MeTA musings

Last week, I had an afternoon Iowa Core district leadership team meeting on Monday and had a sub again all day Wednesday to attend the Iowa 1:1 Institute.  I will be gone again for a full day to start the week to co-present with Kathy Kaldenberg, Shannon Miller, and Deron Derflinger at the IASL Spring Conference.

I typically try to schedule written assessments for days I'm out of the classroom.  It is pretty easy for a substitute teacher to hand out a test or quiz and have students hand them into the basket when they're done.  Once students work on some review problems after the assessment, it pretty much fills up an 84-minute block. 

Well, being out of the classroom this often doesn't lend itself to easy planning.  There just aren't enough written assessments I can give to my students right now.  So, I decided to try yet another experiment in virtual education, this time in my Statistics & Discrete Math course. 

First, students will be asked to watch this video explaining the day's activities- a late night clip created by me with my MacBook and its build-in iSight camera.
Second, after reading a few pages from the textbook, students will watch this video from the textbook's website to see an example of a hypothesis test being worked out. 
Last, students will complete several problems from the textbook to practice the hypothesis test algorithm.

The last day we met together, we did several activities explaining the concept behind hypothesis testing, so they should be vaguely familiar with much of the terminology presented in the examples.  This virtual setup is far from ideal, but aside from assigning more busy work, it is the only way I could think of to push forward knowing that not many substitute teachers have a deep understanding of hypothesis tests. :)

What other great ideas are out there for keeping students busy (as sad as it sounds) AND learning while you're out of the classroom?

Today is a sad day for me and (maybe?) my students, too.  I announced to them that I will not be teaching math next year.  Pending school board approval next week, I will be Director of Instructional Services beginning July 1 in the same school district. "Director of Instructional Services" is a nice title that really says,

Matt - you're now in charge of professional development, the technology budget, curriculum budget, and going to many more meetings. 

I'm sad to leave the classroom and the daily interaction with high school students.  I'm excited to have even more time to help teachers improve their assessment practices and use technology in a more meaningful way.  Sadness, nervousness, excitement are all running through my mind.  From a two dimensional, math nerd sort of perspective, it's like a crazy sine or cosine curve of emotions. 

I don't know yet how the focus of this blog will change.  I hope it will still continue to focus on technology and assessment, but probably with a more of a cross-disciplinary/grade-level focus. 

I had hoped to go back to school someday to finish a Ph.D (Punya Mishra's program looks awfully appealing!), but I don't think I can afford to take administrative classes beginning this fall AND pursue an ed. tech doctorate at the same time. 

To all of my avid subscribers - this is your invitation to remind me in the future what it's like to be in the classroom.  It's a difficult job. You know it.  I know it.  I don't want to ever lose sight of it. 

My colleague next door has laid out a bit of a standards-based grading manifesto.  Read it here.  You'll be hooting and hollering or extremely furious, depending on where you stand.  Either way, it will get you thinking.  A few snippets to wet your reading appetite:

On the problem with traditional grading schemes...

Prob­lem: Kids want to play games to get points in order to get an ‘A’. This is a prob­lem because it puts empha­sis on accu­mu­lat­ing points and not on what the points are sup­posed rep­re­sent: learn­ing. You must migrate your sys­tem of grad­ing away from grad­ing every sin­gle assign­ment sum­ma­tively (that is assign­ing a sta­tic grade for every­thing a kid does), and towards grades that are indexed by content.
Stu­dents could not care less about their score on “Quiz 5″ from last month; they don’t even know what was on that quiz. Don’t put that in your grade­book. Put the indi­vid­ual ideas that that quiz assessed in your grade­book, so that the stu­dents know what it is you care about. I do this, and my grade­book has bal­looned to about three times its pre­vi­ous size. Oh well.

 and some thoughts on implementing standards-based grading so students understand it...

