the stakes for public education

In Chicago, public schools started the strike authorization vote today. It’s stretched out over 3 days because the union wants to make sure all members actually vote (abstaining counts as a “no” vote).  We would need 75% of the overall membership to vote “yes” to authorize a strike, but even so, a strike couldn’t start until March at the earliest. (And honestly, every day pushes this timeline back a bit, because as far as I’m aware, we still haven’t started the “fact finding” stage of the process.)

Before I got into teaching, I didn’t think much about teacher’s strikes. As a student, I missed the days of constant teacher’s strikes. (The 2012 teacher’s strike was the first Chicago teacher’s strike in 25 years. I went to school in the suburbs but still don’t remember any actual strikes.) But 2012 was also the year that I was student teaching, and I remember being conflicted about whether or not to picket with the teachers at my assigned school. I ended up not going to any of the strike rallies, etc., because honestly I wasn’t comfortable with it. And right now, there’s a part of me that’s still not personally comfortable with the idea of a teacher’s strike, the idea of being out on a picket line. But I believe in public education, and right now it feels like there’s a lot at stake.

Just working in a Chicago Public School has been an eye-opening experience for me. I grew up in the suburbs, went to a very white, very male, small engineering school in Indiana for college, then went to an Ivy for grad school. There’s always been a lot of privilege around me, although I never personally felt that privileged. But you only really know what you live and see, and I only saw the nice, clean, touristy parts of the Chicago. And I can’t say that I see a lot of my city even now, because I work in a very nice school that CPS can point to and say “look at all the great things we do!” and therefore has reason to keep well-resourced. My student population is also not really reflective of the city of Chicago, and we have a very active parents’ group that fundraises and has filled in the gaps when the school district cuts funding. Our “Friends of” organization is one of the top 10 fundraisers in the city. But nevertheless, working in urban education, I see the disparities in education, and it bothers me. And I see the disparities in how public funds are being used, and I wonder why those in charge make conscious decisions to not fund schools.

I have realized, starting with the work I did at UIC for my Master’s in Education and continuing with the issues I see arising in CPS, that teaching is an inherently political act. I do not consider myself a political person, but I realize that education really is something that can equalize and change the status quo. But education can also easily be used to keep the status quo intact. And honestly? I don’t exactly teach my students how to challenge the status quo with chemistry. But I want them to learn how to think critically and realize that they are, in fact, capable human beings. I’m sure those in power know what education can do for the otherwise poor and disenfranchised. Why else would the mayor and members of the Chicago School Board not send their children to CPS schools? They have no incentive to fix the problems in our school system because it doesn’t affect them directly. And they may actually have an incentive to not fix the public school system because that gives their own children an edge up. Given a choice, I think most parents will do “what’s best for their students”, resulting in segregation and inequality (more eloquently put by Jose Vilson).

And so, even though my job personally is not really at risk, even though my school has been fine despite all the budget cuts, etc. (overall; this isn’t to say that we haven’t felt the effects of CPS policies, but I am fully away that because of the school that I’m at, my job has been more secure and the daily issues I deal with less of a problem than many of my colleagues in the CTU), I voted yes to a strike.

Sure, I’d like a raise. I’d like to have a secure pension. (Although in all honesty, with the state of Illinois being the hot financial mess that it is, I’m not counting on a pension at all- but the older teachers who have put in sweat, blood, and tears into this job deserve what was promised. I haven’t heard anything at all about cutting the CPD’s pension fund.) And I’d like to not have to worry about my healthcare. But really, I would like as a city and as a nation for us to wake up to the disparity that exists, in education and everywhere else. To understand that there is so much more holding some people down than others, and that a solid education can counteract some of that. (By no means all of the problems can be solved via education. But it’s a step. And cutting public education is like kicking someone who’s already down.) And I would like the powers that be to realize that education cannot be run like a business (Who is the consumer? What are you selling? Why are you selling what you’re selling? Who is paying for what you’re selling? Who decides whether the product is “good”?) but rather should be a basic human right. And I’d like the city of Chicago to understand that there’s more than raises and pension and healthcare on the table. Keeping class sizes manageable (I say I have classes of 28-30 students, which seems fine to me, and my non-teachers friends are shocked), having classroom aides and support staff for students (nurses, counselors, psychiatrists). Reducing the amount of testing that our students are put through. Making the evaluation process both manageable and meaningful. Things that really are in the best interest of children who are supposed to be learning. Things that many suburban and private schools take for granted (I am sure that the University of Chicago Lab School has all of these things and many more “amenities”).

