My first experience using computers to teach was in 1993 when I was teaching French at a small, rural school in the Adirondacks. When the US Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York closed, it donated its old computers to regional schools. They were “286s” that basically only ran, well, BASIC! Fascinated, I taught myself BASIC and started writing programs to drill vocabulary and verb conjugations. I really have not stopped coding educational apps since. It turned into a very stimulating hobby and very useful for my teaching practice. (When we were doing remote learning during the pandemic, my students were already operating in a digital classroom and remote learning was easy!)
Those old “IBM Compatible” computers were designed by computer engineers for the business world. The input interface was a keyboard (for typists and secretaries who, in the old days, were the only ones in the office who needed to learn to type). The big, boxy device was designed to sit on an office desk. The software ran programs like simple word processors and spreadsheets. These are also office utilities. You begin to see where I am going here?
Computers like these were initially devised to increase the efficiency of offices. They were for business.
I saw my first computer game at my cousin’s house when I was in middle school. His family had an Atari system. That was also where I first saw coding in BASIC. I saw the early computer game, Pong, at a restaurant when I was in my early teens. And there was Space Invaders at the arcade in Old Forge… And there was an arcade at the Fairmount Fair mall … You begin to see where I am going now?
Computers like those were devised for entertainment. Whether for entertainment or for commerce, the whole paradigm was intended for purposes other than education.
I was computer coordinator in my school at the time when computers and internet first migrated into schools. I was there in the heated discussions over whether we use Mac or IBM. I helped wire our school for internet and networking. I ran cables through crawlspaces and attic spaces in the 70-year old school. Talk was about what kids will need in this computer age and mainly we felt they needed skills associated with business, so when we adopted devices that were primarily designed for offices and plunked them in classrooms we figured it was good. Computer labs were de rigueur in the late 90s and early 00’s. Each classroom in my school had four or five PCs, which we built in a basement workshop. We were running Windows, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and so forth. We were trying to bend a device and its software that was designed for business and entertainment to classroom use.
By 2012, smartphones had become ubiquitous among students and this led to a number of other problems. Young people mainly play games and socialize on their devices. Socializing mediated by social media platforms has made changes and caused problems we are only beginning to unravel.
People use digital devices to engage in commerce, participate in entertainment, and to socialize. These being the principle purposes of the devices, they shape the course of design not only of the physical device itself but the software and features that the devices host.
My thesis is that when we brought these devices into schools, right from the beginning, we were trying to repurpose things meant for commerce, entertainment, and socializing into an environment where none of those was our pedagogical purpose. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it does not.
What do apps look like that are devised for education?
I use the phrase “21st Century Learning Spaces” to refer to a digital device and its software that fit education well because it is designed for that purpose and not repurposed from some other setting. I don’t build digital devices, but I do write software. For the past ten years, my colleagues and my students and I have been dissatisfied with bending apps to serve an educational function and having it not quite fit. Every try to use Google Forms to give a quiz? Is that really easier than what we used to do?
I hope you will join me in the next few posts and permit me to unpack the 21st Century Learning Space concept with its implications, limitations, and applications to education. I hope teachers will try out Innovation Assessments and see whether I have managed to meet some of the criteria for educational apps in a 1:1 device classroom.
Play is an important part of growing up. Trying out roles, acting out adventures… imagination! Here are some improv activities adapted to the classroom with some rubrics.
I first saw these on a TV show in the ’90s called “Whose line Is It Anyway?” where comedians performed improv scenes. I adapted them to teaching French at the time in order to develop conversation skills and improvised speaking in a fun lesson. When I switched to social studies in ’04, I sometimes used these at the end of a unit.
Stranger in Town
This activity must have a real name among improv comedians, but I just called it this. Three volunteers come to the front of the room. One goes out into the hallway briefly, out of earshot. The two who are left quickly agree on a scene they will perform for 3 minutes. The person in the hall, the “stranger”, is invited in and the scene commences. After 3 minutes, the stranger has to guess who they are based on the scene, in which, by the way, they had to participate. Imagine walking into a room and finding out you’re Henry VIII!
Here’s a sample setup for a social studies class where students had chosen their activity in advance and I had prepared it. To save time, I would sometimes generate the scenes for stranger in town and have teams roll the dice to see which to play. The identity of the person playing “stranger” was always a surprise!
The volunteer goes to the front of the room, preferably to a lectern, and pretends to be some famous person in history. The class are reporters whom she will call upon to ask questions. Pretend you’re Hannibal and you’ve just gotten your army with your elephants over the Alps. Can you answer some questions from our reporters before you disembark?
Although I often had students prepare for these if they weren’t confident, it can be an improv exercise for the brave and bold. Let it be a surprise to the volunteer whom they will play!
Newscast
Two volunteers for newscast come to the front of the room to play reporters who are to report on a scene from history. They don’t know what they scene is until they get there! (Presumably this is at the end of a unit and the scenes are from the current topic of study). One student plays the anchor at the desk which the other is “in the field”, a reporter on the scene. A third student may participate as a bystander whom the reporter will interview.
In artifact, students create a quick construction paper cutout of some object associated with our unit. It could be an Egyptian scroll or a Greek sword or Thomas Jefferson’s quill. The student presents the artifact to the class as an archaeologist at a conference. For teaching world language, the artifact is something from our current vocabulary or reading.
I used all of these to teach French as well. For teaching world language, these scenes would not be about history, but of everyday life. Stranger in Town could be a scene in a restaurant and the stranger is a waiter serving a fussy customer. Press conference or newscast could be an event of current interest.
Improv is fun, but may not be for everyone.
Improv is fun. If you have time for it, dive in! Some kids are uncomfortable with this and I never made them play. I confess that in my later years teaching social studies, I was forced by time constraints to abandon these for my older kids. The demands of curriculum and remediation and state tests were such that the minimal content reinforcement provided by these activities, well, the juice was just not worth the squeeze.
Not all classes are right for this kind of thing. If you have a middle school class that has trouble self-regulating or is over-excitable, this may not be a good idea. It also does not work well with students who feel very uncomfortable in ambiguous situations or in performing. You will know who can benefit from this and who might not because you know your kids.
