Tag: authentic assessment

Should I Stay Or Should I Go

I’ve been told by teaching colleagues that I am too analytical. It’s a pretty good read. I’ve never been comfortable flying by the seat of my pants. I’d rather have as much information as I can get and have the pieces more or less in place before making a move.

Although that one Teddy Roosevelt quote hangs behind my desk because sometimes you just have to make a decision.

Source

It’s not always possible to have all the knowledge you need. To be honest, a key moment in my life was when I learned to operate in a grey area, when “black-and-white” is not one of the options.

Did I ever tell you about the time we bought a house sight-unseen? Moving back to the Region from Vegas, we had enough money to fly back for job interviews but not enough to come back a second time for house hunting. We did our research online (on the baby Internet back in 2005), my wife’s stepdad was our agent, we’d find a house, he’d check it out and report back. He eventually did the walkthrough of the house we selected on his flip phone while we stood in the kitchen of our house in Vegas.

Sold. We never saw it in person until we pulled up in the U-Haul.

That’s when I understood the Colin Powell 40-70 rule. General Powell felt if he couldn’t be 40% sure the outcome of a decision, that was a “no”. But he also recognized he would never have 100% of the information, so he set 70% as the threshold. Once he was 70% positive, that was a “go”.

And so it is in so many areas of life. Gather your data, assess the probabilities, move forward. It’s why the probability unit in Algebra II is so rich with opportunities for real-life connections. Yeah, we do do plenty of Fundamental Counting Principle practice, we figure permutations and combinations (“How many ways can three runners finish first, second, and third in the 100-meter dash in a field of eight runners?”)

But the big money payoff is when students see how understanding probabilities and likely outcomes can help them manage an uncertain (at best) world.

We start the prob/stats unit with a deep dive into March Madness, including a bracket challenge with their new-found handicapping knowledge.

Then out of long habit I make the assessment for the unit a pair of activities: First (because Indiana), John Scammell’s “Free Throws For The Win” .

They were like “Mr. Dull can we do something happy tomorrow? Because that was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”

We follow that up with an investigation into the Monty Hall Problem (doc here). Both days they do real math and see the real applications of probability that they can start using really as soon as tomorrow.

The big takeaways are that even what seem like highly improbable things still sometimes happen. And that just because something is statistically your best move doesn’t always guarantee success. You have twice the probability of winning the car on Let’s Make A Deal by switching doors, but in any one play (which is all you get when you are a contestant), there is still a 1-in-3 chance you get the Zonk.

Goat 🙂

Weigh your options, and roll.

A lot of my friends in the building are making exactly these mental calculations these days. At our next school board meeting next week the district is expected to announce its decision on school closures and teacher layoffs. Consensus is we will shutter 4 of our 12 elementary schools, and we were told back in November that the defeat of a funding referendum would require cutting 250 teaching positions.

But as a colleague of mine pointed out, folks aren’t waiting. In his words, they are “RIFfing themselves”, lining up new jobs before the axe can fall. In some cases, making the move before the school year is done. We had four resignations from just my building on the personnel report last month, and I suspect the number will be similar this month. (That’s 10 percent of our teaching staff in eight weeks, if you’re scoring at home). And can you blame them? As the famous economist observation goes, when you lose your job, unemployment in your house is 100%. It doesn’t matter what the “official” statistics say.

I’ve been on the other side. Some time ago I left the district I call “the Family Business” for a green leafy suburban school. Well, the grass isn’t always greener. I came back. For the people and the kids. I took a pay cut to do it. There’s no district out there where the hallways are paved with gold. Few are paying significantly more than we are. There are so many districts (even in relatively affluent areas) in financial distress right now, it’s the living embodiment of “the devil you know”. You could jump districts and land someplace worse.

