The End of a Great Streak
I wrote two grant proposals this year and did NOT get either of them. With that came an end to an incredible 13 year streak of getting at least one grant per year. I have been very fortunate. But with failing and broken equipment and the threat of losing the 1:1 environment that I have crafted the loss of one of those two grants in particular is hitting me very hard because it was a tech grant. I know, I’m being self indulgent. Sometimes that’s okay.
I have five netbooks that have provided my students enough equipment to have a 1:1 and it has been very useful for my students to learn Science and blog about the learning. Those five netbooks were given to my 6th grade project because I teach all the 6th graders and I was tasked with exposing them to the Solo software suite. I was given those for three years and next year is my last year. Knowing that I applied for a $10,000 grant that would have added five devices to my program to replace the five netbooks plus replacing all the probes and sensor interfaces that have been damage and no longer work made not getting it all that much harder. To my dismay we will be short a sensor interface and several probes. And I don’t even want to think how we’ll manage if I don’t get a another grant to replace those five netbooks in two years.
I have plenty to be thankful for and I have to keep reminding myself of that. In my 21 years of teaching I have received 31 grants for a total of $315, 109 ($179,109 of that to be used either by me or directly for my classes). I got my first grant my second year teaching and my second grant my fourth year teaching. I got my third grant my ninth year teaching and that began the 13 year streak. Only six years of my 21 with no grants. It’s been a great run. Am I quitting? No. But I know it’s too late to get a grant for next year and next year the pressure will be on and with my bad luck streak lately I’m beginning to doubt whether I’ll get another grant in time. The grant project that I’ve had the most success writing has lately not been bearing fruit. I either need to change it up a bit or maybe even think of something else that is grant worthy. It’s all about the project and what kids will be doing.
The tech grant that I didn’t get was a long shot. I knew I was in trouble when I came to the part of the application that asked me to list the technologies currently available to my students. What? Ouch! I can see how that looked to those reading the proposals. Who is this guy? He already has everything he needs! How can I convince them that in order for my project to continue at its current level I need to replace broken equipment? I couldn’t. Yeah, I know, boo-hoo for me. But come on, 13 years of straight grant getting and now it’s over. I am sad.
What’s the worst part? I poured my heart and soul into the proposal. I came so close to all the word limits and got my thoughts out within their guidelines! Ugh.
In case it can help anyone, here’s the proposal. I don’t know if it will help but the first time someone asked to read one of my grant proposals it really helped because the teacher was able to see that you don’t have to be a technical writer or a great writer to get your ideas across and get a cool project funded. But be prepared for failure. You will probably, like me, write many grant proposals (I mean you should) and get a few. But think of that. You may get one or a few. It’s worth it in my mind.
Here are some other posts I’ve written sharing grant proposals:
WA STEM Grant Proposal
Sample Grant Proposal
It’s very doable. You just need to take the time and write proposals.
Assembly sans Awards
Thursday, March 29, 2012 my advisory class hosted our school’s March assembly. The theme was the Month of the Young Adolescent. It was the first assembly I’ve attended at my school where there were no monthly or student of the month awards given to students. That’s the first out of the 132 monthly assemblies that I’ve attended in my 15 years here at Chimacum Middle School that wasn’t an awards ceremony.
My advisory entertained and recognized their peers without handing out of any certificates. The only two parts of the assembly that even looked like awards was when the ASB called out the best decorated doors from student-led conferences and when the Science Olympiad coach/teacher called out the students who represented our school at the national competition.
Back in 2008 my advisory class hosted the March Month of Young Adolescent assembly. Here’s a copy of the agenda we put together for our assembly (click here if you can’t see the embedit.in one below):
Fast forward four years later and look at the agenda for this year’s Month of the Young Adolescent assembly (click here if you can’t see the embedit.in one below):
In 2008 students were asked to sit while we called out the names of those getting certificates for many different things for most of the assembly. My advisory did plan a mini talent show for the fun part. This year we spent the entire 50 minutes on the fun part! We spent 18 minutes watching my advisory’s new show segment and the rest of the time we put on a short skit, silly stringed teachers, had kids freeze dance, and drew names for candy bars. We thought it was a very fun assembly, especially two days before Spring Break and especially to honor young adolescents! We told the rest of the school that we just didn’t think it was fair selecting only some of our students to receive an award for being a young adolescent.
