Exit Tickets Without the Exit

A lot of us do exit tickets. For me, I just take them, sort them into "got it" and "don't got it" piles, glean whatever information I need and then throw them into the trash.

The amount of time vs. amount of information ratio is excellent. Up until now I had only used exit tickets when students were...exiting. 

Today, I realized I don't need to wait until the end of the period to do this. I had some notes we needed to take care of. Notes are not really my thing. I'm not so great at them. I give the "copy this down from the board" parts typed up and they annotate, draw pictures, do examples, etc. 

Today I was intro'ing the periodic table so I wanted my students to be able to read a chemical formula first. The notes looked like this:

(Note: Box.net is awful. If the embed isn't working, don't worry about it. The file is just a poorly written note page with a dotted line about 2/3 down and a few practice problems underneath.)

I partially cut along the dotted line. I direct taught it (GRR-style) and they took notes and did the example with me on the right hand side. We did the slow way of writing out H₂SO₄ three times and counting them up and then we did the quicker distributing way.

After a few practice problems the students worked on the bottom portion alone. The top part got pasted into their notebooks and they detached the bottom and turned it in.

Next we were going over to the lab tables (I have lab tables now!) to do Periodic Table card sorting. They had to be able to read a chemical formula in order to do it. Once the students were at their tables and getting started, I started sorting through the papers they turned in. 

I called over the "don't got it" pile, gave them a quick tutorial, and then sent them back to their groups once they had shown me they understood it now. 

It was less than 10 minutes from the time I started sorting to the time the last student went back to their group.


_________

Postscript 1: I see this as slightly different from something like a choice point which I think of as a mid-lesson correction.

Postscript 2: Writing this reminded me of hot reports which I have never blogged about. I can't find the original paper but I got the idea from Avi Hofstein. I will blog about them next but in case you can't wait they're referenced here as well.

(Update: This video on a teacher using Tiered Exit Cards came through my Twitter stream a couple of days ago).

Product Placement

This is about honesty.

I went to a conference last week at Stanford. One of the panels was on equity. Hey! I just went to a whole conference on equity. There were five people on the panel. Three came from organizations that deal with policy and research. The two people who were actually educators were from Rocketship Education and a Los Altos school.

That seemed...odd.

Some background for people not living in the Silicon Valley.

Rocketship is well known locally for its blended learning model and for its very high API scores with a high poverty, high English learner population. It is also well known locally for its high dropout rate and for avoiding the local school districts and going directly to the county office for approval of expanding to 30 schools. It's also well funded and if I'm reading this financial report (pdf) correctly, it gets about 30% of its money from "contributions."

Los Altos is one of the wealthiest areas in the nation. Actually, according to this Yahoo Finance article, it is (or at least it was three years ago) the third wealthiest. The school being represented has a 978 API (out of 1000), 4% of its students are on free and reduced lunch (state average is 52%) and 4% of its students are English language learners (24% state average). This year, its educational foundation donated over $2 million dollars to its 9 schools.

Two extraordinarily wealthy schools, one through geography and the other through donations, were picked to talk about equity. Especially when, hypothetically of course, a primary argument that may or may not have been put forth is that money doesn't matter.

So why might these conference organizers choose two educators from schools that might not be the best representatives to talk about equity?

From the conference website:

I surfed over to the NewSchools Venture Fund website and clicked on Our Ventures to see where their money was going.

Oh look......

and sitting on the Rocketship Education Board....

But what about the Los Altos school? She was actually there to talk about Khan Academy. It turns out she's from a pilot school.

Three lines above the Rocketship sponsorship on the NewSchools funding page you get......

That panel makes a lot more sense now.

I have no idea if NewSchools (or SVEF who also partners with Khan) had an agenda. I doubt it. I think its likely these were just the first two groups that came to mind because they work so closely with them.

The credibility issue is killer though. I had a hard time listening to anything after this panel.

The sad thing is I would have been happy to have sat in on a presentation about Khan in the classroom and what Rocketship is doing with blended learning and their data monitoring system. I felt like the organizers were hiding something by sticking them into an equity panel.

Does every conference have to be sponsor-free like Creating Balance? Heck no. I enjoyed the ASCD conference immensely and it was like a NASCAR race. I expected Pearson to come out shooting a t-shirt cannon between sessions. I don't even want to know what went on in the Smart Board party bus.

I don't have a problem with that. I know conferences don't pay for themselves. I'm happy to ignore the vendor tables if it is going to bring my registration fees down.

