The Big Idea of big ideas

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.) 

Kohn v. Marzano

Or,

Homework oh homework, I hate you, you stink.

Those who know me know my distaste for Alfie Kohn.  He's the clarinet player of education reform.  He writes things like "The Homework Myth" and "Punished by Rewards" and "Why Your Student's Teachers are Secretly Trying to Kill Him."  (I made the last one up.)  However, he's ten times the researcher and education reform advocate I'll ever be.  When he writes something, it is a foolhardy researcher or practitioner who doesn't take it under advisement.  Having read a number of his articles and books, it turns out that the big reason I don't like him is because I'm under the distinct impression that he doesn't like me.

Those who know me know that I like Robert Marzano.  He's written a number of books that tell me in a clear way how I should be doing my job in order to do it better.  This makes me happy, because even if I fall far short of good practice, at least I know that I could be getting better.  The "Art and Science of Teaching" in particular provides useful frameworks for how to think about teaching.

In Classroom instruction that works, Marzano recommends giving specific kinds of homework.  In September 2006, Kohn criticizes researchers, including Marzano, to task for sloppy research, particularly on the subject of homework.  During the time that Kohn publishes this, Marzano is working on his next trick, The art and science of teaching.  In this book, Marzano cites Kohn's book, The homework myth (which I have not read yet), but not that I have been able to find.  (I skimmed Cha. 3 on practicing new information and was unable to find it.)  

I'm happy not to assign homework if it doesn't help students--that's one more element I don't have to design, align, assess, and provide feedback on.  So I'm left in a complicated spot: Kohn, a researcher I don't like but respect, proposes not to give homework.  Marzano recommends it, but may be faulty in his meta-analysis methods.  By inclination, I don't give homework, because I'm lazy.  (To the extent that someone who works 14 hours a day can be said to be lazy.)  But I'm generally inclined to believe that it's important, so I assign homework mostly of the "review vocabulary" type.  But I'm not sure where the research leaves me.


Kohn, A. (2006).  Abusing research: The study of homework and other examples. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan.  Accessed through alfiekohn.org.  http://wwww.alfiekohn.org/teaching/research.htm

Marzano, R. J.  (2007).  The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Pollock, J. E. (2001).  Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement.  Alexandria, VA:  Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

What a language teacher's job is

 On Thursday, I had a long, intense conversation with my colleague Kris.  She's our instructional coach this year, and I strongly hope that she will continue that role in the years to come, even as she returns to full-time teaching duties.  She expressed the concern that I jump the gun in my classes--I move too quickly from building buy-in, directly to speaking Spanish.  She worries that the students don't get why they're doing what they're doing, and thus never engage, and thus never really learn.  I take her observation to heart, because I'm pretty sure my kung fu is strong, but my students are not learning Spanish at the rate they should be.  Good practice done badly is bad practice, and if my students aren't learning, I'm not quite doing something right. 

According to Krashen, as cited in Lee and Van Patten (1995), "...as long as there is motivation and the right affective environment (e.g., low anxiety), a person cannot avoid learning a second language if there is sustained comprehensible input" (29).  They cite other researchers that say this is overstating the case somewhat, and they themselves stake out the position that using the language in communicative settings is necessary for learning languages.  However, to the extent that this statement is true, it has powerful implications for language learning and, by extension, language instruction.  The whole rest of their book is dedicated to outlining what those implications are.

But for now, I just want to worry at that one sentence for a little while, pick it apart and apply it.  I'm writing lesson plans right now, so the action items are immediately applicable--I can go from this blog screen to my unit plan, to my weekly plan, and apply what I figure out.


It looks like this: 

motivation + affective environment + sustained COMPREHENSIBLE input = language learning.


According to a source I don't remember right now (it was in an audiobook I borrowed from a friend, which I've since returned), as cited by Sprick (2007), motivation is a function of value times expectancy of success.  So, if students value what they're learning, their motivation increases.  If the students expect to succeed at a given event, their motivation to do it increases. 

