"It's a Sin to Waste Teacher's Time"

     

Tanny's other book is Comprehension Connections

     You know it will be a good inservice when the presenter starts with that rule!  And trust me, she DID NOT waste my time!  Tanny McGregor was worth the entire time I put in watching her!  Let me tell you a little about who she is and what she shared!

      Tanny McGregor is a Heinemann author who was invited to my district by our AWESOME representatives, Trudy and Nancy!  And, to make it even better, it was a FREE event for us!  She is a keynote speaker and workshop presenter who focuses on metacognition!  I have been a firm believer in metacognition for about 15 years now.  I've read Mosaic of Thought and been a fan of Strategies that Work!  I was totally into the idea of seeing this presentation and it was worth every moment of my time!  

      Her presentation was entitled "The Transforming Power of Reflective Thinking", another thing I've really renewed my interest in since reading Learn Like a Pirate! The nice thing about Tanny's presentation is she focused on the THINKING aspects of reflecting. Teaching this skill is key to developing the comprehension of our students in ANY area!  She shared an example from recent research by Hattie and Marzano.  John Hattie's research says that metacognition is the 14th most important strategy to improve students learning out of 138 strategies!  That's a good place to be!  In Marzano's research, he calls metacognition the "mission control" of learning!  Tanny says it makes the student more "brilliant" than others.  Not the self-named brilliant, but the shining, thinking, wonderful brilliant that we want our students to be!  I like that!!  

       She also talked a bit about what kills our ability to really teach metacognition-mandates, strict standards, expectations, kids schedules that are filled with "other", and TIME!  All of these things rob us of what we used to do naturally in a classroom, which used to make the kids think deeply and "brilliantly" because we could take that time.  This was my last year.  I felt robbed by all of these things, robbed from teaching my students what they needed.  I promised myself this year that it wouldn't happen-and I'm keeping that promise!  Even more so now that I've heard it from Tanny! 

       She also reminded us to carefully examine our texts before teaching.  Do you remember a time where you felt like you can do that?  That you could really plan out materials and create those awesome lessons that lasted long enough to get good thinking!  She reminded us to do that because if not, you, the teacher are missing connections you can't get back!  The first read of a text is so important!  That's where you make the discoveries that you teach from, that you build from!  We need to slow down, just like the students do, not just in teaching, but in our planning.  I was so happy to hear her point this out-it's what I've been doing this year, slowing down.  I've also been doing her next point-Make it your own!  Take time, as a teacher, to create a system that works for you.  Use the spaces in your manuals, (which, I hate) the WHITE SPACES as my own! She recommends that students come up with their own coding systems, to make it their own and build their knowledge based on something they understand!  I say, let's take this back in our own planning, our own learning, our own classrooms and build thinking, brilliant students who do the same!  

       The final thoughts I would like to share from this awesome inservice are research findings that are the most current.  Tanny shared that the two most important findings are:

1.  Deceleration trumps acceleration:  This doesn't mean slow down a novel to the point of boring.  It means slow down your reading and teaching.  We need to make our teaching and learning mindful about reflection on what we've read and learned.  This means we need to stop the rush of learning and step back into quality! Standards won't be mastered if students can't think!  Period!

2.  Spacing is more effective than cramming:  YES!  Little things matter, like turning and talking, drawing about their reading, and anything that makes them reflect!  Tanny clearly said, "STOP thinking, "If I have time..."  We need to make the time!  The gains students will make by thinking trump the cramming of curriculum down their throats!  The following statement pretty much sums it up, "It helps at our heart level!"  Because, you see, if you don't read and take it from their head to their heart (18" problem as she calls it!) you won't improve their comprehension!  

       So, let's step out and make a "conscious choice in our lesson plans" and stop cramming and spamming them with useless materials that aren't making it the 18" it needs to go!  And let's thank Tanny for the research behind this choice!  (Trudy and Nancy-we owe you so much for this opportunity too!  Thank you will never be enough!)

P.S.  I'm looking forward to diving into her information on Genre Connections!  So blessed to have WON it at the presentation because Heinemann ROCKS!

Going Blind!

And Trusting Myself!

A Page of My Crazy!  

Today I did something that some might thing is just crazy!  I went into my observation blind!  Yes, that’s right!  So, here’s what I mean.