I don’t want a strike. None of the teachers I have talked to are actually looking forward to a strike. And I admit I dislike some of the antagonistic language put out by the teacher’s union, because I personally do almost everything I can to avoid conflict. But as much as I would like to just stay in my classroom and teach and wish that other people would leave me alone, I believe in public education and I believe we owe more to the students of this city than they’re getting. And honestly, although both the CTU and the school board claim that everything they do is “for the children”, I’m more inclined to believe that of the CTU. So I hope that we don’t get to the point of an actual walkout, I hope that the school board and the teacher’s union can actually come to an agreement before it gets to that point, I hope that the state of Illinois can find a reasonable solution to the financial mess that we are in (which is not the fault of the teachers, yet they continually ask us to bear the financial brunt of the problem). But if it comes down to it, I vote yes to public education and all that it stands for.

On Race, Gender, Education

This post has been a long time coming. And what’s finally prompting me to hit the “publish” button is the recent events in Chicago around the release of the Laquan McDonald dash cam video. I don’t quite know how to fully articulate my thoughts, because this is the result from many months (perhaps even years) of thinking about race, gender, and my role as an educator, but this is my attempt to make some sense of all of these things. There are lots of links to many articles that have pushed my thinking on these topics.

On race:

An article that surfaced on my Facebook feed earlier this year was “The Harsh Truth about Progressive Cities” (from Madison 365). And reading about how most progressive US cities are some of the worst when it comes to racial segregation and racial disparities reminded me of “I, Racist” (from Huffington Post) that I also came across. It’s not easy to talk about race when the listener assumes that you are calling them racist because we live in a racist system. I find it very strange to talk about race and racial disparities as an Asian American who grew up with all the benefits of the mostly positive stereotypes. I fit right into the positive stereotypes, for the most part- quiet and compliant with most authority figures, hard worker, good at math and science. My family was able to fulfill the American Dream- my parents came to the US with a few suitcases and little else, and now they own their own home, are retired after two successful careers, and have 3 kids who are by most measures, quite successful. My parents, as they will sometimes remind me, still faced racial discrimination (although honestly, as a child/young adult and sometimes even now, I was/am often woefully oblivious to instances of racism against my family). My dad’s approach was to teach us to work twice as hard to prove that we were just as good, which strikes me as an untenable solution. And until recently, I was really unaware of the story of Asians in American and how the narrative has changed so drastically in such as short time (from the New Yorker).

I am hesitant to step into or start conversations around race because I fear that people will tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I haven’t experienced the same level of racism. Something that I have noted is that many conversations around race seem to focus on the White/Black divide. I still remember the blowup over the use of the phrase “a chink in the armor” in an ESPN article about Jeremy Lin in 2012 (was it really that long ago?) and how angry my Asian friends were about how so many people defended the phrase, its use, and were upset that Asians were upset by the phrase (but I can’t remember the race of those that defended this phrase). What’s the big deal, aren’t Asians a “model minority”? Asian stereotyping doesn’t really exist, right? But did you know? Asian Americans went from being seen as poor, dirty, uneducated laborers to upstanding middle class citizens in less than a century. (I didn’t know this until a few years ago. Probably because I wanted to believe the stereotype, because it’s a nice one as stereotypes go.) Stereotypes, even “good” ones, prevent us from seeing each other as we are: people, and not that different from one another. And, as one of my professors at UIC said, is it ok that Asians benefit at the expense of other minorities in this “model minority” narrative? Consider that the “model minority” myth was a deliberate change in the narrative to counter the civil rights movement.