The updated equation looks thus:


(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained comprehensible input = Language Learning


I don't know enough about what Lee and VanPatten mean by "affective environment" to perform any cute faux mathematical operation on it.  I believe, though, that this largely refers to classroom management issues, about which I've typed extensively.

Lee and VanPatten dedicate most of their book to outlining the concept of sustained comprehensible input.   They later add "meaning-bearing" to the list of qualities of valuable communication.

(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained, meaning-bearing comprehensible input = Language Learning

This means that a student has to catch that there is a meaning she is supposed to understand in the utterance.  The student also needs to be able to understand some portion of the communication.

This is a pretty clear description of a language teacher's job.  These work out to these action steps:

1.)  Sell the value of the learning.  This means explaining reasons that a student should learn languages, but also why a student would want to.  (I always think of the Rosetta Stone ad: "He was a farm boy from Iowa.  She was an Italian supermodel.  He had one chance to impress her.")  This corresponds to increasing the value of learning.

2.) Increase the expectation of success.  Celebrate baby steps.  Define milestones, and move heaven and earth to drag your students towards them.  Once they get there, make a big deal over it.

3.) Run your classroom well.  I've had a lot to say about this.  Marzano has a lot to say about this.  Jackson has a lot to say about this, Wong and Wong have a lot to say about this, and Sprick has a whole lot to say about this.  It sort of boils down to these.

• Have a very few rules which apply all the time.  Be consistent about reinforcing them positively and correcting them when necessary.
• Have procedures for everything.  Teach them explicitly and rehearse them.  (Behaviorism at its finest, but it will help if the students create their own procedures.)
• Make your classroom a place where it's okay to make mistakes, and teach students how to make GOOD mistakes.  As Kryza likes to say, "This is a risk-taking, mistake-making classroom."  In fact,  Corder (as cited in Lee and VanPatten (1997)) says that mistakes are "indispensable to the learner himself" (in Lee and VanPatten, p. 22.) 

It feels like I'm missing one or two, but we'll go from there.

4.)  Give your students language they can chew.  Lee & VanPatten say that if your students are at level N of comprehension, then you should communicate with them at N + 1.  That's a hard number to hit consistently, especially with a class of 20, 30, 40 language learners.  (Not that I have a class of 40 people, but it's probably not far off for many of my colleagues.)  Lee & VanPatten have things to say about that, too.

So, there.  I've defined what a WL teacher's job is.  Not exactly my original goal, but that's okay.  My next trick:  Matching this up with Marzano's 10 reflection questions from The Art and Science of Teaching, Jackson's 7 principles of master teachers, Kryza's "Chunk / Chew / Check" lesson-planning and differentiation model, the National Board's teacher assessment tool, and Kris's "Hook your students" principle.  Also, what this means to what my class looks like.

Resources:



Jackson, R. (2009).  Never work harder than your students.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (1997).  Making communicative language teaching happen.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marzano, R. (2008).  The art and science of teaching.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Sprick, R.  (2008). Interventions audio.  Eugene, OR: Northwest Publishing.

Components of lesson plans

(REALLY long.)


 In the last year, I've blogged a lot about curriculum and lesson planning.  These are the hardest things for me to understand, I think, although every year, every week, I'm getting better at them.  (Classroom management isn't the hardest thing to understand--I get it.  I'm just not very good at doing it.)  Planning a good lesson, much less 5 good lessons, much less 5 good lessons a day for a week, is mind-bogglingly complicated and massively important. 


Planning a lesson is always an interesting trick.  In Robyn Jackson's outline, you start where your students are.  This takes into account their interests, their skills, their emotional needs, etc.  Then, you know where your students are going.  Again, that's Jackson's phrase, but Marzano says the same thing--the first part is learning goals.  We've been working hard at learning goals at our schools this year.  After you know what you want your students to learn, you break it down into steps.  (I think this is something that I'm only just starting to do since Winter Break.)  After that, you see through time in order to pick out the potential challenges--Billy will certainly have a bad day on Tuesday, he always does; I'll have a guest instructor on Friday, so I won't be able to teach anything new; et cetera. 

