Is High School Nothing More Than a Hoop to Jump Through?

Fifty-six percent. That was the percentage of my high school students who said that the grade matters more to them than what they learned. To be honest, it felt like a punch to the gut. After forming meaningful relationships this year, after giving them tons of choice, after having them focus on student agency, fifty-six percent still view what we did as a hoop to jump through to get to the next--and in their perception--more meaningful step: life after high school.

How could this be? How could almost sixty percent of my students reject my entire year's efforts to convince them otherwise? I don't know what the emotion was. Befuddlement mixed with a tablespoon or two of something that felt like incredulity. So I read their explanations, searching for something to explain my failure.

Here is a sampling of the student responses I read:

High school is just a hoop to get to what you really want to do in life.

[School] used to be fun and now it's just tests tests tests and no fun, and when the teachers try to make things fun they can't because the district has banned fun (sic)

I feel that I view school as something I have to do but don't want to do.

If you don't meet a certain criteria your grade drops or it makes you think of yourself like your (sic) not good enough or smart enough but we all have different and unique ways of expressing what we learn and how we write it or read or do our work. We can't do what we like to do.

To clarify, my district hasn't "banned fun"; in fact, the district I work for is quite eager for students and teachers to push the boundaries of educational reform. But the negative perception lingers, clouded perhaps by the high stakes state testing environment in which many of these students have grown up with and within which we still are required to function.

And as I read, I found something unexpected: myself.

Minus the testing issue, these had been my exact thoughts about high school. It just was what it was: something I had to do. Even though I loved to read and write, I remember only really wanting to do the work in my wood shop classes. And though changes in the education world have shifted expectations for what school looks like now, and though I went to a small rural high school, I had some fantastic teachers who tried their best within the context of the educational expectations of the day. Interesting that I find myself thirty-some years later looking in the mirror and seeing them and wondering if I had been the source of the same frustration.

Ironically perhaps, serving in the Army taught me that I might have a few more smarts than all my years of schooling convinced me of. Personally, I didn't really become hungry for learning until well after high school. Truly hungry, that is. So...

Does High School Really Matter?

High school matters. I know it does. It has to. We meet them where they're at and we try to push toward something new and hopefully more important. But I'm wondering in what ways it does matter, and how for my students I can make it matter more in the moment?


There have been many studies over the years about whether or not high school matters. (Does high school matter? Does High School Determine the Rest of Your Life?) One longitudinal study of 25000 students even disputes the current belief that AP and advanced classes better prepare students for college work. The authors write that "the courses that students took in high school had very little impact on college grades" (When the Value of High School Is Exaggerated).

But, they're in college, right? So that door, at least, was open for them.

Regardless of the percentages, I think that's what we have to hold onto--that it is our job to help open doors for students and to convince them that they're worth walking through.

Next year, I'll keep doing what I think is the right thing for students: to connect, to inspire, to convince them that the work can be important not just for now but for the long term if we make the right decisions, if we focus on truly meaningful topics and projects, if we write like our life depends on it.

I'll keep opening the door to this opportunity, and keep hoping that more and more of my students will choose to walk through it.

I'd love to hear your comments on this.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

You might also be interested in these posts about writing with voice and authority.

Emphasizing and Assessing Student Agency

One of the truisms of teaching is that you get what you emphasize. As a teacher, if you want X, you emphasize X. If you want students to use dialogue in their narratives, you emphasize it. If you want them to show their work in math or science, you emphasize it. If you want them to verify the credibility of sources for a history project, you emphasize it.

With the movement toward personalized learning, student agency is increasingly entering our professional conversations. So, it follows that if we want students to move more toward agents of their own learning, they could probably benefit from a heightened metacognitive awareness of their agency.On most days, students rate their own student agency, but we routinely use this form for peer and teacher assessments as well. Some days, students are partnered up, and at the end of class they peer assess for agency.

Out of several definitions of student agency being used in the professional literature, our PLC began building our own understanding using this one from The Knewton Blog because of its clarity and action-oriented phrasing:

Student agency refers to the level of control, autonomy, and power that a student experiences in an educational situation. Student agency can be manifested in the choice of learning environment, subject matter, approach, and/or pace.
  

