, Moodle, and 21st century tech tools to change the way teaching and learning occur at the high school level." Click "login as guest" to view the many resources he has shared.

I'm going to share an older post on using choice points in your class. I'd like to add a couple of updates. First, I'm still addicted to using the index cards. My kids tore through my first set so I got smarter and laminated, single-hole punched, and tied a string through them. Second, the index cards are excellent for starting a discussion. Just put up a series of choices and ask different people to defend their choices. Third, simply designing in choice points has been powerful. It's forced me to anticipate the errors students will have and actually take action.

Thanks for everything. Continue the conversation by passing these posts on to your friends and colleagues. Then submit a future post to the next edition of standards-based grading gala using our submission form.

I know there's some great assessment going on in the English, Social Studies, and primary grades. We need you for the next carnival!

Ellena Bethea has agreed to host the next SBG gala. Check her blog at a future date for more information. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

The First Days

2010-08-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been on radio silence for a little bit. Our school year started and I'm about a week in at this point. I just wanted to dash off a quick list of things I did. This is one of those posts that is for me so I can check back next August and remember what happened.

Here's my first day. To get a mental picture, all of my tables are in groups of 4 but pushed to the sides of the class. The chairs are in a circle in the middle. It stays like this until the teacher that teaches during my prep gets sick of it.

1. We start off with the Cohen writing assignment on stereotype threat. I'm doing housekeeping stuff during this time and walking the middle of the circle trying to memorize their names. (5 min)

2. I spend a few minutes introducing myself, but start off with defining "active listening." I show some pics of last year's students in group and whole class situations. What are some signs that someone is listening? This year we came up with Sitting up, Looking at the Speaker and Being Able to Paraphrase (they said "repeat", I amended it) as signs you're listening. That's pretty standard. The AVID kids are taught SLANT so usually they can also come up with Asking Questions and Nodding. I didn't get that this year so I'm thinking the 7th grade AVID teacher let that one go. (3 min)

3. I give them a quick bio of me. This year I made a Keynote using a countdown as a gimmick. I let them know they'll be asked questions about it when it's done.
Summary:

5 = number of years I've been at the school (I showed pics of my first group graduating from high school in June and gave a brief "You want to be there" pep talk)
4 = age of my oldest daughter
3 = my main hobbies (rock climbing, surfing, doing backyard science stuff—I showed a clip of a potato cannon I built and launched)
2 = room number of my wife who teaches kindergarten at one of the feeder elementary schools
1 = age of my youngest daughter
100 = I left this one undefined until the next day where Surprise! that number is the percent of students in this class (because even though that's never happened before this is the special class and we can do it together) that is going to cross the stage in June. (maybe 10 minutes)

4. The signs of an active listener are reviewed. Because they listed paraphrasing as a sign of active listening, I let them know that I'm going to ask them to paraphrase what others said. I give them a sentence frame to help them out. I also ask them to name the student because I really want all my students to know each other by name. This is a BIG thing for me.

"_______ said ________. One more thing I remember about Mr. Buell is _______"

If they didn't hear what the person before them said, they're supposed to ask them to repeat. If they can't remember a name, ask the person directly. Then I just go through and cold call like crazy. I let them pass on adding something but not on the paraphrasing. If they pass I let them know I'll come back to them. I introduce the quiet signal and again, cold call/paraphrase¹ to see if they've got it. (10 minutes)

5. Next we launch into a handcuff activity I also picked up from AVID. I let them know that everything they need to know to succeed in this class is in this puzzle. The gist is that each student has a rope that's tied into handcuffs. They link together in partners with the handcuffs on their wrists. They need to try to get out. I do this crazy contortion thing to demonstrate, which of course sets them off on the wrong path. (8 or so minutes)

6. I stop them using the quiet signal to practice. Then I ask for a really brave volunteer to show us something that didn't work. They demonstrate and I thank them for helping move us forward because now we know one thing that definitely doesn't work (this is a recurring theme). I let them go for a little while longer and then again take a volunteer. (10 minutes)

7. Last we get seated again in our circle. The first key to success they'll need: Their failures are valuable. We learned not to "insert whatever crazy move the kids demonstrated." Now tomorrow, when we try again, we know not to do that.

Days 2 and 3 look similar. I tell them a little more about myself. I showed a slideshow of last year's promotion ceremony. I introduce a routine. I reinforce the paraphrasing and knowing student's names. We go back into the ropes. On day 2 I emphasize persistence, because inevitably someone will solve it. I ask them how they figured it out and they always say something like, "I went home and worked on it for an hour with my sister."

On day 3 again, more about me. I did a 9 truths and a lie thing. They voted and a few justified (cold call/paraphrase). They made 4 truths and 1 lie then did a Mix Pair Share.² Back to the ropes again. I emphasize that it's never over. They can come up to me at anytime and tell me they've solved it and I'll pull out the ropes and let the class have a go. For some reason, this always happens around November. I never tell them the answer. They say they want it. But I tell them it's like training all year for a big game. They show up to the game and they win by forfeit. Sure it counts as a win, but it's not the same. The joy isn't in knowing the answer, it's in figuring it out (or not figuring it out, which isn't as fun but can be just as valuable).

This week I've been emphasizing the growth mindset stuff. We watched the first 12 or so minutes of Common Miracles: The New Revolution in Learning which was the video shown in a Joshua Aronson study also regarding stereotype threat. We read and discuss the fake magazine article [pdf] from Dweck on how the brain grows when you learn new things. I've introduced the whiteboards. I've mainly used it for summaries to help them get used to discussion in the circle. I've got a BBC show on reading that also emphasizes how the brain changes but I'm not sure if I'm going to show a clip from that yet.

Last year we did a Don't Eat the Marshmallow bit but I think I'm skipping it this year. I don't spend enough time on strategies for delaying gratification for this to be helpful.

Oh and somewhere in there we created our Don't Break the Chain list. We haven't started creating the chain yet. I'm not officially supposed to do anything for a few more days while the rosters get settled. I'll blog it when I get the thing actually started but so far it's been a positive experience. The kids really got into it when I asked them to drill down further than "Be organized" or "Pay attention." I saw quite a few light bulbs go off. For me it was a real eye-opener to see how hard it was for kids to figure out what "Paying attention" or "Working together" looks like.

At this point you're probably looking at what I did and you're saying to yourself that I'm planting the seeds for when I introduce standards-based grading. This is wrong.

This is wrong because I haven't aligned my philosophies with SBG, SBG fit my existing philosophy. That's why I'm such an advocate. I no longer have a huge disconnect between what I say (your mistakes are valuable, we) and what I do (I'm going to average in all of your previous failures even though you get it now).

If you've made it all the way down here, you should reward yourself for your persistence by submitting a post to the carnival. Good assessment posts of all kinds are welcomed.

1: The paraphrasing thing is new but I'm loving it. There's the obvious bonus of preventing a kid from zoning out when another student is talking but I think as a speaker it makes the students feel more valued when they know someone else is listening besides the teacher. Eventually I hope to transition paraphrasing into asking questions or elaborating. I have no idea how to do that.
2: Mix Pair Share - I play music. Students wander around the room. Music stops and they pair up with whomever they are closest. They then do the truths/lie thing. Music starts and the cycle repeats.

Accepting Submissions for Standards-Based Grading Gala 2

2010-08-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

The first SBG gala was hosted by Matt and he has very graciously passed it on to me.
What: Submit your assesment-related posts. Obviously I'm biased for the SBG Borg but any good assessment posts will be considered. It can be a brand new post or an oldie but goodie.

Who: Anyone can submit, even if you were in it last time.

Why: Because my Google Reader is overstuffed as it is and it'd just make it easier if everyone emailed me their assessment-related posts directly. Oh, and it's the best collection of standards-based grading and assessment-related posts you'll find anywhere.

When: Submissions are due on Aug 31. Go to this link here.

How: Instructions on how to submit.

It'll go up on Labor Day (September 6 for my non-US friends).

Here's the link one more time.

SBG Implementation: Power User Tips

2010-08-08T22:21:00.000-07:00

School starts in a couple weeks and right now I'm wrestling with interim (benchmark) assessments. I'll let you know how that works out later. Until then, I've noticed a bunch of bloggers have been hashing out their standards-based grading plans.

