Leadership: New Teachers and the Ethical Standards

    In Ontario teachers are governed by the Ontario College of teachers. Part of being an Ontario Certified Teacher (OCT) means that you are held to the standards of practice and the ethical standards, outlined in the hyperlinks provided.

There is so much to learn as a new teacher. It is flat out overwhelming - even when you have dreamed of becoming a teacher for years and feel you were born to do it, once you get started and really see how much there is to thinking about and consider; the learning curve is steep. 

Here I will analyze the ethical standards in the context of Growing Success to show how it is embedded in the 2010 policy. By following the assessment & evaluation policy, you are upholding the ethical standards (care, respect, trust and integrity) of the Ontario College of Teachers.

Care

"The ethical standard of Care includes compassion, acceptance, interest and insight for developing students' potential. Members express their commitment to students' well-being and learning through positive influence, professional judgment and empathy in practice."

"Developing potential" and "professional judgement" make me think a lot about the purpose of assessment: to improve student learning (Growing Success, pg 6). If you are working to improve student learning through a genuine desire for success for each individual student you will show compassion and interest for developing student potential and you will be committed to student well-being. In addition, the phrase "professional judgement" appears in Growing Success fifteen times, starting on page 2.

On page 8 of the policy (which is providing context for the fundamental principles of assessment and evaluation) it states, "In their important professional role, teachers show students that they care about them, and model a love of learning that can deeply influence their lives."

Respect

"Intrinsic to the ethical standard of Respect are trust and fair-mindedness. Members honour human dignity, emotional wellness and cognitive development. In their professional practice, they model respect for spiritual and cultural values, social justice, confidentiality, freedom, democracy and the environment."

The first of the seven fundamental principles of the Growing Success policy is that "...teachers use practices and procedures that are fair, transparent, and equitable for all students." Additionally, you can only have a sound handle on assessment & evaluation when you are able to build trust with students and parents.

On page 147 the policy defines its use of the word equity as "A condition or state of fair, inclusive, and respectful treatment of all people. Equity does not mean that people are treated the same without regard for individual differences."

Trust

"The ethical standard of Trust embodies fairness, openness and honesty. Members' professional relationships with students, colleagues, parents, guardians and the public are based on trust."

Some of this is addressed above in the analysis of Respect, as it uses trust and fairness in its definition. Moreover, we can build trust through openness by making sure to be transparent in our assessment practices. Another of the fundamental principles states that "...teachers use practices and procedures that are communicated clearly to students and parents at the beginning of the school year or course and at other appropriate points throughout the school year or course."

Page 2 (the Introduction) also uses the term trust: "Successful implementation of policy depends on the professional judgement of educators at all levels, as well as on educators’ ability to work together and to build trust and confidence among parents and students."

Integrity

"Honesty, reliability and moral action are embodied in the ethical standard of Integrity. Continual reflection assists members in exercising integrity in their professional commitments and responsibilities."

We use a criterion-based approach to assessment and evaluation in Ontario. It is important to understand what this means and to use this approach, as this is how we help students to make progress in a reliable, research-based approach. When we fail to maintain a criterion-based approach to our curriculum we are comparing students to each other instead of evaluating their learning based on the expectations themselves.

When growing success defines professional judgement it states that " In professional practice, judgement involves a purposeful and systematic thinking process that evolves in terms of accuracy and insight with ongoing reflection and self-correction" which highlights the importance of ongoing teacher reflection.

Leadership: Why Every Teacher Should Be a Researcher

    The theme of this module in our course was teachers as researchers. While my previous entry was specifically about action research (AR), ultimately it is important for all teachers to think of their work in the classroom as research and to be intentional about using a framework and making decisions based on data.

Action research uses the following process:

Phase 1: Planning (Come up with a testable question, do some secondary research, design the process) 

Phase 2: Action (Complete the primary research and data collection cycles)

Phase 3: Analysis (What does the data show?)

Phase 4: Conclusion

and from phase 4 we can cycle back to phase 1. Ideally action research would be completed collaboratively (and there are other models we can consider, such as Collaborative Inquiry, which ultimately have a similar process and the end goal - to try new things and learn from it - is the same).

If we are not able to engage in formal AR (collaborative time is not always given, common goals may not be determined) then we should make a best effort to engage in this process on a smaller scale for our own educational practices. I can see this process being used in two ways. Many educators likely are doing this very informally, but we could all benefit (as would our students) from thinking about it in more depth and making sure to complete the process.

In our day to day teacher we are constantly assessing student learning, collecting data and making decisions based on that data. Often this process is based on intuition and anecdotal data that is not tracked. This does not make the  process wrong, but likely we could be making more efficient decisions to improve student learning by being more intentional. I see this process as:

1. Plan a lesson including intentional decisions for assessment for and/or as learning
2. Do the lesson and collect the data (it could be fully collected such as a simple exit ticket using Google Forms/Quizzes or it could be as simple as using a thumbs up/side/down survey where you jot down the counts)
3. Reflect on what the data tells you (record your reflections, especially if it informs something to do differently in the plan next time)
4. Make an informed decision about student learning and use it to inform the next cycle

By using the process more formally on an individual basis we making an effort to limit our biases (which we all have - and what makes them a bias is that we often don't recognize them).

