Looking to embed social comprehension in your classroom? Book Rec: Being the Change

By Kim Miklusak

This year and last I have been helping to facilitate formal and informal conversations between teachers, with students--and LED by students--about how we can work to embed social comprehension in our classrooms.  That wasn't what we called it at the time, but we discussed how in the classroom teachers and students can...

• honor people's identities
• respect and/or discuss differences of belief and experiences
• have difficult conversations in the classroom
• build community in the classroom and broader school

I just finished reading Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed, and I wish I had had this resource earlier!  I highly recommend it for anyone looking to embed socio-emotional/affective processing in their classroom in addition to doing any identity and community mindset and practices.

Each chapter covers topics such as "Placing Ourselves in the World," "Listening with Love," "Seeing Our Bias," and "Moving Beyond Our Initial Thinking" among others.  Ahmed sets the context for the book in the preface and at the start of each chapter.  She discusses her own personal experiences but then also makes connections to the broader world and current events.

Inside each chapter she provides clear steps--including a script if one were interested in it!  She provides a list of links and resources to partner texts to help push students' thinking.  Additionally, she provides images of models of work from her class as well as conversations with students and their experiences.

Ideally, each one of these chapters and lessons build on the previous.  However, it is possible to gain insight through individual chapters.  For example, if you've done identity map work in your class before, she speaks in the book (and if you get a chance to see her at a conference!) about how to layer this activity into your lessons all year in order to enhance learning for individuals and the class as a whole instead of having stand-alone activities.

We Are EG Podcast: S1E16 "There Are So Many Amazing Things"

Senior Oscar Gonzalez is excited about his future career plan that opened up to him through the courses he took as part of District 214's Career Pathway Program. He reflects on both the academic and extracurricular experiences that made his four years at Elk Grove High School so memorable.

Learning at Elk Grove: Intro to Engineering

By Patrick McGing, Merlyn Manoj, Kaelyn Rittle, and Mark Heintz

I was fortunate to visit Pat McGing's Intro to Engineering course a few weeks ago.  I asked him and a few of his students to document the learning that took place that lesson and what they hoped to learn in future ones.  From my outsider's perspective, there was a high level of student agency present.  The students were focused and working with purpose.  They rarely deviated from the task at hand and that was evident by the amount of time student spent on the task at hand.  

More importantly, the teacher and the students were all learners.  The teacher was learning right alongside the students.  Because the student projects were so different, it was impossible for the teacher to know the answers to all of their questions.  Rather than giving the students the answers or saying he did not know it, he worked with the students to come up with the solutions.  The equity in the partnership between students and the teachers reminds me that everyone is a learner and together we grow so much more than by ourselves.  Watch the short clip of student focus and the partnership between student and teacher.  Aftwerwards, be sure to read the reflections that follow.  

Teacher Perspective: Patrick McGing

What did learning look like in the lesson?

Learning looked like collaboration.

Students in this Introduction to Engineering Design section are at many different points in a project. Many students were working with their peers to solve problems, demonstrate, or just assist in a minor way to help a peer along. I could look around the classroom and see multiple students leaning over to their neighbor or getting out of their seat to assist a classmate. Therefore, the teaching did not come from me but from students peers.

• Learning looked like students building skills in smaller areas of Autodesk Inventor with 3D modeling or 3D assemblies.
• Learning looked like students building communication skills.
• Learning looked like students building time management skills.
• Learning looked like students recalling previous knowledge to aide in their current project.

What do you hope to do for the next time?

I hope for students to have a better grasp and understanding of assembling parts in Autodesk Inventor. Many of the students helping each other during the lesson were helping students assemble parts. Something I have tried in one of my other courses is having students develop a step by step “protocol” for troubleshooting specific problems. This helped students actually attempt troubleshooting a problem with already brainstormed solutions and gave them better success in solving a problem on their own. I would like to try this in my introductory course so that students could better persevere through problems.


Student: Merlyn Manoj

What did you learn this lesson?

