How I would organize a Primary-Years-Program of Inquiry

In What is a Coherent Curriculum? (1995), James Beane describes how “the self-contained classrooms in many elementary schools only thinly disguise a day divided into subject or skill time slots.” Many PYP schools divide the day into the same fragmented patchwork that plagues secondary schools “whose boundaries are virtually etched in stone by schedules, teacher loyalties, and organizational structures like departments.”

The schedule

From the early years, students at many PYP schools travel through the building according to a rigid timetable which often sees them tackle five different subjects in one day. It gets worse as they advance up the grades and academic demands grow. Homework demands increase to a critical mass to accommodate the vast amount of content mandated by administrators. Everything is boxes: The building is a box. The content standards are in boxes. The timetable is a box.

But why do we do it this way? Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on one subject area at a time instead of trying to carry on several all at once? How can we make this happen for the children?

The specialists

As the complexity of age-appropriate content increases, it makes sense for teachers who specialize in each discipline to lead the learning in their area of expertise. I admit that I have struggled to curate content and respond to my upper elementary students’ inquiries to maximum effect given their impressive depth of understanding and my limited amount of time and knowledge, particularly in the sciences. If I didn’t have formal training, music would feel impossible to teach meaningfully.

Unfortunately, many PYP schools approach specialists as ‘extra’ instead of ‘essential’. To the students, specialist lessons must feel like a break from ‘regular’ class. This can be positive, but how deep is the learning occurring in those once or twice per week lessons?

When it comes to ‘integration’, the default at many PYP schools is for the specialist teachers to simply do something similar to what is happening in a homeroom unit of inquiry for a period of time, sometimes not even at the same time.

Homeroom perspective

Units of inquiry are highly integrated within my classroom. Often, a single task applies knowledge and practices skills across a range of disciplines including and mostly limited to language arts, mathematics, social studies, and sciences.

Yet at the same time they are being introduced to the foundations of astronomy, biology, geography, and a myriad of other rich disciplines by developing theories around their emerging understandings, they have ostensibly been pursuing similar inquiries with several other specialist teachers in PE, ICT, Japanese language, Visual Art, and Music.

Instead of the unit of inquiry being homeroom-led with enrichment content being sprinkled in here and there, the program of inquiry should be designed around specialist teachers leading entire units of inquiry around which homeroom teachers integrate ‘core’ content.

True depth

For a planned period of time, a class would engage in an in-depth inquiry with a specialist teacher every day for the duration of the unit. Rather than bouncing from class to class every day, they would focus as much as possible on that one inquiry. The role of the homeroom teacher would be to co-teach, coordinate, and supplement the unit with essential humanities and STEAM content.

The possibilities of service-learning and project- and problem-based learning, as well as open-ended inquiry-learning have been documented and proven in schools around the world, but haven’t found their way into many PYP schools.

Musical perspective

When I taught music to seven grades of elementary students, I saw each class twice a week for 45 minutes. From my point of view, it was convenient. Each lesson was quick, and progress occurred slowly over the course of an entire year. It was a challenge to plan so many different lessons each week, but I know the content well and never struggled to make lessons meaningful and engaging.

But when I imagine what we could achieve working with one class for 90 minutes a day, every day, for several weeks, there is no comparison. The depth of learning that could be achieved would vastly overshadow what we did in short weekly sessions during an entire school year. At the completion of each unit, classes would be able to deliver a product that reflects deep understanding.

In music, I imagine each unit concluding with a recital far beyond the typical one or two song “That’s my Barney!” performance featured in the assemblies of many PYP schools. The same thinking could apply to any discipline, and would be infinitely more useful toward developing the PYP Exhibition and MYP personal project.

Further considerations

As with any complete overhaul of a system, there are questions to ask and problems to solve. For example, with Physical Education: While studying art, music, or physics for only six weeks out of the school year might be acceptable or possibly preferable, this is not the case with PE. Children need daily exercise (which most timetables don’t adequately provide, anyway). To this end, my program would include daily 20- to 30-minute fitness periods organized by PE specialist teachers. Unlike lessons, they would be routines that the children quickly learn and practice, collecting data about their fitness and monitoring their progress. PE teachers would also lead units of inquiry, but perhaps 90 minutes per day, every day, would be too much. That goes exactly to the point:

The timetables and pastoral duties need to be flexible. First, this requires a creative and organized coordinator working with a collaborative team of teachers and support staff. Second, it requires the commitment and support of administration and management to begin working with teachers to plan the transformation years in advance. The result of providing a fundamentally coherent curriculum would be worth the time and effort.

