Notes on the whiteboard

QR re-revisited

2012-02-09T19:59:00.000-05:00

http://qrvoice.net/#id=tS5ZsH

This website has an app that will take what you type in, create a QR code for it, and, when you scan the code, play the text-to-voice audio. That's pretty cool.

My next research project

2012-01-22T15:55:00.000-05:00

...will be entitled, "A comparison of remediation strategies to behavioristic barriers in the linguistic transfer from L2 input to L2 intake."

The subtitle will be, "Why won't Spanish students just LISTEN?!?"

In slightly less silly news, Apple had their big "education" reveal on Thursday. They revealed a new, upgraded iBooks, which will allow multi-touch digital textbooks. This brings us one step closer to a world in which our textbooks talk back to us. They also revealed a program called iBooks Authors, which allows anyone to turn anything into a multi-touch digital textbook. This brings us one step closer to a world in which textbook companies are merely the biggest of the publishers, and not the only sources of organized material. Hopefully, this will cause them to a) critically re-examine their business model and reorganize into smaller, more flexible publishing companies with increased focus on high-quality, variable-use peripherals, and less focus on giving students pre-chewed information and "higher-order thinking" questions that don't actually relate to anything in the textbooks, or b.) collapse underneath their own weight.

I look forward to playing with Authors, but I need the next generation of the Mac OS before I can download and play with it. It's on the to-do list, though, possibly for the afternoon.

Groupthink and education

2012-01-16T19:49:00.000-05:00

In "The Rise of the New Groupthink" (New York Times, tiered subscription model) by Susan Cain, the author argues that for a variety of tasks, solitude is the best mode of working. Despite this, business and education press ahead with having people work in groups. The takeaway of the article is the line, "If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority," quoting organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham.

I'm not sure how much I agree with the article, which is basically an ad for Cain's book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. But it's the first time in a long time I've seriously questioned my judgment of group work as inherently superior for educational purposes than individual work. I will definitely read the book at some point.

PBiS on MLK

2012-01-15T21:57:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. We celebrate a man who gave his life to make America look a little more like we wanted everyone to believe we were. At school, the students have the day off. The staff has professional development.

We'll spend most of the day working on positive behavior intervention and supports. I've been through this tango before, only this time I know the tune. I'm looking forward to it; it had a big positive effect in my last school district, and it made a huge change in the way I approach my job. There are a lot of posts with tags about PBiS on this blog. I wonder about my colleagues' receptivity to it this time, and I'm a little afraid that we're going to begin work without 80% staff buy-in. But we'll see. I've had a lot of 1-on-1 conversations with my colleagues, many of whom are just better at positive student management than I am, and nobody disagrees with the basic principles: identifying desired behaviors, teaching desired behaviors, supporting desired behaviors. Their hesitation comes, as is always the case for people who already have too much to do, from a fear that this will be one more damn thing they have to do that everyone is going to forget about by August anyway, so why invest the energy? I think this "reform"* has staying power, though; I know it does for me.

I can't help but reflect on the irony of planning a system on changing bad behavior on a holiday in which we celebrate someone's bad behavior. If King had followed the rules, he would have faded into history. Instead, he defied behavior expectations, responded neither to positive nor negative behavior responses, and helped lead a movement of making people a little more equal.

*"Reform" is in quotes because PBiS is something that good teachers have always done. The change is doing it systematically--everybody does it about the same way for about the same things--and deliberately--you know ahead of time what you're looking for, and you do it fairly consistently.

Resolutions

2012-01-07T18:37:00.000-05:00

I've already missed the time of year when people compile "Year's best" lists, which is a habit I think I'll try to get into next year. "Year's best teaching strategy (new)," "Year's best teaching strategy (improved)," "Year's best student progress," "Year's best tech integration," "Year's best collaboration," etc. What categories would be on your "year's best" education lists?

As I think about New Years' teaching resolutions...
...would it be better to resolve to try new things...
...or to get better at the things I'm already doing (or, at least, that I know need to be done)?
Possibly a riddle for the ages.

I resolve all the usual things: to teach to the test only when the test will tell me what the students have learned. To more actively engage parents in their students' learning. To provide students with more useful feedback on their learning. To use technology more effectively: not as the newest shiny thing, but as an aid to high-quality thinking. (Although you know I'm a fan of the newest shiny thing.)

I also resolve to be less product-based in my teaching, and more process-based. In Spanish class, that means less vocabulary, and more vocabulary strategies. Less grammar, and more opportunities for communication. More time spent on meaning-bearing input, less time on meaning-bearing formation, and no time on meaningless utterances. Less reliance on textbooks. More reliance on real things. In English class, it means doing the Common Core standards, and doing them well. The standards are pretty process-based, already.

Inspirational quote of the day

2011-12-27T13:57:00.000-05:00

...not that I'll be doing this every day, mind.

From the Accomplished Teacher e-mail: "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." --Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman military leader and author

I hope everyone's holiday is going stupendously, and that Santa was kind!

One step at a time...and sometimes the same step over

2011-12-11T17:22:00.000-05:00

For the last several years, my professional development has been focused on instructional techniques that are good for all teachers, with a particular focus on Sprick et. al. for classroom management strategies, and Marzano for most everything else. But in college, I mostly worked on strategies specific to second-language instruction, as that was going to be my focus. There is absolutely no question that I'm a better teacher for being familiar with these strategies.

But recent experience tells me that I need to go back and bone up on some of my Spanish teacher skills. Fortunately, last year I took a course for elementary certification, so I haven't forgotten how to do research. I've pulled out Lee and Van Patten's Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1st ed.), my gold standard for applied language acquisition theory. They're like Marzano sometimes, in that they do some more generalizing with specific support which are sort of more useful. But reviewing through it, I'm finding lots of things I've forgotten in my rush to be teacher of the whatever (an award I'm not winning anytime soon).

This week's focus: Have the learner do something with the input. "Learners cannot be passive recipients of language," Lee and Van Patten tell us. "Instructors should not simply talk at the learners or ask learners to simply read something. The learner must be actively engaged in attending to the input to encourage the processing of grammar." (p.107).

QR codes revisited

2011-12-06T20:07:00.002-05:00

I've poo-pooed QR codes as a technology whose time had not come. I've wondered what they might be good for. In the last few weeks, though, I'm starting to re-evaluate them. They might be useful in a couple of different scenarios.

1.) I think I might have the students stealthily put up signs all around the school, labeling what things are in Spanish. (Hallway, locker, fire extinguisher, water fountain, and the like.) A QR code could lead a student to a website with an embedded audio of the pronunciation of the word. I would rather that it simply triggered something in the QR reader itself which caused the phone to pronounce the word, but I think I'd have to write my own program for that. Or maybe hire one of my more knowledgeable friends to do it. Failing that, audio website. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

2.) The last 30 minutes of our school day is spent in something we call academic centers, despite the fact that it's the only period in the day with no mandatory academic content, and nobody is in the center of anything, except by accident. It's what we used to call study halls, which also didn't make any sense, because few people studied, and they didn't meet in the halls. The point is that many of my colleagues feel that this time could be better spent. A few of us have talked about much more flexible AC's than we have now: students could sign up for the "I have homework to do" AC, and they would go to the cafetorium and be left alone by their babysitters...I mean, educational facilitators. (Didn't I see this movie once?) But they could also sign up for "Café Internacional," where they would explore the world through virtual field trips, or possibly speak Spanish to people not necessarily in their Spanish classes all hour. They could sign up for a Socratic seminar: "This week's topic, the Occupy Wall Street movement. Please have these 3 articles read and come prepared to participate." They could, I don't know, sign up to conduct independent experiments in the science lab. Work on an art project. Interview important businesspeople by Skype.

I've been thinking about this, trying to figure out how we could flexibly take attendance at various locations at various times throughout the school. (This is the only part of the process the state actually cares about: our legal responsibilities in a study hall extend to making sure that approximately the same number of people leave as come in.) Then I read someplace that QR codes were invented by one of the many Denso subsidiaries as a quick easy tool for inventory management. I thought to myself, if you think about students as widgets, then taking attendance is basically inventory. Teachers all have computers; lots of QR code readers work on phone cameras, computer web cams, all kinds of things we already have sitting around our classes. We already give students ID cards that they never do anything with. They also are supposed to have their planners all the time. It would be simplicity itself to put a QR code into each of these--for purposes of student confidentiality and the like, it could be the student's ID number rather than the name. Then all we have to do is make our QR code readers have a settable location (which will remember the last set location and default to that every time it's fired up), read the ID on the QR, add the student's name (or ID number) and the location to a database, compare that database to a previously-generated centrally-located database of student names and expected locations, time-stamp the entry, automatically notify any number of interested parties of discrepancies in the two databases (either by push notification or by sending an e-mail, or, ideally, interfacing directly with our attendance-taking software (which is proprietary)), doing this quickly enough that one unassisted educational assistant could do 150 of them in, let's say, 10 minutes (that works out to be, what, 4 seconds a student? Lots of time.), and doing it easily enough that even the crotchetiest Luddite on the staff can do it. Easy peasy.

Anyway, it seems like an idea worth exploring. (And yes, I know we'll never get 100% compliance with cards and planners. (Edit to add: They could carry their code on (or in) their phones, which many of them always have, for all the difference it makes.) Frankly, that's the least problematic part of implementing this plan.)

3.) For a little silliness:

If I did this right, if you use a QR code reader on your smart phone to read this on your computer (or vice versa), it will take you back to this post.

Code generated using: http://createqrcode.appspot.com/

Did you know about this?

2011-11-28T19:48:00.000-05:00

My normal source for clip art is openclipart.com. Today it's experiencing some problems, so I google searched what I was looking for (in this case, a fork. No, a fork onna tha table.) And I found this: Clipart ETC.

Teacher evaluations in public

2011-11-27T09:25:00.000-05:00

In my local rag, Julie Mack blogs about (among other things) education issues. In a recent post, she recapped the comments of an earlier post about Michigan's new "evaluate all teachers!" commission. I know I promised I wouldn't read the comments in local rag articles, because they never serve to do anything but infuriate me. But I was reading a blog post. About comments. And it infuriated me.

Generally, the tone of the comments were critical of the notion that the educommittee didn't contain any current educators, but did manage to find room for an administrator of the National Heritage Academies. That's a criticism I share.

Much of the debate about teacher evaluation centers around the role of test scores: How much of how good a teacher is should be determined by how well her students do on a written test which will either, because of the huge numbers involved, be graded by a computer or "read" for, on average, two minutes? The problem with this is obvious and have been rehashed time and again. Too much of the outcome of one-off assessments are dependent on factors which teachers cannot effect. Is the test a good one? Did the student eat breakfast that morning? Get enough sleep the night before? What's the student's motivation for doing well on the test? Did the student's teacher last year do her job? Who is writing the test, what's their motivation, and what are they REALLY testing?

In response to these legitimate concerns, in the comments of her post, Mack comments legitimately that teachers are not the only profession who are evaluated using formulas designed by non-practitioners, using metrics beyond the control of the practitioners. She cites her own profession as an example. I'm not sure what her motivations for saying this is. In context, she seems to be saying, "Everybody else is putting up with it, and so am I, and so should you." It detracts from the notion that teachers specifically are under attack, but the easy response to that is, will her evaluation be codified in state law? But the relative victimhood of teachers isn't really the point. Mack's comments should increase our awareness of the fact that, increasingly, the decision makers of the world want to see data about efficacy, and sometimes, their idea of data has no actual bearing on our effectiveness at our job. The pushback (or feedback, or collaboration, or negotiation, or however you phrase it--the distinctions between them is the subject for another time) against this practice should be intense, wherever it comes up. I say this not in the spirit of contrariness, but in the spirit of best practice. If these evaluations are going to help practitioners get better, then they absolutely must reflect the outcomes we want to see. They should also carry with them the recognition that we don't necessarily know yet everything we want to see.

Today in world language news

2011-11-14T20:06:00.000-05:00

1.) The NBPTS's daily e-mail included a link to this article. It talks about an online game that a teacher uses to teach Latin. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing I dreamed about doing: technology and immersive language learning. There is a link inside the article to the Pericles group, who is making the website. I hope to learn more about it; if somebody is doing this sort of work, I'm going to want to keep on top of it. I wouldn't know, however, whether I would want to use something somebody else made, or whether I'd want to help them make it.

2.) I've decided that next year, at the MiWLA conference, I'm going to apply to present a session: Using cell phones in the language class. I think I do pretty well at this, but ultimately the purpose would be self-serving. I'd hope somebody would get up in the middle of the presentation and say, "This is stupid. We've been doing this for years, and this is what I'm doing it which is SOOOO much better than what you're doing." That would be awesome.

Mistakes I make...

2011-11-12T12:19:00.000-05:00

which my students could probably learn from.

I started writing an essay comparing and contrasting community and tribalism in my classroom. I breezed through the introduction because I knew what I wanted to say and how I intended to say it, and started rocking through the second paragraph. I stopped and re-read it, and somehow my earnest if uninformed essay about sociological structures had turned into a tongue-in-cheek review of the movie The Breakfast Club.

What I was missing is consistency--in this case, consistency of both subject and tone. (I get playing with tone in a single piece; I'm pretty good at it. So I know what I'm saying when I say that this was an inappropriate shift in tone.) Everything I'd written was good, and they're similar in subject matter, but the movie critique (spoiler: the movie does not come out looking good.) has no place in the paper I'd set out to write. When I tell my students, "Only make your paper about one thing," this is what I'm talking about.

The way I usually achieve consistency in subject in my formal writing is by using some kind of pre-writing device. I like graphic organizers, and have come across some doozies in my brief but eventful time as an English teacher. (I've also come across some real crap. Shaping a Venn diagram like an apple and an orange may make a good visual gag for about 3 seconds, but it doesn't change the fact that Venn diagrams are bad pre-writing organizers. I wish I were making this example up.) Choosing a graphic organizer based on my intent for the piece helps me decide on the ultimate structure of the writing. It also helps me stay on course throughout the pretty long and sometimes tedious process of actually writing the work. It's like building a building: you pick a frame based on what you want the building to be, and then you build that. From there, you add all the necessary bits to make it a house, and not just a neatly-stacked pile of girders. If you have something cool that you want to explore further, that's fine. The house still needs a shed, or a garage, or perhaps an interactive art installation. But please at least consider the possibility that the middle of the living room may not be the best place for it.

The way I achieve consistency in my informal writing, like this blog post, is mostly I don't worry so much about it. I keep it short, and if I have crap that doesn't actually support my original thesis (for example, I'm terrified of zombies and velociraptors, and have made significant life decisions based on the need to protect myself from them. When the time comes, I hope the raptors go after the zombies.), I don't worry too much about it. After all, this isn't intended to be a high-quality, published work. If ever I turn it into one, I will engage in significant re-writes, in some places, probably starting from scratch.