During this project, I learned how to use my manage my time since we worked on our project independently. It was a bit hard though because if you were falling behind you would have to go to the lab outside of class to catch up with your peers. This project also gave me a lot of freedom since we had to create our own parts, and even though it was frustrating at times because you can’t just follow a plan right in front of you when things are going wrong, it was fun having that creative aspect in our project.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

I want to learn more about Inventor rather than the basics of it. I think learning how to figure out a solution to a problem rather than just asking a friend or a teacher right away would be a great skill to have.

Student: Kaelyn Rittle 

What did you learn this lesson?

I’m not sure I can say I learned anything new from this unit because most of what we did included skills I learned in the past. However, this unit granted a lot of freedom as to what we were allowed to create, and I would say the design process was the most challenging for me. My project is slightly different in that I have two cranks whereas pretty much everyone else has only one which makes spacing everything just a little harder. I have 5 parts - three in the back and two in the front and measuring everything out so that they wouldn’t hit each other involved a lot of trial and error. This was difficult because whenever I’ve worked on Inventor in the past, I was either following a sheet with the dimensions given to me or I was physically measuring parts as I went along.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

I think it would be fun to work with other features on Inventor that I haven’t used before. As far as I know, I’ve only used the very basics of it, and maybe exploring it more will help me further understand the program in case I were to ever use it in the future.

One Year in AP: Retrieval Practice (Week Thirty-four)

By Mark Heintz

Context

I have two main focuses as I write this weekly blog. Two driving questions that I have in my mind while making decisions.  They are:

• How do I know if my students know? 
• How do I get them to know if they know?  

Whether that is a skill or content, I want to know if they know it.   I no longer think it is acceptable for me to guess or get a feeling on whether or not they know it. Getting the students to know if they know it is downright hard, but I am really attempting to get to a point where the students can recognize their understandings or progress on their skill levels and content knowledge.  Therefore, the purpose of this year of reflection is to see how I make progress towards these two goals and elicit feedback from staff, students, and hopefully people who follow along on the journey.  You can read how last week went here.

Week Thirty-four: Answer the Question

This week, the content focus was reviewing. How do you get students to know what they know from the entire year?  What is the most effective way to get at that?  Also, how do I know what they know to provide resources to them other than just saying, "study?"

Provide Specific Evidence: 

I spent most of the week practicing their writing, but the focus of this posting will be on the content.  Too often have I given the students too much information to go over in the final weeks of the course.  Whenever I hand out packets or review guides, students feel good that they were given a tome to review. But, they don't do anything with it because it is too much. It is overwhelming or unapproachable. I use retrieval practice to get at the vast content they have to know and recall.  This method is useful because the students have "memorized" content, but have trouble accessing the information.  If they can't access it, then they don't own it.

To give an example,

I asked the students to recall the time periods, major events that occurred in the period, and an example of gender roles in each period.  As I walked around, I observed what facts students could recall and what they struggled with.

Additionally, the exam they are being tested with is not always what you know, but what you can access. Therefore, every day I "tested" them with prompts and asked what information they would use.  Afterward, the students talk to one another and evaluate each other's responses.

I attempted to have the students recall very specific information.  For the BINGO activity above, I had twenty different questions that would recall very specific information.

Explanation

Reviewing is tough.  If students don't know what they don't know, reviewing turns into lecture or just covering material for the sake of covering material.  Students will often go over notes without testing their ability to access it.   They keep covering the same material in the same manner.  Often, that process yields very little growth.  Furthering the problem, the students want to be told what to study or what to know.  However, the problem is I don't know the exact things that would be on the exam.  The exam is not a straight memorization or recall test.

Therein lies the beauty and problems of reviews.  Prompts are not prescriptive and worded in a difficult language.  The review needs to address students ability to make sense of the material they know and to identify a few areas they need to cover.  For me, the best way to help students is hearing their conversations and reading what they come up with.  Hazel Mason has told me numerous times, conversation and observations.  It is the cornerstone of how people learn.  As a teacher, these two things are the biggest tools in our arsenal to help our own understanding of student learning.  They help students figure out what they know and struggle with.  So much can be gained from these two things. However, they are often touted as "soft" practices.  It is hard to quantify things through conversations and observations.  But in the end, the students have so many other validations, having them work through their understandings through conversation is a natural low-stress method that is perhaps the most effective one.

