Some Class Components Written in Stone

My experiment is taking a slight turn, but I see big possibilities on the horizon (more to come later).  My student-teacher has made her way to Scotland to finish her placement, so I have added a 'Movie Day' to my weekly agenda.  I wanted to create a break in the constant stream of 'work days' and take advantage of this generation's propensity toward video learning.  The first Movie Day was a hit; nearly all students were engaged in Hinduism videos and actively asking questions or making comments.  My education experiment will continue to evolve as I learn new things, see a need, and have conversations with my students.  However, there are some components to my class that will always remain:

No Textbooks or Static Resources--I hate to even use the T-word, in a 1:1 school it goes without saying that I won't be using the textbook.  I try to create or assemble digital, interactive resources.  
Authentic Activities--no worksheets or canned items.  Students need to feel authenticity; isn't this what we ask of them?  As teachers, we can collaborate and share materials, but we should modify things to fit our kids and teaching style. 
Intrigue--if we get our kids interested in learning, they can teach themselves anything.  Our job becomes infinitely easier when kids want to learn.
Relationship-based Classroom Management--if you build relationships with kids based on mutual respect, they will respond. Kids won't respond to long lists or rules, yelling, and impersonal sarcasm.  Its all about relationships. 
Progressive Assessment--turning in assignments and grading after-the-fact won't due anymore.  We need constant checking and conversations to evaluate our kids to guide them to higher levels.  One-on-one conversations are the ideal way to assess students and their progress. 

Infographic as an Assessment

Recently I read on Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything about using infographics as a 21st Century Tool assessment.  It really opened my eyes.  You have probably seen simple ones in the USA Today.  I am always looking for new ways for students to demonstrate understanding (assessment).   Anything that stresses creation and moves away from traditional quizzes and tests is a good thing.

http://www.schrockguide.net/infographics-as-an-assessment.html

I am usually interested in infographics when I see them; they are much more interesting than a simple paragraph of information with an accompanying pie chart.  Here are a few:
The Digital Classroom
Teens and Money
March Madness
Real Estate Predictions
The combination of images and data is eye-catching.  More importantly the design of an infographic requires a greater depth of knowledge than simply guessing A, B, C, or D. 

Below there are several web tools to help create a full infographic or a single image.  However, I found a Word document works great for low-budget infographics.  The the image format menu allows you to remove the background of an image and/or modify the color.  You can put text in a textbox and move it wherever position you like.  SmartArt and shapes give you more options and the zoom allows you to work with small details. I made an infographic of my class using Word as an example for my students.  I saved it as a PDF file.  I used PowerPoint and Google Docs to make an image and graph.  The other images were edited in a separate Word document I used as a sketchpad.  I formatted all the images and textboxes in front of text.  My students will be making one on the Great Wall of China... I will definitely share the results. 

Visual.ly

Glogster (edu)

Creately--for diagrams

Google Public Data

TouchGraph--for networks and web diagrams

Stat Planet--maps and graphs

Professional Development of the 21st Century

Professional development money is drying up fast.  Schools can no longer afford pricey conferences and expensive guest speakers.  Fortunately, we live in the era of private broadcasting.  Social networks and blogs are a great place to learn new pedagogy, assessment, and technology skills.  The days of a static classroom are over--using the same old crusty worksheets and activities.  The Digital Age is creating exponential growth, and we have to find cost effective ways to keep up. 

http://ingetang.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/connected_teacher.jpg

The term associated with this movement is PLN (Professional or Personal Learning Network) or PLC (Professional Learning Community).   This is the group of people or resources you rely on for help and professional growth.  Twitter can be a great way to build a PLN.  Google Reader is the best resource I use.  I search education and technology blogs and collect them in Reader.  There are many services to choose from such as Pinterest, Edublogs, and countless others.  You have to find what combination works for you, without overwhelming you. 

Professional development via a PLN is flexible, individualized, and self-paced--all ingredients of a 21st Century education.  Its also easy and free.  District and building administrators can find measures of accountability and collaboration to meet their expectations, but PLN/PLC are without a doubt the PD of the future. 

Creative Activities

Every educator is familiar with Benjamin Bloom's 1956 Taxonomy.  Ben can't take all the credit, the Taxonomy of Learning Objectives was the result of several conferences and committees designed to help educators understand the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dimensions of learning. Something many people don't know is that it has been revised.

http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/images/1/1e/Bloom_1.jpg

In the 1990's professionals from several fields of study came together to address 21st Century adaptations to the famous taxonomy.

