Author: Mr. Eure

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Bell to Bell

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

On In-Class Focus and Vigilance

If you are reading this, you have a reason to refocus or to reconsider your in-class efforts. Perhaps you’ve been ordered to do so. Begin with this:

“Just say, how will you walk?”

If this is not the first time you’ve read that instructional post, read it again. Notice that reading it carefully takes a while, even though it is relatively short. There are hyperlinks, handouts, reviews of course fundamentals, and so on. If you’re reading it during class, that post alone might take you half the period.

That’s the point. In fact, that’s always the point: This takes time. And I’m going to keep saying and writing this, because no theory developed in this space has ever been more solid and more substantiated:

If you work from the moment you enter the room until the moment the bell rings to send you somewhere else, you will be successful.

First Reason: Your GAP Score

The most obvious reason for this is that you are assessed every three weeks or so on on how well you focus. That expectation is all over the profiles and skills and traits we use, and it’s been made even more transparent in the GAP scoring guides updated each year . The first thing you self-assess is your in-class focus.

In fact, every aspect of the GAP scoring process is simple and straightforward, and it all ties back to using your class time effectively. It is not a complicated idea, and it cannot be made any more straightforward for you. It’s also not a particularly unique request. You should be working hard when you’re in every classroom.

That said, let’s be clear that I am not saying that you must have perfect focus. No one is asking you to work so hard that you collapse. What we’re talking about is the really obvious foray into being off task. Not for a moment, but for a lot of moments. Significantly. Obviously.

You have control over this. It’s not a matter for debate, either. There is an entire unit built around understanding and grappling with self-control and focus. I recognize that it’s human nature. You must recognize that it’s your job to master that part of human nature.

And if you can’t do your job on a particular day, you need to advocate for yourself immediately so that accommodations can be made. That’s the other thing. If there’s some reason you’re not able to do the work required of you for these 40 minutes, that’s okay. All it takes is a little transparency and respect. You just have to ask.

Second Reason: A Self-Fulfilling Loop

Now let’s talk about the deeper purpose behind telling you to work from bell to bell. If you know that you have to keep working, you’re going to have to find something to keep working on. You’re going to have to fill the time productively. The quest to fill the time will lead to success.

Example: You’ve started an in-class writing response that should take the entire period and probably some time at home. You finish after 10 minutes. You wrote something. You submitted it. You’re done.

But you’re not done. You know that, because you know you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what. If you don’t know what else to write, ask for help. Solicit feedback from your peers. Print a copy of your writing and edit its grammar and mechanics.

It’s a simple but profound shift at how you look at “finishing“ an assignment. With the same example: It takes you 37 minutes to finish writing, and you have only three minutes left. You decide to pack up, because you just wrote for 37 minutes. You check social media and load a game, because you’ve worked hard enough.

Instead, you should spend the last three minutes looking over your work for typos. You could do a cursory edit of the piece in 60 seconds. Or you could plan out the evening. You might spend three minutes organizing what you want to look at that night. You keep working, because you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what.

However long you think you’ve needed to finish, you must fill the rest of the time productively. The second you disengage from the class and do literally anything else, you have failed the most basic requirement of the room.

Again, and I say this with empathy, it’s not open for debate. You have such extraordinary freedom to navigate the requirements of this course that — including the ability to advocate for a break! — that you have to keep working for the entire class period, no matter what.

If you remind yourself as you walk in that you have to be productive for the entire 40 minutes, you will be more vigilant. Your focus will follow, and your work will improve exponentially. You’ll be asking more questions, working with more peers, writing more, reading more, constantly seeking the next step.

This is how you fit the top profiles. In fact, the default action when you truly have no idea what else to do with yourself is to reflect and be metacognitive. You could do that with any assignment, any bit of feedback, any post, any central text — anything, at any time, is open to that kind of writing.

What Else You Could Do

An entire section of the post on the GAP process covers this:

Those are interactive or instructional guides to how students should spend the class period. Face-to-face time is strongly correlated with whichever profile is eventually correct. To a sometimes surprising extent, staying actively engaged in class is all it takes; the rest of the learning process is almost a logical consequent of that investment and focus.

These correspond to posters on the walls and handouts available throughout the room. If your question is, “What should I do next?” there is a way to answer it for yourself. You could also use the explicit, still-relevant outlines in this instructional essay.

