MeTA musings

Read the curriculum guide and follow the standards.  Come up with some engaging problem-based learning ideas.  Differentiate.  Use some computers and cool web 2.0 tools so that your classroom doesn't become dangerously irrelevant.  Assess students in authentic ways.  Talk about collaboration and critical thinking.  Easy stuff, right?

A day in the life of Mr. Smith:

2nd period ends in frustration.  The computer cart checked out in Mr. Smith's name for the class period was not where it was supposed to be.  In fact, Cart A ended up being in Mr. Craig's room, even though he hadn't checked out the cart for the past three days.  Go figure.  Two senior boys enjoyed their time walking the school hallways looking for it though.  It took an announcement over the PA to find Cart A.  So much for giving students time in class to write about their data collection and analysis project ideas and submit them via Moodle.  If only every student had a computer of their own, this wouldn't be a problem.

Betsy walks in shortly before the 3rd period bell.  She's been out for the past week due to surgery and came back yesterday, but Mr. Smith didn't have time to catch up with her one-on-one.  Today is the chapter test and Betsy still has several unanswered questions even though she completed most of her homework assignments before she left.  In mid-sentence, Mr. Smith is interrupted by Jenny who informs him that she will be gone to Hawaii next week for vacation and needs her make-up work tomorrow.

The bell rings. 

Students begin their warm-up problem and check their answers to last night's homework.  Five different students have five different questions about the review assignment.  The rest of the class yawns or dozes off while Mr. Smith takes time to go over these five problems before the test.  Mr. Smith applauds the six unnamed students who took the time to come in before school to get help on the review assignment and encourages ALL students to follow suit in the future.

It's time for the test to begin.  Mr. Smith tells the students to get out their formula sheet (also known to students as their "toilet paper"...don't ask why) and clear their desks.  Thanks to a last minute print job, Mr. Smith informs the students about a typo on page three of the test.

Finally, students begin the test.

Mr. Smith circles the room for a few minutes and then checks his email.  Mr. Lair, the principal, has sent out a friendly reminder about Mr. Smith's role in the next day's staff meeting.  Great.  Something else to work on tonight in addition to checking the tests.  Mr. Smith fires an email back, "sounds great.  I'll make it happen!"  A few minutes later, the office secretary calls - James needs to leave right now.  His mom is ready to take him to his doctor's appointment and needs to leave within two minutes.  A quick discussion about finishing the test takes place between James and Mr. Smith.  Suzie walks up to Mr. Smith, "What am I supposed to do with the test when I'm done?"  Mr. Smith rolls his eyes and points to the red basket.

Five minutes later, Lance raises his hand and whispers, "Do I have this problem setup right?"
Mr. Smith responds, "If I answered that question, I'd have to put MY name on your test.  I can't tell you the answer to that question." 

The bell rings. 

Mr. Smith's day has just begun.  He thinks to himself, "I thought teaching was supposed to be easy."

I am looking forward to going over this quiz question with my Geometry students:

On Thursday, I, along with the rest of our district team, attended an Iowa Core Leadership Series meeting at Grant Wood AEA.  Becaue it was an all-day event, so a substitute teacher oversaw my class for the first time this semester.  Typically, I try to schedule an assessment or time for students to work on an ongoing project.  I'll be real honest in saying I don't have very high expectations for substitute teachers when it comes to teaching Geometry or Statistics.  It's a better use of my students' time if the substitute can take attendance and read a few directions before letting the students work on a task for an extended period of time rather than diving into new content.

Thursday presented a unique problem for me.  We are only a little over a week into the semester and students are not yet ready to start a new project or take a written assessment.  I decided to try "teaching" asynchronously by creating a website for my students to navigate in lieu of my usual lesson on measures of central tendency.  Here's the link to the online lesson I created in about 60 minutes late Wednesday night.  The videos, except for the first one, were taken directly from our textbook publisher's website.  I checked out some head phones and one of our laptop carts so that each student could work at their own pace.  I asked students to provide feedback at the end of the lesson as well.  Data from the google form is below.


Three take-aways from this experience are worth sharing:

1. I shared the results with students the next day and thanked them for going out on a limb and learning online in this format.  Questions such as "Why can't we find the mean of question 3?" and "Which measure of central tendency should I report for question #1?" encouraged a great discussion about measures of central tendency.
2. In the same discussion about the feedback results, it became apparent to students what quality feedback looks like.  The "keep it real dog" student response to the last question was humorous, but did not provide meaningful feedback to improve the online learning process while the "The lady that narrates the videos has a very boring voice, it made me rather read the book. Maybe if you showed us yourself, instead of having us watch the text-book ones, it would help a lot more" response was detailed and has the potential to improve the process in the future.
3. Overall, the feedback/data tells me that students are willing to engage in this type of learning again in the future with a few small modifications.  

What type of activities do your students engage in while you are out of the classroom?  Have you ever tried this type of online learning?  If so, what suggestions can you share? 

On the great homework grading debate, a teacher says:

"But I want to give them credit for doing it.  They did it, so they deserve something for it.  I don't think I would do it if I didn't get credit!"

How do you respond? 

I wrote about this topic once before.  As I read though Marzano's Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading, I am becoming even more convinced that standards-based grading is merely a tool to improve teaching and learning. 

"Indeed, at the writing of this book, no major study (that we are aware of) has demonstrated that simply grading in a standards-based manner enhances student achievement.  However,...a fairly strong case can be made that student achievement will be positively affected if standards-based reporting is rooted in a clear-cut system of formative assessments." (18)

A grading system that does not allow new evidence of learning to replace the old, standards-based or otherwise, is not giving our students the learning opportunities they need and deserve.  A feedback starved classroom fails to meet the mark, too.   I like the Brookhart and Nitko quote in Marzano's book that nails the definition of formative assessment:

"...formative assessment is a loop: Students and teachers focus on a learning target, evaluate current student work against the target, act to move the work closer to the target and repeat." (10)

From my own experience discussing formative assessment with secondary teaching colleagues, a major hurdle to embracing/using the formative assessment loop in the classroom is grades.  Marzano agrees,

"At the classroom level, any discussion of assessment ultimately ends up in a discussion of grading." (15)

It just so happens that some of us are choosing to use standards-based reporting as a medium for reaching this ideal.  Personally, I can't imagine a grading system in my own secondary math classroom that would philosophically fit other than standards-based reporting.  I'm guessing someone has figured out another way to make their classroom feedback-friendly in the spirit of formative assessment while simultaneously embracing the idea that grades should communicate learning only.  I look forward to reading about it so that I can share with my colleagues.  I find myself preaching standards-based grading too often when I should be evangelizing the formative assessment loop instead.  
 
For regular readers of MeTA musings, is this even possible?