Science!

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Abner Oakes

This entry’s title: Shout it out as if you’re singing along with Thomas Dolby, OK? Science!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWitntwPjM4

The last few days our son’s been playing with several of the sites from Zooniverse, which calls itself the the “home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects…projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.”

Most particularly he’s been playing with Snapshot Serengeti, which has millions of camera trap images, like the one below, and asks visitors to the site to review the images online and identify animals in them.

mooI’ve been interested in his interest, wondering what’s fired him up about this site. First, he’s a kid that likes animals and so identifying them feeds that interest. Second, there are both familiar and unfamiliar animals here, providing mystery and learning to this process. OK, I know a wildebeest, but an eland? What the heck’s an eland, which is below? You’ll also see that the pictures frame animals from any which way – whatever pose they strike when the camera trap goes off. There’s a spontaneity to the pictures and the site – and a reality. Animals just standing around. Animals walking. Animals next to other animals just standing around. No Nat Geo glamor shots here.

moo cowSnapshot Serengeti has also given us the chance to talk about real science – about what it means to identify animals in image after image, developing a huge database from which new ideas can emerge. Repetitive work. Not very glamorous. Many years ago, I had the lucky chance to do an Earthwatch trip over the summer, as part of that organization’s program for school teachers, and I and a group of volunteers accompanied an Indonesian scientist to the Togian Islands, off the coast of Sulawesi. We went to help him research a macaque that was endemic to the islands, and so each day we’d set off, before light, to go out and look for these primates.

mmm hyenaTwo weeks there and we never saw one. Heard them. But never saw one – and yet, no matter, we’d get up each morning, flip on our headlamps, and head off into the jungle with a local guide. During some of these jungle jaunts, we’d stop, our guide would divide up several plots of the rain forest, and each one of us would take one of these plots and count different plants, insects, and other stuff found within our plot and record all that we found in notebooks, to share with our scientist leader when back in camp. And it was hot and buggy and muddy. Yup, not at all glamorous.

porkI’ve written about science before and the need to muck around – that it’s not neat and tidy – and Snapshot Serengeti makes quite real the enormous amount of data that’s collected and sorted through and thought about, as part of scientific exploration. Look at thousands and thousands of images, identify animals in them, and develop a database of info from those images, in order to develop a hypothesis about what’s out there. Hmm: There seem to be many more elands now than there were after the last count. How come? Has something happened to the predator/prey dynamic? Hmm: OK, can we test that idea?

M2E72L215-215R365B327I know that this data collection and identification – and the repetition and the potential for tedium that accompanies them – are not ideal ways to sell science to kids, but Snapshot Serengeti and its sister sites – Seafloor Explorer, Bat Detective, Cyclone Center, and others – all internet-based citizen science projects run by the non-profit Citizen Science Alliance – are one way to share how real science is done. And they do it in a simple manner, the sites have visual appeal, and I’ve not yet tired of categorizing animals. It’s kinda fun – and now I know what an eland is!

monksI wonder how teachers and schools can use these sites in existing units to give their students some sense of scientific exploration. Or how enterprising teachers can build units from them, asking students to develop their own research projects using the images and what they discover from those images. All very cool. Yup, shout it out, Thomas Dolby: Science!

All the above images I got from Snapshot Serengeti – from its Facebook page, its site, and its blog.

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Parents and standards-based grading

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Abner Oakes

report20cardOur district is rolling out standards-based grading this school year, moving away from the traditional report card. As this piece in the Washington Post stated:

“In the old system, students received a single letter grade in a subject area, such as math, social studies or reading. On the standards-based report card, each subject area is broken down into several categories. For example, social studies is divided into ‘measurement topics’ of civics, culture, economics, geography and history.

“Teachers mark students with an ES, P, I or N in each category to indicate how close students are to mastering what they should know by the end of the school year. ES means ‘exceptional,’ P means ‘demonstrating proficiency,’ I means ‘in progress,’ and N means ‘not yet making progress or making minimal progress’ toward meeting standards.”

The district has also created an info page about the change here, complete with a video.

I think the movement to this kind of system is better for all involved, given the quality and specificity of information that can now appear on a report card, and the below blog post on this subject intrigued me, and I asked the folks at JumpRope if I could re-post it. You can find the original blog post here.

