Eduholic

“Teaching for the Test” came out in the Washington Post Magazine a little over a week ago, and if I ever cursed my word-count slashing editor, I’m sorry for that evil wish and now I wish her well.

There’s something about holding it in your hands. The canoe, and the article about it that took me a year to live and write. Five minutes of fame is cool, but what’s cooler still is that I told the truth. And the response has been remarkable.

Right now there are 85 emails in my inbox from readers who were moved to reply. Many are a page long and heartfelt. They are overwhelmingly supportive. Each person deserves a reply, yet instead I’ve spent my weekend catching up on a stack of papers I had to grade for interims. In lieu of individual thank you’s, I celebrate the range of comments here.

From a student: Hi Mr. Rosenfeld. I just finished reading your article, and...wow. It was amazing and really touching to me as a student. I've gone this entire year seeing you as one person, my teacher, but it's nice to see that the teachers struggle too; to make the cut, and get the grade. Your article was a valuable insight to the teaching realm that has helped me understand teaching from a total different point of view, and I just wanted to thank you for that.

From a colleague: On the "burn day" Craig, the mud-carrier you mentioned in the article, was particularly eloquent as he took off time to be guide and educator to the hordes of Mt. Vernon tourists gathered around the canoe. For about 3 hours, Craig was the only TJ student on-site and he was the perfect host: knowledgeable, friendly, and patient with youngsters and oldsters alike. I still enjoy the irony of that situation, by the way, since Craig is a British citizen!... Perhaps a way to beef up your portfolio in the critical piece that you need to resubmit is to conduct a series of interviews of our former students … What about their canoe year informed their learning in the junior year about early American history? What about last year's process of hands-on learning in a usually cerebral curriculum enriched their understanding? How did they change as learners? What did they discover about themselves in the process?

From another almost: I wanted to simply write you and thank you for your words of wisdom in your article. I too embarked on the same crazy year long journey of self-evaluation to only be told I was not good enough by thirty points. I was devastated, up to that point I had never failed at anything. Furthermore, I had worked on my National Boards with a colleague and she passed on her first try. How could that be, I taped her entries, I edited her work? But the worse feeling was that I felt as if someone was telling me I wasn't good enough at the only thing I thought I was good at, teaching. I seriously considered leaving the profession.

I teach in Miami-Dade County in an at risk school where 80% of my students are on free lunch and are bussed in from one of the most notoriously crime ridden neighborhoods. Despite their limitations I've managed to make the best of it and up to that point I thought I was doing a great job. I particularly agreed with what you said, why don't they give us some insight on why we didn't pass? Isn't that was good teachers do with their students? I still don't know what I did wrong, yet I have decided to live by what I tell my students, "failure is not predetermined, it's an option", so I find myself right back where I was last year, video recording, writing and analyzing. Good luck to you on your retake and once again, thank you for your words of wisdom, you will never know how much they have changed this teacher's life.

From an already: I write an education column for the Examiner, and was the first AYA Eng. Lang. Arts teacher to be certified in Fairfax County (way back in '99) so I have been on your road. (I also taught at TJ for 4 years when it first started.) My lowest score was in the area where I was most confident: the large group videotape of a Senior Seminar, a course I co-created which, eleven years later, is still going strong at Oakton. They just don't have many nuances in their rubric for all the "aha" moments you've created with your kids. My advice is to save all the parent notes and emails, and all the student notes and emails as well. Assuming they will all fit into the allotted pages for evidence, they consider that hard evidence. It will not be hard to raise your score higher than a 1 now that you know what they view as evidence.

As you know, the county has axed the money for certified teachers, but it's still worthwhile. There was no money connected in 1998 when I started the process, but I figured it would come sometime. Mostly I did it for the dignity connected to the title.