In the bingo example, the students attempted to recall the information without accessing anything.  This forced great conversations and got the students to realize what they knew and didn't in the specific time period.

Impact

I need to set-up protocols that allow for more conversation through the year.   It needs to be reflective in nature and centered around recall practice.  They need to starts challenging their ability to access the material from day one.  And this needs to be more informal.  It cannot be only on a test or quiz.  If they get to the point where they can talk through their understanding and write about it, the rest of the issues will take care of themselves.

You read week thirty-five here. 

One Year in AP: Valued Student Reflections (Week Thirty-three)

By Mark Heintz

Context

I have two main focuses as I write this weekly blog. Two driving questions that I have in my mind while making decisions.  They are:

• How do I know if my students know? 
• How do I get them to know if they know?  

Whether that is a skill or content, I want to know if they know it.   I no longer think it is acceptable for me to guess or get a feeling on whether or not they know it. Getting the students to know if they know it is downright hard, but I am really attempting to get to a point where the students can recognize their understandings or progress on their skill levels and content knowledge.  Therefore, the purpose of this year of reflection is to see how I make progress towards these two goals and elicit feedback from staff, students, and hopefully people who follow along on the journey.  You can read how last week went here.

Week Thirty-three: Answer the Question

This week's skill focus was still centered on analyzing charts, maps, and texts and pulling evidence from documents to support a claim.

1. Write one cause/effect, and one comparative short response that reflects an understanding of essential content.
2. Analyze charts, maps, graphs, and texts.
3. Write a thesis statement, contextualize a prompt, and draw evidence from two documents to support the thesis. 

Provide Specific Evidence: 

This semester, I am including, or trying to include student's perspective on the week.  We are in the final weeks of the course and I wanted to know what the students learned.  I asked a few students to send me a document that defined what they learned over the last eight months.  It was a very open question and I told them it did not have to be just content or skills.  The question was simply, what did you learn this year?  Here was the result.

Student Response

Over the course of this school year, I’ve learned a lot from taking AP World History. I walked in on day one of my sophomore year into this class just like any other class, except for the fact that I was a little intimidated by the things I’ve heard about the course. After taking it, I learned a lot about history (obviously), as well as a lot outside of history itself, such as myself, the public education system, and what it truly means to learn.

One of, if not, the largest contributing factors to success in this class for me and a lot of others have been the way the class has been taught. Up to date, I’ve really loved the checklist system. Using this system has actually kept me on track with homework while simultaneously giving me the opportunity to work at my own speed on the content of each lesson. This is something I know a lot of people have struggled with, myself included, more specifically last year in AP Human Geography.  Reading and taking notes in a given packet never worked as well as this checklist system, as it didn’t engage me, took a lot of time and patience, and just felt like a drag to accomplish. While some may say to stop complaining because ‘that’s just how school works’, I do agree. Regardless, I also think these things can be accomplished in different, possibly more effective ways. As students, we’ve been enrolled in this game where we score points for submitting things and regurgitating information. How we do may determine the course of our lives. With this, we’ve had the idea of how school ‘should’ and/or is run engraved into our minds for as long as we’ve been playing. The checklist system makes it feel like everything I’d need to know is given right in front of me, quite possibly because it is (for the most part, content-wise).

What does any of this have anything to do with what I’ve learned this year? Simple- I’ve learned what system of education works well for me, and learned what I have to do in order to be successful both without this checklist system and with this system by challenging myself at my own speed rather than faintly paying attention in class. This hands-on system further engages me with my work and material, at my own speed. I’ve grown to really like this system, which has given me the chance to actually learn how and why Islam was so powerful internationally between 600-1450 BCE, as well as why that is no longer the case. While this may sound wonderful, I’ve noticed that a lot of students, myself included, have struggled with writing. More specifically, a lot of us have struggled with how we implement given or known information and context into short essays, document-based questions, and short-answer questions. This isn’t something at fault to an educator, rather a difficult concept by nature. If there is something I’d like to see improved in this course, it would be how writing, or specifically this element of writing, is taught. Again, this isn’t something taught in a sub-par manner, rather a difficult component of this course. Improving upon this would further our knowledge while bringing students up to that next level, and very likely being more successful in the class as well as on the AP Test.

