The experiment

I got a comment about some of my earlier teaching posts, so I figured I'd write an update on how things have been going.

I've learned a lot this year. Some stuff has worked great, and other stuff has not worked out so great. But that isn't saying much. Some classes are more difficult than others. A lot of this is language related though. The more difficult to teach classes have fewer English speakers, but I'd also describe those same classes as "guarded tweens." So blaming language exclusively is just martyring myself for something every other eighth grade teacher in the universe lives with every day. Some students can't understand, but they also don't want to interact either. I have the same problem with a few kids in my English-speakers-only math class.

Speaking of the math class, things have worked out well. It was quite a fight for the first half of that first semester. I really worked hard for those kids. In the end, I realized the main problem really wasn't me or them, it was the material. As soon as we got past all the proofs, things normalized a lot. But the proofs were most of the semester, so it was still really hard.

Most of my fixes were just providing a lot more support. I added bonus questions, changed the homework policy to give them more time to get help outside of class. I tightened up the schedule in each class and added more quizzes. Bell work was a great help. Starting the class with questions from the previous day really helped them retain information from lesson to lesson. One of the best things I did was provide answer guides after the homework came back. Letting the kids see more proofs done right was exactly what a few of them needed.

The changes to homework have also made me think a lot about my grading policy in general. I'm tempted to make the homework worth far less, and maybe even stop grading them entirely in favor of just giving them the answer keys after they are due. Most of the kids that really care about their work just need to see what they did wrong, and they will ace the test. But what bugs me are the ones that answer the easy problems, and skip the hard ones that aren't in the back of the book. They get most of the grade without any of the benefit. So, why fight it. Make the homework practice and use tests to evaluate them. That fits the Japanese system a lot more anyways. High school is a lot like college this way. Most High School classes are on a midterm/final two-test basis anyways. I haven't made up my mind yet. I need to research alternatives a little more. If anybody has an opinion/experience/research on this, please comment!!

The math classes are a lot different than my other classes. Computer classes have been a lot less about "not getting it" and more about "proficiency" in most cases. Are you effective? Are you efficient? Are you considering usability? Is that the best way to do that? These are the sorts of things I'm constantly trying to improve. It's very difficult to test though. I don't evaluate them at all. I just give them lots of practical examples and make the rounds, correcting things as I see them.

The biggest problem with this is that it assumes too much. I didn't know the proficiency of the kids as I started the first term. I thought certain fundamentals were in place. I checked the projects for the previous year and thought to myself "oh, they understand word, and a little excel". But what I realized is that I really don't know anything. Can they merge data or just write reports? Can they write formulas or do they just think excel is for making lists only?

My best class has been the tenth grade class. I thought for a long time this was because they are older "more mature" students, better in English, and are dominated by a very outgoing freshman class. (Yes, it's CALLED Computer 10, but it's not just for tenth graders. We've fixed this for the next year. Now it is called CMP201 - Advanced Computer Applications.) But this was wrong and I just realized this recently.

The advice given me when I took over was to not talk so much (because of the Japanese) and give lots of "practical projects." I can assign it, and just walk around helping. So, I did this. The kids quickly got bored, and answering questions doesn't show anyone how to use something, if they don't know the tool exists in the first place. The computer 10 class was different because it was one topic for the entire quarter. We were learning Photoshop and it needed to be slow, because it was so complicated. I didn't talk much, but I demonstrated a new feature every class, and had something appropriate to work on that would use it. The kids did great, and when I gave them a hard project at the end of the term, they rocked.

But it is so arrogant of me to assume that something "easy" like MS Word isn't just as scary to a sixth grader, as Photoshop is to a freshman. I didn't know what they knew already, so I assumed they knew a lot, or at least the fundamentals. If I didn't think they knew anything, I did spend a few minutes showing them. But I still assumed they had a level of proficiency high enough to handle a "gloss over" of many things at once. I should have taken much longer on the fundamentals. I was worried so much about boring students, that most of them simply were not prepared for the assignments I gave them. I am definitely not cut out to teach sixth graders.

This past year I gave out a few, larger projects designed to teach lots of skills by using them practically. But next year I'm changing this. I've already gotten the big whigs to change the class schedules from a one-to-three lessons a week, depending on the class, plan to a twice-a-week, no matter what, plan. I'm slowing down. I'm going to avoid large projects until the end. I want to teach small discrete lessons on particular skills or tools. I want them to be able to complete these lessons in a day or two, rather than over several weeks. Then, at the end, after they have been taught what they need to know explicitly, I'll give them a project. Smaller lessons can still be practical, but they should not be so epic.

This also makes the project a real evaluation. I know what they are capable of, and I can use time against them to make sure they really understood the material. The projects will take less time, because I know what they should be capable of doing in a single lesson, and I can give them just enough time to finish it. If they know what I taught them, they will succeed in that time, and if they don't, they will not succeed. I can correct them, and they will have a second opportunity to learn. At the same time, this serves as their "final" test.

This seems like a no brainer to me now. Two months ago, I might have even told you that this was what I was doing already, but it wasn't. The key difference is that the project is really only a test if it rehashes what they have already learned. Teaching via big projects doesn't gradually ramp them up enough. It's like a big scatter plot of skills that sometimes overlaps from lesson to lesson and sometimes doesn't. What did they learn last time? It depends on too many choices that are not in my hands, but made instead by student deciding for him or herself how to best achieve the objectives I've given them. So, you can never tell what they have really learned. You can't even be sure of what you expect them to learn, because you haven't decided beforehand what you want them to get out of it. You're just reacting to what they are doing. Too sloppy, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.

I've been very busy rebuilding the entire curriculum from scratch. The biggest thing I've been developing is a true "progression" of skills. I think the current curriculum sees computers as a big grab bag. It's more like a hash table than a linked list. There are no prerequisites. There is just a vague idea that each year gets "harder" somehow. This is evident in how certain software has been scheduled. Photoshop is "hard", so we teach it to the later grades. But analyzing data in a spreadsheet is also harder than making a "my life" presentation.

This was definitely understood by the last teacher, but it wasn't outlined. She had a good sense of where her kids were, and tailored each class accordingly. She had a big sack full of projects, and she used them effectively to teach something new each week. She planned ahead, but I couldn't see the order in it. It all seemed so random. If there was an order, it wasn't written anywhere.

Now there is a master list of computer skills, general objectives, and a progression chart. I can look at it and see clearly what a certain grade should be learning that year. It is broken down categorically by skills, social issues, theory, and topic. I can see what they did the year before, and I know what I am preparing them for next year. It is already making my planning for next year so much easier. There is no more need for me to "come up with something else to teach them this week" because I know exactly what I want to teach them already. In fact, I have more than enough. It's all there and I just have to figure out how I want to teach them, how to test it, and how to make it interesting. It's still a work in progress.

I'll keep you updated. Thank you for your comments!