Standards Based Grading and Leveling Up

I’ve been really happy since joining the SBG fan club a few years ago.

As I’ve gained experience, I’ve been able to hone my definitions of what it means to be a six, eight, or ten. Much of what happens when students sign up to do a reassessment is based on applying my experience to evaluating individual students against these definitions. I give a student a problem or two, ask him or her to talk to me about it, and based on the overall interaction, I decide where students are on that scale.

And yet, with all of that experience, I still sometimes fear that I might not be as consistent as I think I am. I’ve wondered if my mood, fatigue level, the time of day affect my assessment of that level. From a more cynical perspective, I also really really hope that past experiences with a given student, gender, nationality, and other characteristics don’t enter into the process. I don’t know how I would measure the effect of all of these to confirm these are not significant effects, if they exist at all. I don’t think I fully trust myself to be truly unbiased, as well intentioned and unbiased as I might try to be or think I am.

Before the winter break, I came up with a new way to look at the problem. If I can define what demonstrated characteristics should matter for assessing a student’s level, and test myself to decide how I would respond to different arrangements of those characteristics, I might have a way to better define this for myself, and more importantly, communicate those to my students.

I determined the following to be the parameters I use to decide where a student is on my scale based on a given reassessment session:

  1. A student’s previously assessed level. This is an indicator of past performance. With measurement error and a whole host of other factors affecting the connection between this level and where a student actually is at any given time, I don’t think this is necessarily the most important. It is, in reality, information that I use to decide what type of question to give a student, and as such, is usually my starting point.
  2. The difficulty of the question(s). A student that really struggled on the first assessment is not going to get a high level synthesis question. A student at the upper end of the scale is going to get a question that requires transfer and understanding. I think this is probably the most obvious out of the factors I’m listing here.
  3. Conceptual errors made by the student during the reassessment. In the context of the previous two, this is key in whether a student should (or should not) advance. Is a conceptual error in the context of basic skills the same as one of application of those skills? These apply differently at a level six versus a level eight. I know this effect when I see it and feel pretty confident in my ability to identify one or more of these errors.
  4. Arithmetic/Sign errors and Algebraic errors. I consider these separately when I look at a student’s work. Using a calculator appropriately to check arithmetic is something students should be able to do. Deciding to do this when calculations don’t make sense is a sign of a more skilled student in comparison to one that does not. Observing these errors is routinely something I identify as a barrier to advancement, but not necessarily in decreasing a student’s level.

There are, of course, other factors to consider. I decided to settle on the ones mentioned above for the next steps of my winter break project.

I’ll share how I moved forward on this in my next post in the series.

After Individualized Learning, What Comes Next?

This was my classroom in the latter part of the last block of the day.

I should point out that I usually have students seated closer together in groups. Conversation happens more organically in that configuration. I gave a quiz where I didn’t want to set hard time limits. As each finished, I nudged them to work on their own on a PearDeck assignment.

This is what it looks like when everyone is working at their own pace. Each student with a single screen, each solving problems and answering questions.

I like that I can drift from student to student and either ask or answer questions when the time seems right. I can see each student’s answers on the online teacher dashboard. I can decide which conversations I need to have. Students can also decide if they need to have conversations with me. I involved myself in student learning with surgical precision.

Some claim this is the future of learning in schools.

For me, the silence in the room today was unsatisfying. No sharing of ideas. No excitement shared between friends. Nothing that might compel a student to contemplate the other living, breathing beings in the room.

I don’t do this every day, so I know this isn’t how it will always be. Whenever I do this type of lesson, I know that the students are better off when they get what they need. I know it is good for them. My thinking always go to the next step. What will we do when we are back together in a big group, or at least in groups larger than one?

I asked the students the following question:

We have all worked independently today. What is the best way to use our time when we are back together?

