Sites Worth Sharing

• 9 of the coolest educational videos from TED-Ed | memeburn

• iPads in Schools – LiveBinder

• 25 Ways To Use iPads In The Classroom by Degree of Difficulty | Edudemic

• Rocking iPad Ideas for the Classroom | Staffroom HQ

• Search Education – Google - Materials on this site help students become better at searching for things on Google.

• Teach Children Well: “Khan” Project: Day Three

• Free Technology for Teachers: Try Crocodoc for Collaboratively Annotating PDFs

• Free Technology for Teachers: Searchy Pants – A Safe Search Engine for Kids - Searchy Pants is a search engine for students.  In this post, there is also a slide show showing how to create your own search engine within a blog.

• Spread The Word: Free Google-Sponsored #EdTech Conference May 2nd | Edudemic

• Blogs | The Happy Scientist - Science Photo of the Day

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My Aha – Learning Objectives alongside Success Criteria

As you know, in our district, we began asking teachers to post objectives several years ago.  Right at the beginning, some rightfully said, “Posting objectives won’t help students.”  They were correct in that the mere act of posting learning objectives doesn’t change anything.  What we worked on was communicating the objectives, or learning goals, to students.  The act of posting the objectives was really just a reminder to teachers to talk about the objectives with students at the beginning of the lesson.

Fast forward to this year…several teachers and I are learning about Rick Stiggins’ Assessment Literacy work and implementing the 7 Assessment Literacy strategies into our classrooms.  We are already noticing changes in adult and student behaviors (with regards to teaching/learning) as a result of this work.

Assessment Literacy aims at including students in the role of learning.  The 7 Strategies of Assessment Literacy are:

1. Where are you trying to go?
   1. Provide students with a clear and understandable statement of the learning target.
   2. Use examples and models of strong and weak work.
2. Where are you now?
   1. Offer regular descriptive feedback.
   2. Teach students to self-assess and set goals.
3. How can you get there?
   1. Design lessons to focus on one learning target or aspect of quality at a time.
   2. Teach students focused revision.
   3. Engage students in self-reflection, and let them keep track of and share their learning.

In an Assessment Literate classroom, students should be able to answer the 3 questions above.  An “aha” for many of us participating in this study group (roughly 200 teachers and administrators across the District) was the effectiveness of the first strategy.  Put in context, providing students with clear learning targets, in student-friendly language, made a  lot of sense and students responded well.  Earlier when the District told us to do this same thing, there was no context for it.  Hence, teachers did not see the importance of it or the relevance of it.  

Currently, I am reading Visible Learning for Teachers, by John Hattie.  He, too, writes about the importance of learning objectives.  ”The more transparent the teacher makes the learning goals, the more likely the student is to engage in the work needed to meet the goal” (p 46).  Those of us in the Assessment Literacy pilot know this to be true.  Hattie shares research that says that when students know the learning goals (objectives or learning targets) at the beginning of the lesson, students’ confidence in achieving the goals will be higher.

According to Hattie, learning goals should be accompanied by success criteria – “a way of knowing that the desired learning has been achieved” (p 47).  My first thought was…Brilliant!  My second thought was…Duh!  Why wasn’t this obvious to me before?  Not only should we share with students what they are learning, but also we should share how they will know they are successful in their learning.  This also goes right along with the 7 strategies of Assessment Literacy.  By listing the success criteria next to the learning target (or at least thinking about them and communicating them), we will have to think about the level of thinking (whether using Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge) at which the lesson is.  The activities in our lesson will also more likely be aligned to our learning objective and success criteria.

Hattie talks about the 5 criteria of learning goals and success criteria.  Below I will list each criteria and some of my take aways from the book on each:

