Month: September 2017

23 Comments

Scripta Manent

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Interstitial Options

In one of the instructional posts you have been asked to read1, you’ll find this Latin phrase: Verba volant, scripta manent. It is the idea that “spoken words fly away, [while] written words remain.” It’s important enough to the philosophy in here that we probably want it posted on the wall as part our burgeoning creative clutter.

Why? Well, we live in a hypertextual world, which means that we can communicate through the Internet in ways that were unimaginable even 20 years ago. The written word is more permanent, more accessible, and more immediate.

Face-to-face discussion, of course, remains as powerful as ever in a classroom environment. What we want to do is to expand that environment to include interstitial options, like this website and Google Classroom. I’ve tried to explain the evolution of it in this essay, which you are encouraged to read. Here’s what Neil Postman had to say about it, in what is probably another lock for the classroom wall:

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

I’m repeating a lot of what you’ve already been told, but that’s the point: The more often we write down our ideas, the more we are able to revisit and refine them. The more we think in writing, the clearer those thoughts become. It’s an act of iteration, and we need to experiment with tools that let us iterate and collaborate better.

Some of you are already using the comment section of this website to ask questions and engage with the material. That’s great. You’re also sharing documents through Google Drive and leaving comments on each other’s writing in Docs. That’s great, too. Your next stop is Google+ Communities, which were fairly successful last year:

Look at those online communities, make note of how students are interacting, and consider how we can adapt Google+ for this year. You can build your own Google+ Community that is as focused (e.g., on a single table in a single period) or as expansive (e.g., the entire junior class) as you want. I want you to find time over the next two or three weeks to experiment. Those of you who have already built a Community need to share your findings with others.

One way to share our thinking and bolster a community is to use this subreddit:

It hasn’t been utilized in more than a year, but I think it could be rebooted to be tremendously helpful in here. It exists outside the technical boundaries of the school, yet runs under the auspices of the course. It isn’t just an extension of Room 210. It’s a subreddit about carving meaning out of difficult circumstances and using language to transform ourselves and our surroundings. It’s about becoming better people by hacking our current habits and mindsets. It’s part of a makerspace, and that kind of work continues long after you graduate and see your BHS Google account deleted.

At least, it could exist in that capacity. You’ll see that some of the erstwhile moderators are graduates, and I’ll reach out to them to see about their interest in remaining part of the community. I’ll also invite you to think about becoming a mod yourself, if this idea takes off.

The first thing I’d like you to try to do with one or more of these interstitial options is to share your Pareto Project ideas with each other. These projects are a great example of makerspace work that doesn’t require a classroom to be successful. Note carefully that this is not a formal assignment; it’s directed mostly at the students who fit (or are hoping to fit) the highest profiles. This is another example of doing more than just what is required, and it’s absolutely the best kind of galvanizing, infrastructural work you should be doing.

Ask questions below about how to get started with Reddit, Google+, etc, and offer suggestions about what else might help us work together interstitially. One of you has suggested Discord, for instance, so I’m looking into that. What else might fit our makerspace?

  1. There’s no hyperlink, because you need to start making those connections on your own, at least eventually. Everything connects, and most things are reiterated again and again. If you can’t see the bigger picture, let me know, and I’ll help fill it in. ↩

21 Comments

Filling the Time

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

The Carrot and the Stick

What we do in this class is obviously more complicated than this, but if you needed to whittle it down to one thing, that thing would be how you spend the class period.

This works because the assignments and texts and feedback are all designed to reward investment. The more time you spend on our work, the better. There is no busywork here, precisely because we can change the work to be more authentic if it is busywork. We can tailor the work to be more meaningful and helpful for the individual. So the work is always worth doing.

That said, you don’t need an understanding of the material or an inherent investment in learning to understand that you have to work during class. To understand that, you just need access to a copy of the assessment profiles. And if we want to make it even simpler, and we do, you only need to look at that hyperlinked poster, which is now hanging in our classroom.

And then, if we want to simplify it even further, you only need to consider four words:

  • basic requirements
  • required assignments

Those phrases appear in the profile language that corresponds to a 70 and 90, respectively, in Infinite Campus.