Here are some quick tips that really helped me in the setup phase.

Topics and scales:

Cut breadth, not depth. At some point you'll find you have a ton of standards to teach. You will then realize that you can't teach that many standards. It is really tempting to try to lower your expectations so you can cover all your standards. Don't. Cut the content. Never cut depth.

Take a whole bunch of those standards and put them into the "I'm just gonna mention these" pile. When I say mention, I don't actually mean, just-say-it-and-move-on. You can spend the whole day (or more than that if you want) in your preferred method of instruction.

Usually, that means I tell my kids that they're going to need these for the state tests, but it's not going to be important for my class. I'll spend a day here or there loading some vocab, boring them with a Powerpoint, or doing an isolated lab and then just move on.¹ You could certainly skip it entirely, but I'd like to give them a sporting chance at guessing on a 4-option multiple choice test.

Anchor your scale with the hardest assessments/expectations on your students. It's not uncommon for your students to need to take a common department final, a state-mandated end of course test, and an AP or AP-like test. Choose the hardest one, analyze the depth, and use that as your anchor. I didn't buy into this one until very recently, but I believe it now. It's a real problem if I'm setting my criteria based on my district benchmark, which is asking kids to read a passage and summarize what happened. Meanwhile their state test is asking them to make inferences.

Ask to see other teacher's tests in other districts. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the depth issue. I really worry that I am setting my level of expectation at a 5, while schools in Cupertino, Palo Alto, and Los Altos (insert your local high SES cities here) are asking their students to perform at a 10. I emailed about 20 teachers in other districts for copies of finals, benchmarks, whatever. Six emailed back. Since then I've seen three or four more. Mainly I learned that most teachers just use the exams provided by textbooks, but it did help me adjust a few topics and I also saw some really cool problems.

Start with the 3: I'm putting this here because MizT mentioned she didn't really get this until she read this book. I know your scoring system might be different, but you've got to start with the goal. Whatever it is you want your kids to learn, start there. Then work backwards to build the learning progression, which turns into your scale. Take a full or a half step forward to extend your scale. If it looks like backwards planning, or UbD, it's because it is. If you're going to teach that way, you should assess that way too right?

Your scales and rubrics are actually kind of useless by themselves. Sorry. I know you worked really hard on them. Your standards are meaningless until you define them with assessments and exemplars. There's a good example of that here, but it's gated. No matter how detailed and well thought out your scales are, you and your kids aren't going to really get them until they see some exemplars or they know how they'll be assessed. So don't sweat it if you don't have the wording perfect and you're not really sure if "Classify" or "Group" is a better verb. Spend less time working on your scales and more time working on the assessments.

Assessments:
Tests are for self-assessment.... I give tests. But I give them mainly for students to self-assess themselves so they can figure out their strengths—so they can replicate them—and their weaknesses—so they can work on them.

....and for you.
I need to have some info to play with to figure out what to teach next.

Most of your assessment will be invisible. You'll spend a lot of time asking questions as they're doing something, listening in to convos, or just peaking over shoulders. The more you need to interrupt the process, the less valid the assessment becomes.² Your grades will rarely be attached to a specific "thing" which is why inputting grades by time, rather than assignment, is so useful.

Use your scales to help you give feedback. Leaving feedback was and still is one of my big weaknesses. I'm ok with written stuff but I've always been awful with oral feedback. My kids either do a "Great job" or need to "Work harder." Bleh. Your scales help. Leave feedback that specifically references the skills in your scales. "Looks like you're at a 2 right now, to move forward you're going to want to practice calculating density and using the correct SI units." And yes, you're going to want to teach them to be able to do this themselves.

Grades for the Whole Game, feedback for everything else. That's what the last post was about. I'm just reminding you. But think about it when you feel you need to grade every single thing. If it's not the whole game (which it usually isn't) feedback only.

Good luck new members of the SBG Borg.

1: More on mentioning from Grant Wiggins. This came via Twitter but I've lost the source.
2: I made that up as I was typing. I have no evidence for that statement.
3: If you're on twitter, follow the #sbarbook tag and jump in. On Monday Aug 9, they're starting How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. Most helpful book I've read in a long time.

Playing the Whole Game

2010-07-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned this book before, but Making Learning Whole by David Perkins really helped clarify my thinking on assessment. The key idea of the book is to Play The Whole Game.

The need to play the whole game is something that we intuitively understand. In basketball, we don't spend all day just working on dribbling or shooting, eventually, we go out and play an actual game. When painting, we don't just work on our shading, we paint pictures. We don't just work certain chords on a guitar, we play full songs.

Rhett Allain over at Dot Physics argues that grades are a shadow of the real thing. Very true and in fact, I plan to steal that analogy between 10 and 32,000 times over the next year. However, he doesn't go far enough.

School is a shadow of the real thing.

We spend our time working on skills in isolation under idealized conditions. There are exceptions, but most of the time, students are just doing shadows of the real thing.

And that's ok. Our students aren't going to get LHC access or write a novel or create new historical knowledge.

Instead, we focus on creating mini-games. I think Perkins might call them scrimmages, but I could be making that up. Sometimes you don't have uniforms and a ref so you go and play 3 on 3 in the park. That's a mini-game.¹

This is an assessment blog though so I'm not going to focus on creating mini-games (sorry).

In a whole game, you are rarely ever told what skill to use. Most often, the opportunity arises, you identify the need to use a certain skill, and perform the skill.

This is all a roundabout way of saying I like topics over skill lists.²

Skill lists fall short here and we are in danger of falling into the trap of reductionism. In a skills list, you are usually asked to just use the tool, not to pick the right one and definitely not asked to modify it to fit our needs.

Yes, I break down the game into separate skills. Yes, I individually assess those skills. But eventually, I'd like to see those skills in action. My topic scores tell me how they do at playing the whole game. I fully admit that Motion is a vague name for a topic score. But what I really want them to be able to do is measure the motion of something. So they need some vocab and some measuring skills and some formulas and they definitely spend a lot of time practicing the math (Perkins says to work on the hard parts without getting stuck in "elementitis.") In the end though, I want to be able to tell them, "Figure out how much faster you'd get to the mall if you skateboarded instead of walked" and see that they know how to put all those pieces together.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Kate's modeling project. Yes, Kate wants her students to be able to do all sorts of different mathy stuff. But really what she wants her students to do is gather some data, pick a function, justify why they picked it, explain what they're looking at qualitatively and quantitatively, and draw some conclusions (or something like that).

It seems if you include a water tank, you're golden. What's happening here? What skills do I need to pull out of the hat? How is this different from the frictionless, no air resistance, problems we usually deal with?

Note: Even though I'm using "real world" examples, they don't have to be.

Can you create a skills lists for the whole game? Sure. But not nearly as well. You end up in this troubling pattern of having some skills being worth more than others and you'll probably do some strange weighting system that nobody gets. You lose the mental picture a topic creates that "this skill" will help me in "this game." You're also far more likely to include the one-offs with skill lists.³

Anticipated objections:

I can't assess every standard during a single mini-game.
Well yeah. Chris Sharma doesn't need to dyno (30 seconds in) every hold, but should the need arise, he uses it appropriately. That's what's important; not that students are forcing the round skill into the square test because they know they need to to use that skill and are being directly tested on it.

If it's a crucial skill, most of us are deft enough at creating the conditions that the need for that skill will present itself. If it doesn't ever, that should tell you something about the skill itself.

Topics don't give me detailed information for remediation.
I think that's a legitimate argument. There's an extra step involved in drilling down to the standard. I've tried to fix that by adding traffic lighting of my individual standards to my tracking sheets. But look at the other way around. Doing and assessing the whole game gives information that's meaningful and beyond basic regurgitation. It's good to perform the skill, but now you can see if they know when to use it and if they can break from the algorithm if the situation demands it.

It gives information to the student as well. He or she can see how this fits into the bigger picture and how this skill is used in the whole game. Anyone can move their hand up and down and dribble a basketball. It's not until you're actually playing a game when you realize that there's more to it than that.

Everyone who's played a sport knows this. You practice what you can. You go out and play. You watch film to break down your jump shot. Or more likely, while playing you realized your left hand is still weak and you need to practice.You practice. Then you play again.

