Formative Assessment - Part 3 - Secondary Effects

All educational practices, both effective ones and ineffective, have side effects.  

Some side effects are undesirable: 

• lost instructional time from over-adherence to inquiry
• lack of development of organizational skills because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• lost focus from attempted "multi-tasking"
• anxiety from large amounts of high-stakes testing

Some side effects (even from the same practice) are great:

• increased relationship development during an inquiry experience
• students with ADHD not losing all of their work because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• recognition of how important focus is after an attempt at "multi-tasking"
• recognition that you are stronger than you think you are when you persevere through a time of high-stakes testing.

I have noticed some side effects of implementing intentional formative assessment in my classroom.  I have yet to find an undesirable effect, but there are three strong upsides that I have particularly noticed.

1.  Keeping them on their toes

It is possible for apathetic students to go entire days without paying attention to the teacher.  If teachers are merely calling on those with their hands up, the uninterested student can simply not raise his hand. If she knows she has tutoring later, the uninterested student might check out and do some online shopping, knowing she can learn it later. 

Without checking for understanding, a student can get all the way to test day without a teacher ever knowing he is lost. 

I like it when educational principles show up in my life outside of school, and this is one of those times.  I mentioned a few weeks ago on this blog that I have been attending a liturgical church for about a year.  Liturgy often involves a fair amount of call-and-response style participation from the congregation.  A couple of weeks into my attendance at this church, I said to a friend, "There is no way to let your mind wander there." She asked what I meant, and I showed her the bulletin.  "Everything in bold print is something I'm supposed to say.  So, I can't let my mind wander because I've got a line coming soon."

Ongoing formative assessment that requires participation from all students is just like that.  They have a line coming soon.  It keeps them engaged because they know they will be asked a question about what they are doing now about three minutes from now. No one wants to hold up their mini-whiteboard to show a ridiculous answer, so after a few questions, when they realize you really are going to keep doing this, they usually pay better attention.

2. It is motivating to know what your progress is

Have you ever suffered from the illusion of competence?  You know what I mean, you studied for a test, and you were sure you were going to ace it until you actually had the test in front of you and realized you didn't know much.  

Students who are engaged in regular formative assessment have much less of that experience.  Not only do you have frequent check-ins with their understanding, so do they.  Is it a bummer to get a question wrong? Yes.  But that is not a reason to abandon a good practice.  When they get it right the next time, call out how far they have come. "Remember when y'all couldn't do that?  Look at you now, doing it well. Thanks for putting in the work." 

There is not much that encourages people to grow like actually seeing their growth. It's why people in weight loss programs weigh themselves. It's why coaches show their teams game footage.  I'll give you another example from my outside-of-school life.  A few months after I started taking cycle classes at the Y, I began setting goals about distance, tension level, and power on the bike.  At first, I only knew how to check these statistics at the end of a class. I was often surprised to get to the end of a workout and find that I hadn’t achieved as much distance as I had thought.  Because I wasn’t tracking that information at all during the class, I didn’t have the ability to make adjustments that would help me reach my goals.  I could do better on a different day, but I didn’t know how to do better at the moment.  Then, an instructor showed me how to use the bike’s computer to see real time information during class by changing the display screen.

Checking the number on that screen was motivating because I knew if I needed to speed up or turn up the tension. I could adjust my course of action based on what I was seeing.

But be careful, you can have too much of a good thing. I found it was tempting to stay on that screen.  After all, feedback is good, right?  We like having constant access to information, but I quickly learned that was unwise.  It made me so focused on the number that I couldn’t pay attention to instructions.  Worse, I was so focused on the number that I couldn’t enjoy doing the things that would improve the number, and I was in a state of panic if the average didn’t move as quickly as I thought it should.  Worst of all, I wasn’t building any internal sense of how to improve because I was relying too much on the bike itself rather than how my legs felt or my perceived level of exertion.  Eventually, I disciplined myself to only visit that screen once every four minutes.  That gave me enough information to figure out what I need to do to make progress for the next four minute check, but it didn’t do my thinking for me.