Just be honest. If I'm going to sit in an hour-long advertisement, let me know ahead of time.

(Final note: I've been sitting on this post for a few days. I didn't want it to seem like I was specifically targeting the parties involved. I want it clear that I'm just using them as an example and the point is really about transparency. It could have been anyone.)

Creating Balance: Complex Instruction

Sorry. Another long post. The next one will be shorter.

At the Creating Balance conference I went to the Complex Instruction strand. I went through the strand with Sue VanHattum who has blogged about it previously. Bree lead a separate session on it. If you don't know what CI is at all start with those because I'm going to skip over the basics. I breezed through the section of Sue's post labeled "Smart in Math" the first time, but facilitators said that expanding the definition of what it means to be smart in math was the most important part of CI. We observed three high school classes of different levels and then sat in about 3 hours of teacher-only sessions.

Things I found interesting:

What I most enjoyed was talking with the teachers at Mission High School. The teachers I spoke most with were named Carlos and Betsy. They were incredibly reflective about it and their journey to CI was pretty inspiring. It started with 3 or 4 teachers going to a workshop a few years back and eventually it spread to all 13 teachers. Hearing about all the work they do together made me have conversations like this with a math teacher friend from NY:

Me:"So....I kind of have a crush on this school."
Her:"Yeah, let's work here next year together. I'm not joking. I will do it."

Sue mentioned creating rich tasks as a major implementation problem for CI. The Mission teachers work together to create them. They have put curriculum binders together and include spaces to write your reflections and how you would change the task for next year. They set up the department so every prep will always have at least one teacher who has taught the course last year but the same teacher won't teach the same course more than three years in a row. I asked Betsy about this second part and she said they felt that you start to go on autopilot after a few years and you should always be looking at the curriculum with fresh eyes.

They worked out a schedule to observe other teachers. They felt this wasn't quite enough so they also worked out a schedule to get together and watch 5-minute clips of each other every month.

There was more. As a teacher who has always been too much of a lone wolf (both because of my personality and my situation) I spent half the day in a sort of daze.

As for Complex Instruction, three things stood out for me.

1. The lack of scaffolding.
2. The complete commitment to "learning together."
3. The focus on mathematical conversation

Sue shared this problem and we did it as well:

Image from Math Mama Writes

The problem was, "What would number 100 look like?" and "What would number -1 look like?"

If I had done this problem it would have started with number 5, number 6, ask for a pattern, etc. They jump straight to 100. For CI, the group is the scaffold.

For number 2 above, a lot of teachers commented on this both positively and negatively. The teachers all were very strict about enforcing that students work together. They had even installed "checkpoints" in their worksheets so that students couldn't move on unless the teacher had come over, asked a random student in the group to explain what they'd done, and checked them off. I don't think I saw a kid who was completely lost, which is rare in any class.

The flip side was seeing the same problems you see in a lot of group work. Certain kids would drag along other kids. A kid would go to the bathroom and the rest of the group would grind to a halt.

You can usually solve the "dragging a kid along" problem with good grouping and the Mission teachers were very attentive to that. I'm not sure what can be done about the bathroom problem.

Maybe its because I'm used to middle school kids but I was impressed with the amount of mathematical talk that came out of the students mouths. The teachers all did occasional participation quizzes and focused far more on how students were working together rather than the correctness of the answer. In the pile pattern problem above, Carlos said that the -1 question is really what he cared about because, "That's where the really good conversation happens."

Things I haven't resolved in my head yet:

I had written more but before I finished writing this post SciAm posted an article titled, "The Power of Introverts." We spend a lot of time in groups in my own class but if I were to give the students something like the pile problem I'd always ask them to try to think about it on their own first. I know I need quiet time to think first.

(Update: I feel the need to point out that whenever I see something that says classrooms have too much groupwork. I.....don't see it. I mean, I know people talk about groupwork, but I've been in a lot of classrooms and most of them are still teacher in front and students in rows the whole period. I think there's still too much of that but I feel negatively about all groupwork all the time. "Creating balance" was the name of the conference.)

Betsy arranged her class so that Mondays looked like traditional school. She'd mini-lecture and kids would read the textbook or do worksheets. She said some kids just needed that individual time. (Like I said, reflective group at Mission).

