Category: Assessment

I think I figured out something big....

4/6/2018

This revelation deserves a longer blog post, but I just need to gush a little bit and get this into verbal form. It's Friday night and I should probably be doing something (anything) else, but well here I am in the blog-o-verse.
I've gone back and forth for years about how students should show their understanding, and especially when: in the classroom or on their own time? Flipped philosophy is all about what is the best use of precious class time? and sometimes I think it's assessment, but sometimes I don't. Now that it's April and we have just a few weeks left together, I have been swinging toward the "I don't" side of the debate. QUIZZES ARE THE MOST BORING THING that we do in my classroom. Right now I do not feel like philosophizing about that issue. Here's what I am doing instead:

Instead of using Edpuzzle or a similar app (which could go defunct or hide behind a paywall at anytime), I am just using good ol' GoogleForms to collect answers from students about the video lesson. This works sooooo much better for me because I can easily navigate the spreadsheet of responses to check their work.
38 of 84 students attempted the optional "A" item; 26 did a proficient job the first time with the two main questions, and another 19 needed to revise their responses because of inaccurate/incomplete attempts the first time. ONLY TWO students underperformed and chose not to revise their first effort. (That's what senioritis looks like in eighth grade.)
I was quite pleased with their demonstration of learning, not least of all because it didn't require a 15-minute quiz!

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If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

1/19/2018

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Recently I realized that I'm probably the only teacher who does flipping quizzes like I do. Many colleagues use EdPuzzle or some similar online application to check students' understanding of the video lessons. I will address my feelings on that in a later blog post.
My current system has evolved over 5 years, but its DNA traces back to Bergmann & Sams' first book's chapter on accountability. You need to know what students know before they get to the high-order stuff. In a chemistry class, that means they need proficiency on lab safety before they can appropriately perform a science lab experiment; in a history class, they need proficient knowledge before they have the historical context/skill to successfully research, engage in simulation activities, read primary sources, etc.
Anyway, here is what I do:

First, I assign the video lesson

It's due 2 or 3 school days from now.
Students get a handout [below] that is basically identical to what I post in our LMS (Schoology) where the video link can be found. All the learning objectives are listed there along with note-taking advice, because that is our year-long academic skill.
They are called "Need2Know" tasks because these are the essential bits of historical information I want students to retain for future objectives, activities, and learning.
I expect them to take notes before the quiz, but I will not formally grade the notes because those could just be copied from a friend....

In the days before the quiz, I field students' questions by email, during study hall, before school, etc. At some point I also print copies of the quiz and place them inside each students' tabbed manila folder. If students need a modified version, then that's what I insert instead.... They will never see each other's quiz sheets, so my students don't even know their assessment was different!]

2-3 days later: They take the quiz

If students brought notes (95% of them do!), they immediately put them inside their desk and clear off the desktop.
When everyone has arrived, I let them retrieve the notes and 'get in the zone' for 30-45 seconds. Yes they are kind of cramming, but this rewards everybody for producing and bringing notes. (If I had let them do this immediately after arriving, then students would get a different amount of time with their notes, and I don't think that is fair.) Meanwhile, I insert the quiz folders into each student's desk -- they are always turned around 'backwards' so the desk opening faces the front of the classroom. :)
Within less than a minute, everybody has swapped their notes into the desk, removed the quiz sheet from the folder, and stood the folder upright as a Fortress of Solitude to hide their work from their neighbors. They are filling the boxes as well as they are able with 1 or 2-sentence responses. I believe the process of writing this information helps to cement the facts into their memory for future retrieval and understanding.
They already know the quiz questions because I listed them next to the video link and on the printed assignment sheet. The quiz sheet might be formatted with boxes and lines to organize their output, but there are no tricks & no mysteries in Mr. Swan's class.
I guess-timate the amount of time needed, and peek over the shoulders of the last 3 or 4 kids. You can tell who legitimately needs a bit more time to finish writing, and who just plain forgot. Within about 15 minutes we are done.

Same day: I check everybody's quiz while the students....

