Reflections on Benchmark Week

Well, we all survived ACTAAP testing last week.  The children worked hard and checked their work and did their best each day, and every afternoon we celebrated their hard work and success.  I even danced in a teacher talent show.  Despite all the efforts of our school to make the week as "fun," or at least as bearable, as possible, I struggle every year with my feelings about standardized testing.  In fact, I was in a terrible, negative mood during my last two weeks of work.  Standardized testing makes me feel like a sell-out.  I feel like I'm compromising my beliefs as an educator, my beliefs about what makes a good classroom learning environment, and my beliefs about how we can best assess students' progress and knowledge.

On one hand, I firmly believe that a standardized test cannot and will not yield the most accurate measure of my students' success.  It's also the furthest thing from authentic.  Yes, adults have to take standardized tests to enter some professions; teachers take the Praxis; doctors and therapists take board exams.  But once we all enter the work force, no one is going to ask us to fill in a bubble sheet during the work day.  I would rather my kids be measured by the way they can authentically apply their knowledge and skills, not by how they can regurgitate information.

At the same time, I want my kids to feel successful, and knowing that they could be labeled "Basic" isn't going to make them feel great.  While I want my classroom instruction to be authentic, inquiry-based, and student-led, I also feel the need to give in to the culture of testing that is so prevalent in our society.  It's difficult to reconcile these two lines of thought.  I fully supported my students this week in their work.  I did everything I could to pump them up and get them excited, and I want their performance to reflect well on my school and on my instruction.  Most of all, I want them to know that I'm proud of them.

But in spite of all that, there's a part of me that feels like sticking it to the man, like telling the children that this is just one big week of data collection, and I'm over it.  My students are unique, intelligent, wonderful individuals.  Each of them is more than a student ID number and a test score, and I hope that our education system can someday move to a system of accountability that celebrates their different learning styles and needs and honors the professionalism and craft of teachers.  For now, we made it through another year of standardized testing.  Time to focus on finishing out the year with our science fiction unit.  Looking forward to another week of teaching and learning!

Sharing Some Spring Break Reading

I rarely post Book Talks on the blog, but I spent a lot of my spring break time reading.  One of my goals this year was not only to read more consistently but also to share what I read with others, particularly my students.  I'll be Book Talking these four books tomorrow, so I thought I would share them here as well.  All of these books would be considered "young adult," but some appeal to a younger age group than others. I really enjoyed each of these books for different reasons.  Each of the book titles is hyperlinked to its page on Amazon, so if you think it sounds like a good read, buy it!

The first book I read what When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.  Originally released in 2010, this book is about a young girl named Miranda and her journey to solve a mystery.  It's set in the 1970s in New York City, and Miranda and her single mom are trying to find their place in the world.  In between going to school, dealing with bullies, and coming to terms with changing friendships in her life, Miranda is helping her mom prepare to be a contestant on $20,000 Pyramid with Dick Clark.  This is a short, quick read, and just as the age of the main character suggests, the book is aimed toward a younger adolescent audience, probably 4th-7th grade.  However, don't take that to mean that the book is juvenile. It has a well layered plot and rich, complex characters that deal with real life problems.  I found myself thinking about how relatable these characters would probably be to my students. Stead does a great job of building suspense as Miranda unravels her mystery.  Another thing I loved about this book is that Miranda's favorite book is A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorites and one of the books we read in my class. This was a great little read that would definitely draw in reluctant readers from the start.

The next book I read on my break was Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.  OH MY GOSH I LOVED THIS BOOK! I don't typically get into historical fiction, but this book dragged me in from the very beginning.  It is the story of two best friends who meet in the British Royal Air Force during World War II.  I hesitate to say any more than that because the order in which information is given to the reader is part of what makes this book so awesome.  This book came out in 2013, and I noticed on GoodReads that it appears to be the kind of book that you either intensely love or don't like at all. I will say that while the book focuses a lot on planes and flying and used lots of technical language with which I wasn't familiar, I found myself focusing a lot more on the intimate friendship of the two main characters.  While the backdrop of this story is World War II, and it is obvious to me that the author did her research, I feel like this is less a story of war and more a story of the lengths to which we will go for the people we love and adore.  It's a story of loyalty and faith and goodness in the face of evil, and it made me cry a lot (in a good way).  I haven't read the companion novel Rose Under Fire yet, but I'm a little afraid to read it because I loved this book so much that I'm not sure the companion novel can live up to it. While I loved this book, I do feel like it was a little mature for some of my 7th graders.  I probably won't keep it in my classroom library, but I have a few students who are really interested in this time period, and I'll probably check it out to them.  

