I strongly dislike assessments, maybe as much as my students do. Why do we assess? What do we assess? How do we assess? These were three key questions asked in a recent video I watched as I was digging through the innovative ideas of educators around the world on hundrED.org. The video was a presentation called Rethinking Assessment given by Jeff Heyck-William and Pekka Peura largely based on Pekka Peura's work surrounding personalized learning paths.
Pekka Peura describes the problem so many educators face when they follow pacing guides to move through the curriculum. Those who don't get it, still don't get it, and those who are bored stay bored. He created a self assessment tool that students fill out in teams that creates a giant color block for him to look at and decide to whom and what to reteach.
Since I began my quest for a research question, I have decided to narrow it to a specific subject area, most likely math. My latest version is: How can digital feedback loops enhance metacognition in primary students? I am in search of tools that will make providing students with meaningful and easy to digest feedback. Perhaps gamified math programs like DreamBox or ST Math would provide useful information in students' learning journeys. And perhaps posing a self-evaluation set of questions would grow their metacognition. How can the results from these games, lesson activities, and quizzes best be shared with students for them to use it to take their learning to the next level? I have failed at the feedback loop in the past. I tried to put up a chart where students would track their iRead growth under the guise of student number for anonymity. However, this was something I had to manage. Questions arose. How often should I review the data and shift all the student icons? How do I track growth instead of proficiency? How can students move their own icon if the difference between their old and new score is what is to be added to the chart? The whole thing became too complicated. But the idea behind it is still important. Students need to be aware of their own growth to take responsibility for improved decision making. If the data is not available to them and not emphasized, they will most likely ignore thinking about their growth. The feedback loop has to be efficient for the teacher, digestible for the student, and effective so as to produce student growth. Baggio's design suggestions will be important when creating and looking for these tools. When I think about the tools already available for me to measure student growth in math I think of Seesaw, Quizizz, Socrative, Google Forms with data analyzing extensions like Flubaroo, and adaptive math games like FastMath, DreamBox, Prodigy and ST Math. Are there too many tools in the toolbox? Do the tools already cover what I'm asking? I have many questions and I'm already at the end of my course in designing an action research plan. But I know that even as I move into my action research, I will continue to revise...this is part of the "action" part of the research and part of "smart failure." Hopefully that smart failure continues to drive me into the right directions.
5 Comments
"Do something crazy!...and get fired" is a line from the Ted Talk by business educator Eddie Obeng, called "Smart Failure for a Fast Changing World." This phrase can be the result even if the message being spoken is "take risks and be innovative." Obeng brings up the challenging point that when we are problem solving, the solutions we are implementing now are for problems already in the past when new problems have already arisen. How do we get ahead here? His telling line graph shows how the pace of learning is far slower than the pace of change. He states, "it's almost impossible to be certain that what we are going to deliver will fit" and this is what makes deciding on an action research question and plan is so paralyzing. I'm barely understanding the current tools and education world I'm currently sitting in, and now I need to capitalize on all those things to create something that will be useful in our ever changing future! I've shifted my driving question to involve feedback and metacognition. My current belief about the future of the educational world is that it will continue to go in the direction of students being the directors of their own educational paths. My students are limited by their developmental ability to absorb technological and academic information. Each individual also handles responsibility differently but I can envision even second graders having more autonomy and self-monitoring in their learning than what I've allowed for my students in the past. I don't want to place any extra limitations on them because of my own biases for their ability. There are so many amazing tools out there for measuring student growth like Quizizz, iRead, FastMath, Edpuzzle, and Seesaw, among many others, and I want to take advantage of them. The new question that arises for me is, will I be able to easily share these results with my students consistently in a kid friendly way. The upcoming school year is going to bring teaching formats that no one has experienced before. In accordance with where I think the education world is headed, student directed learning, I need to ensure that much of the responsibility in this feedback loop is held by students, otherwise I might find I've bitten off more than I can chew. Since teachers are still in the deep void of the unknown with regards to the 2020-2021 school year's teaching and learning setting, if we do go back to the classroom, I would like to practice some kind of a blended learning format with my students from day one....or perhaps