Space Explainers – Page 3

Home » Category "Space Explainers" (Page 3)

GAP Score Triage: Overview

By Mr. Eure Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

This post explains “triage” delivered through Google Sheets and posted alongside GAP scores during some, but not all, GAP panels. This triage is designed to help students be honest with themselves as they implement the feedback built into the GAP scoring process.

Examples of spreadsheets are at the very end, after the crucial discussion of why and how this works.

Weakness Into Strength

I will now explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus, which is the online gradebook most courses use. As always, this feedback 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. We have to push out low-information resistance and build herd immunity.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and the assessment ideal, which is a narrative. 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.” Unfortunately, online gradebooks are inescapable. So we must look for a way to fight that toxic salience through some kind of sustainable feedback model.

Here is a clarification of grade abatement that elaborates on this idea:

Clarifying Grade Abatement

Look especially 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:

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…
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…
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…
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.

As a result, these spreadsheet numbers are simplified. 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 Sheets¹.

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. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Look at this post on the co-teaching environment:

Inclusion Co-Teaching in the Makerspace

We shouldn’t have to show students that work is missing before assigning a GAP score, but we know it is necessary.

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 in them.

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.

This is explored in great detail here:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

The ideas are elaborated further in a separate post specifically for students in Honors or AP courses.

The message can be made even simpler. I’ll use an assignment that asked for a response to a lengthy article on procrastination — part of a unit on that sort of thing. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given 40 minutes in class to write. They had the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary, before submitting the work.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to echo our writing process. It had to be developed. It had to say something meaningful, since it would then be part of in-class discussion, further reading, and additional writing.

Here’s a submitted 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 pre-GAP triage, that response would be coded as a 1. It can’t be given any real feedback. It’s insufficient for a makerspace, regardless of what kind of in-class discussion we’re having.

Here is a response that would be 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

That one is 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. It’s repeatedly emphasized through instruction, lessons, feedback, and so on. Making good choices in class is essential, which is why this is a recurring unit:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

That unit is revisited all year, every year, through posts like this one on the classroom space:

Objects in Space

Each day requires a goal, and each goal is checked and rechecked. In-class focus is more important to the GAP process than anything else.

So spreadsheets like this 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.

No one is not looking to catch students off-task. 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 obvious:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

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, which is why, to link to it again, there are 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 obviously, seriously, and repeatedly broken that contract. They have not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite constant feedback.

The 0 or 1 for in-class focus, like the 0 or 1 everywhere else, is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

Examples

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. Here are the spreadsheets:

For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English. This time, the spreadsheets were posted to Google Classroom.

On November 5, at the end of the first quarter, they were given another post of exhaustive, annotated data. This time, the spreadsheets were moved back to the instructional post:

Another good example is is the following spreadsheet, from February of 2019, which includes every class and links back to this post:

Copy of 2019: Q3A [Post]

It includes data on daily goal-setting, an example of how test prep is incorporated into the makerspace, and an in-class focus score. It also removes the provisional GAP scores, which forces students to grapple with the granular feedback, not just a final profile.

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 truly motivated and invested stakeholders to deepen their understanding. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩

No comments

In It Together: 2/14/19 Discussion

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

Note: This post is from 2019, but it may help other students and stakeholders to understand the efficacy of the course. The lesson outlined and explicated here was designed to showcase positive feedback from students, both to defend the space from its detractors and to encourage buy-in from students and other stakeholders.

On to the original post:

Scroll past the background to the first subheading (“Rising Tides”) to see the details of the lesson itself. We will be setting up on February 13, weather permitting, and sharing out our findings on February 14. And if you missed this on the main page of the site, here’s an essay about taking risks and getting engaged in our makerspace:

View at Medium.com

In brief, the lesson we’re running this week is about collecting and sharing feedback in order to increase student buy-in and agency. The makerspace embeds Brewster’s SCP and other “future-ready” methods, and specific student feedback, positive or negative, helps us improve that work.

That’s one of our makerspace walls, with notes on the Daily Check-In and its mindfulness component; the use of engineering “failsafes” to insure a common language; the connection between our work and Brewster’s SCP; and in the corner, a note on adaptability in the face of inevitable curricular dissonance.

Just like it is in our writing process, adaptability here is about a universal language that students can take with them¹.

Consider what Gerald Graff and Steve Benton published about this in 2013:

[C]urricular dissonance also does much to widen the achievement gap. The high achievers manage to synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning from course to course, but the rest do not. For them, education is not a cumulative process, but a bizarre obstacle course in which students must virtually start from scratch every time they enter a new course. Who can blame them if they come away believing that education is just a cynical business of learning enough to get past one teacher and then setting aside those lessons to meet the unrelated or conflicting demands of the next one?

This matches what you see in a high school. Students move from class to class and year to year without a guarantee that things will stay the same. That “bizarre obstacle course” persists, even when progressive systems like Brewster develop ways to bring teachers together — and Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan really does give students universal languages for assessing their own learning.

The high achievers’ ability to navigate this is the key. That ability can be learned, and all students need to know how to “synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning,” as Graff and Benton put it. We need to teach deeper skills and develop persistent traits in students.

