Rule breaking!

So, I break rules. To anyone who knows me, that may come as no surprise. I don't do it all the time, only when I believe it to be a rule that inhibits what is in the best interest of others, or when its not officially written down (blue hair story).  Ok, so let me justify it before I tell you the rule I broke, or acutally I didn't break it, the students did at my request. So, I want the kids to take over more of their own learning. I want them to learn how to learn using the content of my class. I explained this to them when I was explaining changes to the way things were working in our school with grading and homework and classwork and all the things we have been dealing with as instructors. Anyway, if students aren't going to be going to me to get information, where should they go? Not a difficult question for any of us who grew in the digital age, we google it, or bing it or whatever. We get the information from the internet. There in lies the problem for me. See, I have what would be considered a lot of technology in my classroom for our school. I have 7 computers. Yep, I'm a computer hog. In fact, we science teachers like to hog the computers in our school. So, not a problem right, at least if you only have 7 students or maybe 14 at the most, but I have anywhere from 25 to 28 so that doesn't work too well for impatient middle school kids. So, I explained to the kids that in order for them to do what we need to do, they were going to have to break the rules. I said, " anyone with unlimited data could get their phones out and use them to began working on learning and exploring the I can statements." In the first couple of classes there were students who had both unlimited data and a wifi hotspot and they set up the hotspot for the students that didn't have unlimited data. OH YEAH, I forgot to mention that students and staff in our district are not allowed on the district wifi with personal devices, hence the need for the work around. The kids pulled out their phones (which of course were not in their pockets because we have a no cell phone policy at our school and they are supposed to be in their lockers and not in class) and got to work. I did inform them that we had to be responsible about the use of the phones and not text and stuff because if we got found out "the man will shut us down" and that we will lose the privilege to use them. Guess what? They actually learned stuff on their own. One student came up to me and said, "Hey Mr. Covey, the protons match the atomic number. Did you know that?" I was like "they do, is it like that for other ones or just the one you are looking at?" and I walked away while he went back to his work. Today, our second day on the job like this, I had a girl say, "come here Mr. Covey. We learned something on our own. The Atomic Mass is the same as the number of protons and neutrons added together." They were actually looking at the relative average mass so I asked them what they meant, and what the protons and neutrons were. So they went back to look that up. I walked by later and they snagged me to explain the structure of the atom and how the atomic mass related to the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons. So I asked them how the atom was related to the elements, and it just kept going.  Now, I could have waited until we had 1-1 technology to have the students learning like this or I could break the rules a little and have them doing it now with the technology sitting in their pockets. I think I'll break the rules thank you.

Grades that say nothing! They made me a better teacher.

So, I jumped into a couple of new things. I developed my I can statements for an introductory mini unit on the periodic table, and decided to punch it up to letting the students work towards the I can statements without me direct teaching it. First, why the changes? They have come to expect the 4, 3, 2, 1 leveled assessments from me but were surprised when it started showing up in other classes. So, I decided that I had the ability to explain the changes. Now, I explained to them that this was not some overnight thing that I had cooked up and that this had been rolling around in my head for the almost decade that I have been teaching. The way my class has been set up from the beginning was an attempt to set up a class where a student like me couldn't do well just by playing the game. I want my kids to really learn. I told them about the AP Calc class in high school that I dropped out of after a semester because it was the first time that I had been challenged to learn and have to get teacher help to be successful at and I didn't know how to do it so I just didn't. In the end, after spending a good chunk of class time plotting coordinate points into my TI-81 graphing calculator to make an animation of  an arrow shooting a target, I had to approach the teacher to tell him that I was switching out. Here's what he said to me, and I still remember it after all these years, "I don't know what grade you actually have but I won't give you any lower than a C." Why did he do that? He gave me a C, when if he had assessed my learning would have found that I probably was more on the low end of a D. He gave me a grade because I had turned in work and had completed everything for the class because I was doing it at home trying to figure it out on my own. That's not the worst part. When I went to college and took the math placement test guess what math they wanted to place me in? ALGEBRA! So, somehow I had gotten all the way to AP Calc in high school and could only test into college Algebra. How did that happen. I had a 3.95 in high school and that one semester of AP Calc was the only non A I got. That would say that I was advanced at the curriculum but yet I couldn't even get placed beyond college algebra. You don't even get credit for that, its a remedial course. To this day, I can't get that out of my mind. So, when I became a teacher I committed to make a class where the students left my class understanding the material or they didn't get a grade. I explained that this is why I don't demand that they complete everything, and that all they have to do is the assessments, and I had been saying this to students over and over again for years, but something in this round finally clicked with students. Maybe it was me relating learning in school to learning outside of school in terms of skateboarding and mountain boarding. Maybe it was because I told them that I didn't like formal education and that I wasn't going to go back to school to get my masters until college became less boring scoring and more about learning for the sake of learning. Maybe it was the I can statements, maybe it was the rule breaking. What??? Rule Breaking? OK maybe that's the next post.

