Totally cool conversation today with my Cyber Security class. They are coming to a consensus on a grade for me to put in the grade book today. The students are picking one of the standards for the course to work toward. At the moment, they do not have fully completed work to support any particular standard, but they have been laying the ground work to support their eventual mastery (their words, not mine). The students are working right now to define the learning goal they are wanting graded, a rubric to evaluate the work, evidence from each student, and a proposed grade based on the evidence. At the moment, all I can say is WOW.
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This week, I took a big leap with my classes. I am giving them control of the course. I've laid out the Challenges for them because they were pre-set prior to the year and other parties are depending on them. These challenges are not just "cool projects" that I will grade and then we put it away. These are actual needs that are in our community or program. Past the fact that they need to solve a problem for someone else through their work this year, I gave up the method of solving it to the class. They will determine everything from deliverable dates, grades, rubrics, even the details of what and how any lessons take place. When I announced it, one of the students looked at me a little worried. He said, "wow, that's scary." I know. I'm a little scared to. I know it will be great for them, but it's hard to give up control like that. To give the students a frame of reference so they can start off in a positive direction, they are treating this adventure as if they are starting their own company. In essence, the class is imagining that they have just decided to start a consulting firm. They have clients that they are completing projects for, and they have stockholders that they have to answer to as well. The clients are the people who are receiving the final products from their project challenges. The stockholders are our administration and school district. In the end, they must complete the projects professionally, on time, and with the highest quality. For the district, they must demonstrate that each and every member of the team (class) has mastered all of the state standards for the course and any other district requirements such as industry certifications. We started out using a deck of discussion cards from MethodKit. For this exercise, It makes sense that I am using the "MethodKit for Startups" pack at this point. At its core, learning is messy and non-linear. Not every learner grasps a new concept at the same time, nor in the same way. Regardless of the learning styles or requirements, all learners need feedback and reflection for learning to take place. The feedback a teacher gives is crucial for the formation and reinforcement of the neural pathways necessary to sustain long-term retention. After all, the goal of education is not holding on to a piece of information only long enough to pass tomorrow’s exam. The primary goal of educators is learners to develop long-term retention and application of information. If education took place in a vacuum, then feedback, reflection, and time are all we would need. But there are more players involved than just the educator and learner. Parents, the community, other teachers, other schools, and future employers all have a role to play as well. The core course content is not the only aspect of learning an educator should be concerned with. Assessing and giving feedback on other skills such as time management and ethics is just as important. These other skills give context and applicability to the core concepts a student learns. I heard a story years ago about two business owners discussing a “Jeopardy” winner. Granted, the story is probably apocryphal, but it does illustrate the point. One owner turned to the other asking “How much would you pay someone like that to work for you?” The second owner replied, “About $500 total. That’s what a good set of encyclopedias costs. I can look up all that information myself. What I care about is what he can do with the information.” What people can do with information and how they work have gone by different names over the years. We are all familiar with the terms, “soft skills”, “employability skills,” “21st century skills,” and such. Bringing in context and these other skills helps in the learning process and does more to prepare learners than just memorizing the periodic table of elements. In 2016, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) released a new set of learner and educator standards. The goal of these standards is to help develop future ready learners. The ISTE Standards for Students cover seven strands: Empowered Learner, Digital Citizen, Knowledge Constructor, Innovative Designer, Computational Thinker, Creative Communicator, and Global Collaborator. As an example, let’s look at 7c under Global Collaborator. The indicator states, “Students contribute constructively to project teams, assuming various roles and responsibilities to work effectively toward a common goal.” The ISTE Standards for Students website even gives a detailed definition of “contribute constructively.” It states, “Facilitate or engage in collegial feedback, manage timelines and scope of project, engage team decision making, contribute in ways that are manageable.” These are not content specific, but instead focus on the skills necessary to develop the soft skills we are looking for. I have embedded these standards into my classroom alongside my content standards as a way to better communicate these “soft” skills separately. In any project we undertake, the learners are provided with checkpoints that I call deliverables. The term puts in the learner’s mind that they have to create and produce something by this point. I prefer to give them clear goals. After all, a student can only hit a target they can see and that doesn’t change. In each of these deliverables, I am assessing their progress, and in these assessments, students get feedback. I have learned that the engagement and progress of the student are fostered by giving specific feedback without a grade regardless of how well or how poorly they do. If I am giving quality, timely, and consistent feedback, then the final grades and report cards are a forgone conclusion. I can say this because we continually work toward mastery of all of the skills and knowledge related to the deliverables and the project. If a student has made errors or otherwise not shown mastery yet, we work together to move toward being successful. I don’t answer everything for them, but I do guide them toward their destination. For example, instead of pointing out that multiplication was used instead of division, I point out the problem with the error and work the learner to figure out what is wrong. My goal is that the learner questions their work and discovers the error. The learning is much deeper now and As Rick Wormeli often says, “The one who edits is the one who learns.” Grades have a sense of finality to them. When I give a grade, the learner takes it as the final word on the worth of their work. I have a standing policy of allowing learners to rework assignments until they are satisfied. In the past, when I gave a grade in addition