NCETA Conference: Well worth the effort

My colleague Kelly Fox and I spent last Friday in Watson Education Building at UNC-Wilmington enjoying the professional development opportunities at the North Carolina English Teacher Association's annual conference.  While it may seem odd to saying enjoying and professional development in the same sentence, my enthusiasm for the NCETA conference is genuine. Even though I was unable to stay at the conference for its full duration, I learned enough in one day to keep my occupied for quite some time. In fact, much of what I learned will be immediately applicable to my classroom and the rest I can tuck away neatly until the summer break allows me time to regroup and reorient.


One of my favorite takeaways wasn't just an idea, it was an entire packet of them.  Anna Frost and Alex Kaulfuss from the NCDPI presented on "40 Ways to Read Like a Dectective: Supporting Text-Centered Instruction".  Honestly, as I was heading into the session, I wasn't expecting more than the basics.  I was more than pleasantly surprised by the well-crafted demonstrations of some valuable strategies, in particular the strategies for close-readings of visual texts such as Waterhouse's paintings of The Lady of Shallot in comparison to Tennyson's earlier rendering of the same story in his famous ballad of the same name.   I loved the questions that framed the discussions because provided classroom teachers the experience of being a student.  The icing on the cake was a packet of the strategies all bound neatly on a ring!

Another session that inspired me was "Flipping the English Classroom".  Believe me, I have read and heard plenty about flipping, the practice of moving lectures to online environments so that teachers can focus their time in class on assisting students with meeting the learning goal and giving students time to demonstrate their understanding.  What I hadn't heard to date is how that might look in an English classroom, with its broad, integrated, nonlinear objectives.  The presenter, Sherrill Jolly of South Brunswick High, did an outstanding job of recounting her successes and alerting us to the pitfalls that she experienced as she flipped her classes.  Ms. Jolly was clear, her thoughts were well-organized and her southern charm and wit quickly won over the participants.  For me, I believe that this session will have the biggest impact on my classroom instruction.  I am anxious to try many of the methods that she used for my class this week!!

I would encourage any of my colleagues to attend next year's NCETA; the price of preparing for a substitute was well worth the benefit of all that I will bring back to my classroom and to my school.

Helping Tweachers Fly:  A post extolling the virtues of a Professional Development Network.

What's a tweacher, you ask? 'Tweacher' if a nifty little neologism referring to teachers who use Twitter for professional networking, keeping current of new trends, and broadcasting information. I am rather proud to be a tweacher although I have yet to maximize my presence in tweacherland.

So if you have rejected or avoided twitter because of the endless, inane minutia that clogs so many twitter feeds, I encourage you to reconsider.  You can tailor your twitter feed to suit your needs.  In fact, if you are clever, you can divert some of those widely-broadcast, list-serve-style emails that languish in your inbox, taunting you each time you check in.   The result of such a transition?  Once you've read a tweet, you can decide if you're interested enough to click whatever link is embedded.  If the bait doesn't appeal to you, ignore it.  There's nothing to delete and no backlog of mail to finish sort through, By 'following', as it's known on Twitter, organizations I was able to unsubscribe from their email lists.  In fact, I am continuing to look for ways to move towards using Twitter to receive information, as opposed to using my email inbox, which is so overburdened that it can take hours to read and clean out what accumulates in a matter of weeks.  For the English Language Arts teachers out there, I currently follow the National Council of the Teachers of English, ASCD, the International Reading Association, the National Writing Project, the Poetry Foundation, Education Week, the New York Times, just to name a few.  


(2) Follow your advocacy groups:  I follow the National Council of the Teachers of English, the International Reading Association, the National Education Association, Education Week, and ASCD.  As soon as I realized that I was getting the same information in my email box, I unsubscribed from these organization's email lists.  Now I can read my Twitter feed, decide if a title looks interesting, and follow a link if I so choose .  If the article isn't appealing then I ignore it.  This one simple adjustment has saved me from some of the tedium of sorting through endless email updates.

Wish List: Adopt-A-Classroom

Please consider contributing to my classroom through Adopt A Classroom.org.

Friends, I am trying to raise money to purchase the Michal L. Printz Award winners for my classroom library. The Printz award is given to young adult books for literary excellence. Please support this worth cause and help turn a struggling student into a life-long reader!  

Mansfield, Alicia Donation Page at http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/

www.adoptaclassroom.org

Giving kids the best education possible starts with giving teachers the tools they need. Adopt-A-Classroom makes it easy to provide teachers with funding and support. 100% of donations go directly to the teachers.

Earlier this year, I posted a request on Facebook asking for my friends and family to contribute to my Adopt-A-Classroom fundraising drive.  Just to see what the experience would be like for my donors, I contributed to my own cause.  While the process was fairly easy, donors need to be aware that there is a $25 minimum contribution and a small processing fee (under $2).   

