Methodology Moment

Best Quantum quote of the day, from Elijah in Miss Michelle's class:

Elijah persisted in asking a question to which Michelle had no answer.  "I don't know," she honestly replied.

"That's an ILLEGAL RESPONSE," said Elijah.  "You can ask for more time, or phone a friend, or . . . "

"I guess I need more time," decided Miss Michelle.

Of course, Michelle, if you want to "phone a friend" over email, we may be able to help you out with the answer to Elijah's question!

Speaking of Michelle, attached is a graph of her class's multiplication timed fact test. It can also be viewed on the ILT page of our PLC blog here.  I believe the goal is forty correct in one minute?  This "run chart" shows the total number of problems the whole class got right. We can't wait to see how many they get right next week!  If it's a new class best, then I'd like to join in an impromptu celebration :).  

Thanks for being a fantabulous faculty.  I am truly blessed to have found my teaching home among such talented and committed educators.  And Inez says Voyager still "sparkles".

Here is my Purpose, Vision, and Mission, for those who are interested in seeing it in writing.  Upon further reflection, it looks like my purpose was actually an "aim", so I've revised it a bit.  

AIM: Joy in Learning about Learning

Purpose: To learn (about professional and organizational learning)

Vision: I am the chiropractor of quality.

Mission: I empower myself and my Voyager colleagues to be masterful, creative, collaborative, joyful educators with purpose by gently stretching and aligning our teaching practice, freeing our creative capacity to flow through us, enlivening our classrooms and inspiring our students.

I'll report back on my Quality Factors tomorrow. Thank you for putting so much thought into drafting them today. I thought the process Amy chose for drafting the factors was efficient, and produced useful results. Next step will be to operationally define what the factors mean.

Speaking of "useful", here's an inventive way of turning our Singapore Math baseline assessment "lemons" into lemonade. It's from a Quality consultant named Lee Jenkins, whose books I'm really enjoying:

1) Give a "preview" assessment of the skills to be mastered by the year's end (Most of us have done this already--painful though it may have been).

2) Give short weekly quizzes on a small, randomly chosen subset of the items on the assessment (take the square root of the total assessment items, and that can be the number of questions on the quiz: Levels 3A and 3B, for example, have 31 questions in all. Square root of 31 is about 5, so select five questions at random from a hat each week).

3) Count up the total number of items answered correctly by the whole class, and post it on a class "run chart". Each student can keep their own run chart as well.

4) CELEBRATE every time the class hits an all-time high number of correct responses.

5) DO NOT attach a grade to any of the scores. The goal here is to build learning motivation and keep it high. Grades add anxiety, comparison, and judgment to the learning process, says Jenkins, and research does not support the use of grades in motivating students to learn (whoah . . . that's deep). Of course, DO analyze the type of items students are generally getting correct or incorrect whenever it's helpful to adjust instruction. We need to get as much mileage out of every assessment task as possible.

6) At the end of the year, give the full assessment again, and gape in awe at the amazing results.

Fascinating stuff. If anyone is willing to try out this model of Baldrige-Based Quality, I would be happy to compile the data and get your run chart up and . . . running. :) We could even do a whole grade-level or whole-team run chart!

Thank you for reading all the way to the end.

Evan