Many think that much of the information thrown at us in this course is or will be irrelevant as soon as the bell rings it is final time this school year, which in my opinion is a slightly oblivious thought to have. While, yes, a chunk of the information won’t be necessary for anything of vast importance to us in the future, a fair majority of the information gives us a better understanding of the world we live in and why it is the way it is today by giving us context to its current events. This, in an ever-changing world, is valuable to have for anyone who tries to understand what is going on within it in relation to economics, politics, and conflicts which often affect the general population. That’s kind of a far-fetched thought for some, but at the same time may be something as simple as asking “why have gas prices gone up recently?” Oh right, there’s conflict taking place, in those oil-rich nations on that side of the world. Oh right, those conflicts have been taking place for long before anyone reading this has been around. Thanks, world history.

Overall, yes, I have learned that the Persians used satraps way back when. But besides this, I’ve learned to open my eyes and actually discover what it truly means to learn and understand something, as well as open my eyes to the world around me. Truly learning the given information is what lets me utilize and apply it to our world today, what’s going on around me, and why. I’m not sure I would have retained the information from this course as well as I have if I used anything other than this unique checklist system, which I’m interested to see how this system will be used in the future, possibly in other courses, possibly in other schools. This system could be useful for a lot of different students as we continue to play the education game. While we all grew up knowing it is important to learn, have we all truly understood what it means to learn? Is this something that has been stressed enough?

My Response

Wow! There is a lot to unpack.  David stated, "After taking it, I learned a lot about history (obviously), as well as a lot outside of history itself, such as myself, the public education system, and what it truly means to learn."  I love this comment! History, education, and learning all in one.  David and I have talked about the public education system throughout the semester, so it was not a surprise to me that he referenced it in his reflections.  He continues to comment on the gamification of the education system, but I really appreciated that he highlighted the learning that took place throughout the semester.  It is a hard balance for a lot of students and how grades are set up.  Sometimes tasks are more important to the students than the learning.  It is a constant challenge for me to not have things go in the grade book but still valued.  This is especially hard in a class that is required for all students to take.  I am always tweaking things to give students more autonomy in a mandated AP course. #struggle

Another comment,  "Up to date, I’ve really loved the checklist system. Using this system has actually kept me on track with homework while simultaneously giving me the opportunity to work at my own speed on the content of each lesson."  One reason I went to the checklist system, you can read about the process here, was for the students to work at their own pace.  The class is very rigid and I have in the past been stricter about the "homework".  I appreciate that he zeroed in on the openness of the content checklists.  I feel that I am still fairly linear in my approach, but to hear students say it is working is good.

David wrote, "Reading and taking notes in a given packet never worked as well as this checklist system, as it didn’t engage me, took a lot of time and patience, and just felt like a drag to accomplish."  I am not sure this is a by-product of my class or just his reflective nature.  I wish that I could have students be this reflective of what works for them.  I need to work on reflection being a natural part of the class.

Students accessing material they know is very difficult.  "More specifically, a lot of us have struggled with how we implement given or known information and context into short essays, document-based questions, and short-answer questions." It is hard to be able to transfer information "learned" in one context to another.  Doing this through writing is especially difficult.  If there is something I’d like to see improved in this course, it would be how writing, or specifically this element of writing, is taught.  This is a constant focus and very difficult to do.  I have been focusing on it the whole year and it is still a struggle.  I have been trying to get kids to find their voice and what resonates with them in history.  However, it is a standardized course and difficult to do.

