Describe it to me!

Ever have those moments where you have to get something out of your head before you forget??  For me, the older I get, the more often those moments happen!  If I don't write it down (and quickly), I'm just sunk.  

Anyway, so today, I had a brilliant idea!  Or at least it seemed brilliant at the time... :). I quickly jotted down a note on a post and now that I have a few minutes, decided to blog it out.  This will be one of those rare posts without a pin-able picture and since I'm using my iPad, my finger might be hurting when I'm done jabbing the screen after this post.  :)

In my Stat class, I often ask kids to describe something, whether that is a graph, a distribution, whatever.  For whatever reason, this is something that gives many of my students trouble.  For years, I have told them to "just tell me what you see!", but some kids still struggle.  Either they miss the big picture or they don't give me enough information.  I've even used the old Saturday Night Sketch where the lady is trying to describe the thief to the police officers, but it hasn't really helped them get what I mean.  So, next year, when I initially teach describing, I'm going to try a different approach...

I'm going to ask a student volunteer to be the "Guesser", then have them sit in my podium chair with their back to my Promethean.  Another student volunteer will be the "teller" and will be seated where they can see the board.  Then, I'll project a photo of a famous person and have the Teller describe the person to the Guesser and after every clue, ask the Guesser if they can guess who is being described. I'm hoping this will get the point across that one clue alone isn't typically enough information and that the more descriptive the Teller can be, the better picture the Guesser can form in his/her head and the better guess that can be made.

After a few of these, I'll give the Guesser a whiteboard and project a graph on the board.  Now the Teller will need to describe the graph in such a way that the Guesser can draw the graph on the whiteboard.  This would transition into student pairs writing descriptions of a graph on paper, giving the written description to their partner and seeing if the partner can recreate the graph.

As a side note, I am pretty sure I have seen something similar as a time filler activity from a substitute teacher guide... Might have to find that book/website again!!

Keeping Track of SBG via your INB :)

This year was my first year using Interactive Notebooks (INBs) in my math classes. This year was a pretty rough year overall, but the INBs were one really bright spot in my year. I can't pinpoint why it was a rough year - I mean, I didn't have any major life occurances, but for whatever reason, I just never really meshed with a lot of my students this year. As a result, I was 95% sure that I was going to skip my yearly ritual of asking students for feedback and just close the book on this year and be done. However, at the last minute, I decided against this plan and the student responses actually shocked me. They were overwhelmingly positive, particulary about the notebook. The students loved that we were creating their own personalized textbook that they could keep as a resource forever!

There were some suggestions for how to improve the notebook, and one of them had to do with Standards Based Grading. I have read quite a bit of research on SBG and one piece even detailed how important it was for students to track/graph their grades. As a result, one of their pages in their INB is devoted to keeping track of their scores.

Here was the 2012-13 version:


The idea was that when I handed back a quiz, students would immediately flip to this page, fill in the info at the top with the quiz number and Learning Target (LT), then color in the boxes to indicate their score. When they reassessed, they could color on top of it to see their improvment. This idea did not work as planned, mainly because I wasn't consistent with reminding them to go to this page and also because students struggled to see their improvement.

After feedback from my students and rethinking this idea, here is the 2013-14 version:


This time, I wrote out all of the objectives for the year so that the students could see the year overall without a ton of flipping back and forth. This also has space for them to write an original score (which I'll have them colorcode), and space for the reassessment score. In my AP class, most students only reassess once, so I only put room for one reassessment.

I'm hoping this increased user-friendly-ness will help both my students and myself keep better organized when recording their scores.

How do you have students keep track of their grades?

Wrapping it up - Embedded Formative Assessment

I love when a book really makes me think, and Embedded Formative Assessment is no exception. I've already posted a few times on quotes that really hit home for me, but this post is more as a record of strategies I want to implement in my classroom next year. A key thing that I've learned is that I need to learn to be more deliberate about my lesson planning. As a younger teacher, that was a given, but as a more experienced teacher, I haven't been as deliberate in my questioning and the instructional strategies that I have used in the classroom.

• Have students individually take a test or do an AP problem, like normal. However, instead of me scoring them or writing feedback, give the students back their unmarked answer sheet, put them into groups with a blank copy of the assessment, and have them compile a group answer. This could produce wonderful discussions!
  
