Learning On The Job

As I explain over on my ‘other’ blog, I’ve never been very happy with how electronic gradebooks deal with criterion-based assessment, particularly as it relates to the MYP. So over the years I gradually developed my own for my math classroom using Excel and a few macros. Since then I’ve created versions for most if not all of the MYP subject groups. (Downloads below as .xlsm files (Excel 2007/2010 macro enabled))

Each gradebook should use the correct criteria and attainment levels for your subject so make sure you download the right one. If there is a mistake, or if there isn’t one for your subject, let me know and I’ll try and fix it ASAP.

I’ve also created a few short screencasts using Screenr on how I envision the gradebooks being used. (If you click on the full screen icon, it’s much easier to see!) Because I believe sharing makes things better, feel free to hack away at these and adjust them for your own use. Because I see these as being covered by a Creative Commons license (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike) all I ask for in return is that you attribute me, you don’t make any money off of them and you share what you create as well!

Adding Assessments to the Gradebook

Determining Quarter Scores

Collecting Formative and ATL Data

Gradebook Downloads

MYP Arts

MYP Language A

MYP Language B

MYP Mathematics

MYP Humanities

MYP Science

MYP PE

MYP Technology

I’m just finishing my 9th year in an MYP school. In that time I have supervised my fair share of personal projects. A few have been fantastic, a few have been shocking, but the vast majority have been average at best. With the release of new guidelines for the personal project comes a chance for us to reinvent how we introduce and, ultimately, get the students to think about the personal project.

When Andrea Law, our MYP Coordinator, and I started talking about this, we decided we needed to find a way to get the students to invest themselves in this year-long project and truly make it personal. Too often in the past students chose topics that they thought would be easy or help them get a good grade rather than one that they truly cared about.

Instead of starting with an Area of Interaction (AoI, which, to be honest, they don’t always truly understand), we asked the students to identify problems that they see in their world around them. They could be huge global problems like poverty; they could be problems based on their community like friends not truly understanding the importance of the Tet holiday; they could be individual problems like not having enough space in your room for your stereo and computer.

Once they identified a few problems, students were asked to write down their personal connection to each of those problems. Why did they matter? Possible links to AoIs were established here as well.

Once personal connections were identified, students began thinking about a solution: what could they make or do in order to address the problem. After conferencing with their peers, students then came up with the topic for their personal project.

All of the information about how they came up with their topic (problem, connection, AOI, and solution) was submitted by survey by each of the students. Teachers then read each description (without student names) and signed up to be supervisors based on their own interests as well.

Andrea, Joyce the librarian, and I just spent the morning rotating between the three homerooms talking about important aspects of the personal project students need to address over the summer: organizational details and meeting with supervisors; information literacy and evaluating sources; and the process journal and blogs.

I’m really excited by the quality of the topics that were decided upon by the students. I could immediately tell that the problem solving  approach has made the whole concept of the personal project much more accessible. I think we’ve also helped the students choose topics that they are really interested in. This will have such huge impact on how the view this year-long process!

Devojka mala by Sebastian Adanko

As so often happens, it started with a tweet:

My response:

For fear of turning into its biggest fanboy, this is one of the things that I love about the MYP. The focus is more on unit planning rather than lesson planning. The focus is not on presenting your content in a specific order; it’s on engaging and connecting with the students.

Everybody (I hope) has a curriculum document that states the content standards that need to be covered. But is there any reason why that needs to be the focus of your unit, with intermittent and ancillary connections made to things that matter to your or your students? Why not start with the things that matter to the students? Ask questions, provoke discussion and debate, get the students invested into the class, all the while knowing where you as a teacher want to end up. That’s what I mean by planning for passion.

I’ve been busy preparing for my upcoming MYP workshop in Mathematics and I’ve been getting all ‘Presentation Zen‘ on the slides. Yes, it adds to the amount of preparation (I could just use some ‘canned slides’ for all workshop leaders) but this way

• gives me ownership of the content
• makes me really think about what I’m presenting
• allows me to make something that I’m proud of
• will be more helpful to my participants (I hope).

