Teacher in Development

From TEFLLogue Katie comments on and points to a post that I’ll be setting aside time to read: How the future of textbooks has to be

I just gotta say that I really loved the little I did read (Katie’s post) and would like to quickly add my two cents:

“if you train the students mainly to cope in real life tasks but then grade them on a grammar test they are going to feel they are being cheated and that you don’t really believe in the method you are using.”  (Case)

Isn’t it odd how our classrooms tend to disconnect away from real life tasks?

Textbooks help provide a sense of direction and structure to class, but they are often a far cry from the student’s real life.

I think real life and classroom content should be mirrors. One should not look different than the other if we want to help our students succeed. What do you think?  

"All I can say is that my particular field; EFL/ESL the "hobbyists" are light years ahead of the professionals in terms of quality and innovation. English language teaching books have barely come to to terms with the 80’s, let alone the twenty first century." (– emphasis mine. — Teacherdude, Are you a digital narcassist?)

Hobbyists vs. Professionals. Interesting. Why is this happening? Could it be that big publishers have just lost touch with what their market wants? Could it be that big publishers — professionals– have tried to deploy solutions that they think we need? (In many cases people buy stuff they want…not what they need.)

There are a lot of reasons why course books  fall behind so quickly, and actually become irrelevant to their target market, but one big reason is very similar to why I hate buying computers: the moment you take it home, your fancy high-tech toy begins to age, and a week or month later there’s a new and better one on the market.

Course books are very similar. They age quickly, and when publishers or English schools don’t notice, or are just two lazy to upgrade…the results are downright foolish end-user experiences. Think Memo writing exercises. (Many companies just use email today.) Fax preparation - yes, faxes are still used today, but again: email is rapidly rising to take that over too (scanning documents etc.) Handling telephone calls…yes….yes…that is still done today, and lots…but VOIP communication solutions between businesses are growing pretty darn quick, and I can promise you that it’ll be many more years down the road (if ever) before you see a unit about how to prepare for a Skype conference in your ESL coursebook.

The point is that normal publishing options are just too slow for the rapid changes going on around us. I wonder if prosumerisim has an option here. (Prosumer is the blurring of the traditional roles of producer and consumer, where the two become deeply involved in the production/consumption process.)  Look at Lego, as an example.  Lego still sells great packages of predesigned things for you to build, but they have also begun opening the door for their users to tell them what they want to build…and are allowing customers to just buy the blocks needed to create the dream product they created. 1 customer tells the big producer what to do, and it does it. Quick and simple.

Designed By You  — great read over at Fast Company today, discussing the exact same thing: the market telling the producer what to produce, and gets actively involved in the process.

I wonder what this could look like in Education…open source coursebooks? Teachers and students having instant influence and involvement in content design and topics? Or maybe big publishers would just vanish from the picture all together with the advent of self-publishing tools like Lulu.com, blogs, wiki’s, and podcasts etc., for example.

Interesting stuff to think about, and some major problem areas as well, like quality of content or accuracy. The little guy will be passionate and likely current, but there will be greater opportunities for mistakes to creep in….

Could the two ever coexist? Big publishers who are closely connected to the little guy to the point where there is influence over production and products…but stronger quality as far as editing and publishing goes? Lego is big and global…and they’ve done it with their Lego Factory….I wonder what is stopping textbook publishers.

I just watched this, and wonder if it’s somehow related to the discussion. Even if you don’t think it is, it’ll make you laugh: guaranteed.

Seth Godin: This is Broken 

 Photo Credit:

 Biloxi Bridge Close-Up by laffy4k

 

Will the Real Juan Valdez Please Stand Up? - Branding - Authenticity

"Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX)

Tactic: Create sumptuous cafés that sell a "coffee experience" along with $4 lattes.

Truth: Stores now use automatic espresso machines–something you’re not likely to find in Milan.

Risk: Starbucks is so mainstream, even its chairman worries it isn’t special anymore."

 What does this have to do with the classroom? Lots actually. Like what happens to your teaching as more clients/students come on board? What happens to quality as your group numbers go up? What happens to quality as you get more busy?

Perhaps we pull a Starbucks: We go for automatic machine style teaching vs. personalized brews in our classes. We get so caught up in our own momentum that we fail to continue to do the things that created the momentum in the first place: provide personal, passionate service.

Getting bigger is great. But to paraphrase Seth Godin: no matter how big we get, we have to think and act like we’re small.  

 What do you do to keep it real in your classroom? Clients?

