Safety First Heavenly Dreams Mattress

The price of the Safety 1st Heavenly Dreams Mattress on Amazon is very good.

3 Sprouts Toy Chest

The price of the 3 Sprouts Toy Chest on Amazon is very good.

A Day in the Life of a Teacher, and a Student

I read a fantastic article this past week, that summarized the experiences of a veteran teacher who shadowed two students for two days through high school. In summary: the daily experience of high school students contrasts greatly to that of their teachers.

So I would like describe both experiences, first from my perspective as a teacher, and then from that of a student, as summarized in the Washington Post article.

A Day in my Life as a Teacher:

 I'm in the school an hour before the students so that I can prepare the classroom, run through labs and lessons, record marks and prepare handouts. I often revise today's lesson based on the previous day's achievements. I check in with the secretaries in the office to keep updated on school-wide activities that may affect my class.

Once the bell rings, the calm is shattered by a wall of noise. Students plop their bags down on the desks, hold conversations, check phones, and some open their notebooks. Often I have requests to take up certain problems on the board. Then the daily annoucements start. I ask the students to quiet down so that we can hear them. Right after announcements, my lesson starts. We have 75 minutes together each day. I write the lesson on the board, I give out handouts, I answer questions. Sometimes we are in the computer lab working through a structured activity. Sometimes we perform a science experiment.

Yes, teaching is regulated by the clock and I watch it with an eagle eye. I spend the majority of class on the move: across the front of the room and mingling around the classroom so that I can have one-on-one conversations with students. Class wraps up with a debrief, assigned homework and a reminder of tomorrows calendar. Often assessment is involved (either self assessment, group assessment or homework). I test comprehension with mini diagnostic quizzes, comfort level questions or this new cool app called plickers. At the end of each day, I regularly coach, I am heading up the swim team this year.

How does this compare to the working world?

Before I became a teacher, I worked in a variety of office environments, a scientific journal, a Learning & Development consulting firm and a sales office.  I walk an incredible amount each day as a teacher, in comparison to the working world. Not only that, my daily working life is highly regulated, I live my life by reminders written on paper slips and ringing bells. I have a daily to-do list. I often need to be at a certain place at a certain time. In contrast to my working world jobs, I have many more stakeholders to consider. I connect with my stakeholders by means of hundreds of daily small conversations. I am perceived through my expectations and my actions, and I am extremely conscious of the messages I deliver through my words, and my demeanor. I am constantly seeking feedback from students for their experience of lessons, looking for teachable moments and opportunities to refocus attention on the lesson at hand. Yes, teachers test and evaluate a lot, both formally and informally. We keep track of where students are so we can move through the subject material as effectively as possible.

This is my experience of school through the eyes of a teacher.

This fantastic article this past week, on Grant Wiggen's blog site, focused on the high school experience through the eyes of a 15-year veteran teacher (his daughter, Alexis Wiggins) walking in the shoes of a student.

A Day in the Life of a Student: 

What struck me most in the article is the level to which the school schedule makes sure that students are doing what they need to, when they need to. In fact, basic needs are experienced as interruptions (stretching, social conversations, and bathroom breaks). To be honest, the level of scheduling reminds me of working life within a call centre, where compliance is king.

Not only that, students spend 90% of their time listening and only 10% moving and doing. Schools expect teenagers sit still while actively listening to each of their teachers, concentrating for 75 minutes at a time. Each day their participation is monitored by means of producing tangible deliverables. Classrooms are often shut off from the outdoors and lit with harsh fluorescents. The student life is a journey from 1 to 90 (each high school semester consists of  approximately 90 instructional days); every day is one more step toward to mastering a subject, and no two days repeat.

Frankly, when I think about student life, it's not a relaxing life. The day of a student is regulated by bells. Their class commutes are timed. They carry a full complement of pens, pencils, calculators, homework, blank paper and textbooks around to all of their classes. And they are asked to seamlessly adjust to the expectations of each of their teachers.

This article made me think of all the ways in which I can ease the sometimes stressful side effects of school structure. Most of these I am conscious of and I do already. Actions that I can take to heart are to:

1. Make sure hands-on tasks and collaborative group work each class allow for movement and conversation.
2. Limit my lessons to 20 minutes and consciously provide time for practicing learning each day.
3. Summarize key learnings so that I can focus on these classroom activities. Sometimes I summarize these mini quizzing with programs like Kahoot.
4. Proactively providing time to preview tests so that I can answer questions and reduce test and subject anxiety.
5. Continue to be conscious of my tone and word choices to be respectful of all students.

These habits create an atmosphere of communication and fairness.

