Idea Control, Part 2

It might be futile to pinpoint what constitutes a great idea in a piece of writing. Like in teaching, so many factors are at play that to narrow down the multitude of possibilities to fit neatly into some eye-catching title (Five Ways to Improve Your Writing! or The 47 Things You Didn't Remember to Do Today that You Should've!) seems fraudulent.

But how do we know that we're on the right track in guiding ourselves and our students toward a more intimate understanding of how to generate compelling ideas in our writing? How do we know that we're pushing ourselves toward writing with more authority--and ultimately--with more meaning?


In Idea Control, Part 1, I wrote about the kinds of questions we want our kids asking about their writing--questions that are idea-focused rather than turn-in/teacher focused. Akin to those kinds of questions, these questions push us toward a more challenging and effective process as we're developing our ideas. In addition, deeper into the writing process, they help us self-assess, peer-review, and assess for idea control.

Here they are:

• Is the piece built around a bold claim?
• Does the piece convey an intimacy with the topic?
• Does the piece provide compelling and thorough evidence?
• Does the piece take intellectual as well as craft risks?
• Does the piece take us somewhere new?
• Does the piece convey a truth that matters beyond the borders of the page?

It is important that students understand that the terms "claim" and "evidence" do not only apply to academic writing, but to any kind of writing. A novelist presents claims and evidence through character, plot, theme, etc. No matter what form of writing my students are engaged in--poetry, fiction, business communication, academic papers--I ask them what their claim is because I want them to know the point--the truth--they are trying to drive home with their piece.

You might argue that craft risks (in question 3) belongs more comfortably in the arena of "Stylistic Control," but I feel it is an important question to begin asking early on in the process because students start to make important rhetorical decisions about how they can execute their idea on paper. Decisions such as, What motif could I use? What metaphor might capture this?

Come peer review and grading time, if the answer to most of these guiding questions is "yes," then we know we have an author who did what was necessary to not only expertly (and perhaps even artfully) convey an important idea--but to grow as writers.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Steve

This article on Writing Control is the introduction to the series.

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: 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.

Why High School Teachers Need to Go Back to Kindergarten

One of the most fundamental and compelling--as well as one of the most nebulous and challenging--shifts in education is the burgeoning approach referred to as personalized learning. Fundamental because this approach has been around for eons (think apprenticeships). Compelling because tapping into personal interests increases motivation through ownership.

But the personalized learning movement--at first glance--can appear quite daunting. It seems somewhat ill-defined at this point, and accompanied by the widespread adoption of one-to-one devices might be interpreted as an online free-for-all with little academic grounding. Add to that the expectations to now differentiate for each individual student, and climbing Mt. Everest backwards and blindfolded seems somehow more achievable.

What is often left out of any discussion of this movement are honest conversations about responsibility. One of the greatest ironies of education is that we have said, probably as long as such things as students and teachers have existed, "I wish insert-student-name-here would take more responsibility for his/her learning."

But, you see, it's not that they won't, more often the truth is that they can't. Why? Because we have not allowed them the gift of taking genuine responsibility for their learning. We haven't asked them what they wanted to learn; we have, instead, told them what they were going to learn. We have for a multitude of reasons spawned by a multitude of pressures, opted for conformity and uniformity and hoped that our students would somehow find enough motivation to elevate themselves to our preconceived notions of acceptable performance.

If we did grant them some freedoms in pursuit of assignment completion, they weren't choices that amounted to much responsibility.

Even if we did open the barn doors wide, we kept them corralled in a pen.

Write a paper of this length due by this date. But you can choose your own thesis.

Perform this experiment using this equipment. You can choose your partner.

Give a report on a famous figure of your own choosing. Presentations must contain 10 slides--one for each category--and cannot exceed 4 minutes.

Again, there are a numerous reasons (many quite legitimate) that this has been the case for far too long. But besides the work being more uniformly easier to grade, we have perhaps made our jobs more uniformly destructive for ourselves and for our students.

We get burnt out on work that the students don't seem to want to do and that we don't really want to grade. Students don't take ownership, nor do we, really. We shift the blame, point fingers at checked-out parents, the ills of too much screen time, and we may even resort to complaining about the lower grades not getting the kids ready.

Sure, those may all be true or not true at all. It doesn't really matter.

What matters is that if we want to do right by our students--and by ourselves--we focus on the following:

Trust--the students are going to trust that they won't be penalized for taking risks and for failing. Long-lasting, genuine, meaningful, powerful learning--heck, all significant advances--are built on taking risks, learning from failures, and having the gumption to try again. And we have to trust that this new paradigm is worth the release of our strict control. Compliance begets mediocrity, if that.

Responsibility--meaningful decisions should be shared between each student and the teacher for the trajectory of their learning. Our job is to provide our students a forum for growth--a sandbox, of sorts--where they are free to take charge of their learning, to discover, to dream, to experiment, to fail, to own their learning, and to thrive.

Sounds a lot like kindergarten, doesn't it? Those of us at the secondary level might want to do what we can to rekindle some of this magic.

Perhaps the biggest challenge won't be convincing ourselves or our students of the necessity of this paradigm shift, it'll be trying to convince our colleagues and our administrators. The answer and perhaps the antidote to this will not only be student performance that not only meets, but will most likely exceed standard, your classroom will be a place where you and your students are genuinely excited.

And if nothing else I've written is true, there is no denying the infectiousness of excitement.

How would your high school experience have been better if it were more like kindergarten? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading,
Steve