(February) Love and Logic

I really enjoyed reading this book. I think, in part, I enjoyed it so much because I very much come from this “perspective” on how to deal with kids. Having worked in an alternative school my first two years of teaching, I found ways to engage students in their learning despite their background or circumstances. While I very much come from a perspective of having students find their own solutions and their own consequences, this book was helpful in aiding me to build more structures for dialogue.

Main Ideas:

· Offer choices. Choices you are okay with.

· Rather than creating a list of rules, establish with the class – baseline values from which you run your class. For years I have done with my class and I present it to them on the first day and explain how I feel a successful will look and sound like:

Our classroom will be

a COMMUNITY of learners,

a RESPECTFUL HOME where we use APPROPRIATE LANGUAGE

in a non-offensive manner,

a place of SUPPORT and EXCHANGE of knowledge,

a community who comes PREPARED TO LEARN,

a community who accepts RESPONSIBILITY for his or her actions,

a community of SELF-ADVOCATES.

· Engage in a healthy problem-solving dialogue, not a power struggle or counseling session. You are not to solve all of their problems nor their consequences.

· Develop techniques/interventions: The “evil eye”, moving in on the student, proximity, eye contact w/ a “no” headshake, “let’s talk about this later”, “Can you save that? Thanks!, changing locations, “I” messages, enforceable statements, providing choices, giving an appointment, informational letters and a few more.

One of the last chapters talked about a conference the author was at and the woman who was presenting had a very “canned’ speech. Someone in the audience told her to tell them just ONE thing they could take away from her presentation. She said….make your students fall in love with you. Because when they don’t love themselves, they won’t do anything for themselves.

You need not be their best friend but having them enjoy you as a person and enjoy learning about what you teach. I think back to my most favorite teachers, the teachers that I wish I was still in school so I could learn more from, I adored them. I adored them for who I thought they were and everything they knew or did for the community. I adored professors who could tell a great story in a way that was not only entertaining but completely relevant to the course content. I distinctly remember Professor Caron on my freshman year of college introducing a required class in my major “Intimate Relationships”. I didn’t know what to expect but what I learned is that he really put his heart and soul into teaching. We all learned a little bit about his past from the examples he used from his personal life. He taught other classes and I took every single one of them. And, likewise, in every single class I thought I would change my area of focus he was just that good at teaching. I wanted to be a marriage therapist, then a gerontologist and then ….really whatever he taught.

I think if you can sell students on who you are as a person and explain your perspective or thinking process to them, it’s a whole other ball game. Everyday each of us (staff and students) are dealing with life’s issues but we come together to work and learn. I can’t expect all of my students to be on their top game everyday but what I can do is facilitate a conversation to get them to be on top of their game. This interest in their lives from a teacher, builds rapport and respect.

One last thing I found very interesting in the textbook. If a student decides they want to argue with you about any topic, you could say, “That sounds like an argument. I schedule arguments at 7:15 am and 3:15 pm daily. Feel free to come back at that time.” Never before have I thought to use that phrasing in my classroom. I have, however, said “I can understand you are upset. Let’s both take a break and talk about it when we are more calm.”

Overall, it was a great book to read. While it resonated with my views on classroom management and student intervention, I learned a lot of new tips that I will carry with me in my classroom.

(Jan) Grading: Part 2 - Being the Change I Wish to See in the World

Grading: Part 2 -

Based on standards based grading, I revamped my grade book. Well, I created a skeleton grade book to experiment with and try next fall. I am not the type to wait – I like to try things as soon as I am ready, however, since there are less than 2 months left of school, it is not possible to change the structure under which I grade students. Imagine walking into a classroom and say, “I just wanted to let you all know that I’ve completely changed how I will be grading you from this point forth and the grading structure will completely affect your current grade.” Students would be in an uproar (I’m guessing those who have earned high marks at this point would NOT like the option of potentially lowering their grade). Therefore, next fall – I will see how the process of standards based grading plays out.

Until then, let me describe how I created my skeleton grade books (one for Foods 1 and one for Foods 2). It’s pretty easy, in fact. What you need is a list of your current assignments/projects and a copy of your standards and a critical mind of what you truly are assessing. I began by typing all my major national standards and language arts standards on a sheet of paper (if yours are electronic, I’d recommend copy and pasting). At this point, it was necessary to weigh which categories/standards were to be given more weight. I thought the standards we spent the most time on in our department (i.e. nutrition which is almost a month long) would likewise be given a similar value in weight. I then went through my assignments and figured out which assignments fell under which standard. I then made decisions about which assignments/project were formative and which were summative. The formative assignments were still put under the proper standards but were given no points assigned to them and were simply marked with a *T (turned in). At this time, I haven’t changed the point values for the larger assessments but I know I need to reevaluate the rubrics I have on file for them to better reflect the overall standards and use a 4 point scale. *Example

(Dec) Grading: Part 1 - Building background knowledge

Grading - It's been a highly debated topic and I'm curious to dig deeper into the issues. The JH made it a major focus of last year but because I was mostly stationed at the HS for inservice days, I missed most of the dialog. At the MS, it is something some folks have chosen to explore, via book studies, however I chose to read the book "Love and Logic" (to which I'll post a blog about later).

Therefore, in helping to prepare the staff development day on April 22nd, I went looking for intriguing articles on homework and grading - two very different but inextricably linked topics.