Why can't I always answer the why?

Why is it absolutely important that every student in my class have to know this? This question is always a real struggle for me. I mean, some small percentage of my students will actually work in a field where the content that I teach them will be an actual part of their life. So, why do I teach it. The easy answer is because I have to. It's on the test and it's important for understanding science, but that doesn't suffice to explain to a student why they should care about learning it. I read somewhere the other day, I don't remember where, someone said something to the effect that school should be important because it's where we are presented with problems from all points of life and we learn to solve them through all different means. What do our classes look like when that becomes the focus of every class? What's some topics that you have no clue why your students would really need them to be successful in life? Should we be asking the what do we plan to teach the kids to do through this content? That seems like something more like  I would like to do, but what does that look like?

OMG! not the late work and missing assignments.

Seriously, it seems like this shouldn't be a big deal but it is. I'll tell you why late work probably bothers most teachers. We all know how hard we worked on getting our lessons together, we know how integral every piece of work is that we ask our students to do, but most of all we know how important it is to keep this train we call school moving. We have tons of stuff to cover and not enough time to cover it. The worst part is that we are not in control of when and where students get stuff done and the train often can't leave if kids are not on it, or at least that's the sentiment. My first question is, why do we all have to leave at the same time? I mean, what is the natural and logical consequences of late or missing work? The kids might not know what we are talking about, they might miss out on the wonderful world of education that we are offering them, they might actually do poorly on the assessment? If this is what we are worried about, these are all valid things to worry about, but what do we do about it. Many teachers penalize (some penalize for retakes of assessments, but that's another story) "Sure you can turn it in late, if you are willing to accept no higher than an 80%." I don't know why, but that sounds absurd to me. Did I do this at one time? Yep! Did it sound absurd? Yep! Why did I do it? I thought I had to to get work done.

As I got far enough along in the classroom to stop and think about all my curriculum decisions instead survival, and realized that there was research out there that said there were better ways, I decided to experiment (crazy science teacher stuff). I asked myself, what happens if I tell students that the only thing they have to do in my class is assessments, but I knew I couldn't just bust this out without a caveat. I knew that my assessments and the work I was asking them to do had to change because I had to make every peice of work matter to the assessment (what a frickin' novel idea huh?). So, no more extra credit, no more study guides for those last minute junkies, if you wanted your grade you were going to have to practice what we do or, as I tell them every year, good luck doing well on the assessments. I still check the assignments and write things down on them and hand them back (if they do them) but I don't require them. I tell them that I don't care when, where or how they learn the material, but they have to learn the material if they want the grade.

So, off we go into the craziness of my current world. Guess what, students are still doing as much work as they always did and there grades are higher, because they are not being drug down by silly things like penalties that had no reflection on learning. So, obnoxious kids get A's and I don't have to explain things like "He would have an A if he would just get stuff in on time" or "She wouldn't be failing if she didn't have so much missing work. Now, if you know it, I'm good. If you don't and you haven't been doing the parctice, then it's time to intervene and get you in to do practice.

