Benchmark Three

What Mr. Logan learned from Benchmark Three

            Most of my students grew--- some staggeringly well in every category but one: Language Standards. What is in that category? Basically, vocabulary-- I admit it, I put no attention to building their vocabulary this year beyond pointing out vocabulary in the literature I made them read.

            As always, I used the data to inform instruction. I had a few options to address their vocabulary deficiency. I have five different series of vocabulary programs (black line masters for workbook pages,) each of differing merit. I opted not to go with any of them for one simple reason. If you are a parent of one of my students, ask them about this.

1.      If a vocabulary chapter had ten words, when I polled my students, only 2 of them were new to them. That means that the exercises designed to reinforce their memory, usage, and comprehension of these words would be wasted effort for 80% of their words. Absolutely no one has time to waste after losing 9 days of school to winter closings and 12 days of schedule interruptions (delayed openings).

2.      The lists that students would have to memorize for tests are discovered in a vacuum. It is highly probable that students will encounter these words, but inauthentic learning is off-putting to students. They see it for what it is and react to it as “busy work.” Again - Absolutely no one has time to waste.

           

            So does this mean I waved the white flag at the problem as being insurmountable and unsolvable? Have you met Mr. Logan? My detractors say I am stubborn and cocky. My fans say I am confident and driven. I can live with either comment--- it’s all about connotation versus denotation. We opted for a different choice. “Choose Your Own Vocabulary.”  I asked students to abandon context clues once a day when they encounter words that are unfamiliar, uncertain, or are totally new.

2.      These words have to appear naturally, within the 24 hours since our last class meeting. Acceptable sources include: an article they read in another class, a chapter out of a textbook, a word they encountered surfing the web, a word they encountered in their free-read novel, or a word they encountered while reading a periodical for fun.

3.      Students were not allowed to just look up random words.

4.      Students brought the word, spelled correctly, defined, with root word, prefix, and suffix already identified.

5.      Each table created a database and shared it with me and their group mates.

6.      The first ten minutes of every class from the past two weeks has been utilized for the groups to share their words with each other and then the scribe shared the words with the class.

            The feedback that students gave about the experience is pretty powerful. In a class of 20 students, students have the opportunity to be exposed to twenty different words each day (theirs and 19 others). Using an informal poll, students gave feedback that more than fifteen of the words they encounter from each other are new. Out of those 15 words, they reported that they could see themselves using five or more in writing or speech immediately.

            Let’s put those soft numbers in perspective. This means that students are potentially acquiring 25 words each week from each other that they will begin using in their writing immediately. Students also shared that they enjoy learning from each other more than a random list generated by a textbook publisher.

            Here is a sample list of words that students encountered yesterday in my period 4 English 8 Class:

·         Opusculum

·         Terminus

·         Phenom

·         guile

·         Intelligible

·         Beguile

·         Robust

·         Arsenal

·         Incapacitated

·         Vigilant

·         Coalition

·         Diagnosis

·         Nombril

·         osmosis

·         cumbersome

·         monocle

·         ratification

·         egotistical

·         inkling

            Where are these words coming from? Most of these words are coming from their academic day. Many are from social studies, world languages, and science. When teachers, who do not teach ELA, ask what they can do to help improve ELA State Testing scores—the answer is pretty simple. They are already doing it. This is not the English classroom that GenX or Baby Boomers experienced, and that’s a good thing. It’s potentially better. The key component to all of this is that the kids still have to do their lesson to learn their lesson.

            Manny Scott, an inspirational speaker and original member of the Freedom Writers (Hilary Swank starred in the movie by the same name about this group of teens) shared with members of an audience-- mostly educators and business professionals, with a handful of teens: “A Texas rancher challenged me when I repeated the phrase ‘You can drag a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink.’ He said you can pry its mouth open, force some salt down its gullet, and then it will be happy to drink!”

            I have been ruled by a desire to find that metaphorical salt for my students this year and I have found it in an unlikely source. Whereas I have, in general, 80% participation with homework, Choose Your Own Vocabulary achieves well over 95%. Why? I’m not sure--- I don’t really want to look a gift horse in the mouth and ask, but if I were to conjecture, I would say the social element of bringing the words, hearing what words others brought, and hearing the teacher’s commentary motivates them. Now for the rest of that salt…

            That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

What's Better?

            Have you seen that commercial that’s been running on tv lately, where the spokesman asks elementary children “What’s better?” and the two choices are so clearly unequal that the question is nearly specious? It’s funny the first time you see it and then it becomes insipid, right?  That’s how I am now feeling about the question about the efficacy of differentiated instruction. Which is better: 1- a situation where the teacher slaves over whole class instruction lesson plans and attempts to teach a block of eighteen to twenty-eight students simultaneously, or 2- a class centered upon the individual needs of each learner? If you are the student, or if you are that student’s parent, the question is first speciously funny and then it becomes insipid. If you’re an educator rebelling and rebutting this idea as you read this, consider this: on staff development days, do you prefer to be talked at in 45-90 minute blocks, or do you prefer to interact with your colleagues and learn the material together? I guess I’m the oddball because there is no contest between the choices.

            My empirical data is backing up that I made the right call. My spreadsheet that I use to track benchmarks is color-coded: blood red for below basic, fire engine red for basic, blue for proficient and green for advanced.  My blood-red students have migrated from below basic to basic and even a few catapulted to proficient and advanced proficient scores. Many basic scoring students from the first benchmark have progressed to proficient. Even some of my proficient students have crossed into the advanced threshold.  The second benchmark exams were given only 2 weeks into my classroom “reinvention.” I could say that the data only shows that I have been an effective classroom teacher. I will concede that this may be true, but if that is all that the data is telling me, then student scores should explode by the next benchmark this spring. Stay tuned.

            I must confess that if I were a color I would be a neon day-glow hue and the farthest from gray. I am excited to teach my students every day. I am energized by minor milestones, and egged along by my student’s enthusiasm. One student put it this way in his end of the marking period reflection:

You're a good teacher but you have the energy of a 5 year old on candy and I have to get used to that.

Guilty. My enthusiasm and energy comes from my desire to keep my students engaged. Students can accuse me of being crazy or crazed but they can’t call me or my class boring.  Students who have become accustomed to the sedate and measured approach to teaching, take a while to adjust to my approach to the classroom.

            I am encouraged by the feedback I am receiving from students about how the change is going:

1.     English is a class that I look forward to everyday because it is fun and I like learning about English. I like the way you set up the classroom in stations. I like it better than before because it focuses on our special needs. I hope English stays this fun until the end of the year.

2.      My first study island of the year I received a below basic. The second one I took recently I got an advanced. So my attitude on school changed. I started working hard to pick up my grades and get A’s in all of my classes. I didn’t get A’s in every class but I got all A’s and B’s.

3.      The thing I like most about English 8 is that we are separated into groups based on our skill level. That is my favorite part of English 8 because I prefer to be in groups and be taught one on one.

4.      What I like the most about it was that the teacher puts himself in our shoes and interacts with us instead of just talking the whole time.

5.     I don’t want to change my English teacher I want to keep Mr. Logan as my English teacher throughout high school I love how he teaches he’s funny and he teaches in ways to help us. He doesn't just teach the whole class he looks at everyone's strengths and weaknesses and goes off from there. I can actually learn from how he teaches because I understand it; he also is fun and lets us have fun.

I did receive some critical notes too. Some kids told me they did not like different learning activities in different groups but that was when I first changed the class. When I met with them to conference, the kids told me that they see the benefit. I am satisfied that the majority of my students have “bought into” the pedagogical shift, and that emboldens me to carry on and go deeper with my instruction.