Agency and Independent inquiry

When reports of the Enhanced PYP began surfacing on the International Baccalaureate Twitter feed, I was elated to see that Agency has been placed boldly at the center of the new model:

 

To me, the philosophical implication for this change is that the primary function and goal of education is to build capacity for action. Within the context of the IB, the Learner Profile describes the attributes within which that capacity can increase. For example, a learner may increase agency in the context of historical understanding by becoming more Knowledgeable about history, or increase agency for conflict resolution by taking Principled and Courageous action.

This is more than transformational: It’s revolutionary.

Past & present

Anyone familiar with the industrial model of education (pretty much everyone) should be skeptical about our capacity for this reform. This 180° turn way from standards- and competency-based pedagogy has a few precedents, and I am curious to learn more about classrooms and schools where independence and agency have been assigned top priority.

One school system who fits this paradigm and whose progress I have enjoyed following is High Tech High. Most of what they have shared is related to older students, so I’m curious to see more about their elementary programs.

Agency as the aim of teaching has been gaining momentum since John Dewey at the latest, and can arguably be traced back at least as far as Socrates. Luckily, my teaching experiences have tended to be less traditional and more progressively minded, and the article, How a Focus on Independent Learning Transformed My Most At-Risk Students, certainly reflects my ideas about the importance of independence in learning.

We make our own agency, no?

— Karen Fasimpaur (@kfasimpaur) October 2, 2014

Independent inquiry

One of my approaches to cultivating agency is Independent Inquiry. Since I started the project six years ago, the mission of this project has been to:

Unify learning at school, learning at home, and learning anywhere, anytime.
Empower learners to engage in and reflect on their own inquiry processes.
Encourage interest- and passion-driven learning.
Integrate peers, parents, communities, and global networks into the inquiry process.

‘…we create conditions under which #agency can flourish…’ @willrich45 #ibpyp https://t.co/cL2iiAzqH2

— Bart Miller (@BarMillEDU) January 28, 2018

While success has varied from year to year, cohort to cohort, I can comfortably claim that the process we use – an online reflection form and weekly meeting in class – helps agency to flourish.

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Call to action

Once again, another gem appeared on the IB PYP Twitter feed. The quote below is a perfect call to action for teachers who are serious about promoting Agency – voice, choice, and ownership.

Making physics physical

One of my favorite units of inquiry in Grade 4 at KIST, in the theme of ‘How the world works’, is titled Force & Motion, and focuses on Newton’s Laws of Motion. The unit resources when I arrived at the school included a few useful tools for demonstrations, but lacked class sets of items and structured experiences that students could use to explore and discuss.

Media

One resource we do have is access to excellent videos and online games. Some of our favorites are published by NASA and other space agencies, like Launchpad: Newton’s Laws On-Board the International Space Station (video), and the Physics Games website.

Can’t wait to use this in @KISTgrade4’s ‘How the world works’ unit this year. https://t.co/M1WS4ISMWi— Bart Miller (@BarMillEDU) October 14, 2017

Twitter once again proved its worth as a tool for learning in the quoted tweet above, a live video of an astronaut playing with and observing a fidget spinner in microgravity. All of the media we have collected are engaging, but can’t compete with a fidget spinner for the attention of nine year olds.

Design & technology challenge

Each year, we have added materials and experiences to make the unit more visceral and fun. To kick off the unit, we introduced an initial provocation in the form of a G4 Water Balloon Drop Challenge. Using the rules outlined in the flyer, students research, design, and build their apparatuses independently outside of class. When we gather on the appointed day, I load each with a water balloon and drop them from the second floor balcony. Those that successfully protect the balloon are taken to the third floor and dropped again. The proud few that survive that are finally dropped from the fourth floor.

We often have visiting administrators and younger classes in the audience, so the event has become a well anticipated and exciting way to get our students thinking about forces and motion.

Get physical

Next, we collaborated with our Physical Education teacher to organize a tug-of-war tournament. Between each round of competition, each team reflected on one of Newton’s Laws of Motion to try to improve their performance.

My hope is that whenever these children think about physics or Newton, they will remember this event. Additionally, by systematically reviewing each of the laws during the tournament, there is definitely higher retention of the vocabulary of Newton’s Laws.

Hands-on exploration

This year, our new addition was a set of Newton’s Cradles. With enough for a pair of students to share one, I wrote a series of questions to add some guidance to their explorations, for example, ‘What happens when you raise and release one of the hanging balls?’.

