What Kind of Student Work Should Go on Display?

What's your philosophy of showcasing student work? Do you only put up the best work of the top student performances? Or do you have no problem putting up less than perfect, level 4 work on other merits such as originality or authentic expression of ideas? 

Putting up only the best work gives a good impression to administrators and other teachers. But what does it say to less successful students? Is their expression of ideas and feelings discreditable because it lacks polish? 

Putting up all work that has some merit as a piece of personal expression surely validates the work of students who may have a lot to say but still struggle with form and accuracy of language structures. But is this not to be viewed as glorifying shoddy work? 

How do you strike the balance on this issue? 

Low Turnout Parents' Night

I'm really trying to figure out why so few parents have been coming to "meet the teacher" night at my school. It's not just that they're too busy because I assume they really care about their child's performance at school. But they may be turned off by a triple subliminal message we convey: 

1. Parents' night will be on our terms: before the end of the school day around 3 pm and no later than 8 pm. If parents can't make these hours that's too bad because we are unionized and don't want to go too far in catering to parents' schedules for fear of making too many "concessions" to our employer. 

2. We are guarded and somewhat defensive, armed with marks and percentages to let you know how your child is doing academically.  

3. We don't want to get to know you, so you only have 5 minutes to talk to us before we will move on to the next person. 

Maybe more parents would be motivated to show up if the message was: 

1. We will call you and set up a time to meet with you at your earliest convenience. 

2. We want to hear your perspective on your child's performance in order to gauge whether or not our assessments of your child's performance are indeed accurate. 

3. We would appreciate understanding your cultural and family situation so we are willing to meet you at your home to talk about your child's life outside of school. 

Too radical? Unprofessional risks? Or the pathway to greater student and teacher success? 

Parents versus Professionalism

Recently I read an article in a Toronto newspaper that described parents' reactions to school report card comments as "meaningless". The professional language often becomes a form of edu-babble that has no specific meaning. It is tantamount to using generalities and technical terms to say no more than what anyone could say about any student. Certainly this approach to reporting protects educators from saying something too direct and thus provoking parents' ire. The safe professional way of communicating works against the goal boards of education say they have today to rebuild public trust in the education system. It contributes to further alienating parents from teachers. What is wrong with personal comments written by individual teachers on report cards? Would this more personal, perhaps less "professional" (i.e. downloads from "comment banks") not be more vulnerable AND and more trust-building? 

Oops! Great Recovery in the Middle of a Lesson

The teacher had the manipulatives to teach math and it was a well-organized lesson on fractions for grade 8s: computer with visuals and moveable shapes on the screen, handouts, blocks for students to manipulate and a clear learning goal. The lesson was unfolding seamlessly until she realized that the demonstration of adding fractions using the blocks did not yield the right answer! She carried on by saying "I've done something wrong here" and then refocused the lesson by asking the students to solve the problem: "why didn't my operation using the manipulatives work?" A couple of thoughtful boys came up with the solution: the base, or denominator has to be the same even using blocks, which means that you can't just separate the blocks and add them up separately and get the same result as when they are joined together. 

Example:  a six inch plus a one inch over two five inch blocks joined together is 7/10, but a six inch over a five inch block plus a one inch over a five inch block understood as 6/5 + 1/5 does not equal 7/10, but 7/5 or 14/10! The problem to solve in math became the teacher's problem for the students to solve, and it worked! Nice recovery for the purpose of learning! Instead of a wounded ego trying to cover up, deflect or deceive, this teacher used her mistake to help students learn! 

Parent Teacher Interview On the Defensive

Mr. Robb was in his second year of teaching. He felt confident about parent-teacher night. He had ample data on his students to support the grades they were earning. He was assigned his own portable as the location for parents of his students to meet him. Mr. Drumble, Mike’s father,walked in and smiled. Mr. Robb shook his hand and invited him to sit down, then proceeded to explain his son’s current grade and the highs and lows of his performance thus far. After a minute or so Mr. Drumble interrupted Mr. Robb’s explanations with “Mike hasn’t had a mark this low before. Your way of evaluating doesn’t seem fair”. Mr. Robb was taken aback. He had the results right in front of him. He had explained the results and now he is accused of being unfair! He retorted “I don’t know how you think my grading is unfair. Ask anyone who works here and they’ll tell you I take my job very seriously.” Mr. Drumble went on: “ Are you sure you can’t adjust your weightings so that the marks are more in line with past performances?” Mr. Robb replied “I can’t change what’s been submitted for reporting, but if Mike is not happy with his grade, he can talk to me about doing some extra work to pull his average up.” Mr. Drumble left unsatisfied and Mr. Robb felt like all the hard work he’d been doing was not appreciated.

Volleyball and French

Today I saw a great lesson taught to grade fives on how to play volleyball. As the lesson unfolded from learning simple tasks to the more complex, I started to see parallels to learning French. 

Bumping = precise pronunciation

Setting the ball = speaking using the correct verb endings

Rally = mini dialogues 

Serving = starting a conversation 

Spiking = impressive vocabulary 

Any other parallels? 

Learning Goals that Don't Matter

In the Minds On introduction of your lesson, if you mention the Learning Goal for the lesson, you will give your students a sense of what is to be accomplished, to be sure. But what do you say? If it's something like "Today, we are going to learn about...." or "Our goal today is to talk about...." or "In this lesson, we are going to learn how to...", are you doing anything more than setting them up for fact-finding, amassing information, or covering an aspect of the curriculum? How then do you UNcover the curriculum to probe into questions relevant to the student's thinking and experience? You can have a great attention grabber to get your students to focus at the beginning, a series of colourful and interactive things to do and a crisp review session at the end of the lesson to cap it off, but why is any of this important? In order to gain any hope of getting your students to think more deeply and be genuinely curious about the lesson content for reasons that matter to them, try setting up the learning goal of your lesson so that it is threaded through with an open-ended question like "Why do you agree or disagree with...?" or "What personal experience have you had that is like....?" or "Design your solution to this problem". Two things may happen as a result: your lesson will be designed around a question or problem that builds, and secondly, you may hear fewer questions like "do you want us to...?" or "how many do we have to know?" Hopefully the lesson will shift from what they are supposed to know to get marks to finding out for themselves the answer to a question they care about.