The same is true in formative assessment. Stop and check at the crucial moments and the hinge information, but don't make them sick of hearing "Take out you whiteboard."

3. The joy of more classroom interaction

I mentioned earlier that it is possible for a student to go through a day without paying attention. It is also possible a for an introverted student to go through a day without having anyone interact with them. One of the best ways to do formative assessment is to require everyone to give an answer. My favorite way of doing this in the past few years was to have each student answer questions on mini-whiteboards. In a quick glance, I can see 24 answers and know if there are several of them with the same misconception. I can see who is taking longer to write their answer and who is copying off of their neighbor. It's great. What I didn't expect was to get so much joy out of their idiosyncrasies.

My favorite example of this was a boy named Jonah. He put on a front of being a cynic and too cool for school. Yet, he was a gifted mathematician and wrote excellent explanations of complex topics. He also had a wry sense of humor, but he never wanted to appear engaged in class, so he didn't use it there. However, he was required to write answers on his whiteboard, leading to some fun moments.

I don't know if this story is going to translate into writing, but I want to give it a shot. One of the things I do early in the year with 8th graders is teach them the names and functions of lab equipment. I explain that on tv, every piece of glassware is called a beaker, but in actual labs, it is important to be precise with your language so you get what you need for the purpose. We then play a game I call, "Beaker - Not a Beaker." The kids spend the rest of the year giving me a hard time by calling beakers flasks and vice versa. So, the first time we used whiteboards for retrieval, Jonah wrote "Beaker" as his answer a couple of times. I finally said, "That's great. You can do that, but you also have to write a real answer." For the rest of the year, he wrote two answers for every question, Beaker and whatever the real answer was. Then, during an exam review, there came a magical moment. I asked a question where the answer actually was "Beaker." He held up his board with, you guessed it, two answers: Beaker and Beaker. I laughed, and he responded with the slightest of smiles. It was a sweet and joyful interaction that I couldn't have planned and that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't regularly engaging in formative assessment with all students.

I hope in these three posts that I have convinced you that there is value in implementing a structured program of formative assessment and given you some practical ways of doing it. If you have a favorite tool for formative assessment, please post them in the comments so everyone can add to their toolbox.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engaging Lessons

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, this is the fifth in a series of my own reflections of some sessions.  This is the last one, and it is very practical.  This is from the presentation of Dr. John Almarode, but he liberally references others, so the book you see pictured here is not his but one that he recommended.

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If you are a teacher of more than one year, you know we have an engagement problem going on with students.  You might know that if it is your first year as well, but you have nothing to compare it to.  If you can compare pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and post-pandemic classes, you know that we have lower engagement now than in any of the other two times.  It's weird, right?  One would think that we would have observed the lowest engagement during the fearful, hybrid, masked, socially distanced time, but one would be wrong.  This year, the one that should be "back to normal" is the one where we are struggling.  I wrote a little about this in my post on Chronic Stress Recovery, so I won't repeat it here.  But the point is, students are disengaged for a number of reasons, but teachers are also so tired it is hard to implement the tools we used to have for increasing their engagement.  So, we need some simple things from research that we can use to help our students engage.

Let's start with clarity.  Teacher clarity combined with student clarity has massive potential to increase student achievement (effect size 0.84 and 0.75 respectively), but it will also increase engagement.  Both students and teachers should be able to answer the questions:

• What are they learning?
• Why are they learning it?
• How will they know they have learned it (success criteria)?

We have all been in meetings or professional development seminars where we didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, and we definitely checked out until the leader came near our table when we bluffed some vague answers.  Is it surprising our students do the same if they don't know what they are learning?  I've also been asked to do tasks where I knew what to do but found it absolutely pointless.  I worked in a real estate company where I was meant to collect data and put it into a bar graph.  While it wasn't a difficult thing to do, I was not at all motivated to do it because I knew it was going to be stuck in a drawer and never used for anything.  And since success motivates, students will be more likely to keep at something if they can see at each step whether or not they have been successful.

