Tinkerings

OK, maybe I just wanted to get your attention with that headline.  But it is a serious question when it comes to reading strategies.  I just got back from TAMS where over twenty teachers from our middle school attended a day and a half of workshops and keynotes (along with lots of food, an indoor water park, shopping at an outlet mall, shooting billiards, and watching the Celtics lose a 14 point lead in the NBA finals).

I chose my first session selfishly.  It was being held in the same room where I was scheduled to present in the 2nd session.  It just happened to deal with reading strategies, which is an area where I am struggling as a middle school teacher.  I’ll post more about this session later when I have time to look back through my notes.  For now, I just wanted to post a small note about something that really got me thinking.

As readers, we learn to chunk early.  Chunking is simply the activity we do to break down words or numbers into something more easily remembered or understood.  That’s why there are hyphens in phone and social security numbers.  A phone number is broken down into 123-456-7890.  We can more easily chunk three or four numbers than we can ten.

Words are the same.  Good readers chunk both through phonics and through syllables.   So a word like auditorium is chunked as aud-i-tor-i-um or au-di-tor-ium.  Our presenter offered a nice tool for assessing how our students are chunking words.  Using crayons, colored markers, or colored pencils, simply ask students to chunk certain words by coloring in what they “see” in their mind when they pronounce or read the word.

An example she gave was the word “brushing.”  I’ve included 3 possibilities in the image to the left.  By analyzing how your kids are chunking words, you can easily see where they are making mistakes or why it might be difficult for them to make sense of certain words.

Unlike so many of those television shows on obscure cable channels…try this at home.

This is the time of year I really like my job.  Well, OK, I really like my job the entire year, but this time of year is really special.  I get to work with 8th graders to help them discover things about themselves they might not have already known and point them in a path toward high school graduation that will make them love school all over again like they did in kindergarten.

When we are dealing with our Career Education section of our lab classes, one of the personality assessments we look at is the Holland Hexagon.  We watch a DE Streaming video on the subject over a couple of days and then the kids take their own assessment to see which personality traits are dominate in their lives.  For those who are unfamiliar, let me give you a brief (and somewhat stereotypical) breakdown of the 6 Holland Types:

The Doer is someone who likes to work outdoors, work with his hands, is mechanically inclined, athletic, and doesn’t really care much what other people think about what he does. (Think auto mechanic, forest ranger, athlete, etc)

The Thinker is a person who likes to investigate and research, works better alone, not athletic (usually), and can get lost in the process of finding answers to complicated questions. (Think scientist, researcher, data cruncher, etc)

The Creator is a student who doesn’t like rules, does everything in her own unique way, loves art, music, and drama, and can get lost in the creative process.  (Think artist, singer, graphic designer, architect, fashion designer, etc)

The Helper is someone who is very social, engages with others easily, empathetic, and tries to offer solutions to personal problems that his friends are facing.  (Think teacher, minister, social worker, nurse, etc)

The Persuader is a person who just naturally takes charge, extremely social, loves to use words, likes to organize events, and is usually respected for his or her leadership qualities.  (Think politician, salesperson, televangelist, etc)

The Organizer is a person who loves numbers, usually more comfortable alone, meticulous, well-organized, and doesn’t usually relate well to people with personal problems.  (Think accountant, math teacher, etc)

The thing to remember about the Holland Types is that none of us are just ONE type.  We are a blend of all these things, but usually 1 or 2 rise to the top as dominate traits.

I have about 130 students I teach this semester.  Out of those students, the 3 predominate personality types were the Doer, the Creator, and the Helper.  Think about that for a moment.

In education, when we talk about differentiation we are usually referring to teaching those that already “get it,” those that are struggling to “get it,” and those that will never “get it.”  We design different types of activities for these levels of knowledge or engagement.

But think again about the Holland results.  The majority of 8th graders (at least in my classes) are kids who want to be outdoors and love to work with their hands, other kids who don’t like to follow the rules and express themselves better with pictures than with words, and a group of kids who are extremely social and drawn to friends with problems in order to help them (what we lovingly call “drama” in middle school).

