Yesterday I wrote up a draft of my SBG concepts for the course. Today I will go hunting for textbooks and course notes from other teachers I know in the area.  I don’t know if I’ll want to use someone else’s notes – I don’t even know if I like premade notes right now. But if I want the option available I’d better find them now.

Before the end of the week I want to have a final exam for the course so I know where I’m headed.  I’ll be doing a common final with the other teacher covering the course at summer school, and I want us to have the same target in mind right from the start.

I want that first day to be something special that sets these kids into an expectation of showing up ready to think and share ideas.  I am formulating a plan; I’ll let you all know if it works when I get there.

In the meantime, if anyone has a favorite WCYDWT or other great opener on any of the following topics, please share the wealth!

• linear functions (solving, graphing, defining them from a situation)
• polynomials (ie. what the heck are they)
• order of operations
• powers and exponent “laws”
• square roots (defn’ of, and estimating roots of non-perfect squares)

I may post my whole concept list once it’s in its mostly-final form, but these are the big ones that could use something to break through the “OH geez those are EQUATIONS WHAT DO I DO” panic thinking that my students will probably have a well-established pattern of falling into.

What if we had WCYDWT pro-d days?  What would that look like?  I’d suggest starting with this image from Frank Noschese‘s latest blog post:

I’d bet this could generate an interesting discussion on assessment without any lead-in or context whatsoever.

1. This was totally not the case in my teacher training at SFU – which tended to drive people nuts who were wanting to get an information dump and get on with teaching.

• I like stats, and it’s funny / interesting seeing how publishing summary stats lends authority to the “You’re doing a great job!” tone of the message.
• I’ve been seeing much of this data along the way, and it highlights why this blogging thing has been so strange for me.  I’ve tried to keep a tight focus on what I blog about, so as to have a chance of building up a regular readership, but as you can see below my focus has wandered as my life and career path have shifted.
• I still can’t get away from that one day that I scratched a mental itch about Portal’s weird feminism.  And the search terms thing just makes it look like all my visits are accidents.
• Seriously, “fresher than ever”?  At less than two blog posts a month?

Anyway, here’s the auto-generated stuff.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,800 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 21 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 62 posts. There were 9 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was March 21st with 102 views. The most popular post that day was Factoring graph puzzles.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were numberwarrior.wordpress.com, Google Reader, blog.mrmeyer.com, larkolicio.us, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for steamuserstats, pokemon roguelike, portal character, steam user stats, and graph puzzles.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Factoring graph puzzles February 2010
2 comments

Portal’s Feminism October 2007
16 comments

WCYDWT: Steam user stats, brainstorming and trigonometric modeling April 2010
2 comments

The useless paper vs. computer debate February 2010

Mysteriously Roguelike Pokémon January 2008
1 comment

Data visualization is a fantastic, growing field of artistic work where artists grab large data sets and generate meaningful, compelling visuals from them.

However, when I first started reading about “data art” a few years ago, there was (I think) one source that mentioned, what about using the database itself as the artistic medium?  What about art that *is* data?

Something in there combined with the politics of the time gave me an idea that I never felt compelled to finish, but which I’m going to share here because I’m concerned that no one else is doing something like this and maybe they could be.

The specific plan was to take the non-combatant casualty data set from IraqBodyCount, and generate a set of (semi)fictional data based on it.  The data set would have one entry for every non-combatant death, with

• a statistically generated American name
• a location of death, also statistically plausible (ie. generated based on population density across the country)
• the nature of the death (from the IraqBodyCount data)
• the original location of the death (in Iraq)
• whatever other data is in the IraqBodyCount entry (date, and I forget what else is there)

The goal was to take a step to break past the disconnect we have for the deaths of those who are “different”, who live far away with names we aren’t familiar with in places we don’t know the geography of.  To be able to look at the absolutely massive death toll from the war and start to comprehend what it would look like if this many people died right here.  It also served to give a name to the otherwise nameless tally in the IBC data set.

After the data set would’ve been generated, it could have been made available for Google Earth mashups, custom visualizations, or even physical memorials left in the documented locations where these people “died”.

Why am I sharing this?

• I’d love to hear of other existing projects already doing this kind of semi-fictional data generation
• If someone was really hooked by this and wanted to make it happen, I might be interested in partnering on it
• It concerns me that I may have an idea here that *hasn’t* been done, that is, the general idea of making a greater artistic statement by fictionalizing or otherwise transforming the raw data into something that more strongly makes it’s point (without, you know, lying to people)
• 140 chars wasn’t enough.

I’ve gone on record before saying that ideas aren’t worth a lot next to an actual implementation.  I suppose I do think that if someone went ahead and did this, it’d be great if they mentioned that I inspired them.  But since I don’t see myself making this happen, I’d rather the ideas at least cross-pollinate out there and nobody really owes me anything.

Why am I not making this happen?

• I felt uneasy about mapping the deaths onto America when I am not American. I considered mapping them onto Canada instead, since that’s where I am, but it seemed to lose some of the power of identifying the victims with the aggressors.
• The war front where Canada is more strongly involved, Afghanistan, doesn’t have a project like IraqBodyCount generating a source data set – or at least not that I’ve found. And when I looked into this recently I found out that the war in Afghanistan has produced far, far less civilian / non-combatant casualties than the war in Iraq.
• Generating statistically-plausible American names didn’t look too hard, based on census data, but generating plausible locations for the deaths looked tricky.  Accessing some kind of heat map of population density and using that to generate latitude/longitude per person could’ve worked, I think, but (due to the other reasons above) I stalled out on the first small roadblock.

So a few weeks ago, I was in the swing of things, trying to learn names as I would actually be there long enough to make it worthwhile.  A bunch of kids in his Math 9 class remembered me from subbing at the middle school next door, which was pretty cool.  It was generally great.

At about 3:30am on the Wednesday of that week, I got a phone call telling me that my sister had very unexpectedly died.

Imagine an emotional rollercoaster, since I won’t actually go into that in depth right now.  But, you know, just pretend.  I got an hour more sleep before heading to work that morning.

Well … it sucked.  I thought about telling them that my sister had died, but chickened out and just told them “I got some incredibly bad news this morning” or just said I was having a really bad day; nothing that really did justice to what was happening.  I was tired and grouchy, a handful of the grade 9′s were acting useless and infuriating, and 1/3 of the 11 Essentials class was composed of kids who just would not stop talking, ever.  Probably the worst day I’ve had teaching since the day last year when some kid hurled a rubber stopper at my head.

I went home and faced trying to travel to be with my family in time to help plan a funeral.

At this point, somewhere in my rational brain I knew I really didn’t owe anybody anything.  I had one day left in the week (Friday was a pro-d day), and friends telling me that to get away from work so I could deal with … everything else.  I looked at travel plans, considering flights that would leave early Thursday vs flights leaving shortly after work.  My wife had already figured that she could get all of next week planned for her class to have a sub, but that she’d need to finish the week off.  I wasn’t sure if I’d get a paid day off as an on-call teacher, and getting all 4 days in a row bumps up my pay scale for that whole week.

But really, I was feeling stubborn.  I had looked forward to this week – I wanted it. And I had already heard the story of a student teacher coming to work with these kids who gave up after one day of teaching the grade 9′s. One freaking day. I did not want to become the next chapter in that story for these kids. I did not want them to see me as someone else who gave up on them after having a crappy day, after being frustrated dealing with their behavior. (This is as much or more about wanting to be accepted by the kids as it is some kind of noble pursuit of improving their self-worth. Still trying to sift through how much of that is healthy and how much isn’t, but there it is.)

So I decided I would finish out the week.  One more day.

This time, I knew I had to tell them the truth.  It wouldn’t be easy, it would be incredibly awkward, but I had to.  At the start of class I would explain that my “bad day” comment yesterday wasn’t really fair to them or me, that I had found out yesterday that my sister died and I was WAY beyond “bad day” and that if they had to deal with me being zoned out or short-fused or whatever that they should know what was up.  That if I wanted them to treat me like a human being, I should probably let them know that I am one.

Thankfully the first two blocks were the classes that were easier to deal with and hadn’t frustrated me the day before.  They were my warm-up, and I told them as much – that they had been great the day before and that honestly I was telling them this so that I’d be able to tell the afternoon classes.

I told the afternoon classes too.  The annoying 9′s were less annoying, and the fantastic 9′s were even more fantastic.  The 11 Essentials class blew my mind.  The worst offenders the day before were the last ones to finish up their work, and they were not only repentant but stuck around and chatted for a minute. They treated me like a human being; they cared.  A few of the others in the class made me a quick makeshift card with one of those stick-figure portraits that are becoming one of my favorite parts of being a teacher.  (Mr. Giesbrecht, smiling and pointing at a board with the words “COMPOUND INTEREST”.)

(By the way, ever felt the room shift when someone says something?  Well, you couldn’t have missed it when I said the words “…my sister died.”  One girl in the last block actually did a minor spit-take, which despite everything made me laugh every time I remembered it for the rest of the class.)

When the bell went, I packed up and got out of there fast so I could catch a flight in two and a half hours.  I was *so glad* I had gone to work that day.  Those kids had made that day worthwhile – they completely healed up what had happened the day before and then some.  I trusted them with something real and they proved they were worth trusting.

…Just group grades by knowledge. Don’t say, “you have 95% in projects, 80% on tests, and 85% in homework.” Instead, report that “you’ve earned 95% in graphing lines, 80% in graphing general functions, 85% in composing functions.” It doesn’t have to be philosophical – this is just more information for your students.

I want to agree, in that I think SBG comes with a lot of extra tools and philosophy attached to the bandwagon that don’t absolutely need to be bundled in for this to be a useful approach.

I wonder, though, if SBG has much of a point if the improved reporting doesn’t create an opportunity for improvement.  If the grade is already set in stone, does any student really want to hear exactly what they got wrong and how?  Wouldn’t that just feel like rubbing salt in the wound?

Another question is whether SBG really means anything without a slight philosophical shift.  Reporting back more information to students is great, but many teachers already do that in the form of reporting every individual quiz and test score.  Quizzes are already grouped by similar material – does that make it SBG?

My thought is that at its core, SBG needs to be about attempting to report what a student understands and what they don’t understand, as opposed to reporting back specific assessments.  This is what Riley was getting at in his example, but it’s worth emphasizing that this isn’t just more information, it’s different information.  At its core this is something of a philosophical change.

The specific implementation can be as revolutionary or as subtle as you want.  Even if you don’t implement a particular system of reassessments, this core SBG philosophy empowers you to choose how to assess and reassess a student’s actual understanding any way you wish, at any point during the year.

I was lucky enough to have some fantastic teachers to work with during my student teaching practicum.  One in particular had a great rule that he introduced all of his classes to at the start of the year, by showing this particular clip:

This pretty much summed up how students should behave in his class, and students got the idea.

What really impressed me, however, was not just the memorable way to deliver the message.  This teacher modeled this message throughout the year, and not just in the classroom.  Even in chatting with other teachers about school politics, or war stories of bizarre people who used to work there before scandals sent them off to another career, his contribution to the conversation was always positive (or as positive as was reasonably possible).

I learned some other good tips from him, things like trying to always deal with misbehaving students outside the classroom door (where the student can be an individual and not a ringleader, and you can be a person instead of crowd control).  But I think the biggest lesson I saw was the unspoken one, of living out and modeling who you want your students to be, even when they aren’t around to see it.  Or, take it in the reverse – don’t demand that your students be someone better than you.  (I don’t know, I’m trying to find a way to word this without falling back on quoting Ghandi.)

If you aren’t a teacher, you may wonder how these things add up to a problem.  If you are a teacher, you probably already have buzzword-proximity sirens going off.  You may experience slight itching or allergic reactions as I nitpick on definitions for things like “summative” and “formative”.  Warning: may contain uses of “flow”, “pedagogy”, or “reflect”.  (Okay, maybe that last one is just an SFU thing.)

When my B.Ed program (called PDP there) first brought up assessment, the guest speaker did an activity where words were passed around on index cards, and we did something I don’t even remember what, but the important part was that I ended up stumbling across these cards that said “summative” and “formative”.  I asked the speaker what these meant, and she pulled a classic PDP technique – she asked me what I thought they meant.  I suggested something totally wrong, about summative being a summary and formative being … um I had no idea.  She nodded and didn’t disagree with me and offered no better definition but suggested I was on the right track.  We then proceeded to talk about assessment some more, providing context to show me that I was pretty much wrong, but feeling just uncertain enough that it continued to haunt me.

And thus, my journey began.

At the time, this kind of annoyed me.  In retrospect, I am so glad that I had this experience rather than someone trying to lay out the facts for me.  This got me hooked on figuring out just what this nonsense was supposed to mean, which helped me dodge a lot of conceptual landmines that I watched other teachers, new and otherwise, get hit by over and over.

There are a number of misconceptions (or things I *think* are misconceptions; still learning here) that I’ll quickly address, and then I’ll try to round out my own definition at the end that hopefully clears up these myths.

Myth #1: Summative = traditional assessment (exams, tests);  formative = progressive assessment (SBG, informal assessment, etc)

Myth #2: Summative is bad, formative is good.

Myth #3: An assessment is either summative or formative, not both.

I’m hoping that for those of you who have looked into assessment practices, these myths are familiar enough that I don’t need to expand on them.  I could dredge up plenty of examples from my own experience, but let’s cut to the good stuff.

My current understanding:

An assessment is summative when it reports information on a student’s past learning to the outside community. This corresponds to the buzz-phrase “assessment of learning” that’s also passed around in educational circles.

An assessment is formative when it reports information on a student’s current learning to the student and/or the instructor. The matching buzz-phrases here are “assessment for learning” and “assessment as learning”.

Probably the biggest shift here away from the myths listed above is to start using these words to describe functionality, rather than as mutually exclusive categories.  There are many types of assessment, both traditional and progressive, that function as both summative and formative assessment.

Examples:

• A traditional unit test is summative in that it is included in the grade that ends up on the report card.  It is formative in that it informs students on what they may need to study for a final exam.
• A Standards-Based Grading assessment is formative in that students are informed of the results in time to adjust their understanding, study, practice, etc and be reassessed later.  SBG assessments are also summative in that they form the final grade which goes on the report card at the end of the course.

One reason I think we really need this clarification in how we use these words is that new assessment strategies such as SBG are not only better at functioning as formative assessments, but are also potentially much better summative assessments as well.  eg. SBG does a great job of gathering information on what a student has learned, and that information could (in theory) be passed along to the outside community, or to teachers who the student will see next year.

Another related reason I think we need to be clearer in how we use these terms is that if we aren’t, we risk falling hard on Myth #2 which ends up ostracizing those peers who primarily use traditional assessments.

On the flip side, with a focus on using “formative” and “summative” as describing functionality, we can start having useful discussions around how good a job a given assessment does at being formative or summative.  In my perfect world, we should be looking for overall assessment strategies that are fantastic from both a summative and formative standpoint.  (In my actual world, we’re usually stuck within a very rigid system of how summative results are reported, so there’s only so much you can do. But, still.)

There’s still (at least) one huge understanding lurking in those definitions that I haven’t expanded on, but this is already rather long and I think I’ll need a diagram to explain what I’ve got in mind next.

Does this help anyone?