With that in mind, here are the prompts and instructions that were posted on January 28, with a soft deadline of February 4:

Engines That Could

The prompts are carried over from the 2018 version of this survey. They are, in order:

Reflect on our use of makerspace ideas and strategies — project-based learning, process-focused feedback, collaboration, etc — to promote student-centered work.
Reflect on the extent to which the interstitial classroom’s flipped, multi-level instruction has changed how you access lessons and other important information.
Reflect on the ways grade abatement’s use of profiles, skills, and traits has impacted your self-awareness, self-efficacy, and overall sense of success. Use this post as necessary: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2139.
Reflect on how you use technology (e.g., smartphones, Chromebooks) in the makerspace to individualize and organize your learning.
Reflect on our approach to writing, especially the focus on process over product and the use of radial and proxy feedback to empower and encourage students.
Reflect on our approach to reading, especially the use of student choice in literature through the process outlined here: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2106.
Reflect on the extent to which the course and classroom have impacted your social and emotional well-being, especially the use of a mindfulness-inspired daily check-in (http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2539).
Reflect on our focus on empathy and collegiality as the “stuff of growth,” including the extent to which your work with others has helped you to accomplish your learning goals.
Reflect on the big questions we consider as a Humanities makerspace — the problems we solve, individually and collectively, through creative and critical thinking.
Reflect on the extent to which this course invites you to take risks, overcome obstacles, and forge connections between hard work and success.
Reflect on the extent to which you are given clear goals and actionable feedback that help you adapt to academic and social/emotional challenges. See the posts on feedback as necessary: https://medium.com/@sisypheanhigh/a-better-form-of-feedback-b340032e3dd0
Reflect on how this course instills in you the skills, traits, and attributes you believe are necessary for college and a 21st-century career.
Reflect on the extent to which our universal skills and traits have helped you in other academic disciplines and assignments.
Reflect on how this course is explicitly and implicitly preparing you for any and all high-stakes tests, including explicit test prep. Consider, too, our approach to quizzes: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2562

There is also a space on the form for additional reflections that don’t quite fit one of the other prompts.

Rising Tides

To set up student work on these responses, my co-teachers and I needed to

take the unedited feedback from students and transfer it to a spreadsheet;
post that spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/SSCP-19;
print the responses and add some of the feedback from last year’s students;
cut out each individual response; and then
bag the responses by prompt.

Each class period gets a stack or two on one of the tables in the makerspace. Then, in groups, they sort the responses, putting positive feedback in one stack and negative feedback in another.

Remember, this is unedited feedback, except where we had to remove identifying details. That’s the point. Students will see overwhelmingly more positive feedback, and that positive feedback tends to be specific and clear. The focus on metacognition and self-efficacy creates that kind of clarity.

And what that does is to open up a discussion about why students are not successful, or at least about what those students report about their lack of success. No one is singled out or otherwise embarrassed, even through an individual conference, because our focus is on helping everyone improve their learning.

As the responses are sorted, each group talks about what they observe, with the ultimate goal of reporting out those findings in a discussion over the next period or two. Each group will also share ideas on how to move the less successful students into the much larger group of motivated, successful students.

We’ll repeat the lesson in each class, from 10th grade to AP, and then provide everyone a chance to codify their findings through website comments, posters in the classroom, and open letters to struggling students.

This is empathy-driven problem-solving, done anonymously so that struggling students in the room can listen and incorporate the feedback at their own comfort level. It’s also a reminder of how powerful the profiles we use can be. The GAP process covers this, of course, but we’ll also be using the first page of a handout on GAP anchors:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F02%2FGAP-Anchors-WIP.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

The fourth tier of profiles center around a GAP score of 8, which becomes a 95 — by any metric, then, a measure of outstanding work. And the key in a makerspace to that performance is improving the learning environment for others. The strongest students benefit as much as anyone from the protégé effect, especially because of what that hyperlinked article ends with:

Above all, it’s the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”

Unmotivated or disengaged students are given a way to reenter the learning environment, not out of fear or through force, but because the path is clear, and high-achieving students are shown a path to even greater success.

And that brings us back to how we started the year.

The Stuff of Growth

The first thing we do in the makerspace is watch the animated version of Ken Robinson’s speech on educational paradigms:

The complete poster of this RSA Animate hangs on our wall, too. And while it’s all inspiring, the key is what he says toward the end:

Great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

As high schools move toward teaching students how to learn, not just teaching content, this collaborative “stuff” will be the most important element. Students will need empathy and a sense of the greater good to teach each other.

Herd Immunity

The other side of Robinson’s coin is that we need students who are inoculated against misinformation, cynicism, and self-doubt. That takes herd immunity:

View at Medium.com

This makerspace is emblematic of the need to arm students with information, open-mindedness, and patience. I can address rumor-mongering directly, and I can clarify what we do repeatedly; it’s only through the testimonials of students, however, that the paradigm shift begins to find roots. If we want buy-in for any major change in education, it has to be sold on the words of students.

That’s the point of a lesson like this: For all the lengthy, hyperlinked instruction delivered through this a website, the real impact will be in class using the oldest tools we have. We’ll have paper, pens, and voices. We’ll have each other.

As always, the comment section below is for questions.

The next few paragraphs are lifted verbatim from that post on the writing process. This is really the focus of a Humanities makerspace, and I am getting used to the language as much as the idea. We are building substructural strength. As Neil Postman wrote, the most important thing students learn is always something about how they learn. ↩

No comments

Turnitin.com Instructions

By Mr. Eure Space Explainers, Triage

An earlier version of Turnitin.com. (Click for a related article.)

Another Tool in the Toolbox

The high school has bought us all subscriptions to Turnitin.com, so let’s experiment with it as a tool in our makerspace. Read on for a quick overview and the directions you’ll need to register for your class.

