Mr. Hamada’s Universe

I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead of me.

I just got back from San Francisco via Taipei, where I spent three days orientation-ing with Big Tree Learning. I got a chance to meet up with Lindsea and I’m really excited about what this company has to offer (more about that in future editions).

In four days I’m flying to Canberra via Bangkok and Sydney to meet up with my family and in-laws.

A few weeks after that, I’m flying from Canberra to San Francisco (again) via Sydney and Auckland, to finish my work with Big Tree, and then back again.

Once I get back to Canberra, it’s another week or so before heading back to Hanoi via Sydney and Bangkok.

Thanks to Google Earth, I can get an idea of how far I’ll travel this summer. The magic number?

67,000 kilometers.

Since Dan has linked to a bunch of readers who have implemented skills based assessment derived from his model, I thought I better post my own experiences with this.

I used this in my grade 8 math class (integrated concepts, heterogeneous grouping) as a way to revise the algebra that they had already been exposed to, with an eye towards needs-based differentiation. I divvied the algebra units from grade 7 and 8 into 25 skills, 5 of which I would consider ‘extension’. (Resources at the end.)

How it worked:

• I handed out a sheet that listed the 25 skills and asked the students to self-evaluate their abilities, based on their performance on homework and tests if possible, using a 3 band rubric: sad face - not sure of what to do or how to do it; blah face - can do it sometimes but with minor mistakes; happy face - anytime, anyplace, bring it.
• Once a week (usually on a Monday, based on our homework rotation) students would be given a 25 question quiz, with each question was aligned to the corresponding skill. The students had 20 minutes to complete as many questions they wanted. Each question usually had two or more problems: one simpler, one more complex.
• I would then give the students 40 minutes to review any topic that they wanted using any method available to them: practice worksheets in small groups, one-to-one or small group help with me, using web resources that I had already searched out, or viewing screencast movies created by me or my teaching partner for that particular skill.
• I would grade the quizzes on a 3 point scale, corresponding to the different faces and return the work within a day or two.
• The goal was to receive two happy faces (show skill mastery twice) in order to receive a ‘gold cup’ for that skill. Students kept track of their own results on their skills sheets but I only asked them to record progress.
• I kept track of all results in my gradebook.

After a couple of weeks, some of the students pointed out the obvious: why not review at the beginning of the lesson and then complete the assessment at the end? Much better…

This went on for 10 weeks, excluding the brief hiatus in the middle so that we could complete some in-class projects. All in all, I’m quite happy with the outcome of this little experiment and will definitely include it next year.

The Good:

• Reinforced discrete algebra skills on a weekly basis, something we couldn’t always do in our integrated setting.
• Students seemed to enjoy it and liked the simple 3-band rubric.
• Many students showed significant growth and improvement over the 10 weeks.
• Teachers in grade 9 will have a way of checking the entry level of students by looking over their skill sheet.

The Bad:

• Time in class needs to be more structured - at times it felt like a free-for-all where little was being accomplished.
• Students kept working on skills that they had already shown mastery in. This is a fundamental change in assessment and learning for them and that needs to be stressed. They didn’t really like the idea of skipping questions at the beginning (what does that say about how they’ve been trained???).
• It got a bit repetitive for the students. More variation in the materials would be nice. These can be added throughout the process in the future.

The Unknown:

• Will this actually have an effect in the grade 9 classroom? I’ll find out since I’m one of the grade 9 teachers…
• The idea was to have students who showed mastery in all skills act as student leaders as well as create their own screencast movies for skills of their choice. Only a couple of students actually got that far, however. As tablets become more pervasive in the school, I hope it will be easier to get the students creating content that can help their peers.

Resources:

algebra-skills-list

algebra-skills-test-1 - Apologies: some of the characters have magically changed, but you get the idea I hope.

A sample math screencast: Graphing in Standard Form

A sample student screencast: FOIL in Korean

Here is the 1 minute video I made for the upcoming Google Teacher Academy in Mountain View on June 25. Fingers crossed and comments encouraged…

The Innovative Classroom - GTA 2008

Comments welcome!

[Edit: My first embed and I screw it up. Thanks MsMichetti for the heads up!]

Powered by ScribeFire.

There has been a fantastic free-for-all going on over at Beyond School. I won’t get into the specifics - check it out for yourself;the real excitement is in the 75+ comments - but it has focused on, among other things, assessing students in an English Language Arts classroom. In this age, how much weight should be given to “traditional” writing assignments and what is the place for

At the same time, the Faculty Room has been giving assessment a closer look. Dan Meyer expounds on his system, which is well-suited for mathematics (I should know: I’ve adapted his strategy to implement an on-going revision of algebraic concepts in my Grade 8 class). Simon Cheatle gives his perspective from an international school in the Phillipines.

The American Paradigm

The vast majority of commentators present a very American slant on assessment. After spending the last 6 years overseas in truly international schools (my first two years were in a school that could have been situated in the middle of Iowa or California or North Carolina) I wonder why this American paradigm persists? Only in the arguments put forward by Grant Wiggins do I see any reference to criterion-based assessment. Being a mathematics teacher, I wonder how English teachers or History teachers go about grading an essay. How do you tell a B+ from an A-? Do you apply some sort of percentage? What do you do with the student who has a clear grasp of the language but a poor working knowledge of spelling? What do you do with the student who knows all of the grammar and structure protocols, but can’t present a reasoned argument? (For those who didn’t check it out, this is the initial focus of Clay Burell’s post.)

Enter Criteria

The answer, in my mind, is criterion-based grading. Why not separate the necessary skills of your course and grade each one appropriately? As an IB Middle Years Programme (MYP) school, we do exactly that. For example, in mathematics we assess four separate criteria: Knowledge and Understanding, Investigation of Patterns, Communication, and Reflection in Mathematics. If a student obviously knows the material but cannot present her information clearly, I can grade her higher in Knowledge and Understanding and lower in Communication. I don’t need to find a middle ground and she can know exactly what her strengths and weaknesses are.

A Step Further

At the end of the term, I look into my gradebook and find the highest sustained level of achievement for each criteria. I do not find the mean. If a student starts the year poorly but shows improvement, I reward that. If a student does poorly on one assessment task, it does not come back to hurt him.

Not Perfect

I will be the first person to admit that this system is not perfect. There is no room for formative assessments to influence the final grade, except as practice for the summative assessments. In my subject, life would be simpler to assign grades based on percentages. The assessment criteria, in my experience, lend themselves to major assessment tasks which are difficult to write, time consuming for students, and bloody hard to mark. Oh, and it’s a difficult system to get your head around, especially coming from The American Paradigm. Ask any other MYP teacher and they will probably have their own list of grievances.

The debate surrounding assessment is one that is necessary. There is no “right” answer as each teacher, school, and district is in a different situation. However, that doesn’t mean we should not strive to find that perfect way of assessing student performance. On the contrary, only by looking critically at our own practices and our motivations behind those practices can we, as professionals, ever hope to evolve.

 MYP Criteria

 sample-myp-gradebook.xls

grade-10-olympics-task.pdf

olympics-task-assessment-criteria-2008.pdf

It’s not my first epiphany EVER, but it is my first blog-related one…

Every day I can’t wait to participate within my PLN. Sure, I twitter about my day and I check Google Reader before classes or during lunch. But I can’t wait for school to end so I can get home and really participate. Is this how my students feel too?

I’ll admit it: I missed the boat on this whole blogging thing. 

But now that I’m here, I got some questions that need some answers. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s all I could write while my Grade 8s were taking their Algebra Skills Assessment:

1. How do I use those footnotes like dan?
2. Are there any support groups for my addiction to Google Analytics and ClustrMaps?  (Note: I’m not blogging for the numbers, I just like the cool visuals.)
3. What are the benefits to self-hosting as opposed to using Edublogs? How much would it cost me?
4. Other than ‘borrowing’ Jeff Utecht’s list, is there a decent primer on how to use all these cool widgets, tools, plug-ins, etc.? What are all the cool kids doing?
5. How many widgets, plug-ins, etc. does it take to cross over into the “excessive” and “distracting” categories? Is there a general school of thought on blog design and layout akin to using PowerPoint?
6. How much time do you put into writing/editing/uploading content?
7. Is Twitter the blogging equivalent of methadone?
8. How do I explain my newest interest to my wife?
9. Where do you find the time?

NOTE: a version of this post first appeared on an internal blog at our school as was inspired by a post by Jeff Utecht.  This post is also cross-posted at Pockets of Change, a new blog that I co-author with my colleague Adrienne Michetti.

With all due respect to Gil Scot-Heron… 

True revolutions are not created or planned. They are organic: they arise when the needs of the masses (students, teachers, and even administrators) outstrip what the dominant establishment (the monolithic entity of ‘Education’) is able to supply.

We are on the precipice of a revolution.  There is a growing number of teachers who realize there is a better way.  There is a change in the demographics of both teachers and administrators as innovators and early adopters of these new technologies take up positions of responsibility within schools. There are groups of students who are becoming more aware of the vast educational possibilities that collaborative technologies allow.

There are two ways for this revolution to be truly initiated: either a watershed event a la the Boston Tea Party, or through a methodical plan of actively searching out the agents of change, slowly proselytizing by example and converting whoever we can whenever we can.  In either case, the goal is to create the critical mass necessary to evoke true reform and revolution in the sphere of education.

Once 50% +1 of a school or even a department are using collaborative technologies in a meaningful and productive way, can the remaining population afford not to? Once the teachers in these trailblazing departments or schools move on to their next destination, as is always the case in international schools, will they willingly go back to the way things were?  These teachers then become the messengers of change as they enter their new schools, bringing with them their expertise and the power of their personal network.

This revolution will be a grass-roots, bottom-up shift from teachers who understand the power of Web 2.0. There should not, can not, and will not be shift in educational philosophy decreed by the powers. That’s not the way revolution works.

Photo Credit: localsurfer

A lot of people are up in arms about a recent US News list stating that teaching is an overrated career.

While, based on the title of the article alone, it seems like an unnecessary jab at those of us who sometimes feel under-appreciated, I don’t think that is the point that the author is trying to make.

 The Reality: In many public schools, classes are grouped at random, which means one class can include special ed students, gifted kids, and foreign-born children who speak little English. Trying to meet all their needs can be exhausting, if not impossible. Government rules often put pressure on instructors to teach all students high-level material, even if it’s over their heads. And summers aren’t sacrosanct: Increasingly, teachers are required to work, or “volunteer,” for part of the summer.

Isnt’ he restating (in very simplistic terms and not very eloquently) what I hear in my school and read in the blogosphere almost every day?  Teaching is hard; differentiating instruction is hard; government policies are ineffective; and we don’t get summers off!  What so wrong with that?

In some respects, teaching is overrated in its appeal.  Too many people think that it would be a great job to have, that it would be easy, that anybody could do it.  I was appalled when I overheard some out-of-work engineer nattering on about how he could ‘always become a teacher’ since he lost his job.

I wonder where that engineer is now?  Did he ever qualify to become a teacher?  I’m sure he had the academic skill, but did he have the people skills?  Could he handle the long days and long nights?  The seemingly endless marking of tests, quizzes, and investigations?  Could he deal with the feeling that nothing is ever really complete, except for those 6 magical weeks?

Sometimes I feel like I can’t, and I love this job to its core…