I first encountered Cornell format note taking in a college education class for teaching reading. I used it with my advanced French classes somewhat, but it became one of the cornerstone activities of my social studies classes beginning around 2006.
Cornell notes is a process that encourages developing reading skills, especially for informational text. It provides a study guide for later, although in truth few of my students used that. In my own experience, this method stimulates long-term memory. I believe this is because to complete the task one returns to the information at different levels of abstraction from text to outline to questions and finally to abstract of the whole. The repetition and organized structure of the information promotes that encoding into memory. In addition, it makes a good class activity: upon completion, students can ask each other their questions in a round-robin or pairs format.
The two informal studies below I conducted in 2013 and 2014 to examine the effects of this method on my students’ progress in social studies. Cornell notes became one of two options students had for processing their reading assignments for each unit. The other was summarizing, an equally effective skill. Consistently, about half my students preferred this method.
“Interim examination” refers to a regularly occurring examination measuring all course content since the start of the course. They are given at regular intervals as a progress monitoring method. They should be highly reliable indicators of achievement in the course (such as being highly predictive of performance on a standardized test) and teachers ought to be able to use the data to make decisions about instruction. A point worth emphasizing about the interim examination is that it is a test that spirals: each successive examination tests the content knowledge of the preceding tests and what had been taught since.
Forty-five students in grade seven through nine social studies at Schroon Lake Central School took the second interim examination in January 2013. Results for some classes were disappointing. An instructional plan was devised to improve student performance by the April interim examination. The most important aspect of this plan was a reading & note taking task. Secondarily, there was some increased exposure to domain-specific vocabulary.
The effort appears to have been successful. 17% more students passed the third interim examination from the second. The mean score went up 6%. The probability that the improvement was not due to random chance or other variables is 83%.
The Note Taking Task
The note taking task that was intended to boost student performance had two components: notes from textbook and notes from lecture. Notes had to be taken in Cornell Note Taking format. Cornell format training has been regularly included in the courses, including training at the start of quarter 3 on using Bloom’s Taxonomy to create higher level questions on the notes. The note taking task is graded as a “high order task” (high order tasks account for 65% of a student’s GPA in the course). Cornell Note Taking is a note taking technique well supported in research1. Students have two full class periods to begin the text note taking and then additional working periods when they may opt to do that. They have twelve days to complete the task as this is the time a topic usually runs.
Notes from textbook could come from any of three sources, designated as “below”, “at”, or “above” grade level. Grade level difficulty level was determined using Lexile and gauged by the Common Core State Standards grade level reading expectations. Students self-select for difficulty level in consultation with me. The amount of reading ranged from 8-12 pages.
Students doing the standard curriculum normally have 1-2 persuasive composition quizzes and 2 expository composition quizzes in each topic. The lecture included some information and media presentations intended as background or to reinforce key ideas as well as the direct answer to the composition quizzes. Notes required from lecture were limited to those aspects of the teacher presentation series that answered specific quiz questions. A modified lecture notes task is optional for students who are not sufficiently able to take notes. They get a copy of the presentation materials and add notes and create questions as for Cornell notes. The maximum score on this is 76 owing to the reduced workload.
Student Performance on the Note Taking Tasks
There were two notes tasks in the third quarter. The average score on the notes task was 70, the median 85. Around a quarter failed the notes task each time. Around half of the people who failed the average of the notes tasks failed interim three. The average score on the notes task was bore a moderately high correlation to year-to-date GPA in the course (0.70).
Twenty-seven students responded to a survey in which they were asked how well they like the addition of reading-note taking to their classroom tasks. 75% responded favorably. Prior to this change, assigned reading tasks were few. Save for grade nine, who had one short reading task per week as homework, students could get the information they needed to pass the quizzes elsewhere other than text – including studying the quizzes of students who took the quiz before them. The amount of regular reading in class had become far too limited. My focus on performance on content knowledge quizzes and on writing took me too far afield of reading for a while.
February, 2014
TOPICAL READING ASSIGNMENT USING CORNELL NOTE TAKING
For each topic of study over the year from February to February 2013-2014, students in social studies grades seven through nine at a small, rural school (N=~50) were assigned to use Cornell note taking for their assigned textbook chapter readings. The practice was initiated as a response to weak performance of some groups on the 2013 midterm examination.
Students are assigned ten pages of traditional textbook reading associated with the current topic of study. They may choose from three levels of text: a fourth-grade text, a grade-level text, and an advanced level text set at two grade levels higher. Providing reading material close to students’ independent reading levels gives them meaningful access to the information and support for continued reading growth (Allington, 2009). Students have two 45-minute class periods to work on the assignment and are expected to complete at least five pages per class period (this is more than double the time it takes the teacher to do the task). This assignment occurs before teacher lecture and is intended to support student learning by providing the basic groundwork information of the topic.
Students are trained in the Cornell note taking format (Paulk, 2014). Using a form provided by the teacher, students create an informal or formal outline of the most important top two layers of detail from the source text in their own words (Marzano, 2001). Next, students create questions to go with the information they recorded. Students are trained in a basic version of Bloom’s Taxonomy for the development of questions and are encouraged to devise questions and the analysis and evaluation levels in support of long-term memory of the information. Finally, students are to construct an abstract of each page of notes at the bottom, summarizing the main idea of the whole page in one or two sentences. Students are graded on the quality of their notes (Figure 2).The task is due at the end of the topic, usually around two calendar weeks later. Students have additional “working days” after the teacher lecture series, some of which they may dedicate to completing whatever was not yet done of the reading task.
Students are assigned the Cornell note taking method because of the strong supporting research (Figure 1). Research indicates answering questions on text to be least effective for supporting reading comprehension (Graham, 2010). Cornell note taking supports higher level thinking such as application, synthesis, and analysis (Jacobs, 2008). Note taking is one of the “most powerful skills students can cultivate” by providing “students with tools for identifying and understanding the most important aspects of what they are learning.” (Marzano, 2001). It supports encoding the information for long term recall more effectively than guided notes and questionnaires (Jacobs, 2008). Note taking is known to be an effective strategy “if it entails attention focusing and processing in a way compatible with the demands of the criterion task.” (Armbruster, 1984) In effective note taking, research suggests, happens when “students failed to take notes in a manner that elicited sufficiently deep or thorough processing.” (Armbruster, 1984)
Informal feedback from students shows the task is generally disliked. The two periods are not maintained strictly as silent working periods, though distraction is generally minimal. Weaker students are observed to be often off task. Examination of work accomplished throughout the period indicates some weaker students complete only a page during the whole time. The completion rate for this task only averages 80% in each topic September-January 2013-2014 grades seven through nine (N=54). Increasingly, this task is coming in late and poorly done with the mean score at only 72. The lack of sustained attention to task during the class periods allotted for this task likely decreases the effectiveness of the task, especially memory of the information (Armbruster, 1984).
