The Art (or Science) of Study Guides

Hubris. It happens to the best of us. This form of arrogance comes with being new to any profession, but perhaps I’ve found it especially true to being a new teacher. It is not an arrogance born of spite nor superiority. It is certainly due in part to naiveté, and a firm conviction in one’s rightness in the world. Usually though, it comes from lack of experience. Experience, life experience or age, has very little to do with this, except perhaps allowing one to recognize the hubris sooner. I am, by and large, a decade older than my fellow second year teachers, and have been since I was in my graduate program at Tech. Hubris is, at best, born of good intentions for life, but it still leads to the same, familiar traps.

We are all so familiar with the phrase “teach to the test.” It has become so engrained in our understanding and lexicon. To be honest I am not even sure where the term came from, or even popularized it. It probably was not born from No Child Left Behind, but the explosion of standardized testing certainly lent truth to this concept. At best we can see a casual connection between NCLB and the phrasing, but not a causal connection.

The phrase rolls over the tongue and many want to bit it down. I know while in graduate school we lamented this idea, and in some small way promised ourselves we would be the teacher who didn’t teach to the test. We strove to fight against the grain. Yet, it works and it continues to work. Certainly students dislike this idea. In my government classes, I can hear the distaste, sometimes biting down their own bile, students rail and rally against this idea. And yet, when it comes to preparing for the test, when it truly comes down to their performance, what they say they want and what they want in reality clash. When it comes to achievement, humans manage to find the least difficult path to success. I am not seeking to condemn myself, other teachers, or even the system. I merely want to comment upon it. To draw inspiration which can lead to a recommendation. When it comes to testing, it couldn’t be easier: We want better test scores, so teach to the test.

What other choice is there?

Instead of teaching to the test, we should prepare students for testing. Rather than cover the content, let’s teach students the skills to uncover the content. If students can learn the content, and learn skills so they can learn (learn to learn) then test results should take care of themselves. I recognize the use of should is problematic, but do we really want to foster the low road? Shouldn’t we help students take the road not taken? This is not to say that we abolish the system (tempting as it might be). Standardized testing is not going away; it remains the only system available that approximates objectivity (I can hear some of my students rallying against my use of the word approximate, let’s save the objectivity debate for another day when Kierkegaard triumphs). So if testing isn’t going away, and if teaching to the test is so reviled, what is left and what does this second year teacher getting at when he argues for preparing students for testing. Once again, it really is quite simple: let’s teach students content AND let’s teach students study skills. Note, NOT test-taking skills but study skills. And skills education is almost always more time intensive and more difficult than content education; made all that more difficult by the culture in the classroom of remembering content for the test.

But what can be done about it? I don’t know that I have the answer, but I have my attempt at an answer. My attempt which is still a work in progress.

My own journey began last fall when I was teaching my first AP Government class and my students were about to take their first test. There was certainly anxiety on their part. I tried to reassure them as much as possible. I did the usual pre-testing review session. To be honest, I don’t really remember what I did exactly. I think in many ways, that first unit was me throwing things at the wall and hoping students understood it. I tried to be open and honest, but well, my students did not succeed and I ended up getting called into the principal’s office. Perhaps a little surprising that parents of AP students took to the administration, and yes, a slightly nerve-racking experience for myself, but it was ultimately good. I learned 1) that the administration at my school was amazing able to provide guidance and support without actually kicking me in the butt, and 2) that there was no expectation that any first year teacher would be a master teacher. So I made some adjustments for the next unit, I adopted unit organizer to give students a better idea of the key concepts. Test scores were low. Consistently low. I didn’t adopt Study Guides for the AP class that year, but I became far more intentional about making sure the content needed to answer the questions on the test were covered in some way, shape, or form in class. And still, test scores were low. So of course, it was no big surprise to see so many students not get a 3 or higher on the AP exam. It was no surprise that so many students needed to take advantage of my test corrections. But where lie the fault: with me or with the students? Ultimately, the fault has to lie with all of us. It was my fault for assuming certain skills and abilities. It was the students who failed themselves for not preparing or getting the needed help, and it was everyone else along the way’s fault who didn’t support their skills learning along the way [Again, not a blame-game, just a recognition of a problem].

Obviously the unit organizers helped some, and it certainly pushed me to be thinking backwards not teaching backwards. What more could I do to help them be successful for the test and for my test? And here then I fell into the trap. In fact it happened so organically, probably without my own reflection on this because of everything else going on, that it really wasn’t until two months ago I realized the problem. I started using Study Guides.

Students would receive a guide at the beginning of the unit. I wrote the test. I then looked at the test and wrote the study guide based on the test. Now, I know that the guides might not have been easy. It still required work, but they were meant to help students study for the test. It was an attempt to teach to the test. And again, I sought to have activities which would touch upon and provide answers to the questions on the test (sometimes this worked better than others, and a few times topics just fell through the cracks). Over the course of five months I saw a marked improvement over the previous year. My AP students were performing better on my unit tests and there were a handful of students who almost aced the multiple choice part of the midterm. On the other hand, my regular government classes’ students were still consistently low. Even those who completed the Study Guides. There was a disconnect.