My state has the most random set of standards.
It's really hard to find the whole game in the state standards miasma. The state of California gives me a list of slightly less than 60 things to teach. Some of the standards, like this one

Students know the appearance, general composition, relative position and size, and motion of objects in the solar system, including planets, planetary satellites, comets, and asteroids.

end up lumping a few standards together. Once unpacked I end up with 80ish. Some of you have more than 100.

This is stupid.

You've got two choices. Race through and spend 1.8 days on each standard. Or focus on playing the whole game. Pick 3-5 Whole Games a quarter. Do something with those isolated skills. Assess it. Remediate the hard parts. Replicate the successes. Repeat.⁴

Play the whole game. Assess the whole game.

1:If you click on the Amazon link, the first review gives a quick rundown of the seven points David Perkins gives. If you're a UbD or PBL/PBL fan, you are likely doing a pretty good job with the mini-games.
2: It also creates a learning progression.
3: Standards that don't go anywhere should be mentioned, not assessed, but that's a different issue.
4: It doesn't have to be a project. You can get at the whole game with a standard written test. It'll just be a lot more open-ended than any skill test you're used to making.

Dieting and other endeavors doomed to fail

2010-07-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

This is my attempt to clarify my last post with a story.

About two years ago I was having dinner with my mom and one of her friends. Her friend, Sarah, was on the Atkins diet while my mom was on a diet of her own.

Fast forward to now and my mom is on her third different diet (now a vegan) while Sarah is still on the Atkins.

I'm going to ignore the relative health merits of different diets and just focus on one thing:

Why was Sarah able to stick with her diet?

Notice that both of these diets had the same goal: LOSE WEIGHT. But Sarah stuck with her diet while my mom moved on. It could be a personality issue (perhaps) or it could have something to do with the results each one was seeing (not in this case).

However, I think there's a larger issue that relates to my last post.

Sample of my mom's diet instructions:
1400 calories per day. No more than 15% daily fat intake. No more than 6 oz of (non-fish) meat per week. No added sodium. No more than 5 ingredients in a packaged food. All grains must be whole. Start every meal with a salad. Drink a full glass of water at every meal.

Sample of Sarah's instructions:
Don't eat carbs.

I think the implications are clear and feel free to stop here. I'm going to go on because I'm a chronic over-explainer. (mansplainer?)

Clear goals are not enough. Lose weight. Quit smoking. Start exercising. Be a good student. Pay attention. Those all are clear goals.

Motivation is not enough. Although I didn't actually ask my mom, I'm going to go ahead and assume that she wanted to lose weight.¹ Also, despite what they might tell you, every student wants to feel successful.

Too much instruction is as bad as too little. I am in hate with goals given without any direction on how to achieve them. However, it's just as bad to legislate every step. Look at what my mom had to do. That is not sustainable. Your brain gets tired of dealing with all of that.

Successful completion of each step is ambiguous. Short of carrying around a scale, you're eyeballing weights all the time. Is that a full serving? How many calories are in there? How many ingredients do you think that has? You're basically guessing most of the time.

Imagine my mom seeing an appetizer spread at a party.² She's got to figure out the nutrition content and the ingredients. She's got to figure out the weight of the meat. She has to do some mental calculations to figure out how that fits into her daily caloric intake. She does this for everything that's going on her plate.

Sarah, on the other hand, walks up the appetizer spread. She asks, "Is this a carb?" and grabs whatever is appropriate.

Now imagine that both my mom and Sarah had to factor a quadratic while doing all that.

If you want to change, having a goal is not enough. Motivation is not enough. You need a few, specific steps to take and it should be clear if you're doing it right.³

If you need to think your way through every meal, your diet is going to fail. You'll revert back to your old eating habits because your brain simply gets tired of dealing with it all the time.

If your student needs to do the equivalent of calculating calories for every action they take in class, they're going to fail and revert for the same reason.

Next time you're planning on creating change, just remember: No carbs.

Extension question:
What does this have to do with standards-based grading, err, whatever Cornally and Cox want to call it?

1. That would have been a good convo. "So..Mom...Did you even WANT to lose weight?"
2. Hopefully that's the last time I ever type the words "Imagine my mom."
3. Some of the best moments occur while negotiating gray areas. You just can't spend your entire day in the gray areas and expect to sustain your momentum. Usually, gray areas should be targeted, not stumbled into.

Final note: I STILL haven't finished Switch yet but there's a definite possibility they may use this as an example later on. I did a Kindle search and couldn't find "Atkins" anywhere, but if this example pops up I'll be sure to credit it later. Either way, most of the ideas here can be found in that book. I can't give a full recommendation until I finish it but it has at least given me some food for thought and a really nice study on radishes and cookies which I hope to blog about later.

Virtual Conference on Soft Skills:The Other Half of the Battle

2010-07-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

Visit the Soft Skills Convention Center

Riley had the very excellent idea for people to post about building soft skills in class. Initially I wasn’t going to do this because I don’t think I’ve got a lot to offer in this area. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a bit of a one trick pony. I succumbed to peer pressure though, so here it is.

This may be the first post I've done about something I'm planning to do instead of something I've actually done. Thus, I have no idea how this is going to work in practice, but this is the first time I have a glimmer of hope in this area.

Here we go.

I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. One of them, GI Joe, had these public service announcements at the end of every show and the tagline was "Knowing is half the battle." I learned valuable things like don't run away from home. The dirty secret of GI Joe is the other half of the battle, the doing, is usually the much harder part.

I have been critical before of people who tell their kids what to learn, but not how to learn. That doesn't just apply to academic skills, but non-academic skills as well. I teach 8^th graders in a low-performing school with a high poverty and ELL rate. It’s not that my kids don’t want to be good students. It’s that they have no idea how to become one.¹

My good students do certain things automatically. If you ask another student to describe a good student, eventually it will come out that this is just "how they are." What I've struggled with for years is to help students see that these behaviors are learned. They can become a part of everyone.

There are two things I’m synthesizing: Positive Deviants and Don’t Break the Chain.

Postive Deviants: I first came across this idea from Atul Gawande in the book Better. Subsequently, I’ve read a Fast Company article and a passage in Switch².

The quick overview: Telling is not enough. If it was, I could pull off a Socratic seminar and my former college roommate could quit smoking. Positive deviants are those people who thrive in the same environment. Showing people positive deviants gives both a message that it's possible and a model to follow. Click on the Fast Company link and read the story or better yet buy the books. How do I know that examining positive deviants works? Check out all those blogs over there on the right side. My positive deviants. I can count on one hand the number of time I've taken and used something from a formal professional development workshop, but I'm ripping stuff off wholesale from my blogging friends.

Don't Break the Chain: This one comes courtesy of Lifehacker. The story is that Jerry Seinfeld needed to work on writing every day, so he put a big calendar up on his wall. From the article:

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

The overview: Identify the positive deviants in class. Create a list of specific behaviors these students engage in. You don't need to make a spectacle of it. I took some pictures of my students from last year both as I'm lecturing and when they're working in groups or individually. For whatever reason, my students are always fine with being examples for next year's kids. This can also be a pure brain storming activity as well.

Have each student pick ONE of those actions to do. Distribute calendars to the students. Each day they complete their specific action, they get to mark a big X on their calendar. If they break the chain, they write down their streak, pick another goal (or the same one) and start over. There's no prize and it's not a competition with others.

By combining a specific, doable task with a very gentle motivator, daily actions become habits.

Details: The list of actions should be highly specific and observable. “Pay attention” is not going to work. You’ve got to dig and find out what those students are doing to pay attention. How can you tell a student is paying attention? They track the teacher. They sit up straight.

Good actions to choose can be academic “Raise my hand to ask a question.” “Bring a sharpened pencil to class” or non-academic “Pick up a piece of garbage from the ground” or "Have my things ready before the bell rings."

I can't stress this enough. It has to be something that's really specific. Either they did it or they didn't. If you get into, "Well I did it most of the time," or "I think I did it but I'm not sure," you're doomed. In the Vietnam example, switching from two big meals to four smaller meals is specific. Eating healthier foods is not.

You should also make sure this is something that needs to occur every single day. As a teacher, I'm really tempted to put stuff like, "Complete all the notes in class" but I don't ask them to take notes everyday. The chain part only works if it's everyday. You'll be surprised how motivating it is not to break the chain.

