Category: Assessment

Vacation, all I ever wanted(?)

4/20/2019

This morning's blog is a Pastichio Medley of some thoughts bopping around my head. I might expand some of these ideas into a separate post later, but for now I just need them outta my head:

There are no bad days on vacation, right? Haha, of course that is false, but it's one of the lies we tell ourselves on a rough Tuesday at work. I've been fairly productive in terms of home chores like landscaping, and made some progress on FlipTech conference planning, but very little schoolwork. I'll find out soon whether that's a mistake, or the brain refresh that I needed....
Gerry Marchand has a piece about countdowns to summer that clicked with me. I have been troubled before by those very public displays of "Look How Long Until We Get To Be Apart Forever." I've been thinking about a countUP on the whiteboard of all the days we have been learning, interacting, making mistakes, etc. As the number gets bigger, we're all smarter and better and closer than before.
As I look ahead to the last few weeks of school, I feel like I need to focus on gamifying those units OR raising my flipped game. I don't think I have the energy/resources/ability to do both of them well, so I need to make a choice. Like, today is when I need to decide! I need to write a pros/cons list after I finish this post.

We couldn't find any "6" candles, so my children improvised....

My oldest child turned 16 yesterday! I remember that was a really rough year for me (all of 11th grade because I have an August birthday), so the milestone makes me extra-conscious of doing what I need to help him through this teenager time.
Back to my first bullet item: Is vacation a good time or bad time to get sick?? My daughter's got the flu and I'm feeling some symptoms but could be psychosomatic. On the one hand I don't need sub plans, but on the other it feels like wasted 'fun days'

[2nd #flipblogs of the week: done]

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Here's what my flipping tests look like

2/15/2019

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"Do you have any standard aligned tests that I could show to teachers?"
(DM from a teacher friend earlier today)

That seems like a simple question, but I have not given a "normal" test for about 5 years. I just spent fifteen minutes searching my hard drive and GoogleDocs, but I still can't find an example of an old Social Studies test to share via link or screenshot. Sorry!
I just don't do the multi-page assessments to fill the blanks, label a map, write short answers, construct an open-response essay, choose the best answer on multiple-choice items, etc. ... all from memory during a full class period. My eighth-graders got a lot of that last year, and I doubt it made them love social studies more than before. These assessments are also brutally difficult to modify appropriately. (I teach heterogeneous classes with 20-40% who have a diagnosed disability.)

This rubric took about 3 years to develop through trial and error, but since 2017 it's been my go-to tool for assessment and differentiation. In certain cases, I use in-between grades like A/B (90%) when portions of the student's response fit the criteria of Advanced, and other parts are Fine. Grading is much faster and feels much fairer than ever before, because the descriptions work pretty well for any task. Of course it's still subjective but so are many (most?) higher-order tasks in any discipline.

I find this rubric does a fine job for assessing students' performance on content standards. (I use something different for skill mastery, but that's beyond the scope of this blog post.)

Here is an example:
In December, I devoted about 2 weeks to this important content standard: Analyze the weaknesses of the national government under the Articles of Confederation; and describe the crucial events (e.g., Shays’ Rebellion) leading to the Constitutional Convention. I also wanted to address the overarching K-12 Civics standard Analyze the purpose and point of view of each source; distinguish opinion from fact and embed the CCSS Literacy standard Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content: Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant, accurate data and evidence that demonstrate an understanding of the topic or text, using credible sources.

I made a single-question test for students to answer during a class period, although many students didn't take the full 45 minutes. (screenshot below and GoogleDoc link here)

Here is the modified version that I made for students with language-processing disabilities. It looks longer because I broke down the task into sub-questions. [GoogleDoc link]

Honestly, this assessment kicked some kids' butts. The average score was 84% (B) with a wide range of performance. I believe the data (1) mainly validate the fairness of the task, because this is a challenging standard so the assessment shouldn't be a 'freebie', (2) indicate some ways that I can teach the material more effectively next year.

I should mention that students were allowed to use a small prewriting outline that they made in class the previous day. This was not primarily a test of recall, but rather of synthesis and analysis. I had previously checked students' comprehension of essential knowledge (like "What are the Articles of Confederation?") with formative assessments of the video lessons. That's an important and supremely helpful element of flipped-mastery!

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Sometimes I am really flipping stupid...