 

Photo Credit:

 latta mosquito    miss pupik

"Language learning is a long, arduous process, and it’s not realistic to expect that ELLs will become nativelike in less than 10 years, much less the one semester I have them in my course." (Error Feedback in L2 Writing, Charles Nelson )

 Completely and totally agree with this statement, and am looking forward to Nelson’s explorations on the subject of how (or if) ESL teachers can promote the transfer of grammar.

 Confession: I’ve been teaching for nearly 8 years now, and I have had the experience of working with the same students for several years. I’ve seen their confidence bloom. I’ve seen them begin to speak with greater fluency, and I’ve seen them increase their vocabulary and actually use new words in everyday conversations. I’ve seen them use verbs correctly in simple and even complex situations. But one thing I have yet to see in all my 8 years of teaching, is a student consistently use native speaker like grammar. Fluent yes: conversation is easy and with few to no pauses or "ummm’s" or "uhhh’s". On some levels, correct grammar…basic tenses are usually ok. But, as Nelson mentions, there are areas of student speech that just seem to rebel.

I would like to wonder if this is partly caused by a lack of engagement with grammar. I wholeheartedly believe that how we learn our second language should be similar to how we learned our first one. Our first language was never about memorizing lists of verbs or complex explanations about "tense" or time. We never agonized over if we were talking in the future or the past or the past perfect. Instead, it was about hearing these grammar items repeatedly (like thousands and thousands of times) in a friendly in environment, recycled sometimes in the same sentence structure, and at other sometimes in new ones over a period of many years. (Ok, really broad, not even near exhaustive, painting of how we learn our first language…) 

But here’s what I think is valuable to remember from that time: Our first language was learned in the midst of engagement. We were deeply involved in the process on a number of high impact levels: emotionally, physically, and mentally.  I wonder how engaged in grammar you were when you ratted on your brother or sister for something he/she DID or was DOING to you.  Or when you were just putting words together to ask for stuff, like when you were hungry or thirsty.  You felt the need to use what you had heard and learned, and so you just did it, mistakes and all.

Grammar development, even as children, takes a few years to get ironed out. My son is 4. Today he speaks with only minor grammar mistakes in his first language, which is Spanish. 4 years. That’s f-o-u-r years of listening to the "grammar" around him. Of interacting and getting correction and encouragement to try again. No rules memorized. No awareness of present, past, or future tense. No verb lists memorized - yet the boy speaks better Spanish than me most of the time. (And I’ve been at this for 8 years!) My vocabulary is much bigger than his (for now),  but he surpasses me in fluency and grammar complexity.

I’ve been pondering why this is, and I keep thinking about that "e" word. Engagement. He’s easily way more engaged than I am in the learning process, and the results speak for themselves.

So my point is this: We can increase grammar transfer the more we find ways to "suck students in" - to engage them with what we’re trying to teach. I’d just like to point you toward a great example of how to make grammar more interesting for students (and teachers) of all ages. Check this out…thanks to Katie over at TEFL Logue for sending me here: GRAMMARMAN

 After I enjoyed a few Grammarman cartoons, I found a gem: Roadrunner Grammar

I’ll be using this one in my class tomorrow to help reinforce some of the work we’ve been doing around the present and past continuous tenses. But the idea is that Grammarman is a fun way to work on grammar. You actually enjoy the process….for sure an ally in making grammar work more exciting for our students don’t you think? 

Photo Credit:

Back Tour by publicenergy

“Do you think I could learn English better if I just went to Canada or the United States for a few months?” I’ve been asked this question many times over the years I’ve been teaching English. It’s an interesting question, with “does immersion work better than what I’m doing now?” at its heart.

Most people immediatly think that 100% immersion works better and faster than the usual classroom experiences that they are used to. (And just to clarify, when I say immersion at this point, I’m talking about living in an 100% English speaking country for an extended period of time.) So…does it work?

I almost always share my own experiences with them around Spanish immersion. I’ve been living and working in a 100% Spanish speaking environment for around seven years now. I can happily say that I understand pretty much everything. I can watch movies in Spanish. I enjoy listening to Spanish radio. I can understand most telephone conversations, and easily follow extended conversations at “native speaker speed.”

That’s the listening bit.