This is a new development in the 2017-18 school year. I used to be proud of myself for taking the quizzes home, scoring them, and returning those grades the next day. That's still too late!! Immediate feedback has huge benefits. If any students need to review & retake, they need to know before leaving my classroom today.
I do not pass back the quiz response sheets, for several reasons. 1) I don't feel the need to write comments on each student's quiz, so I can read through them more quickly! 2) It's one less sheet of paper to get lost, improperly filed, etc. [I keep them for my own records until the end of the grading term.] 3) Students might notice the multiple versions, which can lead to uncomfortable & unfair conversations / disclosures. 4) On a similar theme, I can differentiate for the length/depth of responses, without students seeing two different sheets and asking "Why didn't I get credit for the same answer this kid wrote?" The fact is that his 3-sentence answer might be the best he ever wrote, but for her it would be an underachievement. I teach a wide range of students, so the bar for proficiency must be adjusted sometimes. This assessment system lets me do so!
So, I'm at my desk for about 20 minutes*, skimming through all the quiz sheets and occasionally calling up a student to decipher their own handwriting....
MEANWHILE, students spend class time to engage in the new material in some independent way: make a short comic strip to summarize a sub-topic, or produce a propaganda poster that might have appeared at the time, etc. These are low-stakes assignments that will not grade. If there were 1 or 2 students who weren't ready for today's quiz, then instead they will work on the video lesson during class time -- in the library, with one of the two wifi-enabled tablets in my room, or perhaps on their own cell phone.

* If you feel that this makes me evil, disengaged, lazy, or whatever, then I am sorry but we can still be friends, right?.

How I handle retakes:

They only need to re-try the objective(s) they missed on the first attempt.
On this example quiz, let's say that a student wrote only two items for question #1, wrote rock-solid answers about Bunker Hill and the Olive Branch Petition, but had an unclear response about Common Sense: "It was published by Thomas Paine in 1776" is accurate but does not show the understanding I'm looking for....
After I read his quiz sheet, I turned to his assignment sheet and notes (which he'd placed into the folder after the quiz) and I circled those learning objectives: #1 and #5.
He leaves my classroom with a clear assignment: review the video and/or your notes about Loyalists and Common Sense.
At the next possible opportunity (a student-centered activity tomorrow, a study hall period, a few minutes before homeroom....), he will retry those answers without access to notes. Usually I give a new copy of the quiz sheet, for him to write in a corner of the room; sometimes for convenience I will quiz the student orally.
RARELY, a student is still unprepared with incomplete or inaccurate responses. Now it's time for a one-to-one conversation about study skills and/or the academic topic.
USUALLY the retake ends with a successful result, and verbal encouragement from me.

How does the grading work for these assessments?

You can see the headlines below. I am not playing a numbers game. This is a mastery assessment so I expect 100% proficiency. I'm not going to count some questions more than others, or calculate partial credit for getting 1 out of 2 results of Bunker Hill.
Also, I need a super-quick scoring system to return everyone's quiz within 20 minutes!
These Need2Know quizzes are the smallest element of the term grade: 3% or 4% per quiz (a total of ~25-30%).
A few students complain about the 50% score for just 1 question wrong .... I respond "Yes, you only have 1 item to fix and then it's a B grade"
Any student who bombed the quiz at first can also get an 85%, but he must work a lot harder to get there than the child with only 1 misunderstanding. That seems fair to me.
On the "Rising Tensions Part 4" quiz example I used earlier:

65 students aced it on quiz day [100%]
14 students had to fix at least 1 question [85%]
3 students needed a second retake attempt [85%]
2 (out of 84) never did that retake, so their 50% score was stuck in the gradebook.

I don't feel good about those 50% scores, but since that quiz (November 6th) I have worked more closely with both students and they are significantly improving.

Sooooooo whaddya think? You made it this far in the blog post, so you must still be interested. Like I said at the start, this system has evolved over time and probably will again... maybe with your input!

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Finally, I flipping figured out how to use Bloom's!!