More on "Getting it right"

2011-10-31T20:09:00.002-04:00

For some truly spooky Halloween fun, check out this video on teacher evaluations by the NBPTS!

(No, it's not supposed to make sense.) (EDIT: The joke above isn't supposed to make sense. The video below IS supposed to make sense.) (EDIT AGAIN: All right, my clarifying statement didn't clarify. Ignore all my writing and just go to the link to watch a video about a report about a study about teacher evaluation.)

http://dl.nmmstream.net/media/nbpts/flash/031011webcast/031011loader.html

Why I do what I do the way that I do it

2011-10-27T21:12:00.000-04:00

Because...
...it's more important for my students to speak than it is for them to conjugate verbs.
...there is only so much time, and I have to make it count.
..."I took three years of Spanish in high school, and I don't remember a thing."
...it's the best that I know how. It's not the best possible, but it's what I've got.
...they have their phones. Why shouldn't they be allowed to use them?
...my colleagues are brilliant.

A little Friday night naturalia

2011-10-21T22:23:00.000-04:00

5 minutes of wandering through El Yunque, Río Grande, Puerto Rico. It's good for the soul.

Unit cohesion is definitely lacking

2011-10-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

A review of the year so far

I'm continuing my work this year on tightening my unit plans and making my curriculum an actual curriculum, instead of things I do one after the other. The particular focus this year is on the ELA class. We're training with Annette from the ISD, in accordance with the roll-out of the Common Core standards. I've gotten better every year I've done it. Except this year. My units don't feel like anything.

I have no recollection of how I made my units last year feel like units, except through extensive repetition of the theme. This leads me to wonder if my units were actually as good as I thought they were. I've gone back over my unit plans and my lesson plans. The unit plans, at least for Spanish class, look good on paper: a common theme, usually based on a cultural learning goal, attached to three to five communicative learning goals, each supported by a variety of structured input and output learning activities. Most of them have several learning styles built in to them. Most of them are everything I think they're supposed to be.

The lesson plans are less clear--they're working documents, so I often use shorthand phrases for activities (usually) detailed in the unit plans. But sometimes they're burst-of-inspiration, let's-see-how-this-flies activities dreamed up just before Monday morning. And of course they don't reflect 100% how the lessons were taught. Towards the end of the school year, I stopped planning past halfway through Thursday, knowing full well that something in every class was going to keep me from getting any further than that.

But I watch similar lessons, based off of very similar (nearly identical) unit plans, this year, and I think to myself, what are we doing here? What are we building up to? I don't think I've lost the fire or the creative spark, but everything feels flatter than it did last year, more purposeless, less directed. And if I feel it, you can bet the students are feeling it.

So the solution is to...what? My next idea is to make communicative projects a more integral part of each unit's assessment. As I type this, it occurs to me that once upon a time I had as a goal to do with chapter tests entirely, and have each unit's assessment BE the communicative project: a presentation, an interview, something which would require a range of communicative competencies to complete successfully. So maybe by building the projects back into the unit plans, into the position of primacy I've always intended they should have, I'll be able to give the units the direction I feel they're currently lacking.

Politics

2011-10-06T19:05:00.000-04:00

In their infinite wisdom and their continuing efforts to "reform" "education" (read: make teachers do more and harder work for less money; the sorry ingrates should be grateful they have a job), the Michigan Senate introduced a bill to make Michigan a "Right to Work" state (SB 729, sponsored by Meekhof (R-West Olive).

No, wait. The bill would only apply to Michigan's education unions.

No, wait. It would only apply to education unions with membership greater than 50,000.

So it would only apply to the MEA, but they can't say that, because passing a law attacking one particular institution is unconstitutional. Or something.

The sponsor argues that it will create jobs are something, like in Mississippi.

In unrelated news. the unemployment rate in Mississippi is 10.2%.

"Getting it right" update

2011-10-05T18:05:00.000-04:00

One can find the pdf's at this site, were one so inclined. More about this when I have the time.

I will want to know more about this

2011-10-03T18:04:00.000-04:00

My e-mail box gets a daily dose of NBPTS propaganda. It's a useful summary of recent news in education, and it is honestly these days where I get a lot of the most up-to-date stuff I post about here. (Except the things from my local birdcage liner. Those I get from the website of my local birdcage liner. Which I don't use to line my birdcage. On account of I view it on a $1000 computer.) Also interspersed with the useful stuff is adverts for NBPTS products disguised to look like useful stuff. However, since NBPTS is a net force for good in the teacher development world, even their ads are generally useful stuff.

Case in point: They're having a webcast right now to announce the release of a report called "Getting It Right: A Comprehensive Guide to Developing and Sustaining Teacher Evaluation and Support Systems." I would like to log in to this webcast, but I'm not going to. The dishes ain't gonna wash themselves. However, I will be watching like a hawk to see if they release the report in pdf form. I'd like to read it. If we're going to evaluate teachers, we should get it right. And an organization called the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards probably has something useful to say on the subject.

CCSS and WL

2011-09-30T05:39:00.000-04:00

I just said that to make it sound like I work for a railroad company.

I subscribe to an ACTFL listserv for world language teachers. Much of the time, it doesn't really add anything to my instruction; it's mostly people asking for help in doing work I'm not interested in doing yet (recommendations for exchange programs and the like), asking for recommendations on master's programs, or complaining about vendors trying to sell things on the listserv. Really, guys? 5 posts a day for 3 weeks on the ethics of trying to sell Spanish books to Spanish teachers?

But on this morning's, one of the members asks an interesting question. She wants to know how people are integrating Common Core into their world language classrooms and what the standards are. I'm going to answer her in full over the weekend, and also hopefully secure her permission to re-post her question here.

But, in the meantime, the short answer is that there aren't any Common Core standards for world languages. However, the standards for ELA look a lot, a LOT, like the ACTFL standards for world language. Since the Common Cores are designed to encourage cross-curricular work, pairing the communication skills learned in, say, Spanish class can and should be used to explicitly reinforce the ELA standards.

Doodling in math class

2011-09-28T20:03:00.000-04:00

This is from the Bloggess. (I'm not going to link to her page because it's chock-full of language and themes I don't want to associate my mild-mannered and above all professional blog with.)

Any comment I could make would only ruin it. View in good health.

<br>A

Guess I'm not done talking about it yet.

2011-09-19T14:27:00.000-04:00

So I was just going to make a snarky drive-by comment on the dwindling popularity of merit pay as states face huge deficits (due in no small part to the bad bets of a few madmen in New York), and then get on with enjoying my Fair Day by writing curriculum and maybe playing pirate video games. But I'm having trouble moving on. So, for what it's worth, a few more thoughts.

There is no way this looks good for the reformers who pushed it. At best, it was a bad bet on a motivating system that all available research suggested wouldn't have the stated desired effect. A generous interpretation says that reformers* genuinely believed that merit pay would have an increased effect on teacher efficacy, and that their position is being undercut by current circumstances. In this picture, as soon as the financial situation of the various states (and Washington, D.C.) improve, the merit pay will be back up and running, barring further research that says it won't work.

At worst, this indicates that the political proponents of merit pay aren't even willing to fund their own educational priorities. That means that anything even remotely controversial or expensive, like mandatory universal pre-kindergarten education or 10.5-month school years, are all pretty much DOA. Forget about expanding the Kalamazoo Promise country-wide. They're not going to pay for what they believe in; they certainly aren't going to pay for anything else. So they hope education reform will happen by itself, for free, or perhaps paid for by the Gates Foundation.

Because of the flavor of the political nature of corporatist education reformers, I suspect it was just a bait-and-switch for teacher pay and benefits. "We can't afford to pay you a starting salary of $30,000, so how about $25,000? But if you work hard, you can earn merit pay up to $32,000! No, wait, we can't afford to pay your merit pay. But your contract says that you're okay with a base salary $25,000. So that's what we're going to go with that. Okay? Okay."

Alright. Now I'm done. I think.

*"Reformers" is a hard word for me. I'm an education reformer; I'm reforming education by continually trying to be a better teacher. I wish the system were more supportive of those changes. The word in this context means "people who have no particular expertise in education but want to rearrange the system anyway." All of their ideas aren't bad, but merit pay is.

"Nobody could have foreseen..."

2011-09-19T14:08:00.000-04:00

...that the merit pay hype would die off due to lack of funding.

Oh, wait, it looks like somebody did. What was that, 2008?

For my English students, a reading assignment. Why is my lede misleading as to the content of the EdWeek article?

And a bit of meta-blogging. I've just told Blogger to post my labels at the bottom of my blog. The good news is, the only people ever likely to see them is me. The bad news is a lot of my labels are one-off jokes. I learned the art of labeling blog posts from the oft-imitated, ne'er-duplicated Neil Gaiman, after all. I can't find a way of making a tag cloud just of tags that appear more than once. Any help from the universe on this one?

What's this about then?

2011-09-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

Privatizing teaching. Who thinks this is a good idea? Why?

The Michigan Republican party, that's who. As to why, I couldn't tell you. It didn't work with maintenance staff, and you don't even have to have a degree to be a maintenance worker. It didn't save money, it didn't improve efficiency. Why, it's almost as if there's something here that isn't best served by race-to-the-bottom, get-more-while-paying-less mentality.

It's going to be incredibly ironic (not to mention frustrating) if the only way we can have what we think of as a public school is to start a charter school.

Various items

2011-09-10T10:46:00.000-04:00

* Uncle Arne gives a speech. I agree with basically everything he says, or at least everything in this bullet-pointed version as published. I think the "doctors and lawyers don't work nine months a year" line is a little glib, but I am broadly in favor of increased school time.

*Fun with Blogger stats, updated. So in my post marveling over Blogger stats, I was amazed that I had people coming to my blog after searching for auto mechanics. Well, it turns out that I actually wrote a post about auto mechanics. 'Course, it wasn't about auto mechanics. Further, it turns out that the person who got here looking for auto mechanics left a comment on the blog. It got caught in the spam filter. S/he asked for advice on how to find auto mechanics. Poor devil.

Good wisdom, vol. 2

2011-09-07T20:51:00.001-04:00

The sooner you learn that it's okay to fail, the more enriching your experience as a teacher will be. You will embrace your failures as opportunities for new beginnings.

--Lisa M. Dabbs, M.Ed.; "Twenty tips for new teachers." Quoted in Edutopia News e-mail

Happy Labor Day!

2011-09-05T21:25:00.000-04:00

Jenison, MI: "Unprecedented" teacher concessions will help districts halt layoffs, save programs.

In completely unrelated news, the US doesn't pay its teachers as well as many other places in the world, and its teaching cadre suffers for it.

The importance of context

2011-09-05T09:13:00.001-04:00

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." --Abraham Lincoln

I read this quote and I loved it. But because I'm a pretty skilled reader, and because I've seen Lincoln quotes abused and even fabricated before, I wanted to know more. So, after a very little digging (it was the first non-"inspirational quote" site that came up on a google for "Lincoln quotes about labor"), I found this website, the Library at Northern Illinois University's Historical Digitization Project. And in context, the quote means something different.

Lincoln is addressing an agricultural society in Wisconsin, a Northern state--the very definition of a Northern state, in 1859. He's not talking about labor vs. capital at all, he's talking about how we get people to work; he's talking about free labor vs. slavery. The coup de grace is that he's not coming down unambiguously in favor of labor. He's outlining in broad strokes two different positions on the issue. Pro-labor people (like me) like the above quote because it sounds like he's saying that money is less important, and entirely dependent on, work.

But consider this quote:

"Labor is available only in connection with capital – nobody labors, unless somebody else owning capital, somehow, by the use of it, induces him to do it." --Abraham Lincoln.

This seems to be in favor of capital, although if looking at it closely, the assumption clearly collapses into absurdity. But this comes from the same speech, before the "labor" quote. Lincoln's not so pro-labor all of a sudden, eh? He's not coming down on the side of pro-labor in this speech. He does, however, come down on the side of pro-free-labor.

But it's still a fun quote to pull out this Labor Day.

Fun with Blogger stats

2011-09-04T07:39:00.000-04:00

Okay, so probably everybody does at least one of these. Possibly more, if they find something interesting. But if you'll forgive the self-indulgence, I thought I'd share some of the stats, not because of anything great about this blog, but because of something extraordinary about the world we live in.

This blog has been viewed over 3000 times by people who aren't me. My average blog post has about 5 non-me viewers; the median is probably 4. A few of them have as many as 20. This isn't a huge readership, but it's a much bigger readership than the notes I used to write in the margins of my notebooks when I was studiously not thinking about my anthropology lecture; really, the blog is just a more complex, better polished version of that.

My readership comes from all over the world. People from Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and Vietnam have all seen this blog. Who knows how useful to them it was, but they saw it. 18 people from the Netherlands have been here. 18! (Hallo!) I have 6 followers: a few educators, my wife, one person who would, for his/her own nefarious purposes, follow anyone, and a couple of people I can't tell anything about. I know I have at least 1 regular reader. I don't believe he's following me under an alias, but he might, I suppose. I don't know why he would choose to comment under his real name, then, but the ways of the mighty are mysterious.

People get here in all sorts of ways. Lots of people get here by searching for "Never work harder than your students" or some variation thereof; if I'd known that was going to be my big traffic driver, I might have worked harder on those posts. (But not harder than my students.) Some people get here by searching for "kohn vs marzano." Some got here by searching for notes on "Art and Science of Teaching," a few by searching for "components of a lesson plan," one guy got here by searching for "lesson plan for i am (and i mean it) not going to move." I think it must be a book; it's not one I've heard of.

Someone got here by searching the phrase "do we take the whiteboard for granted". I wonder what they intend to do with the answer to that question: lead a whiteboard awareness campaign? Replace all the whiteboards in their school with chalkboards? Anyway, if the person who searched for that phrase is still here, the answer to your question is "yes."

One poor soul got here by searching for "site:blogspot auto mechanics." I wonder what I've written to make any search engine ever think that this was a valid result for that search. I think about the searcher must have felt when s/he got here; all they wanted was instructions on changing the light bulb in their Mazda 6 (answer: you probably can't in later models; you have to take the whole front end of the car off. It takes 2 mechanics over an hour.) and what they got was a diatribe against, say, Michelle Rhee. How disappointed they must have been. I take comfort in the speed of the internet. At least their disappointment was lingering. I like to think, though, that the confusion lasted for a while.

As I said at the outset, none of these things are meant as self-congratulations. I didn't earn any of those things. My miserable scribblings, more pre-writing exercises than drafts, and certainly not published-quality works, do not deserve to be taken seriously by educators from Florida, California, India, Russia, Germany, and Singapore. More people have been exposed to my thoughts through this blog than through my teaching career, and that's shocking and humbling. The digital world is a strange and wondrous place. It's true that you never know where the road is going to take you when you walk out your front door, what adventures you'll be whisked away to. The less explored corollary is that you never know, when you put out the welcome mat, who will show up at your door.

