Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Bonus: Summit: Self-Assessment, Gradeless Learning, and Teacher Well-Being w/ Starr Sackstein
15 Plays5 years ago
This is an audio version of our Summit on October 27th,, 2019.
Starr Sackstein, NBCT is author of many titles including Hacking Assessment, Peer Feedback in the Classroom: Empowering Students to Be the Experts, and From Teacher to Leader: Finding Your Way as a First-Time Leader without Losing Your Mind, as well as an English nationally board certified teacher.
In this interactive discussion, we will discuss how these principles not only are paramount for our students' success, but our own longevity and joy as educators.
How does gradeless learning change the teacher’s role in the classroom?
How can we use self-assessment to not only change our classrooms for student well-being, but for teachers?
How do student agency and voice and choice lend themselves to teacher empowerment and work/life balance?
What other ways can we foster teacher well-being while simultaneously promoting the well-being of students?
Look out for future Summits via Human Restoration Project’s website and social media. Our goal is to host free, quality PD at least once a month!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Starr Saxton and Gradeless Learning
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome everyone to our October summit with Starr Saxton, who's a prolific author.
00:00:16
Speaker
She's written many books as well as a nationally core certified teacher.
00:00:20
Speaker
The focus is going to be on self-assessment, gradeless learning, and that connection to teacher wellbeing.
00:00:26
Speaker
Starr and I were just talking about how
00:00:29
Speaker
the elements of progressive education that we're talking about today not only lend themselves to students being more comfortable in the classroom and doing better, but also for the teacher, it lessens stress, you have more time at home to do things.
00:00:43
Speaker
It's just a more fun, engaging thing to do.
00:00:45
Speaker
You know, it's the reason why I
00:00:47
Speaker
people became teachers is to teach, not to become like authoritarian rulers over their classroom.
00:00:53
Speaker
And this gives you some tools to make those things easier.
Community Engagement and Participation
00:00:57
Speaker
So this is brought to you by our Patreon supporters.
00:01:00
Speaker
I'm going to shout out some three names here.
00:01:02
Speaker
Bradley Hinson, Lisa Biber, and Paul Wan.
00:01:05
Speaker
Thank you for supporting HRP so we can pay for the fancy technology we're working with here today.
00:01:11
Speaker
That's really appreciated.
00:01:13
Speaker
And for those of you that are in our audience, feel free to participate via the chat.
00:01:17
Speaker
You can type in the chat box.
00:01:19
Speaker
Or if at any time you have a comment or a question, hit the raise hand button, which should be near the bottom of your screen, I believe, or maybe the top.
00:01:28
Speaker
It looks like that.
00:01:29
Speaker
That is a key tool here.
00:01:31
Speaker
The more audience participation we have, the better this is going to be.
00:01:33
Speaker
Feel free to ask hyper-specific questions to your context because I think that's where the real meat of these conversations lie.
00:01:42
Speaker
We can actually help you, especially STAR can help you integrate these techniques into your classroom.
HRP's Focus on Progressive Education
00:01:49
Speaker
If you're not familiar, my name is Chris McNutt.
00:01:52
Speaker
I'm a co-founder of human restoration project.
00:01:55
Speaker
We host free professional development We have a bunch of free resources on our website and our focus is on progressive education and ensuring that we're focusing on humans in our class as opposed to just like little robots or little vessels that are just getting translated information to them and Star I'll let you introduce yourself and
00:02:13
Speaker
Okay, so I'm Star Saxton.
00:02:16
Speaker
I am currently an educational consultant speaker.
00:02:22
Speaker
I mostly consider myself an instructional coach more than anything.
Role and Mission of Starr Saxton
00:02:25
Speaker
The format that I'm in now is like I get to go into schools and work with teams over time to bring the formative assessment process really into their spaces, helping to make the kids really the center of the learning and
00:02:40
Speaker
to help folks kind of shift their assessment practices.
00:02:44
Speaker
Before that, I was a 16-year high school English teacher.
00:02:50
Speaker
I've taught everything from seventh grade humanities to 12th grade AP lit journalism and a bunch of newspaper classes.
00:03:00
Speaker
I was a district leader for two years, a director of humanities, where I got to lead a department of various different subjects and got to try that head on for a little bit.
00:03:13
Speaker
And now I just really, it's like my crusade to help reform education as it is.
00:03:19
Speaker
And
00:03:20
Speaker
I think ultimately, I will say that my career has been a success if I could help get rid of standardized testing altogether and sort of move towards a more portfolio-based strategy.
00:03:34
Speaker
reflection self-assessment system where students and their dignity are kept intact instead of running them through this really sad sort of system we've got working right now that was put in place I guess at necessity god knows how long ago at this point so it's time for a reboot and hopefully I could be a part of that so
00:03:56
Speaker
Awesome.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for giving up your morning to speak with us, especially early morning for some of us here.
00:04:04
Speaker
I also love that terminology.
00:04:05
Speaker
Crusade is like right up my alley in terms of talking about the education system.
00:04:09
Speaker
I love that.
00:04:10
Speaker
So our goal is to talk for roughly an hour here, going through four different questions.
Benefits of Gradeless Learning
00:04:16
Speaker
And essentially what we're doing is we're just talking about how gradeless learning can be implemented, how self-assessment kind of caters itself to gradeless learning.
00:04:24
Speaker
And then how all of that ultimately feeds back to teacher well-being.
00:04:28
Speaker
We already have a lot of conversations, I think, about how students benefit from gradeless learning.
00:04:34
Speaker
So, you know, talking about motivation and not demeaning students and not being judged and just in general, actually learning more, which is very interesting.
00:04:43
Speaker
considerably more in some studies, even when it comes to traditional academics.
00:04:46
Speaker
But there is that teacher component here.
00:04:49
Speaker
So again, feel free to happily engage in chat here, folks, or raise your hand if you want to participate.
00:04:56
Speaker
But let's just jump right into the questions here.
00:04:59
Speaker
with STAR.
00:04:59
Speaker
So let's just start with this first one, which is basically, I mean, you've been doing this for a while now, Gradeless Learning, talking about Gradeless Learning.
00:05:07
Speaker
You have a ton of resources and books.
00:05:08
Speaker
Could you talk about how Gradeless Learning then changes the teacher's role within the classroom?
00:05:14
Speaker
So, I mean, there's a bunch of different things in practice here, I think.
00:05:20
Speaker
For one, you're not gonna grade everything that the kids do, and it thinks about learning on a spectrum instead, so you have this more progressive shifting and student needs become the center of what you're doing.
00:05:35
Speaker
So even in the way you're planning your lessons, the way you're kind of making the space all kind of goes around
00:05:43
Speaker
what kids know and can do.
Innovative Learning Approaches
00:05:46
Speaker
You want them to be setting the goals.
00:05:48
Speaker
You want them to be making the priorities.
00:05:50
Speaker
And then you're able to sort of adjust what's going on.
00:05:54
Speaker
I know some traditional folks might kind of have in their head right away, well, what about the curriculum?
00:05:58
Speaker
There are state tests at the end of the year.
00:06:00
Speaker
There's stuff we have to get through.
00:06:03
Speaker
And what's amazing is you get through all of that stuff anyway.
00:06:06
Speaker
It's just maybe it's not the chronological approach that takes forever.
00:06:11
Speaker
if we think about things more thematically and we have things chunked in themes where kids are doing projects and they have some flexibility in what they're learning and when they're learning it and we're just connecting everything they learn to whatever we're doing in that space.
00:06:30
Speaker
First of all, it's
00:06:32
Speaker
It's so much better for the teacher because then we get to do the stuff we love most, actually work with kids one-on-one or in small groups on the specific things they need instead of preparing lectures or PowerPoints or things like that.
00:06:47
Speaker
It's more of a workshop model.
00:06:49
Speaker
So you might have a mini lesson because you do have that content you need to teach or you do have that skill that you know kids need to keep working on, but it's mostly a workshop.
00:06:58
Speaker
So kids are doing.