Maybe differentiation should focus more on how kids learn than on their present level of knowledge.  A Doer might not ever write a great essay.  She might always struggle with words.  Be fidgety in her chair.  And just long to breathe some fresh air outside the classroom.  The Creator may want to draw you a picture of what he thinks about a certain subject.  But that isn’t the assignment, so we stifle them (one of my favorite Archie Bunker terms…stifle).  The Helper really just needs some time in class to TALK for goodness sake.

What kind of differentiation are you doing?

I like to listen to NPR in the mornings and afternoons.  I sometimes find the news to be refreshing, but always interesting.  Today’s feature was on the way Nielsen is falling behind in the way it calculates viewership for television shows.  The move to watching TV on Tivo, Hulu, and other media outlets might just be making Nielsen’s ratings obsolete.  Currently, Nielsen is not doing much, if anything, to calculate the eyeballs viewing a show in these formats.

But Tivo and Hulu can.

They can tell viewership based on time watched, commercials watched and fast-forwarded, and more.  To do this, they have to look at a show over time. People don’t watch these shows on the nights they air.  Viewers have found a way to watch when they want to, as long as they want to, in as many snippets as they want to, and they fast-forward through parts that are boring.  What we often forget is that everything we do on Tivo and Hulu is being watched by someone.  Every log-in is tracked by our IP address, and that tells them (if nothing else) where we live.

We shouldn’t be surprised that we are watched so closely over time.  Groceries stores and big box stores have done this for years.  Did you really think they gave you that discount card to save you money?  Think again.  With a discount card they have your demographic data and track every purchase your make whether you have a credit card or not.  Using these cards stores determine what products are selling.  They determine which aisles are working.  They determine which shelf is going gangbusters.  And, like advertisers, they charge their suppliers to get their products in those aisles and on those shelves.

So, in education, we do the same right?  We track student scores over time.  We look at how they behave in a certain class.  We look at interactions between students and teachers.  We calculate time on task every period.  We assess how one student relates to another.  We look closely at whether they are late or early to class or school.  If they are absent, we tabulate the reasons.  We factor in how many minutes or days they spend in In-School Suspension.  We look at whether they completed all of their homework, half, or none.  We’ve even looked at whether their parents are involved in their schooling or not.  And once we’ve looked at all these data points throughout the school year, we determine whether the student is working or not, learning or not, behaving or not.

What’s that you say?  We don’t do this?  Well, pray tell, what do we do?

We look at one test on one day for an entire year.

Let’s flip that around for a minute.

Let’s say that Nielsen decided to measure a show’s impact on one night only rather than an entire season.  Let’s hypothesize that Tivo and Hulu will do the same.  Or that grocery stores will determine the impact of their store layout by calculating customer purchases on one day out of the entire year.

Kind of silly isn’t it?

Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not saying to throw away standardized tests.  They tell us a lot.  They can help us determine what we should teach or reteach.  They can show us if a student “gets it.”  We are doing this in the classroom with tests, quizzes, warm-ups, and more.  We are collecting many, many data points and using them to fine tune our classroom instructions.  We need these tests, but we need more as well.

If we truly want authentic assessment that measures not only the learning of children but the effectiveness of teachers, we are going to need a lot more information than what a standardized test can give us.

What is your opinion?  What data points would you gather to assess student learning?  Teacher effectiveness?  Leave me a comment.

We are less than one week away from the TCAP Writing Assessment for our 8th grade students.  The Language Arts teachers have been working tirelessly all year to have nearly 350 kids ready to show everything they know about expository writing in 35 short minutes.

Our students have practiced writing essays throughout the year, both in Language Arts classes and our computer labs.  We have tag teamed with those teachers since the beginning of this semester to double up on the training, tips, and tries that kids get before February 2nd.

I think the work is paying off.

This year we’ve done two things differently in our labs.  First, we purchased a trial number of log-ins for Write to Learn, an essay grading program from Pearson.  While we’ve found a few flaws along the way (nothing can take the place of a pair of eyes scanning a page), for the most part this program has done a fairly decent job of demonstrating the skills of our students.  Some score a little higher than we would expect.  Some score a little lower.  Over all, however, it seems to do the job.  And the immediate feedback the kids get cannot be replaced.  It has been fun to watch their eyes light up when they see how their score increases when they make just a few improvements here and there.