While speaking with a colleague from the English department I realized what it was. Of course my AP kids were doing well, they had been trained to remember information for tests and the Study Guides were ways to show them what to expect. It may not have been me giving them the exact answers, but it was one step away from that. And as to my regular classes, I think the guides were pitched a little too high for many, not high enough for a few and for everyone they simply expected they could memorize the information and be successful. Except the guides required work. My colleague from the English Department shared with me what he did for the Midterm Exam prep. He created a very simple document, where the key concepts were listed on the left of the sheet and the right was blank. During the review time, students were to make note of studying techniques and/or resources which they could use to help them be successful on the test. I liked this idea because it encouraged study skills, it placed the learning on the shoulders of the students, it forced them to self-evaluate and it still allowed for teachers to support student learning.

So for my AP class, I dropped my plan Study Guide for their third test. In addition, I started pushing the students on skills, especially their FRQ writing skills (but that’s a topic for another day). I think this was a rough experience. The data is showing a marked decline from the first unit to the third unit test, but there actually seems to be a slight uptick in grades from the Midterm to the unit test. Now this may be indicative of a couple factors, but it does seem to at least suggest that the lack of a Study Guide is not adversely effecting student performance. I will definitely need to consider the data more carefully in the future. The second thing the data suggests is that there is a smaller disparity gap. That more students are actually performing in the middle range, which is very significant because this suggests the possibility that they might be able to get a 3 of the multiple choice part of the exam. Could I have done better to prepare the students? Certainly. But I would be doing them a greater disservice if I didn’t prepare them for life after school. If I didn’t hold them accountable for their own learning. That’s what this experience was about. And I’m doing it again for our next unit. We shall see how it goes.

So while I have opted to forgo Study Guides for my AP class, I’m trying out a new tactic for my regular class. As I mentioned, I’m seeing such a great disparity between what they can do on a Study Guide and success on the test. So something needs to change. So all of these thoughts were circulating through my brain when two different sources sort of shoved the idea of assessment for learning and self-assessments for learning in my face. My English department colleague started talking to me about these self-evaluation surveys he was giving students. Students would get a simply survey with a key concept listed. They were to evaluate how well they understood the concept using a ranking/rubric and he directly asked them if they felt they needed additional tutoring. He went out to pair up the 4-3 students (the mastery level students) with the 2-1 students (struggling students) on an assignment. At the same time this was happening, my mother-in-law shared an online resource with me which got me thinking about this concept of self-assessments and rubrics. I’m a huge fan of rubrics. They make life so much easier when it comes to grading, but they are a pain to create. And to really use rubrics, students need to understand them, which can take away from content time. Well, this online resource talked about this idea of using rubrics in different ways, more robust ways, which got me thinking. How could I incorporate this in my classroom? How could I augment student learning, help them feel confident walking into assessments, and show them expectations for assignments?

So I went back to basics. I found a copy of a holistic rubric which a middle school teacher had shared with me and I started adopting it for my own purpose.

  • Elder Statesman (5) – Shows evidence of all areas, providing helpful description and analysis.
  • Experienced Politico (4) – Shows mastery of most of the areas, but struggles with one part.
  • Associate Justice (3) – Shows mastery of many of the areas, but struggles with a couple parts
  • US Citizen (2) – Shows mastery of one of the major parts
  • Congressional Aide (1) – Struggles to show mastery of any of the required parts

I adopted some fancy, government sounding names to reinforce the content and have been using this simple rubric for all my graded assignments. The point values might change, but the basic idea remains the same. And I can apply it for so many different situations. Now, while this started out as solving my grading problem, it did not really address the other problem, of assessing student mastery AND helping students self-assess their mastery. So taking my colleagues ideas, I created a couple surveys using Survey Monkey, whereby I applied the same or similar terminology. By using the same terms over and over again, I am hoping to reinforce these ideas. I know, I need to be more intentional in the classroom with these terms, but for most of my students we are so far into the school year that introducing some skill midyear is rough, and perhaps confusing. But again, this didn’t really address the problem about preparing students for the test without teaching to the test.

So I created a review guide. To be honest I’m still not sure how I am going to use this. It still has all the hallmarks of my previous Study Guides. I am using the same basic verbs. I have opted to use the above holistic rubric and superimposed it over Bloom’s. The true beauty of this guide, as my instructions suggest, though seems to be in its ability to help students prepare for the tests, it even more responsibility upon them for their own learning because they have to get the answers to the questions AND the can be intentional about self-assessing, and it supports differentiation. I plan to use a form of this for Midterm for my second semester government classes, and I have created a unit version of this as well. I think the next step would be, and perhaps this would work with my AP class, to leave it blank and have the students self-populate the guide with important terms, concepts and ideas AND allow them to come up with the different types of questions or differentiated activities.

Learning is a lifelong process. So I am discovering is teaching. Have I mastered what works best for supporting student learning? No. Have I found the optimal way to escape teaching to the test while preparing students for testing? No. Am I closer than I was the day before? Yes. And progress is good.

Maybe teaching is a science. Maybe its an art. As a social studies teacher, I’m inclined to think that teaching is history. Uncovering what worked and works, reevaluating and assessing, and making sure not to repeat past mistakes. So maybe, just maybe hubris will not win the day.

