Year: 2011 (page 13 of 28)

Image credit: uconnlibrariesmagic

If you are running a professional development session for teachers, and you recognize that teachers are learners, how are you assessing their learning? Are you embedding formative assessment within your workshop? Are you providing an option for summative assessment of the learning, either at the end of the workshop, or in a follow-up session?

While I don’t think you should be giving grades to teachers for workshops, you do need to provide some way for your participants to receive feedback on what they’ve learned. Feedback in some form while learning is critical. Otherwise, how do you know your participants are learning anything? 

Your instructor brings you a board. Before you can use the board and play with it yourself, she tells you how to properly line it up on your table. Next, you practice this over and over again with everyone in your class practicing the same number of times regardless of when they master the skill. When you line it up in creative or fun ways, you get scolded, and sometimes even have your board taken away from you. You look around the room and notice that everyone’s boards all look the same.

Finally, after you are considered to have mastered the skill of lining a board up, your instructor takes your board away and gives you a nail. She shows you for 10 minutes all of the various ways you can line up a nail, but never shows you how this relates to the board, or any other possible tools. You want a chance to practice lining up the nail properly, but your instructor says that time is up, and assigns it for homework, and takes away the nail. "You’ll have to find your own nail to do this for homework," she says. You wonder if that is fair for the students who don’t have nails at home.

The next day, your instructor checks to see that all of you have practiced lining up the nail. She then gives you a chance to practice with the nail for a few minutes, before she again takes away the nail and gives you a hammer. You spend some time learning about the history of the hammer, and finally you learn some of the possible uses of the hammer. You ask if you can play with the hammer, but your teacher says, "That’s much too dangerous for you now, you’ll learn more about hammers when you are older, and then you can use them."

You never get a chance to see how the board, the nail, and the hammer relate to each other before the unit finishes. You don’t really understand how to use a board, and you’ve forgotten how a nail works by the time the test is given and so you fail the final assessment. You want a chance to practice some more with these skills your teacher says are "vitally important" but she moves onto another unit.

"Okay class, in our next unit we are going to learn about sanding wood. Everyone take out their boards and practice lining them up again…"

At no point in your learning of carpentry do you ever find out why people might want to use carpentry, how beautiful some works of carpentry look, or how to put it all together and make your own buildings.

You might think that this would be a ridiculous way to teach, but this is exactly how we teach mathematics today. Each unit is separated from one another and the connections between the units, and often the lessons, are virtually never taught. Students almost never have the opportunity to play with mathematics, and never get a chance to use some mathematics once they have mastered it. If we even connect mathematics to the real world, we do it in arbitrary and often nonsensical ways. We teach mathematics as a bunch of discrete tools and not as a holistic study of patterns and our world. In fact, we don’t even really have a consensus as to what mathematics actually is!

It’s no wonder kids usually hate mathematics. They say, "Math makes no sense," and they are right.

This is a fabulous video of Kurt Vonnegutt talking about the shapes of stories. Notice the different types of graphs he produces? This is a fairly mathematical procedure, and I love both the idea of embedding everyday variables on the axis, and of representing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the protagonist in the graph. I remember my 11th grade English teacher sharing with us the common graphs of Shakespeare’s trajedy and comedies in an effort to help us understand the two distinct genres.

Wouldn’t this be an interesting activity to do with your students?

About 6 and a half years ago, I started a blog. The purpose of the blog was to provide updates for my family back home while my (new) wife and I were living abroad in London, England. At the time, Facebook was still a closed site for college students, and Myspace was too messy to share with my parents. I needed an electronic space to share pictures, thoughts, and stories from our lives.

As I was jumping into learning programming, and educational technology, I decided to switch from the free hosting offered by Blogspot to my own server. I first installed Movable Type, then WordPress, and finally settled on Drupal for my blog, learning each of the technologies as I transfered between them. My first choice of domains, "UnitOrganizer.com" was intended to be a place for teachers to share their ideas, in the form of unit plans. That never actually came together, and a couple of years later I switched to my own name for my domain.

During the past few years I’ve switched from blogging about my personal life, to blogging about my programming projects, to blogging as a form of eportfolio, to blogging about my interests in education almost exclusively. I’ve had more opportunities come to me than I can count through my blog including having the opportunity to write a textbook, be published in 3 different magazines, have a short series of articles in a newspaper, and to present at conferences all over the world.

I read through some of my earliest writing, and I can see a big difference between both the strength of my writing and the quality of the ideas behind the writing. My earliest writing on education is fairly naive sounding to me today. I wonder what I will think of my writing in 10 years.

To those of you considering a blog, I say go ahead and do it. The opportunity for reflection and personal growth have been tremendous.

I got paid the highest compliment one can get from a fellow teacher after my presentation at ISTE Unplugged.

"I know I’ll be changing some of my teaching decisions." Tom Grant

After reading many posts on standards based grading, it seems clear to me that I too need to change my assessment practices. I need to ensure that I have mastery from my students, rather than a superficial level of understanding. I also need to do more to engage my students with more problems which are relevant to their lives.

I need to rethink my practices. Hopefully, that will always be true. Keeping my teaching practices completely static in a changing world seems like a pretty foolish thing to do.