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Best advisory ever: A How-To & How-Not

HowTo: Have a good advisory

  • Eat. Stop at the store. Pick up some donuts, mini-muffins, and assorted fruit. Advisory isn't a fun place for students. Make it more inviting. Bribery through food is a good start.
  • Apologize. Mainly apologize for using the "curriculum" you're supposed to be using. Be honest. Tell them you were trying to the the right thing, but some times the "right thing" isn't what's right.
  • Talk. This is big. At this point students will most complain about how stupid advisory is and how it could be used for so many more useful things. Complaining is good
  • Share. Show a couple video clips you particularly like. Show a couple video clips students like.
  • Enjoy. The first advisory meeting you've had all year that wasn't forced or awkward.

Advisory (a.k.a. mentor/mentee, homeroom, seminar, etc.) is designed to be a time where students meet with a teacher to form a relationship outside of the traditional teacher/student interactions. Teachers meet with the same group of students for all four years of high school with the expectation that deeper and more lasting relationships will be formed between students and teacher. I believe that a well executed advisory can be a positive influence on school culture and student success. However, our system is broken.

In a nutshell, here are the major problems:

  • We meet with our advisories every two weeks for 30 minutes. This isn't enough to form lasting relationships.
  • Activities and "curriculum" used for advisory are developed on an "as-we-go" basis.  There just isn't time to develop this stuff on the fly.
  • A small, under-attended, over-stressed committee of five or six individuals designs the "curriculum" that is used for advisory. Six simply isn't enough people to tackle this monumental task.
  • All levels use the same "curriculum" materials. All grade levels- and especially freshman and senior levels- should have their own goals and activities.

Today, I quit. I stopped using the materials provided. I stopped using any formal materials. I couldn't put my students or myself through that uncomfortable hell of pushing through an activity that neither of us thinks is appropriate or helpful.

If you had been visited my classroom during this time you wouldn't have been blown away by anything that happened. If you had been in my classroom for every other advisory to see the awkward and forced interactions that used to be the norm you'd understand my enthusiasm more clearly.

As educators we want so much for advisory to be valuable that we forget the most valuable part is just getting to know our students. You don't need a formal curriculum for that. You just need time and desire (a few donuts don't hurt either).

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When frustration is a good thing

I keep waiting for that day when I look at my curriculum and am happy with what I see. You know, that point where it's really good and perhaps only needs a few minor changes each year.  After years of constant tweaking, improving, and overhaul it seems like that day should be right around the corner.

Instead, the more I learn, the more I tweak, the more I realize how imperfect my curriculum really is. To be sure, it has improved dramatically from my first year teaching, and I'd even say it's gotten better every time I teach. Yet I'm still discontent. I'm still frustrated that the level of student engagement and rigor I'd like to have doesn't match the engagement and rigor that actually exists.

The last two weeks my frustration level has been pretty high. We're not doing enough work in groups. We're not doing enough meaningful projects. We're doing too much question answering. I'm talking in front of the class too often and not spending enough time talking with students. I critically tear apart my teaching technique and the way I present the content.

I'm confident that the curriculum I'm using and the way I'm presenting it is at least "good." My frustration comes from knowing that it's not the best. It's the difference between completing a marathon and winning a marathon. Completing a marathon can be pretty a pretty major accomplishment for a recreational runner like myself. However, if you're an elite runner with the talent and training to be able to win a marathon simply finishing isn't a major achievement.

While I don't mind my status as a recreational runner I'm not happy being a "recreational teacher." I have access to the knowledge and skills required to be an "elite teacher." As such I expect myself to constantly strive for "elite" status.  I analyze my teaching and curriculum like that elite runner watching a video of herself in slow motion; trying to find inefficiencies in her stride that can be eliminated.

My frustration (I've only recently come to realize) is simply a manifestation of my desire to improve.

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Image Credits

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The importance of stupidity

Martin A. Schwartz in an essay titled, The importance of stupidity in scientific research, published online by the Journal of Cell Science, says:

...I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. [...]

