This semester I am taking a class in internet applications for the classroom. As I start, I just want to register, as a bookmark for the year, that my goal for the class is to employ what I learn with my students in order to find out if they become better readers and writers.
I know what better reading and writing looks like after 12 years in teaching: will my students improve faster or will this just be shoving paper down wires to paraphrase tech guru Alan November?
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
2008-09 mid-year goals
TO: Ann Knell
Assistant Principal
FROM: Jeff Howell
DATE: January 21, 2009
RE: Mid-Year Goals Review
What follows is my brief summary of the progress towards my two goals for the 2008-2009 school year.
Goal 1 is a character-related goal, calling for the promotion in my classroom of “confidence and perseverance” among struggling students. The methods employed included having the students reflect on “matters of character, proper behavior and their own success in part of regular goal setting.” Eventually the students should have “improved performance of their English Language Arts MCAS and fewer behavior infractions in school.”
The summative data for this goal will have to wait until after the spring MCAS and the fall announcement of results. For now, I can offer observations of how the students have done on the assignments related to this goal, their behavior in class, and the number of times they have been suspended or incurred other such behavioral penalties.
I wish that I could say that this approach has resulted in sweeping behavioral changes among my struggling students. Indeed, I can point to specific students who have been impervious to the concept that reflecting on better behavior, sound ethics or effective work habits has led to consequent changes in attitude, behavior or character on their part. These students frequently miss class due to absences or while getting helped by other aspects of the school system, such as the guidance or assistant principal’s office. In their writing and discussion, they candidly reveal that everything they do is a result of a personal choice. When asked what the school could do better to meet his life challenges, for instance, one such student remarked, “the school does all that stuff; I just choose not to be helped.” His tactic, in his second year in English 10, is to just get by with a “D” to pass. While his strategy worked in quarter 1, he has compounded an absence problem with his low achievement standards to find himself failing quarter 2.
Another student experiences a similar problem with limiting beliefs. He has been doing “A” work in the English Skills class, but had completed little to nothing for another English 10 class. We arranged to have his guidance counselor shift him into my English 10 class, where he has continued to do little to no work, even as he continues to earn “A’s” in English Skills. It is not a matter of difficulty holding him back in English 10, according to his own written reflections. He “feels like” doing the work in one class, and not the other.
What reigns supreme for these students are autonomy issues —the ability to do their own thing, their own way, whether or not it fits in to an authority figures sense of right and wrong. Later on, they reflect that certain behaviors or lack of academic diligence was “stupid” on their part (again to use their word).
In contrast, a number of less-able students have responded positively to the character-based assignments. First, in writing about ethical issues, the students embrace a greater sense of stake-holding than in literature-based writing assignments. Recently, for instance, the students wrote about their reasoning in deciding whether or not to call a repairman’s boss after the worker had done a good job, but with the knowledge that the repairman was also stealing time off the company clock. Their sense of identification with the worker was balanced by their appreciation of the employer’s need to get the most of the employee’s time, in order for him to earn his wage fairly. This sort of prompt leads to a persuasive essay, currently the writing mode of choice on the SAT, and rumored to be upcoming for the 10th grade MCAS.
Can I claim that the students have behaved better by focusing on such questions, by reflecting on behavior and character on a regular basis? The strength of student answers and their more impassioned stances notwithstanding, I think it would be “a stretcher” (to use Mark Twain’s term in Huck Finn) to make such a claim.
Goal 2 deals with more tangible issues involving student learning goals and clarifying points of confusion and misconceptions. On this issue, I can make stronger claims about student learning in very specific ways. I have been much more punctilious about student writing folders and their recording of focus correction areas (FCA’s) from their writing assignments in those folders. Additionally, after the return of each corrected writing assignment, the students create their own writing goals, which they consult during each subsequent writing assignment. Therefore, they are doubly aware of what they need to work on and the new concepts which we are learning: once, by how they score with the FCA’s, and again, in their reflection in new goal setting for future assignments.
Typically, I recycle the particular FCA’s twice before retiring them to the classroom wall, where they stand guard, ready to be consulted for future assignments, and if mistakes resurface in later assignments, the FCA’s find their way into quizzes drawn from previous compositions. For instance, “eliminating homonym errors” is a September, English 10, level 2 FCA, as was “eliminating run-ons and fragments.” Here, in January, though the students might have just completed and had returned a writing assignment that did not have those FCA’s on them, I will declare a quiz on a previous composition on those objectives. They then have to correct all the errors on a particular composition. One of many things I learned from attending the Collins Writing System seminar in December is that if the teacher sets very draconian scoring standards on that quiz (e.g. 1x=C-, 2x=F), it gets the students intensely interested in getting a clear sense of how to satisfy that particular writing objective.
Currently, I have witnessed (and the students have documented) more concrete and specific improvement in satisfying writing objectives than at any other time in my career. When they have misconceptions about certain concepts, the regular quizzes prompt them to seek out the individual help necessary for their more permanent learning, and I have frequent spells of in-between time with students turning the pages of Rules for Writers or Writers’ Inc, searching for answers on everything from punctuation and mechanics to diction and syntax. More of my students are becoming “good writers,” while also being able to articulate what good writing entails.
Assistant Principal
FROM: Jeff Howell
DATE: January 21, 2009
RE: Mid-Year Goals Review
What follows is my brief summary of the progress towards my two goals for the 2008-2009 school year.
Goal 1 is a character-related goal, calling for the promotion in my classroom of “confidence and perseverance” among struggling students. The methods employed included having the students reflect on “matters of character, proper behavior and their own success in part of regular goal setting.” Eventually the students should have “improved performance of their English Language Arts MCAS and fewer behavior infractions in school.”
The summative data for this goal will have to wait until after the spring MCAS and the fall announcement of results. For now, I can offer observations of how the students have done on the assignments related to this goal, their behavior in class, and the number of times they have been suspended or incurred other such behavioral penalties.
I wish that I could say that this approach has resulted in sweeping behavioral changes among my struggling students. Indeed, I can point to specific students who have been impervious to the concept that reflecting on better behavior, sound ethics or effective work habits has led to consequent changes in attitude, behavior or character on their part. These students frequently miss class due to absences or while getting helped by other aspects of the school system, such as the guidance or assistant principal’s office. In their writing and discussion, they candidly reveal that everything they do is a result of a personal choice. When asked what the school could do better to meet his life challenges, for instance, one such student remarked, “the school does all that stuff; I just choose not to be helped.” His tactic, in his second year in English 10, is to just get by with a “D” to pass. While his strategy worked in quarter 1, he has compounded an absence problem with his low achievement standards to find himself failing quarter 2.
Another student experiences a similar problem with limiting beliefs. He has been doing “A” work in the English Skills class, but had completed little to nothing for another English 10 class. We arranged to have his guidance counselor shift him into my English 10 class, where he has continued to do little to no work, even as he continues to earn “A’s” in English Skills. It is not a matter of difficulty holding him back in English 10, according to his own written reflections. He “feels like” doing the work in one class, and not the other.
What reigns supreme for these students are autonomy issues —the ability to do their own thing, their own way, whether or not it fits in to an authority figures sense of right and wrong. Later on, they reflect that certain behaviors or lack of academic diligence was “stupid” on their part (again to use their word).
In contrast, a number of less-able students have responded positively to the character-based assignments. First, in writing about ethical issues, the students embrace a greater sense of stake-holding than in literature-based writing assignments. Recently, for instance, the students wrote about their reasoning in deciding whether or not to call a repairman’s boss after the worker had done a good job, but with the knowledge that the repairman was also stealing time off the company clock. Their sense of identification with the worker was balanced by their appreciation of the employer’s need to get the most of the employee’s time, in order for him to earn his wage fairly. This sort of prompt leads to a persuasive essay, currently the writing mode of choice on the SAT, and rumored to be upcoming for the 10th grade MCAS.
Can I claim that the students have behaved better by focusing on such questions, by reflecting on behavior and character on a regular basis? The strength of student answers and their more impassioned stances notwithstanding, I think it would be “a stretcher” (to use Mark Twain’s term in Huck Finn) to make such a claim.
Goal 2 deals with more tangible issues involving student learning goals and clarifying points of confusion and misconceptions. On this issue, I can make stronger claims about student learning in very specific ways. I have been much more punctilious about student writing folders and their recording of focus correction areas (FCA’s) from their writing assignments in those folders. Additionally, after the return of each corrected writing assignment, the students create their own writing goals, which they consult during each subsequent writing assignment. Therefore, they are doubly aware of what they need to work on and the new concepts which we are learning: once, by how they score with the FCA’s, and again, in their reflection in new goal setting for future assignments.
Typically, I recycle the particular FCA’s twice before retiring them to the classroom wall, where they stand guard, ready to be consulted for future assignments, and if mistakes resurface in later assignments, the FCA’s find their way into quizzes drawn from previous compositions. For instance, “eliminating homonym errors” is a September, English 10, level 2 FCA, as was “eliminating run-ons and fragments.” Here, in January, though the students might have just completed and had returned a writing assignment that did not have those FCA’s on them, I will declare a quiz on a previous composition on those objectives. They then have to correct all the errors on a particular composition. One of many things I learned from attending the Collins Writing System seminar in December is that if the teacher sets very draconian scoring standards on that quiz (e.g. 1x=C-, 2x=F), it gets the students intensely interested in getting a clear sense of how to satisfy that particular writing objective.
Currently, I have witnessed (and the students have documented) more concrete and specific improvement in satisfying writing objectives than at any other time in my career. When they have misconceptions about certain concepts, the regular quizzes prompt them to seek out the individual help necessary for their more permanent learning, and I have frequent spells of in-between time with students turning the pages of Rules for Writers or Writers’ Inc, searching for answers on everything from punctuation and mechanics to diction and syntax. More of my students are becoming “good writers,” while also being able to articulate what good writing entails.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
a quick study in identifying fallacies w/o naming them
Ellen Goodman tears apart the bogus idea, perpetuated in a costly way by the outgoing Bush administration, that "abstinence-only" education helps reduce teen pregnancy.
It doesn't, and it actually leads to higher STD's as well.
Check it out here:
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