Leaving Some Children Behind?

As seems wont to happen at family gatherings, today I got into a political discussion with some family members. We discussed performance-based pay, and the discussion moved into performance-based pay for teachers.

Personally, I'm a fan of performance-based pay for teachers IF it truly reflects the performance of the individual teacher. If students took a test at the beginning of the term and at the end, and the teacher's performance was based on students' mastery of material, gained during the time they were taught by that teacher, then okay. According to an article by Malcolm Gladwell, "Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material." However it is that Hanushek is figuring it out, if we used that measure and it's accurate, that sounds good to me.

The negative reaction I got was mystifying.

First, I was challenged on whether it is possible to actually judge performance. It is true, we don't currently have instruments that judge student performance in all disciplines, only in the ones that are currently part of the "core". However, tests could be developed that would measure what we say we're teaching. Standardized tests that test the curriculum aren't always bad - teachers should be teaching the curriculum, and if they shouldn't then the curriculum should be changed. (I'm not discussing school-based bonuses where all teachers are paid based on student performance on core standardized tests, I'm arguing individual performance.)

The example given? PE. Apparently it's impossible to test how far or fast a student can run at the beginning of the term and test it again at the end of the term to see if there's a difference. Or if it's possible then it isn't fair because, apparently, motivating students to perform or otherwise getting them to do the curriculum is more than a teacher should be responsible for.

I suggested that good teachers are able to get their students to learn the material. Period. That's what makes someone a good teacher.

I was told that I'm unrealistic, because I work in a private school. I don't understand what it's like to have a classroom of 40 kids (largely true) who have varying ability and interest (untrue). It's not possible to support the low kids and help them rise while at the same time boosting the ones who are already above grade level. (You know, like by differentiating instruction and assignments.) A teacher should not be held equally responsible for a kid who is low and truly unable to grasp the material and for one who is low but highly capable.

I am venting here, because Christmas is so not the time to get into a huge fight with a close family member who is being... um... argumentative, but to say I was dismayed is an understatement.

I kept thinking about a master teacher I know. The thing that makes this teacher great is that he believes that every student can master the material. For some kids it's easy, for others it's a challenge, but he knows that every kid can do it. He doesn't teach easy stuff either, and I've never seen him dumb down material - he has high expectations. But he is willing to go the extra mile, help students who need it, and believe in them. He lives growth mindset.

I don't think teachers should be held responsible for students' prior knowledge nor should they be held responsible for what happens to a kid outside of school, and both those things do impact the student who shows up in class. But a teacher should be held responsible for how much knowledge they impart to students in their class. All students, not just the polite ones, not just the likeable ones, not just the ones who are at grade level. It does a disservice to the rest to ignore them and refuse to be responsible for teaching them too. Why would a teacher be okay with leaving some children behind?

Not as hard as you think

My students are working on a project right now, where they have to digitize three-dimensional objects by specifying points in an x,y,z format. They then have to describe quads which have four points.

This is really good for the students. It's part of our unit on digitizing data, so it's good for them to understand how real-life objects get mapped into and modeled by the computer. But even better, it's good for them to practice spacial skills. Spacial skills are the one area (of math) where girls really do fall behind boys in brain development, so practicing is good for their brains. Yay for neurogenesis!

Not surprisingly, many of them find this task difficult. The task is unlike most they've performed before, so understanding it is a challenge. Then keeping the x, y, and z dimensions straight is a challenge. Keeping track of the points is a challenge, especially for the ones with messy handwriting and other organizational challenges. And the class has been battered by swine flu and other absences; even with me posting video of the classes they miss, it isn't the same as being there.

However, I had two conversations last week that made me laugh - and made me wonder how often students psych themselves out about tasks they shouldn't be so worried about. I explained the task to two students who had been absent and were confused. I had them practice creating points and quads so I would be sure they understood what to do. The first one looked at me and said, "That's ALL?" She'd expected it to be so much harder. I think it was harder when I first introduced it a couple of weeks ago, but even with the absence, her brain is more ready now.

The second conversation was more troublesome. It was with a smart student who is insecure about her knowledge and occasionally very disorganized. I went through the material and she showed me she could do the task. We talked for a couple of minutes about the assignment. Then she said, "but I still don't get it." I asked what she didn't get, and she described general confusion with the task.
I asked, "do you know how to figure out a point like you did a couple of minutes ago?"
"Yes"
"Do you understand how to make a quad out of four points like you did a couple of minutes ago?"
"Yes"
"That's it. That's all there is to the assignment. Get the points, make the quads, and type it into the computer."
"But I'm confused!"

At that point the light bulb went on. So I looked at her and said, "No, you're not. You think this is supposed to be hard. So you're worried that you don't understand it because it doesn't seem as hard as you think it's supposed to be. Stop worrying and get to work."

Selling classroom materials

Interesting followup to a Times article about teachers selling classroom materials.

I fall squarely on the side of the capitalist teachers. As long as they're not violating their contracts, I don't think they have any moral obligation to go unpaid for their work.

I have written curriculum for pay before, and I consider it to be owned by whoever paid for it - be it via contract for an outside group or through a summer curriculum development grant at my school. Curriculum I develop on my own for use in my classes is a different story.

I can see an argument that developing curriculum is a part of a teachers' job, akin to being in the classroom teaching and assessing student work. In my case, my administration has made it clear that they don't really care if I change the curriculum; if I want to do so, it's on me to do it on my own time. Work I do on my own time appears to be my own, not of shared ownership with my employer. This is complex and revolves around a reasonable workday, summers off, and all kinds of "what is a teachers' own time?" questions. Hopefully few reasonable people truly believe that every moment of a teacher's life from September to June is owned by the school.

Like copyright protection, if capitalism is leading to improved curriculum, then that's good. If making money on it is motivational and teachers refuse to write new curriculum and stick with the crummy old thing just because it's easy, that's not good for the students.

I should note here that while I have substantially revised my curriculum this year, I have no plans to sell it. I simply think it's acceptable for teachers to do so.

Being Lazy

This week I'm teaching in a camp-like setting. I have ten students learning game programming, three hours per day. All of them chose to be here. I've never taught Scratch or game programming before.

After a first quarter that went at breakneck speed and after finally turning in grades midway through last week, I'm really tired. I also have a towering list of projects to finish. So while I'd like to give my all to teaching game programming, there's just not a lot of 'all' to give. Also, it isn't assessed and I'd like to save more of my all for my real classes.

So I'm being a lazy teacher. I always tell my students that the best programmers are lazy programmers - they look for ways to program that don't require a lot of effort. Thus, things like efficiency are important. Recursion is just an excuse to be lazy - do the least work possible and hand off the rest.

In this case, I gave them an overview of Scratch yesterday in about 90 minutes and I've handed them lots of resources to use in making their games (like the Scratch reference guide and Scratch cards). They know what games are, they have lots of ideas, and mostly what I'm doing is getting out of their way.

It's fascinating to watch them. First, they hate listening to me, so me not doing a lot of direct teaching is working for all of us very nicely. They're all engaged in what they're doing. And their styles are completely different. One is going methodically through all the handouts, following instructions and listening. One couldn't pay attention for the whole 90 minutes yesterday - by 10 minutes in she was taking the game and pushing it to the limits of her imagination. One student couldn't wait to get started on the game she'd thought up (Halo. For Scratch. By a girl.) Another one is spending huge amounts of time working with sounds.

I love camp because I don't care much about the outcomes. No standards, just lots of time for the kids to explore and learn what they like. And they're learning tons, all of it individualized. It isn't a good replacement for regular school, but it's a pretty nice change from the daily grind. And I'm glad to be reminded that when I'm lazy, the students rise to the challenge.

Success

It's been a long couple of weeks; we're definitely into the fall weather with the rain and the gray and the outrageous behavior and the cranky. (That would be outrageous behavior on the part of the students, with me playing the part of Cranky, but you probably knew that.)

Two things happened in the last couple of days that made me feel great.

One, it feels good to know where to find what you need. A friend of mine is doing some teacher professional development. He's been looking for examples of great technology use across the curriculum, specifically looking for a high return on the time invested. I brainstormed a few ideas with him, but it's been a couple of years since I've really thought about this topic, so while I still find it fun to think about, I don't have a lot of great fresh ideas.

Last night I decided to invest an hour to see what I could find. I started with twitter, and thankfully, @dougpete had just posted the link to his daily links blog post. Even if I didn't already adore Doug, he's now my short-term personal hero because his blog, Off The Record, is a treasure trove of resources. I was able to compile a bunch of ideas for my friends just by stealing from Doug. (Thanks Doug!)

Incidentally, the very, very best thing I found was the Learning Science community. WOW. It is a collection - with annotation - of great resources for learning science. From tools like a huge stopwatch applet to online, video-enhanced games about stoichiometry to an interactive model ripple pool, it is awesome.

Second, it is fun to feel smart. Yesterday I briefly hosted a woman from Citizen Schools who wanted to know more about my school. The way it worked out, she observed part of my class rather than just getting the tour-and-discussion. The kids are working on digitizing color pictures, so she asked about it. I ended up explaining digitizing, run-length encoding, compression, and number systems to her. I feel kind of bad, because I should have been giving her an overview of what the school is about, which is not really run-length encoding, as you might guess. But I surprised myself with how much computer science I know. (Stop laughing.) It was fun. I think it was even fun for her.

Perception

Atul Gawande's article, "The Itch" is an interesting look at the mechanism of itching. My favorite part, though, is this:

A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.