Second, we produced a short number of videos for kids to watch based on the theme of “Cheat Codes.”  Kids that play games online are looking for websites that offer cheat codes, a series of tutorials on how to get from one level to another.  We decided to do the same thing. We’ve harped on adding similes and metaphors, anecdotes, quotes, vivid verbs, and more.  It has been fun to see their reaction when we tell them we are going to teach them how to “cheat” the test (in reality, there is no way to do this).  Through a little slight-of-hand teaching, kids have started to do better on first drafts, spend more time editing and revising during testing time, and seem to have more of a desire to do better up front.

Only time will tell how well we’ve done.  What about your school?  What are you doing to help kids improve writing skills?

I just read Seth Godin’s latest blog post on Dashboards.  In it, he says:

Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn’t do a thing about it is beyond me.

In local education we seem to collect a lot of data that we really can’t do anything about.  At the end of the year, sometime in the summer, we learn what our TCAP scores were for our kids.  We learn their Average Yearly Progress (AYP) and calculate our TVAAS.  For what?

All this data shows us is how we did with a group of kids we will never see again.  If we change our instruction based on these numbers, how do we know what we’re doing is going to impact the kids we have in the coming year?  The data is interesting, but it is useless (unless our goal is to pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves what a great job we did).

As a classroom teacher I need different data.  Here are pieces of data I am interested in:

How Good Are My Assessments? If I am using assessments to track student progress, it would be good to know if the assessment is any good or not.  After all, “Garbage In/Garbage Out” as the saying goes.  It isn’t enough to say my assessment is too easy if everyone got an A or too hard if everyone failed.  I need to know what is going on inside the assessment.  On question 13, how many students (across all classes) chose a particular distractor?  (I will post later on the structure of multiple choice questions and how to get kids to increase test scores when they don’t know the material.)  If one distractor didn’t get any responses, it is faulty and should be replaced.  That will make my assessment better.

What Am I Assessing? We spend so much time in language arts classes going over good writing skills.  Those skills are very, very important to be successful in life.  But on our state assessment there are very few questions about writing.  It is nearly all related to reading.  If I am teaching grammar, how can I tie what I’m doing into student reading skills?  Math is another subject that is hard to assess properly.  If we are doing worksheets with tons of math problems, we simply are not preparing kids for the state math assessment.  Our state test focuses on two things primarily: Reading skills and Calculator skills.  If the students know these two things, they don’t need to know math.  Last year I had a student showing another how to solve a very complicated algebra problem using her calculator.  I asked if she could solve the problem on paper without the calculator.  “Are you kidding?” was her response.  She had no idea, but she was teaching math in my classroom.

Where Are My Kids At Today? This is hard to quantify.  I don’t need to know where they are at with the skills or objectives we are studying.  I will assess that in other ways.  I need to know if they are fully present in my classroom.  What happened last night?  What happened this morning?  Did Johnny get breakfast?  Is Suzie still having problems with her boyfriend?  What happened between homeroom and 4th period that caused Billy to be so angry?  This is data.  It is powerful data.  It tells you whether to press forward or back off.

How Do My Kids Learn Compared To How I Teach? I will be the first to admit that when I started teaching I used the tried and true lecture method.  With 7th grades.  Diagramming sentences.  Yeah.  I know.  That’s how I learned, so that’s how I teach.  Kids today don’t learn that way.  Their brains are not wired that way.  They don’t learn sequentially, but we love to teach things in a strict order.  Kids are used to pushing buttons on the Internet and getting taken to whatever interests them.  Take that button away and they are zombies.  So how do I teach?  How do I get kids involved?  Data tells me the answer.  I have to ask questions.  As my friend, Lee Kolbert, puts at the end of each of her blogs, “Ask questions!  Ask lots of questions!”

There is so much data, and so many ways to collect data.  Are we looking at something that can change the way we teach?  Or, like the old tachometer Seth Godin talked about, are we looking at data about which we can do absolutely nothing.

What data are you collecting?  How are you using it?