Over Spring Break, I ordered a collection of books for my classroom.  I am so thankful for my sponsors; I know that these books will be read again and again.  

Wish List: Books for Classroom Library

Help turn a teenager into a lifelong reader!

Many of you may know that I have started a choice reading component in my classroom that has led to me building a classroom library.  While I still send students to the school library, having the books within reach saves instructional time and allows me to help match books and students during small transitional moments in the classroom. 

My colleagues and I are trying to build a community of readers within our classrooms.  With kindness of family, friends, and benefactors, I have been building a classroom library with materials for high school students of all reading abilities.  Watching most of my students become engaged readers has been encouraging and uplifting, but all this magic requires BOOKS and LOTS of them.  Please consider donating to our book drive.  I am in need of new or used books that would appeal to teen readers; however, I will be happy to accept books that can be sold or traded to get the books that we need. 

most of my students will have read between 6 and 10 novels this semester.  At least two will surpass the 20 novels read mark.  That's no small feat for a high school student.

The books listed below are all book that my students have specifically asked for:

Books by Gary Paulsen

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
The River by Gary Paulsen
Brian's Winter by Gary Paulsen
Brian's Return by Gary Paulsen
Brian's Hunt by Gary Paulsen

Books by Katie Alender
Bad Girls Don't Die (I have one copy, with a waiting list)
Bad Girls Don't Die: As Dead as It Gets (many requests!)
Bad Girls Don't Die: From Bad to Cursed


Books by Carl Deuker

Heart of a Champion
High Heat
Night Hoops
Painting the Black
Payback Time
Gym Candy 
Runner     

Books by Dave Pelzer

A Child Called It
The Lost Boy
A Man Called Dave
The Privilege of Youth
Help Yourself for Teens

Various Sports Books

Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger

Though my Eyes, by Tim Tebow

Books by Nicholas Sparks

Safe Haven
The Best of Me
The Lucky One
Dear John
Nights in Rondanthe
A Walk to Remember
Message in a Bottle

Books by Tess Gerritsen
(the Isle/Rizzoli Series)
The Apprentice
The Surgeon
Vanish
The Sinner
Silent Girl
The Mephisto Club
The Keepsake
Ice Cold
The Silent Girl
Last to Die
Body Double

Books by Anne Rice
Interview with a Vampire

Books by Sarah Dessen

Books by Heather Brewer
The Vladimir Tod Chronicles
Eight Grade Bites
Ninth Grade Slays
Tenth Grade Bleeds
Eleventh Grade Burns
Twelfth Grade Kills

The Slayer Chronicles
First Kill 

Books by Robert Rigby
Goal II: Living the Dream
Goal: Glory Days





 
 

Reading with an Analytical Eye: Why We Write about our Reading

When I was writing every day to my class, the quality of my student's journal responses improved.
Note: please forgive the first-draft, unedited writing.

After many hours of research and thought, I am getting a clearer vision for the purpose and expected out come of our Reader Response Journals.  I want my students to have daily thought-clarifying experiences that relate to their reading. I believe that the process of articulating their thoughts about their reading will improve their analytical and thinking skills.  I also believe that their engagement with this type of thinking must occur every day.   Last semester, I personally learned how difficult it was to write about my own reading as I tried to model the sort of thinking that I wanted my students to practice.  Each night as I finished my own choice reading, I could easily say, "That was good", but  articulating how the author created that feeling in me was agonizing at first.  The next morning, I would compose a letter to my students containing my thoughts about my reading.  After writing many of those letters, I now read with that "filter", always thinking of how to discuss the author's craft and literary elements such as characterization, conflict, metaphor, suspense, theme, symbolism, and so on.  I want my students to develop that same mental process, and I believe that reader response writing is a proven way to develop those critical thinking skills.

As a result, I have developed a list of possible journal prompts for students that should focus their thinking while they are reading in their independent reading books.  I developed this list in response to the common complaint that my daily journal prompts didn't always fit a student's reading experience from the night before.  By providing choice, but requiring variety, I hope to encourage more active reading.  Another advantage of this process should be that students will have questions in mind before they do their reading.  If they are reading these writing prompts in mind, they should become more engaged, analytical readers.

Certainly modeling will pay a large part in my student's ability to craft this sort of writing.  I am very grateful to have a new document camera so that I can display my own journal.  As you can see from the sloppy, brief letter to my students, I find the white board to difficult place to communicate your thoughts.  Now the challenge is to carve out time for my own choice reading on top of planning, assessment, parent contacts, meetings, paperwork, and family life.  Sustaining my own reading life is worth is though; the more share my reading life and experiences the more honest and courageous my students become in their reading lives.