Their answers gave me the direction I needed to think about the next steps:

  • Either going over answers so people who haven’t put the answers in will know what to do and what the correct answer is.
  • Maybe review the questions people were confused with or got wrong a lot. This would help to review what we did.
  • Go over some of the answers together or answer some of the difficult problems.
  • I don’t know.
  • To check where the majority of us got stuck and had trouble, and discuss how to figure out those problems. That, and to possibly discuss new concepts that we have yet to master.
  • Going through the questions that could be tricky and solve challenging problems together
  • I think it is good to have a mini lesson to quickly teach what we are learning and to go over, but also save time for students to work independently.
  • Give us a few examples at the beginning of class so we don’t forget what we learned, and then learn new things.
  • To quickly go through and review all the topics we’ve learnt about polynomials.
  • Learn something new

Knowing what to go over is certainly where the online tools are helpful – they make incorrect answers or misconceptions stand out.

I know that the students prefer the social aspects of the classroom. Whatever our next step is, it should involve coming together and acknowledging and appreciating we are in a room of people learning together.

We need to make sure that we are social when being social is productive to learning.

We need to make sure students have time to learn and think on their own.

We need to make sure students can also learn what they need to know in the hands of an experienced guide.

All of these are crucial. Any one channel we use loses its effectiveness to learning when it becomes routine. I think this is especially the case when that routine involves staring at an entity that can’t talk or laugh back.

Unit Circle Practice (#TeachersCoding)

I’ve always wanted a simple interface to help my students practice the unit circle. I’ve found Quizlet sites that help with this, as well as the occasional Khan Academy exercise that approaches what I want. The big issue I find with most of these is that the interface and the questions ask much more than what I’m looking for. I want a simple flashcard-like situation with no bells and whistles that gets my students the repetition and opportunity to think through the functions with feedback.

Over the winter break, I decided I needed to build the resource I had in mind. Here’s the result:

The live site can be accessed here: http://codepen.io/emwdx/full/bgEJYK/

This is essentially a digital version of a set of flash cards, but they never stop. The angles rotate around the unit circle and the trigonometric function used is randomized. Since I am holding my PreCalculus students responsible for the reciprocal functions, but my IB students don’t need them, I added the ability to flip those on and off.

I decided to do this on CodePen in case you want to look under the hood to see how it works. The editor view that contains my code is here. Let me know if you use it for something useful.

Notes to the Future with Google Scripts & PearDeck

I wrote previously about my use of PearDeck in an end of semester activity. One of the slides in this deck was one in which I asked students to write themselves a note containing the things they would want to remember three weeks later at the beginning of semester two. With vacation now over, that day is now. I wrote a Google script that automatically sends the notes they wrote to each student. This allowed me to generally send these out without inadvertently reading the notes in detail. I saw some of them, but made an effort not to see who was writing what.

The PearDeck output spreadsheet for this deck looks like this:

Column 3 of the spreadsheet contains columns with the student’s email addresses, so that made it easy to get the address corresponding with a given note to the future, which is column 4. By selecting ‘Script Editor’ from the tools menu, you can create a script that has the ability to process this data.

You can delete the code that is there, and then paste in the code below to create the email script.

You’ll need to save the script, and from the run menu, select ‘sendEmails’. You’ll need to give permission for this script to read the spreadsheet for this to proceed. The emails will all be sent from your Google email.

Code:

function sendEmails() {

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var startRow = 2; // First row of data to process
var numRows = 12; // Number of rows to process

var dataRange = sheet.getRange(startRow, 1, numRows, 5) //get all the data in the spreadsheet from the range between (startRow,1) and (numRows,5).
//This gets the first 12 students that are in this class, and the five columns of data I want to use for the email.

var data = dataRange.getValues(); //Store the spreadsheet data in an array
for (i in data) { //for each row in the spreadsheet
var row = data[i];

var studentEmail = row[2]; //the student email is in element 2, which is the third column

var subject = "Note To The Future (AKA Now): " + studentEmail; //email subject

//This next line is text formatted using HTML tags that appears before each students' note.

var greeting = "Happy New Year!

