The Danger of Strategies

“We’re an AVID school, so we use AVID strategies.”

“My staff has been trained in Kagan strategies, so when I walk into a classroom, I want to see Kagan structures in use.”

“I want to make sure my principal sees that I’m doing Costa’s Levels of Thinking.”

“Our students are 21st century digital learners; therefore, our teachers implement technology in all their lessons.”

There's danger lurking within the above sentences you might hear at Anyschool, USA.

Teachers are bombarded with strategies in trainings. Principals introduce strategies as campus initiatives. Districts and campuses adopt programs that bring with them their own sets of strategies. Attending a workshop or convention provides teachers with a host of new strategies they can’t wait to try back in their classrooms.

I’m a huge fan of new teaching strategies. There’s nothing I find more professionally exciting than learning something new I can apply to help engage students and stretch them as learners.  New strategies can revitalize a classroom or a campus, but there’s something a little dangerous about working with strategies, old or new.

Sometimes, we get so mesmerised by employing new strategies--and so proud of ourselves for trying them--that we lose sight of the purpose behind the strategies. Using strategies for the sake of using strategies is like getting all dressed up in an elaborate trick-or-treat costume for Halloween and then staying home by yourself and watching Full House reruns on the sofa. It’s fun, but what was the point of going to all that trouble?

The purpose of using any educational strategy should be to achieve a student learning outcome.  If our purpose of using a strategy becomes to use the strategy, we’ve missed the point. Strategies without learning attached to them may be engaging, but they won’t push our kids any closer to where we want them to go.

Television is a childcare strategy familiar to many parents. There’s no doubt that plopping a child in front of a TV and letting her sit there slack-jawed is one way to keep her mesmerised for hours and out of your hair. If the parent has a learning goal for the child--to learn the alphabet, for instance--television can be an effective strategy if it’s employed correctly. A child watching hours of Sesame Street is likely to come away with greater alphabet mastery. There are, of course, other strategies a parent could use to achieve that goal, but there’s no denying that watching Sesame Street has a positive effect on childhood learning (at least it did for me). This is an example of a strategy successfully paired with a learning outcome.

In the classroom, teachers employ specific strategies to achieve specific goals. Sometimes, however, we lose sight of that goal (or never establish the goal in the first place), and the strategy becomes merely something to do.   

Let’s take technology as an example. In the last few years, technology professional development has been all the rage. “Twenty-First Century Learning” has become a buzzphrase in the world of education. Teachers have been bombarded with numerous apps, websites, and programs to “meet our students where they live.”  This technology has trickled out to campuses with varied results.

Here’s an example: Teacher A and Teacher B both attend a training on using technology to increase student engagement. Both teachers are excited to learn about a website called Kahoot that allows students to race one another to correctly answer multiple-choice questions in hopes of landing at the top of the leaderboard; the teachers hasten back to their classrooms eager to try this new technology miracle.

Teacher A uses Kahoot the next day in geography. Since they are learning about landforms, she searches Kahoot and finds a ready-made game to test vocabulary knowledge. She explains to her students how to log on and play the game, and the fun begins! The students are a little bit giddy as each question pops onto the screen. They guess the answers and wait until the results pop up to cheer their brilliance or hang their heads in defeat. Fifteen questions flash onto the screen in 8 minutes’ time, and the teacher feels delighted that her students are so elated to be learning geography. The principal pops her head in and is thrilled to see the students actively participating and using technology.

Teacher B sees the potential for using Kahoot as a learning tool, and she analyzes recent quizzes to identify the terms that appear to be causing her students the most difficulty. She pinpoints the places where confusion exists, and she creates her own Kahoot with questions about her students’ points of confusion. She deliberately includes incorrect answers she thinks some of her students are likely to choose based on what she’s seen from her formative assessments in class. As the students play the game and experience the same level of engagement answering the questions Teacher A’s students showed, the teacher pauses after each question to debrief. She asks students in pairs to discuss the answers they gave and why they gave them. Then, she solicits a few responses from her students to help clarify the trouble spots. She directly teaches the topics which remain unclear. The game becomes, then, a formative assessment that allows her to see what her students understand and where they still need some reinforcement.