1. Challenge – objectives need to be challenging to each student.  While teachers usually assess the challenge level of the activity, students assess the challenge level by whether they think they can complete the task.  Challenges need to be appropriate to each student; this is why differentiation is so important.  The more challenging the goal, the more powerful formative feedback is to a child.  Cognitive dissonance is important for students to learn – don’t avoid it!
2. Commitment – students need to be committed to their learning.  However, unless goals are challenging to students, students won’t be committed, or engaged, in their learning.  So, challenging goals are a prerequisite for engagement.  And the more engaged/committed a student is in one’s learning, the better one’s performance will be.
3. Confidence – it’s crucial that students feel confident that they can learn the objective.  This confidence may come from other students, the teacher, or past learning experiences.
4. Student expectations – Hattie found the highest effect on learning was “self-reported grades.”  Self-reported grades is when students state what they think they earned on a given project.  An interesting note was that the researchers found that minority students and low-achieving students were not good at this; they usually predicted their performance at a much lower level.  Furthermore, over time, these students begin to believe that their lower estimates of their performance are accurate measures.  Hattie recommends that teachers spend time helping these students calibrate their predictions with their actual performance.  Time spent on calibration was much more effective than time spend on rewarding improved performance.  Communicating rubrics to students ahead of time with challenging, but appropriate, expectations and providing timely feedback are crucial here.
5. Conceptual understanding – Understanding can be broken down into 3 levels: surface; deep; and conceptual.  Surface level learning is related to one or many ideas whereas deep level learning is about relating ideas or extending ideas.  I think you could apply Ciardiello’s Levels of Questioning to this as well; Memory and Convergent levels of questions would be more at the surface level whereas Divergent and Evaluative levels of questions would be more at the deep level.  Conceptual learning is the combination of surface and deep learning.  In research Hattie has been involved in, they found that most tests are dominated by surface level questions.  They suggested that teachers use or make tests that have at least 30% of the questions at the surface level and at least 30% of the questions at the deep level.

For the Sake of Learning

Several of our teachers and I are participating in an Assessment Literacy pilot based on Rick Stiggins‘, Jan Chappuis‘, and Steve Chappuis‘ work.  Our building’s team of teachers in the pilot met one morning this week to share what’s working and what’s not.  As often surfaces in meetings focused on student achievement, the topic fell upon those students who aren’t motivated to learn.  From there, the the talk turned to grades and honor roll.  As teachers shared their concerns and frustrations, I found myself writing down a few questions:

• How do we get students to learn for the sake of learning…NOT for grades, honor roll, state exams, etc?
•  How frequently do we – teachers – mention to students grades, honor roll, state exams, etc?
• Are we the reason our students aren’t motivated to learn for the sake of learning?

A couple of days later, I read T. Henriksen’s blog post “Letter Grades and Learning,” in which she reflects on how her students shared with her that letter grades inhibit their learning.  She poses the idea of automatically giving her students A’s and lists reasons why.

On the surface, we want to dismiss her idea because we can’t get rid of grades.  But…WHAT IF we did give all students A’s?  I think we often get stuck on the reasons why we shouldn’t or can’t do something and let that take over a conversation.  Instead, let’s focus our discussions on WHAT IF?  What would actually happen if we did give all students A’s?  I’ve started a list of possibilities off the top of my head.  What do you think?  As you reflect on this over the next several days, weeks, year, please add to my list.  If you come across any examples, also add that to the list.  In my version of this dream world of giving all students A’s, we would still be assessing using detailed, analytic scoring guides based on standards and objectives.  But this assessment would be focused on student learning and helping students set goals to get to the next level of their learning…for the sake of learning.

While current policy prevents us from doing this, I know there are brave education pioneers out there who have tried/are trying such things.  I wonder if their students are learning for the sake of learning.

Eduwin

Student/Teacher Engagement

Dear Kristi,

With regards to my absence from our blog as of late…it’s May.  Enough said!

I recently read The Video Game Model and Education which summarizes a longer blog by Mary Beth Hertz focusing on how video games engage children so well.  More specifically, in video games, children will hit the “retry” button repeatedly without worries about making mistakes, games always provide immediate feedback, and games have specific objectives with lots of smaller objectives as children work on mastering the game’s final objective.  Hertz posited that we, educators, should learn from this and apply these principles to our daily instruction with students.

I agree whole-heartedly with this.  We always express to kids that without mistakes, we would never learn anything.  I observe teachers model making mistakes in front of their students; usually, they are real mistakes and the teachers model appropriate reactions to them expressing that we all make mistakes and this is how we learn.  Yet, kids are still afraid to make mistakes in class.  Why is this?  Might it be the emphasis we put on grades? Might it be not wanting to look foolish in front of peers?  If we did a better job of  creating a community in our classrooms, would students take more risks even if that meant making mistakes?