My speaking skills are little further behind. I feel completely comfortable talking with everyone in Spanish. I no longer translate - think about what I want to say first in English, and then translate over to Spanish. Nope.  I just let loose, and am usually pretty fluent. However, I still get into trouble with my verb tenses. I find it hard to stick to the correct time of my sentences sometimes. If I’m talking about stuff in the past for example, I sometimes screw up the verbs.  I sometimes, especially around more complex topics, find myself on thin vocabulary ice. I sometimes need my kind listeners to help me out with missing words, that they almost always can supply given the previous content of our conversation. I am also getting much better at giving extended presentations and speeches on a wide variety of topics…so the fluency and speaking part is getting pretty good.

My worst area is still writing stuff in Spanish. I am really terrible at this. I often find myself writing in Spanish as if I would in English. (Direct translation.) Sometimes I’m successful at taking “snippits” of Spanish that I’ve heard people say, and include them in my writing, but most of the time I just suffer. Spanish spelling and accents…ha. We won’t even talk about that.

So, a very brief report card of 7 years spent in 100% immersion, but with some additional information that is very important to consider:
1. I’ve never taken an officialy Spanish class. No teachers. No tests. No lessons. Nada. Just plain ole suffering.
2. Until recently, I’ve never really tried to focus my attention to careful and deliberate study in order to improve a Spanish skill area.

So what’s the point of writing about this? Well,  a couple of posts I’ve read recently have gotten me thinking about the immersion issue. Those posts, though dealing with immersion, also provide some really interesting ideas to consider for “normal” language learning experiences. (Non-immersion.)

The first comes via the post: Immersion Plus on the Bill Kerr blog. (Thanks to Graham Wegner for the blog tip.)

Is Immersion Alone Enough?

I still like the Marshall McLuhan quote, “I don’t know who discovered water but it wasn’t a fish” - that some things seem effortless in certain environments - but have come to think that it doesn’t tell us all we need to know about learning. It is too clever. Immersion is essential for learning, but not enough.

Bill Kerr: immersion plus

Kerr goes on to describe some experiences he has had with English learners who have been immersed in Australia for 20 years, but still had poor English skills. Why is that? And in my case, why, after seven years, do I still sometimes struggle? Here are some of Kerr’s ideas:
1. No effortful study.
2. No deliberate practice.

And this great insight: “Just putting in more hours (immersion) is not the same as effortful study with clear goals to improve ones understanding.” (Kerr,2006)

I totally agree. While we can take in A LOT of new language from just floating around in it everyday, there is great need for focus, deliberateness, and goal setting.

Recently, I’ve started trying to be more deliberate with my Spanish development. I’ve started subscribing to local (Mexico City) blogs, with the purpose of expanding what I read. I’ve also forced myself to start leaving Spanish comments on those same blogs. (And just to confirm that authentic language tasks do indeed work: Leaving comments has been a REAL challange let me tell you. Due to the public nature of a blog comment, I certainly feel added pressure to produce a quality bit of work in the target language! I work real hard at making sure my comment is as well polished as I can possibly make it before I click the publish button!)

So what could this mean for classroom work?
1. It’s really important to encourage students to practice FOCUS, DELIBERATENESS, and GOAL setting with their language development. Maybe it would be useful to help them think about what each of those words would mean for them and their English learning.

Focus: Maybe decide to take 30 minutes or an hour each day to do something in English - outside of work, and on my own. Maybe it would mean making a solid committement to classes. (Say no to other things that would suck you away.)

Deliberateness: Learning how to focus on Quality not Quantity. Perhaps this would mean listening to the same English podcast, repeating it, until 100% of content is understood. Maybe this would mean helping students build an “English routine.” Seed up a bloglines account with personalized English content that the student finds interesting. Then encourage daily reading and learning addiction. Help students find interesting podcasts to listen to, but not just listen to: subscribe to.
Maybe it would also mean, and I cringe here cus I think this could be for me: but maybe encourage verb drills and vocabulary building exercises. Deliberately focus on problem areas: the past tense. The pefect tenses etc. Maybe it would mean encouraging students to pick ten new words to try and own over the next month.

Goal setting: Big topic, and not so easy to wrestle down. Most students come out with “My goal is to be a fluent English speaker.” So first of all, we need to learn what goals are, and what goes into making a doable goal: 1. Behaviour based so I can see the outcome. 2. Due date is set. (I will x by January 12, 2007.) 3. Realistic. (Hint: speaking fluently perhaps functions better as a vision or mission statement….but doesn’t work too well as a goal.) Maybe you could say: I will OWN and DOMINATE  the following five vocab words by December. That gives me three weeks to work on them.) Or: I will start English conversations with two Native speakers this week. I’ve likey left a lot out under this point, but setting up learning goals could really be useful.

