Chris's REACH Teaching Blog

Differentiated Instruction, Session 2

2009-05-11T18:55:00.000-07:00

One of the key elements of TPA task 2-4 (and a key element of effective teaching) relates to how you differentiate, accommodate, and/or modify you teaching to make sure that you systematically meet the special needs students and still make sure that they achieve the expected outcomes of the course. How do you make sure that special needs students meet your UbD outcomes and are successful on their assessments despite their disabilities? What do you need to improve?

I think that my biggest strength in terms of teaching different kinds of learners -- be they labeled "special education" or not -- is that I'm not emotionally tied down to one type of teaching or one way of presenting material. I'll try lots of different kinds of instructional approaches in my class; in the last two weeks I've used:

Full-out, hands-on, exploratory learning labs
Demonstrations with student volunteers in front of the class
Direct instruction with whiteboard and/or PowerPoint
Individual reflection/analysis sheets
Group problem-solving
Small group presentations in front of the class
Free writes
Pair-shares
Mind-mapping, and
A field trip to an amusement park with worksheets for the students to examine and reflect on the different rides.

I try to engage students on multiple levels, with different kinds of learning methods and with opportunities for metacognition, in the hope that at least some of the methods I use will be effective in transmitting understanding to every student.

I also try to make time for extra support for students who need extra help. I've had some success here -- some students who clearly have difficulty with whole-classroom instruction do much better when I give them more focused, one-on-one attention. The downside, of course, is that it takes away from time for the rest of the class, unless the student is willing to meet with me during extended day (which they sometimes are).

My biggest weakness at this point is that I tend to be too quick to classify things as "successes" or "failures". (That's the J in my INFJ personality coming out, I think.) This is something that Victoria pointed out to me, and I can't argue with her assessment. If I think that something "doesn't work", my first instinct is to jettison it and try something else, instead of seeing success/failure as a gradient with many possible degrees of success. This can lead me to abandon a tactic when I should be thinking about how I can refine it and make it work better with my students (or even with one particular student). Likewise, if something works one time, I may keep doing it uncritically instead of adapting/modifying it to meet new circumstances -- which can lead to confusion and dismay if it suddenly "stops working" as a result.

I also, in all honesty, often feel like I'm flailing blindly in the dark with my engagement strategies. Human beings are staggeringly complex creatures, and my socialization (or lack thereof) during my school years didn't prepare me for what I would encounter in teaching at a public high school. I don't really have a good idea of why things work, or don't -- at least not enough of an idea to be able to predict what will be successful next time. I'm mostly going by my own intuition about what would be good and effective ways to learn things, and that's limited both by my own experience and by my peculiar way of processing the world around me. (One of the disadvantages of being a personality type that makes up less than 1% of the population, I suppose...)

Culturally Responsive Teaching

2009-02-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

One area where I've been doing a lot of thinking lately is the issue of equity, both in society and in the classroom. I've recently come to the realization that, while I believe in working for a just, egalitarian society, my subconscious cultural programming has often acted in ways that are contrary to those beliefs.

In her book, "Other People's Children", educator Lisa Delpit points out that many instructors who try to engage students in high-level, process-oriented learning experiences often just end up giving students the opportunity to demonstrate the skills they already had. The skills that are needed aren't actually taught, in many cases: they're assumed to be present, and so the material is presented too quickly and with inadequate scaffolding for students who haven't received this a priori training. Often, that training is part of the majority white middle-class culture, but is not present in the cultures of minority or lower-income students. Students are judged according to a set of rules of which they haven't been made aware, which leads to them feeling cheated and alienates them from the experience of education.

Delpit writes extensively about the existence of a "culture of power" and the need for minority and lower-income students to be taught the skills and conventions of that culture, so that they will then be able to succeed in participating in the exercise of power (and hopefully, eventually, in its more equitable distribution). Unfortunately, white liberal educators who are trying to promote a "progressive" education often fail to convey exactly the key underlying skills necessary for these students to be successful. With the very best intentions, they end up recreating the social inequities of the past.

Reading this article was an eye-opening experience for me. When I started teaching, I assumed that the cultural differences between myself and non-white teachers were primarily stylistic, and that students could essentially be taught with the same techniques regardless of where they came from (excepting the occasional student who was a recent immigrant and needed additional language support). I did some things right -- having students work in small groups, building increasing responsibility for projects later in the term, and using varied instructional/learning activities -- but I was repeatedly frustrated with the poor performance on quizzes and tests, as well as an apparent inability to transfer ideas studied in one project into a new-but-analogous situation on another project.

I eventually identified one part of the problem: the assessments I used were language-intensive, and I simply wasn't giving the students enough opportunities to work with the vocabulary. I then consciously worked to integrate vocabulary and literacy practice into the last unit of the course, which helped to improve student performance. Still, they hadn't reached the level I had hoped for them to reach, and some of their final projects were disappointing to me in how little research the kids had done.

Delpit's book, and a visit to two successful "pilot schools" in Boston, helped me realize another component of the problem: literacy skills weren't the only skills I'd been failing to teach them. The work that I wanted my students to do in their final biology project required extensive research and analysis of sources; while I tried to scaffold the project while they were doing it, breaking the research into digestible chunks, I hadn't built in a training for "Informational Literacy" -- the skill set of recognizing useful sources of information and cleaning relevant data from them. I also hadn't done enough explicit training on critical thinking or (as a subset thereof) problem-solving strategies. In retrospect, this explains why so many of my students didn't even try to answer the high-scoring essay questions at the ends of my exams: I hadn't taught them the skills to even know where to begin.

I wish that I could say that these problems were limited to my first semester teaching biology, but a near-revolt among my 10th-grade physics class showed that I had committed the same mistakes and oversights with them. The homework assignments that I gave them required a practiced familiarity with several key principles of algebra, which our sophomores hadn't studied since last spring. Furthermore, because physics problems are invariably word problems, they had the added challenge of extracting meaning from the question, identifying the variables, plugging the variables into the correct equations, and then figuring out how to solve them using those rusty algebra skills. In retrospect, it's no surprise that so many of my students either left several questions blank or failed to turn in their homework at all.

So, now we're starting over from square one. I can't go back and fix what I did with the biology students, but I can at least focus on teaching my physics students the relevant skills they will need -- both for this class and for life in general. My current areas of emphasis are:

1.) Continued vocabulary training so that students can become familiar with the language of science.
2.) Teaching critical thinking skills. When people use their minds well, how do they approach problems?
3.) Building in refreshers for rusty math skills and explicit instruction (and practice) in the procedural skills necessary to do work in science -- whether that means dissecting a word problem or making measurements in the lab.
4.) Finding culturally-relevant examples of the ideas that we talk about in class. This may be the hardest part, but I have some ideas involving both cars and skateboarders...

How People Learn, Ch 1: From Speculation to Science

2008-12-10T00:19:00.000-08:00

Reading this chapter has me excited to look at the science of learning in greater detail.I've realized over the course of this year that not everybody learns like I do, and that even the things that "worked" for me were not necessarily the best ways for me to learn.

I enjoyed the side discussion about "Fish is Fish", in which a fish is told about the terrestrial world by a frog and interprets everything the frog says through the filter of what the fish already knows. This is an aspect of learning and thinking that I think everybody needs to be made aware of; many of the difficulties and conflicts that come up between people (and communities, and nations) can be traced back to this sort of blindness to our own paradigms.

The book is absolutely right when it says that you have to address a student's mental framework (paradigm) in order to get them engaged in learning. There are two especially tricky things about dealing with flawed paradigms, though:

1.) People are generally oblivious to the fact that they have paradigms. A person's conceptual framework is so ingrained into how they see the world that they have no sense of how it limits them. Asking a person to be aware of his/her paradigms is like asking a fish to be aware of water.

2.) When you do confront people with the flaws in their paradigms, they often get really defensive about them. People don't want to discard their pre-established ways of looking at the world. It's threatening and uncomfortable, and it makes them feel stupid. People will often ride a flawed paradigm down into utter disaster, long after it becomes evident to everyone else that the framework is flawed (c.f. Operation Iraqi Freedom; Vietnam War; fiscal policy under Herbert Hoover; collectivist farms in Stalinist Russia; Roman Catholic Church re: geocentric model of the universe; et cetera, ad nauseum).

Since I'm going to be teaching physics in the spring, I have a big challenge ahead of me with confronting student paradigms. Somehow I need to address the many, many misconceptions they will have about how physics works, without making them feel threatened or attacked in the process.

It's going to be an interesting semester...

Pre-assessment, "How People Learn"

2008-12-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

"Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives...most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity...[and] when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life."

“… flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

When and where in your life have you experienced learning experiences or activities like this, where you were so absorbed in what you were doing, you needed no extrinsic motivation to continue? When do you feel the most alive and interested in what you are doing?

I've always been driven by activities that engage my imagination, my sense of wonder, or both:

When I was a child I would play with my brother and my cousin with our stuffed animals, crafting elaborate stories of adventure and epic battles between good and evil. I have spent much of my time in the ensuing years as a storyteller; even now, I devote a large amount of my free time to creating a biweekly podcast for my fiction. It makes no money for me, but it is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I enjoy acting and cooking, both of which give me chances to create something new and interesting out of "raw" components. And I enjoy playing guitar, which gives me a chance to use my hands to make something beautiful.

My sense of wonder has always been well-developed. I remember going to aquariums and staring for hours at those creatures from another world; when we went to EPCOT Center, I was so entranced by "The Living Seas" that I didn't want to leave. Planetariums and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX evoked a similar feeling of awe. As I got older, I felt the same way about visiting museums, watching plays, walking through redwood forests, and reading novels, especially science fiction and fantasy. If someone can give me a glimpse of another world and populate it with interesting people (with interesting problems), I get sucked in really easily. I don't get to read as often as I would like, but there are some authors who I make appointments for: Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison, J. K. Rowling, Orson Scott Card, George R. R. Martin. When one of their books comes out, I drop everything else and devour it, sinking myself back into the world of those characters I've come to love so much.

Those are the two big requirements for "flow" for me: the chance to be creative, or the chance to encounter something new, awesome (in the older sense of the word), or wondrous.

Writing to Learn

2008-11-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

In these two chapters we looked at the use of writing in formative assessments, largely in the form of note-taking and worksheets oriented around reading assignments. I'm reminded of a quote that has been variously attributed to Richard Hugo, E. M. Forester, and Saul Bellow: "How do I know what I think until I see what I write?" Writing sharpens thinking -- as I'm sure the REACH staff knew when they decided to assign us to write blog posts in response to our readings. :) We can take advantage of that by having students write in ways that will help to organize and clarify their thoughts.

One thing that I found helpful in the articles -- beyond the wide swath of different writing assignment tools, several of which look very promising -- is the notion of reading with a purpose in mind, and making that purpose clear to the students at the outset. It's not something I'd particularly thought about before, but it's true: the way I read, say, a biology textbook when researching a lesson is very different from the way I read a novel, which is different from the way I read a newspaper. Most of our students probably don't have much experience with reading for anything other than narrative, which can make other forms of reading confusing when they run into them. Using formative writing assignments will help our students to understand why they're reading what they're reading, which will hopefully help them to put the focus and effort where they are most needed.

In what ways do you currently use writing-to-learn strategies in your class?

I use "Do Now" writing assignments to activate background knowledge prior to a lesson, as well as to help them organize their thoughts about material we have discussed in previous lessons and make connections between those lessons and the new material. Sometimes these writing assignments are about purely factual issues, but often they are Thinking Questions that ask the students to speculate based on what they already know.

I have also used worksheets with short essay questions to have students respond to articles they have read. However, the amount of actual reading we have done in class so far is relatively little.

In what ways could you expand your use of these strategies?

I hope to address this tomorrow when I give my students an excerpt from "You Are Here" by Thomas M. Kostigen, in which he uncovers major ecological problems around the globe and looks at how the things we do have an impact on those problems (for good or ill). The book is part investigative journalism, part ecology lesson and part travelogue, and it makes for easy and engaging reading. Kostigen does a great job of bringing in the human element, showing (for example) the lives of illegal loggers in Borneo, or a small family of subsistence farmers in Amazonia. I am hopeful that it will help our students make connections between themselves and these far-off places where our innocent actions can cause so much lasting harm for everyone. This assignment would be a natural place to make use of a formative writing assessment, both to make the purpose of the reading clear and to help the students to identify parts of the text where they are making connections, suffering confusion or asking questions.

How can writing strategies help students “hold their thinking?”

I think that goes back to the quote at the beginning of the article: you don't really know what you think until you can put it into words. By giving students a chance to interact with the text in a structured way, you give them a chance to let their thinking crystallize so they can examine it further and compare it with the thinking of others. These structured writing assignments give students a "safe" way to comment on the text; they don't have to come up with a response out of thin air.

For the excerpt I'm going to give them tomorrow, I think that the double-entry diary and a set of "mission objectives" will give them the structure that they need in order to make sense of the reading. I'll also give them space to write down words they don't understand so we can deal with any vocabulary issues. I know that the students are doing lit circles in English right now, so they know how to engage in extended reading; hopefully I can touch base with Willi to get some pointers on how to make this happen smoothly.

Older Readers & Vocabulary

2008-11-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

What specific words do you see as vital to your unit that students might have trouble with?

For the ecology unit, I've chosen to focus on the following words:

Ecology (duh)
Population
Community
Habitat
Ecosystem
Biosphere

Producer
Primary Consumer
Secondary Consumer
Decomposer
Top Predator

Competition
Predation
Mutualism
Parasitism

Fixation
Cycle
Flow
Resource

Keystone Species
Exotic Species
Invasive Species
Toxin

How did you go about choosing these words?

These word lists follow some basic thematic groupings: Levels of Organization; Community Roles; Community Interactions; Resource Movement; and Ecological Disturbances. These are, to my mind, the basic concepts that need to be dealt with in order for someone to understand ecology, and the minimum vocabulary terms that you should have access to if you're going to have a serious discussion about ecology.

The activities that we did during the last week and a half focused on community roles and levels of organization. We'll be continuing to hit on those as we get into community interactions and resource movement over the next two weeks. I think that ecological disturbances should be introduced gradually as I touch on the topics related to each type of disturbance; for example, now that I've dealt with community roles, I can introduce the students to what happens when you take out a predator at the top of the food web, or when you remove a key prey resource that a secondary consumer depends on.

Alternatives to "Look it up in the Dictionary"

2008-11-09T00:39:00.000-08:00

This was an excerpt from Words, Words, Words by Janet Allen, and it was one of the most resource-rich reading assignments we've had to date. Unlike some of the other chapters we've read, which were full of good ideas but had little in the way of illustration, this book actually shows us what these literacy tools are supposed to look like.

The chapter opens by pointing out something that I had never really considered about teaching vocabulary: for students who have a low literacy level, looking something up in the dictionary really isn't very helpful. This was rarely an issue for me as a child: since I had been reading for as long as I could remember, I had little trouble understanding most dictionary definitions. If they used a word I didn't understand, I'd look up that word. Ms Allen tells of a situation where this went awry for her students, and the anecdote is both funny and tragic:

I handed out lists of words and had students copy definitions and write the words in sentences. Still they didn't know the words. They asked me which definition to copy from the dictionary. I told them to copy the one that made sense, the one that fit the context. They looked at me as if I were an alien and asked, "Can we copy the shortest one?" None of the definitions made sense to them. Often they didn't even understand the words used in the definitions. (p. 33)

Another thing that she points out is that often the parts of a definition don't capture the whole. Defining "floozy" as "a slovenly or vulgar woman" doesn't really tell us the functional meaning of the word, i.e., a slut. Partly, this is the result of the dictionary using polite, circumspect language that doesn't fit the spirit of the word, but part of it is just that the definition can't capture the context in which the word is used.

In light of these limitations of dictionary definitions, the different graphic organizers and worksheets illustrated in this chapter are a life-saver. Some of them are a bit complicated for my kids at this stage, and some seem much better-suited to Humanities than Science, but there are some gems here that I think could be useful in my class:

Concept Attainment (Figure 3.2): This could be useful for some of the "big idea" words that we discuss in science, though I'd have to think about which words in particular are best suited to this sort of analysis.

Concept Ladder: This sounds like it might be good for pre-assessment on scientific concepts, but I'd like to see a copy of the worksheet first.

ABC x 2: This is another one I want to see a copy of. I'm not sure if it would be useful or not, but it sounds like it could be.