When I first started teaching, back in the day, I allotted participation points. Why? I suppose I thought I needed to hold kids accountable for bringing their supplies, being on time, and remaining on task. To me, the tracking of participation points became burdensome. It was a daily entry and required many comments in the online grading book. And, really......are those things something students should even be graded on.....this was my evolution of thinking at the beginning on my teaching years.

In reality, what items fell under participation were just a general expectation I had for our class and we discussed at the beginning on the term and kids understood. Did they come prepared all the time? No. Did they problem solve and ask a neighbor for a pencil - sure. Did the students who were engaged remain on task - yes. Did the students who had no interest in my class change their behavior because I gave them participation points - no. Really, giving participation points was ineffective and not something I had wished to continue.

Fast forward a few years after being in the classroom. Now, I'm looking behind at my experiences and feeling pretty good about that decision. Research points to the fact that grades should not include participation! Woot Woot.

Now, I'm curious what other aspects of my grading do not reflect research best practices and if I changed them could it be sustainable based on the larger system (meaning, would I be able to do what I wanted to do or would it need to be a change of school culture entirely?).

On a side note, when I reviewed application for admissions in a university, I did not find GPA's accurate or informative. Every school and within that, every teacher, has a different idea of rigor and relevance. How could I, as a reviewer, assess if an A really meant that particular student had mastered the content of that course? Realistically, I couldn't.

The applications I most enjoyed reading where holistic reviews of a students ability, not at all attached to a grade. Yes, this posed challenges in the review process because it wasn't a cookie-cutter situation. But, what I found was that I felt I could truly get a feel for what kind of student he/she was and how well his/her skills would translate at a university level. The critiques/grade report from each teacher was long and very detailed. It gave praises in areas of student's strengths and pointed out areas of struggle. This way, while something might be completely bright they could struggle working in groups and develop meaningful relationships. If I were an ideal world, I would remove GPAs and A, B, C, D, and F's and provide written progress reports. According to the "Reforming Grading Practices in Secondary Schools" only 8 percent of school report using a nontraditional system of grading and 1 percent of schools do not assign grades. Clearly, it’s not a popular thing to do.

According to the article, grades can be grouped into 3 categories: product, process and progress and most teacher’s grades fall into all of those three categories. Often teachers use various methods to assess learning – diagnostic, formative, and summative. The articles suggests to put only summative assessments in the grade book. With formative assessment, the key is that there should be no grade, just comments as feedback is essential to help student’s learning evolve. Feedback should be easily understood, specific, provides choice to the students, can be compared to sample or models, is about the performance not the student, and is part of an ongoing conversation about learning (p.4).

Standards-based grading: indicates levels of performance on essential benchmarks. It’s moving from a grading system of “tests, projects, and assignments” to a grading system of “conceptual understanding, application, analysis and evaluation, and formal writing”. It’s about finding a way to indicate that a student can exceed requirements in one area but fail to meet requirements in another area. How realistically can this happen in a system which isn’t set up to support this?

How do I as a FACS teacher move from a “projects, assignments and tests” gradebook to one connected to national standards? (I know it’s more than just typing up the categories). How do I manipulate or use the online gradebook to somehow “grade” on this standards based approach accurately? How does this impact the assignments I have designed (homework: a later blog)?

Stay tuned… as I explore possible answers to these questions in an upcoming blog!

laziness/motivation

Some students these days just seem lazy and have no energy to do anything. Just getting homework done seems like a huge chore. We had conferences last night and I kept repeating over and over again that the parent’s child needs to do homework. But then I start to thing, does homework really help? Yes it keeps the students busy but does it really help?

I personally think it helps to some extent. A few problems here and there to get the point across would work, maybe 5-10 problems. But I remember in math class I kept doing the same thing over and over again for 30-40 problems a night, this occurred in science as well. I like giving somewhere around 10 problems; they might be more difficult and use more items we have covered in class. But it seems to me that it is actually working. So do more repetitive problems help students learn?

I am seeing laziness in the classroom as well. I teach two classes that are mostly participation. If you show up and get your work done you get credit for it, so little to no homework. I have some students who just don’t do anything in class, sit there like a lump on a log. Is there a way to motivate these students? When I ask other teachers about them, they are doing the same thing in their classes as well. So no one is winning here. Have students these days just don’t care about school? Do they like to sit there and have everyone wait on them? I just don’t like doing more work than they are doing in class. Why should I put more effort into helping them pass the class if they don’t want to?

What is happening to motivation these days?? Too much TV, video games, cell phones, what is happening to the youth?

Behavior

Blog – behavior
My goal for this year was to work on classroom behavior. So far it has gone really well. My chemistry classes are going very smoothly. Start the day off with 4 questions, objectives and goals for the day. Take some notes and do an activity or have some work time. It is going very well. On the other hand my Applied Chemistry class this semester is giving me some issues. It is a class with a very different crowd. Many students are on an IEP, in ESL or just plainly have behavior issues. This class is a perfect fit for students on IEP’s or with a language barrier. But the students with the behavior issues are the ones giving me a problem. I have two students who are very low in there over all GPA’s and currently aren’t doing very well in there classes. They are talking back and forth to each other, they are on different sides of the room and labs are on different sides of the room as well. But they still give me a headache every day……too bad it is how I have to start my day.
I feel like I have tried everything to get these students to behave and listen to me. Detention doesn’t work because they won’t attend, and if they don’t attend they get a day off of school. This just means that they have a free day off of school. Sending them to the office doesn’t work as well, just means they can leave class. I have warned them, and suggested some tactics, but anything will help. PLEASE HELP ME. Some great suggestions would be greatly appreciated.