Aversion to Agency

 
Interestingly enough, most of our high school students find this an agreeable idea, but they are confounded or even resistant when it comes to actually taking charge of their learning. In short, it takes too much work to chart their own course. Add to that, they are genuinely concerned about deviating from what they've become accustomed to doing, which is working toward their teacher's goals and not their own.


We use a Google form (at right) to help students grow not only more knowledgeable about student agency, but also more comfortable in thinking about the role that agency plays in their learning. (Notice the more student-friendly agency definition we use on this form).

The data we gather from this form allows us to think tangibly about progress-or lack of progress--toward students taking increasing ownership of their learning.

We routinely sort the data on the Google Sheet (where the data from this form gets sent) to review with students the trends in their agency assessments.

Improvements we're thinking about incorporating are for each student to maintain their own Google form and own Google sheet and then have them share their sheet with us. This would shift the responsibility for this data to the students and would allow them to sort, work with ways to present the data, and I believe, would help them further heighten their awareness of their agency. A problem this would create is that peers and the teacher couldn't assess a student unless the form was shared with us, creating some issues with multiple documents (and for the teacher with one for each student per class). That said, students could hyperlink their agency assessment form to their green sheet, which would allow access as well as commentary.

 Like everything, this is a work in progress. But, we noticed significant shifts this year in student perceptions and awareness of their agency and its relationship to what we hope has been meaningful learning for them.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this topic. Please consider sharing this with others.

Update: I just read this very thorough article from Zahner History that could help streamline the information-sharing fix we want to incorporate.
  Thanks for reading,
Steve  


You might also be interested in these other posts about using Google Sheets: Seminar Assessment Using Google Sheets, Teacher To-Do List.

Mastering Messiness: Rethinking Project Criteria

As we enter the homestretch of our school year, many of us are undoubtedly ending our courses with some form of project. Whether it is the culmination of a year-long social justice research project (as is the case with our students), a scientific inquiry, or a literary or historical study, our students are creating a product to demonstrate their learning.

For most students, their primary concern is the product itself. And, rightly so since our grading criteria often emphasize elements of the product's parameters (length, number of research sources, professionalism of the presentation, etc.).

Mastering Messiness is the Key to Growth

But as teachers, we often care much less about the product itself than about the journey the students took to create the product. It matters less that the student had five sources for her research, and matters more about her knowing how to inquire deeply, how to mine meaning from these sources, how to synthesize, refine claims as new information transforms her thinking. It matters that she desires disequilibrium because she knows this is the launching point for profound thinking and creating.

And for her own growth.

Process Over Product
If a student is committed to her project, the grade will be largely irrelevant; she'll know its worth regardless of any grade we assign to it. It'll mean something so far beyond any letter grade or number on a 4-point scale.

So, what if we shifted our emphasis away from the product itself to more greatly emphasize the attitudes and approaches that will not only help them create this project, but the many others they will undoubtedly be required to complete over their academic and work careers?

 Here are the Indicators of an Excellent Project that I use to assess my students approaches to their products:

• Messiness (disequilibrium defines the initial efforts; dynamic and wide-ranging thinking progressing toward unity)

• Intrepidness (an embracing of intellectual risks, an eagerness to think creatively, a willingness to take skills risks; innovative)

• Intimacy (devotion to the project; an embracing of complexities/nuances/depth)

• Clarity (effective/authorial delivery in your chosen form; you move us)

Yes, it takes some convincing for students to want to get messy (and it needs to be explicitly said that we're not talking about crumpled papers shoved into a binder--not that kind of messy). In fact, messiness is the indicator they are most unsettled by. But, messiness is the single most important indicator because it is the most realistic starting point for any profound and transformative work.

Ask kids about the cellphones they can't seem to remove from their hands. Ask them how many cellphone iterations, how many failures, approximations it took before tech companies were able to produce the one they're currently holding. I tell them about the brick of a cellphone my father used to carry around when he worked for the phone company years ago. For its time, it was quite advanced, but when I tell them that he had to carry the phone's giant battery in a separate case, they understand that our first attempts are only starting points for further refinement.