The third book I read was so much more than I thought it would be.  At first glance, Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi looks like a "boy book" through and through, especially with the brightly illustrated zombie head prominently displayed in the cover art.  This book is the story of three boys who discover a zombie apocalypse taking hold in their town and then take a stand for survival.  Because of the way the cover was illustrated, I thought this book was going to be written in the style of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series or James Patterson's Middle School: Worst Years of my Life. However, I found when I opened the cover that this book was all words and no pictures.  Despite the lack of pictures, this book reads fast and is full of action.  It would be a great transition book for students who are stuck on Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Big Nate books.  In addition to its place as a kind of transition book for reluctant readers, I also loved that this book was so much more than a silly zombie book.  This book tackles real issues, like immigration and food quality, and it does it in terms that a seventh grader can understand.  I also loved that this is a great example of true science fiction.  It's a story about human beings, solving a human problem that was created by taking science too far, and finding a human solution.  Overall, I was really impressed with this book and found myself having a hard time putting it down.  I think I'll probably have a hard time keeping it on my classroom library shelf, too. 

The last book I read over spring break was Hollow City by Ransom Riggs, the second book is the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.  I read the first book in this series when it first came out, and I felt like it was good, not great.  Then, a few months later my book club read it, and they overwhelmingly disliked it.  When the second book came out in January, I was hesitant to buy it because I worried that if I didn't love the first book, I probably wouldn't love the second one either.  However, I decided to give it a try over spring break, mostly because middle schoolers love these books.  The creepy old photographs that correspond with the story are brilliant, and they keep kids so interested in the story.  Despite my skepticism, I feel like Ransom Riggs ironed out some of the imperfections of Book One in Book Two.  Hollow City picks up exactly where the first book left off.  The children are running away from their home to London in order to save the world of peculiardom and their beloved protector, Miss Peregrine.  Obviously, their journey is far from easy, seeing as it takes a solid 400 pages to tell the story, but the troubles they meet along the way are dangerous and interesting and kept me turning pages for two days straight.  I felt like the pace of this book was much better than the first one, but part of that was probably due to the fact that so much had already been explained in Book One.  A third book is coming out, so there isn't a lot of resolution at the end.  Instead, it takes a wonderfully unexpected twist, which I really appreciated.  There's no better way to keep a middle schooler reading than to leave them totally hanging at the end, and that is exactly what Riggs does. 

So there's my spring break reading in a nutshell.  Hopefully, my students will come back with book recommendations, too, so I'll know what to read next. Wishing everyone a wonderful week!

SXSWedu Reflections: Finding "Ed" in "EdTech"

In an effort to write a somewhat cohesive and organized reflection on my SXSWedu experience, I decided to give myself a couple of days to just let the whole experience sink in and marinate in my brain.  I also had to catch up on a ridiculous amount of grading on Friday, so there's that, too. Over the past few days, I've read several other critiques and reflections on the conference, mostly written by teachers and instructional technologists, and the general critique seems to be pretty consistent; if you're going to call it an education conference, it should be more about education and less about the edtech business. 

In some respects, I agree with this assessment.  I definitely felt like, as a classroom teacher, I was in the minority at this conference.  I think there are probably several different reasons for that.  For one thing, SXSWedu is not designed to be a "teacher conference."  The sessions and panels aren't meant to provide you with a lesson or set of information that you can take back to your classroom and immediately put into practice.  Instead, they focus on policy and development.  These sessions, panels, and forums are meant to make you think.  And to be totally fair, not every teacher feels like they have time for that.  I actually loved that the focus was more on the conversation about where education is and where it is going and less on what I'm doing in my classroom tomorrow.  I found it refreshing.