1/6/2019

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Last week I blogged about some new class structure ideas that I would be starting a few days later (tomorrow!):

online assessment/accountability for the flipped video lessons
opening more class time for 1:1 conferences...
...and for discussions about the concepts introduced in those videos

The stupid part of that plan is that Crystal Kirch already pioneered it with the WSQ model! It's like that idea was buried in my subconsciousness (I finally read the whole book last July) and stayed dormant until now. I actually made marks all over that book about Crystal's systems and how they compared/contrasted with mine. At the time, I was deliberately resistant to systematic changes ... but mid-winter almost always welcomes a sea change of some sort.

I will try to do something smart: Write out the step-by-step plan for how I will set up the lessons and how students will interact with the flipped videos & with each other....

I produce and upload a video into Edpuzzle with several multiple-choice questions. Those will act partly as refreshers & engagement points for the students -- and partly as stopping points that I can see on the Progress Screen in EdPuzzle, to verify students' partial completion of the task.
I will add the link for those Edpuzzle videos and several question items on the "Need2Know Responses" GoogleForm that I meticulously created today. First, I had to test and re-test to ensure that the settings ("Limit to 1 response" & "Edit after submit") will let students revisit their answers later. I also added 2 questions to help with the grading/accountability aspect [illustration above]. The response spreadsheet has conditional formatting to make the "revised", "late", and "we made a deal" items display differently for my benefit. The specific scores were carefully considered over the past several days. 100% scores will be earned through revision after the class discussions (except for maybe 1 or 2 kids who actually really did nail it the first time).
Now I think I could assign a flipped HW task with 1 day notice, but usually I will stick to 2 days. In the LMS (right now it's Schoology), I will post an assignment that just contains a link to the Need2Know Response form -- always the same form, although the old questions will be "bumped down" the list each time for students' sake. That is how I can enter the grade into the Schoology gradebook for each different flipped assignment. I need a different gradebook column for each task, but I decided that I should only have one GoogleForm for all of the responses in this unit, or else I will be going crazy clicking between forms and tabs!
Students will open the Schoology assignment, click into the GoogleForm, find the Edpuzzle link, watch & answer questions about that lesson, then write their several-sentence response to the summary question. [example below] They should also enter at least 1 curiosity / concern / confusion question. Finally, they predict their grade.

5. My turn: on the morning of the due-date, I scan the students' responses and I can quickly assign a fair grade (85% or 50%). I also plan to copy all the responses for each class section, paste them into a document (without names) and print handouts for each student. Those should help our subsequent class discussions: we can all see examples of good, bad, and ugly summaries! This is my twist on Crystal's approach to let all students see each other's GoogleForm responses.
6. Class discussion for about 20 minutes about these concepts. At appropriate moments, I could focus attention to questions that students had posed online. We will probably see some popular/common queries repeated on the handout! I expect that students who gave Incomplete (50%) responses at first will learn how to correct their misunderstandings during these conversations. Maybe not, but this seems like a good way to try. This is my approach to another element of Crystal's system: "WSQ chats"
7. Brainstorm during this afternoon's dog walk: I get a bunch of different-colored Post-It notes. Students who got a score of 50% receive one color of Post-It on their handout, and students who did not yet do it at all (0%!!) get a different color. That's a quick and easy way for me to give feedback, I think. Best of all would be if I save the last couple minutes of those discussion days for 1:1 conversations ... especially for those who got a 50% score (unless I can explain it clearly on the Post-It note).
8. Those identified students should go back to the Need2Know Response form (like I used to make them re-take part or all of their assessments for more credit) to improve their 50% scores with accurate understanding. After some more thinking, I decided that 80% should be the highest-possible retake score for a "Fine" response. The 5-point "penalty" won't really impact anybody's term grade, but it sends a message about the importance of making a solid 1st attempt and it reminds me about their previous trouble with just a glance at the gradebook. I think those students should be eligible for a 100% score, though, if the re-attempt is such high quality. Does that seem fair?

Of course I will blog about the results after I unveil this on Wednesday!

