reading/teaching/technology

Getting ready for online book discussions

Posted on by Mark Isero

 My students struggled with Beloved. It was a tough book: intense, confusing, long. I found out that my students have trouble tackling 100 pages at a time on their own. They need more support.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how best to help them. I could threaten them with pop quizzes. I could check their annotations more often. I could have them answer questions or write dialectical journals.

Although those ideas might work, they seem punitive and likely to zap any remaining interest my students have in reading. Besides, my students in general don’t do assignments just because of the grade. They do work because it’s meaningful, or because they value the class, or because they want to succeed.

They also do work when they’re part of a team.

That’s why starting next week, I’m unveiling a new feature in my class: online book discussions. There are three goals:

  1. Students read the book as part of a team (keeping themselves accountable),
  2. Students talk about the book outside class time,
  3. Students have fun with technology while doing #1 and #2.

Every Sunday night (or maybe Tuesday — I haven’t decided yet), groups of four students will go to iseroma.com/live, a page on my class website. On that page is a private, password-protected embed of a video chat room by TinyChat.

(I would have used Google Plus, but you have to be 18.)

For 20-30 minutes, the group will discuss how their reading is going, what they find confusing, and what they find inspiring. At first I’ll facilitate these sessions (yes, they need to be supervised), but my hope is to find other adults — Book Club Leaders — who’d like to take part. Each student now has an online writing mentor. Why can’t each group of four have an online reading mentor?

One of the primary purposes of this idea is to make reading more public and more social. I also want students to feel like reading is a real thing, something that’s tangible. Finally, by having a discussion the night before the class discussion, I hope students will feel more prepared and confident. I want students to be prepared for class by having a rehearsal the night before. 

teaching/technology

My thoughts about homework

Posted on by Mark Isero

 Everybody’s talking about homework these days. There’s too much. Or maybe we should flip our classroom practice and change homework into what we used to do in class.

Or maybe there shouldn’t be any. Some urban schools are giving up on homework. Los Angeles Unified this summer created a homework policy that decreased its importance (until it was overturned). The argument goes, Students of color don’t do homework, so assigning it is a waste of time and only hurts them.

Then others, like Alfie Kohn, think that homework should be abolished altogether because it steals students’ childhoods.

At my school, we don’t dispute the importance of homework. After all, our students need to extend their learning time in order to catch up. Our problem is encouraging our students to do homework, especially on weekends. For many of our students, school is their first job, and 35 hours a week is sufficient. Spending two or three more hours every night on academics seems like a second shift.

For my AP English students, however, homework is necessary. We’re in class only five hours a week. That’s nothing, especially because we’re competing against students across the country who are also putting in considerable homework hours.

But even though homework is necessary, I do need to think about how to make it interesting and fun. Reading tons of pages from an assigned text is nobody’s definition of fun. That’s why I’m thinking of ways to make homework more social, more public, and more meaningful. I’ll let you know about them soon.

What do you think about homework? 

teaching

Why AP English is Unfair, #3

Posted on by Mark Isero

 This one gets me frustrated.

My students took their first full-length multiple-choice section last Monday, just for practice. Overall, the scores weren’t bad.

But I discovered that the AP test is unnecessarily tricky on purpose. It’s like College Board wants English language learners not to pass.

The passages and poems are difficult to read, of course. I don’t have a problem with that. That’s the test. My problem is with the questions and the answer choices.

It’s entirely possible that a student will know the answer to a question but get it wrong solely because they didn’t understand the tangled syntax of the question or the ridiculous vocabulary in the answer choices.

Here’s an example: A question asks about a passage’s overall tone. The student correctly identifies the tone as “sad.” However, the correct answer is “morose and lugubrious.” The student gets it wrong not because of her reading skills but because of her lack of vocabulary.

In other words, a student can tackle and overcome all the crazy vocabulary in a passage — where there is context, where there is meaning — and then get stuck on the questions, where the words just pop out of nowhere.

So my students, many of whom are avid readers, get penalized because they haven’t yet accumulated as many English words as their monolingual peers.