00:07:00
Speaker
you have your five or six minutes in the front and then you're spending time individually while they're working where you know you're either doing status of the class kind of getting a gauge of where kids are and then you're working with kids individually based on data you might have collected the day before or you might find out while you're walking around that everybody has a misconception about what you're learning so you could just kind of shut the class down for a second and say all right you know after
00:07:25
Speaker
taking a brief overview of what's going on.
00:07:27
Speaker
I just want to do a quick two-minute review of what's going on, address any concerns that I hear you guys talking about in your groups, and then it really just makes the learning space a little bit more dynamic because you can't plan for every second.
00:07:44
Speaker
You kind of need to be versatile and ready to shift based on what the kids need.
00:07:50
Speaker
So for me, I don't have ADD, but I think that
00:07:54
Speaker
you know, just I bore really easily.
00:07:57
Speaker
And when you're in a space where you're doing the same thing that you did last year at the exact same time that you did it last year, and there's only one right answer for every single thing that you're doing, that is really boring.
00:08:11
Speaker
And if you're going to be a teacher for any long period of time, unless you're willing to change things up,
00:08:17
Speaker
stuff's going to get real boring real fast.
00:08:19
Speaker
So I think it just gives us a chance to be more creative as well.
Portfolio-Based Assessment Systems
00:08:26
Speaker
Letting kids be a part of that whole process, letting them co-create the curriculum that we're teaching and also letting them sort of dictate where we go and how we go.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, that, I mean, speaking of which, I mean, I also teach in like a portfolio-based gradeless classroom.
00:08:44
Speaker
And part of the invigorating essence of that room is the fact that students often produce things that are very unexpected and very creative and very cool, even when I think they're not going to, which sounds like really bad, but it's true.
00:08:59
Speaker
So sometimes students really surprise me because like they won't be doing anything to my eyes for like a week and then out of nowhere, they produce a video game or like some crazy animation or
00:09:08
Speaker
something out of nowhere.
00:09:09
Speaker
And it's really like it feels so good to see students who traditionally struggle because they're just given a lot of work time and it's not very traditional that they can really thrive and showcase what they're capable of.
00:09:21
Speaker
And you alluded to this in your introduction, but could you talk a little bit more about what exactly a portfolio based grading system looks like within the classroom?
00:09:31
Speaker
Okay, so when I was in the classroom, we had like a four-step process.
00:09:35
Speaker
The collection part where based any kind of product or portion of a product that students felt showed their learning could be collected.
00:09:48
Speaker
Some people I worked with actually used folders like physical folders.
00:09:52
Speaker
I used a digital one once our school went to Google.
00:09:56
Speaker
It made good sense to just teach kids how to maintain the space and then
00:10:01
Speaker
at the end develop the portfolio that they were going to share.
00:10:05
Speaker
The second part is then selection from the collection because of portfolio isn't just everything I worked on all year.
00:10:11
Speaker
There actually has to be some level of thought about why they're putting something into their portfolio and how it shows their learning and what standards it shows.
00:10:22
Speaker
They need to be cognizant of why they're selecting what they are
00:10:27
Speaker
and how it reflects what they're supposed to be learning, which is part number three, reflection.
00:10:33
Speaker
Once they make those choices, really being able to get gritty with why they chose it, what it shows, what goals were set that were met, or what challenges are still in play that they feel like this was either the beginning part.
00:10:49
Speaker
Because
00:10:50
Speaker
I used to say to kids, you know, it doesn't have to be your best work that shows up in the portfolio.
00:10:54
Speaker
It could just be stuff you're really proud of for one reason or another.
00:10:57
Speaker
And as long as you can articulate why you've selected it, that's really what matters the most.
00:11:04
Speaker
And then the last part is connection.
00:11:07
Speaker
Not only what did I learn in this space, but how does it connect to learning that I'm doing in other spaces?
00:11:12
Speaker
And trying to get them to start doing that transfer piece that
00:11:17
Speaker
Because in a perfect world, you're in a school that does portfolio and it's not just in your class.
00:11:22
Speaker
So they can actually start to draw connections between their learning in math class and science class, in English and in social studies.
00:11:31
Speaker
And I mean, in a perfect world that isn't traditional, we actually have interdisciplinary learning going on and maybe we don't have these concrete classes that are completely separated as they generally are right now.
00:11:43
Speaker
but maybe some kids are lucky enough to have workshop classes where these are already intermingling so that those ideas and connections are already happening.
00:11:54
Speaker
And then I think the best way to showcase learning men at that point is to have kids present on their final portfolio different parts of the year, maybe at the end of the year, and really have them speak to it.
00:12:07
Speaker
And if they don't like live learning,
00:12:09
Speaker
in-person presentations, you could have them make a video, you can have them do a screencast, you could have them do a podcast.
00:12:15
Speaker
I've had students do it all.
00:12:17
Speaker
And the best part about that for teachers is you're not going to get bored when you're, you know, reading it over at the end because you're not going to have a hundred different ones that are exactly the same because you gave them a checklist about things that needed to be in there.
00:12:32
Speaker
And, you know, they were just looking to be compliant little robots are the opposite of what you were saying before.
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah, and the techniques really do work, although I will say something that you, I would love to hear your input on this is that we transitioned, I've always done portfolio systems in the past, but this year we actually do have our entire ninth grade as a portfolio system, so it is cross-curricular.
Transition and Patience in Portfolio Learning
00:12:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:12:56
Speaker
But the caveat is that students have also been very much trained to not think of learning in this manner.
00:13:03
Speaker
It has been a very compliance-based, like, oh, I turn this in, and the next day I get either 100% for doing it or a 0% for not doing it, or something relatively similar to that.
00:13:14
Speaker
And it takes, I mean, we just now have students and it's been like two months who are just now starting to really click it and get it and it's working really well for them.
00:13:24
Speaker
How do you go about like basically, I hate to use the word training, but just kind of aligning the students school process to understand what portfolios are and really transition them to this new system.
00:13:38
Speaker
So I had the dual challenge.
00:13:43
Speaker
When I was in the classroom in that school, I was teaching mostly 11th and 12th graders.
00:13:47
Speaker
So these were kids who had gone through school already for so many years doing things a very different way than what I was asking them to do.
00:13:55
Speaker
So we had to sort of
00:13:58
Speaker
break their understanding first and then kind of mend it and really build in this conversation about what are grades, what is the purpose of all of this, why are we doing this?
00:14:15
Speaker
There was a lot of question of why, what do these things mean to us?
00:14:20
Speaker
you kind of build it in right away in that school that i was in it was a portfolio school so that was one of the few things they didn't need to sort of teach them about they learn about it in sixth grade because we were six to twelve and so that part they always got and it was just a question of reminder that okay we're doing this work you're going to save all your work i would teach them how to label their files how to separate them
00:14:46
Speaker
And since we were also a journalism school, technology was a really big part of what we were doing.
00:14:51
Speaker
So they knew ultimately they were going to be designing some kind of presentation, whether it was a website or, you know, a Prezi or, you know, some kind of movie at the end.
00:15:02
Speaker
And
00:15:03
Speaker
my my smarter more organized students were doing it all along the way sort of taking a little piece from this and a little piece from that and in order to graduate at that school too they needed to do an exit portfolio to be able to walk where they actually presented in front of a panel of their peers teachers and outsiders and they had to align their presentations to what they were going to be doing after school and how
00:15:29
Speaker
school kind of prepared them to do that.
00:15:32
Speaker
So that was an overarching philosophy of the school, even though grades were still present in most of the places.
00:15:39
Speaker
And when I moved to other spaces, it just became an expectation like, all right, we're going to be doing all this work.
00:15:46
Speaker
You're going to be doing lots of revision.
00:15:48
Speaker
You're going to be spending time
00:15:50
Speaker
with these pieces so you're not going to want to throw them away right away.
00:15:54
Speaker
You're going to want to put them in a folder somewhere, label them, keep the drafts, don't just keep revising and revising, make copies so that you could see the progress because I think this is part of it as well, is making sure that students can see their own progress.
00:16:11
Speaker
not just us telling them, wow, you've grown so much.
00:16:15
Speaker
And if they could see the paragraph they started with in September, and now they have a full essay by the beginning of October, and they could even see just in length and development where the changes have happened, that's a far more powerful experience for students to see their own progress than me just giving them a pat on the back and saying,
00:16:36
Speaker
you know, I've noticed great things.
