MeTA musings

Note: This is the eighth and final post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

"We say that we want students to take more responsibility for their own learning, yet we continue to control every aspect of their learning...How will students learn to take more responsibility unless we first relinquish some of the control?" (p. 156).

Guilty.

Of the seven principles of master teachers Jackson suggests in her book, I scored the lowest on this one. She goes on several pages later to describe one of my biggest downfalls as an educator.

"...intervening too soon is one of the most common ways we prevent students from doing their own work..." (p. 176)

When a student raises his or her hand to ask a question during individual or collaborative work time, I have always felt like I need to provide supports that directly help the student understand the concept. Immediately. Rarely do I answer a question with another question. Rarely have I asked a student, "Where might you find the answer to that question?" The math teacher I learned the most from in high school as well as the math professor I learned the most from in college both followed up questions with additional questions. They knew how to ask leading questions to help me and other students think through our misconceptions. This strategy not only takes patience, but it also a solid understanding of the content area.

I admit it. For the past five years as a high school math teacher, I have probably been working harder than my students. When the 3:15pm bell rings, they're energized and I'm exhausted. On average, I probably do much more thinking during the class period then they do. Jackson suggest a conceptual change to my admittedly flawed past practice...

"Helping students means providing them with the minimum amount of assistance they need to learn to do something on their own. Enabling students means doing it for them." (p. 173)

As fellow edublogger Dan Meyer often says, I need to "be less helpful." What does that look like for me?

• Requiring students to check their own homework answers each and every day.
• Using collateral and "rent" strategies when students come to class unprepared.
• Keeping more students after school to finish and get help with their work rather than allowing them to get off the hook with a below-average grade.
  
• Following up more student-generated questions with questions of my own, as suggested above. Scaffold!
  
• Continuing to emphasize routines and procedures to help "facilitate" rather than "teach" students.
• ...and probably much, much more!
  

As I embark on a new school year in less than two weeks, this book has challenged me to make many changes. Some of these changes are subtle while others are more drastic. Jackson makes a plea on one of the last pages of her book that I feel is important to keep in mind.

"Trying to make a radical change right away not only dooms you to failure, it creates a cynicism about change in general." (p. 201)

It is time to take a step back and look at the action lists I've created. Which changes can be made over the first few weeks and months? Which changes will take extended time to implement?

For those of you who have read this entire series of posts, what have you learned? What action steps are you going to take? If you are just tuning in or missed one of the principles, here is a list of the principles and links to my thoughts on each.

1. Start where your students are.
2. Know where your students are going.
3. Expect to get your students there.
4. Support your students.
5. Use effective feedback.
6. Focus on quality, not quantity.
7. Never work harder than your students (this post)

Note: This is the seventh post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

A colleague of mine used to take home 75+ math assignments every night to be graded. She would hand them back the next day with check marks and a score, all written in red. I grinned each day as she walked out my door for the evening after our almost daily conversation about how the day had gone in our respective classrooms. She would often end the conversation with comments like, "Wow, I only have one section of papers to check tonight!" or "Looks like I'll be grading papers while watching a movie tonight." The return on her efforts, she often lamented was rarely worth it based on the glances the students gave their graded papers. I don't think she would be upset at me for sharing this story, because she is now realizing that she has been doing more work than her students. The sheer number of problems she was assigning each evening became a numbers game - how many must they attempt and/or answer correctly to get "full credit."

Robyn Jackson says,

"Master teachers invest their time up front...They spend more time designing quality assignments and assessment than they do creating volumes of work for their students and themselves." (p. 156)

In my earlier years, I remember asking my mentor how many homework problems were reasonable to assign each day. We agreed that 10-12 seemed about right. I felt guilty the night I assigned one hundred (yes, 100!) problems to my Consumer Math students as a "discipline measure. " Nobody completed all one hundred problems, not even the hardest working students. I learned a lot from that day and the subsequent days when the majority of my students did not turn in completed homework assignments. Assigning more problems did not make my class more rigorous or challenging. The attitudes of my students towards homework - and "math" in general, I'm guessing - only decreased as I assigned more problems.

Jackson also suggests what now seems like a no-brainer. Homework needs to have a purpose and that purpose should be clearly communicated to students. This is a great reminder. As I started sifting through the first chapter of Geometry to get my brain back in "math mode," I tried to remember what the overarching theme of the chapter is supposed to be. The theme is the basics of Geometry. It seems so disconnected at times. I'll need to not only share that "the purpose of us going through all of these seemingly disconnected ideas now is to help us later" but also reiterate this time and time again when the practice problems (formerly known as "homework") are assigned.

