Tag: education (page 10 of 13)

March 26, 2010 / 0 Comments

Collaborating for end of year assessments

This year we are collaborating at my school for our end of year assessments. Our objective is to create assessments which are somewhat open ended, while providing opportunities for the students to demonstrate that they understand, and can use, what they have learned this year. In my 9th grade class, it looks like we will be collaborating in Science, Math, and Design & Technology to produce an assessment. I’m pretty excited about it, it’s actually my first time doing a collaborative end of year assessment. I can’t tell you what it is yet, don’t want to let the cat out of the bag for my class. Every other school I’ve worked at the end of year assessment meant "Let’s give the students a final exam."

Although I’m still not convinced that these assessments are truly representative of everything the students have learned, I think they strike a much better balance between our need as educators to find out what the kids know, and the kids need to express themselves creatively.

Some sample assessments which could span multiple disciplines that could be used include:

Create an eco-friendly model for our new school and find the cost of this new building. Present your findings to your peers, critically analyzing the process you went through. (Math, Science, Design & Technology, English)
Determine if the water from the local lake is safe to drink. Present your findings to your peers. (Math, Science, English)

Please comment below if you have any other ideas as I am sure there are lots and lots of good ideas out there.

March 25, 2010 / 1 Comment

Observing other educators working

After school today we had our monthly Middle Years Program meeting. One of the things we worked at this meeting was vertical planning, which is when a bunch of people teaching the same subject at different levels meet to attempt to ensure continuity within that subject. They are themselves very useful meetings, and if you aren’t having them yet at your school, you should be. One of the things that I brought up in this meeting is how much I’d like to be able to observe everyone else teaching.

I remember when I first started teaching I used to go an observe other teachers all the time. I probably did 20 or 30 informal observations of my colleagues in my first 2 years teaching. I found these sessions extremely useful as they allowed me a chance to see what other educators did. Not everyone I observed was awesome, but to be honest, watching someone else make mistakes helps prevent you from making the same mistakes.

I never really got the same opportunity in the last two schools I worked at, so I decided to bring up the topic of peer observation and see how it went. My colleagues, who are awesome, were totally into it. So I borrowed a copy of the master teacher schedule, which for some reason I just found out about today, and am going to plan some sessions asap. I’m very excited.

Without being able to see what other educators DO, my own practice will stagnate. I may be able to prop up my practice by experimenting with the usefulness of new technologies, but I’d really like to improve my own practice, both through observing other educators, and by having my own practice critiqued.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

February 26, 2010 / 0 Comments

Why don’t all students react the same to feedback from their teachers?

There is lots of research which shows that human beings are complex. In fact, although we can be modeled as groups of people mathematically in many circumstances, individual humans are too complex for mathematical analysis to much use in exactly predicting our behaviour. However humans do follow patterns of behaviour, and we can predict what a possible range of behaviours are we expect to see. Obviously this is why our social structures work because this predictive ability is easy enough that one can do it without the aid of a computer.

However this behaviour does follow the mathematical rules of a chaotic system. Chaotic systems are systems which typically follow fairly predictable patterns, but for which small differences in input can lead to widely different outputs. If you want to learn more about this I recommend reading some of Keith Devlin’s work in this area, he explains it in an easy to follow way. Humans are chaotic systems because they take input from the outside world, process it, and modify their own behaviour, which leads to changes in their environment to which they again react, etc… This leads to what we call a feedback loop. Often these feedback loops stabilize, which leads to predictable behaviour, but occasionally they can destabilize and chaos erupts.

We have all seen this as educators. Johnny is a perfect angel every day, and then one day he comes into school and gets into a fight in his first period class. I think sometimes we blame ourselves when these things happen, and we wonder why they happened. Assuming you treat all students very similarly, and they come to school with pretty much the same kinds of things happening in their lives, you might wonder why some students are bright and cheerful despite their possible misfortunes, and others are a bad mood. I think if you look at it from the perspective that they are chaotic systems, you can assign a lot less of the blame onto yourself.