While it is possible to demonstrate a Newton’s Cradle at the front of the classroom, and that would be better than watching a video, having one that every student could touch, see, and hear, up close, instantly transforms the lesson from passive to active.

Making catapults

Finally, as the culminating Summative Assessment Task for the unit, we ordered 1cm x 1cm x 90cm lengths of wood, nails, hammers, hacksaws, and safety goggles for the purpose of building catapults. The objectives were to expose the students to basic design and construction principles, explore Newton’s Laws of Motion in a practical way, then hold a grand catapult tournament on the main field in the center of the school.

Having facilitated a Maker Club in the past, I was aware of the need to emphasize safety early on, but also to trust the students to look after their own well being. I find it’s best if my role is mainly to watch out for unsafe practices and intervene as quickly as possible. Fortunately, it happens rarely, leaving a high degree of autonomy for students and plenty of time for me to interact and promote collaboration among the groups.

Children constantly impress me with their ability to creatively solve problems when they are trusted with the tools and freedom to do so.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhI8rf4ljni/ 

There were many expected and unexpected benefits of this engagement. The expected ones were quite predictable, but unexpectedly, some of my less precocious students absolutely sprung to life. Some students who tend to be distracted in typical class activities, or struggle with academic work, were impressively inspired by the task of building a catapult. This phenomenon has caused me to think that the way we tend to use class time is unbalanced.

Reflection

Observing the excited energy and positive experiences of my students interacting with concepts and vocabulary of physics has pushed my pedagogical thinking even further in the direction of Constructionism. The idea that a learner figuratively builds understanding by literally building a physical – or virtual – object gains traction for me every time I see it in action.

In terms of assessment for the catapult challenge, I think it’s appropriate to use the method I employed for our Model UN scrimmage: Every student begins with a baseline ‘proficient’ score. In this case, we start with 90%. Then, as the activity progresses, teachers use structured observation to modify students’ scores on targeted skills. For this activity, we were looking for evidence of Spatial Awareness, Cooperation, and Independence.

And as always, the students complete a comprehensive self-assessment of all elements of task and unit.

Experiences like these remind me that school should be a lot more time spent doing tasks like these, and a lot less about rigid standards within a few disciplines.

Questions in inquiry learning

A welcome development this year in the Elementary School at KIST has been an emphasis on inquiry. It is more than likely due to feedback from our recent IB re-authorization visit and for me, an opportunity to grow in one of the most challenging aspects of teaching. I’ve blogged quite a bit about the theory and practices of inquiry learning, most recently in the post, CLMOOC Unmake: Unintroducing inquiry learning.

When it was announced that inquiry would be a focus, I sifted through articles I had read and collected over the years.

The people who do most of the talking in class do most of the learning.

Unfortunately, a bunch of teachers will do a lot of learning today.

— Blunt Educator (@BluntEducator) March 4, 2015

I also enjoyed gliding over memory lane and revisiting some saved tweets with choice perspectives on inquiry.

‘If we’re all getting the same answer, we must be asking the wrong question.’ @BruceFerrington #inquiry #ibpyp— Bart Miller (@BarMill) February 5, 2015

One article that grabbed my attention last autumn was Good research starts with good questions by David Farkas and Brad Nunnally. What I found most interesting was that many of the pitfalls of research questions are actually key techniques in developing questions for inquiry learning. For example, research should avoid ‘leading questions’ that may skew data in a particular direction. In teaching, we want the learners to find their ways to a common destination, either general or specific.

Erasing prior knowledge

In an occurrence I wish were more common, while reflecting on the experience, a colleague commented that one challenge inquiry teachers face is the desire of students to ‘get the right answers’, or even worse, to answer in the way they believe the teacher wants. This can lead to regurgitated prior knowledge answers rather than creative explorations of the concepts and contexts presented in the questions.

‘They’ve been constrained by what they already know.’ #inquirylearning #ibpyp

— Bart Miller (@BarMillEDU) March 14, 2018

In Grant Wiggins’ article, 5 Tips To Help Students Arrive At Their Own Understandings, the distinction between Understanding and Knowledge is highlighted. It’s vital that learning in an inquiry setting begin with as close to a clean slate as possible. The more a class feels that their teacher is soliciting a ‘right’ answer, the less likely they are to develop deeper and personal understanding.

Student questions

One solution to the problem is to ask students to generate questions based on elements of the understandings we wish them to pursue. In an IB PYP unit of inquiry, the ‘lines of inquiry’ should help to define the scope of an intended inquiry, while the ‘key concepts’ provide a frame or lens through which to interpret one’s findings.

