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.

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.