I think that this boils down to, not all students, even ones who seem very similar on the surface, are going to react to you in the same way. Even a minor variation in what is going in their lives can lead to very different attitudes from students, and you have to accept that.

There is some recent research though that shows that a lot of chaotic systems have large areas of stability. The implication of this fact to educators is that if we moderate our own behaviour and feedback to guide students into these areas of stability, we can encourage students to behave in a more predictable manner. I think it is well established that a good teacher respects their students, treats them fairly, cares for their students in such a way as to make them feel comfortable in the classroom. These types of behaviours from the teacher are reinforcing the stability that our students need so much in their sometimes chaotic lives.

January 30, 2010 / 0 Comments

Free online education for anyone

Imagine a school without walls and completely online. Students could log onto any web ready computer, and sign up to join classes. They could interact via a moderated back channel chat and vote questions to the teacher up or down during live sessions and participate in forum discussions during asynchronous sessions. Assignments would be handed in electronically, mostly through online individual student blogs. Assessment of understanding would be tricky in such a system, I’m not totally clear how student work at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy would be assessed. Perhaps peer assessment mixed with sample moderated by the teacher?

A number of these schools exist already all over the world but they all include one important barrier, registration. Students have to enroll in the schools, and funding for the school is based on enrollment. If anyone knows of a K to 12 school which is free for anyone to join and doesn’t require registration, please let me know. I would like to see a school where anyone at all, anywhere, can join the school without an application requirement. There might have to be some identity verification, if only to allow the school to comply with federal laws in most countries regarding sex offenders, but that would be it and such information would not be public knowledge.

The reason why I want such a school to be free of registration is because I suspect that there would be three distinct types of people interested in such a program. The first would be high school students looking for an alternative to typical public school. They might want to register in the program to receive official credit for their diploma. Another group of students would be supplementing their education in a face to face to school with essentially free support in an online school. The last group of people, who would probably want the most anonymity, would be the people coming back for a second chance to complete high school, the adult students.

The problems with creating such a school are not trivial.

1. There is significant cost associated with such a school. Each teacher involved needs to be paid for their time, and given that the teachers will both have to be experts in trouble shooting connectivity issues and their content area, they will likely cost more than the average teacher. There’s no reason to run the school if the teaching isn’t excellent and the easiest way to do this is to hire the right people and keep them with the right salary.

2. Finding the teachers themselves will be difficult. How many teachers do you know who would substitute time in the classroom (or free time outside of it), have the technical expertise to assist students who are struggling to connect, know their content area well, AND are good teachers. These are a lot of requirements that need to be met.

3. Assessing student understanding in a meaningful way would have to be well thought out. One of the most time-consuming tasks teachers have is assessing student understanding. Obviously, in an online format, it would be easy to handle any of the lower level skills. In fact you’d probably see these kids tested more often on the easy to test stuff, but figuring out ways to assess the more difficult to assess would require some work.

4. Actually being connected live in such a way that everyone feels like they have an equal opportunity to participate would be extremely difficult. I recently participated in an Elluminate session using webcams for viewing the presenters, and the audio and video were awful, I quit after a couple of minutes. Now, I’ve used Elluminate before successfully, so it was just the set up of these particular sessions.

5. Becoming part of the school and connecting has requires vastly different access points. We’d have students attending part-time from a public library to little 5 year old students who are just learning how to use a computer. We’d have to differentiate the access to the system so that it was easy enough that anyone could participate.

Fortunately, I believe these problems have solutions and that if a team of dedicated teachers and administrators worked together, we could solve these problems. Education is a right for everyone and it is our society’s responsibility to provide it. Unfortunately, as we know, not everyone has the access to the high quality education we all desire for our children, so I think we should step forward and provide it.

January 30, 2010 / 0 Comments

What could 3D do for language learning?