It’s written by Sara Needleman, who’s a mom of elementary and middle school students, an educator, and a former middle school teacher. Sara also works with grad students in the University of Southern Maine’s teacher education department and consults for JumpRope.

So, here goes:

We have been reporting grades for as long as we have sent kids to school. Grades have always told parents where their kids land along a certain spectrum. Why change that?

Traditional grading systems fail to tell parents, students and teachers what the students have actually learned. Rather, they show us, according to any specific teacher’s system, how our kids measure up to one another. Parents have seen report cards with As and have praised their kids for those high marks, but with little understanding of what those marks mean. Similarly, other parents have held their heads in their hands as they look at a column of Ds or worse and ask, “What now?”

Standards-based teaching, learning and assessment systems empower parents and students because they encourage teachers to be very explicit about what a student needs to learn in order to earn an A. Such a system helps teachers and therefore parents and students celebrate what has been learned as well as identify the student’s gaps in learning. So, for the student whose report card shows a column of Ds, the old mantra of “study harder” becomes “you can add fractions really well, but I see you are struggling with subtracting them.” Speaking as a parent, I would much prefer this second conversation starter because now I have a sense of what my child needs to do to turn those Ds around.

In addition, how many times have we had the conversation about the “demanding teacher” on one side of the hall and the “easier teacher” on the other side of the hall? Traditional grading paradigms have teachers working in their own spheres, designing their own systems for arriving at grades. While those systems generally reflect fair-mindedness and clear thinking, they are individual systems and so, a “B” in Ms. Smith’s class might be equivalent to an “A” in Ms. Brown’s class. Standards-based systems help schools engage in mindful conversations about learning that focus on questions like “what constitutes an A?” and “what do good work habits look like?” As a parent, I want the teachers in my kids’ schools to agree on the answers to those questions.

And one of my personal favorite features of standards-based systems is that they encourage teachers to distinguish between academic achievement and habits of work. Students earn grades in academic subjects based on their understanding of that subject, not, for example, their homework completion in that class. The really cool thing, though, is that teachers can still report on things like homework completion, time on task and preparedness. They just do that reporting in its own place. As a parent, I would be thrilled to see those things reported separately because I know mastering things like preparedness and organization are true keys to success. In fact, author Paul Tough suggests in his latest book How Children Succeed that indicators like those typically found in a habits of work report are far better predictors of success than the the traditional indicators like IQ or test scores.

I want my kids to succeed. I think it’s safe to say parents in general feel that way. Standards-based systems provide more specific feedback on strengths and weaknesses, empowering students with the tools they need for success.

I got the report card image here.

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Some nostalgia: Donald in Mathmagic Land

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Abner Oakes

donaldThere are some very specific things that I remember from elementary and middle school – or, really, junior high school, as it was called. The seemingly life-sized model (at least it seemed that way at that time) of the Santa Maria that we helped construct and then romped about in when I was in kindergarten. The Greek festival in 4th grade, complete with togas and laurel wreaths. (That’s when I married Cecily Wilson, which had nothing to do with Greece.) The large open classroom of my 7th grade year, with two teachers trying to keep a lid on us.

And Donald in Mathmagic Land. I know that I saw this film more than once during my school career. It came out in 1959 and was one of the first – maybe the first – educational films. No wonder I saw it more than once, since teachers didn’t have much in the audio-visual realm to share with their kids at that time – although there were those filmstrips with the audio that beeped each time the frame needed to be forwarded. To have a movie like this must’ve been revolutionary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRD4gb0p5RM

We had a pool table in our home in Connecticut, and I remember, after one viewing of Donald and its section on the math of three-cushion billiards, going home to practice trick shots. It was to hard to believe that simple addition and subtraction might help me beat my brother Jeff in pool, and while it wasn’t easy to make this billiard magic work on our askew table – it was set on a not-so-level floor, with shortened cue sticks since it was hemmed in by our basement’s walls – I had some success.

I doubt that I remember this film because of the film itself, although it was a rare treat at that time to see something like it in class, and I wonder if it was the application at home that sealed this memory for me – the chance to take what I saw in the movie and make it work on my own. It makes me think of other learners – including our son, the 6th grader – and the importance of that connection between the classroom and the real world. Is that what really set this movie and its math content – the golden triangle, the golden rectangle – into my head? And if so, how can the schoolhouse ensure that it connects each day with what’s outside it?