I feel horrible for the families who will have to make plans for their kids to attend a different school next year. For the kids who will leave their friends. I ache for my teacher friends who are going to be forced out of a job they’ve poured their soul into. For the clerical staff and custodians who won’t even be allowed to finish out the year. I’ve been told that due to the number of vacancies and emergency permit folks in the district, teachers with a degree and a license are probably safe. But even for the folks who are above the cut line, the daily anxiety over the future permeating my building is physically exhausting.

And the concessions that will likely be written into our contract (yeah that’s not even settled yet, five months after the state-mandated deadline to conclude negotiations) are frankly petty and punitive and are chasing teachers away. Folks who stay will get no raise and shoulder the burden of an unsustainable insurance premium increase.

Tuesday of Holy Week, this line from the Gospel of John hit hard:

Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.” So he dipped the morsel and [took it and] handed it to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot.  After he took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2013:26-28&version=NABRE

That’s all of us right now: whatever the plan is, get on with it. Just tell us. Then we can take that information and make a decision.

Just like they taught us back in Algebra II all those years ago.

Adventures In PBL – SCH Enrollment Investigation

Complied from publicly available IDOE Enrollment data

Last month I gave my students access to almost two decades’ worth of enrollment data for our district and asked them to model it mathematically. And then to analyze the data and think deeply about the challenges facing our district, which has around 40% the enrollment it did 60 years ago.

They did some quality work, and when asked to summarize their learning in a slide deck, they produced some solid documents.

(Planning doc, student doc.)

Their conclusions were based on their research, both into the enrollment trend and also reading contemporary news stories, and from classroom discussions as well as their own experience. In addition, many of the business and government teachers in my building have been showing segments of the school board meetings in class as a learning opportunity, so my students are up-to-date on issues as well as the opinions of various groups regarding a way forward.

But what turbocharged this project experience was a visit from Trustee Carlotta Blake-King, who was generous enough with her time to join us as a community partner the day after a board meeting, and shared the benefits of her life and board experience with my students.

I primed the pump by asking as part of our bellringer: “If you could ask an expert one question you still have after studying the enrollment data, what would it be??”

I displayed the questions for Trustee Blake-King and that’s all the start she needed. She had my kids enthralled, and maybe never moreso than when she introduced them to the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline.

She told them that when government organizations are scouting locations for prisons, they seek out areas where third grade reading test scores are poor. (More on that claim here.)

My students instantly understood how data is used outside of the classroom, including in ways that are to their detriment, and how valuable the ability to use math to frame the world around them could be. It was like cracking a secret code.

The next highlight came after a student question – “What would we need to do to reverse the declining enrollment trend?”

The trustee’s response: “We don’t promote ourselves. Driving around the city or on the Borman you see billboards for other districts and for charter schools – why aren’t there billbards for Hammond schools? Why don’t we tell people about the great things happening here?” She went on to explain that she had a long career as a real estage agent and the number one concern parents of children had when thinking about buying in a particular neighborhood or town was the perceived quality of the schools.

So we talked about the success stories – from the Hammond Arts and Performance Academy and its graduates to four-time world champion robotics Team 71 to our accomplished Mock Trial and dance teams to service projects sponsored by National Honor Society, Black Student Union, Bible Club, and other student groups.

This piece hit home with me as I’m a fellow on the Teach Plus National Policy Advisory Board this year tasked with advocating for education issues and shaping policy at the federal level. During coaching sessions for our virtual meetings with congressional staffers we are reminded to tell the stories of our schools, the bad and the good. It’s good advice.

Rather than asking them to make recommendations to the board on the way forward (kind of an unfair ask given the number of variables involved in the decision and the relative lack of information my kids had, even after the research) instead I asked them to develop three pros and cons of the district’s proposed action plan, specifically closing two elementary schools and laying off a quarter of the teaching staff.

I synthesized this experience while reading a couple of news articles this morning. The Chicago Tribune editorial board examined the Chicago Teachers Union president ask for a pay increase in light of the city’s ongoing financial troubles. Increased property taxes have a tendency to incentivize families to move out of the city to lower-tax environment suburbs.

