Bored kids...my fault

I try really hard to not blame kids.  When something isn't going the way I want it to in the classroom, I try to shoulder the responsibility.  This doesn't always work.  Sometimes I go down that road of blaming, but I don't think I has ever been productive for the long term.  I can, through the stupid power that we sometimes have as teachers, create compliant kids for a short term, but not under an atmosphere that I enjoy or one that is conducive to learning.

For the big chunk of the year in 7th grade Life Science, we learn about how the human body works.  The goal is to investigate the main body systems and get an idea of how they interact to make us work.  I have been struggling for years to come up with something to really pull this together.  I have a lot of great activities, some neat labs, good reading materials...but I was missing a big piece.  I feel like I need more open assessments, something that has less of a correct answer.  Something a big obscure, but will connect to what I am doing.

Yesterday was terrible.  I thought I had an extension project set up, and the kids flat didn't like it.  Now, they would DO it, but I wasn't seeing any passion.  I was getting a lot of procedural questions and a fair bit of off task behavior.  The cell phones were driving me nuts.  Then I had to remember, what I find cool and interesting may not be what they find cool and interesting.  These are mostly 12 and 13 year old kids.  The internal working of an invasive species in the Florida Everglades just isn't cutting it.

So I switched gears.  What is my goal?  I want them to connect the body systems we are talking about to something, in a novel way, to see how it makes an entire organism function.  Well, why not just have them "build" an organism from the ground up.  That's the project, that we will attempt to extend through our body systems learning.  "Create" an organism.  Be goofy and creative and fun and crazy.  We will share through blogs and online posters.

First period today, a student had to figure out how a spider's digestive system works because the craziness she came up with somehow involved a spider.  No cell phone issues today.  Kids were taking them out to take pictures of each other's creations.  Class ended too quickly.

I'm worried about misconceptions.  Organisms are not "created."  There is no such thing as a unibear.  I am aware of these misconceptions on the forefront, and we can deal with those.  Each day that kids are not being curious, is a big day lost.  I can't deal with that.  Their excitement was overwhelming.  They're still kids.  They are goofy, immature, morphing pre-teens and barely-teens.  And I like them that way!

And some of them are learning about the spider's digestive system and comparing it to ours...not because I MADE them, because I LET them.

Shut up and let the kids talk!

I have spent a fair bit of time the last couple of weeks re-reading John Hattie's book Visible Learning and then reading his new book Visible Learning for Teachers.  He talks several different times about teachers talking and how students don't listen.  A few stories about this.

For one, I have a boring monotone voice, and I realize this.  I try to use it to help progress my dry sense of humor, but as far as lecture goes, it just isn't exciting.  Over the years, I have made a huge effort to remove the lecture part from my classes and make class more about students doing the learning.  I always ran into one problem though...going over answers to practice problems.  I always ended up having the students sit down and listen to me spout off the correct response to various questions, or lead a whole class discussion.  So many students simply are not engaged at that time.  Can I blame them?

Awhile ago, I came across Frank Noschese's Orange Pen idea.  This really resonated with me and I gave it a try on my next question set.  The funny thing was that I was telling the students about the idea, and explained that most of them are not listening when I am reviewing these types of questions.  I didn't blame them, I simply stated that was how our brains work.  A few girls giggled in the back.  Upon investigation, they said, "You get it!"  The students then lamented about other teachers who didn't get it...like me 3 days prior!

On the assessment that followed, students had the same achievement that I would have expected they would have had if I had talked at them.  It was nice though because some students didn't need a lot of time to check their answers.  They were on the right track and ready to cruise forward.  Others needed more time.  It freed up my time to work with those who were struggling, it also allowed more students to ask questions about their understanding.  These were students who typically wouldn't have raised their hands in the whole class discussion, or ones were time wouldn't have allowed it.  For now on, student self correction for feedback is a permanent practice.

We are currently working on a large skull activity.  I use mammal skulls to introduce the digestive system as well as introduce ideas about scientific classification and evolution.  It is a great activity.  During the activity, students do not get to know the identity of the skull.  Usually, at the end of the activity, I would have a nice slide show of the pictures of the animals and their common and scientific names.  We would put the skull under the document camera, guess a few times about what it was, then get the answer from the slide show.  Turned out to be quite a show...the Mr. Schaefer show!  I really enjoyed it.  I got to tell stories about where the skulls came from, make scary faces with the different skulls, say how cute some of the animals were.  I, I, I.

