Teacher in Development

What good is a grade anyway? Does it really mean anything to the student? It means something to report cards, or rather on them. It means something to HR folk who make decisions based on them. But when you get right down to it, do they really mean something to students?

Sure it feels great to get a good mark. Everyone loves getting good marks. But does a an 80 over a say…50, really tell you anything of value? Has it helped to shape a person?

 Brilliant post over at the blog of proximal development »Readerly Comments

I too have started to discover the power of comments. I do leave grades on my students’ work, mainly because I have to, but now I’m also starting to leave conversations behind.

When I can, I’ve started to stop stressing the mechanics and have instead begun to get involved with my student’s story. 

The results have been quite interesting. For one, enjoyment is up. The students that I’ve started using this with have started to really enjoy writing more.

What is even more intersting is that they read my comments and sometimes write back.

As they write back, they begin developing their work, and what started as answering a question about something related to classwork, suddenly grows into genuine conversation on paper. It flows.

As I read through the Proximal Development blog post, I just had this…."Of course!" thing going on in my head. A "WOW!" moment.

Wouldn’t we become more valuable to our students if we leave our grading hat in our desk drawers, you know what one I’m talking about, the one that makes you respond in red  ink and numbers.

Instead we should think more about the conversation. How can I draw this person in more? Will a mere number do this? Yes, I likely need to put one, but what can I share? What questions can I ask, as if I were actually interested in what my student would say?

Are we interested?

"Why? Why were they reading my comments? Why were they so involved? Well, after years of teaching and, what’s even more important, after two years of teaching within a classroom blogging community, I have finally learned to write comments. I stopped writing as someone who dispenses knowledge. I stopped writing as someone who cares only about syntax and organization and who has forgotten what it means to get lost in a good piece of writing. I stopped writing as someone who is reading to assign a grade. Instead, I started reading as someone who wants to learn, as someone who cares about ideas, as someone who wants to join a conversation."

Yes you need to work on the mechanics. I’m not suggesting to throw that out, but value added here, in my humble opinion, is not so much that you leave your student with a number, but that you attempt to draw them into deeper involvement.

Just in case you haven’t heard, James Farmer of Incorporated Subversion, has just launched blogs for ESL learners. Check it out here:

Introducing eslblogs.org at incorporated subversion

It will be interesting to see how he develops the community features. Thanks James!

George Siemens writes that "Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known." I think that statement applies to both teachers and students. This post goes out to all you ESL teachers out there.

Via Cleve over at the English 360 blog: English Next 2006.

 Are there major changes on the horizon for our profession? I haven’t gotten past the first few pages of the report, but it sure looks like it will be an interesting read.

So you’ve got a teacher’s certificate. A DELTA or CELTA course under your belt. Or maybe you’re like me and have been at this for a few years. 

Big deal!

Are you ready to reinvent yourself? Am I ready to adapt to the chaging market? I really agree with Siemens’ Connectivism theory. It’s not so much what you know, but your ability to know more. The ability to adapt and reinvent if necessary.

My question as I read English Next 2006 - How is TESOL chaging and how is it going to change, and what does that mean for me? Shouldn’t every teacher of English be asking themselves the same questions?

May this be a blip on our radar screens… 

Portfolios, and when I say that I mean personal learning environments, should proudly show our failures and how we dealt with them. They should show our work, not just the correct answer. Portfolios should showcase the journey - the wrong turns, the tears, the sweat, the plodding along through snow, hail, rain, and blistering sun. They should show our moments of uncertainty, and what we did to resolve the issue.

If we focus solely on the destination, on rewarding the finished product, aren’t we training ourselves and our students to embrace extinction and irrelevancy?  If George Siemens is right, and it’s really not about what you know but your ability to know more, then portfolios should be fluid places that are in constant flux and change. 

They should showcase the meeting of competencies, but only as sign posts along the side of the way. The journey always continues.

And each portfolio or personal learning environment should be unique. Take a peek over at Jeremy Hiebert’s blog. Both his article, and the comments are well worth your time if you’re thinking about portfolios.

""Self-Directed Learning Tools" to reflect the types of tools and functions that connect these concepts above and below — although the label still sucks, this is a significant conceptual shift — we’re not talking about a PLE (or e-portfolio) as a tool itself. I’m not even sure that it can be created or designed by someone for someone else. Just as each person’s desires, abilities and past experiences are different, each person’s personal learning environment should be their own unique combination of tools, networks and methods that help them accomplish their goals. If the learning environment is truly personal, the tools and the learning are self-directed by definition." (Hiebert, 2006)

Interesting thought: portfolios that are unique, because the student is unique. I think there will be some elements of uniformity in that there are core competencies that everyone needs to learn and be able to do, but how that person reaches those goals and records them, can and should be different.