Everybody has an opinion about education because most people have kids in the education system, and we are all products of the education system.  What I liked about SXSWedu was that they brought into focus the large variety of opinions regarding education.  Having the opportunity to hear Diane Ravitch speak and compare her views to those of Wendy Kopp, the CEO of Teach for America, and then go listen to Vivienne and Norma Ming talk about how the edtech industry is steamrolling education instead of supporting it was such a unique experience.  Instead of filtering the conversation to push a particular agenda, the conference just put all the opinions out there.  Personally, it was really eye-opening for me to hear so many different perspectives.  You only grow if you get out of your comfort zone, and I was definitely pushed to do that last week.

Even though, as I said, this conference was more about thinking and less about applying specific strategies to my teaching, I did set some solid goals for myself and my practice after this week...

1. I want to redefine my practice.  I am so fortunate to have technology at my disposal everyday in my classroom.  I want to look at my current assignments and redefine them, so that I'm doing things I couldn't do without the technology.  On Friday, I took my first baby steps toward this goal by having my students screencast their Book Talks using Educreations. I'll post the best Book Talks on YouTube, so we have an authentic audience.  Be on the lookout for that!
2. I want to create my own textbook.  I went to an awesome session about iBooks Author led by two Apple Distinguished Educators.  I've had this program on my Mac for about a year, but I haven't played around with it very much.  This summer, I plan to get serious about creating my own grammar textbook.
3. I want to make my classroom an "incubator of creativity, imagination, and joy." This was my favorite thing that Diane Ravitch said in her talk.  This is what all our schools should be.  I know Benchmark is coming up and lots of people are stressed about how all the snow days might affect our students' scores, but I'm sticking with Diane on this one.  She said, "The trump card of American society is not the ability to fill in the right bubble. It's the ability to think outside the box." Man, do I agree!
4. I want to make time to "unplug." It's probably weird that this was one of my takeaways from a tech conference, but I went to an awesome session with Carl Hooker, and it inspired me to take a timeout from technology on a more regular basis.  Even though technology has made our lives easier in a million different ways, it's also made it harder for us to connect with others on a deep, personal level.  I want to make sure I don't become a digital zombie, and I want to make sure my students can find that balance, too. 

Overall, I would say my first SXSWedu experience was a very positive one. It forced me to think a lot, and it made me want to strive to be innovative in my practice every single day.  I heard such a variety of opinions and ideas; some of them were frustrating, some were eye-opening, and some were affirming, but all of them made we want to be a better teacher, both for my students and for my fellow teachers.  We have to take risks if we want to keep making our profession look good. 

Thoughts for my First SXSWedu

I am excited to say that I'm currently sitting in Austin waiting to kick off my first SXSWedu experience by listening to Diane Ravitch speak. I feel like there's a certain irony in that statement--the juxtaposition of someone very anti-privatization and commercialization of education kicking off a conference all about the EdTech startup.

Yesterday, as I was traveling to Austin, I had a very different set of thoughts than I did back in November as I traveled to Boston for NCTE.  In Boston, I was surrounded by other teachers, learning from other teachers, and sharing with other teachers.  When my team presented at NCTE, I was so nervous  because other teachers were judging the merit of what I had to say. A jury of peers is always more daunting than any other.  They know what you're supposed to be doing, and they probably think they know how you're supposed to be teaching it, too.  Let's be real, we're talking about teachers.  We all like to be right.

Anyway, in November it turned out that all my worry and stress was for nothing.  People actually showed up to listen to us speak, and seemed to be excited to hear what we had to share! As I headed to Austin yesterday, I realized I didn't have that same nervous feeling.  I think part of that is that I'm not just speaking to teachers here.  I'm also sharing the story of my classroom with developers who want to understand the "human element" of implementing 1:1 technology in the classroom.  I can imagine that when you spend your days with computers and adults, it might be hard to predict where problems could occur.  

Yesterday, I was talking to Dr. Michael Mills, who very kindly invited me to be at SXSWedu and who has co-taught several BYOD lessons with me in my classroom, and we realized that we've never taught a 1:1 lesson that has followed the lesson plan.  I wrote about one of our edtech fails last fall.  While this may not sound like a positive to some teachers, I reflected that those "fails" or "monitor and adjust moments" have actually helped my students learn more than they would have learned had we only been teaching the stated lesson objectives. By learning with and grappling with technology, my students are learning flexibility, patience, and creativity.  They're also learning to see their device as more than just a toy or a distractor.