Focus on the fundamental similarities between “requirements” and “assignments.” Assignments usually are more formal, and are usually posted to Google Classroom; they include, however, any assigned task, such as the one indicated by this instructional post. It’s not semantic.You must meet the basic requirement of the course, and if you do not meet it, you must accept the repercussions.

The most basic requirement is that you work from the time the bell rings until the time it rings again. That’s your persistent, unchanging assignment. If you do that, you are overwhelmingly likely to keep up with formal assignments and writing responses and test prep and so on, simply because you’re going to have to find things to occupy your time. You’re also overwhelmingly likely to get the feedback you need for an upper-tier profile, simply because you’re going to need to ask for direction and help as you work to fill the class time.

That’s the built-in circuit: To meet that basic requirement, you’ve got to fill the time, and filling the time means being productive.

In other words, if you commit yourself to being productive for 40+ minutes a day, you’ll find that your productivity can’t help but move you along in the right ways. You’ll have to read and annotate and re-read the interstitial instruction, if you hope to fill that time. You’ll need to flag down the teacher for help and guidance, if you hope to fill that time. You’ll have to collaborate with your peers, write reflections, or read a book.

Because if you don’t find something to fill that time, you are no longer meeting the most basic requirement of the course. You are no longer completing all required assignments. You can, therefore, no longer say that you fit the profile of a 7 or higher, which means you are at best looking at an 85 for the assessment period. You must also entertain the serious possibility that you fit the profile of a 4, which means you might see a 70 for the assessment period — and it probably is even lower than that.

That’s due to the nature of feedback in a makerspace like ours. The first time you stop working during the class period, it might be an honest mistake, even with the clear language of the profiles and the extraordinary amount of front-loaded instruction in the course. The second time you stop working during the class period, it might be another honest mistake — but it’s a mistake that indicates a lack of self-awareness, a lack of internalization, and a lack of assiduousness. It suggests a lack of amenability, too.

The third time you stop working during the class period? That’s a deliberate failure to follow instructions. It’s a conscious decision to ignore posts like this, face-to-face feedback, redirection during the period, speeches at the start of class, etc. You can’t not know that the single most basic requirement of the course is to work diligently and consistently during the class period.

And that drops a profile into the lowest tiers, where it is certainly possible to see scores of 60 or 50 every three weeks.

Just the Carrot

This system has been built to be modular and responsive, which is a way of saying that it adapts to your needs and has a lot of combinable elements. If you do nothing but invest in the class time we have, you’re going to unlock something you want to do, either for the final grade or because you see the value in it. Your motivations are far less important, especially early on.

I invite you to think about what you could do with what we have in Room 210. Ask questions here about how to fill the time. Ask about how to individualize the work. Ask about how to navigate exhaustion and distraction and that panicky feeling when you have a History outline due next period. I’ll help you to do this.

20 Comments

Terra Incognita

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

On Reading

Probably the most traditional of all the traditional focuses in an English classroom is learning how to read. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a grade-abated makerspace or listening to a lecture on 13th-century poetry; it all starts with how well you can decode text and understanding its meaning.

This course forces you to practice reading as a slow and deliberate act. That’s why you have posts telling you what to do, instead of a traditional 42-minute lesson. It’s why those posts are much more complicated than a handout or embedded video. It’s why we don’t review directions and other materials at the front of the room1.

You must dedicate yourself to reading in here, and it has to happen well before you’re studying novels and poetry and all the other expected stuff of an English course. It’s about the skill of reading. You learn by doing — “We learn what we do,” Dewey said — and you only get better at a skill through practice.

What I also know after a few years of doing this — first through traditional, performative lessons, then through student-centered lessons, and now through makerspace work — is that you will seek out shortcuts when it comes to more difficult reading. It’s how we’re all wired: If everything else is equal, we look for the fastest route to the goal. So if you’re asked to read a poem or novel closely, you just might hop onto the Internet and ask it to help you.

In here, there is no summary of the instructional posts. You have to read them, and you have to read them carefully, or you will not know what to do. You won’t improve the skill of reading, either, and the deficit will spiral. The same is true of guides and handouts. They are the teaching, which means they can’t be treated as checklists or overviews. The Pareto Project guide, for instance, is written to teach you slowly and deliberately about many things related to the project itself.

