Picasso’s take on Don Quixote.
Q2 GAP Feedback
TL;DR | The three most important elements of this course right now are these:
- Consistent, effective, respectful use of every class period
- Consistent, careful, annotated interaction with all interstitial instruction/feedback/etc
- Consistent, collaborative, goal-oriented feedback looping with the teacher or proxies
Assignment #1 | Pull out every adjective from that list. You should have an immediate and intuitive sense of what each adjective means, but you’ll want a more articulated definition, too. What, for instance, does effective use of every class period look like? What does respectful have to do with your use of class time?
Assignment #2 | The following document uses data from Q2 to illustrate these elements and give you direction as you move into Q3. You have a Google Classroom assignment built around this document (and the interstitial directions you are currently reading) to force you to start doing what’s required of you. Complete that Google Classroom assignment.
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FTier4LanguageandLogic.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
Maker Spaces
Where you sit in a makerspace is critical. Your use of space is critical, hence the term makerspace. Small shifts in our physical setup open up new perspectives — which is exactly what happened when I moved the de facto teacher desk to the middle of the room. Two days of observing you was enlightening1.
From today onward, all junior classes will be allowed to sit where they like, but they must recognize the need to improve their in-class focus, interstitial reading, and use of resources. There are six desktop PC stations in Room 210, for instance, any of which would work well as study corrals. Our round tables should be for discussion, most likely without Chromebooks, or with a shared Google Document as the focus. The U-shaped conference tables should be for a different sort of discussion, probably led by a student with some proxy or atelier feedback to share. The high tables should be regularly moving into new configurations that reflect each group’s goals.
If you are in one of the juniors classes in Room 210, your assignment is to make better use of the space. I will be observing your efforts and giving you feedback on your choices. You probably want to keep the criteria for a Tier 4 GAP score in mind, too, since this is a formal assignment, and you know that those aren’t just given through Google Classroom2.
Sophomores will have assigned seats, with some self-selected groups allowed to stay together. That class simply isn’t focused enough when given free reign over the classroom space. We will need to shift into more teacher-monitored group work, and individuals will need to sit where they can be held accountable for pretty much every choice.
I’m sharing these decision with everyone at once, by the way, because juniors can absolutely lose the ability to choose where to sit and what to do. There is a limit to this course’s patience, and after that limit, you must be forced to work. You’ll either develop these habits on your own or be forced to develop them. You probably know that the former is almost always more powerful and long-lasting than the latter.
Hi everyone,
I think that this post was definitely an eye-opener for some people. I know that last year there were a lot of people who saw grade abatement as a way to weasel out of harsh English grades, but then saw how we still have to work really hard in order to get “good” grades. I think that the one of the biggest thing, for me at least, was that 38 of the submissions had a profile that did not match the score they picked. There are really only two ways that this could have happened: 1, the person simply does not know and did not internalize the GAP tiers and profiles or 2, they accidentally clicked the wrong score or profile, however it was most likely not the second one. Even if the second situation did arise, I would hope that the person would look over their form before submitting it and checking to make sure of everything they selected, and in addition to that, we have access to all of the GAP materials and they could have gone and checked, in a way that would be sort of cheating, but it is a resource available to us.
The next thing that I would like to direct your attention to is the “herd immunity” essay on Medium. I had previously red the essay earlier in the school year but revisited it today after seeing it hyperlinked into this post. If you haven’t read it yet (please do it is very helpful), herd immunity is when certain cells in an organism that are vaccinated or immune to a certain virus or disease protect those who are not immune or vaccinated. The moral of the story is that the less cells, or in our case people, the easier it is for a virus or disease to take over and kill the organism. In our case, our class as a community is the organism, the disease is common public education systems, and our vaccination is the knowledge we gain from reading all of the posts and essays that help us learn about GAP. The less people that know about the course, the easier it becomes for other students to fall to the Dunning-Kruger effect, or to miss assignments, or become obsessed with grades. Essentially the point here is, we cannot all succeed if one of us fails, because if one of us fails, we as a community are more likely to fail. I guess a good example would be a foundation for a building – if there is even the slightest crack or misplacement of stone, the entire building could crumble under certain circumstances.