The original purpose of Turnitin.com was to check against plagiarism, which it still does better than any other site. The full suite of features is here: Turnitin for Secondary Education.

We’ll test some of these when/if you are asked to submit a writing response to Turnitin. The peer review options are especially interesting, although they may be redundant with Google Docs.

Regardless, you need an account to get started. Follow these instructions:

Visit the website: www.turnitin.com.
If you have an account, enter the login information, click “enroll in a class” and enter the Class ID and enrollment key. (If you have an account but have forgotten your password, click “Forgot your password?” and follow the instructions.)
If you do not have an account, click on the “Create Account” tab in the upper right corner.
Click on “Student” at the bottom of the page.
Enter the Class ID and Class enrollment key.
Enter your first and last name.
Choose the first option for how your name will be displayed.
Enter your BHS email address and confirm it.
Create a 6-12 character password and confirm it.
Choose and answer a secret question.
Click the “I’m not a robot” box and click “I Agree — Create Profile.”

The Class ID for each section will be distributed through Google Classroom. The enrollment key is always the same: tardigrade.

If you have any questions about using Turnitin, ask them in the comment section below.

2019-2020: Turnitin.com Registration Info

Reprinted here for 2019-2020. Find your period, copy the class ID and enrollment key, and register at Turnitin.com.

Class Name: P2 English 12
Class ID: 23156813
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P3 English 12
Class ID: 23156818
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P6 English 12
Class ID: 23156822
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P7 English 12
Class ID: 23156826
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P8 English 12
Class ID: 23156834
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

No comments

Clarifying Grade Abatement

By Mr. Eure Grade Abatement, Skill-Building, Space Explainers

What Grade Abatement Isn’t

In her 1977 book, On Photography, Susan Sontag tells us that “[i]n teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” It’s a novel use of “grammar” — a word usually associated with English teachers attacking spliced commas and split infinitives — but it means only that there are rules in play, even if we are unaware of them.

There are rules in teaching, too, that we don’t usually question, especially when it comes to grading. Grades create a grammar and ethics of learning — an implicit code about why we learn and how we assess that learning. What I call grade abatement is an attempt to change this. It is an attempt to shift the focus from grading to authentic learning — to circumvent the harmful effects of grading on student self-efficacy and productivity.

It may be most helpful to discuss first what grade abatement isn’t:

1. Students do not “choose” their own grades. The verb is in quotation marks because students do participate in the process; that process is precise and data-driven, however, with no element left open to subjectivity. We use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgement informed by evidence.” This guide covers that process, and the instructional post for that process is embedded further down. Here is a direct link: The GAP Process.

2. It does not exist to give the teacher more time. Grade abatement takes about the same amount of time as traditional grading, because of the amount of oversight and feedback required to help students learn without the old crutch of grades. The difference is in how that time is spent. It feels better — more authentic, more useful — in comparison to the sometimes ambiguous and usually frustrating mechanisms we are used to.

3. It does not change the frequency or quality of teacher feedback. It heightens that feedback, in fact, because there is no number attached. Students have to grapple with the specific feedback given to their performance, and they lose the limbic resistance that comes with lost points. There’s no shorthand, because there’s no number. Their focus shifts from numbers to the skills and knowledge being learned. Here is an explanation of that shift: A Better Form of Feedback.

Why Grade Abatement Is Necessary

As for what grade abatement is, it’s best to start with why it’s necessary. Alfie Kohn breaks down the harmful effects of traditional grading in his essay, “The Case Against Grades,” which is really required reading for anyone hoping to understand grade abatement. From Kohn’s opening:

By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it.

You say the devil is in the details? Maybe so, but I’d argue that too much attention to the particulars of implementation may be distracting us from the bigger picture — or at least from a pair of remarkable conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the subject: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.

The italicized sentence is what I keep in mind: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. The crux of grade abatement is this belief. We can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments, and the grades we do use can be stripped of most of their harmful effects.

Here are a few more critical points to address, before we delve into how grade abatement 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. Instead, we need to 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; again, his essay on this is pretty much required reading — 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. So does the teacher’s relationship to the material— and to the students. 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… [s]uddenly 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 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. The positive impact of grades (and that’s a questionable list in the first place) is eclipsed entirely by the negative effects. Which is why it’s so unfortunate that…

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 country. 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 sustainable and self-powered kind of learning.

What Grade Abatement Is

The word “abatement” is the key: Since we can’t abolish grades, we must try to abate their negative effects. The primary goal is to establish profiles — grade abatement profiles, or GAPs — of each student, and then to apply a holistic assessment through those profiles. The complete process has its own corner of this site:

The GAP Process

The process is complex. That makes sense. This is not a small shift. It requires changes to instruction, assessment, and feedback. It can be broken down, though, which is what I’ll do here.

It starts with traits that teachers can observe and students can hone: amenability, collegiality, and assiduousness. Then we consider general skills that support learning: organization, autodidactic strength, metacognition, and the ability to collaborate empathetically. Finally, we consider the core skills of critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication.

The last three skills are universal to all learning, and they are most readily measured through some kind of artifact: essays, multiple-choice tests, presentations, and so on. Instead of number grades, however, those artifacts are filtered through the complete constellation of learning: how amenable the student was to feedback, how collegial and collaborative he was, how well he understood his own learning process, and so on.

Of these, metacognition may be the most important skill, because it allows the student and teacher to parse, quantify, and evaluate elements of learning that can’t be tested by traditional means. Metacognition is also the most important element for achieving a better form of feedback, which has its own complex post.

