Why go through the trouble of creating curriculum documents?

A new teacher coming into a school building needs to have some sort of clue as to what to teach. Can they get that from a textbook company? Sure, but a good hand-crafted, professionally selected set of resources complete with suggested learning targets, activities, labs, and assessment items is a better foundation than just a prepackaged set of worksheets and virtual labs.

Students and parents need to know what they are going to be learning about in a particular course or grade level. A good curriculum project should result in documents that teachers can share with students and parents. There should be transparency to all stakeholders as to what is happening in the classroom. Are teachers showing videos every day? Is what students are learning about important and relevant? Published curriculum documents are one way to show parents and administrators what we hope to achieve in our classrooms.

Who are we writing our curriculum for?

Sadly, the student audience is often overlooked when we’re writing curriculum. Think about the last time you wrote a course or grade level curriculum. Did you use student friendly language? I strongly suspect that you were writing it (at best) for your supervisor, or (at worst) you assumed that no one, including yourself, would ever look at it again.

If we choose to create curriculum to appeal to some mythical state inspector or RTTT grant committee, then we are going to be crafting it with that audience in mind. If we are primarily concerned with communicating our goals with parents and students, then it will look very different.

What should our curriculum focus on?

I (rather snarkily) mentioned this in my last post. What does our curriculum emphasize? When parents and students see our finished curricula posted online, do they get the sense that we care more about our students than meeting state or national testing corporation requirements?

If our curriculum is written as a series of facts to be learned, then we declare to parents and students that our most important audience is the testing companies. Why? Facts are easily tested. Its simpler to write test questions about facts. But anyone can google facts, that’s why they should be emphasized less in a modern educational system.

We should instead build curriculum for all grade levels that builds skills a la Wiggins and McTighe:

“So then, what is a curriculum? In research for our book, Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe, 1997), we uncovered 83 different definitions or connotations for the word, curriculum, in the educational literature! Such a variety of meanings confer an unhelpful ambiguity on the challenge of moving from standards to curriculum. Worse, most definitions focus on inputs, not outputs — what will be “covered” rather than a plan for what learners should be able to accomplish with learned content. This is a core misunderstanding in our field. Marching through a list of topics or skills cannot be a “guaranteed and viable” way to ever yield the sophisticated outcomes that the CCSS envision.”

We should instead focus on “…complex abilities and performances that students should master for college and workplace readiness.”

Basically, our curriculum should consist of a series of opportunities for students to practice skills that we believe are important to their future success. The first step of any curriculum project in a district therefore should be to agree on what those skills are and how to foster them in a developmentally appropriate way at each grade level. I’m excited that in our building the science and social studies departments are considering ways to track student progress from year to year not using standardized trivia-based test data, but by using more performance based assessments of student skills. We’ll be working over the summer to hammer out which skills we want to be sure to address and perhaps designing some of the assessments.

How can we guarantee that teachers will follow the curriculum guide provided to them?

We can’t, especially if that curriculum includes specific timetables of when kids will learn and master each topic. I mentioned previously that I dislike the term “guaranteed and viable” pretty intensely when attached to the word “curriculum.” The main reason is that a curriculum guide is just that, a guide, not a guarantee.

Teachers cannot control which students walk into their classroom in the fall. Would it be great if all students came to us with the same set of skills, one that matches nicely with the skills needed to be successful with our curriculum? Of course, but that rarely happens. Life is messy, especially the home lives of many of our students so they come to us with various deficiencies and strengths. Every group of students is different, so to pretend that we know exactly how long it will take for everyone to learn a particular topic or skill, without knowing each student’s capabilities, is ridiculous.

Holding a teacher accountable to an inflexible set of learning deadlines spelled out in a “guaranteed” document is one of the worst kinds of educational malpractice I can think of. This practice leads to teachers merely “covering” the material to cover their asses and denies kids the help they need if their particular skill set doesn’t integrate well with the established curricular time table.

Some conclusions from the above questions:

1. Work together with your grade level or department to create your own personalized, meaningful curriculum guides to use in your classroom.
2. Write your curriculum documents using student- and parent- friendly language and layout. Post them in an easily accessible public location online.
3. Focus on supporting the growth of important skills and don’t simply “cover” trivial facts when writing your curriculum guides. Begin by identifying which skills you believe are key to student success at your grade level and beyond.
4. Treat your documents as a guide, not a rigid timetable, and do not use them as a evaluative ruler by which to measure teacher success. Teachers need to be able to adapt their curriculum to help the students that they received rather than those they planned for.