In the early 2010s, researchers John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver wanted to study the aspects of a lesson that create sustained student engagement.  Rather than choosing one aspect to study and controlling for everything else, they performed walkthrough classroom observations.  They performed 17000 classroom visits before publishing their book, but they have continued the work and are now at about 24000 visits.  John Almarode, who was the presenter of this particular session, said that no book has changed his teaching more than this one.  (Considering how many books he reads, that is a big statement; so I ordered it from the conference, and it is sitting at the top of my "to be read" pile.  He said that every time he turned the page, he had an aha moment.)  They found 8 things that cause a lesson to be engaging.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - What does the target look like?
2. Emotional Safety - Can they recover if they take a risk and make a mistake?
3. Personal Response - Can they bring their own perspective into it?  Can they write about it as a response?  Can they tell you what they think?
4. Sense of Audience - Is it valuable to someone other than the teacher?  This could be knowing that the work will be hung in the hall or posted to the web.  It could simply be that their partner cares about their part of the activity.
5. Social Interaction - Can they tell someone else what they know?
6. Choice - Perception of choice, or appropriate and limited choice (Choose from a menu that the teacher has designed), not a student coming in and telling you what they want to learn about.
7. Novelty - Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - It doesn’t mean real-world.  It means it COULD happen.  (Don’t build an imaginary creature and design an imaginary habitat.  Instead, have them be zookeepers that have to choose an exotic animal and design a habitat at the zoo where you live that will let them live in your climate.). They need to know someone uses this knowledge, but you do not have to make it apply to their current lives.

In case you are concerned about incorporating eight things into every lesson, simmer down.  Take a deep breath.  According to the research, having only three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement.  If you have only two, you will get only 17%, so that third one is huge.  And, let me quote John Almarode.  "If you have bought into the clarity thing, you already have #1.  If you are a halfway decent person who doesn't hate children, you should already have #2.  So you really only have to choose one more."  He advises looking at your goal to decide on the third.  There are times when "turn and talk" is great (social interaction), and there are times when you need quiet reflection.  There are times when choice is appropriate, and there are times when you need them to do exactly one thing (choice in the lab can be dangerous).   Trying a new tool is sometimes what you want (novelty), but it can also tax their working memory if you are simultaneously introducing new and challenging material.  The ones you choose should be based on your professional judgment in accomplishing the goal.

As you head into this new year, you are planning lessons for next week.  Be ready to communicate clarity and care.  The plan your learning experiences using this list.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engagement Myths, Enemies, and Solutions

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, This is the fourth of five posts that are my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is mostly out of a presentation by Drs. Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, but there is a little from Dr. Jessica Minahan in here as well.  I will take the week off on Christmas weekend, but we will start the year with a very practical post about John Almarode's session on how to construct an engaging lesson.

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We tend to think of engagement as a binary situation.  You are either engaged or not, but if you think about your own level of engagement with things in your life, you know that isn't accurate.  I have been half-engaged in many meetings, with one eye on my email while I nodded along with the presenter.  Even as I write this, I'm also watching the Thanksgiving Day Dog Show, so I look away from what I'm writing frequently to ooh and aah over a cute dog.  That said, there are sort of three categories with a spectrum between the first two.

Full engagement - The student is thinking about the lesson you are teaching.  Note that even researchers can't always agree about how to measure this because it is hard to visually observe when they are thinking.  Some measure eye contact with the teacher, but then they have to recognize that we often look away to think about something.  Some measure note-taking, but others recognize that this act might be taking their attention away from the lesson for a moment or that some people doodle as a means of engagement.  Chances are, you can recognize full engagement from your students if you know them well.