00:16:39
Speaker
It's a lot more powerful if they could see it themselves.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and it's a really scary thing too for a teacher and maybe for a student as well to jump into an alternative style of learning or a different style of assessment because what you initially might get might not be very good because they're just not used to it.
00:17:00
Speaker
I think it's important that we just...
00:17:02
Speaker
give it time to fester and give it time to really line up.
00:17:07
Speaker
That's a bell hooks thing, which is the idea of like a lot of progressive educators start progressive ideas and then they think that their class is going out of control because there's, you know, some of that authoritarianism has been lifted and they have a tendency to double down and go back to how things used to be instead of really embracing it and see what happens over a really long period of time.
00:17:29
Speaker
Like,
00:17:30
Speaker
30, 60, 90 days, or maybe even longer for some students.
00:17:33
Speaker
Well, I mean, I also kind of want to mention, like, when I was writing Hacking Assessment, I didn't come up with the systems that were in place in that book in one school year.
00:17:42
Speaker
It took me years to figure out
00:17:46
Speaker
how to do things and every time I did it the same way I was asking kids to think about their own learning experiences I was saying like okay I could trim time off in this area if I do this if I create a system to make sure that when I'm doing conferences with kids during class that cuts down on the transition time between
00:18:07
Speaker
when kids are coming up and when they're going down, like, just more smoothly that could happen.
00:18:12
Speaker
It took me a long time to figure out, all right, so I'm gonna send out a schedule ahead of class that time.
00:18:20
Speaker
And I'm also gonna put their names on the board when I get into class that period so that they know who's coming before and after them.
00:18:27
Speaker
And then when they get up, they're gonna cross their name off the board so the next person knows to come up without me having to say, okay, next.
00:18:34
Speaker
They just see it happening.
00:18:36
Speaker
And then it was, well, if students are absent, how can I make sure that I don't fall behind?
00:18:42
Speaker
I'm going to start using Boxer and I'm going to start using other platforms that are going to help them interact with me in the time they're supposed to, even if they're not physically here.
00:18:52
Speaker
And all of that happened.
00:18:54
Speaker
like through trial and error.
00:18:56
Speaker
And you have to be patient like scientists or other field workers to kind of understand that you're not going to find the right answer the first time you try.
00:19:05
Speaker
It's almost never going to be right the first time.
00:19:09
Speaker
It could be in the right direction, but you're not going to land on that like perfect answer the very first time you try things out with kids.
00:19:16
Speaker
It's going to be messy.
00:19:18
Speaker
and it's gonna try your nerves because you're not gonna be comfortable with how messy it is.
00:19:25
Speaker
And the kids, you got to invite the kids feedback and sometimes they're not gonna be kind, not as kind as you want them to be at least.
00:19:34
Speaker
And you just gotta like roll with it.
00:19:37
Speaker
You need to be as open to the feedback from them as you're expecting them to be with the feedback from you.
00:19:44
Speaker
So that there really is this
00:19:47
Speaker
understanding that this is a partnership to make this learning space really theirs and to kind of share that together.
00:19:55
Speaker
So I mean anybody who hasn't done any of this yet, if you're in here hearing about this for the first time, be patient with yourself, be patient with the kids.
Teaching Self-Assessment Skills
00:20:04
Speaker
This is likely going to be very new for everybody.
00:20:07
Speaker
So just
00:20:09
Speaker
you know, it's going to fail sometimes.
00:20:12
Speaker
And that doesn't mean it's failed altogether.
00:20:14
Speaker
It just means whatever you tried today needs to be reflected on and improved.
00:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there's also something you said too about, I know when I first started implementing these ideas, there was a conception amongst maybe other staff members or just online that if you transition to a model where students are the ones submitting things into their portfolio, that somehow you're lowering the bar as in the work that you're getting isn't gonna be as high quality.
00:20:45
Speaker
And I thought to be honest that portfolio based assessment makes things actually much more difficult.
00:20:50
Speaker
The stuff that you're going to get turned in likely is going to be way better because of the amount of time and because of the expectations of growth over time, as opposed to just being like, repeat what I tell you to do and then just do it.
00:21:02
Speaker
There's just so much more creativity.
00:21:05
Speaker
And as a result, I mean, creative work takes a lot of effort.
00:21:07
Speaker
It's very difficult to do.
00:21:09
Speaker
And you get some really good stuff.
00:21:12
Speaker
Again, I welcome the conversation to ask any questions so I don't just take all this time up with my own classrooms background, but I would love to hear more about the how when it comes to self-assessment.
00:21:24
Speaker
So building into the second question here, how can we use self-assessment to not only change our classroom for student well-being, but also for teacher well-being?
00:21:34
Speaker
So self-assessment to me is the best way to really truly understand what a kid knows and can do.
00:21:42
Speaker
And you know what?
00:21:42
Speaker
It's not fair of us to expect that kids know how to do it automatically.
00:21:49
Speaker
It is something that needs to be taught.
00:21:51
Speaker
So I think it's really important, first of all, for teachers to model what that looks like.
00:21:58
Speaker
And then to actually teach them a process to do it so they understand the expectations.
00:22:04
Speaker
But so much of the times, particularly with secondary teachers, we only see what kids allow us to see.
00:22:12
Speaker
And there's a lot that goes on in their head that's not terribly visible.
00:22:17
Speaker
So if we're going to have a conversation about something and I really want to understand what kids know and can do, I want them to have an opportunity to fill in the gaps that an assignment I asked them to do might not have
00:22:31
Speaker
given them a chance to show and this goes to for people who are still giving tests.
00:22:36
Speaker
If I design a test and leave out a whole bunch of material because you know you have to choose what goes in and what comes out.
00:22:43
Speaker
What if kids have a really large knowledge base on the area that I didn't choose as important for that particular day but they have a knowledge base that they could then share with me after the fact that gives me an opportunity to know that they took in way more than this assessment said they did.
00:23:00
Speaker
And Chris, you had mentioned just a second ago about how creativity is a harder situation.
00:23:06
Speaker
Anytime that you ask a student to do a synthesis project or a collaborative project, there are multi-tiers of what's going on.
00:23:14
Speaker
They have to first understand the lower level stuff, the comprehension stuff, then they need to be able to apply it and then they need to turn it into something new.
00:23:25
Speaker
if we're asking them to do that much with the content that we're working with on a regular basis, and then they're sharing that knowledge with their classmates and peers through the different systems we set up in our spaces, then there are multiple opportunities for kids to learn things that aren't just coming from us or from textbooks, or it's learning from the doing and then learning from each other's doing.
00:23:49
Speaker
And,
00:23:52
Speaker
The self-assessment piece is then this opportunity for kids to talk about, you know, what did I think I was supposed to do on this assignment?
00:24:00
Speaker
And that's particularly important because if we think we gave good directions on how things are supposed to be done,
00:24:08
Speaker
but they weren't as clear as we thought they were.
00:24:10
Speaker
And that happened to me a lot in the beginning.
00:24:13
Speaker
If I knew what kids thought they were supposed to do, and then I assessed them based on that instead of my expectation, that was also a much clearer, um,
00:24:24
Speaker
and fair assessments of what they knew and could do.
00:24:27
Speaker
Because I mean, if I was expecting them to do A, B, and C, and they did X, Y, and Z, but it's because they thought they were supposed to do X, Y, and Z. It wasn't because they didn't understand A, B, and C. They just didn't realize that's what needed to be done for this particular assignment.
00:24:44
Speaker
I always had them talk about what they thought they were supposed to be doing first.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, I want to invite in Skyler here, who had his hand raised my lambatoc.
00:24:54
Speaker
And I'm also going to plug in my MacBook because I don't have to plug down, which is genius.
00:24:57
Speaker
So here you go, Skyler, you're out.
00:25:01
Speaker
Oh, sure.
00:25:01
Speaker
I also submitted it in the Q&A thing because I wasn't sure how to do this.
00:25:06
Speaker
Hi, Star.
00:25:07
Speaker
Hi.
Technological Tools for Learning and Assessment
00:25:08
Speaker
I was curious as to how you were tracking drafts in a digital portfolio because I find that that's harder with students because they just want to keep editing the same Google Doc.