On gender:

I read “Still Failing at Fairness” with KSTF a few summers ago. Gender is something that has been on my radar far more than race, simply because it’s been more unavoidable for me as a woman who was always interested in science. I majored in chemical engineering at a school that was all male until 1995. Nevertheless, my undergraduate chemical engineering classes were about 50/50 male/female (my friends’ computer engineering classes, on the other hand, had maybe one female student in a class of 30). I then went to graduate school to get a PhD in chemical engineering so I could teach at the college level. In my entering class of about 15 students, there were 4 women. At least two of us never finished our PhDs. Among the faculty, there was only one woman at the time (they hired a second woman while I was there), and there was always conversations at the “Women in Engineering” things about “work-life balance”. A part of my severe disappointment in quitting my PhD program with “just a master’s” was tied to the feeling that I had somehow let down my gender by leaving the research world, even though I hated most of the time I had spent doing research.

In October, I came across this NY Times piece about “What Really Keeps Women out of Tech”. I found this particularly fascinating as a female science teacher- science is, still, a very male-dominated field (where issues like Geoff Marcy’s continued, persistent sexual harassment of female students went unchecked for years before blowing up this fall); however, teaching is very female-dominated. Pollack’s NY Times article suggests that women stay or drop out of tech because the fields just don’t seem to be welcoming to them. I found this statement particularly intriguing: “young men tend not to major in English for the same reasons women don’t pick computer science: They compare their notions of who they are to their stereotypes of English majors and decide they won’t fit in.” But did you know that women pioneered computer programming? I kind of did, but was fuzzy on the details, until “A Mighty Girl” posted an NPR story about “The Forgotten Female Programmers who Created Modern Tech.” Women created computer programming because men didn’t think it was important enough. (I feel like this exemplifies how the female gender is viewed: women do things that men don’t think are important enough, until they do think it’s important and then take over.)

My friend sent me an essay by Claire Vaye Watkins called “On Pandering”. Watkin’s experience with an experienced male writer made her see that this man didn’t see her as a writer, but just a girl (specifically, a drunk girl). Even though English majors are mostly women, then, “real” writers appear to be mostly men.

On education:

I teach in a Chicago Public School. Earlier this week, our principal sent out all-staff emails about the upcoming release of the Laquan McDonald dash cam video. I had to look up what happened to him, because I had never heard his name before this week. And what happened is heartbreaking, particularly with the narrative around his story, recasting him as a thief and a druggie instead of just stating that a police officer shot the boy 16 times. I’ve been sent the official statements from the district, and told explicitly not to show the video in my classroom, as “the students will have ample opportunity… to see the video through the media”. And it makes me wonder- how many other black youth are being killed without my knowledge? It brought home to me how different my life is compared to some of my students- I can ignore or brush aside a news story about a police shooting. For others, this is their life.

So how do I, as an Asian American woman, understand and work with other groups to combat racism, to promote social justice? How do I have conversations around race and social justice in a science classroom when I am not really sure of the history around race and social justice in America (despite covering the civil rights movement in my AP US History course, sorry, Mr. Huff), when my lived experiences are often so different from both White and Black/Brown experiences? And when my lived experiences are so different, even, from other Asian Americans? How do I have conversations around what it means to be a woman in science when I chose not to stay in a hard science and instead teach science? (The phrase “those who can’t do, teach” comes to mind…) I read this Washington Post piece about how a white teacher responded to her students of color who told her that she couldn’t understand because she was a white lady. But I don’t even know how to start bringing issues of race, gender, social justice into my chemistry classroom.

Issues of social justice are an inherent part of education in general. Not acknowledging these issues inadvertently perpetuates the problems, because the status quo does not promote social justice. My curriculum is pretty sanitized and I honestly have no idea how to talk about social justice because I’ve never really had to think about social justice in a chemistry classroom, so I wonder- how can I be thoughtful?  How can I listen to my students and take the opportunities when I see them? Surely there is a place to talk about the Laquan McDonald shooting and subsequent video release. But where does it come in when we’re talking about periodic trends and electron configuration?