Not engaged - This is when the student is simply not thinking at all about the lesson.  Perhaps they are daydreaming or staring at the floor.  I was once in a meeting so boring and so right before lunch that I just put my forehead on the table and looked at my shoes (sorry to the guy leading that, but it was rough).  In one of your students, it might be that they are looking at a website that sells shoes.  It can look like a lot of things, but all it really means is that they are not thinking about what you are teaching.

Actively disengaged - This one doesn't have to be defined for you because you absolutely know it when you see it.  The student is taking action to not think about your lesson on purpose and inviting others to join him.  He kicks the chair in front of him, pokes the kid next to him, says off-topic things out loud, flips his water bottle, and just generally finds any way he can not to pay attention.

As teachers, we are given a lot of advice, and one of the most common is "make your lesson more engaging."  What we are not given, outside of books like the one Drs. Hargreave and Shirley wrote, are realistic ways of doing that (except that my next post will be some very practical ways, so keep your eye out for that).  Worse, some of the advice we are given is wrong; so here are three common myths about engagement.

Students will only be engaged if you make the lesson relevant to THEIR lives. - Well, first of all, if you teach 120 students a day, that's just exhausting (actually, even if you only taught 12 students a day, that would be difficult).  They don't all have the same interests or values.  According to Daniel Willingham's great book Why Don't Students Like School, most attempts to make a lesson relevant by tying it to pop culture will lead to the student only thinking about the pop culture thing you referenced instead of the thing you were trying to connect it to.  So your attempt at engagement paradoxically results in lower engagement.

Trying to do it by trends may also be a problem as it will lead to stereotyping.  For example, if you try to tie your math lesson to something you think girls will relate to, you are alienating those girls who aren't "girly."  And, those who do like the thing you are trying to connect with may feel that you are being cheesy or condescending.  Kids can tell when you aren't being authentic, so don't try to make something fit where it doesn't.  That doesn't mean your content doesn't naturally relate to their lives.  I teach physics, so I often say, "Where are my runners?  My swimmers?  My baseball players?  My musicians?" and ask them for expertise about their field because it is an example of the concept we are covering.  A history teacher is naturally going to end up addressing rights or injustice that connect to students' lives, but it fits there anyway; you aren't shoehorning it in to "make it relevant" while hoping to increase engagement.

Students like technology, so you MUST include technology to get engagement. - I teach in a one-to-one laptop school, so I am not against the use of technology in lessons.  There are things your students can accomplish with technology that they could not have without it.  BUT the idea that technology has to be involved for a lesson to be engaging is wrong.  Students engage in outdoor lessons that don't use tech at all.  They are engaged in physical activities whose only technology is shin guards.  I have found that sometimes, students are happy to have a breather from their screens.  One thing I have loved about my school since the adoption of our one-to-one program is that we were encouraged not to use technology for the sake of it but to match it to the goal of our lesson.  Sometimes, technology provides a better way; and sometimes it does not.  Use it to meet your learning goals, not to increase engagement.

Learning is only engaging if it is fun.  This may be the myth we have been told the most.  Students won't engage in a lesson if it isn't fun.  Good luck to the history teachers who teach about the atrocities, environmental science teachers who address climate change, and geometry teachers who teach proofs.  Even as a science teacher, I have to remind my students that, while I hope the lab is fun, that isn't the purpose.  There is a scientific principle to be gleaned from the observations I'm having them make.  Chasing engagement through fun is a fool's errand anyway as you can't compete with their entertainment sources.  You don't have Marvel's budget or Disney's Imagineers.  Your goal isn't entertainment; it is learning.  You may succeed with engaging them in an activity while still failing to teach them.  

