Endings

Last night I attended the first round tournament game of our boy’s basketball team.  It was a fabulous effort by our young men, but unfortunately they came up on the wrong side of the scoreboard in the end. 

As I watched the final seconds tick off of the clock, I began to get that feeling within that I get at the end of every season, a mixture of disappointment, sadness, pride, satisfaction, and curiosity of the future.  Regardless of whether I am a coach, a player, or a spectator, that feeling is always overwhelming because it is the ending of something that you know each and every person that is a part of the experience spent months devoting time and effort into a common passion. 

I’ll never forget my final high school football and basketball games, or my final college basketball game, when I had tears streaming down my face not because we had lost, but because I knew something I cared about so much had come to an end.  I’ll never forget consoling players when I coached both football and basketball at Hayes and telling them that it’s OK to be sad, it shows that you cared so much.  I wasn’t able to be in the locker room after the game last night, but I’d imagine there were tears, because the effort on the court showed that each and every player to take the court cared deeply about their team. 

As I sit here this morning, I think about school.  The last day of school is filled with joy and excitement.  A weight is lifted off of students as they venture off to college, summer jobs, or three months of video games and trips to the pool.  It’s almost the opposite of that final game they cared so much about. 

Now, I would never expect a student to shed tears over the end of school as passionately as they do about their sport, but why are the emotions such polar opposites?

My fondest memories of school are of extra-curriculars such as sports, theater, and television class, and I would imagine many other people have the same memories.  I wish we could find a way to make the classroom experience as memorable.  

I believe the first step is to look at what we offer to students.  Sports, theater, and other opportunities are remembered because of the experiences we had, not because of the content we learned.  We as teachers need to provide an experience for our students.  Experiences that they enjoy, learn from, and want to put their time and effort into succeeding in.  Students view the majority of classes as requirements to graduate.  While they aren’t wrong, until we provide an experience that changes their mindset to view classes as an opportunity for an experience that benefits them as people, they’ll remain stuck in the mindset that they have to show up, put in their time, receive a letter grade, and then get a piece of paper that says they have finished. 

Will they ever tear up over the end of a class?  Likely not.  But, hopefully students will get to a point where they throw their cap up not because they don’t have to do something anymore, but because they are excited to apply their skills to the world for which they have been prepared.  

 

Take care,

Coach Mo

What to do with feedback?

Ever since I read Dan Pink’s book, Drive, I have been fascinated with human motivation.  I had never thought about incentives and carrot-on-a-stick methods the way that Mr. Pink breaks them down.  I was blown away to learn that these things are not only misunderstood, but debilitating to our society in many ways. 

This past October our administrative staff presented us with an opportunity to attend the 21^st century skills conference in downtown Columbus.  The invitation was open to anyone interested, and each department was asked to send a representative.  In the past I have not followed up on these opportunities, but when I saw that Dan Pink was going to be a featured speaker, I knew it was my time to act. 

One thing that I took away from the whole conference, not just from Mr. Pink, was that the act of assigning a grade to an assignment is counter-productive to the learning process.  One speaker put it like this:

-  If you assign a grade to a corrected paper, the student looks solely at the grade and puts the paper away.

-  If you assign a grade and write feedback on a corrected paper, the student just looks at the grade and files it in their bookbag. 

-  If you do not assign a grade to a paper, but provide feedback, the student will then take in the feedback and will grow from the experience because they didn’t get that grade that they have been so trained to view as the end-all. 

It almost made too much sense!  From the moment I heard that statement, I thought nonstop about how I can use this information to improve upon my craft.  To make a long story short, I’ve adjusted my grading method to revolve around giving feedback, and I have attempted to take grading individual assignments out of my classroom.  I want to determine grades on whether or not the student has learned the necessary information, just like homework, tests, and projects are intended to do, but I want to check the students off for their achievements, not assess one product.  I will not go any further on grading because it is still a work in progress and I’ll devote an entire post to grading once I iron out a few more details. 