I don’t know if this is happening in your school district, but around here we’ve been talking a lot about our Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum (GVC) project. Teachers have been working very hard under the tutelage of curriculum specialists to develop a GVC that spans all grade levels in our district using a common format. We’ve been told that without GVC teachers don’t know what to teach and students can end up with big gaps in their knowledge when they move between teachers, grade levels, or schools. Sounds great! But…

First, let’s agree on some definitions (lifted from http://www.thefreedictionary.com):

If we explain what GVC means to parents using these definitions we might get the following statement:

“We, the staff of (insert your school district name here), pledge to deliver an effective educational course of study, (insert curriculum project/vendor name here), to your children. These curriculum documents will be followed by your child’s teacher in order to guarantee that your child (insert the purpose of education here). You will be able to view these curriculum documents at (insert hyperlink here) to see exactly what your child is currently learning about.”

Perfect! We’ve just created something to put on the district’s webpage that will tell parents all about what their students will be learning. Or have we?

We can easily fill in most of the blanks in this statement, district name, fancy curriculum project name, and website where all the goodies are posted, but how about that one in the middle: insert the purpose of education here. How are we going to express that?

Let me throw out some options for what to write there:

“These curriculum documents will be followed by your child’s teacher in order to guarantee that your child

…can help America compete in the global economy.”

…can score proficient or advanced on the state exam.”

…gains entry into the college of their choice.”

…becomes a productive member of society.”

…gets the same education as everyone else.”

…learns critical thinking and problem-solving skills.”

Discuss among yourselves (or add a comment to this post): Which option (and I’m sure there are others) appeals to you? Why do we send kids to school? What is the purpose of our curriculum documents in light of this goal? Which of the above choices would the leadership of your district emphasize?

I recently saw this email from our curriculum consultant about the timing and placement of our curriculum units:

“I noticed in the 8th Grade Science Curriculum Map that all of the Earth Systems Science standards are located in 4th Quarter.  Please note that on the Colorado 8th Grade Science Assessment Frameworks, 34% of the total score points will be awarded from the Earth Systems Science Standards (see attached frameworks).

Please have your science teachers take another look at the La Junta 8th Grade Science Curriculum Map.  It appears, from what I can gather from the timing of the assessment, that all of the 8th Grade Science Standards will need to be taught by the end-of-third-quarter in order to be fully prepared for the 8th Grade Science Assessment. That will leave 4th quarter available for more extensive application or cross-content integration and/or preparation for 9th grade science.

There is a similar concern with mapping the 7th Grade Social Studies Standards in order to be prepared for the Colorado 7th Grade Social Studies Assessment.”

Just in case you missed it, the email says that our 7th and 8th grade teachers, and by extension everyone else in the district, have to cover all their required course content in the first three quarters of the school year.  The fourth quarter can be used for “more extensive application or cross-content integration” or preparation for the next level. An extreme interpretation of this email would be that 4th quarter curriculum doesn’t matter, since its after the test. The unavoidable conclusion from this email is that the curriculum should be designed to create the greatest possible chance of success on the state test.

Thanks to this set of instructions about my department’s curriculum, I can now accurately craft the message that our curriculum sends to parents. Here we go:

“We, the staff of East Otero School District, pledge to deliver an effective educational course of study, the La Junta Public Schools Curriculum, to your children. These curriculum documents will be followed by your child’s teacher in order to guarantee that your child can score proficient or advanced on the state exam. You will be able to view these curriculum documents at lajuntaschools.org to see exactly what your child is currently learning about.”

Bummer. Talk about a missed opportunity. We could have made our curriculum about teaching kids skills that they’ll need when they leave our classrooms. We could have focused on making sure that we teach kids how to think for themselves and make informed decisions later in life.

Maybe we’ll work on that during 4th quarter.

I’ve been inflicting our state’s standardized test on my students this week. If you aren’t from Colorado, its helpful to know that our current state-mandated test is called the TCAP, where T is for Transitional. Transitional as in “we don’t really have a good idea about what the next test will look like but we know that the old test, the CSAP, has expired.”  I could go on about how useless it is to give a “transitional” test, knowing that it tests a set of standards and skills that the state disposed of a while ago, but I won’t.

What I’ll share instead is the story of one young lady, whom I had never met before she walked into my classroom the day of the first testing session.

