Leadership: Inspired to Learn!

    This entry is for my Teacher Leadership course and we were asked to take any topic from the module that resonated with us and describe it along with "its importance to being a pedagogical leader."

One of the candidates in the course has inspired my own learning when they created their AQ course outline titled "Nurturing Learners in the Classroom." The purpose of the course is to learn more about:

• Science of learning
• Factors contributing to student learning
• Myths in learning
• Executive functioning
• Content retention
• Educational system models
• Teaching students about the brain and growth mindset

The above topics are all ones that I have explored (or at least asked about) in the past and these ideas have sparked me to want to start to dive a little deeper into one or more of them again.

Too often we think of teaching and pedagogy as being based on the topic we are teaching. Too often we make it through our B.Ed programs and still do not really know how people learn or what is required to build classroom cultures and school systems that are actually equitable. It is actually vital to being a good teacher to understand how humans learn (and how this is different depending on developmental age) and to analyze and reflect on our own teaching using this lens.

If you are going to be a pedagogical leader (which can be thought of as "supporting teaching and learning. It includes instructional leadership—supporting classroom teachers in their key role of implementing curriculum" according to Michael B. Abel) then it should be considered essential to understand the science of learning and how we can best take advantage of what we know about the human brain to be effective educators and to lead others into using these best practices.

Thank you, Rachel, for inspiring me to further my learning and return to parts of education that reignite my flame!

Leadership: 10 Admired Leadership Qualities

    I am currently completing my Teacher Leadership Specialist AQ and it has brought be back to blogging. I am hoping that it will serve to help me build some momentum and bring life back into this blog after some time away. So bare with me a little while I get my writing legs back under me!

Leadership is a complicated thing, and as teachers we are often informal leaders among colleagues and friends. Here are 10 leadership qualities I admire in others and am striving to make qualities that I see in myself:

1. Build relationships!
   My outgoing department head is very good at making this a priority in his leadership. He always remembers to ask how things are going before he dives into the work and our department meetings always put an emphasis on getting to know each other before sharing information or diving into the learning. This is something I always have the intention of doing, but my outcome-focused personality tends to take over - so it is a work in progress!
   
   
2. Be a conversational wizard!
   My former principal was fascinating to watch. She could take a conversation likely to get heated and turn it into a calm moment that resulted in a plan of action. I am still not entirely sure how she did it but the foundation of her approach was to allow each person involved to be heard and she was firm. I only wish I had more opportunities to observe more carefully before she retired.
   
   
3. Have a clear vision but build it collaboratively!
   Shared visions are always a lot more effective and motivating for the people that you lead. Having a voice in a conversation always makes me more inclined to buy-in and I see the value in making sure others get this opportunity. Some circumstances may make this more difficult (i.e. when change is needed but routine is firmly grounded) so when the vision may not be shared it is important to find other ways to allow voices to be heard, the vision to be clearly communicated and for the vision to evolve as change begins to happen and collaboration is becoming more common.
   
   
4. Always ground the work in student achievement and well-being!
   My former principal always used to say "the students are our clients - it's not about you." It is human nature to feel ownership over what we do in our lives, but it is so important to step outside of that nature and realize that we are not perfect and many of us have experienced a lot of privilege in our lives (so it is even more important to reflect, listen and avoid becoming defensive). Our classrooms should be student-centred and so should our leadership work.
   
   
5. Lead by example - take risks!
   It is vital to practice what you preach. As teacher leaders we should be an example of what we want to see. This is why I feel it is important to continue to work on effective assessment & evaluation practices grounded in policy and to be innovative and reflective about classroom practices.
   
   
6. Be vulnerable!
   This is connected to #5 - to lead by example you also need to share practices and learning with others. Being reflective in a public way allows others to see that you are fallible and that in being innovative there will always be failings but persistence ultimately pays off.
   
   
7. Seek feedback!
   Part of being fallible is realizing that there is always room for improvement and being proactive to ask for feedback from others. This is another aspect of leading by example and being vulnerable but it important to recognize on its own. All of the best leaders I have had were ones who found ways to seek feedback from students and colleagues.
   
   
8. Have courageous conversations!
   Change is not created by shying away from what might be difficult. I have learned that allowing these conversations to stay away from "getting personal" involves careful listening in combination with bringing a "third point" to the conversation. This is usually in the form of a resource that is impartial so that it can be referred to when the conversation needs to be grounded.
   
   
9. Empower others to lead!
   My outgoing department head's expertise was not in my subject area, so he was very good at asking us to lead professional learning for our group when we had something to offer. He knew that it would be more valuable and meaningful coming from a colleague than coming from him. By helping others around us develop leadership skills we become stronger leaders ourselves.
   
   
10. Be knowledgeable!
    It is pretty difficult to create buy-in when you don't have the vital knowledge to support it. Knowledge of best practices including instructional & assessment practices, knowledge of policy (curriculum, Growing Success as well as board and school policy) and knowledge of school & department protocol/processes (where to find things, who are the resources in the school). Leadership is not likely to be respected if the people being lead have more knowledge (a leader can still need to learn, it helps to be open about that learning but needs to be acted upon in a timely fashion).

At this point I feel pretty comfortable with myself for #4, 5, 6 and 10 and that given some more formal opportunity to lead that I am getting more comfortable with #3, 7 and 9. I am continuing to work in the short term on #1, 2 and 8.

Reflecting on "Gradeless" Math - Modelling Life-Long Learning

This post can also be found on our team's TLLP blog.

As the title of this entry may suggest this entry is serving as a place to express my thoughts around how last semester went and the changes I am hoping to make. My desire is that this "public diary" will help me to be accountable to my goals, will inspire someone else to take a risk, and will model that we (teacher) practice what we preach - we are all learners.

What worked well that I will continue:

• Having students engage in deconstructing curriculum (specifically the math processes and instructional language)
• Making students reflect on their learning (often!)
• Having a grounding document for evaluation (learning map with overarching learning goals)
• evaluation is based in criteria
• Having students analyze their evidence of learning to determine their grades (and conferencing about it)
• Constructing success criteria with students

What I will strive to do better:

• Engage in curriculum deconstruction more frequently (not just at the beginning of the course)
• Doing more explicit instruction around reflection (how, when, why)
• Helping students understand where they currently are (map was not ready until midterm last semester, students did not know how to use it or make meaning from it) so they can better match evidence of learning to the map and, therefore, determine a midterm and final term grade
• Teaching students to self- and peer-assess and give appropriate, meaningful feedback
• Spending time getting students to co-construct criteria for types of questions or tasks (and for daily topics)
• Getting students to self-identify as needing help and committing to getting that help (perhaps with a simple Google form)
• Collecting student feedback on my practices

What I will do differently:

• Provide a copy of the completed learning map from the start of the course to each student
• Engage students in the use of the map frequently
• Scaffold student note-taking based on investigative learning (i.e. in the early stages I am publishing a "note outline" that asks prompting questions indicating that there is something they should take note of/think about

Future goals and desires (that are just not realistic right now):

• Have a usable learning map for the other course(s) I am teaching 
• Engage same-subject colleagues in work around assessment practices [we are engaging in some "department" professional learning time in the coming weeks that may help with this]
• Be better at recording observation and conversation assessment data of student learning

Week 1 in Math - My Motivations & Understanding Expectations with Students

What, Why and Where

I am finally embarking on my vision of a "gradeless" classroom. What does that mean? It means that my students will receive feedback that is feedback-based. Learning becomes about learning. Grades take a step back and are determine for reporting periods.

Why am I going here? I am giving the ownership of learning back to my students. For too long I have been the owner of the learning. It was believed that the teacher "gave" marks and students always wanted to know what they needed to "do" to get an 80. The shift is simple - I give feedback based on set criteria that students need to work toward and they reflect on their learning and act on a next step to meet those criteria. 

Where am I now? In the past 2-3 years I have done some work with creating overarching learning goals and reformatting evaluations (i.e. taking marks off of quizzes, using one-point rubrics to give feedback, etc.). Ultimately these changes have led me to need to go to a fully feedback-based classroom so that I can focus on doing this well. So this year (my grade 10 classes in particular) will learn math through feedback based on 5 overarching learning goals.

Our First Few Days

After spending a period on vertical surfaces solving a problem in groups we started to attack the curriculum. I wanted students to have a chance to find out what the curriculum was and to understand the lens through which the curriculum is taught. In fact, I wanted them to own it.

The Math Processes - the lens through which the Ontario math curriculum is taught

Students were in 7 groups of 3-4 students and each group was assigned to one of the processes. They were tasked with rewriting their process in their own words. I gave them two prompting questions to consider to help with the process: What does it mean? What will it look like in class?

Groups then rotated around and had a chance to add or suggest changes to the work of the other groups. When they returned to their own group they were to look at the suggestions made and decide on their final sentence - sharing their final work in a shared document.

As a group we looked at the final sentences which was my chance to ask them questions about their choices of words. This lead to us making some changes (I tried to make sure we were keeping as much of their wording as possible) and agreeing as a class that we understood what it looked like.

Overall Expectations - the content

Students were given the curriculum for one of the strands of the course and were tasked with rewriting the overall expectations in their own words. When they were finished I had the groups working on the same strand get together and come to an agreement before sharing it on our shared doc. We then looked at it as a class.

With my second section I made a better point of talking about the language in the document, defining words they needed and talked about what words were important to leave in.

Learning Map - putting them together

I reworded my overarching learning goals to use the students words from the above and then shared my learning map with the students. The 5 goals on this map are where we will focus our attention for the semester. Instead of having 7 processes and 10 overall expectations students how have 5 goals to manage and reflect on.

Reflection

While I am at a school where deconstructing curriculum is not new to grade 10 students it was their first time doing it with math "jargon" so the struggle was largely around the vocabulary used. When I do this again with students who are new to this process in math I would spend time at the start looking at math and instructional vocabulary and make sure that we know what they mean and which ones are important to keep.

Portfolio: Classroom Leadership: Top 10 List

I am taking the Teacher Leadership Part 1 AQ. Our culminating task involves creating a leadership portfolio by choosing items from each module of the course to share and reflecting on its contribution to my growth as a leader. I have chosen to share my portfolio as part of my blog.

This entry is from the module entitled Classroom Leadership where we looked at how experiential learning/community connections, school climate (safe and accepting schools policy), being a technology leader, empowering students to become leaders and how teacher leadership begins in the classroom with lesson planning.

One of the assignments was to create a top 10 list of ways you can encourage students to take on leadership roles. I liked that this assignment forced me to think about leadership in a different way - how I can be a leader in my classroom and co-curriculars in a way that will empower others to develop leadership skills? This forced me to think more about how my decisions can impact things beyond curriculum content and put the context of myself as a leader back into the classroom (which is really where I envision myself staying for awhile - and it is instructional leadership that interests me the most).

When creating my list I tried to think about the things that I do every day in my classroom as well as ways that you can empower student leadership outside of the classroom. I also considered the article I had used when researching qualities/skills that made an effective leader and used that to make sure my list was relevant.