On a larger scale, as educators we often have a goal for ourselves for a semester or school year. Sometimes this goal is more personal in nature (i.e. to improve work-life balance) and sometimes it is purely about student learning (i.e. to improve on giving descriptive feedback). Although this goal may not be a collaborative effort we can still engage in a more formal process to work through this goal. We are more likely to hold ourselves accountable and, I would guess, are more likely to succeed. The point in both the day-to-day example and this is the same: be intentional!

Plan (don't skip the research)

Collect the data

Reflect (write it down)

Make informed decisions

Where this can (and does) become difficult is that by not being collaborative we can remain stuck in our isolated classrooms. It becomes important to have conversations with others in the building about your work to keep away from that bubble and to seek feedback from others. If we all engage in work like this it will start to lead to some meaningful collaboration, or at least will allow us to support each other in individual endeavours!

Leadership: Triangulating Assessment Data

 In the third module of our leadership course we are looking at pedagogical leadership and one of the sections focused on pedagogical documentation - specifically, triangulation!

If you have followed along with any of the themes of my writing on this blog over the years you will likely notice an evolution of my interest in student assessment & evaluation (heck, I took the A&E AQ course in 2013), so of course this topic stood out to me.

This is a topic that I have found many educators (including myself) have really struggled to effectively wrap their heads around. It is a topic that is easily overwhelming, but it is essentially for equitable assessment, evaluation and reporting and it is fundamental for pedagogical leadership. We can have great instructional strategies and presence, we can even be good at sharing those strategies, seeking feedback and reflecting on - but without connecting instruction with assessment (and realizing that they must go hand in hand) it is difficult to claim that we are accomplishing the ultimate goal as teachers. We must put students at the centre of our work and remember that to improve student learning we must be able to effectively assess student learning.

Triangulation informs all types of student learning. We should be using it to assess students for, as and of learning stages as well as to determine student grades at the reporting stages. By being able to collect information from our students in different ways we are better able to uncover what a student knows and understands and the depth to which they understand and can apply their learning. This is where using the achievement chart and evaluating student work using levels starts to make a lot more sense. Student achievement is found in depth, not in a number we can come up with because of "correct" answers given.

The most overwhelming part of this (that pedagogical leaders should first tackle for themselves - or at the very least be actively working on tackling) is how to do this in an effective way that does not result in an overload of data! We can't (and shouldn't) record every little observation and conversation (or even formative products for that matter) that we have with students, it would result in way too much data to use at the reporting stage. We should, however, use these opportunities to inform our instruction (identify groups of students needing help, or whole class intervention/changes in lesson plans needed), to give students descriptive feedback in conversations or during observations (depending on the age of students some of this can be recorded by the student even). And we must also be intentional about choosing observations and conversations (transparent to students) that will be included as opportunities to show assessment of learning and record that data for later use in reporting.

Leadership: Positive Professional Development Experience

 This entry comes after some learning about effective professional development facilitation in our Teacher Leadership course. Thomas R. Guskey discusses backward planning needed for this type of professional development to happen - and makes it quite obvious why so much PD tends to fail. The big take away from this article is to note that these 5 things need to happen when planning teacher learning:

1) Desired student learning outcomes - what specific outcomes do we want to see and what evidence best reflects these outcomes (the decision should be based on data)

2) New practices & policies to be implemented - determine practices based on evidence (actual research, with citations) that will result in the desired outcomes

3) Needed organizational support - ideally needing school leader support and school resources (release time, technology, instructional materials) as well as feedback for teachers as they implement new strategies

4) Educator knowledge and skills - what must educators know and be able to do to implement the practices/policies?

5) Optimal professional learning activities - the set of experiences that will allow 4 to happen

So where have I seen this in practice?

A few years ago the Instructional Coordinator for Assessment at our board created the Secondary Assessment Leadership Team. This was a team you could apply to and 1-2 candidates were selected from each school location. We participated in an assessment camp that happened in the summer over 2-3 days and then had full day PL release during the year as well as some evening PL sessions to attend. This was continuous learning over time geared at building leadership capacity in the board in assessment with the goal of improving student learning. Here is how each of the 5 planning items were addressed:

1. We wanted to see student learning improve through changing assessment practices in the secondary portion of the board to better align with Ontario policy. This shift should see assessment & evaluation provide students with more varied opportunities to show their learning, get descriptive feedback and have a more transparent assessment experience in school. By doing this we believed that we would see improvements in student wellness and academic achievement. I don't know if the central data collecting for these goals happened. It may have happened on a school by school basis through student surveys and monitoring grades and final evaluation results.
   
   
2. Our work was all grounded in research. The learning of the SALT team used thoughtfully chosen resources over a period of time. For example, one year our work was focused around "Developing Assessment-Capable Visible Learners" by Nancy Frey, John Hattie and Douglas Fisher. We also had board developed smaller resources created by teachers based on research that as SALT leaders we could use with our school staff.
   
   
3. I have partially addressed this above - you can see clearly that we had board level support and resources (time release, reading materials) - and this support extended to the school level (at most locations). Principals were briefed about the work of the SALT team via a video conference and (ideally) the SALT lead was with the principal at the time. Release time was provided for school teams and principals could use the school discretionary release days for this purpose as well. SALT leads were expected to plan professional learning for their locations and this often occurred during provincial PA days, staff meetings and early-release days. Feedback for teachers would have been more dependent on how each location planned.
   