Time limits help. I hate folding laundry and if I set a goal of folding all my laundry every day, it's not going to happen. Folding laundry for ten minutes every day I can do.

Last, you'll need to make the calendar really visible. The chain is the reminder. You've got to set it up so they see it every day at the beginning of the period. My kids are sticking the calendars in the portfolios where they track their progress.

After a certain number of days (10? 15?), students pick another behavior and add on. So in order to continue their chain, not only do they need to raise their hand at least once a day, but they also need to bring a pencil each day.

Commentary:
Isn't this just behaviorism? Well...yeah, I guess. I've been critical of behaviorism in other places, but that doesn't mean I think it's all bad all the time. I just don't think it should be your guiding principal. I lean heavily on reflective discourse and you've certainly got to integrate that here. However, reflection without action doesn't lead to change. As the positive deviants example shows, knowing what to do isn't enough. If you're looking for another psych idea, self-efficacy is what's coming into play here. A student, who's been expelled from two schools and has a 0.33 GPA, knows they need to "work harder and start behaving." They just don't know where to start and probably don't even think that's possible. You give them something they can do, something that the best students do, and it starts to build. Something you do every day becomes a habit. Habits becomes attitudes and eventually it just becomes "how they are."

If you don't believe in the motivation of the chain give it a try. Get a big wall calendar, or go to dontbreakthechain.com, pick a goal, and start. I guarantee you once you get a few big red Xs going you'll want to continue. Then life will intervene and your chain will break.You'll be depressed for about 30 seconds and then you'll want to start the chain again.

I don't know how many times I've yelled at a kid and told them to Pay Attention, Work Harder, or Listen. I might as well be telling them to write their answers in French.

Start with one thing. Let them do it every day. Attitudes will follow actions.

1: This applies to everyone. I remember my first year listening to a presenter. He showed some writing samples that were tangential to his talk. I asked how he got his kids writing at such a high level. He replied, "Oh you just have to scaffold that really well." Thanks highly paid presenter. I just need to scaffold. Well that solves everything.

2: I have no idea how to reference a book in Kindle, but the Heath brothers call them “bright spots” instead of positive deviants. I don’t know why. The section on solutions-focused therapists is also relevant here, starting in what looks like Location 500 on my Kindle.

Postscript: I'm about halfway done with Switch and the entire book seems to be based around the idea of taking small actions to solve big problems.They would call the behavior list "scripting the critical moves."

The Foundation of Standards-Based Grading

2010-07-12T22:59:00.000-07:00

Two separate digital events collide:

On twitter, Russ Goerend asked Shawn, Matt, and me (and any other takers) to try to define standards-based grading in one tweet.
Kate Nowak drops this on us for Riley's Virtual Conference on Soft Skills.

and produce this:

Standards-based grading is built on trust.

Your students must trust you. The number one question I and others get is wondering if students will still do homework or other classwork if it's not worth points. I can answer with 100% certainty the answer is yes. Yes they'll do whatever you ask them to do, but only if your students trust you. They're trusting that what you're giving them will help them reach their goal. It's not busy work. It's not assigned out of habit. It's meaningful and will help them get from A to B. They will do it because they believe it will help them learn. They must trust that you are helping them get there.

You must trust your students. Allow them to surprise you. Give them freedom. Allow them to fail but allow them to learn from those failures. If you don't trust your students, they will fail. If you believe they won't do it if you don't make it worth points, then they won't do it. Trust your students.

You must trust yourself. Deep in your heart, you've got to trust that what you're giving them will help them learn. Everything you do is to help them learn. If you don't believe that, they're not going to believe it either. You need to trust yourself because the first day of school you're going to give a speech like this:

Hi. My name is Mr. Buell. You're used to being told what to do. You're used to getting something for doing, rather than learning. You're used to being rewarded for compliance, rather than creativity. Get used to something different. I will make suggestions to help you learn. You may choose to take those and in fact, I recommend that you take them. But only you know who are truly are and how you learn best. And hopefully, by the end of the year, you will know yourself a little better.

It's scary. Points are a shield. When you take away that shield all you're left with is the trust you have in yourself that you're doing what's right.

Go ahead and build your topics and design your assessments. Do all the manual work that needs to be done; but always remember, that it's all built on trust. That work comes first and foremost. Start with a strong foundation and build something that lasts.

Trust each other. Trust yourself.

The last word comes from a series of tweets by @PersidaB that I'm putting together:

Before you can do SBG, I believe you need a transformation in the classroom. Where what you ask them to do becomes an opportunity to learn rather than another piece of paper to "complete". It's a shift in purpose and philosophy. And requires teacher and student training to shift thinking in purpose of why they're in the classroom.

Edit: Ok, now Frank gets the last word. Fantastic post by one of the SBG Borg: http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/sbg_and_trust

Picard, not Data

2010-07-06T23:42:00.000-07:00

Riley and Matt have told you before that it's a bad idea to average. Ken O'Connor will tell you that mindless number crunching is one of the cardinal sins of good assessment practice.¹

But why?

Here's a story: I'm driving in my car. I check my odometer and I've just gone 25 miles. I check it again and I've now gone 50 miles total. I check again and I'm 75 miles away. I stop when I'm 100 miles away. If I take an average of each time I checked by mileage, I get 62.5 miles.

Totally unrelated story: I'm taking a test. The first time I get a 25%. I take it again and I get 50%. The next time I get 75%. Finally, I get 100%. If I take an average of each time I took that test, I get 62.5%

Learning is a journey. You cannot average different stages of the trip in any meaningful way. Not only is it an inappropriate use of averaging but it sends the wrong message. It tells students that the 100% they got the last time was nothing more than experimental error. It dismisses the growth that has happened.

I usually disapprove of number crunching for grades in general. But I understand that some people are required to do it.

So when can you average?

Going back to my car trip: I stop my car and get out. I look at the odometer. I take a GPS reading. I check the road signs. I check my map. I've now got four different measurements for how far I am at this exact moment.

Multiple measures for standards-based grading are good. It is in fact a requirement that you take multiple and varied measurements in any good assessment system. Ideally these would all occur at the same time, but realistically they'd be within a few days of each other.

In this case, it is acceptable to average your results as long as you don't do it mindlessly. Not all assessments are created equal. I wouldn't even think of averaging my GPS results with the ones I got by using a ruler and a map.

If you have to average multiple assessments, they should meet two criteria:

The assessments all need to be quality measures of the learning goal. A lab called "Measuring Motion" isn't a valid assessment of that learning goal just because its got it in the name. Check every assessment against your learning goals. Make sure you're assessing what you think you're assessing.
The assessments all need to measure the same point in the learning progression. Usually this means temporal proximity. Don't average two assessments that occurred three weeks apart.

Here's where averaging gets really tricky:

The criteria must be evaluated on a per student basis.

Assessments are not quality assessments for each and every student. The time span it takes to render an assessment obsolete varies by student. This relates directly to the statement by Chris Ludwig I quoted in my last post.

Your grades come from weighing the total body of evidence you've gathered against the standards you've set and communicated. Use averaging if it will help you make a better decision but don't let it make the decision for you.

To quote @johntspencer: "A simple glimpse at Star Trek reminds me that Data is meant to inform rather than drive." [source]

Data is useful. Data is good for advice. But Picard is the captain. Be the captain. Don't mindlessly average.

1: O'Connor says that if you must use mean, also take a look at median and mode to see if the mean is giving you a true picture of mastery.

Data image from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/DataTNG.jpg
Picard image from:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/JeanLucPicard.jpg

Post publishing note: This was probably the first post all summer where I didn't link to Shawn's blog. I publish this, check my Reader.....and he also has a picture of Data! I swear, we're not the same person. He's much cooler than me. Literally. He curls in his backyard.

The Whole Darn Thing

2010-07-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

This comes via @chrisludwig in the comment section of his own blog post.

....the more I read lately, the more I’m convinced that what we need is not standardized, objective grading systems but more subjective grading systems, those that allow the teacher to personalize assessment for each student and students to have a role in defining the assessments. This should be done, though, in the framework of high expectations and defined learning targets. I’m still new enough at this to be idealistic, but I think SBG is the way to allow this to happen.

