Category: 2018-2019

Parent category for posts from the 2018-2019 school year.

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Essay Writing: Five Prompts

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

This assignment builds on the NPR Podcast Challenge we started in early January:

NPR Student Podcast Challenge

You can continue to use the space to complete the challenge, and I’ll make that an ongoing option through the end of March. There is an opportunity here to do more than just a podcast, though. The five prompts provided by NPR could be used for discussion and essay-writing, too.

First, those prompts again:

Tell us a story about your school or community: about something that happened there — recently or in the past — that your audience should know about.

What is a moment in history that all students should learn about?

Show us both sides of a debate about an issue that’s important to you.

What do you want to change about the world? What’s a big change that students today will make in the future?

Explain something to us that kids understand and grown-ups don’t.

Answering these five questions has given you the subject and approach, at least, for five different essays. We will use the writing process(es) outlined here:

The Writing Process

Your assignment is simple: Choose a prompt, and then write an essay in response to it.

You can use your peers for inspiration, by the way, since you can load the Google Form you completed, click on “See previous responses,” and read hundreds of potential approaches:

You have to add your own answers first, of course. If you’ve done that, you now have access to the anonymous suggestions of your peers.

Follow any further directions on Google Classroom, and ask questions below.

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What’s In Your Name?

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Writing Prompt

Earlier this month, you were invited to read excerpts from Freakonomics:

What’s In a Name?

The focus overall is on parenting, with the subject of names dominating an entire chapter. That is now our focus: the names we have and what we might write about them.

Prompt and Circumstance

The prompt for this writing assignment is simple: Write an essay about your name. The trick is unpacking that prompt and finding an interesting approach to the subject.

To do this, we’ll us two tactics. First, a work-in-progress guide to writing built on makerspace principles. It’s roughly 90% complete, which means it will work for you:

It will also be shared in class. Following those steps will produce an essay.

The second tactic is to use the comment section of this post to share, discuss, critique, etc., your ideas. Focus on your approach. What is the interesting perspective you can bring to bear on the subject of your name? What questions can you ask and answer? What will interest a potential audience? And so on.

Post your (succinct) comments here, and we’ll let the interstitial mechanisms of the course take over. Follow Google Classroom for deadlines and other requirements.

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Engines That Could

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

See the 2017-2018 version of this post here.

2/13 Update: We’ll be using this year’s set of data on February 13-15 to tackle motivation and engagement in the makerspace. Load a reader- and printer-friendly version of the responses here: https://tinyurl.com/SSCP-19.

The original instructional post is below.

Strategic Coherence

One of the first texts given to students each year is Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on educational paradigms. It introduces one of the animating beliefs of this makerspace, which is that traditional education does not prepare students for the world they will join after high school. That world demands a different kind of intelligence, and it’s a far cry from the “model of the mind” that Robinson criticizes.

Watch the whole thing periodically to remind yourself why we do what we do.

For most students, what this nebulous “real world” will demand matters less than getting into college and/or starting a career. That’s why district’s like ours look more specifically at what those colleges and careers value. That list always starts with empathy, but it also always includes the rest of the nontraditional skills and traits we centralize in this course. As a reminder, the instructional, assessment, and feedback structures in the makerspace are all linked by universal languages:

The GAP Process

Two of these universal skill and traits are self-awareness and self-efficacy, which we loop together like so:

Students need to understand why we do what we do. They need self-awareness and a sense of self-efficacy. There is a permanent place on this website to discuss the Dunning-Kruger effect and imposter syndrome, for instance, because an accurate sense of self is difficult at any age. And as that post on empathy and college readiness notes, we always need an answer to the question, “When am I ever going to have to use this?”

The Most Important Skill

That’s what we have here. The makerspace makes explicit connections to college-, career-, and world-relevance in order to reshape the geometry of traditional education. Our work is rooted in a shared sense of purpose.