Take a moment to watch the movie. Yes, most of it is quaint and very out-of-date, but there is a charm to it, particularly in the very final section, as we move from Donald’s brain to the universe, and hear the narrator intone that the “mind is the birthplace for all of man’s scientific achievements…there is no paper large enough to hold your imagination.” It ends with a quotation from Galileo, “Mathematics is the alphabet in which God has written the universe.”

Yeah, all pretty highfalutin, but I like when education is highfalutin, when it’s real-world on two levels – that of the pool table in the basement of my boyhood home and that of my dreams, my sense of wonder, the great attic and beyond of my thoughts.

I got the above image from here.

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States and Districts Use Online Video for the Common Core

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Abner Oakes

coreconnectionMy latest article for ASCD on the Common Core State Standards. Go here to sign up for ASCD’s Common Core-focused newsletter.

Each day, it seems, new products and services come to market that aim to help teachers with the Common Core State Standards, and those products and services that seem the most effective are built from the ground up, with the classroom teacher in mind. They are created directly from requests from the trenches, where teachers and school administrators are persevering to ensure that they are prepared for the standards and the changes that will come to classrooms and school buildings.

That in-the-trenches mentality is at the heart of the development of the Common Core State Standards Video Series from the Southeast Comprehensive Center (SECC) at SEDL , a nonprofit education research, development, and dissemination organization. Part of the country’s federal system of education-related assistance centers, the SECC works closely with the states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina to provide access to information, models, and materials that facilitate implementation of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The SECC also works with state education agencies to help build their capacity to implement programs and initiatives aligned to the priorities of the U.S. Department of Education, and it is in this role that the video series was developed.

“We respond to the requests of our states,” says Camille Chapman , a program associate with SEDL’s Improving School Performance program, which encompasses the SECC. Chapman and her colleague, Dr. Como Molina, believed that the Common Core State Standards, particularly the new mathematics standards, were going to challenge teachers as they prepared to teach them, for there was a great deal of new content that elementary and middle school teachers had not seen before. In addition, some elementary and middle school standards are written from a an abstract algebraic perspective, using language that may be difficult to interpret.

“Many K–8 teachers lack certain content knowledge for math,” continues Chapman. “We wanted to give teachers something to raise their own level of expertise.”

They also wondered if online video might be the most effective way to present this new material, allowing for asynchronous viewing and repeated study, even with colleagues. Chapman and Molina reached out to their member states, asking mathematics personnel in the state departments of education to identify standards that they felt—and had heard from teachers—would present challenges for the teaching corps of each state. Mississippi and Georgia each responded with a list of standards, and Chapman and Molina went back to their colleagues in Georgia and asked them to narrow the list down to one standard per grade level.

“We thought about one video per grade level,” says Chapman,” but it’s been a little over a year since we started, and we have over 30 videos, at multiple grade levels, nearly exhausting that original list.” The videos are created based on requests from states in the SECC region and were originally provided only to those states involved in selecting the standards to be addressed. However, they were made available publicly based on requests from the U.S. Department of Education and other regional comprehensive centers looking for Common Core State Standards resources that could be shared with other states implementing the standards.

“Viewers can also download the videos of their choice,” adds Molina, “so that they can be conveniently viewed even in situations where there’s no Internet access.”

Each video highlights one mathematics standard, runs between 10 and 20 minutes, and shows viewers a whiteboard presentation narrated by Molina, whom Chapman calls the “brainchild” of these resources. Thoughtful, good-humored, and thoroughly knowledgeable, Molina leads viewers through the critical ideas and key foundations of each standard, with a review, examples, and the vocabulary that teachers and students need to be successful.

“We want our primary audience to be teachers but also wanted the videos to be useful for parents, who are helping their children with homework at night,” said Chapman.

Teachers in Georgia have been voracious users of the videos, confirmed by both the SECC’s tracking of hits to the videos and by Sandi Woodall, Mathematics Coordinator at Georgia’s department of education. “Our folks are using these video vignettes at a tremendous rate,” says Woodall.