My top 10 list ended up as:

1. Provide opportunities for collaboration and rotate roles in the group (promotes communication skills, commitment, and will help students to learn to take different approaches to tasks with different personalities)
2. Use vertical non-permanent surfaces with a rule that the student with the idea cannot be the student with the marker (promotes communication skills, risk-taking, honesty, delegation and approach)
3. Give senior students on sports teams a chance to plan and run practices (promotes delegation, communication confidence, commitment, positive attitude, creativity, intuition and inspiration)
4. Empower student executives of clubs to run the club (be hands-off) (promotes honesty, delegation, communication, confidence, commitment, positive attitude, and creativity)
5. Give feedback about student communication skills (promotes self-awareness)
6. Explicitly teach students to reflect/self-assess (promotes honesty, confidence, intuition and commitment)
7. Give opportunity to give peer feedback (promotes communication, honestly, positive attitude, intuition and approach)
8. Give opportunities for social advocacy (promotes delegation, commitment, positive attitude, creativity, and inspiration)
9. Create a culture of risk-taking in your classroom - growth mindset, model risk-taking (promotes honesty, confidence, positive attitude, and intuition)
10. Celebrate successes to build confidence (promotes positive attitude and intuition)

Portfolio: Leading with a Plan: Are Leaders Born or Made?

I am taking the Teacher Leadership Part 1 AQ. Our culminating task involves creating a leadership portfolio by choosing items from each module of the course to share and reflecting on its contribution to my growth as a leader. I have chosen to share my portfolio as part of my blog.

This entry is from the module entitled Leading with a Plan where we looked at the importance of planning, learning preference and multiple intelligences, how to use data to inform classroom practice, leadership development opportunities, and debating whether a leader is born or made.

The assignment that I felt was most beneficial to me was our debate on whether a leader is born or made. For this assignment we had to do some research and form an argument for one of the sides of the debate. This forced me to think about leadership in a different light by having me reflect on what kind of environment a person needs to become an effective leader. I realized that it was because other people recognized what they believed were "natural" leadership skills and gave me opportunities to use them. I have never been one to decide for myself that I wanted to pursue particular opportunities - but I have obviously taken advantage of ones that were given to me. I plan to continue with the philosophy that I should seek to make myself a more effective educator, and if long the way I find suggestions to pursue other things then I will consider them. I just want to be the best me I can be.

Here is the argument that I formed for leaders being made, not born:

According to Forbes’ Tanya Prive, there are 10 qualities that make a great leader: Honesty, delegation, communication, confidence, commitment, positive attitude, creativity, intuition, inspiration, and approach.

While you may argue that honesty and positive attitude are more innate qualities I believe that they are actually developed over time as you are raised through your experiences. If you grow up with honest, positive role models than you are likely to take on those characteristics.

The ability to delegate, communicate, be creative, rely on your intuition and to take different approaches with different people are definitely things that are learned over time. These are things that usually require intentional practice and awareness/reflection to improve. Some people may seem to be better natural communicators, but we can learn to be better at it by practicing. Others may naturally tend toward a controlling manner, but can learn to rely on others (and therefore delegate work) as they become better at reading situations/people and balancing their own life. Relying on intuition comes with experiencing a variety of situations throughout a persons personal and professional life and can be enhanced by focusing on observational skills.

Confidence can be developed over time by mentor leaders. This requires you to be given opportunities in situations with other leaders who can help you recognize your strengths and who will give you opportunities to practice leading.

Finally, the ability to inspire comes from thoughtful planning – who will help you? What will be the focus? How does the investment help them? – and using your energy productively. My sister is a head coach of a college sports team and also a team captain for team Canada. She will also be the first person to admit that she is an introvert. Personality tests reveal fascinating things about her natural tendencies compared to her beliefs – when she is coaching or with Team Canada she goes to bed exhausted every night because she has learned to be an effective leader. Leadership did not come naturally to her.

Finished with the Status Quo

I am currently making my way through Starr Sackstein's Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School. I will likely do a blog when I am finished and will include my takeaways in more detail but one of her lines has inspired me to bring up some provocative conversation.

As are many of you, I am tired of the argument "We have always done it this way." It may be true that there are some thing in our lives that can stay the same year after year and still be the most efficient way to do things but life changes, and often things need to change with it. Most of the stages of my life have come with pretty significant changes and I have also watched the world evolve - computers, internet, cell phones - and would be significantly behind in current knowledge if I had ignored those changes.

Of course, I have also watched the world fail to evolve (lack of change in carbon footprint despite the research and negative effects we are experiencing; decades long wars (in so many cases started by some misunderstanding and a failure to learn from history) that are sometimes ignored by the rest of the world; etc.

I can no longer watch education become something that does not change.

On page 28 Sackstein had me out loud proclaiming "Yes! This is the articulation I have been looking for!" when she said:

In the industrial era, schools were intended to train good workers, so students went to schools that prepared them to enter the work force. This model of education valued obedience, conformity, and rote learning.

We are no longer in the industrial evolution.

Of course, I will not pretend to believe that we do not need workers who can conform and follow specific steps to complete a task, but the majority of work that we need to prepare students for requires people who can be creative, who can think for themselves, and who can solve problems. This is the world I want to prepare my students for - I want them to find success in whatever passion or skill they find for themselves through the use of transferable, valuable skills (not rote learning they can look up on YouTube).

Hopefully my journey can help to bring along more teachers, students, parents, admin, and community members who want to see a change.

Math Learning Map Journey

I have been distracted from blogging but am trying to catch up and am back to trying to deprivatize my practice more. And so, I am resolved to blog about my assessment practices (including failures and questions) and hope that I can spark conversation, collect some feedback, and crowd source some ideas. So I have one request - if you are reading these entries, please share them with someone else and/or comment at the bottom and join the conversation. :) The first entry from this series can be found here.