Different schools do testing differently, but at our school we block out (wipe out) four days of instructional time to administer the TCAP to students.  We do three test sessions during the course of a day, with a few breaks thrown in so students can snack and take care of bodily functions before they get back to testing. Throw in some extra testing time just in case students run over the allowed time for testing, lets say a half-hour per test, and now you are asking students to come to school from 7:45 to 1:35, call it 6 hours a day, for 4 days, for a total of 24 hours.

The students are, perhaps sadly, used to this chunk of their lives being thrown away. They file in to my room on the first day of testing with resignation written on their faces. They sit in their proper places with their number two pencils at the ready and wait for test booklets to appear. Appear they do, and, after some standardized directions read by yours truly, they dive into their tests and whatever mysterious tasks await them.

Except one doesn’t. This young lady was right with me during the directions and the slightly useless “sample” problems but now she has closed her test booklet and is sitting quietly staring at its cover. I’m not allowed to “interact with the students in any way” so I don’t say anything, and, as it turns out, neither does she. She just sits there for an hour as the rest of the tested go about their mysterious tasks.

At first I think to myself that perhaps she is not fond of writing. That would explain why she skips the essay part of the reading and writing test. But then she proceeds to do the same exact thing for the math test, then the science test, and so on. She is an equal opportunity non-test-taker, apparently. Hour after hour, day after day goes by with the same pattern repeating itself: I read the directions, she smiles, and then she calmly closes her test book without completing a single test item.

For 24 hours. Twenty-four-hours of sitting quietly while others around her scribble away at mysterious tasks. When was the last time you spent 24 hours in silence? This is a 10th grader we’re talking about. A teenager. The age group where self-control is thrown out the window by hormones and disconnected frontal lobes. To sit quietly while the world goes about its tasks is something a lot of us wanna-be adults struggle to pull off. She must have a pretty good reason for choosing to behave this way.

But why? What drives a student to such outlandish behavior? I wish I knew. Is she sticking it to the man by refusing to test? Was she inspired by the recent Denver student protests and is following their example? Or is she so low ability that she feels that she will fail the test anyway so why even try? Does she hate all of her teachers so much that she wants to nail them with poor test scores so they look bad and get fired? All these reasons are possible and valid.

Why did she come to school at all? There happens to be an interesting bit of state legislation (C.R.S. 22-7-409) that “requires every student enrolled in a public school to take the assessments in the grade level in which the student is enrolled.” Various people (usually school administrators and TCAP testing coordinators) have made it clear that this statement means that state law says that you have to take TCAP. I’m not here to argue the legality of opting out of TCAP, the Coalition for Better Education and the United Opt Out National Movement do a much better job of that, but I am here to say that the message is broadcast to students and parents that refusing to show up for TCAP testing is illegal. I suspect that’s why this student came to school for her 24 hour marathon of non-compliance.

As I watch this student sit (or nap) through these “legally required” tests I wonder, regardless of their motivation, what would happen if more students followed her example?  Could enough passive resistance like this change how we do testing to students? What would happen if all of our students smile, nod, and close their test booklets without completing a single item on our standardized tests?

That would definitely be an interesting 24 hours.

]]> http://see.ludwig.lajuntaschools.org/?feed=rss2&p=833 4 http://see.ludwig.lajuntaschools.org/?p=828 http://see.ludwig.lajuntaschools.org/?p=828#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:06:20 +0000 Chris Ludwig http://see.ludwig.lajuntaschools.org/?p=828  

SMACKDOWN: a confrontation between rivals or competitors

I try not to take sides in student disputes, which is why I’ll let you, dear reader, help sort out this situation:

Two of my best student bloggers have started getting scrappy with each other in class about how many blog views they have. These students have been with me for a couple years now and both have blogs related to biology, anatomy, and AP Biology courses. Their blogs seem to attract a fair bit of traffic around certain science topics at certain times of the year, so we assume that other students across the country (and world) are looking at their stuff. They’ve been arguing lately about who has the better blog and I, of course, have stated that they both have equally excellent blogs, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. They, of course, don’t want to hear that from me and want a winner declared (all in good fun and the spirit of collaboration).

Here’s where you come in. I’ll post links to their blogs and you can go see for yourself the great work they’ve been doing. You can even leave them some comments if you feel so inspired. At the very least you can “vote” with your views as to who might have the better blog. Be sure to click on individual blog posts that you feel are the best they’ve done. That’ll give them some feedback even if you don’t want to write a comment.