As a teacher, it is no understatement that I interact with well over 100 people each day, striving to create a personal teacher-student relationship and a welcoming environment that nurtures learning. Everything that I can do to help learning and create a better experience for everybody is worth it.

Final Exams and the Art of Percentage Marks

It's exam time again. High school students around the province are anxiously preparing for their final exams. Many students would be very happy with the idea of abolishing examinations. I would too, they are the ultimate teacher make work program. Not only do I design examinations for my students, I take care to create a fair environment where my students can write them, then I spend hours marking all of them, and recording the grades in order to come up with final marks and informed comments on learning.

It's work all around, I tell you. I'm not complaining, it's a real art form to come up with a single percentage mark that summarizes student learning. That's what I want to talk about today, the art of a percentage mark. That single mark. You know, on these.

Percentages marks are always based on evidence of student learning. Each teacher gathers evidence of student learning in four KICA categories over time,  and then creates unit tests or projects that summarize the key learning across these four categories. (The KICA categories are part of the Ontario Achievement Chart and stand for knowledge, inquiry/thinking, communication and application. These are province-wide performance standards.)

Without evidence of learning, a teacher cannot determine if learning has taken place, and therefore cannot assign a mark. In these cases, the student will be left with an incomplete course on their high school transcript at best. That's why teachers are such sticklers for due dates and assignments being handed in. And this line of thought leads us to the concept of "most consistent, most recent" bit that teachers talk about.

Most Consistent, Most Recent
The Ontario Growing Success policy document makes it clear that teachers should use the “most consistent, most recent” evidence of student learning when calculating percentage marks (Growing Success, page 39).

A lot of teachers I know use Markbook (Asylum Software) to record and calculate grades. This year, in accordance with the Growing Success policy document, the Markbook developers changed the default mark algorithm to Blended Mode (away from Weighted Average).

This led to some very interesting situations for myself and colleagues when the progress reports came out last October. I myself handed out two separate printouts to my students because I had not yet mastered the new output format of Markbook. Some student marks differed by more than 5% on the two reports. This led to several great conversations with students about what a percentage mark means, and I want to summarize the message of these conversations below.

Mean, Median and Mode

MarkBook has five distinct ways of calculating a student’s percentage grade which can produce five different marks for each student:

• Weighted Average - the arithmetic mean 
• Weighted Median - arithmetic median
• Weighted Mode - arithmetic mode
• Blended Mode - a combination of modes, levels and percentages, explained below 
• Blended Median- a combination of medians, levels and percentages, explained below 

There is a brief description of mean, median and mode in the image above. The mean is the sum of all the numbers divided by the quantity of numbers in the set. The median is the middle number, or the average of the two middle numbers. The mode is the most commonly occurring number. And the range, is the highest number minus the lowest number. The range is simple for mark sets, it's 100-0 = 100.  (I'll define blending and weighting in a few seconds)

The Art of Percentages

The intention of the Ministry is that each teacher considers the mean, median and mode simultaneously, and considers a student's entire mark set in order to make  an informed judgement about each student’s acquisition of the curriculum. There is a diagram to describe this below.

1. When there strong agreement among all three calculations, e.g. a range less than 5 % between the mean, median and mode, the teacher can be quite confident that marks are not being skewed by any one calculation and the average of the three measures strongly indicates the student's progress. This is the symmetric distribution seen in the image below, with strong agreement between the mean, median and mode.
   
2. When there is not strong agreement among all three calculations, as in the skewed distribution above, the teacher is to look at the most consistent and recent levels of achievement in conjunction with the mean, median and mode.(Growing Success, page 39). For instance, if the student aces  the final exam, the mark on the exam will strongly weigh into the teacher's professional judgement because it is the most recent evidence of learning.

Weighting and Blending
Two additional terms that you need a definition are weighting and blending.

Weighting refers to assigning some student scores a greater weight than other scores, because they come later in a unit (a final project) or are more significant (such as a unit test). For example if a teacher weights a vocabulary quiz at a 1 and unit test at a 10, it means that the unit test counts for 10 quizzes, and that the unit test is 10 times as significant as the quiz.

Blending  refers a three-step process starting with a weighted median or mode in each KICA category (knowledge, inquiry, communication and application) then:

1. Converting this number to an achievement level (0, 1, 2, 3  and 4).
2. Converting this level back to a percent using the mid-range value of that level (e.g. if the mode is level 3 with a base of 70 and the  base of level 4 is 80, then the percent assigned to a level 3 result is 75%), and finally,
3. Finding the weighted average of the mode or median  of each KICA category.