00:25:19
Speaker
And I'm just curious if that was as simple as having them make copies or if you were making copies to hold on to for them or I'm just curious as to how that worked.
00:25:31
Speaker
So, I mean, there's a couple of ways you can do it.
00:25:33
Speaker
If you're using Google Docs, you could always use the track history so that you could just go into the history itself and then click on the earlier versions so that if they forget to save those earlier drafts, you could just click on the date due of the first one and then see what that looks like and then click on the next one and then come back up to the beginning.
00:25:57
Speaker
So it's never really lost if they don't share it.
00:26:01
Speaker
Right.
00:26:02
Speaker
Like that way.
00:26:03
Speaker
But it's for me, the best case scenario is having them make a copy each time, especially if you guys are using the Google Educational Suite.
00:26:12
Speaker
It's just a question of, you know, making a copy and then resaving it under a new name.
00:26:18
Speaker
So the first one becomes draft one.
00:26:20
Speaker
And then the second one that you make the copy of is draft two and so on and so forth.
00:26:25
Speaker
And then it all just goes in together.
00:26:27
Speaker
But
00:26:28
Speaker
Some kids aren't going to do that.
00:26:30
Speaker
And the revision history is really a lifesaver in that regard.
00:26:35
Speaker
Got it.
00:26:36
Speaker
Thank you.
00:26:37
Speaker
No problem.
00:26:38
Speaker
Does anyone else have any questions surrounding self-assessment or gradeless learning when it comes to the setup for their classroom, especially when it comes to if you're someone who maybe hasn't attempted this at all or doesn't know where to get started or has tried it and maybe it didn't work out or anything of that nature?
00:26:56
Speaker
Because I think this would be a good time to kind of flush that out.
00:27:01
Speaker
So while you guys are thinking about it, I had like a four or five step process that I used to do for reflection in class.
00:27:08
Speaker
First of all, if you start a project by inviting students to be a part of determining the success criteria, if you go through the assignment together and you ask them at the beginning, what do you think it takes to be successful?
00:27:20
Speaker
And then you guys determine success criteria based on the standards it's aligned with and the specific things that it's asking them to do, you're already starting out with a clear end point.
00:27:30
Speaker
Kids know.
00:27:31
Speaker
what they're supposed to be doing and they had some control over what that looked like before they even get started.
00:27:38
Speaker
And I think one of my rookie mistakes in the beginning was making the assumption that kids knew
00:27:47
Speaker
and then they're shooting in the dark when they start and then sometimes if we get to the end and it doesn't look anything like what you were expecting that's partially because we didn't give them a finished target to look at.
00:27:59
Speaker
If you can do the project first to make sure you kind of walk yourself through the steps that's always a really good idea and it's fun you'll be able to see where are kids going to struggle
00:28:11
Speaker
How can you build in some scaffolds if you yourself kind of struggled a little bit at certain times?
00:28:17
Speaker
What are the tips that you could kind of give different kids in class?
00:28:21
Speaker
Or if you see a kid doing something particularly well in class, how can you leverage that particular student to help other students in this space?
00:28:32
Speaker
So that's the first step, making sure that the success criteria is really, really, really clear and that when you're giving out an assignment, you're co-constructing a rubric right at the get.
00:28:41
Speaker
It's also good if you have older kids who can articulate their understanding.
00:28:45
Speaker
If you could say to them, what do you think you need from me to be successful on this assignment?
00:28:50
Speaker
So like maybe there are gaps in learning where you'd need to do different mini lessons and if kids could articulate that
00:28:58
Speaker
Maybe not in September, maybe not in October, but maybe starting in November and December, you'll have kids who could say, I don't know how to do that yet.
00:29:07
Speaker
That's something I need to learn.
00:29:08
Speaker
And then getting them to get comfortable with that.
00:29:11
Speaker
The next part is making sure on the reflection on the other end that they could talk to what they were supposed to do, that they could...
00:29:21
Speaker
talk about their process for doing the projects.
00:29:24
Speaker
How did they go about doing it?
00:29:26
Speaker
What does the learning look like there?
00:29:28
Speaker
What did they struggle with?
00:29:30
Speaker
How did they overcome their struggles?
00:29:32
Speaker
The next part is probably to me for self-assessment, the most important part and the part that most reflections will leave out is where does it align with the standards?
00:29:41
Speaker
What evidence from your learning actually supports
00:29:46
Speaker
um your assessment of how well you've done so if i'm telling you i was able to meet the criteria for let's say i don't even know like let's say it's two
00:30:03
Speaker
develop clear transitions between ideas.
00:30:07
Speaker
And I actually pull up a piece from a piece that I wrote and I said between paragraphs three and four, you could see the developed transition to create cohesion, which aligns with this standard.
00:30:20
Speaker
And it's sort of giving them that argument development as well, because they're sort of supporting themselves in that way.
00:30:27
Speaker
And then at the end, they're going to tell you what they would have done differently and how they feel they've done with what the expectations of the assignment were and where they ended up falling at the end.
00:30:42
Speaker
And having all that information at the start gives you a much clearer lens through which to give them feedback.
00:30:49
Speaker
Because if you know they were working on a handful of things, those are the things you're going to really target in the feedback you give them later.
00:30:57
Speaker
Awesome.
00:30:58
Speaker
Awesome.
00:30:58
Speaker
I really appreciate the clear guidelines and Nick in the Q&A has a question that's kind of similar, which is he asked, what kinds of questions do you ask students in their evaluation and do you have some kind of standard template that you go through in order to ask?
00:31:13
Speaker
So it's super simple.
00:31:16
Speaker
I did have a poster that was hanging on my wall.
00:31:18
Speaker
And I know Chris, you and I were talking before you have the self assessment book, you know, the poster in there, it's a PDF in that one.
00:31:27
Speaker
So the bottom line is I ask kids to talk about their learning.
00:31:31
Speaker
It's like the visible learning questions.
00:31:34
Speaker
What did I learn?
00:31:35
Speaker
How did I learn it?
00:31:37
Speaker
How do I know I learned it?
00:31:39
Speaker
Really, really, really simple, but really potent if they know how to answer those questions correctly.
00:31:45
Speaker
And it could be used on the micro level in terms of what you did in class that day to make sure that the learning happened as an exit ticket.
00:31:55
Speaker
Or it could be at the end of a project where there were multiple objectives that they're really going back to that assignment sheet thinking about their learning and I think the specific questions would vary from what the task was.
00:32:10
Speaker
You know, if it was a writing task, if it was a speaking task, if it was
00:32:15
Speaker
a creation task of some kind where they were developing something with technology.
00:32:20
Speaker
So depending on the skills we were looking to assess, the questions would then align with those expectations so that everything kind of, again, everything's really clear.
00:32:30
Speaker
You have your learning targets and you have your success criteria and all the questions would then align with those two things.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:39
Speaker
So I guess kind of moving in then into our almost like our second half here, the last two questions, and then we'll have a lot of time for like debriefing, Q&A, that kind of stuff.
00:32:48
Speaker
I'd love to leave as much time as possible there until 1030.
00:32:52
Speaker
So we kind of already alluded to this and we've already hinted at it, but
00:32:57
Speaker
How does all of this then build into student agency, voice and choice, et cetera?
Student Involvement in Project Design
00:33:02
Speaker
But then particularly when it comes to student voice and agency, when it comes to self-assessment, when it comes to gradeless learning, how does all that contribute to teacher well-being and teacher work-life balance?
00:33:13
Speaker
As in, how has all of this changed your own relationship with the school and how much time you're spending at school and all that kind of stuff?
00:33:20
Speaker
Okay, so this is twofold and you could go to either end of the spectrum.
00:33:25
Speaker
You're not going to spend as much time planning per se, like when you're first writing a project that might take a little bit of time.
00:33:31
Speaker
But I know that with the seniors I was working with, I actually started including them in project design as well, where I would give them the objectives and they would come up with projects like
00:33:43
Speaker
you know, what do you kind of want to do?
00:33:44
Speaker
And with older learners, I think you can really do that.
00:33:47
Speaker
Kind of say, these are the things we need to get through.