The other thing I struggle with is anytime I need to "teach behavior" or norms. I just never know when I'm teaching something universally valuable and when I'm imposing some sort of "cultural other" upon them. Am I teaching kids how to work together or am I teaching kids to copy an image of what I think kids working together should look like? What am I asking students to give up in order to be academically or socially successful in my class?

I read too much into this. Perhaps this is why I'm an awful classroom manager.

Link Dump

I had to turn in my laptop so I've been largely stuck on an iPad at home. The result has been my consumption has gone way up and my production has gone way down. Something to think about if you're considering tablets for your classroom. Right now I've just got some links to share. Like always, this will be twice as long as it needs to be.

THE GOOD

My blog post, Test Deconstruction, was cleaned up and published in ASCD Express. Thanks to Laura Varlas for that.

Stephen Lazar wrote a fantastic piece in the NY Times Schoolbook on school reform. I love everything about it. I'm pulling out two quotes:

I used to think we needed to create model schools that could then be replicated. I now think that it is so hard to sustain a model that each school needs to be invested in its own unique vision.

and

I used to think our goal should be to create systems of great schools. I now think great schools are so hard to create and maintain that our goal should be to create good and sustainable ones.

I went to a conference this week and tweeted this:

I dislike the concept of "incubator schools" so much. First, what are the rest of the schools doing? Just sitting around waiting to be told what "works"? Second, like Stephen says, the whole idea of "scaling" has been pretty well debunked.


Last good one is this set of questions from Federal Way schools called, "How to talk about Standards Based Grading." I like how they included questions for parents to ask teachers. I would have liked it even more if they included something to help students talk to teachers.


THE BAD


Joanne Jacobs, who somehow lives a few miles from me but occupies an entirely different planet, posted a story about a bunch of kids who quit their varsity basketball team. The coach felt they were disrespectful. The kids felt the coach wasn't respecting them in the first place. The news article doesn't offer too much more information than that. She closes with:

Lesson not learned, apparently.  Good luck in your first job, Eddie. And your second job. And, if you continue to be a slow learner, your third job.

The commenters pile on. Two things here:

1. Joanne apparently wants kids to learn the lesson that, "You take whatever your boss says and does no matter what."

2. What I CANNOT STAND is how we as adults automatically take the side of the other adult. I grew up playing sports and I've had plenty of jerk coaches. I've also been disrespectful as a player. As far as I'm concerned, the kids had a right to quit and the coach had a right to cut them. I don't have any more information to decide anything else. There's no reason to put all the blame on the kids and yes, I'm really talking about how we automatically take the sides of adults in our schools without even listening to the kids.


(Update: Local writer defends the students here and has a copy of a letter sent to the principal from the team.)


The other link I have to share I'm not actually going to share. I think he's a racist and I have no interest in even accidentally sending one of you over there. On the other hand, his traffic is at least a couple orders of magnitude higher than mine so you might know who I'm talking about anyway. He shared the ETS report  that includes this graph on page 22:

and then this quote:

My guess is that smarter teachers would probably be a good thing, so we ought to be thinking about ways to make the job of teaching more attractive to smart people. In general, smart people don't like dealing with knuckleheads, so forcing teachers to carry most of the burden of discipline, a growing trend in recent decades, is a good way to keep smart people out of the business. You can instead use some of those gym teachers to run after school detentions instead of delegating most of the disciplining down to the teachers as happens in so many public schools desperate to avoid disparate impact lawsuits by not generating a paper trail of discipline actions carried out by the administration.

....
deep breath
....
give me another second
...
I'm going to ignore the gym teacher comment because if you're at my blog you already know how ridiculous that is. Also I'm going to ignore the logical conclusion that people who aren't smart enjoy "dealing with knuckleheads." And also I'm also going to ignore that this report comes from a company that has a vested interest in making us think that educational testing matters.

What I will mention is this idea that smarter teachers equals better teachers.

Disclaimer: I'm not Grace, but I did score high enough on my SATs to be off of both of those scales so I don't think this is sour grapes when I say that it's quite a reach to first link SAT score to IQ and then IQ to teaching ability. This is a classic example of someone with an agenda taking some data and making it tell the story he wants it to tell. If you start off with, "My guess is....." you're not allowed to follow it up with such certainty. I'm going to counter with more graphs:

Clearly the way to be a better blogger is to be taller. Wait. I can do better than the unnamed blogger. CORRELATION SUCKAS!

My guess is....tall bloggers would be a good thing, so we ought to be thinking about ways to make blogging more attractive to tall people.

Status Change

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 an 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.


________________________



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

(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

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.