Some readers may recall our run-in with Tony, the misogynistic homophobe on Parliament Hill a few weeks ago.  Today I finally got around to crafting an email which I sent to the good people at the permit office in Ottawa.

We shall see what transpires...

Writing with whiteboard markers on a desk -- fun, motivating and cleans up pretty easily!

I got the idea from my instructional coach; while co-planning a Data Management lesson on central tendency, she suggested  that as a warm up/"minds on" activity to the lesson, the students calculate the mean, median and mode of a set of data we give them (the number of seconds various speakers at the recent Grammy Awards spoke).  The twist?  Rather than record their work in their notebooks, the students got to write on their desks!

Every single student was engaged, and while they worked in partners discussing their calculations, and which "average" was most representative for this particular set of data, my coach and I walked around with our clipboards and checklists to see which students were demonstrating  an understanding of central tendency in their work, and which ones would appear to benefit from a little review.

Clean up was quick, too -- just a cloth and an organic cleaner spray bottle did the trick:  I sprayed, while two wipers followed me around for about one minute.

As I begin to integrate a wider variety of these sorts of non- or semi-document-able work strategies into my lessons to engage a broader range of learning styles, one topic I'd like to explore in a future blog post is how to share this work with families at home, many of whom may wonder "where's the evidence of learning?!" since so little paper comes home.

Love, love, LOVE this honestly written Toronto Star commentary on report cards by a parent!!!

By: Catherine Porter Columnist, Published on Thu Feb 26 2015




If your kid was terribly scattered in class, would you want to know?

Or would you rather think he was “using planning skills with limited effectiveness.”

That’s how Ontario’s Ministry of Education suggests teachers write their report cards for kids getting D’s. They aren’t struggling, floundering, falling behind. They are “demonstrating limited understanding of content.”

I call this edu-speak. The ministry calls it a “positive tone.”

Watch out. I’m writing about the impenetrable language of report cards again. My last column triggered dozens of emails and phonecalls — many angry — from teachers.

“I don’t think anyone hates those report cards more than the teachers writing them,” emailed Debby Conderan, who retired eight years ago after 30 years teaching grades 3 to 8 in the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board. “They are edu-babble at its best. None of it says what a teacher really wants to say.”

The dozens of working teachers who emailed and phoned concurred. None of them wanted to be quoted by name, for fear of reprisals. But all said they resent labouring for days over reports which in the end, communicate little. Their hands are tied by three things: conflict-averse principals, school board policies and angry mother-hen parents.

They were furious that Ryan Bird, spokesperson for the Toronto District School Board, had said teachers are “encourage[d] to use language that parents will understand.”

Most teachers told me in no uncertain terms that was not true.

One Toronto public primary school teacher described his first “straightforward” report card comments returning to his desk from the principal’s office. “I was told to be more empathetic to how parents feel about their own children, to re-phrase my wordings to be increasingly diplomatic,” he wrote in an email.

So instead of telling parents their kid was disorganized and his desk was messy, the teacher now writes: “Johnny consistently places his materials inside his desk in a random order. He is highly encouraged to adopt a more streamlined organizational style, so that during in-class work periods he is able to locate his documents with greater ease.”

Read the rest of Catherine Porter's article here.

It's the final day of Black History Month, and so I wanted to shout out to my friends of African -(or Jamaican - or Caribbean- etc.) Canadian descent... 

In our struggle for equity and social justice, the LGBTQ community has a lot to learn from our black sisters and brothers; in the face of blatant discrimination and violation of human rights, they fought bravely and resiliently, standing up (and in some cases, sitting down!) for what they knew to be right. 

While some of the students were excited about the prospect of designing a logo that might be selected to be printed on thousands of shirts to be worn by students and teachers across the board, others rebelled, and a few even started a petition, coming to the teacher and announcing collectively, "We're not doing this -- you can't make us!  It goes against what our religion and our parents teach us!" (Wow, really? your parents teach intolerance for diversity, and discrimination on a protected ground?!)

 
The teacher was at a loss: They wanted to promote diversity, plant a thinking seed about equity and social justice, and they knew that both the Board and the Ontario Human Rights Act stood behind them. 

But they also wanted to "respect the home culture" of their students.

I invited the teacher to consider whether they would want to respect the home culture if they were designing Black History Month posters and some students indicated that their parents preferred they not associate with coloured folk.

In discussing the case with another colleague, it was suggested that choices and options be given to the students, a-la "you can design a logo for the Pink T-shirt Day, or you can design a logo for...."

Again I wondered, if the assignment had been given around a Black History Month theme, would there have been a choice not to participate?

I'm not naive enough to think that internal racism has been eradicated...  I know there are plenty of people who give the outward appearance of being culturally inclusive while "feeling" inside -- consciously or unconsciously -- that their lighter skin tone somehow makes them superior. But I also know enough to know that the vast majority of the population, at least in the public service domain, at least knows better than to express their racism openly.  It's simply not acceptable; we've agreed to that as a culture.  One simply is not racist in the Canadian public domain -- at least towards people of colour.

 Oh how I long for the days when we can say the same about homophobia.  Think what you like in your heart (that's a whole other battle), but know that one simply doesn't make homophobic remarks or say things that could be offensive to a full 10% of the population; it just simply isn't publically acceptable.

We're not there yet.  

But then, the civil rights movement wasn't a 50m sprint!  

If our black brothers and sisters can achieve equal rights, at least in theory, and increasingly in practice, then so can we.

A colleague forwarded this to me after our most recent school climate meeting, at which another colleague was talking about the importance of language.  We are considering using it as part of a series of media and character ed lessons as we prepare for Day of Pink in April.

Ever since attending a workshop this fall on integrating technology effectively into the classroom, I have been wanting to try Kahoot.  This morning's lesson on bias in data management was the perfect opportunity: My instructional coach and I co-developed and co-taught a lesson in which we used Kahoot as a formative assessment towards the end of the lesson, to ascertain whether the students understood the concepts we'd addressed that period.

Between BYOD, the classroom devices and an extra one from Ms. Grimwood, there were enough sources for each pair of students to have one.  "The Awesome Ms. Teschow" (Kahoot allows you to enter a nickname) played along too, and managed to stay at number one on the leaderboard!   (Well, okay, I guess the fact that I had advance access to the questions might be considered cheating just a little, hehe...)

The program's instant response graphing feature helped us to see immediately which concepts students had a firm grasp on, and which concepts would benefit from a little review.  We took the opportunity to clarify two or three things immediately, and made a note to address more in subsequent lessons.

Having another adult in the room made the management part of using this tool for the first time a little more, well, "manageable"! :)  I'm grateful for the relationship I've developed with our school's coach that allows me to take risks with trying new things, and that allows her to feel comfortable demonstrating a tool that we're both new to using with students.

Want to give it a try? Check out our Kahoot here!

Being able to critically analyze data and identify bias is an integral part of becoming a critically literate citizen.  Identifying bias and learning how to design an unbiased survey is also part of the intermediate Math curriculum in Data Management, and so my instructional coach and I put together a lesson and culminating unit task that specifically focuses on bias.

The double period lesson begins with students taking on the role of a particular character, and selecting a graph that shows data in such a way that would best represent the position of that character.  The characters then get together to defend their positions, using the data to help them debate their counter-character.

During the lesson's debrief, we guide the students through specific factors (for example, unrepresentative sample population, survey questions that are unclear or answers that are not mutually exclusive, a graph whose scale doesn't begin at 0, some information purposely left out, etc.) that can "skew" the data or create a biased representation.

As we wanted to integrate technology, we also built a Kahoot partner-based multiple choice quiz into the debrief.  Then, to consolidate the learning, we ask students to create a list of ways in which surveys and graphs could be biased.  We provide an answer key for self-checking.  A homework checklist and justification list of examples are distributed so that students can practise and consolidate their new-found understanding of bias in data management.

See the complete lesson here.

Our culminating task will allow students to consider a topic of interest to them, and design an unbiased survey to collect primary data.  They will graph the results, then comment on why they chose the particular graph they did to display their data effectively, and will tell how the data could be used to influence and persuade, and by whom.  (For those teaching in a more integrated manner, rather than on rotary, I would also have students submit a media represention -- such as a flipagram or a series of tellagamis -- recounting the process.)

Thanks, Lise Grimwood, Instructional Coach, Peel District School Board, for your co-planning and co-teaching support with this lesson and its follow up!

On the one hand, we're supposed to be incorporating holistic assessment of student knowledge, skills and understanding, moving away from exclusively paper & pencil-based evaluation to a more triangulated approach that encompasses observations, conversations and products.  On the other hand, at the end of each term, we are asked to plug a number into a program to produce that dreaded piece of paper, the report card.

One of the aspects of my job I have been wrestling with this year is how to align the practical with the philosophical, especially when it comes to assessment!

A solid tracking tool acts as a record of our observations of student work, our conversations with students, and our assessment of their skills and understanding demonstrated on the products they produce.  With fewer products being produced and sent home, such a tracking tool becomes even more critical, as it serves as a reference point when having conversations with families, some of whom are still hung up on marks, rather than having a true understanding of what those marks represent, and how, specifically, their child can move forward.

I recently developed a new template for tracking assessment of each student during our data management unit in Math.  While the tracking sheet is comprehensive, I found it somewhat cumbersome to use when trying to jot down on the fly what specific students were demonstrating in class.

Below is a modified version of the same:

This will allow me to quickly find students by sorting the sheets according to where they sit in the classroom, and still provide a way to efficiently reorder the forms alphabetically when I am getting ready to write report cards.  (My goal is to be able to write descriptive, individualized and insightful comments for each student.)

The criteria for the unit are listed down the left hand side, and descriptors are listed across the top.  This will allow me to quickly check off the degree to which a criterion appears to be understood or demonstrated (or if it appears to be misunderstood) throughout a unit.  

In addition to the growth mindset self assessments, exit tickets and other informal formative assessment I conduct on a daily basis to drive my instructional decisions the next day, I plan for at least 3, or more often 4, more "formal" assessment opportunities and check-ins per class per unit: 1-2 written assignments such as a quiz, test or journal entry, one observation of "work-in-progress" such as when students are working on a problem or other math task, and one conference or conversation with each student.  Sometimes I also more formally record feedback from exit tickets students give me.

I also check homework 2-3 times each unit and record this on the same page.

This way, by the end of the unit, even students who have missed a class or two have had at least three opportunities to show what they know.  Provided they have taken advantage of said opportunity, and have not spent work time horsing around with friends rather than working on their assignment, my tracking sheet for each student provides a fairly wholesome picture of progress over time.  The more checkmarks there are towards the right of the page, the higher the mark on the report card.  If I am unsure, I can check the notes I have made at the bottom of the page.

It's not a fool proof method, but with so many students to see over the course of a 10-day cycle, I am hopeful that this tracking sheet will provide a more concrete recording of evidence of student learning.

I'm still trying to decide whether to send these sheets home at the end of each unit, or whether to file them for my own reference.  I would be interested to hear from other educators who are attempting to implement the research on descriptive feedback vs marks to see how they/you balance the desire to provide and track authentic feedback while still meeting the requirements of our province's archaic report card system, and keeping the lines of communication open with families.  Please feel free to comment below, or email me here.