Ready? Here we go:

Mandi’s Anatomy Blog, AP Biology Blog, and her Biology blog

Steven’s Anatomy Blog, AP Biology Blog and his Biology blog

I’ll have them report how it turns out and I’ll get back to you with the results soon.

Fad: A practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal – Merriam-Webster 

As someone who has been experimenting with standards-based assessment and grading for a while now, I’ve noticed a few things that don’t seem to work when implementing SBG. The following is my list of ways to make sure that no one in your school district ever wants to use standards-based grading again.

1. Don’t get teacher input about the process of implementing standards-based grades.

One way that I’ve seen SBG get implemented occurs when administrators or superintendents attend a conference or read a neat blog post about how wonderful SBG is and how it rocked the world etc. etc. They proceed to get their school board on their side with arguments about how a standards-based education guarantees that all students will succeed and that the best way to guarantee this is to make teachers report their students’ progress not as points and percentages but as discrete standards.

Great! But how? Who will develop the standards? Who will decide the format of the standards-based report card? Will you turn the standards-based report into a letter grade? If so, how? So many choices to make, but who will make them?

If administrators go this alone, you’ll run the risk of making this just another educational fad. Fads seem to make teachers mad and reactionary. The more experienced among us shrug and smile at professional development sessions about the next new best thing and most of the time we take the resulting packet or binder back to our rooms and nothing comes of it but another surface for collecting dust. But when you mess with the fundamental structure of their classroom flow and their gradebook? Wow, do people freak out, especially if that directive comes purely from a top-down direction without teacher input. The fad then becomes something truly evil, more than a binder to be shelved, but an actual invader into the sacred space between a teacher and their students, a fundamental warping of the fabric of classroom space-time. Well, maybe not quite like that, but it does piss people off.

Exhibit A: Hundreds of Teachers Rally Against Standards-Based Grading

Don’t do this. If teachers beg you to allow them to implement SBG, let them. When they are ready they’ll make it work. Otherwise its a fad.

2. Require teachers to use state or national standards for their course/classroom standards.

There are a bajillion things out there masquerading as “standards.” Any group of people with sufficient money and political capital can put together a list of things that they think “everyone” should know. My state, your state, and some so-called national groups have certainly done this, recruiting committees of experts to sit in conference rooms for hours on end, word-smithing and getting these beauties just right for public consumption.

So there you are, in your quest to provide a standards-based education, staring at these lists of what kids should know and be able to do. Should you go with national (CommonCore, NGSS), state, AP, IB, college concurrent, or heck, even someone’s grandma’s chemistry syllabus from 1922?

Nope. Allow teachers to create their own standards.

Teachers can certainly borrow bits and pieces from all of these lovely committees who have spent hours consulting one another on the best bits of knowledge for a particular grade level or discipline, but to limit them to one interpretation of what kids ought to know is sort of the opposite of enabling good educators. Furthermore, most of these standards being published recently are written so poorly and so esoterically that teachers need to be trained for hours just to make sense of them. Is this the sort of language that you want to put on a standards-based report card that parents and students will see? They’ll just crumple up/delete it if we don’t write our standards in language that they’ll understand.

And that’s the real reason that teachers should create their own standards for their classes: only they know who their students are, the community context within which they work, and the kind of language (word-smithing) that needs to be used with their particular group(s) of students.

Take all those fancy-pants standards and make them your own. Otherwise, parents won’t understand them, kids will ignore them, and we’ll all hope that they’ll go away like all fads do.

3. Don’t train your teachers before you roll out SBG.

It might happen like this: You’ve done your research and have decided to use standards-based assessment and reporting in your school. You have at least a few teachers interested in using it. As for those other not-so-interested teachers, well, they’ll recognize the benefits, too, once they start using it. You go for it! At your first staff meeting in August you greet your returning staff with your vision of how they will run their classes this new school year. You have them start the new school year by writing their standards and assessments for the new grading system. Aren’t they excited?

Well, no, they’re not. If you haven’t done a lot of groundwork over two, three, or even four years, teachers are going to have a lot of reservations about your new initiative and a steep hill to climb to meet your sudden shift in paradigm.