There’s always more to read, something to re-read, and a chance to learn. What I will add now is an answer to the question of what to do next that focuses solely on what is available online. What to do:

  1. Read any and all recent instructional posts again and again, looking for something new to learn each time.
  2. Ask questions about those instructional posts online, in a way that will bring other students back to see the answers.
  3. Do the same things — read carefully and repeatedly, ask questions — with our ongoing discussion posts.

The point of all this interstitial content is to invite you into an ongoing interaction with your overall learning habits, not just the content of this course. That’s why the third option in that list — a list that is just a fraction of what you can do to fill your time — refers to these posts:

Overview: Discussion Hubs

When in doubt, go back to those discussions. They are ongoing. They should bridge courses, grade levels, even entire school years. Those are the discussion we need to have, repeatedly, to understand ourselves and our learning environment.

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Pre-GAP Triage: November 5, 2018

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Space Explainers

Note for the week of November 5: The scoring panels, as always, refer to the calendar for the year.

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English.

Those same students will read this post on November 5. Q1C ends on Friday, November 9. Current progress and provisional GAP scores, correct as of November 5, are the end of this instructional post.

This is triage, and it is designed not just to help students, but to give them clarity and agency.

Why a Spreadsheet

I want to explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus. As always, this is in addition to the many kinds of feedback we use regularly.

First, a spreadsheet requires each student to do a little more work to see what is missing, what is insufficient, etc., which shakes off the fog of habit. Infinite Campus is part of a routine. Feedback outside of that routine is likely to be processed more mindfully.

Second, this shows each student the entire class. The notes are anonymous, so it’s about the collective learning environment. Every student has a role to play in what kind of classroom we have.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and narratives. I believe Alfie Kohn is right that “posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” It is also inevitable. We are looking for the line between that toxic salience and a sustainable feedback model.

When I find time, I will rewrite this old clarification of grade abatement, because most of it is prescient about what ends up mattering most1. Look at this section:

The crux of grade abatement is the idea that we can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments. There are a number of points to address, however, before we delve into how that works:

  1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. All we need to do is acknowledge that…

  2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… Suddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…

  3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades can — and often do — lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. Unfortunately…

  4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the world. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a self-powered kind of learning.

Grades are vectors for toxicity. They spread the habits that hurt authentic learning. That’s the key distinction I keep forgetting: A number itself does nothing until it’s tied to a GPA, the threat of failing, the shadow of college acceptance, and so on.

These spreadsheet numbers are simple. They convey only the most basic kind of feedback about work — again, because more meaningful feedback is given in other ways. But some students truly need to be shown that they aren’t handing in work. Telling them isn’t enough. Showing them in person isn’t enough. Even a GAP score isn’t enough. They need to see a zero next to an assignment.

What This Means

We have to recognize that institutionalized students are motivated by certain symbols. These spreadsheets weaponize that through a simple set of annotations and some conditional formatting added to Google Sheets2.

Any student work that has the potential to receive feedback gets a 0, 1, or 2. Other work (e.g., bringing in donations for a charity drive, submitting a form) gets checked in for completion only. That’s a stripped-down version of this:

Take that, which is clear enough, and strip it down further, and it’s just 0, 1, or 2. The conditional formatting added to the Google Sheet automatically converts those three choices to a color. A student doing an adequate or better job sees green, as in, “Keep going.” A student not doing work sees a zero in red — probably the two most powerful symbols of error or failure in school.

The zero is not factored into an average in any mathematical way. It indicates only that an assignment wasn’t completed. Some students need the zero in a red box to begin to process and adjust to the reality that they didn’t do the work.

The vexing part of this is that no student should be that unaware when an assignment doesn’t get handed in. The deadline comes and goes. My co-teachers and I give feedback to other, adjacent students. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Yet we know it is necessary to indicate, again, that the work is missing or insufficient.

What this kind of spreadsheet really does, therefore, is this: It pushes students to take couple of extra steps to engage with numbers that aren’t vectors for traditional toxicity, and it uses red, yellow, and green colors to trigger something basic.

Note: Functionally Missing

Some students hand in work that is so insufficient that it is functionally missing. It’s barely there. There’s no there there. The work isn’t missing, but that’s another reason to avoid traditional grades: That area of student quasi-compliance has to be investigated with more nuance. Yes, there was an effort to hand something in, but it doesn’t matter when that something is a non-starter for feedback.