Before break, I asked you to write an email to yourself with things you would want to remember at the beginning of the semester. Whatever you wrote in that text box in Pear Deck is below for you to enjoy.

I'm looking forward to seeing you Tuesday or Wednesday in class.

Be well,
EMW

";
var message = greeting + row[3] //Combines the greeting and the student's individual note

MailApp.sendEmail({to:studentEmail, subject:subject, htmlBody:message});
//Sends the email to the student, with the subject defined in line 14, and the message from lines 20 and 21.
//htmlBody means the email will be formatted as HTML, not just text.
}

}

Holiday Travel and Exporting PearDeck Data to Desmos

One of the unique phenomena of international schools is the reality that, during a vacation, the school population disperses to locations across the world. I had students do an end of semester reflection through PearDeck, and one of the slides asked students to drag a dot to where they were going to spend the vacation.

PearDeck allowed me to see the individual classes and share these with the students one at a time. I wanted to create a composite of all of the classes together in Desmos to share upon our return to classes, which happens tomorrow. You can find the result of this effort below. This is the combined data for draggable slides from five different sessions of the same deck.

The process of creating this image was a bit of work to figure out, but in the end wasn’t too hard to pull off. Here’s how I did it.

The export function of a completed PearDeck session, among other things, gives the coordinates of each student’s dragged dot in a Draggable slide. I could not use these coordinates as is, as graphing them on top of the map image in Desmos did not actually yield the correct locations. I guessed that these coordinates represented a percentage of the width of the image used for the Draggable background since the images people upload are likely all of different sizes. I did a brief search in the documentation, and couldn’t find official confirmation, but I’m fairly sure this is the case. An additional complication for using these is that the origin is at the upper left hand corner, which is typical for programming pixel art, but not correct for use with a Cartesian system as in Desmos.

This means that an exported data point located at 40, 70 is at 40% of the width of the image, and 70% of the height of the image, measured from the top left corner.

Luckily, Desmos makes it pretty easy to apply a transformation to the data to make it graph correctly. I took all of the data from the PearDeck export, pasted it into a spreadsheet class by class, and then pasted the aggregate data into a Desmos table. Desmos appears to have a 50 point limitation for pasting data this way, which is why the Desmos link below has two separate tables.

Click here to see the graph and data on Desmos

If there’s an easier way to do this, I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments.

Building Up or Breaking Down: Creating States-n-Plates

In piecing together States-n-Plates, I wanted to learn more about React, a web application library created by Facebook. In the process, I found myself finding parallels in how I go about learning anything.

Before I describe the details, I’ll give a (hopefully brief) description of what React does.

An HTML page normally consists of HTML tags that tell the browser what to display, with other rules that also describe how the HTML should look. A page created through React reframes that page as a series of components that each serve a different function. The image components need to have the ability to be dragged onto the targets. The targets need to be able to accept a dragged image, and need to be able to indicate whether the image dragged onto the target corresponds with the correct plate. The scoreboard needs to know how many states have been correctly matched at any given time. The components also have the ability to respond when a user clicks, types, or drags other components into them.

In a well designed React application, each component uses information from the component that contains it in order to behave (or, um, react) as the application is used. Building the pathways for how this information flows from one component into another is deliberately designed so that each component can act independently from another.

When I first started working on creating States and Plates, I started with a fully formed webpage that looked much like the final product above. I followed the React documents that then suggested breaking the page down into components, one by one. I did this without really understanding in detail what I was doing, but was able to get the components to each have the appearance of the original web page, which felt like real progress. Eventually, my progress was halted when I reached the limits of what I understood. I needed help.

It was at this point when I picked up a book on React and started working through the basics. I began to understand better what the guiding philosophies of React were – the design decisions, the behaviors that one component had in response to another, and how to think through an application the React way. This was where it was helpful to read the perspectives of some people much more experienced then me – I understood the vocabulary they used and could make the connections I needed to make progress.

With some of the basics figured out, I rethought the application from scratch. Rather than starting with the webpage as a whole, I started creating components and making sure each one worked as expected before moving on.

By the end, I felt comfortable thinking about my application both from a bird’s eye view and on an individual component level. I needed to have the experience of breaking the idea down into individual pieces and seeing how they interacted with each other to produce the whole. I needed to take time seeing what rules guided the function of one component in order to understand the whole. If I had started by reading the documentation as my step one, I would not have had the context that the big picture view of the application yielded for when I actually did so in my learning. Both views were important, and neither view was sufficient on its own to lead to full understanding or transfer.

We need to give our students opportunities to have both views of the content we teach. Insisting that student mastery of the basics is a necessary gatekeeper to higher levels of thought misses opportunities to understand the context of that basic knowledge. Student exploration of concepts through Desmos or Geogebra or problem solving is a great way to engage with the standards of mathematical practice, but without discussion, review of underlying concepts, or (gasp!) direct instruction where needed, opportunities for growth might be limited.

Let’s make sure, as a team, that we are attacking this problem from both ends.

Releasing Today: States-n-Plates

I’m excited to share States-n-Plates , a project I built with Dan Meyer.

Dan proposed the idea for this activity a while ago with his typically high level of excitement about activities that provoke interesting and productive classroom conversation. This time, however, it wasn’t about mathematics. I was looking for a bigger scale project to help me develop my ReactJS skills, so I took it on. Dan was patient enough to let me hack away at the project in this context. Though I could have certainly done it more quickly using jQuery or another framework, I wanted to try building this project in a particular way.

Specifically:

  • I wanted to be able to play the game myself when I was done. Hard coding everything into a series of HTML pages would have likely resulted in my seeing each plate and the answer over the many times I reloaded during development. By abstracting the behavior of the game to be automated for each group of license plates, I saw most of the plates for the first time during testing.
  • I wanted to experiment with a drag and drop library for React as an exercise for use in future experiments.
  • I also wanted to have a slightly different UI behavior for the desktop and mobile versions. This functionality came from Bootstrap. This led to a bit of wonkiness on small phone displays, but larger tablets work great using touch, and the desktop version works well using drag and drop.
  • I also wanted to experiment with modularity of both files and React component JSX files. I used Webpack. I don’t understand Webpack.

As in my past collaborations with Dan, I learned to do a number of things I didn’t think I could do. For example, I told Dan ‘no’ on the fading effect at one point, and then subsequently figured out how to make it happen through lots of searches, StackOverflow, and careful reading of the React documentation.

If you want to play with the code, the Github repository is at https://github.com/emwdx/states-n-plates/. You don’t need the big node_modules directory for this to work locally, but it is required if you want to change the bundle.js file.

I have more thoughts on the learning process I went through, but that will be shared soon. Have fun and share with your friends.

Zack Miller and his PBL/PBL Merger

I’ve been skeptical about Project Based Learning (PBL) for a while, despite many people trying to sell me on it as being a step up from more traditional instruction. I like the concept, but I have too many reservations with veto-power to keep me from jumping in completely. These are my main issues:

  • While PBL provides a rich environment for learning, it doesn’t work as an effective means for assessment.
  • The idea presumes that every mathematical topic has a problem that forms a solid context for a project. In the recent past, I’ve made a commitment to my students to not force a context on them if it doesn’t actually fit, and to tell them outright when I’ve artificially created one. There are many rich applications for many topics, but this is not generally the case.
  • I have never seen a project based rubric that I really like, even (and especially) ones that I’ve created myself. Something ends up being incentivized unintentionally, or students focus on the wrong elements despite my best efforts to prevent this. This is my fault though, not PBL.

All of that said, I’m really enjoying Zach Miller’s ongoing series on combining Project Based Learning with elements of Problem Based Learning, which I also like, but also with reservations.

His posts are pushing my thinking a bit, and I’m liking how it’s getting me to adjust some plans for this semester. Check out his blog when you can.

More of What Matters

Just over a year ago, my first daughter was born. Like most newborns, she couldn’t hold her head up. Yesterday I watched her pick up her pacifier from a table and plop it in her mouth.

It made me realize that I’ve witnessed the entire progression of skill development that made that happen. She developed an awareness of the muscles needed to grip, lift, and rotate. She learned to use visual feedback to move her stubby fingers to the right location in her field of view, close them, and then move the pacifier to her mouth, which she could not see. This learning was all hers – nobody had to tell her what to do, or why she needed to go through the steps. My daughter’s skills will continue to develop as she grows and encounters the great variety of people and places in this beautiful world we all inhabit together. I’ve made more of an effort this school year to be present for these moments, and it has been among the best decisions of my life.

There have been times in my teaching career when I’ve thought about how nice it would be to be able to start completely from scratch with students. With no misconceptions, bad habits, or fear of failing like the time before, maybe I could help them be more successful. I quickly stop myself. First of all, my own instruction is not perfect, and in all likelihood, the students would still discover shortcuts that might work in my class, but be detrimental to their success in the next. Second, and more importantly, our students are not computers to be programmed. The experiences they bring to our classrooms is what makes this job what it is. As rewarding as it might be for us as teachers to see students make all of the progress we want for them, teaching is not about us.

Our students have all walked their brains through a unique path that passes through our classrooms, and that path certainly doesn’t end within them. The knowledge and skills that our students take from our classrooms are also not under our control. Our students’ lives will hopefully be a long series of meaningful moments of discovery and excitement, and the reality is that those moments that will last are likely not the ones that transpire in our classrooms. That said, the time we all have together is precious and always decreasing.

As we start a new year today, let us remind ourselves to work to make the important things matter. This takes work because of the noise of distractions that surrounds us. Build opportunities to grow instead of dig in to old habits. Make a deliberate effort to express gratitude to the people that you are with. Recognize the value in being at this place, at this time. We will not always be successful, but accepting this is part of becoming more successful on the next attempt.

Be well, everyone.

Scaling Reassessments, Yet Again (Part 3)

I’ve been quietly complaining recently to myself about how the reassessment sign-up and quiz distribution tool I created (for myself) isn’t meeting my needs. Desmos, Peardeck, and the other online tools I use have a pretty impressive responsiveness when it comes to requests for features or queries about bugs, and that’s at least partly because they have teams of expert programmers ready to go at any given moment. When you are an ed-tech company of one, there’s nobody else to blame.

This is the last week when reassessment is permitted, so the size of the groups I’ve had for reassessments has been pretty large. Knowing this, I worked hard this past Sunday to update the site’s inner workings to be organized for efficiency.

Now I know what my day looks like in terms of which reassessments students have signed up for, what their current grade is, and when they plan to see me during the day:

screen-shot-2016-12-06-at-12-53-11-pm

With one or two reassessments at a time, I got along just fine with a small HTML select box with names that were roughly sorted. Clicking those one at a time and then assigning a given question does not scale well at all. I can now see all of the students that have signed up for a reassessment, and then easily assign a given question to groups of them at a time:

screen-shot-2016-12-06-at-1-54-28-pm

The past two days have broken the reassessment records that I wrote about at the end of the first quarter – today, for example, there are over sixty five students taking quizzes. In the scrambling of getting everyone their quizzes in the past, I’ve made concessions by giving simpler questions that may not honestly assess students at either end of my 5 – 10 learning standard scale.

With the user experience more smooth now, I have been able to focus this week on making sure that the questions I assign truly assess what students know. I could not do this without the computer helping me out. It feels great to know things are working at this higher scale, and I’m looking forward to having this in place when we get going again in January.

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