So, in our view, this eventually will lead CPS and CTU to the inevitable discussion about how to reshape a school district that now is serving far fewer students than it has in decades. There’s an influx of migrant children whose likely addition to CPS needs to be appropriately accounted for. But the elephant in the room for CPS is dozens of schools that are serving 30% or fewer of the students they were built to instruct.

Under state law, CPS can’t close any schools until next January. But after that there’s no legal impediment. The savings from making some tough decisions could well yield more resources for the schools, and the teachers, that truly need the investment. Indeed, there are parts of the city where schools are over capacity.

Closures, of course, are anathema to CTU and to Johnson. Emanuel’s 50 school closures following the 2012 strike are referenced repeatedly in debates around CPS and its future today. But school closures aren’t unusual outside of Chicago. In the suburbs for decades, districts wisely have consolidated schools in response to reduced school-age populations.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/03/10/editorial-stacy-davis-gates-chicago-teachers-union/

Hammond’s much larger urban schools neighbor is facing the same fiscal cliff and may have to make similarly difficult decisions.

Then an article from Jerry Davich hit the Times of Northwest Indiana (formerly the Hammond Times, which is a long story but part of the larger and long-term flight to the suburbs that has Hammond and other urban school districts hemorraging students and dollars).

Davich spoke with business and civic leaders to get a sense of how the Region can redefine and reinvent itself in the years and decades to come. A shift away from traditional manufacturing to a tech-oriented base is at the top of the list for the mayor of Hammond:

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. is convinced that Northwest Indiana â€” and his city in particular â€” will see major advances in technology and investment in the near future.

“Technology advances that will draw large amounts of capital to Hammond’s downtown area,” he said.

https://www.nwitimes.com/opinion/columnists/jerry-davich/jerry-davich-whats-the-next-big-thing-in-northwest-indiana-region-visionaries-look-into-the/article_f15bebb6-c924-11ee-af4b-eb5b7981e3a3.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

A Region product who is now owner of a company funding some of that tech development downtown caught my attention:

“The theme for the Next Big Thing is the integration of Northwest Indiana into the Chicago tech hub experience and the whole technology ecosystem that exists in Chicago,” said Tom Dakich, a principal owner at YAB Development Partners.

“Mayor McDermott is brilliant in that he recognized that the downtown concept on the double-tracking is the easiest way for somebody to live in Indiana and work in downtown Chicago. He’s building a downtown living learning area in Hammond and I’m going to put technology people there,” Dakich said.

“When kids graduate from Big Ten universities, more of them go to Chicago than any other city in the country. That is for all Big Ten schools, not just Indiana, Illinois, Northwestern, etc. We have to get some of those people to come over to Northwest Indiana. The only way to do it is by technology jobs.”

https://www.nwitimes.com/opinion/columnists/jerry-davich/jerry-davich-whats-the-next-big-thing-in-northwest-indiana-region-visionaries-look-into-the/article_f15bebb6-c924-11ee-af4b-eb5b7981e3a3.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

Dakich is right, of course, in his assertion that Chicago is the number-one destination for B1G graduates. But Mrs. Dull wisely noted that although kids from Michigan or Iowa may be lured here by a low cost of living, easy access to Chicago via the South Shore Line, and lakefront amenities, eventually they will start families, have kids, and start to think about quality of schools.

“If he thinks they’re going to draw people to Hammond long-term, they’re gonna have to get the schools right.”

(This is why you always marry smarter and prettier, guys. You’ll never regret it.)

I was pleased with the arc and the outcome of my first full-on project-based learning experience. Part of my intent was to introduce my students to exponential and logarithmic functions before we studied them. Part of my plan was to give my students an opportunity to see how math shapes the world they live in right now. As a wise person once stated, we can’t pretend that “the real world” for our students is some far-off abstraction.

They learned about how schools are funded and how school boards make decisions. They had the opportunity to discuss their learning and get expert input on the issue from Trustee Blake-King.