00:33:50
Speaker
Here are your choices.
00:33:51
Speaker
What do you think?
00:33:53
Speaker
And more likely than not, they're going to come up with stuff that you never even imagined possible.
00:33:59
Speaker
And that is really awesome when that happens.
00:34:01
Speaker
And
00:34:02
Speaker
I am thinking in one project in particular with Hamlet, which I had taught for years and years a certain way, and I kind of handed it off to all the kids and they were in groups.
00:34:13
Speaker
I said, you know, this is my traditional unit.
00:34:15
Speaker
You have carte blanche to do whatever you want with it.
00:34:18
Speaker
Come up what you think would be the best, and then as a class we'll vote on the group that came up with the best idea, and then I'll work with that group to develop
00:34:28
Speaker
the actual project and what the success criteria will be and what it will look like.
00:34:32
Speaker
And what the students came up with is brilliant.
00:34:36
Speaker
They made these movies psychoanalyzing individual characters.
00:34:39
Speaker
So they had to first do research on the text to find out about their character.
00:34:44
Speaker
And then they had to do research on psychological issues based on what they learned from the text.
00:34:52
Speaker
Like, for example, Gertrude, with her narcissistic tendencies, so then they had to look up what it meant to be a narcissist and make sure that they could kind of align the text with the diagnosis, and then they had to create a movie about how they cured her.
00:35:14
Speaker
So there were these really and then we did a screening at the end where we looked at all the movies and the kids had to comment on each other's movies and it was a lot of it was a lot of fun.
00:35:25
Speaker
Other projects we did were crazy satire movies where kids were making musicals and I don't know we had a lot of fun in class needless to say so I mean how did that help my balance and my interest in what was going on I was not bringing home
00:35:43
Speaker
150 10-page typed papers that I needed to grade, which were generally miserable to look at in the early days, just not terribly well written, not terribly interesting.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I'll take credit for why they were terrible too.
00:35:58
Speaker
I'm sure I wasn't doing such an awesome job teaching them how to do that to make it really interesting in the beginning.
00:36:06
Speaker
So there's that.
00:36:07
Speaker
I enjoyed the projects when they came in and I didn't have to watch them alone.
00:36:10
Speaker
I could invite my son or my significant other to be a part of, you know, to be a part of that experience of what was going on.
00:36:20
Speaker
Also, in terms of work-life balance on the other side, technology could really be something that makes a balance more challenging than anything.
00:36:32
Speaker
I mean, you might not be planning as much, but my students knew at least five different ways to get in touch with me.
00:36:37
Speaker
If I didn't answer an email, I could get a direct message on Twitter.
00:36:41
Speaker
or they could reach me on Voxer, or they could text me, or they could do whatever, because my newspaper kids in particular had my cell phone number if we were at deadline and something came up and they needed to get me immediately.
00:36:55
Speaker
They always kind of had my phone number too, so...
00:36:59
Speaker
Learning when to say, I'm not going to pick up the phone or I'm not going to answer that email or I'm not going to answer, you know, I'm not going to go into this to give more feedback.
00:37:10
Speaker
That took me a little bit of time because I felt like if kids were working into the night and they wanted feedback, I wanted to be as responsive as I could be without it being intrusive.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:37:23
Speaker
You know, for me, it transitioned a lot of the work and to be more front-loading.
00:37:28
Speaker
as kind of you said there with projects, there's a lot of work at the beginning to make sure that everything's organized and that the project's a cool idea and that you have something to present to students so that there's at least a starting point.
00:37:39
Speaker
So when you're co-authoring your work, it isn't just like, I have no idea what we're going to do.
00:37:44
Speaker
It's just going to be whatever.
00:37:45
Speaker
Because I found that to be very overwhelming when we did it that way.
00:37:48
Speaker
So there's at least an idea going in.
00:37:51
Speaker
But then after that, for me, I find myself working a lot more
00:37:56
Speaker
one-on-one with students at school, which it's a lot more work than what I was doing.
00:38:01
Speaker
It's a lot harder to work one-on-one with students and give a lot of feedback than it is to address all of them and go through like some kind of standardized curriculum with them.
00:38:11
Speaker
Because even though there's a lot of planning involved in that, there's not a lot of unique circumstances.
00:38:16
Speaker
It's just kind of like we're doing this and that's what it's going to be seven, eight times in a row, as opposed to being, you know, you're meeting with 40 kids and they're all have different circumstances.
00:38:25
Speaker
They all have different things to do.
Maintaining Teacher Well-being
00:38:26
Speaker
So it really just shifts, um,
00:38:29
Speaker
kind of where the work lies and how much there is.
00:38:34
Speaker
So building into our final question here, so we have time for Q&A, do you have any other ideas for boosting teacher wellbeing beyond just a portfolio system or beyond just planning a project?
00:38:48
Speaker
I think it's really important, like I was starting to say before about having very clear boundaries and front-loading those as well.
00:38:56
Speaker
like an office hours kind of idea, whether you're giving kids a specific window of time you'll be available, even if it's not physical office hours at school.
00:39:05
Speaker
Like I will be answering your questions if you reach out to me between three and five, but after five is dinnertime at home and I am not going to be like, just being very clear about how,
00:39:17
Speaker
your own parameters for helping kids.
00:39:20
Speaker
And obviously there'll be emergencies that might come up from time to time that you can address quickly.
00:39:27
Speaker
But I think it's really important that parents and students understand that you are not a 24 hour business open for servicing their individual child's
00:39:37
Speaker
you know, their children's needs all the time.
00:39:40
Speaker
And people, because I learned the hard way that when you do that, there becomes an expectation that you're going to do it all the time, and then it becomes exhausting, and then you don't want to do it at all.
00:39:52
Speaker
And so if you could be really clear on the front that these are my available times, when we're coming close to the end of a project, I might open up another window of time.
00:40:03
Speaker
These are the
00:40:04
Speaker
These are the ways you can reach me that I will reach back.
00:40:08
Speaker
We used to do, we tried doing extra help on Twitter one year where we had an hour with the class hashtag that we were using where other kids could jump on and share resources and different people who may have seen it cycling through.
00:40:23
Speaker
Other teachers were really helpful too.
00:40:25
Speaker
I wasn't the only person who needed to be answering certain questions.
00:40:28
Speaker
So having a class hashtag so that kids could use each other as resources and building that
00:40:34
Speaker
into what's going on in class so that you're not the only resource.
00:40:39
Speaker
You really want to give kids the tools and empower them to be the owners of their learning so that that takes the onus off of you as the only person in the space who has the authority to give that information out.
00:40:53
Speaker
So like if you're using Google Classroom, for example, which I didn't use because it wasn't out yet when I was doing most of this, it was just starting to be.
00:41:04
Speaker
when you're using Google Classroom, you could just post resources if a bunch of kids are asking you.
00:41:09
Speaker
Up it goes for everybody, and then it's there, and you don't have to worry about it.
00:41:13
Speaker
And then they could carry on their conversation in the Google Classroom if you're not going to use a class hashtag on Twitter or somewhere else.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a systemic component there as well, which is like thinking about how much homework is being assigned, if any at all, or how much we're expecting students to do outside of the classroom.
00:41:35
Speaker
Because if we're, I mean, if we're not assigning homework, and we're giving ample amounts of time at school to work on things, and we're not really
00:41:42
Speaker
expecting at least most of the time for students to be doing things at home, then it kind of lends itself to thinking, well, then there should be more boundaries between a student needing extra help after school.
00:41:53
Speaker
I'm not saying that teachers shouldn't help people after school at all, but if you're assigning a ton of homework every single day, of course you're going to expect that there's going to be more
00:42:03
Speaker
Students asking questions long into the night as they're working on your stuff.
00:42:07
Speaker
So the way that you're designing and developing your classrooms norms also are going to lend itself to how that communication unfolds and how it takes place.
Project-Based Learning and Collaboration
00:42:15
Speaker
I would recommend not, like if you're going to be doing project-based learning as the main mode of what's going on in your space, additional homework is not going to be necessary.
00:42:25
Speaker
If they're really buying into the projects that you're doing, they're going to want to take it home and do work and work with their groups because you only have a limited of time that you have during the class period.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I opened my classroom up for lunchtimes.
