Archive for the ‘Book Summaries’ Category

Grading, Reporting, Graduating…and the Law by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman is a quick read that can help educators and parents learn about what the law requires so that parents can get their children what they deserve and so educators can obey the law and stay out of trouble as they provide their students with the services they are entitled to. Every school should have several copies.

Introduction: You’re kidding! Another law book for educators and parents! We’ve had enough!

• The goal here is to bridge the gap between the worlds of law and education and I feel that Miriam succeeds. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)requires that states develop a multiple-measure accountability system for all students. Schools need to communicate in plain language about how their children are doing. It needs to include WHAT the student studies and the level of difficulty. The law also prevents the school from reveling the students’ status. Each course has its own standards, while each child has their own needs. About 80% to 90% of students with disabilities have mild to moderate needs and can be taught in the regular classroom. That is the group that this book mostly deals with. The other 10% to 20% have profound needs, have alternate assessments, and alternate standards.

What are the legal requirements for grades and report cards, and setting policy for all students, general and special education?

• Although federal mandates have increased, education is a power that the constitution has left to local and state control. They must set clear standards, and if they do, the courts will back them up. This book contains many summaries of important court cases that help with understanding what schools must do and how to do it. Schools act as their state’s agents to provide public education and each student has the right to due process. Diplomas are property rights, but promotion and retention are not. Due process requires that high-stakes tests are also fair tests in that they measure what students had the opportunity to learn.
• States and local schools develop policies for these issues: class selection and eligibility, grades and report cards, promotion and retention, attendance requirements, gifted/talented programs, transcripts, honors, diplomas, graduation requirements, graduation ceremonies, waivers, and whatever else the school deems necessary. They proactively define course content, difficulty, performance standards, and how students are graded.

Getting more specific about grading policies and promotion/retenion

• Schools are in charge of determining grading Standards and policies. In order to earn regular grades, special education students need to meet the same standards even if their learning is adapted. Courts and hearing officers do not generally have the authority to change grades. Modified grades can be given if a student’s work is substantially different from general education standards even if they are in regular education classes. Such decisions are part of each student’s IEP. Weighted averages can be used if different courses in the same discipline have different degrees of difficulty. How difficult a course is for a particular student doesn’t matter. Schools must have clear course selection policies. Objective promotion and retention policies also need to be in place. Students should be retained for not doing the work, not because of a disability. Attendance policies apply equally to all students.

For students with disabilities: Section 504, ESSA, and the IDEA

• You can’t discriminate against any student simply because of their disability. Students are “otherwise qualified” if they can meet the essential requirements of a course or program. Fundamental alterations lower the standard or requirement. They don’t level the playing field, (accommodations) they change the game (modifications).

What are accommodations and modifications?

• You give students accommodations so they can meet regular course standards and requirements. You use modifications to lower the standards and requirements when necessary. These terms are often misused. Together they are things schools do for students with disabilities that they don’t do for general education students. Tests must accurately reflect what a student knows or is able to do in order to be valid. Accommodations provide access to students without lowering standards. They must not invalidate test scores. Schools may add accommodations to report cards, but not to transcripts. They should not result in adjusted grading and should not offer an unfair advantage.
• Modifications provide access also, but they do so by lowering standards and expectations. Modified curricula are not allowed. Rather, modifications are made on an individual basis as part of constructing IEPs. Both report cards and transcripts should record the use of modifications. Be careful about going overboard. This idea is to assist the children to learn, not to do the work for them.

Report cards, transcripts, honors, graduation, and diplomas: What’s okay?

• There are situations where schools do too much in the way of accommodations. An example would be giving a student a calculator rather than teaching him basic math computations. Accommodations and modifications should be designed to help the student reach his IEP goals, not pass a test or course. Students can be denied access to gifted programs as long as the criteria are objective. They cannot exclude students simply because they are classified or ELL. The same is true for school honors.
• A student’s special education status may be revealed on the report card as only parents see it. It can not be revealed on a transcript as it is seen by third parties. Focus on what the student studied and achieved, not WHO the student is. Any deviation from course standards must be spelled out in the IEP. Parents must be informed in Plain English. IEPs and 504 plans rise to the level of federal law and districts must implement them, so don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

Graduation requirements: Graduation, ceremony, diplomas

• Graduation requirements are set by the state and include courses, graduation tests, and attendance. Services end at graduation. All IEP goals need not be met for a school to graduate a student. Also, meeting all IEP goals does not guarantee a diploma. Parents must receive written notice prior to graduation. The contents of such notice are listed in this chapter. Transition planning must occur prior to graduation. Schools have the discretion to develop their own commencement ceremony criteria. They can also award a variety of diplomas to accommodate students who can’t earn a regular diploma.