I got a pretty big compliment from my students on Tuesday. They were talking about another teacher (who is no longer at our school), calling her “crazy”. My response was “well, I’m crazy too” because not 5 minutes earlier, they were gripping about how I was making them do work the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. And they told me, “no, you’re not crazy, you actually care about us learning chemistry. It’s not all about discipline.” So then, while I was so happy to hear that my care for them learning chemistry has come through, I wonder- how do I go even further and let my students see that I care about social justice? How do I let them see that while I care, I’m still figuring it out and I certainly don’t have all (or really, any of) the answers?

I don’t know what it will be like in my classes on Monday, if my students will even be talking about what happened to Laquan McDonald. Some of them come from very privileged backgrounds, and the ones who don’t aren’t always comfortable bringing things like this up. And my chemistry class is not really a place where we talk about current events. But I want to be open. I want to not be desensitized to these kinds of events. And I want to learn how to respond.

velocity, vectors, and vocabulary

Let me start off with this- I don’t think that vocabulary and conceptual understanding are mutually exclusive. But a friend’s facebook post asking why freshmen need to know velocity and vectors got me thinking about vocabulary vs conceptual understanding. When is the vocabulary essential and when is it, well, not?

A student can conceptually understand the difference between speed and velocity without ever knowing the term “vector”. When I’ve taught physics, it’s just been “velocity is speed and direction”, and we used designators such as “5 m/s north” or “10 m/s south”. We did also use positive vs. negative, but always specified (“left is the negative direction” or “south is the negative direction”). We did also talk about magnitude and direction with forces, but I rarely used the term “vector” with my freshman physics classes. (I might have mentioned “vector” in passing once or twice. And maybe a student even brought it up, because my students like to use science-y words to sound “smart” in class.)

In chemistry, we’ve recently been working on electron configuration and the quantum model of the atom. But I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned the term “quantum model” with my students (we did introduce “Bohr model” to have a handle on what that thing with the electrons in rings is called). This year, we also explicitly took out vocabulary such as “Aufbau principal”, “Hund’s rule”, and “Pauli exclusion principal”, because our team agreed that we didn’t care that students could use the correct names for the rules but rather wanted to focus on whether students could shown how an orbital diagram (Aufbau diagram, apparently) is filled correctly. I actually don’t know exactly what the Aufbau principal or Hund’s rule refer to specifically, but I can draw an orbital diagram and explain what it’s showing. Why would I expect my students to know exactly what these rules are? And does it tell me anything about their conceptual understanding if they can recite the rule? My experience from teaching physics was that students could often refer to Newton’s laws (from their middle school science classes) but still had some naive conceptions about how forces and motion work (e.g., that there must be a force on an object to keep it moving, despite being able to cite Newton’s first law).

So I’m wondering. What does the vocabulary add to the understanding? Am I doing my students a disservice by not using the “official” terms with them, when if they take a college chemistry course their professors will almost certainly refer to the Aufbau principal, Hund’s rule, and the Pauli exclusion principal? Often, principals, rules, and laws in particular are named after the men (almost always men) who are attributed with discovering them, but then what message does that convey about science and discovery? Science in particular is heavy with white male names, and I wonder what that tells my non-white, non-male students about whether they are welcome in science. (Also, I’m sure there are instances where non-white and/or non-male scientists made the same discoveries in parallel, but the discovery is attributed to the white, male scientist. I wish I knew more about these instances, because it would be nice to bring up in class sometime.) Is my class somehow less rigorous because I don’t often include names of rules? When we were working on gas relationships, I never used the terms Boyle’s Law, Charles’s Law, or Gay-Lussac’s Law (and apparently the P-T relationship shouldn’t be called Gay-Lussac’s law anyway, and is rather Amontons’ Law? ). And even now, I have to think a little carefully about which relationship goes with which name, even though I know that pressure/volume are inversely related and volume/temperature and pressure/temperature are directly related. (Of course, we didn’t ask them to do any calculations with the gas laws, so maybe that’s another reason why I never bothered giving the names to each of these laws.) So if I, as someone who is fairly well-versed in chemistry, don’t remember all the names of all of the laws, but I can figure out the relationships, do I need to teach my students the names of these things too?