So I’ve had a thought about the direction of language learning. I’ve been experimenting with 3D interactive worlds (specifically OpenSim), which are programs which let people interact with each other real-time in 3D. Pretty cool stuff. This is already being used to help people learn languages as many of the 3D servers offer the ability to communicate with each other via voice and text.

There are a couple of problems I can see with doing this activity with students in a class. The most important problem is that it is extremely difficult (or expensive) to find a real human being that speaks the language you want to know and who has the time to interact with your students. It can be incredibly difficult to find an entire classroom’s worth of people willing to interact with your students one on one. Certainly the online nature of the 3d world makes this easier to manage, but still it almost certainly does not happen in most classrooms (although some languages teachers are adopting Skype successfully).

The second problem is the lack of control you have over what happens during the conversation. Unless your language learners are somewhat advanced, they will probably struggle to communicate effectively with a native speaker, especially early on in their learning. You also don’t know if they will cover the content you want to cover, or if their conversation even becomes completely off topic or even inappropriate!

Technology has come a long way recently. There are already chat programs which do reasonably well in conversation, especially if they are limited to a specific known topic area. 3d animation is amazing with highly realistic facial animation and human-like gestures, just check out the movie Avatar. Voice recognition is improving in leaps and bounds every month with some big players (like Google and Microsoft) putting a lot of money into development and again this technology works better when the bounds of the conversation are known.

Imagine we combined these three technologies together. Students could then be lead through a carefully arranged conversation including, most importantly, the context of the conversation. All of the subtle cues and body language we use to learn languages can be programmed into the simulations so that students get as close to a real life experience as possible. Programs of study could be designed for all levels of language learners, allowing for extremely differentiated and customizable instruction for every student in your class. Instead of having to carefully plan an online session, your students could interact any time from any computer with sufficient power to run the program. It would also be a fair bit of a fun for the students and hopefully end up engaging them at a deeper level than revision exercises from a textbook.

What’s amazing is that the technologies to implement this are very close to becoming a reality. Within 2 or 3 years, all of the component technologies to make this work will be mature enough to produce a software package which is stable enough to release into the classroom environment. Hopefully with a little bit of work on the administrator’s interface, a typical non-techy language teacher could set up their own simulations for their students.

The future language learning looks very bright, although maybe in 10 years we won’t need to learn other languages because the technology will be so advanced that all of our phones will include universal translators.

January 29, 2010 / 0 Comments

My first semester as a teacher – part 9

…continued from here…

Yes, I sold my soul to the administration of my school. In exchange, I got to keep my job.

Well, actually how it worked out was this. We had a special department meeting about a week before grades were due in which it was discussed that if our students did not pass our classes at a high enough rate, that it was clear we were inadequate teachers and maybe wouldn’t be asked to come back next year. We were even told that about 60% of our students should pass our courses overall, that was the "expected" number in our school.

Whoa! Wait a minute, I thought, that’s not going to happen! I have one class where I don’t even have 60% attendance for the year, how am I going to make these students pass? Am I going to be fired if they don’t pass?

I went back to my classes and made sure they were all aware where they stood in terms of homework. We had sessions during class time when the students were encouraged to "work on" (read copy from each other) their missing homework assignments from earlier in the year. All of my students got a full 20% participation score! Almost all of them had 20% for handing in all of their homework! I was getting there. But wait! In NYC students need 65% to pass, not 50%. Fortunately we did have a few tests from the year, and I did some quick math. Let’s see 65 – 40 = 25 points. Okay my students need 25 points to pass. I shared the math with the students. That meant that they needed to make up 25 points from the 60 points the tests were worth, which meant that anyone who had 42% or more overall on their tests could pass the semester. Oh, and anyone who achieved at least a 60% was bumped up to the magic 65%, the rest were moved to either 50% or 55% depending on whether I felt they were trying or not making any effort at all.

