How Do You Feel Today (about my class)?

English teachers have it rough. Socially, I mean. There’s rarely a week that goes by that I don’t meet someone who,  after discovering I am an English teacher, tells me about how much he hated English in school, all the assigned books he didn’t read, how he doesn’t know anything about grammar or spelling, and/or that he’s a terrible writer.

Math teachers have it worse, perhaps. The whole world is proud to announce how much they hated math in school. They brag about how inept they are at computation and join in with others in the Great Mathematics Hate-athon.

I’m sure there are factions of science haters, social studies detesters, and even PE loathers out there. We’ve done a fantastic job in education of making students despise what we are trying to sell them and of making them feel incompetent at doing what we ask them to do.

I’m convinced that teachers should have two main goals for whatever they teach: to make their students enjoy the subject and to develop confidence in their abilities in that area. Teachers should strive to help students form positive dispositions about what they are learning and about themselves as learners.

In order to accomplish this lofty set of goals, we have to undo damage inflicted upon them by educators past and by societal norms about education. We have to erase the scars of bad grades, scathing comments, harsh criticisms, and failed attempts. We have to empower our students by helping them experience success. Setting each student up for excellence is key, and providing the type of feedback that ignites hope rather than quenching dreams is crucial.

We have to show our students that, though the world wants to convince them it’s not cool to read, write, solve math problems, or engage in other scholarly pursuits, there’s value and enjoyment in learning how to do these things. Reading can unlock worlds of experiences and can thrill you more than any movie or video game. Writing well can give you power over others, help you get your way in the world, provide an outlet for self-expression, and allow you to understand your own life more clearly. Math is everywhere, and being computationally helpless leaves you vulnerable to others who will take advantage of that weakness. Learning to think like a mathematician is important whether you’re hoping to make money, run a household, launch a business, invest wisely, shop ‘til you drop, or create something in the kitchen, the craft room, the workshop, the laboratory, or on the computer. Science is just cool. Every branch of science contains something that will blow your mind if you give it a chance. Social studies helps us make sense of the world we live in and gives us perspective beyond the here and the now. There is something life-changing lurking within the curriculum of every subject in the school day. We have to find those bits of awesome and introduce our students to them.

Dispositions are difficult to change, but I think we can make some progress if we follow several simple suggestions:

• Stop taking ourselves so seriously. It’s school, not brain surgery.
• On a similar note, don’t be afraid to have fun. No one should spend eight hours a day doing something that is miserable.
• Celebrate successes—even tiny ones—and be gracious about failure.
• Unleash curiosity. It’s okay to wonder and explore instead of always seeking the right answer.
• Remember that no matter what the world says, the test is not as important as the learning leading up to it. Passing the test but hating the subject is still a failure in the long run.
• Think like our students. Get to know what they like and how to reach them.
• Let learning be its own reward. Ditch the extrinsic motivators. Trained seals work for treats, but they won’t keep working when the treat supply dries up.
• Sell your subject. Use comedy, mystery, or drama but not horror. Fear is a bad motivator if we want more than compliance.
• Play! Explore! Tinker! Laugh!
• Build bridges of trust with students. Let them know we want to see them succeed and that we’ve got their backs.
• Take moments to step away from the curriculum to share something interesting about the subject we are teaching: something we’ve read, a brain teaser, a brilliant quotation, a surprising bit of trivia, an anecdote, or other fascinating nugget.
• Connect. Connect ideas. Connect with the students. Connect students with one another and maybe with students somewhere else. Let them make connections to their lives, to other things they are learning, and to the world they inhabit, the things they care about.   

We have to remember that our most reluctant students don’t see relevance in what they are learning, don’t believe in their own capabilities, and cannot foresee a future where it’s important that they know and do what we are asking of them. Even many of our high-achieving students choose to live in the world of compliance rather than of intellectual excitement.

If we teach every day as if our subjects matter and do all we can to ignite the excitement of learning in our students, we can make a difference in some kids’ lives. We can change the dispositions of many. We can open their eyes to possibilities that will impact their decisions to go to college, to pursue careers they never considered, to add to the body of knowledge in the world, or simply to continue curiously and courageously learning throughout their lives without apology. 

Guilty!

We’ve all done it. Each one of us is guilty. And some of us don’t even know what we are guilty of.

