What I'm Doing: Made-A-Game Edition
I figure the best thing that I can do for the time being is just talk about what I'm doing as I do it in case it helps anyone else doing similar things. There's not going to be any real grousing about the politics or the other sources of endless frustration here. You can get that from me on twitter (like everyone else). This is just an operational journal. I'll started by trying to update every day that I teach, but now I'm on every week(-ish). Also, it's going to be a bit sloppier than the normal standard around these parts (so incredibly sloppy, then)
Week of Time-Has-Lost-All-Meaning
certainly feels that way, at least. I don't have too much to report, outside of this video that explains how I've moved to turn the last part of my Chemistry class into a self-paced "game" for students. Interested to see how well/poorly that works:
Week of April 13th
We seem to have transitioned to a place of stasis. Not a whole lot to report from this week that is novel or otherwise of interest. Looking at the record below here, I don't have too much to add. Which is expected, and also kind of...sad? I don't know. Here's what I do know:
- We have rolled out a crisis grading policy for this semester. It's essentially to focus on assessing only "core" concepts (as defined by PLC) through the end of the year, with student grades being frozed about two weeks before the end of the semester, at which point teachers can only offer enrichment and opportunities for students to improve their semester grades.
- As part of #1, we are working on developing summative assessments. My (non-AP) PLCs are moving toward very short summatives (maybe 3 prompts with the third being largely metacognitive), written to be open-resource, and involving private recorded responses (using Flipgrid). In AP, grades are almost entirely frozen at this point through to the end of the semester, with the PLC figuring out ways to get those students who want additional ways to work toward having their grade better reflect their understanding those opportunities.
- Personally, It's hard to feel like things are congealing in ways that privilege efficiency and "good enough" over other pedagogical instincts that are more compelling to me, but I find my comfort in understanding that putting up something is better than being paralyzed or over-planned into doing less-than-something. Is this my best work as a teacher? No. And I don't think that working remotely will EVER be my best work as a teacher, but right now, just getting lessons to students (and all of the associated social and emotional welfare these structures offer) is good enough. It has to be.
Thursday, April 9th.
Late again, but with no particular requirement to be on time. I think I'll just tuck right in this time.
Major Structures I Used With Students.
I ran each class a little bit differently than the typical structure that I have used most days. In Chemistry, I opened the class by having students take a formative quiz individually. As they finished, I placed them in Breakout Rooms to work on one last reinforcement Independent Practice (well, "optionally collaborative practice" in this case, but naming habits die hard).
AP Biology had selected one of two extension activities last class (via poll). One option was this "BYO Spreadsheet Population Growth Model", and the other one is this HHMI Community Ecology Project. Having made those selections, I put them in Breakout Rooms according to their option, and then checked in with each group during the lesson to give an overview discussion and address any particular, typically-sticky-wickets, and address the self-directed concluding piece of each one.
Accelerated Chemistry worked on this equilibrium simulation. It worked because the materials that are required are all gatherable at home. We worked through the first two sections in a whole group setting (pausing to let them do the simulations each time), and then they were asked to complete the third section on their own.
Major Learnings
There's really nothing all that shocking or novel in the above, but it was nice to break away from the typical structure that I have been using to this point, and it is nice to start to develop some more project-based approaches for at least some of my courses.
Miscellany
- I ran a department meeting after school and was more intentional about using a protocol where everyone in the meeting had a chance to speak/ask any questions before anyone could go twice. That seemed to work pretty well for making sure every voice was heard.
- I'm really looking forward to leaning into this long weekend!
Tuesday, April 7th, 2020
Late again. It's almost like life is so busy that I barely have a moment to do the (incredibly) necessary reflection on my version of the life that so many of us are living right now. Personally, I find it to be the strangest combination of monastic repetition and totally unprecedented weirdness. My cell (in the monastery sense of the term) is our 1350-square-foot apartment, shared by two adults and two young kids. I haven't been outside of it for days now, and we've only just today entered the official start of the Singapore Government's "circuit breaker" period (which has us in Distance Learning until at least May 4th).
