What Reality TV Can Teach Us About Assessment

Back before I finally pulled the plug on my cable TV, I was once a reality TV addict. My favorites were the competition shows, the ones that pitted ordinary people against one another in a weekly competition, eliminating one person at a time until a victor emerged. Today, while I was doing a bit of last-minute rubric analysis with my students to make sure they understood the writing expectations for next week's state assessment, it occurred to me how much I could learn about good instruction--and particularly assessment--from the television I used to watch so avidly.

Let's take Project Runway as an example. On this show, a crop of wannabe designers performed ridiculous weekly challenges in hopes that a celebrity panel of Heidi Klum and her team of fashionistas would deem their garments worthy of remaining "in" the competition for another week. While designers toiled in the workroom, Tim Gunn periodically popped in to monitor progress, dispense advice, ask questions, make faces, and provide helpful suggestions about how the judges might react to the hastily assembled products. When the time limit expired, the designers paraded their outfits in front of the judges who each offered feedback and candid opinions before making a final judgment and declaring one of the designers "out." Throughout all of this, the producers of the show provided viewers with snippets of interviews with the contestants discussing their progress or lack thereof.

This design-and-judge approach is not unlike what goes on in classrooms all over the world. Teachers present challenges to their students, allow the students to work on them to demonstrate mastery, and assess the final products according to a rubric. Too often, though, we leave Tim Gunn and the interview snippets out of the equation. We go from assignment to summative assessment without allowing for formative assessment and student feedback along the way. Then we are frustrated when the final products don't meet our expectations or are surprised at the number of students who didn't succeed. Educators can't forget that it's our duty to check in with our students periodically along the way so we can catch them before they veer too far off track and offer them guidance to get back on course. Without the wisdom of Tim Gunn, the designers on Project Runway would struggle unnecessarily with a tricky seam construction, get bogged down on an insignificant detail, and fail to manage their time adequately, resulting in an unsatisfactory, slapdash, or incomplete final product. The show's interview clips provide opportunities for the contestants to voice their own understandings of the task and their progress. Similarly, we should require students to talk about their understanding of the assignments in their own words, to summarize the elements of the rubric, and to reflect on the work they are doing as they are doing it rather than waiting to reflect on the final product only. By encouraging this metacognition and awareness of the task and expectations, teachers can help students guide their progress, focus on the most important elements, and produce the best results possible.

Another show I miss from my cable television days is The Worst Cooks in America. In this delightful series, a hapless and inept bunch of newbies, who have been nominated by their loved ones due to their lack of culinary skills, enter an industrial kitchen to be mentored by two celebrity chefs who each take a team of non-cooks and attempt to pass them off as trained professionals. Each week, the chefs-in-training learn a new technique--poaching an egg, filleting a fish, making a sauce--and, once they've supposedly mastered it, get to create a meal on their own to showcase their new skill. After the "learning" stage in which the chefs offer guidance in the kitchen, the competitors must complete the final task without supervision while the celebrity chefs cower nervously in the corner and pray that their proteges can perform without their assistance. The final meal is eaten and judged, and one sad loser says goodbye to the TV kitchen and goes home to inflict his or her under-appreciated cooking skills on the family.

The thing I love about thinking about this show in relationship to the classroom is that it emphasizes the importance of supervised practice on specific skills. The celebrity chefs don't just throw an unwieldy task at their trainees and hope it goes well. Instead, they demonstrate the week's focus technique, allow the cooks to practice it with guidance, provide feedback, and then step up the difficulty by asking them to apply their knowledge to a more challenging, complicated task. This is exactly what we should be doing as teachers. Instead of assigning an entire essay, project, or lab report and hoping the students can figure out all the individual components and put them together into a suitable final product, we should allow students to complete a portion of the assignment--or a sample portion of a similar assignment--and offer feedback before we ask them to combine multiple skills into a final masterpiece. An art teacher could ask his students to practice sketching, shading, and texturing in small assignments in a notebook before drawing a still life for a major-grade assessment. Writing students might learn how to develop thesis statements, write introductions, and incorporate research using correct citation in separate lessons before having to pull all those skills together into an entire essay. A PE teacher or coach drills her young athletes in dribbling, shooting, and blocking before putting them on the court to play a full game.

Throughout the year in my class, I've tried to apply these principles to help my students succeed in the various challenges I've placed before them. Recently, that's been true as I've worked to make sure they are prepared for the weirdness of the expository essay on next week's STAAR test. I've allowed them to explain the rubric in their own words. I've modeled effective word choice and revision and have allowed them to practice on their own and on others' writing. I've offered feedback along the way. We've dissected example essays. We've written thesis statements, brainstormed supporting anecdotes, blended sentences together with transitions, outlined, drafted, and assessed our work and the work of others.