day 2 or 3 after we get to know each other...I want to prepare them to be flexible and resilient in the light of inevitable change. With blended learning, my hope is that students would be used to getting much of their input and practice via digital tools and I would be able to implement intervention in small groups for the majority of the day. My mind immediately goes to possible failures. Where will I find the time to prepare these digital lessons and activities? Will I need to ask my administrator for flexibility in my schedule? This affects other teachers. How digitally prepared are incoming 1st graders? Will I drown in a mess of digital data (so many posts to approve in Seesaw!). But, like Obeng iterates, we should be proud of our smart failures which should be celebrated. George Couros shares that sentiment in Innovate Inside the Box, when he shares the New York Times suggestion that we keep a failure resume and track lessons learned. Like Couros says, I hope to intelligently do something crazy and move away from the "comfortable average in pursuit of an unknown better." During the school year I frequently spout off to friends and family about things I feel strongly about in the education world. However, when asked directly this summer to come up with a driving question regarding an issue in education that I feel strongly about and want to research, I've been going in circles and coming up somewhat empty handed. Based on how shaky I feel about young kids and screen time, I knew I wanted to research something regarding technology and young learners. This week, after going down several rabbit holes via Twitter, Angela Watson's podcast (please read or listen to anything by her...amazing), and the George Couros book I'm reading entitled "Innovate Inside the Box," my memory has been sparked regarding one of those passionate topics I spouted off about during this last school year. During distance learning I remember thinking about the convenience of having student work samples stored online. Although I never ended up having to give students grades, I remember thinking how easy the skills feature of Seesaw could make assigning and recording assessments, and how virtually every one of the activities I assigned was available to look at through the assessment lens later. For years, my 2nd grade team and I have struggled with the incongruity of our district trimester pacing on the report card and our curriculum sequencing and provided assessments. We end up having to cut apart assessments and tape various pieces together and often make our own assessments to match the topics of the report card supposedly covered during that trimester. Did I say cut apart and tape together? Is this 1999??? Ever since reading Alfie Khon's ideas about abolishing grades, I've felt strongly that they do more harm than good. Growing up as a homeschooler through elementary school, I never saw a grade but I did receive plenty of feedback from my mom and myself. Why are we spending weeks of student learning time on foreign looking assessments to collect data for grades? Haven't students been working on what I want them to learn all trimester? Shouldn't I already have plenty of data to know how they are doing? And this is where the current version of my driving question comes in: How can creating a routine of formative assessment using online educational tools improve feedback and learning for primary aged students? This also relates to my long time desire to create a self-run classroom. I love routines. I believe they give students a sense of structure as well as free up the teacher's mental bandwidth to be more creative. If I create a routine of weekly formative assessment online, which is really just assignments digitally completed and housed that I can draw on at any time, kids will not only improve their use of these digital tools but hopefully show academic progress as well, developing in effect, better "transliteracy." I'm thinking fluency reads, math facts, online number of the day charts for place value, and periodic peer feedback in writing, which is always a time challenge area for meaningful feedback from me. I feel like some potential challenges here are assessment in the light of distance learning when students would not be in a controlled environment, the time it would take me to create these assessments (what am I going to take off my plate to make room for this?), and the steep learning curve for students as they learn to use the various digital assessment tools....and my own learning curve too! I am returning to the word autodidact...So many of the resources I've been studying continue to point to the importance of developing this quality in those we are teaching as well as ourselves. I am reminded of our journey not so long ago through distance learning and how many of my colleagues, as well as myself at times, were not used to the constant trial and error method needed to master new learning platforms and digital skills. We are living in an ever changing world. As stated by Clark, previously, learning was more based on factual recall and understanding of concepts. Today there are more and more jobs dependent upon procedural and process based knowledge. Personally, I've always appreciated knowing the why and how or procedures, processes, and principles behind the system I'm working in or task I'm doing, even if sometimes my job doesn't specifically require me to have this information. I feel I am better prepared to handle any unexpected situations even though the process of understanding this takes a long time. My students are entering a world in which they will need to be flexible to problem solve in a variety of