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES PERFORMANCE ON THE READING TASK MAKE?
Five students in the sample who had a passing average for the reading tasks assigned in the 2013-2014 school year to date failed an interim examination1.
Eighteen of fifty-four students in the sample (33%) have a failing (below 65) average for the reading tasks. This includes scores of zero assigned for incomplete tasks. Half of the students who have a failing average for the reading tasks failed an interim exam. Five (9%) failed both interim examinations and four (7%) failed one of two interim examinations.
Only nine of eighteen students with a failing average on the reading task were able to pass both interim exams.
“Interim examinations” are ten-week tests of knowledge of course content going back to the start of the school year.
“Interim examinations” are ten-week tests of knowledge of course content going back to the start of the school year.
The reading task score measures how well students extracted the “study-worthy” ideas from the source text and prepared this content for learning. In this sample it was a weak predictor of performance on both the topic final test (correlation is 0.419) and the interim examination (correlation is 0.334). This stands to reason, since the measurements are for different things. Final tests and interim examinations are measures of knowledge of content.
For the 16th topic of study in grade eight, the task was set up as a “test”. Students were given 30 minutes to complete 5 pages. Students who needed more time received it, though a timer was left obvious and the room remained silent. Students commented that they felt they got a lot done in the more disciplined atmosphere. I am now assured that the class has completed the requisite reading assignment to understand the upcoming lessons and that the task was carried out in the most meaningful way possible.
Since the pandemic, learning from video has become more and more applied in secondary classrooms. In some quarters there were concerns that the demands of learning from video are different than the consumption of video for entertainment that most students engaged in such that student engagement with video lessons would likely be shallow. This shallowing hypothesis has not been consistently supported in the research, however (P. Delgado · Ø. Anmarkrud · V. Avila · L. Altamura · S. M. Chireac · A. Pérez · L. Salmerón).
It is certainly true that students viewing a video that is more than some six minutes long may find their mind wandering, but there are effective methods to teach students that skill set necessary to learn from video and to maximize the benefit.
Effective use of video as an educational tool is enhanced when instructors consider three elements: how to manage cognitive load of the video; how to maximize student engagement with the video; and how to promote active learning from the video.
Brame
1. The Innovation “Etude” Maximizes Active Learning
Innovation’s Etude is an app that maximizes active learning from video. I used this myself extensively with an 11th grade US History class in the 2021-2022 school year. The Etude is a research-supported application that takes a little time to create, but once done is there for your students year after year. Studies show that students who complete video-based learning tasks with students that include interpolated questions performed significantly better on subsequent tests of the material and reported less mind wandering that those who watched passively (Brame).
Teachers using the Etude to create video lessons can opt to add questions in multiple-choice or short answer format. These serve as guiding questions. Providing guiding questions to students promotes active learning by “share[ing] learning objectives with students, thus increasing the germane load of the learning task and reducing the extraneous load by focusing student attention on important elements. (Brame).” Some of my students liked to run down the questions and answer them before watching the video. They would then correct the wrong responses as they watched the video. This is a highly effective method that I encouraged all students to do.
In an Etude, questions do not appear unexpectedly in a dialogue box to interrupt the video like at some websites. Teachers can opt to set a cue point for their questions so that the question becomes highlighted at the right time when the video has given the answer. the video pauses gently while the student responds.
Students engaged in an Etude lesson can control the video playback and are encouraged to re-watch when they need to. Studies show that “[s]tudents who were able to control movement through the video, selecting important sections to review and moving backward when desired, demonstrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction.” (Brame)
The Etudes are self-scoring for multiple-choice and there is an AI grading assistant to help teachers score short answer questions that is easy to train. The scoring app is designed for maximum efficiency. instead of scoring a whole student page at a time, the scoring app prompts the teacher to view students answers one question at a time. that is, you would score all the question ones, then all the questions twos, etc. This increases accuracy and decreases time on task for grading.
2. Summarize the Content
For the busy teacher who may not have time to develop comprehension questions on video lessons, assigning students to summarize the content or take notes from it is an effective practice. Note taking from video lessons has been found to ” help struggling readers overcome their difficulties when learning from text blogs but not from video blogs.” Further, “Studies with undergraduate students […] demonstrated that students instructed to take notes recalled more information from a video lecture than the control group.” (Hashem Ali Issa Almuslamani, Islam A. Nassar & Omar Rabeea Mahdi)
Another strategy for engaging students in video learning that Innovation can help you accomplish is proctored viewing. This application is very simple: it monitors student screen activity during the playing of a video such that it can increase the chances of active engagement. The proctor notes are then submitted when the video ends.
Proctored viewing is less effective that the Etude or having students summarize the content. Proctored viewing probably works best for videos that are six to nine minutes long. Studies found that “the median engagement time for videos less than 6 minutes long was close to 100%–that is, students tended to watch the whole video. As videos lengthened ,however, student engagement dropped, such that the median engagement time with 9- to 12-minutevideos was ∼50%, and the median engagement time with 12- to 40-minute videos was ∼20%. In fact, the maximum median engagement time for a video of any length was 6 minutes. Making videos longer than 6–9 minutes is therefore likely to be wasted effort” (Brame).
[V]ideos […] have a direct and positive effect on increasing the students’ participation in the classroom.
Hashem Ali Issa Almuslamani, Islam A. Nassar & Omar Rabeea Mahdi
When students have submitted their proctor notes, the teacher can quickly view an easy to read summary of each student’s interaction with the video lesson. From there, teachers can discern the level of engagement to some degree. The proctor notes reveal when the student started or paused the video, for how long, and how much of it ran on the screen.
