Thesis Writing Exercises

My colleagues in the science and math departments have increasingly used small white boards in their classrooms as a way for students to do quick problem-solving in groups. Talking with them about this inspired me to consider how to use small, portable white boards in my own classroom for writing exercises, and now I do not think I could have a classroom without them again.

I have used the white boards mostly in my AP World History class as a way to practice writing thesis statements. First, students are put into groups and then given a sheet of paper with twenty to thirty pieces of evidence about one or two civilizations that we are studying (not all the evidence may be relevant; I want them to practice sifting through data). Then they are given a question and must use the evidence in front of them to create a thesis statement. When completed we line the boards at the front of the class and read each of them over, giving constructive criticism and praise where appropriate. This has allowed me to easily point out strengths in theses (such as using appropriate transition words and precise verbs) and to allow the students to quickly dissect what makes for a weaker thesis. One of my colleagues gave me the idea of calling such an exercise the "Thesis Olympics". 

Giving students the same pieces of evidence lets them easily gauge the differences between arguments since they can immediately see the various results from the same set of evidence, but I have also given them different pieces of evidence so that they can reflect on how important it is to articulate an idea well when you cannot assume your audience knows exactly to what you may be referring. For example, below are photos from a recent exercise we did concerning the trade of commodities in world history. Each group was given a packet of primary sources regarding a different commodity (chocolate, salt, fur, and rice) and then had to come up with a thesis answering this question: "How should we understand the role of your commodity in world history?" Considering that the other groups had not read the other sources, we had a good discussion assessing how well the theses articulated an answer. I also posted photos of all the boards from both of my AP sections so the students could review all 8 theses later in their own time. Here are two examples of theses below in their original form.

The white boards have also been great for review games - my favorite so far has been using them as a way for students to compete in Pictionary. Each team selects a member to leave the room and then they all must draw one or separate concept/figures in world history within a time limit. Then the team member returns to the room and the first to successfully figure out the drawing wins a point. They get an extra point if they can also explain the significance of the concept/figure in world history. Here is a fun photo of my students playing this game, with the team members trying to analyze the drawings while their team mates squirm in their seats, pace around the room, and stand in anticipation, waiting for them to figure it out.

Lastly, my freshmen often struggle to synthesize information, so the white boards have been a great way for them to quickly get into groups and try to summarize a complex idea in a paragraph together.

Technology in Class

I am initially hesitant to incorporate technology into my classroom just because I am wary of network reliability and the ease of use of some software, so I am excited to share the three ways in which technology has been beneficial in my AP World History class this year.

• Google Docs - An Upgrade from Moodle: My students at the start of the year were required to upload, via Moodle, their answers to 6 questions from their weekly assigned textbook reading before we discussed the content of the unit. The upside to this was that class time was fairly productive since they came in with background knowledge. The downside was that it meant a lot of grading on my part with every student turning in individual answers (total: 186 short essays to grade per week), and Moodle doesn't make it easy to provide feedback without downloading and reuploading documents, so I would ask students to see me one-on-one if they had questions about their grade. A recent professional development workshop, however, made me consider how to make this process a little more streamlined. 
• Every one of my students received a Google Drive account through my school, and through that account students are now required to send me their weekly answers via a shared document. 
• I have given them the option of working alone or with up to 2 other students, and they really like this idea because it means they can cooperate with friends even in another class section and divide up the work. 
• Ultimately, however, I want to make the 'collaboration' component more of a requirement, because right now they seem to be mostly just splitting up the work rather than peer-editing. 
• Nonetheless, and despite a few technical kinks that our IT department is working through, this has made grading the documents a lot easier as well, so it's been a success.