Next week, you can find me cowering in the corner and praying that my students can successfully complete whatever challenge the STAAR test makers throw at them.







         

How We Do It All Day Long

At the end of the second of five class periods, the guest speaker turned to me with a look of exhaustion and asked, "How do you do this all day long?"

By the end of sixth period, she was, as they say, "phoning it in." A glazed expression in her eyes, she continued to click through her PowerPoint slides and deliver the same art history lesson with the same inflections, the same pauses, and the same practiced information. My students sat there dutifully taking notes, some of them occasionally jolting back to semi-alertness after nodding off momentarily.

Early in the day the speaker told me she didn't have much experience with high schoolers, that she aspired to teach college students so that she could lecture and they could take notes.

Please note that I'm not trying to disparage this brave guest speaker who spent a long day sharing some valuable and interesting knowledge about the art of the Tang and Song Dynasties. Clearly, she knew her stuff and had prepared carefully for her day with my students.

But as I sat and watched her deliver the same lecture five times throughout the day, I had ample time to ponder her question: "How do you do this all day long?"

By the end of the day, the answer became clear. It's not about the content; it's about the students.

Though I like to fancy myself a pretty interesting public speaker who can deliver a 50-minute lecture with witty anecdotes, intriguing nuggets of trivia, abundant humor, and powerful visuals to accompany my ideas, the reality is that if I get too engrossed in my own knowledge-spewing, my students are passive and bored to tears.

The secret to surviving an entire day of teaching the same thing one period after another is to focus on the students. Involve them. Allow them to talk and question. Let them generate knowledge. Permit them to reflect and digest.

One of the many things I love about AVID is its instructional emphasis on WICOR: writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading. Even a "lecture day" provides opportunity for at least three of these: writing, inquiry, and collaboration.

The average person (and teenagers sometimes don't perform at average-person capacity) can only pay attention to a speaker for about ten minutes. Most of us drift off more quickly than that and begin making mental shopping lists, thinking about relatives who deserve a call, or dreaming about things beyond the parameters of the lecture hall or classroom.

The easy fix for this is to follow the 10-2-2 model. Lecture for a maximum of ten minutes; allow the students to write, revise, and reflect on their notes for two minutes; and ask the students to share their thoughts, questions, understandings, and reflections with a partner for two minutes. After that opportunity to interact on paper and with others, the students' brains are recharged and ready for another ten minutes of teacher talk.

An even better solution is to ask the students to do something creative with their learning--a quick presentation, a drawing, a bumper sticker slogan, a tiny poem, a monologue, a skit--and to share their products with the class. I assure you that what the students will have to say is a billion times more interesting and more memorable than anything you've got stored up in your well-practiced lecture.

The added bonus of allowing this type of interaction is that each class period is different. Though the content remains the same, the student input keeps it fresh for the teacher. The day is a lot less repetitive when you, the teacher, get to hear from the authentic voices of students.

So in answer to the guest speaker's question, "How do you do this all day long?", my response it that I do my best to focus on the students. I enjoy their unique personalities, laugh at their jokes, listen to their stories and personal connections, welcome their questions, clarify their confusion, and remember that they're the ones who are supposed to be getting something from the time they spend in my classroom.

That's how I've done it for 22 years, and I hope that's how I continue to do it until they wheel me out of my classroom someday in the distant future.

Lessons from My Worst Nightmare

I don’t usually dream about school.  Several weeks ago, however, I had such a terrible nightmare that it’s continued to haunt me ever since. Here’s what happened:

I was in another teacher's classroom trying to teach a Romantic poetry lesson to all of the students—past and present—who have made it clear at one time or another that they were not Mr. McKinney fans. Personal attacks were made. Words were manipulated and thrown back at me. I couldn't find the page numbers in the book. I said things that were clearly hilarious, and no one laughed. I couldn't remember Keats' name and wouldn't let myself go on until I remembered it (I was so certain it was a two-syllable last name beginning with a C but was not Coleridge). The PA was broken and kept coming on randomly throughout the period, which did not start or end on schedule. Long pauses as I tried to figure out what to do next gave the students a chance to mutiny. A student had found something incriminating someone had pinned on a Pinterest page I made but have never used, and he announced it to the class and wouldn't let it go. My attempt to silence this student and turn this interruption into a “teachable moment” failed epically. I didn't have anything graded because my home laptop had a virus that gave me only a black screen of death when I turned it on (true story). Lesson plans were missing. No one could or would tell me what we learned previously, and what one kid told me was definitely not what we had learned. One student was digging through the teacher's desk drawers to retrieve her Spanish teacher's special rubber stamp to dishonestly add stamps to her homework card, and she refused to surrender the stamp or the card to me when I asked. This led to a confrontation in the supply closet which—though nothing inappropriate happened—would no doubt result in a he-said-she-said accusation of inappropriate behavior with no witness to defend me.  And, worst of all, two students were flagrantly in violation of dress code, the dress code referral forms were nowhere to be found, and a confused stranger was manning the phones in the Student Center when I tried to call for help. My later-in-the-day co-teacher, Linda, showed up at some point near the end, and I looked at her with tears about to fall and told her she might be on her own because I was considering taking a personal day, effective immediately.

I’m sure Freud would have a field day analyzing the goings-on in my dream, and a shrink could help me identify the roots and causes of what was troubling me. Instead, I’m going to use this as fodder for this week’s blog.

I don’t normally write about classroom management, partly because I don’t consider myself especially skilled in that area and partly because it doesn't fall under the heading of AVID’s WICOR acronym which often guides my topic selection. This dream, however, brings up six valid points about effective classroom management, all of which my “dream self” disregarded.  

1.  Walk into the classroom prepared. Dream Mr. McKinney had no idea what he was teaching that day, didn’t have materials and page numbers handy, and looked to the students like he didn’t know what he was doing (which was accurate). Without a plan in place to engage students actively, teachers like Dream Mr. McKinney are setting themselves up for a disaster, or at least for a period where little learning occurs. The days when I don’t have a clear idea of what I’m teaching and try to “wing it” are typically the most stressful.

2.  Don’t leave dead space between activities. One of the most important things I’ve learned about teaching is to give special attention to the transitions in my lessons.  How will I get students efficiently from one part of the lesson to the next? How will I handle distribution and collection of materials? How will I minimize dead space and not allow students to drift away? Sadly, Dream Mr. McKinney did not learn this lesson, and the students used a moment of dead air to unleash chaos in the classroom.    

3.  Sometimes you have to ignore things.  In the middle of the class, a student said something that attempted to get Dream Mr. McKinney off track. He knew what buttons to push and what to say to get his teacher’s attention away from the task at hand. Instead of letting the comment slide and continuing with the lesson, Dream Mr. McKinney stopped class to address the comment, tried to engage the student (apparently, Dream Mr. McKinney forgot that the teacher seldom walks away unscathed in an in-front-of-the-class confrontation), and attempted to seize the opportunity to turn the off-task, inappropriate comment into a teachable moment by sharing an ill-timed mini-lecture with the students.  While such a lesson is something most students need to hear, no one is “teachable” in the midst of conflict.  Every attempt to put the student in his place caused the student to counter-attack with more intensity. The lesson Dream Mr. McKinney learned: strategically ignore some comments and don’t discipline a surly student in front of his peers.

4.  If you ignore too many things, you’ll lose control. I love how Dream Mr. McKinney gets worried about a dress code violation at the end of the dream after everything else has gone awry. Too late, dude. While an effective teacher lets some things slide, he also knows that firm and consistent enforcement of rules and policies throughout the year stops problems before they spiral out of control.  

5.  Don’t let your emotions get involved in disciplinary issues.  At every opportunity, Dream Mr. McKinney allowed his emotions to control his actions. I can distinctly recall feeling the rising levels of anxiety, frustration, and anger while I was dreaming, and at the point when a calm head was required to diffuse the situation, Dream Mr. McKinney was hardly thinking rationally. Students love to see teachers blow their top because it’s kind of funny. Don’t give the students that joy.  Discipline with a cool, detached, demeanor and deal with the observable facts and logical consequences. Not being prepared (see #1 above) raises teacher stress levels and makes you especially susceptible to losing your cool.

6. Take care of what you can yourself, but know when to call for backup.  I’m a firm believer in handling disciplinary issues myself. The office has enough to deal with, and I've found that solving the problem with the student myself helps minimize future issues more effectively than outsourcing my discipline problems to the principal. Sometimes, though, a student needs to be removed from the classroom in order for the other students in the room to be able to learn. Dream Mr. McKinney was unprepared to deal with the discipline himself and didn't have a plan in place when his call for backup failed. I have found that if I make a practice of handling most discipline issues in my classroom (rather than being The Teacher Who Cried Help on a frequent basis), the principals are quick to respond when I finally do have to call them to intervene because they know the situation requires their aid.

I’m sure I could dredge up more lessons from the mistakes made in my horrendous dream, but the time I’m spending reliving this nightmare is causing me some stress. Rather than worrying about things in the dream world, I should spend some time planning my next lesson so this nightmare doesn’t happen in real life.

Thanks for all you do to help your students realize their dreams (and to avoid nightmares for you).

-Craig