Back to the feedback.  On Friday I asked my students to evaluate the class and myself as the teacher.  I asked the students to give me an honest and fair evaluation on things such as clarity of instruction, quality of communication, likes and dislikes of the class, and what I can do to help make their experience more enjoyable and satisfying.  It was an overwhelming success as the majority had very positive things to say to go with great suggestions for improvement going forward. 

Here is where I’m struggling:  What do you do with the following two statements that showed up on a few papers?

1.  What YOU want: this was in the form of “it’s hard to tell what you want” or “I don’t know what you want” or “what I dislike so far is that I don’t know what you want.” 

This alarmed me because my first response was to write “YOUR BEST” in really big letters and underline it multiple times.  Then the second time was to write “it doesn’t matter what I want, what do you want?”  Then my third response was to write nothing at all and to look really deeply into that reply and then become really saddened that a student said this. 

I actually did all three.  But, it is the third one that is still with me today, and it is bothering me because it is a problem that is way bigger than just my classroom.  Where have we gone wrong that would cause a student to come to school looking to just please the teacher and not to come to school with a desire to learn with a view of school as a method of self-improvement for their future? 

In short, the direction for the project was to select a topic that relates to your family history (disease/ condition), research it and learn details, then present your findings in a way that educates others on the part of your topic you found most influential.  I understand why students wanted to know what I wanted (it’s what school usually asks), now I need to figure out how to get them to unlearn this mindset to move forward.   

2.  You don’t teach us.  If you have read my previous blogs, or have talked with me recently you know that I have adopted a project-based approach to my class.  Many frustrations led to me believing that having students research individually would be far better than having me limit the students to my knowledge on one individual topic per day.  Instead, I am attempting to be more of a guide to 30 different paths of learning.  It has been exhausting, but very rewarding thus far. 

Anyway, I was somewhat expecting this comment to come from the evaluation.  I haven’t done any “game of school” teaching; No lectures, no power points, no overheads, no worksheets, no outlining the chapter, no vocabulary terms, no tests etc, etc.  I have a vision of what I want to happen in class, and that vision involves students investing in themselves while enjoying each and every day.  I’d be crazy not to expect this type of response, but still, when it came, I was again saddened. 

Students have become so used to coming in, sitting down, looking forward, listening, note taking, and then studying, that anything else is considered “not teaching.”  I am coming to the realization that students do indeed view school as a place and not an activity, and it is unfortunate that they want to show up and have everything given to them.  Students only see opportunities to learn in the traditional methods of school.  They have been trained to recognize the role of a teacher as the direct instructor of information and the role of a student as a passive receptor to information.   How can we open their eyes to see that the world in 2012 contains so many resources that can teach you more quickly and more efficiently than any single source that a teacher limiting them to only their knowledge is limiting their potential?  How can we make them realize that passive receptors rarely develop skill-sets that are needed to be a productive and successful member of a business, corporation, or company five years from now?

This is the unfortunate result of a mindset that we as an educational system have trained kids to have.  I believe that we need to redefine the roles of student and a teacher at all levels.  My challenge to my students this coming week will be to consider the reason they come to school, and reconsider your role as a student and my role as a teacher.  Consider what YOU want, and how YOU can learn, not what I want you to do.  Don’t rely on someone to teach you everything.  Expect teachers to provide you with opportunities, and expect them to be there when you hit a snag.  Do not expect them to solve your problems, but to provide you with the tools and skills to work through them.  Expect them to care about you as a person, and to teach you to be the best person and learner you can be, not to teach you to only know the curriculum.  Embrace the opportunity to invest in yourself and to improve upon your knowledge and skills each and every day.

I appreciate my students for being fair and honest with me.  I got a ton of incredible feedback, and I cannot wait to make some changes in the coming weeks.  I do not think negatively of my students for the statements I have mentioned, I’m actually proud of them for stating their position.  I have brought the statements to attention because they are another indication that change in the system is necessary.  I hope they serve as motivation to teachers everywhere to be bold, try something new, and help to remove the stigma our students have of what student and teacher roles should be.