            Our district has changed over to the Danielson Model.  We have had very little training and very little time to figure anything out.  Our administrators are learning on the fly, just like us.  Just like us, there is no real time to become experts at it.  Just. Like. Us. I have always said I could never be an administrator, but in this time in education, that’s more than a fact then ever!  Some days, I question…well, I won’t go there!  I know you know what that question is!  On top of all this, we are also completing the “free” version of Danielson.  What that translates to is LONNNNNG.  Very, very LONNNNNNNNNNGGGGG!  Now, let’s back up to what I did for prep work!

Prep Work:  I am very lucky to have a very good friend who thinks like me, who brainstorms like me, and who will just, point blank, tell me what I wrote is crap or is great!  I am very thankful for this friend.  We survived National Boards together at my kitchen table, Saturday after Saturday, while my husband took care of the kids and allowed us to do our crazy work.  I honestly never thought we would be pulling this type of shift again-but it has come-thank you Danielson (sarcasm intended!) 

            Over the course of two Saturdays (thank you flu for making it two instead of three!) we meet at my friend’s house.  I have to say, I am so thankful for the view of horses and open fields to take my mind off the brain numbing effects of repeated questions worded another way.  We spent the first Saturday working through Domain 4.  It wasn’t too bad.  It felt similar to National Boards in many ways.  You learn the tricks and techniques to answer these questions by finding every tool possible to guide you.  We found a decent tool and are hoping for the best.  The second Saturday, we worked on Domain 1 and our lesson plans.  We conquered the plans first-no problem!  Then…oh the THEN!  Can I just tell you that Domain 1 is, well, Domain 1!  Hours later, we still are not sure exactly what is right and what is wrong! We tried our best and are hoping for the best! 

14 hours to be exact!  FOURTEEN HOURS!  The only way to emphasis this was by typing it out!  I have now heard everything from 6 to 21 HOURS of time!  Time is a precious commodity to a teacher today.  There are many things I could do for my family, for my students, or for my class in those 14 hours worth of time.  Have I learned from it-to be honest NO!   No, I haven’t learned from the written response.  I have not seen things differently or in an enlightened way.  That’s what National Boards did.  This was, well, 14 hours of MY time!  Time that is precious and could be used for more then this craziness!  (Please allow me the favor of this moment!  I don’t complain very often and this is my opportunity!)  So, here we go with Going Blind!

Going Blind:  We were told to go through and read Domain 2 and 3 and be sure to cover them as best we could.  I refused to do it.  I honestly did and here’s why-it’s the ONLY way I will get better!   Truth right there!  I could have taken time to go through them, change things in my room, fix things all pretty, plan according to the rubric, and go nuts in general!  But what would that teach me?  What would that show me about my teaching?  How can I get real feedback and improve?  So I went in BLIND!  I taught the way I would have taught this lesson if my administrators hadn’t been in there.  I did do some “extras”-I made my chart pretty, I had my post-its ready, I did some pre-finishing work, like getting my pretty Marzano rubric up instead of my chart paper one.  But I didn’t go crazy and make everything perfect, so I could learn! 

How I Plan to Learn this System! 

Now, I am also not one to sit back and let the good times roll.  What I did do is VIDEO TAPED my lesson!  Here is my “mad” idea.  I will now go and print off the rubrics and watch my video.  I will assess myself (just like we ask the kids to do).  I will find positives and negatives to my teaching and my classroom so that when I go into my post observation I am well aware of just what occurred and where growth can be made.  Most importantly, I WILL LEARN!  I will learn what I do successfully!  I will learn what I can work on!   I will learn what DOK Levels my lesson really hit!  IT WILL BE OF VALUE TO ME!  That’s what I want from this.  Deep down, my administrators are NOT who I am working for-it is my students.  If I don’t learn what I am doing well, what I can work on, and what I can increase or decrease, what does it matter!  In many ways, it is my protest to this whole crazy educational time we are in!  It is my rebel side poking out its head and saying, “I am worth more than this!”  Crazy, I know, but I want to LEARN over and over who I am as a teacher, who I should move forward to be, without the dog and pony show of meeting the expectations to score high and be great!  I want to be that teacher that doesn’t have to, that it just comes naturally as a part of who I am!  So, go blind everyone!  Do this thing to be the natural you! 

Good Luck! My post observation is next week-let’s see how I feel then! 

