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Virtual Conference on Soft Skills

I was lucky enough to have some fantastic teachers to work with during my student teaching practicum.  One in particular had a great rule that he introduced all of his classes to at the start of the year, by showing this particular clip:

This pretty much summed up how students should behave in his class, and students got the idea.

What really impressed me, however, was not just the memorable way to deliver the message.  This teacher modeled this message throughout the year, and not just in the classroom.  Even in chatting with other teachers about school politics, or war stories of bizarre people who used to work there before scandals sent them off to another career, his contribution to the conversation was always positive (or as positive as was reasonably possible).

I learned some other good tips from him, things like trying to always deal with misbehaving students outside the classroom door (where the student can be an individual and not a ringleader, and you can be a person instead of crowd control).  But I think the biggest lesson I saw was the unspoken one, of living out and modeling who you want your students to be, even when they aren’t around to see it.  Or, take it in the reverse – don’t demand that your students be someone better than you.  (I don’t know, I’m trying to find a way to word this without falling back on quoting Ghandi.)

I have a problem: I’m fresh out of my B.Ed program, new to teaching, and I’m easily hooked on expanding my vocabulary.

If you aren’t a teacher, you may wonder how these things add up to a problem.  If you are a teacher, you probably already have buzzword-proximity sirens going off.  You may experience slight itching or allergic reactions as I nitpick on definitions for things like “summative” and “formative”.  Warning: may contain uses of “flow”, “pedagogy”, or “reflect”.  (Okay, maybe that last one is just an SFU thing.)

When my B.Ed program (called PDP there) first brought up assessment, the guest speaker did an activity where words were passed around on index cards, and we did something I don’t even remember what, but the important part was that I ended up stumbling across these cards that said “summative” and “formative”.  I asked the speaker what these meant, and she pulled a classic PDP technique – she asked me what I thought they meant.  I suggested something totally wrong, about summative being a summary and formative being … um I had no idea.  She nodded and didn’t disagree with me and offered no better definition but suggested I was on the right track.  We then proceeded to talk about assessment some more, providing context to show me that I was pretty much wrong, but feeling just uncertain enough that it continued to haunt me.

And thus, my journey began.

At the time, this kind of annoyed me.  In retrospect, I am so glad that I had this experience rather than someone trying to lay out the facts for me.  This got me hooked on figuring out just what this nonsense was supposed to mean, which helped me dodge a lot of conceptual landmines that I watched other teachers, new and otherwise, get hit by over and over.

There are a number of misconceptions (or things I *think* are misconceptions; still learning here) that I’ll quickly address, and then I’ll try to round out my own definition at the end that hopefully clears up these myths.

Myth #1: Summative = traditional assessment (exams, tests);  formative = progressive assessment (SBG, informal assessment, etc)

Myth #2: Summative is bad, formative is good.

Myth #3: An assessment is either summative or formative, not both.

I’m hoping that for those of you who have looked into assessment practices, these myths are familiar enough that I don’t need to expand on them.  I could dredge up plenty of examples from my own experience, but let’s cut to the good stuff.

My current understanding:

An assessment is summative when it reports information on a student’s past learning to the outside community. This corresponds to the buzz-phrase “assessment of learning” that’s also passed around in educational circles.

An assessment is formative when it reports information on a student’s current learning to the student and/or the instructor. The matching buzz-phrases here are “assessment for learning” and “assessment as learning”.

Probably the biggest shift here away from the myths listed above is to start using these words to describe functionality, rather than as mutually exclusive categories.  There are many types of assessment, both traditional and progressive, that function as both summative and formative assessment.

Examples:

• A traditional unit test is summative in that it is included in the grade that ends up on the report card.  It is formative in that it informs students on what they may need to study for a final exam.
• A Standards-Based Grading assessment is formative in that students are informed of the results in time to adjust their understanding, study, practice, etc and be reassessed later.  SBG assessments are also summative in that they form the final grade which goes on the report card at the end of the course.

One reason I think we really need this clarification in how we use these words is that new assessment strategies such as SBG are not only better at functioning as formative assessments, but are also potentially much better summative assessments as well.  eg. SBG does a great job of gathering information on what a student has learned, and that information could (in theory) be passed along to the outside community, or to teachers who the student will see next year.

Another related reason I think we need to be clearer in how we use these terms is that if we aren’t, we risk falling hard on Myth #2 which ends up ostracizing those peers who primarily use traditional assessments.

On the flip side, with a focus on using “formative” and “summative” as describing functionality, we can start having useful discussions around how good a job a given assessment does at being formative or summative.  In my perfect world, we should be looking for overall assessment strategies that are fantastic from both a summative and formative standpoint.  (In my actual world, we’re usually stuck within a very rigid system of how summative results are reported, so there’s only so much you can do. But, still.)

There’s still (at least) one huge understanding lurking in those definitions that I haven’t expanded on, but this is already rather long and I think I’ll need a diagram to explain what I’ve got in mind next.

Does this help anyone?

Things I would like to blog during the oh-so-near summer break:

• deconstructing classroom logistics in my night-school math 12 class (how group work did or didn’t work; WCYDWT with grown-ups, how I structured note-taking, etc.)
• deconstructing what I actually taught:
  • that senior-level trig stuff: unit circle vs ASTC vs ???
  • some fun stuff that actually worked that I haven’t talked about
• deconstructing (is he still using that word? sheesh) a summer math-ed class I took last year during my B.Ed that was amazing and which I would still like to transform my own classroom into. I need to think through why it worked, how it worked, and how to steal it and make it my own.  (And I want to share the good stuff so that I’m not the only one trying it.)  Some overlap here on the previously mentioned topic of co-operative / collaborative group work, which was a key feature of this class.
• Maybe something about Civ-games and colonialism; may review that Canadian History mod I stumbled across this week as a case study.
• Someone challenged me to make a math lesson out of some crazy web-game about fish?  I may have to take them up on that challenge.

