Tag: SLA

26/365 A Great Way for Students to Prep for Quizzes

In observing some of my student teachers this semester, I noticed they were approaching in-class quizzes in some pretty traditional ways. In debriefing the lessons after observing, I kept wanting to explain how my friend and colleague Matt Kay has his students review their reading and prepare for quizzes. Luckily, Matt’s a great guy and agreed to type up his practice so I could share it here.

When he mentions SATs, that stands for Student Assistant Teachers. At SLA, seniors who have room for an elective in their schedule can sign up to be SATs and work as assistant teachers alongside those teachers they’ve connected with during the course of their high school experience. It’s a beautiful piece of built-in mentorship, and Matt highlights its possibilities here.

From Matt:

My classes are divided into Small Learning Communities that I call “Pods.” Each one has 3-4 students. In the first quarter, they are chosen at random, but for each quarter after that, they are created with a purposeful mix of ability levels and social observations.
These pods meet up the day after any assigned reading. The students walk into class and sit immediately into their pods. They then have 10-12 minutes to discuss the previous night’s reading, and the notes that they have taken the night before. I have found that the struggling students are far more willing to ask each other questions than they are to ask during whole-group instruction. When this time is up, the students move to their seats and take the quiz.
Right now, my student assistants are making the quizzes. They are all factual questions that are not answered in spark notes or cliff notes. (I assess richer understandings in different ways). The SATs come to class with seven questions, and I pick five while the pods are meeting. The SATs give the questions, then they grade the quizzes.

Can you imagine making this when you were in school?

Watch this first (and comment), then come back.

I ask the question for two reasons:

  • I can’t imagine being bold enough to tackle the topic of this documentary while I was in high school in rural Illinois. Our history curriculum rarely, if ever, stepped outside of a study of the wars. This is to say nothing of its almost total ignorance of marginalized groups and the completely blind eye it turned to LGBT history.
  • The quality is pretty wonderful. I’d use this in my classroom to intro any of the topics listed above (probably  not war), and generate class conversation and questions about marginalized and untaught histories. Max and Sam are working with a brilliant script, mined excellent primary sources, and kept a close watch on the final product. I may have had their taste in school, but I didn’t have anything that looked like their abilities. Maybe I was an underachiever.

Pretty tremendous.

Things I Know 101 of 365: I teach at a wonderful school

If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

– Proverb

In advisory Monday, we talked about public displays of affection. A couple of days of the week, it’s Spring in Philadelphia, our students appear to have taken note of it.

In an effort to avert any of our 19 ninth grade advisees hanging all over one another in the hall the way so many others have been in the last few weeks, my co-advisor and I decided to meet the issue head on.

We spent a solid portion of advisory discussing how you treat and touch the people you’re attracted to as well as how you set boundaries for touching with the people who are attracted to you.

For good measure, we also talked about how to handle situations where your friends were the ones being hung on and clearly wish they weren’t.

Oh, and I talked about hickies.

In a move that had me feeling all of my 8 years of classroom experience, I brought up hickies and had an open and frank conversation about what it said about a person to want to put their mark (of ownership) on someone else and what it said about a person to let someone else mark them.

“I’ve never thought about it like that,” said one advisee who’d been eyeing me suspiciously as I made my case.

Tonight, I received an e-mail with a link to this story from the Daily News with the comment, “Fodder for advisory, or would it be too much?”

The e-mail was passed along by one of our advisory parents.

We hadn’t e-mailed the parents our lessons or anything, this mom had simply had a conversation about her student’s school day and noted the story when it crossed her path. She was being active and supportive.

In another moment of active support today, a fellow teacher engaged me in a conversation about what I would be studying at Harvard. As conversations do, this one found tangents in teachers unions, sustainability, teacher leadership and what we want for kids. After a day of teaching and a faculty meeting, this colleague invested his time in trying to know me better and to exchange ideas.

The faculty meeting our conversation followed had focused on two main issues. The second issue was the writing of narrative report cards – something I spent the better part of my afternoon crafting. Twice each school year, we get to sit with our students’ work and write thoughtfully about their progress, challenges and successes. I waded through a quarter’s worth of quantitative data to make certain I was saying things that showed each student I’d been paying attention throughout our time together and urged them to continue growing in the final quarter of the year.

Earlier in the meeting, the faculty had been urged to continue to be the amazing school we are in the face of tremendous, district-wide budget cuts. In a time where Chris could just have easily encouraged us to fall to our knees and begin wailing to the heavens, his message was that we should do all we can to continue to serve our students.

The students were not the only focus of the day.

Parents were rallied tonight in an emergency meeting of the Home and School Association to alert them to the budget crisis and begin to move them to raise the money we’ll need next year for supplies and programs while also asking them to contact state officials to let them know our school has a voice.

While the meeting was attended by those you’d expect , it was also attended by students. Not just students who were tagging along with their parents, mind you. We had students speaking out on what they wanted to do to help the school, students helping to set up for the meeting and students in the audience asking pointed questions and offering suggestions for fundraising.

They were engaging the agency they’ve known in our care to solve the problem of sustaining our community.