The photo above is a list of questions generated by a provocation in which students identified company logos, then considered them in reference to the line of inquiry, ‘How images, text, and music are used to influence people’s choices’.

Teacher questions

This year, we are collaborating with another grade level team to develop questions together to provoke inquiry into a new unit. The initial concept was to begin with carefully selected materials and a starting question intended to stimulate creativity and curiosity. Subsequent questions would climb the Bloom’s Taxonomy ladder to higher-order thinking skills, as well as ‘funnel’ students’ understandings in the general direction prescribed by the Central Idea and Key Concepts of the unit.

Our first meeting was to develop questions for the other grade’s lesson. Then, we observed them and followed up with a debriefing session, and to develop questions for our lesson. They attended our lesson and we concluded the collaboration with a final debriefing about the entire experience.

The process reinforced my belief in the importance of collaboration and design thinking in Learning Experience Design.

Impact on learning: Kindness & Respect

At KIST, students complete two important diagnostic assessments at the beginning of the school year. One is academic from the United Kingdom Standards and Testing Agency. The other is a Student Survey which allows the learning community to evaluate our classroom environment.

On the academic tests, only 12% of my class achieved ‘just below expectations’ and only 8% were in reading and math. That result indicated to me that academics were an area of strength and that interventions would be needed on a limited and individual basis. With differentiation strategies in place, a classroom culture that would cultivate peer support and collaboration would be helpful to increase the depth and quality of learning.

Turning attention toward the student survey, I identified two major areas of concern that could potentially derail academic progress and achievement.

For details on the survey, view my previous post, Student Survey Analysis 2016.

This post will focus on an action plan to improve classroom climate and morale with the goal of increasing academic achievement through increased enthusiasm and positive engagement.

Mindfulness

As detailed in the post, Elementary mindfulness, daily meditation is one strategy that could contribute to a more reflective classroom climate. However, such negative survey results showed a need for a targeted intervention with the goal of helping students to be more Reflective.

Community Circle

Another important opportunity for reflection is our weekly Community Circle. To help my class understand the importance of reflecting together, we elevated Community Circle to a top priority. On top of never cancelling or shortening our sessions, I devised an evaluation system by which active participation results in a ‘meeting expectations’ grade in Listening and Speaking. Knowing that their contributions as members of a community was being monitored, students practiced more intent listening and thoughtful speaking.

Positive reinforcement

I set a goal to award at least one IB Learner Profile Award or PYP Attitude Certificate to each student as quickly as their actions and choices would allow. The result was over 100 being awarded and received, and every student received at least one. To provoke parent encouragement, every award was accompanied by an email to the student’s parents with a photo of them receiving it and a description of how it was earned.

The importance of being reflective

The most precise tool in this plan was to create an opportunity for students to reflect on the way the listen and speak to each other. After collaborating with my grade level team about the questions, the result was a G4B Daily kindness and respect reflection form. Completing the form was assigned as home learning every school day for three months. My assumption was that over time, regular reflection would increase students’ mindfulness to help them to improve their communication and interpersonal interactions.

Three months of kindness and respect reflection data

The form was submitted over 800 times and the results were a satisfactory upward trend. A short term intervention might produce more dramatic results, but would not necessarily produce a lasting outcome. These data demonstrate collective and gradual improvement. It also shows that students were generally more critical of themselves than the class as a whole, and that they each improved in relation to their peers.

Listening

The most encouraging results were in the domain of listening. The class showed greatest improvement in listening actively and intently, two skills with a clearly causal connection to academic achievement.

Improvements in listening

High risk cases

Using the academic diagnostic assessment results to identify ‘high risk’ students, I made a point of checking their reflections occasionally and conferencing with them to increase awareness of their own behavior.

Student A

The first case is a student who is well known for having attention challenges as well as socially  awkward patterns of behavior, as well as ‘just below expectations’ results on at least one diagnostic assessment.

Enter a caption

Interestingly, the results clearly converge, indicating that this student believes that their behavior has improved to more closely match their perception of the class. I have observed this to be true anecdotally, as well, as students in the class have taken responsibility for helping this student to interact more productively and follow directions more consistently.

Student B

Another ‘at risk’ student took a very different journey. This may be the only example of a student rating the class lower than themself at the beginning of the survey.