Is it ok to not hold students accountable for vocabulary terms as long as they can demonstrate understanding of the concepts? When is vocabulary important and when is it not? I still make sure my students can use terms like protons, neutrons, electrons, and ionization energy, electronegativity, atomic radius correctly (can you tell we’re working on periodic trends soon?). I don’t necessarily care if they know the terms “Coulombic attraction” or “effective nuclear charge” as long as they can explain the reason for the trend accurately.

Vocabulary is something that I find myself conflicted about as a relatively new teacher. I had to learn all these terms, so they must be important! But do they tell me anything about student understanding? Does it help the student communicate their understanding? Or is it just “one more thing” that students have to wrap their brains around and spit back at me? And if they just cram in all the vocabulary, does that mean they know what’s happening?

I realize that my blog posts tend to have a lot of unanswered questions. But that’s just because these are the things that I’m wondering about as I go through my planning, teaching, reflecting. And I have a lot of wonderings and very few answers, but I think that’s ok. It took me a long time to be ok with unanswered questions (graduate level research did not agree with me when I could not find the answer to the research question), but I think this is a stance I need to be able to process the world of teaching.

introverts in schools, or why my seating charts take me so long to put together

Two posts in two days! (Pretty sure all my grading is done for the end of the quarter, haha. And if I missed something, well, quarter grades aren’t part of their GPA or transcript, so it’ll be ok.) Anyway- this is something that’s been on my mind for a while now.

The Atlantic had an article back in September about how schools are overlooking introverts. The argument is that the emphasis on groupwork and collaborative learning is detrimental for introverted learners, who often need quieter environments to process. And it made me wonder, because I’m a very strong introvert- on every Myers-Brigg personality test I’ve taken, I’m 99-100% introvert. (I wonder about confirmation bias here though- now that I know I’m an introvert, I know how to answer the “introvert/extrovert” questions so I always come up as an “I”.) But despite my introvertedness, I also believe very strongly in collaborative and student-centered learning, where students are talking to each other about the content to generate their own knowledge. (The author of the Atlantic article also acknowledges that overall, cooperative learning is a good thing and that several recent studies indicate that students engaged in cooperative learning tend to outpace students in lecture environments.)

So I’ve been thinking and wondering- am I neglecting my introverted students? I do try to encourage conversation and groupwork, but sometimes I let my students work more or less independently at their tables. I find myself torn about this also- am I doing them a disservice? Am I perpetuating issues of academic status in my classroom? Do students see the value of groupwork in the classroom? Do students see groupwork and the accompanying conversations as integral to the learning process? Students in my quiet groups do usually start talking to each other once they hit something they’re not sure about, and the conversations are often really awesome to overhear. It did take some prodding at the start of the year (“You guys should be talking to each other about this! It’s too quiet in here.”), but now they do it more or less naturally. Even as an introvert myself, I’ve found that groupwork can be really engaging and energizing (mostly) when I’m with people that I can feed ideas off of and who challenge my thinking. (I do still need that downtime at home to process everything, though.) The groups that I struggle with the most are the ones where it’s clear that one student is being left behind in the work and isn’t asking questions (out of fear of looking dumb? low social status? something else?) and other members aren’t making an effort to include them (hence my wonderings about issues of status).

I think the key in all this is who students are seated around. I have one class in particular that’s been hard to seat this year, because there are a lot of high-energy students who are distracting to other students (from what I can tell, these students seem to mostly have high social status as well). I try sometimes to seat these high-energy students with quieter students who might help them calm down and slow down, but sometimes I feel badly for those quieter students who are now sitting next to this human rubber ball. And sometimes the groups work great- students really work together and are drawn in together. And sometimes they’re awful, where one student is either ignored or chooses to be ignored, and the group just isn’t functional. Sometimes I put the high-energy, extroverted students together, and sometimes that works because they realize they all need to focus to get anything done (they can’t rely on the quiet workhorse student because there isn’t one in their group), but sometimes that’s a disaster too because they just continually distract each other.

