Blogs in the Classroom Done Right

Earlier this year, I bought Will Richardson's book, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms." I've finally gotten around to reading it and as I read the section on blogs, it occurs to me that one vital aspect missing from these tools is the aspect of assessment. I haven't seen yet how these tools make it easier for me to grade. There are some problems that blogs present for grading and helping students improve their writing, that I would like to see fixed before I wholeheartedly adopt them as a pedagogical approach.

One issue that I think could be fixed with some innovative computer programming is the problem presented by blogs for proofreading student writing. When a student posts work to a blog to be reviewed by a teacher (or peers) it's easy enough to offer general comments and criticisms, but to specifically highlight and edit the writing (which I can do with a double spaced hard copy), is not possible as far as I know.

I would like to see a blog add-on or platform that allows commenters to overlay editing marks and/or revisions a la Microsoft Word's draft changes feature.

A feature like that, might help a number of blog writers on the internet. Myself included.

Maybe its just that part of me that needs to pull out the red pen and bleed all over their papers, but I don't see adopting blogs as a means of improving student writing until I can better proofread their writing. 

Until then, I will have to settle for proofreading drafts by hand. I'll use blogs more as a medium for publishing final drafts than as a means for me to go paperless with my grading and assessment. 

School Culture vs. Institutional Trends

Schools that want to create lasting improvements that affect school culture should consider institutionalizing systemic curriculum based collaboration rather than hope for organic collaboration to occur. Changing school culture simply means creating procedures/routines/habits that are desired by all participants (teachers, students, parents, administrators). I have often heard the phrase “improving school culture” in the context of faculty morale, professional development, student behavior/attendance, and even school events. This kind of school culture is vital to any thriving school but so too are academic rites of passage: the research paper, the science fair, the presentation, the final exam.

Want to increase collaboration among teachers? Don’t send them to another seminar, professional development, or faculty meeting. Give them a shared objective, hold them accountable, and guide them in creating the parameters. Give them time to work together, observe the progress, and show it off afterwards. Increased collaboration can easily be achieved by creating institutional curriculum requirements.

It is satisfying to meet other likeminded educators who are willing and able to collaborate and who will take time outside of the workday to make real collaboration possible. Who will brainstorm shared projects. Who will create shared timelines for introducing units. Who will help tutor a student for a skill you need them to have. And dare I say it? Who will help you grade.

But such pairings are rare, formed organically, sometimes short lived, and difficult, from an institutional perspective, difficult to create and sustain.

Schools, that want real collaboration to happen, need to create system wide curriculum components that require interdepartmental, inter grade-level, or school wide collaboration. While individuals may at times take it upon themselves to create such shared academic experiences, schools that make it a part of their business model will find that such collaboration outlives the employees participating (or even keeps them coming back for another year).

Thinking back to fifth grade, I might not remember everything I learned that year, but I do vividly remember writing a state report, doing an experiment for the science fair, writing a book report, and going to outdoor science camp. I wasn’t the first student to experience those academic rites of passage but, thanks to NCLB’s nationalization of standards based drill and kill test prep for high stakes testing, perhaps I may be one of the last.

Stop asking students to remember a fact long enough to choose the right bubble on a yearly multiple-choice exam that has no effect on their class grade. Stop asking schools to turn into test prep academies devoid of any purpose other than meeting a national benchmark for funding. Start asking schools to create meaningful, student-centered, inquiry based academic rites of passage. The skills they take away from those activities will be remembered long after the graduation ceremony and long after any answer they rote memorized for a test disappears from their short-term memory.

Famed behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner defined education as “what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” If we want to change education, we would do well to think about what knowledge we want to survive after we are done schooling our children: the ability to remember something or the ability to do something?

Speed Socratic Circles

I would characterize my teaching as Socratic in method and my classroom as student centered. Even when I lecture, I prefer audience interaction.

I like the concept of Socratic circles in theory, but in practice I have had mixed results so far. I won a book on them by Matt Copeland in a PD at a previous district a few years back. It didn't introduce me to the method¹, but it did convince me the method was pedagogically sound. I still use the feedback form Copeland provides in the book as a means to debrief students afterward.

When students come prepared and participate in the class discussion, the inner/outer circle style of Socratic circles functions quite well². However students, who come unprepared or who are shy, often do not speak up. Even students who are not shy and are prepared may need longer to think of a response to questions or need them rephrased before answering. Another out-spoken student may respond first causing their thoughts to go unheard.While I practice wait time when questioning my students, it is obviously a procedure I need to teach students to use in discussion.

I recently attempted a variation of the inner/outer circle style which was facilitated by a recent rearrangement of my classroom into groups³.

Method
This time around, I had students separated into 5-6 groups of 3-4 students. Each group has three roles: note taker, record keeper, and ambassador. The note taker makes a list of all the questions or topics that are discussed by the group. The record keeper lists each participants' name and keeps a record of how many times each person speaks using tally marks. The ambassador rotates to different groups after the signal to switch.

Approximately every 5-7 minutes, I yell switch and the ambassador from each group moves to a new group. This is repeated until they have been to all groups. There is a specified flow pattern for changing groups.