So, now that I've told you what is not going to lead to more engagement, let me depress you a little more.  There are five "dis" words that can be considered the "enemies of engagement."  And we are seeing them in high numbers post-pandemic.  They are disenchantment, disconnection, disassociation, disempowerment, and distraction.  The good news is that there are antidotes to these enemies. (Wow, did I ever mix metaphors there.  Let's say there are superhero rivals to those enemies.)  Let's look at them one at a time.

Disenchantment - It's hard for students to see the magic in much these days.  Some of that is a result of their brain chemistry after returning from lockdowns, and some of it is because we are grieving the loss of over a million people without really acknowledging that grief.  We are recovering from chronic stress, and they are having difficulty seeing their place in the future.  Learning about the periodic table seems a little thin and pale to them.  Not surprisingly, the rival of disenchantment is . . . enchantment.  This comes from you.  You teach chemistry because there is something you find magical about it.  You didn't go into teaching math for a living because you hate it; there is something in it that you find really interesting.  When you read books to young children, you communicate through your demeanor that you just LOVE books.  When I was in middle school, history wasn't my thing, but I adored my history teacher, Mr. Watkins.  His favorite thing to study and talk about was the Russian Revolution.  I learned a lot about Czar Nicholas and Alexandra and Rasputin.  I read the 640 page book about them for no other reason than Mr. Watkins loved it.  Over a decade later, I stood in an art museum 1200 miles away, with tears running down my face because I was standing in front of Alexandra's crown.  It's going to take some time to re-enchant students, but it starts with showing your enchantment with it.  Be authentic about it, but realize you may need to push it harder than you did in the past.

Disconnection - It's hard for students to feel a connection with some of our material.  As I already addressed above, the answer is not necessarily to connect it to their lives.  What is important is that they see a purpose.  In his session, John Almarode said, "They need to know that this information is used by SOMEONE."  They need to see that there is meaning in the material for the world.  This generation is able to see a broader context better than past ones have been at their age, so if you can show them that what they are learning has meaning and purpose in the world, you can help them connect with it more.

Disassociation - There's no surprise here.  The social media that was supposed to connect us has left us disconnected and polarized.  Add two years of limited interaction to that, and the news isn't good for students feeling connected to their peers, the future, or your material.  Well, teachers, this is what we are good at.  We know how to connect kids to each other.  Surveying a class to find common ground, giving them a short collaborative activity that requires them to connect, and asking students to turn and talk to their neighbor about what they just learned are all ways of providing connection and belonging.  We got this if we just think about it for a minute.

Disempowerment - "Empowering students" and "giving students a voice" are so overused that they are now little more than faddish buzzwords.  While both of those things are important, we are addressing how to get kids to engage with a lesson, so think a little smaller.  WITHIN your lesson, how can you provide students with a choice?  Construct activities in two columns and allow them to decide which one they want to do.  You're making the columns, so you can still accomplish what you want, but they feel a little more in control of their lives.  "Would you like to write this down now or wait until the end?" is a way to give students a sense of choice.  Where the choice has to be yours, taking the time to explain why you made the choice you did honors the student as a human being because you cared enough to explain your thinking.  

Distraction - This is the big one.  If you asked most teachers why their students aren't engaged, this would probably be the reason they give.  They would likely blame technology, but ask an experienced teacher if kids were never distracted before they had computers.  I have watched kids read their pencils and play with their own fingers.  The rival of distraction isn't sensory deprivation.  It's to give them a challenging task that requires all of their focus.  Have them build something, engage in a scavenger hunt, make the goal big enough that it requires a lot of thinking.  And, of course, recognize that you are going to need to redirect from time to time.