   
4. Our first year with the SALT team focused on improving final evaluations. Much of the practice was grounded only in the use of products and exams were still common-place in many locations. The Secondary Assessment Steering Committee felt that addressing final evaluations was an important starting point with the most impact as it would help steer more teachers toward changing practices in other places. We use our Final Evaluations checklist a lot that year and addressed teacher knowledge around Growing Success, equity, triangulation and analyzing final evaluations next to the overall expectations of a given course.
   
   
5. The SALT team sessions were set up to have us look at part of the resource we were focused on that year and also evolved to include leadership and facilitation skills (including planning for PL). It always included time to work on our planning while sharing and getting feedback from fellow group members. We often used reflective time to debrief on things we had tried since the last meeting so that we could adjust, learn new things and plan for the next leadership opportunity.

I had never really thought about these explicit steps for planning professional learning/development in the past, but I will definitely refer back to this learning for my future facilitation opportunities!

Midterm Conferences & Term Reflection 2.0

Another overdue blog entry! Better late than never.

I wanted to share the new experience with midterm conferences in second semester (as students were more involved with the learning map and I made some tweaks to the reflection they were doing).

Student Reflection

This time around, students were better able to make use of the learning map. Since they had since it since the first week of the course they had a better understanding of what the map meant and how to use it. This meant that student's evaluation of themselves was generally more realistic. It also meant that students were better able to identify what they were doing well, and what they needed to set out as a next step (which meant that the report comments they helped me write were more meaningful).

Student Conference

Conferences were close to student-led conferences. More of them were prepared to show me evidence of their learning and defend their self-evaluation. Some were still under prepared, but there were a lot fewer that needed to go back to do the reflection before re-booking their conference.

Overall there was still some separation between where students believed they were and what I had seen, but it was a lot easier to ask them for evidence of the learning, which led to students doing some reflection in the moment and often realizing that they had not yet shown me something. They were productive conversations and students sometimes expressed they wanted to have more of them (they are time consuming, but I hope to find more and more ways to give students this individual time that they need).

Term Reflection

Some student feedback and personal reflection led me to realize that the reflection I was having students do was not as productive as it needed to be. At midterm I still had students identify a strength and need for each OLG and then evaluating using the learning map. Problem was, they were not engaging enough with the evidence of learning they had identified (and it was a little redundant), So I changed the first chart they were willing in to look like this: (note, you can see the previous version here)

Feel free to borrow and tweak this if you are interested!

Send me a tweet or comment on this blog if you have any other suggestions, ideas, or questions. Would love to hear from you :)

"Gradeless" Math 2.0

Well the blog updates got pushed to the bottom of the to-do list in second semester (not unusual) so this is a tad overdue, but I wanted to share some of the changes that my reflection on first semester lead to.

Some context:
- first semester did not have a learning map with descriptors until after midterm (I did not find I was able to write clear descriptors that I liked until I had evidence of student learning to use to write them)
- the learning map was not clear to students and since they had not engaged with it during the semester having them do final reflections and self-evaluate their course mark was difficult for them
- students relied heavily on the teacher for feedback

And so I set out in the second semester to make some changes. As many of you will be able to relate to, my thought process was more ambitious than life would allow for.

The new iteration (Gradeless 2.0):
- I added to my deconstruction of curriculum to include the learning map (read here for a description of the first week of class in Semester 1, I kept the math processes part and then the grades 10s did the following instead) by cutting up the map into pieces and giving it to them to put together (this forced them to read at least parts of the map and start to become familiar with it)
- Trying to spend more time modelling the use of criteria and feedback for students and giving them more dedicated time to do assessment as learning (trying to help them be less reliant on the teacher)
- Having students engage in the learning map by self-evaluating at the end of each set of summative evaluations (admittedly, this happened after the first set but did not get done in explicit class time after that)

New reflections:
- The new iteration was time well-spent. Students definitely had a better grasp of what the map was intended to do and were more comfortable using it (not all of them, there is still some work to be done, perhaps a more pointed effort to conference with students more often)
- I want students to refer to the map more to increase their focus on identifying where they are and what their next steps might be (keep the focus on noticing and naming the learning and reflecting on their progress)
- Students seemed to appreciate the transparency. One going as far as to say "I finally know what it means to be a level 4 in math" and used this as a way to help himself set goals
- The feedback at the end of the course from my students shows that even the ones who rated the learning map on the low side liked the idea of it, they just found it confusing at times

So it seems like the learning map is something I should continue to pursue and should put a focus on helping to make it more student friendly - I am just not sure what that would look like yet. I wonder if there is  way to make it a bit more interactive so that students can see examples of some of the more confusing parts or read explanations of terms.

If you have any suggestions they would be welcome!

Happy summer!

JALI Assessment As Learning Reflection

As many of you who have read one of my blog entries already will know, I am have been on a journey to improve my understanding and use of assessment in my teaching practices over the past few years. In semester 1 of this year I had the opportunity to participate in one of my school's "mini courses" offered for teachers. This one was lead by one of my colleagues and was to work on our use of assessment AS learning.

This is an area that I feel I have continued to struggle with but know that I need to tap into better. In order to survive in my quest (see recent post on this quest) for a feedback-focused math classroom I need to tap into the skills of my students to give themselves (and each other) effective feedback. Students deserve feedback, and getting them involved in the process engages them in the learning better, makes evaluation more transparent, and makes teacher workload a bit more manageable.

I was able to be exposed to some strategies I had not considered in my classroom before the JALI course and am now trying some new things in semester 2. My goals are for students to:
- engage in the learning map more regularly
- do more co-construction of criteria
- explicitly use criteria to give each other (and self) feedback on their work
- (and by extension) for students to better self-identify their needs

I am grateful for colleagues who are so willing to share their experiences and expertise with others and found sharing with the other course members was a reward in itself!

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

Seeking "Gradeless" Sanity

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

It has been awhile since my last entry. Life and work got a little overwhelming, in retrospect. The midterm part of the semester contributed to that (you can read about it here) on top of having 3 straight days of PL/a conference to attend to and I was well behind where I would have liked to be in terms of giving feedback to student. Summative evaluations began to pile up, the essentials had to be prioritized and returned first. No matter what anybody tells you, 84 students is a lot.

But too often this number of students for a secondary educator is a normal reality. So we need to make this better. We need to find ways to meet student's needs, give them the feedback they need and deserve, and still come out sane on the other side. I wish I could tell you that this reflection was going to provide you with the magic answer. But...I don't have it...

Yet.

I am determined to find a way. I am determined to figure out how to be able to leverage students to become effective self- and peer-assessors, despite having a curriculum that is loaded so heavily with content. There must be a way. I have spent time reading (and even talking to) Starr Sackstein and reading books about descriptive feedback. I have spent time talking to other educators, in various subjects, who are on a journey to better feedback (many of whom are on a journey to "gradeless" - or at least "grading less"). And I am sold - I have "drank the kool-aid" (as many have put it). I believe that what I am trying to do is good for kids - that it leads to improved learning and skill building, better self-confidence, ownership of learning, and is more likely to lead to growth mindset of life-long learning. What I am not able to find, is anyone who can help me find solutions that work in a content-based subject/curriculum. I believe that what I see now would make for some amazing learning in language classes. But I am still struggling to wrap my head around how it is possible to meet with provincial policy (i.e. cover the expectations of my course) and still be sane at the end of the school year.

Here is what I know:

1. Overarching learning goals and my learning map provide:

• Focus for my course
• Direction for students
• Clear, transparent assessment & evaluation that is rooted in curriculum & policy
• A third point for conversation around evaluation and reporting
• Something tangible for students to deconstruct and make meaning from
• A way for students to engage in self- and peer-assessment (descriptive feedback)
• A way for students to self-evaluate (know where they are)

2. Overarching learning goals and my learning map do NOT (yet?) provide:

• A way to help students see that sometimes the skills are hindered by the content knowledge (i.e. why they are meeting expectations in this area when studying trigonometry, but may not be when studying quadratic relations)
• the ability to "spiral" material in a course that has curriculum strands that are not related in any obvious ways (but this is also something I could see working on in the future)
• A way for students to give themselves and others feedback around individual content criteria needed (and honestly, I would love to de-emphasize this in my head as I honestly believe that mathematical thinking skills are the most important part)
• An effective way to record evidence of learning so I can track student progress (I am finding recording to be much more time-consuming than in the past)

3. Giving descriptive feedback helps:

• Students focus on learning
• Teachers focus on what is the most important at the time
• Students to identify potential next steps
• Students improve their learning
• Show students what you really value

4. Giving descriptive feedback takes:

• Time (giving "out of" marks is definitely faster, but I still very much believe has little real value)
• Effort
• Additional thought
• You to an uncomfortable place (so much cognitive dissonance!)

5. No matter how many times I am kicked down, I love what I do. And I will bounce back. I will accept my short-falls in the past, set goals for the future, and keep coming back for more.

Reflections on Midterm Conferences in "Gradeless" 9-10 Math

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

It has been an observation of mine that students are struggling to transfer the meta-cognition skills gained in other places into the math classroom. The ideas and structures I am putting onto their math learning seem to be very different than anything they have done in math before that they do not realize they have done it elsewhere. It has made for some interesting reflection on my part.

In continuing with my journey to explore student reflection I wanted to have students self-evaluate at midterm and conference with me to determine their report grade and report card comments. I set this up using an assignment on Google Classroom and had the sign up for a conference time-slot.

My grade 10s were given a reflection document that included a few things (outlined via images below).

Part 1: Identify pieces of evidence and start to identify criteria from the map that were evident in that evidence

Part 2: Highlight where evidence shows that they are for each criteria of each overarching learning goal in the course (the map is a partial map, only including the aspects relevant at this point in the course)

Part 3: Self-evaluate and reevaluate learning and next steps

When this was all said and done I opened this file when students came to me for their conference. Since I was finding that students were struggling with this process in math I ended up spending most of this time looking at their map with them and identifying areas where we disagreed so that we could discuss them. I recognize that I had not done the map justice (did not explain it well enough) and had already known that it would be difficult as it would be their first real exposure to it (I was only able to write the map myself the week before giving this assignment). Needless to say, I learned a lot - and had already planned to get a student focus-group together to help me reword the map more appropriately for students.