The proctored video app is useful when students are already likely to be engaged with a short video because of interest or prior knowledge and when there is some followup activity in class using the content. Videos are shown to increase class participation, so proctored video assignments can be useful tools to monitor some aspects of student engagement and support some accountability.
Innovation offers three research-based paths to engagement and accountability in video lessons. The apps were designed by working teachers and tested out by very ambitious teenagers who like to try to find software bugs. Why not give Innovation a try?
Sources
Almuslamani, H., Nassar, I., Mahdi O. (2020, May 12). The Effect of Educational Videos on Increasing Student Classroom Participation: Action Research. College of Administrative Sciences, Applied Science University, Kingdom of Bahrain. Retrieved 24 April 2023, from https://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/ijhe/article/view/17480
Brame, C. J. (October 2017). Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content. CBE—Life Sciences Education Vol. 15, No. 4. Retrieved 24 April 2023 from https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125.
Delgado, P., Anmarkrud, &O., Avila, V., Altamura, L., Chireac, S. M., Pérez, A., & Salmerón, L. (2021, November 30). Learning from text and video blogs: Comprehension effects on secondary school students – education and Information Technologies. SpringerLink. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-021-10819-2
If it’s a conceit of middle age to presume to have some accumulated wisdom or something to share, I apologize and ask your indulgence here. As I transition into retirement, I just can’t resist combing through my long career to try to find something of value.
For this exercise, I would like to imagine myself a guest speaker at a college course for aspiring school administrators. This is the kind of thing I would like to say…
Now, I’ve never been a public school administrator and nor have I ever aspired to such. I appreciate the enormous obstacles to success in this field even if not from personal experience. I have this idea that a person studying to become a school administrator could possibly find something useful in the views of a subordinate.
“Potestas (power) is the ability to do something, while auctoritas (authority) is the capacity to lead, and it comes from the respect one commands by reason of his dignity, his character, his knowledge, and his achievements. True leadership is the combination of both potestas and auctoritas.”
Cicero, De Legibus (On the Laws)
I taught middle and high school social studies. I got a chance in that time to teach about leadership and government in the past; what worked and what did not, maybe with some hypotheses as to why. An explanation from Roman civilization of note differentiated between two leadership powers: potestas and auctoritas. Potestas is the brute force to compel cooperation that societies confer upon their leaders. This is the power to force, physically or though threat of sanction, the cooperation of subordinates. Auctoritas, on the other hand, is the respect subordinates have for the leader that is born of leadership competence and compassion. Inevitably, a leader must get the cooperation of subordinates who may not choose that course of action. Leaders who rely on potestas use threats and sanctions. Leaders who employ auctoritas will get the participation of the unwilling out of respect. Roman philosophers regarded the leader who can lead with auctoritas, who seldom needs to resort to potestas, to be the superior leader. A society under such a leader will prosper and thrive in a more long-term and sustainable way.
Metaphors that work, metaphors that do not.
A metaphor that is apt for the skillful manager, the executive who operates with auctoritas: The Gardener. The gardener does not necessarily know how the tree produces its fruit, and they do not need to, but they do know how much sunlight the tree needs, what kind of solid promotes its growth, what pruning patterns best promote tree health and strong fruit yield. The good admin is a gardener who promotes the growth of their garden by creating the conditions for their success.
“Authority (auctoritas), not coercion (coercitio), creates obedience.”
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City)
Here is a metaphor that is apt for the ineffective administrator, the executive who fails under the modus operandi of auctoritas: The School Bus Driver. The school bus driver is in charge. They are the only adult on the bus, so they are the only real expert on how to safely get to school. Everybody better sit down and behave on this ride! This admin sees themself as the central visionary of the journey; the only legitimate commander. The value of passengers is relative to their obedience, loyalty, and willingness to take the ride wherever the bus driver decides is the best road to take.
“To lead the people, walk behind them.”
Lao Tzu
The reason that the school bus driver is a bad admin is simple: teachers are not analogous to kids on a bus. Kids on a bus are young, innocent, inexperienced, limited by their immaturity. Teachers are highly educated professionals whose knowledge and experience in their subject will surpass that of the admin except for maybe subjects the admin once taught. You can tell when you’re in the school bus driver’s meeting when you realize the supervisor is hearing you but not listening to you.
A metaphor that is apt for the good admin, one who guides by auctoritas and finds success: The Tug-o-war Anchor. The Tug-o-war anchor is the person in the back of the rope. They signal the group to pull together when it is time. They arrange the team members along the rope to pull where they are most suited. The goal is created by the team, not by the leader’s particular vision or prejudices.
The first quality for a commander-in-chief is to be a man of virtue. His authority must be based not only on his power but also on his character.”
Sallust, The Jugurthine War
How can a leader best approach morale problems on their staff?
The proof of the existence of a morale problem is that someone says it; nothing more is needed. If a lot of people say it, then it is a serious problem. If many drop out of committees, it’s not a sign they are lazy, but it’s a sign they no longer have buy-in. Why did that happen?
Potestas leaders eventually have morale problems. There is high turnover is workplaces with weak leaders. Denial or debating whether things are actually all that bad denigrate the listener and trivialize their feelings in ways that have no possible good outcome. That path only earns the contempt of subordinates. An effective leader works to identify the causes of the morale issue and then seeks the counsel of those affected to arrive at reasonable remedies. Leaders accept all morale claims as unquestioningly legitimate and seek remedies as best as possible.
How can a leader best view themself in relation to the educational institution?
Unlike in the private sector where subordinates are often less skilled or knowledgeable than managers, in education the chief executive’s main purpose is to harness the potential of subordinates whose knowledge and expertise is superior to their own in their respective domains. The educational institution that reflects only the vision of the executive officer is culturally impoverished. School leaders understand they do not always know best. They seek regular information from department heads. They accept the direction to which research and regulations point even if it does not jive with their “gut”.
How can a leader enjoy the loyalty and support of subordinates even when they must take decisions they oppose?
