Teaching and testing

I’ve spent the past few days working with 1st graders, trying to show them atlases and dictionaries, and then at the very end of the session, sneak the internet in.

Why? Because on one standardized test or another, there is a question which asks them which would be the best place to find a picture of some animal. Would you look in an atlas, in a dictionary, or on the internet?

Whoever wrote the test item knows that dictionaries don’t have pictures. Except, of course, when you’re six years old, and the whole frickin’ dictionary is pictures.

Up and down the grade levels, our standardized tests ask similarly narrow-minded questions about reference sources that indicate that the people who wrote the test items do not know how the information society works, at least since 2000.

This has been a message for those who think that they’re getting reliable data from those standardized tests.

More good times in teaching

Last fall I applied for and got a National Endowment for the Humanities package called Picturing America: twenty or so gorgeous prints of notable American works of art that illustrate one or more American characteristics. These are double-sided, heavily laminated, and are accompanied by a really good teacher’s guide.

I’ve been posting them on my bulletin board, with the heading I Have a Question… I post a question, and the first student who researches the correct answer gets a free book.

This week, it’s been Norman Rockwell’s “The Freedom of Speech”:

(click for full size photo)
(click for full size photo)

The first question is “What’s going on in this photo?” And a kid we’ll call Jimmy figured out that it was a debate. (Technically, it’s a town hall meeting, but let’s give the little Southern kid a break here.)

Then I asked, “Where does the freedom of speech come from?” And Bobby quickly found the 1st Amendment.

Finally, this afternoon I posted, “What exactly does freedom of speech mean?”

Jimmy was back in the media center, this time with his friend Huck. Huck and Jim had a pretty good idea what it meant, but they weren’t putting their finger on the crux of the issue. They found a Constitutional dictionary. They found a book called Constitution translated for kids. They even found the vertical file folder on the Constitution.

Every time, they reported what they found, but it was never the exact answer I was hoping they’d find. Finally, I asked if they had read the actual Amendment itself. They quickly pounced on a copy, and within 60 seconds Jimmy was at my desk, announcing that the freedom of speech meant that the government could not control what was acceptable speech and what was not.

Bingo.

And to make it even more wonderful, he selected as his book a Star Wars novel that Huck had been shooting for and gave it to Huck. I love my job.

The dumbing down of our schools… not

I just spend 30 minutes teaching 2nd graders what a database was, how one works, how they use at least two nearly every day (the online library catalog and the Accelerated Reader™ quiz software), how I built and use one to keep track of AR™ Point Club tags, and we even built one based on a test question they had had.

Yes, that’s right, we’re testing 8-year-olds on what a database is and when to use one.

For the record, they were fascinated by my lecture/demo and a couple even asked how they might build one to keep track of stuff in their lives. I didn’t even have to prompt them on how we might sort the little cards I had them fill out: they were right on it with “last name,” “homeroom,” “birthday,” or even “homeroom THEN last name.”

This has been a message for those who are convinced that schools have gotten worse since they wrestled with Think & Do workbooks when they were in 2nd grade.

Fred & Mary

I have had fun at work today.

Each week, third grade classes come to me for Info Skills, wherein we learn to approach information problems in a structured way. The first half of the year is given over to learning the Big 6, the structure we use, and the various resources available to us.

It’s an interesting proposition, because when we begin, they’re still sort of second graders, and as such are just emerging from the “learning to read” stage into the “reading to learn” stage. They have no mental picture of how information is structured, nor how to decide whether or not they even have an information problem. They can’t disaggregate multiple strands within one question (e.g., “Who was President when Minnesota became a state?”). They don’t really have any sense of which resource is the best to use. And they are just unwilling to read through all the information to find their answer.

So we take it step by step, making lots of lots of mistakes along the way and debriefing each and every one. With any luck, we’re ready at the semester to begin applying our knowledge.

Which is why I was excited when the third grade teachers approached to see if we could combine Info Skills with the performance standards about Frederick Douglass and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Here’s the standard [SS3H2]: The student will discuss the lives of Americans who expanded people’s rights and freedoms in a democracy. Frederick and Mary are two among a small flock which includes Paul Revere, Susan B. Anthony, FDR and Eleanor, Thurgood Marshall, LBJ, and Cesar Chavez. We are also to explain social barriers, restrictions, and obstacles that these historical figures had to overcome.

(We also have to describe how these historic figures diplay positive character traits of… respect for and acceptance of authority. Wait what?)

So now we have something to which we can apply our info skills. I’m thinking we can do a timeline of these two’s lives, along with the others, and flesh them out with Presidents, wars, etc., just to give the kids some historical context. For one thing, of course, their lives barely overlapped.

Which gave me an idea. The children have no historical context. They really have no clue when it comes to sorting people and ideas and events into some kind of timeline structure in their heads.