So next time I will:
- get students using the map earier
- rework it to use more student-friendly language
- model how to use the map
- have students evaluate using the map before midterm
- continue to build student reflection and self- & peer-assessment skills explicitly

The grade 9s I do not have a map for so I approached their reflection by having them fill in a chart while referencing the parts of the curriculum document that were relevant at this point. They were often able to identify specific expectations that they were doing well on and ones that they had to work on. What ended up lacking was them considering these expectations from a lens that expanded from just the "understand and use" - I need a way to make sure that the 9s consider the math processes as well in the future.

Overall students responded fairly positively during conferences when I pointed out things that had not considered that showed they were struggling with aspects of the course, but the discussions took a long time. The conferencing process was valuable, but I need to seek some ways to make it more manageable and to be away from facilitating student learning for less time.

Questions Coming From "Gradeless" Math

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

Going "gradeless" (using feedback-focused assessment) has brought about some great things with students, but often leads to more question than answers about my assessment practices. If you are reading this and have any ideas or suggestions I would love to hear from you!

Overarching Learning Goals & Learning Maps

I have started my year in grade 10 math with a set of learning goals and an incomplete learning map. I went into this process with an understanding that these documents will always be working documents. Changes will be needed depending on the group of students and changing needs of the course/society/etc. I am only 6 weeks into the semester and already envisioning the need for changes just based on pedagogy and assessment policy. Some of the reasons for this will be become more evidence in the topic below.

My learning map only has descriptors for level 3, which is partly by design.
1) I couldn't figure out how to describe the learning for 4 levels since I had not even tried using these goals for standards-based grading

2) I want student language to be used on the map so really need their voice to complete it

Hopefully I can get to a point soon where I have enough student evidence to show them that they can help me with that.

The Achievement Chart

I am grappling with the achievement chart in math - I am a fan of ensuring that we are assessing using all 4 categories (for those of you outside of Ontario those are Knowledge & Understanding, Application, Communication and Thinking) but I am struggling with the "descriptors" that Ontario uses to split them into 4 levels and even more grappling with what it means to have knowledge & understanding at a level 4 (exceeding expectations) when removed from thinking. I cannot get away from the idea that to show level 4 K&U you must also be showing T.

Manageable Feedback

This is the biggest question for me in out TLLP. How do I give students the feedback in math that they need and deserve in a manageable way? If I were to do all of what I think is beneficial I would literally not sleep. When everything is in place I will try to find ways to do it a bit more electronically so there is less hand writing to do, but the idea still baffles me in such a skill-based course (with the sheer volume of skills/understanding they need).

If anyone has any idea I would love to hear them. There is only so much that they can accomplish through self- and peer-feedback.

Managing Conferencing

I love doing interviews with kids about math. It is always an eye-opening look into what they actually understand (sometimes things they have not been able to articulate on paper and sometimes finding out just how much they are memorizing and not understanding). When I was teaching senior courses I usually found the time I needed to have these conferences, but I am having more trouble doing so with junior courses. It is a to harder to get them to be automonous for 3 days so that I can have the time needed.

Any ideas are welcome!

Week 2/3 in "Gradeless" Math - Self & Peer-Assessment and Reflecting on Progress

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

In the second full week of school I put a lot of focus on starting to develop student's skills in self- and peer-assessment. Without these skills the idea of developing an environment that creates more autonomous learners likely would not happen (and the burden of giving descriptive feedback would fall entirely on me - and I also have a goal to get more sleep this year).

Here is the gist of the steps I attempted to take last week:

1. Give students questions to use when reflecting on their work (such as "Have I written my solution so that someone else can follow it?"). I put these on the board and uploaded a photo of them to our Google Site for student's to reference.

2. Introduce the model I am using for descriptive feedback (Acknowledge what you are doing well; Describe what your next step should be; Determine how/when you are going to work on your next step). I also put this on the board and uploaded a photo to our Site. In the future, I would like to provide students with exemplars and discuss what good feedback looks like.

3. Assign students to choose a question they have done and use the questions from 1 and the model from 2 to write descriptive feedback for themselves (and asked them to upload to Sesame so I could give them feedback on their descriptive feedback).

4. On the next opportunity I modeled how I used the success criteria to write the reflection questions for students (this time we were looking at problem solving).

5. I then assigned a question for them to do as practice and when most of them were finished I had them swap with a neighbour and peer-assess using the questions and write descriptive feedback for their partner.

6. For homework that night I asked them to choose one of the questions they did at home to upload to Sesame and include descriptive feedback for themselves. I followed up with those who posted one to give them feedback on their self-assessment.

I plan to have report conferences with students at midterm and the end of the course to determine their report grades together. To help them prepare for this I also implemented the next two steps at the end of the week.

7. I created a chart (pictured below) with instructions for students for them to use to help them summarize what we had been doing. I filled in the overarching learning goals (OLGs) that I wanted them to focus on and they needed to list the evidence they had of that learning (i.e. quiz, homework, activity) and then list the corresponding success criteria from our learning map as ether "met" or "still working on".

8. Based on the instructions students sent home an email that summarized the chart (on my Google Classroom assignment it stated that they should: Tell them what they learned/were able to do; Inform them of what is still being worked on; Summarize how the student feels they are doing so far).