Why so complicated... well,  the fact of the matter is blended mode is the measure that most closely reflects policy, “ most consistent, more recent” (p 39, Growing Success). All deliberations around determining a final term mark/grade are intended to begin from the blended mode as a point of reference.

My Personal Art of Percentage Marks
I started this semester influenced by my personal comfort with using the arithmetic mean as my preferred  representation of central tendency.

Most teachers I know will immediately reference this comfort, most teachers I interact with take the mean as a valid interpretation of a mark set. However, I began to see problems, especially because the mean can be influenced by outliers. I saw that when I left only the summative "assessment of" marks in my calculations, the arithmetic mean tended to swing by 1-5 %. My observation was that it is really not fair to penalize a student for failing to learn quickly enough, when there is evidence they did indeed learn the material by the end of the course.

As the semester progressed, I saw and experienced first hand that weighted modes and weighted medians are a much better representation of central tendency in a student mark set. These values are are not greatly influenced by outliers. You can see this in the image below. The mode and median describe this mark set more accurately than the arithmetic mean.

It is my intention that a student can have a 'bad hair day' mark-wise early in the unit, without it shattering their final mark. Similarly, acing a few quizzes early in the unit before slacking off should also not unduly influence a final mark. Consistency is the key.

What really matters for the percentage mark is that student demonstrates achievement of curriculum expectations by the end of the course. (Students are also required demonstrate of learning skills and work habits, and these are an integral part of a student’s learning but these are separately evaluated where possible. That is a whole other discussion.)

This past midterm,  I started with the arithmetic mean, and then used both the weighted median and weighted mode, to inform my efforts to leave the mark the same, or adjust it upwards or downwards in order to consistently represent the student mark set.

This process of mark evaluation puts the ‘professional judgement’ of the teacher back to the forefront of  learning. Growing Success asks teachers to use professional judgement in order to:

• determine which specific expectations should be used to evaluate achievement of the overall expectations 
• determine which specific expectations will be accounted for in instruction and assessment but not necessarily evaluated. 
• weigh all evidence of student achievement in light of these considerations. 

"Percentage marks represents a student’s achievement of overall curriculum expectations, and should reflect the student’s most consistent level of achievement, with special consideration given to more recent evidence."(Growing Success, page 39)

As Growing Success states "Teachers’ professional judgements are at the heart of effective assessment, evaluation, and reporting of student achievement." (Growing Success, page 8)


I’m very much for it.

References:
Provincial Report Card 
Growing Success
Markbook 
Ontario Achievement Charts

Authority with Grace - stolen cell phones, cheating on tests and misbehaviour

The most common reoccurring ethical issue that I have experienced in the classroom have been concerns regarding student attitudes to school and work. When I first started teaching, I confess that I thought that the most effective way to deal with a disruptive student in my classroom was to send them to the office. And as I discovered from the first student that I sent to the office for acting out in class, that this type of discipline was not discipline at all. The tone of  this interaction was not appreciated by the student and in fact it was ineffective in shaping the classroom environment that I was trying to create.

I remember a fellow new teacher suffered from the same misconception that I had, and in her case the office was more direct, they sent that student right back to the classroom, telling her to manage the misbehavior herself. 

Sending students out of the classroom is often not the most ethical way of dealing with student misbehavior. Instead, our most ethical response depends on our ability to decipher the cause of the misbehavior. This ability depends in a large part on emotional intelligence. For example, students can motivated to misbehave:

• Because they do not know what the proper behavior is
• For no other reason than they are having a bad day
• They are bored with a certain subject
• They feel uninvolved with the classroom or classroom decisions and feel it is an unfair environment
• Their teacher seems to expect negative behavior from them
• They want attention, power, or revenge
• They have given up on themselves and feel anxious or inadequate.

Since I have a lot of control over what goes on inside my classroom and little control over what goes on outside, I began to focus on how I interacted with students while instructing them.

First, I started by incorporating the philosophy of inclusion in the classroom (using the Tribes philosophy).

The Tribes philosophy focuses on incorporating activities that are designed to create an atmosphere of respect and responsibility in the classroom.

From the first day of school, I discuss the concepts of respect, responsibility and participation, and develop both curriculum and community learning goals for each lesson. Immediately I noticed that the students responded very positively to these changes, the quality of our discussion improved, and the quantity of disruptions dramatically decreased over time.

An important part of the Tribes  process is setting up four key classroom rules which govern our interactions. These are:

• Mutual Respect
• Attentive Listening
• Appreciation - no Put-downs
• The Right to Pass 

The idea is that through discussion, the students and teachers can reach the stage of community where students and teachers can work together creatively to contribute their talents to the classroom.