to the feedback, learners usually chose to just take the grade. In most cases, the only students who redid their work on their own were those looking for an A in the class. The learning tended to be secondary to their Grade Point Average (GPA). For work that was below the minimum standards, I would give feedback but refused to give a grade on it yet. ‘Yet’ is the operative word. The learner would redo their work and I would grade it without penalty. I was concerned with their learning, not in punishing them. It took a while for me to realize that I should be doing this with everyone. When I only give feedback, but no grades, learners keep working until they feel they have gone as far as they are able or willing. In most instances, they keep going back to the work until it meets the highest expectations. Sometimes, they make a decision based on available time in the project to move on. Regardless, the student has taken ownership of the learning, not me. When scores are removed from the feedback loop, learning takes precedence over grades (Wormeli, 2006). As the project advances toward the final product, it is clear where the learners are in regards to the mastery of the course content. Along the way, these frequent deliverables and reinforcements guide them through developing the necessary soft skills necessary. It doesn’t do any good to look back after a project and do a “post mortem.” The damage has already been done and they are not able to recover. By having shorter timelines for deliverables, frequent team meetings, and peer evaluations during the project, I am able to help correct problems in the soft skills and allow the learners to recover. After all, giving a 0 and labeling a student a failure doesn’t teach responsibility or time management. It only reinforces negative perceptions and behaviors. Helping a student recover and get back on track toward the successful completion of the project does teach these valuable life lessons (Wormeli, 2006). We have a saying in my classroom, “Be trusting and trustworthy.” This doesn’t happen by accident. I am very deliberate in helping learners overcome obstacles and develop the necessary skills to work in a global, collaborative environment. Rubrics are very important, but should not be a crutch. Many times, I see rubrics that are lists of finite details to include. The rubric becomes little more than a checklist to get a particular grade. Rubrics should be guides to help students form their learning. I have included a couple of example lines from some of our rubrics below. The criteria describe what is expected of the learner, but does not tell them how to do it, allowing for the learners to explore and be creative. Every year, I have learners who ask me to just “cut to the chase” and tell them exactly what to do. In each instance, I explain that until they do the work they think is correct, I am not sure where they are in their learning. I can’t read their mind, but I can give them feedback on their work. When they give me their deliverable, I know where they are coming from and then we can have a dialog about where they need to go next. It always starts off slow, but the pace picks up quickly over the course of the year. Each year, I have students who have a history of being late with assignments or not even turning them in. They are used to having the date pass, getting a zero or reduced grade and moving on. I don’t allow it. They are responsible for the deliverable and we work together until they get it done. We stay in touch with each other about the progress on their work. When they do finally get the work turned in, they are able to receive full credit for everything. I don’t like to use grades as punishment. It’s ineffective (Reeves, 2004). The real punishment comes from the pressure that mounts. As the project continues, the work we are doing will move on. There may be lessons happening or other activities to complete. Until the first missing assignment has been satisfactorily completed, I will not give any grades at all. I will give feedback on the work being done, but I will not give them a grade for any of it yet. At this time, it is important to call home to let parents know what is going on and why it is important for their child’s learning. I have to do a lot of explaining that I care about their learning. I reassure the parents that their child will get all of the credit they earn for the work when it is completed. There is a lot of power in explaining to parents that their child is learning responsibility by fixing their errors and learning to be successful in their work. Over time, the students realize that they cannot get out of doing the work and doing it correctly. They develop the mindset to just get it done right the first time. By adding in clear standards, such as the ISTE Standards for Students to my content, I have been able to clearly identify, assess, and improve the performance of the learner as well as their acquisition and retention of knowledge. Throughout the year, this does not take away from “content time”. In fact, it has the opposite effect. Expectations such as timeliness, collaboration, and digital citizenship are clear and their application within the classroom is beneficial. Once the standards have been identified and communicated, the work begins. Having frequent, short deliverables accomplishes several goals. First, it leverages the understanding that the teenage brain is underdeveloped in regards to higher order thinking, such as time management and risk. These short deadlines basically save the students from themselves. Secondly, the learner and I both know where they are in their learning at all times. There are no surprises. Additionally, I am able to speed up the recovery cycle when they inevitably fall short. When the student is unsuccessful and recovers to the point of success, they learn resilience. If I have been giving clear and direct feedback and holding the learner accountable to satisfactorily complete all of the work, then by then end of the project, we know what the learner has mastered. At the same time, we have been able to develop and assess future-ready skills as well. Bibliography ISTE. (2017, March 1). ISTE Standards for Students. Retrieved August 7, 2017, from ISTE: https://www.iste.org/standards/standards/for-students Reeves, D. B. (2004, December). The Case Against the Zero. Phi Delta Kappan, 324-325. Wormeli, R. (2006). Accountability: Teaching Through Assessment and Feedback, not Grading. American Secondary Education, 34(3), 14-27. My classes finished unpacking the standards related to their upcoming project. I am very proud of the work they did. The insight and responsibility shown is impressive. Before we began, I narrowed the scope for the learners. They have never done this before, so sifting through all of the standards was going to be too hard for now. I decided to scaffold it and select relevant standards fort them. To start with, each team was given a single standard from either the state standards for the course or the ISTE Standards for Students. Each team accessed a shared Google Doc that allowed them to input their responses and see what the other teams are working on as well. I took pieces from several places to put this together for the students. These are the instructions I gave them.
