Present me is very very happy with past me

Last year, I designed a project.  I turned my school into a small city, gave each of my student a map to exactly half of the city, and had them talk on their cell phones to give each other directions to points unknown.

It was HARD.  I had a print copy of the school's emergency exit map, but nobody seems to have a digital copy.  So I had to manually create that.  I had to assign street names to the hallways and store names to all the classrooms (the easy part).  I had to secure permission from the administration, the custodial staff, and all of the individual teachers whose rooms I would be turning into churches and ice cream stores and municipal government buildings.  (Not a problem, everyone said.  Go for it.)  I had to find a system for keeping all of those papers organized as I was hanging them up.  That was the hard part.  Last year I was one step away at all times from dropping an armload of papers all over the place and ruining everything.  But I got it all up in time for the project, and from my perspective, it went very very well.

Flash forward to this year.  It took me about 45 minutes--one planning period--to set the entire project up.  And this year I'm doing it with three classes. 

As I was agonizing last year over how to do all of these things, I made a lot of good decisions for longevity of the project.  I made all of my materials reusable.  I kept them uncharacteristically well organized.  I made the project's outcomes align with what I wanted the learners to know and be able to do.  We're going to call this one a lesson design win.

Beginning of year reflection

I feel like I'm doing a lot of things right so far; I feel better prepared, vis a vis classroom management and curriculum layout, than I ever have before.  My CHAMPS program is working out nicely, and my classroom token economy system has been shockingly successful.  Our school is making a lot of structural reforms which, if we take them seriously, will make vast improvements in our student achievement.  Most of my students seem pretty excited to be in class, and if I'm not quite up to 100% Spanish yet, I feel like I'm pushing in the right direction.  In all, a good strong start to the school year. 

Next on the self-improvement list: 1.)  Improve the turnaround time on my homework.  I always say I'm going to, and then I get a little better, but never quite enough.  2.) Get my Spanish III online class up and running for realz.  I'm almost there; the ISD contact person who has been helping me has been doing a tremendous job.  3.)  Integrate our iPads.  The iPads are in and waiting, so I just have to figure out how best to use them.  I have some ideas: speaking quizzes, etc. 

Today's to-do list

Yesterday: I made a significant start on beginning-of-year organization.  Today I'm going to keep doing that: Finish syllabi, take a look at some of the online contact I have available to me, clarify portfolio contents.

New tasks: Design review materials for Spanish II.  I have Spanish II classes of widely disparate abilities and exposures.  I'm going to try to design materials to get as many people as possible up to speed as quickly as possible--I want to start new material in two weeks.  I did this fairly well last year, so I think I'm just going to juice those efforts up.

Today's objective

If it's August 15, I must be scrambling to get the new school year ready.

Today's objective:  Review and revise beginning-of-year paperwork (syllabus, rules, procedures, etc.).  Look over Wong and Wong's "First Days of School" and Sprick's "Discipline in the Secondary Classroom" as a refresher.
Draft new paperwork: Portfolio sheet and 2-year topic outline.  (Notably for Spanish 1 and the middle schools.)  Review portfolio assessment from Edutopia, Curtain & Dahlberg's "Languages and Children," and Shrum & Glisan's "Teacher's Handbook."
Get all paperwork possible ready to print and copy when I go in to school tomorrow.
Any time left over should be spent reviewing new "Michigan Learns Online" materials and setting up online supplies through CLEAR.

All that should only take me, mmm, 16 hours or so.  I should be done in time to start tomorrow's to-do list.

This year's opening salvo in teacher evaluations

The Accomplished Teacher SmartBrief e-mail I get once a day, and rarely take the time to read all the way through, pointed me to two excellent resources about teacher evaluations. 

The Christian Science Monitor does a good job of running down the value and issues of teacher evaluations in today's online issue.  Among the highlight quotes include Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond: "I went from being very enthusiastic about [value-added test scores] to extremely worried," and the counter from Dan Weisberg of the New Teacher Project: "How long do you want to wait until we have a system that satisfies all the concerns?"  The article touches on the complexities of adding value to standardized test scores, the power of effective feedback to teachers and the impact that it can have on students, the importance of teacher involvement in designing effective evaluation systems (including incentives), and some of the horror stories of objectively excellent teachers getting terrible reviews through flawed systems.  In all, a good introduction to the topic, I thought.

Aaccording to this article, the Achievement First academies of New York seem to have the balanced approach to teacher evaluation figured out.  A variety of evaluation techniques--observations by trained observers (including other instructors trained to the task), value-added test scores, and student surveys --give teachers much more valuable feedback than what the article portrays as the "traditional" teaching method--a score determined by a laundry list of practices that the observer looked for in her biennial visit to the classroom. 

