Standardize This

Susan Engel directs Williams College's teaching program, and in an Op-Ed in Sunday's Times, she made quite a compelling case against the worship of the standardized test.

As someone who's always thought the obsession over standardized test scores was a real betrayal of the core principles of a good education, I was at once gratified to hear such a bigwig pointing out the problems with standardized testing and also demoralized about the possibility that there's any chance of convincing the movers and the shakers that standardized test scores do not accurately measure real learning.

As it stands, we actually have to take time off from the business of teaching kids to read, write, and think so we can make sure that they get the bump in test scores that comes from becoming familiar with the format and the arcane writing medium—one that exists nowhere else in nature—of the CAPT test. The CAPT provides some useful metrics of English learning, to be sure, but it does not at all measure the total picture of the things we teach in a good English class.

For example, one of last year's "editing and revising" section questions asked kids which of four choices reflected the accurate spelling of the word "occurred." When, pray tell does one teach this particular skill in a curriculum, and how does a right or wrong answer on that test actually reflect a student's learning in the 10th grade?

As long as we rate learning by the ability the fill in bubbles with a number two pencil, and as long as we worship at the feet of the gods of flawed data, we do kids a real disservice.

Metablognition

Right now, my students are all writing a little piece of reflection about their reading process. We're almost halfway through Lord of the Flies, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for them to engage in a little metacognition. In the continuing spirit of putting my own mental money where my own proverbial mouth is, I'm metacognating too.

My 10th graders are, for the most part, at or above state standard reading goals for their year. They tend to be just fine when it comes to reading a 20th century text and figuring out what's going on. However, reading comprehension is only one piece of real reading. Figuring out who said what and who did what to whom is the first hurdle of really engaging with a text, but a real reader has to do much, much more.

For example, when we read the first chapter of Lord of the Flies, I asked the class to model the kinds of things a strong reader might do. I wrote character names on the board, and the students took turns naming physical and personal details associated with each character. Ralph is consistently described as having fair hair; Piggy is described in terms of his fat or his glasses; Jack is skinny and prone to violent outbursts.

An active reader is able to form a mental image of each character's looks and personality, and then when additional description and dialogue takes place, those pieces are continuously added to that catalytic first impression. An active reader is less likely to get two chapters in, see a name, and have trouble remembering which character is associated with that name or that hair color.

Character study is just one tool in a whole box of techniques that an active reader brings to the job. It's one of the tools that can turn an alienating reading experience into an enjoyable and successful one.


UPDATED:
I had a chance to read some of the posts from class and some of the comments, and I'm quite enthralled to hear my students really giving this book a fair shake and trying to use the techniques of character study and visualization that we talked about. Some students are writing "I agree, good point" sort of vague, friendly comments, but some kids really seem to be stepping back and examining their thought process and reading habits, and it's exciting to see. This first little exercise succeeded a bit beyond what I had hoped already, and there's more work to be done.

Tiptorial #1

I'm playing around with creating some tutorials of the procedural web stuff so teachers can learn it in advance and students can get it done at home if they miss a class or have computer trouble.

With that in mind, here's a video of my first "Tiptorial," which walks you through creating a Gmail account. It's pretty straightforward and perhaps doesn't need a tutorial, but it was good practice. Since I'm using the free version of "ScreenFlow," the screen recording tool from Apple, the video is watermarked, but it still seems pretty usable to me.

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous blog

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
     Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
     For promised joy.
          -Robert Burns
          "To a Mouse"

Today was day two of blog setup with my tenth graders, and I think my experience will be quite instructive to those who will try something similar in the coming days. If you want to skip over the story of the trials and tribulations and simply read the lessons, scroll down a bit. They're in bold.

First of all, Google's tools contain many layers of protection to ensure that scammers and software "bots" can't sign up for thousands of fake accounts. When twenty-five students in a class all try to sign up for Gmail accounts at the same time from the same place, these protections kick in. So, the first thing that happened on Friday was that about a third of my kids couldn't create accounts. The next layer kicked in when the kids all tried to create blogs at the same time. Google's software asked them to verify that they were, in fact, real humans. Students could verify this by giving a phone number and receiving a confirmation code via text message, but that obviously doesn't really work in a classroom setting.