Today I am hoping to share the process and evolution of my experiences working toward a learning map for a math course. I think this is a specific journey worth deprivatizing because it has been a complicated one that involved a lot of lengthy discussions.

This entry requires you to know what an Overarching Learning Goal (OLG) is: I described it in an earlier entry as big ideas that are written as board spectrum learning goals that marry the "know" and "do" that we hope a student leaves a course with. I have discussed OLGs in a number of other entries since this one that can show you some of my journey through understanding and using them as well.

Starting in early 2015 I dove into OLGs and started working with a colleague to write some for a math course. At the time we were both teaching Gr 10 Academic ("Mathematical Principles") so we tried to tackle it. This was both of our first attempts at the process for any course so it was an exploration of the process itself and a discovery that every time we tried to do it we wanted to make different decisions. [One thing I would critique us on looking back was our neglect of the front matter of the curriculum].

Here is a look at the 2 different sets of OLGs we landed on in our two attempts.

In 2016 I had the opportunity to gather with some math and assessment colleagues from around the board to take a real look at designing OLGs and a Learning Map (LM). [I showed a sample LM for my Science course in this entry earlier if you would like some context] A LM takes the OLGs and describes what the learning should look like at each level. This map can then be used for many purposes.

Over the course of many discussions with colleagues at my school, one of our math resource teachers (@MashelleKaukab), and the above mentioned gathering we went through a process of unpacking the MFM 1P (Gr 9 Applied - Mathematical Foundations) course and the Math Processes (Ontario math curriculum front matter). It involved a lot of debate with well-reasoned points - and a lot of learning! Oh how our brains hurt at the end of that day!

Our team decided to create "skeleton" OLGs that focused on the processes that could then theoretically be used to finish OLGs for any course at any level (perhaps with rewording needed). Here is where we landed:

Our team left that meeting still feeling like things were a work in process but I am sharing our draft of our work hoping that you will contribute to the discussion by providing feedback. Please visit a copy of the document here.

The hope is that this map will become the foundation for every decision, evaluation and report completed for the course. The hope is that it will be the backbone of my backward design for my course.

Thank you for reading and for joining the discussion!
Happy summer!

Learning Goals & Reflection on Quizzes in 1P Science

I have been distracted from blogging but am trying to catch up and am back to trying to deprivatize my practice more. And so, I am resolved to blog about my assessment practices (including failures and questions) and hope that I can spark conversation, collect some feedback, and crowd source some ideas. So I have one request - if you are reading these entries, please share them with someone else and/or comment at the bottom and join the conversation. :) The first entry from this series can be found here.

In a more recent entry I blogged about the basics of using learning goals (LGs) in my Grade 9 applied science class. You can find this entry here. In today's blog you will find a little more about what I have tried to do with the LGs, particularly related to quizzes.

Here are some of the things I wish to share and/or reflect on:

Challenges of writing in student-friendly language:
It is not always easy to maintain the integrity of the vocabulary necessary for the course while making statements accessible to all students. I try to give them a chance to review the LGs and to ask for clarification if needed, but it is not always easy to get them to admit that they do not understand. And sometimes it makes more sense to revisit the goals at the end of day 1 when the vocab has been introduced through the lesson.

LGs vs success criteria (SC)
It was pointed out to me at one point that the statements I was using were better suited as SC than LGs. The more I have learned and discussed A&E with colleagues I am inclined to agree. I would now zero in on the overall expectations in the curriculum to help with LG writing more and let the types of statements I was writing become the success criteria. But what I was doing did serve these students pretty well as it (but having real learning goals would have benefited me a lot when determining grades for them, but so would editing and knuckling down to use the Learning Map that I started to create for the course as well). I discuss these ideas in this entry.

Quiz layout and using learning levels:
I was inspired by Myron Dueck's book Grading Smarter Not Harder to change the format I was using on written evaluations. I now group things based on learning goal. In addition I no longer give marks on them. Instead I have a grid with the learning goals at the top and I have students reflect on where they think they are (and then I show them where I think they are) and I give feedback within each question. This has led me to write evaluations that much better reflect what I want them to know and do (and I test what is valued without over-testing topics)

Now the unit test is essentially a "re-do" opportunity:
I use the unit test as a chance for students to show me what else they have learned and to give them a different way to show me the same learning goal. I make sure that the goal is tested using a different style of question (i.e. maybe it was a graphic organizer on the quiz and the next time they label a diagram). This was definitely time consuming the first time through, but it was worth it (and creating a brand new (good) unit test is time consuming anyway).

It is much easier to evaluate using levels now than when I gave "marks":
I have been trying to awhile now to think about levels when I mark. For instance, if I am looking at a Gr 11 physics test and the student has problem solved I want to know what level of knowledge and skill they have demonstrated. I then assign a mark based on this level (instead of "taking marks off" for mistakes made, which can be quite arbitrary). Going to levels has removed the idea of getting 1 out of 4 meaning 25% when really it showed the student is starting to get it, but isn't there yet.

Students need better feedback from me than I am giving:
It is still really easy to just circle things, use check marks and question marks. This is not good enough. There is not a level of description being provided when we do this and many students are not asking about them. I know this is something I need to work on, and I also think that by adjusting the LG vs SC aspect mentioned above that this could get easier as I wouldn't have as many things that I think I have to give feedback on.

Most of my 1P students were doing better at midterm than they thought:
There was a lot of surprise in the room that they were doing well. Many of them had never felt like they did well in science before (although they all like the subject). I did notice some of them thinking "oh I can try less now" but it also spurred some of them on to try harder. Some may think this means the course was made "easy" but I believe that they were actually showing knowledge and skill in the course. My practices had allowed me to remove the "noise" from evaluation (i.e. grammar was much less of a distraction) and it was easier to identify students to have conversations with to prove that they knew more than they had written down.