The thing about the generation we're currently teaching is that they've been taught since a very young age that a phone or a tablet is simply a tool for their parents to keep them occupied or a tool for them to drive away their own boredom.  By the time students get to me in seventh grade, they're just starting to realize the social potential of their devices.  I really believe that it's my job as their teacher to help them find the purpose of a personal device as a "life tool." In addition to teaching traditional literacy, I think it's important for me to teach digital literacy skills, like effective search terms and website reliability. 

Now don't get me wrong, I fall into the same routine as my students when it comes to using my device as a time waster.  Yesterday, I watched "30 for 30: The Tonya Harding Story" on my iPad during my layover at the airport (it's awesome, in case you were wondering).  I checked Twitter constantly and kept up with my dad's progress in the Little Rock Marathon via Facebook.  There are a lot of times when I'm worse than my students when it comes to technology addiction.  I feel like that's ok sometimes.  lt gives us a place to "connect," both in conversation in the classroom and to extend the classroom conversation beyond the confines of the 50 minutes I spend with my classes each day. 

I'm excited to be at SXSWedu to share my perspective and personal experience with edtech, but I'm also really excited to learn from lots of people who have lots of experience that will help me grow in my work as a teacher. I'm looking forward to sharing my learning and my teacher tech goals at the end of the week! 

http://schedule.sxswedu.com/events/event_EDUP21829

Pro/Con/Pro: A Look at My Week

Sorry I skipped a week! I've had a weird case of writer's block all week in regards to my classroom. There are lots of things taking up my mind space, but I feel like instead of focusing and reflecting on what's happening right now, I'm really occupied with what's upcoming in my life and allowing it to take over too much room in my brain.  So rather than a cohesive, solid reflection of one particular moment in this past week, I just want to share a few little reflections of things that struck me as important to my working life and the lives of my seventh graders.  My friends and I share about our weeks together over the weekend, and we like to use the pro/con/pro model, so that's what I'll use here.

PRO: Our current unit of study that I've been writing about, focusing on civil rights, is probably one of my favorites that we teach all year.  Most of all because we do a lot of interdisciplinary planning and teaching with our social studies teachers.  Our students have been immersed in learning about the Civil Rights Movement, nonviolent protest, Mahatma Ghandi's teachings, and the continuing struggle for civil rights for all.  This week I was grading some assignments in which students had to analyze and compare Langston Hughes's poems "Dream" and "What Happens to a Dream Deferred?" They then had to draw connections between the poems and their study of the civil rights movement so far.  High level thinking for seventh graders! As I was grading, my heart leaped for joy when I read so many responses in which students were combining their social studies work with the work we've been doing in English class, discussing Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the 14th and 15th Amendments, Brown vs. Board of Education, Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, sit-ins, and other demonstrations.  It was so refreshing and exciting to see such synthesis coming out of my students! Definitely a pro in my week. 

CON: This week, I've been super antsy.  Don't get me wrong, I love my job, and I love my students. I've just been really craving an opportunity to branch out and do something new with my work.  Don't read this as anything serious. I just have a case of work wanderlust, like I need to adopt a new plan of action with something in my classroom. Or like I need something new to dive into in some aspect of my work. Right now, I'm looking at using Curriculet to move my short text instruction online, and I'm really looking forward seeing how my students respond.  I've been loving the way that piloting Google Docs is working out, and I'm thinking about adding the rest of my classes to the pilot during 4th quarter instead of waiting until next year to fully implement.  Anyway, what I'm saying is that I need to branch out into new territories.  I think this CON was why I struggled to write this week.  I was just feeling kind of bored and disconnected, like I was in a rut. I needed to create more time for myself to create this week. 

PRO: Toward the end of the week, I overcame my antsy-ness and snapped out of my slump, so I could do some BYOT vocabulary work with my kids.  I felt bad that my slump had turned into a little bit of slump for them, too.  We all just got a little bored on Tuesday.  To make up for it, we did some cooperative vocabulary work with their devices, identifying key words in a nonfiction text and determining the best search terms to locate the most information about each word.  It was so fun to see them so engaged in their work and really owning these new words. Here's some pictures of them hard at work....

Overall, I had a great, productive week, and my kids showed a lot of new understandings.  Sometimes, that one "con" in the week can really affect my psyche, and I lose my perspective on how wonderful my work really is.  I'm looking forward to a new week and to challenging myself to really engage and focus on the "pros."  Maybe next week my list will be a pro/pro/pro.  

