→ "A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days" →

In this classic, the late Grant Wiggins shares the experience of a teacher who shadowed two students for two days.

The whole thing is worth reading, but her three (related) takeaways:

Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.

You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long. I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day.

Considering how much teachers complain when they spend a day sitting in professional development, it's unfortunate that we forget what our students endure all day every day.

We spend a lot of time in schools observing teachers, trying to quantify good teaching. But much could be learned by focusing on students and their experiences. I wonder what a student shadowing program would look like at my school, and what insights it might provide.

Teachers work hard, but I now think that conscientious students work harder. I worry about the messages we send them as they go to our classes and home to do our assigned work, and my hope is that more teachers who are able will try this shadowing and share their findings with each other and their administrations.

Curriculum

In my freshman World History/Global Studies class this year, we have a habit of getting into the weeds on all kinds of topics that are not directly related to our curriculum, which covers the first few millennia of human civilization. Our 10-minute Daily Briefing projects that begin each class have consistently evolved into 30-minute discussion of ISIS, Syria, liberal vs. conservative philosophies, Palestine and Israel, and other items. None of these topics are explicitly covered in the curriculum for the course, but I think helping students understand, for example, why ISIS is such a vexing problem is essential.

Last Thursday I was giving a very brief lecture on some background on ancient Greece, including Homer. As a Classicist, it breaks my heart to try and summarize the Iliad and the Odyssey in about two minutes, but I did, highlighting a couple of my personal favorite scenes from each (Hector and Andromache from the Iliad, and Odysseus and Argo from the Odyssey), knowing we'd come back to them in more detail later.

After I regaled them with these barebones stories, multiple students said, "That sounds really cool, can we read them? Can we read the Odyssey?"

"This is it," I thought. I had actually inspired 14-year-olds to want to read Homer, the foundation of all of Western literature. What more could I ask for as a teacher? I wanted to stop everything and say, "Great idea, let's spend the next four weeks reading and discussing the Odyssey! We can even find free translations online!"

But of course, that's not what I did. Reading the Odyssey isn't in the curriculum for World History/Global Studies 1. I have just one semester to cover not only ancient Greece, but also the Neolithic Revolution, the rise and fall of Rome, Egypt, China, India, Nubia, the Olmecs, not to mention a plethora of skills like SPICE charts and thesis writing and five paragraph essays. There's just no time to read the Odyssey in class.

My point is not that the Odyssey should be on the curriculum. Sure, I'd love to teach Homer to all our students, but even if this particular group would enjoy it, I've had plenty who didn't share their interest. No, what I can't help but note is that it increasingly breaks my heart just a little bit each time I'm made aware that I can't allow students to follow their own interests, even though I know it happens every day in large and small ways.

I realize that most students would not likely have signed up for World History/Global Studies 1 to even hear about Homer if they weren't required to take the class. And I know that each day my classroom activities are likely not engaging the interests of each and every student. But the more I teach, the more I try (even when I fail) to focus on the students and what they are interested in, not me.

I love teaching about ancient Greece. I could lecture about Pericles and the hubris of Athens all day, or show countless examples of Greek art and architecture. But the last few years, I've essentially stopped lecturing about Greece at all beyond the basic introduction, instead allowing students to choose a research question that interests them and then to present their research to the class.

Does it pain me that some years no students will choose the topics that I love the most? Absolutely. And if I think a topic is important enough, I'll make sure we cover it in some way. But the students are vastly more engaged and the work they produce is better if they are able to follow their own interests.

For example, on Thursday after this exchange about Homer, the students split into groups to work on crafting research questions for their presentations. I had three different groups tell me that they wanted to research the role of women in ancient Greek society. That's a topic that I only very briefly covered in my lectures back when I started teaching, simply because I chose to spend my time on other areas. Whether it's me choosing what topics to cover or the students, either way we're only going to be able to scratch the surface of all there is to know about ancient Greece. Once I accepted that I'd never be able to cover everything, it helped me give up some control and hand it over to the students.

But despite my halting efforts to try and take into account the students' interests, I still have to make sure I am serving The Curriculum. Don't get me wrong, as curricula go, World History/Global Studies 1 at my school is a good one, with a solid mix of content and skills. And of course, I'm in a privileged spot only teaching one class, so it's easy for me to wish I could adapt things for my students when I don't have to worry about teaching other classes who may have different interests. There are very practical and pragmatic reasons why I can't drop everything and read the Odyssey with my students, but increasingly, the practical and pragmatic answers have become less satisfying for me.

→ "Do schools kill creativity?" →

In this old TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the impact it has on children that schools still value very narrowly defined academic skills:

And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way...

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

How can schools adjust to value all the skills our students possess, not just those that will get them into college?

→ "Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing" →

Giving "pretests" has never been a big part of my teaching (and with Latin, there's really not much point when students are such novices). But there's research that suggests I may want to give it a try in my World History courses.

But the emerging study of pretesting flips that logic on its head. “Teaching to the test” becomes “learning to understand the pretest,” whichever one the teacher chooses to devise. The test, that is, becomes an introduction to what students should learn, rather than a final judgment on what they did not.

