Month: May 2020

Shouting Into The Darkness

Mrs. Dull has some time to read these days. That happens when your entire division of a multi-billion-dollar, multi-national company is eliminated in an economic downturn.

About a week earlier I had pre-ordered the latest Jennifer Fulwiler book Your Blue Flame as a gift for her. (Excellent timing, right?)

Goodreads

We’re very large fans of the atheist-turned-Catholic-mom-of-six-turned-SiriusXM-talk-show-host-turned-stand-up-comic around here. And yes, she’s aware there is an Urban Dictionary definition of the title of her book.

So she is absolutely relatable.

So here we are on the first morning of summer break, sitting in the sun on the back porch with coffee and a book. And Cath runs across the latest laugh-out-loud Fulwiler anecdote, when she and her publisher were planning out the promo tour for her first book.

I’ll cede the floor for a summary from Jen’s blog:

But the real excitement came when I mapped the data. I took all the zip codes and input them into a program that plots them on a map, then Joe and I pored over the data.

We were surprised that nobody from Connecticut or Massachusetts was interested in me coming to that area, but we were delighted to find that my blog seems to have a small cult following in Luxembourg! The map showed a heavy concentration of responses near the Belgian border — so much so that Joe and I decided that we should ask Ignatius if they’d send me out there as part of the book tour.

I had a note that said Book tour – Luxembourg? all set for my next call with the marketing team…and then I happened to notice that the Google Drive spreadsheet I was using had automatically shortened zip codes that begin with zero to make them four-digit numbers.

When I called Joe to give him the update, I was laughing so hard I could barely stammer out the words as I visualized myself sitting in an empty bookstore in Luxembourg, noticing that everyone around me speaks French and German, wondering where on earth all the Conversion Diary readers are.

7 Quick Takes, 3/7/2014

Fulwiler (always self-effacing) says she has a friend who only needs to think of hearing, “I’m huge in Luxembourg” to give herself a laugh and bring herself out of a funk.

In my pre-teaching lifetime I used to be a sportscaster. I was fortunate enough to fall in with a station group that was happy to let me fill in as a newsman during the week to pay the bills while I prattled on about Indiana’s favorite pastime on Friday and Saturday nights. Pretty much a dream job for a kid who used to scan the AM dial for distant stations, a hobby known as DXing. Dialing in 50,000 watt clear channel stations from New Orleans or New York or Denver was a thrill. But it gets better. Due to a phenomenon known as sunset skip, at certain times and under certain atmospheric conditions a radio signal can travel amazing distances. In high school I’d occasionally set my alarm clock to pull in KFI from Los Angeles. Hobbyists will send letters along with a tape recording of the signal to a station, asking for a confirmation of the reception (known as a QSL). Which is why one day an engineer at WIMS radio called me to his office in the basement of our studios, popped in a cassette tape, let me listen for a minute and asked, “is this you?”

Turns out, yes. He showed me the envelope with a return address from Sweden. Or Norway, I forget which. Either way, I was floored. Someone on the other side of the world heard me!

(It’s a little Inside Baseball, but regional stations such as WIMS sometimes have limits placed on their signal to prevent interference with stations in other cities. At sunset, the WIMS antenna pattern was changed to broadcast almost straight north. The red outline on the map below represents the extent of the coverage.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea…”

So we covered the city, and then I guess the crews of the ore boats coming to and from the steel mills that ring the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and that’s about it for potential audience. Most of our signal was wasted on the open waters of my Great Lake.)

Back to that reception report though. We were pumping 5000 watts of power straight north, up the length of Lake Michigan, over the Arctic Circle, and to the other side of the planet. Turns out the nighttime signal booms into Scandanavia. I’m big in Sweden. Or Norway. Either way, cool, right?

All the time I was honing my craft and calling the latest touchdown run or buzzer-beating trey, I loved that families and fans were listening but I secretly hoped some Chicago radio program director or pro team front office official would stumble across my play-by-play while on their way to their Harbor Country vacation cottage or a Notre Dame game and offer me a job in the bigs.

It never happened. Most days, no one was listening.

At least it felt like that sometimes. Screaming into the vast darkness across the lake, across the frozen north.

But you never know who’s out there, somewhere, pulling in the signal.

After Cath filled me in on the Fulwiler-Luxembourg adventure, I related my “big in Norway” tale. She looked at me and said,”It’s kinda like teaching then. You never know the kind of reach you have.”

