R. Tyler Horner

Reflections on the School Year

During the course of the craziness that is a state testing week, I’ve had time to reflect on some things that I’d like to research more about this summer.

I’ve run across the idea of gamification in the classroom. It’s an intriguing idea to me, but I need to see some examples to help me wrap my head around it. I understand the concepts but for some reason I’m having trouble wrapping my content around it. If anyone has any good websites for resources that show real world games used in a classroom I’d love to hear from you.
I’m interested in better ways to motivate students when it comes to classroom management. I feel like I have a good relationship with my kids, but I want to break the cycle of having external motivations to act better. I really want kids to internalize the reasons we need to act civilly in class. I want to experiment with things like Classroom Dojo and similar products to better understand how I can use them in the classroom to my advantage.
I’m always on the lookout for how to streamline my classroom so that kids only have to go to a single location to understand and access everything for class. I’m not super good at it currently. I’ve tried Edmodo before, experimented with Google Drive, and housing everything in my classroom website and all of them have their flaws. I’d really like to simplify as best I can. I need to be intentional and really think through and commit to one thing for a school year. We’ll see if I can make this happen.

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment, and assessment in general, is a hot button word in the education word right now. That is a fancy way of talking about the ways we as teachers make sure that our students actually know the concepts that we are teaching them in the classroom. What I have also found as I review my practices in the classroom is that formative assessment is always happening if you know where to look (or listen) and that it does not have to be a daunting task that we dread doing with our students.

Before I begin my discussion of formative assessment, let me start by saying what it is not. Formative assessment is not a child regurgitating exactly what you taught them, it is not a test of any sort, it is not right and wrong. My position is that formative assessment should be varied over the course of the school year, engages the students in different ways, and should be happening at all times of the day.

None of us like the tedium of doing the same task over and over. If we as adults do not like having to do menial tasks on repeat, why should we expect our students to do the same things over and over while remaining engaged? I try and assess my students as many different ways as I can during the course of the year so that my students are never bored by allowing myself to become stagnant. We all fall victim of falling into routine during the course of the school year and to some degree that is not a bad thing. We all need to have routine in our classroom or there would be chaos, but what if you tried out one new way of assessing your students every week? I think you would be shocked at how much more interesting your class could become simply by applying one new technique per week. Think about all the teacher training hours that have been spent looking at different techniques for assessing understanding. I know if I opened up my filing cabinet (or Evernote), there would be mountains of things that I highlighted at the time that sounded so great to use in my classroom. Rarely, if ever, do I go back and review these documents and take advantage of them. The current push in my district is to utilize iPads and web 2.0 technologies in the classroom which means I am bombarded by different things constantly that I can leverage in the classroom. Between training hours and technology at my hands I can easily find the space in my lesson plans to try out one of these per week. My current technology is using Kahoot in the classroom for a quick assessment of knowledge. In reality it is not that much different than other quizzing services…until you factor in the competitive aspect of the program. My kids have loved competing with each other to make the leaderboard, even the kids that could care less about their grades.

I am a visual learner. If I see something on the screen I can remember it really well without ever seeing it again. In fact, when someone asks me a question about a seminar I have attended, I can usually picture the particular slide in my head. Imagine you are a student who is a kinesthetic learner sitting in my classroom. If I, as a teacher, do not go out of my way to vary my teaching, the kinesthetic learners in my room could be in for a long year. The point is that we usually teach in the way that we enjoy to be taught. Some people really enjoy having lengthy discussions with their classes, some people enjoy building projects, others enjoy multiple technologies working together, and some like to lecture and be listened to. All of these are not necessarily good or bad, but too much of anything leads to students who could care less about what is going on in the classroom. I have found this year in my classroom that simply giving students the choice of two different methods of proving their knowledge of a topic will increase engagement. On almost every assignment I have given at least two choices and do my best to vary the assignments to hit different learning styles as well as student passions sitting in my classroom. I have found less student grumbling about school work and more creative submissions. There are some flaws to my research and you may not get perfect results, but wouldn’t it be more interesting to look at a variety of things rather than grading the same submissions over and over? One of my personal favorites is allowing the students to create something that proves their knowledge of a concept. This really helps the kinesthetic learners in my classroom. This school year I have had one student build a replica of an early shotgun using cardboard and another student has build a realistic replica of the Alamo using Minecraft.