Good leaders will have already built a reservoir of goodwill among subordinates. From time to time subordinates will need something extra or unusual: a little time off, an indulgence for a mistake, etc. Such little things are opportunities to build a reservoir of goodwill such that generosity and indulgence from time to time creates an attitude they will fall back on in times when executives must choose an unpopular but principled path. Executives in such cases are also prepared to give sound and convincing reasons for their claims that any reasonable person holding the opposing view would accept as defensible.
A leader’s power is not enough to inspire loyalty and obedience from their subordinates. Instead, a leader must possess personal virtues, such as courage, integrity, and wisdom, that inspire trust and respect in others. This idea reflects the Roman concept of virtus, or the combination of courage, excellence, and morality, as the foundation of leadership
Leaders Must Be Good Communicators
Leaders who are unskilled often communicate poorly. They often fail to convince the listener of an opposing view. They know they have the authority to impose their view and it shows in their manner. Being unresponsive is another communication flaw. Leaving messages unanswered is not a legitimate way to deny a query.
When a leader who relies on potestas attends a meeting to observe the input of subordinates, they arrive with their mind already made up and with a view to performing the show of hearing what subordinates have to say. When a leader who effectively manages with auctoritas arrives at a meeting with subordinates, the plan will be the one the group arrived at by consensus. These effective leaders say things like “once we all agree, we will…”
One should maintain an abiding and unwavering respect for the truth. One should strive to establish a workplace that is stable, predictable, and intellectually prosperous. Subordinates should not come to work wondering what will befall them that day; what aggression they will have to defend against. The ancients knew this well and it is a body of wisdom well worth considering in the present. I am not sure that good leadership can even be taught or studied. It seems very likely to me that some people are simply born with an innate leadership intelligence, a social intelligence, that other people can appreciate and respect.
The purpose for introducing the constructed response question (CRQ) in middle school is to prepare students for this kind of assessment later in their education. Ideally, the task should lay the groundwork for the habits of mind that promote success and should accustom students in a practical way to the assessment itself, its common form and its vocabulary. Experience teaching this to eighth graders shows that one of the first major obstacles is to get students to move away from the reflex ingrained in elementary school: to respond to a text by stating what it says. The second major obstacle to teaching this is that students coming out of elementary school are wholly unfamiliar with the idea that some materials they may be given are quite possibly not reliable. In addition, they lack the vocabulary to manage the concepts of text reliability.
It is difficult for upper elementary students to address primary source material for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is the text complexity. Secondly, a limited ability to comprehend given their severely limited background knowledge (class lessons should remedy this). The middle school CRQ needs to be accessible to most students while still preserving the “primary source” characteristic of the task; the opportunity to see what people of the past had to say in the way they said it. It is often a further revelation to people at this age that the English language has not always existed or that it has existed in variant forms they would find incomprehensible. An appreciation of language change and variety plays an important role in addressing primary sources for this age not only for a deeper understanding but to appreciate reliability concerns of translation and excerpts and secondhand accounts. The documents for analysis in the middle school CRQ will be carefully devised in the following ways:
An image of the source’s original format and language will be provided for purely observational purposes. This may be merely an incomplete image or fragment.
A standard translation of the source will be provided despite that it is at a text complexity above the grade level band. This is also purely for observational purposes, though some students may make the attempt to analyze it.
A translation of the source into a Lexile range of 800-1000 will be provided if necessary. This is the document on which students are to work.
There will be a citation of the source in the simplified version of the citation format used by genealogists. Students should consider the source in their analysis.
One task will consist of two pairs of documents. Students will give the historical or geographical context of the first document in each pair. Students will assess the reliability of the second document in each pair. In addressing the reliability of the source, students will need more support, naturally, than their compatriots at the high school level. The second document in each 2 pair will ask the student to address reliability in multiple-choice format. This will habituate the student to the typical phrases used in addressing reliability. First, students will be prompted in multiple-choice format to identify the document’s bias, point of view, audience, or purpose. Secondly, students will be asked to identify the best use of the document for a historian or anthropologist. Thirdly, a multiple-choice format question will ask the student to conclude how the reliability factor affects this document’s use as a reliable source of evidence to prove something specific. This latter point is important to help students understand that sources may have different reliability depending on what the historian wishes to do with them.
The last part of the task calls upon the student to synthesize a relationship between documents 1 and 2. This will also be in multiple-choice format. Students will be prompted to use both documents in one of three possible ways: (a) state a similarity or a difference between the documents; (b) explain one change associated with a turning point in history that the documents reflect (the turning point will be identified for the student); (c) explain how some development or idea is the cause of some event, idea, or historical development reflected in both documents.
Gradually toward the end of grade eight, students will move toward short answer format CRQ’s as they will see in high school. Having seen the same wording each unit across grades six through the first part of eighth, the idea of context, reliability, and turning point should be well established. A multiple-choice version for students who are still developing the skill could be offered for a reduced maximum score.
Task Models
Borrowing from the “task model” concept used in developing the New York State Global history and Geography Regents examination part one (stimulus-based multiple-choice), the following are the task models for the multiple-choice version of the middle school CRQ. It will be important to use similar language in constructing the questions for consistency.
Which of the following [statements | titles] best represents the [historical | geographic] context of the [document | map]?
Correct answer will be historical background information not present in the document
One incorrect option will be of the type “This document is about…”
Correct answer will be geographic background information that explains the origin of the map’s information
One incorrect option will be of the type “This map is showing is about…”
Which of the following statements best represents the geographic context of the map?
Which of the following would be the best use of this document for a historian?
Which statement best describes the [point of view, intended audience, purpose, bias] of the document?
When point of view is asked, one incorrect option will be “first person’ or “third person”. This is to teach the student to distinguish between how that term is used in English and how it is used in social science.
Which of the following factor(s) would [weaken | strengthen] the reliability of this source for the purpose of __.
The reliability factors taught are: authorship, format, point of view (objective or biased), time and place, intended audience, purpose.
These will often have more than one correct answer.
The factors are listed, followed by a colon and a description. Example:
Point of view: The author is very biased.
These two sources are artifacts from a turning point in history. Which would be the best title for that turning point?
Which statement best describes a [similarity | difference] between the two sources?
These two sources are artifacts from historical events. Which statement describes a cause-effect relationship of the historical events the sources represent?