That is a wise woman. We should sit in the sun and read together more often.

As a post-script: on an assignment late during emergency remote teaching, one of my students confided to me that she was considering becoming a math teacher as a career. She had found a great deal of joy and fulfillment by helping her classmates understand material in my class, and felt it was something she could see herself doing as an adult.

I felt kind of honored by that (not just because what kind of kid wants to be a math teacher when they grow up? It’s like wanting to be a dentist, right?). This is a student who excelled at learning, not just at “the game of school”. She had teachers whose classes she dreaded. I feel like she would “get” teaching, and especially “get” teaching kids who don’t like school very much.

I hope so. I mean, that’s always been my thing. I’ve only ever had one official student teacher in my career, so I don’t really have a “teaching tree”. I have a few former students who are working on teaching degrees right now. I’ve had some kids who did cadet teaching in our district elementary schools. But this is the first time I’ve had a current student express interest in high school teaching of any subject, let alone math.

I’m looking forward to getting that QSL sometime off in the future. Even if I don’t, I’ll know it’s out there. Maybe she’ll drop a note on my FB (or whatever social media platform we all use a trajillion years from now).

Teaching is kind of like that sometimes – like the voices of thousands of radio hosts whose voices go seemingly unheard.

Source

But somebody is listening. Even if it’s around the curve of the earth right now.

Flipping Me Off

In school, when it comes to kids and teachers and expectations, the arms race always escalates. As soon as teachers set a rule to “make” kids do a thing, kids will find a work-around to not do that thing.

I’ve been aware of the concept of the flipped classroom for almost a decade, since I read an article in THE Journal about a pair of science teachers in Colorado who wanted to open up classtime for their students to do hands-on activities. A year after I arrived at my current school the flipped instruction model took my department by storm.

Recognizing that my Algebra II students needed more time & support in class I flipped my class at the start of second semester three years ago and never looked back. Students definitely appreciated the help in class, from me or from their friends.

But….

I noticed an issue almost right from the jump. Some students were not watching the videos and taking notes. They were moving the scroll bar until they found an example, copied it down, and moved on to the next example until they finished the notes.

It’s not a problem local to my class. I’ve heard the same from my colleagues in the building and even from my PLN (one of my online teacher connects calls it “the power of the pause”).

There’s no learning happening. It’s like ditching every class and getting the notes from a friend. You got the notes but missed out on the learning. And that’s not good.

So: how to fix that?

A few years ago I’d have got all indignant and made a speech. I’m a little more grown up these days, a little more cognizant that I can’t make my students do anything.

So instead I decided to ask them what do they need from me to help them learn. I put together a Google Form back in the fall, gathering 114 responses.

And here’s what they told me:

Roughly 40% my students admitted to pausing the video to copy examples, rather than watching and listening to the notes.
We were already doing the 3-2-1 summary, so I was happy that they’d be willing to continue that. But the Google Form answer? Hmmm…
At the time I was locked out of my Youtube channel and couldn’t upload video with captions. Instead they just got the mp4 embedded in Canvas. That has since been rectified.

So we made some changes. I didn’t move to the Google Form (yet). Started by implementing some retrieval practice tools (courtesy of Pooja Agarwal & Patrice Bain and their book Powerful Teaching), and to encourage compliance I bribed them with points on the notes summary and the in-class work “check for understanding” page.

I felt like maybe we were on to something.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and we closed schools and embarked on two months of emergency remote teaching. Working off advice from a former colleague, I started using GForms as my shell (easier start-up than EdPuzzle), now I could ask questions whose answers came directly from the notes, insert questions where they worked out an exercise and either inserted an answer to the form (had to be the exact answer – if not, they can’t submit the form, and they would email me which started a math convo) or took a snap of their work and uploaded it.

This version of The Flip was perfect for emergency online teaching. How will it look in a regular face-to-face classroom? Hmmm…

Some of my math department colleagues are wondering if the flip is the best way going forward – a couple of them strategically “unflipped” portions of a module or two this year. Myself, I want to find a way to get the basics to my students before we meet, saving classtime for practice and productive conversations and partnerships.

And to be honest, I’m never going back to assigning “homework” – regardless of district our students have unequal access to support at home, and with the popularity of Mathway and Photomath I have to assume that any procedural math that isn’t done in front of me was done by an app and not by a student. Which is doubly unfair.