The most important change is the highest level of thinking--creating.  Creating is define as "putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing". 

Its true that students must have the prerequisite levels to effectively create, but educators should make the creative level their focus for classroom activities.  When students create, they authentically demonstrate content knowledge.  In addition, creation develops more permanent memory anchors, which means students will internalize the content and remember it longer.  Creative projects also mean students must be authentic, so cheating isn't really a concern.  Creation also lends itself to collaboration--a 21st Century skill. Plus, students love to create. 

Obviously, technology lends itself to creation.  In fact, this is probably the main reason I am now an Apple computer advocate.  Garageband, iPhoto, and especially iMovie have unparallelled creative potential.  Similar web-based programs can be found such Prezi and SlideRocket. Regardless of the program, creation is the future.

The Next New Thing in Education

It seems like every time a new thing is introduced in education you hear one of the following:  "No. not another new thing to learn... its always something".  "We just learned (insert thing), now we have to learn this"?  "TTSP--this too shall pass".  We have all heard it.  I have said these things myself in the past.  I understand the feeling, but we have to change our attitude as educators in the Digital Age.  From the time of John Dewey until the Digital Age, changes in education were relatively small and incremental.  The Digital Age has caused an explosion of exponential change that is rippling chaotically through all facets of education--often from the bottom up.  Progressive educators now have a voice and an ability to assemble---digitally.

Content, pedagogy, assessment, professional development, classroom management, communication, administration--everything is rapidly changing.  The tremors of change have not shaken public education uniformly, but its only a matter of time.  The question is, are you going to do the shaking, or will you be shook?  I would rather do the shaking.  With an expectation of change on the horizon, I want to be a part of the changing, not sit idle and wait for someone to change me.

Our school has used Moodle in the past, then Google sites was introduced this year along with a few other web hosts, now Edmodo is becoming popular.  Some people are just now getting really comfortable with Moodle, and we are off to a new thing.  Fear not; this is a good thing, and its something that will never go away--change.  Do we need to radically shift our class with every new shake in education--of course not.  We should all maintain a general style, but we can never stop.

In fact, education is very similar to our wardrobe.  We all have a general style.  New fads are always springing up--we don't buy everything, but we must buy something.  We can't be afraid to change out of what is comfortable.  We risk the metaphorical style of cousin Eddie.  Is this how you want your teaching to look?

It never stops.  We are never "there".  We ask our kids to keep learning more, push themselves, go farther, sharping their skills--shouldn't we?  Our classrooms are learning laboratories, and we must be educational scientists, lest we find ourselves in a leisure suit.

Income and Education

Recently, several studies have been published concerning the income gap between rich and poor and how it relates to success in education.  I suppose we have the Great Recession and the election season to thank for bringing this issue to the forefront--where it needs to be.  I work in a school where about 70% of the families receive free or reduced lunch--a relatively high measure of poverty, so I see the relationship between income and education on a daily basis.

http://directaction.org.au/issue37/on_occupations

I once read that standardized test scores are a great way to measure one thing--the size of the houses in a school district.  Though hyperbolic, there is truth in this statement.  The link between income and education is probably stronger than in any time in recent history.  Why is this?  Why is the amount of money your parent(s) make such a determinate of your likely success in school?  One study gives a clue, "affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes".   This means that children from higher income homes are getting more life experiences.  Think of the implications of this...  more exposure to interesting geography, architecture, art, road trips, air travel, family vacations, museums, libraries, etc. All of these experiences expose kids to life's possibilities--careers, forms of success, literacy opportunities, and the general intriguing things about life.  All of this translates into a deeper and more intrinsic interest in learning and working hard for what you want.

What can we do as teachers to provide a counter balance?  We can't change their past, but we can affect their future.  We can create more intriguing learning experiences in our classroom.  We can build an inspiration to learn and rebuild a positive concept of their future.  We need to expose our kids to the amazing possibilities the world has to offer and cultivate their confidence so they have the courage to work hard for what they want.   Textbooks, worksheets, and standardized test scores will never break down the wall in the picture.  If we can get our kids excited about learning and working toward their future, the test scores will take care of themselves and that wall will crumble.