We Need to Stop Testing and Start Thinking

I heard something that was music-to-my-ears today. Apparently there was a presentation to senior leadership in my board a few weeks ago that included a prof from UTM and one from UGuelph (both from math departments) that passed on this message (I am paraphrasing of course) that I hope makes its way around the board sooner rather than later:

"We need secondary teachers to stop using tests as a crutch claiming they need to "prepare students for University". Your students are coming to us as great test takers, but without critical thinking and problem solving skills. These skills are vital, and students who have these skills will be able to succeed no matter the assessment environment they are put in."

I have been saying for years now that we are graduating hordes of students who do not know how to think - even the ones getting 90s. This was confirmed by the numerous peers who have become math teachers and admitted that they now realize that they never actually understood the math they did in high school (until they started teaching it). We need to stop testing and to start giving students the opportunities they need to do some true learning and thinking.

To this I add....we need to bring back the Al Geo course! That had to be the course that I did the most thinking for in high school, without a doubt.

Using Learning Goals in 1P Science

It has been pointed out to me recently that I should try to deprivatize my practice more. And so, I am resolved to blog about my assessment practices (including failures and questions) and hope that I can spark conversation, collect some feedback, and crowd source some ideas. So I have one request - if you are reading these entries, please share them with someone else and/or comment at the bottom and join the conversation. :) The first entry from this series can be found here.

I think that most teachers can agree that it is very difficult to focus on making major changes to more than one course at a time, and at my current job I am usually teaching three courses at a time. So of course, some things get neglected. This semester I made a conscious decision to try to make some changes to my Grade 9 applied Science course, particularly related to my assessment and evaluation practices.

I have been trying to find ways to help all of my students be more responsible, reflective, and to use metacognition constantly. I have also been making efforts to move toward not using marks to motivate students (I have read that studies show they discouraged struggling students and that most students motivated by marks can also be motivated by the learning). When I looked back at discussions I had with other teachers on the assessment working team I recalled some discussion about the use of LGs in vocational classes. And so, I decided to make an effort to make explicit use of learning goals.

This use of learning goals is another step to me attempting to throw out grades (follow the hashtag #TTOG to connect with others trying to do this as well). Here is what I am doing with my 1Ps as a first step:
At the start of class I put up three LGs that show the students what we will be learning that day (typically I am showing the same goals for 2-3 classes). I am using a model that was demonstrated to me by a colleague for professional learning goals (for PD) which involves having learning goals that describe:
1) What the student will know
2) What the student will do
3) What the student will be

Generally speaking the "know" is the core concept that is necessary to move onto higher order thinking; the "do" is usually some kind of application (such as calculating, using, drawing, etc); and the "be" is often related to a hands-on approach such as identifying actual objects/situations in a lab setting or showing confidence in interpreting drawings.

I am finding that doing this is helping me to see how each of the expectations from the curriculum we are tackling might fit into my overarching learning goals for the course. And in other ways, it is helping me reflect on those OLGs and think about how I might tweak them in the future. I try as often as I think of it to make sure that we also revisit the slide at the end of each class to make sure students at least have the opportunity to reflect on their learning.

Thank you for reading. Please join the conversation!

My #oneword for 2016

This is my first time coming up with a #oneword as a professional new years resolution, and I am having trouble doing it. I had initially thought of using the word "basic" to try to get myself to focus on the basics, sleep more, and be a little less crazy. But let's face it, I wouldn't be very good at that. Perhaps the writing of this blog is proof enough of that.

And so I have settled on LEARNING as my word for 2016. Being a learner is something I have really grown to embrace since I started my career and I want to continue to build on this in 2016. My areas for being a learner:

1. Drive my own LEARNING.

Try to more consistently read blogs/articles/tweets that are related to things that I want to learn about. I hope to pay a bit more attention to #mathBoS and #TTOG so that I can focus on the things that drive my every day learning.

2. LEARN from my students, every day.

I am constantly reminding myself to focus on improving my communication with my students. I want to learn to be better at making connections with students every day.

3. LEARNING at some interesting PD opportunities.

I would really like to find an interesting conference to go to. Maybe even one that would require me to travel (such as #flipcon). I don't know if this really counts as part of a resolution since I am a PD nerd though :)

What is your #oneword?

Creating Culture: A #flipclass #FlashBlog

Hello #flipclass friends & visitors!

In this week's #flipclass chat we are discussing classroom and school culture and have been asked to blog about how we create culture in our flipped classrooms and/or schools.

I have blogged about embarking on a journey to create a better culture of communication in my classroom and am attempting to use a strategy called Accountable Talk (it was proposed within our board as a numeracy strategy to get kids talking about their thinking - so I thought "two birds, one stone". I am going to try to reflect on how I think this is going and how I think it helps to create a positive culture in my classroom.

First of all I would like to acknowledge the light bulb moment I had recently - I have to change my own mind set and habits to really make this ever work. I am not there yet. It is difficult. It is a work in progress. I still struggle to stay out of it completely. But perhaps that will never stop. Sometimes a question needs to be rephrased, or an example is needed to clarify.

This strategy makes discussions take longer at first, so requires a lot of patience and a lot of direct instruction around why and how it can/should be used. I am trying really hard to interject its ideas into conversations I am "eavesdropping" on within my class and trying to speak less and less during full class discussions. My goal is to merely become the facilitator of the conversation (i.e. help them still speak one at a time and remind them when they need to rephrase to maintain a positive discussion).

I have witnessed a few groups of students putting the strategy into place more often in their own conversations (hooray!) but ultimately I hope to see it more. I am getting better at it (slowly) myself and it is starting to rub off on the students. For example, I gave my Grade 11 physics class some discussion questions at the start of class surrounding Newton's first and second laws. They were given time to discuss in their groups first and then I usually pick one or two for full class discussion (so that I can make sure we are all on the same page).

