Providing feedback on Student Writing

Here is an excellent essay on editing student writing by Ilana Reimer from Editors Canada:

http://blog.editors.ca/?p=6956

That article also linked to this other excellent article on teaching writing

https://curiosityencouraged.com/help-students-revise/

Homework and Worksheets

This Foxtrot cartoon strip has been circulating on the internet these days and raises the question of the relevance of completing homework or in-class worksheets.

Adults may recall that when math homework was being assigned in the 1950s,60s,70s instructors often said, "Do questions 1, 4, 7 and 9" There were two reasons for this. First, those were the questions that had the correct answers in the back of the textbook--the answers to 2,3,5,6 and 8 were wrong. There was a famous study of math textbooks that found that something like 38% of the answers in textbooks were wrong, because *sloppy*. Wrong answers in textbooks drove students insane, of course, as they worked and reworked questions trying to figure out why their (correct) answer didn't correspond with the (incorrect) answer on the answer key. On the whole, textbooks are held to a higher standard these days (in math, anyway) so that's less likely the reason your instructor is skipping questions now.

Which bring us to the second reason: worksheets and textbooks have more questions than necessary to demonstrate a student's knowledge. Pratice makes perfect (okay, makes satisfactory) but some students need more practice than others. Even great students are going to blow the occasional question through some silly mistake or through misunderstanding the concept. Consequently, they need a second or third practice question to see if they have the concept or can avoid careless mistakes this time. Weaker students may need to work through half a dozen examples before feeling confident they have it. So I don't have a problem with worksheets/homework that provides a lot of examples, or with teachers who chose questions 1 and 4 to start with, because 1 tests a different concept than 4, so teacher needs to see both of those, but not necessarily 2 and 3 if 1 was done correctly.

But that does bring us to the question raised by the above meme: if a student has demonstrated his proficiency with a sufficient sample, should we be wasting the student's time by penalizing not completing every question. Obviously they can't stop half-way through the sheet because later questions may get harder, and we need to see if the student is up for the more challenging examples; or later questions may test quite different concepts. But young Mr. Fox has it right when he did a representative sample of questions from which it would be reasonable to coonclude he had mastered the skill being tested. Too often teachers confuse means and goals, enforcing completeness rather than trying to identify if the student has particular skills and knowledge. The purpose of any assessment is to find out what students know and can do, so that the teacher can (a) reteach missed concepts and (b) know whether it is possible to move on to the next learning objective. Too often, however, worksheets and homework become about which students can tolerate tedium, are the most compliant, and who never question whether directions make sense.

I like to think most teachers are interested in teaching concepts and skills, not subservience to authority figures. Yet I regularly encounter instructors who say things like, "This student is one of my best, they know the material backwards and forwards, but I can only give them 50% because they never complete their work." No, that's not a bad student, it's bad assessment. If your sense is the student knows their stuff, and (if one took the time to actually look at their worksheets/homework rather than just run over it with an answer key to document whether they are covering all the necessary concepts and difficulty levels, then assigning them a lower grade is simply inaccurate. If you're going to use worksheets/practice homework, get it right.

Curving Class Grades

Question writing

I appreciate when instructors attempt to relate their abstract course content to real-world situations. Math teachers who just come in and cover the board with numbers—without any explanation of when one might need to deploy that equation—do a disservice to math instruction. You have to teach Z-scores in the context of when you'd need to use Z-scores, or whatever.

But by the same token, you need to have some passing familiarity with your real-world example. "If a train leaves Pittsburgh at 4PM going 100mph..." was fine when most people traveled by train; now, not so relatable. And if you going to use, "If a plane leaves Pittsburgh" you'd better include, "not counting the time spent clearing security or the delay for the flight crew showing up" as part of the problem.

How am I going to make this assessment relevant?

Peter Greene said:

. . . if your spouse says, “I’m looking for ways to make you interesting and appealing,” that is not a good sign.

Once you look at a lesson and ask, “How am I going to make this material relevant,” you have admitted that the material is not actually relevant. If that’s true–if the lesson is inherently irrelevant–then you need to ask a bigger question. Why are you teaching it at all? Because it’s on the test? Because your boss said you have to? These are lousy reasons to teach anything. More importantly, no amount of stapling on pictures of movie stars will convince your students that you aren’t wasting their time, and wasting students’ time is one of the unforgivable sins in the teaching biz.

Know why you are teaching what you’re teaching. Know why the material has value for your students. This is not always obvious, but this is where your expertise in the subject matter is supposed to come in. You’re the teacher–you’re supposed to know what the connection is between your content material and the business of being fully human in the world. If you don’t see a connection, you need to go study and look to find it, or you need to reconsider whether you should be teaching it at all.

[Via www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/06/08/dear-teachers-please-dont-make-your-lessons-relevant — Found on Scott MacCleod's excellent blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, about the need to move schools forward into 21st century.]

The same is true of assessments. It's easy to come up with assignments that generate grades for a report card, that rank students against each other, but does the activity actually have anything to do with anything that matters? If the assessment isn't authentic, don't do it.

Math Understanding

A popular meme:

The objective of the marker is to assess the student's understanding, not their ability to follow expectations.

Summer Reading Assignments & Note About Assigning Shakespeare

Dangerously Irrelevant, an excellent blog on school leadership in 21st century, has an excellent list of six articles on why assigned summer reading is a seriously stupid idea. An important first step in good assessment is having good assignments. Forcing kids to do reading homework over the summer is obviously wrong-headed, but these articles will give you the amunition necessary to argue with those who still think it is a good idea.

On a related topic, any teacher about to take up Shakespeare could do a lot worse than to hang up posters banning the Shakespeare for Slackers series.. Aaron Kite provides the translation of Elizabethian English (the original text on the left hand page) into modern punk (on the right hand page) which is both hilarious and educational. Students get to understand the jokes in the original, get to observe how modern English is more linear than Shakespearian English, and gain a whole new appreciation for the original drama. Better than the Star Wars as Shakespeare books, in my opinion. Or assign a compare and contrast essay on the two versions if the whole 'banning' trick doesn't work....

Alternatively, try John Poulsen's Shakespeare for Reader's Theatre series, which gets students performing Shakespeare's plays within about 45 minutes of the start of the unit. Highly recommended.