From a never: I do not have my National Board Certification, and I do not plan on going through the rigors of this process. Graduate school was enough for me! However, I do respect your commitment to this endeavor. (The financial gains alone are worth the sacrifice.) There were just a few things that you mentioned in your article which I felt necessitated a response. Perhaps you could even share my thoughts with some of your bloggers. Although I do support the notion of reflecting on one's practice and its impact on students, I don't agree with the statement in your article, "what the best teachers do that the rest don't." I would not assume that those with certification are always "the best teachers" nor would I assume that those without certification are are not doing what "the best teachers" are doing. Like much of education, there are those that know how to "play the game" whatever that may be.

Now, I am not saying that the process is a farce, but I am not saying that it is invaluable either. I have known teachers who passed Board Certification who don't have good relationships with students - ie. they are far from motivational. Yet, they knew how to follow the directions. Second, I do not think that comparing yourself to others will truly establish if you are the best. I feel that I have much to learn from my colleagues, but it's not a competition; it's an art. Your work may look very different from mine, but they both make a contribution and stir thought and emotion. The audience may have a preference, but that doesn't change how I view my craft. I do not measure my worth by some outside agency, and I don't think you need to do this either. Clearly, your students are thoughtfully engaged and that alone is worthy of praise.

From a maybe someday: I am a year shy of obtaining a BA in Secondary Special Education (English Track) from Towson University and I hope that I'll have what it takes to be certified by the National Board one day. After reading your article, I have a better understanding of what is expected of me in my career. I would also like to thank you for incorporating a part of Native American culture into your curriculum. There are so many universal teachings found when taking things back to the basics in nature. I've been playing/making the Native American flute for several years now and I learn something else about myself everyday. I'm glad to see that someone else has made such a strong connection by tying teaching into Native America. It inspires me to do the same with my
flutes one day.

From a lawyer: As a lawyer, I have taken the bar exam. The bar exam is a minimum competency exam, much like the state certification requirements for teachers entering their profession. In contrast, the National Board Certification is marketed as a top credential. As such, it seems reasonable to receive some feedback. If a student wrote a book report that missed the mark by 10 points, wouldn't any decent teacher provide feedback on how the student could improve on the next assignment? Only a poor teacher would tell the student to "figure out what needs to be improved." NBC appears to be a gimmick.

Once law students pass the bar and medical students pass their boards, they enter the marketplace. The marketplace rewards hard work, strong skills, innovation, creativity, specialization, and other attributes. Unfortunately, when teachers meet the minimum certification requirements, they enter a government bureaucracy that provides little if any
reward for similar efforts. Instead, every teacher, regardless of quality, is paid the same for years of experience. The NBC is designed to remedy this failure but it falls far short.

From an expert: I don't know if you are familiar with our work - Understanding by Design - but it can improve your abilities on the very issue in question. The essence of our work is to help people design backward from student achievement as opposed to thinking only about wonderful teachings and activities. A number of now-certified folks have told us that our work was key in helping them think through assessment of goals, and adjustment in instruction to achieve goals.

Here's my own take on your story (mindful of the fact that you only shared with us the facts in the article): you ended up confusing the meaning they made of the wonderful experience with actual evidence of student achievement. Nowhere did you say, if memory serves me, what the long-term intellectual goal of the project was, and how you were going to assess whether it was met or not.

In other words, like so many teachers do, you may have confused the project with the learning. Building the boat and taking pride in it was not the goal; that was the means. What, then, was the academic goal? What, then, should you have been assessing (and adjusting) en route to achieve that goal? And what should you have assessed at the end to determine how well you met the goal? Hence, what should your own reflections and thoughts about future adjustments been?

From me: Thank you!

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 6:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

After two years of growing my own here on Teacher, I am finally using blogs in my own classroom. And I’m wondering what took me so long.

This is a real live example of the pace at which technology gets integrated in a meaningful way into one’s practice. These days we throw a lot of money into Smart Boards and other electronic widgets for our schools. Some take, some don’t (what ever happened to laser discs?). The good stuff is only good insofar as we teachers are able to use it effectively. Not as shiny tech bells and whistles, but as tools that help us do what we do—reach kids—better than we could the old way.

