My Personalized, Blended, Project Based, Inquiry, Standards Based, Yeti, Learning Dilemma

The Yeti, a.k.a. the abominable snowman. You hear about him, but like the unicorn and his buddy Bigfoot, there isn't much evidence that there's any truth to their existence. I feel like I'm the educational equivalent of the Yeti scientist. I’ve had so many moments in the last few years where I'm right in the middle of doing what I do in the class and find that my mind is on autopilot. In those moments, the other part of my brain seems to be thinking, “I don’t want to be teaching like this.” It’s not that I don’t want to be teaching, I just don’t want to be educating like I am. I guess I’m sounding kind of cryptic. What I mean is that there are a lot of things “under the hood” that I have managed to find solutions for like assessment and grading. I have become almost entirely digital in my interactions with student assessment and feedback. I have developed a system with a decent fidelity between what the student knows, the score I give them, and the expectation the parents have of what those scores should mean. I have a pretty good ability to connect with the students on a personal level. I have figured out how to navigate standards and develop learning goals and rubrics for them. There are lots of the details that I have figured out, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around personalized learning in the classroom. It bothers me that my class fully meets the needs of only a small section of students. The kids that learn quickly are constantly waiting for the rest, and the kids that learn at a slower pace are constantly being dragged on their faces through this thing we call science education. I have made modifications that allow for students to learn at slower paces by assessing as a form of ongoing digital conversation (in a future post I'll explain how I do assessment). This works for an additional group of students who will take the time to continue the conversation online. For the kids that work at a faster pace, I really have nothing. This whole thing frustrates me most because ultimately this results in people being “bored” waiting, or lost dragging behind. I have spent hundreds of hours online and in books looking for a solution that works for me. Flipped learning only seems to work if you can get students to do some work at home and if they have computers at home to do the work and watch the videos. Seeing as neither of those things seems to be a reality for me, I don’t see that happening. I like the idea of blended learning, which I have some components of, but I can’t quite figure out how to effectively personalize the learning in my class.  How do I provide personal choice to students in a way that is manageable for me. How do I have students in all different places in a blended learning environment, doing inquiry science and discussion, with students having some choice over pacing and direction, project based learning, and hitting all the science standards in the process. Oh yeah, I also would have to do this within the traditional school context. I have looked for someone out there in the internet world that is doing even part of this. I have not found it yet. Where is the yeti? Where are the unicorns of science education? I was talking to my teaching intern today, I need a software that does exactly what Google Classroom does in the way it easily interfaces with Google folders and Google Apps for Education. I need it to interface seamlessly with Google forms for giving assessments. I need it to interface with the students Google accounts to send notifications  when I respond to them in our feedback conversations. I need it to interface with a forum where I can have multiple conversations set up so they can jump in and out of discussions and respond to prompts in a digital community space. I need a way to hand out assignments to all students or just a specific few. I need to be able to group students and move them around digitally. I need to be able to provide the resources for students to progress through the curriculum at their own pace. I need all this because it will allow me to spend the time doing what I do best, sitting down with students in small groups and pushing them when they need it. I need all this so I can get out of the way of students when they are learning faster than I can go. I need all this because the students need to be met with a properly paced science class that works for each of them. A class that gives them the freedom to explore the curriculum. A class that gives me the freedom to work in a way that maximizes the use of my strengths in teaching my students instead of spending the majority of my time educating students in ways that I am less effective and only getting a small group of students to reach their fullest potential. I want to find the educational Yeti.I want that crazy personalized, blended, project based, inquiry, standards based science classroom to exist. I just want to find a couple of footprints to get my hunt back on track. The world of science education would be a better place if that Yeti is discovered.

That One Kid.

That one kid. That one kid is the one that drives me to get better. That one kid is the one who made me find a better way to grade. That one kid is the one that taught me to find a way to connect. That one kid is the one that is constantly driving me to find a better way to teach. That one kid every year that I can’t seem to reach is the reason why I am the teacher I am today, but even after 12 years I’m still a long ways from the teacher I want to be. In my third year of teaching, I had a student that was failing my class so bad that when he decided he wanted to improve he realized it was impossible. (I never liked traditional grading but I didn’t know how to do it any differently.) This student was the reason I pushed further into questions about why we grade the way we do. This push led to base 50%, then rubrics for assessments, and then full on standards based grading and a level of assessment that I could have never imagined possible. Today I only grade the standards and not a single piece of daily or practice work, and all of that was launched by that single frustrating moment. This mean that I have very few grades in the grade book but every grade is truly meaningful to me and to my students. I’m that one kid that got frustrated with work that was nonsense and just busy work, so I don’t give my students work to do just to keep them busy. We don’t do crosswords, or word searches, or coloring pages, we try to dig in every day and stay engaged. These changes are the easy ones, they just change the structure of what I do, most of it is done before it ever hits the students. The real struggle is that one student whom I can’t seem to connect the learning to in a way that results in better learning outcomes. These are often students that I connect with on a personal level, and they need that, but I still can’t change the outcome of their learning. These are often the students that don’t fit the traditional structured classroom, but yet there they are with no other options but me. Most of the time these students are somewhere on the ADHD spectrum, but sometimes they are not. It seems like every time I talk about this with others the common refrain is, “you can’t win them all,” but I have to refuse to accept this. If I believed that I couldn’t “win them all” then I’m accepting casualties and I refuse to do that. Every year it is these students that push me the most. I watch as many of these students slide along and keep aging up. Every year the teachers know that some day all of it will catch up to this student and they will find themselves a struggling adult as well. I just can’t in good conscience not try to do anything to change that trajectory. Here is the problem though. Every year they come through my class and leave with the same issues and the same struggles they came in and they did not make as much progress as I had hoped. Each year I try to wrap my head around personalizing learning for them, but each year I don’t quite figure out how to pull off what needs to happen. I get stuck trying to figure it out. I spend hours digging through the internet to find that breakthrough. I have begun to see that the solution might lie in a blended learning environment, but I struggle to find what this looks like in a traditional structured school and classroom. I struggle to see how to do this in an efficient way that doesn’t end up taking time away from my family in the evenings after I arrive home. I’m not sure where the solutions lie, but this particular issue has been one that continues to haunt my teaching brain. It seems like the issue lies in individual management of material and individualized grading, but I can’t find anyone out there doing this in a way that makes me go BAM! That’s it! Many days I ponder starting a new school where we can throw out the rules and make it work for that one kid. That one kid needs us to make a better school. That one kid needs us to “win them all,” because that one kid matters. If we can change the trajectory of life for that one kid, we can change the trajectory of life for them all. I have made many changes to my class that have opened the door for more and more students to be successful, but there is still that one kid.