8/3/2017

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I believe in Bloom's Taxonomy, despite some critical skepticism out there which I don't consider compelling. The general concept certainly seems relevant for history classes: you need to know some facts (like when & why "The New Colossus" was written) before you can make analytical or judgmental claims (like whether or not that poem expresses the message of the Statue of Liberty).
History matters, people.

However, I just figured out exactly how to connect the concept with my flipping practice -- how to consistently 'climb the ladder' for each curriculum unit. It's a long post, but let me try to walk you through an example from Unit 1 of the year.
I expect that all students will be able to contrast several areas of daily life in the 1750s with daily life in the 2010s. That’s part of our “America Before the Revolution” unit. If I asked them to respond in the first week of school, their answers would be generally on-target: “People didn’t have cars so they had to walk everywhere … They were dirty … Colonists wore dresses and suits and hats…” These statements are true but not well-informed, and missing some key elements of colonial life that help explain the Revolutionary period.
In terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, this objective asks students to ANALYZE the daily life of a historical period – to distinguish multiple aspects of 1750s life and note differences with their life today (which can rely on their prior knowledge). Why can’t they do this analysis right away? Because we skipped some steps.

However, this will not be effective unless students have some basic knowledge about specific details of ‘lifestyles in the past’, or else how will they recognize them in the primary sources? Also, they need to know enough about aspects of 1750s life so they can accurately contrast it with the present-day

These understandings can be expanded and made more memorable with discussions and class activities. The last one in particular is a deep concept that can be understood in shallow or deep ways. They should be internally maintained (in the students’ brain) to improve fluency with the APPLY objectives. We should formally assess the accuracy and depth students’ understanding, to ensure it is proficient to move forward. These mastery assessments can and should be retaken until proficiency is achieved.
The italicized vocabulary is the most basic level of understanding. Some students might already know these terms. They are essential terms that will appear in later activities, sources, etc. in this unit and perhaps some later ones too. These terms could be externally maintained (on a word wall, a reference sheet, etc.) or we might expect them to be internal (memorized). We could place these on the lowest Bloom’s Taxonomy level:

Now let’s view these levels in a different way: left-to-right in the order students will experience them.

After experiencing this process for several days, some students are ready for the top of the Bloom’s Taxonomy ‘pyramid’: CREATE and EVALUATE. Others will need more time to correct their misunderstandings at the ANALYZE level, and they should revise their responses for accuracy, detail, appropriateness, or another major area.
The creators and evaluators can spend 1 or 2 class periods on a self-selected task. These are more independent, more unique, more “fun” for students. The quality is almost guaranteed to be high, because they have already successfully analyzed and understood the topic. We’re not throwing them into the deep end to make a skit or build a model about something they barely understand. These projects might be a continuation of an earlier class activity, such as writing a possible next-day diary entry of the primary source we looked at in class, or a based-on-real-life skit/comic conversation that includes historical details in a humorous way.
It’s tempting to leap ahead into this exploratory zone, because it’s more fun and engaging and kids seem to be learning. However, if we skip the UNDERSTAND, APPLY, ANALYZE steps (and the two levels of assessment along the way), then we have set up many students to fail. Even the best and brightest will not get as much out of these cool projects, or they will get exhausted and needlessly frustrated by researching details. The teacher is also likely to get irritated and bothered by questions during the workshop time, or sifting through a stack of projects with widely-varying quality.

Effective flipping for social studies should follow the Bloom’s Taxonomy levels by:

giving multiple convenient opportunities for students to gain essential “low-order” understandings (usually from video lessons)
expanding & clarifying those understandings with in-class discussions & brief activities (ex. short comic, tweetstorm) that students are prepared to join
opening up class time to practice skills by applying them in structured and informally-assessed activities AND learn more from primary or secondary sources by applying prior knowledge to find examples, counter-arguments, etc.
giving multiple opportunities to analyze the issue at a deep level, which all prior activities and lessons have been connected to and preparing for!
offering proficient students some class time to explore even more deeply by creating and/or evaluating the issue in some way

Thoughts? Complaints? Adulation? Rotten tomatoes?