So thank you, dear reader, and to the people who wanted instructions on replacing the timing belt in their Ford F-150, sorry about that.

Thursday night marimbas

2011-09-01T21:41:00.000-04:00

Title: Two Mexican dances for marimba.
Performing artist: David Hall.
Album: Saudação
Composer: Gordon Stout.

The wisdom of Ray

2011-08-31T21:14:00.000-04:00

Ray left this in the comments of the last blog. I put it here so that everybody who stops by can see it. And if it's just Ray and me who see it...well, at least I won't have to go into the comments in order to re-read it.

Have a great year and don't be afraid to take a risk and don't be afraid to fail because you took a risk. It is truly the way we all become better.

You can't expect your students to take risks if you're not willing to do it yourself. Let's have a great school year.

The Big Idea of big ideas

2011-08-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

Part II:

We've had key ideas of classes re-packaged and re-sold to us in so many ways, it's tough to know where to begin, or what action to take. Here, to help the confused and unwary, a brief overview of everything.

(Caveat lector: If you thought the last one was bad, go no further. The concepts are murkier, the definitions are longer, and the jokes are worse. There's even a bibliography.)
(Special note to education students: After reading this, you're likely to be more confused about one of the most important concepts in education than you were before. That's okay: you'll be in the same position as everybody.)

Key vocabulary:

Standards--At its finest, a standard is an indivisible unit of knowledge or skill that a student must have in order to be considered knowledgeable about a topic. In reality, they are impossibly long lists of random tidbits, vocabulary, skills, history of the topic, professional-level mastery of obscure topics, and attitudes towards the subject. Michigan's were originally drafted to provide guidance to teachers about what to teach, and to provide consistency to a piecemeal statewide curriculum. Really, though, it added an unachievable burden to teachers and a world of confusion to students and their parents.

Power Standards--These came about as a reaction to the overwhelming curriculum mandates of the state standards. "Sure," some clever assistant curriculum director said, "our students have to know all of these standards. But which ones do they REALLY have to know?" And from the big list, they made a smaller list. Purportedly, these are really the things without which a given field of study is actually some other field of study. Or, put another way, these are the requisite prior knowledge that a student needs for success in the class. But since everyone's power standards are different, nobody can be sure of exactly what they’re getting. We're pretty sure students should be able to read and count by the time they're in the 7th grade, but beyond that, it's all a little vague.

Star Standards--Another word for power standards for people who liked astronomy class more than physics class.

Content expectations--This is what we in the state of Michigan are supposed to call standards now. Apparently "standards" became a swear word. Ours are broken up into two kinds: Grade-level content areas(GLCEs, prononuced "glicks" or "glickees"), for pre-K through 8th grade, and High School Content Expectations (HSCEs, pronounced "huskies," after their inventor, Imelda Husky.) None of this matters now, though, because we use Common Core State Standards (CCSS, pronounced "Common Core State Standards").

Key Learning Goals--In any given division of instruction--course, semester, marking period, unit, class period--the Key Learning Goals are the things that students must know and be able to do, to a pre-defined level of mastery, in order to have "learned" that lesson. How is this different from standards and content expectations? The key learning goal here is “pre-defined level of mastery.” For each concept (or learning topic: see below), you identify some complex idea the students should be able to get, and you teach to that goal. When the students reach that, they have an "A" for the unit. You also identify some requisite background knowledge, and that becomes a "B" or a "C+" grade, depending.

Por ejemplo: “Students will be able to use a variety of pre-writing strategies” is a perfectly acceptable content expectation for ELA, applicable equally to 4th grade English and 12th grade Honors English. And therein lies the problem--if I show my teacher an outline, a mind map, and a pile of bibliography cards, do I fulfill the standard? What if I turn in a paper and say my pre-writing strategy is to think about what I’m going to write, and then write? What if my strategy is to NOT think about what I’m going to write, and let the words flow out of me like water from a struck stone in the desert? Hey, it worked for Salinger. So for each grade level, you change the level of mastery. As people get better at a given task, you make the task harder. Not so hard they can't do it, just...harder. This level of difficulty is defined in the "key learning goal."

Big Ideas--A term so vague and overused as to be meaningless. I’ve seen it used in place of “standard,” “power standard,” “key learning goal,” “learning topic” (which we haven’t even gotten to yet), and even the philosophical rationale for teaching a unit at all. The thing that differentiates a “big idea” from all of the other ideas it proxies for is the notion of student accessibility. A “big idea” is a power standard (or whatever) in kid-friendly language. So instead of saying, “Students will use adjectives effectively and appropriately to support a theme or enhance a mood in their fiction writing,” a big idea says, “Use sparkly description words” or “You write good now. NOW!”

Benchmarks--indicate where a student should be in their development at a point in time, as a way of gauging progress over time. Students should be learning writing in all grade levels, and they should be demonstrably better by the end of fifth grade than by the end of fourth grade. A benchmark is useful in telling the intrepid instructor how much better it can be. These were developed looking at developmental psychology and research into effective education practices and the net results they can be expected to achieve over time. Or possibly made up 12 hours before they were supposed to be submitted to the Senate Special Subcommittee on Curriculum and Instruction. Which is what I would have done. Benchmarks are most noticeable when they’re first set, when they’re universally criticized for being unattainable, and then when they’re not attained, as everybody attacks the person who failed to meet the goal. This is as true in PK-12 education as it is in experiments in military nation-building projects.

Learning topics--Closely related to “key learning goals,” learning topics are all of the standards and expectations and the like, grouped into logical chunks. In social studies, these can be discrete units, like “World War I.” In math, they probably are, as well: “Linear equations.” In ELA, they seem to be groups of skills: “Reading non-fiction.” “Writing a position paper.” A teacher could then build their key learning goals off of these topics: “Students will analyze the causes and outcomes of the US’s involvement in WWI and compare them to the causes and outcomes of the American Civil War.” “Students will use new information from others’ position papers to enhance their own positions.”

Objectives--If you’ve taken an education class, you know about TLW statements: The learner will... . It was how a generation of us were taught to write our lesson plans. I don’t know if they still teach it this way or not. The TLW statement is the objective of a lesson or a unit: a (hopefully short) list of skills and knowledge you expect students to take away from a lesson. My toughest problem with objectives lay in the fourth dimension: I lacked the requisite knowledge that a lesson is NOT the same thing as a class period. That’s still a tough one for me.

Goals-- “Okay, Cosby,” I can hear the reader say, patience strained beyond reason. “Now you’re just throwing out synonyms. You’re making stuff up.” No, gentle reader, seriously. Goals are different from objectives, key learning goals, standards, learning topics, knowledge, skills, and all that has come before. This is arguably the most important one: this is the one the student creates for him/herself. That means it’s also the hardest for a teacher to get right, because the teacher has almost nothing to do with it. What you want is a meaningful statement of learning that runs parallel to the course of the goal, something about the topic that students want to know, which allows the student to personalize the learning. “What role do ninjas play in WWII? How do I create an atmosphere of mystery in my stories? How can I use triangles to build a house?” What you usually get is, “To survive. To get a good grade. To learn everything I’m supposed to.”

Unpacking-- This is the process of taking either the long long list of standards and benchmarks (Spanish I and II have 76 standards--sorry, content expectations) or the extremely efficiently written Common Core State Standards (ELA has 10), studying them to the point of sublime understanding, and turning them into useful groupings of skills and knowledge (see learning topics). There’s a reason that the people who come up with these standards and so on don’t simply unpack them for you, the over-worked, under-appreciated teacher: that would be mandating curriculum.

So, there you go. Everything you need to know about everything you need to know.

These people would be horrified to know I read their stuff:

Marzano, R. (2007). The art and science of teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Marzano, R. (2010). Formative assessment & standards-based grading. Bloomington, IN: Marzano Research Laboratory.

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2010). English Language Arts Standards.

Pickering, D. (2011 Aug 11 - 12). Formative assessment & standards-based grading. (Presentation). Centreville, MI: St. Joseph County ISD. Deb Pickering works with Dr. Marzano and gave us a 2-day presentation over the book. She will also conduct follow-up courses 4 or 5 times throughout the coming year, to help teachers implement the idea of “learning topics” in particular.

Michigan Department of Education (2006 Apr). High School Content Expectations: English Language Arts. Lansing.

MDE (2007). High School Content Expectations: World Languages. Lansing.

"How did YOU spend your summer break, Señor Cosby?"

2011-08-22T20:46:00.000-04:00

Trying to learn how to do this, kids:

In other news, you can tell I'm getting tetchy to go back to school. All my blog posts are imaginary conversations.

"Good lord. What ARE you teaching these kids?"

2011-08-18T14:44:00.001-04:00

or,

The Big Idea of big ideas

Part I: Overview and background knowledge

"Welcome to English class, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to learn a lot in this class."
"Excuse me, teacher. What are we going to learn?"
"A lot."
"Well, right, you said. But a lot of what?"
"A lot of English."
"Okay. Well, I already know a lot of English. Can I go?"

We've had key ideas of classes re-packaged and re-sold to us in so many ways, it's tough to know where to begin, or what action to take. Here, to help the confused and unwary, a brief overview of everything.

(Caveat lector: This goes on for a while. Only click through if you have some time on your hands.)
(Special note to education students: The definitions below appear in none of your textbooks. If you use them on your tests, your professor will fail you. On the other hand, the business college is always ready to take dropouts from the other schools, and I hear they pay their interns.)

Learning overview: A list of vocabulary terms
Requisite background knowledge:

Requisite background knowledge
Knowledge
Skills
Key vocabulary

Key vocabulary:
Big Ideas
Key Learning Goals
Standards
Power Standards
Star Standards
Content expectations
Benchmarks
Learning topics
Objectives
Goals
Unpacking

Requisite background knowledge:

Requisite background knowledge--this term describes something a student needs to know going into a lesson, in order to get whatever you're teaching them. For example, in this article, "requisite background knowledge" is requisite background knowledge. I will be using the phrase a great deal below, so you have to know it in order to get anything else I'll be talking about. As a counter-example, "self-referential definition" is not requisite background knowledge. You do not have to know it, but it might be helpful.

Knowledge--Generally, a fact or an organizing principle that we want students to leave our classrooms with. Examples include lists of vocabulary, the names of all the presidents, the identifying characteristics of post-modern literature, etc. For my purposes, "knowledge" will be shorthand for "new knowledge," which in turn will be shorthand for "stuff we think the kids should know, but have no reason to believe they already do."

It is generally agreed that there is more knowledge than any one person can know, and that the effort to try to know everything just keeps making more stuff to know. As a result, we have to be pretty choosy about what knowledge we want our students to know.

Skills--Physical or mental processes we want students to be able to do to some degree of mastery. Solving quadratic equations, picking out the post-modernist poem from a pile of cheap knockoffs, and doing your makeup like Ke$ha are all examples of skills. (Only one of them is likely to make you a millionaire, and it ain't post-modernist poetry.) A lot of the higher-order thinking skills fit into here, as well--organize, summarize, make decisions, argue with their friends without making them their enemies, solve problems.

Key Vocabulary--It is very possible to know how to do something without knowing what it's called. But we're teachers. We don't hold truck with that kind of thing. So we have to be able to call things things, or things get confused with other things. That's where key vocabulary comes in handy. These are the lingo that specialists in the field use to describe objects or actions (or description words or whatever) special to that field. For example, "quadratic" is a math vocabulary word, a word used to describe a mathematical concept which it normally takes an equation with no fewer than 3 letters, a power, AND a factor to describe. "Quadratic" is shorter. Speaking of which, "succinct" is an ELA vocabulary word. It is not a KEY vocabulary word if you read Melville, Dickens, or me. (A tendency to yammer is my only similarity to these literary greats.)

Next lesson: Key vocabulary in big ideas

(Edited right away to fix a formatting issue)

Articles like this get my goat

2011-08-17T14:06:00.000-04:00

From the local rag:

"Here is the list of Kalamazoo-area schools that failed to make AYP."

In all fairness, I know that the author, Julie Mack, is generally a proponent of public education, although sometimes it would be hard for a casual observer to tell. On her blog published not six hours later, she calls for a reform of NCLB. Even in this article, she doesn't necessarily do anything wrong--she presents the information as it exists, in as succinct a form as the language will permit.

But when a parent reads this article, what they see is "Your school failed." When an opponent of public education (or an "education reformer") reads this article, they see "Public schools fail." Then there are the comments. (I try not to read the comments in my local rag, because they inevitably infuriate me. I understand that this is a common pattern among the comment section of newspapers online. I read the first one on accident.)

Look, I'm on the data train. I think we need good data to make the right decisions. All stakeholders in education (which, the first comment on the "Your School Failed" article reminds me, is everyone) should have access to information about the achievement of their schools. Saying that all schools are wonderful! obviously doesn't make schools better places. There is no need to sugar-coat our shortcomings. There's no reason we shouldn't ask the community for input on how to improve, and every reason to do so.

This kind of thing, however, doesn't further that conversation in any meaningful way. It casts aspersions in the guise of providing information. It takes as its premise a flawed idea, the idea that naming and shaming is the first best tool for school improvement. To reiterate, I'm certain that this is not what Ms. Mack intends to do, but I don't know that a reader could help but to see it as an accusation.

A timely webcomic

2011-08-14T22:13:00.000-04:00

I don't remember if I've re-posted XKCD comics before. But Randall Munroe is one of my favorite webcomic authors, and he often has keen insights.

Friday's was especially timely. As I mentioned, on Thursday and Friday I went to a training (along with an extraordinary number of St. Joseph County's best and brightest) on Marzano's Formative Assessments and Standards-based Grading. One of the key ideas of Thursday's training is that a traditional, letter-grade-based-on-a-100%-scale grading system is almost useless, and that averaging grades together is no way to show a student what she has learned. (Friend and regular commenter Ray told me so in a comment in an earlier post.)

Friday morning's XKCD:

Another educator who does everything better than me...

2011-08-10T08:07:00.000-04:00

...writes a blog better than I do.

Peter Pappas's blog Copy / Paste seems full of practical suggestions to do the kinds of things I want to do in my classes: project-based learning, student-centered and student-directed educational practices, critical thinking skills crammed into everything, clear and effective communication skills. I was introduced to him through Larry Ferlazzo's blog.

Some favorite posts so far:

First day of school? Here's how to get students thinking. Instead of passing out books, going over rules, etc., give your students an engaging puzzle to solve that involves communication and analytical thinking. And then, just for kicks, have them think reflectively about the whole experience.

A taxonomy of reflection. An application of Bloom's taxonomy of thinking to reflecting on learning. This is the first of a four-part series. It's an interesting framework for reflection.