The biggest thing about late work and missing work, is to keep in mind that the importance is learning. It doesn't motivate students to punish grades for late work, it motivates them to say "screw it, its not worth turning it in" and if you want to know how I feel about punishing grades for missing work please see my post about zeroes.

Is that all? Probably not, but it's what I have for now.

The Zero Has Got To Go (at least how it is currently employed)

I don't know how long I have been working with a base 50 in my class, I think this is the 6th year, but I can tell you why I started. At a school I was teaching I had a student who messed around and goofed off for a good chunk of the first semester, but he's a 7th grader and they make these kind of crazy choices. He came to me and for some strange reason, for which I am still not privy, he was wanting to turn things around. At this point the student had a 12 or 14% in my class and There was no way that even with him busting his tail the rest of the semester was he going to dig out of that hole. When he realized this, he just quit working. That bugged the crap out of me. I wanted to help but I also wasn't about to just falsify grades to get him back to where he could dig out but I didn't have another way. I started to research on the web and stumbled across the no zeroes/base 50 idea in an article. I started thinking that the same student would have still been failing but he would not have been in a hole so deep he couldn't dig out had I had this system in place. Now, not the best reason to switch but it was the reason I originally switched. I didn't have a clue that this was even an option seeing as I never had a teacher that worked that way. As I researched more I became more and more convinced that the zero wasn't the problem but the 100 point scale. It didn't make mathematical sense to me that the F part of the scale so greatly outweighed the rest of the scale, and since I couldn't get rid of the 100 point scale (digital gradebooks) I felt like the next best thing was to shrink my grading up to even all the grades to 10%. Let's take a look mathematically at how a 0 affects the grade (assuming you still love or are stuck to the average score like am). Let's say that you are trucking along getting B's, let's say you are getting 85's and you forget your homework one day (ugh, I'll take about how I feel about grading homework later) and for that assignment you get a 0. Let's say that up until that point you have 10 grades, 85x10=850 and then you get that 11th grade that is a zero. So now that 850 points are now going to be divided by 11 grades to give you a 77% as your average. So with 10 grades at 85% and one at 0% you have now gone from having a B to having a C, an 8% drop from 1 grade that is weighted the same. Does that C reflect the level of work you have been doing in the class? NO! You have been getting 85% on everything, you should have an 85%. With a base 50 that student, even with averaging, still ends up with an 82% (900 points/11 grades) All of this stops mattering if we don't have to use the average, which many of us are stuck to in one way or the other. If I could find some way around the aggregated score and work with something like the mode instead, the fact that the student had one zero wouldn't even matter because the mode would easily be found to be an 85%. Not only that but for this to matter even less, I wouldn't allow that zero to stand there in the gradebook because if it was so important that it had to be factored into the representation of student learning we call a grade, then I would have them doing it and completing it at some point, but that's for another post.

Rick Wormeli spells this whole thing out pretty good in this video.

Reforming Me (sounds existential or something like that)

Like many teachers out there, this blog comes out of a need to document my thoughts with reforming the way education is done in my class and possibly hold me accountable to change things. I also need a place to document my struggles to change more than myself.

Since the beginning of my teaching career 10 years ago (9th year of teaching now) I have always felt like something about the way we were doing this thing called school wasn't right. I was just too ignorant to even know exactly what to do about it. I am alternatively certified. What does that mean? I never planned to be a teacher. I didn't sit down and teach little stuffed animals when I was a kid or anything like that. In fact, nobody would have looked at me any different if I had chose not to go to college, but yet I did.

I went to college to become a veterinarian, so chose zoology/pre-vet as my major and thus graduated with a BS degree in zoology (I love BS, but the degree is real). Graduated with a 3.45 GPA but that was not good enough for the extremely competitive world of veterinary colleges, so home I went to deliver flowers for the florist that my sister worked for. I eventually found my way back to a veterinary clinic and that's what I did for the next bunch of years, eventually working my way up to vet-tech. Throw in a world changing trip to Denver and an attempt at seminary, and wham, I went from Seattle to Oklahoma City where I found myself working as a youth pastor and a vet-tech (I know, what a crazy church that was).