If this is tough at first, it’s because you need to get stronger. It gets easier as you gain strength. You have to develop more than a habit of mind; you also need some sinew and muscle to move you through the work.

On Habits of Mind

Now, the tone of that first section is mostly matter-of-fact. There’s no judgment or disappointment, just encouragement to tough it out until you get better at the all-important skill of close reading.

The tone in this section will shift slightly to be more critical, both as an explicit model of how to use tone and because you need something more critical2. These instructional posts exist to help you strengthen your reading skills, yes, but they also exist to fight a particularly dangerous reflex: learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness isn’t unique to you, your age group, the year 2017, etc. It’s human nature to want things to be easier than they are, and it’s human nature to adapt to what we’re given. The educational system was built to spoon-feed students information, and it will take many more decades of reform to undo that ethos. Students are used to the spoon.

There’s no spoon here3. You need to be resilient and tough. You need to be okay with the feeling of being a little lost. Everything has been built for you so that hard work and focus will teach you what you need — from how to read more carefully to how to get organized to how to write essays.

Learned helplessness makes confusion and uncertainty much worse. But if you feel lost in this room, you can trust that there’s a route forward. There’s a map. There are even people who will read the map with you. They will help you figure things out.

But they won’t read for you. They won’t do the work for you. You have to help yourself first.

In old maps of the uncharted world, cartographers would sometimes use the phrase terra incognita to indicate the unknown. There’s a bit of a myth that this sometimes took the form of “Here be dragons,” which is, even if it’s untrue, still much more interesting:

It meant that there were dangers in those unknown waters. In here, the sections you haven’t charted yet have no monsters in them. Or if there are monsters — I probably shouldn’t assume; they say that makes monster food out of you and me — you’ll know how to fight them. You’ll have allies.

The point: If it’s true that some of you have learned helplessness, you can also unlearn it. You just have to be willing to struggle.

While you think about that, here’s a video remix of the Reading Rainbow theme song from PBS:

  1. Well, that and the fact that we don’t have a front of the room. ↩

  2. It’s also important to show you that “critical” doesn’t mean “insulting.” Pointing out flaws can be ameliorative, which means to make something better. ↩

  3. I’d rather this not be an allusion to The Matrix and, instead, an allusion to the allegory of the long spoons. Either one works, though. ↩

36 Comments

Creative Clutter

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

If you haven’t already, take a look at the calendar uploaded and photocopied earlier this week:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2F2017-2018-Calendar-Updated.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

This is a static, PDF version. The updated Google Doc file is here and in the menu to the right of this page.

The calendar gives details on how we’ll spend the rest of the first semester, breaking it up by three-week GAP period. We’re in the middle of a gestalt unit, and the calendar itself teaches you a bit about what that means. On October 16, we’ll shift to an umwelt unit, which is also explained in a bit of teaching done by the calendar itself.

This post is about the umwelt panel of your Q1 triptych. More specifically, it is about the classroom proper — the physical space of Room 210.

Crowd-Sourced Creative Clutter

Here is a photo of a makerspace in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Click for an article about the space and the spaces it has inspired.

We’re looking for that kind of creative clutter. That’s the phrase we are going to lean on, because it invokes the image of a STEM makerspace. We need the Humanities equivalent of a bin of robot parts, a deconstructed computer tower, a shelf of power tools, and so on.

First, we have to establish that this isn’t the same thing as a typical English classroom. There, you’ll find student work on the walls, posters about reading, bookshelves filled with literature, inspirational quotations, and so on. Which is all great! We should have some of those elements in our makerspace, too. But it’s much less about showcasing student work, which will be part of long-term projects that have an audience bigger than just us and the classroom. And it’s a little less about celebrating literature, because we want to embrace the full scope and sequence of the Humanities.

Instead, it’s about the creative tools and modular components of the Humanities that we can use to transform ourselves and the world around us. It’s about hacking personal and interpersonal system. It’s definitely about hacking the way we learn and how we assess that learning.