Teachers, have the courage to be less helpful. 4 key points on how to make your classroom more student-centric.

How to tell a story: Five rules for better writing. Actually a cross-post from someone else, but still good.

The trouble with grades

2011-08-09T09:01:00.000-04:00

How many times have I written about grades? (Well, Señor, if you were better about tagging your posts, you'd be able to find out.) I'm brushing up my syllabi for the coming school year, and I'm pleased to note that relatively little needs changing for the first week or two of school. This is excellent, and now I can focus on the other 34 weeks of school. I feel like I'm in a position, finally, to begin with the end in mind. (If you parse that sentence carefully, it's full of false assumptions, logical inconsistencies, two or three confessions of less-than-best practice, and possibly a spelling mistake.)

One of the things we did in teacher college (I say it that way to liken it to "clown college," a slightly more prestigious organization) was to write out course-long rubrics. "An A student in this class will have these attributes and display these skills and knowledge..." on down to at least a C student. We stopped at C because evidently D students weren't worth defining; they were defined as the not-quite-critical absence of the skills that made all the other students A, B, or C students, I guess.

Now I'm doing that for my 2nd-year Spanish students. This is an exercise I engage in periodically. It's based heavily on ACTFL performance standards. But they just don't fit nicely into grading categories. At the end of year 2 of high school Spanish, according to the state, students should be performing at a Novice High level of communicative ability: able to function in familiar, formulaic communicative settings, with limited re-formulation of the language. So, if that's the minimum required skill level, does that become a D-? A C? A B? An A? At what point am I penalizing students for not being outstanding?

I'm going to a training on Thursday and Friday. We're going to work on one of Marzano's books, I don't remember which off the top of my head, which talks about grading in a standards-based system. Hopefully I'll know more after that.

Advocating for our profession

2011-08-02T18:57:00.002-04:00

More on this later:

http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/shoulders_of_giants/2011/07/why-teachers-must-advocate-for-the-teaching-profession.html

That's a little more like it

2011-08-01T13:45:00.000-04:00

This is what I like to see from the national-level leader of education in our country. (We can debate how important the national-level leader is in a system as de-centralized as ours some other time.) He says that teachers should start out making around $60,000 a year, and end their careers making around $150,000. We all know that he has been pushing a great many of the "reforms" that are so odious to teachers' unions: relaxed charter schools, increased "accountability" for teachers (and apparently some school-level administrators, as well), merit pay, etc. With this speech to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, he indicates his awareness that under current circumstances, there is no reason for any competent person to become a teacher. He also noted the political improbability of making that happen.

The teacher leader in me says that it's nice to see a national figure recognize something the appropriate value of teachers. The cynic says that it's nice to see a national figure make a symbolic buy-off that will score political points without costing anyone anything.

Every year, at the district I last worked at, the superintendent took Teacher Appreciation Week seriously. He and his wife would spend the week before that preparing little tokens of appreciation--satchels with messages of support, lapel pins of acorns ("The mightiest oak tree grows from an acorn"), and the like. One day during that week he would make breakfast for the staff. He would give a three-sentence speech, in effect saying, "I wish I could show my appreciation by paying you thousands of dollars, but instead I made you pancakes. Thanks for all your hard work." And we would all eat.

I've heard the wish for thousands of dollars, Secretary Duncan. Now I'm waiting for my pancakes.

Tech tools update

2011-07-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

I looked at my calendar this morning, and found that it was the 23rd of July. The start of school is right around the corner. I haven't read a teacher tech blog in weeks, and those are normally among the highlights of the internet for me. So I looked at some of my RSS feeds, and a lot of really intelligent people are doing a lot of really cool things.

Via iLearnTechnology, we have Automatoon, an online animator that uses HTML5, not Flash, as its basis. This is important because Flash works badly on Macintosh computers, and not at all on iDevices. (There are also some philosophical reasons for HTML5 over Flash, but I only barely understand them, and wouldn't deign to try to explain them.) It's easy to use, and unlike other online animation features I've demonstrated here before (notably Go! Animate), with Automatoon it's relatively easy to start an animation from scratch, right down to the component pieces. It requires a little more freehand computer drawing skill than I have, but I imagine most of my students are better at it than me. This is a welcome addition to the world of visual learning tools and student-production-other-than-5-paragraph-papers tools.

Free Tech 4 Teachers points us in the direction of a QR code reader treasure hunt generator. QR codes are those square bar code things that you see everywhere from magazine ads about perfume to, er, other magazine ads about perfume. The idea behind a QR code, I guess, is that it's supposed to allow people with mobile camera devices to take a picture of the box and get a lot more information about whatever the code is attached to. I saw them the other day on the tags in house plants in Lowe's. Taking a picture of the code would take you to a website or something that gave you information on care and feeding of the plant, something that used to be printed on the tag. I guess they had to get rid of that information to make room for the QR code. I don't really get QR codes; I don't know what they're really good for. I feel like they're an answer looking for a question.

That makes them a perfect fit for the QR code treasure hunt generator: students have to go looking for the questions. *rimshot* The idea is that students take their device, equipped with an appropriate QR code reader app (and the site provides some suggestions on where to find them), and go searching the school for QR codes. They take a pic of the code with their device, the reader app reads it, and gives them a quiz-type question. Students punch in the answer, and they're off to find the next question. Setup seems easy enough: the teacher types the questions and answers (or copies and pastes them off of a text document) into the program provided, the program gives QR codes for each question, the teacher prints them off and hides them around the school. S/he gives the students X minutes; the ones who come back with the most correct answers wins.

Again, this feels like an "almost there" technology. I haven't fiddled with it yet, so maybe I'm missing something. What I'd like to be able to do with this is an Amazing Race-type event: The answer to the question is the location of the next question. Maybe it will work for that; I don't know. I intend to give it a try, but I'm not certain I get the advantage over doing exactly the same thing, but having students take pictures of themselves at the appropriate locations. If it's an excuse to turn short-answer quizzes into kinesthetic learning activities, I guess that's fine. It feels like it could be more so, though.

Preview of coming attractions

2011-07-21T10:53:00.000-04:00

So I never got around to posting my summer to-do list; I was too busy doing it. That's probably okay. I've got a lot on my mind, though, and I've got either ideas or drafts for the following ideas which I intend to write about:

The role of unions in education; possibly an ancillary on organized labor in general (hint: I'm broadly in favor)
Effective teacher and administrator evaluation
Effective student evaluation
The role of journals in my English classroom
Creating community in the opening days of school
Common Core standards and their implementation
Communicative learning in the mixed-level classroom
Technology integration and educational computer programs you'd like to see
Project-based learning

What's on your mind as we pass the half-way point of Summer 2011?

AWWWW!

2011-07-20T07:38:00.001-04:00

This is the sort of thing that makes me just love the Internet.

I dare you to watch this and not smile. It's got EVERYTHING that makes a youtube video great--a baby monkey AND an iPhone.

Edited to add: Credit where credit's due: http://gizmodo.com/watch-this/

Some sort of reform position from the union

2011-07-05T15:31:00.001-04:00

According to the New York Times, the National Education Association has an official policy on student evaluation outcomes in teacher evaluations: Use them, but only if they're good tests. The article does a good job of sampling the union's position and laying out some of the big picture of what this means. (Full disclosure: I am a proud member of a local affiliate of the NEA. While I'm not a union shill, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking I was.) From my perspective, the union's new policy feels like sense, and it resonates with my thinking on the matter.

We need data to drive effective instruction. We need good data about educational outcomes for students, and we need good data for educational outcomes for teachers. (Someday we'll get to have the conversation about data for educational outcomes for administrators and school boards. But in the meantime, teachers are the proxy for all those levels of the education machine. And that's to put entirely aside the effects of poverty, parent responsibility, and all the other smoke screens we teachers like to release when people try to look at us too hard.) This need for data means that we're going to have to include student testing in decision-making at some level; if data-driven decision making is going to be used to improve education, we need good data.

There are two key phrases: the more immediate concern is "good data." Neither I nor any of my colleagues I've talked to about this (a pitifully small sample size; even if you count my former colleagues at my last posting, the total number of professional educators I've worked with adds up to less than 50, and the ones I've talked to add up to less than 15) trust any of the current assessments. The disconnect between the assessments and educational reality is simply too great, for a lot of reasons, and it isn't necessarily because the ACT is "too hard." It's not. The reality is that assessments sample such a small number of learning goals, and do so in such a cursory manner, that drawing meaningful conclusions is tough. Equally importantly, the current assessments are not really designed to evaluate the skill of instruction. The good standardized tests assess really big ideas--critical thinking, drawing conclusions from data, things like that. But they don't do it in a way that means a great deal. Colleges have been de-emphasizing their focus on standardized test scores as an admission requirement, even as everybody else ramps it up. The union's director of teacher quality makes a valid point: the Common Core curriculum might be a starting place for getting better standardized tests.

The second, long-term consideration about data is longer-term political. I said, "if we're going to use data to improve education". That wasn't a rhetorical flourish. As trained professionals, many of us see the value in data (even if we lack the know-how, the resources, or the time to do anything about it). But I for one don't trust the motivations of many of the people pushing "testing testing testing" as the new standard for teacher (and by extension public education) efficacy. Many of them have a track record of being distinctly anti-public-education. These are all the usual boogeymen for this blog: the Mackinac Foundation, private charter school management companies, people who think that a lack of officially-sanctioned prayer in school is de facto a reason to be against public education. For many of these organizations (cue the "straw man" arguments, and I see your point), data-driven instruction may simply be another weapon to attack public education with.

Conversely, critics of the NEA (and, in this particular instance, I don't count myself among them) could argue a similar thing: In name, the union has accepted testing as part of teacher evaluations, while in practice rejecting any existing tests. It will be at least a decade before the kind of tests the union wants are available, by which time this argument will likely be moot. Good practice will show that high-stakes testing doesn't produce notably better education outcomes, and opponents of public education will move on to some other angle of attack.

So what's to be done? Well, I can't do a whole lot about public policy right now. Thanks to a recent vote in the Michigan Senate, my local union has less power than ever to do anything about teacher evaluations. What I can do is this: use the (pretty crappy) data we have to make decisions about what's good for my students. Make sure my learning goals are crystal clear in my head, and make sure my formative assessments are as good as they can possibly be. Get the data that I need myself. Make sure my class is so hard, when someone throws a standardized test at my students, they don't think twice about knocking it out of the park. Make sure my support structures are so strong, that all of them get it. Ray, I think you have the right idea: What do you want students to know? How are you going to help them learn it? How are you going to know if they got it? What are you going to do about it? The key questions are the only ones that matter.

(Edited to fix spelling error in the title. Thanks, Jamie. Who's the English teacher around here again?)

A brief thought for further consideration

2011-06-24T12:40:00.000-04:00

According to research, a great way of teaching background knowledge is to teach key vocabulary. (Marzano has something rapidly approaching 6 books on the topic.) It is very possible to know some information or possess some skill without having the vocabulary for it; for example, children from Spain conjugate verbs in the second-person plural imperfect without ever knowing what those words mean. Another example is a basketball player who knows nothing about physiology or trigonometry, but has a free-throw average of 80%. It is, however, very difficult to teach a concept without a shared vocabulary. To give a skill without a vocabulary would involve simply modeling a skill over and over, and having the student mimic it. To give knowledge without the vocabulary...again, modeling, maybe? That's tougher, I think.

Portuguese Friday

2011-06-17T21:08:00.003-04:00

A student sent me this link. Great song, cool video, tight execution.

Edited to add a link to the lyrics.

Education reform, unions, first principles

2011-06-12T22:23:00.000-04:00

Or, More Questions than Answers

I'm bashing my head against two posts: this one from Shawn Gude, and this one from E.D. Kane. trying to figure out what it is that bothers me about them. I agree with nearly everything they both say, but neither of them quite...do it for me. In 6 Traits writing speak, I would give them a 5 out of 6 in Ideas, without quite knowing why.

Favorite lines:

"Ends are often regarded as self-evident. It’s a bit more complicated than agreeing that, yes, we all want an education system where students are well-educated. Reform discourse needs to include discussions of first principles, end-games, and educational values" --Gude

"[T]here is no doubt in my mind that corporate for-profit charter chains would be a mess; that the influence of the big foundations can create perverse incentives; and that the top-down approach of many reformers is a bad approach." --Kane

Things I have trouble with:

"So I support the unions, I just think they also need to reform. And I support the idea of charter schools and school-choice, I just don’t support the profiteering off of education that some reformers and corporate interests seem to want. I think charters, like unions, can be a great force for progress." --Kane

How do unions need to reform? He seems to be in favor of all the things that unions do.
How can charters be a force for progress? What do they bring to the table? I'm glad that both of these people (much better than me at this stuff) are leery of charters run by for-profit companies.

In the end, we're left with the beginning. Why do we educate our children? Do we want to make our students ready for the workplace? Well, yes, but is that all schools are good for? If so, then we should probably just go back to apprenticeships as our primary vehicle for education. That way, the cost is borne by the companies who will benefit from their labor. If we want our schools to do more for our students than that, if we want students who think about things, if we want inventive, creative thinkers, that's something different.

And, of course, if we want schools to be vehicles by which the children of the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful, we have models for that, as well.

Sudden insights

2011-06-09T12:44:00.000-04:00

I'm putting the wraps on SY 2010-2011; it's proving to be deceptively difficult. I'll have a year-end review and a summer to-do list up, probably next week. In the meantime, a few random thoughts:

1.) In my Spanish classes, I'm shocked to discover that a great deal of my assessment of comprehension is in fact an assessment of production. This is not a new problem for me; I seem to remember having written about it before. I wonder why I haven't done anything about it yet. Maybe it's because writing tests is hard. (/whine)

2.) This from my friend Qandeel:

I told her she was confusing coffee with crystal meth.

This looks like fun...

2011-05-29T20:05:00.000-04:00

Larry Ferlazzo (and, let's face it, he has more good ideas on a Sunday in a long weekend than I've had in my whole year, which is why I keep stealing his stuff) talks about Protagonize. It's a social networking writing website which Ferlazzo says has "choose-your-own-adventure" style elements to it. I'll play with it over the summer, and see how it goes....

Everything we're doing is wrong

2011-05-29T10:09:00.000-04:00

I'm late to the party: most of the people who know stuff about stuff have already talked about this. But the National Research Council has done national research on incentives and high-stakes testing. The short version is that they find them wanting.

My favorite line from the summary: "The tests that are typically used to measure performance in education fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways."

Larry Ferlazzo, as always, has an excellent collection of other people's writing on the topic. He promises his own commentary presently; he's usually insightful, and I usually agree with him.

