Make them Think

One of the great things about planning for this school year was going back through my various journals, notes and so on from the last couple of school years. It was fun to see notes to myself to try ideas that I had done last year, and had made work. I really got a sense of making actual progress in my teaching skills over the last couple of years.

Last year the big thing was trying the History Alive! style notebook and really focusing on having a transformative/higher-level thinking activity to go with every topic. It is a pain to grade, as I was expecting, but the insights into what the kids actually understand have been so useful that it's worth it. So this year the big change has been focusing on making them think, including making them think about how they learn. I know, crazy, expecting self-awareness and metacognition from 10th/11th graders!

(Pause for a moment to imagine a classroom where "that's so meta" jokes can actually be made.)

There's a lot of issues rolled up in "make them think". It starts small -- refusing to answer questions that amount to "tell me what to do because I'm too lazy to read directions/look at the board" and instead pointing at the directions. Getting out of the habit of going over reading questions & giving answers but still finding ways to discuss the information with the class. Making them offer opinions and back them up.

Then we get to doing things like giving regular learning log assignments that amount to asking them to reflect on how various class activities affect their learning, what they're doing, and what they could do better. I am loving those! It is so fascinating to see students' varied opinions of themselves as students, where they're happy, where they struggle, and what they think of all my crazy activities. I leave comments here and there -- encouraging, offering suggestions, pointing out what they do well, asking for clarification. It gives me a chance to give detailed feedback that's not tied to a grade*, and also to hear a little more from my shy students and introverts.**

Here's a great example -- today in US History they worked in partners to rewrite a section of the Declaration of Independence in their own words and we posted them on a wall and did a Gallery Walk. Afterwards, I asked them to reflect on what they learned from the activity, what grievances seemed the worst to them, and whether the colonists were justified in declaring independence. I only got to read a few of the entries so far but they were very interesting. It shows you pretty quickly who is taking things seriously and who isn't, too. Sometimes the kids who would seem to be keeping up because they're good at getting the right answers from someone get revealed by the lack of depth in their answers.

Another example is that in World History I had them complete a Study Skills checklist survey a couple of weeks ago and make a study goal. I told them to make sure the goal was realistic, something they could achieve for the next few quizzes. Today I handed back their third quiz and asked them about how they're doing towards the goal. One student asked "Do you want the real truth?" I said "Of course." "Well, it's just that I know some teachers have an attitude of what I don't know doesn't hurt me." "Not me." "So I can put that I studied during watching 300 and didn't really learn a lot?" "Yup." That conversation is important to me because I want my students to see that I'm not doing this so they can write what I want to hear to get brownie points.

Another learning log that I had them do was when they got their notebooks back after the first check at the end of Unit 1. Since I have very specific and somewhat unusual expectations, I knew from the beginning that some students would need help meeting them. Some also need to realize that I'm serious about them -- you can tell them all you like your expectations the first week of school but if they don't see results (grades, reinforcement) from them they'll forget all about them. So after I handed back their notebooks I asked them to look through, read all the comments along with the grades and answer a few questions about it.

You get the idea. It was rather insane when I needed to grade all their notebooks at the end of the unit. I'm working on figuring out how to stagger it a little bit. It also didn't all go smoothly -- I have one class with some serious attitude and students who despite it all couldn't understand why they got an F.***

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* In reading through the research for grad school last year I learned that one of the key things to making formative assessment work is detailed, useful feedback. However, research also shows that many students will ignore feedback if a grade is also given and just look at the grade. So giving feedback w/o grades becomes important.

** As hard as you try, some students talk more in class and some sit there quietly, doing what they should but not giving you any indication of what goes on in their heads.

*** Still trying to figure out how to deal with a certain attitude. These are the ones that complain every time we do anything that smacks of work, and everything is work to them. They take bad grades as a personal affront even when I can point to a clear rubric handed out Day 2 and where they fit on it. They think it's ok to shout complaints across the classroom and don't get why I ask them to wait and speak to me privately. So far my strategies involve being calm, polite and reasonable no matter what they say and making sure I've CYAed with clear expectations.

Math teachers have got it goin' on.

I'm quite jealous of math teachers.

I thought about teaching math, back in the day, when I knew I wanted to teach something but had no idea what.* I love math. I didn't do any serious acceleration in high school, but I took AP Calc my senior year and loved it. (Got a 5 if you care about that sort of thing.) I've always been a history nerd, but it was always nice to take a break from the seemingly endless reading and writing to solve some problems. There's just something so addictive and satisfying about solving a hard math problem, isn't there?

My AP Calc teacher, Miss Hawes, greeted us the first day of class by telling us "You will all get 5s." She was serious. She was also terrifying. I loved her. Sure, we did a ton of homework and it was hard work, but she really knew how to teach math. She had that dry sense of humor that only math teachers can pull off--you know, where they're making a joke while explaining a very complicated problem and five minutes later you go "That was a joke!"

I'm reminded of her, and of my jealousy for math teachers, by stumbling onto Dan Meyer's posts about assessment. One of the things I always admired about Miss Hawes was the way she handled tests. On every test, you had the opportunity to do test corrections to receive points back on the test. The way it worked was that she'd hand back the test and announce 5 or so students (it was a class of 16) who were tutors because they'd done well. The rest of us would get tutored by them to figure out how to fix what we'd got wrong. She'd then set aside some class time and the tutees would be interviewed about their test, why they got it wrong, and prove they'd figured it out by doing a new problem for her. If they did well enough, they and their tutor would get points added to their test grade. If not, they could go back to their tutor and try again.

This sort of approach seemed like sheer brilliance to me then (and was I ever so proud of how often I ended up on the tutors list) and I still carry it around in the back of my head as "how assessment should be done." Dan's approach is a bit different, but the same idea that the student should be able to get credit for mastering a skill they'd not got at the test is behind it. I really admire the way he's broken his curriculum down into its elemental pieces, because I know that took a lot of thought for him.

So why am I jealous of these math teachers?

I don't know how to do this in social studies. My curriculum is content-focused, not skill-focused. I want it to be skill-focused, but I have to work within the reality of the dread end-of-course test. I do think I'm going to spend some time with my thoughts on essential social studies skills so that I can break them down into elemental, assessable piece and do a better job of instructing & assessing them in the future. However, I'm not sure how to integrate this with the rest of my curriculum. How do I deal with a reality of high-stakes, knowledge-based testing? How do I remediate whether or not a student knows standard VUS8b "transformation of the American economy"?**

I constantly struggle with this, and I haven't found any good answers.

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* I'm not a math teacher because I cannot explain it to other people. I used to try to help my brother with his algebra homework. I'd look at the problem, solve it, and he'd ask. "What did you do?" "This." "Why?" "Cuz that's what I needed to do to solve it?" "How did you know?" "I just did." Not very helpful, huh? (Besides, I wanted to major in history anyway.)

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