Data Informed-Good, Data Driven-Bad

I have already mentioned the obsessive nature some people have toward the quantification of learning.  In recent years, the term "data-driven" has become popular in education.  The idea is that the decisions we make in our classroom should be supported by solid numerical data.

Texas school's improvement coordinator (source unknown)

Again, you can't quantify learning.  Any empirical study of learning will fall short and give only a partial understanding of something far deeper than numbers.  Students are not just a collection of numbers (right).  A teacher's impact on a student's learning, psyche, and emotional well-being cannot be represented with a number.  To do so, is to insult our profession.  We are asked to be a teacher, parent, counselor, mentor, coach, etc. to our students, and some people want to judge us by a kid's score on one test?

There are other problems with being data-driven. It doesn't take a holistic view of the student or classroom. Any number of factors could explain a low score on a test; personal issues, test anxiety, bad questions, vocabulary issues, etc.  The data-driven mentality also breeds a certain type of gamesmanship in education, encouraging school leaders to only focus on the "bubble kids".  As my superintendent recently pointed out, ALL students are "at-risk", and to give special attention to a narrow portion of the student population only so they can pass a test pushes us farther from our mission statement.  Does this line up with our philosophy as educators?  Why pander to a bogus evaluation system?  Will constant remediation and gamesmanship inspire life-long learners? We should be data-informed, and driven only by needs of kids. 

Project-Based Learning

 The only thing better than my personal adventures in Experimenting in Education is sharing the experiment.  I am lucky enough to work with a fantastic group of teachers.  Our resident mad scientist at Wabash Middle School is an outstanding progressive educator.  Ryan Evans has enriched our school and profession in general.  He writes the following guest blog about project based learning:

"A huge part of what I do in my classroom is based upon the concept of project-based learning.  Since science itself is a process rather than just facts, project based learning lends itself well to science curriculum. For most project based learning units I start out with a focus question that we answer as a class by the end of the unit.  This question is specific and gives the students a purpose for learning the information since they can apply it to a real world situation.   

As the project progresses through a series of activities (labs, short information sessions, group collaboration, etc.) the students form an answer to the focus question.  The culminating experience for the project is the presentation to show what the students learned answering the focus question.  The presentation can be in various forms such as a multimedia created presentation to models created by more concrete items.  As the students present their information, I ask them specific questions related to focus question to make sure they understanding the concepts.  The grade is assigned using a rubric that they receive before the completion of the project. 

I also like to vary the structure of the projects throughout the year.  For some projects, students present their answer to the focus question to a panel of experts that deal with the problem trying to be solved.  For example, during a project that dealt with water quality of different rivers in the county, the students presented their findings to a group of water quality experts that judged the validity of their work.  For true project based learning I always keep the following constant:

1.     Students work in groups (most of the time assigned by me) learning how to collaborate effectively and how to think critically.

2.     Students create a presentation demonstrating their knowledge of the material by answering the focus question thus demonstrating their 21^st century skills through the use of technology." 

I am proud to call Ryan Evans a professional colleague, and fortunate to work with him.  He has been our local expert on project based learning (among other things) in the 7th grade.  Ryan's creativity and dedication have played a major role in the relatively ground-breaking initiatives from our team of teachers.  I look forward to my daughters being in his class.

Structuring Class

As adults in the workplace, we all have to manage our time.  We all have required activities, due dates, and a certain level of work time to finish our activities.  This juggling act requires skills.  Better for our kids to learn (and fail, if necessary) in middle school rather than later in life.   

Pic by: Kat Rodenas

My curriculum is organized into 4 units.  Each unit is divided into topics such as 'Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia'.  In each topic, I have created several activities.  Students work their way through the activities.  During the first semester, I let them work at their own pace.  They had to finish all activities, but they could work at their own pace.  If they didn't finish an activity they got a zero in the grade book.  I assumed grades would motivate them.  Turns out, a surprising number of kids don't care about their grade.  This semester, each activity has a prescribed number of days until it is due.  After the due date, students stay after school until the activity is completed. They value their time far more than they value their grades. 

When we start a new topic, I introduce the topic with an intriguing aspect to get the students hooked.  Most days I teach a short mini-lesson that usually matches up with the activity students should be working on.  When we finish a topic the kids take a diagnostic so I can see how effective the activities and mini-lessons were.