I'll get to the real purpose of this in a moment, but I will note that schedule-wise, Tuesday was particularly jammed. I was up at 4 AM to do my part in the Biology Distance Learning Project that I'm a part of at 5 AM (aka 5 PM EST in the states). Off from teaching for just long enough to loudly air some pretty profound grievances with the College Board's recent decisions re: this year's AP Exams, before meeting with my Advisory and then teaching three blocks in a row (with breaks for stretching and lunch. I very much like our current Distance Learning schedule). Then running a distanced Department Meeting for half an hour, before heading immediately into a 3-hour (!) meeting of our Instructional Leadership Team to discuss possible crisis grading policies (hence the massive length of this meeting). By the end, I could barely eat dinner (home-made chicken chili!) before shutting it all down.
Still, none of the above is a complaint about my life or my job. I was glad to be in everything (even if the other three members of this particular family association sounded like they were having a bit more fun than me on multiple occasions).
Major Structures I Used With Students:
For both chemistry classes, I ran pretty student-driven reviews of recent independent practice activities. This involved me putting both classes into small breakout groups following a pretty quick opening/check-in, and then basically left them alone except for when they needed me. I told groups that they could either call me into the breakout or just return to the main room for help. That happened a bit, but for the most part, they kept to themselves (even in the digital space, a good bit of my teaching remains getting out of my learner's ways). I brought Accelerated Chemistry back for a last-pass whole group question solicitation, and once that was done, they took another formative quiz (again, the problem-attic Google Form export feature is wonderful!). I let General Chemistry exit class from the groups once they had finished their review of the prior lesson's independent practice and worked to complete one of these wonderful gems that I just recently found on the internet, however they wished (stay in the group, come back to the main room with me, or just log off and do it on your own, whatever works). Once each learner had taken a screenshot of the final score report and put it in their drop folder on Drive, they were done for the day.
AP Biology is in the very last piece of new material. For a variety of reasons, I elected to run an instructor-paced Pear Deck through that material yesterday. It was overfull, but I think the tradeoff was warranted for a few reasons: First, the material we are covering is incredibly crucial for larger biological understanding (it's ecosystems and human impacts) BUT it is also almost entirely review for our students from their first Biology course, so everything we discussed was recall of prior knowledge and adding a bit of cognitive finesse. I would never run a lesson like this for a novel, first-pass through new material (and while we're on that topic, it bears remembering that my course is blended, and all students watch my videos about the material prior to our in-class discussion of that material). Pear Deck also lets me chunk a big material structure in interesting ways, which also factored into the decision. Finally (and probably most importantly) by doing one last heavy material lift altogether, we have Thursday free and open to having some more interesting fun.
Major Learnings
- Planning lab activities takes a bit more in this world. First, the types of labs that we can do are pretty limited. But I've got some decent enough lab-type-activities that students can do at home, and they'll be doing them next class. This means that I needed to spend some time at the end of class previewing these activities in different ways than I normally would since students are now their own lab techs and need to gather materials from around their houses. But they seemed into it. A bit of change of pace.
- Many of our kids are pretty nervous about grades and "lingering" tests. We are doing everything we can to give them the permission they need for themselves to stop worrying about these things, but my daily opening "What's on your mind?" always surfaces these concerns. I just keep saying the same thing: We don't have clarity as a school year, but we promise you that when we do, we will let you know, and everything will be as fair and respectful of you and this situation as possible. I don't know what else to do here. I don't think there's much until the crisis grading policy issue is resolved.
Miscellany
I've got a pretty good mix of new things going on to occupy my time here in the monastery. I'll value them here according to where I think they fit on the three alignment rows:
"Good" things: I'm trying to get back into a meditation practice, and sit for at least ten minutes a day (early days, small intervals), and have been pretty consistent. I'm writing at least 750 words a day as per the best tool I know of to do this. I've helped to create a pretty nice distance learning biology resource (linked above). I've taken the necessary time to learn what Discord really is, and to set up a Discord chat server for Biology Teachers (want an invite? [Let me know]). I'm spending more time with my favorite people in the world. We seem to be tag-team managing the needs of the 7-year-old a bit more effectively, and he's doing pretty well with the situation, even though it's CLEARLY the most difficult for him out of all of us (the 2-year-old will never have a memory of this time. I'm totally okay with that).
"Neutral" things: Spending a few hours a day tending to a new Island with my spouse. We have friend codes if you want to visit. I haven't played "Animal Crossing" in 20 years. I agree with the assessment that it's pretty great for this current life. Just fishing and pulling weeds, planting flowers and collecting insects. Doing nothing with any real purpose except to do it. I like it a lot, because it's neutral. Similarly to TV and movie habits as of right now. We have secured all 9 of The Fast & The Furiouses to watch. And that's going to happen. Again, neither good nor bad.