What are your thoughts?  How should I/ we react to that feedback? 

Take care,

Coach Mo

The Layover

I was helping my parents search for plane tickets this past summer for their trip to Las Vegas.  My mom had asked me to assist them in finding the best price, and I distinctly remember the day I found a ticket for a significant price below what we had been finding.  I called their house and broke the news, only to find that “we went ahead and bought some.  Only one stop, and it is a short one.”

I personally would have chosen the cheaper tickets and stopped twice, or waited an extra few hours, but they had determined that it was worth the extra cash to be free of a long layover. 

Unfortunately, in health class, we don’t have the option of choosing a different flight.  The layover analogy is the best I can come up with to describe our current status.  We have this goal in mind (Las Vegas) of student learning coming in the form of projects that make a difference in society.  But, because of learned habits developed over time (the lack of a direct flight) we’ve had to make a stop along the way in the form of our first project (layover in Dallas), to unlearn ways of thinking that inhibit our ability to be creative and to think in ways that allow students to express their voice, not just restate information. 

Don’t take this all the wrong way.  I am actually excited about this layover to see the progress that we have made.  This layover certainly isn’t like one you’d take on a trip out west, it is a layover that allows students to present their work, evaluate their work, share their work, and ultimately improve on their ability to work going forward. 

I have learned so much as a teacher over the past two weeks.  I have learned that not only do students develop some unfortunate habits during their school years that are hard to break, but I’ve learned that 6 years of teaching can bring on some automatic, almost subconscious responses that must be unlearned as well. 

I, like the students, really want to get to our ultimate destination quickly.  An ultimate destination that has a more streamlined process, with better explanations, better feedback, and better guidance from me as the teacher.  This destination is but a vision in my head, and I cannot wait until we board the plane on our next project to take us even closer to a learning environment that all students take pride in coming to on a daily basis. 

For now, we must enjoy our layover.  The work the students have produced for their second assignment is being posted to our class websites this week.  I am very excited to finally launch the sites and allow students to share their work with whomever they wish.  It is another step in the process that will allow the students to have a vision, like I do, of that final destination.  I am hoping that this project allowed them to have some adversity and some frustrations, because those things will only make our next set of projects better.  If that adversity didn’t show itself this time around, I’m hoping the students set the bar a bit higher next time and try to do something that they have never done before. 

I heard a great quote this week from a fellow educator on twitter:  “If failure isn’t happening in your classroom, why not?”  I think this is great because failure is our best teacher.  Failure also exemplifies a student’s willingness to try something difficult, something new, or something that they thought they’d never get the chance to try in a high school classroom.  

If you’d like to visit our sites please feel free to click the links below.  Projects will continue to be posted throughout the week. 

Thank you for being part of our journey.

Period 3 Health 

Period 9 Health 

Period 10 Health 

Take care,

Coach Mo

Discovering Successes

Change often leads to a certain level of frustration.  As I have communicated in previous posts, the change in culture that I am trying to create has been accompanied by many frustrating realizations and hardships.  What I don’t want to happen throughout this journey is to have all of the successes remain in the classroom while the frustrations are projected to the world.   So, I want to make sure I share successes as they come, just as I do those tough moments. 

Each day in this process I have had a handful of students have an “ah ha” moment.  Whether it was during a one on one meeting, or while collaborating with peers, students are finally starting to grasp the concept of using their creative side to convey a message in a thoughtful and interesting way. 

I have frustrated many students when they’ve told me they want to do a power point or a poster, and I’ve replied with “those are visual aids, not projects” or “isn’t a poster just a re-creation of a website that I could google in less time than it takes me to look at your poster?”  But, I’ve been so proud to see the look of excitement on their faces when they’ve returned to their spaces, thought it over, and have come hurrying to report that they have succeeded in coming up with an idea that is both interesting and informative. 