I don't want to elaborate too much on this because I'm trying to peer pressure him into spinning it off into a separate post. All I want to say is that his comment captured everything I've tried to communicate in 50+ posts, but he did it in three sentences.

Go visit his blog. Follow him on twitter.

It's not the end, it's the beginning

2010-07-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

Here's the gist: Your assessments are your starting point, not the finish line.

In the style of Gladwell or Pink, I'm going to spend the next 1000 words on something I just summarized in one sentence.

Pretest:

There are 3 sheep, 4 goats, and 7 pigs on a boat. What color is the captain's hat?
You're going on a field trip. Each bus holds 10 people. You've got 31 students going and 4 chaperones. How many buses do you need?

You've probably seen these questions before if you've read about mindless learning. A mindless learner might answer 14 to question one and 3.5 to question two. These are obviously wrong but notice the problem isn't a lack of basic math skills. Bad implementations of standards-based grading stem from the same problems. You might have all the stuff in place, but if you don't really get it, you're going to fail without realizing why.

The First Why: Why am I assessing so frequently?

If you think of a test as the thing you use to decide what to do next, standards-based grading makes a lot more sense. If you're still thinking of tests as something purely evaluative, you're going to feel like all you do is give your kids tests. I get that a lot from my teachers. When will I have time to teach stuff if I'm just testing all the time?

Yes, there are probably 15-20 minutes of "stop what you're doing and answer these questions" per week. I get that time back, and more, by using it to set the course for the rest of the periods, next day, or the rest of the week.

The old me would introduce something new. We'd work on it for a few days. Then I'd introduce the next new thing. Then the next new thing. Then I'd have a test on the last few weeks because, well, it's been a long time since my kids had a test. Then what did I do? I entered in grades. I'd be surprised by a few (good and bad) and then....move on. If some arbitrary amount of students didn't pass, I'd spend a day or two in front of the entire class "reviewing." Seriously. That's how I taught. I need to start drafting my own letter of apology.

Now? Sometimes I'll start with the new thing, sometimes I'll pretest.¹ We get some feedback. I set up the next few days based on the results of the test. The non-intrusive assessment still takes place. I walk around. Give some feedback. Get some feedback. Adjust instruction again. Have a learning lab day. Then re-assess to see where we're going next.

If you look at the paragraph above, you'll notice the word feedback occurs three times while grading never enters the picture. Focus on feedback. Whenever possible, leave feedback but not grades or scores. I do spend time really breaking down certain assessments and I have been known to go all out with testing data. Most of the time, I'm simply looking to get and to give feedback. I get a lab report and take a look. I'll jot down a couple of specific pieces of feedback, including a next step for the student. The student can use my next step or choose their own. We get a chance to actually act on the feedback

Side note: One of the hidden benefits of standards-based grading is how much less time you'll spend "grading" papers. You're just looking for feedback. It's not this accounting game of going through and marking and tallying. You're also going to find yourself leaning really heavily on non-intrusive or only mildly intrusive forms of assessment. You'll ask questions as they're doing labs or working problems. You'll circle the room. You'll ask a question on a slide and choose your next slide based on the response. If you're worried about the paperwork that comes with standards-based grading, it's because you haven't changed your mindset yet.²

Teachers tend to worry about all sorts of technical details when it comes to standards-based grading. How will I input it into my gradebook? What should tests look like? How do I design my scales? That's important. But I'm going to freak you out a little here. That's the easy stuff.

The scariest part for me, BY FAR, was realizing that I might not know what I'm doing on Tuesday based on what happened on Monday. Take into consideration that I'm not an organized person. I don't write out my daily lesson plans and, despite being "required" to before I was tenured, I've never actually submitted weekly lesson plans to my principal.

So why am I assessing so frequently? Your assessments are the tools you use to help you move forward. The format is less important than what you do with them. You will like them. Your kids will like them. Ok, your kids will at the very least see the purpose of them. But if your assessments just go into this mystical gradebook and nothing ever happens to them, you've missed the point of standards-based grading. You're going through the motions and you're the kid who thinks 3.5 buses is a valid answer.

More mindful standards-based grading to come. Leave a comment if you'd like me to address something in the future. Here's a sentence starter, "I don't get why....."

Another last minute add! Twitter saves the day again. By @misscalcul8: Scroll to the bottom of this post for the words of wisdom from @PersidaB. Well said, Persida.

1: I plan on pretesting more this year. I didn't before because everything was new to my kids and felt it was just getting them discouraged. I've started a common assessment system this year and so we're going to pretest each unit, post test, then level the classes for a week. More on that when I actually, you know, figure it out.
2: I have now broken the record for "most times any blogger has linked to the same two other bloggers in consecutive posts."

The carnival is coming to town

2010-06-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

Matt Townsley, through some gentle prodding by me, has agreed to host the first ever standards-based grading gala. Enter in your own posts on standards-based grading and other assessment-related posts. How you ask? Allow me to guide you.

First go here.

Click on "Submit an article." Edit: As Denise pointed out in the comments, you could also click on the GIANT ORANGE BUTTON in the top right corner. That would work too.

Fill out the form, submit it, and you're all done. Make sure you submit the permanent link to the exact post you want to feature, not just your home page.

They don't have to be brand new posts. However, please only submit your own posts. If you see one you like, comment to the author and tell them to submit it. I have no idea how many submissions we'll get so you may or may not be in the first carnival. This is the first one, so spread the word. We have no idea what we're doing so we may need to clarify some rules later. I'll update this post as needed.

Final exams in a standards-based system

2010-06-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

Programming notes: If you actually visit the site instead of in your Reader, you'll notice there's a tab for the standards-based grading implementation series. You'll also notice I've changed the blog roll titles to Twitter names. I did it in my Reader because I had trouble mentally linking people on twitter to their blog. If you're on there and DON'T want your twitter name connected to your blog, please let me know ASAP and I'll change it. On the other hand, if you're not on there and should be, let me know that too. Don't be shy. I've got about 150 blogs in Reader so I probably just missed it looking over the list.

Shawn told me he's posting on this as well and I'll update this link when it comes out, but it's definitely in the comments here. Edit: As promised.

Note to Shawn and Matt: I'm going to need a list of all your upcoming posts. I hate that you say everything I have to say, only better. Oh wait. I love that.

Just to warn you, I'm a middle school teacher and we don't give finals at my school. Be more skeptical of anything I have to say than you usually are.

Before we move on, here's a reminder: Assessment is not just tests.

So what do we do about finals in a standards-based system? It will require some compromises.

In the Ideal World you probably don't give a final. You might have some culminating project of awesomeness (edit:fixed link) but if you've really done your job you don't even need a final. Actually, if you've really done your job your students can just assign themselves a grade because they're such master self-assessors. Some would argue that the ideal world doesn't even have grades. I understand that argument but I don't fall into the all-grades-are-the-root-of-all-evil camp.

In the Almost Ideal World you still need to give grades and you still operate in a fairly traditional school setting. You need to give a written test, not some sort of showcase.

Assuming you've broken your curriculum into topics or skills lists, you've got specific things you want the students to know and do. You also assess them regularly. For me, when I start off a topic I'll give a quiz about once a week and the last week I'll give two. Then I'll move on and re-quiz¹ every few weeks and slowly bring it back more frequently as the grading period closes.

During the last two(ish) weeks of the trimester, I will fully reassess each student on each topic as needed. A student who has been banging out review quizzes all trimester doesn't need to be reassessed. It would be hoop jumping, which is what we're avoiding with all this SBG business. Think of your student that has 102% in your class. There is nothing positive that can come from the final. At best, she stays the same. I've had teachers with "fail the final, fail the class" policies. It shocks me they're willing to invalidate an entire semester of hard work because of a single test.

On the other hand, some students will need to reassess on everything. They want to take your final.

Those students might be taking something that might look like a final. The difference is that the final is based on need and is transparent. They know what they need to take and can focus accordingly. It's not a guessing game of, "Is this cumulative? How much of the first month is going to be there? Is Mr. Buell going to ask anything about calculating acceleration?" A student should never fail your class because they guessed wrong about what would be on the final.