Students can mess around in class and work at home, work hard in class and have no homework, they can finish early and enjoy some free time, or waste time and stay after school; the choice is theirs.  They need to learn to manage their time.  Students move through the activities sequentially, where as in Joey Till's math class, the students pick the order of their projects.  This allows me the time to grade everything one-on-one and spend time with the students that need it the most.  In addition, I'm not holding back students that are motivated and learn quickly.  I spend my day walking around helping students, reteaching, checking, and grading. 

After my student-teacher leaves, I plan on building in a few days that won't count as "work days".  Friday will be "video day".  We will learn with videos, movie clips, etc. and discuss the topics.  This will break up the monotony of constantly moving from one activity to the next.  Like the blog's name suggests... its all an experiment.

Assessing "Math"

For much of educational history, the words "math class" were often said with a glum attitude.  No one ever puts an exclamation point after the words 'math class'.  (Today I went to math class!)  This is tragic because math teaches thinking and logic--something our kids desperately need and the workforce demands. However, dozens of the same math problem every night, lack of real world application, inauthentic worksheets, and rigid solving methods have put a bad taste in the mouth of students when they hear the word math.  Fortunately, many progressive educators are changing this, and Wabash Middle School is lucky to have one. 

When Joey Till designed his class website, he called it "7th Grade ???????".  He didn't even like to use the word math because of the historic negative connotation.  You won't find any worksheets here.  His class is basically made up of math journal projects and math game scores.  He writes the following guest blog:

"Kids in my class are assessed in two ways: 

My students work on individual projects.  When they are finished they “grade out” with me.  They show me their project.  As I am checking their presentation, they explain the math steps to solve a problem or they explain the math vocabulary they learned.  I close their computer and ask a couple of questions to make sure they can verbally explain the math.  They assign a grade based on the quality of the project, how well they understand the information, and timeliness of their work.

On “Game Day” my students work on math games or online activities that they choose from a list.  At the end of class, the students “grade out”.  On these days, the kids write me a little note and give themselves a grade that justifies why they deserve it.  The grade is based on how hard they worked and their overall production during class.

 
The students in Joey's class personalize every project and find the math in everyday parts of life that interest them.  They stay intrigued and engaged and.... actually look forward to math class.  It even seems weird to type.  Traditionalists might be wondering... "yeah, but how do you know they are learning, what about standardized tests"?  On the last Acuity test (a standardized test similar to ISTEP), 75% of Joey's class are predicted to pass ISTEP.  This is equal to the 2011 state average by the end of the year.  I really look forward to seeing where Joey's experiments will take him in the future.

A Different Take on Assessment

The Digital Age easily lends itself to creating numerical data.  It seems people want to quantify every part of society, especially education.  In fact, we seem to only assign value to quantitative data and shrug at qualitative data as being quaint.  In truth, you can't quantify learning.  You can quantitatively measure a student's score on a single test on a single day, but that, in no way, captures the complete experience of learning in a class, from a teacher, or in a school. 

I have come to realize that grades, just like numbers, do not represent learning.  Maybe they represent completion rates, but not learning.  Inspired by people such as Mark Barnes, I have completely changed how I assess this year, and so far I love it.

When a student completes an activity, we sit down together to assess their work.  We first look at the requirements.  I ask some questions about their work.  I ask them some content-related questions to make sure they understand the material.  The student chooses a fair grade we can both agree on.    I move on to the next student.  While students are waiting to be graded they move on to the next activity, depending on the day.
Students are pretty harsh when they grade themselves.  I have to raise the grade 9 out of 10 times because they are so hard on themselves.  I'm trying to encourage self-assessment and meta-cognitive skills.

When we finish a "topic" (similar to a section or chapter) in my class, we take a brief diagnostic.  The diagnostic is set of 10-15 question on my eInstruction clickers.  I don't take a grade on this, I just use this as a measuring stick for me to evaluate the effectiveness of my activities and mini-lessons.  Generally they kids score 70-90 percent.  This happens about every 2-3 weeks.  Other than my diagnostics, I HAVE NOT GIVEN A SINGLE QUIZ OR TEST THIS YEAR!

In the past I wasted so much class time quizzing, reviewing, testing, studying... not learning and definitely not inspiring a love for learning.  Cramming for the purpose of brief memorization is not learning.  Besides, the State does enough testing.  This assessment system is so much more personal.  Students are not simply dropping a piece of paper in a tray and forgetting it.  They know they will have to sit down with me and be accountable for their work.  It changes the whole dynamic of assessment and provides more time for more important endeavors such as learning and inspiration.