At some predetermined point, the teacher and student collaborate on a holistic assessment of the student’s total progress and output. In the Humanities makerspace, this assessment occurs every three weeks, using technology and old-fashioned analysis to give the work a new kind of authenticity. The evidence is gathered in a way that invites honesty and introspection. The student is a partner in the process, helping to fill in the teacher’s observations and notes. Then the profiles are used to translate that evidence, including any final conferences or writing responses, into a number.

The full GAP guide has a copy of the rubric and a description of each profile, plus detailed explanations of each criterion and element of the process. Most of the particulars wouldn’t change if this process was adapted for other courses, because we are really talking about the basic components of learning. Moreover, the language of each profile is precise enough to prevent ambiguity, while giving students a significant amount of agency and choice.

Here are the skills and traits written out more generally:

The skill of reading closely to build empathy, broaden knowledge, and emulate authors
The skill of thinking critically, especially in answering essential questions
The skill of communicating effectively, especially in writing
Assiduousness, or the ability to persevere in completing difficult tasks
Amenability, or the ability to take criticism well and use it effectively
Collegiality, or the ability to collaborate with peers to read, write, and think
Metacognitive aptitude, especially as demonstrated in journals and self-assessments
Autodidactic aptitude, especially in navigating an interstitial classroom

They can then be paired under more precise labels:

Collegiality ⇆ Empathy | The crux of the course and the stuff of growth, especially in a collaborative learning environment. Empathy is a skill built through discussion, writing, and reading in the Humanities.

Integrity + Character | The focus on individual learning environments and experiences, especially the honesty and openness necessary to take risks. Character is built through the internal and external artifacts below.

Close Reading ⟹ Internalization | Encompasses the texts analyzed for emulative purposes, the universal languages and structures memorized, and the literature read to develop empathy.

Critical Thinking ⟹ Metacognition | The problems being solved, the meaning being made, and, most importantly, the thinking that drives every iterative and individual choice.

Effective Communication ⟹ Writing | Employs bishop composition to centralize writing, especially essay writing, among other discussions and communications.

Amenability ⇆ Self-Awareness | Requires an awareness and acceptance of critical and constructive feedback from all stakeholders in the atelier environment. Especially focused on radial discussion, proxy feedback, and metacognitive analysis.

Assiduousness ⇆ Self-Efficacy | How to live like an academic tardigrade: testing limits, adapting to challenges, and embracing failure as a necessary step in learning. Builds the muscles to beat down procrastination, impulsivity, and complacency.

Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism | The systemic, systematic, and individualized approach to getting things done. The “secret” skill that frames the rest and enables self-directed learning.

The ⇆, +, and ⟹ convey a relationship of sorts, which is the point: These skills and traits connect to each other, support each other, etc., in a way that matters. Understanding that lets us develop a single sheet — a handout that can be posted, downloaded, photocopied, and so on. That’s an essential step in making this usable in a classroom: taking a complex process and giving it an intuitive user interface.

The final step takes those skills and traits and connects them to the profiles, which can again be presented through a more user-friendly handout:

The two fonts are due to my stumbling into this excellent infographic. One handout is better for online use; the other, for photocopies.

Iterative note: This is always evolving, which is really the point of a makerspace. Here is another version of the profiles, with a breakout of each tier: Grade Abatement – Tier Guide

Efficacy and Transparency

Grade abatement is student-centered, but the teacher must build, tweak, and tune the machinery. It’s ongoing and iterative. This requires flexibility and a kind of interstitial access to student evidence — a means of taking notes and marking progress throughout the assessment period. The narrative comes together over time; after a few weeks, for instance, it should be more or less clear to both the teacher and student which tier fits. Technology is invaluable here, because it makes the data readily available and trackable over time.

The skills and traits required in all classes are, at a basic level, the same, which is why the profiles are essential. Beyond the profiles, the teacher needs to distinguish a set of more specific criteria. What are the most important artifacts produced by students? What skills are tested on state or national exams tied to this course? When are students most responsible for their own learning?

The key to all of this — gathering evidence, collaborating with students, compiling GAP narratives, and arriving at a profile score — is efficacy. We can use the definition implied by Jerry Jesness:

Grades are educational quality control, and passing grades “prove” that teacher, student, and school are successful; therefore, the “best” teachers are those who give the highest grades, and the “best” administrators are those who can convince their teachers to do so. In this bizarre system, it is better to teach 10 vocabulary words than 100. If a teacher assigns 10 words and the student learns eight, the student scores 80 on the exam and both teacher and student are successful. If the teacher teaches 100 words and the student learns 50, both student and teacher have failed, even though the second student has learned more than six times as much…

The entire essay, “Why Johnny Can’t Fail” (published in Harper’s in 1999) goes a long way toward identifying how a dependence on grades warps our teaching, and it echoes Kohn’s logic and research into how grades corrupt authentic learning and effective feedback.

The GAP process, in contrast, lets us create assignments with efficacy, and it helps students to recognize, report on, and utilize that efficacy. That leads to the second watchword: transparency. Sharing GAP guides — this is one among dozens — with students gives them more control. There is a blueprint for the learning process, and that transparency should empower students to focus on the skills and knowledge they truly need. There are stakeholder guides, system update notes, and archives of pretty much every iteration.

