If I Could Do My First Year Over Again...

As I embark on my fourteenth year as a teacher I have the unique experience of mentoring a first year teacher who also happens to be my former student. ( I will purposefully skip over the conversation about how old that makes me feel). Yesterday she asked me what I normally do in the first week of school, and more specifically, how I approach the first day. To be honest, this is something that I haven't given serious thought to in quite some time. I know what I do, and I can articulate why I do it; but, I haven't given much thought to what I used to do, or even how the first day/week experience might be different for a brand spanking new teacher rather than a veteran.

In my attempt to answer her, I really tried to anticipate how would it feel to be under the age of 25, looking a lot like my 15 or 17 year old students, and to not have the comfort of my experience and the confidence in my routines that I have tweaked and mastered over the last several years. So, I broke this down to a list of things that I want to accomplish on the first day, and if not on that day, at least in the first week. It is really pretty simple. Just three things I want to do...

1. Learners need to know who I am and have a pretty good feel for who I am

During my teacher training I was told "Don't let them see you smile before Christmas and things will go more smoothly." That made sense to me then. Looking back, that might have been the worst advice I ever received. I won't argue with the idea that it is easier to start out a little tougher on the classroom management side and ease up as the year goes on and the comfort level increases. BUT, my learners need to know the things that are important to me. They need to know that I am a human being. They need to know that I have a life beyond my classroom. They MUST know that my number one priority while inside the walls of this building is them, their learning, their growth, their well-being. If I don't let them in, they will never let me in.

2. Learners need to feel comfortable in my physical space

Over the years I have created procedures that work for me: procedures for things like restroom breaks, tardies, and attendance; I also have routines like where I post reminders, weekly calendars, tutoring availability, and posting objectives and skills; mundane details like where to turn in completed work, whether they can borrow a pen from my desk without me flipping out, whether they can rearrange the tables and chairs (this is the one thing that irritates me more than bad driving!), etc. While I don't create a list and go over my procedures and rules with powerpoint slides, I do make mental note of these items, and try to speak them as the situation arises. My goal in the first day is to give them a chance to see what my room looks like on a typical day, and to give them some time to get out of their seat and see what is hanging on the walls, where they can charge their iPads, where they can find floor pillows, etc. They need time to take it all in and process.

3. Learners need to believe that I care about them

My top priorities on day one: meeting kids at the door, trying to pronounce their names correctly, and trying to get to know something about everyone. This looks a little different for me each year. This year, I am using a writing task where learners follow my lead to write a story about walking through the forest. When we are finished writing, they are told that each item they wrote about represents something about their view of the world. I fill them on the symbolic meaning, and we share out with our elbow partners or even whole class for the classes who are willing. It is so much fun to read these and get a little psychological insight into the types of learners I have in the room. No matter how you do this (interest inventories, personality tests, learning style surveys, or even just your favorite ice breaker), this is the most important thing I do. I have to know them, not just as a student, but also as a person. Who are they? What do they enjoy? What are their passions? What are their hurdles?

The most important things I have learned over fourteen years aren't these ideas I listed, it is more about the items that are missing. Nowhere in my priorities are my classroom syllabus, or my list of 100 rules, or my grumpy faces about my pet peeves. The ONLY thing I really want to put my focus on is my kids. Building relationships with them is my number one priority. Make them feel comfortable with me, with my expectations, with my classroom, and with the idea of growing our relationship throughout the year.

If I had it all to do over again, my first few years of teaching would look a little different. Get to know the kids, let them know who I am, let them know I have high expectations, let them know I care about them and helping them find success. If I can accomplish those things, everything else will fall into place.

Keepin' It Real

Every year I see those educators who feel gut-wrenching sadness and shed tears with their kids as they share hugs on the way out the door in those final days of schools. Every year, I am not that teacher. While my learners would tout my skills as a teacher and as a writing instructor (most of them anyways), none of them would describe me as touchy-feely. And if you asked them about me in the last few days of school, they would probably laughing say that my mantra was something along the lines of "Sit down. Be quiet. And DO NOT ask me about your grades." Or they may even admit that I was counting the days long before they were.

