“We cannot direct the wind…but we can adjust the sails.” --Unknown

So last term, I spent a year with colleagues from SEMS East and Kennard Dale working on a district formative assessment committee. We learned more about formative assessment, tried new strategies, visited each others classrooms, shared successes and failures and generally collaborated with the goal of improving and increasing our use of this pedagogical tool. The lasting messages I take with me into this year are how to achieve 100% class participation, ways to monitor learning as it is acquired, schema mining, and progressive feedback.

This year, our principal asked our staff to come up with their own self-improvement goal. I truly learned a great deal about what I was doing well, what I should do more of and what I wasn't doing at all, so the goal plan was easy to come up with. In New Jersey, we called them PIPs (Personal Improvement Plans). No brainer-- I am going to work to be more intentional in my implementation of formative assessment by intentionally embedding formative assessments at least twice a week into my lesson plans.

To that end, I gave myself permission to think out of the box. Today, we were in the computer lab for the purpose of reading international and national news stories on the districts online newspaper subscription. I expose students to 3-5 root words per six-day cycle, and today, students were to read articles and see if the pros were using any vocabulary that used any of our roots.

I learned a few things that, upon reflection,  just make sense--- newspapers do not follow my lesson plan -- it actually is possible that students could read more than one article that did not use ANY of my  vocabulary. I'm a middle school teacher, after 18 years of  teaching --- I'm not surprised when things go awry. Now in year 19, I just try to figure out what will go wrong before it does.

So the formative assessment I intended to use had a twist. I intended to use the back channel,  todaysmeet.com,  to ask my anticipatory set  questions. I wanted all students to be able to show me what they knew without worrying about my calling on them. Todaysmeet allows kids to instant message me or create a chatroom that only includes our class. The idea was cool but the execution needed some work.

Problem one-- I had access to the back channel but the student's access was blocked.

Solution - call tech support and have them unblock the site to the kids.

Problem two - kids misspelled my name or words in the room name

Solution - teachable moment-- even in the 21st Century spelling accuracy counts, matters, and the computer will not self-correct everything. I guess I'm not going to be obsolete afterall. :-)

I feel sorry for my first period class because they always help me get the "bugs" out of a lesson, especially when technology is involved. But it's ok, they learn I'm not perfect and don't expect them to be. We also work daily on problem-solving skills. We're learning this technology thing together.

Period 2 I had my act together better. The site was opened, I used a PowerPoint page to broadcast the web address prominently, and included logging-in instructions. Kids answered the prompt and then I had them log in to the online newspaper.

The only real "fail" in the lesson today was that the YDR is written on an 8th grade reading level or lower and none of the roots appeared in the articles the students read. I used my speed reading skills on about 6 articles and discovered the kids were correct.

I did what I always do when things go awry. Improvised. Finding evidence of our root words for the cycle in their own free-reading became extra credit and I used the blunders as connecting schema for the quote of the day: 

“We cannot direct the wind…but we can adjust the sails.” --Unknown