As an example, I’ll use an assignment given to juniors. The prompt asked for a response to a lengthy article. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given a day to write — 40 minutes or so in class, plus the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to be developed. It was the foundation of in-class work and further reading.

Here’s a “finished” response with significant composition errors (“perposley,” run-on sentence, etc.) and no development:

Humans are addicted to procrastination you can stop hesitating to work by making work the only thing to do like perpoisley be bored like the author of the hunchback of notre dame he locked away all of his clothes and wore a sackcloth so he can stay home and finish his books. Moral of the story it is more important to start work than to get it done.

That’s not an essay, no matter what definition of the word we want to use. In the spreadsheets below (which include this assignment), that response is a 1. This is coded as a 0:

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout.
This quote means that Procrastination never fails to beat someone

It’s functionally missing. There is no feedback to give.

Note: In-Class Focus

In-class focus is the first and most important step to successful learning. Spreadsheets like the one below can be used to indicate how focused students have been. In the past, some have argued that they were only off-task for a moment, or that it only looked like they were off-task, or that they finished the work, or some other excuse. But this misses the point.

I am not looking to catch students off-task. Neither are any co-teachers in the makerspace with me. We are looking to help students who are focused. We are looking to help them with their work. We are giving them feedback and redirection. We are building posts and projects and lessons. That takes our focus and attention. We aren’t watching the room for mistakes.

If a student is off-task often enough or significantly enough during a GAP panel for it to affect a profile, it’s a serious lapse. These are students who are doing homework for other classes without permission, who are on social media repeatedly, who are gossiping and chatting. It’s well past the point of semantics, debate, and appeal.

It’s also critical for students not to elide how often they’re told to get back on task. This isn’t a gotcha environment. Any teacher in this space is constantly and kindly pointing out the serious repercussions of not doing work. We’re here to help you to focus, hence entire units built as triage for exactly that purpose.

Therefore, a student with a 0 or a 1 for in-class focus on a spreadsheet has been told, again and again, that they are off task, individually and generally, with opportunities to improve. They have continued not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite this feedback. The 0 or 1 is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

Provisional GAP Scores and Assignment Data: November 5, 2018

Sorted by student number:

  1. The scoring scales are wrong, and the skill/trait criteria are less precise than they are now. It’s the philosophical stuff that remains useful. That’s the problem with a one-man show, at least as far as writing the guides goes: I’m running to stand still. ↩

  2. In this post from a previous year, the feedback is much lengthier, but it teaches a tremendous amount by being so lengthy. Over time, these old posts become connective threads: links that can be used for the truly motivated and invested students to deepen their learning. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩

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Choosing to Read [2018]

  By Space Explainers

Note: This protocol is for longer works of fiction and nonfiction. Essays, poems, and short fiction and nonfiction are required to be read in full.

The Invitation

In his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt explains his approach to reading as follows:

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

We can use aspects of this idea to navigate the first 30-40 pages of any novel or longer work we read in our makerspace. Each time, we can use a specific protocol to learn more about how you read, what that means for your learning, and where the threshold lies between forcing and inviting you to read.

Ultimately, you will decide to continue any longer text that is assigned to you, or you will decide to choose another work of equal literary merit. You must read, but what you read will be your choice.

Making an Informed Choice

After the first 30-40 pages of an assigned text, you must answer these three questions, which will posed to you most often through discussion and writing prompts:

  1. What does it mean “to get [a] story going,” and how has that happened here?
  2. What does it mean to care about what happens to a character, and which character(s) do you care about so far?
  3. What does it mean to enjoy a story, and to what extent are you enjoying this one?

These questions center you, the reader, and invite us to discuss the assigned text as a group. You can see an example of how this looks in the 2018 unit for A Long Way Gone in English 10.

After answering these questions, you must then carefully consider how the assigned text meets the criteria of a work of literary merit. To do this, you must work or have worked your way through the following post in its entirety:

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Any assigned text will meet these criteria in full. That is why it is assigned: It will do all of these things for you, and it has been vetted by teachers and students repeatedly. An assigned text will be a good text.

That does not mean it is the right text for you. This is the choice you have been given.

To make that determination takes tremendous self-awareness and careful thinking, however, starting with a clear sense of why we read. Your choice must be deliberate, either way. You must study or have studied this:

The Reading Process

Then you can begin to go through the criteria for literary merit. You can load the post or use this printable, two-sided PDF:

In brief, your choice must

  1. teach you something about how you read;
  2. serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
  3. be well-written enough to teach you how to write.

If you are able to find, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, a suitable and more interesting alternative to the assigned text, you should read it.

You will always be required to justify your choice in the kind of reflective and metacognitive writing that supports the best decisions, and you will always have the freedom to change your mind, if the first 30-40 pages of your choice don’t pan out as you expected.

This is about choice. It’s also about assiduousness — about persevering to read something that takes time, takes focus, and rewards both.

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As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

  By Reading Resources

Application

Use this while reading any work of literary merit as part of your makerspace learning. You can also use this protocol to replace an assigned text with a text of your own, when and if you are given permission to do so. The replacement must enable all three focuses outlined below.

Load a printable, two-side PDF of these criteria here:

The sources for all adapted materials are here, plus more on the reading process:

Continue reading

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Emulation-Through-Analysis Reading: Literature

  By Space Explainers

In a makerspace, the focus is on creating, so students read what they write and write what they read as often as possible. Emulation is at the heart of the creative process. For most students, that means essay-writing, with poetry and short fiction occasionally.

Most other literature, especially the novel, is difficult to emulate. It takes a lot of time and a particular passion, like the it did for the first Pareto Project highlighted in 2017-2018. It isn’t for everyone.

Instead, literature is the primary tool for building a better human being:

The Reading Process

The first section of that post pitches reading as a tool for understanding ourselves and our world. As the video, “What Is Literature For?” puts it:

We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

So literature is the most effective tool in the Humanities. That doesn’t address literary analysis. When do we analyze the symbolism, leitmotifs, imagery, etc., of a work of literature? When do we write essays of literary analysis?

Well, as much as Paul Graham seems to be right about how that subtype of essay-writing is “three steps removed from real work,” he’s not right to call it pointless. All analysis has a point:

View at Medium.com

Comedians deconstruct jokes; musicians deconstruct songs; writers deconstruct writing. Literature is slightly different, because it can teach us how to write well, even if we’re not interested in writing novels ourselves. There’s a reason that Hunter S. Thompson copied literature to learn how to write. Good writing is good writing.

Probably no student should copy Fitzgerald’s fiction verbatim (Hunter S. Thompson was special), but we can apply an emulation-through-analysis lens to literature, just like we would to nonfiction essays.

Emulation Through Analysis (ETA)

We’re going to use a series of questions adapted from The Language of Composition, a textbook on college-level argument and rhetoric, to apply an emulation-through-analysis lens to literature. From Chapter 2:

When we talk about diction, we might look for interesting or powerful vocabulary, but we also consider figures of speech like metaphors, similes, personification, and hyperbole. When we consider syntax, we want to notice interesting constructions like parallelism, juxtaposition, and antithesis, along with sentence types such as compound, complex, periodic, cumulative, and imperative, among others. We also might look at the pacing of a piece of work: Does the writer reveal details quickly or slowly? How does he or she build suspense?

The bolded terms here probably are worth memorizing, because they are the easiest to vary in your own work.

Use the following questions to analyze diction:

  1. What type of words draw your attention? Do they tend to be a particular part of speech, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs? Is the language general and abstract or specific and concrete?
  2. Is the language formal, informal, colloquial, or slang?
  3. Are some words nonliteral or figurative, creating figures of speech such as metaphors?
  4. Are there words with strong connotations? Words with a particular emotional punch?

Use the following questions to analyze syntax:

  1. What is the order of the parts of a sentence? Is it the usual order (subject-verb-object), or is it inverted (object-subject-verb, or any other pattern that is out of the ordinary)?
  2. What are the sentences like? Are they periodic (moving toward something important at the end) or cumulative (beginning with an important idea and then adding details)?
  3. Are many of the sentences simple? Complex? Compound? Are the sentences on the long side, or are they short?
  4. How does the writer connect words, phrases, and clauses?

If you are able to load the original textbook chapter through Google Classroom, you’ll note that the fourth question in the second set (“Does the writer ask questions?”) has been dropped. It’s a good question for certain texts, but it doesn’t have universal usefulness across different modes of writing.

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The Age of the Essay

  By Age of the Essay, Units

If you are looking for the lightly updated version for 2022, click here.