Knowledge Chart: I like this one a lot. It's similar to the KWL charts, except that the "W" column is missing and it's focused on a specific word rather than a broad concept.

Analysis Map: This is another one that seems like it would be a good thinking tool for "big idea" concepts -- not so much for teaching vocabulary initially as for helping them to organize their thoughts after they've had some instruction on a topic.

Context-Content-Experience: This one is really cool, but it also seems very cerebral and a little complicated to fill out. I'm impressed by the student who was able to draw examples from PE, Math and Science for the concept of "metamorphosis". I don't think my students are ready yet for this level of sophistication.

Words in Context: This could be really useful with science words, since it breaks up the target word into its separate parts. Most scientific words are made up of a fairly predictable set of components, and getting my students to recognize those components would be very helpful in their ongoing education. Of course, as Ms Allen points out, if you can fill out this worksheet on your own, you don't need it, so this is something we'd have to do as a class and/or in table groups.

Thinking Trees: This one immediately made me think of my students' end-of-the-year class project, which is to create a poster, handout and verbal presentation about an ecological issue. I love how the organizer moves the student from the broad to the narrow, from the general to the specific, and from problems to possible solutions. This could be really useful for organizing their thoughts and research in preparation for doing their posters.

The trick now is going to be figuring out which tools will give me the most "bang for the buck" with the small amount of time remaining in the semester. Ms Allen warns against weighing students down with too many worksheets, and the point is well-taken. How can I give my students the best support possible without giving them so much to do that they miss out on the point of the exercise?

After Third Grade

2008-11-08T23:46:00.000-08:00

This article from Educational Leadership was more of a meta-analysis than an actual research piece; the authors combed through a bunch of papers for strategies found to be successful in promoting literacy among older students, then compiled the ones that were the most consistently useful here in this paper. By their very nature, meta-analyses deal in generalities, so there isn't a lot of "meat" here, but it's a good overview for teachers who want to promote literacy in their classroom.

The key thing that I took away from this article was that literacy promotion requires a comprehensive, integrated approach across subjects. Teachers need to work together to coordinate comprehension training; students need to work together in teams so that the stronger readers can assist the weaker ones; school libraries need to have a diverse mix of reading material across subject areas; multimedia techniques need to be incorporated with more traditional methods, so that students can successfully use the forms of literacy needed in the 21st century (including navigation of hypertext and cross-correlation of text, sound and video). Everything needs to work together with everything else in a way that is purposeful.

It really brought home to me how much work we still need to do at ARISE on interdisciplinary integration. Willi, Paul and I do talk about our plans and try to hit on similar themes in our classes, but ultimately we each have our own little worlds inside our classrooms, and there isn't a lot of integration between them. That's something we're going to need to do better at in coming years if we want to give our students the best literacy support possible.

Strategies That Work: Possible Unit Texts

2008-11-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

What are the possible texts you will be using in your literacy unit? What challenges do you see these texts posing to your students in terms of comprehension?

I'm currently working on teaching a unit on ecology. This is a vocabulary-intensive field, so literacy techniques should prove very useful here. I've already started using "Vocabulary Note Cards" to give the students a chance to work with the language before encountering it in their reading.

It's hard to find good entry-level texts on ecological issues. There are picture books for young children and thick nonfiction tomes written for well-educated adults, but there isn't much out there for teens and less literate adults who might want to know about the issues affecting our planet. Because of that, I'm falling back on periodicals. I've started scanning the newspaper each morning while I ride the BART, looking for articles about environmental/ecological issues that we could discuss in class. I should also go to the library and see if I can find some good magazines for our use.

The biggest challenges I anticipate are (1) articles with a lot of vocabulary terms and (2) articles that are written above the reading level of most of my students. I'd like to challenge them a little, but not so much that they get frustrated and give up.

Looking at the lists of strategies that good readers use, which strategies do you think would prove most useful to your students in their comprehension of the text you give them?

Monitoring comprehension is foundational, I think. If you don't know when you're lost, you can't take any steps to correct it.
I like the idea of using sticky notes to make notes on the text. While I wouldn't have any problem with them writing on photocopied newspaper articles, I notice what the authors said about students filling up sticky notes where before they couldn't write more than a few lines on a blank page.
One technique that they didn't explicitly mention in the text is the Socratic seminar. Our students have practiced this technique a few times in Advisory, and I think it lends itself well to the (often-contentious) debates about ecological issues.

I also want to talk to Willi about the strategies she is using in Humanities. The students are currently doing literature circles, so I think it would aid buy-in if we could use the same techniques in both classes.

A final thought: One of the things this week's assignment has done is to make me more aware of my own literary comprehension -- or lack thereof. Every time I sat down to work on the homework for this week, I found my eyes crossing in short order. Partly, I think this is because of the lack of visual aids; this book has long stretches of uninterrupted text about techniques that are not really explained very thoroughly (at least not in these opening chapters). I tend to learn complex concepts more easily when charts and diagrams are employed. Of course, my fatigue is no doubt another factor; I've hit the end-of-semester drag, I'm only sleeping five or six hours per night, and I'm running into a chain of discouraging events at school. It probably says a lot that I devoured that first chapter last Thursday, when I'd only had to teach one lesson and it had gone quite well, whereas now I'm having a hard week and trying to read this stuff on my own.

There's a lesson there for teachers: the stuff going on in your students' lives is going to affect their ability to absorb new content, especially via reading. Most of my students are far less literate than I am, so if I'm having trouble reading my assignments, how much more are they!

Literacy Pre-Assessment

2008-10-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

1.) What was your own early experience as a reader? When did you learn to read? What do you remember about it?

I've been reading literally for as long as I can remember. By the time I entered kindergarten I was reading NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC on my own. I didn't understand all the words, of course, but I understood enough to keep me engaged with the content.

When I was in elementary school and middle school I used to read the dictionary for fun. I loved learning about words, where they came from, and how they were related to other words. I was home-schooled from 3rd grade on, and Mom used to have me start every day with a "Word of the Day" diary: I had to look up a new word, write down its definition, and use it in a sentence. Typically, the search for one interesting word would lead me to six others. Even into my teens and twenties, I would often go to the dictionary to look up one word, then become side-tracked and spend half an hour jumping from one word to another, absorbing new vocabulary. Dad used to shake his head in amazement when he would come into the family room and find out that the book I was curled up with was a dictionary.

One big part of my early literary experience was when my Mom would read to my brother and me. This continued even into my early teens. She read to us from The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, Mr. Revere and I, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, several books by Jules Verne, and others that I've since forgotten. Listening to a very fluent reader like Mom helped me to understand how books were supposed to be read: dynamically, with proper emphasis and emotion. (Sometimes a little too much emotion: Mom used to get choked up at the ends of a lot of our books, to the extent that it became a running gag. She would bury her face in the book and make loud weeping noises, and the resulting laughter would relieve enough of the tension for her to go on.) Hearing such a wide variety of words spoken aloud also greatly enhanced our oral vocabulary.

As I grew older, I would often return the favor by reading to Mom. I used to sit in the kitchen while she was making dinner, either working on schoolwork or reading for pleasure. When I found an interesting passage, newspaper story or magazine article, I would read it to her and then we would talk about it. The content ranged from serious editorials to book excerpts to Dave Barry columns, so I got a lot of experience in reading different kinds of content aloud. Looking back on it, Mom and I were almost a two-person forensics team.

2.) As you grew older, what was your experience with reading in school? What (if anything) did you like to read? Pay particular attention to your reading experience at the age of the students you teach now. What was reading like for you at that age?

Early high school was a very exciting time for me as a reader because the first of the new STAR WARS novels began coming out at that time. I had fallen in love with science fiction and fantasy in general, and with Star Wars in particular, so the existence of all new stories with my favorite characters was cause for rejoicing. Timothy Zahn didn't write down to his audience, so those were highly stimulating books for me to read, even if they weren't what you would call highbrow literature.

Mom had me read some of the classics, in addition to the modern SF/Fantasy stories that I tended to choose on my own. I remember, at various points in my schooling, reading The Red Badge of Courage, Animal Farm, one of the Huck Finn books, and Black Beauty; I'm sure there were others, too, but they've faded from my recollection. I also had to read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet for my Shakespeare class.

During my teen years I also read through the Bible, in its entirety, at least twice. I had been reading the Bible on my own from a relatively early age -- first using a simplified children's translation, then the Living Bible paraphrase, and finally the NIV -- but it was when I got into high school that I really started to make a serious habit of it. Between daily readings on my own and discussions in youth group and Sunday school, I became very familiar with the unusual language used in the scriptures and modern religious texts.

Besides novels and the scriptures, I also read magazines, newspapers, and (especially) comic books, which became a major addiction of mine during this time period. Except when we were dining together as a family, I never ate without reading something -- even if it was just the cereal box in front of me. I also used reading as a refuge from social interaction, since I was rather shy and very self-conscious about my weight, appearance and lack of social skills. During family gatherings, when other kids were playing whiffle-ball or throwing darts, I would be the one inside on the couch with a book in my hands. Reading was a precious comfort to me at one of the most difficult times in my life, and I would retreat to that shelter whenever I could get away with it.

3.) Answer the same question with regards to writing.

I've been telling stories since at least first grade, when we had a story contest at my Montessori school and they brought in someone to type our stories for us while we dictated them. (Mine was about two friends, an icthyosaurus and an elasmosaurus. Yes, I was a dinosaur nut -- and no, those aren't actually dinosaurs. At the end of the story they went home to eat pancakes.) My story won third place, thus creating a monster that persists to this day. :)

Once I got into home-schooling, Mom used creative writing as a way to engage me in assignments that were otherwise making me drag. I remember the first time she did this: I was either seven or eight, and doing an assignment for science about cleaner wrasses. I enjoyed learning about them, but I was bored with the idea of a written report. Mom suggested that I write her a story about them, and that sounded like a lot more fun. The result was a whimsical story about cleaner wrasses who ran a "service station" for bigger fish, which was being threatened by a group of "gangsters" who were sabre-toothed blennies. It was the sort of thing that somebody might have made a movie about a generation later, but at the time it was wonderfully obscure, and it made the project a lot more fun.

It also opened the floodgates. I wrote another story the year after that one, a long and rambling journey into weirdness that was equal parts The Phantom Tollbooth and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. In the early 1990s I wrote a series of stories based on adventures that my cousin Monica, my brother Casey and I had acted out with our stuffed animals during our younger years. In 1995 I had a dream that inspired me to write a novella about a woman who was changed into a wolf. In 1996-98 I worked on a set of novellas about shapeshifting aliens who protected the Earth (and other primitive planets) from the classic UFO-flying "Greys"; I completed two of the planned set of six stories, then got halfway through the third before I realized it wasn't working and abandoned it.

In 1996 I also joined an online writers' group, where I got interested in shared story universes. I started small at first, putting out a couple of character intro stories and a few other bits here and there. By 1998 I was deeply involved with the community and had helped do a huge amount of world-building for the Metamor Keep story universe, which eventually spawned my own spinoff of Metamor City. I continued writing off and on throughout my college and grad school years, eventually completing my first full-length novel earlier this year.

Writing nonfiction has never been as interesting for me as writing fiction, but it wasn't hard, either. The hardest part of writing good nonfiction was doing the research. All those years of reading anything and everything that I could get my hands on helped to build my feel for what it meant to write in different genres. I served as the editor for my youth group's newspaper, which gave me practice in writing editorials and other forms of persuasive writing (as well as editing other people's writing, which was both torturous and the best thing I could have done to build my own writing skills). I got consistently high marks for my written papers when I got into college, and it wasn't until I had to write my thesis for grad school that I learned of my biggest flaw as a non-fiction writer: too much of a propensity for overstatement and excessively flowery language. I blame my fiction writing for that. ;-)

4.) Thinking about your own classroom right now, what role does literacy play in your class? What do you want to learn how to do better in your classroom to support your students in subject-specific literacy?

One thing that came out in my reading of the article was that I'm not doing a lot to build comprehension. I wrote my lab experiments with an informal style and simplified language, thinking that I could produce comprehension simply by not challenging their vocabulary too much. I didn't think about the fact that comprehension is a separate skill, and that the students might know 90% of the words on the page yet still be unable to derive meaning from it. No wonder most of my lab worksheets went unread!

Vocabulary is a constant struggle in science, as well. While I tried to scaffold understanding of many important terms, I don't think I did enough. I would put the words on the board, break them up into their roots and define the roots, and then try to explain the definition of the word -- but I don't think I was giving the students enough situations where they were forced to with those words while they were fresh in their minds, which might have helped them to retain the knowledge. I was appalled this past Monday when I discovered that one of my students -- who is poorly self-motivated but not stupid -- did not remember what homeostasis was. This, despite the fact that the whole unit has essentially been about homeostasis.

The article described a number of tools for practicing both vocabulary and comprehension, but it's difficult for me to build solid mental constructs about these tools when I'm just reading about them. I'd like to see these tools implemented in our REACH meetings, either as a group or one-on-one with Victoria, so that I can see them modeled and then practice using them. I want to give my students some better grounding in vocab and comprehension, especially as we're getting into the jargon-heavy field of ecology, but I won't feel like I really understand these tools until I have the chance to practice with them.

Inquiry vs. Content

2008-10-22T23:09:00.000-07:00

This article struck a nerve for me, because it highlighted one of my ongoing insecurities about my own teaching: the fear that I haven't been effectively implementing the sort of inquiry-based approach to learning that I wanted to use. Given my students' poor performance on the quizzes after the early lab activities, I had to conclude that they retained very little of what I had tried to teach in those lessons.

How do you know students understand key points of your content?

I've been trying different approaches. The quizzes are intended to check for the ability to remember, comprehend, and analyze/synthesize concepts discussed in class. The students are improving in their ability on the first two points, but many of them haven't even tried to answer the more difficult written problems intended to check for the latter. Less formal checks for understanding, like asking them to explain concepts to me verbally, have mixed results.

Today I tried something new: I had my students do a written reflection for me on three questions related to the cardiovascular, digestive, and nervous systems. The focus of the questions was on how these different systems keep the rest of the body running. I also asked them to each identify one thing they understand now about biology that they didn't before, and the biggest thing we've talked about that they still don't understand. I haven't checked these papers yet, so I don't know how well they did. I do know that a lot of them wasted time during the class and didn't finish, even with the incentive of having the computers ready and waiting for them to use after they completed the assignment.

What skills/understandings do students need to know about learning your specific subject?

I'm trying to parse this sentence in order to answer it correctly. I think it's asking, not what specific skills and understandings must be gained by the end of the course, but what skills and understandings they will need in order to even begin learning effectively within my subject. The latter is a more difficult question, and also more interesting.

One thing that I think is key is the concept of the scientific method. This is something I haven't hit on heavily in the class up to now, and I think it's going to be crucial when we start to get into ecology. One can work through much of physiology without understanding how we learn things in science: the parts of the body and their functions are very well-characterized now, and it isn't necessary to understand the process of scientific inquiry in order to know how these parts work together. When we get into ecology, though, that's inherently fuzzier territory, and the system of observe-hypothesize-test-refine is going to be much more important. Scientific method is important both as an understanding (they need to get the reasoning behind it) and as a skill (they need to be able to do it, if they're going to do inquiry-based learning).

Another key understanding that underlies biology is that everything is connected to everything else. We study organs and organ systems in isolation, but it's critical to realize that these things function as parts of a unitary organism. Similarly, the different organisms in an ecosystem are closely tied together, both with other members of their own population and with other populations occupying different niches within the community. What affects one species affects the others it is connected to, as well.

How are you teaching this in your class right now?

Not well enough, to judge from the results. I'm going to need to put in some serious effort on this next unit to design inquiry-based lesson plans and get away from both all-traditional instruction and undirected hands-on exploration.

Oh, yeah: and I have to do it with two weeks less time than I thought I had.

Lovely.

Lesson Planning: The Real Story

2008-10-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

How do I plan my lessons? Well, it goes something like this:

1.) At the beginning of the year I identified the topics that I wanted to teach and when I wanted to teach them. I worked out a syllabus with plans for where the major projects would go and came up with some general ideas for how I wanted to present certain aspects of the material.

2.) The actual lessons then got put together at more-or-less the last minute. Usually I'd be working until 10 or 11 the night before, writing out lab worksheets or putting together slides. Then the next day I'd have to do it all over again.

3.) Eventually I started coming up with some multi-day assignments that would save me from having to start again from scratch every night. I also brought in La Clinica to do a two-week sex ed program, which took up an hour of class every day and thus cut the amount of time I had to plan activities for in half. This probably saved my sanity when I was trying to catch up on grading for the mid-semester marking period.