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman

• Miriam is an attorney and former teacher who works with people who want better schools. As an immigrant to America at elementary-school-age, she was empowered by public schools and works to help educators teach all children. She works for the Boston firm of Stoneman, Chandler, & Miller where she gives lively and practical presentations, training, and consultations. She co-founded Special Education Day, authored eight books, and has written for many national publications. If you are interested in her presentations visit schoollawpro.com and contact her at miriam@schoollawpro.com.

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Grasp: The Science of Transforming How We Learn by Sanjay Sarma with Luke Yoquinto tells the story of teaching and learning during the last hundred plus years. They explain what works and what doesn’t. They make it clear that learning should be spaced rather than crammed at the last minute, that different concepts should be interleaved, and that the effort one uses to retrieve memories helps reinforce them. While we need to teach hard facts, we also need to let students use their hands to wield them. This book is a must-read for teachers and learners alike and would make a great textbook for any introduction to education course.

Introduction: The Adventure Begins

• The big metaphor used here is the educational winnower. From the beginning, education is designed to sort students into gifted programs and elite schools. We think we are testing aptitude when we are mainly testing a student’s environment and experiences. At the end of the trail is the opportunity to innovate, which mostly ends up in the hands of males from wealthy homes (patent-holding inventors). In addition to gender, the great winnowers include poverty, expectations, and environments that lack access to language and feature lots of stress. In our efforts to standardize education we have made it too damn hard. We need to shed the myth that serious learning must be difficult and use what we know about the brain to make it more user friendly so we can save more students from the winnowing process.

Part One: Learning Is Science and Science Is Learning

1. The Learning Divide

• Through the lens of a robotics course at MIT we learn that any education scheme worth its salt must not only deliver knowledge but do so in a way that is highly engaging. It must activate that knowledge so its owner can do real work in the world. Next Sanjoy plots the path that education took from the beginning of the twentieth century away from the holistic approach of John Dewey towards the reductionist path of Edward Thorndike. This lead to standardized education where repetition ruled based to an extent on behaviorism. IQ tests were used to sort students into tracks and if you weren’t sorted into the college track, you weren’t going to be prepared for college. Not only is this approach racist and classist, but it also conflicts with how people really learn.

2. Layer One: Slug Cells and School Bells

• It is well established that spacing out your study rather than cramming all a once leads to more retention. This is even true for invertebrates without brains. Here we encounter Eric Kandel’s work with the large neurons in sea slugs. This lead to a Nobel prize for describing the connection between memory and the action of individual neurons. Repetition creates more connections known as synaptic strength. The concept of interleaving suggests that while you are putting space between learning efforts on the same content, you should work on learning another subject. It seems that universities feature a few high-stakes tests each semester with no return to the content in subsequent semesters in many disciplines. This goes against what we know about the spacing effect. Corporations, however, seem to know better as they teach and test frequently. This is due to the fact that their employees must understand the key concepts.. It’s clear that frequent low-stakes quizzes that continually call back earlier material promote efficient learning.

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Goodbye, Grades; Hello, Growth

• When she started her new system, Starr found that her lower-level students liked the idea of not being judged as they lacked success with the traditional system. Rather than assigning additional nightly homework, students just continue working on the projects they were working on in class. Top students had to realize that top grades had little to do with learning and were more about their need to feel smart. Portfolios of work are key here and you can make YouTube videos to display student work. When grades are required, you can let the students work with you to determine grades together. More important is ongoing feedback from the teacher and other students.

Hack 1: Shift the Grades Mindset

• Changing how students think won’t be easy and will take time. Starr teaches seniors who have been living in a grading culture for a long time. In essence, you need to promote a growth mindset. For more on this topic see my summary of Carol Dweck’s Mindsets. Expect ongoing discussions and be ready to redirect the conversation to remind students that learning has no grades. Ask “what did you learn, what can you do now you couldn’t do before, and how do you know.” Be sure to make the standards clear, give examples of mastery, and use frequent feedback. Students should submit reflections and self-evaluations about what they learned compared to the standards. Eventually Starr’s students stopped worrying about grades and became more excited and eager to try things as they had been when they were younger.