There are students who could reasonably evaluate their own behavior as being better than the class as a whole. Unfortunately, this student is not one of them. We discussed his reflections in detail and there were many instances when I pointed out when choices, ranging from playing with a pencil case to shouting over group members during discussions, were examples of poor listening. The result seems to be increased awareness of their own actions, resulting in a dramatic drop in scores, followed by improvements illustrated by increases in some areas.

Student C

Another student who is not achieving academically has also had several issues outside of class related to inappropriate use of language. This is another case in which these reflections may have served as a ‘reality check’.

What is most interesting about this case for me is in which areas this student felt they were doing well and comparing that to their evaluation of the class. At first, two speaking categories were higher than the class, yet the scores converge at the end while the remaining areas dropped.

Are results like these desirable? If the goal is increased awareness, and there is a clear problem, then reflections that become gradually more negative could show increased awareness or acceptance of the problem.

Student D

Some students were not ‘at risk’ based on their diagnostic assessments, but warrant special attention for other reasons. The next student is well known, if not notorious, for being at the center of most episodes of misbehavior and interpersonal drama in our class.

Interestingly, they seem to accurately assess that their behavior is less kind and respectful than the class as a group. Yet, I am struck by the ambiguity of the self reflections. There doesn’t appear to be any strong trend and the averages of the scores simply converge at 3.5 at the end. This is a case that raises more questions than answers, the most important being whether the student is very aware of their choices, but simply failed to make or observe any progress. It’s also possible that these results could indicate a deep lack of mindfulness about the student’s own actions and interactions with others.

It is possible that a differently designed reflection tool could reveal more insights into this case.

The following graphs are included simply because the look fascinating. The first shows a strange consistency, yet also a clear trend of improvement.

Next, here’s another example of consistency based on category and gradual progress.

Result

At the end of the three months, I asked the students to answer the original questions of concern: ‘Students are respectful to each other in my class.’ and ‘Students’ behave appropriately in my class.’ This survey was random, like the initial one.

The results are improved, but much more dramatically than I expected.

There has been a fundamental shift in behavior and the perception of behavior in my class since the beginning of the school year. While it is impossible to attribute the change to any one variable, it is safe to say that all efforts to increase kindness and respect had a cumulative effect.

World Cultures Day

At KIST we celebrate International Mother Language Day with an annual ‘World Cultures Day’ event which includes a traditional costume parade and PTA bake sale featuring delicious treats from around the world.This year, I challenged the Elementary Student Representative Council to host a ‘Mother language recordings’ booth. We wanted to provide an opportunity for students and parents to record brief video messages about peace in their mother languages.

Photo by Bart Miller via Instagram

Ready for World Cultures Day at KIST. #mothertongueday #edu #servicelearning

— Bart Miller (@BarMillEDU) February 17, 2017

The students made a poster and I created a form for participants to write their messages along with English translations. We collaborated with the Media Club to record the videos. In an hour, we recorded around twenty videos by community members in languages including Japanese, Russian, Turkish, English, Bengali, and three different languages from India: Tamil, Odiya, and Hindi.

We are currently in the process of deciding how to publish and share the videos, although I did make a point of obtaining permission from the adult participants to share their recordings on the school website.

The greatest takeaway for me was the encouragement we received to widen the scope of this project next year with more promotion and a larger window of time to record messages.

We are looking forward to International Mother Language Day on 21st Feb! #IBschools how are you celebrating? #IMLM #internationalmindedness

— IB World magazine (@IBWorldmag) February 20, 2017

A few days later, the tweet above from IB World Magazine caused me to reflect on how International Mother Language Day is an essential opportunity for internationally minded people and organizations to celebrate and preserve language diversity. Hopefully, we will expand the ‘Mother language recordings’ project next year.

Student Survey analysis 2016

This year, my Student Survey results held few surprises (link to view last year’s Student survey analysis). Items directly related to me, such as ‘My teacher cares about me’, were positive. Generally, 70-80% of students answered ‘usually’ with very few, most often only one student, answering ‘no’.

Listening to students

One surprise was the response to the statement, ‘My teacher listens to me.’, to which 48% of my students think I only ‘sometimes’ listen to them. Slightly baffled, I reflected on my practice and identified a few of my behaviors that could lead to this result.

First, as a rule, I ignore students when they suddenly shout across the classroom, begin asking a question without saying ‘excuse me’ or otherwise catching my attention, and especially interrupt other students. I can easily understand how a child could perceive that I am not listening to them because in some cases, I intentionally don’t listen in order to cultivate a culture in the classroom of politeness.