"Bad" things: Lots of takeout food. Notably more alcohol in the house than at any other time since we have been here (lest that come off wrong, that means there is some alcohol in the house. We never keep it here in normal circumstances, because it's expensive. But this exists, and I definitely secured our needs this past weekend).
It should be obvious that None of these things are really deserving of the value judgments I'm giving them here. I'm just dumping them on the page while they are in my mind. Whatever we all need to do to get by, is exactly what we should be doing. And that's very much what I think I've got going on.
Friday, April 3rd
As was basically guaranteed, I finally missed an update. Oh well, I suppose you get what you get and you don't upset. We had some interesting developments over here. On Wednesday, we decided we would move toward reopening school. So everything that follows below was done in anticipation of having students back in the building for our next class meetings (Tuesday, April 7th). But all of that changed Friday at 4PM when the Prime Minister let Singapore know that we would be entering a one-month "circuit breaker" for the crisis, that involves (among other things) distance learning for the duration of that time. That decision (and the crazy work we did to move in that direction) are all discussed here, along with some special gifts, so go get yours.
Major Structures I Used With Students
Again, nothing all that different. Really, I let my students have more time with each other, and a bit less directed work from me, with the exception of AP Biology, who I put back into a teacher-directed Pear Deck for the next section of AP Biology. The College Board is making some pretty significant changes to the exam this year, but it really doesn't affect us, since we don't really run a course dictated by the exam, We're in the middle of Ecology, and will continue through this final unit of the course before we start thinking about the test.
I'm definitely handling chemistry the most "delicately", trying to keep the grain size of lessons to a very manageable amount for students, and really giving them space to work through it. It's informed by the fact that we're currently in stoichiometry, which is hard for chemistry students in the best of instructional circumstances.
Accelerated chemistry got to play with a POGIL on the method of initial rates for the whole block. I asked that they work it through for the block, and then bring it to class with them on Tuesday (now back to digital space).
Major Learning
One thing I'll note is that I'm keeping stakes as low as I ever have in my career. Even in years where I had students self-assessing for the majority of their grades, they still had to do some summative assessments. To this point, I've kept summative assessment well out of mind for any students (and without tipping my hand too much, I don't imagine there will be any real summatives for any of the work done here during the crisis). But a lot of that depends on what we as a school decide to do about our grading policy this year. And those conversations are very much ongoing. Until they occur, I think it's wise to continue to give students as much permission as we can to not think about such things. If you're reading this and your institution has gone a different direction, I'd love to know more about why that is.
Miscellany
Did I mention there are free gifts available here? Go get yourself some copies, (and check out what a wild ride the last 48 hours of last week were!).
Wednesday, April 1st
I haven't updated my Distance Learning Journal in almost two weeks. There are very good reasons for this. The main one is that last week was our spring break. So that takes that whole week off the table. The second one is that I'm only updating this thing on the days that I'm teaching via Distance Learning, and we haven't had another day of me doing that since my last update on Thursday, March 19th. Because I only teach every other day this year (the benefits of being both a Department Chair and a Teacher on Special Assignment), and we have been so incredibly intentional in our rolling out of Distance Learning, that once it was decided that we would continue Distance Learning the week after vacation, we also had a whole additional non-teaching planning day this past Monday. I don't make this note to brag, I just want to point out the difference in how a school like mine goes about carefully rolling out a planned Distance Learning model with the situations of so many of my colleagues who were thrown into Distance Learning for huge tracts of time with almost no warning. As we continue to get the full measure of the impact of America's botched federal response to the crisis, I think it's wise to keep in mind that the lack of preparation has also affected things as far away from the immediacy of illness as the K-12 education system.
Major Structures I Used With Students:
I continued to really inhabit the structure that I've taken to seeing as the "typical core" of a Distance Learning Lesson for most of the teachers I work with: Synchronous Whole Group Opening --> Asynchronous Independent Practice/Group Work --> Synchronous Whole Group Closure --> Formative Assessment. This is essentially the third (out of three) days that I've really inhabited this structure.
I always have this notion that I want to really get used to a form before I start experimenting too much with it. Of course, this structure is very much enabled by the fact that we are maintaining a regular school-day schedule, albeit a bit modified:
- We've aligned our instructional periods with the middle school's so that families can eat lunch together.
