Conveniently, while I was writing the explanations for the first part of this week's assignments, I happened to slightly cover what one would assess for the students. However, for the rare individual that may stumble upon this blog post in a vacuum, here is what I am doing:
We are creating assessments for objectives we have generated for standards based on our school districts. Since mine is a district that follows Common Core State Standards, and I wish to teach high-school English/Language Arts, my standard is this:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.9-10.3
Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.
The objectives I created for this won't be posted here, however, the assessment ideas I had for the piece are below.
Formative:
There would be many formative assessments for the month-long unit that would be covering this standard, but for my purposes, I was thinking something along the line of a student check-up. What would happen is each student would bring in a piece of complicated or confusing language for the other students at their table to decipher, complete with a translation from whichever context of language the initial writing was in to something more simple. The students would trade, testing each other on something neither one would have prior knowledge of, then have a small conference where they discuss similarities, differences, and moments of confusion as they tried to translate. At the end of the day, students would turn in their snippet of language (a few sentences to a paragraph), their translation, and the translation they wrote for their partner's language snippet for assessment and review by me as the teacher. That way, they could keep practicing with real-world instances of language, and, if I saw common problems, I could give a refresher in the next class, or simply give them notes on what each individual wasn't quite understanding on their returned handouts.
For this particular assessment, they would have to do these once a week, but be given a time limit in class to translate, they would be able to work on what they don't know actively, grasping the ideas and concepts being given to them, the result would both fit the standard AND be helping them translate something they didn't know before, helping them in the real world, and since I would collect and correct the translations, I would be able to measure everyone's progress as the unit went on.
Summative:
The "final exam" of the course would be the summative assessment, and for this one, I had the perfect idea in the description of my final objective. Essentially, students would be required, on the last day of the class, to do a much larger version of the formative assessments. They would need to bring in a large legal document, technical instruction, academic paper... something at least 1 page long and written for a context that your "average" person wouldn't understand. They would also have to bring in a translation of the entire document's language into a different context (ideally something more understandable, but they could go from legalese to academic or sales-pitch, if they so choose).
If they didn't want to do that, from being sick of doing smaller versions of that or just more intrigued in the second option, they could write a letter to someone (a friend, a teacher, a doctor, etc) and then translate the contents of that letter into a formal document, a job resume, or a story to be told around a campfire... or any other contexts that weren't its original form.
Both of these options would be turned in (or presented, if the student wished and it was in a form the student could easily present) and, after a celebration for completing a section, we would move on to the next idea.
Both of these options would cover precisely what the standard is talking about, showing the translation, understanding, and creation (though this last one is more present in the second option) of language in multiple contexts. This would be a large project proposed, say, the week before it was due, giving them a firm time limit, and would be graded on quality of the overall translation (both faithfulness and ability to be understood). After all of the other work they had been doing, this would feel like, at most, a larger homework assignment that should be grasped by the students quite easily, but, by its very nature, helps them with real-world problems by helping them learn the proper etiquette for a cover letter, legal letter, or just helping them be motivated to learn how to understand legalese or see through sales-talk. It may be presumptuous of me, but this might just be a SMART idea.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Standards Reflection
When it comes to unpacking standards and backwards mapping, while I wasn't a teacher yet, these were already concepts (if not names for them) that I was well aware of. I have been in far too many classes where there are vague standards nobody, including the teacher, seems to understand, and that doesn't benefit anyone. Sure, it makes the school look good for parents, but if nobody understands what needs to be taught or learned, what is the point?
Understanding is the goal in all things. We talk so people understand us, we write so understanding may pass on to future generations, we do experiments to broaden our understanding of the world... So it only makes sense that standards should be as understood as possible. This doesn't seem like a job for teachers but, like so many other things in the world, somehow it has fallen to teachers anyway, even in things as nigh-universal (in this country) as the Common Core State Standards (as I have to deal with in Hawaii).
The thing about standards are that they are benchmarks. They are designed to be fuzzy lines of achievement, but with real, tangible effects. I, personally, find it best to use standards as a marker of the direction students should go, hoping to cultivate a learning environment where those fuzzy lines get blown out of the water by clear pinnacles of understanding and proficiency. To do this, we have to break down the academic speak and fancy talk that looks good to politicians, lawmakers, and shareholders, and turn it into the language that everyone else speaks. What do students need to do? What do they need to know? This is, actually, precisely why I picked the standards I did for activity 1 and 2 this week. It is the one most geared towards helping everyone know how to unpack standards from their flowery academic talk to something more generally understood.