• deconstructing classroom logistics in my night-school math 12 class (how group work did or didn’t work; WCYDWT with grown-ups, how I structured note-taking, etc.)
• deconstructing what I actually taught:
  • that senior-level trig stuff: unit circle vs ASTC vs ???
  • some fun stuff that actually worked that I haven’t talked about
• deconstructing (is he still using that word? sheesh) a summer math-ed class I took last year during my B.Ed that was amazing and which I would still like to transform my own classroom into. I need to think through why it worked, how it worked, and how to steal it and make it my own.  (And I want to share the good stuff so that I’m not the only one trying it.)  Some overlap here on the previously mentioned topic of co-operative / collaborative group work, which was a key feature of this class.
• Maybe something about Civ-games and colonialism; may review that Canadian History mod I stumbled across this week as a case study.
• Someone challenged me to make a math lesson out of some crazy web-game about fish?  I may have to take them up on that challenge.

The key points of the game design analysis that came up (for that case) were:

1. Keep it small.
2. Keep the action constant.
3. Reward success.
4. Extend the challenge as people master the basics.

How many of these are practical tips for your classes?  Here’s my first thoughts.

1. Keep it small.

This is something I’ve incorporated into my assessments.  I try to keep them as short as they can be.  What does this mean?  If I am assessing a given standard, two good questions are just as meaningful as ten mediocre ones.  What is the point of asking twenty questions on the same topic?  Are we testing comprehension, or mental endurance (ie. tolerance levels for boredom and redundancy)?  At best, this is just wasting everyone’s time; at worst, it’s disadvantaging students who do get it but have attention problems.  (Yes, it’d be good for those students to learn how to cope, and college exam prep etc etc, but I still want them to know they actually do get this stuff.)

Plus, um, it’s more work for me.  Why would I do that to myself?

There’s more grey area stuff to explore on this point but let’s move on.

2. Keep the action constant.

If there is one thing I’ve learned as a teacher-on-call, it’s that boredom leads to scary things being thrown at me trouble.  But this doesn’t mean busy-work.  If my design goal is to get students thinking, then busy work is nearly as bad as doing nothing at all.  The parallel to teaching is to keep them thinking.

This relates directly to the last point: 4. Extend the challenge. Students who get it should still be kept thinking.  Got a handful of students who finish the assigned problems in half the time of the rest of the class?  Have a few tougher problems in your back pocket on the same topic.  (I’ve varied greatly as to how good I am at being prepared for this.)

The flip side is to do what you can to keep students from shutting their brains off and giving up.  This means support mechanisms.  At this point, though, it’s probably obvious I’m talking about all the “differentiated instruction” tricks that get praised in Education circles but which are sometimes really hard to make actually work.  All I can say is, take it with a grain of salt as needed, but don’t give up on it.  The plan I think can work is simply emphasizing group work – peers are an instant support structure.  But my adventures with structured group work in a classroom are another post.

3. Reward success.

For the design of Super Meat Boy, this meant a unique replay system that showed all your failed attempts at a level simultaneously while replaying your success.  The message?  “Look at this crazy hard level that beat you up so many times and now you beat it! Therefore you are awesome.”

The goal for their game was to make something crazy-hard, but keep building up skill and confidence in the player so that they persist through the challenge and get to enjoy the success at the end.  They did this by deliberately not dwelling on failure, giving as many chances to succeed as the player needs, and highlighting what the player accomplished at the end.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of an entire industry mastering the art of creating self-efficacy in people.  (Sorry, I know it’s a ten-dollar word, but ever since I found a word that describes exactly what is most needed for students to succeed in math, I can’t let it go.)

The thing is, when teachers talk about crazy things like standards-based grading, replacing poor marks with good ones whenever students demonstrate mastery, etc, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will come out of the woodwork and complain, “Oh great, more dumbing down the math class. Hope I’m not stuck with your students next year!”  But even the video game design example we’re looking at here is all about making things hard in a way that people won’t give up on.  Get that?  This is not about dumbing down – this is about training students not to give up.