There were a couple of kids who told me that they missed not getting an award. One in particular really wants to get student of the month and this month she didn’t even get a chance! So this was just a first step. A first step to see if we can run our monthly assemblies differently or not. I still want to challenge our students to find ways to feel appreciated by their teachers without getting a certificate while others don’t.
We’ll see what happens next month. Will the advisory hosting next month’s assembly have awards or will they find other ways to honor all the wonderful things our students are doing?
History of this endeavor:
Awards, Grades, and Competition
Awards as a Habit
Grades and Feedback
Here's what my progress reports used to look like.
Just a couple of years ago this is what my progress reports looked like. This is what I would give students every three to four weeks for the whole school year. This was what I thought would motivate my students. A majority of them were never motivated by this. And those who got “good” grades? They craved those points and A’s. They depended on them and wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their A’s.
It wasn’t the find of learning environment I wanted for my students, to say the least. I wanted Science learning to be an exploration where curiosity and mistakes both went hand in hand. Where students could look up anything they wanted at any time. Where texting and Facebooking were life lines and not “cheating.”
First thing I had to do was to get rid of grades. With support from teachers like Joe Bower I approached my principal and she supported my plan wholeheartedly. Our school year is divided into three trimesters with three final reporting periods and three midterm periods. I tell all my students, sometimes 135 out of a school of around 250, that in order to take the emphasis out of grades and in order to make failure and mistakes something necessary for learning that all of them will get a pass from me for every grading period as long as they learn something.
Grading being out of the way, I then needed ways to give students feedback. Here are two great blogs for ideas of how to give feedback without grades: Replacing Grading by Joe Bower and SE2R approach to narrative feedback by Mark Barnes.
So I tried a form of standards-based grading. I started with the standards that most closely related to the projects and activities that we were doing. Knowing from Alfie Kohn and from my own experience that numbers, letters, stars, or any type of mark will be the main focus I used words to let kids and parents know if they were showing understanding of each standard from the work they did in class. Here’s what a standards-based progress report looks like using Easy Grade Pro:
Standards-Based Progress Report
This way students and parents can see what the standards are so that if students have ideas about how they want to show learning or ideas about different ways to learn it they can! That’s really about all it’s good for. It doesn’t provide any feedback at all because it’s summative. I’m also experimenting with this Marzano style rubric using the standards to have kids self-assess their understanding by providing evidence themselves:
Standards Self-Assessment Rubric
Both of the above methods are summative, as grading tends to be. Basically, I use the standards-based progress report as a hook. If parents see that progress report and they get curious I explain that to get a better picture of what their child is learning in Science they should visit their child’s Science blog. That Science blog is their child’s electronic portfolio for Science. Everything we learn in Science either becomes a reflection question or a share what you’ve learned assignment. Each blog has a list of assignments followed by the actual assignments their child has completed and had published:
Now time for a reality check. I know the best way to give my students feedback is with written narratives much like Joe Bower and Mark Barnes describe in their blogs. One of the least effective ways is to give them verbal feedback (telling them instead of writing it down). I see 134 students a day. I do not have the time to provide valuable, effective feedback on everything we do. No one can. Even with traditional grading many assignments are just checked off trying to pass for feedback. So I give my students verbal feedback as often as I can each and every day because I know that I cannot give every student narrative feedback on every assignment.
First line of attack is to check in on students, ask questions, and give feedback to help them progress. If I notice through formative assessment activities that a small group is having a problem I will sit with them and question them to help them figure it out. If it’s a majority of students who are having problems with something I will do a whole-class re-teach or offer different resources for kids. I can give feedback based on what I see them writing on their blog assignments, which make great formative assessments.
