Redos and Retakes? Management Strategies for that Endless Pile of Grading

I participated in the #sbgchat on Twitter a few days ago and the topic was redos and retakes.  It was a great discussion, and you should definitely check out the archive on Storify.  On simple grading tasks like quizzes or tests, this is a no brainer if you use standards-based approach to learning in your class.  If they haven't met the standard, how can you not give them an opportunity to reach it?  However, the waters get a little murkier when those long assessments like essays and labs start to pile up and then pile up again and again.  ​There is an element of time that has to be taken into consideration. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day.  In fact, I am writing this as I procrastinate grading a stack of labs that I will be looking at for the second and for some the third time before sending them off to IB for moderation.  A few people voiced this concern in the chat, but interestingly enough, when I went back to offer a suggestion to one of the participants, her tweet had mysteriously disappeared.  Was she shamed into retraction in the face of all of the enthusiastic responses championing the redo?  Perhaps, or maybe she was just having a day like I am today...drowning under a pile of labs with no end in sight!   Feeling Anonymous's pain, ​I am going to share some strategies that I use in class to cut back on the regrading. 

Strategy #1: ​Todaysmeet

First and foremost, you must have a culture of trust and collaboration in your classroom coupled with strong formative assessment practices. One strategy that has worked well for me in the past is to ask for a volunteer from the class to present their lab to the class for feedback.  Students usually LOVE to do this, as it is a safe environment to get some feedback before they have to submit their "final" write-up.  While the student presents, I have the rest of the class use Todaysmeet as a backchannel for commenting and asking questions during the presentation with me monitoring the conversation.  Since labs are divided into separate sections, we stop after each key piece and then discuss as a class, and review the chat.  I then give students about 5 minutes to make notes on their own labs.  Here is a link to the specifics of running a Todaysmeet backchannel in class, including examples from one of my lab sessions. 

Strategy #2:  Collaborative Team Docs

When I have students work in groups to design a lab, I have them peer edit in teams.  If I have three groups then Team 1 shares their collaborative lab with all of the members of Team 2, Team 2 Shares with Team 3, and Team 3 shares with Team 1, and of course they all share with me so that I can monitor while they are working on their peer edits.  All students are required to comment on the docs.  I give each team a lab checklist and a series of question prompts to guide them through their peer edit.  Then as a group they read through the other teams lab and make suggestions using the comment function on Google docs.  While monitoring, I will occasionally pipe in if necessary to redirect, or point out something that they have missed.  Though it is great to get feedback from a fresh pair of eyes (or three or four), the real benefit of this strategy is that every time they find an error on another group's lab, they reflect on their own lab and secretly (or so they think) they make edits on their own lab as they go through this process.  I also strategically pair up a model group with one that seems to be struggling so that the weaker group can see what a well written lab design looks like.  Here is a screenshot from one of these CTD sessions. 

Strategy #3:  First Come First Serve

...or the early birds get the feedback :-)  I take the first five labs submitted before the deadline and give them a once over.  I then hand them back with my comments for revision, but in addition, I create a general comments list comprised of common mistakes and omissions that I share with students on Google docs.  I then take about fifteen minutes in class to walk them through some ​of the general errors that I found and give them some time to make notes on their own labs. I then extend the deadline by a couple of days and direct the students to our Facebook group if they have any questions while they are working through some last minute errors that they discovered on their own labs.  By doing this, student are forced to start to recognize errors on their own, which pays off in the end when they are writing up subsequent labs.  I find that if they only correct errors that I point out while grading, they tend to make the same errors over and over again. This helps to cut back on this recurrence. 

Regardless, I still do my fair share of regrading.  In fact one of the labs in my dropbox at the moment is labeled "Final, Final, FINAL Hydrilla lab".  I guess I better get back to it.   ​

March Madness and How I Learned to Love Physics

It has been a rough week, and it is only Monday.  March Madness has an entirely different connotation for IB teachers.  While basketball fans all over enjoy the frenzy of NCAA fever, IB teachers are similarly overcome with a frenzy of panic.  Will I finish the syllabus before mocks or better yet, exams in May?  Will they manage to submit an internal assessment that will give them the points that they need to achieve their goal?  Have I done all that I can do to combat the senioritis that is invariably picking my students off one by one? This is my March Madness, and it happens every year like clockwork. It is times like these that I need to remind myself why I teach in the first place.