Once you know the goals, backwards mapping becomes key. You know where the student needs to end up, now all you have to do is walk them back to where they will start the year. This can be done in multiple ways, and not every single step needs to be set in stone (as many classes may grow or explore in directions you weren't expecting, but still head towards the final goal) but there should definitely be checkpoints along the way to make sure you're reaching where you need to be. Assessments and activities built in to make sure that students are, roughly, where they should be and on track to reach the finish line. But you only know the intermediate steps when you know the start and the finish: the standards of the grade before and the standards you're meant to meet this time.
The main thing this also helps you do is plan according to the grade level. The example in the video showed to the cohort was in baking a pie: while there are many ways to learn how to bake a pie, if you want to demonstrate your ability to bake one, writing an essay on the history of pies won't work. In the same way, with standards, if your final idea is to be able to speak fluently in one group and be able to write in specific contexts in a second, you shouldn't practice writing too heavily with group one or speaking too heavily with group two. While they might be useful things for each group to know, if they prove they can do the wrong thing, that gets you no closer to knowing if they have learned the standard, and them no closer to understanding the standards that have been just out of their reach.
This idea has always struck me as a relatively obvious one, but the amount of people for whom this idea is some strange, alien novelty kind of boggles my mind. It illustrates a strange stagnation we need to break free from in education, and one that will only be accomplished by creative teachers getting into the works and modifying them for the better from the inside.
In the end, these skills, while simple and obvious to myself, are vital ones that need to be drilled into all teachers, regardless of how long they may have been teaching. Teachers must understand what they are to teach before they can teach it, and students must understand what they're supposed to learn before they can learn it. You can't learn something you don't know you don't know, you can only learn information you know you don't know, solving the problem of not knowing it. Teachers must also be able to backwards map (which I always want to refer to as pamming... but this is me liking silly puns and jokes) to make sure students are engaged and learning what they need to be every step of the way towards their goal. This way, everyone is focused and unified in their efforts to teach, learn, and grow to be the people who make tomorrow the bright future it is.
Understanding is the goal in all things. We talk so people understand us, we write so understanding may pass on to future generations, we do experiments to broaden our understanding of the world... So it only makes sense that standards should be as understood as possible. This doesn't seem like a job for teachers but, like so many other things in the world, somehow it has fallen to teachers anyway, even in things as nigh-universal (in this country) as the Common Core State Standards (as I have to deal with in Hawaii).
The thing about standards are that they are benchmarks. They are designed to be fuzzy lines of achievement, but with real, tangible effects. I, personally, find it best to use standards as a marker of the direction students should go, hoping to cultivate a learning environment where those fuzzy lines get blown out of the water by clear pinnacles of understanding and proficiency. To do this, we have to break down the academic speak and fancy talk that looks good to politicians, lawmakers, and shareholders, and turn it into the language that everyone else speaks. What do students need to do? What do they need to know? This is, actually, precisely why I picked the standards I did for activity 1 and 2 this week. It is the one most geared towards helping everyone know how to unpack standards from their flowery academic talk to something more generally understood.
Once you know the goals, backwards mapping becomes key. You know where the student needs to end up, now all you have to do is walk them back to where they will start the year. This can be done in multiple ways, and not every single step needs to be set in stone (as many classes may grow or explore in directions you weren't expecting, but still head towards the final goal) but there should definitely be checkpoints along the way to make sure you're reaching where you need to be. Assessments and activities built in to make sure that students are, roughly, where they should be and on track to reach the finish line. But you only know the intermediate steps when you know the start and the finish: the standards of the grade before and the standards you're meant to meet this time.
The main thing this also helps you do is plan according to the grade level. The example in the video showed to the cohort was in baking a pie: while there are many ways to learn how to bake a pie, if you want to demonstrate your ability to bake one, writing an essay on the history of pies won't work. In the same way, with standards, if your final idea is to be able to speak fluently in one group and be able to write in specific contexts in a second, you shouldn't practice writing too heavily with group one or speaking too heavily with group two. While they might be useful things for each group to know, if they prove they can do the wrong thing, that gets you no closer to knowing if they have learned the standard, and them no closer to understanding the standards that have been just out of their reach.