There's a lot to consider in there, and I'm starting to get a good enough feel for Learning Goals that I can start worrying a lot more about the efficacy of Learning Activities.  I was already pretty good at Learning Activities, and a lot of my training has been focused that way.  Learning Activities without a solid grounding in Learning Goals don't mean much, though.  Now I've got a much better handle on the Learning Goals (so when I rewrite my curriculum again this summer, I might finally have something to work with), so the more specific things are coming back up.


When I'm writing lesson plans, I want to know the students I'm teaching.  For every group of students, I want to know: 1.) what they're interested in; 2.) how they learn most effectively (or at least think they do); 3.) what they want to know about the topic at hand.  Having some idea as to how they react to certain stimuli is helpful, too.  For example, every time I utter 3 sentences of Spanish together, a number of my students want to know why they have to know Spanish at all.


While I'm designing learning goals, I need to make sure that I'm really writing learning goals and not communicative goals.  The difference is that my communicative goals outline a situation in which, if nothing weird happens, my students should be able to talk their way through.  Learning goals go more universal.  At the moment, this tends towards a comparison of that social situation in our society versus the society we're studying (Mexico, Spain, Ecuador, Argentina, Puerto Rico, whatever--there are of course sub-societies in those countries, of course), or even an examination of what that social situation means for the human condition.  It makes for more of an aspiration than a goal, but it's what we're working towards.

One of the things I'm trying to do when designing lesson plans is this--how am I going to model this?  How am I going to help them practice them?  How am I going to get them to practice without help?  How am I going to get them to do it?  The general phrase is--I do it, We do it, You do it.  (That's Kathleen Kryza's phrasing.) 

In the World Language world, there's a similar structure in communicative methodology theory.  You start with structured, comprehensible input--utterances in the target language that a student can nevertheless understand (using context clues, illustrations, acting or other things).  You have to check a student's comprehension for the language--yes/no, true/false, point-to type activities are usually what goes on here.  The students have to process the information and then respond to it, but their response doesn't require a huge language output.  Then, you move to structured output--there are only a limited number of responses, but the responses aren't formulaic or meaningless.  Then, you can go to more and more unstructured input.

Then, of course, the National and State Standards and Benchmarks prescribe the communicative modes--conversation, comprehension, and presentation.  And in living languages, there are two different vehicles of communication--oral/aural speech, and written/read texts.  So you have to work your way through the "structured input / structured output / less-structured output" assembly lines on both of those lines.  Not all of these things fit into a single day's lesson plan, but there should be some examples of all of them throughout the week.  Some of these things lend themselves better to different stages than others, of course--listening and reading comprehension are obviously much better structured-input activities.

Kryza's lesson plan structure is "Chunk, Chew, Check," and that method really helps me think about what each activity is meant to do.  It means that when I'm really, REALLY writing out my plans, for each of the above things, I write a "chunk"--what Marzano calls a "critical input experience"--a short bit of structured input (usually), either spoken or written--with a lot of examples of the vocabulary or grammar or culture I'm presenting, and a few non-examples that the students are generally already familiar with.  Then there's a "chew," something where the students have the opportunity to process what they've just heard or read, and have to react to it in some way.  And then there's a "check," where I see how well the students are doing and change instruction accordingly.  (Marzano calls this a "formative assessment.")  Mostly, like I alluded to, I focus on input activities, so I may be stiffing my students on practice time opportunities.  I make our practice activities count, though.

 Mix into this mix Gardener's multiple intelligence theory, the need to work culture into everything, a burgeoning realization of the importance of social justice as a component of Spanish instruction, and a disinclination by disposition to pay attention to details, and I begin to see why my struggle with lesson plans has taken up so much time.  It's likely to keep doing so for some time, but I finally feel like I have a usable document that covers most of the bases.  Have I ever written a complete plan?  Nope.  Has my plan ever gone off without a hitch?  Not even close.  All I know is that the more time I spend planning, the better on average the week goes for me.  So I keep doing it.

Update, 1 hour later:  And differentiation!  I forgot about differentiation!

People doing, etc.

Dina Strasser's take on Chapter 4 of Marzano's Art and Science of Teaching.