Here’s an example of a time I was unknowingly guilty:  My English students were in the midst of a study of Romeo and Juliet. My main goals during the unit were to familiarize my students with the language of Shakespeare and equip them with the reading strategies they could use to analyze difficult poetic text. In a planning meeting, our team came up with an assignment we thought our students would enjoy completing. We provided four options students could choose from:  

• working with a group to rewrite a scene into more contemporary language and perform their modernized scene for the class
• illustrating a scene from the play in a comic-book-style format
• writing diary entries from the perspective of Romeo or Juliet about the events taking place during the play
• watching or reading a contemporary adaptation of the play and writing an essay about parallels with Shakespeare’s original text

We gave the assignment, the students chose their options, and they set out to work. We crafted a generic rubric that would apply to all four options and awaited the student creativity.

What we were guilty of, even though we had the very best of intentions, was not aligning our assessments with the instructional goals. The goals, as I stated earlier, related to students’ abilities to comprehend Shakespearean poetic language independently. The assessments, depending on what students selected, measured a variety of things. Acting out a modern scene in a group assessed the ability of one person in a group to be able to rewrite a scene from the play and for all the members of the group to perform the script effectively. The comic book tested a student’s ability to draw but not necessarily to have a keen understanding of what the language means, especially if the student paid attention to the scenes from the film I’d showed in class and could render them on paper. The diary required insight into character, an understanding of the plot, and some writing ability. The modern adaptation analysis assessed whether a student could write a compare/contrast essay (or, perhaps, the student’s Google skills).

None of the options we gave our students was terrible. They simply had little to do with the objectives of the unit and were thus not an accurate assessment of student learning. Furthermore, the four assessments didn’t even assess the same skills. A student could strategically select an option that played to his or her strengths and never have to demonstrate actual learning of a curricular objective.  

Every teacher has had a planning brainstorm about something that would engage students and has inserted it into the curriculum without spending the time to think about how the new idea fits with unit objectives. WIth more deliberate planning, however, we can make sure we never commit this instructional crime again.

Two questions developed by WIggins and McTighe in The Understanding By Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units help me think about how assessments align with unit goals:

1. Could students do the proposed assignment(s) well but not really have mastered or understood the content in question?
2. Could students do poorly on the specific assessment(s) but really have mastery of the content in question? (p. 53)

In the case of my Romeo and Juliet assignment explained above, I can answer yes to both questions, which isn’t a good thing.  

Yes, a student could give a convincing and impressive performance of a modernized scene from the play without knowing anything about how to read and interpret Shakespearean verse.

Yes, a learner who knows how to read Shakespeare could make a C if she didn’t have the art skills to draw a comprehensible comic book rendering of a scene.

Yes, a student could write an awesome diary from Juliet’s perspective with only knowledge gained from watching the film or reading the Sparknotes online.

Yes, a kid could analyze West Side Story as a Romeo and Juliet adaptation without reading a word of Shakespeare.  

It’s clear that when we were planning this assignment, we were thinking a lot more about activities than we were thinking about understandings. Though our Romeo and Juliet project gave the students choices of several potentially interesting activities, the activities we designed weren’t valid measures of the student outcomes we claimed to be seeking.  

When we string a bunch of activities together to create a unit, we often commit the crime of not having activities line up with unit objectives. Another crime we could be charged for at the same time is lining up activities that do not work together to ensure student success on the final assessment. In an effectively-designed unit, the activities the students do are carefully planned and sequenced to prepare learners to transfer their learning to the final authentic assessment. Anything that is incongruous with the end goal should probably be avoided.  

When we realize we are guilty of misaligned activities, we have to make some hard, sad decisions to say goodbye to some beloved old friends.

I’d have to say goodbye to that AVID assignment where students researched various colleges and worked in teams to create a scrapbook that showcased their findings and “memories” of their fictional first year in college. In reality, a group could get a good grade for putting together an attractive scrapbook and have learned little about college itself; conversely, a group lacking scrapbooking skills could know a lot and not be able to show it.

I would have to sever ties with that day the kids loved when they brought in Greek food while we were reading Homer’s Odyssey because how does making (or buying) a pan of baklava demonstrate any understanding of Greek epic poetry?

I’d bid a tearful farewell to any quiz or test where I asked the students to recall the speaker of a quotation from a novel, short story, or play because I never taught any unit where the learning objective was, “Memorize a text you read once, maybe twice.”

I’d realize I had to let go of most of my artworks depicting scenes from books, artistic vocabulary posters, anything involving paper mache or a trip to Hobby Lobby, and all other activities and assignments that don’t measure skills I have taught or help students develop skills necessary to be successful on an assessment of their skills and understandings.

