Lights, Action, Ditto

I’m sending this out early because, as you know, the construction crew is taking us offline soon after the dismissal bell today.  It is hard to believe we are at semester.  If time flies when you’re having fun, we must be having a blast.  Either that or we are so busy trying to stay ahead of the constant demands that time gets away from us.

No doubt about it, we do have a lot on our plates.  We are still figuring out TEDS, HSE21 pushes us to look at instructional practices, the building project has officially broken ground, budget cuts keep worrying us, and in the meantime, kids keep coming through the doors. 

My Neighbors

Below are pictures of two houses which sit side-by-side in our neighborhood.  The first one belongs to the Fishers version of Clark Grizwold.  Chances are good that you have a house like this in your neighborhood as well. You can’t tell from the picture, but his lights are synchronized to a radio station.  If you tune in to the right station, you can watch the lights flash on and off to the rhythm of the music.  When my wife and I were out walking a few weeks ago, our neighbor was putting up the lights and called out, “Just wait until Friday.  You’re in for a treat.”  He was right.  It is a veritable House of Wonder.  Our kids want us to take the long route through our neighborhood when we come in at night, so we drive by slowly and are appropriately dazzled by the light show.

Lights, Action....

This next picture is a neighbor who lives to the immediate east of the Holiday House of Wonder.  My guess is this homeowner knew he wasn’t going to be able to compete, so he used a little humor and ingenuity to get a response. 

Ditto

If I have my etymology right, ditto is Latin for something that has been said before.  In this case, I think the neighbor is saying, “I can’t beat him.  I might as well join him. I’ll make his lights become my lights.”

HSE: So what does this have to do with us?

It’s a bit of a stretch, but I suggest that sometimes we are like the House of Wonder, and sometimes all we can manage is “ditto.”  That’s okay.  We do what we can do, use a little humor, keep our spirits up, and we all keep taking steps forward. 

I hope your holiday break is a good one.  Find time to relax, enjoy friends and family, and come back ready to light up your part of the HSHS neighborhood.  When that seems like too much, maybe a little Ditto can help keep you going.

Even though it has been said before, have a great break, HSE. 

Phil

I would like to end with a few words from a variety of faith traditions that seem appropriate for this time of the year:

• Always wear a smile.  The gift of life will then be yours to give.  –Rabbi Nachman
• Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.  --Thich Nhat Hanh
• Kindness in words creates confidence.  Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.  Kindness in giving creates love.  –Lao Tzu
• The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.   –Mahatma Gandhi
• May you live fully.  May you love wastefully.  May you become all you were meant to be.  –John Shelby Spong

To those words, I’ll add, “Ditto.”  Enjoy your Winter Break.

Essential?

Third in a Series on Understanding by Design: Essential Questions

What makes a question so important that it is essential to ask during a lesson, unit, or semester?  Arriving at an answer to this particular question is no easy task.  You would need to think carefully and ponder long in order to identify questions that are significant enough to reach the level of being essential to student learning.  

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, early in their book Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, include this paragraph penned by Stigler and Stevenson, who studied different approaches to education around the globe:

Teachers ask questions for different reasons in the United States and in Japan. In the United States, the purpose of a question is to get an answer. In Japan, teachers pose questions to stimulate thought. A Japanese teacher considers a question to be a poor one if it elicits an immediate answer, for this indicates that students were not challenged to think. One teacher we interviewed told us of discussions she had with her fellow teachers on how to improve teaching practices. “What do you talk about?” we wondered. “A great deal of time,” she reported, “is spent talking about questions we can pose to the class—which wordings work best to get students involved in thinking and discussing the material. One good question can keep a whole class going for a long time; a bad one produces little more than a simple answer.”

In the rest of their book, McTighe and Wiggins discuss what Essential Questions are and what they can do to improve student learning.  I will only scratch the surface of this topic today, but I want to include a few key concepts from the developers of Understanding by Design. They begin by suggesting a helpful approach is to think of Big Ideas and Essential Questions as the “flip sides of the same coin.”  The Big Ideas are the key concepts, knowledge, and skills that you most fervently hope students will take with them beyond your class and be able to transfer to other contents and to life.  The Essential Questions are the way to unpack the ideas.  As students start to find answers, they deepen their understanding.

Remember that UbD is a lesson planning framework.  It is not prescriptive and gives you lots of freedom and options to use Essential Questions in a variety of ways.  They might be used to hook the learner, to lead the learning during a lesson, to guide the students to focus on key concepts, and/or to stimulate ongoing thinking and inquiry.  They can provide a structure for lessons, units, and even whole courses.  They can be used as the daily or unit objectives.  They can be used as checks for understanding, as discussion starters, or as writing prompts. 

However you choose to use them, to be essential, these questions reach a slightly higher plane than commonly used questions—and even higher than very important questions.  Wiggins and McTighe say Essential Questions…

• Are open-ended and have no simple “right answer”
• Are meant to be investigated, argued, and looked at from different points of view
• Encourage active “meaning making” by the learner about important ideas
• Naturally arise in everyday life, and/or in “doing” the subject
• Constantly and appropriately recur and can be asked and re-asked over time

The Essential Questions are the key questions that students must examine and attempt to answer if they are to come to an understanding of the content to the extent that they can transfer the learning to new situations. 

No question, creating these questions is not an easy task.  When you get it right, however, you take a big step toward increasing student learning.  I started with an excerpt from Stigler and Stevenson about the importance of good questions, but I also discovered many other great minds share their perspective on the importance of questions. 

