Alternative assessment (and the bribery of my students)

This week, I am not giving my Level 2 Physics class a topic test, even though they have finished all their learning about waves. Instead, I have given them an extended collaborative project. They all blinked when I said that, so I have taken to calling it "your jewellery project".

I don't really like topic tests. The project I have given them requires the students to work together to answer a range of questions that cover everything you'd expect a topic test to cover, but they get more time, can use their books and online resources, and can talk. I assigned the groups by getting them to line up in order of the wavelength of their favourite colour. I'm seeing a range of group styles in their different approaches.

First, some groups assign questions to different people and they work more or less independently on their own tasks. They seemed to assign the questions randomly. On the plus side, they are working pretty consistently. On the minus side, it does make them more likely to ask me for help instead of asking someone else in their group or looking up the answer. I guess they like having a reassuring someone to tell them things.

Other groups went through the entire question sheet and separated out particular questions. One group has one person who is the 'diagram specialist'. This person is doing all the ray diagrams, while another person is doing all the mathematical problems. This is quite efficient, and shows that they have some pretty clear ideas about delegating and division of labour. It means I can't be completely confident that all of them understand all of the topics, but I think that is a small price to pay.

Still other groups are all working on the same question at the same time, just different aspects of each one. These groups tend to be noisy, with lots of checking that they are all on the same page and all on track. They don't ask a lot of questions, but when I check in on them, they are clear about what they are doing and where they are going.

I think these types of group styles can rise organically in classes, like this one, where the majority of students know each other fairly well and are all confident about communicating their ideas. In other classes, particularly bigger ones where the students are younger and less self-directed, most groups default to the first type. I think this is a bit limiting in some scenarios, and I think I might set up some activities deliberately to tease out some other styles of group management.

I am pretty pleased with how seriously the Level 2 students are taking this project. Of course, when I handed it out and explained the parameters, they negotiated hard for a prize for the best team. We had some discussion about how 'best' should be defined, eventually agreeing that it would be a combination of group work skills and value added to answers since their last formative assessment. Naturally, the prize consists of food. On Wednesday, we will have a judging session and the winning team will nominate their choice of home baking. I think it's worth a few hours of my time.

Key Competencies

I like the New Zealand Curriculum. I get excited by things like the Vision and Values in it. I think its awesome that we are encouraged - expected, even - to explicitly teach about citizenship, to integrate creativity, and to develop curiousity.

Anyway, one of the big pushes in our school right now is to make the way that we teach the Key Competencies more explicit in our classrooms. I think this is a great idea, so long as it can be done relatively painlessly. Fortunately, this is possible. I used the activity below with my Y10 students yesterday:

Key Competencies Self Evaluation

I just wrote this on the board, and typed it up this morning so it could be shared. Some students found the matching difficult, and I worked with them to remind them/build with them a definition of what each KC actually is. Some students flew through it, and were coming to me with their statements and wanting to know what to do if they thought they did the KC twice. I haven't had a good look at what anyone wrote yet, but I will do that soon and give some feedback and feedforward. Overall, though, it was a simple activity that students got into far more than I expected. I guess all my excitement was infectious for some people.

I'm kind of embarrassed for them

I don't think my students quite understood what I meant when I said, "I will scan the pages that you make into a pdf and upload it to a sharing site so that you - and others - can access it." Personally, I think that is clear and unambiguous. My students did not quite get it, which, I think, explains why their pages look like something escaped from their pens and died on the paper. Well, perhaps that's a little harsh. Most of them are legible.

Optics Visual Dictionary

This was my first attempt at making an online visual dictionary with my Level 2 Physics class. They chose a word from a list I generated; in a perfect world, they would generate their own list from a pre-reading activity. Allowing the students to choose their own words worked well. Some students tried to pick a word they thought would be easy, but they turned out to be deceptively difficult. You should have seen the student who picked 'upright' as his word; it was a vexing task for him.

The biggest problem with this, I think, was that the students just didn't realise that when I said that I would upload it, that meant that I would be sharing it with other people. I trust that next time will look a lot more organised.

Adjectives, or the most sumptuous and delectable post ever

My daughter, aged six, has an inordinate love for adjectives. I approve. Her favourite adjectives right now are 'adorable' (applied to babies, mostly) and 'sumptuous'. The last one has me a little confused, as I generally use 'delectable' and 'toothsome' for food I like. I think she picked it up at school.

Some of my time at school is spent on adjectives. Just this week, I made the first part of a visual dictionary of optics with my Level 2 Physics class. It contains adjectives such as 'real', 'virtual', 'upright' and 'inverted'. You have no idea how much trouble a simple concept like 'upright' caused. The finished product does not contain the word 'erect', but only because I was particularly vigilant. I now just have to check the rest of the entries and scan them - I wanted to use the computers, but they were all booked. How irritating.

A lot of the explicit vocabulary work I have been doing lately with the Level 1 Science and Y10 Science classes, however, has been concerned with verbs. I have been using a lot of starters that focus on learning outcomes and learning verbs. At Level 1, some of this has been associated with the learning outcomes for the standards on which the students are working (even though we teach according to the curriculum, the students still need to understand the achivement standard specifications from the NZQA). At Y10, a lot of it has been to do with students understanding - and, hopefully, making their own - learning outcomes.