Think about what you are asking teachers to do:

• Wade through pages of local, state, and national standards to figure out what other people say they are supposed to be teaching
• Select from that bloated body of standards the ones that students really need to know
• Rewrite the clunky language of these standards into words that students will understand
• Organize the new set of standards into an instructional plan in a way that makes sense thematically and chronologically
• Learn to work with new or modified electronic gradebooks to collect and display grades using standards instead of points/percentages
• Write and/or modify activities and assessments that align to the new standards
• Write rubrics and/or set performance criteria for A/P/PP/U performance levels
• Determine if and how students’ standards-based grades will be converted to a letter grade

If you want teachers to do all of these things on the fly during their first year of implementation of standards-based grading, be my guest, but don’t expect really stellar results and you should expect to lose the support of much of your overworked staff.

Instead, try implementing some of the steps that this district took before they went whole hog. Solon Community School District, you’re doing it right. Otherwise its a fad and its gonna die for lack of support.

4. Use SBG to provide even less information to parents than your traditional grading system.

One of the big benefits of standards-based grading is its potential to replace the nonsense of numerical points and averaging and zeros with a system that pinpoints a student’s academic strengths and weaknesses in order to help them get better in those areas. This works if students and parents can see which areas are deficient and if they can use the teacher’s observations of student performance to help plan ways to improve.

What often happens, though, is that poorly-implemented standards-based reporting kills any meaningful data that a teacher might have gained from their new system of assessing by standards. If all a parent sees is something like this, the system is in trouble. I can picture a kid getting this report card and the parent asking “Larry, why do you have a PP in Math Content 2? What is Math Content 2? And why is your ORC knowledge a U?” I doubt the kid could answer.

Unless there is an easily accessible, DETAILED collection of student assessments and performance data available for parents to see, the switch to a standards-based report card tells parents even less about their kid than your current rack-up-the-points system. At least in that sort of points system most parents can go to an online grade book and see that their kid didn’t turn in Math Content Sheet 91.1d or that they got a 78% on their last science quiz. Telling parents that their kid is partially proficient in Numeracy doesn’t really mean squat, especially if the parent only sees this judgement of their child at the end of the quarter or semester.

Try out ActiveGrade, BlueHarvest, Three-Ring, JumpRope, or have teachers make their own Google Spreadsheets to record feedback to students and parents. Get your current implementations of Infinite Campus or Powerschool to play nice with reporting standards-based data online. Make the evidence that your teachers collect visible to both parents and students. Otherwise its just a fad and nobody figures out how to improve.

So what does work? How do I start using SBG in a really meaningful way?

Teachers, this one’s for you: start with this article by Frank Noschese. All the fancy stuff will come later. You’ll figure out a system that works for you.

Best of luck to you all!

With all these topics popping up on my blog, I’m not sure whether I’m an edtech blogger, a SBG/SBAR blogger, or whether I even deserve the title “blogger.” I break most of the rules for being really good at any of those. I don’t sit around reviewing the newest tech goodies and apps or trends in “educational technology.” I have my days where I want to rail against standards and SBG (more about that in a bit). And I certainly don’t write blog posts with the frequency associated with anyone who labels themselves a “blogger.”

So what is this online space that I’ve created? Who cares! Its mine. And yours too, if you’ve been reading my notes and/or leaving comments. Thanks, and keep on reading!

My vote for a much more transformative tool goes to BlueHarvest, brainchild of Vic and Shawn over at ThinkThankThunk Industries.  And before you open another tab and search for BlueHarvest, here’s the link: http://main.blueharvestfeedback.com. If you jumped the gun and did the search already, you’ll find what my students did at the beginning of the semester: Star Wars references. Actually, even if you did click on the link, you’ll still find Star Wars references. Shawn’s kind of a fanboy, apparently. Regardless of his fanboy status, he and Vic put their collective nerd powers to work to create a very powerful service for communicating about learning with students and parents.

Since you likely haven’t seen BlueHarvest before, I’ll play tour guide here for a bit, from a teacher’s point of view. I’m going to skip the initial sign-up process which you can figure out for yourself. Its free to try, and apparently free for the first year and some dinky yearly charge after that. They’re not doing this for the money.

Groups and Standards

The first thing you’ll want to do is create groups either by course or by class period (My Students > Modify Groups). I found it easier to make groups by course topic so I currently use the groups Anatomy, AP Biology, Biology, and Chemistry. You’ll then want to enter your standards for each course (My Curriculum > Add/Modify Standards). These are the essential questions or targets that you want each student to be able to do by the end of that particular course. Creating these, of course, is the hard part. Entering them into BlueHarvest is easy. There’s even a mass-upload option, although I didn’t use that.