Today, I started acting on one of the principles I previously blogged about, "Know where your students are going" by looking at the first chapter to eventually see if it matches my assessments. I think I'm going to practice what Jackson calls "curriculum flexibility" - sorting out the "need-to-know" vs. the "nice-to-know." This will also help me better decide which problems to assign and how many to assign that correspond with each learning target. To clearly communciate the purpose of the assignment, I will need to articulate how the problems match up with the specific learning targets. From the perspective of my colleage, the more problems assigned, the more that will need to be graded. I think I have an alternative approach on "grading homework," but I'll save that for another post. :)

What successes have you found when trying to focus on "quality rather than quantity" in your classroom? Feel free to share in the comments section below.

Related reading:

• The Quality School by William Glasser
  

Note: This is the sixth post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

"If we just grade assignments and never use that information to help inform our instruction, we have wasted our students' time and we have reinforced to students the false notion that they only reason they are learning the material is to take the test." (p. 127)

Yet another quote from the book that resonated with me was...

"It is one thing to collect feedback about students' progress, but if you simply collect this feedback and never use it to adjust your instruction, then you are collecting it in vain." (p. 132)

Of all the principles listed in Jackson's book, this one of my absolute favorite. I have a passion for assessment, there's no question about it. The quotes above are alluding to the age-old practice of simply "grading" everything and not doing much with those letters, numbers and percentages. In this chapter, the author discusses more than just "feedback." It's actually a nice summary of what many other authors are calling, "assessment for learning." For example, Jackson says...

"The purpose of assessment is to provide you and your students with feedback on how well students are mastering the objectives of your course." (p. 137)

(For a more in-depth discussion of formative assessment and assessment for learning, check out this Ed. Leadership article or a few of my previous posts.) Notice how Jackson's statement is centered on the student and how s/he is learning. The purpose of feedback/assessment is to guide the student towards mastery. I have long been guilty of assuming that numbers and letters were great ways of providing feedback to my students. Here's a challenge: the next time you grade a student's paper and give him/her a "B" or "85%", follow it up by asking what that grade or percentage means. What type of effort, mastery, and/or feedback does your "classroom grading scale" give to your students? From my experiences, it is typically a reference point for honor rolls, pleasing parents, allowance bonuses, staying eligible for sports or some combination of the previously mentioned reasons. Rarely have these measures been enough to spur students on to improve their own work in a specific and meaningful way.

Rick DuFour, probably most well-known for his work on professional learning communities, recently blogged about grades, homework and feedback.

In most schools, what a grade represents remains in the eye of the beholder of the individual teacher. Some teachers grade homework; some do not. Some allow students to retake a test; some do not. Some provide students with additional time and support; some do not. Some provide extra credit for tasks unrelated to the curriculum; some do not. Some consider behavior, participation, and promptness in determining a grade; some do not. It is time for educators to grapple with the question, “What does a grade represent in our school?” in a more meaningful way.

Grappling with the "What does a grade represent?" question is an excellent conversation starter, but Jackson's principle takes it one step farther. From my personal experience, I used to think that the hardest questions to answer from the mouths of students were along the lines of... "Will this be graded?" or "How much will this affect my grade?" With a more laser-like focus on learning targets and a change in the culture of my classroom, I am now hoping to eliminate these types of questions. But until I got past the "everything must be graded and recorded" mentality, it was impossible for me to see the value of effective feedback. My feedback (grades, numbers, etc.) was focused on "now" rather than the future. Jackson goes on...

"Evaluative feedback keeps students focused on the now. Coaching feedback focuses students on the next time." (p. 142)

This principle teaches us that much of our "grading" should actually be "coaching" instead. A few pages later, the author nails this idea.

"The best thing we can do for our students who fail is to provide them with an honest assessment of why they failed and show them how to do better the next time." (p. 144)

Letter grades, percentages and points just don't provide this type of feedback to our students. My grading to coaching ratio is really out of whack. In summary, I've learned that I need to do less "grading now" and more "coaching for the future."

What about you? What is your grading to coaching ratio? How much effective feedback are you giving your students?


Related post:

• "Practice with feedback still matters"
  

Note: This is the fifth post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

One of the hardest parts of being a high school math teacher from my perspective is not falling into what Robyn Jackson calls the "Curse of Knowledge" trap.

"Once we know something, it is hard to understand what it is like to not know it. Our knowledge makes it almost impossible for us to imagine what it is like to lack that knowledge." (p. 104)

Perhaps someone in your building is always ragging on students because they just don't "get it." Isn't that our job...to help students go from "not getting it" to "getting it."?! If students came to me knowing everything there is to know about math, then...

1. I would have a pretty boring job, and
   
2. I would not have a job for very long.

When I begin teaching Geometry this August, I need to once again "recalibrate" my brain and think back to what it was like to know very little about naming angles, rays and line segments. I cannot assume that students know about Pythagorean's Theorem, let alone when (and when not to) use it. In my experiences, the difference between being merely a content expert and a master educator is the ability to comprehend and understand what it is like to "think like the students do."

The content expert says, "I know this and so should you."

The master teacher thinks, "What barriers exist between where my students probably are and where I would like them to be."

The realists in my readership are thinking right now, "How do go about doing this?" Robyn Jackson's fourth chapter and principle, "Support your students" suggests a few practical ways of getting past the curse of knowledge.

• Use pre-assessments to identify common misconceptions ahead of time. In our current era of high-stakes testing and accountability, pre-tests have been given a bad rap. Through pre- and post-tests, teachers are quickly able to "show" they are doing their job. While that may be true, a well-designed pre-test can quickly tap the brains of a classroom of students and in turn reveal commonly held misconceptions which can be used to guide future instructional planning. A pre-assessment of this type does not have to be scored or entered into the gradebook. It can merely be used as a narrative or snapshot or where students currently stand in their understanding of upcoming concepts.
• Focus on error analysis. What are your students currently struggling to understand and why are they doing so? Might I suggest my previously documented thoughts on debugging as a place to start your reading?
• Show bad examples and common errors/misconceptions. Once you have identified the errors and misconceptions, use them as future teaching moments. Some of my most meaningful group and individual remediation has not revolved around a new lesson plan script, but rather pulling examples of incorrect student work and asking students questions about it. Questions such as "What were you thinking here?" or "What do you think Johnny did wrong at this step?" These types of prompts also model self-assessment, a skill I believe is necessary for truly developing "life long learners" as so many of our school mission statements propose.

In what ways have you found success in helping your education-minded colleagues get past the "curse of knowledge"? What types of tools/strategies do you use in your classroom to identify misconceptions? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Note: This is the fourth post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

"If you want to raise your expectations of your students, you first have to raise your expectations of yourself. " (p. 85)

Of the principles I've blogged about so far, principle 3, "Expect to get your students there" is one in which the self-assessment indicates may be a current strength. Several of my colleagues (perhaps those among this blog's audience may even attest to this) often pass off comments such as, "Don't you ever go home?" or "It's Friday, time to leave school for a few days!" I do not mention these comments to give myself some sort of virtual "pat on the back," but rather to support my perceived strength and a point Jackson makes on p. 91.

"The more important you believe something is, the more time, attention, and effort you will put forth to make it happen."

I am not afraid to admit that I like my job as a high school math teacher. I enjoy the reverse commute from the "big city" to the "bedroom community" every morning and afternoon. In general, I truly look forward to the students and staff I interact with during the school year. I value my job as an ongoing opportunity for making a positive impact in the lives of the future generation. That's me. A worthwhile task that's a pleasure to take part in.

What about the students?

Is it fair to say that the students in your classroom and mine are frequently embarking in a "worthwhile task that's a pleasure to take part in"?

When I first started teaching, I thought my class was in good shape when they were all quietly working on a task I had assigned. Yikes, was I wrong! My value was on control rather than learning. Jackson makes another point that made much more sense to me recently,

"The consequence for not completing work or completing it well should be that students have to spend more time getting it done right." (p. 94)

This is why I, like others are suggesting, hope to implement a new "consequence" for not completing important tasks. The consequence is, "a new opportunity to learn it!"

This will not be an easy change to make in my classroom of high school students with jobs and extra-curricular activities. "Requiring" them to come in outside of class is not as easy as keeping an elementary student in from recess for remediation, but I think a few small changes can be made to better support this philosophy:

1. Increase parent communication. Explain to parents early and often if/when their student is not "getting it" or "turning it in" and the value of coming in to "learn it."
2. Look for the WHY. A question to be constantly reminded of is What can I do to help you, the student? Look for ways to figure out why a student is not turning in their assignment or what specific misconception he or she is struggling with.
   