Camille Corot’s “Interrupted Reading” (1870)

Our Approach to Writing

Our writing philosophy in this course is best expressed by Neil Postman:

Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Over time, that philosophy has led to a universal writing process. Here are the links you need to utilize that process:

The universal writing guide, college essay guide, and Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” are also available in a printed packet:

The universal guide is essential to any writing-based work in our makerspace. Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” is also the textual focus of our writing unit. More on that below.

Overall, except when test prep is necessary, you should read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate that author, of course, so we are focused on using what we read, not doing what David Foster Wallace described as “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.”

This essay, while focused in part on one particular quarter/class, explains more of what analysis means to us:

View at Medium.com

The Age of the Essay

Here is Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” on his website:

Read this carefully. You aren’t required to annotate the text, but you must understand it. Annotating is one way to do that. Another is to read the essay individually and silently. The collaborative chaos you create on most days is vital, and I think we will always be more inclined to spend our time that way than any other. It’s important, however, that you occasionally let silence into your life, especially while you read. Sometimes you need to sit with your own thoughts, free of distraction, in order to find meaning.

Once you’ve read Graham’s essay, complete the following:

Q&A: “The Age of the Essay”

I might also encourage you to practice interrupted reading with this text. The copy below numbers the paragraphs:

Interrupted reading is what it sounds like: You read a bit, discuss or write about what you’ve read, and then read more. That’s closer to what real-world reading looks like, and it invites others You don’t want to destroy the act of reading, though, which is why you should read the instructional essay on analysis and over-analysis. You need a balance.

To encourage you to get started, here is an excerpt from the beginning of Graham’s essay on essays:

The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.

With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.

How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years…

The complete essay gives you the rest of the history, and then it gives us the philosophy and practicality we’ll need to spend the rest of the school year developing your ability and desire to write.

You should also read Graham’s “A Version 1.0,” which is an interesting look at how he edited and revised “The Age of the Essay” into its published state. Here is a direct link:

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Inclusion Co-Teaching in the Makerspace

  By Space Explainers

This is a guide to inclusive teaching practices in Room 210, which is the Humanities makerspace at the high school. The post provides an overview of the process alongside a cross-section of strategies and techniques in English 10 and English 11 courses.

Co-teaching in a makerspace starts with flipped instruction — all lectures and notes posted online well in advance of any unit, individual lesson, or assignment. We plan instruction around student needs and curricular requirements. It’s done collaboratively: We discuss; I write and post. That keeps instruction consistent and clear1.

We collaborate with other teachers whenever possible, which also helps with alignment and consistency. In 2018, that meant partnering up our English 10 classes with another teacher’s unit on A Long Way Gone, including a UNICEF service project. And we otherwise follow our district’s ELA framework, sticking to assured experience and common texts as a means of teaching the same universal skills and traits.

That universal framework leads into our profile-based assessments, which use consistent expectations and language. There is flexibility for us to differentiate and even individualize assignments, because the substructure remains the same. The universal profiles, skills, and traits also give us a consistent basis for feedback and redirection. At all times, all teachers and students in the space are speaking the same language.

Next, we use redundancies to help students. This is the engineering version of redundancy: backup resources and systems to insure that all students get what they need. Instruction is posted here, to this website, and then cross-posted to Google Classroom; depending on need, we also print copies of these posts for distribution in class. All central texts are available in multiple formats, from audiobooks to PDF files to photocopies. Assignments are started and often finished in class, and then something is always handed in through Google Classroom or Google Drive. Copies of all writing are submitted as evidence of grade abatement profiles through Classroom, but students can also share directly with us, print and submit hard copies of assignments, or complete the work entirely by hand. Many assignments — most that aren’t essays — also have a Google Forms component, which makes it easier for us to sort responses by class, target missing work, look at patterns in the whole class, identify individual needs, etc., in addition to creating a further redundancy.

All these options — especially the multiple ways to hand in work — create plenty of opportunities for feedback, and feedback is the key to a co-taught classroom. In-class feedback is a given; it happens during every period, and we make a point to dedicate our time as evenly or effectively as possible. The “or” is operative: Due to our use of flipped or interstitial instruction, there is rarely a need for groups of students to stop and do the exact same thing at the exact same time. We are able to circulate constantly in order to intervene as necessary — to reinforce positive choices and correct negative ones. It’s a better form of feedback. In fact, the logic of that hyperlinked essay is stronger in a co-taught class than it was in the solo AP course for which it was originally written: We both act as experts, giving every student twice the opportunity to learn and then to teach others.