What is most important about the video series for Woodall is the conceptual knowledge that each promotes. “I wanted a teacher resource that did not have to do with pedagogy and instructional strategies,” she says, “but one that had to do with what I thought to be an obstacle for teachers, which was conceptual understanding.” It was this deep dive into the conceptual knowledge of each standard that “resonated” with Woodall.

The SECC videos have become an integral part of the training of Georgia teachers on the Common Core State Standards, with the videos available for teachers at the same online portal from which teachers access teaching materials and data about their students. With its goal of full implementation of the standards this year, Georgia has leapt further into providing new training tools for teachers, with state-level personnel, for example, providing monthly webinars to school and district personnel on Common Core–focused units.

“And we have partnered with Georgia Public Broadcasting,” stated Woodall, “to develop and broadcast two-hour-long, grade-by-grade overviews.”

For school districts, the SECC and state are providing a wealth of resources, and Dr. Kelly Price, the curriculum coordinator at Forsyth County Schools in Cumming, Georgia, sees her role as a “conduit to the teachers.”

“We provide them with an extensive set of resources,” she says, “and our conversation with teachers is not only that they have plenty of resources, but also that they have the time to weed through them all to look at quality.” She and her colleagues at the district office assist with that process, building playlists of materials for each unit, and when she and her colleagues train at the district’s school, they use the SECC-developed video material , which, she says, “expands the conceptual understanding” of the teachers.

In fact, Georgia is not shy about offering its wealth of resources to other states. As a Race to the Top state, it has had the funding to create resources that many other states have been unable to, and Woodall says that “close to 25 states have contacted the state department about using our resources. And so we have put more and more resources on the public website, not on the private teacher portal, and that is our pay-it-forward.”

And it looks as if, on that website, there will be more SECC videos, for all teachers implementing the Common Core State Standards, not just those teachers in Georgia. The SECC’s Camille Chapman finished by saying that she and her colleagues will begin to develop videos around the language arts standards, and teachers and other users of the videos can visit the SECC website to get on an e-mail list so that they get notification when new videos are posted.

For the language arts standards, Chapman imagines a video of a teacher talking directly to the viewers, sharing a story with them, as if with 1st grade students, and then stepping out of that role to discuss what’s going on behind the reading and teaching of that story.

“Our videos [will continue to be] well received,” she concludes, “as long as we do them on the pieces that are most problematic for teachers.”

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Me and My MOOC

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Abner Oakes

I’m about to finish a MOOC. Yup, a MOOC – a Massive Open Online Course, this one run by Stanford’s Venture Lab. The course is called Designing a New Learning Environment, and while I was interested in the topic, I was more interested in taking a course that was free, was fully online, and had thousands of participants from all over the world. A group of 11 other students and I worked on a project together, and my teammates were from Evergreen, Colorado; Lahore; London; Dubai; Sao Paulo; Adelaide; Tampere, Finland; Montalvo, Portugal; and Gurgaon, India, just southwest of New Delhi. It was a fascinating mix of people and represents the best part of this experience: Getting to know and working with a very diverse group of folks, of all ages, of all walks of life.

MOOCs, given their very nature, are for the self-directed. Sign on the course’s web portal, and posted there are weekly video lectures, none more than 20 minutes long, and weekly assignments, none of which have been too onerous – thoughtful, sure, but not too onerous. Some of the weekly assignments are reviewed and graded by peers, and there is a community forum that I’ve not ventured into, given a lack of time recently. A quick glance at it, and topics on the forum range from a complaint about misspellings when video lectures are transcribed to a question about how to help “students enhance their motivation and make them better self-regulated learners.” In just the forum that asked people to introduce themselves, there were 1508 threads and 3882 posts when I last looked. No doubt there are far more now.

Perhaps that’s what I struggle most with in the course: The immense amount of information that it presents, given the thousands of participants, and trying to find the gems within that information. It takes a lot of digging.

We’ve all heard what MOOCs may do to the post-secondary space, that they’re an innovation that will cause some disruption, although it’s unclear what exactly. For example, is there a business model for these huge, free courses, enough of a model to sustain them? Time will tell. But what about high schools, a place that MOOCs might impact? Can we imagine high school students taking part in a MOOC in a school’s blended learning environment – or maybe in the summer or over a holiday break, as a way to shore up what was learned in the traditional classroom? In fact, here’s a news release from the University of Miami saying that its online high school, UM Global Academy, will sponsor the first MOOC for high school students, a three-week, six-session class focused on the SAT subject area test on biology. Seems a brilliant use of the MOOC format and a way for this online high school to attract new users.

