Professional Development

Last weekend I went to Philadelphia for Educon 2.2 and this weekend I went to an AP Workshop here in SF presented by Michael Lew.

A common theme is starting to emerge from my recent professional development experiences: I usually don’t know what I need help with. Of course, I have some things I can identify if you ask me where my weak points are or what my problem is today. But I’ve found that in addition to “answers” or “solutions”, going to conferences and workshops is also about getting some distance from the hectic regularity of school and lessons — but not so much distance that I’m on vacation.

From Educon at the lovely Science Leadership Academy (SLA), I got three major take-homes:

1. Chris Lehmann is a great principal in large part because he can articulate what he thinks is important and he puts effort into structuring the process of getting there with his team. Sounds simple, but it’s harder than you’d think and his dedication shows. Some choice quotes from the conversation he led:

“If you have to lecture about it, you’re probably not achieving it.”
“You can not bully teachers into caring for kids.”
“Every good teacher knows how to outlive a mandate.”
“Don’t pretend to care.”

2. Nancy Caramanico has a incredible success story working to overturn an overly-strict and repressive internet filtering policy in a conservative environment. She and I met because we were both trying to attend a session that had been canceled. Since Educon is supposed to be about the conversations, we decided to have a conversation anyway, and I’m really glad we did.

3. I still learn so much by watching another teacher interact with her students that I’m not sure why this isn’t the primary mechanism for improving teacher practice. The SLA students and teachers are thoughtful, warm, and generally impressive in the level of interactions they have. I listened to some students talk about a reading group they did in their English class and the conversation they had with us was above the level of some college undergraduate discussion sections. Over the course of the weekend, I became convinced that these were representative students from the SLA population and not some kind of special show put on to impress people. Which made it all the more impressive.

From the AP Workshop yesterday, I got some specific tools that will be helpful and also remembered how nice it is to be able to talk (face to face, in this “real life” thing) with other teachers who teach the same subject. Teaching CS is lonely in most high schools, including mine, and being in isolation with an academic subject isn’t great for developing new ideas unless you’re a genius — which I’m apparently not. The session was really valuable for me in thinking about how the AP test questions are graded, how I grade, and what I need to help students understand about the scoring process. Michael is a generous and dedicated teacher, organized and willing to share his materials in a way that’s very practical and useful.

Overall, I can feel my perspective on PD changing. In the past, I measured every workshop and session by how much explicitly actionable pedagogical content knowledge was being offered. And I’m still picky about that stuff. (Presenters: Have a thesis.) But it also seems like having unexpected prompts, hearing the questions that other people are asking and how they’re thinking about the work we do, and thus being reminded about aspects that I’ve neglected are also valuable parts of “professional development”. I must be getting soft in my old age.

More Performance Correlates

I was really struck by finding that of all my AP Computer Science students, only those who had done a significant amount of extra out-of-class practice scored over 90% on the major test of the semester. I took 10 minutes from a class period last week to share my findings with them. Of course, these are some smart kids and so they immediately wanted to know what other correlates might exist and if I had quantified them. So I went back to the data to see what else might be there. Since I teach an introductory programming course that some but not others of them had taken, that was one of the first places I could look.

Taking the intro class turns out to be worth about a letter grade (12%) on the average score. But it’s no guarantee that a student won’t fail, and not a prerequisite for success. Not all students from the intro class go on to this class. So it’s also quite possible that the first course merely serves as a filter for students who would fail, not as a transformative educational experience that ensures later success. I suspect reality might be somewhere between these extremes, but the camel still has two humps.

I decided to look at another measure of the impact of being in my class: attendance.

There was a small negative correlation (r = -0.25) between class periods missed and exam performance. But again, do the kids who come every day already love the subject? Wouldn’t they teach it to themselves if I weren’t there? Or is it that every moment in my room imbues them with an increment of additional knowledge and skill? Ask the student who came every single day and got a 29%. There’s some relationship, but I wouldn’t call it controlling.

That being the case, I thought I’d look outside of my own class to see what other factors might predict performance. I have access to their standardized math test scores from last year, when most of them took precalculus.

There’s a positive correlation here (r = 0.49). It makes sense. But a couple students with fairly low math scores did great, and some students who, in comparison, had much higher math scores did much worse. Again, nothing as strong as the correlation between practice and performance that I found previously.

My strongest motivation behind looking at all of this data is to see if there’s any clear indication of something I ought to do more of or less of or differently. I’d also like to find a reliable measure that predicts success in programming, with the intention of recruiting more students into the course with confidence that they have a shot at it. So far those are still open questions.