And the optimistic teacher in me, the one who gets irrationally happy on Cap & Gown photo day when our seniors are walking the hallways in their graduation regalia and taking enthusiastic group selfies, that teacher holds out hope that when my students get their hands on the big problems facing our world that they will be the ones to hammer out a solution.

Otherwise what is problem-based learning even for?

Teaching To The Student

Source

Today is the first day of Daylight Saving Time. It is unquestionably Mrs. Dull’s least favorite day of the year. For her that lost hour of sleep is a thing she can never get back and it feels like its been unfairly taken, the same reaction you have as a kid to dropping an ice cream cone on the ground.

For me, it’s one of the unmistakable markers of the coming of spring. Truth be told, I’ll be dragging tomorrow morning too but there’s a 7:00 sunset scheduled for Monday of spring break and that re-energizes me for the last 9 weeks of school. I’m very Vitamin D-responsive. I’m more motivated to get my dogs and myself out for evening walks when it’s light out later. I’ll put the patio chairs back out and spend some quiet time sitting outside after dinner. It’s mentally and physically healthy for all of us.

Everybody out there trying to get what they need, and some folks need something different. For Cath, we’ll balance out the sleep deprivation some night soon with an impromptu pizza dinner on the beach at sunset.

My district revealed its testing numbers a few weeks ago. There was good news and bad news: we are improving but still lagging the state-wide average. And breaking down our students’ I-Ready and PSAT results, we have got significant work to do.

Our principal shared out the results at last month’s faculty meeting, and added a note of guidance: if we have a large portion of our students reading at well below grade level, and we are giving text-based assessments, we can’t be too surprised that our students are struggling grade-wise in our classes. His suggestion: can we consider and implement other ways we can give our students to show us what they know?

Amen. Preaching to the choir right there.

I’m a long-time project-as-assessment guy. Especially when Algebra II gets weird.

Last week we finished triangle similarity and took a Desmos quiz on the topic, with so-so results. I followed it up with the Capture-Recapture goldfish lab and made that a quiz grade. It checks plenty of my favorite boxes: collaborative, crunching numbers, real-world application, a quick snack while mathing. They are after all The Snack That Smiles Back™.

If you want the definitive write-up and docs, Julie Reulbach is my go-to. And you’ll probably dig the BBC video that serves as the hook.

There was some quality math on display and plenty of productive table-talk, and a little competition (which group came closest to the actual number of goldfish in the bag) never hurts.

They showed me they can set up and solve proportions, which is a major objective for the unit. That was my motivation for making it a quiz grade. As a former colleague of mine likes to say, “you learn it, you earn it”. For many of my students, it helped balance out their score on the more traditional quiz. Which seems eminently fair to me, and is aligned with the philosophy our school leadership is espousing.

Win-win. I can teach to the test, or I can teach to the student.

Kind of an easy decision, as I understand it.

Now let’s make it throught this last week of the quarter, enjoy spring break, light the Weber and bathe in the soft light of a late-March sunset.

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.

Everything’s On The Table

Aces up. Image via caesars.com

I spent many a weekend night as a young adult hanging with the fellas, drinking beer and playing cards. One of the dads who would occasionally sit in on the games was famous for his table banter as he dealt the cards. His most memorable line, deadpanned as he dealt a pair of aces across the table: “Gentlemen, the price of poker just went up.”

Well, in my building, the price of poker just went up. Time to for me to put my money where my mouth is.

We’ve been moving slowly towards a more tech-rich environment over the last year or so. One high school in our district has already made the leap to 1:1 with Chromebooks, and we have made steps in that direction with some informal PD, and each department having use of a Chromebook cart. There is some grant money available to beef up our infrastructure so we can increase the amount of tech available to support teaching and learning.

So at our last faculty meeting, our principal extended a challenge. She announced that next school year we are moving to an emphasis on more authentic learning opportunities for our students.