Whatever method you use to give your students feedback I believe that it will be more effective without grades or any marks. How often do teachers say that students just look at the grade and don’t even read their comments?! The comments is what the students need to be reading, not a number, a letter, or a mark. Yet that mark will take precedence. Try leaving out those percentages, numbers, letters, or marks and focus on the comments.
Connecting
Connecting is cool. We live in the age of being connected. All the time, or at least anytime. Anytime is probably healthier because we should do other things besides stay connected all the time. The reason I integrate the kinds of technologies I use with my students is to have them connect, collaborate, and create. Every now and then a really good connection is made and I get reinvigorated. That happened to me recently.
I retweeted a tweet about this new service for teachers called ClassConnect. Shortly after that I got a tweet from its creator, Eric Simons (@ericsimons40), saying that he wanted to pick my brain about ClassConnect. We set up a Skype meeting and we talked this past Thursday, March 22.
As we talked I found out that Eric is a recent high school graduate. I asked him if ClassConnect was a hobby because I wanted to know how he was working on it being so recently graduated from high school. I found his story very inspiring. Turns out that Eric began dabbling in php programming his freshman year in high school. By his junior year he was disillusioned with school and his chemistry teacher asked him what it would take to get him motivated. The teacher let him create a website where students in his class could collaborate and connect. I guess making that website spurred his interest in creating ClassConnect because he put off going to college to pursue his dream. And what a noble dream.
Eric wanted to create a space that would work something like a one stop lesson sharing, learning management system, and social network for teachers. He is looking to fashion a site to save teachers time! What is it that is stopping our unconnected colleagues from tweeting and even blogging? Time. Creating such a space has by no means been an easy task for Eric. He told me that even though he got some money invested into his project it went quickly as he purchased servers to run his site. He’s been moving around sleeping on couches and currently has moved back home see this through.
I was so moved by his story. I told him that I had just earlier that same day asked a couple of my 8th graders what it would take to get them motivated to do some learning in my class. And here I got a really cool response from someone I didn’t know before that day! Eric is the embodiment of so much of what I’ve been reading about in the blogs that I read everyday and the tweets that I retweet so much. The fact that we need to find, or at least create the space for our students to find, what it is that they will be passionate about so they will get engaged and take control of their education! (And let’s remember that not all kids figure this out right away. I remind myself of this because I teach kids who are only 11 to 13 years of age. So no, those 8th graders I asked don’t yet have an idea.)
So this young man is working hard following his dream. He is making ClassConnect so that teachers can have a place to share lessons. If you find a lesson you can use and adapt for your students you can add it to your space. It’s like Moodle meets a lesson database that continually gets updated. And what’s more Eric wants to add a social networking component so that if I find a lesson for middle school kids on photosynthesis I can connect with the teacher, or other teachers, who are also teaching photosynthesis and collaborate on it! I told Eric how important that was for a teacher working in a small, rural school where often I am the only teacher in my entire district teaching the content I teach. I am impressed by how Eric is connecting with educators, asking us questions, seeing what we need, all to make his product something we would be able to use to actually save us time!
This is what I want my students to see. How they can use what they do for fun, connecting, as a way to help them do what they are passionate about. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, our students already know how to use social networking for fun so I want them to discover how they can use it for whatever career they choose.
Rain Gardens
Rain Garden Outdoor Lesson
Friday, March 9, we had six Washington Conservation Corps (WCC) crew members visit all five of my Science classes to talk conservation, watersheds, pollution, our creek and to share a rain garden they planted on our campus. It was a great experience for my kids to see a group of highly motivated young people who are making a difference helping the environment. They shared stories of how they each got into the WCC and listening to how they each got involved and at what stage of their schooling made them a perfect group! Of the six of them one was from New York, one from Wyoming, and the rest were from Oregon and Washington (one a Chimacum Schools alum!). Four of them joined the WCC after graduating college with degrees in fisheries and biology while one joined WCC after a couple of years of college, planning to go back and get her degree, and the other joined WCC on his way to college! A great representation of life after high school! Like AmeriCorps they said they could work for a year or two years and they all were very excited and happy with their choice to join the WCC and get outdoors to help the environment.