00:42:39
Speaker
Like kids were always busy.
00:42:41
Speaker
in my classroom either working on their blogs, working in groups that they couldn't meet at other times outside of school.
00:42:48
Speaker
Like I made my space available.
00:42:50
Speaker
I'm an early riser so I would get to school early.
00:42:54
Speaker
They could come to school early but in the afternoons I knew I couldn't stick around because I had a young child I had to pick up.
00:43:00
Speaker
So it was sort of like knowing your schedule and then
00:43:05
Speaker
Sort of finding ways to make it work for them.
00:43:08
Speaker
And then again, setting those boundaries in certain spaces.
00:43:12
Speaker
Training the kids to also help each other is a big part of it.
00:43:17
Speaker
That's another thing that we can't assume they know how to do.
00:43:19
Speaker
We actually need to teach them to do it.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'm with you.
00:43:24
Speaker
That takes a very long time.
00:43:26
Speaker
And I learned in my own practice, you to be very explicit about the fact that you're trying to teach it as well.
00:43:33
Speaker
Like when we first started doing that kind of stuff, we had like a lot of activities that were based around like,
00:43:38
Speaker
giving good critique or helping each other evaluate each other's work and helping each other.
00:43:43
Speaker
But it's turned more into like, we're going to spend 15 minutes of giving each other feedback.
00:43:47
Speaker
Here's what it looks like modeling it, showing a video about it.
00:43:51
Speaker
And doing that way more often than you'd think you would need to do it.
00:43:56
Speaker
Like we're at the point where it's like once a week, at least of explicitly saying this is exactly how you do it.
00:44:03
Speaker
That's something that I've always struggled with personally, which is,
00:44:06
Speaker
repeating things over and over again, because I'm used to talking about all the time.
00:44:11
Speaker
So I just assume that everybody knows that if we do this once, then it's like, okay, it's what you should be doing.
00:44:15
Speaker
But it's not like that, especially when you're, you know, 13, 14, 15 years old, you need a lot of repetition in order to really understand what it is that, you know, the teacher's looking for and, you know, what it is that we're, we're trying to promote kids to do.
00:44:29
Speaker
So I have a quick hack that you could do over time.
00:44:33
Speaker
You could have kids create a library of videos that you keep on your website of these different things that you are repeating over and over and over and over again so that it's kid voice,
00:44:46
Speaker
in this one area, hey you want to know how to give feedback on Socratic seminar questions or you want to give feedback on somebody's project.
00:44:56
Speaker
Like when you have some kids who are super good at doing it and either you just get a quick recording of it happening in school and then using it as a tutorial you ask a kid who's particularly tech savvy if they want to do that
00:45:11
Speaker
not because they're going to be getting extra credit for it because that's going to be the inclination to ask for extra credit, but they're doing it because this is going to be a resource that's going to help them and other students in the future.
00:45:22
Speaker
And then you have a go-to library.
00:45:24
Speaker
So instead of having to repeat yourself a million times, you could just say, hey, check out the playlist that we have on this kind of topic on either a private YouTube channel that you set up for them or a spot on your website.
00:45:38
Speaker
And
00:45:39
Speaker
As much as that sounds a lot of work for those folks on here who may or may not be a tech savvy kind of individual, it's really easy.
00:45:47
Speaker
And once you set it up kind of on the front end, adding stuff to it is super easy too, especially if you're only adding one or two things at a time.
00:45:55
Speaker
So that's a quick fix for having some resources that you develop over time.
00:46:01
Speaker
And then, you know, three or four years in, you actually have a robust library of kid generated work.
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's a really, that's a fantastic point.
00:46:11
Speaker
I'm with you 100% on that.
00:46:13
Speaker
And I think that with our remaining time here of like 15 minutes or so I encourage anyone to ask any specific questions that they have surrounding how to do any of these things while you're typing a response or raising your hand or whatever it is that you want
Restoring Intrinsic Motivation
00:46:26
Speaker
to do.
00:46:26
Speaker
I just want to share a quick story about this.
00:46:28
Speaker
It's super relevant because it happened like the last week and why I love this stuff so much which is I have two learners in my class who to be honest I haven't done much for the last two months.
00:46:39
Speaker
There's been a lot, we have actually like a PBL block
00:46:43
Speaker
So we have a project-based time where students are working on mostly just their passions and pursuits.
00:46:49
Speaker
And these two learners, it's going to sound really bad, but really, I mean, when I say they haven't done anything in two months, I mean that quite literally.
00:46:56
Speaker
There really hasn't been much there.
00:46:58
Speaker
And as Kathy's kind of alluding to into the chat about the
00:47:03
Speaker
that, that fear or the ego of the teacher.
00:47:06
Speaker
Like there's that part of me that's just like, I just want to tell them like, you're going to do this and here's what it is.
00:47:10
Speaker
And you're just going to repeat this because it's what I'm telling you to do.
00:47:12
Speaker
And this isn't appropriate for what you're doing right now.
00:47:15
Speaker
And it's just been a lot of conversations about like, you know, what do you want to do?
00:47:19
Speaker
Do you enjoy doing this kind of thing?
00:47:21
Speaker
Probably every other day for literally 60 days.
00:47:26
Speaker
And as of the last week, we finally figured out that these students really like to make video games.
00:47:32
Speaker
They really like playing video games.
00:47:35
Speaker
And we introduced them to a project that we actually did last year surrounding video games that meets
00:47:40
Speaker
pretty much standards across the board it's like writing reading research all sorts of kinds of things um and we gave them the software and it's gotten to the point now where these students are working on this game so much that they were staying after school for an hour every single day and just like hyper focused on it and these were students that were labeled by other teachers as being like low or being lazy or
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah, just like not good students.
00:48:06
Speaker
And it's amazing once we built that relationship and we made that connection, like how much is getting done and how quickly it's getting done to the point where they're working on it so much that they're actually surpassing what some people have done over two months just because of how
00:48:20
Speaker
focused they are and they're using their time wisely.
00:48:22
Speaker
So again, I just want to reiterate the fact that it takes a lot of time and you can't give up on it.
00:48:29
Speaker
I mean, it's taken some people in my room more than a year, like beyond my actual classroom to get to that point.
00:48:35
Speaker
But I guarantee that there will be a result at some point because people intrinsically do want to learn.
00:48:40
Speaker
That just has to be restored to them.
00:48:42
Speaker
And it takes some others, a lot of deprogramming time.
00:48:47
Speaker
I'm going to toss it over to Eric here.
00:48:51
Speaker
Who is going to talk?
00:48:55
Speaker
Oh, Eric, you're using an older version of Zoom.
00:48:57
Speaker
So apparently you're going to be a panelist here.
00:49:00
Speaker
That's what it just told me.
00:49:01
Speaker
So Eric, you're a panelist now.
00:49:02
Speaker
Welcome.
00:49:05
Speaker
Hello, Eric.
00:49:06
Speaker
And you're here.
00:49:07
Speaker
There you go.
00:49:08
Speaker
Hello, Eric.
00:49:09
Speaker
Hey, how's it going, guys?
00:49:10
Speaker
Good, how are you?
00:49:11
Speaker
Good.
00:49:13
Speaker
So I'm an AP Lit teacher.
00:49:15
Speaker
I have three sections of AP Lit.
00:49:17
Speaker
And as much as I try not to focus on the AP exam, there is that multiple choice component of the AP exam.
00:49:27
Speaker
I know you said earlier you taught AP Lit and that you threw out tests.
00:49:32
Speaker
Do you have any suggestions or ideas for someone in my position who I'm trying to prepare kids for the AP exam
00:49:40
Speaker
They care about it enough that I feel like I have some obligation to, but at the same time, giving them choice in that or using self-reflection to help them in their multiple choice practice
00:49:56
Speaker
Okay, so I have a couple of suggestions.
00:49:59
Speaker
For one, don't use class time for it.
AP Exam Preparation and Criticism
00:50:02
Speaker
Maybe do a lunch and learn where you have study groups come in and you do some timed targeted practice where maybe you do one reading excerpt and the five to seven questions that come with it.