She's a better teacher than I am. She's a better blogger than I am, she's a better analyst and applied researcher than I am. And dammit, she's better at sarcasm than I am, too.

People doing pt. 2

Dina Strasser's take on Chapter 2 of Marzano's Art and Science, over at ASCD Inservice. I'll be eagerly watching to see if Marzano continues to speak.

Dina Strasser's other blog. I haven't had time to look through it yet, but I've liked her on ASCD. Looking forward to less "assignment-driven" blogging.

To find her first chapter, you can click on the "Teaching" tag on the left of ASCD's website. You can also click here for this humble blog's link to the first chapter, and Marzano's oracular response.

Metablog: Tried the Trackback link instead of the other link, the wossname, the Permalink. We'll see if I show up.

Update: It didn't like the TrackBack link. Updated to fix.

People doing what I do, better than I do it

At the ASCD website, Dina Strasser works her way through Marzano's Art and Science of Teaching. She's posted her blog entry on the first chapter.

I tried a similar exercise this past summer. I'm looking forward to reading the work of someone who's good at it.

UPDATE, 21 Feb: Marzano speaks. This is actually a pretty cool format--it's like listening to a really fascinating conversation, with a computer right next to you that cites the speakers' sources as they talk.

I'll try to keep abreast of Dina's (etiquette check: is it okay to refer to someone I've never met by their first name? Politeness in World 2.0 is so weird.) blogging and Bob's responses. (Can I call him Bob?)

Day-to-day consistency and lesson planning

I'm never really been sure as how to structure a class so that it looks the same every day, what with the wide variety of events that might happen in a school day. I know that part of that is designing and teaching a procedure to get back on task after interruptions, but the interruptions range in intrusiveness such that one procedure, even two or three or procedures, to get them back on task continues to escape me.

So my lesson plan has been an ad-hoc document, an objective followed by a list of activities designed to achieve the objective. That's probably fine as far as it goes, but it means that Wednesday doesn't look much like Monday. (Also, Wednesday doesn't often look like Wednesday's plan.) This makes it hard to model the same 3 or 4 classroom-management phrases in Spanish every day, which makes it nigh impossible for me to conduct class entirely in Spanish, which is the goal.

So, I've spent some amount of time looking for a way of making plans that would help establish a more consistent daily class structure. And I finally found a document that was handed to me during the New Teacher Academy meetings, and probably during my teacher education courses in college, based on Hunter (1984):

READINESS

• Warm-up:
• Objective:

INFORMATION

• Instructional input:
• Modeling:
• Activities/Questions Strategies

PRACTICE

• Guided practice
• Independent practice

ASSESSMENT

• Closure

A lot of this looks like it would fit well into a WL class, and into my class in particular. Every day, I have a warm-up activity and a learning objective to engage students in what they already know. Instructional input is what in world language pedagogy would be called "comprehensible input." "Input flood," a term I've only recently come across and thus may be misinterpreting, transfers to modeling. Activities / questions strategies (called by Marzano "checking for understanding" (2007) ) just involves a preliminary check that the students gets what they're supposed to get and how they're supposed to go about getting it. (I say just; it's no simple matter. I often think I've taken great pains to make sure students understand, only to have to anser the same question I've just addressed 4 times.) Guided practice==in-class checks; independent practice==more practice; homework. Closure = a formative assessment and some groundwork for a summative assessment down the road.

Here's where my issue lies: In the Communication column of my standards, each lesson has to take two things into consideration: context and communicative mode. (Ideally, a lesson should also include some Cultural context; get a student to make Connections between this lesson, other classes, and their own lives; help a student make communicative and cultural Comparisons, and then help move their learning into their Communities. But one step at a time.) If a unit has 3 communicative contexts, it means that there are 18 different lessons that happen in an ideal world: a spoken / listening conversation; an written / read conversation; a listening comprehension; a reading comprehension; a spoken presentation; and a written presentation. Even if you tie together a few (or even all) contexts together for the presentational communication mode, there's still a heap of lessons that should occur.