Practice and Performance

This is my second year teaching AP Computer Science. It’s certainly easier the second time, because I can start with all the assignments and tests I used last year and improve or restructure them instead of creating them from scratch every time. It also means that I can compare results between different classes. I recently gave the test that functions as the semester final exam, and since the test was mostly the same as last year, it’s interesting to put up the score distributions against each other.

Yes, four students scored above 90 this year, where last year none could. But the bell curve turned into a bathtub! Why? There are so many variables that it’s really hard to know. It’s worth noting that I’ve run the class through the material much faster this year, which probably exacerbates any spread between high and low performers. We’re about six weeks ahead of last year’s schedule, which is a big deal.

But here’s something else I noticed: All of the top scoring students have also completed a significant number of optional practice problems using Nick Parlante’s excellent JavaBat. I introduce this tool at the start of the year and offer them extra credit for doing the problems. (To be clear: the extra credit is not part of the exam scores, so that’s not the proximate reason their scores are higher.) I found a strong positive correlation of r=0.71 between the number of practice problems completed and exam score.

This points toward Mark Guzdial’s recent post about how practice leads to success in computer science. His question, and mine, then becomes, “What sort of practice is useful?” We might conclude from this data that ANY sort of practice is useful as long as it is sustained and represents real engagement. Of course, that’s just restating the problem.

My data might also mean that if a student is already really excited about CS (or already skilled), they’re more likely to enjoy doing extra practice. Both could be symptoms of an underlying cause we don’t understand. The significant question for me is, “If the other students were to complete these exercises, would they also see high achievement?” Would it help at all? Or would it be another thing to look at without understanding, to stumble through? I wish I still had the Javabat completion data from last year. I wonder what would happen if I made completion of, say, 100 exercises a requirement next year.

If I attribute any of the changes in score distribution to the faster pace of the class this year, it seems like more students are actually better served by a slower pace. I’m looking forward to getting the AP scores from this class — which won’t happen until the end of summer or so — to see how things compare. But between now and then, we still have a lot to learn! My great hope is that by pushing the pace faster this year, there will be more time for more practice before the exam. After looking at this data, I’m feeling like it might be wise to distribute that practice time a bit more as we progress through new concepts next year.

Beyond Cynicism

I’ve noticed that a certain subset of newer teachers, say those who started in the past 5 years or so, have this really intense emotional reaction to certain activities within the realm of professional development. Specifically: If you put a photocopied packet in front of us containing strategies for organizing classroom activities or groupwork, we will go ballistic on you. Mild-mannered English teacher start composing death threats in rhyming couplets. Normally rational physics teachers start calculating how much force it would take to throw you out the window. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why this is, and I think I’m starting to get a handle on it.

Last week Jennifer Abrams (the educational consultant, not the bodybuilder) was at my school to give a workshop on working with adults. This is something I definitely need help with. In the context of my social group — mostly early 30s overeducated progressives with a bent for alternative culture — I know how to run an effective meeting and how to get a project off the ground. Among the mostly career teachers of widely varying age and experience levels that make up my professional group, I have a much harder time.

The workshop started with Jennifer reviewing some of the things that set adult learners apart from children, and she modeled some approaches to dealing with these differences. The points she raised — that adults want to be seen as competent, that they want to be involved and self-directed, that they need context, and that they need time to process experiences in order to truly learn from them — were all, I think, spot on and rang true for me. We ran through a basic set of questions from The Presenter’s Fieldbook – A Practical Guide by Robert Garmston which I thought were a great framework for stepping back to consider both the purpose and structures around work we want to do with other adults.

Then we jumped to the sample activities. And Jennifer modeled the idea that adults need some autonomy and self-direction in order to be engaged by letting us look at the activities on our own. These activities have names like “Say Something” and “Head, Heart and Hand” and “Seeds, Weeds, Needs”. I and some of the other teachers in the workshop immediately got frustrated. Here was another set of “strategies”… the sort of thing we’ve seen a thousand times held up as a examples of good instructional practice, but rarely, if ever, seen demonstrated in real-life teaching situations.

