A Morning with Dr. Katz

This past Friday was a PD Day, and Dr. Steven Katz came to speak at my school about professional learning in order to improve student results. I've been in sort of a "funk", and I really was not looking forward to being "talked at" for an entire morning. I'm glad I went in with the mindset that I was going to make the most of my morning and take notes, because I felt motivated and challenged in a positive way by Dr. Katz.

Dr. Katz discussed how the path to improvement was "adding value to where you are". I felt this was powerful, because the message was hopeful. The goal isn't to go from okay to awesome, but rather, to make small improvements to eventually get to excellence. This also translates into the idea that "small wins have enormous power". Just as we should be celebrating the small successes of our students, we should celebrate the small successes in our own learning as teachers.

I also appreciated the message that "together is not always better" in terms of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). There are times where I am with my PLC, and we are being professional and a community, but learning isn't actually happening. This is probably because learning is the hardest part of a PLC. As Dr. Katz reminded us, cognitive dissonance is essential to new learning, and that is uncomfortable. The questions remain, how can PLCs be effective? How can PLCs be places where we have "focused learning conversations", not simply "great discussions"? I think one important factor is the necessity to check our egos and be vulnerable...two really difficult tasks. Another key to making PLCs successful, if I understand correctly, is to Plan, Act, Assess, and Reflect. I think we are working on the Plan and Act, but don't always see the Plan through to the end to what may be the most important part of the learning, Assessing and Reflecting.

Overall, the morning with Dr. Katz was worth my time, as I have new ideas to think about and I felt supported and challenged in my teaching.

Marking essays: One of my least favourite weekend activities

One of my least favourite aspects of teaching is marking, especially the evaluation of essays. It is often time-consuming (one class set can take at least five hours), and nothing seems to come of it, except a mark. It can be frustrating to take all of that time for students to continue to make the same errors again and again. One reason for this is that students simply don't review and think about the feedback given. I am attempting to cut down on the time it takes to evaluate essays, as well as make the feedback worthwhile for the students.

You can see the comments alongside the student's essay.
Notice that the comments aren't all "stock", but there are times
that individualized feedback is required.

With the goal of reducing my time spent marking, I developed a feedback document where I have compiled a list of the comments I find myself using frequently. I have organized them by areas of assessment for easier reference. As I evaluate a student's essay, I simply copy and paste the appropriate document into the commenting section of a student's submission.

There was one glaring negative I noticed about feedback: it is overwhelmingly critical. It is focused on things that students need to improve on. As a student, it would be really disappointing to see all of my hard work so critically looked at, even though the criticism is constructive. I need to be conscious of commenting on the positives of the student's work.

In addition to cutting down marking time, I want to ensure that students are actually reading and using the provided feedback. For the first essay, I dedicated approximately 40 minutes to returning essays. Students were provided with a sheet entitled "Next Steps to Improved Writing", developed by my colleague, Scott Jordan. Students were required to review my comments and highlight the areas (from Scott's handout) they needed to improve on for next time. This was great, because students actually had to go over the feedback and many took the opportunity to ask for clarification. For the upcoming essay, I will return each student's "Next Steps to Improved Writing", so that they can ensure they aren't making the same errors.

Overall, I am hopeful that as I become familiar with my own feedback document, time spent marking will be reduced. Additionally, I am hoping that by providing the necessary tools and time, the feedback will actually be used by students.

Thinking about what a good course looks like

At the end of last school year, I reread Grant Wiggins' post "Critically Examining What You Teach". His words resonate with me as I work on teaching a history course with a slightly new big idea and an English course I'm teaching for the first time. It also made me reflect on past courses that I have taught.

I think one of the struggles that I face(d) in teaching history is content coverage. There are so many people, places, and events that help create the story, and therefore, are valuable for students to learn. Wiggins forces me to think beyond just the "valued stuff", when he writes, "I am claiming that to be a valid course, there has to be more than just a list of valued stuff that we cover-even if that list seems valuable to me, the teacher." When I began teaching the Grade 10 history course, there was a list of "valued stuff" that had to be taught in each unit  for students to be able to write the final exam. About six years ago, the department struggled with deleting some of the "valuable stuff", because in light of big ideas and essential questions, the "stuff" was valuable, but not necessarily needed or useful for students to know in order to understand the big idea.

Wiggins also challenges the idea of using the textbook as the driving force for a course, as he notes, "the textbook does not know your personal or school priorities; the textbook does not know your students; the textbook doesn't identify any priorities or through lines that unite all the chapters, etc." Since I'm at a school that values big ideas and essential questions, a textbook can't know what our specific priorities are, nor what my students necessarily want to learn in order to understand. A textbook is a useful way to transmit knowledge, but as the teacher, I need to create questions that allow students to make meaning of the content they will consume. And the end goal isn't to simply consume content, but to use the content in meaningful ways.

Arguably the most valuable excerpt from Wiggins' article are the prompts below:

7 Prompts That Every Teacher Of A Well-Designed Course Should Be Able To Answer

Here are some simple prompts that a teacher who has really thought through the course as a course should be able to answer:

1. By the end of the year students should be able to…. and grasp that…
2. The course builds toward…
3. The recurring big ideas about which we will go into depth are…
4. The following chapters and sequence support my goal of…
5. Given my long-term priority goals, the assessments need to determine if students can…
6. Given my goals, the following activities need to build insight and incentive…
7. If I have been successful, students will be able to transfer their learning to… and avoid such common misconceptions and habits as…

Over a year ago, one of my department heads shared this with the department and asked us to think about it. I began completing it for ENG3U. The questions helped me get a clearer direction for myself, and I would benefit from carving out some time to go over the prompts for ENG3U again, as well as my other courses. I challenge everyone to consider these prompts when thinking about their courses.

Get over teaching content!

Characteristics of a model society,
as determined by students on the first day of the course.

I am currently teaching Grade 10 History for the ninth time in my short teaching career.  I have always struggled with teaching the third unit, which covers over three decades of Canadian history (1945-1982).  It is an area of Canadian history where my own knowledge lacked, and I used to focus too much on content coverage.  I needed to make sure the students knew all about the mega projects, the ins and outs of the Cold War, the minute details of the issues with Quebec, etc.  Over the years, I have realized that this is NOT an effective way to teach.  Just because I say it or because the students read it doesn't mean they have actually learned it.

I really have found the essential question for the unit (What is the perfect society for Canada?) to be helpful.  On the first day of the course (way back in February), the students and I brainstormed possible answers to all of the unit essential questions on chart paper.  I began Unit 3 by referring the students to what we came up with as characteristics of the model society and gave them a chance to add some new characteristics.

I did some direct teaching of the immediate postwar era and Louis St. Laurent's leadership.  We focused on key people, events, and issues that helped determine what Canadian society looked like during this time.  Afterwards, students got into small groups and were responsible for creating a slideshow about the final three Prime Ministers of the unit: Diefenbaker, Pearson and Trudeau.  The slideshow requirements are below.

I was very impressed with my students' work.  I did not directly teach any of them what any of the three

How I used to feel when teaching the post-war period.
(www.compendian.com)

prime ministers' visions were--they discovered the visions themselves.  They were able to sift through information and draw connections between what they found and a vision.  Additionally, students had the choice to focus on ideas and events that were of most interest to them.  Another positive was the small group feedback I was able to give the students.  I actually had the opportunity to talk to each student and discuss their learning.  No student was able to "hide".

Obviously, nothing is perfect.  There are certainly things I will change the next time I teach.  For example, many students skipped, or skimmed over, discussing French-English relations.  I'm not entirely sure how I will approach this omission.  My first thought was to directly teach the tenuous relationship during this time period.  Upon further refection, I could also add French-English relations specifically to the task outline.

I feel that this independent task prepared students to transfer their learning from the unit to the summative task.  When I reviewed the assignment, I was concerned because I had trouble seeing a connection between the assignment question ("what was the most dominant value in Canada during this time period?") and the unit essential question.  After listening to the students' slideshows, the summative assignment made complete sense.  It demands that students now synthesize the visions of the Prime Ministers during this time period and find an overall similarity and defend it.

Overall, I feel like this was the best job I have done teaching the post-war era, despite some concerns.  I am unfortunately not teaching CHC2D next year, but I really think that I can easily adapt this learning strategy for my CHC2P class.

Is it possible to make English class relevant?

One of the goals of our English department is to:

Make English class relevant to students' lives now.