For any standard to be completed and accepted, we had to have 100% agreement with all students in both classes. This took some work. Inside one class it was easy enough. A show of hands would do it. If someone had any issue at all, they were allowed to speak and say what they had to say. Every voice is important. Very rarely was something brought up that did not make it into the final document. Once one class approved it, the next class had to approve it as well. It took several days, but we got everyone through the process. Over and over, the discussion focused on if the class felt the targets were clear, completely addressed the standard, and every student could be assessed by it in the upcoming project. The final document is attached below. With this, we are about to start writing the rubrics now. I'm very excited. It is rare that learners get the opportunity to have this much input into their learning. They are very excited because they know that they should do well on the project and truly learn what they should. There is no doubt because the learners are setting the target and setting how it will be evaluated. There is clarity for everyone. While this did take several hours of valuable project time, I feel that we actually gained time in the process. The learners really took a hard look at what the standards mean and what they need to do to show mastery. In that, they have already started learning at a depth that no lecture, report, or homework assignment can reach. Next stop, the rubrics...
On the tail of letting my learners write the class policies, I gave them an even larger stake in their learning today. Today, my classes started unpacking the standards in preparation to write their own rubrics. That's not a typo. I am going to let them write the rubrics that I will be using to assess their work in class. To put this all in perspective, I am tired of arguing over interpretations of rubrics and the quality of their work. No matter how many times I stress that my feedback is to help them get better, I still have a number of students who don't see eye to eye with me. I say they still have a way to go and they will dig their heels in saying that they have met the standard and should be allowed to move on. I don't just take what they turn in and that is all there is to it. Learners must meet at least the minimum standards before moving on. I care more about learning than calendars and GPA. For the last several years, I have had a shift in the types of learners coming into my class. For years, if I assigned something for homework, almost every one of them did it and did it correctly. Working with 1 or 2 stragglers was easy and infrequent. That isn't the case now. The numbers in our program have grown to necessitate having two other teachers. The popularity and growth have come with an increase in the number of learners who are not sure why they signed up for the course (sometimes for the fourth year in a row). It has been my mission to reach these particular learners and get them engaged. If they are going to come in my room, they are darned well going to enjoy it, have fun, and learn. All means all. This year, instead of coming up with all of the project directions and rubrics, I am turning the tables. They learners are going to unpack the standards. They are going to determine what it means to "demonstrate responsibility for shared group and individual work tasks," or "complete tasks with the highest standards to ensure quality products and services." Let's not forget "demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property." Every learner will agree to all of the learning targets before moving on. There is no reason for all of us to see eye to eye. Today, I started with my 8th period class. I went over the Unpacking Document. Part of the discussion was looking up the Depth of Knowledge Chart and Blooms Taxonomy. That's right. My engineering students are learning about pedagogy. After explaining the chart, I gave each team a standard to use in relation to the project. Everyone had a different standard. The chart was shared in a Google Doc that they are all working on. Each team creates a new line. As the teams finish, I give them feedback on getting their standard better "unpacked". It is exciting to see them really working on it. Tomorrow, we will finish the standards with the other classes. Everyone will have to come to complete agreement on all of the learning targets before moving on. When we get done unpacking, we'll start diving into the rubrics. I'll keep you posted. Here is a copy of the Unpacking document we are using.
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About me & this blogThis blog is for things related to my class, PL, coaching, or just teaching in general. You can follow me on Twitter @myakSTEM Archives
June 2021
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