SLO Wordle Activity

Above is the Level 1 document. The number of students who weren't quite sure what verbs were was not quite a huge as I had anticipated. This was encouraging.

Plastics Learning Outcomes Starter Activity

This Y10 starter activity proved a little more difficult. Not many students spotted that the verb was always the first word in the learning outcome. Fortunately, those that did tended to shout it out at the top of their voices, so everyone soon knew.

I don't, in general, print starter activities like this off. I usually put them on the projector and get students to write down what they think they need. We informally assess it by students getting the whiteboard markers and coming to the board to write their answers up. It works for us.

He whero, he whero, he whero

Matariki is one of my favourite times of the year - in theory, at least. In practice, I dislike getting up when it is still dark and cannot wait for the solstice to pass so I can get some sunlight.

Last year, we planted flax at the school. Sadly, we haven't done any planting this year, but we will be more organised next year. Instead, I have been finding out all sorts of intriguing scientific astronomical things.

I enjoyed this post on sciblogs about the stars that make up the Pleiades. One of the things I like about this post is that the author recognises that mythology is important, and, get this, that retelling myths is not a defeat for scientific fact. It is possible for myths and science to coexist. How revolutionary.

Anyway, I do enjoy the night sky in winter. I love looking up and seeing the Milky Way, though I am terrible at spotting stars in particular. I never have been very good at it, and my general dislike of being cold has always impeded any desire to learn more.

Aside from the sky, I have also been excited by the haka competition at school. I love this competition, and worked really hard on it. The students rocked on the day, especially since we wrote the introduction ourselves and it was a bit nervewracking to perform. The video below shows my house, Inverness. I think the students did a brilliant job:



And, immodestly, something I am particularly proud of were the korowai that the two leaders wore:

We already have a bunch of things that we're going to work on for next year, but, for the moment, I am happy with two korowai, seven sisters, and cold mornings. Happy Matariki, everyone.

Science is full of big words

My students have an unfortunate hatred of 'big words'. For example, this morning, they expressed their loathing for such words as 'covalent' and 'polyatomic'. Of course, they also hate being explicitly taught vocabulary. Sometimes, dialogue in my class looks like this:

Students: You're using big words!
Me: Okay, let's learn some vocabulary
Students: Learning words is for babies!
Me: You said you didn't understand these words
Students: We should be learning Science!
Me: Okay, let's learn some Science
Students: We don't understand these big words!
Me: You said you wanted to learn Science

Of course, there is a lot more hand waving. Also stamping of feet and huffing. Possibly some shouting.

The thing is, I have tried teaching new vocabulary in a range of ways. I have tried making visual dictionaries that students add to each time we learn a new content word. I have literacy Do Now activities that involve definitions, example sentences, and cloze activities. I have tried keeping an online glossary on the class site (there was so much complaining about this one). I have tried posters. I have tried embedding vocabulary on purpose into learning. Students hate it, even though they know they need it.

Anyway, I am continuing with my literacy Do Nows, since five minutes of vocabulary seems a lot more palatable than a longer chunk. Here are some things I do, from very low level to quite high level:

Unscrambling letters to make words (visibility of words)
Matching related words and identifying what they have in common (topic-specific words)
Matching words to definitions
Matching halves of sentences that show vocabulary words in context
Cloze activities using vocabulary words
Differentiating between the Science meaning of a word and its common meaning
Creating a picture or diagram to illustrate a word

Anyway, now that I have reminded myself that I do actually do things that help literacy, I feel much better

Creativity and the artist/crafter/mistaker

Ken Robinson asks, in the TED talk embedded at the end of this post, why don't we teach children dancing everyday, the same way we teach them mathematics? I am going to make posters from this, that's how much I love what I see embedded into this question.

You see, I agree with his basic argument, that creativity is a skill, or an orientation, or a collection of attributes, that we need to teach just as much as we need to teach literacy and numeracy. One of the things that makes it hard, though, is the fact that people think that creativity is a kind of a gift that some people have and others do not.

Wrong. You only have to watch young children playing in sandpits to realise that the capacity for imagination and creativity can be found in all of us. I mean, what is there to get excited about in sand? But when you have a truck and can create a city (or a farm or a spaceship) - then sand is fun.

I was thinking about the key things that keep me creative, and that I think helped me when I was growing up. I blame books, a lot, but also having plenty of quiet time away from other people. I might not have internalised all the lessons about cooperation, but I learned how to entertain myself. I got to try things out and make mistakes - and that's there in the title.

Now that I am a teacher, I've worked hard to find ways to encourage creativity. I model it, by bringing in projects that I have been working on or talking about something that I have tried recently. If I finish a sewing project that I am pleased with I will bring it in and show it off - and talk about what went wrong and how I fixed it. I talk about the whole body and start senior physics classes with a few minutes of yoga or stretching. I have a whole unit in junior science about playing round with diy and everyday materials. I encourage students to use interpretative dance to present ideas (ideal for waves).

But I find that I am fighting all the time to incorporate creativity and learning about creativity. I want to make it like metacognition, a thing I slip in all the time. Perhaps I should start thinking about it that way.

And, finally, the TED talk that sparked all this in the first place. Here's Ken Robinson, kicking it old school about creativity and schooling: