Schedule time before March 1 to read this post and apply its data and feedback to yourself. Think of it in terms of interstitial awareness: When and how will you be able to read this most carefully?
Ask any general questions in the comment section at the end of the post.
GAP Q3A Scores
It is critical that you first read this post on pre-GAP triage:
Then you must find your set of GAP Q3A data in the following spreadsheet:
You can also use type the URL directly: https://tinyurl.com/gap-triage-218. Scores for Q3A will be posted in the morning on February 25.
New Hall Passes
On Friday, February 15, one of the bathroom passes for Room 210 was found on the floor of the cafeteria, which is, as you may have noticed, not the bathroom. We’d already lost a pass or two this year to that sort of abuse, so you’ll now be signing out and back in every time you leave the room.
If you take too long, go too often, wander down to the cafeteria, or in any other way abuse the privilege, you lose that privilege.
No More Phones
December saw the first moratorium on phones:
Phones can be learning tools, though, or so the thinking goes. In January, we went back to student choice and self-control (again), and you were allowed to use phones and other personal devices in the makerspace.
Starting February 26 — on Tuesday, so you have Monday to make peace with the change — you’ll be prohibited from using your phones in the makerspace. The negative impact on your learning far outweighs the benefits.
You might want to read this to understand why the ban is necessary:
I will sort out individual access as necessary. Anticipate putting your phone in the holder in the corner, or accept that one of your teachers will take the phone to administration.
Spreadsheet Specifics
You should read the triage post and look over the spreadsheet first.
Total Check-In %
These numbers are based on the maximum possible “Daily Check-In” responses from November 17 through February 14. Absences and individual circumstances were taken into account after the fact on a case-by-case basis.
These percentages also ignore the content of those responses; instead, we are using them as reference points for habit-building and compliance. They are part of a bigger picture, like everything else.
Learning By Doing
This will get its own lesson, post, and discussion at some point.
The basic idea is that the more you, the student, do on your end, the more you learn. The work teaches you without the need for constant correction and redirection. When the assignments, texts, questions, etc., are done sincerely and thoughtfully, the doing is often enough. Hence the 0/1/2 scale on a triage spreadsheet like this.
That scale is there to tell you, after the fact and in conjunction with a GAP score, “No, you didn’t do enough.” Find the folks who wrote a lot for the ETA podcast assignment, for instance. Their work taught them through the way they did it. Others would be recorded as a “2” mostly out of kindness, but they definitely didn’t learn a lot from the writing — it’s a couple of sentences, if that, and obviously not enough to construct real meaning.
You get out of this what you put in. That’s the key to learning. You are given lessons that teach you by making you the agent of change. It’s not just about being corrected and redirected and so on. You explore and think in writing, and while helpful correction always comes in person, in class, in face-to-face meetings, etc., the habits and understandings that last longest happen through the work itself.
It’s a better form of feedback. When you don’t complete the assignment sincerely and thoughtfully, it doesn’t work. For you. It’s on you, then, to put in your best effort each time.
Update: Reading Calendar [Assignment Notes]
This assignment is on the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet as “Update: Reading Calendar.” It required only a single click. You had to indicate that you read the update by marking the assignment as done. Look at the directions in Google Classroom: “Let us know that you read the post.”
That’s it. Click a button. Let us know. Look at the spreadsheet, and note how many folks didn’t do that. Whether it was an oversight, an indication that they didn’t read the update, or disengagement, the takeaway is the same: You have to get better at organization. You might want to revisit that unit from the beginning of the year:
Regents Students: Overall Feedback on Q3A
https://tinyurl.com/gap-anchors | Load that document. Review at the descriptions on pages two and three. When you’re done, look at your assignments on Google Classroom for Q3A.
Here is a comment that could have been applied to many students:
Read both the student’s thoughts and my response. Then read a similar exchange with a different student:
Both students feel that directions, deadlines, and expectations are unclear. That feeling is important, because we need to work together to alleviate it. It is not a feeling based on fact, however.
There absolutely are deadlines. They are clear and consistent deadlines. Here is a student from the same Regents class as the previous two:
Note the time stamps for my responses. My feedback for these three students was within the same ten-minute window on Saturday, February 16. Here is another student in the same class, less than ten minutes later:
This student is using the idea of “External Artifacts” to take responsibility for missing work, because they know how clear and consistent the expectations have been. Rather than make excuses, they’ve embraced the empathy and flexibility at the heart of the course.
It’s also important to note that you have several days to write a paragraph like that about some element of your grade abatement profile. Here is what is possible in just 25 minutes of focused writing:
Again, read the student’s response and my feedback. This is a student is “focused and productive,” despite “a very large class with the potential to distract”; since every Regents class in the space this year is large, that could be said for all focused and productive students.
This student’s response is also honest. That’s why we focus so much on the Dunning-Kruger effect and the fear of being honest that holds students back. That last student has the following row in the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet:
That is exactly what they describe in their paragraph. That’s why they are a 90 in Infinite Campus: self-awareness, amenability, integrity, and overall consistency.
Practice Regents Exam (Aug. ‘16) [Assignment Notes]
First, a review of how we got here. On January 3, you were given this post:
On January 7, through Castle Learning, you were assigned the following:
- 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
We dedicated class time to each assignment, and then extended the deadlines for each section of the exam to February 15, which was the day before your February break.
The metacognitive or reflective prompts attached to each section of the exam were generously assessed as sufficient or insufficient according to this standard:
We left feedback where and when we could, prompted you repeatedly to return to incomplete assignments, and so on.
Load the GAP triage spreadsheet, and scroll over to the English 10 tab. The practice Regents Exam has its own section in your sheet. Before I paste in a copy of that spreadsheet, two note:
- Part 1 multiple-choice scores with yellow shading reflect incomplete task (questions left unanswered), not a total score.
- Essay scores of 0 in red reflect missing work (no attempt at a response at all), not a low content score.
As we explained in class, the least important part of exam prep is your score; it’s far more important that you understand how to improve, how to help others, and so on.
Here is a screenshot of roughly half of the total students in English 10:
Let’s talk about what this means.
Rewards and Incentives
If you earned an 85 or higher on the practice Regents Exam we did between January 7 and February 15 — five weeks or so — and you did the majority of the all-important metacognitive analysis, then congratulations are in order: You don’t have to do any more Regents Exam prep this year.
That includes the otherwise required work on exemplars and rubrics, all of which will be assigned in late February and March. You did well enough with the test and the required self-analysis that further test prep is not necessary.
If you earned between a 70 and an 85, you’ll be asked to redo the section with your lowest score. It will depend also on how much of the all-important metacognitive analysis you completed. You’ll also need to work on some, if not all, of the exemplar and rubric assignments.
If you’re below 70, you need practice, either in following directions and meeting expectations, or in the core skills of the test itself.
Depending on how low the score is, we’ll be folding in lots of exam-related practice to boost your skills. You’ll definitely be completing all of the exemplar and rubric assignments — that’s a great way to see what the state expects, and one of the fastest ways to improve written responses. Otherwise, we are going to individualize the work based on your scores and the quality of your self-analysis.
A scale score of 65, for instance, might just mean that you need to redo the section with your lowest score. You might need extra attention on the exemplars, and we’ll look closely at the quality of your metacognition.
Failing scores, of course, indicate the need for more support. Don’t worry! Again, the least important part of exam prep is your score; it’s far more important that you understand how to improve. We have plenty of assignments that will help you. We’ll make sure you do lots of self-analysis and reflection, too, including a special focus on the rubrics and exemplars.
For those students who really struggled and have scores at the bottom of the scale — 31, 27, 6, and so on — there is obviously cause for concern. Don’t beat yourself up, though. Test-taking is a skill. You’ll just need to keep practicing.
Fortunately, we’ll keep giving you chances to improve. That might mean that you have to give up a Pareto Project Friday or in-class reading day to finish another practice test, but the Regents Exam is something you must pass to graduate. That was the purpose of this diagnostic — to show us where the greatest needs are.
GAP Q3A Starts the Ending
With all that in mind, you have to start thinking in Regents English about getting credit for the year, passing the final exam, etc., because some of you are closing in on the point of no return.
We’re going to try to slow down. You’re still going to have to make good choices, pay attention to directions, etc., but we’re going to go as slowly as we possibly can. You must
- follow all directions exactly;
- meet all deadlines, unless explicitly told otherwise;
- use all individual and general feedback to improve; and
- stay focused each and every day in class.
If you don’t know what to do after reading this post, start with a review of what it means to do enough work to get credit:
Ask general questions in the comment section below.