Examples of ICT Work

Here is an example of co-teaching in a Regents-level English 10 class:

A Long Way Gone: The First Five Chapters

The instructions were posted online for all students. They were given seven questions based on the first five chapters of A Long Way Gone and our pre-reading exercises and discussions, which are visible here. This is a screenshot of what the instructional post looks like:

That showcases the other flipped instruction happening in the makerspace. In English 11, another co-taught class, the students are receiving the same level of instruction. What’s more interesting is the evidence of feedback through this interstitial site. Both teachers developed that general feedback, using recent student work to generate feedback on the first profile scores of the year. (This is common, as seen in this general feedback post from the next scoring cycle.)

The English 10 assignment required answers to seven questions about the novel and the reading process. This is part of our unit on A Long Way Gone, and as an example of what we mean by “redundancies” in instruction, here is what that looks like on Google Classroom:

The assignment for the first five chapters — again, seven guided responses to seven questions about characters, plot, and the reading process itself — had to be typed in a Google Doc and submitted through Classroom, but it also had to be copied over into a Google Form. That gave my co-teacher and I a chance to monitor student progress and provide feedback in different ways.

The next screenshot shows me sharing the responses to that Google Form with my co-teacher:

This is one way to split the responsibilities of giving feedback. We can use the technology to talk to each other where students can’t see, like this:

I’m highlighting an obviously deficient response and preparing to ask how we should intervene. That’s a common question: What kind of feedback is going to motivate this particular student? How can we get more out of him in order to develop his writing? This is especially useful with students who haven’t done the assignment in full.

Form are one of the fastest way to look at patterns in student responses across a roster, which helps when we shift to giving feedback in real-time, as students finish their work, through a few different mediums. Here is what it looks like when we load Google Classroom to check on student progress on that same assignment:

Note that this is before the actual deadline. In a makerspace, especially a grade-abated one, the focus is overwhelmingly on process. You can see in this screenshot a bit of positive feedback to one of the students who finished already, but the real benefit of the workshop model is that it lets us run a kind of triage. We can see at a glance which students need attention first — the ones whose screen-capped work is minimal or missing.

Again, you can see the first part of a private comment left for a student who simply didn’t write enough. This is the equivalent of redirecting a student during the period when he gets distracted or discouraged. The advantage to using Google Classroom is that these comments are private, and students are notified about them through their GAFE accounts.

We are also able to open up student work for a particular assignment in Google Drive, which gives us another avenue for feedback:

This is additional redundancy that lets us differentiate. This Google Drive folder gives us access to all student work at once for any particular assignment, even before the deadline. In this case, the first student document was last modified at 9:05 by a teacher. That’s actually during the class period — an example of my co-teacher opening up and working on the writing while sitting with the student.

Where the ownership of the document has shifted to me, it means the student’s work has been submitted formally through Google Classroom. That sparks the usual feedback loop, in which we read and respond to student writing as a complete artifact.

More on ICT Feedback

All of this online and interstitial feedback exists in addition to the in-class, face-to-face feedback that occurs during the period. The importance of that face-to-face interaction has always been emphasized, and it matters doubly in a co-taught course.

As an example, I’ll explain a pre-reading assignment given to a co-taught English 11 class. Students were tasked with responding to a series of articles and ideas, all of which had been flipped online in an instructional post a week earlier. We set aside a class period and noticed, through the Classroom-generated thumbnails, that some students were already handing in work. We ran triage:

The first level of triage, especially in an ICT class, is often based around missing or incomplete work. Writing especially must be develop enough to allow for richer and more individual feedback. In this case, the student in the lower-right corner of that screenshot submitted very little:

Remember that this is still during the period, with a deadline of midnight for the complete writing assignment. My co-teacher found this to explain that this would obviously not be enough to earn credit, and to encourage him to focus on the flexibility and depth built into the assignment. Either teacher can then follow up with a private comment on the piece itself, a comment through Google Classroom, or a conference the next day. It depends on the student’s amenability.