Everyone has an idea of what the future holds for education.  Not all of them are in alignment with each other. Some see longer days (perhaps weeks) in the classroom, while others are claiming to have visions of shorter days and more asynchronous online learning.  Some see an expansion of state testing into national testing (can I get a show of hands?) while others foresee a time when standardized testing is scrapped for a more vigorous, and costly, project-based assessment.  Visions of the future run the gamut of ideas.

But there is one idea I believe will eventually happen.  I’ve looked into my own crystal ball for this one.  See if you agree.

I believe that textbook companies will eventually scrap the idea of paper books for online versions, and that schools will be required to give students the tools they need to utilize them both in and out of school.  These textbooks could be available on the Kindle, via a secure website, or even on an iPod.

Why do I believe this will happen?  Simple.  Printed textbooks are the worst books on the planet for ease of readability.  An online version could be made to be much more robust, engaging, and student oriented.

Follow me here.

Open any social studies, science, math, grammar, or reading textbook.  You see lots of words.  Lots and lots of words.  Some are bold.  Some are different colors. They are all spread out with pictures, charts, and tables interspersed to make it seem almost fun.  But it isn’t.  It is static.  It is boring.  Kids can’t follow the text patterns.  They get confused.

Now open my imaginary online textbook.  There are a lot of words on every page.  But, instead of a static picture in the middle of one, there is a link to a video clip.  The video clip might be a re-enactment of an historical event, a mini-teaching lesson from a trained instructor, a digital story created by an elementary school student, a step-by-step guide on finding the slope of a line.  Instant Instruction.

You see that static chart in the paper book?  It is now an interaactive chart with data that can be manipulated to see what would happen if certain perameters of an event changed over time.  Instant Engagement.

The questions in the back of the chapter are now an instantly graded pre-test.  Vocabulary is not only pronounced and defined, but a ahort 1 to 2 minute video clip shows the word being used in everyday conversation.  Instant Instruction.

Look again at the picture of Abraham Lincoln in the paper book.  Yep, it is the same old picture we’ve seen for the last 100 years of textbook printing.  But, in our online version, that picture is a link to an entire photo gallery of pictures that deal with Lincoln, the Civial War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and more.  Why you ask?  So kids can download them into Photo Story or iMovie and create their own instructional video based on the materail in the section and post it for the teacher to see how well the student comprehended the unit.  Instant Assessment.

Not only that, but the entire textbook can be embedded into the class wiki so students can work together on projects online.  Instant Collaboration.

And, the online book is user friendly.  That means that a teacher can create his or her own instruction video and embed it on page 76, or 152.  Or a Voicethread assignment.  Or a teacher-made online quiz.  Students have access to their own teacher 24/7.

Still think you want a class set of paper textbooks?

I didn’t think so.

Today we begin TCAP testing at our school and around our district.  We will have kids sequestered in home rooms across our campus for the entire morning over the next four days as we ask them to tell us what they know by making dark, little, colored-in ovals on scan sheets.

Don’t get me wrong. I think testing kids to see what they know is a good thing.  I believe there is a lot of data schools can use to improve teaching and learning as a result of state testing.  I wish there was a better way to see what kids can do, but that is for another post on another day.

We have used DE Assessment in our school this year to create benchmark data points along the way.  Looking at that data tends to make me sleep better at night knowing that, on practice tests at least, our kids have demonstrated that the number of students below proficiency falls within the acceptable range to keep us off “the list.”  It is close, mind you, but acceptable.

State testing has its problems of course.  For me, the biggest lies with math.  We really have no idea if kids can do math or not.  The majority of the math test is based on their reading skills.  If they can’t read or comprehend well, they aren’t going to do well on the math test.  And, lest we forget, students are able to use calculators on these tests, too.  As a result, our math tests seem to be more of a Reading/Calculator Skills test.

Overall, however, we can get a small glimpse of how well these kids can use information presented and manipulate it into something that helps them arrive at the correct answer.

What I don’t understand is why it is so hard to get the data into a manipulative form for analysis at the school level.  For a few years I was fortunate enough to receive an Excel file with student scores from the previous year’s TCAP.  We used these scores to help place students in remedial and advanced classes, exempt them from certain required activities, and more.