Kerr has a lot of really interesting things to say, but one thing I really agreed with was around the importance of crafting experiences that help immersion to happen:

So, the learning materials and the learning environment created by the teacher are vitally important! Some situations are more likely to lead to immersion combined with effortful study than others! This turns pedagogy, the art of teaching, into an art form. It is certainly not simple to create rich learning environments.

Bill Kerr: immersion plus

This quote comes from Kerr’s discussion around the role of appropriability (how things lend themselves to learning), evocativeness (how materials evoke personal thought), and integration (how well materials carry multiple meaning and concepts.) Kerr argues that teachers need to learn how to effectively balance all three while at work in the classroom. Hence the reference to teaching as an artform.

Kerr’s post, and then a follow up one from Graham around the same topic, have really given me much to think about. I have a feeling, that this is just a “part one”, with some more ideas to come.

An older, but related post over at the English360 blog, explores the “Teacher as Artist” meme: Strickland Series II: teaching artistry

What do you think? The conversation, as always, is wide open.

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I just read a fantastic post over at the Cool Cat Teacher Blog called: Perspective

I think it’s fantastic because Vicki writes about what really matters in life. It’s stuff few dare to ponder I think. We strive to succeed. We strive for excellence in our classrooms. We strive to get successful business ventures rolling, we strive to bring in sufficient income to pay the bills and keep food on the table, roof over head etc.

All important things. But a very tricky road to walk. I’m in the middle of trying to get my own free lance buisness off the ground. To me, that has meant getting up at 4:30 and 5:00 a.m., and going hard until 10 or 11 at night. It’s meant logging long hours behind my computer screen, researching this, planning that, developing something else - and then racing about one of the largest cities in the world to meet with clients and give classes.

To add to all this, I have a wife who is 6 months pregnant, and a 3 and a half year old boy. I’m a husband, a father, an active member of my church - I often get asked to "preach", I’m involved with trying to get the children’s program off the ground - as Vicky says in her posts, I, like many of you, have lots of balls to juggle.

What really gets to me, is how fast the important parts of my life get neglected. Just last night, after coming home from a long day (10:30 pm) my wife gave me a hug and told me that she feels like she never sees me anymore. (She works during the day too.)  and she told me that my son was wondering why I wasn’t there to say goodnight. 

Gulp. Could that be the gentle "tap on the shoulder" of perspective? 

What’s important?  I know the answer. My mom and dad always talked to me about that - that God should come first, then your wife, then your kids, then your job. But knowing, and doing are very different things, specially when money and tight budgets are involved.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is this: Spiritual matters, my wife, my son, my health….those would be the glass balls Vicki was talking about. The balls that I cannot allow to fall.  All the busyness, all the running around, all the "new client" hunt - those are important balls, but can bounce a little.

Working hard, and achieving excellence in your profession are not bad things. I think we are called to that…but we are also called to excellence around the parts of our lives that really matter. Sadly, I see in my own heart that I very often think of "the important" as balls that can bounce. That they can be forgotten for a while in order to get the other balls up in the air. But I see that this simply is not true. They may bounce, but bruising may start if they hit the floor too many times.

What about you, are you paying attention to the balls that matter most in your life? 

 

 

 

This was going to be about a few posts that I have followed with interest in my bloglines account, but something far more personal is calling for my attention today.

It’s happening to me as we speak: The death of a program. What do you do when a program you worked to create seems be on the death bed, about to die?

What do you do when your system looks like it’s about to fall apart in your arms? Do you frantically try CPR? Do you scramble to inject fresh blood by increasing your involvement with it? Do you take the blame and say: This isn’t working because I’ve not been hyping it enough? It’s falling apart because I’m not advertising and selling it to our staff enough? 

Do I need to slam medication down the program’s throat? Do I need to jam more tubes and devices into it to get its lungs to function again? 

Today I’m being faced with the likely death of one of our company’s programs. It’s not just any program though: it’s one I developed and launched. It’s one that I followed and took care of during 2005. The program: an employee incentive and motivation scheme.

2005 saw the program’s birth. It rapidly grew, and our employees seemed to embrace it well. We worked it. Our teachers worked it, and all were happy.

2006 saw something different. A disconnect between program and staff. A disconnect that I didn’t notice until a month or two ago. Interest and staff "buy-in" seem to have parted company, but the program marched onward.  

I just had a meeting with my bosses about it, and they are feeling the same: the program seems to have lost it’s usefullness. I sort of felt the same way, but didn’t know if I wanted to come to terms with that.

