My article, “Toward “Moral Perfection”: Integrating Judiac Concepts and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” is now available to subscribers of English Journal online. If you are not a subscriber, you may purchase the article here. If you subscribe to the print edition, you should be receiving your copy in the next week or so.
Why We Teach
I think moments like this are why we teach. Make sure you let those who inspired you in your life — teachers, parents, grandparents, whoever they are — actually know how they impacted you. There is no greater gift that you can give a teacher. Having been the recipient of this only on a small scale, I can tell it must be an incredible feeling, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to experience it one day.
More on AYP
I have been following with interest AJC’s education blog Get Schooled today, as Georgia released the results of schools’ performance for AYP. Sometimes the comments on that blog get fairly nasty, which, let’s face it, is entertaining if it isn’t directed at you and takes place on someone else’s blog — I have had to teach myself to try as hard as I can to ignore negative stuff written about me elsewhere or comments in my blog, because I get my feelings hurt too easily — not really a good trait for a blogger if you are trying to incite discussion, is it? 🙂 Anyway, I came across this comment on Get Schooled that really made some wheels in my head turn. Here it is:
I thank my lucky stars every day that we are in our own school system with only one middle and one high school so we do not have to face the transfer chaos that Tucker and Shamrock faced. I am absolutely amazed that Shamrock made AYP after what it went through. Congratulations!!!!! It must be a kick butt school!
When will everyone realize that NCLB is designed to destroy public schools (I am sure that Mr. Liberty is thrilled). First the low performing schools fall… then it is only a matter of time before all schools fail because of taking transfers of gobs and gobs of low performing students and because by 2014 – all measured groups must have 100% meets/exceeds rates.
What will happen when the Walton Highs, Chamblee Middles and Vanderlyn Elementaries of the world don’t make AYP (and they won’t by 2014). Where will those kids transfer? – to private school? – you guessed it! Vouchers here we come. Bush has tried to get vouchers into NCLB for years, but Congress kept dropping it from the bill.
No neighborhood schools, no kids learning and growing with their buddies up the street, no critical thinking, no creativity, no recess, no summer vacation, no arts. Just a bunch of fat kids who play video games alone at home and practice bubbling in sheets with factoid questions all day at school but can’t answer a question requiring anything but the most linear thinking. … and we will just go ahead and hand over our economy to the Indians and Chinese.
Brave New World Indeed.
If you don’t like NCLB, do your darn research and do something about it – quit complaining on these boards and write your politicians. There is a lot of big business power behind NCLB (all the testing and tutoring companies) but they do not have nearly as much money/power as the businesses that used illegal labor – so we still have a chance to turn this ship around – at least at this point.
I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads, “No Child Left Behind… from the folks who brought you the Iraq War.”
…. and I’m a Republican (at least I used to be).
Ugh! This NCLB stuff gets me so burned up I could spit.
My question is, what do you think about what this commenter said?
No AYP for My Former Employer… Again
For the third year in a row, my former school has failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress. It’s a real shame, because there are some good teachers there (if they haven’t all bailed). The administration, unfortunately, doesn’t support the teachers so that they can effectively do their jobs. The constant discipline problems at the school prevent students from learning much of anything. I was once called out on the carpet for having expectations that were too high. Now the students are reaping what the administration has sown. It’s very sad for the students, as Ms. Ris reminded me in my comments last time I was perhaps too smug about the results, when they are zoned for a failing school. Because this is the third year my former school has failed to make AYP, they must now offer free tutoring to their students. I hope for the sake of the teachers and students at that school that something will be done about the administration at long last. Sometimes, money talks. I checked, and the high school that all of my former middle school’s students feed into met AYP. Furthermore, all three of the feeder elementary schools also met AYP. Seeing as how the schools have the same “raw material with which to work,” what does that say?
The good news is that my daughter’s school made AYP, as did the elementary school my younger daughter will attend starting in August.
The Trouble With Rubrics
I was poking around English Journal‘s web site to see if I could figure out when the July issue (containing my article) was coming out, and I found Alfie Kohn’s article “The Trouble with Rubrics” (PDF).
On one point, I agree with Kohn — I wish we didn’t have to assign letter grades to students, because they focus on the grade instead of on what I said was good and what needed to be improved in their writing. Grades aren’t going anywhere, however, and reformers who espouse the position that we should have no grades are generally viewed as crackpots who don’t want to be held accountable for what their students learn (or don’t want students to be held accountable). For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with that assessment, but our society is standardized-test driven.