I have been teaching biology for the past 16 years.  It is my first love and my passion.  Naturally, chemistry fits right into my passion, so by default, I love chemistry as well.  If I could spend my days exploring the mysteries of these two disciplines in depth with my students, I would be a happy girl.  However, when you teach in a high school with only 200 students, you need to be a jack of all trades.  This means that physics has to enter into the equation.  For 13 of my 16 years of teaching, physics has been a part of my repertoire.  Every year, I converted countless students to the biology and chemistry fan clubs through my enthusiasm for these two subjects alone...and then I taught them physics.  A large percentage of the population share my former apathy for physics, and an even larger percentage of the population break out into a cold sweat and curl up into the fetal position at the mere mention of kinematics and energy conversions.  Imagine how hard it is to convince students to embrace physics when you yourself are counting the days until the trimester of torture will end.  I realized last year that I had two choices: learn to embrace physics and find my passion for teaching it, or move to a school with 2000 students where I could avoid it altogether.  

I decided that I could no longer let physics control my major life decisions, and I began my search for the magic that was missing from my relationship with Isaac Newton and James Joule.  It just so happened that I was researching games-based learning for my task force with the Research and Development Team.  To borrow from Dr. Strangelove, this is my story about “how I learned to stop hating and love physics” through gamification.

A couple of years ago, Jason Roy, a friend of mine who teaches Math, described a Newton's Law activity that he used to do with his physics students called "Save Kelly".  Essentially he would give the students a survival kit filled with random stuff.  It doesn't matter what you put in it, but you need to include ​materials that could be used to propel a vehicle of coins across the room on a string.  He would give them the period to design a vehicle and then hold a competition at the end.  He then had them write up their lab in a creative way.  One student actually wrote an obituary for Kelly.  You can imagine how that vehicle turned out.

Anyway, I thought the idea was genius, so I shamelessly stole it (with his permission of course) and transformed it into a week long project to introduce my physics game that takes the kids through the concepts of work, energy and power.  ​Since he frequently reads my blog (mostly to find ways to mock me), I am hoping that he will write a counter post (success...check it out) on his blog and share some of the work that the students produced. 

You can find all of the instructions and the rubric for Save Earth! under the Integrated Science Lessons ​tab.  Each year this project gets bigger and more fantastic.  Tomorrow as a faculty we are supposed to share ways that we address the following 21st century skills in our classes:  creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and information fluency.  This activity hits the three c's right out of the park.  I cannot tell you how much I love watching these kids struggle with epic fail after epic fail as they collaborate on creative ways to design their vehicles.  By allowing them three days to create, test, fail, destroy and repeat over and over, the learning that takes place is out of this world (pun intended... you will understand when you check out the assignment). 

Here is a video of my students working on this project this year.  Thanks Jason Roy for planting the seed. There is certainly something to be said for stealing like an artist.  It is hard not to love physics after you see this project in action.

http://bit.ly/14k981K

Breaking Away From Content Delivery

The more I research and reflect on how we learn best, the more frustrated I get with programs that essentially require teachers to teach to some form of standardized test in order to ensure the success of students.  Though I believe that IB biology provides a good platform for skill development in higher order thinking skills with lab design and analysis of data, I find the content to be too prescribed in terms of terminology and phrasing.  As a result, a teacher could potentially get great results by simply teaching the test using only a program approved textbook or study guide for teaching resources.  In addition to this, the time requirements for completing the "content delivery" in the higher level course, frequently prevent teachers from using more time-consuming, non-traditional methods such as project-based learning for much of the content. 

Several months ago, I read a great post by Shawn Cornally from his blog "Think, Thank, Thunk".  If you do not follow him, you should definitely add him to your list.  In this post, he made me yearn for a teaching situation in IB biology where I could implement all of the cool strategies I get to use in my 10th grade integrated science class (not bound by a standardized test at the end of two years) such as project-based learning and gamification.   ​The struggle he describes is one that I would love to tackle in my IB biology class.  I wrote to him to ask how he could possibly do all of that in an AP/ IB class (talk about your super teacher). It turns out that his school doesn't have an AP or IB program for biology, though some elect to take the AP Biology exam after taking the course.  I suppose the grass is always greener, but at the same time, I decided to make it my mission this year to find ways to move away from the test and challenge my IB students creatively forcing them to use those higher order thinking skills that we as a school have embraced this year: namely critical thinking, creativity, information fluency, and collaboration. 