Engagement can also be different in kids with high anxiety and those who have experienced trauma.  The amygdala in their brains is sometimes hypervigilant, and that can result in inaccurate self-thoughts when they are stressed.  In everyone, stressors are likely to distort our perception (assuming someone is looking at us when we have a zit or spilled coffee on our shirts, walking into a room where people are laughing and assuming that they are laughing at us).  In the anxious student, the presence of a pretty normal stressor can result in a complete shutdown, with inaccurate thoughts like, "I just can't do any of this (even when there is evidence to the contrary, like having done well yesterday or having a good grade). They may decide a teacher just hates them (even if there is evidence of much love from them).  You will not be able to get them engaged in a class until you have turned down the amygdala by giving them something incompatible with the negative thoughts (today's Wordle, a small Sudoku puzzle, a trivia question on a card).  Once their distorted thoughts have calmed down, they may be able to re-engage with the class.

As I said earlier, my next post will contain practical advice on how you can make your lessons foster engagement, so next week, look for some very practical advice.

Engagement is a Tool, not a Goal

I was scrolling through Twitter and found this tweet.  Before I clicked on the video to watch it, the title put me off.  "What message is this guy sending to students?" I thought, "that they have to be entertained for learning to be valuable?"  I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I thought maybe he means something different by the word engaging.  Maybe he means engaging in a way I might agree with (like valuable or interesting), so I clicked on the video and realized why Tom Bennet had commented that it looked exhausting.  Tom was right.  This video is an ad for the guy's professional development seminars, and it is filled with teachers in training, doing a lot of energetic dances at the instruction of the trainer.  There is not a single moment (at least as portrayed in this ad) where anyone has a chance to sit and reflect on what they have learned.  They may be energized; they may be having fun (although I imagine the introverts among us would be miserable).  I'm not sure they are learning.  I'm not sure what they will take back to their classrooms that would add anything other than motion.

This causes me to ask the following question.  What's the sweet spot?  Where is the line between fun for the sake of fun (which is fine for recreation) and fun that actually enhances learning (which is what I want if I am going to spend class time on it)?  Are there times when having students dance while learning might be useful?  The research is clear that some movement while learning is good.  But, where is it just movement for the sake of movement?  I fear that is happening because well-meaning teachers hear "Movement is good" at a conference and don't take the time to find the nuances of what kind of movement is good and whether it should be connected to content.  

So, let me start by exploring what we mean by the word "engaging." I did a quick google search and found the first definition was "occupy, attract, or involve someone's interest or attention."  I'm on board with that.  I want to have my students' attention and interest.  Next question.  What do I want them to pay attention to?  What do I want them to be interested in?  The answer should obviously be "the thing I want them to learn."  I can put on a good show without teaching them a dang thing, and that is the opposite of what I want.

If you follow me on social media or have read a few blog posts, then I hope you know I am not in favor of boring students to death and just telling them to deal with it.  I believe strongly in involving students in their own learning and teaching with appropriate hands-on activities and technologies.  I assign projects to deepen learning in a way that my talking in class might not achieve.  But, teachers, please hear me - We must be intentional to choose activities that engage students in learning, not just in class.  When I tell my students about the time my cat ran up a tree and would not come back down, it is a little bit to get them to view me as a real person, but it is mostly to give them a visual image of gravitational potential energy transforming into kinetic energy so that when I give them similar problems to work on, I can say, "It like the cat in the tree," giving them something to connect to.  The seeming aside of that story doesn't just engage them in hearing a silly story; it has an educational payoff.   I show a lot of short videos in my class, often those that demonstrate things I cannot, but I have very few that last a full class period.  When I do show one of those, it isn't just because it's fun and engaging to watch videos (otherwise I would show them Marvel movies).  It's because the videos I have carefully chosen give them a view of something more effectively than I can.  For example, Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now: Glass shows students how their lives would be very different today without mirrors, lenses, phone screens, fiber optics, etc. and they leave with a different view of a seemingly mundane thing.  When I take kids into the lab to electrolyze salt water, I am aware that it is not going to involve fire or explosions or other things they might find more engaging, but I also know it is the most valuable lab we do because I refer back to it during the bonding chapter, the solutions chapter, and the electricity chapter (and tangentially in the acid/base chapter).  I have chosen it because while it is less engaging than another lab might be, it has more academic value.  When I blow something up, it is to demonstrate pressure and Boyle's law or synthesis reactions, not just to blow something up.  Are those things engaging?  You better believe it.  But what makes them valuable is the lead-up to and the reflection after the explosion.