Not Cool, Robert Frost!

The poet Robert Frost once wrote, "You can't get too much winter in the winter." After the winter we've been experiencing this year, I must beg differ.  In response to his quote, I would like to quote the young but wise Kid President who said,

This winter is definitely not cool with me.  It's been cold and gray and unpredictable, and it's taken over everyone's thoughts.  We can't get through a class period without debating whether or not we'll be at school all five days during any given week.  I'm all for staying positive, but this weather is really bringing me down. I'm ready for spring and sunshine, please and thank you!

I guess I've been spoiled.  Living in Arkansas has led me to expect mild winters, and compared to places like Minnesota, that have seen lots of negative temperatures, our weather has been downright pleasant.  I guess the biggest difference between our weather and their weather is our reaction to our weather.  Last week, several districts dismissed early just because of the threat of snow, and we all heard about what happened when it snowed in Atlanta and Birmingham (#chaos #snowpocaplyse).  Clearly, we are not equipped in the South to handle winter precipitation.

I've been reflecting a lot recently on all of this winter weather, so I asked my homeroom students if they had anything they would like to say to Mother Nature.  Here are a few of their responses:

"Bring on some hot air!"

"If you're going to make it snow, make it snow on Saturdays!"

"Mother Nature, you need 3-4 inches of snow to make a good snow man."

In reaction to both the weather and the TV special about The Beatles last night: "Let It Be....SUMMER!"

While we all love a good snow day, I think even the kids are tired of Mother Nature cutting into their summer break.  The weatherman says we're supposed to see 50 degrees later this week, and I sure hope he's telling the truth!  I think the kids do, too.

Choices and Opportunities

Yesterday, my students had an excellent debate in class.  I posed the following questions:

For things to be equal, do they have to be the same?

Are there situations where it is ok for people to be treated unequally? Name these situations and explain why it is ok.

At first, many students said that, of course, "equal" and "same" are synonyms, so things that are equal must be the same.  But several students offered rebuttals to this thinking...

"I mean, think about in math.  A balanced algebraic equation has be be equal on both sides but the expressions don't have to be the same."

"What if a mother took her two children to the grocery store?  If one wants a chocolate cupcake and the other one wants a vanilla cupcake, they're receiving equal treats, but those cupcakes aren't the same."

"What about in school? We all deserve an equal chance to do well on a test, but some of us need glasses and stuff to have an equal chance.  That's not the same, but it's equal."

We've worked on Socratic, student-led discussion all year, so I had the wonderful opportunity to pose the original questions and then sit  back and listen to all of this thinking and debate.  As the conversation continued, each class eventually got to a place where they were debating what should be equal.

"Well we're all humans, so we should all be treated equally."

"Yeah, like equal rights, but not necessarily like equal things.  Wouldn't that be like socialism or something?"

"Right! America is a democracy.  We all work and go to college and stuff a different amount. But we all have equal choices to do that."

"And opportunity! We all should have equal opportunities in America!"

Guys, this exact conversation happened in one of my classes. It was like music to my ears, hearing them think beyond their initial thought, reason with each other, and come to new understandings together.  I totally agree with their final concensus.   We should all have equal opportunities and equal choices, and I think that those are things we should be able to guarantee.  Some people have to work really hard to take advantage of those equal opportunities, while others seem to have an easy road from the beginning, but those opportunities are there, regardless, waiting to be taken.

I feel like this conversation offered me a lot of wisdom, or at least some things I needed to hear.  Yesterday morning, my principal asked me if I had heard about the anti-Common Core demonstration at our state's capitol over the weekend.  I told her I had not, but I wasn't surprised by it.  Like I've said before, people love to hate change, and there's a lot of misinformation out there about the CCSS.  As the day went on, I began to think about that conversation in connection to my students' discussion.  All of those protesters have an equal opportunity and equal choice to be involved in the education of their children.  They can choose to go on defense, to exert lots of time, energy, and anger in their fight, or they could come across the battle lines. A colleague said to me yesterday, "Man, what if those people put all that time and energy into being in our classrooms and supporting our instruction! Think about the amazing things we could do together to help and support our kids."  What a lovely thought. Yes, we definitely all have equal choices and equal opportunities.  It's what we do with those choices and opportunities that can make all the difference.