And if we do our jobs correctly, the real power of the portfolio is what happens after our students have long left our classrooms.

Success: the portfolio, or at least the act of ongoing development and learning, goes on and continues.

Failure: School’s finnished, I graduated, I passed the level = I’m done.

The Value Added Portfolio: I show my work. My audience can see the process, and how I utilized  resources and connections to create solutions. 

Via the Connectivism Blog

This week has been an exercise in what not to do when you don’t know the answer, or at least when you don’t know it well enough to effectively work with it in class.

One of my groups are reviewing the passive voice for a test. Up until last Tuesday, the sessions have been pretty tame and well…predictable. (read: we strictly followed the book’s example constructions.) Then I made the silly mistake of closing the text book and asking students to write their own passive voice sentences. As students began reading out their answers, I felt like I had been blindfolded and then shoved into the deep end of a pool. The nice "safe" book answers were quickly kicked around, beaten up, and thrown mercilessly into the garbage.

I normally welcome such things, but this day something different happened. My students brought me into unknown regions. I was clueless. Their sentence constructions caught me off guard. Some of them were clear and easy to identify as passive voice, but others seemed to defy my attempts at locking them down correctly.

I fumbled. I tossed my team the ball, but wasn’t prepared for how they returned it, and instead of having a nicely run review session, I found myself slipping about on an icy, unknown playing feild - trying desperatly to gain control of the ball again.

Thankfully, the fumble occurred a few minutes before the end of the class, so I was able to semi gracefully pause the play until the next session. But the moment was difficult. I didn’t do what I should have done, and admit to my uncertainty. That would have been the best response, and one that I know my students would have happily accepted. But I didn’t do that. I fumbled and tumbled. For some strange reason, I felt afraid to admit the obvious: "I don’t know." (As an aside, the really silly part of this was that I’m pretty sure my students caught on to my fumble, eventhough I tried to pretend it didn’t happen.) So I paused the play and breathlessly scrambled to learn the answer.

It took two days of research, but I finally came to a better understanding of my subject. I worked hard and found the answers I needed, just in time for my class thismorning. This time, I started honestly. I told them what had happened during the last class, and admitted to not knowing the answer, and needed to get a better understanding of it on my own.

Nothing bad happened. There was no laughter. No eyeball rolling. There was no punishment of any kind. On the contrary, there was fascinated silence. A few heads nodded, and there were one or two friendly smiles. It was ok for me not to know the answer. The class went brilliantly after that. I was able to share what I had learned over the last few days of personal study (cus it was for me just as much as it was for my students) and well, it just worked.

There were a few questions, but as we worked through a few of their "unexpected" sentences from the previous class, we, and I include myself, began to see a much clearer picture of passive voice. Now I ask myself, and you dear reader, what was more valuable here: getting the right answer, or the passionate journey to get there? My two cents is that it was the journey. I echo gsiemens:

"School should be a safe place that allows a learner to step outside of the destination view of learning and embrace the journey view. It’s ok to not know. It’s heathy to accept confusion as part of the learning process. Often, for myself at least, I learn the most when I’m in the greatest level of confusion. It is at this point that I’m actively trying to create connections between varying viewpoints and perspectives. I’m thinking critically of new information, I’m seeking to build a neural network that represents the physical/conceptual elements I’m encountering…while contrasting those elements with previous experiences and established conceptions." (gsiemens, 2006)

I rarely deviate from edu-related postings, but today I make an exception. This comes via James over at Palimpsest Redux.

I am really excited because tonight my wife and I are going to see U2 in concert. I really admire U2 for their long trajectory as a band, their fresh edge, and their strong devotion and promotion of Social Justice and Equality.

If you think of yourself as just, or as a person who is behind equality - I point you towards Bono’s remarks for further reflection and sober contemplation…if you dare.

BONO’S REMARKS TO THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST - DATA, Debt AIDS Trade Africa

Really interesting post over at Palimpsest redux on complaints in the classroom around blogging.

I think James’ thoughts are well worth your time to read, especially if you’ve ever had to deal with complaints around blog use in the classroom.

His ideas totally reminded me of my parents’ wisdom. To a kid, washing dishes, cleaning up dirty rooms etc, are just plain NOT FUN. In fact, we do anything possible to get out of such things. But I can still hear my Mom’s voice in my head: “Aaron, sometimes you have to do things you don’t like doing because they’re good for you. They’ll help you become a better person. You’ll thank me someday.”

It’s really true. School, on many occasions, has a lot to do with that whole area of learning how to subject yourself and submit yourself to the wisdom of others. You may not like it, you may not enjoy it instantly, but learning the concepts and gaining the experience - in this case blogging - I think is a very vital part of literacy and basic skills that all should have in our digital environment.