• Flipped Classroom: With our shortened school calendar putting more pressure on the pace of my AP class this year, I decided I needed to try a flipped classroom for one unit in order to minimize my lecturing and maximize the use class time as an opportunity to practice writing and applying content. So I spent a fair amount of one of my Saturdays trying to figure out what software would be most user-friendly and allow me to frame the material best.
• I first tried Voicethread, which a colleague of mine who is running an online course suggested. Voicethread is a great tool for generating discussions between classmates, and it is fairly user-friendly, but it did not serve my purposes since I was not interested so much in a forum tool as a lecture tool. But it is worth considering for future lesson ideas. 
• Another teacher suggested Camtasia, which is a software that makes it possible to audio record over a power point; the Camtasia record feature becomes part of the PowerPoint tool bar.  I may actually think about how to use this for future take-home assessments - my first thought is to make students responsible for narrating slides that we can then share - but for the purpose of a flipped classroom I wanted something that played more like a video and had a script.
• I ultimately ended up using Photostory, which is extremely easy-to-use. It gave me the chance to add voiceover narration, transitions, and music to slides of my choosing. The product is a lot like a Moviemaker video, but the ease of making a presentation with narration was great. Here's a 5-minute selection.

• Upside? My students were able to download it from our Moodle site and watch it outside of class, after which we did a few activities in class that gave them a chance to practice using evidence to write thesis statements. Many of the students said they found the video helpful, so it is something I would consider doing again in the future, especially since Photostory made it relatively easy.
• Downside? Putting together a script and choosing the right slide images took probably a good 4 hours for a 20-minute video. But it is something I can use potentially in the future again, so in the long-term it is an investment.

• Popplet: Since I felt like my AP class was having to rush through our 600-1450 CE unit, I wanted to create a project for students that would encourage them to organize the material in a way that incorporates the habits of mind required to analyze primary sources and consider continuities and changes over time. But I also wanted the project to allow them to share the results of their work with each other for future review. As I weighed my options, I came across this and this post by Indiana Jen, both of which give very useful advice for tech resources in the classroom. 
• I thought about creating a Google site for our class through which we could all edit and share items with our Google drive accounts, but the set-up for the various pages was more complicated than I expected (although I would consider creating a site over the summer to bypass Moodle in the future). In the end I decided to use Popplet, which is free and very user-friendly. Below is the assignment and grading rubric.

• The students had two days in class to work on this, and the results were very well-done, I think. I was very glad that the project allowed students to consider what it means to organize information, and I was particularly pleased by how many of them found primary and secondary sources that were not in the textbook. Indeed this allowed us to have good discussions about what criteria makes a source "reliable". Here are two Popplets that my students put together. 
• http://popplet.com/app/#/656107 
• http://popplet.com/app/#/656081
• In the end the majority of students said they enjoyed using the site and would visit their peers' Popplets, but they would like the choice of working alone or in a group. So I may consider this again when we review other units in the future.

Ultimately I am really enjoying these tools in the classroom, and while I was surprised by how some of my students were reluctant to try these items out because they prefer pencil and paper, in the end even they were somewhat converted to the benefits of these methods. The drawback I could foresee in using all of these many resources on the internet, however, is the amount of log-in names and passwords the students would have to keep track of. This is why I want to utilize our Google drive a little more frequently, so we can share items all in one place; I hope to get some more ideas in the future with regard to that.

Reassessment Survey

In my last post I said that I planned to give my freshmen a short survey to see how well they understood my SBG and to ask why they don't make reassessment or tracking their academic progress more of a priority. I made the survey in my Google docs account and sent it to them as a link; 15 out of 18 of them responded and their results were anonymous. Here are the results:

My conclusions from this survey are colored below.

The good news? Those who reassessed unanimously thought that that reassessing was helpful in meeting the standards. That is reassuring. 

The feedback from the students who didn't reassess at all was also interesting.

• One student said he/she didn't understand it and simply doesn't want to

• Another thought it wouldn't help, but this term plans to use their planner to remind themselves to do it
• The others said that they would consider doing it, but it would happen only if they had time and they thought their grades needed improving

Hence a little more than half of my kids are committed to doing better (which is majority, at least), and the rest are basically not motivated to make this a priority. Over Christmas break I plan to consider how to make reassessments an integrated part of class rather than something they do only if it's a priority. For example, I may try something a colleague of mine here did, which was to make reassessment actually homework for students toward the end of the term. That would be a great way to get them to review too if I was creative with crafting a reassessment that would force them to synthesize material from multiple units.