I've written before about incentives, but I'm having a hard time finding those posts. This new report jves with the other research I've posted here, though. Incentives and disincentives are only good for forcing compliance. They are worse than useless at encouraging creative problem solving, which is a big chunk of what teaching is. Teaching is also compliance with best practices, gathering data, good assessments, effective instruction, etc. But how to apply those materials? What about the students that nothing seems to work for? Creatively applying what we know works is how we get the best results.

Whoa! Two posts in one day.

2011-05-21T09:16:00.000-04:00

My seniors' last English unit was on satire. If only I'd seen this three days earlier....

Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students

A great piece of lateral thinking and writing for communication

2011-05-21T08:10:00.000-04:00

I talk to my students a lot about some of my deepest fears. Preeminent among them are 1.) my fear of dying in a gas station explosion caused by a lit cigarette and 2.) zombies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has as part of its mission preventing major medical emergencies, but sometimes has trouble making itself heard in a wide enough venue. So someone thought to themselves, "If I write about zombies, people will read it," and they did. And they were right.

According to this article, where I first heard about the blog post, a typical CDC blog post will get between 2000 and 3000 hits. After 2 days, traffic to this blog post crashed the web site after 60,000 hits. That's reaching your audience.

Quote of the day

2011-05-17T19:10:00.002-04:00

“If school reformers really wanted the best possible teachers in every clssroom, they’d select and prepare them carefully, support them diligently on the job and fight to retain them, given the high cost of replacing teachers."

--Nancy Flanagan

My new school improvement proposal

2011-05-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

We have a school improvement team meeting tomorrow, at which we'll rejigger our school improvement plan. Here's my proposal, courtesy of my wife:

Less suck. More rock.

The fundamental problems with merit pay

2011-05-14T16:27:00.000-04:00

1.) You can't pay good teachers as much as they're worth. No amount of merit pay is going to make up the difference, really. So maybe good teachers aren't really in it for the money.

2.) Some of the people philosophically responsible for merit pay basically don't want to pay public teachers anything. (Mackinac Center, DeVos, I'm looking at you.) Introducing merit pay is a step towards that goal.

Minimum page requirements

2011-05-09T19:58:00.000-04:00

I assign minimum page requirements to stick it to my "do-as-little-work-as-possible" students. They get back at me by making me read what they write.

No, really, though. My students always want to know how little they can get away with doing. (I say "my" as if it's unique to me. Everybody's students want that.) In most of my formal writing assignments, I tell them a minimum of 3 pages. I specify margins, acceptable font sizes, spacing requirements, everything. That's what my high school English teachers mostly did; that's what I do. I tell them that when they get to be crack journalism students, they will be able to write comprehensively about a topic in fewer pages, but for now, just do it.

Students go to extraordinary lengths to hit the page requirement, without actually doing any more writing. It's amazing. Instead of a punchy conclusion, the last line of the paper is occasionally a drawn-out, run-on monstrosity with more clauses than a sack full of catses. (I've been waiting years to write that joke.) I imagine that that's why the model shifted to the introduction--3-body-paragraph--conclusion model; that way nobody has to care what the page requirement is. (Weirdly, though, everyone still does. Evidently, this includes the people who assess the ACT writing section.)

Once I get an efficient system for turning papers in digitally (Google Docs, Moodle, I'm looking in your direction), I can use a word count system as a way of judging minimum lengths. But the point is that I hate that kind of nonsense. It's stupid game-of-school stuff. There's nothing magic about three pieces of paper with ink on them, especially if the third one has exactly seven words printed on it; there's nothing magic about 1500 words, especially if 400 of them are "very". It's just that most students stop thinking far too soon without some kind of minimum requirement. The minimum requirement doesn't seem to be any help, either.

Maybe in the future, when I get better at teaching and grading by rubrics, I'll be able to show students that a minimally good paper will probably take up 3 or more pages, but that I'm not grading by weight. In the meantime, I have 35 pounds of papers to grade.

Readers: How do you ensure that your students put an adequate amount of thinking into your writing assignments? I'm talking Tier-I, fully functional, basically good high school writers. Everybody knows that some students will never do that, and some will only do it when people sit next to them and say, "Get back to work" every 15 seconds. I don't mean them.

Stealing other peoples' links

2011-05-08T10:08:00.000-04:00

The great part about the internet is that almost everything is on it. (At least temporarily.) The bad part you have to be able to find it when you want it. These are tech sites I hope to use someday, but have to keep track of in the meantime.

Tiki toki (stolen from iLearn Technology). A tool for creating timelines. I'm going to try it for a presentation, although the presentation was not intended to be exceptionally multimedia.

Snipsnip.it (also stolen from iLearn Technology). An apparently decent video editor. I don't know that there's anything here I can't already do in iMovie, but for those times iMovie isn't available or sufficient, this might be useful.

Goodreads.com (stolen from Free Technology for Teachers). A social networking site for readers. It looks like it will make independent reading assignments much more thorough, effective, and maybe fun.

Links to stuff

2011-05-03T20:15:00.000-04:00

Heather Wolpert-Gawron talks about the 5 most important skills students need, based on a survey she performed The winners are collaboration, communication, problem-solving, questioning, and independent learning. She lists 8 or so others, as well; I really like them, as well.

Dick DeVos talks to the Heritage Foundation about destroying public schools. h/t Jamie.

Another front the war on ignorance

2011-05-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

I got it from an e-mail, which got it from a blog, which got it from the New York Times.

If I understand the NYT's new pay structure correctly, you should still be able to view the above article.

I told myself I wouldn't do this

2011-04-27T20:57:00.003-04:00

Gov. Rick Snyder came out with proposals for reforming Michigan's education system. I'm not watching the press conference.

I'm not going to read the article or the accompanying PDF. I'm certainly not reading the follow-up articles on mlive.com.

And whatever I do, I'm not going to blog about it.

I won't be happy with anything I hear. I've got real work to do. I don't have time. I had four hours of sleep yesterday. My clothes are slimy with the humidity. I'm cranky. No good can come of it. It will only upset me.

Dammit....

(All of these references come from the Special Message on Education Reform PDF.)

Do schools really give pizza parties on count day? I think that the attendance taking system actually sees through that ploy. I have the exact same criticism for this funding model that I had for it when Bush proposed it under NCLB: He wants to give money to schools doing well. A "reward," he calls it, or an incentive, or something. What about the schools that don't improve? Well, less money for you. I forget who said it, but it's still true: Money can't solve everything, but it can solve some things. It's obvious that a businessman would want to put more money into what works, but it just leaves too many schools behind, and there's no way--NO way--the remaining "good" schools could pick up the slack. In a competitive environment, the winners pull further ahead, the losers stay really lost. His solution to this is to erase all school borders and increase on-line learning opportunities.

I disapprove of charter schools. I don't think more of them will do anything to improve education. Indeed, in an environment where the people furthest ahead are likely to continue to be so by dint of increased funding, the charter schools won't last long. They'll be nothing more than an expensive distraction for the next 10 years.

Merit pay is a pipe dream. It may or may not work for the next 5 years, while people still think it's a great idea. Then, some funding emergency will come up. The funding for merit pay will dry up. Then, all the "incentive" teachers had to do a good job will be gone. Here's hoping the good teachers stay. This scenario is just as probable for schools and districts as it is for individual teachers.

I kind of like the idea presented in "Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace." Anything that makes success in school less dependent on the game of school is a good thing. The rest of that paragraph sounds like it was inspired by Waiting for Superman.

"Cost-efficient, competitive, innovative, and effective." Hmm. I'll ponder the grouping of these four adjectives later. Particularly their order.

The symbolic gesture of creating "a P-20 state education system" by making the state school fund pay for the whole thing, while simultaneously not paying anything extra into the system, would be laughable, if there were anything at all funny about it.

Effective feedback for teachers is important. Fair, rigorous and meaningful evaluation systems are important. Peer learning and shared practice are important. Intelligent use of technology to enhance performance is important. Recognition of high performance is important. I don't know if reward for high performance is or not. Research suggests not. The point is, though, we don't have any of those other things. We're not getting them any time soon. It will be good to have them. If nothing else, this speech should be able to push everyone in the direction of getting them.

I will be evaluated on the effectiveness of my teaching to the tune of 40% based on student achievement growth, when I've seen some evidence that the state's standardized tests are in any way a meaningful assessment of same.

I don't think most administrators are able to put in the time to do teacher evaluations properly. On a similar note, who's evaluating the efficacy of administrators? We're all about transparency and accountability, right? And I don't mind about effectiveness in teaching being more important than seniority, although I think more experienced teachers often have a great deal to add. We simply have no system for determining effectiveness of teachers. I really need to find the link, but not so long ago, I remember reading that when Arizona got rid of its seniority priority laws, they fired all the experienced teachers. This was not because they were ineffective, but because they're expensive. Whether or not the law is intended this way, it will be used this way by increasingly cash-strapped school districts.

And the money phrase: "Michigan has to nurture great teachers, make sure they find satisfying career paths that reward them for teaching excellence, and keep them in the classroom[...]." You're doing a heck of a job, Rickie.

PD. I am going to write to my congressman and ask him to propose legislation to officially change the name of our state from Michigan to New Michigan. This will allow us to break completely with the old way of educating our kids, and symbolize the new and shining future that we'll create for them. I further propose that every 100 years we successfully manage not to be annexed by Indiana, we add another "New" to the name. Not necessarily to the beginning. "New Michigan New" has a nice symmetry to it.

Edited to add: I just saw the Education Dashboard. Under the category "Value for money," the only metric is the percentage of school districts running a deficit for 3 years or more.

Management theory, education theory, and philosophy

2011-04-17T12:59:00.000-04:00

I was thinking that this summer I might read some management books, based on the idea that big chunks of classroom management probably have considerable overlap with the most effective HR departments of major corporations. If management companies can find a way to convince employees that working for (for example) BP is actually a good move, then surely I can convince my students that reading is fun; at least my statement is true.

Before I got the chance, though, I read this article (h/t Making Light) that argues that business management theory is basically a stupid, corrupt sub-set of philosophy. Now in my college years, I had a philosophy instructor suggest that all knowledge was a sub-set of philosophy, and for all I know, he was right. But this philosopher-turned-business-consultant-turned-philosopher argues (I think) that the bond between management theory and philosophy are much more tight than a simple "philosophy trumps all" philosophy.

This intersects with the focus of this blog in several ways. First, the whole premise of the article is a critique of the education of managers. Shorter Stewart: We charge too much for MBA's and then we don't teach them anything. Many graduates of Harvard's MBA program are successful, but this is not because Harvard cranks out great MBA's. It's because you have to be very intelligent, ambitious, hard-working, and probably financially stable to get into the program. You have to be all of those things, only a lot more so, to graduate from those programs. Coincidentally, those skills are also requisites for success in any area, but specifically business management. So Harvard's MBA program isn't necessarily good at creating good managers, but it may be good at finding good managers.

In education, this question is asked of most advanced coursework: does my Honors English class create good thinker/communicators, or does it just find people who are good at those things and make them work at it? Is there really a difference? If there is, is it one that matters after graduation? If that's all we're good for, then why do we insist on educating everyone? Why not just find the best? (NB: Regular readers know that I am firmly dedicated to the principle of high-quality education for ALL students. I have no interest in being a cherry picker.)

Second, throughout Stewart's criticism, the parallel between business management theory and classroom management holds. In fact, in many ways it grows stronger and expands to include the whole field of education theory. Ed theory focuses on how people learn, what they should learn, how other people can get them to learn it, how we know when they have learned it, and what to do with them if they haven't (and if they have). It's a field of study which, like philosophy and management theory, has at its core a search for tools for quantifying and analyzing human experience. This leaves me with the resounding question: Should I be studying more philosophy than ed theory? Stop reading Marzano and start reading Kant?

Naaaaah.

How to teach books to kids

2011-04-15T21:45:00.000-04:00

My friend Jamie sent this to me. It seems not to be so much "How to teach books to kids," as "How not to teach books to kids like me." Here's my response in its entirety.

***

Hmmm.

*rereading*

Hmmm.

*processing, please wait*

Well, at first blush, I reject the premise that schools are strictly utilitarian in nature, or that the objective is to make productive little workers ready to jump into the job market. I also reject the unstated premise that no "form of mass education" can be of benefit to "poor students." Coates himself seems to be a product of public schools, and he seemed to turn out all right. (I love Coates, by the way. I hadn't seen this piece yet. I'll have to subscribe to his RSS.)

Second, the way he describes the process and pleasures of reading is insightful and almost poetic. I had a rough day trying to teach a couple of pieces of poetry to my students today, and I can hear echoes of what went poorly in what he writes. He says it in a way that adds clarity to some important thoughts I was having.

But more broadly speaking about school, research shows that there's a right way to teach reading and a wrong way. Handing out a copy of a book which is far beyond 60% of the class and far behind 20% more, and then going around the room taking turns reading paragraphs out loud, isn't it. Michigan actually has a pretty good model for teaching literature. At any given time, barring other considerations, students should be reading 3 books: one which they choose, anything they want. Judy Bloom, Dungeons and Dragons, Philip K. Dick, whatever. It should be something they'll be reading successfully on their own with NO intervention from the teacher. One book should be a little bit beyond them, and a small group of similarly just-slightly-out-of-their-league students are reading the same book, and they're all trained on how to support each other's reading. The third book is the book the whole class is reading--it should be considerably, but not impossibly, out of the range of most students in the class. It should be something they can be successful at with significant support, scaffolding, and instruction from the teacher. The idea is not to have kids read certain things, or to get specific ideas out of particular pieces of literature; it's to teach kids how, and why, to read.

But this model leaves the teacher with a need for a lot more human resource management and a lot less knowing-how-to-read-good. Most English teachers are good at reading, and not great at HR. Teachers also like to teach what they love, which is why everyone reads The Scarlet Letter and Jane Eyre. (I take that back. I've never read Jane Eyre.) And a lot of curriculum decisions are made by other people, which is why people still read Beowulf in high school. To add wrinkles to this, there is a great deal of support for the idea of thematic units: you're not just reading The Scarlet Letter, you're reading it and a lot of things like it to study, say, the role of women in 19th century literature. The development of the American Dream. The literature from war zones. Colonialist literature. Whatever. So that makes coordinating everything much harder. The point is, though, there are other, better, much much much harder ways of doing it.

And the broader BROADER point is that the objective is to teach reading, and not to have kids read specific things. I also reject the "cultural literacy" point made by the first commenter. And the way to teach reading is to have students read things that are too hard for them and show them how to be successful at it.

And more broadly speaking about literature, it is in the nature of good books to change with their readers. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not the same book for me now that it was 10 years ago; it's one of the reasons I keep re-reading it every couple of years. I understand that I might quite enjoy Scarlet Letter if I re-read it now; I just can't bear the thought of trying. So I understand Coates's frustrations, and I share many of them. The article has a sort of "Don't even bother trying to teach me to read; I'll get it in my own time or not" feel to it that I'm not sure I like. He doesn't have to be rational or correct about his response; I do (or at least look and sound like I do). It's what I'm paid my absurdly big salary for.