Of students who responded ‘sometimes’ or ‘no’, their overall average response was only 69% positive, meaning that those who responded negatively to this item were also negative to most of the other items. Of those who don’t feel that I ‘usually’ listen to them, 69% also don’t feel free to ask and answer questions, a tenuous correlation.

As a simple action plan, I would follow the steps below.

1 Observe if and when I don’t listen to students.
2 Make more explicit that I sometimes ignore students speaking to me if they are acting disrespectfully or impolitely.
3 Reinforce our classroom essential agreement – which was composed, synthesized, and signed by all of the students – about being Open-minded Communicators.

We are Open-Minded Communicators.

We have a right to share our opinions and feelings.

We have a responsibility to show respect by listening and practicing empathy.

I would also note that of all of the classes I have taught in nine years, this is by far the most needy. During any written assessment, there is a constant queue at my desk and barrages of hands in the air asking for help. My email box is also consistently populated by emails from students asking to send PDFs of lost homework and other requests for favors which I politely decline. It is possible that their concept of the role of a teacher is significantly different than mine.

Choice and agency

A difference in expectations might illuminate another perplexing survey item result to the statement, ‘My teacher allows me to demonstrate my understanding in various ways.’

For their first unit Summative Assessment Task, students had the instruction to ‘Present your research findings in an appropriate medium of your choice (written report, video, poster, dance, cooking, etc).’

Almost everyone in the class chose to do an oral presentation with a poster or PowerPoint for visual support. The remaining two students submitted written reports. Although this may only be a case of carefully reading and following instructions, I feel justified in being somewhat annoyed.

Respect and classroom behavior

I was shocked to discover their responses to the statement, ‘Students are respectful to each other in my class.’

Only two students think that their peers ‘usually’ treat each other with respect, and almost a quarter feel that their class is always disrespectful. The same holds true for their perceptions of classroom behavior.

When I asked if anyone wanted to learn in a class like the one shown above, no one responded.

I have discussed these results with my grade level team, administration, and the precious grade teachers. All assured me that the students’ feelings about their community are absolutely about complex social dynamics. In brief, this class has too many ‘alphas’ and not enough empathy. This is a case study to test my ability to cultivate social and emotional intelligence. And a fair and timely challenge it is.

A future post will detail the reflection and data informed action plan I have set into motion to help this learning community to become more Caring.

I would certainly appreciate anecdotes and suggestions that might more brightly illuminate a path forward.

Impact on learning: Language and engagement

One admirable feature of professional development at KIST is the annual Impact on Learning study. Teachers design a data driven experiment based on a pedagogical approach or strategy and then analyze the data to reflect on the efficacy of that aspect of their teaching.

To start, I formulated a question and answer dialogue:

On which group of students do I want to have the greatest impact?

 

All of them. Inclusive practices and thoughtfully designed learning experiences which emphasize student choice and voice should provide opportunities for all students to excel.

Which group of students are most difficult to reach with inclusive practices and learning experiences that emphasize student choice and voice?

Students who are reluctant to share their ideas in class or participate actively in learning engagements are the most difficult to reach.

Why don’t those students participate?

 

The reasons they don’t participate are as diverse as the people themselves. However, if they don’t participate now, they likely didn’t before either. If not, then their opportunities for practice have been limited, possibly severely.

Often, students (and people in general) with little experience speaking in a group feel shamed by their lack of fluency. Lack of confidence leads them to withdraw more, causing them to practice even less.

I have been tempted in the past to ‘call out’ reluctant students, but Alfie Kohn’s article, ‘Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You Anyway, provides needed perspective into this issue. When done improperly or insensitively, calling on these students might do more harm than good.

Being fairly introverted myself, I sympathize with many people’s preference to remain in the shadows of a crowd, but nine year old introverts, preferences aside, need to practice public speaking in a safe environment.

Being introverted doesn’t make you averse to collaboration. Everyone should practice social skills. https://t.co/P87RzlBL68

— Bart Miller (@BarMill) February 1, 2016

Articles like Chapter 1. Why Talk Is Important in Classrooms from Content-Area Conversations by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg, and Talking to Learn by Elizabeth City reinforce the position that Listening and Speaking form the foundation of Reading and Writing.

What I needed was a strategy to encourage the students to grow as courageous Communicators by sharing their ideas with the whole class.

Gathering data

My methodology for gathering data is simple. At various times in class, I propose an open ended question. For example, I might ask for interpretations of an idiom, impressions of an image, or opinions about a famous quote. That there are no correct or incorrect answers is made clear to students, as is the fact that ‘I don’t know’ is an acceptable response. Students may also ‘pass’. Sometimes the provocations are directly connected to our unit of inquiry, sometimes not.

Using a deck of laminated cards with the students’ names written on them, I ensure that every student has an equal opportunity to speak. My response to every contribution is ‘thank you’, and I very rarely paraphrase or ask clarifying questions in this context. To students who ‘pass’, I simply respond with ‘OK’.

Cards are separated into two categories and then data entered into a spreadsheet about who contributed an answer and who did not.

 

Visualizing data

The raw data is relatively easy to process to produce interesting graphs.

Some students always talk and some never talk by default. Filtering out those students makes the graph more readable, but still not very revealing.

Referring to diagnostic assessment data in Reading from the beginning of the school year, I included only students who score ‘just below expectations’ or ‘below expectations’.

Next, filtered for students who scored ‘Just below expectations’ or ‘Below expectations’ on Aug diagnostic assessment in Writing.

Again, this graph doesn’t instantly reveal anything other than a general upward trend in participation.

Next, I wanted to explore a possible correlation between this exercise and improvement. The next graph is students with more than 10% improvement on ongoing informal and formal assessments in Reading from Q1 to Q3.

Next, students with more than 10% improvement on ongoing assessments in Writing from Q1 to Q3.

Interpreting data

This is the first graph which indicates a clear correlation. With only two exceptions, students whose writing has improved are also increasing their participation.

Since the objective is to improve language skills, I tried including only students who consistently achieve below 80% on ongoing assessment in English language.

Compare to consistently strong achievers in language.

Interesting that consistently higher performers seem to have random participation while consistently lower performers are participating progressively more and more.

If only for the purpose of having more data visualization, members of most advanced guided reading group.

And the least advanced guided reading group.

It’s exciting to see that this activity is impacting the exact group of students it was designed to benefit.

When the class completes its end of year diagnostic assessment in Language, I expect to see similar improvements among students who have gained confidence as communicators through this simple activity.

Finally, here is the whole class average.

 

Unexpected outcome

Rather than analyzing individual students, this graph reveals something I hadn’t expected. If I compare the number of opportunities to speak with the average rate of participation, there is stark correlation.

Number of data points (% participation):

October 4 in one week (61%)
November 16 (61%)
December 3 (41%)
January 7 (60%)
February 7 (74%)
March 7 (71%)

It would seem that the more we do this activity, the more participation there is. Thinking of the student trying to build confidence, it makes perfect sense. If one hesitates, one loses an opportunity. However, missing a chance might be just the motivation one needs to seize the next one. If that next opportunity comes sooner than later, one is more likely to take it.

And so, the data comes full circle from thinking of individual students, back to individual students.

Peter Gow’s post, The Data Challenge for Schools – What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?, reminds me that the importance of data is not about averages, it’s about outliers. The greatest impact can often be made where there are cracks or gaps in the data. What is important is being intentional when gathering data so that when it is organized and interpreted, it answers the initial question.

It’s also important to remember that while ‘data’ and ‘gut’ are not the same, as Doug Johnson notes in his post, Data or gut?, through investment in time and training, it is possible to align the gut more precisely through data.

‘Level up’ transdisciplinary skills

In the IB Primary years program, ‘Transdisciplinary skills’ play a critical role in planning, teaching, and assessing student learning. However, they are not often explicitly taught and when they are, it is usually in an isolated manner. For example, one might teach a mini lesson about ‘gather data’ as part of a unit of inquiry.

To reinforce the transdisciplinary nature of the skills and provide more opportunities for students to reflect and discuss them together, I designed a slightly gamified system.

Each skill is posted on the wall with an eight by one square grid underneath.

 

Each square represents a level. Every Friday, students are invited to nominate a skill to ‘level up’ and support their choice with examples from the week. For instance, a student could suggest that we have increased our ‘organizing data’ skill by learning how to use a new type of graph.

Each colored box represents a brief class reflection and discussion of a particular way to practice a skill.

The learning around this simple chart in barely ten minutes per week has been incredible, and occasionally students comment during class that we are practicing a certain skill.

Another benefit is that as our skill levels grow, it becomes more difficult to achieve higher levels. In the photo above, ‘Listening’ is at level seven with only one space to go. Many nominations have been made, but I have had to politely decline and explain that to achieve the final level of Listening, a new innovation will need to be discovered. I’m holding out for some expression of active listening, questioning or paraphrasing to improve clarity and understanding in communication.