It’s all part of a kind of engineering redundancy. I repeat and repeatedly connect the elements of instruction, assessment, and feedback so that we have failsafes in place. It becomes nearly impossible to be uninformed or misinformed about grade abatement or any of its mechanisms, except through willful ignorance, spite, or a weird kind of rumor-mongering. That happens, of course, but more and more, it happens only outside of the classroom, with stakeholders who are consumed by their own issues¹.

And this matters because grade abatement is important. It lets us focus on learning. It lets us sharpen student skills and deepen their knowledge and inculcate the traits they will need for the rest of their academic and post-academic lives. It prevents the entitlement, grade inflation, and social promotion that hurts learning, replacing all of that with the potential for a radically different environment. Grade abatement let me build this makerspace, and this makerspace does wonders for students:

Sisyphean High

Use the top menus to navigate this site. The course syllabus is embedded here, since that is the fastest and most comprehensive way for students and all other stakeholders to start learning about what a Humanities makerspace is.

Isaac Asimov identified one of the issues with paradigm shifts: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ↩

No comments

Feedback: Improve the Learning Environment

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

From one perspective, this is a gamified environment. There are levels, and you can progress through those levels in many different ways. You earn experience (in the gamification sense and in the academic sense) by accomplishing set tasks. To succeed, you must dodge environmental hazards and avoid other elements that damage you.

That’s why the Pareto Projects work as well as they do: Students aren’t graded on them, but the best projects are evidence of the skills, traits, and knowledge that are found in the strongest profiles. Investment in the project is an investment in the process of the project, which is really an investment in gaining meaningful experience.

Pareto Projects are also among the best opportunities to level up collegiality and empathy, which remain the most important facet of your learning. Peer-to-peer feedback is an essential part of what we do in a Humanities makerspace:

View at Medium.com

Here, then, is a post about a few of the most direct ways to generate evidence of peer-to-peer feedback. And it is fine if you look at this as a way to game the system to earn credit. Even if your motivation is less than pure, the net result is positive. That’s the design, at least: You can’t cheat the system, and “faking” your investment still helps others. That idea is explained in the tenth section of an essay on an earlier (but still relevant) iteration of the makerspace:

When you are in doubt, fake it. Force yourself to be collegial. Force yourself to do metacognition. Force yourself to spend the entire period pretending to be the right kind of student.

Do this for long enough, and the skills and traits you are pretending to hone will be honed. You will become a better student. This is the Wiseman effect transposed onto education. It is a kind of psychosomatic inverse: tricking your brain into developing habits by forcing your body to take particular actions.

In here, it’s fine if you try to game the system by generating whatever evidence it takes to justify that GAP 8 or GAP 9. Why? Because there is no gamesmanship — no way to cheat the system, fabricate evidence, or twist the language of the profiles. There isn’t even a way to cheat yourself.

If you force yourself through the motions in here, those motions will inculcate the skills and traits we want. A misanthrope who forces himself to take collegial and galvanizing actions will incrementally learn empathy. A narcissist who forces herself to reflect and metacogitate every week will incrementally find new self-awareness and insight. An apathetic student who grinds through assignments just to get them done will incrementally gain a real appreciation for the value of the work.

This is a subtle conversion. It evades the entitlement at the heart of both helplessness and arrogance. The helpless among you feel entitled to be shepherded from task to task; the arrogant among you overvalue your intelligence and devalue the good work of this course. Both groups anticipate being gifted a high grade through some kind of alchemical magic.

The logic of this course is immutable, however. There is no game to play and no gamesmanship to lean on. This course does not care how naturally gifted you are. It does not care if you play sports and play them well. It does not care what your parents think of you. It does not care what you look like, how charming you are, or how much latitude you have been given throughout your life to do what you want.

It cares only about what you do.

I think I’d add now, a few years later, that I care about all of the things listed in the penultimate paragraph. As a teacher and human being, I care. But the course has a logic to it that focuses purely on what you do. You can force yourself to give effective feedback, and it doesn’t matter, provisionally, if you are intrinsically motivated. As long as it’s effective feedback — that is, not perfunctory, superficial, vague — the eventual effect is the same.

Galvanic Work: GAP 8

The first and second page of this PDF cover the top tier of profiles:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FGrade-Abatement-Tier-Guide.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

That’s a new iteration of the guide to the profiles. Here is a screenshot of the anchor profile, which is the profile for a GAP 8:

And here, again, one of the many explanations for how this tier works:

Probably the most important requirement of the highest profiles is a feedback loop — an individualized academic connection with the teacher, the materials of the course, and your peers. There are four main ways to do this:

You can learn directly from the teacher in small groups or as an individual.

You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #1.

You can interact thoughtfully with the interstitial instruction of the course.

You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #3.

Learning from an expert peer is nearly as effective as conferencing with the teacher, and it more closely emulates what you’ll need to do throughout your life, which is to read and annotate and think about the writing of others without a teacher standing over your shoulder. Mentorship should be something you seek out, especially as you get older, but it’s not always a given. Collaboration is.

The burden is evenly distributed, too. Once you have learned something meaningful or mastered a skill, you need to teach it to others. That is known as the protégé effect, and it is almost universally accepted as the best way to hone skills and retain knowledge. In this course, we also call it proxy feedback.

That is another key criterion for the highest profiles: evidence that you have contributed to the learning environment. After that, it’s about the other most effective way to learn, which is to think about your thinking — to get to know yourself and your choices through regular reflection and metacognition.

This should all be done through a mix of discussion and writing, and it needs to be insightful and consistent. Throughout the learning process, you should be using the right language — the universal language of grade abatement.