Patrick Welsh, who has taught long enough at TC Williams High School in Alexandria to tell the truth on a regular basis in the Outlook section of The Washington Post, recently wrote about how lots of fancy technology has come along with their newly renovated building. His is a cautionary tale about what happens when teachers get tech gifts they never asked for and may or may not be ready to use. (“Technolust: A School That’s too High on Gizmos, Sunday, Feb 10, 2008)

On the other hand, useful technology with appropriate support in the hands of a willing educator can eventually pay dividends. For me, I’m starting to see these payoffs with blogs my students are writing about The Canterbury Tales, The Inferno, Candide, and Gulliver’s Travels.

Instead of taking lit-book-sized bites of these canonical works, I decided we should read them all at the same time. In this unit I call "BTB's" (Big Travel Books), kids had the choice of which classic they wanted to tackle in a reading group with their peers. I structure lessons along the way to facilitate their understanding. For example, each group is doing research now on the context and time period in which their book was written.

But, for the most part, I’ve done my best to stay out of the way. I want these kids to encounter the Great Books-- all books-- head on. Struggling to make meaning, drawing on other things they know… in short, doing all the stuff that makes reading so demanding and rewarding. What I don’t want them to do is take my opinions about the book and spit them back at me. And here’s where blogs strike gold.

Blogs give people license to think. Out loud, and at some length. And what makes them even more powerful is that blogs think back, via readers’ comments. (This dialogue becomes especially fruitful when I can compel students to respond thoughtfully by giving big points for writing comments. Read below the fold for the how-to info I gave the kids).

Before I share some tasty morsels, I should explain where I learned to cook. I was first exposed to educational blogs through professional presentations given by other teachers in the Northern Virginia Writing Project. Teachers teaching teachers… imagine that. Eric Hoefler told us about all things 2.0 a couple summers ago. When I first heard him talk I suddenly felt old.

Shortly thereafter Teacher Magazine took a pass on my offer to write an article about my upcoming attempt at National Board Certification, but sent me to the online guys who immediately suggested a blog. Having heard the word used a few times, I felt eminently qualified to write one. “Certifiable?” was born.

Last year, I wrote about my education blog as one of my documented accomplishments in Entry 4, for which I was tragically dinged. Ironically, this year I’ve moved a few steps further down the path and started using blogs with my kids. So there really is student achievement in them thar hills. It just took a while to find it.

Do blogs really help kids learn? Check out this excerpt from the comment board, where students discuss Voltaire’s vision of human nature in Candide (emoticons theirs).

S writes:
Mmm.
I find it interesting that by reading this book, people assume that Voltaire is displaying the nature of mankind - greedy for gold, reaching for power, so on and so forth. Okay, maybe a generalization isn't the right way to go - but it seems like it would be easy to squeeze that idea from Candide. It's interesting though, because Voltaire actually believe that all men…were born with kindness and pretty much - good characteristics. So by showing us all of these emotions - what exactly is Voltaire trying to tell us? =]
K writes:
In respose to S, I'd have to say that Voltaire is displaying truth.

In terms of J's insight about Biglugs with no money, I have to disagree. I don't Voltaire was actually showing that uncorrupted nature is good with the Biglugs. First of all, he was himself a part of civilized society and disliked Rousseau, who propagated the theory that uncorrupted nature produces the best results. Thus, I think he was trying to satirize this aspect as well, by showing how the Biglug women loved monkeys and how the men were such savages, who would have killed him for being a Jesuit (which is no better than civilized society). But I liked the fresh perspective on money, although my interpretation was completely different.

M. writes:
I sort of disagree with P. I believe that the people in Eldorado are both rich and happy because they don't care about the money, and they don't really need it. Everyone is rich, so everyone is pretty much equal and ordinary. It's the very fact that no one in Eldorado cares about money and are so generous that makes the country the "perfect" place.