Blogging How to Create and Use Rubrics: Part 2

What Not to Grade:  My rubric has criteria that are not aligned to my intended learning outcomes.

Brookhart sure does pack a punch in Chapter Two, "Common Misconceptions About Rubrics."  I was quickly taken aback as the author made me think twice, and then three and four times, about the purpose and outcomes of using rubrics.  According to Brookhart, many of the rubrics commonly used or circulated on the Internet are simply tools that measure compliance and not learning. (Ouch!) Brookhart also makes note of the prevalence of "so many near-miss — engaging but "empty" —classroom performance tasks." (17)  (Ouch, again!)

This chapter warns against "confusing rubrics with requirements and quantities" and discusses the misguided nature of creating rubrics that are simply checklists in disguise:  "What is at issue is the use of task-based (rather than learning based) rubrics that count or enumerate aspects of the directions students are expected to follow.  The resulting "grade" is a measure of compliance and not learning."  (21) This certainly gives me something to ponder as I set a new course within my own classroom.

Self-Reflections

Q:  Think about a performance assessment that you have used and scored with rubrics.  Were the criteria in the rubrics about the task or about the learning outcomes the task was intended to have students demonstrate?  Do the task and the rubric criteria need modification, and if so, what would that look like?
 A. I have used rubrics to grade two assignments and to grade participation in a Socratic Seminar.  The first assignment was a Glogster project.  I found the evaluation process to be tedious for that rubric, but upon reflection, I see that that rubric was partially based on the criteria for the task and didn't really measure the learning outcomes.  That rubric definitely would need to modified.  On an interesting note, I felt very frustrated by the whole assignment.  I noticed that the "A" students earned A's, the "B" students made B's, and so on.  I felt that, with just weeks to go before the state exam, I didn't have time for something that did not improve students outcomes.

Q: Were you familiar with the argument against rubrics that merely summarize the requirements of the task, as opposed to rubrics that describe evidence of learning?  If the argument is new to you, what do you think of about this issue now?
A.  I was not aware of this argument.  I agree that rubrics that merely summarize the task requirements would not provide the evidence needed to assess learning.  I am trying to adopt a SBG (Standards Based Grading) model in my classroom, and I was struck by Brookhart's criticism of neatness as a criteria — a fairly common grading practice — when neatness is not one of our learning goals as defined by our standards. 

Blogging "How to Create and Use Rubrics": Part 3

These Reader Response Journals are helping me to learn the strengths and weaknesses of my student's
reading and writing skills, but how do I assess them -- and assign a grade -- in a reasonable amount of time? 

So now I am faced with a real conundrum.  I have stacks and stacks of journals to be graded, and each one takes a prohibitive amount of time to grade using this somewhat ineffective rubric that I created.  After reading chapter three of How to Create and Use Rubrics, I am getting a clearer picture of the source of some of my problems.  This chapter, entitled "Writing or Selecting Effective Rubrics", provides some doable adjustments that teachers can easily make to increase the effective of rubrics as a tool to improve learning outcomes; however, some decisions will (in may case) create major paradigm shifts in order to align performance tasks to learning outcomes. To highlight the major points of the chapter:

1. Rubric characteristics should be on a quality continuum from high to low. (24)
   This much I knew.
   
2. Effective rubrics do not list all possible criteria; they list the right criteria for the assessment's purpose.
   This seems like a no-brainer, but I see now that I have elements in my rubric, such as neatness, that are not relevant to the standard that I want to address through this task.
3. The overarching question to ask yourself: What characteristics of student work would give evidence for student learning of the knowledge or skills specified in this standard?
   This one makes my brain hurt.  I will need to continue to reflect on this.
4. Aim for the lowest-inference descriptors. 
   While she advocates against using the rubric descriptors as a dressed-up checklist, she advises teachers to choose precise words that clarify instead of words that are open to several interpretations.

Brookhart included a rubric "makeover" in this chapter, which I found very helpful.  She added a before and after shot of a rubric for a elementary science class that underwent her keen evaluation and remodeling.The improvement is substantial, creating a targeted rubric that addresses a learning outcome.  I realize now that some of my criteria are unnecessary and cumbersome.  I also need to reflect upon my desired learning outcome in order to narrow the focus.  In either case, it looks like my rubric needs a makeover.

I have read ahead a bit, and I was struck by how vital it is to have students analyze the rubric and how the growth comes by having students assess themselves using the rubric.  While everyone of my students had a copy of the rubric taped into their journals, I don't think that any of them actually evaluated themselves against it before submitting them for interim grading. I was disappointed the vast majority of the work that I saw.  So not only am I overwhelmed with the time commitment of grading these rubrics, I'm not happy with the quality of most of their products.