Assessment Task Comparison Across Three Assessments
The purpose of developing this task is to create a logical early training step for students in middle school working toward the assessment tasks they will see in high school.
Teachers use video lessons a lot these days, some they create themselves, and other videos that they find on Youtube. Not everyone has time to build a set of cued comprehension questions for each video lesson. Some teachers assign their students to summarize what they saw in the video. This is a fantastic way to keep kids engaged in the video, but it’s a lot of work scoring them.
The Innovation AI grading assistant is the perfect solution. In this post, I would like to show you how to generate a video lesson in Innovation and then quickly train the AI to help you score the summaries very rapidly.
There are two broad categories of AI: those that work using a complex algorithm and those that work using large language model learning. The Innovation AI is of the former type. The latter, the machine-learning AI, is exemplified by ChatGPT and the Bing AI under development right now. They “learn” by analyzing vast amounts of data across the internet. The Innovation AI is trained on five to seven models that the teacher provides for comparison.
I developed the Innovation AI to help me grade summaries and short answer tests. When I taught social studies, I often assigned summaries of texts instead of comprehension questions. It works by comparing the student text to a number of models and scoring the comparison on a dozen features. These features include measures of similarity like cosine and Jaccard, as well as readability, number of words, level of text complexity, and so forth. The scoring rubric was designed using 500 of my students’ work submissions that I had scored manually so that the AI essentially grades as I would.
The Innovation AI is highly effective for helping you score summaries and short answer responses where the range of possible answers is fairly limited. The AI does effectively recognize different ways to say the same thing using natural language processing algorithms.
Training the AI
When you train the AI, you give it model answers to use in the comparison algorithm. For short answer tasks, the limit is presently five models. For writing samples such as summaries and compositions, you can store up to seven model answers.
The process, in summary, is this: (1) Compose your own summary of the task or let the Innovation AI generate a summary from the source text for you; (2) Manually score the work submissions of your students who usually get full credit. When you find a submission to which you would award full credit, ask the AI to score it. If the AI cannot recognize it as a full credit answer, you “add it to the corpus” of model answers. The next time you ask the AI to score a student submission, it will compare it to each of the models in the corpus and award the highest score earned by the student in those comparisons.
Since many of us reuse our assignments from year to year, you really only have to do this once. I trained the AI on most of my Global 9 and Global 10 assignments in 2018 and just continued to score with those for several years.
Creating an Inbox for a Task with Embedded Video
Select the Inbox button from the new course playlist element dashboard.
2. Enter the title and some optional attributes. Paste in the embed code from the video you want students to watch and summarize.
Embed code from youtube.
Paste in the embed code.
3. Once created, you can click and drag the element to its right position in your class playlist.
Students Save their Summaries
When students access the task from the course playlist, they will see the video you embedded and the space underneath to compose their summary.
AI can coach students to write better!
The AI grading assistant can be engaged to coach students along the way. As they compose their summaries, they can periodically click the “Coach” button to get an estimate of their grade so far. In my experience, this promoted student prolonged engagement for a better work product.
The stimulus-based multiple-choice test item was introduced into the New York State social studies Regents examinations starting in 2019 for Global History and Geography II and for United States history. The task poses challenges for students such that it merits some regular, focused training throughout the year.
In a stimulus-based task, the student is directed to respond to a document, map, or image using their ability to analyze and their knowledge of historical context. In the case of the New York State exams, there are eighteen “task models” used when designing questions. For example, a student may be asked to evaluate and classify (identify) best use of a source or to respond based on knowledge of historical context. Principles of reliability assessment are applied here, such as when students are asked to identify point of view, purpose, context, bias, format of source, location of source in time and/or place, and/or intended audience of sources using background knowledge.
The first important habit of thought to train students to engage is to think beyond the document. Habit since their first reading lessons has asked them to find the answer in the text somehow. It takes a lot of practice and reinforcement to get students to activate their schema on the topic; to think of the story of which the document is but a fragment. The question cannot be answered without background knowledge.
part I of the Global and US History Regents
25-30 questions
primary or secondary source documents
M-C questions are always paired with stimulus
primary or secondary source
maps
charts
cartoons
may have more than one stimulus tied to it
no more stand-alone questions
estimate 30-45 minutes for this part of the exam
I used almost exclusively primary source documents for my stimulus-based tasks. This can be challenging for weaker readers, but with practice in skills for addressing difficult texts, this obstacle can be addressed.
My custom was to assign a stimulus-based multiple-choice at the end of every unit starting in October. At first, students find these very difficult. I use a z-score standardization procedure to adjust the scores so as not to bomb out their GPA while they are just learning. Click here to read up on standardized scoring. It is a great way to score students in tasks they are not yet proficient at.
Practice! Students are generally not good at these at first.
Read the question first. be certain you know what it is asking.
Remind yourself that the answer is rarely found in the document itself.
Identify the historical time period the documents go with.
Consciously call to mind the historical context of the document before you read. Try to recite to yourself who, what, when, where, why of the time period.
Use process of elimination to narrow down the options.
Some of my students always would wonder why ask questions this way. If the test writers want to know whether a student knows something, why not just ask? I don’t have a good answer for this. I strongly support instruction in social studies that calls upon students to think critically and make meaningful connections with knowledge. I also think that students should actually possess knowledge. This assessment method was no doubt inspired by AP history exams. It remains a question in my mind as to whether this level of complexity is necessary for an instrument for secondary school evaluation. If we want to know whether the student knows what caused the French Revolution, for example, maybe we should just ask them that?
The updated New York State Regents examination in United States History and Government, part II, is a short essay task designed to measure students’ ability to work with historic documents. It is a mature version of the “CRQ” found on the tenth grade Global Regents. Students are called upon to understand text, engage it with historical context, and assess a text’s reliability.
In document set 1, students describe the historical context surrounding two documents and identify and explain the relationship between the events and/or ideas found in those documents (Cause/Effect or Similarity/Difference or Turning Point).
Turning point is always the most challenging for students, mainly because it demands a strong knowledge of historical context which only the higher performing students usually possess. In stating similarities and differences, it is important to stress to students that this should be a substantial feature of the two texts, not trivial. For example, some students may respond something like this: “Document one is a cartoon and document two is a newspaper report”. This is trivial and should be discouraged. For cause and effect analyses, remind students that some events may lie outside the documents at hand, so they may need to rely on their historical knowledge.