I thought it was interesting that even though Candide was suffering due to his newly acquired fortune and the change in the way he was thinking and feeling was apparent to us, he still thought that giving money to Paquette and Brother Giroflée would make them happier. We haven't read far enough to see what happens to them yet, but I'll bet that Martin was right; the money will only increase their unhappiness the way it did for Candide.

Pretty cool. Maybe reading isn’t just a lonely struggle after all, but also about the meaning readers make when they share the sort of immediate but informal communication to which blogs lend themselves.

I encourage all old and new dogs out there to learn blog tricks, when you’re ready. And don’t worry, if you find creative ways to screw up, there’s always a kid around to help. For example, this morning I sent a student this email: “Hi D- I don't see a blog post #2 by you. Did I miss it, or did you?”

To which D. patiently replied, “I made my second blog post fairly early, it might be below some other people's first blog post. By the way, there's an option on right of the blog to filter posts by author, which lets you find people's posts.”

Blogging "BTB's" (Big Travel Books)

Rationale
A blog is an online diary (short for “weblog”). It allows you to set down your thoughts in the flow of things, as opposed to more formal types of written response, which might be composed after an experience is completed. As we explore these challenging canonical works, I hope the blog format allows you to capture and share responses during your reading in a way that will lead to a richer experience than you might have reading alone.

Content: posts and comments
For purposes of this assignment, a post should be 200-400 words, and linked to a specific reference in the text. Your thoughts may be more expansive, but it must have this anchor for full credit. Feel free to make connections within and beyond the text (even to appropriate external links, if you want).

A comment can be any length, but yours will be evaluated based on engagement with the blog and the book (something like “nice job” wouldn’t receive a lot of credit). Comments are to bloggers as water is to plants. Nourish your peers and the garden of discussion will flourish.

How to
Each group member should post once per 1/3 of the book, and comment on at least 3 posts during that section. We will create a schedule for posting in class.

To access the blog, click on “BTB Blogs” in the course menu on blackboard. Then just click on your book> new entry (or “comments” on an existing entry). You’re on your way. Note that you can read any book’s blog, but only write on your own (I think).

Netiquette
The same rules apply as in other conversations we share. Be respectful and appropriate, though feel free to challenge someone’s ideas. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want your parents to read.

Voice in blogs is welcome, and can be conversational, but let’s not descend to the level of informality that you might share with friends while texting (“lurl”). Also, please don’t jettison basic rules of punctuation and grammar. Nuff said…blog on.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Remember the test of the bow near the end of The Odyssey? It was when Penelope, the wandering hero’s long-suffering wife, finally agreed to let one of the suitors marry her if he could string her hubby’s bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads lined up in a row.

None of them was man enough to even bend the weapon, but luckily Odysseus himself was there, disguised as a beggar. When it was his turn he not only strung the thing, he proceeded to fire off a quiver of arrows at the bad guys (the first went through a particularly nasty suitor’s Adam’s apple). He and his once wimpy son wreaked bloody vengeance on the freeloaders that had plagued their house so energetically for the past twenty years or so.

How often do we as teachers assign end-of-unit assessments that are a little like the test of the bow? We’ve completed the arduous journey through a book and now, by Jove, we’re going to see what the fatted students have learned. We concoct a test tough enough to separate the men from the boys, and pick off points one by one as we grade it in the teacher’s lounge with a blood red pen.

We might show a little more mercy than Odysseus (after he was done with the men, he forced maid servants to clean up all the gore and then hanged the unfaithful ones from the rafters like a brace of pigeons). But isn’t the traditional barf-what-you-know kind of test fundamentally violent toward the student, at some level? I contend that from a constructivist perspective, it is.

My ninth graders finished The Odyssey recently, and I decided that the best thing to do to see what they knew was to play. So I assigned Play Odyssey, where I asked them to form groups and design a game incorporating specific elements that would show their knowledge of the story, including important themes, vocabulary and literary terms. You know, the sort of stuff you might put on a test.

This week in class, we finally played the games. It was a blast, and I think making and playing these games accomplished the same review and synthesis of material that a traditional test might have done, only better. It also had some benefits a test wouldn’t have.