We cannot out-entertain their phones, and we should stop trying.  It doesn't make us engaging; it highlights how lame we are compared to the entertainment industry.  I like to think I'm a pretty entertaining speaker, but they aren't going to choose me over Disney or Batman.  They have a budget that allows them to be immersive, but it is more than just that.  The end goal of the entertainment industry is, not surprisingly, entertainment.  Ours is learning.  For us, engagement is a means, not an end.  Learning is the end.  We're educators who use entertainment, not entertainers who might teach you something along the way.

As you lesson plan, choose activities that engage students in the thing you are trying to teach, but don't waste time on dancing and jumping around and taking laps around the room if they don't connect in some way to what you are teaching (that's possible, by the way, if you plan it well - I have a "States of Matter Dance").  Ask yourself how it will benefit your students, and if the answer is engagement with no objective or learning words after that, choose something else.  Engagement is a tool, not a goal.

Reflections on Student Engagement with John T Almarode

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

The first one that I will tackle is the one I think might be easiest to implement.  It was a session on creating engagement in your classroom and how to design engaging tasks.  The session was given by John T. Almarode.  If I believed in spirit animals, I would want him to be mine.  He is a quirky, fun, sassy Southerner who so obviously loves his job that you can’t help but be drawn in, and what you are being drawn into is valuable, smart, research-based information that you enjoy learning.

This session could be broken down into these sections:

1. Assessing the level of thinking students are at so that you can teach them one level above that.
2. The characteristics of an engaging task
3. Differentiation of lessons to provide equity to students

I am going to focus this post on that middle section because I think it is the one I can start implementing immediately.  The other two will require more time to make some design changes in my lessons.  I may blog about those as I deal with them as well, but here’s a good place to start.