Now, it appears that our state has changed the software used to calculate and report scores.  No one seems to know how to get that data to us in a fashion that we can sort, filter, and manipulate for our own needs.

So, if I had one wish from the Assessment Fairy, it would be this: Model your assessment results after DE Assessment.  If we had this capability, schools would be better able to make curricular changes. Teachers would be better able to make instructional changes.  Even students would benefit by seeing which questions they missed and have someone explain to them why.  Parents would better understand the usefulness of these tests and perhaps even help prepare their kids to take them.

That’s my take.  What is yours?

I have friends in my social network from all around the world. I call them friends because that is the common term used in these fantastic virtual worlds. Probably sixty percent of them I’ve never met face to face (except to see their picture in Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Linked-In, Plaxo, and more).

Around this time of year, we start having the same conservation: How do you evaluate teachers?

Since I am a classroom teacher, I am only asked to evaluate one or two “new” teachers who work in my direct area of instruction. As a result, most of my additions to the conversation are based on my philosophy of education and leadership without much real-world experience on which to base my ideas.

So, I thought I would put a couple of ideas out here in cyber space and see if any of them take hold.

When doing coursework at the University of TN at Knoxville, I became a firm believer in the ideas of Appreciative Inquiry developed at Case Western Reserve a few decades ago now. Appreciative Inquiry is based on certain assumptions about how the world operates. One of the main assumptions is that the things you concentrate on are the things you get more of.

The old paradigm of “problem solving” (a skill for which we are still responsible to teach children) concentrates on what is NOT working. If you can “freeze” the actions and fix the problem, then when you “unfreeze” the actions the problem will be solved. Unfortunately, by concentrating on the problem you usually get more of the problem.

Appreciative Inquiry encourages you to concentrate on what is working and “fan the flame” of that activity to spark more of best practices in everything you do. By focusing on what works, you get more of what works. It is an interesting paradigm shift.

Here is how I see the differences played out in schools:

Teachers:

Problem Solving - We have a real problem in this class with too much talking while I am trying to teach. I need you to stop talking. (OK, I confess. That was me).

Appreciative Inquiry - The class really goes smooth and we get a lot done when the class is quiet while I am giving instructions.

That is a subtle difference, but it is a difference that works.

Administrators:

Problem Solving – Probably your biggest weakness in the classroom is your classroom management skills. You seem to have a problem controlling the talking in your room. You need to find a way to fix that. If you can’t control the kids they can’t learn.

Appreciative Inquiry - I noticed during the lesson that you really held the students’ attention when you were telling short, funny anecdotes about your time overseas. I saw kids really listening during that time. What do you think it is that makes that so powerful? How can you make that work throughout the entire lesson?

Which evaluation process would you prefer? What has been your experience?

This semester I am trying out a new (for me at least) website to host our daily starters and quizzes for the computer lab classes at our school.  Say hello to Classmarker.com.  I thought the site was pretty good when I signed up.  But after some upgrades, I have to say the site is pretty excellent.

Once inside, you can set up classes with just a few mouse clicks (I use only one class and have input about 150 students into that class to keep things simple.  More on that in a bit).  You can add students one at a time, or type them into a box with First (comma) LAST.  Classmarker will input up to 50 students at a time.  You can allow the program to generate passwords, or you may assign every student the same password.  I used the former option this semester, but if I had to do it again I would choose to assign everyone the same password simply for the ease of use.

The upgrades to the system allow you to create tests with any or all of the following question types: Multiple Choice (single answer), Multiple Choice (multiple answers), True/False, Essay, Free Text, and Punctuation.  Once you input a question it is automatically added to your question bank.

We use Classmarker for our daily starters.  We have 3 multiple choice questions each day for Monday through Thursday.  On Friday, we randomlyl select 10 of the questions used to generate a quiz that is graded.

So far, I am loving this program.  The biggest drawback I have at the moment is that I have not created categories for my tests.  As a result, each test is listed on one page.  Using one quiz each day means we have a LOT of tests.  For our purposes, once the grades are recorded for the tests, I delete them.  The questions are still available to generate other tests from them later.

Classmarker is free (with ads) or you can get a year’s subscription for $24.95 that will remove the ads and give you a little more versatility in the options menu.

Give it a try!