When it comes to assessment, our job as teachers is never ending. We should always be paying attention to conversations, products, working habits, reading ability, as well as dozens of other things in the classroom. All of this helps build a picture of the students in our classroom and their ability to comprehend the material they are being taught. The students do not even have to be aware that it is happening at the time that you are collecting information. Even basic conversations I have with my students is a way for me to gauge understanding. While my kids are working I will walk around and discuss elements that they are working on or have already completed. This allows me to alway keep in mind where they are at and what they need clarification on. This gives me a big advantage as a teacher. When you rely on quizzes at the end of a section or unit you are at the mercy of your kids understanding it the first time you tell it to them. The majority of the time this might confirm your student’s level of understanding, but what if it does not? Then you are “behind” because your students need to re-cover the material so that you can press on. Either that, or you are leaving huge gaps in knowledge for your students to catch up by themselves. If you are constantly assessing your students, it is very easy for me to recover the missed material the following day so that the gap is not as large and the students are not completely clueless when you are covering new material that builds upon old material. My favorite way to accomplish this is to listen at all times. Some of my kids think that I could be a wizard because I hear everything. When I look like I am not paying attention I am listening. I have been known to hear minute details while having a conversation with someone else in my classroom. This gives my students the pressure of knowing that I might come and talk with them about anything that is happening in their conversation at any time. You might be surprised at all the things you can hear if you just tried.

Choices, choices

This school year I’ve really been trying new things and being intentional about a few specific things. I’m really finding some interesting things about middle school age kids and their learning abilities and habits. By far the most interesting thing I’ve learned about students has been in the area of voice and choice. If nothing else from this year, I’ll always opt for student choice because of the change I’ve seen in student attitudes toward work.

I had read many articles and studies that talk about increasing student engagement and achievement in the classroom. Recently I’d heard a lot about the idea of increasing choice as something that would increase both. I decided that it couldn’t hurt, so I decided to try it a few times across both of my grades that I teach. With my sixth graders I noticed that the students seemed more energetic and excited when given the opportunity to choose from assignments that both show the same knowledge and skills in different ways. I decided to kick it up a notch and started using different learning styles and ways of communicating knowledge and what I noticed was that the kids did not complain as much (which is relative) and were being more creative in the things that they turned in. When I combined that with the ability to work in collaborative groups my sixth grade classes are buzzing with active learning.

The more difficult class, or so I thought, was my 7th grade classes. The majority of these classes had me the previous year, so I figured they would be more set in their ways when it came to the work they turned in. What I found was that similar tendencies happened with them even despite their comfort level with me. I did find that I needed to tweak my wording just a little bit to encourage creative and out of the box thinking.

Overall, I think that voice and choice over the course of the fall semester was a huge success. It is also so simple ti incorporate into my class that I see no reason to take it off of my lesson plans. I highly recommend trying it out in class.

TAGT Conference Reflection

Every year my district’s awesome parent advocacy group for gifted students offers scholarships to go to either the National Association of Gifted Children Conference as well as the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented Annual Conference. Every couple of years I apply for a scholarship so that I can continue to grow in my teaching of gifted students and try and stay on the cutting edge. This year the conference was in Houston, TX and I got a scholarship to go. I came away with three thoughts on my time there.

I love hearing about the different G/T programs that are offered around the state. This conference is a melting pot of people from all levels of gifted education from all over the state as well as the nation. Every time I go, I hear about how different districts provide services to their gifted students and I’m always amazed at the variety of programming. I made a point this year of asking people to explain their programming so I can become better versed in all the shapes and sizes of gifted education. I’m particularly fascinated, this year, by hearing about district’s magnet schools for gifted children. This totally makes sense, but until this year’s conference I’d never hear of such a thing.
I’m lucky to be in a district that is so forward thinking when it comes to technology. Every time I go to a conference I’m interested in learning about the newest and greatest technology that people are using. Outside of Dr. Brian Housand’s technology presentations, I really didn’t find too many new things this year. I know that this has a lot to do with the technology specialists on my campus as well as my district’s push to put as much technology as they can in our classrooms. One of the presenters was throwing out everything she could think of to try and stump me, but I’d heard of everything she had. I’ve had the opportunity to see Dr. Housand a couple of times this year and I really enjoy his presentations because I always learn a few new things to try out. This time it was some new techniques for designing presentations as well as geosettr.
I made the decision to attempt to present at the conference next year. I’m going to talk with a couple of my co-workers to see if they have any interest in presenting as well. I’m mulling over my topics that I might present on, but for now I’m thinking it would either be on narrative feedback in the classroom or student voice and choice.

The tail end of my trip to Houston was possibly the most memorable part of this excursion. North Texas was in the midst of one of the largest snow/ice storms I’ve been around for. I left the conference a little early to try and beat the ice freeze on Friday, but unfortunately I didn’t leave early enough. It took me around 3.5 hours to travel south to Houston from Dallas. On the way back it took me 8+ hours to drive to Dallas, and I still didn’t make it all the way home. Memories.