Once students started to send the emails and I looked at a couple I realized I needed to get them to do a reflection portion to help consolidate a bit better. Upon this reflection I decided to add this to the bottom of these reflections.

This will make sure students are reminded to revisit their goal and will hopefully lead to students setting some relevant goals for where they are at the time.

I will definitely be continuing to get students to use self- and peer-assessment and will continue to work on using the above style reflections to see how they go. Right now the tough part is convincing all of them to complete it (I gave them time in class, but probably not enough).

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.

"Skills Check" Quiz

This past school year my department head was introduced to a new style of quiz (origin unknown - if you know who in the board she got it from please let me know and I will give credit where credit is due). We use them as an opportunity for a specific skill check - generally knowledge-based but sometimes the level 3/4 questions will involve using the skill in a new context. There is no use of marks

The "quiz" is set up with a learning goal at the top with success criteria listed (I now look back and would probably argue for myself that the SC is really just 1 or 2 criteria split into levels). There are 4 questions on the quiz, set up in a chart (3 columns - the question with work space, feedback & reflection/corrections) starting with a level 1 type question and ending with a level 4 type question. A sample (from MCR 3U0) of the front of one of mine is shown in the image below (I put the level 3 & 4 questions on the back).

The focus of this style of quiz is on the feedback.

If a student is struggling with the level 1 question than I will focus my feedback there and stop. The feedback is descriptive (tells the student what they are able to do and what the next step needs to be - as well as where to get the help with it) and manageable - if they are struggling with the level 1 question then giving feedback on other questions will likely be too much.

What really sold me on this particular format is that it became easy for me to record a level for the student at the end - I had already done most of the thinking when I planned and created the quiz. This was mind-blowing for me because so much of the hardship in the adjustments I was making in my assessment journey was the extra time I was spending giving feedback and then figuring out levels.

Granted this is just a quiz and it cannot be used for all purposes. But it's a start.

Finally, when I return these to students I do not take them up (because the individual feedback they need is on them) but students are giving time to do corrections/reflections, redo the next question, and are then encouraged to hand it back in. I will then check their corrections and if they have succeeded at that level will look at the next one and provide them feedback on this.

The hardest part for me? Continuing to work on the classroom culture where this kind of practice is valued and more students take the opportunity to resubmit.

Portfolio: Team Lead

As part of my Teacher Leadership Part 1 AQ we are to build a portfolio of artifacts that reflect who we are as a leader and who we want to become. In this entry I will be reflecting on how opportunities to lead an assessment working team have impacted me as a leader.

Along my journey mentioned in my previous post I mentioned that I was led along a path after being tapped on the shoulder by admin. Part of that path was to be part of the Assessment Working Team. This team worked on building capacity to lead others through discussions and work around learning goals, success criteria, overarching learning goals (big ideas) and learning maps.

This team inspired me to start an assessment working team at my school (I prefer this terminology to "committee" since we were there to learn from and support each other through our assessment journeys. This gave me experience with scheduling and planning monthly meetings as well as collecting data/feedback.

I feel that this opportunity has equipped me to lead our TLLP team. We are embarking on a journey to explore ways to use feedback based assessment (not grades) so that out students become autonomous learners while maintaining a manageable workload as teachers.

For this post I have decided to share where the "scratch work" of my science department grade 9 overarching learning goal work landed (this work was made possible by the working team's efforts and work. I think that showing some of the grunt work makes it a better example for others - your journey does not need to be neat and tidy. In fact it is going to be messy and will zigzag around into unexpected places along the way.

Portfolio: Assessment Leadership

As part of my Teacher Leadership Part 1 AQ we are to build a portfolio of artifacts that reflect who we are as a leader and who we want to become. In this entry I will be reflecting on how opportunities to participate in board assessment opportunities have impacted me as a leader.

At some point my admin tapped me on the shoulder and informed me that I was seen as a teacher leader and there was an opportunity I should take advantage of. After a brief pause of confusion, I said "okay!" and a series of circumstances have lead me to where I am now - a member of our Secondary Assessment Leadership Team (SALT) for the 2017-2018 school year.

This opportunity is going to give me a chance to network with colleagues in my board from almost every secondary school who have an interest in moving assessment and evaluation forward. We are specifically going to be focusing on final evaluations so that the board can build practices that are better aligned between schools and better aligned with Growing Success (2010) and our board assessment policy.

This network of resources will be valuable going forward as we will be able to connect colleagues at our schools with people who are working on the same course or subject - which will help break down barriers that sometimes exist in the secondary school world.

The SALT team is what lead me down the Learning Map journey. This example is my most recent one created. These are always a work in progress and I am planning to make use of them in my "gradeless" journey this year.

Portfolio: Shared Responsibility: Developing Autonomous Learners

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 Shared Responsibility where we looked at parent communication reasons & strategies, inquiry-based learners, mental health & resiliency, and student success stakeholders and planning. The item I have chosen is the inquiry-based activity (lesson) that I developed as part of the Developing Autonomous Learners section of the module.