Furthermore, to help those students who struggle to make time for reassessing, this term I decided to ask all of my students to email me instead of make an appointment in order to receive the reassessment. With this new system, I am forced to write down my reassessments (making my own record-keeping more effective) and they have to set a deadline for themselves as to when they will have the reassessment ready for handing in, and I will hold them to that deadline. So far I have already had about a quarter of my class email for the reassessment of a recent unit goal assignment, and about another quarter have told me in person they plan to email me, but they haven't done so yet. This makes me conclude that many would reassess if they had better time management, but so far I'm fairly pleased with these results if at least 50% of my students are already finding this system helpful and the others are aware that it could be helpful.

Final thought: parents are excited about this system when I meet with them during conferences, and for students who are doing poorly, the parents are much more willing to put the onus on their child to do better when they hear that the student is not taking advantage of reassessment opportunities. So it's been nice for me to also watch parents redirect the conversation to how their child can take the initiative to improve instead of having their hands held.

SBG 4: End of term

We had a professional development day at my school recently and I, along with my friend in the math department, was asked by the administration to share with the faculty how we have used Standards Based Grading in our classes. It can be nerve-wracking to speak to your colleagues about what you are doing in class, but I was happy that our presentation was well-received, and I honestly hope this will give me the chance to speak with other humanities teachers about how to refine and improve my system. Preparing for our presentation was a wonderful opportunity not only to reflect on how SBG has been going in my class, but also to talk to the other teachers who are using it this year, and thus I want to share some of the conclusions I've reached.

WHAT'S WORKING

(Some) Students are taking it seriously: Looking over my statistics, almost half of my entire freshmen class has come in at least once for reassessment on the unit goal standards, and I can think of two students in particular who've found the opportunity for improvement to be empowering.

I'm getting usable data: In calculating the final grades, I can see how my students are doing individually on standards and how they are doing as a whole with skills and content. So, for example, I have one student who is really struggling with the 'Using Evidence' standards, but not so much with the 'Writing' standards (i.e. they can articulate themselves, but often fail to answer questions). Another example is that I can see that over the course of the term students are getting better at trying to bring evidence into their writing, but they haven't improved much in terms of organizing their writing. I'm excited by this since previously I may have had some intuition that these were trends for my classes, but now I actually have some quantifiable data.

My own lesson planning is getting better: See my last post. Long story short, having these unit goal standards has really forced me to backwards plan smarter. I have also decided to give the questions at the end of the unit rather than at the start, because when I gave them at the start we never really referred to them again until I assigned them (granted, I could do better with that), and students would forget to leave room for answering them in their interactive notebook, which also made their notebooks less organized.

WHAT STILL NEEDS SOME WORK

Converting to percentage grades: Essentially I have converted my standards scale to the 4.0 scale, so that a '3' equates to 85%. Some of my other colleagues, however, have decided that a '3' is equivalent to 75%, which forces me to consider what it really means to 'master', 'succeed', 'develop', and 'begin' a standard. I've had some interesting conversations about this. First, one math teacher who has '3' equal a 'C' in her conversion argued that the area in which there should be more nuance is between students 'succeeding' and others 'mastering' a standard, and thus she has added a 3.5 to her standard scale. Furthermore, the best argument against my scale is that as it stands, it allows a student with mostly 1s and 2s to pass my course (as a beginning/developer) with a low 'C'. Nonetheless I think I will stick to my standard scale at the moment. I think that in assessing kids in their argumentative writing, there is a need to have more gradation between students who are really struggling with even understanding a concept (e.g. bringing in evidence) and thus get a 1, versus those who may get it conceptually but can't apply it - say a '2' performer. Thus there are fine gradations at the lower end of the spectrum. Which brings me to my next point...