  
• Use exit passes more. If you follow me on pinterest, you may have seen me pinning some of the awesome ideas about exit passes and post-it notes. I really want to get to the point of using these on a more regular basis, such as a quickwrite answer to the essential question of the day, work a problem, etc. I really like the idea of using the exit pass to create groups for the next day, but I don't know if I could keep up with that on a regular basis.
  
  
• Create a set of A/B/C/D cards to use in class. I have a set of clickers, but sometimes (often?), simpler can be better. This could be very useful for practicing AP Multiple Choice questions or matching graphs to descriptions, etc. To extend this idea, use the "Four Corners" discussion method.
  
  
• Make sure that each activity/lesson has a clear learning objective. As EFA says, "It is relatively easy to think up cool stuff for students to do in classrooms, but the problem with such an activity-based approach is that too often, it is not clear what students are going to learn."
  
  
• To help students develop a "nose for quality", ask them to look at student work samples, rank them, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each sample. I really like this idea for AP Review or lab reports in Forensic Science. An extension of this would be the error analysis worksheets in Algebra, so that hopefully the students don't make the same mistakes. By providing students the opportunity to discuss quality work, they should be able to internalize that feedback to their own work.
  
  
• Integrate "hinge" questions into my lessons. By using discussion and diagnostic questions, I can gather information about student understanding and misunderstandings before the summative assessment. By spending the time up-front to probe student thinking, I can hopefully save time in the grading and feedback cycle. This won't be easy, but by I plan to use more AP questions to help with this.
  
  
• Integrate more written and verbal discussion. According to EFA, "Engaging in classroom discussion really does make you smarter." I think using richer tasks, articles, reflections, cooperative learning strategies, these discussions will be a natural byproduct.
  
  
• Create a method to randomly select students. In the past, I've not been much of a fan of the "popsicle stick" method, etc, but mainly due to my own insecurities. I am a very introverted student and *hated* being called on in class. It really creates major anxiety for me and I am sure it does for my students as well. However, integrating this with the classroom discussion, it would be less stressful to call on a student randomly and ask them to share their group discussion. This should be less anxiety producing as well as requiring students to be more engaged as they have to participate in the group chat.
  
  
• When providing feedback, make sure I am providing a "recipe for future action." I need to help students learn HOW to get better, not just tell them to get better. :)
  
  
• Use the "three questions" technique when grading by providing students three questions to reflect and respond to, then give them time to respond during the next lesson. Nice benefit of this technique is that no matter how well the student did on the assessment, all students have something to reflect on.
  
  
• Read through my Kagan materials to develop Cooperative Learning structures for my classroom.
  
  
• Create a poster for my room... 'There is more than one teacher in this room.' I would also like to create a poster with the self-assessment questions from Ch 7.
  
  
• I am guilty of asking "Any Questions?" of my class. One idea that I really like is to have them discuss in their groups and decide what questions they still have, then writing those on a sticky note for the teacher. Then I can sort them quickly and see if there are several groups with the same question. According to EFA, this also has an added literacy benefit in helping students verbalize their struggles.
  
  
• Use the "traffic light" color coding to help students communicate their level of understanding. I really like the idea of having them do this when reviewing for a quiz to help them learn how to prioritize their study time.
  

Hopefully recording these ideas here will help me actually implement them in my classroom next year!

Take the time to do it right...

As a little girl, my Momma always tried to instill in me the work ethic of taking the time to do the job right the first time and it would save me time in the long run. Throughout my life, I'm tried to follow this advice, or at least I thought I did. Then comes along Chapter 4 of Embedded Formative Assessment and yet again, I'm knocked flat on my backside!

... grading can be seen as the punishment given to teachers for failing to find out that they did not achieve the intended learning when the students were in front of them.

See if this scenario is familiar to you...
You give an assessment (quiz, test, whatever) and sit down to grade it, only to find yourself writing the same comment over and over and over on student papers.

