Archive | June, 2009

Test More, But Test Right

Posted on June 30, 2009 by in Differentiation

The Passage of Time
Image by ToniVC via Flickr

Teach­ers fre­quently com­plain about debate the need for the plethora of tests that we admin­is­ter on a reg­u­lar basis, and I have to admit I’m right in there with them. It seems like there is so much test­ing going on that we have lit­tle time left for instruction.

The real­ity of course is that there is plenty of instruc­tion going on, we just don’t have time to teach every­thing we would like or even are sup­posed to teach.

In this arti­cle, Scott McCleod pro­poses doing more test­ing, not less. I can almost hear you say­ing, “You have got to be kid­ding!” But hold on. He has a great point, and in fact if we do more of the right kind of test­ing, we can actu­ally save time and have more time for the qual­ity instruc­tion we want to do.

Pretest­ing like Scott is sug­gest­ing is some­thing that I heartily advo­cate. As a teacher of gifted stu­dents, I’m often called on to help class­room teach­ers fig­ure out how to meet the needs of stu­dents who have already mas­tered a large chunk of the mate­r­ial they are about to cover in class. Though some teach­ers are open and will­ing to learn how to com­pact the cur­ricu­lum by let­ting kids “test out” of some things they’ve already learned, many are reluc­tant. They are afraid they won’t have enough “scores” for the child to ade­quately cal­cu­late a report card grade, for exam­ple. They have a hard time jus­ti­fy­ing allow­ing a child to “skip” an assign­ment that oth­ers have to do because it’s “unfair.”

But as Scott points out, how fair is it to the child who has to sit through instruc­tion they don’t need? Con­sider tak­ing the time to pretest every unit you teach, and you will gain much:

  • Pretest­ing can help you iden­tify con­tent that every­one in the class has mas­tered, which means you can skim over or skip it completely.
  • You will also note the areas that are most broadly mis­un­der­stood so you can plan the most inten­sive instruc­tion around those top­ics and avoid skim­ming over things you “knew” they already had last year.
  • You can iden­tify pat­terns in the errors that stu­dents make so you can select spe­cific exer­cises and instruc­tion that will cor­rect those misconceptions.
  • You can use the data to group stu­dents accord­ing to need, design­ing small group instruc­tion or learn­ing cen­ter assign­ments that are tar­geted to sup­port­ing their par­tic­u­lar weaknesses.
  • If you team teach or co-​​teach with some­one who isn’t in the class­room with you every day, pretest results can give that co-​​teacher a more com­plete pic­ture of your students
  • If you are bas­ing instruc­tional deci­sions on pretest data, you have some­thing objec­tive you can point back to if you are chal­lenged by a par­ent or admin­is­tra­tor about why you are doing a par­tic­u­lar les­son, activ­ity or assignment.

What have been your expe­ri­ences with pretest­ing? When is it most use­ful? When do you find it not as helpful?

(A shorter ver­sion of this arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared in Grandé With Room.)

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Supporting Student Thinking Skills

Posted on June 15, 2009 by in Differentiation, Thinking Skills

Scaffolding: Not just for construction workers...

Image by kevin­doo­ley via Flickr

Yes­ter­day, I shared some ques­tions that I often use to help cre­ate an atmos­phere of think­ing in my class­room. Unfor­tu­nately, when I ask a stu­dent to explain their rea­son­ing, they often aren’t able to reflect back on their thought process and ver­bal­ize what took place. In some cases, the best they can come up with is “it just popped into my head.”

In order to train stu­dents how to do this, I scaf­fold the process for them at first to give them a struc­ture within which they can build their own responses. They need to learn three skills to allow this to happen:

  1. Focus on the process before they start
  2. Mon­i­tor their rea­son­ing as they are working
  3. Reflect back and explain to some­one else what they were thinking

Each of these skills needs to be mod­eled and prac­ticed, and stu­dents need many oppor­tu­ni­ties to use them. These think­ing skills are learned best when they are inte­grated into the reg­u­lar flow of instruc­tion rather than explic­itly taught as dis­crete top­ics. One way to do that is to build one or more of these scaf­fold­ing activ­i­ties into every lesson:

  • Think-​​Alouds
  • Lev­eled problems
  • Graphic orga­niz­ers (e.g. T-​​chart)
  • Using “magic words” that stu­dents can use which require expla­na­tion of reasoning
  • Ask­ing prompt ques­tions (such as those in yesterday’s post)
  • Give part of the solu­tion, then have stu­dents com­plete it
  • Give the answer, stu­dents write the solution
  • Give the expla­na­tion, stu­dents write the solution
  • Give the solu­tion, stu­dents write the explanation
  • Check­lists or mnemon­ics to aid recall of processes
  • Jour­nals to prac­tice infor­mal writ­ing about prob­lem solving
  • Vocab­u­lary games to build lan­guage skills and improve com­mu­ni­ca­tion about reasoning
  • Allow stu­dents to rewrite weak expla­na­tions to improve them
  • Show sam­ple stu­dent papers that demon­strate good skills
  • Teach stu­dents to score responses using a rubric
  • Have stu­dents score their own work or a partner’s work
  • Trade papers with another class and have stu­dents score
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Questioning for Thinking

Posted on June 14, 2009 by in Thinking Skills

I'm thinking of...

Image by gut­ter via Flickr

One of the things that I fre­quently see in class­rooms that I visit is stu­dents who can mechan­i­cally pro­duce an answer to a ques­tion or prob­lem but who don’t really under­stand how or why the process they used works. As teach­ers, we need to focus more on the think­ing process that a stu­dent used to get to an answer rather than on the answer itself.

Cer­tainly there are times when sim­ple recall is impor­tant, and when it’s best to give stu­dents a brief indi­ca­tion of whether their response is cor­rect or incor­rect. But for any ques­tion that involves rea­son­ing, judg­ment, assim­i­la­tion, syn­the­sis, or sim­i­lar higher level think­ing, I like to ask follow-​​up ques­tions like these:

  • “Why did you do that?”
  • “How did you get that?”
  • “How do you know?”
  • “What does that number/​fact/​word represent?”
  • “What does that mean?”
  • “Can you jus­tify your answer?”
  • “Can you prove it?”

I ask these regard­less of whether the ini­tial answer is right or wrong. This has sev­eral benefits:

  1. I can get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of both the right and wrong answers a stu­dent gives. Was it sim­ply an auto­matic appli­ca­tion of a rote process? Is there valid rea­son­ing going on with sim­ple mis­takes? Was the right answer a guess or a fluke? Does the stu­dents have a mis­con­cep­tion that hap­pens to work right in this instance?
  2. Occa­sion­ally a stu­dent will have a good jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for an alter­na­tive answer I hadn’t con­sid­ered, and ask­ing for the ratio­nale saves me from a hasty dismissal.
  3. It makes it clear to the stu­dent that they are respon­si­ble for their answers, not me.
  4. It cre­ates an atmost­phere that is simul­ta­ne­ously more rig­or­ous and more open. It becomes safer to be “wrong”, because when they can explain their think­ing, we focus on the process instead of the result. It is rare that a stu­dent does noth­ing right in that think­ing process, and so we can begin with “I under­stand where you are com­ing from. This part was really good think­ing, but here is where you got off track and how you can fix it next time.”

So many times I have been in a class­room where a stu­dent gives an incor­rect answer to a ques­tion, the teacher gets a cor­rect answer from another stu­dent (or sim­ply pro­vides it him– or her­self), and moves on. I’ll some­times go to that student’s desk and pri­vately ask for the expla­na­tion. “Show me how you got that,” I’ll say, and they’ll walk me through the process. It rarely takes me more than a few moments to explain the flaw in the think­ing and help the stu­dent understand.

Take the time to ques­tion every­thing your stu­dents do. Cre­ate an envi­ron­ment for think­ing in your classroom.

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What To Do When Your Child Says “I’m Bored”

Posted on June 13, 2009 by in Characteristics, Differentiation

In my job as a gifted teacher, par­ents often come to me with con­cerns about their chil­dren hav­ing appro­pri­ate learn­ing expe­ri­ences in school. Many times, the first clue that a stu­dent is bright or gifted and needs extra chal­lenge is when he or she says, “I’m bored.”

As adults, when we are in a learn­ing sit­u­a­tion that’s bor­ing, it is often because the con­tent is some­thing we already know and don’t need to prac­tice more.

