They Can Do It! Stop Selling Kids Short.

 

Being respectful is my baseline, so I very rarely vent for fear of being disrespectful to a hardworking teaching.  However,today I have something I’d like to vent about because my blood truly boils when I hear teachers sell their students short with statements like these:

- My kids can’t do that.

  - This is too challenging for my students.

  - They’re too young for this responsibility.

  - They’re not going to get this.

 

Kids are amazing.  They can do lots of things that we don’t think they can.  They’re resilient and willing to try out new things, even when we aren’t.  They may need a little bit of support and a little bit of training, but kids can be taught pretty much anything with the right supports. But here’s the thing, kids also believe us when we tell them “You’re too young.”  They listen to us when they say “You’re not ready for this.” or “This is too hard.”  They listen to our words and they listen to our action.  So, as teachers, it’s our job to tell them:

 

- You can do this!

- Let’s think of a way we can solve this problem.

- This problem is difficult, but if you try hard enough, you can solve it.

- Think positively!

 

I have taught Kindergarten students to use Power Point, First Graders to create online posters, Second Graders to blog, Third Graders to e-mail, Fourth Graders to create websites and Fifth Graders to create videos.  I have taught low income students with very little background knowledge to make inferences.  I have taught students with learning disabilities to work through word problems. I have taught spoiled, rich kids to think compassionately about others.  I’ve used a flipped classroom model with students as young as second grade.  Each time I have tackled a new challenge someone said to me “Those kids can’t do that.”, but guess what, that wasn’t true.  My kids did it, and did it well, often better than I thought they would.

 

Now, I’m not saying we can (or should) be teaching Algebra to kindergarteners.  But if a challenge is put in front of our students, I believe that it is our job, as teachers to try and help them meet that challenge.  I also believe that the more we believe in our students, the more they will believe in themselves.  We’ve all heard of the study where half of teachers in a school were told that their average class was a class full of gifted students?  The students whose teachers thought they were gifted did better on test scores, on projects and overall than the other students, even though they started out the same.  Those students weren’t any smarter or any more gifted, they simply had teachers who believed in their abilities.   Teachers who in turn pushed them and let them try out new more challenging things because they had this idea in their head that “These kids can handle this.” and they could.  Kids can do amazing things if we let them.

 

So, when you walk into your classroom tomorrow, tell yourself that “ALL students can learn and succeed – not on the same day or in the same way.”  (quote from William G. Spady)  Then, tell your students that they can succeed and push them to do just that.

   

Why are Projects Better than Tests?

Tests, especially multiple choice tests don’t tell me whether students understand a concept.  As inconvenient as it is to notice, students taking a standard multiple choice test have a 20 – 25% chance of passing a multiple choice test if they can’t read any of the questions, just depending on how lucky they are in their guesses.  In fact, I’ve had students do better on a test when they didn’t read the test than when they took the time to try and read the words on a test.  As a teacher, a multiple choice test given to a set of silent third graders tells me:

1.  How good of a reader my student is

2.  How good my student is at making inferences

3.  How much vocabulary my student has

4.  How good my student is at using test taking strategies like process of elimination

5.  How good my student is at sitting still and quiet for long periods of time

 

And all of this is on a good day.  If students are having a bad day, a multiple choice test may tell me:

1.  Who had a good nights sleep last night

2.  Who ate a nutritious breakfast

3.  Who had a fight with a sibling, parent or friend this morning

4.  Who isn’t feeling well due to a virus or cold

5.  Who is distracted by the class playing outside on the playground, the kids fooling around in the halls, or the clock ticking away

 

Okay tests aren’t perfect, but they’re convenient and time saving devices, right?  This allows us to take away less instructional time, right?  Not really.  When you figure in:

1.  We spend a lot of time preparing students for a test – teaching them the specific skills, vocabulary and type of questions will be on a test.

2.  We stop all learning to take time out for tests and require students to sit still and be quiet until every child is done.

3.  Because we require students to sit still for so long, we have to take further instructional time to let them “unwind” after a test.

4.  Children who did poorly, or who are anxious that they might have done poorly on a test, may shut out everything done in class after the test until they receive their score.

5.  We still need to spend time grading the tests and reviewing the scores with students.

 

Alright, but the argument goes that students still need to take tests so that they will be prepared for their future.  Think about your every day life.  When was the last time you took a test that WASN’T part of a class?  In Cosmo magazine?  At the doctor’s office?  Probably the last time you took a test that impacted your life was when you took your teacher certification test, which is a whole other can of worms!  However, when was the last time you completed a project?  Wrote an article?  Created a presentation?  Taught others about something you had recently learned?  As a teacher and a business person, I am much more likely to do the projects, the presentations, the teaching the staff about what I learned at a conference than I am to take a test.  The same could be said about 99% of the jobs that our students will hold in their future.  So a good generalization would be to say that 99% of success in life is based on project completion and 1% is based on test results.  Unfortunately, in many classrooms today at least 75% of a child’s grade is based on tests and quizzes while only about 10 – 20% is based on projects.  How exactly is this helping our students?