Peer-to-Peer Feedback

Which brings us to what you do now. You are reading this because it is helpful to have direction when you give feedback to a peer. A template is useful. Sometimes, sentence starters are useful. You can default to this worksheet, which comes from collaboration with Mrs. Greenfeld, who runs the other makerspace at the high school. Here’s a PDF of it:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FFeedback_-Glow-Grow.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

As you can see in the file name, this is adapted from the “glow and grow” model of reflection and assessment. The key is the use of sentence starters. It also helps to have the blurb at the top of each feedback section. Because we are grade-abated, we can use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” The feedback, again, is the key, not a score.

You have a number of options for giving peer-to-peer feedback. Written feedback has lasting power, so focus there — not because face-to-face feedback is unimportant, because it is so important that it happens naturally. If you are talking in class after a project presentation, for instance, feedback will happen. You could use this template to help you be more specific in your feedback, but it’s in the written feedback that it really shines.

Some options:

Leave feedback on the artifact, if possible. Add comments through Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc., if you’ve been given permission to do so.
Make a copy of the artifact, if it’s available but not open to comments, and leave comments on that copy. Then send the annotated copy back to the original owner.
Write a response offering positive and constructive feedback, and then email it to your peer.
Send brief but specific feedback through social media.
Leave comments on any teacher-created version of the artifact, like the Pareto Project pages posted online.

Building Evidence

Here is the most important part of the process, at least in terms of quasi-traditional assessment: You want evidence of your feedback. Look again at the anchoring language of the Tier 4 profiles:

To “demonstrably improve the learning environment,” in this context, means to demonstrate that you gave effective feedback. Again, the gamesmanship of this is built into the system, and there is no harm at all in being somewhat extrinsically motivated. You need evidence of your hard work for the GAP process:

The GAP Process

What does that mean? It means that you are putting feedback in writing not just to make it more permanent, and not just to allow for more thoughtfulness in its construction; you are also preserving copies of that feedback for your records. You can take pictures of handwritten feedback and screenshots of typed feedback. You can make copies of emails and other direct addresses.

Most critically, you can write about the feedback. Be metacognitive about what you said and how you said it. Reflect on your use of sentence starters, since those really do help, and on how the conversation developed. It should be a conversation, after all; delivering feedback with no follow-up is much less effective than a discussion about the work.

Ask questions about this below.

No comments

Pareto Projects: Final Self-Assessment

By Mr. Eure Pareto Projects, Space Explainers

The details of the final self-assessment assignment are at the end. First, a review of the background for the Pareto Project.

Background

The following screenshot was taken on December 7, 2018, but it will match the work of any Pareto Project undertaken at any point during any school year.

The complete guide is posted first. Students brainstorm, pitching their ideas according to the guide’s protocol. Then a blueprint is created, submitted, edited, resubmitted, etc., until it is given final approval.

After refining the project’s final goals and answering any frequently-asked questions, we are able to set final goals. These examples come again from 2018:

These projects, of course, are created under the auspices of the Humanities makerspace, which means they are assessed as part of the grade abatement process. No rubrics are necessary. Instead, we look to an authentic validation of student work, as seen here. And we look to the validation and feedback guided by a student’s own self-assessment, reflection, and metacognitive insight.

Final Self-Assessment

The blueprint step of this process requires students to set two goals: a learning goal and a product goal. The final self-assessment requires an accounting of those goals. Which goals were met? Which changed over time? In the end, what was created, and what was learned?

The blueprints are completed through Google Forms, which means that every student has a copy of the blueprint emailed to them. We can search through Gmail to find that copy to see what was written back before the project truly began.

For the final self-assessment, we can evaluate the extent to which those goals were met. The prompts are changed from predictive to reflective and metacognitive:

1. Pareto Project: Product and Process

What did you create, develop, explore, experience, etc., through this project? How did the process evolve over time? How did your goals shift over time? What now exists for others to see, hear, experience, etc., and to what extent have you chosen to share that work? Will the project continue? If so, what are your future goals? Be specific, and evaluate yourself honestly and empathetically.

2. Pareto Project: Skills, Traits, and Knowledge

What did you learn through this project? What skills, traits, and knowledge did you gain? Use the specific, universal language of grade abatement, referring explicitly to the details in this handout. These questions can also be used to guide this work:

How did the loop between collegiality and empathy factor into your project?
What sort of discussions did you have with others about your project, whether or not you formally worked in a group?
What kind of reading and research was required for your project?
What new knowledge and information did you internalize as a result of your process?
To what extent were you able to practice divergent thinking and creative problem-solving through this project?
How did working on your project test and develop your ability to communicate with others?
To what extent was writing involved, excluding this final self-assessment?
To what extent did you seek criticism and praise about your project as it developed? Did you become more self-aware as a result?
How successful were you at honestly and objectively assessing your progress and product(s)?
What limits did your project test in you? To what extent were you able to demonstrate or develop resilience?
How successful were you in maintaining focus and self-control throughout the project?
What did you learn about your organizational strengths and weaknesses through this project?
To what extent did you need to teach yourself the necessary skills and knowledge to reach your goals?

Whether these final self-assessments are bulleted or, more helpfully, written as essays, they serve as the capstone to the process.

No comments

A Better Kind of Quiz

By Mr. Eure Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

The origin of the term is also its purpose: A pop quiz asks what a student actually remembers, not what was crammed into short-term memory in the moments before the bell. A pop quiz reveals what is internalized.

