Monthly Archives: July 2012

Are We Confusing Standards with Standardization?

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Standards, not standardization

My soap box. Here I go again…

As I write this, I’m ducking behind my screen, ready to dodge virtual tomatoes. Please bear with me as I question some assumptions we are making with regards to standards and standardization.

We educators use terms and acronyms, assuming that all people have the same understanding. First, I will clarify terms. Then I will ask questions.

Clarification 1: Textbooks are not curriculum.

Most simply put, curriculum is a list of things students should know and be able to do. We call the list a list of standards because we hope that all students will be able to know and do these things when they leave school. Then we create benchmarks, clarifying what those standards “look like” at various grade levels.

I often hear teachers and other school leaders saying that they want to find a curriculum that teaches to the standards. What they’re really saying is this: They are looking for the “magic bullet” educational materials that will help student test scores improve.

I haven’t used textbooks in over ten years. What I learned from my Australian colleagues is this: Teachers can look at a list of standards and figure out the best way to teach to those standards.

So here are some questions: Are schools underestimating teachers? Are schools assuming that teachers cannot teach to standards unless they have the “right” materials?

Clarification 2: Standards are different than Standardization

If we understand curriculum as a list of standards describing what students should know and be able to do, we can differentiate between curriculum and instruction.

Curriculum is built on standards. Instruction may or may not be standardized.

The progression of assumptions goes something like this (my reaction in italics):

  1. We need to teach to the common core (standards). True.
  2. The district has purchased materials that align with the standards. Okay.
  3. If we all teach this curriculum (a misuse of the term), then [the company's] research suggests that students will test better. Here is training on how you should all use these materials… Hold the phone!!!!!

We have crossed a line at #3. We assume that, to hit standards, instruction must be standardized according to commercially-created materials.

My next question: Once companies have convinced us that they have the “right” materials, are we requiring all teachers to use those materials in the same way?

Clarification 3: If we agree that instructional standardization is unnecessary, we can maintain creativity and passion in a standards-based classroom.

But we need to make a few paradigm shifts.

Specifically,

  1. Look at the standards before we look textbooks or think of “thematic” activities. The unit on Spiders is no longer a list of activities. It is a list of standards first (classification, expository writing, research, health and safety), then activities.
  2. Use team meeting time to plan. Work together to compile activities and resources that will teach to the standards. Use textbooks and other materials as resources. Trust yourself to create new activities that teach to standards more authentically than pre-packaged materials.
  3. Maintain checklists of standards and keep track of students that have and have not met specific standards. Project-based learning is then tweaked to include the following instructions: Somewhere in your project, you need to show me that you understand the difference between insects and spiders. You need to tell me whether or not your spider is dangerous and how you can tell. When I come and talk to you, I will ask which books and websites you have been reading and how they helped you.

Clarification 4: There are some things that are just wrong.

Wrong: Awards and sanctions for schools, teachers, and students based on test scores. Household rewards and sanctions do not get kids to bed on time, nor is bedtime a single standard by which we judge parenting (thank heavens!). Let’s pay attention to the scores, but realize that tests will never tell us the full extent of student knowledge.

Wrong: Hours and hours of standardized testing. I’ve created assessments where students learn through the process of demonstrating, synthesizing, and evaluating their knowledge and skills. Students learn nothing when they fill in bubbles. A few hours per year is okay. Weeks? Wrong.

Wrong: Teaching all students the same way. The little Steve Jobses and Mark Zuckerbergs in your classroom (who probably test well), will withdraw or start programming social media when they should be underlining the topic sentence.

There are more wrong things, but those are the biggies.

Conclusion: Education is not doomed, unless we confuse standards with standardization.

As Yong Zhao Trim said, American education was “doomed” in the 1960s when the Russians beat us to space. American education was “doomed” according to the 1980s publication “A Nation At Risk.” NCLB was created because schools were failing.

Yes, we have work to do in education. But, we have innovative teachers who care about student passions and are capable of creating lessons that teach to standards. Accomplished teachers know their students and how they learn.

Let’s teach to the standards, but teach them in ways that are individualized, differentiated, and personalized.

My last question: What if we change the assumptions?

If the new assumptions are as follows…

  • Teachers can teach to standards with or without specific, commercial materials.
  • No one set of materials (commercially-created or otherwise) will help teachers teach all standards to all students.
  • Standards can be taught and tracked in the midst of innovative, project-based classrooms.
  • We fight government initiatives that are truly wrong while resolving to show the world that students learn through individualized, differentiated, and personalized instruction.