In a 1710 “Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” the Irish philosopher George Berkeley objected to this view. We do not know the world of objects, he argued; we know only our mental ideas of objects. “Light and colours, heat and cold, extension and figures—in a word, the things we see and feel—what are they but so many sensations, notions, ideas?” Indeed, he concluded, the objects of the world are likely just inventions of the mind...

Although the article goes on to make it clear that this isn't complete, doesn't it sound like perception is just based on mental models?

I've been thinking a lot about simulations lately, and this article makes it seem like even fairly poor simulations could be surprisingly realistic if they abstract the right things or if people are able to get past the perception that what they're experiencing is a simulation:

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals...

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

The article goes on to talk about the use of mirrors for phantom limb syndrome and other more interesting things. The idea is to reset the brain, so it stops thinking it is getting sensations that it isn't.

As always, I am thrilled when (a) computer science shows up in real life and (b) I guess right:

Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.

I wish the article was accessible to my students; it would be interesting to talk to them about perception and simulation. I might still try, or use the article for differentiation purposes.

Relinquishing tight control

The link to "Death to the Syllabus" is going around the twitterverse. I must admit that the first third of the essay did not fully engage me; though I'm not sure why I persevered to read the whole thing, I'm glad I did because the last third was excellent enough to comment on.

Mano Singham makes a case that the traditional college syllabus, full of specific rules and consequences for tiny infractions, is a Very Bad Idea. "The implicit message of the modern course syllabus is that the student will not do anything unless bribed by grades or forced by threats." He goes on to mention,

There is a vast research literature on the topic of motivation to learn, and one finding screams out loud and clear: controlling environments have been shown consistently to reduce people’s interest in whatever they are doing, even when they are doing things that would be highly motivating in other contexts.

He laments that there is a negative cycle between students and teachers, where teachers do not feel comfortable making judgements about students' performance and behavior, where they instead create new rules to handle each situation. He mentions that making individual judgement calls is time-consuming and that in our legalistic society, teachers may feel defensive about making individualized decisions.

In the final section, he describes an experiment he's been performing in his courses for the past several years, where he gives a very open-ended syllabus, develops a classroom culture, then asks the students to create their own policies. He finds that students entrust his judgement and for the most part decline to make many specific rules.

It should not be surprising that I feel validated and encouraged by this essay. Without grades at my school, we rely largely on rubric scoring. (I recently discovered that the word "rubric" can have many meanings, what I'm thinking of is pictured here.) My rubrics tend to be vague, when I even make them at all. I do give students the list of criteria I'm looking at - algorithmic complexity, creativity, good documentation, whatever. But I hate rubrics that are overly specific, mostly because I hate grading that way. An example:

On our website rubric, one of the things we look for is good writing. Some of that is web-appropriate writing, like shortish paragraphs and clear sentences. Some of it is just plain-old good writing: correct spelling, good grammar, that kind of thing. Example rubrics are "specific." 0-1 misspellings will get you an A. 2-3 misspellings will get you a B. 4-5 a C, and so forth. Can I tell you how interested I am in spending quality time hunting down every misspelled word in a website and counting them? For every student? And then there's a whole list of other criteria to look for. I have better things to do with my time than count misspelled words. Especially since I'll then have to cross-reference with the list of kids who have accommodations for learning differences and can't be expected to spell correctly. And the kids who write more - which usually means a better project - will be penalized because they have more opportunities for misspellings. (Oh look, I got started on this. Aren't you lucky?)

Instead of putting specific thresholds of how many misspelled words, I tell the kids that spelling and grammar count, and if the spelling and grammar are bad enough to interfere with the quality of the project, they get dinged. But the rubric looks like, "Excellent grammar and spelling", "Good grammar and spelling", "Poor grammar and spelling", not specific numbers.

On the one hand, I understand that the common thinking is that students want specific guidelines. And yet, so much of life is in vague judgements. The kids know what excellent grammar looks like. They know what poor grammar looks like. They know how to get from poor to good (find an editor, use software tools...) and I don't think that any of our lives are enhanced by suggesting that in a whole website the difference between an A project and a B project is one misspelled word.

I think that by being vague in this way, and then being willing to engage in discussions with the students if they disagree with our assessments, we help students develop their own judgements. They should have a sense of what good grammar looks like, one they can apply without a teacher telling them if they're right. (Oh right, I'm a computer science teacher, not an English teacher. They should have a sense of what a well-documented, neatly coded program looks like, how about that?) Being open to the discussion is an important corollary - students should be able to question, teachers should have reasons, and teachers should be open to being convinced, though not too open.

The place where I'm less secure, but unlikely to change, is that I - like Mano Singham, I think - have a holistic view of assessment. I know teachers who take the scores on the parts of the rubric and essentially average them into a score for the whole project. I don't do that. You can do very well on a bunch of parts of a project and still not have it gel into a cohesive excellent project. You can have a bunch of mediocre parts and still make something amazing, much greater than the parts. In life, we're graded on overall impression, not by whether we had two misspellings or three.