Month: October 2021

First Checkpoint

Adoration at St. John Bosco parish, Hammond.

Driving in to work the other day a Lake County squad goes flying by me on the Borman. County police HQ is way south of me, and there’s a small unincorporated area east of my school but aside from that there is zero reason for them to be speeding into Hammond. Unless they are providing backup to… something large. And bad. Off in the distance I saw him exit onto Cline Ave., and then make a left onto 169th. Not good.

We’ve had way more than our share of violence and threats this year. Intellectually I know a shooting during the school day is very unlikely. But in my brain I thought:

“Oh shit. Here we go. Today is the day.”

Parenthetically: I don’t know about my colleagues. But I’ve pretty much made my peace with knowing that I could die at school, any day I walk through the door. The parish by my former school does Adoration and confession every Tuesday afternoon, and I’m building the habit of staying in a state of grace.

The police response turned out to be for a head-on collision on the roadway that shares space with the entrance ramp to the expressway right by my school. Not an uncommon roadway design in cities, but still.

I was never so happy to see what was probably a severe personal-injury accident in all my life. At least my students are all still alive.

First quarter ended today. We are all weary. Emotionally and physically. Students and kids both. We’re short subs, like every district is, so all of us cover each others’ classes on our plan. And for students, nothing like standing in the rain for an hour before getting wanded and having your bag checked just to get in the building, and then the occasional lockdown to distract you from learning. Or an emergency e-learning day called (and rightfully so) because of a threat of violence after half the kids are already in the building, because we are short bus drivers and they all run multiple routes and that means some kids get dropped off at school at like 6:20 am. All that “Maslow before Bloom” stuff is real.

Fall break could not have come at a more opportune time.

All the toggling between remote and in-person, plus a Covid quarantine for a couple of sports teams, has made the first quarter very difficult to navigate for our students. They deserve grace. And a chance to catch up. We’ve been offering quiz re-takes (up to three attempts) all year. But I also carved out a day for them to do make-up work and re-take quizzes right at the end of the grading period. Call it “Amnesty Day”. And an Extra Credit opportunity. (link here).

And it was glorious.

“I did it”. For real. It’s so beautiful to see kids excited about anything that happens in school. Especially after the first couple of months we’ve had. I’ll take it.

Trying to determine the volume of the largest cylinder that would fit in my classroom, they got up and moved around and measured things, either with the Measure app on their phones, or by counting bricks and multiplying. It was most excellent. They also made up work that needed to be fixed, grade-wise and learning-wise. We all need the rest. But just as much we needed a day that confirmed us in our hard work.

One of my favorite former colleagues (now a school counselor) was fond saying with her students back in her classroom days “you learn it, you earn it”. Seems like a pretty good class motto. Especially in this year when our students have faced challenge after challenge. So many students grabbed the opportunity these Amnesty Days and did work, re-learned and re-quizzed, and got the grade they wanted. It was crazy hectic for me. In a good way. I was doing student conferences while they were working on quizzes and make-up stuff, me showing them in the gradebook what their work could to to their grade (the “what-if?” game). And occasionally answering questions about the volume formula for a cylinder or to check their work.

Did they work this hard just to get a silly letter on a piece of paper? Possibly. I mean, “grade grubbing” is still a thing. But there’s a difference between “is there any extra credit I can do?” and “can you help me with this problem and then can I re-take that quiz?” That’s what UChicagoImpact is talking about when they say that grades measure learning in a way that no standardized test can.

So I’ve been posting my class averages on my board, partially because my math neighbors have been, and partially so my students can see that their efforts are paying off. This is what I wrote today:

We had the “race is against yourself” discussion today. That I don’t care what other classes did, I care that your arrow is pointing up. I think they bought it.

I think.

Really as long as their own personal grade went up I think they were cool with it. But that is all part of a bigger plan. I think the student conference was the best part of the day. I got to give pep talks, and let them know I saw how hard they were working, regardless of grade. That I saw their improvement. They got that part for real.

I also picked this day for my Jordans to make their Morton High debut. My youngest son is the Shoe Guy in the family. Camps on StockX for every new release. So last December he told me he was getting me a pair of Jordan 1s for Christmas. At first I resisted a bit. It’s not the kind of thing I’d spend on myself. I am brutal on shoes. I get one pair, wear them till they’re worn out, buy another.

But he’s the kind of guy who wants to share the things that are important to him with the people he loves. I was worried I’d wear out the shoes. He said “I know you’ll take care of them”. (Awesome reverse psycholgy on his dad, huh?).

And I do. Put them up with the forms inside at the end of the day and everything.

Sometimes you just have to give people a chance to do what’s right, right? And then sit back and watch the magic happen.