It’s impor­tant for us as par­ents to remem­ber that chil­dren often don’t have the vocab­u­lary or intro­spec­tive abil­ity to explain what they are feel­ing, so they may fall back on “bor­ing” as the clos­est approx­i­ma­tion. They also may not under­stand the root causes of their feel­ings to be able to describe for you where they are com­ing from.

Cer­tainly stu­dents will be bored when the work they are asked to do is too easy and they have already mas­tered it, and it is one of the first things we need to con­sider. But there are many other things that might be con­tribut­ing to the feel­ing that a child asso­ciates with bore­dom. When a child says, “I’m bored…,” it could also mean…

  • The work is too hard
  • The work isn’t inter­est­ing to me
  • The work is…work
  • I’m afraid I can’t do it
  • I don’t like the subject
  • I don’t like the assignment
  • I don’t like the teacher
  • I don’t like my classmates
  • I don’t understand
  • I don’t want to understand
  • I’m tired
  • I’m dis­tracted
  • I’m pre­oc­cu­pied
  • I’m uncom­fort­able
  • I’m angry about some­thing that hap­pened this morning
  • I’m wor­ried about some­thing that might hap­pen tomorrow
  • I’d rather be at recess
  • I’d rather be at home
  • I’d rather be at the movies/​pool/​park/​etc.

If we are too quick to assume that “bored” always means “too easy,” then it won’t take long for our chil­dren to learn that when they don’t like doing some­thing, just say­ing those magic words will make it go away

It’s up to us, then, to be sure we don’t take this kind of state­ment at imme­di­ate face value. Instead, ask ques­tions and probe deeper into the sit­u­a­tion to find out more about what is going on and why. Then we will have the infor­ma­tion we need to address the prob­lem and fix it.

(Orig­i­nally posted June 5, 2008 at Grandé With Room)

Simplify

Posted on June 13, 2009 by in Uncategorized

As I begin the process of stream­lin­ing and sim­pli­fy­ing my online pres­ence, I will be rethink­ing the pur­pose of this site. I will be mov­ing all education-​​related posts to my pro­fes­sional blog, Quis​i​tiv​ity​.org, over the next few weeks. I’ll keep them here also tem­porar­ily, for his­tor­i­cal and search pur­poses, but will even­tu­ally redi­rect the perma­links to the new version.

I don’t know yet where that will take me here, or what this site will evolve into, but stay tuned as things develop over the summer.

Digital Discipline

Posted on June 9, 2009 by in Organization, Personal Growth

About six months ago, I read an arti­cle by Wes­ley Fryer and made a note to myself to write a blog post about my reac­tions and how it applies to my life. The fact that the note sat in my “drafts” folder on this blog for six months tells you some­thing about how much I really took it to heart.

As I’m wrap­ping up the school year over the next week, I’m already begin­ning to plan for the sum­mer and for next year. Yes, I’m kind of sick that way. In any case, one of the things I know I need to do is stream­line and sim­plify, par­tic­u­larly my dig­i­tal life. Here’s an exam­ple: I cur­rently have 141 feeds in my blog reader, with 897 unread arti­cles. Every one of those feeds is one that I added because it was some­thing worth­while and that I wanted to read reg­u­larly. I’ll never be able to keep up, though, and unfor­tu­nately some of them will have to go.

Just as I plan to sched­ule seri­ous time eval­u­at­ing and purg­ing my feed reader, I have many other things I plan to exam­ine care­fully and decide which things to keep and which to reluc­tantly drop.

Part of my dig­i­tal dis­ci­pline will also involve bal­anc­ing con­sum­ing and cre­at­ing. I learn and grow more when I’m con­tribut­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion than when I’m just absorb­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, I have allowed the con­tri­bu­tion side of things to dry up—my last blog post before yes­ter­day was almost two months ago. Part will also involve being selec­tive about where I con­tribute, focus­ing on the best. As a result, I plan to move all of my education-​​related posts from this blog to Quis​i​tiv​ity​.org to make that one a lit­tle broader and more regular.

It’s going to mean some hard deci­sions. There are things that I enjoy and are very worth­while that I’ll have to give up sim­ply because they take time away from things that are more impor­tant and more wor­thy of my invest­ment of time. But I think the dis­ci­pline will make me a bet­ter hus­band and father, and also a bet­ter teacher.