Document set 2 asks students to describe the historical context surrounding two documents and (for one identified document) analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects the document’s use as a reliable source of evidence.
A good strategy for ensuring students possess the skills to address this task is to be certain to assign one every month or so throughout the year, followed by a debriefing where the class can study their classmates’ work (anonymously) and develop strategies for improvement.
Weaker readers are particularly disadvantaged in this task, although since the test items are field tested before administration it is likely the field testing will mitigate some issues with the difficulty of reading some primary source texts. Students can be taught compensatory reading strategies to help deal with difficult texts.
As always, the challenge is to ensure that students have learned a strong body of historical context. That is, the best marks are reserved for those who actually recall the history and who can analyze it (cause-effect, turning point, etc.) This is best achieved by regularly administering quizzes on historical knowledge. I like to give students time in class to study for these. The apps here at Innovation Assessments are especially suited to that end. A lot of social studies assignments can tend to be just look-it-up and transfer kinds of exercises without real demands on students to remember. This is an easy instruction error to remedy.
Teaching factors affecting the reliability of sources is another matter. This takes a great deal of time and practice and, I would argue, is of upmost importance for a person’s education in this day and age. Students, for the most part, do not intuitively analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects a document’s use as a reliable source of evidence. They tend to take what we give them on face value. It is important to teach students to think critically and approach all historic documents with a healthy skepticism.
I think teaching reliability should begin young, down in middle school. Engaging students with documents that have very vague reliability weights is a good practice. In a debriefing after the task, it is useful to anonymously display some student reliability evaluations for all to see and to discuss. It is important to do this regularly, starting off right at the start of the school year. There are really no stock phrases that students can learn by rote for this, given the variety of context and source material. I had the benefit of working in a small school where I had the same students grades seven through ten or eleven, so I could implement reliability assessments early in my program. In larger school districts, it would be good to consider a commitment to reliability factor training from an early age. I assigned one longer primary source to analyze each topic (so about once a month). This short essay included an extended analysis of reliability in a conclusion paragraph. The training paid off and when my eleventh graders were preparing for the Regents in US History and Government, they had little difficulty with reliability factors.
A good piece of advice on this is to assign students to do this every month in grade eleven. I suggest assigning it as a test each time. Coach students on the historical context they have to memorize in advance. Lots of teachers assign these for homework, but this entirely misses the point of such training. Student independent work practices are highly efficient in applying the minimal effort to a task, including copying their colleagues’ work or copy-pasting from a source. If they are not doing these without notes, they’re not really practicing.
If you are afraid to assign your students this as a test because they are not likely to do well at first and don’t want to bother their GPA, I recommend using standardized scoring. You can use the z-score calculator here at Innovation Assessments. Use 78 as your standard mean and 14.8 as your standardized standard deviation. Read more about standardized scoring here and where I got those figures. The beauty of this system is you can apply this to their grades every month and as the class improves, as the class average approaches the standardized mean (78 in this case), then the algorithm affects their scores less and less.
Once you have scored their papers, select out some problem responses for class discussion in a debriefing. Keeping the responses anonymous, review how to improve the answers next time.
The short essay is 14% of the Regents score, so for passing the text it’s a good practice. But I would suggest that this kind of work as a regular lesson is extremely valuable as an educational tool. Studying primary sources rightly should take center stage in our social studies lessons. It is not just teaching to the test to do this. It is developing a critical thinking skill set and insisting on recall of historical context that are the values here. Remember, that the highest valued performance is that which is based on a substantial recall of historical context!
I have been procrastinating writing this post. Probably because, like many of the readers who taught online during the pandemic, this is not exactly a fond memory. However, I have two reasons to move this task to the top of my to-do list. Firstly, I am aware that it has already been three years and I don’t want to forget anything important. Secondly, I will be teaching a course online next year and I want that to be a highly successful enterprise. I think there must be lessons to learn on reflection from teaching secondary level students online.
Pre-pandemic Experiments in Remote Teaching
My first foray into teaching online was a pilot online class I taught in 2016-2017. It was called Virtual United Nations. My school was a small, rural Adirondack district with limited offerings outside the core subjects and remediation. I was active on the technology committee and we found distance learning, as it was envisioned in the 1990s, was not going to work for us.
I had four students in the pilot course. It was an asynchronous course, the final project of which was participation in a regional high school United Nations simulation. For me personally, this course had the dual purpose of satisfying a graduate course requirement in digital teaching and learning through Empire State College. My paper is attached below.
At the time the pandemic hit, I was teaching social studies for grades 6-10 and a French class for grade 6. Schools in New York State closed 13 March 2020, supposedly for two weeks. I did not set foot in the school building again until September.
Like most schools in the region, our students all had Chromebooks. We scrambled to send middle and high school students home with these and chargers. Our plan evolved somewhat from its start, but eventually we settled on mostly synchronous remote classes that followed the same daily schedule as our regular day. At the end of each week, we were required to submit a summary of the week in our remote classes, including what we covered, student and teacher morale, and participation rates. I was able to search my email sent box to save copies of my reports from 13 March to 12 June 2020.
Lessons Learned
Here are some highlights of what I learned about online teaching from my weekly summaries in 2020:
24 AprI prefer delivering prerecorded video lessons to the live video. I think the live video sessions may turn out to be more PR than substance for a lot of reasons. I like them, but we’ll see. I embed my prerecorded video sessions with questions.
01 MayIt makes me feel happy to interact on video with [students]. I am still just learning how to conduct video classes. This week, I make them show their faces and I call on them to respond.
8 MaySadly, my little Zoom “working together” idea did not work – no one showed. The streaming lessons are the highlight of my week because I get to see the kids, but I only get 6-8 now whereas I was getting the majority the first week.
08 May Education for people under ~17 needs to be a social, in-person experience and the governor’s “re-imagined” education might fail to see that. We are still primates, after all, and education requires the physical presence of teachers until upper high school.
15 MayParticipation in live streaming classes is very poor even with a reward system. I only get 3-6 kids out of classes of 20. These are among the highlights of my week, though. I put together nice presentations and I like seeing them.