By the way, I'm going to post this response and your link on my blog, if that's okay; I have at least one other reader who might find this really interesting. Thanks!

***

Japanese erasers...?

2011-04-13T06:06:00.000-04:00

A possible new source for models for vocabulary in my class. They're off-beat, and in some cases off-putting. They're amazingly detailed, and utterly bizarre. They could be attached to vocab cards, or put in little plastic baggies which hang from cork boards with the vocabulary word up above and students have to match them, or....

The only downside is that they're a touch pricey.

Reform is in the air!

2011-03-27T10:38:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons I think teachers have been so reluctant to embrace "reform" is because we were afraid it was going to look like...well, what it's looking like now. Things in the mid-west are getting ugly fast. Dianne Ravitch speaks to the AASA of demoralized teachers all over the country. School districts can't count on the states to continue funding operations at a sustainable level; states can't trust the federal government to step in and fill the breach; parents can't trust that students are getting the education the students deserve (and the parents are pretty sure they're paying for.) In the face of this, the reforms have largely come in the form of draconian budget cuts, calls on school districts to do less with more, and unrealistic demands on teachers. We are expected to do less with more, to make concessions in pay and benefits that "the state just can't afford anymore," to meet ever-increasing standards, and not to complain about it because we're lucky we still have jobs.

This causes real problems for actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness school reformers. At the end of the two thousandsies, I think we were really making progress towards figuring out what would make our schools massively better. A number of excellent organizations had developed effective teacher-ed programs that would improve student achievement. Research was pointing the way towards what works: consistently high standards for students and teachers, coupled with effective support programs for those who need them; greater collaborative decision-making at the school level; effective teacher training and on-going professional development. Research had also begun to show that some common themes of reform were ineffective--competition through increased charter schools; merit pay; firing "bad" teachers en masse.

I fear now that this moment of opportunity has been lost. In Wisconsin, the biggest attention-getter in the news, the national focus has landed on the union-busting measures. In Indiana, these union-busting measures passed months ago, and people are just now realizing their implications. In Ohio, the governor's proposed budget would slightly increase funding on paper, while in fact meaning significant budget cuts in action. Because of this, the conversation circles around what we can afford, not what is right. We're talking about teachers' compensation packages, not what works.

Because of this, teachers don't trust anything that comes down the pike, and they're unlikely to do so any time soon. State policy makers have never trusted union teacher members to be legitimate partners in reform. (I suspect this is why all of the recent reform efforts have included some element of union-busting.) This lack of trust means that genuine partnerships to improve the American education system are in jeopardy, perhaps for years to come.

Some of the articles I was reading that led to this post:

5 myths about teachers that are distracting policymakers by Barnett Berry, guest posting on The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post. H/T Larry Ferlazzo.

Gov. Rick Snyder says public school cuts will be 'difficult,' but denies he's trying to break unions by Julie Mack, in my hometown rag.

And a little political cartoon, just for good measure.

(I've obviously referred to a lot of information I haven't cited. If anyone asks me about it, I'll try to pull the reference list together.)

True story!

2011-03-17T21:13:00.000-04:00

So I'm grading quizzes, the kind I can basically turn my brain off and let the pen do the work (so long as nothing egregious happens). I get to one quiz, not far from the end, and I'm rolling right along. As soon as I finish the first section, I think, "Man, this student is getting everything right, but their handwriting is terrible."

It was my answer key.

Taking it for granted

2011-03-05T21:46:00.000-05:00

I've been working really hard on developing an English IV and Honors English curriculum this semester. I've also been trying to push Spanish II forward, and have been looking ahead to the possibility of Spanish III and IV. I've been coasting through my Spanish I, trying to catch up with everything else. On Thursday, it bit me in the temporal adverb.

I've been through this lesson a dozen times before, so I came in a little underprepared. I hadn't looked over my notes or the handout that I'd be giving--this presentation had worked every other year; why not today? Well, it didn't. It was kind of a disaster. I still don't know what happened; I wish I'd been video taping. The practical upshot is that I had to re-teach the entire lesson on Friday.

This experience got me thinking about taking things for granted. For the first time in my professional career, I haven't had to fight tooth and nail for every inch of learning my students achieve. Some of them study Spanish outside of class; many of them use my throw-away utterances in their own Spanish conversations. Most of them know better than to ask for translations or to shout out the English once they've figured something out. I have yet to send a student to the principal's office, or indeed to use any punitive measure other than a reminder of rules and procedures, maybe an explanation of why they're important, and to hold some "extreme" cases after class for a minute.

It's March now, and because of all the amazing achievements my students are making, I've been thinking that I'm doing a great job of teaching them. Also, they mostly behave really well, so I sort of thought my classroom community program was working effectively. It turns out I'm the guy born on third who thinks he hit a triple. I've gotten lazy with re-teaching expectations, positively reinforcing behaviors, reviewing content, and re-designing lessons to meet students' needs. In fact, I've almost forgotten that the students have needs. I've been teaching Spanish 1 for long enough that most of my weekly plans play on several different intelligence types, and most contain some level of differentiation of instruction. So I really have just been pulling out old weekly plans and photocopying old handouts, and calling it a day.

Thursday really was a wake-up call for me: I can't make it through the week just planning my "new" classes. My Spanish I students deserve the same level of prep that my English students do. I apologized to them on Friday as I re-taught the lesson, hopefully better. (It felt better.) If there are any students reading this now, I apologize again.

"It's like a box whose instructions on how to open the box are inside the box."

2011-02-16T20:20:00.002-05:00

There's an iPod ebook on how to use your iPod.

A great summary of my position on pejorative epithets

2011-01-28T19:39:00.000-05:00

Of course we don't allow students to use pejorative epithets in school. (The original title of this post was "The real problem with epithets." Then I remembered that epithets are a literary device commonly found in epic poetry.) I fancy myself an intellectual, so until recently, when a student said, "What's wrong with calling someone 'gay'?", I would tell them in excruciating detail. For the student, it probably sounded like: "Because when you zzzzz...."

Then I tried overcompensating the other way. "Because I said not to. It's my classroom, and I don't want to hear that kind of language. When you have your own classroom, you can use whatever language your morals and your lawyers decide is acceptable." "But..." "We can talk about it further in detention tomorrow evening, if you'd like. But I'm done talking about it now."

But Ta-Nehisi Coates, an actual intellectual, one who writes quite intelligibly about the complicated state of race relations in the US, and in the meantime has a lot to say about language and how it's shaped by (and shapes) our thinking, has the perfect sentence. It encapsulates both the ethics of my lecture, and the brevity of my discipline-based approach. (It's even better, because it's shorter.)

"[...I]t's always wrong to treat individuals as a 'collection of others.'"

I think I'll get it on a T-shirt.

NEA blogs!

2011-01-25T20:21:00.000-05:00

That's the National Education Association, not the National Endowment for the Arts.

True story: My artist wife and her artist friends and I spent years casually dropping the NEA acronym in conversation, never realizing that one of us was talking about a completely different institution.

Anyway, as a faithful pawn of the Teachers' Union Uprising, I thought I should pass the word on.

Big ideas/little ideas

2011-01-16T16:55:00.001-05:00

Big ideas:

Teamwork
Literature circles
Effective research
Cross-curricular writing portfolios (which also include spoken or visual presentations)
Communication as a tool for self-fulfillment, self-expression, self-reflection, and self-improvement
Communication as a tool for connecting and creating individuals and communities

Little ideas:

Non-academic vocabulary (50-cent words)
Grammar lessons
Responding to teacher-generated questions
Right and wrong answers in literature

I'm not saying that what I've labeled as "little ideas" are unimportant. But I think they should build towards the big ideas. The problem is that I spend all of my time thinking big ideas and acting little ideas.

How to teach English

2011-01-02T16:10:00.003-05:00

I tried embedding this into the blog itself, but it's not fitting. So instead, you get a link. My entire job, summarized in 7 panels.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2112

h/t Jamie

Useful videos

2010-12-29T22:16:00.000-05:00

Now that Delicious is going the way of the dodo (everybody tells me so, that's how I know) there are two things I should really start doing here, in my own little space on the interWebs. First, I should start cataloging serious alternatives: lots of people have them. I followed someone's directions and imported all of my Delicious links into Google Bookmarks. It seems a poor alternative thus far, largely because I can now not find my Google Bookmarks page. Nor can I add bookmarks without going to Google Bookmarks. For Delicious, I just pressed Command + D. Viola, permanent record of link forever. (I'm still doing it, and will up until the day they officially pull the plug.) (Which, evidently, they might not.)

Second, I should start using the space to keep track of links I want to keep track of. Well, I've kind of been doing that already. But I should probably, I don't know, do it better or have a better tagging system or something. (An analysis of tags as the most insanely useful, or not, way of organizing information is forthcoming. Some year.)

For example, Nova has a bunch of videos online, like this about Machu Picchu. There are others, I'm sure.

Finland, Finland, Finland...

2010-12-29T08:06:00.001-05:00

Linda Darling-Hammond has taken to various publications to talk about Finland's educational model. She did so again in the fall in NEA Today. While the article presents a great many ideas that US policy makers should take note of, and while many aspects bear further investigation (doctorate, here I come), one particular point jumped out at me, grabbed me by the ears, and started pounding me in the middle of the forehead.

All students receive a free meal daily[...] (Darling-Hammond, 2010, par. 19.)

Imagine if we suggested something like that here. No, really. Think about it for a second. Envision it. Every student gets a meal. You walk into school, you get lunch. The ramifications are kind of staggering.

Start with the un-shaming of the free-and-reduced-lunch program. You don't have to be ashamed of not paying for your food. Nobody does.

Move on to lower-middle-class income families. Parents who skimp on school lunch because they can't really afford it stop trying. Their students eat a decent meal.

The upper-middle class families continue to send their students to school with lunches from home. Sometimes, though, the students eat the school lunches, because for whatever reason they don't bring one.

Some parents talk about "charity," and how they won't accept it. School officials and policy makers simply state that it is now the policy of X state to provide every student with a good, nutritious meal at no front-end cost. Besides, the parents are still paying for it, just like they're paying for physical improvements to the school and teacher salaries.

Initially, a great deal of food is wasted as students who have never eaten school lunches before try them. The issue of taste comes up at school board meetings. At the same time, health-conscious parents take a closer look at the contents of school lunches. This brings about a push for school lunch reform. As a result, school lunch improves in nutritional value and tastiness. This reform applies financial pressure to the companies that currently produce large amounts of, let's say, pre-packaged cinnamon rice. This, of course, doesn't happen everywhere at the same time, and it happens last in urban districts with high levels of poverty, where most students are already receiving free and reduced lunch.

I once had a student from Finland in one of my Spanish classes. I told her there was a song about Finland. She didn't think it was funny.

Also, no mention of school lunches.

Why I love my friends: A holiday post

2010-12-28T13:58:00.000-05:00

Those who know me probably refer (hopefully lovingly) as a Nerd. The capital N was intentional, and well deserved. I'm getting too old to be one of the cool nerds; hopefully I'm old enough soon to be considered retro, and thus cool again. That cycle gets shorter and shorter, so it shouldn't be long now.

As a result of my friends' knowledge of my nerdliness, I have received a few really, REALLY nerdy holiday gifts, with which I am inordinately pleased.

Exhibit 1:

This is, as you can see from the title, a fundamental bibliography of Don Quijote. During my graduate class on Don Quijote, we read the Murillo edition, and would refer frequently to his footnotes for cultural clarification. For our term papers, we were encouraged to consult this bibliography as a great starting point for finding source information. The Bibliografía was no longer in print, though, and essentially impossible for a graduate student to acquire. We all borrowed our professor's WELL-worn copy, and were grateful for the chance.

Since then, there have been an amazing number of times when I've wished I could pull up some quick articles about Quijote on some theme or another. I've thought longingly of this bibliography, wishing I could refer to it just to see how much research had been done on the topic as of 1978. And now I have a copy.

I know, nerdy, right? But, admit it: kinda awesome.

Exhibit 2:

This, friends, is an ocarina, which is sweet enough. But wait, there's more:

It's an Ocarina of Time! This is a genuine replica of the instrument played by the intrepid hero Link in the video game classic The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. I played a few scales on the ocarina, and it has a good sound to it.

I know, awesome, right? But kind of nerdy.

The best part about this is that these came from different friends. They're appealing to my nerdy nature from all sides!

Thank you, guys. They're great.

NB: I already had a Don Quijote tag, ready to use. That's cool.

Free WL resources

2010-12-19T09:23:00.000-05:00

These come courtesy of Carrie C. on the ACTFL listserv. (Not that Carrie C.)

Learner.org seems to have a variety of free video sources for different school subjects. For Spanish, they have the video for the textbook series "Destinos." They also have a college-themed version. That, combined with some scaffolding, would go a long way to help a learner find comprehensible input. (Ray, if you read this....)

For the teacher, they also have a seminar on K-12 language teaching and some arts instruction methods courses that look really interesting.

Also on the free video front, the BBC has a whole host of language tools. The Spanish video was insufferably slow-going for my taste--it felt like "Dora the Explorer" for adults. ("Can you say 'largo?' [pause] ¡Muy bien!) But maybe it's just what some learners need. And maybe later lessons focus on providing comprehensible input.

Important lessons learned from literature

2010-12-17T22:35:00.000-05:00

Any plan that involves faking your own death is a bad plan.

Also, any plan that involves losing your hat is a bad plan. (Can't find the exact reference right now. It's from Girl Genius. Yes, it's steampunk. Yes, I know what I said about steampunk. Yes, I've read the whole thing. Sue me.)

Literature circles

2010-12-16T19:28:00.000-05:00

A quick link to a blog post about literature circles. Is this something that I can use in higher grade levels? Does anybody out there use literature circles? I have a group of fairly disengaged high school seniors.

h/t Edutopia

Hmmm...maybe my students CAN use it.

2010-12-08T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've long been excited by GoAnimate. I've posted all two of my animations in other blog posts. But I've encountered difficulties when students use it. These range from the standard technology issues ("Mr. Cosby! I broke the internet!" One time it was almost literally true.) to simple time-management issues. There were a lot of things about it that my students didn't understand the first time around, and would be able to do better after having some experience with it. there were also some issues sharing the resultant videos, strangely.

But now GoAnimate for Schools is live, and theoretically, it would solve the sharing problem. It also means that the limitations suffered by mere mortals--the character creation difficulties, for example--would also be overcome.

As for my students breaking the Internet, well, I understand it's fragile anyway.

One for when I get "spare" time

2010-12-04T11:25:00.000-05:00

I'm wondering about the culture clash between standards-based education, which I wholly believe in, and "holistic" learning, where students learn things that are not necessarily part of the curriculum. It's something that bears closer examination.