Authorial Attitudes
And when these mindsets are emphasized over the product, the students start asking the right kind of questions. Just today, several students wanted conferences because they sensed their early thinking wasn't "messy" enough. Ironically, perhaps, when they're in these messy conceptual situations where there are a million different directions they could go, they begin to feel more in control. They begin to evaluate, to inquire further, to prioritize, gain traction and ultimately, they begin to work their way out with a more intimate understanding of what their project is really about.

They can now write, produce, create, dance, act, debate, present with authority that comes only from having struggled toward ownership, toward growth, and toward meaning.

Thanks so much for reading. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you encourage students to own their work.

You might also be interested in these posts that talk about authorial voice and control in writing: Writing Control,  Idea Control.

The Pedagogy of Grief

Last week a former student of mine was murdered. Only a little over a year removed from my classroom, his life was ended by a single bullet--a bullet discharged by a gun held by another teen who wanted my former student's designer belt.

A belt.
I'm angry.

Angry because of all the love that I and my fellow teachers threw his way during what was a challenging and trying freshman year. Ticked that it seems to have been all for naught.

Angry because it's senseless. Over a belt? I'd buy all the kids in the park that night whatever belt they wanted if that gun could just stay hidden.

Angry because he was going to be a good man. You could sense it, see it in his eyes, in his smile. If he could just make it there, to manhood.

Angry because he's going to be forgotten, isn't he? His story seems to already be slipping from our memories, lost in the strong current of more kids and more guns and more senselessness.

Angry because I got choked up teaching my university students last night. While reading the final pages of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a paragraph from the end when he is describing his young friend's death, I couldn't shake the image of my former student lying on the cold grass of that park taking his last breaths. I couldn't stop imagining how his eyes must've been open and searching for some explanation that made some sense to him.

There I was in front of my students unable to proceed. The words wouldn't come. Something had risen up from somewhere deep inside of me and I felt paralyzed. Truth is, it was all I could do to not break down in front of them.

Maybe I should have. Maybe that would've made some sense. Here were twenty-five future teachers watching me succumb to my emotions. Peter, who is going to be a brilliant teacher, finished reading the last page for me because there was no way I could read those final lines. So, Peter, thank you for that.

After class, Angela, another student destined for an amazing career in her own classroom, asked about guilt--if I felt any in situations like this. I told her no.

I can't. I tried my best for him. We all did. I think I would feel profound guilt if I would've made him invisible through indifference, but we offered him the best we had; some days he accepted it, some days he didn't. But we never, ever gave up on him. Not once.

So, no--there is no guilt. Only anger.

My dear future teachers, I'm angry that people will try to somehow blame you for society's ills, for intimating that you're not trying hard enough to reach these troubled kids, for the fact that you will undoubtedly lose students who were dear to you through accident, illness, suicide.

And even murder.

I'm angry that one day, perhaps, you will decide to cut short your own classroom careers because the weights are sometimes too hard to bear. I'm angry that some of you may choose not to enter the profession because of the enormity and the seeming impossibility of the job.

Please don't. Please know that you are so vital to bringing sense to all this senselessness. Yes, you will carry weights. Many weights. But you will not carry them alone.

Peter will finish the book for you. Angela will ask a caring question. Justin will send an email. Jay will shake your hand. Shelby will read a news article to fill in the blanks you couldn't bear to read for yourself. Josh will offer his genuine sympathy.

We will never quit. Never.

Not on ourselves, not on our colleagues, not on our students--none of them. Not even the ones you know somehow are destined for an early grave. Especially not them.

Because that is the only thing that makes sense.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for helping me carry these weights.

Steve

Seminar Assessment Using Google Forms

 In a previous post (Trio Seminar), I outlined the near impossibility of hearing everything said in a seminar format in which more than one voice is talking. And, it is often vitally important that I make this tradeoff because higher levels of student engagement are worth the added challenge of assessing a wide-spread and multi-directional conversation.

While I often place myself dead center of the trio seminar circle, recording excerpts of conversation, visually documenting participation, collecting anecdotal evidence, I have no way of knowing--at least during this segment of the seminar--what depth of understanding and the frequency and range of contributions an individual is bringing to the discussion.