Whew! That worked out to about 70% of the students in my two strong classes and about 30% of the students in my weakest class. I felt a bit guilty but decided that the attendance rate was poor enough in that class that I would be forgiven for the poor grades. Besides, I’d carefully kept my phone call log from the semester with the several dozen phone calls I’d attempted to make to encourage my students to come to class. That should cover me.

What sickens me about this experience now is that I was encouraged by the administration to be much more concerned about the numbers of students passing and my job security than the quality of work I was doing. As long as my students pass at that magic 60% or greater mark every year, I felt like I was okay, I could keep working in the school.

Actually doing report cards in New York city was very easy. Incredibly easy, I’ve never had it so easy since. Every teacher gets bubble sheets from the school, with one row for each student in each of their classes, and carefully filled in the bubbles for the percentage grade, and then choose between 2 and 3 appropriate comments for the students, which were also selected by filling in bubbles. Lots and lots of bubbles sheets, that’s what I remember from grading in NYC.

The end of the semester soon came. I handed in my bubble sheets and looked forward to a fresh start. I had survived a semester teaching in NYC. I had developed some friendships which have lasted since. The students had come to give me some respect and I had learned a tremendous amount about to survive in Brooklyn. My life would never be the same. Since New York I’ve had the confidence to face anything, and this experience will always stay with me. I’ve lived and taught in 3 other countries and although I miss friends and family from those countries, only the city of New York do I truly miss itself.

January 28, 2010 / 0 Comments

Maybe we should be aiming for computer programming instead of calculus in Math?

I read an article one time which questioned why we choose calculus to be the top of the math pyramid in school. Basically, most of the mathematics students learn once they master the basics aims toward preparing the students to take calculus at the end of K-12 school. The article I read suggested that statistics instead of calculus should be at the top because it is much more practical to real life than calculus is.

We deliberately choose calculus to be at the top because we want our society to produce more engineers and scientists. This helped produce a generation of engineers and scientists.

However, although engineers and scientists are still needed, the US Department of Labor predicts that neither engineers nor scientists will be in the fastest growing jobs in the future. They have predicted the 30 fasted growing jobs in the United States and there is something interesting about the list. 5 of the jobs involve the use of computers. Jobs number 25, 24, 23, 4, and 1 all include the significant use of computers in a highly technical fashion. In fact all 5 of these jobs require computer programming skills to some degree.

So I propose that we make computer programming skills should be at the top of the list. This way we will be preparing our students for careers in the future rather than the careers of the past.

Now we will still end up producing engineers and scientists because there is a huge overlap between the mathematics required to master calculus and the skills required to master computer programming. We will end up producing a lot people who are totally capable of programming a computer. Students who do not end up completing the stream will still end up having a very good understanding of how a computer works, which is obviously going to be an advantage in the future anyway.

I suspect that the current stream of math would end up diverging just after algebra. It would end up involving a lot more number theory and logical reasoning and a lot less graphing and physics based mathematics (except for the stream of students interested in game programming). I don’t know that students would find this much more interesting, but at least it would pretty easy for them to use the math they were learning and use it in direct applications involving their favorite technological devices.

Maybe kids might enjoy math more?

January 27, 2010 / 0 Comments

My thoughts on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers – The Story of Success

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. It was very cool, I knew a lot of the information provided in it but some of the things had a fresh perspective and were collected in one place.

He starts off with an observation, which I’ve known for a long, long time (from even when I was in school) that kids whose birthdays fall immediately after a cut-off deadline in our society are way more successful than the kids who are near the other end of the spectrum in that area. Suppose a child is born in January, and the age limit for a sport is 10 years old with a cut-off of January 1st. The kid born in January will be nearly 10% older than a child born in December if the season starts in December. At that age, there is a huge advantage to being slightly older, some of the 10 year old kids will even be starting puberty and could be much larger than their peers.