Both Teacher A and Teacher B are achieving the aim of student engagement by using Kahoot. Teacher A’s students, however, are engaged in the way my little brother was enthralled with the game Space Invaders on his Atari. Though he played for hours with nary a break, he was responding to stimuli and not substantially learning. Teacher B, on the other hand, realizes the strengths and limitations of Kahoot. She knows that the type of learning Kahoot encourages is Level 1 of Costa’s Levels of Thinking: checking to see whether or not students know facts, definitions, terms, etc. While Level 1 thinking is important, it’s not the end goal of learning for her students, so she uses the game to check for understanding and clarify misconceptions. Through her discussions and questioning between rounds, Teacher B extends the learning beyond the literal level.She is also clear in her aim to use Kahoot as an informal assessment to guide future instruction. Teacher B gets it; Teacher A has a bit of growing to do in her implementation of technology as a tool for learning. Teacher A has student engagement; Teacher B has students engaged in learning.

As a  fan of AVID, I’m a champion of the WICOR strategies. But these, too are not foolproof. Just because students are writing on Cornell Note paper doesn’t necessarily mean they are using the notes as a tool to deepen and strengthen their understanding of the content they’re taking notes on. Students believing they’re using the AVID Critical Reading process may be  arbitrarily circling and underlining words in an article without growing as readers or even increasing their comprehension of a text. A One-Pager isn’t a learning tool if it’s little more than a pretty picture with some words written nearby. Socratic Seminars may not result in authentic dialogue and exploration of ideas if the teacher doesn’t understand and communicate the why and the how of the strategy. In other words, things that look like worthwhile AVID strategies may be masquerading as learning when in reality they’re simply tasks for students to complete. AVID strategies are powerful and transformational but only if they’re used with intentionality.

Teachers who set out to use strategies of whatever type without considering why they’re using them and how the strategies will result in a specific student learning outcome are missing opportunities to harness the intended power of these strategies.

You may be asking yourself, “How do I do this?” I think there are two best ways:

1. Start with the outcome and select the most appropriate strategy. This one is probably the better route. Think about what you want your students to be able to do, and then dig through your bag of tricks to choose the best strategy for the job. If you have a goal in mind but don’t have a strategy to make it happen, talk to your teacher friends or call upon an Instructional Specialist to help.
2. Begin with the strategy and determine how it best fits into your curriculum. This one is a little trickier, but it’s possible if you remain focused on your learning objectives. Consider what student outcomes are most likely to result from using the strategy, and identify a place in the curriculum where such an outcome would be desirable or appropriate. If you’ve just been to a training and are itching to apply what you learned,  this is the approach you may end up trying. Just don’t forget that behind every good strategy is a better student outcome.

This might be a great time to crowdsource some ideas to help you along in your increasingly effective use of teaching strategies. I’d love to get some ideas from you about how you use your favorite strategies to achieve specific learning outcomes. If you have a moment, visit this Google Form. It offers the opportunity for you to share a strategy and the student learning outcome you desire when you choose to use it. I’ll incorporate your responses in a future post so all can benefit from the collective experience of those who had the stamina to read all the way to the end of this lengthy diatribe.

In the meantime, I wish you all the best in your successful use of instructional strategies to help your students soar.

'Tis the Season for Test Preparation

The time of the year is quickly approaching when teachers get to showcase their active monitoring skills while America subjects its public schoolchildren to day after day of standardized testing.  It’s the least wonderful time of the year.  

In the upcoming weeks, however, teachers across the country will inflict another extended torture upon their kids: preparation for state standardized testing. In the days, weeks, or (yikes) months prior to the test, students will sit for hours taking practice tests, listening to the teachers go over the answers, copying down test-taking strategies, and trying to stay awake. No matter how “fun” we endeavor to make it, explicit test preparation does little more than raise students’ anxiety about the upcoming high-stakes test. 

It’s natural for teachers and principals to be concerned about how students will perform on the state tests. After all, we know that if our students don’t do well, we’re going to be judged by those scores and that our schools and lives will be negatively impacted by them. I’ve talked to teachers in some buildings who fret because their principals are asking them what they’re doing to prepare for the test, and they are concerned that what they’re planning to do won’t be acceptable in the eyes of an outsider. 

Here’s my bold assertion for the day: The best test preparation doesn’t look like test preparation to the students or to others visiting the classroom. 

In an effective test preparatory scenario, you won’t see photocopies of released tests, students sitting and bubbling answers, and teachers talking about ways to outthink the test itself. Instead, you’ll see students engaged in the kind of thinking they’re expected to do on the test while they are doing the authentic work associated with the course’s content. 

Research supports this assertion. In “Guidelines for Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well,” a pamphlet released by the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement, Dr. Judith A. Langer and a team of researchers investigated practices in 44 classrooms in 25 schools to determine the differences between typical programs and those with outstanding results. You can read their complete findings here: http://www.albany.edu/cela/publication/brochure/guidelines.pdf

One of the study’s findings explicitly addresses the issue of test preparation:  “In schools that beat the odds, test preparation has been integrated into the class time, as part of the ongoing English language arts learning goals. In contrast, in the more typically performing schools, test prep is allocated to its own space in class time often before testing begins, apart from the rest of the year’s work and goals.”  

In other words, teachers at high-performing schools are mindful of the objectives on the test and infuse them into instruction throughout the year. They seize the moments in the curriculum to reinforce the skills the students will need to demonstrate to pass the state test. Teachers in typical schools, on the other hand, overtly teach to the test.  

So in an ideal world, you’ve been working all year mindfully preparing your students for the state tests as you teach your curriculum. But what if you haven't been? You only have a few weeks remaining. Do you suspend all instruction and snap into test-prep mode, or do you do something less blatant? 

Here are a few strategies I suggest you use if you want to prepare your students for testing without halting everything and resorting to old-school test prep. 

Use stems to create questions: Examine released tests or use published lists of test questions stems to write your own questions about material you are studying that mirror the types of questions asked on the test. Leave the questions open-ended instead of multiple choice, and allow the students to work with other students to find the answers. This will give them some experience with the types of questions they are likely to encounter on the test. 

Let the students write the questions: The abovementioned article says that high-performing schools “identify connections to the standards and goals” that are tested. One way to do this is to provide the students with the standards tested and have them create questions of their own. Don’t waste your time asking them to create wrong multiple choice answers. Instead, have them pose open-ended questions and answer them. This activity is also probably best done in pairs or small groups because it will be challenging for some students to think this way. When they get used to thinking like a test maker, they ought to have better awareness about how to handle the kinds of questions they will see. 

Write, think, talk: Learning occurs when students are actively engaged in the process. Going over a test in front of students generally involves the teacher doing the heavy lifting while the students sit back and absorb. Or at least we hope they do. In reality, they’re probably thinking about a million other things. Get them writing, thinking, and talking about the content of your course by asking higher-level questions patterned after the test and letting them wrestle with them on paper and then with one another. That’s when the learning happens. 

Reassure the students: I tell my students that the test is using fake methods to test that they know how to do real things we do in class all the time.  For instance, the Texas English I End-of-Course test asks the students to complete short-answer responses to literature in lined boxes. This is the fake way of testing that they can answer a question in a class discussion. In class, I ask a question.  They raise their hand and answer.  I ask them to go back to the literature to find proof for their answer, and after they give the proof, I ask them to explain how that proves their response. That’s exactly what the short answer question requires of them. In another section, they have to answer revision and editing questions about a student’s paper.  That’s a fake way of testing whether they can successfully give feedback to a peer in a writing conference, something real we’ve done all year in class. If the students have been participating successfully in class and doing what they’re supposed to do, they're prepared to jump over all the ridiculous hurdles on the state test. 

Make them justify their thinking: If you can’t stop yourself from digging out the released tests (and, please, try to do so if you can), at least don't make the students sit there and take the tests individually during class. I assure you that students don’t need to practice sitting and filling in an answer sheet for a boring test. Give the challenging questions to the students in groups and ask them to come up with answers together, explaining their reasoning to one another as they answer. Often, allowing students to tell one another what is going on in their heads as they deduce the correct answers causes all the students to learn how to figure out the types of questions the state throws at them. 

Whatever you do to prepare your students for the test, the most important things are to reassure them that they are capable of succeeding because they have navigated appropriately rigorous curriculum and instruction throughout the year. Don’t turn test prep into a chore. Blend it with your regularly scheduled instruction, and don’t make your life and their lives miserable on account of one three- or four-hour experience. Pulling out the practice tests only makes them believe you are worried on their behalf, which will cause the most conscientious among them to worry, too. If you believe in the students and you help them believe in themselves, you’re steering them toward success. 

Hearts and Grades

Hearts and Grades

How My Valentine’s Day Craft Project Helped Me Clarify My Thinking About How Students Learn and How We Assess It

Last Wednesday at work, two of my new coworkers placed Valentine’s Day cards and candies on my desk. Generally oblivious to holiday gift-giving occasions at work, I had given little (actually, no) thought to providing any red-and-pink merriment for my teammates, so this took me by surprise. In the ensuing discussion with my officemates about how awful I am at this sort of thing, one of the bunch threw down the challenge that I make something for them. “We want a handmade card,” is what I believe she actually said.

My new work friends have already learned that I enjoy (and can be cajoled into) making things. I once brought some homemade bread to work just because I felt like baking; a few weeks ago I responded to a joking request that I bake cookies for the next day’s planning meeting by bringing in several dozen pecan sandies. And I caused a bit of a stir with my slightly-irreverent set of decoupaged ornaments at the end-of-semester white elephant gift exchange. I think it’s become a bit of a game of “let’s see if Craig will do it,” and I fall victim to the challenge nearly every time.

The challenge of handmade Valentine cards seemed so unchallenging. A more miraculous feat, I thought, would be to learn to crochet tiny Valentine hearts. Wouldn’t that be a fun new skill to teach myself...and a delightful gift for my team!

That night, I sat on the sofa and tried to learn to crochet. Six days later, on Tuesday the 16th, I delivered three mostly-heart-shaped crocheted creations to my teammates.

Between the time I began and completed my task, I had the chance to hear an interesting and challenging presentation by Tom Schimmer, who spoke to many of our secondary teachers about assessment during our professional development day on Monday.

As I was working on my craft project Monday night, I couldn’t help but think about how my own learning effort related to what I’d gleaned from Schimmer. By the time I had finished the final stitch, I had answered a few questions and raised some new ones about learning and assessment.

First of all, my heart-making drove home the point that not everyone starts off on an equal playing field. I quickly realized that the maker of the YouTube video claiming to teach “beginners” like me how to crochet a simple heart had failed to preassess her learners and had presupposed that I already knew things like how to tie a slip knot, how to hold the yarn, how to make a chain, single crochet, double crochet, and triple crochet, and more. Try as I might, this beginner couldn’t keep up with her nimble fingerwork during the 15-minute video.

To catch up, I embarked on the adult equivalent of remedial tutorials by watching a 30-minute video that taught me the basics of crochet. I appreciated that the instructor on that video tried his best to provide me with mnemonics and plenty of practice so that I could--after pausing it frequently and rewinding dozens of times--complete all of the basic stitches with semi-confidence. (Sadly, students can't typically pause and rewind our classes as easily.) It was time for me to rejoin the “class,” and I was already at least two hours late.

Adding to my difficulty was the fact that I have a learning difference. I am left handed. This wouldn’t be an issue if almost all of the videos available for the heart-making tutorial weren’t made by right-handed crocheters for right-handed students. As I watched the videos of unfamiliar moves and tried to mimic them, I had to concentrate extra hard to transpose each move by flipping it from right to left. This must be what it feels like to be a student who struggles with the very act of seeing text as most of us see it. Concentration was difficult yet mandatory if I hoped to succeed.

Suffice it to say that I went to bed that first night without a satisfactory final product. In fact, the result of my efforts was a lumpy tangle of yarn that resembled the shape of an actual human heart more than the familiar Valentine’s version.

If a teacher had graded the outcome of my homework that night, I would have received an F (or perhaps a low C if the teacher were feeling generous). What my teacher would not have known is that at the beginning of the evening, I didn’t even know how to hold a crochet hook and that four hours of hard effort later, I had created something that showed (to me) some promise that I might one day conquer this task. I felt hopeful about my progress; I’m not sure that I would have remained motivated at this point, though, if a grade had been entered in the gradebook to remind me that I still had far to go.

The next night, life got in the way of my progress. I had other, more pressing, work to do for a presentation I was giving on Friday, so I didn’t return to my handicraft. If there’d been a homework grade for that night’s work, I’d have a zero in the gradebook.

Things went from bad to worse the next evening when I turned on YouTube to learn more about how to proceed. I determined that perhaps I should view a different video on the same subject and was shocked to learn that there are multiple ways to crochet a tiny heart. Some began with an elusive contraption called a “magic circle” while others wanted me to create a chain and join it to itself. There’s lots of talk of crocheting into holes, but it was never clear to me which of the many holes in my sloppy creation should be the home for the stitches. So many mixed messages! So many teachers delivering instruction at breakneck speed! Each of my attempts turned out different from the previous, and not in a good way.

Fortunately, I knew that the next day I would be riding in a car on a roadtrip with my friend Elaine, who happens to be an expert at all things yarn-related. I sent a quick message (along with my pitiful photo of my attempt) asking for an in-person tutorial, and she gladly agreed. Even better, she complimented my efforts and reassured me that hope was not lost.

We spent about an hour of next-day’s journey working on my hearts. Elaine was a patient teacher, but my disability threw her for a loop. Teaching someone to crochet is hard; teaching someone who crochets with the opposite hand is even more of a challenge. Because my stitches were backward and because I had to work around the circle in the other direction, Elaine had a tough time analyzing the source of my mistakes and figuring out how to redirect my efforts. At several points, she took the emerging heart away from me and, in attempting to diagnose what was wrong, finished the project itself. This resulted in a pretty heart--much prettier than the ones I made on my own--but didn’t help me learn to do it myself. How often as a teacher have I been guilty of doing all the work for my students and assuming they understood because they witnessed it?

What I found most useful was when Elaine took me on a tour of a completed sample and showed me the “why” behind its construction. Once I understood the philosophy behind each section and how they fit together, I felt much better equipped to tackle the rest of the project on my own.

Creating a suitable final product took longer than anticipated. On Monday night, I finally put everything together and managed to produce a few passable hearts. Since it was already two days after Valentine’s Day, I could wait for no further improvements.  I decided to deliver the hearts on Tuesday.

My crocheted hearts weren’t perfect; I would have given them a B+ if I’d been grading them because I clearly demonstrated understanding of the objective, produced a product that fit the criteria, but didn’t exhibit advanced understanding. If I had had more time, I certainly would have attempted to create an A+ heart, but I’m happy with my B+.

There’s just one problem. I delivered my hearts two days late. With Valentine’s Day on Sunday, they were due on Monday, so would I receive a late grade penalty? How many points off? 15? 25? Ouch! I am going to have a failing grade on my report card.

My grade gets even lower if you average in my near-failing first attempt and the zero I received for not having time to do my homework the next night. So what is my grade in the gradebook communicating about my learning?

If we agree that the purpose of grades is to provide an accurate report of what students have learned, shouldn’t my final grade for this project be a B+ since I can make a B+ heart? If my report card says something different, how is the grade useful to me or to anyone else who sees it and wants to know about my mastery of the performance objective?

These were the kinds of questions Schimmer brought up in his presentation. And, like most challenging questions, these raised more questions than answers. I’m completely on board with beginning discussions on how to make our grades meaningful and useful in directing and motivating further learning. Making this happen, however, means that teachers and campuses are going to have to wade into some murky waters, turn a critical eye on time-honored and comfortable practices, and completely rethink what teaching and assessment look like.

I envision gradebooks with a few essential grades each six weeks, grades that can be entered and adjusted throughout the grading period as students evolve in their mastery. Maybe there will be some unweighted grades recorded to show parents about students’ practice attempts along the way. These could help guide students to know where they need to improve on each individual skill that is part of the final assessment but wouldn’t penalize the students who took a little longer to catch on or took an unsuccessful risk. The time teachers used to spend grading and recording a multitude of assignments can be reallocated to helping students in their various paths on the road to mastery. All of this sounds great to me, but it’s not going to look like any classroom I attended or have taught in. For one thing, the gradebook is going to be less full and more meaningful. More important, though, students should be doing the work to demonstrate what they've learned, but it will be happening in different ways and at different paces. Things might get a bit messy.

The outcomes of this transformation might not be perfect at first--like my early attempts at crocheting a heart--but with enough introspection, troubleshooting, study, and vision, schools can transform to have a  culture of learning that empowers all students to continue to strive to be the best they can be. I’m ready to wade into these waters. Who’s coming with me?

Read more about assessment from Tom Schimmer and his associates here.

Dissecting the Prompt

I hope you’re giving your students assessments—at least occasionally—that require them to write about what they know. Asking students to explain a concept in their own words, to write about their own insights on the material being studied, or to synthesize on paper several different ideas provides the students with an opportunity to showcase their learning and to practice essential written communication skills.

No, students are not generally good at this. Yes, sometimes grading these is painful. And yes, it’s good for them. If students don’t practice writing, how will they ever get better at it?

One way to help students be more successful on these in-class written assessments (ie. test and quiz essays, timed writings, etc.) is to teach them how to analyze and attack a writing prompt.

When students are not trained to respond skillfully to a writing prompt, it’s anyone’s guess what they’ll write about. Some students answer only part of the question asked. Others give much more information—much of it irrelevant—than the task requires. And, of course, some will write an essay that has nothing whatsoever to do with the prompt they were given. This same thing happens on standardized tests, and, sadly, some students write outstanding essays and subsequently fail the state test because they did not address the prompt they were given.

This failure to address the prompt is not always because students do not know the material they’re asked to write about. Sometimes, it’s because—for whatever reason—the student writers misinterpret the writing task itself.

Here’s one strategy to model and practice with your students (AVID or otherwise) to help them become more proficient with prompt dissection.

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1.  When students receive a writing prompt, ask them to read it and underline all the verbs. (Verbs, you sometimes have to remind them, are the action words, the things you are asked to do.)

Example:  Compare and contrast the religion and the economics of Classical China and Classical India. Discuss the significance of the comparisons and contrasts you make. [Students would underline “compare,” “contrast,” and “discuss”.]

2.  Number the tasks. Go through the prompt and put a number next to each task you are asked to accomplish in writing this essay.

[With the above example, students would identify three tasks:  1. Compare the religion and economics of Classical China and Classical India. 2. Contrast the religion and economics of Classical China and India. 3. Discuss the significance of the comparisons and contrasts.]

3.  Make sure you know what each of the verbs in the tasks means.

[“To compare” means to point out similarities. “To contrast” means to point out differences. “To discuss the significance” is to explain the importance.]

4.  Rephrase the prompt in your own words, making it a question if possible.

[A student might rephrase the original prompt like this:  “What are the similarities and differences between the religion and economics of China and India during the Classical Age? Why are these similarities and differences important?”]

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The next step after this could be to have your students write a thesis statement they could use for their essay and also to create an outline for determine what structure is best suited for responding to the prompt.

You could ask your students to write the actual essay or just have them practice planning what they would write if they had to. Merely practicing these steps will help the students become more skillful and confident about the anxiety-producing process of writing in-class test essays.

And guess what? Once your students get better at timed writing, your grading of these essays will go much more quickly and will be much less painful. Hooray for quick and pain-free grading!

Thanks for helping your students get ready for college by teaching them to write on demand.  

Pausing the Parade

I recently spoke with an AVID elective teacher I know who told me of a common concern she hears from her students. They express frustration because they feel like many of their teachers move so quickly through the curriculum, give them a test, and then move on, leaving them behind, bewildered and confused.

Having taught a fast-paced course with a packed AP-preparatory schedule, I know the pressure their teachers feel about getting the students prepared for the end-of-the-year test in May. It’s a daunting task to teach college-level work to hundreds of students who catch on to the content at different speeds. I also understand the students’ frustration. No one enjoys being confused, and the feeling of being left behind while the parade marches on is a horrifying one.

I remember--to use a completely non-scholastic but seasonally appropriate example--a college trip to New Orleans with two friends around this time of year. Festivities were in full swing on Bourbon Street, and I was sidelined by a nasty stomach bug. Trying all evening to keep my Sprite down, I accompanied my friends for festive fun. At one point in the evening, when I was secretly hoping everyone would suddenly decide to call it a night, we heard a great commotion on the street outside. We ran (well, I kind of shuffled pitifully) outside to see a stream of parade floats passing by. Some of the beautiful parade float passengers called out to my friends, who naturally responded by leaping onto the parade float with the local revelers.I was in no condition for leaping, so I just stood there with my Sprite in my hand and watched in disbelief.  I will never forget the sick feeling of watching my friends ride off into the distance on a float, leaving me all alone and fairly incapacitated in the French Quarter.

I imagine the students in my friend’s class feel something similar when a test is over and the teacher presses on to the next unit of study.

The bright side to my New Orleans anecdote is that about five minutes later my friends reappeared-- festooned with beads--and accompanied me back to the hotel so I could get some sleep. I hope there’s a bright side to the students’ experience, too.

Whether you teach AP classes or on-level students, you undoubtedly have some students who “don’t get” what you’re trying to teach them as quickly as you hope. If you realize after grading a test or assignment that you’ve lost a majority of the students, you owe it to the class to pause the parade for some reteaching. Otherwise, you’re in for trouble down the road. I suggest building some “reteach or enrich” days into your calendar. If you discover that all the kids performed beautifully on the test, this gives you the opportunity to dive more deeply into the topic you’ve just studied or the one you’re about to begin. If you find that a portion of the class mastered the objectives, you can devise an activity to provide them some enrichment while you sit down with the stragglers and help get them back on track. And if the test was a widespread disaster, you can spend some time reteaching the class as a whole and offering them an opportunity to demonstrate their mastery again. Those of you who have a team of colleagues who teach other sections of your course simultaneously might consider shuffling kids around for the day, sending some of them to another room for enrichment activities while you focus on the students from both classes who require reteaching.

When you provide time in class for “going over” the tests the students took, make sure you plan an activity with the goal of improving students’ performance on future tests. Give the students ample time to look at what they’ve done, to analyze any patterns and problems, and to formulate a plan for future success. I suggest allowing the students to collaborate as they debrief their tests; often, a classmate can explain something more successfully than a teacher can. As unthreateningly as possible, encourage students to come to your tutorials to spend some time with you talking about the test, how they studied, and what they can do to improve. When you miss these opportunities, you can probably expect a repeat performance on the next assessment. It’s important that students develop a growth mindset regarding testing. We have to help them break the habit of getting down on themselves or giving up when they encounter a low grade and instead see it as an opportunity to rethink their methods of preparation.

Of course, it would be ideal if all students mastered what we were trying to teach. Having a bunch of failures on a test shouldn’t be a badge of honor proving that we are appropriately rigorous in our lofty expectations for our students.

One way to help this become a reality is to employ formative assessments effectively. Build in ways to check students’ understanding throughout the unit so you’ll have a clear picture of their levels of understanding and your need to reteach the class as a whole or reinforce the learning targets with specific students. Formative assessment also gives students an idea of their own understanding so they won’t be shocked by a low grade they didn’t see coming on test day. Formative assessments can take the form of exit tickets, quick in-class checks for understanding, hand-signal responses, or ungraded self-quizzes. I’ll write more about how to employ formative assessments soon.

As teachers, we often misidentify understanding when we do too much of the work and don’t ask our kids to do enough. We think that because “we” went over the material and the students nodded their heads, they understood. When we ask, “Does everybody understand?”, our students either say nothing or reply in unison agreement. We take that as a sign of success, when in reality we probably didn’t make sure that everyone cast an honest vote.

Next time you plan for instruction, think about ways to ensure that your students stay caught up or have options for how they can catch up if they’re left behind. Don’t hop on the parade float and ride into the distance leaving them feeling alone, vulnerable, and frightened they’ll never be able to join the parade.