Over Thanksgiving break, I planned to launch a new novel study. Boys will read The Dream Bearer by Walter Dean Myers and girls will read Like Sisters On the Homefront by Rita Williams Garcia.  This is always a very successful study for the students, because they find the novels compelling and the gender split adds some developmental dimension to the experience (This is the only time in the year I split by gender. More on that another time.)

As excited as I was to start the novel study, I felt that over the last month or so, things had gotten too ragged in my classroom. Students seemed lax about their own behaviors--in conversations with them later, students knew exactly what they had done wrong, but just seemed to lack self-consciousness or motivation to act appropriately in class. I'm talking about the usual 8th grade stuff--socializing excessively during class, antics that interrupt lessons or set off other students, etc., etc., etc.  These behaviors were upsetting the momentum of the learning and the group dynamic.  

At the end of every period I have the class assess itself as a group in 5 categories on a scale of 1-4: 

• Agenda (did we complete it?), 
• Quality of Work (this is for the class as a whole, not individual students)
• Jobs (official jobs in each class are Teacher's Assistant, Supply Manager, Director of Maintenance, and Librarian--did they do them?)
• Golden Rule (Harm no one in word or deed--did we follow it?)
• Neatness (how did we leave the classroom?)

The self-assessment chart serves as a good data source for me.  Students are very honest when completing the self-assessment, because it doesn't count as a grade, so there's no motivation to cheat.  I saw the scores decreasing and decreasing--and it was only November.

20% of my students' final grade is reserved for a category I call "Member of a Learning Community."  In my mind, it's very clear what this includes: coming prepared to class, participating in lessons, meetings and discussions, active listening, supporting peers, following the Golden Rule, good work habits, professionalism, etc., and I have communicated this to students.  However, I needed to find a way to make students' individual grades in this category more visible to them, more immediate and short-term, and empower them to improve in specific ways.  But logistically this can be challenging. 

I remembered something a student teacher I had last year from Bank Street College shared with me from another cooperating middle school teacher she'd worked with that year--Sharon Kramer, also a Bank Street-trained teacher who teaches in NYC public schools.  I had debated implementing it in September, but thought nah, I'll be alright without.  Now things are falling apart a little bit, so it's time for a change.  

So it's only been 2 days, but this new system has been really positive.  The atmosphere of the class is quite different.  Kids are more focused, more self-aware and we've picked up the pace a lot.  Maybe it's the new novels, or the new system, or a combination.  Any which way, I'm happy about the change. I'm happy I found the courage and time to take a risk and switch things up.  

The new system: Each table has a student leader who keeps track of participation points on a chart using a code for the members of the table. Every student begins every period with 60 points.  Positive behaviors and negative behaviors are assigned + or - point values and a code letter.  For example, coming to the meeting area within 60 seconds of the bell ringing (M) is worth 10 points.  Cursing (C) is worth -10 points, and so forth. Students gain points for great group work, helping another student, leaving their table area beautiful, etc.  Students lose points for eating in class, coming late, not having a writing utensil, breaking the Golden Rule, etc.  I made it so there are equal number of positive and negative behaviors.  (I've been training students to calculate grades based on those letter codes, which as some basic math value as well!) 

The table leader rotates weekly. At the end of the day I tally up the points and make any corrections if need be.  Every day students see their official grade from the day before. At the end of the week each student averages their scores from each day together and gets a grade out of 100, which I will enter into my online grade book.

It's not rocket science, but I think it helps kids be clear on what they are choosing to do and the consequences of those choices, good or bad.  Also, there are many ways within a single period to redeem a falling grade, and this makes that visible.  However, if a student has made poor choices throughout a period, it also becomes clear that he or she can't simply work for 5 minutes and redeem the grade.  It helps kids check each other, which is much much better than me playing the cop.  I hope and suspect students also see more clearly how their actions affect their learning and the rest of the class.  Maybe that's something we could have a class discussion about soon.  

I've never really been a fan of point systems for behavior.  Ideally, we will use this for a while and then outgrow it.  But for the moment, it's the structure and clarity my students need in order to do their best work and become members of a learning community, not just students in a class. 

[Image credit: a student deep in thought on a trip to study the neighborhood. This is how I want my students to feel in class every day!]

As I've written before, grading has always been a weak point for me. Partly because it's tedious, but more likely because my own methods have never fully made sense to me.  And if they don't make sense to me, they can't make much sense to my students. 