So, I present to you Frederick Douglass & Mary McLeod Bethune: BFF! (Notice the next button down at the bottom; you’ll probably have to scroll.)

You like? I think we’re going to have a great time.

Literacy

I was appointed to be a member of the State Literacy Task Force. We are charged with developing a proposal for a long-term plan to improve literacy across the board in Georgia.

Our first task, which we’re already behind on, is to define literacy.

I am not being flippant when I suggest as a definition the ability to find and use information. Yes, it’s totally colored by my day job as a media specialist, but think about it. If we charged schools and communities to make sure their students and citizens could find and use information, then we don’t have to get into reading and technology and blah blah blah. Do what it takes to make it happen.

In chatting about this with Kevin on Saturday morning, I allowed as how, despite what you might think, I was not interested in including padding like “self-enrichment” in the definition, because that’s not something the state has any control over, or vested interest in, if I were to turn all Antonin Scalia on us.

Then Kevin said something that I though was very important and I wrote it down immediately to steal: “Sort of like a Maslow’s hierarchy for literacy?”

Bingo!

So whattaya say, dear readers? Help me develop said hierarchy, and we shall be as gods.

NCLB

No Child Left Behind.

Well.

My sister Linda is a media specialist in Gwinnett County, where last year they gave their media centers zero dollars to buy books with, but that’s another story. A couple of weeks ago she forwarded to me a response she had gotten from her congressman, who shall remain nameless in his representation of Georgia’s Seventh District, about supporting H.R. 2864.

H.R. 2864 is an amendment to that most perfect of laws, No Child Left Behind. I know what you’re thinking, what kind of madman would advocate changing a law that has served our children so well? Without NCLB, how would we ever have gotten halfway to having every single one of our children performing at or above grade level? (In case you had forgotten, that’s the goal: in 2014, every single child will perform at grade level. We will achieve this by testing them until their ears bleed.)

But Rep. Paul Grijalva [D-AZ] has had an insane idea: what if we required every school to have a highly qualified library media specialist? I know, it’s crazy talk.

As you know, NCLB requires schools to verify that their classroom teachers are “highly qualified,” i.e., provide documentation of their competence in their subject area. This might mean passing a standardized test for teachers, well, duh!, or even having a degree in the subject. If you teach more than one subject, e.g., earth science and biology, then that means providing evidence of competence in both areas.

The more cynical among you have already spotted that “highly qualified” has nothing to do with “highly competent,” which is not adjudicated by NCLB, praise be to its name.

If you teach in a rural school, which by the DOE’s own calculations means about a third of all American schools, and you have to teach all kinds of things because it’s a little hard to get teachers out in the middle of Montana, don’t worry: you have three years to cough up evidence of competence in your field(s). If not, then you have to be fired. Because if we don’t fire you, there’s no way to get 100% of the students performing at grade level by 2014.

That’s “highly qualified.” As columnist Bob Herbert pointed out in his New York Times op/ed of 10/2/07, all that documentation and certification is not the same as effectiveness. (Of course, then Mr. Herbert weasels out of it with “New forms of identifying good teachers … have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.” Yup, that’s what we gotta do, all right, all right. Carry on.)

Why, you might ask, would I want to saddle media specialists with the burden of proof that their colleagues in the classroom have to bear? Allow me to point out that even if the amendment only required schools to have any kind of media specialist in their building, it would be a radical move. There are more than a few states which do not, in fact, require schools to have media specialists at all. So if we have to speak NCLBese to make sure schools have such a critical piece of the puzzle on hand, then so be it.

Back to Rep. X and H.R. 2864. My sister had emailed him, asking for his vote in favor of this amendment. Astonishingly, he responded that “quite frankly” he questioned “the need for a library media specialist in every public school.”

His reasoning? He sees maybe the need at the high school level, because high school students regularly engage in academic research for college. But “a fourth grade student has little need for a highly trained library specialist who can teach advanced research techniques.” What a fourth grader needs is a librarian who can “make reading enjoyable,” and “instilling a love of reading does not require an advanced certification in library media studies.”

Actually, Rep. X (I just know I’m going to slip up and call him John Linder in a moment), instilling a love of reading does in fact require advanced certification in your home state of Georgia. We have to have a master’s degree even to get into a media center in this state. So you’re wrong about that.

What else might you be wrong about? Those who keep harping on how our schools have to produce workers who are expected to maintain our nation’s competitiveness in the world economy, and I believe some might even be found in your party, Rep. X, might be startled to hear you say that we don’t need to teach our elementary students how to find and use information, how to evaluate information, how to solve problems with information.

They would approve highly of the fact that I start teaching second graders how to look up books and find them on the shelf, that in fact by Thanksgiving almost all of them can do it flawlessly, and that by the end of the year I have first graders and kindergarteners who have learned the same skill.