The solution?  PROJECTS!  And not always close ended, follow the steps to a set conclusion projects.  Students need time for open ended inquiry projects, research projects, present my learning projects and create something completely new projects.  But, projects are time consuming and teachers have so much to get through, so how do you find the time?

1. Integrate!  Cover multiple standards with a single project.  My new Create Your Own Cookie Science Inquiry project covers math, science and literacy standards.  My African Folktales Online Poster Project covers social studies, literacy and technology standards.  Even projects like my Balanced Checkbook Project covers math, social studies, literacy and technology standards.  This means that instead of giving three or four tests, one project can cover all of those standards and actually save you time.

 

2.  Let students evaluate themselves.  Many of my projects, including the Build Your Own Vocabulary Game project and Math Video Creation project give students a chance to evaluate their own work before you sit down and conference with them.  This means that the conversation is geared up and ready to go. A simple two minute conference is all that is needed to explain to students where they are strong and what they need to work on next time.

  3.  Use a rubric.  Scoring a rubric with 5 – 10 categories often takes less time than grading a 30 question test.  Also, if you go over the rubric with students BEFORE they begin their project, they have a clear idea of what you are looking for and there is so much less of the “I didn’t understand what it was asking of me.” conversation at the end of an assessment.  All of the projects I have available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store come with some sort of a rubric.  However, I also use rubrics in my Reading Response Journals, Math Problem Solving Journals and Writing Journals.  So, by the time we get to a project, my kids are so used to looking at rubrics, they can often grade themselves.  In fact, sometimes I have students grade themselves on the rubric using a green pen and then go through their work and mark my own grades with a red pen, so that they can see how I look at their work versus how they look at their work.  Often you will find that kids are harder on themselves than we are on them.

  4.  Multitask!  Projects don’t have to be done when the entire class is sitting still in one place, like tests do.  Instead, you can be teaching a mini lesson in one area of your classroom while students work on a project in another area.  In fact, projects can be a regular part of your math or literacy centers, making one less center for you to have to plan each week.

  5.  Get rid of the fluff.  Projects – when done right – are fun for kids.  So, instead of inserting craftivities or other “fluff” to make our lessons more fun, let students work on a project.  They will have fun, learn a lot and give you a good idea of where they are in a variety of different areas.  Kids will agree too.  I have had kids give up recess to build virtual field trips to the desert for my Deserts of the World project and forgo watching a movie to work on designing projects for their Earth’s Materials projects.  Kids like projects, simple and easy.

 

Finally, according to the constructivist school of thought, kids learn more doing the project than from reading an article, listening to a lecture, watching a video or working on a math problem.  Now, I think that all of those are great ways to build up background knowledge, but students won’t truly understand anything if we ask them to absorb it and spit it back out on a test.  However, if they take that information, use it in a project, process it and then are asked a question on those end of the year tests that unfortunately public schools cannot avoid, they might just remember the information. 

Food for thought.  What do you think about projects?  Do you use them?  How much?  Why or why not?  I’d love to see a conversation about this begin in the comments.

 

 

 

Technology Should Be MORE Than a Substitute

 When new technology arrives, the first things teachers do is to try and take the things they have been doing and substitute them with technology.  These things make our prep time less, but give kids essentially the same learning experience.  Examples of this would include:

- Using a fact fact website in place of flash cards.

- Using an iPad app in places of a file folder game.

- Using a word processing program to type up a published essay in place or writing it in neat hand writing.

- Looking up the definition for a word in an online dictionary instead of a book dictionary.

- Reading a book online instead of in a paper format.

 

While all of these are good ways to use technology, technology use SHOULD NOT stop there.  Technology provides us with the opportunity to do things we weren’t able to do before.  This should be the focus of our technology instruction and technology integration.  Some examples of using technology to take students to the next level would be:

- Creating videos to explain to others the tricks to memorizing math facts. (Consider using this video planning sheet.)

- Creating a collaborative document (using a program like Google Documents) with students from a different class (maybe even in a different country) to compile information.

- Using a website like Storybird to create an online storybook using the provided pictures as inspiration, and then publishing the story to your classmates so that they can leave you comments on the website.

- Reading a book online and using the embedded dictionary function to learn new vocabulary words.  And then creating an online book report with a link that can be shared with family around the world.

- Comparing information on verified and un-verified sources when conducting internet research.

- Publishing in-class writing assignments on your blog to share with students around the world.

 

As teachers, we should be spending at least half of our technology time using technology to do something that we couldn’t do without technology.  Technology helps students to collaborate, to create, to find large quantities of information and to connect with students all over the world.

How do you use technology in your classroom?