I’m exploring some ways to build a “blended” classroom rather than a strict “flipped” classroom. As always I’ll have way more usable tools than I have time for in one class period. So similar to the way I approached extended e-learning, I’ll have to pick one and roll with it. That sounds like work for the summer.

I’m hopeful that I might be able to glean some ideas from Michele Eaton‘s new book The Perfect Blend. Her experiences with online/blended learning in Indianapolis should be informing all of our plans for hybrid or 100% online formats when school resumes in August.

The Director of Virtual and Blended Learning for Wayne Twp. Schools in Indianapolis sharing her knowlege.

I’m thankful my students were honest with me when I asked them about the flip and how it could be improved. I think they were thankful that I asked them in good faith how our class could be better, instead of lighting them up for “cheating” on notes. And I think implementing some of the tactics I gleaned from professional reading paid off this past school year and will continue to in the future.

Did the reading on my own, consulted with friends and experts when I had questions. Kind of like a mini-flipped learning model. Hmmm…

This is my contribution to the #MTBoS2020 blogging initiative started by Jennifer Fairbanks. That makes 4 out of the 5 months so far (I’m on a roll now). But take a look at the #MTBoS2020 tag for some great thinking about teaching and math from my online PLN.

Now What?

(Ed. note: if this isn’t the longest piece I’ve written in this space, it’s close. If you’ve got some time, make some coffee and settle in. Otherwise, bookmark it for later.)

All the best teachers I know are reflective practitioners. In fact, all the teachers I know are reflective practitioners. Some are a little more organized about it, some are a little more public about it, but even if it’s just a “Wow, that lesson sucked! I wish I would have (x)…” all of us are constantly thinking about how things went, what we learned, how we can be better next time.

Just some #INeLearn teachers, keepin’ it real. And thinking about things.

From the POV of spring of 2020, many of us are pondering what chunks of emergency remote teaching we can take with us back into the face-to-face classroom, whenever that might be.

In my building, the question was given to us a mandatory exercise. Our administrators received responses from 95% of the staff within a day. Which, “mandatory” or not, is pretty high.

So clearly folks had been thinking things.

The three questions:

  1. State your name, and then in reflecting on this extended period of e-learning, what have you learned and what would you use going forward to augment your teaching in a traditional setting?
  2. What was the greatest challenge you faced during this e-learning experience?
  • Technology Issues
  • Student Completion of work
  • Lack of Communication with Students/Parents/Guardians
  • Other

3. In what areas do you feel you made the most growth as a teacher during this e-learning setting?

Fortunately I had been giving these questions some thought myself, and our department chair tipped us off to the survey, so my response to “what have you learned?” wasn’t completely off-the-cuff:

I think like all of us I was initially pretty stressed about navigating the quick turnaround from the announcement date to the start of e-learning, and I spent some time pondering some options. I quickly got in touch with a former colleague and fellow presenter to get her feedback and decided on using Google Forms for my shell. That allowed me to ask wellness/mindset/check-in questions, embed my notes video, link to tools such as Flipgrid, Quizizz, Desmos activities, or my own custom activities on a google doc. In addition, students can upload files of their work thru the form. And since the responses are sent to a spreadsheet, I was able to quickly and easily grade/check student work or find & grade late work. That somewhat duplicated my “formative-assessment-by-walking-around-and-looking-at-student-work” that I use in face-to-face class. I also experimented a couple of times with setting an answer to require an exact value so if students did not enter the correct value they would get auto-feedback from me and the form could not be submitted until the answer was correct. This led to many students contacting me in office hours for assistance so we were able to talk a little math. Many of my online connects use GForms as their warm-up to ask check-in questions and have a place to collect student responses. I could see this as a tool I could use in a face-to-face class. One of my biggest takeaways was to trust my background, the skills I’ve developed as a lesson designer and the tools I’ve learned to use to create activities for my students that complied with district guidelines on time-on-task, content, and technology. I did some reflecting throughout the extended e-learning period, but I didn’t make major changes. I wanted to settle on a format that (in an imperfect world, at a challenging time) was a good fit for my students’ needs and my needs. Going forward, I have the same question that many of my fellow teachers have, which is how to create opportunities for students to collaborate. It’s how so many of us conduct face-to-face learning, and it doesn’t translate easily to an online environment. Many of the smartest teachers I know among my online PLN have been struggling with the same question. Since we will likely be on some type of hybrid or possibly 100% online when school resumes in August it’s a topic I’ll spend some time on. Coincidentally enough the #INeLearn twitter chat this week is moderated by Michele Eaton (Director of Virtual & Blended Learning for MSD of Wayne Twp. in Indy) and I imagine the topic of feedback & collaboration online may come up. 