      Do you remember the student I mentioned in an earlier post? He had noticed that one of my vocabulary words was using more than one of the roots that I taught him, and his reaction to praise for this feat encouraged others to speak up and take chances. Well, not only did he improve on his benchmarks from below basic to basic, he also has been completing his classwork consistently. I was so pleased with the change in him that I called his mother to tell her about the day when he was the only one in his cohort that was prepared with his writing piece to share on our conference date.

      I made her day. He made mine. I love positive phone calls—they are even better when you are calling back a parent that you originally contacted with grave concerns. The next day, my student informed me that the whole home had great fun teasing, congratulating, and making a positive fuss over him. He made my day again. These little moments of small triumphs that just might change a life are what teaching is all about. To be a member of the village that impacts a child is a powerfully rewarding feeling.

      This is my twentieth year in the classroom. I am more enthusiastic about my job now than I was in 1993, when I started this journey. Great students, supportive parents, accessible and supportive administration, along awesome colleagues are a huge part of my success this year.

      That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Eyes on the Prize

Lesson Plans

There is a problem and it is related to a funny aphorism for stupidity: “Question: What is the definition of stupidity? Answer: Doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome.” I’ve been struggling with lesson plans since switching to DI as the dominant model for my classroom. The district push is to go deeper into what we teach instead of flying over the surface in the name of “covering” the curriculum. Well, the good news of creating a student-centered classroom with a differentiated instruction model is that you have to slow down.

When you apply this principle to lesson planning, the paradigm of day to day lesson plans goes out the window. I have been experiencing that and thinking I was doing something wrong because I am not hitting my objectives—not even closely.  Just as middle school teachers should not fight the highly social nature of their students when trying to teach them, and they should instead embrace the energy and redirect it towards learning, so should a teacher who tries to differentiate his lessons embrace the slower pace of his classroom and use it to his advantage. For that reason, my lessons are going to look differently. Instead of daily goals, it makes sense to think about lessons in terms of clusters of days: weeks, cycles, triads and double dates.

When I plan that way, I allow learning to happen authentically. For example, I was able to hit all my objectives for today with my first period class, but the other three morning classes either did not get past sharing their work on fragments from Friday, or  they only finished enough to look at today’s writing reflection question.

Normally, I would be alarmed, but since I am focused on learning and not schedules I was able to look at what happened. Friday’s fragment exercise was formative assessment of the concept. In my period 2, 3, and 4 classes, students showed me that they forgot about linking verbs. This necessitated an “on-the-fly” mini lesson to reinforce that fuzzy concept. Then we applied it to our sentences, when many students took phrase fragments and made even more fragmented sentences by just adding more phrases or clauses, without making sure that the sentences had subjects, or that they demonstrated a complete thought. This caused another mini lesson on the fly. Do you see the time ticking away? If you’re a teacher--- you know this is a doomed lesson when it comes to adhering to schedule, but if you are focused on student learning you see that you responded to teachable moments to scaffold missed learning.

So, tomorrow all my classes will get to the writing prompt and tomorrow I should get to sitting down with at least one group to review their last prompt with them if the formative assessment I am writing up is completed quickly. When I expressed concern that students were only 75% proficient at turning phrase and clause fragments into sentences, and that my benchmark for mastery was 90%, a student made a bet I am following through upon tomorrow. She said most students, if individually tested, would score better than that. So I’m writing up another formative assessment now to test her theory. That’s a bet worth taking, especially when a student expresses that level of confidence in her peers.

Is it a big deal that the marking period ends Friday and we’re not even ready to take the end of the novel test yet? If I am to be ruled by the calendar—yes, be afraid, lose sleep tonight worrying about how to squeeze it in this week. If I am ruled by making sure the students actually learned the skills I am teaching--- no, we can get there by next week.