In this section I was forced to come back to an always-repeating thought "what does inquiry-based learning really mean in a math classroom?" So I did some research to find out what others thought this means and discovered that for a math teacher this really should be thought of in the lens of discovery learning or problem-based learning. The goal, in the end, is to get students learning/asking questions in the context of the learning so that it has more meaning and leads to better retention. For instance, the teacher can introduce students to a basic idea (i.e. factoring trinomials) and then use problems for students to work through so that they can start to identify patterns or methods that work. In this model the teacher (who I now prefer to call the coach) can answer questions, connect groups of students, do mini-lessons, or stop the whole class to discuss something.

Our assignment had asked us to submit an inquiry-activity. Going through the above process helped me to realize that I am doing more inquiry-learning than I had realized and then forced me to think through an activity more thoroughly. I now feel like I am better equipped to answer the question "but what does this mean in math?" and to be an instructional-leader in this area.

The assignment was to outline an activity, describe the assessment process(es) involved, and to describe how we would share the resulting data with others.

Here is the activity that I submitted for this assignment:

Inquiry-Based Activity

The idea behind inquiry-based learning is that students use an activity as a learning opportunity (to discover or uncover new learning). In many classes this might involve a topic that is introduced (or an open-ended question) where students come up with a question to investigate. In mathematics there is not necessarily a chance to come up with big issues to get students interested in the learning but we can use problems to get them to investigate a main idea and learn the details of that idea from the problems.

Activity

Prior Knowledge: Students have already learned what a function is and they have reviewed characteristics of 5 main functions (such as asymptotes, vertexes, etc).

1.      Review characteristics of 5 functions, address any concerns or questions.

2.      Get students onto student.desmos.com to complete Domain and Range activity. Most slides in the activity have students submit work and then they will see the responses of 3 peers (so they can self-assess immediately) and teacher can see all responses to monitor class progress (so the whole class can be paused if needed or teacher can go to discuss with specific students). The activity progresses as follows:

                           i.          Graph is given and domain and range are described in words. Student is asked to describe what they think domain and range mean.

                          ii.          A graph is given with description in words. Students identify whether they agree or not.

                         iii.          Graph is given. Students are asked to describe domain and then range in words.

                         iv.          Graph is given and “select all” list using algebraic description of domain and range.

                          v.          Graph is given with algebraic description for domain. Students have to correct the domain.

                         vi.          Graph is given. Students submit algebraic description of domain and then range.

                       vii.          Algebraic domain and range is given. Students create a graph that fits description. ( x 3 )

                      viii.          Graph is given with MC question asking for which algebraic statement is false.

3.      Teacher leads a discussion to consolidate learning of domain and range and add full notation and review function vs relation.

4.      Students add domain and range to characteristics in chart from previous class.

5.      Students pair up to check each others domain & range and to give feedback.

Plan for Sharing Successes, Challenges and Next Steps

This particular inquiry will help to determine the preparedness of the grade 11s to discuss functions (based on introduction of domain and range briefly in grade 10) and on student preparedness to complete investigations (which is an important thinking skill in mathematics and ties directly into the math processes of reflection and connection and this particular task ties into representing). In addition it will help inform the grade 11 team for readiness to move onto the next lesson (immediate next lesson is an activity to practice using the domain/range vocab and we will do some algebraic lessons before coming back to characteristics of functions).

I will share the above with the current grade 10 team so they can make informed decisions about introducing domain/range and with the rest of the grade 11 team to get a conversation started about next steps for investigative thinking. If admin want to know how we are looking at skills continuum in mathematics I will also share this information with them. 

MHF Cycle 2 Reflection

I have previously posted a reflection of our first cycle here.

Here is the plan that we used for our first cycle.
(Most of the activity credits go to Jamie Mitchell and Steph Girvan in the Halton Disctrict School Board - Thank you for sharing your resources - including your blood, sweat and tears guys!)

One of the things we have found as a department is that students often struggle with the algebra portions of this course. Because of this I offered my students an "algebra crash course". I attempted to remind them the core of algebra and solving equations through manipulatives and a clear reminder of what inverse means (i.e. that log is a function, so has an inverse). These should be ingrained ideas that these students have and I find myself often wondering how to best help students at the high school level with these skills. If anyone reading this has any ideas please share!

As you can see in our plan we had two traditional tests in this cycle. We split the algebra portion up into two sections, polynomial & rational functions and logarithmic & trigonometric functions. The last part of the cycle has students explore combinations of functions through investigation of graphs and getting students to do their best to generalize rules for different types of combinations. As a final evaluation in this unit we had student-teacher conferences.

Students had a conference like this one during cycle one as practice (for all of them I was using Google Forms to track and DocAppender to give student immediate access to feedback). For this conference students were given two functions in small groups. They were asked to identify the characteristics of those two functions and then to as a group predict the superposition characteristics of those two functions. On the day of their conferences students rolled a die to get a random second combination. Students were given 5 minutes to prepare and then had 5 minutes to share as much as they could about that combined function. The key was that they were to explain why they believed those were the resulting characteristics, not just to list them.

I found this evaluation very insightful into student reasoning and understanding of characteristics as a whole. It also provided insight into the emphasis that I should consider putting onto the graphical representation of functions in earlier courses. I have started to think that we take for granted what students take away from graphs.

I really enjoyed the experience with conference with these classes and definitely plan to continue working on using them in other courses. Getting students to explain things verbally has an ability to show student learning that reading a written response just cannot do. The power of triangulation of evidence.