I'm a proponent of standards-based education. From that perspective, my dogmatic twist on this thorny issue is that if you write the standards well, if you write them with big juju thinking skills at their heart, if you think "big" enough about them, then they can incorporate holistic learning practices. They don't have to be in conflict. The problem comes when your standards are a list of 200 things your students have to know before they can leave Algebra class.

But like I said, that's an article of faith with me. I'm pretty sure the research is there to back me up on this one. I'll just have to wait until I retire to look into it.

Sir Ken Robinson rocks the animation

2010-11-30T05:58:00.001-05:00

The inimitable Sir Ken Robinson doing what he does best--blowing holes in the education world.

Hat tip Open Culture.

http://www.openculture.com/2010/10/sir_ken_robinson_a_creative_education.html

More books I want

2010-11-28T11:31:00.000-05:00

Doing Literary Criticism by Tim Gillespie. In my "Teaching Reading" class in college, we had a mini-unit on using literary theory to give readers a purpose for reading. I found it to be mind-bogglingly useful in that and subsequent classes. Picking a literary theory provides students with a way to pick out key information. This is useful as students learn to read an entire text, and also when (as often) they're required to read a book they don't want to, or are stuck on.

Stenhouse Publishers here.

To my students: Thinking vs. knowing

2010-11-21T08:20:00.000-05:00

or,

The difference between when I ask you a question and when you ask me a question.

It's a common enough scenario in our class: I ask you a huge question, give you no guidance or background information, and demand that you analyze, choose and defend a position on it in three minutes. I imagine that this is frustrating for you sometimes, especially since my skills at communicating my goals are not great.

This happened on Friday, and instead of just answering the question, one of your classmates responded, and then said, "What do you think about this topic, Mr. Cosby?"

I didn't exactly deflect the question, but I didn't exactly answer it right away, either. I think I said something about not wanting to presume to know everything, to which somebody said, "Well, you expected us to know the answer."

It reminded me of a few days earlier, when I asked you about a camera angle in To Kill a Mockingbird. "Why put the camera there for this scene, and why not somewhere else?" One of your classmates asked, "Does this have a correct answer? I like things that have correct answers." My response to that was similar: There may well be a correct answer, the director made that decision for a reason. I can only guess at what it was. The better I am at the language of film, the more likely my guess is to be close to correct.

The common theme to these two scenarios, dear readers, and the theme that connects a thousand others just like them, is this: When I ask you a question like that, it's because I want you thinking about the answers. I want you to come up with what you think the best answer is, and I want you to defend it. When presented with new evidence, I want you either to explain how the new evidence fits into your position, or I want you to change your position to accommodate it. I do this because I think that this is the most reliable way for people to learn. There's something pretty Socratic about it, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, but there you go. That's pedagogy for you. I don't expect you to have the right answer every time, the first time. You often get the right answer, or at least a right answer, because you're smart. And even when you're off-base, you quickly come to a right answer. But for our purposes, that's sort of the cherry on the sundae. I want you to think in as many different ways as possible, and I want you--and this is the kicker--to be aware of your thinking as you do it.

When you ask me my own questions back, there's a different dynamic. Based on past experiences, you imagine that I have answers to all the questions I ask. Maybe you visualize a Teacher's Annotated Edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, which gives me questions to ask and themes to present. Such things exist, and I use them when my own thinking is unclear or incomplete, or honestly, when I'm in a hurry. So I feel like when you ask me a question, it's because you want to know the answer, and you want me to give it to you. Your motivations are your own--I like to think you're checking your own thinking process against that of a respected local authority. You may simply be tired of thinking. But the point is this: When you ask me a question, it's because you want the answer.

The problem with that is the nature of the questions I ask: "What are the qualities of leadership? What does a society owe its people, and what do leaders owe to unwilling members of a society? How do stories and leadership relate?" These questions have no one answer. My objective is not for you to know how to answer them, it's for you to know how to ask them.

So, just keep thinking. A lot of good will come of that, far beyond the limits of school.

To my students: On being and becoming teachers.

2010-11-18T22:35:00.000-05:00

Students,

A few weeks ago I told some of you that I was inspired to teach Spanish by my high school Spanish teacher, and that I hoped to be able to do the same for some of you. I said that the mark of an excellent teacher is not how many students he has, but how many teachers he creates. This is as close to a religious belief as you will ever hear from me. However, something didn't feel right about the way that conversation ended.

I said that I wanted for you to become Spanish teachers. That wasn't quite right. I want you to live happy, good, full, productive lives; I'm teaching you because I think that what you learn from me will help you do that. Communicating in Spanish will open doors for you that have previously been closed. These doors are not just in the Spanish-speaking world. These skills that I hope you're learning in my class will open doors inside your own head. In some cases, they'll build whole new wings on the mansions of your mind. (Or the airplane of your mind. Pick your metaphor. You build wings on both.)

I want you to love Spanish. I want you to love speaking Spanish, and I want you to be fascinated by the myriad cultures that use Spanish as their primary language. I want to have a part in bringing that to you. People who feel this way sometimes become Spanish teachers, because it lets us work with the future of our world AND speak Spanish. But many other people who love Spanish just as much as I do, decide not to become teachers. They become business people. They become doctors or lawyers. They become farmers. They become stage magicians. They re-mix YouTube videos for fun and profit.

I don't want you to become teachers for my sake, which is what I said if you were listening carefully. I hope you like Spanish class. I hope that you look forward to coming. I hope that you like the way I teach. But what I want for you, what I really want for you, is for you to find what you love and spend the rest of your life doing it.

That's what I'm doing.

Atentemente,

Señor Cosby

True dat.

2010-11-14T08:09:00.000-05:00

From Education Week:

Comment of the Day:

"We are asking teachers to be doctors, lawyers, artists, scientistsn and sociologists but paying them as though they were the manager at a Wendy's. "
— greeney

How dare teachers want to retire someday?

2010-11-13T09:22:00.000-05:00

More to the point, how dare teachers expect their contracts to be fulfilled?

This kind of thing always makes me angry. The author may well have a point that we have been promised more than the states can actually afford. However, the implication is that teachers are a luxury that society cannot afford. The whole tone of the article, from the first sentence to the very last self-righteous "Don't say you weren't warned", is one of dire warning and dismissiveness of negotiated contracts. He even takes the requisite left hook at teachers' unions.

There are three reasons this makes me angry. One of them is entirely visceral and gut-driven, and I think the other two probably are as well, but they feel more rational. The visceral reaction is, of course, that my team is being attacked. Nobody likes being referred to as the cause of the next savings-and-loan crisis. And I don't think we're being given anything we haven't earned. Traditionally in this country, civil servants tolerate a comparatively low salary and a heavy work load in exchange for a not miserably poor retirement after many years of dedicated service. Teachers qualify as civil servants.

There. The good news is, I feel better. The bad news is, I've spent so long trying to express emotion without being vituperative that I don't remember what my two actual points were. Well, maybe I'll remember them later, write another blog post.

More stealing toys

2010-11-06T15:55:00.001-04:00

Editing edition

I'm going to link to Larry Ferlazzo's post about photo editing tools. He talks about Wylio and ImgOps.

While I'm at it, a user review of another website I stole from Mr. Ferlazzo. I've mentioned the website CutMP3 before as a potentially interesting piece of software. I haven't had a chance to play with it, but one of my students (at my recommendation) used it in a "book soundtrack" presentation. He said that it was easy, took him not much longer to do than just assembling the playlist would have, and played back perfectly in Windows Media Player. No word yet on whether it plays in iTunes, but my student gave me all of his source files. Mac tests are forthcoming.

Incidentally, Mr. Ferlazzo cites TechCrunch as his original source for the picture-editing software. I think I'll try following them for a little while, too.

What next?

2010-11-03T22:26:00.000-04:00

The elections yesterday brought sweeping changes to the party in power in Michigan. The governor is now a Republican, the Senate was already Republican and is more so now, and the House is probably Republican now, as well. The two newest members of the state school board are Republicans.

I have one education policy question, and one selfish-but-can't-survive-doing-this-job-otherwise question for our new policymakers. 1.) Are you going to leave the Michigan Merit Curriculum more or less intact? 2.) Is my job part of the "wasteful spending" you expect to be able to eliminate? 'Cos I've got to tell you--after something like 6 consecutive years of more-than-billion-dollar budget deficits, I don't see a whole lot of waste left.

Edublogging on Halloween

2010-10-31T20:33:00.000-04:00

It's been a disappointing evening at the Cosby household this Halloween. We've only had two trick-or-treaters; they were appropriately grateful, but still. This has left me a lot of time to do the grading I didn't do yesterday, because I was doing schoolwork. It's also left me a lot of time to do the lesson plans I didn't do earlier today, because I was busy making calabaza en tacha for Día de los Muertos. La Señora Cosby was once again gracious enough to make calaveras de azúcar, for my not-officially-a-Spanish-club to decorate.

So, of course, I'm blogging.

I actually tripped across another book I want, and I wanted to record it here before I forgot it.

O'Connor, K. (2009). How to grade for learning. Linking grades to standards. 3d ed. Corwin. ISBN 9781412953825.

O'Connor signed off on PowerSchools, which is the grading software we're using. I sort of dropped the ball on the whole standards-based grading thing this year, so it's much more traditional-grading than I would like. For what it's worth, I'm making sure that the standards assessments are worth four times as much as the practices and homework and whatnot. So, there.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

Value-added analysis of auto mechanics

2010-10-23T11:10:00.000-04:00

KALAMAZOO AUTO MECHANIC RATINGS

About 1,000 Kalamazoo auto mechanics and 300 auto body shops are included in the Señor Cosby’s database of “value-added” ratings.

Domestic and imported vehicles’ mechanics who worked on at least 10 automobiles from 2003 to 2009 were evaluated by the Blog analysis. Most of Kalamazoo’s auto mechanics are included. Evaluations for independent, front-yard auto mechanics that do not report to the state authority were not available.

An auto mechanic’s value-added rating is based on a few key indicators of performance of his or her customers’ vehicles. The difference between expected performance and actual performance is the “value” a mechanic added or subtracted during the year. A body shop’s value-added rating is based on the performance of all cars worked on during that period.

Small differences in rankings are not statistically significant, particularly for those rated near the average. In some cases, recent gains made by mechanics and body shops may not be reflected in their ratings.

Although value-added measures do not capture everything that goes into making a good mechanic or school, the Blog decided to make the ratings available because the bear on the performance of providers of important services, and in the belief that auto owners and the public have a right to the information.

FAQ:

What is “value-added” analysis?

“Value added” analysis is a statistical method that estimates the effectiveness of a mechanic or shop by looking at key indicators of performance of the cars they’ve worked on--in this instance, the functioning of the left turn signal, the fuel efficiency measured in kilometers per hour, and the acceleration rate, measured as the time taken to go from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour. These scores are aggregated to form a single rating. Past scores are used to project each car’s future performance. The difference between the car’s actual performance and projected results is the estimated “value” that the mechanic or shop added (or subtracted) during the year.

Do value-added scores tell you everything you need to know about a mechanic or a body shop?

Not at all. Even advocates of the method say it should count for half or less of a mechanic’s overall evaluation. In reviewing a mechanic’s performance, administrators may want to consider their supervisor’s observations, the quality of the automobile’s appearance, mechanics’ abilities to work on systems other than the three mentioned, and many other factors. Similarly, auto owners looking for a shop for their car may also want to consider factors such as the shop’s state credentials, honesty and integrity policies, and their own impressions of the mechanics and the shop.

Why publish individual mechanic’s ratings?

Research has repeatedly found that mechanics are the single most shop-related factor in an auto’s long-term functioning, yet until now, auto owners have had no objective information about their effectiveness. The Kalamazoo Auto Body Workers Association has had the underlying data in hand for years but has not used them to inform auto owners--or mechanics themselves--about how mechanics are doing. The Blog made the decision to release the information because it bears on the performance of service providers and the belief that auto owners and the public have a right to judge it for themselves.

How accurate are mechanics’ rankings?

Value-added scores are estimates, not precise measures, and readers should not place too much emphasis on small differences in mechanics’ percentiles. As a technical matter, both sampling error and measurement error contribute to the variability of the estimated mechanic effects. The percentile rank is based on a point estimate for each mechanic, but the mechanic’s "true" rank falls in a range around each point estimate. In general, the potential for error is smaller at the high and low end of the scale and wider in the middle. Put another way, the scores are most accurate for the most effective and least effective mechanics and somewhat less so for mechanics whose scores are closer to average. The range of potential values for acceleration was plus or minus 5 percentile points at the 20th and 80th percentiles. For turn signals and fuel efficiency it was plus or minus 7 at those percentiles.

Is a mechanic’s or schools score affected by low-achieving vehicles, diesel trucks, Fords, or other cars with challenges?

Generally not. By comparing each vehicle’s results with its past performance, value-added largely controls for such differences, leveling the playing field among mechanics and shops. This distinction means that the assessments of the auto mechanics are strictly measures of an individual mechanic’s ability to exceed expectations. Research using Kalamazoo Auto Associates data has found that teachers with a high percentage of autos who are easily-repaired autos or Fords have no meaningful advantage or disadvantage under the value-added approach. The same applies to mechanics with high numbers of Audis, at one end, or Kias, at the other.

LA Times Teacher Ratings
LA Times value-added FAQ

MiWLA

2010-10-21T20:46:00.000-04:00

I went to the MiWLA conference today. I always like going to this conference; it reaffirms my sense of competence as a teacher, and I always come away with a few good ideas. In the past, I often went with a sense of insecurity in my job, and came away feeling reaffirmed.

Today, I went feeling great in my job, and came away wanting to be anything but a Spanish teacher.

I have been toying with the idea of learning to program in a few different languages, and creating language content. I've especially been excited by the idea of electric textbooks, especially of the open source variety. I talked to a small business owner in the educational content field, and got some great ideas for how to move forward with a similar situation.

I went to a meeting called "K-16 Articulation." Now I want to be an ISD curriculum advisor.

The thing is, I'm still super-excited to go back to my school tomorrow.

Animation test

2010-10-17T10:46:00.001-04:00

I don't remember if I've already tested this, and I can't be bothered to search the archives to find out. I should actually be working right now.

Go!Animate is an online tool for creating flash animations with relative ease. I say relative because it's still a fairly time-consuming process, and it isn't quite as intuitive as it likes to think it is.

I created this animation because in Spanish I, our most recent unit was about basic socializing. The exam for the unit is a one-on-one conversation. I have one student whom I know knows all the stuff, but I don't think I've ever heard her speak individually in class. My thought was that, instead of having a straight-up conversation with her, she could help me do the voice-over work with this cartoon. It turns out that you can't directly record voice-overs into the video--you have to use a different piece of software to record them, and then import them into the animation. If your objective is creating videos, that's not a problem, but if your objective is getting reluctant students to speak, you add a whole layer of abstraction and hassle that you don't want. So that idea isn't really going to work.