Some of this is in training students to really work together. And I’m trying with things like group roles and actionable norms. (I think it’s been kind of successful- colleagues who’ve been in my classroom seem to think it’s successful in that students are working, but working doesn’t always equal learning.) And some of it is just knowing student personalities, and grouping students well. It’s not easy, and sometimes a group that I think will be great is terrible, or takes a few days to work functionally. And sometimes a group that I’m hesitant about turns out to be awesome. So it can take me a good two hours to put together a new set of seating charts (~20-30 min per class), and sometimes I wonder if the amount of time I’m putting into it is worth it (at some point, surely, there’s diminishing returns).

Which brings me to the thought- groupwork and collaborative learning are great, but should be carefully implemented and structured. Even my extroverted, quick-thinking students sometimes need to slow down and reflect, and being around introverts in a group can help them with that. I wish I did a better job at helping students really reflect, because it’s not easy to do. But just putting students together in a group is not really collaborative learning. Just doing an activity instead of a lecture is also not collaborative learning. I’m thankful for the work I’ve done with the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation around Complex Instruction and group-worthy tasks (are most of my tasks really group-worthy? Just conversation-worthy? Not really either?), which I would love to learn more about in a science classroom (I understand Complex Instruction started around math tasks, and there’s a lot of overlap, but I would like to think about the differences between math and science tasks as well). There are so many places where I want to improve the scaffolding and structures I have for groupwork, and I want to think about how to gradually take those structures away as the year moves on so that it’s the students who are really leading the conversations and bringing in their peers without having to consciously think about it. And I want my students to really see each other as resources (not just me as the teacher being the arbiter of the knowledge).

Teaching is one of the most intellectually demanding things I’ve ever done. Not only the content, where I really have to make sure I understand what’s going on, but thinking about group dynamics and student-student interactions and how to facilitate these things to really lead to better understandings for all students is challenging, to say the least. But there’s always something new to think about, always a new challenge to solve. It’s like a never-ending puzzle, and I have to say that I love it for that reason.

Grading, grading, grading

I occasionally get this comment from students: “You grade things so quickly!” And I do try to return work quickly, because for me, the most important part of grading is the feedback, for both me and my students. But the result is that sometimes, it feels like never-ending grading. As soon as one pile is graded, there’s another stack to be tackled. I suppose this is just the life of a teacher. So sometimes I wonder if there are ways to give them better feedback without having to grade everything. (I don’t grade everything, by the way. I would go insane.) I’m a little worn out by grading right now, particularly because it’s the end of the quarter and I find myself checking and double checking the online homework sites to make sure I didn’t forget to give someone credit for an assignment they completed late. I sometimes wonder if I should be more strict about the late policy (which is officially anything over a week late is a zero, according to my syllabus), but I see zeros as overly punishing to students. Then again, their grades become a little meaningless (in terms of formative feedback) when they submit the online homework after we’re done with that unit.

Some things I’ve been trying this year to keep a handle on the grading:

Exit tickets instead of collecting/grading assignments. We go over almost everything together in class, so I found it not very useful to grade their individual assignments. These days, I’ll give an exit ticket at the end of class with problems similar to the homework, to get a check on their understanding. However, it still turns out to just give me a sense of what the table group as a whole can do, rather than what an individual student can do, because as soon as one student figures it out, s/he will help the rest of the group. I’m mostly ok with this, but I do wonder how I can give students better feedback on their individual understanding.