They led my students through an in-class activity to learn about watersheds and how water flows through a forested area versus a clear cut or paved area (or grassy area too because grass doesn’t allow water to soak in and make it to aquifers!). They sprayed water on kids’ forearms, on the top, hairier part and the bottom smoother part, to illustrate the flow of water in a watershed. Then we took a short walk to the rain garden they built where they showed us how it works.
As a middle school Science teacher I appreciate opportunities like this to have people come into my classrooms (we can even Skype if need be). Being able to take kids outdoors for learning is also something I think is very important for students to do when learning Science. Even though it was a bit windy and cool enough that some kids were uncomfortable it was a great day to be outdoors because we weren’t rained on. This was a wonderful way to spend a Friday in Science class! Thanks WCC crew!
WCC Crew in Chimacum Middle School's Rain Garden
What is School For?
Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License, FreeFoto FREE USE license.
That’s what Seth Godin, author of Linchpin and other books, is asking us in his blog post www.stopstealingdreams.com is ready to read and share.
Stop Stealing Dreams is a free book Godin wrote to get discussions around education reform going. Why did he do that? Because his readers ask him, “What do you think we ought to do about education?” more than any other question. Education reform is a hot topic that everyone should be interested in because everyone has to be in school at some point in their life (and yes, I’m including homeschool as a type of schooling).
So if you haven’t read it, check it out. But more than that tell someone about it. Start and/or continue a conversation of what education should be for everyone. I appreciate Godin’s efforts at asking us what education should be like because it is the 99%, the students, parents, and teachers, who should be deciding what education should be, not the super wealthy (they can already afford any type of education they want for their kids) or the legislators (you better believe that they are choosing the type of education they want for their children).
What are your thoughts? What is school for, for you and your kids?
Student Engagement
I think about student engagement, what we call on-task behavior, a lot. All the time it seems. I’ve written a few blogs on the subject. I wrote What is On Task back in April of 2011, I wrote How Much Socializing Can You Put Up With on August of 2011, I wrote, I’m Bored, So What on October of 2011, and I wrote Innovation, Passion, Engagement on January 2012.
With regards to What is On Task I didn’t improve much on my 6th grade water quality project. Allowing for kids to learn at their own pace still resulted in some finishing every component, some finishing little to none of the components, and some falling all over an in between area. With the 8th grade plant project I am implementing some of the ideas people suggested in the comments. I am including more frequent, shorter deadlines for different parts of the project to give some more structure than last year. We’ll see how that goes. Already teams, and kids, are at different stages from those who are off and running to those who are still at the starting line.
I look at my own kids. My daughter has never done anything, from potty training to eating her veggies, until she is ready. No manner of coaxing, cajoling, or disciplining has managed to do otherwise. She’s eight. My son is different. He responded better to coaxing, cajoling and disciplining. He would do as he was told, when he was told but he is more passive aggressive in letting us know that he’s not ready to do something. He’s 14. Two different ways of letting the adults in their lives know when they are not ready to do something.
So as a teacher what I am trying to do? I am under the delusion that I can get 27 to 30 unique, individual kids to do what I want them to do when I want them to do it.
So what am I learning from these experiences? Ease up on kids without easing up them. If you think that’s nuts, you’re right! But that is what teachers try to do every day whether they realize it or not. It’s that fine balance between having kids work and learn and realizing that not all our students are going to want to, or be able to, work and learn every day, every period, in every subject. This is what drives me crazy and leads to sleepless nights! I don’t know when to ease up, when to be okay with off task behavior, when to feel okay moving on even though not everyone is done, when it’s okay to extend a deadline even though 10 to 20% of kids are done. One thing I do know from working with so many kids is that no matter how hard I try to make a lesson, activity, or project engaging, even if I let them choose everything, it’s NOT engaging to everyone! Why??