This idea has always struck me as a relatively obvious one, but the amount of people for whom this idea is some strange, alien novelty kind of boggles my mind. It illustrates a strange stagnation we need to break free from in education, and one that will only be accomplished by creative teachers getting into the works and modifying them for the better from the inside.
In the end, these skills, while simple and obvious to myself, are vital ones that need to be drilled into all teachers, regardless of how long they may have been teaching. Teachers must understand what they are to teach before they can teach it, and students must understand what they're supposed to learn before they can learn it. You can't learn something you don't know you don't know, you can only learn information you know you don't know, solving the problem of not knowing it. Teachers must also be able to backwards map (which I always want to refer to as pamming... but this is me liking silly puns and jokes) to make sure students are engaged and learning what they need to be every step of the way towards their goal. This way, everyone is focused and unified in their efforts to teach, learn, and grow to be the people who make tomorrow the bright future it is.
Holding the Map Backwards: Not Always a Problem
I do not currently teach, but I expect to teach in a secondary school English Language Arts when all is said and done, in Hawaii, which uses the Common Core State Standards. As such, for my planning today, I will be using standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.9-10.3 for 9th and 10th graders. This standard reads
"Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening."
I chose this standard as it is quite important not just in class or in school, but in the world at large. Many different companies or groups use language differently, and as a functioning member of society, one must be able to not only hold a conversation with your friends, but be able to communicate with the legal system and the government, understand warning labels on packaging and doctor's notes, and otherwise be able to understand complicated language and, often, explain it to people who don't have these skills. It is a vital and useful ability in this day and age, and one that we shouldn't skimp on teaching.
Also, for the student in school, this standard involves critical thinking in being able to understand and edit papers they both receive and are working on, giving them the scholastic tools to be able to write academically when they need to and creatively, informally, or professionally when it is more appropriate.
When my students are done with this unit, the proficiencies I can expect are:
- Be able to recognize the differences in language used in different contexts.
- Be able to edit other people's writing to fit into a specific context.
- Be able to write their own work as appropriate for a specific context.
- Be able to understand new information when it is provided to them, regardless of the context.
- Using a fresh text (not given to the student before), each student has to write a summary and rewording of what is being written.
- Using a fresh text read aloud in class (one they have not heard before) students must be able to summarize the statements and give suggestions on what kind of contexts those statements might be appropriate for.
- Using a prompt and given information, students must be able to write a letter or paper appropriate for different contexts.
- Using a fresh text, students must be able to guess the context it was written in, then edit the content to fit into a different context or make suggestions on how to change its context.
- A summary practice day: Students read several short passages from different contexts. Initially as a class, but later on their own, students identify the contexts the passages may be from and summarize their meaning.
- The summary should be short (A single sentence to a full paragraph, depending on passage length) and clearly show the information given.
- The summary should identify what context it is in.
- Letter writing practice: After discussing how students talk differently to their parents, their teachers, prospective employers, and people like police officers or guards, students are given a single situation and some details and must write a version of a letter or essay for their family, for a classroom presentation, for their boss, and for a courtroom to demonstrate their ability to write for different contexts.
- Students would be able to peer-review each other's works, editing and suggesting changes to better fit contexts.
- All students would have the same information to begin with, but may use their own critical thinking and creativity to create any letter they wish.
- Letters would be collected, and exemplary instances of writing for each context would be shared with the class in a later discussion on the topic.
- Conversation time: Students would be placed into groups, each of which having different information. They would have to share that information, but when a bell is rung, must change how they speak to fit a different context. At the end, one person (chosen at random) must present the information they gleaned from the experience.
- Students must share all information, or else the student sent up would not be able to share their information with everyone else.
- Students must be able to understand multiple contexts, and be flexible enough to share information with a student not-comprehending in a context they might understand.
- Groups would be assessed in whole, and by anonymous peer review after the fact to narrow it down to individuals.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Classroom Rules and Procedures
Applying rules and procedures to a classroom is key if you want your students to behave and, more importantly, learn. Having a rule in place lets them know what the boundaries are for them to explore, and having procedures keeps them grounded in ritual and order, making it easier for them to explore the area given to them and find every last bit of information they can.
But just having these things in place is meaningless without ways to enforce rules and reinforce behavior. That, however, quickly becomes complicated, as this chart can show you (I will link the picture below as well). However, with the integration of modern tools and technology, along with good, old fashioned withitness and empathy, every teacher should be armed with the tools to manage his or her classroom.