People who disagree with me on this are probably thinking, “This buzzkill thinks we need to get rid of everything that is actually fun and enjoyable to the kids!” That’s not the case. I’m a firm believer that fun and authentic learning are not mutually exclusive terms. There is fun in discovering a new book, reading it, and engaging in worthwhile conversation about it with another reader. There is fun in exploring a topic in depth, posing student-derived questions about the learning, and seeking the answers. There is fun in learning how to do something you couldn’t do before and using that new skill to solve a real-world problem. There is fun in debating a topic and using logical support to buoy your argument. With careful planning and attention to learning goals and outcomes, you can make learning fun and engaging.

The next time you are planning for instruction, ask yourself those guiding questions to make sure you’re not guilty of a goal/assignment mismatch. Your instructional coaches will be happy to do our best to help you remain crime-free...at least in terms of curriculum and instruction.  

Your Hidden Objectives: Are You Accomplishing Them?

What are you teaching tomorrow? If I asked you that, you might respond in several ways:

“Cellular respiration.”

“Pythagorean Theorem.”  

“Act II of Romeo and Juliet.”

“The French Revolution and the American Revolution.”

“I don’t know yet. I have to make it through today first.”

Maybe answering a question like that makes you uncomfortable. In many cases—perhaps most—we gauge our classroom experiences not by what we are teaching but by what our students are learning or doing. Teachers who want to make the learning clear to students do so by informing them of the learning objectives for a particular lesson or for a unit as a whole. Students like to be told what they’re supposed to be learning or doing so they can figure out whether it’s happening.

When we shift our thinking to what our students are doing, we come up with more thoughtful objectives, and sometimes we see where the weaknesses in our instructional plans lie. Your students might be explaining how their cells extract energy from the foods they consume, determining the length of the third side of a right triangle when they know the lengths of the other two, or comparing and contrasting the French and American Revolutions and using their discoveries to determine features common to all revolutions.

If you discover that all you can say is that tomorrow your students are learning what happens in Act II of Romeo and Juliet, you might consider how you’re teaching it and what you might change to make that learning more meaningful. Perhaps your students could debate whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of the blossoming love between the teens is convincing or ridiculous. Or your students could analyze how Shakespeare uses figurative language to communicate the feelings of the young lovers to the audience and discuss how figurative language might strengthen their own writing.

     

Whatever your stated objective is, I also invite you to consider something bigger, something I like to call the Hidden Objective.

The Hidden Objective is the overarching transformation you hope will occur in your students because they took your class. It’s the life-altering difference you hope to make in them that will benefit them even if they never take another course in your subject area. It’s something you would probably never overtly tell your students, but it’s something that you would be completely delighted sometime in the future to discover has taken place and that you played a part in it.

Here are some of my own Hidden Objectives from my own teaching of English, humanities, and the AVID Elective:    

• My students will read for pleasure and will share their love of reading with others.
• My students will feel confident as communicators who can speak and write powerfully for a variety of audiences and in any situation.
• My students will be able to form an opinion of their own, back it up, and share it with others in a way that makes others consider it.
• My students appreciate the arts as a means for understanding others, understanding the world around them, and understanding themselves.
• My students seek out arts experiences of their own to add value to their lives.    
• My students use their talents and abilities to make the world a better place for someone other than just themselves.
• My students will realize that learning doesn’t always have a quantifiable outcome and that the best learning is learning for its own sake.
• My students will take charge of their lives, advocate for themselves, and not just let life happen to them.

Considering your Hidden Objectives gives you life and direction as an educator. The objectives become a part of your mission, the driving force that propels all your other efforts. Reminding yourself of these objectives and checking in on your progress not only keeps you on track but also gives meaning to the work you do.

If you’re lucky, you’ll run into one of your former students years later, and, in thanking you, that student will let you know what impact you’ve made on his or her life.

It’s not likely that the former student will say, “Thank you so much for being my teacher. Because of you, I know what happened in Act II of Romeo and Juliet.”  The former student probably won’t say, “Because of your class, I can analyze the effect of figurative language on a reader. That has taken me far in life.”

Perhaps—and this will warm your heart when it happens—you’ll hear your former student say, “I write all the time for my job, and I think that I’m good at it because you taught me the importance of always considering how the audience will respond to what you write. I choose words carefully, reread my writing for clarity, and anticipate my readers’ reactions in advance. Thank you for teaching me that.”