Google Forms to the Rescue (Again!)

A brief version used to collect quick peer assessments.

Because my students have access to Chromebooks, I am able to have them help me assess seminar contributions via a Google form.

Prior to using the form for peer assessment purposes, we calibrate our thinking about what high levels of performance in a seminar look like.

What is not displayed in the image is the pull-down list of names I use to have students select the name of who is being assessed. You could simply have a Name? text field instead, but I found that student misspellings, make data sorting difficult. Madison becomes Madeson becomes Madyson becomes Maddisson. The pull down list standardizes the data sorting and is well worth the effort to type in all the names. (This takes me no more than five minutes per class (and is a great job for a TA), and once done can be used over and over by making a copy of the Google form for the next seminar.)

During the seminar, both the students and I use the form to assess student performance, evidence of preparation, etc. And, once the seminar is complete, the students self-assess using the same form.

At the completion of the seminar, I can calculate student scores (with the data that is automatically sent to a Google Sheet), and review comments and contributions, to determine a student's seminar grade.

 Depending on the seminar goals (and time I have to do this), I will use a Google add-on (Save as Doc) to select the comments and scores for each student so that I post the link to their green sheet, which gives them the full range of the peer and teacher and self assessments from which they can formulate goals for growth in the next seminar.

If you have any questions, I'd be glad to help. Just send me a note.

Thanks for reading!
Steve

Performance Conversation To-Do List: A Google Forms solution

In a previous post I explained how we used the Performance Conversation (affectionately referred to as the Green Sheet) for the bulk of our work submissions and assessments. One of the most significant benefits of this forum that focuses on an oft-times extended conversation with the student about the assignment is that it creates an elevated desire for students to revise their work.

And while this is precisely what we want for a multitude of reasons, it does create a not-so-insignificant issue: keeping track of who needs what re-assessed.

Mr. M's Student To-Do List

Yes, from your Google Drive page you can see which students have recently updated their Green Sheets, but it gives you no indication of what precisely they updated. This is where another Google product can help solve the problem and shift the burden of notification and organization to the student.

Students, of course, do not need to individually notify me if they are submitting an assignment that is submitted on-time since my expectation is that I will be able to open their green sheet and find it hyperlinked and self-assessed. But, if they have been absent, if they need their work reassessed because they've revised, if they need a letter of recommendation, to send an email home, etc., they fill out the questions on the Google form. The form then sends the results to a Google sheet (my Student To-Do List), which I check regularly.

I proceed (usually) in order of submission which is date-stamped on the sheet.

And because the form sends the data to a spreadsheet, I'm able to sort by student name to track frequency of revisions, late work, number of letters of rec., etc.

This has helped me rid my desk of all those maddening scraps of paper and sticky notes that were the bane of my existence. 

Thanks for reading,
Steve

Performance Conversation: Changing the way work is submitted and assessed

"What we need," my wife, who is also an English teacher, said to me one day, "is a document where we could do everything: track student work, have students self-assess, provide feedback and assessments, and document standards growth." The next day, the Performance Conversation (a.k.a. the Green Sheet) was born.

The Green Sheet: as the year progresses, we add more rows for students to continue posting their work.

Because our district uses Chromebooks, Google docs tends to be our default for most things. The Green Sheet is no exception.


The Green Sheet is where students post all their work by hyperlinking it in column 2. For each assignment they are to fill out the Student Comments and Self-Assessments column. One of the strategies we often use to force/encourage self-assessment is to tell them that we will not grade their assignments until they are self-assessed.

But, we emphasize the proper name of this form even more than we do assessment of student work. Our hope was that this document would be a forum for student and teacher conversation about their work and their growth, and it has indeed become that. As you can see from the example below, students are quite eager to reflect in depth about their work, I think, because they know it is going to be read, because it is building upon their previous reflections which are often right above in a previous assignment's row, and because we have a genuine interest in seeing what the student thinks of his or her own work before we dive in to read/discuss/assess.

We all know the immense importance of conferencing with students--my wife and I are constantly conferencing with them--but even so, we can't get to everyone every day. The green sheet has helped fill this void. Students post works-in-progress and we are able to electronically-conference with them, thus freeing up some in-class time to work and conference with those students most in need.