In both of the changes suggested above, I believe I have been on the right track, but need to "up the ante" a bit. As classroom teachers, we all need to expect to get our students there.

What practical ways have you found to raise expectations of yourself and your students? Feel free to leave your comments below.
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(On a related note, I want to welcome a new reader to MeTA musings, Robyn Jackson via Twitter!)

Note: This is the third post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

Do we really plan homework, tests, etc. around our learning objectives?

This is a question I grappled with last year as I transformed my grading practices to a more standards-based system. A hiccup I ran into was using assessments I had created the year before. With a renewed laser-like focus on learning targets, I slowly realized that my assessments did not always clearly align with my intended outcomes. To be brutally honest, "time" was a factor that often hindered me from creating assessments that explicitly measured my learning targets. My intentions were great through an improved reporting and grading system, but the assessments need to be tweaked.

Robyn Jackson says...

"Master teachers spend more time unpacking standards and objectives than they do planning learning activities because they understand that clear learning goals will drive everything else they do." (p. 58)

Several pages later, she alludes to an idea found in a book, Understanding by Design, written by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. In my spring reading, I found this book to be very helpful in thinking about the order in which to design assessments and instruction. Jackson states it clearly...

"For each learning goal, decide how you will know when students have achieved that goal and how you will know when students are on the right track. Explain these indicators to students." (p. 63)

I think I have a pretty firm grasp on this concept of keeping the end in mind. I need to take a second look at the list of learning targets (objectives) for each course I teach and then ensure that I have formative assessment prompts ready to help students see when they are on the right track. Furthermore, explaining to students my philosophical difference between "grades" and "feedback" will be key. Initially, I anticipate students questioning my practice of not using traditional scores to mark up their formative assessments. My hope is that this will be a prime opportunity to show them the value of written and verbal feedback rather than a single score.

"To be effective, feedback needs to cause thinking. Grades don't do that. Scores don't do that. And comments like “Good job” don't do that either. What does cause thinking is a comment that addresses what the student needs to do to improve" - Nov. 2005 Ed. Leadership article.

A conversation might have look something like this last year before I implemented standards-based grading.

Me: You earned 10/16 points. Which ideas did you understand and which ones do you still need work on?
Student: Well, I missed one point on question #1 and five points on question #5. I think I need to better understand how to do #5. Can you tell me how to do it?

With standards-based grading in place, the conversations now look something more like this:

Me: How do you think you did on your quiz?
Student: I got 4/4 on learning targets 1-3, but 2/4 on learning targets 4 and 5. I really don't understand the ideas behind [insert learning target here]. Can you help me?

I need to take my "feedback" one step farther by not only giving students a score for each standard, but also a narrative outlining what the student needs to do to improve. I believe that this small tweak to my formative assessments will help students see not only how they've done (past tense), but also what they can do to improve (future tense) - the "thinking" Jackson mentions.

All of these ideas are all great, but my first order of business needs to be taking a solid look at my summative assessments. Jackson paraphrases the ideas of Wiggins and McTighe,

"It is not until you define your assessment instrument that you have clearly spelled out what your true objective is." (p. 66)"

Wouldn't it be nice if students no longer asked "what's going to be on the test?" What if the norm instead was students who knew exactly what to expect on the test and worked diligently to ensure that they understood those concepts and skills at a level in which they could articulate them not only on a "test," but also to their parents and peers? I think this is what the Iowa Core Curriculum is calling "Teaching for Understanding."

Personal action items from this principle are as follows:

1. Take a detailed look at summative assessments for each course. If an assessment does not clearly match-up with its intended learning targets, modify to fit.
2. Create a rubric or blank space on each formative assessment for detailed feedback. This will remind me and the students of the "feedback narrative" expecation mentioned above.

Through the implementation of these action items this summer, I hope to have a year similar to the master educator described on p. 76 of Jackson's book:

"Because I had invested the time up front to unpack my standards, define mastery and the steps toward mastery, and identify how I would determine whether my students had reached mastery, I had more time during the year to relax and teach."

Now is the time to plan with the "end" in mind and know where your students are going.