Some days I think I should try a little harder to show the kids how much they mean to me. That I should give more hugs. That I should smile more. That I should write them teary goodbye letters. But anyone who knows me knows that this would probably just scare them. Every year kids write me thank you letters, give me gifts, stop by to see me during senior goodbyes, and every year the awkwardness that ensues is borderline hysterical. I smile too much because I am TRULY ecstatic and overjoyed that they see how much I care for them and to think I just MIGHT have left an impression. Then there is that ludicrous moment where they are trying to decide if a hug is appropriate--I am not even 5' tall and hugging a short person is logistically cumbersome.

As we gear up for the last few days of school and I am in full on reflection mode, I am actually happy to see them go. Not because I won't have to grade another essay for the next two months. Not because I won't have to discuss a child's grade with an angry child or an angry parent for the next two months. Not because I won't have to fill out ridiculous amounts of paperwork for the next two months. I am happy to see them go onto the next phase of their education. I am happy to see where they will go next and what they will do next.

One of our greatest gifts to our learners is to share apart of ourselves with our kids. For me, this means being me. In the words of my last written evaluation, I "keep it real." When I read that statement, I was a bit taken aback. I worried that that was somehow unprofessional or not really what an educator should be doing. But then, I realized that I am who I am. And maybe what teenagers need is a dose of "real." Not a bunch of blowing sunshine or putting them on pedestals, but good old fashioned conversations about the reality of their situation and the world they live in. As a teacher of high school juniors, I wonder if we can't have real conversations with them when they are seventeen years old, when exactly do we expect them to grow into real people with real responsibilities and a real voice in the world.

And so, I want to say thank you to all of the kids who have come through my doors, all of the administrators who have supported me, all of the colleagues who have changed my life for the better, and all of the support over the last 13 years. Just to keep it real, I'm sorry to see you go, but not as excited as I am to see the things that are waiting for you just around the corner.

#EarthDay2016

Many moons ago I worked with a woman whom I absolutely adored, and it just so happened that she adored Earth Day. Each year we would stop whatever we were doing and observe Earth Day in our AP English Language and Composition classes and have some sort of an Earth Day celebration. This year I decided my kids needed a break from all of the "AP testing" pressures, so we had ourselves a little Earth Day assignment.

My course focuses on rhetoric and the study of persuasion, so we spend the whole year discussing how to persuade effectively based on the rhetorical situation. We work hard to find "real world" situations for the learners to both analyze other's persuasion and to create persuasive pieces of their own.

With those things in mind, we kept the activity simple. We simply asked them to create a product (in my class that is the code word for "anything") that would encourage and/or inspire the same ideas and principles intended by Earth Day. The kids had one partner and one class period (52 minutes) to come up with an idea, make that idea happen, and post their completed product to social media. For fun, we created a little competition to see which post had the furthest reach. I'll talk more about how I did this later.

First, I want to show you a few things my kids came up with. I had everything a little bit of everything: infographics; lots of pic collages; lots of girls who jumped at the chance to use construction paper, glue, scissors, and markers; and even a few video submissions. The kids got a nice break from the rat race of test prep and all night study sessions, and I got to see a bit more of their creative side. It was fun, and I hope, at least a little bit "purposeful."

As a part of the assignment, I required my learners to use #CHSAPLAC on their social media post if they wanted to be considered for the furthest reach contest. On the Tuesday following Earth Day, I created a TweetBeam to showcase all of the #EarthDay products, so their work would be on display in the room. We had a real quick lesson on how to run analytics on Twitter for your own account, which most the kids already knew how to do. Then, I ran analytics on the #CHSAPLAC hashtag to see the total number of impressions, retweets, etc for those kiddos who used Twitter. There are a lot of different tools out there that can do this, but I used TweetReach. The only downside here was that it will only run analytics on the last 100 Tweets with a given hashtag and within the last 7 days. Might not work in all situations, but it was enough to do what I needed it do. 