Pushing Others

One thing I’ve wanted to work on for the past couple of years is my ability to lead people who don’t think like me. It’s really easy to modify people who are on the same page with your, but pushing people to try new things and do things differently has always been a struggle for me. This week I took a new tactic with my department, and that is requiring change in small baby steps.

My department falls short in its adoption of technology of any kind. We have half of the department that does a very good job with technology and innovating in the class room, but we have another half that isn’t as innovative as our principal or our district is wanting out of us. In the past I would have allowed our campus technology person to present some technology and ask for people to try it out. This would lead to the tech-savvy people trying it out and reporting back to the group how it went, while the non-savvy people would get the pass on having to try something new. I want for everyone to get a taste of trying something with the possibility of failing, so I tried a new tactic.

This week I gave them a goal to be on Twitter for fifteen minutes over the course of the next two weeks (since we have Thanksgiving break next week. I based my number on an article I read extolling the virtues of Twitter as professional development and figured I would give my department a little more time than the article says. We each took a different educational hashtag to put into either Twubs or Tagboard and look for interesting articles. When we get back to school after the break, we’ll share our findings from Twitter and I’ll talk about using it consistently to innovate as an educator.

Students Grading Themselves

When my principal came to me at the end of the year last year telling me about the ROLE classroom and how she would like me to attempt it (with some other teachers) one of the things that made me leery was the idea of students assessing their learning for the grading period and giving themselves a grade with my assistance. I have now gone through this process with all the students in my class for the second grading period and I think that I have come to some decent conclusions.

First I think that students are more honest with you than you would think. My first grading period I was shocked at how many students were well thought out in their evaluation of themselves without much guidance in how to do so from me. Unfortunately for my students, since it was also my first time through the process I was still learning how to coach them up. This second marking period I added a Google Form for them to fill out beforehand that allowed them to process how they did this grading period and set some ideas of what their goals for the upcoming weeks will be and what their grade should be. The kids did even better with some prompting than they did when we began for the first time. I would say that 90% of my kids had a grade that I would have given them myself. The other 10% took a little bit of conversation to help them understand why their grade was either too high or too low. In the end, I reminded them that the grade is not important to me at all, I just want them to have an accurate representation of their growth this grading period.

Be careful with your prompting of children. I found that my kids had many of the same goals and usually they had to do with any prompting that I gave them to help them think through their growth. We finished a PBL late in the grading period and with that came a ton of different ways that my students could grow themselves for next time. When I reminded them to think through this on their Google Form, they all gravitated to one of a few basic skills for their goals. My hope was for them was to use my suggestions as a way to brainstorm specific skills each student needed to work on, but what I got was the path of least resistance.

The only other thing that I’m noticing with this process is that it takes time. For my classes, it’s taken me between two and three full class periods (of 50 minutes) to get a grade for every student. I have been asked a few times if I thought this was worth it, and I can legitimately say that I think this classroom experience is growing my students in ways that I could not have even planned. It was not evident in the first few weeks of trying, but the further in the school year we go the more convinced I am that this way of teaching is revolutionizing my classroom. I’m excited by where my classroom is heading and look forward to see where it is going to head in the future.

Presentation Fatigue

This last week was the first round of presentations for my classes. I go into this first round every year hoping that the kids will come into middle school with and innate ability to present information that they have learned. I show them previous presentations that have wowed me and point them to some of our eighth graders to help them with their technique. Without fail, there are always a few groups here and there that do an unexpectedly good job presenting for whatever reason, but realistically no group of students is any better than the rest at presenting.

It frustrates me too because our eighth graders are so good at presenting by the time they leave. I can’t help but wonder if the teachers are doing something in different ways that I’m not or if it truly is more about the age of the children. I don’t want to believe that 6th graders cannot physically or mentally handle presenting and just need practice, but the more I have students present the more I think that’s the case. If anyone out there has any suggestions please let me know you’re experiences because I almost feel like I’m getting down on myself.

Minecraft and Play by Play

I’m not too sure why I have always shied away from Minecraft as a teacher. Maybe it’s because anything that students want to play instead of doing school related things is difficult for a beginning teacher. Maybe it’s because our district hasn’t put it on every computer and iPad, unlike other games of this ilk. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been a bit stubborn and needed to change my attitude about something my students love to work with. Any way you look at it, my attitude changed this week and I decided to step out and give Minecraft a chance.