15 MayI got good participation in a survey asking successful online learners to share their secrets.
15 MayI probably did not need to shorten 8th and 9th grade curriculum as much as I did.
15 MayI have found breaking the tasks down to smaller steps so there is some small thing to do each day a highly effective practice for remote learning.
12 JuneBreaking tasks down into daily 25-30 minute bits works great and I’ll do that in-building now too
12 June “Remote learning” is NOT “homeschooling” and I worry that we burden parents too much.
12 JuneI think about 40% of my students need to be in school with a person teaching them.
The paper “Successful Students Share Their Secret for Online Learning” is linked below. This was an extended survey of 21 (out of 87 total students on my roster that year) of my most successful students in remote learning during the pandemic. You can see for yourself the good advice they shared and some interesting survey results that may not be very surprising.
Overall, participation actually remained fairly stable, especially in grades nine and ten. I did a study in May of task completion rates of my freshmen and sophomores since 2017 and found only little changed in the pandemic. This was very surprising, since subjectively, it felt like it was a real struggle to get work in. I gave little assignments and took a grade a day. That’s how I teach in-person too, actually. The paper linked below, “Task Completion Study”, also includes a fairly comprehensive description of how I taught online. Many of those practices I retained when we returned to in-person and we had Chromebooks in class.
The curriculum and assignment length were modified under remote learning. Assignments were decreased in size and duration. I avoided assigning multi-day tasks because many people just wait until the last minute to do it all, to poor effect. Students were also getting graded on “lectures” now, which consisted of 12-15 minute video tutorials embedded with questions. Some of the few multi-session tasks I normally assign in class, I now broke up into smaller assignments. The unit reading task, normally four pages to read and process, was reduced to three . In consequence of the setup of remote learning assignments, I did not complete the curriculum in grade nine to the point in history that I usually do and I moved some topics to the second part of the course to come in grade ten. I actually had more teaching time for grade ten under remote learning because, with Regents exams cancelled, I now had twelve extra lessons since I did not have to stop teaching and do review. There were on average 45 assignments across grades nine and ten in these courses over the date range. The 15% jump in the number of assignments under remote learning is because the tasks were broken down into more numerous, smaller steps. This cannot be interpreted as an increase in workload.
Resources in my online courses were curated through my own website, InnovationAssessments.com. Assignments were organized and posted at Planbook.com. Students were expected to complete one social studies assignment each school day. Courses were mostly asynchronous, save for a 30-minute live streaming lesson once a week which was optional and non-graded (there was a reward system built in for attendees). Video tutorials with multiple-choice questions ran 12-20 minutes, averaging around 14 minutes. Students were invited to attempt these twice for a higher grade. Textbook reading tasks consisted of either three- or four- page reading selection to process or multiple-choice comprehension questions. Each unit has an essay on a primary source where one session was reading and outlining the important points and one session was to compose the essay. There were a number of multiple-choice and matching quizzes which usually take about five minutes exclusive of pre-study time (students can rehearse the questions and answers in advance of some of these, so it’s very easy). Other assignment types follow similar patterns. In my opinion, a good estimate of the time commitment for the average student would be about 25 minutes a day on social studies in grades nine and ten under remote learning for the date range. I charge a late fee of ten points per day late just as in regular school and if students contact me with good reason or if students work to catch up a lot of work in a short time span, I always waive these late points.
Morale: Theirs and Mine
The short story on student morale as near as I could detect it was that it was always good. None of my weekly summaries reported adverse student morale. However, as the year progressed, some students dropped out of participation so I can only report on the students who were still involved.
My own morale story is more complex. In my memory of the events, it is all negative. But reading the contemporaneous notes of 2020, I see that it started out just fine. On 20 March, I actually wrote “My week went great. I absolutely love working from home. If I could, I would switch to just doing this.” Ugh. By my last entry on 12 June, I wrote “I endured the most serious aversion to teaching I ever experienced. This is not because it was online. I can teach online just fine. The reasons were complex… no room here… but I am getting better and look to the summer and next school year with a sense of optimism and hope.”
The problems were not really connected to online teaching…
When on 12 June 2020 I wrote “The reasons were complex… no room here… ” I was alluding to a collection of things that were aggravating in the extreme. This only got worse in the coming school year. The things that made working in my district an aggravating and unpleasant experience are largely beyond the scope of this article, but these things, they were born of the pandemic. My school district imposed actions, directives, and policies which ranged from the insufferable to the outrageous. This trend gradually broke my working relationship with my district and inspired me to hasten my retirement and to request part-time work in my last year. Though I was not one of the 16% of the faculty who resigned or retired early that year in my district, I was aiming to get out as soon as feasible.
Innovations
The pandemic fostered a large number of innovations for my teaching in a digital environment. One issue of note, which I would like to address in a separate post, is the issue of online testing. Is it possible to offer valid, reliable assessments in a remote teaching situation? I am convinced that this will improve in the coming decade, but there is a lot that can be done now.
A few of the innovations that were inspired by the pandemic remote learning situation involved devising ways to give good online tests. My district subscribed to a service called “GoGuardian”, which allows me to view and control student screens. I cannot emphasize enough how important this was. But at my own site, I developed a number of useful apps. One was a parent proctoring system. Parents needed to enter a code to let students take a test. Another was a sort of AI proctor I developed in JavaScript that tracked student activity online while they worked.
I wrote a short paper on this experience. It is linked below. With the help of my colleague in the math department, we established that an examination of student scores on online tests showed no real change from performance in the classroom, thus supporting with this small study the idea that secure online testing is possible.
I am reminded now of a student who was taking one of my “credit by examination” tests. While he was writing his essay, I was able to watch his screen and my own app would prevent him from leaving the test web page in order to look something up (to cheat). I watched him type sentences I knew were not likely his — I discovered he was using his phone. Easy catch. I typed in his sentences into Google search and quickly located the web page he was copying from on his phone. It was easy to award no credit for the task and provide the very websites in rationale where he cheated.
Teaching in the pandemic for me was an adverse experience, though not for the reasons one might think. I believe it would be a good effort toward justifying the adversity if some lessons can be gleaned from my patient endurance.
