the journey is the reward

In class today, we discussed our individual experiences with assessment.  Though I didn’t speak in class, I thought I’d blog about my most recent experience with writing assessments.

Over the past year, our district has asked teachers to review and revise our writing curriculum.  We began by identifying our goals for the writing sequence, reading some position articles from professional associations, and examining some of the skills identified in the American Diploma Project.  A relatively small group of teachers then spent about four days over the summer identifying standards and sequencing them in a way that we felt better suited our goals and yet still aligned with the state standards our students are expected to meet.   Over the school year, we turned that sequence into a more detailed unit guide for the writing portion of our English curriculum by determining mastery points for each semester and accumulating resources and examples of best practices that would help teachers implement the curriculum.  This summer, we have begun working on the common assessments that the all teachers in the district will use to measure student progress toward these objectives.

Working on these assessments led this group of teachers (including me) into debating many aspects of assessment.  Some of the teachers wanted many common tests and wanted them to be administered on the same days across the district, while others wanted fewer common tests and wanted more freedom over when to incorporate them into their class plans.  We also debated whether or not EVERY standard had to be commonly assessed, that is, could we trust teachers to teach skills that wouldn’t be commonly assessed.  Over the course of these debates, we also looked at assessment for learning and assessment of learning as defined by Rick Stiggins.  Our adminstrative leader encouraged us to move away from the mainly summative testing we had been doing and toward improving our use of formative testing to provide students with timely, relevant feedback that may actually help them improve their writing skills before the summative essay at the end of each term.

The end result of this experience has left us with many compromises on both sides.  At the freshman level, we will now have four formative assessments (rubrics) that will be used prior to the summative essay rubric that will be used at the end of semester one.  Hopefully, these formative rubrics will be used FOR learning, as they’ve been designed.  These rubrics don’t have numbers attached (which was another huge debate), they have deadlines but not “administer on” dates, and they do not assess every standard in the writing curriculum.

While I see these rubrics as an improvement over our previous summative rubrics, I have some concerns over the implementation of them that will occur in the fall.

• Because there is an increase in common assessments, there will be resistance on the part of many of our teachers for that fact alone.  Many of our teachers see common assessments as essentially mistrustful of their professionalism and as a way to judge teachers, not assess student growth.
• Without numbers attached to the formative rubrics, how will that affect student motivation?  Will that lead to students and teachers to undervalue the formative assessments, and therefore not use them in a way that will really help students?  Will teachers put numbers on them to motivate students, but then turn them in to summative assessments?
• Not every skill that is assessed on the summative rubric is assessed on the formative rubrics.  Is this misleading for students?  Teachers must work in their own formative assessments (that are not common) to give students feedback on these skills.  If we don’t “force” teachers to do this through common assessments, will that happen?
• Conversing with Rita also led to me to realize that these formative rubrics are still leaving the kids out of the equation in terms of determining their own learning goals.  While the rubrics are meant to give them feedback, it is still feedback toward teacher/district/state determined goals, not student goals.

Working on this committee has been frustrating because we not only debated issues that needed debate, we also debated over whether the standards would be typed in capitals, bolded, or italicized and whether we should use calibri or times new roman font.  In any case, it was an interesting experience, and I am glad I participated.

I know next to nothing about video games. As I mentioned in my wiki, I was not allowed to have video games growing up. I got to play occasionally at a friend’s or cousin’s but, even then, I think I maybe made it to level two of the first Mario Brothers only once. Because of this, I feel pretty out of the loop when thinking about games as learning tools. I also thinks this makes far more judgmental of students who are vocal about how much time they spend on gaming. The reading and discussion we are having is helping me to see this gaming as valuable for my students, at least to some extent. I think I have missed the time in my life where I could get involved in this activity, but I do want to buy a Wii.

Hi Guys,

For the last major unit of the year (and for my learning element), my co-teacher and I decided to change our final research product  from a traditional paper to a shorter, more specific wiki entry. This week, we actually got to see the kids using the wiki and are starting to identify positives and challenges of the process for our freshmen.  I’m just going to brainstorm these things below as part of my reflection on the learning element.

- Lab Help –> When we were doing explicit teaching about how to use the pbwiki the 2:30 teacher:student ratio was not a problem.  When we asked the students to start trying things out, however, it became difficult to provide the students with the help they needed in posting, linking, formatting, simply using word, etc.  Theresa and I felt like meeting their needs in the time available was frazzling, and our attempts were not really helpful to the students.

- Citations –> Though I feel like I am beating the dead horse of plagiarism, the issue of citations seems even more important in this wiki format.  I hope that it seems more important to the students as well, and I think that the public nature of the wiki is going to help prevent them from posting without internal and end citations… Asking them to use the hyperlinking function will hopefully help.

- Appropriate use –> Fingers crossed, a simple explanation of appropriate use/behavior seems to have worked – that, and telling the kids that we can see who posted what and when.

-Creating usernames & passwords –> We used pbwiki’s option to create the usernames and passwords for all of our students rather than link them to their email addresses because not all of the students have email, and because we didn’t really want to link it to their personal accounts.  We were able to assign their school network passwords to their pbwiki usernames.  This is good.

- More on this later.

Okay, this post probably belongs a few weeks back, but I am a little fired up right now.

This week, there have been a series of small events that reminded me of the cultural exclusion I witnessed and felt during my under-grad work.  I attended Calvin College, a small, liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  The school is touted as a rigorous center of Christian scholarship rooted in the reformed tradition.  From what I read before attending, and since, the school has a good academic reputation.  Culturally, the college community consists of Dutch, Christian Reformed students- at least, the majority of students come from this background.  Personally, as a United Methodist with an Irish Catholic family and a public school diploma, I felt excluded both socially and academically.  Most of this exclusion  was a result of my own lack of cultural knowledge specific to this small ethnic (?) and religious community.

