A few teachers have mentioned a stumbling block for blended learning has been the limitations of their students. It makes sense. If it takes 10 minutes for students to navigate to the website, then that's 10 minutes of lost instructional time. Teachers wonder, is it worth it?
But oftentimes the benefits of using the technology are great, and with a few tricks or hacks, teachers can speed up the process and reap those benefits. Here are a few, designed especially for younger learners or other students who might need more supports:
Issue: Students have trouble navigating to websites/apps on the device.
If students are using school devices, you might take a day to set up one of the hacks below. To do so, you would add a bookmark or shortcut to the "desktop" of the student device for the chosen webpage.
Everything students need to open for the day is a click of the date away! This allows you to embed slides, videos, etc. so that students don't even have to open a new browser tab or window to view content.
Hack #2: Use a tool like Symbaloo or Wakelet to curate the sites/apps that students use most frequently.
These curation tools are highly visual and are best if you have a few tools used frequently. You can create different boards/lists to help students access the apps they need. If it requires login, be sure to contact technology about how to use CLEVER for single sign-on.
James Clear's book Atomic Habits has been popping up all over the place lately. (It has been the subject of a series of Teaching to the Top Podcasts, which are great if you are looking to build some new habits.) The basic thesis is that small changes or actions that we take can have a massive impact on our progress.
This made us think about the power of self-talk and of habits in how we approach our classrooms. If one says I'm "not a touch-feely kind of teacher," then that person is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. With that said, just reframing my self-talk isn't enough. If we really want to connect more with kids, then we need to think about the habits we can create to make this happen.
The way to "become" someone is to do it. Habits change beliefs. Habits matter.
This was echoed in a recent blog post from Dave Stuart Jr, which was about creating the habit of connecting with students each day. (If you haven't read his strategy for Moments of Genuine Connection, it's worth the look.) He suggests using a roster, a clipboard, and a pen to literally "check" when connecting to students. And this connects to one of our district goals for SEL, as one of the best "habits" we can create is to give behavior-specific praise to our students.
And perhaps find a teaching partner to hold you accountable, not with carrots or sticks, but with celebration and encouragement. If you miss your goal one day, your partner can encourage you to make up for it with more praise the next day, or remind you to give yourself a day of grace.
And once you meet that goal, say for a full week of school, then maybe you set your sights at two weeks, and onward and upward from there.
Midterms at GHS have inspired several questions about ways to save time on scoring assessments. While there are limits to what multiple choice can assess well, questions that are carefully designed and target specific objectives can assess higher order thinking and provide teachers with the ability to provide students with fast feedback.
There is so much research about the impact of feedback on student performance. But for fast feedback from these types of assessments to be meaningful, teachers need to plan for students to use it.
Depending on the tools teachers use, there are many options for helping students review and use their feedback from assessments that involve limited choices.
"Make a connection between the expectations of an assignment and feedback. When I set an expectation, I explain how I will give feedback and the way students should apply the feedback to their work."
"Create opportunities for students to interact with feedback during class sessions."
Students can work with peers who had similar challenges to determine what skill or concept was involved in the question troubled them, and think about what knowledge or strategies might help them in the future.
Teachers might also create specific plans for students to review questions or problems, recognize their strengths, and utilize resources to help address areas of struggle. Simply having students review incorrect responses and answering questions like, "Why is the correct answer better than the other options? Why did you think the answer choice selected was right? Can you find evidence for why it is wrong?" helps improve engagement with this work.
This aligns with research that shows that "Short, low-stakes tests also help teachers gauge how well students understand the material and what they need to reteach. This is effective when tests are formative—that is, designed for immediate feedback so that students and teachers can see students’ areas of strength and weakness and address areas for growth."
Asking students to take the time to review not only saves you time, but then also leads to better results, especially if students know they can retest or they earn back credit for showing that they know the material via these test reflections.
In several posts on this blog, we talk about the value of fast feedback for student learning. So how do you do this in a way that is safe (remember CT's student data privacy rules) and speedy?
Enter tools like Google Forms and Zipgrade, which offer fast results and teacher-friendly data reporting.
Zipgrade has the advantage of working with paper. This is great if you have a longer multiple choice assessment (up to 100 questions) or secure test that wouldn't work well as a Google Form quiz OR if you don't have access to student devices. Essentially, you can print a premade scantron-style sheet to use for multiple choice, true/false, and matching questions--or create a custom one for gridded-numeric entry questions--and students will fill in their responses. The teacher then uses a smartphone or tablet with the app to scan the answer key and score the papers. A set of 20 sheets can be scored in under 2 minutes!
To see what this process looks like, watch the first few minutes of this video; this YouTuber also walks through the getting started process, which is regularly updated for iPhone and Android users on the Zipgrade website.
Zipgrade also quickly provides an overview of student scores, item analysis, and allows you to print individualized reports for students:
Class Overview Reporting
Item Analysis
Google Forms quizzes have the advantages of being completely free (Zipgrade has a limit of 100 scans/month in a free account), and offering a wider variety of question-types, embedded media, and seamless integration with Google Classroom.
The above video shows just some of the options for creating Google Forms quizzes and viewing data that will help you plan instruction and focus areas for students.
What makes this an huge time-saver is the ability to work with Google Classroom and Infinite Campus gradebook sync to quickly pull the scores from the Form to the Classroom, and from the Classroom Gradebook to the IC Gradebook. This two minute process not only gives students quick feedback in Classroom (as you can enable them to view their quiz results), but also saves you time entering data.
In a recent post "Student Pathways into a Curriculum: Chaotic or Empowering," Benjamin Freud raises many questions we've heard from teachers about how we build student-centered curricula.