Unfortunately, we don’t always get to know about the impact our work has on students. Rest assured, though, that because of our collective efforts and the many Hidden Objectives that drive our interactions with students, we have made and will continue to make differences in the ways they view themselves as thinkers, citizens, community members, readers, writers, problem solvers, mathematicians, historians, scientists, leaders, athletes, performers, scholars, family members, students, employees, team members, listeners, speakers, partners, innovators, caretakers, creators, planners, hosts, guests, producers, and people.

I’m interested in hearing about your Hidden Objectives. If you’d care to share yours, add them to my Google Form here. If I get enough responses, I will share them in a future post. There’s power in seeing the impact we are each making and how it affects the big picture of our students’ experiences.

Can Costa's Levels of Thinking Make Me a Better Teacher?

For years I've used Costa’s Levels of Thinking in my AVID, English, and Humanities classrooms to help my students push themselves to higher levels of cognition and to assist them in analyzing their own thinking on assignments and assessments. When going over the results a test, I've asked students to identify the levels of thinking required by the questions that have posed a challenge for them. Knowing what kind of thinking is tripping them up has allowed them to refine their study skills for continued growth. We've written questions together and dissected the questions of others. Costa’s Levels of Thinking have made a world of difference in the way my students learn.  

Recently, I had an epiphany. Not only can Costa’s increase student success, but improvement-minded teachers can use Costa’s to shape and guide their own instructional efforts.  

Costa’s Level 1 refers to the information-gathering stage of thinking. This is the realm of right and wrong answers. Level 1 thinkers simply need to know facts and ideas that others thought of first. Level 1 knowledge is essential for every teacher. Not only must teachers know the nuts and bolts of their subject matter, but they also must understand the state’s essential elements or standards, the district’s curriculum (if such a thing exists), and the rules and policies of the school. Spending time studying lessons on the curriculum database, reading instructional materials, boning up on content, discussing curriculum maps, familiarizing yourself with the textbook, and perusing the TEKS involves necessary Level 1 thinking. Teachers should also be aware of student data: What are the specific strengths and weaknesses of my students, as a class and as individuals?

Effective teachers can’t stop with Level 1 knowledge, though. Level 2 thinking--the kind where you do something with the Level 1 knowledge by applying and analyzing what you know--must take place so teachers can bring instruction to life.

Level 2 thinking for teachers involves customizing the curriculum and standards for their individual campus situations. Teachers consider the needs of their students to determine what instruction needs to look like. Classrooms with multiple ability levels or multiple levels of understanding suggest opportunities for differentiation. In other words, the Level 2 thinking forces teachers to consider how to most effectively implement instruction. It also requires teachers to connect the dots between the elements so that instruction is seamless and has a recognizable direction. Level 2 is the problem-solving stage. It’s all about putting what you know into action.  

More importantly, Level 2 thinking also requires teachers to ask themselves, “Why?” Why am I teaching this content? Why is this skill necessary for my students to learn? Why is the curriculum written the way it is?  What is the thinking behind this curriculum document? When a teacher can articulate the “why” behind the subject matter and curriculum, students will understand the “so what” for the things they’re asked to do.    

Level 3 thinking occurs during and after the lessons are taught. Teachers view their instruction through an evaluative lens. What went well? What didn’t? Why? What do I need to do differently next time? Did my students perform to expectation? If not, how will I need to adjust to remediate or reteach?  Often, I find that as teachers we rush from one activity or assessment to the next and don’t allow ample time for reflection and growth. Level 3 of Costa’s reminds us of the importance of evaluation; it’s how we get better at what we do. The best teachers--like great athletes--are always self-assessing and making microadjustments as they teach, sometimes even in the middle of lessons.

Sometimes, teaching also provides the satisfying Level 3 task of creating. Teachers--individually or on campus or district curriculum teams--take everything they know about learning, content, standards, and students and synthesize all that knowledge to produce thoughtful curriculum units and lessons to engage students and meet their needs. It’s a monumental task that requires the teacher to be simultaneously detailed and visionary.  

I encourage my teacher friends to join me in some metacognition about Costa’s and their own journeys in education. Take stock of the thinking you’re doing and consider what you can do to strengthen any areas of weakness. Let Costa’s Levels of Thinking guide you toward continual improvement. It’s what we’d expect from our students, so I think it’s worth expecting of ourselves.