One of the ideas that I was really struggling to present was the difference between transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. I realized it was because I didn’t fully understand the nuances of them myself!

So, with the help of Twitter (@klbeasley, @amichetti, @stangey especially) and our Curriculum Coordinator, I came up with the following visual metaphors for monodisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching and learning. I wanted something that people could recall in their head to help explain the differences between these terms.

All of the original images used were found on Flickr and licensed under Creative Commons. Please feel free to use or reuse them as you see fit!

I have included some brief explanations on the Flickr pages (each image links back to its Flickr page) for each image but have purposefully left them off here. I wonder if those images clarify, to you, the differences? If you go back and read the explanations, does that help?

Any comments or suggestions, either on the content or the presentation of the slides, are greatly appreciated!

I just received the feedback forms from my first MYP Mathematics workshop that I led in March.

It’s mostly encouraging, although the few responses in the “Strongly Disagree” column really jump of the page.

• One person strongly disagreed with the statement “Information was presented in a clear and organized manner.”
• One person strongly disagreed with the statement “I gained a deeper understanding of how to achieve horizontal and vertical articulation.” (This was probably, overall, my weakest point according to the results.)
• Two people strongly disagreed with the statement “I can use what I learned in this workshop to collaborate effectively with other teachers in my department/school.”

In general, the feedback was quite positive. 78% rated the overall quality as “very good” or better. 88% were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the workshop. Overall, I’m not too concerned if one or two people didn’t like my presentation style: I know it is impossible to please everybody. I also know that we (as a group) chose to focus on certain things, such as assessment, at the expense of others, such as interdisciplinary planning. It does concern me that two people walked away feeling that didn’t learn anything that would allow them to collaborate effectively with others, especially since the main thrust of many of my sessions were around using Zoho Docs to create and edit collaborative documents, particularly when it came to planning.

In the free response section, some of my strengths were listed as:

• Very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. Listened to participants very well. Led discussion well and allowed time to cover topics participants needed to know about.
• He obviously is an extremely organised teacher with very thorough methods of assessing his students. He was reactive to needs of the group, was able to answer (almost) any question that was set and clarified some of the less concrete MYP requirements (the unit question/significant concept debate)
• He was very open to people’s ideas – and as result participants were very open to share and accept feedback. He did not allow arguments about assessment to go onto long.
• Kept the group on task, listened to everyones point of view, accepted the times when someone disagreed with him and was always open to other people’s points of view.

Some of the suggestions for me:

• Some people in the workshop kept having private conversions during the workshop which made it very distracting. I wish he had a creative way of addressing that situation.
• differentiate the sharing session by grade levels
• some of the participants were a little disgruntled that we started things and put them aside without unpacking them or wrapping them up (eg. the newspaper exercise). That said, the ability to share our work and ask numerous direct questions about our practise meant that something had to give…
• Make a summary of what has transpired in a previous session before proceeding to the next session.
• More time is needed sharing resources and actual units of work. More time spent on mathematics and less on general IB topics.
• I thought the first day included too much introductory information about the MYP as this was a stage 2 course. (Not a big issue but this would be my only criticism of the course.)

Probably my biggest concern as the workshop leader was my midjudgement of time. As two of the suggestions point to, we didn’t have enough time to complete the task and then have a discussion about the task. I had hoped that a lot of that ‘unpacking’ would have happened in their own personal reflections on the session (I tried to incorporate a different Visible Thinking Routine for each session, both to model the use of VTRs and to give some variety in how participants were reflecting upon their learning).

Any ideas on how I can address those suggestions? My future workshop participants – next up: Kobe, Japan in October 2010; like one person said to me, I couldn’t have sucked that bad if they asked me to do another one! – will certainly appreciate it. So will I! =)

A while back I wrote about Mr. Whatley using Google Earth as  a way for students to create their own ‘life maps’ in Grade 8. Here’s an example: Bloomability Life map (10MB .kmz file). This was also featured in our Speedgeeking session in February.