Except when it doesn’t. In my experience, pop quizzes don’t work. They operate on fear and anxiety, which undermine knowledge and skill. Quizzes require obfuscation and subterfuge on the part of the teacher, too, resulting in a kind of arms race between student gamesmanship and real learning.

What I did with that realization is here:

View at Medium.com

The first two paragraphs are mostly the same as the start of this post; the rest of that Medium essay explores what pop quizzes do and how we might reimagine them.

Data-Driven Quizzes

In a makerspace, the goal of a quiz would be to gather data that lets us direct instruction and learning. For example, during a unit on narrative writing and literary analysis in English 11, we needed to test students’ understanding of literary devices. That led to this quiz:

The directions are repeated at the start of the Google Form, too, for the sake of a kind of engineering redundancy:

DDQ: Literary Devices (1)
Complete the following quiz without using any additional online or offline resources. Match the term to the definition. Identify what you have internalized. Then use the resources of the makerspace to make sense of your performance. Submit evidence of that metacognitive insight as indicated elsewhere.
Terms and definitions: https://blog.prepscholar.com/list-of-literary-devices-techniques
Header image: https://dribbble.com/shots/5330302-Creativity-Book-Club

The focus is on how students learn, not a quiz score. The scores help students self-assess their needs and advocate for their roles in a different and often better form of feedback.

In this example, the questions were simple enough: given the literary device, match it to the definition. For each term, all 19 definitions (we cut it down from the 24 suggested in the instructional post) were randomized, which forced a basic kind of repetition. Here is the start of the choices for verbal irony:

In a quiz like this, each question is instructional, and determining the correct answer is about learning, not performance. On my end, I am able to look at real-time data like these:

That screenshot is illustrative of the process. One tab is open to an instructional post; another, to this quiz and its data. For each question, I am able to see what students seem to know. Irony, for instance, is a difficult concept; perhaps these students need a lesson in irony, then, or a model text that demonstrates verbal irony. I’ll know the answer when I read their metacognitive analysis of the quiz.

Moving Forward

That’s an explanation of the pedagogy. For students, it’s now a question of efficacy: Does this help you to internalize information? Does it make your learning habits more transparent? How does your performance improve as a result of this kind of reimagined quiz? Use the comment space here to ask questions and offer insights — including any onomatopoeia that might replace “pop” with a better metaphor.

2 Comments

Objects in Space

By Mr. Eure Space Explainers

Updated in September of 2019.

The Physical Makerspace

Here is a partial view of the makerspace in Room 210 on November 27, 2018:

The physical space changes often. It is finally a reflection of our pedagogy, which was described as far back as 2015 like this:

Grade abatement isn’t a grand and unifying theory that solves the problem of grades and grade obsession; it is, instead, the kind of art where the shaping of instruction is the instruction. It evolves because it is in use.

That linked post is itself a showcase for iterative pedagogy. Some of the raw stuff in that post has been refined; some elements have been jettisoned; some has been kept intact. We shape this space by using it.

The physical setup reflects the same sensibility. It can be rearranged every morning to fit my plans — let’s circle students up for discussion; let’s separate students for timed writing — but it should, most of the time, shift to fit students’ plans. Here is a tour of the space cobbled together as part of the testimonial site:

The photos in that tour are a little older than the photo at the top of this post. If you look closely at the latter, you’ll see copies of our skills and traits laminated and fixed to each table. There is also a copy of a check-in checklist, which starts with a consideration of the physical space and continues with a form for goal-setting and mindfulness.

When the physical space is modular, that daily calibration is essential.

Daily Calibration

That daily check-in form might be the key to focus for all students. Here is a pre-filled version of the check-in form that anyone can view:

Daily Check-In: Sisyphus

That takes only a few moments at the start of each class period, but those few moments build powerful habits and generate useful data. Consider this screenshot of student feedback:

The first two columns’ data come from the following parts of the form, which are drawn from the excellent educator resources at Stop, Breathe & Think:

While these sections are optional, they can center students physically and mentally, giving them a greater chance of shifting cognitively from whatever came before — an exhausting gym class, a frenetic lunch period, etc. — into the work of a makerspace.

The next columns of data are goals and miscellaneous feedback or updates from students. This is incredibly powerful information to have at the start of the class period, and not just for teachers. For students, this is a way to orient themselves in the middle of a day that pulls them in a dozen different directions.

Completing this form is, therefore, incredibly important. To address students directly: This is a habit that you need in life. Goal-setting and mindfulness will help you navigate academics, relationships, and the equally Sisyphean grind of many jobs. You can and often should pause momentarily to take stock of your physical and mental wellbeing. You can and often should set an immediate, achievable goal.

Off the Floor

If you look again at the picture of Room 210 at the top of this post, you’ll also see a set of assigned seats for each table. This runs somewhat contrary to the idea of student-driven collaboration, but it’s often required when we’re faced with those flying guillotines. For years, I’ve tried different iterations of assigned seats. For a while, these iterations improved accountability and focus; overall, they undercut the purpose of the space.

We have to consider the needs of the space. When students arrive, that seat is where they shift cognitively. They set a specific goal for the period, either formally or informally, often by completing the above “calibration” form. They note briefly how they are feeling mentally and physically.

To again address students directly: When you sit with friends at the start of a period, your mindset tends to be less focused. If I need to announce something or review directions, you tend to miss that information. Regardless of the paradigm shifts in play here, this is still a public high school; you need to make a conscious effort to set aside the million distractions around you.