And now I wrestle with myself; I wrestle with what I think about myself, and I ask if I am a capable leader. I find my mind rushing back to my childhood, and I remember a string of failed building projects - cabins and forts in the woods, all imagined greatness that I could not seem to bring into reality. Today I remembered that frustration, that idea of "I’ll never be able to build anything good…"  

This present project feels like yet another failed cabin in the woods. It looked great in my mind, but somehow just couldn’t survive for long in the real world.

I wrote an email to my wife after the conversation with my bosses.

I told her what had happened, and how I was feeling. I wasn’t expecting her response, but it totally made sense.

Programs shouldn’t live forever. Systems that don’t evolve stagnate. She rightly suggested that I not see this as failure, but as a big request to innovate, and roll with the changes. Our company has changed dramatically over the last year, in fact, so have our staff members. (One of the banes of being an English teaching company is dealing with high staff turnover. We’ve lost a lot of excellent people over the last year…) 

That struck something in me. This isn’t about program preservation. It’s about being relevant, both to a company and to our staff. If 50% of our teaching team had changed over the last year, wouldn’t it make sense that employee satisfaction and motivation programs need change as well?

I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think I need to just face myself and realize that great leadership isn’t about having programs that last for centuries. Great leadership is being relevant. It’s about meaningful influence in the lives of those around you.

If you notice that the way you express that influence is no longer touching the people you’re trying to touch, it’s time to reinvent. It’s time to evolve.

Perhaps this story was not what you were expecting. I know I wasn’t expecting to write it…but it just seemed to be really important for me to say. This is meaningful to me…and if you want an edu-spin, well…I think there’s clear crossover there too. What do you think?

Reinvent yourself, your programs, your lesson plans, your class content, or find yourself in the place of being irrelevant.

 

One final bit for you to ponder over the weekend.

"A general concern appeared to be the desire to get people to use virtual museum resources.

I think this is the wrong question. People don’t want to visit your content. They want to pull your content into their sites, programs, or applications. This is a profound change, largely not understood by educators. We are still fixated on the notion of learning content, and we think we are making great concessions when we give learners control over content (and start to see them as co-creators). That misses the essence of the change: learners want control of their space. They want to create the ecology in which they function and learn. Today, it’s about pulling content from numerous sites and allowing the individual to repurpose it in the format they prefer (allowing them to create/recognize patterns). Much like the music industry had to learn that people don’t want to pay for a whole album when all they want is one song, content providers (education, museums, and libraries) need to see the end user doesn’t want the entire experience – they want only the pieces they want. We need to stop thinking that learners will come to us for learning content – our learning content should come to them in their environment."(gsiemens)

Fit that into your classroom, and you have a very interesting thing to think about don’t you? Teachers wonder how to sell their students on their subject content. Is that the right question to be asking? "How do I get them into x?" Connectivism Blog http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/57/tbping

 

I’ve been reading a few posts from Autono Blogger which delve into assessment and testing. The first part of the trail, or where I picked it up anyway, begins here. Marco explores a variety of interesting topics: Unpacking touchy-feely assessment. Hoop jumping. A quick quote from this theme that I think is meaningful:

"students learn that "education" means jumping through hoops… not learning anything of value. I see this year in, year out in my own classes: students who, from the outset, don’t expect to learn anything of value (they seem to have given that hope up long ago) but only aim to pass the course; indeed, they are just "doing the time". "How many classes can I miss without failing? Have I missed too many classes yet?" These are the vital issues, not whether they’ve mastered the content or the target skills." (Naace Conference Blog � Computers in Education: An alternative view, Autono Blogger)

 

 

Ouch. I encourage you to read through his post, but then wade on into the comment at the end. Well said.

 

 Then the trail jumps here. Marco goes a little deeper into the "touchy-feely" thought he got started with in the first post. I totally agree with him there. I think the spirit behind recent conversation [see this blog, James’ "The Demise of the Red Pen" ] is not about hurting the feelings of students with feedback in red. It’s more around being meaningful in how we deliver feedback. Not IF we should. HOW we should.

 

 

It’s not about being radical, and it’s not about subverting for the sake of subverting. It’s about genuine care and concern about learning.

Tests are not the things that are wrong in our classrooms, it’s how we use them. It’s how we give and use the tests that requires thought and subversion.  

"It’s the way testing is carried out that is the problem, not testing itself. You have to give feedback on performance to learners - how can you do that without some way of assessing what their performance is?"(Testing…testing…one two three.English360 blog)

 

And what is the purpose of that feedback? Is it to generate a number for a report? Is it just something teachers and students have to do because they’re in school? Or is testing a way to provide feedback? A catalyst for reflection, review, discovery, and redelivery (if you’re a teacher.)