            

Looking, and Finding, the Answer to Conceptual Grading

About 3 weeks ago, we had an inservice at our school that answered my question, finally!  Or, at least in my mind, it did!  I’ve been having this ongoing conversation about what conceptual grading looks like and acts like, with many questions still lingering. One of the lingering questions was, “How does this look for each skill?”  I mean, I had examined my practice and figured out what I was doing, but I couldn’t pin it down for EACH SKILL!  Then, bam, the inservice hit!

So, here’s what went down!  Our district is still looking at training intermediate teachers in Common Core.  This particular inservice dealt with how to determine the success of a student based on learning ladders and continuums.  At first, I was skeptical.  I had never heard of either, and I’m out there a lot!  I pin, I read blogs, I follow multiple teachers on Facebook, I’m out there!  We discussed the rigor and the purpose, and that’s when I began to believe.  The purpose behind a ladder or continuum is to:

1.     Establish the clear and concise expectations for a skill.  During our inservice, it was support for the text. 

2.     To provide a clear and concise example of the expectation to the students. 

3.     And, if determined ahead, to provide a starting point for evaluating a student on the skill to be taught over a period of time. 

It was like hitting the mother load!   I started to see the realities of what could be done with a tool like this!  I saw the connection between these tools and Marzano’s Rubric for Learning.  This is what I’ve been searching for!  Can you tell I’m excited!!??

            How would this look in a classroom setting was my next thought-bam, answer provided!  There was a cool video about how to work with them.  The teacher had a small group of students with her and they had provided answers to a question she had asked in class on a post-it.  The kids then shared their answers and worked with one another on the continuum.  They had to agree on the placement with each other before the post-it could go on the continuum.  My thought, “I could TOTALLY do this!”  I completely believe that if you are going to teach a child how to do something, they need to know how to self-evaluate to be successful.  Many children do not go through elementary being able to do this very thing.  They have only been shown what teachers think of their work, and that is how they answer questions-to provide what the teacher wants.  Many of the open-ended questions we ask have multiple answers with none of them being wrong.  We need to be sure we begin to support our students in the skill of self-evaluation!  It is, after all, a life skill. 

            Now, to get to the transition from inservice, to classroom use.  During the inservice, I had already targeted a skill-author’s purpose.  My teaching partner and I had determined through assessments that students really only “got” author’s purpose on the very basic level- to entertain, inform, or persuade.  They did not, and, as the case is, many cannot get it on a conceptual level.  From this need of conceptual understanding, I developed a power point about Roald Dahl.  Here is a page from it.

Through this power point, we targeted Author’s Perception, the deeper part of author’s purpose.  As you research this, you will discover that the two are very separate, but are placed under the title of author’s purpose.  Our goal with the power point was to show them how important an author’s life and understandings are to the text.  Here is another example:

Roald Dahl was Charlie in so many ways, and that’s what this slide represents.  Imagine having the President of Cadbury bring you chocolates to try!  How would that torture you through your entire life!  How did Charlie feel about chocolate?  That’s a pretty good example of the perspective Roald Dahl brings to the text, isn’t it!

The kids were really getting it!  They could see, with their own background knowledge of the text from the movie, that this was important stuff! 

            Next, to bring a deeper thought development to the process, we assigned a thinking map!  Thinking maps are used to help kids use their own thought processes to develop understanding.  By not giving too much information or requirements, you can begin to see the child’s understanding emerge, or not. Each time they read, they can add to their understanding.  The more they share, again, the more understanding, or lack of it, comes forth. To be honest, I have some struggling readers making some deep insight into author’s purpose because of this.  I have some stronger readers with fewer insights.  It is my plan to go back to these and really examine them to determine who needs additional practice and who may, simply, need to learn how to transfer their thinking to question format. 

            After starting this process, I introduced the Author’s Purpose continuum. 

This is in kid friendly language.  I shared what each level looked and sounded like.  Then I let the kids get to work using one of the characters from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Then I let them work with their team to decide what level of author’s purpose they were on.  I was amazed to see them bring points out about each entry and how they felt each other did.  It showed up in two ways- in their oral discussion and in their reading journal entries. 

For the entry, I had them put their post-it in their journal, record what their team said, and, then, I responded with what I thought.  Most were right on!  The next step is to do this activity. 

The students will write in their reading journal “how” to get to a higher level on the continuum.  From this experience I discovered that most kids want to write about the “who” of a character.  Who they are, what they do, etc.   Author’s purpose is really more about they “why”-why the author included them, why the author made them behave a certain way, why did the outcome occur. This is where the impact is. 