→ "Instead of Framing ‘Failure’ As a Positive, Why Not Just Use Positive Words?"

From KQED's Mind/Shift blog:

Failure, in education as well as general society, is a negative word. To fail means there is finality in being unable to meet standards or objectives for a task. Whereas in general society there is a dichotomy between success and failure, in education there is a spectrum. To not meet all expectations in business (except perhaps in the “fail fast” tech industry model) may be deemed a failure, and one from which to reconvene and try again, whereas in education the endeavor is not a failure but a space between full success and failure, one from which to reconvene and try again, in the spirit of effort. Failure is a foundational element of assessment in education, the letter F as important to the spectrum as the letter A.

As I'm (finally) reading Mindset, I've been thinking a lot about how to help my students be more resilient. The language used, especially around effort and what constitutes "success", is a big part of that.

→ "A good bucket brigade" →

From Cory Doctorow (via Seth Godin):

A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.

I think I am fortunate to work with teachers who understand this. It's also important school leaders feel this way, and see themselves as part of that same bucket brigade.

Homework Follow-up

A student asked me today about my blog. "Don't you write it for teachers?"

I've never specifically thought about my target audience much, but yeah, I suppose most posts are for teachers. It's not that I'm specifically avoiding writing for students, I just don't think I'm the right person to target the 16-year-old-girl demographic. Which made it all the more surprising when my recent post about homework was not only read by some students, but shared by them. I had three different girls stop me in the hallway and say they really liked the post, and one even went so far as to tell her teacher to read it too.

In that post, I specifically avoided suggesting that teachers should never give homework. If I had said that, it would be obvious why my students agreed so strongly. Instead, I simply suggested that teachers should be more aware of the realities their students face. The fact that students responded so positively to that message tells me they would welcome the chance to engage their teachers in this line of dialogue.

When I was in high school, one of my classmates asked our World History teacher why he never gave surveys to the students at the end of the year like other teachers did. His response: "What does a 16-year-old know about education?" While he may have been particularly blunt, his opinion wasn't rare. Most of my colleagues now are more open-minded than that, but that attitude persists. And yes, after almost ten years of teaching, I do know more about education than my students, but that doesn't mean some of them don't spend time thinking about how they learn just as I think about how I teach.

So whether it's homework or grading policies, I've started more frequently asking students what they think. "How long did this assignment take you? How much do you think it should be worth? What's a good assignment to finish up this unit?" It's not that I've given over my lesson-planning to my students, and I still override them pretty frequently, but I'm definitely a better teacher now that I'm able to have those conversations with them. My first few years of teaching I didn't always have that confidence to ask their opinion, but after a few years of being humbled in the classroom, that's no longer an issue. I welcome their take, and it's often more thoughtful than I'd expect.

Which takes me back to my conversation this morning:

"Don't you write it for teachers?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Why?"

"It just seems like the teachers who need to read it the most probably won't."

We try to teach our students to be "open to growth", and we teachers need to model that too. I don't think there's anything special about my blog, but I'm definitely a better teacher for having sought out a variety of opinions. Yes, even (especially) those of teenagers.

Precision

Our online gradebook displays grades with one decimal point. And according to the company's online forums, many teachers and college professors around the country are quite upset with this lack of precision. How can a teacher possibly rate a student's performance if they don't know if their grade is a 92.44% or a 92.45%?

For me, grading is one of the hardest parts about teaching. It's not easy to assign numerical grades to students' work, especially knowing just how many students tend to conflate that grade in the course with their value as a person. (Not that we teachers should get any sympathy from students for this–their job is hard too.) Anything we teachers can do to make it more objective removes a bit of that psychic burden.

But we have to admit that there's always a subjective quality to grading, from the creation of the assessments to the grading of them. We can try to limit the subjective portion, but my fear is that using our fancy digital gradebooks to give more precise numbers only gives the illusion of objectivity. "I'm sorry, Bertha, I know you're a great student, but you only earned 89.99% of the available points this semester, so that's just not an A."

Some teachers are fine with that philosophy, and that's OK. Of course, there has to be a cutoff between an A and a B somewhere. I just don't have the confidence to say that I didn't "cost" them a hundredth of a point somewhere over the course of the semester. So much as I try to ensure that each assessment is precisely written and then graded consistently for every student, I'm not perfect. What if I was a little hungry when I read Bertha's essay, and I marked off a few more points than I did on somebody else's essay of similar quality? Or what if a single multiple choice question on a test was unclear, with two possible correct answers?

There's nothing wrong with teachers who don't have these same doubts as I do, and are completely comfortable with highly precise grading scales. But I can't help but wonder if this has the potential to be an example of the "False Precision Fallacy":

False precision (also called overprecision, fake precision, misplaced precision and spurious accuracy) occurs when numerical data are presented in a manner that implies better precision than is actually the case; since precision is a limit to accuracy, this often leads to overconfidence in the accuracy as well.

It's entirely possible (likely even) that I'm wrong about all this, but acknowledging the inherent subjectivity of grading rather than fighting it has given me peace–I don't lose sleep when I give students the benefit of the doubt.