The exhilaration of sharing

Last week was an amazing one for me! On Monday, Edutopia tweeted a link to my "letter to me on my first day of teaching." Then it was re-tweeted and re-tweeted. Over 500 people read my work by the time I checked in at lunch. By the end of the week, it had over 1,000 page views. I haven't had that many people read something I wrote since my local newspaper published my winning Arbor Day sentence in 1st grade! Sharing with that many other educators was amazing!

I dropped in on #idedchat later in the week and when the topic of holding kids accountable when working in groups came up, I linked to a self-assessment I created earlier this year. I hoped this form that I had found so useful would help someone else.

Another Idaho teacher was looking for pros and cons of different devices for a 1:1 initiative. I shared the Google doc my school has been using to organize our data about device choices with him (and the rest of my Twitter PLN). At least five people added on to the information I already collected. Some of the comments were absolutely invaluable for our analysis. The simple act of sharing improved upon my work!

Since I started my career in education, I always admired those teachers who were constantly sharing their work. I was impressed by their kindness and concern for others. Now I see that they benefited from sharing as well: sharing is exhilarating!

To better share with my fellow educators, I've created a page of classroom resources. There are only a couple things there now, but I'll add more soon. I hope that you can find something there that is helpful to you. And I'll keep you updated as I experiment and refine...

A letter to me on my first day of teaching

One of the first things I saw this morning was the great Edutopia and SoulPancake collaboration, "If I Knew Then: A Letter to Me on My First Day of Teaching." It made me think back to my first days in the classroom.  Man, they were rough! There were so many things I could have done better. What would I be able to tell myself? I knew I had to give it a try.

 Dear Mr. Windisch,

I don't know if you realize what you've gotten yourself into.  You are in for a challenge!  Being a teacher is more difficult than you imagined.  Each of the 30 students who will walk through that door later today is an individual: a complicated, growing, and changing individual who is colored by all of the triumphs and disappointments he or she has experienced in the last ten years.  It is your responsibility to determine how to reach each of these students and help him or her learn and grow this year.  Right now, that is an abstract concept, but it will become more real to you each and every day you spend in this classroom.

Here's my biggest piece of advice for you: be yourself!  Your students are ready to connect with that guy who loves the Muppets, brings his tuba to school, and is always cracking jokes.  That isn't their idea of how a teacher acts, but they will love you for being genuine. I know right now you want to play the role of a confident, veteran teacher because you're scared to make mistakes.  You are going to encourage your students to learn from the mistakes they make - give yourself permission to do the same.

There will be times when it feels like the other teachers working here have your back and there will be times when you feel isolated and alone.  Don't let the ideas in this building limit what you can do. Reach out to teachers in other places, listen to their ideas, and use the ones that work for you. Maybe you can find a community of like-minded educators on-line (that will be all the rage in about ten years using something called Twitter - try it as soon as it becomes available). If you can honestly say that the things you are doing will help the kids in your class grow and improve, you are doing the right thing. Don't let others' negativity get to you.

The Coeur d'Alene Press printed a story about my first week

Notice the amazing moments in your classroom. Jeff is going to actually write, respond, and
participate this year because you refuse to believe his Asperger's diagnosis means that he should spend the whole day drawing and playing games on the Internet. Karen is going to find her voice in your classroom. In fact, by the end of the year you'll have to stop her from turning everything into a classroom debate. In a few years, she'll proudly tell you that she received a full-ride scholarship to college and a coveted position on her school newspaper. And she'll thank you for all the encouragement you gave her in fifth grade.

You'll survive each day. Over time, you'll move from surviving to thriving! Someday, you'll be seeing your former students every time you go to the grocery store. Many of them will be able to tell you about amazing things they've done since being in your class. Others will be having a tough time. But they will all be happy to see you and each one will remind you of something great that happened in your classroom.

That bell is about to ring. Go meet your first class. You've got the first day of school ahead of you. For that matter, you have years of teaching ahead of you. Just remember, you will keep improving as long as you make it a point to experiment and refine.

Go get 'em,

-Jim

Perseverance in mathematics

My math students have come a long way this year! At the beginning of the year, most of them had a hard time "staying in the struggle." They wanted easy answers and algorithms. Thinking about the "why" of mathematics and explaining personal problem solving approaches seemed like foreign concepts.