 

Restorative Practices

My second step was becoming trained in restorative practices. Restorative Practices has deepened my practical understanding of classroom leadership.

Restorative practices focuses on the art of seeking to solve problems collaboratively, instead of seeking to solve problems by placing blame.  The premise of restorative practices is that students are happier, more cooperative and productive and more likely to make positive changes when those in authority do things with them, rather than to them or for them. Restorative practices is proactive, rather than reactive, and it works to improve and strengthen human relationships by repairing harm. Students feel fairly treated and are less likely to re-offend. 

Since I started using restorative practices in my classroom, a lot of what I choose to do in terms of classroom management has to do with involving the student into the problem solving process and re-affirming our relationship, rather than relying on punishment as a social regulator.

When I encounter an behavioral dilemma, the main tool in my arsenal are the restorative questions. These questions provide an opportunity for everyone involved to tell about the incident from their perspective and how it affected them. Everyone gets to speak, and because they feel heard, I frequently get apologies from students and the process ensures they do not repeat their actions that caused the harm. The their behavior has changed and our student-teacher relationship has strengthened. My classroom feels much friendlier.

The restorative questions are purposely scripted, and provide all involved with an opportunity to speak and listen to one another in an atmosphere of safety and equality.

Restorative practices has helped me to successfully mediate a variety of classroom conflict: from stolen textbooks, cheating on tests, finding missing cell phones, dealing with poor word choices and excessive lates.

Teachers face ethical dilemmas on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Our focus as teachers is to provide equal opportunity for education for all. One size does not fit all. In teaching, what is considered the most ethical often comes down to determining what is in the best interest of the particular student involved with the situation. Both the Tribes Philosophy and Restorative Practices have been critical in shaping my understanding of classroom leadership.

References:

Tribes Learning Communities: http://tribes.com/about/research-based-components/

Restorative Practices: http://www.iirp.edu/pdf/beth06_davey2.pdf

Personality Colours in the Classroom

Myers Briggs
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)  measures the preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.  It's a comprehensive test and quite involved since there are 16 different personality types defined in this test. You can see these 16 types in the image to the right. 

It's complicated. I took a leadership course in which we determined our Myers Briggs personality type.  We spent two of the four sessions just getting a handle on comparing and contrasting the four aspects:

• Extraversion with Introversion
• Sensing with Intuition
• Thinking with Feeling 
• Judging with Perceiving

By far, the  most rewarding part of the course was working with purposefully diverse teams and experiencing first-hand the interaction styles of all personality types.

Personality Colours
I use Personality Colours test extensively in my classroom. The four colours in the test simplify the sixteen types of the Myers Briggs:

• Blue for the Harmonious
• Orange for the Adventurous temperament
• Green for the Curious
• Gold for the Responsible

Right now I am teaching one very ‘orange’ class. More than 80% of my students in this science class of mine are ‘orange’. This means that they tend to be extroverted, outgoing, active, and kinesthetic learners.  

I am a green/gold personality, so the enthusiasm and natural inclusiveness of my students came as a welcome surprise to me. I am continuously warmed by their sheer willingness to participate in activities and their extremely positive response to our classroom lessons of inclusivity and respect.

Knowing that this class is orange helps me find solutions to their natural busy-ness in science, a subject that works on developing the green/gold personality traits. For example, it helps me to be understanding when an ‘orange’ student asks yet again to be let out for a drink of water (really a walk and a destressor). It also helps me create assessments that involve their kinesthetic tendencies, such as setting up laboratories as stations activities.
 
In addition, knowing their personality colours really helps my students.  It helps students understand why they like to do the things a certain way,  and why sometimes a different choice makes more sense for them than their peers. It helps them understand why some subjects come naturally to them to see that even if another skill or subject does not seem as natural, it is still important and worth the effort to learn. Personality colours also helps me to create a purposeful teamwork in the class. I purposefully pair complementary colours or diverse colours, so that my students can gain a practical understanding of their own strengths in relation to the strengths of their peers.

I feel that I as a teacher have a great role in teaching personality colours. I think the tests of the personality colours are remarkably accurate for me. They reflect how I think about me, my preferences and what I make a priority. Personality colours provides a framework in which my students can reflect on their strengths and develop strategies for their areas of need.

Try them:
Myers Briggs - Test, YouTube video
Personality Colours - Test, YouTube video
A Personality Colours handout for the classroom handout

Anxiety and the Classroom - helping students to move through alarm to courage

Gordon Neufeld, a developmental psychologist from Vancouver, British Columbia, conveys a warmth that is natural, welcoming and supportive when he speaks. I have heard him speak twice, once at the Peel District Board Office during a PD session, the second at the Waldorf Academy in downtown Toronto last year.