circumstances. As George Couros asks in Innovate Inside the Box, "do students see the larger purpose in their learning?" or are they simply trying to obtain a quick result? When I conducted an interview with one of my students to help me better fill out my End User Profile, I was surprised to learn of the amount of time my student spends doing self-guided research, mainly via Youtube. He loves bugs and reptiles and desperately wants a pet gecko and already has a worm farm. I was embarrassed to think about all the time I had spent all year trying to load him up with other facts and concepts, and my failing to see all the learning he was doing independently. He already had the skills to find answers and problem solve on his own and I did not necessarily build on these. Likewise, as Couros quotes Simon Sinek, "'working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.'" Looking at the SITE Model Analysis questions I see that my students already have motivation to learn and many interests that fuel that motivation and I simply need to provide the tools and techniques to help them reach their goals. One area I'm struggling in, however, is my love for language and grammar, still knowing how at times it can be a relatively dry subject area for kids. When I think about guiding students to be independent learners in social studies, science, and math, I can almost see it. I am especially trying to understand how technology can aide in this process, in a healthy way, even in the primary classroom. However, my vision gets a little blurry when I think about student motivation and student choice-driven learning projects as they relate to learning parts of speech or correct verb conjugations (Spanish), an area of need I have noted at my school. How can I finagle the dryer facts and concepts of learning language into the more meaningful connection with real world procedures, processes, and principles? I know that tying language into a real world need, which language certainly is, is the key. I'm hoping to learn more tools to motivate students and simulate real world language use to help them see why these seemingly small elements are important instead of random pieces of information they need to memorize. I have been trying to connect the dots between several readings I have recently done. These include, Baggio's The Visual Connection, Clark's Developing Technical Training, A Structured Approach for Developing Classroom and Computer Based Instructional Models, The SITE Model, and Brent Wilson's Broadening Our Foundations for Instructional Design: Four Pillars of Practice. I think that these author's and texts are encouraging their readers to think about the end user of their product, training, research, or instructional design. Ultimately, the goal is to have these end users apply knowledge in the appropriate contexts. When I tried to apply these readings to my particular scenario, I think of my 2nd grade students. When I think about what I ultimately want them to have, I realize I don't want them to "know" new things or simply "have" knowledge, rather, I want them to have the ability to "do" new things. When I'm teaching my students, one of the most powerful things I can do to get their minds into the headspace where I need them to be to learn new content, is for me to connect to their prior knowledge. When I talk about stories that relate to me when I was their age or real life experiences we all share, they immediately have a place of reference from which to begin to build.
There are so many different directions in which I could go with my driving question and research and these articles remind me of so many different scenarios in my classroom that I want to work on and study. For example, context was a huge theme in the readings. One idea I am toying with for my driving question is regarding the educational efficacy of technology use for primary aged children. When I relate this to the importance of context for the learner, I think of a saying my high school teacher told me, which is that your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. Technology in the wrong contexts can wreak havoc on a child's development, but perhaps given the right setting or context, it can lead to great improvement. Another direction I'm interested in heading after much of the reading I've been assigned in courses 702 and 791 is how to create "autodidacts" in the classroom. As the article on the SITE Model states, "In this age of information overload, success depends on an individual's ability to use autodidactic strategies." I have long been intrigued by the power of giving students choice and have heard parents sing the praises of Montessori schools because students have more say about the direction of their own learning. The SITE Model describes the importance of making sure learning goals are in accordance with the learner's underlying values. How can I connect to my students' underlying values to create an atmosphere of intrinsically motivated learners? My mind is swimming...where do I start? When we think about finding problems to solutions, we need to approach our thinking from many angles and examine the questions we are asking. Dervin begs us to remember that human behavior is influenced by context, or time and space. It would be great if all information was concrete and never changing but information only really exists because humans created some kind of understanding, assessment, or standard. Because of this, in research, we need to make sure we study the process of how humans solve problems or bridge gaps/discontinuity they encounter. Only then, can we begin to make some generalizations about how to solve problems.