I don’t think it’s possible for even the least-sharp of blades to cut through the years of credential-mandated formal education and induction programs on the way to being a Highly Qualified Teacher without hearing about Jigsaws and KWL Charts and Think-Pair-Shares and 3-2-1 Lists and Exit Tickets and a myriad of other gimmick strategies again and again. Before last week, I hadn’t quite put my finger on why these sorts of things incense a certain subset of teachers, myself included, while others are perfectly happy to take the ideas and run with them. And others, the real veterans, either instinctively know how to avoid these sort of meetings or how to switch seamlessly to grading papers without getting perturbed. But now I think I know why this stuff burns some of us up, and how to avoid falling into the cynicism that disconnects people.

When strategies are put in front of me in the abstract, without any story around them or concrete example of their implementation or justification for why they would be the right thing to do, it feels like a cop-out on the part of the presenter. Sometimes a teacher doesn’t have a solid lesson plan and thinks, well, I could just have them read from the book for 30 minutes. Handing me a packet of strategies feels like saying the same thing: Here, use this stuff to teach yourself. And often (although not in Jennifer’s case) this lazy dictate comes from someone who is also telling you how to do your job.

And I don’t mind if you have an opinion about how I should do my job. I know I have more to learn. But if you have a technique that you think is worthwhile, show me an example that I can evaluate, or put it into a larger context that frames its utility. Don’t just throw a bunch of abstract ideas in front of me and claim that they’re useful or make it my job to figure out if and how they’re useful. As the old adage goes, “If you want to help, you have to be helpful.” And what’s really helpful is if we talk about how to use techniques in ways that actually make a difference in addressing the kinds of problems that we’re actually facing. I need to be able to imagine not only using the strategy but also believing in it. That’s how I teach. If the person handing me the packet doesn’t have anything to say about when and why they think these cute little activities are worth using, why should I bother trying to guess? If you truly believe that these are powerful tools for teaching, then show me how they work!

Last week, I started to get some perspective on this position for two reasons: One, some colleagues that I like and respect got annoyed at the same thing I was annoyed at and spoke up about it. Two, another colleague I like and respect pointed out times when she’s used the very strategies I was disparaging. She then went on to point out how I could use another one of these strategies in a specific context that she knows I’ve been struggling with. Suddenly the very objects of my discontent became useful tools. Jennifer handled the feedback really well and kept the group more or less on track. To me, it felt like a turning point in my understanding.

If you, dear reader, happen to work with newer teachers who have probably had an overload of ideas pushed in front of them but stand at a deficit of working examples, keep this in mind as you help them. It would be much more helpful if they saw and heard about the details of one strategy working in one situation than to get ten strategies and zero applications. This connects back to one of the key points about adult learners that Jennifer opened her presentation with: “What is to be learned must hold meaning; it must connect with current understandings, knowledge, experience and purpose.” We know from working with students that meaning doesn’t come from a worksheet or a chalk-and-talk. But it can pretty easily come from a story or an example. If there’s no story offered, a good presenter will be able to give me one when I ask. Or I could make one up for myself using my own current challenges. These are ways for me to be beyond cynicism and to extract any available value from ideas that float by.

Students, Accounts, Privacy, and Safety

I had a very productive Thanksgiving holiday, if by productive you mean “found cool stuff on the internet”. One of my best clicks was OpenProcessing.org. This site allows anyone to create an account and upload Java applets created exported from Processing. There’s a commenting feature and a mechanism for creating collections. In short, it’s the perfect solution to the problem of getting this kind of student work online reliably and being able to see it all in one place. I think Art Simon over at Lowell put me on to the site at the end of the last school year but it didn’t really sink in until just now how useful it might be.

I emailed the info address at OpenProcessing and Sinan Ascioglu who runs the site replied right back and let me create a classroom, which is essentially a collection. And now all I need to do is get all my kids to put their work up on the site. And for that, all they’ll need to do is create an account. This means picking a username, password, display name, and giving an email address. This is where it gets tricky.

I’ve always followed a policy of not letting student’s full names or individually-identifiable photos get out on the public web in association with my school or classes, and in particular being sure to never instruct students to publish that information. I’m sure there must be times I’ve messed this up, but I have in my mind for some reason a general idea that we’re supposed to protect student privacy. Presumably this is because you don’t want some psychotic adult to be able to stalk a kid by googling them and figuring out where they go to school. At the very least, you don’t want to be responsible for their name being there if someone does do that. Now that I’m about to have my kids create accounts on this new site, I’m wondering if my rule is paranoid, or if I should be more paranoid, or how other teachers handle the situation. When students win awards or perform well on sports teams, the media publishes their full name and school affiliation. Is that different in some meaningful way?