One thing that helps me sleep at night is the knowledge that middle school aged kids come in all shapes and sizes, and that they are NOT all at the same level of anything. And after 21 years of teaching, 15 of those at the same building, I see that even those kids that worry me the most in middle school turn out okay as they get older. Maturity plays an essential role and I have to keep reminding myself of that. I have to keep reminding myself that most of those little 6th graders and those bigger 8th graders (some bigger than me!) do mature into high school students and adults who will be okay.
It’s that lesson, that most of my students will be okay, that helps me ease up on them now. Ease up by not being so frantic that they all do everything I have planned for them and instead to allow them to tell me what they will and can do when they are in my classroom. It’s not easy for me but at least I’m working on it because I still don’t have this student engagement thing figured out.
Have you figured this thing out?
6th Graders Finishing Water Quality
Our amazing water quality project has come to an end. Students have been busy the last few weeks sharing presentations of their work with each other, writing final conclusion blogs (#comments4kids), and self-assessing their understandings of the Science standards that most closely fit our project.
Since we are beginning a completely different unit studying physical science students who are not done with any of the above can access any of it from home to finish. Their goal is to have all this work done by March 28 for student-led conferences! Parents, don’t forget that you can see what we’re doing in Science at my HW/Daily Work site.
Here is a picture of the Pacific Northwest Peninsula. We find it on a map of WA state by looking for the peninsula that looks like a dragon. The dragon’s head is where Port Townsend can be found while just south of there, where the heart of the dragon would be, we find Chimacum and Port Hadlock and Port Ludlow. On this image you can see the two forks of our creek. It’s the west fork that passes through our campus so that is the one that we get all our data from.
This image is a zoomed in view of the first image. This one allows a slightly more detailed view of Chimacum Creek, including both the West and East Forks.
Why Collaborate?
Teachers Collaborating
Why collaborate? That is the question. Let me focus in a bit on a more specific question. If you, in a middle and a high school, were given the opportunity to meet regularly with your peers why would you want to? What could all the Science teachers in grades 6 through 12 meet about if they had one or two hours a week, two to three times a month to meet? What would Math, Social Studies, and Language Arts (English) teachers do if they could meet two to three times a month? What would you do with the Special Education, Art, PE, Music, Band, Choir, Media Productions, and Counselor during those meetings?
It has to start with the why. Why do teachers need time to collaborate? In my experience and training the reason I collaborate with my peers in Professional Learning Communities or PLC’s is to improve student learning. That’s it. Not raise test scores but to improve learning.
Here are some ideas that I thought of after talking with a couple of my colleagues in my school district:
Topics we could address at these regular collaboration (otherwise known as PLC) meetings could include power standards, core standards, TPEP (the new WA State teacher evaluation model), tech integration or 21st century teaching, lesson planning or study, looking at student work, AfL, vertical planning and alignment, talking about kids, discipline, school climate, bullying, and evaluating student data ACROSS the content areas in the areas of literacy (which include reading and writing).
Here are some concerns and ideas raised by other educators in my district:
“It seems without a doubt that the most powerful collaboration opportunities might be in working together across content areas. However, it is also very challenging to make this consistently meaningful for teachers and their students. ”
“To get more teachers on board, I think we might need to find a way to solicit more ideas on meaningful collaboration. We also need some creative ideas on scheduling–alternating common and individual planning periods, early release, whatever.”
Areas to consider: “Furlough compensation, Data/evidence gathering for evaluation, Work on transitioning to common core state standards/assessments, Looking at student work/data for improved student learning, and Exploring instructional frameworks to improve teacher practice.”
These are all great conversations to be having. If you have any input on these matters I would love to hear from you. How do other educators around the world collaborate and what value do they find in collaboration. I’m a strong believer in deprivatizing our work and I feel that collaboration is the way to do that.
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