Over the past year and a half, the college has been dealing with the controversial decision to remove a professor from tenure track because of her unwillingness to worship with an acceptable CRC congregation.  Professor Denise Isom was, ironically, first connected to Calvin through a graduate study fellowship that was “designed to enhance the recruitment of ethnic minority persons to the college faculty.”  Once hired and working at Calvin, Professor Isom was bound to a requirement that college faculty attend a church in “ecclesiastical fellowship” with the Christian Reformed denomination.  As related in the Christianity Today article entitled “Values Clash,”  Isom requested that the college allow her to worship at an African American, Baptist church because she needed, “a place of worship that is already consistent with my culture and able to grapple with issues of race in ways which make it a respite, a re-charging and growing place for me, as opposed to another location where I must ‘work’ and where I am ‘other.’”  The college denied Isom’s request, and removed her from tenure track.  Professor Isom and two other education professors resigned because of the college’s decision (Prof quits Calvin...).

This week, I received the college’s alumni publication, The Spark, in the mail.  This spring’s letters to the editor included comments from a 1994 graduate who stated:

“Of course I hope we can strive to welcome those students and faculty from other faiths and other ethnic backgrounds, but the bottom line is, if you come to Calvin, you are knowingly choosing a distinctively Dutch, Reformed education and environment. And, when you choose to teach here, you are choosing to teach in a Reformed, Dutch community with ALL of its values, requirements and even guidelines regarding church membership. I’m afraid too many of us are trying to make Calvin into something that fits our current needs and neglect to see it as a college with a rich, well-defined heritage holding a unique position in a post-modern society which seems to cater to a morally relativistic worldview. Ideally, people choose Calvin College because they agree with its worldview. There are plenty of state colleges that have no requirements. We are not Baptist. We are not Lutheran. We are not Catholic. We are not publicly funded. We can do our best to make it a welcoming atmosphere for anyone, but let’s not compromise or be embarrassed by who we are.”

This attitude, expressed by a Dutch-American, Michigan resident, will likely be applauded in many of the homes receiving The Spark this week.  Professor Isom, it seems, is the fool for having dared to find encouragement from the graduate fellowship she received in 2003.  I, too, feel chastised by Mrs. Peterman’s comments.  In her estimation, I should have known I would be alienated when I chose to attend Calvin as white, eighteen year old looking for an academically challenging school that also offered Christian community.  Unfortunately, the cultural background of a statistically small majority has brought about a feeling of exclusion among the number of students and faculty the school has managed to attract in its concerted efforts to diversify.  When it comes down to it, they wouldn’t want to be embarassed by who we are.

What a broad topic to examine this week… with the election and inauguration, I have been thinking a lot about regular civic engagement in my own life.  I am unsure of how this goal of regular civic engagement can best be incorporated into the classroom.

Teaching American Literature has provided me with the opportunity to look at both historical and literary figures and their relationships with American culture.  We try to use the relationship between and individual and society as the theme for our class.  I feel comfortable doing this.  What I am unsure of is how to effectively move this examination from literary figures to the students in my classroom.  Beyond talking about it,  what activities can I be doing that encourage students increase their level of student involvement?  The article I read for this week’s wiki work advocated a change in institutional practice that would make service learning a progressive program that had both curricular and community connections.  Without the power to make such institutional changes, where does that leave me?

I suppose I could incorporate some of these ideas into the “applying creatively” activities in various units.  When we were working on our placemats for last semester’s course, our unit plan to teach Night culminated in a project that asked students to inform their community about genocide in today’s world. I hope that getting more practice with the learning by design format will allow me to get better at incorporating community involvement into my classes no matter what kind of civic education provided by the school system as a whole.

I appreciate the opportunity to look at both the institutional and individual aspects of this issue.  Thanks for your time!

The Lincoln Memorial 1/20/09

As I mentioned earlier, I traveled to DC last week to attend the presidential inauguration.  I was fortunate enough to stay with some great friends from high school and to celebrate the change in power with others who had also contributed time and resources to the campaign.  I feel blessed to have been able to make the trip and witness the incredible mass of people united there.

Hi all,

This blog post comes to you late because of my trip to DC for the inauguration of President Obama.  More on that later.  In reading about the changing shape of work, particularly about companies like Google, Microsoft, and NetApp, I have been challenged to see how the experiences and relationships developed in my classroom might be preparing students to participate successfully in companies like these.  If I view myself in a management position, I am struggling to figure out how I can effectively do the things these companies do.  Do I establish a culture of trust in my classroom?  I hope so.  Do I reward the best?  Do I value the contributions of my students and respect their diversity?  Again, I hope so.  What I am unsure of, however, is if I am doing a good job making these types of things transparent in the classroom.  That is, can the students see the value of these things in the classroom beyond this semester?  I suppose this is the struggle that I also go through with content and content specific skills.  Where is the relevance in their lives when their perspective is limited to their experiences as students?  Do I need to try to explicitly connect their experiences in my classroom to their future as workers? Or are the experiences in and of themselves enough for now?

In addition to these questions, I have been thinking about how my educational experiences have shaped my own concept of work.  As an alum of the high school where I currently teach, I have realized just how much people tend to be limited by their own educational experiences when envisioning the ideal learning environment – myself included.  I tend to think, “well, when I was in high school, we did it this way… why did it change?”   On the other hand, I feel a greater investment in my school and perhaps a stronger connection to my administration because I knew many of them while I was a student.  This allows me to feel like my contributions are valued and taken into account more so than some of my less invested colleaugues.

I look forward to reading your thoughts about this topic and hearing the discussion I missed last week.  Thanks for your time.