To begin with, I'd like to talk about rewarding good behavior. This part seems the easier area, as it has less chances for confrontation with the students, but it is actually the trickier half of the prospect. You see, rewards can cause perverse incentives. If you only give rewards for certain behaviors, students may lose some creativity for things that are following the rules, but aren't blatantly following the rules, causing even more disruption as students try to get your attention with how good they're being. Or, they may get jealous at a student who is more obviously being rewarded, causing "bad" students to act worse as they try to get the chance to shine themselves by bullying the "good" student when you aren't around.
As such, you, as a teacher, have to make sure that students are rewarded fairly and, if at all possible, equally. This is why, personally, I would rather have students grouped together, giving rewards to the table or group, rather than the individual, for good behavior. This will allow students to police each other, as all of them work towards a common goal. Now, the actual act of rewarding comes in a few ways. Tokens or points (such as those awarded by Class Dojo or Classcraft) create an obvious, tangible thing that students can strive for. If these points are able to be traded in, either for a big prize at the end of the year, or little prizes along the way, students will naturally strive to get the points and do the right thing. If the rewards seem a little too much for you personally, verbal encouragement and pointing out students doing the right thing has an equal amount of positive effect on the other students, as everyone likes being praised for being a good student.
Now, for myself, I have another category, called a major reward. These would be very rare, but very big rewards. Things like a student who was doing badly getting a perfect score, or a student standing up to bullying that I had possibly missed, even if it was out in the yard at recess, or one student helping another or a table understand an idea that they were having problems with while I helped a different group of students. These kinds of large actions would get bigger rewards, and truly heroic ones would be rewarded with a call to the parents praising their student and letting them know how good the child is. It could change the entire dynamic at home and keep the praise and the good feelings going through the whole week.
Conversely, negative behavior has to be punished. There should be layers of punishment, with students being able to correct themselves before I step in. If they're in groups, I expect the entire group to keep tabs on each other, so that they don't lose points or anything, but I would look at the offending student while continuing with the lesson, or talk to them quietly if everyone was supposed to be silent and they realized they were caught. If they didn't realize I saw them, then I would get closer to them, until, if they are so oblivious with whatever had their attention that they didn't notice me looming, I would stop the class to punish them verbally. It wouldn't be anything big or scolding if it was a quiet disruption only for a couple of students, but just enough to let the students realize what they were doing wrong. If it caused a larger problem and there was a point or token system in place, they'd lose some, based on the rules, so they knew why they were being punished and how to fix it.
If they repeatedly broke the rules, or broke the rules in a larger way, such as obvious disruptions or bullying, I would stop with quiet warnings and moving over and begin positioning myself near them more often, giving full scoldings for repeated behavior, or a sharp warning to make them stop their actions before someone got hurt. Points would be deducted if it was an obvious problem, and if they were damaging books or desks or something, I would force them to fix their damage, as well as any other damage in the class, overcorrecting to let them realize what the initial problem was.
If these larger actions continued, or if they had a truly bad disruption, like trying to start a fight with another student, inciting a class to mock someone, or a huge confrontation with myself, I would immediately react with accordance to school guidelines. I would break up a fight or call security to do the same, and in the other situations, I would find the leader and, calmly but firmly, calm them down, explain what I needed them to do, and discuss why their behavior was bad and the consequences of their actions. Only as a last resort, should the problem not be able to be dealt with in the class or the disruptions are so frequent and large that there's no other option, will I actually send a student to detention or the principal's office, and I would make sure the incident was followed up by a call to the parents (a strong tool, whether positive or negative) to explain why it happened and hopefully help instigate discipline following the student home so it is drilled into them by people they do listen to and respect, since they've proven, at that point, that they don't listen to or respect me.
Discipline is a messy, complicated, not at all fun, but crucially important part of a classroom. You must, as a teacher, reward good students and punish bad, not only because these are how the rules are set up, but because this is how society works. You aren't just teaching students new information, these children are learning how to be responsible, dependable adults functioning in a society that has very clear, very strict laws with very clear punishment should you break them. You must be a force of order (sometimes, the only force of order) in the student's life so that they understand how laws and order work and learn to operate within those forces. A quiet, respectful classroom is just a pleasant side-effect to the larger mission of even this dirty job.
(The chart linked above:)
But just having these things in place is meaningless without ways to enforce rules and reinforce behavior. That, however, quickly becomes complicated, as this chart can show you (I will link the picture below as well). However, with the integration of modern tools and technology, along with good, old fashioned withitness and empathy, every teacher should be armed with the tools to manage his or her classroom.