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

As a teacher who seems to constantly be changing, updating, redirecting, and otherwise in flux with the curriculum that I present to my students each semester (even if I'm teaching the exact same classes every semester), I identified strongly with feeling stupid.

I'm constantly wondering if there aren't better ways to do the things I'm doing; constantly doubting whether I can get the important bits of science through all the standards, state assessments, and district requirements.

This article reminds me why I constantly change things up. I could rest on my decent curriculum & teaching skills and take it easy. However, decent isn't enough. I may never be great, but I'm sure I'll avoid being mediocre. I may fail in some pursuits, but I hope that those failures can guide me to successes.

What I'd love: to work alongside teachers and administrators who enter this realm of stupidity to try to figure out a better way than the current way.

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Rookie mistakes

I sat down to grade my students' chemical reaction primer artifacts this weekend. It didn't take me long to realize that as a class we weren't done with these projects yet. Clearly I hadn't built in the necessary support for the project's format. I seemed to do pretty well supporting the information (as described previously), but I made a few fatal errors:

  1. These freshmen have next to no experience citing sources. I required in-text citations and a bibliography. We went over this on day 1, but not too much more than simple reminders since then. Many students did either a bibliography or did in-text citations, but not both.
  2. Many students gave Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com URLs as their sources for information or images. Again, we went over this on day 1, but with little prior knowledge of citing internet sources it's an easy mistake to make.
  3. I emphasized strongly that their artifacts should include lots of images related to chemical reactions. I didn't make it clear enough that those pictures needed to match up with the content being described. I can't tell you how many times I had pictures of chemical reactions with no explanation of what reaction it was or why it belonged in that spot.
  4. I didn't include a review and rewrite of their projects on the schedule. Especially the first time around, they really needed it.

Rookie mistakes, all of them. All easy enough to anticipate. Heck, I've even included reviews and rewrites in similar projects I've done. What was I thinking? Today, I created time for a review and rewrite. I graded the hell out of their artifacts knowing that I would give them time to fix them up.

I was pretty worried about class today. I was handing back rubrics with some very low grades on a project that was worth as much as a full-on test. I was very careful in how I opened the discussion on doing rewrites so as not to cause frustration, despair, or anxiety over the grades on the rubrics I was passing back. Here's what I did:

  • Created a positive (perhaps inspirational?) environment. I've been sharing short (~1 minute-ish) and fun videos with my classes all year. I usually don't start class with them, but I wanted to set a positive tone right up front. What better way than with 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes?
  • Explained myself honestly. Because this was the first time they've done anything like this, their perception of what their finished artifact should look like is different than my perception- and that's okay. I told them it's my fault that I didn't do a better job explaining my high, even ridonculous expectations (went back to an old slide to illustrate), and that I should've scheduled a review and rewrite from the very start.
  • Ensured them the grade on the rubric wasn't binding. Once I decided to allow students to revise their artifacts, I toyed with the idea of not going through their artifacts and just explain to the class as a whole the issues I was seeing. I avoided another rookie mistake by diligently going through each student's artifact and grading it like I would if the grade would really count. I wanted each of them to see what specific things were lacking and needed to be fixed. It took 10 hours of grading this weekend. Morally, it was the right decision.
  • Maintained a totally positive outlook on their artifacts. I didn't want students to get the idea that I was disappointed or frustrated with their work and was simply having pity on them by giving them a do-over. I want them to know that revisions are a natural and necessary part of the work flow.

Dan Meyer noted that as your teaching expertise grows the technical challenges (i.e. designing and implementing projects, among other things) disappear and the real challenge becomes moral (will you put in the effort to ensure all are successful?). My technical challenges have decreased dramatically since year one. However, I'm not confident there will ever be a time when I don't mess up the technical stuff. What differentiates my mistakes in year seven from mistakes in year one is that now I can fix the mistakes.

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Teaser:
Even though I messed up, it's amazing to me that some students still hit it out of the park. Here are two artifacts that needed little fixing:

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Alfie Kohn on Self-Discipline

Thanks to a tweet this morning by Will Richardson (@willrich45), I came upon the article "Why Self-Discipline is Overrated" written by Alfie Kohn and published in the Phi Beta Kappan in November, 2008.