4.) Currently I have the students working on a big mid-semester Public Health Project, which is taking up good-sized chunks of time with comparatively little direct instruction on my part. Again, this has saved my sanity. Gustavo and I are team-teaching this section, since he knows the computers and the community far better than I; together we broke down the PHP into small, digestible steps for each day's activities. This has greatly reduced the amount of last-minute planning that I need to do ... though Victoria and I were still working on scaffolding the whole idea of a Public Service Announcement on the morning that the project began. :)

In general, then, I would say that I tend to plan the Big Picture far in advance and do the details at the last minute. This works better at some times than others; I feel like I'm pretty good at coming up with ideas to present material -- something that several others have echoed -- but it's easy for me to get to that point where I feel overwhelmed by all the stuff on my plate.

On the bright side, I think that the second unit of this class was structured in advance much more than the first unit. On the other hand, we're running about a week and a half behind schedule, so some of the stuff I had in mind for Unit 2 isn't going to happen. Figuring out what to keep and what to toss is the next big challenge.

Science Framework

2008-10-13T23:06:00.000-07:00

This was actually my third time examining the California content standards for the sciences. I had to go through this document with a fine-toothed comb when I was studying for my two rounds of CSET exams in early 2007 and early 2008. Of course, in those cases I had a month or more to review them, not four days in the middle of the midterm week. ^_^ Needless to say, I gave the document a far more thorough examination the first two times.

Now that I'm actually attempting to teach this stuff to students, my primary reaction to the list of standards is: "Yeah, great. And while I'm at it, let me spin some straw into gold for you." I have one semester to teach my students all the biology they will get in high school. Even with two-hour blocks --which I consider the absolute minimum to get anything accomplished in a lab course -- that's not remotely enough time to address all of the standards they present. I my planning this year by cutting down to three content areas, then eliminated one of those during the summer retreat. Now I'm at the end of the time I had set aside for the first unit, and my students still need more time working with this material to really get it. If they can leave my class with a genuine understanding of physiology and homeostasis, and nothing else, I'll count that a victory at this point.

Having high standards is all well and good, and I believe in holding students to a high bar for achievement. What I've discovered in the last seven weeks is the difference between a high bar and an impossible bar. My students are not prepared, at this age level and maturity level, to process all of the information that the Science Framework asks them to process. If I had four years with them, I might be able to build understanding of all of the content standards for one of the sciences. As it is, though, I need to choose between breadth and depth, and our school's charter is clear on which one wins out.

At any rate, a lot of the stuff they want students to know is really only of tangential importance:

Students know meiosis is an early step in sexual reproduction in which the pairs of chromosomes separate and segregate randomly during cell division to produce gametes containing one chromosome of each type.
(Biology Standard 2a)

Is meiosis an important biological concept? Yes, absolutely -- if you're planning on pursuing a degree in biology. As such, it's absolutely an essential standard for a university-level bio course. But I feel fairly safe in saying that most of my students do not need to know this. I would much rather throw out all of meiosis, all of Mendelian Genetics, and spend extra time on proper sex education and risk assessment. It doesn't matter how much they know about how sex works, on a genetic level, if they don't understand how to make good choices about their own sexual reproduction.

The key here is to separate out the important from the relevant and timely. Many of the content standards fall into the former but not the latter. Unfortunately, as long as the government bureaucrats overseeing school "reform" fail to understand that distinction, it's likely that we're going to keep bashing our heads against the wall, throwing a mountain of information at students and hoping desperately that it sticks.

"Assuming the Best" and "Reaching Fragile Students"

2008-09-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

Continuing our study of classroom management and culture, these two articles addressed issues that are very immediately relevant for me.

In "Assuming the Best", authors Rick Smith and Mary Lambert talk about the unwritten contract between teacher and student: The student wants to learn in a safe and structured environment, and the teacher does his/her best to provide that environment. When students act out, they are (consciously or subconsciously) testing the teacher to see if that contract will be upheld.

That, in and of itself, is not a new idea to me. There were some specifics in the article that I found valuable, though:

1.) The idea that we have our own "internal radios" projecting unhelpful static, just as the students do. While their radios are saying things like "Being seen as cool is more important than anything else" or "School is boring", our radios are picking up static like "These kids don't care" or "They're just lazy." That negativity can poison our relationship with our students and render useless any tactics that we might employ to gain their compliance. (As Victoria pointed out two weeks ago in our meeting, mere compliance is not the objective: engagement is.)

2.) How we correct behavior is as important as that we correct it. There were some incidents this week that I think I handled well on this front, but in other cases my tone was too harsh and the correction may have been too public. I'm still figuring out how to convey a firm, serious tone without it coming out unnecessarily harsh, and it gets harder when I'm short on sleep. I've got to remember to keep taking care of myself so I don't take out my own exhaustion on the students.

3.) The idea of the "Two by Ten" strategy intrigues me. (That means spending two minutes a day for ten days talking with your toughest student about whatever interests them -- as long as the conversation stays G-rated.) I can already think of a few students I want to try this with -- if I can keep them from running away from me. ^_^

Some of the ideas suggested in the article seem more immediately useful than others. The concept of building behavior rubrics (a set of guidelines for what good behavior should look like in various situations) sounds good in principle, but my mind shudders at the thought of any more organizational prep work when I'm already up until midnight three or four nights a week working on lesson plans.

The other article, "Reaching the Fragile Student", talks about creating an inviting learning environment that won't turn off students -- especially those whose lives, frankly, suck in a lot of ways we can't control. Our school is off to a good start with this, I think, in that no student ever gets a grade below a B: if your work isn't up to expectations, you have to fix it or take the class over again. Classes that you don't complete with at least a B don't give you any credit hours and aren't included on your transcript. Of course, we do have to deal with the problem of students who are (for example) juniors by age and 9th-graders by credit accumulation, but better for them to stay and learn with us than to end up with a diploma that isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

This article also talks about looking to heal conflicts through mediation rather than just suppress them with punishment. I had a couple of experiences with that yesterday, one of which I'll share here:

One of my students, A., is smart and diligent in her own work but has trouble relating to other people. She seems to have a big pile of resentments built up from the way people have treated her over the years, and it's caused her to put up defensive walls that make her seem mean and off-putting. She despises group work and doesn't want to collaborate with anyone. As a quite dark-skinned African-American woman in a school that is 85% Latino, she feels alienated from the people around her; she believes that the other students won't work with her because they're racist. That makes her more angry and defensive, which causes people to pull away from her even more -- thus reinforcing her opinions. When the class divided into teams for a project, she was the last person left unpicked and refused to work with the team that was assigned to her.

I talked to her yesterday in private about how we project impressions to the people around us, and how her very self-confident, "go to hell" persona was intimidating to others. I shared my own feelings of isolation, being an Anglo man in a Latino school, and that seemed to resonate with her. Racism, I said, is a hard thing to deal with directly because you can never know what's going on in another person's heart, and all you can do is strive to be the best person you can be so that others have a chance to see that whatever prejudices they might have don't apply to you.

I told A. that she's going to need to be willing to open up and be vulnerable, to risk getting hurt, in order to give people the chance to make a positive connection with her -- essentially, she needs to try to "assume the best" about her classmates. I then suggested several individuals in the class who could make good partners, and she agreed that a few of the ones I suggested were nice and would talk to her. I'm hoping that this will be the beginning of a new start for her, and that she can take the risky step of giving someone a chance to be her friend.

Warm but demanding

2008-09-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

The articles we were assigned to read for this week ("The Teacher as Warm Demander" by E. Bondy & D. Ross and "Understand the Symptoms" by M. Tate) struck a resounding note with me. It's good that I've read these articles now and not before I started teaching; I don't think I could have really grokked them until I had some actual classroom experience under my belt.

"Understand the Symptoms" talks about four of the most common causes of student misbehavior: needing attention, needing control, boredom, and feelings of inadequacy. I've seen cases of all of these in my class, and some cases where I'm not quite sure I've identified which of these the root cause. To be sure, they often go together: a student who feels inadequate to understand the material might stop trying, get bored, and act out in order to get attention. Another student might get bored because he understands the material perfectly well and wants me to get on with it already. The tricky part is identifying root causes, and I suspect that comes with getting to know your students better. I've already gotten valuable insights on a few of my students by talking to Romeo, who seems to know a lot about everybody (which is probably part of his job description, come to think about it).

"The Teacher As Warm Demander" highlights the kind of teacher I try to be: one who communicates clear expectations but also clearly conveys an affection for the students. Being human, I sometimes have problems with conveying "unconditional positive regard" for students who are frustrating me, but I think I'm getting better at it. One of my students who was causing a lot of disruptions early on, C.R., has gotten a lot more on-task since I made an effort to slow down the pace of my instruction and explain things more clearly. I gave him one-on-one help when he was working on our drug education project, and I think that helped to show him that I did care about seeing him do well in the class.

One passage in this article that I found interesting was about learning the cultural context of students' actions:

"Gaining insight into cultural values and habits helps teachers monitor their reactions to student behaviors that they might deem "bad", but that are considered normal or even valued in the student's home culture." (p.3)

Leaving aside for the moment the thorny question of whether all cultures are equally valid/healthy/productive for their members -- particularly in a global 21st-Century society -- I'm curious about what sorts of behaviors would fall into this category for my students. What are the cultural mores and expected behaviors of Latino and African-American culture in the East Bay? Which of these manifest themselves as "bad" behavior in the classroom?

On the whole, this article was challenging for me. I saw some things in it that I'm already doing, some things that I want to do better, and some that I still need to implement. Being consistent about discipline is one area where I need some work: "Many teachers believe that they are showing students they care when they continually give 'one more chance.' Unfortunately, giving 'one more chance' demonstrates that a teacher does not mean what he or she says, and this practice could be interpreted as a lack of caring." Ouch!

Progress Update

2008-09-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

Wow -- it's been a long time since I updated this blog. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind!

On the whole I feel very good about the way my first year of teaching is progressing. I've been leading the students in a variety of interesting activities that all feed in to a central, cohesive theme. I'm starting to get to know the different students and recognize the ones who are really engaged with the material. Last Thursday our co-principal, Romeo, sat in on my lecture that introduced the nervous system, and by his tally more than half of the students asked meaningful questions about the material. Other teachers report that students have been speaking positively about my class and me as a teacher. The activities seem to be well-timed; while we don't have a lot of wiggle room on most labs, the students have generally been able to finish everything in time to get things cleaned up for the next class.

On the down side: I have a handful of students who seem like they really don't want to be there. One of them, P., is pretty obviously desperate for attention. He's been kicked around from one school to another and gained a reputation as a "bad kid", which he has apparently embraced. (Perhaps a negative self-identity is better than no identity at all?) He has a tendency to roam around the classroom during the labs and make loud outbursts during direct instruction. He can complete at least some assignments, but he needs a partner who will keep him on-task and be patient with his antics. In yesterday's lab I saw him working with one of my most earnest students, F., and on the sections of the lab where she assisted him he was able to complete his work and turn it in. I may ask her if she's willing to continue working with him like that; it may help her own learning to assist another student, and I think she has the temperament for it.

I also have a couple of packs of female students who are more deeply engaged in their mutual social life than with anything going on in the classroom. In my first section, 9B, the young women in question are the "cool girls", the ones who are beautiful and fashionable and oh-so-aware of this fact. When an activity is too gross or unpleasant, or when I'm trying to give instructions, they'll withdraw and talk to each other rather than focus on the work. They seem to be getting better about this, though, and on Thursday's lab they actually completed their work first and did an excellent job with it. One of them was even asking some very thoughtful questions during Thursday's lecture.

The pack in my second section, 9A, is more problematic. These are what I mentally refer to as the "chibi girls": cute, giggly, gabby, easily-distracted, and acting about three years younger than everyone else. When one of them goes to the bathroom, they'll all look for a way to sneak out after her when my back is turned so that they can go socialize. During lecture they keep up an almost constant background chatter; when I ask (or tell) them to be quiet, they start up again as soon as I go back to my instruction. In light of this, it should be no surprise that they're frequently lost during the labs, since they don't pay attention and won't read the worksheets that reiterate my verbal instructions.

At this point I think my biggest objective is to get the students to grasp the idea of the learning contract: I can be flexible in how I present the material and work with them to help them learn, but they need to be an active part of the process. If I'm going too fast, or not giving enough detail, or not explaining something in a way they can grasp, they need to tell me so I can make appropriate corrections, rather than just disengaging and doing their own thing. When Romeo sat in on that lesson, everybody stopped horsing around -- and because of that, they started to get interested in the material and asked some great questions, including the ones who normally don't get engaged. I'm hoping that this lesson will stick in their heads and that they'll start actively looking for the stuff that will engage their interest -- though Romeo tells me it will take them a while.

Of course, he also said that this group of 9th-graders is much better-behaved than their first group, so I'm hopeful that our ongoing efforts to build a culture at the school are working. Little by little, we build...

UbD Chapter 13: Yes, but...

2008-08-24T23:11:00.001-07:00

In this final chapter of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN, the authors explicitly address the three biggest objections they have faced with the UbD approach: namely, the need to "teach to the test", the excess of content that must be taught, and the lack of teacher time to implement these plans.

They answer all of these objections ably. While they are realistic about the pressures that teachers are under to perform, they are also brutally honest about the present state of affairs: they point out, for instance, that the schools that perform the best on standardized tests aren't the ones that spend endless hours training students to take tests. They also address one of the concerns that I had about the UbD approach: namely, schools that implement it do see a rise in test scores among their students. It is possible to teach for understanding and still reap a "fringe benefit" of improved performance in standardized assessments.

One part of this chapter that I found interesting was the reference to a collaborative curriculum-planning community called UbD Exchange. Apparently there are teachers all over the country who are using UbD and making their lesson and unit plans available over a shared website. I'll need to find out how we can access this service, because it would be a huge help to me in my ongoing lesson planning -- especially when I get ready to teach physics in the spring semester.

UbD Chapter 12: UbD as Curriculum Framework

2008-08-23T20:07:00.001-07:00

In this chapter the authors attempt to expand the concept of UbD planning to the broader sphere of entire curricula and programs. This is something that ARISE is already doing, attempting to unite all of the classes faced by each grade level under a common set of essential questions. In the case of my 9th graders, as mentioned before, these questions are: Who am I? Where are we going? What are the tools that will help us get there?

I like the idea of organizing the curriculum this way, and it has certainly helped me to better arrange my content in a way that will be engaging (I hope) for my students. As the authors point out, the logical order in which one might lay out a summary of the knowledge in a given field is not usually the best order in which to present that material to a novice. This is something I already knew on some level -- witness my rejection of the cell-first approach to teaching biology that has been used in so many courses and textbooks. However, the order that I had first planned on presenting the material -- focusing on ecology, then physiology, then evolution -- may have been appropriate for a storytelling-based approach to biology, but it wasn't the best approach for a bunch of 9th graders who are primarily interested in what's happening to their own bodies.

I found this chapter to be a lot harder to get through than most of the previous chapters. The authors, having made their central points in the earlier portions of the book, seem to be flailing around at this point, presenting their ideas in a haphazard way and delving too far into extraneous details. The three-page recapitulation of a rubric for scientific inquiry was almost ridiculously excessive, and probably should have been relegated to an appendix; they talk at great length about "scope and sequence" curriculum planning without ever defining it; and most of the ideas presented in the chapter have been adequately addressed earlier in the book.

That said, there are some good points in here. One that jumped out at me was the example of software manuals: Most complex software programs come with "Getting Started" guides to get people working on the basics quickly and tutorials to walk them through more complex features; the reference manual, if it exists at all, is a separate document designed to be called upon only when needed. (Most programs nowadays, in fact, eschew reference manuals entirely in favor of complex Help menus.) As the authors point out, many elementary students are able to master quite complex software using this approach, while high school students are baffled by the linear, fact-driven presentation of science and history.

It's an important lesson, and one that already has me thinking about the 10th-grade physics class that I'll be teaching next semester. The focus of that class is on Newtonian mechanics, simple machines, and thermodynamics, and I'm beginning to think it might be wise to have the students discover Newton's laws by observation and measurement before having them described. The tricky part will be figuring out how to allow them to explore those laws, given the messy and complicated systems that are available to us in the real world. Hmm ... I wonder how much an air track costs...