Truly learning the given information is what lets me utilize and apply it to our world today, what’s going on around me, and why.  A great takeaway and I wish I could have every student realize this or have the internal drive to understand it.

As a whole, the systems of school are what can help or inhibit learning.  I think the focus is what learning really is and have a cohesive definition of it to move forward in making changes to the "system."  I love his ideas and how open he was in his reflection.  I value his honesty and wish I had that with all of my students.  Something to hope for in the future.

You can read week thirty-four here. 

Reflections On "How Things Used To Be"

By Kim Miklusak

As the school year comes to an end and we start planning for next year, I have been hearing people reflect online and in person that students in general are coming in "lower" than previous years on state standardized tests and in reading ability and that this "wasn't how it used to be."  I'm not saying I've never said this before, and I'm not saying we don't have new challenges in areas of testing, technology, etc., but I'm struck by a few thoughts on this and reflected more after following some threads on Twitter.  One in particular by @triciaebarvia pointed out that this Declinism is a bias as well as is deficit thinking about our students--both elements to consider as we plan our curriculum, content, instruction, mindset, etc...

So this led me to reflect on my own beliefs:

• What do we mean when we say "kids are coming in lower and lower" on standardized tests?  In reading?  In writing?  What does that mean as a value judgment on another person?
• Do we believe all students can succeed if we view them as "lower than" someone who came in the past?  Do we hold implicit biases about students or groups?  Further, do students internalize this in their beliefs about themselves?
• Did students actually come in "stronger" before?  How is that determined by our metrics, our assessments, and how they are used?  (i.e. do we believe students used to all read the whole book we assigned outside of class before? has the testing changed? is the testing accurate?)
• Have societal expectations changed?  Are our students, for example, taking on more responsibilities?  Are they working more hours?  Are they taking on more AP classes?  More sports and activities?
• Would we want our own children--if we have children--to be viewed as the "low kid" or one of "those kids?"  And if the answer to that question is, "My child wouldn't be the 'low kid,'" what does that mean for how we view our students?

What if we instead celebrated our students' strengths, as @triciaebarvia says in her tweet--and others have pointed out?  How can we combat deficit thinking about our students: defining them by a perceived what they are not rather than who they are and who they want to be?

As we prepare our curriculum, we set goals of wanting our students to have agency and take ownership and embrace their learning.  Let's reflect on our own beliefs and be sure our mindsets are framed in such a way to create and support those conditions in our classroom!  Another way to do this is to be sure to follow people on Twitter and read resources by others who have been explaining their experiences on this for some time.

Related: I'm currently reading Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed and will have more to share in another post next week!

One Year in AP: What did Students learn? (Week Thirty-two)

By Mark Heintz

Context

I have two main focuses as I write this weekly blog. Two driving questions that I have in my mind while making decisions.  They are:

• How do I know if my students know? 
• How do I get them to know if they know?  

Whether that is a skill or content, I want to know if they know it.   I no longer think it is acceptable for me to guess or get a feeling on whether or not they know it. Getting the students to know if they know it is downright hard, but I am really attempting to get to a point where the students can recognize their understandings or progress on their skill levels and content knowledge.  Therefore, the purpose of this year of reflection is to see how I make progress towards these two goals and elicit feedback from staff, students, and hopefully people who follow along on the journey.  You can read how last week went here.

Week Thirty-two: Answer the Question

This week the content focus was primarily on World War I. Here were the standards for this week:

1. Analyze the responses to the influenza pandemic of 1918.

This week's skill focus was still centered on analyzing charts, maps, and texts and pulling evidence from documents to support a claim.

1. Write one cause/effect, and one comparative short response that reflects an understanding of essential content.
2. Analyze charts, maps, graphs, and texts.
3. Write a thesis statement, contextualize a prompt, and draw evidence from two documents to support the thesis. 

Provide Specific Evidence: 

This semester, I am including, or trying to include student's perspective on the week.  We are in the final weeks of the course and I wanted to know what the students learned.  I asked a few students to send me a document that defined what they learned over the last eight months.  It was a very open question and I told them it did not have to be just content or skills.  Here was one of the responses.