“Next year – if you’re gonna be with me, we’re going to move forward on this together.”

She told us she hoped to see our staff move to “blended learning”.

So, what does that mean?

George Couros posted on exactly that question recently:

If you google “What is blended learning?”, you will find the following definition:

Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through delivery of content and instruction via digital and online media with some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace.

Right now, I do not think of this blog as “blending my learning” even though it is online and I was in a face-to-face setting earlier. It is just the way I connect and deepen my thinking.  Is Googling something when you are interested really something that we would deem “blended” in 2016?

Why I point this out is not for people to feel bad for using the term “blended learning”. My hope is that we get to a point that having an online component to our classrooms where students have an opportunity to learn with “control over time, place, path, or pace”, just becomes what we see as the norm, not the exception.

That sounds like exactly what we have in mind. Like so much education jargon, maybe “blended learning” has lost a bit of its meaning. Maybe a better term for what we are aiming for is “connected learning”? The ability to bring tech to the party changes everything. Including the culture. It’s a huge leap from “sit here and take these notes and do these practice problems” to “holy crap, this guy‘s students just verified a graph of the dating pool by age in an xkcd strip.”

In my world, students like this are the equivalent of likable Republicans in an Aaron Sorkin drama. Unicorns.

What could this look like? Jonathan Claydon says boring 1:1 can still be pretty cool. Especially when you don’t force the tech where pencil and paper would do as good a job, quicker.

But, he notes in a post titled “Boring 1:1“, about the worst possible thing is to use tech as an electronic multiple-choice worksheet machine.

At a local EdCamp, there was buzz about Google Classroom. But the end result was a lot of people migrating fill-in-the-blank worksheets and debating ways to have students fill in the blanks electronically. Or yet another way to boil math down into computer friendly multiple-choice sets. When asked (I usually just listen at these things), I said it’s the wrong approach entirely. You haven’t thought about whether filling in blanks or skimming through multiple choice was an appropriate assignment in the first place. Ask any college kid putting up with MathXL.

Do we need a #DitchBook club? Maybe a small group in the building gets together to learn how one guy (a one-man department, actually) in a small high school in rural Indiana left the textbook on the shelf and used technology to help his students break down classroom walls.

Or #TLAP? I don’t know. I do know the answer isn’t using thousands of dollars worth of Chromebooks to have our students pretend to do PLATO all day.

I spend part of every Tuesday night at the #connectedtl chat. Or as I like to call it, “My West Coast Teacher Brain”. Here was Question 1 from a few weeks ago, on site-level leadership:

As always, Matt Vaudrey brings the goods:

That’s what I heard at that faculty meeting.

So we have a plan. Good. Having a plan is great, but…

“Once you do that, this tank is going to get filthier and filthier, and the dentist will have no choice but to clean the tank himself. He’ll put us in individual baggies, then we roll out the window, down to the ground, across the street, and into the ocean. It’s foolproof!”

..once the theme is in place, how do we implement concrete strategies?

Here’s how: SCH Tech Day. My district has planned a Tech Day for a couple of weeks after school lets out, with teachers as presenters. I’ve been subtly trying to plant the seeds for an EdCampHMD for a couple of years. I know I had less than zero hand in it becoming reality, but: Now here it is.

Of course, you wanna have a camp , you need presenters.

Tech Liasons filling out the dance card.
Tech Liasons filling out the dance card.

Ooooh! Pick me pick me pick me pickme.

Sharing the #MTBoS love in the HMD.
Sharing the #MTBoS love in the HMD.

Seriously, if  after all this there’s not a a dozen teachers in my building next year crushing seamlessly integrated tech awesomeness with totally bitchin’ authentic student products to show for it, I’ll be sorely disappointed.

Maybe we won’t be IowaBIG (who is), but still. To paraphrase the great Shawn Cornally: We did it, so….

Yep, the price of poker just went up. We’ll see you, and raise…