First, it was fun. When Hareesh did a charade of “plundering” while playing a Cranium-inspired game that had kids act, draw, and answer questions, he and his group were 100% engaged. And I don’t mean the sort of white-knuckle silence that normally occurs during a high pressure test. We all stopped to laugh when Brandon and Nimesh had to dance for two minutes because they didn’t have a spare hecatomb with which to appease an angry Poseidon (the Greek word for the sacrifice of a hundred bulls was one of our vocab words).

Also, the activity was multimodal, allowing kids to play to their strengths a la Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences. Gaby, whose interpersonal skills sometimes get her shushed by the teacher, was completely on task while working the dvd remote to play video clips that were the clues in her chatty group’s high-tech game made on a Mac with digital editing software.

What’s more, this was individualized: each group of kids was able to design games with their own unique stamp. Steven, a computer whiz who carries around a miniature laptop at all times, created an 80s-style text-only role-playing game with his very analytically minded friend, Stephen. They planned in advance using a complicated flow chart covered with geometric shapes and branching paths.

In most games, the goal was to win, but the competition here was not the kind that pits kids against each other for coveted but scarce high marks. Instead, the games encouraged problem-solving, cooperation, and communication. Kids not only poured hours into making their games, but as they played they gave feedback to their peers to smooth out rough spots.

For example, Siddharth helped Kishore figure out how to incorporate a vocabulary word left out of his group’s head-to-head card game. Kishore’s group will now create a “deus ex machina” card that, when drawn in the heat of battle, causes the two players to switch hit points as if some god above had waved her magic wand.

A working feedback loop is another benefit of this assessment. In real life, when we want the best product—for example, a memorable commercial during the super bowl or a product design that will turn heads—the process is recursive and collaborative. A creative team offers up its work, gets a response, then heads back to the drawing board to improve the product. Here, kids have a week to tweak and resubmit for a final play session and grade.

Will’s group created an ambitious game where mini boats moved along a dotted line on a map of the Mediterranean using a formula involving a ruler and rolling a die. They also constructed a cool little bow and arrow out of balsa wood and rubber bands; at the end of the game, players were supposed to shoot through a ring and then take out some cardboard suitors. Because the game play was too complex, no one got to the challenge of the bow. For next week, Will’s group needs to trim the rules.

Ultimately, Play Odyssey reviewed and reinforced material just as well as or better than a traditional test. And guess what? Not a single student took an arrow through the throat.

Play Odyssey

Directions: Each group will create its own version of a game based on The Odyssey. Games will be played by students and evaluated based on criteria below.

REQUIRED ELEMENTS

Each game must include the following:
40 plot points
30 vocab words
20 characters
10 passages with cites
3 important themes

Each game must incorporate these concepts or literary terms:
in medias res
invocation
epithet
hubris
epic simile
deus ex machina

EVAL

Required elements
Are they all included?
Are they correct?
Are they well integrated into the game?

Playability and design
Does it work?
Is it fun?
Does it look cool or show exceptional craftsmanship?

Knowledge of the work
Are references to text accurate and specific?
Does selection and use of elements highlight important aspects and themes?
Does the game help players understand the story or see it in a new light?

SCHEDULE
Unit intro Mon 1-14
Work days in class Tu 1-22, Thurs 1-31, Mon 1-4
Final due and game play Thurs 2-7

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I’m back from my trip to the netherworld (article has gone to bed) and ready to pick up where I left off, which was with a promise to discuss the media consumption habits of ninth graders who are reading Fahrenheit 451. I told you I wanted to look at the book not just as a parable about censorship but also, as Bradbury himself suggests, as a cautionary tale against couch potatoism.

So, I asked the students to record their media consumption for one week, and we collated the data in class. The results were interesting, if not scientifically valid. I’ll tell you what we found out, and also kick around some ideas about collecting and using data in the classroom.