They would really approve of the fact that all of third grade spends the year learning to implement the Big 6 model using a wide variety of information sources, including the internet. These are eight-year-olds, Rep. X., and yet you would have me wait an entire year more before even trying to “instill a love of reading”? Are you talking story time, Rep. X? Honey, please.

And so you can see why, when talk turns to reauthorizing NCLB, all blessings upon it, I just roll my eyes. Look who’s doing the reauthorization. Can we test them until their eyes bleed?

Wonderful Car (Day 235/365)

Yes, I finally got work done. I listened through Blake’s Wonderful Car Delivers Us Wonderfully Well and made a few tweaks. Pretty subtle, but they were necessary. I think it sounds marginally better.

In other work, I dug out my personality profile from when I was a student at GHP in 1970. I find that it is the Cattell 16PF Profile. We were given this test, and then called in by the counselor (Eddie Najjar, a theatre person actually, and kin to the Mansours here in Newnan) to discuss it. He would show us our score on each item, and then we got to choose which of the synonyms on that end of the scale we thought described us.

Looking at it now, I’m a little surprised to see that I was in the average range for Self-Assured. Geez, I was an insufferable little thing. I must have cheated on the test.

Anyway, I dug it out because I’m going to use its scales to give my little bloggers a handle on describing characters from their books. If they can see some contrasting personality traits, they can latch on to one or two to hang their writing on.

Another blog (Day 218/365)

No, never fear, I am not starting another blog. At least, not one for me, and not one that you will ever read. Today I worked on the Newnan Crossing 100 Book Club blog. We’ve been trying to get it up and running since October, and on Monday I decided that it was time to implement it whether it was exactly in the shape I wanted it or not. After all, it was ready for me to put students in as users, and they would each have their own blog.

I had originally wanted to use the multi-user version of WordPress, called WordPress MU, but apparently there were installation issues. (All the tech end of this is being handled by the school system’s IT people, specifically Mike. He’s been great.) So we switched to Drupal, with which I have been unfamiliar.

WordPress is a dedicated blogging software package. Drupal is a “content management system,” whatever that means. All I know is that it has a lot more buttons to push and boxes to check to make it do what you want it to do, and sometimes those boxes and buttons are distributed in non-intuitive ways.

Anyway, I got all the kids put in, with nifty passwords that look random but actually are rememberable for the kid. I got it to look like a nice place to be. And we’re ready to start training the 8-10 year-olds how to blog.

The idea is that they read a book from a preselected list of award-winners or starred reviews, then blog about their reading. I’ve trained them (although I have no doubt that training was shallow and noneffective in 80% of them) not to write about the book, but about their reading.

After they post, then I and the other Book Club members can comment on it. Lo, a conversation about reading occurs. Children, these are advanced readers, who otherwise would be zooming through “short books” and racking up AR™ points just to rack up AR™ points are now thinking about what they’re reading. They’re making predictions. They’re discussing an author’s use of language. They’re deciding what makes a book good. And they’re learning, most importantly, to write.

If this works, I shall be called blessed.

Read Across America Day (Day 211/365)

I spent the whole day in my media center, surrounded by reading caves for Read Across America Day. As you all know, March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and this year was the 50th anniversary of The Cat in the Hat.the media center with reading caves

This is my media center with reading caves. Everything you see here was built by teachers and their minions on Thursday afternoon. In the foreground is the circus tent, with the Mulberry St. House behind it. Beyond that you see the houses of the Three Little Pigs, and behind that, the Wardrobe that leads into Narnia. In the very back is a starry night campground.

Right behind the Mulberry House is Hogwarts, and you cannot see the pirate ship behind that. Also invisible, beyond Narnia, is Mr. Tumnus’s cave, and to the right, out of the frame, is a beach and under the sea.

Here are some young Gryffindors reading inside Hogwarts. Gryffindor's commons roomYou can see the portraits in the stairwell. Behind the camera is the Great Hall, and under that is Slytherin’s commons room. I took the opportunity to dress up as Snape and snarl at children all day. A couple of kids actually, and correctly, addressed me as “Professor Snape.” I also identified every redheaded child as a Weasley, although I think only one was old enough to get it.

It was pretty amazing day. Kids would go nuts when they saw the transformation of the media center, and we’d give them five minutes to explore before settling down to read for about fifteen minutes. There was room for two classes at a time, although I think with a little judicious placement we could have handled three at a time.

Mr. Tumnus's caveEveryone’s favorite of the day was Mr. Tumnus’s cave. It was very cozy, and the way they used the actual shelves was quite witty. Believe it or not, that was a conscious design decision on the part of the young ladies who put it together Thursday afternoon.

All in all, a very good day. Everyone’s reaction was so positive that we decided to leave everything up until Monday afternoon. Many wanted to leave it up all week, but it shuts down the media center, as you can imagine, and we just can’t be closed that long.