2013
03/17
CATEGORY
AP US Government
Social Studies Education
US Government
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From Digital Literacy to Digital Citizenship (6)

And finally, for your viewing pleasure:

2011
05/01
CATEGORY
Digital Humanities
Pre-Service Teacher
Student-Teaching
Virginia Tech
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Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (5)

Tagging My Work: Zen and the Art of Reflection (VI and VII)

So I need to be honest with myself and others, this is perhaps not the most well thought out project in the world, but it really is not the results that matter but the process. Do not get me wrong, pushing students to grow, especially by fostering studying and researching skills which by and large are not a priority for many educators given the current focus upon testing and scores, is especially critical. I cannot recall the number of times I heard my CT mention how underprepared many students now were when they entered his classroom, and how he continually hears from teachers in the high school how they feel students are underprepared when they enter their classrooms. So fostering student growth is important, but the focus here should be on whose student growth? Theirs or mine? While I certainly am not happy with the outcome of my work and the assessment thereof it does nonetheless help me as I prepare and shape instructional strategies for the future. But before I can look at the future I would like to consider the use of Diigo in the 3rd period classroom, reflect upon what I did and then offer some ideas on how to improve my work for the future.

There were any number of ways I might have gone about teaching media and public policy, but given my penchant for technology, and of course this particular assignment, it seemed like a perfect fit. Now, while planning this first unit my focus was constantly and always upon pushing students. I had seen then, with Mr Longstreet, learn the facts but I wasn’t sure about their awareness of critical thinking skills and I certainly had seen very little evidence that students understood the implications and ramifications of their work. Namely, I was looking for students to build upon their knowledge and start applying information to different situations and settings. Not only did I want them to transfer what they knew, knowledge-wise, but my overall hope was they would be able to transfer skills as well.

The first Diigo assignment then was designed as part of the larger meta activitiy, modeling with information what I wanted them to learn about skills. As I’ve hinted at above it did not quite worked like I had wanted. Moreover, the use of Diigo was going to be the first real foray I made into technology in the classroom. While I had mentally prepared myself for such a fact I am not sure I was truly cognizant of how difficult it might be. Not only did I suffer a slight setback when I couldn’t get the students to install the toolbar on the computers and had to resort to using Diigolet – which indeed was time-consuming as some of the students noted in the surveys – but I also didn’t full prepare myself for the neediness of the students when they apparently got lost. As such, as you have seen above, I started to prepare step-by-step checklists and screencasts as resources for students to use to help themselves. In the end though, those additional resources were underused. I found myself still walking around, helping to put out fires, so to speak.

Returning then to the planning of the first Diigo activity, I was left with the initial concern whether it was feasible to use Diigo in the classroom, or whether I would have to revert to a low-tech version of the same activity: having students find and read and clip articles out of newspapers. The problem with this particular way of doing things is newspapers are becoming by and large alien to these students. Even their own school newspaper is no longer printed but solely made available to students online. The printed press is not something that terribly connects to their lives, so by starting with media they know – TV and the Internet – I am making the connection between media and policy that much easier. During the Concept Diagram activity I did in class with students, I was the one who had to suggest newspapers or the press as an example of media; electronic media rules the day.

So the value added to using Diigo had more to do with the medium than anything else.  Of course, the additional value I saw in Diigo had to do with the possibility of connecting something that is digital – social bookmarking, highlighting and Sticky Notes – with something that is analog – using a highlighter, underlining and taking notes. My primary act during all of this was as chief instigator. I introduced the tool, walked students through how to do things and then let them work on their own. In part I also wanted to encourage and provide students with a chance to be self-starters. As you might guess this worked to varying degrees. I did my best to monitor their work, help students with they had questions, but I provided very little feedback, and as I have noted above, my focus on assessing their learning was not so much on the content but on the process. Process, after all, does matter. Unfortunately I was largely hampered by the number of students clamoring for my attention and the fact that I have not yet found a way to clone myself so I can be in more than one location at a time.

For the second assignment I shifted my attention from an open-ended environment to a closed one. Sure I told students to use specific news sites as their sources for their Diigo research, but it was by and large open to whatever they could find. And I’ve discovered specificity is the key. As such, having students focus on just one site, and a series of hyperlinked pages made it easier for them to find information and participate in the activity. This time rather than engage them in meaning-making I was focusing more upon summarizing or paraphrasing. And I must be completely honest, I did not succeed. Because of this lack of success, again as I have already noted, for assessment I focused more on the process then the content. This in itself is not a bad thing, after all, the point of the Digital Humanities Project itself is more about the process of supporting student learning and growth through Web 2.0 technologies, but is it really fair to grade students on the process and not on the content, or vice versa? Can they ever truly be separated? The problem I see with this particular activity is that it should have required an additional layer of information and process and thus content, and that would have been how to read a text and analyze it for information. Especially the website I had chosen which contained a number of historical documents. Here then is the first hint at what I might do I the future: employ a SCIM-C framework so that students have some experience reading and then analyzing the material prior to any sustained paraphrasing.

On the flip side of all this, though, was I felt I supported student efforts better here. At TJMS students’ last period of the day, at least for 7th graders, is a directed study. One day after this activity I had as many as 52 of 82 students come see me for assistance during directed study, to work on the Diigo project. And certainly that is more problematic than 20 students all clamoring for attention, it was a more relaxed environment where the structure of the classroom and time was not as great a factor and I could spend 2 to 5 minutes with individual students or groups of students helping them work through Diigo and its several quirks and kinks.