While I forgot to take a screen shot of my analytics, I was impressed to find that my learners last 100 tweets had a total number of impressions of more than 25,000 within 4 days. This was not ALL of their posts because some used other social media accounts. The maker of TweetReach has analytics features for Instagram, Tumblr, and other social media accounts as well. This was a nice reminder for my kids that their posts go a lot further than they might realize! A win/win in my book :-)

Lessons Learned: Doctopus and Goobric

So, I was SOO very excited after working with @dlcoachbrooke the last few weeks to get Doctopus and Goobric set up and running. We went through the process of kids drafting inside the templates I created, and it went off without a hitch. We had a few kids who didn't get email notifications, but we were able to work around it with a quick search for the term "Doctopus" in their Google drive. Worked like a charm every time. Setup was a little slow, but fairly simple and reliable.

THEN, came the lessons learned. The instructions for kids to provide feedback are MUCH different than the instructions for teachers. It requires the Goobric for Students extension, and it was a bit of a pain in the rear to work out the exact instructions because no one seemed to have them written down with any kind of detail. So, I had to create my own. Here is the gist:

1. On a computer, kids must use Chrome and log into Chrome using the same account as their Google account. This seemed to help prevent some of the glitches.
2. Go to the Chrome store and load the Goobric for Students extension.
3. Theoretically, they should be able to close the Chrome store and navigate to Google Drive. The Goobric "eye" icon should appear on their URL bar.  For anyone that this does not work, they could usually make it appear by closing and quitting Chrome and coming back into the browser. This took some troubleshooting with a few kids, but we got there eventually.
4. Once the "eye" is working, they needed to go to their template and authorize Goobric to work.
5. Once it was all authorized and ready to go, I had to find a way to share links to their peer's work for evaluation purposes. We had 300+ essays for one assignment, so we took the Doctopus spreadsheet and color coded. We created one color chunk of about 6-7 kiddos. We shared this spreadsheet with a tinyurl to expedite the process. Spreadsheet will look something like this:



6. Each learner was responsible for opening the spreadsheet and providing feedback to every kid who was in their color block.
7. They fill out the rubric by clicking in a square and provide feedback in the written comments section. The student view DOES NOT look like the teacher view, but it does almost the same thing. Almost.

Here is the Google Slideshow I used in class to get the kids set up for evaluations:




After a peer review day or two, we spent another day for the kids to see their peer feedback and to self assess. Here is how you go through this process:

1. Using Chrome the learners open up their document. They should see a red dot in the upper right hand corner near the "Comments" and "Share" buttons. They click on the red button to open a pop-up window which shows them ALL of the rubrics sent to them. Below are a few notes:
--Goobric for students does NOT send emails with rubric info like it would if a teacher completed the rubric.
--Each time a student hits submit it is saved as a new rubric. So advise your kids to complete the entire rubric and then hit submit.
--Goobric is apparently pretty finicky about the internet connection. In the morning hours we were experiencing some wireless issues and the red dot would not appear for some or would appear and then disappear or would not load the pop-up window, etc. Bottom line, you need a strong connection to get to your feedback.
2. After reviewing their feedback, learners clicked on their own "Assess this Document" button and completed their own rubric and wrote a reflection in the comments box.

So, the process was not flawless. And I did feel like I was going to pull my hair out more than once. BUT, in the end we made it work. I think it was a valuable activity--the kids got feedback from 5 different people from various classes and ability levels. So, that meant more to think about and reflect on. I am not 100% sold as to whether or not I will use this method again, but in the end, it did what I needed it to do, it was just a lot of work to get it done.

Peer Evaluation Using Google Add-ons: Doctopus and Goobric

Last year I posted all of my excitement about the Blackboard peer and self evaluation features. It wasn't perfect, but it allowed me to run a peer and self evaluation feature across 300+ learners with a simple click of some buttons rather than shuffling and sorting papers for two or three days. Unfortunately, my district moved away from Blackboard as our LMS and moved to Schoology. While I don't have major complaints about Schoology, my biggest complaint is that there is NO options for peer or self evaluation. So, I recently sought out the help of our campus DLCs, Brooke and Kelly, to try and come up with some way to recreate what Blackboard was doing for us.