This is the second post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

Jackson's first principle of great teaching is "Start where your students are." As I stated in the initial post of this series,

"I need the most help in improving on principles 1 and 7."

When I first saw the topic of this principle/chapter of the book, I thought to myself, "here comes another rant about building upon students' pre-requisite knowledge." I was anticipating a lecture on using assessments to assess students' misconceptions before instruction or even some tips on how to better embrace the constructivist learning theory. I was familiar with the assertion that...

"When we encounter something new, we have to reconcile it with our previous ideas and experience, maybe changing what we believe, or maybe discarding the new information as irrelevant. In any case, we are active creators of our own knowledge." - Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning

I have my own philosophy of how this idea caters to some, but not all, aspects of math education, but those details are better described in a separate post. Wow, was I wrong about the direction the author was going with this principle. She touched on content and procedural knowledge and the need to

"ask students to explain how that concept might be relevant to their own lives." (p. 37)

but she also extended her thoughts to soft skills such as how to take notes, find information, study for tests and come in for extra help. A big "aha" I had from this chapter was how master teachers help students develop these "non-cognitive skills" as well. I was surprised to read example after example of teachers who did the "little things" to enable their students to experience success. The author makes it seem so simple to do...

"She didn't waste time trying to motivate her students to do well. Instead, she created a classroom culture around trying hard and working together to accomplish goals." (p. 46)

All of this "classroom culture" stuff makes sense to me, but implementing it is admittedly a challenge and something I need to think more about. Because this is an area of growth for me, I have decided to make a short list of measurable goals to address this principle as it relates to non-cognitive skills during the upcoming school year.

1. Model four different test-preparation study strategies during the first nine weeks of school to my math students.
2. Create a schedule so that each student comes in for "extra help" once during the first nine weeks of school. This goal will hopefully encourage students who wouldn't otherwise seek help outside of class to see the value of one-on-one instruction and remediation.
   

What strategies have you used in your classroom to help students develop "non-cognitive" skills?

Robyn Jackson says...

"Mastery teaching is not about the time you put in. It's what you do with your time that counts." - Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching, p.2

I will be starting my sixth year of teaching high school math this fall. As I look back, a brief time line comes to mind illustrating some of the challenges of the profession and how I've attempted to tackle them.

• Classroom management (years 1 & 2) was addressed through building a positive rapport with students. Reading The First Days of School and implementing a series of procedures helped immensely, too. I feel like I have a relatively good handle on this area right now.
  
• Diversifying instructional strategies took some time as well. Questions such as "When should students work in collaborative groups?" and "When is direct instruction most appropriate?" were common thoughts in years 3 & 4. This is an area I hope to improve on this year. More in later posts.
• Last year, I took a deep look at my assessment practices. Reflecting upon formative assessment and standards-based reporting were at the core of this blog. DuFour and his colleagues asked several questions that sum it up best
  1. Exactly what is it that we want all students to learn?
  2. How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?
  

After talking with colleagues and sharing my success stories this past year (with the underlying hope that they, too, would "buy" into these changes), I realized procedures, instructional strategies and changes in assessment were not the true hurdles to be jumped. Each of these aspects of teaching and learning were related to my classroom culture. In an earlier post, I lamented on this very topic.

Emphasizing the importance of what we do and why we do it on a frequent basis is a first step...

As I begin to revise my assessments as well as classroom syllabus and communication blog, I realize that it's not about the time I or my students put in. It's what we do with this time that counts. How will I best use the first few weeks of the academic year to entrench in the minds of the students that in Mr. Townsley's class "it's about learning" above all else?

Robyn Jackson also said...

"...I believe you don't become a master teacher by simply doing what a master teacher does. You become a master teacher by thinking like a master teacher thinks." (p. xiv)

I believe I'm at that point in my teaching career where I want to start using my time to do more than check papers and create new homework assignments. Jackson suggests several principles to build upon this mindset. I plan to blog about each one individually over the next week or two to keep my mind focused on making the most of my preparation time for the rest of the summer. The principles are as follows:

1. Start where your students are.
2. Know where your students are going.
3. Expect to get your students there.
4. Support your students.
5. Use effective feedback
6. Focus on quality, not quantity
7. Never work harder than your students

Based on the self-assessment provided at the beginning of the book, my strengths lie in principles 3, 4, and 6. I need the most help in improving on principles 1 and 7.

I hope you'll considering joining me on a quest towards better "thinking like a master teacher thinks."