You’ll want to assign standards to each group so that when you add a student to the group (course), they automatically get that course’s set of standards. The easiest way that I found to do this was to go through My Students > Modify Groups.

When you are done entering standards and assigning them to groups, you should have a setup that looks something like this:

Science process standards in BlueHarvest

Tip: When creating standards, I found it better to create different standards for each course, even if some of the standards are the same between your courses. That way if you have a student that takes several classes from you, BH can keep track of that student’s performance separately for each class. For example, a student that takes both biology and chemistry from me has both Lab Skills (BioStd3) and Lab Skills (ChemStd3) assigned to them since they are going to be learning very different lab skills in the two courses.

Add Students

The next task in getting BH ready for use is adding in your students. This is accomplished either one at a time or using mass upload from spreadsheet or Powerschool files (My Students>Add/Modify Students). The big benefit of setting up groups first is that adding students to the right course is easy, just select which group they belong to as you set up each account.

Tip: BH can share students between teachers if more than one teacher in a school is using BH. If you are sharing students between two or more teachers, only have one of the teachers input the students into BH. I share several students with our Spanish teacher and at first we both input all of our students. This led to some of the students getting two different sets of login information, one for each class. Its best to only create one account for each student and then use the My Curriculum>Share window to pass those students on to the other teacher(s).

At this point you’ll have lots of student accounts in place and they should even be populated with your course standards. Student passwords are auto-generated by BH, although they can change them later. Most of my students didn’t change passwords, the auto-generated ones are too cool. I used Edmodo to share account names and passwords, but if you can get your kids’ emails in to the system (I didn’t) BH can send login info out.

Providing Feedback

Once you get past the setup phase you now have a way to write specific feedback to students about products that they create for your classes. When you select a student, a list of standards that that student is trying to meet will appear. You can click on one of these to open a dialog box like so:

Providing feedback on a new standard

From the screenshot you can see that you can add text, links, and even audio and video feedback. I’ll admit I haven’t used the audio and video much, but I’ll get there soon. You can leave a numerical score if you like, but I often don’t. Once you click “Leave Comment” the feedback is posted and both you and the student will receive a notification that there is a new comment ready on BlueHarvest. BH supports both email and text (SMS) notifications.

After you’ve done this enough and your kids have gotten the hang of it, some of the discussions start to look like this:

Part of a discussion with a student (name hidden) who is learning about cell membranes 

Once students have had chances to master several different standards, each with a conversation happening about it like the one above, a glance at their standards lets you know about where they stand, especially if you have chosen to use the option to mark some standards proficient, as in this example:

A list of all standards for a student

These features are great for keeping track of what a single student is doing, but BlueHarvest also has the ability to let you view the activity of all students in BH at once in the form of proficient, recent activity, and convo length reports (in Analytics). Here’s an example recent activity graph where each row is a different student (names hidden) and the brightness of the red color represents how recently any comments have been posted:

Recent Activity Report

This graph reflects the fact that the second student recently asked me to review her online portfolio so there are new comments on several standards. You can also tell from this graph that I need to check in with the last two students on the report since there was a black row almost all the way across which usually means they aren’t producing anything for me to comment on.

These are the main features of BlueHarvest that students and I are using. There’s a lot more it can do that I haven’t touched on, such as numerical grades, which it can track too if that’s your way of operating.

While it might seem to some like just more work and another grade book to keep track of and update, in my experience, this is the grade book that matters most and it really is pretty easy to maintain. But then again, this is coming from a teacher who was managing student comments and grades in 120+ individual spreadsheets last year.

The Point: If you are interested at all in making learning targets or standards the focus of your class, BlueHarvest lets you keep track of student progress towards those standards and streamlines the process of providing timely feedback to students. This sort of tool can be transformative for your classroom if you can train yourself and your students to rely less on number scores and more on detailed, actionable feedback when discussing how much they’ve learned.

Some background: I’m mostly a biologist by training and a chemistry teacher of some ability, but I occasionally get called on to teach high school physics. The last time I was called upon to offer physics resulted in some very interesting things indeed. If you are a new reader here, you might want to catch up on some of the Phunsics shenanigans here (or here if you prefer video). Basically, the students and I set about learning physics through a series of projects that they designed and carried out. Most anything was fair game, since, after all, everything is physics. Projects ranged from wind tunnels and hot air balloons to trebuchets and potato cannons.

I’ve fielded many questions about how this class operated: Did we follow a syllabus? No, it would have rapidly become obsolete since students were designing the class. Did I know more than one or two weeks out what projects we would be working on? No, students determined what we would work on. Did we have a set of standards that we based our work on? Yes, I created a standards document from Colorado and New York physics standards that students used in planning projects and students created their own wiki based on AP Physics standards. As I look forward to doing this course again in 2013, after this year’s “break” to teach AP Biology, my main question is this: can I still call this course Physics knowing now how it will likely operate?

Let me complicate matters more. It turns out that the Physics course at our high school has always (in recent memory) been a weighted course, weighted 5.0 (the highest) in fact, so that a B in the course averages in at a 4.0 (an A) for GPA calculations. So now I have the situation of a powerhouse of a science class, a weighted 5.0 class, that has no preordained syllabus, students can follow pretty much whatever lines of inquiry they desire, and it only has a list of “suggested standards” rather than requirements. Uneasy yet?

I am uneasy with the idea of continuing to call this class Physics, which is why I’m wondering whether I should try to rename this course something like Advanced Science Research (like this teacher) or Applied Science Practicum of Awesome. But then the little voice speaks: but colleges won’t know what that is, will they?

Ah. Here it comes: the role of colleges and universities in deciding how we do science down at the high school level. I’ve been asked to provide syllabi before for a student or two, so I know colleges are looking at them. Are they looking at the course name on a transcript or at what we do in that class to help students learn? I’m guessing usually door number 1, the name. And just like that, I’m back to keeping the name as Physics because that most closely matches the content and skills that my students are going to acquire during that course.

See my lovely logic loop? The old-school science teacher in me says I’m no longer teaching a Physics class but the practical considerations of calling the course anything else are maybe too much to fight for, especially once the diverse student/parent/counselor/college audience is factored in.

Now its your turn: would you call a project-based, student-designed course in which we tried to tackle a variety of physical principles and design challenges Physics or not? Weigh in in the comments.

If you’ve been following this blog, you may remember that at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year I managed to get around 40 iPad 2′s for my students to use. These were given out primarily to my Anatomy students but some found their way into Physics students’ hands as well. If you’re interested in some notes on the deployment check here.

The deployment this year was similar, but was aided greatly by the addition of a Mac Mini as a sync station that students can use to update the apps on their iPads (Last year I had a dedicated local user account on my own Mac laptop to manage the iPads and, well, that sucked).

On to the apps! Here are some apps that we use and some sample learning artifacts from students that should give you a sense of how we are actually using the iPads:

Explain Everything: The iPad is great for drawing on with your fingers and it has a microphone, so why not talk and draw at the same time! That’s the premise behind Explain Everything. Here are some examples from Tiffany and Bethany in my Anatomy class.

WordPress and BlogPress: Since I run a paperless classroom based on student blogs, these apps see a lot of heavy use. Besides the obvious benefits of being able to create and edit blogs on the iPad (I’m using the WordPress app to write this), a secondary benefit is that students without Internet access at home can work on drafts that can be saved on the iPad at home and published once they’re back on the school’s WiFi.

Evernote: If you are familiar with Evernote at all, you know that it can do a lot. It should be no surprise, then, that different students use Evernote in many different ways. Several AP Biology students (including Steven and Mandi) are using it to keep track of some of their long-term experiments, taking both notes and pictures that they then use later in blog posts. Another student and I use a shared Notebook in Evernote to make sure he doesn’t lose his work, which for most of the first quarter seemed to never make it onto his blog. Using Evernote on both of our iPads lets me see his writing, even if it never makes it to his public blog.

Camera: No App Store link is necessary for this one, as long as you’ve got an iPad 2 or later model. The camera allows students to capture both still pictures and video. Some of the uses of pictures taken with the iPad can be seen on Evan’s Chemistry blog where he captures a periodic table scavenger hunt sheet he did and at Ashley’s Anatomy blog where she captures drawings from a histology lab. An example video is this one that Henry shot on his iPad in AP Biology to introduce the class to his viewers.

Skitch: Once students have pictures on the iPad, Skitch can be used to draw and annotate on top of those pictures for artistic and academic purposes. Some examples can be found on Leeanne’s blog and Stephen’s blog.

AirPlay and screen sharing: While not technically an App, one of the built-in features of the newer iPads is the ability to share the iPad screen over an AirPlay connection. In my room we use AirServer on my Mac to project student iPads onto the screen for the whole class to see. This has come in handy several times when those “google moments” happen in the middle of a discussion when a student wants to contribute something they just pulled up on their iPad. Much more about the technical side of AirPlay sharing can be found here.