Just in as I'm writing this: Relevant tweet by @jerridkruse

Compromise 1: The final will be given as needed. Students will only take the parts you need more evidence for or they want another chance to show you something. Goals should be clear going in.

Ok, you probably do need to give everyone a midterm or final. You might be able to format it by topic and let certain students just cross out the ones they've passed out of. On the other hand, you might also be giving a common final and have no choice in the matter.
So what's a good SBGer to do?

Remember this: Finals are just one more piece of evidence. It is up to you to decide if that evidence overrides all of your previous evidence.

So what happens? Students take the final like normal. Now you can sit with your excellent department and pour over testing data.

When it actually comes to the grade, you need to make a decision here. Does the evidence from the final override what you previously believed about the student's level of learning?

What does this mean? Assuming you've got some fairly recent assessment data on your student, you are within your rights to 100% totally and completely disregard something on the final. You have a section on your final about states of matter. Your student has aced every states of matter problem you've given her, she leads tutorial groups on it, she performed an interpretive dance on the states of matter, and has predicted the existence and properties of the Bose-Einstein Condensate through a pure thought experiment. On your final, she bombs it. Why does she bomb it? No idea. Almost Ideal World you can go back and talk with her. In Your World, she's on the beach somewhere because it's summer vacation and you're the only sucker still in school. Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend that day. Maybe she didn't get enough sleep because she was studying for her history final. Maybe she just read the question wrong.² In this case, you, as a teacher and a human being and not a scantron machine, is ~~able to~~ ~~required to~~ morally obligated to make a decision. You need to decide if all of your previous evidence were wrong or if your final was wrong (or something in the middle).

This is where organizing your gradebook into separate topics is clutch. If you have an entry that says "Final exam" and it averages everything in, you're going to have to massage the points somewhere to make it work out. That usually means randomly giving points. That distorts the record of learning. Not to mention it gets...uncomfortable... and isn't very CYA friendly.

On the other hand, in a topic-based system, you just update the other scores as needed while keeping intact the current topic score.

Compromise 2: Give everyone the final. Use it as a single piece of evidence and decide for yourself if it is relevant and meaningful.

Before you decide what to do with your final, take a second to remember how angry you get when you hand out the All Important State Test to your kids and you realized you guessed wrong about what standards they would be testing. Sarcasymptote told me his recent NY test had 39 questions on 104 standards. Your final should NEVER be a game of chance. Take another second to remember how outraged we all get because someone out there is trying to measure our worth as a teacher based on a single test, on a single day.³

All of this is a way of saying that your tests should never override your judgment. Never let the points make a decision for you. You are the teacher. Own your grades.

1: Usually, mid-course that's not a full assessment. I'll lump all the previous topics together on one quiz and only include one or two big ideas per topic. The rest of the period or the next day, they'll work on the topic they had the most trouble with.
2: I once almost failed a class because I didn't turn over the page and see there were questions on the back of the final. My professor let me come in and just talked with me about what we learned. Take that "standards-based grading doesn't prepare them for college" people! Thank you Dr. Ebbesen.
3: If you want an assessment guiding principle, you couldn't go wrong with, "Don't do anything your state does for high stakes testing." or WWMSTD? What would my state test do?

SBG Implementation: Setting up the Gradebook

2010-06-13T00:09:00.000-07:00

If you've been following along, you've already created your topic scales, designed assessments, and tracked progress.

Next we're going to actually input scores into our gradebook.

Most of our gradebooks were designed for traditional assessments only. You give points for assignments and they're averaged for the final grade. Mine does that too. There are a few programs out there that are supposed to be compatible with standards-based grading, like Global Scholar. I have zero experience with those, other than sitting through a few sales pitches, so I can't vouch for how those work in practice. You can also follow along with Shawn or Riley or the Science Goddess and see how they're doing creating their own.

I haven't hit on the one-tracker-to-rule-them-all. As such, I've got a bunch of different systems that kind of do what I want but none of them are quite perfect. I use/have used three methods for recording scores before they ultimately get recorded into my online gradebook.

Paper gradebook
Sticky notes
Excel

I still go old school with the paper gradebook. A picture would be ideal here but my scanner is currently on the fritz. It looks like a standard gradebook except that instead of each student name getting a single row, each name gets five rows. Instead writing down assignments I give another five columns to a topic and record scores as I see fit. I circle the score when I feel they've reached that level. A single class will take multiple pages in your gradebook. I don't record the specific assignment that was attached to each score. I used to have a coding system for the type of assessment but was terrible at doing it so I stopped. I can regularly record scores and comments but not much else.

I use the sticky notes to jot down quick reminders of conversations I've had with the kids. In standards-based grading the assessment type is usually irrelevant.You'll find the conversations with your kids are incredibly valuable and you'll want to write stuff down. In my best times, I can keep little notes while they're doing labs or working out problems. Often I just scribble down a few notes after the bell rings. They say things like, "Still confusing speed and velocity." or "Gets light years" or "Double check can calculate density." One of the most valuable things I've found to keep track of is who's helping whom. The kid who's always explaining things to the rest of his group knows what's going on.

The Science Goddess's excel workbook is just like mine if mine went through a few cycles of the Barry Bonds workout enhancement system. I only include overall topic scores and use conditional formatting (Green for 3/4, Yellow for 2, Red for less than 2) to keep track. I also include a column named named Proficient in All Standards and an IF-THEN formula runs through and marks yes/no if they have at least a 3 in every topic.

There are bar graphs showing the number of students scoring at each level by topic.

Lest you think I'm a master teacher, this is my second highest performing class. I have a class that's the mirror image of this one.

Setting up the Gradebook
Here's a snapshot of my gradebook. Here's Matt's.

We use PowerSchool. It looks like it's also called PowerTeacher Gradebook.

When you set up your gradebook, you should be thinking - When a student or parent reads this, can they tell what they've learned and needs to be learned? They should be thinking about what they need to learn next.

If your gradebook says Wksht Ch1.2 or Midterm, that's not so helpful.

In my gradebook I have tried to decouple the assignment from the learning wherever possible.

Instead of using categories like Quizzes, Labs, Classwork, I named each category after a topic.

I enter in scores by time, rather than by assignment. This is new this year. I moved to entering in a score every Friday instead of a score for some sort of specific assessment.¹ Using the old method, when a student or parent looked online and saw a low score, they immediately wanted to make up/redo that specific assignment, whether it was a test or lab or classwork. They were focusing on the assignment rather than the learning goal. By removing the assignment entirely, I forced them to focus on the learning goal.

Additionally, differentiation is hard enough as it is. Don't make it even harder by trying to figure out how to enter grades 30 students who are working on 30 different things.²

I've changed the naming conventions over the year because of how PowerSchool formats it when I look at the gradebook. At the end of my first week teaching a new topic I'll put in something like Graphing Progress Check 1. The next week I'll put in Graphing Progress Check 2. I may simultaneously be entering a score for Motion Progress Check 4. This score is purely for reporting purposes and is zero weighted. On a good day, I can leave a comment on the score stating which particular standards they have mastered or need to work on. If you're one of those people building a gradebook, allow me to import a list of standards, attach them to a student, and check them off.

I keep track of their current level in a particular topic using Motion Topic Score or Graphing Topic Score. I overwrite this one when I see fit. I don't have an algorithm for when this gets overwritten. I err on the conservative side and I need to be pretty sure before I will overwrite a score. This may take multiple assessments but doesn't always take multiple weeks. A student might have weekly progress that looks like 1,1,2,2 but then the Topic Score is 3 because they blew me away this week. In case you're wondering, yes, I do lower my scores.

When viewed online, parents or students can click on the Final Topic Score and see a quickie version of the 4-point scale.

I like this combination of progress checks and topic scores because it keeps the record of learning intact while allowing me to not be confined by either averaging the scores or using the most current score; both of which I think have serious drawbacks.

I really wish I could display the scores by topic, instead of chronologically. Our "update" over the summer to the java version only lets us view the scores chronologically. We used to be able to sort them by category which was much better and made more sense for this method. If you have the java version of PowerSchool and know how to do this, let me know. If I can't figure out how to list them by category, I think I'm just going to fudge the due dates next year.