Online homework. I’ve been using the Quest system from the University of Texas (quest.cns.utexas.edu) to assign multiple choice review problems. Pros: students get instant feedback. Cons: online access can be an issue, also they have to sign up separately and the UTexas system assigns them an ID that they may or may not remember. Also, sometimes the question wording is not quite what I use in class. I’ve added a few of my own questions to the site, but writing/formatting questions for the Quest site is not simple and sometimes it’s just easier to pick question that are “good enough”. I changed the policy to “80% correct = full credit” because I had just been giving full credit for completion and I wanted them to actually try/think about the questions. This policy got a little pushback at first, because I assigned some question sets before we had covered the material in class, but overall I think they’re ok with it. There’s enough room for making mistakes while still forcing them to be thoughtful about their work (at least, that’s the goal).

Google classroom for lab reports. This lets me grade their lab reports in somewhat real-time (close to when we’ve done the lab), because last year I would collect their lab notebooks periodically and grade several labs at once. I also really love grading labs online because I can make comments (that are legible) and also cut & paste common comments from a running document (if I remember to start one). The downside is similar to the downside for their other online homework, because some students have hit-or-miss internet access at home (and apparently Google Classroom/Google Docs on their phones/tablets doesn’t always save properly… Still trying to figure out this particular tech issue.) I’ve made laptops accessible in my classroom and some students take full advantage of this during our academic lab block (study hall/tutoring time every other day) but other students don’t. So I have the odd result of students with ~80% in test/quizzes with 40% in homework because they never turned in their online assignments. I do allow students to resubmit lab reports for 1/2 credit back, because sometimes they just miss things (and sometimes my questions aren’t worded in the best ways), but that’s more grading for me and honestly sometimes they still miss the point on the second attempt. I wish there was some way I could get them to really read and absorb my comments (or ask me if it doesn’t make any sense). Or even just read the rubric that’s added to the bottom of their document (I love Goobric, by the way. Makes my life so much easier in terms of grading online work.)

Spiraling quizzes that are graded SBG-style, where content shows up on multiple quizzes. I like this because it shows me whether they’ve retained the information or not, but then I wonder how useful the spiraling is because we’ve often moved on in the unit and don’t always refer back to the beginning material. So I wonder if our units should be better designed (but then, how?).

I also recently allowed test corrections on our most recent unit exam. I have mixed feelings about test corrections, because (like the exit ticket issue) most students can do the work with help but may struggle to do it on their own. My averages for the first test were lower than I would have liked and the test was worth a lot, so I allowed students to come in during academic lab (our bi-daily study hall/tutoring block) to correct their exams for 1/2 credit back. Most students struggled on the multiple choice (which I’ve found is pretty typical), and I realized as students were doing their corrections that the multiple choice emphasized concepts that I didn’t in class. It was a common unit exam, and some things tripped up my students that just didn’t occur to me as I looked over the test questions. (For example: under “select all that apply” for beryllium, students only selected “alkaline earth metal” instead of also selecting “metal”. In retrospect, I don’t really like that type of question because it feels a little like a trick question, and there were a fair number of them on the multiple choice.) And then so many students showed up for one ac lab period that I ran out of seats, and again I had a pile of grading. On the plus side, I think it really made students think about what they missed on the unit exam, which will hopefully help them for finals.

The grading thing is a constant tension for me- how much to grade so that I keep sane but still give meaningful feedback. How to assign points when points seem so arbitrary sometimes. And how to help students see their grades as sources of feedback rather than a value judgement on them as people. I’m trying these unit tracking sheets for students to fill out after every quiz. Not 100% sure it’s useful, but maybe?

There are aspects of my grading policies that I really like (giving students feedback, allowing them opportunities to resubmit and show improvement) and aspects that I’m not so sure about (being super lenient with late work, having to regrade assignments that have minimal thought put into the second attempt, trying to get students to think more about the feedback and less about the grade itself). Still thinking these things through. I’ll probably try something else mid-way through the year, and luckily most of my students will come along for the ride without too much complaining. I continually wonder how I can make the grades more about mastery, learning, and improvement, rather than just a grade.

To lecture or not to lecture

It’s Sunday night, and I should be grading. But two articles popped up on my Facebook newsfeed this weekend and they’re on my mind, distracting me. So I’m writing here, to help me process my thoughts (and hopefully to have a more productive grading session soon).