That’s why we started with full-sized posters of all the Sisyphean High materials. They aren’t just posters; they have bins beneath them filled with actionable handouts that help us navigate the space. They are visual checkpoints for staying on task and being productive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2HpaCWOlleySDNEZUlCWi0zQVE

We also have a bookshelf or two stacked with paper copies of the most important instructional posts, guides, and systems; a pair of whiteboards, which can be rolled around the room; moveable chairs and tables; and a Chromebit-enabled TV screen. It’s a good start.

What we need next are two categories of creative clutter:

  1. Actionable stuff that helps us make meaning in here
  2. Aesthetic stuff that helps us energize the environment

So we might order a copy of Ken Robinson’s TED Talk for the wall, and we might pull some Sisyphus-inspired symbolism from this video. I think an adaptation of Chad Fowler’s guide to empathy, which we’ll study in a few weeks, would make sense. We’ll certainly get the latest version of our writing system, bishop composition, on posters by the start of Q2.

Here are other possibilities:

We need to talk about how to use Pinterest for our learning, too. Consider making an account and talking to me about how to use it.

This push for creative clutter will be a formal-ish assignment soon, but you can start thinking about it now. What can we do with the space we have? What actionable stuff fits a makerspace as intended in here? Head back to the syllabus for some of the philosophy, and think about how the year has already been different for you. Then ask questions here, suggest ideas in the room, and find some time to brainstorm together about how to fill our space with creative clutter.

A Note on Motivation

Explicit in the language of the upper tier profile is the need to improve the learning environment. That includes, of course, all the collaborative work you do and the investment you make in the online and interstitial elements prepared for you. What this creative clutter concept offers is a way to improve the physical environment. The more you contribute to shaping that environment, the more evidence you have of improving that environment, which pushes you toward those top scores.

As always, I want to emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with motivating yourself extrinsically. You can do this because you want a higher grade. If that’s all that motivates you, it’s probably unsustainable; I think that we all need a balance, however, between doing things because they are inherently valuable and doing things because we will be rewarded. There is no ethical issue there.

In this case, for example, you will have evidence necessary for a higher profile if you contribute creative clutter to the classroom. That can motivate you just as much as the desire to make the classroom more galvanizing and comfortable for you and your peers. It can motivate you just as much as the desire to build something meaningful and unique.

8 Comments

Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. The track featuring Sage Francis is here. It’s one of the two songs I’d give you as a precursor to these projects, and the one that underscores, in a dark and surreal and imagistic way, the idea of being anaesthetized; the other one is just about creating things and feeling pretty good about doing that.

Something Completely Different

Your predecessors spent the last six months of last year working on what we called Pareto Projects. It ended up showcasing the strengths of the classroom itself — the ability to iterate, refine, and evolve an idea; the sense to reboot when necessary; the openness to student feedback — but it also took a long time to find itself, pedagogically speaking. Search the site for “Pareto Project,” and you can see the long arc of it.

You get to start now, in September, with everything in one place. Here we go:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FPareto-Project-Guide-2017.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

That’s the only guide you need to launch your own project. We are going to try to keep it digital, since so much of it requires you to click links and take notes separately. Here is the always-updated Google Docs version:

That guide has also been placed in the resources section of Google Classroom, and you’ll have another copy of it with the first week’s assignment. That assignment is to hammer out your initial project idea using the resources in the guide, your peers, and your teachers — and not just me, by the way.

The formal assignments for this project will, like all formal assignments, be posted to Google Classroom. That will include sketching out your schedule, filling out a Google Form, making a copy of a blueprint and completing it, and a few more things. You have to read the guide to figure it out, and that will require you to work together and work diligently.

This is probably the best example you’ll find all year of how to unlock the real course. Let’s see what we can do.

4 Comments

“What Do I Do Next?”

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

The menus of this website have been updated with a calendar1 and a section titled “Lost?” that should help you to organize yourself as we pick up speed in our studies. This post is about the question, “What do I do next?”

Three Steps to Repeat

You now have a poster of this in our room:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FPoster-Plus-What-do-I-do-next.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

The handout version is formatted so that you can print a copy of it on a single sheet of paper. Something like 100 copies will always be available in Room 210, as well.

This document, in any form, is the answer to the question, “What do I do next?” If you finish a formal assignment, you move on to another step in this cycle. You write about what you’ve learned. You share your insights. You ask questions. You go back and read older instructional posts. You keep working.