This week has been wonderful to see students creating these projects with such focus.  I’d share some of the projects, but there are too many great creations happening that I wouldn’t want to single any out.  I had a student today during 9^th period that came in, and before the bell could ring asked “can we go ahead and get started?”   I didn’t hear that once during the first semester, what a cool moment!

I am eager to share these projects with you.  They are due next week and we will be loading them up to our class website.  There are a lot of finishing touches to both the projects and the website construction, and I cannot wait to turn the frustrations that will appear into successes in the coming week. 

Take care,

Coach Mo

"Learned Helplessness"

This week was eye opening and alarming.  My project-based philosophy has hit the first snag of what I am certain to be many difficulties along the way.  My wife defined it best as “learned helplessness” when I explained my dilemma to her. 

What I have discovered is a problem that is out of my control.  I can help the situation (at least I’m giving it my best attempt), but a cure is found only in a shift of culture within the system.  As Dwight Carter (follow him: @Dwight_Carter) stated in his most recent blog post, Culture Matters! (click here to see the post)

What I found this week is that students have developed a learned helplessness.  My hands-off, student-controlled learning process has become almost an overwhelming experience.  Students continue to want directions, step-by-step orders, and a predetermined path.  They want me to “just tell me what to do” because “this is too hard.” 

The “this” that I am speaking of is simply to create a project, of your choice, that conveys a message, of your choice, to an audience, of your choice, using each and every class period to grow as a learner and an advocate. 

Monday’s assignment was to research your family history to seek out a disease, disorder, or condition that has traditionally shown up in your family tree.  The remainder of the week has been seeking out information about that condition, defining an audience that may want to know more about that condition, and developing a product that can present information to that audience in an interesting way.  The one rule was that the project had to be able to be posted to the internet on our class webpage.  I spent most of my week explaining to students that visual aids such as power point and posters aren’t recommended unless they do something with them such as film their presentation, because those alone are just a recreation of a website, and it would be better for us to just send the person to the website.  There are many more fires I tried to put out, but that is one for the sake of the point. 

Back to the theme of learned helplessness.  I approached countless students with blank looks on their faces that were sitting at their desks in a frozen state.  When I asked them how I could help, or what they are doing to further their project, the replies were on par with “I have no idea what to do, I am lost, I like it better when you just tell me and I can do it and turn it in.”  They were expecting me to seek them out, put them back on track, and almost hold their hand every step of the way.

This is a learning process for me as well.  I feel well equipped to assist a student, to help them learn more about a topic, to improve upon their ideas, but by the end of the week, I felt like I was doing 30 projects per class, not helping to guide 30 projects per class. 

In the past I would get frustrated at this point and revert to old strategies of lecturing, worksheets, bookwork, and sprinkled in group activities.  But, that would lump me right in with the “learned helplessness” crowd that gives up and goes right back to the same old things that are out of date and less effective, but are easier.

My challenge to my students is to rise above these habits and take pride in the learning process.  Get rid of this learned helplessness by taking on your difficulties and attempting to solve them without the help of a step-by-step set of directions.  Learn to fail during this process, and then get right back up and fix it.  Learn to take initiative, to dream big, and ultimately learn how to learn because in the real world there won’t be that safety net that comes over to your desk to encourage you to get back to work. 

My challenge to myself is to learn how to assist my students so that I am not doing the project for them, but I am providing better assistance so that they do not lose hope.  To learn how to provide a better vision of my expectations, so that students don’t feel overwhelmed or unprepared.  And finally to identify the times when I need to take a deep breath, recognize that the helplessness has opened up the opportunity for a teachable moment, and I need to capitalize, not out of frustration, but out of joy for an opportunity to make a difference. 

My final challenge is to the entire educational system.  This scenario is not entirely the student’s fault, nor is it the teacher’s fault.  Our school systems train our students to think in one way- the way that satisfies the teacher’s guidelines or standards, not in a way that allows them to learn more and to improve.  We need to keep in mind that we are preparing our students to become our future, not to be able to repeat the strategies of the past. 

