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