Rotation, Rotation, Rotation

We have a principal at my school that is convinced that the only decent intervention model involves students rotating to other teachers. She has been pressuring us for the last year plus. I am not convinced that sending my students to a teacher they do not know is going to improve student achievement.

I tried it once last year with another teacher in my department. The other teacher did the intervention with the students who had failed the test and I did the enrichment with students who passed. During the intervention he went back over the content and explained it to students again. When my students retook the test, only a small handful did better. Most did the same or worse. My enrichment lesson involved a reading and discussion on how to increase voter participation while ensuring there was no voter fraud. It was a timely lesson on a current issue since it was right before the election. Some of the students from his class participated while others chose to try to sleep. Another challenge occurred during the last class of the day when I sent my students to his class and waited for his to arrive. When I called him, he told me he had decided to just let his kids that passed go to the computer lab.

What I learned from this was that a simple review of a multiple choice test was not going to improve student achievement. I also learned that there need to be clear guidelines and expectations for what each teacher was going to do. And each teacher needed to communicate expectations to their students.

This year we tried it once again, this time with 4 teachers. We gave students a 6 question quiz.  For intervention/enrichment, we did an advanced group which had 59 students, a proficient group with 56 students and an intervention group which had 39 students. I was in charge of the advanced group and chose to do a gallery walk of current quotes on the topic we had discussed, state's rights. While I thought it was a good opportunity for students to go further in depth through current events, having to manage 59 kids, of whom only 17 were my own students, was quite the challenge. Most students were well behaved, but I did have a few from another teacher who chose to be challenging and disregard my instructions. I also found the quality of answers to not be what I had hoped for from other students.

One teacher took the 56 proficient students and also did a gallery walk, but related to the exact topic we had covered in class. I have not yet spoken with him regarding how his group did. Two teachers split the group of 39 and worked with them on vocabulary and some of the things that they had missed on the quiz. They also mentioned challenges with behavior, but seemed to have better feelings about how it went than did I. One solution we came up with was to have an administrator or aide or someone in with the larger groups to help with crowd control.

This week students will write their essay and it will be interesting to see how the students who received the intervention do. I am still not convinced that rotation is a good idea. My other 4 classes of the day had a different lesson. All but a small group of 4-5 students did the enrichment portion I had led in the large group. It went better as they worked in groups of 3-4 and made posters with their reactions to the quotes. The small group I pulled aside due to low quiz grades  got my personal attention as we went through the major concepts they needed to know for the essay and reviewed what they missed on the quiz. I still stand by the fact that students perform better when the intervention comes from the teacher they know and have a rapport with, rather than strangers. It is not that the other teachers did not do a great job, because I am sure they did. It is that the assignment the day of the rotation was not graded, so students had no incentive to try.

Sadly some administrators, and even teachers, think that there is only one way to do something. For this situation, there are those who refuse to accept that rotation may not be the best answer for high school. It worked for them in elementary so they assume it is one size fits all. I still believe that intervention needs to be teacher driven, individualized to the students and not a mandate from higher ups. If we are going to improve education, we must allow teachers who are in the classroom to test out all options instead of being told what to do.

History is SPECtacular!

Anthony Fitzpatrick, Implementation Manager for the NJ Department of Education, was a guest speaker at one of the Teaching American History grant sessions in 2012. His book, Social Studies Can Be SPECtacular motivated me to change the way I approach the teaching of a time period.

On Thursday, the second day of school, I started out by having my students brainstorm everything they knew about Abraham Lincoln. Students wrote down things like 16th President, lawyer, born in a log cabin, tall, beard, top hat, married to Mary Todd, had 4 kids but only one survived to adulthood. I then shared with them this Prezi that I had made and discussed Social, Political, Economic and Cultural characteristics. Finally students were instructed to group each item into one of those categories. It worked really well...except for how do you categorize tall? We skipped that one, but it did provide a nice side lesson about determining important vs unimportant facts.

I am excited to use it throughout the year as students investigate different time periods, set the context for historical documents and much more. I hope that you will try it out in your own classroom!

Where Have the Leaders Gone?

The public is often eager to blame teachers when things go wrong in a school, but take it from me, the problem starts at the top. I feel that we have a crisis in leadership in education right now. I cannot say whether it is an issue of people are being promoted too fast, that they don't receive enough training and support or that too many just don't have the skills to be leaders.  I have worked with plenty of administrators during the course of my 13 years in education, and sadly can count very few of them as effective. Most seem to forget what it is like to be a teacher in the classroom. Several are unapproachable and unwilling to take input from teachers. Staff development is decided by them and all teachers are treated alike. They ask us to differentiate in our own classrooms, but never give us the opportunity when it comes to professional development. They act as if they have all the answers and constantly remind us that they have control over our schedules. Any given year they could make you teach a new subject, regardless of whether that is in the best interest of the students.

I thought that maybe it was just my school experiencing this lack of leadership, but sadly I am hearing from many fellow teachers that their schools and districts have the same problems. What is the consequence of a lack of leadership at the top? Well, in my particular school, morale has declined as we have been made to feel that we are not doing as well as we think we are. Teachers feel as if they have to "battle" administration on everything from meeting times to schedules. With so much to focus on in our classrooms and with our curriculum, it seems to me that a positive working environment should be a priority for administration. I think about how good of a school we are already and how amazing we could be if we just felt more support from our leaders. I am inspired when someone gives me autonomy to be creative and work with colleagues to come up with solutions for the challenges that face my school and students. I don't feel inspired when I am told what to do and how to do it. I like to feel as if I have a voice in improving my school. I like to know that my unique talents and skills add value to the staff and are utilized. However, too often my requests to provide assistance have been overlooked. It makes me not even want to offer any more and leads to burn out. I know I am not alone.

Another problem is that in California, a person only needs three years of teaching experience to become an administrator. That is not nearly enough. It takes far more time to really become a master teacher. How can an administrator with only 3 years of classroom teaching experience possibly be an instructional leader for their staff members? Often times this person is responsible for evaluating a teacher with 20+ years of experience. This I believe is one of the problems with our educational system. Evaluation should be done through peer review and the instructional leaders on campus should be the master teachers.

If we want to improve education, we need to take back our schools and allow those who are in the trenches day in and day out to make the important decisions. We often times know a lot more than administrators give us credit for. We have good ideas and really do want to work to solve problems. Most of us care a great deal about our students and schools. If you would just ask us, you might be surprised at how much we could do to help improve our schools.

Mind Mapping in US History

I participated in a Twitter chat tonight and can't believe how much I have been missing out on by not being on Twitter until now. The #sschat topic tonight was on thematic vs. chronological teaching. Many ideas were tossed around and one of them was mind mapping the curriculum so that even if it is taught chronologically, students can see connections. I think I may try this since my US history team has decided to have a singular focus for 1st semester on the conflict between federal authority and state's rights. We will be discussing issues such as the constitution, nullification crisis, slavery, national bank in the first unit so it would be cool to break them into social, political and economic ways the conflict when throughout history. By the end of the year we could even connect it to today. I have taught mind mapping to adults and think that is a skill I will share with my students this year. And then we can create a giant mind map in my classroom which will help students visualize the connecting themes. Thanks @KaelynBullock for the idea!

Here is an update that shows the mind map I created for the unit discussed above. I think it came out pretty cool!

Creative Internet Activities

While attending the Presidential Timeline Institute at the Nixon Library last week, I learned about several websites that can help students create fun and interesting projects to display what they know. One of these was Big Huge Labs. There are tons of games and activities, but the three that I found most useful for a high school class were the Motivator, Magazine and Movie Poster apps.

The Motivator allows students to add pictures and text to create a motivational poster. It is an easy way to assess student learning, as are all of these apps. I also plan to use it as an anticipatory set for a unit or maybe a daily warm up. Here is an example that I created.

The Magazine allows students to create a magazine cover with headlines, date and price. Here is one I created to give you an idea of how to use it.

The Movie Poster is very similar, only one is promoting a movie about a particular topic. It takes some critical thinking to decide the title, leading actors, producers, etc.

I plan on trying these in my classroom this year. I think the students will have fun with it! They can be used in any of the social sciences and even for current events. I love programs that are adaptable to a wide range of topics and subjects.

The Great American Hall of Fame

This post is in honor and memory of a friend and teacher named Darren Thomas. Darren taught AP US History. He was quite proud of his Idaho roots and so established a Mr. Potato Head project for AP students to conduct after the exam was over. Each year students chose 2 famous Americans to induct into the Great American Hall of Fame. What they did was choose Americans they thought were worthy of the honor and had debates over their merits. Once the two individuals were chosen for the year, a Mr. Potato Head was created in their likeness. They are then formally inducted into this hall of fame with a special dinner ceremony. Here are examples of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton:

Other individuals who have been inducted include Sacajawea, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton and FDR. There is even a Hall of Shame group of inductees that includes Aaron Burr.

Mr. Thomas just recently passed away and his students created a Mr. Potato Head of him and inducted him into the Hall of Fame.

Fakebook