Finally I want to address the final portion of the post – the maker-space. We have been given equipment that allows us to interact in ways that really wouldn’t be possible in a normal classroom, yet we still use it as if it was just a classroom, except with a lot more talking. It is very rare that there is a quiet moment in our AP Lang classroom 7th period. I don’t really know exactly how much talk is actually about the course itself or if it is about other stuff from either social media, other classes, etc, but I think that we should really start using the equipment for what it is meant for. We have conference tables, so we should conference, we have small circular tables that we can have small conversations at, and we have tall tables that we could use for either independent work or just more small conversations, but we end up just using all of the tables for our work and conversations. I think that especially going into the second half of the year we should specialize the different actions we take depending on our position in the classroom. I understand that many of us sit where we do because we feel comfortable there with our friends, but a big part of the course is having collegiality and interacting with other students to learn and teach so that there is a mutual benefit.
Any thoughts on all of this?
Your idea of thinking of Sisyphean High as a community really resonated with me. I think lapses in knowledge like not recognizing the language of the profiles can be remedied by more “vaccinated” individuals- who are not just surviving, but thriving (4th tier) need to take more of an effort to engage with others through the atelier feedback as Mr. Eure is suggesting here. In our discussion tomorrow morning, I will try to bring this up and see what other people feel about it. Talking to some other individuals, I know that teaching others about the course seems daunting and uncomfortable, they don’t want to come across as know-it-alls, and when their efforts aren’t met by the person they’re trying to help, it can be all the more frustrating. Through talking with Mr. Eure, we’ve discussed trying it on a smaller scale, which is what I want to happen with the heightened need to change how we use our physical space.
I think that this is a crucial element that must be incorporated into the schemata that we, as students and members of this community, must create for ourselves. It is important to converse with others about the course’s infrastructure and the language encompassed within each profile. Through collaboration and writing, we can all reach that level of conflated comprehension. Writing crystallizes the thought and provokes inculcation, therefore through those platforms, we can effectively combat that issue. The problem, however, comes from effective galvanization. You can’t force a person to understand something or do something. I think that maybe being structured into different groups and conversing about the profiles and maybe having a student leader in each one could be an effective outlet. We tend to focus more when we are put into that position. Many of us have a solid and confident understanding of the language utilized in each profile. Therefore, if we structure groups with students that have conversed with Mr. Eure about the profiles and the substructure of Grade Abatement, then we can effectively spread those ideas in an efficient way. Google Plus is another outlet that could be used but we must also combat that issue revolving around the lack of active involvement with that medium. Only a select few are active through that interstitial community, so it wouldn’t be effective to share it through there, unless we all strive to try and become more active participants of that outlet.
I agree with Chris on how some people just might not know which GAP score corresponds with which profile. Some people might just be thinking about a certain GAP number and the grade that goes with it, without actually taking the time to understand what it is and how to get there. That’s why I like the idea of receiving a GAP score every 3 weeks, then averaging them at the end of the quarter. This will make people actually want to work hard throughout the whole quarter instead of trying to put everything together at the last minute, right before the quarter ends. Also, I think by doing it this way people will be able to see what they can improve on every 3 weeks, instead of having to wait a whole quarter to find out.
I agree that the Triptych Model is an effective way of directing and gauging our progress on a regular basis. In fact, Mr. Eure had conversed with Arianna and I about the Triptych Model and I shared that proxy feedback on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/118297101274441004233/posts/7GAv7tUfSUj?sfc=false
Nonetheless, it would promote organization and self-efficacy because more students would have their evidence compiled and categorized according to each respective cycle. It would be more efficient because that paradigm would prevent students to spend a week scrambling frantically for evidence towards the end of the quarter. It would also serve as a way to self-direct your learning and galvanize more students to work harder, as you mentioned. It’s also a great way for students to be cognizant of what they need to improve for the next cycle and strive to ameliorate those weaknesses. 🙂
I agree with Chris that it is most likely that the 38 errors are due to a lack of internalization of the profiles. I think that people who filled in the wrong match for number and description view the two elements as separate parts of their score. They don’t realize that it’s not just a correlation, but in fact they are the same thing. The numbers ARE the profiles and vice versa. These students were self aware enough to recognize the description of the profile that matches their work, yet they still asked for a number that they wanted, instead of what they deserved. They are using motivated reasoning as Mr. Eure mentioned in the PDF; choosing what they want and figuring out a way to justify it instead of simply being evidentiary. And I definitely agree that the herd immunity metaphor applies here; the more people that are informed about this means that there will be less errors by default.
I also noticed in the graph that the highest rate of imposter syndrome occurred at the 8 profile, followed by 9 and then 7, 6, etc. Does anybody have any thoughts about why that might be? I thought maybe because of the direct relationship between a 9 and metacognition, the 9s were actually more self aware and therefore more confident in their profile.