Alien Pedagogy

I often think about what it means to be a great teacher, and one condition for being a great teacher at a small school is involvement. I often find that the teachers that I (not to mention the students) respect the most are the teachers that are involved in the school community and culture. They lead extra-curricular activities, they show up to performances and games, and their classes reflect dedication.

Teachers that are involved tend not to seek acknowledgement, but because they’re always around you feel like you can depend on them.

One of my goals going into summer school was to design a course in which skills were clearly assessed and tracked back.

Categories of Objectives/ Standards:

• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking
• Listening
• Media Literacy
• Research

So to this end, I picked objectives that went alongside each of these categories. Then I decided how to assess each of them. Then I worked on building skills for each of them. Often, the way I taught content was to have student interact with the text in skill building activities.

For example:

Goal: Speaking – Students will speak with dynamism using an image that enhances rather than distracts from the speaker’s presence.

Task: Present one image to the text that summarizes the message of The Crucible.

To do this, the student is required to interact with the text, but my feedback to them will primarily be on their presentation speaking goals.

Reflection:

Normally, I’d prefer to really go after the student’s discussion of content in my feedback. I shifted that discussion to the time when the students were choosing their image. Since we did more than one skill-based activity like this, I found student interpretation and analysis grew in response to the activities that we’d done.

It was as though they were learning.

My understanding is that formative assessment tasks should not be for marks since it penalizes students for learning slowly, rather than rewarding them for learning. However, I’ve always attached some grade to formative tasks, fearful that students wouldn’t complete the assignment if I didn’t attach a grade to it.

In summer school, I decided to do formative assessment. I’m glad I did.

For one thing, the students often did pick up skills slowly. So having more than one opportunity to demonstrate skill and receive feedback before assessment was really helpful. So when students started getting high grades, they were quite surprised that their learning had been recognized.

I realized that formative assessment should have real feedback — perhaps more detailed than summative feedback. This struck me as counter-intuitive at first — shouldn’t the graded assessment have more feedback? However, if the graded assessment is the last time that we assess that skill then the time that the student is given to learn comes from the formative assignments.

I realized that formative assessment should be recorded. This fall, I’ll add formative assessment tasks to my gradebook but with a 0% weighting. In this way, it is transparent that students are learning, or that they’re not. I think it has additional benefits, including: increased student motivation, it imposes UBD planning on the teacher’s unit plan, and it provides diagnostic data for the learning community.

Coming to this point, I’m quite embarrassed that I didn’t get here sooner. If the last two years counted for marks, I suppose my teacher grade would take a hit because of it.

I had only four students in my summer school course. I took advantage of this to experiment with seating arrangements. We had the following stations:

Work Station — This was our base. It’s an ironic name since most of our work was done at computers. However, we would generate notes and discussion here. We read here. Students sat here when if I presented information or a demonstration for the first time. Five desks were arranged in a group.

Computer Stations — Conveniently, there are four classroom computers in my room. So “go to your computer” was something I was able to say every day. Students appreciated having this option and it was not abused. One desk per computer.

Quiz Station — This was the station that really showed the power of the different stations. When we moved to this part of the classroom, students shifted into testing gear. Desks were in two rows of two.

Scored Discussion Station — Four desks arranged so that students could sit and talk to each other.

Conference Station — Where students would meet with me in the classroom throughout the course. One desk for me and one for the student.

I’m not sure that I would run all of these stations again, but normally my class holds like six times as many students so I enjoyed partitioning off the room.

We often think that this sort of seating is designed for elementary students, but even adults subconsciously obey the cues of seating arrangements and interior design. In class, I noticed that this helped students to “transition” from one assessment skill or task to another. So instead of me speaking to guide them through the transition, they just walked to a different place and sat down in a different mindset.

I spent two weeks teaching summer school this month. It was fun, though not what I expected.

• I expected that students would be resentful of spending time at school in July. Actually, all of my students seemed happy to spend more time with their peers.
• I expected to see students to have little enthusiasm for English. Actually, the students did enjoy the story. In fact, what they really lacked in the course was sufficient attention from the teacher.
  
• I expected students to get really bored of spending seven hours / day with me. Actually, they stayed focused and invested in the winter course all the way to the end of the course.
• I expected that I would have to work hard to motivate the class. Actually, each lesson consisted of an demonstration followed by a practice and task. The students couldn’t wait to work.

In the end, summer school was a really great experience for me and for the class. We established a productive learning environment that was fun, safe, and focused. I hope that it will stay with them as they move on to the next grade this fall.