5 bullet summary

Self-discipline is a trait that generally gets high praise from both progressive and traditional educators. However, Kohn points out that:

  • extreme self-discipline is as much of a disorder as extreme lack of self-control, yet we usually attempt to prevent the latter and praise the former.
  • all internal motivation isn't good. Students can be wrecked by always worrying about what they "should" be doing.
  • our pervasive cultural emphasis on self-discipline seems to be based upon conservative religious philosophies.
  • emphasizing self-discipline ensures that the fault lies with the students instead of the structure that the students find themselves in.
  • obviously not all self-discipline is bad. Just our total systemic bias towards it is.

Go Alfie!

What resonates most with me in this article is Kohn's point that focusing on self-discipline is a method of being sure the status quo remains unchallenged. Our educational system explains away student "lack of slef-control" as the students fault. Instead of examining why students have little desire to complete the tasks we set before them and questioning our current practices, we just pass students off as immature and lacking in some way.

This general theme also pops up between any groups that have authority over each other. Districts where teachers are "causing problems" according to administration often are simply challenging the status quo.

Psychologically (to the extent that I know psychology), I agree that simply because students are sitting quietly in class and focused on their work doesn't mean they'll be better prepared than their classmates who are often loud and disruptive. Anecdotally, I've known many friends, family members, aquantainces, and ex-students who were a handful in school and yet managed to go on to live happy and successful lives.

Yeah, but...

How do you teach students to lose control? Further, how do you teach students who are overly self-disciplined to loosen up while at the same time help students who really do need to learn some self-control? Kohn doesn't drop any hints towards that end. As a teacher, I can actively strive to provide lessons and activities which students want to work on, but how can I help a student who has become overly self-disciplined? Is there anything I can do?

I've always been frustrated that while I might really like most of Kohn's ideas, many of his writings don't offer practical examples. "What does that look like in action?" is question that keeps coming up as I read. I can hypothesize to some extent, but seeing a few real-life examples to benchmark would be wonderful.

Unfettered quotes

  • "Learning, after all, depends not on what students do so much as on how they regard and construe what they do."
  • "What counts is the capacity to choose whether and when to persevere, to control oneself, to follow the rules – rather than the simple tendency to do these things in every situation."
  • "There is no reason to work for social change if we assume that people just need to buckle down and try harder.  Thus, the attention paid to self-discipline is not only philosophically conservative in its premises, but also politically conservative in its consequences."
  • "...to identify a lack of self-discipline as the problem is to focus our efforts on making children conform to a status quo that is left unexamined and is unlikely to change."
  • "Some children who look like every adult’s dream of a dedicated student may in reality be anxious, driven, and motivated by a perpetual need to feel better about themselves, rather than by anything resembling curiosity.  In a word, they are workaholics in training."

Best quote taken totally out of context

  • "...children are self-centered little beasts that need to be tamed..."

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Image Credits

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Multitasking. Really?

"But I'm multitasking!"

-What nearly every student tells me when I tell them to get off their MyBook and focus on their academic work.

"If you're multitasking, why is it you're not getting anything done?"

-A rough paraphrase of my usual response

Somehow all my students have been sold that multitasking is a wonderful thing and they should do it whenever they can. Did they learn this in middle school? Is it just a part of pop culture now?

In my opinion, multitasking is best when you don't have much to accomplish in a large block of time. I love multitasking. When it comes down to getting some serious work done I turn off the twitter, shut down email, facebook, the aggregator, and the youtube. I might keep the tunes, but turn it to something low key and quiet.

The world of my students teaches them they should be doing 5 things at once. They don't need that reinforced at school. Perhaps we should be teaching them focus.

I could be wrong. After all, I'm notoriously bad at focusing.

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Welcome to my wiki

My last school required that all teachers have web pages in order to (at minimum) communicate the daily schedule to students and parents. I used it for my schedule, but also as a jump-off for online assignments.