UbD Chapter 11: The Design Process

2008-08-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

This chapter reviews a number of ways to practically apply the concepts presented earlier in the book, taking into account that many teachers will be approaching the UbD process with lessons and units already planned out. I count myself fortunate that I was exposed to UbD at the beginning of my teaching career, but I can still draw a number of helpful tips from this chapter, particularly since certain elements of our course design are mandatory and I need to figure out how to incorporate them most effectively within an understanding-based framework.

One point that the authors give extensive time to is the idea of compromises and dilemmas in teaching. They warn against relying too much on process and losing touch with what's going on with your students:

"Too much reliance on a recipe leads to other problems. It can close off thoughtful responsiveness of the teacher-designer -- empathy! -- in the false belief that any well-thought-out plan must, of necessity, work, and if it doesn't, it must be the students' fault." (p. 267)

I probably narrowly missed falling into this trap myself, to be honest: my "xenobiology expedition" idea would have been great for students of a certain stripe, but it just isn't likely to work with students who are as grounded in the brutal realities of inner-city life as mine are going to be. I'll have to meet them where they're at and do my best to make the content as relevant as possible -- and, even then, keep in mind the need to keep getting feedback and making adjustments on the fly. As the authors make clear throughout the chapter, good design is an ongoing, iterative process -- one that's never really finished, because each crop of students is different.

Stage 3 Summary

2008-08-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

My completion of Stage 3 of the UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN course takes place after our professional development retreat, a week of meeting with my fellow teachers at ARISE, and a complete overhaul of the order of presentation. All the same, I'm feeling good about where things are.

ARISE is big on using Essential Questions that run across multiple subjects in a grade level, giving the students' entire learning experience a feeling of cohesion and unity. The questions for the 9th Graders this year are:

Who Am I? (Anyone who fails to recognize the applicability of this has forgotten what it means to be fourteen.)
Where Are We Going? (My perhaps-too-close-to-the-mark addition, "...and why are we in this handbasket?", is left unstated.)
What Are The Tools That Will Get Us There?

In the case of biology these questions tie in nicely to the themes of physiology (looking at the student's own body), ecology (looking at how all of our lives, animal and plant alike, are tied together), and scientific skills and social outreach (which address the technical and personal aspects of how we're going to deal with the problems that face us as a species).

Given this progression, it was necessary to push ecology to the back burner and focus on physiology for the first unit of the course , with skills and social perspective spread throughout both units. This will engage the natural self-centeredness of 9th-graders, then (I hope) expand their thinking to the people and world around them. It might not be the most elegant presentation of biology, but it's the approach that will be the most immediately relevant to the students, and that's the important thing.

As far as lesson plans are concerned, I've worked out a syllabus for what to teach and when, which covers the entire semester. Victoria, my coach, agreed that it was a challenging curriculum but worth a try, provided that I keep giving the students opportunities to revisit what they've learned and integrate it with new concepts. I'll be using a lot of formative assessments this year, and the list provided in Chapter 10 will be a big help.

The key thing, from an instructional standpoint, will be to keep tying back everything that the students are learning to the big unifying concepts. Fortunately, I don't think it's that hard to do that in biology, because everything really is connected. My first unit -- "Your Body: A User's Manual" -- will use the analogy of the human body as a machine, which needs fuel (provided through the digestive system) and oxygen (the cardiovascular and respiratory systems) in order to run and a control system (the nerves, sense organs and brain) in order to steer it. I'll round out the unit with explorations of the three biology topics that can most easily capture students' attention: germs, drugs, and sex. (I'm particularly looking forward to my demonstration of germ transmission, which will use ... no, I'm saving that for a surprise.) Not coincidentally, these are three issues where our students are most in need of good instruction.

Yesterday I worked out what I'll need in order to do each of the lab experiments over the course of the year. Now I have to push to actually get those supplies, and as soon as possible. Good thing I don't actually have my first biology lesson until a week from tomorrow!

UbD Chapter 10: Teaching for Understanding

2008-08-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

This chapter was chock-full of good advice, even if it was necessarily general. I was somewhat relieved to find that the authors came out in defense of direct instruction, reaffirming its necessary place alongside exploratory and constructivist approaches to education. Certainly I couldn't imagine teaching science without a combination of these methods; after all, if men as brilliant as Aristotle or Hippocrates had so many mistaken ideas about biology even after a lifetime of study, we can hardly expect students to "construct" correct understandings without some essential underpinnings.

Still, this chapter had a whimsical but sobering reminder in it: To whatever extent you're inclined to do something, you're probably going to overdo it to that extent.

Teachers who love to lecture do too much of it; teachers who resist it do too little. Teachers who love ambiguity make discussions needlessly confusing. Teachers who are linear and task-oriented often intervene too much in a seminar and can cut off fruitful inquiry. Teachers who love to coach sometimes do too many drills and overlook transfer. Teachers who love the big picture often do a poor job of developing core skills and competence. The upshot? Beware of self-deception! (p. 242)

For myself, I know that I'm both a big-picture thinker and a lecturer: I like imaginative tangible projects, and I also like to hear myself talk. I have to be careful throughout the coming year to save the talking for where it will do the most good, and to teach the skills necessary for the students to do the tasks I want them to do -- something that Victoria already warned me about. Happily, our 45-minute lessons on Wednesdays give me a nice time block when I can focus on skill-oriented instruction; it's too short a period for any but the simplest experiments and demonstrations, but it's a good length for introducing concepts like, say, the scientific method, or how to conduct an interview for the students' ecological awareness project.

UbD Chapter 9: Planning for Learning

2008-08-06T22:30:00.001-07:00

The first chapter of Stage 3 -- developing a learning plan -- was a massive barrage of new content spread over 35 pages (which is a lot when you're talking about information-dense textbook reading). I'm still assimilating it all, and I think it may be a while before I feel like I'm actually "getting" everything in here. As I've noted before, straight reading is not my most efficient means of taking in new information, and there was enough here to make my eyes cross.

The basic concept is that a lesson plan should be designed with seven criteria or stages in mind, represented by the acronym WHERETO:

W = Where is the content headed? Where are the students coming from?
H = Hooking the students: how do we get them engaged with the material? How do we hold onto them once we've got them?
E = Explore and Experience, Enable and Equip: Students need to have experiences that will help them explore the Big Ideas of the unit. We also need to Equip them with the tools they'll need to perform well in the assessments and demonstrate understanding of the material.
R = Revise and Reflect: Return to the same questions and problems again and again. Challenge initial assumptions. Make the students think again about their first instincts, and see how their inferences change in the light of new knowledge. This mirrors what Howard Gardner said about "going deep": you have to stay with a topic long enough to get down to the student's essential misconceptions and dispel them before new understanding can take root.
E = Evaluate work and progress: This refers to letting the students evaluate their progress, not just the teacher. These is where strategies like the "1-minute essay" become invaluable. Give the students opportunities for constant reflection.
T = Tailor and personalize the work: I really, really appreciate what the authors say about this one -- namely, that a "diverse" student body is not merely one that is composed of minority groups. Every student body is diverse because all students come to the class with different strengths, weaknesses, prior knowledge, learning styles, interests, and preferences. (The use of "diverse" as a euphemism to describe members of racial minorities has always struck me as deeply offensive for this very reason.) It's important to keep pursuing the same Goals and Desired Results while making room for students to explore the content in different ways, as befits their strengths.
O = Organize for optimal effectiveness: It's important to present the material in a way that will generate the most interest and maintain that interest throughout the unit. Marching in a straight line through the content is bad for understanding on several levels -- it lowers interest in the material, which causes students to disengage, and also prevents students from going back to Reflect and Evaluate on previous content. I particularly liked the analogy here to soccer training: teach discrete skills, then build up to more sophisticated drills, then "play the game" (which would probably equate to the Performance Task Assessment we constructed in the last chapter).

In between pulling my focus back to the material of the chapter -- did I mention this was a LOT of reading? -- I've been brainstorming about "hooks" to get the students engaged early. That, in turn, has led me back to the xenobiology theme that I came up with earlier in the design process. What if, instead of just making the xenobiology presentation the big end-of-the-year class project, I build that concept of exploring an alien world into many of the projects throughout the year? I could present the students with "messages" and "log entries" from the captain of a new colony mission that has landed on an alien world; the colonists are running into various problems with the local flora and fauna, and the captain has turned to his team of xenobiologists (the students) to figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it. Our class can then turn to considering different real-world situations and extracting the necessary Understandings to make sense of the problems being faced by the space colonists.

This suggests a structure for the overall unit: Begin by explaining the role that the students are playing and presenting a message from the captain, describing a mysterious problem with the local ecology and asking for their help. I can start out with a pre-assessment where the students guess at possible causes of the problem, which should reveal which ones have some prior understanding of ecology. We can then return to the colonists' dilemma throughout the unit as we uncover new understandings and new knowledge; through written responses and class discussions, the students can refine their previous thinking about the situation, until they finally arrive at the actual cause and a recommended solution at the unit's end. The two subsequent units can feature similar biological "mysteries" for the students to solve in the areas of homeostasis and evolution.

I think this will be a fun hook for the students; the idea of learning from Earth's biology to answer questions about an alien world inherently embodies the idea of "transfer", which is one of the true marks of understanding. It also creates a theme that I can draw on in activities and assessments throughout the rest of the unit.

Stage 2 Summary

2008-08-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

After reading through the additional examples in the workbook, I believe I have come up with an effective rubric for my Amazon Basin Brochure. The students will be graded on two separate scales:

Understanding (65%):

4 - The brochure clearly and accurately identifies all of the major reasons why slash-and-burn agriculture is destructive and ultimately counterproductive. The brochure shows sensitivity to the Amazonian farmers' difficult situation and clearly presents the benefits of shade-grown crops as an alternative. There are no misunderstandings of key concepts.

3 - The brochure correctly identifies at least two of the major reasons why slash-and-burn agriculture is destructive and counterproductive. The benefits of shade-grown crops may be presented somewhat glibly, without full acknowledgment of the farmers' concerns. Any misunderstandings are minor and do not affect the central argument.

2 - The brochure only correctly identifies one of the major reasons why slash-and-burn agriculture is destructive or counterproductive. The concerns of the Amazonian farmers are not explicitly addressed and/or the reasons for switching to shade-grown crops are not properly explained. There may be evidence of misunderstandings that affect the central argument.

1 - The brochure shows little apparent understanding of the relevant ideas and issues. Phrases may be repeated verbatim from reference materials without proper understanding of their meaning or their relationship to each other. The arguments used against slash-and-burn agriculture and in favor of shade-grown crops are inadequate and do not address either the lasting effects of deforestation and/or the benefits of shade-grown alternatives. The document reveals major misunderstandings of key ideas.

0 - Assignment was not completed; no assessment can be made.

Performance (35%):

4 - The brochure is presented eloquently and powerfully. It is well-organized and lays out its argument in a logical, engaging and persuasive way, mindful of the audience, context, and purpose. There is unusual craftsmanship in the final product.

3 - The brochure is presented effectively. The argument is presented in a clear and thorough manner, showing awareness of the audience, context and purpose.

2 - The brochure is presented in a somewhat effective manner. There are problems with organization, clarity, thoroughness, and polish. It is unclear whether the audience, context and purpose of the project have been considered.

1 - The brochure is presented ineffectively. It is unpolished, with little evidence of prior planning or consideration of its purpose and audience, OR it is so unclear and confusing that it is difficult to determine whether the key points have been covered.

0 - Assignment was not completed; no assessment can be made.

On the whole, I think this stage has been very helpful in sharpening my ideas about how to assess understanding of the ideas and concepts established in Stage 1. My conversation with Page yesterday was particularly helpful; it got me thinking about all of the tangential skills and abilities that are necessary for students to successfully complete the tasks we give them, and the importance of making sure that the students are prepared to use those skills as well as the explicit content that we want them to learn. Even when we're not "teaching the test," we never quite escape the challenge of teaching students how to perform the assessments we intend to use.

In any event, all of this work on assessments has made me eager to get into the question of how to present the material we're going to be assessing. It's time for Stage 3: planning the lessons and activities that I'll be using to help the students learn about ecology.

Self-Test Assessment

2008-08-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

In considering my idea for the Unit 1 summative assessment -- the brochure written to farmers in the Amazon Basin -- it's important to stop and do a reality check to see if it will be a useful and valid assessment. The following questions come from p. 180 of the UbD workbook.

How likely is it that a student could do well on the assessment by...

1.) Making clever guesses based on limited understanding?

Not very. The students are going to have to translate some complicated ecological concepts into language that the farmers could understand. It's not enough for them to say that slash-and-burn agriculture is bad or that shade-grown crops are good; they have to be able to provide a well-reasoned argument from the ecological principles we discussed in class.

2.) Parroting back or plugging in what was learned, with accurate recall but limited or no understanding?

I don't think so. Accurate recall may help them remember some basic facts about the Amazon, but explaining the connection between the farmers' activities and the resulting changes in the ecology will require a deeper understanding.

3.) Making a good-faith effort, with lots of hard work and enthusiasm, but with limited understanding?

Anyone who puts in a lot of legitimate hard work on the project will have formed a deeper understanding by the time they finish. This isn't something they can just push through with brute force.

4.) Producing lovely products and performances, but with limited understanding?

No matter how pretty the brochure, the student isn't going to score well unless they make a solid, persuasive argument.

5.) Applying natural ability to be articulate and intelligent, with limited understanding of the content in question?

While being articulate and intelligent will certainly help, I think it will be easy to tell from the student's arguments whether they have a true understanding of the content or not. It is possible for a person to articulate a superficial argument in an attractive way, but I don't plan on being taken in by such pretty facades.

How likely is it that a student could do poorly on the assessment by...

6.) Failing to meet the performance goals despite having a deep understanding of the big ideas? (i.e., the task is not relevant to the goals)

I don't think that's very likely. I plan to make clear to the students what I'm looking for, in terms of the structure and format of the brochure, so as long as the student is reasonably articulate they should be able to convey their understanding in the content of the brochure. My one concern here is for the English Language Learners, but the language gap is something that they're going to face with any substantive assessment. If a known ELL is having trouble expressing him- or herself in text, I should have plenty of advance warning and be able to make accommodations. Perhaps I can work with the student's English teacher to help them sharpen the technical aspects of their writing. In any event, I plan to ask the students to turn in a draft of their brochure before the project is due, which should give us advance warning to clear up any difficulties of this sort.

7.) Failing to meet the scoring and grading criteria used, despite having a deep understanding of the Big Ideas? (i.e., some of the criteria are arbitrary, placing undue or inappropriate emphasis on things that have little to do with the desired results or true excellence at such a task)

This seems very unlikely to me. I'll be grading the students' work on two rubrics, one for Understanding and the other for Performance, as recommended by the UbD textbook. If the student has good understanding of the material, that should come out during the draft stage, and I can give them tips at that time to help sharpen up their execution.

On the whole, I think that this project meets the desired objectives for a summative assessment. The key, as Page told me yesterday, will be to make sure that the students are clear on what is required of them, and to check their progress at the draft stage to make sure that they're on the right track.

UbD Chapter 8: Criteria and Validity

2008-08-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

In this second half of their discussion of Stage 2 (Assessments), the authors turn their attention to vetting the assessments we brainstormed about in Chapter 7. An assessment activity may be interesting and creative, but that's not enough; it also has to measure whether the key understandings, knowledge and skills have been attained, and it must do so in a manner that will reliably gauge the student's capabilities.

Here the authors delve into the topic of rubrics -- which, in educator-speak, specifically refers to scoring guides that list the criteria that a student's assignment must aim to reach. These are new territory for me, though I understand the logic behind them; happily, coach Page Tompkins has directed me to RubiStar, a free online service to help teachers develop quality rubrics. I'm sure I'll be making use of it as my design work progresses.

Page and I had a great conversation this afternoon, and together we separated out my various formative assessment projects from the summative assessment at the end of the unit. I hadn't distinguished between them when I was brainstorming, but as we talked it over I realized that two of my ideas were best suited to use as a summative assessment to round out the unit. One of these was the "invasive species report" that I mentioned in my previous blog post -- a truly complex task that would require a lot of prep work to make sure that the students understood what was needed. The other idea was to have the students design a brochure aimed at Amazon Basin farmers, explaining to them why trading slash-and-burn agriculture for shade-grown crops is in their own best interest.

While I like the idea of the invasive species report, it's probably better-suited to an entire class on ecology. It would require teaching the students how to perform research, weigh the validity of sources, and write a detailed paper with references. All of those are valuable scientific skills, but the project would assess those skills at least as much as the actual content of the unit. I'm more concerned at this point with establishing that the students have grasped the basics of how ecological communities work; a Scientific Skills course is better aimed at students who actually want to go into the sciences, not a survey course like freshman biology.

(Come to think of it, Scientific Skills might be a great summer elective course. I'll have to talk to Romeo and Laura about that...)

In contrast, the Amazon brochure requires fewer technical skills but more understanding of the Big Ideas of ecology: the interconnectedness of species (removing the trees destroys the "keystone" that hold the local community together), the cycling and flow of resources (the poor soils of the Amazon can't hold nutrients on their own, so without the trees the land soon becomes unproductive), and the effects of disturbance on ecological balance (the species removal and habitat destruction cause permanent shifts in the local ecology from high to low biodiversity). Presenting the argument to the farmers will also require the students to engage multiple Facets of Understanding, including Explanation, Application, Perspective, and Empathy (since they need to see the problem from the farmers' point of view -- they're just trying to feed their families, and many of the products they produce are driven to artificially-low prices by market forces that favor short-term exploitation over long-term resource management).

The brochure project can be combined with other, more traditional forms of assessment to test the students' knowledge and understanding of other aspects of the material. A test with a mixture of multiple-choice, short-answer and short-essay questions should help to cover the gaps, along with the formative assessment projects that I'll be using throughout the unit.

Now that I've chosen my end-of-unit assessment project, I'll need to come up with a rubric that is suitable for it. The two metrics suggested by the UbD authors -- Understanding and Performance -- seem like a good place to start. Proficient "Understanding", in this case, would mean that the students demonstrate a grasp of the ecological issues at play in the Amazon Basin and the negative effects of slash-and-burn agriculture; proficient "Performance" means presenting a clear and persuasive argument that acknowledges the farmers' situation while offering a better alternative. This project will also give the students a chance to engage their creative sides, if they so choose, which will probably help keep the artsy types engaged.

Time to start digging into this and get a good rubric in place.

UbD Chapter 7: Thinking Like An Assessor

2008-08-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

In this first chapter of Stage 2 of the UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN process, the authors focus in on the idea of designing assessments before getting into the details of content. Before you can figure out what to teach, you have to figure out how you're going to measure attainment of the goals laid out in Stage 1. The analogy used is one of the justice system: we have to gather sufficient evidence to “convict” the students of having learned the material -- a humorous but perhaps somewhat insulting analogy. :)

This chapter was full of great ideas. I love the concept behind the GRASPS model of assessment (Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Product/Performance/Purpose, Standards/Criteria for Success): posing a problem for the students to solve that mirrors a real-world situation. The big end-of-semester project that I envisioned earlier, in which the students play the role of xenobiologists reporting on an alien world, closely mirrors the GRASPS ideal, even if the sci-fi spin gives it a more whimsical feel than a “real” real-world scenario. This reassures me that my thinking has been on the right track.

I've also come up with an idea for a GRASPS project to close out the ecology unit: Have the students research an exotic species that has been introduced to California, determine whether it has become invasive, and then play the role of researchers recommending to the appropriate government agency what steps (if any) should be taken to control the species – and what will probably happen if the agency doesn't act. I'm hoping to bring in one of my former colleagues from UCSC to talk to the students about her research on invasive species, so the students can get a feel for how this sort of research is done.

I was also heartened to find that this chapter reaffirms the need for a wide variety of assessment methods, including old-fashioned tests and quizzes. I know that there is a lot of resistance to these methods in the progressive education community, but they remain an effective way of testing for knowledge of basic facts and skills.

Another trick that this chapter mentioned that seems very valuable is the “one-minute essay”: at the end of class, have the students write down (1) the big point that they learned in class today, and (2) the main unanswered question that they're leaving class with. This is such a simple, elegant way of checking the students' learning that I couldn't keep from grinning when I read it. I'm going to be sure to implement this system from the very beginning; the ritual of filling out these essay cards at the end of class, then discussing them at the beginning of the next class, should help to introduce some valuable structure and rhythm into the class.

One question that lingers in the back of my mind is whether I should implement these GRASPS projects as solo efforts or group assignments. On the one hand, having each student complete the project for themselves allows me to check each student's understanding individually; on the other hand, students who have difficulty writing in English may not be able to present everything that they understand. Perhaps I could have each student turn in their own project, but allow them to compare notes and collaborate with each other during class to check their comprehension and reasoning? Any advice or suggestions that others might have on how to deal with this problem would be appreciated.

Stage 1 Summary

2008-08-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

Stage 1 Summary:

After completing the Stage 1 section of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN, I feel much more confident that I'll be able to present the material to my students in a way that is both engaging and relevant. The trickiest part, I think, was distilling out the “Big Ideas” of the material and devising the essential questions that would tie in to those ideas. The process is very logical, on the whole; it just takes some practice to get used to designing a curriculum this way.

The biggest concerns I have now are practical ones: how to introduce this material to my particular crop of students. As Page noted in response to my last blog post, these students are likely to speak a language other than English at home and may be behind grade level in their English reading skills. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to present this complex and challenging material in a way that will ensure these students are able to keep up. I'll have to review the articles on dealing with English Language Learners and ask some of my fellow science teachers for ideas. Right now I'm reminding myself of what George Leonard said in MASTERY – to embrace the process of gradual improvement. I know I'm not going to do this perfectly right out of the gate, and trying to go from Zero to Master instantaneously would kill me. I'm going to do the best I can, leaning on the wisdom and experience of those around me, and revise and refine my methods as I go on. I have no doubt that my second semester of teaching this class will go more smoothly than the first, and next year I'll do better yet – assuming I haven't hit one of Leonard's plateaus by then. :)

Very well, then. Onward to Stage 2.

Unpacking Goals

2008-08-03T22:53:00.000-07:00

After working through Chapter 6 and looking at the content standards again, I've taken another look at my big ideas, the stated or implied real-world performances that go with the standards, and the essential questions that fit best with the standards.

BIG IDEAS:

Interconnections between species
The flow and cycling of resources (energy and nutrients) in ecosystems
Ecosystem responses to disturbance

REAL-WORLD PERFORMANCES:

Students should be able to...

ANALYZE changes in an ecosystem.
REPRESENT energy flow through an ecosystem, as in an energy pyramid.
DISTINGUISH accommodation within individuals from genetic adaptation in a population. (I'm saving this for Unit 3 when we get into evolution.)
DETERMINE the fluctuations in population size caused by birth, immigration, emigration, and death.

UNDERSTANDINGS:

Students should understand that...

Ecosystems include a variety of different roles that can interact in complex ways. (Big Idea #1)
Both negative interactions (competition, predation) and positive interactions (cooperation, mutualism) are important in shaping the structure of ecological communities. (#1)
Different species use different survival strategies, which can be successful in very different ways (e.g., r-selection vs. K-selection; Type I, II and III survival curves).
Species' populations can be regulated from the "bottom up" (by resource limitation) or from the "top down" (by predation and disease). (#1, #2)
Nutrients cycle within the biosphere: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and water are reused again and again, with little "new" input or loss (though human CO2 production is a major exception!). (#2)
Ecosystems are open-ended with respect to energy: producers obtain it from one source (almost always the sun) and pass it up the food chain, losing some energy to heat at every step. (#2)
Some ecosystems depend on "keystone species", and that threatening these species threatens the entire structure of the community. (#3)
Outside disturbance can upset the balance of an ecosystem, and that the degree of upset depends on both the magnitude of the disturbance and the robustness of the ecosystem. (#3)

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS:

How are different species dependent on each other?
Why is preserving biodiversity important?
What makes an ecosystem stable or vulnerable?
How do resource needs constrain the structure of ecological communities?
How can we protect ecosystems from damage, and when should we do so?

PERFORMANCE TASK IDEAS:

Have students plot the flow of resources and/or interaction webs in sample ecosystems.
Write the "biography of a nitrogen atom" (or a carbon atom, etc.) as it journeys through its nutrient cycle.
Examine population data to determine if a species is at its carrying capacity in a particular ecosystem.
Identify populations that are under "bottom-up" or "top-down" regulation.
Study real-world systems where dramatic shifts have occurred in community structure, and identify likely causes for the change.
Research an exotic species that has been introduced to California (chosen from a list) and present a report explaining whether it has become invasive, how they can tell, and what is being done to combat it (if anything).

At this point I think my Stage 1 picture looks pretty clear. Assuming that my coaches agree, I'll be ready to jump into Stage 2: designing the assessments that will allow my students to demonstrate their understanding of the material.

UbD Chapter 6: Crafting Understandings

2008-08-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

In this chapter of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN we delved into what we specifically mean by "understandings" and how to craft useful ones for our classes. I feel pretty comfortable with this concept now; the idea that "knowledge" refers to discrete facts that can be taken as givens, while "understanding" refers to the theory or inference that we make from those facts, is one that meshes well with my experience in scientific research. Looking at the list of sample understandings that are commonly mistaken for bare facts (pp. 136 & 138), I was somewhat surprised that any educated person would be willing to accept these deep concepts on mere authoritative fiat.

Then again, that got me thinking about my own response to concepts in geometry like the Pythagorean Theorem. I was never all that interested in mathematical proofs when I was in school, and I remember being annoyed that my textbook spent so much time proving ideas that were so easy to remember. As long as I could remember the formula and knew when and how to use it, I didn't care to know the gory details for how mathematicians proved such things. In retrospect, it's obvious to me that I didn't understand (heh) the distinction between knowledge and understanding, nor the need to "construct" understanding of deductive theorems.

Constructing inductive understanding was always pretty easy for me to wrap my brain around, perhaps because that's the way science works. It's easy to understand why you have to use speculation, testing and reasoning to come up with a theory for how something generally works when all you have to work with are a few specific data points. Deduction, to me, always felt like working backwards: if you've set your axioms right, there's only one possible conclusion you can reach -- but who's to say whether your axioms are right? Even something as seemingly solid as geometry is ultimately rooted in a fairly arbitrary set of rules; once you change those rules, your whole system of deductive consequences is changed as well. Even more disturbing, there is no one "true" set of geometric rules that applies in all situations; Euclid's system works well for most common circumstances, but when you start getting into the far-flung corners of physics, they're no longer applicable.

I suspect that this lack of congruence between math and reality is part of why I've always found math irritating, even when I was good at it. It always seemed to me that math ought to be "true": that it should remain consistent with reality in all circumstances, without resorting to apparent "cheats" like imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometries. (The existence of pi still creeps me out when I think about it too much. I'm surrounded by circles, spheres and cylinders of quite obvious solidity, and yet their areas and volumes can never be precisely known because they are dependent on a number with an infinite number of digits!) The notion that new maths had to be invented in order to describe quantum mechanics is deeply distasteful to me, on a level that I'm not sure I can really explain even today. I suppose I have to look at "ordinary" math the way that I look at Newtonian mechanics: a useful approximation of reality that works for most practical purposes.

My own struggle with truly understanding math is a useful reminder of the struggles faced by my students:

"...experts frequently find it difficult to have empathy for the novice, even when they try. That's why teaching is hard, especially for the expert in the field who is a novice teacher. Expressed positively, we must strive unendingly as educators to be empathetic with the learner's conceptual struggles if we are to succeed." (p. 139)

I'll have to stay aware of the fact that many of the biological principles that I'm teaching these young people will be just as baffling to them as the paradoxes of mathematics are to me.

Hmm ... maybe I should put a giant pi symbol over my desk as a reminder.

UbD Chapter 5: Essential Questions

2008-08-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

In this chapter of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN, the authors delved into the topic of Essential Questions -- questions that encourage a deeper exploration of the material rather than mere pat answers that can easily be memorized. These questions can be specific to the topic at hand or more overarching, and they can also be open-ended (questions that have no generally agreed-upon "right" answer) or guided (questions that do have have agreed-upon answers, but not ones that would be readily available to the students, and which point to key understandings that the teacher is attempting to convey).

While I was reading about the different kinds of Essential Questions, I started scribbling notes in the margins of the book about possible Essential Questions for my Ecology unit:

OPEN-ENDED, OVERARCHING:

What is "life"?
Why should we care about biodiversity?
What makes an ecosystem desirable? Why should we care about protecting it?

OPEN-ENDED, TOPICAL:

Are ecosystems driven more by negative interactions between organisms -- "nature red in tooth and claw", competition and predation -- or by positive interactions, such as cooperation and mutualism?
What makes an ecosystem stable or vulnerable?
Why is the world green? (I.e., why is so much biomass tied up in producers rather than consumers?)
Are species' populations limited more by "bottom up" effects (food supply, available habitat) or by "top down" effects (predation)?

GUIDED:

Where does the rain go after it falls?
Where does the oxygen we breathe come from?
In what ways do humans alter the environment around them?
What happens to a body after it rots? Where do its components go?
Why are decomposers important?
Why are primary consumers (herbivores) important?
Why are predators important?
What traits might indicate that a species is more likely to survive disruptions in its habitat?

This may be too many essential questions for one unit, so I'll have to figure out which ones are most important to focus on. I'm very fond of the "Why is the world green" question -- both because of its deceptively simple phrasing and because it opens up the opportunity to explore a number of interconnected ideas about the roles of species in a community and the differences between top-down and bottom-up regulation. (The current working theory is that the world is green because predators keep herbivore populations below their carrying capacity, which prevents the herbivores from stripping the ecosystem of every available scrap of foliage. This is in marked contrast to the situation in most oceanic ecosystems, where primary producers -- algae -- are quickly eaten by primary consumers, which are in turn quickly eaten by the secondary and tertiary consumers who make up most of the system's standing biomass.)

This may be one of the most useful chapters to date, because it provides a methodology for getting at one of my chief objectives: getting students to think.

"Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers. They need to experience how their own inquiries and discussions are 'essentially' parallel to those of experts, and how even key agreed-upon understandings can change over time as a result of ongoing inquiry. In this way, they come to more deeply understand knowledge as the result of inquiries as opposed to disembodied 'truths' that are just 'out there' to be learned from teachers and texts." (p. 122)

Not coincidentally, I was also inspired today to put out feelers to several of my former associates among the graduate students and faculty of UC-Santa Cruz. Hopefully some of them will be able to come out and talk to my students about their research, so as to help them get a better feel for what it's like to be on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry.

UbD Chapter 4: The Six Facets of Understanding

2008-08-02T16:01:00.000-07:00

The concept that we call "understanding" is actually many different concepts, all interrelated but distinct from one another. Chapter 4 explores these different kinds of understanding and how they relate to teaching.

1.) Explanation: Can the student construct a meaningful theory for why the facts are what they are? Understanding the situation means grasping the mechanism behind the observed events.

2.) Interpretation: What is the meaning of the observed events or narrative? An abstract theory (Explanation) can describe the general reasons for how things happen the way that they do, but interpretation means looking beyond mechanism to the deeper implications, be they philosophical, moral, sociological, etc. Interpretations are provisional by their nature; different people may look at the same situation, or the same theoretical construct, and have very different ideas about its meaning. The vehement disagreement among physicists about the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a good example of this.

3.) Application: If you really understand something, you can take the knowledge you've acquired on the subject and apply it in new situations. You should be able to perform novel, creative work that demonstrates what you've learned.

4.) Perspective: Understanding a situation means being aware of the importance of a person's point of view and how that affects their interpretation of the data. To go back to the quantum mechanics issue, it's helpful to know what metaphysical and philosophical baggage are being carried around by the proponents of the different interpretations, and how that influences their thought. A person who advocates the Copenhagen interpretation (that there is only one universe, and that the wave functions of quantum mechanics represent probabilities that "collapse" when we finally make a measurement) is necessarily coming at the problem from a different viewpoint from someone who advocates the many-worlds interpretation (that the probabilities of the wave functions actually describe the frequency with which different results occur across an infinite number of universes).

5.) Empathy: While perspective is the ability to judge alternate viewpoints from outside, with a detached, critical eye, empathy is the ability to get inside another person's POV and see why they hold that viewpoint. Since many "Big Ideas" are confusing, counterintuitive or crazy-sounding when you first encounter them, you often have to suspend your own judgments and put yourself in the thinker's perspective before you can really "get" those ideas. Otherwise you risk discarding important concepts because they don't fit in with your preconceived notions of the world.

6.) Self-Knowledge: In addition to understanding others' viewpoints, you have to understand your own viewpoint. Everybody looks at the world through a filter, unconsciously omitting or discounting data that do not coincide with their worldview. Self-knowledge means that you're aware of your filter and making a conscious effort to consider perspectives that lie outside it, or even conflict with it completely.

"Our intellectual blind spots predispose us toward intellectual rationalization: the ability to unendingly assimilate experience to beliefs and to categories that seem not merely plausible ideas but objective truths. Too easily, we keep verifying our favored and unexamined models, theories, analogies, and viewpoints." (p.101)

This sort of self-blindness is the bane of good science -- or, for that matter, good scholarship in any subject. The first and greatest mistake many researchers make is to assume that they are impartial observers, that they are completely fair and even-handed. It's not just scientists who have this problem, either; we've all seen examples of how biased reporters can be, even when they repeatedly proclaim that they are "objective" or "fair and balanced."

The first three facets are what I would call "external" aspects of understanding; these are the facets that my students can directly apply to the material of the course itself. I can help my students learn how to grasp the theory behind biological processes, to interpret the deeper implications of those theories, and to apply them to new problems. The other three facets are "internal" aspects of understanding: they concern the students' understanding of how they understand the material. The "Big Idea" of Resource Cycling & Flow in Ecosystems is an objective process that can be Explained, Interpreted and Applied, but it doesn't have an inherent perspective attached to it that must be perceived or empathized with; rather, students will need to apply these three latter facets of knowledge to the interpretations of this process, both the ones that are presented by experts and the ones that they come to for themselves. For example, the objective existence of the Nitrogen Cycle leads to a possible interpretation that humans need to stop dumping nitrogenous agricultural runoff into our lakes and rivers, because this excess nitrogen is throwing natural systems out of balance. Students will need to have the Perspective to analyze the arguments of environmentalists and the agricultural industry about this question, the Empathy to appreciate why each side views this situation the way that they do, and the Self-Knowledge to see how their own biases affect their opinions on the situation.

All of these facets of understanding work together to lead to what I have previously described as "critical thinking." I'm glad to see them described explicitly in such detail; it will be a big help to me as I figure out what sorts of assessments and lesson plans will engage these different styles of thinking.

Understanding By Design-Templates

2008-08-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

The first 57 pages of the UbD Professional Development Workbook introduce three different templates for "backward design" of an instructional unit: a brief 1-page template, a somewhat more detailed 2-page version, and a very detailed 6-page breakdown that gets into the details of day-by-day lesson planning. The remaining pages are mostly taken up by examples of unit plans in everything from science to history to English.

After looking through the different designs, I've decided to go with the 2-page version for planning my ecology unit. It gives a bit more space to describe different portions of the unit than the 1-page version, especially for the Stage 3 tasks and lessons. The 6-page version looks too detailed and complex for my first attempt at unit design; I don't want to fall into "paralysis by analysis." I'll stick with the 2-pager for now and expand my ideas as necessary once I have a basic framework in place.

UbD Chapter 3: Gaining Clarity on our Goals

2008-08-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

"...a big idea is not 'big' merely by virtue of its intellectual scope. It has to have pedagogical power: It must enable the learner to make sense of what has come before; and, most notably, be helpful in making new, unfamiliar ideas seem more familiar." (Understanding by Design, 2nd Ed., p.70)

This chapter took a closer look at the so-called "Stage 1" concepts for unit planning: key questions, key understandings, big ideas, and core tasks. All of these are related, though not synonymous, and they're all different ways of getting at the heart of the question: what do I want my students to understand, know, and be able to do when they complete this unit?

The chapter is full of a lot of good advice on how to screen through lists of material -- whether a textbook or a set of state-imposed content standards -- and filter out the big ideas and core tasks from among the less-crucial concepts. The models presented here help to distinguish the crucial from the important, and the important from the incidental, and the incidental from the trivial. It's something I'm going to have to put into use for myself as I screen through the California science standards to figure out which points are most important for my students to understand.

Reading through chapter 3 inspired a number of thoughts about the "big ideas" of ecology, the first unit for my upcoming biology course. The book points out that big ideas are usually counter-intuitive and susceptible to misunderstanding. This got me thinking about food webs, nutrient cycles and energy flow in ecosystems, all of which involve the central "big idea" that thermodynamics limit the possibilities in biological systems. But the first law of thermodynamics -- the law of conservation of energy -- can easily be misunderstood by students in this context, because energy is constantly being lost from the ecosystem in the form of heat. Energy isn't being destroyed, but it's no longer in a useful form. Likewise, the second law -- the law of increasing universal entropy -- often seems like it's being violated by living systems, in which organisms that are higher on the food chain often appear more "advanced" or complex than the creatures they feed on. Yet the constraints placed on ecosystems by thermodynamics -- a fixed amount of energy entering the system (1st law), and every energy transfer leading to a loss of energy to heat (2nd law) -- are essential to grasping why ecological communities are structured the way that they are. The key misconception is that students might be fooled into thinking that the biosphere is a closed system, energetically speaking. It isn't; it's a closed system for nutrients, which is why we speak of nutrient cycling, but it's an open system for energy, which is why we speak of energy flow.

I think I have a good way of modeling energy flow for the students: an analogy to money. Suppose American shoppers buy products from Company A, leading to a gross income for the company. The money flowing into Company A from the shoppers represents the maximum amount of money available in the "system;" the Company has no other way of acquiring more money. The Company then pays its employees, but it can't pay them everything that it got from the shoppers; it has to pay for the electricity, the water, maintenance of the equipment, the raw materials to make its products, and various regulatory costs in the form of taxes. Only a small portion of its gross income gets passed on to the employees. Employee B thus gets a small fraction of the money Company A had; that's his gross income. But that isn't pure profit, either; he has to pay for upkeep on his house, gas for his car, food for himself and his family, and his own income taxes. Only a little bit of money is left over for the next step in the monetary "food chain": his kids. Child C gets an allowance that is only a tiny fraction of what Employee B got; it's such a small amount, in fact, that the child doesn't have enough money to support anyone "higher" on the chain.

By the same token, the "gross income" of an ecosystem from the sun leads to a lot of energy going through the producers (A), with less being passed on to the primary consumers (B) and still less going to the secondary consumers (C). My students will probably find the analogy of themselves as "apex predators" to be an amusing one -- though perhaps "parasite" would be a more accurate analogy. ;-)

I think this will be a good way to explain energy flow, but I'm having more trouble finding a way to explain nutrient cycling. I need something to represent a commodity that can be passed around from one group to another, modified repeatedly into different forms but ultimately recycled back to the beginning again, unchanged in what it essentially is. The carbon, nitrogen and water cycles are key examples, all important for illustrating how ecosystems function -- but I'm having a hard time finding something similar to compare to that these students would be familiar with. I thought about the example of a commodity (such as a bicycle or a CD) being passed around from one person to another, but that analogy misses one of the key elements (no pun intended) of nutrient cycling: that these basic nutrients are often repackaged in radically different forms and used for very different purposes as they make their way around the ecosystem. The sugar made by the plant, the fat stored in the human, the carbon dioxide breathed out when the human exercises -- all of these contain the same carbon atoms, passed on from one place to the next but showing up in very different chemical forms.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any suggestions on a better analogy for this difficult concept. I recognize that this is only one example among several "big ideas" that I'll have to tackle in this unit, but it's one that I'm going to have to wrestle with soon enough, and I think it's a useful "field test" of the UbD process to start thinking about this now.

UbD Chapter 2: Understanding Understanding

2008-08-01T11:10:00.001-07:00

"Zathras understand. ... No. Zathras not understand, but Zathras do. Zathras good at doings, not understandings." --Zathras, Babylon 5

This chapter brought to light a depressing fact about modern education: most students who are "good at doings", as Zathras would say, are not "good at understandings." They have collected facts in their heads, but they don't know what they mean, and questions that present them with the opportunity to use their facts and skills in novel ways often leave them staring blankly at the page. The emphasis on loading students' brains with as many facts as possible only makes the situation worse. "Teaching to the test" can help students to regurgitate the right answers on command, but only if the questions that they face on the test are exactly like the questions they've seen before. This is why so many students hate story problems: they point out the fact that the student never understood what he thought he knew.

The listing of common misunderstandings in this chapter was somewhat unsettling for me, because it revealed some of my own misconceptions. I'd had no idea that Impressionism was an attempt to be more realistic, to convey the raw sensory impact of a thing rather than the emotional or mental response that the thing engendered in the artist. I've often thought that history classes were almost useless because they consisted of bombarding students with an endless procession of facts, which could easily be looked up in an encyclopedia if they were actually needed. The idea of historian as "storyteller," putting events into any of several possible narratives that might "explain" these events, is one that runs rather contrary to my instinct that there should be one "true" reason or explanation for why things happened. I can only imagine how many similar misconceptions people in other fields must have about my area of study.

The one part of the chapter that jumped out at me the most, though, was the section about understanding the phenomenon of misunderstanding:

"Misunderstanding is not ignorance, therefore. It is the mapping of a working idea in a plausible but incorrect way in a new situation. ... Paradoxically, you have to have knowledge and the ability to transfer [i.e., to apply it in new situations] in order to misunderstand things. Thus evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts." (p. 51)

This section was a wake-up call for me, because I used to get very frustrated at my college students who would return garbled and nonsensical answers to my quiz questions. "They soak up all of this information and then spit it back out like a random comment generator," I would sometimes complain to my fellow TAs. "They just aren't thinking about what they're saying!" The irony, of course, is that they were thinking, but they hadn't arranged the facts into the correct framework. Like a Rube Goldberg machine with the parts in the wrong order, they were failing to get the desired output, but it wasn't for lack of trying. It's a distinction that I'm going to have to be more aware of when I teach my 9th graders -- and I'll have to be patient with them, to acknowledge and refine what George Leonard calls "the approximations of the correct technique", while helping them to make the necessary adjustments to their thinking.

Understanding by Design, Introduction & Chapter 1: Backward Design

2008-07-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

In our primary textbook for the summer coursework, Understanding by Design, we're at last getting into the details of how an instructional unit should be organized. The basic idea behind the UbD process is simple: (1) Identify desired results, (2) Determine acceptable evidence that those results have been achieved, and (3) Plan the learning experiences and instructional elements that will allow the students to reach those goals. It's beautifully logical, but unfortunately it is a practice that is rarely followed in traditional classrooms:

"You probably know the saying, 'If you don't know exactly where you are headed, then any road will get you there.' Alas, the point is a serious one in education. We are quick to say what things we like to teach, what activities we will do, and what kinds of resources we will use; but without clarifying the desired results of our teaching, how will we ever know whether our designs are appropriate or arbitrary? How will we distinguish merely interesting learning from effective learning? More pointedly, how will we ever meet content standards or arrive at hard-won student understandings unless we think through what those goals imply for the learner's activities and achievements?" (p.14)

The UbD system provides a template for a better alternative, in which both the teacher and the students understand why the students are learning what they're learning and how those specific activities are going to tie in to the bigger picture.

I'm already thinking about my goals for the first unit of my biology course. There are a lot of different ways you can go about teaching biology. The most common seems to be starting with the basic processes of the cell and then working up through tissues, organs, organ systems, and different types of organisms; then focusing on development and evolution; then, if there's time, getting into ecology and environmental protection at the end. The problem with this, I think, is that students don't see the "big picture" until the end of the year, when they're already thinking about summer break more than their classes. Keeping in mind what Howard Gardner said about training people to think like scientists, geometers, historians, etc. -- as well as the UbD focus on "big ideas" -- I think this approach is backwards, at least for the high school level. If I want students to understand how the ecosystem functions -- and how the things humans do can disrupt that functionality -- then it's essential to start with the big picture.

The first unit, I think, should focus on ecology: What makes something alive? What roles do living organisms play in their environment (producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, etc.)? How do these different organisms interact with each other, and how do nutrients and energy flow through the system? These are questions that students can tackle without understanding the nitty-gritty details of how organisms are put together, and having this "big picture" in place will make things easier when I get to the other big topics that I want to cover, homeostasis (how do organisms maintain themselves within their specific niche?) and evolution (how do species change in response to changes in their environment and its available niches?). It may well be that, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution; however, in terms of putting information about biological systems into a "big picture" narrative that the students can grasp, it is equally true that nothing makes sense except in light of ecology. I look forward to continuing to develop my plans for this first unit as I delve further into the details of the UbD process.

THE DISCIPLINED MIND, by Howard Gardner

2008-07-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences -- the idea that there are at least seven or eight different metrics for intellect, and that a person who is strong in one area (such as logical reasoning) may be weak in others (such as musical aptitude or interpersonal awareness). Gardner has long been a critic of education systems that treat "IQ" (logical/mathematical intelligence) as the be-all and end-all of human thinking, and has called for educators to look for opportunities to engage students' other types of intelligence in order to keep them interested, active, and (most importantly) learning.

In The Disciplined Mind, though, Gardner only touches lightly on his multiple-intelligence theory; this time he has other fish to fry. His target is the mainstream education system and its obsession with coverage -- the idea that students have to accumulate a certain number of facts, about everything from the Mayflower to mitochondria, and be able to regurgitate them on command in a standardized test. This, according to mainstream thought, is what it means to be "educated" -- and Gardner calls B.S. on the whole notion.

The problem with education in this country isn't that we don't have enough facts. 21st-century humanity is inundated with facts; thanks to the Internet, we are essentially drowning in a sea of data. The problem is that, as my own history professor once said, "Facts without theory are trivia." If students cram their heads full of information but never learn how to process it properly -- how to think critically and sort good data from bad -- they'll never be able to use that information in any practical way. And when humans are faced with a bunch of facts they can't interpret, they'll usually throw up their hands and "go with their gut" -- falling back on the same flawed premises and mistaken notions that they formed in their early childhood. This is why an examination of MIT physics grads found that, just one year after graduation, they were no better at solving basic physics problems than a group of younger students who had never even taken a physics course.

Gardner proposes a better way: instead of focusing on "covering" topics, teachers should focus on un-covering the modes of thought that are necessary to interpret data correctly. By focusing on a small number of topics and going into them deeply, teachers can help their students to understand how to think like a scientist, or a mathematician, or a historian, or an art critic. Going deeply into a topic is the only way to expose the flawed thinking that lies deep in the student's mind -- at which point it can be replaced with something better.

"Better", in Gardner's way of thinking, means helping students to discern between accurate information and false information, to recognize and appreciate beauty, and to build a moral compass that will distinguish between ethical and unethical behavior. Gardner summarizes these objectives as the pursuit of "the true, the beautiful and the good." A student who learns how to recognize truth (and falsehood), beauty (and ugliness), and goodness (and evil) will have the necessary mental tools to deal with any data set that he or she may encounter. Once you've learned what it means to think like a scientist, for example, you can apply the same tools whether you're studying biology, chemistry, physics, etc. The same goes for appreciating art or interpreting historical events: the details change, but the disciplines themselves are consistent.

This is an extraordinary book. While Gardner's writing style is dense to the point of being baroque, the principles that he puts forward are ones that I think every educator (and every lawmaker) needs to grasp. He has put his finger on exactly the problem that made me so discontented with aspects of my own undergraduate education. The course that I found least satisfying (Genetics) was a barrage of facts and trivia with little to interconnect them; the professor covered many topics in only enough detail to let us answer questions on the GRE standardized test, without bothering to explain their deeper significance. I did well in the class, but only because of my own talent for storing large amounts of trivial data; I didn't actually understand much more after leaving the class than I did when I first entered it. By contrast, my organic chemistry professor focused on teaching mechanisms and processes; while there was a lot of memorization, it all fit together into a larger conceptual framework, and even years later I can still recognize the different types of reactions that he taught us to look for, even if the precise reactants in question are new to me.

Gardner is less than enthusiastic about the idea of charter schools -- he would prefer to see a nationwide education system that used his technique, or a small number of competing national programs that put their emphasis on different styles of teaching. (Given his own fascination with evolution, perhaps he is hoping that his "discipline-focused" schools will eventually achieve dominance through natural selection, while the coverage-obsessed schools go"extinct.") Still, he does acknowledge that charter schools have the opportunity to experiment with new techniques and methodologies. Hopefully ARISE High School can serve as a model for how a "disciplined" education can be successful.. The strategies and ideals Gardner espouses are right in line with the sort of education that I hope to give my students; I look forward to the opportunity to teach them the path of "the true, the beautiful and the good."

MASTERY, by George Leonard

2008-07-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

One of our two required "leadership readings" for the Reach Pre-Service Summer Coursework, Mastery is a short and elegantly-written book in which George Leonard -- former Army Air Force flight instructor and Aikido master -- puts forth a set of deceptively simple rules on how to live your life. He points out that most people, upon trying to learn a new skill, fall into one of three categories:

The Dabbler: Jumps into a new venture with great enthusiasm, but loses interest when he soon hits a "plateau" of acheivement. Discouraged, he abandons the enterprise, only to jump into the next thing that strikes his fancy and repeat the process.
The Obsessive: Impatient with the "plateaus" of achievement, the Obsessive pushes herself night and day in an effort to recapture the sudden burst of growth that she first experienced. Her performance becomes erratic as she tries to rush the process of improvement, until eventually she burns out -- physically, emotionally, or both.
The Hacker: The Hacker doesn't care about pursuing excellence; he just wants to play around with the skill. Unlike the Dabbler, he doesn't get discouraged when he hits a plateau, but he doesn't push himself keep learning and growing either; beyond a certain point, his performance remains flat. He may only practice his skills occasionally, enough to maintain that plateau where he leveled off but not enough to press onward. He's content to "know enough to be dangerous" without going deeper into the pursuit in question.

Leonard puts forth an alternative to all of these paths: the path of Mastery. The Master sets up a regular practice in the skill in question and pursues that practice for its own sake. The discipline itself becomes its own reward. Along the way, the Master encounters bursts of measurable improvement followed by long periods on the plateaus; but rather than give up, obsess over continued improvement, or become content with mediocrity, the Master continues the regular, steady discipline, embracing growth when it occurs but also embracing the periods of apparent stagnation (which are actually the points when you're integrating everything you've learned to the point where it becomes second nature -- an essential step on the road to further improvement).

As Leonard points out, you can apply these different "paths" to any pursuit in life, and you needn't follow the same path in everything. Looking at my own life, I can see that I've been a Dabbler at art and a Hacker at guitar-playing. I'd like to say I've approached my writing in accordance with the path of mastery, but I've been a bit too erratic in my writing schedule for that to be strictly true; I think I alternate between periods of Mastery and Hackerdom where writing is concerned. The important thing is to recognize the pursuits that you really care about being better at and then pursuing the path of mastery in those disciplines, because that's the only way to keep improving over long periods of time without getting burned out.

One of the most eye-opening parts of the book was chapter three, "America's War Against Mastery." Leonard pointed out that our entire popular culture is based around a value system that scorns the path of mastery. This is particularly obvious in commercial advertisements and television shows:

"Keep watcing, and an underlying pattern will emerge. About half of the commercials, whatever the subject mater, are based on a climactic moment: The cake has already been baked; the family and guests, their faces all aglow, are gathered around to watch an adorable three-year-old blow out the candles. The race is run and won; beautiful young people jump up and down in ecstasy as they reach for frosted cans of diet cola. Men are shown working at their jobs for all of a second and a half, then it's Miller time. Life at its best, these commercials teach, is an endless series of climactic moments.
"...In all of this, the specific content isn't nearly as destructive to mastery as is the rhythm. One epiphany follows another. One fantasy is crowded out by the next. Climax is piled upon climax. There's no plateau." (pp. 23-29)

This fantasy of endless upward progress is insidious because it doesn't match up with the way things actually work in reality. Driven to find the sort of life that we see on TV, we either work ourselves to exhaustion or seek shortcuts to excellence. The recent steroid scandal in baseball and the collapse of the mortgage industry are both examples of what can happen when people follow the siren song of Better, Faster, More!

I found this book greatly inspiring because of the firm but gentle way it encourages the reader to get on the path to mastery and stay on it. The acknowledgement that we can't (and won't) keep growing in a steady upward rise is refreshing and liberating; it's right and natural to find yourself "stuck on the plateau." The admonishment to keep pressing onward, to find your rewards in the daily practice of your craft rather than losing heart or obsessing over the next burst of improvement, is a lesson that can be applied to any area of life. It's a lesson that I plan to embrace as I move forward with my career as a teacher.

Off to start my new life...

2008-07-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

As I sit here, nearly all of my worldly goods are packed up in my car and trailer, awaiting transport to California. Tomorrow morning I set out for Chicago, my first stop, where I'll be visiting with two of my fellow podcasters. Subsequent stops will take me to Springfield (MO), Denver, Albuquerque, and Phoenix, before finally arriving in the Bay Area on July 31st.

I've been busy over the last week and a half working on the reading for my REACH Pre-Service program. Last Saturday I finished The Disciplined Mind, which is an excellent book that I heartily recommend to anyone interested in education. I'll post my thoughts on the book in more detail in a later post. Right now I'm working on Mastery, a book written by a former Army Air Force pilot and aikido instructor -- the premise of which is that there is a distinct path to self-improvement that requires us to love the process of self-improvement. We have to embrace the journey even when we're not seeing results, because the practice itself is its own reward. I can speak to the truth of this on a number of levels, particularly in playing guitar and writing fiction. I'm a bit more than a third of the way through the book and greatly enjoying it; I look forward to continuing to digest it over the course of my travels.

Once I arrive in Cali I'll be staying with a friend in Palo Alto until my room in Berkeley becomes available on August 4th. Her house is quiet and beautiful and has a lot of space in which to work, which will give me a great opportunity to focus in on my remaining coursework and crank through it quickly and steadily. I haven't been able to spend as much time on the coursework as I would have liked to thus far -- my previous day job, which ended yesterday, and the work of getting ready to move cross-country have utterly devoured my time -- so I'm looking forward to the chance to be alone with the books, with no greater responsibility than to absorb this material and prepare for the career that awaits me.

My ideal biology class...

2008-07-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend working on my elective book from the annotated book list: The Disciplined Mind, by Howard Gardner. I'm about halfway through it now -- it's dense but scintillating reading, and he's definitely captured my loyalty with his call to teach students "the true, the beautiful and the good."

One of the things Gardner points out is that it's impossible to cover everything that there is to know about any field of study, so any approach to teaching that is based ultimately on hitting a certain number of content-based guideposts is falling short of its potential. Facts leak out of students' ears as soon as they take the test; the real challenge is to confront and correct underlying misconceptions in thinking, to teach people to think like scientists (or geometers, or historians, or what have you). He draws comparison to athletics and music: it's not so important that the student of these disciplines be able to describe a particular football play in detail or play an exact copy of a master's performance of a given piece, but that they learn the underlying techniques, concepts and skills that will allow them to tackle a wide variety of possible situations. Breadth of coverage is not as important as depth, because it is only by sinking deeply into a subject that you will discover your flawed thinking and be able to correct it.

To that end, Gardner and his colleagues recommend projects in which learning, presentation of understanding, and assessment are all rolled together. There are no secret tests at the end of the unit, but rather students are coached throughout the course in the preparation of a presentation that will demonstrate what they have learned. Along the way they have the opportunity to ask questions and receive clarification, and the teachers can work with the students to expand their thinking and point out the misconceptions when they crop up. The final presentation is a source of pride for the students, rather than a source of apprehension. (I should note that this somewhat mimics my experience in grad school: my thinking was corrected along the way by my thesis committee, and the day when I stood before my classmates and teachers and presented the results of my research was the proudest day of my academic career.) Most importantly, the students should be able to take the concepts that they have learned and apply them to a new situation; this is the true assessment of whether learning has taken place.

As I was pondering these things, an idea for a biology curriculum came to me: Organize the entire semester around the theme of an alien world, being explored by humans for the first time. Students would be divided into teams, and at the end of the year each team would present information about a species that they had invented to inhabit this world. The students would play the role of the xenobiologists exploring this world, giving their reports the people of Earth on what they've found.

Each species would have a specific ecological niche, key adaptations that allowed it to exploit that niche, and an interaction web with the other species. (Who eats whom? Which species compete with each other, and how? Are any of them keystone species, and why?) I would give the students some basic information about the world for starters: key biomes and the producers found there, key environmental challenges found in the different biomes (which the animals would have to adapt to), and key species found in the fossil record (from which our various modern species would be descended). The students would have to demonstrate how the different species might be related, and which adaptations arose when. (If three species have eyestalks of the same general configuration, do they all come from the same ancestor? What role did the eyestalks serve for that ancestor? Do they serve the same role now, or have the species adapted that trait to serve other purposes?)

As the piece de resistance, the students would have to confront ecological questions about this alien world. If human colonists cut down the chuwumba trees for building materials, how will that affect the other species in the ecosystem? If they discover that the pink-toed crinklehump is good for eating, what other predators that feed on the crinklehumps might be affected? If humans accidentally bring rats with them on the colony ship, what native species might be endangered by this invasive species? The answers that the students give to these questions will demonstrate what they have learned about the concepts they have studied.

For this to work, the students will have to learn the basic concepts of three major areas of biology: homeostasis (how animals stay alive), evolution (how populations change in response to changes in their environment), and ecology (how organisms in a system interact with each other). The students will study specific examples in each of these areas of focus and use them to think about their hypothetical alien species. By the end of the course, the students should be well-versed enough in the concepts driving each of these areas to be able to construct their alien world -- and the presentation at the end will be a great way to show off to the parents and the other students what these kids have learned.

So, what do you all think? Am I on the right track here?

Reach Daily Classroom Practices

2008-07-11T22:02:00.000-07:00

For this assignment we compared the "must-have" classroom practices from the previous post to the requirements used on Reach's classroom observation form.

For the most part, the guidelines match up with the things I mentioned: setting expectations, having a daily schedule, setting up routines and procedures, making sure that classroom materials are well-organized and accessible to the students, etc. The Reach guidelines did mention some things that I left off:

Clearly posting daily homework assignments: This seemed such an obvious practice that I didn't even think about it in terms of a "must-have" element of classroom/instructional procedure.

Posting student work / exemplars of student work: This is a great idea, when the assignment's nature allows the work to be displayed. Posters presenting various scientific concepts would be a great example of this.

Student activities encourage movement around the room: An interesting idea. Many lab experiments require working at one's own station -- you don't want to be moving around much when you're doing a dissection, for example. Incorporating elements of movement and activity is definitely something that could be done with some times of activities, though, and it's something I'll keep in mind as a way to break up monotony.

Teacher moves around the room: Again, this seemed to go without saying, from my perspective. I can't imagine not circulating around the room and checking in with my students as the activities progress.

Scoring rubrics are displayed/provided: The word "rubric" apparently has a very specific meaning in the education community, one that is unfamiliar to those of us who were trained primarily in the sciences. (I knew only the dictionary definitions of the term: a category of classification, or an established rule, tradition or custom.) Having looked up a definition of the term as it is used by educators, I can agree that it would be useful; certainly as a student I would have appreciated having a set of guidelines that showed what constituted an excellent, good, average, or poor grasp of the material. Playing fair with the students is important, and these "rubrics" seem to be a good way to show students what we're expecting of them.

On the whole, I think that Reach's evaluation form matches up well with what I would have expected. It doesn't make any mention of the sorts of science-specific items that I discussed in my previous post, but that's hardly unexpected since this is a generic form. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to practice some of the instructional techniques mentioned here, so that I can give my students varied and interesting course material and a lot of different ways to work with it.

Daily Classroom Practices

2008-07-10T19:41:00.000-07:00

For this assignment we read through a set of book excerpts about establishing classroom rituals: rules, procedures and behaviors that should be set in place at the beginning of the year so that students will understand what is expected of them. I can see the wisdom of this: Students may simply not know what behaviors are appropriate or inappropriate, particularly the younger ones, and it's better to set your expectations in the beginning than to reprimand for inappropriate behavior on a case-by-case basis. I also like the idea of working with the students at the beginning of the year to develop these rituals; not only does it establish a social contract that they can be reminded about, but it forces them to think critically about the effects of their actions on other people. I'd rather get their cooperation that way than by playing the "heavy" because someone got out of line.

We also read a chapter about organizing content for instruction, to make sure that the material is presented in a way that is engaging, effective, and uses class time efficiently.

After reading the articles, I think the following elements of classroom management (both behavioral and instructional) will be "must-haves" in my biology class:

1.) Giving the students a "Do Now" list of tasks to complete when they come in to the classroom. I can put these instructions on the projector using PowerPoint. Tasks that the students might need to complete at the beginning of class could include getting out materials needed for that lesson, dropping off homework at a pile on my desk, stashing their bags out of the way (in a pre-designated location) when we're going to do a lab experiment, and writing down their answers to a pre-assessment question on an index card.

2.) Basic ground rules for talking, listening, and paying attention: students raise their hands to speak during instructional phases, pay quiet attention when I or another student is speaking, and stop whatever they're doing and listen when I give them a pre-arranged signal. I like the idea of raising my hand and having the students raise theirs in response to show that they are listening; it seems like a fair way to enforce compliance, and it exploits the "herd instinct" for a constructive end (i.e., students aren't going to be the only one not doing something that everyone else is doing).

3.) Lab experiments will be a big part of my class, and that means that there will be specialized materials that need to be distributed for these lessons. I'll need to develop a "ritual" for how these materials are distributed to the lab groups, and (even more importantly) how cleanup is handled afterward. This will be especially important with dissection labs; I've seen too many classrooms left as disaster areas because professors didn't make students clean up after themselves -- and that was at the college level, when students are (theoretically) more mature. Commonly-used materials, such as dissection kits, will be kept in numbered boxes or bins that are assigned to the lab group of the same number; this also allows me to prepare ahead of time by putting any special materials the students will need into that bin. It will also be important to teach the students proper safety procedures, especially when they're working with sharps or potentially hazardous chemicals.

4.) I need to establish procedures for following directions on lab experiments. I noticed in my sample lesson that some lab groups read through the printed directions and followed them closely, while others obviously did not read them at all (since they asked questions that were answered on the first page of the instructions). Some students may not have well-developed English skills, so I think a good way to deal with this would be for each team to choose one member to read the instructions to his/her teammates. This would give the students with stronger English skills a chance to explain the instructions to the ones who might not read as well, and it has the added benefit of cementing the instructions in the mind of the team's presumptive leader.

5.) Chapter 4 of "Qualities of Effective Teachers" presented an excellent idea: having "contingency plans" worked out in advance for events that are likely but whose occurrence is unpredictable, such as the arrival of a new student in the class. I'll need to brainstorm with some of the more experienced teachers to work out what sorts of contingency plans I'm likely to need.

6.) Going along with #3 and #5, having a set of organizer bins in place to store commonly-used materials seems very important. Knowing my own tendency for my personal spaces to become cluttered, things will go better for me in the long run if I set up a system of organization at the beginning.

7.) I'll need to develop a clear, consistent routine for moving between phases in the class. Two hours is a lot of time, but I know first-hand how quickly it can go by when you're doing a lab or other small-group activity. One idea that occurs to me is to use sound files on the computer to signal that the small-group phase is wrapping up; it would give me an opportunity to put a little whimsy into the presentation, and that's usually a good thing where science is concerned.

8.) Chapter 4 talks about establishing plans for student activities at three different levels: high-achievement, standard, and remedial. The idea is that students who have mastered the material will be able to go deeper into it while those who are struggling will have more time to learn the basics. I love this idea in principle, but in practice it seems daunting to do not one, but three preps for every lesson. I'll need to talk to some more experienced teachers to come up with ideas on how to implement this and still have time for things like eating and sleeping.

Those are the main points that jumped out at me while reading these chapters. Much of the information presented was very abstract and general, explaining what effective teachers do without going into detail about how these things are accomplished. The "Qualities of Effective Teachers" chapters were also rife with jargon that I haven't mastered yet, so I think it will take further time and exposure before I am fully comfortable with the material presented here.

TPE Summary

2008-07-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

How has your understanding of the TPEs changed as a result of the readings you just did? Are you clearer about the TPEs and their role in teaching, or are you even more confused as a result of the readings?

The readings definitely helped. As I mentioned in my TPE Introduction post, most of the Teacher Performance Expectations make intuitive sense. The question, for me, was not "Why is this important?", but "How can this be effectively implemented in the classroom?"

The articles on classroom management and strategies for assessment were particularly valuable to me. It was very helpful to see someone identify the different types of high-need students we're likely to encounter and prescribe specific strategies for working with them. As for assessment, I'd never seen anyone explicitly distinguish between testing of learning, testing for learning, and testing as learning, and that article definitely sparked some ideas about different ways to use assessments in class. The article on being a culturally responsive teacher was also valuable; it really pointed out how students bring the weight of their experiences into the classroom, and it gave me some ideas on how I might make biology more relevant for students from different backgrounds.

Which TPE do you think will be the easiest (or most natural) for you, and which do you feel will be the most difficult?

The easiest one, I think, will be TPE 4 - Making Content Accessible. I've been explaining science to everyone who would listen since I was ... oh, about five years old ... and most of my friends and family don't have much formal education on the subject, so I have a lot of practice in making the complex understandable. My experiences at UC-Santa Cruz further point to my ability on this front; one of my thesis committee members told me, after my defense presentation, that it was the best lecture she'd ever heard a student present in all her years of teaching.

My biggest challenge will probably be TPE 7 - Teaching English Language Learners. As I said in my intro, this is largely new territory for me, and I'm looking forward to learning techniques that will help me. Victoria's comment about treating the language of science like a foreign language was instructive: when I studied Spanish, we were first introduced to the vocabulary, then given opportunities to practice using it in both spoken and written exercises. We were also exposed to the use of that vocabulary in different contexts: prose, music, and video, among other things. I'll be thinking about ways that I can adapt that approach to the science classroom -- though, in the case of science, I think it will often take the form of doing experiments and then practicing the language by talking about the things the students are observing.

With all of the focus on the different ways that students learn, I found this segment of the coursework a little ironic in that all of the material was presented in the same way: through reading articles excerpted from journals. This sort of passive learning isn't my most effective way of absorbing information; I have to get my hands into something before I can really feel like I know it. With that in mind, I'm very much looking forward to our upcoming retreat.

TPE F: Professional Learning Communities

2008-07-09T17:32:00.000-07:00

This assignment introduced the concept of the "Professional Learning Community", a new model for the way educators should interact with one another. The gist of the idea is that we need to put the focus on what students are learning rather than what instructors are teaching; we have to pay attention to not only what we put in front of our students, but what actually sticks. The author of the article, Richard DuFour, emphasizes the importance of teachers operating transparently and collaborating with each other, not just on the superficial elements of school life but on content.

This made me wonder how we will implement this strategy at ARISE High School. We're a small, young school; as far as I know, I'm going to be the only full-time biology instructor we have. The concept of a professional learning community, in which teachers work together to put together course content and design means of assessing learning, sounds great in theory, and I'm sure it works very well at schools like Adlai Stevenson High (which has 4,000 students). But when I'm the only one presenting my content, I'm not sure whom I'll be able to collaborate with. Right now I have Kenny, the outgoing biology instructor, to bounce ideas off of, but I don't know how often he's going to be available to talk to once the school year is in full swing. I'm more than happy to talk to other teachers for ideas, especially other science teachers, but it seems like the amount of practical guidance that they'd be able to give me would be limited by their own knowledge of my subject material (and vice versa).

It'll be interesting to see how this is implemented. Like I said, I like the concept; maybe I'll be able to collaborate with other new science teachers at other schools who are participating in the Reach program.

TPE E: Creating and Maintaining Effective Environments for Student Learning

2008-07-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

For this assignment we read "The Key to Classroom Management," by Robert and Jana Marzano. This may be the single most useful article we've been given to date, at least from my perspective; I have no doubts about my capabilities with my subject matter, but maintaining a proper classroom environment for a group of teenagers is an area where I realize I still have much to learn. I appreciated the Marzanos' focus on striking a balance between "dominance" (maintaining control of the class and setting clear standards and expectations) and "cooperation" (fostering a spirit of reasonableness and understanding between teacher and student, and giving students some flexibility in how they pursue the stated goals of the course). I interviewed at another school once where the teachers had to behave like drill instructors in boot camp, maintaining what seemed to me like insanely rigid standards of behavior and conduct. I'm not an authoritarian by nature -- quite the opposite, actually -- so, while I can admit that that particular group of students might have needed that level of enforced discipline, it ran contrary to my instincts, both as an educator and as a human being.

One thing I am wondering about is the Marzanos' frequent reference to "rewarding" successes and good behavior, and I'm unsure how this plays out in the high school environment. I don't want to establish a system in which students have to be bribed to learn; it seems to me that learning is its own reward, and that we ought to foster that view by showing them how to apply their knowledge to the way they deal with the world around them. Other than with verbal praise, how can I reinforce students' positive behavior without invoking their greed and tainting the entire experience?

TPE D: The Culturally Responsive Teacher

2008-07-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

This paper, published by two professors at Montclair State University, put forth the concept that teachers need to be aware of the cultural differences between themselves and their students -- and, more importantly, that they need to see the opportunities to make use of their students' backgrounds to facilitate learning, instead of seeing them as a disadvantage. One passage in particular jumped out at me:

... teachers who see students from an affirming perspective and truly respect cultural differences are more apt to believe that students from nondominant groups are capable learners, even when these students enter school with ways of thinking, talking, and behaving that differ from the dominant cultural norms. Teachers who hold these affirming views about diversity will convey this confidence by providing students with an intellectually rigorous curriculum, teaching students strategies for monitoring their own learning, setting high performance standards and consistently holding students accountable to those standards, and building on the individual and cultural resources that students bring to school.

This confirms something that I've strongly believed for years: that, in our attempts to contextualize material for students from racial and ethnic minority groups, we must continue to uphold high standards and believe in the students' capacity to achieve. One of my pet peeves with old-school liberal approaches to social work was the "White Man's Burden" attitude that these well-meaning workers carried around with them. When you assume that the people you're working with are so far "beneath" you that they're never going to amount to anything without your help and guidance, you demean them and diminish the opportunities for them to live up to their potential. Look at the dramatic difference in results when poverty relief organizations shifted from giving handouts to making microfinance loans that could help people start businesses: the latter approach gives the aid recipient much more responsibility -- and assumes that he is capable enough to handle it. As a result, organizations like Kiva are making more of an impact in fighting poverty than traditional charity ever did.

We have to take the same approach with our students: we are investing knowledge in them, and expecting them to manage it responsibly and produce a useful return on the investment. We can learn how to make the most of our students' experiences so that we can help them grasp the material more readily -- but ultimately they are responsible to use that knowledge, and we have to show them that we believe in their capacity to do so.

TPE C- English Language Learners

2008-07-06T07:04:00.001-07:00

The article we read for this assignment, "Teacher Skills to Support English Language Learners," addresses a lot of the concerns that I've had about my upcoming teaching position. My charter school is located in the Fruitvale area, which is a prominent Latino community. While I had three years of Spanish in college, I haven't used it much since then, and my facility with the language has atrophied, particularly in conversational use. While I'm still better off than a teacher who has had no Spanish, I know that the technical material I'm presenting is going to have to be explained in English. As the article points out, there is a big difference between conversational proficiency in a language and proficiency with the technical language used in academic settings.

The authors state that they have developed a system for teaching English Language Learners (ELLs), the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model, and that it has shown strong positive results in the classroom. I'm pleased to learn that people have been working on this problem and that there are successful strategies that I can learn to implement to help these students. This article was only an overview, of course, so much of the information presented was very general and abstract. The authors also assume knowledge of some terms that are not part of my academic vocabulary -- "word walls", "semantic webs", and "graphic organizers" as prewriting activities. I'm looking forward to learning more about the techniques described so that I can begin to think about how to implement them; this is the sort of material that I'm going to have to practice with in a practical setting before I'll feel like I really understand it.

TPE C- Neuroscience

2008-07-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

I just read a fascinating article called "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education". Recent neurological research confirms what people have noted anecdotally for years: you don't learn as well when you're stressed out.

The truth is that when we scrub joy and comfort from the classroom, we distance our students from effective information processing and long-term memory storage. Instead of taking pleasure from learning, students become bored, anxious, and anything but engaged. They ultimately learn to feel bad about school and lose the joy they once felt.

I'm reminded of a story that my mother often relates about my experiences when I first started school. They initially enrolled me in a local private school that followed fairly traditional teaching methods: the students sat at desks and did assignments that were, for me, far below my level of capability. After about the second week I turned to my mother after school and said, "How long do I have to do this? I already know everything." They ended up enrolling me in a Montessori program, where I flourished until the middle of second grade -- by which point I had outpaced all of the other students. My teacher tried to keep me learning by giving me paperwork to do, but the assignments I had were dull and lifeless compared to the interesting stuff that my classmates were doing. As a result, I slacked on the assigned work and didn't complete it. Faced with the prospect of double-promoting me the next year -- which wouldn't have been a good choice because I was emotionally young for my age -- my parents pulled me out and home-schooled me for the rest of my elementary and high school education (though I did take a few college classes in my senior year to fulfill my science and foreign language requirements).

My own experience illustrates how important it is to engage students' interest and give them the chance to do things that are fun in the process of learning. It's my hope that I will be able to give my students that kind of positive learning experience, to open them up to the wonder of the world around us.

TPE B: Learning to Love Assessment

2008-07-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

For this assignment we read an article by Carol Ann Tomlinson, an education professor at UV-Charlottesville, about the insights she gained into the process of assessment over the course of her teaching career. There's a lot of good material in here, as she presents other uses for assessment beyond simply administering a test at the end of the unit and seeing who grasped the material and who didn't. As she points out, by then it's too late to fix anything:

I came to understand that assessments that came at the end of a unit—although important manifestations of student knowledge, understanding, and skill—were less useful to me as a teacher than were assessments that occurred during a unit of study. By the time I gave and graded a final assessment, we were already moving on to a new topic or unit. There was only a limited amount I could do at that stage with information that revealed to me that some students fell short of mastering essential outcomes—or that others had likely been bored senseless by instruction that focused on outcomes they had mastered long before the unit had begun. When I studied student work in the course of a unit, however, I could do many things to support or extend student learning. I began to be a devotee of formative assessment, although I did not know that term for many years.

The idea of checking on student knowledge before and during a unit, as well as after it, is a good one that I'll definitely want to incorporate into my teaching plans. I also like the idea of giving students different ways to demonstrate mastery of the material, though it will be a challenge to make sure that these different approaches are both consistent and fair.

Teaching in the hard sciences is both reassuring and frustrating when thinking about assessment: the facts are what they are (to the best of our knowledge), and there are certain key concepts that the student must understand in order to be competent with the material, just as a student in mathematics must demonstrate mastery of arithmetic and algebra before going on to more advanced topics. While one might be able to devise different ways of presenting mastery that play to the different students' strengths, ultimately a successful biology student must understand how evolution works, how a cell is put together, how metabolism is carried out, how homeostasis is maintained, etc. This isn't like English, where a student may express himself poorly in oral presentations but perform brilliantly in writing fiction. Science is integrative, and if you don't understand the basic concepts you won't be able to grasp the higher ones.

I can appreciate Ms. Tomlinson's comment about "accentuat[ing] student positives rather than negatives," but we also have to be on guard against imbalanced learning: if a student focuses all of his efforts on an area of the material that he is already proficient at, he isn't going to learn as much as he could, and his weaknesses in other areas will continue to hinder him when it becomes necessary to use those areas of knowledge. America is lagging behind the rest of the developed world on science education; too many students are failing to learn the fundamentals. While I can agree that student confidence is important to facilitate learning, I'd like to see this process of "accentuating student positives" in action to make sure that the students are still learning everything that they need to learn. Sometimes the only way a student knows whether he really understands a concept is when he's tested on it; as a wise man once said, The purpose of the test is to reveal the student to the student, not to reveal the student to the master. The teacher may well be able to discern all sorts of things about the student throughout the course of instruction, but ultimately the student has to demonstrate to himself that he knows what he's doing. I'd like to hear more about Ms. Tomlinson's approach -- in specific, practical application -- to be sure that the students are really leaving the class knowing everything that they need to know.

TPE A: The Thought-Filled Curriculum

2008-07-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

For this assignment we had to read an article by Arthur L. Costa, a professor of education at CSU and the co-author of the Habits of Mind series, which seeks to analyze different types of intelligent behavior and use them to make learning more effective. This article, "The Thought-Filled Curriculum" [Educational Leadership 65(5):20-24], argues that teachers' curricula must be designed to teach students how to think skillfully, constructively, collaboratively, reflectively and creatively.

While Costa's books have netted some criticism for their failure to draw on any scientific data to back up his recommended techniques, I believe that he is right on the mark in terms of his general argument. I've long said that the failure to teach people to think critically is the greatest weakness in our educational system, and much of our society is oriented toward intellectual laziness. We like our answers the way we like our food: quick, convenient, and prepackaged in easy serving sizes. Unfortunately, the sorts of "ideas" that come prepared in this way are no more healthy than the food of the same type, and they're ultimately toxic to one's intellectual development.

The one area where I have reservations with Costa's ideas is in the area of thinking collaboratively:

Collegial interaction is a crucial factor in the intellectual ecology of the school and classroom. Collaboratively, individuals can elicit thinking that surpasses individual effort, but such collaboration is difficult because it means temporarily suspending what I, individually, think. It means relaxing our grip on certainties and opening our minds to new perspectives, abiding by and supporting group decisions that are arrived at through deep, respectful listening and dialogue. Learners must come to understand that as they transcend the self and become part of the whole, they will not lose their individuality, only their egocentricity.

This is an exceedingly optimistic viewpoint on collaborative projects. It is true that when you have a group of active, creative participants with different strengths and weaknesses who are working together to solve a problem, they can come up with solutions that none of them could have developed individually. However, there are at least two other possible scenarios in which group projects can have disastrous consequences:

1.) One of the students is substantially more capable or motivated than the others. In this case, it is common for the student who is the most serious about learning to end up doing most or all of the work on the project, while the other team members passively ride on her achievements. In some cases the lead student may actually prefer this, if she perceives that her team members are incompetent and will do damage to her own grade if she allows them to have control over the project. This leads to feelings of injustice and resentment on the part of the lead student, because others are benefiting from her efforts (or, if the other students are required to contribute to the project, her grade is suffering because of her fellows' incompetence).

It is also possible that the lead student is wrong about her perceptions of the other students; she may have a team member who does have good ideas but is too timid to share them in the face of the lead student's forcefulness. In either case, the passive students likewise suffer, because the group project simply reinforces their own predisposition toward laziness; they will coast through the project on the minimum amount of effort and allow their more motivated fellows to raise their grade.

2.) Groupthink. This is potentially even more dangerous than Scenario #1. Psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that social conformity is a powerful negative force on human cognition; his experiments on social pressure and perception showed that many people will go along with an answer that is clearly incorrect in order to avoid conflict, social embarrassment, or being singled out as "peculiar." The power of groups to suppress argument, ignore data that deviates from their constructed worldview, and impose self-censorship on its members has been the cause of more bad policies than any other force in history.

Collaborative thinking does not, in and of itself, promote critical thinking; rather, it magnifies the thinking habits of the majority of its members, for good or ill. I think students have to learn how to be good thinkers as individuals, and to express their thoughts courageously, before they can be good contributors to collaborative thinking; otherwise, they will most likely be swept up in the silent, passive majority, going along with even things they are sure are incorrect, either because they are afraid of standing out or because they just don't care enough to raise the argument.

TPE Introduction

2008-07-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Today I was introduced to the Teacher Performance Expectations (TPEs), the list of standards to which California teachers are expected to conform. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory: Making subject matter comprehensible to the students, monitoring student learning, allocating and managing instructional time, etc.

The TPEs all seem important -- I can't pick any one of them as being "irrelevant", since I can see the usefulness and applicability of each. If I had to pick one that stands out as particularly critical, though, it is TPE5: Student Engagement. A teacher must know what the academic goals are, shape the presentation of the material in order to keep the students active and engaged, monitor their progress, and -- key phrase here -- extend student thinking. This, to me, is crucial: not just teaching content, but teaching students how to think critically about that content. All of the data in the world is useless if you don't have the skills to process it, filter it, analyze it, and draw conclusions about it. Keeping students' minds engaged in the learning process in an active way is essential if they're going to walk out of the classroom with knowledge that they can actually apply to the world around them.

One area I'm looking forward to receiving more information about is TPE7: Teaching English Learners. The overview of the standards talks about "Drawing upon student backgrounds and language abilities to provide differentiated instruction"; I'd like to see how this works in practice. I would suspect that science, in particular, would be difficult to learn in a language that you had not already mastered; the technical language involved in scientific theory is complex, and it can be difficult to express these concepts if your knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of a language is limited. I took three years of Spanish in college, and I would still not have felt comfortable conversing about scientific concepts in that language, even when I was at the height of my Spanish-speaking capability. I'm curious to see what tools and techniques have been developed to help students deal with this barrier to the material that some of them will no doubt have to confront.