Now it looks like the Grade 8 Humanities class is going to use Google Earth to create a timeline (of sorts) of events worldwide that led to Vietnamese independence. I think it will be a great way to show the inter-dependence of events in France, the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam and how they collectively affected Vietnam.

I thought I’d share this wicked video by Cristóbal Vila. I bet you could design a whole MYP inter-disciplinary unit around this.

h/t Boing Boing

Thanks to Tom Barrett for the inspiration!

After finding this blog entry, I quickly went to find one of our more open-minded English teachers (Mr. Whatley) and shared with him what I found. I was particularly interested in the unit on Travel Writing that he does and thought that Google Earth would be a perfect medium for giving his students – many of them EAL students – that extra bit of scaffolding needed to really create some extraordinary writing.

He did me one better and has decided to use Google Earth as the tool for creating life maps for the students. The ability to embed images and videos as well as add written text will really help these life maps come alive! Plus, with the ability to create a narrated tour, the students will also be focusing on the oral component of MYP English.

Mr. Whatley is also having the students create a map of the nomadic protagonist’s journey in Bloomability, a la Google Lit Trips. I can’t wait to see (and share!) the results.

Over the past few weeks, I have been finding Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr using Compfight and FlickrCC that I felt represented the 10 attributes of the IB Learner Profile. Check out the original posts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 –  and the subsequent discussion in the comments.

I’ve had a great time completing this activity. I originally envisioned this as an Advisory activity,with the outcomes of making the Learner Profile more relevant to students and giving them a sense of ownership of these (possibly) abstract concepts, as well as teaching students about Creative Commons, Flickr and various CC search engines. I’ve realized that this is way to big to be done in total by students learning about the Learner Profile. It took a lot of time and effort to think of and locate meaningful and appropriate visualizations of the 10 attributes. I think the hardest part was trying to strike that balance between literal and abstract representation. This really drives home the power, the importance and the difficulty of teaching visual literacy.

Okay, so here are my interpretations of my Learner Profile images. Feel free to comment below.

Top Image: Knowledgeable – One of the most literal images of the series. What represents knowledge like a big ol’ stack of books?
Bottom Image: Thinker – I was going for a primate version of Rodin’s The Thinker.

Left Image: Risk Taker – Another pretty literal image.
Right Image: Reflective – I was inspired by the adage “The eyes are the window to the soul.” To be reflective one needs to be able to look inside oneself, to stare at one’s own soul.

Top Image: Principled – This is probably the biggest stretch of the lot. When I think of principled, I think of having firm beliefs and strong ideals. To me, the pillars of the pier represent the principles that support your beliefs.
Bottom Image: Balanced – This one was for Adrienne, my aspiring yogini friend.

Left Image: Caring – Living in Tanzania for 4 years, this image really resonated with me. It is such a common sight to see young children caring for even younger siblings. I love the title of this image as well: He’s Not Heavy, He’s My Brother!
Right Image: Open Minded – In order to be the architect/builder responsible for this building, you have to be pretty open minded! In my opinion, this is the weakest image of the group but I struggled with how to visualize open-minded. I thought of merging the old with the new (an old Japanese woman in kimono talking on her iPhone, for example) but couldn’t find the right image.

Top Image: Inquirer – The raw curiosity of the boy peeking under the fence gets to me. What’s he looking at? I want to know!
Bottom Image: Communicator – This one was much harder to find than I thought it was going to be. I was initially looking for a multi-tasker – maybe somebody talking on their mobile while sitting at a cafe IM-ing with somebody else – but couldn’t find the rght image. I then decided on this image. I liked that it was lo-tech and that he is listening rather than speaking.

I have placed the hi-res versions on Flickr. Each pair of photos will print out on a single A4 sheet. Feel free to use them as you see fit. Or, even better, add your or your students’ interpretations to Flickr as well so that we can all play “Guess the Learner Profile”. If there’s interest we can get a Flickr group started.

Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 have been posted earlier.

Here are the last 4 learner profile attributes.

Guess the LP pt 4

Guess the LP pt 5

Your interpretations in the comments please!