Our skills reflection routine, for its minimal investment of time and materials, has provided opportunities to explore the nuances of each skill and highlight the importance of applying them in diverse contexts.

Perhaps before the end of the school year, we will finally level up the elusive Metacognition.

 

GAFE Summit 2016

A few weeks ago, I attended the Edtech Team Summit Featuring Google Apps for Education in Kobe, Japan. It was my second ‘GafeSummit’. The first was in 2013 and was a dramatic turning point in my career as a teacher and my life as a digital citizen.

 

The one notable difference was that this year, I would be presenting a session on Google Apps for Transparency.

360º

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A post shared by Bart Miller (@bartmlr)

 

My first eye opener was Jim Sill’s session, Google Views – Lessons in 360º, in which I was introduced to Cardboard. This is a realist iteration of virtual reality that could be easily integrated into schools. Although I haven’t had other VR experiences, I wonder if Cardboard offers a majority of the sensory experience.

The flow

Overall, I was most inspired by Stephen Taylor’s Formatting the Flow session. As an inquiry teacher, I have always wrestled with the impulse to manage students’ learning. What Stephen showed was how formatted documents can make processes visual and focus students on their learning rather than their presentation and reporting media.

 

BreakoutEDU

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A post shared by Bart Miller (@bartmlr)

My group was beta testing BreakoutEDU with augmented reality and was not able to open the box like some other groups.

Woo-hoo! We did it! #BreakoutEDU #gafesummit pic.twitter.com/wWtytw102c

— Benjamin James, M.A. Ed. (@BenJamesEDU) February 6, 2016

 

Transparency

Finally, it was time for my presentation, Google Apps for Transparency.

As a form of modeling, I shared a Transparency notes Google Doc with all participants for public note taking and documentation.

Transparency builds trust @BarMill #gafesummit #Kobe

— Carol Walter (@carolwalternz) February 7, 2016

I began with a brief introduction to the concept of transparency as it is viewed in practice in government, business, and education. Then, following a generally ‘less to more’ transparent framework according to the slides embedded below, I shared the tools that I use to make planning, teaching, and assessment in my classroom as transparent as possible.



Included in the demonstrations were my weekly planners. I use a template in Google Sheets that allows me to plan to five minutes of accuracy include relevant details including differentiation. These documents are published as a webpage and the link is shared on our class Moodle site.

Having the plans published via a link allows easy access from any internet connected device. A classroom computer at the front of our classroom is dedicated to our projector, but it also has all of our links saved as bookmarks in the web browser. Throughout the day, students check these links. This increases the amount of time that I can devote to learning by minimizing questions like ‘what are we doing next?’ or ‘what’s after lunch?’.

Click image to view as webpage.

A teacher in the workshop asked if there was added stress from publishing all of my planning. I replied with that this level of transparency adds a component of accountability that is its own reward.

Using the publishing capability of Google Apps, I also publish slides of our daily warm ups and home learning assignments. They are embedded on our class Moodle and require no additional maintenance. They update automatically when new slides are added. If a parent or other member of our learning community uses them even once to have a conversation with their child or keep up to date on home learning, it’s worth the minimal effort to set up.

Finally, I shared my data workbook. This is a system of spreadsheets that provides me with real time data from assessments and then publishes the same data to individual pages, published as websites, for students and families.

This works extremely well for parents to keep up to date on their child’s learning and for sharing web addresses, usernames, and passwords.

All materials for the workshop are shared in a public Google Drive folder, Transparency | GAFE Summit Kobe 2016.

Strangely, as soon as my session ended, I felt the urge to develop a new data management system that could provide more possibilities for data visualization and analysis. I’ve already begun sketching ideas and look forward to designing and programming this summer.

Reflection

I’ve completed tons of online professional development, and nothing compares to the invigorating social and interactive experience of a face to face conference. Ironically, this can be especially true in technology where digitally isn’t necessarily the best way to learn something new.

The tools which I have put to work immediately are Quizizz and SafeShare. Since introducing Quizizz, my students constantly ask when we will be taking the next quiz.

Reflecting on my own presentation, I feel that I probably learned more than my participants! It is easy to feel that the time and energy spent preparing to conduct a conference or workshop session is wasted, but I found the opposite. By deeply analyzing and presenting my approaches to technology in the classroom, I deepened my understanding. Being inspired to expand my strategies was an unexpected surprise!

If you’re curious to explore the conference, follow this link to view the full schedule.

I’ve already been contacted by Google related colleagues about organizing an event in Tokyo, so I look forward to putting some of that inspiration into action.