Given all that, is it even theoretically possible to make tomorrow like today? Probably not, but it's worth the try. But up until now, I've had a different understanding of the structure of a unit. This is a day-to-day model, which seems to sacrifice a big-picture understanding for an illusory class-structure uniformity. I've always understood a unit to be a different kind of thing: a presentation, modeling, and practice of vocabulary in a wide context, followed by a closer examination of the vocabulary and grammar necessary for specific communicative tasks. Communicative practice activities, a few activities that tie in all the different contexts, a day of review, then a test.

Anyway, I'll try this "new" lesson plan format and see if I can make it work for me. It will probably be rough going for a while, but once I get the hang of it, I think it will tie objectives, instruction, practice, and assessment a lot closer together. (That's the point of the format, after all.) Also, I think it will increase my students' capacity for taking Spanish as the primary classroom language in the future.

Update: Two minutes of further reading revealed Marzano's claim that this lesson plan structure "is best suited for kessons that address procedural knowledge" (180). Good for some situations, but not all. I'm still going to try it for a little while; there's a lot of procedural-type stuff in communication: how to say you're going to do something, how to listen for key vocabulary, how to identify the main idea of a passage. I think vocabulary learning may more neatly fit in with "declarative knowledge," which is a different ball of wax.

WORKS CITED:

Hunter, M. (1984.) Knowing, teaching, and supervising. Using what we know about teaching. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Modified by Wilson-O'Leary for teacher conference.

Marzano, R. (2007.) The art and science of teaching: a comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 181.

Procedures and structure in the World Languages classroom

Everything I've read ever suggests that the single most important element of classroom management is to establish and teach procedures consistently and well. (Wong & Wong 2005, Marzano 2007, Flannery 2008, and an e-mail I just got from the State Education Association illustrate the point, but I'm pretty sure that that's far from exhaustive.) It's an aspect of teaching that I've had to get a lot better at in my classroom, since I'm not inclined by nature to be procedures-driven.

At the same time, communicative language theory suggests that you start speaking the target language immediately and more or less constantly (Lee & Van Patten 1995, to name one). The act of a student understanding a language they're learning is referred to in the literature as "comprhensible input," and its importance in the language classroom cannot be exaggerated. The mor of it, the better. This is an aspect of my job that DOES come naturally. I love speaking Spanish, and to be perfectly frank, I like the sound of my own voice.

However, I've always had a problem with these two key elements of my job, because they seem to come into direct conflict with each other. I base a lot of early-stage language education on playing off of prior knowledge--my students know that they're students, they know I'm a teacher, and they know they're in school. In the younger grades, that's 4 sessions worth of lesson plans, after you get done adding songs, pictures, TPR activities, and the like. Even for the 1st-year high school students, that and peripherals make for a good chunk of vocabulary acquisition. But procedures require great precision and absolute clarity. In order for a procedure to be effective, a student has to know when, where, how, and WHY. Beginning-of-class procedure doesn't work for coming back from a fire drill. In the same vein, if you're making up procedures as you go along, students are (rightly) going to think you're asking to jump through hoops; besides, the next day, I never remember which procedures I said were in effect. This is the antithesis of a procedure, it's the whim of a dictator.

So, marrying these two practices suggests that from day 1 a language teacher should teach procedures in the target language. But the chance for miscommunication in such occasions is great, and the consequences include misunderstood, misapplied, or ignored procedures. This as good as plunges a classroom into chaos. (At least, it did mine.) Another potential solution is to teach mostly procedures in English with some Spanish content instruction. This feels like a splitting-the-baby solution, one that satisfies neither the need for good procedures nor communicative theory. It's failed to work for a long time, though, so it's what I went with this year. We're two weeks into the school year, and my high school students seem to be pretty okay on the procedures, as well as on the smattering of Spanish we've covered so far. (I'm thinking about my Spanish I students here.) Not an ideal solution, but an okay stop-gap measure so far. One could, I suppose, simply ignore one beginning-of-the-year obligation or the other, but that sounds like the makings of a hard year.