It was this agency I was reminded of when I continued to scroll through my e-mail on my walk home tonight. Aside from the advisory parent’s e-mail, I had a message from a student turning in homework, a message letting me know a student finished reading a book of choice and wanted to know if she should write a review, a message from a student saying she’d have class during a scheduled meeting but would e-mail me if she had any questions.

I work in a place of invested individuals who teach and learn on their worst days and lead, create, inspire and question on their best.

Everyone should have such a place.

Things I Know 23 of 365: Bars are better than pedestals

The time to make up your mind about people is never.

– Katherine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story

Someone mentioned to me the other day that I’d set the bar high.

I like that.

Alex is a former G8 student of mine who pole vaulted when he moved on to high school. I went to cheer him on once. Never having seen pole vaulting before, I was struck with the concept of it.

Kids were competing against two people – whoever cleared the highest measurement and their own highest vault.

The day I watched Alex compete, he didn’t place. The other athletes were of a different caliber. When he came over to talk to us following the event, though, Alex didn’t mention how he’d measured up to the others. Instead, he was frustrated with his own performance compared to what he knew he was capable of.

He’d vaulted his best for the day, but knew he could do better.

In Alex’s mind, his bar was higher.

A friend of mine had to call a student’s parents the other day. Not for the best of reasons. The student was terrified.

Her parents were pedestal people.

Their daughter could do no wrong. She was an A student. She was a star athlete. If she joined an organization, that group would be foolish not to have her as its president.

The phone call was to alert her parents that the student’s homework was off of late. As a result, her grade was slipping, and the teacher wanted to soften the blow.

The pedestal was shaking.

When bars are set, they give us something to shoot for – a reason to aim higher the next time. We know we’ve been there and want to go a little bit higher.

When we’re placed on pedestals, we’ve nothing to do but fear falling.

Bars are better.

Friday marks the start of SLA’s fourth iteration of EduCon. Watching the Interwebs, it is clear many are looking for a pedestal experience.

Don’t.

Education policy in the U.S. at the moment is built around pedestal experiences. We ask this year’s students to crawl up the the pedestal of last year’s students while we arbitrarily move it a bit higher. I never understood the purpose of King of the Mountain.

Set a bar instead.

Hell, set many bars.

For those returning to EduCon, consider your experience last year, what you took home, how it shifted your practice. Then, think what you can do this year to own the experience a little more, to ask a little more of yourself. Move the bar.

For those attending EduCon for the first time, decide what you want to learn, ask what assumptions you want to question, and how you want to inform your own practice. Then, do that. Set a bar.

EduCon is no more some sort of educational Mecca than my English class is a literary Jerusalem.

If you want to get the most from EduCon, approach it the same way I’ll be approaching teaching tomorrow – mindful of the best days and thoughtful of what I must do to be a little bit better than that.

Things I Know 3 of 365: I like to help

Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was hoodwinked today.

In the minutes between arriving for the start of the school day and the actual school day, I was tricked into going to SLA’s fifth floor. As my classroom is on the third floor, this was decidedly out of my way.

Diana brought her weekly load of produce to give to the kids and needed help getting it to her classroom. She asked for my help. I moaned and complained, claiming I hadn’t time to go ALL the way up and then ALL the way back down.

I compromised by telling her I’d help get the load to the elevator and then part her company at the third floor.

And then, I didn’t push the right button.

It was nice to see her classroom.

As we were exiting the elevator, I joked it was my midwestern subconscious that led me to help.

I was only partly joking.

Truth be told, I knew when I was complaining in the office that I’d be taking that fruit to the fifth floor.

I like to help.

Really.

A little over a month ago, I met a first-year TFA teacher at my local coffee shop. She was meeting with her program director, and I got drawn in to their conversation. I butted in for a few minutes dropping the pieces of my classroom I thought could be of use as she struggled to reconcile the teacher she wanted to be with the teacher she’s starting out as. When I left, I gave her my card and said I’d be happy to sit with her and just talk about teaching.

A few weeks later, we had coffee and did just that.

Hopefully, we’ll be doing it again soon.

I knew when I heard the frustration in her voice that I’d do whatever I could to help her right the rocky ship of her classroom.

I like to help.

Don’t you?

It’s what I hope for my students every day. I hope that they help those around them. We call it “collaboration,” but it’s really helping. It’s really caring.

Nel Noddings writes, “I would not want to choose, but if I had to choose whether my child would be a reader or a loving human being, I would choose the latter with alacrity.”

I wouldn’t want to choose either, but I would choose the same.

Some unquantifiable part of why I like to help comes from the feeling of worth it brings me. The other equally unquantifiable part of why I like to help comes from the memory of all those times I’ve needed help and it was freely given – the extended deadline, the midnight statistics tutoring session, moving to a third-floor apartment in the late summer heat with the aid of someone who’d known me only a few days.

I will commonly tell whoever will listen that I want my students to leave better speakers, listeners, readers, writers and thinkers.

Chris says he hopes our students leave SLA thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind.

We don’t say it because it is embedded in how we treat one another, but more than all of the above, I think we want them to leave us capable and willing to help.

Help isn’t doing it for someone. Help is doing for someone.

Help is not telling a runner to sit down so you can finish the race for him. Help is handing them the cup of water and telling them to keep running.