After meeting and going over a few options, we are going to give Doctopus and Goobric a whirl. Theoretically, the kids would type their essays onto templates which I create and use Doctopus to share with all of the kids. By creating a roster and running this roster and template through Doctopus, every kid will automatically have a document with the correct shared settings and their links will be populated in a Google spreadsheet as well as copied into my Drive if I choose. This means no turn in or ownership issues, etc.

As a part of this process, I want my kids to be able to self and peer assess. The Goobric extension allows us to attach a rubric to the template I am sharing with the kiddos. When the document is viewed with the Goobric for Students extension loaded, we see a nifty little button that says "Assess this Doc." When we use this button, we have the option of filling in the rubric and providing written feedback.  Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom, we have peer and self assessment!

For the instructions for loading Doctopus, creating rosters, sharing documents, and attaching rubrics, please click here.

I feel like I should warn you that as far as I have gotten in this process is the set up. I have not tested beyond these instructions. I ran the documents with this setup, and it worked just fine. HOWEVER, we created 1 roster with over 300 kiddos on it, and it was VERY slow. In the future, I will probably break them into smaller groups OR I will start earlier. Look for a future blog post on my progress later!

They Reflected...Now What?

My blog post last month compared teaching to a Nascar race and reflection to the caution flag and yellow light pit stops where the race becomes more about strategy than just outright skill. My first few years as a teacher (and if I am being 100% honest, an ongoing struggle after 13 years in the classroom) I would find lots of methods and opportunities to reflect, but not much would change based on that reflection or feedback. It's like the kids would come to pit road and say "the left tire feels a little loose" and I would send them back out on track without an adjustment or a new tire or a new game plan of any sorts. I'd wave as they passed through pit road and yell "NICE JOB OUT THERE!" but then do nothing with the new data I had received. In hindsight, and with a few more years of experience under my belt, I can see that this type of reflection does nothing for me or my learners.

In fact, it might be more detrimental than if I had just not asked them to reflect in the first place. They leave the reflection experience feeling like I don't listen to them or like I don't care or appreciate their words and their feedback. They feel as though reflection is just one more hoop I MAKE them jump through that has no real meaning. Slowly over time the entire process of reflection and collecting feedback from the learners becomes pointless and the kids treat it as such.

So, the question isn't just when do I reflect or how do I reflect, but WHAT DO I DO WITH IT?

I ask my learners to write reflections after every essay we complete in class, and they keep them in a Google Doc titled Essay Reflections which works pretty much like an old fashioned writing portfolio. They keep a photographic copy and written reflection of every piece of writing they complete for me. This is something that is mostly for them, but it can be helpful in writing conferences, especially with kids who are struggling. I ask my learners to provide feedback and reflective input after every unit. Sometimes I include questions about the assignment itself which I use later to help me make changes to instructions, rubric, scaffolding, or just to realize they all hate it and I should probably come up with a new assessment altogether (don't you hate it when that happens). But more often the questions I ask consist of things like this:

1. How confident do you feel in your ability to ________? (fill in the blank with a skill like rhetorical analysis)

2. What is one thing that increased your confidence and/or abilities in this skill during the last unit? It is ok if you say nothing.

3. What is one thing you feel  you need additional practice with regarding the previous unit? (I usually provide a list of suggestions, in case they aren't really sure...writing a purpose statement, embedding quotes, etc)

4. What is something you need from ME in order to increase your confidence and abilities?

5. If you could design the next activity and/or assessment for this skill, what would it look like?

I collect this data in different ways and at different points from October through January checking and monitoring progress as I go. I keep my eye out for patterns where every kid is saying the same thing or the same kid is saying the same thing every time. I try my best to make small adjustments to my teaching as I go. You know, change the tire when it needs changing, etc.

Sometime near the end of the first semester (usually the week before exams), I ask my kids to write reflections on ALL of the skills we have covered so far; usually this consists of rhetorical analysis, argumentation, and some research/synthesis skills. I take a few days and spread it out so that it doesn't get too boring, but I pick their brains about everything I can think of. Then, I spend the next two-three weeks designing the first unit of study for the new semester. This is 100% based on their feedback. Not what I THINK they need, but what they actually said. It looks a little something like this when it is done: a chart of possible activities to choose from all created from their ideas.