My new school does not require all teachers to have web pages. Yet I enjoyed the benefits of having an online space for my class. I just had to have some online space for this year too. After a bit a research into what was and wasn't blocked by the school filter, what sites other educators have used, what features various services offer, etc., I settled on using Wikispaces for my new class website.

I began using my class wiki for the same things as my old static website: weekly agendas and a jump-off for online assignments.  Since then I've slowly been increasing the level of involvement my students have with the wiki.

I'll go into specifics about how students are using the wiki in later posts. For now, I want to focus on a few observations and issues that have come up.

The good

  • Messaging

    • Students realized quickly they could send messages to each other (and to me) through their Wikispaces accounts. Students send me messages asking for clarification. Students send each other messages asking for help or information.

  • Creating & Publishing

    • I've only had one assignment that required students to create a wiki page (details in a future post), but we like that it's being published for everyone in the world to see. They like they can work on it directly from any computer in the world (though usually just the computer at their house).

  • Saving

    • The scourge of digital assignments: lost files. My freshmen have next to zero experience saving files to a network drive. I can't tell you how many times students have saved a file to a computer's hard drive instead of their network drive, thus losing access to the file as soon as they log off that machine. The wiki creates a record of the page after each save. If somehow the contents of the entire page gets deleted (which has happened- thrice) they can simply revert back to the last version.

  • RSS

    • I was a little nervous letting my students loose on the wiki. I really didn't think anyone would do something inappropriate, but I still worried. Luckily, Wikispaces (and many other wiki sites) create RSS feeds for page edits and discussion postings- both for individual pages and for the entire space. I subscribe to the feeds for all page edits and all discussion postings. It's an easy way for me to keep track of what's happening on the wiki. I don't want to be a wiki-dictator (wikitator?), but I want to be able to catch anything inappropriate before half the world sees it.

The not so good

  • Messaging

    • There's definitely plenty of personal messaging going back and forth in addition to the academic-related messages. I don't have a problem with this- if it's done in moderation. For 95% of my students it's not a problem. 5% would message people all hour if I didn't get after them for it.

  • What's the point?

    • Roughly paraphrased, the student asked why we couldn't just do this on paper- wouldn't it be way faster? Sheesh. I wasn't ready for that one. I figured the relevance of publishing content online for parents, peers, and the world to see would clear that up. I figured the increasingly digital world we live in would make the point obvious. Obviously I didn't explain what wikis are or why we're using this particular tool very well. In classes with students who have very little computer experience (I had to show some students how to use Google), this stuff isn't obvious. They don't know what a wiki is, what it does, or why they would ever want to use one.

  • Quirkiness

    • Let's face it: Editing a wiki- even one that has a visual editor like Wikispaces- isn't always inuitive and striaght forward. There are certain quirks to it that take time to adjust to. It's trickier and less flexible than editing a Word document. Students who aren't tech savvy can quickly get frustrated with these quirks. I'm constantly finding myself saying, "Just be patient, everyone is running into similar issues, I promise it'll get easier the more experienced you become." These first few uses can be a bit trying.

Exemplars, tips, suggestions?

I'm coming to the realization that I really don't have good examples of wiki usage in a science classroom. I've done my research checking out several classroom wikis, yet I can't recall finding a single high school-ish science class' wiki. Anyone know of any?

I'm feeling a little frustrated that my curriculum doesn't seem to mesh extremely well with the use of a wiki. I could make the wiki a more prominent part of assignments and projects, but I'm wary of forcing the wiki into situations it really doesn't belong. However, I can't help but feel my lack of experience using a wiki in a science classroom and of exemplar science class wikis means that I'm missing some really powerful and obvious things that would mesh perfectly. I'm hoping when I revamp the curriculum next year to facilitate more project-based assessments these uses may spring up and smack me in the face like a garden rake.

Any tips, suggestions, or examples would be greatly appreciated. 😉

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Focus vs. filtering

I've been using the laptops a good bit in my classes recently.¹ Students often stray off the assigned task to check their MySpace, Facebook, check their email, or one of many other options.

I realize that it may be a rare and wonderful activity that captivates my 14 year old students' mind more than reading comments on their MySpace page, yet I feel students need to learn to focus on an activity when there are other options available.