Paradigms shift and then there is chaos and cognitive dissonance. The old folks used to encouragingly admonish the youth of the next generation (I know it sounds like an oxymoron or at least a paradoxical phrase) “Keep your eyes on the prize.” My prize= real student achievement that can be measured with empirical data. Everything else is noise.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 

Finding My Guide on the Side

            I’m a few days off my target but this is a learning year for me. Rome wasn’t built in one day and I guess I cannot expect that I will be able to gut and reform how I teach my students in one week. I’m still feeling “under the gun” even though the stress is of my own creation.

            I have finally shared with all my students what the data is telling me about them and what my solutions are. I have gathered my supporting materials, posted the “remedies” online and have started assigning supplemental class assignments to be completed in and out of class. What makes me most enthusiastic about this endeavor is the feedback I am receiving from my students.

            They like the change. The students who scored” basic” and “below basic” are hopeful about improving their scores and believe in me because I believe in them. Not many of my students are what I would categorize as “excited” about the change but they are receptive. That’s good enough for me--- have you talked to a 13 or 14 year old lately. Seeing them “excited” about doing anything that resembles “work” is unusual. I can deal with receptive.

            Next step: reconfiguring my room into an autonomous, student-centered environment. That means I need to give responsibilities back to my students: supply maintenance, class routines, etc. That’s not that hard--- every kid will have a job and will be expected to be responsible for executing that job.

• ·         Supply wizard  - responsible for retrieving and putting back supplies needed for the learning activity
• ·         Scribe  - responsible for composing and submitting written material for the group when group assessments and assignments are given
• ·         Spokesperson - will present information the group worked to create or find and share back formally with the rest of the class.
• ·         Accountant - keeps records for the group to submit to the teacher daily—who finished their task? Who did not?
• ·         Time Guardian – watches the clock and  keeps the group working toward the their task with five minute interval warnings
• ·         Editor – checks group submissions for grammar, spelling, and word usage errors before submitting group work for the teacher. All members are responsible for reviewing their work and looking for editing errors but the final responsibility belongs to the editor.

My goal is that, by Halloween, students will have adjusted to my expectations and that visitors will see a room run by the students, managed by the teacher, and that learning is occurring with or without the teacher leading them. I want to be a clinician and facilitator of learning this year. These are just some steps along the way.

Mom's Homework

            I am writing this blog because my mom told me I should. That’s right. At 46, I still do what my mom tells me to--- to be honest, I do it more now than I ever did in any other decade. My mom’s usually right about the important stuff. I resented that truth when I was in my teens and twenties.  Now that I’m ending my fourth decade, I count on it.

            I called mom and dad on my way to bowling last night to check in with them and share some news I figured only they would understand or be happy for me to share with them. Two wonderful things happened. I found an” attaboy” specifically addressed to me and my closest teaching colleagues in my email yesterday, and I saw the beginnings of a real change in a student who had the potential to be a challenge student this year.

            Mom says those are the things I should commit to paper so I remember them because something may come of them. She’s probably right, so here goes:

            I was on a field trip last week to a diversity summit. I mentioned it in an earlier blog. I was invigorated for teaching by it, but I already was inspired by the opportunity to try something new with my students this year. On the bus ride to the conference, I sat with two of my closest teaching buddies. Our friendship was founded upon a discovered mutual passion for teaching our students and shared teacher values for excellence, empathy, and compassion.

            So, on the ride up, we shared and discussed many things: the new electronic systems we are learning this year; how to use the data we now have about our students to help them meet with success in our classes; enrichment and intervention periods; how we assess our students’ learning and what improvements we are making; and stories about growing up and our families—lots of stories. I was aware our superintendent was there, but we didn’t really feel a need to be self-conscious about our conversations. They were kid-friendly and therefore boss-friendly. We really needed the chance to catch up.

It turns out our boss was listening. A week later our conversations on the bus ride had become a faded memory.

             Yesterday morning, I saw a message from our superintendent labeled “Kudos”, but I thought it was a general message to the faculty about the success of our in-service training, so I was startled when I saw this message when I finally opened it in the afternoon:

Good morning.  KUDOS to the three of you!  I could not help but notice the rich professional dialogue that took place both on the ride to the Diversity Summit and on the ride back to Stewartstown.  I congratulate you for making exceptional use of the time available to share best practices and instructional strategies.  Our students are fortunate indeed.