My biggest struggle at this point is how to help a conversation get started when they are not sure how to begin (without going back to my old habits that lead to student-teacher conversation). But that will have to be a bigger thought for another day. But I am seeing them getting used to my madness - one student flat out realized "she's not going to give us this answer, I need to just say something". So he did. And it helped kick off a conversation with multiple participants and all I had to say was "who agrees? why do you agree? what can you add? ...". It felt amazing. They were starting to get it - and it sounded like they were trusting each other, and pushing each other to be better without a single negative comment. It was as if the conversation was building them up, instead of threatening them to need to be right. They were no longer seeking my validation, they were seeking explanations that they could understand - that they built themselves, without needing to use my words.

The part that felt the best was talking to that student who started it all off after the fact when he added "I also get why you do this now. It is easier for us to help each other because we are learning this together." He added on to this idea by clarifying that because they were all trying to learn it they could relate to the difficulties and struggles in a way that I couldn't.

This is why I think of myself as a coach now instead of as a "teacher".

My Marking Hacks & Things to Come

(Sorry my American #flipclass friends, but whenever you see "mark" you will have to think "grade"..It's a Canadian thing)

There are two main things that I do that contribute to (hopefully) speed up marking a bit.

1. Using EduCanon to embed questions and note-taking suggestions into video lessons. This app is connected directly to Edmodo (and also to Google if you use Classrooms, so students only need one login) and I can log in to look at my "monitor" page and can see how my entire class did on one screen. I immediately see which Ss are struggling on an individual topic and/or if a Q gave a whole chunk of the class issues. Students can also go back and write explanations that I can read and give them credit for. Love that added communication piece.

2. More discussion, less grading. Evaluation comes later. During the semester verbal and written feedback is much more valuable than marks themselves. I do everything in my power to get kids to stop thinking about the mark and start thinking about the learning. This is where I want their focus to be, and when I have to do something with an actual mark they will hopefully be better prepared (and, as a result, do better). If I could throw out grades entirely, I would.

Then there are the things that I want to do. I have (what we call in Ontario) my AQ (additional qualification) in assessment & evaluation. I am a bit of an assessment nerd, but my practiced do not yet match my beliefs/values (I am working on it).

Ontario has a policy called Growing Success that was published in 2010. Apparently we were one of the first provinces to have such a document and it is both vague and detailed. There is a lot in there that we should/have to do that we are still working to put into practice.

I am currently working on making better/more accurate use of Overarching Learning Goals (OLGs, this is a board term...they are similar to what some books call Big Ideas or Enduring Understandings) and learning goals in my classes. On my lesson plan (that is posted online for all to read) I give a learning goal (and am working on shifting them to more student friendly "I can" statements) that Ss can use to self-assess. Last week I had release time with some department colleagues and we created OLGs for Gr 9 and 10 science. I am planning to reveal these to my Grade 10s and make a point of referring back to them often.

Here is the ultimate goal - all assessment and evaluation will be developed with the OLGs in mind. In other words, the OLGs will serve as my starting point for backwards design. One of my colleagues has switched her "tests" in one of her courses to be much less traditional. Instead of having a bunch of (potentially insignificant) questions, she only has 4 questions on each test. One for each OLG as it relates to that "unit" of study. I love this idea. It seemed like the biggest issue was training Ss to answer the types of Qs she was using. Basically to UNtrain them of their previous habits of "studying content" to making connections and communicating well.

First Cracks at Accountable Talk, Note-Taking, and Video Watching

I have some relatively significant goals this semester and have tried to get them going as early on as possible. I am going to try to reflect on them as often as I can to try to keep myself on task. Here are my thoughts after the first week:


Day 1: I set out to accomplish two things the first day of school. 1. Make use of Accountable Talk strategies to start to work on collaborative, effective discussions between students (student to student, not teacher to student) as I continue to seek a more student-centered classroom. 2. Start the semester off with someone that would make students want to come back tomorrow!

I created tent cards for student groups of desks to help introduce a variety of Accountable Talk strategies and tried to model a couple of them while I was introducing the ideas. So far students seem to have a mixed reaction to them. But I will continue to try to get them to focus on self-improvement in communication as a life skill, not just a classroom skill.

I used activities from Spark101 that were scientifically relevant and engaging to each course to use for the first day. Students seemed to have a lot of fun in those discussions and got to attempt to solve a real-life problem using their current knowledge and info shared in the video.


Day 2: Another goal for this year is to do a better job of helping students become better note-takers (and by extension, better at watching educational videos for my flipped class). I found a College Geek video that introduced effective strategies for note-taking and create a note-outline for students to use to take their first note (that was a model of the first strategy mentioned).

I also modeled a strategy for video watching by pausing thee video after each note-taking method was shared to allow them to record their thoughts/ideas. We also discussed pros and cons of each method and where different people might choose to use each one. I also stressed one of the lines in the video "You are a STUDENT, not a dictating machine!" and the importance of actually PROCESSING information while you are learning (so that you are learning not just writing down something to learn later).

This lead to a fun start to the next day because I got to show them some electronic note-taking apps and organizers. A couple of students have even started using a couple of the apps and trying one of the note-taking methods already!


Day 3: Continuing the goal of helping them become good video watchers (and needing to introduce them to one of my main reasons for switching to a flipped class) I had them watch a video as an entire class, while taking notes, without touching the pause button. The effective one was a Crash Course I picked for my Grade 10s to watch. He speaks pretty quickly in general and it was introducing some things that they did not know yet (but was related to something they did last year).