This is a lofty, but I think, incredibly important goal.  Yesterday, I had a brief conversation with Susie, a colleague, regarding this goal.  I mentioned that I thought we had to ensure the texts we selected for students to read were relevant to their current lives.  She countered that it was the writing that had to be relevant.  This forced me to think about my original position and question the texts my students read.  How is The Kite Runner significant in the lives of students in mostly white, Canada-born Orangeville?  What about The Rez Sisters?  What possible connections can my teenage students make between their lives and the lives of middle-aged First Nations women living on a reserve?

In PLC today, Andrea, Scott, and I discussed this goal briefly, and now I am of the opinion that the writing is how we can make seemingly irrelevant texts relevant to our students' lives now.  Scott highlighted the fact that guilt is a driving force in The Kite Runner.  Perhaps the specific events and experiences of Amir aren't directly relevant to the lives of our students, but the concepts of guilt, or parental battles, or love, are in fact relevant to students.  We need to give them the opportunity to make these links.  Andrea pointed out that within The Kite Runner unit, we already encourage students to make connections via their defining moment speech.  This is a good point, and I think I am going to begin encouraging students to begin making and sharing personal meaning during our chapter seminars.

Now I think that many of the texts we study--even the Shakespeare we chopped from the course--can be relevant to our students, but as teachers, we need to encourage and welcome the personal connections via writing and speaking opportunities.

...but common assessment is foggy

I love how when some things, such as big ideas, become clearer, other ideas just become foggy.  Over the course of the semester, I have been doing some thinking about the drive for common assessments.  I always thought that common assessment meant that in all common courses all students do the exact same summative and culminating tasks.  This ensures that all students are meeting the same expectations and have similar experiences (despite having different teachers with different teaching styles).

At a recent staff meeting, I left with the message that common assessment didn't actually mean the EXACT same summative.  I breathed a sigh of relief, and I really hope that I didn't misinterpret the message.  What I

layoutsparks.com

understand common assessment to mean includes:

1. Teachers assess the same big ideas, enduring understandings, and essential questions.
2. Teachers assess the same skills.
3. Teachers have flexibility in designing their specific assignments, as well as the content they use, as long as they fulfill 1. and 2. above.  For example, tests can have different questions, essays can have different topics, English teachers can choose different texts.
4. The culminating task is the exact same TYPE of assessment, such as an interview or an exam, but the content used may be different.  For example, two different English teachers can use two different short stories, as long as their students are all writing an essay.

I'm really curious how others interpret "common assessment" and what it looks like in their schools and/or departments.

Big ideas are becoming clearer...

About this time last year, I wrote about big ideas in the history and English courses I was teaching.

I felt that in history the overall big idea was really vague, but that the enduring understandings of each unit were the driving forces.  Lisa Unger, one of my colleagues, has done a lot of thinking about the big idea for CHC2D1, and has come up with some important questions that connect the enduring understandings to the big idea.  This has been incredibly helpful for me.  The big idea for CHC2D1 is "The Canadian identity is shaped by its past."  Instead of focusing on content-driven questions, such as "how did Vimy Ridge shape Canada's identity?", the focus has moved to broader questions, such as "how has participation in overseas shaped Canada's identity?" Or "how have contributions to the war effort on the home front shaped the Canadian identity?"  This can also lead into a compare and contrast question, such as, "what has a greater effect on a nation's identity: the role overseas or the war at home?"

I feel that these types of questions move the focus from covering content to using content in a way to answer significant questions.  This makes the big idea flexible in that teachers (and students) can choose what areas of content to focus on, but it ensures that students leave the course learning how to answer the same questions, perhaps just a bit differently.

Additionally, in my post from last year, I was rather critical of the fourth big ideas in each of our English courses.  The first three, that are common to all courses, have a built in flexibility and are easily applicable to the study of English.  As I previously wrote, the fourth big idea can be rather "strangling" to quote a colleague.  For example, the fourth big idea for ENG3U1 focuses on understanding the world around us.  At this time last year, the big idea in the course seemed to always be a stretch for me to explicitly teach.  It felt forced and the connections weak.

This semester, in collaboration with Andrea, we have fleshed out three key ideas that tie all of our texts together: identity, struggle and relationships.  I think this clearer direction also brings to life the big idea.  By studying these key ideas, students naturally begin to better understand the world they live in.  They can begin to see the connections between the experiences of others and hopefully draw parallels to their own lives.

The process of creating big ideas, and the freedom to play with them and challenge them, allows teachers to truly see their role in designing meaningful (hopefully) experiences for students.