According to John Almarode, there are 8 characteristics of engaging lessons.  This list was developed as the result of observations made in 20,000 classroom observations.  This is a credible sample size, and the methodology is strong.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - Imagine the frustration you feel at a faculty meeting if you are given a task and told to get started, but you aren’t really clear yet on what you are supposed to do.  Now imagine that happening at least once a day.  A lot of the misbehavior in classrooms comes from student frustration with not being sure what they are supposed to be doing.  If you want an engaged classroom, you have to be clear about what they should do. Be clear about what the target looks like.  
2. Emotional Safety - Your classroom must be a safe place to learn.  Students must not be allowed to laugh at someone giving a wrong answer or make fun of them.  That is not, however, the only component to emotional safety in your classroom.  It also means having the means to recover after having made a mistake.  Is there a way to get feedback, revise their work, and do better?  (Don’t get crazy, y’all.  I’m not talking about retaking summative assessments. I’m talking about daily tasks and work-in-progress check on projects.)
3. Personal Response - Students, if you haven’t noticed, care a lot about their own opinions.  That’s not unusual.  We did and do too.  Can students bring their own perspective into a task?  If so, they will be more likely to be engaged in it.
4. Sense of Audience - Have you ever had a job where you had to look busy?  It’s more exhausting than actually being busy.  I had a job once where I got done with the daily tasks by about 3pm, so if the phone wasn’t ringing much, I had little to do for the remaining two hours.  If my boss saw that, he would give me “busy work.”  Making a graph out of data was something I was happy to do if we were going to use the graph to analyze advertising trends, but we weren’t.  He was giving me the graph task so that I wouldn’t be sitting at the desk waiting for the phone to ring.  I started making up interesting and productive tasks for myself just to keep this kind of nonsense from happening.  The educational equivalent of this has to be doing something just to get a grade for it.  Students want to know that the task is valuable to someone other than the teacher.  If there is a way to provide a real audience (parents coming in to hear a speech, other students or staff members to ask questions about the project you did, or bringing in a community member that works in the subject area of the task), please make a way to do it.  
5. Social Interaction - The adolescent brain is developmentally social (See Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore).  They will learn more if they can tell someone else what they know.  This can be as simple as think-pair-share.  It can be as complex as finding an expert to present their findings to.  At least once per task, your students should be explaining their thinking to SOMEONE.
6. Choice - I do not mean completely free choice because that is dangerous and not educationally sound, but where you can work in limited choice, you will get more engagement and better work.  Create a menu of ways students can choose from to show their work.  (You can write a song, record a podcast, or draw illustrations showing the trig identities.)  You could give them list of topics to do a project on.  (You can learn about electrochemistry equally well by studying batteries, electroplating, or electric eels, so let them choose which one they want to learn about.)
7. Novelty - The human brain craves familiarity, which is why we watch TV re-runs and listen to old songs, but it also craves novelty, which is why seek out new restaurants.  Sometimes, when we find something good, we use it too much.  (When GRACE teachers discovered Kahoot, kids got sick of reviewing for every test in every class with it.) Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - Authentic doesn’t have to mean that it is actually happening.  (This was good to hear because I have had trouble trying to connect everything to actual situations and feeling guilty about it.)  It doesn’t mean real-world.  In fact, you may not want it to be.  If you have a student whose home life is that of an alcoholic parent who has to get their siblings ready for school, you don’t want to ask them to write about something fun they do with their parents.  It means it COULD happen.  John Almarode's example involved an elementary ecology project.  The teacher had given students the assignment to create an imaginary creature and then figure out what habitat it would have to have. (Now, I do have to say I think that might be a fun creative writing or art assignment because of the imagination it involves, but it wouldn’t be a great ecology project the student isn’t learning about real ecology.)  Instead, give them a project in which they are zookeepers who have to choose an exotic animal and design a zoo habitat that will keep that animal alive in the climate where you live.  That’s authentic without being real-world.  

If you are thinking that there is no way you could have all 8 of these every day, take a deep breath.  You are right.  You can’t.  The point isn’t to get them all every day.  The point is to work in as many as you can where you can.  What the walkthrough data revealed is that having at least three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement (and the first two should already be a normal part of your practice).  Having only 2 of them resulted in (are you ready for this) only 17% engagement.  Isn’t that crazy?  Just the difference in one of these items makes that big of a difference.  By the way, having only one of them results in zero engagement.  

This seems overwhelming, but if you have created a positive classroom climate, you should already have #2, and if you are a teacher who cares enough about your practice to read educational blogs, you probably already communicate clear expectations, so #1 is a given.  Working in one or two more of these should be the first thing you do when designing new projects.

As I sat in this session, I tried to think of the topics I have the hardest time making engaging.  As much as I love the periodic table, it isn’t the easiest thing to get 8th-graders to love.  There aren’t a ton of hands-on ways to teach it.  At the end the session, I thought, “Well, I’ve identified a problem, but I still don’t have a solution.”  During the next morning’s keynote, it suddenly clicked. I think I got it.  I can put in novelty and social interaction by having the kids be elements and move (oh, yeah, in another session with Marcia Tate, we were encouraged to have students move) according to properties.  Something along the lines giving each child an element to be and making the room the periodic table.  Determine if you are a metal or non-metal and move to the part of the room where you should be.  Raise your hand if you have low electronegativity.  Who has the highest electronegativity (one of them will have to be fluorine)?  Who has 8 valence electrons?  I’m still working this out in my mind, but I think it could be a great way to make some of what I am doing more personal (and Marcia Tate also encourages role-playing as a technique).  If I put the elements in a google doc and let them each choose the one they want to be (but remove it from the list because we can’t have two of the same element), then they will also have choice.

As John had us do at the conference, turn to your neighbor and say, “We can totally do this.”