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a #flipblogs follow-up

7/30/2017

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A couple days after writing my latest #flipblogs contribution about the origins of my flipping, I found this Word document from June 2013. That's the month when I was starting to read Flip Your Classroom, at the end of my first year teaching Social Studies after 8 years of ELA. After months of using the textbook for homework + lengthy class lectures, I knew things weren't going great.
At some point in the final weeks of the year, I divided the class into 4 seating groups, each with the task of brainstorming what does/doesn't work about one form of teaching. Then I did the same one day later for 4 different types of assessment. The summary of their findings are in these charts:

This compilation confirmed the likely benefits of flipping my classroom. It combines the best of class lectures (clear & organized presentation) without the disadvantages (inactivity & speed challenge); also it allows for the positives of "learning together" and "teaching themselves", without many of the disadvantages because everyone got the direct instruction first. Best of all, these details came from my own students!!

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Trying something new for flipped mastery (part 2)

4/3/2017

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[This is a follow-up to a recent blog post from March 30]
  I declare this experiment a success! I feel much closer to mastering mastery in my instruction.
     Last Wednesday, I gave the formative assessment and scored it during class (while students explored a set of Jackdaws about the Lewis & Clark Expedition). Students got a brief message whether they passed the quiz or needed to retake it ASAP.
You can see a copy of the quiz at bottom of this post. Most students spent 8-10 minutes on it.
   The pie chart shows that a large majority (over 75%) gave proficient answers to all the quiz questions. I think that's pretty good!! A few of those students only needed to improve their understanding of one item, like defining "manifest destiny" or clarifying how the U.S. gained Texas and the Mexican Cession.

Retakes occurred during class on Thursday or Friday. Every student ended up showing proficiency on this quiz, including kids who were absent on the quiz day. Even students with learning disabilities passed this quiz, according to their IEP-appropriate modifications/accommodations. For example, two students wrote most of their quiz answers on paper but needed more time; they both finished their quiz by answering orally with me later during class.

When I returned the quizzes, I also gave copies of the grade chart in my earlier blog post. Students learned they had 4 days (until Monday April 3) to answer the question How did the US expand west of the Mississippi River? I expect students to do this sort of work in their Schoology account but I announced that I would accept handwritten responses as well -- as long as I get them on-time!
Most students submitted their pieces on Sunday (of course). They were quite simple to grade because I was just looking for inclusion of manifest destiny (for B+) and some sophisticated analysis (for A).

Above you can see that nearly half the class earned an "A" for their responses. I got some terrific pieces which compared US growth to Alexander the Great's conquests, or connected the "Make America Great Again" slogan with manifest destiny's appeal, or described significant differences between violent and peaceful acts of expansion. These were not "easy A's"!
About two-thirds of students earned A or B+ for attempting one of the "go-beyond" options. Fifteen (the red wedge of the pie chart) either did not try to include manifest destiny OR just mentioned the definition vaguely without connecting it to the big idea of territory expansion.
Eleven students ended up with a C grade, because they showed proficiency of the essential details but did not submit a response to the question:

3 claimed that they wrote a response but forgot to submit it. Maybe true, maybe not. All three are typically strong students who would probably have done well. They must keep the "C" for this item (a fairly small element of the trimester report card grade), and hopefully learn a good lesson about meeting deadlines.
4 told me they forgot about the assignment completely. Bummer. Again, there's a valuable lesson to be learned about deadlines and responsibility.
4 other students didn't have a real explanation, but these are kids who struggled to pass that quiz in the first place. Two needed to retake the quiz on Friday, and one was absent most of last week. The "C" grade fairly accurately shows their limited-but-proficient understanding of this topic. The fourth kid looked really sick during 1st period and probably felt gross all weekend, so I may arrange an extension for him.

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I think I figured out something big....

If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

Finally, I flipping figured out how to use Bloom's!!

a #flipblogs follow-up

Trying something new for flipped mastery (part 2)

Who is this flipping guy?!

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