- We've shortened our instructional blocks to 60 minutes from their normal 80 minutes to cut down on screen time a bit for students (and teachers).
- We've built in a full hour and a half at the top of our day for planning and consultation with students, and we've moved our meetings (department, PLC, and otherwise) to the last half hour of the day.
None of this really impacts the overall structure of our lessons, it just means that we plan to do less in a particular block of time. That noted, I did play around a little bit in two of my classes. In Accelerated Chemistry, I didn't really use any active learning structures in either of my whole group sections, transitioning quite quickly into a breakout collaborative POGIL for most of the block, bringing students back together quickly afterwards for a whole-group clarifying of any sticky parts of the activity, and then moving to the formative. In AP Biology, I had students spend most of the lesson working through the day's active learning structure (a Pear Deck) in self-paced mode, before bringing them back together. I hadn't really used the self-paced mode previously. It's quite lovely.
Major Learnings
- As is seemingly always the case with me, I tend to expand to fill a structure pretty quickly, and generally get tired of doing the same thing repeatedly after too long. If Distance Learning continues, I totally see myself working to really start making changes to my lesson structures.
- I'm really proud of my faculty. No one has tapped-out on the tech side, or demonstrated anything other than a willingness to learn and to be uncomfortable in the learning space. I love the other faculties I've worked with in my career, but I don't think any of them would demonstrate quite as universal a spirit of willingness to engage in this kind of lift. It's remarkable to see.
- I'm also really proud of us because everyone is super-focused on the welfare of our students during this process. The changes we made to our schedule came from suggestions by teachers in our first-ever Zoom-based faculty meeting. We had possible models that kept 80-minute blocks intact, and no one preferred those structures. So much of what I see in my professional learning network involves teachers over-scheduling and over-burdening students with material during this Distance Learning period. To see us all clearly moving the other way makes me very glad that I work where I do.
Miscellany
Not a whole lot, just a few "inside-baseball" efficiency tips. Regrettably, I have to spotlight a few specific tools here, but that's the nature of these kinds of tips:
- I wanted an easy way to make and deploy quick-hit formatives after every lesson. The best thing that I've found is using problem-attic to select items from their pool (which is quite robust) and then using their export to google form tool. This tool generates a "ready-to-go" google form quiz that can then be used by students. The whole process takes less than 20 minutes once you get it down. Huge time-saver!
- Speaking of time-savers, I had found that my to-this-point-regular process of sending .pdfs that I wanted to put into Notability for markup into Dropbox and then "sending to..." into the app from my iPad to be a bit too repetitive. The solution for that was to purchase the OSX version of the app. I think it was $4. So now, I drag and drop my .pdfs into notes on the desktop app and they are automatically synced to the iPad app, bypassing the whole Dropbox loading sequence. Probably saves me 2 minutes per upload, and a PILE of mental effort.
Thursday, March 19th
Well, I'm certainly quite glad that I did the "dry run" to the "pilot" phase of this work on Tuesday. It would have been an even larger hill to climb today without that.
And there's a LOT to be said for the quality of my fellow teachers and administrators. I couldn't dream of a more supportive environment in which to do this work. It's unbelievable.
Major Structures I used with Students
My structures were very similar to what I used on Tuesday. I had prepped the decks for today's work yesterday and cut them down in size to get PearDeck to work a bit more quickly, particularly with the TakeAway construction at the end. I also fooled around a bit with iPad streaming. In AP, after the students had their breakout discussions, I streamed the whole group portion from my iPad. Exports of decks into Notability as .pdfs is working well for iPad-based instruction. I ran some formatives using albert.io, the google quiz export feature on problem-attic, and in PearDeck itself. But I'm absolutely NOT under any illusions that today was anything more than "advanced tire kicking". Anything outside of the main structure of my lessons that is geling right now is not even a consideration for me right now.
Major Learnings:
In a previous life I had joked with friends that I would be terrible at digital instruction, which was a half-joke given my training in Ed. Tech. But I do feel pretty strongly that I am not as good an online teacher as I am an in-person teacher.
I very much feel that the move to digital instruction is a tremendous amount of effort that results in lessons that are about half as useful for students as our time together in meatspace would be. I'm guessing pretty much everyone who has been "forced" to make this move feels this way. So much learning to do in this arena, but nowhere near enough time to do it.