The activity has a very musical chairs quality to it. My students remarked that it was kind of like speed dating.

During the short period, each member of the group asked each other prepared questions (both comprehension and analysis) about an article. The article we used for this activity was one on the Pearl Harbor conspiracy debate. I also previously had them take notes on a PowerPoint lecture I gave on the same topic. After I called switch, the ambassador moved to the next group and the process began again.

Observations
As students talked, I walked around observing each group (rarely getting involved; only observing, occasionally tossing in a word of advice, clarification, or posing a question-to-ponder if the discussion died down). I told the students ahead of time that I would give them participation points every time I walked by and saw them speaking. By the end of the period every student in class (including my ELLs) had earned the daily maximum participation points. At the end we debriefed, discussing both what I saw and what the students learned from each other.

I was very impressed by the depth of knowledge displayed by my students. Some students even revealed that they had finally learned very basic foundational knowledge about World War II that they had previously not understood/known (Ex: That Germany and Japan were allies or that the U.S. and Britain were allies). These facts were apparently things they had failed to pick up or at least remember from both last year's coverage of WWII in World History and this year's lessons. I was a little stunned.

Thirty minutes of focused discussion with their peers had beaten a year and a half of my lesson planning.

Assessment
I collected the article that they annotated and the questions they prepared. I also collected the notes and tally mark records from each group. The question now is how to use this data to assess individual student performance.

Rather than crafting a rubric after the fact⁴, I am considering simply assigning performance levels (outstanding, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory) to arbitrary point totals (curved tally marks + my recorded participation observations) and grading each set of notes on the same levels but giving the grade to each group as a whole.

I am conflicted about whether or not this is fair, but failing an alternative falling into my lap I am likely going to grade it this way, for now. I will probably experiment some more with rubrics for future attempts, but this should do for now.

Afterthoughts
I think these Speed Socratic Circles worked well in terms of engagement and worked well as a means of student centered learning. Despite not having a perfect way to assess them, I do feel that this allows students to think critically outside of the spot light. Even previously shy students and students who never speak up in class were engaged and participated at levels I have not seen all year.

One anecdote stands out to me the most. When I stopped by to check in on one of my ELL students, I kept noticing the group speaking in Spanish. I prompted them to speak to her in English first and to only translate what she doesn't understand. I came by a few times and had to remind them as new ambassadors alternated into the group. Later, I watched quietly as this ELL student prompted another student, about to speak to her in Spanish, to "tell me in English first".

I want to try these Speed Socratic Circles again as a method of prewriting for an upcoming DBQ essay on Japanese Internment. If my students can really solidify their opinions on the question and documents before writing, I am hoping they will write better thesis statements and perhaps better identify what to cite as evidence.

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1: That, I learned at an AP by the Sea at University of San Diego my first year teaching AP World History.

2: I am still reflecting on how to better assess whether students are meeting their objectives (Namely: comprehension, analysis, and retention). I feel like a rubric is in order, but in depth analysis of student skills is difficult due to the quick pace of dialogue and the number of speakers. Having 30 rubrics on hand for each student is difficult. While a checklist style of rubric could work for this, I have difficulty making assessment decisions on the spot. So far, filming presentations and discussions and grading afterward has come to mind (and has been attempted), but I find myself putting the work aside in favor of written work to be graded.


3: For the first semester of school, my classroom was arranged into an inner/outer circle arrangement, shaped like a U, facing the whiteboard.

4:Which kind of misses the point. If you are trying to assess the degree to which students met objectives it's pretty essential to make the objective clear up front.

Rubric to Percentage Conversion Table

For some time, I have been puzzling over using rubrics to score skills assessments such as essays, projects, presentations, etc. Simply entering rubric scores into a grading program produces unwanted results that do not accurately reflect a letter grade conversion of rubric scores. I could go into the mathematical details, but if you are interested check this article or this one. I am not satisfied by the specific conversions offered by either of the previous sources but the descriptions of the rubric to percentage problem are adequate enough to justify the need for a conversion tool. Below is a chart I created that converts a 5pt rubric (0-4) into grade percents. Click on the image for better quality.
There are some inherent compromises in these scores, but I feel they adequately represent the various levels of proficiency I expect when grading. I have just begun implementing this tool in my grading and so far I am liking the results.

If you decide to use this please post feedback on how it works for you.

Teaching Note Taking Skills: A Solution?

I've been thinking about note taking a lot lately. While I was at Stanford last week, I had a good conversation with a community college economics professor who was struggling with getting his entry level college students to take effective notes. I proposed an idea I have been tooling around with and hope to post the results after the first week of school.

The basic idea is this:

• Create a lecture
  
• Record it
  
• Play it back to students using my digital projector
• Simultaneously use the overhead projector and some transparencies to model note taking including:

1. Shorthand
2. Cornell Format
3. Identifying Main Ideas
4. Picking out Key Words
5. Creating deeper than surface level questions
6. Summarizing

• Let students copy my initial notes
• Expect students to mimic this process by themselves in future attempts

If I can lay down the foundation for better note taking now, the results of their shared notes should (hopefully) be even better.