Can I create a rubric for my standards?: What does it mean to support an argument with evidence? How can you quantify the difference between a student who brings in persuasive evidence well, versus one that does it weakly? In other words, I need to try to fine-tune the differences between a 4, 3, 2, 1. I think that would help me solidify my thoughts about my first point above; hopefully I can research this on the internet to see how some other schools set up their standards.

I need more modeling: The majority of my freshmen have never been asked to write critically, so for a while my standards really meant nothing to them because they had never really seen good writing in English. It was not until students who came to talk to me about their writing one-on-one began to write much better essays that I had models which to show the poorer performing students, and that has been a bit of a game-changer. We read the model essays together and discussed what made it strong: using transition words; having a logic and a flow to ideas; being selective about what they brought in as evidence. All of this became much more evident to all my students when they saw a peer could manage it. My goal next term, when we have more time in class compared to the wacky calendar we had this term, is to model more writing in class together. I have small white boards that I have used to have them draft paragraph summaries and arguments - hopefully we'll get a chance to do that more often together to see that writing is a process.

Reassessment ideas: For the students who have come in for reassessment, I have given them the opportunity to redo their unit goal questions using a creative writing format. In particular, I have asked them to write a dialogue for me. This has been successful because it forces them to think about how a conversation flows, and thus how that should even work when writing more formally. How do you anticipate a reader's thought? How do you connect ideas? It's also inherently Socratic, and so while I like this reassessment, I want more ideas. I have thought about students doing a multimedia project for me (a video/documentary) or writing me a letter or filming themselves teaching a friend, but I would love more ideas. I also know it would be best if students could come up with their reassessment projects, but frankly many of my freshmen are not at a point where they fully understand the full range of what it means to 'assess'...they were so used to being spoon-fed at their previous schools that at this point they need coaching to stimulate their creativity. But any ideas would be wonderful!

Surveying the students: I plan to give my freshmen a quick survey at the start of the next term to see how well they feel they understand SBG and to ask why they don't make reassessment or tracking their progress more of a priority. I think I can guess at their answers (e.g. lost gradebook password; struggling to organize all obligations) but I hope it'll just be one more way in which I can include reassessment as a part of my daily lesson plan.

Using it in AP: I had a couple of AP teachers ask how I would use SBG in my AP class, and my instinct was to reply that it should actually be easier since the College Board provides a lot of standards for us already. It also made me think using SBG would be ideal for my AP class because this year I found that many of my AP students are perfectionists, and they were incredibly panicked before our final exam this term. It was clear that the pressure they were putting on themselves came out of a fear of not doing well on this exam because it would hurt their grade, and it was draining for me to play the psychiatrist for a week to get them to calm down. Using SBG could really help alleviate the test anxiety because it teaches them that making mistakes is a part of the learning process - it's not something to be aggressively avoided. I want to turn that into a mantra! And I would hope that someday, if we can get a consistent SBG system in place, students at our school would find themselves understanding how they learn, and to target their weaknesses, so that when they go to college they won't have such test anxiety. And while I understand colleges won't have reassessments or SBG, I do believe it will foster habits (particularly in reflecting on objectives and weaknesses) that will help the student be an independent learner so they can feel better prepared for summative assessments. 

SBG 3: Reflection Time

We're in week five at my school and so this weekend I spent some time reflecting on how things are going in my freshmen world history class. It was a good time to do this because they had just completed their first summative assessment and we had spent time discussing their progress reports; plus I had just graded their first unit essential question answers.

I'll start by saying that even though it took a good half hour to discuss their progress reports, it was time well-spent because it gave them a chance to think about the process of learning, and how that was more important than thinking about the final product (i.e. a grade). For the discussion I had printed a progress report for each student and then we went over each component using a fake Justin Bieber sample as a comparison (see below). 