Dr. Neufeld speaks on anxiety.  Just saying the word anxiety conjures the feeling of sweaty palms, a dry throat, butterflies and a pounding head. These are natural symptoms of our body`s response to our thoughts of alarm and unease, when we are faced with a perceived danger. In his talk, Dr. Neufeld first points out that anxiety is meant to be beneficial. The feelings of anxiety are our natural, internal activated alarm system.

Gordon Neufeld estimates that today, 1 in 5 children suffer from moderate to severe anxiety. Sometimes a school subject itself may create alarm in a student. I have taught anxious students in my math class.  Math anxiety is “a feeling of tension, apprehension, or fear that interferes with math performance." Every day, when the class time approaches, I may see that student begin to exhibit the symptoms of alarm. If there is no intervention, their feelings can lead to decreased motivation, resulting in math avoidance. Ultimately their confidence in their ability plummets. It's a reinforcing downward spiral. It's a real problem, for the teacher and the student, because an alarmed state prevents learning. Learning requires a tranquil mind.

So how do children cope. These students try to deal with their feelings of alarm through avoidance and distraction. Common coping mechanisms can include:

• Refusing tasks
• Making frequent trips to the washroom 
• Developing attendance problems
• Engaging in intensive procrastination such as using technology
• Creating distractions by performing a 'show' for their peers
• Developing physical complaints such as stomachaches, headaches, fatigue. 
• Becoming aggressive or defiant

The good news is that a teacher can step in to support the student in resolving their alarm and help return them to a state of calm, so they can learn.

Gordon Neufelds key message is that by understanding the natural process of alarm in our bodies, we can help children to overcome their feelings of alarm and move forward, beyond the fear and tears and into courage.

Neufeld describes that the three possible outcomes of our internal alarm system are caution, which if not resolved, moves into a state of adaptation (to the situation, creating a new steady state) and, if not resolved, finally moving through into courage. This is described by the image below (taken I believe, from a Neufeld talk):

1. Alarm - At the top of the diagram you can see the child becoming alarmed in response to perceiving a danger. This activates the internal 'alarm system'.
2. Caution is the first response after a child feels alarmed. Caution is a natural and good response to an alarm, it allows the child to focus and pay attention. Caution can be resolved once a child realizes the situation they are in is not dangerous after all, and they can relax from their hyper-attentive state.
3. If however the situation causing alarm is persistent unavoidable, the child moves from caution into the stage of futility. Tears are usually released and this leads to adaptation and the child experiences release and becomes restful at this point. At the stage of adaptation, the alarm system is internally recalibrated and the child experiences a calm state.  This is a good outcome of the alarm process, the child has successfully resolved their alarm by adapting to the new situation.
4. If adaptation stage is not reached, the child will need courage to continue to face the alarm-filled situation that confronts them. Courage isn’t possible without mixed feelings and children are not capable of experiencing mixed feelings until the age of 7 or 8. If a child reaches courage, the child becomes brave. They are able to  persevere in the face of difficulty, work toward their goals.  Reaching this stage frequently requires an adult's help.

Teachers are an important support in helping students develop productive strategies to cope with alarm in classroom situations. Neufeld suggests specific strategies based on the natural alarm process.

First, Neufeld suggest anxiety reduction behaviors that  relieve anxiety and turns off the alarm. These can include:

• Physical activity 
• Eating
• Focusing on a sensory input like a squeeze ball
• Doing relaxation exercises

 These behaviors temporarily relieve anxiety and turn off the alarm.

Second, Gordon Neufeld’s suggests anxiety can be addressed by reducing the separation the child is facing. Strategies include creating a a classroom that is a place of rest and safety. For a child safety means that as teachers we can first accept our role as an alpha figure in a child's life so the child can relax. This is a state of being that influences our approach to classroom management in a fundamental way. It means that teachers:

• Work on our relationship with the student so the child knows we care 
• Take responsibility to bridge any separation that cannot be avoided by focusing on the next connection 
• Accept and allow the symptoms of anxiety as a natural process
• Bringing alarmed children to rest and build resilience by helping to find the tears of futility when appropriate
• Cultivate courage by fanning their desires so the child can develop their ability to work through frustration by means of their own loves, passions and interests

Until we meet again.

Sources:
The Neufeld Institute
http://sensationalchildren.blogspot.ca/
Gordon Neufeld: Making Sense of Anxiety in Children and Youth - an hour-long presentation