Sadly, my test taking career has largely been something I’ve had to do because I’m in school. I rarely recall revisiting material that was not "passed with success" on a test. The band just played on, with or without you. My test taking career reminds me of Disney’s Sport Goofy as he does the obstacle run. He clears the first few hurdles with no problem, but then things start to go wrong. Instead of clearning the hurdle, he starts to collect them. He jumps, but not quite high enough. The hurdle gets stuck around his leg. Goofy starts to slow, but somehow manages to move forward. He comes to the next hurdle, and again doesn’t manage to jump high enough. Another hurdle rolls up his leg and gets stuck around his waist. He stumbles forward and ends up crashing through the next hurdles, dragging them along with him as he moves along toward the finish line.

Ok, so I can’t believe I’m using Goofy in this discussion, but the point of this post is hit home rather well with his example. If we’re not thinking about HOW we give tests, we’re turning our students into Goofys.  Are tests just something they have to jump over and pass, or are they reflective tools - for both students and teachers?

Do we slow down after a test (hurdle) to see if content being tested was actually understood by our students? Do we, as teachers, take time to redeliver material that was not taken on by students? Or are we guilty of marching ever forward in our dedication to cover the year’s required content? The material may get covered, but if we look back will we see our students jumping high and easy, or will we see them lost in a failed hurdle?

Testing is not only about the student. It’s also a measure of how well we delivered and worked the content in class. When a test is given, we should mark ourselves as well as our students. Maybe the way I delivered or worked through the material didn’t connect properly with my audience?

This morning I did something I’ve never done before with my students and their test. (See previous post.)  I spent a few hours last night marking them, but from a very different perspective. Inspired by James’ The Demise of the Red Pen and Konrad Glogowski, I hauled out my trusty pencil and set to marking. But not marking to asign a grade, it was marking to set the stage for meaningful feedback. 

James asks: "What if we invested in walking through the text instead of skimming from an ‘objective’ distance?"("The Demise of the Red Pen" ) Indeed. What if? What if, and WHY NOT?

Today’s class was a walk-through. We slowed down. The test showed some pretty important holes,  and instead of just passing out their grade and moving forward with what was next, I tossed the book, and handed back their tests without their grades.

James’ recent post Real Teaching Means Being Quiet (Sometimes)… really left me with a lot to think about.

"After walking through constructing a post, I have my students mark each other’s blog entries using the same rubric I will use tomorrow. As I walk around the room I find myself in a strange situation…overhearing students talking through their peer’s post and adding suggestions and or compliments I realize that I have nothing to do.

 

They are teaching each other." (Real Teaching Means Being Quiet (Sometimes)…)

Students teaching themselves…What a thought. I don’t always have to be the "great answer man." In fact, I know I’m not that. But isn’t it funny how tempting it is to just give students the answer? So today and last night, after reflecting on these guys’ posts, I decided to throw out the conventional one sidedness of test taking. I decided to take my own advice and value the journey just as much as the end product.

I returned their tests without a final grade, and paired them up to work on revisiting their incorrect answers together. I paired my stronger students with weaker ones, and the result was magic.

Instead of me broadcasting the answers, my students helped each other discover the correct ones. I just floated around, and dropped in to offer advice and suggestions, but never the complete answer. I heard and saw amazing things: A "strong" student correctly, efficiently, and clearly explaining why a sentence structure wasn’t quite right to a "weaker" student. Then, not five minutes later, the "weaker" student became the teacher, and she correctly, efficiently, and clearly explained why the "stronger" student had gotten one of his passive sentences wrong.

It really was a magic moment. But it was magic for all of us. I think I learned just as much, if not more, than my students did from the exercise.

Testing is an important tool in the classroom. HOW we test is what we really need to think about. A test should not just be about a final grade, it should be the little kid in the back seat of your car asking you constantly "are we there yet?"  Tests should draw out reflection from the one who administers it: Did we cover this material in a way that met my student’s needs? Are we just going to march onwards after I hand out the final mark? Am I going to make the choice of placing value on learning from mistakes?  

Do my tests invite students to reflect on their own understanding of the material? Am I inviting them to dive deeper if need be?

Tests should be 100% all over that.

Subvert the marching band test and the condition of Goofy. Slow down and make sure you’re all there. Have you lost people along the way? Is someone getting stuck under a hurdle?

Test Subversion 201: How does everyone feel about that?