Today, I tried the traditional approach for the first two periods of the day.  I had good class participation; there was always a hand up to guess the animal or count teeth.  It was usually the same hands.  Several students were simply following along.  They were not really engaged.  So, I had some time between my 2nd and 3rd class of the day and I quickly revamped the lesson.  I simply printed out the slides, grouped up the skulls, and had the students go from station to station looking at skulls and their correct identities.  The conversation changed entirely.  Students who would have anyway been involved were still involved.  Other students also had a chance to come out of their shell as well.  They were handling the skull, telling stories about what they knew about the animals, and asking questions about dentition, shapes, sizes, and relationships.  A simple change of perspective changed everything.

Earlier today, I was reminding students to not blurt out...turns out I was telling the wrong person to shut up (of course I never used those words!)  Sometimes, it is worth it to be quiet and let the kids talk...and learn.

Capitalizing on Desire

Summer time for me is a subtle switch in gears.  I take a few weeks away from thinking about school and put a great deal of focus on my dogs.   This is the time of year to polish up a dog for hunting season, or in the case of two of our dogs, finish up some important training in preparation for hunting tests.

This blog is primarily for talking about teaching, and I promise to bring it around by the end of the post.  This evening, I was training a young dog named Colt.  He is well named, as at 80 pounds he is very horse-like.  We were preparing for a section of his HZP hunting test that is referred to as the search-behind-the-duck.  In this section of the test, the dog and handler stand on a shore line.  Prior to their arrival, a duck, who is unable to fly but can readily swim, was released about 25 meters into the marsh.  The dog’s job is to enter the water, swim around until if finds scent of the duck, track the duck hopefully to the point that the duck is recovered.   When you think about it, this is a pretty complex task.   How do you train a dog to do this?

There are 3 main methods that I have seen to teach this.  One method is very scripted.  It starts out on land.  A white 5 gallon bucket is placed a distance away.  The trainer sets the dog on a stay, walks out to the bucket, and drops a retrieving bumper.  He then returns and commands the dog to retrieve the bumper.  This is done over and over again, eventually the dog doesn’t have to see the handler drop the bumper, he simply knows that the bucket means there is a bumper nearby and can be sent to retrieve “blindly.”  This idea is transferred over to water, the whole sequence is repeated.  Eventually, the bucket is even removed, and the dog is supposed to cross the water and search.

Another method is more streamlined.  Here, a duck is released without the dog’s knowledge.  Then, the trainer crosses the water with the dog in a kayak or canoe.  Eventually, the dog works out in front of the kayak and finds the scent.  Hopefully, the dog follows the scent on its own, and learns that the key is to cross the water without the help of the trainer’s canoe or kayak.

Our method of training is a little different.  If anything, it is a little like the first method.  What we do is rely upon the dog’s innate desire.  Our dogs have been bred for over a century to want to go out, search for, find, and retrieve game.   I don’t have to train them to go to a bucket.  All I really need to do is find a way to light the fire inside them.  What typically works is to work with 2 people.  The handler/trainer is next to the dog at the shoreline.  The helper appears on the other side of a small marsh.  This person usually stands out, and the dog easily sees this person.  An alive, but flightless duck is thrown from that opposite shore.  The dog gets to see the splash, see the duck flap its wings a few times, and is more than ready to go across.  From here, the dog isn’t really sent to go search, instead he is simply released.  The dog typically crosses the shore, and since it has actually seen the released duck, rarely gives up until the duck is found.  Dogs in this situation make all kinds of mistakes.  They have to teach themselves to focus.  They over run the track sometimes, they focus on too small of an area sometimes.  Because they know that duck is out there somewhere, the persevere.

This idea is repeated, with the helper taking a smaller and smaller role.  Before long, the dog can actually be hard to control when you approach any water.  They simply think there is always something to find if they go searching long enough.  As a trainer, I do two things.  First, I don’t try to hold back the excitement, if anything, I try to encourage it.  When we approach the water, I whisper, “Do you want to get the duck.”  They get amped!  Also, I have to be sure to not let them down.  There has to be game out there to find every time they are sent.   I certainly can make it challenging, but success has to be within their reach.

When I look back at these three methods, I think of dogs that I know that have been trained in each of them.  I will say that our dogs love searching for ducks.  They usually do really well, and I attribute at least some of it to our approach.  One of our good friends does the “bucket method.”  Their dogs tend to struggle.  They look at the duck search as work.  They are commanded, or sometimes almost forced, across the water.  In the end, their scores are similar, but there is something lost.  Their dogs are more robotic, and less fluid.

As I came home today, it was hard to not think about how this relates to kids.  Our kids come in with a ton of curiosity.  They want to learn.  They want to figure things out.  I think of the times when I have held kids back until just the right moment, and released them to go do a task.  They make all kinds of mistakes, but they learn so much.  I think of other times, when I teach step-by-step….the bucket method.  Both approaches have their time and place, but I try to think of how I can build on their desire first.