Hack 2: Promote Buy-In

• Throwing out grades is a big change. Many people won’t get it right away so get ready for a lot of push back. You need to reach out to administrators first to get their support. Next you need to set up sessions to roll the idea out to other teachers and perhaps look for a beta team to roll it out with you. If that works you can later look to expand the effort to the entire school. Parents are next at the same time you work on changing student thinking. You should be able to find parent leaders who can be a big help once you persuade them. In addition to your own written and spoken explanations, you can provide links to articles by others who have tried it. Starr includes some in this book. Don’t expect the push back to stop and there are sure to be stakeholders who you don’t win over.

Hack 3: Rebrand Assignments as Learning Experiences

• You need to avoid assignments and tests that don’t allow for creativity and student growth. Chances are that some or most of your old lesson plans will have to be overhauled or discarded. Assignments need to allow students to show depth of learning. Allow for student autonomy and avoid single paths. Students should be able to modify the teacher’s assignments or create their own. All assignments should allow for revision (iteration). The lack of grades makes this possible. Expectations need to be tailored to each student so that all are capable of success. Try to find out what students are interested in or passionate about and try hard to fit that in. Try to connect everything to content and skills previously experienced. What’s the point of learning something if you don’t use it? When students have something ready to show, be sure that everyone can see it. This will help convince skeptics.

Hack 4: Facilitate Student Partnerships

• When the teacher is the only one in the room giving feedback, students miss opportunities for growth. Also, teaching what you know demonstrates a high level of mastery. These are two very compelling reasons to promote student collaboration. You need a plan to teach students how to be peer reviewers. This should involve encouraging them to model your behavior when it comes to giving feedback. Give student groups the chance to become experts in an area that each can share with others. If students post work on a blog, make sure that others leave comments. Student feedback probably won’t be of high quality at first, but encourage them to work on getting better at it. At the end of the chapter Starr tells how this works in her journalism class.

Hack 5: Digitize Your Data

• Starr believes that many teachers spend too much time collecting data which leaves too little time for using it in a meaningful way. She recommends that you create digital forms for students to fill out so that they essentially do the work of data collection. This sounds like an efficient way to find out where each student is in the learning process. With this data in hand you can adjust your instruction. Starr includes sample form. Secondary teachers can share student data with other teachers who have the same students. Students should periodically update their data. By the end of the year you can use this data for final evaluations.
• Starr also uses her smart phone to capture pictures and short videos of students in action that can be shared with students. You should consider using a classroom Twitter hash tag which can help students and parents see what is happening. She recommends that you take a look at Google forms.

Hack 6: Maximize Time

• Time is a problem for all teachers so if it is important to coffer with each student you need to extend yourself beyond class time. Starr has students complete conference forms before she meets with them and reviews student feedback as well. Students should also have questions for the teacher ready to go. You can use an app like Voxer, which allows conversations to extend over time. In-class conferences can take place while students are working on projects. Conferences should be tightly scheduled and last 3 to 5 minutes. You can follow up electronically as needed. You may need to see some students for additional time after class. With social media, students can often get questions answered by other students.

Hack 7 Track Progress Transparently

• Starr uses a spreadsheet with column headings like assignment, feedback, standards addressed, and strategy. Students are responsible for maintaining the chart which shows transparently what they have accomplished. If you are still in the middle of a traditional grading process you can try a test run and refine as you go. Parents can view the forms the students fill out to track progress as well. The focus should be on students demonstrating how they have grown with a critical eye for where they need to go next. Starr uses the text messaging app Remind to send general announcements and after class public praise to highlight examples of student learning. Formative assessment tools like Socrative and Kahoot help to check for understanding, provide feedback, and course correct. Students also complete a weekly self-reflection Google Form so students can engage in meta-thinking.