Baggio, dives specifically into theories surrounding learning and the mind. She turns our attention to the most widely accepted learning paradigm today: constructivism. Constructivism, originally championed by Piaget and Vygotsky, is a learner centered paradigm, where the learner possesses autonomy and a willingness to learn. Here, the instructor takes a back seat, especially in today's world with information so readily available via the internet, and simply helps create the path between the learner and the information. This is in contrast to the previously held notions that the instructor was the main source of information. Baggio shares that learners take in new information primarily via visuals which can be stimulated externally and internally. In working with my students, I know that visualization is key. The hard part is getting and maintaining attention to get students to go on the visualization journey I am leading them to. These visualizations are powerful. I will never forget the way I had to especially encourage imagination instead of external stimuli when I had a student who was visually impaired in my classroom. Ruth Clovin Clark, in Developing Technical Training, warns of a common misconception. Often it's assumed that experts in a particular field are equipped to train others in their expertise. Like Dervin, she teaches how to be more efficient at finding solutions to problems, targeting specific deficiencies. I can relate to being on the receiving end of trainings perhaps not based on previous assessment of staff needs. I know that I often also feel pressure to implement procedures and teach content without first analyzing the needs of my students and then giving myself and my students time for trial and error. The best instruction comes when I find out first, what my students need, and then freely go from there. For a more in-depth look at the key concepts these three authors share, see this document. Two sentences into the chapter, “From the Mind’s Eye of the User: The Sense-Making Qualitative-Quantitative Methodology” on sense-making by Brenda Dervin, I knew I needed to slow it down and look for some tools to make sense of all that sense-making. I opened up my trusty Kami Chrome extension and decided I would use some tools to help me categorize and digest the information. Usually I prefer to use just one yellow highlighter when I annotate but now that I'm studying post-graduate level articles, I decided I should use three highlighter colors. While I began with the idea of using colors to distinguish between main ideas, examples, and key terminology, I didn't stick to a super concrete plan for the colors and after my second day into the article, they ended up turning my pdf file into a colorful spritz of confetti with little rhyme or reason. I was able to relate some of the initial information with things I had briefly learned at some point in the past like differentiating between qualitative and quantitative research. The large focus of the article is on qualitative research and at first it would appear that the author is discouraging us from drawing any conclusions from qualitative research at all. However, after more reading, at least one of the actual purposes of the article seems to be "guidance for framing research questions, (and) for collecting data..." Through sense-making, we can "break with the undergirding assumptions that guide our current system designs which, in turn, mandate our research." In essence, we need to make sure we are looking at questions from all angles or even reevaluate our initial questions. All questions are valid, but if you are asking the wrong questions or even asking the question in a confusing or ineffective way, you won't get the solution you might be looking for. Discontinuity seems to be an important theme in the article but I am still getting my bearings around this topic. From what I understood so far, it is the bridge that humans have to cross when they face a problem or question. Discontinuity pertains to the human "behavior that is internally controlled." Human conditions change frequently in time and space and from human to human. If information has "complete instruction" or "continuity," it is specific to to a certain subset of human conditions. If we are not careful with our questions, we might fail at solving problems. Often people indicate, through rigid surveys or studies that they want something. Sometimes when the request is granted, the system or structure given goes unused because the initial study failed to show "where we might move our systems if we are really to serve people on their terms." The study made users bend to the structure rather than the system or structure bending to the user. The article continually points out how difficult it is to draw conclusions from individual behaviors which are varied and ever changing. But sense-making encourages us to draw conclusions based on human behavior at a "moment in time-space." We can, indeed, study how humans bridge "gaps" they encounter when faced with questions and problems. By making lists and using sequence phrasing, Dervin helped bring my attention to some key interviewing methods such as studies of information needs, studies of satisfactions, studies of images, all of which asks the respondent to focus on a specific experiences or recollections. Other kinds of interviewing methods include the abbreviated time-line interview, the help chain, and message/q-ing. If I had to teach this content to a high schooler, I would first do some yoga and take a long, hot bubble bath. Then, I would preface the whole article with an explanation or a video that demonstrates problems in research or even simple problem solving. By posing a problem or error to students, one can get them thinking in the direction of this article. Research helps us to answer questions and solve problems and by posing some examples, you can set the stage for better understanding the complex article. While the diagrams and visuals in the article are helpful, a video and or tying them to specific examples would be better. Examples that come from situations the high school student can relate to would be most powerful. Perhaps they've already participated in a study that utilizes the methodologies mentioned by Dervin and can relate to being confused by questions, or to looking for solutions to problems on campus or inadequate school structures that are currently in place. I would also teach them to effectively use annotation tools to help them break apart information and remember key ideas. Ideally, there would be a doodle which gives a simplified audio-visual explanation of the main ideas of the article, a little like this one. Technology and Young Learners:
There's one of me and 25 of them during a 6 hour school day with 6+ subjects per day. How do I reach all the needs? The potential for kids to slip through the cracks is huge but I can't let that happen. I feel passionate about prioritizing. How can I zero in on what's most important for each group of students and make sure they don't leave my class without that skill or characteristic? Some would say the use of technology is key in personalizing learning for each student. However, in the primary grades, I personally feel that it is important to strongly limit screen time. Students learn to use technology so quickly when they have a motivation to do so, that I feel they will not fall completely behind if they aren't using computers in their early years. Additionally, there are many studies that show that more screen time negatively affects children's social/emotional development and physical health. During the last two months of distance learning, limiting screen time has become, of course, impossible. How can I utilize new ideas and technological tools to make learning even more personalized and engaging but still limit screen time for young learners? Language: I feel passionately about language. This coupled with my perfectionistic qualities make me a likely, in some people's opinion, language nit picker. I am often surprised by the lack of education teachers and other professionals have when it comes to teaching kids about language and how it works. I see this in both dual immersion Spanish and English classrooms. The common idea seems to be, if some people say it, it's ok. However, I think that as teachers, we hold a huge responsibility when it comes to modeling what is correct and educating about what is incorrect. I don't like explaining away the English language with a simple, "English is just weird and you're going to have to memorize it." If there are reasons behind why we say what we say and write what we write, then I would like to know them so I can share them in my job. My knowledge of English grammar, though nothing extensive or deep, helped me immensely when it came to learning Spanish and a little Finnish. I was able to recognize patterns and draw parallels and noticed many classmates who didn't understand basic components of English grammar who struggled with the altogether new grammatical ideas in a new language. I don't want to apologize to students about the inconsistencies of language, rather, I want to give my students answers and structure so they feel more confident when they go out on a limb to try new phrases and conjugations in Spanish or English. I want them to feel like they have a structure in place already with their first language, to add in new linguistic components or even new languages. Phonics and Spelling: Along with this goes my passion for phonics. The fact that so many children in upper elementary grades and even high school struggle in reading, is an indicator to me that somehow we have been emphasizing the wrong points. So many adults still guess at words based on the initial and final sounds when trying to read an unknown word. I want to give my students strategies to confidently tackle any word they are given with English spelling. Site word reading based on pictures and books with repeated text may get kids to develop fluency but should not be used to measure complete reading growth. A students' knowledge of the basic building blocks of English words, no matter what the context, should be the indicator of their readiness for moving up in their reading. |
Minna NummelinLife-long learner and dual language 2nd grade teacher. Archives
April 2021
Categories |