My students needed perseverance. It was my job to create the environment that would build it. It's taken all of the perseverance I have. I needed to make sure students knew it is okay to make mistakes. I had to tinker with assignment difficulty until I found a sweet spot where students were challenged, but not frustrated. I had to keep pushing and pushing my students and get them to embrace the idea that giving up is never an option.

I think my students have come around to the idea. I realized I needed to work on their parents, too. So I sent home this letter:

Dear parents and guardians of fantastic fifth graders,

Did you know that Colonel Sanders “Original Recipe” for chicken was rejected 1,009 times, Steven Spielberg was not accepted to film school until his fourth attempt, and 27 different publishers rejected the first book by Dr. Seuss?  Yet, all three of them became leaders in their fields.  They didn’t let failure stop them!

Last week, I shared information about the eight Mathematical Practice Standards.  As a teacher, it is my responsibility to incorporate these standards into everything we do in math class. As a human being, it is the first standard that I find myself dealing with everyday: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.  Professionally and personally all of us are faced with many problems that we need to sort out and solve.  And frequently we find that our first solution doesn’t work. Yet, whether the problem is big or small, we keep chipping away at it until we find a solution!

Our kids need to be comfortable struggling through problems and making multiple attempts to find a solution.  By now you have probably noticed that the math problems I send home take more than one step to solve.  Real-world problems are rarely solved in one step, and what we do in math class represents that.  This week, I would like you to support your child by letting him or her really think this problem over and use multiple strategies to find the right answer.  Feel free to remind your child how to perform any needed computation, but let your child own the problem and the solution. Learning to deal with a failed first attempt will help your child in the math classroom and beyond.

Thanks for reading,

-Jim Windisch

At our recent parent/teacher conferences, I talked about my new approach to math homework with many of my kids' parents. The overall reaction was positive, but many of them are having a hard time with perseverance at home. A few parents commented that they want to jump in and help by showing how to solve the problem with an algorithm. Others mentioned getting frustrated by the inefficient strategies they saw their kids using to solve the problem. I assured these parents that the important part of problem solving is making sense of the problem and persevering. Their children would adopt more efficient strategies as they become more comfortable with solving problems and manipulating numbers. And then I had the parents who were 100% behind this.  They talked about letting their kids figure it out independently and then listening to the explanation, questioning their children, and sometimes discussing multiple methods for solving the problem.

More than anything else, I want students to leave my class with perseverance. My kids who have support for building perseverance at home are there.  How do I get the rest there? Has someone discovered the magic formula? If you've discovered it, please share with me. And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine... 

The facts about Sanders, Spielberg, and Seuss in my parent letter came from mental_floss Vol. 13, issue 1

Inspiration from the Common Core Text Exemplars

When I first began studying the Common Core Standards, I was struck by the emphasis on text complexity. Every time I opened my book of English and Language Arts standards I paused when I came to that phrase: the one that set the expectation for students to "read and comprehend ... at the high end of the grades 4-5 text complexity band independently and proficiently."  What was a text complexity band?  How could I know if my students were reading appropriately complex text? I knew that many of the selections in the reading series I agreed to use to fidelity were not complex.  The Accelerated Reader reading levels that I labeled on all of my classroom library books didn't appear to indicate text complexity either: Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers by Dav Pilkey is the same AR reading level as Neil Gaiman's (very adult and complex) American Gods.

Then I figured out that the CCSS ELA standards had appendices. And one of these, Appendix B, has a list of text exemplars.  That was where I would find an easy answer, right?  Not exactly - it takes perseverance to figure it out.  I've heard our district reading coaches and others say that the list is not to be used as a curriculum or required book list, but I knew I would need to have my students work with a variety of texts on the list so I could understand how they interacted with complex texts.  Hopefully I could learn from that until I was able to identify appropriately complex texts on my own.  I'm not there yet, but I'm making progress.

I started the year by putting together a Springpad notebook to keep my ideas for working with the 4-5 exemplars and link to the articles and poems that were available for free online. Then I wrote a grant proposal to our local education foundation, EXCEL, to fund copies of a few of the non-fiction books on the list.  All through the school year, I have been trying out ideas with these texts. I'm finding that the complexity is a big jump from the texts I used last year. Still, it is amazing the insights my kids have as they read this material. Here are three of the things we have done:

Celebrity endorsement from Mariah Carey

Bandwagon example (and she doesn't sit on babies)

The Kid's Guide to Money by Steve Otfinoski 

We're just finishing this one up in my reading switch group. Kids have worked to make a business plan and create advertising using information from the book as a guide.  My students also did some terrific persuasive writing and had a class debate over whether kids should be allowed to have credit cards.

"Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer 

This poem had a sample performance task from the Core Standards: "Students refer to the structural elements (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” when analyzing the poem and contrasting the impact and differences of those elements to a prose summary of the poem." My students had a difficult time with the vocabulary of this poem. I found a nice text summary of the poem in this poetry unit from Pottsgrove School District in Pennsylvania. Even though they had a difficult time expressing exactly what it was that gave the poem a greater impact than the prose summary, my students had rich discussions around these texts.

“Fog” by Carl Sandburg and “Dust of Snow” by Robert Frost 

 I thought these two poems made for a nice comparison and contrast activity with my students.  Both evoke natural scenes of weather, but in very different ways.  First, I asked my students to look at the animal in each poem.  “Dust of Snow” describes the actions of a crow while “Fog” uses a cat as a metaphor for fog.  Next, students examined the rhyme and rhythm of the two poems.  After discussing, students wrote a paragraph comparing and contrasting the two poems. They noticed the metaphor in "Fog" right away and most of my students had a lot of success with this activity.

I would love to hear other ideas for working with the text exemplars list. Has anyone reached a high level of comfort in finding appropriately complex text?  Have you identified some outstanding excerpts from some of the longer texts on the list? I look forward to hearing your ideas.  And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...

  

A new approach to math homework

Teaching math has been a challenge this year!  The Idaho Core Standards (CCSS) are a totally different animal than our previous Idaho Content Standards.  It feels like we're jumping at least one grade level worth of content and asking our kids to make more connections and solve more real problems than we ever have before.

It's terrific!

But it is tough.

Due to scheduling factors outside my control, our main math class is at the end of the day.  My kids are tired.  They also see mathematics as a somewhat passive activity.  Their thinking is "there is one right answer to each problem and someone will eventually explain how to find that answer."  They could get by with that attitude under our previous standards: but that won't fly now.

It feels like I tried a million different things for math homework. I sent home review computation, extra practice on our current topics, a few word problems, and work with our online math enrichment program. None of those ideas worked like I wanted. The review wasn't transferring, students weren't confident enough to succeed on their own with the current topics, life happened and homework wasn't done for the next day's class.

Then I read "Rethinking Homework" by Math Minds.  It was a revelation! Homework can encourage conversation about what we're doing in class.  I ask my students to explain their thinking to each other all the time.  Why shouldn't they build a home-school connection and explain mathematics to their parents, siblings, babysitters, and anyone else who can listen to them?

I made a form, put together a problem, and wrote this letter to send home:

Dear Parents/Guardians:

As you are already aware, we have been working with the new Idaho Core Standards this year. Although these new standards have changed my approach in all subjects, the biggest changes have been in math.  The Idaho Core Standards ask students to solve multi-step problems drawn from real world situations and to explain the strategies they used in finding an answer. 

To encourage my students to explain their thinking, I am trying a new type of math homework between now and spring break.  Instead of a nightly skill review page, I will send home a single problem like the one on the back of this page.  Each problem will list the some of the standards students will draw on to solve the problem.  In addition, there is a place for you to respond at the bottom of the page.  Since explaining strategies and understanding is key to success with the new standards, I would like your child to explain his/her thinking to you.  Explaining how he/she solved the problem to someone who may not be familiar with some of the strategies we’re using in class will encourage your child to clearly describe what he/she is doing.  After you have discussed this with your child, please mark a selection at the bottom of the page and sign it. 

Thanks for giving this a try!  Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. 

-Jim Windisch

I'm just two weeks and four assignments into this grand experiment.  I always give my students at least two nights to complete it.  A few of my students have come a long way in explaining how and why they chose strategies to solve problems.  Others have been able to teach their parents something new about math.  Some are struggling with this, but I am supporting them by encouraging them to stay in the struggle and occasionally being the adult to sign the form.

I like to think that it has opened up some more communication about school between my kids and their families.  I know I will be asking parents about it at conferences later this month. And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...