Of course if you look at school themselves, the same problem exists. Each school has a date they choose, usually somewhat arbitrarily, which determines whether or not they accept students into the school. In this case a student who is deemed too young has to wait a year, and the students who are just before the cut-off end up starting school almost a year younger than their peers. Can you imagine how much of a difference this makes? This results in a 20% age difference between the students on one side of the date to students on the other side.

The solution Malcolm suggests, which makes sense to me, is to create multiple dates during the year for these cut-offs and run simultaneous systems along side each other. Instead of everyone starting school in September for example, students would start in one of 3 or 4 streams during the year. You wouldn’t need very much more money to support this system since the number of students wouldn’t change, but it might make a much more equitable system.

There are a lot of areas which Malcolm decides are problems. He points out that cultural differences and differences in how people of different socioeconomic status react to setbacks and communication are even larger barriers to success. His argument is pretty complex, but I can see his point. One example of this is in measurement of reading scores. If you measure reading scores during the course of a year, kids tend to make about the same amount of progress during the year. It’s the summer vacations during which the poor kids tend to fall behind the richer kids. Apparently their school experiences are pretty similar, but what happens outside of school can be quite different. Over time, these differences tend to amplify.

The solution here is to make the summer vacations shorter. I know it’s not a popular move for teachers, we really like our 2 month vacations. We can get course work done, finish building our house, all sorts of projects. Take this away and you will definitely decrease the quality of life for teachers. That being said, the improvement on the quality of life and equitability of our system would be dramatically improved.

For the rest of his argument, I strongly suggest reading his book.

January 27, 2010 / 0 Comments

My first semester as a teacher – part 8

…continued from here…

As the Christmas break loomed in front of me, I began to finally feel more confident in my teaching. I had more classes which seem to run smoother, not many more, but a few. A lot of these things though, in reflection, I really don’t think had to do with me.

First, in November our school’s cap on suspending students was lifted as we’d had our annual Title one attendance taken. Students who were extremely disruptive, even dangerous in the school were now out of school on long holidays. This meant that my classes were smaller, and that the most disruptive students were generally gone. It’s not fair for those students, but it made it a lot easier to manage the other 90%.

The second thing that happened is that my 10th grade students decided to declare a truce and finally admit defeat. They were neither going to make me quit, nor make me cry in class. I found out from one of them that they had successfully made 3 teachers quit the year before I started and were going for a 4th. This revelation actually made me feel better, I realized that some of their misbehaviour was deliberate and intended to destroy my self-confidence. Why did I feel better? Mostly just because it wasn’t entirely due to my bad teaching.

And my teaching was bad. I mean, you probably remember your first year, it was horrible. You did everything wrong! We all did. We lacked the experience necessary to do our jobs right. In some schools, the students are forgiving and will even make an effort to help you out. In others, such as the one I was in, the wolf pack instinct kicks in and the students go for your hamstring.

The third thing that happened during the semester, which always makes me sad when I think about it, is that kids started dropping out of school. My M$AA class (see an earlier post for the reference) started with 17 students by the beginning of the year. There was another similar class with 17 students as well. The second semester they combined these two classes, and by the end of the year I had 6 students who were still attending school. 6 students out of 34! The only advantage to this was the students who were still attending actually had SOME interest in learning and were more willing to participate. One of these students passed the state exam with a reasonably strong score for our school (he ended up in the honors stream the next year) and 3 others barely passed.

Finally, I think my teaching improved a bit. I started to experiment with a larger variety of activities. I used the time I had with my 10th grade students in the computer lab more wisely. My classroom management was better, etc… I finally had enough experience with my students that I was angry less often when they were disruptive.

Of all of the things which I do miss from my time in NYC, I am certainly glad I’m not angry all the time anymore. I used to spend at least an hour each school day angry at someone or just the system in general. I shouted at students in frustration, and even at coworkers. I was often very unpleasant to be around. Since I’ve matured and the teaching I do is in a much more student friendly environment, I am almost never angry not even when students are deliberately trying to antagonize me.

Life was starting to become bearable. That was until I sold my soul to save my job.