After I brought up that I wished I could combine my passion for working with teens and my passion for science, somebody at church told me that Oklahoma had a process for people to get certified as a teacher even if you didn't have a degree in education. I looked into it and because of my experience in the research labs as an undergrad, my experience in vet clinics, and my years of experience working with teens already, they gave me a certificate to teach and sent my on my way. I needed to be under the supervision of a college evaluator and I was assigned 9 hours of college course work that I needed to take to make that certificate official. Got a job in an urban school 3 months into the school year, and yep, TEACHER (or something like that).

What a fricken' eye opening experience. I had no idea what I had gotten myself into, nor did I know what I was doing. In fact, I would have fired my first year self. The thing that got me through was that the kids mattered to me. I Had some really big ideas when I came in to see these under used (not used at all) courtyards in the middle of the school redesigned as outdoor classrooms, but that was shut down because they didn't want another space to have to watch students. I realized pretty quick that the focus wasn't so much on learning but more like managing and getting them through. I also realized that I had to get better if I was going to change anything. I dug into everything I could to try to learn about teaching, and since I knew nothing except how to research I found some stuff to get me started.

My early years looked like every class I had ever been in. After a year off (after my second year of teaching) to work with an orphanage in Africa, I landed at a suburban school. A little less stressful of a job and I found a science teacher that was good at what she did. She challenged me without even knowing it because I have an inner need to compete. I wanted to teach as well as her if not better, but I was an amateur and she was the professional. I wasn't re-hired at that school because I was not the assertive discipline type that the principal was looking for, and since I was on a non-continuing contract, I was allowed to leave. That's where the story get's good.

I get a phone call near the end of the year and the lady on the other end says "I know this sounds weird, but I got your name and number from the lady in the office at your school, we're friends, and I was asking for contact info about another science teacher that had worked there before, and she said that she had a science teacher that I needed to talk to that wouldn't be coming back the next year and so I gave you a call and would like to see if you would want to come interview." I said yes, and now I have been married to that school for 6 years. I have found my home.

Belle Isle Enterprise Middle School is an application school in the the Oklahoma City Public School district (back where I began my career). Kids apply from all over the district and beyond to come to our school. These kids need to be challenged but are not getting it in their neighborhood schools. So, here we are. This school has changed everything about my teaching thanks to an awesome principal and a group of science teachers who care about being good. They stuck their necks out to get us involved with a research group at the University of Oklahoma, where we received heavy duty PD in inquiry and launched us back into the use of FOSS (Full Option Science System). Honestly, I learned the basics of how to teach science and what assessments should be from using that curriculum.

In one interaction we had with the K20 center staff at OU a suggestion was made about expanding the rubric idea to every part of the class, and at the time I had no idea that this was the idea of standards based grading. I couldn't even wrap my head around that because it was so different from how things had been done.

I started looking up using rubrics and landed on standards based grading. I didn't fully get the idea at first and tried to implement it anyway. I created a rubric for every question on the assessment (no multiple choice ever), took an average and and used this to assign a percentage. This resulted in a 100, 4-95%, 3-85%, 2-75%, 1-65%, and no evidence score of 50% (base 50). This got thrown in to our standard online gradebook for the district, I weighted the grade 80% tests, and daily work 20%, students got 100% on daily work for completion and I gave them feedback on it without taking off for anything. That's where I functioned for the last few years. I was only partially happy with the results, but I didn't know there was a whole other level.

Recently we began looking at a change that was coming at the state level in Teacher Evaluations using Marzano's stuff and assessment resurfaced in my mind as something that I was just not totally happy with. I was also tired of being bored along with my students at "dead spots" in my curriculum. Being husband, dad, coach, and teacher has been my excuse for not making changes the last few years but now it's time to dig in again because it matters that I get better. I will not be a teacher that is satisfied with good enough, especially when I am fully aware that good enough isn't good enough for me or the kids in my class. Long post but that gets me to where I am today.