So, more on that post I made a little while back and failed to follow-up on.

The key points of the game design analysis that came up (for that case) were:

1. Keep it small.
2. Keep the action constant.
3. Reward success.
4. Extend the challenge as people master the basics.

How many of these are practical tips for your classes?  Here’s my first thoughts.

1. Keep it small.

This is something I’ve incorporated into my assessments.  I try to keep them as short as they can be.  What does this mean?  If I am assessing a given standard, two good questions are just as meaningful as ten mediocre ones.  What is the point of asking twenty questions on the same topic?  Are we testing comprehension, or mental endurance (ie. tolerance levels for boredom and redundancy)?  At best, this is just wasting everyone’s time; at worst, it’s disadvantaging students who do get it but have attention problems.  (Yes, it’d be good for those students to learn how to cope, and college exam prep etc etc, but I still want them to know they actually do get this stuff.)

Plus, um, it’s more work for me.  Why would I do that to myself?

There’s more grey area stuff to explore on this point but let’s move on.

2. Keep the action constant.

If there is one thing I’ve learned as a teacher-on-call, it’s that boredom leads to scary things being thrown at me trouble.  But this doesn’t mean busy-work.  If my design goal is to get students thinking, then busy work is nearly as bad as doing nothing at all.  The parallel to teaching is to keep them thinking.

This relates directly to the last point: 4. Extend the challenge. Students who get it should still be kept thinking.  Got a handful of students who finish the assigned problems in half the time of the rest of the class?  Have a few tougher problems in your back pocket on the same topic.  (I’ve varied greatly as to how good I am at being prepared for this.)

The flip side is to do what you can to keep students from shutting their brains off and giving up.  This means support mechanisms.  At this point, though, it’s probably obvious I’m talking about all the “differentiated instruction” tricks that get praised in Education circles but which are sometimes really hard to make actually work.  All I can say is, take it with a grain of salt as needed, but don’t give up on it.  The plan I think can work is simply emphasizing group work – peers are an instant support structure.  But my adventures with structured group work in a classroom are another post.

3. Reward success.

For the design of Super Meat Boy, this meant a unique replay system that showed all your failed attempts at a level simultaneously while replaying your success.  The message?  “Look at this crazy hard level that beat you up so many times and now you beat it! Therefore you are awesome.”

The goal for their game was to make something crazy-hard, but keep building up skill and confidence in the player so that they persist through the challenge and get to enjoy the success at the end.  They did this by deliberately not dwelling on failure, giving as many chances to succeed as the player needs, and highlighting what the player accomplished at the end.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of an entire industry mastering the art of creating self-efficacy in people.  (Sorry, I know it’s a ten-dollar word, but ever since I found a word that describes exactly what is most needed for students to succeed in math, I can’t let it go.)

The thing is, when teachers talk about crazy things like standards-based grading, replacing poor marks with good ones whenever students demonstrate mastery, etc, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will come out of the woodwork and complain, “Oh great, more dumbing down the math class. Hope I’m not stuck with your students next year!”  But even the video game design example we’re looking at here is all about making things hard in a way that people won’t give up on.  Get that?  This is not about dumbing down – this is about training students not to give up.

A couple of days ago, Rhett Allain of Dot Physics suggested that not everyone needs a “functional understanding of math” to get by.

What percent of people in this world have a functional understanding of math? (let me just say functional understanding means they can do basic word problems and understand what is going on) If I estimate this percent of people at 50%, you might argue that this is too high, but that is my estimate. …

Now compare this to the ability to read and write. I think that in this society you really need to know how to read and write to get along

He then goes on to say, thankfully, that yes the world would be a better place if more people understood math, and yes you should study it.

However I think it’s still worth critiquing what’s going on here.  Rhett’s definition of a functional math competency is boiled down to understanding word problems.  Later on, he continues in the comments and generalizes more to “anything above counting”, although he seems to mean anything above basic arithmetic.

There are some weird problems going on here, and they’re not uncommon.  First of all, “word problems” are given as a starting point – probably because they symbolize a roughly late-elementary or middle-school level of mathematics.  And yet, when is the last time you saw a word problem outside of a classroom?  Of course word problems are irrelevant to real-life competency – they’re a construct used solely in schools.  Ironically, these problems are ones which test both reading/writing skill as well as mathematics, and often it’s the reading comprehension that makes students struggle with these problems.

But looking beyond that, there’s a bigger problem of apples-to-oranges.  Anything beyond arithmetic is considered “math”, and arithmetic is something lesser.  And yet, isn’t arithmetic the same kind of base-level functional skill that reading and writing are?  To put it another way, when is the last time you heard someone say, “Oh, I don’t know how to write” because they aren’t any good at composing sonnets, or writing essays?  And yet “I don’t know how to do math” is the message we hand to students who have trouble with factoring, solving equations or deciphering clumsy word problems.

So do we need “math”?  If we’re talking basic numeracy, yes.  Beyond that, we may be able to get by, but we’ll be a lot more competent and much less taken advantage of if we expand our numeracy to include basic probability, statistics, and core algebra skills.  I file this directly next to skills like: reading and critiquing print media and rhetoric, critical media literacy (ie. video, etc), basic political and economic knowledge.  I view these as near-mandatory as a public school educator because I don’t want my students to grow up and get ripped off, taken advantage of, and used for other people’s political or economic gain without understanding what just happened.  They may be able to get by without it, but they won’t be as free as they could be.