…how would schools look different?

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Standardized Testing and Innovation: Chinese-American Perspective

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The ISTE final keynote by Yong Zhao Trim was especially meaningful to me – an international school educator living in China who has a background in Oregon public education.

I’ve watched many changes unfold over the past eleven years – both in the United States and China. I especially focused on the differences and changes in the Chinese and American education systems.

Yong Zhoa Trim’s keynote sums up much of what I have observed: Federal laws and other US initiatives aspire to make US students perform as well as Chinese students on standardized tests. Chinese families are clambering to give their students an American education with the hopes that they might become the next Steve Jobs.

This keynote has come up in a number of conversations the past month or so. I’d like to share it with everyone as a perspective that should be considered when discussing “educational achievement.”

What do you think? Is there a balance between achievement as measured by tests and achievement as measured by creativity/innovation?

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How to Help Students Develop Passion for Writing

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In an earlier post, I included a video that can be used to introduce students to a Writer’s Notebook. After two weeks of working with a new group of students, students have written more than ten entries and have reflected on their writer’s journals.

Here are some student reflections:

Individual Lessons

Each writing lesson provided students with a different writing idea to try, but no lesson required students to write in a certain way. My “ideas to try” came from a few sources:

  1. Ralph Fletcher’s A Writer’s Notebook
  2. Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5
  3. Various picture books.

The Overarching Goal

It’s easy to get caught up in a cycle I call product-based learning. In a product-based learning classroom, teachers focus student lessons toward the final narrative, the final essay, or the final whatever.

Using only the Lucy Calkins materials, students work on three to six exploratory journal entries before choosing and working on a final piece. The exploratory journal entries include thoughts about important people, places, objects, memorable events, important “firsts”, and more. Ralph Fletcher offers more suggestions – to write lists and wonderings and memories and observations and…

For additional journal entries, consider inspiring students through mini-field trips. In my case, classes walked to the beach in order to make observations along the way, play, and then write observations, memories, and experiences. Students took “mini field trips” around the school. They visited the school fish pond and were introduced to the turtles on the ground floor (most students didn’t know the turtles existed). The science lab hosts a butterfly garden – which many had never seen. The group also walked along a small section of the hiking trails surrounding the school.

Other schools might have students take “trips” to the roof of the school in order to get a different perspective on “ordinary” settings. They might write along the periphery of the playground and write about observations or memories. Ordinary field trips can include intentional writing time at the site or writing during lunch at a park. If possible, arm students with  an iPod Touch to take photographs.

When students begin having fun with writing, they are better equipped to be independent writers – working in a workshop community envisioned by Donald Graves. They also begin to know themselves as writers.

Common Core Considerations

It might be easy to dismiss the idea of a writer’s notebook since no particular Common Core Standard specifically states that students “free write” or “develop a collection of writing.”

Yet a writer’s notebook does two things to directly support all of the CCSS writing standards:

  1. Notebooks provide a foundation for more formal pieces of writing. Writer’s notebooks are places where students explore ideas for the formal opinion, narrative, and research pieces they need to write to achieve Common Core Standards. Notebooks lessen the “I-don’t-know-what-to-write-about” time.
  2. Notebooks provide a place where students can practice writing fluency – getting thoughts down on paper in an efficient way.
  3. Writer’s notebooks allow teachers to better personalize the instruction of Common Core Writing Standards. Assuming teachers use a workshop model of instruction, the key is to develop a checklist of standards and address those standards through individual student conferences and small group instruction.

Say, for instance, you have a student like the boy who produced Sample 2 (above). This student is obviously interested in science, especially science having to do with animals and insects. After a month or so of writer’s notebook entries, begins to steer the student toward research and informational writing about an insect of his choice. Later in the year, he might write an opinion piece on the use of pesticides to control that insect. Still later, you might challenge him to write a story using A Bug’s Life as a mentor text. What would a day in life of that particular bug look like?

When you begin the year with a writer’s notebook, you slow down temporarily by putting off the “formal” curriculum – but the notebooks allow you to go faster later.

How do you help students develop writing ideas?

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Teaching Oral Reading Fluency to Older Students

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My father taught me to read with fluency and expression. He didn’t know he was doing it. Every Sunday afternoon, my brother and I would sit with him by the heater or on the porch and he would read us the Sunday comics. Characters such as Beetle Bailey, Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace, and the Wizard of Id each had their own voices.