Part of that is our focus on metacognition and reflection. Tracking the arc of our learning over time gives us the necessary self-efficacy. And that applies to all stakeholders: Teachers in the makerspace practice metacognition and reflection. Brewster, as a district, also reflects on its progress in order to improve.

Which brings us to the BCSD Strategic Coherence Plan:

This Strategic Coherence Plan has been available to the public for a while, but January 11, 2018 saw the formal release in that post. In late January of 2018, the Tri-State Consortium visited the district for three days to evaluate the SCP, which has led to even more innovation.

A quick aside: You can learn more about the Consortium here. I’ve been involved as a team member for almost a decade, and many of the innovations of this course started with Tri-State. I first heard of Alfie Kohn’s essay on de-grading through one of their study groups, for instance.

Our job as stakeholders is to help the district, and we do that by highlighting the extent to which our Humanities makerspace fits the Strategic Coherence Plan. Through the support of district- and building-level administration, we’ve been able to develop a unique and uniquely nontraditional learning environment, and it aligns perfectly with the SCP:

Load a PDF explaining how by clicking here.

Our particular innovations beyond the SCP are just that: innovations particular to our classroom. We have a unique assessment model, grade abatement, based on growth in universal skills and traits; an interstitial model of instruction that improves on the flipped classroom; and makerspace-inspired assignments that reframe and individualize the important work of the Humanities.

Students in this course can speak specifically to the district’s vision. It’s why feedback and advocacy are essential. The district values that perspective as much as I do, and a sense of how this SCP is enacted on the frontlines will help to shape what happens next. The feedback provided in 2018 is available here:

We do this at the halfway point of the year for two reasons: First, students are now fully immersed in a different way of learning and creating meaning. Like any makerspace, we need time to learn the basics and establish good habits. For a reminder of how this works, load the following post:

The Big Sky

Second, this gives us another semester to use the feedback. As you look at those responses from January of 2018, you’ll be able to see how each prompt is tied to student goals and growth. There needs to be time and space to process the responses while still in the makerspace.

With that said, there are a few notes for current students in the makerspace, who are probably reading this as part of the formal assignment.

Students, recognize this as an opportunity for self-awareness and self-efficacy. It requires the most important kind of reflection and metacognition, which is why this assignment is replacing the usual self-assessment writing that accompanies the GAP report process.

There is also an extrinsic motivation: This form will help you to generate evidence for the top tiers of grade abatement: the use of “inquiry-based tools and structures” in an attempt to “demonstrably improve the learning environment,” for instance. The cited language comes from the fourth tier directly:

This is also an opportunity to “do more than just what is required,” since the quality of your responses is entirely in your control. Those of you who take advantage of this opportunity will find more clarity and purpose, but you will also receive more feedback from me and the other teachers in the makerspace.

Review the questions first, and then write your initial responses in a separate document. Copy them into the Google Form when you’re ready. You can submit multiple responses at different times, edit your answers after you submit them, and get feedback before posting anything. Try to answer as many prompts as you can, and ask for help on prompts that are unclear.

The formal assignment will be posted to Google Classroom. Look there for any other pertinent information. Like everything else in our makerspace, this process is about looped feedback and shared understanding, so you need to work together. You might start by asking questions in the comment section below.

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Makerspace Reading Calendar: 2018-2019

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

Here is a printable Google Doc with this information: https://tinyurl.com/ycep9emy

Background: Instructional Posts

These are embedded, in order, after the list.

  • The Reading Process | Covers everything.
  • As You Read: Works of Literary Merit | One version of the analysis process. An updated version is here: https://tinyurl.com/simplifiedanalysis.
  • Choosing to Read: Directions | Covers assigned texts versus student-chosen texts.
  • Literary Analysis Guide | Another version of the analysis process.

The Reading Process

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Choosing to Read [2018]

Literary Analysis Guide

Background: Course Syllabi

Each syllabus covers reading goals for the course in full. A note on AP English Language & Composition follows that embedded syllabus.

AP Language follows the reading requirements from the College Board, which are available here: tinyurl.com/210APCB. The most relevant section is this one:

Language & Composition is explicitly focused on a different kind of reading. Canonical literature isn’t excluded, but traditional analysis is discouraged. Nevertheless, the makerspace so strongly emphasizes literature as an aesthetic experience that exceptions must be made. See the course orientation and Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video for more on this.

Makerspace Reading Lists: 2018-2019

The makerspace shifts us away from mandated reading and toward literary merit and student choice. One of the essential texts in the prefatory reading is John Holt’s “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which we use to frame that choice:

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.

As the “Choosing to Read” instructional post says, students navigate the first 30-40 pages of a novel in order to make that decision. Each time, we use a specific protocol to learn more about how students read, what that means for their learning, and where the threshold lies between challenging their habits and forcing the issue until something breaks.

Ultimately, students decide between the assigned book (e.g., 1984, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and another work of equal literary merit. They must read a book. They are encouraged to stick with the assigned one; the choice, however, is theirs.

We then focus on skills, traits, and the common experiences that all works of literary merit provide us. There are no quizzes and no tests. Literature is used in essays when it is appropriate in a real-world sense, or when we must do test prep.

Otherwise, literature is used to teach the reader. Reading gives us life experience, wisdom, and empathy. It also teaches students something about how they read, which is essential to how they learn.

The assured experience is in the skills and traits developed by reading, the discussions that don’t depend just on plot points, and the metacognitive and reflective work that drives growth.

Reading Calendar: First Semester (2018-2019)

My co-teachers and I built the course calendar in September: tinyurl.com/210-2018-cal. For all classes, the Pareto Projects and GAP scoring dates stay the same. Each quarter is divided into panels, like a triptych, with different kinds of literature assigned during each panel.

Here is a post explaining the use of Q1 as a skill-building crash course:

The Big Sky

Through the first semester, a variety of literature and other texts were studied:

Q2 ends with every course having studied a book according to the makerspace protocol, which includes, of course, doing close-reading exercises on prescribed excerpts, discussing thematic elements, and practicing literary analysis.

There are additionally several posts that combat misinformation and disinformation about the makerspace approach to literature. Here is one:

Mongering and Congeries

Here is another that focuses specifically on reading:

Well, Why Read?

Reading Calendar: Second Semester (2018-2019)

Up next will be three full-length books or plays in each course, in addition to short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Below (or in the printable version of this post), you can see the major texts cross two GAP panels each, with around 30 class periods available to us during those two panels. This is more than enough time to introduce the literature, begin the reading process, and then make the student-driven choice to continue or to choose a work of equal literary merit.

Each class will keep test prep and the required essays in place, of course, as well as the Pareto Projects and other project-based learning opportunities (like the ongoing NPR Student Podcast Challenge).

Note that the listed texts are provisional. It might be that we decide that Othello is a better play for English 10, for instance, since it is taught in other English 10 classes. We might move up our study of The Catcher in the Rye in English 11 to partner up with other junior classes, too. We are using some of the most commonly taught books in the English Department in order to create assured experiences.

Note on the overlap between English 11 and AP English Language & Composition:

English 11 and AP English Language & Composition are taught some of the same canonical texts. They are also given some of the same essay prompts, including junior-year staples like the personal narrative. This is because AP English Language & Composition, while open to juniors and seniors, is practically and provisionally a junior-level course.

In 2008-2009, it was officially called English 11 AP. In 2009-2010, the course lost its lab periods, dropped the 11, and opened up enrollment to seniors. Since then, 553 students have taken the course. Exactly 20 (or 3%) have been seniors. Over the last four years, sections of AP English Language & Composition have had an average of 29 students. The only three seniors enrolled during that time are all from 2018-2019. The average number of seniors in any section in the last ten years is 0.8 — less than a single student. Juniors take AP English Literature and Composition; seniors do not take AP English Language and Composition.

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NPR Student Podcast Challenge

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

Update for Students: You were overwhelmingly in favor of spending time on this podcast challenge, so it has been folded into all classes. Formal assignments have been added to Google Classroom. You will not be required to produce a complete podcast, nor will you have to enter the contest. Instead, you will have three required assignments: to analyze example podcasts, to gather potential ideas, and to answer six questions about one of those ideas. All of the surrounding information from NPR is critical, of course (click this link for an example), but you will be working more explicitly through the following:

The current deadline for all this is January 25. Let’s revisit that deadline on a class-by-class basis next week.

The Challenge

We’re a makerspace, which means we make things. Sometimes, those artifacts are inspired by people and organizations outside of our walls. Case in point:

This podcast challenge is a ready-made makerspace unit. It requires you to analyze existing podcasts to figure out how to emulate them. It requires all of our universal skills and traits. In fact, if you look through the student resources NPR has provided, you’ll see a mention of a “toolbox” in the first step:

That’s not just a tremendous example of how those universal skills and traits work in the real world; it’s also remarkably similar to a 20 Time or Pareto Project.

The Calendar

Speaking of your Pareto Projects, this is timed well for us. Look at the calendar for the year:

As I write this, we are in between Pareto Projects. February 25 is set aside as the start of the next process. NPR’s podcast challenge ends on March 31. That overlap gives us a unique opportunity:

  • We work on the podcast challenge once a week or so through the February break.
  • In Q3B, which runs from February 25 through March 15, you continue the podcast challenge or begin a new Pareto Project.
  • If you continue the podcast, you will finish and submit it by Friday, March 29.
  • In that case, you would begin a smaller Pareto Project on Monday, April 1.

Projects are meant to be presented from May 28 through June 14, which is the last Friday we meet together. There is, therefore, more than enough time for you to create a podcast and a second, meaningful Pareto Project.

Let’s start with your feedback: What do you think of this podcast challenge? After looking at NPR’s website, are you inspired by the possibilities? How do you think this would fit our space? Talk to me in the comments, where your peers can benefit from the exchange.

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What’s In a Name?

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Click here for the post and podcast on names.

Reading: Freakonomics, Chapters 5-6 and More

The focus of our current lessons is an excerpt from Freakonomics, one of the more interesting and controversial non-fiction books available to us. You can learn more about its authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, at that Wikipedia link. You can learn even more by exploring their website, which is also embedded below.

We are reading two chapters: Chapter 5, “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” and Chapter 6, “Perfect Parenting, Part II: Or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?” The photocopied packet also includes the epilogue (“Two Paths to Harvard”). The epilogue comes, as epilogues do, at the end of the entire book, but it serves perfectly as a capstone to Chapters 5-6.

You likely began this reading offline and without an instructional post. That’s not just to balance the online and offline work we do, but to stress how important those two photocopied chapters are to our work. There will also be copies posted to Google Classroom.

After you’ve read and annotated them, you can explore the Freakonomics website for other interesting articles, especially those about parenting, raising children, and naming children. The image at the top of this post links to a podcast that you could listen to, for instance, before you load the website proper:

Because Levitt and Dubner have published so many follow-up articles, studies, and books, you are almost guaranteed to find more to read on the subject of parenting and raising children. As a teacher trying to innovate the way we do assessment, I’m particularly interested in this one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/freakonomics-goes-to-school-and-teaches-us-the-right-way-to-bribe-kids/258672/

You really ought to start with the podcast on names, though. It’s available here or through the image at the top of this post.

Your Reading Assignment

Take notes that track what you find interesting, what you want to discuss, what sparks your curiosity, etc. You can write on the photocopies, in a notebook, or online through Google Drive. As you write, you should discuss what you read with your peers. You can always rearrange the classroom to suit your needs:

Objects in Space

So you have a simple goal: Read carefully, take notes of some kind, and look for what’s most interesting to you. More formal assignments will be given separately.