I am really excited to see where we go with this study.  I will share more as we go.  If you have any great ideas for author’s purpose, I’d love to hear about them.  Feel free to leave me a comment or a website that you have had success with!

Thinking Through Conceptual Grading

            Wow, it’s been a while.  Not because I’ve been busy, which I have, but because I don’t know where to start or even go with this one-so, I’m just writing to see where it “goes”. 

            All right, I’ve been reflecting more on conceptual development and RTI.  I started to pay attention to what I do while I am grading.  Most of the following will pertain to written response.  First, I noticed that when I am grading a concept, I develop a list of criteria FOR EACH QUESTION!  Yes, each, individual question has it’s own list of correct pieces of information that belong within it.  Maybe that’s why I dread grading this type of question so much.  It takes a lot of work to develop those ideas and to fully be prepared to know what should fit and shouldn’t.  And with concepts, it’s deeper thinking.  Kids can totally surprise you too, providing deep thinking that you may not even have thought about!  That’s when you begin to really wonder if you hit it right.  But, isn’t that the joy of concepts-you can be taken by surprise!  Ok, back on track. 

            Once each question has an answer developed, then I’m ready to grade.  Where did I get the grade?  Do I just give points? Do I base them on a set of criteria from research?  Do I use a national or state standard?  That’s where it becomes difficult.  State standards no longer exist for written response in Florida.   We haven’t transferred totally to Common Core and, frankly, their rubric is poor at best (PARCC).  That led to looking back at the past and combining it with research.

            Let’s start with RESEARCH!  Oh, yes I am!  And, get ready……Marzano!  Oh, I know, his name is the dread of most teachers everywhere!  Can I tell you, that’s a mistake of every inservice given by someone who hasn’t really understood who and what he did-including me. I had to give one of those lovely inservices once, and I thought I knew something.  Then I actually read some of his actual books-not papers someone gave me at that dreaded inservice-but a REAL BOOK!  I must say, I think he jumped in my brain and pulled out information to create THE Marzano Academic Rubric!  Now, the original is found in Classroom Instruction that Works by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock, and includes the Effort Rubric (5 stars also in my book!)  I will say, I did jazz the original up a little, changing some of the words and using the combination of some of the parts of the Effort Rubric.  This is now a MUST HAVE in my classroom, and I use it for everything!  Since this is a “write it out as I go with no idea of where I was going”, I don’t have a picture.  (I will, however, post it to my Facebook page tomorrow-my shameless plug to push the new, shiny button on the top of the page that says “Like me on Facebook!”)

            Now, let’s look at the old. I must say, the state of Florida did something right a number of years ago.  Back then, students had write to respond answers on their state test that were scored on a 4 or 2 point rubric, depending on the weight of the question.  Here are the two rubrics (Thanks to FCIT for not deleting old material that is still valuable!):

Notice, they are very nonspecific, yet specific! I know that makes no sense. What I mean by that is that they can be applied to any of the conceptual skills that are presented within a written response.  They are, actually, in a format that teachers use within our own thinking!  And, if only I had a picture to compare, they are also very Marzano before Marzano became a thing. These are from the late 90’s, if my memory serves me right!  Once upon a time, long ago, this state did it right. 

           

At this point, I feel like I have an answer to my question, as strange as that feels.  However, it opens twenty more.  Here are a few:

1.  What does this look like for multiple choice?

2.   If kids can write a response, but not pick the same

      response from a list, why is that?

3.  How do you actually transfer an ideas they can write about

     to finding one in the list?

4.  Which is easier?  Which is harder?

5.  What do we do for kids who are being RTI’d because they

     are behind and can’t conceptualize?

6.  How do we close that gap successfully-to the point that it 

     is REAL and not for a test?

Oh, I could go on.  Isn’t that what this crazy thing we call education is all about? To explore these concepts to better student understanding?  I will continue to keep track in my mind things that I notice.  In the mean time, I tried something out that I wouldn’t mind others trying out too!  I created a multiple choice style test for two articles from Time for Kids.  I’m going to offer it for FREE with the hopes that:

1.     It will work for you

2.     I will create more! 

The articles are “They’re Back” and “What’s for Lunch?”  Both of the links to the articles are found in the document.  It is your job to figure out how to get the articles in the kids’ hands-computer, print and share, project, or any other way you can. (I printed them and, once cut down, they can actually fit on one sheet of copy paper!)  If you use it, let me know what you think! 

Have a great week,