Busted! By my principal! Right is Right.

I was at a meeting of new staff and interns and as we wrapped up the meeting our principal asked us to go over the Common Principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools.  No one was familiar enough to come up with more than one and she was clearly disappointed.  I have been studying the principles since then.  The seventh principle stresses the value of “unanxious anticipation” which is described as an attitude of “I won’t threaten you, but I expect much of you.”  This principle resonated with my interpretation of the “Right is Right” technique in Teach Like a Champion.  “Right is Right” says to “Set and defend a high standard of correctness in your classroom.”  Teach Like a Champion goes on to say:

In holding out for right, you set the expectation that the questions you ask and their answers truly matter. You show that you believe your students are capable of getting answers as right as students anywhere else. You show the difference between the facile and the scholarly. This faith in the quality of a right answer sends a powerful message to your students that will guide them long after they have left your classroom.

In other words you are fulfilling the seventh Common Principle and saying “ I expect much of you.”

Baby steps toward getting students to answer questions.

I have mentioned this before but I am still caught up in the problem of asking all students questions.  At the start of the school year we had students write “letters of introduction” and in several of these letters students requested that they not be called on.  I was willing to honor this request, especially if the student was doing well in the class.  This has proved untenable, the forces around me have pushed me to call on students randomly and comprehensively so I was looking for strategies to accomplish this.  My cooperating teacher does call on students randomly, and if they struggle he is quick to say: “I didn’t want to put you on the spot, it’s OK if you don’t know.” He then will move on to another student.  I like the honesty and transparency of this approach.  In Teach Like a Champion the “No Opt Out” strategy adds a sweet detail that could be added to the reassuring statement my CT uses.  When a student does not answer a question, for any reason, you can turn to another student and (hopefully) get an answer.  You then turn back to the original student and again ask the question.  Of course they can simply repeat the correct answer but this approach allows the student to “rehearse” success and lays the groundwork for the student to eventually entertain questions and produce appropriate answers.  I am going to implement this in my lessons from now on.

Addendum to High Leverage Teaching Move 3, Use of Vocabulary.

When the Seattle School District describes “Use of Vocabulary” two terms are defined: “Content Terms” and “Process Terms”.  I struggled to explain how these two terms are related and yet different.  It turns out that a quote by Poincare clarified the difference for me.  Poincare said: “Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” Content terms are like stones to a house, and are often offered as facts in the classroom.  Facts are important but students whose heads are just filled with facts are not what we are after.  We want Content to lead to Process; we want students to know how to arrange the stones to build the house.  In mathematics we want students to become mathematically literate.  It is difficult for me to come up with Process Terms and all the vocabulary listed in the Seattle School District pacing guide are Content Terms.  I looked to Polya’s “How To Solve It” for some Process Terms.  Polya lists many Process Terms in his book and he casts the Content vs. Process dichotomy into a description of Pedantry and Mastery when he writes:

            Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules.

            1. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry.  Some pedants are poor fools; they never did understand the rule which they apply so conscientiously and so indiscriminately.  Some pedants are quite successful; they understood their rule, and least in the beginning (before they became pedants), and chose a good one that fits in many cases and fails only occasionally.

 To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

            I think I’ve got it now.

Opps! I don’t know how to ask questions!

Yes I ask my students questions but apparently I do it wrong.  I try to engage the class through questioning but of course it is always the same minority that volunteers to answer my questions.  How do I engage everyone.  My questions don’t really elicit learning; they tend to be questions that have a pat answer (“what is 8 squared?”).  I actually avoid students who have requested that I not call on them (most of whom are doing well in the class).  I was at a Seattle School District seminar when I learned how woefully adequate my questioning was, on more counts than I have enumerated here.  So for now my solution is to check out the book “Quality Questioning” from the UW and see how I can improve my questioning skills.  More later.

Slowing down students who rush through worksheets.

When I hand out a worksheet which I want to work through step by step  I often have to cope with the majority of students just working their way through it as quickly as possible.  I lose control of the class and when I want to consider a detail on the sheet it can be like herding cats to get everyone to focus on that aspect of the worksheet.  A solution that another teacher uses is to remove specific numbers from the worksheet and simply feed numbers to the students as the problems come up.  Now I just have to effectively structure the time around which I now have the students’ attention.

First Class Blues

I had never realized that by being the first class a teacher teaches in a particular subject on a particular day is a handicap.  It certainly is for students I teach.  First period are my guinea pigs.   By my third run through a class I and the lesson are practiced and better.  How can this handicap be mitigated?  I had an idea for a solution which seemed fair.  What if you staggered your classes and at some point in October had your first class engage in some reasonable activity, different from the other two, that put them a day behind the pacing of the lessons?  This shouldn’t create more work: it is still three classes just out of order.  Now the first class of the day, third to receive the lesson, gets the benefits of all your mistakes you learned from in your other classes.  If you regularly inserted a single day’s activity that changed the order in which the classes received a given lesson all your classes would evenly experience the same handicap but would also benefit equally.

Assesment ah ha.

PPA 4D says: “The plan includes opportunities for students to engage in a variety of assessments that measure their performance relative to the learning targets”.  I was not sure how, other than an exit slip, to offer a variety of assessments.  One option that was offered to me included having students have small white boards at their desks so that I can ask a question, get them to write an answer and hold up the white boards for me to assess their understanding.  I am planning a trip to Home Depot to buy a special kind of melamine board to cut in pieces, tie markers to and launch the white board assessment adventure in our classroom.The irony is I was familiar idea I just hadn't considered it a form of assessment.