Excerpt of a university-level Performance Conversation

Students are encouraged (and sometimes required if they are struggling a bit) to share their Performance Conversation with a parent/guardian, and we have had some parents take an active interest in their student's writing by joining in on the conversation in their Parent/Guardian column.

I also use the Green Sheet in the university courses I teach, and the college students like the flexibility it affords them, not to mention the ownership, accessibility, and the professor-student connections it fosters. Here is an in-use example from one of my recent college courses:
 
Over years, there have been a few changes and additions that I would encourage you to incorporate.

Because each kid needs their own copy of the document, you need to force them to make a copy. Google makes this really easy to do. When you get the shareable link, it'll look something like this:

 https://docs.google.com/documen/d/1PCY2XYoUvTvfJFsAP2ZriF6dnwBXRVGZFITwATzqTU/edit?usp=sharing 

If you delete everything highlighted in yellow and replace it with the word "copy" the students will be forced to make a copy of the document. They will then add their name to it before sharing it back to you.

It'll look like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PCYe2XYoUvTvfJFsAP2ZriF6dnwBXRVGZFITwATzqTU/copy

(In fact, if you follow that link, you will be able to make your own copy of the example green sheet. Feel free to use it/change it however you'd like.)

Another addition is the "Important Updates" link we've added to the top, which is our way of broadcasting reminders and updates to students without having to open each student document and update.

I also use a Google Sheets document with one sheet per class as my Green Sheets Master List, where I have my class list and hyperlinks to each student's green sheet. This allows me to quickly navigate to student work.

While we believe that One Note might be a better vehicle for this document, our district's use of Chromebooks makes Google Docs a more sensible choice at least for the near future.

Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions about this. I look forward to conversing with you.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

You might be interested in this article which addresses how to get notified when students resubmit work.

Trio Seminar

One format that I've found to promote accountability as well as high levels of participation is the trio seminar. This one sort of came to me one day as I was struggling to get my senior English class to effectively-engage in the traditional whole-class seminar (you know, the one with everyone circled up and nervously starting at each other and dominated by three or four students!).

While I suspected that there were more students who had something of significance to contribute, they didn't have the courage to offer their ideas in this large circle, they were content to let others do the talking for them, or (and this one is most disheartening), they would--under pressure grade-wise to contribute something--offer a shallow observation that had most likely been floated ten or fifteen minutes before by another student.

So, one evening, I dreamed up this seating chart:

And here is how it works. All the tables are pushed against the classroom walls. Each of the squares represents a student chair. Each trio of chairs is numbered (Trio 1, Trio 2, Trio 3, etc.). The students walk in and find their name and trio number which I have projected on the screen. (A note on trio selections: sometimes they are randomly-selected, other times they are purposely-grouped.)

Depending on time of the year and goals for the seminar, either I or the students will generate discussion questions/topics. Students are numbered 1, 2, 3 in their trio groups, and they take turns leading three- to five-minute mini-discussions. I stand in the middle, clipboard in hand, and take notes as I listen in to the ten or eleven simultaneous conversations. While the seating chart above shows eight groupings, I've had as many as 14 in one of my larger classes.

The benefit of this simultaneous chatter is just that--at any given time, a third of the class is talking in a more intimate setting. They get a chance to test their ideas, build deeper understanding, learn from their trio partners--which helps not only helps them refine their thinking, thus improving the quality of their conversation, it emboldens them for the next, whole class round.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, all students turn their chairs so that we form a large whole-class circle and proceed in a more traditional Socratic seminar format. But, as I quickly discovered with that class of seniors, the level of engagement is immensely improved, as is the level of confidence, the contributions, and the number of contributors.

For these reasons and more, this is one of my favorite seminar formats.

For some thoughts on assessing the first segment when it is humanly impossible to hear everything, I have a few ideas to help. You can contact me or wait for an upcoming post on using Google forms for seminar data collection.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

For an idea about how to streamline seminar assessment, you might want to check out this post on using Google Docs for self-assessing, peer assessing, and teacher assessing seminars of any structure.