If you are like me, that scenario has played itself out many times in your career. However, in the past, I've never really analyzed what it was that went wrong... until now. None of us have tons of spare time on our hands - we have families, lessons to plan, papers to grade, other responsibilities. We've heard the old adage "work smarter, not harder", but how does that play out in the classroom? Answer: Formative Assessment! By taking the time to do things right, we can find out whether our students have understood something while they are still sitting in front of us, rather than playing catch-up once the assessment has been given. By taking the time to craft good probing questions during the learning, we save ourselves the time of writing the same comment repeatedly on the quiz. Such a simple idea, why did it take me so many years to figure it out???

Guess my Momma is always right after all!

Possible AP Exam Review Idea...

This is based on the book Embedded Formative Assessment..

Reading Chapter 3, I ran across this gem of an idea...

Some teachers wonder why a class should spend time looking at other students' work when they could be doing their own work, but as many teachers have discovered, students are much better at spotting errors and weaknesses in the work of others than they are in their own. Once students have pointed out such errors or weaknesses, they are more likely to avoid repeating them in their own work.

On the page prior to this quote, there was an example of a middle school science teacher teaching about writing lab reports. The teacher provided each group of students a set of 5 sample lab reports of varying quality and asked the students to rank them in order of quality. Neat idea, but I don't teach science.

I didn't really think much about it until I turned the page and read the quote above, which made me think about AP Exam Review. I know the College Board posts student samples, but those tend to be mostly high scoring papers, not a variety of papers. When we are training to grade a question, we are given a packet of 30 or so student papers so that we can see a variety of scores (0 through 4). Those training papers are not allowed to be posted, but I am thinking we could develop our own database of student examples throughout the year to be used during AP review. Even if it was just part of a question, like the cereal comparison problem, part a from 2008, having our students read and rank the responses in order of quality might be a worthwhile exercise.

But I taught that!!!

I'm currently reading Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan William in an effort to get back to the place that I need to be as a professional.

I just finished Chapter 2 and I'm sure I've driven my friends and hubby nuts by posting many quotes from Chapter 2, but this one really hit me...

Teaching is a *contingent* activity. We cannot predict what students will learn as a result of any particular sequence of instruction. Formative assessment involves getting the best possible evidence about what students have learned and then using this information to decide what to do next.

In today's world of high stakes testing, how many of us think of teaching as a "contingent activity"? I know that I'm often stressed about pacing and getting everything done that needs to be done before the End of Course test or the AP exam or etc, etc, etc that I lose focus on that contingency part. My lesson tomorrow should be contingent on what happened today and what my students learned today. It's important that we don't miss the fact that our teaching should be contingent on *what students learned*, not on *what we taught*.

Another quote from this chapter...

Students do not learn what we teach. If they did, we would not need to keep gradebooks. We could, instead, simply record what we have taught. But anyone who has spent any time in a classroom knows that what students learn as a result of our instruction is unpredictable.

I love when a book gives me the "kick in the pants" that I needed! Recently, during the End of Course exam review and AP review, I've been guilty of this type of thinking. I have gotten irritated that students don't remember how to do long division, etc because I taught that! I need to remember that yes, I taught that topic/concept, but that does NOT mean that the students *learned* that topic/concept.

Teaching != Learning

Embedded Formative Assessment

As part of my goal to find my mojo again, I'm reading the book Embedded Formative Assessment. I'm currently in Chapter 2 and just found a paragraph that I had to share...

Even the best teachers fail. Talk to these teachers, and no matter how well the lesson went, they always can think of things that didn't go as well as they would have liked, things that they will do differently next time. But things get much, much worse when we collect the students' notebooks and look at what they thought we said. That's why Doug Lemov (2010) says that, for teachers, no amount of success is enough. They only teachers who think they are successful are those who have low expectations of their students. They are the sort of teachers who say, "What can you expect from these kids?" The answer is, of course, a lot more than the students are achieving with those teachers. The best teachers fail all the time because they have such high aspirations for what their students can achieve (generally much higher than the students themselves have).

I'm not sharing this because I think I'm a "best teacher". I'm sharing this because of the 2nd sentence. No matter how well things have gone, there are always things I can improve, things that could have gone better. This is one of the shared qualities that I see among my twitter/blog-o-sphere friends. The math blog-o-sphere is full of rock stars, but if you were to ask them, most of those teachers would never describe themselves that way.

This might just be what I needed to read right now... :)