One minute survey: Grade This!

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.
 

Layering

Overall the class goes something like this:

1. Pose a problem/Show something/Do something
2. Do some experiments and figure stuff out
3. Name/Practice/Refine/Elaborate 
4. Reflect
5. Do something with what we've figured out
6. 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

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

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:

1. 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?
   
2. 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

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)

Test Deconstruction

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

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.