And that means I can sleep easy tonight. Fall Break won’t be near long enough. But it will be just long enough for me to catch my breath and go back on Tuesday.

Quite a swing of emotions this week. One down, three to go.

“Don’t Boil The Ocean”

It’s become kind of the unofficial motto of the IDOE Teacher Leader Bootcamp: “Don’t Boil The Ocean”. Apparently a phrase that is in heavy rotation at the department offices, it translates well to our work. Fifty teachers from around the state embarking on a year-long mission to create change and improve schools, having a direct influence on their buildings, their districts, and their communities.

Kind of a tall order. Only way you are going to do it is in manageable chunks.

But there’s another en vogue phrase bouncing around my head tonight: “drinking from the firehose.”

Source

The program switched to virtual tonight (still Covidtide, obviously, but also the state not having to pay for subs for 50 teachers four times a year makes the grant dollars go much further). So I gave myself a quick refresher course in Zoom Call etiquette (stay on mute, and then remember to unmute myself, yes the cat crawling across my lap on camera is adorable, turn off my camera when getting up to fill my water bottle or check on soup in the instant pot) and signed on at 5:00.

So we spent some time learning about how adults learn (remarkably, kind of the same way high school kids learn which is both comforting and terrifying). Everyone was a bit stunned at reading the Linda Darling-Hammond finding that it requires 50 hours of professional development for a teacher to master a new skill at the level required to implement positive change for students. That’s pretty much a trimester at one hour per day, every day.

We learned how important it is to allow time to process and connect dots during PD – in fact the recommendation from Elena Aguilar in The Art Of Coaching Teams is that one third of the session time should be introduction of new material and the remainder for thinking, writing, talking, and practicing. Which is to say, kind of the way we hope to plan out a class. (Common thread alert). But the most vivid breakout room conversations came after watching Dr. Jeni Cross’s TED talk on the myths of behavior change.

What we learned is, we’re probably doing it wrong. Our table leader/mentor and I had the same anecdote pop in our heads while watching the video – that tired old trope we roll out with freshmen. “Look left, and look right. One of the three of you probably won’t graduate”. Turns out the message we are sending is, “only two-thirds of the kids here graduate so it’s OK if I don’t”.

Dr. Cross also skewers the adage that attitudes have to change before behaviors. She says it’s the other way around. Fix the behaviors first, build a culture of “how we do things”, and the attitude will follow. Like Seth Godin says, “people like us do things like this”. I’ve always believed that, just had my struggles in implementing it. Changing culture is hard. Especially when folks don’t want to change. They can be quite stubborn.

Which brings us to Switch by Dan Heath and Chip Heath. I remember it being the It book back at about the same time that the teachers I follow online were all into Dan Pink and Malcolm Gladwell and Make It Stick and that genre. I haven’t read it tho. So when our presenter from University of Chicago displayed a slide with the following, my ears perked up a bit:

“Even if you don’t have lots of power or resources behind you”. As teachers we think we are in charge in our little four corners of the world, but deep down we know better. We can’t just put our foot down and demand change.

(I’ll wait while you go google the Berwick story if you want).

So here are the 50 of us, teaching rural kids and suburban kids and city kids, all trying to create change, and trying to figure out how. I thought back to the Donna Foote book Relentless Pursuit, how the freshly scrubbed TFA recruits set their Big Goal of 80 percent of their kids reaching 80 percent mastery, then trying with everything they had to make it happen.

There’s a lot of overlap between TFA’s Teaching as Leadership concept and the 5 Essentials, by the way.

My action research topic involves some change on my part (changing formats of my assessments to better allow me to understand student strengths and weaknesses), but what am I asking my kids to do differently? Within the 5 Essesntials framework, all the 5 pieces eventually are to lead to increased student performance. And interestingly enough, performance is measured by grades and not by test scores. To paraphrase our presenter from Saturday’s session, grades require not only a mastery of the content but also a mastery of organizational skills, communications skills, and a willingness to do the tasks by which the performance will be judged. In other words, adaptive skills that have value far beyond school. And as such, they measure learning in a way no standardized test can.

So we hand grade quizzes now. There’s a bunch of them in my Desmos waiting to be scored. But what else am I trying to achieve? Eventually I want my students to see their efforts reflected in their grade. I had one kid today as part of the survey express his displeasure that two quizzes have trashed his grade. Of course, that’s the deal when quizzes are weighted 70% – the quiz average basically is the grade. So how do I create a situation where I’m preparing my students for my quizzes, and measuring the learning that matters in my class? Yes, we still offer retakes. But maybe I hold out and insist on a student conference first. I think it will be easier to ID areas of growth when I have either a pencil/paper test or the entries on a screen in Desmos in hand. Yes, we’ve begun a regular student progress conference with each student, so they can see “under the hood” of their grade and have a better handle on their learning. I grade daily work by effort but I probably need a way to get a better sense of understanding each day before we get to review/quiz day. And yes, I’ll have them re-take the survey every couple weeks so I can track their perception of my knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.

