...when I made changes that allowed for Earth Science 11 students to complete a test—successfully—that I was improving my instruction. It was 1998, and I thought it just made sense, and it represented a real shift in my teaching practice from “following along” with my peers to choosing my own direction. Tests didn’t need to huge marathons of questions, so I reduced a test given to me by a peer from 237 multiple choice questions, plus a 40 mark short answer section, plus essays to tests with 100 multiple choice questions, plus an extended answer section. I didn’t think that tests didn’t need to be full of tricks, so I reduced the number of choice per multiple choice question from 5 to 4, and then went through the PLOs an removed all questions that were duplicated somewhere else and not actually part of the curriculum. Then, I made some adjustments for a second test for students with learning disabilities, really focusing on what the key learning outcomes were, and further reduced the choices per question to three (I had decided that I wanted to test what they knew, not how well they could figure out my test). I took the old written section, combined the best parts of the old test with my learning outcomes and came up with 10 really good questions, and then did something crazy: I gave the kids the questions in advance of the test. There was, however, a catch. They would be required to answer 3 of those 10 questions on test day, and the three questions would be of my choosing. Having three blocks of this class, I could also mix up the questions that I asked each class to do. It wasn’t any more work for me; I had already created a grading rubric with exemplars for each to help the class study. Feeling pretty good about myself, I did something else that some colleagues though improper: I offered the test designed for the student with a designated learning challenge to 5-6 other students who always worked hard, but never, ever passed their tests. Guess what? They passed this one. The other students? Not only did they do well, but I gradually moved toward a “choose the 3 questions that you can answer best model”. We covered the entire curriculum—really well, in fact—and the students came to class believing that they could be successful.
...when my Social Studies department decided to improve students writing through 3 common assessments that we teachers then marked, collaboratively, using the pre-determined rubric that the essay question was built around that we were using our assessments to inform our instruction. We didn’t know that this was called Assessment for Learning. We didn’t even do it because we thought we were cutting edge. We did it because we were having challenges agreeing with the English department on how to improve writing, and—even worse—because we felt that some of our department members were providing an easier “ride” through our course than others. We were trying to level the playing field. But, then an amazing thing happened. Because we all taught different courses, we all had a different amount of sections of this particular course at one particular time. That meant while I had 1 block, a colleague had 3. To even out the marking load, we decided to sit down and mark together. Our administrator was ahead of his time, and offered us some TOC coverage to work collaboratively during the school day and we were off. I learned more from that common marking time about good teaching from my colleagues that I had learned in the previous year. We had to pre-arrange our marking criteria, and once we did we decided to share it with our students. It’s funny, by attempting to fix a problem that might not have existed, we used our common knowledge and experience to greatly improve our learning and the learning for our students.
...when I embedded online tools into my instruction that I was actually changing the way we were learning in my classroom—my learning included. I thought that “teaching students in the medium of their generation” (Dave Matheson, circa 1998) was my moral imperative, and I honestly didn’t realize that level of academic success that my students would achieve. I started off trying to justify my blended model of online learning by creating so many assignments to check for every trivial piece of content that I became buried in papers. I couldn’t keep up! A colleague suggested that I try to use discussion boards, and to make the students more responsible for their learning. Desperate, I tried it…and it worked. I feared that they would miss out on content, but found that by using a case study approach they picked up all of the pieces they needed and then worked in class at a much higher cognitive level. This class of students had a class average more than 5% higher on than any other class in the school on our common assessments. It was amazing, and the change came about by accident.
We have a tough job, and sometimes it is important for us to reflect back on a job well done. Spend some time this weekend thinking of some of your successes, and use those feelings to help you put together something wonderful for your students next week.
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