Both of these articles deal with college lecture. I am not a college professor, I teach high school students, so the setting is different, but lecture is something that I have struggled with as a relatively new teacher, both in implementation and philosophically. Annie Murphy Paul wrote an article about whether college lectures are unfair and inherently biased towards white, male, affluent students. Paul’s article points out that many studies have shown that “active learning” benefits all students, but particularly women, minorities, and low-income students. Her parting question is “Given that active-learning approaches benefit all students, but especially those who are female, minority, low-income and first-generation, shouldn’t all universities be teaching this way?” And I will say honestly that overall I agree with Paul’s assessment, at least for the sciences. When students interact directly with the concepts that we are trying to teach them, they have concrete experiences to draw upon when organizing their knowledge in their own brains. And perhaps particularly for science, where students’ lived experiences can be so different from one another, having a shared classroom experience to draw upon can help immensely when students are asked to apply knowledge to a new scenario and defend their line of reasoning.

Molly Worthen recently wrote a rebuttal defending the college lecture course. Worthen’s article seems to be primarily defending lecture in the humanities. And I honestly cannot comment on that- I did not go to a liberal arts school, I majored in engineering and was at a small school where my classes were about 30 students and “lectures” were mostly the professor working out example problems on the board. Worthen, however, points out that lecture can teach comprehension and reasoning, and says “In the humanities, a good lecture class does just what Newman said: It keeps students’ minds in energetic and simultaneous action. And it teaches a rare skill in our smartphone-app-addled culture: the art of attention, the crucial first step in the “critical thinking” that educational theorists prize.”

I find Worthen’s article particularly intriguing because she speaks about how the humanities are often called upon to follow the lead of the sciences in terms of teaching methods. My gut response to her article was “well, those lectures sound amazing” but also “is there something different about the nature of science vs. social science that would make lecture more appropriate in one setting vs. the other?” (I’m inclined to answer my question with “yes”, but I honestly don’t know the answer.)

The more that I read and think about education and education policies and pedagogy, the more I realize that what we would really, really like is some “magic bullet” that will work for all students regardless of anything else. As if there is some mythical perfect instructional strategy that will work across the board. But I don’t think that such a strategy exists (I do want to be careful here, because this type of thinking can easily translate to “well, those groups of students need direct instruction but these students can handle open-ended, inquiry-based learning” which is a dangerous line of thought to go down.) At this point in my teaching career, all I can really say is that one format does not seem to work all the time [in terms of topics and where students are at developmentally rather than in terms of different student populations]. I struggle with lecture in my science classes because there is a lot of evidence out there that lecture is not an effective way to teach (science, at least). I also struggle with lecture because I don’t think I’m very good at it. But even with all the small group work that we do in my classroom (things that would be readily labeled as “active learning”), I still want to have whole-class discussions (would you call it a lecture?) to bring students back and help them put together the big picture of what they’ve been working on in their small groups. And the small-group to whole-class transition is one of the places where I struggle as a teacher. But it’s sometimes necessary, and maybe right now it’s because of time constraints and a huge curriculum map, to just tell them how to do something or what something means.

So I guess I wouldn’t throw lecture out entirely, that would seem like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But I do think that we as teachers need to think more carefully about our lectures, to make them into the engaging experience that Worthen talks about. And I would like to revisit the term “active learning”, because I find it incredibly hard to always know, just from looking at a student, whether they are “actively learning” or not. Even an activity that is designed for active learning can quickly become passive for students. And an activity that seems to be passive on the surface (such as a traditional lecture) can be very active if the student knows what to do with it. So, then, how do we teach students to be active learners regardless of the format with which they are presented the material? That’s my real goal as a teacher. And I’ve been trying (harder? again?) this year to help students navigate groupwork, to help them engage in their small group settings and make small groups productive. (There was also an Atlantic article about how schools are overlooking introverts with all the emphasis on group learning… As an introvert but also a believer in group learning, I have thoughts on this one as well, but it will have to wait for another night. Grading calls.)