I explained that their overall grade was not shown because I wanted to emphasize that the skills and unit goal parts of their grade are still in flux, which meant their overall grade is in flux. Yet if I had to give a converted grade, then their 'beginning', 'developing', 'succeeds', and 'excels' standard grades would equate roughly to 'D', 'C', 'B', and 'A' percentages (respectively) for the standards portion of their grade. I'm happy to say that they responded pretty well to this discussion and there weren't any frustrated or confused remarks.

Nonetheless after grading their answers to the first unit essential questions, I was disappointed by their responses. They had done so well on the summative assessment, so what went wrong here? They tried to 'include evidence', as I had talked about in class, but they really struggled to answer the questions. It was basically clear they didn't understand my questions.

So it dawned on me that our constant conversations about standards were making them comfortable with the idea of learning, but that they are still struggling with understanding what they need to learn. For instance, what does it mean when I ask for them to include evidence? How do they connect primary sources we discussed to the objectives of the unit? What became troubling to me was the fact that I don't think my essential questions as I articulated them for the kids were actually all that good for this first unit. And it's important I clarify that difference: the questions themselves weren't poor, but the articulation was. After all, they had done well on the summative assessment, but it also occurred to me that the questions on that test were very different kinds of questions than those I had given as essential questions.

So I spent some time on Skype last night with one of the best teachers out there, my friend Gary. It was an invigorating conversation and he gave so much good advice that I filled up three big notecards with ideas (both front and back I might add!). Firstly, he convinced me not to beat myself up for perhaps having less than optimal essential questions at the start. Just as I was asking my students to reassess their own writing and skills, I had to reassess my own framing of units. We also had a great conversation about the type of questions I should be asking my kids. Really I should center much of my content around debate questions and have my kids learn how to articulate the criteria with which they reach judgment. So, for example, instead of asking 'Why is Socrates important', a better question would be 'Is Socrates important?' This seems rather obvious in some ways because in history, after all, we are teaching kids how to be persuasive, and while on summative assessments I am great about asking more debate-type questions to get them to apply what they know, nonetheless I may be more 'conclusions' based in my backwards planning than might be optimal. In other words, I think about what students should know about a time and place, when really I should be thinking about how my students should wonder about those time and places.

What is also fantastic about Gary's advice for structuring my essential questions around 'defend or argue against' type verbs is that it gives me more options for reassessments as well. It encourages a type of creative thinking from both myself and my students that makes the class much more collaborative than having me hand down pronouncements for what they should know. I also thought Gary's observations were so insightful because as my department head once said, part of the reason why students have a hard time finding relevance for a history class is because they don't have enough baggage themselves at their age to understand how the past can be important, so questions in which students are forced to confront ethical or philosophical questions by using historical and even their own experience will give the material so much more meaning.

Hence I will spend some time rethinking my essential questions, which in turn will help me rethink the way I craft my lessons. I will admit, with head bowed, that my classes have always proved successful in the past, so in my own arrogance I was a little concerned at the start of my reflection that this whole standards thing was somehow ruining my mojo. But as I thought more about it and talked with Gary, it has instead become fulfilling to realize that although at first I was a little frustrated that my students did so poorly on their first unit standards, it also helped me come to a pedagogical epiphany about what would better frame the content. So yes, as Gary said, it is worth embracing this first foray into standards because it will only improve & strengthen the way I craft the curriculum, and I am excited to continue to update this blog with how it all goes.

Lastly, if anything my conversation with Gary only continues to solidify my belief that collaborating and working with other teachers is the best resource for any teacher. The advice, encouragement, and empathy of other teachers has made this profession all the more meaningful, and I will always be grateful for those moments of discussion.

SBG 2: Online reports

Last year I started to use Easy Grade Pro as my electronic gradebook, and part of the reason I chose Easy Grade Pro is because it allows me to easily upload a progress report to my school's network that my students can access anytime they are on campus and thus get a real-time view of their grade. This successfully helped prevent surprises about missing work and low grades - most students made use of the online report, and even for those who didn't, I could explain to their parents how accessible my gradebook is.