I think James’s opinions are very true. It’s frustrating to hear the complaining, but a mark of a great teacher, I think, is to know when to pay attention to student complaints and act accordingly, or to hear the complaint but stick to the guns anyway because this whole experience will be good for you in the future.

James comments on blogging in the classroom that:

“Excitement quickly fades to apathy, and the complaints begin to surface. In my experience, this has been extremely demoralizing. I take it personally, especially since I have spent a great deal of time researching this process and planning it, but my colleagues and my wife all agree in their advice to me: something along the lines of ‘do students complain when you assign an essay? Do you drop it because of those complaints, or do you push through it because you know it is important for their learning…then why are you hesitating now?’ (by the way, I teach high school English, hence the essay ref.).
A big thank you to people who remind me of that fact. These people are willing to remind me that I am a professional, and that students will complain about things, whether they are cool or not. They are also holding me up, in a sense, reminding me that I am a teacher and that my job is to facilitate learning. Sometimes we need those reminders to trust our judgment and go with our instincts (and all that research and planning that helped test those instincts). If it wasn’t for them, I would be pulled down by this apathy.”

Teachers should never be the “sage on the stage” 100% of the time, but there is wisdom there that has you there in the first place.

Good trajectory coaches know when to bump, nudge and influence the direction of their charges don’t they?

I remember one junior high math teacher above all others because she taught me to show my work.

She said that the process of getting to your answer was just as important as the answer at the end of the problem.

In that one exchange she showed me that the process was just as important as the product, and through following the process we could better arrive at the right product.

Just a little riff that comes to mind as I’ve been reading through a few related posts today around ePortfolios - or rather Personal Learning Environments. The first comes via Dave Tosh
then over to Aaron Campbell.

Are portfolios finished products or process markers or both? Can they coexist? How do you assess growth, or a person in development? Aren’t most schools geared to measure success or failure? The “in-between” or the journey seems to matter little.

And even if a school valued the journey in assessment, how would you arrive at a “this is good development” or “this is bad?” Can you grade that sort of thing?

I’m all for the Personal Learning Environment. I’m working to employ them where I work…I just wonder how the school and the portfolio should work together.

From my end, this will be a short post that is just here to point you to a better one:

Palimpsest redux » Chokeing on Textbooks…

I don’t, at the moment, have time to add my two cents to this, but I wanted to pass it on.

I really liked his ending…

“You can’t replace a living breathing teacher who has guts and passion. No textbook can do this!

I guess our job is to find some kind of co-habitation with the textbook, where we 1) recognize its value, and 2) we inject it with our ideas and passion.”

Now…how to get that co-habitation thing going.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed something really interesting in my classes.

1. It’s usually easier to use the coursebook. Why? It does the thinking for you.

2. Using a coursebook is like stepping into, and being swept away by a fast moving river. Once you’re in, it’s really hard to get out.

3. Use a coursebook and you instantly are considered “acceptable” to students and admin. Your class is somehow made kosher and sound.

4. Energy spikes may happen when using the coursebook, but remember - you’ve fallen into a current and it’s hard to break away. That energy spike may have been sparked by the something in the coursebook, but if you are a coursebook purist you will very quickly stomp out the flame in order to move on to the next exercise.

I just read a really interesting article over at the Guardian Unlimited website called Embrace the parsnip. While I found the entire article to be very interesting, this one liner really got to me: “The more you teach without a coursebook, the more aware you will be of the energy drop when you do use it.”

Boy is that true. I’ve really noticed this in my classrooms, where I’ve been going “coursebook free” in one, and strictly following it in another. My coursebookless class is usually harder to prepare for, but energy levels (read: passionate interaction) are usually quite high.

Our discussions are normally around what is interesting to my student like: customer service, advocacy, social software, education, and digital natives vs. digital immigrants. Class time literally blows by us. Time is forgotten.

On the other hand, my coursebook classroom usually runs like clockwork. Everyone arrives, sits down, and opens their book to where we left off from last class. I literally feel the current tugging us along.

I love getting into conversations, on or off topic with my students, but in this classroom - the coursebook classroom - I for some reason feel a burden to return to task, to stomp out the fire before we lose control and slow our “progress” down.

But what is progress in the ESL classroom? Is it about finishing a coursebook in six months? Is it about racing through your class plan?

Or is it, as the article suggests, more in line with the student’s life?

I say it’s the latter. The more I learn how to let go of the “security” of the coursebook, allowing for reality to break into my classroom, the more authentic and real language acquisition will become.

What do you think?

Source:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/tching/story/0,,1690419,00.html