First, the very raw data. Each kid had a table on which she or he was to record information in columns: the date and amount of time spent, the form of media (like internet or ipod), the content (ESPN Sportszone, Red Hot Chili Peppers), and the “purpose or activity” (fantasy football research, working out). Some kids were meticulous about this and others had about 3 rows scrawled out on the bus.

In class, I asked them to go down the list, and for every activity, rate it from 1 to 3 based on its degree of interactivity. A 1 was for something you did with another person or that was very interactive, like playing a head-to-head video game or chatting online. A 2 was for something that you did in the presence of others but was essentially solitary, like listening to an ipod in the backseat of the minivan on the way to soccer practice. A 3 was the rating for lonely stuff that you did alone. Like reading a book under a tree far away from the madding crowd.

Next, I asked groups of 5-7 kids to put their data together in a chart that showed the amount, form, and degree of interaction. I didn’t specify exactly how to make the charts, as I figured these math-science whizzes would be able to figure that out far better than I. There was a wide variation in presentation, but most groups settled on a pie graph to show the forms, and a bar graph to show the degree of interaction.

One problem was that I did not specify in advance of the data collection what the “forms” should be. If I did this again, I would give them categories here, making a distinction between print (books, magazines, newspapers), computer-based (games, social networking, web-surfing), and non-computer (ipod, TV, console video games). As it was, the way that each group chose to conglomerate the individual data was not consistent.

Spitballing it, online activities were the most popular accounting for an estimated 40-45% of media use, then music at maybe 30%, and the reading of books under 5%. (And this was during a week when I’d assigned them 120 pages of reading).

As far as the average degree of interaction, about a quarter of the activities were rated a 1 (very interactive), a third got a 2 (“alone together”), and the rest were labeled 3 (no interaction with others). For those as math-challenged as I am, that means that 42% of the time a kid consumed media he was also shutting out the world. Earphones on, nobody home.

So, how much did they actually turn on and tune out? In the first period, there was an average consumption per kid per week of just under 52 hours. Second period had a much lower average, for some reason, at 21 hours per kid per week. And third period came in at around 14 hours. Did I explain it differently as the day wore on? The average over three classes was 32 hours of media consumption per kid per week. That’s 4.5 hours shoehorned into every already jam-packed day of a bunch of over-programmed superachievers.

Okay, so let’s assume a standard deviation of… wait a second, who am I trying to kid. What I do know is that, based on my own informal survey of a typical Saturday as reported in the post before last, these kids are probably wildly underreporting their media use.

Scientific or not, the exercise was engaging. It was sort of a minds-on way for science-oriented kids to grapple with the ideas in the book. I helped them along this path with some good old writing to learn. Before assigning the media journal but after they’ve read the first third of the book, I asked them to write in class about Bradbury’s vision of the future with attention to the portrayal of the role of media. After compiling the data, we did another writing in class: Was Bradbury right or wrong?

In other words, did the data we collected support or refute his dystopic vision of a dumbed down nation sedated by wall screens while a ubiquitous war rages around them? (Like that could ever happen.) The before and after writing showed a range of opinions. Michelle’s was typical: “I believe that Bradbury was somewhat right. He exaggerated to make the point that media would become a large part of our life. He said that media would be extremely censored but now media is not censored. Rap music, different shows with racy topics… He made it seem that media use was boring and required no thought but activities we do using media many times require thought and effort, like talking to friends on line. In the book, whenever Mildred talked to her friends it was about TV shows and things like that. When we talk to friends it is mainly about music and TV shows. It barely ever goes to the topic of books… Books still require more imagination than TV shows because you have to imagine the scenes in the book but scenes are given to you, you don’t have to put effort into [TV].”

Rocket science? Maybe not. But to me, Michelle and the rest of the kids are grappling in a genuine way with the ideas presented in the book, holding them up against their world and their own experience to see if they still ring true. As long as Bradbury’s book-- or any book-- can still kindle that kind of curiosity, we can hold the mechanical hounds at bay.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)