• The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.  –Thomas Berger
• Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.  –e.e. cummings
• Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and the importance of the question.  –Tennessee Williams
• Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.  –Voltaire
• Successful people ask better questions; they get better answers.  –Tony Robbins
• You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions.  The questions are diamonds you hold in the light.  Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.  –Richard Bach
• Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.  –Francis Bacon
• I never learn anything talking.  I only learn things when I ask questions.  –Lou Holtz

Have a great week, HSE.  May it be filled with questions that lead to learning.

Phil

Kudos this week to our media center staff.  I have been in schools where media centers are lifeless places.  Dust collects among the books and whispers are shushed to silence.  That is not the case at HSHS.  Our media center is a place of laughter, deck umbrellas, hard work, good talk, fun, and learning.  

Test Central

“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” –Nelson Mandela

This past week the boxes of End of Course Assessments were carted into HSHS and took up residence in Test Central, the Small Office Conference Room.  Starting this Tuesday, our students will start taking these high-stakes tests.  During the work of sorting and packing the ECAs, I tend to ruminate on how testing has changed education.

No question about it: Our current students are the most tested generation ever.

Like most educators, I have some biases about testing and am asked about these at times, often when I am unprepared for the conversation.  If this happens to you, the following three points about assessments in general and high-stakes testing specifically may be useful.

1)      ECAs Do What They Were Designed to Do

End of Course Assessments do a good job of measuring what they were designed to measure. They are very good indicators of whether or not students have reached minimum competency in three content areas: English/Language Arts, Biology, and Algebra I.  But let’s be clear: This is all they were designed to do.  They are not diagnostic in nature, and they are not designed to measure teacher or school effectiveness.  Certainly, there are attempts to use these tests for other purposes, but they were designed to measure minimum student achievement in three specific areas. 

Sometimes I think we lose track of this fact, and it is helpful to keep their designed purpose in mind.

2)      One Problem with Single Assessments: Margin of Error

Single Assessments are all imprecise to a certain degree.  Imprecision in assessments can be the result of many factors: poorly constructed test items, student lack of attention or effort, and/or mistakes in scoring or grading.  The impact of imprecision on interpretation of test scores is often surprising to educators and completely startling to non-educators.  To illustrate, Robert Marzano uses this equation:

Observed Score = True Score + Error Score

He explains: 

This equation indicates that a student’s observed score on an assessment (the final score on the assessment) consists of two components—the student’s true score and the student’s error score.  The student’s true score is that which represents the student’s true level of understanding or skill regarding the topic being measured.  The error score is the part of an observed score that is due to factors other than the student’s level of understanding or skill.

In other words, error is inherent in scores assigned to students on every assessment.  In his book, Formative Assessments and Standards-Based Grading, Robert Marzano provides this chart to show how dramatic the impact of error can be. 

Reliability of Assessment	Score Student Receives on the Assessment	Lowest Possible Score	Highest Possible Score	Range
0.85	70	60	80	20
0.75	70	58	82	24
0.65	70	56	84	28
0.55	70	54	86	32
0.45	70	52	88	36

Consider this: The typical reliability of a state standardized test is 0.85, which is very good.  Again, I defer to Marzano’s chart and his own words: “For an assessment with a reliability of 0.85 and an observed score of 70, one would be 95 percent sure the student’s true score is anywhere between a score of 60 and 80.”  Reread that line until it is clear because this is a really important concept about a single-shot assessment. 

Another way to look at the same numbers: Using our typical in-house scoring scale, we could be fairly confident that a student with an observed score of 70 is likely to have a true score between a D- and a B-. 

Spend some time considering this chart and the idea of reliability, and I think you will agree that good assessment and grading practice requires multiple assessments to get us closer to identifying a student’s true ability.

3)      It’s Not Just Standardized Tests: We Face the Same Problems in Our Classrooms

Bob Marzano doesn’t let us off easily at the school level either.  He states that the highest reliability we can expect from an assessment designed by a teacher, school, or district is 0.75.  Again, this is very good reliability for a school-based assessment.  The research from Marzano Laboratories, however, is that the typical reliability for classroom assessments is 0.45.  If we use the same example from above, this means that with the typical classroom assessment (which has a reliability of 0.45 and a range of 36) we can with confidence say that a student with an observed score of 70 is likely to have a true score between 52 and 88.  On a typical grading scale, this falls somewhere between an F and a B+.  That’s a bit frightening!

The good news is that our common practice is to have multiple assessment points, rather than just one exam.  The more evidence we gather, the better our understanding of a student’s true ability.  This is good practice and why multiple forms of assessment are more reliable than any one single assessment.

In Summary

If Marzano is right—and let’s face it, he is perhaps the leading educational researcher of the past two decades—his findings have major implications for our grading practice.  But that is a discussion for another day.  The topic for today is testing, especially high stakes testing.   Marzano’s research makes a very, very strong argument for using multiple and varied assessments at the classroom level, and it also reminds us exactly what our state standardized tests do well and what they may or may not tell us about student performance.

Robert Marzano’s argument is neither for nor against state standardized testing.  Rather, he encourages us to be informed about the science of testing and to communicate accurate information to people outside of education, especially those making decisions about how test results will be used.

I hope this helps you talk to friends, family, and acquaintances about these high-stakes tests, and I hope this week of giving ECAs doesn’t test your patience too much.

Keep fighting the good fight, HSE.

Phil

I started this week’s memo with a few words from Nelson Mandela, a man who exemplified to the world a life well-lived.  So Kudos go this week to our Set a Good Example students.  I love walking by the display case by the media center and seeing pictures of our SAGE students.  It’s a gift to have kids like this at our school.  We have the opportunity to teach them and learn from them. 

“There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”  --Nelson Mandela