What we want is a way for each student to slough off distractions, set an immediate goal, and get to work — eventually without needing a teacher to call for attention. Think of it as putting on a lab coat and safety equipment in a more traditional makerspace. You wouldn’t walk in and casually fire up a blowtorch. You would check in first.

Remember the true purpose of this space: to use its resources to solve authentic problems, most often through reading and writing in the Humanities. The seats are just furniture to hold us off the floor while we do that. The people around us are resources and supports while we do that. All it takes is deliberate action and a sort of sedulous self-awareness — not an easy habit, but a necessary one.

One Comment

Exemplary Feedback

By Mr. Eure Skill-Building, Space Explainers, Triage

The following three emails were sent on November 21 at 7:51 AM, 8:09 AM, and 8:16 AM, respectively. The assignment in question is this one:

SWOT Analysis

My response is essential reading for any student using the makerspace. It covers, among other things, the value and universality of the skills and traits of grade abatement. It highlights the kind of feedback used in this space, too.

Student’s Email: 7:51 AM

Mr Eure,

I want to be completely honest and open. I am absolutely BAFFLED by this SWOT Analysis. I have no idea what my strengths are, I don’t know how to organize this information, I don’t know what questions to answer because the article that was given is mostly work related and it confuses me.

Even if I could come up with my strengths, I don’t know how to word them properly. I don’t exactly understand how I can explain my own strengths and weaknesses, I think sometimes my weaknesses are that I do not use my strengths to the full extent that I can. Why I do that? I don’t have the answer to that. What strengths am I limiting myself in using? I also don’t have the answer to that.

Every website I look up only further confuses me, and they are all ad-ridden and barely load. I am truly baffled, that is the only word I can use to describe my current state. I really don’t understand this at all. I think one of my weaknesses is SWOT analyzing.

Thank you for reading in advance,

[Anonymous]

My Reply: 8:09 AM

One of your strengths is amenability, which includes asking for help like you have here. You’re also self-aware enough to admit when you’re confused or lost — a real strength, especially when so many folks feel pressure to be perfect all the time.

To adapt a SWOT analysis to academics — to student life — you need to think about school as a company. Its products are the students themselves. More specifically, it’s about work to produce that student. Your job is to make yourself.

Think of strengths and weaknesses in terms of GAP skills and traits. Those are universal. They apply to everything — so much so that we were able to draw analogies yesterday, using those universal skills and traits, between our work and everything from soccer to waitressing to playing in a band. Use that language. Look at your amenability, assiduousness, self-efficacy, etc., and recognize that you absolutely have strengths from that list.

Then recognize that strengths and weaknesses are elements you control. That’s the distinction that works best for me: a strength can be honed, and a weakness can be mitigated. We control those, at least to a certain extent. Opportunities, on the other hand, are of our control. So are threats. All we can do is prepare for them, taking advantage of opportunities and navigating threats.

In our class, you have the opportunity to write me like you have here, and you’ll get immediate feedback. That’s outside of your control; if I don’t check my email, or if I never invite you to work interstitially in the first place, you can’t force it to happen. But you can take advantage of the opportunity that is there. Similarly, you can’t do anything about this holiday break. For five days (since today, Wednesday, isn’t a full day of school), you don’t have face-to-face time with your peers and me in this makerspace. That’s a threat to continuity, momentum, and the best kind of feedback, which is always given in person. You can’t change the calendar. But you can reach out, as you have, for interstitial help.

Which brings me to your most obvious strength: critical thinking and metacognition. Look at the set of universal skills and traits, which pair those and frame them in terms of “problem-solving in an authentic context.” It also says that “you strive to make that thinking as transparent as possible.” That’s what you’ve done by sending an email: You’ve made your thinking transparent, asked the kinds of questions that lead to helpful feedback, and opened yourself up to further critical thinking and metacognition. That’s a real strength! It is, in fact, the most important strength to have, when you feel lost or confused. It’s easy to dodge responsibility — out of embarrassment or frustration or fear — and blame others. It’s much harder to do what you’ve done, which is to communicate effectively in writing in order to get help.

And just look at that last sentence: You’ve demonstrated strength in effective communication, writing (especially the idea of “mak[ing] thinking clear”), amenability, and self-awareness. All through a single email.

If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take your name off of your email and use it, alongside my response, as an example for all students. That, too, gets at a strength: collegiality and empathy. You have strength in both, and this would be another way for you to demonstrate, as anonymously as you choose, the “[e]mpathy [that] animates and facilitates the collaborative environments that drive innovation.” That, too, is from the list of universal skills and traits.

Thank you for reaching out,

Mr. Eure

Student’s Reply: 8:16 AM

Thank you very much for your timely response!

This helps a lot, especially with comparing a school to a company. That makes the questions on the link you provided in the instructional post make much more sense. I would be okay with you using the email as an example, I always find that others student’s emails and your responses help me understand things more clearly and I would want to be able to provide the same for my peers.

No comments

Pause: The Big Sky

By Mr. Eure Space Explainers, Triage

If you’re reading this as a student, it’s likely because you are being asked to complete an activity like a SWOT analysis or a blueprint for a passion project. There is sometimes a question about when, in our makerspace, we will get to the so-called “real work” of English. This is a response to that question, and it is written to help even those who already know the answer.

The TL:DR is that the makerspace is dedicated to building habits and developing substructural skills and traits. English is about reading, thinking, and writing; you’ve been immersed in the Humanities since you entered the room. We must occasionally focus on a skill or trait in order to better read a novel or write an essay. We must dedicate the time to putting those skills and habits of mind into practice.