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At today’s staff meeting I wanted to help my staff understand the power of creating a PLN. Always trying to model what I believe in, I decided to have my PLN create the content rather than creating it myself. To this end I created a Google Doc, made it public, then used Twitter to ask my PLN to tell my staff why they should have one of their own. The result is below:
Please explain to our staff why you think every educator should have a PLN.
A PLN enhances opportunities to encourage, challenge, and support colleagues – no matter where they are in the world.
(Headings 2-6 from Tanya Rascola)
- Show this video : http://vimeo.com/10398759
- To learn with others
- Professional Development everyday (if you want)
- Challenge your thinking by blogging and putting your ideas out there
- To share your ideas and thinking with people like you and people very different from you.
- Efficiently connect to ideas, information, and people from wherever you are.
- To serve your students
- Have your own set of local, provincial, national and international pen pals
- Collaboratively plan lessons / units. Connect your students’ work with the work of other students around the world.
- To access dynamic resources
- Have greater access to resources, journals
- Stay more current in education
- Why reinvent when chances are someone, somewhere around the world has tried it and will be able to give you feedback on their experience
- To be plugged into the idea universe.
- To extend your learning base
- See and understand what is happening in other districts around BC and the world
- To be able to connect to people outside your normal sphere of contact and influence.
- Find out about conferences world-wide that are streamed and that you can attend virtually for free
- A PLN/social network is a major amplification of your ability to learn from and with others not possible in a purely face 2 face world.
- To stay engaged in education
- Be exposed to other (radical?) ideas
- Introduce a few of the tools: Twitter; LinkedIn; Google Docs; Skype
Your PLN:
Challenging u to (re)think old/new ideas; sharing resources, strategies, thoughts, feedback; connections w/ educators: local & global
During the staff meeting I started by tying 21st Century Skills and Personalized Learning (two big buzzes in our district (province) right now) into the work our school is doing on Project Based Learning, then talked about how a PLN is a great tool for improving practice. I had actually printed (yes, I know) the document created on the Google Doc and put it with the meeting agendas, when I told the staff that I didn’t actually create that, just asked for input for others I could tell that most people understood what I was meaning about the power of a PLN. Mission Accomplished!
I am sure the Google Doc will continue to be edited and updated. Feel free to access it here: Why a PLN?
Thanks again to @remi_collins, @bkuhn, @i_rober, @ms_michal and the many other anonymous members of my PLN who created my presentation for me – Good Work, you were well received and helped make my point!
It really surprised me that during a 5 month..vacation?..sabatical?…let’s go with adventure, away from work I didn’t have an itch to blog…I guess I should say ‘itch to blog here’ as I did blog here. I guesss that could be considered a good thing, as I managed to unplug (for the most part), turn off (disconnect) the blackberry and enjoy time as a new dad.
I guess I must really be back at work now as I am feeling the itch. I have now completly reconnected and am likely to get back on board soon. Most likely about Project Based Learning, Geocaching in Social Studies (I teach a class now, which is cool), and other admin stuff.
Soon, I promised myself, soon!
Below is my response to a recent post on Me myself and LLT entitled ‘When does a snapshot not get the whole picture”. Would love to hear others’ opinions…
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To begin, thanks for your post. This is a great topic and is open to so much interpretation. It is a far more complex question than just should we average marks to determine letter grades. For example: Should we use points (out of 10) or use performance standards? Are we actually assessing student ability (achievement) or are we assessing their effort? Should we mark homework? What does ‘0′ mean on an assignment?
Some (Joe Bower for example http://www.joebower.org) would argue that we shouldn’t be grading student work at all, instead we should be creating motivated learners who learn because they want to, rather than to impress their teacher or get an ‘A’.
Although I don’t know who was presenting to you I would imagine that the point they were trying to get across is that we should be reporting on how well our students are able to demonstrate understanding of the learning outcomes at the time we are creating the report.
Let’s take a P.E. example and say you are teaching your students how to do a layup. Take a student who starts out having never played basketball before and by the end of the term can do a proper layup (left and right handed) every time! By adding up their marks over the term the student has ‘earned’ a B, is this fair to the student, or are they being penalized for the fact that they needed to learn, and during this time did not do well on the assessments? What would this student need to do in order to earn an A? Would they need to have started the course being able to do a layup in order to get enough points to ‘earn’ an A?
Let’s take another student who starts the course able to complete a layup somewhat correctly most of the time. Could this student learn nothing all term long and ‘earn’ a B? Is this fair to this student, or are we teaching them that if they can already do something well enough to get by that they don’t need to continue learning?
I have heard many versions of the parachute packing example. I understand your disdain for this example if one student started out packing parachutes well and then didn’t do well on a summative assessment. However consider the following 5 day parachute packing course:
Day 1: Parts of a parachute
Day 1 Assessment: Label a Diagram of parts of a parachute Quit (5)
Day 2: Explain the function of each part
Day 2 Assessment: Function Quiz (5)
Day 3: Memorize the steps for packing a parachute
Day 3 Assessment: Written Steps for packing Quiz (5)
Day 4: How to store the materials for packing.
Day 4: Assessment of ability to identify correct storage Quiz (5)
Day 5: Packing a parachute
Day 5: Finals Exam – PACK A PARACHUTE (10)
Student 1 – 5/5 5/5 4/5 3/5 3/10 = 20/30
Student 2 – 3/5 4/5 3/5 4/5 6/10 = 20/30
Student 3 – 1/5 2/5 3/5 4/5 10/10 = 20/30
I have seen it with all sorts of explanations (Student 1 is the son of a fighter pilot who doesn’t study; Student 3 is from a single mom and was beaten by a dead beat dad, etc. etc. etc.) but the question at the end is always the same…Who do you want packing your parachute. And seriously…if the learning outcome is being able to pack a parachute how could you justify not giving Student 3 and A? Moreover how would you justify passing student 1 and sending them out to pack someone’s parachute.
What is often left out of the above example is the fact that the assessments used are flawed. As if the learning outcome is to be able to pack a parachute, that is what the assessment should be based upon, rather than knowing the names of the parts etc. etc. I wonder how often we do this as teachers? And I often ask myself how often I gave students marks for neatly colouring a map? (Everyone loves a neat map!)
As you noted in your post, the Math example is very tough and I think that we need to use some common sense when applying this concept to Math as some averaging is needed. However, instead of averaging the marks a student earns while learning each concept, we should look at the student’s ability to demonstrate understanding of each topic at the time of reporting. (This would also hold true, to a lesser extent, in other subjects)
My two cents…well maybe four,
Frank.
The Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) is British Columbia’s province-wide standardized assessment given to all grade 4 and grade 7 students each year. The tests have been a political firestorm as the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) has vehemently opposed their existence (and their member’s participation in them) and our provincial government has continued to publicize the results on a school by school basis. Although the Ministry of Education notes on their sites that these results should not be used in this way, they are taken by the Fraser Institute and used as the sole indicator in a ranking of B.C. schools; understandably schools in more affluent areas and private schools that only accept top academic students consistently are ranked as the best schools in the province.
A relatively neutral article about what the FSA is along with some advice for parents can be found here.
The negative side of the F.S.A. argument is well documented as the BCTF has put a tremendous amount of resources towards their anti-FSA campaigns.
Negative press, posts, and comments regarding the FSA’s and the Fraser Institute’s use of the results abound in the media and blogosphere of British Columbia. If you are interested in the reading a couple of well written articles I suggest the following:
With the above in mind I would like to suggest that there is a silver lining to the F.S.A. process and a positive way to use the results as a school.
This year the F.S.A. was administered between January 18th and February 26th. The marked tests (including 80 multiple choice answers, two short writing pieces, a long writing piece and two written numeracy problems) were returned to parents before the end of March. Most of these tests also passed over the desks of the teachers who teach the students before going home to parents. Although many teachers would prefer that the tests didn’t exist (as noted above) most who I spoke to took the time to look through the assessments of their individual students. Knowing that the tests are just a snapshot and only represent how each student was able to perform on a single (some would argue flawed) assessment they were used by teachers to get more data about the progress of their students. Some teachers even questioned some of the grades, trying to stick up for their students or wondering why a students was graded as high as they were. In this small way the F.S.A. has not only provided more feedback for teachers on how their students are doing, but has also given teachers an opportunity to reference their expectations of students with the provincials standards.
Once the F.S.A.’s have been marked there is also a tool available (F.S.A. Item Level Response Reports) to focus schools in on areas that their students’ struggled, if used properly this tool can really help to inform the educators in specific schools as to how they can best support their students learning. For example from looking at the data for 2009 I found that 57% of the 231 grade 7 students at my schools answered question 23 on the numeracy assessment incorrectly (this compares with an average of 34% of students answering each question incorrectly). This question focussed on the following aspect of the Numeracy Integrated Resource Package (Curriculum):
- Students were not able to estimate the volume of a right rectangular prism. They likely selected the response that most closely corresponded to the sum of the length, width and height.
This information can then be taken to our school’s numeracy committee to discuss why our students would perform so poorly on this questions. Possible reasons could include:
- The question was poorly worded, and ultimately flawed (this may be the case as I also learned that 57% of students province wide answered this question incorrectly).
- This material was not covered yet this year and many students did not remember it from the previous year.
- This is a tough concept for students to remember, and the formula for volume of a prism is not committed to their memory.
- This is an area that our students are struggling with and we need to look at alternate ways to teach this as a school.
Whatever the reason for our students’ poor achievement on this question by engaging in the professional conversation around this (and conducting our own action research into this) we are likely to have benefited the learning environment in our school, and ultimately will impact the teaching in the classrooms of our school.
Although I place little credence in the validity of our school’s F.S.A. results to rank the learning that goes on in our school, I do believe that if these assessments can create authentic professional conversations about the areas in which our student are and are not achieving, it is our duty as educators to use this data and engage in the beneficial conversations.
Do I like F.S.A.’s? Not really.
Do I like what the Fraser Institute does with the F.S.A.’s scores? Definitely not!
As an educator should I use all data that is available to benefit the learning opportunities available to the students in my school? Of course I should!
Over a month ago the son of a colleague of mine had very serious accident at home. He reached up and pulled a large T.V. on himself causing him to become trapped and concussing himself quite seriously. Although he was hospitalized for a few days and is on ‘light duties’ (or as light duties as a very active 5 year old can be on!) he is going to be alright in the long run. After this incident the teacher involved sent out a letter to our staff reminding us to look around our houses and ensure that our kids were safe. I read the letter and unfortunately must have had a ‘not me’ mentality!
 Last night I was cooking dinner with my 2 1/2 year old son. As usual he pulled a chair over and climbed up to the counter to help me assemble the ingredients. “Daddy, I put the mrushrms in!” After which I cooked the sauce and put on the pasta. When the pasta was ready to be drained I turned off the element and grabbed the pot off the stove. As I turned to drain the pasta my son climbed back up on the chair without me knowing and just before he started screaming I heard “Daddy I stir!”.
He reached to the back of the stove and put his hand on the element I had just taken the pasta off! Luckily, after a quick trip to the doctor, is doesn’t appear as though the burns are not going to leave lasting scars, but he has blisters on each finger and two across the palm of his hand. I was totally freaked and have now taken my colleagues warnings to heart! Time to make my house SAFE!
Knowing that I, and my son, are very lucky that his injuries are relatively minor and that things could have been a lot worse I ask you to do as I say and not as I have done. Please listen to those of us who preach safety for kids. Please look around your house and ask yourself “what could they hurt themselves on if I wasn’t watching!” Please understand that it only takes then a second to move from the floor to a chair and understand how many more things are at ‘chair height’ than floor height! Please also understand that it is ok to eat Eggo’s for breakfast once in a while, especially when you have a burnt right hand and are being forced to eat with your left!
It has been way too long since I last planned a formal lesson, however my Assessment Project has got me back into the classroom, and thus planning lessons. The fun part is that I am trying to integrate the assessment and differentiation practices that I am learning with the teachers in our school. Here is my basic plan for tomorrow. I will let you know how it goes, and would love input with insights in the following areas:
- Is there evidence of authentic “assessment for learning?”
- Are the questioning techniques uses safe and do they maximize student think time? (Are all students preparing to answer each question?)
- Are there any other strategies (Cooperative Learning, Concept Attainment or other) that may have been useful / may be useful next time?
**You must know this before reading the lesson**
- There are three students who are currently being pulled out of the class to receive intensive resource support with basic Math skills. As the support is available right now, we decided that it is best for them to receive the help and miss part of the fractions unit. The resource teacher will cover an adapted version of this content.
- There are four students who are working on an independent Wiki project about our fractions unit (I am sure I will blog about it soon). They are in the class but are using laptops.
- This is the second lesson on adding fractions with like denominators. The core teacher taught the first lesson and I am teaching the second “going deeper lesson”. While I teach this lesson the core teacher will pull out 4-5 student who she believes will struggle with the next concept (subtracting fractions with like denominators) and will pre-teach this concept. The following day she will teach this concept to the whole group.
- Therefore I am teaching about 16 average students in this class.
(These are my rough notes, not really a classic lesson format, just ideas of what I will be doing during the lesson)
Objective:
My objective is to have the students connect with the previous lesson and then extend their thinking by figuring out how to explain why we add the numerators when adding fractions and don’t add the denominators. By developing this level of understanding and the ability to explain it, they will be more likely to understand that they need to find like denominators before adding / subtracting fractions with different denominators.
Intro:
I will start by explaining to the students why I am teaching today as I have not taught them before. I will probably allow them to come up with one question about me as a teacher per pair and ask it, just to let them know a little about me as a teacher.
Learning Intentions:
“At the end of this lesson, you are going to put your books away and answer this question, on this piece of paper: “Please explain why you add the numerators when adding fractions and don’t add the denominators?”
Link to previous lesson:
“In your partners decide who is the numerator and who is the denominator”
“I am going to give you 30 seconds to discuss what your teacher taught you last class with a partner. Then I will randomly pick a few people to give me an answer.”
Get answers. Asking for the “numerator from this group to answer” and the “denominator from that group”
Instruction
“Ok, here are three questions to do with your partner, answer them, and come up with an explanation for me as to why I chose these questions, in this order, when most pairs are done, I will choose one numerator and one denominator to answer each question and then one of each to explain why you think I asked the questions in this order.”
(questions on overhead) 2/8 + 3/8; 3/4 + 1/4; and 5/16 + 15/16
Choose students to answer questions.
More Instruction / Cooperative Learning:
“Numerators choose your favourite consonant, write it down, Denominators choose your favourite vowel, and write it after the consonant, Numerators choose another consonant, write it down, denominators choose another vowel, write it down. This is your team name…write it on the top of both of your pages” (Example. “HIRA”, “NOHA”, “JARY” etc)
When I say go I want everyone to take 2 full minutes to try to write out the answer to your end of class quiz on this piece of paper. No talking, laughing, no smiling, no breathing…ok, fine, breathing is allowed – but that’s it!”
“Start”…”What are you doing, I didn’t say go”…”Go”
After 2 minutes…”Ok, now denominators you have 30 seconds to explain your answer to the numerators…numerators you must listen, no talking at all” 30 seconds pass “numerators you now have 30 seconds to talk” 30 seconds pass
Discuss your ideas with your partner and make any changes you would like to your answer.
Ok, everyone put your sheet on this table.
Anonymous Peer Assessment
I hand the sheets out at random…”Take 2 minutes with your partner and grade the two papers you have with a 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 based on these criteria”
0 – No response (blank)
1 – Attempt, but lacks understanding of concepts (adding fractions)
2 – Understands adding fractions but poor reasoning
3 – Clear reasoning, sensible and straightforward
4 – Clear, concise, easy to follow, well explained
Hand them in, and I call out team names to get them back. Give each pair a minute to look them over…ask students to put everything away, give out quiz.
Assessment
Collect “quiz” before end of block.
Help…
Please Help…
This is probably what you expected after reading the title, but wait!
Thank Goodness…
Am I ever glad I’m hooked on Twitter!
This morning I found myself out of the office, sitting on a BC Ferry (A nice one at that) with my computer. First I deleted about 2000 messages from my inbox (felt great) then I started catching up with my RSS feeds. It was awesome time, I read some great stuff! Unfortunately I was offline! Ok, not completely, I had email on my phone, but limited internet, and NO TWITTER! Usually I read, and Tweet at the same time, sharing the great stuff that i find! Instead I was limited to flagging and tweeting later, once the moment is long gone! How sad!