If you walk into a Lower Primary grade classroom, you’ll likely see students reading aloud to teachers who explicitly teach them to read more smoothly and read with expression. Do Upper Primary and Middle School teachers need to focus on oral reading fluency? If so, how can upper grade teachers explicitly instruct students on fluency without it feeling “childish”?

How does Oral Reading Fluency Fit into Common Core Standards?

The Common Core standards include oral reading fluency as part of the Reading Foundational Skills. Until grade 2, foundational skills focus on students understanding print features, translating print features into words, syllables, and sounds. Until grade 6, foundational skills comprise phonics, word analysis, accuracy, and fluency as they support comprehension.

Does this mean teachers can stop teaching oral reading fluency after grade 6? Probably not. While Common Core Reading Foundational skills are discontinued at Grade 6, Middle School teachers still need to know the following:

  • Are the students recognizing at least 95% of the words they are reading?
  • Do students use phrasing, punctuation, and italics to pick up on author’s intent?
  • Do students differentiate between characters by hearing the characters’ different “voices”?

Oral reading fluency does not necessarily align with silent reading fluency, but oral reading fluency can indicate what happens in students’ heads when they read silently.

When students read fluently, they are better able to analyze of the impact of word choice on meaning or tone. Students who read fluently can better analyze poetic and musical tools in poems and stories (Grades 6 and 7 Reading Literature Standard 4).

Students who differentiate character voices more easily analyze ways in which authors develop and contrast points of view of different characters. (Grade 7 Reading Literature Standard 6).

How to Teach Fluency Without It Feeling Childish

Comics and Graphic Novels: Almost all of my struggling readers gravitate to comics like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. In the context of reading fluency, those books are a good place to start. How would Calvin’s voice be different from the voice of Hobbes? Have students record some of their favorite strips or pages. The listener should be able to hear the difference and the recorder should be able to defend why he/she chose the particular type of voice. Let the student “ham it up.” Then move the student to graphic novels.

Plays: Like most other skills, fluency and expression come with practice. Plays allow students that practice. The difficulty is that, unless well-planned, play reading becomes another form of round-robin reading that can quickly disengage students. Also, cold readings of plays set up lower-fluency readers and second language students for public scrutiny. I recommend the following progression of activities:

  • Before assigning parts or having anyone read aloud, have the students read the play silently. Ask about the characters. What type of person is…? What do you think his or her voice would sound like? How would specific characters sit? Stand? What kinds of clothes would the characters wear? Hairstyles?
  • Find out if anyone is particularly “attached to a part”. If two or more people want the same parts, you can delegate in whatever age-appropriate way you deem best (rock-paper-scissors), dual recordings (multiple girls play Broadway’s Annie). Consider challenging higher readers to play (and understand) the character they identify with the least.
  • Highlight the importance of practice. Line. By. Line. Model mistakes and re-takes until the line is perfect. Model how you decide which word in a sentence should be emphasized – and how sentence meanings change slightly based on the emphasis (let students help you decide which sounds best).
  • Give students recording devices to record, listen, evaluate, repeat. They should keep/save recordings of the best “take” of each line or section.
  • Pair up students who listen to each others’ recordings and offer advice.
  • Then meet as a group to read the play orally. Record. Garage Band is a great recording tool. If someone makes an error, they can pause then read the line over again. Errors are easily erased.

If you’re teaching fluency to two or more groups, allow the groups to compare the line interpretations. How did someone else read the same part similarly? Differently? Why do you think they made those particular choices?

Morning class:

Afternoon class:

Modifications for English Language Learners

When listening to the podcasts above, you will notice that each podcast features a student who has limited English. Consider recording lines with the students who struggle with English pronunciation. Then, transfer the practice session to iTunes (or .mp3), and have students practice reading with the recording.

End With Reflection

When I started doing class news videos, I realized that students could easily tell me what they did, but had a harder time telling me what they learned.

Take the time to ask students what they learned about reading fluency. What was difficult at first? Which lines needed the most practice? Why do you think the [tongue-in-cheek mean/crazy] teacher would ask you to do this? How might these skills be valuable when reading other texts?

If you are unfamiliar with the workings of Garage Band, see this tutorial:

…but you don’t need Garage Band. Here is a tutorial on iPad Voice Recorder (also featured on iTouches):

In what other ways might older students practice reading fluency?

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