A related subject to this is the level of structure during instructional time. I have boardwork at the beginning of class and I try to have an assessment on the lesson at the end of the class, but what happens in between varies wildly--instruction? practice? speaking activity? listening activity? vocab?. I imagine it's the same with other teachers, that it isn't simply my disorganization biting me in the tail yet again. Ideally, in order to maximize comprehensible input in Spanish, my students should know what to expect every minute of the day before the tardy bell rings. My plans are thorough, but they're not prescient. So balancing structure and comprehensible input again seem to come into conflict. It's an issue that I've noticed, but I haven't thought a lot about it yet.

I don't think that I've read anything that addresses this apparent contradiction. I'd hoped to acquire a copy of the ACTFL's Keys to the Classroom, a book designed for new World Language teachers, to see if the pros had any suggestions. So far, no dice. If anyone in the real world has seen anything like this, or otherwise has suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Works cited:

Lee, J., and VanPatten, B. (1995.) Making communicative language teaching happen. McGraw-Hill.

Wong, H., and Wong, R. (2005.) The first days of school. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.

Flanery, M. E. (2008.) "When the ship sails adrift." NEAToday, 27 (1), 30-31.

Update: I just looked at the program for the State World Languages Association conference coming up one month, and there appears to be a session that strives to resolve the very conflicts I mention above. More about on this after the conference (assuming I can go).

The Art and Science of Teaching, Pt. 1

I'm working my way through The Art and Science of Teaching by Marzano, and want to review some of the most useful bits of the first half. The book is highly usable. It's maybe a bit dense to wade through the first time, like everything with a healthy dose of research and statistical analysis, but it's set up such that a reader looking for something can find it very easily, and I haven't even looked at the index yet. As my exposure to books on education practice increases, I'm finding that that's important: if you're going to tell me to do something, tell me what it is you want me to do. Don't hide it in the middle of a bunch of soft squishy feelings about how you love being a teacher. I love being a teacher, too, and if I didn't, reading your book probably wouldn't make me love it. But this book is set up, as the subtitle of the book says, as "a comprehensive framework for effective instruction." Each chapter title is a question about an element of instruction, and is set up to provide a definition of the issue, an example of that element in a classroom, research to explain why the element is important, and specific steps that a teacher can take to implement that element into his classroom.

Chapters 1-5 deal with issues in instruction--respectively, using learning goals, acquiring new knowledge, practicing and deepening understanding of new knowledge, generating and testing hypotheses of new knowledge, and engaging students. The later chapters deal with issues of classroom management and community-building, and more about these when I've read them.

Having read some other of Marzano's work and derivatives of it, I'm a little surprised to see so little talk about building background knowledge and vocabulary. This is disappointing, because of all the in-class strategies I've read, the work with vocabulary was the most immediately applicable th the language classroom. I'll have to sit down and think a little more about language learning and how it's different from learning, for example, science.

Some of the suggestions I intend to implement follow.

Have students identify their own learning goals: Upon introducing a new chapter / unit / some other division of learning, students will write down what they hope to be able to understand (language-wise), recognize, and be able to communicate about by the time they finish. Throughout the unit, students will revisit that goal to see how well they're progressing, and whether the course and I are addressing their objective. Part of the final assessment will be a a self-assessment on their learning objective.

Identify critical-input experiences: The word "input" has a special meaning in language acquisition, but the two meanings run parallel. Of course, ALL classroom time is an input experience, especially in courses conducted entirely in Spanish like I strive to conduct. But some moments are more important than others, require greater coordination of forces, and really are (or should be) the anchors of a unit. I can do a better job of separating these experiences from the textbook, and then bringing the necessary resources to bear on them.

Homework: I don't give anywhere near enough homework. As someone who was never very good at getting it done myself, I've always questioned the wisdom of it. But it's important, and there's a right way of doing it. And when college happened right in my face, and I had no idea how to deal with the work load, I recognized what I'd missed. So, vocab practice, reading comprehension practice, drawing--more of it.

These are obviously not all of the things I should be doing or could be doing better, but it's a place to start. And, as I'm learning, a small number of effective goals you can work towards is better than a lot of goals that you'll work on once and then forget about.