So, about that #INeLearn topic. It lived up to the hype. Powerhouse chat every week, with some really brilliant contributors.

It was the nightcap of back-to-back Indiana teacher chats – the Wednesday night #INEdChat also took on the topic of reflection on the extended e-learning process.

There’s a common thread in the tweets I pulled out of the chat, aside from legit reflections on grading practices, lesson design, what worked & what didn’t, making connections with students during distance learning, and self-care tips (guac recipe, anyone?).

Virtually everyone on the chat recognized that regardless of what “school” looks like in August (we all have our predictions, some more pessimistic than others, and many districts have been busy planning for as many contingencies as they can imagine), we have some work to do regarding the inequities of extended distance learning. As Ken Shelton and many other have pointed out, those inequities have always been present in a face-to-face environment, but they were exacerbated and laid bare by two months of emergency remote teaching. Our most marginalized students are hiding in plain sight.

Nutrition, technology & connectivity, physical & mental well-being, all things that are provided seamlessly by experts in face-to-face settings, all required new methods and super-human efforts when we only see our kids from behind a screen (if at all).

It’s a monumental challenge and one that even the sharpest minds won’t be able to solve in a 30-minute twitter chat.

Like I mentioned in the chat, it’s the thing that keeps me up at night these days. But the thing that makes me optimistic about August and beyond is:

Clearly, folks have been thinking things.

Moms, man…

My Chicago people know Lin Brehmer, the cerebral, literate WXRT host known in equal parts for his love of the Chicago Cubs and his long-running audio essay series Lin’s Bin.

Listening to him host middays from his home is like having a really smart, really good friend with excellent taste in food and the greatest record collection in the history of electricity. And of course he peppers his discourse with his patented wry observations on life.

Today he was relating a conversation he had this week with a friend about Mothers’ Day plans. According to Lin, she told him all she wants to do is get in her car and drive to a park or something and just be out of the house for a while.

(For context, Chicago has been under a pretty strict lockdown. To the point where the mayor has become a meme.) Everybody wants out. For any reason or no reason at all.

Brehmer closed the segment by reminding his listeners that all this woman wanted for Mothers’ Day was to get out of the house so she could have some time to herself. (Emphasis in original).

The job of mothering has always been perplexing and exhausting and thankless, as evidenced by the above anecdote from a few Mothers’ Days ago. But the worldwide coronavirus pandemic has redoubled the degree of difficulty.

Everyone has seen the viral declarations from moms who have tapped out on emergency remote learning for their kids. For Work From Home parents of elementary-aged kids, it was never sustainable. For working parents trying to guide their kids through a full-day schedule mimicking the in-person daily schedule, five days a week, distance learning has always had an expiration date.

And the movement is gaining strength. It’s probably showed up in your Facebook feed, from moms in your neighborhood or your town, maybe to your surprise.

Even some teacher-moms have brought the e-learning year to an early conclusion.

My youngest is a sophomore and motivated to have whatever level of success in school keeps him eligible for sports, so he’s mostly self-sufficient. When he needs help he comes to see me. We check his work to make sure it gets turned in. Done and done.

But if I had to carve out time after office hours and planning and grading and entering feedback to sit with him for six classes a day, or put my own work off until after his classes were done I’d be seriously considering tapping out too.

This might be one of the most under-appreciated pieces of the puzzle as districts plan to re-open schools in August. If parents are back to work but schools re-open on a partial or fully online schedule, a lot of parents (moms primarily) are going to have some decisions to make. Some literal lose-lose decisions.

I don’t know what the right or wrong thing to do is regarding opening schools in 12 weeks. Well actually, I do, the right thing is the option that keeps the most people alive. But I do know that whatever we do is going to have to have the interests of families in mind. Or it won’t work.

And I also know that if you are celebrating Mothers’ Day this weekend, tread lightly. Give grace. Give love. She could use the break.

And maybe a trip to Greenbush and Weko Beach. Or whatever is the equivalent in her world. Because she earned it, way before the world had heard of Emergency Online Teaching.