I just looked in my out-box, there are 21 messages ready to send! Many of these are to myself to follow links, and send information later. What a chore it will be!
This very post must be posted later.
Tomorrow I have a meeting at 1 PM with my phone rep. Better make sure the new phone supports Twitter, because thankfully I’m Hooked!
@fpearse
It seems like every year I am faced with a teacher who wants to keep a grade 8 student in Middle School for another year. Usually these requests are for one of two reasons:
- The student is not working hard, and thus is not meeting learning outcomes.
- The teacher believes that the students is not socially or emotionally ready for high school. (And they aren’t meeting learning outcomes) (1)
 Our province has a pretty hard and fast rule that students are kept ‘age appropriate’, meaning that we don’t ‘fail’ students and instead move them forward with their peer group and attempt to remediate their programs in the higher grade. This usually continues until about grade 9 or 10 when the student actually starts failing individual courses and either drops out or is moved to a ‘non-academic’ stream and works towards a leaving certificate instead of a grade 12 diploma.
Usually the motivation for failing students that fall into the first category is in one form or another revenge. These teachers are so frustrated with these students that they want to keep them back to ‘make them do the work’. “How can we possibly move them to grade 9 when they haven’t done the work I assigned them?” I completely disagree with this line of thought and believe that it is in the best interest of the student to move them forward. I believe that the social stigma involved with failing them will most likely not lead to a turn around in their work and will lead to disengagement from school and ultimately dropping out. When moved forward many of these students repeat their same behaviour in high school and either don’t finish high school or have a long and arduous experience. Others however do figure it out, they don’t necessarily become straight A students, but they manage to get by, and with support can easily catch up enough to get through.
Category two is much more challenging for me than category one. Often the teacher asking about this type of student will ask “how can we send this student off to grade 9 when we know they will not be able to establish any social connections, will lose all of their supplies and work, will not take care of any of their responsibilities, and will ultimately fall flat on their face?” – Good Question! These teachers are asking the question from the heart, worrying about how their student will survive the coming year. Although the local high schools are much larger than our middle school I do know they are full of caring and dedicated educators who will help to prevent these students from falling flat on their faces and if they do fall, will help to pick them back up and get them on track.
The important question to ask about this type of student is “what will the benefit of keeping them in middle school for another year be?” Will this student who has been socially inept or an organizational disaster or who has the maturity of a grade 3 suddenly transform into a well adjusted grade 8 student on their second attempt? Will they finally get it, and realize that they need to grow up and become normal, like the rest of the students in the class? Or will they just keep on being themselves, ignoring the lessons going on in the class, ostracizing themselves from their new classmates and putting off the inevitable for one more year?
I think that the right answer to this question is that there is no right answer. The student should move on with their peers, although we know they will likely struggle during the transition, and their chance of failing in grade nine is high. The student should also be kept back in a safer environment, although we know the risks of further social isolation and the chances of a miracle turn around are minimal. Luckily there is no decision to make – the student moves on and stays age-appropriate. But is this truly in the best interest of every child?
Unfortunately the research appears to verify this conundrum. According to “Critical Issues: Beyond Social Promotion and Retention – Five Strategies to help students succeed” retention (Failing) “negatively impacts students’ behavior, attitude, and attendance”, while “social promotion undermines students’ futures when they fail to develop critical study and job-related skills.” The authors go on to articulate how recent research “indicates that that alternative strategies, which strike at the root causes of poor performance, offer genuine hope for helping all students succeed. These strategies are: intensify learning, provide professional development to assure skilled teachers, expand learning options, assess students in a manner to assist teachers, and intervene in time to arrest poor performance.”
My issue now become what do you do after putting in these supports and interventions in place and the student still doesn’t meet the learning outcomes? What are our options? Where can we turn to support this student?
Notes
(1) Students who are not capable of meeting the learning outcomes are not included here as they would either have adaptations to help them meet the outcomes (L.D. students) or would be working on modified outcomes based on their abilities (intellectual deficiencies).
This is part two in my Assessment series. Please see part 1 here.