00:50:17
Speaker
And then just focus on that and then really do a breakdown after you time it and you do it of what the questions are asking, what kind of answers they generally come up with, because there is a formula.
00:50:29
Speaker
So if they understand how the questions go, how they should dig through context, how they shouldn't skip certain things when they're reading and working on those specific strategies.
00:50:41
Speaker
And let's say you do like maybe one lunch and learn or two lunch and learns a month.
00:50:47
Speaker
up until like February and then come February when you're getting closer to the exam in May, maybe you start offering one weekly and then maybe the week before every single day and then kids who want to come every day can and kids who don't, don't have to and
00:51:06
Speaker
You can also set it up where you're asking them to write questions for each other based on the same text so that they're going to understand the structure of the questions.
00:51:16
Speaker
And they also become better question askers of themselves.
00:51:21
Speaker
Personally, I think, and I'm sorry if I offend anyone here, I think it's a shitty test.
00:51:26
Speaker
And most of the time, as somebody with a degree in English, I never once took a multiple choice test on any kind of literature in English.
00:51:35
Speaker
in my entire degree and my master's degree or my other like multiple choice test is just a really crappy way to assess literature understanding so college board folks if you're listening out there maybe it's time to i petitioned them for two years to accept my students research papers as a legitimate alternative to their crappy test but i was like we'll pay for it we'll pay for readers
00:52:02
Speaker
You'll get your 90 bucks.
00:52:03
Speaker
Don't even worry about it.
00:52:04
Speaker
But, you know, they just, they have a way and it's a standardized way, but it's crappy.
00:52:11
Speaker
It's real crappy.
00:52:12
Speaker
And I didn't want to waste class time making kids feel horrible about themselves because they couldn't answer those questions.
00:52:18
Speaker
So,
00:52:19
Speaker
Like the writing, my kids were always hyper prepared for the writing because we did so much writing in class.
00:52:26
Speaker
But those questions, like I said, just short timed lunch and learn situations where they understand the questions, how they could tackle what's actually being asked, giving them strategies for going back to the text with highlighters, making sure they understand the trick parts of what's going on in there.
00:52:46
Speaker
And then asking them to write their own the same way so that they've really dissected it in a way that's going to make them feel really confident when they're in there.
00:52:56
Speaker
Thank you.
00:52:56
Speaker
You're welcome.
00:52:58
Speaker
That's a really good point as well.
00:53:00
Speaker
What's really interesting to note is that there's a reason why...
00:53:07
Speaker
upper middle class to wealthy students who go to like SAT camps or ACT camps and out of nowhere, they do amazingly well on tests, even though they might have not actually learned the information that's being tested.
00:53:22
Speaker
Something that actually helped me and I hate doing this because it's so anti the things that I believe in.
00:53:27
Speaker
But I actually went to one of those SAT after school sessions just to see what they do.
00:53:34
Speaker
And right before we take those kind of tests, we just go over the exact same methods.
00:53:40
Speaker
And we did see test scores go up.
00:53:42
Speaker
So even though we don't necessarily care about the test scores, there is still that underlying threat of you do bad on the test, then someone's going to come after you.
00:53:51
Speaker
And something that's really helped us a lot to realize is that it's not even necessarily even about the content.
00:53:56
Speaker
It's about just understanding how to answer a question.
00:53:59
Speaker
Yep.
00:54:00
Speaker
And for me, with those exams, like I'm a literature, I'm like a writing nerd.
00:54:05
Speaker
Like I enjoy these things in such a way that it's so upsetting to me that they get bastardized by these tests in a way that they take the most obscure excerpt, especially with the AP Lit Exam.
00:54:19
Speaker
They take the most obscure excerpt.
00:54:22
Speaker
from some 17th or 18th century British text that is already completely inaccessible to most people, even if they had the entire context.
00:54:32
Speaker
And then they ask these really hyper obscure questions that
00:54:37
Speaker
even really smart people who have studied literature for a long time could potentially get wrong.
00:54:42
Speaker
So I just I really struggle with the idea of having right and wrong answers when it pertains to literature because we want to go deeper than just content comprehension kind of questions and if we're going to be going with inferential questions then
00:55:02
Speaker
the kinds of answers that you could put into a multiple choice question to me are just limiting.
00:55:08
Speaker
That's not the way we want readers to read.
00:55:10
Speaker
We want them to be able to feel, feel and understand a full spectrum of certain things when they, when they behave as good readers.
00:55:19
Speaker
So again, college board, rethink your process.
Rethinking College Admissions and Success
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the revolutionary side of me wants to say, because we do this as well, is sending home a lot of literature around test time about the, just the poor nature of how tests are designed, not to like soften the blow per se, but just to ensure that, you know, students who really get a lot of anxiety, or parents who get a lot of anxiety about their students getting low scores,
00:55:49
Speaker
Don't freak out if they get low scores and that at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter too much A lot of our work has been in just showing that if you want to go to college, you're gonna get into college Yes, you might not get into Yale or Harvard but most state schools take almost a hundred percent of students They don't care about your ACT or SAT score.
00:56:11
Speaker
There's some way that you're gonna get in there and
00:56:13
Speaker
because frankly, the college wants your money.
00:56:16
Speaker
A lot of schools too don't do that anymore.
00:56:18
Speaker
Like Dartmouth throughout the SATs is a part of their process a long time ago, as well as a lot of other IVs have done so.
00:56:26
Speaker
And I think along the lines of the gradeless classroom, like to tie this all back to that, one of the major reasons most teachers come to me and say, I can't do this because kids want to go to college and what about the transcripts?
00:56:41
Speaker
The bottom line is homeschool kids are there are more kids homeschooled now than there ever have been before.
00:56:48
Speaker
And those students go to college without transcripts.
00:56:51
Speaker
I don't want to burst anybody's bubble here, but they're going without the same curriculum your kids are learning in school and they're going without a regular traditional high school transcript.
00:57:01
Speaker
So it can happen.
00:57:03
Speaker
What needs to happen is that those barriers that are keeping more kids out need to be lowered for every kid.
00:57:11
Speaker
So there's a real equity challenge here too in a lot of ways.
00:57:17
Speaker
And what we really want to do is give every child, because we've all been to college on this summit right now.
00:57:25
Speaker
We've all been there.
00:57:26
Speaker
And college is largely what you put into it.
00:57:29
Speaker
So if I went to a SUNY school, the New York State public colleges, and I decided I was going to be the kind of student who really gave it my all and kind of went in and got the extra help and took more classes than I needed to, then I'm going to get a lot out of my degree.
00:57:49
Speaker
Or I could have been the kind of person who did just enough to get by.
00:57:53
Speaker
And at the end of the day, I don't know how many of my employers actually looked at my degree to see that I graduated with honors or what the specific, I mean, I did that for me because I'm a nerd and I'm happy.
00:58:06
Speaker
Like, I just want to take it all in.
00:58:08
Speaker
And I've always been like that.
00:58:11
Speaker
But at the same time, it doesn't make you any less marketable if you graduated from a different place and didn't get, you know, all A's.
00:58:22
Speaker
And for the record, schools like Harvard don't even grade once you get in there.
00:58:26
Speaker
I don't think it's pass fail now.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:29
Speaker
I mean, this kind of stuff riles me up and I won't take too much time here.
00:58:32
Speaker
I'll get to like two more questions here, but there's something to be said about the fact that college students are more and more purposeless.
00:58:39
Speaker
And what the hell was the point of going to college and meeting all of these test scores if you actually don't care about the things that you're doing?
00:58:46
Speaker
That's like a excellent sheet by William Dureshowitz, which is that concept of, yeah, you got all A's on everything.
00:58:52
Speaker
Yeah, you met all the benchmarks, but you don't actually care about what you're doing.
00:58:55
Speaker
And you don't know anything either because 15 minutes after you took the test, you just made space for the next useless information that you needed for the next test.
00:59:05
Speaker
Horrible.
00:59:06
Speaker
So let's dive into, we got two more really quick.
00:59:09
Speaker
I'll try to make these super short.
00:59:11
Speaker
So first we have Jeff Wells who writes that his students tend to be very myopic about only applying to big universities in Ontario.