This is the template the kids complete where they CHOOSE the assignments they want to complete. They make this decision based on the style evaluation and reflection they had completed previously where they were asked to create goals for themselves (this evaluation and reflection is activity one of the new semester, just to get them refreshed and thinking about themselves as writers). Based on those goals, they will choose the activities to complete. When they have chosen their activities, they will complete the review materials (parts 1 and 2) and the assigned activities (parts 3 and 4). All of the activities from the chart are inside my iTunesU course, but here is a sample.

After completing 2 choice activities, the kids are asked to write a NEW essay spending extra care with the topics they have been working with. Their final essay is scored like an AP essay with a few "bonus points" on the rubric for doing a "better than usual" job in their chosen area. So every kid has a section on the rubric which is customized to his/her own needs and wants.

The first year I took this more intentional approach to using their feedback, I thought I was going to cry. It was hard. I had to come up with 16 activities from scratch. Once I got over the prep work, it was SOOO worth it. At the end of this activity, I had kids tell me I was the first teacher EVER who actually read their feedback and gave them what they needed. The end of unit debrief was full of "Now I understands" instead of "I am still losts." I couldn't have been happier with the results. The best news is that when I did this again a little later in the year as a an AP review and again the next year with a new crop of kiddos, I didn't have to start from scratch. Several of the topics were still relevant and could be tweaked an reused. The one time investment, really paid off for me.

The Power of Reflection

AP courses are like a Nascar race. You get set up in that first week of school in the "Gentleman (and ladies), start your engines" sort of motivational speaker kind of a way, and then before you know it everyone is flying around the track at 200+ miles an hour. You do your best to keep everyone on the track and avoid any major collisions, but the reality is, eventually someone is going to crash. You just have to hope there is no burning along with the crashing. The thing you don't know before the race begins isn't IF there will be a crash, it is WHEN will there be a crash, HOW BAD will it be, and HOW MANY will get sent back to the garage unable to finish the race? Our goal, of course, is to get everyone across the finish line, but in reality, we all know that some will finish in first and some will finish with their car duct taped together and 20 laps down. Everyone knows there is more to the race than just the endless circles on the track. There are spotters, mechanics, crew chiefs, business deals, sponsors, and a whole heck of a lot of tension between drivers. But only the true fans understand the power behind the caution flag.

While a caution flag is practical thing-it gives the road crew time to make sure racing conditions are safe and racers are protected, when that yellow light shines, every pit crew, driver, and fan goes into full on strategy mode. Do we take four tires or two or none? Do we adjust the tension rods? How much gas do we take? Those moments in the pit can make or break the entire race. You can go in first, and come out last, or go in last, and come out first. You might think you've got 'em all beat just be given a penalty for driving too fast or illegal contact or even for an error on someone else's part. It is a mixture of strategy and skill at its finest!

So, I know at this point, I have lost some of you, but try to stay with me! Reflection is like a caution flag. It is a necessary part of any race. Sure it would be nice if we could throw them all on the track and just expect them all to make a pit stop when necessary, but the reality is that someone will stay on the track until they have blown all four tires or until they've completely run out of gas and require emergency assistance. If we want to avoid these types of scenarios, we, as the experts in the room, have to see the warning signs coming. When we see that a kid is about to blow a tire, or when we see that the room is running a little low on gas, or when we notice that cars are getting a little loose, we have to preemptively throw the caution flag. We have to force them into strategy mode. We have to force them to become just a bit more calculating--what do I know? What don't I know? Where do I need help? How bad is the damage? What adjustments do I need to make?

If we are intentional with our reflection and if we can get our learners on board with strategic reflection, we can prevent the long extended cautions that only happen after a major accident. Instead, each reflection can be like a yellow light pit stop where the Lucky Dog can gain a lap back and join the rest of the crew on the lead lap. This should be our goal for reflection.

**A NOTE: Just a few weeks after writing this blog post, I had the chance to sit in on a Webinar that was about reflection. During the Webinar, we were given a list of tools and resources that can be used for reflection. Check out this awesome list put together by our Coppell ISD Tech Team!