Now, it could be convincingly argued that using Diigo for this type of research added nothing to the project as a whole. Students already had a packet full of information, which many of them did not actually bother to read. So I could have better spent my time walking students through that packet of information, have them do the underlining, highlighting and annotating there. But once again, we are operating in a digital world. And while the immediate skills students might need have to do with note taking with pen and paper, the skills required for future research will undoubtedly require the Internet and computer access. Moreover, and again something I have mentioned before, is the idea that Diigo serves as a self-generated social-networked aggregator. Students are not only taking and creating notes for themselves but they are making their own thoughts and ideas available to other students. In some ways it is not unlike wiki creation, but perhaps more social and less formalized.

I would like to conclude this analysis and review with some additional thoughts and random ideas via the below video.

2011
05/01
CATEGORY
Digital Humanities
Pre-Service Teacher
Student-Teaching
Virginia Tech
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Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (4)

Aggregated and Collated: Gathering and Assessing how Diigo Works (IV and V)

Certainly gathering data was going to be a problem. How does one assess the students’ abilities and/or interest in using this tool? Perhaps if I had more time I would have constructed this project with a tighter focus, and began with some work and analysis of student’s abilities with regard to note taking and/or research, but given the short time-frame involved in student-teaching and the focus, not unsurprisingly, upon instruction I was unable to construct this project as well as I would have liked. So in order to assess the outcome from the project I will look at two significant pieces of data.

First I will look at the student’s work on Diigo. As part of this project I used an educator’s account for Diigo, which allowed me to create a group for each of the classes AND specifically to create accounts for the students. Since at the time I was not sure students would have email addresses, this was a huge asset because it allowed me to bypass one of the usual methods for registering students. Plus it gave me some control over the student accounts if needed. I could show the student’s work on the individual pages they visited, bookmarked, highlighted and annotated, but Diigo is a wonderful aggregator of all that information.

The second set of data I gathered, and which I will consider is a survey I provided for the students. I had originally planned for this survey to be completed immediately following the second time they used Diigo, after the research for the mock trial. There was a slight delay between the assignment date and the survey date, which may have caused some confusion for students (which I will talk about below), but it did also give them a chance to approach the survey from a slightly more objective perspective, they were not either happy using the computers or so frustrated with the limitation of the computers and/or Diigo that it would cloud their perspective.

To consider both of this collections, just watch the following screencasts. Actually, I should note that the first screencast has been marked private (and thus there is no attached link or video) to maintain some privacy for student; I was unable to redact certain information and thus have opted to leave that out, however the latter screencast focused on a survey which has all the information aggregated together and is shown without regard to names.

PRIVATE SCREENCAST: Do Not Disturb

As I’ve mentioned before, I had a very small window of opportunity to conduct this work, and I wish I had more time to incorporate some interventions. The work, particularly, in this class was uneven at best. As you can see from the survey I was only able to collect 15 out of 20 responses. In part that was due to the fact that the remaining 5 students were either absent the day of the survey or were doing work for me since they had fallen behind (you can learn more about that here and here). However, after seeing how students struggled with Diigo the first time around I eliminated another Diigo activity I had planned and simplified the second one with the mock trial. Rather than have students find the websites to bookmark I instead wanted them to focus on Sticky Notes.

Now, as you could see in the surveys some students opted to use highlighting as well, but it was not required as part of the assignment. I did try to explain to students that the Diigo My Library would allow them to see the notes of their fellow students and use that information as well to help prepare for the trial, but to be honest I am doubtful that many if any followed that procedure. In an earlier screencast I talked about grading of these assignments, especially the second one as it employed a rubric. I would like to comment again about this because it is important. With regard to these assignments I was not focused on the content so much as the process. I wanted to make sure students were able to find four examples of media and policy, identify a policymaker and tell me which example of media it was. The original hope was I would have time to identify and correct misunderstandings about the content, but unfortunately that did not happen. I followed a similar procedure with regard to the second assignment, looking primarily for students to attach three different Sticky Notes and that the content was more than just “Galileo was born and then he died.”

2011
05/01
CATEGORY
Digital Humanities
Pre-Service Teacher
Student-Teaching
Virginia Tech
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Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (3)

The Media and Galileo: Learning the Ropes of Diigo (III)

The original intent of the project was to introduce two Web 2.0 tools, Diigo and Evernote. Diigo was meant to show students a little about researching, including how to bookmark and tag, and how to highlight and annotate information found online. Evernote was going to be an online note-taking platform. However in the process of introducing Diigo to students I learned one important lesson: school districts do not like students installing software or even toolbars on their computers. As such the feasibility of Evernote disappeared quite quickly so I ended up employing Google Docs instead, which seemed to work well except for a few quirks and kinks (which have nothing to do with this project and so I shall leave it at that).

With that said, I return to focus on the tool that I did teach to students, Diigo. I was not sure if students had seen this before, but after a few minutes trying to get students signed up I realized this was a completely new tool for them. The first time they used Diigo was during week one of my unit on public policy, specifically on media and public policy. I had planned to use Diigo again at the end of week two, when I was focused on public policy at both a local and international level. However, given my experience the first time around I opted to forgo using it that time. However, I did want to use it during my second unit, this time the unit was on the judiciary system. I had decided to use a mock trial as one of the major performance assessments for this unit, and as such I knew students should do some additional research. The below screencasts will explain in greater detail the lessons themselves, including SOLs, NCSS Themes, objectives, etc….