00:59:19
Speaker
And there's a deeper mindset that has to change surrounding that.
00:59:23
Speaker
So do you have any thoughts on how we can change
00:59:25
Speaker
student, parent, you know, culturally, the mindset that the big universities are all that really matters.
00:59:31
Speaker
exposure.
00:59:32
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if you have the opportunity to take kids on trips to different places and not just in the year they're applying, maybe years before, start bringing them as soon as they get into that.
00:59:46
Speaker
I know in Canada, they have like the academic sort of track that happens and they start to segregate the kids by ninth grade, I think.
00:59:56
Speaker
Correct me if I'm wrong.
00:59:58
Speaker
So, you know, at that point, I would start exposing them, making it a point to bring them to symposiums on college campuses that they have, you know, let them take college visits, talk to college students, visit with college advisors.
01:00:13
Speaker
If you can't get them to those other places, bring guest speakers in from those colleges to talk about them and give presentations on it so that they have the opportunity to have that exposure and a little bit more understanding about
01:00:28
Speaker
the differences and what the benefits might be to be in a smaller space and having that more individualized sort of attention than they'd get in one of those larger institutions.
01:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, and just the choice that's out there.
01:00:41
Speaker
Like, I wish I would have known then what I know now about schools and that fact that there are all these schools pretty much everywhere that have really cool progressive settings that are just way more focused on things that you want to do as opposed to what they want to do.
01:00:56
Speaker
And typically, that isn't the large state school.
01:00:58
Speaker
No offense to OSU, but my undergrad was really boring.
01:01:02
Speaker
I mean, all I ever did was just go to lectures and answer questions.
01:01:05
Speaker
But if I would have gone an hour west to like Antioch, anyone familiar with Antioch, that's a hyper progressive school.
01:01:12
Speaker
But all they do is just go on trips and they talk about stuff and they have everything's hands on.
01:01:18
Speaker
It's all gradeless.
01:01:19
Speaker
Just how much different that experience would have been for roughly the same amount of money once you factor in the fact that private schools tend to give more scholarships, especially for those that have portfolios.
01:01:30
Speaker
A lot of progressive schools grade based on portfolios or assessed based on portfolios.
01:01:34
Speaker
Um, so lastly here, uh, to wrap things up one more thing, which is from Nick Covington.
01:01:42
Speaker
So Nick, you're on.
01:01:45
Speaker
Okay.
01:01:47
Speaker
Hey, how's it going, Star?
01:01:48
Speaker
It's going great, thanks.
01:01:49
Speaker
Great.
01:01:50
Speaker
So I was just thinking about this earlier in the chat.
01:01:52
Speaker
We were talking about AP testing and Eric brought up that question.
01:01:57
Speaker
I thought your response was great.
01:01:59
Speaker
And maybe it hasn't been a topic that has come up so far, but I've really seen it in my own gradeless practice.
01:02:04
Speaker
But how would you maybe characterize that issue of student anxiety,
Reducing Student Anxiety and Emphasizing Dignity
01:02:08
Speaker
right?
01:02:08
Speaker
And kind of their anxiety about school, their anxiety about maybe AP testing and those kinds of things.
01:02:14
Speaker
Because I know I could speak to that on my end.
01:02:16
Speaker
I've talked to Chris about that too.
01:02:18
Speaker
But how would you characterize students' attitudes?
01:02:23
Speaker
And what have you seen happen to anxiety in your classroom since you've made these changes?
01:02:27
Speaker
Thank you.
01:02:28
Speaker
So you know that when you're working with kids who are in that honors track, AP kids, you're dealing with the most anxious.
01:02:36
Speaker
And their grades matter so much to them.
01:02:38
Speaker
So for me in my school, I spent a lot of time breaking rules.
01:02:43
Speaker
breaking that expectation that an A is what defines them as a learner.
01:02:48
Speaker
It was more about their experience, more about that deep understanding.
01:02:52
Speaker
And I had a lot of super anxious kids.
01:02:55
Speaker
And to be honest with you, I have a son who's in ninth grade who is also very anxious and a high achiever.
01:03:01
Speaker
And he goes to a very traditional school.
01:03:03
Speaker
I'm not sure if you guys saw my most recent rant on Twitter over what is going on in my son's school and me being a parent about
01:03:13
Speaker
It's so hard for me to sit on my dissatisfaction of how they are educating my child that I can forward to send him to a private school that does like it.
01:03:25
Speaker
I feel like progressive schools shouldn't only be private schools that cost $30,000 a year extra so that your kid could get exactly what they need.
01:03:35
Speaker
And my son's been anxious probably since the fourth grade.
01:03:39
Speaker
They start testing in New York in third grade, so there's no small correlation there that his anxiety about learning happens a year after he started taking the tests.
01:03:52
Speaker
and there was such a huge push for him to be filling out packets, and he did well on all of them.
01:03:59
Speaker
He was rating fours on all of them, but by fifth grade, we stopped making him take it because the amount of pushback we were getting at home was just miserable, and I think that when you take away grades and you take away competition in the classroom and you make it a collaborative, cooperative effort,
01:04:17
Speaker
That anxiety drastically decreases, especially when you remind kids that doing that deep level work is far more engaging and it works better.
01:04:31
Speaker
So at the end of the day, if we have to put a grade on the report card, they're gonna be contributing to that conversation.
01:04:36
Speaker
And as long as they are doing the learning every single day, they don't have to worry about the work on the back end.
01:04:45
Speaker
And in terms of the AP exams, you know, I kind of always had conversations with my students about how these exams, kind of what you were saying before, Chris, like to soften the blow, but these exams don't define their intelligence in any way, shape or form.
01:05:03
Speaker
Teachers aren't writing those tests.
01:05:06
Speaker
outsider parties who have determined what's important are and they don't always share that information with us and if it was all about getting a five on the AP exam we do nothing fun in this class all year long because all you would be doing is reading you know the worst excerpts of Jonathan Swift and you would be answering questions about syntax that nobody cares about
01:05:33
Speaker
ever, even if you love Jonathan Swift, and I do, but it never seems to do it justice.
01:05:42
Speaker
So I think we have to think about the social emotional aspect of everything that we do and giving
01:05:49
Speaker
Taking the grades out of the equation, I think, really does treat kids with dignity and it creates an opportunity for kids to really feel like we value their voice and not just what they're going to get as a defining point, if that makes any sense.
01:06:04
Speaker
Well, yeah, for sure.
01:06:05
Speaker
I mean, at the end of the day, if you're killing the student's motivation to learn, it doesn't matter what you're covering.
01:06:11
Speaker
You could be covering whatever you want, but if they're not motivated, then none of that is going to get communicated regardless.
01:06:17
Speaker
So the focus should be on motivation and interest first, content second.
01:06:21
Speaker
The content will automatically come as students motivated and interested in it.
01:06:25
Speaker
So it all just adds up.
01:06:27
Speaker
So Star, thank you again for joining us, giving up your time.
01:06:32
Speaker
I think this has been really beneficial.
01:06:34
Speaker
I've enjoyed the conversation.
01:06:36
Speaker
If anyone wants to send a message, HRP is always open to messages via Twitter or wherever you can find us on our website.
01:06:44
Speaker
And I think this has gone really well.
01:06:46
Speaker
A recording will be made available on our YouTube page here in a bit, as well as via our podcast podcast.
01:06:53
Speaker
which links will go up on across all of our different social media pages.
01:06:57
Speaker
And feel free to ask any follow-up questions as you see fit.
01:07:00
Speaker
So yeah, thanks again.
01:07:02
Speaker
Thanks.
01:07:02
Speaker
And if you guys ever have questions for me or you're starting this crazy process and you haven't checked out hacking assessment, there's lots of free stuff on my blog.
01:07:13
Speaker
If you don't want to buy a book, that's totally cool too.
01:07:16
Speaker
And I'm always open to open.
01:07:18
Speaker
Like if you ask me a question on Twitter, I'm pretty good about getting back to folks.
01:07:23
Speaker
So just reach out.
01:07:25
Speaker
Cool.
01:07:27
Speaker
Awesome folks.
01:07:28
Speaker
Thanks again for joining us and we'll talk again soon.