He introduces the challenge, which is that standards (and some other outside forces) dictate what we MUST teach students, but these skills and concepts themselves may not be innately interesting to our students. But, if we give students license to learn what they want to learn, then how will we know if they've learned what they need to learn? Some would argue that the more structure we put into curriculum, the better. The more common our activities and assessments, the more equitable the education. Correct?
Freud says,
"Careful! There is a bait and switch at play: in order not to see ourselves as one of those people who force curriculum down students’ throats, we defend our ways by saying we’re helping students, guiding them. “You’ll see,” we declare, “they’ll thank us for it one day when they realize that we were that inspiring figure who opened them up to the unknown world of calculating the angle of the refraction of light!” It’s all nicely brought together in a conscience-appeasing dictum. Our job is to introduce students to subjects they don’t know they love yet.
The problem is that all these good intentions can quickly lead us to teaching what the teacher is in love with, or worse, what the teacher somehow feels the students should love because that is what the teacher was told she should love back when she was at school. Good intentions gone astray. "
While the post raises more questions than it provides in answer, the post is timely as many teachers are thinking about revising and implementing curricula and performance tasks while working toward our Griswold Forward goals. Consider:
Are all of the tasks or topics that we think we "have to do" really mandatory? Or are they simply customary, a reflection of what past teachers said was important or what the individual teacher likes?
Can we provide flexibility in the content, process, or product for the unit while still meeting the spirit and rigor of the standards for our grade level and content?
Can we build our units around meaningful topics or questions that can be customized for student interest, but which are still manageable for a single teacher or team to monitor and implement?
Placing students at the center may mean leaving behind traditions and opening our minds to new texts, new activities, and new ways of structuring class time. If you are interested in looking for places in your curriculum to incorporate student-centered learning, check out this resource from Cult of Pedagogy that breaks down the steps for planning a unit around an authentic "task."
What questions or concerns do you have about project-based learning (or similarly, problem-based learning or inquiry-based learning)?
During the tough winter months, we can all use some play. Plus, who doesn't love activities that are FUN for kids, can be done at a distance, AND which are low-prep for teachers?
Enter: the snowball fight.
A short clip, originally captured by Louis Lumière in 1896, documents a rowdy snowball fight on the streets of Lyon, France.
Teachers often put pressure on themselves to come up with unique and creative activities for their classes. And while these memorable activities are valuable, there is also value to using routines and predictable strategies that put students in charge of the learning activity. While not exactly a routine, the snowball fight "strategy" can be deployed in many different ways, some of which are very low prep, and some of which can be deployed in the moment when you need (or want) to fill time with meaningful learning activities.
So what is it?
To have a snowball fight in the classroom, simply give each student a piece of paper, have students crumple the paper up, and then throw it around the room. After you stop the snowball fight, each student picks up one of the snowballs and is responsible for doing something with that sheet of paper. Then, students crumple up their snowball and play again!
Classroom Management Note: You will want to give clear guidelines to manage the mess and keep students safe (i.e. no throwing at the plants, no tight wads that would sting, don't throw at people, etc.). You might also use the balls in a manner more akin to bowling, avoiding throwing in rooms where kids can't handle airborne objects!
Teaching Made Practical clarifies that this strategy works well for retrieval/practice and sorting/comparison. Both of these are high-yield teaching practices!
"A Quick Review - On each snowball, I would write something that students should be able to answer very quickly like a math problem or a sight word. After the snowball fight, each student would quickly answer the question on their snowball before playing again.
Sometimes I would have students partner up to answer their questions, and other times I would have everybody bring their snowball to the carpet and they would share their answer one at a time so I could quickly assess everybody.
A Sorting/Categorization Activity - I would hang "category" signs around the room and each snowball would have a number or sentence that would fit in one of the categories. After the snowball fight, students would open their snowball and decide which category they belonged to."
The Teaching to the Top podcast shared several ideas for this strategy. With a little prep, the teacher can pass out papers with different problems, words, or topics related to the learning targets:
In math class, students might solve the problem on the first turn, and on the second turn, they might solve the problem a different way.
In English, the teacher might put different characters on paper, and students would add traits to the characterization (perhaps with evidence) on each throw.
Any class can use this to review content area vocabulary, adding a synonym, example, sentence, etc. to the paper each time they pick one up. You could even use a Freytag organizer and have students complete one part of it on each throw, exposing them to many words over the course of the game.
This could also be used for peer review of short drafts. For example, students might create a word problem that results in a given number as an answer, and their peers have to provide feedback on the quality of the problem. Students might likewise create sentences with certain characteristics, and their peer then "annotates" the sentence for the required features.
The Beakers and Ink blog shared this idea for adding more writing to the science classroom, but which would work across disciplines: ask students to write several sentences about what they just learned, watched, read about, etc. Then, snowball! Students pick up and read, maybe writing a response suggesting a change or addition. And they can repeat or return the ball to the owner.
"Not only are they practicing summarizing new information, but they are sharing and reading multiple summaries!"
This Edutopia video shows how this strategy can also be used for an end of class debrief, but with an SEL twist:
There are so many ways to use this strategy, many as simple as giving game guidelines and putting the students in charge of writing something on a piece of paper. While not fancy, this fun strategy can be used over and over again for high quality learning. How do you see this working in your classroom?
Research shows that adults and children are more likely to achieve their goals when they take steps like:
Put goals in writing
Commit (i.e., they must be motivated to complete that goal in a meaningful way)
Be specific (SMART goal setting is but one way to do this!)
Plan for/Have available systems for feedback and support
This can be powerful practice to support student executive functioning, which is not just important for life, but valuable to the success of practices involving blended learning.
As you think ahead and plan for lessons--and life--in the new year, how can you involve students in setting and meeting goals? How might you use these steps to meet your own goals?