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New Year, New Flipping Systems

1/1/2019

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a screenshot of the unit overview sheet that I am also writing today

There are lots of good reasons not to change class systems in January, but sometimes you just have gotta do it. We have a stupid little 3 day re-entry week starting tomorrow, so I don't plan to pull the trigger right away. I've got a few more days to finalize and polish the plan, but it's pretty much set.
I have written elsewhere in this blog and presented at several conferences about this flipped mastery system of in-class quizzes to verify students know what they "Need2Know" before getting into the deeper stuff. Parents like it, special education staff seem to like it too, and returning students always respect it too.
Here is what I hope to gain from an assessment shake-up:

Avoid the panic of winter when snow days impact (or threaten to affect) my plans. We have 3 straight months when that's a possibility. When I have in-class quizzes, they get bumped by snow days (or, again, I might have to prepare for just in case it will happen). That always slows down my curriculum progress and momentum. If my checks for understanding are online instead of in-class, then I should get less heavily impacted by the weather ... as long as we don't lose electrical power!
Get more in-class time to work/meet with students instead of assessing them so often. It's an easy data trap to fall into: I know what they don't know...but when can I get to actually do something about that? When I spend about 1 class per week isolated from students (while they take the quiz and while I'm feverishly scoring them before the class period ends), that makes the other classes so precious. Getting more 1:1 time was supposed to be part of the point of flipping! I see that I've gotten away from that.
For this unit, I imagine having basically 2 kinds of class period. A) Start with a short video or reading together (or referencing a recent flipped lesson), then dive into class discussion for ~20 minutes, with a few minutes of debrief / reflection before the bell ... and B) mostly workshop time for an independent-choice project, which is when I get to have those 1:1 conferences. That structure is much easier to plan for than the 1/2 assessment-1/2 class activity system that I have been struggling to design effectively.
By making open-response online assessments of the flipped lesson (with Edpuzzle, GoogleForms, or Schoology), I shouldn't need to stress so much about creating videos that fit the specific quiz questions and objectives; I could also offer multiple info sources for these open-response assessments. That might lead to better and easier differentiation than I have been able to manage lately. Maybe that's why people make fun of me for how long I've spent on video production.
Finally, the upcoming government unit needs flexibility that the Need2Know system doesn't always provide. News events are changing so quickly that I need the ability to switch tomorrow from a workshop day to an article-reading/discussion day. I imagine that I can move online assessment deadlines much more smoothly than the in-class quiz dates, and that I can change the topic/focus as needed as well.

OK, those are some of the pros. I'm sure there are cons to this plan as well. That's partly why I am blogging about it today: so Future Self can see where I went wrong this week! For students who really liked and just got used to the "regular" system, this is not good news. (Of course, it might really help some kids who were struggling with the in-class quizzes!)
A big reason why I avoided the Edpuzzle-style assessment of understanding is the issue of academic honesty: How do I know these students really know it? But I've got to face it: there are flaws in the paper-pencil quiz approach as well. Kids still sometimes just cram-and-forget.
OK, I have not yet convinced myself that this is a bad idea. Sometimes that actually does happen while I'm blogging, and usually it's only the final draft that gets published -- not the series of thoughts that led me there. I trust that it's a good idea for me to be designing the unit at the same time as I'm devising this assessment change. It's not like I'm doing this in the middle of that unit! Now I better publish this post and switch gears to unit design! My vacation is so totally over....

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I really flipping hope that this works!

11/30/2018

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Someone recently posted something on Facebook or Twitter about branching GoogleForms. You can make a form where the user's experience depends on what they select for a multiple-choice item. It's like those Choose Your Own Adventure books that many of us remember from childhood, and I guess the rest of you are millennials who apparently just eat avocado toast and killed the mayonnaise industry.

Anyway, the point is that I got inspired by that post with a mystery author. [EDIT: I have shortened this post a lot from the original draft because you probably don't really care about why I am focusing on discussion skills.]
Today I assigned a different kind of flipped-video lesson. Students will access a GoogleForm, enter their name, and answer this item:

Depending which item they select, one of 6 pages will display. I have an example below:

Students will actually do this twice, because I want them to work on 2 different skills.

I produced six different video lessons (one for each skills), but they are all 4 minutes or less. My wife crashed a couple dishes at the end of one video, but I decided not to re-record it. Four of them were recorded last Sunday evening, and I did the other 2 very early Monday morning (after shaving sooner than usual!) while wearing the same red shirt. My hair looks less-than-impressive, but whatever.

Let's see if this works out as well as I hoped! Comment below if you want more details about how I made the branched GoogleForm, or something else in this blog post.

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Vacation, all I ever wanted(?)

Here's what my flipping tests look like

Sometimes I am really flipping stupid...

New Year, New Flipping Systems

I really flipping hope that this works!

Who is this flipping guy?!

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