Vernier Video Physics: I’ve mentioned this app before, but its awesomeness begs for it to be mentioned again. Students take videos of anything in motion and can create motion maps and graphs simply by marking where the object of interest is over time. Here’s an example from a constant velocity buggy lab.

Prezi: If you’ve been a Prezi user as long as I have, you’ll know that it has come a long way from its early days as a spinning, sometimes nausea-inducing replacement for powerpoint. These days there’s a Prezi app, and, while it can’t do everything that the web version can do, it does have some editing capabilities. I have several students currently working on Prezis, and some even prefer working on them on the iPad.

That’s the wrap up of the apps we use most. Sure, there are several science apps on the iPads, too, like our Inkling Hole’s Anatomy textbook, Visible Body, Frog Dissection, and Molecules, but these apps and books are content-specific tools that get used for a special purpose only every now and then. The real workhorse apps seem to be the ones that allow for manipulation of text, images, and video into new forms. These kinds of tools can be applied regardless of the content being discussed and give students creative new ways to show what they know.

Since that post was written (wow, is it October already?) we’ve had a great time and discovered a few things along the way. So far we’ve learned that:

• ants make terrible pets, but they do have awesome battles when ants from different nests are combined together
• the ends of our grow-light enclosure have far less illumination than the middle (sorry Michael)
• worms need to be kept moist, but do seem to prefer outside dirt to wet potting soil
• a mating population of 7 students violates the conditions for Hardy-Weinberg equillibrium (as well as other school policies)
• Black Widow spiders are awesome pets (if they don’t get out)
• the old saying may be true: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks
• a ZPA is not something on the front of your pants, but it might have something to do with genes
• really pretty green caterpillars sometimes turn into really ugly moths

How much of this was my doing? Just the fast plants, ma’am. That and I’m making them read “Your Inner Fish.” I tried to foist my usual pillbug behavior lab on them as well but they were too distracted by worms, dogs, and Black Widows. I suppose my critters weren’t as cool as theirs. They do like watching the parade of roly-poly’s come out when we water their soil, but the sheer carnage of a spider capturing and slurping down a grasshopper is in a completely different dimension of awesomeness.

So what is my role in this type of class, where students are driving a lot of the day to day activities? Besides being head of the spider containment team and he-who-finds-dead-worms-on-floor, I suppose one of my jobs is to give these kids grades that communicate how well they are doing in my class. Yet I consistently find, year after year and especially this year with the new and improved inquiry-based curriculum, that, out of all my courses, my AP Bio kids always have the fewest assessments listed in my gradebook. What is that about and should I (or their parents) be concerned? Isn’t AP Biology supposed to be a tough class, a Test-o-Rama? What about the piles and piles of learning objectives that are supposed to be assessed by the AP Biology Exam?

Its like this: sometimes stopping for formal assessments can feel like hitting a brick wall. Instead, we just go. We do science. Not in an unplanned and chaotic way, although there are certainly elements of randomness that come from being responsive to student interests. We do labs, hopefully mostly student-driven ones, because labs are way more likely to get students to learn how to think scientifically, not some vocabulary exercise followed by a quiz. Is there assessment of student learning? Yep. Assessment of learning is something that happens with every conversation about the lab procedure or results or omglookatthat and often doesn’t find it’s way into the grade book in the same way that a chapter test or a fancy blog post will. We’ll do those things, too, just not as often. For example, right now the students are working on a big writeup for their population genetics lab as well as a writeup of their observations of different animal behaviors.

But here’s the catch: it’s taken us over a month to even begin to get major assessments into the grade book and I’m starting to get twitchy over the massive scope of material that these kids are supposed to know. I’m already having to restrain myself from launching into a powerpoint-fueled frenzy of content-spewing vocabulary-laden gibberish in the name of “Getting them ready for the test,” and its not even March or April yet.

If you haven’t heard, the AP Biology course got a major overhaul this year with a focus on, you guessed it, inquiry. I’m down with that and love the emphasis on the seven science process skills outlined in the course description. But there’s a ton of plain ol’ biology factoids still inherent in the system, some of which are going to be pretty ugly to inquirify, if that’s a word. I suspect at some point that as a class we’ll need to start striking a balance between the wild carefree days of inquiry past and the rote memorization of tomorrow. AP Biology is a college-level course, you know ; )