So as the above screencasts indicate, while my original plan and intent had been using Diigo to introduce some basic studying skills like highlighting and annotating, I ended up using it in a different way the second time around, as a research tool, and I think that is where I really hit my stride. There are a number of alternatives I might have used instead of Diigo, perhaps focusing on the bookmarking and tagging aspect, but I found those two ideas perhaps a little too conceptual for students. After all, I am still struggling with the proper ways to go about tagging things and ended up having to see some outside assistance for using Diigo in the classroom. But highlighting and annotating was something they could understand, since they were doing some of that already for Mr Longstreet. The concept of annotating was perhaps a little bit of a stretch for some of them, but not for all of them. Mr Longstreet was fond of using the term “paraphrase” to describe the student’s task to read and regurgitate information using their own language. I think I prefer the term summarize or annotate because it goes beyond that, but I digress.

2011
05/01
CATEGORY
Digital Humanities
Pre-Service Teacher
Student-Teaching
Virginia Tech
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Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (2)

Unearthing the Details: The School and Students (I and II)

As with all things in life, the learning activities need to be framed, they need to be placed within the larger framework or perspective of the school, the class and the students themselves. For my student-teaching I was in a small school district in the Roanoke Valley/New River Valley area, Peaceful City Schools. The district has three elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. The district is generally considered one of the best in the area, with high testing scores and academic achievement. The high school employs the International Baccalaureate (IB) program rather than the Advanced Placement (AP) program. Unsurprisingly, the district considers itself primarily middle-class, however given the number of families in the area who are connected with one of the local colleges or universities; I would argue that it is a stratified middle class, with some on the very high end of this socio-economic scale, and others on the low in. It is a school district like many in this area, with relatively low diversity, and considerably less diversity than some of the sister districts in the area.

I was placed at the sole middle school, Thomas Jackson Middle School (TJMS). TJMS used to be the actual high school for the district, until the built a new school. All the classrooms have use of a Mimio short-throw projector. The Mimio is very like its sister short-throws, SmartBoard and Promethean – both used by other districts in the area – however the key difference here is that the Mimio does not require a special board. It uses the whiteboard as the screen and employs a simple device attached to the whiteboard to monitor and record information projected. While some of the elementary schools have SmartBoard projectors, they are not available in all the schools. And the high school relies upon moveable carts for projecting. In addition, TJMS had wireless devices and dongles which allow teachers to use their laptops in anywhere in the room and not be tied to the front of the room with the Mimio short-throw. This may be changing as the district is discovering problems with this wireless technology. All instructors are provided with a school-approved laptop, which they use to connect to the Mimio, record attendance and grades, and employ a Google-based email system.

While Peaceful City Schools does not have a one-to-one laptop initiative they do have a ready to use computer lab and a series of Computer on Wheel (COW) carts. These COW carts can be checked out by any teacher and used in the classroom. The carts themselves range from five year old Dell or Gateway laptops to newer Dell netbooks, but during this semester they have been in especially high demand as teachers, especially Language Arts instructors, use them for SOL preparation. The school itself has a few support staff, at least two full-time individuals whose sole responsibility is the maintenance of the computers as well as a resource for teachers. In addition there are a couple of part-time individuals who were more of the hands-on maintenance of the COW cart computers, and there were any number of issues that required assistance. At the beginning of their time in the school, students were assigned a specific ID number and password. This number and password served as their login to any of the computers on campus, be they laptops from the COW carts or desktops in the computer lab. This information also allowed them to access the Google Apps based system, which the district used. So students could create their own email address, but most importantly could access Google Docs, for all their word processing needs.

While at TJMS I was assigned to work with Mr Longstreet. Mr Longstreet has been teaching with PCS for nearly thirty-years, the first decade or so teaching high school history, but the last two decades he has been teaching Civics & Economics (CE) to 7th graders. For 6th and 7th grade, TJMS employs a team approach to the core classes. The same 80 some students are assigned to four different teachers – Language Arts, Science, Math and Social Studies. This allows for some collaboration between teachers, and creates a strong network of support for individual students. This year the school adopted a new CE textbook from Pearson, so this was the first time many of these teachers, including Mr Longstreet, had been using the book. The book was designed specifically with the Virginia Standards of Learning in mind, so the text connected information to different SOLs. The majority of the SOLs had been covered by Mr Longstreet by the time I took over the class in late February. After some thought and scheduling issues worked out, we determined that it would be best if, during my nine weeks of student-teaching, I instruct students in SOL CE.9, CE.10 and CE.11. In essence I was covering public policy, the judicial system and doing an introduction to economics. This would leave CE.12 and CE.13 for Mr Longstreet to cover after I left.

Mr Longstreet was very much a low-technology person when it came to the classroom. He would occasionally use the Mimio, but it was primarily a way to project information on a screen. And while he had used the COW carts in the past, they were more often used by either the Language Arts instructor, Mr Lee, or the Math teacher, Mr Grant. During my time at TJMS I learned from one of the technology people that very few of the instructors on the 7th grade wing, including my own Cooperating Teacher (CT), Mr Longstreet, employed technology in the classroom. The major thing Mr Longstreet did use was a website called Bloust.com. This was his Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), for lack of a better term. Students could check his site every day for information about lessons, upcoming due dates, missed assignments and the like. The use of Bloust.com was bit contention, according to Mr Longstreet, as some of the students did not and still do not have access to the Internet at home. However, given the fact that students could use computers at the public library or come in to the school in the morning to use the computer lab mitigated some of his concerns. This was though an important hint at the possible level of familiarity some students had with technology in general, and Web 2.0 tools in particular.