Anyway, without further ado, two methods of sharing the video: the link,

http://goanimate.com/movie/0y_W4EyibzgY?utm_source=linkshare

and the video embedding:

GoAnimate.com: Las presentaciones by jcos

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Update: You can sort of record your own voice. You call a telephone number, and it will record you, and by some mechanism, it ends up attached to your video. It's still not as good as just pressing a record button and talking to the computer, but it might be able to work.

Teachers' unions

2010-10-17T08:10:00.000-04:00

I did a brief spiel on Cesar Chavez for Hispanic Heritage Month, and in it I emphasized the role of the National Farm Workers' Association. My seventh-grade class, which often calls out anything I say which even hints at political overtones, asked me many questions which made it clear they'd heard that unions were bad. My eighth graders just wanted to know what unions did for me.

As I answered their questions, I tried to make it clear to them that I was a biased source of information, that everything I was going to tell them was pro-union, and that therefore I couldn't be trusted to provide the whole story. (It's more important that they know valid information when they hear it than that they like teachers' unions.) But it made me think again about what unions are, what unions do, and why unions are generally unpopular in the US and generally getting less so.

And then I came across this excellent post by Audrey Watters, about why almost everything they say about teachers' unions is wrong, or at least skewed. I would only add the following things.

When teachers' unions oppose reform, it is not because we (the teachers, and the members of the unions) are opposed to improvements. We are, however, opposed to being taken advantage of. Part of what unions do is make sure that their members' working conditions improve over time, or at least not get worse.

And part of the argument that a certain flavor of education "reformer" makes is that teachers do not deliver value for money. The obvious solution to this is for teachers to increase their work load and complexity by an undetermined amount up to infinity without an increase in compensation in other areas. They call it--and this might be the worst part--accountability. (As this paragraph currently exists, it's awfully straw man. I'll find some examples--well, honestly, probably when I retire and write my book in the history of education at the turn of the century.) Unions (at their best) try to slow that process down somewhat, to force consideration of whether each change is going to actually improve the students' education experience, and whether it would place undue hardship on the teachers.

This is the take-away quote from this article: "If unions oppose merit pay, it isn’t because they want to just reward long-time teachers with higher pay, quality of instruction be-damned. It’s because what counts as “merit” in these proposals is not the same as being a good teacher."

Stealing other peoples' links

2010-10-15T06:06:00.000-04:00

Online MP3-editing software? Sweet!

http://cutmp3.net/

I can do it in Garage Band to a certain extent, but unless I want to pass my laptop around the classroom every time I want a student to fiddle with a song, I'm the only one.

Great thanks and hat tip to Larry Ferlazzo for pointing it out.

More books I want

2010-10-09T12:15:00.000-04:00

The brain that changes itself, by Norman Doidge. Recommended to me by Elaine. It's apparently about the way your brain changes its shape all through your life, and the long-term value of learning. Since what I do is highly dependent on brain research, and since Elaine declares it highly readable, I'll be acquiring a copy as soon as feasible.

Well, that's September gone, then.

2010-10-03T09:31:00.000-04:00

This has been a REALLY good start to the year, I think. I hope my students would agree. I actually spent the first two weeks on community building, and have an outline for continuing it through. I have enforced my rules consistently, and when I noticed a big upsurge in students pushing the boundaries, I responded in what I think is the appropriate way. The students had seen the consequences for consistent disruptive behavior already, so the students who were testing the rules were unsurprised by their consequences. After a few minutes, I found an excuse do to a re-focusing activity, like Braingym. The next day, we re-covered our expectations, a la Randy Sprick, and rehearsed the routine where the students fell apart. This was in my 8th grade Spanish class. In almost none of my other classes have I had any difficulty that I couldn't pin on "the teacher kept us in the chair too long." In fact, in my honors English 12 class, I have asked the students to re-write the rules--none of my original rules are a problem.

All of this almost certainly has more to do with the school climate and the students themselves than with my opening sequence. This school is something of an anomaly. There's no school-wide positive behavior support system, the school expectations are not posted on banners all over the walls. And yet the students know. And even more amazing, they follow them. I am frankly stunned at the internal level of communication between faculty, staff and administration that must be going on to make this happen.

What will be REALLY interesting is to see what happens in December. Our football season ends in September, and the football coach is evidently a key part of keeping this whole system running. We're a "Friday Night Lights" kind of school, except instead of the football players expecting special privileges because of who they are, they're held to a higher standard of comportment and academics. It's awesome.

I'm clearly well-liked by the students. My Spanish students tell their parents they like my class, and their parents tell my principal, and my principal tells me. In return, I call students' homes as often as I can to gush about the wonderful things they're doing. If it keeps up like this, the positive behavior stuff will just end up running everything. And wouldn't that be nice?

My Spanish 7 and 8 classes are what I expected them to be--start with social niceties, and go on from there. (I expected my 8th graders to have had Spanish 7, and evidently this isn't universally true. So that was a surprise.) My Spanish I class is a little different. They all claimed some familiarity with Spanish from middle school, but none of them could tell me what they knew, and nothing I've taught them so far

As for my actual performance in delivering content, I give myself a B in my Spanish classes, and a pretty generous C in English class. In my early Spanish classes, I teach students the geography of the Spanish-speaking world. (It's one of the content expectations. I didn't write them.) It's part of my Schmoozing 101 unit (hat tip to Annette from the County ISD for the name); students have to know where their Spanish-speaking friends are from without running to Google Earth. (Although that is precisely what I do.) But it's the sort of thing I hate--it's basically memorizing, it takes FOREVER to do right, and apart from some commands, I have a hard time doing it in Spanish. So the students aren't speaking as much Spanish as I want them to. (I've finally got the "draw your own map" project doing what I want it to do, though...yay!) So they're learning what I'm teaching, I'm teaching it in the right way, but it doesn't feel like the right thing to teach. I'll be working on that for future classes.

My Spanish II has thrown me a complete curve ball, because they're grammarians at the fourth-year level, but have the communication skills of people who have never spoken Spanish. Because they haven't. They have surprisingly strong packets of vocabulary, but there's no reliable way to predict what they have. I've spent most of the last month selling Spanish as a vehicle for communication, and met with a few days of wide-eyed terror-stricken stares when I refused to translate directions. They're starting to catch on, though, and I think they love it. We started a unit in which we'll review everything that happens in a day, with a focus on them speaking Spanish every single day. After that, it will be my standard Spanish II curriculum, with a de-emphasis on grammatical concepts that they already know extremely well, and with plenty of time for back-filling.

Unsurprisingly, my English classes are a little meh. I have a clear learning goal, and a good vision of what steps we need to take to get there. I think my day-do-day practice is good instruction, because a lot of my students are doing good learning, some of them actually against their will. (That was kind of a joke.) I can clean up some of my routines, particularly the beginning of class. But there's a gap, and I keep feeling like there's something missing. I look around and wonder what I'm not teaching. I may ask Annette from the ISD if she has time to observe me teach someday soon, and give me some pointers.

Stealing other peoples' links

2010-08-20T12:17:00.000-04:00

In what I suspect is going to become a tradition, I'm going to post a link to a "Technology for Teachers" blog post, so that I'll be able to find it again later.

7 sources of free sounds for multimedia projects

Lots to read

2010-08-18T18:06:00.000-04:00

Right. I've started re-reading I read it, but I don't get it by Tovani. My summary of the first couple of chapters will be up...erm, as soon as I finish reading the first couple of chapters. Chapter 1 is in deceptively simple storytelling form, so I'm not sure I caught the lessons from it.

Also, my textbooks came in. I'll be taking a course in elementary Spanish methodology from a private college, starting in a few weeks. As it happens, the two textbooks for the class are books I've written about here before--Languages and children, 4th ed., by Curtain and Dahlberg, and Teacher's handbook, 4th ed., by Shrum and Glisan. So hopefully I'll have a chance to at least start reading those before the school year starts.

I'm writing syllabi for my new classes, although I'm still not certain which levels of English (or, for that matter, Spanish) I'll be teaching. The grading policy should be about the same for each class, unless the district has a grading policy I don't know about. And I'm VERY excited--I think I finally have a workable portfolio outline, something that my students can start working on from Day One.

And every teachers' website on the Internet is firing up with "Good first day of school" posts, and I've been trying to catch as many of them as possible. Below are a few, so I can close the blessed tabs, along with a few words of take-away for each.

Using literature the first weeks of school. From Elena Aguilar at Edutopia, a few books that a middle school teacher can use to set the tone for reading and community-building from Day 1. She suggests Seedfolks, by Fleischman, The house on Mango Street by Cisneros, and The library card by Spinelli. I can definitely use Mango Street; Aguilar even suggests a few ways to do it.

Start of the year routine and handouts. Some typically excellent suggestions from the always-excellent Heather Wolpert-Gawron. Random seating chart; beginning-of-the-year handouts; Find-a-Fib activities (X true things, 1 false things, you guess the false things); creating Works in Progress and Portfolio folders; a sample of content; and introductions to class-specific elements, like websites and positions. I do a lot of these things already, so it's good to see them confirmed by somebody I have a great deal of respect for.

The best kind of teacher evaluation--Larry Ferlazzo writes about how to evaluate teachers the right way. Regular observations by people who know the teachers, the students, the school, and what good teaching looks like; multiple sources of data; regular feedback from students and parents; and self-reflection. This enforces the idea of collaborating to improve student achievement, and helps teacher leaders to know what areas need improving. It sure beats blaming teachers for rotten test scores. Ferlazzo also has his own blog: larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/

On food in school

2010-08-16T22:18:00.000-04:00

Mark Bittman is a chef and activist for healthier eating. He wrote "How to cook everything," which my best friend in college had. I didn't cook ANYTHING more complex than spaghetti and jarred sauce the entire time we lived together, but I flipped through it once, and it seemed good. He also wrote "How to cook everything vegetarian," which looks good.

Bittman, like so many others, has been advocating for healthier school lunches and a more sensible approach to free and reduced lunches. In this blog post, he does a good job of explaining the school lunch reform bill that just passed the Senate, and explains its shortcomings.

Everything in education is controversial. We can't keep things the way they are now, but nothing can change in any direction. This is true for even the most self-evident piece of our school systems--our students don't eat well, including at school, when a lot of them are eating on Uncle Sam's dime. We're feeding our students blocks of salt, sprinkled with sugar, fried in oil, and sometimes breaded. Such vegetables as we do manage to sneak into the cafeteria are canned, processed, salted, boiled, and, in the best cases, flavorless. My wife still tells stories about hiding peas in her milk container so she didn't have to eat them. That's what school-lunch vegetables are--they serve more as an exercise in stealth than a nutritional supplement.

This bill is an okay answer to a long-overdue question. Using Marzano's grading rubric, I would give this a 2.5. Maybe that's the best we can hope for.

Technology and how teachers are using it

2010-08-14T10:19:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer, I bought a Mac laptop computer. I did this because I know how to use a lot of the tools it comes pre-packaged with. iPhoto, while not the world's best photo editor, makes moving photos to other applications very simple. (I like '09 less than I like '06--they did something to the organization options that I find simultaneously more invasive and less intuitive.) Garage Band is an AMAZING piece of software, and I have endless fun with it. It also lets me (or a student) record a podcast and export it to iTunes. From iTunes I can convert it into an MP3 file and distribute it in one of myriad ways. Mac's Work suite is pretty well designed, too, although, again, I like the '09 version less than the '06 version. The software designers seem to have de-prioritized simplicity for the sake of lots of cool mouse-clickable buttons. The big advantage is the ease with which bits of some applications move into other applications.

But for as much as I love my Mac, and am excited to use it in my classroom, it turns out that my tech fu is no longer at the black belt-level I thought it was. (Well, maybe it is, but like a 1st-degree black belt, not a 3rd-degree, like I thought.) So, here are some of the apps and sources I'm finding online that can make my job better and easier:

Free Technology for Teachers. This is a blog about, well, I'll let you guess. I'm going to start following it a lot more closely. In the meantime, it led me to the some of the following websites.

Screencasts. Just the other day, I wanted to create a video out of Google Earth. I could do it in Google Earth, for the entirely reasonable price of $400. I decided against it. Today, I found out about a whole host of screencast tools, which will permit me to do just that. They will also let me make how-to videos for the whole lot of new technologies I hope to introduce. I'm just going to link to this post, which describes a variety of tools for doing this: Four free tools for creating screencasts. I'm going to download Jing and play around with it, and maybe I'll try some other things.

Online whiteboards. Colleen Young highly encourages the use of these for teaching math. She recommends Sketchcast with some reservation. We'll play around with those, too.

Notes on the whiteboard

QR re-revisited

My next research project

Groupthink and education

PBiS on MLK

Resolutions

Inspirational quote of the day

One step at a time...and sometimes the same step over

QR codes revisited

Did you know about this?

Teacher evaluations in public

Today in world language news

Mistakes I make...

More on "Getting it right"

Why I do what I do the way that I do it

A little Friday night naturalia

Unit cohesion is definitely lacking

Politics

"Getting it right" update

I will want to know more about this

CCSS and WL

Doodling in math class

Guess I'm not done talking about it yet.

"Nobody could have foreseen..."

What's this about then?

Various items

Good wisdom, vol. 2

Happy Labor Day!

The importance of context

Fun with Blogger stats

Thursday night marimbas

The wisdom of Ray

The Big Idea of big ideas

"How did YOU spend your summer break, Señor Cosby?"

"Good lord. What ARE you teaching these kids?"

Articles like this get my goat

A timely webcomic

Another educator who does everything better than me...

The trouble with grades

Advocating for our profession

That's a little more like it

Tech tools update

Preview of coming attractions

AWWWW!

Some sort of reform position from the union

A brief thought for further consideration

Portuguese Friday

Education reform, unions, first principles

Sudden insights

This looks like fun...

Everything we're doing is wrong

Whoa! Two posts in one day.

Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students

A great piece of lateral thinking and writing for communication

Quote of the day

My new school improvement proposal

The fundamental problems with merit pay

Minimum page requirements

Stealing other peoples' links

Links to stuff

Another front the war on ignorance

I told myself I wouldn't do this

More about reading

Management theory, education theory, and philosophy

How to teach books to kids

Japanese erasers...?

Reform is in the air!

True story!

Taking it for granted

"It's like a box whose instructions on how to open the box are inside the box."

A great summary of my position on pejorative epithets

NEA blogs!

Big ideas/little ideas

How to teach English

Useful videos

Finland, Finland, Finland...

Why I love my friends: A holiday post

Free WL resources

Important lessons learned from literature

Literature circles