This problem irritates me because there’s not an easy solution. For the other parts of the test, I feel like hard work can close the achievement gap. But I can’t tell an English learner to go back in time and read more books before her family immigrated. And I can’t tell their parents to stop speaking Spanish at home and to go get a college degree.

Sure, my students can and should read books in addition to the 12 that are on my syllabus. That will help. But they’re competing against monolingual students across the country who are doing the same thing. That’s what’s annoying: There doesn’t seem to be a way, with just a few months left, to accelerate vocabulary development.

Do you think this aspect of the AP test is unfair? Or do you think it’s an accurate measure of college scholarship?

teaching

Who didn’t turn in their essay? I can guess.

Posted on by Mark Isero

 Yesterday, my advisees turned in their post-graduation plans, one piece of their senior portfolio. They’d worked on these essays with another teacher for the last week. They were focused and did excellent work.

After I received the essays, I counted them, hoping that this time, I’d get a 100 percent turn-in rate.

(I don’t remember the last time all my advisees turned in an assignment on time. Last year, the typical on-time turn-in rate hovered around 50 percent, which devastated me. I’m not exactly sure how to conduct a class that way.)

The count this time? I got 14 out of 18, or 78 percent. Not bad, but not good.

Then I decided to see if I could identify the four students who didn’t turn in their essays without looking at the stack. How predictable is this data? I wrote down four names, then checked, then didn’t know how to feel when I found out I was 100 percent correct.

Is it a good thing that I could make this prediction? Does it mean that I know which students are struggling? Or is the opposite true — that the achievement gap is so strong that struggling students have no chance? What’s my role as a teacher if I always get the same result?

As a next step, I asked our counselor to see if she could also name the four students who hadn’t completed the essay. Even though she has limited contact with my advisees, she identified three out of four correctly.

What does this tell me? As a school, we know our students well and can identify which students are struggling. Unfortunately, if we can make these kinds of predictions, that means we’re not intervening effectively enough. We’re not addressing the achievement gap. We’re seeing our students, seeing the cracks, and letting them fall through.

And if that’s true, what exactly am I doing here? What kind of influence am I having as a teacher? 

teaching

An experiment on the predictability of achievement

Posted on by Mark Isero

 I’ve written before about the predictability of student achievement. The achievement gap is big and sinister, and the reason I’m a teacher is to mess with it, to help students do something they didn’t think was possible.

Last year, 8 percent of students passed the AP Literature and Composition exam. The highest pass rate ever for our school was 62 percent, in 2008.

When I first was assigned the course, I was unclear about what my goal should be. I’m still unsure. Would I be happy if 50 percent passed? That’d be much higher than last year, but it still would mean a failure rate of 50 percent. I say no. A pass rate of 100 percent would be nice (and cause for the sequel to Stand and Deliver), but I’m no Jaime Escalante. What about 67 percent, a record for our school? That seems just right.

Note: That goal comes out of nowhere. Because this is my first time teaching the class, I don’t have a score to improve. Besides, a goal of 67 percent doesn’t take into consideration the students’ likelihood of passing the exam before taking AP English. Perhaps all of them, with a different teacher, could pass the test, and I’m actually lowering their chances.

So there needs to be a baseline. On Monday, students their first full-length multiple-choice section, which accounts for 45 percent of the overall AP score. After consulting College Board, I looked at my students’ results and sorted them into three categories — green, yellow, and red — based on their current likelihood of passing. (If you want to know more about how I determined these categories, let me know.)

Of my students, 11, or 48 percent, were in the green category.

So now some questions arise:

  1. Will those 11 students end up passing the exam in May? (I hope so!)
  2. If #1 is true, then I need five more students to get to my 67 percent goal. Can I do that? Or is predictability too strong (or am I ineffective)?
  3. What’s the best way to make sure #2 happens? What does it take?
  4. What about the other seven students, particularly the five who scored really low? (One got 4/55 correct; another got 8/55.) Is it impossible for them to pass?
I have many ideas, and I’m certainly willing to work hard (and so are my students), but part of this inquiry is to figure out which strategies work best to disrupt the achievement gap. After all, we don’t have too much more time left.