This is also (as always) a unit designed to test your attentiveness to this kind of flipped instruction — the posts, links, etc, that teach you what to do before you work directly with your teachers. If you’ve gotten this far, you should click below to load a strange and often hilarious website that relates to our reading:

That, too, is part of the fabric of this discussion. The focus on parenting is central, of course, but the power of names is right there.

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Notes on Your Progress

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Provisional GAP Scores

Before you move into the silent, sustained reading that will occupy your time for the next few class periods, be sure that you’ve seen the update to Infinite Campus. Load that in a separate window, if you need to. Take a look at what we’ve posted under GAP2C: Q2C Profile.

This is a provisional profile score. Provisional, as you know from this post on the provisional moratorium on cell phones, means “temporary, precautionary” — so this is a score for the time being, and one that is designed to warn you. We’ve used provisional scores before.

This particular score represents the appropriate profile for your work on January 2 and January 3. It includes the progress you’ve made toward revising your Pareto Project self-assessments, which were due over the break, and the progress you’ve made toward analyzing a short story through the provided handout. It also reflects your in-class focus and feedback, as always.

First, consider the self-assessment of your Pareto Project. Take a look at this:

Pareto Projects: Final Self-Assessment

That was posted on December 7, after three months of weekly work on a project of your choosing. The timeline and background are reposted there, but the central assignment is the two-part self-assessment. You had three weeks to write insightfully about what you learned. As it says there, on Google Classroom, and on the printed copies of the assignment:

It is being posted now [on December 7] so that you can organize the next two weeks around this kind of thinking. You must pay attention to yourself and your peers as we share the results of your Pareto process. This assignment is how you derive insight from that attentiveness, and it will help you set up the next passion-driven project you do.

When you came back on January 2, you were given a second chance to do this right. Three months of work, three weeks to think critically — and then another three days to provide some insight.

Here’s the data we have that led us to post a provisional GAP score. First, we have when you most recently accessed the required Google document. We can record the students who didn’t touch their work for two days. We can see each iteration and revision.

We also have the Google Form, which tracks entries and edits. We know who didn’t touch that for two days. We can see the extent to which you were working.

And we have whatever else you produced between December 7 and, now, January 3: all the documents, feedback, notes, etc., that you gave us, we compiled through observations, and so on.

The same thing goes for the revamped version of your short-story analysis. That was due on December 21:

English 11: Narrative Writing + Literary Analysis

It was posted on December 10. We bumped the final, emulative exercise — the writing of your own story — to Q2C:

A simplified worksheet, time in class to do it, and the option to write your own story or use a provided one.

We can also see what you accessed on 1/2 and 1/3 for this assignment. We can see what you typed. We can document that only 11 students opened up the new document to work on it over two days, and we observed only three students write by hand on the printed version. We can even see how many people view the instructional posts.

We’re waiting to give you feedback, too. If you write anything all, we can help. Case in point:

It is irrelevant to this feedback that the deadline for this short story analysis is tomorrow. Our course is always about the process — about a process-based form of feedback and focus on growth. It’s about what you do, each and every day, not whether you might be able to — might be able to — rush through an assignment at the last minute and do it well. It’s about every choice you make, and how, sometimes, those choices show us a sudden and clear picture of who you are:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

We watched you gossip, play games, scroll social media, etc., every time we moved to help another individual or group. Some of you, at least, chose not to work. And we’ve been over this: You always have something to do. Today, a few hard-working students had finished their work, so they were asked to read this and give us some feedback:

Clarifying Grade Abatement

You also had feedback to process from January 2. GAP scores for Q2B were held in abeyance until we’d talked face-to-face on our first day back. Those scores, too, are powerful indicators of what you need to improve immediately, and you are always meant to unpack and process them.

Hence these provisional GAP scores. With enough hard work, you can improve them. Growth is rewarded. Self-awareness is rewarded. Amenability is rewarded. Focus on that.

If you have general questions, ask them below, where we can answer them for everyone’s benefit. If you have a question about your individual circumstances, send us an email or speak to one of us in class.

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Regents Exam Practice: August, 2016

  By All Classes (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), Test Prep, Triage

 

All test prep should be prefaced with a close reading of the following quotation:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

That is one of the two framing quotations on the front page of this instructional site, and it gets at the core philosophy of a makerspace: You learn by doing, and by thinking about thinking — being a “capable psychonaut,” as it’s called in this unit on akrasia and self-control.

You should also read the guide to grade abatement and this clarification of the process. Test prep, like everything else, relies on universal skills and traits. It teaches us as much as we allow it to teach us.

Castle Learning Triage: 8/16 Practice

Students in New York must pass the ELA Common Core Regents Exam to graduate high school. It’s a comprehensive exam, which means it is not explicitly tied to a single year of ELA instruction; in fact, it can be taken and retaken at any time, with permission1. All but a few of you will take it at the end of your junior year.

Whenever we do test prep, we are really performing triage — score-driven, teacher-assisted triage. We are also identifying strengths in order to promote a better form of feedback.

The practice discussed in this post comes from the ELA Common Core Regents Exam given in August of 2016. We will use Castle Learning.

Castle Learning has already been set up for each of you according to class period. If you are in a different situation (e.g., graduating early and needing to take the exam in January of what would have been your junior year), you will be added individually. You’ll need your Castle Learning login information, which you can get from any of your teachers. Here is the main site:

You will be helped through the registration process, if this is your first time using the service. Once you are registered, you’ll find these tasks have been assigned to you:

  • 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage A
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage B
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage C
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 2
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 3

For each of those, there is an additional CR — Constructed Response — that asks you to be metacognitive about your choices and performance. These metacognitive constructed responses are essential. They turn cursory work into meaningful work, and they force us to identify and analyze strengths and weaknesses.

For Part 1, which pairs close reading with multiple-choice questions, the metacognitive prompt is this:

Use teacher feedback, your peers, and the correct answers that are provided by Castle Learning to engineer an understanding of how these questions and answer choices work. Write metacognitively about the passage, the questions, and your problem-solving efforts.

For Part 2 and Part 3, which ask for writing responses, the metacognitive prompt is this:

Identify and analyze several writing choices you made in this response. You can focus on your use of detail, your arrangement, your central meaning, or your rhetorical manipulation of grammar and style.

Part 2 and Part 3 will be assigned to students through Castle Learning. There will be no corresponding Google Classroom assignment; scores and feedback will be given through Castle Learning itself. To receive feedback (and credit), the following five steps must be completed:

  1. Write Part 2 and Part 3 by hand in the provided essay booklet.
  2. Type Part 2 in Castle Learning, revising it as you type.
  3. Write a thorough response to the metacognitive prompt about Part 2 in Castle Learning.
  4. Type Part 3 in Castle Learning, revising it as you type.
  5. Write a thorough response to the metacognitive prompt about Part 3 in Castle Learning.

The last step we will take is to look at exemplary student responses, which are provided by New York:

Additional Notes

Use this post to ask questions about the August 2016 exam. These questions can be related to procedure or to the passages, questions, and prompts. These comments will be used now and in the future to save students time.

Remember that this is a grade-abated assessment. Your score on each part of the practice exam is important, and you will be given that score. It does not factor into your GPA, however, because that score is not nearly as important as understanding the how and why of that score. Those of you who struggle on tests will focus on collaboration, growth, and metacognitive insight. Those of you who excel will focus on using metacognitive insight to help others reach your level.