Ultimately, I had to assign the creation of Gmail accounts and Blogger blogs as "homework." When the kids are working from their home computers, Google no longer sees them as potential bots and allows them to create accounts.

Wrinkle number two (three?): today we tried to configure all the blog settings so they're viewable only by invited guests. That meant collecting all the students' new Gmail addresses (easy), e-mailing a list of those e-mails to all the students (relatively easy), and then having the students paste those lists into the invitation box in the blog settings (still not so hard).

Then, the students each began to receive twenty-four e-mails from their classmates, each bearing an invitation link. Students have to click those links, accept the invitations by entering their Google password each time, view the blogs, click "follow," and then click "follow this blog" again in the popup window (complicated).

Another wrinkle: the school laptops run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7. What that means is that the box on the blogs that shows followers and displays the "follow this blog" link may not load for all students. I believe this is because IE 7 doesn't handle Java so well. Kids who brought their own laptops had no issues. We're not scheduled for an upgrade to Windows 7 and the newest version of IE until next summer, so this whole year we're stuck.

By the end of the short period, all kids were invited to all blogs and most blogs were being followed by most kids (each blog has about 18 of the 25 potential followers). Despite the wrinkles, it was a relatively successful period, and they certainly got their collaborating on as they helped each other out and taught each other how to set up the blogs and follow each other.

So, the lessons?
1. Have students create Gmail accounts as homework, not during class.
2. Have students create the blogs as homework, not during class.
3. Be aware that students may not be able to "follow" each other's blogs right away if they're working on a school laptop.

Safety

As I drafted the instructions for creating and configuring student blogs, I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to reflect on the reasons we've chosen this particular configuration.

Our setup closes the blogs to the public. Only invited folks (other students in the class and the teacher) can see it. If students and their parents decide to open up the blogs beyond that, more power to them, but the default for our purposes is a closed system. However, even though the blogs are technically restricted to class members, we have to be really careful that we don't fool ourselves into thinking that online privacy truly exists. Whatever is read by a class full of students can be passed by mouth, by paper, or by digital copying.

Configuring the blog to auto-email the teacher adds another layer of protection. Posts and comments will be archived in the school's e-mail system in accordance with federal law, and they'll be retrievable in case of problems. Again, though, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that we've found a technological answer for what is essentially a community issue.

Bullying, harassment, and other kinds of bad choices existed before the computer, and they will continue to exist no matter what kind of technological measures we put in place to catch the offenders. The real answer isn't catching at all, though. The answer is to create a culture that views nastiness for what it truly is: unacceptable. Kids need to have the opportunity to exercise their voice and to moderate it. They need to learn to give criticism constructively and to take it maturely. They need to learn how to conduct and protect themselves in an increasingly interconnected world. And what better way to learn than by doing it in a supportive environment with a teacher to guide the way?

We need to have conversations, online and in person, about how to act, just the same we as we set expectations for classroom behavior by discussing it and managing it when it happens. Punishing a student after the fact is not nearly as effective as giving him a chance to make a good choice up front.

Education and Opinion

I was struck this morning by some of the data in a New York Times poll and article on the Islamic center that may be built at 45 Park Place in NYC on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory. Yes, tempers are high and it's a contentious issue, but fear not: I have no intent to comment on its legality or appropriateness right now.

However, since this is an education blog, I thought it might be useful to highlight the following section of the Times data. Be aware that this is a telephone poll of "892 adults throughout New York City" with a margin of error of +/- 3%.

[. . .]

Now, I'm not foolish enough to conflate progress through higher education with intelligence or even with what I would call being truly educated. However, I would guess that there's some correspondence between educational progress and the ability to critically research and assess an issue. So I was absolutely struck at the mathematical rigor with which education level and opinion match up here.

Whatever your personal opinion on the building of an Islamic center, this kind of polling data should indicate that our education level does seem to correspond strongly to our opinions on certain kinds of highly charged issues.