Feedback drives learning, especially when it’s specific and timely.  The quicker students can get it, the better.  In games, the feedback is usually immediate.  (That’s one of the reasons I’ve started questioning the value of literacy corners – due to time constraints, it’s hard to provide immediate feedback to students).  I think it’s safe to assume that if students are receiving feedback immediately when they learn, then they would be receiving a lot of feedback daily.  We, teachers, all get frustrated with those students that shut down when receiving feedback.  If students received immediate, specific feedback as frequently as they do in video games, would they shut down less?  Would they use the feedback to do better quicker because they are receiving so much feedback?  (Important Note: for feedback to be effective, it needs to be objective)

Not only can children always state the objective of the video games they love, but they can do it in their own words and very specifically.  They can also tell you everything they must do to achieve the objective.  This goes for all ages of children.  Can our students always do this for each and every lesson we teach?  Can our students do this on every assignment or activity they work?

I am asking a lot of questions.  People used to complain that I would answer their questions by asking more questions.  However, I don’t think there is a simple answer to how we can get students more engaged.  Yes, there are a lot if ideas…but the hard part is making those ideas a reality.

I pose these thoughts and questions about student engagement because I believe the same questions and ideas are relevant to the question you asked in your last entry: Do you have any tricks to bring along those (adults in schools) who simply do not want to hear what you are preaching (importance of adult learning – i.e. professional development)?

In each question I asked above (and some of the statements), substitute “teachers” or “administrators” for “children” or “kids” or “students.”  Substitute “teaching” every time you see “learning.”  Substitute “grades” for “evaluations.”  You see, I think the same logic applies, the same questions apply, and the same rules of engagement apply to adults as they do to children.  In order to get the adults in our schools to “hop on the train” you refer to, we need to create a community where it’s not only okay to make mistakes, but where mistakes are expected.  We need to create a community where immediate and specific feedback is the norm.  We need to create a community where everyone knows and can explain the big objective and the smaller objectives.  We (teacher leaders and administrators) need to create a train where everyone is running to jump aboard.

From what I’ve heard and read, the book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck, might be a good resource on this topic.  It’s on my summer reading list.  So, I’m sure you will hear more about it in the months to come.

Love,

Eric

Hello Stranger

Dear Eric,

Okay, I am just as bad as you.  When you set the goal to blog once a week, I commented that I would be doing it more often.  Now, here it has been, let’s just say a while.  As you know, this research paper is weighing me down and filling my every waking moment.  I am nearing the end of this journey though.  (For those of you not living in my house, I am currently a mentor through a local university in the fellowship program.  It is a terrific program that pulls an experienced teacher out of the classroom for a year to mentor two first year teachers.  As part of the experience, alongside with my fellows, I am to conduct an action research project and then write a research paper about it.  My project’s question was:  What would happen if teachers received weekly professional development? )

You now have my paper in your hands to work on revising and editing.  While this is a bit nerve-racking, to have someone, particularly you, scrutinizing my baby, I am excited for you to see the results.  I was pleasantly surprised to see upon data analysis that I had made a change in the teachers at my school.  In the day-to-day battles of school, I did not believe that I would have such positive findings.  That is the part I am definitely anxious for you to see.

Here is my question for you.  Being the perfectionist that I am, I want everyone to jump on the “I want to be continually improving as a teacher” train.  I had one grade level in particular that was resistant from beginning to end and made little growth.  This is no different from being in a classroom and encountering those resistant students.  However, with students, I felt equipped with a bag of tricks to address this.  I have heard people in my own building comment that as far as those resisting go, you just have to leave them behind and hope they jump on the train.  That seems like a rather bleak view.  Do you have any tricks to bring along those who simply do not want to hear what you are preaching? 

XOXOXO,

Kristi

Word Clouds

Dear Kristi,

If the only thing one is using word clouds for is decoration, then they are a waste of time.  We don’t have time for instructional fluff, as I like to call it.  I think teachers should ask themselves of the purpose of all activities they have students do, especially when using technology applications and websites.  That being said, I believe teachers can find purposeful uses of word clouds.  Below are some good links to resources for uses of word clouds:

• Hardy Leung’s 101 Ways to Use Tagxedo; if you’re not familiar with it, Tagxedo is one of many word cloud generators available.  Some of the ideas include:
• Resources for Wordle - thank you @KathyPerret for this site

I think you will agree that the rigor will be higher if the word cloud is the end product, possibly an assessment.  A good analytical scoring guide can also help raise the rigor.

Love,

Eric