MHF Cycle 1 Reflection

As mentioned in a post early first semester we made an attempt to spiral the MHF4U0 curriculum at our school. I will try to create some more posts to share more details, so for now this post will just focus on the first cycle we used.

If you missed the planning post, you can find it here.

I personally started off with a couple of classes where we did some collaborative problems solving. I wanted to introduce my intention to use visible random grouping (VRG) and vertical non-permanent surfaces (VNPS) in the class. I used this with a couple of fun tasks (such as the Tax Man problem) and then continued with them working on the boards while having them do some review problems together (factoring, radicals). It was a rough beginning. My madness was very new to the students, particularly since I was completely new to the school.

Here is the plan that we used for our first cycle.
(Most of the activity credits go to Alex Overwijk and his team in the Ottawa-Carlton District School Board and to Jamie Mitchell and Steph Girvan in the Halton Disctrict School Board - Thank you for sharing your resources - including your blood, sweat and tears guys!)

The textbook references made above are for the Nelson Advanced Functions book. I very rarely assigned work from the book but students were given the sections as a reference for if they needed it or wanted to do extra practice.

Part way through the cycle (probably about 2/3rds of the way through) I asked the students for some feedback. They were struggling with my use of Desmos Activities and lack of "traditional lectures". We added some more structure to the daily work we were doing. At the start of class we went back to the previous day's lesson (took any questions, which we were already doing) and then co-constructed success criteria based on what they had done. This criteria was added to the lesson plan that the students had access to. I also made a pointed effort to make them read that day's learning goal and asked if anything needed to be clarified. This seemed to help students realize that they were learning.

In retrospect, the vast changes they were going through were a lot. I would create brief google forms for each Desmos Activity the next time to help students consolidate their learning (which would have helped them build their functions portfolio we had asked them to do), essentially they would be exit tickets of some sort. I could collect data for myself while giving students a chance to reflect. And the form could be attached to student documents via DocAppender so that they could have a copy of their own responses.

Our formal evaluation for this cycle was a large group stations task. Students were in groups of 3-4 such that there were 8 groups in one class. There were 8 stations in total (we did 4 per day) that were designed to last approximately 15 minutes each. Of course there turned out to be some they spent more time on than others. Students were to use the time in their groups to work through the problem (i.e. match a graph, table of values, and equation and justify the match) and then record their answer in their own words on their answer sheet.

Students found this to be a very valuable learning tool and, for the most part, the results seemed to align with what we, as teachers, thought that student had shown they knew and could do. They were not big on the fact that it was the only formal evaluation we had done in the first 6 weeks of the course, but appreciated that it was less stressful than a unit test.

In retrospect, the task was too huge for the teachers to deal with all at once. We each had 2 sections x 2 days worth of tasks to go through. It took a lot longer than we anticipated. I would love to do something similar to this again, but would definitely consider splitting it up somehow so that it is not all happening at once. Suggestions are welcome if you have any!

Reflections on cycle 2 to come!

Planning a Spiraled Course

This year I am embarking on a new journey - I am working at a different school and have more math in my schedule than I have had since my first year of teaching. As a part of that journey our MHF 4U (Advanced Functions) course team is taking a crack at "spiralling" the course.

Over the summer I spent some time laying out the course to begin to plan. I started with the skeleton Overarching Learning Goals (OLGs) that were created last year for math to come up with OLGs for the course (I wrote about these skeleton OLGs here) so that I would have already wrapped my head around the overall themes of the course.

Then I created a new document to start the actual planning. I pulled the overall expectations (OEs) for the course and the front matter of the math curriculum (math processes (MP)) into the chart by strand and then created a new column where I put in only key words (content & skills) from those OEs and MP. From those words I looked for common themes in the skills/content that I noticed and colour coded them.

Through this process I noticed a major theme in recognizing characteristics of functions and making connections between representations of functions (numerical, graphical, and algebraic). This seemed to be the backbone of a large portion of the course so it made sense to make this into a group of expectations - and cycle 1 was born.

Here are images of that document (they are a work in progress, evolving as we work our way through the course):

Creating the other cycles became largely about noticing the layers involved in the course. I wanted to build the remainder of the course by adding on layers of difficulty, which would allow us to revisit the same concepts. You may have noticed that the second cycle adds on algebraic techniques but is still focused on the same things introduced in cycle 1. This is the purpose of spiralling - students are able to see the same things over multiple exposures to better build their understanding of the material.

Studies are showing that the use of spiralling techniques will help with long-term retention for learners. It is not necessarily about improved results within a particular course, but will help with the foundations moving forward for longer-term success. My hope is that this type of pedagogy can also help with engagement and mindset for learning in the mathematics classroom.

The planning process was somewhat time consuming but was worthwhile for moving forward into the course as I knew what the purpose of the first cycle was and could see the long-term goals. The difficulty was not being able to co-plan with my course team (complicated by it being summer, going into a new school, etc). Now that we are a few weeks into the semester the team is more on the same page and is starting to be able to see the long term plan more easily.

One of the ideas we added to this plan was to have students start and maintain a portfolio where they would put information as it is learned organized by type of function. We are also going to do part of our final 30% as a conference with students - so students have been told that maintaining their portfolio is to aid them with this conference at the end of the semester. The possibilities are exciting.