In my Texas History class we’re talking about the Texas Revolution and I want my kids to understand the battles, understand the momentum swings throughout the course of the revolution, and put themselves in the shoes of the Texas freedom fighters. With that in mind, I was putting together a project for our revolution unit I decided to try two different ideas that seem to be big hits with my students so far:

Create a reenactment of two battles of the Texas Revolution using Minecraft. For each battle include at least two recommendations for the Texas army that would have aided their campaign.
Create an audio recording of yourselves doing a play-by play commentary of one of the battles of the Texas Revolution. Be sure to describe major events, momentum swings, and who ultimately won the battle.

I wanted my students to be creative in their projects, but what I found is that the students are getting wildly creative with these two options specifically (there was one more) and have actively asked to get more time to work on these rather than doing other things. All free time this week was spent with kids working on these projects instead of leisurely activity. The kids really want to do well on these two because I think I tapped into some deep passions of my students without necessarily planning it that way.

I’m finding that my Minecraft kids are happy because they have a deep passion for Minecraft. They were going to be playing it anyway, so why not give them an educational reason to play it? On top of the engineering related reasons for them to play, now they can get another view of important battles in history using it. I’m also finding that my athletes are really pumped about the play-by-play option. Most of them watch sports religiously and are keenly aware of good and bad sports announcing. I tapped into this passion with this project and the kids have already decided in their groups who is going to by the “play-by-play guy” and who was going to be the “color guy”. The passion I’m getting for both is making me very excited to see the end results here in a couple of weeks.

A Weekend of Firsts

Most weekends are the same for our family. I take that back, after the fall our weekends are mostly the same. I feel like in the fall we spend time in a lot of different places for different family events, but as the spring season comes around we settle into a groove. This past weekend had a couple of things happen that were firsts for our little family:

Picture from Kam Abbott

Caroline went to her first pumpkin patch ever. I’m not a huge fan or opponent of Halloween. I think it’s an average holiday and take it as an opportunity to meet neighbors I never would have otherwise. Generally we sit on our driveway and talk with people when it’s light out and then retreat into our house once it gets dark. It gives us an opportunity to interact with people as they walk by and talk with other young families in our neighborhood, mostly because they are the ones who are out before dark. Part of any good Halloween is having a pumpkin. Not a fake pumpkin, although we have one of those too, but going to an artificial pumpkin patch in a church parking lot and picking out a pumpkin. We have two options in our neck of the woods a gigantic one with a carnival next to it or a small patch with only pumpkins. We opted for the smaller one for Caroline’s first so we could get some good pictures without making her crazy with all the noise.

After the pumpkin patch, we loaded up and headed off to the nearest Trader Joe’s…which was 35 minutes away. We have never shopped for groceries at one and had heard the magical claims of the Trader Joe’s faithful. We bought so much stuff while we were there. We bought stuff for lunches for this week, bottles of wine (which we don’t drink often), things that looked new and interesting, all kinds of stuff. When we got to the register I was a little worried about what number might be waiting for us, but it was about the price of an average week at the grocery store for us. We got home and tried some of our newly purchased food and it was all excellent. I don’t know if we’ll head there too often (because of the commute), but it’s good to know that it lives up to the hype if one decides to sprout up closer to us.

Stop and Ask Why

I got the opportunity a couple of years ago to become the department head of the history department of my middle school. I knew this was going to be a challenge from the day I took it over, but I always thought that it couldn’t be too challenging. I guess I never stopped to think about how the people in my department could make me stop and ask why I’m doing things.

Very recently I’ve started to get challenged on some basic things that I took for granted. For instance, this year we opted to not issue every student a history textbook. We did this for a number of reasons, the main one being that we thought that we needed to use the textbook as a resource and not a crutch. My principal and I both thought that history from a textbook is a boring way to be force fed history. Some of my department disagreed, but went along with it. For the most part this school year it hasn’t been an issue, but this week I feel like I’m starting to get more resistance. I’ve gotten challenged in meetings and it has been referenced in our department meetings. Usually, this wouldn’t have bothered me very much, but I was absolutely exhausted on Friday and it seemed to linger with me.

All of today I reflected on the situation and I had to ask myself why I’ve chosen some things that I have. I think my assumption was that my department all thought the same as I did about these topics, but when they didn’t I had to go back to the drawing board. What I settled on was that we’re doing the things we are in the history department because my principal and I think it is what’s best for the kids at my middle school. Period. All I want is for the kids that walk through this school to be taught by the best educators possible. I think some people in my department get scared when they see test scores. My focus is not the test scores, it’s making the teaching in my department to be the best it possibly can be. I have to remind myself that often or I start to waffle on what needs to happen.