Final note: I can't possibly emphasize enough how much of a critical change it was for me to remove assignments entirely from my gradebook. You will encounter two situations fairly frequently once you fully embrace a standards-based system. One, your students will pick what they need to work on and will be doing something completely different from the person next to them. I anxiously await the day I can tweet that I had 30 students working on 30 different things. As of now, 6 or 7 different things is reasonably common and 3 or 4 different things is the norm. Two, you'll have one student who needs 10 different assessments for a single standard and another who showed clear mastery on the pre-test. Your online gradebook is not designed to accommodate either of those situations. Do not waste your time trying to figure out how to enter all those different grades in and then trying to explain to parents why Matthew has an A but 40% of his assignments are blank scores.

As always, leave any improvements or clarifications in the comments. I'm wrapping up this series soon. Thank you for the good comments and support. If there are any specific issues you'd like addressed - twitter, email, comment.

1: I just realized that the snapshot I used isn't spaced out weekly. The rest of the scores are pretty evenly spaced. I have no idea what I was doing with graphing.
2: It is unfortunate that grading program creators think that all students in a class will always be doing the exact same assignment on the exact same day worth the exact same amount. It is more unfortunate that this is usually true.

SBG Implementation: Tracking Progress

2010-06-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

So far we've designed our topic scales and written out a test. Now we're going to track our progress. By the end of this post you should have a pretty good idea of what my typical assessment cycle looks like. Matt Townsley has more thoughts here.

Step three in my adventures into standards-based grading: Tracking progress
I ask students to numerically track their individual progress for each topic scale.The purpose of the tracking sheet is to help them track their progress and self-assess. The tracking sheet is designed for student use.

For every topic I give students something like this:
Tracking Atoms

They store these in a two-pocket portfolio.¹

Specific features:
1. Topic name at the top. My original tracking sheet didn't have a separate topic name, only a learning goal. I don't know what I was thinking.

2. A graph to track progress. The y-axis is a 0-4 score. The x-axis is individual assessments.

3. On the bottom you'll see the 0-4 scale along with a condensed form of my specific learning goals. I print out and posterize a slightly more detailed version on my bulletin board.

4. On the back there's a checklist of each specific standard. The far left column has the letter that matches up to questions on the tests. The next column is chapter and section the information can be found in the book.

How to use it:
Again, this tracking sheet is for them. They should get two things from it. Am I making progress? What do I need to work on next?

Testing day in a nutshell:

Hand out test.
Kids take test.
We score the test immediately.
Track progress.
Set next individual goal.
Start immediate remediation.

Testing day out of a nutshell:
Step 3: Score the test. I'm a big believer in immediate feedback. I need to know how I'm doing right away. Ideally, I can get feedback as I go. If you're a Montessori kind of person, they have all these self-correcting activities. If you're a coach of a sport, you teach music, or art, you guide them as they go. You probably have some self-checking worksheets. If I can't get my feedback as I go, then I want it as soon as I'm done. We go over the answers immediately. I want their test in front of them so they can immediately compare. If I want to input the score into the gradebook¹ I have them copy their answers down onto a half sheet of paper and turn that in.

Here's how the scoring system works. They get a 2.0 if they got 100% correct all the way up to where it says 3.0. If scribd and the pdf export didn't mess up the formatting, that means all the questions on the first page. If they missed anything, even one thing, that's less than a 2.0. If they got ALL the 2.0 questions and ALL the 3.0 questions right, that's a 3.0. 4.0 means everything is 100% correct. I use half points as well as full so 1.5 and 2.5 are fair game. Why insist on 100%? Because your grades should have meaning. A student scoring a 2.0 in my class will understand, at minimum, all of the simple concepts on that topic. It dilutes the meaning of the score if it means, "Carina gets most of the simple concepts but there's something she's fuzzy on. That's different from the thing that Michael is unclear on, but his score is also the same." It's called standards-based grading for a reason. Their grade is based on meeting a well-defined standard.

Step 4: Track progress. I have my students write in the date in the line to the right of the graph and then do a simple bar graph. They lightly shade in the bar. You will be amazed at how often students point out the progress they've made. It is also incredibly powerful to point to the tracking sheet of the person next to them. My students usually think students are just born smart. It's a big deal for them to see that the straight A student sitting next to them also scored a 0.5 on the first assessment.

On the back, they traffic light each standard. They match the letter next to each test question with the corresponding standard. I just have them mark a plus/check/or minus for each one. I tell them that a plus means they'll understand it the rest of their lives, a check means they've pretty much got it but need a bit more practice, a minus means anywhere from "I get some parts of it" to "What class is this again?" This checklist is my way of getting the direct remediation goodness that skill-lists offer while maintaining the learning progression that topic scales build in.

The front graph is almost always based on test results. They might traffic light a single standard after doing an assignment, notes, lecture, or whatever. Anytime they feel like they've got it now, they can go ahead and put a plus next to a standard.

Step 5: Set a goal. Immediately after filling in their tracking sheet I have them set a goal. This year I just had them write at the bottom of their test,"The standard I will work on next is _______. I am going to____." I've tried a few different sentences frames but haven't really found a difference in how they perform. I think next year I might just include a separate goal sheet in their portfolios. I'd like to create a single reference place with the ultimate goal of being able to help them determine which specific strategies helped them achieve their learning goals.

Step 6: Start remediation. This one is always tricky. I usually go over the answers with a Keynote preso so the last slide will often include specific options I have prepped. They also have a textbook, an interactive reader, and a workbook. Most often it looks something like this where I have them break off into groups focusing on selected topics. I haven't gotten to the point where I can have 30 students working on 30 different things at 30 different levels. If you've got the technology and access, I know some teachers who screencast everything and send their kids off to different stations to watch those. Right now, I'm just happy that I've moved beyond all 30 students doing the exact same thing. I get them going then direct teach for a few minutes at each table. A quick description is here.

I have 53 minute periods so a typical test might take 15 minutes. It takes another 15 minutes to score, track, set a goal and get somewhere. That leaves a good 20 minutes of individualized time.³ If you're pressed for time or you want longer and more in depth tests, have them set a goal for the next day and just walk in and get going.

Sticking Points:
Your students have no idea how to help themselves. It's really hard to get this going and takes a ton of front-loading if they're not used to taking responsibility for their own learning. It took a lot of modeling. I think the first test I gave we spent a whole period just scoring it and doing the bar graph and traffic lighting. The next day we spent half the period writing goals. There are a special few that still just can't figure it out by the end of the year and wait for me to come around. I don't know what to do with those kids. Having them create a specific plan helped a lot. One of my major mistakes was just thinking I could tell them what they needed to learn and they'd go off and learn it. Totally not happening. Setting written goals was a big step and offering a range of choices was another. I was hoping to wean them off choosing something I had created and get them to create their own plan but I didn't have a lot of success with that.

It seems like an insane amount of prep for different kids to be working on different things. It is at first. No question. But you can reuse most of the same stuff for the duration of a topic. The student will get what they're supposed to get, move up the ladder, and work on something different next time. So, yes, there's a fair amount of prep the first time, but after that it takes care of itself. I'm not a master organizer, but you could have a bunch of numbered folders or trays on a back table. When you put up the choice list (or leave it up throughout the unit), they'd just match the standard to the number of the file folder. The internet is your friend so if you have access, make use of all the applets and videos you can find. The few kids at my school that have working internet access at home will tell me that a few minutes on an applet I pointed them to is worth a whole week of me blabbering at them in class. If I had computers in my class it would probably be pretty easy to send them to specific websites to get help.

In the last post, I added a fourth and fifth principle to Dan Meyer's. I've tried to set up my tests and tracking sheets in such a way that it does most of the work for me. I'm hoping to be as invisible as possible in this whole process. The more I interject myself into it, the more likely it is a student is going to attribute success (and failure) to me instead of to him/herself.

As always, leave any improvements/suggestions/modifications in the comments. I tend to write these posts at 11:30 at night so if something isn't coherent, I'll explain more as needed.

Edit: Probably should include this link again: http://www.box.net/shared/6xplu3btfy It's the Word 2004 (mac) template for the tracking sheets.

1: I buy these for them in the beginning of the year along with a spiral notebook. I get the notebooks from Target. Office Depot usually has the portfolios in store for, I think, 29 cents each during back to school sales.
2: Don't worry, the gradebook post is coming next.
3: Ok, by the end of the year it takes that long. The first few tests take an entire period and remediation follows the next day. We get pretty quick as the year progresses though.