This summer I did some reading on the topic, including Rick Wormeli's Fair Isn't Always Equal: Assessment and Grading in the Differentiated Classroom. I'm now pretty convinced that grading needs to be based on mastery of academic standards and classroom objectives (even if some of these are not reflected in actual state standards), and not much else.  
However, as I get closer to designing a clear, standards-based assessment and grading structure for my classroom, some philosophical questions arise for me.
The major benefit of standards-based grading that includes multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate proficiency and growth is that students get a clear picture of what their strengths are and what they need to work on.  This can help them gain agency in their own development of these skills and understandings, which is a goal of any progressive educator.  
In progressive classrooms, teachers design experiences for students.  The idea is that through experience, students construct knowledge and build skills.  One question that sometimes concerns me is, are students always aware of what they are learning?  At what point is it necessary for them to become aware? 
Sometimes teachers design such compelling learning experiences that students are able to forget they are doing a "school" activity.  They derive genuine pleasure from the curiosity and intellectual engagement of the experience.  This is what we want and, in my experience both as a teacher and student, leads to the highest levels of understanding.  But it's not ALL we want.  It's a necessary step in the learning process called exploration.  
What happens after exploration?  In a well-run classroom, reflection and analysis and term introduction--and often multiple rounds of the whole process--lead students to develop conceptual understanding of the topic.  They have also built relevant skills along the way.  
At what point in the constructivist process does it make sense to assess students on what they've learned?  When is it fair and useful to grade the students on said learning?  
Since individual students may differ in what they take from a given activity, at some point it seems only fair to let students in on what the learning objectives are and what they'll be graded on.  That way students and teachers can be full partners on the road to proficiency and understanding, right? 
The place where I get philosophically tied up is around who is calling the shots on what needs to be learned and when.  Do students get a say in this?  Is the trajectory basically the same for all students with slight variation, or are there fundamental differences in what each child should learn and when?
In my last post, I describe a student who has been home-schooled and has had almost total agency over his own learning for years. Guess what? At age 14--the same age that some 50% of our country's youth begin to think of dropping out of high school--he chose to enroll in junior college, where he selected his courses.  He selected some classes based on interest (architecture) and other classes based on his own perception of what his weaknesses are (writing).  Seems like he came around to those objectives without anybody else setting the bar for him at any point.  And my guess is that he'll go as far as he needs to with his education.
In the end, as a public school teacher with 65 students for one year only, I will have to compromise in the name of efficiency.  I will not cut out the exploration stage of the the learning process, because without it, I don't believe real learning takes place.  But after students reflect upon and analyze the introductory experience, it is far more efficient for students to go into a second experience knowing what they should pay closer attention to and learn.  In many cases, individual students or the whole class together can identify what point or skill they will focus on in a subsequent activity.   
Thinking hard, as I create standards-based rubrics and tracking grids that anticipate all of the learning my students will do this year... I would love to hear your thoughts.

[image found at dvice.com]

At the school where I taught for my first three years, I had two classes: one class of seventh graders and one of eighth graders. My seventh graders would move on to become my eighth graders the next year, so I taught them for a wonderful two years in a row.  (This was only true for English classes for some reason.)  
By the time my students reached eighth grade, we already knew each other well.  We did not have to spend a few months testing each other and building trust.  By eighth grade, my students also had formed a strong group dynamic and knew how to work together.  I remember one September a new student came to my class as an eighth grader and groaned when she saw one of the school's most troublesome students, Maurice, in line for the class.  Her friend said to her in Spanish, "Don't worry, he doesn't act out in English class." I attribute this to the fact that we had already developed a positive group dynamic in the class; Maurice felt comfortable in the environment we had worked for a whole year to create. 
My second-year students were also accustomed to the type of assignments I designed. They knew I would ask them to reflect on their experiences, and they knew what that meant. They were also accustomed to drawing their own conclusions from their experiences, and listening to the ideas of their classmates, rather than constantly deferring to me for the "correct" response.  This gave them great confidence in their work.

