Feedback Frenzi

I know how I feel about collaboration, but what about everyone else? To find out, I surveyed some teachers a while back and I learned a few things...

The survey I sent out via email is as follows: 

1. On a scale of 0-10 (10 being most important) , how important do you believe teacher and administrator collaboration is and why?

2. On the same scale, how often do you collaborate with other teachers or administrators? Explain. 

3.  Would you be interested in more collaboration opportunities?

4. Are there any suggestions you have for possible collaboration ideas we could implement in our school?  

Question 1: Every single teacher rated collaboration at an importance of 8 or 9.  Here's what they said: 

"You can succeed on your own, but it's more stressful and difficult." 

"Being able to talk to each other, work together, and collaborate, allows for higher sense of community and causes creativity to increase."

"Two heads are better than one- some of my best ideas come when I am talking with colleagues." 

Question 2: When asked about how often teachers actually collaborate on a day to day basis, teachers scored themselves between 4 and 6 out of 10.  As a student would realize, this is a failing grade.  All teachers at my school realize there are limitations to working at a small school including limited opportunities for collaboration.  Here's what they said: 

"The one big project I did, a research paper with a science teacher, didn't go well because there was not enough crossover teacher time and the students were confused." 

"Being a small school means that no one else has the same prep period I do, and I don't get to talk shop with others."

"At our school, most teachers have different planning periods...  However, due to small size of our school there are not many teachers within each subject area so it is easy to personally meet with fellow teachers." 

"I feel like I am creating a curriculum alone." 

Question 3: Yes!  Every teacher responded that they would like more opportunities for collaboration.  

Question 4:  Here are some ideas from the teachers at my school: 

• Department, grade-level, and administration-teacher meetings
• Staff development opportunities where teachers of the same content area can receive continuing education together
• Brainstorming sessions (English and science teachers come up with writing ideas for science class)
• Cross-curricular assignments (planned out well in advance to limit confusion)
• Pintrest- share ideas with each other through Pintrest

Obviously, I'm an advocate for using blogs for collaboration. If you're reading this, you know about mine! But here are a few more that I follow for information, ideas, and sometimes just a nice break from my classroom. 

• Affective Living- Teaching, Learning, Living
• RtI- Mainland to Hawaii
• Teaching Character to Kids
• Classroom Inequalitiy- Boys vs. Girls

Check out some of the attached websites and ask around for interesting and creative ways to collaborate with your colleagues.  

What ideas do you have for collaboration that are fun and/or simple?  

Project Positivity

Classroom management is a constant struggle. 

One way to help make management easier, is to boost positivity at school in general. 

While reading through a Mines newsletter, I saw a small article on Project Positivity. The idea of this project is to boost happiness by leaving notes for strangers to find. 

In advising last week, I asked my students to write a positive note on a sticky note. It could be a joke, a quote, a saying, a picture, whatever they liked! 

Most of the kids loved it. Some had even found my notes hidden around the school. 

Students wrote:

"You are beautiful in every way."

"If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone as attractive as you, I'd have a dollar."

"Don't worry, be happy." 

and so much more!

I asked the students to take their notes with them and hide them around the school. Some hid them in classrooms, others in hallways, and I saw some in really creative spots! 

I can only hope this helped at least one kid. I hope to continue writing my own sticky notes to keep the positivity present! 

What other ways can we help keep the attitude positive in our school? 

What is the funniest thing you've seen or heard in school?

How have students shown you positivity when you least expected it? 

"You never told me there was homework."

In celebration of my missed blog last week, I want to take a minute to talk about late work from our students. As a math teacher, I assign homework every night. Even if that's not the case, it seems that there's no getting around late work and missing assignments.

Homework grading is one of the most laborious jobs a teacher has. It requires constant attention and very specific guidelines. This website discusses the complexities of homework policies that are important to consider. 

After two years of education classes, I truly believe that handing out 0's for missing work and moving on isn't an option. This is an "easy way out" where students aren't held accountable for completing the missing work or practicing the material. The trouble is, how do we get the students to complete these assignments?

Our school has a FINO (failure is not an option) program where students are signed up by teachers to attend a lunch study hall three days a week for any missing assignments they have. The trouble is, signing students up and staffing this study hall are both time consuming and from what I've seen, students still don't get the work done. However, some schools and teachers have found this to work.

I truly believe that a student's grade should reflect their understanding of the material. If students have numerous 0's because of missing assignments or late work, their grade won't be an accurate representation of how well they understand Algebra.

In my classroom, I allow students to turn in late work for full credit up until the unit test. I would prefer to take all missing homework at any time, but this leads to a mile high stack of unlabeled homework assignments the last week of the semester which doesn't help me or the students. Plus, forcing students to complete work before a unit test gives students an extra reason to put in a little extra practice before the exam if they haven't already finished their assignments. And my final, most exciting benefit of this policy is that I don't have to hear the excuses for why they didn't get their homework done. 

Part 2 of my policy is what really helps. Clean up days! Every so often, I give work days in class. Sometimes before an exam, sometimes after a hard lesson, and sometimes just out of the blue. During these days students work together to complete assignments while I sit at my desk and go through my students one by one. For each student I look through all missing assignments for that unit as well as check for missing or low project, quiz, or test scores. Students with any missing work or low test and project scores are called to my desk. We look at their grade in the class and all of their red flags. I make sure the students know what they're missing and provide them with missing homework or study guides for quizzes. 

These clean up days generally end up in a huge influx of missing work and there are always a few students who jump a grade letter. Sometimes, the kids just forgot about an assignment or didn't know what to be working on. These kids are easy. The other ones know they were missing the work. For these students, this day allows me to put them on the spot. They need to explain to me why they didn't do it, when they plan on doing it, and if nothing else, have to deal with me being on their case. 

It works for a lot of them, but not all of them. 

But what else can I do? There are still some students who have 75% of their assignments missing or constantly wait until the last second to scribble something down to get some credit. 

What works? 

What doesn't? 

How can we avoid the late work before it happens?

What works for the kids who are missing more than half of their work?

Enticing Incentives

I was told over and over and over and over and over again that classroom management was THE most important aspect of teaching successfully as I made my way through education. Turns out, they were 100% correct. I am constantly trying to come up with clever, interesting, cheap ways to promote good behavior in the classroom. 

I've spent a lot of time browsing around the internet for ideas and here are a 2 descent websites I've found: 

http://www.interventioncentral.org/behavioral-interventions/rewards/jackpot-ideas-classroom-rewards

http://www.wisconsinpbisnetwork.org/assets/files/resources/Free%20or%20Inexpensive%20Rewards.pdf

The problem is those rewards work for their students in their school. I need ideas for MY students in MY school. 

Some things I've tried that have worked:

• Let a student leave early from class for completing their work early.
• Randomly bring donuts for a class that had good behavior the previous day.
• Have cheap candy (Jolly Ranchers/DumDums) at the ready for students who answer questions or are exhibiting excellent behavior in class. 
• Tickets for Mizenko specific rewards

There has to be more though. Students are picky about what reward works for them, so I feel like the more ideas I have to use, the better off I'll be. 

What have you done in your class for rewards? 

What has and hasn't worked? 

Do you have an idea you'd like to try? 

SPRING BREAK!

Happy spring break 2014! 

Not to toot my own horn, but I'm going on an awesome spring break cruise to the Bahamas. This means I will be out of cell phone and internet service for five days. Perfect vacation from everything in my opinion! 

Anyway, this means there won't be a technique of the week post, so I want to instead ask for your ideas! What should we talk about in the future? Any thoughts? 

Ending Boredom with Engaging Activities

It's a constant struggle to engage students in a way that makes them want to learn. Part of the problem is that each teacher only has so much creativity and so much time. It's hard to hit a roadblock when trying to design an engaging lesson or activity to use in the classroom. 

What I've got: With extremely low test scores in math, I felt that I needed to cover some often forgotten concepts before TCAP this year. I knew the students would probably be doing similar reviews in other classes and wouldn't be looking forward to it. I decided the best way to get students engaged (and actually learn something) was to have stations for students. This would allow students to work at their own pace and cover as much material as possible. I tried to make each station cover a different concept in a different way. 

• 3 Memory game stations (3D shapes, 2D shapes, and angles)                     
• 2 "Order the Numbers" stations where numbers were put on cups and students had to put the cups in order from least to greatest (Comparing radicals, scientific notation)
• 1 Connection station where students connected graphs with their equations using markers (graphing inequalities)
• 2 worksheet stations (Pythagorean's Theorem, Finding Area of Complex Shapes)

There may have been too many stations in too short of a time, but the students genuinely seemed to enjoy themselves. It would have helped to have a bit more room because it was hard for students to find all of the stations. Overall, I would say it was a success though!

What have you done in your classroom that worked really well to engage students? Did you try something that didn't work? Have you seen something that you haven't tried, but want to? 

Week 1: Creative Test Alternatives

Creative Test Alternatives

Test anxiety, proctoring, grading, corrections, retakes...  Tests are time consuming and sometimes quite boring. What ideas can teachers try for testing their students on material without following the ritualistic pencil and paper, pass or fail testing that we're so used to?

What I've got: 

Checkpoints

• 10 question tests (3 per semester) that cover the bare minimum of what standards students need to know and understand. 
• Students know EXACTLY what is on them because you give them a practice checkpoint with questions that look identical (in math, just different numbers...get creative for another subject... it must be possible). When I gave out my first checkpoint, the students were confused because the practice looked exactly like the quiz. 
• They must retake the checkpoint until they get at least an 8/10 (I give them 2 tries in class). 
• Questions are graded right or wrong; no partial credit. The kids hate it, but they are allowed to retake them as many times as they want for full credit. So, for a lot of kids, this means they retake them two or three times to ensure a 100% on a small test grade.

*At Golden, they used these as a bare minimum to pass the class.  If you pass all three and the Checkpoint final (20 questions taken from the 3 checkpoints), you pass the class with a 60%.  

Why are these so wonderful you ask? Instead of students failing the test, accepting it, moving on, and then coming back at the end of the semester asking how they can get their grade up, students are forced to keep working on the material until they get at least a basic grasp of what is going on.  Plus, they don't get quite the test anxiety when they're not surprised, yet they're tested on what they need to know. 

Now, it's your turn to respond.  This could mean 

• something you already do in your classroom
• something you'd like to try in your classroom
• something you've heard about or seen someone else do
• a link to a website with cool ideas
• a brainstorm of things you could do, but don't really know much about

Get the idea?