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.