What I know for sure from doing this for a while is that just about every kid wants good grades. Their family members want that too. Nobody really wants to be that “one in three” who doesn’t graduate. My job is to figure out how to convince them to do the things they need to do to get the grades they want to get.

Maybe go get that book. My “to-read” stack is growing by the day it seems.

There was a lot to process tonight. A lot of dots to connect. So let’s fill a pot with water, put it on the stove, add a little salt and oil, and set it to simmer. Start there, and see what happens.

Source

“Some Kind of Super-Teacher Thing”

Lunch at a long-ago conference, coincidentally held at the school where I now teach. And a new sticker for my water bottle.

A few years ago Matt Miller used “Maverick Teaching” as a hook for his CUE keynote, urging the teachers in attendance to take risks in the classroom.

I saw him at a conference in Hammond later that year and he still had some stickers left over, so of course I grabbed one for my water bottle. Because for guys of a certain age, Top Gun plays on loop in our heads.

I felt a little bit like Maverick on Saturday, sitting in a meeting room in suburban Indianapolis for the opening session of the IDOE’s Teacher Leader Bootcamp, a year-long series focused on school improvement. Looking around, trying to figure out who’s the best.

Except that’s where the analogy falls apart. TLB isn’t a “best of the best” thing, although there is an application and selection process and each cohort is limited to 50. Unlike the movie, we were explicitly told there will be no grades, no evaluations, no “second place”. It’s a collaborative group, all 50 of us there on a Saturday morning because we want to improve our practice and be agents of change in our buildings, our districts, and our communities.

I applied on a whim when the window opened up in July, not really expecting to make the cut. There’s a lot of pretty damn good, innovative, creative, reflective teachers in this state. But here we are.

The TLB is the brainchild of former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Jennifer McCormick. She saw an opportunity for teachers to drive change by making research-based changes to their practice. The program uses the “5 Essentials” framework from the University of Chicago’s UChicagoImpact. That effort got its start when former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett called the CPS the worst public school system in the nation. Researchers at the university went to work, looking for levers that could be used for school improvement. That led to the 5 essentials. There’s nothing earth-shattering here. Anyone who’s taught could guess the five:

  • Ambitious Instruction
  • Effective Leaders
  • Collaborative Teachers
  • Supportive Environment
  • Involved Families

Of course it’s what you do with that list matters. The research showed that schools that excelled at three of these areas had 10 times the results than schools that could not implement three. And schools that underperformed in even one area had a less than 10 percent chance of seeing measurable improvement.

So the cohort of teachers are tasked with carrying out action research in their building, focusing on one aspect of the 5 essentials, or on one of 11 questions offered to students regarding classroom practices or classroom culture.

I’m already getting a sense of where I’ll go with this.

I administered my survey to four of my classes today. The other three will take it tomorrow. I made it anonymous, asked students to be as honest as they want to be. I was ready for anything, from a ridiculous amount of praise to getting my head ripped off. I peeked at the results and the answers to one question – “Mr. Dull knows my strengths and weaknesses” were, well, bad. On a 1-to-5 scale my four classes today gave me average scores of 3.11, 2.78, 2.85, 2.88. Ugh. But not a surprise.

I’ve got my largest-ever roster of students this year, 216 all told after selling my prep. I made a trade-off of using MathXL for quizzes because it is self-grading. Otherwise who knows how long it would take to get graded quizzes back to my kids?

I’ve already committed to quizzing in Desmos going forward. It’s gonna cost me some time but I need to be engaged with my students’ work to see what they know and don’t know. I’ve been in places where Canvas quizzes are king for self-grading and auto-feedback purposes, even got admin-splained how to write distractors for multiple-choice questions (as if I don’t make a whole activity out of students writing their own Quizizz questions, including explaining how they built their distractors), but I pushed back because I felt I was taking myself out of the loop by using self-grading multiple-choice assessments. Like, even I knew I didn’t know what my kids did or didn’t know after two rounds of quizzes.

I’m collaborating with my admin and instructional coach team on a topic for action research, but this seems to be the area of need, and the plan for improvement, laid out in front of me, wrapped up with a bow.

Now just need to start documenting the change to Desmos quizzes, and to give the survey on the regular for next quarter at least to try to track changes. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to respond to my students’ stated needs. Like I told them after the survey today, I have strong ideas about how to teach math and what works best, but it’s good to get feedback from my students as to whether it’s actually working. And as my principal pointed out when I filled him in on the day Saturday, students are not used to getting opportunities to give feedback to their teachers and to have it taken seriously.