When a student needs more direct interventions to be successful, we coordinate around a list drawn from our district’s RTI and MTSS implementation:

  • Accommodation: Additional Time
  • Accommodation: Schedule regular breaks
  • Accommodation: Student removed from group to work by himself
  • Cooperative Learning
  • Corrective Feedback
  • Counseling
  • Differentiated Instruction
  • Double dose of explicit, systematic instruction
  • Explicit Systematic Instruction
  • Goal Setting with regular follow up
  • Guided Practice
  • Individual Outreach
  • Instruction tailored to student interests and/or social situation
  • Modeling
  • Monitor with Frequent and Timely Feedback
  • Multi-Modal Instruction
  • Positive Reinforcement / Rewards
  • Remediation and Acceleration
  • Responsive Scaffolding
  • Summarizing
  • Supplemental research-based intervention curriculum
  • Targeted tutoring outside of class time
  • Use of manipulatives (concrete) and/or pictorial representations

This list is common to all classrooms, co-taught or not, but it takes on special importance in light of the divergent needs of an ICT roster. As we identify those needs, we are able to coordinate interventions. Here is an example from the very same day as every other example in this post2:

This is a student with self-identified difficulties speaking and writing in English, and this is her chance to write, without risk, about those struggles. This assignment replaces the original essay about A Long Way Gone — a substitution possible through a profile-driven assessment model — so she can grapple with a more pressing academic need. And while she met with only one of us to discuss the possibility of this individual assignment, everything else, from the prompt to the eventual feedback, runs through two teachers.

  1. I’ve also been developing an interstitial classroom in ELA for almost a decade. Those older sites are evidence of how long it took to develop an iterative process, and it would be unfair to demand another teacher take on the posting/design responsibilities any more than they’re comfortable. ↩

  2. This is important, because it highlights how any cross-section or snapshot of the classroom would reveal the same mechanisms. Barring the rare days set aside for prescriptive test prep, every period sees the same level of co-taught differentiation. ↩

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English 11 GAP Q1B: Added Value

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Look up the word provisional, or click here for the definition. Then read on.

Within an hour after this post goes live, you will have provisional GAP scores for Q1B. These scores are low, for many of you, because of missing and incomplete work. A lack of in-class focus led to lower profiles, too.

If you want to raise your scores slightly before the end of the day on Friday, you will have that opportunity. You can demonstrate your amenability, self-awareness, integrity, etc., while producing the kind of evidence that fits higher profiles.

Step #1: Pick new seats. This could be forced on you, but it will be more impactful if you make the decision yourselves. Pick new seats that give you a better chance to focus. You must adjust, because your current seats aren’t helping.

Step #2: Complete the GAP Q1B report posted to Google Classroom. Be honest and specific. You have permission to do this a day early (see our calendar again for a reminder of these assessment dates). As necessary, let the provisional score you’ve been given direct you toward an accounting of mistakes and poor choices.

Step #3: Then write a separate reflection about your use of this space and your approach to our work. Explain what you will do to be successful in the future. Make this meaningful and insightful. Attach it to the Classroom assignment for the GAP report.

Do that, do it accurately and insightfully, and you’ll have demonstrated enough of the skills and traits that matter to raise your profile — and, as a direct result, you will raise that number in the gradebook. For more on how that works, you can read this:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

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English 10 GAP Q1B: Added Value

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Look up the word provisional, or click here for the definition. Then read on.

Within an hour after this post goes live, you will have provisional GAP scores for Q1B. These scores are low, for many of you, because of missing and incomplete work. A lack of in-class focus led to lower profiles, too.

If you want to raise your scores slightly before the end of the day on Friday, you will have that opportunity. You can demonstrate your amenability, self-awareness, integrity, etc., while producing the kind of evidence that fits higher profiles.

Step #1: Pick new seats. This could be forced on you, but it will be more impactful if you make the decision yourselves. Pick new seats that give you a better chance to focus. You must adjust, because your current seats aren’t helping.

Step #2: Complete the GAP Q1B report posted to Google Classroom. Be honest and specific. You have permission to do this a day early (see our calendar again for a reminder of these assessment dates). As necessary, let the provisional score you’ve been given direct you toward an accounting of mistakes and poor choices.

Step #3: Then write a separate reflection about your use of this space and your approach to our work. Explain what you will do to be successful in the future. Make this meaningful and insightful. Attach it to the Classroom assignment for the GAP report.

Do that, do it accurately and insightfully, and you’ll have demonstrated enough of the skills and traits that matter to raise your profile — and, as a direct result, you will raise that number in the gradebook. For more on how that works, you can read this:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros