EDUC115N Review #4

I am eager to share some thoughts that have come in this class about ability grouping, but I am going to save that for my next blog post. This one will be short and it will be about assessment.

In the How to Learn Math class that I taking one of the ideas discussed is the value of formative assessment. Now, teachers at my school are relatively progressive about assessment, so they are already quite aware of these ideas, but there are a couple of notions that deserve to be heard again and again.

but it's a valuable story

1.  Feedback is more valuable to a student's learning than a grade. "Students who only got feedback scored significantly higher than ones given a grade or a grade and feedback." The best thing you can do for your students is to ditch the grade and give them diagnostic feedback.
2. Students need the opportunity to practice self and peer assessment. What would this look like in the math classroom? Students given access to the learning goal of a given lesson and assess where they are in their understanding. Then students are given the opportunity to work with each other, problem solve together, discuss solutions and peer assess each others ability according to the lessons learning goal. 
3. After low achieving students spend time discussing and assessing themselves and others they will start behaving like high achieving students. 

This is what assessment in the math classroom needs to look like. It is tradition and the need to classify and group students that insist on having big unit exams with grades given to students. These are not necessary practices, and are in fact harmful because they create a fixed math mindset in students.

I know that this is controversial, but wait until the next blog post...

EDUC115N Reflection #3

Lots of great ideas in session four, but I think the best way to share what I am learning is to share what I am learning. Check out the link below to see the difference between how math is taught and how math ought to be taught.

When I let them own the Problem

Here are my ideas about the problem:
The initial wonder, creativity, and questioning would be so much more interesting to students than a problem in a textbook. I also appreciate how students would have to measure the lines and angles that they drew with ruler and protractor. All of the questions in a text book have nice rounded distances and angles for students to work with that they never get to apply their measurement and drafting skills to an actual problem. Bringing real life measurements into the math problem will develop skills that the students need. Students need to be open to different methods of solving a problem. There is not only one way to do it, but in order to reinforce the lesson, and in order to make sure students have achieved the learning goals, having students work on each others drawings is brilliant. As always, making students explain to each other puts even more learning on the students. I can hear the math teachers I work with objecting that the teacher who wrote this blog took a 20 minute lesson and turned it into a lesson that would take two classes, but the results are worth the time it would take. Instead of only 40% of the class understanding and only 10% of the class enjoying the lesson the teacher should have 100% of the class understanding, 40% of the class having a deep understanding and almost all of the class also enjoying the creativity, skill development, and real world application of math.

Which type of math question will create future engineers?

EDUC115N Reflection #2

Now that I can access google apps again, here is what I am taking away and will use from my Stanford online math course.

The math classroom matters. The environment that is created for the students when they enter and experience the math classroom is crucial. When I talk about the environment I really mean the mental environment. How one physically organizes and decorates the classroom can impact the mental environment, but it really comes down to how the students feel when they sit down and begin to learn math.

Students need to feel safe to make mistakes.The importance of speed needs to be eliminated. A growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset, needs to be taught and encouraged. These three ideas will almost certainly run counter to a student's pre-existing ideas about the math classroom, so they will have to be explicitly taught and modelled. Mistakes will have to be celebrated, the teacher will need to prove to students that all are capable of learning math and growing as a person, and assessment practices will need to change. 

To stick with this assessment idea a moment longer. What does it mean to be successful in the math classroom. Traditionally it means getting through the curriculum and doing well on math tests. Is that really creating students that will have successful careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math? Of course not. Our assessment practices need to encourage a growth mindset by providing positive individual feedback. We need to stop moving through the curriculum before all students have experienced success with the content. 

Just to reiterate, the ideas above are coming from Stanford math professors. More to come...

How to Learn Math: EDUCN115 from Stanford University

I will use this space over the summer to share and reflect on my experience taking a free online course from Stanford University titled: How to Learn Math.

The fact that there I can take, for free, a course from an Ivy league school is exciting and potentially powerful. We will see.

The first thing about this class that I am excited about is that there will be a course for students offered in the Fall. I hope I can register our strategies students, if this turns out to be a good course for them.

Positive experience with the course #1: Click pause, change a diaper, back to math class.

Key take aways from the introductory session:

1. Make sure your students know that you have high standards, and that you believe in their ability to achieve them.
2. Math stereotypes can be debilitating and need to be actively combated. 
3. Students should use their imagination in the math classroom. Indeed, it could be the only subject that can operated unencumbered by reality. Why imagining a perfect circle should be an artistic endeavour. 

The Cell Phone Debate has Been Ignited

After having just read a post from Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irrelevant Blog on The Unholy Trinity of Classroom Technology Uses I wanted to get out a couple of thoughts on the upcoming cell phone debate that is heading towards Westlawn.

Now this is a public forum, so I am not going to get into the specific reasons for this renewed debate, but I think I can safely identify some general misuses of cellphone/ipod technology that is common to this and other schools.

Then I will present some arguments for and against a BAN ON CELLPHONES!!???

I am really torn on this issue. I am a fierce advocate for the utilization of ed. tech. tools in the classroom and school, but I am seeing so many problems in the classrooms because of cellphone use, and I am not seeing many positive uses of the student owned devices. 

1. Cellphones as distraction - receiving texts and receiving updates and notifications from various sights are distracting students. I know that personally when I get pinged with a new notification or email I want to check right away. This is happening in the classrooms and it is making teachers justifiably angry. Listening to music at inappropriate times is also a manifestation of this cellphones as distraction problem.
2. Cellphones as agents of evil - I am so freakin tired of the word bullying, but cellphones are used to be mean to other people. There are all kinds of ways that these adolescents are mean to each other through their phones during the school day. Girls texting each other the mean, profane and threatening things they would never say in person, anonymous sites like ask.fm that allow people to send and receive some of the most hate-filled and vile anonymous messages that I have ever seen. Problems with cameras and sharing inappropriate pictures (take this for what you will, it is a problem in all schools and it needs to be addressed). 
3. Cellphones as underutilized (non-utilized) potential. One of the most provocative and damning arguments here is that they aren't being used anyway, so why have them in the classroom. If the cellphone is only ever used by the teacher as device for listening to music in social and a calculator in math then do students really need their cellphone in class?

The three items above captures the main problems with cellphones in schools and can be used to justify the ban on cellphones at Westlawn. Did I miss any of the big reasons to ban cellphones from our students? Let me know in comments.

Onto the other side of the debate. 

IDK who would argue which side here. Donkey Laugh or Objectivist (both  insults)

Two of the above points can be handled in one argument, and I am not trying to be contrite, but this one argument alone is enough to practically end the debate because of the logical finality of it:

Students need to be taught how to handle and navigate the distractions of their always on, always connected digital environment. Students need to be taught the positive uses of cellphone technology in order to counter the evil that they are currently being taught by society and their peers. Junior high is the time to teach and assess the learning of these skills, values and attitudes.

There, I might as well leave the debate now, that's all that really needs to be said, but of course it isn't. Given that you agree with the above argument you would have to agree that cellphones do in fact belong in the school. They even need to be brought out on purpose, so that they can be discussed and children can be taught how to use them properly. This work is too important, and doing nothing is too destructive, that it can't be left to individual classroom teachers. 

Here is what I propose needs to be done as an alternative to banning cellphones:

1. A curriculum of lessons and assessments teaching students the nature of cellphones and digital technology as agents of good and evil. One or two lessons a month delivered to homeroom classes, so that all students are learning the same lesson together. This would take some thought on how exactly to develop this, but as an example we could run grade 7 - texting, it's impacts and consequences, grade 8 - anonymous messaging, it's impacts and consequences, grade 9 - sending nude pictures, it's impacts and consequences. Some lessons can be delivered to all grades - grade 7, 8 + 9 reporting evil online behaviour: is it tattling? With a well thought out body of lessons we can teach and measure and value the right kind of behaviour, and when society looks at us, or we look at the mistakes our students still make we can at least say that we did teach the lessons and provided that opportunity for students.
2. A whole staff built school policy on the use of cellphones in class. Our current policy, that it is a classroom decision, is flawed. There is a correct time to listen to music, and it is not while you are reading!!!!! Students should know what the consequences will be for breaking policy in all classrooms. One policy that I support is that students are required to show their communication to their teachers when asked. This will be contentious, and considered by some to be an invasion of privacy, but it is necessary if we are the agents that society has deemed responsible for teaching these lessons. Once the policy is agree on, we communicate to students and we communicate to parents, and if they do not agree than the cellphone is, in fact, banned.
3. Teachers need better PD on how to use cellphones for productive work. Remind 101, polleverywhere, how to send pictures to a class blog, and blogging with your phone. Teachers need to be taught that these tools exist, and they need to be taught how to use them with their students.

This blog post helped me think seriously and concisely about the topic. What started as a conflict, now seems very clear to me. One last thought remains only partly expressed. Students will have these devices, it's inevitable. In some families they will be taught how to use them for good and not evil, but in low-income areas like ours, this will not always happen. Our students deserve to learn how to navigate these waters. So often I catch myself saying, "these poors kids, how will they not drown in this sea of change?" Yes, I am often melodramatic at work. They do not come into grade 7 ready equipped with how to survive the digital age, but they should sure as hell leave grade 9 with a few tools to help them on their way.

Descent into the Maelstrom

I am going to borrow heavily from the ideas of Marshall McLuhan here, and I invite you all to stop reading. Do you remember what he said about Edgar Alle Poe's story, Descent into the Maelstrom?

To paraphrase grossly, McLuhan looked at Poe's poem as a metaphor for surviving the chaos of a world that is rapidly changing because of technological change. Here are some excerpts, as you read them (if there is anyone left) think of the storm that this young man and his ship are about to enter as a metaphor for our current situation - rapid technological shift altering the fundamental nature of the world our students are growing up into.

As the boat approaches the Maelstrom:

"I now made one or two attempts to speak to my brother - but, in some manner which I could not understand, the din had so increased that I could not make him hear a single word, although I screamed at the top of my voice in his ear."

 On the inability of our strong and solidly built classroom and schools to weather this new storm:

"When a boat is well built, properly trimmed, and not deep laden, the waves in a strong gale, when she is going large, seem always to slip from beneath her - which appears very strange to a landsman - and this is what is called riding, in sea phrase. Well, so far we had ridden the swells very cleverly ; but presently a gigantic sea happened to take us right under the counter, and bore us with it as it rose - up - up - as if into the sky. I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high."

Can you interpret this passage?
"It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of the gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was despair that strung my nerves."

As educators, we are already in the middle of the storm. We can ignore the noise and clamour of the outside world and focus our attention on helping student survive the storm:
"There was another circumstance which tended to restore my self-possession ; and this was the cessation of the wind, which could not reach us in our present situation - for, as you saw yourself, the belt of surf is considerably lower than the general bed of the ocean, and this latter now towered above us, a high, black, mountainous ridge. If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection. But we were now, in a great measure, rid of these annoyances"

The Desire to ban cellphones:
"As I felt the sickening sweep of the descent, I had instinctively tightened my hold upon the barrel, and closed my eyes. For some seconds I dared not open them."

Here is the secret for survival, observation and reflection: We have to help students to observe and reflect. 

"Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious - for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. 'This fir tree,' I found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,' - and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all - this fact - the fact of my invariable miscalculation - set me upon a train of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily once more.

"It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more exciting hope. This hope arose partly from memory, and partly from present observation."

After observation and reflection:
"I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother's attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design - but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach him;"

This storm will not last forever:
"The barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which I leaped overboard, before a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-ström had been"




Another "last thought" on my interpretation of McLuhan. He is often understood as a supporter and advocate of technological change. I disagree with this interpretation. McLuhan was terrified of what electricity and television were doing to humanity. If he were to see the power of the devices that our students carry around today he would think us mad and likely doomed. What McLuhan advocated was awareness and planning. Look at the changes you have wrought! Imagine the future changes that are coming! You must prepare yourself and your society in order to survive with values and sanity intact.

We need to heed his prescient advice and prepare ourselves and our students to survive this and the future of  technological change.

Please comment below.

The Nucleus of our School

Picture it: Our School is a Living Breathing Cell

To help this metaphor along I am lucky because Westlawn is actually shaped a little like a cell

Can you label this cell?

I want to ask you what the Nucleus of our school is?

Most would be tempted to say the office, and from a staff point of view, they would probably be correct. The office directs activity of the rest of the school and is responsible for making important decisions for the cell.

From the point of view of the individual classroom, and of most of the students, the nucleus would probably be the teacher in the classroom.

What I would like to propose, and this gets to the point of this blog post, is that the nucleus of the school should be that octagon shape near the northern third of the map shot. That little octagon in the roof is the top of our library.

A Library cannot be the nucleus of a school, but a literacy centre sure as heck can.

I know that there are budget restraints, but I wanted to paint my dream of what every modern school should have as a literacy centre, and I will use Westlawn's current library as the base model. This also gives me a chance to try out LucidChart in our google apps set of tools.

Westlawn's Current Library

Here you can see a few distinct rooms with some flowing work space and a nice area for group presentations. This is a great design for turn of the century and late 1990's learning with technology. There is computer lab, the netbooks are stored away for teacher use and students can use the library as they would any typical library. I say our current library is a fantastic use of space, but it is not the nucleus of our school.

So, here is what I propose, in a dream world and with a budget that would allow us to knock down a few walls.

Westlawn's Future Literacy Centre

Some of the text is hard to read, so I will take you on a quick tour starting at the north end. We still have our server room and a teacher's resources depository where the class sets on books will be stored, but just to the East of this is the student and teacher resources checkout terminal. From here teachers can borrow class sets of ipads and netbooks, and students can sign out individual ipads and netbooks. They also use this terminal to sign out books. Moving South East there is a POD of Desktop P.C.s where groups of 6 or 12 or 18 students can access the internet, create cloud based objects and do various types of student directed learning. In the middle of the room our books play a prominent role in creating an environment where reading and literacy are respected. Also in the middle of the room are our laptop PODS where students can read or work on their laptops.

The large group presentation Centre is supposed to have a screen there, but there must have been some problem with the dowload from lucidchart. We could still have groups of 60 - 120 students in this space for guest presentations. The smart board, on the far west end of the room, would be the centre of a small group presentation centre where a teacher could deliver instructions to an entire class.

All in all there are 6 PODS of Desktops, 4 PODS of Laptops and a storage space for our poratble ipad and netbook carts (easily and affordably upgrade-able to chromebooks).

If this vision were to come to life the library literacy centre, would become more than the geographic centre of the school, it would become the controlling idea of the school. It would be the nucleus of life at Westlawn, where learning (21st century learning) is what matters.

Whole School Assessment Data

So the whole school wrote a few exams that I helped manage and implement, and now I have some whole school data. Now what? What do I do with the data that I've got?

First of all I have to thank all of the teachers that did the hard work of administering the exam to their students, grading and recording the results and getting the info into me in a timely and well organized fashion. I know these tests eat into the quickly disappearing classroom instructional time, and I truly appreciate the effort you take in these whole school projects.

As I am reading through the body of numbers that I have carefully compiled and analyzed , the dominant thought that keeps coming up is this, "look at all those flaws."

To begin, rather than jump right in and use the data that I do have, I want to refine the data collection process, so that next year there will be far fewer flaws, and far more effective, usable information. This approach of focusing on the negative,  may in itself be flawed, but I will follow Stephen Covey's advice because, "the highest and best use of a person's time is that action that most effectively addresses the problems at hand and is most consistent with the individual's identified purpose in life."

My purpose: collect meaningful and useful data on the literacy and numeracy skill levels for the entire student population. This data must be openly shared with teachers so that they can have more information about their students and their instructional effectiveness. This knowledge can then be used to refine instructional practice.

I haven't read this book ;-)

Now that I know my purpose I need to understand the problems at hand, so here they are:

Problem 1: The information on the outliers is not accurate enough. From this recent battery of assessment information I calculated that in grade 9 alone there are 29 students reading at a University level of reading comprehension. At the same time I calculated another percentage of students reporting similairly flawed results, but at the low end of the g.l.e. spectrum. While it is certainly clear that there is a range of ability, I know these students personally, and I know that both results are inherently flawed. The problem with this is that if a report of 12.9 grade level equivalent and a report of 2.2 g.l.e.is flawed, then doesn't it stand to reason that a report of 7.8 g.l.e. or a report of 9.4 g.l.e. is flawed as well?

Problem 2: Exam implementation. While the exam administration and implementation this May was astoundingly better operated than the one in September there are still some big gaps in how this assessment is handled. Two points of conflict arise i) some classrooms allowed students to use calculators while some did not ii) one of my key math teachers tells me the estimation exam is much less valuable than the computation exam ie) I may have been using the wrong assessment.

Problem 3: There may be enough information in the one reading comprehension exam. Does it make sense to include reading comprehension part two? Vocabulary? Spelling? Language/Writing Conventions? If so, then how could I ensure a smooth administration of a much more complex and harder to organize, grade and analyze battery of assessment?

The ultimate goal is how to use the data effectively, but until the above problems are addressed, the next step should really not be taken.

Solution 1: The test sequence needs to be changed. Instead of starting a Fall Grade Seven Exam at level 16. We have to start the testing sequence at level 15. The future test sequence needs to be as follows:

• Fall 
• Grade 7 - Level 15
• Grade 8 - Level 16
• Grade 9 - Level 17
• Spring
• Grade 7 - Level 16
• Grade 8 - Level 17
• Grade 9 - Level 18

This eliminates the vastly flawed results from the grade nine level 19/20 exam. This will eliminate the top range outliers, but there is still a problem with our strategies and literacy students writing exams that yield the useless results of g.l.e 1 - 4. The solution that I propose for this problem will be to drop down one exam level for the strategies class and two exam levels for literacy classes. So when the regular grade eight class write a level 16 exam the strategies class will write a level 15, and when the regular grade 9 class writes a level 17 exam the literacy class will write a level 15. This should hopefully eliminate the inaccurate and useless low-level g.l.e. outliers.