I’m not sure I’ve ever received a note like that from a superintendent before. It was humbling. Mom says I should shout it from the rooftops. Hello rooftops. I’m shouting at you now.

            The second reason I called my folks was to share a small victory. I met one of my students in seventh grade last year while covering the intervention room. The intent of the duty was to be on-hand to help students who needed to catch up with a missing assignment and to monitor students while they made up a missed quiz or test. This young man was a frequent visitor because he not only would not do his work, but he also was often an active disruptor of his science class.

            Every time he came in, I would ask him what he did. He would tell me honestly, and then I would ask: “Was it worth it?” Sometimes he would say it was, but most of the time he would say it wasn’t. The difference was often predicated upon exactly how irritated he was when he walked in.

            This year, he’s my student, and after the first two weeks of school, he started to show similar, work-avoidance behaviors. He would interrupt other students by tapping their shoulders, try to whisper across the room or rock apathetically back and forth in his chair. I didn’t take the bait to get angry or correct him with frothing hostility, but I did redirect. I had sidebar conversations with him, worked with him one on one, and tried to get him to understand he was in a room for learning that was safe for everyone, my strongest, my weakest, and every student in between.

            Yesterday he showed me a willingness to make the effort. Every day, as a warm up, I share with my students a quote for the day and a Greek or Latin Root Word. We are in the Latin Roots now. Since I already have shared 30 common Greek Roots with my students and we are now into the Latin Roots, to make sure the Greek Roots are not forgotten, I share words derived from the Greek Roots as vocabulary words for students to look up.

            To help my students understand the value of this daily practice, I shared that I once tutored a student who needed to improve his verbal scores to get into a college that wanted him to play soccer for them. I helped him improve his verbal score by 200 points in 4 weeks by teaching him roots. When students can look at a word and recognize there is a root word in it and remember what the root means, they have a better chance of decoding the word. I received big thumbs up from my students after that story.

            Yesterday, my former intervention “buddy” volunteered an answer when we started decoding words, “Mr. Logan, can there be more than one root word in the vocab word at the same time?”

            I answered him.“Absolutely. Which word do you see that looks like there is more than one root word?”

            “Pathological?”

            I was stunned—I hadn’t really paid that close attention to the word when I pulled it from the “pathy” list, he was right. I was extremely proud of him. “You are absolutely right. He’s in it to win it! Awesome!”  I rushed to his chair and gave him a fist bump.  “You took the skill and found something about a word no one else could see. More than that, you recognized ‘logy’ was being used in the word even though they changed the root to ‘logical.’ You made my day.”

            My “buddy” is cool. He didn’t beam but his eyes did, even though he held his countenance in his controlled smirk. He was proud too.

            Today. It happened again in the same class period, this time a student who has been identified as having language standards issues in English class(among other things, that means that acquiring vocabulary is a challenge for her.) stepped up to the plate, swung for the fences and knocked it out of the park. That one student’s decision to jump on board the train to success gave his peers permission to do the same. Now, I really don’t want to mess this up.

            That’s my story, I’m sticking to it. Pssst--- tell my mom I did my homework would ya?

Evolve

            Here’s a thought. Am I really reinventing my own wheel, or am I just fully becoming the “me” I always hoped I’d be as a teacher? I wonder because, instead of being nervous through this change into a differentiated classroom, I am relieved. It feels “right” to me.  The students were already responding favorably to me as their teacher before I rolled out what I am doing and why today. What was interesting to me about the first full day was how much more receptive the students were to what I was trying to do with them after I rolled out the plan.

            To say it was all my students would be a lie. With one more class to go, I can share that one student did not like the flexible grouping plan.

            His complaint: “You mean to tell me that we won’t be sitting with the same people every day?”

            I nodded affirmatively.

            “That’s stupid. Why can’t we just stay where we are?”

            Kids looked at me cautiously. How would I react? Was the student going to get in trouble? Would I yell?

            I grinned and said. “Different days different people will be sitting together because they have the same need.”

            He was not satisfied but he dropped it. “Staying where we are” is the problem I am trying to remedy through this approach. I do not want to preserve their current levels of proficiency in the four standards. I want to explode them using lessons like surgical strikes to heal what is ailing in their learning.

            The tenor of the room shifted from uneasiness to diligence. Kids got to work and I got down to the business of facilitation their lessons.

            After building home groups, I jigsawed the class according to last week’s quiz. Students who earned 100% on the grammar/Greek words quiz, were moved to the “front of the room.” I beamed their journal question for the novel to respond to and share with me on google docs.

            Next, I moved students who were perfect on the Greek Roots part of the quiz but missed a part of the grammar assessment to the next row of groups. Their assignment was to complete an additional adjective and adverb exercise set. When they finish tomorrow, they will look into my teacher addition, find the right answers and, as a group, present how to correctly identify adverbs and adjectives and the words they modify.

            For the vocabulary group(s,) students were gathered into two tables. Each table was given a copy of last week’s questions. Students were advised that not only did they need to correct their missed answer but that they also had to explain to the class how to keep from choosing the wrong definition for their Greek Root words. Tomorrow will be a formative assessment of the students’ emerging understanding of modifiers.

            Formative assessment is also evolving and I am happy to report that I am seeing genuine improvement in most of my student’s quiz scores. Class averages for last Friday’s quiz ranged from 80 to 95% where as the pre quiz scores were closer to 70% in all but one class. Even the failures (there were VERY few) managed to bring their grades up 20% from the preview quiz. I even had a student for whom I knew a failing grade would be devastating. I took the time to focus on the fact he scored 4/20 the day before but scored10/20 on the “real assessment.” I gave him a fist pound and reminded him that, although he did not cross the passing threshold he made significant gains nonetheless. I was genuinely happy for him. Learning is happening when your progress is forward even small steps in the right direction are genuinely applauded because I coach the way I teach.

            That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

We Elders

We, Their Elders…

That phrase stayed with me from yesterday’s Fifth Annual Diversity Summit. Elders. I know I am a grown-up and I’m older. I have grown nieces and nephews who are now raising their own families. I have mentored first year teachers and supervised student-teachers in the past. I guess I knew I had become an elder, but it didn’t really strike me until Consuelo Kickbusch referred to the adults in the room that way. Elders.

That word resonates with me. My father was an elder in our church. In the church homes of my parents, there was no Mr. or Mrs. Or even Dr. There were only Brothers and Sisters. I remember confusing my Franciscan Order Nuns at St. Mary’s School in Baldwinsville, NY when I would tell them stories of Sister Jerry and Brother Herbert. That is how we showed reverence to our elders.

As elders, we yield great power and must exercise great responsibility to our students. They are our charges and we are charged to teach them well. Well, isn’t just the curriculum and faithful execution of polished lesson plans. Well is teaching the whole child. I don’t think that happens when the child feels you don’t see them.

I heard Manny Scott in two days give two very different talks to his audience. In one, he spoke to us, the elders of the learning community, and in the next, he spoke to the students. He shook some trees and invited the students to share that they were in pain and needed us, their elders, to help them or get them help.

With the elders, he shared uncensored stories of his youth. They were still lingering with me when he showed us that many of our students had stories that were similar and it broke my heart to see how many of our students were in pain, feeling hopeless, or had burdens too heavy to bear by themselves.

Every day I set out to create an environment safe for learning, risk-taking, sharing, being authentic. Every day I try to let my students know that they are the reason I wake up, without grumbling, at 5am. They are the reason I look forward to Mondays. I don’t usually tell them, I just hope they will know, by my spirit, that I am here because of them--- not the paycheck or the bills I pay with the paycheck. They matter.