…final part…

January 26, 2010 / 0 Comments

Reflection on using Activexpressions for the first time

I used clickers in the classroom for the first time today. For those of you who don’t know, a clicker is also known as a classroom response device, and is used to collect immediate student feedback. Students have a small device, it looks like a remote and on your computer you have a hub of some sort for collecting responses wirelessly from the students, and some software on the computer to process this data as well as display the questions. You ask a question, it gets displayed on an LCD projector, the students answer the question, and you can post the results very quickly. The whole process takes under a minute, and can take as little as 15 seconds once the students understand how to use the clickers.

The clickers I’m using come from a company called Promethean, they also produce an interactive white board (IWB). Their clickers are designed to work with their interactive white board software and when you use the installation CD for the hub it installs their IWB software. I have to say, I wasn’t very impressed with the license for their IWB software. It only allows a single use and can only be legally installed on one computer. This means that if you want to share the clickers between teachers, you need to purchase multiple copies of the software. However, we only have 1 class set of clickers so we will never actually be running one copy of the software at a time.

The installation failed halfway through, it seems it requires a very specific copy of the Macromedia Flash installer. I tried 4 different versions and none of them worked. I cancelled the installation of Flash and the rest of the installation went through smoothly. It was very strange, since of course I have Flash installed on my computer.

Once you actually start using the devices, the first thing that needs to happen is that each device needs to be registered to the hub. This process took some time, and has some definite flaws in it. First, you really need to name each device as you register it. We tried to number all of the devices as we were registering them and we discovered that the internal number changed once we registered it, UNLESS we named the devices with numbers. Pretty painful, I can’t imagine a non-techy trying to set up these devices.

Creating questions for the students to do was relatively easy, but a bit too slow to do on the fly. Tomorrow I’m going to test the "question-less" questions, which are ideal for asking verbal questions and getting student feedback and take a lot less set-up. If you want to have the students answer complicated written questions, my recommendation is to set up the questions in advance and use the multiple-choice or short-answer versions.

Once we were set up, the questioning part worked fairly well in two classes and really didn’t work well in a third class. My 10th grade class and my IB Year 2 class took to the clickers fairly easily and participated with them well. My 9th grade students struggled using the clickers. Some of them were great, but some of the students pretty refused to try them. I’m hopeful that in the long run the clickers will help this class participate more, but it was not an auspicious beginning.

We tried a wide variety of different types of questions. All of the questions are pretty easy to set up but each question requires it’s own screen, so right away I realized that formal assessment through the clickers would be pretty difficult. Students definitely found answering the multiple choice or true/false questions easier to answer, the text response questions should be limited to at best very short answers. Trying to enter mathematical expressions on the clickers is tremendously painful and should be avoided at all costs. Given my recent exploration of the iPhone device, a proper keyboard on the clickers would be ideal, using old style phone texting through a number paid is pretty painful now.

Once the class is over, you can export the results. If you want to use them again and analyze them, you need to export the results. I tried to save my flipchart, hoping the results from the questions would be saved as well, and it turns out they are removed. Unfortunately this means I lost all of my results from today, but the good news is that I won’t make that mistake again. I probably should have read the manual first, but there wasn’t a paper one included in the set, just one on a CD. I couldn’t imagine a teacher popping in a CD to read the manual, so I worked out how to do everything without it.

The response from the students was extremely positive from my 10th grade class, and moderately positive in the other two classes. The students generally liked using the clickers. One student asked if "we could use these every class." The 12th grade students had a more reasoned response, questioning if the value of the clickers was worth it, and one wondered if they could spend the money elsewhere more wisely. One huge complaint from all of the students was the time it took to enter responses via text. I think I’ll avoid the text responses, unless I use extremely short responses (like numeric responses).

So far it’s gone fairly well, we’ll see if the process improves over time. I’ll also need to introduce the clickers to more staff members, so far just myself and one other staff member are testing the clickers.