What I don’t agree with is that Kohn sees rubrics as ineffective. Kohn argues the whole in assessment is often more than the sum of its parts. Often, students meet the criteria of rubrics, but their writing is still not good. I think when this happens, the problem is with the rubric. Rubrics should be written in such a way that they measure performance in a meaningful way. Teachers need to write rubrics that measure exactly what they seek to measure. I fully believe that many teachers don’t know how to create a good rubric. I sometimes have trouble myself. I know what I’m looking for, but how do I parse it out into different levels of achievement? Then, since I still need to give it a grade, how do I grade it?
I learned a new system this year that I will share with you. I use the Greece, NY rubrics that Jay McTighe introduced to us at a professional development session this spring. These rubrics measure five dimensions — Meaning, Development, Organization, Language, and Conventions — across six different levels of achievement. I personally think the rubrics are great. One of the problems I ran into with rubrics is math. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you work in a system that requires you to give numerical grades. The Greece rubrics allow for a maximum of 30 points (5 dimensions X 6 levels = 30). The problem comes when you have a student who, say, earns 25 points. We’ll say for the purposes of illustration that the student earned five 5’s — 5 X 5 = 25. However, 25/30 = 83. Wait a minute! The student scored very well on that rubric! A low B is an OK grade, but not reflective of the student’s true score. Jay McTighe showed us how to adapt rubric scores so that they are a more accurate reflection of the grade.
What you need to do is decide what the absolute lowest grade on a piece of writing should be. Most of us would not assign a score of zero to an essay. I decided that the lowest grade, if a student received five ones (the lowest level of achievement on the rubric) should be a 50. That seems fair to me — that is an F, which is indicative of the achievement of a student who received ones across the board. What this means is that the absolute zero on the assignment is not 0 points but 40 points. The difference between 100 and 40 is 60 points. As the rubric has 30 points, that means that each rubric point is worth two grade points. From there, I developed this scale:
- 30=100
- 29=98
- 28=96
- 27=94
- 26=92
- 25=90
- 24=88
- 23=86
- 22=84
- 21=82
- 20=80
- 19=78
- 18=76
- 17=74
- 16=72
- 15=70
- 14=68
- 13=66
- 12=64
- 11=62
- 10=60
- 9=58
- 8=56
- 7=54
- 6=52
- 5=50
So that means that student who earned 25 points on that rubric actually earned a 90 — much more indicative of the performance level of fives across the board.
The trick is to decide what your own absolute zero is on writing assignments and work from there. I have decided 40 is mine, so no matter how many points my rubric has, I can figure out how many grade percentage points each rubric point is worth. For instance, if I have a rubric with three dimensions and four levels of achievement, that’s a twelve point rubric. Sixty divided by 12 is five, so each rubric point is worth five points.
I think perhaps if rubrics are used in a way in which absolute zero is, indeed, zero, then perhaps Kohn has a point — they do seem punitive. But they don’t have to be used that way. I remember feeling like the proverbial light went on when Jay McTighe showed us how this could be done. Contrary to what Kohn says in his article, I think rubrics can be fair and can help students improve. I do not see them as a crutch — they are a way of demystifying something that is fairly complex — how to grade writing.
Weber in the News
Some of you may recall our school’s construction made the news last September due to a threat by Fulton County’s BOE to seize our property through eminent domain. The school system backed down, and construction has continued. Along with a small contingent of our faculty, I toured our new building in June. I was surprised to open the paper this morning to see a story about the contruction, along with picture of our group. Unfortunately, the picture wasn’t reprinted in the online edition of the article, but you can read it here (use Bug Me Not to bypass registration). I couldn’t find the picture at our school’s web site either, but if you have access to the print edition that includes the NorthSide supplement for residents of North Fulton and Cherokee Counties, you can see pictures of our group and building on p. ZH9. I am the one in the cuffed jeans and black sweater with my hands in my back pockets.
What Would You Do With $300K?
In his recent editorial on the book banning lawsuit currently brewing in Miami-Dade schools, Leonard Pitts bemoans the school system’s waste of $300,000 on a lawsuit that the school board’s own lawyer said, according to Pitts, “violated the board’s own rules, not to mention multiple legal precedents.” In order to make his point, he asked two teachers what they would purchase for their classrooms if they were given $300K.
It made me think, though. What would I get for my classroom if I was given $300K? Here’s a list of things I could think of:
- A laptop for my use
- Laptops for all of my students
- SMART technology, including a SMART board
- Funds for guest speakers, including published authors
- Professional development that will enable me to be a more effective teacher
- My own copy machine and a ton of paper
- Consumable books, including paperback novels, so my school could save some money
I’m sure given time to do more research on products, I could think of more, but this is what I came up with off the top of my head. What would you do with $300K for your classroom?
Internet Explorer
I don’t use Internet Explorer, so I didn’t realize my template had gone all wonky. I opened up my blog in Maxthon, a browser my husband favors (it was open on the desktop when I sat down) and discovered that my CSS in the sidebar was a mess. I tried to validate it, and sure enough, it didn’t work. I narrowed the culprit down to the bit of text that diplays what I’m reading, so I took it out. If I figure out how to fix it, I’ll put it back, but the fact is, I don’t read much professional literature, so who knows how useful it even is to have that. Got it to work again.
If you ever notice something weird with my template, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Firefox wasn’t rendering this problem, so I had no idea it was going on.
Technology and Teacher Ed
I stumbled upon a new blog by JJ called Teachable Moments. She mentioned in a recent post that she felt her own preparation for teaching was lacking the technology department and advocated the following requirements:
- A BLOG — We certainly did our share of reflections. We posted information that we obtained from various sources on tools like blackboard, yet we never shared them. (Why? I don’t think my professors realized the possibility, plus encouraging honest reflection through confidentiality seemed more important than learning from each other) In the short time that I have been lurking around the blogosphere, I have learned more than I did in any of those required journal letters to my professors. This in mind, I will most definitely be blogging with my students from now on.
- A DIGITAL PRESENTATION — Although I did take the initiative to do this myself, during my four years in the School of Ed I was never required to do much of anything with technology. I suppose that part of this was due to the fact that our placements in the city schools were, for the most part, tech-less. However, when our school decided that all exit portfolios needed to be in digital format (i.e. powerpoint or html) we actually had to have an emergency computer lab refresher course so that we could all (re)learn how to properly insert information into powerpoint.
- A WEB-BASED ASSIGNMENT OR LESSON — Again, although I was able to create my own webquests during my preservice teaching, this was not a requirement. Many of my colleagues have graduated without any knowledge or first hand experience with any kind of internet tool.
I think all of these have a lot of potential. Imagine how much we all might have learned from each other if we had a blogosphere when we were student teaching (or perhaps I should speak for myself — I student taught in 1996-97). I am pretty much self-taught with regards to using technology.
What do you think of these requirements? What would you add or change?
Schools Attuned Workshop, Part Two
I spent one week in Charlotte, five full days, in the Schools Attuned Subject Specialist course. I need to complete a practicum and portfolio in order to earn CEU credit, which will be quite a few credits. Plus, I can do this online, so that works out great.
My first thought on completing the course is that I wish I’d had it as part of my teacher ed training or had taken it earlier. Some of my peers were somewhat daunted by the terminology that Dr. Levine uses, but it didn’t really bother me much. Basically, Levine breaks down learning, or neurodevelopment into the following constructs:
- Attention
- Memory
- Language
- Social Cognition
- Spatial Ordering
- Temporal/Sequential Ordering
- Higher Order Cognition
- Neuromotor Functions
The first thing I wanted to do after completing the workshop was “attune” (evaluate, figure out areas of strenth and weakness) myself and my daughter. It was kind of like after I took psychology and wanted to figure out what my loved ones’ mental issues were.
I noted that all of the participants were from private schools. Most taught at schools that specialized in students with learning disabilities. It seems to me that it would be easier for a private school to implement the Schools Attuned program across the board, but I don’t think that individual public school teachers would have much of a problem trying it in their own classrooms.
One of the things I really liked about the program is that you have a handy glossary that gives examples of what students who have strengths or weaknesses in each neurodevelopmental construct look like. It’s like having a mini-rubric. I think it will help me pinpoint students’ strengths and weaknesses much more quickly. I also think it will help me better help students, as I can locate management strategies in my notebook that will work with students’ specific weaknesses.
I should back up and say that a lot of the strategies are things that good teachers already do. However, I think it is handy to have the notebook of management strategies anyway. For one thing, it will save a lot of time.
One of the things our facilitator said is that most teachers don’t learn how people learn in ed schools; rather, they learn theory. She’s partly right about that, I think. This class would have been great to have in ed schools.
I know that Levine’s non-labeling approach is not exactly practical in a school system that requires labels in order to help students; however, in my school, I can very well see how a smaller private school could make this work. I do think Levine’s system makes sense. Often times, a student’s problems are much more complex than ADD. If you used Schools Attuned to evaluate a student, you might learn more about his/her strengths and weaknesses and be better able to help him/her.
Frankly, if I may level with you, I think it will be extremely helpful in terms of talking with parents. I can foresee being able to use the information I learned to explain what students’ particular problems are. I will admit to not always being able to do that. I can tell, for instance, that there is an attention problem, but not necessarily what kind or where the breakdown occurs.
The course’s pricetag is quite hefty. I do not know that it is practical for most people to take it for that reason alone. However, if the tuition is not too daunting, I have to say I recommend it highly.
If you have questions about it (and I am able to answer — I did sign an agreement with regards to copyrighted information), then please leave them in the comments and I’ll respond.