SBG Implementation: Creating Assessments

2010-06-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

Programming note: I'm breaking this post in to two parts. This one is on the test itself and the next will be on scoring and tracking progress.

Citation: I forgot to mention that I started off with the base system outlined in Classroom Assessment and Grading that Work and have spun it off a bit to better fit my context and style.

This is the second in a series on the process I went though implementing standards-based grading in my class. Part one here. If you haven't read that one yet, you should go back. You'll need to understand the 0-4 system before you read the rest.

Just as a refresher, here are the ground rules:

There is no canon for SBG.
Context is everything.¹

In case you're one of twelve people in the world that hasn't read it, here are Dan Meyer's templates. I take a topic-based approach versus his skills approach so our formatting is different and the meaning behind the 0-4 scale is different. However, his guiding principles are the same. Excerpted here:

It doesn't matter when you learn it as long as you learn it.
My assessment policy needs to direct my remediation of your skills.
My assessment policy needs incentivize your own remediation.

Adding a fourth: My assessment policy should do as much of the work as possible.
And fifth: The ultimate goal is self-assessment. Any assessment policy should help students to become better self-assessors.

Jargon alert: I use the term "standards" to refer to your in class learning goals, not your state standards. I use the term test and quiz interchangeably. I'm specifically referring to a written assessment that a student takes by him/herself

Step two in my adventures into standards-based grading: Creating Assessments
Before you get overly excited, this is not the post where you're going to learn how to write really rich and interesting problems. Look to your right. Most of those blogs devote themselves to that exact purpose. Grace has a good, short post on testing conceptual development. Personally, I like to use the rich problems for teaching, but not so much for written assessment. Context is everything here and I'd love for you to comment that I'm wrong about this. I have so many English learners that I find that I'm not really testing what I think I'm testing (h/t @optimizingke). My written test questions tend to be straight vanilla.

What I am going to write about today is test formatting. Not very glamorous, but it's one of those things that will make your transition much easier.

Tests exist so you and your students can tell where they are and what needs to be done next. The test itself should provide feedback.

There are many other ways to do this but tests have a couple of advantages. One: They're darn efficient. You can knock out a test in 15 minutes and get kids working on remediation in the same period. Two: There's a paper trail. It helps students to see how their thinking has progressed and to analyze the mistakes that they've made again and again (and again).

I definitely use multiple methods of assessment, and in fact it's necessary in any quality assessment system. However, written tests are the bread and butter for most teachers so that's what we're going to focus on here.

Here's a sample test. Most of my problems are drawn from sample state test questions, textbooks, and what we develop as a department:²
atomslg2

Specific features:
1. In the top right you'll see the topic name and which assessment number it is. They're going to reassess a lot. In my class that's usually a minimum 4-6 times for a single topic in class and even more if they want to come after school. You've got to have a way to keep them/you organized.

2. I wrote the learning goal on top. I'm actually planning to remove that. I think my original tracking sheets only had the learning goal on top and not the topic name. It was my way to help the kids match up the tracking sheet to the assessment. Now that I put the topic name on both, it's superfluous. You would think having the learning goal on the top would be like a cheat sheet to help my students answer the questions. Sadly, you'd be wrong. If anyone has a good reason for me to leave it, let me know.

3. After each test question, there's a letter that matches the question to the standard listed in their tracking sheet. Mostly, the reason for this is to help you and your students track their progress on each standard. There's a second plus. It serves as a self-check when you're writing your test questions. If you can't match up a question directly to a standard, or multiple standards, you need to edit your question, your standards, or both.

4. Questions are separated into 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 questions. The front page consists of simple ideas, usually vocabulary or basic knowledge. The 3.0 questions are the more complex ideas. The 4.0 question has not been addressed in class but if they understand the complex ideas, they can apply those to arrive at a solution.

Most teachers I've observed cluster by problem type (multiple choice together, then matching, then short answer at the end.)

If you're clustering by problem type, please stop. It's unhelpful. You and your students should be able to identify some sort of pattern by looking at the results of the tests. That's really hard to do on tests like this. Unless your goal is to help students figure out what type of question they have the most difficulty with, I can't think of a good reason for doing this.

The second most common method is to cluster by standard. I like this method, but don't use it. I really like it for some purposes and designed our department benchmarks in this way. The strength is that there's a direct line between "what I missed on this test" and "what I need to work on." Remediation is really straightforward. Since I cluster my test questions by complexity, there's an extra step they need to work through to figure out what needs to be done next. It's not a difficult step, but some students will need more hand holding than I prefer.

So why do I choose to group my tests in this method? The most obvious is that this is how my grading scale works. It's really clear both to my students and to myself what score the test will receive. There's a better reason for choosing this method though.

I often come back to how I think using topics helps create connections across standards better than skill-based assessments and here's another example. In a skill-based assessment, students can easily see what specific standard they need help on, however because of the very format of the assessment (chunked by standards and often on separate pieces of paper) it is harder to look for patterns of errors and broad misconceptions. In a topic-based system, it is easier to see systematic errors.³

Imagine a student missing questions 7 and 9 on the test above. I could ask them to go and learn more about both states of matter and the kinetic molecular theory. In a skills-based assessment that would be my default, especially if those standards were assessed at separate times. In a topic-based system, when I read the answers together I might realize that the student has a knowledge gap that's affecting both questions. For example he/she might not understand the relationship between temperature and molecular motion, which is necessary to answer both questions.

Additionally, by clustering from simple to complex, I can quickly focus on a few common problem areas. If they're stuck on the first page, it's usually something like, "He has no idea what an atom is so he's just guessing at everything" or "She is confusing velocity and speed." If the difficulties occur on the 3.0 questions, I can rule out all of the simple stuff because I've seen that they've mastered that already.

This is totally possible to do with an assessment grouped by standard. I think the trade off of more direct remediation for making connections/ease of scoring is worth it.

All of this is a really long-winded way of saying that if you're going to implement a topic-based system, it makes sense to design your assessments by topic. Since you've taken the time to build a learning progression into your topic, keep that intact as well.

Sticking Points:
You can't figure out how to cram an entire topic into a single test without making it the SAT. You're aiming for frequent smaller assessments rather than a big one at the end of a unit. Don't feel the need to cram every last question in. Get to it next time. Notice that the second question only deals with the charge of a neutron. In other assessments I would have the properties of protons or electrons as well. Generally, if a student doesn't know the neutron is neutral, they're also not going to know the proton is positive and electron is negative. I don't feel the need to put all three on the same test. I just want to get an idea for what they know so I know what to teach next.

You've made this great topic scale but don't know how to write questions for it. I've found that commonly the problem isn't that I can't come up with a question for a standard, it's that the standard doesn't lend itself to being answered in a standard testing format. You just can't assess your state's oral language standards in writing. In your classroom, anything is an assessment. You've got your topic scales, get them to do whatever it is they need to do and evaluate it against those scales. My textbook's assessment software includes questions with pictures of a triple-beam balance and different arrows pointing at the numbers. You're supposed to then tell the mass of the object on the balance. I could do that. Or I could not be the laziest person ever and get out the triple beam balances and walk around as they determine the mass of different objects. For the most part, teachers seem to be pretty good about understanding that different modes of assessment are necessary. We're not as good at realizing that those other modes should be replacing written tests. Most teachers I know would start with having the actual triple beam balances out but then pull out the written tests later. Either they don't think it should count unless it's on a test or they're worried about CYA or they're just in the habit of putting everything on a test. Break the habit. Everything doesn't need to eventually show up in multiple choice format.

Next up: Scoring the assessment and tracking progress

1: Forgot to mention this last time. The book Mount Pleasant is about the high school my kids feed into. Don't buy it, but if you're in California you might want to check it out from your library and read what our current insurance commissioner and aspiring governor thinks of public schools.
2: Teaser: After the implementation series is done, I'm going to start on the joys of common assessments. Most teachers I talk to hate them. If you do, you're doing it wrong. More likely, you're school is doing it to you wrong.
3: It's easier for me at least. I don't have a good system, or even a mediocre system, for teaching students to look for patterns of errors and misconceptions.