This naturally leads me to consider the students themselves. I ended up designing a series of activities and lessons using Diigo. Each class was responsible for completing these assignments however, for the sake of this project I would like to focus solely upon one of my classes, 3rd period. This is the first period of the day where I am actually teaching. For Mr Longstreet 1st and 2nd period are planning periods, one period for individual lesson planning and the second for team lesson planning. These are also when students have gym/health and exploratory classes, including band and choir. For better or worse, 3rd period ended up as my guinea pig classroom as all of the lessons I had planned were first tried on them, and then subtle adjustments were made throughout the day to improve the lessons. The main reason I want to look specifically at these 20 students is because of the diversity in the classroom. While I have noted there is relatively little cultural diversity in the district writ large, there certainly other types of diversity in the classroom, and this class was perhaps the most diverse with regard to interests and academic abilities. Several of the high achieving academic students could be found in 3rd period, alongside a number of students with Individual Education Portfolios (IEPs). Because 2/5 of the students in the class have an IEP this was also the only class where an Instructional Assistant, Mrs Lincoln, was in the classroom.

During the course of my student-teaching I discovered a number of things about this particular class. They were certainly diverse in their technological abilities, some students were able to easily follow my instructions as I walked them through various websites and introduced them to new tools like Diigo, and others constantly struggled with these things. When students struggled it became incredibly difficult for me to keep the class moving along, as they were either unable to or unwilling to get assistance from their fellow students. Oftentimes in the early part of my nine-weeks I or Mrs Lincoln would be called upon to assist students. After a couple days of this frustration I made it a rule to get help from a classmate first and this seemed to work; it also empowered some students who understood to show off their abilities.

However, by and large trying a new technological tool in the classroom was difficult because students were not terribly good at self-starting, and those that were got distracted or bored while I assisted others. When I did employ Google Docs during my second week, it also became apparent how little exposure they had received to Google Docs and other Web 2.0 tools because I ended up have to walk students through account creation. While this may reflect more on other teachers, it does indicate the general lack of knowledge and awareness of some of these, at least what I would consider, basic tools found on the Internet. Outside of technology, this class was also quite diverse in its academic interests, with many preferring Language Arts or Science over Math and Social Studies. Then of course there is the diversity in their home lives and hobbies. Several of these students were involved in soccer or track, only a few expressed strong interest in music, but most had either one sibling or several and the majority seemed to be in two-parent families, although there were a couple students whose parents were divorced and at least one student who was in foster care. It was this type of general diversity I found most appealing and felt would give me an accurate gauge of how Diigo might influence and affect their studying and/or researching skills.

2011
05/01
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Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (1)

From Study Routines to Research Skills: Deciding on Diigo

Let’s be honest, coming up with a Digital Humanities Action Research Project was not going to be a problem for me. I’m the “tech guy.” Whether that particular appellation is appropriate or not I shall leave for others to decide, but it is, at least in part, true. I love new toys, especially when they are electronic and are connected to the Internet. The old adage is true that all that really changes as boys grow older is their toys get bigger (with more power, thank you Tim Allen) or more expensive.

I delved into our first semester of Digi Hum with characteristic abandon. Oh, Prezi looks cool let me check that out. Okay, done, what’s next? Oh, I like Evernote, great place to write blogs and keep notes stored in the ubiquitous cloud. That’s fun, let me keep using that, but what’s next? Word Clouds, well they seem nice but… oh wait there’s a website called Tagxedo and I can turn word clouds into different shapes! Count me in [Apologizes for that insight into my inner monologue, he can be quite a wordy fellow with very little appreciate for complete sentences].

So the real problem was not going to be what digital toy or tool to select, but could I possible narrow it down to just ONE tool and then of course connect it to something, some driving question or need. I decided the tool, okay tools, I was most interested in using in the classroom were Diigo and Evernote. I quote from my proposal: “It seems that while providing some hooks into developing study and note-taking skills are evident, there is still room for students to grow in this area, and there are tools available online which may aid in their digital literacy as well as in their study and organizational skills using other forms of technology (i.e. – pen and ink).”

My original aim then was to use these tools to augment and improve student’s abilities to understand text, take notes and summarize and then transfer those same techniques back to the pen and paper forms. I am nothing if not bold and entrepreneurial in my thinking. It was pretty much doomed to fail from the beginning, but not unlike the phoenix something new and different and yet eerily familiar rose from the ashes and took shape: Diigo as research tool. It is by far a simpler way of talking about the same concern and issue, while also maintain much of the focus of the original thought and driving question: In what ways may student learning be augmented and improved through the development of better organizational and study skills? However, before I get to the phoenix arising anew it is important to consider the context of the school and the students.

2011
05/01
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Turn Turn Turn

It’s been a week since it ended.