The frustration in the students was very evident. Some gave up entirely. Some were madly note-taking the whole time. Some gave me exasperated looks when I just smiled at them when they said "can't we pause???" Afterward we shared some feelings/adjectives to describe the experience and I promised them that they should NEVER have to feel this way again because their learning would be in their control. A point a used to remind them that this involves them communicating with me - a lot (I can't read your minds, really!) - if they do find themselves feeling this way again.

I think some of them were annoyed that the "note" ended up being futile, but most of them appreciated the resulting honesty and seemed to feel like they would be in the driver's seat in my course. Maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part though.


Day 4/5: I have now started to introduce students to watching educational videos individually and taking notes effectively. We are using class time to watch lessons at this point in the year and I am making sure they are taking notes and trying to give them feedback about the notes themselves. This is probably the hardest part for me...I do not feel like I am an expert myself. But I am trying. I am doing my best to encourage them to (at the very least) have examples/visuals when possible, and to show they processed by taking NOTES not recording every word.

My Grade 10s are being introduced to EduCanon right away so I am trying to use the embedded questions to get them to focus on important things and forcing them to pause at various points. Hopefully we can work together to pare back on my forced pauses by the end of the semester knowing that they will do it on their own. Fingers crossed.

Any advice/ideas/etc that you have for me on this topic would be greatly appreciated!


Still to come (i.e. something I have not started yet but hope/plan to) - student ePortfolios and reflections

Teachers Need to Fail

As teachers, we are constantly asked if we are ready/looking forward to going back to work. I usually say that I have "mixed feelings". I mean, of course I like summer and (if the weather would stay nice) I could live with a few more weeks of "free-time"....but I actually love my job. I actually spend a lot of time thinking about my classroom, year-round. And I'm not alone. Just venture to the many education blogs out there...the thousands of teachers on Twitter, learning on their own time...the Staples locations where teachers are spending their own money on the "little things" that make a difference - and I guarantee you will find them.

What September gives us is a new start. A new year to try new things, to tweak old things, to wonder out into the vast world that education is becoming and to take a chance...to risk failing. There has been a lot of talk about grit, perseverance, and mind-set over the recent years in education - a discussion hoping to find a solution to the need for change in education, to remedy the apathy we see in our classrooms. I think the answer lies within the system - the system that needs to change, if only in its own mind set. A change to finally believe, that it is okay to fail.

Isn't this what we want our students to learn? We want them to take risks with their learning. To "guess" answers based on what they know, even if it might be wrong. To take a chance on something new, because what is new might just be what they are looking for (even if they don't know it). I do not claim to think that this is a novel idea. I am sure many people have had it before me - in fact there is research to support failure as the backbone of learning. I do not even claim that I am the first person to believe that teachers need to start failing to learn to get students to do the same, I have just realized that this is the easiest way I can express my feelings about what education needs right now.

We need to try new things. We need to start failing. So that we can learn. So that we can truly embrace the 21st century as educators (and learners). So that students will care. So that students will learn to fail, too. So that students will not just come to school to "get knowledge", but will come to school to work on problems, to learn from others, to actually "Forget what you know" and start thinking! 

It's funny, I initially titled this entry "A New Beginning" and I was going to share how I am going to start my first week of classes - but this is what evolved. Sometimes taking the time to write helps us find some clarity. Maybe it will even spark a discussion that will help evolve my thinking even more. If you would like to participate in this discussion feel free to comment below or to reach out on Twitter.

Have a wonderful 2015-2016 school year! May it be filled with risk, failure, triumph, and laughter!

[The link is to a boys TED talk address about how some of the worlds most influential minds have stopped learning so that they can start thinking. I highly recommend that you watch it, in entirety]

Week 27 - Using Investigations to Teach Quadratic Functions

Part of using a flipped class model means identifying lessons that will not be best taught by mass instruction (i.e. video) but will be better served by something like an investigation. A big part of my current philosophy of math education is that most (if not basically all) students memorize algorithms and never really have a strong grasp of the material, so I seek to change this trend and try to push students to make connections between ideas and really understand why it works. "If you understand the basics, you can use them to figure out the hard stuff" is what I am often heard saying. I think I came to this realization when I was in my B.Ed year and/or my first year of teaching when my friends (a year ahead of me in school, so already teaching) were commenting that they couldn't believe how much they realized they did not understand in high school. In fact they did not understand it in university and were only getting it now because they had to teach it!

As part of these ideas I wanted to find a more effective way to teach quadratic functions that would (hopefully) lead to less memorizing. I set out to find/modify/create some investigative tasks for students to work on. This usually involved them doing the intro portion for homework the night before and then working through the rest of it in class in their groups. The first two investigations explored and linked step property (the pattern created by the changing slope - the idea being that students start to make a connection between linear and quadratic relations), first differences, and congruence (as well as symmetry). In the third investigation they were given some challenging problems that they would hopefully be able to solve using the ideas they had discovered.

These classes were then supported afterward with short video lessons to hopefully help students consolidate and to make sure everyone took away the key ideas I was hoping for. One of my biggest challenges has been creating that authentic, risk-taking environment where students are not afraid to be wrong while working through tasks like this. Many of them have never really worked through such challenging tasks or ideas and they seem to fear the unknown, to fear trying new things. I sometimes feel like a broken record, but I really do wonder if this might have been different if these tasks had come later in the semester.

What I am hoping to do in the future is to work toward creating this elusive learning environment is to focus more on talk strategies in class to help students enhance the communication among themselves (so they do not always have to have a conversation with me to feel like they have gotten anywhere). I think that this, in combination with a higher confidence with linear relations before embarking on this unit, will lead to better results (i.e. less memorization!).