Everything you do in here connects to something else. Usually, the connections are varied and significant. We are always trying to tap into the white matter of your brain — to make connections that help you internalize knowledge and inculcate skills and traits. Let’s say you don’t know what “inculcate” means, for instance. First, I would send you to Merriam-Webster to read the denotation of the word. Then I would send you here to read about how “inculcate” means to stamp something into the brain. The metaphor of an idea or belief being stamped repeatedly into your brain (the grey matter, this time) is more information to remember, but you’re more likely to recognize the word because of the extra connections made.

Paul Graham, author of the essay that will inform how we write essays all year, described it this way:

When you first read history, it’s just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto — which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate.

You need hooks for this stuff, too.

Three Steps to Repeat: Annotated

That’s one of the most powerful aspects of flipping instruction and teaching you through these posts. It’s not just that I can write them on my day off, or that you can learn from them over long weekends, but that they explicitly work to make connections between all sorts of things for you. They all but force you to develop more hooks for new facts to stick onto.

Which is why you need to read this set of annotations:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FAnnotations-of-What-Do-I-Do-Next.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

We can stick to PDF versions for now, simply because they have more universality. Drive documents sometimes look awful in non-Google phones. The basics aren’t going to change much, anyway, which means this PDF is somewhat future-proof.

Read those annotations. They don’t just explain why we’re using a picture of Donkey Kong on a paradigm-shifting approach to assessment; they also give you links to learn about everything from the Dunning-Kruger effect to the tardigrade. And it all connects. You will almost feel your brain making those connections, if you take the time to look for them.

As always, ask questions here. I should have time to start answering interstitial comments and responses this weekend, now that most of the foundational work is done.

  1. Which has already been updated and rendered obsolete behind the scenes. I will post an updated version with an account of the rest of the year later this weekend. This is one reason we use Google so often: We need to be able to update documents and protocols and so on without having to print another 150+ copies or render another PDF to post online. It’s a process, right? ↩

22 Comments

Above/Beyond: Data Analysis

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Whenever possible over the next three weeks, I’m going to draw your attention to opportunities to generate evidence for those top profiles. In this case, we’re looking at the idea of doing “more than just what is required,” which is critical to a GAP 8:

Click to see a legal-size PDF of the profile poster in Room 210.

Nothing in this post is required. There won’t be a Google Classroom assignment with a formal assignment. Instead, I’m asking you to think differently about the work you do and the feedback we generate. It’s not just about our different form of feedback, though; it’s about the sort of collegiality that sits at the top of our set of skills and traits:

Click for a copy of the skills/traits poster from Room 210.

You should work together to make sense of these data, starting with…

[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19

Here is a PDF of the response summaries Google Forms gives us:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2Fdd-quiz-091917-pdf-1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

You don’t need to read every response to get a sense of the sort of thinking and understanding we’re dealing with, but every response is here. What do you notice?

I see an unwillingness to leave a question blank, despite a lack of specific knowledge that would answer the question. That’s worth unpacking. It suggests that you are trained to try to earn every point possible in academics, even if you don’t stand a chance of actually doing so. You would never willingly leave an answer blank, even in a grade-abated course, because you latch onto any non-zero chance of earning points. But leaving answers blank is precisely what some of you should have done here.

That’s a general observation that’s worth some writing and discussion from you. Why not leave an answer blank if you know you don’t know it? Obviously, some of it is a lack of reading directions. The context for this diagnostic gives you permission to leave things blank. And that’s a secondary observation: Many students fail to read instructional posts first.

What you could do, if you wanted to generate evidence of “more than just what is required,” is to consider the specific questions from the quiz. What patterns do you see in student responses? How do most people interpret the GAP tiers? Is there a common denominator in what’s missing, poorly understood, etc? What information is missing?

Analyzing this set of data will teach you what wasn’t clear on 9/19, which is the point. If you want evidence of an 8 or 9, you’re going to have to get better at the core skills, traits, and knowledge of the course.

You might also look at…

The Summer Reading Responses

Below is an image gallery of screenshots taken from the summary responses to your summer reading assignment. You might be able to see these by loading the Google Form, but this makes it easier.

You should also read this PDF of responses to one of the questions, which gives you more information to consider.

All of this is an even further step beyond “just what is required.” The data from the quiz on 9/19 will help you adjust to the course as it functions all year, so you have a real motivation to spend time thinking about your work, the work of your peers, etc. This stuff, like the writing you did about summer reading, is functionally very different.

Which is why I’ll leave the prompt even more open-ended. What do you notice about those charts and graphs? What about the data might be meaningful? Why should we care about what you and your peers have indicated in these responses?

Ask questions below about all this, and please let me know if there are any errors loading or reading the data.

4 Comments

[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

If you’ve invested time and effort over these first two weeks, you’re already beginning to unlock the second course described here. You’ll also want feedback to know how you’re adjusting. Here, take this:

This is a reimagining of the pop quiz. Read about it here, ignoring the irrelevant stuff1:

View at Medium.com

Another way to view this sort of quiz is as weaponized feedback. Your ability to answer those questions will be combined with recent observations of your in-class work and formal writing. You can think of it as sorting you more broadly than the GAP scoring protocol does in order to attack procrastination, anxiety, etc.

I’ll write brief descriptions of where you’ll be after the quiz, and then I invite you to note that this is why cheating doesn’t make any sense: It would only bring on more work and responsibility that you are unable to do.

Weak performance in class, weak performance on quiz | Start by treating these posts as you ought to treat lectures, textbooks, and test-driven packets. This is the instruction. Read it all thoroughly and repeatedly, ask questions, etc, and isolate yourself in class until you’re caught up.

Weak performance in class, strong performance on quiz | There is always more to do, and you can start by helping others understand what you’ve figured out. Teach them, unlock that deeper curriculum, individualize the work. Anything else is disrespectful, so it’s an explicit path to anti-amenability, which is Tier 1.

Strong performance in class, weak performance on quiz | Don’t worry. This means you need more direct feedback, more guided discussion, and probably some extra help with tricky concepts. If we do that, you’ll be able to teach others, which means you’re knocking on the door to an 8 or 9.

Strong performance in class, strong performance on quiz | Great. Start working with others, designing interstitial ways of honing our collective understanding, and figuring out how to make the room more efficient and effective.

Before we even look at the data from this quiz, I can already tell you that most of you need to work harder at the instructional posts. You can’t read them casually or skim the contents. That’s just as harmful as daydreaming during a lecture or falling asleep while reading a textbook.

The other predictably necessary adjustment is something that never stopped being true: If you aren’t on task throughout the period, you aren’t meeting the basic requirements of the course, which means you should not score higher than a 4 on our GAP scale. That 70 should be your ceiling, especially if you’ve been warned to refocus.

This is functionally similar to being made to change clothes for physical education, to clean up your workstation in science, or to complete homework for points on your final average in Math. These are the rules of the classroom, and you can’t break those rules without a penalty.

On the other side of the motivational scale, there is always something to read or write or discuss in here. You will never run out of things to do. These posts are built to be deep and ramiform, and the work is always about an ongoing process; but if all else fails, somehow, you have me to redirect you or suggest further work. So it doesn’t matter if you are bored, tired, angry, possessed by demons – the room is built to help you be productive, regardless.

Ask questions about this below.

  1. Sooner or later, I’ll update this essay to make it more universal. For now, focus on the obvious connections to what we’re doing. ↩

6 Comments

Cutting the Stone

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Triptychs and Collective Judgment

A triptych is a multi-panel work of art that offers different perspectives on a subject or scene. Read more at Wikipedia, mostly so you can stumble across The Garden of Earthly Delights and get lost for a while in the very, very strange paintings of Hieronymus Bosch1. If you’d like simpler but just as disturbing triptychs, you might like Francis Bacon.

In here, the triptych metaphor started last year when we shifted to three GAP scores a quarter, as opposed to just one at the end. Here is the post detailing the shift, which remains critical to your understanding of it. The rest of what you need has been gathered in the ramiform materials spread throughout How Feedback Should Work and A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils, plus the introductory post from the first day of school.

This is all flipped instruction, designed to be read interstitially and carefully, at your own pace. It teaches you by making explicit connections and reiterating key ideas. Everything is completely, painstakingly transparent. You must invest in the reading to do what comes next, even though it will take practice and time to internalize the process. When you do, you will be able to handle any class, any teacher, any job — anything at all that life throws at you.

In our course, we stop briefly every three weeks to assess your body of work. It is a collective effort. It’s what Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators and Most Likely to Succeed, two books studied by administrators and teachers in your district, calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” That’s the first of three ways you should look at the process:

  1. As collective human judgment informed by evidence
  2. As a measure of the value you’ve added to the environment
  3. As part of a story about you

The third one may be counterintuitive, but all data tell a story. The one told by traditional grades is unclear, except in broad strokes: High numbers are good; low numbers are bad. You can’t unpack traditional grades into a clear picture of what was learned, what was created, etc. You need a cipher to do it — a breakdown of weighting, point values, penalties. It’s why the case against traditional grades is so easy to make.

In here, the story is clear, and the cipher is universal. The number out of 100 corresponds to a GAP score, which unpacks into a profile. That profile corresponds directly to universal and timeless skills and traits. Your formal and informal work are all tied directly to those skills and traits, and all of it can be tracked — and therefore assessed — interstitially and transparently.

You’ve been given an opportunity to read about my approach to feedback, which is a window into the kind of makerspace trial and error you are meant to embrace in this room. What once took a week or longer to process and included individual conferences and essays or reports now takes only 24 to 48 hours. This is the paradigm shift.

The technology available to us makes this far easier than it used to be. Our collective assessment is framed by the profiles, and the profiles can be sorted into tiers. Those tiers have explicit criteria, and there is no mystery surrounding how a student meets or doesn’t meet those criteria. It all comes down to the evidence you’ve generated and the value you’ve added, which can’t be faked easily, if at all.

I won’t repeat what is in the many essays and instructional posts you’ve been given. I’ll only tell you that the answers to your questions are in one of them. Where we need to focus instead is on how Google and related technology allow us to make our collective assessment more efficient and effective.

Googolplexes and Other Strings of Zeros

New to Google Classroom this year is a central page for all your work, which is essentially a portfolio of assignments. It looks like this:

Enlarge that by clicking on it. This tells us if you’ve missed any assignments, left any incomplete, and so on. It also lets us click on any response to quickly review the content and quality of the work. It’s the first and most important level of investment in the course: getting work done to the best of your ability.

Then we consider this handout/poster, using that evidence and all the notes and observations made on your in-class focus and feedback loops:

That’s a slightly edited copy of the Scoring Basics on the main page of the site, distributed in class, and embedded in two or three feedback-related posts. As one of those posts explains, we are interested most in what an objective observer would note about your in-class focus and student-generated feedback over these three weeks. Your intention doesn’t matter — not yet, anyway. Intentions will matter more than anything else when we move into the next three-week panel. For now, all that counts is what we could have observed.

As we move into scoring, we have your formal assignment data from Google Classroom, a sense of your in-class focus and the value you’ve added to the classroom, and evidence of the feedback loop generated from those things. If you don’t have enough evidence in these categories, you can automatically sort yourself into one of the lower three tiers, using that GAP Scoring Basics handout or the first section of this longer protocol.

Tier 4 students, on the other hand, might need to provide further evidence. This is a self-fulfilling criterion: If you’re truly a student in that fourth tier, you understand the course enough to know what to do; if you don’t understand the course enough to know what to do, you aren’t in the fourth tier. And if you haven’t asked for help in order to understand the course, that by itself is evidence of a lower tier.

That’s why the final assignment of any three-week period is a Google Form — a self-assessment of your in-class focus, feedback generation, and general value added — with the chance to submit evidence that doesn’t fit one of the other formal assignments. That evidence is made more accessible and more transparent through the tech we use, but it starts with the in-class focus and feedback looping you’re required to do.

One way to look at it is to return to a handout distributed in class, posted around the room, and embedded in a half-dozen instructional posts:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FHandout-What-do-I-do-next.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

A legal-sized version is available here and embedded at the top of the website. Keep it handy. And, as always, ask questions below.

  1. The title and tags are a reference to his paintings, by the way. Cutting the Stone gives us the featured image thumbnail, if you look closely, and also serves as an apt metaphor for education. ↩

Kafka on Reading

Aside

  By Asides

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

― Franz Kafka