What more is there to say? On the one hand there is plenty. There is recap and reflection, summaries and sorrows, poetry and praise, adulation and ambivalence, elation and egadyness (okay, so my alliterative abilities failed me there and I resorted to a crass word creation ala Whedonism, but still).

Ecclesiastes I think sums it up well. Or was it the Byrds? 😀

My last week was supposed to be a light one. I knew my time was drawing to an end, I knew I wanted to give myself some wiggle room in case I needed it. I knew I wanted students to have a little fun. Especially after my test!

Monday was review day. I had opted to do a flyswatter, like last time. It seemed a very popular review game and students definitely had fun with it. I made a few changes to the game and informed students ahead of time. First, I had MORE questions, including some from previous units. So it served as a mini-review of all the units I taught. Second, it included some fun questions about me or my CT. Third, I was limited their number of tries to TWO. So two students go up, asked a question they get a chance to pick correct answer. First one does it gets TWO points. If neither gets it right then they can get help from their team. Now, the answer is only worth ONE point. If neither team gets it right after the second try, I get TWO points. Well, I am proud to say, I did not win in any of my four classes. In two classes, I received ZERO points, in the other two I received no more than seven. As incentive, the winning team was going to get an improved grade. Originally I was going to change their lowest score into an automatic A. Decided to just give them all extra credit in the amount of turning a low score into an A. SO MUCH easier.

Interestingly enough, many students listed this review game as one of their two favorite activities from this unit.

Tuesday was the test. I had designed the test using Quia, so I could more quickly grade the exams. As a platform it worked very well and certainly made the multiple choice grading easy. The problem was I wanted to do a graphing question which could only be done on paper. That, and for many students they just do not know how to take a test in a timely fashion. Yeah, I was a little strict when it came to this test. I did not have the time or inclination to coddle students and allow them to come back to complete the test. Someone suggested maybe my exams are too difficult and that is why they take too much time. Possible. But trying to push! All in all, I think students did the best on this test, at least of the three I’ve given during my student-teaching. Especially with regard to the short answers. There was still some confusion and sadness as I looked at their multiple choice answers, but I shall leave that for the CT to address. Bad of me?

Wednesday was a simple day: play Settlers of Catan online. Having the computer lab for Tue and Wed made this a CAKE.

And then came Thursday, my last day. I designed a virtual scavenger hunt, with students ended up on Wallwisher where they could leave me a message or two. I also allowed students to bring in food to share. And boy did they bring in food. There were several during my first couple periods who even went so far as to bake cookies or cupcakes or brownies. Color me impressed. The virtual scavenger hunt did not work like I wanted. I had hoped students could work in groups, but the confusion of typing answer into Twitter and finding Sticky Notes using Diigo I think would have been too great.

Plus, there was a pesky little thing called a Pep Rally. And it was the last day before Spring Break. So students kinda fled. I’m not sure I really got a good chance to say goodbye. But that’s okay too.

 

2011
04/28
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Final Thoughts on Plans, Re-Plans and Un-Plans

As you might expect, I can never do things like anyone expects, and why should I start now. Ergo, you will find below two brief-ish videos. The first is a vlog entry I made which walks through my thoughts and feelings about planning, teaching and adjustments made during my student-teaching experience. The second is an even short video, this time a screencast where I try to pull together some of the various thoughts posted on my blog, Twitter feed and in YouTube videos. And I have to be honest, its success or failure relies solely upon all the material I’ve gathered, collated, aggregated and then ignored.

Below you find a very lengthy vlog entry of mine. Rather than going back and writing all the information about questions, SWBATS, standards, assessments and reflections I’ve tried to do a week-in-review with regard to planning. To be honest, I’m more than a little exhausted from all this review, so I shall leave the bulk of my comments to the video.

Of course, for me 15 minute vlog is not enough time to say it all (perhaps I need to work on brevity). So I am also including this screencast. The original intent of the screencast was to visually try to connect planning with everything else. I have to be honest, it did not come together like I wanted so about 30 seconds in, I ended up switching over and giving me a chance to say some more about the whole process of planning and re-planning. What I can definitively say now is: planning is a bear, planning gets easier, planning works, but as with everything else, planning can only take you so far. In many ways, overplanning is ideal because it allows for you to change things up and still remain confident that what you are doing is teaching children and teaching content. While I’ve focused above, and below, on some of the little things, the big ideas and concepts don’t change. And as I’ve mentioned before and will again, I’m a big idea person. Sure I’ll get frustrated when I have to switch up lessons and alter the flow, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter. Kids will learn. Teachers will instruct. And I know, I believe, I trust, that it all works out.

Teaching is play. Teaching is reflective. Teaching is praxis. Now I am tired.

2011
04/27
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Conceptual Framing and Developmental Understanding

Live the Questions, Love the Concepts

I love to play around with ideas. Sure, I can get down and dirty, focus on what is practical or pragmatic, but by and large the things that interest me in life are concepts. Word puzzles, thoughts and riddles. The realms of what ifs and what could have been. It is without a doubt why I ended up focusing so much of my interest and attention in the humanities and the “soft sciences.” I love concepts. I love questions not answers. As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “Live the questions.” That was a motto of mine. Well, let’s be honest, it is a motto of mine. However, not everyone is like me, and while there are times I certainly lament that fact because it makes my life a constant struggle to explain and clarify, I also celebrate that fact because my life is a constant struggle to explain and clarify.