Solution 2: Exam implementation and administration by classroom teachers. This problem can be solved in the same way as Solution 3 will be solved. I need to work with the teams on building next years battery of exams. I need to ask math which is the more beneficial exam (estimation, computation or both), and I need to work with the humanities team and find out which exams they would like me to run (r.c 1, r.c. 2, spelling, vocabulary, writing conventions or some combination of the 5 tests). Once this has been decided I can do the labour intensive first draft and keep a collection of originals for teachers to re-create. 

Solution 4: I need two instructions to come across more clearly when we do this in September i) when can a calculator be used b) teachers need to instruct students on how to fill in a scantron - ever single time. It is surprising how many grade nine students used pen or crossed out instead of erasing their answers when they changed their minds. 

The next step is the hard one. 

Now that the above problems have been addressed the real work will begin: How can we use the data effectively? 

This may seem like a one part endeavour, but it is slightly more complex. There are two separate issues. One issue can be addressed here, and with the help of my staff, and the other step needs to be considered a future date, after the conversations with the humanities and math teams have taken place. 

The step that we will not take today is how do we effectively use this data once it has been collected in September? Save that for a future date.

The step we are taking today is how do we use the data that we do have right now? I will start and I hope you can finish in the comment section below. We have whole school information about one standard reading comprehension exam and one numeracy exam. What do we do with this info?

1. Use it to help place students in their classes next year. As we move to ability grouping for our classes next year this data can be the hard fact that help justify some movements. Of course the knowledge of our students as individuals will trump this numerical report, but this information can help inform some of the more difficult decisions.
2. Look at our own personal effectiveness as a classroom teacher when compared to our peers. Is one class improving more? Why is that? Are there particular students in your class that experienced remarkable improvements? Can you think of anything in your instruction that would explain the phenomenon?
3. What else???? comment below or email me steven.greene@epsb.ca

One more big question

As I am writing the above numbered list about what to do with the data that we have there is one nagging question in the back of mind? Is this worth it? Will the data that is eventually arrived at really help our school reach their goal of better instruction and learning at higher levels? 

I think yes, but I would like to talk about it and know for sure. What do you think?

Watch this:

Thanks to George Couros (again) and his blog The Principal of Change for sharing this video. I am happy to share this video with the staff here at Westlawn, and anyone else that may be reading this blog (yeah right). There isn't a whole lot I can say about this video except that it will make you laugh and it will make you feel good about the work that you are doing. As everyone is working away in their teams building and refining their final exams it is nice to be reminded of the individual student and our special relationship with them.

Enjoy,



Have a great day Westlawn.

Idea du Jour

I have seen this video posted on a number of ed blogs, most notably by George Courous at his blog the Principal of Change. He is one blogger that I love reading because it really seems uncensored. Far too often we hesitate to click publish because we are scared of being misinterpreted or offending someone. The purpose, as I see it, of blogging is to explore ideas publicly. Part of this means possibly making mistakes and maybe even upsetting some people. As long as it is done with honesty and respect, I say click publish.

The idea that George and others are sharing is a video called ten expectations. This video is a commentary by the organization "leaving to learn.org." The main idea of this book/site is that student engagement and success can increase by allowing students to pursue "out-of-school" learning experiences.

The video challenges schools and classrooms to meet ten student expectations. Well, here you watch it:

One of the ideas that stands out in my mind, this speaks about the lens that I am viewing through in my position right now, is that it encourages schools and classrooms to be student-centered. We like to think that we are student centered, but how often are schoolwide or classroom decisions made based on larger organizational policies or budget restraints? I know that this is the reality that we have to work in, but can we really claim to be student-centered?

Some changes and policies are difficult to achieve, but if we put the individual student and their needs first, and then form our classrooms, schools and districts policies around that one student, only then can we say that we are in fact student centered.

There's Only One Rule...

This is true of life, and we need to make it true of this school,

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." 

Vonnegut

If we all operate under this one basic principle here at work Things can be so much better for all of us. We may have different ideas of how things should operate, but all of us want what is best for our school, our students and ourselves. 

If you are reading this try to take a second, I know I have taken hours, to think about how kind your actions have been. Have you distrusted anyone? Have spoken unkindly about them? Have you worked against people?

I admit I have done all of those things, and I commit today to stopping this unkind behavior and following that one rule stated above.