Yet this year the SBG component has made this process a bit more complicated for my freshmen class. I'm not the first to run into a conundrum with releasing frequent progress reports (see here); the SBG inherently disapproves of the idea of focusing on results, but instead emphasizes process, so telling a student that they can always find their cumulative grade in a class that wants to promote formative learning is somewhat counter-intuitive. So I've spent the last few days playing around with Easy Grade Pro and trying to decide what would be the best way to show students their progress.

Ideally I would like for them to have access to a graph that would show them how they are doing on standards. I tried a quick draft in Excel and it came out something like this:

The top graph shows their abilities in using evidence, and the bottom in writing skills. In this way of visualizing the student's process, for example, it's easy to spot that he/she improved in standard ES 2.3. My freshmen could easily keep track of their standards in such a way, but Easy Grade Pro does not make for internet reports that are graphic. So this isn't really an option unless I want to make a separate report card through Excel instead, but I am not sure how I would securely get such a report on the network for my students, and I haven't spent enough time considering Excel as my ultimate Gradebook.

Fortunately Easy Grade Pro does allow for showing the proficiency on each standard per assignment, so this is a snapshot of ultimately what my students would see:

The only slight problem is that this report shows a 'cumulative' standard grade (see "Succeeds" for ES 1.3), which is really an average of all of the scores per standard. I think this is ok for the purposes of progress reports, since the students should understand that their standards grades are meant to be in flux until the end of the term, but at the end I will have to calculate their final grade differently because I plan to weigh the scores at the end of a term more heavily than those at the start of the term (i.e. I'm not averaging the scores).

I have also decided that I will not show their current overall grade on this progress report - really the purpose of this online report will be for students to examine closely where they are 'beginning', 'developing', 'succeeding', and 'mastering' in the Essential Skills standards, and where they need to reassess for the Unit Goals standards. 

I will also take some time at the mid-term to have them reflect on their own progress - they'll get a physical copy of their standards scores and complete a reflection something like given here. The point of SBG is to get students to reflect on their learning process, so I want my online gradebook to show the least number of final results as possible, while still giving them a good idea of what assignments they are missing and what skills/content material they need to focus on. 

The first day of class: not too shabby

First confession: I was a little nervous today in anticipation of introducing the standards based grading system to my freshmen. I had written a concise but informative description of how I planned to implement the system in my syllabus, but I also decided I wasn't going to introduce it by just reading the syllabus together. That just would have been too wordy and boring. So instead I told them they could read all the details in the syllabus (indeed their first assignment is to sign a mutual agreement of expectations that I also signed and that their parents need to sign), but that I would explain the system using visuals and we'd have a discussion.

Second confession: I cribbed *a lot* from my friend Bowman to introduce the concept of standards based grading to my freshmen - in particular, he came up with a wonderful analogy between SBG and the game Angry Birds. So I will also give him all the credit for just how well they responded to the explanation. It was actually kind of thrill to see their positive reactions. 

First, it was obvious that they really welcomed the idea of having it be made very clear on every homework what they could work on and what skills they were required to master. I thought they'd be intimidated by it all, but instead they were really receptive. In fact, some of them almost anticipated some of my visuals with their questions. I think showing them a sample homework and explaining how it would work really helped (see sample homework image below).

Second, they clearly loved the idea that they could fix their knowledge of content with my unit goals component. I'll be interested to see which students end up actually pro-active about it, but at least today they made it clear that they understood they could be rewarded for improvement as well has penalized for not being pro-active about understanding the skills and content necessary for the course.

So we'll see how it goes, but third confession: I'm quite relieved that introducing my grading system was not as painful as I feared. In fact it only took about 15 minutes total with their questions and my visuals. 

I'll also say that while they didn't seem immediately sold on the concept of having a notebook solely devoted to my class, and the idea that we'd be gluing handouts in it, they clearly perked up at the idea of designing the cover of their portfolio. I had already decorated a cover for my portfolio and so I showed them mine and challenged them to make theirs look better because I'm a terrible artist. We'll see what they come up with next week!