As I walked into Methods for the first time, I must admit, I felt woefully out of my league. Sure, I had been around the block a time or too, but I had been trapped, by and large, in academia. Sure, I loved education and I wanted to share my love of learning with students, but love and interest do now always translate into success in the classroom. I had only a vague notion of what to do in the classroom. And to be perfectly honest, it had been over a decade since I was in a high school classroom and nearly two decades since I was in a middle school classroom (we called them junior highs back in the day). So I was feeling pretty clueless on how to teach concepts, especially when everything I had been learning about the current educational environment screamed testing and standards and rote memorization. I couldn’t yet articulate, but I was really wanting to bust out of remembering and understanding and really focus on analyzing and applying.

And then along comes some SIMS from the University of Kansas (or Kansas University as I know it, go Jayhawks!). There was something both difficult and easy as we walked through the different routines, first the concept diagram and then the frames routine. It didn’t take me very long to employ this in the classroom. During my field internship at Green Mountain High School, I found myself helping Mr Lazenby and the students prepare for an upcoming test by using both the FRAMES Routine and the Concept Diagram. In that instance, I did not gather student work and I only spent a few minutes introducing the form to students. However, I knew I would use it again. I just needed to find the right fit and time during my student-teaching experience.

Framing Policy and Diagraming Media

I started full-time student-teaching at Thomas Jackson Middle at the end of February. I knew that for the Civics & Economics SOL 9 there were going to be a number of concepts and ideas that were relatively new to students, so I decided I wanted to employ the Frames and Concept Diagram for this first unit. My intent was that I would introduce students to the Frame early in the unit, completing the form as a class. The following day I would employ a similar process this time with the Concept Diagram. Students would then use these forms to study and prepare, and I would then do a So What? type activity the week before the test as a review. It was important to me that I do two things 1) Model how to properly complete both the Frame and and Concept Diagram, and 2) Do this early enough in the unit so they would be familiar with the form and structure for later in the unit.

 

So Whats?

Days past by and students delved into the “meat” of the unit itself. We started to work with worksheets, a little with textbooks, but mostly different types of in-class activities including Diigo. The unit itself was oddly designed because of some scheduling issues. So by the end of the second week I felt it was time for a review. I had fully intended to have the review the day before the unit assessment, in this case a test. Since this was an SOL test class, and I knew students were familiar with quizzes and the like, I wanted to maintain some continuity with Mr Longstreet. And while I did include a number of alternative assessments, including projects and simulations, I felt the best way to assess for these students as well as prepare them for the SOL in May was to give a test.

Now, I must admit I am still a little fuzzy on the whole concept of “So Whats?” with regard to assessment and reviews. But I knew that it was more than merely going over the material again. Reviews should be covering the material, but they should also be a way for students to engage facilities beyond remembering. This was especially important to me as I was giving students a couple short answer questions.

While students were given until the end of the period to complete these, they actually had the weekend and another three days with which they could study and prepare and alter their Frames and Concept Diagrams. I had given them several copies of the routines so they could make their own, or in case they made a mistake they could re-write on the reverse side.

Conclusion

As with all things in life, practice makes perfect. Certainly, this is true of using these in the classroom. While I am convinced now, more than ever of these are invaluable tools for education there is still a nagging concern about their efficacy. Only time will truly be able to answer that question for myself. However, I have learned a few things based on my experience this past year, especially with regard to student-teaching.

  • Modeling is key. Not only is it important to do the pre-write/create so one can anticipate certain comments and questions, but one needs to show how to do it for the class. Spending time walking through the process is not wasted time. In fact it is time well spent. And if I can managed to do this early enough in the year and give students the tools, some might actually employ this type of graphic organizer themselves, outside of the class. Here is where, unsurprising, I think Prezi might be a great tool because giving students a Prezi version of this might be a perfect way to connect concept attainment with technology. Plus this type of graphic organizer, while mostly linear has elements of non-linearality to it and thus is perfect for Prezi.
  • Working with students is key. I loved how well the first day of Concept Diagramming went. Not only did students feel a sense of ownership in crafting their definitions, but it also showed that students have knowledge they can bring to the discussion that may not always be directly related to the content covered in the class.
  • Sometimes you just have to give information to students. Sure, by and large, these kinds of routines are designed so that students can assert themselves and provide their own understandings, but they are still students. They are still children and sometimes they need frames and structures. And yes, even information and explanation. Giving students knowledge is not a failure but a reality.
  • Beware of using for review. While I do love the idea of using this as a review activity, it might need to be tempered. Perhaps having students share their Concepts and Frames with the class, and allow others to chime might be a better way to go. Plus, it would allow myself and other educators to more clearly monitor what students are pulling together and possibly using as forms for reviews. I certainly think I might have helped students with their short answer question about agency if I had spent more time talking about it in class AND providing my own thoughts on it during the Jigsaw Review.
  • These are not the only ways to play with concepts. As we’ve discovered during seminar this semester, Concept Attainment is another fine option and one which I hope to play with more in the future.

Addendum : Course Organizer

The SIMS from the University of Kansas go beyond merely Concept Diagram and Frame Routine. There are a variety of other graphic organizers available and viable. I would like to conclude my blog by looking, albeit briefly, at how I used and adapted a Course Organizer for my class.

2011
04/26
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Student-Teaching
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