I can also imagine MOOCs bubbling up from technology-savvy teachers, who’ve already created digital tools and artifacts for their regular classrooms and move them over to an online platform, to share beyond their schools. These MOOCs will only work for the most self-directed of young people, as I said before, but imagine the benefit for them, as students dive into a topic of interest and get to study and develop relationships with peers from all over the world. Could be a very powerful experience, with all kinds of connections to 21st century skills.

Now, I’m not yet done with my MOOC adventure, as I plan to enroll in a five-week-long MOOC offered through Coursera, called E-Learning and Digital Cultures. The topic again interests me, and I’ll be able to experience a new course structure and approach, to compare to my experience with Venture Lab. In fact both MOOCs give me the chance to study e-learning and examine closely its inner workings, as a participant.

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Connecting at school: The importance of a caring adult

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Abner Oakes

As readers of this blog know, our son has moved from an intimate elementary school setting to a large middle school, and his move – and what I’ve heard from a few friends about their own kids’ experiences at other schools – got me thinking about the research around a strategy that can make or break a child’s experience in a new and larger school: Connecting at school with a caring adult.

Personalization is the name given to a set of strategies that schools and districts use to foster a sense of connectedness with their students – connectedness to the school and the people there – and as this policy brief states, at “the heart of these efforts is a desire to create more positive and caring relationships between students and adults responsible for teaching and mentoring them.” Why is this kind of relationship important to students? In their 2004 paper Adena Klem and James Connell state that studies “show students with caring and supportive interpersonal relationships in school report more positive academic attitudes and values, and more satisfaction with school. These students also are more engaged academically.”

A variety of strategies are used to develop this kind of relationship, such as advisory periods, team teaching arrangements, and looping, when the same students have the same teacher over two or more years. Interestingly, though, kids can sniff out a fake a mile away: Research suggests that a formal structure such as a weekly advisory period does not have the kind of impact on students as “informal, improvised, and, therefore, more authentic” encounters with students. As Larry McClure, Susan Yonezawa, and Makeba Jones write, students can distinguish “between the lived experiences of personalization versus the more formal structure of advisory programs.”

In my last high school teaching position, when I oversaw the students that created the school’s newspaper, I remember very fondly the gang that would gather in my classroom after school to discuss, debate, write, and edit the articles for each issue. Yes, it was a sort of formal setting – these students had signed up for this group and showed up in my room on an assigned day – but it tended to have a more organic feel to it, as kids came and went, as I was pulled over here or over there to discuss article ideas, as the student editor-in-chief would halt the chaotic proceedings from time to time to check the pulse of her team. I developed strong relationships with several of the young people that worked on the newspaper, and I credit the setting for this happening, as we moved out of the formal classroom setting and into one that was still intellectually engaging but far more informal.

But how does a school or district help teachers and other school personnel nurture these kinds of relationships, since planning for them seems to fly in the face of what means the most to kids? Again McClure, Yonezawa, and Jones write that, in their research, they “were struck repeatedly by the teachers’ lack of confidence and desire for assistance regarding developing mentoring skills. Although not every teacher felt this way, many believed that they had been trained to teach a particular content area, not children, necessarily. And they had little time, resources, or energy to receive and really learn from mentorship training.” The authors go on to write that school and district policies “should advocate that teachers work on personalization content in a professional learning community and be provided on-going” school-level support.

So, parents, a good question to ask your kid: Is there an adult at school that you trust and has taken an interest in your work and success at school? And a question to ask the principal or even someone from the school district: What’s being done at the school – what strategies are in place – to personalize that environment for each kid? And how does the school or district help teachers connect with their charges – in a manner that is authentic? I know that it’s not an easy proposition – to create a system of support for students that they do not feel is a system – but no doubt schools that are effective in this realm have cultures based on this very issue, with that urgency to connect with young people just a natural part of the day-to-day. No doubt that is what effective school principals and teachers are working on, the school’s culture, and not just the schedule and curriculum for advisory.

I got the photograph from here.

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