How much censoring should I do of their wanderings? Currently I keep a close watch: If they quick check an email, the boxscore to last night's game, or their profile page and flip back to the assignment, I don't say anything. After all I function much like that when I'm working. If they're lingering a little too long or falling behind, then I ask them to stay off all other sites.

I don't want to block everything, but I also don't want to put my students in a situation where they can choose to fail via social networked distraction. Sometimes I catch myself wishing the school would block these sites; thus saving me the hassle.

But who am I to require students to focus on only one thing?

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¹ I'll share some of what I've done this week on this blog soon.

Image: Screenshot from my work computer

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A computing conundrum

I have a decision to make. I don't want to make it. I already know what I'll end up doing in the end. Think you can figure it out?

The situation

My new school has two laptop carts per floor. That works out to two classroom sets of laptops for every 20-22 teachers or so. They're brand new and not many teachers realize that they're working perfectly fine (98% of the time at least).

There's no check-out or check-in system. When I wanted them, I went to the teacher's workroom and rolled them on down to my room. I had no way of telling if they would actually be available until I opened the door to the teacher's workroom. I have no way of telling when other teachers would like to use them.

The options

1. Do nothing.

  • Pros: I could (in theory) just keep the laptop cart in my room unless people ask for it. I'd definitely be able to use the laptops multiple times during the week. With my seeming inability to accurately plan how long things will take, I wouldn't have to worry about not getting to that online activity on time.
  • Cons: (1) I'd be monopolizing 50% of the available computers to regular classroom teachers. (2) I'd have no idea how long other teachers would be using the laptops when they did take them (if they ever found out where I was stashing them, of course!).

2. Do something (i.e. set up a shared Google Calendar or the like for teachers to sign out the laptops)

  • Pros: (1) I'd know when and for how long other teachers would be using the laptops. (2) There would be the opportunity for more equitable use of the laptop carts for all teachers.
  • Cons: I'd lose my potential monopoly of the carts, and would more thank likely have to reduce the number of activities in my classroom that would require the use of laptops. Boo.

The laptop cart: currently hiding in my room

The real problem

We don't have enough laptops.

I wrote about a very similar topic in March while I was at Whitmore Lake in Michigan. Back then we had four laptop carts and a media center lab available for use between 22-25 teachers. Here I'm down to two laptop carts and essentially zero dedicated computer labs available for use for the same number of teachers.

I sometimes chuckle to myself when my vice-principal talks about how much technology is available to students this year.

So, take a guess:
What am I going to do? Something, or nothing? 😉

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Week 1 = Done

Week one of my new job is done! We only had students on Thursday and Friday (today), but the rest of the week was jammed full of "professional development" and meetings. This semester I have mainly upper level freshman classes, which means the last couple days has involved lots of wide eyes and not a lot of conversation. The students were just starting to open up a little bit today.

Observations on my new school and job so far:

  • They've done an excellent job keeping class sizes down. Science classs are capped at 24. If it's a lower level class, they're capped at 15. It's not just a "desired-but-not-implemented" goal either.
  • Technology-wise, the perception within the school is that they're ahead of the curve. They have LCD projectors, a few interactive whiteboards, and six laptop carts (for 1400-1500 students). From my perception they're behind the curve. I miss networked copiers, dual-screen LCD/computers, and four laptop carts for 400 students.¹
  • I'm bugged that no staff meetings, professional development, or other teacher events seem to start on time. They've all actually started between 10-15 minutes after the scheduled time.
  • I'm clueless on a lot of school policies and procedures, and I'm not sure who to go to for information. They need a cheat sheet of some sort for this stuff.

Overall, I'm definitely glad I'm here. It seems like it'll be a good fit, though there's some culture shock coming from a small school in Michigan to a large school in Connecticut. I feel like I'm subbing for someone else. It doesn't feel like my school, or my classes, or my classroom yet. I guess it takes a bit for 6 years of growing accustomed to a certain environment to wear off.

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¹ Though interestingly enough, most staff and students at my old district seemed to feel as if we were behind most schools in the tech department.