The Gap Between Recognition and Implementation

Perhaps the best part of my first year of teaching was getting to observe in the classrooms of far more experienced teachers. In particular, one visit was incredibly powerful. The class had been reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle as a class novel/literature study. One of the things that they did was use Activotes ("clickers" if you will) to have students voice their opinion. From there students would offer why they made their choice, and debate their respective reasoning.

I walked away with a vision of my own. I wanted to kids to have discussions about books, but also to write about books. I also wanted to have them talking about ideas, and debating. What did I do? I modeled responses to literature ("What is one word to describe the character?", "What is the problem in the story and how do you think the main character will resolve it?") along with some basic criteria for "is it good enough." This gave students a baseline for whether the response that is at standard.

Since last year I've had kids scoring responses on a 4 through 1 scale. The point is to uncover "good enough" looks like. We'll look at a few different responses modeled after student work past and present, and score them. We did this last week and the discussions kids were having were fantastic... When you hear kids say "That response referenced the text, and explained why they chose strong to describe the men.." you feel really good because they are getting it. The issue I ran into was that not all kids were making the leap when it came to their own responses.

Why was that? Part of it was because of the way I crafted the questions for their novel study books. When you don't necessarily provide multiple avenues for kids to travel down then you won't get the quality you're looking for. That was one reason. Another connected to stamina. Writing a quick couple of sentences gets you just above the threshold, and is "enough." This was an instance where I gave feedback to almost all in order to have them improve. Most knew that they could add more, and simply needed direction. More of the same is planned for this week. Should be fun.

Talk About It

There are times that having vibrant student discussion can be like climbing a mountain. The overt questions are fairly forgiving, if not scalable for most learners. Conceptually there is little rigor, and kids often feel fairly safe responding. Why? Because being wrong is on a lack of knowledge, a gap in their learning.

But there comes a point where the climb becomes difficult- make that the proverbial snow line, or perhaps a little further up when you start to feel the work load increase. Often this is when students need to analyze information, evaluate it, and maybe even offer an explanation for their evaluation. The fear is no longer that you don't know information, but that you won't see the information the way your peers do.

This week we had a discussion session about explorers. I crafted four slides for my Activboard flipchart that one might feasibly see in a "Best Explorer Presentation." This was spun to the kids as "These are slides that were created last year, but have been touched up to make their look more presentable." In actuality they were the result a mental compilation of slides I have seen in PowerPoint presentations in my two years of teaching. I handed out the slides, reminding kids that we were going to only be looking at the Ideas/Content column on our rubric. We then examined slides one by one, scored them based on the rubric with NO half scores. Kids needed to look at the criteria and make an evaluation that they would explain to a peer (and potentially the whole group).

The result: Fantastic student discussion focused on characteristics of a good presentation. I pulled popsicle sticks for who would respond, telling what they chose and why. The next people to respond needed to state if they agreed or disagreed and why. Kids did a fantastic job being respectful of each other, but also pointing to specific things in the rubric and slides that helped them make their evaluation. Beyond that, they then were working on their presentations and had great success integrating elements of the Level 3 (at standard) and Level 4 (exceeding standard) presentation into their work. Hopefully this yields a great set of projects, and some great learning around comparing, contrasting, and evaluating!

Discuss Amongst Yourselves

One of the things I really want to do is get kids having a variety of discussions. Kids need to talk to each other, arguing their points of views at times. They aren't vessels to be filled with knowledge by me, as I'm certainly filled with a variety of faults of my own. Instead I want them to exercise far more abstract skills, like analysis, prediction, and evaluation. If you can take information and use it appropriately (leveraged if you will) for the purpose of your argument, then I am definitely doing my job.

A comment earlier mentioned how technology had largely been used for a test taking purpose. I have an Interactive Whiteboard. I could teach without it, but am fortunate to have it. One of the tools that come with my Activboard is an Activote. In short, it is a device that is shaped like an egg, and can transmit voting information to your IWB. You can use it to do an informal comprehension check. You can use it for more formal assessments. You can simply use it for opinions.

Last year in my first year, I was fortunate to observe in a few different classrooms. One in particular had been doing some novel study around the book "True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle." With that, she had a variety of opinion questions that students responded to. The whole group discussion was one of the more powerful things I've seen. Everyone participated in voting with each question. But the teacher then acted as moderator as kids debated responses, agreeing and disagreeing with each other. Kids were able to respectfully disagree with each other, pointing out ways that each other's arguments were flawed. It was a fantastic way to see kids interacting and learning together. There was incredible power in seeing kids talk together, and seeing a myriad of kids participating. I can't emphasize how useful the activote was in that discussion, as kids were inspired to act based on the results- seeing it as vindication (or a challenge) to/for their argument.