Included in the same e-mail was a tip towards the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards's new resource for evaluators of teachers: the Video Observation Program.  The idea is to provide observers with videos of what good teaching looks like across a variety of subjects.  I'm reminded of my poor principals who come into my class and listen to me speak Spanish for 45 minutes--they have few resources to determine how well I'm doing my job.  (If after 6 weeks my principal can't understand me and my 7th graders can, I think that's a growth measurement.  But it's tough to fit that into a rubric: "How much more content do the students know than the principal?"  Doesn't really work.)  They can look for general best practices: Do the students know why they're doing what they're doing?  How engaged are the students?  How is the instructor assessing learning in an ongoing way?  But in terms of content delivery, how is one principal supposed to know the differences between good teaching in ELA, math, science, social studies, X number of world languages, phys ed, and technology?  NBPTS wants to provide principals, for a nominal fee, a library of videos.  This is an excellent idea; I wish it were available for free, and not just targeted at principals (and other teacher leaders).  I think it would be a valuable part of a teacher's self-improvement kit, too. 

And now we return to your regularly scheduled reflections

I took the month of July off from school things.  I've been doing no concrete work, and whenever I've thought about my classes, I've tried to think about something else.  The idea behind that is this:  For many summers in the past, I've woken up most days, all summer long, thinking, "Okay, I'm going to do school work today."  And then I don't, and I'm disappointed with myself.  Well, this year, for a variety of reasons, I did school work through the entirety of June.  When July came, I told myself that I could use some down time. 

So I guess it's not really taking time off, so much as it is recognizing reality: I'm not doing any school work.  It's been great for me, anyway.  I've done a lot of things I've been trying to do for a long time.  I grew basil and made pesto.  I painted something without adult supervision.  I used a binder clip to hook a battery to an LED and make a sort of flashlight out of PVC pipe fittings.  I've been exercising, and I've gone to the dojo once a week for two months.  I finished taking Stanford's iTunes U course on computer program design principles, and have started re-taking the iPod/iPad programming course, now that I know a little something about writing programs.  (It's still well below what the professor on the videos expects from his real students, but he'll never know.) 

But August starts on Wednesday, and I'm going to be kicking it in to gear.  I've still been learning about how to learn and how to teach, I've just been avoiding thinking about practical applications.  As a result, I have a back log of really exciting possibilities that I want to get to work on; I think I'm going to come out of my corner swinging with both fists.  Stay tuned for a goal list and some plans of action.  In the meantime, here's something that my friend Jamie sent me to chew on:

http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2011/10/how-to-learn-stuff.html

What are you most looking forward to doing when you get back to school?  What changes do you hope to see, and what changes do you hope to make?  What do you hope hasn't changed at all?

Learn a language in 90 days

This is a post by Maneesh Sethi about learning a language very quickly, from the perspective of a motivated learner.

http://zenhabits.net/how-to-learn-a-language-in-90-days/

Here are the highlights of the post:
*Less than 3000 words make up 80% of the occurences in a language.  Learn those, and you're well on your way to fluency.  Spend your first 30 days memorizing 30 of those words a day.  This will form a strong basis for learning from context. 
*In the next 30 days, keep memorizing 30 words a day, but expose yourself to the language as much as possible.  Figure out words from the context you find them in; when you come across new words whose meaning you can't figure out, make a note of them.  Look them up later and add them to your cycle of memorizing words.
*After that, keep memorizing.  Now, spend as much time as possible socializing with people.  Go out with friends.  Hang out at cafés.  Interview people.  (Tell them you're writing a book about the area.  That's worked for me.  I still consider writing that book sometimes.) 

He also suggests materials and mental strategies for learning new languages.  His methodology is very strongly immersive: He recommends thinking in the new language, hanging out with people who only speak the new language, and constant exposure to new vocabulary.

This fits in well with my experience and my theoretical training.  I think I've told the story here before about my semester in Spain.  It had 2 take-aways, in terms of learning:

1.) I learned more Spanish in 4 months than I had in 6 years, and let me be clear: I was GOOD at Spanish before I went to Spain.  I don't just mean on vocab/grammar tests and writing academic papers, although I was good at that, too.  I mean I had no trouble making myself understood in any context that I had any knowledge about.  I had no real difficulty in reading even difficult literature.  None of this is bragging, because my first 72 hours in Spain were a humbling (which is not to say humiliating) experience.  I learned Spanish nearly exponentially in the first 2 months, and after that I still learned very very quickly, so quickly I didn't have time to notice how much I was learning.

2.) About the same time I got to Spain, a Norwegian named Sten arrived in Burgos.  He didn't speak any Spanish at all when he got there.  He spent the next 3 1/2 months partying, renting apartments with native Spanish speakers, hanging out in bars and cafés, and going to concerts.  When I left in December, Sten spoke Spanish nearly as well as I did, about every topic except the academic stuff I'd been studying at the university.  Again, I was good.  But Sten did almost as well in less than 4 months as I had done in almost 7 years of dedicated study. 


How does this help me as a Spanish teacher who can't afford to drop his students off in Spain for 4 months?  Well, it still outlines a kind of timeline.  More on that later; I just wanted to get this down someplace I could find it again.