Hack 8: Teach Reflection

• Metacognition, or thinking about your own thinking, has been a hot topic in education literature, but not often stressed formally in the classroom. In a no-grades classroom, students replace grades with their own evaluation of their learning through reflection. Questions the teacher should consider are: 1) What did I do to succeed with this task? 2) How did I overcome the challenges I faced? 3) What evidence do I have that I have met some standards? 4) What do I still need to work on? 5) How might I do it differently? You can ask them at the end of each class to consider what they have learned, and be sure to model the process for them. Part of the process should focus on how what they are doing now connects with previous learning and the real world. Teachers need to provide feedback on students’ written reflections. Students may see this as extra work and push back, so be ready to convince them how this process makes their learning more effective. (Doug: Reflection requires recall, which is more effective in building long term memory than further study.)

Hack 9: Teach Students to Self-Grade

• It is vital to include students in the evaluation process as it shows what they really know. Understanding the level of mastery achieved is the goal and each student must decide if they achieved mastery. Forms containing rubrics connected to the standards will help as will checklists. If final grades are still necessary, have each student provide and defend their grade with the teacher. (Doug: I did this when I taught leadership courses for teachers working on administrative certification.) Use the grade determined during this conversation so there are no surprises. If there is disagreement, continue the conversation. Starr is inclined to err on the side of the student’s opinion as she doesn’t think grades matter very much. Although you might think this process would lead to grade inflation, that’s not what Starr has experienced. For the most part, students work to defend their proposed grade and that only serves to increase what they learn.

Hack 10: Cloud-Based Archives

• Report cards don’t tell you much about what a student knows and can do, but portfolios of their best work do. Contributions will be more frequent and contain much more detail. They are also a tool for growth and student reflection. If a teacher can see a student’s portfolio from the previous year, they are in a good position to know what to expect next. It is also important that students share their best work with a broader audience. Starr suggests that students do class presentations on completed projects and that parents be invited. Some class time should be devoted to project work due to its importance. The work also needs to be digitized in some fashion for storage, future reference, and possible sharing on the Internet. When it’s time for college applications, you will find that admissions offices are more use to viewing portfolios than ever. (Doug: My daughter was an art major so for her the portfolio was essential. Let’s hope it becomes essential for all majors.)

Starr Sackstein

• Starr is a high school English and Journalism teacher at World Journalism Preparatory School in Flushing, NY. She is also the author of Teaching Mythology Exposed: Helping Teachers Create Visionary Classroom Perspective. She does a blog for Education Week called Work in Progress in addition to her personal blog at StarrStackstein.Com where she discusses all aspects of being a teacher. She moderates #jerdchat and #sunchat and contributes to #NYedChat. If you are looking for an energetic, high quality speaker on the subjects of blogging, journalism education, and bring your own device (BYOD), contact her at twitter (@mssackstein) or FaceBook.

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Hacking Project-Based Learning: 10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom by Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy is a must read for any teacher interested in this mode of teaching. Their ten hacks provide a path for more student-centered learning in any classroom. Be sure to get some copies for teachers you know.

Introduction

• Project-Based Learning (PBL) is messy. The authors have done everything in their power here to de-clutter and tidy up the mess to make it as approachable as possible. PBL may not happen overnight in you classroom or school, but it won’t happen if you don’t get started. Ross and Erin started doing PBL as teachers and now support it as administrators. They will help you set the stage for students to thrive in a culture of inquiry and creativity with these ten hacks. Keys are to make student work public and for them to reflect on their work. The role of feedback is also vital.

Hack 1: Develop a Space That Promotes Risk-Taking

• Schools are designed to fill kid’s heads with information. Student questioning diminishes. The assembly line is populated by robots. We need students who can think and solve problems. They need to be driven by their curiosities. Teachers need to do what they can to bring in materials from garage sales or anywhere. They should post failed ideas. They also need to develop relationships. Make sure that things are designed for student learning rather than teacher convenience. The walls should contain student work. Bring in the real world.

Hack 2: Teach Collaboration Skills

• Starting group work without first teaching collaboration skills is a mistake. Working with others requires dialog and productive struggle. Students should know this. They should understand that collaboration is working with others in order to achieve or do something. A good way to teach collaboration is to search the Internet for collaborative experiences. Look for discussion skills, body language, transitions, and organization strategies. Students can also visit other classrooms and watch collaboration in action.
• A big focus should be on the idea that it’s possible to not like someone else’s idea without disliking the person. After early collaboration activities, students should debrief and discuss what went well and what didn’t.

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