Later this year, we’ll talk about score conversions, final scores, and the gamesmanship necessary for high-stakes exams. Here is a preview:

Gamesmanship: Regents Exam (CC ELA)

  1. Our school has experimented with a few different options. For a couple of years, we gave the exam to sophomores, even having some sophomores take it in January. That was before the test was overhauled and brought in line with Common Core, though. ↩

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Feedback: Improve the Learning Environment

  By 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:

  1. You can learn directly from the teacher in small groups or as an individual.
  2. You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #1.
  3. You can interact thoughtfully with the interstitial instruction of the course.
  4. 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:

  1. Leave feedback on the artifact, if possible. Add comments through Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc., if you’ve been given permission to do so.
  2. 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.
  3. Write a response offering positive and constructive feedback, and then email it to your peer.
  4. Send brief but specific feedback through social media.
  5. 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.

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Moratorium

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

Starting Wednesday, December 12, there will be a moratorium in our classroom on the use of any all devices (e.g., phones, tablets) except district-issued Chromebooks and personal laptops. There will also be a moratorium on choosing your own seats1.

We’ll review this together — hands-on, with liberal use of a whiteboard to define and detail certain points — but you may have questions or comments that require an interstitial forum like this one. Remember, too, that this site is for all stakeholders, not just students. Our conversation about technology is an inclusive one.

The most important note is probably this: moratorium refers to a pause or delay in action. It’s a temporary suspension. It isn’t a permanent ban. The second most important note is that you can be part of the conversation about technology use and learning. Start in the comment section here by asking questions, making observations, etc., so that I can reply to you.

Moratorium on Phones

Since smartphones are the most common distraction, “phone” is a placeholder for any device except district-issued Chromebooks or personal laptops.

If you want context for this moratorium, you’ll find it in the unit we did on self-control and self-discipline:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

Self-control is one of the most important skills you can develop, so we’ve used the flexibility of the makerspace to give you opportunities to test your focus and discipline. Many students failed those tests.

That’s okay, at least in a larger sense. The purpose of that akrasia unit is, in part, to normalize the problem as a decidedly human one. In other words, we all struggle with self-control, distraction, procrastination, etc., and we all need to improve.

In a more immediate sense, we have to get these phones out of students’ hands. There are, of course, academic reasons to have a phone, and this site is designed to be read on the smaller screens. But those academic reasons continue outside of school. You’d use your phone interstitially, as intended, when you are making the choice to learn, create, question, etc., in an academic sense.

In class, the phone is too much of a distraction. We’ve tested it for three months now, and the rate of improvement is too slow. I imagine that this moratorium will remain in place for a long time.

Assigned Seats

The context for assigned seats:

Objects in Space

All we’re doing now is keeping you in those start-of-period assigned seats until the bell. You need the separation to get work done. We’ll obviously make exceptions when it comes to group projects, but this is otherwise about isolating you from distractions.

It needs to be clarified that collaboration is the stuff of growth, which is why we start the year there; simply being in a group, however, is not proof of collaboration. Being in proximity to other students is just being in proximity to them. Collaboration refers to what you produce. When members of our group fail to stay on task in their chosen groups, it helps to assign seats.

We Have Work to Do

All of this is predicated on the obvious: You have work to do. You are in a makerspace, and that means there is always more work to do. Even that last link proves its own point, because it would take a while to read that entire lecture and process its ideas.

Right now, as the winter holidays approach, you need to be more focused than ever. In every course, the end of your first Pareto Project process requires the following:

Pareto Projects: Final Self-Assessment

Meanwhile, English 10 students are writing personal letters, English 11 students are analyzing and writing short stories, and AP students are applying the makerspace mentality to Santa Claus. This is perhaps the worst time of year to lose focus.

Below is the version of our grade abatement profiles that was affixed to each workstation earlier this week. The color-coded tiers may help you to maintain focus. You shift into the red by ignoring directions and disengaging from the work, and the more you resist, the more you build evidence of those lower tiers. In other words, refusing to focus, especially in the particular way you are being directed to focus, is enough by itself to lower your profile and grade.

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

  1. With the possible exception of the AP classes. This is based on group dynamics, which is really about a kind of herd immunity, and AP students have earned a few days to prove they have the requisite discipline to choose their own seats. The moratorium on phones applies to everyone, though, which says something about the addiction we’re dealing with. ↩