They also had been through my "Whole Novels" program for an entire year.  Without going into great detail here, this method has students reading a number of whole class novels almost entirely on their own, and then coming together to discuss them in student-centered seminars.  Each novel builds on the previous one in complexity, but similar themes run through them all.  By 8th grade, my students know how this process works and how rewarding it is.  They trust my choice of novels, because they recognize that nothing in my curriculum is random and everything is connected and carefully planned with them in mind.  They take pride in formulating their own opinions and interpretations of the book, and look forward to expressing them in discussions.  
Recently, I've been wondering why my 8th grade students at my new school, whom I meet for the first time in September, seem to have less confidence in their own reading and their own thinking than my old 8th graders did.  Although my new students actually have higher literacy skills than my previous ones, they struggle more to trust their own thinking, to relate positively to one another, and to take on challenges.  There are many possible reasons for this, but I'm certain that part of it is because they have not--as my old students did--spent seventh grade building a foundation as a group, with me as their leader, for our work this year.  Much of the work I used to do with my seventh graders now has to be done in the first half of the school year with my current eighth graders.  It's still rewarding and I see a lot of progress, but the net effect seems to be less than when I looped.  
Enter the NY State ELA Test.  It is given every year in January, after just 4 months of eighth grade.  I have always resisted "teaching to the test," preferring to think that good teaching is good teaching, and if my students are learning, they will perform well on the test.  Well, many do, but there has been a lot of variation over the years.  In four years of testing every January (I haven't gotten the results for this year yet), there were two classes that made huge, startling gains.  By now you can probably guess which classes those were--the two 8th grade classes I had taught the year before as seventh graders.  
I remember puzzling over why my seventh graders never improved as much and as reliably as my eighth graders did, even though I believed they were learning a lot, and they seemed to feel that way too.  I had concluded that it was developmental; that seventh graders just didn't do as well as eighth graders.  But looking at my 8th graders' scores from last year, the level of improvement is very similar to that of my previous seventh graders: not bad, but not striking, with some serious question marks about a number of students.  
My conclusion at the moment is that the deep learning I design my teaching around takes time to achieve. Four months is not enough to see the long term benefits of the work, at least on the standardized test. It requires a substantial amount of work on the social-emotional level [that includes their understanding of what learning is and how they do it], both for students individually and for the group as a whole before the class really begins to take off.  
So what I believe is good teaching is not good teaching as far as the test is concerned, if I only have 4 months to prepare.  The good news, it would seem, is that with one year plus four months, good teaching begins to pay off quite a lot on the state test.  
After seeing last year's scores, I'll admit, this year I spent a good month and a half before the test preparing my students--hard core--for the type of formulaic responses and tricks they'd need to do to excel on the test. I felt good about it at the time.  But now, I'm watching them struggling to dig in to a challenging novel, and I'm thinking again.  We broke up the flow of the year for that test. More significantly, I broke the commitment I had to helping them as critical thinkers, readers, and writers, in favor of standardization of thinking. Sure, it was only a month and a half, but as my father once said, "Whatever doesn't help hurts."  I see now, we are paying for this decision.
Maybe looping is the way to go.  I'd imagine most teachers and students would benefit from this, especially in the middle school years, because you don't have to spend the first few moths of the year getting to know one another, building trust, and assessing academic needs.  You can say hello, and take off full speed.
[image found at www.coaster-net.com]

As you probably know, I'm not a big fan of multiple choice tests, especially the annual high stakes ELA test.  (Check out my last post, The New ELA Test, for some more discussion of this.)  That said, I spent the last week analyzing my students' choices of A B C or D on the sample tests and I think I've come up with a handy tool for helping students to choose more wisely. 

It started when I went through to take the tests myself.  Very few questions had clear-cut correct answers.  Instead, I found that most questions had two or even three answers that had some validity.  To make my final choice, I had to go back to the passage and weigh each answer against its competition.  Which one had the MOST evidence to support it?  That was the one I chose, even if I had not initially favored it.  Later, I came across the answer key online and found that my answers were all "correct." (Big sigh of relief!) 

I hypothesized that many of my students were choosing the first answer that seemed to line up with what they had read, instead of recognizing the multiple possibilities and carefully reasoning through their choices. In fact, a number of my students admitted they had not fully read the passages.  Instead they read the questions first and looked for the answers in the passages.  Indeed, they chose the first answer for which they had found evidence.  These students answered the questions with less than 50% accuracy.  
I created a template to give students a process for reasoning through their answers, as I had done.  For each question students had to explain their choice of answer using this format:
[Note: students should number the paragraphs of the reading selection to do this activity.]

7.  In this article, the author’s purpose is
most likely to

            A   analyze the secrets of business success

            B   explain the power of advertising

            C   tell about the life of an inventor

            D
  describe the history of an invention

We chose this answer, because ______________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________

Evidence that our answer is the best one is in paragraph # (s) _____________________

We also thought the answer might be
_____ , but we did NOT choose this answer, because    

______________________________________________________________ 

I first asked my students read the passage with a partner and work together to complete the multiple choice questions using the template.  The next day I gave students another passage and had them work individually using the template.  The next day, I gave them their second multiple choice practice test without the template.  On the first practice test--before using the template above--the class had answered questions with an average of 59% accuracy.  Three days later, after practicing with this template the class average had increased to 68% accuracy, with a number of individual students making startling increases of 20-30%.  I shared the activity with a few other teachers at my school, who reported it to be helpful for their students.  
In my scoring, incomplete questions were marked incorrect, as they are on the actual exam, so my students' rate of accuracy on questions attempted could actually be higher than these numbers show. The next step is to identify the students who regularly run out of time and give them some strategies to help them finish faster. I will continue to encourage everyone else to continue reading as carefully as possible--the risk of skimming for answers is higher than most of them realize. 

[image credits:http://www.i-italy.org/files/imagecache/600x/files/still_photos/Test_1205948884.jpg http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/progressionmaps/images/english/supplementary/traffic_lights.jpg]