Our world is changing so rapidly that we do not know the world these students will enter when they leave us.  Our students need to be equipped with the ability to learn, adapt, and push forward, not to merely meet the requirements of today. 

Take care,

Coach Mo

What is something that you've always wondered?

One thing that I learned from my two years of elementary teaching experience is that kids are unbelievably curious (yes, understatement).  I would get a bit frustrated when I’d be giving directions to my PE class and this would happen:

Me:  So, at station number two we are going to (student hand goes up with urgency, so I pause)… Yes, you have a question?

2^nd grader X:  Why is that tennis ball stuck to the ceiling?

In my head I’m furious.  I went against rule #1 of teaching elementary kids and that is to always finish your thoughts before letting a student interrupt because most of the time the question will not be on topic.  As a result, the whole class is laughing, pointing, forgetting what I had already said, and in most cases laying down, spinning around on their backs having the time of their lives.  It is a minimum of 3 minutes to get them back focused and even then 5 or 6 kids are now looking at other areas of the ceiling trying to be the next one to find a hidden treasure to make the class laugh. 

When do students lose this level of curiosity and wonder?  Sure it made me frustrated, but I had to embrace it and laugh it off or else I’d go nuts.  Sir Ken Robinson, in his TED talk titled “Schools Kill Creativity,” provides fabulous insight on the decline of wonder and creativity as children progress through school. 

I showed this video to my class on day number 1 of the semester and asked them to react.  I didn’t want a summary.  I asked students to state what they agreed with or disagreed with, what they found interesting, or simply what they thought of during the video.  There are slow points of the video, but for the most part, I think the video assisted in getting my students’ attention enough to set up the culture of my room as one that welcomes the creativity that they possess, but may have let go of in recent years.

Their homework was to spend the next 23 hours thinking of “something you’ve always wondered.”  It could be anything, not just something that directly relates to health class, then write it down and bring it with them to class to begin day 2. 

I never expected this to be one of the more difficult assignments I handed out.  I was amazed at the number of students who came back with nothing, an “I don’t know,” or flat out had to say to me “can you just tell me what to do?”  (you don’t think there isn’t an entire post coming on that last statement do you? Yes, yes there is!)

The students were asked to take their question and find the answer, as well as additional information that would support their answer and better educate their classmates. 

The students had now answered their own question, but unlike many experiences they’ve had in learning before, it wasn’t just about them and this one question.  We had to make sure that the information obtained through research was interesting to the audience to which it will be presented.  So, on day 3, the students got feedback from their peers in the class (the eventual audience) by sharing what they had found, and asking their peers what they found interesting, and what different angles they’d be interested in discovering about the topic.  Some students learned the hard way that asking just their friends brought little to no useful feedback.  The students that benefitted were those who sought out people they didn’t know and/ or people that they knew would give constructive criticism. 

Day 4 was devoted to taking feedback and redesigning what they would tell the class during their 60-90 second presentation.  They may have needed to seek out additional information, or they may have needed to just be certain they worded things in a way that was interesting to their peers.  Devoting an entire day to refining and practicing set the expectations high for the presentations tomorrow.

Friday brought presentations and I was pleased with the results.  While self-evaluating many students noted that they could’ve worked harder, or that they now know that what they chose wasn’t very interesting (learning!).  A few presentations were great, but what I was most pleased about was the fact that the students obviously learned, and the process of the week opened their eyes to the new way of thinking that I am expecting.  As I told them afterwards, “regardless of whether or not your speaking skills were great, everyone could tell if your information was great and whether or not you learned something.” 

Going forward, it is that final thought that I’ll be using as an example.  For the first assignment I required them to do a speech (time constraints of the week).  For the remaining units, I am asking the students to do what they are best at, and to create a project that showcases those skills.  If they are great at getting information but not at public speaking they may not have given the best presentation.  Since the students can now create a project that showcases their skills, they can continue to be great at getting information and select what they are best at as a means of communicating what they have learned. 

“Do what you do best.  Better.” 

Take care,

Coach Mo