Major Hur­dle: Kids don’t lis­ten on the day you present the syllabus/explain expec­ta­tions, so they won’t under­stand your new grad­ing sys­tem. You can bela­bor the point for the entire first day (why are you spend­ing a whole day on the syl­labus? Get going; they can read), but the stu­dents are so dead to class­room logis­tics that you’re going to have to teach about SBG as they go along.
I have many moments through­out the semes­ter where kids show me how trained they are by the pre­vi­ous sys­tem. Kids will ask me if they can do extra home­work to raise their grade. Why the hockey sticks would some­one ask that? It’s absurd. I don’t even grade home­work!! I say, “No, but you can study and show me that you under­stand this topic from a pre­vi­ous chap­ter that you’ve pre­vi­ously demon­strated a low under­stand­ing of.” They usu­ally snap back into our real­ity. This is the behav­ior I’ve wanted all along, and I’m happy to say I have it now.

Tweet about it.  Send it to your colleagues.  Post it to your listserv.  It just makes sense.

Parry Graham and Bill Ferriter said,

"Lacking any kind of organizational decision-making power, teacher leaders can only change the behavior and commitments of colleagues when they are committed to actively building positive relationships with peers" (39). 

Over spring break I anxiously started and finished Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year by Graham and Ferriter.  I was really excited to read this book, not because I am a self-proclaimed expert in PLCs or even have any experience at all with teacher collaboration, but the idea of creating common assessments, building consensus about what it is all students should learn and be transparent with colleagues about successes and failures in the classroom has intrigued me ever since reading a few of the (in my opinion) more theoretical PLC books written by DuFour, DuFour and Eaker.  This book claimed to be written BY practitioners (Ferriter is a teacher and Graham is a principal) FOR practitioners and it lived up to the claim.

In my nearly six years teaching, I have slowly realized as Ferriter and Graham suggest,

"The truth is, most teacher just don't talk about practice with one another" (50).

In my admittedly rare visits to the staff lounge, the talk is typically centered on weekend plans or recent sporting event successes and failures - adults being social and there's nothing wrong with that, I guess.  When the phrase "teacher collaboration" comes to mind, I think of informal hallway conversations about weather-related dismissals or the timing of the upcoming pep rally.  Other times, I think all staff in-services or departmental meetings.  Teachers "collaborate" from time to time, right?

"It's not whether teachers are collaborating - it's what they're collaborating about" (51, emphasis mine)

This book proposes specific tasks for teams to complete, "such as identifying essential curriculum objectives for the next quarter or creating common assessments..." (73) - just the kind of practical suggestions I'm imagining a true professional learning community needs as it begins the journey of trust, collaboration and transparency.

Yet another part of the book that stood out to me was describing collaboration as seen in many schools today and how it differs from that of a professional learning community.

"Unfortunately, many teams get complacent and fail to move beyond the simple sharing of instructional practices, while such conversations are a good beginning, the real work of PLCs is reflective and inquiry oriented, resulting in teacher learning and improved instruction" (73).

Ferriter and Graham describe the journey of a fictitious school, both the ups and the downs, as they begin to form grade-level, discipline-friendly professional learning communities.  Coupling realistic scenarios with the theories such as proximal development and positive deviants make for a fresh mix of academic, yet practitioner-friendly commentary.

Most of all, I appreciated the pragmatic outlook expressed by the authors.  Bill and Parry clearly articulate the work of a PLC functioning at a high level, scaffold the necessary steps to overcome the
inevitable obstacles, leaving the reader hungry to jump in and start the journey for him/herself.

Ready-made surveys, templates and PLC handouts are provided at the end of each chapter with digital copies are also available online.  If you've read any of the DuFour, et. al books and are ready to put theory into practice and begin collaborating with your colleagues in a meaningful way, this book is for you. 

(Note: I was not compensated in any way by the publisher and/or authors to review this book)

I've been a part of a handful of conversations lately that go something like this:

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"On the quiz last week, students were asked to label their graphs.  Half the class didn't, so I took off two points."

"Oh, really?  That's pretty frustrating."

"On the test today, guess what?  The same kids forgot to label their graphs.  I tell you, Matt, it was right there in the directions...you'd think they learned...."
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We (math teachers) think that taking off points for incorrect or missing labels, forgetting to answer part of a question or not turning in homework is THE solution.  Does it really work though?  In my experience, for the most part, the same students continue to make the same mistakes over and over.  They need to be taught soft skills of becoming more detailed readers and writers or following directions carefully - some of them need help...reading!  By taking off points, what message are we sending to students?

I don't know the answer.  Maybe more critical conversations with students rather than relying on points and grades to do the talking?  Thoughts?  Leave 'em in the comments.