So it’s gonna be a good year, in class and in Cohort 3 of the TLB. I’m not too worried about getting my name on a plaque, even if there was one. I’m more interested in what I can do to be better for my students. One of my online connects who did the program last year and came back as a mentor this year said it would be transformative.

Next meeting is virtual, this Thursday. I’m willing to be transformed. And maybe to be in on the ground floor of a hashtag.

#superteacherthing. For real.

You Can’t Have Both

I brought home a stack of papers to grade this weekend.

Breaking news, huh? I mean, I am a teacher. Most years that’s just SOP, right? But it’s the first time this year. This crazy, crazy year. To the point where one day last week Mrs. Dull looked at me and said “don’t you have schoolwork to do tonight?” She’s a veteran of the game.

I sold my prep this year, so for the first month or so I had like 240 kids in seven classes (now down to 216 after we balanced some classes a little and removed the no-shows from the rosters, but still), and in light of that increase in student load and decrease in planning time, in consultation with my geometry colleagues we made the decision to go self-grading for quizzes. It was not a decision made lightly, but something had to give. I did a search for my twitter handle and “grading”, and ooh, that brought back some unpleasant memories of long nights and little sleep.

I’ve never been the kind of teacher who just wanted to churn out a bunch of numbers so I could put a stupid letter down in my gradebook. And that’s what giving self-grading summative assessments feels like to me. Going through the motions of “school”. It takes the human out of the equation. And we’re paying the price.

We’re not using Canvas at my school, but you know how this goes, right? (Source)

Our online math program has some quirks about how it requires answers. As a for instance, when students enter an ordered pair as an answer, they can’t just type <left parentheses-number-comma-number-right parentheses>. They have to use the “ordered pair” button from the tool bar,then enter their x- and y-coordinates into the little boxes. So I end up with dozens of students typing in a correct answer and having the program mark it wrong. I had students turn in their work paper, so I could go back and look at the work to confirm they did the problem correctly, but if I’m going to have to read 230 pages torn out of a spiral notebook I might as well just give the quiz on paper to start with.

Agency Idea Sticker by Taylor & Pond for iOS & Android | GIPHY
Source

Or on Desmos.

After two rounds of (mostly bad) quizzes I’m ready to make the switch.

After 18 months of remote & hybrid I’m a little out of practice on grading giant piles of student work. I do remember that it took a while.

I sense I’m about to be reminded. The math: 5 minutes per paper x 216 students =1080 minutes=18 hours. That’s a long weekend, any way you define it. But this feels like a tradeoff that will be worth it. On the positive, we’re doing shorter, more frequent quizzes this year (every 2-3 sections or so) so that should cut down on long nights of grading.

I’m willing to admit that part of my students’ struggles may be related to 18 months of remote learning. But in talking with them and looking at their work more of the blame lies with the tool I’m using to assess. So I’m going to use a different tool.

Of course, there are some benefits. I’d forgtten how much fun student artwork on math assignments can be.

“Mr. Dull, I can’t draw.” That’s OK, stick figures are fine.

To intro the proofs/logic unit Friday we used an old favorite of mine, writing a short (8 sentences) story in the style of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. We watched the video, talked about “cause and effect” and defined conditional or if-then statements, then had students recall cause and effect in their own lives. (“Well Mister Dull, the other night I stayed up late playing on my phone, then I was so tired the next morning I hit snooze on my phone when my alarm went off, and then I missed the bus and was late to school.”) Then I introduced the assignment. (I used this as my base and tweaked it a little for my needs). A couple students asked if they could just change the animal and the treat. I figured that was just kind of like “fanfic” so OK, sure. Except with one kid, I gently guided him to use a non-traditional animal. I told him about the javelina.

His story turned kind of dark at the end but the illustration was totally worth it.

I made this assignment a quiz grade partly because they have been getting pummeled on the MathXL quizzes and I want to level that out a little since quizzes are 70% of the overall grade. But I also wanted to get them a quick win. Never underestimate the mental part of the game.

But still I had kids that absolutely refused to move a pencil. Didn’t do a thing, didn’t turn in a paper. Basically refused free money. I still don’t know what to do with that, even after 19 years.

I can’t make them do anything, but somedays I can convince them to do something. And some days doing something counts for a lot.

So I’m going to do something about our struggles with quizzes. Can’t just sit back and let them struggle grade-wise when they are doing the work. I know better.

I’m going to miss getting an appropriate amount of sleep. But I’ll sleep a lot better knowing I’m doing the right thing for my students.