I would love to hear from others who are trying anything similar. What worked in your class? What didn't? Why?

Week 21 - OMCA with Mathalicious

As a mathematics educator I am always looking for ways to show math in an authentic light. It often feels like curriculum limits these opportunities as we feel forced to cover certain topics in a fairly short time-line and we get sucked into it easily. As they say, we often resort to methods and ideas that we were taught with. It takes effort to find new ideas and make changes in education.

So when I heard about the OMCA conference this year and heard that it was featuring the Mathalicious website I wanted to jump on it. Their website has one goal - to use real-life problems to show how math is used as a tool to solve them. Textbooks generally used what is referred to as "canned" math - that is to say that questions are created for the sole purpose of using a specific math tool. What Mathalicious does is take something that is a problem first, and narrate it in a way that allows math to clearly be used as a tool - and generally the end result is something the students will not expect. This can be anything from taking a scene from a play, to looking at pizza to crust ratios, to deciding if a university education is worth the money.

The conference turned out to go as well as we had hoped (I went with a colleague) as the presenter was engaging and sold his product well. We got to try out a bunch of the activities on their site and experience a bunch as an audience. I must say that I don't know that I will ever do the site justice as a presenter myself, but I am still excited to try things out - we got a 6 month subscription with our conference fee. I think what really hit home about the whole experience was that he really forced you to reflect and recall why you had become a math teacher to begin with. We were forced to look at the core of math education and decide what was important - and that is exactly what we did.

By the end of the two days we were ready to head back to work to try something new! The timing of the conference was both terrible (leaving our classes for 2 days in the very first week of he semester was difficult, routines are yet to be established) and perfect - we were able to head back to immediately start using what we had learned. We intend to make use of the website this semester to test out how it might work, where things can be used, gauge student engagement and try to master the art of presenting these well-planned, authentic problems.

First goal is to use one to introduce a topic and to just see how it goes! Basically, to throw ourselves into the deep end - and either sink or swim! (probably a bit of both).

Looking forward I can also see how this has the potential for authentic assessment, great opportunities for collaboration, and the hopes for observation and conversation! It will take me some time to get there (and I can only hope that I will get to teach this course again in the near future - not 5 years down the road again). The excitement of having access to a well-planned, thoughtful resource is invigorating and a great opportunity. I am hopeful that the time they put into these lessons (literally a team putting in at least a week into ONE lesson - time I could never hope to have for one lesson) will only add to my students' experience.

If you have had the chance to try one of the Mathalicious lessons I would appreciate you sharing your story :)

Week 13 - Assessment & Evaluation

Starting last spring I started to go to after school sessions lead by our Secondary Assessment Resource Coordinator of our board around assessment in secondary schools. I have been (what many of us lovingly call ourselves) an assessment nerd for awhile now. In the spring of 2013 I did an online AQ through Queen's to develop a better understanding of student Assessment & Evaluation and have enjoyed discussing, learning, and developing student assessment practices ever since. It is a complex beast, worth a lot of our time and effort - it is the backbone of our everyday decisions and long term planning (or at least it should be).

Around the time I had planned to write this blog we had a positive climate day at our school that included a speaker for our students. In his presentation the speaker showed the students part of a children's book he had written that refers to education as a hegemony. It was a light bulb moment for me to have one word that can describe my feelings around the changes that education needs to make all of a sudden - I have always found it ironic that we reference education as preparing students for what comes next (this phrase is used at all grade and levels of education) and yet, we are not really equipped to do this in our changing world.

These early experiences with out A&E coordinator had a lot of discussion around triangulation of evidence and the fact that appearances in secondary education are that we are further behind in implementing growing success than our elementary counter parts (though perhaps this is just an appearance?). As it turned out a bunch of the teachers who had chosen to attend one of these sessions were math educators and we all had the same feeling - we all WANT to learn to triangulate evidence in our math class rooms but do not feel like we know HOW. From this session we requested a chance to create a working team to come up with some things to work from that we can hopefully spread and share with other colleagues. [At the time I planned to write this we had not gotten to a point where we had anything planned, but we now have meeting dates in place for a group of us to do just that with support from our A&E coordinator. These are planned for April and plan to blog about these experiences later.]

It is going to take some time and effort up front to make all of this work, but I am looking forward to continuing to explore these ideas with my peers and to trying new things. I have started to explore e-portfolios as a way to track student learning (and find this way more meaningful for report writing than just looking at a list of marks I have recorded as I can speak to specifics a lot more easily). I have started doing this on my own (which is time consuming) and plan to explore ways of getting students to do this for themselves and sharing it with me instead (next year).

More A&E blogs to come.

Week 10 - Students Appreciate Learning About Credit Cards and Banking

At this point in the semester my Math for Every Day Learning class (MEL 3E) was finishing up learning about interest (finishing with compound interest) and starting to do some investigation into the large variety of credit cards that are available, comparing their use to using cash, and learning to read credit card statements. Despite this not being the most fascinating unit I can imagine being a student in they seem to really appreciate how useful the lessons and investigations are. They are seeing how it is relevant to their lives (even though most are only 16 so cannot get credit cards for awhile still) and seem to understand why it is important to learn.

When you ask them what they have learned after some of these lessons they can easily tell you about the benefits and consequences of credit card use. I keep reminding them that the important part of this semester is that they leave with some ideas of what to think about in their financial lives and hopefully will know how to find resources to help the make decisions in the future. It seems like many of the students in this class this year are hoping to leave with those things (some have since even said "this binder is going to be my bible after this course is finished").

If I get another change to teach this course I would also like to put some more focus on basic math skills. I am not sure how this would look, but I know that it would have to be something that would be motivating for them...and that would, in the end, improve their numerical confidence.