I continue to be shocked by how haphazardly this transition has occurred for many of my friends in public schools. It's incredible that they could be expected to just flip this like a switch with far less resources and far less planning time than I have in my circumstances. So as challenging as I find this work, I fully recognize that there are many remarkable teachers trying to find solutions to similar problems to mine in circumstances that are VERY different. I'm deeply Grateful for what I have.
As always, let me know if you need anything or have anything you want to tell me in comments on this post, via email contact, or on my social media platform of choice.
Tuesday, March 17th
We were told yesterday after school that our schedule would shift for the rest of the week due to some changes in the global COVID-19 scene. Today was our last day with students on campus. Tomorrow is a planning day, and then Thursday and Friday are a full-scale Distance Learning "Drill", prior to the start of Spring Break (next week). Since none of us are going anywhere during Spring Break now, this seemed like a natural fit. We are back to meat-space school with kids on Monday, March 30th, but IMO all bets are off as to how likely that is to happen.
We've been planning for this for six weeks now, so it's not a huge surprise. And we also have total laptop saturation, every tool any teacher could ever need, and standard gigabit internet across the island, so our situation is not...typical...of those in many other places on the planet. Anyone reading this would be wise to keep that in mind.
All of that noted, I didn't think it was wise to wait until Thursday to kick the tires some more on Distance Learning. So I tried my best to go as "all in" as I could today.
Major things I'll be using
My meeting platform is Zoom. Hangouts would work almost as well, but I like the recording aspect of zoom and I REALLY like the Breakout Rooms. Zoom is free for any teacher who wants it, but it is another "layer" on a system (it's another platform). If that was a difficulty for us, I'd stay within our larger infrastructure (gSuite or Schoology for us), so that kids didn't need to do yet another thing, but for us, Zoom is pretty widely distributed in the high school, so no big deal.
I'm really digging PearDeck. I like the way it plays with existing google Slides, and my kids like it. I have used it before, but now it’s going to get some serious attention in my practice.
There are other things, but these two are what I really used today.
Major structures that I used with Students:
Generally, my "lesson" flow goes like this:
Kids log in to common Zoom space. Top of class announcements, etc. Agenda for the day.
In Chem and Accelerated Chem, we moved into a "Peardecked" slide deck. I used Zoom's connection to an iPad to share some worked problems while I was working them and that really went well (much better than a computer webcam trying to capture me at a whiteboard).
In AP Biology, I sent them to Breakout Rooms in Zoom to have a group discussion about a series of prompts, and then brought them back together for a quick group debrief. More than any other class, AP Bio wants to spent a lot of time during the top-of-class asking about the pandemic, effects, etc. Happy to do that for as long as they need.
Back together for group discussion, closure, discussing asynchronous work, etc.
It's not anything amazing, but it's a simple and workable flow for me.
Major Learnings
Send Zoom meeting invites on the daily class agenda and via email to students before class starts. It integrates with the Google Calendar, so calendaring the event takes care of a lot of that.
I told students up top that it was going to be a bit ugly in parts and there would be tech problems, etc. I really lowered expectations early. Transitions between group zoom, to shared desktop, to shared iPad, and around and around is going to take time. That said, I was surprised with how well it all went. Closure surveys of students via Pear Deck prompts indicated they were in agreement about that.
I had to be more intentional in building in pauses for students to ask questions either via the video or in the chat. Really explicit. Also thumbs up/down works well for quick group survey.
Students need explicit discussion around setting up an appropriate "mise en place" for distance learning. It's not just "open computer", they need a way to encode information, and maybe interact with multiple programs simultaneously (my kids needed zoom and a browser with peardeck open at the same time, so that's multiple desktops switching back-and-forth). Make sure they know how to do that. Tell them what you do and show them what your space looks like.
Students also need some explicit discussion about working in breakouts, making sure that they are intentional about workflow in the group, etc. I'm thinking of coming up with a checklist of what to do at the top of a breakout group, unless someone else has one already...
I always did less than I had planned to do. Which is correct and good.
I gave some "optional" reinforcement HW, but nothing required. I think that's probably going to keep being the ethic.
There are probably some other things, too, but I don't remember them right now. I'll post again after Thursday.
Do you have questions? Ideas? Critique? Do you need me to make something I mention above public for your reference? Or Share anything else? Please let me know in comments on this post, via email contact, or on my social media platform of choice.