The original project I spoke of in my first post has been partially placed on hold (until the beginning of April). The students in the class have become very interested in their current project which involves each of them teaching a lesson on a different event in a history timeline the class has created. What I love about what the classroom teacher has done though is that she is teaching them how to teach a lesson and not assessing them just on the lesson, but on how well they implement the demonstrated teaching strategies to ‘teach’ their classmates. As part of this project I am going into the classroom to teach the class a lesson on Blooms’ Taxonomy and teach them how to understand where they have their ‘students’ working on the taxonomy. The classroom teacher put it really well already when she told her students that if their I-Touch could do it – then it was probably near the bottom of the taxonomy. I think it has been about 4 years since I have actually planned and taught a lesson, so it should be an interesting time. What I love most about this project is that while the teacher is helping the students to understand the relevance of different historical events she is also furthering their own understanding of how they learn.
I have also started work on a second project, with another teacher in the school. This particular teacher was wanting to explore how to differentiate her instruction in Math while covering the topic of fractions and decimals. Specifically she wants to find a way to get three students who really struggle in Math some sense of accomplishment while working in the classroom setting (rather than having them work on a completely different Math program). She also wanted to find a way to provide meaningful activities for 3 students who were very advanced in Math (one does Calculus with his mom on the weekends) without just giving them work from higher grades.
We are working on adapting one of David Spendlove’s strategies from the book “Putting Assessment for Learning into Practice” to help build the confidence of our three struggling learners. Our basic strategy will be this:
- Before each concept it taught, use a resource teacher to pull these three students and pre-teach the concept.
- Introduce the concept to the rest of the class with the three students present
- Create safety in the class by using a cooperative learning / questioning strategy that always allows for think time (and hopefully talk time) before questions are posed.
- Use the “Planned Intervention” strategy from Spendlove to specifically target questions to the three students we are focusing on during the lesson.
- Have all students complete work at the basic level of the concept.
- The following class have the three targeted students work with the resource teacher on the next concept while the rest of the class ’goes deeper’ with the original concept.
- Repeat the same process with each concept.
It is hoped that this strategy will accomplish the following:
- Increase the learning / decrease the frustration of the three struggling learners
- Help these three learners develop some confidence in Math class (they know the answers to the questions)
- Allow the rest of the class to learn the basic concepts and apply them at a slightly higher level
To help meet the needs of our high achieving students we have set them up a Wiki library on the class webpage. During the concept introduction lessons these students will be working on developing the wiki library to contain each of the following:
- A new (not from the book) explanation of each concept.
- A new (not from the book) concrete example of each concept.
- A link to a website or web-resource that can be used to practice this concept.
Our hope in this task is that it will force these students to look at concepts that are relatively simple to them and really understand the mathematical processes that are present, analyze these processes and come up with their own explainations for them. These students will also participate in the second half (Going Deeper) portion of each topic and will have an opportunity to share the progress of the wiki with the rest of the class to use as a study aid.
More updates to follow I am sure…Questions, comments, suggestions are always welcome and encouraged.
As I organize myself for the upcoming week I am interested to see what effect the end of the Olympics has on the 700+ students at my school. Since we held a 6:45 AM celebration on Feb 11th to watch the Olympic Torch pass our school our students have been completely ’olympicized’. I didn’t truly understand how into it they were until I was setting up my laptop/projector in the cafeteria the morning after Virtue and Moir won gold in Ice Dance.
I asked a group of grade 8 boys what they wanted to see from the night before and the first thing I heard was, “Do you have those figure skaters that won gold last night Mr. Pearse?”
We threw a school Olympics and had each class completely engrossed in supporting their adopted country, and after mentioning that we wanted everyone to wear red and white on the Thursday afternoon announcements had about 90% of the kids do it on Friday (ok, this was only about 10 more kids than would have worn it without the announcement, but it was pretty cool!).
So what happens now? Sure tomorrow will be about hockey. “Did you see that game” “What a play by Crosby” “Looooouuuuu!”…and as per A reponser to ‘A Question on Teacher Attire’ I will appropriately be wearing my Team Canada jersey tomorrow.
But what about the next day? Our student are only 11-13, they have never been so close to something this big before. This afternoon my entire city (a Vancouver suburb) was in party mode, there were people dancing with Canadian Flags on major streets, fire trucks with horns and sirens going just for fun, it was awesome.
So what now?
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