Metablogging: Clever post titles

Blogging is the only kind of writing I've done in massive amounts with the intent that other people read it.  People I don't know, I mean; a few near and dear have read the occasional short story.  But some few blog posts have started off as nothing more than clever titles.  The one that remains my favorite is, "Curriculum?  I barely knew 'um!"  I've never been quite sure that the joke works outside my head, but I think it's funny.


And that's a funny thing about this medium.  Some of my favorite blogs are usually nothing more than snappy, witty, sarcastic, or funny headlines with links to other websites.  Sure, occasionally they offer commentary of some kind, but mostly it's the post title.  The whole endeavor seems like an exercise in giving titles.  The masters also use tag lines well, but you can tell you've made it when your title is snappy.

I wonder if journalism is like this, as well.  I'm laboring under the understanding that, once a journalist writes an article, somebody else writes the headline.  (At least in newspapers.)  I find myself wondering who writes the lead-ins to TV news segments--the producers, the anchors, or the journalists doing the segment?  Or is there a special guy just for writing those bombshells they give you just before going to commercial--"And when we come back, how many things in your home can kill your pets?  Stay with us and find out."

One thing I do know, and that's that almost no blogger I read knows how to end a post well.

Bad wisdom, vol. 2

The teacher is the first among equals in his classroom.

I don't think I've ever heard this statement said out loud.  But sometimes I act like I believe it. 

Because, think about it--the only difference between me and the students are that I'm twice their age, have 4 years' higher education in what they need to learn, a shocking amount of professional training in classroom management, a declaration of professional ethics which carries the force of law, and a detailed knowledge of the content they should be learning.

Spam posts

So I've been getting the occasional spam post.

It's flattering in a way.  Some program out there thinks that someone reads this.

Despite that, I've been deleting them.  (There are few enough of them that I only have to delete one or two posts a week.)  And I've been doing it without clicking through the links to see if there was anything worthwhile.

So, if I've deleted one of your posts, which had serious links to things you honestly believe relate to the content of this blog, tell me so.  If your English is not so good (as is the case in the posts I deleted), remember two things: 1.)  I read Spanish, and by extension, a certain amount of the other Romance languages.  If you happen to write in one of those languages better than in English, go crazy.  2.)  Google Translate is NOT your friend.

Now, back to your regularly-scheduled lack of programming.

What teachers make

Somewhere, I posted my hundredth blog post.  That seems like a cause for celebration of come kind.

Also, at the last conference I attended, the latest in the Kathleen Kryza series, Kathleen reminded me of the mind-boggling resource that is TED.  And now they evidently have a "best of the web" feature.  While looking for the video clip that we watched, I came across this.  Hope you enjoy as much as I did.

Education fu, episode 1

PROFE:  Let's go over this again.  The purpose of homework is to...

SEÑOR COSBY:  Allow students to practice skills they already know, Profe.

PROFE:  And the objective of this practice is...

COSBY:  To improve the speed and accuracy of the skill.

PROFE:  So far, so good.  Now: The purpose of assessment.

COSBY:  The purpose of assessment is to determine how well a student has learned the skills and knowledge taught.  This can be used as data-gathering for how well the teacher instructed the lesson.

PROFE:  Is it?  Is that the purpose?  [Waits expectantly.]

COSBY:  Oh!  That's summative assessment.

PROFE:  Okay, not so bad.  What's the other kind of assessment, and what's it for?

COSBY:  Formative assessment, used to inform instruction.

PROFE:  What does that mean, "inform instruction?"

COSBY:  It's like a stepping stone in a learner's learning.  It gives the instructor information about what he needs to do to maximize learning.

PROFE:  It gives the instructor information?

COSBY:  Well, I suppose it lets the learner know how she's doing, too.

PROFE:  You should do more than "suppose," Saltamontes.  It's a vital form of feedback to the student.  Working a system for students to keep track of their progress is a vital component of classroom management, motivation, and self-directed learning.

COSBY:  Yes, Profe.

PROFE:  Now, on to providing feedback.  Tell me your thoughts about it.

COSBY:  It needs to be immediate and contingent.

PROFE:  I think you're thinking of behavior correction.

COSBY:  Hmm.  Well, immediacy is important, I know. 

PROFE:   Yes.  What's immediacy mean?

COSBY:  It means you give feedback right away.  If you give an assignment, correct it and give it back.

PROFE:  Instead of doing what with them?

COSBY:  Letting them sit on your desk until they start to decompose, then throw them out at the end of the term, Profe.

PROFE:  And this is important because...?

COSBY:  If you're going to have a student do the work, you have to recognize the effort.

PROFE: WRONG!

COSBY:  Uh...

PROFE:  Feedback has nothing to do with effort.  It has everything to do with learning.  The learner shows you what she knows.  You take that and tell the student how to take the next step.  In that way, feedback helps both student learning AND teacher's instructions.

COSBY:  Isn't that...formative assessment!

PROFE:  Good, Saltamontes.  You may just get this through your thick skull yet.  What does formative assessment have to do with grades?

COSBY [promptly]: Nothing.

PROFE:  Nothing?  Do you mean to tell me that you're going to make a student work through a whole lesson, turn in a homework assignment, and it's not going to show up on their grade?

COSBY:  Yes, Profe.  It comes back to what you just said--it's about learning.  I believe it was Sensei Marzano who said that learners must do activities without grades attached, to do learning activities just to learn from them, not for the grades.  Besides, if they're graded on it, lots of students won't do it.

PROFE:  Do you even have to record who's done it and who hasn't, then?  If it doesn't count, then you're not marking it in your grade book, are you?

COSBY:  Respectfully, I disagree, Profe.  If it really is formative assessment, then you need to know how well your learners have done on it, so you know what you need to do to make them better, or whether they're good enough and you can move on.

PROFE:  What about the ones who don't do it?

COSBY:  There's value in knowing who those students are, too.  Maybe they don't know how to do it at all.  Maybe they can do some of it with help.  Maybe they were just absent that day.  The point is, you don't know unless you record the data somewhere.

PROFE [thinks for a moment]:  What is the source of Education Fu?

COSBY:  Profe?  I'm not sure I understand.

PROFE:  Formative assessments.  Summative assessments.  Learning activities.  Instruction.  Where does it all begin?

COSBY:  Umm....Classroom management?

PROFE:  Wrong!  That's just the dojo, that's just where it happens.  Where does it come from?

COSBY [takes a slow breath in through the nose, lets it out through the mouth]: Learning goals.

PROFE:  Hmm.  Your learning seems to be progressing, Saltamontes.  10 more years of hard training, and you might--might, I say--be ready to begin teaching at the professional level.

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!

Another book to read someday

Catching up or leading the way by Yong Zhao.  It examines the role of the American education system in the world.  The selling point seems to be this: as the US education system moves closer to that of the rest of the world, the rest of the world's education systems move closer to that of the US. 

My principal has told me a little bit about it.  I'd be interested to read the book, because the blurbs and the bullet points off of ASCD's website immediately raise my hackles.


Available here.