My last post is one example of how I have moved away from the lecture model in IB to teach content that is typically delivered old school style.  Today I will explain how I taught cell transport processes using a new tool I discovered called Inklewriter.

It is almost a guarantee that my students will find a question similar to these on their exam in May of their senior year:

1. Describe the process of mineral ion uptake into root.
2. Explain how the structure of the villus in the small intestine is related to its function.​
3. Explain the process of active and passive transport that move materials across a membrane.  ​
4. Explain how a nerve impulse passes along a neuron.​
5. Explain the process of ultrafiltration.  ​

What do all of these have in common?  ​Cell membrane transport.  As a result this is one of the most crucial themes for kids to not only understand but also be able to apply to a myriad of situations. 

​Inklewriter is an online "choose your own adventure" tool.  Though you would typically find uses for this in an English class, I adapted it to address this theme in IB Biology.  Since cell membrane transport is dependent on several variables such as concentration of molecules, size, polarity etc., it reads just like a choose your own adventure story.  If this is the situation does it do this or this?   

Prior to class, I had all students sign up for accounts and familiarize themselves with the instructions on how to create a choose your own adventure story.  Then in class, I paired them up and let them run with it.  The majority of them chose to use a metaphor such as a bouncer (cell membrane) at a party, or Middle Earth (still trying to process all of the weird references in this one).  Others created their own fantasy or went the literal route.  ​

Either way, the entire class was actively engaged in this activity, and I was able to identify any gaps in their understanding of transport by reading their stories.  Since the majority of them also applied their knowledge of transport using a metaphor, they are more likely to remember how this works and be able to apply it to new situations when they learn about the different body processes or transport in plants.  The best part was that we only had to spend one class period working on this. The engagement factor alone motivated my students to devote more time outside of class working on this than they would have if I had simply assigned a reading out of a text for them to memorize. 

Here is a link to the assignment.  ​You can find a more detailed description of this along with a PDF file under the IB Biology Lessons link on this blog.

And the Oscar goes to...

...Argo.  Sorry to ruin it for you.  ​If you haven't seen it, you still have a few more days to join the fan club.  You might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with biology.  Well, a couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some engaging, informative videos on Cellular Respiration for my IB students to watch in preparation for our first class on Glycolysis.  After the 20th video featuring a slow speaking computer generated voice that could put anyone to sleep, I decided that I would challenge my students to create a video that they would want to watch and post it to Youtube so that we could improve the quality of video options available for students learning about this topic.  In this assignment,  I asked the students to choose the content for their video, and then provided them with a list of tools they could explore along with some style options.  Students were only given one class period to plan out their video with their group.  The rest of their collaboration occurred outside of class. 

Though a couple of the projects were contenders for the Razzies, or rather on par with the videos that inspired me to do this project in the first place, many of my students rose to the challenge. Not only did they produce some engaging videos, most of them chose to explore a new tool or method, including some that I had not listed as a possibility like Adobe After Effects. 

And the Oscar goes to... ​

The weasel and the gazelle (I am using their animal spirit names to protect their identities).

This video was created using the RSA Animate style of illustration.  ​You should have seen the outtakes :-)

Unfortunately, the second video I am sharing with you had to be eliminated from award contention, much like Ben Affleck, for his controversial use of a contraband video (illegally filmed without me knowing...clearly). The video in question depicts me singing "I Will Survive" using my travel mug as a microphone (filmed at the worst possible angle ever).  Needless to say this video is banned in most countries and the full video cannot be found on Youtube (I hope).  In any case, I decided to sacrifice my own pride and post a short segment so that you could see how After Effects can enhance a video presentation.  BTW, he added the laugh track.  He will pay dearly!  As punishment, "the peacock" has to teach me how to use After Effects, and I plan to stretch this out over many painful sessions.  Oh the things we can learn from our students!