Student Response

I didn't really know what to expect with this course because I'd heard so many different takes on it from the juniors and seniors I know who'd taken it - some people said it was the hardest social science, some said it was the easiest. At the end of my year in the class, I have a couple observations and general feelings.

First of all, I think the structure of the general course is really easy to understand. There were a lot of ways the grand scheme of world history was broken down into a lot of patterns which only really began to come together at the end. It's incredibly difficult to connect everything after learning it in fragmented bits, but I don't know if there's really a shortcut to putting the pieces together. I had my own method with filling out blank worksheets that helped me a ton, but I know people that do pretty well even without this.

As for the structure of the class itself, I think the checklists were more efficient than any giant textbook I'd have to carry around. Being someone who lives for routine and organization, I appreciated the consistency the Thursday checklists. As much as I didn't ever want to do them, I have to admit that it's probably tons better than annotating a 10-page packet or trying to translate a textbook into comprehensible content. I also think the way the checklists were structured well in that they threw in a lot of reviews (annoying, but effective). A lot of people complained that the excessive review was too difficult for a weekly thing, but I personally didn't mind it because it helped so much. For the first semester final, studying was so much easier than it was last year for APHG because the checklists incorporated continuous review rather than me teaching myself all the content over again.

A big component of this class was an emphasis on writing. Some of the other classes started learning how to write DBQs and short answers after the entirety of first semester, and that just seems crazy to me. Considering things can still be confusing and we've been working on them all year, I can't imagine what it'd be like learning them so late. I think the idea of adding in a component of the DBQ every unit was a great idea because before you know it, you can do the whole thing and know how it all fits together. Obviously, there were times that I was pretty confused about the format, but after doing a lot of examples in class and analyzing them, I'm comfortable with the process. Honestly, I didn't really enjoy writing with partners because it didn't exactly portray what I did or didn't know. I either felt like I was carrying the group or that I was “cheating” because I wouldn't have known the content by myself. The best progress for me came when we had to write individually and get direct feedback from the teacher because it was brutally honest in what you could and couldn't do. Overall, I think the amount of planning and thought put into this class really shows and it's been enjoyable for me despite the work required.

Another Student Response with a Differing Opinion on the Checklists

If I were to change something about the AP course I would probably change a part of the checklist. Sometimes I feel that the review for each checklist is intimidating because of the timer it has, I used to rush through it to be able to finish. If I redid this course I would hope to get more practice on stimulus tests and have more opportunities to help improve my grade. Otherwise having a good mindset about AP helped me improve in this class and gain more interest in taking the course.

My Response

I didn't know what to expect with their responses. I purposefully did not want to skew their reflection so I intentionally made the question very open-ended. Because of that openness, I have a few other student reflections that go into different directions.  As for this week's reflection, it is interesting to note that "learning" was more about school and the nature of systematizing learning instead of truly what they learned.  For example, how the checklists were orientated or the group work with writing.

Furthermore, the student addressed what "worked" for them.  I love that the students were aware enough of their workflow and how best to tackle the tasks needed to be completed.  Even the student who had a different opinion of the checklists wrote more about the structures in place rather than the learning. I think students are cued into being compliant with tasks rather than what they are learning or why.  But maybe the "doing" is how they perceive learning.  Cal Newport has this quote from his book, Deep Work, that resonates with me and what I am thinking.





I am not sure the students know what is valuable to them. I think they want to be connected and have validation.  Because of this, they resort back to industrial metrics of visibility and compliance. They want to show me that they have "done" things and put in the effort and the writing on a daily basis and checklists do that.

I am not sure how to completely remove this thought or get at the value of learning rather than compliance.  A lot of what they are commenting on is related to the way we do school.  I want to get at the point where the students are valuing the conversations, the new understandings, or how to solve problems.  I am rethinking my language, task needed to be completed, and the entire grade book.  I need to communicate more with the reasoning behind everything and allow for more student agency and inquiry-based learning.  I need to get the students to find their voice in the process.

You can read week Thirty-three here.