To begin with, I'd like to talk about rewarding good behavior. This part seems the easier area, as it has less chances for confrontation with the students, but it is actually the trickier half of the prospect. You see, rewards can cause perverse incentives. If you only give rewards for certain behaviors, students may lose some creativity for things that are following the rules, but aren't blatantly following the rules, causing even more disruption as students try to get your attention with how good they're being. Or, they may get jealous at a student who is more obviously being rewarded, causing "bad" students to act worse as they try to get the chance to shine themselves by bullying the "good" student when you aren't around.
As such, you, as a teacher, have to make sure that students are rewarded fairly and, if at all possible, equally. This is why, personally, I would rather have students grouped together, giving rewards to the table or group, rather than the individual, for good behavior. This will allow students to police each other, as all of them work towards a common goal. Now, the actual act of rewarding comes in a few ways. Tokens or points (such as those awarded by Class Dojo or Classcraft) create an obvious, tangible thing that students can strive for. If these points are able to be traded in, either for a big prize at the end of the year, or little prizes along the way, students will naturally strive to get the points and do the right thing. If the rewards seem a little too much for you personally, verbal encouragement and pointing out students doing the right thing has an equal amount of positive effect on the other students, as everyone likes being praised for being a good student.
Now, for myself, I have another category, called a major reward. These would be very rare, but very big rewards. Things like a student who was doing badly getting a perfect score, or a student standing up to bullying that I had possibly missed, even if it was out in the yard at recess, or one student helping another or a table understand an idea that they were having problems with while I helped a different group of students. These kinds of large actions would get bigger rewards, and truly heroic ones would be rewarded with a call to the parents praising their student and letting them know how good the child is. It could change the entire dynamic at home and keep the praise and the good feelings going through the whole week.
Conversely, negative behavior has to be punished. There should be layers of punishment, with students being able to correct themselves before I step in. If they're in groups, I expect the entire group to keep tabs on each other, so that they don't lose points or anything, but I would look at the offending student while continuing with the lesson, or talk to them quietly if everyone was supposed to be silent and they realized they were caught. If they didn't realize I saw them, then I would get closer to them, until, if they are so oblivious with whatever had their attention that they didn't notice me looming, I would stop the class to punish them verbally. It wouldn't be anything big or scolding if it was a quiet disruption only for a couple of students, but just enough to let the students realize what they were doing wrong. If it caused a larger problem and there was a point or token system in place, they'd lose some, based on the rules, so they knew why they were being punished and how to fix it.
If they repeatedly broke the rules, or broke the rules in a larger way, such as obvious disruptions or bullying, I would stop with quiet warnings and moving over and begin positioning myself near them more often, giving full scoldings for repeated behavior, or a sharp warning to make them stop their actions before someone got hurt. Points would be deducted if it was an obvious problem, and if they were damaging books or desks or something, I would force them to fix their damage, as well as any other damage in the class, overcorrecting to let them realize what the initial problem was.
If these larger actions continued, or if they had a truly bad disruption, like trying to start a fight with another student, inciting a class to mock someone, or a huge confrontation with myself, I would immediately react with accordance to school guidelines. I would break up a fight or call security to do the same, and in the other situations, I would find the leader and, calmly but firmly, calm them down, explain what I needed them to do, and discuss why their behavior was bad and the consequences of their actions. Only as a last resort, should the problem not be able to be dealt with in the class or the disruptions are so frequent and large that there's no other option, will I actually send a student to detention or the principal's office, and I would make sure the incident was followed up by a call to the parents (a strong tool, whether positive or negative) to explain why it happened and hopefully help instigate discipline following the student home so it is drilled into them by people they do listen to and respect, since they've proven, at that point, that they don't listen to or respect me.
Discipline is a messy, complicated, not at all fun, but crucially important part of a classroom. You must, as a teacher, reward good students and punish bad, not only because these are how the rules are set up, but because this is how society works. You aren't just teaching students new information, these children are learning how to be responsible, dependable adults functioning in a society that has very clear, very strict laws with very clear punishment should you break them. You must be a force of order (sometimes, the only force of order) in the student's life so that they understand how laws and order work and learn to operate within those forces. A quiet, respectful classroom is just a pleasant side-effect to the larger mission of even this dirty job.
(The chart linked above:)
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